The Angry Clean Energy Guy

The Angry Clean Energy Guy on pretty much everything you really need to know about nuclear energy. That's for example the fact that conventional nuclear energy is not only finished, but has also become a massive distraction in our climate emergency, diverting precious dollars away from sun, wind and water. Or the fact that nuclear fusion is worthy of investing enormously more money and career...

 The IPCC released a hugely important scientific report this week. However, in this episode, I would like to talk about biodiversity instead, and in particular, biodiversity loss in the oceans.  On climate change, it's crystal clear that what we desperately need is action because the evidence is all around us. However, we rarely talk about action to counter biodiversity loss. Yet, the mutuall...

 I’ve had it with the bashing of bitcoin, the blockchain and crypto miners for their energy usage. This is all, in one word, noise and should be ignored. 250 million people already think bitcoin is useful. In addition, the world consumes approximately 160,000 TWh / year of energy and wastes, along the way, at least one-third. What bitcoin consumes is 0.07% of that energy and 0.002% of what we wast...

This Episode is a slightly longer version of a TEDx Talk I gave at Singapore's National Gallery on 28 April 2021 about ESG. What Bill Gates calls the “Green Premium”, the extra cost we have to pay because most zero-carbon products currently appear more expensive than their fossil-fuel equivalents, doesn’t in fact exist. We only have a “green premium” because we have been "cooking the boo...

The Angry Clean Energy Guy on pretty much everything you need to know about ESG, starting with the need to be very suspicious whenever you see an ESG label on an investment product.  ESG has become a huge business, with one dollar out of every 3 professionally managed dollars in the US for example labelled “ESG” (and an even greater proportion in Europe).  The trend is clear and pretty much 100% o...

 If you want to get elected, requirement number one is to come up with a meaningless tagline while pretending everything is going pear-shaped, e.g. “Take Back Control” or “Make America Great Again.” Adopting tactics from that playbook, today's requirement number one to continue to pollute at will (while everything is actually going pear-shaped) is to announce “NET ZERO by [insert date, the mo...

Over the past year, multiple oil and gas companies have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in planting trees, or threatening to do so, to offset their greenhouse gas emissions. There are, however, several fundamental problems with what they are doing, or probably more accurately, pretending to do. First, most are planting trees to earn carbon offsets, as if they are at Church, confessed, rec...

We need to talk about lawyers and about law firms.  One of the strongest weapons in the fight to do nothing at all about climate change is the anti-climate-action litigation carried out by most, if not all, of the largest law firms in the world.   Law firms, quietly and below the radar, do three big, bad things: By a ratio of 10 to 1, they love to work on cases that make climate change worse; they...

 With an estimated $30 trillion in assets under management, the insurance industry is a huge (but mostly invisible) force in influencing the direction of the global economy. Yet insurance companies are doing incredibly little to fight climate change -  and get away with it: Out of the largest 30 insurers in the world, 29 pretty much do not take the Paris Climate Agreement at all into account and c...

If you listen to banks and their explanations of they are doing about climate change, you might get the impression that most "get it" and are fighting it shoulder-to-shoulder with the rest of humanity. In fact, banks are funding enough carbon-intensive projects and companies to guarantee a 4 ° C rise or above in global warming, with their eyes wide open and in full cognizance of the fact...

"Fresh air" is a myth. In reality, 90% of us (worldwide) are breathing dirty air on a permanent basis. Because we can't see the pollution in our air, we don't tend to think about it enough.  But our air is weakening all of us and killing 7 million a year, as well as placing an undue burden on health systems in every country. This has to stop and it can: No more petrol or diesel...

The latest, newest attacks against clean energy, namely “Oh my God, what are we going to do with all those solar panels and wind turbines and batteries at the end of their lives” and "Oh my God, what about the mining practices employed to get the materials necessary for clean energy ” are, in one word, bollocks. In Episode 42 of The Angry Clean Energy Guy, you will hear how the take-back and...

