The big debate in climate tech. Plus Jancis Robinson

This is an audio transcript of the FT Weekend podcast episode: ‘The big debate in climate tech. Plus Jancis Robinson’

Pilita Clark
Tell us exactly what’s going on here. How are these things managing to suck in and extract carbon dioxide from this extremely clean Icelandic air?

Unidentified speaker
Well, these are . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
My colleague, Pilita Clark, is one of the most compelling people to talk to you about climate change that I’ve ever met. She’s been reporting on it for years. That’s her in Iceland recently, looking at a promising new technology.

Pilita Clark
Those injection wells belong to Carbfix, just across the road from the Orca plant. One bit of this operation is sucking CO₂ out of the air and the other is burying it.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Pilita is the FT’s business columnist on corporate life and climate change. And she just hosted a season of our sister podcast Tech Tonic, all about climate technology. Over the years, Pilita has seen a lot of new technology show up, some disappear, and some of them recently have been really promising.

Pilita Clark
So we actually went to Iceland for the Tech Tonic series, which was, it’s uhmm . ..

Lilah Raptopoulos
Careful.

Pilita Clark
Very lucky. But imagine a stack of shipping containers on kind of legs on stilts in a kind of a semi-circle or sort of a C shape just with these kind of big fans and big collecting equipment at the end of it, on the other side of them. And they kind of suck in air and are able to extract the carbon dioxide, which they then through another process, kind of pipe underground so that it’s permanently stored and can’t get into the atmosphere.

Lilah Raptopoulos
It sounds pretty amazing, right? Like if carbon dioxide is warming our planet, then pulling it out of the atmosphere is an incredible solution. But there’s one catch, which is that the technology, like a lot of these new technologies, isn’t actually very useful yet.

Pilita Clark
The trouble is, I think when you look at the amount of carbon dioxide that the world’s growing, but still small collection of direct air capture machines is managing to collect. It’s kind of like imagine taking a teaspoon and dipping it into an Olympic-sized swimming pool. (laughter) That is, that is kind of what we’re talking about when it comes to the amount of emissions, carbon emissions, that are going up into the atmosphere.

Lilah Raptopoulos
All that said, if we were able to scale all this up, direct carbon capture could make a real dent. So could a lot of other technologies. Some don’t work at all yet, like nuclear fusion, but they have the potential to basically solve the climate crisis. But if you’re a politician or an investor or even someone making decisions about your local village budget, you need to decide, should you put your money into older, renewable energy that already exists, like wind and solar? Or should you fund these promising new technologies that might take years to pay off? Pilita is calling that question the big debate in climate tech. And today she joins me to talk about it. Then we speak to the inimitable Jancis Robinson. She’s the FT’s wine columnist, and she has also been thinking about our carbon footprint. Jancis wants us to drink wine out of more environmentally friendly packaging than bottles that might seem a little radical — cans. This is FT Weekend. I’m Lilah Raptopoulos.

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Lilah Raptopoulos
Pilita has been covering climate since 2011, and she makes me feel like climate change is not some confusing collection of nightmares that we should shrink from. Yes, it’s an enormous problem, but there’s a field of people dealing with it and they’re getting somewhere. And some of their work is really exciting. Pilita explains it well and understanding it matters because a lot of decisions are made more locally than you think. You or I might have to make one.

Pilita, Hi. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for being here.

Pilita Clark
Hi, Lilah. It’s great to be here.

Lilah Raptopoulos
So you are the FT’s business columnist on corporate life and climate change. And for many years, you were award-winning environment correspondent. You know, how much as you were starting, just to remind people — how much awareness of climate change was there then, like what was the understanding of what it was doing?

Pilita Clark
It was totally, totally different . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Pilita Clark
I don’t know if you remember but there was this thing called “Climategate”, which was . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Pilita Clark
This big controversy ah, yeah, where scientists were accused of kind of being dishonest about climate change and overcooking it and, and exaggerating the threat. You know, today we just sort of say, well, you know, that the record heat we’ve been seeing and these extraordinary floods in Pakistan and heatwaves and bush fires and wildfires all over the US and everywhere, you know, clearly they’re being fuelled by climate change. But you couldn’t even write that when I first . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Pilita Clark
Started. And if you did, you would be pummelled by all of these readers. I mean, journalists were taken to, you know, the equivalent of the Press Council . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right.

