Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news. I want to have
Speaker 1: a wide ranging conversation.
Speaker 2: I know you have some things to share with this,
Speaker 2: but I want to start by asking you, like, what's
Speaker 2: the biggest surprise.
Speaker 1: This was a massive bet in a.
Speaker 2: Lot of ways, maybe the biggest bet you've made in
Speaker 2: your career.
Speaker 1: What have you learned.
Speaker 3: I've learned that approaching climate change, you have to think
Speaker 3: of it as two sides of a coin. For years,
Speaker 3: since Kealing in the sixties, we've been focused on the
Speaker 3: need side. We have a problem to solve, but the
Speaker 3: other side of the coin is actually the opportunity.
Speaker 1: We're about to under take one hundred.
Speaker 3: And twenty trillion dollar reindustrialization of the world, and that
Speaker 3: need and that opportunity need to move together. The money
Speaker 3: can't come from governments, No coalition of NGOs can get
Speaker 3: it done. Unless we can get the money moving in
Speaker 3: a capitalist system, we can't solve the problem. So this
Speaker 3: idea of putting the need and the opportunity together has
Speaker 3: been more challenging than I expected.
Speaker 2: All Right, So one of your signature moves as an
Speaker 2: investor over the past forty years has been every year
Speaker 2: you get together with your investors, and you put together
Speaker 2: this presentation. You and I have talked about it in
Speaker 2: the context of the year ahead. Now as you're totally
Speaker 2: focused on climate. You have a version that you've been
Speaker 2: playing around with and presenting. We have a version that
Speaker 2: we're going to share with you, and we're going to
Speaker 2: run through it if we can bring.
Speaker 1: It up on the screen.
Speaker 2: All right, so I get to pick and choose here,
Speaker 2: all right, Optimism Green Shoots, let's start there.
Speaker 1: Just a little background on this.
Speaker 3: As well as creating an organization that invests, we actually
Speaker 3: have a very interesting seat in the middle of the
Speaker 3: climate yaio system where meetian investors literally have met with
Speaker 3: fourteen hundred entrepreneurs around the world. We're operating nine billion
Speaker 3: dollars of climate companies. Those companies are forecasted to replace
Speaker 3: against the counterfactual about one hundred and sixty million cars
Speaker 3: off the road for a year.
Speaker 1: So we're kind of in the mix.
Speaker 3: But not only are we generating investments, we're hopefully generating insights.
Speaker 1: So this is us stepping back from that process to
Speaker 1: watch so we're inside your brain right now. This is cool.
Speaker 1: Let's go.
Speaker 3: So, first of all, Green Shoots and one of the
Speaker 3: things that I've been a tech investor, I've been a
Speaker 3: climate investor. Both of them are known for one thing,
Speaker 3: which is conferences. Like there are more tech conferences more
Speaker 3: climate conferences that I've ever seen, but they look and
Speaker 3: feel very different. Same hotels, same awful coffee, same bad
Speaker 3: damish But let me show you what a tech conference
Speaker 3: sounds like.
Speaker 1: Can we get?
Speaker 4: But I'm genuinely optimistic about work in the metaverse, whether
Speaker 4: it's a hologram sitting next to you in a physical
Speaker 4: meeting or in a discussion taking place in the metaverse.
Speaker 1: I think this technology is inevitable. I think this is
Speaker 1: the future of the Internet. So I think over time
Speaker 1: you will see greater and greater acceptance.
Speaker 4: I believe the AI will be about individual empowerment and
Speaker 4: agency at a scale that we've never seen before, and
Speaker 4: that will elevate humanity to a scale that we've never
Speaker 4: seen before.
Speaker 3: Either, we'll be able to create a theory of the
Speaker 3: entire universe.
Speaker 1: Which has a car. Next year will probably be fourteen.
Speaker 3: I'm extremely confident of achieving full autonomy and releasing it
Speaker 3: to the telent customer.
Speaker 1: Base next year.
Speaker 3: Everything is possible. Everything is happening tomorrow. Like a font
Speaker 3: of optimism. If you go to a climate conference, it's
Speaker 3: it's different and for good reason. If we can go
Speaker 3: ahead on this, Bruna, I want to show you a
Speaker 3: word cloud from a recent climate conference. Schah went to
Speaker 3: supply chain problems, inflation, nimbiism, et cetera. Essentially, there's almost
Speaker 3: a paradox of pessimism, and that's well earned. But every
Speaker 3: once in a while I find myself saying, I want
Speaker 3: to just channel my enter tech for a second and
Speaker 3: like what could go right?
