March 12, 2024 • 30 mins
It is now cheaper to save the world than destroy it. But is capitalism up to the challenge of preventing the climate crisis?
In his new book Climate Capitalism, Zero host Akshat Rathi introduces a dozen people who are already steering capitalism to solve the climate crisis: from the engineer who shaped China's electric car policies and the politician who helped make net-zero a UK law to the CEO who fought off a takeover attempt so he could stick with a sustainability strategy. Akshat argues that not only is capitalism capable of taking on the climate crisis, but harnessing it is the only way to solve the climate crisis in the time we have available.
And yet while some improvements have been made over the past few years, the world is off track to meet its 2050 climate targets. So today on Zero, Bloomberg’s Greener Living editor Kira Bindrim sits down with Akshat to discuss his new book, and asks him: If climate capitalism is so doable, why does it seem so difficult?
Read more:
- Order Akshat’s new book, Climate Capitalism
- Listen to the interview with Fatih Birol that Akshat mentions
- Hear Akshat and Kira talk about the reality of carbon footprints
- Read a transcript of this episode
Zero is a production of Bloomberg Green. Our producer is Oscar Boyd and our senior producer is Christine Driscoll. Special thanks to Anna Mazarakis, Gilda di Carli and Kira Bindrim. Thoughts or suggestions? Email us at zeropod@bloomberg.net. For more coverage of climate change and solutions, visit bloomberg.com/green.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio News. Hi again, it's suckshot.
My book Climate Capitalism, Winning the Global Race to Zero
Emissions is out in the US and Canada today, so
I thought as a preview you might enjoy listening to
a conversation I had with podcast editor Kira Bindram about
(00:26):
the book and the ideas in it. After you read
the book, please write to me with feedback at Zero
Pod at Bloomberg dot net.
Speaker 2 (00:33):
Thanks.
Speaker 3 (00:37):
Welcome to Zero I'm Kira Bindram, editor of Bloomberg's Greener
Living section and a good friend of the pod. Today
is a special day on Zero because today is a
day your usual host has been waiting on for months.
Climate Capitalism, a new book by akshat Rapi, is now
on sale. Climate Capitalism sets out to answer an important question.
(00:59):
If capitalists are set up to maximize profits, how can
they also prioritize the planet. Over twelve chapters, akshot introduces
a dozen people who are already making climate capitalism work,
from the engineer who shaped China's electric car policies, to
the politician who helped make net zero a UK law,
to the CEO who fought off a takeover attempt. So
(01:20):
you could stick with a sustainability strategy. Akshat and I
have known each other for almost seven years now, and
what comes across in his book is what comes across every.
Speaker 2 (01:29):
Time I talk to him.
Speaker 3 (01:31):
A lot of very smart and very interesting people are
working on climate problems. Many of them are proof positive
that the capitalist framework can be effective. As Akshot writes
in the book's very first line, it's now cheaper to save.
Speaker 2 (01:44):
The world than destroy it.
Speaker 3 (01:47):
I also know how much work Akshot has put into
this book, so after reading it, I thought it might
be fun to put him on the hot seat for once,
because I wanted to ask Akshat, if climate capitalism is
so doable, why does it seem so difficult?
Speaker 2 (02:07):
Aksha, Welcome to your podcast. How are you feeling nervous?
Speaker 1 (02:10):
Because I don't usually get interviewed, I'm not on this
side of the screen.
Speaker 2 (02:15):
I'll try to be gentle.
Speaker 3 (02:17):
The underpinning of the book, I would say, and you
can correct me if I'm wrong, is that capitalism and
climate progress are compatible because they have to be. You
say in the intro, changing our entire economic system and
our entire energy system in the time that we need
to do it to affect change with the climate is
just really not feasible.
Speaker 2 (02:36):
And I'm curious.
Speaker 3 (02:37):
Whether you think most people would agree, Like, if you
sort of set out with these two things are compatible,
do you think of that as a statement of fact
an article of faith? Do you think you're making a
provocative argument? Where do you think most people land on
this question of whether these two ideas can work together?
Speaker 1 (02:51):
Sadly, the answer is that most people haven't talked about it.
The trouble with climate is that there are very loud voices,
very few of them on opposite side of the political spectrum. Yes,
there's a whole range of voices in the middle, but
that's also a small population. Most people aren't thinking about
climate solutions. But if we speak to the climate crowd,
(03:14):
I think most people will not agree that capitalism can
be a solution. And that's because the root of environmentalism,
or the root of most people who are trying to
work on solutions, has been to try and overcome this
economic system that we must accept has been a part
of the problem, has been the driving force of profit
(03:36):
maximization over making sure all the impacts of that process
are taken into consideration, and so there is no doubt.
It's a provocation. That is how the publisher pitched it
to me, which is, if you're going to give people
something they will read, you have to be a little provocative.
But as I wrote the book, and as I tried
to tell the stories, it actually became easier because I
(03:59):
wasn't trying to create something that wasn't happening. I wasn't
trying to make a case for something that should happen.
I ended up writing a series of stories of things
that are already happening.
Speaker 3 (04:11):
So the way you've structured the book, as you're alluding to,
is each chapter you give us a person who is
working towards climate campus is not just one person, but
there is sort of an anchor person in most of
the chapters. So for example, we've got Wangang, who is
not a household name the way Elon Musk is in
terms of electric cars, but has plays a huge role
in ev development in China. Or we've got Brian E. Worthington,
who was actually the very first guest on zero, who
(04:33):
was the lead author of the two thousand and eight
Climate Change Act in the UK. I'm curious what made
you want to approach the book in this way where
it's centered around people, instead of maybe looking at a
different technology in each chapter, or even a company, or
even just telling the story linearly over time.
Speaker 1 (04:48):
Our driving force for the kind of journalism that I've
kind of learned with Yukira, starting at Quartz and then
now at Bloomberg Green has been to try and tell
stories that have not already been told, or tell them
in a way that has not already been done. Take
Bill Gates's How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, really good
(05:08):
book makes the case for what needs to be done
with some small case studies of what's already being done.
Or This Changes Everything by Naomi Klein, which is in
the subtitle The Climate Versus Capitalism, which is a rhetorical
powerful exposition of what's wrong with the system and why
(05:28):
we must break it down. I wanted to take the
journalistic instincts of taking the story of ideally one individual,
but then building out the context in which and the
decades over which some of these stories play out. And
my hope was that having the anchor person will allow
people to read those stories in a way that they
won't get lost in the abstract ideas that are all
(05:51):
around us. To deal with the climate problem.
Speaker 3 (05:53):
It almost reminds me of when you're a kid and
you think politicians are just like such adults and like
these people that make all these huge decisions and the
or you get you're like, right, they're just we're just
humans all trying to figure it out. And they're just
people now my age, with my level of expertise, shaping policy.
