Ep2: Rachel Kyte "Investing in climate leadership "

Transcript

My guest this week on Cleaning Up is somebody that I've known for nearly two decades. Rachel Kyte CMG is the 14th Dean of the Fletcher School at Tufts University, first woman to lead that institution. Before that, she was the chief executive officer of Sustainable Energy for All where I was on the high level advisory group. And she was also special representative for the United Nations Secretary General for Sustainable Energy for All. Prior to that, Rachel was at the World Bank Group where she was vice-president, special envoy for climate change. And before that, she was at International Finance Corporation. So she has been doing work on the climate for a very long time before switching to the Fletcher School. She is a Brit, I'm pleased to say and CMG, for those of you who don't know, all of the terminology means that she's a companion of the most distinguished Order of St. Michael and St. George. So she's desperately grand and posh as you're about to find out. Rachel, let me bring you into the conversation. How are you?

I'm fine, Michael, it's lovely to see you. Two Brits abroad.

That's right. Absolutely. Where are you now? Explain to everybody. Where are you sitting at the moment?

So I am in my home in Lexington, Massachusetts, which of course is important to us Brits, because it's where a certain battle was lost. And I'm about five miles from the campus of Tufts University, which is in Medford. And we've lived here for a few months now. And actually, our house is made with recycled concrete and steel from the Big Dig. So if anybody knows anything about infrastructure, the Big Dig was one of the biggest infrastructure projects in the United States. At that time, about 20 years ago, one of the enterprising vice-presidents for the construction companies decided that to throw all of the stuff away just seemed to make no sense. They've built a rather exciting house from it, and we bought that house last year.

And the Big Dig was in Boston, it was where they put the elevated..., put it underground, and all the rats came out of the reclaimed ground, didn't they? They were like that, but that's what... So it was after I was at business school. But it was it 20 years ago, good Lord. But yes, the Big Dig. I hope at least it delivered the benefits, having done so many cost benefits on infrastructure investments, we could probably use that as a starting point, whether it actually delivered. But let's actually start with climate. Because you know, before you were at Tufts , before COVID, which will probably also kind of come into the conversation, you were probably as close to the epicenter of climate action, as anybody could possibly be, both at the World Bank, and then Sustainable Energy for All. And you said, and I want to quote this, you said in a tweet at the end of last year, so just before COVID, you said: "we have a decade to ensure clean, affordable, reliable energy for all, and we can". And I love that "and we can". Can you talk us through 10 years, "we can do it" and, in particular the "we can" piece?

Yeah, I mean, so in the framework, and the framework of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, sort of development enterprise, as it were climate action, you know, you're really talking about making the energy systems of the world as I say systems plural, right? Really a lot more efficient use of your energy productivity has to be much more than it is today. We obviously need to shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy. And we then need to ensure that everybody has access to energy and it's affordable and reliable. And we have system inertia, we have incumbency, which fights against innovation. We have mindsets which prefer centralized and which prefer and understand the way we've always done things. And those are really the barriers. Finance is something that can always be engineered. Technology is proving us wrong every year as you always comment, right. And the work that you did at Bloomberg New Energy Finance years are just showing how quickly things could potentially go. So the finance and the technology can be brought to the table, I think. And also, there's lots of technology we have today that we just don't deploy, we're always looking for the silver bullets. It's sort of a plague upon our house as a human species. And so I think there's a large part of this is about being determined to do and what I saw when I was at Sustainable Energy for All, is that the countries, the leaders, the business leaders that just sort of determine that, that they're going to go for it whatever go for it might mean, actually, were able to make the extraordinary progress. And sort of companies, countries that sort of, didn't take the weight off their back foot as they cross the stream, right. So they were sort of hedging ended up faffing around, really. And you see that in oil company leadership, you see that in utility leadership, you see that in country leadership, from prime ministers, to governors, to mayors, those who've you kind of committing, and sort of, then organizing everybody to sort of come in and, and fill the gap, are making extraordinary progress. So we said in 2030, we would do this. And you know, we've got 10 years to do it. And lots of things are working to our benefit: price of renewables, understanding of what works, decentralization, digitalization - all working in our favor, hopefully now COVID reminding everybody that we actually need resilience, which means that you need functioning systems. So the only thing that kind of trips us up is ourselves.

But in a sense, when you said "we can", you know, "we've got 10 years, and we're going to do these things". Were you referring specifically to the developing world getting energy access? Yeah, because I'm known as an optimist. Right. And, and I think that we're going to see peak emissions, I wrote about at the end of last year, peak emissions are closer than you think. And here's why, obviously I wasn't thinking of COVID, I was thinking of the trends. But I was looking at, you know, 2030, maybe we'll have seen the peak, and maybe it will be down five, maximum 10%. Globally, but that's developed world, China, developing, that's a whole lot. So your optimism about what we can do in 10 years was that, you know, are you being more optimistic than me, or you think you're sort of wiz, becoming more optimistic about the developing world and getting energy access into people's homes and so on.

Yeah, so I think I'm about as optimistic as you are. And I mean, sometimes I'm rhetorically sort of, kind of trying to cut through the, well, on the one hand, on the other hand, and sort of what I've seen is leaders saying: we're going to do this, we might not know every step of the journey, we might not know every possible policy, you know, innovation, but, you know, we are going to set off on that journey with a determination to get there. And we'll figure it out as we go. Those leaders, they make quite a greater progress than those who are sort of waiting for everything to be ironed out every sea to be crossed, every "i" to be dotted before they set forth on the journey. So I think I was going there rhetorically. But yeah, in terms of access, and if you look at who really doesn't have access to energy today, and we're talking about people who don't have access to anything, they are the rural poor, they are living in fragile and conflict affected countries, they are living in the peri-urban, you know, sort of informal settlements of fast growing cities and towns in Africa. And it's going to require some really spirited public sector interventions with lots of private sector ingenuity to get power to them. But we can get decentralized renewable power enough for them to participate meaningfully in the economy, if we want to. We will always be pushed back by more wars, we will always be pushed back by conflict. And so whether we get 100%, I don't know. But there's absolutely no reason to believe that we can't. And there's a big problem for us geopolitically, if we don't, because the numbers of people who don't have access to energy, they're concentrating in Sub Saharan Africa. And so this really becomes a story of Africa rising. And this becomes a story of African investment in Africa, of stopping capital flights of private investment, understanding the move to the innovation as possible in those markets. It's about letting innovation fly and not importing solutions from the rest of the world and having you grow from the ground up. But there's no reason why it can't be done.

