In this episode, Gil Jenkins sits down with Akshat Rathi, a senior climate reporter at Bloomberg News and the host of Bloomberg Green's Zero podcast, to discuss his new book, "Climate Capitalism: Winning the Global Race to Zero Emissions and Solving the Crisis of our Age," which was released on March 12 in the U.S. "Climate Capitalism" takes readers across five continents, tracking the unlikely heroes driving the fight against climate change. The stories within the book reveal how people, policy, and technology are converging to create a green economy that is not only possible but profitable. Akshat and Gil explore key chapters from the book, touching on stories like that of Wan Gang, a Chinese bureaucrat who played a pivotal role in the rapid expansion of electric vehicles in China. They also discuss India's significant progress toward solar power since 2015, the transformative influence of the International Energy Agency, and the UK's legally binding decarbonization commitments, among other topics.
In this episode, Gil Jenkins sits down with Akshat Rathi, a senior climate reporter at Bloomberg News and the host of Bloomberg Green's Zero podcast, to discuss his new book, "Climate Capitalism: Winning the Global Race to Zero Emissions and Solving the Crisis of our Age," which was released on March 12 in the U.S.
"Climate Capitalism" takes readers across five continents, tracking the unlikely heroes driving the fight against climate change. The stories within the book reveal how people, policy, and technology are converging to create a green economy that is not only possible but profitable.
Akshat and Gil explore key chapters from the book, touching on stories like that of Wan Gang, a Chinese bureaucrat who played a pivotal role in the rapid expansion of electric vehicles in China. They also discuss India's significant progress toward solar power since 2015, the transformative influence of the International Energy Agency, and the UK's legally binding decarbonization commitments, among other topics.
Links:
Episode recorded March 8, 2024
Chad Reed: I'm Chad Reed.
Hillary Langer: I'm Hillary Langer.
Gil Jenkins: I'm Gil Jenkins.
Chad: This is Climate Positive.
Akshat Rathi: the way climate action will succeed is if you bring people along. What does it take to not just have the technocratic ideas, but also the ability to explain those technocratic ideas and show the impact that they have on people, is what is going to unlock whether 2024 goes in the way of good climate action or bad climate action.
Gil: This week on Climate Positive , we’re thrilled to welcome Akshat Rathi, senior reporter for Bloomberg, host of Bloomberg Green’s Zero podcast, and author of a fantastic new book called Climate Capitalism: Winning the Global Race to Zero Emissions and Solving the Crisis of our Age.
Climate Capitalism takes readers on a journey across five continents, tracking the unlikely heroes driving the fight against climate change. These narratives reveal how people, policy, and technology are converging to create a green economy that is not only possible, but profitable.
I've been a big admirer of Akshat's work over the years, so having the opportunity to sit down with him and delve into the key insights from his book was quite special for me. And I hope you find our ensuing discussion as engaging and enlightening as I did.
Gil: Akshat, welcome to Climate Positive. Thank you for doing the show.
Akshat Rathi: Hey, thanks for having me.
Gil: Could you tell us a little bit about what inspired you to write Climate Capitalism, and how you find time to do this given your prolific reporting schedule and podcasting duties?
Akshat: I started because I wanted a fun challenge and that when I was trying to look at whether solutions are scaling around the world, I was finding examples everywhere. It was the moment, at least when I pitched the book in 2019 where what I was seeing wasn't quite aligning with what people were feeling or people's perception of where climate solutions stood.
Initially, it began as an idea that I'm going to try and tell you about the places that you don't know about where these solutions are scaling, or you don't know how they scaled because either they are happening in places that are hard to report from or hard to have visibility in, or are places where typically you don't get media attention going. As with books, it's a long journey. You take a long time to report them, write them, edit them, put them down.
On thinking about it evolved and what I ended up with was a series of success stories at scale, but all of them working in the capitalistic framework that we have, and tweaking it to make it work for tackling climate change, which is again going against the grain of general environmental movement that says, "Look, it's the economic system, unless you change it, we're not going to fix this problem." We are starting to change it. People would like to rip it apart and replace it with something. I don't know what that was, but at least we are starting to change it, and we're doing it in different ways around the world.
The book gives you examples of where that's happening and how to think about creating a framework for getting to zero emissions based on those success stories.
Gil: Totally share that worldview, and I'm appreciative of your work to put this all together in such a cogent and arresting read. Before we dig into a little bit more on the motivation behind the book, which you touched on, and the themes in some of the specific sections, I do want to just take a moment to have our listeners learn a little bit more about your own story.
