You know, I often say that one of the most important things any of us can do about climate change is to talk about it.

So our job isn't to make other people care. It's to help them figure out how they already care. They just didn't realize it.

Because hardly anyone is talking about it. And if you don't talk about it, how would anyone know that you cared? Your friends, family, neighbors, and colleagues are not mind readers.

We often assume that talking about climate change is controversial, but research keeps finding the opposite. Most people support climate action, they just don't realize most other people do too.

ask questions and listen to the answers rather than talking to them. And then once you know what they care about, then frame what you're talking about in those terms, around those values, even using those words.

Identify a community you're a part of. Then share something you've learned about why climate change matters and what climate solutions can do. And be brave. Try having that conversation with someone who has never heard you bring it up before.

I'd actually disagree, as I don't think there ever was one, to be honest. But the instinct underneath the worry is correct. We need one now. And building it starts with talking.

So starting a conversation with other people who I know are also Christians over the fact that I care about climate change because I'm a Christian, not despite it.

Most people have never heard that connection made out loud and that silence is exactly what lets it continue. You don't have to be a scientist or a policy expert to say something.

However you choose to show your stripes, use them to start a conversation today about how the world has changed since we were born and how our future is in our hands.

136 news organizations across Japan... are working together to remind people that 89% of Japanese people support stronger climate action.

the transition is happening the question is will it happen fast enough to protect us from the increasingly severe impacts of climate change

Transcript note: This line is unpunctuated and lowercase in the transcript, and the host's sign-off is merged onto its end.

At this point, trying to hold back the clean energy revolution seems as futile as doubling down on horses and buggies when cars are not only available, but cheaper.

China installs more solar in a single year than the U.S. this entire history. So the world is changing. The question is just how fast is it going to change?

Transcript note: 'this entire history' is probably a mistranscription of 'has in its entire history'.

Renewable energy has grown fast enough to make the highest future pathways less likely than they were 10 years ago, but not fast enough.

But here's the good news. We are already seeing a course correction. In the U.S. this year, solar has produced more electricity than coal for the first time ever in the U.S.

There's already more solar than coal on the Texas grid. And for the first time on record last month, solar generated more electricity than coal across the whole U.S. 12.8% versus 12.2%.

In fact, the U.S. government has been actively trying to hold back renewables. That's what makes this trend so remarkable. It's happening despite active federal policy opposition, including paying a French company a billion dollars to give up its offshore wind leases.

you look at china the last two years they installed twice the solar energy that the u.s has in its entire history and china's clean energy exports are reducing global emissions already by one percent

when you look at countries like china they installed more clean energy last year than the entire rest of the world put together the transition is happening

Transcript note: This line is unpunctuated and lowercase in the transcript, and the host's sign-off is merged onto its end.

I live in Texas where we already get almost 40% of our energy from the wind and the sun that won't run out on us and don't produce heat trapping pollution.

in fact i just checked today and as of right now when we're speaking 40 of our electricity is coming from solar and 20 is coming from wind in texas

Transcript note: The transcript drops the percent signs: '40' and '20' are percentages of Texas electricity.

The world hit a major milestone in 2025. 112 gigawatts of new grid battery storage installed across the planet. This represents almost 50% growth from 2024 and a tenfold increase from 2021.

The truth is bad enough. More doom and gloom information actually led people to be less likely to take action, less likely to support climate policies, and then therefore less likely to actually participate in fixing this thing.

Focusing exclusively on negative news makes people think there's nothing we can do. They check out or even give up. This is why I always sandwich the not-so-good news between the good news and what you can do.

If I feel efficacy, I will act. And what builds efficacy is seeing real solutions in action on the ground.

Those who watched it became better at... spotting climate doom, news that either implies or outright claims there's nothing we can do about climate change, and were more likely to flag it, dislike it, and share it less.

Transcript note: The transcript inserts an ellipsis after 'better at' at a pause in the narration.

So what many passionate climate advocates do is they make that assumption and then they load up their wheelbarrow of scary facts, so to speak, and they go around dumping that wheelbarrow on people

So what happened in Canada was people's levels of concern and willingness to vote over climate change plummeted after the record-breaking wildfire season. Why? Because they thought, there's nothing I can do.

We already have so many more solutions than most people realize. And when we see what others are doing, it can give us ideas for what to advocate for where we live.

So to care about climate change, you don't have to be an environmentalist. You just have to be a human living on planet Earth.

What I love most about Climate Week is it shows us clearly how you do not have to be a scientist, an environmentalist, or an activist to care about climate change. You just have to be a human living on planet Earth.

But the faster we make this change, the safer we'll be because climate change is not just some environmental issue that doesn't affect our lives. It is literally a health issue. It's an economic issue. It's a human issue.

If you're a human being living on this planet, you have every reason to be concerned about the impacts and to advocate for and support the solutions that will give us a safer and healthier and better world.

Or as I say, it's the hole in the bucket. Whatever bucket we're trying to fill, there's a hole in the bottom that holds climate change and it's getting bigger.

but when you ask people do you think that it will affect you less than half of people in the us say yes so that's what i think of as the head to heart gap

This is not about tackling climate change. It's not even about addressing the biodiversity crisis. It's not about fixing a myriad of health issues in isolation. It's about building a better future.

oh by the way turns out most of those solutions are also solutions for climate but climate is like the cherry on top of the whipped cream on top of the icing on top of the cake

But that gas in our home also increases the risk of childhood asthma by a factor of six. So do we have to be running gas into our homes? Can't we just electrify our homes instead?

as climate changes as the planet warms decade by decade by decade our heat waves are getting longer and stronger more intense and more dangerous

It's the difference between accidentally dropping a match into a pile of green wet wood when not much would happen versus accidentally dropping that match into a pile of bone dry kindling that's been baking in record high temperatures for weeks.

And a more recent attribution study found that emissions from major fossil fuel companies contributed to about half of the increase in intensity of heat waves since pre-industrial times, and that this contribution is rising.

Well, what we're seeing is natural weather patterns of hot and cold, wet and dry, superimposed over a long-term warming trend. And the reason the planet is warming is 100% up to us.

just like you would if someone snuck into your room when you already had a low-grade fever, that would be our heat wave, and they put a pile of extra blankets on you when you already were experiencing a fever, you'd be that much worse.

It found that nearly 40% of the area burned by wildfires across Western North America between 1986 and 2021 can be traced to the emissions of just 88 companies.

And most of the wildfires we see in the lower 48 states these days are the result of accidental human ignition. But we have never had as hot, dry conditions as frequently before.

Then there's the fact that this event is occurring over a background of a rapidly changing climate, which makes everything that much worse.

It is only fair and just that the companies fueling the crisis should help pay for the damage they are creating, not the families suffering its worst effects.

Those who have done the least to cause the problem in the first place are bearing the brunt of the impacts, and that is not fair.

These findings highlight critical gaps in how societies protect people from climate impacts, and how, once again, they tend to fall disproportionately on those who have done the least to cause the problem in the first place.

why not tax these record profits and use the money to help communities prepare for extreme heat and recover from climate disasters and transition to clean energy so they don't need to use fossil fuels.

And you need to remember that heat affects us all, but it doesn't affect us equally. Children, senior citizens, women who are pregnant, people who have chronic illnesses, they're much more at risk from heat.

