Zero: The Climate Race

Major economies around the world are grappling with electricity grids under stress from equipment bottlenecks and workforce shortages. What can be done to solve it? This week on Zero , Akshat Rathi talks with Manoj Sinha, CEO of Husk Power Systems, about distributed energy resources and their potential to bring electricity to where it is needed most — from energy-poor regions in the Global S...

What is the best way to tell a climate story? This week on Zero, Akshat Rathi speaks with Booker Prize-winning novelist George Saunders. His new novel Vigil is an exploration of guilt, told on the deathbed of an oil executive haunted by ghosts. Rathi asks Saunders what he learned about climate change, his thoughts on whether AI complements or compromises human creativity, and why literature still...

Decarbonizing energy is just one part of the climate story. The other half is electrifying as much as possible. That is why electrification, not decarbonization, is likely going to be the most important climate story of 2026. Kingsmill Bond is a strategist at thinktank Ember and the author of a paper called the Electrotech Revolution. This week on Zero, Bond tells Akshat Rathi why he believes elec...

For the last decade, since the Paris Agreement was signed, governments have been trying to nudge big financial players to move more money into climate solutions. The idea was to drive action through data disclosure and net-zero goals, but that hasn’t yielded the results they hoped for. Have we got our approach to climate finance wrong? Lisa Sachs, director of Columbia University’s Cent...

President Donald Trump wants US companies to rebuild Venezuela's oil fields after the capture of Nicolas Maduro. This week on  Zero , US Senator Sheldon Whitehouse joins Akshat Rathi to discuss why the US is acting like a petro bully, how countries can resist an increasingly aggressive Trump administration and why Democrats are making a mistake by shying away from talking about climate action...

Kim Stanley Robinson’s life project has been imagining utopias. He’s a science-fiction writer best known in climate circles for writing Ministry For The Future , which depicts a future in which the world gets to grips with climate change following an extreme heat event that kills millions. Robinson joins Akshat Rathi this week on Zero to discuss how to create better futures and whether...

This episode was originally recorded in July 2025, and updated in December 2025. Happy Holidays from the Zero team.  When exactly China’s emissions peak will make a big difference to the fate of the planet. That moment has come, according to Lauri Myllyvirta, co-founder of the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air. A combination of factors – including a huge deployment of re...

Despite endless financial difficulties, Argentina has seen a remarkable increase in clean energy over the past decade. It has gone from practically zero to almost 18% of its electricity sourced from renewables. In doing so, Argentina has overcome a challenge faced by many countries that are considered uninvestable by major financial institutions. Sebastian Kind, former undersecretary at the minist...

When Canada elected Mark Carney as prime minister, there was hope that the country would pursue climate policies. That hope was crushed after Carney signed a deal with the oil-producing province of Alberta that will roll back or dilute green regulations.  As a result, Steven Guilbeault, Carney’s culture minister has resigned from cabinet. He was the environment minister under Justin Tru...

In his new book Breakneck , tech analyst Dan Wang argues China’s engineering mindset has given it an edge in all sorts of domains, including climate technologies, while America’s lawyerly mindset is holding it back. This week on Zero , Wang tells Akshat Rathi what the world can learn from China and how the US could start to compete on green tech in the future.  This episode was re...

Australia has suffered a major climate setback, losing its bid to host next year’s COP summit in Adelaide. At the same time, the Coalition has reignited Australia’s climate wars by abandoning its commitment to net zero emissions by 2050 – a reversal that resets the political debate just as the world pushes for faster decarbonisation. In this episode, Rebecca Jones asks Bloomberg&...

Over the last two weeks, tens of thousands of people took to the city of Belem, at the mouth of the Amazon river, for the annual United Nations climate summit: COP30. Alongside tense negotiations, there were indigenous protests, daily rainstorms and even a fire at the COP venue. But at the end of it all, what did COP30 achieve? Bloomberg Green’s Jennifer Dlouhy joins Akshat Rathi on Zero, to...