And how do you answer, because you've been such, this is exactly the message that you've been sending out for as long as I've known you that, you know, just have to lean in and just, you know, just do it and the progress... And in fact, your point about those people that do lean in actually make remarkably fast progress, and the costs come down. I mean, we've seen it actually across different areas of environmental progress. It's not just climate, but also whether it's SOx and NOx or you know what? Everybody said: "oh, it'll be so expensive to deal with problem x". And then when you actually do it, it's not that expensive. You have capital asset cycles, you start doing smart stuff, the other stuff gets more and more expensive. And pretty soon, nobody can remember what the whole fuss is about. And we're not quite there that nobody remembers, but so you've been sending that message for a long time. But, you know, you've probably been faced, and I'm thinking maybe back to a decade ago within the World Bank more than SE for All with people saying: "No, no, no, no, this is a rich country game to do clean energy and to do this expensive stuff and to deal with the environment and energy efficiency." And that is absolutely not the thing. It's not the priority. And you know, there was Alex Epstein. He wrote a book called The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels. He wrote it in 2014. And his thesis was: people need energy, energy makes people wealthy, energy pulls people out of poverty, energy powers health systems, and you, and people like you, and me as well, are immoral. I mean, that's the implication of fossil fuels having a moral case is that non-fossil fuels, alternative, renewable, etc., are immoral. How do you answer? If you were stuck in an elevator with Alex Epstein what would you say to him?

Well, I think in 2014, you know, we were still arguing about whether coal was cheaper than renewables, right? And this argument was going on in full hue and cry. And there was also, it cuts across a separate argument, which was that the development world was focused on poverty alleviation. And they didn't see that climate was a poverty alleviating argument, so that there was that poverty versus climate and they spent years arguing inside the Bank. And also arguing with people like, you know, DfID specialists, who were, you know, we are about alleviating poverty. And I'm like, in that case, we have to address climate change, because climate change is gonna push people back into poverty. And argument still, I mean, I mean, it's more or less won, but I mean, there's still pockets of that. But in 2014, yes, it was an argument of coal is the cheapest way to get access to energy to those who don't have it, except that it had never happened, except that the way that centralized grid systems with coal fired power plants being popped up here or there, we're always going to rely on very inefficient transmission systems, and those transmission systems, were never going to reach those, you know, marginal communities of people who don't have power. And so you know, the rhetorical talk was like, Well, yeah, but you've been trying it for, you know, a few decades now you never got there, and what kind of subsidy you're gonna want from the government now to connect that family and connect that family. Meanwhile, you know, we were learning much about decentralization, we were learning a lot around renewables. And I remember being at the IFC. So the International Finance Corporation, the private sector, part of the World Bank. And when Lars Thunel, arrived, the Swiss banker, now investor in green new technology, and he arrived, and he was like, why is the IFC not investing in off grid at scale? And I think that, you know, he arrived at IFC in 2006, December 2006. And this was a question he asked in 2007/2008. And he was getting a little bit of traction, and then the financial crisis hit and we became a counter cyclical lender, and that all sort of went for a little bit, but he was asking those questions then, and he was right to, but I would say that what happened then is as renewables started to become cheaper, or as cheap as coal, and certainly more easily deployable, to where the people who don't have power, then you started seeing Peabody Energy. And those guys coming in and subsidizing and paying for a massive advertising campaign around coal is the answer to energy poverty. And they used to buy banners on the FT's website and things like this. And so then it became whack a mole. I mean, it really became political campaigning, but in 2014, it was still an argument about price.

But some of the people, Medupi power station in South Africa, and that was a big fight around 2014. I think and, you know, and then sort of triumphant coal brigade that said, you know, finally we saw reason we're able to put money in those decided, was it how many billion dollars and how many gigawatts and it was just a huge and of course, now, it seems this monstrous white elephant that has, is bringing down Eskom as it as we knew it. Have you met any of the people who sort of fought such a hard campaign within the World Bank and within the development community to kind of support those power stations. Have you met any of them recently? Have any of them said, you know, gee, you were right, God, we were not just wrong, we were really wrong.

Well, when the first decision to invest in those plants was made, I was the vice-president at IFC that was handling environment, social issues. And also the investment on sort of climate issues. And the one good thing that came out of those deals was this sort of the setting aside of investment that would be then go into solar and wind. So it was, you know, in exchange for building these coal fired power plants, there would be all of this investment. And the team that worked on that, who split now one of them's got their own consultancy in Washington, one's working for an insurance company in the Netherlands. And they've I think they've all sort of split in different directions. But that scheme put together some of the most innovative financing at scale of solar and wind on the African continent at that time, I think my predecessors at the Bank... and then I was still at I was at the Bank, then when we had to make the decision to put the next tranche of money in, right? And that was a very painful decision that was just before Paris, but by then sort of die had been cast. You know, it would be interesting to talk, I haven't talked to the individuals concerned. But I think that these are extremely difficult geopolitical decisions at the time that they are made. And at this time, at the time, I mean, there are others that I could go back and look at as well. But at that time, there were and I mean, they still are. To this day, right? And the African Development Bank has only just resolved where it really comes down on coal in the last few months. The Japanese were pushing them really hard up until very recently, to continue to leave the door open for coal. And you know, that the argument was very strongly that, you know, we have a right to develop, and we will choose how we develop, and that includes choosing our energy systems. And I, you know, I was in meetings, you know, after that where, you know, African leaders, elected leaders would say, look, we would rather, you know, we would rather have dirty energy than be dead on the bottom of the Mediterranean. And I think that's evolved. Now, I think you've got a generation of finance ministers and leaders in Africa, who are making real change: Ethiopia, Kenya, Cote d'Ivoire, Senegal, but you know, that you can only get out, you can't get that far out ahead of your audiences.

But when you see, you know, when you see that there is still, you know, coal fired power stations being financed, whether by the Japanese, by the Korean, by, you know, whoever. And then of course, there's the Belt and Road, which is got a few coal fired power stations and fossil assets too. Do you just look at that and think, you know, why don't they read the script? Why didn't they, because they're sort of doing what we were still doing. We the, you know, the developed world, the Western world was doing all the Western world because obviously, you know, Japan and Korea, to certian extent, still doing. But, you know, we were doing that. But by around 2014/2015, it was just sort of it was shutting down. So it was obvious which direction it was going. But in 2010, we were still steaming, you know, straight towards those particular rocks. And do you look at that, and think, you know, just on the economics alone, they're just going to be burning billions and tens of billions and maybe hundreds of billions of dollars.

