Speaker 1: What temperatures of the summer show is that we are
Speaker 1: losing the fight against climate change, and not only that,
Speaker 1: we are choosing to lose the fight against climate change
Speaker 1: because we are not embracing the things that we know
Speaker 1: will reduce emissions and ultimately reduce temperatures.
Speaker 2: You might say, the devastating heat that's crippling so much
Speaker 2: of the globe right now is climate change once again
Speaker 2: screaming at us at the top of its lungs. And
Speaker 2: it's not just scorching temperatures, but floods, wildfires, and hurricanes
Speaker 2: all happening with alarming frequency. Bloomberg's John Ainger, Eric Rostin,
Speaker 2: and Zara Hirjee report on why extreme events like this
Speaker 2: are intensifying. They say it's not a phase of crazy weather.
Speaker 2: It's the start of a new normal that will only
Speaker 2: become more dire and destructive the longer we insist on
Speaker 2: clinging to fossil fuels.
Speaker 3: This year, the heat index at sixty six point seven
Speaker 3: c or one hundred and fifty two degrees fahrenheit. That
Speaker 3: is just too hot for humans to really survive on
Speaker 3: a regular basis.
Speaker 4: Poor countries, which have contributed the least to the problems
Speaker 4: that are causing climate change. They're the ones that have
Speaker 4: been dealing with the kind of impacts that we've been
Speaker 4: seeing in developed countries over the last couple of years,
Speaker 4: when many many years now.
Speaker 2: But hold on, this isn't just another sky is falling
Speaker 2: conversation about global warming. There's some good news to be
Speaker 2: found here because rapid advances in technology not available only
Speaker 2: a few years ago means the warming of the world
Speaker 2: can be slowed if we decide to do it.
Speaker 1: And that's what makes this the greatest story in the world.
Speaker 1: Like the stakes could not be higher. We have most
Speaker 1: of the solutions we need, many people are actively deploying them.
Speaker 1: So every day is just this incredible race against time
Speaker 1: to see if we can place dirty machines with clean machines.
Speaker 2: I'm West Kasova today on the Big Take, How to
Speaker 2: Beat the Heat.
Speaker 3: Eric.
Speaker 2: If you're not living in a part of the world
Speaker 2: right now that isn't really hot, you're certainly hearing about it.
Speaker 2: The heat is just about anyone is talking about this summer.
Speaker 2: Can you paint us a picture of why it's different
Speaker 2: this year? Because I mean, it's July, it's warm.
Speaker 1: It's supposed to be hot in July, and as promised,
Speaker 1: it is. It's useful to think about climate change as
Speaker 1: the long term trend and weather as a fluctuation from
Speaker 1: year to year. Weather changes every year, climate change doesn't
Speaker 1: really change every year. There is an important distinction between
Speaker 1: climate and weather. Climate is the long, often thirty year
Speaker 1: trend in a region or the world that scientists used
Speaker 1: to sort of average all the weather. It's the boundary
Speaker 1: of the weather. So what's happening this year is something
Speaker 1: called an El Nino in the Pacific, and when the
Speaker 1: eastern part of the tropical Pacific heats up, it just
Speaker 1: blows heat into the atmosphere, changes weather in many different
Speaker 1: parts of the world in many different ways, and it
Speaker 1: raises global temperatures. So anytime there's an Alnino year, you're
Speaker 1: probably going to get a heat record because it's coming
Speaker 1: on top of climate change.
Speaker 2: Zara, we have El Nino, we have summertime heat that
Speaker 2: all comes together to make things hotter.
Speaker 5: But that's not really the whole story, is it.
Speaker 3: I've been talking with a lot of researchers about what
Speaker 3: is actually happening this summer, and the al Nino is
Speaker 3: certainly playing a role. But this is also just started.
Speaker 3: Like the al Nino was only officially declared in June,
Speaker 3: and it's expected to ramp up as the summer and
Speaker 3: as the fall in the year progresses.
Speaker 6: We ended up having the hottest June on.
