Wicked Problems - Climate Tech Conversations

Welcome back to Wicked Problems. Despite sounding like we’re auditioning to be the new noise of the TARDIS, we hope our conversation with Startup Coalition deputy policy director, and friend of the show, Charlie Mercer is easier to listen to than running a key over the bass strings of a piano.

Charlie helped us decode the implications for the climate tech sector of this week’s UK “Autumn Statement”, which is not a new line of outerwear but a fancy name for the mini-budget unveiled this week by Chancellor Jeremy Hunt.

Some of the highlights worth noting:

* £960 million by 2030 for a “green industries growth accelerator” - calling out offshore wind, hydrogen, CCUS, power grids, and nuclear. (Which makes us wonder how much of that turns out to be new money.)

* £2 billion for the automotive sector, mostly for “zero emissions investments”

* £500 million for AI - some of which could find its way to climate tech applications

* progress on removing barriers for pension funds to invest in climate tech and work better with VCs - Charlie points out that a 5% shift in UK pension investing would be £50 billion.

* ensuring - thanks to Startup Coalition lobbying - that some 5,000 UK businesses didn’t wind up falling short of qualifying for R&D tax credits

* promise of future clarity on “smart data” - which could inspire a whole range of new companies using that opted-in data for new ideas: like using smart electricity meter data to help manage demand and create “Virtual Power Plants” that are becoming a hot topic in the US.

Charlie’s reaction on LinkedIn.

And CarbonBrief had an excellent summary of the climate implications as well, worth checking out.

We’ll be back Saturday to bring you me and speaking with Ulrich Seitz, founder of The Climate Adaptation Project, making the case that it’s time for a lot more money to flow towards climate tech adaptation.

Get that and other episodes here or on

Apple

Spotify

YouTube

Thanks for listening. We’re off to get some Strepsils.

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Welcome back to Wicked Problems. We know when we’re outclassed so we’ll leave the jokes to the professionals. 

Claire Brady and Richard Delevan were joined by Ben Carey and Nick Oldridge, the co-founders of Climate Science Breakthrough. Like most really good comedy it’s deadly serious at its core - like spending your family fortune on a climate science comedy project instead of your kids. 

We hear about how the project came about, why they thought putting comedians like Nish Kumar and Jonathan Pie together with climate scientists like Dr. Fredi Otto and Professor Joanna Haigh might break through in new ways about the climate problems and solutions. 

Tell us what you think at news.wickedproblems.uk and sign up for our newsletter. You can also find us here:

Claire on LinkedIn and BlueSky

Richard on BlueSky and LinkedIn

Oldridge and Carey are about to release the fourth video in their series, but this is a chance to catch up on the ones that have been released so far and hear the story behind them. 

Nish Kumar and Dr. Fredi Otto

Kiri Pritchard McLean and Bill McGuire

Jonathan Pie and Prof. Joanna Haigh

And some of the other videos we referenced: 

Bassem Youssef + Piers Morgan

Dr. Matthew Winning

Rolleigh Williams

Thanks for listening. We’ll be back soon with another episode. 

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Maritime shipping accounts for 3% of global emissions.Moving away from diesel for powering the 90% of global trade that happens by ship is beginning in earnest as the industry starts to decarbonise, and shipping gets included in emissions trading schemes.

BAR Technologies CTO Simon Schofield talked to us about their WindWings technology, applying high-performance racing design thinking to shipping, and how could be part of the decarbonisation mix for shipping.

Tell us what you think and sign up for our newsletter at news.wickedproblems.uk.

Watch Simon demonstrate how the wing works, using a scale model:

https://youtube.com/shorts/h-7mzdJdDlE?feature=share

For more episodes, subscribe here or at 

Apple Podcasts

Spotify - 

YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/@WickedProblems-ClimateTech

We’ll be back next week with more episodes with our co-hosts Claire Brady and Richard Delevan.

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Mark Little was a foreign correspondent for RTE, the Irish national broadcaster, before a second career in tech. He founded citizen journalism verification service Storyful, sold that to NewsCorp, was the Ireland MD for Twitter, founded an online safety startup, Kinzen, before it was acquired by Spotify, where he continues to work. 

