Transcript provided by Kensho.

Lindsey Hall: Hi. I'm Lindsey Hall, Head of Thought Leadership at S&P Global Sustainable1.

Esther Whieldon: And I am Esther Whieldon, a senior writer on the Sustainable1 thought leadership team.

Lindsey Hall: Welcome to ESG Insider an S&P Global podcast where Esther and I take you inside the environmental, social and governance issues that are shaping the rapidly evolving sustainability landscape. Esther happy new year.

Esther Whieldon: Happy 2025 Lindsey! Can you believe we've been doing the show since 2019.

Lindsey Hall: No I absolutely cannot. When we started, all my kids were babies and it was pre-pandemic, so much has changed. But somehow we're coming up on our 7-year anniversary. And in the new year, we're taking the opportunity for a fresh start at the podcast.

Esther Whieldon: That's right. New music, new recording equipment, new artwork and maybe even a new name.

Lindsey Hall: Yes. Please stay tuned. We'll have some exciting news on that front in the coming weeks. One thing that won't be changing is our approach. We'll continue talking to leaders from around the world about the sustainability news that matters, and we'll continue bringing you behind the scenes coverage from big sustainability events, and we'll continue trying to do it in a way that cuts down the jargon and hopefully is entertaining as well as informative.

Esther Whieldon: One thing we discussed a lot in 2024 is how to break down barriers between different groups to find sustainability solutions because we hear again and again from our guests, you can't address the world's big challenges like climate change without working across silos. You need to bring in all the actors. Climate change and the energy transition are two of the biggest topics we'll be covering in 2025. And in March, we're going to have a chance to hear from many different stakeholders when we take the show on the road to cover one of the world's largest energy conferences, the annual CERAWeek gathering hosted by S&P Global in Houston, Texas from March 10th through 14th.

Lindsey Hall: The Financial Times has described this week-long conference as week Davos of Energy and Politico has called it the Super Bowl of the energy industry. This event convenes stakeholders from across sectors to discuss some of the biggest challenges facing the future of energy, the environment and climate.

Esther Whieldon: The event is also big when it comes to the size of the venue. You have the executive conference, which takes up several floors of a hotel and features interviews with high-profile industry executives and energy ministers. It's also where our podcast recording booth is located.

And then on the other side of this giant connecting walkway, you have the Innovation Agora part of the conference, which takes up a full floor of a convention center and features a myriad of sessions and exhibitions tied to technology and innovation. It can all feel a bit overwhelming at first. So my tip for someone who's going for the first time is to have at least a general plan for which sessions you'll attend before you get there and pack an energy bar and reusable water bottle in your bag.

Lindsey Hall: Well, for today's episode, we're sitting down with two people with a unique perspective on this event and also the energy transition. They're going to talk to us about what's ahead for 2025. First up, we'll hear from S&P Global Vice Chairman, Daniel Yergin, who is also the Chair of CERAWeek.

That means he's the one on the main stage of the executive conference interviewing energy leaders and CEOs from some of the world's largest energy companies. Dan is an authority on energy, international politics and economics and author of a number of books, including a Pulitzer prize winner called The Prize: the Epic Quest For Oil, Money and Power.

More recently, he wrote a book called The New Map: Energy, Climate and the Clash of Nations. I talked to Dan about what's ahead for the energy transition. In the interview, you'll hear him mention LNG, that's liquefied natural gas and the IRA, that's the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act. Okay. Here's our conversation where Dan starts off with some background on the CERAWeek event.

Daniel Yergin: This is a very unusual conference. I think it's regarded as the thought leadership conference really for the energy world, and it covers the range from conventionals, renewables, electric power, innovation, technology. And it's really become as much an energy transition as an energy conference.

And it has, last year, we had about 10,000 people divided between the executive conference, what we call the Innovation Agora, which is focused on technology. And it brings a very cross-section of people. We had 85 countries represented, a lot of people from governments around the world, energy ministers, but we also had 150 start-ups. So it really is a conference that I think points a way to where things are headed and gives one a window into the future.

Lindsey Hall: I would also say for me, it provided a window into how some players in the energy world are thinking, players that I don't necessarily always hear from in the sustainability or climate-focused events that I attend. So that was eye-opening for me when I attended for the first time in 2024. So Dan, your latest book, The New Map: Energy, Climate and the Clash of Nations.

