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Inside Climeworks’ big experiment to wrest carbon from the air

In the spring of 2021, the world’s leading authority on energy published a “roadmap” for preventing the most catastrophic climate change scenarios. One of its conclusions was particularly daunting. Getting energy-related emissions down to net zero by 2050, the International Energy Agency said, would require “huge leaps in innovation.”
Existing technologies would be mostly sufficient to carry us down the carbon curve over the next decade. But after that, nearly half of the remaining work would have to come from solutions that, for all intents and purposes, did not exist yet. Some would only require retooling existing industries, like developing electric long-haul trucks and carbon-free steel. But others would have to be built from almost nothing and brought to market in record time.
What will it take to rapidly develop new solutions, especially those that involve costly physical infrastructure and which have essentially no commercial value today?
That’s the challenge facing Climeworks, the Swiss company developing machines to wrest carbon dioxide molecules directly from the air. In September 2021, a few months after the IEA’s landmark report came out, Climeworks switched on its first commercial-scale “direct air capture” facility, a feat of engineering it dubbed “Orca,” in Iceland.
The technology behind Orca is one of the top candidates to clean up the carbon already blanketing the Earth. It could also be used to balance out any stubborn, residual sources of greenhouse gases in the future, such as from agriculture or air travel, providing the “net” in net-zero. If we manage to scale up technologies like Orca to the point where we remove more carbon than we release, we could even begin cooling the planet.
As the largest carbon removal plant operating in the world, Orca is either trivial or one of the most important climate projects built in the last decade, depending on how you look at it. It was designed to capture approximately 4,000 metric tons of carbon from the air per year, which, as one climate scientist, David Ho, put it, is the equivalent of rolling back the clock on just 3 seconds of global emissions. But the learnings gleaned from Orca could surpass any quantitative assessment of its impact. How well do these “direct air capture” machines work in the real world? How much does it really cost to run them? And can they get better?
The company — and its funders — are betting they can. Climeworks has made major deals with banks, insurers, and other companies trying to go green to eventually remove carbon from the atmosphere on their behalf. Last year, the company raised $650 million in equity that will “unlock the next phase of its growth,” scaling the technology “up to multi-million-ton capacity … as carbon removal becomes a trillion-dollar market.” And just last month, the U.S. Department of Energy selected Climeworks, along with another carbon removal company, Heirloom, to receive up to $600 million to build a direct air capture “hub” in Louisiana, with the goal of removing one million tons of carbon annually.
Two years after powering up Orca, Climeworks has yet to reveal how effective the technology has proven to be. But in extensive interviews, top executives painted a picture of innovation in progress.
Chief marketing officer Julie Gosalvez told me that Orca is small and climatically insignificant on purpose. The goal is not to make a dent in climate change — yet — but to maximize learning at minimal cost. “You want to learn when you're small, right?” Gosalvez said. “It’s really de-risking the technology. It’s not like Tesla doing EVs when we have been building cars for 70 years and the margin of learning and risk is much smaller. It’s completely new.”
From the ground, Orca looks sort of like a warehouse or a server farm with a massive air conditioning system out back. The plant consists of eight shipping container-sized boxes arranged in a U-shape around a central building, each one equipped with an array of fans. When the plant is running, which is more or less all the time, the fans suck air into the containers where it makes contact with a porous filter known as a “sorbent” which attracts CO2 molecules.

When the filters become totally saturated with CO2, the vents on the containers snap shut, and the containers are heated to more than 212 degrees Fahrenheit. This releases the CO2, which is then delivered through a pipe to a secondary process called “liquefaction,” where it is compressed into a liquid. Finally, the liquid CO2 is piped into basalt rock formations underground, where it slowly mineralizes into stone. The process requires a little bit of electricity and a lot of heat, all of which comes from a carbon-free source — a geothermal power plant nearby.
A day at Orca begins with the morning huddle. The total number on the team is often in flux, but it typically has a staff of about 15 people, Climeworks’ head of operations Benjamin Keusch told me. Ten work in a virtual control room 1,600 miles away in Zurich, taking turns monitoring the plant on a laptop and managing its operations remotely. The remainder work on site, taking orders from the control room, repairing equipment, and helping to run tests.
