Bloomberg Businessweek Weekend - July 12th, 2024

This is Bloomberg business Week Inside from the reporters and editors who bring you America's most trusted business magazine, plus global business, finance and tech news. The Bloomberg Business Week Podcast with Carol Messer and Tim Stenebeck from Bloomberg Radio.

Hi, everyone, Welcome to the Bloomberg Business Week weekend podcast. Call it the Wall Street Churn this past week as Vetchir J. Powell spend two days up on Capitol Hill

You don't want to wait until fluflation gets all the way down to two percent, because inflation has a certain momentum. You wouldn't wait that long. If you waited that long, you probably waited too long because inflation will be moving downward and we'll go well below two percent, which we don't want.

Excluding food and energy year over year core CPI running at three point three percent, but still a softer report for the month of June, and that spills good news for investors hoping for that long awaited interest rate cut later this year.

And well, J.

Powell gave us a check on the economy, Carol and I this week got a check on the climate.

That was definitely our focus. And that's because this week we broadcasted live from the Bloomberg Green Festival in Seattle, Washington. It was gathering of Earth's foremost collaborators, activists and innovators, business leaders, leaders from government, all on ways we can work toward a new climate era, on everything from sustainability and design to food policy, tech and so much more.

And so our show this weekend is dedicated to just that. We'll hear from great minds discussing the effects of climate misinformation, ways to improve ecotourism, how a satellite can track climate warming pollution, and how the chief sustainability officer over at Amazon and a WNBA Legend are collaborating for change.

We begin this hour with one of the nation's most respected voices on climate change, the environment, and public health. Jena McCarthy is a former EPA administrator, Harvard professor, and environmental thought leader. She was also the first ever White House National Climate Advisor under President Biden. We got her take on building a partnership playbook when it comes to

Bloomberg.

You know, we have a lot of good companies that are here represented, but honestly, we need more partnerships, both across the USA and internationally to really tackle this at the scale that it deserves. Clearly, the Inflation Production Act was an opportunity to give some public money to drive a whole lot more private investment, and we have to stop thinking that way.

I don't think it's e the or.

I actually think it's so partnerships that are going to drive this in a way that actually provides meaningful scaling of this opportunity, not just in the US but globally.

Okay, where's the government involvement? You mentioned the Inflation Reduction Act? Yes, in your view, is that just the tip of the Iceberg.

Do we need more that Well, we saw our immediately after that happened, we saw the EU st driving new changes in Germany. So it's begun to take off, and people are realizing that it's a way for the public and private sector to really join together so that they both of them can win. This is not about, you know, spending so much money in the private sector that you can't.

Afford to do the deals. This is about how.

Do we make these deals affordable by connecting public and private. But there's still a lot of opportunities for private companies to accelerate their markets, and they're going to take advantage of that, and we should let them.

You've worked in both Republican and democratic administrations. Why and when did the idea of climate change become so political in your view?

You know, it started off being pretty political because it took a whole lot longer time than it should have for us to recognize that this was a legitimate issue. And so now, of course it still remains fairly political. But honestly, the politics starts to move out when you realize that the kind of technologies and opportunities we have today are going to make people's lives better, if it's going to keep us healthier, it's going to save us money, if it's going to create real jobs, which.

Is what we're seeing today.

The politics may still be there, but it doesn't have the punch it news to.

How much speaking of politics of America remains all in if it elects Trump in November, given his promises to eliminate what he calls the ev mandate, target offshore wind and pull the US out of the Paris Crimate Agreement.

Look, I have every expectation that what he said he's gonna do, he's gonna do. So give you your answer. I don't see the United States or globally the kind of progression we need on climate if we don't elect someone who understands climate and wants to move those.

Issues, and in your view, that is not the former president that is.

That is correct because what's at stake is not just climate, which is the existential challenge of our time, but it's fundamentally our democracy.

Are you concerned from climate? First of all, that we would go off in a very different direction, We would be more isolated, because climate obviously has no quarters right. So yes, never before have we needed to work together with everybody. You know, we would just talking about that.

It's going to take public private partnerships, and it's going to take the US and the other developed world to start investing in the developing world if we want to make this work. And those investments can't be cold, they can't be more natural gas. They've got to be the shift to clean energy and transportation that we I know we can do well.

It is interesting because we know the US pulled out of the Powers Agreement under Donald Trump, then President Donald Trump if he threatened to do it again if he's elected in November. You have pointed though, in terms of climate progress that's made by states, by cities, like the local level. I think about we're going to be talking with the mayor of Seattle, like the local level really matters too.

You know.

That's really what Bloomberg's America All In program is all about. And it's more than five thousand people are joining together, and that's because sub national governments matter. If you remember when Trump was president before, the effort was to make sure that states and cities stood up and held the ground and kept moving forward, and that's exactly what happened. So we need to make sure that We're not going

You were talking about the Inflation Reduction Act, the investment in clean tech manufacturing, clean energy products projects under biden fed by the IRA. How much of that endures regardless of what happens at the polls in November. How durable is the investment that's been unleashed by the IRA and other policies that could be carried back if Trump wins the White House? Like, how vulnerable is it?

Yeah?

When you look at the money, we're talking about something like three hundred and sixty one billion dollars right, right, And this is just the start.

This is a ten year program. We just had a second birthday.

I think.

Yeah, So we have a long way to go. And we're talking about job growth that's in the plus three hundred thousand plus new jobs.

Right.

These things matter to people.

Human beings care about this and so these are benefits that people can see and feel and taste. So that's why I believe this going. Will there be challenges, absolutely. I expect that under a Republican administration, you're going to see lots of folks wanting to pull that out. You're already seeing bills in Congress being proposed to get rid of this and that.

But when push.

Comes to shove, we have more money going to Republican districts that are now building the manufacturing plants that they don't want to shut down. So if they want to go against their own constituents and their benefits, then then more power to them if they want to risk it. But I don't think that's going to be the case. I think we're going to hold the fort.

We'll lose some.

There'll be challenges, I think internationally, not just pulling out of the NATO even, But these are the things, the lodge, things that we have to think about that.

Could be at risk.

Thirty seconds genius. I'm thinking about everybody who's listening, yet, what's the one thing every individual take politics out, sh'd be asking themselves when it comes to the climate, what do.

They want as a future for the kids, What do they see right now as the challenges that they're facing. We can no longer hide from the climate impacts. But what we can do is grab the clean energy future for our kids. That's how we're all going in.

It's definitely something we think about, right you have young kids. I have a twenty one year old. We definitely think about it. Thank you so much and all the work that you've done.

Really appreciate it.

Jada McCarthy, I'm so glad I squeezed it on you.

Where to run out of time? If I've read all her title.

It's really impressive, But it's why we wanted to talk to you.

Do you former in the US EPA administrator under President Obama, the first White House National Climate Advisor appointed by President Biden. Once again, she's part of the coalition co chair of America is All In Coalition, which is supported by Michael Bloomberg.

Do you have something about the environment? Climate change and all the work. We're just going to say that if you missed any of it, check it out on our podcast week This is Blooper.

You're listening to the Bloomberg Business Week podcast. Catch us live weekday afternoons from two to five pm Easter. Listen on Apple car Play and then brought auto with a Bloomberg Business app, or watch us live on YouTube.

Tim Another big thing lawmakers will have to think about is climate disinformation. In fact, we all have to think about it. Just do a Google search or ask chat GPT and lots of entries pop up from around the globe and for the last few years, and not all of it when it comes to the climate is correct.

That's right.

In the World Economic Forums Global Risks Report twenty twenty four ranked misinformation and disinformation as the biggest short term risk to human society, and extreme weather events is the top long term risk, which implies that obscuring the facts about climate change can be extremely harmful. This is compounded by false information being significantly more likely to be reshared than the truth on social media platforms.

