Cleaning Up: Leadership in an Age of Climate Change

Trump, Venezuela & The Future Of Clean Energy | Ep239: Michael Liebreich & Bryony Worthington

Episode Notes

Is the link between oil and geopolitics starting to diminish? Has climate consensus fractured just as clean energy hits escape velocity? And are batteries, not barrels, becoming the true source of power and security?

In the first episode of Season 17 of Cleaning Up, Michael Liebreich and Bryony Worthington unpack a turbulent start to 2026. From shock geopolitical moves in the Americas and riots in the Middle East to the curious calm of a $60 oil price, they explore whether fossil fuels still move the world the way they once did.

The conversation ranges from the collapse of climate multilateralism and Europe’s energy malaise to the unstoppable rise of electrification, batteries, and system-level clean energy solutions across China, India, Africa, and the “rest of the world.”

Leadership Circle:

Cleaning Up is supported by the Leadership Circle, and its founding members: Actis, Alcazar Energy, Davidson Kempner, EcoPragma Capital, EDP, Eurelectric, the Gilardini Foundation, KKR, National Grid, Octopus Energy, Quadrature Climate Foundation, SDCL and Wärtsilä. For more information on the Leadership Circle, please visit https://www.cleaningup.live.

Discover more:

The Electrification Staircase: https://www.watts-next.eu/
Kingsmill Bond on Cleaning Up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2bsoCOznXk
Arunabha Ghosh on Cleaning Up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMrn-JewoCo
Rachel Kyte on Cleaning Up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1m2lm2n_EE
Catch up on Season 16 of Cleaning Up: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLe8ZTD7dMaaDWQkhmAsaQ28p0h3Lw5I6v

Episode Transcription

Michael Liebreich

Hello, I'm Michael Leibreich.

Bryony Worthington

And I'm Bryony Worthington.

And this is Cleaning Up. Welcome to the first episode of season 17, that is the first episode of 2026.

So, Michael, here we are again. Our listeners won't know this, but we did actually do a sort of season opener between Christmas and New Year. A great episode, as always. But, you know, events happen. And between that recording, and here we are on January the 6th, we've seen some quite amazing world events. I mean, not least the US capturing the sitting president of Venezuela. And so we can't really not talk about that. So I wanted to kick off and ask you, you know, from our perspective, from an energy sector perspective, how significant is it, what are the ramifications?

Well, that's such a big topic. And the honest answer is that we don't know how it's going to play out. And it's not just the US capture of Maduro, the president of Venezuela, but also what's happening in Iran, these riots that are going on, and the brutal repression once again, by the government. There were riots in 80 cities.

So we've got, you know, two absolutely colossal stories, energy stories that just erupted and kiboshed that episode, which we record, which is one they'll discover in the archives, no doubt, in 100 years. Now, what I'm struck by is I've been keeping an eye on the oil price throughout this. And it really has hardly budged. So it's still just, you know, becalmed around $60. And by the way, the context is pretty extraordinary, you know, we’ve still got war going on in Europe. So you've got, you know, Russia, which is one of the major oil producers in the world, one of the top two or three in the world, huge reserves. So they're involved in a war, which is really, really challenging their economy. And about a third of their refining output has been destroyed. You've got participants in the Middle East, you've got Saudi Arabia and UAE finding themselves on differing sides of the Yemen conflict.

So you have these, you know, just gargantuan things going on. I mean, the US threatening to annex Canada, which is I think the sort of seventh largest oil reserves in the world. And how can the oil price just stick at 60? And what are the explanations? And that's what I've been trying to get my head around. Because, you know, clearly, if the economy, the world economy, was in terrible shape, you would say, well, then the low oil price, which is actually $60, fairly low, that would be explicable. But the world economy is not becalmed. There's this frenzy in the US around AI, which I've no doubt we're going to talk about in a bit more detail.

But you've also got continued growth, healthy growth in China. You've got India really looking very interesting. Last year, I was in Egypt, you know, 4% growth. Africa is growing well. So you've got a strong economy and a low oil price despite this tremendous turbulence in the markets. And, you know, a part of it, I think, has to be down to the trends that you and I spend our time thinking about, which is the transition and the fact that there are now alternatives to oil, particularly electric transportation, that has to be playing a role now in absorbing demand.

I completely agree. And I mean, it was an excellent episode that we did. And what we said was 2025 was a pretty chaotic year. We were surprised by the ferocity of the new Trump administration. And we predicted 26 would be chaotic, you know, the continuation of it. But we didn't quite nail that this particular set of events would happen. But your point there about the failure of the response on the price of oil, I've seen quite a lot of analysis that said, it's basically because the power of oil is waning. You just look at China's demand for oil, reducing last year by 5%. And they have one of the biggest buyers.

So is oil just going to become a commodity like any other? I mean, is the US playing a script from 30 years ago, where oil was the big dominant commodity that everyone had to control, but actually, the rest of the world's moving on. And it's just a sort of phony obsession. That just shows you that they're sort of stuck in time, whereas the rest of the world's moving on. Is that plausible?

It is more nuanced than that. So 30 years ago, the US was staring down the barrel of the Hubbard Peak, and it was looking at, which is the name for when oil production was going to peak. And so it was looking at being an importer, and all of its foreign policy was around how do you secure the big sources of oil, largely the Gulf.

And that was where a huge amount of its time and resources, material, money were being invested. And of course, with the advent of non-conventional oil, fracked oil, and obviously, the arrival of gas as well in huge quantities 30 years ago, there was very little gas used in the energy system. So you've got a big diversification of the potential sources of oil.

And of course, you know, the US sitting there, the biggest producer in the world, and it doesn't look like it's about to be running out, nobody really talks about peak oil production anymore. So I think there's this diversification, almost a de-risking, from America's perspective, a de-risking, the chance of it being suddenly caught, like in 1973, or in the 1980s, without access to oil that has just receded. And that has freed them up in their national security strategies to play a much more robust role, first of all, to say that Europe is less important, and also the Gulf is less important. And, you know, Venezuela, you could see through the lens of denying Venezuelan reserves, the largest reserves in the world, to China.

Or certainly to the Middle East, where, you know, it's being linked to the propping up of regimes, terrorist regimes through that oil trade. So yeah, there's that lens. From my perspective, I just find it fascinating that we're in an era where Trump can, you know, we're all hanging on his every word now.

