TRASHFUTURE - The Dishonourable Shadow Lord feat. Dr Jess Green

Episode Date: November 25, 2025

Climate Scientist Jess Green returns in the wake of COP30 to discuss exactly why the UN brokered international climate accords are so ineffectual. Also, we talk about some old friends, ongoing developments in private credit, and a plucky new startup aiming to “save the world.” Get more TF episodes each week by subscribing to our Patreon here! TF Merch is still available here! *MILO ALERT* Check out Milo’s tour dates here: https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/liveshows Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and November (@postoctobrist)

I have some really, really, really bad news. Oh, my God. Is everyone all right? Okay. Is the podcast ending? Are we all fired? What happened? I need you to. I need everyone listening just to, are you in a place to hear news that might hurt you right now. Yeah, sure. Yeah.

Okay, here it goes. Okay. Richard Evans of hond the web.co.uk no longer has a dad who is a working labor peer. God. Fucking damn it. I thought that for one week, I could, like, bad enough to lose, like, a bunch more civil rights.

But then you come to me and you tell me that the guy with the website that we found that was pretty funny. who was like sort of pimping his dad and his connections in the House of Lords can't even do that anymore nothing in this country

that is good as legal nothing is fun as legal I remember only six months ago we used to have trans rights choking porn on the web.como.

UK now we don't have any of these we used to have Bob Hope, Steve Jobs Johnny Cash and now we don't have any choking porn on the web or trans rights

yeah Yeah, fuck. It's Lord David Evans, Richard Evans' dad. Richard Evans, of course, as we mentioned, I think quite recently, because he was just on my mind. Yeah, we were on this story. We were on the story months ago saying, hey, this guy is nakedly corrupt. I'm just back on the website and the blog is down. I'm hitting 403s. This is my 9-11. Yeah. The gallery is the gallery is done.

The only thing that has survived is the opening page where you can meet him for a coffee, but you can't because when you click it, it's 403 forbidden. So he's not allowed to drink coffee either. They put this man in a Kafka-esque situation. Oh my God, this is fucked. Merely for doing, like, some really ethical networking. They've forbidden him from having coffee with us, his friends from the internet. And just in general, you're just not allowed.

Like, he will be arrested if he tries to buy the Aldi Instant brand. Yeah, he's got like a, you know, like the sort of breathalyzer you need to start your car? Like he's got one of those, but for caffeine. And the most fucked up thing is that when I recorded earlier, my interview with Dr. Jess Green, climate scientist, and also returning guest of the podcast, I thought that what we talked about, about like, the failure of the cop process

to, like, deliver any kind of meaningful climate action and going into the details of how it failed and so on, I thought that would be the most depressing thing that is on this episode. But like, this is so much worse. Well, it sounds like there's been a success of the cop process in the House of Lords. least, which is the real issue.

I mean, so they, they've suspended or whatever. They put on sort of like paid probation. They had them turn in their ermine. Two lords. One of them was the hon the web.com. At UK guys down. And the other one was Sir Richard Dannett, who used to be head of the British Army, and who was also getting a little bit too flagrant with it.

And again, in both cases, this is something that had been written about and had been noticed for months, if not years. And now, you know, the wheels of justice grind exceeding. slow, right? But now they've finally gotten around to it and it's like, actually, we've remembered the House of Lords exists and you can't do that here. So, uh, introducing

the podcast, it's T.F. It's Riley. See, I remember to do it. Bam. It's Riley. It's Nova. It's Hussein. The Belem action mechanism? Um, back in, uh, back in the back half where he's going to be me and Jess Green. I hope you talked about the Belam action mechanism. Otherwise, that joke's really not going to pay off for me.

Well, I guess we'll find out. And of course, uh, we're going to be talking about a few things up top before we get to that second half. But first, we need to de-arrest, of course, de-arrest action. Jail support for an arrested, comrades. Son to a suspended father. Listen, I'm sorry, all right? I thought it would be funny to get the on the web guy to talk to his dad about Palestine

action. I didn't know that it would have all of these repercussions, okay? So there's another old friend We have to revisit before we get to the news And all this stuff And this is of course The TF Department of Addenda and Corrections I missed some very important information

On Daniel Heinen Who was discussed at length on the previous Premium episode with Greg Foley About his company GeoSpy Which is basically weaponized geogosur Not to suck myself off here But that's a great episode And if you're on the fence about subscribing

to the Patreon Or about subscribing to Bloodwork Greg's podcast Do both Yeah yeah 100%. But what I missed And I'm holding my hands up and I'm saying I missed this, is that Daniel Hinen in his, I'd say, mad dash to try to get funding from Andreessen Horowitz, is buying tasers and giving them out to anybody in San Francisco who wants one for free. He's giving away two Canadian tasers for the price of one American taser. Yeah, like Mel Lastman.

Yeah, so he's doing a big taser giveaway, essentially. That's, I mean, okay, man, sure. I just, all of these people, what they want in. is attention, and we end up giving it to them in a way that I hope harms them. I hope this email finds you worse for me having sent it, you know? But at the end of the day, we can never really know. Well, I think it's the same thing about, like, these guys who run these companies leaning into what I increasingly see in the whole wider San Francisco tech industry as, like,

virtue signaling for right wing, like vice signaling, basically, being like, and Dries and Horowitz, being like, yeah, fuck you, we're making like a million gambling bot farm apps. Fuck you. We're giving away tasers to people. 10 years ago, vice signaling used to mean something different. 10 years ago, vice signaling used to be saying that you had done like the sort of Somali pirate party drug. And now it's this, which is way worse.

