In this this episode of Climate Positive, hosts Gil Jenkins and Conor Fryer sit down with Tim McDonnell, Climate & Energy Editor at Semafor and the author of Semafor’s Net Zero newsletter, to delve into the current state of climate journalism, real-time energy crises, and the forces driving the energy transition. Tim reflects on how far climate reporting has come, moving past basic awareness to explore intricate, interwoven stories at the heart of sustainability and energy. They also discuss Semafor’s mission to bridge divided audiences with “common facts” and Tim’s take on the energy demands of AI, and the high-stakes landscape of climate policy ahead of the 2024 U.S. election.
In this this episode of Climate Positive, hosts Gil Jenkins and Conor Fryer sit down with Tim McDonnell, Climate & Energy Editor at Semafor and the author of Semafor’s Net Zero newsletter, to delve into the current state of climate journalism, real-time energy crises, and the forces driving the energy transition. Tim reflects on how far climate reporting has come, moving past basic awareness to explore intricate, interwoven stories at the heart of sustainability and energy. They also discuss Semafor’s mission to bridge divided audiences with “common facts” and Tim’s take on the energy demands of AI, and the high-stakes landscape of climate policy ahead of the 2024 U.S. election.
Links:
Episode recorded October 16, 2024
Chad Reed: I'm Chad Reed.
Hillary Langer: I'm Hillary Langer.
Gil Jenkins: I'm Gil Jenkins.
Chad: This is Climate Positive.
Tim McDonnell: I’ve been covering climate for almost 15 years now. I’ve seen how this has changed. We don’t have to talk about what is climate change? Does it exist? Is it caused by people? This fake two sides of the scientific argument thing that people used to have to do in the news 10 years ago. We’ve totally moved beyond that.
Gil: This week on Climate Positive, we’re talking with Tim McDonnell, Climate & Energy Editor at Semafor.
Tim writes a fantastic, twice-weekly newsletter for Semafor called Net Zero, covering the nexus of politics, tech, and energy.
Before joining Semafor, Tim worked for Quartz and Mother Jones, and has written for a number of outlets, including The New York Times, National Geographic, NPR, The Washington Post, Bloomberg, The Economist, and Slate just to name a few. He’s lived in San Francisco, New York, Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria, Ghana, Egypt, and now Kyiv.
We enjoyed talking with Tim about the state of climate journalism and some of the big trends he’s been focused on this year. So, with that, here is Tim in conversation with Conor Fryer and me.
Gil: Tim, welcome to Climate Positive.
Tim: Thank you so much. Happy to be here.
Gil: We’re thrilled to have you. For our listeners who may be a little unfamiliar with Semafor, can you give us a little background on what is a really unique news platform that aims to deliver “common facts to divergent audiences.” Could you also talk about your twice weekly awesome newsletter, the Semafor Net Zero newsletter that you edit and write for?
Tim: Of course, more than happy to. Semafor is a very awesome, excellent new-ish business and politics magazine with offices in New York and DC and London and other parts of the globe, which covers a pretty wide range of news subjects. We’ve got a lot of people on Capitol Hill covering that really aggressively, breaking news left and right over there. Then a few different topical verticals, a colleague that covers tech in the Bay Area, my colleague on Wall Street, Liz. Mine focuses on climate and the energy transition. I have a newsletter that comes out twice a week on Wednesdays and Fridays called Net Zero, which everyone should sign up for. It’s free.
Gil: It’s free, right? Yes.
Tim: It’s free. Please join us there. I’m hitting a bunch of different topics in this energy transition universe. It’s pretty wide-ranging, and I try to pitch it, angle it at a level that is going to be new and interesting for people who are working in the field and who are already somewhat in the weeds on this subject. I’m allowed to get pretty wonky with things, and go into detail, and go off on tangents that I think are interesting to climate world.
Semafor has been growing a lot since it launched two years ago. The company is doing really well. We have, in the last year, really been building up this series of live journalism events that we’re doing in DC and New York and all over the place. We had a few back-to-back crazy events all week during Climate Week in New York just the other week that was really, really fun, which I can talk about more.
Gil: We definitely want to come back to that. I think you were talking to someone high up at Constellation after they had made some big news.