Pilita Clark
By regulators for exaggerating the threat. And there was a very well-organised lobby that was constantly complaining about the way we covered this issue.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. You know, I remember when we, around 2016 when I started, I was responsible for decisions around reader comments and we had to turn comments off on climate stories for years even then, 2016, 2017, 2018. And then one day we thought, All right, let’s turn them on again. Let’s just see. We think the conversation has changed enough. It’s been accepted enough. And we did. And it was fine. (laughter)

Pilita Clark
Why? You are reminding me . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
It was like something happened.

Pilita Clark
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, you know, this, this concept of the Overton window, you know, shifting it, really, really did.

Lilah Raptopoulos
An Overton window. If you don’t know, is just a cultural shift. And it’s true: public opinion has shifted a ton in the last few years. But that doesn’t mean we’ve made a lot of progress in actually reducing carbon emissions. Most recently, since the Paris Agreement in 2016, governments have signed on to stop emitting greenhouse gases entirely by 2050. But we’ll almost definitely miss that target too. That’s why we need to do things like suck carbon out of the air. Today’s push for climate tech is actually not the first one. Do you remember An Inconvenient Truth? It’s that documentary that US vice-president Al Gore came out with in 2006. And it was part of the first rush to solve the climate crisis through innovation. Back then, innovation meant things like solar panels and wind turbines.

Pilita Clark
Yeah, they were what we would now regard as very boring renewables. But you know back then, because they were much newer, they were hugely expensive, a lot of them like offshore wind. I remember people in the UK saying, well, offshore wind is just ridiculous, far too expensive, it’s never gonna take off. And then (Lilah laughs) within a really short space of time, the UK became literally like the Saudi Arabia of wind. It, there were (Lilah laughs) it had, it had more offshore wind capacity than the rest of the world combined. So that’s, that was you know, that was a lot of what people were trying to invest in then. What people are looking at now are these kind of, you know, direct air capture is, is really quite new.

Lilah Raptopoulos
So solar, wind and hydro and geothermal renewables are working on a large scale now. You probably know someone who drives a Tesla or who lives next to a wind farm. So one way we could go is just double down on the stuff we know works. Just do more of that and make that stuff better, even if we’re still lagging on the big goals. But then there is this boom in next generation technology. We could go that way, too. There’s direct carbon capture, which we explained at the top. There are new green ways of fuelling air travel, which is one of the fastest growing offenders for emissions, because more and more people are flying every year. There’s also green hydrogen. That’s a new form of power we’re starting to use to produce things like cement. Green hydrogen is really cool. It’s made by zapping water, using electricity, and when you burn it, it just emits water vapour, which is way better than getting hydrogen from coal. And then there’s the holy grail of climate, tech: nuclear fusion. Pilita, could you quickly explain nuclear fusion.

Pilita Clark
Oh, God!

Lilah Raptopoulos
If it’s possible now. If it’s not. It’s OK. (laughter)

Pilita Clark
Hang on. (laughter)

Lilah Raptopoulos
OK. Nuclear fusion is a really complicated process. Not easy to explain in a sentence. But what you should know is that nuclear fusion reactors would be more powerful than nuclear fission, which is what we’re using now and with no toxic nuclear waste.

Pilita Clark
I think the simplest way to think about nuclear fusion is to think about the sun . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
OK.

Pilita Clark
And the sun essentially is this tremendously efficient thing that generates energy in a, in a way that is kind of endless, reliable. And you know we, we feel it every day. We, we don’t even think about it. But it turns out that the process of replicating what the sun does on earth is really hard.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Pilita Clark
The sun kind of has it easy because of gravitational forces and other pressures that mean that a fusion reaction can happen relatively easily. But even though we understand how the sun works, when we try to do it on Earth, it’s ah, it’s really difficult. And for example, one thing you have to do is you get sort of temperatures that are actually, actually even hotter than the sun, if you can imagine that . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right.

Pilita Clark
On earth and make sure that everything doesn’t kind of burn up and you know vaporise in the process, it’s, it’s, it’s a very difficult process.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Pilita says that if we could make nuclear fusion work, every other way of generating electricity would have trouble competing. But projections for when it could happen range from a very optimistic 2030s to the late 2040s or 2050s, which might be too late.