Yeah, yeah. It's just leading like, oh, hey, Mark Andreessen, hey, look at this. I'm also being, like, cruel to, like, poor people. Getting Mark Andreessen on, like, 2015 vice content. we did Ket with a bunch of Congolese rebels and Mark Andresen

Chaud you'll never guess what fund he started next Doing Capiton With Mark Andreson And Warthor and Warthorne Syria

Yeah cool Yeah I miss that I miss that genre of vice posts It's a real shame If only someone Was gonna somehow

Bring that kind of thing I couldn't guess Couldn't guess It's not gonna happen But yes So this is the This is the old friend segment. So, yes, jail support for Richard Evans.

And by jail, I mean, no longer gets to pimp out his dad's influence. It's a real shame. You know, I think the honorable pathway of the dad pimp is, or the sun pimp, I guess. It's one of the last industries in Britain, really. Like, you know, in the UK, like, the way that you get social mobility now is you either, like, become a right-wing talking head straight out of uni, which, like, I think actually is sort of like a shrinking industry because there's now too many of them. And they're trying really, really hard. And so it's really hard to, like, distinguish. Well, especially because I think Charlie Kirk kind of ruined the market for young right-wing

influences. That is actually true. I'd love to talk about this sometime, yeah. Yeah, he really sort of turbocharged his career by doing something that is unrepeatable if you want to have a career afterwards, which was just getting murdered. Yeah. And there isn't really anyone who's sort of, like, willing to literally take a bullet. No.

Which, I don't know, says something about, like, the young conservators of today. But the other industry is the industry of, like, riding the coattails of your father, right? Because dads are the only people who still have jobs, right? Like, sort of go to the office jobs. And so, of course, the only thing you can do is a side hustle based around your dad's job. Also, I like the idea of inventing now that there are so few actual jobs left, are kind of reversing into a woke position on sex work by being like, yeah, work is a form

of sex work. Okay, how about this? Check this out. Is Richard Evans is now dark Richard Evans. And he's no longer hawn the web. He's now dishewn. the web. My God.

And he's like, yeah. He's like, he's like the evil Richard Evans. Punished Richard Evans. Yeah. Hans and rebels on the web. Well,

he could like, this could be an interesting movement. Like, you could sort of develop your own like, you know, do you know how, what's his name, that fucking like Israeli,

like, Spokesperson who got fired because like, Oh, Al Levy. Yeah, he got too wild with it. Yeah. And so he,

and so he created his own job where he was still in, in the world that he occupied, he was still like the official spokesperson for Israel. But he was just, kind of doing a podcast that I don't think really has any listeners. My dad's in the civilian House of Lords. Yeah,

but in this case, like you develop, yeah, it's like the Shadow House of Lords. So then you could call himself the Shadow Lord David Evans. Oh shit. Shadow Lord Dishonorable David Evans. That's like a fucking Yu-Gi-o card right there. Yeah, I'd want to get a coffee with that guy's son. Just saying that like

kind of on-street sexual harassment, like, I'd like to get a coffee with that guy's son. Yeah, and he develops like this really cool badass title primarily so that his son can still go and hang out with people because he's like son i'm not allowed to drink coffee anymore so you're going to have to drink coffee on my behalf his son has to his son has to cut off his top knot because he's now a ronan son he's a wandering fatherless son who must peddle influence to whoever will take it he's going to restore his father's honor yeah that's right yeah okay all right okay this is the perfect british anime

copyright no one else is allowed to do it if they suspended the count of monte cristo I wanted to talk about another couple of things before we get into the interview with Jess. Number one is just a quick update on something we were talking about with Rob Smith a couple weeks ago. Of course, the private credit market. Yeah, and again, that was a great episode. If you want to subscribe to Rob's thing, which is called The Financial Times. You should probably do that too. I don't think they have a Patreon.

You should try, we should get to tell them to make one. It's like, buy me a coffee or something. I'm not sure. No, maybe it's like, I think it's like a zine thing. Yeah, yeah, because we like to support. sort of like up-and-coming content creators, sort of like blood work or the financial times. Yeah. No, I don't like suggesting we're in a superior position to blood work. The financial times, though, we absolutely are. So what we talked about essentially, you go listen to it. But the most of it is

that there's this multi-trillion dollar sort of private debt asset sort of explosion where a huge amount of money, this is included in a lot of data centers, are invested in things that don't have to disclose basically anything and it's very ripe for fraud. So this has happened a couple weeks ago, Black Rock was lending to a company called Renovo Home Partners, a home improvement company. And about one month ago, they valued their debt to be worth par, like a hundred cents in the dollar. And then two weeks later, revalued the entire thing to zero, which is awesome. That's the big sort of like a flag you're running up outside your building that says we are the best at valuing debt. And you should continue to trust our ability to do that.

Yeah, we are super good. Does BlackRock value a lot of debt? Um, I would say some. I would have to check. Does this kind of, does BlackRock's ability to do that and sort of mark its confidence and his ability to do that matter? Ah, well, you know what? This is actually like something we didn't talk about with Rob, but is worth bringing in here, which is that all of these like shitty private equity created groups like for Nova home partners or fucking Black Bear sports group, one of the most evil companies, I think, in the United States. It sounds like a P.T. Anderson that like. Yeah, Steve Lockjaw works there. Yes.

No, so basically, these companies don't get valued by like S&P, right? They get valued by like Morningstar DBRS. They get valued by second tier ratings agencies. And so like they're easily more easily captured. They have fewer staff and they're much more liable to be like, yeah, that seems pretty investment grade. Here you go. Have fun.