Well, the numbers don't work, but the numbers absolutely don't work for people in the countries where these plants are to be built and which will, will become white elephants. And so I actually get very angry. I mean, you know, I used to get angry when I was in the development business, because I would see deals structured in a way that everybody would walk away whole, except for the tax payer of the country where the deal is being produced, right? Because that's, where the, that's where, you know, the payments are going to be made. If the, if the private sector, you know, can't meet it, so can't put whatever the deal was, or if they can't get what they want. It would always be, you know, the last resort would end up with the tax payer in the country. And so I, the people whose voices are not heard in this infrastructure, are the people who don't have access to energy. And if you if you ask them, you know, they see a village being electrified, they want that, and they want it reliably, and they want it clean. They don't want to have bad air quality. They don't want to have their kids develop respiratory diseases. They want to be able to participate in the economy. And so and the Belt and Road, I mean, I think a lot of the ones that are being commissioned and all that are on paper at the moment, I don't think actually will get built. So I think that what we've got is a lot of, well, in terms of COVID recovery, we've got a lot of, we've got to throw things up because we've got to stimulate the economy, whether or not they ever are completed and whether or not they're ever used or ever producing anything is another question. And then why Korea and Japan, having started to embrace sort of green recovery domestically? Why they would export this? I mean, I understand why, but I mean, I don't really, I think it's travesty.

I was gonna say, I don't really understand why because, you know, it's not so fabulous. for you know, their domestic industry in Japan or Korea to sell a couple of, you know, steam turbines and coal fired, you think they would just, you know, okay, we understand that these are difficult geographies to go clean domestically. But why export? But that's a that's a, that's probably a long discussion. But, you know, there is... that does raise a question. It's at the heart of a lot of the kind of sustainable development that you've got, and that I've been around. Which is, it's not that... it's not so much... It's not donations, it's actually investment now. And I guess, I want to ask the question about, is there a sort of downside to that, which is, it's all very well, if the model works, then you invest in the infrastructure, the energy system, the transport, etc., in the developing world in a developing country, and hopefully, they get really wealthy over the next 10 to 15 years. And so providing the profits back to Western investors is not a problem. I mean, is it? You know, but what happens when it goes wrong? I mean, I guess there's two questions. Is that the right way to do it, you know, some of these countries which have been, you know, victims of colonialism, you know, over many, many decades, a long time ago, should we be providing investors with positive returns by providing them with capital to develop? That's question one. Question two is, what happens when it goes wrong? Do we just do another big debt restructuring?

Well, there's a lot of questions wrapped up in it, I think that there's a large part of the development industry, which is about perpetuating the development industry. And I, you know, I wrestled with that I wrestled with it while I was, quote, unquote, part of the development industry, and I wrestle with it now. So where I think what I've seen where we've seen countries really emerge from, from poverty after independence. And when you look at the countries that are really progressing, then they have taken control of their vision of their development. And then they are taking control of whose investment under what terms public or private, you know, from whom, and then they're making the decisions. And then they have the whip hand, and then say: well, no, actually, we want the Norwegian government to come in and give us the, you know, technical advice on this, and then we will open it up for investment to these people. And, you know, and I've moved very quickly, so and there's different models of that everybody that I was working with, in infrastructure and transport and energy when I was at the Bank, you know, every African country, or every Central American country that we work with wanted to be like Korea, they wanted to get it done in 35 years, right. And they were interested in Singapore. And so if we were going to be providing technical advice, it was to take bureaucrats from, you know, from I don't know, from Malawi and take them to Seul so that they could see what light railway had done and what the transit corridors look like. Or we could take them Singapore, and look at modern building techniques and things like this. So those are, those are the models that inspire but you know, when Rwanda wants to become Africa's Singapore, that's what it's trying to do. But if you look at the rates of electrification in Kenya, you look at now, the plans that are coming through in Ethiopia, so not just the Chinese big dams, but what they're going to do in the rural areas. You know, these are governments that know what they want, and they prepare to go out and get the partners that they want to deliver it for them. They're also very clever at how they use development aid. So they know what they want from the World Bank, they know what they want from a regional development bank, they know what they want from China, and they know what they want from the Chinese owned banks. And so I think that's when it really works anywhere, it doesn't work its way we've got a weak government, or disorganized and weak government or, you know, worse a corrupt government. And then it's really, it's a supply game, you know, it's the development industry is telling them what to do. But the ownership isn't there. And of course, underneath all of that are, you know, the people and civil society and their ability to sort of be heard and be part of a vision of what they want their own country to look like. So and it can work. It sometimes doesn't. And there's plenty of reasons for that, including the way that the development industry runs itself. And then I get really upset about sort of the on the green side of development aid, where we put so many conditions and bells and whistles. On this fund or that fund or this new program, and we just slice and dice the funding available to people so that they're, you know, every sort of government or, you know, it has to like negotiate 16,000 different sorts of ways of doing it just to get their hands on any scalable finance. And that, of course, employs a lot of people in monitoring and evaluation, employs a lot of people in the funds, which are all managed in Europe or North America or outside of Africa or Central America. And I think that becomes self defeating in time. We will never get to scale if we if we bifurcate the money that way.

I think that articulates brilliantly actually, how it can work and how it should work. And I think that there's a sort of preconceived notion that these are all hopeless countries, and that the World Bank is sort of flying around, and sort of telling them what to do with its acolytes at the African Development Bank. And that's not my not been my experience at all. So you're highlighting that there are actually real success stories. And we're not talking about just South Africa and just Morocco or whatever, two ends of the continent that are doing well. There are actually, there's the Ghanas, and there's the Rwandas, and there's the Ethiopias, and there's the Kenyas, and there's the Tanzanias, isn't it? And actually, there's an enormous amount of best practice and good stuff that's happening. And I think absolutely right, this has to be, ultimately, Africa-led initiatives, they have to be provided, meeting the needs, as perceived locally and not by you know, anybody else. So, you know, I'm very heartened that, that you've sort of summarized it, and that there are those best practices, and there are things that are really working, because, you know, I'm optimistic, and it's quite extraordinary after there, how optimistic. I guess, here's my question, I'm gonna frame it as a question. Do you think that you left Sustainable Energy for All more optimistic than when you first started to work with it?

That's a really good question. So, I always describe myself as a hopeful pessimist. Because I think there's real power in the concept of hope, because it's about agency. And then, you know, the data makes you pessimistic, right? So, I was pessimistic about parts of the development industry's ability to just get out of the way. And I was extremely hopeful, because of the extraordinary creativity, entrepreneurship of financiers of people running businesses of, you know, competitions that we were part of that show extreme ingenuity around... And for me, it was all about asking the right question, I just felt that we spent a lot of time running down rabbit holes, you know, around the wrong question, you know, that at the bottom there's always this question of, you know, how can we equitably and cleanly ensure energy systems work for everybody? And that's the question, you know, it's not, you know, should you spend this many, you know, billions on that much gigawatts, right? And so I felt that the development industry, quote, unquote, got in the way sometimes, but I was humbled every day, and extremely hopeful by just the ingenuity that you would find.

