Resources

• Center for Climate and Energy Solutions (C2ES)
• Business Environmental Leadership Council
• Nat Keohane’s November 2022 statement at the conclusion of COP27.
• UN Conference of Parties (COP) resources:
  • Global Stock Take
  • The Paris Agreement
  • Loss and Damage
• Just Energy Transition Partnership (JETP)

Guests

Climate Rising Host: Professor Mike Toffel, Faculty Chair, Business & Environment Initiative

Guest: Nat Keohane, President, Center for Climate and Energy Solutions.

Transcript

Editor’s Note: The following was prepared by a machine algorithm, and may not perfectly reflect the audio file of the interview.

Mike Toffel:
Nat, thanks so much for joining us here on Climate Rising.

Nat Keohane:
Well, thank you for having me.

Mike Toffel:
Let's start with an introduction. What's your role at the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions or C2ES?

Nat Keohane:
I'm the President of C2ES, and I just started July of 2021.

Mike Toffel:
We'll get into C2ES and its founding and what it does, but why don't we start by rolling back the tape. What was your journey?

Nat Keohane:
When I graduated from college, I went down to Washington DC. I spent a little bit of time at a small group called the Environmental Working Group, which is now a pretty good size group, but that was as an unpaid intern way back in the day. Then, I landed at Environmental Defense Fund, and I spent about 18 months there. At that time, the Acid Rain Trading program, which was a hallmark piece of legislation that Congress had passed in 1990 and EPA was implementing it, and it was the world's first cap and trade program, emissions trading program for, in that case, sulfur dioxide. In retrospect, it was one of the most successful environmental programs ever. EDF was really involved in the implementation, and I got caught up in this sense of promise and potential from having economic theory informing the design of environmental policy to do things more cost effectively faster, better, more ambitious, and so on. I went to Harvard to the Political Economy and Government Program and did my degree there. I came out as an economist and I went and I taught for several years at the Yale School of Management. I learned a lot of economics by being a professor and teaching it, but I was impatient that I wasn't more involved in environmental policy, which is why I had gone into economics in the first place. Immediately upon getting promoted to associate professor, I thought that was a good time to leave and jump into the fray. I went back to EDF and I got very involved working on the Waxman-Markey Cap and Trade program for Carbon Dioxide, which passed the house but ultimately failed in the Senate was a big thing back in 2007, 2010, modeled in some respects on that Acid Rain program that had inspired me in the first place, and spent three years at EDF leading the policy and analysis behind our fight for that emissions trading program. At the end of 2010, Larry Summers, who was in the White House as the head of the National Economic Council, called me up and asked whether I would join the White House to be a special assistant to the President for Energy/Environment in the National Economic Council. This is 2011, 2012, the nadir of climate in some ways in the Obama administration, but actually a period where we got a lot done on other aspects of environmental policy, and really enjoyed that time in the government, but it was really intense, and so after two years, I was ready to move on. I ended up coming back to EDF, running the climate program over the past several years and when the opportunity came to join an organization as a president, C2ES, which has a lot of that economics DNA, it was a great opportunity and I lept at it.

Mike Toffel:
C2ES was founded originally under its name of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change in 1998. Can you tell us a bit about what led to its founding back then?

Nat Keohane:
Yeah. As you say, founded as the Pew Center, really the first non-profit organization, the first NGO focused on climate. Environmental Defense Fund, of course, where I spent a lot of my career, had been working on climate for a number of years by then, but also had all these other things, oceans, health, ecosystems, et cetera. Other environmental organizations started to think about climate, but there was no one organization that was just really focused on climate and also focused on addressing climate from the perspective of policy solutions like those kind of economic-inspired policy solutions, emissions trading I mentioned before. Eileen Clauson, who had been a high-level official in the Clinton administration, put together a bipartisan board of folks who had been involved in both Republican and Democratic administrations and set up the Pew Center on Climate Change in 1998, with really the focus and the goal of providing the business and analytical case for market-based climate policy. when I was working for EDF on this effort around the Waxman-Markey Emissions Trading Program really the two organizations that were the impetus behind that effort, were EDF on the one hand and the Pew Center, and they worked together on something called the US Climate Action Partnership, which was involving businesses in pushing for well-designed climate policy. That was really the origins of the Pew Center and of C2ES. Pew Center was a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Pew Charitable Trust. Pew shifted its goals, it moved a little bit away from climate, more towards more conventional environment and conservation, decided that the model of having this in-house climate organization didn't suit their strategy anymore, and so C2ES was spun out to be a new organization, the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, and ever since then, has been its own 501C3 non-profit organization, but still with much of that DNA as we can talk about.

