Alyssa Gilbert, the director of the Center for Climate Change Innovation at the Grantham Institute, talks about the current gaps in climate technology investments. She discusses her research into areas that are currently underfunded, including transport and energy. She also covers the importance of energy efficiency, especially in relation to the built environment. Alyssa emphasizes the necessity of various models in the fight against climate change, including private sector initiatives, philanthropy, and governmental grants - and highlights the need for a diverse range of solutions. She also speaks about the innovation within the London climate tech ecosystem and shares her perspective on various topics including carbon offsets, behavior change, and geoengineering. Transcript below.

• 00:15 Discussion on Climate Technology Investment

• 01:15 Exploring Areas of Underinvestment in Climate Change

• 01:54 Climate Change Adaptation and Innovation

• 02:23 The Role of Heavy Industry in Climate Change

• 03:15 Climate Change Policies and Energy Efficiency

• 05:10 Challenges in Implementing Energy Efficiency

• 08:09 Debate on Degrowth vs Techno-optimism

• 11:34 Role of Venture Capital and Philanthropy in Climate Change

• 16:11 London's Climate Tech Ecosystem

• 21:58 Pitching Climate Change Ideas

• 24:17 Role of Big Companies in Climate Change Innovation

• 25:49 The Importance of Corporate Involvement in Innovation

• 26:26 A Glimpse into a Day in the Life of a Climate Innovator

• 29:13 Overrated or Underrated: A Discussion on Climate Solutions

• 40:48 Exciting Projects on the Horizon

• 44:02 Advice for Those Interested in Climate Action

Is carbon tax, over-rated or under-rated? Alyssa: I spent a really long time, like too long in my career looking at market mechanisms and the difference between emissions trading and carbon taxes and so on. The reason why I think it's overrated is that it's important. And it's important as a market correction for people to see the cost of carbon and the things that they pay for, but actually it exists to a greater extent than we already think.

So what I think is overrated is the idea that suddenly someone will introduce something new called a carbon tax that will save everything.  But actually a carbon tax for some things in some places already exist, and there's quite a complex set of taxation that already exists. Even if it's not peg is too carbon taxes, things that are car, some things that are carbon intensive more than others. 

The second thing is that for carbon tax to be a solution that some think it might be the knock on behavior reaction to that tax has to be available, possible, desirable, and just right in terms of at least progressive, right? And a tax alone won't do those things. You need to also have the solutions and the structures in place so that when you implement, which makes sense when you implement a higher cost of more polluting things, everybody has a choice that they can make to move away from those polluting things. 

And so for me, the best illustration of why we're not completely ready for a tax at the scale we need yet is the hike we've seen in energy prices in the UK because of our moral decision about the Ukrainian war. And actually what is that it's hit a lot of people really hard and the governments had to compensate them.

But essentially you could almost see that as an experiment in a very high carbon tax and it hasn't delivered what we'd want.  In terms of lasting sustained emissions reductions, because we actually haven't done the thing that we could have done, which is invested in  options that allowed people to actually use less energy rather than just continue to pay a higher price.

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Transcript (this has been AI assisted and may contain errors)

Ben: Hey everyone, I'm super excited to be speaking to Alyssa Gilbert. Alyssa is the director for the Center for Climate Change Innovation at the Grantham Institute. She's based at Imperial College and the Royal Institute. Welcome. 

Alyssa: Hi, thanks for having me.

Ben: In terms of climate technology, where do you think we are most under invested in?

Where would you like to see more investment flowing to? 

Alyssa: So I've, a nice way to look at this is to look at The areas where we need to take action, so look at both the kind of spread we have of greenhouse gas emissions and also look at where the areas are of greatest climate impact and then see what's the level of.

Activity in terms of innovation, relatively speaking, and all of those areas. I did see some research on that just recently, and I can't precisely remember where I saw it, but basically, we're behind on all of them in terms of all of if you look at all of the major blocks of energy innovation. Yeah, it just in terms of I know where I saw it.

There was some investment stats for 2023 that looked at the kind of tracks of money invested in different. Bits of climate innovation and what is that there's a significant chunk of money that goes into the broader category of energy. But it's still not enough because we have so many emissions that come from energy.

It in a way, it seems because there are some interesting opportunities in areas like transport, particularly, we see is getting a lot of investment. So it might give you the feeling that we're doing quite well in transport, but actually broadly across transport. If we consider things like heavy, goods vehicles, things like the need to really tackle the growing emissions from aviation and maritime. We're basically under investing in all of those areas. Across sectors under invested across the piece but particularly in adaptation to climate change. We've seen this across the board, really.

It's really easy to measure emissions. It's very hard to measure impact. And the different things that determine who's impacted worst by climate change are also very varied. So there's different kinds of points of intervention. And it's less easy for people to invest in it in a kind of traditional innovation way.