Tim: Yes. That’s what’s happening with Semafor. It’s an exciting time to be there. As someone who’s been covering climate for a long time and has worked for different digital media companies and across the news space, I’m really excited about what Semafor is doing, and I’m feeling very optimistic about all the coverage that we’re doing and the strength of the company itself and all of that. It’s an exciting time to be there.
Conor Fryer: Yes, that's great. You already touched a little bit on Net Zero. You really lean into the complexity of climate change. Any given newsletter can cover a variety of topics, and those topics are often deeply interconnected with other issues, from tech to politics and energy. How do you balance providing accessible content for a broad audience while also diving deep into some of these complex issues?
Tim: One way that you solve for that is that, of course, climate change touches on pretty much every aspect of society these days. There's interesting stories and news to write about tech and health and politics and finance, geopolitics, and everything under the sun is in this climate umbrella now. That means when you're writing a newsletter like this, you can range fairly widely across the global economy and across different news verticals, looking for things that are interesting and that are going to keep the audience feeling fresh and engaged.
I think that we're now in a stage of the climate discourse publicly that we can move past some of the really basic-type questions that I had to usually answer in every single article that I wrote back in the day, if I'm thinking 7 or 8 or 9, 10 years ago. I've been covering climate for almost 15 years now. I've seen how this has changed. We don't have to talk about what is climate change? Does it exist? Is it caused by people? This fake two sides of the scientific argument thing that people used to have to do in the news 10 years ago. We've totally moved beyond that. I don't really bother addressing that in stories anymore.
That's just the baseline, but there's a lot of ways in which the conversation has become much more sophisticated, I think even just among the general public. We're able to go into subjects at a level of detail and nuance that-- Not that it wasn't possible in the past, but just had a much narrower audience, which made it more difficult as a news product. I think these days, because the conversation broadly across society is so much more advanced and nuanced and sophisticated, that the journalism can reflect that.
I have the advantage with Net Zero. I'm specifically writing for an audience that's in this field, which is a luxury. I don't have to be quite as generalist as the New York Times or a very broad based newspaper or something like that. This is written for people who are in the space, who are following this stuff, who want to go one step deeper. That's what we try to do.
Gil: I wonder if you could expand on some things I've heard you discuss before. One of the things I like about your newsletter and reporting is it's not just the apocalypse beat, and it's not just the Pollyannish solutions. It's got some policy, and it's got some deep tech and science, but I do think still, and maybe you disagree that a lot of the climate journalism is, oh, it's expanded and there's more of it and it's great.
There aren't enough folks like yourself too that come in, I think, with a mainstream news value approach, but also a little bit of a business story. I've heard you talk about climate change is many things, many angles, many beats, but it is a business story, and that's how I think you come at it a lot in your reporting. I don't see that as much still today, even though there's a lot of climate-focused businesses. There aren't enough classic business reporters covering the energy transition from my perspective and the business side.
Tim: I think that's right. There definitely are a strong group of people doing what I do at Bloomberg and the FT and Wall Street Journal and other new publications like Heat Map or Canary or these other things that I follow, or Axios that do a lot of really interesting stories in this space. I think the momentum is growing, but all of those things that I just mentioned are, I think, fairly niche. I read them, you read them, people in climate read that stuff, but when you get to more very broad mainstream media, yes, I think there still are a lot of missed opportunities to cover the really exciting and interesting and difficult aspects and elements, red herrings and whatever, all these different pieces of the energy transition puzzle that are all happening in very rapidly unfolding in real time. People always use this metaphor of changing the parts on an airplane while it's in motion across the sky. That is really the energy that the energy transition has, which is different from covering climate change, just like you said, like as the apocalypse beats.
I write about natural disasters from time to time when they happen. I wrote a little bit about the recent hurricanes in the US, but I usually try to take it one step or several steps, hopefully, beyond just saying, "Here's a terrible thing that just happened." Again, it's like, we know that stuff is happening, and sorry to say that these disasters are definitely going to get worse before they get better. That's the world that we're living in for the next however many decades. You don't get a lot of insight by just covering X terrible thing happened again, as much as you can get from, like, how is the economy responding to that? How our policymakers or entrepreneurs or different sectors of society responding and developing solutions?
