252: Mission 2025: It's Time for Leaders to Lead

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Transcript generated by AI. While we aim for accuracy, errors may still occur. Please refer to the episode’s audio for the definitive version

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Tom Rivett-Carnac: Hello, and welcome to Outrage and Optimism. I'm Tom Rivett-Carnac.

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Fiona McGrath: And I'm Fiona McGrath. And we're live from London Climate Action Week.

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Tom Rivett-Carnac: Today, we're going to be talking about Mission 2025, what it is, why it's needed, and how you can get involved. Thanks for being here. All right.

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Fiona McGrath: We're now going to have some quick fire discussions about why this matters, how it's all going to take all of us. And to start us off, we're gonna hear about Mission 2025.

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Tom Rivett-Carnac: Okay, so I'm gonna introduce this first speaker, and I'm gonna take a moment to do so. 12 years ago, one of the best decisions of my professional life was made when I hired this man to come and work in the UNFCCC strategy function in the months leading up to the Paris Agreement. The UN bureaucrats were not ready for the man that arrived. The English gentleman that walked down the corridors in finely tailored double-breasted suits with exquisitely paired pocket squares. And he would invite them to drink pink gins at 4.30 on a Wednesday afternoon. But they fell in love with him and he proved to be incredibly effective. And we're now delighted he's leading the groundswell program, a partnership between Global Optimism, the Bezos Earth Fund and the System Change Lab. Please welcome Matthew Phillips.

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Matthew Phillips (guest, Groundswell): True to form, I am wearing a double-breasted suit.

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Tom Rivett-Carnac: Where's the pocket square?

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Matthew Phillips (guest, Groundswell): Where's the pocket square? So I'm here to talk a little bit about Mission 2025. It's really a coalition, a grand alliance of courageous leaders, of mayors, governors, businesses, citizens, cultural leaders, that are going to rally behind governments as they kind of submit the next round of their national climate plans due next year with 1.5 degrees. We want Mission 2025 to reverberate around cabinet rooms, boardrooms, living rooms as a kind of act of rebellion against this idea that the transformation is impossible. We can still do this. It isn't too hard. So over the course of the next 18 months, we're going to build Mission 2025 from here in London all the way to September in New York, through Carly, through Baku, all the way to Belem and COP30, and kind of say governments, we got you. Now I know this is going to be really hard, Fee and Tom, with the current political and economic climate. I also know that we're way off track, but I think that's precisely why we need Mission 2025 to reawaken a sense of belief. And I'm really delighted that already a wave of organizations have thrown themselves into the fray. Many of them are in this room, so thank you. And I should be just one final thing, just be really clear that Mission 2025 is not a new logo, it's not a new brand, it's a kind of shared alignment, unifying space, building on all of the existing stuff, which basically rallies us all together so a multitude of voices can speak up at this critical moment. So hopefully you can all join.

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Tom Rivett-Carnac: All right, thank you Matthew. Thank you so much. Okay, as Matthew said, Mission 2025 is not an organization, it's a collective effort to get us where we need to go in the next 18 months. Now I'd like to invite our first speakers, or our next speakers rather, to come up to the stage. First of all, Sir Andrew Steer, the CEO of the Bezos Earth Fund, and Isabella Noero from Earthrise. Please join me. Fabulous. Welcome. Lovely to have you both here. Andrew, let's start with you. Why do we need Mission 2025?

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Sir Andrew Steer (guest, CEO of Bezos Earth Fund): Because when the history books are written, the next 18 months will be regarded as the decisive 18 months. Take two people who know a lot. You ask one, how are we doing? And they say, it's terrible. We're lemmings going over a cliff. Did you know they're still building coal plants? We're still having massive problems of pollution. You ask the other one, and you say, how are we doing? And they say, it's incredible. The price of solar energy has fallen by 99.8% since Jimmy Carter put solar panels on the roof. Did you know that 77% of the citizens of the world actually want their governments to act strongly? Did you know that actually, it turns out that of the increment of electricity, 90% of it is being provided by wind and solar? Did you know, et cetera? You add more and more of that. If we are pessimistic, we will stop trying. Tom, if you thought you were going to get into the Olympic team...

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Tom Rivett-Carnac: I don't think that.

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Sir Andrew Steer (guest, CEO of Bezos Earth Fund): You would get up at 5 in the morning, go to the gym. But because you don't think you're going to get in the team, you stay in bed. And that's exactly what's happening. And in those three battlegrounds, the cabinet room for governments, the board room for CEOs, and the living rooms for everybody else, we are fighting the battle of our lives. And so Mission 2025 is shifting the debate in a truly inspiring way. And we're in, and so is everybody here. Love that.

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Tom Rivett-Carnac: Thank you so much. Mission 2025, the battle of our lives. Fantastic. And Isabella, as Andrew pointed to there, you know, two realities are true at the same time, but we have historically been so bad at telling inspiring stories about where we are. Please tell us how we can do better.

