Odd Lots - Why The Transition To Clean Energy Is Happening A Lot Faster Than People Realize

Episode Date: January 24, 2020

At the recent World Economic Forum in Davos, there was a lot of talk about the need to change the world's energy usage in order to address climate change. While it's easy to get cynical about business leaders and politicians talking about sustainability on a mountaintop in Switzerland, it turns out that a lot is already happening right now. On the latest Odd Lots episode, we speak with journalist and analyst Gregor Macdonald, the editor of The Gregor Letter, about what's actually happening on the ground. And why the transition to renewable energy is happening fast, even in the absence of aggressive government subsidies.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Thanks for listening to Odd Lots. Follow the show on Amazon Music for more future episodes or just ask, Alexa, play the Odd Lots podcast on Amazon Music. Hello and welcome to another episode of The Odd Lots podcast. I'm Joe Wisenthal. And I'm Tracy Allaway. Tracy, have you seen Tesla's chart lately? I have, actually. I think because you tweeted it. It's a pretty crazy chart. Do you know that at this moment that we're recording this, just this right precise moment that if Tesla opens up today where it's trading in the pre-market, it could be a $100 billion company for the first time? That's amazing considering, you know, just a few months ago people were talking about Tesla actually going bankrupt. And of course, there are a lot of people out there who still think that the company might go bankrupt.

Did you know that Tesla bonds are trading above par for the first time since they were issued? I wasn't aware of that, but I'm not surprised that you were on top of the bond angle and following that, I totally just think. Stocks are, I like stocks. They're just simple. They go up and down, you know. Well, together we provide a holistic cross-asset overview of Tesla. So we've done our job. So that's obviously big news in the world of electric vehicles. There was also another big thing in the world of sort of climate and energy and renewables this week. Did you happen to catch it? Would that be the launch of something called green?

Yeah. So exactly right. So our colleagues within Bloomberg News have launched a new green vertical. It's called Green. It's on Twitter at the handle at Climate. and it's a major endeavor to cover climate in a whole new way, all kinds of unique, fresh data. It should be a pretty interesting endeavor.

Our colleague Aaron Rutkoff is launching that, and it looks pretty cool. Yeah, there's been a lot of great coverage already, and I'm particularly interested to see us try to break down some of the numbers and stats behind a lot of the, I'm going to say, corporate PR guff behind environmentalism. I think that's important. Yeah, I think it's important to exactly, as you put it, break down the corporate PR Guff. We also happen to be this week.

It's Davos Week. So it is certainly a very big week for corporate PR type stuff. There's an extra Guff to go around. Yeah, it's a bull market in Guff this week. So it's kind of the perfect week for us to do an episode talking about climate, renewable energy, electric vehicles, all of these things. that are suddenly the sort of confluence of things happening right now. Great. I'm into it.

So here's, there's one piece of good news before we get into the actual discussion, which is that although there is a lot of corporate PR guff, as you so eloquently put it, related to climate, there are real things happening. And it's easy to be cynical and say politicians aren't doing anything. And business leaders, it's all just lip service and greenwashing and press releases that sound good. But there is some good happening in the world, and there's actually a lot of progress being made on the transition to renewable fuels or renewable energy sources, and that is what we're going to be talking about today. Great. And this is why I think it's so important, by the way, to identify the bad actors in this space, because then you can actually find the things that are happening, the companies that are changing their practices, the policies that actually work around this, and funnel more capital to. them. So this should be interesting. Yeah, absolutely. So without further ado, I want to bring in our

guest for the week or for the episode. He's Gregor MacDonald. He is a journalist. He is an analyst. He is the editor of the Greger letter, which is a newsletter that everyone should subscribe to. It's about the world of energy, both the conventional energy and the shift to renewables, published in many places. And he has been tracking for as long as anyone I can remember. the evolution of the world's energy balances and the trends happening and what's driving the trends. And we're going to be talking to him about what he sees. So Gregor McDonnell, thank you very much for joining us. Oh, thanks, Joe. It's great to be with you and Tracy today. Really look forward to our chat. How long have you been following energy? I mean, I've been following your stuff

on Twitter and newsletters for years and years. What got you first looking into this space and how And why? I lived in London about 20 years ago, and that was right around the time that the price of oil fell to about $10 a barrel. You may recall the famous economist cover drowning in oil. Yeah. Yeah, I was living in London, and I was a writer and a teacher. I was teaching poetry writing to a program. But, you know, my educational background and my family background had all been in finance,

And I just, I couldn't, I couldn't resist getting interested in why oil was so cheap. And I began to research that and started writing about that. And I took my unexpected journey into energy. When did that journey into, I mean, I'm guessing that was traditional types of energy 20 years ago. When did your interest in energy sort of flip into alternative sources, such as solar? or environmentally friendly energy generation methods. So around 2006, 2007, the world felt like it was an energy crisis part two because of the price of oil of people who wanted to help me in clean energy.