Our next guest is working to get out correct information on climate change. Lower Hesse Fischer is Program director for the MIT Climate Engagement Program.

Now, there's a lot As you mentioned, when you Google climate change, you get a lot of confusing information, and we understand that climate change is hard to understand. So what we do at MIT is we help people get smart, quick about climate change. You go online and you not only see the misinformation, but also a lot of the

Though?

Well, we fact check everything that we publish, so we make sure that we're not just putting out something that we don't understand or we understand ourselves, that we're really doing our due diligence inside of this, and we primarily interview MIT faculty who are trusted.

At the top of the game.

Okay, but it's getting a lot better than it used to be. Here's some data from a survey recently have found that those who believe climate change is happening out numbered those who don't.

Five to one.

Over half of the surveys just been said they understand climate change is mostly caused by humans, And if you look at it from just a few years ago in twenty eleven, that group survey said that fifty one percent said Americans would ask scientists whether climate change was a hoax compared to thirty nine percent in twenty twenty three.

I mean, things are really going in the right direction.

Listen to these are good news trends. But that's not the issue anymore. Yes, we have people that we still need to convince that climate change is happening in human calls, but now people have questions. There's this growing climate curious audience that are like, Okay, I hear about all these bad things about wind turbines and solar panels, Are those true? How do I think about carbon capture or planning?

Sometimes you have presidential candidates talking about partage whatever that's.

True, And so people are going to be googling and fact checking. We want to make sure that they get the right information and actually the content that we're putting at climate dot mit dot edu is one of the top research sites coming up on Google search terms.

More I'm what are like, what's some of the top questions that people?

Oh, yes, it's a lot of fun actually to see. We get really wonky science questions about like what's happening and why.

We get a lot of questions.

About EV's and batteries, the environmental impact of evs. One of our favorite ones that we get is about trees, planting trees. Why can't we just plant trees as a climate solution. Well, what we do is we say, okay, well, let's look at what would it take to actually plant trees to offset our carbon emissions in the United States. When we walk through that, we realize we're not talking

Well what is the right solution? Because I'll be honest, that does not sound great. No, doesn't sound like we're moving in the right direction.

Well, we need to The term is decarbonized, right, we need to stop putting in more carbon into.

The atmosphere than they can take care. How is it it's about stop producing carbon?

Well?

There is it.

Well, okay, we can have a long conversation about the carbon cycle, and I'm sure it will be very intellectually interesting for everybody, But there are natural pulls from the atmosphere that the Earth does. We need to accelerate some of those in order to pull out the carbon that's already up there.

But we also need to stop putting.

Stuff up there, because it's been accumulating and it's going to keep accumulating if we can't take it out fast enough. There's this great analogy I like using called the toolbox. We have an energy toolbox of solutions.

Right.

We have wind, we have solar, we have nuclear, And I'm kind of obsessed with this term called nuclear is part of it.

Nuclear is part of it. We are increasingly having conversations about it.

And you should be.

So there's this concept of technological tribalism. There are people who are all wind, all solar, forget everything else. Then there are people who are all carbon capture, forget about wind. Well, we need to get beyond all of that, right, because each of these technologies have their strengths and have their weaknesses, and we need to have an honest conversation about that.

Just care what do the solar people do at night? Just out of curiosity? Well, I mean do they have big batteries everywhere?

Yes?

I mean energy storage is a big part of the right now, you can only have about thirty percent of wind and solar on the grid in order to kind of keep the grid running and be reliable.

We really need to get.

Beyond that and get to energy storage different kinds of battery technologies.

Okay, so let's talk about the battery technology because I think one thing that keeps coming up over and over again is the idea that the batteries have rare earth materials in them. They are built with materials that have questionable labor practices. In some instances, you're digging into the earth to use these things. What do you do when they're dead and they where do you put them? How do you store them?

It's not perfect, it's not perfect, but it's also not a new problem. We've been dealing with this with diamonds. We've been dealing this with lithium that goes into our computers and our cell phones. I mean, this is a growing industry. But also when we look at the history of coal mining and the dangers that come with coal mining and all the other impacts of that. I'm not

Is the toolbox toolkit in terms of renewables complete at this point. You talk solar, you talk win, you talk nuclear. Is there more that we need?

There are some applications where carbon capture is part of the equation, right There are some industries that are hard to decarbonize. We're not saying carbon capture. So when you're emitting, when you're burning fossil fuels, capturing that carbon, putting it under the ground, turning into products. Listen, we're not there with that technology. It solution it is, it does work, but it's not a climate solution.

Is it a solution because it's not at scale? Or is it because it's so expensive to do?

Because someone's expensive to do. I mean we're at very high levels of efficiency when it comes to carbon capture, it's still way too expensive and so are batteries right now. So when I talk about the toolboxes, there might be a small, very important application like kind of last mile of to carbonization for carbon capture. But yeah, wind, solar, nuclear, So.

We have that constant flow of electricity.

These are very important.

A tiny battery for an electric bike h eight hundred dollars. I mean, tiny batter.

Are not there yet, but there's lots of innovation that's happening in this areas.

I have a question, and I would go to your platform and say, is it too late?

Oh, my goodness, it is not. So people really don't understand the momentum that is building.

And through climate dot MIT.

Dot edu, we really try to share all the good news stories that are happening in this area.

But is it because you're right too, because it is a much more balanced and nuanced story, or is it you know what I'm saying. It's gotten hotter earth and there's some things.

So there are.

Climate impacts that are scary and happening, and the progress towards actually solving this problem is happening.

The momentum is there.

We are decarbonizing faster than the economy is growing, so there's a decoupling of the growth of the economy and how much we're reducing emissions. Wind and solar have never been cheaper, of course, I mean China built more solar in the last year than US has ever built in the history China.

Yeah, so businesses really need to get like.

This is not a Our business is leading the way more than government, just real quickly.

Well on some issues and some issues not so much. I mean it's a trend. It's a fast moving train, and we need to get up. What's your bringing in people on board?

What's the platform again? Where can we find? Climate dot Mit dot edu.

We run a podcast where we talk about all these things in fifteen minute easy to understand segments called til Climate. We'd love for your folks to listen.

Really good stuff today.

I learned climate. That's what it stands for.

It's really pretty cool. Staple stuff or thanks so much about Laura hesse Fischer, program director of the MIT Climate Engagement Program. On site here at the Bloomberg Green Festival in Seattle.

You're listening to the Bloomberg Business Week podcast. Listen live each weekday starting at two pm Eastern on Apple car Play and Android Auto with the Bloomberg Business app. You can also listen live on Amazon Alexa from our flagship New York station, just Say Alexa Play Bloomberg eleven thirty.

More of our.

Broadcast from the Bloomberg Green Festival in Seattle. Washington this past week and Tim, it's new coincidence that we're in this city. We're here because of this these impressive legacy of environmental leadership. We had a lot to talk about.

Yes, Seattle has been a focus on building a clean energy economy and investing in healthy, well connected communities, and yet like other cities in the nation, its struggled to come back after the pandemic. For his take on the role that cities play in climate change and green policies, we spoke with Seattle Mayor Bruce Harral.

You've heard the cliche now mayors get things done, and it's more than a cliche. Is actually how we are going to transform our climate battles. I believe that we are what we work with. For example, in our building emissions performance standard and legislation that I proposed in the past, we look at our buildings which is a high polluter, and we said we will reduce our carbon emissions by

With each other.

But cities have the flexibility to go even further. And so that's what we try to do.

In everything that we do.

I you know, transportation, of course, you know, we're doing some incredible things in transportation. So I think the cities are the best position to get it done.

Let's talk about transportation.

In the two days I've been here, I've taken the bus, the light rail, the monorail.

It's been pretty great.

But this is still a city where a lot of people say they need a car.

How do you how do you change.