What inspired you to transition from a background in, is it organic chemistry, and chemical engineering to journalism?Then was there a moment, and you do talk about this in the book where you really started to dig into climate solutions? I know that's a multi-part, but you have a great anecdote in the book that I'd love for you to share.
Akshat: Well, the book starts with Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign where he's talking about clean coal, and my editor is like, "What the hell is that?" I was a science reporter at the time, and I was like, "Well, he doesn't know what he's talking about." [laughs] It's the thing, it is a technology you actually don't just take the coal, clean it, and then burn it. You actually take the coal, burn it, then clean it up by capturing the emissions. My editor was like, "Well, okay. Is that a thing that works?" I'm like, "Yes, there are two coal power plants in the world where it does work." He's like, "Well, maybe we should look into it, do a story about it."
That ended up becoming a long series looking at carbon captures, both opportunities and pitfalls because it's been around for 50 years. That series took off, and viral and as things happen, it hit a moment in the energy transition with Trump having been elected and all these movements trying to figure out how to keep climate action going in the face of a presidency that was opposed to it.
How I came to it was circuitous. I grew up in India, as you do, if you know math or science in India, you're going to become an engineer or a doctor. I did chemical engineering. I suppose the only choice I made was I wanted to do chemical engineering rather than just engineering because I like chemistry. Then the desire to study more chemistry ended up with me to study for a PhD at Oxford doing organic chemistry. I was on the path to be a professor, at least that was the goal with which I started my PhD. Somewhere in the middle, I was like, "No, the life of an academic is not for me."
Well, I used to write as a hobby, and so I thought, "Well, maybe I could put some of my science skills to use here. It feels like there is room for better coverage of scientific topics for a general audience.
Gil: That's a very diplomatic answer. There is indeed room.
Akshat: Yes, I ended up doing that. I started with science and then of course Trump happened and so now I'm a climate guy.
Gil: I first met you in the hallway of the Atlantic Council during the Trump years. I can't remember the context but we were I think in the same mode of reacting to what does this mean for climate action? You were chronicling it and I was advocating for the American renewable energy business. What an interesting time that was for both of us and maybe we'll be again. Anyways, we'll get into that later. Let's expand a bit more on the themes of the book that you touched on at the top. Obviously, this notion you talk throughout in the beginning and throughout in the end, very simply it's cheaper to save the world than to destroy it.
You illuminate that through these players that you chronicle who are sitting at the intersection of politics, technology, and finance.Do you want to maybe expand a bit more on how you arrived at that theme before we jump into some of the rich narratives chronicled in the 12 chapters?
Akshat: I feel another thing you have to do with books is to find your niche. There is growing literature around climate and that's good. There's more journalism in the climate space, that's good. When I was trying to write this book, A, I wanted to focus on the solutions and what lessons we can learn from it. I also wanted to figure out why they work at a very high macro level.
To me, the distillation of that is it's cheaper to save the world than to destroy it because the economic case for climate action has now been made for many years that the cost of doing something to reduce emissions to meet climate goals will be lower than the cost of dealing with the impacts that may come if you don't. Now that is true at a macro level globally. That's true on a country level in most countries.
It's not always true at an individual's level. It's not always true even on a regional or a city level but how do you take what is a clear economic case but then make it work for all players in that space was the animating point that I could bring through with the book and with the examples. Of course, there's a long way to get to net zero and so you will need fundamental drivers that will push it. Obviously, technology has been one and that's made the economic case easier because we have clean technologies that have been getting cheaper and cheaper barring the inflation-adjusted period of the last two years but have been getting cheaper and cheaper. That's helped.
Gil: Still cheaper than many of the incumbents.
Akshat: Yes, the second thing that's helped is sadly climate impacts are here and you can see them and you can feel them and you, yourself are affected by them. Almost all of the planet has people affected by climate impacts. Not everybody understands those. Not everybody appreciates the climate linkage of these extreme weather events but more and more people do. You've got that second force which translates into a political force, into a campaigning force, into an activist force but it's the people force that's there.
Then finally even if you have the motivation from people to act and the technology's getting cheaper you still need something that unlocks the politics and that is policy. To me this book it's climate modifying capitalism, it's climate finding ways to shape policies so that capitalism can actually be a solution rather than a problem.