And there's something a little terrifying about that, but there's
as some comforting that these are human beings actively working
to solve these problems, who are really applying themselves to it,
(06:15):
and they are turning me abstract into something quite tangible
or you can affect change, and.
Speaker 1 (06:20):
That their actions are directed but are also shaped by
the chance encounters and the chance events that they live through.
Speaker 2 (06:28):
Is there anyone in your mix of people?
Speaker 3 (06:30):
I know you don't want to choose a favorite child,
but I'm curious of the people you spoke with or
are focused on in the book, is there anyone you
think about the most often or you find yourself relaying
their story the most often when you're talking to other people.
Speaker 1 (06:41):
You already mentioned his name. It's one Gang really because
it's sort of a character as a Chinese bureaucrat you
rarely hear about. You know, you probably are aware Chi
Jinping as the leader of the country, but you're unlikely
to know very much beyond that as a general news reader,
and also one gang doesn't own a social media platform.
So you get this place where this individual within a
(07:05):
system has made a huge impact on the EV transition,
getting the Chinese state to spend tens of billions of
dollars in a decade to move the technology which we
are all benefiting from. But people don't know who was
the driving force, what are the policies, what are the
massive changes that have allowed this to happen. So it's
the story I bring up very often. The other one
(07:28):
that I don't bring up that often, but I think
about quite often is the story of Fati Birol. Fatti
Birol is the head of the International Energy Agency, and
in the sort of seven year period that I have
been a climate journalist, he's gone from being the character
who was hated by the climate movement to being the
character that is loved by the climate movement. That is
(07:49):
reflected in how he approaches the problem. Even though you
know he runs an international organization, you can see he
has really understood the climate problem and gone from this
energy agency that was built as an organization that was
very fossil fuel oriented to being this organization that really
wants to drive the energy transition.
Speaker 3 (08:10):
For me reading that chapter, and he was also a
guest on the pod, we have another person who is
a former zero guest. You're struck almost by how recent
a lot of this evolution is happening, that it's all
moving quite quickly, and that one agency is a good
sort of stand in for how quickly the conversation changes.
I want to ask you about what I'm thinking of
is like the thumbs that capitalism allows to be put
on the scale outside of market forces. So I'm thinking
(08:31):
about regulations, I'm thinking about subsidies, and as we've heard
on the podcast very recently, I'm thinking about tools like
shareholder activism, things you can do to affect change within
a company. In your view, and having done all this reporting,
do you think that those tools are sufficient to sort
of check capitalism's most profit driven in individualism driven instincts.
Speaker 1 (08:50):
We can answer that in multiple ways. Right, there is
actually no one form of capitalism in the world. The
American capitalism is very different from the Indian capitalism very
different from the Nordic capitalism to being very different from
the Chinese capitalism, and each of those at the core
of it have two tenets profit maximization driven in a
(09:11):
competitive market. However, a market is never free. It's always
regulated in some form if you want a market to
function and do the job it needs to do for society.
And to what level that is regulated is different in
different countries, and we can see there are benefits to
the level of regulation that may exist in a particular
(09:34):
circumstance versus another one.
Speaker 3 (09:36):
I mean, it sounds like you're saying that you have
to shape the tools of capitalism to the society and
like the system you're in, and it's all about the execution.
Speaker 1 (09:44):
Yeah, we probably will never have the perfect way of
making capitalism work for the planet. But what we do
have is a series of experiments currently happening in different
parts of the world. And what we can see is
things that are working well in one part work well
because of a certain mix of those tools. And something
I try and do in the book is to learn
(10:06):
from the successes that are enabled in that context and
whether we can translate those successes in other places where
maybe there is a different form of capitalism.
Speaker 3 (10:15):
So I think I agree with you that adjusting a
capitalist system at the margins, or sort of finessing the
nuance of it, versus trying to overthrow it, is the
logical move. But for fun, just for fun, I wonder
what you'd say if we found out tomorrow that we
actually have another century to deal with climate change. In
other words, if we could somehow remodel our economic system
and energy system at the same time, would you change
(10:37):
your answer.
Speaker 1 (10:38):
In a way? We already ran that experiment, right, We
knew the science was pretty certain. Early nineties, mid nineties,
the latest didn't really do very much. So as a
society we chose not to. And sure you can blame
certain actors in society directing this, but the end is
(10:59):
of we kind of choose. But if we do have
another one hundred years and suddenly that is a possibility,
I think there are a few things we could do.
One is we should not try and slow down the
transition in the sectors that are already on the move.
The move to electric cars is a really good one. Yes,
(11:21):
we're going to need more metals, and that's a thing
that we need to deal with but we will cut
air pollution in cities everywhere in the world, and that's
a good thing, and you could do that for renewables.
It would be a much better world to have sources
of energy distributed across the world rather than being concentrated
in some places where you have to take a pipe,
drill it down, get some black go out, ship it
(11:44):
to a refinery, put in tons of energy to try
and draw out energy. It's just not a good system.
But the biggest advantage we will get with time is
not really to slow down the fossil fuel transition. It
is more that we'll have more time to do diplomacy right,
that we'll have more time for countries to actually come
together and agree on something, or we'll have more time
(12:08):
to find a way in which countries that are going
to struggle can be uplifted and be brought along for
the transition, rather than what is a reality for some
countries getting drowned as sea levels rise.
Speaker 3 (12:21):
I want to ask you one more question the sort
of high level macro capitalism conversation. And I don't want
this question to come out wrong, So I hope you
know that I love you, and I respect you, and
I don't mean anything by this, but do you think
sometimes that you are too much of an optimist? Which
I asked because I said in the beginning, and I
think it's true, you, more than anyone I know or
have worked with, have really helped me see that it
(12:42):
is possible to reach net zero technically, scientifically, like all
of those things can fall in place, but we are
off track to meet net zero by twenty fifty. We
are still in a place where the wealthiest one percent
of humanity is responsible for as many emissions as the
poorest fifty percent.
Speaker 2 (12:58):
We are not.
Speaker 3 (12:59):
Really succeeding at the level that we need to. So, if,
as you argue in the book, capitalism can solve the
climate crisis, the biggest question is why does it seem
to be failing at it.
Speaker 1 (13:09):
It might be to do with something in my brain
chemistry that I prefer to think this way, but I
can also justify it. Right. It's not that I have
an ideological stance of only writing about optimistic solutions, right.
You know, as a journalist, I do all sorts of things.
I write about problems, I write investigations exposing all the
flaws that companies have and people have. But I also
(13:30):
think one aspect of journalism that is less celebrated, is
less pursued, is to look at successes and what we
can learn from them. So the optimism is kind of
baked into doing the book because I wanted to focus
on the successes. If I wanted to focus on the problems,
that book's already been written. It's called The Uninhabitable Earth.
