Global-scale solutions to climate change with Kirsty Gogan from TerraPraxis and Jaimie Johnston MBE

In this inspiring episode, we discuss how to achieve a practical, global-scale solution to the very biggest issue facing humanity – climate change – with Kirsty Gogan of TerraPraxis.

To learn more about Bryden Wood's Design to Value philosophy, visit www.brydenwood.com. You can also follow Bryden Wood on LinkedIn and X.

Transcript

Jaimie Johnston: 0:00

Hi all and welcome to this edition of Built Environment Matters, the Bryden Wood podcast. I'm your host, Jaimie Johnston, Head of Global Systems. This episode I'm delighted to be joined by Kirsty Gogan, who is the Founder, along with Eric Ingersoll and Managing Partner of Terra Praxis, which is a nonprofit focused on developing climate scale solutions for our most difficult to decarbonise sectors, including coal and liquid fuels. Kirsty's also managing partner of Lucid Catalyst, a highly specialised international consultancy focused on large scale affordable market-based de-carbonisation of the global economy. Kirsty's voluntary work includes having co-founded Energy for Humanity. She serves on the UK government's nuclear innovation research advisory board, as well as on the board of US NGO, Nuclear Innovation Alliance and the French NGO Voices of Nuclear, the U S National Academies of Sciences Engineering and Medicine has appointed her to serve on a new committee to identify opportunities for barriers to the commercialisation of new and advanced nuclear energy technologies over the next 30 years. So Kirsty, Thanks for joining.

Kirsty Gogan: 1:06

Great to be here. Jaimie, thanks for having me on.

Jaimie Johnston: 1:09

That's an incredible CV actually. Isn't it? When you just list those things, but it takes a while, but they're all fantastic things to mention. You've got incredible background, so I'm sure we'll, we'll cover some of that in more detail. I said right at the top, you're the Founder and Managing Partner Terra Praxis. Can you tell us more about Terra Praxis and your history, bit about Eric and how this came about?

Kirsty Gogan: 1:29

Oh yeah. Thanks. Well I'm super lucky really to be working with Eric Ingersoll. He's been my business partner now for several years, at Lucid Catalyst and Terra Praxis is relatively new venture just over a year old. But working with Eric sort of more broadly to unleash the, I guess, the creativity, the determination that we need to tackle the hardest parts of the decarbonisation challenge, just being a total highlight really of my career and Terra Praxis, we founded to really sort of start assembling solutions for these really tough to decarbonise parts of the economy and design and, and then execute really kind of complex high leverage strategies that are aimed at sort of inspiring and then also mobilising leaders across multiple sectors to actually initiate action themselves and then hopefully they'll sustain their own momentum. So we can, can tell you about some of those projects that we're working on, including with you now Jaimie as well. And how we hope that they really could transform our prospects for avoiding catastrophic climate impacts. And so it gives me hope. really.

Jaimie Johnston: 2:34

Yes. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, it's interesting. We've talked a lot about this. Nuclear seems to get us sort of very much a knee jerk reaction from people. I think there's a lot of preconceptions around it. The language is definitely changing. Even the last couple of months, we've seen some of the messaging start to shift. One of the things we found fascinating is when you actually start to explain what these new advanced heat sources are like, why they're more passive, why everyone's misconceptions around nuclear aren't necessarily true. So perhaps you can sort of explain a bit about some of those technologies.