Speaker 1: And let me share just a few things that are
Speaker 1: out there.
Speaker 3: First of all, I think we have to assume discontinuities.
Speaker 3: If you look at most of the climate work that's done,
Speaker 3: it's over thirty years essentially assuming. And this is by
Speaker 3: the way that I'm sorry if you go back one please,
Speaker 3: if you go back to what SBTi just put out
Speaker 3: for the paths to net zero, I want to read
Speaker 3: this to you, Jason for a moment.
Speaker 1: So this is what business is supposed to do.
Speaker 3: The minimum forward looking ambition of near turn targets consistent
Speaker 3: with reaching net zero by twenty fifty ath the latest,
Speaker 3: assuming a linear absolute reduction, linear intensity reduction, and intensity
Speaker 3: convergence between the most recent year and not increasing absolute
Speaker 3: emissions or intensity.
Speaker 1: I mean that makes total sense to me. Now, First
Speaker 1: of all, there's great science behind that. I admire it.
Speaker 3: But imagine trying to figure out the iPhone in nineteen
Speaker 3: eighty two based on a computing graph. One thing I
Speaker 3: know from forty years in business is nothing is linear
Speaker 3: and there will be surprises. In fact, we should assume
Speaker 3: that there's going to be discontinuity. More people died from
Speaker 3: infections than heart attacks before penicillin. You know, taxis were
Speaker 3: taxis before uber, trading was trading until indexing. So industries
Speaker 3: constantly go through disruptions. As I travel the client world,
Speaker 3: I'm running into disruptions that are about to happen at
Speaker 3: any time. I can't yet tell you which will happen,
Speaker 3: but I would bet on the field there are going
Speaker 3: to be discontinuities.
Speaker 1: That break our way. Our goal is to position for them.
Speaker 3: The second thing I'd point out on the green shoot
Speaker 3: side is understand the power of cost curves. Think about
Speaker 3: cell phones. In about two thousand, they hit a whole
Speaker 3: new level and suddenly they were ubiquitous. It changed how
Speaker 3: video conferencing came out in nineteen sixty four, but it
Speaker 3: was fifty three hundred dollars an hour. When it's free.
Speaker 3: Things work very differently in the climate world. You are
Speaker 3: watching some of the most powerful industrial cost curves I've
Speaker 3: ever seen, twenty eight percent for solar, that is double
Speaker 3: a normal industry. And these cost curves, while they look linear,
Speaker 3: they hit points like right about now, when solar becomes
Speaker 3: dramatically cheaper.
Speaker 1: Things happen.
Speaker 3: We can predict the cost curves, we can't predict how
Speaker 3: the market change.
Speaker 2: So then why that word cloud of pessimism?
Speaker 3: Well, I think in some ways the voices that got
Speaker 3: us to this key moment have been calling out the need.
Speaker 3: And part of the reason I'm on the stage I
Speaker 3: don't do many conferences is we need to change our
Speaker 3: voices a little.
Speaker 1: We need to also make sure that.
Speaker 3: We're looking for that opportunity and we're looking for the
Speaker 3: Colin Powell once said about leadership is that optimism.
Speaker 1: Is a force multiplier.
Speaker 3: We have to find a little bit of optimism. That
Speaker 3: is not to deny that this is tough. And the
Speaker 3: last thing on optimism is, you know when things like
Speaker 3: this conference happened, where you get many parts of society,
Speaker 3: policy members, act activists working together, things happen.
Speaker 1: Anyone remember the population bomb.
Speaker 3: Thirty printings back in nineteen sixty eight, We were going
Speaker 3: to be out of food Los Angeles.
Speaker 1: The smog was awful. I was in Beijing three weeks ago.
Speaker 1: The skies were clear.
Speaker 3: The ozone layer is actually going the other way now.
Speaker 1: With time and.
Speaker 3: With action, I think we can make progress and that
Speaker 3: green shoots are something we need to grab hold of.
Speaker 2: All right, So I'm going to go counter then for
Speaker 2: my next from a next question, which is the what
Speaker 2: about isms?
Speaker 3: Yeah, we also, as well as some optimism, we have
Speaker 3: to basically.
Speaker 1: Not fall for what about ism? Yeah, And you know,
Speaker 1: one of the.
Speaker 3: Interesting things has happened if you look online in a
Speaker 3: social media the attacks of climate deniers have flattened, but
Speaker 3: the attacks.
Speaker 1: On climate solutions have gone up. And these are what
Speaker 1: about isms? Now.