During the huddle, the team discusses any maintenance that needs to be done. If there’s an issue, the control room will shut down part of the plant while the on-site workers investigate. So far, they’ve dealt with snow piling up around the plant that had to be shoveled, broken and corroded equipment that had to be replaced, and sediment build-up that had to be removed.

The air is more humid and sulfurous at the site in Iceland than in Switzerland, where Climeworks had built an earlier, smaller-scale model, so the team is also learning how to optimize the technology for different weather. Within all this troubleshooting, there’s additional trade-offs to explore and lessons to learn. If a part keeps breaking, does it make more sense to plan to replace it periodically, or to redesign it? How do supply chain constraints play into that calculus?
The company is also performing tests regularly, said Keusch. For example, the team has tested new component designs at Orca that it now plans to incorporate into Climeworks’ next project from the start. (Last year, the company began construction on “Mammoth,” a new plant that will be nine times larger than Orca, on a neighboring site.) At a summit that Climeworks hosted in June, co-founder Jan Wurzbacher said the company believes that over the next decade, it will be able to make its direct air capture system twice as small and cut its energy consumption in half.
“In innovation lingo, the jargon is we haven’t converged on a dominant design,” Gregory Nemet, a professor at the University of Wisconsin who studies technological development, told me. For example, in the wind industry, turbines with three blades, upwind design, and a horizontal axis, are now standard. “There were lots of other experiments before that convergence happened in the late 1980s,” he said. “So that’s kind of where we are with direct air capture. There’s lots of different ways that are being tried right now, even within a company like Climeworks."
Although Climeworks was willing to tell me about the goings-on at Orca over the last two years, the company declined to share how much carbon it has captured or how much energy, on average, the process has used.
Gosalvez told me that the plant’s performance has improved month after month, and that more detailed information was shared with investors. But she was hesitant to make the data public, concerned that it could be misinterpreted, because tests and maintenance at Orca require the plant to shut down regularly.
“Expectations are not in line with the stage of the technology development we are at. People expect this to be turnkey,” she said. “What does success look like? Is it the absolute numbers, or the learnings and ability to scale?”
Danny Cullenward, a climate economist and consultant who has studied the integrity of various carbon removal methods, did not find the company’s reluctance to share data especially concerning. “For these earliest demonstration facilities, you might expect people to hit roadblocks or to have to shut the plant down for a couple of weeks, or do all sorts of things that are going to make it hard to transparently report the efficiency of your process, the number of tons you’re getting at different times,” he told me.
But he acknowledged that there was an inherent tension to the stance, because ultimately, Climeworks’ business model — and the technology’s effectiveness as a climate solution — depend entirely on the ability to make precise, transparent, carbon accounting claims.
Nemet was also of two minds about it. Carbon removal needs to go from almost nothing today to something like a billion tons of carbon removed per year in just three decades, he said. That’s a pace on the upper end of what’s been observed historically with other technologies, like solar panels. So it’s important to understand whether Climeworks’ tech has any chance of meeting the moment. Especially since the company faces competition from a number of others developing direct air capture technologies, like Heirloom and Occidental Petroleum, that may be able to do it cheaper, or faster.
However, Nemet was also sympathetic to the position the company was in. “It’s relatively incremental how these technologies develop,” he said. “I have heard this criticism that this is not a real technology because we haven’t built it at scale, so we shouldn’t depend on it. Or that one of these plants not doing the removal that it said it would do shows that it doesn’t work and that we therefore shouldn’t plan on having it available. To me, that’s a pretty high bar to cross with a climate mitigation technology that could be really useful.”
More data on Orca is coming. Climeworks recently announced that it will work with the company Puro.Earth to certify every ton of CO2 that it removes from the atmosphere and stores underground, in order to sell carbon credits based on this service. The credits will be listed on a public registry.