So I proposed a one point five to five billion dollar leve a translation level to look at our whole ecosystem. And it's all about choice. And you know, cars are getting smaller and they're becoming electrified, and so we don't have an anti car campaign which a lot of cars are getting bigger, a lot of cars are getting well, yeah, the the US, the four to the truck is still yeah. So you know, if your point is, we're still car dependent.

Ask you about that, because as a mayor, you've got to look at all of your citizens. And I too have walked around the city. I've walked down Pike Street. Your city's not alone in terms of dealing with homeless, a large homeless community. We see it certainly in New York City. Back home, I also think about office occupancies right people are staying home, they're working from home. Remote work is still a thing post pandemic. Like New York and some other major cities, you have a lot of

It is very challenging. So the first question I think we try to answer is to get people downtown. That example, if they're working from home, what drives people to downtown actively? There are certain things you cannot get through ecommerce, and again we're the home to Amazon, so we use forty commerce. You can't get a beautiful art show or beautiful song, or you can't buy that, and so we activate areas. You can't get daycare online or to speak, and so

Downtown, right, what was it before the pandemic?

Oh, that never has been pretty consistent. These are residents. But what I did was I proposed the legislation to convert office buildings to residential buildings, acceleration of permits, a lot of incentives to do that because we think more people will live downtown. What's happening in this country with the introduction of fentan illinoisio. It is killing our country.

What they will do.

And that's what you're seeing is people that could not in a meritocracy, could not find their way to success, and there could be a host of issues they're dealing with, whether it's mental illness and who knows what the challenges are. So we're going upstream. We now invest in pre K brain development between zero and four. We're looking at the middle schools and the high schools, trying to find the triggers.

Them all So if you would change one more thing that you think would get them off the streets.

What would it be, Well, I'd like to have the ability to control the health dollars to get them treatment. They are sick, and you don't arrest a sick person, You treat them, drink them healthy, and realizing they are bad people as well, so we're not afraid to make arrest and get the bad people off the streets. So if I had one thing to do, would be too. And we're working on this is to redesign the health strategies on these PBC dying on the streets.

You know what.

Housing is also part of this conversation. It's part of the sustainability conversation. It's part of the green conversation. The cost of housing here is astronomical, like in many parts of the country.

What are you doing in terms.

Of encouraging developers, working with developers to build affordable housing to house some of these folks.

Yeah, so I passed the largest housing levee last year in our country's history, is nine hundred and seventy million dollars. And in that it's all about affordable housing. Is making sure the teacher, the barista, the healthcare worker can live in the city. We create incentives throughout a tax and centers, if you will, to make sure that we reached you know, thirty fifty sixty percent of area median income for people

I have wealthy people moving here. Supply and demand dictates housing prices. So so my relationship with other cities becomes critical as well, because I want people to be sheltered preferably in Seattle.

But I have to realize the economics and such that it makes a look tough here. You know, the meeting house being nine hundred thousand to a million. You know, my wife and have three children, and when I look at and one just got married three weeks ago. So we're in their house highting and thinking, a wow, you got to have to come up with one hundred thousand dollars make a down payment here, and so locking mom and dad for that congratulations.

So it's a real problem.

So we get as creative as possible. You know, we talk about the terms called a podments or micro units. We relax our standards for our detached dwelling units and das outos attached, detached to look at single families owning building more so, we're being as creative as possible to make it affordable. But we are going and supply and demand.

That's just the reality of it.

What do you make of kind of citizen dissatisfaction with the country you see applying out as we make our way to the November presidential elections. Right, we talked about the economy doing okay, although we see some softness in the labor market. I'm continuing, but what do you make of that disconnect that maybe we're not realizing some of the struggles of our citizens.

So this is what concerns me. And then in the context of climate change, is that our younger generation, they understand the needs to protect our planet, they are getting dissatisfied when they see potential leaders that they somewhat feel like there's a disconnect. And you know, I've won four elections in the city. I know how to debate. One thing I never do. I never just denigrate my opponent.

I just figure they're they're they're applying for the same job I'm applying for.

This is what I have to offer. They have another brand, that's fine, But what you're seeing is this debate that I think and I'm not even taking signs, I think that it's such a turn off for the younger generation, Like I forget, forget those two guys. I'm gonna I'm going to disengage. That will hurt our country.

Here.

What I want to see is one person says, you know what, I respect your opinion, but this is what I'm going to do for the for this this country, and we're losing that. So leaders like myself elected leaders, we have to be louder than that radioactivity that we see the younger generation being so turned off. I talked to all three of our kids about this that that.

Scares me well.

And you wonder about the younger generation. Maybe they're looking for a younger candidate right to vote for like going forward.

Since I'm not part of that generation, I won't speak for them.

Listen, Thank you for speaking though to us today. We really appreciate it. Thank you, really appreciate it.

Thank you, Mary, good to see you. Thank you.

You're listening to the Bloomberg Business Week podcast. Catch us live weekday afternoons from two to five pm. Easter Listen on Apple car Play and andnbroud Auto with a Bloomberg Business app or watch us live on YouTube.

From a city's climate policies to the different ways we travel to these cities, everything has an impact on environmental sustainability and on our climate.

An estimate at eleven percent of global greenhouse gas emissions are due to tourism, and that's predicted to double by twenty fifty. It's the year that scientists have forecast does the tipping point for all sorts of ecological disasters. So how can tourism fix its emissions problem?

That's where Ryan Spies comes in. He is the managing director of sustainability at Alaska Airlines. He was at the festival to talk about sustainable aviation fuel.

So for sustainable aviation fuel is yeah, it can be almost like a miracle drug, but that doesn't exist in any quantities that we really need today. Sustainable aviation fuel can be made from things like fats, in greases, oils. That's primarily what we're seeing today. But the next generation of those things is really where the fund science comes into play and where the carbon emissions comes down quite a bit.

Is it always made of byproducts or are there certain crops that it could be grown just for producing this, So we.

Haven't seen any crops grown directly for producing it. You're usually using byproducts. But the future technologies is actually all about pulling CO two out of the air and transforming that with renewable energy and renewable hydrogen into jet fuel. It's something that can be dropped right into two planes today, which is really exciting. Right You're not worried about, you know, taking the farm.

And making it into fuel, Okay, I mentioned it's just a drop in the bucket right now. The aviation fuel management software provider I six Group says that only one tenth of one percent of all jet fuel that's used worldwide is sustainable aviation fuel, and that has remained level in the last four years.

You know, that number is definitely growing.

It's it's certainly we're seeing in about one percent right now and we're actually having demand much more every day. And so what we're seeing and what the challenge is is how do you scale up industry that is three to four times more expensive in the industry that exists today.

But also the planet really challenging.

So one gallon of sustainable aviation fuel is literally three to four times more expensive conventional.

Yeah, that's right. Okay, where are you getting it right now?

So primarily we're getting it out of a group in Montana that's doing FATS, oils and esters, and we're sending that to our Los Angeles Airport and Sentencisco report.

How do you bring these costs down? It's a great question.

One is investment, but really the idea here today is finding great partners. So innovation happens in a lot of places, and that's why the Bloomberg Greenfest being here is an amazing opportunity to meet with our partners, folks like Microsoft, folks like Amazon that have a vested interest in how do they bring their emissions down when they're traveling for it with their employees, and so finding those partnerships to help us offset that green premium is part of it.

It's the deal with any scaling.

Operation, right, how do we get more We need to induce more demand and we need to kind of keep that train rolling and having partners that help.

Us long, but are you just able to induce that demand by getting large corporate customers to pay more.

No, And that's actually a really exciting thing that Alaska has done. So we've engaged our guests on this journey as well. Back in December, we offered a promotion that if you bought a sustainable aviation fuel with US, you got some elite qualifying miles. We sold over a half a million gallons of staff in December alone. In May of this year, we just offered that to our guests to do it in the bypass, So the first US

It's also thinking about policy.

