How Trump & Musk Will Reshape US Climate Action — Michael Liebreich & Bryony Worthington

Michael Leibreich

Hello, I'm Michael Liebreich   

Bryony Worthington

And I'm Bryony Worthington.  

ML

And this is Cleaning Up.

ML

So what we're doing today is a shorter than normal episode to reflect on the results of that extraordinary election last week in the United States. Bryony, let's get stuck in. When you heard the news, where were you?  

BW

I was in China, actually, which, it turns out, is quite a good place to watch this unfold, because it was during my day, so I was awake, and I was watching it continually throughout the process. And yeah, it was obviously the topic of conversation for many people.  

ML

I was in Brussels, as it happens, I was not watching the results as they came in, but I woke up, saw the results, and then spent the day with a number of people in and around Brussels. So we've probably got quite an interesting perspective there. Just before we go into what people were saying in China or in Brussels, what was your emotional reaction if I might ask? So we get the kind of, let's get that out the way first, how we felt about this.  

BW

I think I wasn't surprised. I'd been feeling for a few weeks, months beforehand that he had a chance of winning. I think what I found quite hard to comprehend was the extent of the win and the fact that it was a really red wave that swept across the country and has resulted in a very unfettered form of Trumpism. Now there's no checks and balances. So as that was sinking in, I started to feel a little bit sad, I think, is the emotion, yeah. So, yeah, that was it. How did you feel?   

ML

Well, I actually thought that Kamala was going to win. And I've been reading, spending much too much time, it turns out, since none of it was of any value, trying to read the runes on how many women were voting, or how many people were attending rallies. The polls, it is absolutely obvious, were completely rubbish. They were herded towards the 50-50 point, simply because the pollsters were too scared to say anything different. But I was surprised this time. Last time in 2016 I was not at all surprised. I was pretty sure that Trump would win this time. It was a shock, and it was an unpleasant shock. There's no question.  

BW

I think it was odd, because I was in America in the build up, so I was watching the media and actually seeing Trump signs appearing on the lawns of California. You see Trump signs, certainly, when you get outside of Silicon Valley, they're everywhere. But there was a sort of a newfound confidence of Trump supporters within what would normally be a very blue part of the United States. And so I felt, if it's happening here, it's almost certainly happening everywhere. And then, of course, I was also watching social media far too much. I'd gone off X for a while, and then I just got lured back in. And once you see what's going on on that platform, so many memes… and it's all done in an equal ways. You see one pro-Kamala, one pro-Trump, as if it's entirely equal. But the ones that are coming through pro-Trump are very emotive and, well, very clever. And I could just, and there's lots of signals. I just thought, actually, he is probably going to win, because the memes they were using were very tailored to the audience. And so moderates were getting, “Trump's a first pacifist. He's not going to stop wars.” And those were memes that were appealing to sort of centrists like me. So I thought, “if I'm starting to waver, goodness knows, then everyone's must be.” You know there's something happening here.  

ML

Wow, you were wavering. I have never wavered. I've always loathed the man. Absolutely loathed him. I've been a never-Trumper since the day I was born. There you go.  

BW

I don't want to leave anyone with the impression that I was actually convinced, but I could see I was being worked on. There were things that were being put out that were designed to make people like me think, “actually, he's not a monster. I'm being lied to. This is all hyped up.” So it was very clever. You could see that the messaging was super, super sophisticated.  

ML

I was just very aware that there were a lot of people, particularly Kamala supporters, saying he's rambling. He's lost the plot, and they just didn't understand what he does when he speaks. He has this very loose scaffold, which enables him to reach out — he calls it the weave. He reaches out and he touches on all these different analgesic points, all these little hot points, these little hot buttons. He links them all up, and then he gets back and he'll either answer the question or not. It’s entirely at his discretion. It's actually very clever. I don't like it, but it's clever.  

