Speaker 1: With Laurent Segeland from London and Gerard Read from Berlin.
Speaker 1: This is Redefining Energy.
Speaker 2: Today, on Redefining Energy, we're going to talk about the
Speaker 2: Tony Blair Institute recent report on climber, which we warmly
Speaker 2: recommend people not to read.
Speaker 3: Joining us on the show, our partner in crime, the Fearless,
Speaker 3: the Invincible, Michael Barnard, the three of us, we have
Speaker 3: put together the most downloaded episode of the past twelve
Speaker 3: months of prediction, extremely popular, and of course the episode
Speaker 3: on Bill Gates where we were not very nuts. I
Speaker 3: really won't though, where we still have guests because we're
Speaker 3: better off babbling together. So without further ado, Michael Barnard, Michael,
Speaker 3: welcome to the show.
Speaker 1: Great to be here again.
Speaker 3: Talking about the Tony Blay Institute. Probably child first, we're
Speaker 3: going to talk about Tony Blair because for those Billow
Speaker 3: forty years old or American audience, probably Tony Blair is
Speaker 3: like a forgotten name. So just remind us of his career.
Speaker 2: What Tony player was Labor Prime Minister in the UK
Speaker 2: from nineteen ninety seven to two thousand and seven and
Speaker 2: really popular through that whole period until the Iraq War.
Speaker 2: Came really two thousand and three, and that sort of
Speaker 2: has left to sort of stain in and around his reputation.
Speaker 2: But he definitely was the sort of body called the
Speaker 2: cultural icon and around the center left in the Labor Party.
Speaker 2: So he took the Labor Party more from the left
Speaker 2: side to the center. And really, you know, you could
Speaker 2: say he was the most charismatic European leader of his era.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he was young. And if you look at the period,
Speaker 3: China was still an economic mino. The Russian early garchs
Speaker 3: were busy killing themselves rather than killing us. The Gulf
Speaker 3: States wonder construction. It was low. Europe was expanding, what
Speaker 3: three percent grows? It was cool. Britannia where the spies
Speaker 3: girls the most at my company was Gee, the big
Speaker 3: company were IBM, AOL andron Kodak Nokia. So it's a
Speaker 3: different it's a different epoch.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And in the United States had turned into a gerontocracy.
Speaker 1: Bill Clinton was the charismatic, young, energetic leader that was
Speaker 1: Blair's foil on either side of the Atlantic until he wasn't.
Speaker 3: After his tenure as Prime Minister, he becomes lead the
Speaker 3: list envoy whatever that means. It means you go a
Speaker 3: lot to the Middle East. That was until two or fifteen,
Speaker 3: and then he created the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change,
Speaker 3: the Tony Blair Institute. What is it right now, Jod.
Speaker 2: That's a good question, ruh. I mean, ultimately, they produce
Speaker 2: lots of reports and the lobbin that's what they do.
Speaker 2: Huge budget, one hundred million dollars. I suppose they model
Speaker 2: themselves really on the Clinking Foundation in the US, and
Speaker 2: some people listen to them.
Speaker 3: A lot of people listen to them. Look the stuff
Speaker 3: of eight hundredd which is a lot. And if you
Speaker 3: look at their website, they do government advisory services, which
Speaker 3: is his name, lobbying for governments and they have no
Speaker 3: problem dealing with any type of regime. They got a
Speaker 3: lot of money from Ceudi Arabia, from Azerbaijan. Big funders
Speaker 3: also are the Larryalism Foundation, the Gates Foundation. So it's
Speaker 3: a very cozy DeVos world we have here.
Speaker 2: And actually, by the way, they do write quite a
Speaker 2: bit on energy. Yeah, they don't write very well on energy,
Speaker 2: but they do write on energy.
Speaker 3: So they publish their report on policy two or three
Speaker 3: per months on anything like health, economics, technology, governance and
Speaker 3: climate change. And if I look at the statistics, one
Speaker 3: in four of the report are related to energy. And
Speaker 3: the reason we're having that conversation today is because last
Speaker 3: month the release they are now infamous Climate Paradox report,
Speaker 3: which triggered a certain number of number one wonderful coverage
Speaker 3: by the classic media, the ft the Bloomberg, Oh my god,
Speaker 3: Tony Blair is so brilliant and so and a few
Speaker 3: eark reaction, once from Michael Levage and his substack and
Speaker 3: the other one by Michael Barnard on a clean Technicia.