Policy is incredibly important and one that we've seen on the federal level with the Inflation Reduction Act that certainly helped. We want to take that a step further, we see credits expiring, how do we extend those? So there's so many levers that we need to be really engaged with.

And at Alaska we are.

Does the lever need to be pulled by the government out by governments outside of the US as well as by governments in the US.

You're seeing both, right.

So in Europe it's much more of a stick approach, mandate on percentages of staff that you have to use. That's just sort of come into place. So we'll see how that market develops. Obviously, we're a much more caret focused market here in the US, and so you see incentives for building you and see incentives for delivering, and those are a different approach, and we're.

Both going to see how this plays out.

But I think both are really important and so it's exciting to see how this industryald growing.

You sometimes hear terminology that doesn't exactly match what people think it means. So when you talk about sustainable aviation fuel, is it actually sustainable?

Yeah?

I mean you look at the life cycle. The science is certainly there behind it. But the challenge is is not all saff is equal, right? Each one might have a different carbon content or a life cycle carbon emissions associated with it, and so explaining that level of detail is challenging. We're always trying to think about it not in just gallon, a dollar per gallon, but dollar per ton. How much does it cost to reduce a ton of

So what's the byproduct that's created when an engine burns sustainable aviation fuel?

It is CO two, so it's still burning it. The thing about sustainable aviation fuels, you're looking at the entire life cycle of how the fuel is actually made, right, whether you're pulling fossil fuels out of the ground, which is traditional jet fuel, or you're using some lower carbon material in the production and process and transportation of that fuel. So at the end of the day, you're still burning some CO two. But if you look at the full life cycle much reduced with SAPPS.

So how much does it decrease the carbon output traditional flight if it's still emitting CO two?

Yeah, so you're looking at you know, with with with SOA today about a forty percent reduction if you're putting that a plane in the in the total life cycle. Our hope is to get up to eighty or one hundred percent with the e fuels that we talked about earlier.

Is this the only part of the solution when it comes to it, is it is the fact that airlines have on the climate.

It's the I would say it's the short and medium term solution for many flights and the long term solution for long haul flights. We believe in battery technology, but we believe that there's an opportunity for hydrogen to play a part. But those things don't scale quite at the same rate. If you think about flying from here in Seattle to New York, by the time you land today, or if you you took that flight, the weight of the aircraft has gone down tremendously.

If you do that with batteries, it's still the same weight.

So you're really fundamentally fighting against something that's physics. And so we think that for those short and medium term medium hall flights, new technologies will absolutely start to take take old staff will be there for.

The long term. What about hydrogen.

You know, we made an investment and actually donated a plane to zero avia.

So they're looking at Yeah, we're joined by the CEO and founder later on the program.

Yeah, it's super excited and an incredible talking to that we're all anxiously waiting for. You know, that's a technology where we think, hey, there's some promise here. There's still a lot of infrastructure challenges with hydrogen. There's still a lot of how do I get that to my airport? But we are investing and encouraged by it. But we'll see where it plays out.

Not to mention the production of the actual hydrogen and persons be energy intensive too.

Very energy intensive.

But that's the case with all these feels at this point, right and so we're encouraged by renewable energy obviously dominating every new piece of energy that's going in the market, and that would help on the hydrogen side as well.

So right now, if you look at the fuel usage of Alaska airlines, what portion is sustainable aviation?

To you?

We are about one percent, and like most airlines here in the US, our goal is by twenty thirty. To hit a ten percent goal will be a challenge without all of those levers pulled at.

The same Is it a realistical I think it is. I think it is. I think the challenge is today.

I think that there are absolutely opportunities to get us there.

Not going to say it's going to be easy.

It's also if you think about the sustainability element, you said, do you have a facility in Montana that you work with and then you have to get that fuel then to the West coast? Yeah, that's not exactly you know, carbon neutral.

Right, it's the infrastructure challenge is it's its own beasts. Especially here in the Pacific Northwest. We have some real challenges with getting saff into seatak. So how do we solve those working with policymakers, working with partners, working with traditional oil and gas to solve some of those challenges. But yeah, I mean most people don't ask where they're getting their jet fuel from in the start.

Yeah, that certainly makes sense.

Do you think that we'll start to see traditional energy companies that make conventional aviation fuel get into this market?

You know, I think they've dabbled.

I think they're a bit waiting on the sidelines to see is the demand really there?

Is it?

Yeah?

It sounds like it is, because if the goal is twenty thirty, that the demand is there the.

Demand is the intention is there, right, but the demand to pay for it is still developing right, And now I think that'll be the biggest challenge. And honestly, if you're looking at the loan gas markets, they're worried about their margins too, so they're doing they're doing what they need to do well.

One of our Bloomberg Intelligence Commodities analyst, Mike mclohan always says, the cure for high prices is high prices. So if you have something that's high priced, you get more people coming into that market.

It's just basic economics. Right.

Do we get to a point where you get so many people coming into the market because they see demand for it that you see price to fall in the coming years.

Absolutely, And that's where I think engaging our guests and engaging corporates and telling those stories about the demand that we have will encourage and will, you know, hopefully incent production in the places that we need in numbers.

Ryan Spiece, Managing director of Sustainability at Alaska Airlines, here from the Bloomberg green At Festival in Seattle. Ryan, thanks so much for joining us.

Thank you this much. We really do appreciate it.

You're listening to the Bloomberg Business Week podcast. Listen live each weekday starting at two pm Eastern on applecar Play and Android Auto with the Bloomberg Business App. You can also listen live on Amazon Alexa from our flagship New York station, Just say Alexa Play Bloomberg eleven thirty.

Here's something you're not going to want to hear as you pack your bags for your summer holidays. Tourism has a dark side.

It's not just the climate impact over tourism also an issue. Unmanaged crowds ruined destinations for locals and travelers alike, and high visitor numbers they don't necessarily translate into benefits for the local economy. Ven has implemented a new entrance fee, and anti tourism protests have sprung up in places like Barcelona and in the Canary Islands.

This is where Jeremy Sampson comes in. Jeremy is CEO of the Travel Foundation. It's an independent charity that works with tourism companies and organizations to make tourism benefit both the environment and the communities where it's happening. We continue our coverage from the Bloomberg Green Festival in Seattle this past week, the.

Industry has been talking about sustainability and in some ways as an end points, but really sustainability as a you know, is not a is not a thing you can actually achieve as a tick box. It's a it's a continuous process of improvement and working towards you know, reducing negative impacts and increasing increasing the positive ones, and creating a better balance.

And I think.

Ultimately that's that's the goal, and absolutely that's possible. Defining what good looks like in a place is a whole other discussion.

Is it on the radar at all to people who are booking trips right now?

We that's a great question, is and you know, we do see quite a few research, you know, surveys showing that people are interested in sustainability as a as a key driver of you know, of their decisions. But we see a huge gap between intention and action when it comes to their you know, their actual purchase you know, purchase choices money almost always, and location and sort of

Remind us, for those who maybe are not familiar with your organization, what you guys are doing and what you're looking to really solve.

Sure, you know, we exist primarily to represent a voice that is often not represented in the travel in tourism sector, and which are the communities that host travel, that host travelers. And the environment in which the industry depends on the eighty percent of travel and tourism is actually coastal, and so you know, the beaches, the marine infrastructure that the industry depends on has often not been so kind to

Especially after the pandemic.

Right well, it's been peaks and valleys for years. There was nine to eleven, there was the economic downturn in two thousand and eight there was COVID. Each of those took the industry to its knees, and then there's been a great recovery story ever since. And oftentimes those recoveries

Well, some companies have integrated it to try to get consumers to make decisions. You can go to certain online travel agency booking websites when you're booking a flight. I think actually ours does this ferrol internally when you get a flight, it has how much carbon that's is released. I got a confession to make. I completely ignore that number. Am I a bad person?