Kirsty Gogan: 3:07

Yeah, it's really interesting. Isn't it? There's such a big gap between the fact that it's consistently identified as being really necessary in our climate mitigation, roadmaps by everyone from the Intergovernmental panel on climate change, the International Energy Agency, the European Commission, and then the perception, which is sort of, is a bit outdated, really, especially when you do start to look at these new technologies, I'm an environmentalist whose spent my whole career working on sustainability issues and, you know, including as a civil servant for Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott, as an activist planting forests and as even a consultant for big corporations like Ben and Jerry's and Greenpeace, and I have to confess that. as an environmentalist, I was basically by default anti nuclear and that changed when, well, first of all, I was given a book actually as a wedding present by my now husband's aunt. Which I really recommend to anybody it's called Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air, by Professor Sir David MacKay and he number crunches through what it would take for the UK to meet its climate targets with existing technologies. And reading that book Ifirstly realised that it was going to be really, really tough to get to zero, to get to zero emissions just with renewables alone. And, you know, we'd have to make really tough choices about how to use our land and so on. But also that basically I really realised that I wasn't educated about nuclear and I'd made a whole bunch of wrong assumptions based on old ideas that didn't really hold water. So, I started reading into it more and started my journey. And here I am now really advocating strongly for nuclear to play a big role. And particularly when you look at the small modular reactors and the advanced heat sources, I think that will really help convince any of the remaining skeptics. and that's partly because they're designed to be smaller manufactured products that can be largely made in factories. And that's really a big contrast with the sort of Olympic scale. Construction projects that take a decade to build and cost 20 billion quid. It's easier to finance a 1 billion or 2 billion pound plant than a 20 billion pound plant and it's much better for communities to have the plant being quickly assembled on site rather than having years of disruption and dust and noise associated with a big construction project. But ultimately I think the real turning point is going to come. When more people realise that these technologies big and small. Are actually really versatile. They do a lot more than just deliver always on electricity. They can operate really flexibly to compliment wind and solar. And most importantly, they can produce heat and that emissions free heat turns out to be really, really useful for all kinds of things, including making hydrogen or supplying heat directly to homes and businesses or desalinating water and so on. So actually when he looked beyond electricity, which is only 20% of our energy use to the other 80% of our energy use, then it turns out nuclear technologies, can actually be incredibly useful. so that's, I think why you're starting to notice that big change, Jaimie, and in this sort of discourse and the language that's being used more and more people are realising we're just not bending the curve on emissions. We're going to have to diversify our strategies. And it turns out we do have this other tool available to us, that could be really, really

Jaimie Johnston: 6:26

I think one of the light bulb moments for me, I saw somebody did a presentation on sort of all energy sources available to human kind. And solar's massive. You're going well, there we go. Slam dunk, but again, but the density is so low that to harness enough energy, you need to build a solar farm, the size of Wales to power the UK and things. So there's the kind of.

Kirsty Gogan: 6:48

Exactly

Jaimie Johnston: 6:49

there's the density, dispatch power that you can't get it consistently enough and all the easy sites have been knabbed. So it's getting progressively harder to do some of those, renewables. So yeah, Martin Wood talked a bit about this on the last podcast. He's saying it's like the vaccines race. Yes. Obviously we need solar and wind, but to only rely on them and not to be exploring these other technologies, you're missing a massive trick. And if you can't do it with wind and solar, you go flip . Now we should have been doing a lot more on nuclear. So yeah, it, his, his view is, you know, we need to lean into all of these technologies and if we find we don't need nuclear in thirty years fantastic, but to not have it in our toolbox now would be a huge mistake.

Kirsty Gogan: 7:25

I think that's right. I think what's happening is it we're reevaluating the perceived risks of nuclear against the risks of failing to decarbonise. And when you look at those macro trends of So if we start building out wind and solar and everything's going brilliantly, it looks like you're on a kind of hockey stick curve that the upward trajectory of deployments, just going to keep on going and going. And that's often what is included in the energy systems modeling, you know, it's just a total hockey stick. And actually what happens is that you use those early sites that you building on or the easiest sites they've got maybe access to transmission they're, you know, really well suited to accommodate those wind and solar projects. But the more and more you build the harder and harder it gets. And then actually what happens is the hockey stick curve turns into an S shaped curve. We're finding that, in many places there's macro trend of encountering more and more public resistanceto building out more and more infrastructure. And that's, before we start talking about transmission, which you know, is really hard to build because, it's really difficult to make the case that people will benefit directly from jobs and so on associated with transmission build. So when you start looking at the land use issues, you start to realise that actually the net zero transition is going to require a large amount of new infrastructure to be built. And there's big questions about where it can be built. And frankly, it doesn't matter how cheap it is if you can't build it.