Mike Toffel:
How large is the organization?

Nat Keohane:
For most of its history, the organization has been around 20 to 25 people and around $5 million budget.We are about 27 now, we are hiring. I expect we'll be probably 40, 45 people in a year.

Mike Toffel:
How does C2ES differentiate itself from other climate energy non-profits?

Nat Keohane:
The first one of those is our policy and analytical expertise and acumen. As I said, we're founded as a think tank. We do have that in our DNA, that policy and analytical expertise, where we've got really terrific experts on staff on policy, as well as on technologies, things like carbon capture technology, what do you need to get in the electricity grid to decarbonize the electricity grid, et cetera. Number two is engagement with business. One of the first things that Eileen Clauson did after she founded the Pew Center back in 1998 was create a business council. It's called the Business Environmental Leadership Council. We sometimes use the acronym BELC. The BELC now has 41 companies in it. We're actually adding a couple more in the coming months, mostly Fortune 500 companies. These are companies that really run the gamut in the US economy, which is one of the things that's distinctive about our mode of business engagement. There are 13 electric utilities from DT in Michigan, PSEG in New Jersey, Southern Company all the way to Southern California Edison out in the West Coast and everyone in between. We have heavy emitters. Holcim, the cement company, Arconic, Alcoa, Chemours and DuPont and Dow, the chemical companies. We've got BP and Shell and Equinor. We have banks, JP Morgan, Wells Fargo, Bank of America. We have tech companies, Google and Microsoft and Amazon. Really, a wide range of companies from a wide range of sectors, and the purpose of the view behind that, the theory of change is, if we're going to accelerate the transition to a thriving just and resilient net zero economy. we need to engage economic actors across the US economy. We develop our own policy proposals, but we engage with those businesses to understand what they're seeing, to understand the challenges and opportunities they see, and also to mobilize them as advocates for a well-designed policy. The third piece is convening. We have long been a trusted convener of stakeholders at different levels. Local, state level in the US, federal level, and then international level. For about 15 years, C2ES has been convening negotiators, heads of delegation or HODs as they're called to the UN climate talks several times a year to really have a Chatham House, off the record conversation around where the zones of agreement and the consensus can be. In the lead up to the Paris agreement, which was agreed in 2015, those head of delegation dialogues played a key role in identifying consensus. We continue to do that as the Paris Rule book was being written. When I think about what it is that we do well, it's the things that touch on those three core competencies.

Mike Toffel:
Great.

Mike Toffel:
You mentioned that Environmental Defense fund and C2ES are both important players in helping the US federal government design its environmental policies. What's the role that these environmental NGOs play? Why can't the federal government think through some of the issues you mentioned before about efficiency and maybe even equity? I would think we would have that expertise in-house in the federal agencies.