Speaker 3: Record kind of globally when you look at global average temperatures,
Speaker 3: a little bit of that with them, a lot of
Speaker 3: that was climate change. And then we had the hottest
Speaker 3: July on record, and now we're anticipated to have hot
Speaker 3: August and we'll see how that plays out, but we're
Speaker 3: on track for the hottest year on record.
Speaker 2: John, in the story, you write about how scientists are
Speaker 2: really closely tracking this difference between al nino and climate change.
Speaker 5: How do they do that and what are they finding?
Speaker 4: Yep, So we spoke to many scientists during the process
Speaker 4: of writing this story. We spoke to Climate Action Tracker.
Speaker 4: Now they analyze all the different pledges by countries around
Speaker 4: the world, So the US, the EU, China as part
Speaker 4: of their global commitments to try and keep global warming
Speaker 4: to below one point five degrees. Now that's the one
Speaker 4: point five degrees is the political target that was agreed
Speaker 4: at the Powis Agreement in twenty fifteen, and all our
Speaker 4: actions are basically.
Speaker 7: Judged off that barometer.
Speaker 4: So now climate action trackers looking at how we're going
Speaker 4: towards those targets, and currently puts us on course for
Speaker 4: around two point seven degrees of global warming. By comparison,
Speaker 4: where we're at currently is one point two degrees of
Speaker 4: global warming. And we're already seeing these kind of really
Speaker 4: extreme weather events taking place across the world. And just
Speaker 4: to give you a flavor from Europe as well, recently
Speaker 4: in Greece, we had one hundred and forty six different
Speaker 4: forest fires across the Greek islands. You saw almost apocalyptic
Speaker 4: scenes of tourists and people working in the tourism industry
Speaker 4: having to evacuate from these islands. And that's not just
Speaker 4: alone in Greece. I mean we've seen record breaking temperatures
Speaker 4: in Sardinia and outside.
Speaker 7: Of Europe of course as well.
Speaker 4: We highlight in the story in China they're also seeing
Speaker 4: temperatures above fifty degrees. Right now, this is what global
Speaker 4: warming at one point two degrees looks like. And if
Speaker 4: we're heading to two point seven, the fear is among
Speaker 4: scientists that these kind of extreme weather events are going
Speaker 4: to get much much worse and more regular.
Speaker 2: So the goal has been to try to contain the
Speaker 2: rise in global temperatures to one point five degrees celsius.
Speaker 2: What you're saying is that what we're seeing is two
Speaker 2: point seven is what we're going to hit. Has the
Speaker 2: goal just been entirely abandoned?
Speaker 1: Now, whether we've abandoned a fight or whether we never
Speaker 1: embraced it is a matter of opinion. It'd be hard,
Speaker 1: given the political culture in many democracies, to acknowledge something
Speaker 1: that has been scientifically in different ways going back to
Speaker 1: the fifties, right, which is that fossil fuel emissions warm
Speaker 1: the atmosphere, and so as we see year after year,
Speaker 1: temperatures creep, higher, storms become stronger, coastlines increasingly challenged. It's
Speaker 1: just a simple fact that as long as we're still
Speaker 1: burning fossil fuels and letting the emissions go into the air,
Speaker 1: climate change is always going to be in its opening act.
Speaker 3: Reminding you that we are at one point two degrees
Speaker 3: of warming now. We are not guaranteed to get to
Speaker 3: two point seven. That's just the track that our world
Speaker 3: is on based on the policies that are in place.
Speaker 3: If you actually look at kind of the goals that
Speaker 3: people have set. We are potentially on a lower track,
Speaker 3: but you have to assume that people are actually going
Speaker 3: to meet the various bold goals that they've made.
Speaker 6: Humans are controlling this.
Speaker 3: We're in the driver's seat, and so we can make
Speaker 3: changes over the next couple of years and decades to prevent,
Speaker 3: hopefully the two point seven. That's just where we're headed
Speaker 3: right now.
Speaker 5: John.