But I think there is potential for some innovation in adaptation and for combining making us resilient to climate change alongside. Reducing greenhouse gas emissions, so you can see that in terms of buildings materials. For example, you could design a building. That's both climate resilience and really green in terms of emissions.

So we could be doing some more innovations there. And I guess where we also need a lot of more activity is in heavy industry, where we know that we really need the power of fossil fuels to continue, but we need to work hard at. solutions that work for people in those sectors. And sometimes those solutions, they're not the whizzy ones that are attractive to you and I, like we can't imagine buying it ourselves, we would never buy it ourselves but new kinds of materials for industrial use and new kinds of processes for industrial use are really important.

Great. That was similar in some ways to the answer that Chris Stark, who Is CEO of the climate change committee, but is leaving this year gave that actually adaptation was an under looked at area, but across all of the domains, like you mentioned, land use, transport, buildings, industry, and the like it to seem like we're overall under invested.

If you had then a magic wand, some sort of magical ability, and you could implement one or two policies, one or two climate policies, or they might be an intersectional policy, what would you have at the top of your list? 

So the number one thing that's at top of my list relates to energy efficiency and the built environment.

This is an area where we, particularly in the UK, have been underperforming in terms of implementation for a long time. We don't have. To struggle to find the solutions, the technical solutions, but we do struggle to find the mechanisms for implementing in an efficient way, the solutions that should make our homes more efficient in the way that they heat and cool us.

And, the solutions need to be integrated, so they need to be spaces that provide quality of life for the people living in them, ventilated, and that combines a whole range of things that should suit people's needs. The built environment in the UK, in some places, we have a lot of beautiful old slash heritage buildings.

It depends on how you look at it, but some of those don't deliver the best for people. This is also an area where we can combine delivering for the climate agenda with combining delivering for people's pockets. And the tricky thing is getting the financial models, we're delivering these solutions to people that lower their long term energy bill costs.

Improve their quality of living and are better for the environment and we just haven't seem to manage at least as UK as a nation to just put our foot on the accelerator pedal and appreciate that reducing the demand in terms of energy and carbon related emissions from our building stock can also.

Improve our energy security and so on. So that's my number one. And 

yeah, so go on. 

Ben: Yeah. Do you want to do a number two or we can talk? 

Alyssa: No, you go, you go ahead. 

Ben: So on the end of it, energy efficiency piece as an example do you think the bottleneck is primarily this financing model, or I also hear sometimes that.

Yes, money is an issue, but partly it's an issue of skills and coordination so that just isn't a organizing force because to your point, the technology is actually there for a lot of energy efficiency. Yes, we could do more things in more different ways, but it's not an unknown technology, but we have a difficulty in coordinating.

There's some money, there's some policy. And it, there seems to be a consensus that this is something that could be win. I'm intrigued to know from your point of view, where you think the bottlenecks have been, that we haven't been able to implement this in the UK. 

Alyssa: Essentially, if you think about it from a user perspective, so the person who is going to have either their home improved in some way, the experience has to be easy for them.

They have to feel like they have trusted providers to give them the service, whether that's a housing association or an individual at the end of the recipient of that service, they have to. Probably know other people who've had it done and not been completely disrupted. So it has to work for that person and to create a system that works effectively to deliver for a wide range of people and types of houses requires a program of delivery or different kinds of programs of delivery.

Some perhaps publicly delivered, some perhaps privately delivered, which yeah. Are both able to deliver quickly, but actually have a longer term certainty and have time to deliver a good program delivery mechanism. And I don't think that no, no one's invested in that kind of. Institutional structure in some way, and I don't mean that it has to be institutionally heavy.

So you could empower several private sector organizations to do this, but you have to give them more than, let's say, what's been done in the past a year or a year and a half to deliver tons and tons of energy efficiency outcomes. You have to say. Here's our objectives for 5 years or 10 years.

Create some trustworthy programs for consumers like this. Here are the standards they would have to adhere to. Here are the existing trusted consumer bodies, etc. That, we'd rely upon. Here's the trusted financial service bodies that will oversee your financial offering, etc. So we haven't, the desire for it to be done quickly.

And the sort of almost. Stop, start, stop, start, release of packages of money hasn't allowed a cohesive implementation framework to be developed. 

Ben: I guess that also means that optimistically, there's no reason why we couldn't do this over time. It's something that we could win at, even if we're not winning at the moment.

Alyssa: Absolutely. I am like a die in the wool optimist. So I absolutely, we can do this well. And I, there are plenty of things that we do deliver well. So let's make this another one of those. 

Ben: Great. In terms of a kind of simple caricature, we have those in the world who are arguing for a kind of degrowth stance less consumption, and those who say on the other side are more techno optimist, saying that technology will do things, and everything in between.

What do you think of those camps and how should we think about it? 

