The Angry Clean Energy Guy on why the blockchain is possibly one of the most powerful tools for citizen climate action, in particular for those angry about how little their governments have been doing for 30 years about climate change. We (citizens!) can leverage its power and potential to drive hundreds of billions more to accelerate the renewable energy revolution, fight deforestation, clean up the oceans, push back on the plastic epidemic and so on - all because it allows us to do what we want to, as opposed to what big governments, politicians, banks, the capital markets and corporations are prioritizing and doing. 

We need to talk about corporate evil: companies knowingly doing harm.  In this episode, the Angry Clean Energy Guy features a massive company many around the world don't know about which is overtly trying to greenwash its deeds by using children, while simultaneously –  and boldly - trying to fry the planet. 

 The Angry Clean Energy Guy on a little known, secretive, stealthy tool undermining climate action, the innocuously called the Energy Charter Treaty, - such an unthreatening name, on a par with "natural" gas or "plastic", don't you think? – threatening to ensure global heating exceeds 2 degrees Celsius by driving tens, or even hundreds, of billions of dollar more to Big Oil, Big Gas and Big Coal  

 "COP26," the 26th year pretty much all the countries in the world convened in an annual conference to talk about what to do about the climate catastrophe, will result - just like its preceding 25 editions - in talk, then in some more talk. That's because real climate action doesn't happen at these annual climate meetings: It takes place instead elsewhere, at individual country level, when local action results in stopping deforestation; in accelerating renewable energy deployment and electrifying everything; and in stopping any new oil, gas or coal projects. 

The Angry Clean Energy Guy on pretty much everything you really need to know about nuclear energy. That's for example the fact that conventional nuclear energy is not only finished, but has also become a massive distraction in our climate emergency, diverting precious dollars away from sun, wind and water. Or the fact that nuclear fusion is worthy of investing enormously more money and careers in, even if we won't have a result for 50 or 100 years (who knows), because limitless, clean and around around-the-clock power will most likely be our most amazing scientific achievement ever, and because it's already made more progress than expected   

 The IPCC released a hugely important scientific report this week. However, in this episode, I would like to talk about biodiversity instead, and in particular, biodiversity loss in the oceans.  On climate change, it's crystal clear that what we desperately need is action because the evidence is all around us. However, we rarely talk about action to counter biodiversity loss. Yet, the mutually reinforcing nature of climate change and biodiversity loss means that satisfactorily resolving either issue requires consideration of the other, and action: In the real world, the multiple impacts of climate change everywhere increasingly add to the enormous human pressure on biodiversity loss, which to put it bluntly, is about how we’re wiping out, or certainly trying to wipe out, pretty much everything on Earth, from trees to fish to insects to birds to mammals and more. Much more.  

 I’ve had it with the bashing of bitcoin, the blockchain and crypto miners for their energy usage. This is all, in one word, noise and should be ignored. 250 million people already think bitcoin is useful. In addition, the world consumes approximately 160,000 TWh / year of energy and wastes, along the way, at least one-third. What bitcoin consumes is 0.07% of that energy and 0.002% of what we waste. Most importantly, the disruption of information technology created by bits is an excellent preview of what electrons are in the process of doing, once increasingly massive amounts of excess energy compared to existing electricity demand, at near-zero marginal cost, are delivered: Entirely new business models and applications will emerge, alongside the electrification of everything. We can already see the harbinger of the electron abundance era in the increasing electrification of cars, scooters and buses as well as heating for example, and this will extend to multiple other sectors such water treatment, green cement and green steel, waste processing and many others.  Bitcoin miners are just the vanguard.  

This Episode is a slightly longer version of a TEDx Talk I gave at Singapore's National Gallery on 28 April 2021 about ESG.

What Bill Gates calls the “Green Premium”, the extra cost we have to pay because most zero-carbon products currently appear more expensive than their fossil-fuel equivalents, doesn’t in fact exist. We only have a “green premium” because we have been "cooking the books," mis-stating the earnings of corporations worldwide by letting them get away with not pricing their environmental destruction through their income statements. As a result, based on mis-stated and incorrect corporate profits, we have diverted trillions over the past 40 years which could have moved us to a safer planet much faster, but instead were spent digging and burning more coal, oil, and gas, producing more plastic and paying everybody handsomely along the way.  The "cooking the books" pandemic needs to be stopped right now. 

The Angry Clean Energy Guy on pretty much everything you need to know about ESG, starting with the need to be very suspicious whenever you see an ESG label on an investment product.  ESG has become a huge business, with one dollar out of every 3 professionally managed dollars in the US for example labelled “ESG” (and an even greater proportion in Europe).  The trend is clear and pretty much 100% of funds under management will have an ESG label soon. But in order for this to have a material impact in the fight for clean air, against climate change and against environmental destruction, we need global ESG standards and we need to divorce the “E" from the "S" and the "G". Then, we need to price the "E": Climate risk isn't just a disclosure issue and should be priced into earnings, as should other environmental risks. Then we would have a chance to change the world. 

 If you want to get elected, requirement number one is to come up with a meaningless tagline while pretending everything is going pear-shaped, e.g. “Take Back Control” or “Make America Great Again.” Adopting tactics from that playbook, today's requirement number one to continue to pollute at will (while everything is actually going pear-shaped) is to announce “NET ZERO by [insert date, the more distant the better],” then to keep polluting at will, hiding behind voluntary carbon offsets.  So I am just going to come out and say it: Voluntary carbon markets should be cancelled.  All of them. Corporations buying carbon offsets when not required by law, in other words voluntary carbon credits, are greenwashing. Some know it, some don’t – it doesn’t matter in any case: They need to stop. Individuals buying carbon offsets on a voluntary basis (to offset their flights or the pollution from their gas-guzzling SUVs) are mostly being abused.