Speaker 3: What about isms is a term that came from the
Speaker 3: seventies with the Irish Republican Army. Whenever they would do something,
Speaker 3: they'd say what about the journ what about the British soldiers?
Speaker 3: And sylviet propaganda uses what about isms? When Chernobyl hits
Speaker 3: it's what about three mile island. And what about isms
Speaker 3: have hit now an absolute art form in today's politics.
Speaker 1: Let me just kind of show you what that sounds like.
Speaker 1: What about those twenty one Democrats? What about beans that
Speaker 1: have more oil? What about the Buddhists?
Speaker 3: What about the alt left that came charging at the
Speaker 3: as you say, the alt right?
Speaker 1: What about us? What about me? What about terrorism? Well,
Speaker 1: what about ben Ghazi?
Speaker 4: What about the blatant lies that the Obama administration told us?
Speaker 2: What about the fact that Ben Rhodes bragged about lying
Speaker 2: to the media and the public about the Iran deal.
Speaker 3: Whenever a pundit or a politician starts with what about,
Speaker 3: be prepared to be deflected and potentially deceived. So what
Speaker 3: abouts are rampant in climate?
Speaker 1: Like what about evs? Right, aren't they dirtier?
Speaker 3: Well, yes, when it leaves a factory because you have
Speaker 3: the battery in it, it's slightly more emissions at manufacture,
Speaker 3: but once it gets on the road at ebe is
Speaker 3: ninety percent more efficient and uses one third of the
Speaker 3: emissions over its lifetime. It's a ridiculous argument. Or what
Speaker 3: about solar panels in China? Yes, they take some of
Speaker 3: the power from a grid that is still dirty and
Speaker 3: they generate emissions.
Speaker 1: But if you look at the numbers, those emissions are.
Speaker 3: Replaced in three months of their twenty five year life.
Speaker 3: Are we not supposed to use solar panels because we're
Speaker 3: trying to replace a grid that's dirty. We can never
Speaker 3: replace it if we don't start using them. It's a
Speaker 3: circular argument. Or one of my favorites is basically the
Speaker 3: pessimism and what about ism with materials.
Speaker 1: Yes, we have a lot of work to do.
Speaker 3: We can find oil and or sea, we can't find lithium.
Speaker 3: Like if you look at what happened in lithium, we
Speaker 3: went from worried we'd never have enough lithium to a
Speaker 3: massive oversupply in two years. So my point here is,
Speaker 3: as we're going down this path, we have to make
Speaker 3: sure that we don't get caught in.
Speaker 1: The what about isms?
Speaker 3: And I always say, like, you know, what about doing
Speaker 3: the work? What about solving the problem?
Speaker 2: And so how do you institutionalize or how do you
Speaker 2: sort of create? I mean, because part of this is perception,
Speaker 2: Part of this is the dialogue.
Speaker 1: Part of this.
Speaker 2: You know, we saw a lot of cable news clips
Speaker 2: and between cable news and social.
Speaker 1: Media, this it picks up a lot of steam.
Speaker 2: So what can a group like this of the what
Speaker 2: about we do the work folks do?
Speaker 1: It's exactly that. I think.
Speaker 3: One of the things I've learned in climate into your
Speaker 3: earlier question of why I've gone deep, is you cannot
Speaker 3: be a tourist in climate. You can't just sort of
Speaker 3: pop in and think you know the answer. This is
Speaker 3: an immensely complicated revolution that we're going through. I don't
Speaker 3: think I have to tell this room because you're here,
Speaker 3: but we have to encourage people to do the work
Speaker 3: and not simply fall back on how things are done
Speaker 3: now as an aside here. You have to understand what
Speaker 3: we're doing is a simplify problem. I want you to
Speaker 3: think about our current energy system.
Speaker 1: You want to turn on a white How does that work?
Speaker 3: Well, First of all, fifty million years ago, the sunshines,
Speaker 3: it's captured a tree. The tree falls down. For fifty
Speaker 3: million years, it gets subsumed under thousands of feet. We
Speaker 3: then take an iron pipe, We put it down ten
Speaker 3: thousand feet, We turn it right, We put in water,
Speaker 3: We crack rock, We bring up a vapor. The vapor
Speaker 3: goes in three million miles of pipe. We wash it
Speaker 3: in a two hundred and fifty million dollars natural class
Speaker 3: processing plan. We put it in three million miles of pipe. Again,
Speaker 3: we put it to a billion dollar gas turbine. We
Speaker 3: basically blow it up, releasing a molecule that can destroy
Speaker 3: the world. And we have an electron. The other way
Speaker 3: to do that is we can get sun from this afternoon,
Speaker 3: hit a silicon panel or silicon everywhere.