Gil: I want to ask you later about reactions and maybe some of the criticisms. You alluded to the literature out there in the climate world. I'm sure you may observe as I do that sometimes the loudest voices in our space are focused on the doom and that's real but I think there's plenty of sciences which suggest that is the worst thing we could do for action. It breeds inaction at this moment in time. We need that for the awareness and then you've got the struggle with anti-capitalist fuse. I love that, very early on you cite Noam Chomsky who himself acknowledges that there's no possibility of overthrowing capitalism and managing the change we need on the timescale that climate change requires. I thought that was very deft of you to put that in early. Is that what you were getting at on, focus on the solutions without being pollyannaish, bring in the notion of reforming capitalism. It's a system we have largely throughout the world, and the opportunity is increasingly being recognized.
Akshat: I think if you spend any time trying to grapple with the challenge that is climate change, you quickly get overwhelmed by how big it is, how much needs to be done, how big the forces against it are, and doom is, I would say a natural reaction. You sometimes do feel helpless and climate anxiety is real. It shows up in this level of activism that has grown up, which is people are taking to the streets because they're so motivated once they realize how big a challenge this is. It's not to say that no don't be a doomist. I think all narratives are valid given how big the challenge is.
Gil: That's right.
Akshat: The thing that needs to happen after you acknowledge the challenge is that you have to do something about it. For different people, it might be different narrative that might force them to do something about it. Some people prefer to have those apocalyptic optimism where they go and talk about how bad things are going to be, and that fires them up. For other people, it's, "Look, this is going to be a better world because the solutions are actually making everything better. It's not just about reducing emissions, it's about opportunities. It's about jobs."
That's the way to get them motivated to do more. For other people, it might just be, "Look, here's an opportunity, I'm going to make business. This is work, I'm going to make a ton of money because that's where governments are going to be forced to act now. I'm an entrepreneur and I want to try and solve a problem and make money." Whatever gets you motivated, it really isn't about the reason behind it. It's about what you do with it.
Gil: That's beautifully said. Thank you for that. So let's talk specifics. I want to start by something that may be surprising to our listeners since we're talking about capitalism today.
Could you share more on the story of Chapter 3 about the Chinese bureaucrat, Wan Gang? I hope I pronounce that right, behind China's rapid growth in EVs and more about that playbook. I was fascinated by that story. I had never heard of this gentleman before.
Akshat: If we write history well, and we typically don't because it's the winners who write history. If we did write history well, he will stand taller than Elon Musk. That's not an overstatement.
Gil: Wow.
Akshat: He is a Chinese born during the Cultural Revolution, during a period where the Chinese Communist Party thought cities had gone mad and that urban rich people had gone mad, and that they had to go to farms to learn the way Chinese people live.
Gil: The Red Book…
Akshat: He was sent to farms and he found himself repairing tractors. That's the passion for automobile engineering that he got during that period. Came back, studied in China then got a PhD, fellowship through the World Bank to go and study in Germany. Got a PhD in automobile engineering and then got a job in Audi. Rose up through the ranks as an immigrant does, and is motivated to make the most of having left your country to pursue opportunities.
By about 2000, he was also feeling high-level bureaucrats coming from China to Audi, but to other automakers to learn the art of how to make cars better because the Chinese made cars, but they weren't as good as German cars were. He gave them tours, but he also at one point saw that if Chinese were to live like Germans, they would have to burn 16 times as much oil per person, per year. There just wasn't enough oil in the world for that. He made the case to the science minister who was visiting that look, "It would be better if you find a new technology and one that does not use oil as a fuel source to command a new way of making cars. I'm not trying to reinvent the wheel. We know electric cars are a thing. Obviously, we need to make lots of advances to get there. It would be a bet that if you make, in the long term, you will succeed and maybe even benefit not just the people living in China, but also have an export industry."
That case he made to even the [unintelligible 00:15:51] bureau. He got to go all the way to the top and make that case and was given an advanced research program with a good amount of funding. He brought in academics and industry together over a six, seven-year period, showcased what that could be at the Beijing 2008 Olympics in electric cars and buses that ran and took the athletes around. All the time, all consumption was going up. Car purchases were going up and of course, air pollution was going up. By the time the Beijing Olympics happens, he is seen to be this guy who can deliver.