But even if Orca eventually runs at full capacity, Climeworks will never be able to sell 4,000 carbon credits per year from the plant. Gosalvez clarified that 4,000 tons is the amount of carbon the plant is designed to suck up annually, but the more important number is the amount of “net” carbon removal it can produce. “That might be the first bit of education you need to get out there,” she said, “because it really invites everyone to look at what are the key drivers to be paid attention to.”
She walked me through a chart that illustrated the various ways in which some of Orca’s potential to remove carbon can be lost. First, there’s the question of availability — how often does the plant have to shut down due to maintenance or power shortages? Climeworks aims to limit those losses to 10%. Next, there’s the recovery stage, where the CO2 is separated from the sorbent, purified, and liquified. Gosalvez said it’s basically impossible to do this without losing some CO2. At best, the company hopes to limit that to 5%.
Finally, the company also takes into account “gray emissions,” or the carbon footprint associated with the business, like the materials, the construction, and the eventual decommissioning of the plant and restoration of the site to its former state. If one of Climeworks’ plants ever uses energy from fossil fuels (which the company has said it does not plan to do) it would incorporate any emissions from that energy. Climeworks aims to limit gray emissions to 15%.
In the end, Orca’s net annual carbon removal capacity — the amount Climeworks can sell to customers — is really closer to 3,000 tons. Gosalvez hopes other carbon removal companies adopt the same approach. “Ultimately what counts is your net impact on the planet and the atmosphere,” she said.
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Despite being a first-of-its-kind demonstration plant — and an active research site — Orca is also a commercial project. In fact, Gosalvez told me that Orca’s entire estimated capacity for carbon removal, over the 12 years that the plant is expected to run, sold out shortly after it began operating. The company is now selling carbon removal services from its yet-to-be-built Mammoth plant.
In January, Climeworks announced that Orca had officially fulfilled orders from Microsoft, Stripe, and Shopify. Those companies have collectively asked Climeworks to remove more than 16,000 tons of carbon, according to the deal-tracking site cdr.fyi, but it’s unclear what portion of that was delivered. The achievement was verified by a third party, but the total amount removed was not made public.
Climeworks has also not disclosed how much it has charged companies per ton of carbon, a metric that will eventually be an important indicator of whether the technology can scale to a climate-relevant level. But it has provided rough estimates of how much it expects each ton of carbon removal to cost as the technology scales — expectations which seem to have shifted after two years of operating Orca.
In 2021, Climeworks co-founder Jan Wurzbacher said the company aimed to get the cost down to $200 to $300 per ton removed by the end of the decade, with steeper declines in subsequent years. But at the summit in June, he presented a new cost curve chart showing that the price was currently more than $1,000, and that by the end of the decade, it would fall to somewhere between $400 to $700. The range was so large because the cost of labor, energy, and storing the CO2 varied widely by location, he said. The company aims to get the price down to $100 to $300 per ton by 2050, when the technology has significantly matured.
Critics of carbon removal technologies often point to the vast sums flowing into direct air capture tech like Orca, which are unlikely to make a meaningful difference in climate change for decades to come. During a time when worsening disasters make action feel increasingly urgent, many are skeptical of the value of investing limited funds and political energy into these future solutions. Carbon removal won’t make much of a difference if the world doesn’t deploy the tools already available to reduce emissions as rapidly as possible — and there’s certainly not enough money or effort going into that yet.
But we’ll never have the option to fully halt climate change, let alone begin reversing it, if we don’t develop solutions like Orca. In September, the International Energy Agency released an update to its seminal net-zero report. The new analysis said that in the last two years, the world had, in fact, made significant progress on innovation. Now, some 65% of emission reductions after 2030 could be accounted for with technologies that had reached market uptake. It even included a line about the launch of Orca, noting that Climeworks’ direct air capture technology had moved from the prototype to the demonstration stage.
But it cautioned that DAC needs “to be scaled up dramatically to play the role envisaged,” in the net zero scenario. Climeworks’ experience with Orca offers a glimpse of how much work is yet to be done.
