Welcome to Zero.

I am Akshatrati.

This week Al Gore on the climate reyseet.

Last week at COPP, I had the great privilege of speaking with former US Vice President Al Gore on the big themes blocking progress on climate action.

We are publishing that conversation in two parts.

If you haven't already listened to the first part, please do so.

It's in your feed and linked in the show notes.

If you aren't subscribed to Zero, Now onto part two.

In today's episode, we will discuss Vice President's attempts to reform the COP process, what it means to be a climate realist, how to move more finance to the countries that need it, and how to tackle the tragedy of the horizon.

Send me your feedback on Zero pod at Bloomberg dot net.

Here's part two of my conversation with Al Gore, recorded at a line event at Ted Countdown House during COP thirty in Brazil.

Now let me come to COP because we are here at COP thirty coming into this COP there's so much discussion about logistics in this place, and you know, we've had ten years of the Paris Agreement, all the things that we needed to negotiate have mostly been negotiated.

What is this COP going to be about?

Now we have a clearer idea, there's going to be a discussion around having a roadmap to transition away from fossil fuels, just like we had a roadmap published about getting to one point street trillion dollars in climate finance.

A big gap that needs to be sorted.

So we're gearing up to something that may become a meaningful outcome from this COP.

But there is still the problem that you highlighted earlier about Saudi Arabia.

You know, we talked about the fact that Saudi Arabia in nineteen ninety two and onwards has blocked the voting rules at COP, which means the only way this gets done is through consensus.

Any one country can try and stop the proceedings from going forward.

You were involved in a process to try and reform the court, to try and get a majority or a supermajority vote in place.

What's progress on that.

Front, Well, not enough, but yes, you know the history of it.

Thirty three years and five months ago I chaired the US Senate delegation coming here to Brazil for the Earth Summit, and when the treaty was finalized, and before it was finally adopted, the question arose, what are the rules of procedure going to be?

And Saudi Arabia, working closely in cooperation with the fossil fuel polluters in the US, objected, and the default procedures became the requirement for a consensus that should change.

We should also change the methods by which the host nation of EEL.

I mean, how much more of a disaster could that be?

We still don't know who the host for COP thirty one is going to be because the system that's followed is so whack a doodle.

They know who's going to host COP thirty two, but it needs to be changed, and the Secretary General, in my view, should have co responsibility for approving the host and the COP presidency.

Now I love Secretary General Guterres.

I think he's a global hero.

He doesn't want that power and understand why he doesn't, but I think he should have it.

And so these reforms ought to be instituted.

How's it going?

Not as well as it should?

No, it's because of the same procedural difficulties that it's a catch twenty two.

The same procedural difficulties that we're facing in the outcome of each COP also impedes the ability to reform the rules.

But it should, it definitely should be reformed.

So one quote that I hear from lots and lots of people who've been to COP over the years, especially reflecting on the ten years since Paris, is it's the best of times, it's the worst of times.

That we've made progress.

We've avoided maybe four and four and a half degree celsius of warming, but we're still on track for three degrees celsius, maybe two point eight degrees celsius of warming.

Still too much the next ten years?

Are you know?

This is a decade long problem.

We have to take it decade by decade.

What would ideal COPS look like in the next ten years.

I think we have to reestablish our ability to reason together collectively and to minimize the outsized influence of fossil fuel polluters.

As I've often said, they're way better at capturing politicians than capturing emissions, and the size of their delegations has increased in each successive COP, and really their influence is one of the biggest problems of all the fossil fuel industry.

Is so large it has become hegemonic in every policy vertical, every policy area that affects the continuation of their business models for as long as possible.

That really has to change.

In the US, we've you know, they actually played the key role in a strategic effort to destabilize American democracy.

This story has not been told as well and as often as it should be.

But you know where the Tea Party began to disrupt the process when Obama the first month of his presidency.

Where did that come from?

Well, the copyright and the establishment of that organization was a combination of the Koch Brothers, the largest private fossil fuel company in the US, and Exon Mobile.

Exon Mobil was one of the biggest contributors to establishing the Tea Party.

And now with the advent of social media, we see a huge asymmetry in the amount and quality of communication going to publics from the polluters compared to the communication from advocates of creating a healthy, sustainable, prosperous future for all all the people, and that really has to has to change.

A second inflection point was when there was a Supreme Court decision a few years later called Citizens United and what that did was it legalized unlimited anonymous corporate donations to politicians in the US.

As the old line goes, what could go wrong, Well, we've seen what can go wrong, and we really have to to address the democracy crisis as part of our strategy for addressing the climate crisis.

