Press Briefing: How Positive Tipping Points Change the Climate Story

Transcript

Mark Hertsgaard: Welcome to another press briefing from Covering Climate Now. I’m Mark Hertsgaard. I’m the executive director at Covering Climate Now and also the environment correspondent for the Nation Magazine. Our subject today, Positive Climate Tipping Points. For those who may not know, Covering Climate Now is a global collaboration of 500 plus news outlets that reach a total audience of billions of people. We’re organized by journalists for journalists to help all of us do a better job of covering the defining story of our time. You can go to our website, coveringclimatenow.org and you’ll see a list of our partners you can apply to join us. Everything is free to you. You can learn about our newsroom trainings, our annual awards program, weekly newsletters, et cetera. And our Newsmaker interviews, for example, just today covering Climate Now organized a Newsmaker interview with the actor and activist Jane Fonda about climate change in the 2024 elections in the United States.

You’ll find that story now at The Guardian, at Rolling Stone, at CBS News and many other Covering Climate Now partner outlets. Also, I want to commend to my fellow journalists here, climate on the Ballot. That’s a three-day online conference we hosted last week to help you and all of us talk through how best to make sure that climate change is part of the conversation in our elections coverage between now and election day. So again, you’ll find all that at our website coveringclimatenow.org. So now to today’s topic, positive climate tipping points. Many of us journalists have already heard about climate tipping points. The general idea, usually those are a climate scientist nightmare. A climate tipping point, if you need a little refresher, go to Wikipedia. They have a very brief and authoritative page on this. They define it as, “A critical threshold that when crossed, leads to large, accelerating, and often irreversible changes in the earth’s climate system.”

One example, melting ice sheets in Greenland and West Antarctica because white ice reflects the sun’s rays, but melted ice turns into dark water. Dark water absorbs sun’s heat, that increases global warming, which melts more ice into dark water and increases global warming again, and so on and so on. That is the nature of a climate tipping point. But what most journalists do not know yet is that there’s also something called a positive climate tipping point, and that’s what we’re going to be talking about today. Negative climate tipping points refer to physical changes in the earth’s climate system, but positive climate tipping points generally refer to changes in government policy and private sector behavior that can exponentially accelerate clean energy take-up and the phase-out of fossil fuels. One real-world example is how solar and wind are increasingly pushing coal out of the electricity market worldwide. The cost of solar and wind has been plummeting for years and it makes coal less and less competitive over time, such that in 2023 solar and wind accounted for 80% of the new electricity generation plant around the world.

There’s a lot more of these climate positive tipping points, and we’re going to hear about them today. We are unveiling with two of the world’s leading experts. That’s not hyperbole folks. Two of the world’s leading experts are unveiling a new study that outlines a series of climate tipping points. And this is really important for our coverage as journalists. We need to remember that the public needs to hear the good news as well as the bad news about climate change. That doesn’t mean we sugarcoat, it doesn’t mean we look at the world with rose-colored glasses. It means we tell the whole story what’s wrong, but also potentially how it can be fixed. That’s what we’re talking about today. Quick ground rules are… We are going to be hearing from one of the co-authors of the study in a moment. He’ll lay that out in about 10, 15 minutes and then there’ll be a response from the other expert and then they’ll be taking our questions.

So get ready with your own questions working journalists only, please. When you put your question, look at the Q&A button at the bottom of your screen, put in your question there and I will ask them on your behalf. Please put your name as well as your news outlet. We’d appreciate it.

And now it is my truly great pleasure to introduce first Christiana Figueres. She’s a founding partner of Global Optimism and a co-author of the book, The Future We Choose: The Stubborn Optimist’s Guide to the Climate Crisis. And as I’m sure you all know, from 2010 to 2016, Christiana was the executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, where she led the process that delivered the landmark Paris Agreement.

And Professor Tim Lenton, he’s the director of the Global Systems Institute and the chair in Climate Change and Earth System Science at the University of Exeter. His work identifying negative climate tipping points informed the setting of the 1.5 degree climate target of the Paris Agreement. And his recent work has focused on positive climate tipping points, including co-authoring the report being unveiled here today at this Covering Climate Now press briefing. Please join me in giving both of our panelists a warm virtual welcome. And with that, I turn it over to you, Professor Lenton.

Tim Lenton: Thank you Mark, and thanks everybody for being here. So I just want to walk you through, first of all, elaborate on that key concept of what is a positive tipping point for tackling climate change. And then tell you a bit about the ones that we’ve analyzed in the report we’ve launched today, in the main sectors of power production, cars, trucks, and electrifying the heating and cooling of our homes. But as Mark said, when you have a tipping point in a system, you heard about the climate example, well, there’s something going on within that system. It’s something we would call amplification or positive feedback. It’s where within a system, a little change can cause a further change that encourages and adds to the initial change that causes further change and so on in a feedback loop. Now, in the stuff we want to talk about today, what we’re talking about is things that are familiar to all of us.