And that was quite a challenge because, as you may recall, clean tech or clean energy sort of had a little mini bubble and bust in 2006 through 2009 as a result of the Great Recession. But I could see then, doing a lot of research then, talking with experts in the field, I could see that if the price of solar and if the price they ever get down to certain levels, that it could be very transformative. And, yeah, that's where we are today. So as Tracy mentioned in the beginning,

anything to do with renewables or clean fuels is associated with a lot of corporate PR, Guff, and I'm sure you'd agree, and based on knowing you, I don't think you have tons of patients for sort of lip service or sort of corporate green messages. But you wrote a piece, it was actually published in BuzzFeed last year, and you've written on your newsletter, that in the real world, there is a major transformation going on. As you put it, there is kind of a green new deal happening even before we're seeing anything policy-wise really being put into place, what excites you? What is this positive transformation that you're seeing look like on a big sort of big picture level?

Yeah, so, I mean, you're absolutely right. So the energy transition really kicks off in earnest at the start of the last decade around 2010. It gets a push from policy, but then traditional learning curves or the learning rate kicks in, and as more is manufactured the cost of every, every unit of solar and every new unit of wind drops. Unfortunately, we're still in a period where a lot of people have, they're sort of anchored to that memory of the policy support, and they're just unaware that we're departing the domain of policy support. We have utilities in the United States that are running sophisticated software modeling programs. They're doing

Monte Carlo, and they're just reviewing their entire portfolio, and they're discovering that they can shut coal and build new wind, build new solar and storage for money. So, yeah, my op-ed last year in BuzzFeed was just trying to explain to a sort of a broader audience that there are really good things happening already. And, you know, with something like the Green New Deal, which I hope we get to talk about a little bit more. I was sort of, I was politely suggesting that the new Green Deal doesn't need to get out a big sledgehammer and hit something hard. The New Green Deal can just really take advantage of the cost alignment and the favorable cost curves that really give everything that's happening, you know,

sort of its own wind at its own back at this point. Can you give some examples of those cost curves? because I think when a lot of people think about the transition to clean energy, they start thinking that it's very expensive and we're going to have to replace all our old power generators with something new and we just don't have enough money for that. So if you could explain exactly how costs are changing, that would be interesting. So at one point in time, you might have thought the main determinant of what it costs to run a coal would be the price of coal. And that was true at one time. That's why China built a lot of coal, starting in the late 90s. That's how we sort of got a coal 2.0 globally because the price of coal was cheap, and China could build a lot of coal-fired power plants. As it turns out, the main cost of coal is the infrastructure and the supply chain and the maintenance and the operational cost.

Right now, coal is very cheap right now, but that doesn't make coal power cheap. Now along comes clean energy, wind and solar, and the investment propositions, then coal. When you build a coal plant, you've got to feed that coal plant 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 12 months a year, and you've got to have an elaborate supply chain that feeds that coal plant, and you've got to operate and maintain that coal plant. When you build a solar plant, all your investment comes in sort of a lump sum up front. It's just an enormous steep hill that you climb right at the outset. And then once the solar plant is built, it starts running at extraordinarily low operational costs. I sometimes think of a large utility solar plant is sort of like a long bond,

where you sort of push a pile of money towards an investment, and then you wait for that, interest payments to start giving you a return on your capital. So that's sort of what's happening right now in, like, the American utility business, the crossover point has now been reached. And it's happening so fast. I mean, even for those of us who followed this, only three or four years ago, the main question was, well, sure, utilities can build new wind and solar at a competitive cost, but their existing coal plants are still running very economically.