You know, at a time of even worse crisis in my country, our greatest President Abraham Lincoln said, the occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion, as our cases knew.

So we must think anew and then we will save our country.

That applies in the US, and it applies in the global dialogue about how we're going to solve this climate crisis and the larger ecological crisis affecting nature as well as the climate alone.

And it is a challenge for those of us who are privileged to be alive in this time of choosing.

You will, I hope be able to tell your grandchildren I was there, I stood up when it mattered this.

I'm here, by the way, not just to do this interview.

I respect you so much, Oxshot, but I'm here to recruit you.

We need more help.

We need everybody to stand up and be involved in this struggle.

So much is at stake.

We can win this.

We are winning it over time, but we are not winning it fast enough to avoid some very dangerous tipping points.

I was with Professor Tim Linton from the University of Exeter yesterday, a long long time friend of Johann Rockstrom, who has developed some of Tim's ideas.

These tipping points are not just an abstract matter.

They're extremely dangerous and we are reckless in continuing to use the sky as an open sewer.

And for those of you may not be familiar with the basics, you know we're putting one hundred and seventy five million tons of global warming pollution, man made global pollution into the sky every single day, using it as an open sewer.

That thin blue line you sometimes see from pictures in space is a thin blue shell surrounding the planet.

It's so thin.

If you could drive a car straight up in the air at highway speeds, you get to the top of it in five to seven minutes.

That's how thin it is.

Is blue because that's where the oxygen is, and we're using it as an open sewer, and the what we're spewing into it stays there quite a long time.

On average, you average them all out about one hundred years per molecule, and so the accumulated amount today traps as much extra heat as would be released by seven hundred and fifty thousand first generation Heirosima class atomic bombs exploding all over the world every single day.

It is insane for us to allow that to continue.

And why don't we stop it?

Because those who are profiting from it have captured so much of the political systems and so many of the political systems in the world that the politicians who are captured, when they say jump, they say, yes, sir, how high they're under the thumb of the polluters.

And it is time for the people of this And it's hard to do because, again going back to an earlier exchange, our ability to reason together collectively has also been distorted by all these bots that are used to magnify and amplify and multiply the polluters messages.

We have to break free of this now.

The good news is there are now some grassroots developments of alternative ways of reasoning together.

You've seen it in my country in the No Kings movement.

You've seen it in places like Taiwan and Estonia, where internet based systems with integrity that allow people to really connect on the level of reason.

They it can work, but we have got to put our heart and soul into making it work now.

I have spoken to lots of activists who have said that they've become climate activists because they've watched either your movies or have heard you speak through the climate reality.

But sure very nice.

I often say that if it hadn't been for me, we might have a big problem right now.

And you continue to do that work.

What are lessons that you've learned that you can give to other people so that this message can be scaled up.

Well, most of what I have learned has come from other people.

I get energy from the activists, and I see a bunch of them here in this group.

That's where a lot of my energy and drive comes from.

I've learned, and I often say this that we have the technologies we need, we have the deployment models.

They're proven to be successful.

And for those who say we don't have enough political will, political will is itself a renewable resource.

We have to renew political will.

We have to solve the democracy crisis in order to solve the climate crisis.

So we've we're solving one problem at a time.

We talked about government, we talked about COP, we talked about politics.

I want to come to finance because that's also something that you work on, you think about.

You know, last time you corrected me for the many billions of dollars that Generation Investment Management that you co founded has under access.

You should tell us.

How much of business now, no, no go ahead.

It's that they billion dollars or more.

And one of the things that has happened, and we've talked about here at COP, is that we need more finance to come to these climate solutions.

But just like the politics has gone sour on on right wing parties and on climate policies, it's also invaded the financial sphere.

There's been a backlash on ESG environmental social governance investing that you know, Generation has done great work on what is it that you think can make this work?

Because one of the ways in which people had thought, if the politics doesn't work, at least rational investors will see the climate damages, we'll see the opportunities in the technologies, will see the future and invest in those.

But no, we are nowhere close to private capital coming to the scale at which we need the solution.

Yeah.

I saw your Ted talk or Ted Countdown talk, and you gave the audience a choice between burn capitalism or burn coal.

Very clever.

I agree with you that it's not fundamentally capitalism itself.

It's the problem, but it's the form of capitalism that we have.

And I'll give you a specific example that illustrates this problem.

You talked about the future.

A great science fiction writer, William Gibson once said the future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed.

And I think the same thing is true for climate solutions.

They're here, they work, they're cheaper, better, create three times as many jobs as money spent on old, dirty fossil fiels.