And if nothing else, it shows it's a reminder of what an amazing propagandist he is, in that he has this innate sense of how to pick a kind of symbolic action that will completely dominate the world's attention. He seems quite drawn, he seems to be a person who's quite comfortable with violence, or this kind of very aggressive stance. And he knows that that combination of America exerting its might, this kind of violent thrill he seems to get from these violent moments, that it captures everyone's attention.

And it takes the attention away from any other problems you might be facing at home. And he kind of uses these narratives of it's either we're stopping narco trade, or we're now taking their oil because we can. But I think it's more about the, how am I being perceived in the world? And as he was, just before Christmas, he was waning. There was always talk about his health and his losing popularity. He's never been very popular across all of America. You know, lots of domestic problems, the economy not doing what he wants.

The Epstein files.

Exactly. No one's talking about the Epstein files.

There's two ways of trying to interpret what's happening. And, you know, the bookends are, you know, he's a sort of violent sociopath narcissist who will just do whatever it takes to grab the limelight and indulge his whims and so on. That's one bookend. I actually don't subscribe to that. The other bookend is that there is a strategy, and I sort of don't subscribe to that either. But let me at least try and lay it out.

Which is there was, in October, a new national security strategy published by the Trump administration, which very much focused on the hemisphere, the Western Hemisphere. And that means the US.

Our hemisphere. No, they're calling it our hemisphere.

They call it ours. You know, Europeans might disagree. NATO might have some views on that, the NATO Secretary General. But it's certainly Latin America and North America. And so, you know, if that is a genuine sort of strategic framework rather than just a word salad, and I think it is worth reading and forming a view that it has, it starts to explain a little bit about what's going on. And in fact, there's even rumours that the deal with Putin that was done, you know, historically between Putin and Trump is, well, you get Ukraine and we'll get Venezuela.

So there is a possible rationale, geostrategic rationale. By the way, that strategy is very different from Trump's first administration, where it was all about confronting and containing China. Whereas now it's we kind of, we're going to focus on our hemisphere, as you say, our hemisphere, the ‘Donroe doctrine’.

And that's consistent then with not wanting to really support Ukraine, just wanting that all to go away. But the question it raises is, does that mean China now has the carte blanche to clean up what it would consider its hemisphere and somehow robustly, whether by invasion or blockade or otherwise, take over Taiwan? So it's a scary world. And so I'm sitting there looking at the $60 oil and thinking, this could also get really ugly. So it's not that oil is not important anymore, because it is, and the economy still runs on it. The growth in oil, I mean, now is less than 1% per year. And I believe it's about to get well less than 1% per year, maybe even go negative pretty soon. So oil definitely has not got the kind of pivotal role in the global economy that it used to have. But it would be highly premature to say, none of this matters, because the electrotech revolution and cleantech is going to take over, and we're all going to go electric and China is going to inevitably win. And it's going to be a sort of, you know, a clear path to a transition with no speed bumps.

Whatever we can say about this in its early days, what we can see is a very different US. I mean, even different from the first Trump administration, the shock and awe, the chaos, and it's played out in lots of different arenas. And for our audience and things we care about, we've seen a very belligerent US showing up in UN negotiations. I mean, famously never a big fan of multilateralism. But it did feel like 2025 was the year that the consensus that climate change was real, and that we needed to do something about it was severely challenged by the administration's showing up, for example, the International Maritime Organization and ripping up the climate deal that had been pre negotiated there. They didn't turn up a COP. It's the first time since the start of the cops that there was no formal presence at the meetings in Brazil. And so this feeling that there has been a fracturing of what was a kind of consensus that we need to take climate change seriously. And how have you sort of seen that? Does it even matter, I suppose, is the question, because there seems to be increasingly divergence between the politics of climate and then the reality on the ground. Would you say that? Do you share that view?

Yeah, that's right. If you go back to the beginning of 2025, if you remember, we did a couple of episodes with Ethan Zindler, who was the climate advisor to Janet Yellen, with Jigar Shah, who ran the Loans Program Office. And the topic was, is the Inflation Reduction Act, which is the centrepiece of the Biden administration climate action, is that so locked in. or which bits of it might possibly not hold and be dismantled?

And of course, by the end of the year, we were looking at the Trump administration essentially putting a hold or trying to run a coach and horses through $25 billion worth of offshore wind. And so you couldn't be further from climate action in the US. And you did a great episode with Tristan Smith on the IMO negotiations and, you know, the US not just no-showing, but actually destroying a position that had already been negotiated and been negotiated during the second Trump administration by the Sherpa team and then not ratified and pushed back.

One of the most fascinating conversations I think that I had last year was with Rachel Kyte, because it's very easy to think of the COPs as this sort of ritualistic argument about commas and full stops and Article 6 and whether, you know, the carbon markets would work this way and that. And then from Rachel, we learned just how this kind of full tapestry of negotiations that happen, you know, India will say one thing at the COP, but actually be negotiating a whole bunch of other things to do with access to labour markets or investment or whatever. And so the COPs are not over, because so many of those conversations and so many of the players around the world are still committed to the agenda. They may not be signalling about it as much, lots of companies and investors, but the COPs will continue.

But the fracturing of the international consensus is very real. And I think there needs to be, I've written about it, a reset, a rethink, about what can be achieved and what should be achieved in the multilateral space there. Because of course, meanwhile, the microeconomics, the economics of clean energy and the geopolitics of security, they're just ignoring that whole climate issue, frankly.

Yeah, and I think that's my feeling that the climate lens on energy is becoming less and less relevant. And in a weird way, the COPs just reflect a kind of misalignment between what's really going on on the ground, and what they talk about when they're in the negotiating chambers, which is a kind of performative or victim culture of, oh, I'm not going first, and you should go first. But then in the meantime, real world deals are being signed where people are moving fast into clean tech, for various geostrategic reasons. And it feels like a kind of theatre of the absurd at times, which is dislocated from the sectoral changes which are happening, which are bleeding through into all sorts of interesting changes.

One thing that really struck me, let me come in here on that, to the theatre of the absurd, is there was this, the Tropical Forests Forever Fund, the TFFF, it was the centrepiece of the conversations in Belem at the COP30. Well, the centrepiece was actually where is COP31 going to be? Is it going to be in Australia or is it going to be in Turkey?

Always the most interesting conversation to be had, yes.

But the substantive centrepiece was this Tropical Forest Forever Fund. And the idea was that a bunch of wealthy countries would put in $25 billion, private markets would put in $100 billion. It would essentially be a huge, great hedge fund carry trade. The profits of a couple of billion per year would go into the forests, right? Now, if you believe all of that, you haven't done a huge amount of risk management in the debt markets. But anyway, the point being $2 billion, which all of these people running around Belem were acting like it was a vast amount of money.