So I worked with Sustainable Energy for All when it was... Actually before it was first set up when it was just, it was a cross-, an interagency initiative that was set up by Kandeh Yumkella at the time. He was secretary general of UNDP, I believe, and then he became your predecessor. Yeah. Not UNDP, UNIDO, and then he became the first head of SE for All. And I joined it. And my premise was very, very simple. I think we're going to solve the electrification problem. I know that, you know, at times, you've sort of said the numbers are not there, you know, we're not going fast enough and, and been a bit, you know, depressed about that, or a bit less optimistic than today. But I was always optimistic about electrification, because it just seemed obvious. This stuff just gets cheaper and cheaper. It delivers benefits to people. And we've seen with mobile phone uptake in the developing world, in India and Africa and Latin America, Central. When it delivers benefits people get hold of it somehow, with or without our help. So I was always very optimistic. I'm less optimistic about things like cooking, and it's just so much harder of a problem. Culturally, numbers 2.5 billion versus 800 million now that is still cooking with dung and wood and charcoal and you think, oh, my goodness, how do we really... You know, we've only got 10 years for the SE for All goals. So I don't know, unless there's something pretty dramatic there, I think we're gonna have trouble on the cooking and heating side.

Well, just one thing on electrification, one of the reasons to get frustrated, why I still get frustrated, is that so... You're quite right, right, the pathway of electrification is fairly clear. And, you know, the ability to zoom along that pathway is there. And then when you think of what is the role of development finance or concessional finance, it is to just sort of nudge it along where it needs to be, and to make sure that it goes where it won't go on its own, right? So just to act as a sort of smoothing of the way. And what was frustrating is, when we started tracking the financial flows into decentralized renewable energy access, we found that, you know, like 1% of the sort of $20 billion that was earmarked that was flowing was going into those kinds of solutions. So the public money was going, you know, it was lazy, basically, and just going in and doing easy things on the back of the front end of the revolution. I'm like, no, that's the point of public money is you go in and you're doing the things that no other form of money, you're drinking Heineken, you know, that no other form of money will do. So that was one frustration. On cooking, I actually think that there is there are things that could go much faster. But we we've got to sort of do the, you've got to treat it like a serious, serious problem that needs serious solutions. And it kind of always gets treated as a sort of, I don't know, a nursery room problem, or maybe because it's women that cook I don't know. And so there is all kinds of market data, sort of penetration analysis, all kinds of stuff that you would do if this was a serious market, or even if it was talking about electrification, that hadn't really got done for clean cooking. And then the other thing is that... there isn't like the people don't cook, they cook, but... And that, you know, the charcoal is a mafia business in a number of countries. I mean, it's this is, you know, dangerous business, you know, so you've got incumbents. It's not like you're walking in, and nobody cooks, right? So I just felt there's a little naivete about the way in which we were attacking the problem. So there is money to be made in helping women predominantly get access to clean fuels for cooking. And as soon as people see it as a market of that kind, then then there's lots of, I think, entrepreneurship possible. But we've tended to make it a development problem and as soon as you make it a development problem. And then you sort of stymie some of the innovation that may be possible.

But I think there are parallels with how difficult energy efficiency and heating are in the developed world because, you know, electrification, you know, it's technology, you can stick it on the blockchain, you can get venture capital, you can monetize, you can have scratch cards. There's a, you know, whereas cookstoves is just, it's just hard as either you said it was lazy because people were avoiding the decentralized solution. I think that has some systemic problems with the multilateral finance institutions, it's everything from how the careers are set up to, it's just easier to do big chunks of project finance. So that's hard. That's easier than distributed electricity. And then cookstoves gets really hard, because it's just kind of, I mean, it's pretty low tech. But, right, we've established now in the first, whatever it is, half hour, that you really, really know what you're doing in the sustainable development, climate, clean energy, and so on. But you chucked all that in and you went to the Fletcher School. Now, you had studied Fletcher, so you knew the institution well. Talk us through that change. It's a great institution. You know, I pulled out actually, when I was preparing for this. You've got, you know, for those who don't know, the Fletcher School, I mean, it's one of the preeminent international relations schools in the world. Certainly one of the... you'll probably say it's the preeminent one in the US, but it's certainly you know, right, right up there. Juan Manuel Santos, president of Columbia, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2016. Bill Richardson, he was Secretary of Energy as I was building New Energy Finance in those earlier years. Michael Dobbs, Lord Michael Dobbs, author of House of Cards, former advisor to Margaret Thatcher, so you know, a good Brit that studied there and Jeremy Rifkin, economist, writer and futurologist. Although, I would say that I don't think he's ever actually predicted anything correctly, but then I'm just being mean and catty, but you know, eminent, eminent people, fantastic institution. Were you just sort of lured away by the glamour of it all to turn your back on the whole climate issue?

No, it was for once a very deliberate decision. So for most of my career, I hadn't really planned things and things sort of happened or people talked to me or Bob Zoellick called me up at six o'clock one afternoon and said: you're coming to the Bank, you know, it wasn't necessarily a purposeful, mindful... but I had got to the point where I mean for a long time, I had been on a plane every Sunday night, and on a plane many days during the week. And I have to say, I had angst about that kind of flying from a climate perspective. But also I've got two...They were pre-teens and I just, I needed to be around more. So I needed to do a job where I wasn't on a plane all the time. I mean this is pre-Covid, right, none of us are on planes. And I'd sort of come to that realization. And also, a lot of the jobs that people talk to me about, I mean, people are saying, well, Rachel, what about this, are you going to throw your hat in the ring for this, or whatever, it was similarly structured jobs, where I just knew I was going to have to sort of really go around the world and rattling a tin can. And so it seemed to me that I was going to have to make a different kind of break. And so I set myself a timeframe, I said, you know, by December 2019, you need to know what you're going to do. And as these things happen, and so that was a conversation I was having with myself at the end of 2018. And I was literally having that conversation with myself. And I got a phone call saying: did you know that this position is now coming open and whatever. And so I threw my, after a long period of discussion I decided to throw my hat in the ring. And I was very lucky to get the job. But it was for the first time that I actually decided that I needed to kind of step off the merry go round a little bit. And the other reason for doing it is that I had become very, very convinced that these generations, the younger generations see the world in a very different way. And they see possibility in a different way. And they are intersectional, they're interconnected in a different way. And I thought that, you know, actually to go and be around that generation in a more purposeful way than the way I was would be, would be a way for me to contribute. I mean, I didn't want to walk away from the barricades as it were. But I felt like I wanted to contribute in a different way. So that's, and then the Covid happened. So nobody's traveling anyway. And my kids are just getting used to having me around all the time at the moment. So...

