New Climate Capitalism Denise Young

Today I am talking with Elaine Johnson from the Environmental Defenders Office about climate litigation in Australia. With a unique situation as a rich country on the frontlines of climate impacts and a coal exporter, Australia has emerged as a world leader in climate litigation and 2022 was a bumper year.
Among the big headline wins was the Tiwi Santos case which barred oil and gas company Santos from offshore drilling in the Northern Territory, and another which shut down billionaire Clive Palmer’s plans for a coal mine in Queensland.
As this field matures, we are seeing new frontiers emerge and one of the most exciting trends is lawsuits on greenwashing.
So watch out in 2023 for the lawsuit against Santos for misleading and deceptive claims in its net zero plan.
Despite the impact of these lawsuits, Elaine cautions that the biggest challenge is the stranglehold of the industry narrative on the media. That narrative asserts that coal is part of the transition, that Australian coal is cleaner than coal from other places, and that coal is a part of the national identity.
Don’t miss our conversation on this exciting, and fast developing field.
🗒 And you can find a full transcript of our conversation over on the podcast website here.
What we talked about:
2:25 Why Australia has a big role to play in reducing emissions as historically the country has been a big exporter of coal, oil and gas. But it is also one of the driest continents on earth, and vulnerable to climate impacts.
4.40 Elaine talks about an ongoing case, which is a world first, challenging gas company Santos for misleading and deceptive claims in their corporate net zero plan for 2040.
12.40 Landmark human rights case in 2022 in Queensland in which youth group including First Nations Australians defeated Clive Palmer’s plans to build a massive coal mine, invoking threat to human rights of young people and First Nations Australians.
16.30 This case involved an important innovation in how evidence is heard. First time ever that the land court which hears all the applications for mining projects in Queensland, was invited to hear from First Nations witnesses on country, and welcomed on country. The court is now looking to formalize that process in court rules.
21.56 This judgement was a historic and memorable day. Judge thanked the communities for welcoming the court onto their country and for everything she had learned through that experience.
22.50 What are the main challenges? How are vested interests fighting back?
Narrative is the biggest challenge: industry has well crafted narratives that are constantly brought up in mainstream media that say that coal is part of the transition.
Lawyers can address parts of those claims, but they need partners across the spectrum of civil society to achieve the needed transformation.
28.00 Regulators in Australia are taking a keen interest in the wake of the net zero challenge to Santos to investigate what other misleading claims they should explore.
29.15 New trend to watch: corporate accountability for loss and damage. As we start to see impacts of climate change being felt in Australia and the Pacific there will be more claimants bringing cases against carbon majors.
32.30 Elaine observes that the tide has turned in the last 12-24 months, in part because of the intense impacts of climate change that Australia has experienced in recent years plus the strength of attribution science. Its been slow, but she’s surprised by the number of big wins in the past 12 months.
34.33 To challenge the industry narrative will take more than legal cases, and the Australian media needs to do more.




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Today we are excited to welcome back Sony Kapoor to the podcast, and we’re talking about the Bridgetown Initiative, a new plan - an exciting new plan - to overhaul the international financial system to unlock huge flows of finance to the global South for the energy transition.
Now disagreement between the North and the South on how to finance the latter’s exit from fossil fuels provides a useful lens on a wider problem about the geo-economics of today’s world of multiple, intersecting crises.
Sony outlines the nuts and bolts of this new plan - championed by the Prime Minister of Barbados, Mia Mottley, to “unlock the trillions” for the global South. But, more importantly, he explains why this approach is far from sufficient.
He questions whether headline-grabbing news that focuses on big numbers instead of the quality of the finance, is the answer.
And raises the issue of which economic model the new engines of global growth - India and Indonesia - can follow in a world where we no longer have the carbon
budget to replicate China’s carbon-intensive trajectory.
Now Sony has a plan for a new “grand bargain” between the North and the South for a new development model led by services and virtual delivery of services that respects global environmental boundaries. This is arguably one of the most important policy conversation of our times, so stay tuned.
What we talked about:
0:57 Stocktake after COP27
3:47 The loss and damage fund is for now an empty shell
5:31 Why the Bretton Woods system is well overdue for reform
8:01 Note that World Bank/IMF played big role in opening up of China in 1980s and liberalization of India’s economy in 1990s
10:03 But today these bodies are not tackling the urgent debate about which economic model the new engines of global growth such as India should follow, as replicating China’s carbon-intensive model is not an option
11:00 Climate change still doesn’t feature in the IMF core function of macroeconomic surveillance. World Bank calls itself the world’s bigggest climate finance lender, but this is only because it is the world’s biggest lender.
12.19 Enter the Bridgetown Initiative: what’s good about it
14.15 Why the ambition of Bridgetown falls short
16:43 Bridgetown - short term aspect seeks to reduce the outflow of money by extending the suspension of debt repayments agreed during peak of COVID crisis.
22.55 Medium-term - how Bridgetown proposes to allow lending up up to a trillion dollars of cheap money to developing countries
29.37 If climate risk is properly assessed and taken into account by markets and credit rating agencies, the poorest countries will see their already sub-par credit ratings go down several notches because they face many physical risks from extreme weather.
31.04 Why the quality of finance matters more than the quantity. Too many discussions about climate finance focus coming up with the largest headline number.
32.55 Sony’s Grand Bargain, explained.