The combined GDPs of the rainforest countries of the world is $6 trillion, right? I'm sorry, I cannot get excited about a theoretical, if the capital markets don't blow up and eliminate it altogether… $2 billion per year for rainforest protection is just not a large amount of money arrayed against the forces of economics, which would want to do something completely different with rainforests. So it is a fantasy discussion.

Yeah, no, I don't disagree. But okay, so, but what it does show up though, I suppose, is it puts all of this chaos and changes of the geopolitics, the reality. It puts Europe into quite an interesting space, doesn't it? Because Europe is still trying to hold the line on rules-based systems and we've got to have an orderly transition away. But yet, you look at the politics of Europe and it's struggling. And I just wonder if you do a lot, your episodes in Europe, you're following European markets. How is Europe responding to these times? Is it stepping up?

So, I have spent quite a bit of time in European capitals. That's one of the things I've decided to do for Cleaning Up and also for other projects that I'm involved in. Pragma Charge, the truck charging business that I've been incubating and building and other things. And it is striking that there is this general sense of malaise. And obviously the Draghi report, Draghi wrote about how to get out of it by focusing on productivity. Here we are two years later, everybody still agrees it was a marvellous report and it's spawned presumably endless committees, but it's not actually changed the trajectory.

In energy, there's malaise about the cost of energy. And there is this understanding that has dawned that the pretense that there is no trilemma, the famous energy trilemma, you can have it affordable, you want affordable, you want clean and you want secure. And Europe has essentially, the game it has been playing, and it has been a game, has been to focus on clean. We really want clean. We want clean. By the way, what they don't say is that the way they make it affordable is by buying Russian gas, huge amounts of Russian gas. 30, 40% of European industry energy was Russian gas. And then there was the Zeitenwende, as the Germans call it, the time changed after the, I'm going to say the second invasion or the 2022 invasion, not the 2014 annexation of Crimea. There was suddenly this awakening.

And since then, Europe has not found its mojo. It hasn't got a model because it's had to admit that that was cheap, but absolutely not secure. So it can do clean at a very high cost, or it can do secure and it can do clean and some combination of clean and secure, but at a very high cost, at a cost which threatens huge numbers of jobs. And so the fantasy world that it's been living in or the pretend world of no trilemma is over.

Can I come in there because, I mean, and it's been revealed, but it's not clear that they've learned the lesson of trying to analyse the situation clear-headedly. You drop some of the ideology and be a bit more pragmatic. But then be clear sighted about what we'll try to, you know, thread that needle. And for me, I mean, I know we always end up back with me talking about nuclear, but this was symptomatic of their lack of understanding. Nuclear is still the single biggest source of clean terawatt-hours in Europe, but for the longest time until very, very recently, it was being phased out. And that's for me, you've got an existing asset already amortised producing clean terawatt-hours.

And yet you decide that you can do without that because you're living in a fantasy land of cheap gas and renewables that you're going to have to do a lot of investment to make firm and reliable. So I think they're still way too reliant on fossil fuel imports. And they've got a very old mindset that they've struggled to get rid of. And I'm hoping that this is a wake up call and recent events will even perhaps reinforce that even more. But it requires them to really take a long hard look and drop some of these fantasies, including now the gas lobby telling them hydrogen's the answer, which I know you've been doing a lot of work on. That kind of mirage is definitely deflating.

Oh, yeah. Look, there's no question about that. And that's one of the reasons why I've been so, you know, sort of outspoken about hydrogen is because it's the refuge of fools, dreamers and scoundrels. Because if you are losing Russian cheap gas and you don't know what to do, but you can just talk about hydrogen and it sort of pushes back to after an election or after an investment cycle and so on. I do think that the hydrogen souffle has souffled pretty hard and it's continuing to souffle. And so I think that there is now the most marvellous, interesting, fascinating piece of news in Germany. There's a section, 400 kilometres of hydrogen pipeline. I don't know off the top of my head. I can't remember the developer of it.

It's one of the gas pipeline network companies, 100 million euros spent, filled and compressed with hydrogen, does not have anybody feeding in hydrogen and does not have anybody buying hydrogen. And, you know, because that's 100 million euros, essentially, that's going to be clear that that's shot, gone. It’s just a question of who writes it off and who’s holding the can for that.

But still in the package that was announced by the most recent energy network, so electricity and gas package announced by Teresa Ribera, a great friend of mine, she's been on the show. Hello, Teresa, if you're watching this. 240 billion euros supposed to be spent between now and 2040 on, get this, hydrogen pipelines. You know, hello souffle, can you keep working?

Yes. I mean, I'm not following Europe as closely as you are, but I do keep a close eye on the UK. And in the episode that we did with Seb Kennedy on gas prices, in looking into how we relate to our biggest gas provider, which is Norway, you know, you quickly get to, oh, we want to talk some about hydrogen and CCS. Oh, and we're going to be converting some of our gas stores into hydrogen stores at great expense. And you're like, well, aren't we missing something here? We're leaping into this kind of mirage without really working it through, thinking about the demand, thinking about the pricing and missing the bit in the middle, which is much more pragmatic. How do we keep prices affordable? How do we make sure electrification is central to our strategy?

So definitely in the UK, there is non souffléd hydrogen nonsense that is going to go away. I mean, there's 2.4 billion, I think, that's already been hard ringed by the Chancellor. And, you know, you've got BP pulling out of projects as well. I suspect none of that's going to happen, or very little. But certainly the big plans beyond. But that episode, you know, was talking about Norwegian gas. I mean, one of the things that's going on, which I think we haven't done much on. I want to finish actually by sort of teasing a few episodes, so we're going to get onto that. But we need to do a lot more on the commodity markets and what is and isn't driving them. Because, you know, sitting here looking at $60 oil and acting as it's always going to be $60.

Yeah, it's only one big shock away.

It's one big shock away. And then the question is, is $100 oil or $120 oil, which we could have, would that accelerate the transition because people want to get off it? Or would it crash economies and therefore actually stop everything? And then of course, there's the flip side, which is if you're a producing country, I think we need to talk a lot about fiscal break evens. Because if the oil price stays low, then there's a whole bunch of countries that cannot finance their current spending. And I'm talking about countries, you know, yes, of course, some of the smaller oil producing countries, but also Saudi and some of the Gulf players, they need prices of $80, $90 to fund, you know, big projects like Neom, the great green city in the desert etc, etc.