Alyssa: So firstly, I would say that to be successful in tackling Climate change and other environmental issues. We really need everybody on board. But we don't need everybody on board in the same way. There are different approaches and attitudes to where solutions lie.

We shouldn't feel the need that everybody has to agree. It would be nice for the majority of people to see that the challenge is important. But the solutions can be varied. I'm interested sometimes that. Yeah, some of the aspects which underlie what you described as the degrowth scenario, I'm surprised that some of those principles aren't interesting to the techno optimists as well, particularly the efficient use of resources.

So underlying this, I know I mentioned energy efficiency already, but I think that most people I think should be able to get behind. But if we use things more efficiently, it's got to be better for us in general and more productive. So I think that there are different ways to capture the idea of efficient use of materials.

And the way that, that different people implement that could be culturally very different. So it could be that there are people who like and feel empowered by and feel positive about the extensive reuse using, a more kind of Made at home, this kind of the feeling that gives people, that's a way to use materials efficiently, but equally you can have quite technical ways of using materials more efficiently.

What underpins that is the same. So I find that kind of interesting as a concept, but ultimately as an overlay, I find just the whole cultural bit interesting. So for me, the techno optimism bit, it all comes down to what do people find cool? And I'm completely fascinated by that. It's great to have technical solutions that make.

a range of people excited and want to engage with them because ultimately technical solutions alone won't solve anything if no one uses them. 

Ben: Interesting. Yeah, that idea that everyone's being on board, humans. Can't really agree on anything at any one time. So you're not going to get everyone on that.

And I agree that actually, sometimes it's the terminology because you mentioned efficiency, but for instance, food waste, so eliminating food waste, either on the kind of table side is it is in developed nations or richer nations and on the waste on the supply chain in poorer nations, you can actually have a technology way round that.

On the one hand, food waste is a degrowth idea to let's not waste our consumption, but actually you could have a techno optimist partner that, and I think if you describe to that, a lot of technologists are are interested in that. Some also think just abundance is the way forward, but it's interesting that actually when you think about it, there's some things where you will want to apply technology to some other principle.

I guess I slightly call them maybe techno pragmatists or techno realists, but I don't think that's a term that's actually come into existence yet. I was listening to Jeremy Grantham. Who's a philanthropist and also an investor and he gives money both by venture capital. So VC and also via philanthropy.

So he does both. And I think it was interesting. He made an observation when I was listening to him one day that he's currently making giving more grants via VC than via philanthropy. And when he was asked about this. Essentially, it came down to business model and profit motivation and sustainability of whatever the idea that was supported.

That actually, if there is some profit and money involved, then that venture might be able to be more sustainable than a grant making. Type of thing where it might be good for a catalyst, but it was harder to, to perhaps sustain. You also have a foot a little bit in both worlds. So I'm really interested in your work in VC and what you think about that.

Also the role of philanthropy and what are the pros and cons of both the a philanthropy view and grant making view of things and a kind of VC startup innovation view of things. 

Alyssa: Yeah, so I really like being in both camps. And for me, Anyone doing anything, I think it's always really important to be really clear about what your primary objective is and then the drivers of what you do need to be well aligned to your primary objective.

Otherwise you might. Fear, of course. And so this issue of valuing profit or not profit approaches to tackling climate change relate somewhat to what the objective ultimately is, and to what part of that a capital gain approach can deliver that objective at the same time. When I look at climate innovation as a topic, as a whole, what I see is that we really want to incentivize the creation of new ideas and commercializable businesses.

And then we want their rollout at scale as quickly as possible now. If you take a traditional venture capital approach, where you want to have quite a large return in a certain timeframe, then of the world of solutions that we have that can tackle climate change through this commercial route, maybe a certain percentage, let's, for the sake of argument, say 10 percent will deliver within that perspective to what a typical VC investor will want.

That means that 90 percent will not. Now, the question that you have to ask yourself is, Do we think that in terms of tackling climate change at pace, it's okay for 90 percent of those to not go further. Probably it's good for some of them to fail. We don't want to build a bulky kind of organization that supports everyone, but through.

Less VC driven or different models of work and valuing those businesses, you can maybe think about how do you then drive commercial success that's delivering 5X or 2X or perhaps over a lower period of time so that you can have a flourishing, much more varied set of commercial enterprises. And then beyond that, you can think about the ones for whom a for profit model might not be suitable.

And then you can ask yourself is it worth supporting those? Because maybe if there's no financial value, there's no value in their outcomes, and then you really have to identify which of those outcomes are important to delivering against the challenge, your wider climate objective, and some of those will be valuable, even though they're not delivering financially, and those are the ones where you need philanthropic capital.

And then the final bit of the question you asked was what about their longer term sustainability in financial terms? You have to be really honest with yourself about the longevity then of those non sort of capitalist investments. Not everything should last forever. It's really important to define the timeline over which that additional service with its added value should exist.

