If reducing emissions from industry is the first step for carbon capture, then drawing down excess CO2 to reverse climate change is the next. This week Akshat speaks to Dr. Jennifer Wilcox, head of the US Department of Energy’s office that is funding two gigantic carbon removal hubs and many small demonstration projects. They talk about why carbon removal is so complicated, crucial, and hitting the magic number $100. This is the second in a two part series about carbon management. Listen to...

You may not know Jim Hagemann Snabe by name, but he has been called Europe’s top industrialist. Snabe has held leadership positions at some of the world’s biggest companies like Maersk and Siemens. He is now a chairperson of Northvolt, Europe’s largest battery manufacturer with 4,000 employees, $55B worth of orders and the competitive edge of greener batteries. Akshat spoke with Jim Snabe at the Bloomberg Tech Summit in London about how industrial behemoths like Maersk and Siemens can meet...

At Bloomberg, we’re always talking about the biggest business stories, and no one is bigger than Elon Musk. In this new chat weekly show, host David Papadopoulos and a panel of guests including Businessweek’s Max Chafkin, Tesla reporter Dana Hull, Big Tech editor Sarah Frier, and more, will break down the most important stories on Musk and his empire. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The U.S. is spending billions on carbon capture as a climate solution, but is it realistic? The method has been around for 50 years and used primarily as a way to extract more oil. To find out how and if carbon capture can work as a climate solution, Akshat speaks with Emily Grubert, a professor at Notre Dame about what tech demonstrations have actually demonstrated and where this precious resource should be deployed. This is the first in a two part series about carbon management.  Read...

Saleemul Huq was a pre-eminent climate scientist and champion for developing countries. For many years, he was a lone warrior trying to bring the issues of adaptation and loss and damage to the UN negotiating table. His death last weekend caused an outpouring of emotion across the climate world. Ahead of COP28, Zero hears from some of Saleemul’s colleagues about his life, legacy and the hole he leaves behind in climate diplomacy. Read more: Saleemul Huq's obituary  Saleemul Huq and Farhana...

This week, the International Energy Agency published its flagship report: The World Energy Outlook. It's hundreds of pages long and makes some bold claims. It says in the year 2030, there will be 10 times as many electric cars on the road as today, 80% of all new power generation will be solar or wind, and demand for fossil fuels – coal, oil and gas – will have peaked. The report is dominating climate news because what the IEA says makes a big difference to how governments tweak their energy...

Cars are only half the electric vehicle story. There are also billions of two and three wheelers that need to be electrified, as well as bigger vehicles like vans, trucks and buses. In this bonus episode of Zero, we’re joined again by Colin McKerracher, BloombergNEF’s head of advanced transport, to look beyond electric cars and hear how electrification is going for other forms of road transport. Are batteries still the answer?  Zero is a production of Bloomberg Green. Our producer is Oscar...

Peak oil is here, or is it? Depends on how you measure, but at least one person is sure crude isn’t coming back. This week Akshat speaks with Bloomberg Opinion columnist David Fickling about why he thinks the world has reached peak crude oil demand, what comes next, and what it all has to do with the American soap opera Dallas.  Read more  David’s original article: Peak Oil Has Finally Arrived. No, Really Not everyone agrees: The Harsh Truth: We're Using More Oil Than Ever Latest IEA...

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...

The rise of electric cars is staggering. In 2016, just 700,000 electric cars were sold worldwide, this year it’ll be over 14 million. However, we are still off-track to meet climate goals. Colin McKerracher, head of Advanced Transport at BloombergNEF, joins Zero to discuss how electric cars can get on track to meet net-zero targets, why China has succeeded where others haven’t, and when we’ll finally see more electric cars on the roads than those burning fossil fuels.  Read more:  China...

Brynn O’Brien not only reads corporate climate plans, she crunches the numbers. When they don’t add up, she calls her friends who manage trillions of dollars in assets and they all ask to speak to the manager. Brynn is the Executive Director of the Australasian Centre for Corporate Responsibility, a shareholder activist organization that works to ensure that publicly traded companies with net zero goals are conducting their coal mining, electricity generation, and other activities in a way...

Are two wheels better than four? Can cutting commuting cap carbon consumption? And where’s all the clean energy coming from? There are many climate numbers out there that we don’t get to talk about on Zero but that deserve attention. In this bonus episode, host Akshat Rathi and producers Christine Driscoll and Oscar Boyd talk about some of their favorite stats showing people taking action on the climate crisis. More Links:  Electric Vehicle Output Report 2023 — BloombergNEF People who work...

Setting world records. Combing through warehouses of old electronics. Seeding the Chinese solar industry from afar. This is the life of Martin Green, a professor at the University of New South Wales in Sydney and the director of the Australian Centre for Advanced Photovoltaics. Green’s work on solar panel design made the modern solar industry possible: 90% of solar panels made last year were based on his designs. He’s still going strong, too, regularly breaking new records in the pursuit of...