Speaker 2: Not so long ago, there was a lot of optimism
Speaker 2: around the Paris Treaty, which you mentioned that a lot
Speaker 2: of countries were going to embrace less fossil fuel use
Speaker 2: and other ways of reducing climate change.
Speaker 5: What happened?
Speaker 2: Why are we seeing this acceleration now despite big efforts
Speaker 2: by a lot of countries.
Speaker 4: Well, I think, just to make clip to start with,
Speaker 4: I mean, progress is already being made. Right Since twenty fifteen,
Speaker 4: since the Paris Agreement, around eight billion metric tons of
Speaker 4: CO two that would have gone into the atmosphere hasn't
Speaker 4: and that's as a result of things like scaling up renewables, massively,
Speaker 4: electric cars, even changing some of the things we do
Speaker 4: in our day to day lives. So there has been
Speaker 4: progress there. The problem is we still haven't turned the tide.
Speaker 4: Emissions are still rising, and really we need emissions to
Speaker 4: fall by forty five percent this decade, so when emissions
Speaker 4: are still rising, the windows really getting a lot smaller
Speaker 4: in order to do that. I mean to be clear,
Speaker 4: we're not going to get this done in the summertime.
Speaker 4: It's likely to take a generation. But we have done
Speaker 4: this kind of thing before through the scaling up of renewables,
Speaker 4: through boosting electric vehicles on our roads, and that is
Speaker 4: really what's going to have to be accelerated as we
Speaker 4: move forward this decade.
Speaker 2: Zarah, especially for Americans since we're the last country on
Speaker 2: Earth that refuses to use the metric system. When you
Speaker 2: hear something like two point seven two point nine degrees celsius,
Speaker 2: it doesn't sound like that much, but actually talking about
Speaker 2: very large leaps.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So with the warming that we've had, we often
Speaker 3: talk about how we've risen in temperatures one point two
Speaker 3: degrees see compared to pre industrial times. That translates to
Speaker 3: closer to a little over two degrees fahrenheit. When we're
Speaker 3: talking about two point seven degrees, you're right, that's closer
Speaker 3: to four or five.
Speaker 6: Degrees fahrenheit and heating.
Speaker 3: But I think the other thing to remember is that's
Speaker 3: just the global average or the global mean. It actually
Speaker 3: also means that you're getting a lot less cold days
Speaker 3: and you're getting.
Speaker 6: A lot more very hot days.
Speaker 3: And one great example of this is what's been playing
Speaker 3: out in Phoenix, Arizona, where the entire month of July,
Speaker 3: all of July, they had hit one hundred and ten
Speaker 3: degrees fahrenheit for every single day. That is what we're
Speaker 3: talking about when we say that you're starting to get
Speaker 3: extreme heat more frequently and more intensely, and that's only
Speaker 3: going to grow as the temperatures continue to rise.
Speaker 1: The last nine years are the hot end years in
Speaker 1: the one hundred and eighty year record. Twenty two of
Speaker 1: the hottest twenty three years in the record have occurred
Speaker 1: in this century. In every decade has been hotter than
Speaker 1: the prior decade since the nineteen sixties.
Speaker 3: I will also add, like right now, one of the
Speaker 3: things that's been playing out all summer has been the
Speaker 3: temperatures in the Atlantic Ocean are extremely hot. And we're
Speaker 3: specifically talking about how the temperatures off the coast of
Speaker 3: Florida have hit ninety five and then also up to
Speaker 3: at least one hundred and one degrees fahrenheit. So that's
Speaker 3: literally the temperatures that fishes and corals, or if you're
Speaker 3: going snorkeling, you are going to feel. People have described
Speaker 3: that as the bathtub type temperatures to me, very uncomfortable,
Speaker 3: very hot.
Speaker 6: Normally, this is water that.
Speaker 3: Would be in maybe the high eighties to low nineties,
Speaker 3: So we're talking ten degrees fahrenheit above what's usually seen there.
Speaker 5: And can fish living water that hot?