And then BlackRock's able to be like, yeah, got an A from Morningstar. Let's do it. Not saying that's what they do do, but that's what they could possibly do. Why am I seeing visions of the due diligence of Lex Greensill being a single Australian accountant? Yeah, so this is more of that, basically. Yeah, that was sort of my question. Yeah, it's more of that. Oh, okay, good.

Good, good, good. So, yeah, basically, this is another example of something that was worth, so some billions now being worth some nothing. Is that good for the economy? I think it's, I mean, it's economic activity in a thing. sense, right? Number is moving. You're keeping the money going, you know? You know what else? It's like Dead Man's Shoes. You're giving another private equity roll-up of a bunch of kitchen renovation organizations, the

ability to like have a go. It's their turn on the Xbox controller now of Texas kitchen renovation. Absolutely. Absolutely. This is like wailful, you know, it's going to sustain a whole sort of like ocean floor community. I mean, I actually do think it would be worth at some point doing an episode about like what a private equity, what a private equity role Privacy equity. Private equity. What that entails, because basically it's like you just take a bunch of these companies, load them up with a huge amount of debt to keep like buying more and more and more of them, fire the vast majority of the people, like put them on Salesforce basically, jack up the prices.

Or in the case of the Black Bear sports group, this is so fucking evil. They buy youth like hockey stadiums or like youth hockey leagues. And then if parents film their kids hockey games, their kids get like taken off or get like points against them because you need to subscribe to their streaming service for $50 a month to have any record of your kids youth sports games. Is that fucking crazy? Yeah, I, okay. Cool.

The economy, I feel so good about it, just in general, you know? Oh, yes. It is pretty good. So this basically, like, this is, it's everywhere, right? It is, this approach is everywhere and it creates huge amounts. It drives up prices, which Renovo also did, drives down quality, and then it massively just creates all these risks because now there's some asset holder somewhere, owns all of Black Bear Sports Group.

And Black Bear Sports Group, all they have to do to report their like financial health to them is be like, yeah, we're good. And also on the subject, the company Blue Owl, which is co-building a data center the size of Manhattan with Meta in Louisiana. and also is like a sort of big private credit monster. When asked about in an earnings call, about frauds related to the kinds we talked about with Rob and whether or not Blue Owl is worried about this growing interest, the CEO had this to say, which I thought was very funny.

He says, I don't know if you're all familiar with the Mandela effect. Is it good when the CEO of your large asset manager that holds notably famously opaque financial instruments, when asked about fraud immediately. refers to the Mandela Effect. Is that a good thing when that happens? Listen, a lot of things are going to seem like fraud to you, but that's because on the way in, we had Darren Brown neurolinguistically programmed the idea of fraud into your head so that you would stand up and ask that question. You were all puppets. You were all pawns on his chessboard. Well, interesting. I could answer your question about fraud,

or we could watch Chris Angel get into this box. He's not going to leave for seven days. Yeah, going to Darren Brown and being like, I'm going to need you to manipulate this guy into asking this question and then shitting himself really publicly in the AGM, just so as to discredit the idea that we are being fraudulent in anyway. So he says, this is like the Mandela Effect of Finance, which is this common population collective misimpression, you know, and for those who don't know, the Mandela effect is when there are these like, people imagine that the Monopoly guy had a monocle or that Pikachu's tail has a black tip. Your honor, it's, you have confirmation bias.

It's like, okay, sure, man. Surely this pop psychology will protect you. So, in any case, the point being, like, somehow just by talking about this enough, people have worked themselves to this imaginary world where there's some big potential credit problem. And for where we sit, there's definitely not, you know, performance remains extremely strong. And it'll be gutter over time.

So, you know, congratulations to Blue Howl. Anyway, anyway, look, that's, these are all the updates. I want to talk about a startup before we go to talk to you, Chess. And, of course, a company that we're talking about today is called Gigablu. It is a climate tech company. And they're accelerating the oceans return to balance, combining science, AI, and nature's way to secure our planet's future, which was an odd phrasing. Yeah, sure. How many words was that?

I lost count. Fine. So, I mean, listen, I like the oceans. Everyone likes the oceans. think it's important that we probably have them. I think they're useful for something, not sure what. So on that basis, this all sounds very, very valuable. I didn't like the mention of AI in there, though. Oh, so what this company has done is it's created an entirely AI-driven digital twin of the ocean, like how Neon was going to create a digital twin of you so that they

could like do help for you. You don't have to worry so much that there's no ocean literally anymore because now there's, there's a meta ocean that you can sort of paddle around in. And if there isn't, yes, there is. So basically, they also say, we've worked tirelessly to unlock operational methods and commercial models that now ensure the greatest corporations of the world can join in our mission. Years of research and experimentation by our scientists and engineers led to a breakthrough. A solution rooted in the deep-seated belief that nature and the ocean in particular already has the answer

and we just need to help it along. And then they say, one planet, one last chance, one solution. So what do we think this solution is? So again, with the, I mean, maybe I'm being oversensitive, you know, the sort of number of words in the thing about preserving the future of oceans and stuff is fine. And it's completely normal to be like, you know, one X, one Y, one Z. That's normal, right? That's normal. We're not being driven insane by the sort of ambient Hitler particles. No, no, of course not.

Because the Hitler like PPM in the atmosphere is also rising and that is also a problem for the oceans, I have to say. It's causing coral bleaching. Not mainly for the oceans, but also, you know. Yeah. So basically, what they think they've done is they think that they have developed a workaround, an end run, if you will, around having to ever stop taking fossil fuels out of the ground. That what they're going to do is they're going to have these particles that encourage algae growth. They're just, yeah, they're going to take these particles.