BW

Well, the whole thing is clever. And I don't know if people have listened to this episode, but there's a brilliant episode on The Rest is History, about George Wallace, one of the early populist politicians in the US, who worked out that you could galvanise the white American vote, not by talking directly about racism, but by indirectly hinting at it, and then coupling that with a load of other populist concerns, like the size of government or government intervening in your lives too much. And so you can stand on a ticket of ‘I'm the different candidate who's going to tame this overreaching government,’ and never really mention the fact that actually the underlying theme is that we're all concerned about race. And that's just… I think he was brilliant at that. That's what he's achieved, right? He's assembled lots of things that people are generally unhappy about: the economy, government being too in your face, and this sense that America's losing itself somehow. And, yeah, that's populism. And there's a long tradition of it in US politics.  

ML

Do you know, I was struck as you were speaking, by the parallel with your episode that you recorded with John Marshall of Potential Energy. Because he said the most powerful motivator for the climate is to invoke the sense of loss of something you love. And really that's what Trump's whole platform is. We've lost the America of yore when it was all kind of controlled, it was all fundamentally white controlled and so on. But also it was very predictable and it was safe and all those things. So it's that sense of loss. I mean, in a way, he's proven that John was right in that episode. He's just invoked it a whole damn sight better than most of the people working on climate change.  

BW

Yeah, and John also said that fear can be a great motivator, right? And that somehow we've over indexed on hope, where actually one of the basic emotions is fear. And that's what populists do. They make you feel scared that something's happening that's going to affect you, that there's an ‘other’ that's going to make your life less safe. And that's all part of it. So yeah narrative works, and it's definitely worked in this case.  

ML

Now, the oddity of recording this today is we're less than one week in, and we don't really know what's going to happen. We can guess, we can theorise, and we can say it's all going to be catastrophic, or we can also say, well, it won't be that bad. But we don't have any real facts and data. We don't know who's going to be leading the transition team. We don't know — I'm going to put them in air quotes for those listening on the podcast — what “policies” he's going to pursue, because I'm not sure that they could be dignified with the name of policies, but they certainly are decisions. So we don't know exactly, but there's a few things that we already pretty much know are likely to happen. Do you want to reel off which ones are top of your mind?   

BW

Yes, I guess he's been pretty clear that he is against certain technologies, right, certain clean technologies that we spend a lot of time thinking about. I think perhaps the most obvious one that's going to go is offshore wind. It was always a little bit tricky, and Biden had put a lot of emphasis into that technology. I can see them cutting that completely. There's electric vehicles, I'm sure we'll talk about this in a bit more detail, where the signals have been a bit ambiguous. I mean, he started out as very anti-electric car, and they're almost certainly going to try and roll back some of the subsidies. But then you've got the Elon Musk effect: What kind of deals have been struck. Basically, Musk helped hand him the election. So will that mean that he doesn't move so quickly on things that are going to affect Musk's business interests, of which Tesla is a huge one? So that that might be a little bit less certain. But I guess the other thing that will happen is they'll start drilling. They'll relax all sorts of environmental regulations to get building again, and continue what's already been happening, which is turning the US into a fossil fuel superpower, and that will happen, I think, at an accelerated pace.   

ML

And just to complete on technologies. Solar is an interesting one, because Republicans love solar. That's the funny thing. It's much less controversial than wind. And you know, it just seems to be that one will be less in the crosshairs than wind, particularly offshore wind. The electric vehicle stuff is so difficult to pass because you've had the election of somebody who has, as you say, said he hates electric cars and mocks them. And yet Elon Musk's business, Tesla, the value soars immediately after the election, but it's very difficult to read what will actually happen. So last time, there was that huge effort to try to stop California setting its own emissions standards, and I'm assuming that we're going to see that start again.  

BW

Yes, potentially. I mean, California is only really allowed to set tighter standards because it's got a kind of waiver. And it'll almost certainly be challenged in the courts to try and roll that back. And I guess the question is, have we reached a point where people are buying electric cars just because they're nicer, better, cheaper, in which case getting rid of the subsidies and making things difficult could slow it, but it might not stop it. And I think the other thing that is playing into this is the US desire to have manufacturing being installed into the US. And so plans are there to build battery factories. And there are other plans to start with the manufacturing of vehicles. Will they roll that back when they really want to show that jobs are getting better and incomes are growing in these important states? So I think, as you say, this is probably hard to read.  

