With Laurent Segeland from London and Gerard Read from Berlin. This is Redefining Energy.
Today, on Redefining Energy, we're going to talk about the Tony Blair Institute recent report on climber, which we warmly recommend people not to read.
Joining us on the show, our partner in crime, the Fearless, the Invincible, Michael Barnard, the three of us, we have put together the most downloaded episode of the past twelve months of prediction, extremely popular, and of course the episode on Bill Gates where we were not very nuts. I really won't though, where we still have guests because we're better off babbling together. So without further ado, Michael Barnard, Michael, welcome to the show.
Great to be here again.
Talking about the Tony Blay Institute. Probably child first, we're going to talk about Tony Blair because for those Billow forty years old or American audience, probably Tony Blair is like a forgotten name. So just remind us of his career.
What Tony player was Labor Prime Minister in the UK from nineteen ninety seven to two thousand and seven and really popular through that whole period until the Iraq War. Came really two thousand and three, and that sort of has left to sort of stain in and around his reputation. But he definitely was the sort of body called the cultural icon and around the center left in the Labor Party. So he took the Labor Party more from the left
side to the center. And really, you know, you could say he was the most charismatic European leader of his era.
Yeah, he was young. And if you look at the period, China was still an economic mino. The Russian early garchs were busy killing themselves rather than killing us. The Gulf States wonder construction. It was low. Europe was expanding, what three percent grows? It was cool. Britannia where the spies girls the most at my company was Gee, the big company were IBM, AOL andron Kodak Nokia. So it's a different it's a different epoch.
Yeah, And in the United States had turned into a gerontocracy. Bill Clinton was the charismatic, young, energetic leader that was Blair's foil on either side of the Atlantic until he wasn't.
After his tenure as Prime Minister, he becomes lead the list envoy whatever that means. It means you go a lot to the Middle East. That was until two or fifteen, and then he created the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, the Tony Blair Institute. What is it right now, Jod.
That's a good question, ruh. I mean, ultimately, they produce lots of reports and the lobbin that's what they do. Huge budget, one hundred million dollars. I suppose they model themselves really on the Clinking Foundation in the US, and some people listen to them.
A lot of people listen to them. Look the stuff of eight hundredd which is a lot. And if you look at their website, they do government advisory services, which is his name, lobbying for governments and they have no problem dealing with any type of regime. They got a lot of money from Ceudi Arabia, from Azerbaijan. Big funders also are the Larryalism Foundation, the Gates Foundation. So it's a very cozy DeVos world we have here.
And actually, by the way, they do write quite a bit on energy. Yeah, they don't write very well on energy, but they do write on energy.
So they publish their report on policy two or three per months on anything like health, economics, technology, governance and climate change. And if I look at the statistics, one
in four of the report are related to energy. And the reason we're having that conversation today is because last month the release they are now infamous Climate Paradox report, which triggered a certain number of number one wonderful coverage by the classic media, the ft the Bloomberg, Oh my god, Tony Blair is so brilliant and so and a few eark reaction, once from Michael Levage and his substack and the other one by Michael Barnard on a clean Technicia.
The auto is Lindy Firstman, and she's the head of energy policy for the Tony Blind Institute. And she has a PhD in sociology from UC Berkeley, and she has done her all work in academia, government and ngios. I think she never worked in the company in her whole life, but I'm sure she's very talented. Okay, let's go back to the report. Child.
Well, look, at the end of the day, it's a report for me that's follow words. Now, why do I start with full of words? Is because nobody reads reports like that anymore. I mean, I think there was two graphs in the whole thing, right, you have to do a word search to understand it. But what I will say is, maybe take a step back. What I would look at is the first recommendation of the report is
accelerating scaling technologies that capture carbon. Then it's harnessing the power technology including area, investing in breakthrough in frontier energy solutions, scaling nature based solutions. So the whole message is that we don't have the technologies in place to actually solve the issue. And actually what annoys me by this is, and I will talk about the technologies head run, we do have the technologies right and also, by the way,
they're also low cost. So when I listened to this and when I read it, and I read it with some of the comments and newspapers, I looked at it and I went, Okay, this is the typical blocking strategy. And what we're seeing a present is a fossil fuel industry that is doing a huge amount of financing of
anti renewabilization, anti electrification. And there's a reason why because listen, they've got huge amounts of assets in play, and guess what if electrification and renewabilization happens quicker, it's very, very bad for their business. So that's certainly what you're seeing in the media. So when I saw this report, i'ment, ah, this is just propaganda, you know. But Michael, I don't know you wrote something of this. What was your initial reaction what you saw this? Well, I'm just going to.