The more we make of some new clean product, the better we get at making it. The more units we make of the new clean technology, the cheaper that the next unit gets to make. We have familiar names for those feedbacks. We’d call the first one learning by doing. We call the second one economies of scale. And then there’s the fact that as consumers, somebody starts adopting a new technology like solar panels on their roof or an EV, but we talk to each other, we learn from each other. And that often triggers something we call social contagion where through that learning process, the process of uptake among the consuming population starts to amplify. And the crucial thing is those reinforcing feedbacks can come together to create what’s sometimes called a critical mass. You get a point of adoption of the new clean green technology where the adoption becomes self-preparing. One more person adopts is enough to trigger the majority to do so.

So that’s the crux of a positive tipping point. And that’s founded on really… I hope you’d agree with me, pretty… Actually familiar concepts that are well-known and well-evidenced. And what we’ve done in this study is take a state-of-the-art model, which captures what those dynamics, those feedbacks, and we calibrate it on the best available data we’ve got for how these four key sectors are already performing across 71 different world regions with regard to the tipping of change from the old dirty fossil technologies to the new clean green technologies. So those four sectors we focused on, power, electricity generation, currently a quarter of still of greenhouse gas emissions, light road transport, cars in simple terms, that’s another 7 or 8% of emissions at the moment. Heavy goods transport on the roads, trucks, that’s 4 or 5%. And then heating and cooling at homes with the potential to shift to electric.

Well, it’s hard to get a very clear decisive figure, but that’s at least 10, 15, maybe more percent of emissions. So we’re tackling a big chunk of the three quarters of greenhouse gas emissions that we have to get rid of here. And what I want to show is maybe just a few slides to show you that the results of the exercise, but the crucial thing here is to ask the question, what are the most effective policies and initiatives that can bring forward the tipping point in each of these four major sectors? But crucially, on top of that, for the very first time we look at how sectors are coupled, how change in one sector can have causal effects that encourage change in another.

And so that’s… Well, as we get into that, to give you a concrete example that the moment you’ll be well aware that there’s growth of battery, electric vehicle sales and fleet, the batteries that are in battery electric vehicles, when they get maybe to 80% capacity, maybe you decide I’m going to get another car as a consumer, those batteries can come out of the cars and onto the grid because they’re still useful down to 20% capacity. And there on the grid, they can play a crucial role in balancing renewable electricity supply with electricity demand. Because when you want to… As I say in [inaudible 00:09:45], when you want to boil, the kettle isn’t always when the sun’s shining or the wind’s blowing.

So that’s just one example of how something coming from one sector can reinforce change in another. With that, I’ll just walk you quickly through the headline figures. We won’t overdo it on the PowerPoint, don’t worry. I’ll just check. I think you’re seeing that. Okay, the title slide now. Yeah. Great. So give me just one second to change over. First of all, just a sketch of those four sectors, and I gave you a sense that there are labeled with an R, a bunch of reinforcing or amplifying feedback loops that we look at that are between sectors as well as within sectors that were simulating.

I think I gave you a nice clear example. There’s several more of these coupling reinforcing feedbacks. We can come back to it in the questions if you want me to spell them out a little bit more detail. Here’s the first headline result, which where we ask ourselves with the current policies, how close are we on the global average to the tipping point of price parity, we’d call it between the fossil fuel technology and the clean technology in the four sectors. And the colored lines here, as you can see at the bottom, are some different major markets. And what we’re looking at is in the dotted line, when do we get to… Levelized cost price parity, we call it. When’s the clean alternative becoming the cheaper as well as the better option. Now clearly that’s varying a bit between the sectors here and between the countries, but let me just explain crucially what the tipping point is, especially in the power sector because we’re already past the tipping point where new renewables plus battery storage is a better cheaper option than new fossil fuel power generation.

So instead, we’re looking at the next tipping point here, which is where does it make economic sense to shut down an existing coal or gas burning power station and replace it with new renewables plus battery storage? And you see already in several countries that makes, we’re past that tipping point, but there’s a couple of big ones and the US is one of them where we’re about… Well, we will be there pretty soon by 2030 in the global average, even under the current policies and the main projection of the model. And in each of the four, three other sectors, it’s where the tipping point is. Where do electric heat pumps basically become the cheaper option for cars? It’s a straight comparison between electric vehicles and petrol diesel cars and for trucks, it’s electric trucks versus diesel trucks. So then let’s go on and look at, if we start to look in the global average at three types of policy, which one is more effective?

So let me just briefly tell you that in comparing the policies here for a carbon tax, we’re considering a pretty hefty value of 200 euros per tonne of CO₂ imposed from 2025 onwards. And mainstream economists have been busy telling us, we argued quite wrongly that pricing carbon and taxing it is the most effective policy, you’ll see in the next few minutes. It isn’t, it’s usually the least effective. We also compare that with the subsidy, which would be 30% of the upfront costs for the new clean technology subsidized from 2025 onwards. So that’s like 30% of the new heat pump for my home, for example. And then mandates, the mandates’ policy varies between the sectors, but for the power sector, it’s mandating the phase out of all coal burning power stations by 2035 in rich countries and 2045 in developing economies. For petrol and diesel cars, it’s saying you can’t sell them in 2035 onwards.