(13:52):
And so I wanted to provide a narrative that would
be more corrective to where we sit, where it feels
like this problem is so big that we will not
be able to fight it, that we will not be
able to solve it. And yet if you just look
at the numbers, we are not on track for five
or six degrees celsius, a warming, which was within the
(14:13):
realm of possibility as recently as twenty fifteen. And then
we sign the Paris Agreement, and now we're on track
for three degrees celsius. It's not enough, but at least
we may progress.
Speaker 2 (14:28):
After the break.
Speaker 3 (14:29):
How exactly is climate capitalism supposed to work? I want
to dig into some of the mechanics here of marrying
capitalism and climate progress, and I'll start with a big question,
which is, we have seen arguably a recent example of
(14:50):
capitalism succeeding and failing at the same time, which is
the COVID vaccine. So, with state support, we had private
companies that were able to develop vaccines extremely quickly, but
the distribution was very, very unequal around the world. And
we see that with all kinds of tech, where poor
countries that would benefit from a quicker access ultimately don't
get it. Is it possible to address that type of
(15:11):
inequality within capitalist framework?
Speaker 1 (15:14):
The COVID example is such a good one. It's one
that we thought about as climate journalists at large as
a good parallel. Shouldn't we think of what happened with
COVID and apply it to climate And there are parallels
to be drawn, but they are not one to one.
The COVID vaccine was created to deal with an emergency
(15:37):
in the human timescale we think of emergencies. Right, climate
emergency is also an emergency, but it's not on the
same timescale as a COVID vaccine. Did science and technology
help us avoid what could have been an even worse disaster?
One hundred percent? Right? Take any other global dynamic of
(15:59):
this kind when you didn't have an mRNA vaccine, which
just won the Nobel Prize earlier this month. We would
not have been able to create a vaccine at the
pace at which we did. So you can take some lessons,
which is technology can help, and that global diplomacy is
crucial in making a global problem solvable. But then with
(16:21):
climate change, we have time, not to say if you
have plenty of time or we have infinite time, but
we have decades and that allows you to think about
that problem differently. In COVID, you kind of needed one
silver bullet solution, you needed a vaccine. In climate you
don't have that shortcut. You need all kinds of solutions
(16:41):
to work, and that's a much harder problem in a
way than the COVID vaccine. In some cases, we also
don't kind of have the technology at scale for some
of these problems to be solved. So the parallels exist,
but not enough. And I don't think the failure that
was COVID or the success that was COVID, because you
(17:02):
can slice andize it either way, will determine whether we
solve the climate problem or not.
Speaker 3 (17:09):
It's interesting that you fin I mean, obviously it's different timeframes,
but pandemic was three four years and the next ten
twenty years are like pretty important. You write in the
book about how research development responds to like a brute
force strategy that like something so important happens that everybody
mobilizes around something with such urgency that just like makes
it happen. And that is generally what happened with mRNA vaccines.
(17:29):
Don't we need a brute force moment for climate like
it does feel like if we could take a little
of the urgency that was implied by the pandemic, it
would be more effective, because, as you say, that is
the thing that tends to move the ball forward on technology.
Speaker 1 (17:43):
And we kind of have the brute force method in
different places. A ban on selling fossil fuel cars by
twenty thirty five, which now exists in more than twenty
countries around the world, including most of the major car markets,
is a brute force strategy, especially if you're a motorist,
especially if you ask somebody who loves their gasoline car.
(18:04):
At some point we're going to have to talk about
eating less meat. That's going to sound like a brute
for strategy. And so yes, there are uncomfortable choices that
we have to make, and policy will have to play
a role there. If you talk to utilities, they're going
to tell you. In the two thousands and twenty tens,
it was a brute for strategy to come in and
(18:24):
say you need to have ten percent renewables in your
mix by this date. Now they look back and they're like,
of course, duh. It was so easy. But at the
time they also had their lobby groups coming around and
saying that's not good. We are not going to be
able to make that transition work. So yes, it's not
a brute for strategy in the sense of a COVID
vaccine that there will be a silver bullet solution, but
(18:47):
we are starting to apply some of those in many
different parts of the transition. You could very well argue
not enough parts of the transition.
Speaker 3 (18:56):
Let's keep talking about timescale for a second. So also
in the book, you write about how clean tech development
basically operates on a longer timescale than most venture capital
and one of the chapters you go in depth on
Bill gates breakthrough energy mensures, which decided to work in
a twenty year timeframe instead of the typical ten years.
What other aspects of traditional investing do you think need
to be rethought here or are being rethought in an
(19:19):
era of clean tech being instead of internet companies. The
dominant thing that is getting a lot of investment.
Speaker 1 (19:25):
A big missing one that I could not have written
a chapter on because there isn't a successful story around,
is how do you move large amounts of capital. We're
talking tens to one hundreds of billions of dollars from
developed country markets to developing country markets. If you look
at the energy transition today, you can slice the numbers
many ways, but one way in which you can do
(19:47):
it is see that develop countries are actually spending as
much as is needed on a net zero transition. They're
not spending it in the right way, not in the
right places, they don't have the right policy mix available.
But in terms of pure capital, that money is starting
to flow in developed countries. The gap with developing countries
is massive, three, four or five times as much more
(20:10):
money is needed in developing countries, in the places where
energy is not accessible to hundreds of millions of people,
in places where energy demand is growing, and in places
where you can't tell them not to use the fossil
fuels that they have in their ground, but you can
enable them to transition faster if you allow for money
(20:34):
to flow to places where solar is already the cheapest
source of electricity, except that all these cash bottlenecks and
other bottlenecks, but definitely cash as one bottleneck that needs
to be sorted, and there isn't a good solution. We're
currently in that place where some experiments are happening. There's
the Just Energy Transition Partnership, which many of the G
(20:55):
seven countries are trying with South Africa, with Indonesia, with Vietnam.
They're messy, I know, working right now, but it's at
least one experiment in moving tens of billions of dollars
to these countries. We'll need many more of those.
Speaker 3 (21:08):
When I was trying to think about to answer this
question for myself, are there aspects of the investing mindset
that we would need to change for clean tech? One
of the things that came to mind for me is failure.
And I'm thinking here of Cylindro, which, for the listener,
Cylindro went bankrupt in twenty eleven, and it had received
this five hundred and thirty five million dollar loan from
the US Department of Energy, and it became this huge
talking point for why the Department of Energy should not
(21:30):
give out loans, even though the Department of Energy also
gave Tesla a big loan which worked out quite well.
Do you think that there's a lower tolerance for failure
when it comes to clean tech, or at least a
quicker mindset to use a failure as emblematic of like
why this whole thing isn't worth doing.
Speaker 1 (21:45):
I think the lower tolerance for failure exists because it
is easy to use that as a political wedge. It
is easy to point to a failure and say the
entire project is not working, even though if you actually
analyze the US Department of Energy's loan program, it's been
pretty successful, and so it is easy to turn the
(22:07):
failure of a clean tech company into a talking point.
