Ep43 Climate business: fiction and reality, ft Genevieve Hilton & Steve Willis

In this episode podcast, we’re privileged to host two seasoned stalwarts of the heavy industry, Genevieve Hilton and Steve Willis. Their unexpected pivot has led them to channel their vast experience into a compelling work of fiction: ‘Fairhaven: A Novel of Climate Optimism’ (Habitat Press, 2024). This isn’t just a novel; it’s a beacon illuminating the pressing climate issues that our planet grapples with. Our conversation takes a deep dive into Genevieve’s and Steve’s transformative journey towards net-zero. We then shift our focus to three innovative climate solutions, not mere theoretical constructs, but viable both project-wise and financially, as explored in the novel. We also touch upon the topic of corporate sustainability and underscore the paramount importance of raising awareness. This episode isn’t just a discussion; it’s a thought-provoking exploration of climate change from a truly unique vantage point. Tune in for an enlightening experience.

ABOUT GENEVIEVE. Genevieve Hilton has worked in corporate affairs and sustainability in the Asia Pacific region since 1994. She previously led ESG and communications in Asia Pacific for Lenovo, as well as Corporate Citizenship and External Communications Asia Pacific for BASF. Since taking a step back from the corporate world in 2022, she has become a full-time sustainability activist and writer. Under the pen name Jan Lee, she is an award-winning science fiction writer. She is the co-author, with Steve Willis, of "Fairhaven – A Novel of Climate Optimism" (Habitat Press UK), a winner in the Green Stories contest. Her work has also been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and recognized several times in the “Writers of the Future” contest. She also is Editor-in-Chief of The Apostrophe, the quarterly magazine of the Hong Kong Writers Circle. She currently acts as a senior advisor for a number of environmental and social activist organizations, as well as co-chairing the Energy & ESG Committee of the American Chamber of Commerce of Hong Kong.

ABOUT STEVE. Steve Willis is an engineer and innovator with decades of experience providing solutions to environmental problems for large scale industries. The start of the covid lockdowns gave him pause to think carefully about climate solutions, what was needed and what it would take to get there. This led to a collaboration with the GreenStories team to produce the No More Fairy Tales anthology for COP27. Steve continues to work on large scale climate solutions, currently developing a CO2 sequestration mineralisation process which can be deployed at the million tonne scale.

HOST, PRODUCTION, ARTWORK: Joseph Jacobelli  |  MUSIC: Ep76 onward excerpts from Vivaldi’s La Follia, played by Luca Jacobelli.

Transcript

Transcript is automatically generated. There may be errors. Please only rely on the audio.

📍 Welcome to the Asia climate finance podcast, where our host and his guest discuss and evaluate climate business and climate finance issues and trends,  please support us by liking and subscribing to the podcast.  Also, please note the disclaimers at the end of the show.  Here is your host, investor analyst and author, Joseph Jacobelli. 

Hello and welcome to episode  43 of the Asia Climate Finance podcast.  Today's episode is a bit special.  We have two guests, Genevieve Hilton and Steve Willis, instead of one guest. And also we discuss a book that our guests have co authored.  In the episode, we first talk to Genevieve and Steve about their transformative journey towards net zero. 

We then shift our focus to three innovative climate solutions. Not mere theoretical constructs, but viable both project wise and financially, as explored in the book.  We also touch upon the topic of corporate sustainability and underscore the paramount importance of raising awareness.  I hope you enjoy the show. 

Hello again, and welcome to episode 43 of the climate finance podcast. As I mentioned earlier today, we have two guests, which is very special for our podcast. We usually only have one.  We have Genevieve and Steve. So hello, Genevieve. How are you? 

Hello, great to be here. 

Thank you. And hi, Steve. I believe you're in Malaysia.

So how's everything over there? 

It's hot and wet, not raining at the moment, but it will be shortly. It's I'm quite used to that weather, especially when I visit visit Singapore, which I think is quite similar, but I'd like to first ask you both to perhaps provide a very brief personal introduction.

I mean, we've got your bio on the show notes, but just just a brief introduction from you both. Maybe we'll start with Steve.  

Yeah. I'm a chemical engineer and I've been here in Malaysia for 17 years. So I originally came out to do environmental work with the oil and gas industry. So there's A very particular problem that they had, and I worked for a British catalyst company that supplied the solution.

And as a result of that, I went to the offshore platforms and the refineries all around the region. So I've been to some fantastically remote locations and seen some quite remarkable things. And Asia is a A very busy, very expanding determined area. So some of the oil refineries that you see in South Korea, for instance, are quite literally the largest in the world.

And they're just like astonishing to see the the scale that can be achieved. So I've been here doing environmental work for all that period. And for the last seven years, I've been outside the company doing a consultancy and supporting work for various different groups, as well as Doing innovation and particularly looking at large scale climate solutions.

So with a colleague, we set up a Herculean climate solutions to find the really big routes to capture multi million tons of carbon dioxide and do things with it.  

Right, so I've also been in the Asia Pacific region for probably about the same time or a bit longer than Steve has, moved here in 1994, moved to been in Hong Kong since around the beginning of 2000. 

And my path was in the area of research. public relations, communications, corporate affairs, and eventually setting, settling on corporate affairs and sustainability. And while Steve was out on oil platforms and production sites you know, battling the winds, I was the one in the, in the head office with the bureaucrats.