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The storm currently battering Jamaica is the third Category 5 to form in the Atlantic Ocean this year, matching the previous record.
As Hurricane Melissa cuts its slow, deadly path across Jamaica on its way to Cuba, meteorologists have been left to marvel and puzzle over its “rapid intensification” — from around 70 miles per hour winds on Sunday to 185 on Tuesday, from tropical storm to Category 5 hurricane in just a few days, from Category 2 occurring in less than 24 hours.
The storm is “one of the most powerful hurricane landfalls on record in the Atlantic basin,” the National Weather Service said Tuesday afternoon. Though the NWS expected “continued weakening” as the storm crossed Jamaica, “Melissa is expected to reach southeastern Cuba as an extremely dangerous major hurricane, and it will still be a strong hurricane when it moves across the southeastern Bahamas.”
So how did the storm get so strong, so fast? One reason may be the exceptionally warm Caribbean and Atlantic.
“The part of the Atlantic where Hurricane Melissa is churning is like a boiler that has been left on for too long. The ocean waters are around 30 degrees Celsius, 2 to 3 degrees above normal, and the warmth runs deep,” University of Redding research scientist Akshay Deoras said in a public statement. (Those exceedingly warm temperatures are “up to 700 times more likely due to human-caused climate change,” the climate communication group Climate Central said in a press release.)
Based on Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration concluded in 2024 that “tropical cyclone intensities globally are projected to increase” due to anthropogenic climate change, and that “rapid intensification is also projected to increase.”
NOAA also noted that research suggested “an observed increase in the probability of rapid intensification” for tropical cyclones from 1982 to 2017 The review was still circumspect, however, labeling “increased intensities” and “rapid intensification” as “examples of possible emerging human influences.”
What is well known is that hurricanes require warm water to form — at least 80 degrees Fahrenheit, according to NOAA. “As long as the base of this weather system remains over warm water and its top is not sheared apart by high-altitude winds, it will strengthen and grow.”
A 2023 paper by hurricane researcher Andra Garner argued that between 1971 and 2020, rates of intensification of Atlantic tropical storms “have already changed as anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions have warmed the planet and oceans,” and specifically that the number of these storms that intensify from Category 1 or weaker “into a major hurricane” — as Melissa did so quickly — “has more than doubled in the modern era relative to the historical era.”
“Hurricane Melissa has been astonishing to watch — even as someone who studies how these storms are impacted by a warming climate, and as someone who knows that this kind of dangerous storm is likely to become more common as we warm the planet,” Garner told me by email. She likened the warm ocean waters to “an extra shot of caffeine in your morning coffee — it’s not only enough to get the storm going, it’s an extra boost that can really super-charge the storm.”
This year has been an outlier for the Atlantic with three Category 5 storms, University of Miami senior research associate Brian McNoldy wrote on his blog. “For only the second time in recorded history, an Atlantic season has produced three Category 5 hurricanes,” with wind speeds reaching and exceeding 157 miles per hour, he wrote. “The previous year was 2005. This puts 2025 in an elite class of hurricane seasons. It also means that nearly 7% of all known Category 5 hurricanes have occurred just in this year.” One of those Category 5 storms in 2005 was Hurricane Katrina.
Jamaican emergency response officials said that thousands of people were already in shelters amidst storm surge, flooding, power outages, and landslides. Even as the center of the storm passed over Jamaica Tuesday evening, the National Weather Service warned that “damaging winds, catastrophic flash flooding and life-threatening storm surge continues in Jamaica.”
With Trump turning the might of the federal government against the decarbonization economy, these investors are getting ready to consolidate — and, hopefully, profit.
Since Trump’s inauguration, investors have been quick to remind me that some of the world’s strongest, most resilient companies have emerged from periods of uncertainty, taking shape and cementing their market position amid profound economic upheaval.
On the one hand, this can sound like folks grasping at optimism during a time when Washington is taking a hammer to both clean energy policies and valuable sources of government funding. But on the other hand — well, it’s true. Google emerged from the dot-com crash with its market lead solidified, Airbnb launched amid the global financial crisis, and Sunrun rose to dominance after the first clean tech bubble burst.
