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Topic: Climate Risk

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[Episode #228] – Public Persuasion

Jul 10 2024

Full Episode

Most climate communicators emphasize the risk of climate change, in the belief that if only people understood how dangerous it is, they would do something about it.

But what if terrifying messages about rising sea levels and life-threatening weather events have the opposite effect? What if they only serve to turn people off, rather than motivate them to act?

And what kinds of messages do resonate with people and get them interested in taking action on climate and participating in the energy transition?

In this episode, we are joined by the Jessica Lu, the Associate Director of Strategy and Analytics with Potential Energy’s Insights Lab. Her team has used established market research techniques to test various messages to unearth what motivates humans to care about climate change. The insights she shares with us are simultaneously surprising and obvious, suggesting much more successful strategies for climate communications.

Because we feel that this information is critically important for all climate communicators to understand, we decided to make this episode one of our occasional lagniappe shows and put it in front of the paywall so that subscribers and nonsubscribers alike can enjoy it. So, nonsubscribers, now you can see what you’ve been missing! And we hope you will all share this episode widely with your friends and colleagues.

Guest:

Jessica Lu is Associate Director of Strategy and Analytics and leads Potential Energy’s Insights Lab. She leads teams that execute hundreds of message tests and focus groups and perform in-market measurement analytics to unearth what motivates humans to care about climate change.

Prior to PE, Jessica was an analyst at the Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation, supporting entrepreneurs building innovative, non-profit startups and social enterprises to solve gnarly social issues. She graduated from Princeton University with a degree in Civil and Environmental Engineering.

On Twitter: @pe_coalition

On LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/potential-energy-coalition/

On the Web: https://potentialenergycoalition.org/

Geek rating: 1

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[Episode #135] – Internalizing Climate Risk

Nov 25 2020

Mini Episode

Climate change poses a host of risks to the global economy. From ‘natural’ disasters causing property damage, to climate mitigation measures rendering fossil fuel assets unburnable, to potential impacts of climate change on agricultural production, energy, food, insurance, real estate, and other sectors, it’s clear that private sector companies and all kinds of investments stand to suffer significant losses as a consequence of climate change.

Yet few regulations exist to require these risks to be recognized on balance sheets, or disclosed to investors, unlike many other everyday risks that are subject to such disclosure and protection. A home built in a floodplain and destroyed in a flood, or at a wildland interface and destroyed by a wildfire, has not seen its cost of insurance go up to reflect the rising risk of another loss due to climate change. Pension funds have not been required to evaluate the risk of their investments in oil, gas, and coal companies losing value due to future restrictions on carbon emissions. And entities like the U.S. Federal Reserve have been free to continue lending to fossil fuel producers even as they warn about the damage that climate change is doing to the global economy.

Clearly, it is long past time to recognize the risk of climate change across all sectors of the economy. We must begin implementing ways of measuring those risks, testing portfolios for their risk tolerance, divesting public money from the fossil fuel sector, and start implementing economy-wide ways of pricing carbon emissions.

To that end, in 2019 the U. S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) formed the Climate-Related Market Risk Subcommittee, and tasked it with producing a report to consider what climate-related risks might be; examine whether adequate information about climate risks is available; identify any impediments to evaluating and managing climate-related financial and market risks; ask whether the market can do a better job of integrating climate-related scenarios and use them to stress-test investments; incorporate disclosures of climate risk into financial and market risk assessments and reporting; identify how risks can be managed and disclosed in order to protect the stability of the financial system; and ensure that information about climate-related financial and market risks are internalized into the market.

On September 9, 2020, that report was released. In this episode, we speak with the chairman of the subcommittee, Bob Litterman, founding partner and Risk Committee Chairman of Kepos Capital. Bob has had a decades-long career in risk management, and has been a champion of recognizing and integrating climate risk for many years. We’ll ask him about what the report says, why it’s important, and how its findings might be used to integrate awareness of climate risk into financial metrics and enterprise governance.

Geek rating: 6

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[Episode #115] – Wildfire and Transition in Australia

Feb 19 2020

Mini Episode

Australia’s out-of-control wildfires in recent months have captured the world’s attention and raised serious questions about how climate change is affecting the continent, whether the country’s leadership is taking appropriate action to address climate risk, and what the future holds for its unique weather patterns and ecosystem.

But Australia is one of the most fossil-fuel dependent countries in the world, which makes it politically difficult to face the reality of its climate risk, and how its own activities are increasing that risk. So in this episode we invited a longtime journalist and researcher, based in Sydney, who works in research, strategy, and communications around climate change and finance, to help us understand the political, economic, and climate context of Australia at this moment, and to understand how the wildfires are influencing the trajectory of energy transition there. She reveals a country delicately balanced somewhere between hope and despair, with political leadership in thrall to the fossil fuel industry, and a populace eager to pursue energy transition and reduce its exposure to climate risk.

Geek rating: 1

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[Episode #114] – Cyber and Climate Risks

Feb 5 2020

Mini Episode

As energy transition progresses and more internet-connected distributed energy resources (DERs) join the grid, they increase the grid’s flexibility and dynamism, but they also expose those systems to the risk of being hacked. What kinds of protections do we need to have as grid modernization proceeds and more and more devices in the so-called “internet of things” (IoT) become part of the grid ecosystem? Should we be encouraging the adoption of smart, interconnected devices at all? Or would we be better off using devices that were not connected to communication systems in any way, to better ensure their security? And what are the relationships between cybersecurity on the grid, and the effects of climate change?

Our guest in this episode is a cybersecurity expert with the Idaho National Laboratory, part of the US Department of Energy, who provides strategic guidance on topics at the intersection of critical infrastructure security and resilience to senior U.S. and international government and industry leaders. He’s a longtime expert in this domain with a deep and wide set of relevant expertise, and you’re sure to learn a lot in this conversation about things that you probably didn’t even know existed, but that are intimately connected with grid security, climate change, and energy transition. Open your mind wide for this one – it’s a doozy!

Geek rating: 9

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