Speaker 3: The auto is Lindy Firstman, and she's the head of
Speaker 3: energy policy for the Tony Blind Institute. And she has
Speaker 3: a PhD in sociology from UC Berkeley, and she has
Speaker 3: done her all work in academia, government and ngios. I
Speaker 3: think she never worked in the company in her whole life,
Speaker 3: but I'm sure she's very talented. Okay, let's go back
Speaker 3: to the report. Child.
Speaker 2: Well, look, at the end of the day, it's a
Speaker 2: report for me that's follow words. Now, why do I
Speaker 2: start with full of words? Is because nobody reads reports
Speaker 2: like that anymore. I mean, I think there was two
Speaker 2: graphs in the whole thing, right, you have to do
Speaker 2: a word search to understand it. But what I will
Speaker 2: say is, maybe take a step back. What I would
Speaker 2: look at is the first recommendation of the report is
Speaker 2: accelerating scaling technologies that capture carbon. Then it's harnessing the
Speaker 2: power technology including area, investing in breakthrough in frontier energy solutions,
Speaker 2: scaling nature based solutions. So the whole message is that
Speaker 2: we don't have the technologies in place to actually solve
Speaker 2: the issue. And actually what annoys me by this is,
Speaker 2: and I will talk about the technologies head run, we
Speaker 2: do have the technologies right and also, by the way,
Speaker 2: they're also low cost. So when I listened to this
Speaker 2: and when I read it, and I read it with
Speaker 2: some of the comments and newspapers, I looked at it
Speaker 2: and I went, Okay, this is the typical blocking strategy.
Speaker 2: And what we're seeing a present is a fossil fuel
Speaker 2: industry that is doing a huge amount of financing of
Speaker 2: anti renewabilization, anti electrification. And there's a reason why because listen,
Speaker 2: they've got huge amounts of assets in play, and guess
Speaker 2: what if electrification and renewabilization happens quicker, it's very, very
Speaker 2: bad for their business. So that's certainly what you're seeing
Speaker 2: in the media. So when I saw this report, i'ment, ah,
Speaker 2: this is just propaganda, you know. But Michael, I don't
Speaker 2: know you wrote something of this. What was your initial
Speaker 2: reaction what you saw this? Well, I'm just going to.
Speaker 1: Lean back into the primary energy fallacy. These people are
Speaker 1: in the same camp as Vaclav Smell. So we can't
Speaker 1: get there from here in less than a century, which
Speaker 1: just isn't true. The primary energy fallacy. Brief primary on
Speaker 1: that right now, A bunch of energy comes into our
Speaker 1: economies because it's fossil fuels. We burn it and we
Speaker 1: get fifteen to fifty percent of the energy, and the
Speaker 1: rest of it we waste. It is waste heat in
Speaker 1: an electrified economy, Well, guess what we waste a lot
Speaker 1: less of the energy wind turbines to heat pumps actually
Speaker 1: gives us excess energy from the environment. We're going to
Speaker 1: be down forty percent of the energy coming into our
Speaker 1: economy to deliver all the same economic comfort and convenience
Speaker 1: benefits we get. No anybody who's driven an electric car
Speaker 1: knows this. They accelerate faster, they're a quiet, they don't
Speaker 1: think they're full in the morning when you get up
Speaker 1: and hop into them, and you can use an app
Speaker 1: make sure they're warm when you get in. That future
Speaker 1: is a lot lower waste than the present. And Smill
Speaker 1: just kind of miss that he in his very influential
Speaker 1: books on this. Bill Gates was a big fan read
Speaker 1: apparently all of Smill's thirty seven books. Smill just missed it.
Speaker 1: It was only in twenty twenty one that Vaclav Smill
Speaker 1: wrote a monograph of three pages acknowledging the primer energy
Speaker 1: fallacy and didn't change the assumptions that he'd gotten wrong
Speaker 1: in his books. And Tony Blair is in the same space.
Speaker 1: They're saying energy use has only ever gone up in
Speaker 1: every energy transition. It's always been an energy addition, ignoring
Speaker 1: the fact that we don't burn whale oil and lamps
Speaker 1: and albums anymore. The primary energy fallacy is the big one.