How are you going to push those out? And now just two to three years later, we've reached a point where utilities are, as I said, running simulations and calculations, and they're discovering that just having to run the existing coal plants for another year or two is now become uneconomic. I mean, I could get into some of the utilities that have started to do this, But I think having sat in a presentation, for example, recently from Pacific Corp here in Portland, you almost have the sense that Pacific Corp itself was surprised when they got the answer about what to do with their power portfolio, which, as I said, was accelerate and accelerate.

What happened to something that I heard about a lot a few years ago, like, yeah, the cost curve is plunging rapidly with solar. and wind, but sometimes the wind isn't blowing, and at night there's no solar power, and so battery tech is still really expensive. So even if all these things are getting cheaper, that doesn't provide a sustainable 24-7 electricity grid. How does that, how is that problem getting solved? The way it's getting solved is more like an evolutionary process rather than a revolutionary process. In other words, the world just presses forward. now at a pretty good rate building out new wind and solar, and the cost of wind and solar continue to drop very fast.

But you're right, Joe, that the cost of storage has not dropped as fast. But I'll tell you one thing that's kind of curious that's happened is that even though the price drop of storage has been slower, because the price drop of wind and solar is so fast, it's made an all-in system more affordable. And so, but to get to the other part of your question about how do we make use of wind power that tends to blow at night and solar power, which tends to come up and peak during the daytime, the system is already finding ways traffic, if you will, almost like air traffic control, routing those surpluses and gaps into various markets. So I'll give you one example right now. California tends to produce surplus solar power midday around lunchtime when the grid isn't demanding as much electricity. And so you get a utility like Arizona Public Services, you get natural gas plants to give Metro Phoenix power.

Then they thought they would build some wind and solar to get Metro Phoenix power. Then they look at all that surplus power coming from California. they just decide to build storage. They just decide to build utility scale storage. And then you're, in fact, you're arbitraging cheap electricity at lunchtime and selling it back to the grid at dinner time. So they'll just pull the electricity off the grid when it's cheap, when it's offered midday. Then they'll sell it into Metro Phoenix during peak time around dinner.

So the way it's getting solved is problem. all in a big bang and a flash, we're going to sell it, we're going to solve it incrementally as we go along through examples like that. You mentioned that policy gave the start of this process a little bit of a nudge, but you're obviously emphasizing the market forces here and how those cost curves are coming down. What is the role of policy in this process? What should it be?

That's a great question. And so a good way to think about the world's energy system is that there's basically there's electricity, right, and all the things the world uses electricity for. Then there's transportation, and then there's heating and industrial processes. And we've got really good clarity and visibility now on how we're going to decarbonize the world's electricity system. And even in a country like China, which is still largely running its power. grid on coal, the wonderful thing about having established and built such a huge power grid

is that you can plug in a new energy source to that. And that's exactly what China has been doing. It's increasingly plugging in wind and solar. And so policy has less to do now in the area of electricity. And you've kind of heard this articulation from people at Bloomberg, New Energy Finance and so forth, talking about the energy system's way. policy needs to do now is something about transportation. And then, unfortunately, what's going to be the really harder area is heating and industrial. But I would say right now what policy can do

most is in the area of transportation, making sure that drivers of cars pay a fuller cost, we'll call it the atmosphere, that the car drivers are using. And so, you know, we don't have a carbon tax yet, but like in a city like London, you have a day charge. you have a road charge that came in about 20 years ago, that's a form of a carbon tax. And it's been enormously helpful in pushing London towards better use of transport and better use of bicycle. In fact, London has really exploded with the right now policy needs to focus on transportation. And then research and science really needs to think about the hard problem of industrial processes, you know, steelmaking and so forth. But that's going to be very tough.

Let's talk a little bit more about electric vehicles and the transportation problem mentioned at the outset that this week shares of Tesla hitting an extraordinary, that $100 billion level sentiment towards them really swinging towards the positive. You wrote last year in your newsletter that the Chinese EV market, let's start there. We also know, we know that's a market that Tesla wants to expand in. when I'm in Hong Kong visiting Tracy. I see a lot of Tesla's on the road there, but that the Chinese EV market was at some sort of tipping point, that people weren't paying attention to it, but that something very big was happening in China with the number of EVs being sold as a percentage of the total automobile mix. Let's start there. What do you see happening in the Chinese market that got you excited? Great. Yeah. So the Chinese EV market is a classic example of what we were

