Instant Genius - The positive tipping points that can help us solve the climate crisis

Episode Date: September 7, 2025

When it comes to climate change, we often think of tipping points as having a huge negative effect. Be it the loss of ice sheets in the Arctic, the deforestation of the Amazon rain forest or the alteration of ocean currents, scientists have identified several key systems on the Earth that will be impossible to reverse if they cross a critical threshold. But if we look at the situation from the opposite side, there are also several positive tipping points that, given the correct momentum, can potentially halt the crisis the planet is facing. In this episode, we’re joined by Prof Tim Lenton, chair in Climate Change and Earth System Science at the University of Exeter, to talk about his latest book Positive Tipping Points – How to Fix the Climate Crisis. He tells us how the pop group A-ha helped Norway to lead the way in the adoption of electric vehicles, how government mandates can act as powerful amplifiers to get us closer to these vital climate tipping points, and how each positive tipping point can feed into another to push us closer to a greener future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed sponsored jobs. It gives your job posts the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this shelf will get a $75-sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. This podcast is sponsored by name, audio and focal. Streaming has made music more accessible than ever,

but true listening is about more than ease. It's about quality. British audio experts name audio, alongside French acoustic specialist focal, combine handcrafted tradition with cutting-edge innovation and high-end materials, delivering digital precision with analogue warmth, so you can experience exceptional sound at home.

Music just as the artist intended. Visit name, audio, and welcome to Instant Genius, a bite-sized masterclass in podcast form. Every Monday and Friday, you'll hear world-leading scientists and experts talking about the most fascinating ideas in science and technology today. I'm Jason Goodyear, commissioning editor at BBC Science Focus. When it comes to climate change, we often think of tipping points as having a huge, negative effect, be it the loss of ice sheets in the Arctic, the deforestation of the Amazon

rainforests. or the alteration of ocean currents. Scientists have identified several key systems on the Earth that will be impossible to reverse if they cross a critical threshold. But if we look at this situation from the opposite side, there are also several positive tipping points that, given the correct momentum, can potentially halt the crisis the planet is facing.

In this episode, we're joined by Professor Tim Lenton, chair in climate change and Earth System Science at the University of Exeter, to talk about his latest book, Positive Tipping Points, How to Fix the Climate Crisis. He tells us how the pop group Baha helps Norway to lead the way in the adoption of electric vehicles, how government mandates can act as powerful amplifiers to get us closer to these vital climate tipping points, and how each positive tipping point can feed into another to push us closer to a greener future. So welcome to the podcast. Thanks very much for joining us.

Thanks for having me on the cast. So today we're talking about your new book, Positive Tipping Points, How to Fix the Climate Crisis. So I think typically when most people, scientists, talk about tipping points, they tend to be seen as a negative thing. So first off, what do you mean by a positive tipping point? Well, I mean where a change that we need to get a zero emission, technology or behaviour becomes self-propelling, self-accelerating and hard to reverse. And so it's the flip side of what I've studied for 20 years, which are the negative tipping points in the climate, where the loss of major ice sheets or the reorganisation of the ocean

circulation or the loss of the Amazon rainforest could become self-propelling, but in a bad way. So what are some examples of these positive tipping points then? Well, there's some great range of examples that span from what you could call tipping points in norms, what we think is acceptable as a society, to changes in behaviour and technology, the ones that are currently responsible for lots of greenhouse gas emissions. To give a couple of examples of the latter, the UK, 40% of our power supply came from burning coal as recently as 2012. And that fell off a cliff over the following several years, and we don't burn any coal for power today. Instead, that 40% is new renewables now, or more than 40%.