For trucks, we picked 2040 as the phase out date for diesel trucks and for the heat pumps, we also considered the 2035, you’ll only be able to buy a heat pump. So what you see if you’re watching the colored lines in simple terms is mandates are the most effective policy. It’s stimulating those reinforcing feedbacks that bring forward the tipping point. And the tipping point here is where the colored line is going to hop through the dotted line. And you see it’s coming quite soon in the global average, which is good news, and that mandates can bring it forward markedly.

And this really matters because we’re in a situation, as Christiana will emphasize, where we have to have greenhouse gas emissions in the five remaining years of this decade. Because we haven’t managed to start doing that yet, although we’re very close. So every year and every month counts and all the squiggly lines here, but this is how it looks… On the columns you’re looking at on the left, the current trajectory of change in each of the sectors, which are the rows, so power at the top, then heating and the second row, then cars, then trucks at the bottom. And then going along the columns, you’re comparing the effect of carbon tax subsidies or mandates in each of the sectors.

Same basic key messages coming across, mandates are the most effective thing, bringing forward the tipping point and transforming to clean technologies. And they’re way more effective when it comes to trucks, quite a lot more effective for cars and for heating as well.

And then I won’t go into the detail here, but what we’re able to show is that a mandate or in one sector, doesn’t just bring forward the tipping point in that sector, but it measurably brings it forward in the other sectors. And then it’s right to ask the question, where’s that potential for super tipping points that cascade across sectors? Where’s that strongest? We find that two key mandates seem to have disproportionate impact. One is that phasing out coal burning power generation that helps all four sectors tip sooner. The other one is mandating the end of sales of petrol and diesel cars by 2035. That helps accelerate the declining price and the improvement in quality of batteries. And that benefits both the power sector but also brings forward the tipping point for electric trucks measurably by several years in some major economies.

So to stress that all of this works best when countries coordinate, they act together, that’s what gives you the killer results as well of reinforcing change. And this final slide is just showing the difference that these policies, particularly the mandate policies across the sectors, managed to achieve, both in the cumulative emissions between now and 2050 at the top and the actual emissions in 2050.

And you could read this plot either way. One way is this is great news, we were able to eliminate more than three quarters of emissions by 2050, if we took this path. Or you could read it the other way and say, “Wow, there’s still more to do.”, which there always is. But the more to do again, the way we’re going to get there to stopping fossil fuel burning and stopping the greenhouse gas emissions from food and land systems is going to be through the intelligence of working with these positive tipping points where the change becomes self-propelling. So, that’s enough from me. Thanks. And back to Mark and over to Christiana, no doubt.

Mark Hertsgaard: Thank you so much. That’s Professor Tim Lenton. He is with the University of Exeter, and he is unveiling today’s positive climate tipping points report. Professor Lenton, just in the interest of remembering that sometimes they say England and America are two people divided by a comment language, I want to just focus in on the word mandate. And say to my colleagues, journalists, and correct me if I’m wrong here, a mandate is a government action, that is to say a law or a regulation that says to actors in the civil society, businesses or consumers for that matter, “You must do X, Y, or Z, or you must not do X, Y, or Z.”

Tim Lenton: Yeah.

Mark Hertsgaard: Right? It’s not a subsidy, it’s not a price signal, it’s a direct government command. Is that correct?

Tim Lenton: Yes, Mark. So to spell it out, it’s like saying you’re not going to be able to sell petrol and diesel cars in our market after 2035, for example.

Mark Hertsgaard: Yeah. Okay. Now we got that clear, now it’s my great pleasure to turn it over to Christiana Figueres.

Christiana Figueres: Thank you, Mark, and thank you, Professor Lenton, for that very clear presentation. As Tim has already mentioned, I hope we don’t need to emphasize to anyone here that we are in the decisive decade. Science has been abundantly clear about the fact that by the end of this decade, which is just five and a little bit years from now, we must have reduced current global greenhouse gas emissions to approximately one half of what they are right now. So, we are in an emergency situation.

And Tim did not say so in these terms, so I’m going to use, if I may, Tim, your messages and put it in a politically incorrect way. And that is, it is time for governments to take the training wheels off. The fact is that since the adoption of the Paris Agreement almost 10 years ago now, we have been learning in many sectors, especially the ones where Tim has focused his study on, we’ve been learning how to decarbonize the global economy. We now know in the energy sector, that we can actually move over toward clean, cheap, and higher performing energies. And we can do that in a way that is cost-effective. We also know that that is becoming clear in the transport sectors, that we can have clean transport, that we can have top performing transport, and that cost parity is around the corner.

And we also know that once that occurs, as Tim has suggested with these feedback loops, that investment then follows that trend. So I think the thing that to remember, at least for me, is that at least in those sectors that Tim has mentioned, we’re no longer experimenting. We actually know the basics. We may not know exactly everything, but we definitely know the basics. And the low hanging fruit has already been harvested by that learning phase that we have had in the past 10 years. So in order to harvest the higher hanging fruit, as Tim has pointed out, we now need tougher regulation. We are in a period in which we’re getting to tougher challenges than what we had before, with the advantage that we are much more experienced certainly in those sectors.