The circumstances may change, but behind all of these against-the-odds successes are investors who saw opportunity where others saw risk. In the climate tech landscape of 2025, well-capitalized investors are eyeing some of the more mature sectors being battered by federal policy or market uncertainty — think solar, wind, biogas, and electric transportation — rather than the fresh-faced startups pursuing more cutting edge tech.
“History does not repeat, but it certainly rhymes,” Andrew Beebe, managing director at Obvious Ventures, told me. He was working as the chief commercial officer at the solar company Suntech Power when the first climate tech bubble collapsed in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Back then, venture capital and project financing dried up instantly, as banks and investors faced heavy losses from their exposure to risky assets. This time around, “there’s plenty of capital at all stages of venture,” as well as infrastructure investing, he said. That means firms can afford to swoop in to finance or acquire undervalued startups and established companies alike.
“I think you’re gonna see a lot of projects in development change hands,” Beebe told me.
Investors don’t generally publicize when the companies or projects that they’re backing become “distressed assets,” i.e. are in financial trouble, nor do they broadcast when their explicit goal is to turn said projects around. But that’s often what opportunistic investing entails.
“As investors in the energy and infrastructure space — which is inherently in transition — we take it as a very important point of our strategy to be opportunistic,” Giulia Siccardo, a managing director at Quinbrook, told me. (Prior to joining the investment firm, Siccardo was director of the Department of Energy’s Office of Manufacturing & Energy Supply Chains under President Biden.)
Quinbrook sees opportunities in biogas and renewable natural gas, a sector that once enjoyed “very cushioned margins” thanks to investor interest in corporate sustainability, Siccardo told me, but which has lately gone into a “rapid decline.” But she’s also looking at solar and storage, where developers are rushing to build projects before tax credits expire, as well as grid and transmission infrastructure, given the dire need for upgrades and buildout as load growth increases.
As of now, the only investment Quinbrook has explicitly described as opportunistic is its acquisition of a biomethane facility in Junction City, Oregon. When it opened in 2013, the facility used food waste — which otherwise would have emitted methane in a landfill — to produce renewable biogas for clean electricity generation. But after Shell acquired the plant, it switched to converting cow manure and agricultural residue into renewable natural gas for heavy-duty transportation fuels, a process that it’s operated commercially since 2021. Siccardo declined to provide information about the plant’s performance at the time of Quinbrook’s acquisition, though presumably, it has yet to reach its total production capacity of 730,000 million British thermal units per year — enough to supply about 12,000 U.S. households.
The extension of the clean fuel production tax credit, plus the potential for hyperscalers to purchase RNG credits, are still driving demand, however. And that’s increased Siccardo’s confidence in pursuing investments and acquisitions in the space. “That’s a market that, from a policy standpoint, has actually been pretty stable — and you might even say favored — by the One Big Beautiful Bill relative to other technologies,” she explained.
Solar, meanwhile, is still cheap and quick to deploy, with or without the tax credits, Siccardo told me. “If you strip away all subsidies, and are just looking at, what is the technology that’s delivering the lowest cost electron, and which technology has the least supply chain bottlenecks right now in North America —- that drives you to solar and storage,” she said.
Another leading infrastructure investment firm, Generate Capital, is also looking to cash in on the moment. After replacing its CEO and enacting company-wide layoffs, Generate’s head of external affairs, Jonah Goldman, told me that “managers who understand the [climate] space and who can take advantage of the opportunities that are underpriced in this tougher market environment are set up to succeed.”
The firm also sees major opportunities when it comes to good old solar and storage projects. In an open letter, Generate’s new CEO, David Crane, wrote that “for the first time in nearly four decades, the U.S. has an insatiable need for more power: as much as we can produce, as soon as we can, wherever and however we can produce it.”
Crane sees it as the duty of Generate and other investors to use mergers and acquisitions as a tool to help clean tech scale and mature. “If companies across our subsectors were publicly traded, the market itself would act as a centripetal force towards industry consolidation,” he wrote. But because many clean energy companies are privately funded, Crane said “it is up to us, the providers of that private capital, to force industry improvement, through consolidation and otherwise.”