Yeah?

I look at the time. I look at the time of the flight. That's like what I listening.

Listen. I'm probably one of the world's most well known experts in sustainable travel, and I have a horrible time making good decisions about sustainability when I when I do my own personal travel. Why the information is either you know, too confusing, so you want to you want to find I find out the basics about a place or about

One thing I wonder like, I think about it when you order food now, right, the calories are up there, right, And I think about when I buy some products or food, I turn around and I look at the labels more than I've ever before. Is there some kind of labeling or metric that you can really apply across the travel industry that will make us all kind of think differently and be more concerned. So this is coming and change our habits.

This is coming. And there's been a there's been a great movement, especially among the travel tech space, so the online travel agents like Booking, dot Com, ex Media, Airbnb to have a common framework for reporting to consumers. For many years there were there was a badge here, a leaf here, a circle here. No one knew what it meant, and we really did a poor job of aligning those you know that communication.

I always assume a leaf is good. Yeah, it seems good.

It seems good.

It seems good.

Who doesn't like leaves?

But actually it actually responds to one of the big the big risks there, which is that most people associate sustainability with tree hugging. Okay, we we uh hung up our towels and.

We used we didn't use planted a tree exactly. Problem solved.

The challenge is much more holistic when it comes to sustainability. And it's also the industry is incredibly fragmented, so it's not a sector at all. It's really a bunch of

Where does government come in.

So tourism has long been the most unregulated sector in the world, even behind oil and gas, and part of that comes from the the this fragmentation. It's it's reallyallenging to regulate something that is so fragmented and really could sort of could sort of beat the system in many ways. And the concentration of sort of power and influences has shifted because now it sits with the big tech companies, which for a long time said we're not even in the travel industry, we're tech platforms.

You know.

So government is increasingly needed, actually, I think find to set those limits. Until the sort of twenty ten time period, it was easier to manage the capacity in a place right like you had only a certain number of hotel rooms and a certain number of people could fill them, and you were sort of at capacity. Then two things happened.

What is the worst thing what makes tourism so bad for the environment? Have a list for you. Is it planes? Is it cars? Is it cruise ships? Is it food and food waste? Is it garbage? What are the biggest contributing factors or is it kind of all above?

Yeah, we've done the research on this and when it comes to climate change specifically and carbon emissions, you know, air travel is particularly polluting. We know this. Air travel is also one of the most difficult to decarbonize. We also know this right now, sustainable aviation fuel is only able to fuel the fleet of airplanes that fly around the world for less than one So we're nowhere near the scale of the solution that will be required for

Flights, so it's a long half flights that it's a.

Long half flights. Shanghai to Sydney is about the sort of average long half flight that we studied.

One thing that I'm really interested in this is this idea of over tourism and the idea that a tourist dollars spent somewhere doesn't necessarily go to the local community.

That's right.

This is a new part of a conversation that's happening because for years we were taught, oh, we should go here because it supports the local economy.

Not that simple, right, How do we quantify.

That this is climate justice?

Right?

A little bit?

Well, a little bit. I mean, there's a couple other issues that play here that I think are really important. On the overturism front. Overturism itself is a symptom rather than a root issue. What you see there is again places that have been stripped away from their ability to manage that the fact that that the demand and number of people is outpacing the resources that are available. Overturism

It doesn't take much. We've all been in developing world right where you're somewhere and it's just the systems all the time.

You feel you feel it, you feel that it's broken, but it is solvable actually, and it's not just about crowds. When it comes to this issue of equity. Uh, you know, the industry has long had this platitude that travel is a force for good. I tend to leave actually that the industry can be a force for good. But it doesn't do so just by showing up in a place that's trickle down economics and and trickle down economics. I'm

If you could change one thing in the tourism industry just quickly, what.

Would you I would cut marketing budgets because.

And don't get me wrong on them, don't break in more travelers.

No, not necessarily, I believe in marketing, but the balance is way out of whack. We have an industry that markets itself to death and spends very little on issues around around climate change, which to me pose a great threat to business. So I think shifting that balance just a little bit would make a huge difference.

All right, listen, So glad we got some time.

Thank you so much, great, Thank you so much. You're welcome having me and appreciate the thoughtful conversation.

You bet, good luck a greed.

Thank you.

Yeah.

Jeremy Sampson, CEO of the Travel Foundation, Live from the Bloomberg Green Festival in Seattle.

You're listening to the Bloomberg Business Week podcast. Catch us live weekday afternoons from two to five pm Eastern Listen on Apple, car Play and and Broyt Auto with a Bloomberg Business at or watch us live on YouTube.

Plenty Ahead in our second hour of the weekend edition to Bloomberg Business Week, including more insightful conversation and from this week's Bloomberg Green Festival in Seattle, Washington, we'll check in with the chief scientists at the Environmental Defense Fund on how a highly specialized satellite can spot emissions that other satellites cannot.

Plus, speaking of taking flight, we're joined by the founder and CEO of a company that says it's building the first zero emission engines for commercial aviation.

First up this hour.

As we've mentioned, the Bloomberg Green Festival this past week in Seattle was all about bringing together innovators, policymakers, entrepreneurs, artists, activists, musicians, folks from business, government, all kinds of leaders to explore new solutions spanning the entire climate spectrum.

Two of those voices are the chief sustainability officer at Amazon, Kara Hurst, and the WNBA's all time winningest player and co founder of the media and commerce company Together and the production company A touch more we're talking about Sue Byrd. They joined Carol for a panel on using platforms to affect change.

Well, I have to say these two are pretty incredible and they have unique I just want to do a little quick setup. Karraspearheaded the Climate Pledge, which was co founded by Amazon back in twenty nineteen, group of more than five hundred companies. I think it was five hundred and three, to be exact, per your website, forty five countries around the globe. They've made a commitment to reach

The Storm was.

The first w NBA team to actually sign the Climate Pledge and the second North American professional sports team to do so, so pretty cool. The Storm plays home games of course in the Climate Pledge Arena, and Sue, by the way, won her fifth Olympical metal in Tokyo in twenty twenty, So I'm just kind of tying it all together.

So Car, I want to start with you.

For you guys at Amazon, it is largely but a lot of things, but for you sustainability and the climate. How do you think about the value of having Amazon worldwide known, huge firm, huge company, massive platform. How do you think about the responsibility of that platform and how do you prioritize the things you want to do.

Sure well, I could be more excited to be on this stage and this conversation today, so thanks for having me.

It is it's a.

Huge responsibility and also a really exciting one because one of the things we get to do at Amazon is to use our scale and really the speed also that we go at to send really big demand signals for clean technologies, like what was just being discussed to say that we want an accelerated fight towards climate change and what you just mentioned that we set our intention to be net zero carbon by twenty forty that's ten years ahead of the Paris Agreement, and we set that looking

Operations, which is a huge feat.

We have over five hundred projects zachly around the world. We've got twenty four thousand electric delivery.

Vehicles on the road already.

We've got one of the world's largest charging electric charging infrastructure kind of operations going.

We've just got.

You know, we look at all the different aspects of our operations and think about how do we make it more sustainable on behalf of our customer. We want to reduce waste. We took out those plastic air pillows. We took out ninety five percent of those in North America. So we want to make a sustainable company and do it on.

Behalf of our customer.

So I want to bring you into it. You are part of a group of very elite athletes, and when we use the word legendary, it doesn't apply to everybody, but it definitely applies to you. So krudos. The platform, though, has been a couple of decades in the making, and then some how do you think about your platform and the responsibility of how you use it.