He's then given a mandate to try and expand this into a real industry. From 2009 to 2017, during his period as the science minister, he's given the job of science minister, the Chinese state invests $60 billion into lithium and battery manufacturing and into EV manufacturing. Obviously, that's multiplied many times by private industry. The results are for all of us to see. The biggest maker of electric cars and the biggest maker of lithium-ion batteries, not just in China, but globally, and now building them outside of China too.
Gil: Incredible story. Let's jump around the world. You talk in Chapter 4 about India's notable strides towards solar power and a boom that began in 2015 and how it could provide a blueprint for sun soaked tropical countries to transition. Tell our listeners about your story that you uncovered there.
Akshat: India is a developing country, not like China because it does not have the economic heft that China does. It doesn't quite have the capacity to be able to make huge capital expenses like China did to try and build an electric car industry. What it is very good at is, once some technology is at the cusp of becoming economical, it can take it and run with it because it's a very price-sensitive environment. People only buy things that will actually be affordable and useful and be value for money. The room for luxury is growing but is very little.
You get to a point by 2015 where the Indian government has recognized that solar is an opportunity for India, the prices have come down to a point where we can actually set really good ambitious targets. Even after those two things are done where there's a target and the technology is available, there are still so many other things that need to be overcome in a country like India or in any developing country because doing business is hard. There's corruption, there's bureaucracy but also in India, the population is large. Finding land to be able to build so much renewables is hard.
I wanted to try and see how, by the time I went reporting, India was building the world's largest solar farms and still does, two gigawatts at a time, which is tens of thousands of football fields worth of land that you need. I got a chance to go and visit this place in Karnataka where land had gone fallow because of climate change, but also droughts and extreme weather events. India's had a difficult time with its degraded lands. Lots and lots of farmers have committed suicide as a result of taking on debt that they couldn't repay because the land wasn't as productive.
In this moment comes the option of actually leasing your land for solar. You don't get as much money as you would if it was productive land, but you get more money than you would if you didn't do anything with it. You get this perfect example of how to make a societal benefit out of not just reducing pollution, but actually creating wealth for the people who are deploying it.
Gil: Incredible. Let's go toChapter 5, the International Energy Agency, IEA, which plays a vital and little celebrated role in influencing necessary changes on climate. Tell us about that story and why IEA is so transformational.
Akshat: In this ecosystem that we're going to have to build, it's not just technologies and it's not just national policies, but you need international organizations also to be a part of it. Obviously, the international meeting that we talk about every year, the climate space is the COP meeting. It's run by the United Natio ns and specifically the climate body within the United Nations, but it's only one of so many other international organizations that are involved in this process.
I wanted to look at one that's transformed in a short period of time from being the target of climate activists to being the darling of climate activists. That is the International Energy Agency born in the era of the 1970s, the oil crisis as a bulwark against OPEC, against the oil-producing nations as a group of oil-consuming nations so that you could get access to this fossil fuel on a secure basis at an affordable price. In the 2000s it becoming a ridicule of energy analysts in general because it just couldn't keep up with clean energy trends.
Gil: Their projections were like the running joke being so far off.
Akshat: Yes. Even the United Nations recognized that, so it created the International Renewable Energy Agency in 2009-
Gil: IRENA, yes.
Akshat: -and as a fight against an IEA. IEA was born as a fight against OPEC, and then IRENA was born as a fight against IEA. Yes, it's that time where Fatih Birol takes on the role of leadership at the International Energy Agency and recognizes that if IEA is to be relevant in the 21st century, it has to try and develop skills that would not just be about ensuring energy security, which is its prime mandate, but also doing so in a period where that energy becomes cleaner over time and quite fast if it's supposed to meet the very climate goals that its own members have set.
That transformation takes about five to seven years, and you're seeing the fruits of that. Now the IEA is actually targeted by oil traders as being too aggressive on clean energy.
Gil: [laughs]
Akshat: The response that I get from the IEA these days is like, "Look, previously we were attacked by climate activists and now we are being attacked by oil people. I think we are doing something right."
Gil: Climate Positive is produced by HASI, a leading climate investment firm that actively partners with clients to deploy real assets that facilitate the energy transition. To learn more please visit HASI.com
Gil: I want to ask you about Chapter 7, the Wrangler and carbon capture in the story of Julio Friedmann. You've mentioned earlier your great chronicling of this space. Tell us about what you uncovered there.
