Zero: The Climate Race

Latest Episodes:

The godfather of solar predicts its future Sep 21, 2023

Show notes

Setting world records. Combing through warehouses of old electronics. Seeding the Chinese solar industry from afar. This is the life of Martin Green, a professor at the University of New South Wales in Sydney and the director of the Australian Centre for Advanced Photovoltaics. Green’s work on solar panel design made the modern solar industry possible: 90% of solar panels made last year were based on his designs. He’s still going strong, too, regularly breaking new records in the pursuit of the perfect solar panel. This week on Zero, Akshat Rathi sits down with the man many call “the godfather of solar” to hear firsthand how it happened, the next record he wants to break and whether solar panels are destined for space.

Read more:

Making Solar Panels Is 'Horrible' Business. The US Still Wants It. (Bloomberg)
Listen to Akshat’s conversation with Jenny Chase (Apple Podcasts)
Solar Power Investment Set to Surpass Oil Production Spending This Year (Bloomberg)
China Leaves Everyone Behind in Race for Renewable Energy (Bloomberg)
A transcript of this episode.

Zero is a production of Bloomberg Green. Our producer is Oscar Boyd and our senior producer is Christine Driscoll. Special thanks to Jill Namatsi, David Stringer, Jenny Chase and Kira Bindrim. Thoughts or suggestions? Email us at zeropod@bloomberg.net. For more coverage of climate change and solutions, visit bloomberg.com/green.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Perfume? Yes. Potatoes? No. Vertical farming tries to grow up Sep 14, 2023

Show notes

Cleantech is hard. Farming is harder. This week, Akshat Rathi visits entrepreneurs doing both.

GroGrace in Singapore and Jungle in Paris are two vertical farming companies taking agriculture indoors, and trying to grow crops efficiently and profitably. While the technology to do this has been around since the 1990s, the business model has yet to be perfected, and several other vertical farms have closed down or laid off staff this year. As the world faces rising energy prices, water scarcity, and hotter temperatures, can the entrepreneurs in Paris and Singapore avoid the problems of their compatriots?

Read more:

Akshat Rathi’s reporting on Singapore’s cleantech scene: Singapore’s Building Technology It Needs for a New Climate Era - Bloomberg
From AppHarvest to AeroFarms, Funding Is Drying Up for AI-Run Vertical Farms - Bloomberg
Heat, War and Export Bans: Global Food Threats Are On the Rise
Another tale of the Dutch exporting their vertical farming know-how: Saudi City of Future Enlists Dutch Help to Grow Crops in Desert - Bloomberg
A transcript of this episode.

Listen to related episodes of Zero:

The world's food system needs a radical rethink - interview with George Monbiot

Zero is a production of Bloomberg Green. Our producer is Oscar Boyd and our senior producer is Christine Driscoll. Special thanks to Sheryl Tian Tong Lee, Natasha White and Kira Bindrim. Thoughts or suggestions? Email us at zeropod@bloomberg.net. For more coverage of climate change and solutions, visit bloomberg.com/green.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

How the world’s biggest green bank is electrifying Australia Sep 07, 2023

Show notes

Trillions of dollars are needed to fund the climate transition, with both the private sector and governments required to contribute. Australia’s answer is the Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC), the world’s largest green bank.

Established by the government in 2012 with an initial funding of A$10 billion ($6.5 billion), it was tasked with financing green projects and ambitious Australian climate startups at a time when large-scale investments in things like wind and solar were still seen as too risky for most private banks. Despite early efforts by opposition parties to abolish the bank, over the past 10 years it has made itself an essential part of Australia's energy transition and, in June, received an extra A$20.5 billion to help the country meet its target of 82% renewables by 2030.

This week on Zero, Akshat Rathi sits down with CEFC chief executive officer, Ian Learmonth, to learn how this huge amount of money will be spent, why the CEFC had so many enemies early on, and what kind of innovative startups and clean-tech projects the organization is looking to fund.

For more:

Our episode with Jigar Shah, a $9 Billion Deal to Supercharge US Cleantech
Our episode on Australia’s new climate politics
A transcript of this episode

Zero is a production of Bloomberg Green. Our producer is Oscar Boyd and our senior producer is Christine Driscoll. Special thanks to Gilda Di Carli and Kira Bindrim. Thoughts or suggestions? Email us at zeropod@bloomberg.net. For more coverage of climate change and solutions, visit bloomberg.com/green

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Your carbon footprint should bring you joy Aug 31, 2023

Show notes

The concept of a “carbon footprint” began as a distraction from Big Oil: get people to focus on their own actions rather than the impact of large emitters. Oil companies come up with PR campaigns all the time, but the carbon footprint took off because it taps into a question we keep coming back to, can our choices lower emissions? If so, how? And if they don’t, why bother? This week, Akshat is joined by Kira Bindrim, the editor of Bloomberg Greener Living, which focuses on consumer choices, to talk about what she’s noticed in a year of editing stories about products, misconceptions, and how much people just love to read about electric cars. Plus, we break down her carbon footprint.

Listen to related episodes of Zero:

The climate case for flying cars - an interview with the man who will help cut Akshat’s carbon footprint.
The writer behind Love Actually wants to green your retirement fund - why you should look into where you store your retirement

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Best of: How to build a battery that replaces a coal plant Aug 24, 2023

Show notes

This week, a visit to the energy startup trying to replace coal with a very cheap battery. Form Energy has attracted nearly $900 million in investments and is building its first manufacturing facility in the US. Its big innovation relies on rust. Really. The materials scientists at Form have taken the same process that’s a symbol of time slowly passing and turned it into electricity. It’s one of the first big bets that batteries could help push the grid closer to running without fossil fuels altogether.