So as I said, time for governments to take the training wheels off and mandate decarbonization, which means put very clear targets and timelines for the decarbonization of sector by sector. And that target of decarbonization sector by sector will be different from country to country, and certainly from sector to sector. But the point is that there needs to be clarity. Because otherwise, business doesn’t know exactly in what direction to go, and certainly investment sector is confused.

So from the point of view of governments, because we are preparing, as everyone knows, for the next round of NDCs, which are the national policies that governments will present in February of next year. What it actually comes down to is that all of those NDCs need to have three characteristics. They need to be ambitious, which means they need to be science aligned for 1.5 degree maximum. They need to be built on sectoral pathways because the sectors across the coherence of the sector needs to obey the targets and timetables that would be established for that sector. And they need to be catalytic in the sense that they really need to be effective.

We have to go beyond incentives, subsidies, all the training wheels that the economy has had for 10 years, which were great and we needed them. But we have learned. We now know almost, how to ride the bike. And if governments do not remove the training wheels, we will never learn to ride the bike properly. So, it is time to take those training wheels off and be able to take advantage of the innovative capacity of the global economy. And finally, if governments do not take those training wheels off, they’re not only underestimating what the innovation capacity of the global economy is, but they’re actually holding it back.

Mark Hertsgaard: Thank you, Christiana Figueres. And I will just remind my fellow colleagues here that this briefing is totally on the record. You are allowed and indeed encouraged to write stories about it. I think we just got our headline, governments need to take the training wheels off. And now I’m going to invite all of you to put some questions in the Q&A to ask follow-ups here. But I’m going to take the prerogative of the chair and ask one or two at the top here.

It’s very striking to me, as someone who’s covered climate policy for more than 30 years now and all over the world, that this report says mandates are what work, mandates are what work best, not subsidies, not incentives, et cetera. And I’m going to put this question first to you, Christiana Figueres. Because clearly, the mindset in global politics and indeed in the COP negotiations for many years, has been one led frankly by my country, the United States, that shies away from government mandates. Much prefers so-called market-friendly solutions to climate change, rather than the government saying, “No, you cannot do this at any price or you must do this.”

So my question to you is, have I got that right, that this would mark a pretty significant shift in the policy directions on climate? And could you speak from your perspective, as someone who has dealt with so many governments when you were putting together the Paris Agreement, and since, you know those conversations inside those rooms, behind closed doors. How can we as journalists and the public that we report to, how can they understand that and perhaps even influence and push governments to do what really needs to be done here?

Christiana Figueres: I think what Professor Lenton has been very clear about is that this is not a blanket mandate, this is sector-specific. First, it is targeted at those sectors that are actually mature in both their technological performance and in their cost parity. So, it’s not that we’re saying they need to mandate across all sectors. Some sectors that are completely immature and not ready for this are all the land use sectors. That is evident. What we’re saying is let us identify those sectors that have benefited from technological progress, from investment, from innovation, and that are already at cost parity or beyond, or about to get to cost parity. And let’s take advantage of those sectors to actually pull the economy forward into a decarbonized state. So, it is not for every country the same date, and it’s not for every sector. So, let’s be careful about that.

Where there is a difference, Mark, there is, as you say, that it is time to go into targets and timetables for sectoral progress and sectoral decarbonization. We cannot continue, sorry, to babysit and hold by the hand, this transformation, we just don’t have the time. 2030 is around the corner. We actually need to be adults around the table about this, take the training wheels off. And yes, governments need to identify in what sectors can they now move to mandates, and do so.

And it is not very different from what we’re doing in other adjacent sectors. We know that, for example, carbon disclosure started with training wheels in a very voluntary way, in a very, I would almost say in a very primitive way. And now we’re moving toward carbon disclosure that is going to be mandated. This is the way that we have to do decarbonization. It is not different from what is being done in many other spheres of decarbonization.

Mark Hertsgaard: And just to follow up, what is the role that journalists and our audiences can play in pushing governments to recognize the findings of this report and adopt them? First you, Christiana, and then Professor Lenton?

Christiana Figueres: Well, that is exactly the point of this conversation here, to really invite journalists to understand this concept that Professor Lenton is putting forward. And to help us take that message that we are ready for mandates in certain sectors in certain countries. And that will actually pull. So to see the benefit of this rather than the burden, how does this actually help decarbonization? How does it lead to a much more stable, a much more high performing economy? What are all of the benefits of this? As opposed to harping constantly on what the burden is, on what the responsibility is. This is a huge opportunity. So it is an invitation to focus on these opportunities, but also with discipline.

Mark Hertsgaard: Folks, you can see why this is the co-author of the book, Climate Stubborn… Sorry, I’m going to get this wrong if I don’t look at it. The Future We Choose: The Stubborn Optimist’s Guide to the Climate Crisis, Christiana Figueres. And Tim Lenton, could you speak to that a little bit? You’ve been around policy makers a lot, so what’s the holdup here?

Tim Lenton: Well, I want to build on what Christiana said and emphasize that several, quite a lot of nations are already showing their signaling support for this agenda in specific sectors. Since COP26 in Glasgow, we’ve had something called the Breakthrough Agenda, which many UNFCCCC signatories are fully signed up to. Which is absolutely framed by my friend and colleague, Simon Sharpe, originally around this way of thinking. And is really built further upon by voluntary initiatives like the Powering Past Coal Alliance, where now a growing number of nations are committing to mandating the phase out of coal power.