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The summer of 2022 may go down in history as the moment the world woke up to the global water crisis. So I’m thrilled to introduce today’s conversation with Nigel Crawhall, who heads up the local and indigenous knowledge division at UNESCO.
What I wanted to learn about is a recent upsurge in demand for indigenous perspectives and solutions in the water space. Nigel recently attended an important UN meeting on water in Tajikistan where he facilitated a first ever forum for indigenous people to have a voice in this political process to reshape how we think about and and act on water in an era of crisis.
Nigel explains the nuts and bolts of how to bring indigenous perspectives into fora previously dominated by Western knowledge. We also talk about the new geopolitics of water - why high altitude actors, for example, are now influential players, the role of decolonization in closed-door meetings and everything you need to know about the latest IPBES assessments on wild species and values of nature. 
Nigel has a fantastic ability to convey vast amounts of knowledge through great storytelling. So if you’ve found this topic challenging in the past, our conversation will definitely open new doors.
What we talked about:
2.34 The paradigm shift on indigenous knowledge dates back to the 2007 UN Declaration on rights of indigenous peoples. Over time, this converged with global challenges around sustainability - the idea that we need everyone at the table, that exclusion is part of the problem so participation is part of the solution
4.13 The new normal is bringing in multiple streams of evidence including indigenous knowledge into scientufuc assessments and decision making.
6.38 For too long we have been focused on western models & urban living & missed out on the majority of human understanding & knowledge about the world.
7.38 Zoom into the politics of water: why did the UN wait nearly half a century to hold a big international conference in water next March in NY?
8.41 Why is it difficult for indigenous people to be involved in water policy ?
9.28 What is the UN water action decade ? UN Decades are major areas of international policy concern -they are a global agenda setting tool. Alongside water currently there are Decades on Ocean Science & Ecosystems Restoration
10.07 one distinctive feature of the Water Action Decade has been the scant public participation - mostly a technical process. Until the Dushanbe conference opened the door.
13.00 From the Arctic to the Kalahari to the Mekong, traditional knowledge holders bring a wealth of insight on water governance. Hearing their stories helps build a bridge between the rights based and the knowledge based approach.
17.05 Why is water so political?
One reason is that the state is the main arbiter of the management of water, yet thé living experience of water happens at the ground level.
18.50 high altitude countries with glacial systems have emerged as influential actors in mulltilateral negotiations on water.
20.21 Why the Dushanbe declaration is an extraordinary document, a mini Paris agreement
22.17 what to know about the latest IPBES assessments approved in Bonn?
The values assessment gets to the heart of « what matters ». While many want to quantify the value of nature, others say if you put a price on it it means you intend to extract it & turn it into cash value. What the assessment does is look at what is the value of nature from different perspectives.
26.05 Should we talk about decolonization as a context for understanding north/south & east/west stressors in multilateral negotiations? The developing world sees itself as having collective interest about global justice & equity.