Speaker 1: We have an electron. So it seems hard to do.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's we have. This is hard to do,
Speaker 1: but what we're doing is hard, So like, why not
Speaker 1: make it a little more simple? All right?
Speaker 2: So that takes me to the third one that I
Speaker 2: wanted to touch on with you, which is the policy box.
Speaker 1: Because this is a room of doers.
Speaker 2: As you mentioned, it's not totally simple how we get
Speaker 2: this done, and it requires a bunch.
Speaker 1: Of different angles. So tell us about the policy side. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I am.
Speaker 3: I think we have had an enormous gift and we've
Speaker 3: picked up an enormous set of allies in the recent
Speaker 3: policy wave. And I'm often asked like, are you nervous
Speaker 3: investing in areas that have subsidies?
Speaker 1: I'm nervous investing in.
Speaker 3: The food I mean there's four hundred million of subsidies
Speaker 3: in European food, healthcare, like that's subsidized.
Speaker 1: And if you think about the IRA it's about.
Speaker 3: Seventy six billion dollars a year. We are subsidizing fossil
Speaker 3: fuels around the world at close to.
Speaker 1: Seven hundred billion dollars a year.
Speaker 3: So it's not just about subsidies, it's are they settled
Speaker 3: and has it become part of the landscape in a
Speaker 3: way we can And you know, it's staggering what's happened
Speaker 3: in the last four years. If you look at it,
Speaker 3: you know, the US and three bills, and in three
Speaker 3: bills it's it's close to six hundred billion. If you
Speaker 3: go to Europe, it's a they've pledged at trillion six
Speaker 3: You can never really tell in Europe where the dollars
Speaker 3: are there, but it's a pledge. China, the only part
Speaker 3: of investment that grew in China last year is green.
Speaker 1: Sector of their economy.
Speaker 3: And you know it's not just there, it's it's uh India,
Speaker 3: which is all in Australia.
Speaker 1: You know, Australia has a Green New Deal And I
Speaker 1: could go on and on around the world.
Speaker 3: You know, Kenya, Malaysia, the world has decided, much like healthcare,
Speaker 3: much like education, that this is an area that needs
Speaker 3: to be subsidized. But what's important is actually not the numbers,
Speaker 3: and this has been a light going off for me.
Speaker 1: It's the shape.
Speaker 3: So the original policy dilemma was a bounce once beam
Speaker 3: affordability and sustainability. As I showed you, the affordability is
Speaker 3: getting better. But what happened is we've now changed the
Speaker 3: shape of policy. With the Ukraine, Suddenly Europe and around
Speaker 3: the world realized that they could not count on the
Speaker 3: current system for energy security. If you want energy security
Speaker 3: and you don't have oil and gas, you got to
Speaker 3: go green, right, So suddenly Green had a new ally,
Speaker 3: which was security, and then a fourth ally picked up
Speaker 3: because if you look at the IRA, probably the key
Speaker 3: part of it, and the reason Macron was so mad
Speaker 3: at us, was there was a industrial policy to it,
Speaker 3: a reindustrialization of the country. Two hundred and seventy thousand
Speaker 3: jobs in the US, millions of jobs in China.
Speaker 1: They figured out in China that for every.
Speaker 3: Job that they lose in the fossil fuel industry, they
Speaker 3: pick up four and a half in the green So
Speaker 3: suddenly this debate that many of us in the room
Speaker 3: have been rooting for the environmentalists. The activists got new allies,
Speaker 3: and those new allies are called energy security and jobs right,
Speaker 3: and those allies are showing up in weird places. One
Speaker 3: of the reasons that I'm maybe less worried about policy
Speaker 3: right now changing with an administration is the money has
Speaker 3: gone to the Red states.
Speaker 1: The Blue states voted for it.
Speaker 3: The money has gone to the Red States, and so
Speaker 3: your new set of allies looks like this.
Speaker 1: In the heart of Texas, green jobs are booming, but
Speaker 1: increasingly Wyoming's energy comes not from mining what's down below,
Speaker 1: but for mining the wind above.
Speaker 4: Different kind of farm in Crintain County is planning the
Speaker 4: seeds to grow jobs and produce green energy. Texas is
Speaker 4: seeing a boom in renewable energy. Then that means more
Speaker 4: companies are hiring.