The transition to the extent that oil producing countries and gas producing countries are going to engage in it, they need a high oil and gas price. Now we could be in a period of sustained low oil and gas prices. That's going to have consequences. But I want to come back to one thing you said, the number of terawatt hours out of nuclear in Europe. First of all, if you exclude France, that simply isn't the case anymore.

You can't exclude France, it's a member of Europe.

So legacy nuclear producing a lot of clean energy, absolutely. But absolutely no clear pathway to economic nuclear.

Oh, no, no, I wasn't talking about that. My point was about the assets that we had and that were working perfectly fine. And there was this ideological decision to get rid of them at a point when we were facing an energy crisis of security. We've done this to death, so let's not go over it.

But let's come back to the European malaise, which was, I think, the sort of umbrella term for where Europe is in all of this. And I do think I can see signs of that malaise receding. I can see potentially very interesting next few years for Europe. So it's not all negative. So on the nuclear dossier, I think there's a much better understanding in countries like Sweden, Poland. Clearly, the Czech Republic have always been fairly sort of pro-nuclear.

Yeah, and Poland for good reason.

Yes. But the UK, you know, really pushing hard to get, okay, it's overly focused on Rolls-Royce's SMRs and on fusion, which is a whole other episode or many, which we may get onto. But there is this understanding, even in the corridors of Brussels, that demonising nuclear is not a thing anymore. You know, Germany and Austria tried to make it kind of an official policy of the EU. They have failed. The Zeitenwende, the change of times, it's really clear that that has failed. Now, can Europe build new nuclear affordably?

BW
Yeah, well, let's just start by not switching off the ones we've got.

As I've been saying for 15 years.

And our friend, Teresa Ribera, if you're listening to this, Spain, you too have fallen into this trap of believing that you should dump perfectly good assets and replace them with less reliable assets.

Absolutely. The locus of ideology has gone from sort of Germany and Austria to Spain. Yeah, or Belgium. But then other green shoots. So, you know, Europe does have some extraordinary assets, electrotech assets. So, it's got an incredibly impressive grid.

And, you know, I did a few episodes with Tim Meyerjurgens of Tenet, John Pettigrew in the UK National Grid, but also Nikos Tsafos, who's now assistant minister in Greece and so on. And, you know, it really makes you think we've got a single grid synchronized that goes from sort of Latvia to Cadiz and from, you know, from Normandy to Ukraine, bringing Ukraine onto the same synchronization in 2023, I think it happened — no, 2022 — was an incredible feat of engineering.

And we have great companies. We've got the Schneider Electrics and Wärtsilä, Leadership Circle member, obviously.

We've got Arup.

Well, I was thinking in terms of the grid, it's perhaps Arup does a lot of the planning issues. But, you know, obviously Siemens and so on. So, we've got real strengths around, particularly high voltage DC, Hitachi, Europe based now, formerly ABB. So, we've got a lot of strengths there. And if we go into an era of lower gas prices, we must not as Europe and — Brexiteer speaking — but as Europe, we must not not blow the time, use the time wisely and pragmatically. So, I'm somewhat optimistic about Europe. I'm going to say that. I'm going long Europe.

Okay, good. Well, I'm glad you're closer to it. So, that encourages me. But let's just return to this theme of electrotech, because we were part of this narrative. You had a great episode with Kingsmill Bond, where we talked about their very impactful deck that came out, the electrotech revolution. I'm delighted that Kingsmill is now part of Ember, which is one of my other day jobs, looking after Ember.

And there is this genuine excitement, I think, about the pace at which things are changing. And they're happening at a systems level, aren't they? It's not just, oh, solar is a bit cheaper here. Batteries are getting cheaper. But it's now cascading into these things interrelating, a whole new energy system is being sort of brought to market and really not relying too much on government intervention. It's almost happening despite governments rather than because of them. So, what's your view? I know you've tracked it for many years, but electrotech does feel like in the medium to long term, it wins, right?

That's absolutely right. I certainly believe it does. And, you know, I've been tracking, you know, wind, solar, batteries, EVs, HVDC, high voltage direct current transmission, and so on. Almost sort of, certainly go back to the new energy finance days. It was about a deep dive into each of those. You deep dive, you get the best data, and you try and figure out what happens next in the microeconomics of each of those.

And I think what Kingsmill has, and the Ember team, and others, Saul Griffiths, another great episode from a couple of years ago, have done is what they've understood is that it's a system. It's a system. So, you can start to talk about things, a word that I've used around the UN for many years, and people look kind of blank, was leapfrog. You know, really what we need is for India, if India leapfrogs to the technologies of the future, versus going into just coal, then the planet has a chance, not to put too fine a point on it.

That's something that I have been tracking, is this kind of China-India rapprochement, you might call it. So, in August 2025, there was this meeting between Xi and Modi in China, in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which is their kind of almost NATO, really, meeting. And it was reported at the time as being very significant, because it all links back also to this first conversation we had about the chaos that's coming out of the Western Hemisphere, that this kind of feeling that they would not be defined by third parties, they were going to define their own relationship, and they were going to have reopened direct flights, there's going to be trade arrangements. And within that, they talked about defence, as you'd imagine, but they also talked about electric vehicles specifically. And obviously, the reason for that is, if you look at what China's achieved, now 50% of all cars sold are electric, their truck segment, their bus segment, their semi segments, they're all up in the 10%, 20% sold, 10% of cars on the road are now electric. It's been phenomenal. And it's had an effect on oil demand. They've managed to reduce their oil demand in 2025 by around 5%, which is enormous in terms of millions of barrels of oil per day.

So, it's having this geopolitical effect. And for me, I think that relationship between India and China now, how real it is, how quickly they're able to find a shared way of working, especially with terms of supply chains, they both want to dominate the supply chains. But what I think they'll do is they'll collaborate on trade. I think they both feel victimised by the US, they both believe in free trade, and they will move forward to some degree together.

And victimised by Europe, by the way, because of the CBAM, the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, which has come into force. I bet you there are people listening to this who import into Europe, who don't realise that they're actually, the clock started and they're running real financial liabilities starting on the 1st of January this year. And there are no CBAM certificates that are going to be sold until 2027. You do not know what the liability is, sorry. But this is regarded as a very hostile act by a lot of these manufacturing and exporting growth economies. It's a very hostile act. Sorry, I just wanted to...