What we do know just from entrepreneurialism one oh one
is that failure is baked into trying to solve a
hard problem, and so while politics can make it hard,
we should try and make space for more failure, both
on technology but also on policy. We need many more
(22:30):
experiments around the world trying different models for how to
rein in the excesses of capitalism so it can work
to tackle climate change.
Speaker 3 (22:39):
Let me ask you for a second about entrepreneurs. I
want to talk about the people that are starting these
companies and developing these technologies. In reading the book, I
found it kind of striking how many of the people
we met who did not necessarily start out focused on
climate change or start out focused on solving for emissions.
They wanted to hedge against oil price spikes in the seventies,
(23:00):
or maybe they just thought, like, that's going to be
a big industry and I could make money in it.
I guess my first question is do you think this
is a feature or a bug? Like does it matter
if most of the entrepreneurs out there right now aren't
actually motivated by climate change specifically?
Speaker 1 (23:13):
It's a feature of the moment in which we are
in the transition. I wasn't a climate journalist till twenty sixteen, seventeen,
and I am a climate journalist now. This is a
story that I've heard again and again over the past decade,
where people realize how big a problem this is, want
to do something about it, and finally find a place
(23:33):
in the energy transition. In the future, that may not
be the case, because we already have teenagers in schools
going out to strike wanting to work on solutions. But
is it a feature of a bug? I think it
doesn't matter. I think for entrepreneurs, they need to go
out and solve a problem that they are really passionate about.
And currently, it turns out society is making more entrepreneurs
(23:56):
care about the climate problem. That's a good place to be.
Speaker 3 (24:00):
Also, someone that has written another book with youth climate
activists and has spent a lot of time talking to them,
and it sounds like you're saying, in twenty thirty years,
we will look back and see that actually a greater
share of people who got into this space did it
explicitly because they wanted to solve the problem of climate change.
Speaker 1 (24:14):
Yeah right, rather than the transition that many of the
people I know today have made, which is they didn't
start working on climate, now they are working on climate.
Speaker 3 (24:22):
Okay, let me bring this all back around to one
question for you, which is, let's come back to capitalism.
Speaker 2 (24:27):
Everyone loves to hear that.
Speaker 3 (24:29):
As we talked about a little bit, China, is this
really fascinating case study because it is dominant in several
aspects of clean energy, including solar manufacturing and electric cars,
and it is both communists and capitalistic, which Beijing artfully
refers to as capitalism with Chinese characteristics. So if we
roll with this idea, I want to ask you to
invent what I'm calling capitalism with climate characteristics. If we
(24:51):
had a system that was backed up by the larger
motivations of the planet, but was capitalist, what would that look.
Speaker 2 (24:57):
Like to you.
Speaker 1 (24:58):
It's never a good idea to make me dictator of
the world.
Speaker 2 (25:02):
Just one country, okay, take over the world.
Speaker 1 (25:07):
Or dictator of a country. In a way, the answer
is that we are already in that place where there
is capitalism with climate characteristics in different parts of the
world kind of forced upon you, right, Like climate impacts
are here, you've got to deal with them. And in
the US you're getting an Inflation Reduction Act, which is
a subsidy driven injection of capital into green solutions. In
(25:31):
Europe you're getting the Green Deal, which is a little
bit of subsidy but mostly direction and regulation and clarity
on where the money needs to be spent. And in
China you're getting a jingoistic to some extent, version of
climate capitalism, where China wants to build these green technologies
(25:51):
as a way of being a leader in the world
taking advantage of it to provide the solutions that the
world needs. That's why we have Chinese solar panels dotted
all around the world. So is there one form of
capitalism or one set of solutions that will enable us
(26:12):
to make this work. I'm not so sure. I think
nobody currently has the solution, the perfect solution, And even
if we did have the perfect solution, as we did
during the COVID vaccine, we are not going to be
able to deploy it correctly because we're humans and re
fight and we gossip, and we don't do the things
that may seem the most economically rational thing to do.
(26:33):
But in that messyness of being human, I think we
are starting to move in a direction which is acknowledging
the problem that is climate change, acknowledging the opportunities that
it presents in creating a world that will not just
deal with the climate impacts coming our way, but also
(26:53):
be a better world. Getting rid of your fossil fuel car,
yes cuts down to your two emissions, but also cuts
air pollution. It's a really good thing. You should do
it even if there was no climate problem. And so
there are all these solutions that are going to just
make the world a better place, and it's starting to
happen again, not at pace, but at least there are
(27:15):
people working on it.
Speaker 3 (27:17):
You also have this great sort of through line in
the book that we sort of have decoupled in our
mind the economic forces and the climate forces, instead of
saying that the planetary motivations and the economic motivations are
the same. One of the chapters you talk about London
developing its sewer system, which is fantastic history, and you
have this quote from someone saying, untill people have the
idea that throwing CO two in the air is like
throwing poop in the street, We're not going to spend
(27:39):
what it costs. So until we see that we are
compromising ourselves our health. But certainly like our economies with
the climate change, we're not going to put the money
that we need to solve the problem. So if we
could just put these ideas together, that capitalism with climate
characteristics is just capitalism if you really think about the
climate as a representation or something that has an impact
on the economy, we could do the mental math a
little bit better.
Speaker 1 (27:59):
Yes, but always have people opportunistic enough to try and
take advantage and break that consensus. The UK is a
very good example of that. In the chapter I go
through the creation of the Climate Change Act as this
thing that has driven the country to become a climate
leader around the world, cut the most emissions amongst G
seven and G twenty countries. And yet today we are
(28:23):
led by a prime minister and a party that is
trying to water down, that is trying to find wedge issues,
to create false narratives around a meat tax or trying
to tell you not to have a fifteen minute liveable city.
It's just a way for politicians to try and get
some words here or there. And that's going to happen
right if it can happen in the UK, a country
(28:43):
where people understand climate change, where there's a political consensus
on trying to do something about it, and yet some
politicians in powerful places are going to do things to
try and slow down climate action. We are in for
a messy transition.
Speaker 3 (28:57):
The book is out. You've been working on it forever.
How does it feel. How do you feel having this
finally out in the world.
Speaker 1 (29:03):
It's such a long process, a really nice one, but
also you just never know whether it land by the
time it comes so I didn't know what it would
be like. When I actually held a copy in my hand,
and I will not lie, it did feel really satisfying.
I sat down then I was like, huh, it's real.
Speaker 3 (29:23):
Yeah, I made this. I want to throw to you
the questions, which is, if you could put a billboard
outside of your house, what would it say. Surely you've
given this thought. You've asked it like twenty times.
Speaker 1 (29:37):
No, I've given it no thought. I always go back
to what my dad told me. There is good in
every person in the.
Speaker 2 (29:46):
World that's nice. Do you want know what mine is?
Speaker 1 (29:49):
Please?
Speaker 3 (29:50):
I would do my favorite line from your book. The
robots did their jobs naked, no additional content, just get
people thin. Thankin you know, while they're driving. Thank you
for listening to Zero. If you'd like to order a
copy of Akshot's book, there's a link in the show notes.
