367: Extreme Heat Breaks: The hidden climate story behind the World Cup

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Christiana Figueres: Or not, Tom. Or not. Because, I mean, there's one scenario, which I think is the one you're pointing to, that people will use the public transport and be outraged, of course, by the jacking up of the prices. And I'm sure there will be a lot of blaming of the increase of oil and gas because of the Iran War. But that's not the only reason. And maybe the best of all scenarios is that people will react by saying, we need much more public transport and much better price. The other scenario that could happen is that people go, see, I told you, public transport stinks. Yeah. I'm never getting back on here again. I don't ever want to use public transport again. I'm getting back in my SUV, of which I have four in my garage, and I'm never going to use public transport. And I am not going to vote for anyone who wants to increase the budget into public transport. So it could go either way.

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Tom Rivett-Carnac: Yeah. Yeah.

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Paul Dickinson: It's the opportunity that things could change and that the sort of soul of the nation and the spirit of the people could push in either direction. I think that's a great opportunity behind events like this. But Christiana, you absolutely draw it down to the, will it happen? Should it happen? Could it happen? I mean, I've traveled across the US on the Amtrak, that train. You know, there are trains. There was a time when the US ran on trains. You know, it was the first country to have this sort of like massive train network and it's fallen back. You know, the contrast between a Swiss train and a US train is pretty considerable. But the opportunity is always there. But as I've traveled across the US before I looked out the window, the houses are as far apart from each other as they can possibly be. So there is an issue about, you know, it's almost as if the nation was designed around the automobile. And that is a challenge.

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Tom Rivett-Carnac: Yeah. I mean, in the end, of course, this will come down to price. And that, I think, probably brings us on to our next topic. Because if we do see the prices for fossil fuels continue to rise, of course, not only will we see a shift towards electric vehicles, but we will also see a shift towards more public transport because price drives so many things, particularly in the US. And this week, we found two of our favorite podcasters and former guests on the show talking about one of our favorite topics. So I wonder if either of you would like to introduce this topic.

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Paul Dickinson: Well, you know, it's Ezra Klein, who's just very good at sort of holding a space around, you know, the key issues of the day. And he's interviewing Ian Bremmer, the chief executive of the Eurasia Group, which is this fantastic think tank. And Ian's such a articulate commentator. He's been on our podcast a few times, but he's not particularly a climate change person. But here they're discussing the war between, I guess, the USA, Iran, and to some extent Israel, and how it's impacting the global energy system. So let's have a listen.

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Ian Bremmer (archival clip, The Ezra Klein Show): I could make an argument that long term, the end of OPEC and the shift of the global economy to a much faster degree towards post-carbon energy as a consequence of this war is a really positive thing. I mean, it's a huge amount of short-term economic hardship, but absent that, it was moving more slowly. We're going to move to electric vehicles faster. We're going to move to solar and wind and nuclear faster. Donald Trump, a climate president. Donald Trump turns out to be the guy that has done more to ramp up that shift than any other move except for the Chinese leadership.

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Christiana Figueres: Okay. I never thought I would hear anybody say Donald Trump, a climate president. I mean, that just knocks me off my chair. But Klein does push back.

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Tom Rivett-Carnac: Is that really true or do you just have everybody building more pipelines to make sure they don't need the Strait of Hormuz as much? And after that, what I really picked up on was Ian Bremmer's answer, which I thought was really interesting. And he says both things will happen. Yes, some pipeline rerouting, but also he makes another point.

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Ian Bremmer (archival clip, The Ezra Klein Show): Yes, you can move pipelines that will have more go through the Red Sea. The Houthis can disrupt the Red Sea. They haven't. They've been bought off by the Saudis. But in a world where drones are becoming so much more cheap, do you really want to have choke points that can be hit that easily? Today's problem in the Strait of Hormuz could be tomorrow's problem in Malacca. Given that, do you really want these global choke points on oil and gas, or do you want to invest in 21st century technologies?

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Tom Rivett-Carnac: So Ian Bremmer here is making a similar argument to the one we've been making, and many others in this space since the war broke out. And that is that the war has accelerated something that was already happening. The war has made the fragility of fossil fuel supply chains visible in a way that political arguments about climate have never quite managed. Christiana, you've been saying this for a while. How did you feel listening to these two foreign policy and international security experts highlight this point that we have been trying to shout from the rooftops?