Trying to figure out you know, what is a corporate sustainability strategy? You know, how do you categorize your,  how do you categorize your products? How do you do the reporting properly and how can you, how can you make a sustainability strategy work, especially with a large company? So most, I spent 11 years with BASF and then was with Lenovo, both in the Asia Pacific headquarters for several years after that.

And in September of 2022, I officially left the corporate world and now I'm doing consulting on a pro bono basis for NGOs full time. And besides that, which we'll hear about in a minute, writing.  

That's, that's great. Thanks. So for that can I ask you both what moved you to do things that are going to help us get to net zero?

What, what, what is your, what is your, motivation for being so interested in, you know, climate change and all things to climate change. Genevieve? 

Well, I had been realizing this recently, that this has been an ongoing theme, even since I was fairly young. I've  realized at some point that the first piece of written work that I published was a was a one act play about housing development, which was going to get which was going to destroy a pond.

And so all of the pond animals were trying to figure out whether to move away or whether to try to fight against the housing development.  Now again, that was at the age of 14.  But you know, I rather lost the plot for a long time because I was simply trying to you know, Make a career and make a  and make a life but the the The thing is, at a certain point, you realize that the actions, especially of a larger company working on these large projects they are having an impact.

And, you know, whether you like it or not, so this is what we need to do to run the company, they will have an impact. And I was fortunate enough to work at a company that had already started on that sustainability journey, like a long time before I got there. And that was BASF. And I think they're probably pushed into it in the 1970s and 80s by a lot of the very active NGOs and activists at the time, but I learned an enormous amount about the fundamentals of things like, you know, environmental protection, environmental health and safety you know, product stewardship and things like this to the point where I realized it was, it was time to it was time to work with with other organizations that were maybe For me.

On the other side of the fence. So when, after I retired, as I mentioned I started working with a lot of the activists to help them understand how better to work with the companies as opposed to just, you know, shall I, shall I line up outside the door and, and with my protesters? Is that what makes companies is that what makes companies  change their ways?

So that was a, it was a long, very long process for me.  

Steve,  I have a rather different path. So I've always worked in the chemical industry or started working in the chemical industry. And the first job I had, which goes back to 1986, we were running large chemical plants, which were designed before the.

Second World War. So, so the emissions from these sites were considerable and problematic. And we were using a process which the Victorians would have been proud of, but in terms of its impact,  it was certainly problematical. So I had many years of working In industry where there was genuine problems and we dealt with them on a day to day basis as best as we could, but it was definitely quite a difficult environment.

And from that, I shifted over into ICI. And when I was at ICI, I worked within the catalyst business where we focused on  purification and. So like climate compliance or, you know various different types of compliance. And because we were a new small team, we used to get all of the strange inquiries.

So we get these lovely things where people would say, I've got this problem. Can you help me fix it? And we'd sit around the table, you know, with six of us and just sort of like brainstorm random solutions to their problem. You know, either with the equipment we had or with things that we might be able to access.

And we were constantly going around this loop of, well, this is a difficult one. I have no idea how to fix this. What are we gonna do? And some of them we could fix. Some of, some of them we were lucky, some of them we struggled with. And, i, you know, for many years have worked in this environment of here's a great big problem and we're just going to try and fix it, you know, and that mindset sort of like has carried, carried with me to try and fix the environmental and climate problems that we're seeing today.

You both have very different and very, very interesting journeys, and I can kind of relate to, to, to both of those.  Let's talk a little bit about the book that you both just wrote and just published. Should we first actually talk about what was the idea behind the book? I don't know who wants to take the question first. 

Well, Steve, why don't you 

talk through that a little bit? 

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Please. I'll start and you can fill in the gaps, because there's always gaps. Yeah, so I started writing climate fiction as  an actual activity at the start of the COVID lockdowns. So the lockdowns here in Malaysia were particularly long.

And very strictly enforced. So it was an awful lot of time on, on on our hands. And up to that point, we'd been working on several different climate related solutions, including the Rigs to Reefs project, which is one of the things that's described within the book. And because we had all of this time during the lockdowns, and I was working on a couple of big climate startups there was an opportunity to think,  even if our startups are fantastic.

they're not going to be enough.  And if they're not enough, is there enough elsewhere to make, to add up to a big solution to the climate problem? Or is it just not solvable? So I started at the other end of the problem and looked at what does the future like, look like if we have solved it? What things are out there and back calculated back to the present day to look at what we need to be doing today, which you know, we, we either are, we aren't doing so in amongst the startups that we were working on at the time, there are a couple of really big things that we need to be doing today, which aren't currently being done at scale.

And that is the ocean restoration and the Arctic. restoration. And those are covered extensively in the story.  

Now, maybe I can add a little bit from, from my side, is that I am primarily a science fiction writer.  And what science fiction endeavors to do is  to try to, you know, do exactly what Steve just mentioned, to envision a world that is different from the way it is now, and usually that's a future world,  or at least an alternate universe at, at most, but generally speaking, it's a future world in which something has happened that, is dependent on either technology or historic things that are changed in history. 

And there's nothing bigger than it is affecting our future history than the climate change. So in a certain sense, almost every science fiction book that wants to be taken seriously, every science fiction story that wants to be taken seriously, if it's talking about something that happens in the next 10, 20, 50, 100 years has got to mention this whether or not you think that we're going to make it, or whether you think we're not going to make it, it is, it would be ludicrous not to mention the enormous impact that climate change will have on us and, you know, the, the robot overlords or the or the aliens or whoever else is going to come, you know, no matter what, it's, it's, Climate change on Earth will have that impact. 