Jaimie Johnston: 8:50

Yeah, absolutely. Which kind of leads us on to the Repowering Coal project that we're working on with you guys. So looking at how you can repurpose some of the existing infrastructure and, decarbonise perhaps you can explain a bit more about that project.

Kirsty Gogan: 9:01

Yeah, it was really working on the risks issue actually that led us to really start thinking that actually the opportunity to repower existing coal plants is more than an interesting idea. It might be really necessary. So the Net Zero America report that was produced by Princeton recently suggested that the low renewable scenario would need the US grid to double or triple in size which as we've just been discussing , seems extremely unlikely, very high risk strategy. But if you were to be able to reuse all of the existing thermal sites if you could repower all of the existing coal plants in the United States, you could reduce the amount of new transmission bills by 40%. So that is a sort of radical de-risking of our net zero transition. And so it's a big opportunity to essentially what we're proposing to do. Jaimie is, is co-locate one of these advanced heat sources next to existing coal plants decommission the coal boiler, but keep the rest of the plant operating. So the steam turbine, the power island and the existing transmission and working with you on developing a real scalable building system that can be configured to meet any kind of site or plant requirements and accommodate a range of different heat sources in a highly automated, design, manufacturer and assembly approach could actually deliver incredibly low costs and achieve the sort of rates of deployment and scale that we need to fully decarbonise the two terawatts of coal. that's still projected to be operating in the world. today

Jaimie Johnston: 10:34

I mean, it protects the livelihoods where these plants are often situated. The entire town is there to support the plants. If you switched to the plant off, suddenly you've got massive political problems, you've got unemployment rates and things. The idea that you can do. Reuse all of that existing infrastructure, all of that kind of economic infrastructure and just literally swap out the heat source, you go, oh, that's so obvious. It sounds so plausible. So doable and yeah, the impact you'd have, would be vast wouldn't it?

Kirsty Gogan: 11:01

It really would. Yeah. I mean, it's unforgivably unrealistic, really to just think that we're going to abandon those.assets even in countries with old coal, like in the United States and Canada and in Europe, it's really, really tough to shut down these coal plants because, you're right, it's devastating the impact on communities when you close down those plants there's 260 gigawatts of operating coal still, even in the United States. And the prospect of abandoning those assets is creating a total political deadlock on President Biden's climate plan. So this is a really important opportunity, political opportunity to create bipartisan support for climate action in a way that actually has climate justice at its heart as well. Because as you say it does then mean you can, you can maintain those jobs, their socioeconomic benefits, the tax revenues in those communities. And actually what's really interesting is that the plants, when they're re-powered with these heat sources will likely run at a much higher capacity factor than they currently do today at a lower cost making the plants even more profitable than they were before. And then also with potential to add additional value services, like for example, carbon removal, atmospheric carbon removal, with the cooling towers, the production of hydrogen. So you end up potentially creating real clean energy hubs in these communities. will operate now for decades to come. So it's, it's gaining a lot of traction in the US. And we'd expect that it will do the same elsewhere in the world. where the vast majority of the global coal fleet is actually only around 14 years old or less than 14 years old. So, there's a trillion dollars of unrecovered capital in that global coal fleet and those plants are providing reliable electricity to citizens that need it. So, you know, maintaining that energy is going to be really important as well for, for not only for prosperity and economic growth in those parts of the world, Asia, China, India, Africa. But actually also that energy is necessary for climate resilience as well for resilience against climate impacts that these communities are already feeling.

Jaimie Johnston: 13:09

Can you just unpack some of those numbers? I love the statistics around this, but I mean, the scale of how many of these plants there are the fact that there is more being built as we speak the fact that there's yeah, the existing ones are nowhere near end of life and therefore it makes no financial sense to switch them off and the sort of percentage of and if the climate change targets, we need to hit, that could be addressed by this one initiative. Just it staggers me some of the numbers that are attached to this. It's a huge, huge problem, but the opportunity is absolutely vast, isn't it.