Cleantech is hard. Farming is harder. This week, Akshat Rathi visits entrepreneurs doing both.  GroGrace in Singapore and Jungle in Paris are two vertical farming companies taking agriculture indoors, and trying to grow crops efficiently and profitably. While the technology to do this has been around since the 1990s, the business model has yet to be perfected, and several other vertical farms have closed down or laid off staff this year. As the world faces rising energy prices, water...

Trillions of dollars are needed to fund the climate transition, with both the private sector and governments required to contribute. Australia’s answer is the Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC), the world’s largest green bank.  Established by the government in 2012 with an initial funding of A$10 billion ($6.5 billion), it was tasked with financing green projects and ambitious Australian climate startups at a time when large-scale investments in things like wind and solar were still...

The concept of a “carbon footprint” began as a distraction from Big Oil: get people to focus on their own actions rather than the impact of large emitters. Oil companies come up with PR campaigns all the time, but the carbon footprint took off because it taps into a question we keep coming back to, can our choices lower emissions? If so, how? And if they don’t, why bother? This week, Akshat is joined by Kira Bindrim, the editor of Bloomberg Greener Living, which focuses on consumer choices,...

This week, a visit to the energy startup trying to replace coal with a very cheap battery. Form Energy has attracted nearly $900 million in investments and is building its first manufacturing facility in the US. Its big innovation relies on rust. Really. The materials scientists at Form have taken the same process that’s a symbol of time slowly passing and turned it into electricity. It’s one of the first big bets that batteries could help push the grid closer to running without fossil fuels...

Methane is a potent greenhouse gas, with 80 times the warming potential of carbon dioxide over a 25-year period. However, it also degrades much more quickly than CO2, meaning cuts in emissions now can have a quick and significant effect on reducing global warming. On this bonus episode of Zero, producer Oscar Boyd talks with host Akshat Rathi about the methane problem and the ways to solve it. Read more:  A Cheap Fix to Global Warming Is Finally Gaining Support The $75 Billion Climate...

How do you turn climate change into compelling TV? What scenarios do you draw on? And how do you make sure a call for climate action isn’t lost to a feeling that a dystopian future is inevitable?  When Extrapolations premiered in March, it became one of the first major TV shows to put climate change at the core of its narrative. Packed with A-list actors like Meryl Streep, Kit Harington and Sienna Miller, Extrapolations begins in a not too distant 2037. The world feels all too familiar, and...

True crime is one of the most popular genres in every form of storytelling. But can that pull be used to tell stories about the environment? This week, Akshat speaks with Amy Westervelt, a climate reporter for over twenty years, and the creator of the podcast Drilled - a true crime show about climate change. Westervelt launched it after being turned away by large production companies but found over a million listeners in the first season. This is the second of three episodes talking with...

To tackle climate change, we need good stories and we need good storytellers. Kim Stanley Robinson is a climate fiction author who has written more than 20 novels, including Ministry for the Future, which was published in 2020. It opens in 2025, with a heatwave that kills millions in India. It’s a grim scene, and what follows is the story of humans striving to cope with an increasingly inhospitable planet — there’s ecoterrorism, high-finance, wild chases over the Swiss Alps. What emerges in...

What’s worse for the planet than Big Oil? The world’s food system, argues environmental journalist and campaigner George Monbiot in his new book Regenesis. He makes a passionate case for how current agricultural practices not only damage the environment, but prevent vast amounts of land from being rewilded and restored to its natural state. Monbiot speaks with Bloomberg Green reporter Akshat Rathi about his proposed solutions, which include an end to livestock farming entirely and using new...

In the next three years, 1TW of solar power will be added to the global grid and competition is driving solar prices even lower. And after years of innovation in China, Japan, and Germany, the U.S. is finally getting in the game in a major way through its IRA which offers incentives to manufacture cleantech in the U.S. In early 2023, the South Korean company QCells announced it would build a domestic supply chain in the U.S. to gain access to enormous tax credits. But in a global marketplace,...

Where’s all the oil money going? What’s happening with cycling in France? And how far behind China is the US on solar? There are many climate numbers out there that we don’t get to talk about on Zero but that deserve attention. In this bonus episode, host Akshat Rathi and producers Christine Driscoll and Oscar Boyd talk about some of their favorite stats showing people taking action on the climate crisis. Akshat will be traveling to Singapore, Sydney, Melbourne and Delhi over the next few...

Canada is a leading producer of oil and gas. It’s also one of the few G7 members with a carbon tax. As Minister of Environment and Climate Change in 2015, Catherine McKenna was charged with getting Canadians on board with that policy. One of the most important tactics was calling it “a price on pollution.” Carbon taxes are having a moment after the Paris Climate Finance Summit and Cath joins Akshat this week to talk about the political practicalities of passing a carbon tax. She has advice...