Speaker 4: John No, I think over thirty degrees celsius, which is
Speaker 4: around eighty six degrees fahrenheit. That's when you start to
Speaker 4: get coral bleaching. And coral bleaching is this phenomena which
Speaker 4: is a very visual phenomena. You know that coral is
Speaker 4: full of vibrant colors, purples, reds, oranges, greens. It's when
Speaker 4: those colors completely leave and you're left with this dull
Speaker 4: white color on the coral, which is basically a sign
Speaker 4: that the coral is dying. And as that takes place,
Speaker 4: we're already seeing huge bleaching events taking place off the
Speaker 4: coast of Queensland in Australia, the Great Barriery for example,
Speaker 4: and in other places too, you're seeing real undermining of
Speaker 4: some crucial ecosystems globally.
Speaker 2: When we come back, climate change hit some countries harder
Speaker 2: than others. Eric Zara mentioned some of the things that
Speaker 2: happens when you start to see rising temperatures across the globe.
Speaker 2: And it's not just heat that global warming causes. There's
Speaker 2: a lot of other kinds of people that you write about.
Speaker 1: When oceans are as hot as they are today and
Speaker 1: they're only going to get hotter if we don't change
Speaker 1: our ways, that produces much more intense cyclones different countries.
Speaker 1: Low lying countries, often poor countries are most vulnerable to
Speaker 1: those kinds of storms. It's almost hard to just make
Speaker 1: a list of the things we're expecting. Yes, there'll be
Speaker 1: more drought, Yes there's more wildfires. And we've built bridges
Speaker 1: and roads and shipping lanes and airports with the understanding
Speaker 1: that certain things never change. Those things are changing.
Speaker 5: So what are some examples of that.
Speaker 1: Tarmac on airport runways melts. Places flood that have never
Speaker 1: flooded before because sea levels rising. Miami frequently gets flooding
Speaker 1: when there's no rain because the ground is just kind
Speaker 1: of porous and so ocean which is rising just kind
Speaker 1: of seeps in and then seeps up. One study from
Speaker 1: a couple of years ago found that by two point
Speaker 1: five degrees of warming, New York City could face three
Speaker 1: once in a century floods every year.
Speaker 3: Some other examples we've seen play out this summer is
Speaker 3: there was this intense flooding event in Vermont, and one
Speaker 3: of our colleagues had done this great story about how
Speaker 3: parts of Vermont were hit by this intense Hurricane Irene
Speaker 3: about a decade ago, and then the state spent a
Speaker 3: lot of money really trying to prepare itself because it
Speaker 3: knew that inland flooding, even just not on the coast,
Speaker 3: could be very damaging. Even still, there were major cities
Speaker 3: across the state that experienced really just like record levels
Speaker 3: of flooding and damage to really show that our preparedness
Speaker 3: isn't enough. Other things that we see with heat, train
Speaker 3: tracks buckling, you can get cracks in roads, You start
Speaker 3: to see crop failures. So in Europe we've been hearing
Speaker 3: about how some of the fruit and vegetable crop has
Speaker 3: been suffering. I know there was one agricultural group that
Speaker 3: mentioned that cows actually produce less milk when it gets
Speaker 3: really hot. There are just a cascade effects that impact
Speaker 3: everything from industrial processes. So if you have nuclear power
Speaker 3: plants that are situated on water, if the water gets
Speaker 3: too hot for them to use for cooling, they have
Speaker 3: to reduce or even shut down. That's been playing out
Speaker 3: in France and other parts of the world. Also, when
Speaker 3: the temperatures get too hot in the water, you can
Speaker 3: have jellyfish blooms, and then that blocks the water that's
Speaker 3: used for all sorts of industrial processes.
Speaker 2: John One thing that Eric mentioned is that horror countries
Speaker 2: often suffer more from the effects of climate change than
Speaker 2: richer countries, and you write about that quite a lot
Speaker 2: in this story.
Speaker 4: Yes, exactly whichever way you splice climate change its inequality. Obviously,
Speaker 4: poorer countries which have contributed the least to the problems
Speaker 4: that are causing climate change, they're the ones that have
Speaker 4: been dealing with the kind of impacts that we've been
Speaker 4: seeing in developed countries over the last couple of years.
