We live in interesting times...
It has been a crazy few weeks, as the world absorbs the news of a second Trump term. Cleaning Up has aired three episodes. But I have also been busy on UK politics, bus safety, and a spot of shopping!
Today’s episode will be a bit different, covering not just Cleaning Up but also some of the other stuff I have been up to. It’s a bit longer than usual, so let me know if you like/dislike it.
Welcome back to Trump-world!
The news has been predictably dominated by the re-election of Donald Trump. He didn’t just squeak back into the White House, he got in with a resounding margin and Republicans also took the Senate and the House. What does it mean for clean energy and climate? Not good, but how not good?
There are no details yet of anything worthy of the name “policy” under a returning President Trump, but nevertheless on Monday we released a special episode of Cleaning Up in which Bryony and I speculated about what the future might hold.
How Trump and Musk will reshape U.S. Climate Action
Since Bryony and I recorded that episode, we have learned who President Trump has picked for Secretary of Energy: Chris Wright, CEO of Liberty Energy, a leading U.S. fracking services provider.
If you are involved in climate or energy I really suggest you watch this keynote by Wright, given in November 2023 at an online conference hosted by Marietta College in Ohio, a liberal arts school which happens to have the largest petroleum engineering programme in the Eastern U.S.
Before you caricature Wright as a drill-baby-drill nodding-head (along the lines of former Trump Secretary of Energy Rick Perry) slow down. Wright is very smart and very articulate. He says he worked on solar power in graduate school and then on enhanced geothermal. Through Liberty Energy, he has invested in nuclear (Okla) and geothermal (Fervo). He is deeply committed to bringing modern energy services to those lacking them in the global south, and to keeping energy prices down in the U.S.
On climate change, Wright accepts that it is happening and that it is mainly driven by human activities - and all things being equal he would prefer energy sources that don’t contribute to it. However, in his view all things are not equal, and the overwhelming benefits of fossil fuels outweigh the economic cost of doing anything about climate change by around six to one. As his source, he cites the work of Nobel Laureate William Nordhaus.
It is worth recalling that in his Prize Lecture in Stockholm in December 2018, Nordhaus outlined the latest results from his DICE model (the first model to unify climate science and economics) as follows: “the cost-beneft optimum rises to over 3°C in 2100 – much higher than the international policy targets.”
Yikes. The incoming Secretary of Energy of the world’s leading economy is a super-smart and driven guy, with what appears to be a strong moral compass, who nevertheless believes that if we see 3°C of warming within the lifetime of his grandkids, that will be OK. Make of that what you will.
Two other episodes of Cleaning Up
Bryony and my conversation about the U.S. election was just one of three episodes we released in the last two weeks.
Before the election I had a very engaging conversation with Jonathan Maxwell, CEO and founder of Sustainable Development Capital LLC - the only person so far to have been on Cleaning Up three times, and a new member of our Leadership Circle.
Jonathan and I explored the thesis of his book, The Edge: How Competition For Resources Is Pushing The World And Its Climate To The Brink. Jonathan contends that energy efficiency holds the key not just to addressing climate change, but also to saving money and avoiding global conflicts - and it’s hard to disagree.
The biggest, dirtiest secret of the energy industry
The other episode recorded just before the election consisted of Bryony Worthington on a recent trip to China, sitting down with with Qi Ye, Director of Public Policy at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.
Bryony and Prof. Qi talked about China’s extraordinary momentum and dominance in clean energy transition technologies and their supply chain, and what rising tension with the US might mean. He rather shrugged off concerns about a possible Trump victory, but it remains to be seen whether he was right to do so.
Is President Trump’s victory a win for China?
The next episode of Cleaning Up, which is with Rory Sutherland, Vice Chair of the Ogilvy & Mather group of companies, will be aired tomorrow.
Rory and I talk about how most attempts to sell climate-relevant technologies to consumers ignore how humans actually make decisions - falling into the gap between what we feel, what we say and what we do. Rory is a fount of fun anecdotes, and sparkles with lateral ideas about how to accelerate the uptake of clean solutions. We also touch on the ethics of promoting fossil fuels and, let me just say, you don’t want to miss the episode!
A bit of UK politics
Last week also saw the publication of a piece I wrote for the UK’s leading conservative website, ConHome, explaining why I believe the UK Conservative Party needs to reaffirm its commitment to Net Zero or resign itself to losing the next General Election.
My spur for writing was the commitment by Robert Jenrick MP, losing candidate in the runoff to replace the hapless Rishi Sunak as party leader, had promised to abandon Net Zero and repeal the Climate Change Act (lead author one Baroness Bryony Worthington, co-host of Cleaning Up). The winner of that runoff, Kemi Badenoch, has yet to come down on the question, so there is everything to play for.
The point I make in the piece is that acting on climate is not just the right thing to do, working from conservative first principles, and not just in line with the greatest traditions of the party, it is also good electoral maths.
For every voter lost to Reform at this year’s General Election that could be lured back by renouncing net zero, the party will permanently alienate three voters lost to Labour and the LibDems. Recent polling by the Conservative Environment Network bears this out - in fact it shows that even among Reform voters, 62% want a consensus approach to addressing climate change. Rishi Sunak thought his “climate reset” would unleash a landslide of support. nothing of the kind happened because the reality is that a small minority spend an absurd amount of their time loudly hating on Net Zero.