(30:12):
It will make you rethink where we're at on the
climate fight, and the book also makes for a great
stocking stuffer. If you liked this episode, please take a
moment to rate and review it, Subscribe on Apple Podcasts
or Spotify, Send it to a friend or a budding
climate capitalist. Get in touch at Zero pod at Bloomberg
dot Net. Zero's producer is Oscar Boyd and senior producer
is Christine driscoll. Our theme music is composed by Wonderly
(30:34):
Special thanks to Anna Maserakas and Jilda de Carly.
Speaker 2 (30:37):
I'm Kira Bendram and Zero will be back next week
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio News. Hi again, it's suckshot.
My book Climate Capitalism, Winning the Global Race to Zero
Emissions is out in the US and Canada today, so
I thought as a preview you might enjoy listening to
a conversation I had with podcast editor Kira Bindram about
(00:26):
the book and the ideas in it. After you read
the book, please write to me with feedback at Zero
Pod at Bloomberg dot net.
Speaker 2 (00:33):
Thanks.
Speaker 3 (00:37):
Welcome to Zero I'm Kira Bindram, editor of Bloomberg's Greener
Living section and a good friend of the pod. Today
is a special day on Zero because today is a
day your usual host has been waiting on for months.
Climate Capitalism, a new book by akshat Rapi, is now
on sale. Climate Capitalism sets out to answer an important question.
(00:59):
If capitalists are set up to maximize profits, how can
they also prioritize the planet. Over twelve chapters, akshot introduces
a dozen people who are already making climate capitalism work,
from the engineer who shaped China's electric car policies, to
the politician who helped make net zero a UK law,
to the CEO who fought off a takeover attempt. So
(01:20):
you could stick with a sustainability strategy. Akshat and I
have known each other for almost seven years now, and
what comes across in his book is what comes across every.
Speaker 2 (01:29):
Time I talk to him.
Speaker 3 (01:31):
A lot of very smart and very interesting people are
working on climate problems. Many of them are proof positive
that the capitalist framework can be effective. As Akshot writes
in the book's very first line, it's now cheaper to save.
Speaker 2 (01:44):
The world than destroy it.
Speaker 3 (01:47):
I also know how much work Akshot has put into
this book, so after reading it, I thought it might
be fun to put him on the hot seat for once,
because I wanted to ask Akshat, if climate capitalism is
so doable, why does it seem so difficult?
Speaker 2 (02:07):
Aksha, Welcome to your podcast. How are you feeling nervous?
Speaker 1 (02:10):
Because I don't usually get interviewed, I'm not on this
side of the screen.
Speaker 2 (02:15):
I'll try to be gentle.
Speaker 3 (02:17):
The underpinning of the book, I would say, and you
can correct me if I'm wrong, is that capitalism and
climate progress are compatible because they have to be. You
say in the intro, changing our entire economic system and
our entire energy system in the time that we need
to do it to affect change with the climate is
just really not feasible.
Speaker 2 (02:36):
And I'm curious.
Speaker 3 (02:37):
Whether you think most people would agree, Like, if you
sort of set out with these two things are compatible,
do you think of that as a statement of fact
an article of faith? Do you think you're making a
provocative argument? Where do you think most people land on
this question of whether these two ideas can work together?
Speaker 1 (02:51):
Sadly, the answer is that most people haven't talked about it.
The trouble with climate is that there are very loud voices,
very few of them on opposite side of the political spectrum. Yes,
there's a whole range of voices in the middle, but
that's also a small population. Most people aren't thinking about
climate solutions. But if we speak to the climate crowd,
(03:14):
I think most people will not agree that capitalism can
be a solution. And that's because the root of environmentalism,
or the root of most people who are trying to
work on solutions, has been to try and overcome this
economic system that we must accept has been a part
of the problem, has been the driving force of profit
(03:36):
maximization over making sure all the impacts of that process
are taken into consideration, and so there is no doubt.
It's a provocation. That is how the publisher pitched it
to me, which is, if you're going to give people
something they will read, you have to be a little provocative.
But as I wrote the book, and as I tried
to tell the stories, it actually became easier because I
(03:59):
wasn't trying to create something that wasn't happening. I wasn't
trying to make a case for something that should happen.
I ended up writing a series of stories of things
that are already happening.
Speaker 3 (04:11):
So the way you've structured the book, as you're alluding to,
is each chapter you give us a person who is
working towards climate campus is not just one person, but
there is sort of an anchor person in most of
the chapters. So for example, we've got Wangang, who is
not a household name the way Elon Musk is in
terms of electric cars, but has plays a huge role
in ev development in China. Or we've got Brian E. Worthington,
who was actually the very first guest on zero, who
(04:33):
was the lead author of the two thousand and eight
Climate Change Act in the UK. I'm curious what made
you want to approach the book in this way where
it's centered around people, instead of maybe looking at a
different technology in each chapter, or even a company, or
even just telling the story linearly over time.
Speaker 1 (04:48):
Our driving force for the kind of journalism that I've
kind of learned with Yukira, starting at Quartz and then
now at Bloomberg Green has been to try and tell
stories that have not already been told, or tell them
in a way that has not already been done. Take
Bill Gates's How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, really good
(05:08):
book makes the case for what needs to be done
with some small case studies of what's already being done.
Or This Changes Everything by Naomi Klein, which is in
the subtitle The Climate Versus Capitalism, which is a rhetorical
powerful exposition of what's wrong with the system and why
(05:28):
we must break it down. I wanted to take the
journalistic instincts of taking the story of ideally one individual,
but then building out the context in which and the
decades over which some of these stories play out. And
my hope was that having the anchor person will allow
people to read those stories in a way that they
won't get lost in the abstract ideas that are all
(05:51):
around us. To deal with the climate problem.
Speaker 3 (05:53):
It almost reminds me of when you're a kid and
you think politicians are just like such adults and like
these people that make all these huge decisions and the
or you get you're like, right, they're just we're just
humans all trying to figure it out. And they're just
people now my age, with my level of expertise, shaping policy.
And there's something a little terrifying about that, but there's
as some comforting that these are human beings actively working
to solve these problems, who are really applying themselves to it,
(06:15):
and they are turning me abstract into something quite tangible
or you can affect change, and.
Speaker 1 (06:20):
That their actions are directed but are also shaped by
the chance encounters and the chance events that they live through.
Speaker 2 (06:28):
Is there anyone in your mix of people?
Speaker 3 (06:30):
I know you don't want to choose a favorite child,
but I'm curious of the people you spoke with or
are focused on in the book, is there anyone you
think about the most often or you find yourself relaying
their story the most often when you're talking to other people.
Speaker 1 (06:41):
You already mentioned his name. It's one Gang really because
it's sort of a character as a Chinese bureaucrat you
rarely hear about. You know, you probably are aware Chi
Jinping as the leader of the country, but you're unlikely
to know very much beyond that as a general news reader,
and also one gang doesn't own a social media platform.
