Zero: The Climate Race – Details, episodes & analysis

Before he founded the geothermal startup Fervo in 2017, Tim Latimer was a drilling engineer for the oil and gas industry — a job he loved. “Honestly, if it wasn't for climate change, I probably wouldn’t have ever changed my career,” he says this week on Zero. Now Latimer is applying his drilling know-how to Fervo’s wells, supercharging their energy production in the process. The company opened its first power plant in Nevada late in 2023, and is now in the process of opening another plant in Utah. Latimer and Akshat Rathi chat about opportunities in geothermal, the infernal permitting process, and why Fervo has its sights on expanding into Kenya, Indonesia, Turkey and the Philippines.

Explore further:

• Past episode with the National Grid’s Sanjeet Sanghera about the need to update the grid on the path to net zero
• Past episode with Bill Gates about investing in nuclear power and other green energy plants
• Past episode with BNEF’s Claire Curry about how clean energy technology startups can succeed in a difficult investment climate 

Zero is a production of Bloomberg Green. Our producer is Mythili Rao. Special thanks this week to Kira Bindrim and Monique Mulima. 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.

The “cold chain” that delivers our food is inconspicuous but vast. The US alone boasts around 5.5 billion cubic feet of refrigerated space; that’s 150 Empire State Buildings’ worth of freezers. Now, the developing world is catching up. On Zero, Nicola Twilley, author of Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves, discusses how refrigeration became so ubiquitous and what our reliance on it means for our palates and the planet. 

Explore further:

• Past episode with Stacey Abrams on how kitchen-table decisions can cut emissions
• Past episode with journalist George Monbiot on how the world’s food system needs a radical rethink 
• Past episode with two vertical farming companies taking agriculture indoors

Zero is a production of Bloomberg Green. Our producer is Mythili Rao. Special thanks this week to Kira Bindrim, Aaron Rutkoff and Monique Mulima. 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.

Earlier this month, tech billionaire Bill Gates broke ground on a new nuclear plant in Kemmerer, Wyoming– a historic coal town. Gates tells Zero why he hopes the plant, which uses sodium for cooling, rather than water, will be the first of many in the country– no matter who wins this year’s election. “The idea of the US being more energy secure and US innovation allowing us to export, those things are still somewhat bipartisan in nature,” he says. Plus, he weighs in on AI as both a major generator of emissions and as a potential source of climate solutions.

Explore further:

• Past episode with BNEF’s Claire Curry on how energy startups can dodge the valley of death
• Past episode with Brookfield Asset Management CCEO Connor Teskey on making renewables a profitable bet
• Past episode with Bill Gates on the significance of the Inflation Reduction Act

Zero is a production of Bloomberg Green. Our producer is Mythili Rao. Special thanks this week to Kira Bindrim, Kate Evans, and Alicia Clanton. 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.

The task of cutting emissions is becoming more urgent by the day. Are democracies up to the challenge? Do we have time to let the usual course of consensus-building and debate play out, or should governments around the world prioritize climate action at any cost? In this week’s episode of Zero, Bloomberg Green’s Akshat Rathi puts these questions to Daniel J. Fiorino, director of the Center for Environmental Policy at American University and author of Can Democracy Handle Climate Change?

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.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.

Carbon offsets are everywhere – a $2 billion dollar industry that’s set to grow even more as the US is even incorporating them in its effort to fulfill international climate pledges. Yet in the thirty years since they were created, they have not been proven to work. How did such a good idea go wrong and why is it so sticky? In this episode of Zero, Akshat talks to Mark Trexler of The Climatographers, who helped build the first carbon offset program in 1988, about what went wrong with offsets and if there’s any way to fix them. 

Read more about the dodgy world of carbon offsets in Bloomberg’s three part investigation. 

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. 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.

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.

COP27 ended with a historic agreement on loss and damage, but other major challenges remain — including the gap that has long existed between energy needs in Africa and the funding that the continent receives. As the “Africa COP” comes to an end, Akshat speaks with two experts about the continent’s unique financing challenges: Rebekah Shirley, director of research, data and innovation at the World Resources Institute Africa, explains the “chicken and egg problem,” and IFC Managing Director Makthar Diop, who talks about the institution's strategy for reaching $60B in funding by 2025. We’re also joined by Bloomberg News editors Siobhan Wagner and Will Kennedy to discuss what happened on the sidelines of COP27. 

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 https://www.bloomberg.com/green

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Lewis Pugh has swum across seas and in between melting sea ice, but the hardest part of his work is what comes after – contributing to negotiations to protect those same bodies from development. And he’s been successful: In 2016 he got the Russians to sign a pact to create a marine protected area in the Ross Sea – one of the few healthy seas left, and the size of Britain, France, Germany, Italy put together. A negotiation should be an exploration, not a battle, he tells Akshat Rathi. Pugh also talks about how he got his start, the swim that made him into an environmental advocate and what he wants to come out of COP27. Akshat speaks with Salma El Wardany, a Bloomberg News energy and commodities reporter based in Cairo, and Zero producer Oscar Boyd, about their experiences of COP27.

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 https://www.bloomberg.com/green

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Whether the so-called implementation COP will live up to its promise will be answered this week as negotiators begin to do the work of writing the final agreement. Bloomberg Green Reporter Akshat Rathi spoke with young climate activists about their engagement with this COP, the difficulty of activism in a repressive country and how they are making change in their own nations. We’re also joined by Bloomberg News reporters John Ainger and Jen Dlouhy to discuss the latest announcements from the conference regarding loss and damage.

Read our story on the difficulties climate activists faced at COP27.

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 https://www.bloomberg.com/green

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

As week one wraps up at COP27 in Sharm El Sheik in Egypt, Bloomberg Green Reporter Akshat Rathi talks with Patricia Espinosa, who until August 2022 was the executive secretary of the UNFCCC, the body charged with organizing the annual COP climate conferences. Espinosa tells Zero what goes on behind the scenes at COP to get the 200 participating member states to agree, and why the global platform is vital for making any progress on climate issues. We’re also joined by Yinka Ibukun, Bloomberg News West Africa Bureau Chief, to hear about whether the “African COP” is living up to its name. 

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, Laura Millan and Stacey Wong. 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.