And I think there will always be some things that won't generate profit and people won't pay a lot for, maybe not enough for, but maybe you then have to. iterate on what your business model is, so to speak. Is it just philanthropy or other things? So I think we do need a variety of models out there. So we should be harnessing what we've got in the capitalist model to take us as far as we can, but not ignore what we also need.

Ben: That's very well thought out, pluralistic view of how we need to tackle things. So you're very involved in the London climate tech ecosystem. Tell me what your work is around that. What are you excited about? Where do you think the kind of challenges? And I guess as an adjunct to that, there's some thought that ecosystems like this benefit from a agglomeration effect where you have lots of startups or businesses and interactions, and they seem to have these kind of spillovers.

We look at it in various cities and places in the world, and that seems to be a thing. On the ground, I'd be interested if you are seeing impacts of that agglomeration already here in London, and what, yeah, what do you think about the climate tech scene? 

Alyssa: Yeah, so I'm going to start with the excitement question because it's really exciting and I think that at least anecdotally on the ground, I am feeling that agglomeration effect.

So I'm lucky to be building on the work that a colleague of mine started some 10 plus years ago Richard Templer. He just got a well deserved OBE for his work on climate innovation and he kicked off what we're doing now. And what we're doing now is really. Because I based at Imperial College, we're really working on what is it that a university can give to this ecosystem.

So we start at the very beginning of building the pipeline of both. Potential innovators, students and staff, and the potential of ideas. We nurture that pipeline through competitions and all kinds of other things. And then we have our own non dilutive, so we don't take a share of it, accelerator program to support early stage businesses.

And then we do a little bit of work to help the overall ecosystem have success. So we work on, for example, the Clean Tech for UK program that Bill Gates launched at Imperial. In February, 2023, so we do some activities that are about helping launching, getting those business going, but then at that point, we step back because it's a bit like our conversation about where the for profit and the commercial success becomes important.

Then these companies need to survive on their own. So we've been doing that for about 10, 11, 12 years in some shape or form. But what we can see now, and this is the exciting bit is that now we're not alone. At the beginning, we were alone and we've kept doing it. And now there's all kinds of accelerators and incubator programs.

More and more universities in our sector are thinking, not just about innovation, but also about climate innovation and adding interesting. Flavors depending on where they are in the country that includes social dimensions. They include more applied research. So it's really exciting to see that grow. And we've seen a big influx of VCs, new investors.

Some that I've heard referred to as ESG or climate tourists. So interested investors who are like, Oh, this is exciting. We've seen a kind of a resilient flow of capital entering, but the things that get me really excited are. Fun new technologies, and particularly people. So I have met increasingly numbers of people who have either already been successful startups in completely unrelated fields, and they're like, now I want to do a new startup, and I want it to be in climate.

They know nothing about climate. And that is great. People quit their jobs after working sort of 25 years in heavy industry, and they're like, I have the knowledge that's needed. I want to join a startup in this area. That's really exciting. And the other people related dimension is seeing people come to London from other parts of the world.

And we're talking where you would expect coming from San Francisco, coming from Asia with their money saying this, we know this is the place we need to be come meet with us. We want to invest in your ideas. And so there's absolutely this kind of. Real flourishing of the sector. And that of course, it's the, it's a, it's virtue to a circle.

Ben: That sounds excellent. Anything on the challenge side you'd want to highlight? 

Alyssa: One of the things I'm interested in at the moment. Yeah, there's maybe three things I'd raise. One of the things I'm interested in at the moment is how do we match properly talent with this growing community?

So there's a range of different kinds of talents we need. And as I alluded to, there's a number of talented people. Wanting to work in this area and even with the kind of brilliant new tools, how you can find a job using AI and blah, blah, blah, we just, I want us to be better at matching the talent with these growing startups and businesses and, Talent selection is really hard when you're creating a startup because you go from being a small group of founders of a business, the next person you hire is high risk.

You want to trust them. You need them to be great. And so how can we do a good job of successful kind of that, matching those talent pools as well as making sure we have the right skills that we need, which, that's also why London's attractive, right? It's a high center of highly skilled people, but it's the matching that I find interesting.

The second challenge now. Is in this kind of pool of interest, how do we make sure that we're not saturated so. We need to, beef up the number of ideas if we have more accelerator places, or do we have good high quality support and incubation? So we don't want there to be any blocks along the way.

And if you speak to different people in the innovation chain, they might tell you different things about where that block is. And that just relates to where people's perspectives are. So making sure that we quickly identify and unblock any kind of blocks in the chain and link to that is making sure that the kind of.

Flooding in of things like lots of accelerator programs can of course mean that you do get some cowboys and you know what would sadden me the most is if you have brilliant ideas that kind of get sucked into something that looks like a good program and so on and then actually just takes advantage of them.

