Speaker 1: This is Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Messer and Bloomberg
Speaker 1: Quick Takes Tim Stinovich from Bloomberg Radio. So if you
Speaker 1: think about the venture capital world, the legendary venture capitals
Speaker 1: that really helped build the foundation of today's VC world,
Speaker 1: and the iconic companies in the tech space, you definitely
Speaker 1: have to think of our next guest. John Door went
Speaker 1: to work for Kleiner Perkins back in the eighties early eighties.
Speaker 1: He's been involved in investing companies we all know so well,
Speaker 1: including being an original investor and board member at Amazon
Speaker 1: and Google, backing then entrepreneurs Larry Page, Sergey Brin and
Speaker 1: Jeff Bezos and so many more. He has seen innovation
Speaker 1: up close and personal, scene disruption and the evolution of
Speaker 1: our world and the action plans necessary to bring it
Speaker 1: all about well today, he has an action plan for
Speaker 1: solving our climate crisis right now, and it's very timely.
Speaker 1: With COP twenty six continuing in Glasgow as we speak.
Speaker 1: Delighted to bring in John Doer, chairman of Kleiner Perkins,
Speaker 1: author of a new book, Speed and Scale and Action
Speaker 1: Plan for Solving our Climate Crisis. Now. He enjoys us
Speaker 1: on the phone in Menlo Park, California. John, So looking
Speaker 1: forward to talking with you. Thanks for being here with
Speaker 1: Katie and myself. UM, so much to talk about. I
Speaker 1: want you to take us back, if you would, and
Speaker 1: you start out your book this way. Uh. And I
Speaker 1: know it's been out in a lot of press materials,
Speaker 1: but I think it's it's very telling. Um. Take us
Speaker 1: back to a two thousand six and a dinner you
Speaker 1: hosted after a screening of an Inconvenient Truth. Your daughter
Speaker 1: made some comments. Yes, my daughter was an inconvenient youth.
Speaker 1: That evening I had gone with some friends and her
Speaker 1: to see Al Gore's epic movie. But that put really
Speaker 1: the climate crisis. I think in the global conversation. Eight
Speaker 1: million people saw that movie. But at at dinner, we
Speaker 1: went around the table and I had a number of
Speaker 1: my Republicans friends there and we talked about, well, is
Speaker 1: is the world getting warmer? Yes? Is it man made
Speaker 1: or not? There we had some disagreement over that at
Speaker 1: the time, uh, but then we asked people what they thought.
Speaker 1: And when it came to marry she turned to me
Speaker 1: and she said, Dad, your generation created this problem. You
Speaker 1: better fix it. And I had no idea what to
Speaker 1: say or what to do? I was I was speechless.
Speaker 1: She said, I'm scared and I'm angry. And so I
Speaker 1: set out with my partners to understand climate technologies, the markets,
Speaker 1: the innovation, the forces at work. And over time we
Speaker 1: devoted over three of our venture funds a billion dollars
Speaker 1: to about seventy climate tech startups. And it was hard.
Speaker 1: It looked for a while like the portfolio would fail,
Speaker 1: but we stood by these entrepreneurs and today that that
Speaker 1: billion dollars is worth three billion dollars and companies like
Speaker 1: Beyond Meat and Bays and and other investments. So what
Speaker 1: I learned from that is it takes guts and courage
Speaker 1: and staying power, and it's hard. But that was then
Speaker 1: and this is now. And you know, Testless what the
Speaker 1: seventh most valuable company in the world, and innovations and
Speaker 1: clean the transition to a clean energy economy. This is
Speaker 1: the biggest opportunity of our lives. I'm I'm convinced, and John,
Speaker 1: I want to hear more about the action plan that
Speaker 1: you lay out in the book. I mean, what steps
Speaker 1: do you view are needed to take now to address
Speaker 1: this climate crisis? Well, uh, one thing your listeners can
Speaker 1: do is they can go to speed and Scale dot
Speaker 1: Com and get the plan for free. So it's ten
Speaker 1: great big objectives. The first six of those are solutions.
Speaker 1: In the latter four speed ups, I'll just go through
Speaker 1: the solutions issue with you. If we electrify transportation, which
Speaker 1: means stop using gasoline and diesel for our vehicles, then
Speaker 1: number two decarbonize the grid by shifting to wind and
Speaker 1: solar and safe nuclear. And then number three fix our
Speaker 1: food systems, which means eating less meat and dairy, not stopping,
Speaker 1: but less while improving how we grow our crops and
Speaker 1: reducing food waste. And if we do that, while number
Speaker 1: four we protect nature which is to stop deforestation, protect
Speaker 1: our oceans, and five clean up industry, especially the making
Speaker 1: of steel and cement is a very dirty carbon generating process.