They're going to spread the, yeah, the particles we're talking about. They're going to spread them out in the ocean. And then the particles are going to. encourage algae to grow on them. Algae will sequester a bunch of carbon from out of the atmosphere, sink to the bottom of the ocean, and there the carbon will stay for hundreds or if not thousands of years. I mean, that's such a, like, fun way of doing carbon capture and storage, right? It's to just dump a bunch of shit into the ocean. I sort of approve of this. If it works, then I'm up there with like, I don't know, do the fucking cloud seeding or some shit like that,

do some geoengineering, fine, whatever. But does it? work and are there any complications to dumping a bunch of particles into the ocean? Yeah, creating like algae blooms and stuff. Probably not. Those are good, right? Those are pretty. Yeah, those are great. But also, they've been validated by the World Ocean Council, a private organization,

Rain, a private organization. The World Ocean Council? Skies 50, their main client in the Carbon Plant Exchange, a private organization. Almost as though, much like the ratings agencies, everyone's incentives are aligned. to just magic carbon credits into existence so they can be traded and everyone can take their FV you need a greenwash

or you can get your transaction fees. This is from an article in Fortune magazine for a couple months ago. And the reason we're talking about this, by the way, is this is sort of what Jess and I get into is the fakeness of carbon markets. And this is an example of how fake it is because this is a company

that has an unproven technology where they won't publish the specifics of their research. They won't publish their proof that it works, just asking to do pilot programs everywhere to like dump bunch of stuff into the ocean to encourage the growth of algae to sequester carbon. And it says, this is what...

If it doesn't work, it's fine. You just pick all the particles back out of the ocean. Big Siv. Yeah, just go get them. Formed three years ago by a group of entrepreneurs in Israel, the company says it has designed particles that when released to the ocean, trapped carbon at the bottom of the sea. No, Hitler particles could come from there. No, of course not.

By harnessing the power of nature, Gigablu says, we will do nothing less than save the planet. But outside scientists have been frustrated by a lack of information released by the company, which they say raises serious questions. about whether or not the technology works as the company describes at all. Yeah. But that hasn't stopped Gigablu from selling carbon credits. They've sold 200,000 to Skies 50, a sustainable aviation platform that's now able to say it is emission free because they bought a bunch of carbon credits from these fucking people.

Does that maybe say anything about the kind of general nature of carbon credits or no? Well, just that it's like a wildly unregulated sort of branding exercise. Yeah, a wildly unregulated branding exercise where you can, and just even the idea that like 52 square kilometers of like forest in Honduras is kind of equivalent in some sort of global bank account to a new coal plant being opened up in Connecticut is fucking ludicrous. Yeah, but Jimmy Palace spelled like the Greek goddess. Jimmy DeWise. Jimmy D.

He was wearing this big owl helmet. Yeah, he famously jumped out of my dad's head. An American event organizer based in Italy struck a deal with Gigablu last year. American event organizer based in Italy was Dickie Greenleaf's job, as I remember. Yeah, he says he trusts the company does what it promised him and has offset the sports car that he bought. No, he says, ensuring the transportation, meals, and electricity of a 1,000 person event will be offset by particles in the ocean. Gigablu's service is described by Pallas as, quote, an extra trash can where I can. discard my unwanted emissions. Same way as I use my trash cam. I don't follow the truck when it comes

and picks up my trash. I just take their word for it. Yeah, we use the ocean like a trash can. What about this is strained? Why do you want me to do diligence? I'm trying to impregnate one of the Italian locals. I'm busy. It's from, of course, the talented Mr. Ripley. So Gigabloos 200,000 credits are also pledged to Skies 50, a newly formed company investing in greener practices for the aviation industry. So also, again, this is just all fake companies in a fake economy together doing fake stuff. Like other, like, not unfamiliar to like other weird financial instruments. I don't know what you would call them. But yeah, I'm glad that there's another industry that's basically like creating its own system of value that we all just sort of have to buy into for some reason.

Yeah, well, for me, it reminds me of Web 3 where they create this reasonable facsimile of an economy, but that doesn't have any connection to doing anything. It's just, it's just nothing. It's just, it looks like an economy. It's moving around. It looks like something's being traded. It's parallel play, sort of. That's not what that means.

Yeah, it's, you know, you're watching your kid play hockey, but you're not allowed to film it. So, and it could be a rapid, it could beckon a rapid acceleration in the company's work. Gigablu hopes to reach a goal this year of cashoring 10 metric tons of carbon dioxide from each ton of particles it deploys. And that means they want to disperse 20,000 tons of particles throughout the world's oceans. Pretty good. Okay. But yeah, that sounds like. a lot. Yeah. So Gigablu has made

several commercial deals, but no one knows what the particles are made of. And they say, they also, but they assure everyone the particles are benign and have zero impact on the ocean. Just, just let these guys put the miscellaneous particles in the ocean. It's fine. It's fine. Has it ever seen pluribus by the way?