As you said, very important not to be Pollyanna-ish about solutions that people are discussing, but there is a lot of real interesting stuff that's out there that people are doing. I think it's important to cover it. Obviously, even more important to cover what's not working. Where's the snake oil? That's the question that I'm always perpetually asking myself in my head, in the background of pretty much every story is, where's the snake oil in this? It's usually there. there's still a lot of really interesting stuff to unpack in this story.
Conor: Just diving a little bit more into the breadth of the subject, to mix metaphors, but you're a mile wide and also a mile deep. If you open up the Net Zero homepage, and you open your latest edition, you might cover electricity, used EVs, climate risk, domestic politics. How do you process all that information, and do you find it challenging to crystallize it and synthesize it into something that's presentable to your audience?
Tim: It is challenging to stay across all of those different things at once. Sometimes at the end of the day, when I've written one of these newsletters, my brain is a little bit melted, but I'm used to that at this point. You have to have a Zen attitude about this. I was actually discussing the other day with my brother who also works in the sustainability consulting space for a very large multinational company. He has a similar thing where it's like climate and sustainability issues are now coming up across so many different sectors that he's also having to code switch between different fields all the time, chemicals or agriculture or whatever.
For me, writing about these different subjects, it's definitely challenging to feel like I sufficiently have a finger on the pulse of many different categories of news happening simultaneously. I do the best I can with that challenge and try to bring those different perspectives to it. We're trying to cover a geographic range as well in the stories. If you see at the top of the newsletter, there's usually a little map that shows you where the stories are located globally in the world.
Gil: I love that little feature. I haven't seen that before. Global and local. That's a nice touch. Someone made a good call on the user experience there.
Tim: Nice. Okay, great. I'm glad to hear that. When I'm reporting or curating stories, I have that map in my head. I'm trying to think about how to populate it in a broad way. I'm self-conscious if I have a newsletter where every dot is sitting on top of Washington DC. I [crosstalk] to avoid that.
Let's go on the map too. You're based in Kyiv. I'd like you to talk about, I don't know how long you've been there, but what's it like living there and reporting during the war? How has your perspective changed on energy security and climate? I've read some of your reporting in the last year, but I'd love for you to expand on some really powerful pieces, including one you did a while back where you talked to a mayor on the border and what he's doing with solar. You've had some also some really interesting pieces on the struggles of the utility there trying to keep coal plants operating because of the looming winter and the pressure from Europe on DECARB. Just what's it like living and reporting in Kyiv where we sit today?
Tim: It's a really fascinating and at times difficult and heart-wrenching story to be involved with. I live here because my wife, Siobhan O'Grady, is the Ukraine correspondent for the Washington Post. She's covering a lot of the frontline stuff and the politics here. I'm along for the ride with some of that. Then also doing my own reporting while I'm here about the energy crisis that the country is facing and their very unique experience of the energy transition.
Ukraine, of course, is coming at this from a very different way than most, certainly, European or Western countries are, which is that it had an energy system that, for the most part, dates back to the Soviet period, which has now been about 50% of the country's generating capacity has been destroyed since the full-scale invasion started in 2022. A lot of what's been most heavily hit are these hulking, enormous Soviet-era coal-fired power plants, all of which- -I think there's eight or nine of them in the country that have all been destroyed either completely or almost entirely. They're not working.
The country's had to fall back on a few nuclear power plants that it still is operating. One of their big nuclear power plants is still under Russian occupation in Zaporizhia. Then some hydro dams. They're piecing together this energy mix because they have a necessity to keep the lights on. This summer, the blackouts were really bad through most of the summer. We didn't have power for, sometimes 12, 15 hours of the day when it was hot at a time of peak demand when people are running their air conditioners. During that time, of course, energy assets were still being targeted by the Russian military on a daily basis, and blowing up transformers and grid infrastructure and power plants and solar fields and, you name it.
All this stuff is at risk and has been specifically targeted at one time or another. Now we're looking ahead to this winter. It's going to be cold. The weather is just starting to get cold now. This is also a time of high electricity demand because there's some power that gets used in the heating system and people also use electric heaters in their houses. Demand is going to go up.