So I think it's an absolutely brilliant move, I'm going to say, because, and your point about "young people see these challenges just in a very different way" is absolutely correct, not just that you're not just correct, observationally, but it is correct to see these challenges in a different way. And the example that I always use is you've got this, you know, we have a kind of climate change is seen as an environmental issue, but climate action, to my mind, first and foremost, is actually a trade issue. And actually, it's a very strong, it's obviously a political issue, because the solutions, frankly, I hate to say it, and not that darn hard. They're hard when you put them into political tribalism. And they're hard, when you put them into geopolitics and trade policy, because you could solve the problem, and there might be some, you know, interim period where you're disadvantaging certain sectors of your economy, and therefore it becomes a trade issue. But if you come at it from the environmental always, it's always seen as, as being in the environmental silo. And then, frankly, that impedes progress. Because first of all, you're not having the discussions. When it's about trade, you're sort of into some little junior parallel thing about climate. And you've made it all massively more complicated by being it you know, the probably the number one touchstone issue for political polarization in the Anglo-Saxon world. So if young people can come at it in a different way and say: this is not, you know, this is not climate. And I don't mean overhyping and saying: oh, this is survival and we're all gonna, you know, but if they can just deconstruct the problem or put it into different buckets, that is going to actually be a really, really refreshing in my view? And I think, frankly, I think we should be doing that. As leaders, we should be much more prepared to say: look, it is not a, you know, it is not an environmental junior issue. It's actually core to... It's part of everything. So I think that, you know, maybe I'm projecting my views onto your decision to sort of take your knowledge of climate and clean energy, but embedded in a layer that's, frankly, closer connected to the levers of power. I mean, is that a fair...

Yeah, no, I think so. I mean, I so as we teach, we teach climate, we teach climate policy, we have a climate policy lab, we advise, you know, all kinds of people with that, we teach energy policy, But what I'm interested in is how we're teaching climate to our military fellows who are taking time out of the military, they're going to go back, you know, into a world where, you know, AI controlled battlefield logistics, things like this. I'm interested in how we're teaching climate in the way we understand migration, and the future of human rights law, right? So for me, it just it is the context in which we do everything now. And the solutions are embedded in economic decision making. And, you know, weaning ourselves off GDP, which doesn't really work for welfare or for the planet. It's, you know, how we see politics, how we see relationships between nations. I mean geographically the Arctic is completely transformed by climate. That means different actors needs to be sitting around the table, that table looks very different. And the questions are very different. So for me, it's everywhere. And what I've been really inspired by is the generation of leaders who kind of just understand that this is what it's all about for the next 20 to 30 years. And so, you know, people talk about Jacinda Ardern a lot in New Zealand, but Mette Frederiksen who came in, in the summer of 2019, as a new young leader of Denmark, and sort of Denmark already had aggressive climate goals. And she made them even more aggressive and what was really... what struck me about her speech, when she, and it was about a week after she'd been elected, where it was that she said: okay, this is the revised climate goal, and she'd run on climate as an issue, but climate was the number one polling issue for all Danes. And she said: look, you know, I don't know exactly how we're going to get there, but I trust in Danish business, I trust the Danish public. And together, we will figure this out. And, you know, that has a name that is called, you know, in social psychology, that's reciprocal vulnerability. It's basically saying: I'm your leader, I'm committed, I don't know exactly everything, I'm not telling you that we're just going to, you know, tramp our way over this bog, and we're going to get there. But we will do this, and we will work this out, and I'm committed to it, that allows the public to then say: okay, this is our challenge. So we can be part of figuring this out, it gives permission to the private sector, etc. And, of course, there are very high levels of social trust in Denmark, you know, which are strengthened by that kind of leadership, put that in stark contrast to some other countries, including, we're recording this on the day when Boris Johnson just made his big Roosevelt speech, right? And, you know, there's all kinds of things that he could, he could do that he hasn't quite got, right? I think rhetorically yet. Or maybe even substantively. So, you know, where is the core of people who are going to completely deal with the refurbishments of you know, British buildings, so that they are hyper efficient. You know, that's jobs, that's generation, local economies that's, you know, you don't get, you know, a point of CO2 emissions for every flowery adjective, you know, you're going to get CO2 emissions reduction from good old fashioned, you know, let's roll up our sleeves and do this together. And, you know, it might be not very sexy in the context of the UK. But we see in countries where there's high social trust, that they are able to get things done more smoothly.

Yeah, in the UK context, where I've been doing my bit to try to say, look, you know, actually, this is not a drag on the economy, dealing with climate. That's not a drag on the economy. This kind of is the economy. This is... and we actually in the UK, I believe, the UK is incredibly well positioned, you know, we're good at chemistry, we're good at finance, we're good at electrical engineering, we're good at architecture, we're good at, you know, all sorts of things that you need in the future economy. So it's, I mean, to me not to lean in, not to be... But the funny thing is, we're also, we are leading, I mean, we're the we're the G7, G20, you know, fastest decarbonizing economy. But we're doing it in a sort of incredibly British way to do it. We're doing it by mistake. You know, we put a carbon floor price completely unexpectedly, we end up with floor price on carbon that nobody was really asking for, there was no political constituency for it. And suddenly we got it. And then we started to do these things. Well, that's rather good, jolly good. And that was good. And then we decided to get rid of coal by 2025. Oh, let's get rid of coal, we'll get rid of coal. The Germans have this sort of very detailed process, and they do vast models. And they say, you know, they come out this out, you know, couldn't possibly do it before 2038. And we're... You know, the Brits are? Well, we just did it.

God bless the British civil servant. That's what I say,

Well, I guess. But I don't know enough of the process that were behind those decisions. But they were transformational There was something terribly British about muddling through to these incredible outcomes. It may continue. Maybe, maybe, maybe, yeah, maybe it will continue. I hope that the offshore wind, you know, commitment, 40 gigawatts of offshore wind, and somehow I think we will muddle through and remain, maybe not as, it's maybe not the same style of leadership, or maybe not as good as but, you know, I don't know, maybe I'm more of an optimist about the political process in the UK, you've been, you and I have had our moments of disagreements on where we're

Well, we don't need to go there.

I think the audience would rather enjoy re-litigating Brexit.

I remember trying to litigate Brexit with you in in an oak paneled lunchroom in some hotel in San Francisco. And at the Clean Management Energy Ministerial once I think.

That's right, it was a it was a Friends' of Michael lunch.

That's right, that's right.

I was waxing lyrical about, about taking back control, some such nonsense anyway.