ML

Just the background is that in the US, about one car in 10 that's being sold is electric, so it's far behind. The EU, it's about twice that. China, it's five times that. And so there's a real question about whether the US is over some kind of tipping point. And maybe it's a regional tipping point. California or the Northeast might be different from sort of main street USA. Now, you did an episode with Ethan Zindler, who's the climate advisor to Janet Yellen, the current Secretary of the Treasury, but not for much longer. What was your take away in terms of the IRA, the Inflation Reduction Act. You talked quite a lot about whether it was locked in, and I think Ethan had talked about how the efforts have been made to get it locked in. Were they persuasive to you? How much of that do you think can be wound back? And if so, how quickly?   

BW

Well, I think the fact that the Republicans control the House, the Senate, and the Supreme Court means it's much more likely that they will be unraveled — the ones that they decide they don't like. The methane regulations, for example, I can't see those surviving. I suspect some parts of the manufacturing credits, or certainly all the oil and gas credits, will survive, but they'll selectively prune out the things that they think are too green or that go counter to the interests of the oil and gas sector. So yeah, I expect we will see those things being repealed because it was talked about in the campaign. Unfortunately for us, climate change has been included within this kind of populist agenda of pushing back on what they consider to be ‘woke’ issues. And obviously what saddens me about climate change. I'm sad in general, but climate change is about science. And I guess that's another theme. This is a party that's kind of said ‘science isn’t what matters.’ And that will mean that they will repeal certain parts of this, pretty certain, and that will slow down the US transition for sure.  

ML

Yes, I think it's going to be perhaps selectively rolled back. Because, although it's very interesting, you say that he had said during the campaign that he was going to repeal it, but the Inflation Reduction Act never formed the sort of iconic… it didn't play the iconic role that Obamacare, that the healthcare regulation, or legislation, played in 2016. That was very definitely, ‘we're going to take what Obama did and we're going to stick a knot in front of it, and we're simply going to get rid of it all.’ The IRA, it's been sort of mentioned in passing, he’s taken a few sort of side swipes, but it hasn't been positioned as the big, iconic thing that has to be repealed. And of course, we know that a bunch of the money, most of the money, has gone to red states, which didn't mean anything in terms of voting, but it might mean something when it comes to actually crafting what happens, don’t you think?  

BW

Yeah, and I think you're right. I mean, he did call it the Green New Scam, and he's got some good lines that probably did resonate to some audiences. But you're right. There are Republican senators now and representatives who are benefiting from people actually pouring concrete in their state and employing people. So you're right, I think it will be selectively pruned. But like I say, I think the vulnerable ones are offshore wind and certainly they will pick some things, I think, and turn them into totemic issues. They will say, ‘this is why we're different’ and it'll be in the cause of trying to keep energy costs low, and trying to get people's experiences of the economy to be more positive. But that's where solar might play a really interesting role, right? Solar and storage, which probably is the cheapest form of energy in the US, could see a big increase, because they're going to also probably repeal some forms of planning regulations and permitting will be sped up. So actually you might see a big solar boom.  

ML

But that's then going to run into two other areas where it's very clear that Trump is, very early on, going to make a big statement, and that is tariffs and China. Because it's all very well saying ‘we love solar,’ but if you simultaneously put, you know, various numbers have been thrown around, from 400% tariffs to 60% tariffs. But there's definitely going to be a huge push back against imports from China. And the other is exports of LNG, where, of course, President Biden had put a moratorium. It wasn't actually that impactful in the short term, but it was very iconic. That's going to be presumably repealed, and we know that President Trump is going to use LNG as a geopolitical weapon. He's done it before. He's going to do it again, and that is going to push up both of those. The tariffs and exports of LNG are actually going to push up domestic energy costs, not down, which is another thing he's promised but he can't deliver.   