And I'd like to pick up on that last point, the clash of nations because when we last spoke about 6 months ago, you talked about the role that diplomacy will play in facilitating solutions to climate change and the global energy transition. And I'd say this topic since we talked has only become more relevant with U.S. election results, continued geopolitical unrest, in this shifting global landscape, how is thinking changing about the energy transition, would you say?

Daniel Yergin: Well, I think there are really two parts to the question you asked. First of all, the use of the word shifting is right. Things look different. And I think that from a world point of view, we're in a much more divided world. I think the risk of conflict is there in a way that hadn't been seen before.

In The New Map, I call great power rivalry, great power competition has become much more intensified. You hear the phrases now like strategic adversaries. So I think the global political situation is very unsettled, and that's going to reverberate on energy transition, on sustainability and on energy markets themselves. So that's the big picture.

Lindsey Hall: Dan said that in recent years, there was more consensus about the energy transition. Now, however, he said that's changed, and this requires a rethink of the energy transition. Here's Dan talking about the shift away from consensus.

Daniel Yergin: I think that a fair amount of the thinking about energy transition was actually developed first in a more peaceful world. Secondly, a lot of it congealed during COVID when demand was down, prices had collapsed, and there was this kind of linear transition you get in kind of hopping the car and you'd end up in 2050 where you wanted to be. But that's not what's actually happening.

First, we've seen that, in fact, there are a whole host of reasons why energy transition has gotten more complicated. And they're very relevant to the issues, Lindsey, that you deal with every day and that many of the listeners address. First, I think, is scale. When I was writing The New Map, already people were talking a lot about energy transition.

So I said, okay, I'm going to go back and look at the history of energy transitions and how does that compare to this one? And none of them compare to what is expected today. They unfolded over a century. In fact, I dated at the beginning of the energy transition to January 17, '09 when an English metalworker figured out how to make iron better using coal than wood and charcoal. But all these transitions took a really long time. And they weren't really just transitions, there were energy additions. And we've just seen the numbers since we've spoken last have come out about 2023.

Take coal, in the 1960s, oil overtook coal as the world's number one energy source. Last year, the world used more coal than it ever used before and three times as much as the 1960s. So first, it's scale. I mean, really, how quickly can you change $110 trillion world economy in 25 years. We see the problems in Europe right now where because of higher costs of converting industry to lower carbon, Europe is in a very difficult process of deindustrialization.

It seems almost every day jobs are being cut in Germany. The second thing that has changed is a focus on energy security, which was not there during COVID because there's no problem. But the Ukraine war, Russia's invasion, the disruption of markets certainly put energy security back on the agenda. And the German Chancellor, Germany is at a forefront of pushing renewables.

They're going to Senegal and Canada asking for LNG. And a few months ago, he was in Kazakhstan looking for Kazakh oil. So governments can't not worry about energy security, and we saw the use of the strategic petroleum reserve in the United States.

A third thing, and you have a perspective on this, Lindsey, having just come back from COP29 is the difference between the North and the South. They call it the global North, the global South and on climate issues. And that has just become sharper. I was just at a conference with a number of energy ministers from developing countries, and they talk a lot about that they have different priorities.

That's what led Atul Arya and myself to come up with the idea of a multidimensional energy transition, which unfolds at different paces in different parts of the world with different technology mixes and different priorities because developing countries also are focused on economic growth and poverty reduction in a way that the advanced countries. And Lindsey, maybe just your perspective on that before I go on those other issues.

Lindsey Hall: Well, I definitely heard this, I guess, you could call it frustration with the fact that the money is not forthcoming to help these developing countries or the global South decarbonize in the way that these developed countries are expecting them to.

Basically, this frustration that if you expect us to make these kind of changes to our energy mix to our economy, there needs to be money to back that up, especially since we haven't historically been the ones who are most responsible for greenhouse gas emissions. And I think there's also frustration with the final numbers that came out of COP29 in terms of what was agreed $300 billion a year.

Daniel Yergin: I mean so you pointed to one of the other key issues about the struggle of thinking about energy transition is the cost and who pays for it and that the numbers are very large and with the pressures on government budgets in the developed world, the way the politics are going, $300 billion was not what many were aiming for, but even meeting that commitment is going to certainly be a challenge in the kind of environment we are today, particularly where governments are really going to have to feel that they have to step up their spending on defense in a way that they didn't think about in the post-cold war era.

So I think you pointed to one of the other big challenges is just what are the costs. And there's no real agreement I think you found too on really what does the transition cost. There are numbers that some say it would be less expensive, others say it'd be much more expensive. So I think that's a factor that's feeding in.