Kirsty Gogan: 13:39

It is it's astonishing. I mean, we had two gigawatts of coal operating in the UK yesterday, post COVID coal, is surging to its highest ever level, and it's partly as a result of the energy crisis. That, of course, we're all feeling where we're seeing gas prices now spiking to very, very high levels and security of supply issues being felt around the world after an unusually cold summer and, and a still and cloudy summer as well. So we didn't see renewables generating as much as we would've liked. So that combined with the fact that the global economic recovery. is a very energy intensive process. And therefore, we have countries like China, like India, African countries, Asian countries, burning coal in order to start reviving their economies and do the sort of post pandemic recovery and the bottom line is that, you know, we often think, oh, it's nuclear versus renewables or coal versus renewables. It's really not, you have to have that sort of reliable. Always on electricity. Um, so back to the numbers, Jaimie, we're still expecting to see two terawatts of coal operating by mid century, which just on its own would swallow up our entire remaining carbon budgets. There's the coal-fired capacity that's used in the world today is emitting around 15 billion, tons of carbon emissions per year. Almost half of all of our carbon emissions. It's sort of quite astonishing actually the scale of it, because it's not just electricity generation, of course, coal is contributing to our industrial emissions as well. More than half of the global fleet are very young assets, less than 14 years old. So retirement of that infrastructure seems highly unattractive and unrealistic as a prospect for most of those owners and investors.

Jaimie Johnston: 15:24

Yeah. One of the things that Martin talked about when he came back from COP 26 was a lot of the demand projections are probably wrong. So I love that, Factfulness the Hans Rosling book, where it talks about the journey that countries go on from where they start everyone, industrialises, their energy needs go up, et cetera, et cetera. We've got another 4 billion people on the way. So to think that we're not going to need vast amounts of more power, actually in the next a couple of decades is, is completely wrong. So even if we could control it now, we haven't got a plan for that massive increase in population and their energy demands are only going to increase over time.

Kirsty Gogan: 16:00

Yeah. I mean, it is quite an interesting idea. this actually that we, we really don't know what trajectory we're on because when you look at the current projections for our temperature increases based on the commitments that were made, for example, at COP 26, you know, for deforestation, methane emissions reduction, the updated nationally determined contributions, the NDCs, you know, the International Energy Agency said, oh, well we've put all that into our energy systems modeling. And the good news is we're now on a 1.8. Degree trajectory based on if all of these commitments are met, which firstly, is a really big caveat, right? Because you know, let's see all those commitments be met, but none of those projections include any increase in global energy access, any meaningful increase. And firstly, we hope that that's wrong because 4 billion people lack access to enough electricity, you know, almost a billion people in the world, lack access to any electricity at all today. That 850 million people without any access is projected to increase to 3 billion people without even a light bulb in their house by 2050. You know, that that is just astonishing. And, it's well, as we say, hopefully it's wrong. The question we need to be asking is where that energy is going to come from. Eric's done some analysis that suggests that if, if everyone in the world was to have access to this sort of median level . Of energy, which is equivalent to about sort of Czech Republic. It's about 4,000 kilowatt hours per person, compared to, you know, 15,000 in the U S and zero or very, very low in the majority of the world. We'd need to triple our global energy infrastructure to just bring everybody up to the average level. And that means bringing people down as well as up, So you're absolutely right, Jaimie, that until we start really taking into account the rising global energy demand and build that into the heart of our climate mitigation strategies, you know, so not only do we have to replace our entire global energy fossil fuel based energy infrastructure by 2050, not just electricity, but transport and industry as well. We're we're still looking at very high risks of very severe climate impacts.

Jaimie Johnston: 18:17

Yeah. One of the things I absolutely love that working with you guys is, yeah, you are looking incredibly broadly. So as you say, it's not just repowering coal is one initiative, but you're also looking at, oil and gas in shipping aviation industry or all these other things. Perhaps you can explain some of the other initiatives that you guys looking at. Cause it is, an incredible roster of initiatives. All of which are probably needed to address the massive challenges.