BW

Yeah, absolutely. And that's the irony. And what was interesting was watching the party — well, people who are supporting Trump — struggle with the idea of what is a tariff? The assumption was that China paid the tariffs, that this was some great weapon they could wield against China. But then the reality will dawn that this just means more expensive products for American citizens. And it'll have an effect on energy, but there are huge parts of the American economy that rely on imports from China. And are you going to this? Are you going to put a blanket tariff on all products? That would be quite incredible. If you're going to do selective tariffs, ultimately, I can see that that would happen, just to give them some breathing space to catch up. And it might be that that means more of the supply chain of these technologies is then located in the US, so more of the critical minerals, and more of the battery manufacturing. And actually, that's possibly a good thing in the long run, right? Because you want the US to feel that this is something they are invested in, absolutely.  

ML

But there are so many problems with that. Apparently, by the way, there are now people working out that a video games console that now costs $600 is going to cost $1,000 because of tariffs. And apparently, the people who’ve discovered this suddenly are outraged, despite the fact that last week, they voted for President Trump. But even if the impact of tariffs is going to be the building of factories, the creation of a supply chain in the US, which, you know, it does put pressure in that direction. There's no way that that happens within a few years. These things take a little time. And of course, what started as a process under the IRA — so you've actually got a process of domestic re-shoring of the supply chain. That started under the IRA. So I suppose if we see a repeal of bits of the IRA and then tariffs, it could all just end up being one whole hell of a wash, as simple as that.

BW

Well possibly. But remember, they've got Musk there, whose sole job it is to speed up things being built. And Musk famously built a factory in 19 days. This is the legend, you know, I'm sure it's actually probably true.   

ML

That would be his, that would be for X-AI, it's not a factory. The 19 days, I think, relates to a super computer.   

BW

Well, it relates to a data centre, but okay. So it's not a factory, but he's capable of installing… I mean, and he did the same with his gigafactories. He worked out how to build a manufacturing plant pretty fast, and he's going to have a central role in this government. And he's going to clear out things he doesn't like, which will include lots of environmental regulations the EPA currently oversees, so I think it will be speeding up.   

ML

But Bryony, that's a fantastic example. 19 days to build his data centre. What he did, and I don't know whether that included all of the energy infrastructure, but what that consisted of, and I've seen the photographs of it, is these portable gas generators, right? They are Innio, formerly Jenbacher, because I looked, gas generators. And what's interesting is the way he got them in and up and running is under a temporary permit. As long as you're installing stuff for less than a year, you don't have to go through the whole air quality process, right? So he's got whatever it is 364 days before that. And that will be a state, not a federal air quality permit that he needs. And so there's a real question about the role of the states, because they don't have to go along with federal regulation. Obviously you could start pushing regulations through Congress, but that's a slow process, and it only takes a few Republicans to say, ‘Well, wait a minute, we are actually not on board with this.’Because, frankly, it's not going to be popular to override air quality, or whatever regulation. I mean, we saw last time, Trump won a big push back from civic society, business and states, which actually was quite difficult to navigate for the federal government. Lots of things Trump wanted to do he ended up not being able to do.  

BW

Yeah, but I think that's why the extent of his win is so important, right? Because the number of states who are actively going to stop him is vanishingly small, really. And I think what will happen is there will be states like Nevada, that's gone red, that's going to be saying, ‘Actually, this is great for us. We want jobs. We don't really care about air quality.’ Air quality is a big issue in urban centres, but in the vast areas of America that are largely empty, does it matter to you if you don't believe in climate change? Does it matter to you if there's a gas generator burning somewhere in the desert? No, not really. And so I don't think there will be a slowdown. But I suppose if there is all of these relaxations, it will cut both ways. You're going to see way more fossil infrastructure going in. But you will also, I think, see cheap manufacturing of the things that we support, like the solar and the batteries and the electric vehicles. So yeah definitely, there will be an emphasis on pulling back some of those environmental regulations, which Trump and Musk have squarely said, ‘This is what's holding us back as a nation.’ It doesn't make me happy, but I think it's what's going to happen.  

ML

There's me trying to look on the bright side. Well, it's not just the bright side. I think it's going to be one of the big differences from Trump 1.0. Back then, he put a lot of people in charge, Myron Ebell and Scott Pruitt, I'm sure you know all the names, but they really didn't know what they were doing. They didn't have legislative experience. And this time, it's different. They do have legislative experience. He's got a deeper pool, in a sense, to draw on, even though his cabinet from last time have all ruled themselves out, pretty much, other than Nikki Haley, who apparently is not going to be chosen anyway. So there will be a more competent group, but they will spend longer crafting things that might actually get through the legal system and the regulatory system. I still think it's not going to happen as fast, but it might be more profound than last time.  