Yeah, women's sports is at an interesting moment, you know, especially women's basketball, and for a good interesting right yeah, no, great, interesting. But what's interesting about it, maybe in a negative sense, is while the coverage has increased, what I've noticed is it's not always accurate. And it's really had me take a step back and be like, first of all, what else is inaccurate out there being told to us, you know,

It's also the way women women athletes have been portrayed. Like I was reading some things about the Olympics coming up in the Olympic Committee, have they been changing some of the standards and updating in terms of how they want media representation of women and it's not just how they look or kind of superficial stuff, but really.

Just what they are achieving.

That's important, so important, so important.

I think what's beautiful about women, especially women's athletes, is we are dynamic. We've had to be, you know, for so long, we weren't getting the covers that we deserve, we weren't getting the credibility, so we had to be. We had to have different parts of us. So I think it is great to highlight those things. But to your point, not just about appearance, you know, not just about these these artificial things.

So I love that the Olympic Committee is doing that.

I want to talk a little bit about the Climate Pledge. So I'm curious, Cara, when you have conversations with companies, what is it Is it tough to get them to sign on or tell us kind of the environment here.

Yeah, I think it's a huge commitment to sign on, and it certainly takes resources, and so I think it takes a leap of faith too.

Not all of us know how we're going to get there.

There are some things we know how to do, like electrifying fleet, and then there are other things like aviation where we know sustainable aviation feels part of it, but we don't know all of the solves, and so some of it is a bit of jumping into the fray and saying we know some of we're going to get there.

Well.

Sue, was it like a no brainer for the Storm to sign the Climate Pledge?

I was playing then, so I wasn't in those rooms.

But that's true, yes.

But knowing our franchise, knowing the ownership group, I'm sure, I'm sure it was a no brainer. They're very much an ownership group. That wants to help the world change. I mean it's a big statement, but at the same time, when you find the ways that you can have that impact, it's really not that big of a statement.

You can really change the world.

I always think about, like, you know, we all set out on a course, whether we go to school or we start working, and we think we're going to go this way, and then we start going a different way, And I'm curious about so, like what motivates you and how maybe that has evolved over the years to where you are today.

Yeah, well, I'm very lucky.

I say this from the start to be an athlete when you think back to childhood. When I think back to my childhood, I was just a kid that really liked playing, Like I just loved playing sports. And how lucky am I that that led to an actual career where I graduate college and immediately I have a job, a profession waiting for me. So I was super lucky in that sense. But throughout my career, motivations change. Right, there's the motivation early of maybe wanting to.

Prove yourself in a field.

Right, you haven't in my world, I haven't won the championship yet, I haven't won awards yet, so I have this grit about me that I want to prove it. But then that flips when you have done it and now you have to prove that it wasn't a fluke, and now you have to sustain and now you have to stay, for lack of a better on top with that mountain, which has a whole other type of challenge.

So it's really interesting how through.

The course of my career I've had these these different moments, these different types of mountains, and trying to figure out how how to stay motivated. And again, I'm lucky I play a team sport. A lot of my motivation came within the locker room, within my team. I had teammates to look to whether they were pushing me or I was pushing them them seeing me succeed, me seeing them succeed, And that's really a big motivating factor for me.

What about for you, Kara in terms of your job, and I think about your career too, You've been in Silicon Valley, different worlds in terms of sustainability, how do you think about, like what motivates you in terms of your choices and then wanted to be part of Amazon and their mission.

Yeah, I think it's really interesting.

I've worked in angios, I've worked in government, I've worked in now corporate America, and I think, you know, being on those teams and thinking about the different languages you have to.

Be able to speak.

I'm impact oriented, So what I really have been motivated by is trying to figure out a way I've always wanted to make a difference, wanted to make an impact on the world. I've worked on human rights issues, I've worked on environmental issues, and I want to figure out what is like how do I use the resources and the scale of whatever I'm working on to kind of make that change. And in NGOs you have influence in a different way. Government you have scale, you have policy

But you have to remain authentic to.

Yourself and you know, lead in the way that's going to make the folks around you understand the impact that you're trying to make and the context that you're in.

How do you guys think about the next generation in particular? And let me go over to you. You know, I think about the next You really kind of change change the game, no pun intended, in terms of the attention that you've brought to certainly women's sports, women's basketball on the college level, and then of course on the professional level. Like you made a difference, Like it's huge, and I think young women need to see that. So how do you think about that?

I mean, I've always taken great pride in that. I think, what's amazing about this younger generation? And I can kind of tell the story within a story, if you will. When I got towards the end of my career and we were doing things like CBA negotiations, it was really.

The younger players.

So if I'm by the way, at this point, I was like thirty seven and I was considered old still, like.

It's so inert that out.

I'm like, wait a minute, I old? Am I young?

But we had you know, the younger players at that point in the WNBA were twenty one, So let's say twenty five, right, like this this age range, and for me, I had.

Grown up in a era where we were.

Fighting, but also just happy to have a league in a sense, you know, and I hesitate to use this term, but we're all very familiar with the shut up and dribble krinch.

But that's really how it was. A little bit. We were happy to have a league.

We didn't want to push too hard because oh, we don't want this taken away from us. And now, like I said, I'm in my late thirties, these players in their early twenties, so this younger generation you're alluding to, they were like no, no, no, no, no, Like we need charters, we need charter flights. What are we talking about? Like no, no, no, this locker room not good enough. And they really it wasn't an entitlement as much as it was this is what we deserve, right, this is

CAAR.

For you and I know we've talked about sustainability is something that a younger generation looks about I have a twenty one year old daughter and she's turning the things over, looking at ingredients, Where was this made? What's the carbon footprint?

Like?

They matter and they care.

So how do you think about what you guys need to do at Amazon in terms of the next generation?

Yeah?

I think increasingly this next generation they both care a lot. They're incredibly passionate, and they have a lot of anxiety about what's coming in, what the state.

Of the world is.

And so one of the things I think is our responsibility is one to act fast, to drive big solutions, but also to bring some optimism to it. We have time, we don't have a lot of time. We're in this decisive decade where we have to act now. We have to move very quickly, and so I think one of the things that we need to lead on is to show that there is there are solutions, but we need to deploy them now.

We cannot wait any longer.

So one of the things leaders need to do is to take those decisive actions. We need to make changes now, and we need to make them at scale.

So I want to ask you, can you stand up for a second and show your T shirt?

Stand up?

Yeah?

All right, look at this shirt.

This is there is Yes, there's t shirt.

I'm doing this because Caro, I want you to ask the question of Sue. I mean, these are incredible leaders, Like I just throw you in a bar and I can imagine the conversation.

What do you want to ask?

Sue?

We've already had some really great conversations you about lots of things in New York and favorite shows and stuff like this. But one of the things is I was thinking about is you have so many different passions and interests, and we were talking about some of the things you could work on. And I'm sure you'll get approached all the time with ideas that people have for you, given your platform and your reach and how passionate you are

How do you make decisions about where you want to spend your time?

Yeah, great question. Still working on it. You know.

I'm only retired soon to be close to two years, which still feels really fresh and the best part about being an athlete was that was it, That was the north star, that the priority, and what you could fit in around that you would try, but that was always the guiding light, and that got you know, I don't have that anymore, so in a wonderful way. You know, I shouldn't complain. I have a ton of options, but like anybody who has that problem, you know there's a

You want to make sure that align.

And I found that when that's there, when that's the baseline and the foundation, then you can start to maybe carve out things.

You're passionate about.

Then you can start to carve out things maybe that you think are going to have a larger impact. But as long as that foundation is there, then you can make your decisions based you know, on all the other things you might be interested in, and then of course the bandwidth part is really that's what I think I took on a little bit too much, to be honest, and now I'm.

Littling back soon ash you have to say no, yeah, yeah, or no.