So check this out. He says, Ken Buesler, a senior scientist with the Woods Hole oceanographic institution who spent decades studying the biological carbon cycle of the ocean, says that, well, he's intrigued by the proposal. The idea that particles won't alter the ocean at all is, quote, inconceivable. There has to be a relationship between what they're putting in the ocean, the carbon dioxide

that dissolved in seawater for this to, quote, unquote, work. And he literally says, quote unquote, work. Ah, yes, he says, typical phytoplankton doesn't grow on services. They don't colonize particles. To any phytoplankton ecologist, this would be, I think, absurd. And another expert was to was talked to where they said, the rates at which the gigabloose says its particles sink up to 100 meters per hour would simply shear the algae off from the particles in the quick descent, it would float back up to the surface, then release the carbon

back into the air. And it's also likely that the particles have simply be eaten by fish, limiting carbon capture and impacting marine life. Yeah, I'm hearing a lot of objections from these so-called scientists, but not one of them understands the simple thrill of just dumping stuff in the ocean. Yeah, just being like, hey, we have this special dirt that we invented. I don't even care about the special dirt, right? What I'm interested in, this. I think I need, like, you could convince these people. You take them on a vision, a vision trip, right? You take them down the end of a long pier and you bring a bunch of car batteries with you, like used car batteries. And you show them how good it feels to like overarm

two-handed throw, like a used car battery into the ocean. And once they get that, once they crack that, they'll be like, fine, do whatever particles you want. Because I bet turning over a coal barge full of mysterious particles into this feels amazing. You know what you could do? You could sell the opportunity to rich people and then use the money to reforest bits of Honduras, right? Like Jeff Bezos spends, you know, $500 million or whatever to hit the button that overturns all 20,000 tons of particles into the ocean all at once. And then, you know, that money just goes to reforestation. This is, this is the perfect, a perfect market.

It's incredible. I would say so. I would say so, yes. So whether Gigabloose methods are going to be deemed successful is not determined by regulators or any scientific authority. but by another private company, Puro.Earth, a private carbon credit registry. Because, of course, all of this stuff is voluntary. None of its well-defined.

None of its public sector. No states, no scientists could ever possibly come to grips with, like, the nature of the particles. Yeah. But the state just doesn't want you to have, they don't want you to overturn a shipping container full of magic dirt into the ocean to save the world. Big government trying to get between you and the dirt.

Big government's trying to be like, oh, dirt belongs on land. that's why it's called land. And like, you know, they are, they're just, it's because they hate fun. Yeah, that's true. That is true. So this is, this is Gigablu. This is the carbon credit market. This is like a player in the carbon credit market that Jess and I are going to be discussing in just a few minutes. I'm not even a few minutes, probably under a minute, because I'm going to hand over to myself in the future past for you all to enjoy. See you in a second. Hello, everybody from the first half.

Welcome to the second half, which is, of course, recorded first. I'm sure all of the sort of japes and laugh-em-ups in the first half were delightful. Can't wait to hear them myself. I'm joined by returning champion. It is climate scientist, Dr. Jess Green. Jess, how you doing? I'm great. How are you doing, Riley?

Well, you know, I just. wanted to celebrate the success of COP 30, because as far as I'm aware, capping and trading emissions or pricing carbon has worked really well. We don't need to be having this conversation at all. Jess Green, thank you so much for coming on the show. Where can people find you? Yeah, we solved the problem. No, no. So, look, we're having this conversation in the aftermath of COP 30. The celebration, it seems, of three decades of an arcane and ineffective industry of pretending that carbon offsets work. And

I want to just kick off with something you've written in foreign affairs, which is the precy to the argument you basically make in your book, existential politics, which will be available soon, I gather. It's out. It's out. Yeah, you can get it at your local bookstore. Perfect. You wrote this in an article in foreign affairs.

Climate diplomacy, as orchestrated through the Paris agreement and under the auspices of the UNF, TRIB, C, is not up to the essential job of decarbonizing the global economy. I must admit I fainted with surprise when I read that but can you just

introduce the listeners to what you're talking about here and what we mean when we say climate diplomacy has orchestrated to the Paris Agreement thanks for having me back it's great to be a returning champion so the funny thing about talking

to you on this podcast is all many of the arguments that I make in the book are blindingly obvious to you and people who think like Thank you. But shockingly, not blindingly obvious to the literally thousands, tens of thousands of diplomats who go to COP every year. But the basic idea of the book is that we've been managing

the wrong problem, that global climate policy has been focused on what I call managing tons. So that's this very narrow construction of climate change as a problem of measuring, accounting for, and of course, buying and selling quantities of CO2 and other greenhouse gases. And that this is basically an elaborate distraction from the real problem, which is the fundamental power asymmetry between fossil asset owners who own things like fossil deal companies, mining companies, big ag, and green asset owners who are in most parts of the world kind of fledgling industries that are still kind of building out both their economic and their political power. And so we need to focus on that problem, which is the elephant in the room,

rather than the like how do we commodify and count carbon, which is not working, as you mentioned in the intro. So you characterize this as sort of carbon trading itself, the creation of a market is essentially attended to solve what is seen as a collective action problem. That is to say, how do you incentivize everyone to produce public goods, or in this case, not produce public bads, in a way that is beneficial for everyone, but in a way that's hard to coordinate. And the idea of carbon markets is, well, we can use the price signal to create incentives to produce public goods. And that's the idea of climate change as a coordination or a collective action problem. But as you say, climate change is not a collective action problem. It's an existential political problem where there

are sides who are enemies. You say, I'm just going to quote from your book in fact, climate change is not a collective action problem like I and you just said. As economists and political scientists have long insisted, it is best understood as a political economic contest between fossil asset owners who lose from decarbonization and vulnerable asset owners who will lose the effects of climate change. And then, of course, as you also said, green asset owners. I mean, this is also, this is something that we've actually talked about in a larger scale on the before, where much of the kind of ongoing political crisis of the global north since the 2008 financial crisis, I think is largely best understood as intra-elite competition that is split