And you've just described a kind of real-world, real-time experience of this issue of cost of it. People in Europe may be opposed to an oil pipeline in Uganda, but the Uganda say, wait, your per capita income is 30 or 40 times higher than ours. and this whole complex can really double our GDP. So I think that difference in priorities is very important, and then that gets to the question of finance.

So I think in 2025, we'll see more of this North-South division on priorities. I was reading the budget statement by the Indian Finance Minister recently. And I could see that was part of her, what she was talking about, we have to focus on economic growth and India continues to burn a lot of coal. So I think resolving that, and as I say, what you saw in Baku, is not a microcosm, but is a central example of the practical questions of implementing an energy transition that is meant to be different than all energy transitions that have ever come before, which have also been energy additions.

Lindsey Hall: Yes. And I think the other complicating factor in all of this or consideration in all of this alongside energy security and affordability and the like is just the fact that climate change is coming for all of us and for a lot of these global South countries disproportionately. So there is this urgency that I hear.

Daniel Yergin: Yes. I think there are a couple of other things that I think are really important. One is the recognition as the International Energy Agency said, as you move in an energy transition, you're moving from a system that is almost exclusively fuel intensive to one that's also mineral intensive.

We've done these studies at S&P Global on minerals. The most striking one was the one on copper, which is the metal of electrification, which says that you need to double copper supply by 2035 in order to achieve the 2050 goals that the Biden administration or the EU have. And at S&P, we've then said, okay, how feasible is that? And we've gone back into our databases of more than 100 mines and see it takes 20 years to develop a new mine on a global average. In United States, it takes 29 years. So there is this question of metals.

Now innovation will play an important role there. Greater efficiency will play an important role there, but that is a constraint. And permitting wherever it is in the world is a huge challenge, certainly in the United States, certainly in Europe, but really in many parts of the world. And I think there are two other things to mention.

One, and we talked about at the beginning, is geopolitics. When the Paris Agreement was done, that was really a joint China-U.S. deal. President Obama went to see President Xi in Beijing and went into Paris with an agreement on climate. The relationship between China and the United States was very different then. The relationship between Europe and China was very different then.

Now it is much more competitive. And we've seen the quandary of the outgoing administration of, on the one hand, wanting to advance solar, EVs, but not wanting to reduce the dependence on China in terms of electric cars, 100% tariffs.

This was the Biden administration, not a Trump administration or look at restrictions on solar panels from China, partly because you say investing in the IRA, where investing, want to create a U.S. industry, we will protect the U.S. industry. But not having an open global economy I think that in a sense, that's where geopolitics and energy transition collide with each other. And China is poised to be dominant in the global market for EVs.

So I think the China issue is something else and the notion of getting great cooperation between the U.S. and China, that seems increasingly tough and Europe is in a quandary about it because worried about Chinese EVs coming into Europe will undercut the automobile industry, particularly, which is so important in Germany.

On the other hand, Germany doesn't want to see its companies not being able to sell their own cars in China. So that's going to complicate it. And then there's a last thing that's really only popped onto the radar screen in the last year. And we may have talked about it before, but it was so vivid at CERAWeek this year, it became the number one issue, which was and is electricity and artificial intelligence, AI, data centers.

Lindsey Hall: Well, I think you're absolutely right. This is just the buzziest topic, right? Everyone sees great promise in AI and the potential for efficiency gains and what it could do to help with the energy transition. But then on the flip side, there's also, I think, a lot of concern about how is this huge increase in electricity demand that's being driven a lot by AI.

How is that going to impact company's net zero goals, for example. So I think we're at this point where, from my perspective, we're balanced between a lot of optimism about the promise of AI, but then also concerns about what it means for climate and decarbonization goals and then also what it means for governance, privacy and other kinds of concerns like that.

Daniel Yergin: NVI. There's certainly on that latter one, huge concerns, all the questions about is AI to be regulated or not, how to regulate it or if you do it, will you styme it, all those questions and what it means for jobs, all kinds of jobs. So there's that side of it. But there is this insatiable appetite. If you take North American electric power for about 25 years, demand was basically flat.

And utilities needed to worry about obviously being reliable, dealing with their commissions, dealing with consumers, dealing with maintaining the system, dealing with issues like wildfires or hurricanes and disruptions, but didn't really have to look much at growth because growth hadn't been on the agenda since about the mid-1990s, but now it's back there.