Speaker 1: We can innovate around that. And then finally, as hard
Speaker 1: as we work at this, we're never going to eliminate
Speaker 1: all carbon emissions. So the i p c C, the
Speaker 1: U N Scientific body, says we've got to find ways
Speaker 1: to remove carbon that's being emitted on an ongoing basis
Speaker 1: were already in the air. That's the sixth big goal.
Speaker 1: Now we don't just have to do these six things
Speaker 1: and do them all at once. Right, it's going to
Speaker 1: be a tall, tall order. We got to do them
Speaker 1: fast well. So the big objective, the big objective is
Speaker 1: to get this done to net zero by We are
Speaker 1: talking with John Door He's chairman of Kleiner Perkins. He's
Speaker 1: got a new book out called Speed and Scale, An
Speaker 1: Action Plan for Solving our Climate Crisis. Right now, John,
Speaker 1: we've just got about a minute and a half and
Speaker 1: then we'll do some more news and then come back
Speaker 1: and finish our conversation. But you mentioned Tesla. You know
Speaker 1: what are the companies who are the innovators that you
Speaker 1: really are falling there saying they're making a difference. These
Speaker 1: are the companies that are going to be around for
Speaker 1: the long term because they get it when it comes
Speaker 1: to climate change. And just got about a minute here. Oh,
Speaker 1: there's so many companies. Tesla for sure is one. The
Speaker 1: transportation sector is a huge area for innovation, so companies
Speaker 1: that are making better batteries. For example, it's estimated that
Speaker 1: the market to electrify all transportation is four hundred billion
Speaker 1: dollars of batteries per year. That's five times bigger. And
Speaker 1: the US online advertising market that my friends at at
Speaker 1: Google and Facebook are fighting over. So nd phase energy,
Speaker 1: quantum escape. Uh. Larry Fink has said he thinks there
Speaker 1: will be a thousand unicorns, that's a thousand companies worth
Speaker 1: a billion dollars or more in this climate tech sector.
Speaker 1: So you think the investment money and again just got
Speaker 1: about thirty seconds here, So the E s G money,
Speaker 1: does it make sense because there's a lot of people
Speaker 1: are saying, you know, at E s G money, there's
Speaker 1: not really great metrics for measuring. Do you think it's
Speaker 1: being as productive as it could be when it comes
Speaker 1: to climate change initiatives? Just quickly, the data shows that
Speaker 1: investments in sustainability outperform those that don't. So my answer
Speaker 1: is yes. I want to get right back to our
Speaker 1: guest still with us as John Door, he's chairman of
Speaker 1: Kleiner Perkins Still with us from Menlo Park, California. His
Speaker 1: book out his speed and scale and action plan for
Speaker 1: solving our climate crisis. Now, as I mentioned earlier, a
Speaker 1: legend really when it comes to the venture capital world,
Speaker 1: early investor in Amazon and in Google. So John, you
Speaker 1: laid out, um, you know what needs to be done
Speaker 1: in terms of decarbonizing the grid, fixing the food system,
Speaker 1: which I agree, I've done a lot of work on
Speaker 1: that that's really crucial. But then there's for um, what
Speaker 1: you call the accelerants. Get talked to us a little
Speaker 1: bit about that. Well, we have to do all these
Speaker 1: things at once, and we have to do it by
Speaker 1: and in fact their specific goals. So the four accelerators
Speaker 1: to get this done in time are to win the
Speaker 1: politics and policy in every nation around the world, to
Speaker 1: turn movements into action, not just protests but code read actions,
Speaker 1: to innovate, and then to invest, to invest like our
Speaker 1: lives depend on it, because they literally do. And we
Speaker 1: we we have to have more urgency and ambition. We've
Speaker 1: got to go for the big carbon emissions. I say
Speaker 1: in the book, go for the gig it times well,
Speaker 1: and let me you know, when someone lays out it,
Speaker 1: and forgive me, it's not just you, because I feel
Speaker 1: like there's so many different things about how we solve
Speaker 1: this and how we go about it, and it kind
Speaker 1: of my head gets a little muddy. But I'm glad
Speaker 1: we're talking about it and we're starting to put a
Speaker 1: lot into action, because that's how you get things down.
Speaker 1: Do we have until to get a lot of this done. Uh,
Speaker 1: this is the decisive decade. You're on an important point.
Speaker 1: We have to cut emissions in half by the end
Speaker 1: of this decade to have a reasonable chance of having
Speaker 1: a habitable planet in so, no, we have to reduce emissions.
Speaker 1: That's eight percent next year and eight percent the year
Speaker 1: after that and after that. We have not reduced emissions
Speaker 1: in the history of civilization, except briefly during the pandemic.
Speaker 1: We've got work to do well when it comes to,
Speaker 1: you know, cutting emissions, doing this work, turning this into
Speaker 1: code read actions. I mean, who is at the forefront here?
