Zero: The Climate Race

Something remarkable is unfolding in developing countries. From Nepal to Costa Rica, more people are buying electric cars than fossil-fuel vehicles, as battery prices plummet and cheap home-grown EVs come to market. And in China, more electric cars will be sold in the last quarter of this year than the total number of all cars sold in the US. Colin McKerracher, head of transport at BNEF, joins Aks...

Monira Al Qadiri says she is pre-empting the end of oil and building monuments to it. As one of the most important contemporary artists of the Middle East, her work — spanning sculptures, films and performances — throws new light on humanity’s deep interdependent relationship with fossil fuels. This week on Zero , Akshat Rathi asks Al Qadiri how art can help make sense of the cur...

You’ve heard about Formula 1, right? But do you know about Formula E, its plucky all-electric sibling? This week on Zero , Akshat Rathi talks with Sylvain Filippi, co-founder and chief technology officer of Envision Racing, about why the world needs an electric racing series, how Formula E is improving the experience for consumer electric cars, and why he’s not too concerned about the...

This week, we hear from you. Bloomberg Green’s Akshat Rathi answers questions from Zero listeners: Can a decline in trade help fight climate change? How do we tell if corporations are greenwashing or not? And are we about to enter a new era of global collaboration when it comes to green tech? If you have a question for the show, send us a voice note or message to zeropod@bloomberg.net. Explo...

Nearly half a million people die every year as a result of extreme heat. That’s more than the total from hurricanes, earthquakes and floods combined. And as the planet warms, the risk of deadly heat is increasing. On Bloomberg's Big Take podcast, climate reporter Zahra Hirji brings Sarah Holder a dispatch from a lab at the forefront of understanding how heat affects the human body. They brea...

Science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson imagines the future for a living. And the future is very much upon us. Robinson’s seminal 2020 novel  Ministry for the Future opens in the year 2025. Robinson tells Akshat Rathi about how our real-life climate politics stack up against what he imagined for this era. They also discuss the dangers of science-fiction thinking in politics and why,...

In April, Spain suffered a nationwide blackout that lasted nearly a full day. It was a traumatic event for one of Europe’s fastest adopters of solar power, tripling capacity in just five years. The outage sparked a big question: Was solar to blame? And what will it take to avoid blackouts in the renewables era? Bloomberg Green’s Laura Millan joins Akshat Rathi on Zero to unpack the les...

Electricity demand is soaring, and some think the answer isn’t building bigger, but smaller. That’s the idea behind small modular reactors (SMRs): take a large-scale nuclear plant that’s hard to build, and shrink it down to something that’s more manageable, cheaper and easier to replicate. Instead of one huge nuclear plant, you build 10 small ones.  Right now these kin...

Electricity demand is booming, and it’s not just because of artificial intelligence. So much so that many are ready to revisit the idea of nuclear power. Microsoft signed a $16 billion deal to reopen the Three Mile Island nuclear plant to power their data centres for the next 20 years. But developed countries haven’t built more than a handful of new reactors in decades. When they have...

In 2019, a group of law students from Pacific island nations set in motion a case that made it to the world’s highest court: The International Court of Justice. The students wanted answers to two important questions: what responsibility do countries have to stop climate change? And if countries don’t stop polluting, will they have to pay for the damages? Now the ICJ has delivered its v...

Everywhere you look, it seems like bad news for climate tech. Investments are down, the US government has cut incentives and startups are running out of cash. But venture capitalist Vinod Khosla is still bullish, even though the One Big Beautiful Bill cut an estimated $500 billion in green spending. This week on Zero , Akshat Rathi speaks with Khosla to find out when we can expect to see fusion, w...

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act cuts almost $500 billion in US clean-energy spending, just as the country was starting to get serious about its climate goals. Some say the country is acting like a petrostate, waging war against clean energy. Others are more sanguine and believe that the US will stay the course in the long term. This week on Zero , Akshat Rathi is joined by Jigar Shah, a clean energ...