And interestingly enough, when Steve first got in touch with me, which was in April of last year, so almost a year ago that was right about the time that Grist magazine in the United States, it's an environmental magazine, was running their first climate fiction short story contest.  And I'd been, that had been on my mind.

I'd been thinking about entering it but was having a little bit of lack of inspiration because, you know, sometimes if you have to write a story that has a happy ending, well, there's no drama in it. So that was, that was the moment, that was where I was when Steve first got in touch with me and said, do you want to collaborate on climate fiction? 

And here, here we are a year later with the book, with the book under our belt. 

So we're swinging back to one of the points that Jan made there. Any story that. doesn't include the climate crisis is fantasy.  So, you know, the, all, all works of fiction going forward need to include the the changes in the climate, because if you're not including them, you're, you know, you're just Writing  proper fairy stories because the climate crisis is definitely coming, whether we like it or not. 

Obviously, you're trying to highlight or underline some key climate business and maybe even finance solutions in the book. Without, without any spoilers for those of us who are going to be reading the book,  Could you tell us perhaps what some of these kind of key messages, key messages are? climate business and finance solutions would be,  

or?

Well, maybe I'll, I'll jump in before I'll let Steve talk about some of the solutions themselves, but just to set the stage or set the context a little bit when we are talking about the solutions in the book, they're often forming some of them are a plot point in themselves and some of them are forming the background on which all of the other action is happening.

And because we, Wanted to make this as real as possible. The solutions presented are financially viable. These are things that are not happened. That might not happen in fantasy worlds. These are, or, you know, through the magic deus ex machina, you know, coming down from, from the sky and, you know, the, you know, so suddenly the project was viable, no, these are things that would really work.

And you know, I've been sitting in those corporate offices for many years looking at spreadsheets. And saying, does this project work? Will this make money? So this had to be the basis on which every one of the solutions is pre is presented. So maybe I'll let Steve talk th talk through I guess there's three or four main big main projects that are featured in the book as part of the, part of the storyline.

Yeah. 

Yeah. So, so there's three big topics we'd like to cover Joseph. So ask questions as we're going along so I don't monologue too long.  So the, the first, the first one is ocean neutrification. So this is a classic geoengineering in some ways where you take nutrients to the ocean and you add nutrients to the ocean in order to encourage algae to grow and to to force the food web.

To absorb CO2 from the atmosphere and the algal growth that you see in the dead zones around in the Gulf of Mexico and so on, they cause terrible problems. That's completely undeniable. And the nutrients that are coming from the fertilizer runoff are causing great problems. And the the moral hazard thing that's pointed out, the concern is that if you add fertilizer to the ocean in some other place, you're going to get the same kind of problem. 

One of the realities about the ocean is that the, the bulk of it, the you know, far away from the coast is extraordinarily nutrient lean. So there's a, there, there isn't. Very much living in it because all of the nutrients have been pulled out by the things that have been living in it, you know, so they've had plenty of time to pull down the the, the nutrient level in the ocean.

So if you added a limited amount of additional nutrient into the sea, you could get it to absorb, you know, potentially many millions of tons of carbon dioxide as well as.  Rebuilding bits of the food web and encouraging fish and so on to grow in, in other areas. So one of the stories does the experiment that has never been approved.

So without giving away too many of the plot points there's a,  A little incident occurs where there's a large fertilizer spill, and there's a large fertilizer spill in the ocean, and it releases nutrients into the sea over a, over an extended period of time, and one of the key characters in the story, a lady called Marina, takes the opportunity to use that as the experiment that should never get permission to do so that there are some rules of the sea and adding fertilizer to the sea is currently not permitted for this kind of activity.

But, but as it happens this experiment is taking place at the moment because a ship containing fertilizer. Was sunk by the Hooty rebels in the Red Sea and it will be releasing fertilizer into the ocean, so if somebody could Get that area carefully monitored you would we would find out What the long term impact of fertilizer release can could be and within our little fictional environment we Went to that, went to the location where the the fertilizer had been lost and we managed it better so that the experiment was better. 

And, you know, it's all fictional, of course, so you can just like, and, you know, let's introduce these characters. Let's introduce this equipment. What information do we need? How do we go about gathering that who was involved and what do we see over time? And do you use the fictional fiction. As a pure modeling tool to say, okay, we've done this for six months now, what, you know, how far did they get, what did they see, what problems were they faced with, what other equipment do they have to bring along?

So it's a, it's a beautiful little modeling system to do that. And there are companies out there that have proposed ocean notification as a way of pulling down large amounts of CO2. Thank you. They have applied to do the trials and they've never been allowed.  And the fiction is just a means of saying, okay, let's let's  break that barrier, you know, let's push through it.

By some, you know you know, fictional event, which as it happens, has happened in the Red Sea and they'll just let the story run. Let's see what does happen and let's give us the opportunity to speculate what it, what it would be like if it works. 

The other part of this, which I think is so fascinating is that it makes use of two separate two separate, say sources of, of of growth in the ocean. So one of, one of them is the nutrients that Steve mentioned. And the other part is that. thing that we already see happening now which is below an oil platform, you know, life clings to the legs and they, you know, you, you start to find, because the fish find it as shelter.