along these lines, where the forces of reaction, of populism, as it's sort of called in the news, is actually often driven by capital that is provincial, dirty, extractive, very heavily material against the neoliberal coastal urbanized metropolitan global financial fictional capital of the big cities, right? You could call it basically the argument about the Deloitte pride float, essentially, right? You know, that this is, and these are the two sides of the elite argument about the Deloitte pride float. And this is it just sort of recast in very specific climate terms. That's how I see it anyway. Yeah, I know. I mean, I think I think that's right. I think part of problem is that the first part, right, the dirty, extractive rural, that kind of cleavage is not,

it's not a real thing in most OECD countries anymore. Like I was talking to someone who said, you know, there are more yoga instructors in the United States than coal liars, right? And it's like, but we have this imaginary, you know, we haven't updated our, our narrative and, you know, the economic reality that this isn't the engine of the economy anymore. You know, these kind of totems of the old guard of how we do, you know, economic policy just have changed radically, especially since the 2008 financial crisis. Well, it's, they are able to exert because of a concentrated lobbying effort for decades, because of like they're able to latch on to a larger reactionary movement. I mean, how much of the global reactionary movement is just oil companies? Like

the Heartland Institute, for example, one of the most arguably successful non-governmental organization the United States history is just a, it's just oil companies. It's just Coke industries, right? This at every turn, it's just them fighting a rearguard action, basically, to maintain tight minoritarian control via, and also via gaming voting systems by understanding where those ideological levers can be pulled, where fewer people will need to be persuaded to be reactionary. 100%. No, and we're kind of like late to the party, I think, as a lot of social scientists who study this of being like, yeah, this isn't, you know, this isn't a scientific problem. This is absolutely a political problem of existential proportions, as you just described, right? Because

these are companies worth hundreds of millions or billions of dollars that have a lot of skin in the game. Yeah. Also, that's why I think it's interesting that it's the trade war view of green technology. There are two different views of green technology, both of which center on the question of what to do about China's solar panel production, right? China produces. China produces a huge amount of solar panels, and they've been accused before by the EU, the US, under various administrations of engaging in dumping in the global economy, making it therefore unprofitable to produce solar panels. You could also argue that they are driving the cost of solar panels pretty far down. And the two different wings of the Deloitte Pride Float argument

had two different ways of responding to this. The yes, the Deloitte Pride Float is good wing of that argument in the States, as represented by the Inflation Reduction Act, responded to that by also trying to subsidize green industries and be competitive in green industry. Again, you could argue whether or not that was the right choice, but it was choosing one side of that existential battle. And then the Delight Pride Float is bad side of that particular elite argument said, no, solar panels are gay. We're not going to be engaging in anything to do with that. Instead, what we're going to be doing is drilling, mining, and we're going to very much take the side in the existential battle of oil producers and minors and so on and so on.

And so in the context of politics, this existential, it seems insane that anyone is still talking about carbon trading. Right? Right? It does. And yet, like, not only, so one of the, you know, big initiatives to come out of Pop 30 was this, um, reinforced preservation, uh, initiative to like,

you know, basically pay rainforest, country won't pay tropical countries to keep rainforests in the ground, which is a thing that we, you know, talked about and done for like 40, 50 years at this point, you know, debt for nature starting with debt for nature swaps. And like, yet it seems to be one of the primary tools that countries are still like going to, even though, yeah, we know that this is not working. So we are pretty stuck, I think, in thinking about this as, yeah, either we have to keep extracting because solar panels are gay, or like, let's invest, you know, the efforts to invest have been really, you know, obviously prone to the political winds. And when there's rising populism and all

these Western democracies, then, you know, there's a lot of retrenchment. When we talk to talk about, like, the actual existential stakes and what I was sort of alluding to with like, well, how on earth you could think that carbon pricing is anything like a solution to this is the whole point of carbon pricing is to try to get both of those players on either side of the existential struggle via the mechanism of a market to align their goals, right? Which is, well, green energy is going to be able to be subsidized by dirty energy because we're going to make dirty energy by carbon credits from them. But that also can include, I mean, we sort of alluded to this before on the show that the coal carbon credit industry is largely fictional, but I'm going to read a little more

from your book here, which is the revaluation of assets to both climate change. and climate policy. So we say revaluation of assets, we mean things like oil platforms becoming worthless. We mean things like when the realities of climate change become undeniable, which you could argue that they are, these sort of stopping production of new coal plants, except as like to make a political point, right? Or we could even say like internal combustion engine car factories becoming less and less worthwhile as the shift to electric becomes more and more pronounced. This is actually one of the reasons why Elon Musk actually sits so uncomfortably in the Trump team sometimes and why he had to be like, yes, please cancel all my subsidies, daddy at some point early on

in the presidency. But that's what you mean we talk about the revaluation of assets. It creates existential politics. In extreme cases, people will lose their lives in place we wiped off the map. Assets will become worthless and firms and whole industries will collapse. But to date, governments have failed to confront these realities. Instead, they've been obsessively focused on emissions alone, measuring, reporting, buying, and selling them. Worse still, not only is measuring emissions created the illusions that we're all in this together, but encourages us to believe that we actually are tackling the climate crisis when all the evidence indicates the opposite. And I think one of the best examples of this is to think about, well, what are people

actually trading when they're trading emissions? They're trading tons of carbon, but this is a fictional market. It's not real. It's not like the carbon is being moved around, and it's not as though the things that are offsetting it are actually meaningfully offsetting it in any way. Yeah, I I mean, so this is, so there are two different kinds of carbon trading, right? There's cap and trade or where, you know, governments set a cap and then emitters have allowances that they are either given for free or they purchase, right? So if they're given for free, that's just, yay, you get to pollute. Also, the one thing I noticed that you wrote as well was that very frequently the allowance