But I do, but I do think that one or the other, I mean, I think it's eroding a little bit. But one of the strengths of Britain is the public esprit de corps when under pressure, right? So we don't need to get rose tinted glasses on and get all, you know, emotional about white picket fences in the 1950s. But there is something about, you know, Brits when they get together. And I and I do and I've always felt that. That one of the brilliant things about the Extinction Rebellion was that the question that they had to government wasn't, you know, we want you to stop fracking, or we want you to do this or to do that. It was like, you know, we want you to tell the people the truth. And if you tell the people the truth, then you know, maybe every garden club in Britain can get themselves organized, and you get the WI organized, you get the scouts and the guides and whatever. And that fabric of British society, faith communities, etc. I mean, that that's how Britain organizes itself. And we're going to need everybody. So, you know, we don't want to have a sort of yobbish culture about, you know, "I'm not going to make my house efficient". You know, we need the "yeah, everybody's going to do it". And it's, you know, everybody's going to help everybody else do it. And we're not asking you to sacrifice, we're asking you to save money on your electricity bills. So my father, at one point, was an energy efficiency auditor. So this is the early days of energy efficiency, when the EU had a scheme where they were helping, then you could get EU money to help local authorities go and look at the energy efficiency of their housing stock. And this is at a time when the Tories were wanting to make these into housing associations. And of course, that was important to understand before they were sort of quote unquote, privatized. But he would go around public housing, I remember, Lewisham, parts of Birmingham, whatever, and go house to house, you know, and just look at the efficiency. And he saw, you know, I mean, he has an extraordinary array of stories about things that he saw, you know, people having just put their foot through the back doors to let the cat out, and then wondering why the cold air is blowing in and everything like that. But you know, this is a long story around different piecemeal attempts to get the basics right. And, you know, I do think there's a moment for leadership in terms of like, we actually don't have time to have piecemeal efforts anymore. This is something that we need to do, we need to do it with a certain degree of urgency, and everybody could be involved. And, and, you know, I think there's a way to do that, that is building of a kind of solidarity rather than eroding of it.

I think, I definitely agree that, you know, on the importance of that kind of cultural shift from, you know, in America, there's this thing called rolling smoke where you burn diesel and you create huge plume of smoke out of your, your vast truck, and that's regarded as cool. And then you contrast that with Japan. I'm not sure if I get the word right. But there's a word called "latineye", which is the pride in being efficient, in recycling and being frugal and so on. And, you know, those are two bookends of cultural engagement in resource use, and clearly, you know, you sort of think oh my goodness, wouldn't it be great if we woke up in a world where Americans thought that the dimension of competition, you make America great again by being frugal, by saving your natural resources, by having the lightest footprint on the Earth, and being, you know, and displaying your success through, you know, other ways, cultural or whatever. Anyway, one could always dream about those things. I think you're being a bit generous to Extinction Rebellion. And so I agree with the need for the cultural change. But I see, I think they sort of had a chance to capture some mainstream space, but then they blew it by just displaying the fact that actually they're just old school anticapitalists. And they are actually the yobs. Maybe not putting that foot through the door to let the cat out. But, you know, stopping people from getting to work. You know, and, yes, displaying an extraordinary level of privilege, and also not understanding and, because I come in as an analyst and said, well, you know, but they said: let's be, you know, net zero by 2050 is not good enough. 2025! And they don't realize that, you know, fertilizer is made with natural gas, we don't have another way of making it at this point. There are no electric tractors, they don't exist. The only way to get food into the cities where they all love to live and hang out. The only way is actually, at the moment, a fossil fuel powered distribution system, and 2025 is five years away. So we know what ideological top down handbrake turns in agriculture and resources look like. They look like Great Leap Forward, Holodomor, collectivization, disaster. And it's easy to come to: oh, you know, Michael's exaggerating. But that is, that is what happens when you ideologically and through, you know, sort of mob rule, do these things. So I personally, I have a.. I think that, you know, the calls. Greta saying that listen to the science. Brilliant. But when you have people say listen to the science, and the science says: we've got to, you know, we've got to do these extraordinarily disruptive, we're really motivated just by breaking the status quo, then to me, you know, you have to count me out. And maybe you have more sympathy for it.

No, I mean, that was my window into that narrative, as of the early days of the Rebellion, clearly, like any movement, there's been splinters, and there's different pushing and pulling within the leadership. And now I think a lot of the leadership have gone instead of something else. But I think that the frustration and the urgency, I think the urgency had an impact, it certainly had an impact on the government's at the time, so I think that's fine. And young people uniting with older the older generation, I think that's really actually good. And then the social fabric, which needed to be strengthened. And then the fact that there's sort of these, you know, these all these county towns in Britain, you know, with assemblies and things like that, I think that's positive as well. So yeah, I mean, I don't condone all of the tactical decisions that were made. But I think, you know, I think it's quite profound. You are the government of the people tell the people the truth, you're sitting on the data, the evidence...you know, tell them the truth.

The evidence, I mean, I'm sorry, I'm just too distracted. There's one of the founders of Extinction Rebellion, there's a fantastic YouTube clip, he jumps on a table in front of a bunch of 11 year olds, and tells them that when people ask what you want to be when you grow up, you should answer them saying: if I grow up. Because of the climate change. There's nothing in the science that says that an 11 year old, a posh 11 year old in Britain, is not going to grow up because of climate change. That's not what the science says, I'm distracted, but I'm overly distracted, maybe. But you know, coming back to the Fletcher School and this question of leadership, you said: we need to be able, this is something we can definitely, definitely agree on, we need to be able to put the best global leaders we can on the field of play today. You know, you're producing students, and you're sending them out into the world where, you know, you could sort of have you make sure that you don't prepare them for this kind of to be the best they can be, and to lead on all of these issues. And then they go out into a world which rewards tribalism and populism, where one side is saying climate change doesn't exist and trying to essentially, I mean, you know, foment division in one way. And on the other side, you've got people who want to jump on the desk and tell 11 year olds they're going to die before they reach adulthood, because frankly, that is what gets them rewards in their environment. So, aren't you sort of, you know, isn't there a risk that you're sort of like a First World War generals, you know, just not giving your students the right tools to fight in the leadership battles that they will actually face will be around will be tribal wars in a sense and not great inclusive, sort of social democrat center left center right wars, that you and I would like, you know, the environment to be.