Speaker 1: People have done big studies on this, mark said Jacobson
Speaker 1: did this in the two thousands, did a whole bunch
Speaker 1: of work to say what would an electrifying economy look
Speaker 1: like in terms of energy demand. Saul Griffiths did this
Speaker 1: under contract to the US Department of Energy in the
Speaker 1: twenty tens and I did my basic Napcin math. It
Speaker 1: only takes Napkin math to show this, and apparently Napkin
Speaker 1: math and reading decades of articulation of this is beyond
Speaker 1: the Blair Institute's capacity. That's my first observation.
Speaker 3: Lurm, what was your thoughts on when My thoughts was
Speaker 3: very simple, because I did the word count and the
Speaker 3: world DAK directa capture a peard eleven times, CCS nine times,
Speaker 3: capture seventeen times, NUCAR eight times, wind four times, so
Speaker 3: last six times give you a bit of an idea.
Speaker 3: And of course the second thing which triggered this current
Speaker 3: episode is on the cover there's a picture of the
Speaker 3: I would say famous or infamous climb Works direct air
Speaker 3: capture plant in Iceland. The week after the publication of
Speaker 3: the report, the posta child for direct air capture, which
Speaker 3: I call deception, amatterism and con because that's what DAC
Speaker 3: is about, started showing the real numbers of how much
Speaker 3: the capture and it's an absolute joke. And immediately Michael
Speaker 3: wrote another uped on Clint Technica. Michael, can you talk
Speaker 3: a bit about climb Works, which is the posta child
Speaker 3: of Tony Blair.
Speaker 1: Let's talk a bit about the problem they're trying to solve.
Speaker 1: They're trying to drag CO two out of the atmosphere.
Speaker 1: The analogy uses, you've got a beach full of dark
Speaker 1: black sand, and there's a million grains of black sand,
Speaker 1: and there's four hundred and thirty grains of dark gray sand,
Speaker 1: and your job is to take the dark gray sand out. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: somebody else is scattering dark gray sand over the rest
Speaker 1: of the beach. As you're sipping through the sand looking
Speaker 1: for those individual ones. It's just an entropic nightmare. It's
Speaker 1: a waste of time. And from a materiality perspective, you
Speaker 1: need to get up to one hundred million tons a
Speaker 1: year to be making a dent in the forty billion
Speaker 1: tons a year of CO two that we're adding. So
Speaker 1: those are the numbers, like they're big numbers now, Clime
Speaker 1: Works this was their second plant. Their first plant was
Speaker 1: orca ten thousand tons a year. In theory has not
Speaker 1: hit those numbers. Then they're building Mammoth, and Mammoth is
Speaker 1: the one that hit the headlines because an investigative journalist
Speaker 1: found that it, though was designed for forty thousand tons
Speaker 1: a year forty thousand, it had managed to remove one
Speaker 1: hundred and five tons in twenty twenty four, and they
Speaker 1: have all sorts of excuses for that. But the other
Speaker 1: thing is I like to their sustainability page to look
Speaker 1: for their metrics, and you'd figure they'd say, here blazon
Speaker 1: how much carbon we've sequestered. They never tell anybody on
Speaker 1: their website how much CO two they've actually seequestered, which
Speaker 1: is a remarkable gap for a firm which is whose
Speaker 1: only purpose is permanent speek questation in CO two. It's fascinating.
Speaker 1: And I've got a long history of looking at direct
Speaker 1: air captures or was it deception, amateurism and cons yep.
Speaker 1: I looked at carbon engineerings back in twenty nineteen, and
Speaker 1: I spoken to the founders of Global Thermostat, you know,
Speaker 1: I think that was in twenty ten. You know, I've
Speaker 1: talked to people all over the space, David Keith, and
Speaker 1: I just never found anything worth doing in the entire
Speaker 1: space because none of them scale up to that degree
Speaker 1: of materiality. And cly Works is no different. Eight hundred
Speaker 1: million dollars, five hundred staff. Now they're laying off staff
Speaker 1: because all gee thermodynamic and entropic reality is just proving
Speaker 1: that they're not going to ever be dirt cheap, and
Speaker 1: they have to be dirt cheap and or to be relevant.