Governments have the power to shift the cost back onto polluters. As citizens, it's our responsibility to make it politically impossible for them to ignore, show them that their constituents care, not only by voting, but also by calling, writing, and emailing them.

A new study last week from Oxfam projects that BP Chevron ExxonMobil, Shell, and Total Energies will earn a combined $44 billion in the second quarter of 2026, nearly twice the previous quarter.

Transcript note: The episode intro at 0:26 calls it Big Oil's $45 billion quarter; the body gives $44 billion.

And they aren't ramping back either. They collectively plan to increase production by 14% by 2030.

99.9% of these objections are what scientists call solution aversion meaning I think the solution poses a greater threat to my life and things I value than the risks so I don't want to fix it

for the last 20 years, climate change has been at the top of the list of the most politically polarized issues in the US. There is no other issue that has been so consistently polarized as climate change.

There's actually five flavors of climate denial. Number one, it's not real. Number two, it's not humankind. Number three, it's not so bad. Number four, we can't fix it. And number five, it's too late.

Transcript note: 'it's not humankind' is probably a mishearing of 'it's not human-caused' or similar.

And the main reason why you see climate opinions sort of trending down with age is because you see political affiliation trending more conservative with age. That's the actual underlying driver.

In fact, research shows in the U.S. that the more educated and the smarter we are when it comes to science, the more divided we are on climate change, not more in agreement.

So it isn't just an opinion for 10% of people who are dismissive. It's actually part of who they are.

So arguing with people over whether it's real, it's human caused, it's serious, that isn't going to change their minds. But what absolutely changes minds is when you change people's hearts and hands first.

So 1.5 degrees is not a magic threshold. If we end up at 1.4999, that doesn't mean that we're fine.

It's true that 1.5 Celsius isn't a magic threshold, but what science says is that every fraction of a degree of warming matters.

It's a little bit like smoking. There's no magic threshold where if you smoke 9,999 cigarettes, you will be totally fine. But if you smoke number 10,000, then you'll have lung cancer and you'll be dead in a year.

And even if we will pass the 1.5 degree C threshold, the best time to stop is 1.6. And if we don't can't stop there, then stop at 1.7.

A new generation of climate scenarios concludes that limiting warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius without a overshoot is no longer plausible.

Transcript note: A word is probably missing between 'a' and 'overshoot' at the segment break.

The best-case future now still pushes past 1.5 Celsius, while our current trajectory puts us on track for about 2.6 Celsius, 4.7 degrees Fahrenheit of warming by the end of the century.

But now, thanks to the actions taken in the past 10 years, we are headed for a world that is likely to be between 2.7 and 3.2 degrees warmer by the end of the century.

I am definitely a climate scientist because of my faith.

So starting a conversation with other people who I know are also Christians over the fact that I care about climate change because I'm a Christian, not despite it.

So that is why I truly believe that if we took the Bible seriously, we would be at the front of the line demanding climate action for people and nature.

And how loving is it to actively contribute to people's harm? It's the exact opposite of love. And so for me, climate action is a way to express God's love to others.

God is in control, so there's nothing we can do. Whereas Genesis 1 says God gave humans responsibility over every living thing on this earth, including ourselves, who are responsible for the problem.

And sadly, for many people today, their statement of faith is written first by their political ideology and only a very distant second by their faith

The virulence of the attacks I receive, I think, is indicative of the fact that because I am speaking out as a person of faith, more people are likely to take me seriously.

We absolutely can fix it. In fact, an Oxford study two years ago found that if the world transitioned to clean energy, we would save at least $12 trillion. And the faster we did it, the more money we'd save.

Solar is now the cheapest source of electricity in history, and the market knows it.

These batteries make the grid more reliable and help push energy costs lower. They also replace gas-powered peaking plants that would otherwise be flipped on to generate electricity when it's needed most.

I just had a conversation with somebody yesterday about the price of gas and the fact that to fully charge our plug-in car now costs less than a third of what it would cost to fill up a car with gas.

And even in Lubbock, Texas, we're surrounded by wind and solar energy on the land of farmers who, for them, it's not about sustainability or clean energy. It's about the fact that the check arrives in the mail.

The question isn't whether we'll pay for climate change. It's whether we'll pay before infrastructure fails or after. We must rebuild for the extremes we're already living through.

Do not take heat lightly. It is very, very serious and it can kill.

But it's also revealing that infrastructure built for yesterday's climate can't handle today's heat.

I've previously shared tips for staying safe outdoors during extreme heat, but recent heat waves are a reminder that staying safe increasingly means thinking about whether our homes are ready for the climate future, not the climate of the past.

Its new Heat Ready London plan offers a blueprint, from retrofitting vulnerable buildings to expanding shade and preparing essential services for hotter conditions. That's how we build cities ready for the climate ahead.

I grew up without AC myself, but my parents had to install it a few years ago because summers have warmed so quickly in southern Ontario.

The loudest voice in the room often shapes what people believe, whether or not it tells the truth. And this is why my latest publication makes the argument for how important it is that cultural influencers speak out on climate.

Well, what he was doing there is he was doing something known as cherry picking, which is that you pick out only the numbers and information that justify your pre-existing opinion, and you completely ignore the context of those numbers.

it's so concerning that the same president, speaking to the UN during Climate Week, repeated false claims he'd made about climate change, including that the planet is cooling when this year has a 93% chance of being the warmest on record.

So air pollution deaths occur from two main causes. The first cause is the burning of fossil fuels. And that is responsible for millions of deaths a year. And that is not declining.

So, for example, in that article that you're referring to, he stated that the Canadian wildfires were not so bad this year. Well, actually, we're only in August, and it's already a top 10 year.

No one has died from climate change. It's responsible for 37% of extreme heat-related deaths alone.

And scientists said, we'll all be dead in 12 years. We didn't. And I debunked that myth seven years ago.

It was really written in large part by the fossil fuel industry to turn the United States effectively into a petrostate like Saudi Arabia or Russia.

And we have an administration whose policies right now, environmental policies and energy policies are literally being written by the fossil fuel industry.

The people who are in control of energy policy, of environmental policy in this administration are literally fossil fuel lobbyists who are tied often to conservative foundations like the Koch Industries.

It was spelled out quite clearly in Project 2025, which was this blueprint by various organizations, conservative organizations like the Heritage Foundation, funded by the Koch brothers and other plutocrats, other fossil fuel plutocrats.

In the end, they became a wholly owned subsidiary of the polluters, of the fossil fuel industry, and they weren't going to do anything to ruffle their feathers.

There's been sort of a purging of the Republican Party by sort of the power brokers, the fossil fuel interests, the polluters and the plutocrats who sort of rule that party.

And with the Republican Congress and a Republican dominated Supreme Court, you've got all three branches of government working together to deny the science, to defund climate science, to deflect attention

And it isn't just climate policy that they have been eradicating. It's really 50 years of environmental progress, the Clean Air Acts, the Clean Water Acts.

But it was actually, oddly enough, almost a brainchild of even Republican EPA administrators who once actually cared about the environment.

In fact, she said at the very outset that carbon dioxide is a pollutant that should be regulated under the Clean Air Act. She got forced out by Dick Cheney and his energy industry folks, and she was out after one term.