Another example, Norway has led the world in tipping its market for cars, from people buying petrol and diesel cars, to now being almost 100% fully battery electric vehicle car sales, just tipping. tipped in the last decade, but there's a great backstory to that that we might come to. Yeah, so let's stick with the electric cars then and see how Norway has led the way doing this, you know, what sort of things they've done differently from perhaps other countries. Well, as is often the case with positive tipping points, it's social activists who start a change, and this change started way back in 1989 when members of the pop band AHA, including Martin Harket, the lead singer and his architect friend Howard Rospick and an environmentalist friend,

Frederick Haug, were all disgruntled with their prime minister of the time, Grohan and Bruntland, who was busy espousing sustainable development to the rest of the world, whilst increasing oil and gas exports from Norway. They viewed that as hypocritical, and they were passionate about the potential for Norway to switch through, well, electric vehicles and renewable energy and all sorts of stuff. But it already had almost 100% hydroelectricity, cheap electricity. So electrifying road transport seemed like an obvious target. They came up with nine policy demands to incentivise a switch to electric vehicles. And they used, they leveraged the fact that they were a world famous pop band to bring this idea to the attention of the Norwegian people. And then they imported a hobby

converted electric vehicle, we'd call it a Fiat Panda into Norway in 1990, and got the first of their policy demands, which was to have the import registration tax for electric vehicles waived for that vehicle and every one since. And then they fought for about seven or eight years to get their other demands, which included having road tolls waived for electric vehicles. And they had a, it's a great story because they would drive said electric Fiat Panda round the road tolls of Oslo, refuse to pay the tolls, get the vehicle impounded, and then it would come up at auction. They'd be there in the audience, and often as someone they didn't even know would like buy it back at auction, give it back to them, they'd repeat the cycle and so on. Anyway, by the end of the

90s, policymakers in Norway had kind of come round to the plan, if you like, and they put in place a load of things that the activist had suggested, like also waiving VAT for electric vehicles and so on and so forth, giving them access to bus lanes. And then people got it. experience, the ones who had little electric city cars were getting experience of like, oh, I can go in the bus lane and get my kids to school in half the time of everybody else. And other people learned about that and thought, I want a bit of that. Anyway, the long and the short of it is once you have major manufacturers like Nissan putting cars like the Nissan Leaf onto the market around 2011-12,

at that time in Norway, it's already a comparable price to own the electric vehicle compared to the fossil fuel equivalent over its lifetime. And the market just starts tipping immediately. You get kind of exponential growth in the market share, and then it levels out, and then you get what we call an S-curve when it saturates now at nearly 100% EV sales. So how about the situation in the UK then?

Because, you know, as I've, the last, I don't know, five, ten years, as I've been cycling around, driving around, whatever, I have noticed more electric vehicles on the roads, but there are still sort of certain things in the way that put people off. So like the charging station situation being a big one. So how can we tip over like that they have done in Norway? Well, you've highlighted one of the crucial things, which is Norway was far-sighted enough that even by 2012-13,

when EVs were just around pushing, the market share was growing, it was doubling every year, but it was only a few percent maybe. They already put out to tender for the installation of a well-designed charging network, a supercharger network, in fact. And Harold Rosvick, who I mentioned, won the tender. And they built out what's still the world's kind of best charging network in the sense of the number of charges per vehicle that are available in Norway. So we can all learn a lesson from that. China is actually second in the world for the charges per vehicle.

But the good news that I haven't really explained is the amplifiers in the system, the more electric vehicles we buy, or particularly the batteries we buy for them, the better those batteries get and the cheaper they get. And the amazing thing that's happened is the price of batteries has fallen a factor of 10 in the last decade, roughly, and in fact it just plummeted in the last year. And the range you can get from a given mass of battery has gone up a factor of three in the last decade. and continues to improve. And the point is, the electric vehicle is very close to the point where it's cheaper

to manufacture than the fossil-fueled one, because it actually has less moving parts. And at that point, it should be cheaper to buy, like it is already in China for many models. And then, you know, the market tips, as long as you could say the obvious thing happens, and you roll out the charges. And there's money to be made in offering charging services. So whilst there can be a few, like, technical issues about boosting the grid connections and whatever. It's not rocket science of governance and to like open up the space for that, for the charging infrastructure to grow. And some countries