talking about where you kick off these trends with a policy push and you theorize that once you get going, the cost curves will kick in. And that's exactly what's happened in China. So, for example, if you go back to 2015, EV sales were just about one and a quarter percent of the market. By 2017, there were 2.5 percent of the market. And last year, although of EV were hit in the second half, partly because China's economy has struggled last year, but also because of a short-term policy change. EV sales didn't grow quite as much last year, but they did get close to what a lot of energy and sort of business researchers identify is sort of this tipping point in substitution

curve. EV almost got to 5% of the market for new. cars last year in China. And when we look at across a lot of the space, was a build out of wind power in the UK, that 5% tipping point to something. So, you know, Joe, I declared that China somewhat single-handedly killed the internal combustion engine. And by that, I don't mean the internal combustion engine is going away. It's not going away. It's going to be with us for another couple of decades. But if we do have, it does look like China sort of stuck a peak into the sales of global internal combustion engines around the 2016, 2017 point. And there's just

no way we're going to get back there because the EV platform is just such a superior platform in many ways, especially in China where they have what are known as minis and super minis. These are like little tiny EVs that are highly affordable, the second, third, fourth, and fifth tier cities in China where incomes aren't as high. So back to Tesla, the Tesla will concentrate on the higher income strata in the Chinese market, but the EV platform has really had its greatest success at the lower price tag end in the whole of China. You know, listening to you talk about EVs being a superior platform, I think it was last year, maybe two years ago. I actually drove one for the first time.

It wasn't a Tesla. It was, I think it was an Audi, maybe hybrid, EV, I see, it was an Audi, maybe hybrid, EV, ICE type thing. And I remember thinking, and I know I'm not the first person to make this analogy, but then when I went back and drove my car, which is just a regular ICE, it felt like going from a smartphone tool. back to a flip phone after that. Like, regardless of the environment and of the environmental issues aside, the smoothness, the quietness of the EV, it was just so clearly felt like a superior technical experience. Definitely, if I ever buy another car, environment aside, like, there's no way I would get another engine that has to, like, sputter in the beginning and stuff like that.

It was just so clearly superior. So when you talk about, when you're talking about an obviously better platform, clearly resonated with me. Okay, I'll take your word for it, Joe. Just to play devil's advocate for a second, Gregor, I mean, you mentioned a shift in Chinese policy, which I think was the removal or the reduction of subsidies for electric vehicles. A lot of people will look at the China example and say, well, China's a command economy. They're able to put in place these big policy initiatives, and they're able to create the infrastructure of electricity distribution for electric vehicles to make this happen. So for that particular example, could you just break down a little bit more the market forces versus policy incentive when it comes to China?

It's a good question. So when policy support sort of resolves or transform market that can stand on its own two feet, you still have the antecedent influences of policy, you know, sort of flickering through the market as you transition to a market that can stand on its own. The one thing I would say is that when you talk to, what I do, to get into the details of the Chinese market, it does look as though the mini and the super mini sales really are happening. simply because those vehicles are cheaper. They're just cheaper, and they're especially cheaper to run. And this is something we might want to get into about the EV platform versus the ICE platform and why energy transition may very well represent a cost savings rather than a cost outlay. So you have to imagine that consumers in China who are able to purchase a super mini for 7,000,

know, US dollars or six to eight thousand US dollars, once they start running that vehicle, their fuel costs are so significantly lower. And of course, this is something that's true, not only for an EV driver in a smaller, less well-known Chinese city, it's also true for someone in San Francisco. And so China announced that it wouldn't hit electric vehicles in 2020, the way they hit them in 2019, which I think was, I read as sort of a, their sort of a wake-up call occurred and they realized that they've got this new EV industry going. And the last thing they wanted to is puncture, you know, its growth rate. So I think, you know, most people, including Bloomberg analysts and so forth, are expecting

a fairly significant rebound this year. And, yeah, I don't think that's going to be something that we can. point to and say, oh, that's a price, I think, still in a policy and price. Talk to us about EVs outside of China. So, again, Tesla doing very well. But I've seen questions about whether the market, say, in the U.S., there is a big appetite for EVs per se, or whether it's mostly there's a Tesla phenomenon and then people don't really care about it. What do you see happening just in general with EVs in the West and in the U.S.? And then how does it also connect to the grid in terms of, as you mentioned, you know, the grid is slowly becoming more based on renewables.