October, 2020 marked the end of an era: The world’s largest solar and wind power generator, the US utility NextEra, surpassed ExxonMobil - literally the embodiment of Big Oil's recklessness and once the most valuable company on earth - in stock market worth: It took a pandemic to show the markets that the time for clean energy and clean air is right now, and here we are. Major announcements a...

Indonesia, population 270m and basking in abundant sunshine most of the year while stretched across the Equator, has less installed solar power capacity (198MW) than Finland (215MW), an Arctic country with just 5.5m people.   That's one of the reasons South East Asia remains the global laggard on renewable energy while at the same time threatening to set the world on fire through the world&ap...

I am sharing good news on this podcast: Natural gas is done in 10 years.  Certainly in Europe.  Give it another 5 years on top and it will also be done in Asia and in the US too. It’s going the same way as coal. Why? In short, because the information fog is lifting after decades of obfuscation: We now know it's about as dirty as coal.  Whoever named it "Natural Gas" instead of &quot...

The plastic industry says it’s a "hero" of the coronavirus pandemic. What is driving this propaganda? Single-use plastic is a big chunk of the future demand for oil forecast by OPEC or by the International Energy Agency and their other friends trying to cook the books. So if you take out single-use plastic, future demand for oil and gas will decline immediately and so will the projected...

Recently, an open letter from dozens of investors, business leaders, researchers and climate policy advocates accused the International Energy Agency, a Paris-based intergovernmental organization mistakenly labelled as "authoritative", of marginalizing key climate goals in its research. They were being too polite: The IEA is a very dangerous organization and should simply be closed, beca...

The Angry Clean Energy Guy on the incredible resilience of renewable energy in the midst of a pandemic, and why that means its rise will accelerate further post COVID-19; and on the incredible non-resilience of the airline industry, its irresponsible and reckless mis-management and why the earthquake in its midst means it has already seen its carbon emissions peak

In our arsenal of anti-virus weapons, a powerful force is emerging. It’s one of the most hygienic alternatives for the prevention of the virus and it’s changing the world before our eyes. This not-so-secret weapon is cheap and promotes cleaner air. It's healthy. It allows us to move about. It contributes powerfully to the fight against climate change, yet effortlessly delivers social distanci...

"If you want a proper adaptation strategy to the Coronavirus, then you must finally properly tackle climate change. There. I said it." In this Episode 34, The Angry Clean Energy Guy describes what the "exit strategy" is for the global Coronavirus lockdown and how this exit strategy is so similar to the one from climate change; and then he describes some of the future trends tha...

Twenty five per cent of the western world could be unemployed by the end of March: COVID19 shows that society failed to provide, to most, secure jobs and pensions, income support, skills training, clean air, clean water and healthy food. We must change the way we work, move, eat and live and do capitalism differently, by focusing on people not corporations. So as airlines, hotels, the retail indus...

What do Amazon, Microsoft, Finnair, Teck Frontier, Llyods Bank, Equinor and Singapore have in common? Buried in the news so far in 2020, there's been a deluge of good climate change developments around the world, signifying a clear uptick in momentum in the fight against global heating. In Episode 32, The Angry Clean Energy Guy, less angry for once, goes through these positive developments an...

There is so much anti-electric vehicles propaganda around, I’ve started hearing kids repeating it recently: “Oh, EVs aren’t clean because of how batteries are made" and "oh, we don’t know what to do with batteries when discarded.” In this Episode 31, The Angry Clean Energy Guy sets out why this is propaganda; where it's coming from; why it's flat out wrong; and what to do about...

The Angry Clean Energy Guy on all you need to know (sort of) about Hydrogen: Green vs. Black vs. Grey vs. Blue, the myths peddled by Big Oil and whether hydrogen is the solution to our de-carbonization imperative

The Angry Clean Energy Guy's definitive guide (sort of) of what works, and what doesn’t, in fighting climate change: How much can you fly? Should you eat any meat? What about plastic? What’s the best approach to transport?  Should you buy any carbon offsets? How much should you recycle?