are doing that way better than others. Do we know anything about time scales for this sort of thing? Well, we know that the Norway could tip the market really fast. So it would have gone from like 20% electric vehicle sales to 80% in the space of five years. And we kind of need to do the same across markets. China's ahead of us, the UK, but other major European markets, need to tip at that rate now because by the end of this decade, well, we have a ban on petrol and diesel new car sales anyway. And that's a good thing, by the way,

because that should also be forcing the manufacturers to retool the production lines to electric vehicles. And they know the manufacturers that they can make at least as much money in the clean technology. They're just always going to be resistant to the upfront costs unless they know this is the trajectory we're heading on, which it clearly, in my view, it clearly is, although at the moment it's fair to say to listeners that Mercedes-Benz and others in a big lobby group in Europe are trying to get Europe to delay, amidst 2035 ban on petrol and diesel car sales and push that back to 2040, and we should all be fighting against that because listeners need to know that globally 8 million people a year are

still dying from fossil fuel air pollution, and a lot of that is coming out of the back of cars and trucks. So this isn't just about the climate. This is about clean air and health and lives. So summing up that then, in these tipping points, there's many sort of arrowheads pointing up them that needs to work together in order to take us over the edge. Yeah, the way I think about it as a systems thinker is things really start singing when the different bits of the choir come together. And what I mean by that is what you'll see is when like bottom up action, like it starts often with social activists, once that gets matched with top down policy,

then things are really getting going. But you've also got to remember there's firms, businesses in the mix. some of whom have seen the great opportunity in the new technology and are busy forming little lobby groups to try and encourage government to provide more support and more infrastructure for the new thing. And then the general public has got its own views on the new technology, which in turn are getting biased, shall we say, or influenced, to put it plighter, by different wings of the media.

And we've seen a lot of that in Britain of late. But we've also seen in other domains good news stories, like for, we've seen Britain have this amazing exponential growth in offshore wind power. And a lot of that is tied to the fact that the general public, who have been very grumpy about onshore wind turbines, not in my backyard, started to get positive about, hold on, these offshore turbines, it's generating new jobs, cheaper electricity, export industry, actually, in installing this stuff, and a whole positive narrative and media narrative

built up around that and help build the confidence in the government that, that, oh yeah, let's just keep pushing this. We can go further than we thought we could. We're going to up our targets for 2030. We're going to have 50, 60 gigawatts of offshore wind power, which means on a windy day in 2030, the whole of the UK will be powered by offshore wind. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes.

At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost.

Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your oceanfront room. Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay.

Hilton, for the stay. This podcast is sponsored by Name, Audio and Focal. With over 100 years of combined expertise, Name and Focal have been bringing music to listeners just as the artist intended. Since day one, this mantra has shaped every innovation in high-fi design, technology and acoustic engineering, balancing craftsmanship and tradition with pioneering thinking.

Name Audio pushes cutting-edge technology to ensure digital precision whilst successful. staining Pratt, pace, rhythm and timing, the elusive quality that makes music feel alive and gives it emotional texture. Today, in partnership with French acoustic specialist focal, name audio creates systems that deliver exceptional sound and unforgettable listening experiences at home. Try it for yourself at a focal powered by name boutique. Visit focal powered by name.com for more information. So another thing interesting about this is how different tipping points affect the others.

So yeah, can you run us through that? Yeah, so let's go back to our electric vehicles example, which isn't just about cars, by the way, listeners. It's also at the moment a revolution in electric three-wheel rickshaws in India and electric swappable battery motorbikes in Africa. it's something great for the global south as well, because it's way cheaper to run on electricity than petrol or diesel. But if we think about the batteries that are the core technology

that's kind of behind the electrification of mobility, batteries have another really valuable use, and that is in the power sector. It's to balance renewable electricity supply and demand, because when you want to boil a kettle, it isn't always when the sun shines. all the wind's blowing. So you need some cheap storage of electricity on the grid. And batteries are going to be the major part of that storage. And as we've heard, they're getting cheaper all the