So you find under an oil platform, you have this, you know, really amazing coral growth. You have, you know, fish growing, you have algae of all sorts of things, starting from the bottom up. If you could manage that, and use the the multiple, multiple I can't remember the number we were talking about, Steve, but the number of abandoned or unused oil rigs in the ocean is just 

massive.

In Southeast Asia,  there's about 500. of various different sizes. So because of the way the geology was particularly in the Gulf of Thailand, there's a lot of relatively small rigs quite close together. And all of those rigs are on great big steel legs jackets as they're called. And there is, there has been some attempts both in Southeast Asia and also in the Gulf of Mexico to do what they call rigs to reefs projects and what we, we explore in the story.

So, like the ocean eutrophication runs into the, what we call the sea orchards within the story is to take the opportunity of those platforms and the decommissioning of those platforms to make absolutely top class. Fish habitat over the biggest area that you can do at the lowest cost that you can deliver.

So the, the platforms have to come down anyway. So that's a contractual requirement. So there is an opportunity to handle that platform. And if you imagine it as a collection of Lego pieces, it's like, what do I do? What do I do with my Lego pieces? You know, do I do the cheap option of tossing it into the deepest, darkest water I can find Cooling rigs to reef, even though the reefs don't grow in the In the deep water, or do I, you know, put a little bit more effort in and break up the platforms, spread them over large areas, build additional structure and volume around the around these new sea orchards  and use it as an opportunity to rebuild the fish stocks.

So, particularly here in Southeast Asia, the. The seabed was extraordinarily prolific 50 years ago before the trawlers came, you know, so trawlers were introduced to improve fishing yields, trawlers  do increase fishing yields, but they also destroy the fish habitat. So going and putting ocean orchards back into the, onto the seabed, particularly in the 20 to 30 meter depth range, which is heavily trawled, very damaged, but also where the reefs grow you have the opportunity to put back the abundance, which the ocean originally had and generate more fish, more income, more blue carbon capture, and so on.

So the Sea Orchards is a very plausible project which can be delivered. 

And again, we've actually done the done the legwork, I guess, behind the scenes to Ensure that this would be a viable, financially viable project as well, because again, we're on the climate finance podcast. So we, I wanted to emphasize that, that this, this is a viable project. On one hand, you have the  income stream from the fish restoration.

You could call it in a certain, if you wanted to put it at its simplest level, then it's a fish farm. But yeah, that's, that's a, that's a little bit of an oversimplification, which again, has a viable income stream at the same time. the carbon sequestration impact is itself now becoming more and more a resource that is able to be packaged and sold and thus create another revenue stream and to be, I think, a very attractive investment project for someone who'd want to go this direction. 

Could you talk a little bit more about one point, which I thought was quite important when the oil and gas companies put up the oil rigs, there is a decommissioning cost of capital expenditure, which is factored into the overall investment, right? So could you could you talk a little bit more about that and how that money could be potentially redeployed? 

Yep. Yeah, I could. So the clearest example is actually in the North Sea in Europe where the the oil companies are contractually obliged to take away their platforms and clear the seabed of all traces of the operation. Now, the there's an awful lot of to ing and fro ing on where the money comes from and what the government contribution to all of that is, which is you know very interesting.

Very complicated subject, but there's an ongoing debate in Europe around the North Sea about whether the platform should be removed or not, because just like here in Southeast Asia,  there are enormous centers for sea life. So if you take them away, you're taking away the habitat of the creatures that live around that.

So in the North Sea it's a bit colder and the there tends to be a lot of life, a lot of cod and so on along the pipelines. So the the crawlers, of course, trawl along the pipelines, which isn't good for the pipelines either, because the sea life is associated with the with the structures on the seabed.

So there's clear evidence that the But  the the structures help the the productivity and when the, the expenditure of the decommissioning is required, which, you know, can be in a mul multimillion dollar projects, there's an opportunity to say we're going to do spend the money in a different way and use the money to transfer the the structures, the legs the platform legs.

Into areas where they before would become productive reaps. So there's not necessarily where the platform is today, although in a couple of cases, you know, even in today location, they're quite good reaps but where their platforms are deeper, you would cut them chop them up into smaller sections.

And then lay the pieces of platform in a way which secures large areas and makes it impossible to trawl in the future because you lose your trawling gear,  but also provides optimum habitat for the fish. And when we, we looked at this closely, just before COVID actually, for some of the Southeast Asian oil companies.

And the, the cost of doing a conventional decommissioning and dumping the platform or bringing onshore cleaning and scrapping it it's cost effective to build these new sea orchards within the approximately the same budget. And the, the matter becomes how do you organize that? And what is the cutoff between the, the oil company's responsibility for the scrap when the scrap goes.

and becomes a sea orchard, which becomes like a more agricultural kind of operation and no longer under the the control of the oil companies.  

Were there other solutions that you wanted to bring up?  

Yep, so the other really big solution. So there are two go ahead, Jan,  you start. I  

was going to suggest that we maybe just mention that we actually have, of the three solutions, the sea orchards one is that which is most focused on, I would say, mitigation.

In other words, it actually does absorb absorb greenhouse gases, whereas the other two that are in the books, one of them is kind of halfway in between which Steve will talk about in a minute. And the other one is very much an adaptation. So assuming that, you know, climate change is coming, we need to do something, but maybe you can talk about those two projects, Steve.

