Cleaning Up: Leadership in an Age of Climate Change

Latest Episodes:

'This Is A Narrative War' - How To Win The Climate Argument | Ep172: John Marshall Jul 24, 2024

Show notes

Who are the merchants of doubt and how can their narrative be countered? How much money does it cost to get someone to take action on climate change?

This week on Cleaning Up, Bryony Worthington is joined by John Marshall, the founder of the Potential Energy Coalition, a marketing firm that uses data-driven marketing techniques to accelerate the energy transition and climate action. They discuss:

How John transitioned from a career in Madison Avenue marketing to founding a non-profit focused on climate change, inspired by his son.
Potential Energy Coalition's use of data-driven marketing strategies to identify the most effective messaging and framing to motivate climate action, including leveraging loss aversion and emphasising what people love and fear losing.
The importance of using marketing to shape the climate narrative, counter disinformation, and create political space for climate policies.
How marketing can be used to promote clean energy solutions like electric vehicles and heat pumps, and the role of the nonprofit sector in supporting pro-climate policies and infrastructure.
Insights on global marketing strategies for climate action, highlighting the need to tailor messages to local markets while maintaining a unifying narrative.

Links & More:

Potential Energy Coalition website
John's TED talk
The Schoolbus Ad
Cleaning Up Episode 141 with Naomi Oreskes

The Climate Challenge is an Engineering Challenge - Ep171: Dr. Rosemary Barnes Jul 17, 2024

Show notes

This week on Cleaning Up, Michael Liebreich sits down with mechanical engineer and YouTube creator Dr Rosemary "Rosie" Barnes to discuss the critical role of engineering in addressing climate change. Rosie shares insights from her work developing clean energy technologies and her popular channel "Engineering with Rosie," where she tackles topics like wind turbine design, the hydrogen debate, and the nuclear power discussion in Australia through the lens of engineering. Rosie and Michael dive into the engineering challenges and solutions driving the energy transition, from optimising wind turbine size to navigating the politics around nuclear power. They also explore why engineers' voices are often overlooked in the climate conversation, and Rosie offers practical advice for the next generation of women in STEM fields.

Read/watch more:

Rosie's YouTube Channel
Michael on Engineering with Rosie
Are Vertical Axis Wind Turbines Better?
How Big Things (Should) Get Done - Ep128: Prof. Bent Flyvbjerg
GenCost by CSIRO
Australia's Nuclear Future - Centre for Independent Studies

The EV Revolution is Unstoppable - Ep170: Ben Nelmes Jul 10, 2024

Show notes

Electric vehicles are finally becoming more mainstream, but this hasn’t stopped a flood of negative stories and political attempts to scare people away from making the switch to better, more cost efficient vehicles. So is the EV revolution now inevitable? Bryony Worthington sits down with Ben Nelmes, the Chief Executive of New Automotive, a UK-based not for profit focused on the clean energy transition in road transport. Ben shares his insights on the UK and European electric vehicle (EV) markets, including:

How data and evidence can shape policy debates around EVs and other clean technologies
The latest trends in EV costs, range, and charging infrastructure
The politics of EVs in the UK and Europe, including differences between political parties
The impact of EVs on government revenues and potential reforms to vehicle taxation
The role of EVs in integrating renewable energy onto the grid

Read more/links:

What a New UK Government Means for Climate and Energy - Ep169: Dr Simon Evans Jul 03, 2024

Show notes

With the UK general election tomorrow, the Cleaning Up team sits down with Dr Simon Evans of Carbon Brief to run through each party's manifesto, and what they say about UK climate and energy policy. With Labour widely predicted to win, will the UK's become an international leader on climate once more? How will GB Energy work? And where will all the money come from to fund the investments needed to turn the UK into a clean energy power house.

Dr Simon Evans is the deputy editor and senior policy editor at Carbon Brief, a UK-based website covering the latest developments in climate science, climate policy and energy policy.