No, no, no, I agree with this feeling that, you know, there are unintended consequences. You can be the bully in the playground, but other children may form little alliances. And they're not even children, you know, these are equally powerful nations. And you look at where people live, and the size of their economies. The other hemisphere is doing its own thing, and they don't have oil, right? They do not, that commodity is something that is a vulnerability to them. So, of course, this electrotech move into transport is going to electrify very fast.

So, my view on the India-China rapprochement is, look, it's clearly significant, but it's probably significant more as a shot across the bows of the, you know, do not take us for granted. It's India saying, do not take us for granted. And, you know, China, I don't want to say opportunistically, because when you have a thousand year time horizon, nothing is really truly opportunistic.

Well thought through in advance.

But there's a long way to go between, and I agree on trade, because there it's just clear that they're aligned. But if you're saying, okay, well, there's going to be Chinese technology in Indian factories making solar panels to sell to countries around the world, there's a long way to go for that.

Yeah, you're right, because they both want to have that security of supply that it's their own made in India, made in China kind of dominance. So, there'll be competition for sure. But let's just double click on India for a second, because what was so fascinating about last year was for the first time since COVID, you saw a reduction in coal burn, a significant reduction in the amount of coal burned in India. And it was partly circumstances, they had a very good hydro year. But they built a lot of solar, and they brought nuclear power. And there's just enough, you know, remember your little equation of if you build enough clean energy over time, it will just displace the fossil. We saw a little microcosm of that or a little, you know, early presage of that happening in India last year.

And the question is now the power industry, the power ministry of India, there's this very visible fight happening between the pro-coal lobby and the pro-clean lobby. They're both out issuing projections, and we're going to build this many gigawatts of that and the other. And there's not a consensus. And this is a highly influenceable story emerging in India. But this data from 2025 tells you, if things go well, you can absolutely leapfrog and you are leapfrogging. And that's what's exciting.

And you did a great episode with Arunabha Ghosh. And it was really about… because I've thought of India as being its key thing is it's going to largely ignore clean or not clean and so on in the necessary legitimate drive for electrification, just to kind of get electricity into the villages, to get everybody on the grid. But actually what he was saying is it happened in parallel. It's both.

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Talking about this word leapfrog and the kind of the systems, because Kingsmill's electrification chart, the one that's most striking is new ways of producing electricity, which is largely wind and solar. He doesn't talk about nuclear, but you and I do. New ways of managing it, which is batteries and high voltage DC and all of the grid investment, and then new ways of using it, which is about transport, which is about heating. I think it's about industrial heat.

I'm not sure if that's on his chart, but this idea that you've got new ways of producing, managing and using, suddenly a country like Pakistan, business people, farmers, homeowners can just say, I can go soup to nuts, A to Z, electrically and I'm not going to be dependent on either an unreliable grid or for the kind of national level or the ministry of finance level on something that drives up your imports, destroys your balance of payments. Again, so China and India, and by the way, Pakistan and a whole bunch of other countries, they're incredibly dependent on fossil fuel imports.

And this is where, coming back to where we started, this vision of, if there's this hemispheric strategy, there's another part of it, which is another part of the US strategic vision, if there is one, is that the only reason people do clean energy is because of woke-ism and subsidies. And the sooner we strip all of that out, the more aggressively, the more ferociously we address that, the quicker we can get back to the real business of providing energy to people. And I think that Chris Wright, Secretary of Energy, he's well-meaning, he's a smart person. He's a well-meaning person. He wants to bring cheap energy to people around the world and particularly in the US. But his vision that you only do that through fossil is, in the words of Lord Brown, last episode before Christmas, wrong. So he is Chris Wrong, not Chris Wright.

Chris Wrong, I think that is a name that might stick. And it does become, because you've not spent the time to really study it. Because if you just dip in and you have a fossil lens on things, they are not seeing what's happening in batteries, for example.

But the amazing thing is, Chris Wright is an investor in I think it's Fervo, the geothermal business. He's an investor in Oklo, in the nuclear business. He did part of his master's on solar. So to me, it's mystifying how he doesn't understand it, but he definitely…

Well, maybe he's missed the batteries. Maybe the fact that he's obsessing with mini-nukes and geothermal means he doesn't understand that the lithium-ion revolution has happened. I don't know. But maybe he thinks that the US just can't be competitive in that.

I don't know. But let me come back to batteries in a second.

I was trying to tee you up

I do want to talk about batteries. I'm very excited about batteries. It was an excellent attempt to move me along.

But you've still got something else to say.

One of the most interesting trips that I did in 2025 was to Cairo. And I was invited by Alcazar Energy, one of our Leadership Circle members, to meet and talk to some of their investors. And so I did a deep dive into Egypt and extraordinary, you know, 110 million people, and you can do wind there for $30 per megawatt hour. You can do wind. The economy is growing 50% every decade, 4% per year. And my question that I was, as I was prepping to kind of understand what was going on is, if you were Egypt sitting on a million dollars, and you've got to buy energy, you've got an economy growing and you need energy. And just at a very, very, you know, I don't want to say Mickey Mouse, but a very kind of simple level, it's not even a model, what would you spend that money on? You could spend it on oil, gas, solar, wind, or nuclear, and you need energy.

And the fact is, because wind, solar, and nuclear are assets that you build, you spend your million building an asset, the overnight building costs of the asset, they then produce 10 to 15 times as much energy per dollar as if you blow it on gas or oil. And to me, I just sat there having done the calculation, I looked at it and said, well, you know, if the question of the next decade is, is the most of the world, so Lord Browne's term, most of the world, you know, not China, not Europe, not the US, but everybody else, which is the majority of all the people in the world, it's 70% of all the population in the world, India, Africa, Latin America, the Southeast Asia, and so on, absolutely huge. If their question is, should we buy oil and gas? All these other things that produce 15 times more energy per dollar, then to me, it's a no brainer. To me, it's a no brainer, a big mistake that the US is therefore making by just going off and doing its petrostate thing.

Yeah, no, don't disagree. Well, look, let's do something on batteries.

So I think 2025 was kind of a year of big arrival of batteries, grid connected batteries. You know, we know what's been going on in EVs, one of your favourite topics. We need to talk, by the way, about your Rivian. But just lots of, you know, essentially grid connected battery projects have moved from the hundreds of megawatt hour scale to the tens of gigawatt hour scale. And you saw all these announcements, you know, country after country, Saudi Arabia, I think the biggest project. And the costs are, you know, another 40% drop in the costs. And we're seeing these new chemistries, sodium-ion chemistries, looking like they can continue the cost reductions. And I did one of my favourite episodes of last year was with Malcolm Turnbull, former Prime Minister of Australia. And he was talking about pumped hydro.