Yeah, sure. So the when I was doing my thought experiment during COVID of, you know, what is out in 2050 there. We have done that we need to start doing today. One of the really obvious things is refreezing the Arctic. So a conscious effort to go and and rebuild the ice in the Arctic and that there are actually now four little groups working on this.

So they're looking at doing it and costing up the engineering and in parallel and separately to a degree. We use the fiction to explore what it would take to actually do that at scale. So, in terms of the, what would it take to fix the climate crisis, as I've said to Jan many times there, there are four things that we need to do, and they are slash consumption of all kinds re do, do renewables properly, pull down a huge amount of CO2 from the atmosphere,  Refreeze the Arctic and those are four very difficult things to do and we aren't going to like any of them and particularly reducing consumption of all kinds is going to be very unpopular, you know, people just don't want to do that  and when you go through the little list. 

People say, how on earth do you refreeze the Arctic? Because they have no idea, you know, what that would take. But I think of, of those four, refreezing  the Arctic is the one that we could start today. And we have the equipment, we know what, roughly what we would need to do. We'd need to do some trials to work out how to do it efficiently.

But refreezing the Arctic is something that we could we could start this winter. Because the the resources are all ready to hand. So, at this point, people normally say, and how exactly do you do that? So, what we're proposing in the story, and what the various research teams are 

already looking at, 

is taking a ship 

into the freshly forming sea ice, And pouring  seawater over the top of the freshly forming sea ice in the winter. So during the Arctic winter, it's minus 40 degrees and you would take  cold seawater, run it through cold air and make thicker ice. So the intent would be to take the thin sea ice, which occurs naturally and you would make it into very much thicker ice.

And you would do that by trundling through the thin ice and You know, taking it from two feet thick to two meters thick and build areas where you'd end up with multi year ice, which would last more than one season. So, at the moment, the Arctic is losing its long term you know, mature ice, which might last a year.

10 years or more, and instead you're ending up with large areas of fresh sea ice, which are lost every year, so you, you're ending up with open areas of of Arctic Ocean, which are, do refreeze every season, but they lose their ice Nearly completely every season. And we need to get back to the point where multi year ice will last a long period of time.

Would the cost be forbidding? No, not at all. So, one of the things that we've is being explored is how it would be funded. And one of the things about refreezing the Arctic, of course, is that you do it in order to put reflective ice back on the top of the Earth. And reflective ice Reflects heat back out into space and light back out into space. 

And the, the, this reflection has a carbon dioxide equivalents. Now, exactly what that is, is one of the things that we need to do. To do the experiments for in order to determine, but our very rough numbers were that if you have if you're able to make a square kilometer of, of long term it's, it's roughly equivalent to 10, 000 tons of  CO2 removed from the atmosphere a year and, you know, the work needs to be done to verify those numbers. 

If you've got an operation where, you know, a square kilometer of, of good ice is 10, 000 square, is 10, 000 tons of CO2, and you've got 10 bucks a ton, you've got 100, 000 then to pay for the operation to make that ice. And the, the ship is 15, 000 a day plus plus fuel, and could you make a good square kilometer of sea ice with a ship doing that?

We're quite confident that you could. So the, the,  could it cover its own costs quite possibly? And could it even be a profitable enterprise? You know, I think it probably would. And once you start doing that and you know, getting into the latest stages of the story and the development. new technologies come forward, which would allow more ice to be made over long, longer periods for lower cost. 

I was going to mention that one of the important things about the sea ice restoration, or the Arctic ice restoration, is that if you look at why persistent ice exists, but It's, it's very, it's very much a factor or a function of not of how hot it is during the summer, but how much ice doesn't melt during the summer.

So in other words, if you go back to the Ice Age and look at, you know, why was, why did the Ice Age or how did the Ice Ages develop? It was because the winter ice didn't melt.  And so it was able to build up over time, over, you know, winter after winter over You know, more, more and more ice buildup.

And that's what caused ice the ice to be able to advance at that time. So now we are not trying to create an ice age, but trying to restore the type of ice that was there,  you know, a very short time ago. So if we can build up an ice enough, restore enough ice during the winter season, that we are able to recreate a situation which there is not lessening ice during the winter, that allows us to to.

Create the the persistent ice over time that creates the albedo that reflects the sun that then has the, has the carbon reduction equivalency that Steve was just mentioning. So 

I would, I would add to that the well, one of the things about attempting to refreeze the Arctic is that it's a long shot Don't know for sure it would work.

We don't know how many ships you would need, how much ice you can make, what the costs are, but we need to start taking some really bold, long shots, which are going to have a high yield. So high risk and high, high, Return projects, because if we try and do just timid projects, which have got you know, proven mrv and you know, people are being conservative, we're not going to make it, we need to stand there and say, you know, there might be a 20 percent chance this project's going to work, but we're going to fund it anyway.

We're going to try anyway, and we're going to line up all of these high risk high return projects and give them all a go because some of them will work. And so when you have more tools in hand that have been demonstrated to a satisfactory degree and you're getting into your second year and fifth year of running the project.

You will solve the problems and you will make it more efficient. You will get a better return and then you're in a position to start doing it. But if we're doing  stuff that's too small and too timid we've run out of time to get these big, big solutions underway. Shall we talk about the third solution?

Yep. So the the book's called fair Haven  and fair Haven is a, a fictional solution to the problem that Penang Island faces. So Penang is a an island on the west coast of Malaysia and the, the coast of peninsular Malaysia is very flat and a big chunk of the island itself is also very flat.