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Christiana Figueres: You mean finally agree with us? Is that what you're asking?

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Tom Rivett-Carnac: I'm trying to say it in a different way.

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Paul Dickinson: It's been a while, but we're there.

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Christiana Figueres: No, but it is a very good point, because one thing is the availability and the extraction of fossil fuels, which we have been talking about for a long time as being completely unnecessary now. But the other piece is the transport, and that is what has really been coming through. I mean, they call it choke points, you can call it whatever, but the fact is that the transport, the fact that fossil fuels need to be transported from where they're extracted to where they're going to be used, and that usually means crossing international borders either on land or on ocean. It's the transport piece that makes the fossil fuels have this incredibly difficult characteristic in a world in which those transport routes are dominated by completely unpredictable powers.

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Paul Dickinson: So let's dig into that a bit, Christiana, because I think you've completely nailed this point. You can ask yourself, what's really happened? What does closing the Straits of Hormuz mean? I mean, we kind of think we know what it means, but just think about it for a minute. Why did this never happen before? The reason it didn't happen before is because the Straits of Hormuz is so important. The Iranians were afraid that if they blocked the Straits of Hormuz, then other nations might attack their government or take out their supreme leader or something like that. But the reverse happened. The US attack took out the supreme leader of Iran. So the Iranians smashed the glass and said, right, we're going to close the Straits of Hormuz. So there's no way to escalate out of this. Closing the Straits of Hormuz and we may get this problem all over the place. Trump has broken, in a sense, with this action, the international rules-based order. So everyone everywhere may be considering firing drones and everything. Let's just think about this for a minute. I looked these up. The bigger ships, the supertank is about 380 meters long, 500,000 tons fully loaded. They are super easy to sink. When they're full of oil, they're worth about $400 million. Weirdly, AI was telling me what I have to spend to sink one. I shouldn't have asked. By the way, if anyone's studying me, like in the Secret Services, I'm just preparing for the podcast. But it's about $250,000 for a drone, a seaborne drone that could damage one of those. You need about three or more to sink them. But for $1 million, you can sink a $400 million ship. So we've got this extraordinary asymmetry that's broken out now. And I don't think anyone knows how to stop it. It's terrifying. And it may not be limited just to the Straits of Hormuz.

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Christiana Figueres: I think bottom line, the question is, and we've also been talking about this for a long time, what are the forces that are helping the shift over to cleaner technologies? And we've said for a long time that it's not necessarily the argument of climate responsibility. We've said so many times that we don't need to tattoo climate change on our forehead. It's so much else. It is the superiority of the technologies, that you can, they're better, faster, cheaper. But also here, what is really interesting is that if, if, because we don't know this for a fact, but if this war should accelerate decarbonization of the global economy, it will have done so for reasons that have nothing to do with climate change. And in fact, ironically, it will have done so for reasons that have to do with protecting, so-called protecting the delivery of fossil fuels. So it is so ironic that a war that is started for oil supply reasons could actually be one of the forces, not necessarily the only one of the forces, that make us move away from oil more quickly than without the war.

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Tom Rivett-Carnac: Yeah. Is that possible? It's 100% possible. And it will also do something else, of course, it will hasten China's rise. So it brings a different future together. And a US foreign policy analyst would talk about the Thucydides trap and the fact that a rising power and incumbent power will end up coming into conflict with each other. And interestingly, I think what's happening is because of Trump's war in the Middle East, the rising oil prices, the instability, everybody is then looking at Chinese exports because China just dominates the exports of solar, batteries, EVs. These are now hitting record highs. So this transition is being driven by a geopolitical rivalry and an accidental consequence of an oil war, as you've said. And now I think it raises some interesting questions that we should probably think about. If the clean energy transition is now, as we say, being driven predominantly by Chinese manufacturing and American foreign policy.

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Christiana Figueres: Is that your euphemistic description of the war? Is US foreign policy?

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Tom Rivett-Carnac: US foreign policy chaos is perhaps a better additional framing.

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Christiana Figueres: Foreign chaos, yeah.

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Tom Rivett-Carnac: So Chinese manufacturing dominance and American foreign policy chaos. What does that mean for who gets to shape the post-carbon world? The post-carbon world emerges out of issues and conflicts that are not associated with climate. That's not the orderly transition we've been talking about. That is a transition happening as a sort of unintended consequence of two other factors. Does that matter? Do you get the point I'm making?