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This is a special edition of the podcast, the Big IPCC edit.
IPCC reports are notoriously hard to read - they are long and very technical. This means that few people actually read them.
But they matter to all of us - the insights from these reports affect the way we vote, invest, consume and just generally how we live our lives.
To make this bumper episode, I talked to three different authors from three chapters in the latest Working Group 3 report on mitigation solutions.
* Demand-side solutions, a fast growing area of knowledge, the new, good news chapter of the entire report
* Investment and finance - volume of literature on this tripled between previous 2014 assessment and this one
* Long-term emissions pathways - the heart of net zero
In the second segment, I talk to Joyashree Roy, Coordinating Lead Author for the new chapter on demand, services and social aspects of mitigation. This is a big deal, as previous reports focused mostly on supply-side solutions like renewable energies. But this report shows with high confidence that demand-side strategies can reduce 40-70% of emissions across all sectors.
But first, I talk to Christa Clapp and Glen Peters from the CICERO Centre for International Climate Research in Norway.
Our conversation is an important primer for anyone who wants to get their head around net zero.
Among the highlights: why the “three more years to reduce emissions” thing is wrong. Why peak emissions are an important signal for the oil and gas sector, and why does the report have an entire chapter on finance and investment, yet the IPCC doesn’t target financial decision makers with its report?
We also talk about #climatetwitter - how is it changing and what does that mean for the IPCC and its reports?
What we talked about:
Part One: Christa Clapp and Glen Peters
2.35 The finance chapter is 3 times bigger than in the previous assessment. A lot is happening, but we still don’t know the impact of that activity
6.31 Why “three more years to reduce the emissions curve” is an error, one that sends the wrong signal about having more time
10.02 What is “peak emissions” and why does it matter? In fact, what matters most is the reduction after the peak. (Glen)
11:59 The language around peak emissions matters to the oil and gas sector because it affects decisions around when to reduce production. Most oil and gas majors in their scenarios have emissions peaking between 2030 and 2040.
15.44 Emissions were back at 2019 levels in 2021. So we’re essentially at a new peak emisssions.
18.20 War in Ukraine is driving new interest in nuclear, and we’re starting to see nuclear energy deals being labelled as green.
22.08 Everyone agrees climate specialists from different areas such as finance and carbon cycle specialists should communicate and collaborate more, but there are many barriers.
27.08 Glen says that an Integrated Assessment Model is like a jack of all trades but a master of none.
28.22 The finance sector is a whole new consumer group for climate scenarios, and sometimes this means they use the scenarios in a way they weren’t intended. We should be clearer about what the models are doing and not doing, and provide extra information.
29.21 The IPCC doesn’t target financial decision makers as an audience with their reports.
30.18 One thing the scientific literature shows is that all the activity in the finance sector is focused on financial regulation around climate risk transparency, which builds capacity within institutions but does not, for the moment, drive emissions reductions.
34.33. Glen talks about climate twitter and how it’s changed in recent years.
Part Two: Joyashree Roy
42:02 Literature on demand solutions has proliferated since the Fifth Assessment, especially from the social
sciences.
44.38 Lifestyle and behaviour changes can reduce energy demand and our carbon footprint without reducing our wellbeing
49:07 Demand-side strategies can reduce 40-70% of emissions across all