Yeah, it wasn't one of my favourites, to be honest, Michael, mainly because I thought he's gone off on a tangent into his world of pumped hydro. But what you're going to reveal is, it is a tangent.

Well, so that's kind of where I was headed. Because it was, I also went off to the pumped hydro conference. And I really did a deep dive. And for as long as I've been doing this, it's been a truism that nothing can beat the cost of pumped hydro for storage. You know, if you really want lots of cheap storage, there's only one game in town. You can obviously do natural gas, pragmatic climate reset, just keep some gas and all those sorts of things. But if you really wanted storage, it's pumped hydro, that's it.

And if you look at these really big BESS, battery energy storage systems that are being connected to the grids and being built now, they are still more expensive than pumped storage. But if you take that big project that Malcolm Turnbull was talking about, Snowy 2 down in Australia. And if you look at what it's really going to cost, which is not the $12 billion that Malcolm talked about, it's probably more like $20 billion, including grid connections.

And if you look at what it's the cycle, because it's not always going to go from completely full to completely empty 350 gigawatt hours, it's actually going to do something in the middle. Calculate the costs. And Snowy comes out at something like $70 per megawatt hour. And the big battery systems now in China are at $80 or $90. And outside China, they're at $120, $110, $120, $130 per megawatt hour. So they're only kind of 50% more expensive, let's call it.

But you can put them anywhere. So you can co-locate them with your demand. You can put them strategically around a grid bottleneck. You don't have to put them up in the mountains or somewhere where there's enough water and then have a huge investment in the grid to do anything with it. You can actually just put them where they're most valuable.

Yeah. And also there's a learning curve of it's a manufactured unit with learning cycles.

And we ain't done yet. Exactly. On the cost side, we ain't done yet. So to me, that was an eye-opener. I've always been sceptical about people like Kingsmill and others. Oh, and then batteries win and it's a game over and so on. And I'm a learning curve guy. And I've been thinking, I'm not sure I could be that optimistic. I can now be that optimistic. It is truly, truly transformational.

And it transforms on every level, right? I mean, we talked about Australia. That's kind of where they had such a high penetration in certain parts of the grid of renewables that the batteries had to follow just in order to keep grid security. They're very elongated grids, very tricky to manage. But then at the very micro scale, one of my favourite moments of last year was visiting a tiny little island in Fiji where the owners proudly showed me around their solar and battery operation, not running a single drop of diesel now, running a desalination unit.

All of the rooms for guests were all being run by solar. And it was a combination of a New Zealand engineering firm who came in and did the assessment, did all the economics and BYD batteries. And that was the breakthrough. And what I loved about that was, it's not as simple as, oh, we've got to be worried about China. There are companies being built on the back of some of this brilliant engineering that China's bringing to market. That means that this change is just happening in all sorts of places, making life better, reducing costs for businesses, increasing productivity. And it's almost impossible to track because it's happening at micro, it's everywhere. So that's why I think we keep coming back to Electrotech's winning because it's just stealthily, but then quickly it's going to happen.

I can't move on without talking about Project Bo, the Sierra Leone solar and battery project, which is, okay, Fiji, of course, you hang out and look at energy systems of luxury ecolodges.

Oh, no, no, we're not going to do this,

Well, producer Oscar and I went to visit this solar and battery system. And in fact, you know what was the most memorable or maybe the most systematic part of that? Memorable was meeting the mothers, seeing the babies, talking to Dr. Conroy, the doctor who was behind the creation of that unit. And then of course the local nursing team and doctors and very memorable, but systematic, you know, what was very interesting was we visited a college where they're training solar engineers. And that is the system change because there are, you know, there was, we met, there was one class of about 20 engineers and they were learning, you know, from beginning to end, how you build one of these systems. And speaking as somebody who's been involved in Sustainable Energy For All before it was even called that, before SDG7 existed, it was so theoretical.

It was all lines on a spreadsheet or it was all, you know, this ought to happen, but it wasn't concrete. But when you're sitting there in Sierra Leone, outside the second biggest city, you know, on a hilltop, there's a class of 20 young engineers learning to do this stuff. And what are they going to do their whole career? They're going to install this stuff. There's a stream of installations that comes out of that college forever.

And, you know, just to return to the electric tech revolution, why it was, there was one slide that really struck me, which was about how much headroom there still is, because everyone who follows these S-curves is like, oh, it's going to soften. And the IEA famously is always saying, oh, solar is going to flatten. But when you look at it country by country, there are so many countries who've got great installation, you know, good enough grid, good investment climate. They're nowhere near into the highest penetration possible of wind and solar. So there's a lot that the ceiling is high above us. And it's higher than we think.

So I did a piece, I think it was in 2018, I wrote about the solar singularity. And I said, it could equally be a wind and solar singularity. And obviously, there'll be a bit of nuclear, don't worry, Bryony.

That's all right. I know China's going to do that for us.

But the point being that when we talk about penetration of solar into the grid, and this talking about solar and batteries and saying that it'll never get to 10, Chris Wright said in 50 years, it will not get to 10% of energy. He means, of course, primary energy, claxon alert, fallacy. But when you start to get solar into industrial applications, when you start to get solar powering, you know, first of all, we've got huge investment required in cooling. So cooling alone is going to become, you know, I think cooling right now is about 10% of all global electricity. And it's not even got started huge, huge swaths of the world that don't have cooling that deserve it and need it. So we don't know what electricity penetration is going to be. And we certainly don't know what solar and then solar and battery or solar wind and battery penetration is going to be. So that massive headroom.

And I suppose the other thing that we look at, you just mentioned cooling, one of the biggest uses for cooling now is this big surge in data centres. And but interestingly, I don't think we've got time to do a huge segment on AI, but we have talked about AI last year. It's going to be, I'm sure, a topic that comes up.

But with AI, not only does it boost demand, which can be seen as a good thing, because it gives a market for lots of new entrants to build new stuff, but also you get the AI applied to the system. So you get better engineering solutions for cooling, you get that kind of multiplier effect of being able to sort of take huge amounts of data and come up with more elegant solutions. So I think, you know, whilst we probably can't do AI justice on this episode, it's definitely gonna be a topic you've definitely covered and will cover in the future.