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Christiana Figueres: Yeah, I don't think it matters, honestly. I don't care what the title of the book is, as long as the book is about the right topic.

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Tom Rivett-Carnac: Well, it's not going to have justice at its core if it's about that, is it? That's the point. It's not organized around justice and interconnection, historical responsibility, it just happens as a result of other actions that have taken place that didn't mean to accelerate a transition.

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Christiana Figueres: Well, I don't know that those two things exclude each other, Tom.

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Tom Rivett-Carnac: Okay.

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Christiana Figueres: I mean, justice, what do we mean by justice? It's just such a big word and a concept that is very, very close to my heart. But would it be historical justice that the Chinese finally complete their journey out of poverty?

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Tom Rivett-Carnac: Yeah.

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Christiana Figueres: It's not bad. Yeah.

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Tom Rivett-Carnac: I think we've gotten used in climate to thinking that finance is the justice part of mitigation, right? You get mitigation in exchange for that. There's finance, and that's how you get a balanced approach. You know this better than anyone on the planet. If the way we solve climate change is an unintended consequence of other things, then that doesn't become part of the transition.

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Christiana Figueres: Yeah, but I mean one thing is what is accelerating the shift, and the other thing is what are the characteristics of that shift going to be? And I don't think that we should confuse those two or make them mutually exclusive. In this case, the accelerant that we've been discussing is this crazy war and Chinese manufacturing capacity both coming at the same time. Does that mean that there's not going to be any justice in the transition? Not necessarily, or let me put it differently. If the accelerators were others, would it be slower or faster? And would it necessarily be built on just transition?

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Tom Rivett-Carnac: True. Not necessarily.

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Christiana Figueres: Not necessarily.

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Paul Dickinson: I mean, I associate, I suppose, some aspects of justice with democracy. Tom, you mentioned the Felicities Trap. I don't know if I pronounced it correctly. How would you say it?

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Tom Rivett-Carnac: Felicities.

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Paul Dickinson: Thank you. The Felicities Trap was actually referenced, of course, not just by US foreign policy experts, but by Xi Jinping himself when Trump visited him in Beijing. And that was reported, you know, that trip from the US president was reported on page three of China Daily. So China is playing it very cool here because they have essentially stability which seems to be showing up the democracies. And what do I mean by that? Well, I think we're all aware that if Donald Trump hadn't won the presidency this time, there's a pretty good chance he would have gone to jail. Right now, Bibi Netanyahu is prosecuting this enormous kind of military campaign. And there's a good chance he would go to jail if he doesn't win the election that's coming up in Israel. So we've got this kind of precarious edginess from our polarization in the democracies. And it's really weakening us in the face of other political systems which, you know, I think longer term are more dangerous than democracy, which right now look incredibly stable and ordered. Although I do think there are, you know, fundamental issues about how China, which is a bigger importer of oil, is going to be able to ride out the shock of the closing of the Straits of Hormuz, in a sense, by Iran and the USA. And that is going to be complex. But in the end, needs must. And I guess we migrate away from, it's just not cool to move oil and gas around by ship in the mid to long term. And it's not happening in the short term. And that's the future.

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Christiana Figueres: I would like to go back to Tom's just transition point. Sorry, Paul.

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Paul Dickinson: No, no, no, no, I was kind of just...

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Christiana Figueres: I was still noodling on that. And Tom, here's the other question. There's so many different aspects about the just transition. One of them is, are developing countries going to have access to clean technologies at a price that they can afford and at the speed that they need it? That is part of the just transition. So is it possible that China continues to invest into all different types of clean technologies, whether that is solar, wind turbines, electric cars, charging stations, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, and that they continue to invest in such a way that it continues to bring the price down because if anybody has brought the price down on solar, it's been the Chinese for the past decade. For sure. What if they continue to bring it down? What if that means that developing countries would have access to clean technologies at prices they can afford? You would say, well, okay, the price of capital in all of those countries is much higher. Yes, absolutely. Can the Chinese as part of their international policy actually help to alleviate that very unfair burden of the price of capital in developing countries because it will be of their interest? Of course, they would want to be the, hopefully, the monopoly exporter of clean technologies to the entire developing world. That is their dream come true. And if that means, you know, providing not just technologies that work and that are sold at affordable prices, but also to help with the financing of that, then you could argue that is one factor of just transition. Of course, the consequence of that is then the developing world will no longer depend politically and economically on the United States, but it will shift over and depend politically and economic on China. We've all depended, always depended on some big power. It's just that I don't like sweeping statements of, you know, there is no just transit. There's so many different aspects about the just transition. And even in what I have said, which is completely incomplete argument, you can poke holes. And so there's never one reality that supersedes all of its factors, in fact.