Speaker 3: The governors of Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Louisiana announced the hydrogen
Speaker 3: partnership this week. But essentially now politicians are in a box.
Speaker 3: If we did away with the IRA, we do away
Speaker 3: with a lot of jobs. And are the politicians that
Speaker 3: have been cutting ribbons willing to shut the factories.
Speaker 2: Down and do you think does I mean we're headed
Speaker 2: for I think it's fair to say quite an.
Speaker 1: Election is do you have confidence?
Speaker 2: Do you have real confidence that a new administration, a
Speaker 2: non democratic administration, will continue to invest here.
Speaker 3: As my partner Hank Paulson said, if some of the
Speaker 3: things happening in politics happen here, this is maybe number
Speaker 3: ten on my list. I can't have confidence about a
Speaker 3: lot of things, right, But what I can say is
Speaker 3: these allies of jobs make a.
Speaker 2: Difference, and Texas, I mean Texas is a fascinating example
Speaker 2: of that because clearly not a lot redder than that place.
Speaker 2: All Right, we just have a couple of minutes left.
Speaker 2: Let's talk about passing the baton briefly, because I feel
Speaker 2: like that's a nice sort of way to send this
Speaker 2: audience off or send us off, I guess, and give
Speaker 2: them something into chew on.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So one of the things I'm watching, and this is important,
Speaker 3: It is an important moment, is a bit of a
Speaker 3: passing the baton of a race that we're all running together.
Speaker 3: And I think it's a very positive thing. We should
Speaker 3: celebrate it. In certain types of human endeavor, there tends
Speaker 3: to be a little bit of a relay race.
Speaker 1: This is an Olympic year or something that you can relays.
Speaker 3: And it often starts with the scientists, think about Neils Bohr,
Speaker 3: the Arpronet scientists, Mariko and Wiseman. Then it moves on
Speaker 3: to the profits. The people tell us we need to
Speaker 3: make pay attention. Eisenh Einstein sends a note to FDR says,
Speaker 3: you got to think about this bond thing.
Speaker 1: Gates talks about pandemics.
Speaker 3: It then moves to the policymakers, and finally it moves
Speaker 3: kind of to the people who then have to get
Speaker 3: it done, the people in this room and elsewhere that
Speaker 3: have to get it done. I do love that young
Speaker 3: handsome Al Gore up there about that he invented the internet.
Speaker 1: Call back.
Speaker 3: He didn't invent the internet, but he helped, he helped
Speaker 3: power it right. And so this relay race happens over
Speaker 3: and over again. And if you think about what's been
Speaker 3: happening climate, we owe so much to the sign is
Speaker 3: Yashio Keeling, who's got us started right. And then the
Speaker 3: people that have called out the need right, we owe
Speaker 3: so much to this. The policymakers, as I just showed,
Speaker 3: you stepped up, you know, part of the reason I'm
Speaker 3: on this stage is the rest.
Speaker 1: Of us have to step up.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there's a passing of a baton that needs to
Speaker 3: happen to people.
Speaker 1: That's what to answer your question, that's what we're trying
Speaker 1: to do.
Speaker 2: And so less than a minute, given everything that you've
Speaker 2: just told us, clearly you've thought about this a little bit,
Speaker 2: what does this room do, Like, what what do you
Speaker 2: send them off with to What's something that they can
Speaker 2: take home and say to their families, say to their partners,
Speaker 2: say to their kids about the next step that they
Speaker 2: need to take.
Speaker 1: Given that you represent the money side of.
Speaker 3: This, Yeah, I think the money is going to start
Speaker 3: moving because the opportunity is there. But I think importantly
Speaker 3: we need to take a bias to action into a
Speaker 3: touch of optimism. So one of the things that happens
Speaker 3: in a relay race is the last leg is sometimes
Speaker 3: the fastest. And what surprised people historically is when you
Speaker 3: look at the time, I mean, after thirty years of
Speaker 3: the atomic Revolution, Oppenheimer stepped in and won a war,
Speaker 3: won seven oscars, right, So I think there's an optimism
Speaker 3: here that we can get this moving there. We may
Speaker 3: not be moving fast enough, but we are moving faster
Speaker 3: and the path the progress is in perfection starts with progress, right.
Speaker 1: And I see that.
Speaker 3: I think that's happening, and the passing the baton will
Speaker 3: accelerate it.
Speaker 1: So let's have some hope, all right, and let's get
Speaker 1: to work. Jim Culture, thank you very much, Thank you everyone,