There's going to definitely be blackouts. I've heard between 4 hours to 20 hours a day of blackouts for households is what we should expect depending on how cold it gets. They're in a really difficult situation, and I think trying to do the best that they can under the circumstances. There's been some political infighting here between the leadership of the Zelensky administration and different leaders of various relevant ministries and state-owned energy companies that don't always see eye-to-eye on every aspect of this recovery.
Gil: What about stories of hope or green shoots for the future? Tell us about the story of the mayor on the border who put solar on.
Tim: That was a mayor in eastern Ukraine, in Sumy, who's been involved in putting solar on municipal buildings and the local hospital. You've seen actually a lot of really fantastic stories of those kinds of public buildings, schools and hospitals mostly that have really been making a big push into solar, sometimes with the help of NGOs or foreign investors or the government. People are really trying to do as much as they can with that, and that was great to see. I think people clearly see the advantage from just a resilience and keeping the lights on point of view of having this distributed energy system.
Gil: That's right. Frankly, they save money so they can buy bullets. It's heartbreakingly profound. I don't mean to whitewash or oversimplify the real challenges. I think you've also talked about the planning for after the war. There is this opportunity for Ukraine to rebuild and really be on the vanguard. Maybe on some of the larger scale renewables as well as we rebuild infrastructure in Ukraine could really be a model for all of the EU.
Tim: There are a number of big utility scale solar plants that are either underway or just waiting for foreign investors to kick in. I've heard from a lot of private renewable energy developers about that. DTEK, the big power company here has several large scale utility scale wind farms that are under construction. There's one that's going to be starting the next phase of construction at the beginning of next year.
I think Ukraine really has an opportunity to be a clean energy powerhouse after the war for Europe, and getting back into the business of exporting electricity to the rest of the continent, and getting involved in green hydrogen production. There's a lot of opportunities. They also have a big untapped resource of critical minerals here that could be mined more. There's a lot of ways for Ukraine to be more involved with the broader global energy transition in a really positive way once the conflict, God willing, comes to some positive resolution.
Conor: That's really interesting, because I think a lot of the reporting that you see is that there's some tension between immediate energy needs, this concept of energy security and long-term sustainability goals. The situation in Ukraine has had shockwaves far beyond its borders. What are the lessons of Ukraine specifically on this issue?
Tim: I definitely understand being here that in this particular context, there are certain investments in fossil fuel infrastructure that are unavoidable and probably it does make sense to some level to repair hulking ancient coal plants that, in any other context, no one would ever give a second thought to financing. They need to build some more gas, these little gas peaker plants. A lot of those are getting built. Those are near-term necessities. I think the bigger picture, longer term lesson from Ukraine is to think about the resilience of the energy system as a whole.
Ukraine experienced, and all of Europe actually experienced the level of insecurity that you can face and unreliability of the energy system you can face when you have an energy system that's too reliant on centralized old fossil fuel assets and also on acquiring fossil fuels from a country like Russia that was not a reliable trading partner. The concentration of those resources left Ukraine and all of Europe very vulnerable when the geopolitical situation changed.
I think coming away from this, as we think about the energy transition, is going to have different sorts of implications about what are the supply chains for clean energy and how do we seek to avoid replicating mistakes of the past when it comes to relying too much on certain trading partners that could leverage that against you in the future. I think making the supply chain for clean energy where we're getting minerals and other bits and bobs of this hardware, making sure that that's well diversified as well, I think is a really interesting takeaway from Ukraine.
Gil: I think you're going to have to write a book on this, of your first book. It seems obvious, but I'm not the first person who said that to you, right?
Tim: I've had this idea, actually.
Gil: Get on it.
Chad: 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
Conor: We'll pivot a bit. Like you've been doing there in Kiev, you've been reporting on the front lines of climate change for over a decade now. Could you talk about some of your experiences that some of your past publications, and maybe how your approach has evolved over the last couple of years?
Tim: Sure. I started my first real job covering climate change at Mother Jones magazine in San Francisco, and then I moved later to New York for them. During the Obama administration, there was a lot of interesting early days energy transition stuff happening then. We were traveling around--
Conor: Clean power plan, all that stuff.
Tim: Writing exhaustively about the clean power plan. I went to the COP in Paris. We were bouncing around the country. My colleague who is a videographer and I, we were doing this thing called climate desk, which was a collaboration-- A multi publication partnership that Mother Jones spearheaded with the Guardian.