Nat Keohane:
It depends on the context, it depends on the administration, it depends on the Congress and so on. One thing that I think NGOs like C2ES, EDF, WRI, others out there, is be generators of policy ideas, maybe bring them in from other aspects or put them on the agenda, which is not to say that people in Congress don't have any idea about policy. Obviously, they do, and in the White House, I'm a former White House official. The NGOs have resources, have experts, and so they can put things on the agenda or push particular policy ideas. The emissions trading back in the Waxman-Markey days, what I mentioned before, was a great example. That was really something where the Pew Center then, C2ES now, and EDF worked together to mobilize broader support and put that on the political agenda and then inform congressional staff and even administration officials, how would you do that? How would you design it? Because after all, a lot of that expertise is pretty specialized. The design of an emissions trading program can be pretty specialized. A lot of folks in academia at Harvard and Stanford and Yale and all these places who know something about that and an NGO can pull that information in and deliver it almost on a platter to government officials. NGOs can be a kind of transmission mechanism of knowledge and expertise and information. When you're in government, if you're on the Hill or you're in the White House or you're at an agency, you have just a very limited bandwidth to go out and get new information, and so having a channel of that to come in can be very useful. I'll give another example. So much economic modeling gets done around climate, what are the impacts of climate policy X versus climate policy Y, and that might be done in the University of Chicago or MIT or all these other places, IEA, the International Energy Agency. NGOs build relationships with policy staff in the Hill and the White House and so on, and they can be great conduits s for that. Then, the third one, and this is not exhaustive, but this is a pretty different one, and it's one where C2ES has done a lot of lately, a third one is to just provide external validation and support and push advocacy for the kind of policies that we think will help accelerate that transition. A good example here would be the Inflation Reduction Act this past year, the biggest climate legislation we've seen, passed in August and signed by President Biden this past year. That was the largest amount of spending that US has ever put into climate, with about $370 billion of tax credits and subsidies and so on for climate. Now, from a certain point of view, a lot of that was just a tax bill. It was extending tax credits that were already in the code, it was broadening that a little bit. The ratio of new ideas going into that, there were some new ideas that were prompted by NGOs, but a lot of what the NGO activity around that was was building the drumbeat of support. That's organizations that have millions of members, might get their members to write in and support it, organizations that have communities behind them or plugged into labor, whatever might get them to support it. C2ES' role in those cases is to help build a drumbeat of support among businesses, the businesses in our business council and others. We organize sign-on letters and get businesses to call into the White House and say, "We think this is really good," or to call into leader Schumer's office or whatever it is on the Hill. Those three things are very distinct. It's this putting new policy ideas on the agenda, it's being a transmission mechanism for all the expertise that's happening outside and delivering that in digestible ways or it's just mobilizing support.

Mike Toffel:
Historically 20, 30 years ago, the lore at least, is that there was quite a lot of pushback from many companies and trade associations against environmental regulations because it would raise costs. It would, instead of externalizing those costs, actually be internalized and companies have to bear those costs. Certainly, we still see that with climate in a number of industries and companies. But we also see companies, at least publicly in some manner, leaning in toward policy saying, "Actually, we'd love to have some climate policy and some stability, because we think there's going to be a cap and trade system or there's going to be a carbon price or there's going to be all sorts of other types of policies. Can we just converge on whatever policy it's going to be, so we can make some long term investments and have some insurance, but the returns will be what we think they will be?" Where are we in that journey and how has that changed over time, and how are the companies that you deal with directly, how are they changing their narrative over time and how typical are they or rare are they?

Nat Keohane:
I think there really has been a sea change in how companies engage in policy. Obviously, not every company, because obviously each company is distinct and has its own priorities and so on. At the risk of dramatically oversimplifying things, you might have thought earlier eras maybe in the 70s, the default posture was anti-regulatory. Then, there was this wave. I think the 1990 Clean Air Act and the Acid Rain Program I mentioned and this emissions trading approach, the economic incentives approach. I mentioned this US climate action partnership that the Pew Center and EDF and some others put together in the early noughts that was behind this emissions trading push that was really a great example of companies saying, "Look, if you're going to do climate policy and we understand that this is an urgent thing, then here's how we would suggest doing it and here's how we would support it with this kind of economic approach and incentives and trading and so on." That still remains. Over the past decade, the sense of climate as an urgent issue that society needs to address is a generational challenge. Ten or 15 years ago, those of us working on climate, it was a niche thing. Maybe other people are working on biodiversity, other people are working on other issues. Now, I think, you ask anybody, I bet most of the people, if you did a poll of your listeners, everyone say, "Oh yeah, climate change definitely a top x, top 5, top 10, top 3 concern." You're starting to see this in polling of voters as well. That's been a societal sea change that has also been felt by companies. Almost all of the companies in our business council now have net zero commitments. I don't think anybody did 10 years ago. Not just in our business council, I don't think anybody anywhere did. Now, to me, that opens up a really important avenue for policy, because if you think about how is a company going to meet, how is electric utility going to meet a net zero commitment? Well, some of that is they can do on their own, they can make efficiency gains, they can opt to build out more solar or wind or whatever it is, but a lot of it, they're going to need policy support. That's even more true for industrial. Let's say a cement producer or a steel producer, if they're the only company that's trying to do something, it's going to be much harder for them to do it than if there are policies in place that encourage their consumers to buy lower carbon cement or steel that set a level playing field with respect to other countries and other companies and so on. Once a company sets the net zero target, there are two things it needs to figure out. One is, how far can it go in its own operations and supply chains towards meeting that target? There are McKinsey and Accenture and EY and a zillion consultancies have grown up to help companies with that internal operation. Even if companies do all they can internally to reduce their own emissions and their supply chain emissions, they still need policy to get all the way to net zero, and that's where a group like C2ES can step in and say, "Well, we know the policy. We can work with you on what those policies are that are going to enable you to reach your goals."