The power of no, yeah yeah, turning the table yeah. So something that I know that I've encountered, especially at not especially being a woman, is at times I've walked into rooms and I've just kind of assumed that maybe I wasn't the smartest, so I didn't have enough experience of knowledge, and I can only imagine in the corporate world what that must be like as a woman walking

Yeah, I'm a.

Little bit older than you, so I think it's it's taken a while, but one of the things I think is really important in order to be able to lead is to really just figure out who you are first and really own that and I think over the years, I'm just really understanding what you have to offer and the authenticity of your own experiences and just feeling that

Of a pressure.

And so I think whatever that translates for for any of you, you know, to take a moment back, take a breath, and be like, I, you know, I got this, I've I can lead in that kind of a situation, and then just feel that, take a brath, you know, and own it. I think that we all need to just kind of remember sometimes who we are.

All Right, just got fifty seconds, so this could be really quick. We started talking about platforms and using your platforms. Sue advice to everybody out there, everybody has a platform. What's your advice? What do you hope people walk away from?

Yeah?

I think I think at times the word platform can be almost intimidating because you think you have to have I said it kind of early. I touched on it earlier. YE like to say you want to change the world is such a big statement. It can be intimidating and like, do I have a platform? How big is my platform? How am I ever going to do that? But the reality is, if it's just one person that's going to

Sorry, one Starson.

Makes a difference. I love it all right, Carara.

Real quick, I would just say, you know, remain optimistics because I think you know the beauty and being optimistic can have a lot of power.

I'm gonna leave it there. I wish we had oodles of more time, Sue, Cara, thank you so much.

Thank you everybody.

You're listening to the Bloomberg Business Week podcast. Catch us live weekday afternoons from two to five pm Eastern Listen on Apple CarPlay and then Broute Auto with a Bloomberg Business at or watch us live on YouTube.

Back in March, you might recall a SpaceX rocket made history. It blasted off carrying a special payload. Methane SAT a highly specialized satellite that can spot methane leaks from the oil and gas industry, the missions that other satellites can't see, and with it ushered in a new era of climate transparency.

The goal to motivate and enable urgent action to reduce methane emissions.

That's a quote.

Methane SAT is a collaboration between organizations including aerospace companies, space agencies around the world, academic institutions, and the nonprofit and vironmental advocacy group, the Environmental Defense Fund.

Steven Hamberg is senior vice president and chief Scientist at the Environmental Defense Funder DF. He's also the project leader of Methane SAT. He joined us from the Bloomberg Green Festival in Seattle.

So what we need is a global picture, and we need to be able to figure out where are those emissions occurring, how much is being omitted, and how they're changing over time, and we need to do that across the entire sector. And we can do that with methane set because we designed it with such high precision and we are delivering the data as actionable data, meaning we're actually doing the processing to get it all the way to how much is being omitted from where where is

Are the stakeholders engaged teams? So I'm sure some of them are going to be a little fearful right in terms of what this date is going to show.

Absolutely, because it's going to show obviously those who are doing a good job and those who are not.

Right, but absolutely so.

The oil and gas industry knows that the things are changing, transparency will be part of the future. And we're seeing also in the financial industry, we're seeing a lot of interest. I just spent a lot of time going to many of the major financial institutions talking about this, so we are seeing engagement, but it's still early days.

What are the financial institutions want to know?

They want to know how the data is actionable, right, And part of it is a conversation, So we're asking what do you need to use it to make more informed decisions? And it's not just so we have the financial sector, but we also have regulars.

What do you need to know?

So we have.

Multiple different stakeholder groups, including civil society, and we are working with those groups to make sure we understand what type of data will be most effective for them to take the actions they need to take. And that's again something no one's ever done before, creating these diverse products out of a single data stream.

What is the action basic in the sense that we need to make sure we trap the methane that's being released into the atmosphere. Is that at its most fundamental, basic level at the point of this.

Right so there's no need.

So we know that almost all the emissions that occurring from the production of oil and gas don't have to happen. The technology exists, The emissions can be reduced cost effectively in almost all cases.

And again we're not talking about the burning of fossil fuels as a result of the end user.

We're talking about the production, the production and the transport. Most of it's occurring at the production and so it's what we refer to as upstream, and that actually the emissions are large enough right now that if you were

Stephen, what do you think in terms of the general public, if they knew that is happening, like in their own homes, how it might change their activity and their actions.

Well, I think the key is to give them options and to make sure that the suppliers of the gas are held accountable because you don't. It's it's absolutely clear there's a wide difference in these associated emissions, and there's nobody producing oil and gas who has to create these emissions. This is the technology exists. This is why this is not even low hanging fruit. This is fruit on the ground.

Why haven't they done something? You know, this always blows my mind of like doing the right thing. Right, They've got to know that they're emitting this into the air.

So when I started working on this fourteen years ago, the companies actually did not know. And as we collected data on the ground, not with satellites, there were surprises at every corner. And even today, most of the oil and gas companies have a very incomplete understanding of how much they're being emitted. So the key is to provide high quality data. We do not have enough high quality data about greenhouse gas emissions across the board.

Is it just the oil and gas companies or are we seeing methane as a byproduct When it comes to the decomposition of trash at.

Landfills, absolutely, so we have to think about all of the sources of methane. We focused on oil and gas first because of course it is economically so easy to do.

I mean, it's literally no net cost.

It's just got to get action.

But we have to worry about waste and also agriculture is a very large source of which enteric fermentation, waste from animals, also rice production.

But again there are tools we can use.

It's more complicated.

Because we're talking about many more actors and we're talking about a more complex system. But we are working New Zealand, who's a partner in the New Zealand Space Agency. They have a whole program to collect data from mething SAT on agriculture around the world, and we'll again build that picture so we can start to get some better action.

You mentioned that as a partnership. What are the partnerships that you already have like in the work so that you anticipate are going to be coming in the future that will really kind of magnify the impact of this.

So we have partnerships with the UN Environment Program, the International Methane Emissions Observatory, we have partnerships, as I said, with New Zealand Space agencies. We're partnering with philanthropic groups, right, So the vasos Earf Fund has been an integral part of the funding that to make this possible. Because we want to be able to provide this free, we also have partnership that allow us to get that data out into many people's hands.

Stephen.

As I mentioned, this was a really big deal when the satellite launched back in March. One of the reasons it was is because it has a complex set of instruments that allow it to see you with no other satellite has been able to see before. Talk about the tech on board here, like what gives you the power to be able to see this through space?

Well, the real advantage of being here in the United States because we're taking advantage of technologies that at the very cutting edge, so it's itar protected, right. We have all kinds of controls appropriately and so we can provide a sensitivity so we can see very very small differences in concentration with these very highly specialized detectors. And then the kind of technology we have in the ability to put it together.

We worked with Ball Aerospace.

Now BAE would really the leading instrument maker probably in the world. They built the Hubble telescope, the Web telescope and really bringing that kind of level of technology and working with colleagues at Harvard University and also at Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. So we just got a lot of really smart people leaning in with the world's best technology so that we are able to really take the technology a major step forward.

So when do we start to see lots.

Of data, Well, lots of data will be the beginning of next year, but we start seeing data before will actually be doing We have an aircraft version and we will at the end of the month be actually releasing a comparison of oil and gas methane emissions across the United States that we collected from the air with a very comparable instrument. And then we will be releasing data because one of the things we have to make sure is that we really are confident that the data is

How do you do that? How do you make sure because you know they'll ben sayers and probably people challenging you, and we do want to make sure you get it right. So how do you make sure that the information that's collected is accurate.

So, of course, and we want people to chat just as we need to get we're doing something new, you want to make sure you get it right, as you said, So what do you do? There are sensors around the world that actually look up and give you data, and you compare what you're seeing down to what's going up.

So if all goes according to plan, what's the conversation that we're having ten years from now? Are we talking about a decline in the mathane emissions that have been released as a result of the imaging technology that you developed.

