Survival & Innovation on the Front Lines of Climate Change

SARA SIDNER, HOST: Our next guest traveled to 26 countries to discover how those on the front lines are adapting to the climate crisis. Simon Mundy documents their innovative response to the challenges in his new book, “Race For Tomorrow.” Simon spoke to Hari Sreenivasan as the mercury hit 40 degrees Celsius — that’s 104 degrees Fahrenheit — here in the U.K. yesterday.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

HARI SREENIVASAN, CORRESPONDENT: Thanks, Sara. Simon Mundy, thanks so much for joining us. Let’s have this conversation take place in the here and now. You are sitting, fortunately, and so am I, in an air-conditioned room, but it is the hottest day on record in the U.K., in case anyone needed to know that climate change is having an impact.

SIMON MUNDY, AUTHOR, “RACE FOR TOMORROW: SURVIVAL, INNOVATION AND PROFIT ON THE FRONT LINES OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS”: Absolutely. I think, in my opinion, something about the national approach to climate issues is changing this week in the U.K. Traditionally, in this country, when there was a heat wave, this was something people got excited about. Everyone thought, let’s put on our swimsuits, go to the park, have ice cream. It was almost a sense of celebration. Something’s different this time. People are worried. People are thinking, 40 degrees Celsius in England? That’s not normal. That’s not healthy. Our homes and infrastructure are not built to cope with this level of heat. I think something’s changing. And I hope that it translates into a more serious sense of determination to do something about it.

SREENIVASAN: I want to try to have this conversation, maybe start from the solutions end of things, because so many people are automatically turned off to conversations about climate change when they hear problem after problem first. We will get to some of those. But you spent a great deal of time in this book going around the world and finding the ways that countries, companies are trying to solve for some of these things. You have people who are literally sucking carbon dioxide out of the air, adding water to it, and shoving that soda water down into the ground to turn it into rock. You have got so many different ways that people are trying to tackle this. What stood out to you.

MUNDY: Well, there are so many things that it feels almost wrong to single out a few, but I will try anyway. And the example that you gave, actually, that was one of the most extraordinary ones to me. This is a company in Iceland that, literally, they’re sucking carbon dioxide out of the air, turning into stone on the ground. This is not science fiction. This is not something they’re planning. This is something they’re doing. Companies are paying them for this service. This is one example of the extraordinary advances that are happening in technology, being driven by entrepreneurs all over the world. And that in itself is just one angle that I was able to pursue on my travels, seeing how people are reacting to climate change, because often when we talk about climate change in terms of the future. We talk about terrible things that will happen many years hence. But actually, all over the world, there are people who are engaged in what I consider the single greatest race of our time. And that is the race to respond to this challenge. People are not just sitting around waiting for disaster to strike. People are taking action. And it’s a fascinating story for me as a journalist.

SREENIVASAN: There’s a segment of the population watching that will say, well, we’re going to innovate our way out of this. The technologies are coming. And we really don’t have that much to fear. And we don’t have to change our personal behavior. And you crawled into a cobalt mine. And I want you to tell us why cobalt is important, especially as we think of an electric car future.

MUNDY: Absolutely. I think it’s important to say we do need to move towards electric cars, zero emissions technology. It’s really important. But just having something being low carbon, that’s not enough. You need to think about the wider impact of the products they use. So, electric cars, a key ingredient that goes into the batteries is cobalt. Two-thirds of the world’s supply of cobalt comes from the Democratic Republic of Congo, which is a huge and very poor and very troubled country in many ways. So I visited there because I wanted to understand what’s going on in the supply chain of these products. And what I saw was quite troubling. A large proportion of the cobalt production in Congo comes from informal mines, which are often very dangerous. There have been problems with children working inside them. As you said, I climbed down inside one of these mines. It was 40-feet-deep. It’s very dangerous just getting down there. And then once you’re down there, it could — they frequently collapse on the miners inside them. It was pretty scary being down there for just 15 minutes. The men that I went down there with, they’re down there all day every day. And the answer to this is, of course, not just to get rid of all informal mining. The reason why Congo is so poor is because the wider economy has such problems with corruption, often involving foreign companies. We need to think much more deeply and broadly about how we fix these issues. And that’s why I really feel that, as we try to change our economy to make it lower impact in terms of carbon emissions, we have a much wider opportunity to make it a better economy in many other respects too.