Mike Toffel:
We were talking mostly about the US context, and let's talk about the international climate policy context. In your current and previous roles, you've been involved in several international climate talks, including the COPs, which is the UN Global Climate negotiations or conference of parties. I definitely want to hear your take on what just happened at the latest COP, COP27 in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt. But can you first set the stage for us and reflect on this process of these annual COPs and what have we accomplished over time? Then we'll jump in to talk about the most recent one.

Nat Keohane:
Sure, yeah. These conferences of the parties or COPs, we've been doing these since 1995. The 1992 Framework Convention on Climate Change was agreed as part of the Rio Earth Summit. President George H.W. Bush of the US was at that summit and signed the UNFCCC, the Climate Change Convention, and actually had that ratified overwhelmingly by the Senate. That's the origin of all this, and then, COP1 was in Berlin in 1995 and goes from there. I've sometimes described the COPs as a negotiation wrapped in a conference, wrapped in a trade expo, because it really does have all those dimensions to it. At the core of the COPs has always been negotiations among members of government delegations. In the back room of the COPs, there are conversations going on around pretty detailed textual agreements, the conversations over commas and brackets and what word goes where. Now, the relative importance of these has changed over time, but that's always been at the core. It was those kinds of negotiations, for example, that produced the Paris Agreement in 2015, which is the high point, I would say, of the negotiations, but also they produced the Kyoto protocol back in 1997. After the Paris Agreement, they produced the so-called Paris Rule Book, which guides the implementation of Paris, so there have been some important things to negotiate and that remains in the back rooms. But around that has built up this whole other structure, because essentially the COP is the one thing on the calendar every year that everyone in the international climate community is going to go to. There are a huge number of side events and panels and events going on. There's an area with a huge number of exposition booths, where people are talking about their organizations and programs and businesses and what they're doing, huge number of side meetings and dinners and so on. The relative focus on those backroom negotiations over commas and brackets and where the and and the or is, that is waning, I would argue, relative to the importance of focusing effort on what needs to happen in countries to reduce emissions, how they can learn from one another, what the policies are that are going to succeed, so that we can meet the goals of the agreements we've laid out.

Mike Toffel:
One of the biggest things that came out of Paris was a shared target to limit global warming to below two degrees with an aspiration of 1.5 degrees. Importantly, it committed all signatory countries and not just industrialized nations to set emission reduction targets, although those targets were meant to be set by the individual companies. That's what the commas and crossing your Ts got us. Now, the question is, "Okay, well, what's your target and how are you going to achieve it?" Importantly, we saw most recently, this has been going on for decades and really, who's going to pay for it? In particular, for the developing countries who looked to the developed countries and said, "Well, you caused this mess, and so maybe if you want us to leapfrog technologies and not go through coal and not go through fossil fuel and go right to renewables, well, that's all nice for you to say, but actually maybe you can help us fund it." That's at least one sticking point when we think about implementation is who's going to fund it. What are the other types of issues when you say we're going to pivot to implementation beyond the funding question?