you get for free is because often polluting industries are so strategic, the allowance you get given for free is just whatever you need to use in a year. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, you know, that happened in the very beginning of the EU trading system. All the allowances were given out for free and every country got to say how many allowances they needed. And guess what? They all made very, very cushy decisions about how many allowances they would be. Now, that was a trial period and they walked it back. But, you know, it shows what the incentives are. The incentives are to make sure that you don't actually have to buy that money or any at all. So that's one, that's one mechanism for carbon trading

and the others is offsets. Yeah. And so offsets are even more bonkers because what you're paying for is in most cases, in the cases of avoided emissions, right? So let's say a company pays for a wind farm in another country, you are paying for the hypothetical absence of emissions, right? Because what you're paying for is the amount of carbon that would have been, emitted in the case that this project was not financed. And that's what is being bought and sold. And that is obviously a very, both technical and artistic calculation to be made. Like, what is the baseline? What is business as usual? And that's, there's literally, like, you know, the voluntary carbon market is, it's gone up and down. But like at its peak was two billion dollars,

which is, you know, chunk change compared to the rest of the world economy. That's a lot of that's a lot of hypothetical absences to be buying and sell it. Yeah, it's not difficult to say that climate change is the single most material thing possibly that has ever happened in the history of our species. And to try to handle it via accounting is very typical of the sort of way the global North sort of tackles problems. I think it's also worth talking about like where these ideas come from, right? So they're formalized in the Kyoto Protocol as part of the cop, but the roots are in the

States, and specifically, I swear to God, everything shitty and crazy in the world comes from the 1970s oil crisis. It's all there. It's when, like, it's when the Montpelin Society briefly got to just seize the reins of global production and politics and just

send it in a very crazy direction. Because, like, the whole point of using markets for trading carbon was originally arose from the criticism of the Environmental Protection Agency as a command and control agency. And again, these like Montpelrin Society, University of Chicago freaks. I mean, the original idea was from a University of Chicago economist. But basically said, look, you can't tell states, given price shocks, they might be unable to meet clean air. Because this wasn't thought of in terms of climate change

back then. It was thought of in terms of air cleanliness. Commitments regarding like steel industry. This expanded to things like lead credits for the gas industry, greenhouse gas credits for the ozone for the 90s. And it's really a right-wing critique of government action that creates the whole carbon market. And of course, obviously it doesn't work. Right, because we want businesses to be able to decide, right? They need to have flexibility in order to streamline their, you know, their production processes. And that's the most, quote, unquote, efficient way to do it. But of course, all of these things create markets, right? So markets don't just, as you talk about ad nauseum in your podcast, they don't come from.

from nowhere, but governments make them. And if they are made poorly, they will function poorly. And that's precisely what's happened. So the first carbon credits are traded in the late 80s. And this is, this is from Carbon Brief, by the way, I didn't just know this, where the World Resources Institute advises applied energy services, a Connecticut-based power company, what they can do to offset the dirty air that will be produced by their new coal fire power plant. And the World Resources Institute just says, as plant trees in Guatemala. Right. first base, first carbon offset project. And then it becomes influential in the states and is really influential in the Thatcher and Bush senior administrations, which is cool. Hey, you know what? Any

environmental plan endorsed by both Thatcher and Bush senior, I co-signed. It's got to be great. Yeah. It was something called Project 88. It was two U.S. senators in 1988 were advocating again for more market-based mechanisms to solve environmental problems. And again, this is like the American Enterprise Institute signs off on this. Even though now, They're like, no, we reverse our decision. Carbon credits are gay with solar panels in the pile of stuff that we consider to be gay. But nevertheless. And so the Bush senior administration and the UK Tories take this Project 88 idea. And they're like, all right, everybody should start like, you know, doing this and trading. And we create a whole new market because we love markets. Energy companies also this time start publishing paper after paper demonstrating that carbon credits are a great way for stopping emissions. It's the favored way of energy companies to reduce emissions, which is to pretend that that's, what you're doing. And, you know, this gets formalized in the 90s in the Kyoto Protocol and then falls apart in 2012 because it's stupid. That's my, that's my pot in history. Have I got it basically right? I mean, I think you've gotten, yeah, most of it right. Like, certainly the origins. It comes

from, you know, yeah, the Deloitte, you know, the precursor to the Deloitte rainbow quotes, right? is like the sort of technocratic elite, the PMC, who are like, we can do this bloodlessly, right? We can figure out a technocratic solution. That's great for everyone. We'll just plant trees in Guatemala. And I would say, like, you know,

to put a little nuance on it, in 1988, this was a different problem, right? So we weren't at, you know, having to cut greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by the middle of the century. Though I think there was a universe in which, you know, that could have been part of a legitimate solution, but not the only part of the solution.

So I think the pot in history is correct, but I would say that when we get to 2012, there are a lot of social scientists and people who are saying, this offset thing isn't working so great, but that was certainly not the case of governments and not the case of NGOs who are like, full steam ahead. Let's keep doing this. This is a great idea. We are going to ignore the fact that there's a lot of problems with whether or not this is actually reducing emissions. Everybody seems to like it, so let's go. And also for NGOs and like business organizations who created basically their own parallel unregulated market, this was a great way for them to like have policy influence was to sort of make their own set of rules and regulate themselves.