Pilita, so I know you were really sceptical of the new technologies when you started the Tech Tonic series, and I’m curious where you come down now, like, do you think we should be spending all our money developing these big ideas that will take years to pay off, if they pay off? Or do you think we should just work with what we’ve got? Which one should we do?

Pilita Clark
Well, yeah, I, I wrote this column about this. I, I kind of have had a minor change of heart. Really, what’s changed my mind is just how quickly some of these new processes and technologies are reaching the marketplace. And that’s particularly the case for green hydrogen. So I spoke to people from the Volvo group, not the Volvo cars, but the Volvo trucks and construction equipment. And they were telling me how they decided in April last year that they were going to try to use fossil free steel made with green hydrogen. Then six months later, they’d worked up a prototype, and only eight months after that they handed over a finished machine to . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Oh wow.

Pilita Clark
A customer. So, you know, this is not, it’s not making electricity. It’s being used to make green steel and steel and cement and other products like that have traditionally been seen as just really hard to decarbonise. And now we’re starting to see this greener steel being actually produced and used and delivered to customers.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Pilita thinks now that we have so little time that we really need to invest in everything: existing technology, tech that needs to scale up, and the big stuff like nuclear fusion. The important thing is just being aware of which is which.

So, Pilita, one thing that I find kind of frustrating in conversations like this, to be honest, is that I think, OK, how do I do my part? I do what I can. I’m recycling. I’m consigning my clothes, I’m eating less meat. And then we talk about these bigger issues like nuclear fusion. And they are exciting, but they feel entirely beyond my control. Like, I don’t know, this is not a question for me. These are questions for scientists and investors and policymakers. Or maybe I’m wrong. Like, basically, is this conversation for me too?

Pilita Clark
Yeah. I think it’s really for everybody. You know, if, if, for example, you know, you live in a village and a solar company comes along and wants to build a big solar farm. And some people in the village say, well, you know, this is just ridiculous because, you know, we’re gonna have nuclear fusion soon or we’re gonna have direct air capture machines gonna be sucked, be able to suck all the air out. Or we’re gonna have carbon capture so we’re gonna be able to keep burning gas. We don’t need this stuff. It’s really ugly. You know, I think if you’re informed and you understand the need to really quickly bring global carbon emissions down, you go along to the town hall and you say, you know what, I really, really want that solar farm. (laughter) I think I really, I really think it’s a good idea. And I’m so in favour of renewable energy and it’s the one climate tech we’ve got that we know that it works, it’s become very cheap and we want this now. So I would say, you know, of course it’s investors and of course that, you know, it’s banks, financiers, policymakers at a very high level. But, you know, I think everyone kind of has a responsibility to be informed about this and to do if they, if they care, they then should act. I think, you know, I mean, it’s no point sort of just sitting around saying, you know, I’m really worried about this climate thing. But (laughter) I guess that’s, that would be my answer, really. But it, it, it’s, it does go well beyond the venture capital industry.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Pilita, this was so fascinating. Please come back soon.

Pilita Clark
I’d love to. Thank you so much for having me.

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Lilah Raptopoulos
I’ve put links to the Tech Tonic season that Pilita hosted and a few of her related columns in the show notes.

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We’re approaching the holiday season, which means that people are buying a lot of wine. This year, our favourite wine critic, Jancis Robinson, has an unexpected Christmas wish: that instead of us choosing heavy bottles, we consider buying more canned wine and boxed wine. Seriously! It turns out that packaging is a lot better for the environment.

Jancis Robinson
Glass is fabulous because it’s inert for wine that you’re gonna age for years and years. But for wine that you’re gonna drink within weeks, sometimes hours of purchase, you really don’t need the glass.

Lilah Raptopoulos
As regular listeners and wine fans know, Jancis Robinson is the FT’s official wine critic and also among the most influential wine experts in the world. So I invited her on today to talk about what it would take for us to change our ways.

Jancis, Hi. It is so nice to have you back on the show.

Jancis Robinson
Well, it’s a great pleasure. Thank you. It’s the time of year when people start to think about wine.

Lilah Raptopoulos
It sure is. And uhm I am going to pepper you with questions for holiday wine recommendations at the end of the show. But actually, I’ve invited you on to talk about a new phenomenon in wine, canned wine, and you’ve been on a campaign to get us to drink it. So I’m curious how it’s going like, are people on board? Are they interested or are they definitely not interested?