Nat Keohane:
When we say pivot to implementation, it's how do we refocus the conversations and the expectations on implementation and policies that countries put into place and the progress they're making rather than on the next piece of text that gets produced. There's something called the Global Stock Take. It's a classic UN-English term. If you're taking stock, then you turn that into a noun, you get stock take. The Paris Agreement in a one-paragraph thing calls for a global stock take, and the idea was, well, we need to be taking stock every five years as a global community of how we're doing towards the goals of the Paris Agreement. It's an empty vessel in the Paris Agreement, because it's just mentioned, every five years starting in 2023, you need to do a stock take. There is a connection to what's called the Paris Ambition cycle we sometimes call the ratchet, which is that every five years on 2020, 2025, 2030, countries need to resubmit their targets. You have the stock take in 2023 and that's going to inform countries coming back and submitting new targets in 2025. Then, you're going to do the same thing again in 2028, 2030, and so there's this ratchet and ambition cycle. We're coming into the home stretch of the first global stock take, and that is a really good way to refocus the attention from what's the text that we're negotiating and agreeing on to, "Well, what are countries doing collectively to meet those targets? What more can we do? How can we use the COPs and use the global stock take as a way of sharing information about what works and what doesn't." That would be a very powerful idea, to have countries share ideas about what works and what doesn't, to bring in expertise from the private sector, to bring it in from the non-profit sector and civil society, not just have this conversation just among government negotiators, but really have a broader conversation about how do we accelerate progress. Think about the Paris Agreement, so much focus is on that temperature goal you mentioned, well below 2 degrees, pursuing efforts to 1.5. That focus on temperature goals, what people call mitigation, reducing emissions, that's really central, but the Paris Agreement really has several pillars. It talks about mitigation, that temperature goal, but it also talks about finance and the need, as you say, for richer countries to finance that transition in developing countries. It also talks about adaptation. countries like Bangladesh with tens of millions of people living within a meter of sea level, very vulnerable to sea level rise. Small island nations are at existential risk. How do we think about financing adaptation? Sub-Saharan Africa, where a lot of the heat and the drought we're going to see. There's a need not only to finance the energy transition in developing countries, but also to finance adaptation, so that those countries are better able to withstand the climate impacts. Then, there's a fourth closely-related issue that was actually the key issue at this most recent COP in Egypt called loss and damage, which is the idea that, it's one thing to help countries adapt to the climate changes that are coming to sea level rise to higher temperatures and so on, but there are some things they're never going to be able to adapt to. If you have a small island state that might be gone from the map in 30 years, 50 years because of sea level rise, how do we compensate nations for that? What does that even look like? There are going to be some losses and damages that are, at this point, unavoidable consequence of climate change, that it's really the obligation of the richer nations who have contributed so much to the problem to figure out how to address. But that's a very thorny issue, and so that also gets a lot of attention. We are going to have to make progress on these other issues around finance and adaptation in loss and damage if we're going to progress on implementing the temperature targets or the policies to meet the temperature target as well.

Mike Toffel:
You've talked about the back rooms where the policymakers are engaging, and then there's a whole bunch of other activities surrounding the formal element of the COP, and that includes, for many years, included non-profits or NGOs, it seems like increasingly, it's including businesses as well. Can you talk about that trend a bit? When did businesses arrive? What are they doing there?

Nat Keohane:
Definitely part of that trade fair expo that I talked about, that layer that's wrapped around the negotiations, as that gets bigger, you get more and more folks from the business world, that are there. To give you a sense, this last COP in Sharm El Sheik, was not a particularly important COP from the point of view of the negotiations, and yet it set a new record. I think 35,000 people came to Egypt for this COP and something like maybe 10,000 to 15,000 of those folks are actually negotiators. Most of the people who are coming are people like me. I don't have a party badge, I am not in those back rooms, some of my staff might be, but I'm not. You've got a lot of people who are there just for those side events, maybe they're talking with the negotiators to advise them, but not inside those negotiating rooms themselves. You have academia, you have non-profit organizations, you also have multilateral development banks and all that extra number features a lot of folks in the international finance community and so on. But increasingly, you are seeing folks, and I think appropriately from the private sector. Now, it's important to note that from an official UN point of view, there are categories of folks, there are negotiators Parties, capital P parties, there are media representatives, there are multilateral institutions and there are observers. By the way, they're color coded, so if you walk around a COP, you can look at somebody's badge and there's pink for parties and that means they can get into negotiation and there's that weird burnt yellow color for observers and then there's, I think, it's green for media, and there's blue for the multilateral. You can go around and it's color coding. The point is that there's no lane for businesses, but there are some organizations that are trade associations or that are nonprofits that support business, who have delegations that will include the private sector folks. Now, look, originally maybe 10 or 15 years ago, that was mostly folks in the energy sector, who were most directly affected by the conversation as we were thinking about it then. I think that's attracted a lot of scrutiny and even opposition from some folks in the environmental community. C2ES works with business, so I think it's perfectly appropriate for business to be there, but there's been a lot of folks who have asked real questions, "Well, why is it that we have energy execs walking around?" Now it's so much broader than that. All the kinds of companies I mentioned before that are on the business council at C2ES are represented. If you go around the COP now, you have people from banks, you have people from tech companies, You have people from heavy emitting sectors, you have people from energy companies, from electric utilities. Again, it's the place where people go to talk about climate and to really make progress on climate, and so it's become a place where folks from all aspects of the public and private sectors and civil society come. I think the role of business there in the COPs for the most part, is the role of the rest of us. Going to these side events, going to many conferences, speaking on panels, meeting with folks, I think it's subsumed in that larger crowd of everyone who is there because that's the epicenter every year of international climate action.