And with half a meter, a meter of sea level sea level rise. A huge area of this coastline is going to be lost.  So the story speculates that one way of dealing with it is to join the island to the mainland with two enormous dikes. Which is what you would do if you were a Dutchman a hundred years ago a Dutch engineer.

Standing on the hilltop, you'd say a big dike there, and a big dike there, and I'll recover all of this land. And at the time you would have grown rice there, but now obviously situations are changing in Asia and with even a meter of sea level rise Jakarta's gone, half of KL's gone, Bangkok is gone.

Singapore is challenged, particularly as it gets higher, and a lot of the Asian cities are really struggling with sea level rise. And the story speculates that Fairhaven is this new piece of land in between Penang Island and the Malaysian mainland. Which is 250 square kilometers, and that becomes in effect the new capital city for, for Southeast Asia.

So it's got great big dikes, it's got a plan to cope with 10 meters of sea level rise, if 10 meters of sea level rise were to occur, and it, it becomes the place where you would build your banks and you would build your you know, large industry centers in order to be able to have a secure place to operate going long, long term, and it becomes the the hub of many of the developments in the region.

What have I missed, Jen? 

No, I think that pretty much says it. Again, the, this is the project that is most about adaptation rather than mitigation. It's, it's imagining that you know, if, you know, nothing else happens, we still need a place to put our, our industry, our, our banks, our capital, our, you know, our, our people as the sea levels are rising.

Because again, at this point I think everyone realizes that there is not, really a very clear path to saying, okay, climate change is fixed. If only we would do everything by next year. No, it's, it's very clearly not happening. We will experience sea level rise in the near future.  So this is, this is very much a way of saying, here's how we handle that right now.

And the, and the, in the book, I believe the Fairhaven project is already underway when the storyline begins in 2027.  So this is you know, this is something that. We would like to see, you know, you can start it next Tuesday at four o'clock from as far as we're concerned.  

That's quite an interesting example, Joseph.

So, so in some ways how likely is it that it will be done? You know, it may, it's maybe a 10 to 20 percent chance that this particular project might be done in this particular way, but it serves as an example to show the scale of what needs to be done. So. It's simple and easy to visualize and it gives you this set of advantages but not without costs and not without effort and it shows that  to secure adaptation an awful lot of effort needs to be put in.

If I can take. If I can talk about a very much related subject and something I alluded to before, which is awareness. I mean, obviously part of the aim of the book, I presume is, is to raise awareness and, you know, why is it so crucial in our path to decarbonization and net zero, To raise, raise awareness on key issues, whether it's with governments, with financial institutions and corporations and related to that is the fact that, you know, you do have some lobbies out there, which are the climate change deniers or the, you know, anti climate change rhetoric 

and some of some of the kind of greenwashing as well could, could we talk a little bit about that?  

Sure, I think the denialists will never leave us. We will always have, you know, contrarians, no matter what the topic is, you know, if I say the sky is blue, I'm pretty sure someone will come up in another minute and say, well, is it really blue?

The color blue doesn't even exist. You know, your perception is different from mine. So this, this is something that we have to accept. This will happen for, you know, has for many years and it will in the future. 

Yes.  

On the other hand we have seen many times in history that fiction has  changed things in the real world.

And it is necessary for this, us to look at a way to do this because these are big projects. This is a massive human undertaking and it needs a lot of people. It needs yes, it needs the people with the, With the investment funds to make it happen, but it also needs politicians, as you say, but not only that, it needs you know, middle managers, it needs fishermen, it needs accountants, it needs HR managers, all to be working on projects like this.

And actually, in the book, we have a lot of people who are HR managers and accountants and so forth. And, you know, the guy, the guy doing the corporate video about the Arctic project, you know, all of these people All of these people are in the book,  but coming back to it, why, why do we think that this, that fiction is the right way to approach it, or at least one way to approach it,  is that this has happened in history time and again, and if you'll look back, you know, in the 19th century, for example there was the book Uncle Tom's Cabin,  Which has been which was about the topic of human slavery, and I think this was in the 1850s when it was published, and that book was, was called the book that started the Civil War in the United States.

You have in the early 1900s the book, The Jungle by Upton Sinclair.  which was about immigrants working in the meatpacking industry. It was the direct influence that created food safety laws because of that book and the public, public response to it. And those foods, the type of food safety laws, which were the direct outcome of that book, started in the U.

S. but are now present all over the world. You know, more recently we have we have the direct impact on politicians. It tends to be, you know, nowadays tends to be more, you know, film and, and you know, in TV shows and in videos. But there was a, there was a made for TV movie in the, I think it was the year night, sometime in the 1980s called the day after, and it was about a nuclear war.

We actually have documentary evidence. in the form of the diary of then President Ronald Reagan, saying he had watched that movie like internalized what it was about. And he wrote in his diary, he, it was his plan to make sure this never happened in real life.  So, I mean, we actually, we have that. And then again, more recently there was a sitcom called Will and Grace, which aired in the United States and I think was popular around the world as well.

One of the first times you ever saw same sex couples. Or same, same sex couples and you know, especially gay characters being portrayed in a positive manner and as, you know, regular people. It was because of that TV show. That was one of the, it was a huge factor in changing public opinion towards same sex marriage.

And we also have, again, that was public opinion was changed, but when public opinion changes, then politicians change their mind as well. So we saw then. President, then Vice President Joe Biden, now President Joe Biden he actually said that his opinion had been changed, his thinking had evolved based on that show. 