Speaker 1: Who is responsible for that? Does that fall more on
Speaker 1: corporations or governments to really take a leadership role there.
Speaker 1: We need corporations, we need governments, we need leaders we
Speaker 1: we we need nonprofits, we need entrepreneurs. Of all these parties.
Speaker 1: The ones that are lagging, in my estimation are the
Speaker 1: governments of the world. They're responsive to their political forces,
Speaker 1: and we have not made climate a top two voting
Speaker 1: issue in the twenty largest emitters. It is in Europe now,
Speaker 1: it's not in the US, it's not in China, it's
Speaker 1: not in India. We have work to do, to win
Speaker 1: the politics and the policy to elect government officials who
Speaker 1: make this a top priority. One thing I wonder about,
Speaker 1: and you're someone who understands capital flows and going into innovation, right,
Speaker 1: what I wonder is, as we track the Katie and
Speaker 1: I attract the public markets and everybody here at Bloomberg
Speaker 1: day in a day out, how is it that companies
Speaker 1: will move aggressively enough unless there are some kind of
Speaker 1: measurements or metrics or penalties. So when they report earnings,
Speaker 1: for instance, shouldn't there be a climate metric that you
Speaker 1: get penalized on if you're not being aggressive enough? Like,
Speaker 1: how do we need something like that in order to
Speaker 1: really make certainly the corporate sector move fast enough. We do,
Speaker 1: and it's happening. There's the Net Zero Investor Alliance, which
Speaker 1: has a hundred and fifty trillion dollars of investor capital
Speaker 1: committed to UH invest in companies that have made and
Speaker 1: declared and report on pledges to achieve net zero. I'm
Speaker 1: really pleased by the movement underway in the investment community.
Speaker 1: I'm really pleased are our goal is to have a
Speaker 1: hundred percent of Fortune global five hundred companies commit to
Speaker 1: net zero by not. Walmart has committed they're going to
Speaker 1: do that. Amazon's leading a coalition of companies that are
Speaker 1: doing the same thing. So uh, investors demand it, employees
Speaker 1: insist on it. It's the right thing to do. And
Speaker 1: I mean you definitely have seen that demand if you
Speaker 1: look at the flows into some of these e s
Speaker 1: G funds and e s G investments. But I mean,
Speaker 1: in the past year, you've really seen a lot of
Speaker 1: concerns about greenwashing come to the forefront. I mean, I'm
Speaker 1: curious your thoughts on that. How much of an issue
Speaker 1: you think it is? And I mean, how can investors
Speaker 1: discern that they're actually putting their money behind sustainable causes. Well,
Speaker 1: we need audits, we need reporting, we need standards for
Speaker 1: higher quality what are called offsets. But more than anything else,
Speaker 1: we need to cut the fifty nine giga tons of
Speaker 1: emissions we have every year to net zero. We've got
Speaker 1: to reduce emissions, then conserve energy, and at the same
Speaker 1: time remove some of the stubborn carbon that's that's still
Speaker 1: out there. You know, I'm thinking about people who are listening,
Speaker 1: and I guess individuals can make a difference, But it
Speaker 1: sounds like from what you're saying it's really institutions that
Speaker 1: are going to move the needle here, and whether it's
Speaker 1: our public institutions or private institutions, John, That's what it
Speaker 1: kind of ultimately comes down to, is that fair, Well,
Speaker 1: we need individual action, but we're at a place in
Speaker 1: time now where that's not enough. And I've been really heartened.
Speaker 1: And the book tells the story of individuals who get
Speaker 1: their communities, for example, to adopt clean buses through collective action,
Speaker 1: or they get their employers to make commitments to to
Speaker 1: net zero. So, uh, we need them both. We need
Speaker 1: them now. H Yeah, we're we're out of time. No,
Speaker 1: my heart's kind of breaking here. He just got about
Speaker 1: thirty seconds here. What is it that worries you so
Speaker 1: much when you hear statistics about the climate change or
Speaker 1: about climate change? Is a deforestation or what just very
Speaker 1: quickly if you could deforestation stopping it, which is one
Speaker 1: of the outcomes of the of the COP twenty six process,
Speaker 1: is U is an encouraging pledge. There was a pledge
Speaker 1: to reduce methane emissions by that's a fast acting improvement.
Speaker 1: But the pledges are one thing. It's the action that
Speaker 1: follows that we need to track. Well, John, you are
Speaker 1: welcome anytime because I'd love to continue this conversation, so
Speaker 1: please come back, UH and look forward to it, and
Speaker 1: thank you so much. John. To our chairman of Kleiner
Speaker 1: Perkins his book Speed in Scale and Action Plan for
Speaker 1: Solving our Climate Crisis Now