Mike Toffel:
If you're a company not in the energy sector, and you decide to send a representative to the COP, where they're not going to get in the back room, but they're going to stay in these other rooms, what would their mission be? What would success look like if they spent a week or two? They came back and they reported to their colleagues, what does success look like in that type of assignment?

Nat Keohane:
It really varies. Suppose you're an electric utility in the US. You might say, "a US electric utility, why would they be at the COP?" Well, the answer is they're able to participate on panels to talk about things like, "How do you build out the resilience of the electric grid?" That's something that we can focus on in the US, but you can also learn from other countries and everybody is there. There are people from German and French and UK electric grids, and there are also people from renewable energy companies, and maybe you learned about that. Whatever sector you're thinking about, there are people from around the world who are addressing similar issues, but in different context as you. If you're from Holcim or Alcoa, there are other cement companies there, there are panels on low carbon innovation and low carbon technologies and so on. If you're Google and Amazon and Microsoft, you're already a global company, but you might be thinking about, Google has a 24/7 clean energy goal, so they would be talking with folks about how can they meet globally, worldwide for all their data centers or all their needs, their electricity needs, how can they be meeting those targets? Where are the opportunities to build out clean energy? There might be more specific things. For example, one thing we haven't talked about but is very active and growing, although there's lots of scrutiny of it, is something called the Voluntary Carbon Market. There are lots of companies, I mentioned all those companies with net zero commitments or with climate commitments. Generally, some of those companies are looking at investing, buying credits for emissions reductions in other parts of the country, whether that's protecting tropical forest or building out renewable power or deploying cook stoves or whatever it is. There's a bunch of ways to reduce emissions and there's a whole voluntary carbon market for companies that are buying those credits to help meet their climate commitments, and so there are a lot of companies that might go there to learn more about that carbon market or learn more about what the opportunities are. Climate right now is central to the operations and the business strategy and the long-term goals of many, many, many companies in many, many sectors, and this is the world's biggest climate conference. For that reason, most people who go to the COP probably never see a negotiator because it's got this whole ecosystem around those negotiations that provides the reason to be there.

Mike Toffel:
Yeah. From the picture I'm getting is there's almost like two things happening with parallel play. There's the government function and then there's the function with businesses and non-profits discussing and learning from each other. Is that right?

Nat Keohane:
Yeah, I think that's a good way to put it. One way to think about the pivot to implementation is, if you think about the information exchange between those two, for most of the history, the negotiators have been the center of the focus and then maybe some of the NGOs and observers and whatever are trying to feed information into the negotiators to affect the outcome of those negotiations. That's fine, but we'd like to actually have that broadened so that when you have a conversation around implementation and how to actually meet our policy goals, that more information rather than just, "Well, here's what you should say on paragraph three of the text," but it's more, "Let's open up the conversation for all these expertise that's among those, that private sector, the NGOs, the civil society, how to get that expertise into the real question of reducing emissions and implementing the targets that have been set."

Mike Toffel:
Yeah. If companies want to influence these international climate negotiations, it doesn't sound like it's happening at the COP. That must be happening more at the national level when they're preparing their negotiation tactics. Is that right?