Read more:

Carbon Brief
Cleaning Up Episode 131 with Tzeporah Berman
Cleaning Up Episode 25 with Bryony Worthington
Cleaning Up Episode 30 with Claire Perry O'Neill
The Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Initiative
The Beyond Oil & Gas Alliance

Hot Rocks in a Box: The Rise of Thermal Batteries - ep168: Anand Gopal Jun 26, 2024

Show notes

As the world transitions away from fossil fuels, one of the biggest challenges is decarbonizing industrial processes that require consistent, reliable sources of energy to produce high-temperatures. Typically these processes run on fossil gas, but now thermal batteries offer a solution by using electricity to store renewable energy in the form of heat.

Anand Gopal, Executive Director of Policy Research at Californian think tank Energy Innovation, joins Baroness Bryony Worthington to discuss his team's research on using thermal batteries to provide heat for manufacturing. Or as he calls them, hot rocks in a box. By storing intermittent solar or wind energy as the heat of molten salts or crushed rocks, thermal batteries can deliver reliable heat on-demand.

While the tech is almost at commercial availability, there's still one big obstacle: cost. In many countries it is still much cheaper to use gas over electricity, and that makes powering up thermal batteries uneconomical. So what needs to be done to employ them at scale? And will they take the wind out of hydrogen's sails? Find out on this week's episode of Cleaning Up.

Texas Hold'em: Playing Poker With Methane - Ep167: Grant Swartzwelder Jun 19, 2024

Show notes

Depending on who you ask, methane is either a useful transition fuel to a low-carbon future, or a super polluter. The science of methane says that for natural gas to have a lower climate footprint than other fossil fuels, particularly coal, there can be leakage of no more than 3.2% from end to end. Yet studies across the US show wildly different leakage rates. One of the most influential, by Robert Howarth of Cornell University, puts it at 4.8%, making methane worse for the environment than coal. The EPA tells a different story, and says leakage rates are just 0.93%. All of this really matters for the climate, especially since Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The US has become the world's biggest producer and exporter of natural gas, and hundreds of billions of dollars have been invested globally on the premise that natural gas is a cleaner stop-gap between our fossil present and our low-carbon future. So who's right? And how can we find ways to reduce those methane emissions in either case. Grant Swartzwelder, founder of OTA Environmental Solutions and ESG Dynamics, based in Dallas, Texas, joins Cleaning Up to tease out the problem.

Episode Update (Dec 2024)

The 3.2% figure refers to the relative warming impact of coal-fired power generation versus national gas with a given level of leakage on day one - when all of the methane is still in the atmosphere. As methane decays in the atmosphere faster than CO2 is absorbed, the “breakeven” level of fugitive emissions increases as you look at longer periods. If you take the standard 100-year warming period, fugitive emissions from natural gas would need to be around 8% - well above those measured in the US – for gas power to be as bad as coal power. At 20 years the figure is around 4%. (source: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1202407109)
The 4.8% figure has been modified by Professor Howarth subsequent to the release of the episode, based on critiques received when it was in pre-print. Criticism continues, however, and one proposed corrected analysis shows that 100-year GHG intensity of LNG that are at most 15% below the lowest general estimates for coal-fired power. (source: https://thebreakthrough.org/issues/energy/a-major-paper-on-liquified-natural-gas-emissions-is-riddled-with-errors)

More links/resources:

OTA Environmental Solutions - https://otaenvironmentalsolutions.com
ESG Dynamics - https://esg-dynamics.com
Robert Howarth study into US methane leakage rates - https://www.research.howarthlab.org/documents/Howarth2022_EM_Magazine_methane.pdf
International Energy Agency methane tracker 2024 - https://www.iea.org/reports/global-methane-tracker-2024
Cleaning Up Episode 157 - Leaking Methane Needs an Urgent Fix - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIK8Z7oZMps
Cleaning Up Episode 146 - Jason Anderson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWUzOZmJSlI

Fake Meat, What’s The Beef? Ep166: Bruce Friedrich Jun 12, 2024

Show notes

Has science cracked the code on mass producing realistic meat substitutes? Or are lab-gown alternative proteins an impossible dream? In this week's episode of Cleaning Up, Baroness Bryony Worthington sits down with president of the Good Food Institute, Bruce Friedrich, to explore the future of food. Friedrich details his vision for a more sustainable food system through technologies like plant-based and cultivated meat and outlines the promising progress and significant challenges remaining in scaling these novel proteins. Worthington and Friedrich debate the roles of policy, public opinion, and big agriculture in determining whether alternative proteins can truly transform our food system or remain forever niche.