Continuing to maintain high volume, high quality and getting those ideas successfully implemented. 

Super insightful. If someone has an idea, or even something just vague and they'd like to pitch to you, what are the type of things that you're interested in hearing about? Either about the idea, or the purpose, or the kind of elements that you want to see in terms of an idea which comes to you?

Yeah, so I guess we, we invite people to enter our open climate launchpad competition once a year, which is every summer. And there we're looking for very early stage ideas, or we look for people to apply for our greenhouse accelerator program which happens twice a year. And there we're looking for slightly more developed ideas when we're looking for ideas.

We're looking for a number of different things. First of all there has to be a little bit of a good sense, and it will be more developed. If you apply to the greenhouse of a product or a service that can actually. Solve somebody's problems. You have to have a bit of an idea about the market that you want to serve and really been thoughtful if it's an idea or actually spoken to some people to understand that it really meets the needs of some consumers or users.

As a warning to people, if you're starting a startup, your idea will for sure change, but just demonstrating that you have engaged with that market's really important. You need to have a solution, and your solution can be very technical, so we have a lot of people who come to us with discoveries that they've made that are very technical, and we like to see those, because as a technical university like Imperial is, we're able to offer a lot of support for technical solutions.

But sometimes those solutions can be bringing together. Idea is a combination of things that have existed for some time. It doesn't need to be complex, but it's the way that you might combine it. So bring us your original idea. Bring us something that really has a kind of a story vis a consumer need and have some thoughts about what business model you'll use to create value from your ideas.

So what is your kind of initial idea of how you're going to monetize it? And the final factor, which I'm sure many people have heard is, of course, it's about you. So it's about, You as an individual, and what we're looking for really is people who are persistent, creative, but also very important people who are adaptable and flexible, willing to take advice.

So this kind of delicate combination of people who are inspiring and gung ho, but also understand that they might not have all the answers. 

Ben: Excellent. And zooming out, then, do you think you have an ask for, say, other big companies in the ecosystem? Some of them are doing a little bit here, a lot of them are just working on whatever their core business is.

Do you think there could be more innovation or partnerships at that level, or do you have an overall ask for big companies in this?

Alyssa: So I think there's a few areas where big companies can get involved. The first one is that big companies have their own challenges in terms of their climate change objectives, both regulated and sometimes voluntary. And again, that's in terms of both climate resilience and also emissions reductions. If those companies don't feel like they can do their R and D or innovation themselves, and some businesses would rather not share your problems, with somebody, because we've got lots of innovative capital, innovative people and entrepreneurs. We want to understand your problems as deeply as possible.

So be willing to connect to us and partner with whether it's a university or other groups, just to start to draw out those problems and help to stimulate, Through competitions or through other engagements with researchers, and we do some of that, but I would love to see more of that. That's what I personally want to engage with companies.

The other part of the story, as I also mentioned earlier is innovation is all very well and good, but the almost the hardest part of innovation. Is making it happen. So getting it implemented and that part of what we call the S curve of growth, right? You get slow, gradual growth, and then zoom, you get taken out by lots and lots of people having corporate entities, big businesses willing to try things out and then importantly, go beyond the nice high profile.

I can tell everyone about it on social media trial to a proper implementation. That's the bit of the story that can really help us. And doing that in a way that is really evidence based and experimental. Innovation requires trying stuff and making mistakes. So that's hard for corporates.

I'd love to see more of that and engage with businesses who are willing to try do some of that. 

Excellent. And tilting to perhaps a tiny bit more of a personal note, do you have any highlights from your working week or working day in terms of what it's like to work in this cluster in London, doing the kind of stuff that you do?

Let's

see, I guess there's my days are so varied, let me just think about my Week this week, I just bumped into a senior colleague here. We've been talking a little bit about how we can connect better to the international ecosystem around climate innovation to allow for more efficient flows of ideas, capital, market knowledge to help with that implementation at a global scale and also to help understand those problems and how they differ in Like differentiate and are varied in different parts of the world.

So I just spoke to a colleague literally this morning about our opportunities to set up a kind of node or hub or partnership in Singapore. And I had that follows up on a trip I went to earlier, and I had a similar conversation with a colleague yesterday about India and how we can encourage our colleagues to think about.

Their solutions, but in very different economic environments, so different business models. So there's been a fun international dimension to my week this week, which is part of looking forward. Exciting that I'm actually sitting right now and speaking to you from Imperial's West London campus, which is in White City.

And that's exciting for me because in our incubation work where we support. 30 startups a year, we offer them some workspace and we are moving them to white city to this space here. And I'm excited because this is a really cool place to be. And yesterday one of my colleagues gave us a tour of what is our called our advanced hack space.

