2023 was a huge year in climate and clean energy, culminating with the grandiose theatre of COP28 in Dubai. We have a fantastic line-up of guests lined up for Season 11, kicking off on Wednesday 10th January with Ed Conway, economics editor for Sky News and author of 2023’s must read book, Material World.
In other news, Michael is launching a Substack, called The Thoughts of Chairman Michael, to bring together all of his written, audio and video content. For those not in the know, Substack is a flexible content publishing platform that also facilitates sending out email newsletters like this one. We have migrated this list to Substack, but to stay up-to-date with all of Michael’s activities we encourage you to subscribe to The Thoughts of Chairman Michael.
So, now let’s take a look at the episodes of Cleaning Up since our last newsletter.
Season 10 episodes in November and December 2023
Cleaning Up kicked off November with Alex Grant, CEO of Magrathea Metals, which is targeting the production of magnesium from brines, rather than by mining and processing rocks – hence the tagline “from mining to brining”. By way of disclosure, Michael is a modest investor in Magrathea’s seed round, which was led by Cleaning Up’s main supporter, Capricorn Investment Group. We learned about how magnesium is one-third lighter than aluminium, and could replace it in many use cases, subject to addressing its currently high cost and horrendous environmental footprint. Check out the episode here.
Baroness Bryony Worthington returned for her second episode as guest host, this time for a conversation with Johannah Christensen, CEO of the Global Maritime Forum. Johannah took us through the landscape of the shipping sector, hitting on the geopolitical processes that are driving its decarbonisation strategy via the International Maritime Organisation. Methanol and ammonia are currently the top contenders to fuel what might be described as the “easiest hard-to-abate sector”, but dark horses bio-CNG and nuclear cannot be ruled out. Give the episode a watch (or listen) here.
Also in November, Michael spoke with “iron-air man”, Matteo Jaramillo, CEO and co-founder of Form Energy, former director of powertrain business development and head of energy at Tesla. Mateo illustrated the surprising usefulness of rust as a battery technology. Designed for 100-hour energy storage, Mateo is hoping his Bill Gates-backed solution will displace mid-merit gas plants (which are currently flexed to follow changes in electricity demand throughout the day) in our power grids. With the first commercial deployment of these shipping container-sized batteries set for 2025, Form is targeting one of the toughest challenges in the transition – longer duration storage. Full episode available here.
Just a couple of days before they both flew to Dubai for COP 28, Michael sat down with Professor Avinash Persaud to discuss the challenge of financing climate solutions across the Global South. The requirement, according to Avinash, is $2.4 trillion per year to fund mitigation, adaptation and loss-and-damage, significantly higher than the $100bn Copenhagen Commitment for North-South funding set at COP 15 in 2009. As climate envoy to prime minister Mia Mottley of Barbados, Avinash developed the Bridgetown Initiative, a bundle of reforms to the multilateral finance system intended to increase the flow of climate finance to the developing world. Watch the episode here to get a primer on climate finance, its challenges and potential solutions.
An often overlooked but nonetheless important source of global warming is so-called “super pollutants”. Although much scarcer than the big-name greenhouse gases, super pollutants like HFCs and SF6 have hundreds and even thousands of times the global warming potency of CO2. In December, Bryony spoke to Jason Anderson of the ClimateWorks Foundation, to discuss the devastating impacts these gases – as well as methane – can have, and how we should go about building international consensus to eliminate their use.
Then it was Michael’s turn to speak with Dr Hannah Ritchie, Lead Researcher at Our World In Data, about her book Not The End Of The World, which will be out this month. Spanning air pollution, climate, deforestation, food, biodiversity, plastics and over-fishing, Hannah explains how we could be the first sustainable generation in human history, reconciling the twin challenges of living good lives without compromising future generations’ abilities to do the same. She expounds her thesis of “pragmatic optimism”, which stands in stark contrast to the rhetoric employed by doom-focused climate activists like Rupert Read and Roger Hallam, as they discuss in the episode.
To wrap up Season 10 and close the year, Michael sat down for a second time with Lord Adair Turner, chair of the Energy Transition Commission, former financial regulator and director at McKinsey & Co. They began with an exploration of the conclusions of the COP28 global stocktake, then reviewed the year’s main developments in the Net Zero transition, the future landscape of hydrogen and energy storage, the phasing out of fossil fuels and the strategies of big oil companies like Aramco.
Cleaning Up is back on 10th January to kick off Season 11. Meanwhile, don’t forget, there is a huge archive of back issues totalling over 175 hours of conversations with extraordinary climate leaders, which you can access via The Thoughts of Chairman Michael on Substack or at cleaningup.live.
Happy New Year from Michael, Bryony and all of us here at Cleaning Up!