Go ten years, five four and two years from now, we will have so much more data than well, basically we've collected more data in the next two years than we've ever collected before. We will have It's like we're going to put on a sharp pair of really high quality glasses, and greenhouse gas emissions across oil and gas will come into focus in a way we've never had. We need to replicate that across methane sources and other greenhouse gas.

But are those oil.

Companies going to just respond by capping their methane and mission It's not.

That's why it's not just me. It's the whole data to action pipeline. It has to be about bringing the many actors, whether those are financial institutions, governments, investors, policy makers collectively. I'm confident because you're already seeing the industry.

They're not high.

They're making commitments.

At the Conference of the Parties last December, fifty two companies, mainly national oil companies, all committed to minimizing their oil and gas missions. They got ahead of it because they realized this is going to affect them well, now we will have the data to see great, congratulate them they're doing the job, or saying, in fact, you haven't met your commitments.

Just got about thirty seconds LEFTO. So what's still challenging though in this mission mission?

Well, I think the challenging is to provide these kinds of high quality data for the first time and make sure they're really of that quality. That's challenging the team,

Okay, be honest, did any part If you want to ride with that rocket with that satellite, I get motion sickness.

So no, that's a.

That's a absolute no.

Listen. It's one of those things that you need all of like public, private, everybody kind of in the game. If you will, Stephen, thank you so much. Look forward to as the data starts to come out the next few months. I'd like they're crucial.

Thank you for having me, you bet.

Steven Hamberg, Senior vice president scientist at the Environmental Defense Bound Right here at the Bloomberg Green Festival.

In CM, you're listening to the Bloomberg Business Week podcast. Listen live each weekday starting at two pm Eastern not Applecar Play and Android Auto with the Bloomberg Business Ad. You can also listen live on Amazon Alexa from our flagship New York station. Just say Alexa Play Bloomberg eleven thirty.

Long haul international flights are picking up at a record pace. According to a Bloomberg Big Take published last summer, international air travel's share of CO two output is set to climb dramatically as other segments decarbonize, to an estimated twenty two percent by twenty fifty from about two percent today.

All right, that's a big difference. So how do we get there? Sustainable aviation? Fuel ev talls or battery powered electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft Ernexcus says that the only way to get there hydrogen.

Val Miftakoff is the founder and CEO of zero Avia. It's a company that says it's developing the world's first zero emissions engines for commercial aviation. He joined us from the Bloomberg Green Festival in Seattle.

So we develop new generation of engines for commercial aviation, large aircraft going long distances taking a lot of passengers. So I think the prime solution for that is hydrogen is fuel and then hydrogen fuel sales and electric powertrain to bring the aircraft into.

The new future.

How far can it go?

It can go?

Actually, so we have different programs. Yeah, we start with a small aircraft and then go larger and larger. The largest aircraft so that we can reapower will go the same distance as you know London for example, right, So we believe that within the next twenty years or so we will have engines for aircraft of that size and being able to go that type of distance.

Do you have to build entirely new aircraft or can you strap a parodise for.

Those distances You would have to modify the aircraft. Generally, you can get to about half the maximum range off the fossil fuel aircraft without modification of the aircraft or with minor modifications. Yeah, and that's our first launch will be like that. And then we work already with the aircraft manufacturers. You know, Airbus is one of our major investors.

Well why twenty years?

Well, you know if you look at the current engines, Yeah, those beautiful things, huge engines off the wings.

Of the aircraft from nineteen sixties.

Yeah, and actually even before that, right, so right after the World War Two the first jet engines were.

Developed, so we had almost one hundred years of development, if you will, right, So twenty years is not that huge of a time really, right, But it's what takes to get to technology up to that level.

All right, now Mother Earth is calling and saying we're running out of time. My point is, if the technology is there, is it a case of those engines are really expensive, those planes are really expensive, and the cost of that changeover is what's holding things back.

Yeah, that's a significant component.

Yeah, especially in aviation because you know, you look at our don't motif market, right, And my previous company was in the EV space, electric vehicle space, and there you have the lifetime of vehicle is just ten years. And we've been already since Tesla delivered more or less, it's been already been fourteen years, but we're still below ten percent of the fleet, right converted in aviation, it's even worse.

Sooner sounds great. You still need to get the hydrogen though, Where do you get the hydrogen?

Yeah?

Well, and we're here in Washington State, right, which is great because the grad is large and renewable, so we believe in breeding hydrogen production. We actually make all of our fuel for our testing ourselves.

So that uses a lot of electricity.

Yeah, it used a lot of tricy.

But you need electricity anyway to electrify, right, So you need energy, you need primary energy. Now, hydrogen electric approach, the approach that we have is the most efficient way to use that energy. So think about hydrogen in our aircraft is effectually an energy carrier.

For renewable energy.

Is that the batteries are to have a fundamentally too heavy right, Theoretically you cannot make them light enough for you.

Can make it a lighter then today.

Yeah, but it's still not going to be sufficient for a large aircraft going long distances. Hydrogen is the best carrier of that energy, so nothing else will really work. Right, And sustainable aviation fuel you mentioned, Yeah, the small portion of that can be made with bio stock by a feedstock, but this can repower less than ten percent off aviation.

What do we need in terms of government policy you mentioned the government involvement what specifically.

Yeah, so we need and you know we have some blooprins the government to lead.

Yeah, we have.

Some blooprint galraty from the ev industry. Right.

So a lot of the transition was driven by the progressive governments like California for instance, right with the low carbon fuel standards, with emission standards and then you know, there's some examples outside of the US, like Norway for instance. Right, great policies to bring ninety percent plus new vehicles being sold are electric. So policies like that for fleet modernization will be super important. And we are launching our first commercial products within the next two years.

So we're talking to the government saying, hey, you know, the technology is there.

We're now officially in certification with the regulators across the world and it will get here before or you know, two years, three years out.

So we need the policies right.

Now, what does that route look like. We're the operators who are taking that plant. Yeah, so we need buy in from all constituents here. Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.

So we already have over two thousand engines on our order book, which is give or take ten billion dollars worth of future revenues already pre booked.

We have announced the production facility actually right here in the Everts.

Our first production facility are going to be in the state of Washington, which is straight.

History.

Yeah, we're taking over Collins Airspace engine production.

So it's like a great story, you know, fossil fuel. So right, so we already have demands.

Right.

So you mentioned the last airlines, right, they're our customer, they're our investor. We have United America and British Airways Amazon. So ecosystem is already supportive. I mentioned Airbus. Yeah, we just signed also the world's largest deal with all three mad airports in Canada for example, Vancouver, Montreal and Toronto plus Airbus and US together to bring them to hydrogen future.

Right.

So the ecosystem is getting around this vision. Now will need the governments to really push it, help us push it.

Is that the biggest challenges is it just you need the government buy in to be able bit more aggressive with that.

Yeah, yeah, and in two ways.

Right.

So we are now in certification, which means that we're working with government regulators to bring it to the markets.

And we need the right level of priority to this project.

And then once it's done, actual help in bringing the fleets on.

Say you're getting on a plane to London. What year will that plane be powered by your engines?

It will be powered. We will have engines like that by twenty forty.

All right, countdown, it's on.

Not sooner. I told you Mother Earth is come.

I'm realistic, right, So you know, it's a lot of a lot of startups out there. You know they say things that they cannot deliver and that they fall on their faces.

You know, well, good to check in look next time. Already about Michter, co founder and CEO of zero auvia right here at the Green Festival.

This is the Bloomberg Business Week podcast, available on Apple, Spotify, and anywhere else you get your podcasts. Listen live weekday afternoons from two to five pm Eastern on Bloomberg dot com, the iHeartRadio app, tune In, and the Bloomberg Business App. You can also watch us live every weekday on YouTube and always on the Bloomberg terminal.