And what we see in some wonderful examples of nations like Chile, is that it’s coming strongly from industry and from the people that they don’t want coal power anymore. So in that specific example, the copper industry that’s arguably one of the strongest industries in the country, has said, “We don’t want coal-powered electricity. We want solar and wind. And we want the government to be going faster and sooner and bringing forward the phase out…”

Tim Lenton: Going faster and sooner and bringing forward the phase out mandate for our country. And I would argue that they’re the people. It’s a popular mandate as well because the people are voicing their disapproval for this dirty technology and they’re embracing of the change. So you’ve got that reinforcing feedback loop between the populace and the policy and business. So we’re already seeing smart citizens, smart communities, smart policy makers move in the right direction and we’re just emphasizing, this is take the training wheels off, as Christiana says, but this is the right lever to do the radical acceleration of change. We need to get the radical benefits we’re going to get in each of these sectors from, well, not just from less climate change, but remember cleaner air. Remember that 5 million people are dying worldwide every year from fossil fuel air pollution still.

Mark Hertsgaard: That’s Professor Tim Lenton of the University of Exeter. A number of my colleagues have asked in the chat in the Q&A, how do we get the report? Look in the chat. The report is linked right there at the top of the chat and we’ll put it in again right now. I urge all of you to read this. This is a potentially game-changing shift and because it is so important to recognize, as just was spoken about, how parts of some countries are way ahead than others on this. Again, that’s where we as journalists can be so helpful. The average reader or listener or viewer does not know what’s going on around the world. That’s our job to tell them that it can be worked well. And so because of that, although we’ve got a number of questions, I’m going to start with a question from outside the United States on this, and then there’s a question also from a colleague of mine in New Mexico, and I encourage all of you to keep adding them here in Q&A. We’ll get to as many as we can.

This question comes from, pardon me if I mispronounce this, Toralf Staud, and he is with I believe, or she, I beg your pardon, with Klimafakten in Germany. And they write, “In Germany, but probably other countries as well, we have conservative and market liberal politicians calling for ‘technology open’ or ‘technology neutral policies’ and they’re arguing against, for example, an electric vehicle mandate because ‘the government does not know which technology is best’. What do you reply to them? How do you, that is to say science, know that EV and heat pumps are indeed the most promising technologies worth to support?” That’s the question. And I’ll just add that as exactly the same argument here in the United States, in Japan. We know this from working with our colleagues around the world. So very good question, Toralf Staud. Over to you, Professor Lenton.

Tim Lenton: Well, of course neoliberals are arguing to not intervene with an industrial strategy, but they’re the same people that have got us into this mess. So frankly, I’m going to be blunt and say why would I listen to them? I need to listen to the data and the evidence, as your question rightly highlights. So how does government know what technology is best? We can take that piece by piece. We can look at EVs. There’s a lot of noise out there, a lot of nonsense. Yes, at the moment there’s slightly more embedded emissions because of the big batteries in making an electric vehicle. But if for example, it’s powered on 100% renewable electricity, those extra embedded emissions as soon paid back or eliminated within six months of driving the average EV. And you’ve got to remember the other co-benefits that come with cleaner air, less mortality and the things I mentioned for an EV.

We also know that it’s perfectly possible to make the EV batteries in an almost zero emissions way by making them with renewable power and also that they can be recycled the end of life. They’re highly valuable. So it’s incontrovertible that that’s a superior technology. You highlighted, did you highlight the heat pumps as a second question? That’s a basic question of thermodynamics and engineering, if you like. A heat pump is about four, sometimes five times more efficient than a gas boiler as a way of heating your home. So you could go to many sources, maybe I’ll look some up and put them in the chat for you. But this is solid scientific knowledge in terms of the basic superiority that most of these electrification options are, at bottom line, way more efficient than burning stuff in an inefficient way that you barely get a fraction of the energy from burning the fossil fuel.

So we cannot continue to listen to the voice of neoliberalism and deregulating markets which has driven us into this climate crisis. We have to have the collective intelligence to know when to deploy effective measures to make the change to a better future for all of us at the speed that’s necessary to avoid the severe consequences of climate change we’re otherwise going to suffer.

Christiana Figueres: Can I just add, Mark?

Mark Hertsgaard: Please do.

Christiana Figueres: Sorry, can I just add? I totally agree with Tim, but the other way of thinking about it as well, which is complementary, what the regulations and the market and the mandates ought to be doing is establishing the date beyond which we can no longer pollute. That is the sense of those mandates, is to say after a certain date, let’s take 2035 for example, the market will no longer be able to offer new cars that are using fossil fuels, whether that is gasoline or diesel, so that you stop the pollution, you close the faucet on the pollution, and then you let the market compete for what technologies are best in which use cases in which countries. So it’s not that you’re mandating one specific solution for all. It would not be a straitjacket. What we’re doing is we’re closing the faucet on the incumbent fossil fuels and then opening up to the market to say what is the best solution and let the market decide that. But you have to close the faucet.