Akshat: Julio was a person who gave me the education into carbon capture. He's somebody who spent time in ExxonMobil, in national labs, in government, in academia, in think tanks, and now in a startup. He's done all these things in his career and they've all been related to carbon. He calls himself the Carbon Wrangler, and carbon capture has been a majority of that career. To see how this technology, which has been around for 50 years, obviously around because it was useful and that use was to actually extract more fossil fuels.
You capture the CO2, you put it in an oil field that's depleting and increase the production of oil, but because you're actually putting the CO2 into the ground, it actually stays there and so you could use it for climate good. Since the '90s, a few ideas and few actual projects were being deployed to make use of this capability of carbon capture, to do climate good. Julio comes in during the Obama era to try and figure out how to deploy some of these projects in the US. The Department of Energy provides funding for some of these projects. I take the example of two projects. One that is a success and one that is a failure, to try and learn what is needed. The conclusion I come to is that A, you need policy support, obviously, but B, you also need actors who are going to build these projects, who are actually committed to the transition. When you don't have those actors, and in this case, it is the oil and gas industry that's going to build many of these carbon capture projects without having that support mechanism, you don't get scale up. As Julio says, the butts in the seats matter. It's the people who are doing the work and what their motivations are matters. It comes back to the big framework that we have. It's not just policy and technology, but you need the people to make it work.
Gil: Would you agree that, at least in the US, given the enhancements to, I think was known as the 45Q credit for carbon capture, we're starting to see that?
Akshat: It's still been a mixed success. 45Q has been enhanced. The amount of tax credit you get for each ton of CO₂ that's being sunk into the ground is increased now. The places where you can sink it, which are called Class VI wells, which are regulated and have to be approved by the Environmental Protection Agency, have not been met with the scale of the deployment that is there. That's why you haven't seen much steel in the ground yet. Yes, is growing. There are lots more announcements, and some of them are reaching investment stage, but it's far from the pace at which you need to deploy carbon capture to be able to keep up with climate goals.
Gil: How about one more inspiring story you encountered during your research and covered in the book?
Akshat: I live in the UK, and I have a chapter looking at what the UK has done, which just purely, objectively, the economy that has cut the most emissions since 1990. The UK remains on reducing emissions, the global leader. Of course, that sounds strange saying it today, where you have a Prime Minister and a party that is backtracking on climate goals, or at least rhetorically, not in policy. They just announced an £800 million, subsidy for offshore wind deployment in the UK. In December, they announced a carbon border adjustment mechanism.
In policy, they're still going ahead because they are legally bound to do it. That's the story I'm trying to tell in the book about how in 2008, a range of forces came together that created the perfect storm for all political parties to back the Climate Change Act, the first law that set a climate target in a parliament that bound a government to meet them. That structure that was created, which was about how do you get from where we are all the way to zero eventually, but also through what are called carbon budgets, where you give a government a five-year period over which it cannot emit any more carbon.
You don't have to do it every year, you do it over a five-year period, so there's some flexibility, but those budgets keep reducing all the way to zero. You create a watchdog, which is the Climate Change Committee here in the UK, which is an independent body that gives you annual report cards on where the government is and gives you advice on what the government can do. That ecosystem of having a law, having a watchdog, has been phenomenally successful, and it's now been copied around the world.
I wanted to tell the story of how it happened and why, despite what you might hear as rhetorical backtracking, the UK is still very much committed to its climate goals because it just cannot get out of the legal nature of it.
Gil: We could learn a thing or two here in the United States.
Akshat: The thing that enabled it is actually bipartisan politics. Labor Party was in power at the time. It wasn't particularly interested in trying to do much on climate. Then the conservative Party under David Cameron comes out and says, "Actually, we see that people want climate action, and we're going to make it our campaign issue. We're actually going to get votes because we're going to campaign for climate action." In doing so, they force the labor government to also up their game. That's why you had this cross-party agreement to try and get a Climate Change Act. That's why the climate policies that have been set are only getting stricter and are continuing despite what the political rhetoric might be.
Gil: What do you think are the common traits or characteristics just on and across all the stories that you share?
Akshat: If you look at it from the framework of people, policy, and technology, the people side is really crucial. You see a lot of these are, despite their place in the ecosystem, really entrepreneurial at heart. They may not be running a business, but they're always creative in trying to solve a problem because we've just not done anything like this ever. Nothing like this that's going to change everything around us. You just have to, A, take on the size of the challenge, but then also come up with creative answers to that challenge.