Jancis Robinson
It’s going really well. In fact, it’s not necessarily just canned wine. I’m recommending it to make people realise about bottles that we are shipping. Vast quantities of heavy, fragile, very carbon-emitting containers around the world. And cans have the great virtue that, that, there, there’s a recycling programmes in place. They’re non-breakable, they’re light. They are smaller serves generally than the 75 centilitre bottle. And I, you know, the wine trade kind of agonises, “oh, why can’t we get more young people to drink wine”? Well, they’re expecting them to, to invest in 75 centilitres of it, which is kind of 6 to 8 drinks. And in most cases, they need a special implement to get in it. (Lilah laughs) So it’s not really surprising that, that younger people need a bit of encouragement to try wine. And I think cans are a, a pretty ideal way to start.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. Can you tell me a little bit more about the problem with glass?

Jancis Robinson
Sure. When you do a sort of life cycle analysis of the whole of wine production and you look at what is emitting the most carbon. Perhaps surprisingly for many people, it is glass bottle production and transport. The transport because they’re heavy and they have to travel twice, once from the manufacturer to the bottler and then from the bottler to the consumer. But the whole process of bottle production is pretty wasteful. And, you know, you have these red, red hot furnaces that you can’t turn off because if you turn them off, then the whole thing kind of solidifies and you know, you can’t use it again. So that continuous production of fossil fuel burning furnaces.

Lilah Raptopoulos
So what are some canned wines that you love or are there certain types of wine to drink from a can?

Jancis Robinson
No, I don’t think I could say there’s a particular type of wine that’s particularly suitable for a can.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Uhm hmm.

Jancis Robinson
I think any kind of wine can go in a can. I didn’t realise there was a World Canned Wine Championships or something run from some, by someone in America. And they, they had hundreds of entries. And I noticed that one of the winning trophy winners was from this company, Djuce — D-J-U-C-E — I think, based in Germany. And they seem and I tasted their range and they managed to persuade some really top producers to give them wine to put in a can. Like a guy called Jean-Marie Gubbins in southern Burgundy. He also makes veggie wines. He’s hugely respected, makes absolutely top quality wine, and it’s now in, available in a can.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Wow.

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Jancis says she’s thrilled to see all sorts of grape producers introducing boxes and cans. And the difference can be huge: if you buy three cans of wine, which is basically the same as one regular sized bottle, it cuts carbon emissions by 79 per cent. It seems like a no brainer, but can we get used to it?

And Jancis, all of this, you know, about letting wine breathe and being able to smell it, that’s still applies, right? Like, you’re not supposed to drink wine from a can even if you’re buying it from a can. Is that right?

Jancis Robinson
I definitely wouldn’t drink wine (Lilah laughs) from a can. There’s a huge pleasure to be had from drinking wine from a good glass. And if, if you were drinking it straight from the can, you wouldn’t get what is at least half, if not two-thirds of the pleasure of any wine, which is its aroma. And, and the aroma isn’t fattening and doesn’t make you drunk. (Lilah laughs) So, you know, you’ve really got to savour that aroma and you can’t from a can.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Mm hmm.

Jancis Robinson
No, I think, I think drinking wine straight from a can is probably akin to drinking it straight from the bottleneck. (laughter)

Lilah Raptopoulos
I think there’s something romantic about opening a bottle of wine that I’m sure people don’t want to lose. You said in your column that you can’t, even you can’t imagine having a nice dinner party and having people kind of cracking open cans. (laughs)

Jancis Robinson
Well, if I wanted to serve canned wine to my friends at a table, I would pour it into a lovely decanter. And actually, probably there’d be some wines that would benefit from the aeration involved in that.

Lilah Raptopoulos
You know, Jancis, what would you say to sceptics of canned wine or of wine from a box, you know when they just won’t have it despite your arguments? What would you say?

Jancis Robinson
I would say that I cannot understand how they’re sceptical because in the early days of packaging technology, neither cans nor bag in box kept wine very long. It would deteriorate quite fast and there was some transmission of the taste of the packaging into the wine after a few months. But it has dramatically increased in sophistication. I would also say that there’s no way that any packaging would affect the taste of a wine in under a few months. And something like 90 per cent of all wine is drunk within weeks, if not days, of purchase. So you know, there’s — don’t worry about that aspect.