But obviously that's an important question because if everyone is plugging in their EVs at night at home, but that power isn't particularly clean, then maybe it'll be a marginal improvement on the ICE platform, but doesn't necessarily get us very far. So what do you see developing here? Let me go to that part of the question first, and then I'll address the market itself, which is slightly less interesting in the U.S. The U.S. is a little bit of a disappointment in terms of a market. But let me talk about that bigger picture, Joe, because I think that would really help tie up a lot of the themes that we're talking about. Yeah, so EVE have come up above 5% of the California market.

They're up around 6 to 7%. Now, I'd have to check the number. But it's important for people to understand how much energy savings we can harvest by just transitioning from ice vehicles to EV. And the reason is that fossil fuel combustion, which occurs in an individual engine, it's very powerful, but it's also very powerful of what you spend on petrol, on road fuel, gasoline, diesel. it tends to just get lost into the atmosphere through waste heat. It's probably more like 60 or 65%. So when we think about transition, we want to never lose sight of the fact that when we transition eventually, let's say all of California's 35 million vehicles to electric vehicles, you know, we want to imagine that the 15 and a half or 16 billion gallons of gasoline that California is. is consuming each day, that that goes away, but it only takes us about half and maybe even

only 40% of the energy to run that same fleet. They can do all the things they normally do, drive to work every day, but on a different energy platform. And that's because we've moved away from combustion. And that's just a very important sort of concept that you can keep applying and reapplying to the decarbonization process. But just in terms of the market, the U.S. EV market suffers from over concentration by Tesla. It's sort of a story where the market has become overly dependent on Tesla sales.

Without huge booming Tesla sales in the U.S., the U.S., the U.S. EV market would be way behind. And so, yeah, the U.S. had another disappointing year last year, and I would say the simple reason is this. Lack of consumer choice. You go into a showroom and you've got. a couple of Teslas to choose from, and you have a Chevy Bolt and a Leaf and some hybrids. So that's just not enough for people to choose from.

Why do you think we haven't seen a stronger competitor to Tesla emerge in the United States? Because certainly in China, again, we have so many EV startups that people are actually talking about the market being crowded, and that's actually caused some problems for some of those companies. But it's a different picture in the U.S. Yeah, that's a good question. So the EV ecosystem in China obviously get started through state support. The EV ecosystem in Europe, automobile industry, to in some ways, some people feel that the emissions crisis that Volkswagen had wound up working in a positive way, it helped Volkswagen get sort of shocked into retooling for a world of TV. And then you have that. the U.S. market, which is sort of a laissez-faire market, and I think what the Tesla example shows is how high the hurdles are to trying to create a new capital-intensive company. I mean, America's forte is creating software companies and non-capital intensive companies.

Musk has created a company that's just admittedly very difficult to create. And we have a regulatory environment where the process is slow by which foreign models of EV can come in to this market. And so I think we've got a pretty big mismatch between demand and availability. And I've written in my newsletter that once the market has what's called a cross-popular, short wheelbase sort of mini SUV. The Mazda makes, I think, something called the CX-5, which sort of seems like the archetype of what would be popular. Hyundai and Kia both have a couple of crossover models that have started to come into European market. And I think once they're here, you'll sort of see that uprush adoption in the United States that, you know, we're still waiting for.

The U.S. TV market is still trapped down at that 2% level. And unfortunately, just getting back to adoption curves and substitution curves, markets can get trapped at that 1 to 2 to 3% level for years before finally, you know, breaking out above 5%. So, yeah, it's not that encouraging in the U.S. how dependent we are. So before we wrap it up here, I just want to go back to policy. And I think this sets it up well what you're talking about, about the sort of disappointing EV market. And you said in the beginning that you, given the progress that we're seeing towards a renewable energy mix, that policymakers don't need to take a sledgehammer to improve the system, that there are things that can be done.

So let's say, you know, there's a new president at some point, and they're listening to this podcast with a guard I want to have Gregor. be one of my energy advisors. What are some of the things, say, in the U.S., that you would recommend in terms of pushing the gas pedal, so to speak, on this acceleration, or on this transformation? Okay. Well, the main thing the federal government can do is it can smooth the siting and permitting process for utility scale solar and offshore wind. And that has started to happen to a certain extent. The other thing they can do is actually either provide financing or create green bond markets or partly back green bond markets, or perhaps the United States might even want to take minority stakes in new energy infrastructure. Also, I think the

transportation system is sort of ripe for a nudge. It wouldn't hurt to dip back in some traditional 20th century technology like trains and so forth. You know, upgrading our train lines would be enormously helpful. And the reason for that is that urban planners are increasingly discovering that you can use existing rail line in a network effect to sort of layer up or build on top of those existing rail lines to build out bike lanes and other forms. of transportation that get people from houses to the train stop. This is happening in Los Angeles, by the way, where as L.A. builds out its metro.