The inconvenient choice for Conservatives is to recommit to net zero or get used to opposition
ConHome’s comment section has long been dominated by supporters of Nigel Farage, so it should have been no surprise that most of the comments were about how and anyone who believes in anthropogenic climate change isn’t a real conservative: the climate has always changed, CO2 is plant food, if it does exist the answer is quite obviously 100% nuclear power, etc, etc. It was enough to make me yearn for the days when I worked with those enviro-loons Daniel Hannan, Tony Abbott and Liz Truss on the Board of Trade’s Green Trade Report.
It was even worse on Xitter. The average response was along the lines of “You lying fraudster and Chinese Communist Party stooge, you just want billions in subsidies for electric cars and wind farms that don’t even work. Donald Trump knows where you live, so shut the f*ck up, winter is coming.” I’ve corrected the spelling, obviously.
Now, I know from people I meet that this is not the typical human reaction, not even among those on the right. This was the final evidence for me, in case I needed any, that I’m done with the toxic sewer into which Elon Musk has turned Twitter.
Mr BlueSky
I experimented with Mastodon a while back, but found it clunky. BlueSky has been a revelation. It works pretty much exactly like Twitter, but has a few extra community tools like starter packs and feeds, which help users get up to speed quickly. And it has no bloody Temu ads!
Mr. Blue Sky, please tell us why
You had to hide away for so long (so long)
Where did we go wrong?*
Follow me now on BlueSky as @mliebreich.bsky.social
In many ways BlueSky feels like what Twitter might have been, had it focused on helping people and communities communicate, rather than trying to monetize itself with ads and useless add-ons, and then opened its arms to assorted selfie-stick white supremacists.
The response on BlueSky to my ConHome piece was more like “Hey, I may not agree with Michael’s politics, but he has said what a bunch of people I know who vote right have been saying in private. Let’s discuss this!”
My sense is that Twitter will shrivel down over time until it’s just another version of Truth Social, Gab or 4Chan. This month, for the first time ever, my Twitter follower numbers dropped, after stalling out for a year. I suspect the a large proportion of my 69,000 followers are already in effect dead accounts. Here is an interesting statistic: each time I post to Substack, my 47,000 LinkedIn followers drive around 12 times more traffic than my supposed 69,000 Twitter followers.
BlueSky still has a long way to go - apparently it has doubled its users in the last two weeks to around 20 million, compared to Twitter’s alleged 540m to 600m. If you want to follow breaking news from around the world, Twitter still wins, although you now have to invest considerable time to sift out vast amount of fake news.
There are two apps you can use that make it easier to switch to BlueSky. SkyFollower Bridge is a chrome extension that allows you to find the people you have been following on Twitter, and make it easy to follow them on BlueSky. And BlueArk allows you transfer your historic tweets over - not including responses, retweets and other people’s responses to your tweets - for a one-off payment which in my case was $27 for 10.3k posts.
I won’t be deleting my Twitter account for a while. I’ll still cross-post to it, but my main micro-blogging platform from now on will be BlueSky, where you can find me as @mliebreich.bsky.social.
See you there!
Bus safety
On to more personal stuff. Some of you might know that, when I’m not working feverishly on climate and energy, I have a side hustle trying to hold the Mayor of London and TfL to account for London's appallingly unsafe bus system - which I have been doing since my time on the TfL board a decade or so ago.
Last week I addressed a rally organised by bus drivers and unions, protesting against their working conditions and demanding TfL adopt a Bus Driver Bill of Rights.
If you want to join the dots between how TfL contracts out services, working conditions of bus drivers and the pressure out on them to speed, the number of people killed and seriously injured on London's roads, and the impact on victims and their families, then please read this FT column by Camilla Cavendish.
London bus crashes are the result of an unsafe model
Next time you read about someone killed by a London bus, or about a bus ploughing into a bus stop, or into a house or shop, and the next time you see a bus jump a red light, or close pass a cyclist, or hoot at a pedestrian, or refuse to pick up a wheelchair user, remember: it's not the driver, it's TfL's 'institutionally unsafe' contracting out system.
And TfL's "London Model" is about to be rolled out across the UK. By all means let's have more and better bus services. But they must not come at the price of dozens of deaths and thousands of hospitalisations each year.
What Is Life?
Finally, I promised you some shopping. Walking into an antiquarian book shop to kill 20 minutes between meetings this week, I stumbled across a first edition of a book I have long been looking out for.
What Is Life? by Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger, was based on a series of lectures he gave in Dublin in 1943. In it he postulates the idea of an "aperiodic solid" that somehow contains genetic information in its chemical bonds. James Watson and Francis Crick may have failed to credit Rosalind Franklin for the x-ray image that enabled their discovery of DNA, but they do both credit this little book with inspiring their search.
OK, so I can’t afford a first edition of Darwin’s On The Origins of Species (yet?), but I am chuffed to own a copy of What Is Life?
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Great format. I enjoyed the bite sized chunks across different topics on my morning commute by train.
Unifying climate models and economic models sounds like the blind leading the blind. For what it’s worth I would put more faith in climate modelling (backed by the scientific method) over economic modelling which always seem to carry the rider “all things being equal”.