Inside the Trillion-Dollar Climate Solutions Industry - Bloomberg
Inside the Trillion-Dollar Climate Solutions Industry - Bloomberg
Inside the Trillion-Dollar Climate Solutions Industry
The Zero podcast is celebrating its one year anniversary. Here’s a look back at some of the biggest takeaways from the show.
Akshat Rathi with Gilles Dreyfus, co-founder of agricultural technology startup Jungle.Photographer: Oscar Boyd/Bloomberg
A lot can change in a year. At this point in 2022, the world had yet to experience what has now become the hottest summer on record, Ukraine was just six months into combating a Russian invasion that permanently changed the world’s energy landscape, and the US Inflation Reduction Act’s promise of billions of dollars to reduce emissions was little more than ink on a page. The Zero podcast from Bloomberg Green had just published its first episode.
Since then, billions of dollars of IRA money have started to flow in earnest, and sky-high energy prices have helped push clean-tech like never before. Solar generation grew 26% in 2022, and is set to overtake both natural gas and coal as a source of electricity by 2027, according to the International Energy Agency. EVs are responsible for more than 5% of new-car sales in nearly two-dozen countries, a milestone figure on the way to mass-adoption. And Zero has produced more than 50 episodes, covering everything from the high-octane world of clean-tech venture capital to the role of property destruction in climate activism.
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Related Knowledge Center: Climate economics
Climate change is now a driver of the world’s economy. The impact is profound:
- Catastrophic weather events — hurricanes, floods, droughts, high temperatures — are more frequent and more extreme. The cost can be measured in both the initial damage caused and the longer-term impact on the economy.
- Vulnerable communities are increasing climate-related investments, hardening infrastructure and taking other protective measures.
- Investment in carbon capture and storage technologies is increasingly rapidly.
- Governments are making investments and crafting regulations to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.
On top of all of this is the cost of uncertainty. As the Fourth National Climate Assessment, released in 2018 by the U.S. Global Change Research Program, says, “The assumption that current and future climate conditions will resemble the recent past is no longer valid.”