Links and more:

The Good Food Institute (https://gfi.org)
TEA of cultivated meat. Future projections for different scenarios (https://cedelft.eu/publications/tea-of-cultivated-meat/)
A new land dividend: the opportunity of alternative proteins in Europe (https://green-alliance.org.uk/publication/a-new-land-dividend-the-opportunity-of-alternative-proteins-in-europe/)
Recipe for a Livable Planet: Achieving Net Zero Emissions in the Agrifood System: (https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/entities/publication/406c71a3-c13f-49cd-8f3f-a071715858fb)
UNEP Report on alternative proteins (https://www.unep.org/resources/whats-cooking-assessment-potential-impacts-selected-novel-alternatives-conventional)
Episode 136 with Jim Mellon (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqFPic5iqds)

Battery Recycling Is Here - But Where Are The Batteries? - Ep165: Hans Eric Melin Jun 05, 2024

Show notes

As everyone knows, battery prices are plummeting and manufacturing volumes are soaring, whether for EVs or for grid-connected storage. And everyone knows there's a problem: only 5% of lithium-ion batteries are recycled. The rest go to landfill, right? Wrong. This week's guest on Cleaning Up is the world's preeminent expert on battery recycling. Hans Eric Melin is the Founder and Managing Director of Circular Energy Storage.

Circular Energy Storage is a London-based data collection and analytics consultancy focused on the lithium-ion battery end-of-life market. They help companies and organisations in the entire battery value chain to take better decisions in everything that relates to reuse and recycling of lithium-ion batteries. They do this by continuously collecting, analysing and publishing data from all parts of the value chain worldwide and by working actively with customers in their strategy and business development.

Please like, subscribe and leave a review. Follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook or Instagram, and sign up for the Cleaning Up newsletter at https://cleaninguppod.substack.com.

Links and more:

Circular Energy Storage: https://circularenergystorage.com/about

Hans' LinkedIn post on the false narratives around lithium-ion battery recycling rates: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/5-rate-other-untruths-battery-recycling-hans-eric-melin-m5lde

Hans' more extensive research report explaining the real rates: https://www.energimyndigheten.se/globalassets/forskning--innovation/overgripande/state-of-the-art-in-reuse-and-recycling-of-lithium-ion-batteries-2019.pdf

The 2023 Battery Materials Review Yearbook, featuring a chapter authored by Hans: https://www.batterymaterialsreview.com/products/

The 2016 paper Hans mentioned, featuring the 95% landfill rate: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11837-016-1994-y

#LightsOn - Live from the Eurelectric Power Summit 2024 in Athens - Ep164: Leonhard Birnbaum May 29, 2024

Show notes

Last week the leading lights of Europe's electricity industry gathered for the annual Eurelectric Power Summit at the Lagonissi Beach Resort just outside Athens. The conference - under the hashtag this year of #lights on - lasted two days and covered the key issues facing Europe's and the world's power sectors. Two topics in particular stood out: the need to accelerate the build out of transmission, and the pressures and opportunities offered by digitization and AI. At the event, Eurelectric published a brace of reports on these two topics. On the final day of the conference, Michael caught up with Leonhard Birnbaum, Chairman and CEO of German utility and distribution grid operator E.ON and President of Eurelectric, on a sunny and windy terrace just outside the conference centre to discuss all this and more.