So you get this place where this individual within a
(07:05):
system has made a huge impact on the EV transition,
getting the Chinese state to spend tens of billions of
dollars in a decade to move the technology which we
are all benefiting from. But people don't know who was
the driving force, what are the policies, what are the
massive changes that have allowed this to happen. So it's
the story I bring up very often. The other one
(07:28):
that I don't bring up that often, but I think
about quite often is the story of Fati Birol. Fatti
Birol is the head of the International Energy Agency, and
in the sort of seven year period that I have
been a climate journalist, he's gone from being the character
who was hated by the climate movement to being the
character that is loved by the climate movement. That is
(07:49):
reflected in how he approaches the problem. Even though you
know he runs an international organization, you can see he
has really understood the climate problem and gone from this
energy agency that was built as an organization that was
very fossil fuel oriented to being this organization that really
wants to drive the energy transition.
Speaker 3 (08:10):
For me reading that chapter, and he was also a
guest on the pod, we have another person who is
a former zero guest. You're struck almost by how recent
a lot of this evolution is happening, that it's all
moving quite quickly, and that one agency is a good
sort of stand in for how quickly the conversation changes.
I want to ask you about what I'm thinking of
is like the thumbs that capitalism allows to be put
on the scale outside of market forces. So I'm thinking
(08:31):
about regulations, I'm thinking about subsidies, and as we've heard
on the podcast very recently, I'm thinking about tools like
shareholder activism, things you can do to affect change within
a company. In your view, and having done all this reporting,
do you think that those tools are sufficient to sort
of check capitalism's most profit driven in individualism driven instincts.
Speaker 1 (08:50):
We can answer that in multiple ways. Right, there is
actually no one form of capitalism in the world. The
American capitalism is very different from the Indian capitalism very
different from the Nordic capitalism to being very different from
the Chinese capitalism, and each of those at the core
of it have two tenets profit maximization driven in a
(09:11):
competitive market. However, a market is never free. It's always
regulated in some form if you want a market to
function and do the job it needs to do for society.
And to what level that is regulated is different in
different countries, and we can see there are benefits to
the level of regulation that may exist in a particular
(09:34):
circumstance versus another one.
Speaker 3 (09:36):
I mean, it sounds like you're saying that you have
to shape the tools of capitalism to the society and
like the system you're in, and it's all about the execution.
Speaker 1 (09:44):
Yeah, we probably will never have the perfect way of
making capitalism work for the planet. But what we do
have is a series of experiments currently happening in different
parts of the world. And what we can see is
things that are working well in one part work well
because of a certain mix of those tools. And something
I try and do in the book is to learn
(10:06):
from the successes that are enabled in that context and
whether we can translate those successes in other places where
maybe there is a different form of capitalism.
Speaker 3 (10:15):
So I think I agree with you that adjusting a
capitalist system at the margins, or sort of finessing the
nuance of it, versus trying to overthrow it, is the
logical move. But for fun, just for fun, I wonder
what you'd say if we found out tomorrow that we
actually have another century to deal with climate change. In
other words, if we could somehow remodel our economic system
and energy system at the same time, would you change
(10:37):
your answer.
Speaker 1 (10:38):
In a way? We already ran that experiment, right, We
knew the science was pretty certain. Early nineties, mid nineties,
the latest didn't really do very much. So as a
society we chose not to. And sure you can blame
certain actors in society directing this, but the end is
(10:59):
of we kind of choose. But if we do have
another one hundred years and suddenly that is a possibility,
I think there are a few things we could do.
One is we should not try and slow down the
transition in the sectors that are already on the move.
The move to electric cars is a really good one. Yes,
(11:21):
we're going to need more metals, and that's a thing
that we need to deal with but we will cut
air pollution in cities everywhere in the world, and that's
a good thing, and you could do that for renewables.
It would be a much better world to have sources
of energy distributed across the world rather than being concentrated
in some places where you have to take a pipe,
drill it down, get some black go out, ship it
(11:44):
to a refinery, put in tons of energy to try
and draw out energy. It's just not a good system.
But the biggest advantage we will get with time is
not really to slow down the fossil fuel transition. It
is more that we'll have more time to do diplomacy right,
that we'll have more time for countries to actually come
together and agree on something, or we'll have more time
(12:08):
to find a way in which countries that are going
to struggle can be uplifted and be brought along for
the transition, rather than what is a reality for some
countries getting drowned as sea levels rise.
Speaker 3 (12:21):
I want to ask you one more question the sort
of high level macro capitalism conversation. And I don't want
this question to come out wrong, So I hope you
know that I love you, and I respect you, and
I don't mean anything by this, but do you think
sometimes that you are too much of an optimist? Which
I asked because I said in the beginning, and I
think it's true, you, more than anyone I know or
have worked with, have really helped me see that it
(12:42):
is possible to reach net zero technically, scientifically, like all
of those things can fall in place, but we are
off track to meet net zero by twenty fifty. We
are still in a place where the wealthiest one percent
of humanity is responsible for as many emissions as the
poorest fifty percent.
Speaker 2 (12:58):
We are not.
Speaker 3 (12:59):
Really succeeding at the level that we need to. So, if,
as you argue in the book, capitalism can solve the
climate crisis, the biggest question is why does it seem
to be failing at it.
Speaker 1 (13:09):
It might be to do with something in my brain
chemistry that I prefer to think this way, but I
can also justify it. Right. It's not that I have
an ideological stance of only writing about optimistic solutions, right.
You know, as a journalist, I do all sorts of things.
I write about problems, I write investigations exposing all the
flaws that companies have and people have. But I also
(13:30):
think one aspect of journalism that is less celebrated, is
less pursued, is to look at successes and what we
can learn from them. So the optimism is kind of
baked into doing the book because I wanted to focus
on the successes. If I wanted to focus on the problems,
that book's already been written. It's called The Uninhabitable Earth.
(13:52):
And so I wanted to provide a narrative that would
be more corrective to where we sit, where it feels
like this problem is so big that we will not
be able to fight it, that we will not be
able to solve it. And yet if you just look
at the numbers, we are not on track for five
or six degrees celsius, a warming, which was within the
(14:13):
realm of possibility as recently as twenty fifteen. And then
we sign the Paris Agreement, and now we're on track
for three degrees celsius. It's not enough, but at least
we may progress.
Speaker 2 (14:28):
After the break.
Speaker 3 (14:29):
How exactly is climate capitalism supposed to work? I want
to dig into some of the mechanics here of marrying
capitalism and climate progress, and I'll start with a big question,
which is, we have seen arguably a recent example of
(14:50):
capitalism succeeding and failing at the same time, which is
the COVID vaccine. So, with state support, we had private
companies that were able to develop vaccines extremely quickly, but
the distribution was very, very unequal around the world. And
we see that with all kinds of tech, where poor
countries that would benefit from a quicker access ultimately don't
get it. Is it possible to address that type of
(15:11):
inequality within capitalist framework?