It's already here, but they're not evenly distributed.

And they're not evenly distributed because the hegemonic economic system that the world follows is a blend of capitalism and government policies.

And as you say, people are very important, but people have to you know, public sentiment.

I'll plug that right in there again.

But the system for allocating access to private capital is fundamentally broken and needs to be fixed.

The good news is there are a lot of people working on fixing them.

Let me give you some examples.

First of all, if you look at the statistic globally last year, if you look at all the new electricity generation installed worldwide, ninety three percent was renewable, mostly solar and win But where did the money for that come from?

That's the question.

Seventy five percent of all the money that resulted in that massive change came from private investors and lenders, but only eighteen percent of it of the total went to developing nations.

Take the example of Africa.

Africa is a giant continent.

It has fewer solar panels than the single state of Florida.

That's a disgrace for anybody who's looking for a global system that works.

Africa has sixty percent of the prime solar resources of the entire world, but only two percent of the climate finance that to install the solar panels and the microgrids or grids and batteries.

That has to change.

Why is there this crisis in misallocation?

Well, because the system now this public private hybrid with the balance on the private side.

The risk perceived in developing countries is dominated by concerns about sudden currency valuation, continued access to courts for the enforcement of contracts, continuity of government in some cases, corruption, et cetera.

And so private investors and lenders don't feel safe in saying to their clients, well, you know we're gonna put a huge amount of money in country.

Why in the developing world, even though the risk you're going to lose all your money is way way higher.

They can pay eighteen percent interest rates, So you can't build a solar farm with eighteen percent in interest rates.

So this has to be a j bong at the World Bank.

I'm a big fan of a jay and the other MDBs are trying to fix this problem, but we need better solutions to it.

I've just met with the Green Climate Fund, I've met with a lot of people on this issue here in Berlin and last week in Sound Pollow.

There are great efforts underway, but we need to do more to make this access available.

Essentially, the solution is to have a so called first loss security so that these extra layers of risk at the top of the capital stack and transactions with developing countries don't have to be borne by the lender or the investor that they have some reassurance that if that happens, they won't be held liable.

There also needs to be a more accurate perception of what those real risks are.

That's why some of the African countries have lashed out at the three oligarchic ratings agencies.

You know, as soon as the pandemic hit, they raised the risk levels and interest rates and all over Africa.

Why it was irrational, but it was, you know, the frightened of their shadow Moody's and Fitch and so forth.

And they're trying to create their own ratings agency.

Good luck with that.

I hope that they can.

But we have to fix this problem of unequal access to private capital.

Private capital is the mainstay of how we're going to solve this has to be allocated correctly.

Are there examples from generation investment management where you see that kind of unlocking that can happen and others can replicate.

Well, yes, First of all, if you have a more accurate perception of what the real risk is, and if you have local partners who have deep expertise in helping to mitigate those risks, that can be one way.

And if you have partners who are willing to allocate capital based on their success full experience elsewhere in the developing world.

That's one way to do it, and if you pick the opportunity.

Picking the opportunities correctly is the mainstay.

We have an office in Soundpollo now.

This is the center of our natural climate solutions business for our just climate product, which looks at long term hard to abate sectors.

We've had some great success with this.

It can be done.

Join us after the break for more of my conversation with Al Gore, former Vice President of the United States.

And if you'd like more from bloombergreen at cop thirty.

Sign up to our newsletter for daily coverage on the ground.

Sign up at Bloomberg dot com Forward Slash Newsletters.

So I want to take you a few months b for the Paris Agreement in London, a central banker gave a speech that central banker.

Was not the tragedy of the horizon and the strategy of the horizon.

He's talked about the fact that by the time finances that it's in their interest to actually invest in climate solutions, it will be too late.

So that is remembered by a lot of people.

What is not remembered by a lot of people, is what he said in the second half of the speech, And the second half of the speech was about what do we do?

And his solution was that we need to get people to understand the risk of climate change, that we'll have companies who have to disclose their climate related financial risks.

Once we do that, we'll have investors making rational choices.

We are living in McCartney's world today.

The twenty four thousand companies that disclose emissions data.

There are thousands of companies in places like UK, Europe, New Zealand who are regulated to disclose that information, and yet the allocation of capital has not moved at the base at which the climate risk the climate science tells us.

How do we break that problem and how do we get ahead and actually make investors put the money in the right places?

Well, that is one of the reasons why six years ago I co founded with a scientist named Gavin McCormick, the Climate Trace Coalition.

It's one hundred and sixty five nonprofits, universities, research institutions, scientists NGOs that all work together and have identified every significant point source emission site in the world, not just the ones that disclose on their own.