Speaker 3: Now one hundred five tons. To give our listeners a
Speaker 3: bit of an idea, if you fly going from from
Speaker 3: London to New York, that one hundred and sixty five tons,
Speaker 3: So they did not even compensate for one flight. And
Speaker 3: there is eight hundred million at stake. Now that lab
Speaker 3: in research to do some that's all when I'm fine,
Speaker 3: But we're talking eight hundred million, and we're talking about
Speaker 3: serious people which have been advocating it. You want to
Speaker 3: talk about serious people, Let's talk about the people who
Speaker 3: financed them their Series A into twenty two, you know,
Speaker 3: the Hey days. So we have Partners Group. Of course,
Speaker 3: some people say, okay, Climb works, they're Swiss, they bring
Speaker 3: Swiss Ray, they bring Partners Group. The guy who signed
Speaker 3: off and it's not me. I mean it's on the
Speaker 3: press release they did way back when you add the
Speaker 3: vice CEO, Alfred Gartner, you had the Esther Piiner, head
Speaker 3: of infrastructure. I mean those people normally they're serious. Esther
Speaker 3: I know her, she's doing some real investment, but what
Speaker 3: the heck is she doing in climb works? And then
Speaker 3: they brought in poor guys because I'm sure they didn't
Speaker 3: have time to re see what's going on. They broad
Speaker 3: in the g i C, the Singapore Sovereign Wildfront. Okay,
Speaker 3: they brought in so Swiss Ray so is Christian Momentary,
Speaker 3: our CEO at the time now is gone. But the
Speaker 3: guy who did the investment, mich Repman, is still there.
Speaker 3: And of course the guys who did the placement is
Speaker 3: JP Morgan. They are names same on the press release,
Speaker 3: so it's not you know, it's not a new secret.
Speaker 3: Brandy Marino, ed Zichell. They're there, the Global ad of
Speaker 3: Sustainability and so on. A lot of those people are
Speaker 3: still around, and of course the question is are they
Speaker 3: going to ask to pony up for the second rounds?
Speaker 3: Because for me that smell like tuna bonds. The people
Speaker 3: in the finance industry know what I'm talking about.
Speaker 2: Can I just guys, it's easy easy criticize, and we're
Speaker 2: right to do so, but I just want to just
Speaker 2: talk about the reality of what's going on in the
Speaker 2: world of electrification. So the first thing is just take
Speaker 2: the case of solar. There were six hundred kickawats install
Speaker 2: last year just in terms of power produced without six
Speaker 2: hundred kick awats. This here, that's the equivalent of Japan's
Speaker 2: demand needs for the whole year. That's the scale. I'm
Speaker 2: saying this because it's the scale at which that technology
Speaker 2: is coming to market, right. And the second thing is,
Speaker 2: we'll take the case of lithium ion batteries. If you
Speaker 2: went back twenty twenty, it was two hundred gig of
Speaker 2: what hours of batteries produced a year. We're over eleven
Speaker 2: hundred now, fourfoldingquish Again, I'm just giving you an example
Speaker 2: that's for me technology innovation and speed to market. And
Speaker 2: we go back to what you said about backlaf Smell.
Speaker 2: He does not understand the technology change that's going on
Speaker 2: around it now. The one thing I did like in
Speaker 2: the report is the mention of AI because AI is
Speaker 2: really critical because what AI does is it enables you
Speaker 2: to manage this complexity going forward in a much better
Speaker 2: way than before. And I would also say a lower
Speaker 2: cost way. And that's the reality of what we're in now.
Speaker 2: So it's not again to put into context. The technologies
Speaker 2: are here and they're coming faster than whatever everybody thinks.
Speaker 1: I'd like to lean into that because one of the
Speaker 1: takeaways I also get in addition to them not understanding that,
Speaker 1: not understanding the primary energy fallacy, Clearly they've never looked
Speaker 1: at anything China has been doing for the past two years.
Speaker 1: If they're asserting nuclear is the answer, wind and solar
Speaker 1: and batteries and storage arn't. So let's give some numbers.
Speaker 1: Last week, it was announced by an analyst who spends
Speaker 1: all this time assessing stuff that China's emissions of CO
Speaker 1: two declined by one percent from March last year to
Speaker 1: March this year, despite their economy growing substantially.
Speaker 2: Wow. I didn't see that. Wow, But that's big news.
Speaker 2: That's brilliant.