Tonight he’s back on TV, presenting a fictional newscast from the future, Tomorrow Tonight - Ireland 2050. It promises to be great television - grounded in the science, not dystopia or utopia, and with some characters that writer Colin Murphy may or may not have taken verbatim from actual earnings calls of 2023 techbro billionaires. 

Find Mark online

BlueSky

LinkedIn

History of the Future podcast

Tomorrow Tonight - Ireland 2050

RTE Player

And you can get this and other Wicked Problems podcasts in the usual places including:

Apple

Spotify

YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbds-IoMme638pxF0OLHPfw

Thanks for listening.

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Gil Michel-Garcia is co-founder of EVelution Energy, which is building a solar-powered cobalt processing facility in Yuma, Arizona that could supply enough material for 1 million EV batteries a year to US auto manufacturers. And how competition for critical mineral supplies between China and the West will shape his sector as well as a lot of the politics of the next decade.

Cobalt is one of those minerals that has seen wild price swings over the past couple of years: 

We spoke just as US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen met with her Chinese counterpart and US President Joe Biden is expected to meet with President Xi Jinping this week, to deescalate recent tensions over among other things those critical minerals vital to the energy transition, and where a tit-for-tat trade dispute over them threatens to either temporarily disrupt supply chains or reconfigure the world into ever more decoupled trading blocs. 

Gil talks with 

Richard Delevan about how the sector is being shaped at this moment, and whether he’s worried about how next year’s elections could affect his business and those like it.Subscribe at news.wickedproblems.uk to get this and other episodes with co-host 

claire brady

Also find us on:

• BlueSky - Delevan.bksy.social
• Apple
• Spotify
• YouTube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbds-IoMme638pxF0OLHPfw

Thanks for listening. See you soon.

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Welcome back to Wicked Problems - the climate tech podcast that has to be as good as other podcasts, but backwards and in heels.

Richard and Claire chat through Akshat Rathi’s new book, Climate Capitalism.

They also reflect on their reactions to the new research that says staying under 1.5C of warming might be out of reach, their conversations with Ketan Joshi and Susan Joy Hassol. And the answers to the question, what should we be saying about the 1.5C target in light of their new research - from Leo Hickman of Carbon Brief, asked by James Murray at the BusinessGreen Net Zero Festival, and Akshat Rathi of Bloomberg and Solitare Townsend of the consultancy, Futerra.

Subscribe at news.wickedproblems.uk to get more episodes, and our newsletter.

Some of the episodes and resources we reference:

* Climate Capitalism, by Akshat Rathi - tl;dl - It’s great and you should buy multiple copies.

Other episodes we reference: Ketan Joshi, Susan Joy Hassol, BusinessGreen Net Zero Festival, Alastair Campbell

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Get these first if you subscribe to news.wickedproblems.uk.

The 2015 Paris Agreement set a goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees C. In the years since, the language of that goal has crept into thousands of corporate sustainability reports, media discourse, and the language of international climate diplomacy.

Then, last week two research papers - in Nature Climate Change from a team mostly at Imperial College London and Oxford Open Climate Change from a team led by legendary climate scientist James Hansen - suggested that it is now impossible to remain under 1.5C.

If we’ve been telling that story for 8 years, including that number - saying the path to stay under 1.5 is still open, and it’s increasingly sunk in to a wider and wider audience - what happens when the science says that the narrative is no longer supported by the evidence? What now?

Our first episode centred around a conversation with author and clean energy analyst Ketan Joshi. You can go back and listen to it first but this episode works fine on its own.

For the second part of this Wicked Problems mini-series, spoke to one of the world’s most respected climate science communicators, Susan Joy Hassol. She is director of Climate Communication. For 30 years, she has been translating climate science into English - making it digestible for the public and policymakers. She's written and edited key climate reports, including the first three US National Climate Assessments; she’s testified to the US Senate; she’s written a documentary for HBO. In just the last two years she has written 15 op-eds for outlets including the New York Times, The Washington Post, the Guardian, the Indepdendent, Scientific American, and many others. For her service in making climate science understandable, she has been made a fellow of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). And this year she was named Friend of the Planet 2023 by the National Centre for Science Education.