I know, so I think that, I mean, that's a very good point, I think that my role as the dean is to sort of hold the center. So that, you know, even though, you know, I think many academic campuses, certainly in the United States, are sort of seen to be left of center, there has to be a space where all views can be interrogated. And you have to be able to look at an issue from a 360 degree perspective, which means being able to look at it from an interdisciplinary perspective. So knowing enough about the law to be able to interrogate it, knowing enough about economics to interpret, enough about finance, enough about security, etc. So we've sort of known for our interdisciplinary approach. And so what I want students to do in the time that they're with us, is really hone their analytical capability and their critical thinking, because they're going to need that wherever they go. And about a third of our students go into the private sector, third, go into sort of international organizations or international NGOs, or whatever. And the third would go into the foreign services, or the international departments of treasuries or whatever have their own governments, and half the student body is international in half is US. So yeah, these are, they're going to, they're going to have international careers. And they need to be able to interrogate, interrogate every situation and be able and need to be able to put themselves in the shoes of the people with whom they're arguing, or, you know, people from another tribe or people they're negotiating with. What young people today are asking for is they want all of that. But they want really hard skills. I mean, they're going into a world where big data, machine learning and AI is going to transform everything. Whether you want a career in energy or agriculture, or whether you want to be a traditional diplomat, you have to understand some of that. So they want many more hard skills in addition to that sort of analytical capability. And, you know, and I think there's some real structural issues about higher education in the United States, that most people have to indebt themselves to get an education, which it didn't used to be. And I think there's something profoundly uncompetitive in the US economy, if that's what we're doing to the next generation. So I have to find solutions to that. But I want you to come, I want you to be able to interrogate an issue from any perspective, I think that we were traditionally known as having a conservative part of the school, which I think is really, really important, because we have to be able to respect the different views. And you then need to be able to deploy that skill when you go out into the world.

And as you were speaking, I was kind of thinking: well, when I framed that, as you know, the world is getting more and more polarized, I realized I built an assumption into that question, because actually, polarization has waxed and waned. And, you know, if you think back to, as I often do, when I was, you know, five years old, 1968, there was enormous polarization in the 60s, right? And then it kind of, you know, we nevertheless got through that, and had some times which were not as... So do you think that, I suppose to certain extent can depend on what the outcome of the US election may be? But do you think maybe I was being pessimistic by framing it as the world is just gonna get more and more polarized, more tribal, and, particularly, as you see different demographics coming through into leadership positions: minorities, women, people with much more diverse backgrounds, which I'm sure is a trend that you're seeing in your student body. Is that going to change it? We're going to see those? Are they going to kind of join the tribes? Or are they going to actually break all that up?

Well, we've definitely got a trend of populism, right? And which is meaning that a number of key economies are looking inward, and that that populism is coming with xenophobia, is coming with a sort of, you know, antidemocratic bend, whether on the left or the right, right, so that's definitely from within the United States. I think that, for all kinds of reasons, we're sort of shouting at each other louder and we're shouting past each other, more and more. And the center is kind of eroded on any issue, and so you get pushed, you get pushed to the sides as it were, and then the only technique available to you is to sort of shout on Twitter or chant on social media or then of course, be in your own bubble. So you're having your views, you know, reinforced every minute of every day. And I think that's really it. So when you're taking students who, I mean, the average age of a student coming into Fletcher's is 28. So they come, they've done their undergraduate degree, they've been out in the world, and they've done something and now they're coming back for the international affairs degree, and then they kind of go off and either pivot or pursue their degree at a higher level, or their career at a higher level. So they come in, they're mature, right, but they are swimming in that water. And so just reminding ourselves that, you know, negotiation, how to talk to each other how to listen, and then you've got the issue of diversity. So international affairs education is, you know, is a construct. The canon was written in the middle of the 20th century by white men. And so the decolonization of international relations is an issue, which has been sort of at the top of the agenda for about four or five years now. That's very challenging for many people within international relations. And it's challenging for schools like ours. But that's, I think, very exciting, because you're talking about bringing a different perspective to the table to look at how things are, and understanding where you came from, and why we are where we are, in order to be able to understand way to go forward. But the State Department, for example, last few days has been article after article, after article in the mainstream press in the US about how far it has not come in diversifying. So the diplomats in the United States are mainly straight white men, right, still to this day, and some of the stories for people who aren't that are quite challenging in terms of building a career. So these issues raised to the fore, and they and they haven't gone away. And I think it's interesting, I mean, I'm an out lesbian, you know, energy diplomat, activist, climate activist, whatever you want, you know, not your traditional pick for dean of the school of international affairs, the oldest school of international affairs in the US. And, you know, you feel the responsibility of just, you know, telling people, that you can piece together a career and that you can deal with these issues. Now, I have to deal with issues of the fact that I have no Black American tenured faculty at Fletcher, we've got an extraordinary distance to travel still. But I think that building the space to hear each other, and trying to get dialogue back into the political system in the US is absolutely fundamental. It is a deeply, deeply corrupt political system, which is one reason why there's such little social trust and why money is, I mean, that the impact of money on politics in this country. I've lived in the US for 20 years. And over those 20 years, and Citizens United being the pivotal Supreme Court, I mean, I think it's very difficult for Europeans to just quite understand what money in politics has done here.

You know, as I have said in the past, if you gave me one wish to accelerate the transition towards clean energy, clean transportation, it would be campaign reform, principally in the US. I think, if you just do that, then all of these trends, and of course, trends on inclusion and so on, will also they'll just accelerate, but are you not getting a sense of Deja vu all over again, because the energy industry, and the development industry was also very, very, it was very straight, it was very white. It was very, I mean, the energy industry, conventional energy industry is extraordinarily reactionary. And then clean energy and clean transportation suddenly opens up spaces of innovation, whether it's new technology, and therefore, there's kind of younger people understand machine learning and older people don't. And therefore, they're, you know, that suddenly, you start to see women coming in and more minorities. And, you know, you were kind of in an environment that was just getting, becoming more diverse. And now, do you not feel that you kind of have to, you're gonna go through, you know, you've sort of gone back 10 years, the time machine, and will now have to accelerate it forward. Have you seen in the last six weeks since the tragic death of George Floyd? You know, have you started to change the way you do things and think about different ways that you can accelerate the trends within Fletcher?

Well, yes, I mean, when I came into the role, I knew that diversity and inclusion was going to need to be a top priority if it wasn't already. And I sort of allowed myself sort of 90 days, 100 days to sort of like learn my way into a new industry in a new organization, and then started some steps to move forward with that. And we made a couple of missteps as well. And so, and then, you know, we went into lockdown, and then the unlawful killing of George Floyd brings everything into relief once again. And so what I've had to do is double down on this as a priority, and this has to stay. And every morning, I have to make sure that I am moving that agenda forward. And, you know, it has to be a collective effort. Because in academia, you know, we all have to move together, right? So I have to bring the community along, and that what I didn't, what I didn't know, and what I've had to learn, and I need to continue to learn and listen to, is the depth of the anger and the depth of the frustration, the depth of pain, frankly, of black alumni, of alumni of color, of the staff of color at Fletcher, and current students as well. So that's been humbling, and I needed to go, I needed to learn that wasn't their responsibility to teach me, but I've got to move the school forward. So that's fine, I think. I think on the issues of, you know, the energy industry, I mean, it was like in banking when I worked at the IFC, you know, then it was like <inaudible>. And I think that, you know, you're always, frankly, you have good days and bad days. And so you can still walk into a room and be the only woman or be the only, I mean, you've got a non visible difference that you're not sure if you're the only one or not. But I think that I'm sort of fairly used to that. It used to get exhausting, I think, in energy ministerials. Because I would really look around the room and thinking, well, if you are building a boardroom, you would never build this board. And if this is the ministerial for energy, and we need an energy transition, then this is really not with no disrespect to anybody in the room. This is not the board, you would build for the energy transition. And I think that's where it becomes particularly difficult.