Mark Hertsgaard: Thank you. So it is government and market processes here. And just I want to underline something that Professor Lenton said so it’s not lost. Four to five times more efficient is the heat pump. That’s why it’s an exponential difference when we talk about these tipping points, exponential differences. And again, we as journalists, we don’t editorialize. That’s not our job. But we certainly can interrogate and report out the statement that Professor Lenton made here that basically the neoliberal policies, we kind of tried that for the last 20 years and it hasn’t worked. Now we can interrogate that in our reporting. It’s not that we have to take a stand on this either way, but tell the facts and then present this.

So with that in mind, I’m going to take another question from overseas before I come back here to the United States. And this is from Brazil, from Giovana Girardi. She’s the climate correspondent of Agencia Publica and she says, “Christiana mentioned that the focus on these mandates are not for all countries. In Brazil, most emissions come from land use, but there is a stubborn interest of the government in increasing oil production. You showed in your study a slow improvement in cars in Brazil. What is your suggestion to address this incoherence?” And I think maybe both of you should speak to that. It’s directed to you, Christiana, but Tim, I’d like to hear from you as well.

Christiana Figueres: Tim, do you want to take the technical part and I’ll complement?

Tim Lenton: I certainly can have a go first. You’re absolutely right, obviously in the question around the land use sector, and although this report isn’t specifically on that, we’ve now had our focus, we’re actively working on what would it mean or what would it take to have a positive tipping point away from the net land use emissions that’s happening in Brazil and across the Amazon basin to a situation of net carbon removal from land use sector. And in that case, it is a positive tipping point story. I’m going beyond today’s report, but I think it’s worth mentioning because ultimately it’s meat eating and particularly beef consumption that’s still the net driver of deforestation. And we’re seeing in many richer nations a trend towards declining beef and overall meat consumption. And we’re seeing a rise in plant-based diets, plant-based alternative proteins, and that could have disproportionate leverage to tackle that issue.

So this thinking does thread together across that. In terms of Brazil’s opportunities, my experience with working with Brazilian policymakers is we are seeing some concrete appetite for progress. And in the transport sectors that you hint at, they’re in a very strange situation where they pushed hard for biofuels more, arguably more than anybody else in the world and that could leave them in a sort of stranded position because it’s not really a meaningful future where everybody else has electrified cars, trucks and road transport. And you’re all going to have to make the only biofuel cars in the world, which you’ll be the only market for. That doesn’t look realistic. So we’re actively working with Brazilian policymakers to look at the options for electrifying trucking as well as buses and cars. And as you might have seen quickly in the plots, they’re actually also already on total cost of ownership the most cost-effective option because the price of driving in them on electricity is just way cheaper.

So I know I think you’re absolutely right to emphasize the issues with stubborn, as you put it, stubborn interest in increasing oil production. But I would emphasize that that is a very unsafe strategy in a world where we’re seeing a global market tipped towards electric cars and electric trucks. And the major market for oil in the world is cars. So we already calculate that many trillions of dollars of oil assets supposedly is, in fact, stranded asset. It’s oil that countries think they’re going to be able to sell in the future that they’re not going to be able to sell because there won’t be a use for it because the vehicle fleet worldwide would be electric. So yes, all I can say to those particular policymakers you mentioned is they need to come and do some homework with us because they’re taking a very risky and foolish strategy when you have such wonderful renewable energy potential that’s also expanding, I should emphasize, in Brazil. Christiana?

Christiana Figueres: Well, I would agree to that and I would say it is a risky option viewed from today. The fact is that one has to recognize that Brazil’s emission profile is highly slanted toward land use because of deforestation in the Amazon and also because Brazil’s energy grid is so clean because of the overwhelming presence of hydro and also because Brazil started way before many other countries to begin to bring down the carbon intensity of the fuels that are used in transport. So it’s because Brazil many years ago already experimented and that was an experiment that Brazil did, bringing down the emissions from transport and already had a pretty clean matrix, and therefore their deforestation emissions are so high.

That is not a typical profile of a developing country. Most developing countries’ emissions profile are actually much more slanted toward transportation. That is not Brazil’s case. Now, of course, next year we will be in Brazil in the COP and it is going to be a very interesting COP because I am sure that the Brazilian presidency is going to bring forward the issues of deforestation very clearly on behalf of all of the heavily, still fortunately heavily forested countries of the world.

And let’s remember that that sector, everything to do with land use is not yet one of the sectors where I think even Professor Lenton would not suggest that we go to mandates yet, because there we still do need the training wheels. We haven’t figured this out. We don’t have a business model to keep trees standing. We don’t have a business model yet for most of the land-based solutions that we know that we need to implement. So that is not one of the sectors for which we could say we’re going to mandate. So we have to differentiate between which sectors are mature and ripe enough for mandating and which ones are not.

Mark Hertsgaard: Thank you so much. Two questions, both really smart from here in the States. One from Hannah Grover, she’s with the New Mexico Political Report. She points out that many communities in New Mexico are rural in nature and people rely on trucks to haul water to their house. Some people, especially on Navajo Nation land, they drive more than 100 miles to access clean drinking water. Electric trucks still not price competitive in New Mexico. So the question is, how can mandates be implemented in an equitable way that doesn’t leave communities in rural areas and indigenous people behind where the electrical infrastructure is also still limited, and how can journalists really gauge whether policies at the state government level are hindering or are helping this transition?