The obstacles aren't physical. They're not technological. They are entirely political. And political obstacles can be overcome.

there is one party now that basically will do something about climate and one party that's trying to undo all the progress. So it's night and day. And there's no way not to be partisan.

You can't stay home in the midterm elections. You can't stay home in the off-term elections because if you do, they're going to make all that progress that we made is undone and we've seen that happen.

obstacles aren't physical or technological, they are political and political obstacles can be overcome.

Donald Trump will remain president, you know, for, for two more years, but with a democratic Congress, those, those policies, the Trump policies could be kept in check.

we can change that by voting those people out, by voting in politicians who are willing to do what's right for us, putting the people and the planet over the polluters.

Transcript note: The previous line ends 'but collect', apparently a cut-off 'collectively'.

so in the end the only way that we can truly attack this problem is by attacking it at its source getting off fossil fuels moving towards clean energy and electing politicians who are willing to help us do that

We should all do everything we can as individuals to decrease our environmental footprint and our carbon footprint. But ultimately, we're not going to be able to tackle these problems without systemic changes.

And one thing I would add is that when comes to Senate races, there should be a litmus test. It isn't just good enough to be a Democrat. You've got to be a Democrat who would be willing to expand the Supreme Court.

You expand the Supreme Court to redress the imbalance that right now is putting a rubber stamp on the polluter sort of friendly policies that the Trump administration has.

And so I would say that that was a consequence of this trend that we're seeing towards the politicization of the court. And we can no longer, in my view, trust the courts to objectively litigate these sorts of issues.

Really pretty remarkable. And that was basically a gift to the fossil fuel industry. to make it more difficult for courts to actually implement the laws that do exist.

And that was a significant decision that has all sorts of ramifications now for efforts to deal with climate change and to rein in carbon emissions.

So they're just, you know, they're cleaning our clock when it comes to advancing this technology. And it's going to be difficult at this point for us to even catch up.

you often hear that argument and it's really it's a misleading, I would even say cynical argument because it just isn't true. China is investing so much more in renewable energy.

where China is now so much out in front because of the efforts of the Trump administration on clean energy, renewable energy, electrification, that they are going to be the dominant superpower

China understands that clean energy is the future of the global economic race and they are way ahead of us now and we are falling behind.

Donald Trump doesn't get to determine what happens to the clean energy transition worldwide. It's happening. All he gets to determine is whether we get on board or we get left behind at the station.

And ultimately, it makes economic sense. The countries that seize upon this transition, the countries that recognize that clean energy is the great economic revolution of this century, those are the countries that are going to prosper.

Transcript note: The opening of this answer (at 1632, about China moving dramatically into renewables) is merged into a line labelled Esti Dinor.

And ironically, during these years, the second Trump administration, when the United States is sort of going back on its commitments, China is actually moving forward on its climate commitments.

And they have more than a billion rides on their bullet trains every year. And those are electrified and increasingly mostly run off of renewable energy.

When you're in a climate hole, as I like to say, you've got to stop digging fossil fuels. So we're in a climate hole. We've got to prevent it from getting worse. We've got to decarbonize as quickly as we can. That's task one.

One of the key findings is that when human carbon emissions reach zero, the planet stops warming up. The surface of the planet stops warming up.

But right now it's being used as a tactic to delay the obvious solution to the problem, which is, I like to say, when you're in a climate hole, stop digging and burning fossil fuels.

But the flip side of that is we're sort of stuck at the temperature that we're at now for decades, if not centuries.

The bad news is that the surface temperature remains where it is when you stop emitting carbon. It means it's elevated at that level for perpetuity.

I'm a little skeptical about that. That stuff is, you know, we're decades away from the point where we could deploy that at scale.

If we really said that the fossil fuel companies have to capture the carbon from all the fossil fuels they're burning, that price them completely out of any competitiveness in the energy marketplace. And so it's a ruse.

Transcript note: A word is missing before 'price them' (presumably 'would').

Well, there's a worthy conversation to be had about whether ultimately we might need to intervene to prevent catastrophic warming.

It may be available at scale decades from now to actually bring those carbon dioxide levels back down so that we can maybe start to cool the planet back down, bring it back to 1.5

And those people right now are actually putting massive funding into geoengineering. And so that was, in fact, Adam McKay's commentary on the dangers of these sorts of promises of future techno fixes as an excuse for business as usual today.

Dangerous climate change is here. You might even argue catastrophic climate change is here.

Dangerous climate change isn't at some far off horizon, like 1.5 Celsius, 2 degrees Celsius. It's here, right?

You might say, well, this is a new normal, except for the fact that a new normal implies that it stops here. But it all gets worse if we continue to warm the planet, if we continue to burn fossil fuels.

So it's the heat, it's the drought, it's the floods, it's these extremes in all directions. Floods, we see worse flooding. We also see worse droughts. The extremes get larger.

On top of that is the fact that the warming is, and the extreme weather events, the droughts, the floods are destroying crops, which decreases the food supply, which raises the prices of these food sources.

And so when you put all that together, the climate crisis and fossil fuel dependence is more deadly than the deadliest pandemic that we've experienced yet.

Then there are, you know, diseases like Lyme disease, malaria, spreading because of the disappearance of the cold winters that used to kill off the organisms that spread those diseases

But if we continue to fossil fuels warm up the planet even more, we're going to exceed our adaptive capacity.

Transcript note: A word is lost at the segment break ('continue to fossil fuels'), presumably 'burn'.

Fossil fuels, by some estimates, are responsible for as much as 25% of all premature deaths.

There is no cliff. It's more like a dangerous highway that we're driving down. And if we miss the 1.5 Celsius exit, which it looks very likely we won't, We still do our best to get off at the next exit, 1.6, 1.7.

Transcript note: 'which it looks very likely we won't' is as spoken; the context shows Mann means the 1.5C exit will very likely be missed.

That next exit, 1.8 Celsius would be a whole lot better than 2, and it's still absolutely achievable.

And at this point, to repeat myself, all we get to determine is how bad it gets. And we can prevent it from getting much worse by rapidly decarbonizing

we may miss the 1.5 celsius exit it looks very likely that will happen now especially because of of inaction here in the U.S. with the current administration.

1.8 is the number I talk about is absolutely actionable. If we can bring our carbon emissions down over the next two decades at a steady rate, and we have the technology to do it, as I said before, we can avert that next threshold.

And so it's not really like there's some cliff that we went off, but we did miss sort of that particular target.

But when Trump was reelected two years ago, I'm afraid that's where we missed that exit ramp. We missed that possibility.

Doomism, I think, can be destructive. It can lead us towards disengagement. Just the opposite of what's needed.

And there's the potential that we do start to cross some of those tipping points, some of those irreversible sort of changes, the collapse of ice sheets, the collapse of the so-called ocean conveyor circulation.

If we go with just sort of current policies into the future, the planet will warm up more than three degrees Celsius, the better part is six degrees Fahrenheit later this century.

That would be catastrophic in terms where we start to use words like civilization ending, where we can no longer envision meeting the needs of more than eight billion people on this planet

But I'll tell you, when the human body warms up that much, it's called a fever. It's called a pretty serious fever.

to be reducing our carbon emissions by 50% within the next decade if there's any hope. And that window is probably nearly disappeared now.