Yes, I started 2025, actually, I wrote my big piece on AI during 2024, but it only appeared in Bloomberg published it, I think, on Christmas Eve. So I spent the first few months of 2025 talking a lot about AI. And obviously, we've all tracked it since. And, you know, yes, AI from at the moment, most of what you hear is this kind of craziness around AI data centres and their energy demand and this sort of, you know, Fermi, the IPO of Rick Perry, former Secretary of Energy in the US, who pulled together a ragbag of projects and did an IPO. Suddenly, this thing became worth $15 billion. Well, guess what? That's halved already. Nuclear players that are riding that, Oklo, which did its own IPO and was suddenly worth, I don't know, $16, $15 billion and is now only worth $8 billion. And, you know, so there's this bubble behaviour.

But at the end of the day, what I'm seeing is that the demand for power for data centres, although it's growing and it's huge and there is a lot behind it, it's real. AI does extraordinary things. But the electricity demand growth that could come out of electric transportation, cooling, heating industry is much, much bigger. It's an order of magnitude bigger. But the data centres are so challenging because they are all in one place. You know, it's a gigawatt or two gigawatts in a town, perhaps just outside a town that maybe has 50 megawatts of demand or 100 megawatts of demand.

And suddenly, the richest guys, all guys, in the world are demanding gigawatts of electricity. And, you know, they're all off. They're trying to do all sorts of, you know, they're trying to procure gas generators or aero-derivative hypersonic engines or nuclear power stations to supply their data centres.

So, we're going to see a lot of that. I think we're probably pretty close to peak craziness. Actually, we may not be because now we're talking about data centres in space. So, I'm afraid that the AI data centre souffle is going to have to souffle a little bit also, perhaps probably not until 2027, 2028, if I'm honest.

Well, it'll be a topic we come back to as we did episodes with Google and NVIDIA last year and we'll keep tracking. Okay. So, should we look a little bit forward then for the year ahead? It's already proving to be quite an interesting year. And I know that we've got certain themes that we've talked about, we want to do more. But one thing we are going to do more on is this electrotech revolution. And do you want to talk about the electrotech staircase or electrification staircase?

So, you know, if we look forwards, what I'm going to be spending my time, and I think we're going to be sharing with the audience on Cleaning Up, clearly, the electrification. And I think we're moving into a new phase, I'm getting a sense, I'm getting a sense of the zeitgeist. And, you know, I've done that in the past, sometimes quite, you know, a reasonable amount of times, I've done it right. And sometimes I've got it wrong. But I do think that now, amongst policymakers, amongst investors, there is a new understanding that all roads to the energy future go through electricity. And, you know, it's maybe a little bit linked to the souffling of the hydrogen bubble, that now, there's nowhere to hide anymore.

So I’ve started to get invitations to come and talk to very senior people on different types of, you know, whether in finance, or whether in policymaking, or whether in industry, about electrification, and about where does this go? And how do we power it? And how do we make sure it's robust?

And, you know, how do we not overinvest in the grid? How do we, what sort of market mechanisms are required to get to much bigger penetrations of electrification? One of the things that I did in the last quarter of 2025, was work with Adrian Hiel, who is now with the Electrification Alliance in Brussels. He was actually the originator of the hydrogen ladder. Not me.

You made it pretty.

Well, I nicked it, developed it and worked with him, you know, and we did five versions, maybe there'll be a sixth at some point. But anyway, he has, he asked me to work with him and a few other people. Silvia Madeddu, who's one of our alumni on the show, and also from Regulatory Assistance Project, there's Tom Butler, and from Liebreich Associates, EcoPragma Capital, Will Drake, my analyst, we work together on this. And so, you've got this staircase. It's not a ladder. The ladder was about stuff you do, stuff you don't do.

So, we wanted to make sure it was understood in what we're doing with an electrification staircase if there's a dimension of time. So, it's a whole bunch of things, all of which are going to electrify, but not all tomorrow. Some of the industrial uses are much harder. Some of the there are some here and now uses around whether it's heat pumps in new homes or whether it's electric transportation. So, it lays this out. Hopefully, it helps to spur that conversation. And we'll be doing an episode on it. I think, I'm not quite sure, it'll be February or March, and it's going to be launched. So, we can link in the show notes to the staircase, but then we'll do an episode on it in the coming weeks and months.

And the key part of that, of course, is what's happening in transport markets and car markets, vehicle markets in general. And the thing that I'm looking forward to the year ahead is despite all the political headwinds and despite all the nonsense about electric vehicles being awful and killing people, whatever you want, all the narratives that are trying to hold this back, it is just going to keep going.

And there are going to be so many exciting moments, I think, in 26 where we see new vehicles coming to market. There's a whole interesting development happening in affordable vehicles in Mexico, which I'm looking forward to tracking where a public-private partnership is trying to bring the electric vehicle for the people. It's Olinia is the name they've given it, which is ‘movement’ in a native language. It's just about basically a $4,500 electric vehicle that any family could own that reduces your reliance on that oil dependency. So, plenty of lovely things to look forward to, including, I know we're going to get here, Rivian teaming up with Volkswagen to bring out their R2 vehicle.

I was going to give you a hard time because you love to talk about the Mexican electric Volkswagen, the $4,500 vehicle. I'm not convinced at all that states need to get in the auto building business. But the point is that there's innovation right down at the very cheap vehicles. And India actually has done a lot of that, China, of course, as well. And could Mexico play in that? Of course, they've got a fantastic automotive industry and they could and should. But also, I was going to give you a hard time about your, I've given you a hard time about your ecolodge, but your Rivian. I mean, a Rivian, really? How much does that, how much does it weigh? Come on, Briony, how much does it weigh?

Tons, but it's beautiful.

Over three tons, I'll tell you.

But the point of it is that it's a car for an American market. And in a way that the Cybertruck really didn't deliver. This is a car that Americans love because it's got a 420 mile range. It's got amazing torque, it can go off road. It's engineered for a certain segment, of course. But what's exciting about 26 is the R1, which is this big three ton thing, they're teaming up with Volkswagen to bring out the R2, much smaller, lighter, more affordable, obviously, with an eye to European markets. So, yes, I've got a Rivian, I leased it, I didn't buy it. And it is a thing of great beauty. But this is what's interesting though, right? You've got both ends of the segment. And as you talked about, for a long time, trucks were seen to be in the hard to abate sector. Look at what's happening in China. Trucks are electrifying, everyone else will follow. And you've got the pragmacharge investment into Europe. So lots of excitement around that.