So this is, this is something we've seen time and time again. Now, I don't know that our book, Fairhaven, will be the one to you know, change every, you know, you know, change every opinion on, on the planet, or I hope it won't cause another war. But but the idea is that when people read something, they watch a TV show, they watch a video, they watch a movie, they, you know, read a story, and they can envision something which has been dry and technical and scientific. 

And, you know, we're humans, right? We're people. We like to read about other people and see what they're doing. Maybe they can visualize themselves. You know, well, I'm gonna, you know, I'm an HR manager. Maybe I could be an HR manager for a project like that. Or they say, well, I'm, you know, I'm looking for investments.

This is interesting. You know, I've, I've thought all this ESG stuff is nonsense. But, you know, this is something concrete. This is something I can get my head around.  So this, this ability to envision something in some, in a way that is not just a dry technical document that we think is crucial.  And it's part of the whole, it's part of the whole effort.

I  

mean, obviously, as, as you know, this is something very close to my heart. The, the kind of raising awareness to try to, Make very complicated issues a little bit more, more simple. And when we're talking about whether you're talking about impact investment, T. S. G, etcetera, it is. It is very complicated.

I think the kind of sad thing is.  Today you know,  I think it's probably a minority. I don't know if you agree, shouldn't even see that it is a minority of people who you know, believe that ESG for lack of a better expression is bollocks. That impending investment doesn't make money et cetera, et cetera. 

But there's also an issue which is kind of very hot right now, which is greenwashing. What are your thoughts on that?  

Well, I, myself has been very involved for a long time, and I don't want to say with greenwashing, but rather with trying to prevent, prevent companies from greenwashing.  And in, In a certain way, and this is maybe the optimistic side coming out, I see the prevalence of greenwashing as a sign of something good, which is that the people in charge think that it is important to,  to at least be perceived as doing something environmentally friendly.

And thus they push the, marketing folks, you know, there's some poor advertising copywriter, you know, sitting in some office and this is often how it happens, right? It goes down the chain until the advertising copywriter sitting in some office somewhere says, okay, we've got to do something green. And so he writes a, you know, he writes a sentence, which is, you know, sustainable future for everyone tomorrow, and, you know, put some leaves and some, you know, some happy, smiling children and butterflies in the image. 

That's the X, that's a problem of execution, not a problem of intent. The executive who said we want to be perceived as environmental has taken a first, as environmentally friendly, has taken a first step towards being environmentally friendly. You know, if you want to be perceived that way, at a certain point, you're going to figure out that you can't just lie about it.

You have to actually do it. So, and I've seen companies go through this process at the beginning. They say, well, let's package the nice things that we've already done. Well, we gave a big check to that charity. So therefore, let's talk about it. And then eventually they start realizing that being public about the actions being means being held accountable, and then they want to do something.

They start talking to the stakeholders. And, so that, this is a first, greenwashing is, you know, as  terrible as it is, a lot of it, and I keep a big collection of greenwashing, greenwashing examples when I capture them in the wild. As terrible as it often is it is the sign of a positive first step. No, not for everybody.

You know, some of them are just bad actors, but again, you'll always have those, you, you, you won't, you won't get away from those. 

I'd add to that, one of the American airlines spent 130 million buying carbon credits in order to be able to offer carbon neutral flights. And then there was a big controversy about them buying all these low grade carbon credits and the problem with No forestry and the various things that came out and it became a real sticky mess. 

They react, the way they started was that they wanted to spend money to do the right thing. And the problem was the market wasn't able to give them the good quality carbon credits that they needed. And one of the things that the story speculates about is that some of those carbon credits might be refreeze the Arctic carbon credits, you know, they're risky and they're a long shot to start with.

But if you get a airline to say, I'm going to put 10 percent of the money that I'm going to spend on carbon credits into this really risky stuff, because. We have to do it, you know, we need to do it, and then they make a positive story about it. It's not a, not so much greenwashing as contributing to the fixing of the longer term problem.

Yeah, 

and we are seeing we are seeing a certain level of regulatory controls now coming into force. I mean, where I'm based in Hong Kong, there is no  Law against greenwashing at present, but there are in many places around the world, already existing truth in advertising laws, which, which actually cover this topic very well.

It's just that it's a little bit more complicated to verify the to verify the truth of a particular claim when it's further down the line. So, you know, in the old days you could say, well, this you know, this box of raisin bran has you know, 42 raisins per, you know, whatever.  Kilo or something, or gram, I don't know what, or per box.

You could count the raisins, but if I say that this particular box of, you know, raisin bran is carbon neutral, that's a lot more difficult to verify.  So the, the issue is, is really with the verification, the complexity of verification not necessarily with the legislative It's not necessarily true that we need, you know, new laws against  greenwashing.

But again, you know, the fact that people are, are interested in it, that the CEOs think that the customers want it, that is extremely powerful. And I've been in the room so many times where a decision is being made by some senior executive and that decision,  is asking the question of, of his subordinates do the customers want this? 

And if the answer is yes, then the executive is going to make that decision. You know, do the customers want a more sustainable solution? Do they want us to be green? And if the customers want it, then, you know, the market has spoken.  So again, I see this as a,  in a perverse way, something of a positive sign. 