Kirsty Gogan: 18:40

Yeah, we try and like focus on the big ones. That's for sure. Uh, coal is a big one, but yeah, oil and gas. There are big ones too. We use about a hundred million barrels of oil per day right now. So it's big. And when you look again, when you look at, you know, all of the sort of projected energy use, IEA, EIA, DNV, BP, they're all still expecting more than half of our global energy to come from from fossil fuels by mid century. So that really puts us onto something that looks much more like a three to four degree trajectory of warming, which you know, is a really bad outcome. so yeah, we need really good answers for our cold, but also for our liquid fuels. And one of the things we've been looking at is very low cost, very large scale hydrogen production. And you've, I'm sure you've heard about hydrogen as being an important decarbonisation tool and that's because it has the potential to be an ingredient in clean drop-in substitute fuels. So we don't see hydrogen necessarily as being that useful as an end use product because it's quite difficult to store and transport and move around and you'd have to invest a lot in new infrastructure for end users as well. But as an ingredient for ammonia, for example, which can be used as a Marine shipping fuel or synthetic hydrocarbons, that means you can use your existing storage, transport and end use infrastructure. You can use today's planes and ships and so on. And that, that starts to get really useful, but for hydrogen to be an ingredient in those fuels, it has to be really, really. Which means it has to be less than a dollar, a kilogram, which is way out of range for, you know, for any of the prospects for renewables until, 2050. And, that's largely because. You know, they're very dispersed, very dilute energy source. So, you know, even if you build renewables and windy and sunny places and combine them to increase the capacity factors, you still have to pay for the transport of those fuels around the world. And you still get into high prices. But, with these advanced heat sources, if you move into a shipyard based manufacturing environment, to make Offshore production platforms, which are really akin to what the oil and gas industry uses today, these sort of large floating production platforms. Then you can start to get into very, very low costs and it it's the same model. Again, Jaimie is the repowering coal, which is figuring out how to make very high, high productivity manufactured based products, in highly automated environments. And then, you know, the, the opportunity to move away from sort of electricity generation, where you're tethered to a transmission system and the electricity market towards a commodities based system where essentially, or you're making a product that you can store and transport and export to global markets, then you free up your siteing opportunities to and that's where the offshore, citing opportunity really comes into its own. And is extremely scalable as well.

Jaimie Johnston: 21:36

Could you, reappropriate some of the petrochemical supply chain, so that like repowering coal, you re repurpose the supply chain and say, stop doing oil and gas. We're now doing this other thing. Cause it feels like there must be some relevant skills that you could actually adopt and start to move into a different, better space.

Kirsty Gogan: 21:53

Absolutely. I mean the oil and gas industry is already operating it's at global scale. So we should be seeking to leverage as much of that. Skills and capability, but also their existing infrastructure, as much as possible. We have an analogy ' the Impossible Burger' analogy that we like to use, which is if you don't know the Impossible Burger is a plant-based meat substitute, that you can buy in any Burger King across America now. And it looks like a burger, it tastes like a burger. Cost the same as a burger and it doesn't require behavior change in order for it to be widely adopted and we see that we need a lot of the Impossible Burgers for climate and essentially that's what these fuels are. These clean drop-in substitute fuels that can be produced at a cost, which is comparable with the fossil fuels that we use today and has the same performance as the fossil fuels that we use today. But that can be distributed through all of the existing supply chain infrastructure. That's really an Impossible Burger. It doesn't require behavior change and it doesn't require a huge amount of investments in associated infrastructure, which again, not only reduces the overall cost and therefore reduces the overall likelihood of us actually doing it. But it also reduces the risk because you don't have to sequence a whole load of investment in order to make the product in order to make the product really work.

Jaimie Johnston: 23:10

Yeah, that's an interesting, it's been a sort of common theme over the last year and these podcasts are talking about the behavioral change that's needed for when we're typically talking about industrialised construction. It's always the cultural barriers that we discuss. It's never the technical thing. So yeah. Fantastic point if you don't have to change people's behavior, some of your problems just evaporates, you go . Right. I don't have to lower the barrier to entry so much that it becomes entirely sensible and just the right thing to do, and an easy thing to do.