Leonhard began his professional career at McKinsey in Düsseldorf. After holding various positions, he was Senior Partner for the energy and industrial sector. In 2008, he joined RWE AG and was appointed to the Board of Management the same year. He served as Chief Strategy Officer and as RWE Group’s Chief Commercial Officer until 2013, when he was appointed as member of the Board of Management of E.ON SE and took on a variety of responsibilities within the Board. From 2018 until 2021 he was responsible for the innogy integration project, and from 2019 to 2020, he was also Chairman of the Board of Management of innogy SE. In 2021, he was appointed to his current role as CEO of E.ON SE, in which he is responsible for Communications & Political Affairs, Corporate Audit, Strategy, Group and Executive HR, HSE & Sustainability, Legal & Compliance and Nuclear Coordination. He is also Vice-President of the Executive Committee of BDEW, the German Association of Energy and Water Industries, a member of the Executive Committee of the Federation of German Industries (BDI) and President of Eurelectric, the European Electricity Association, and Vice Chair of the World Energy Council.

Please like, subscribe and leave a review. Follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook or Instagram, and sign up for the Cleaning Up newsletter at https://cleaninguppod.substack.com.

Links and more:

Eurelectric: https://www.eurelectric.org/

E.ON: https://www.eon.com/en.html

Eurelectric Power Summit 2024 - LightsOn: https://powersummit2024.eurelectric.org/

Eurelectric's new report - Grids for Speed: https://powersummit2024.eurelectric.org/grids-for-speed/

Eurelectric's new report - Wired for Tomorrow: https://powersummit2024.eurelectric.org/wired-for-tomorrow/El

Electrify Almost Everything for Net-Zero - Ep34: Kristian Ruby: https://www.cleaningup.live/episode-34-kristian-ruby/

Can Nuclear Repower China's Coal Fleet? - Ep163: Staffan Qvist & Dr. Yaoli Zhang May 22, 2024

Show notes

China's policies that direct capital towards cleaner industries have been game changing, and this week we're continuing the China theme, sharing two conversations Bryony had earlier this month at a conference at Xiamen University in Fujian Province. China's role in the clean energy transition could not be more important. The think tank Ember's latest report on the state of the global electricity transition states: over half of the world's new wind and solar power capacity last year was added in China, and together with hydro and nuclear, clean electricity in China now meets 35% of their electricity demand. And yet, the scale and the nature of the Chinese economy is so enormous it's hard to grasp, the majority of which is still powered by roughly 1000 gigawatts of coal-fired power stations, half of the global total. The focus of the conference was on a specific lever that could help China further along its decarbonisation path: the repowering of existing coal stations with clean sources of heat.

Bryony's first guest, Staffan Qvist is a published academic, co-author of the book A Bright Future, and founder of a number of companies dedicated to the clean energy transition. He's been studying this concept of coal repowering since he first co-authored papers on the subject with Polish colleagues in 2019. Bryony's second guest is Assistant Professor Yaoli Zhang of Xiamen University, a thermal generation engineer by training who later "repowered" himself and switched to nuclear engineering. He currently oversees a team researching the repairing of coal in China from both a practical and economic perspective.

Please like, subscribe and leave a review. Follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook or Instagram, and sign up for the Cleaning Up newsletter at https://cleaninguppod.substack.com.

Links and more:

How China Became a Green Finance Superpower - Ep160: Dr. Ma Jun: https://www.cleaningup.live/how-china-became-a-green-finance-superpower-ep160-dr-ma-jun/

The 2019 book Staffan co-authored - A Bright Future: https://brightfuturebook.com

The March 2024 US Department of Energy guide on converting coal-fired power plants to nuclear power: https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/8-things-know-about-converting-coal-plants-nuclear-power

...and the associated press release: https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/doe-study-finds-replacing-coal-plants-nuclear-plants-could-bring-hundreds-more-local

The 2022 Paper Dr Zhang and Staffan co-authored on the potential of repowering China's CFPPs with nuclear: https://ideas.repec.org/a/gam/jeners/v15y2022i3p1072-d739738.html

A recent IAEA article on repurposing CFPPs to nuclear: https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/repurposing-coal-power-plant-sites-with-low-carbon-nuclear

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