time because of the growth of electrification of mobility, cars and trucks, etc. And actually the demand for batteries for moving around is greater than the need to, in 100% renewable electricity future. So there'll be like a surfeit of secondhand batteries that are already starting. to come out of first-generation EVs, go onto the grid, provide cheap storage. So what that's doing is reinforcing this other tipping point, which is to solar power and wind power, basically, which are also busy getting cheaper all the time. But they need that cheap storage, which they're getting. And then the beauty of it is, if the electricity from renewables is getting cheaper all the

time, well, that incentivises getting an EV, because now it's even cheaper to charge than it already was. I think mine's only like eight or nine p a kilowatt hour if I charge it at night. This is peanuts. I can get like 300 miles for five quid. But that's two different tipping points and two different sectors helping each other. And the big one that's in the power sector, which is going to renewables, cheapest electricity ever now and getting cheaper all the time, well, that's a massive incentive to electrify loads of other stuff like how we heat and or cool our homes, and then you get onto things it's hard to electrify, but you can use renewable power to split water to get what we call green hydrogen, which you can then use to synthesize, well,

green ammonia for fertilizer, green ammonia for shipping fuel, and various other things like even synthetic jet fuel in the future and zero emission jet fuel. Yeah, so we've concentrated there on talking about technology for a while. But clearly, as you mentioned, with the situation in Norway with the electric vehicles. The government has to play a really key role in order to get things properly moving, doesn't it? So what are some of the headline actions that they can take to help us reach these points? Great question, Jason.

We've been busy geeking it out, you know, building a state-of-the-art model calibated on the best available data of all these potential tipping points in technology. and then we can play with the model and ask it, well, if we introduce this policy or that one, how much effect does it have on the tipping of each sector? And the policies could be taxes. We've heard a lot about, I think, carbon taxes as an idea. They could be, broadly speaking, subsidies,

like subsidising the clean tech. There could be like pollution regulations, as we've seen on the vehicle fleet in Europe. Or they could be what we call mandates, which are literally things like the ban on petrol, diesel car sales in 2035. It's a phase-in mandate and a phase-out of the fossil-fuel technology. Well, the short version is mandates and also sometimes emissions regulations are the most powerful policies to activate the amplifiers that are in the system anyway, because I think

what they do essentially is force the hand of entrepreneurs and businesses to start to realize what we call learning by doing in economies of scale that improve and bring down the price of the new tech. That's not to say that there isn't some role for cleverly deployed taxes or subsidies. The reason the UK tipped away from coal power was simply because a targeted carbon price or what was called a floor price on carbon, a minimum price on carbon emissions, was levied just in the power sector with the government promising it was only ever going to step it up over the time and would never reduce it. And that just got us to a tipping point where coal became unprofitable to burn.

And then investors pulled their money out, which made it even less profitable for the investors who remained in the system who ran their money out even faster. So that's the short story of mandates, phase in the new tech, phase out fossil fuels, the most powerful thing. But definitely intelligent policy is about using a mixture of tools. And behind all of this is the fact that it's usually our money as tax. taxpayers, public money, it's crucial to have supported the research and development of the key technologies in the first place, whether it's the batteries, the solar panels or the wind turbines or

whatever. Yeah, so sort of sticking with that, it's all well and good for us to criticise the government, but in a democracy which we're supposed to live in, they're supposed to be acting on our behalf. That's right. And you also talk in the book about the sort of rise of environmental activism that has happened alongside these other, as we were saying, like tipping points. So how does that feed in? Well, basically,

as you put it, the governments in our liberal democracies need a popular mandate to act. They actually have one because all the survey evidence shows, in fact, pretty much worldwide, around 80% of people think we're in a climate crisis of some description

and governments should be acting more decisively on it. What we can observe from that then is if you read a lot or hear a lot about resistance to the change, it's coming from a very vocal minority. That said, governments can be captured by vested interests. And we don't have to think too hard to see a few examples of that in the world today. And even those that aren't captured are being subjected to very strong lobbying from the fossil fuel sector and from the meat livestock sector, for example,