Climate solutions are here, they’re just not evenly distributed. So says former US Vice President Al Gore, who remains staunchly optimistic that we can move faster to tackle climate change, even at a time of increasing political resistance in some parts of the world.  This week on Zero , Gore joins Akshat Rathi to discuss what it means to be a climate realist, the ways to move more fina...

Former US Vice President Al Gore is one of the grandees of the climate world and knows just how much power America can wield on the international stage. So with President Trump on the warpath against climate action, how should other nations deal with an increasingly rogue US?  Gore joins Akshat Rathi on Zero to talk geopolitics, polarization, and energy-hungry artificial intelligence.  E...

Most oil company CEOs have turned their back on COP30, but not ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods, who this year attended his third COP conference in a row. This week on Zero, Akshat Rathi asks Woods why Exxon is backing a new carbon accounting idea, what his plan is now that the Inflation Reduction Act has been gutted, and why Exxon wanted the US to stay in the Paris Agreement.  Explore further: Ze...

COP30 negotiations have officially started, and began with a fight about what to put on the agenda. While not completely unexpected for these enormous multilateral gatherings, it’s a rockier start than the Brazilian hosts in Belem would have wanted. This week on Zero, Akshat Rathi is joined by Rachel Kyte, the UK’s Special Representative for Climate, to talk about how to forge climate...

World leaders are gathering in Belem, Brazil, for the COP30 climate negotiations, but what will be achieved? Brazil hasn’t given much indication of what it hopes will emerge from the negotiations, other than implementing the many promises of previous COPs. This week on Zero, Akshat Rathi sits down with COP30 President, André Corrêa do Lago, to try and figure out how the negotiat...

The Paris Agreement was a huge deal when it was signed in 2015 at COP21. But after 10 years and $10 trillion dollars invested into decarbonizing our economies, what has it accomplished? As we approach COP30 in Belem, Bloomberg Green’s Laura Millan and Akshat Rathi look back at a decade of the Paris Agreement, and speak to Christiana Figueres and Laurence Tubiana, two of the architects of the...

Just three companies control the lion’s share of the $120 billion global market for industrial gases: Linde, Air Liquide & Air Products. And because the production of these gases is so energy intensive, each company consumes as much electricity as some small to medium-sized European countries. This week on Zero, Sanjiv Lamba, CEO of Linde, tells Akshat Rathi how he sees electricity deman...

From trade wars to skyrocketing tech valuations, governments and investors seem to be making economically irrational moves. As the world heads into another global climate summit, there is a need for fresh thinking to bring countries back to work on the urgent challenge of climate change. This week on Zero , political economist Abby Innes tells Akshat Rathi what governments are getting wrong about...

There's always big ideas in the climate technology space, but it can be hard to get your head around all the different types of technologies making waves. What’s real and what’s low-carbon smoke and mirrors? This week on Zero, Akshat Rathi teams up with venture capitalist and Catalyst podcast host Shayle Kann to talk about which climate technologies are working, and which are going now...

There’s a battle underway to win the energy export market between the world’s two largest economies: The US wants the world to buy its fossil fuels, while China wants to sell the world its clean energy technologies. For now, there is a clear winner: China. How did that happen? Akshat Rathi and Oscar Boyd discuss. More: Read Akshat’s newsletter Read Ember’s report on electri...

The UK used to be a shining example of how to act on climate change. It created one of the world’s first climate laws in 2008, which bound the government to reduce emissions on tight deadlines. That law used to have cross-party support, but that’s no longer the case with politicians trying to make climate a wedge issue. This week on Zero, Greg Jackson, chief executive officer of the UK...

AI needs a lot of energy — and a new Bloomberg investigation has found that those soaring costs are being passed on to consumers who live near data centers. On today’s Big Take podcast, host David Gura talks to Bloomberg reporters Josh Saul and Leonardo Nicoletti about the AI boom’s impact on power bills, how utility companies are handling surging demand and the implications for...

Rising power demand from data centers for artificial intelligence has led to a shortage of the gas turbines needed to generate electricity. This shortage might not seem the most obvious climate story, but it's having impacts across the entire energy sector. This week on Zero, Bloomberg’s Stephen Stapczynski joins Akshat Rathi to look at what’s causing the bottleneck in gas turbines, if...