Transcript note: The following line, 'Any hope of keeping the planet both three degree Fahrenheit warming', is garbled (presumably 'below three degrees Fahrenheit').

I am cautiously optimistic that we can still turn this around.

And everything that Trump has can be understood in terms of what best advances the petrostates, Russia and Saudi Arabia that put him in power.

Transcript note: A word appears to be missing after 'Trump has' (presumably 'done').

And the United States might be their most successful venture yet, because essentially Donald Trump is doing everything that Vladimir Putin would want him to be doing to help, again, keep the world dependent on fossil fuels, including Russia's fossil fuels.

And it's pretty clear if you look at the various wars that Donald Trump has started against Venezuela, against now Iran, fundamentally, this is about access to fossil fuels.

It's so ironic, isn't it, that everything that Trump is doing here in the way of foreign intervention is an outgrowth, is a direct consequence of a fossil fuel driven worldview. I mean, that's what Venezuela was about.

The United States, as a petro state today under the Trump administration, trying to disrupt efforts, international efforts to act on climate.

And so it's pretty clear that getting Trump elected was about paving the way for this massive collaborative venture between ExxonMobil, the world's largest publicly traded fossil fuel company, and Russia's.

There were a small number of petrostates that don't want us to move on, that are profiting greatly from our current reliance on fossil fuels, that have done everything they can to block those agreements.

And there's even another layer of irony here is this war of choice that Donald Trump is fighting against Iran, which is driving up oil prices and fossil fuel prices and inflation.

Just imagine if we were using all of that money to instead help speed up the transition away from fossil fuels.

if it were not for the fact that we are warming the with carbon pollution, burning fossil fuels and creating the conditions, creating this fire weather, the sorts of weather that gives rise to these unprecedented wildfires, hot, dry.

Transcript note: The word 'planet' is lost at the segment break ('warming the with carbon pollution').

He wants us talking about these antics, so we're not talking about the fact that it is this fossil fuel driven warming and drying that's creating these catastrophic wildfires.

In Western Europe, you take that heat, you take the drought, there's been very little rainfall. Again, both of these tied to human-caused warming and climate change. You put those together and it is an incendiary mix.

It's almost like they want the story to be ridiculous, this idea of raking, because it gets us talking about it because it's so silly. And ironically, the more we're talking about that, the less we're talking about the true culprit, which is climate change.

Look, these forests that are burning are boreal forests. There are very few people there. They have not been managed historically.

I likened it to, you know, you're speeding down the highway and you, you know, you're tailgating the person in front of you, you're speeding and and you hit them, and then you demand that they pay for your broken headlights.

You know, the atmosphere doesn't have boundaries. It doesn't have between Canada and the United States. Though our president might want to build those walls with other countries, there are no walls in the atmosphere.

Transcript note: A word is missing after 'It doesn't have' (presumably 'walls' or 'boundaries').

you get wet winters that favors that the growth so you get lots of vegetation then you get those hot dry summers that vegetation dies it provides the fuel for those fires combined with the extreme heat

This June was the warmest June on record for Europe. That's not a coincidence.

we're more likely to see that wildfire smoke here on the east coast of the u.s because of a very wavy jet stream that is probably being impacted by climate change as well.

Under the current administration, of course, we see an effort to end renewable energy projects, even though renewable energy is actually cheaper. So this is driving up energy prices, ironically, making us more reliant on fossil fuels

The affordability crisis that we face right now in part is a manifestation of a fossil fuel driven agenda by the Trump administration.

The only reason that fossil fuels are still competitive is because of all the incentives, all the subsidies that the fossil fuel industry gets.

That's an essentially solved problem. It's not a real problem any And when you read about it, when somebody's citing intermittency, you know that they are not engaging in good faith.

Transcript note: The sentence 'It's not a real problem any' is cut off (presumably 'anymore').

In fact, the current administration, Donald Trump, is actually paying wind companies, for example, to cancel the wind projects and instead build fossil fuel projects instead.

85% of all additional power generating technology last year was from renewables. So almost all of the additional power generation we are generating now, we are creating now, is coming from renewable energy.

Even if you don't care about the consequences of climate change, if all you care about is sort of the future prosperity of the United States and sort of the economic strength of the United States, then you should be aghast.

It's obvious that the real solution here is dispatchable renewal energy from a strategic standpoint, from an energy security standpoint, from a national security standpoint.

Transcript note: 'renewal energy' is presumably 'renewable energy'.

Somehow the word is no longer investment, but cost. When they talk about renewable energy infrastructure, oh, that's going to cost us. It's going to cost us. No, that's an investment.

So it's really two things, electrify and decarbonize the grid. And we absolutely need to invest far more than we have in upgrading the grid.

So they've shifted to sort of a kinder, gentler form of denialism, as I like to say, away from like the outright denial of like the physics of change itself

Transcript note: The transcript drops a word before 'change itself' (presumably 'climate').

and when it comes to platforming, if not outright climate denial, certainly climate delayism, publishing op-eds by people like Bjorn Lundberg, who are apologists for the fossil fuel industry.

Transcript note: 'Bjorn Lundberg' is presumably a mistranscription of Bjorn Lomborg.

The editorial board of the New York Times expressing their editorial view that somehow we shouldn't be continuing to incentivize clean energy. It was absolutely shocking.

One of their primary tactics was to deny that climate change is happening. But that just isn't credible anymore because people can see with their own eyes the dire consequences of climate inaction.

They wrote the playbook, and we've seen other industries run with it, the fossil fuel industry being a great example.

No, it's been one of the great successes of the fossil fuel industry is sort of to gain the terminology, right? Even natural gas. It sounds, what's wrong with natural gas? It's fossil. It's fossil gas. It's fossil carbon.

Transcript note: 'gain the terminology' is presumably a mistranscription of 'game the terminology'.

The New York Times receives more advertising dollars from the fossil fuel industry than any other media outlet in the world.

one of their columnists in his first column in the New York Times was basically, yes, climate change is real, but no, it's not a problem.

Transcript note: The columnist's name is garbled in the preceding line ('Brent making a Brent, Brent'), apparently Bret Stephens.

Anything, you know, any area where the findings of science represent a threat to powerful vested interests like the fossil fuel industry, we've seen effort on the right, almost exclusively on the right, to try to discredit that science.

The editor went in and tweet the language and inserted some additional quotes in a way that dilutes the powerfulness of the argument for climate action and created sort of a notion of false balance.

Transcript note: 'tweet the language' is presumably 'tweaked the language'.

The greatest threat we face right now because it's a fundamental to democratic governance is disinformation, the deliberate spread of misinformation for ideological reasons, whether it's climate denial or anti-vax viewpoints

Transcript note: A word is missing after 'fundamental' (presumably 'threat').

And now with AI, that disinformation can go global. It can go infinite, as some have said. We're facing the prospect of infinite disinformation.

the billionaire oligarchs like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and the Koch brothers, a name that may be familiar to some of your listeners, Rupert Murdoch, who owns News Corp, these billionaires who have sort of banded together and used their immense wealth and influence

And it's not a coincidence that Saudi Arabia and Russia, two of the biggest authoritarian States played a hand in helping Elon Musk buy Twitter because they want to control the public sphere.