So sometimes you need governments who lack, you could say lack, I don't know if they lack confidence or the courage of their convictions or whatever, but they've got lobbyists in their ear. They might need to see activists on the street and mass visible demonstration of public sentiment and support for the change we need. And that's what we saw with Greta Toonberg and Extinction Rebellion back before the lockdowns. so unfolding from summer 2018 through 2019. And what's great about those movements is they have their own tipping point dynamics. So if we think about Greta, she's breaking from social norms when she late summer 2018 decides to disobey her parents in the state and skip school on a Friday to sit down in front of the Swedish Parliament with her placard school strike for climate and demand, you know,

go to government action on this crucial issue. So she gets vilified in the right-wing media at the time, and you're always going to get some flack if you step out of social norms. But crucially, you make it that little bit easier for the next person who agrees with you to feel brave enough to join you, in this case in the protest. And I looked at the photos, actually, and the early data on that movement. And each week, the number of people sitting with Greta doubled. So to begin with, you've got two people after a week, four after two weeks, eight after three weeks.

doesn't look great, but if you carry on doubling like that for 20 weeks, you have a million people and that's pretty much what happened with Fridays for Futures of Movement. And of course, that and XR and everything else going on around the world, whatever you felt about the methods, did have a discernible effect on public awareness of the climate issue and public views on the need to do something about it. So whilst many people might have said, I'm not wild about some of, you know, the way some of the direct act of that's going on. Subliminally, we were all actually getting the message and the activism was really doing an important functional role. And the data shows that for the UK, particularly for the

older demographic in the UK, who beforehand were like 50%, or I'm not even sure climate change is real, or why should we bother doing it? Think about it, to becoming one of the strongest supporting demographics for climate action. But we're in a good country in the sense we already have a climate change act that is itself the product of what's called a private members bill, which is itself the product of decades of environmental activism in this country. So we've got into the machine, the wonderful machine of the civil service, a written law, arguably to lead the world and get into net zero by mid-century. So sort of one final question into summer. Do you remain optimistic that these positive tipping points can be triggered before, you know, it's too late? Well, I'm what I call

a conditional optimist. My optimism is conditional on some other people listening to this or reading the book getting on board with the argument that we've all got some agency to be part of the change which I'm arguing we definitely need. We have to accelerate our efforts to zero emissions and to stop global warming in its tracks. Otherwise we face an unmanageable horror show. But I'm conditionally optimistic. Some of you are going to join in with that cause. And I don't luckily the beauty of tipping points is it doesn't need everybody to like sign up at the start and agree and act. A minority can tip the majority. And that's what we've seen repeatedly in history with technologies, with social norms like votes for women, which I write about in the book,

end of foot binding in China, things like this. So that's why I still hold out some optimism despite everything that's going on in the world. Because I can see the great forces of amplification that are happening with uptake of solar is continuing to grow exponentially led by China. There's great forces unleashed now and even the most resistant actors who are trying to stop the change may now find it very hard to stop in some sectors. Thank you for listening to this episode of Inson Genius brought to you from the team behind BBC Science Focus. That was Professor Tim Lenton. To discover more about the topics we've just discussed, check out his latest book, Positive Tipping Points, How to Fix the Climate

Crisis. If you liked what you just heard, then please do consider subscribing to Insidgenius on your preferred podcast platform. If you'd like to see our guests and hosts in person, then please also check out our YouTube channel at Science Focus. The current issue of BBC Science Focus magazine is out now. Pick up a copy wherever you buy your favourite magazines or download us on your app store of choice. You can also find us on Apple News or online at sciencefocus.com. This podcast is sponsored by Name, Audio and Focal.

The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal. Name Audio believes you can have digital precision with analog warmth. Alongside French acoustic specialist Focal, name creates high-end audio systems combining innovation with craftsmanship so you can listen to music, just as the artist intended. Discover more at name audio.com.

There's a moment when you start to wonder, what's the right next step? Not about changing who they are, just finding the right kind of support. At Kingsley Manor, life stays expressive, connected and full of character, shaped by people who have lived interesting lives and aren't finished yet. So it doesn't feel like a change. It feels like a continuation. Explore your options at canesley manor.org, a nonprofit month-to-month senior community within the Front Porch family.