Speaker 1 (15:14):
The COVID example is such a good one. It's one
that we thought about as climate journalists at large as
a good parallel. Shouldn't we think of what happened with
COVID and apply it to climate And there are parallels
to be drawn, but they are not one to one.
The COVID vaccine was created to deal with an emergency
(15:37):
in the human timescale we think of emergencies. Right, climate
emergency is also an emergency, but it's not on the
same timescale as a COVID vaccine. Did science and technology
help us avoid what could have been an even worse disaster?
One hundred percent? Right? Take any other global dynamic of
(15:59):
this kind when you didn't have an mRNA vaccine, which
just won the Nobel Prize earlier this month. We would
not have been able to create a vaccine at the
pace at which we did. So you can take some lessons,
which is technology can help, and that global diplomacy is
crucial in making a global problem solvable. But then with
(16:21):
climate change, we have time, not to say if you
have plenty of time or we have infinite time, but
we have decades and that allows you to think about
that problem differently. In COVID, you kind of needed one
silver bullet solution, you needed a vaccine. In climate you
don't have that shortcut. You need all kinds of solutions
(16:41):
to work, and that's a much harder problem in a
way than the COVID vaccine. In some cases, we also
don't kind of have the technology at scale for some
of these problems to be solved. So the parallels exist,
but not enough. And I don't think the failure that
was COVID or the success that was COVID, because you
(17:02):
can slice andize it either way, will determine whether we
solve the climate problem or not.
Speaker 3 (17:09):
It's interesting that you fin I mean, obviously it's different timeframes,
but pandemic was three four years and the next ten
twenty years are like pretty important. You write in the
book about how research development responds to like a brute
force strategy that like something so important happens that everybody
mobilizes around something with such urgency that just like makes
it happen. And that is generally what happened with mRNA vaccines.
(17:29):
Don't we need a brute force moment for climate like
it does feel like if we could take a little
of the urgency that was implied by the pandemic, it
would be more effective, because, as you say, that is
the thing that tends to move the ball forward on technology.
Speaker 1 (17:43):
And we kind of have the brute force method in
different places. A ban on selling fossil fuel cars by
twenty thirty five, which now exists in more than twenty
countries around the world, including most of the major car markets,
is a brute force strategy, especially if you're a motorist,
especially if you ask somebody who loves their gasoline car.
(18:04):
At some point we're going to have to talk about
eating less meat. That's going to sound like a brute
for strategy. And so yes, there are uncomfortable choices that
we have to make, and policy will have to play
a role there. If you talk to utilities, they're going
to tell you. In the two thousands and twenty tens,
it was a brute for strategy to come in and
(18:24):
say you need to have ten percent renewables in your
mix by this date. Now they look back and they're like,
of course, duh. It was so easy. But at the
time they also had their lobby groups coming around and
saying that's not good. We are not going to be
able to make that transition work. So yes, it's not
a brute for strategy in the sense of a COVID
vaccine that there will be a silver bullet solution, but
(18:47):
we are starting to apply some of those in many
different parts of the transition. You could very well argue
not enough parts of the transition.
Speaker 3 (18:56):
Let's keep talking about timescale for a second. So also
in the book, you write about how clean tech development
basically operates on a longer timescale than most venture capital
and one of the chapters you go in depth on
Bill gates breakthrough energy mensures, which decided to work in
a twenty year timeframe instead of the typical ten years.
What other aspects of traditional investing do you think need
to be rethought here or are being rethought in an
(19:19):
era of clean tech being instead of internet companies. The
dominant thing that is getting a lot of investment.
Speaker 1 (19:25):
A big missing one that I could not have written
a chapter on because there isn't a successful story around,
is how do you move large amounts of capital. We're
talking tens to one hundreds of billions of dollars from
developed country markets to developing country markets. If you look
at the energy transition today, you can slice the numbers
many ways, but one way in which you can do
(19:47):
it is see that develop countries are actually spending as
much as is needed on a net zero transition. They're
not spending it in the right way, not in the
right places, they don't have the right policy mix available.
But in terms of pure capital, that money is starting
to flow in developed countries. The gap with developing countries
is massive, three, four or five times as much more
(20:10):
money is needed in developing countries, in the places where
energy is not accessible to hundreds of millions of people,
in places where energy demand is growing, and in places
where you can't tell them not to use the fossil
fuels that they have in their ground, but you can
enable them to transition faster if you allow for money
(20:34):
to flow to places where solar is already the cheapest
source of electricity, except that all these cash bottlenecks and
other bottlenecks, but definitely cash as one bottleneck that needs
to be sorted, and there isn't a good solution. We're
currently in that place where some experiments are happening. There's
the Just Energy Transition Partnership, which many of the G
(20:55):
seven countries are trying with South Africa, with Indonesia, with Vietnam.
They're messy, I know, working right now, but it's at
least one experiment in moving tens of billions of dollars
to these countries. We'll need many more of those.
Speaker 3 (21:08):
When I was trying to think about to answer this
question for myself, are there aspects of the investing mindset
that we would need to change for clean tech? One
of the things that came to mind for me is failure.
And I'm thinking here of Cylindro, which, for the listener,
Cylindro went bankrupt in twenty eleven, and it had received
this five hundred and thirty five million dollar loan from
the US Department of Energy, and it became this huge
talking point for why the Department of Energy should not
(21:30):
give out loans, even though the Department of Energy also
gave Tesla a big loan which worked out quite well.
Do you think that there's a lower tolerance for failure
when it comes to clean tech, or at least a
quicker mindset to use a failure as emblematic of like
why this whole thing isn't worth doing.
Speaker 1 (21:45):
I think the lower tolerance for failure exists because it
is easy to use that as a political wedge. It
is easy to point to a failure and say the
entire project is not working, even though if you actually
analyze the US Department of Energy's loan program, it's been
pretty successful, and so it is easy to turn the
(22:07):
failure of a clean tech company into a talking point.
What we do know just from entrepreneurialism one oh one
is that failure is baked into trying to solve a
hard problem, and so while politics can make it hard,
we should try and make space for more failure, both
on technology but also on policy. We need many more
(22:30):
experiments around the world trying different models for how to
rein in the excesses of capitalism so it can work
to tackle climate change.
Speaker 3 (22:39):
Let me ask you for a second about entrepreneurs. I
want to talk about the people that are starting these
companies and developing these technologies. In reading the book, I
found it kind of striking how many of the people
we met who did not necessarily start out focused on
climate change or start out focused on solving for emissions.
They wanted to hedge against oil price spikes in the seventies,
(23:00):
or maybe they just thought, like, that's going to be
a big industry and I could make money in it.