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Isabella Noero (guest, Earthrise): Well, Tom, first of all, thank you so much for having us and creating this space for us today. Well, frankly, I could not be more passionate about storytelling. Stories are that invisible glue that join us together as communities. They tell about our histories, our stories about how new communities and how can we learn from the unfamiliar. And as a Colombian woman, I have seen both sides of the coin, the positive stories and the negative stories and how negative stories can actually cause very harmful stereotypes. So what are the three quick questions that I get asked as a Colombian? Well, what is your favorite Shakira song? Have you watched Narcos? And my favorite, do you have cocaine? But Colombia is so much more than what we see on TV and what we see in pop culture, but we need diversity in our stories. We need global stories from the global south, from the global south. So in short, stories are about identities. So at Earthrise, over the fast four years, we have built a community and a platform that is inspirational, aspirational, educational, reaching youth audiences in 45 different countries. And the key point of why we do this is because when we learn and what we have to innovate constantly, what we have to be constantly learning. And here are three things that we have learned from storytelling. So the first one is the right stories told the right way, have the power to impact the real world. So we know about the problem, we have sound the alarm, but now we have to point people towards the exit. And we need to do that optimistically and excitingly. Second of all, we need to tell human stories, stories from the front lines, whilst also being able to acknowledge that the marginalized communities in the Global South are the ones who are seeing the most impacts of the climate change today. And the third one is we have to step out of our eco chamber. We are, you know, we need culture and culture makers to be able to get the right messages in front of the right people through the right messengers. And the one last thing that I want to point out is that oftentimes good storytelling is taken a little bit for granted and is sadly widely underfunded. So good storytelling takes time and it takes resources and if the invitation is to get storytellers to be more ambitious and more radically optimistic and imaginative, the invitation should also be to funders to be more radically brave and bold.

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Tom Rivett-Carnac: Love that. Isabella, thank you so much. Thank you both very much. Love that. Fee, back to you.

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Fiona McGrath: Thank you both so much. So we just heard why narrative and stories are so important. We're now going to hear from two leaders who know exactly what we need and how we can get there. I'll invite Lord Adair Turner and Hein Schumacher to join me on stage. A little hand for them, please. So you two know a lot about what we need from governments and how it is possible. Maybe, Adair, I'll start with you. And you chair the ETC, the Energy Transitions Commission. Can you tell us about the recent report and what is possible from governments to align their economies with a 1.5 degree world?

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Lord Adair Turner (guest, Energy Transitions Commission): Well, thank you. And first of all, I have to say, Andrew doesn't often make mistakes, but his figure on solar energy is 100 percent wrong. He said it had fallen by 99.8 percent, it's fallen by 99.9 percent. You are precisely six months out. But that was nothing like the mistake I made back in 2010 when I was the first chair of the UK's Climate Change Committee, and we spent a lot of time trying to work out how much the cost of solar PV would come down over the next 10 years. And we were very proud to produce our carefully calibrated forecast that it would come down 25 percent in cost. It came down 90 percent. We are sitting on a technological revolution in solar, to a significant extent in wind, not quite as much, in batteries. Dramatic. What is happening in batteries is truly dramatic. And in many of the other technologies that we need to get to a net zero economy. But the politicians and the governments haven't caught up with that yet. And what our report, our Energy Transition Report, on the NDC show is that if you look at the NDCs around the world, they do not reflect yet the technological possibility. So what we need to do is unleash a self-reinforcing circle of increasing ambition and delivery, which involves us, the leadership in business, telling governments that more is possible if only they will set more stretching targets. And once they set stretching targets, business will invest, and then we will get the opportunities, we will grab us the opportunities of the technology advance that has already occurred, and that will generate even more technological advance. So it's about an ambition loop, it's about self-reinforcing ambition, and it simply needs leadership to get there.

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Fiona McGrath: Thank you so much, a hand. We heard about ambition loops. We have the CEO of Unilever, a leader in the private sector for sustainability environment. Can you expand on that, the ambition loop between governments and private sector?

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Hein Schumacher (guest, CEO of Unilever): Sure, I can. Thanks for the pressure, by the way. But I absolutely agree with you. No, look, I mean, in Unilever, we have been pioneering on the climate side, and we're obviously proud of that. But you know, it's interesting when you talk about stretching targets. We made, based on our progress that we've made over the last 10 years or so, we put forward this year to our shareholders a climate transition action plan. And actually, that had more ambitious targets for the years to come towards 2030. We also put it forward to independent validation, which I think is super important not to talk fluffy stuff, but to make sure that it's grounded, that it's time-bound, and that it's really costed, and we did get it. We also talked about how much is it going to cost. And yes, there is a very big net expense in the short term, and I don't think we should sugarcoat that. But you know what? With all of that, we had a 98% approval rate in our shareholders' meeting for the Climate Transition Action Plan, because people do know by now why it's so important. And again, we've put some points on the board. Now, let me talk to governments. I think there's a lot of analogy here. You know, when you think about a time-bound, costed and a clear plan, I think there's room to improve the NDCs. They need to be very clear, and I think are calling upon governments to do that, but also to work it through across different parts of government. We do the same. There's a lot of interdependence. If we don't make our plastics target, we're not going to make our greenhouse gas emissions target. If we don't make our deforestation targets, we're not going to make our climate targets. So make sure that it's across government and very well embedded. These things, to me, are super important. Second, we need to increase transparency. I really applaud the increasing convergence on non-financial reporting that is happening throughout the world. But governments need to step up and actually look at it and promote it and make sure that they have the right incentives for business to provide that transparency. But also for themselves, transparency is incredibly important. And then finally, don't be concerned about validation. We put it forward for external validation. Hey, let third parties comment because you can only get a little wiser. Hey, just a few nuggets.

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Fiona McGrath: There we go.

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Hein Schumacher (guest, CEO of Unilever): Tom.

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Tom Rivett-Carnac: It's fabulous to hear there about how we can give confidence to governments and what governments need. We're going to kick off now with a couple of other conversations. Tamsin, I'd like to start with you from PRI. What can private finance provide?