BW

I mean, I don't want to overplay the effect of Musk, but he has inserted himself as someone who… he's kind of one of those outlier people who will just dig in and really focus and put all of his energies into this. And I suspect his control of what's slashed within government is going to be one of the biggest things that people will notice. And not to go too far down another sidebar, but he has preyed on the fact that, generally, people in America don't like government overreach. They don't like too many rules and regulations. They like to be able to make their own decisions using what they consider common sense. And there was this crazy moment where this squirrel called Peanut was basically taken away from a family, you know, and euthanized. And it became a crazy totemic thing that here we've got the government intervening and killing your pets. And I suspect this is going to be one of the top things that keeps coming up, that we are rolling back this deep state interference and letting the innovation and the entrepreneurialism of America run forward unfettered. Now how successful they are, I don't know, but I wouldn't bet against Musk. No one wins when they bet against him.   

ML

Yeah, look, are we going to see lots of crazy memes about Peanut the squirrel and ‘they're eating the cats, they're eating the dogs’? We're going to see all of that. There's no question. All I would say is that Musk is also not a seasoned legislator, right? And so there are things he can do, the move fast and fix it, move fast and break it, all that stuff. And there's no question he is what they're calling, in the tech world, an N of 1, in terms of his ability to get things done. But if you really roll back big chunks of legislation, that requires a certain process. Anyway, there's some inertia in the system, I guess that's what I'm saying. Let's finish, if we might, by moving to the international stage. So first of all, was there any trepidation in China? People who said, ‘this is going to be terrible for China.’ Or did people say, ‘No, we can do business with this guy. He's a known factor, and there's lots of bluster, but basically we'll be fine.’

BW  

The feeling I got was that China was expecting Trump to win. They kind of wanted him to. I mean, this is a sample size of a few people, but I was talking to university educated academics, largely business people. And yeah, definitely the narrative was, ‘Trump's a businessman. We know where he's coming from. We don't know who this Kamala person is, and all she does is laugh. So we don't think she's serious.’ And so that speaks to a lot of prejudices that perhaps China already has about women leadership, etc. But, yeah, the general expectation that this was what would happen. But my time in China just left me under no illusion that China is going to dominate all of the clean technology. It's going to benefit from LNG exports from America to diversify away from coal. You know, there's all sorts of things that they're looking forward to, actually, weirdly.  

ML

Do you want to just give a quick plug for the episode that will be coming out in a couple of days from when people might be watching this? Your episode, your conversation in China was with...  

BW

With Professor Qi Ye, who's a seasoned climate commentator who was at Tsinghua University, now at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Really wonderful, thoughtful individual. And yes, that episode will be coming out on Wednesday as scheduled. And we recorded it pre the outcome, but we did talk about the relationship between China and the rest of the world, and of course, touched on their tariffs and everything else. So yes, we'll be covering that in a bit of detail with the China perspective.

ML   

And to a certain extent, China has been investing outside China in factories. So if it's just tariffs on China, they will not have the impact that they might have had 2-4 years ago. Let me just give you the view from Brussels.   

BW

Can I just finish on that? Because one of the things that I was really quite impressed by was that we visited a factory that manufactures buses — buses and trucks — and the owners of that factory, Kinwin Auto, were entirely flexible at how they will make money in this world going forward. They didn't want to own the factory. They didn't want to even build the factories overseas. They wanted to partner with brands and have their technologies be adopted. So they make controllers, world-class controllers and motors, and they just happen to have factories as well to assemble. But they were really thoughtful. Because they were like, ‘well, if India wants 50% of the bus to be made in India, that's fine by us. We'll help them build the factory. We'll teach them how to do it. And we'll sell them some controllers. But we're not seeking to just have Chinese workers, Chinese factories planted all over the place.’ So there's a new understanding of what partnerships mean, and a new awareness that China's dominance doesn't necessarily help them, that they need to partner. And I just was really blown away by how quickly they've learned that and worked out how to make money, whatever the circumstances.   