We need to regulate the big tech companies, and they're opposing that with all the wealth and power that they have right now.

he was once a hero of renewable energy and climate action. And now he is actually using his immense power and wealth to block climate action, to support the Trump agenda, the MAGA agenda, which is an agenda of doubling down on fossil fuels

The planet's average temperature right now has increased almost exactly as much as the model said it would, given our continued burning of fossil fuels.

it's an example that I often like to point to of where, if anything, the models are actually understating the impact that human-caused warming from fossil fuel burning is having in the form of these catastrophic, increasingly dangerous and deadly extreme weather events.

And the reality is that a lot of the consequences are worse than expected with regard to extreme weather events, with regard to the disintegration of ice sheets and the sea level rise that goes with that, with regard to any array of impacts.

And there are some scientists who are making extravagant claims that I would argue don't actually measure up to, don't actually match the evidence.

We published an article about a year ago showing that the number of those events has tripled over the last half century from about one such event per summer to about three of them.

That's changing the temperature difference between the Arctic and the subtropics and the mid-latitudes, and it's that temperature difference that drives the jet stream. So it slows down the jet stream, and under certain circumstances, the jet stream sort of gets stuck in place.

we're more likely to see that wildfire smoke here on the east coast of the u.s because of a very wavy jet stream that is probably being impacted by climate change as well.

And on the high end, it could be, you know, as much as 4.5, 4.6 degrees above normal, which would completely smash prior records. The median of all the models, the central estimate is about 3.9 C, which will happen around November of 2026.

So, you know, 1997 was a particularly warm year, but 1998 smashed the record. 2015 was a particularly warm year, but 2016 smashed the record. 2023 and 2024 followed the pattern. And so we expect something similar to happen with 2026 and 2027.

And so we are already, as of July this year, above two degrees in the tropical Pacific, so already in super El Nino territory. And the event isn't going to peak until probably October, November, December.

And 13 out of those 14 expect us to have a record event this year. And some of them expect us to have a record event by a pretty large margin, almost a degree higher than any previous El Nino event on record.

You know, most of the models that we have today, and there's about 14 different groups around the world that provide dynamical models of El Nino, expect this event to peak close to 4 degrees C above normal in the tropical Pacific.

You know, the strongest events we've seen previously, it peaked at about 2.8 degrees in the tropical Pacific above normal. And the models currently have this event peaking at 3.6 degrees. So, you know, maybe 25% stronger than any previous Al Nino have seen.

But what that does mean is that, you know, we almost always see after a very strong Al Nino event, the warmest year in recorded history. And so, you know, 2027 now is the awesome favorite to beat 2024 and 2023 and 2020.

Transcript note: 'awesome favorite' is probably 'odds-on favorite'; 'Al Nino' is El Nino.

if the models are right, it turns out being well above three degrees this year, that would be clearly well in excess of anything we've seen in the last 500 years.

Transcript note: The segment opens mid-sentence ('or so studies that have been published'); the quote starts at a clause boundary.

that at least back to the year 1000 AD, there's nothing in those coral records that suggests an El Nino anywhere close to what we've seen today.

Now, current temperatures in the tropical Pacific today are running at about 2.5 degrees above normal. August 2026. So we're not quite in record territory yet. But if El Nino peaked today, it would be one of the top three or four warmest on record.

The strongest El Nino event on record was in 2015-2016, the that's roughly tied with one in the early part of the record in 1877, 1878. And that event was about 2.75 degrees above normal in terms of its monthly peak.

our emissions of co2 and other greenhouse gases are adding a permanent super al nino worth of heat to the climate system every decade which is a little frightening

Transcript note: Unpunctuated lower-case segment that runs on into the host's next remarks (not quoted); 'al nino' is El Nino.

it could boost it closer to 0.3 degrees C. And so it would really give us a sneak peek of the type of global climate that we'll have in another decade, decade and a half.

But, you know, the size of a strong El Nino event might boost global temperatures by 0.2C or something. You know, we're adding 0.2C to the climate system every eight years through our emissions.

And so, you know, a super El Nino, like the we're experiencing this year sort of gives us a sneak peek in terms of what typical temperatures will be like about a decade from now given human-driven warming

Transcript note: A word is missing after 'like the' (probably 'one').

You know, the globe as a whole has warmed about 1.5 degrees since the mid 1800s. It's going up at almost 0.3 degrees centigrade per decade.

And I think that the boreal, because of its enormous area and remoteness and the nature of the trees that grow there, there's no way to fundamentally stop it from burning. You can't put out all fires in the boreal.

So, you know, there's not really a world where Canada builds a spiraling network of fire roads all through the boreal forest and, you know, intensively manages it with thinning and controlled burns throughout that whole region.

And I think a lot of the confusion that we've had over the last week in the US is, you know, trying to treat the boreal like Western US forests, when in reality, they're very, very different systems.

So it's significant because it reflects this broader misdiagnosis that a lot of Americans have of boreal fires. You know, when we think of fires, we think of the Western US.

You know, four fifths of the area burned in Canada over the last 20 years happened in remote boreal regions that have never been managed and never been suppressed.

You know, four-fifths or 80% of the area burned in Canada has occurred in very remote regions, far from any road that have never had firefighters on the ground putting out fires.

You know, the idea of taking the entire boreal and making it a fire-free zone, you know, would cost hundreds of billions of dollars. Every individual Canadian would have to, you know, manage something like 900 square kilometers of space.

It would cost something like, you know, the entire federal budget of Canada just to do that. And it would destroy a lot of the ecosystem in the process, which would be great either.

Transcript note: 'which would be great either' is probably 'which wouldn't be great either'.

forests had adapted to these low-level fires that would go through and clear the brush. And by putting out those fires too effectively, we essentially built the conditions for really catastrophic crown fires that would actually kill the trees to occur.

You know, in the most recent national climate assessment, we estimated that about half of the increase in burned area in the Western US is attributable to changing climate conditions, but the other half is attributable to this history of bad forest management.

And in fact, fires in remote regions far from where people live are actually good for the forest. Many of the trees have adapted to germinate and produce new seeds after a fire

And so what we're seeing climate change is an increasing frequency of these boreal fires because they're much drier. The vegetation is much drier than it used to be because of the heat.

Transcript note: A word is missing between 'what we're seeing' and 'climate change' (probably 'with').

Today, because the vegetation is much drier, that lightning strike is much more likely to cause a big burn, which in turn results in a huge plume of smoke that affects people.

So it's important to say that climate change itself by and large doesn't cause fires, right? There still is, you know, a campfire that gets out of control, a lightning strike in a remote region.

So some forests are what we call more ignition limited. You know, they're primed to burn, but there's just not very many sparks. Others are more climate limited. So even if, say, a lightning strikes, the forest is just too wet to typically burn.

You know, Canada's fire season has warmed by about 2.7 degrees centigrade since the pre-industrial period and about 2.2 degrees just since the 1960s.

Now, we see this in Canada, for example, you know, nine out of 10 of the biggest fire years in Canadian history happened when it was hotter and drier than normal.

