Cost reductions [of renewables] have basically taken fossil fuel power out of the game. It’s just that some countries don’t know that yet. Assaad Razzouk, chief executive, Sindicatum Sustainable ResourcesAmong the big corporates to think harder about reducing their impact are Kellogg’s, the cereal company, which aims to train 500,000 American farmers in techniques that lower greenhouse gas emissions, and the big tech giants Facebook, Google and Apple, which want to only use renewables to power their energy-guzzling data centres. In Southeast Asia, the only region in the world where coal is growing in the energy mix, the regional bloc’s three biggest banks, UOB, DBS and OCBC, all declared in an unprecedented 11 days for corporate climate action in May that they would all stop funding new coal-fired power plants. As for consumers, the demand for green products is another reason for the eco anxious to quit the Xanax. According to study by market research group Nielsen, a quarter of all store sales in the United States will be from sustainable products by 2021. Meanwhile, governments including Ireland, the United Kingdom, California and the European Union, which recently declared a state of climate emergency, have taken bold leaps to curb emissions. In Asia Pacific, the leader is New Zealand. The government has passed a law to cut carbon emissions to almost zero by 2050, go 100 per cent renewables by 2035, plant one billion trees and invest $15 billion in transit, biking and walking infrastructure.
“Over the next few years, Big Oil will find it increasingly hard and increasingly expensive to finance new projects,” said Razzouk.
“These cost reductions have basically taken fossil fuel power out of the game. It’s just that some countries don’t know that yet,” said Razzouk.
The number of public charging points for electric vehicles has increased five-fold in four years, from less than 200,000 in 2015 to 1m in 2019, the price of lithium-ion batteries has fallen by 87 per cent in a decade, and cities are being redesigned away for electric vehicles, Razzouk noted.
And automative manufacturers have finally caught on. According to Razzouk’s calculations, 84 models are being rolled out over the next two years from the likes of Volkswagen (VW), Audi, Porsche, Mercedes, Ford, Toyota, Honda, Nissan, Range Rover and Jaguar, and automakers such as BMW, VW, General Motors and Peugeot are now offering electric scooters and electric bicycles, not just cars.We are winning [the climate fight]. For now, slowly, slowly, but soon we’re going to be winning all of a sudden.“The transition to electric cars would have been a lot less painful for the car industry if it had spent the last decade preparing for it instead of fighting it. So today they’re laying off people when they shouldn’t have, had they been thinking.” But the electric mobility revolution is not just about cars. Taiwanese electric bicycle firm Giant is selling 600,000 units a year, while there are 100 different electric planes in development. Perhaps most promising of all is that new technology enables electric vehicles to supply energy back to the grid, rather than suck from it. “There’s an emerging technology called vehicle-to-grid (V2G), and that allows a plug-in vehicle to act as a form of energy storage. So the batteries in your car can be used to let electricity flow from the car to the distribution network and back,” Razzouk said.
According to Columbia Law School, there are 1,640 lawsuits fighting fossil fuel companies and governments over climate change right now.
“Even though we are in a planetary emergency, we are fighting back,” said Razzouk, who noted that climate lawsuits are exposing the “misinformation and obfuscation” of Big Oil, which has long known of the impact of their operations on the climate. “The wheels of justice are slow and sadly, justice maybe cannot be guaranteed to prevail in some countries, but the sheer number of lawsuits and the dedication, commitment, and passion I’ve seen from those launching them is a big cause for optimism,” Razzouk said.Monetary policies, Razzouk explained, have an implicit “carbon bias” because carbon exposure is almost irrelevent for normal credit ratings. If that changed, financial markets would stop mispricing climate risks—which would be a huge lever for change, he said.
“One more push by all of us, and we will set off on a downward slope for emissions,” he said.
“We have activist lawyers, activist teachers, activist unionists, activist engineers, activist consultants, and activist politicians. We even have some activist bankers. We even have some activist oil and gas professionals working at changing the oil and gas fat cats from the inside. And most important of all, we have activist citizens everywhere I look.”
Clilmate solutions are available, and slowly but surely, they are being implemented, and soon they will be as ubiquitous as our mobile phones, he said. “We are winning [the climate fight]. For now, slowly, slowly, but soon we’re going to be winning all of a sudden,” said Razzouk, who started his podcast by declaring that a friend recently unfollowed him on Twitter, because he found his tweets to be “too depressing.”Singapore-based renewables executive Assaad Razzouk is the creator of the Angry Clean Energy Guy podcast series, and has 137,000 followers of his environment-themed Twitter account.