ML

And I think we're going to have to update our model of China. We think, ‘Oh it's just mercantilism, and it's just a clunking fist going around absorbing all the resources and forcing people to buy Chinese and so on.; And it's really moved well beyond that. Let me give you the view from Brussels. I was in Brussels when the news broke, and I would say, there was shock, there was disbelief, and there was certainly no sign that there's an understanding of how to compete. There's no sign of how to compete even in a non Trump world, but even less of how to compete in the Trump world. So there's lots of conversations about the Draghi report and how Europe has to become competitive, but there's really… and even in the Draghi report, I find it completely underwhelming, right? Because there's no real plan to get energy costs down. It's like, oh, investment… Invest in what? There's no, ‘we're not going to frack and we're going to…’ They still want to put all this money into hydrogen, which is going to be, whether it works or not, can be very expensive. There's no understanding of how you become competitive in energy. There's no understanding of how you have to invest in defence, because, particularly in a Trump world, you might be on your own. So there's no plan for that. There's no plan for agriculture. Particularly with AI, the world is clearly going to push ahead with genetically modified this, that, and the other, because it just measures so well with the knowledge that we're generating from AI. And, of course, ‘oh, you know, that's an impure technology, so we're going to be uncompetitive in agriculture and talk about organic, this, that, and the other.’ Digital… you know, AI is just seen as something scary, threatening, and has to be regulated. So it's kind of, ‘we're going to regulate AI by forcing AI data centres to use CHP,’ you know, to put their waste heat into to use their waste heat. It's like, ‘Hang on a second. How about having an AI industry before you start adding to its costs in that way.’ So there's just nothing there that would make me think that the EU can respond in a coherent way. It's actually very scary.  

BW

Yeah, I mean, it's been this way for a while, right? I think we've had three experiments running in parallel. China, a planned economy, 50-year planning horizon, making things happen. It's still difficult, there's still tension, but by and large, they listen to science and they think long term. US: Let's let business decide, and let's deregulate and let them get on with it. And then Europe is a kind of weird hybrid of protecting old industries, using regulations and laws to try and get through. And I do worry that they will be squeezed by those two other big blocks doing things differently, and neither do one or the other well. And so, yeah, it doesn't look great. That said though, there's still, I think, a growing hope that China and Europe will partner on certain things, and that they both share a belief in climate as an issue, and that this is a defining issue for the next 50-100 years. And you know, the science there, they both subscribe to that, which the US is seeming to move away from. And I think there'll be technology partnerships that happen, for example, offshore wind in China is going to continue to grow, and that's already being done in collaboration with Europe. There's a Dutch offshore floating wind farm, etc, etc. But can that benefit Europe itself? I don't know. It might benefit the world, but I'm not feeling particularly confident that Europe's got a plan, as you say.   

ML

So the axis I would love to see develop for Europe is actually Africa. You know, where have you got huge land areas? Where have you got great resources, whether it's renewable resources or minerals, and where are we going to have all the young people? And so to me, it feels like that is just something that, you know, we haven't got a strategic plan with respect to that either. So who knows. And maybe the Trump victory will be the wake up call that Europe needs. Who knows? Who knows? I don't want to be pessimistic, but let's just close off with the diplomatic scene. So the US presumably will pull out of the COP process. So COP29, I don't know what's going to happen over there in Azerbaijan. I can't imagine anything meaningful coming out of it. I actually think we need to have a reset of that whole process, because you've got Papua New Guinea who have said there's no point going because it's pointless. And then presumably the US will pull out. And the US might even pull out of the framework convention of the UNFCCC, which they didn't do last time, they just pulled out of the Paris Agreement. So I think there needs to be a reset, if I'm honest. And you and I have touched on this in previous episodes and conversations. What do you think? What happens and what should happen there?   