Nat Keohane:
There are clearly examples in the past where some big energy companies have really spent huge amounts of money on disinformation and distortion and trying to get things out of whack. The focus of these COPs is increasingly and continues to need to be more focused on the policies that we're going to need to implement them. The private sector and all of these actors are clearly working in capitals to shape and affect those policies, and indeed, when we were talking about US policy, I mentioned one of the things C2ES does is try to mobilize business voices in favor of ambitious and well-designed policies in the US. Clearly, as you say, there are conversations happening back in capital, as we say, where companies, private sector, NGOs, civil society is helping to shape the position of a country. Once you get to the COP, mostly, it's the negotiation among those country policymakers around their perceived priorities and interests and red lines and so on. You're not getting a huge amount of any things getting affected or shaped or distorted by really any of those other non-governmental observers at all.

Mike Toffel:
Got it. Are there other big takeaways we should consider from the most recent COP27 in Egypt? Talked about it being an unprecedented size because of the growth of the actors who are not in the back rooms, the non-profits and the companies and other organizations. Were you optimistic? Did you come back excited? Did you come back depressed? What's your forecast for COP28?

Nat Keohane:
In brief, I think the headline from COP27 that we just had is that it was a modest but real success. Underscore modest, we weren't expecting a lot from this COP. There wasn't a lot that needed to be delivered in terms of the negotiating text. There's this ongoing, how are we doing in that pivot to implementation, and I think we made progress there for focusing more and more on, for example, what is the global stock take going to look like in the next year. There was, the most notable progress that people might have seen is that there was progress on this issue of loss and damage that I mentioned before. A mitigation workflow program was set up, which is fine. Check the box on that, and so making modest but incremental progress. The two main takeaways really, one is, it goes back to what you said a minute ago. We still need to be meeting the commitments we're making. I've talked a lot about implementing on the policy side, that's also true on the finance side. Countries continue to make new finance commitments. One of the headlines from COP27 was something called a joint energy transition partnership, JETP, and Indonesia, $20 billion, something like that, pledged to help Indonesia in the energy transition. But that money now still has to come. It can't just be pledged, it has to come up from somewhere. The developed countries like the US are lagging on meeting those finance commitments, and that's really important for the whole progress in the negotiation. One thing to look for going forward is, do we start seeing some of that money flow and how does it flow? The other thing looking forward at COP28, I mentioned that global stock take, that's the big thing for next year. The United Arab Emirates is the host for next year. How the UAE runs that global stock take, how well it brings in perspectives from civil society and the private sector, we've been talking a lot about the role of business, well, here is a productive, constructive role, which is to bring in experience about how we can really reduce emissions, what policies are going to work, what actions are going to work. I think the big test for next year will be, can we bring all of that expertise and experience into the conversation in a way that broadens it beyond just those backroom negotiations, really focuses on what's needed to reduce emissions rapidly at the pace and scale we need to meet those temperature goals.

Mike Toffel:
Great. Super interesting. All right. Final question. Some of our listeners are considering dedicating their careers in business to focus on climate change. Where do you see the biggest opportunities and what advice do you have for them?

Nat Keohane:
One of the advantages of the fact that we now see climate touching so many areas of business and civil society and academia is that there are ways to get involved and to focus on climate and contribute almost in any line. For folks who are interested in research and analysis, there's so much that needs to be done in terms of researching pathways to reducing emissions, better policies, more effective measures, developing new technologies. Research in new cutting edge technologies and material science or in developing things like hydrogen fuels, ammonia fuels, there's a bunch of new technologies that need to be developed. Financing all of that is going to be important. If folks want to think about if they want to go into the financial sector and be thinking about how to channel money into a new climate technologies or emissions reductions or whatever it is, if folks are just interested in running a business, every business now needs to be thinking about what its sustainability strategy is, how it's positioning for climate risk and for climate opportunity. So, I would really encourage everybody listening if they're interested, dive in and find a way within whatever your chosen field is to contribute to accelerating the transition to net zero emissions, to low carbon economy and investing in the adaptation and the resilience that's going to allow us to make it through the impacts that we see regardless of how successful we are in reducing emission. There's a lot to be done and we need all the help we can get.

Mike Toffel:
Nat, it’s been really interesting diving into the nonprofit sector and how they influence policy and how that occurs at the US level, and then also the international level. You've given us a view on COP and what goes on in the various rooms. Thank you so much for joining us here on Climate Rising.

Nat Keohane:
Well, thank you for having me on and thanks for doing this podcast. I think it's really important that we get the climate conversation out to as many audiences as we can. I know that the folks listening in are a really important part of that, so thank you and thanks for having me on.