Kirsty Gogan: 23:38

Yes. It's really a kind of important operating principle for us, which is. Making this as sort of irresistible and easy as possible, which means making it more profitable, making it, a very like straightforward decision for the investor. And whether you're sort of repurposing existing coal plants where you've got a kind of ready workforce that actually might be really interested in the prospect of having, you know, another 60 years of operating, highly profitable plants. but without all of the pollution and the, you know, the emissions associated with that, or, you know, an opportunity to repurpose all of our existing infrastructure and frankly, Having guilt-free flying, rather than sort of trying to guilt people into behavior change, you know, people like junk food., let them have junk food, let them fly on holiday, go with the grain of human behavior. And we're more likely to actually succeed because we don't have time on our side. You know, the, the really important detail here is timescales that sort of it's yeah, it's the a hundred million barrels of oil scale, but we've also got 28 years to achieve this transition globally

Jaimie Johnston: 24:44

and presumably everyone who's in this space must be looking for some, some good news answers. No, one's running a coal powered plant thinking. Yeah, this is fine. This will be fine for another 30 years. So there must be, yeah, there's this moral shift. There's a big political shift. Obviously the language is getting a lot easier on some of these things. So it feels like everythingis at leastpointing in the same direction, having sort of talked about the doom and gloom earlier, it does feel like there is at least a greater acceptance that we have to do these things now.

Kirsty Gogan: 25:09

Yeah. So it's super interesting, isn't it? Because we started off by talking about how, you know, nuclear energy has been kind of dismissed or ignored or neglected in the discourse. Really until quite recently, and in some ways that's given us this great opportunity to sort of discover a new tool. And if we can figure out ways of delivering it, like modernising the delivery of that technology working with organizations like yours that are kind of at the cutting edge of, manufacturing and design and delivery that can actually achieve this scale and rates of deployment, the speed and the scale that's necessary within the climate context that we're operating. Then all of a sudden you've got this kind of whole new avenue of potential, especially for these tough to decarbonise parts of the problem. Because again, the sort of the unique attributes of nuclear technology is not only does it make power, but it also makes heat. And when you combine heat and power, That's when you start to be able to really dig into these tough to decarbonise sectors, industrial heat, domestic heating desalination. But of course, then also, you know, the big ones like fuels and repowering coal

Jaimie Johnston: 26:21

yeah, it does feel as though there's a sequence. A lot of these new technologies just need large amounts of clean, heat and power to regenerate that it unlocks all these other technologies feels like there's a sort of domino effect of yeah, potentially you suddenly get this sort of exponential increase in adoption of these things, which is potentially fantastic news.

Kirsty Gogan: 26:38

It is. And we're starting to gain a lot of traction with these strategies. we're getting a lot of interest from investors, from governments, from policy makers, from other NGOs and also customers, so airlines are really interested in the prospect of having clean drop-in substitute fuels that are comparable in price and performance to the fields that they use today, because that's not on offer in the current sort of sustainable aviation fuel discourse. So that starts to become like a real prospect for them. And likewise for the oil majors and oil producing nations that are really starting to have to think about their transition strategy. I was at an oil and gas conference recently and watching the CEOs of one oil company after another saying, even two years ago, we weren't under this kind of pressure and now they really are. And I think it's because people around the world are already experiencing climate impacts, not just, you know, in the poorer countries, but everywhere in Germany, there was the terrible floods this summer, the wildfires in the United States, starting to become real. I think that's creating an appetite for new solutions and our job is to be ready for them.

Jaimie Johnston: 27:47

Absolutely. so just changing tack slightly. So you were up at COP 26 very recently I heard very mixed reviews, but there was a lot of disappointment, I think, coming out of COP 26, that things weren't accelerating as quickly. I'd like to get your view on what you saw, what you experienced, how your COP 26 was. Cause obviously you had the event that we attended on repowering cold. So perhaps you can explain a bit more.