This week, we explore how the legislation’s attack on renewable energy may push up electricity bills and damage US competitiveness in AI. The tax credits in President Joe Biden’s sprawling Inflation Reduction Act were introduced to help the US keep up with rising electricity demand by making clean power sources cheaper. But now the big bill has changed all that, and an executive order...

The world’s militaries are incredibly polluting, collectively accounting for some 5.5% of global emissions. Western economies are now gearing up for a big expansion of their militaries, with members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) agreeing to increase defense spending to 5% of their gross domestic product by 2035. That will commit trillions of dollars more to an enormously c...

What does it mean to do business with compassion? How can a company marry purpose with profit? We explore that and more with B.Grimm--the Thai conglomerate that has been doing business compassionately for nearly 150 years.  https://sponsored.bloomberg.com/media/bgrimm/the-stewards-of-compassion-podcast This episode is sponsored by B.GRIMM. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

When the UK handed the Labour party a parliamentary majority last July, it promised to build a new state owned energy company called Great British Energy. It's almost exactly one year since its creation, and GB Energy now has a budget of £5.8 billion to get the organization off the ground. It sounds like a lot of money, but is it? And what exactly will the organization do with all of it? On...

Climate tech is not the hot investor thesis it once was a couple of years ago. After several record breaking years, and billions of dollars being poured into climate startups, venture capital investments are way down. This week on Zero , Akshat Rathi speaks with Mike Schroepfer, who runs Gigascale Capital, a venture firm focusing on climate investments, and used to be Meta’s chief technology...

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 renewables and electrification of transport – has put China’s emissions into a structural decline. This week on...

High-voltage electricity cables are in huge demand around the world, so much so that a lack of cabling has become a bottleneck throttling the clean energy transition. So why are cable manufacturers so hesitant to expand? Also, how are these giant cables made? And is China about to eat everyone's lunch? Claes Westerlind, chief executive officer of cable manufacturing company NKT, joins Zero to disc...

Western economies need to electrify and fast, but where are all the skilled workers going to come from to install the heat pumps, solar panels and batteries needed? This week on Zero , Akshat Rathi talks with Olivia Rudgard about the shortage of labor in electrification industries, and why some experts are calling it an ‘existential’ crisis. This is the second episode in Bottlenecks, a...

To slash emissions fast, the formula is simple: electrify everything and clean up the grid. But in practice, progress is slowed by all sorts of bottlenecks — from arcane permitting processes to sky-high electricity costs. This week on Zero , Akshat Rathi sits down with producer Oscar Boyd to spotlight a surprising culprit slowing the transition: a global shortage of transformers, and why it...

Scientists are clear that meeting climate goals means ending carbon pollution and drawing down excess CO2 from the air. That’s why carbon-removal technologies have proliferated over the past decade. But with the US government slashing climate incentives and programs, some companies are being forced to cut costs. This week Akshat Rathi speaks with Jan Wurzbacher, co-founder of Climeworks, a s...

Low-carbon tech investments reached $2.1 trillion last year. But with the whole world trying to work out how to navigate US President Donald Trump’s unpredictable policy agenda, is 2025 still a good time to invest in climate tech? This week on Zero Akshat Rathi interviews Greg Wasserman, head of private company climate investment at Wellington Management, which  oversees more than $1 tr...

Australia is in a unique place when it comes to the energy transition. It is the world’s largest exporter of coal and a leading exporter of gas, yet has set a target to reduce emissions by 43% and have 82% renewable electricity by 2030. It is also caught  juggling relations between the US, its military ally, and China, its biggest trading partner — as the two superpowers fight ove...

What connects Hamburg, the Thai Royal court and the conservation of tigers? A pioneering young pharmacist who wanted to do good in his new home of Thailand. Find out how his vision yielded B.Grimm--one of Asia’s most impactful businesses.  https://sponsored.bloomberg.com/media/bgrimm/the-stewards-of-compassion-podcast This episode is sponsored by B.GRIMM. See omnystudio.com/listener for...