Gil: The NPR and a lot in the Guardian, a lot of [unintelligible 00:19:54].
Tim: Yes, exactly. Which we were just getting started then. We were doing a lot of video and social media content for them and distributing that amongst our partners. We were traveling around the US a lot for that. That was really fun. Then after that, I was a Fulbright National Geographic scholar. That was a nine-month fellowship that I did in a few different countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, writing mostly for NatGeo about climate change impacts to the agriculture and food system in Uganda and Kenya and Nigeria. I met my then-girlfriend, now wife, during that phase. She's also a journalist. We were bouncing around Africa for a couple of years after that and freelancing for different publications. I was still mainly focused on climate then.
Then we came back to the US. I did some work with National Public Radio. I was working still for NatGeo. I did a really interesting trip to Bangladesh for NatGeo that was about rural to urban climate migration within Bangladesh, and speaking with people who had moved from the very vulnerable Sundarban mangrove forest in the southwestern part of the country into Dhaka, the capital, and challenges they faced living there.
I feel really fortunate that I've gotten to travel around to all these places and see the front lines of climate change from a lot of different points of view. I spent a lot of years of my career feeling very fortunate to get to tell stories of people who were really living through those frontline experiences. That was really a big priority for me. These days, I would say I do a little bit less of that, not for any particular reason other than just--
The nature of Semafor is such that I've, as we were talking about before, shifted a bit of the focus more towards the private sector, and looking at companies and seeing this as a business story.
Conor: How do you think the role of climate journalism has evolved in that time? What are we doing better now than we were doing better previously? You talked about, specifically with Net Zero, the benefits of having a well-informed, engaged audience, but do you think the audience is better equipped to understand the complexity of this challenge?
Tim: I think the audience definitely is better equipped to understand the complexity of the climate challenge and more willing and able to do so now than maybe they were in the past. I think from the media point of view that this is a really important story, that having gone through layoffs or other hurdles for the media industry in recent years, many of them have really stuck with climate as a beat and actually grown their climate desks. I think that the media is getting more sophisticated about how it tells the story, and I think moving away from some of the susceptibility to greenwashing that was probably present in earlier days and susceptibility to false binaries between the real science and fake science, but somehow equating those errors that people made previously.
Is this message or story getting through to the right audiences? I think is an important question. That's what we think about with Semafor is like, not just, is this a bigger audience, but also is this the right audience? Is it getting to the higher level decision makers, people in the really high powered rooms who are in positions to move a lot of money or change policy in really meaningful way?
I think that most of those people in the US and Europe at least and elsewhere really are paying very close attention to the climate story. It's become unavoidable. Of course, not everybody sees eye-to-eye on this issue politically, but even if you look at the level of discourse around climate that you see on the right in the US among the Republican party has changed a lot in the time that I've been covering this. You don't see the James Inhofe throwing a snowball--
Gil: Snowball on the Congress. Now it's like they're taking my hamburgers and my stove.
Tim: Of course, there's different shades of climate denialism. There are still people who say things that are just patently untrue or out of step with reality. We need to--
Gil: Like wind causes cancer.
Tim: Right. If you want to talk about what are the big stories of 2024, the election obviously is number one. That's the biggest story. The divide between the candidates on this issue is very obvious. It's been very interesting to cover how Kamala Harris has approached this issue and seen some evolution in her viewpoints on this over time. We'll continue to cover that, definitely. That's a big one.
Gil: What's number two if you had to think of the year thus far? Is it the AI-driven need for a compute rising to energy man, at least in the US. I know globally too. What else? What are the other big five?
Tim: Those are a lot of them. I think this whole AI and data centers, but also EVs and manufacturing. The rise of power demand for the first time in a decade or more. What does it mean to navigate a huge explosion and how much electricity society needs at the same time that we are already struggling to decarbonize that electricity is a really interesting challenge. I think that's been the big one.
IEA just had its big report on the subject today that basically found that electricity demand is growing much faster than anyone anticipated. Also that even though clean energy is growing rapidly and displacing fossil fuels, given the growth in demand, it's not growing fast enough for countries to be able to meet their climate goals, unless we really accelerate the pace of clean energy deployment.