If you want to make anything with any tool, you can do it there. So my personal reflection on that is. That I really want to make something in that workshop. And I've been like spending a bit of time thinking, what can I do that involves me learning how to weld? Basically, that's my like but on, at the same time, it's really exciting because our startups will be coming here.

They'll be able to engage with startups across different sectors. So we have lots of life science startups here as well. So last night on my way home, after I'd been thinking about what I could build in the Hackspace with welding equipment, I also walked past the gathering of startups that happens every Thursday after work here.

In our offices, which is just a whole load of startups from different sectors hanging out together. So all of those things have been pretty exciting. I also, on my way to lunch yesterday, bumped into the science minister who's coming to visit our campus. So that's also cool because we're always interested in building kind of links to policymakers.

And we have the president of a very large environmental foundation coming to visit us this afternoon, which is also exciting. So every day is different here. 

Ben: Excellent, so much great stuff going on. If I play a little game of overrated, underrated, so I'm going to throw out a little thing and you can say whether you think it's overrated, underrated, or just some comments and you can pass or be neutral about it.

So overrated or underrated carbon offsets. 

Alyssa: Overrated. Overrated. 

Ben: Why overrated?

Alyssa: I think that we really need to focus very heavily on the need for us to reduce our emissions in the first place. And offsets are so tempting. I have to tell you that I love the beauty of market based mechanisms where you can trade things off with each other. I'm completely seduced by market mechanisms and I've done a lot of work on them.

But the temptation is so great. To think about using something that offsets rather than then, first of all, delivering with the technology we have offsets are important. So it doesn't, there are some very high quality offsets they deliver. They can deliver lots of benefits of a huge number and a very wide range of benefits.

That go well beyond carbon emissions, and they can play a really important role in unlocking private capital. So they're useful, but I do think they're a bit overrated. 

Ben: That's very fair. A plant based diet. 

Alyssa: Oh yeah, underrated. Basically they're vegetables and fruit. That's the thing that we know is important to our health in general.

It can have an enormous impact on, emissions. So really important. I think, maybe. Weirdly marketed, but definitely underrated. And I think, the idea, I like the idea of a flexitarian diet also, because I've had some really interesting and informative conversations with really deep experts in different types of sustainable farming and agriculture, where you can also continue to.

Eat meat and other kinds of things in quite a sustainable manner but fruit and veg. Yes. Great. Yeah, 

Ben: great. I guess that segues into behavior change or culture change

Alyssa: underrated. 

Ben: Why underrated

Alyssa: the way that behavior change is presented makes it sound like it's a choice either we just, go, either you should just turn off your heating, wear a sweater and never leave your house. And basically have a low quality of life like that's what people understand behavior change to be sometimes, I think, but actually.

I think culture and values is everything. And because the uptake of technology requires us to like and want to use those technologies and them to be easy to use and them to be popular and acceptable by different people, it's desirable. All of those things are cultural actually. And the choices that we make, the choices that business people make, that's behavior change.

So we don't label enough things. We shouldn't do it by the way, because I think. Nobody wants to know that they're changing all the time, but cultural underpinnings are everything. 

Ben: Yeah, makes it sound like it's sacrifice. I always think about in, there's a picture in 1900 New York City everyone's on horses.

And then just 10 years later in 1910, everyone's in a car. And actually that's behavior change. That's the whole transition which has happened. Yes, with technology, but no one gets on horses and everyone gets in cars. And we don't really think of that as behavior change, but it's a critical underpinning.

Great. 

Alyssa: Yeah, the other example of that I think people like the car horse one. But the other one I always think about is mobile phones. Yeah. This morning, my daughter said to me, just as we were leaving the house this morning, her to school and me to work, she's I still can't believe that when you were my age, you didn't have the internet.

And I was like, okay obviously she thinks I'm old, but also a phone. Like we all what would we be without our phones and no one told you had to do it. And it's a big cultural change to the extent that many of the services that we need to access, assume that you have your phone now.

Ben: Yeah, this will date us, but our university experience with kind of the last generation, the very in between generation, where most of us did not have mobile phones at university. It just crept in, but the majority did not which is a different, very different way of being. 

Alyssa: Yeah. That's an interesting cultural point, right?

The people who had phones when you and I, as old as we are, were at university. In a way, not they weren't ridiculed, but they were the people who were under pressure to communicate with home really regularly, and that was not a plus, right? So actually, not having a mobile phone was a badge of independence.

Your parents not expecting a call every night. Yeah. Ever. Okay. 

Ben: Underrated, overrated carbon tax.

Alyssa: Overrated. Overrated. 

Ben: Why do you think that? 

Alyssa: Okay. So I spent a really long time, like too long in my career looking at market mechanisms and the difference between emissions trading and carbon taxes and so on. The reason why I think it's overrated is that it's important. And it's important as a market correction for people to see the cost of carbon and the things that they pay for, but actually it exists to a greater extent than we already think.