A lot of these people have that entrepreneurial spirit. The other one is that because you have to do this everywhere all at once, you have to bring other people along. That is another thing that shines through in all these people's stories is how they unlock the rest of the ecosystem to come along on this journey. We're going to have to do that a lot more. Then, of course, the technocratic side of it is also very crucial. There's technology development, which we know, and it actually works really well. We know exactly what we need to do.
You deploy something at scale, and the more you do it, the cheaper it becomes in almost every case. The specific policies that would allow for that deployment, those policies are different in different countries. There isn't a silver bullet solution. Just because the US did the Inflation Reduction Act, that's not going to work in India, which does not have the capacity to give billions of dollars in subsidies. You have to find the policy mix that actually works in that setting. That is not to say every setting is unique.
You can learn from each other. The IRM might actually work in Europe if they really wanted to spend all that money. What's working in China may work in India. If India is committed to trying to build an industry out because it sees it as a business motivation as an economic benefit, it actually can start to build a clean energy industry, especially at a time where there is so much tension between China and Europe and China and the US, that India could be the place where you could get those technologies without having to rely on China for everything else. That's my hope that you will get this mix of things, but they'll have to be tailored for the solution. There isn't one thing that will work.
Gil: In your day job as a senior reporter for Bloomberg, and having covered this space for a while, you have such a unique vantage points on global climate issues. Your book will be out by the time this podcast airs in the US. It's been out in Europe. I think you're coming to the US to talk up the book. How are you feeling about things right now on the global climate technology and policy front?
Akshat: It's an interesting time. We're in 2024, there's going to be a bunch of elections. By one estimate, half the world's GDP goes to the polls this year. Of course, India and China make up probably most of that. What happens at the end of 2024 will make a big difference because what happens in the US makes such a big difference. I'm looking out for that, keen to understand whether what seems like a very robust set of actions that a government has taken on climate that is oriented not just to reduce emissions, but create jobs, create technology, advantage to create equity, whether that message actually lands.
After all of this, the way climate action will succeed is if you bring people along. What does it take to not just have the technocratic ideas, but also the ability to explain those technocratic ideas and show the impact that they have on people, is what is going to unlock whether 2024 goes in the way of good climate action or bad climate action. Very keen to see what 2024 looks like. As a journalist, sometimes, I'm thankful. My job is actually to watch and learn and not be in it because I can imagine it might be pretty stressful for the people who are in it. As an observer, there's nothing more exciting to look out for in 2024.
Gil: Great answer. I want to challenge you a bit, though. I have to ask, personally, how are you managing your optimism and your hope for the future this year and at the end of '24?
Akshat: It's funny because obviously the book is meant to look at solutions and so, by nature, it's optimistic because it's looking at the solutions. It's not driven to try and make you be optimistic. I'm much more pragmatist. I'm like, "Okay, here's a problem. It needs to be solved." I suppose that's the engineer in me. It's not changed. You are shaped by your education and the circumstances you are growing up in. This is a huge challenge, it needs to be solved. If it's not solved, we'll suffer the consequences.
To me, what is interesting is actually there is so much happening on trying to solve it. The fact that I got into doing climate in the Trump era, just makes me a lot more resilient to the fact that actually really, yes, in the short term, everything matters, but in the long term, the direction is pretty clear. Yes, things will be bad for some people and things will be bad for some time, but the only way out is to actually do something about it. Nothing gives me more hope and optimism than just a sheer number of people involved in it.
That's why to me as an observer, as a journalist, it's the best time to be a climate journalist. You just get to be able to observe the world changing in front of you and to be able to tell the people around you why and how and what you can learn from it.
Gil: Wow. How about feedback, reactions, positive or negative thus far? What are you hearing?
Akshat: It's been fun. My goal with the book was, A, I hope people learn from these examples and deploy them. I'm a journalist, and my goal is to reach a big audience, as big an audience for the ideas and the stories that I have. I was told a book is a different beast, you get to A, spend a lot of time with it, so you have to struggle through it, but B, it also reaches a different kind of audience. That has proven to be the case. I feel like I've ended up in spaces that I would not usually end up in, and that's been really nice.
Some of it I expected, which is people are like, "Oh, this is optimistic." I'm like, "Yes, because it's about solutions. I'm not trying to tell you what's going wrong with climate, there are plenty of books that do that. Go read The Uninhabitable Earth if you want to feel the force of what climate change can be if you don't do anything about it." Yes, that's been the case.