Gil: Yet, if there were ever a time to double down on energy efficiency, which does not get the headlines, it would be now, right?
Tim: Yes, definitely. Jason Bordoff just had a column in foreign policy this week on looking at this AI challenge and what's the solution to providing clean power for AI. The first thing that he recommends is efficiency. We need to use less power for this stuff. That is the first part of the solution. Definitely that can't go unremarked for sure.
Gil: Just staying on that, because before we hit record, we were talking about Climate Week, New York takeaways. You interviewed someone high up at Constellation who had just made the really surprising news about opening up through Mile Island. What did you think about that? What was your experience? What level of skepticism did you have interviewing someone from Constellation about the realness of this moment for nukes?
Tim: I don't know. I think it's super fascinating. I think that deal with Microsoft.
Gil: Microsoft, yes. How many companies can do a $16 billion PPA?
Tim: Right. That deal with Microsoft. My first takeaway from it was that this just goes to show you the level that these tech companies are willing to go to solve this power problem. We often, in climate world, think about the energy transition as being something that's daunting and expensive, but from the perspective of a Google, or Microsoft or Amazon who are very highly committed to winning in the data and AI race to do something like-- I think that some of the challenges around building new power generation and stuff that they need to do are very manageable and affordable for them.
They will find solutions to some of these problems. They may not be the solutions that everyone wants, at least with what you can say about [unintelligible 00:29:00] a deal like this dream Mile Island thing or the one from-- There are two. Amazon--
Gil: Michigan, right? Yes, the one in Michigan.
Tim: Yes. Just today, Amazon announced some news around deal with for SMR nuclear. Google had one on Monday of this week for something similar.
Gil: Great. I'd love to see it. Let's do it. Let's keep the press on renewables and building more transmission and energy efficiency in the meantime. Let's not get distracted. I'm off really editorializing here, but giving you my take on that as where we sit as a-- It's not a threat. It's not renewables versus nukes. We need it all, however.
Tim: They need to do everything.
The key is, to what extent can some combination of low or no carbon sources help, because the most obvious thing for them to do is build a lot of natural gas peaker plants and just have those run everything. I think if this data center boom comes with a huge carbon footprint cost, then that's not going to make anybody happy. That's not what we need. I think it's interesting that they're trying to come up with other solutions.
Conor: I just want to hit one more on that point because it's really interesting, Tim. I heard that some of the tech companies really think that their two key inputs are energy and chips. This is going to be a defining issue of our time. A lot of these same tech companies that need these massive amounts of power in the years ahead also have really high level sustainability goals. Do you see this as an issue of rising salience to the general population and one of the key issues that are just going to be percolating in the years ahead?
Tim: Yes, definitely. People in the public are definitely paying more attention to climate and sustainability and holding companies, I think, to higher bar on that. I do think it's something that people care about when they shop. Using the internet hopefully is-- and AI and chat GPT and everything is an extension of that. Hopefully people do become more conscious of what the carbon footprint of all this stuff is. That's the message I'm trying to get out in my reporting. Hopefully they're listening.
Gil: Let's come back to the presidential election. In today's issue, you had a fun dispatch from Tucson, Arizona, where--
Conor: Grew up, right?
Tim: Yes.
Conor: High school.
Tim: Yes.
Conor: The Wildcat.
Tim: Yes.
Gil: You talked about a congressional election there. I want to ask you about that because they interesting local zoom out national implications for control of the house and climate policy. Let's talk a little more presidential election because Arizona is a swing state too. What do you think is standing out about the last three months of doing economic plans and Harris on the issues and the reactions and the wide dichotomy with Trump? Maybe talk about that story today and anything more on this major thing that we're all waiting to see which way it goes, and then the implications for that one side of the coin.
Tim: I definitely will not be making a prediction. [laughs]
Conor: I thought you'd give me some local intel about Maricopa County [crosstalk].
Tim: Oh, yes. On that? I don't know. I can't predict that one either, but we're just thinking about Harris and Trump. Obviously, it's a very close race. I think it's been very interesting to see the evolution of Harris's energy policy. She hasn't said much about how she would differ from Biden on the key inflation reduction act, global climate finance, domestic environmental regulation, those core issues, hermiting reform. We don't have a super clear view of what that's going to look like. Obviously, seeing, I think, somewhat of a shift to the center from her around fossil fuels and the energy market doing a lot of campaigning in Pennsylvania.