If you have a few of the disclosed and you don't know what the rest of the universe is, then it limits the value of the ones that do disclose.

We now track constantly seven hundred and forty five million point source emission sites, essentially ninety nine percent of all the emissions in the world.

We publish monthly reports climatetrace dot org.

Climate trace is one word dot org.

It's all free.

We just did our last monthly report.

We have now also included the copollution, the PM two point five, the conventional pollution soot, which kills an estimated eight point seven million people every year from lung and hard diseases from breathing in all this pollution, and many people have become kind of inured to it, used to it.

But now we will show you the plumes in thousands of cities around the world exactly where the pollution, that pollution is coming from, where it's going depending on the meteorological conditions.

We'll soon have every city in the world, and we'll soon have it soon as probably two years on having a daily periodicity.

But my hope is that it will be available to all local weather TV weather forecasters and internet weather so that if you look at whether radar to see where the coal front or where the storm is, you'll also see where the pollution plumes that day are.

And if your kid has asthma or you have a family member that's coughing more and you look on the website or see it on TV, then the opportunity to build coalitions between public health groups, budget conscious groups that see the rise in health expenditures, and the climate community all together, then that can give us a much greater chance to transition away from the combustion of fossil fuels, because when you get rid of it, transition away from it, you're getting rid of that conventional pollution that's killing so many people, and at the same time you're getting rid of the global warming pollution that's creating this big threat to the future of humanity.

Now that i've mentioned McCartney, it's ahead.

There's a question I have to ask about McCartney because you know, McCartney has been a UN Climate champion.

You know, we have a world leader in a G seven country was a UN Climate champion before he had to give up to take on his Prime ministership in Canada.

But the first thing he does when he comes in is gets rid of a consumer carbon tax.

Just last week they had a budget come out in which they've gotten rid of the oil and gas cap that they were going to institute that Trudeau had passed previously.

And it's not like we don't have climate leaders in places of power today.

Claudia Shinbaum is a very good example in Mexico, a climatetastic, fantastic leader.

And yet and look at her new DC.

Yes, yes, and yet the policies currently aren't going in anywhere close to the pace at which you know she would understand the science demands action.

So there is this conversation a lot of people are talking about, we need a reset, We need to think about where are baselines on what we can actually achieve needs to happen.

You've read the Bill Gates memo.

Climate reality nowadays is being referred to as we can't reach one point five degrees celsius.

Let's think about what else can we do on this problem?

What is your answer to these new ideas on resetting the conversation, changing our baseline, getting rid of the one point five degree Celsia's goal, and aiming for something more real.

Yeah, well, the so called climate realism, which they don't mean it in a sarcastic way, but it's the way I hear it.

If you want to know my full response to that, go to the TED countdown site and if you pull up box shots video.

The next up in line will be my video from Nairobi last year where I did a whole slideshow.

It's just on this, This so called climate realism movement is deeply cynical.

It is another Saudi Arabia led project.

By the way, because after COP twenty eight, After COP twenty eight, when UAE and Doctor Sultan, I was very critical of a lot of what they did, but I applaud what he and his chief of staff Modjut did in getting the final document to commit every nation in the world to transition away from fossil fuels.

That was a genuine achievement.

Barely one month later, my friend, he really is a friend, I mean Naser, the CEO of a Saudi aramco, said that is a fantasy.

Soon Exon Mobil was saying the same thing.

Soon the other Petro states were saying the same thing.

And it gets back to their hegemonic power in every policy vertical that affects their business models.

They have used the captured politics that do whatever they tell them to do, no matter their prior convictions, and they have pushed this narrative all around the world.

Now they have an opponent in this narrative that is more powerful than they are, and that is Mother Nature.

And you mentioned Bill Gates this.

I almost felt sorry for him because the same day that he put out that thing, the same day the Lancet commissioned by far the most respected global voice on health, reiterated that climate and health are are intertwined.

And the World Health Organization has been telling us over and over again that the number one threat to health in the world is the climate crisis.

It's not just the eight point seven million people that are killed every year by the co pollution.

It's the heat and humidity in It's the movement of tropical diseases to the higher latitudes north and south, and especially in the northern hemisphere.

We have one hundred new varieties of ticks in the United States in the last twenty years, some caring diseases I never heard of before in my life.

We're seeing also some very dangerous changes in fungi that have never been a threat to human beings.

The list, unfortunately, is a very long one.

Now, I want to call your attention to a very healthful statement Tedro's just yesterday saying, and this is one useful thing that can come out of Bill's unfortunate, kind of silly statement.