So what I think is overrated is the idea that suddenly someone will introduce something new called a carbon tax that will save everything. But actually a carbon tax for some things in some places already exist, and there's quite a complex set of taxation that already exists. Even if it's not peg is too carbon taxes, things that are car, some things that are carbon intensive more than others.

The second thing is that for carbon tax to be a solution that some think it might be the knock on behavior reaction to that tax has to be available, possible, desirable, and just right in terms of at least progressive, right? And a tax alone won't do those things. You need to also have the solutions and the structures in place so that when you implement, which makes sense when you implement a higher cost of more polluting things, everybody has a choice that they can make to move away from those polluting things.

And so for me, the best illustration of why we're not completely ready for a tax at the scale we need yet is the hike we've seen in energy prices in the UK because of our moral decision about the Ukrainian war. And actually what is that it's hit a lot of people really hard and the governments had to compensate them.

But essentially you could almost see that as an experiment in a very high carbon tax and it hasn't delivered what we'd want. In terms of lasting sustained emissions reductions, because we actually haven't done the thing that we could have done, which is invested in options that allowed people to actually use less energy rather than just continue to pay a higher  price.

Ben: Yeah, that's a super sophisticated view. It's part that we have no alternative, so it's not transitioning away at the speed we would like, because what do you move to? And there is this impossible trifecta at the moment, that ideally what you want is green energy. cheap energy and secure energy. If you could have all three, that's my kind of magic.

Obviously, it's not available and you do have to deal with all three pillars. I also think that we can see, for instance, within transport, which we mentioned before actually sector based policy ideas can get you there without a full on carbon tax, right? So transitioning. raising your standards, supporting EVs and the like have actually transports on the way, we can argue about the speed.

And they haven't had to use a carbon tax, which again, has these issues and popular supports of that. So theoretically, I know a lot of economists like it, but the political economy and the sector based policy actually says that maybe you don't need it in order to do the things That we have. 

Alyssa: Yeah, I've had lots of conversations with people who've implemented carbon taxes, like in British Columbia, where they have a famously quite successful carbon tax.

But when you speak to people there, they also know that they need a mix of other policy instruments. So I think it's recognized by some people. And of course, in transport, we do tax fuel. Yeah, it's not labeled a carbon tax, but It's pretty significant. It's, a mix of policy measures.

So I guess maybe never trust the silver bullet. 

Ben: Yeah, exactly. And actually now there's pushback in BC as well, to some extent. Okay. And last one on this one, overrated, underrated geo engineering.

Alyssa: Overrated. 

Ben: And your thoughts on why? 

Alyssa: And, but it depends a little bit. People use the word geoengineering in a very broad way. Yeah. And I think that's. In a way, that's a little bit problematic because there were some things that people lump in to geoengineering that I think are really important the use of greenhouse gas removal technologies and some things like carbon capture and storage some of these technologies, people call geoengineering but they're Basically engineering.

Yeah. And I think we do need engineering. And we also do need to recognize that we need to do some carbon removals amongst the mix of what we're doing. So the category of engineering that I would consider overrated is the ones where we do some quite large planetary experiments.

That are rather than tackling the two challenges we spoke about in the beginning, which is reducing greenhouse gas emissions, we're helping us become more resilient to climate change. There's a third approach, which is to circumvent the climate system, right? Interfering somehow directly in the climate system, which is what we've accidentally been doing for whatever, 150 or 200 years.

And that kind of geoengineering, like literally experimenting with the planet directly, I think is overrated, or it's not my, it wouldn't be the first thing I choose on the menu, basically, and we accidentally made a choice on the menu already. So let's not just let's not follow through with dessert just yet.

However, and maybe this is my perspective because I work at a university, it's important to understand stuff, right? We should understand stuff and we should understand technical things and we should also always understand social and political economy dimensions of things. So doing research to understand these techniques and how they're understood, what people feel about them, the risks and the political economy.

So might some other countries do some things that. Which countries they might be and so on. Yes, we should always seek to understand broadly. 

Ben: Yeah, I think, I agree. Lots more basic research would really help because actually we still don't understand enough about the climate, but partly that you don't want to put a big metal shield in the sky when you don't really know what's going to happen.

But to your point, maybe there's a island nation, which is going to disappear. And so it decides by itself, it will do some geoengineering to save itself. That sort of slightly fantastical situation is perhaps not quite as fantastical as we would like it to be. And so there's issues around that, that you might want to talk about.

I didn't think about geoengineering as things like carbon capture or this weathering rock and type stuff. But you're right, we should probably do more of that. That will be part of a part of the things. Great. So are you working on any particular current or future projects that you would like to share, or do you have a particular process that you want to share about how you think about the world?