Obviously, the politics of this are pretty obvious having to be sensitive about doing a ban on fracking or having to be more sensitive or nuanced around this fossil fuel phase-out-type language. It's been interesting to see her evolve on that. From the Trump side, I guess the interesting storyline with climate and Trump through all of this has been the deepening relationship with Elon, to the extent that Elon is able to bend Trump's ear on EVs. I feel like there's been maybe a little bit of more of a willingness, on Trump's part, to entertain a more favorable attitude toward EVs. Maybe that's a good thing. I don't know.
Conor: I don't know how to pick that one.
Tim: I guess those are the dynamics there that I'm still paying attention to. One thing that I take away from that is just that the race is very close. To get to the story today, it puts even more of the pressure, I think, on down-ballot races. That's what I was writing about with this case study in Arizona, because we have a lot of uncertainty about what's going to happen at the federal level, and who's going to be in the White House, and who's going to have the majority in Congress.
Meanwhile, there are all these dozens or hundreds of races across state legislatures across the country, and gubernatorial races and other local elections that are happening in the background that also have really high stakes for climate and the way that states themselves plan around clean energy or take advantage of federal funding or have their own environmental regulations. Arizona is one where-- It's one of a handful of states that are within a hair's breadth of flipping the majority control of the state legislature.
In Arizona's case, if that happened, it would be the first time in 40 or 50 years that there's been a Democratic majority in both houses of the Arizona legislature. That would be, I think, really interesting to see what that allows the state to unlock. It has a Democratic governor but hasn't really been able to do nearly as much as some people think that it should around building a solar industry or--
Gil: No, not at all given their resources. Might have something to do with the public utility commission down there, right?
Tim: Which also has elections this year.
Tim: That's just another example of the importance of these local elections. Yes, fascinating.
Gil: Let's zoom back out international before we turn to the hot seat. How many COPs and climate change conferences have you covered? You mentioned--
Tim: I went to Paris, Glasgow, Sharm el Sheikh, Dubai, so four. Now I'm going to Baku next month.
Conor: I just missed you. My last COP was in Peru in the lead up to Paris. Haven't been back to a COP since, but I still follow. Once you've been to one, it's quite the experience. Tell us about, what's in your reporter's notebook for Baku at the next COP? Obviously, the digest of the elections, I'm sure US, China dominates, but what are you starting to zero in on to plan your two weeks there?
Tim: It's going to be definitely a lot smaller than last year's COP with a hundred thousand people in Dubai. I think this year is going to be a lot smaller. In chit chatting with people about who's going and who's not, definitely far fewer business leaders are attending this one than they did last year. I don't even know that I'm going to stay the entire two weeks, probably. The big story from Baku is going to be about international climate finance, and hopefully, trying to get some new target for how much money rich countries can raise to help the climate adaptation and mitigation efforts of developing countries.
I'm sure whatever number they come up with is going to be way smaller than what it really needs to be. It's not clear how they're going to reach agreement about who contributes to that, and whether a country like China should go from being a neutral tending towards recipient-type country into more of a donor-type country, which probably is what it should be. There's a lot of unanswered questions about that. That's going to be the big story coming out of Baku.
Gil: Yes, plan that too. Any what US and China can get close to doing or doing? Are you hearing any whispers about any more bilateral? Maybe that's dependent on the election.
Tim: My understanding from the last time that John Podesta was in China just several weeks ago, he had a visit there meeting with his counterpart is that they had some conversations around, again, state level partnerships or, partnerships between the US states and Chinese provinces to keep some sub national momentum on climate change going as a insurance against a slowdown of ambition at the federal level in the US. I don't think that China is going to really commit to any big deal with the US before the outcome of the election is known. We just really have to see what happens there. That's going to totally color the outcome of the COP. I think it'll just depend on what happens.
Conor: Now that we've ticked off geopolitics, true to form, I think, we've covered just about everything under the sun here, but we like to close with a little bit of a lightning round. Most are just one word, fill in the blanks. You're up for that?