For more of Susan Joy Hassol’s work:

* Climate Communication

* BBC interview on the language of climate change

* Scientific American: The Right Words Are Crucial to Solving Climate Change

* Susan on X (formerly Twitter)

Other resources mentioned in the show:

* Stories to Save the World, Solitaire Townsend, Futerra

* Climate Capitalism, by Akshat Rathi

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That James Hansen paper, Global Warming in the Pipeline, saying 1.5° C is toast - is it just saying the quiet part out loud, or is he recklessly playing into the hands of doom-mongering delayists? We built up expectations and endlessly repeated 1.5° C as a real thing. Will trust suffer if the message changes, like public health messaging during COVID? 

Clean energy analyst, author of Windfall : Unlocking a Fossil Free Future, creator of the #GreenSky community on BlueSky, and climate strategic communications researcher and public advocate Ketan Joshi joins the discussion. 

Featuring some bonus audio from Hansen and more!

Ketan’s Catalysts: 

• Amy Westervelt’s Drilled, series 3: The MadMen of Climate Denial
• CoalWire, edited by Bob Burson
• Distilled by Michael Thomas

Find Ketan Joshi on:

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/ketanjoshi1/

BlueSky - https://bsky.app/profile/ketanjoshi.co

And connect with Richard on BlueSky while you’re at it - https://bsky.app/profile/delevan.bsky.social

Hansen press conference: https://youtu.be/NXDWpBlPCY8?si=v87TL48QAxE8Crh3

Sign up at your favourite podcast app or at news.wickedproblems.uk to check out our next episode, featuring Richard Delevan’s interview with Susan Joy Hassol, director of Climate Communication and possibly the most experienced and influential climate communicators around. Available Monday, 6th November.And co-host Claire Brady will be back soon! 

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Welcome back to Wicked Problems. It’s been quite a week and we’re not even halfway through yet. So on Halloween, for a treat, Richard Delevan did some reporting at Day One of the BusinessGreen Net Zero Festival. 

This episode offers you some excerpts of some of the best conversations from the day, as well as some chats with those intrepid folks working the booths. You’ll hear from 

James Murray, editor of BusinessGreen

Lucy Siegle, writer, broadcaster and environmentalist

Alex Scott, E3G

Solitaire Townsend, Chief Solutionist at Futerra

Leo Hickman, editor of Carbon Brief

Jake Dubbins, MD of Media Bounty

Pamela Stathaki, Dentsu

Matt Winning, environmental economist and stand-up comic

and Alastair Campbell

we also caught up with 

* Paul Bains, supply lead at The Felix Project

* Paul Gosling - director of Sustainability & Environment at Hays Recruitment, who mentioned his Sustainable Futures - Career Conversations pod

* Julie from the Woodland Trust, who hooked us up with a very cool VR tour of woodlands

* Faye from the Community Massage Project (communitymassageproject.co.uk). If you’re hearing this on your way to Day Two of the Net Zero Festival do go check them out. 

We also caught the moment when an Extinction Rebellion protestor crashed one of the panel discussions and was calmly and respectfully handled by James Murray. You can have a look at the whole exchange:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pem0d919cJg

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IEA's World Energy Outlook, COP28, Hydrogen hopium, CCUS, predatory delay, HVDC, electrification, LDES, Michael Liebreich, and MPs "with the STEM background of illiterate newts"

Subscribe to our newsletter at news.wickedproblems.uk, and get new #climatetech conversations first with co-hosts Richard Delevan and Claire Brady.

Michael Barnard is a Forbes and Cleantechnica contributor, chief strategist at The Future is Electric, and climate futurist advising global corporates and financial institutions on decarbonisation scenarios with 80-year horizons. And woe be unto you if you turn up in his LinkedIn comments without receipts. 

This week the IEA released its 2023 World Energy Outlook, an updated Michael Liebreich Hydrogen Ladder 5.0, and #COP28 is only a month away - making it the perfect time to check in with the most unfiltered energy and climate tech strategists around. 

He comprehensively out-nerds host Richard Delevan in this episode of the Wicked Problems Podcast. 

Michael’s Catalysts: 

Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters by Richard Rummelt - a key for understanding Barnard’s ruthless focus on what’s real.

Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order by Ray Dalio 

Has China Won? The Chinese Challenge to American Primacy by Kishore Mambabani - The Eminence Grise behind Singapore’s Lee Kwan Yew 

Co-hosts Claire Brady (LinkedIn) and Richard Delevan will be back soon with another epsiode. Send your feedback and ideas for guests and topics at [email protected] and subscribe at news.wickedproblems.uk

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