Gil: I thought it was great that the author, David Wallace-Wells gave you a book blurb. He, the writer of the ultimate doom text, which was great. You also had the Kim Stanley Robinson who wrote the very dark apocalyptic climate fiction books. She was inspired by your book. Tell those folks to look at the back cover.
Akshat: Yes, exactly. That was one. The other one has been this expected pushback on like, "Oh, capitalism," and everybody rolls their eyes. I feel like the phrase capitalism just means everything wrong to some people, and then you can't really disintegrate that. I hope people can look past the fact that this is not about defending capitalism, it's about making capitalism work for the problem and hear the examples of it.
That is, again, unexpected one. I would say unexpected ones have been that the nuance with which I have been asked questions in audiences that I've been to, has been amazing. Just the level of understanding that I, as a journalist, my job is to know what it is that's missing in the public discussion.
Gil: They're stumping you [inaudible 00:39:53] -
Akshat: Yes. Sometimes I am stumped by how much they know, and sometimes I'm like, "Maybe I really don't need to explain how batteries work anymore. Maybe I really don't need to say what the challenges with the grid are." I can just assume some of these things as I explain them but that to me has been fascinating. Many of these places I go, people haven't read the book, they're going to buy the book or they're going to get the book and so after a 10-minute discussion about what the book is about, they already have a ton of questions because at some level, at least in these audiences, they've all grappled with climate and energy and the transition, and they all have questions which has been fascinating.
Gil: I know these are heavy lifts but if you're writing a follow-up, let's say in five years, guesses on which themes and chapters you're covering, maybe not people. What came to mind was what about how AI saved us or is there a hydrogen chapter?
Akshat: There's so many things that are missing in this book because there's so many solutions that are not working at scale technology-wise. Yes, hydrogen lab-grown meat, regenerative agriculture, even carbon capture, it's not really working at scale right now. Carbon removal is not working at scale. I have a chapter looking at the biggest project but it's really quite tiny compared to what will be needed but that's just technology. I think there are systemic levers that are not working right now. Global finance isn't working for climate right now. We don't know how to get trillions of dollars invested from developed economies into developing countries.
We don't know how to compensate people. Yes, we've got a loss and damage fund. There's very little money in it. We just don't know how to give that money out. What that structure is going to look like? Of course, all of this has to happen in a period where we are seeing the politics of the right where people are using climate action as a veggie shoe to try and stoke unfounded worries about the cost of the transition or clearly the freedoms that are being taken away.
I think that is such an interesting point and okay, I would love to be able to figure out maybe if I write an expo, it's a big ordeal but how do you bring along people on this transition? I don't think we've done enough of that. We've not done enough of that at scale. Many of the solutions we've deployed so far have been technocratic and haven't required the public to come along for that journey, but I hope by 2030, by the end of this decade, we'll have many examples of how we've done that.
Gil: What advice do you give to aspiring journalists who want to specialize in climate reporting?
Akshat: I think some of this is really basic advice that I would give to anybody who is interested in journalism which right now, given the business model is a tough sell to start with but if you're committed, well, be curious, write a lot because the only way to learn is feedback. That's how I've become a journalist. I never got training, I just learned from doing it and for climate people, don't fear complexity. Feel there is a tendency to want to try and tell the simple story and that is a bad instinct to have in climate specifically. I think that's a bad instinct to have in general but specifically in climate. The nuances as important as then simplifying that nuance to tell a rich story.
Gil: Do you have a favorite passage from the book? You've got some stuff for the ages here, so I want to give you a chance.
Akshat: I think if you go to the last chapter this bit which is the fight isn't for one group to stop the other but for everyone to work together, this battle to create a new economic system, climate capitalism will dominate the agenda for decades to come and it is crucial that we understand it if we are to safeguard our planet for generations to come. Given the disruption that's coming, the race to zero emissions is unlikely to be smooth and if history is a guide, it'll probably be a series of missteps.
Still, all the main forces needed to tackle this problem. Politics, technology, finance, are headed in the right direction with more and more people diverting their focus to the solutions.
Gil: Akshat, thank you for this.
Akshat: Thank you. This was a fun conversation.
Gil: If you enjoyed this week’s episode, please leave us a leave a rating and review on Apple and Spotify. This really helps us reach more listeners.
You can also let us know what you thought via Twitter @ClimatePosiPod or email us at climatepositive@hasi.com
I'm Gil Jenkins.
And this is Climate Positive.