Inspired with Alexa von Tobel
00:27:26 · Taylor Francis, Alexa von Tobel
We tell every person that when they interview for a role, so that they can opt out of either the intensity or the care. [00:27:36] S2: The people who opt out of the care are a real self selecting group. [00:27:40] S0: No, I think people opt out of both. Think there are people who hear the words kindness and warmth and don't want a workplace that's about that, and there are people who hear the words intensity and say, wow, that doesn't quite sound like you know, what I wanna bring to this next role, and that's great. And we end up with a, you know, a culture of people who've kinda opted in to both halves of that. [00:28:01] S2: I love that on many levels. I feel like I would enjoy being a teammate at Watershed. This feels... That feels [00:28:09] S0: If only we could be so lucky, Alexa. [00:28:11] S2: I'm I'm like, there's gotta be, like, an internship or something I could apply for. I want to just take a step back. As I think you know, I care a lot about climate. And what's happening with climate right now? Like, just can you give us your point of view? And I don't mean politically. I mean, just what's happening to the planet that we all, as human beings, stewards of this place? What's happening right now? Can you cut through a lot of the noise? Yeah. And I feel like even I'm overwhelmed sometimes by the media of like, what's this and what's... Just facts. Like, what's happening right now,
00:28:45 · Taylor Francis, Alexa von Tobel
[00:28:45] S0: Taylor? I think three things are three big things are happening right now. One is because of decades of us dumping a ton of planet warming gases into the atmosphere, the planet's warming up. And everything that was predicted thirty years ago is happening today. And you see that in weather extremes. I think you see it most acutely. I mean, my view is that the most acute impacts of climate are gonna be felt in destabilizing already at risk communities around the world. We in The US, there's gonna be very bad impacts of climate change. I think of wildfires in California. We've got capacity to adapt. The thing that really matters is that there are billions of people who don't have the capacity to adapt, and where crop failure means a really big impact on livelihoods and health and communities. Thing one that's happening is that the planet is warming exactly as predicted, if not worse, and we are seeing that show up in newspapers and lives human suffering around the world. Thing two that's happening is that the world is slowly decarbonizing. This is the good news story that you don't hear on the news. [00:30:00] S2: Give me a good news story.
00:30:02 · Taylor Francis
[00:30:02] S0: In 2006, when I first started presenting the Inconvenient Truth slideshow, solar and wind were way more expensive than coal and natural gas. Today, if you wanna deploy a megawatt of power, it's gonna be a megawatt of solar or wind, because they're cheaper than the alternative, and the market knows what to do with that. That's happened decades faster than the forecast slides we had in the Inconvenient Truth presentation twenty years ago. Last year, clean energy stock index up 30%, oil stock energy index flat. Why is that? It's because we're building a lot of new energy, and it turns out that solar and batteries are the best way to do that. So the world is decarbonizing. You look at The US, economy growing, emissions going down. The UK, economy growing, emissions going down. There's dozens of countries where economies growing, emissions are going down. A lot of that, by the way, is because China, which has been much maligned by the West as a heavy emitter, has become the arsenal of decarbonization. They are the superpower of solar, of batteries, and EVs, and they've made these technologies very cheap, such that people are opting for them purely on the basis of economics. Different question around what that says about The US versus China's strength in the future, but the world is benefiting from a massive build out, especially in China, of clean energy technologies at low price. What that means is that the range of outcomes for climate is now more constrained than it was twenty years ago. Some of the worst case scenarios of five and six degree warming are extremely unlikely to happen. And we're looking at a range between two and four degrees. Now, it turns out the difference between two and four degrees is enormous. Every tenth of a degree, especially for the global south, makes a really big difference. And so the third thing that's happening is the world is decarbonizing, but it's not decarbonizing fast enough. And I think that's because maybe partially inertia, these are complex systems, But also because the industries that are not gonna be around one hundred and fifty years from now are fighting a rearguard effort to remain relevant. And there's an attack on climate policy in the West that is not gonna prevent a zero carbon future. It's just trying to slow it down. So think those are the three things that are happening right now.
00:32:39 · Taylor Francis, Alexa von Tobel
The verb that we obsess over at Watershed is accelerate. Accelerate the climate economy. Climate economy is an inevitability. We're just on track to get there a decade or two too late. And so how can we move faster? [00:32:54] S2: First of all, thank you for having some good news. It's nice to hear. If we fast forward, you obviously have just been, thank God for you seeing that movie decades ago. If you fast forward the next decade, what do you see? If you're gonna make a prediction, two or three, just things that feel obvious to you, Taylor, of where the world is headed. What's in your mind?
00:32:54 · Alexa von Tobel, Taylor Francis
[00:32:54] S2: First of all, thank you for having some good news. It's nice to hear. If we fast forward, you obviously have just been, thank God for you seeing that movie decades ago. If you fast forward the next decade, what do you see? If you're gonna make a prediction, two or three, just things that feel obvious to you, Taylor, of where the world is headed. What's in your mind? [00:33:22] S0: I think on climate in particular, couple things. One is the climate AI intersection matters a great deal. I think about that in two dimensions. One is we're building a ton of new energy capacity to power the data center economy. It really matters that that economy be powered by clean power. Because if it is, then this can be a catalyst for building new generation that decarbonizes the grid. If it's not, it can be backwards progress on decarbonization right at the worst possible moment. So it's really important. And I think it's a mixed picture actually on that. I think that there are some companies that are deeply, deeply committed to renewable energy for data centers, and there are others that aren't. And where the dollars end up falling, back to our earlier discussion around supply chains and choice across supply chains, really matters. The other part of AI and climate is that if we're gonna spend all this energy building the superpower, we'd better point that superpower at solving the climate problem. [00:34:24] S2: Amen.
00:34:25 · Taylor Francis
[00:34:25] S0: And there's no shortage of parts of the climate problem that would benefit from acceleration by AI. That, of course, is a huge obsession of ours. We view Watershed as a company trying to harness the best of the AI superpowers for the climate problems that matter as people use data to make decisions. We've built a bunch of products in that area. We're gonna build a bunch more. We're super excited about what's possible there. So I think that AI climate intersection is one thing that I think is gonna be really dominant over the next decade. And then the other I would say is I think you can chart the progression of how does climate interact with business. And it was initially about reputation and brand, and that motivated a lot of the early climate programs. And brand and reputation have value, so that was useful. Then it was around policy and compliance and regulation and paperwork. That also serves a purpose. I think we're now entering this mode of climate as a driver of revenue. A thing that I'm really obsessed with is, what's the Fortune 500 of climate businesses if you were to rank the businesses with revenue from their climate products? BCG did research that the green products market is worth $5,000,000,000,000 today, second only to the technology and AI and data center market. And that includes everything from EVs to batteries to solar panels to people selling green materials and green crops. And we see it across our customer base. But I think like, the bigger that number is, the more the kind of forces of capitalism and companies are gonna take us to a good place.