You can read more about Form Energy and see what the battery looks like here.

Read a transcript of this episode, here.
Zero is a production of Bloomberg Green. Our producer is Oscar Boyd and our senior producer is Christine Driscoll. Special Thanks to Kira Bindrim and Blake Maples.
Thoughts or suggestions? Email us at zeropod@bloomberg.net. For more coverage of climate change and solutions, visit https://www.bloomberg.com/green

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Methane leaks are the low-hanging fruit of the climate crisis Aug 21, 2023

Show notes

Methane is a potent greenhouse gas, with 80 times the warming potential of carbon dioxide over a 25-year period. However, it also degrades much more quickly than CO2, meaning cuts in emissions now can have a quick and significant effect on reducing global warming. On this bonus episode of Zero, producer Oscar Boyd talks with host Akshat Rathi about the methane problem and the ways to solve it.

Read more:

Zero is a production of Bloomberg Green. Our producer is Oscar Boyd and our senior producer is Christine Driscoll. Special thanks to John Fraher, Meg Szabo and Kira Bindrim. Thoughts or suggestions? Email us at zeropod@bloomberg.net. For more coverage of climate change and solutions, visit https://www.bloomberg.com/green

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Why Hollywood A-listers are rushing to star in climate shows Aug 17, 2023

Show notes

How do you turn climate change into compelling TV? What scenarios do you draw on? And how do you make sure a call for climate action isn’t lost to a feeling that a dystopian future is inevitable?

When Extrapolations premiered in March, it became one of the first major TV shows to put climate change at the core of its narrative. Packed with A-list actors like Meryl Streep, Kit Harington and Sienna Miller, Extrapolations begins in a not too distant 2037. The world feels all too familiar, and with each episode the temperature becomes a little bit hotter, and the impacts of climate change a little bit worse. The planet is less hospitable, but humanity remains much the same.

This week on Zero*, host Akshat Rathi interviews Extrapolations writer and executive producer Dorothy Fortenberry about the growing demand for climate stories, how reality is overtaking the premise of the show, and how choices made this decade will impact the next.

(*this interview was recorded before the ongoing Hollywood strike action)

Read more:

Apple TV’s futuristic climate show is already coming true
NRDC Rewrite the Future
Zero’s interviews with Kim Stanley Robinson and Amy Westervelt

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Inside the industry that made climate denial work Aug 10, 2023

Show notes

True crime is one of the most popular genres in every form of storytelling. But can that pull be used to tell stories about the environment? This week, Akshat speaks with Amy Westervelt, a climate reporter for over twenty years, and the creator of the podcast Drilled - a true crime show about climate change. Westervelt launched it after being turned away by large production companies but found over a million listeners in the first season.
This is the second of three episodes talking with climate storytellers on Zero. Listen to hear why and how Westervelt decided to use “true crime” as a way to talk about Big Oil, the history of climate denial, and how reporting on the climate crisis has changed for the better.

Zero is a production of Bloomberg Green. Our producer is Oscar Boyd and our senior producer is Christine Driscoll. Special thanks to Kira Bindrim. Thoughts or suggestions? Email us at zeropod@bloomberg.net. For more coverage of climate change and solutions, visit bloomberg.com/green

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A sci-fi writer’s guide to a low-carbon future Aug 03, 2023

Show notes

To tackle climate change, we need good stories and we need good storytellers. Kim Stanley Robinson is a climate fiction author who has written more than 20 novels, including Ministry for the Future, which was published in 2020. It opens in 2025, with a heatwave that kills millions in India. It’s a grim scene, and what follows is the story of humans striving to cope with an increasingly inhospitable planet — there’s ecoterrorism, high-finance, wild chases over the Swiss Alps. What emerges in Ministry is the a ‘optopian’ roadmap, in which the world gets to grips with the climate crisis and begins to rectify the situation.

In the first of three episodes talking with climate storytellers on Zero, we hear from Robinson about how he crafts a good story out of a desperate situation, what he thinks the limits of climate storytelling are, and how his thinking has changed since publishing Ministry for the Future.

Zero is a production of Bloomberg Green. Our producer is Oscar Boyd and our senior producer is Christine Driscoll. Special thanks to Kira Bindrim, Todd Woody and Abraiya Ruffin. Thoughts or suggestions? Email us at zeropod@bloomberg.net. For more coverage of climate change and solutions, visit bloomberg.com/green

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Best of: The world’s food system needs a radical rethink Jul 27, 2023

Show notes

What’s worse for the planet than Big Oil? The world’s food system, argues environmental journalist and campaigner George Monbiot in his new book Regenesis. He makes a passionate case for how current agricultural practices not only damage the environment, but prevent vast amounts of land from being rewilded and restored to its natural state. Monbiot speaks with Bloomberg Green reporter Akshat Rathi about his proposed solutions, which include an end to livestock farming entirely and using new technologies like precision fermentation to meet the world’s rising demand for protein.

Read a transcript of this episode, here.

Zero is a production of Bloomberg Green. Our producer is Oscar Boyd and our senior producer is Christine Driscoll. Special thanks to Kira Bindrim and Stacey Wong. Thoughts or suggestions? Email us at zeropod@bloomberg.net. For more coverage of climate change and solutions, visit www.bloomberg.com/green.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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