BW

Yeah, it does seem likely that… I mean, the US has only really ever engaged fully in that process for about four or eight years during Obama. It's been largely ambivalent and somewhat on the sidelines for most of the time of its existence. I think Trump will certainly pull back. Some of the more worrying things he might do is defund the International Energy Agency and UN funding, so the whole architecture is going to be undermined, not just in terms of pulling out of one agreement, but just withdrawing US money and US support for most multilateral processes. They may build back certain more targeted things that they care about, like the genuine cross party interest in putting up carbon border adjustment mechanism, CBAMS, to try to protect their own industry. And so they may lean in on certain aspects of trying to protect steel manufacturing with a more than multilateral process. But by and large it's going to be America first, and that means, ‘we're not interested in working with other people unless it's in our own self interest.’ And so that's going to be a challenge for the UN writ large, and certainly a challenge for climate talks. But does that really matter? And I think in a way, if we have reached a tipping point where the cleanest technology is the cheapest technology, and we're all looking for economic growth and we all want energy to be cheap, does it really matter if the COP process pauses or stops? I mean, personally I think not, but the sentiment may change. But really, the reason people are investing in big-scale renewables now is because it's economic. There's money to be made across the world. So I don't know if the halting of this UN system will do too much to change that.  

ML

I suppose where I am on COP meetings is, I think there was a big mistake to try to go from the five-yearly rhythm, which was working really well, which, of course, was copied from the Climate Change Act 2008. I don't know who wrote that but...  

BW

No, no. We copied it from Kyoto. But yes, we kept the Kyoto process, and Kyoto was abandoned.  

ML

The five-year rhythm seemed to give society and business and investors a chance to do something, and then you had to put more on the table. This business of it becoming a sort of perma-crisis. Every COP is a critical COP. To me, that was a huge mistake. So maybe we see a five-year hiatus, and who knows what will come after Trump? Because one of the things is there will be life after Trump, and I think there'll be a big social push. But at the moment, everybody's saying, ‘Oh, this red wave is something profound, and there's a shift to the right.’ I'll be honest, I don't buy it. I just don't buy it. I think that what you've got is an incumbent that has taken us through a period of inflation, for better or for worse, that was unpopular, uncharismatic, and people have just turned away. But I don't think that there's a fundamental turning away from the issues. It could well be that there's, you know that these things are pendulums. It could well be that we see a swing back in the US in another four years. And when there's a diaspora of people, whether it's for, I hope it's not from the IEA, which some of the Republican senators have had in their crosshairs because they've been working on net zero scenarios and so on, and therefore have been coming to the into the crosshairs and potentially under threat of defunding. But you know, even if that happens, which I hope it doesn't, those people will go and they'll find a way to continue working on the same issues. And we saw that in Trump 1.0, that not every action also has a reaction, and we shouldn't underestimate that.  

BW

Yeah, no. And the other wild card in all of this is what the physics of climate change is going to do to the US. We're going to see extreme weather. It's a continental weather pattern, right? So it gets hit by extreme weather more so than Europe, say, for example — although notwithstanding all the terrible flooding that's happened. But you're going to see climate impacts in the US, on US soil. And how are Americans going to respond to that? They can just try to insulate themselves. You know, ever greater use of air conditioning and battening down the hatches. But at some point, I think there's going to be a realisation that you can't do a deal with physics. Trump can do certain things, but if climate change remains part of this narrative, and people start to feel that that's wrong, it might undermine the whole experiment. You know if people start to think, ‘actually, do these guys have our best interests at heart, or are they just ideologues, which I now don't really trust.’ We just can't tell how that's going to play out.  

ML

So on that note, I think we have speculated as much as we can in the absence of data. I think we've done very well for about a half an hour of speculation. And obviously these themes we’ll be coming to again and again during future episodes, because we've now got four years of a Trump presidency.  

BW

Absolutely, yes, I can see this will be a big, big feature. But as we've said, it's somewhat clear that this is… you know, I'm absolutely unhappy that we're having to go through this. But we don't really know what the macro effect is going to be on the things we care about, which is clean energy transition. So there'll be a lot of good content for our episodes going forward.  

ML

And that brings this special episode of Cleaning Up to a close. Don't forget that Bryony will be back in two days for a conversation with Professor Qi Ye of Hong Kong University. And so, I'm Michael Liebreich.   

BW

And I'm Bryony Worthington, and that was Cleaning Up.  

ML

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