Speaker 1: Yeah. This is not decoupling. This is decline. This is
Speaker 1: not slowing of growth. This is decline of the emissions
Speaker 1: over a year. And this is the first one without
Speaker 1: a forced third event like it declined in twenty twenty
Speaker 1: two because of COVID twenty twenty twenty two. But that
Speaker 1: was a global slowdown. This is economic growth, a vibrant economy,
Speaker 1: no matter what the headlines and the economists say. They've
Speaker 1: had twenty five years of getting China of publishing, China
Speaker 1: is doomed headlines. They've been wrong every time, and so
Speaker 1: the next thing. Coal generation dropped by four point seven
Speaker 1: percent Q one twenty twenty four to Q one twenty
Speaker 1: twenty five, despite having an over five percent GDP growth
Speaker 1: and a growth of electricity demand of total electricity consumed
Speaker 1: in the economy and a bunch of that. The actual
Speaker 1: grid demand drops slightly, but behind the meter solar. They've
Speaker 1: hammered in so much that a drop in grid demand
Speaker 1: is not indicative of a drop in octification, quite the opposite.
Speaker 1: What that is is an indication of their ten thousand
Speaker 1: villages Bloom program, where they basically ask an EPC contractor
Speaker 1: to do an entire county of rooftops at once, is working.
Speaker 1: So China is buying more electric cars than any country
Speaker 1: except Norway. Half the grid batteries went in China last year.
Speaker 1: They're building three undred and sixty five gigawatts about twelve
Speaker 1: to fourteen tarawan hours of pump hydro. They have that
Speaker 1: in operation, building it today or in plan to start
Speaker 1: by twenty thirty. They hit their renewables targets for twenty
Speaker 1: thirty last year, they're hitting their EV sales targets for
Speaker 1: twenty thirty five this year. Meanwhile, Nuclear one of Tony
Speaker 1: Blair's institutes pillars of decarbonization. They haven't hit their twenty
Speaker 1: twenty targets yet. They're likely to hit the twenty twenty
Speaker 1: targets this year, and their twenty twenty five targets are
Speaker 1: two percent of capacity. They're not going to hit that
Speaker 1: two percent of electrical generation capacity. Meanwhile, they're fifty percent
Speaker 1: of electrical generation capacity for renewables and coal is in decline.
Speaker 1: So this is a proof point for the future. And
Speaker 1: apparently Tony Blair Institute and the person who's responsible for
Speaker 1: energy and decarbonateation isn't paying attention.
Speaker 2: Why not, Well, they are a lobbying organization. So that
Speaker 2: tells you something, right, So follow the money.
Speaker 3: When you google. So Tony Blancy to TBI when you
Speaker 3: google the sentence, what does TBI stands for? And the
Speaker 3: answer from Google is traumatic brain injury. That says it all.
Speaker 1: On that note, Paul Martin, Friend of the show, he's
Speaker 1: got a meme saying stop paying attention to old guys.
Speaker 1: And I look at the news coming out about Joe
Speaker 1: Biden and how his handlers were preventing people from realizing
Speaker 1: how much in decline he was. And now Tony Blair
Speaker 1: kind of in a similar demographic. I would say Clinton
Speaker 1: has mostly declined into a me too quiet place more
Speaker 1: than Tony Blair. And it's probably a good thing. But
Speaker 1: I hope that somebody takes me aside when I get
Speaker 1: into that demographic and says, Mike, it's time for you
Speaker 1: to hang up your keyboard.
Speaker 2: Definitely say that to you might don't worry, you know,
Speaker 2: you know, or like, okay, guys, My last words are
Speaker 2: carbon capture is state capture.
Speaker 3: That's as simple as it is. And you're absolutely right.
Speaker 3: Either they're stupid than old, or they crepeat, or they
Speaker 3: are hide guns, and frankly they at best it's significant
Speaker 3: and at worst it's nefarious. That's my conclusion on the
Speaker 3: Tony bar report. And even that technology that which has
Speaker 3: no future said well, I said.
Speaker 1: Yeah, My last words are everybody ignored Tony Blair, look
Speaker 1: at China's emissions being in decline.
Speaker 3: Gentlemen, Thank you very much, and I hope you were
Speaker 3: not too hard on certain people. But you know that's
Speaker 3: we do it here. We just with the Mavericks exactly cheers.
Speaker 1: Thank you very much, thank you always a pleasure.
Speaker 2: Thank you for listening to Redefining Energy.
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