- We are raging upwards in terms of the emissions
on the planet
and we've got to turn that around.
(upbeat music)
Increasingly, I've see CEOs of major companies
around the world,
beginning to move spontaneously
to commit their companies
to net zero,
to decide on
when if they're in an investment firm or bank,
how much they can land or what they can invest
in climate related emissions reduction activities.
So I think there's a huge new market opening up.
I think it's very exciting
and in my judgment,
it's gonna be the biggest market we've seen in the world
since the industrial revolution.
- Do you have to drive
that like your work with other countries
and in setting emissions goals?
How does that tie in
to the private sector type trends
that you're talking about?
- The private sector
will ultimately, obviously, make its own decisions
but what we're trying to do is galvanize groups
of entities to come together
in order to challenge other companies
and other corporations.
Why are we doing that?
Because there's no way any government
will find or has the trillions
of dollars necessary to affect this transition.
And when you add up
the other entities
that are coming to the table,
we have the potential
of huge amounts of capital going
into alternative, renewable fuels,
possibly hydrogen exploration, get green hydrogen.
You have the possibilities of a storage of one kind
or another which could change the entire game.
Just as people have for years in venture capital bet
on some particular technology
or disruption in the marketplace,
that's gonna happen now in the energy sector
because people feel compelled
to try to address this challenge.
And governments are gonna create incentives
for some of that capital and move
in certain directions. For instance,
President Biden is planning
to build 500,000 charging stations in America
which will certainly begin
to make it more possible for people to feel good
about buying electric and transitioning.
There will be a transition in the auto industry.
GM has announced,
they're gonna only produce electric vehicles by 2035.
Ford is moving
in a similar direction, Mercedes, Volkswagen.
Car companies around the world are setting dates
for when they will no longer be making
an internal combustion engine.
- A lot of that is driven by market forces.
Your job is to negotiate with the other countries
of the world, presumably on...
Emissions reduction targets--
- We can say that affects the market force that becomes...
Part of the transition in the market.
If all of a sudden...
What happened in Paris?
(speaks in foreign language) (crowd applauds)
196 countries came together.
They all decided,
they were each gonna pursue their own plan
but they were all gonna reduce emissions.
That meant that they have
to find the means of doing so
and in the first year after Paris,
and second year after Paris,
several hundreds of billions of dollars went
into alternative, renewable investment.
That's the direction we were moving
until President Trump stopped the momentum
by pulling out of the agreement,
and he gave license to some reluctant countries
to sort of pull back
but we will regain that now.
- You mentioned President Trump and his withdrawal
on a lot of environmental regulations, of all the rollbacks,
but a lot of the private sector trends
that we're talking about continued on, anyway.
That investment grew exponentially.
Coal-fired power plants closed.
Things like this happened all around the world.
- And not enough in enough places.
- So then, what is success for you?
Do you think that figuring out new numbers
for every country, more ambitious numbers
will lead to this?
Do you need to see
the private sector investment already follow?
How do you define success?
- Well, success will be
the vast majority of nations,
coming to the table in Glasgow
and putting down plans
for how they're going
to target net zero by 2050
and what they're gonna do in 2020 to 2030,
to be down paying on that goal.
If we can get the...
If I say, the vast majority
of nations taking that seriously,
that is success.
Many scientists have said,
the IPCC which is the UN scientific arm,
that does the analysis,
has said to us two years ago,
we have about 12 years in front of us within which to make
the critical decisions necessary to reduce the worst damage
from the climate crisis.
So that's it, we've used up two of those years,
not enough happened.
We now have about 10 years or so
within which to get the job done.