Ian Morse, publisher of “Green Rocks” newsletter; Thea Riofrancos, Assistant Professor Political Science, Providence College
Lithium mining is in the spotlight right now - prices have gone insane, as Elon Musk tweeted only just last week, saying that Tesla may get into the mining business itself as a result.
Lithium, along with cobalt and nickel, are critical elements of electric vehicle batteries and we’re hearing everywhere these days that there isn’t enough of this stuff to go around.
I wanted to know if this is actually, geologically, true? And is this the dirty secret of the clean energy revolution?
To find out, I talked to Thea Riofrancos. She is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Providence College, and Ian Morse. He is science writer and publisher of the “Green Rocks” newsletter
What I found out was that this is a really big conversation that touches everything from global supply chains to climate action to human rights to geopolitics to commodity markets.
Some of the big questions we tackled were: Are we in locked a global struggle for scarce mineral resources that are critical for the energy transition?
Does this mean we have to mine like crazy to get them?
And is there such a thing as clean and responsible mining?
Spoiler alert - nothing may be actually quite what it seems on the outside.
Oh, and, by the way, Elon Musk says that Tesla have some cool ideas for sustainable lithium extraction and refinement. But, as Ian explains at the end of our interview, Tesla’s batteries are notorious for being impossible to recycle, thereby driving even more demand to mine for lithium.
So, buckle up for a fascinating and thought provoking discussion.
We talked about:
01:25 “Critical minerals” is a term with military origins, Thea cautions against replicating that idea - that national security depends on the control or dominance of the supply chains that these minerals feed.
5.54 Calling them “climate” or “decarbonisation” metals allows mining companies to re-brand extractive activities as sustainable and responsible.
8.57 Why are prices so high right now? Thea & Ian talk about market speculation and the financialization of commodity prices, the role of commodity traders.
14.27 Mines on average take a decade to build and operationalize - this creates a lag between demand and supply, and drives markets shortages and price rises.
19.27 Relying exclusively on mining to drive the energy transition may be one of the slowest ways to do climate action, because we know we’ll only have enough materials in 15 years.
22.42 The global map of lithium extraction is changing. Right now there are four main producers, in 10 years from now that will probably double. Rivalries will change, and nation states will shift their economic policies around these stakes.
24.03 Market shortages of critical minerals is driving two big new trends: On-shoring of extractive activities and vertical integration of supply chains.
Car companies like Tesla and VW are contracting directly with raw material companies, either via direct investment or joint ventures. This further drives market shortages as it takes years of supply off the market.
24.13 Ian talks about his experience covering nickel mining in Sulawesi, Indonesia, “where the ground was dug up, shipped elsewhere. And people there were left with red seas, polluted air, no rainforest.”
32.45 The “global race” media narrative crowds out discussion of solutions to the climate emergency, and it allows mining companies to brand themselves as climate heroes.
35.00 The worst way to organize an energy transition is to change only the fuel source. The fastest way to decarbonize the transport sector is to scale up public transportation.
40.50 What can we learn from the recent example of Chile, a mineral powerhouse with a new left-wing government breaking new ground on policy approaches to the extractive sector.
57.49 Our EV batteries were not designed to be recycled -

Edwin Castellanos & Joern Birkmann; IPCC AR6 WG2 Coordinating Lead Authors
The latest IPCC report on adaptation is out, and it came out 4 days after Russia invaded Ukraine.
If you're asking yourself: what did I miss?
The UN Secretary General described it as "an atlas of human suffering". He said, I quote: “Nearly half of humanity is in the danger zone right now”.
For the first time, scientists have given us a number, 3.3 billion people, who are highly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change.
Second, we now know where many of them are located. And while there are groups in all countries vulnerable to climate change, the IPCC report shows that in some places - called “global hotspots” - the level of human vulnerability is a lot higher. 
For example, in the most vulnerable regions, deaths due to floods, storms and droughts are 15 times higher per event compared to countries like Germany and the United States.
There’s a map (see below) in the report which shows where many of the most vulnerable are, and it includes parts of East Africa, South Asia, Central America, and the small island states.
If you’re nodding, and saying to yourself “hmm that makes sense”. In fact, this map was highly contested by delegates from both rich and poor countries at the approval session for the Summary for Policy Makers. Those objections led to it being removed from the summary - the most widely read part of the 3,500-page report. 
To find out why, and to learn about the highlights of this important report, stay tuned for my interview with IPCC authors Joern Birkmann from Germany and Edwin Castellanos from Guatemala. It’s not all gloom and doom, there are even a few reasons to be hopeful.
We talked about:
* 5.08 Billions more people will face dengue risk by the end of the century, and among them many people in non-tropical regions such as Europe
* 7.54 Reflections on the final approval session
* 11.42 Why language matters so very much in the negotiations between governments and scientists over the Summary for PolicyMakers
* 12.23 Imbalance between developing and developed countries in terms of who speaks up in the approval session, and size of delegations
* 13.53 What happened with the figure on vulnerability (see below) at the final approval session. Why was it contested?
* 16.01 The art of defining “policy-prescriptive”
* 17.14 Quantifying the 3.3 billion number: a first for the IPCC and an important message of the report
* 19.17 What else is new? Approaches to vulnerability have changed from the Fifth to the Sixth Assessment
* 19:43 First ever reference to “colonialism” as a driver of vulnerability, few governments contested this
* 21.55 Global hotspots of human vulnerability
* 24.41 The idea of climate-resilient development is something new & important in this report
* 25.55 Regional approaches were also a highlight
* 28.21 What’s the good news? The Sixth Assessment has a lot more literature on adaptation; the challenge is how to assess the effectiveness of what’s happening, especially in developing countries
* 34.19 How are we doing on adapting to extreme heat events in Europe?






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