SREENIVASAN: A lot of the cobalt that goes into our electric cars is in the batteries. And the batteries, many of them, if not the bulk of them, are made in China. And you take several pages and chapters really in the book to lay out in different ways how this greening landscape or this green economy landscape is sort of the next big battlefield for global dominance, especially between the United States and China.

MUNDY: This was so interesting to me, because, as you say, this is the great contest of the 21st century between the U.S. and China, the two great economic superpowers of this era. And one of the major theaters of that contest is going to be the battle for supremacy in clean tech. So, in China, I visited, just to give one example, a company called BYD. It’s in a town called Shenzhen, which, by the way, back in the ’70s, was a tiny village of a few thousand people. Now it’s got 13 million people. And BYD is one of the biggest companies there. And they’re making enormous amounts of money now from clean tech. They have 40,000 people living on their campus producing electric cars, solar panels, batteries. The scale and speed with which Chinese companies can move was very impressive. But then, when I got to the U.S., I saw some companies that were very, very impressive in different ways, to give just one example, Commonwealth Fusion Systems, based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. So this is a bunch of nuclear physicists who have been researching fusion power. And fusion power, people have been researching this for decades. And these guys say that they could be the first ones, this start-up of scientists could be the first ones to actually get fusion power on the market. Why would fusion power be so important? The input, the main input is just hydrogen. It’s the most abundant atom — element in the universe, and minimal pollution, minimal dangerous waste, an incredibly potent source of energy. And I spoke to the CEO of this company, Bob Mumgaard, a scientist at MIT. And I said, look, Bob, people have been working on fusion power for decades. People have been saying it’s around the corner for decades. Why should we believe that you really are getting close? He said, well, people were saying the same thing to the Wright brothers the day before they took their first flight. I believe it’s going to happen. And you know what? A few months later, he raised $1.8 billion from investors, who also seem to believe what he had to say.

SREENIVASAN: One thing I found interesting is that, while in one part of the Earth, say, in Nigeria, where there are efforts to try to fight sea level rise by literally building above or raising your house on stilts, you also go to places where it’s already too late. I mean, you went to the middle of the Solomon Islands, or you saw people in the Philippines who are climate refugees today.

MUNDY: Yes. And this was upsetting. This was deeply disturbing. I mentioned, here in London, people are just waking up to the fact that, wow, it’s pretty uncomfortable in London today, actually. The environmental changes are making life tougher for us, more uncomfortable. Well, in places around the world, principally developing countries, where people are already relatively less well off, those have been already getting hit, many of them, for quite some time, and in some very severe ways. In Bangladesh, in the Philippines, in the Solomon Islands, as you mentioned, in Ethiopia, I saw the ways in which people are contending with these things. And in some cases, it’s droughts. In some cases, it’s storms. In some cases, it’s rising sea levels. But those people — and you still have some people in rich countries who like to play around as though the science is not clear, as though climate change may or may not be real. I will tell you what. Those people who are really feeling the impacts, they are in no doubt at all as to how serious this thing is.

SREENIVASAN: At one point, you’re standing in what was the village center up past your knees in water. And what was intriguing was, it’s not just the fact that they physically have to be moved away, but then the kind of social ripple effects also about how a community stays a community and the kinds of costs when, well, I guess you have to paddle into church, instead of just walk across the sand.

MUNDY: Yes, the Solomon Islands was a very powerful story in many ways. So, one thing that really struck me was, as you say, the sense of social all divisions arising where they were not before, so in terms of an individual community becoming less and less close because people have been scattered over a larger area. So, these beautiful community traditions are becoming weaker and weaker, in some cases, dying out. I also saw how tension, conflict was arising between different communities that were competing for land where they didn’t have to in the past. But one thing that everyone in the Solomon Islands, including these different communities who are arguing between each other over territory, the one thing they really agreed on was, it’s pretty crazy that we are the ones who are suffering the worst impacts here when we have been contributing almost nothing to global carbon emissions. And the countries that have been driving this, disproportionately the richer countries in the world on a per capita basis, those countries have promised and promised and promised to come up with serious financial support for the poor countries that had been feeling the worst effects. And time and time again, those promises have been broken. And for me, as a citizen of a rich country, one of those countries that have been making and breaking those promises, I felt very, very uncomfortable because they had a strong point.

SREENIVASAN: Yes, and where are we in that conversation when it comes to developing nations? I mean, there’s different kinds of funds. There’s different agencies that are trying to go through. But ultimately, when you talk to somebody on the ground who saying, well, who’s going to pay for me to, you know, have extra hay because my goats out in rural Mongolia here, can’t find the grass under all the snow?