Kirsty Gogan: 28:09

Yeah. It's the cop only half-full it's the, yeah, I mean, it's funny, a colleague of mine said, well, it's a bit like, you know, having gone to New York last weekend and people saying, how was New York, you know, because so many things happening, it's such a huge event and it's tens of thousands of people. But yeah, I mean, broadly speaking, the, the expectations were, of course they were high. in my experience, having been at each COP since Paris and COP 21 in 2015, I found, you know, two big changes. One was that the representation from the global south seems to really be increasing. And, the global south, is on the front line. It's almost like these are voices from the future that are already really exposed to climate impacts that are happening now and because of the lack of access to energy, in those countries, because they're poor and they lack access to energy that can help deliver that, build their economies and build their infrastructure. They're much less resilient to those impacts. So there's a kind of combined demand for energy growth in those countries. And decarbonisation clean energy growth as well. So that was really striking and, you know, it's, I think it's getting more and more difficult for the developed the industrialized world that's contributed the sort of lion's share of historical emissions, be so slow in decarbonising our own economies and that in itself is opening real questions around, you know, the social acceptability, frankly, of having this indulgent approach to, oh, I like this technology, but not that technology, how can we justify shutting down our existing nuclear plants which provide around half of European clean energy and replacing them with coal and gas. It's a very interesting shift. I think that's happening in the discourse right now. And it's, I think it's beginning to marginalize the traditional left, environmental, anti nukes, and actually the representation from nuclear at the COP was very strong. It was the strongest that I've seen and the appetite for it was the strongest that I've seen. And I think, again, it comes back to the same themes that we've been discussing Jaimie, which is that we're not bending the curve on emissions. The emissions are continuing to rise year on year, despite 25 years of building political support for action on climate and having these climate conferences. There's a recognition. We have to do more. We have to diversify our strategies and we also have to look beyond electricity and decarbonise other parts of the economy as well, and that nuclear could be really useful. So the big outcome for me at COP was the decision to have an annual holding to account rather than a five year accounting period. And that should hopefully start to build up the pressure particularly on, on Europe and the United States and Canada, the wealthy world to actually you know, to demonstrate some progress.

Jaimie Johnston: 31:09

Yeah, why we don't do it every year. It's beyond me anyway, given the urgency of this and you go in every year counts that we've talked about on this podcast before about it feels like there was a few years where sustainability and climate crisis or dropped off the radar a little bit. And we've sort of feels like we lost some ground there and we're now desperately trying to catch up and you go, yeah, we can't be, yeah. Let's not give it another five years and see how we're getting on. I think you're right. It needs to be an annual thing now doesn't it , and it needs to be something that everyone's considering all the time.

Kirsty Gogan: 31:35

And it really shocking that, the pandemic was indetectable in terms of emissions. We had this amongst the highest ever growth and emissions. In 2019, 2020 during the pandemic, even though it felt like the world's economy sort of came to a stop in certain ways, it really didn't.

Jaimie Johnston: 31:56

Yeah, that's fascinating. So what was that then? Cause obviously, you know, no one flew anywhere, but was just the fact that data centers were at peak capacity cause on suddenly everyone was on Teams all the time. And so yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Lots of, lots of Amazon deliveries and things as well presumably there was all those things,

Kirsty Gogan: 32:13

but I guess making steel and concrete and. Construction was continuing and in many places and manufacturing was continuing. So they're , which is largely invisible to lots of people. And this is one of the interesting things about this whole climate agenda. Isn't it? That our own personal behavior of course contributes to a certain extent, but actually it's the much larger sort of macro economy that's really driving very large amounts of the, of the overall emissions

Jaimie Johnston: 32:39

yeah, you're right. I think it is quite invisible to people isn't it? So, yeah. Even if people are not flying as much and they're eating vegetarian food, more often things you go, okay, that's all helpful. It's necessary. But yeah, it's a rounding error compared to these other big, big industries, which are constantly around in the background. Yeah. I guess that that's the stuff that people don't see. And that's why some of these technologies, are absolutely vital.

Kirsty Gogan: 32:59

That's why the manufacturing approaches that you design at Bryden Wood are just so interesting because they have this opportunity for like, a radical reduction, in resource intensity and in overall lifecycle and the production in the materials and the equipment and the manufacturing of these. Jaimie Johnston: Yeah, it does feel more repeatable, more manufactured things has got to be the way forward. I mean, it's like, you know, when you look at the scale of a sort of Hinkley Point and things, the scale of that biblical construction, how long it takes and how much it costs you go again it's too slow, we need something that's much, much quicker, much more scalable, much more deployable. Like now, not 15 years, whenever Hinkley Point is going to be finished. Yeah. You know, in the U S the assistant secretary, Katie half, she said we've got to start building airports and start building airplanes.