And guess what? When actors make their own rules and regulate themselves, they turn out not to work so hot. So yeah. So where are we now in terms of like, the cop approach to solving this problem. I mean, one of the things I've seen just by way of example to set us up for this is the estimate investment by the developed world that is going to be required to ensure anything that looks like climate justice in the global south, things like protecting Bangladesh from catastrophic flooding or making allowing industrialization to proceed along a, let's say, investing so that more expensive green energy can power industrialization in the global south rather than relatively cheap fossil energy.

stuff like this. It's about a trillion dollars and Cobb has dispersed like a thousandth, like six thousandths of that or so approximately. Yeah. I mean, so last year, the number that the developing world came up with was 1.3 trillion. And the number that they settled on, 1.3 trillion starting in 2035. And the number that they settled on was 300 billion, which is not as big. Basically, they settled on one open A. according to its own internal valuation. Okay, good. Maybe we should start, yeah, measuring in that, in that unit of value.

Look, there's a lot of measure. There's a lot of these like sort of instinctive measures. There's football fields. There's rails, W-A-L-E-S, and there's Open A-I. There's Open A-I. Exactly. It's one Open A-I. We can't seem to get our shit together to do more than one open AI.

So, yeah, I mean, I think that this, you know, know, there's been a lot of like punditry about what's happening. But like, I think that the two main sort of decisions that came out of top or not of like most consequential ones are not in the official decision. They are sort of outside of the formal decision making process. They're voluntary initiatives. And I think that speaks volumes as to like, what is the political utility of this process right now? It's very, very broken. And developing countries are like, look, man.

And we, you know, we need money. Like the whole Paris agreement has, it's kind of like a tiered process where each country gets to make its own pledge about what it's going to do to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. And developing countries make two pledges. One's called a conditional pledge and the other is an unconditional pledge. The conditional pledges will do this more stuff if you give us more money. Yeah. But, you know, basically passing the hat at the cop once a year is not a great strategy for actually raising them on. Shocker. Because this program is so based on markets and volunteerism and treating it as a

coordination issue, then all it takes is a change in government in the U.S., for example. And then, well, the process is completely hollowed out because the sort of, as at the time of recording engine of the global economy is not interested. Yeah, I know at the time of reporting, which could change in the next 20 minutes, but we'll see. I mean, I think that's true in some ways and not in others. Like, the U.S. has never been an enthusiastic participant in the climate process since forever, right? It didn't find the Kyoto Protocol. And you could argue that maybe this, that is the reason why this has not been a robust process

is because the biggest, you know, historical emitter and the biggest, you know, political power hasn't signed on to it. On the other hand, this is voluntary. So state's going to do what state's going to do, you know. And in some ways, like, I think it was better not to have the Trump administration at the cop, just spreading chaos and bullying people and just have other countries, you know, sort of see what they can do. But ultimately, that's, yeah, that's the limit of international law, right? It's basically voluntary. Yeah. I mean, it's, in effect, it goes back to all of these things

treat existential political problems as coordination problems. This is true for more or less all forms of international law that aren't sort of readily enforceable. Right. I mean, and there are some coordination problems that are legit coordination problems. Like, where do we put the C cables? You know, like how do we assign satellite orbits? Like, fine. Yeah, great. The difference is, where do we put the C cables? Where do we assign satellite orbits? Everyone involved in that transaction needs there to be a C cable. Right. Everyone involved in that transaction needs there to be a satellite. Yes. But when you just, when you fold everything into the realm of a coordination problem that can be solved by a market, then you get cop. You get this big sort of festival that

happens, you know, regularly that detours the world where a lot of very UN style, a lot of promises are made, a lot of delegations spend a lot of time together hammering out agreements that sort of kind of might get followed. And the sort of main economic impact of a lot of it has been relatively minimal outside the field of creating an entire cottage industry to cater to its various peccadillos, such as like, you know, the invention of carbon credit on the, so the invention of carbon, I mean, we'll have talked about a startup in the first segment of this show called Gigablu, that basically is able to, through a series of private agreements, allow itself to create 200,000 carbon credits based on a sort of completely unproven

technology, that it is then able to sell to someone who's then able to pollute a lot. And what's happened is that we've created a set of easily gamed rules that are allowing pollution to proceed at the exact same pace as before, except with a small, tax paid to the people who were smart enough to start the company to be a middleman that was created by the arcane rules. Yeah, the sort of tech bro turned carbon bro, kind of like, we will innovate our way out of this is not great because for precisely the reasons you just described. Anyway, so I think that's unfortunately all the time we have for this segment. But as ever, Jess, I want to thank you so much for spending some time with me today

on this very cheery subject. Yeah, right. Thank you. This is great. And now I have the idea, like the international cop is the international festival. Maybe it needs to be more like burning man and we'll get closer to actually fixing some problems.

They got to burn the man. Exactly. You're not burning a man. They got to burn the man. Yeah, further man. People, you can find existential politics, wherever fine books are sold. Exactly.

Do check it out if you want to get probably kind of angry. And other than that, Once again, thank you very much, Jess, and we're going to see you in a few seconds on the wrap up of the whole episode. Bye, everybody. What an interview it was. I'm so glad or frustrated that you did or didn't mention the Bilema action mechanism. and I'm going to now open the letter I did we did not talk about the Bilem action mechanism

but let's see what she's won no no no no no no no no no no thank you very much of course to if you keep the no kind of diagetic in there it's the most frustrating quiz show host in history yeah that's right the quiz show host who's moving on look I think that's but that's all the time

we have today for this episode of TF this free episode there will be a bonus later in the week. There have been some bonuses that we've referred to with Rob, Smith, and Greg Foley, which you should check out because they were fun to do and fun to listen to. And we will see you otherwise in a few short days on the main episode and a reminder that Jess Green's book, Existential Politics is out now and available wherever books are sold. The links, of course, to its official publisher sale page will be, of course, in the description. But we will see you in a couple of days.

Bye, everybody. Bye. I'm going to be able to go.