Lean back into the primary energy fallacy. These people are in the same camp as Vaclav Smell. So we can't get there from here in less than a century, which just isn't true. The primary energy fallacy. Brief primary on that right now, A bunch of energy comes into our economies because it's fossil fuels. We burn it and we get fifteen to fifty percent of the energy, and the
rest of it we waste. It is waste heat in an electrified economy, Well, guess what we waste a lot less of the energy wind turbines to heat pumps actually gives us excess energy from the environment. We're going to be down forty percent of the energy coming into our economy to deliver all the same economic comfort and convenience benefits we get. No anybody who's driven an electric car
knows this. They accelerate faster, they're a quiet, they don't think they're full in the morning when you get up and hop into them, and you can use an app make sure they're warm when you get in. That future is a lot lower waste than the present. And Smill just kind of miss that he in his very influential books on this. Bill Gates was a big fan read apparently all of Smill's thirty seven books. Smill just missed it.
It was only in twenty twenty one that Vaclav Smill wrote a monograph of three pages acknowledging the primer energy fallacy and didn't change the assumptions that he'd gotten wrong in his books. And Tony Blair is in the same space. They're saying energy use has only ever gone up in every energy transition. It's always been an energy addition, ignoring the fact that we don't burn whale oil and lamps and albums anymore. The primary energy fallacy is the big one.
People have done big studies on this, mark said Jacobson did this in the two thousands, did a whole bunch of work to say what would an electrifying economy look like in terms of energy demand. Saul Griffiths did this under contract to the US Department of Energy in the twenty tens and I did my basic Napcin math. It only takes Napkin math to show this, and apparently Napkin math and reading decades of articulation of this is beyond the Blair Institute's capacity. That's my first observation.
Lurm, what was your thoughts on when My thoughts was very simple, because I did the word count and the world DAK directa capture a peard eleven times, CCS nine times, capture seventeen times, NUCAR eight times, wind four times, so last six times give you a bit of an idea. And of course the second thing which triggered this current episode is on the cover there's a picture of the I would say famous or infamous climb Works direct air
capture plant in Iceland. The week after the publication of the report, the posta child for direct air capture, which I call deception, amatterism and con because that's what DAC is about, started showing the real numbers of how much the capture and it's an absolute joke. And immediately Michael wrote another uped on Clint Technica. Michael, can you talk a bit about climb Works, which is the posta child of Tony Blair.
Let's talk a bit about the problem they're trying to solve. They're trying to drag CO two out of the atmosphere. The analogy uses, you've got a beach full of dark black sand, and there's a million grains of black sand, and there's four hundred and thirty grains of dark gray sand, and your job is to take the dark gray sand out. Meanwhile, somebody else is scattering dark gray sand over the rest of the beach. As you're sipping through the sand looking
for those individual ones. It's just an entropic nightmare. It's a waste of time. And from a materiality perspective, you need to get up to one hundred million tons a year to be making a dent in the forty billion tons a year of CO two that we're adding. So those are the numbers, like they're big numbers now, Clime Works this was their second plant. Their first plant was orca ten thousand tons a year. In theory has not
hit those numbers. Then they're building Mammoth, and Mammoth is the one that hit the headlines because an investigative journalist found that it, though was designed for forty thousand tons a year forty thousand, it had managed to remove one hundred and five tons in twenty twenty four, and they have all sorts of excuses for that. But the other thing is I like to their sustainability page to look for their metrics, and you'd figure they'd say, here blazon
how much carbon we've sequestered. They never tell anybody on their website how much CO two they've actually seequestered, which is a remarkable gap for a firm which is whose only purpose is permanent speek questation in CO two. It's fascinating. And I've got a long history of looking at direct air captures or was it deception, amateurism and cons yep. I looked at carbon engineerings back in twenty nineteen, and I spoken to the founders of Global Thermostat, you know,
I think that was in twenty ten. You know, I've talked to people all over the space, David Keith, and I just never found anything worth doing in the entire space because none of them scale up to that degree of materiality. And cly Works is no different. Eight hundred million dollars, five hundred staff. Now they're laying off staff because all gee thermodynamic and entropic reality is just proving that they're not going to ever be dirt cheap, and they have to be dirt cheap and or to be relevant.
Now one hundred five tons. To give our listeners a bit of an idea, if you fly going from from London to New York, that one hundred and sixty five tons, So they did not even compensate for one flight. And there is eight hundred million at stake. Now that lab in research to do some that's all when I'm fine, But we're talking eight hundred million, and we're talking about
serious people which have been advocating it. You want to talk about serious people, Let's talk about the people who financed them their Series A into twenty two, you know, the Hey days. So we have Partners Group. Of course, some people say, okay, Climb works, they're Swiss, they bring Swiss Ray, they bring Partners Group. The guy who signed off and it's not me. I mean it's on the press release they did way back when you add the vice CEO, Alfred Gartner, you had the Esther Piiner, head
of infrastructure. I mean those people normally they're serious. Esther I know her, she's doing some real investment, but what the heck is she doing in climb works? And then they brought in poor guys because I'm sure they didn't have time to re see what's going on. They broad in the g i C, the Singapore Sovereign Wildfront. Okay, they brought in so Swiss Ray so is Christian Momentary, our CEO at the time now is gone. But the guy who did the investment, mich Repman, is still there.