Jaimie Johnston: 33:48

Yeah. Perfect. Conscious of time that's been one of the most interesting conversations I think we've had in this podcast. Been so ranging through compliments. Well, the implications of getting this wrong and it us killing the planet to the optimism around some of these technologies being just ready or nearly ready to deploy. Where do you sit? Are you generally optimistic? Are you generally still terrified? You think we're going to bail ourselves out of this issue? Because obviously the stakes are vast aren't they?

Kirsty Gogan: 34:16

They are. Yeah. And my daughter will be the age that I am now in 2050. You know, that sort of helps me realise, it's not that far away, sometimes timescales can feel quite abstract in the future, but they're really close. And we have to turn this around in a generation. Basically our working generation has to turn this around. And half of the emissions that are in the atmosphere today were emitted in the last 30 years. So we have to really turn this tanker, And yeah, we have to think really big. And one of the big challenges I think we have is finance. So there's still a lot of prejudice against nuclear energy in the finance world. So the World Bank, for example, won't finance nuclear projects, the European sustainable finance taxonomy has been considering for years now, whether nuclear energy would qualify as green, despite all of the science telling us that it's actually the lowest carbon clean. energy source that there is. So we do have big challenges ahead, but I really do think that the tide is turning on this. And as I say, you know, our job is to anticipate that that, in five years from now or two years from now, the urgencyis only going to be greater and we just need to be ready to have the finance licensing, citing public acceptability, supply chain strategies that are designed and ready to go, ready to roll out the door at global scale. When the world is ready, which I think it will be very soon.

Jaimie Johnston: 35:45

Yeah, I suppose if I look back on the last 20 years and think how many things in certainly technology and the way we deal with technology and retail, commerce entertainment, all of these big, big sectors have been shifted fundamentally through some rapid adoption technology. So yeah, it does give you hope. I suppose that in another 20 years we'll all be looking back and going, oh yeah, we were much cleaner greener we've really got a handle on climate crisis. Yeah, it does.

Kirsty Gogan: 36:14

It does help working with Eric because he's incredibly imaginative and creative and talented. And, he's sort of thinking at this global scale, which not many humans are able to do, I think. Um, and, that's the secret, isn't it? That we have to sort of surround ourselves, by people who are just as motivated and bring many, many different talents and insights and capabilities to the team. It's in that collaboration that we might actually be at us, humans, puny, humans. We might actually be able to make it.

Jaimie Johnston: 36:46

When I first met you a few years ago, I wasn't entirely sure why we were chatting. Cause I was thinking, you know, we do some industrialised construction stuff how can we possibly help with some of the big challenges that you were tackling? It's seemed likewe were in the, in the margins, but actually a repowering coal it's a phenomenal project. We're really pleased to be a part of it. Yeah, I desperately hope we can, we can get it to work cause, yeah, I was talking to Martin at the last podcast saying it's probably the biggest value problem statement we've had. It's the biggest social impact we could potentially make through through this initiative. So, we're delighted to be part of it.

Kirsty Gogan: 37:18

Delighted that you're being part of it too, because, I think what you bring is, the, really the sort of solution for how we can actually design this to be delivered at the scale that's needed. It's a very, unique proposition from Bryden Wood. And, um, everybody who sees your work in our world is just astonished and amazed and says, well, we should be building all our buildings this way.

Jaimie Johnston: 37:41

We definitely think so.

Kirsty Gogan: 37:42

Yeah. Thanks for partnering with us on this. And you know, it's exciting. I think we're going to go from strength to strength.

Jaimie Johnston: 37:49

Thanks ever so much for joining us, as I say, that's been a really, really fascinating conversation. Hopefully has given everyone lots of optimism about the future and how we might actually tackle climate crisis. So I hope you found that as fascinating as I did. Thanks for listening and please join us for the next episode of Built Environment Matters.