And I'm hoping, by the way, that there'll be big news on PragmaCharge in Europe this year. But yeah, you said that our Rivian is a car for the American market. To hell with that, I want one. I'm still driving my big Volvo XC90, 18 years old, waiting for a seven-seater SUV that can get me from London to the Alps without having to stop. And I know I'm going to get all these people in the comments and they're going to say, you can already buy a Xiaomi this, that, and the other, or a Hyundai. But I need it to do 500 miles in all weather conditions, fully loaded.

And then I can get rid of that petrol burner, which I love as a car, but not as a climate statement.

Get on the Rivian waiting list is my advice.

But I want to just say that we've got a few more things that we should just finish off and bring this to a close. Stuff we're going to do during the year. I'm going to be in Singapore and then Australia. So I'm actually, and particularly Singapore is very interesting because I want to really dive into this ‘most of world,’ the huge chunk of population that is not US, Europe, China. We always see things through that lens. Now we're doing much more on India, which is great, but there are so many important countries that we need to understand. The Vietnams, the Bangladeshes, the Thailands, the Malaysias, Indonesias, Nigerias, South Africas, and of course, Latin America, where I'm hoping whether it will be this year or certainly next, we should really go and do a tour.

Yes, well, I'll kick that off by a little trip to Mexico.

Right.

We'll hopefully record an episode there. And I'm also going to go back to China in April. Always good to check in, always mind blowing to see the speed at which they're moving on things. So yeah, I think that's right. We've diversified our focus, I think successfully in 2025. And as you say, we're only going to be doing more of that. Whilst at the same time, we still get this big gravitational pull of US politics. We can't ignore it. But I do feel increasingly as if we are in a big propaganda bubble of Trump's making, which we've got to make conscious efforts to break out of and really get back to what's happening in the rest of the world, or most of the world as you described it.

And as we get outside the US administration propaganda bubble, there's another big one out there, which is climate science. I think you've got some episodes or some topics and themes that you want to explore during the coming seasons.

Exactly right. Yes, I have become slightly obsessed in the same way that we take on these little targets like your RCP 8.5. I've become obsessed with watts per metre squared as the metric of how much harm we're storing up. And that leads you into a conversation about exactly what is happening in terms of the physical science of climate.

We talk a lot about energy systems, lots of good news there, less good news in the physical sciences where we do seem to be tracking quite an extreme track of heat. And it's partly because we're losing reflectivity. And it's partly because we're still emitting more greenhouse gases than we ever were.

So I want to do a deep dive episode on that with Zeke Housefather, who's one of the best analysing this. And then also just because I like to do quirky little offshoots, I'm also becoming really interested in the role of microbes, the world of the microbe and how it has such an outsized effect on everything that we, you know, life on this planet. So I'm going to be doing a little excursion there as well.

So you've done fungi with Merlin Sheldrake. So now you've got to do microbes, bacteria and so on.

Exactly, yeah.

And the watts per square metre, I mean, that's the climate forcing, as it's called. And I think that I'm assuming that you mean climate forcing and then what happens to the heat, how it gets distributed, what it does to our natural systems.

Yeah, I'm meaning it more that we either do parts per million in the concentrations of the atmosphere or we do carbon budgets, which is where you get down the RCP8.5 rabbit hole. But really what matters is how much extra heat are we experiencing? And that's the watts per metre squared, which is a combination of how much sunlight reaches us and how much is trapped by it.

So we're going to have to do a bit of a deep dive, just you and me probably on metrics because, I wrote this thing, the pragmatic climate reset. And a lot of people out of that, they said, ‘well, Michael, does that mean that you just think we should ignore 1.5°C, not worry about that, we missed it and just go for 2°C?’ No, because the temperature difference from pre-industrial levels to 2100, when frankly, I probably will be very surprised if I'm still around. It's just not a way of organising thought and action. And what I came back with, so people then said, well, what should our target be? For me, it is to build clean stuff faster than energy demand growth. So the little tiny model that I wrote for the first part of pragmatic climate reset, to me, that's the guide for action.

Yes, I agree with you. That will help you with the concentrations of greenhouse gases. For me, I'm interested in what the physical world actually is. How is it changing? We're in an era of consequences. And if we have got all this AI intelligence, all these wonderful sensors and cheap technology, let's not fly blind. Let's instrument the planet effectively. So we actually do know the other part of the equation, which is that we could be going gangbusters on getting rid of fossil. But the natural world might be doing some things that really come back and bite us.

So you focus on that, understanding the natural world. I want to use all the AI to actually accelerate the building of the clean stuff. I'm the action guy, I want to build the clean stuff. But let's just wrap up. I think we owe it to our audience to draw this to a close. We draw it to a close really where we started, because the final area that we're going to be spending time on during the coming seasons, months, and probably years, is going to be around geopolitics. But what I want to do is really focus it on energy security.

So for energy security, you need hard security. I don't want to say I mocked Germany, but I was criticising Germany for not admitting that it was doing the energiewende on the back of cheap Russian gas. I think we're all guilty of ignoring the fact that you need hard security to do this stuff. So your cables, undersea cables, etc. But also, we are building a system which does not have piles of coal, that does not have strategic petroleum reserves, that does not have a line pack of gas. And so it's lacking in buffers. An electrotech system will naturally lack buffers.

And can I just add into that as well, it's also weather dependent. I know that's obvious, but look at what happens when the hydro swings in China. Suddenly, we have more coal burn. When the hydro is good, you get less burn in India. Solar insolation, you know, these things are variable. And that's another great difference.

Absolutely. And I think we can't, although I've done my little, you know, sort of batteries are great, you know, hymn to batteries I did just a few minutes ago. But batteries alone will not solve those security problems. And we must not kid ourselves. Now, it comes back to pragmatic climate reset, the role of gas, the role of storage, the role of overcapacity, interconnections with lots of hard security and so on. But that's an area that I want to dive into. And I've got to find some good voices to bring into the conversation on those topics as well.

Brilliant. Well, I don't think we've got enough episodes to fill us in. But I'm looking forward to the rest of 2026, exploring all these excellent topics with you. It's always a pleasure. Great to see you in person and look forward to the rest of the year ahead. Thank you.

So now, Bryony, normally I leave you to do the thanks because you're so good at it, but I'm going to give it a go.

You've been getting better.

So all that's left for me is to thank our producer, Oscar Boyd, our video editor, Jamie Oliver, new head of operations, Kendall Smith, and the rest of the team behind Cleaning Up, to thank our Leadership Circle members without whom none of this would be possible. And also to thank all of our audience. We'll be back at this time next week for another episode of Cleaning Up. How did I do?

Not bad.

Thank you.