And of course the guys who did the placement is JP Morgan. They are names same on the press release, so it's not you know, it's not a new secret. Brandy Marino, ed Zichell. They're there, the Global ad of Sustainability and so on. A lot of those people are still around, and of course the question is are they going to ask to pony up for the second rounds? Because for me that smell like tuna bonds. The people in the finance industry know what I'm talking about.
Can I just guys, it's easy easy criticize, and we're right to do so, but I just want to just talk about the reality of what's going on in the world of electrification. So the first thing is just take the case of solar. There were six hundred kickawats install last year just in terms of power produced without six hundred kick awats. This here, that's the equivalent of Japan's demand needs for the whole year. That's the scale. I'm saying this because it's the scale at which that technology
is coming to market, right. And the second thing is, we'll take the case of lithium ion batteries. If you went back twenty twenty, it was two hundred gig of what hours of batteries produced a year. We're over eleven hundred now, fourfoldingquish Again, I'm just giving you an example that's for me technology innovation and speed to market. And we go back to what you said about backlaf Smell. He does not understand the technology change that's going on
around it now. The one thing I did like in the report is the mention of AI because AI is really critical because what AI does is it enables you to manage this complexity going forward in a much better way than before. And I would also say a lower cost way. And that's the reality of what we're in now. So it's not again to put into context. The technologies are here and they're coming faster than whatever everybody thinks.
I'd like to lean into that because one of the takeaways I also get in addition to them not understanding that, not understanding the primary energy fallacy, Clearly they've never looked at anything China has been doing for the past two years. If they're asserting nuclear is the answer, wind and solar and batteries and storage arn't. So let's give some numbers.
Last week, it was announced by an analyst who spends all this time assessing stuff that China's emissions of CO two declined by one percent from March last year to March this year, despite their economy growing substantially.
Wow. I didn't see that. Wow, But that's big news. That's brilliant.
Yeah. This is not decoupling. This is decline. This is not slowing of growth. This is decline of the emissions over a year. And this is the first one without a forced third event like it declined in twenty twenty two because of COVID twenty twenty twenty two. But that was a global slowdown. This is economic growth, a vibrant economy, no matter what the headlines and the economists say. They've had twenty five years of getting China of publishing, China
is doomed headlines. They've been wrong every time, and so the next thing. Coal generation dropped by four point seven percent Q one twenty twenty four to Q one twenty twenty five, despite having an over five percent GDP growth and a growth of electricity demand of total electricity consumed in the economy and a bunch of that. The actual
grid demand drops slightly, but behind the meter solar. They've hammered in so much that a drop in grid demand is not indicative of a drop in octification, quite the opposite. What that is is an indication of their ten thousand villages Bloom program, where they basically ask an EPC contractor to do an entire county of rooftops at once, is working. So China is buying more electric cars than any country except Norway. Half the grid batteries went in China last year.
They're building three undred and sixty five gigawatts about twelve to fourteen tarawan hours of pump hydro. They have that in operation, building it today or in plan to start by twenty thirty. They hit their renewables targets for twenty thirty last year, they're hitting their EV sales targets for twenty thirty five this year. Meanwhile, Nuclear one of Tony Blair's institutes pillars of decarbonization. They haven't hit their twenty
twenty targets yet. They're likely to hit the twenty twenty targets this year, and their twenty twenty five targets are two percent of capacity. They're not going to hit that two percent of electrical generation capacity. Meanwhile, they're fifty percent of electrical generation capacity for renewables and coal is in decline. So this is a proof point for the future. And apparently Tony Blair Institute and the person who's responsible for energy and decarbonateation isn't paying attention.
Why not, Well, they are a lobbying organization. So that tells you something, right, So follow the money.
When you google. So Tony Blancy to TBI when you google the sentence, what does TBI stands for? And the answer from Google is traumatic brain injury. That says it all.
On that note, Paul Martin, Friend of the show, he's got a meme saying stop paying attention to old guys. And I look at the news coming out about Joe Biden and how his handlers were preventing people from realizing how much in decline he was. And now Tony Blair kind of in a similar demographic. I would say Clinton has mostly declined into a me too quiet place more
than Tony Blair. And it's probably a good thing. But I hope that somebody takes me aside when I get into that demographic and says, Mike, it's time for you to hang up your keyboard.
Definitely say that to you might don't worry, you know, you know, or like, okay, guys, My last words are carbon capture is state capture.
That's as simple as it is. And you're absolutely right. Either they're stupid than old, or they crepeat, or they are hide guns, and frankly they at best it's significant and at worst it's nefarious. That's my conclusion on the Tony bar report. And even that technology that which has no future said well, I said.
Yeah, My last words are everybody ignored Tony Blair, look at China's emissions being in decline.
Gentlemen, Thank you very much, and I hope you were not too hard on certain people. But you know that's we do it here. We just with the Mavericks exactly cheers.
Thank you very much, thank you always a pleasure.
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