For example, think hard and do things to foster pedestrian and bicycle networks that get from the neighborhoods to the train stop. So I think those two things alone would be enormously helpful. There are a couple of wonky things. It might be helpful if we let utilities all. more of their assets. That could get them building storage and wind and solar. It would help if the U.S. would help provide financing to upgrade our power grid. So, for example, we have a new that's going to start appearing on the eastern seaboard between Virginia and Massachusetts.

Very exciting job opportunity and so forth as the supply chain forms. But that's going to be a lot of new electricity coming into the power grid. It would be good if our government fostered or encouraged or upgrade and modernize the power grid so that we can do things more, specifically, if you will, getting back to what we were talking about with storage, buying and selling and arbitraging of power, perhaps on a more automated basis. The main idea I would say is our government needs to accept that we're going to electrify. Electrification is the efficient, the most efficient way to decarbonize. So we want to electrify as many processes as possible.

And that means some increase, some good chunk increase in electricity demand. And that means a power grid that needs to be more in the 21st century. Gregor, that was a really great conversation. Really enjoyed talking to you. And I'll hopefully have you on again at some point. Really appreciate it. Thank you. pleasure for me as well.

Thanks, Gregor. Yeah, that was great. You know, Tracy, as we were saying in the beginning, I think both of us are a little bit cynical about a lot of corporate PR-Guff around clean energy and renewables and sustainability and all that. But I think that conversation was a good reminder that you can kind of be a little bit cynical at the same time, but not necessarily pessimistic, if that makes sense. Yeah, I think that's right.

I mean, I think all of these projects warrant close scrutiny and analysis for obvious reasons. There does seem to be a sense out there that if we just throw a bunch of money at the problem, things will improve. But I think when it comes to stuff like the Green New Deal or other big climate change initiatives, I think it's really, really important that we actually sit down and think about the problems that we're trying to solve and design the program around it. So for the Green New Deal, maybe you know the answer to this, but I've missed out on a lot of the conversations in the U.S., but is the point to boost economic growth or is the point to tackle climate change? Yeah.

I mean, I think they would say the advocates would definitely say it's both to tackle climate change, but in a manner that doesn't impair the economy, but that actually puts people to work. One of the things that I like about Gregor's framing as well, and I think that for a lot of climate activists, it should be positive, which is that there's a lot of alarmism about climate, but there's also the risk that if there's so much alarmism that people just become throwing the towel, that, okay, the earth is burning and the oceans are boiling. So what good does it do to sort of always complain and show up? And I think that is why it is good to highlight. some of this transition that we're already seeing that, A, it's not unrealistic, that we actually do, we can economically transition to different energy sources, and B, that there already is progress being made in some respects on reducing carbon emissions and things like that. And so even if there is more work to be done, and even if there is a lot of tension in terms of reducing emissions overall, there are sustainable models that show how it can be done. So I think Gregor's work and some of its insights are very useful from that perspective.

It is definitely heartening to hear from someone who thinks that minor policy pushes or policy sort of around the edges can lead to big shifts in how the market actually functions so that eventually market forces sort of take over and these things start happening naturally. I like that. I do too. Okay. This has been another episode of the Oddlots podcast. I'm Tracy Allaway.

You can follow me on Twitter at Tracy Alloway. And I'm Joe Wisenthal. You can follow me on Twitter at the stalwart. And you should definitely follow our guest on Twitter. He's Gregor MacDonald. His handle is at Gregor MacDonald. You should also sign up for his newsletter. You can find it on his Twitter page.

Definitely one of my favorites. I read it every time I get it in my inbox. And check out the new Bloomberg climate coverage, the new green coverage at the handle at climate. Very impressive snag they got there with that Twitter handle, along with, of course, all of the Bloomberg podcasts at

podcasts. And be sure to follow our producer on Twitter, Laura Carlson. She's at Laura M. Carlson, as well as the Bloomberg head of podcast, Francesca Levy, at Francesca today. Thanks for listening.