Tim Lenton: I can come in, I think.

Mark Hertsgaard: Go ahead.

Tim Lenton: Absolutely crucial question to consider the just transformation element here. I think I would emphasize that there’s an upfront cost clearly for getting a different kind of truck, but if you had the policy support to have an electric truck rather than a pet diesel one, you’d rapidly find it’s a lot cheaper to run. So it is the better option already, actually, in total cost of ownership, it’s about having support where it’s needed from policy to get over that upfront cost barrier, I suspect. But in the broader picture of answering the question, clearly, there are situations where people who are less well off may feel, I do not want to be, or I fear that I’m going to be disadvantaged in this transformation. First, we need to repeatedly emphasize to each other that the great majority are in a situation of net gain With this transformation. 80% of the world’s people are living in net fossil fuel importing economies, and just beginning to make the shift away from fossil fuels to renewables is going to be an immediate economic benefit.

But for those situations where communities that need to be supported are fearing or being directly disadvantaged, that’s precisely where policy has to work to give them the support or the social safety nets that can enable them to take advantage of what is certainly cleaner, greener, better alternatives. I’ll keep my answer short, but both of us could give you many concrete examples of intelligent and thoughtful policymaking at national and subnational scales that have helped support communities and peoples who feel they might be missing out, and actually help them take advantage of the net benefit in the change.

Mark Hertsgaard: Christiana?

Christiana Figueres: Again, I totally agree with Tim, and would just complement to say that this transition mandate that Tim is recommending always has a timeline. It is not from Sunday to Monday, it is not from 2024 to 2025, there is a timeline that allows for the transition, and the sooner that that timeline, that target and timetable is established, that then unleashes investment into infrastructure development, such as in this case that we’re talking about, very important to have the charging infrastructure that is necessary for these long, long drives that are necessary in these states, such as in New Mexico. You have to have that charging infrastructure, but that charging infrastructure is not going to be built, it’s not going to be invested into, unless there is a very clear sign that, by such and such a date, we would not be able to access any more new trucks, let’s remember that we’re talking about the renovation of fleets, anymore new trucks that use fossil fuels.

So those targets, those timelines, are important, because what they do is, they pull forward the investment into not just the trucks themselves, the technologies themselves, which, by the way, once you have a critical amount of investment made into that technology, it brings the cost down, but also, into the infrastructure. So you need both, you need the investment into both the vehicle and into the necessary infrastructure. But if you have the time to make that transition and you understand that that is actually going to provide more reliable, cheaper, less maintenance … I mean, how many truck owners spend weeks and weeks without being able to use their truck because they have to put it into the shop?

The fact that you can have electric trucks that need much less maintenance, are much less exhausting to drive, much less … And let’s also think about health of these truck drivers that go for hours and hours and hours sitting behind the wheel. This is a much better alternative for the driver, for his or her health, certainly, for the environment, for sure. But in general, there’s so many more benefits, what we need is just a clear signal that that is going to be the future, and once you know that, then industry and finance begins to prepare to make that future a reality.

Mark Hertsgaard: So speaking here as a working journalist myself to my colleagues, here is … If today’s report is the news peg, you can also use this report to talk about the Inflation Reduction Act. This very question is an example, there is a lot of money in the Inflation Reduction Act for both parts of this to put up the electronic … Sorry, electric vehicle infrastructure, but also, to subsidize through tax credits, consumers’ purchases of electric vehicles. And I have to say to my colleagues, we in the media have not done a very good job explaining the Inflation Reduction Act to the public. The latest polling I’ve seen showed that 70%, that’s seven zero, percent of the American public knew little or nothing about the Inflation Reduction Act. That is the signature climate achievement of the Biden administration, and that’s on us. So here’s an opportunity to kind of do a little better, this report is a great news peg for that. So quickly-

Christiana Figueres: And Mark, can I just add that the IRA, this Inflation Reduction Act, is the signature regulation in the world on decarbonization, because not only is it effective in accelerating the technological progress, but because of what is even more important than that. It’s because its design and its implementation is focused precisely on benefiting the most vulnerable populations. That whole social benefit aspect was very pioneering when it was built into the IRA, the Europeans had not thought about that, and the Europeans are now thinking about, how do they also bring that in to their next chapter of regulation? So if there was any country that really thought about not just the technological improvement, but also, how do you use that technological improvement to benefit especially the most vulnerable? It is the United States, and that is not very well-known.

Mark Hertsgaard: And that is another opportunity for us as journalists to do accountability reporting here, 40% of the IRA money is supposed to go to disadvantaged communities, so go into your local community and check that out, is that actually happening? Quickly now to Los Angeles, the biggest national public radio station in Los Angeles, KPCC, and their digital companion site, LAist, Erin Stone, Erin, it’s great to be hearing from you, she has a really smart question here about this, and it’s a little bit of a devil’s advocate question, about mandates and the effectiveness of them. What about the, seems to be, pretty clear and present danger that mandates will be met by lawsuits that can not just delay this, but create further social division, and does your study take that aspect into account? And then, second follow-up is, how can local reporters elevate the opportunities that these mandates present in terms of, say, local jobs? What are the narratives that we can be using? But first, what about the lawsuits?