In 2023, which of course was the worst fire year in Canadian history by mile or kilometer, happened in a year that was the warmest by far on record for the fire season, the sort of May through September period.

we see a very strong relationship between how hot dry the vegetation is, or sorry, how hot it is outside, how dry the vegetation is, and how much burns in a given year

If we look just at forests, you know, fires in forests, those have been roughly flat globally for the last 20 years. But that itself mixes up an increasing trend in higher latitude forests within decreasing trend in tropical forests.

Transcript note: 'within decreasing trend' is probably 'with a decreasing trend'.

There actually has been a lot of progress in recent years to reduce the clearing of rainforests and the burning of rainforests for agriculture that's reflected in those statistics.

So most of the area burned globally is actually in Savannah and grassland ecosystems. And most of it is in Africa. You know, something like 65, 70% of the total area burned is in Africa historically.

And so the future is still going to have a lot of fossil fuel emissions. We're not on track to solve climate change soon. But some of these worst case scenarios have moved outside of the realm of plausibility.

One is that whether or not, you know, we were headed toward four and a half degrees or three and a half degrees, or if we're headed toward three degrees today, those are all bad outcomes. We still need to reduce emissions to avoid them.

It's not going to make our job any easier to meet our climate goals, but it's not like we're going to end up at, you know, four or five degrees warming instead of three by the end of the century because of data center build-out,

Climate scientists were not wrong 20 years ago when they created this scenario. But it turns out the world of today is not the same world we had 20 years ago.

a rise of self-proclaimed doomers who think it's too late to solve climate change, that humanity is going to inevitably have horrible outcomes. And I think that's not true.

Global coal use has plateaued. Global to emissions have more or less flat lines. And the idea that we're going to be using a huge amount more coal by the end of the century is increasingly unlikely in the world we're living in today.

Transcript note: 'Global to emissions have more or less flat lines' is a garble, probably of 'Global CO2 emissions have more or less flatlined'.

The fact that we have made some progress, that these very high-end scenarios have come completely off the table, I think should give us a bit of hope. It shows that progress is possible.

And so we're really not out of the woods for some of these high-end outcomes, even today, if we sort of roll sixes on the proverbial climate dice.

But there had become in the 2010s a pretty wide perception that this scenario was somehow business as usual. It was the path we're headed down. We're still headed down a pretty bad path, but probably not quite that bad.

And so when we try to run this through our climate models, a given might give a middle outcome of, you know, three degrees C, but it really could be as little as two or as much as four

Transcript note: A word after 'a given' is missing, probably 'scenario'.

And I think a lot of what we do on climate needs to be also in that frame. We're not just planning for the most likely outcome, we're hedging against the worst case.

But we're still not quite at the point where we're seeing large-scale declines in fossil fuel use globally, even if there are some countries like the US, the UK, the EU, where we have seen coal more or less collapse.

And so that high scenario gets us quite a bit more warming by the end of the century. We don't think it's where we're headed today still, but it's a useful exercise as what if, you know, what if we roll back the clock?

Coal use increased something like fivefold and global temperatures increased by about 4.3 degrees centigrade by 2100.

There are remarkable successes in making clean energy cheap. And in many places, clean energy is competing with and outdoing fossil fuels, not because people care about climate change, but because it is the cheapest way to produce power.

to be honest I think we're doing better you know I wasn't particularly optimistic 10 years ago and I think what we've seen in terms of cost declines from batteries from wind and particularly from solar is a goddamn miracle

Transcript note: The segment opens with the host's question; the quote starts where Hausfather's answer begins.

We have become used to a certain amount of comfort in our modern lives. And I think any attempt to get the public to give that up is going to be a political dead end.

Too cheap to meter solar panels didn't descend from the heavens on tablets. They came from 50, 70 years of intensive R&D efforts at US labs and, you know, very expensive public policy efforts in places like Germany subsidizing these technologies

is more solar than California, not because Texas is, you know, a deep green state that loves renewables, but because they have a deregulated power market and so they buy the cheapest stuff.

Transcript note: The segment opens mid-sentence; the words before 'is more solar than California' were not transcribed.

In reality, the US reduced its emissions 18% by the year 2020. We actually beat the targets of the policy that was never enacted during the Obama administration. And part of that was the fact that these technologies got cheap.

Clean energy has gotten cheap. We are going to see and are already seeing a huge amount of resources go into building things like wind and solar and batteries and electric vehicles.

You know, China made a strategic bet here that we're going to drive the cost down of these technologies for it to become a huge export industry for us.

You know, everyone remembers in the U S at least Jimmy Carter, you know, asking everyone to turn on the thermostat and wear a sweater. And that did not end well for him.

Transcript note: 'turn on the thermostat' is probably 'turn down the thermostat'.

You know, the world last year spent about $2.3 trillion altogether on clean energy technologies.

This last quarter, more than 25% of all cars sold globally were electric. It's only 5% in the U.S. were a big laggard there. But globally, it's really taken off.

Transcript note: 'were a big laggard' is probably 'we're a big laggard'.

You know, Canada has, like many countries like the U.S., chronically underinvested in the types of measures that are needed to protect the communities most at risk from these fires.

You know, in Canada, we should focus a lot more on protecting vulnerable communities in the wildland urban interface. And so there, you know, mechanical thinnings, some controlled burns, you know, more defensible spaces, stronger building codes.

So, you know, I don't think we're going to see a famine where millions of people die. Hopefully not. If we do, that'll be a bigger failure on the part of humanity than on the natural world.

We can do a lot to protect lives and livelihood, even if we're not going to be able to fundamentally change these occasional extreme smoke events from more remote fires in the boreal.

Now, thankfully, the world is a lot more technologically advanced than it was in the 1800s, but it just goes to show that we have to prepare for these things, and it can have a big effect on a lot of people.

And so I think practically there's not much we can do about these sort of smoke events and they are going become part of a new normal as, you know, the boreal becomes more flammable in an alarming world.

Transcript note: 'an alarming world' is probably 'a warming world'; 'are going become' drops 'to'.

So we can't rule it out, but I think it's one of these areas where the science isn't particularly settled yet. So I want to avoid overstating our confidence that there's a link there.

Some climate models suggest that we see stronger El Ninos in a warmer world, but some don't, right? And so I think this is an area where the jury is still a little bit out.

trying to force states to keep coal plants open is celebrating the demise of high-end emission scenarios and, you know, celebrating the fact that we're headed toward lower emissions under current policies when he's trying to undo those very policies.

It's sort of like throwing stones in glass houses, so to speak, if the US, particularly under an administration that's so opposed to climate action, is blaming Canada for a problem.

Climate scientists were not wrong 20 years ago when they created this scenario. But it turns out the world of today is not the same world we had 20 years ago.

One is that whether or not, you know, we were headed toward four and a half degrees or three and a half degrees, or if we're headed toward three degrees today, those are all bad outcomes. We still need to reduce emissions to avoid them.

And so now that we're cleaning up that air pollution, we're sort of unmasking past climate change. And that's, at least in my modeling, is the primary driver of we're seeing.

Transcript note: Words are missing between 'primary driver of' and 'we're seeing' (probably 'the acceleration').

So to put it another way, we're at 1.4 degrees centigrade warming today. We'd be closer to 2 degrees if we hadn't been masking some of that warming through air pollution accidentally.