MUNDY: Absolutely. I was struck by this COP26, the U.N. climate conference in Glasgow last year, I was there for the full two weeks. It was the first time I’d gone to a conference, at the parties as they’re called of these big international climate conferences every country in the world has a presence. Because I had previously been a foreign correspondent, not an environment correspondent. I was very struck by the overrepresentation of rich countries, the overrepresentation of big companies, for example. I think it’s good that big business is paying attention to these issues, that’s good in itself. But I couldn’t help but think all these sorts of people that we’ve been mentioning, who I met on my travels, herders in Mongolia or in Ethiopia, islanders in the Solomon Island or in the Philippines, these people were not there. You had various sorts of leaders from those countries. You had various sorts of relatively prosperous people from those countries. And to be clear, I think it’s good that those people are there. But I couldn’t help but think most people in the world, a few thousand dollars a year or less. And at that climate conference, on the ground, I didn’t meet anyone who is earning a few thousand dollars a year or less. So, is the voice of those people, the kind of people many of whom I profiled in the book. Are they really being heard? Are their interests really being reflected in what comes out of those climate conferences? I’m not sure they are.

SREENIVASAN: What was also interesting for a lot of people watching in the west from those conferences was perhaps reinvigorated youth movement around climate. And survey show that there is much higher level of anxiety depending on the generation that you ask about how significantly they feel that climate change is a threat to them.

MUNDY: Absolutely. And this is — in the book, I featured a few people from that movement. One person in particular, Joanna Sustento from the Philippines. She lost her entire family — almost her entire family to a typhoon. And I met her when she was protesting outside the office of Shell, a huge oil company. And she made the point that Shell had paid out more money in dividends to its shareholders, than any other company in the world, $20 billion. Its chief executives earn $62,0000 per day. And this was possible only because the costs of Shell, the pollution from Shell’s product is not being paid by its shareholders or its CEOs. It’s being paid by these people in these developing countries. And she makes this argument so powerfully. And she’s just one member of this growing, real global movement of young climate activists. Again, I saw them on the ground in a big way at COP26. I think, you know, it was positive to see them there. They were shaking up the conversation.

SREENIVASAN: So, if President Biden declares a climate emergency this week, I wonder, from your vantage point, as a reporter in the Financial Press, as a Brit. I mean, the U.S. doesn’t seem to be able to figure this out politically. What are the consequences?

MUNDY: It’s a big deal. It’s a really big deal. The U.S. is still the biggest economy in the world. Without American leadership, on this issue, it gets much, much more difficult for anything to happen at a global level. You know, to be honest with you, I talked about this contest between the U.S. and China. A lot of people I speak to from a global climate point of view, this is not to say that one country is better than the other in any other way. But from a global climate point of view, a lot of people I speak to are more worried about the U.S. than they are about China. This is not because Xi Jinping is some sort of hero who’s trying to save the world. But China does seem to have a clear strategy aimed at decarbonizing its economy. It’s still a huge emitter for the moment, they’re still building coal-fired power station. But it seems pretty clear that their direction of travel is towards lower carbon emissions. Is to pushing forward quite — like a recipe on that front. In the U.S., it’s just not clear what path it’s taking. Some people might try to characterize this is a problem with democracy. I don’t agree with that. I think, you know, in Europe, you’re seeing the fact that democracies can tackle this problem quite aggressively and relatively effectively. What’s unfortunate is that in the U.S., this thing has been polarized in a way that several other issues such as guns and abortion are polarized in the U.S., in a way that they’re not polarized in other developed countries. Unfortunately, the same thing has happened with climate change. And speaking to some — I had spoken to old-school Republicans who were just really bewildered by this. And think hold on, there’s no particular reason why our party, why the Republican Party should be against action on climate change. This is the party of Teddy Roosevelt. It was Richard Nixon who set up the EPA and pushed through the clean air act. There’s no particular reason why the Republican Party should be taking the position that it’s taking on climate action. But that is where we are. And frankly, I’m concerned about, I think anyone who’s really concerned about the climate should also be concerned about it.

SREENIVASAN: Simon Mundy, author of the book called, “Race for Tomorrow: Survival, Innovation, and Profit on the Front Lines of the Climate Crisis”. Thanks so much for joining us.

MUNDY: Thank you so much for having me.