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Tom Rivett-Carnac: Yeah, no, I agree with you. And I think there are two ways to respond to that. One is that the biggest justice element is developing countries having climates that sustain their populations. First of all, if they don't have that, that's the biggest injustice. So that has to be the number one objective. However, we structured things in UN climate talks.

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Christiana Figueres: Well, that means fast decarbonisation. Yeah, that means fast decarbonisation.

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Tom Rivett-Carnac: It is a justice issue. Exactly.

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Christiana Figueres: Yes.

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Tom Rivett-Carnac: The other thing, which is maybe more of a philosophical point, is if we end up, and I hope we do, solving this issue as a result of Chinese manufacturing brilliance, American foreign policy chaos, and self-interest in developing countries being able to invest in technology supported by the Chinese, to drive down cost of capital, to invest in affordable technology, to improve their lives. There's a really interesting philosophical challenge to all the principles that sit behind the liberal agenda that part of the role of capitalism is that we should have development budgets, that we should think about how we proceed in doing things by deliberately having little carved off budgets to help other people. Because actually, those things you can argue, and I'm being provocative here, you can argue that Chinese manufacturing brilliance and insanity in the White House have done what decades of foreign development, what UN climate treaties and negotiations have not succeeded in doing. And that actually, it's a really interesting philosophical point that I think we should be humble and open to, that the thing that broke through was not what we thought would break through.

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Christiana Figueres: Yeah, exactly. I mean, I totally agree. And it just, for me, what it does is it confirms that while we all may agree on the desired outcome, i.e. fast decarbonization and net zero as quickly as possible, and at the latest by 2050, the road to that is never going to be a straight road. It's always going to be a curvy road, and it's always going to take very, very weird unexpected turns and maybe even U-turns. And it will never proceed along what we thought would have been the road toward that outcome. So remaining flexible and understanding that it is the decarbonization at heart, it's the decarbonization as you have put out, that is the greatest injustice, and that is what needs to lead. Then whatever factors help with that, then they're welcome, and we will have to be on the lookout for what are the negative unintended consequences of that, and then mitigate those.

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Tom Rivett-Carnac: Yeah.

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Paul Dickinson: Just to add a word on extreme heat, you know, what drives so much of, although there is more solar being produced than purchased at the moment, and I think there's such an opportunity for every right-thinking person to support developing economies to buy more solar, to every economy to buy more solar, but there's a very practical issue with the risk of heat stress and an absence of any kind of air conditioning threatening the lives of people. And I think one thing that comes out of this whole conflict is that your country can't expect that the liquid natural gas ship is going to arrive and run the power stations to protect you from extreme heat. You need to have your own solar and battery to run that air conditioning to make sure you're safe. Necessity is the mother of invention, and that's a major driver.

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Tom Rivett-Carnac: For sure. And to your point, Christiana, I think if it turns out that something different is needed now to what has been thought for a while, it's on all of us, you and me, Paul and climate management in general, to be flexible and adaptive and not attached to what we may have thought was right before, and that could be different going forward, and we don't want to get stuck in thinking that the solutions that we thought were right before are not right now. It's an interesting, it's actually quite a refreshing way to think about it.

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Christiana Figueres: I've been looking through for a completely different thing, I've been looking through some old photographs, and I have an absolutely gorgeous photograph of a sloth in Costa Rica hanging, you know, as they do upside down and looking out, usually they're asleep, but this one was wide awake. And you know, when I looked at that photograph, the mental caption that came to me was, well, from this perspective, the world doesn't look upside down. And I thought, it's all a question of the perspective, the world is upside down, but it's all a question of what perspective, yeah, it's all how you're standing or hanging for that matter.

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Paul Dickinson: I'll go upside down if it helps. It's definitely a strategy to make the world the right way up again.

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Christiana Figueres: Okay, guys.

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Tom Rivett-Carnac: Okay. I think that probably draws us to a close. Lovely to see you both. Great to be back together and we'll see you all next week.

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Paul Dickinson: Bye for now.

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Tom Rivett-Carnac: Bye.