Speaker 4: They've been seeing that for many, many years now. Those
Speaker 4: kind of things can be ranging from desertification, which has
Speaker 4: a whole host of knock on effects when it comes
Speaker 4: to food prices. Desertification is basically where fertile arable land
Speaker 4: that's used to grow crops becomes increasingly dry, increasingly arid,
Speaker 4: and that soil starts to blow away in the wind
Speaker 4: and turns into desert basically, so it becomes no longer
Speaker 4: fit to harvest crops that are vital in so many
Speaker 4: parts of the world. We're seeing that at its most
Speaker 4: extreme in sar Hell, that band of green across the
Speaker 4: top third of northern Africa, and that's where the problem
Speaker 4: is really taking place most dramatically. But then you're also
Speaker 4: seeing that in a three degree world, for example, forty
Speaker 4: percent of people in developed countries will be inoculated against
Speaker 4: those impacts. That's what developing countries are already feeling now,
Speaker 4: and we're not even at one point five degrees. So
Speaker 4: this is really a problem of inequality and that underpins
Speaker 4: many of the international climate negotiations that take place around
Speaker 4: the world.
Speaker 2: John, Why is it that richer countries are inoculated whereas
Speaker 2: poorer countries don't. I mean, if it's hot.
Speaker 5: It's hot.
Speaker 4: Well, obviously money is what comes into play. Most of all,
Speaker 4: the cost of finance is way way cheaper in richer countries.
Speaker 4: That helps from everything to mitigation. Mitigation is the building
Speaker 4: of new solar farms, new wind facilities that help to
Speaker 4: actively lower emissions, but also adaptation. Adaptation is much more
Speaker 4: difficult to finance, especially from the private sector. But that's
Speaker 4: things like sea walls, that's things like growing trees in
Speaker 4: cities which can help cool the temperature of cities down.
Speaker 4: That's things like air conditioning as well, which can really
Speaker 4: help lower the temperatures that people face on a day
Speaker 4: to day basis.
Speaker 2: Of the countries that are really seeing the biggest effects
Speaker 2: of this inequality, so.
Speaker 3: It sort of depends on what the extreme is that
Speaker 3: we're talking about. If we're talking about rising sea levels,
Speaker 3: it's island nations that are the ones that are really
Speaker 3: in the danger zone. As you know, even just getting
Speaker 3: to one point five degrees of warming could mean a
Speaker 3: matter of additional feet of extra sea level rise, and
Speaker 3: so that's why you'll often hear from countries like Barbados
Speaker 3: or Trinidad or others along the Caribbean at these annual
Speaker 3: meetings saying one point five degrees is a death sentence
Speaker 3: for us, because they could see much of their islands,
Speaker 3: the places where they live inundated with water. Looking at
Speaker 3: places like Pakistan, which last year had already experienced just
Speaker 3: absolutely extreme and devastating floods and then having to see
Speaker 3: those potentially year over year.
Speaker 2: Eric At some point, do places that are just really
Speaker 2: hot now simply become uninhabitable? Are we going to start
Speaker 2: to see places that were just people that are no
Speaker 2: longer able to live.
Speaker 1: We already see it Southern Louisiana, for example, parts of Alaska,
Speaker 1: the low lying islands that Zara mentioned, Many millions of
Speaker 1: people are no longer going to be able to live
Speaker 1: where they're living in coming years and decades, and they're
Speaker 1: going to go somewhere, and we don't know where.
Speaker 5: John.
Speaker 2: This question of inequality, how climate change hits countries differently,
Speaker 2: has become a big source of discussion and kind of
Speaker 2: tension among nations in global discussions about climate change.
Speaker 4: So for the last two years I've been at the
Speaker 4: U and COP summits. That's Conference of the Parties, and
Speaker 4: those are where countries one hundred and ninety six countries
Speaker 4: from around the world get together to try and thrash
Speaker 4: out climate progress. And a key part of that is
Speaker 4: the mitigation, which is the cutting of emissions. But the
Speaker 4: main kind of thing that poorer countries have been pushing
Speaker 4: for is more finance to help them deal with the
Speaker 4: impacts of climate change.