Tim: Sure. Let's do it.
Conor: All right. Perfect. The most interesting story I've covered this year is?
Tim: I think AI and the low growth issue. That's been the big one.
Conor: The biggest misconception about climate change reporting is?
Gil: It's activism journalism?
Tim: Yes, that's a good one. That it's either activism or that we're somehow in cahoots with big oil or something. I got called a shill for Monsanto one time just because I wrote something that was semi-favorable about GMOs. I don't know. You're always shilling for someone, that's what people think, but I'm not.
Gil: Fill in the blank, the most surprising thing I've learned in my reporting this month was?
Tim: I think that seeing the level of internal struggle in Ukraine over the energy transition that I was talking about earlier has been really fascinating to see. That's a story I'm going to be really excited to continue covering closely.
Conor: The book I'm currently reading is?
Tim: I'm reading a novel called The Bickford Fuse by a Ukrainian novelist named Andriy Kurkov. It's a super interesting and dystopian-- It's like The Road by Cormac McCarthy, if you're into that kind of thing.
Conor: Some real light bedtime reading. Okay. We'll put that in the show notes. When I need to recharge my battery, I?
Tim: Play guitar. I had a band in Egypt called The Lost Cowboys. Check us out on Spotify.
Conor: Is that alt country?
Tim: It is actually, yes. Alt country with a Egyptian wood vibe. Check it out.
Conor: Are you are you rhythm guitar and lead singer or are you--
Tim: Yes, I was the singer and the songwriter and the guitarist. My buddy was the wood player. We had a really cool thing.
Gil: What's your axe? I can play eight chords, but I have a much nicer guitar to justify my skill level. What are you playing?
Tim: I've got a big Taylor acoustic guitar. That's my main one. Then a semi-hollow Fender tele that I play for electric.
Gil: That's a nice setup. I have an old Ibanez. I don't have a Taylor, and I have a semi-hollow Gretsch, which doesn't stay in tune. It's just like I'm trying to be Crosby, Stills and Nash. They play a similar guitar, but it doesn't come out that way. I applaud your commitment. Best movie about journalism, in your opinion.
Tim: Oh, you can't go wrong with All the President's Men.
Gil: I know you're going to say that and that's the correct answer. I think that's the correct answer. Spotlight would not be the correct answer. Climate leader I most admire is?
Tim: I have a huge amount of respect for Mia Mottley, the prime minister of Barbados, who I think has done probably as much or more than any other leader to really advance the conversation around climate finance and finding real solutions for paying for climate adaptation in the global south. Really, she deserves a Nobel Prize or something for that.
Gil: This is a tradecraft question. Are you particular about your notebooks and your writing instruments? If so, do you have a recommendation?
Tim: I often use Moleskine's because I'm like a hipster, I guess.
Gil: Okay. No classic reporter's notebook, just the Moleskine.
Tim: My main takeaway from doing journalism for a long time is just to use the cheap ones because you take-
Conor: That's right.
Tim: -notes on stuff and then they fall apart and they get lost. They're expendable resources.
Gil: Feel the same way about pens? Are you obsessed about the--
Tim: No, I use the Muji 0.38 pens.
Gil: I've heard I've heard about this. I've got to try the Muji. I like a classic reporter's notebook, but I'm not particular about a pen, but I'm going to check out Muji. Thank you for humoring me on that.
Tim: Of course.
Gil: Last question, we ask our guests to finish the sentence. To me, climate positive means.
Tim: That it works.
Gil: Damn good answer. Tim, keep up the great reporting, the curating of the globe and all the politics and technology and policy with this great story of our time. Stay safe with you and your wife there. You have a dog, too, right?
Tim: Yes, she's behind me somewhere here. She's asleep. Babette.
Gil: Babette. What kind of dog is Babette?
Tim: Babette's a Goldendoodle.
Conor: Awesome.
Tim: The most beautiful Goldendoodle in the world.
Gil: That balances you out when you're reading the dystopian novellas at night. You have a Goldendoodle to--
Tim: Just to stroke for comfort. Yes.
Conor: All right. Thank you, Tim. We'll talk to you down the line.
Tim: Thanks, guys, so much. Appreciate it.
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.