But Tedro said, you know, we should have a track in these cops that focus on climate and health, and I strongly agree with that.

That is the main reason why Climate Trace has implemented the tracking of these copollution plumes.

We are now our coalition members are now collecting and codifying the hospital admissions and other health statistics in the areas under the plumes compared to the areas on either side of the plumes.

So yes, I think that we can and should do more on health.

And but the idea of taking the money away from from a climate is is uh, you know really some to some people was surprising to hear them say that.

It was shocking to a lot of people.

Here's here's a place that I think we could find a lot of money for for health.

Why not take it from all of the government subsidies for fossil fuels that are still going on.

You know there, there, there are, there are, There's a long list of nations because they've been captured by the fossil fuel polluters, their lobbyists and their campaign contributions and and more.

They spend more on fossil fuel subsidies than they do on healthcare.

There are a lot of countries that's been twice as much on fossil subsidies as on healthcare.

Why not get it from there?

And anyway, you've triggered me again.

Last question.

Yeah, you're seventy seven.

You're younger than the current US president.

There's an election coming up in twenty twenty eight.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Your speech is still hid the same vein.

Yeah.

You know, it's interesting you should ask this because I've been sensing a rising demand for another septuagenarian candidate.

But thank you for the thought.

Will you run?

Well?

You know, if this rising demand becomes unstoppable, you know, who are the.

Leaders we should be looking for in the US who could take on what you.

Know, at this stage of the election process, in the cycle where Barack Obama was elected, nobody had ever heard the name Barack Obama.

I have.

I've been extremely impressed with a lot of young members of the Senate and the House, some governors.

I think that this is a prize.

The Democratic nomination for president in twenty twenty eight is going to be a prize worth having, and you're going to see an extremely vigorous competition from which I would predict that a very strong new voice will emerge.

You know, when a political party in the US doesn't control the White House or the Congress, the courts, they seem effeckless and impotent.

I've seen times when the Republican Party was in that position, was the same kind of thing.

But once there is a nominee, then that person man or woman becomes the face and voice of the party and gives a new direction to the party, which is by definition going to be popular because they've been chosen as the nominee.

So be of good cheer.

The sun will rise in the morning.

We sometimes overreact to an election that goes the way we don't want it to, and sometimes we overreact when an election goes the right way too.

The democracy is a continuous, ongoing effort.

It has to be defended and won and revitalized again in every generation.

I believe that what we saw in the elections last week brings some real incurbentrid.

There are a lot of people out there who are just damn fed up with this craziness that they're seeing every single day in this White House.

Not everyone's of the same mind, of course, I understand, but his approval levels are the lowest they've ever been.

He now is in a lame duck status.

The competition in the Republican Party for their nomination is already beginning.

That they're scared to death to offend him, of course, because he'll tweet them away or something.

But you're going to see a resorting of this process unfold as this year continues, and there's going to be another vote next week that may have some real significance.

We may be surprised by how many Republicans join that vote.

So I don't know.

I would just caution against.

You know, they used to say denial a just a river in Egypt.

Well, despair aing just to tire in the turn.

It's a it's a real problem.

Don't let yourself fall into despair.

We can do this, We will do this.

We have to do it faster and stronger.

I'm encouraged most of all by the energy and passion and enthusiasm from people like those of you here, people who are are parts of these groups that attend the cop This is going to happen.

This is emerging as the largest global grassroots movement in the history of the world.

It is widely distributed.

I'm telling you there is passion in every single one of the one hundred and ninety five countries around the world.

There's a generational change as well.

You look at the polls on all of these questions and compare people of you know, my generation or even your generation with the opinions and the passions of the younger generation.

We are going want to bring change.

I am confident of it.

But again I want you to be a part of it.

I'm here to recruit you, and I say this to those who are watching on on TED countdown.

Let's do this.

Thank you.

Let me say one last thing.

The SCRUD is going to hear from Kim Stanley Robinson shortly later today, and he said, the thing to aim for, the greater thing to aim for is not abundance, but adequacy.

Say that again, the thing to aim for is not abundance but adequacy.

Oh with that, thank you your adequacy.

Thank you very much.

Thank you, Thank you all for coming.

Thank you for listening to Zero.

If you've not heard the first part of my conversation with Vice President Al Gore, look for it in your podcast feeds.

If you liked this episode, please take a moment to rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

This episode was produced by Oscar Boyd with the help from the team at ted Coundon House Our Them.

Music is composed by Wonderly Special Thanks to Soamersadi Moses andam Laura Milan and Sharon chan I am Akshatrati.

Back soon.