A number of us IPCC authors published where we argue that the current rate of human-induced warming is probably closer to 0.3 or a little below 0.3, rather than 0.37.

You know, the globe as a whole has warmed about 1.5 degrees since the mid 1800s. It's going up at almost 0.3 degrees centigrade per decade.

But if we can get to a trajectory where we're reducing our greenhouse gas emissions, and in particular reducing our methane emissions quickly, we can help avoid the termination shock of sorts that we're seeing from cutting air pollution.

I mean, we're probably going to get close to two degrees this century, no matter what we do at this point, unfortunately, just because the world isn't getting its act together to reduce emissions quickly enough.

I personally am in favor of having it as a sort of break glass in case of emergency measure.

What I'm concerned about is, you know, in fact, in that New York Times piece, we had a good line on this, which we said, you know, the biggest risk of geoengineering isn't some Hollywood catastrophe, it's complacency.

And this is more or less a version of that, right? It doesn't solve the underlying problem. And so there is a worry that if we start doing it, people say, oh, well, we can just kick the can down the road.

And so the politics of it sort of become that you own the weather once you start doing it.

But I think at the end of the day, stuff like this isn't going to solve the bigger problems we have. We're not going to get the Colorado back to its full flow long term by doing cloud seeding.

The only way to stop the world from warming is to get to zero emissions globally. The only way to cool the planet back down durably is to remove more carbon than we're emitting.

And if this is going to be 10%, 20% of the solution later in the century, it's worth spending 1% or 2% of our money today on it.

And so if a company is deciding to get to net zero by spending an enormous amount of money on direct air capture or Bax or enhanced weathering instead of reducing its own emissions, it's effectively setting money on fire.

Transcript note: 'Bax' is BECCS (bioenergy with carbon capture and storage).

Some of them have these crazy worlds where we're removing half of all of what we're emitting today by the end of the century, and I think that's just absolutely insane.

So my general advice is always when you see a number, ask, is that a big number? Is that a small number? And compared to what?

Where actually a lot of the most dangerous misinformation is like planting a little seed of doubt or a little half-truth, not giving all of the numbers, just like giving one number that sounds kind of big or kind of small depending on the context.

So I think the key point there is that there are two opposing trajectories. There is this global decline and that is in some sense masking some of this regional increase

And obviously these hazards just don't get the same attention in terms of policy and media attention as wind turbines do.

Now, it's actually correct that wind turbines across the US kill a couple of million birds every year. What's missing there is the context of whether that's a little or a lot compared to other hazards to birds, right?

And I think there's quite a bit of this, often because there are incentives to not shift towards clean energy. If you are in the business of fossil fuels, you don't really want this transition to happen. So there's some incentive to deliberately seed doubt.

I think this is the challenge that people often have is that we are primed to focus in on this particular stories of the particular countries that are in the news and they're in the news because they're having a very very bad welfare year

Transcript note: 'welfare year' is a mistranscription of 'wildfire year'.

And to put in perspective, so Russia's welfare burn is responsible for around 83% of Europe's total. So basically, whether it's a high or a low welfare year in Europe depends on whether it's a high year for Russia

Transcript note: 'welfare burn' and 'welfare year' are mistranscriptions of 'wildfire burn' and 'wildfire year'.

Yeah so we also do the European Union which again I think when people are thinking about wildfires in Europe they're thinking about Greece or Spain or Portugal basically the EU and on that aggregate it's around the fifth highest in that time series

that in context of other hazards kind of top of the list is cats now cats probably kill just over two billion right so a thousand times higher than my estimates for wind turbines

these technologies are different from fossil fuels and it's because they're technologies and with technologies you can get these incremental improvements over time with oil gas and coal they're commodities right that's stuff that you dig out of the ground

the price of solar power has fallen by more than 90%, batteries by more than 90%, wind by 60% or 70%. And they're now, at the margin, cost competitive or undercutting the cost of fossil fuels.

Now that's flipped and that's the opposite, right? So many of these low carbon technologies are also economically viable or economically competitive. Plus you have the climate benefit as well.

every time global capacity of solar has doubled, you've had around a 20% drop in the price. So 10 years ago, solar was way more expensive than fossil fuels.

the deployment of solar has increased so much because it's got so cheap so there's two things that are advantage for solar it is now incredibly cheap to build and it's also very fast to build

but i think the challenge is to put that in perspective of what the status quo is And the reality often is that the solution we're building is better than what we have now.

I don't think the death toll from wind turbines should stop us from deploying wind power for a couple of reasons. I think the first one is that we are actually deploying clean energy for a reason.

So the amount of mining we need to do for renewables over decades is less than we need to do for fossil fuels in one single year.

I'm very positive about the solutions that we have to work with and continue to develop. But the onsite answer is that they're not perfect, right?

Transcript note: 'onsite answer' is probably 'honest answer'.

And the reality is that if you add up the amount of stuff we need to dig out the ground to build a low carbon energy over decades we're probably mining less than we mine fossil fuels in a single year

Transcript note: A word ('system') appears to be lost at the segment break after 'low carbon energy'.

I think my best estimate is that in the US wind turbines probably kill between one and two million birds every year so with the million statement that's broadly right but I think it's missing a lot of context.

that in context of other hazards kind of top of the list is cats now cats probably kill just over two billion right so a thousand times higher than my estimates for wind turbines

So I think the numbers are around more than half the number of birds that are killed. And the amount of energy you lose by turning the wind turbines off at very low speeds is like something like 0.1%.

I think we also need to think carefully about where we're putting wind turbines and what we're putting in place to try to mitigate those risks. I don't think this is purely about total numbers.

And part of that reason is to mitigate climate change and also has the side benefit of mitigation air pollution. And both of those are relatively large threats to birds and wildlife at large.

Transcript note: 'mitigation air pollution' is probably 'mitigating air pollution'.

Some particular species such as eagles, raptors, shore-like birds, they to be at higher risk. And that's for a couple of reasons. The main one being that they will often use ridgetops to get lift when they're flying.

Transcript note: 'they to be' is probably 'they tend to be'; 'shore-like birds' may be a mistranscription of 'shorebirds'.

I'm truly convinced that they're solvable. My journey there was from this place of, you know, maybe hopefully we can find a way to solve them. And I've become increasingly optimistic that we are solving them and we can do much more.

So you can look across the world and there are lots of pockets where you can see that progress is happening. And importantly, progress is accelerating. This stuff is getting faster and faster every year.

But we actually have made substantial progress on many of these metrics. And I think that's only accelerating and will continue to accelerate over the coming decades.

But they were only proven wrong because people invested in increasing crop yields and agricultural productivity techniques. So it took human effort to avoid that. And I think that's the same place we're in with lots of problems today.

a techno-optimist is someone that just thinks some technology will come along and save us in some vacuum. So we'll just invest in the technology and it will come and it will save us. And that's just not my view.