Alyssa: Yeah, I've got a couple of really exciting projects that I'm working on at the moment that I would like to tell you about. The first one is, I think is really exciting. At least for me anyway, I said to you that one of the things I'm concerned about is, I don't want there to be any blocks in the pipeline for climate innovation.

So one of the questions that I've got a new project that's going to try and answer is, do we have ideas, inventions, discoveries in the research community in the UK that are not crossing the threshold over becoming into like becoming an innovation that could do, but are not? Do they exist? Things that could help us tackle climate change?

And if they do exist, why aren't they crossing that threshold? And then if we do find some that aren't crossing that threshold, can we try and find some interventions and test them and play with them that could help? And that's a trial. So it's a project we're going to do for a couple of years. We're going to see what we find.

We're going to test. We're going to play with a bit of machine learning, which is exciting for me because as we've ascertained earlier in this podcast, I'm old and I don't know much about machine learning, so I'm excited to try something new. But I'm excited about that project because. I want to understand what the real situation is, and so do our funders and we're going to do that as collaboratively as we can with the whole UK academic community so that for me is really exciting, and we genuinely don't know what we'll find out.

There's, of course, the possibility that we don't find any. Research that's not yet being commercialized that could do, which is perhaps worrying in a different way. So we're gonna we're gonna unpick that. So that's my project number one. And we'll be recruiting some new people to help us do that over the course of early 2024.

But trying to engage with a much wider community in the coming couple of years. So that's the first one. I can have a second. 

Ben: Please. 

Alyssa: The second one speaks to the other area that I Think is trickiest for climate innovation right now, which is that of implementing those innovations once they're ready.

The people who go through our incubator programs or similar programs have brilliant solutions, products and services that can help us tackle climate change. But they enter a marketplace where people aren't yet ready for them always, the vision of some of those innovators is of the future we want in 2050.

And we're not always there yet. So we're doing a project focusing on the built environment. To bring together actors at the moment, just in London in the built environment and construction sector together with a group of climate innovators with different kinds of building materials or building processes or software digital products that can help deliver on climate change and built environment, and we're going to run a practical exercise.

To understand what the barriers are to implementing those climate innovations that scale in the construction sector, and we're going to work across those different actors to try and develop solutions and do some practical stuff. There'll be a report, but this is not about a report. This is about talking, discovering, trialing solutions and trialing some things in building development sites across the city.

So those are, that's another thing I'm really excited about this year. 

Ben: Excellent. That sounds really exciting. People listening do watch out for that if you want to get involved. And final question, do you have any, I guess I'd call it life advice or career advice, perhaps for people wanting to get involved within climate, or even just for the person in the street who's interested, isn't going to get involved in climate, but wants to be involved in some way?

Alyssa: Great. I guess it feels odd to be asked for advice, but I guess here's my musings. First of all, there's a role for everybody. Don't, if you are interested in this issue, don't feel like you need any special kind of qualification to get involved. If you are someone who wants to make a difference in your personal life, you're not sure it's something you have the bandwidth or ability to do in your career then an easy place to go is we've actually created something at the Grantham Institute that I did several years ago in my previous role called nine things you can do about climate change.

It's very evidence based, but there's a selection of things that you can do in your own life that might be just worth looking at for those people. But we are also thinking about how we can get people involved in community based innovation. So if you like this discussion about climate innovation and finding solutions, and you're at a community level the mayor of London, and I think this happens in other regions of the UK as well, run competitions and opportunities for people who are innovative at your community level.

I know that sometimes you can find those kinds of opportunities, I think through networks of libraries as well. So you can become an innovator at a community level as well. And then. In general, if you're interested in this topic, remember that you can do it with whatever expertise you already have.

So increasingly, tackling this problem, we need you to do it. Whatever job you're in. So don't immediately feel like I feel so inspired to take action on climate change. I'm going to quit my job as an accountant, or I'm going to stop being a teacher. No. Can you just please make sure you teach about this or you engage your students in this, or you think about how you can integrate carbon accounting or resilience measures if you're already someone who's really excellent and involved in businesses and a process level.

So you can do quite a lot for wherever you are. And I've seen some amazing people lead their organizations. From different positions, because they cared about this issue and actually eventually create new roles sometimes for themselves, too. But finally, if you are specifically interested in the things that we've spoken about, always feel free to reach out.

You can reach out to me and I will eventually reply. I think my two weeks is my kind of make sure you reply to people within two weeks deadline. But you won't be ignored. But also if there are other people that you think, oh, I've seen that person speak, or they run an interesting program, I'd always say.

Just drop them an email. Not very many people do it. You are likely to get a response. So always try that. And yeah, for people earlier, think about the people that you're speaking to, not just what you're learning. So connect with people and you'll find something interesting to do. 

Ben: Excellent. That sounds like excellent advice. So on that note, Alyssa, very much. 

Alyssa: Thanks so much for having me