I mean, I remember being in Davos, in a room of I don't know what it was 110 people building the future of transportation with, you know, five women and no people of color. And just thinking, well, you're not going to build, you're just not going to do it, are you? You're just really not actually very serious. And I certainly, you know, as you talked about the black alumni and so on, I think I've, you know, I was supposed to have my 30th Harvard Business School reunion was supposed to be this summer. And I can say, I am really glad that it has been postponed, because, frankly, doing that in the, you know, in the environment of a US presidential election, which is just so extraordinarily polarizing, you know, I'm sad to say probably more than half of my peers from Harvard Business School, I suspect we'll be voting Trump. And we'll be you know, sympathetic to this kind of, you know, don't know what they're all about. And it's all nonsense. And then, you know, and I go back, I think back to the time when I was in graduate school in the US, and I don't know, I'm not sure that I'm not sure whether the right responses to want to apologize to my black classmates, because I, you know, I've certainly was not, I was not an offender in any way. But equally, I was not as aware, as you know, the openness and the dialogue was not there. Absolutely, clearly, and that's something that I want to remedy. But I don't know how and I've got to kind of think through that. So I'm, you know, I'm hoping to hoping to, you know, it's a bit of a journey. I think that all of us are interrogating the way we have been over the last few decades. I did a lot of work, as you know, we work together on women in energy women in clean energy. The Hawthorn Club, you know, pushing for 30% thought leaders at the Bloomberg New Energy Finance Summit 30% might not sound great now, but I tell you, when I started to push for that, the equivalent conference in which was IHS CERAWeek in Houston, had 7% women thought leaders, seven! And we were pushing for 30. And it took us a few years. And we got there. So you know, we've done lots of things particularly together on women, but then I suppose question will be have we done the same on gender, LGBT and also on minorities, and I look at myself, and I think you know what, no. Even though I worked on Africa, on the developing world, I probably didn't really delve in and think about the biases and the inclusion and the empowerment of, you know, colleagues across the board, you know, in our own environment.

Yeah, no, I mean, I worked... We had huge diversity issues at the IFC under the World Bank, when I was there, and, you know, the thing that was always really difficult was the representation of African Americans or people of color from United States, you know, we could, once we sort of got better at diversity, we were, we were bringing in really talented Africans. And we've had to really work at the pipeline and really work at making the Bank group an attractive place for them to come. But where I think we really struggled was on bringing into the World Bank Group, people of color from the US. And you and I didn't know we objectively didn't do enough, needed to understand why you haven' done enough. And I think, you know, it's interesting now to be in this role. Because, you know, if you if you have choices, if you are a young person of color and wanting to pursue an international relations career, and so I have to make the Fletcher School the place you want to come. It's not just about me opening the door, then are all going to come flooding through, right, I mean, I've got to make it a place where you want to come, which means that we do have to have more diverse faculty, we do need to be having different perspectives in the syllabi and in the curriculum, we do have to understand the origins of the theories of international relations, we do have to be able to critique them. And so we have to do all of that. And it has to be it has to be an attractive place for the best people to come and want to work in terms of the staff. And it has to be the kind of place where you want to come and be supported if you're junior faculty or senior faculty. So it is we're not going to do it in a day. But we've got to sort of, you know, we can't just use the problems of you know budget or tenure or whatever, as excuses to not do it. We've now just got to say that's enough. And now we are going to move forward and I think will be will be a better school for it in the end. So I still have alumni who think that I'm watching down the school, right? I mean, there's sort of affirmative action argument that, you know, suddenly I'm going to let in, you know, people who wouldn't, you know, be there in the first place. But I think it's actually the opposite. Because I think, if you're smart, then you can command a premium. Because everybody wants you at the moment. So yeah, work to do, and lots of personal work as well.

And I think you put your finger on it, work to do, it does feel to me, like it's a different moment. That the, you know, finally, now there really does appear to be a consensus in society that there is a real problem. And although there'll be some old alumni or some incumbents also in the energy space or transportation, all the areas that I work in, or banking or in policymaking. There will be some, you know, holdouts, there's no question. But my sense is that the herd has started to move. And that as leaders, we shouldn't be moving with it, we should be doing what, you know, you talked about it, building the pipeline, doing the work. And I think it's also got to start when, you know, when I started to work on, on getting women thought leaders and women into leadership positions at New Energy Finance, Bloomberg New Energy Finance, the first step is actually to talk about it. The first step is just to be able to talk and to open up the conversation and say, this, you know, this is not off limits. This is a thing we talk about as a team, as a company, as an organization. So I really wish you luck with that. I think it's an incredibly important piece of your job. Probably more than you thought when you joined, but that's the right thing.

Yeah, again, I think it's getting, I just have to get out of the way of the students because they kind of get it, they're intersectional in the in the way that they think about the world, you know, issues of gender, and race, class are all sort of mixed into one mélange for them in a way that it wasn't for us growing up. So again, part of my job is to just get out of the way and hold the door open for them.

Well as the old adage goes, I can't remember which French leader said it but, you know,: "there go the people, I must follow them for I'm the leader". So that's what you're gonna have to do. Rachel, it's always a huge pleasure to talk to you, to catch up. We've got so much more that we could talk about. There's probably eight different topics that we could spend an evening on, that we've opened up there that we've touched on, but unfortunately, time is passing. You've got a big job to do. It's late here in Europe. So I got some big jobs to do as well, but they're less important than yours. But I'd like to thank you for joining us on our second episode of Cleaning Up. Thank you so much.

Thank you, Michael. Take care.

So our guest next week on Cleaning Up is going to be Antony Slumbers. Now Antony is not a clean energy or climate person, he'd be the first to admit that, but he is an expert on real estate. Now real estate is at the epicenter of change, both because of climate because of technology and because of COVID-19 and our need for social distancing and safe places to work. So I hope you join me next week for our third episode of Cleaning Up with Antony Slumbers. Thank you and good night.

Ep2: Rachel Kyte "Investing in climate leadership "

Listen On

Academia Episodes

Recent Episodes