Lilah Raptopoulos
After talking cans and boxes, I was excited to hear what kinds of wines we should be drinking this holiday season.

Uhm, what would you recommend that you know if somebody is going to their holiday dinner and they want to bring a bottle of wine to have with the meal to share with some friends?

Jancis Robinson
Mm hmm. Well, on jancisrobinson.com last week, we published quite a long, detailed article with specific recommendations, very much on the kind of holiday theme. But if you’re just bringing one bottle just and hoping to sort of please everyone, I think there are, there’s one red and one white that I think tend to please, tend to please everyone. And the red, I think, would be one of the fuller-bodied Beaujolais, because it is very fruity, it’s got nice freshness . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Jancis Robinson
Maybe, maybe a Fleurie, maybe a Morgan, maybe a Saint Julien — something like that. And as long as you get it from a good store and preferably with a personal recommendation from the person behind it or a recommendation from a reliable wine writer such as myself (Lilah laughs), and then I don’t think you can go wrong. And then.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Jancis Robinson
For a white, where you don’t know — do people like bone dry or bit more fruit and then half the group will say ugh they want a sweet white. Uhm, an Alsace Pinot Blanc actually is, is I find please-all and it’s not expensive because it’s the most planted grape variety in Alsace. And it’s, it’s got lots of fruit, but it finishes dry and it’s kind of got an interesting smokiness to it and it goes really well with all sorts of foods.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right. OK. And for anyone who doesn’t know, Alsace is . . . 

Jancis Robinson
Alsace is on the border of France and Germany. It’s right on the Rhine.

Lilah Raptopoulos
And then Jancis the other recommendation I was curious to ask you about is, you know, in your piece you said that glass is useful for the 5 per cent of wines that are not consumed quickly after purchase. And it made me think, you know, I like the idea of giving someone something that is in the 5 per cent that’s nice, that they’ll open maybe a year or maybe a few years from now. And, and think of, you know, think of the gift or the friendship — what are maybe a few wines that, I would say a reasonable price point, I don’t know, 50 to $100, that would be a nice gift?

Jancis Robinson
Yeah. You Americans think 50 to $100 is reasonable. We Brits think, you know, £12 is way beyond the bounds of positive . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
I know, I know. I know. (laughter) A nice gift, right? Like a reasonable . . . 

Jancis Robinson
Yeah. Well, I think. I think you can’t go wrong with the two classics of the wine world, ie, smart red Bordeaux and, and smart-ish, white Burgundy. Burgundy prices have gone through the roof. So you’ve got to be a little, a little clever with your purchases.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Brilliant. OK, Jancis, this was such a pleasure, as always. So informative and so fun. Thanks so much for being on the show.

Jancis Robinson
Great pleasure.

Lilah Raptopoulos
I’ve put a link to all the pieces Jancis mentioned, which are on FT.com and on jancisrobinson.com in the show notes, alongside all the wine recommendations that she mentioned today. She also has a new podcast which is excellent —  it’s called The JancisRobinson.com Podcast.

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That’s the show this week. Thank you for listening to FT Weekend the podcast from the Financial Times. Next week is our predictions episode with Matt Vella, FT Magazine editor. It’s also our last episode of the year. It’s gonna be great. You guys really delivered. So thank you.

If there are some topics that you’d really like to hear us cover in the New Year, we would love to hear from you. You can email us at ftweekendpodcast@ft.com. I see all of those emails. The show is on Twitter @ftweekendpod and I am on Instagram and Twitter @lilahrap. I collect a lot of ideas for the show from you and post behind-the-scenes stuff on my Instagram. If you like the show, please do share it on your social feeds or recommend it to your friends. That goes a really long way to support us. I’m Lilah Raptopoulos and here is my talented team. Katya Kumkova is our senior producer. Lulu Smyth is our producer. Molly Nugent is our contributing producer. Our sound engineers are Breen Turner and Sam Giovinco, with original music by Metaphor Music. Topher Forhecz is our executive producer. And thanks go as always to Cheryl Brumley. Special shout-out also to Lulu Smyth, who did an incredible job guest hosting last week. Have a wonderful weekend and we’ll find each other again next week.