I guess my first question is do you think this
is a feature or a bug? Like does it matter
if most of the entrepreneurs out there right now aren't
actually motivated by climate change specifically?
Speaker 1 (23:13):
It's a feature of the moment in which we are
in the transition. I wasn't a climate journalist till twenty sixteen, seventeen,
and I am a climate journalist now. This is a
story that I've heard again and again over the past decade,
where people realize how big a problem this is, want
to do something about it, and finally find a place
(23:33):
in the energy transition. In the future, that may not
be the case, because we already have teenagers in schools
going out to strike wanting to work on solutions. But
is it a feature of a bug? I think it
doesn't matter. I think for entrepreneurs, they need to go
out and solve a problem that they are really passionate about.
And currently, it turns out society is making more entrepreneurs
(23:56):
care about the climate problem. That's a good place to be.
Speaker 3 (24:00):
Also, someone that has written another book with youth climate
activists and has spent a lot of time talking to them,
and it sounds like you're saying, in twenty thirty years,
we will look back and see that actually a greater
share of people who got into this space did it
explicitly because they wanted to solve the problem of climate change.
Speaker 1 (24:14):
Yeah right, rather than the transition that many of the
people I know today have made, which is they didn't
start working on climate, now they are working on climate.
Speaker 3 (24:22):
Okay, let me bring this all back around to one
question for you, which is, let's come back to capitalism.
Speaker 2 (24:27):
Everyone loves to hear that.
Speaker 3 (24:29):
As we talked about a little bit, China, is this
really fascinating case study because it is dominant in several
aspects of clean energy, including solar manufacturing and electric cars,
and it is both communists and capitalistic, which Beijing artfully
refers to as capitalism with Chinese characteristics. So if we
roll with this idea, I want to ask you to
invent what I'm calling capitalism with climate characteristics. If we
(24:51):
had a system that was backed up by the larger
motivations of the planet, but was capitalist, what would that look.
Speaker 2 (24:57):
Like to you.
Speaker 1 (24:58):
It's never a good idea to make me dictator of
the world.
Speaker 2 (25:02):
Just one country, okay, take over the world.
Speaker 1 (25:07):
Or dictator of a country. In a way, the answer
is that we are already in that place where there
is capitalism with climate characteristics in different parts of the
world kind of forced upon you, right, Like climate impacts
are here, you've got to deal with them. And in
the US you're getting an Inflation Reduction Act, which is
a subsidy driven injection of capital into green solutions. In
(25:31):
Europe you're getting the Green Deal, which is a little
bit of subsidy but mostly direction and regulation and clarity
on where the money needs to be spent. And in
China you're getting a jingoistic to some extent, version of
climate capitalism, where China wants to build these green technologies
(25:51):
as a way of being a leader in the world
taking advantage of it to provide the solutions that the
world needs. That's why we have Chinese solar panels dotted
all around the world. So is there one form of
capitalism or one set of solutions that will enable us
(26:12):
to make this work. I'm not so sure. I think
nobody currently has the solution, the perfect solution, And even
if we did have the perfect solution, as we did
during the COVID vaccine, we are not going to be
able to deploy it correctly because we're humans and re
fight and we gossip, and we don't do the things
that may seem the most economically rational thing to do.
(26:33):
But in that messyness of being human, I think we
are starting to move in a direction which is acknowledging
the problem that is climate change, acknowledging the opportunities that
it presents in creating a world that will not just
deal with the climate impacts coming our way, but also
(26:53):
be a better world. Getting rid of your fossil fuel car,
yes cuts down to your two emissions, but also cuts
air pollution. It's a really good thing. You should do
it even if there was no climate problem. And so
there are all these solutions that are going to just
make the world a better place, and it's starting to
happen again, not at pace, but at least there are
(27:15):
people working on it.
Speaker 3 (27:17):
You also have this great sort of through line in
the book that we sort of have decoupled in our
mind the economic forces and the climate forces, instead of
saying that the planetary motivations and the economic motivations are
the same. One of the chapters you talk about London
developing its sewer system, which is fantastic history, and you
have this quote from someone saying, untill people have the
idea that throwing CO two in the air is like
throwing poop in the street, We're not going to spend
(27:39):
what it costs. So until we see that we are
compromising ourselves our health. But certainly like our economies with
the climate change, we're not going to put the money
that we need to solve the problem. So if we
could just put these ideas together, that capitalism with climate
characteristics is just capitalism if you really think about the
climate as a representation or something that has an impact
on the economy, we could do the mental math a
little bit better.
Speaker 1 (27:59):
Yes, but always have people opportunistic enough to try and
take advantage and break that consensus. The UK is a
very good example of that. In the chapter I go
through the creation of the Climate Change Act as this
thing that has driven the country to become a climate
leader around the world, cut the most emissions amongst G
seven and G twenty countries. And yet today we are
(28:23):
led by a prime minister and a party that is
trying to water down, that is trying to find wedge issues,
to create false narratives around a meat tax or trying
to tell you not to have a fifteen minute liveable city.
It's just a way for politicians to try and get
some words here or there. And that's going to happen
right if it can happen in the UK, a country
(28:43):
where people understand climate change, where there's a political consensus
on trying to do something about it, and yet some
politicians in powerful places are going to do things to
try and slow down climate action. We are in for
a messy transition.
Speaker 3 (28:57):
The book is out. You've been working on it forever.
How does it feel. How do you feel having this
finally out in the world.
Speaker 1 (29:03):
It's such a long process, a really nice one, but
also you just never know whether it land by the
time it comes so I didn't know what it would
be like. When I actually held a copy in my hand,
and I will not lie, it did feel really satisfying.
I sat down then I was like, huh, it's real.
Speaker 3 (29:23):
Yeah, I made this. I want to throw to you
the questions, which is, if you could put a billboard
outside of your house, what would it say. Surely you've
given this thought. You've asked it like twenty times.
Speaker 1 (29:37):
No, I've given it no thought. I always go back
to what my dad told me. There is good in
every person in the.
Speaker 2 (29:46):
World that's nice. Do you want know what mine is?
Speaker 1 (29:49):
Please?
Speaker 3 (29:50):
I would do my favorite line from your book. The
robots did their jobs naked, no additional content, just get
people thin. Thankin you know, while they're driving. Thank you
for listening to Zero. If you'd like to order a
copy of Akshot's book, there's a link in the show notes.
(30:12):
It will make you rethink where we're at on the
climate fight, and the book also makes for a great
stocking stuffer. If you liked this episode, please take a
moment to rate and review it, Subscribe on Apple Podcasts
or Spotify, Send it to a friend or a budding
climate capitalist. Get in touch at Zero pod at Bloomberg
dot Net. Zero's producer is Oscar Boyd and senior producer
is Christine driscoll. Our theme music is composed by Wonderly
(30:34):
Special thanks to Anna Maserakas and Jilda de Carly.
Speaker 2 (30:37):
I'm Kira Bendram and Zero will be back next week
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