Speaker 2: After the break, how we can start to turn things around.
Speaker 3: The airline industry announced a goal of net zero airline
Speaker 3: emissions by twenty fifty.
Speaker 6: PEPSI pledges to be net zero by twenty forty.
Speaker 1: Amazon is looking to achieve net zero carbon by twenty forty.
Speaker 7: Now Show wants to be net zero by twenty fifty.
Speaker 1: Net zero is a pledge that you won't increase the
Speaker 1: amount of carbon in the atmosphere.
Speaker 5: Eric.
Speaker 2: Of course, all this sounds pretty dire, but one of
Speaker 2: the things you write in the story is that there
Speaker 2: are solutions if we want to embrace them. So what
Speaker 2: will it actually take to slow or possibly reverse these effects?
Speaker 1: Here we bring some relief. The fact is as dire
Speaker 1: as all the things we talked about are at the
Speaker 1: top of the podcast. It is phenomenally in to watch
Speaker 1: people making the twenty first century economy by deploying solar
Speaker 1: and wind power and electric vehicles. The price declines we've
Speaker 1: seen in the last ten years and those three technologies
Speaker 1: are unprecedented. The price of solar is I think eleven
Speaker 1: percent what it was in twenty eleven. Accordingly, solar power
Speaker 1: is cheaper than coal in most of the world. That
Speaker 1: economic fact is avoiding emissions and changing the way societies
Speaker 1: power themselves.
Speaker 4: Most of the tools that we need for the next
Speaker 4: thirty years already exist. You mentioned solar and wind. Those
Speaker 4: are already super super cheap, and probably the prices won't
Speaker 4: come down that much more. So how do you accelerate
Speaker 4: those going forward at the end of this decade? And
Speaker 4: that's where we really need to see big changes in
Speaker 4: investment in things like battery storage to help these kind
Speaker 4: of technologies work around the clock.
Speaker 7: As one of our.
Speaker 4: Guests in the article described the predicament, So that's going
Speaker 4: to be where the real technological changes need to start
Speaker 4: taking place.
Speaker 2: Jan can you talk a bit more about batteries. Why
Speaker 2: are batteries so important.
Speaker 4: In a twenty to fifty scenario, will be almost all
Speaker 4: renewable energy, so solar, wind and these are things which
Speaker 4: are intermittent by nature. So solar works best obviously when
Speaker 4: there's sun in the sky, wind, when there's wind happening,
Speaker 4: and when those things don't exist, that's when you need
Speaker 4: to store that electricity using batteries on the grid so
Speaker 4: that we can use power at all times of the day,
Speaker 4: depending on our uses and needs, and that's one of
Speaker 4: the areas which needs to accelerate really really quickly, especially
Speaker 4: this decade.
Speaker 3: So right now, our economy is largely being run on
Speaker 3: fossil fuels, even as we've been slowly ramping up our
Speaker 3: reliance on cleaner energies and renewable energies.
Speaker 6: But then we're also seeing that there are.
Speaker 3: Just a lot of industrial processes where fossil fuels or
Speaker 3: emissions or sort of like baked in. And yet there
Speaker 3: is change research. Tons of money being dumped into this,
Speaker 3: oftentimes their solutions, but they haven't been proven yet a
Speaker 3: market level scale that we know we'll probably get there
Speaker 3: if enough money and support continues, could get there in
Speaker 3: the next decade. So examples of this are like sustainable
Speaker 3: aviation fuel, so having jet fuels and plane fuel that
Speaker 3: is greener. It's making cement and other types of construction
Speaker 3: material in a greener way. We're not just wanting to
Speaker 3: continue our energy use as it is today but powered
Speaker 3: explicitly by cleaner energy sources. But it's also increasingly finding
Speaker 3: ways to kind of reduce that overall powerload and adding
Speaker 3: in efficiencies as much as we can.