No, I, I, I get that. And I, and I agree with that. Moving on to kind of the last portion of this of this discussion, if you guys had a crystal ball how do you see the sets of issues that we discussed  evolving over the next, you know, 25 years or so? Well,  Steve, 

that's the big question. Are we, are we optimistic? 

You're calling us out on whether we're optimists. I'm persistent and determined as well as optimistic, I suppose.  And the purpose of writing the book is to, Show a pathway to a place where we get there and it's worked because when I've spoken to people, I was at a cop 28 last year and you you ask people what they, what they think the future might be the common answers are things like mad max and the road and handmaid's tale.

And that's partly because there isn't a story. That they can point to and say i want to do that you know i want that feature you know i want the one which isn't the mad max future but the other one and the other one doesn't have a name and  when i was  pushing all of these ideas around so late get to the point where if you can't put a name on it if you can't describe what it is.

That you want and where you're going how on earth are you going to get that  you know so there's lots of people working on small projects and they're all really interesting and together they may all add up together but there's not been very much work done to add the whole thing into a great big piece and see if it's enough and if it is enough how do we make sure we deliver all of those pieces and if it's not enough.

What's missing, and what is it, and how do we deliver it? 

Yeah, in my sense, in my case, I think the interesting question will be really how fast or exactly when does the scaling happen, the scaling up happen in Asia? Because you see,  you know, we talked at the very beginning about climate denialism, like, yes that exists.

But, you know, a lot of it, a lot of it is really in the U. S. I mean, I, I think it was already years ago, like 15 years ago, when I heard my Indian colleagues starting to blame everything in the weather on climate change. So it was not, they didn't, there was no discussion of like, oh, this is a big hoax or this conspiracy.

No, they're just like, yeah, we know climate change has happened.  happening now. So that, that is already accepted. So the question is then how do you handle it? What do you do about it? Asia in many ways is still, you know, it's such a diverse diverse group of jurisdictions of you know, countries of nations of peoples of cultures.

So you, you find a lot of a lot of different levels or a lot of, a lot of different pathways of and steps, you know, where, where are different Asian locations on the journey. But what Asia is great at is when something is proven, Asia can scale that up and make, you know, you look at an interesting big city in Europe, 250, 000 people.

And, you know, we, in Asia, we have, you know, small cities of, of 7 million people. And this is,  The, the lessons learned, the technologies used can be taken in this region and taken to the next level. So that's, that's really what I think is very interesting and to see when exactly that happens. So  I guess number, number one, you said, do we want to, how do we see this panning out?

I say, I think we will still have discussion and, you know, back and forth, and there will still be arguments about it, but  people are getting on with it. People even in the US are getting  on with it, it's still happening, the market is changing  and really the question is when will Asia make that switch from, you know, doing a little bit here and there to making it really large scale because that's when the, that's when the big difference will happen.

Are there any kind of final thoughts or conclusions or takeaways before we wrap up from  Steve or from Genevieve? 

Yeah, there's one piece which is sort of the beginning of the story Joseph, which is about climate anxiety. So the the main character that we have in the story young lady called Grace Chan, she's working on the biggest climate adaptation project in the world.

She's getting stuck in, she's totally doing everything that she can do, and she still suffers from climate anxiety. And the, the story, you know, recognizes that, acknowledges that,  And explores her journey through it and how she deals with it and how the people around her deal with it. And I think the climate anxiety we know it's like almost paralyzing  vertigo, which you know, can come along with it.

Is a real issue, which affects a lot of people, particularly the younger people. And we wanted to write a story which just says it as it is, you know, and talks about how at least some of the people deal with it by, Just getting on with the job, you know, here's the thing that's in front of me that I know is doing the right thing.

I'm just going to go and do that. And that's my  contribution to solving the larger problem and ultimately how they 

deal with their climate anxiety. 

And I'll 

maybe make my last comment that one of the things that you, I think I mentioned it briefly, is that in this book, you can see that there is a role for everyone. So whether you're a, you know, a bank teller, who's, you know, When the customer comes looking for interesting new, you know, your relationship manager or something, customer comes looking for interesting new investments and you start to look at things Like sustainability funds.

If you are a  or if you, if you are a fisherman, who is looking at how, you know, where is your, where are your fish in the future gonna come from? If you are, you know, a cameraman who's thinking about what, you know, what are some ways to, you know, how, how is your career going to progress? There is a role for everyone, and even if you are not working, which most people in the world are, but even if you're not working as a consumer,  there is also a role for you because as I mentioned a minute ago, the. 

making that question and asking for it. That is, you know, it takes millions and millions of those, but they, those questions collectively make huge changes  and those quest, those individuals saying like, okay, I want this to happen. That is what changes changes things at the large scale, the enormous scale, which we which will happen and which We need to happen.

That's great. I want to really thank you both for, for your time today. And really, really enjoyed the conversation. Just again, a reminder for all of the listeners, the book is called Fairhaven a novel of climate optimism, and it's published by  Habitat Press.  Habitat Press. Thank you for that. I couldn't see that on the book.

Thanks a lot. Great. Well, once again, thank you very, very much for your time. Thank you, Genevieve. Thank you, Steve. My pleasure. 

Thanks a lot. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Asia Climate Finance Podcast.  Please note that the Asia Climate Finance Podcast is presented for educational purposes only. 

All information in the podcast must not be construed as investment advice.  Always consult a licensed investment professional before making investment decisions.  Also, please note that the views and opinions expressed by our guests are personal and may not represent the views and opinions of current or previous employers.