When did we last talk about the ozone hole, right? Go back some decades and that was the climate change of its day, right? That was a kind of impending environmental disaster. And the world largely solved the ozone hole problem, right?

we're very rapidly approaching one and a half degrees of warming we will pass that there's no way that we're going to stay below that

the way that these climate impacts work is the higher the temperature they increase the danger and the hazard right so even if when we go past 1.5 degrees you know fighting for 1.6 or 1.7 or 1.8

I think maybe what a lot of people get wrong is that they see these targets as these kind of cliffs that we fall off and once we pass these targets we hit some tipping, one global tipping point

I'm optimistic, but I'm not that optimistic that I think that we can do that. I think that the reality is that is too late for us now, that we just won't be able to achieve the one and a half degree target

I think there has been this narrative that the energy transition is only for rich countries And they'll do a bit, but the rest of the world are not going to do anything or can't do anything on this.

This has been part of an industrial strategy that has been going on and been planned for decades, right?

So once you've bought the thing, it's yours. And you're not tied into global energy markets. You're not tied into what war is going on on the other side of the planet and putting up the cost of gas or oil or, yeah.

what people maybe get wrong about the coal plant thing is that they see China building new coal plants and inevitably think they're going to burn huge amounts of extra coal. What China is largely doing there is building new and flexible coal plants

there are actually now a number of countries in sub-Saharan Africa that have more progressive policies on electrification of transport than North America or some countries in Europe.

I think in many parts of the world it will be, I think it will be a key structural shift. And I think it's not just Iran. I think it's the compounding of the energy crisis sparked by Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

So if you look at exports of batteries or EVs or solar panels and you look at the curve of what's happening in many countries in sub Africa, it's a flat line, it's a flat line, and then it spikes up.

Transcript note: 'sub Africa' is 'sub-Saharan Africa' split across two transcript segments.

So to put into context, in just a single year, China's electricity generation is increasing by a Germany-sized grid.

And last year, all of that came from solar and wind. So they are deploying electricity sources very quickly.

So take the example of China. In China, now more than half of new cars in China sold are electric.

So when you break it down by, you know, how many deaths occur per unit of electricity produced, burning coal or gas or oil is order of magnitude more dangerous than nuclear power.

So I think I'm not concerned about the nuclear safety part of this. The challenge for nuclear recently has been, can you build a power plant on time and on budget?

so you build this stuff again and again and again and if you do stuff a lot you progressively get better at it the problem of building a big nuclear plant is that you only get a couple of tries at it

You know, we have millions of people dying prematurely from fossil fuels every single year. So you have millions every year compared to thousands over decades.

But when you look at how many people died across those events, for 50 years or more, it's in the thousands, a couple of thousands at most.

If this huge demand and power from AI can stimulate that a bit and drive some innovation there and potentially drive the cost down, I think that's very, very positive.

But even in the US, I think the gap is exaggerated, right? So the majority of people on the left care about climate, but also more than half of people on the right also care about climate, right?

But that largely disappears when you just focus on clean energy, right? People on the right are also very in favour of clean energy.

if you look at where renewable energy has been built most quickly across the US is in incredibly red states right it's not blue states it's red states so Texas is a very clear example so Texas has been building huge amounts of solar

But that breaks down even further when you actually just stop talking about climate and you just talk about clean energy. Actually, the share of people on the right that support clean energy goes up even more

In every country in the world that's been surveyed, and that's a large number, the majority of people believe in climate change, care about climate change, are concerned and want to see governments and other policymakers make effort to take climate action.

For most countries in the world, even that polarisation gap is really, really small, right? The US is actually a bit of an outlier here. So the US is much more polarised than other countries.

It's like, yes, focus on the climate aspect of this is important, but focus on the other stuff that people care about as well, these co-benefits of clean energy, which is not just about climate.

To me, it's a straightforward success story in the sense that for rich countries, we are able to get access to more lighting.

No one changes how much they drive. No one changes how many cars they have. And if you just electrify that overnight, we would cut energy use by probably at least two thirds, if not three quarters.

it's something we probably take for granted in high-income countries, but when you have very, very low levels of electricity consumption, it makes a huge difference to your standard of living, whether you have an incandescent light bulb or whether you have an LED.

There could be dramatic cost reductions and price reductions for someone switching from a gasoline car to an electric car or whatever the electrification technology is. So I think that's where people could really feel it in their pockets.

yeah so if you look at global electricity use for lighting it's basically stalled over the last decade

if they were to swap that out for an led light bulb they could run that for four hours so the entire evening they have electricity to charge a mobile phone they can maybe run a fan for an hour because it's really really hot

Now, what you've seen across the rich world is much faster adoption of LED bulbs. And the impact that that has on lighting use, like electricity for lighting in those countries, is that generally electricity for lighting has gone down.

So if you were to put a dollar of gasoline in your car, only around 20 cents of that actually go towards turning the wheels and getting you from A to B.

So if you look at the data on, you know, for those that actually have access to electricity in low-income countries, how much electricity they're using per day at home around 50 to 100 watt hours

What LEDs have achieved is actually pretty unique. Other technologies have also seen efficiency gains, but I don't think to the same extent as lighting, right?

the fact that they could stick a solar panel on the roof and get really really cheap power but actually at the moment they don't really have any power at all

it does not make sense to me that if someone is extremely, extremely hot, siphling hot in the summer in heat and do not have a way to cool themselves, that's also fuel poverty to me.

Transcript note: 'siphling hot' is a garbled word, probably 'stifling' or 'sweltering'.

for most people in the world that live in hot climates, they do not have air conditioning. And it's actually very bad that they do not have air conditioning. And it will get even worse that they do not have air conditioning.

But it's still true that Europe has much, much higher heat deaths than the US. And I think a big part of that is air conditioning.

but actually they've gone down and they've gone down dramatically and that's because we developed weather forecasting and early warning systems and we knew how to design buildings that are resistant to extreme weather and floods

And even when it comes to climate change, it's a quarter to a third of our emissions. So I think if we have to solve these wide range of environmental problems, tackling that is really key.

Cement is 7% of global emissions, right? It's like double or triple aviation. Lots of people think about, when they think about climate, think about people flying. They don't think about people building houses and bridges, right?

No, I think population size will have little bearing at all on our ability to solve climate change or other problems.

So yeah, so I think the food transition that would be needed to greatly improve environmental outcomes is going much slower than the energy transition.

Yeah, globally it's going backwards because meat production and consumption is increasing. And a big part of this is because as people get richer and countries get richer, they shift to more diverse diets that have more meat and dairy in them.

And climate change is one driver, and for some species it's the primary driver, but actually the largest driver of biodiversity loss by far is basically food production and our use of land, right?

And the reality is what we need to do to solve climate change is we basically need to decarbonise lives by 2050, right?

Transcript note: 'decarbonise lives' probably lost a word at the segment break ('decarbonise our lives').

And you actually ended up with a much, much larger population by the end of the century. Four or five billion more people, which seems huge. And you'd think that would have a huge impact on our emissions.

if we were to just put solar panels on that land we would produce the same amount of electricity as we produce globally today so we'd be able to build a global sized grid on the land used for biofuels

But I think the second thing that I think people underappreciate is the challenge with energy demand for AI is really a geographical and localized problem.

So AI is roughly around half a percent of the world's electricity. And I think people are always very surprised because that probably seems quite small to people.

Electricity demand across Europe has actually fallen in the last 30 years. In the US, it basically hasn't grown much at all. And now we're starting to see this huge demand from AI.

Electricity demands to power AI, I think, will go up in the future. I think it's hard to see that going any other way.