Tim Lenton: Very key question, or very insightful question, Erin. I mean, I think it’s, to state, perhaps, the obvious, the crucial issue of leadership here is to have the strength of leadership when you issue a mandate to stick with the commitment you make in the face of all of the incumbents who are going to lobby the hell out of you to not stick with that mandate. A story we saw play out in California probably more than once in the past, but certainly, over the original zero emissions vehicle mandate, that was just subjected to so much systematic lobbying from the invested interests of the fossil fuel industry and everybody else, that they eventually faulted. So yes, the law, well, what is the law for? Wasn’t it meant to be there for the collective public good? Of course, it often gets manipulated for either side’s ends, but we really have to be in a place with this need for a transformation that’s for the good of us all, and arguably, the protection of us all, that the law functions as it should with governance for the public good.

So yes, I don’t deny that there might be incumbent fight back through the courts and the law, but that asks for, I think, yes, a maturity of governance to ensure that the law is deployed in favor of the public good and not against it, which might sound like a rather idealist for this position coming from across the Atlantic. But what I could emphasize is that, if we take that holistic view on how the law is being used across the world, we could take some encouraging signals that the number of, let’s say, jurisdictions and governments that are seen to be failing on acting on climate change, that are getting taken to court by the people, is escalating exponentially. So whilst I recognize the concern you raise, I would sense that there might be a tipping point, in the holistic sense, going on in the law and its use in this transformation, and that is an essential part of the puzzle.

Mark Hertsgaard: Christiana, could you speak to the second part of that question, too, about the narratives for local reporters to help the public understand the opportunities here for jobs and such?

Christiana Figueres: Exactly, thank you, thank you for that, because I think that’s the really key part of this. I don’t think that we should be surprised that we are in a messy transition. Transitions are always messy, and this is messy from any perspective that you want to look at it. The fact that the fossil fuel industry takes advantage of the messiness of the transition to distort the facts and turn the narrative around shouldn’t be surprising, because frankly, they’re fighting for their dear life. They know that that industry is one whose expiration date is already on the wall, and they’re just trying to push that expiration date out as far as possible. That’s understandable. What is not understandable — or excusable — is that they do that at the cost of public health and of common good. That is simply unacceptable, and that is where media comes in.

That is exactly where … That ESG backlash that we saw in the United States one or two, or I don’t know how many years ago, that was predictable, that is what the fossil fuel industry is going to do in order to delay climate policy as much as possible, and they will do it again and again and again and again. And that is where media responsibility comes in, to not allow the facts to be distorted, to do really true, very, very scientific and fact-based reporting, not ideological reporting. Decarbonization of the economy, whether it is in the United States or in any other country, is not a matter of ideology, is not where we are, it is a matter of common good, it is a matter of human survival, it is a matter of the quality of life of all citizens on this planet. It’s not about ideology, so let us not let the facts be distorted by a handful of industry agents whose only interest is to protect their industry for a few more years.

Mark Hertsgaard: That’s Christiana Figueres, she is the head of global optimism, and of course, played an essential role in putting together the 2015 Paris Agreement that mandated the … I should not say mandated, that proposed the 1.5-degree target, and so many of these tipping points, the negative tipping points, endanger that 1.5-degree target. We could talk all day here, this has been incredibly helpful. I want to mention that Professor Lenton is open to taking follow-up questions after we go off camera here, and his email, I believe is in the chat there, I’m just going to repeat it for people who are just getting up to speed here, that’s t.m.lenton, L-E-N-T-O-N, @exeter, E-X-E-T-E-R, .ac.uk.

And a closing word from us at Covering Climate Now, we have long been believers in the importance of solutions journalism, climate solutions journalism, which, as I said earlier, it’s not sugarcoating, it’s not cheerleading, it’s not activism, it’s telling the entire story. So for example, with Erin Stone’s last question about lawsuits, one of the things that we can do, accountability reporting is solutions reporting, follow efforts, and report to the public on the efforts if there are lawsuits, figure out which mandates are susceptible to lawsuits, which are not. That is all very much within our remit as journalists to … As we say, the best climate coverage localizes the climate story, it humanizes the climate story, and it solutionizes the climate story.

So today, we have gotten an incredible briefing and a lot of meat here that we can put out into our stories. I encourage all of you to be writing about this, both of stories today, but also, let this inform your coverage going forward. Look at the report, it’s well worth your time. It’s well-written, it’s not in science and policy wonk speak, you can understand it and report it out. So with that, I’m going to thank my team here at Covering Climate Now for putting this together, and our special thanks to Christiana Figueres and to Tim Lenton for taking the time during this very busy week at Climate Week New York to really bring us up to speed on a potentially game-changing intellectual intervention in the climate debate. And with all of that, I will simply say, on behalf of Covering Climate Now, this is Mark Hertsgaard wishing you a very pleasant day.