Speaker 2: John, Even though it seems like all these technologies are
Speaker 2: there if we want to use them, the price tag
Speaker 2: is still pretty eye popping.
Speaker 4: So from our research, the total cost of getting to
Speaker 4: net zero by twenty to fifty is going to cost
Speaker 4: a whopping one hundred and ninety six trillion dollars.
Speaker 7: Now that sounds like a lot of money.
Speaker 4: But that's actually quite a low price tag given the
Speaker 4: cost of not acting and possibly seeing these kind of
Speaker 4: tipping points creating exponential costs to try and cope. But
Speaker 4: we're also going to have to see things like, by
Speaker 4: the end of this decade, a four fold ratio of
Speaker 4: investment in renewables to that on fossil fuels, and then
Speaker 4: that's even going to have to climb up to a
Speaker 4: ratio of ten to one, So that means every dollar
Speaker 4: we spend on fossil fuel infrastructure will have to be
Speaker 4: spending ten dollars on renewables. As we get towards the
Speaker 4: middle of this century, these kind of amounts of money
Speaker 4: are already going in. I mean, we've seen from the
Speaker 4: US Inflation Reduction Act that's a huge package of incentives
Speaker 4: of tax credits to kind of boost electric vehicles to
Speaker 4: boost hydrogen production, and other parts of the world are
Speaker 4: trying to catch up with that as well. We've seen
Speaker 4: in the EU just less than seven months after the
Speaker 4: IRA was passed into law, that the EU had to
Speaker 4: come up with its own package to try and stimulate
Speaker 4: these kind of new technologies that will really help speed
Speaker 4: the transition.
Speaker 3: We often talk about how there can be a positive
Speaker 3: feedback in warming where processes happen and then you get
Speaker 3: more warming, kind of in this spiral which we're in now,
Speaker 3: but there's also a positive feedback when it comes to
Speaker 3: putting investment into these solutions. So part of the reason
Speaker 3: why solar costs have dropped so much is because we
Speaker 3: had invested a lot of money early on into research
Speaker 3: to kind of figure out ways to drive it down
Speaker 3: and to deploy it more. And now that's sort of
Speaker 3: what we need to do for a lot of these
Speaker 3: other technologies, and it's happening now with electric cars, so
Speaker 3: a lot of money was put in. We're kind of
Speaker 3: getting at this point where more people are buying them
Speaker 3: year after year, they are cheaper.
Speaker 5: They are cheaper. There has to be the huge cost.
Speaker 3: Absolutely, and the more money we put into it and
Speaker 3: kind of build out those technologies the cheaper it's then
Speaker 3: going to get in the future.
Speaker 2: So I guess that brings us to the big question,
Speaker 2: will governments, will citizens embrace these changes and actually do
Speaker 2: what's needed to be done before it's too late.
Speaker 1: It is all hands on deck. This is a problem
Speaker 1: we've known about for decades. We've put off many changes
Speaker 1: that we could have put in place some time ago. Interestingly,
Speaker 1: many of the changes we need we didn't even have
Speaker 1: available for the last few years. Do technologies appear when
Speaker 1: we need the most.
Speaker 2: John, is it foolish to be optimistic at this point?
Speaker 7: It's definitely not foolish.
Speaker 4: I think we're definitely in a stage where we're taking
Speaker 4: two steps forward one step back, depending on the government
Speaker 4: of the day in the US or in various countries
Speaker 4: of the EU, depending on what the government of China
Speaker 4: decides to do in the years ahead. I think there
Speaker 4: is progress being made. As we've said in this article,
Speaker 4: we have the tools to do it. It's just going
Speaker 4: to be a case of the political will and drive
Speaker 4: to make sure that those costs are shared evenly across society.
Speaker 2: John, Zarah Eric, thanks so much for coming on the show.
Speaker 6: Thanks for having us.
Speaker 2: Thanks for listening to us here at The Big Take.
Speaker 2: It's a daily podcast from Bloomberg and iHeartRadio. For more
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