Helping solar companies accelerate their construction timelines to lock in tax credit eligibility has actually become an opportunistic market of its own, Chris Creed, a managing partner at Galvanize Climate Solutions and co-head of its credit division, told me. “Helping those companies that need to start or complete their projects within a predetermined time frame because of changes in the tax credit framework became an investable opportunity for us,” Creed told me. “We have a number of deals in our near term pipeline that basically came about as a result of that.”
Given that some solar companies are bound to fare better than others, he agreed that mergers and acquisitions were likely — among competitors as well as involving companies working in different stages of a supply chain. “It wouldn’t shock me if you saw some horizontal consolidation or some vertical integration,” Creed told me.
Consolidation can only go so far, though. So while investors seem to agree that solar, storage, and even the administration’s nemesis — wind — are positioned for a long and fruitful future, when it comes to more emergent technologies, not all will survive the headwinds. Beebe thinks there’s been “irrational exuberance” around both green hydrogen and direct air capture, for example, and that seasoned investors will give those spaces a pass.
Electric mobility — e.g. EVs, electric planes, and even electrified shipping — and grid scalability — which includes upgrades to make the grid more efficient, flexible, and optimized — are two sectors that Beebe is betting will survive the turmoil.
But for all investors that have the capability to do so, for now, “the easy bet is just to move your money outside the U.S.” Beebe told me.
We might be starting to see just that. Quinbrook also invests in the U.K. and Australia, and just announced its first Canadian investment last week. It acquired an ownership stake in Elemental Clean Fuels, an energy developer making renewable fuels such as RNG, low-carbon methanol, and — yes — clean hydrogen.
Last week, Generate announced that it had closed $43 million in funding from the Canadian company Fiera Infrastructure Private Debt for its North American portfolio of anaerobic digestion projects, which produce renewable natural gas — Generate’s first cross-currency, cross-border deal.
Creed still has confidence in the U.S. market, however, telling me he’s “very bullish on American innovation.” He certainly acknowledges that it’s a tough time out there for any investor deciding where to park their money, but thinks that ultimately, “that volatility should manifest itself as excess returns to investors who are able to figure out their investment strategy and deploy in this environment.”
Exactly what firms will manage this remains an open question, and the opportunities may be short-lived — but it’s a race that plenty of investors are getting in on.
“I mean, God bless the Europeans for caring about climate.”
Bill Gates, the billionaire co-founder of Microsoft and one of the world’s most important funders of climate-related causes, has a new message: Lighten up on the “doomsday.”
In a new memo, called “Three tough truths about climate,” Gates calls for a “strategic pivot.” Climate-concerned philanthropy should focus on global health and poverty, he says, which will still cause more human suffering than global warming.
“I’m not saying we should ignore temperature-related deaths because diseases are a bigger problem,” he writes. “What I am saying is that we should deal with disease and extreme weather in proportion to the suffering they cause, and that we should go after the underlying conditions that leave people vulnerable to them. While we need to limit the number of extremely hot and cold days, we also need to make sure that fewer people live in poverty and poor health so that extreme weather isn’t such a threat to them.”
This new focus didn’t come with a change in funding priorities — but that’s partly because some big shake-ups have already happened. In February, Heatmap reported that Breakthrough Energy, Gates’ climate-focused funding group, had slashed its grant-making budget. Gates later closed Breakthrough’s policy and advocacy office altogether.
Despite eliminating those financial commitments, he still dwells on two of his longtime obsessions in the new memo: cutting the “green premium” for energy technologies, meaning the delta between the cost of carbon-emitting and clean energy technologies, and improving the measurement of how spending can do the most for human welfare. The same topics dominated his thinking when I last spoke to the billionaire at the 2023 United Nations climate conference in Dubai.
What seems to have shifted, instead, is the global political environment. The Trump administration and Elon Musk gutted the federal government’s spending on global public health causes, such as vaccines and malaria prevention. European countries have also cut back their global aid spending, although not as dramatically as the U.S.
Gates seemingly now feels called to their defense: “Vaccines are the undisputed champion of lives saved per dollar spent,” he writes, praising the vaccine alliance Gavi in particular. “Energy innovation is a good buy not because it saves lives now, but because it will provide cheap clean energy and eventually lower emissions, which will have large benefits for human welfare in the future.”
Last week, Gates shared his thinking about climate change at a roundtable with a handful of reporters. He was, as always, engaging. I’ve shared some of his new takes on climate policy below. His quotes have been edited for clarity.
The environment we’re in today, the policies for climate change are less accommodating. It’s hard to name a country where you’d say, Oh, the climate policies are more accommodating today than they have been in the past.
The thesis I had was that middle income countries — who were already, at that time, the majority of all emissions — would never pay a premium for greenness. And so you could say, well, maybe the rich countries should subsidize that. But you know, the amounts involved would get you up to, like, 4% of rich country budgets would have to be transferred to do that. And we’re at 1% and going down. And there are some other worthy things that that money goes for, other than subsidizing positive green premium type approaches. So the thesis in the book [How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, published in 2021] is we had to innovate our way to negative green premiums for the middle income countries.
Climate [change] is an evil thing in that it’s caused by rich countries and high middle-income countries and the primary burden [falls on poor countries]. When I looked into climate activists, I said, Well, this is incredible. They care about poor countries so much. That’s wonderful, that they feel guilty about it. But in fact, a lot of climate activists, they have such an extreme view of what’s going to happen in rich countries — their climate activism is not because they care about poor farmers and Africa, it’s because they have some purported view that, like, New York City, can’t deal with the flooding or the heat.
The other challenge we have in the climate movement is in order to have some degree of accountability, it was very focused on short-term goals and per-country reports. And the per-country reporting thing is, in a way, a good thing, because a country — certainly when it comes to deforestation or what it’s doing on its electric grid, there is sovereign accountability for what’s being done. But I mean, the way everybody makes steel is the same. The way everybody makes the cement, it’s the same. The way we make fertilizer, it’s all the same. And so there can’t be some wonderful surprise, where some country comes in and, you know, gives you this little number [for its Paris Agreement goals], and you go, Wow, good! You’re so tough, you’re so good, you’re so amazing. Because other than deforestation and your particular electric grid, these are all global things.
If you’re a rich country, the costs of adaptation are just one of many, many things that are not gigantic, huge percentages of GDP — you know, rebuilding L.A. so that it’s like the Getty Museum, in terms of there’s no brush that can catch on fire, there’s no roof that can catch on fire, adds about 10% cost to the rebuild. It’s not like, Oh my god, we can’t live in LA. There’s no apocalyptic story for rich countries. [Climate adaptation] is one of many things that you should pay attention to, like, Does your health system work? Does your education system work? Does your political system work? There are a variety of things that are also quite important.
The place where it gets really tough is in these poor countries. But you know, what is the greatest tool for climate adaptation? Getting rich — growing your economy is the biggest single thing, living in conditions where you don’t face big climate problems. So when you say to an African country, Hey, you have a natural gas deposit, and we’re going to try to block you from getting financing for using that natural gas deposit … It probably won’t work, because there’s a lot of money in the world. It’s not clear how you’d achieve that. And it’s also in terms of the warming effect of that natural gas, versus the improvement of the conditions of the people in that country — it’s not even a close thing.
People in the [climate] movement, we do have to say to ourselves, For the Europeans, how much were they willing to pay in order to support climate? — and did we overestimate in terms of forcing them to switch to electric cars, to buy electric heat pumps, to have their price of electricity be higher? Did we overestimate their willingness to pay with some of those policies? And you do have to be careful because if your climate policies are too aggressive, you will be unelected, and you’ll have a right-wing government that cares not a bit about climate. I mean, God bless the Europeans for caring about climate. You worry they care so much about it that the people you talk to, you won’t be able to meet with them again, because they won’t be in power.