S&P Global calculates that by 2030, somewhere between 7% to 10% of U.S. electricity demand may well be going to data centers. That's a huge increase. Obviously, there's a lot of uncertainty about those numbers. But how is that demand for electricity going to be met? Wind and renewables as you continue to get rolled out, it does appear that there's going to be more natural gas in electric generation.

Natural gas now is about half of U.S. total electricity generation and that you're going to need more natural gas because utilities or power providers need reliability, data center operators need reliability 24 hours. What is striking is, boy, the enthusiasm about nuclear at CERAWeek in March, the Head of the Nuclear Energy Institute, which is their trade association, she was describing how when she took the job in 2017, the outlook was very bleak.

Now 60, 70 different start-ups and advanced research programs, maybe more in nuclear. We see multibillion-dollar valuations for small nuclear reactors, which have not yet been produced. Fusion is being talked about differently. The impact assuming this all goes forward, we won't be felt until the 2030s. But a big change here is that the big tech companies now are players in a very serious way in electric power and in terms of looking for technologies because there's one other way that the electricity demand will be met, and that's by reducing the electricity demand.

I was just hearing the other day from a group of investors about data centers that will be less electricity intensive because I don't think until recently, there was a big focus on being more efficient in the electricity demand. And also NVIDIA says their new chips will be less electricity intensive. So it's an uncertain picture, but it's certainly changed the perspective.

And then you do have the growth of electricity demand also because of, call it, energy transition demand like EVs and so forth, electrification of industry. and also the reshoring of manufacturing to the United States. So I think front and center is the overall response to the need for electricity and then the challenge of how do you get anything permitted in a timely way in the United States. And we're going to see that played out a lot in 2025.

Lindsey Hall: I certainly heard a lot of frustration about the permitting process when I attended CERAWeek in 2024. Dan, as we look ahead to CERAWeek 2025 in March, talk to me about some of the key themes that this year's event is going to cover up.

Daniel Yergin: Well, I think your listeners will be very interested in what's happening in decarbonization and the pace of it, as the outlook for hydrogen changed, where technology is, how heavy industry is decarbonizing. They'll be very interested to see the viability of carbon capture. And I think that the wind industry has been under a lot of stress, I think, and because of supply chains, particularly for offshore. And so one big question is offshore wind and the change of administration will make a big difference.

So to understand what the new administration's priorities are, what the priorities of the Democrats are in Congress, we'll hear a lot about the topic you've talked about financing the energy transition. We'll be hearing about what's going to be very significant is what's happening to global trade in terms of tariffs, export quotas and so forth and how is that going to affect energy demand.

I think that China has been so important in terms of energy demand, Half of all the growth in the world oil demand for 2 decades has been China, but is China really changed now? Is it just in a kind of down period? Or is the fact that over 50% of new cars being sold there are EVs, is that really going to change the course of world energy demand?

Obviously, the power grid, how you make it more efficient, how you deal with transmission, those will be big issues. And I think, certainly, geopolitics is going to be a very key question for the future of energy. But in so many countries, you have new policymakers. So in the U.S., you have a Trump administration in the U.K., you have a Labour government.

You have the EU with its own challenges about the industrialization and growth and falling behind the United States. And so they'll all come with kind of different priorities. We'll have a whole track on critical minerals which will be very important. And going back to what you said about finance for not just energy, but for the energy transition.

So I think those will be some of the big things. And then what are the options for managing emissions? How do you do it? What kind of investment needs to be made in that? And I guess we will be 4 or 5 months after COP29 and looking to COP 2030 and saying, where is the global negotiation, the words you used at the beginning of the global diplomacy around energy transition, how is that going to play out? And what are the next stages? And I think COP 2030 is in Brazil. Is that right?

Lindsey Hall: That's right, yes.

Daniel Yergin: And it's going to be somewhere in the rainforest. So that will have probably a very different perspective than COP29 did. So those are some of the issues. And then there will be the things that always come as surprises, the issues that were not so apparent. And as we said this past year, is electricity. I think there will be a discussion.

There's a lot of growing amount of experience about hydrogen and how fast it's going to develop and in what ways it's going to develop. And going back to what we're talking about, a lot of the energy transition is about electrification. And so that will be a fundamental theme that runs through the entire conference.

Lindsey Hall: Anything else, Dan, that you'd like to highlight about start with 2025?

Daniel Yergin: I think the era of globalization that arose with the end of the Soviet Union and the sort of collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and the integration of China into the global economy in a way that I called in The New Map, the WTO consensus that we're all in together, globalization is generally good, although there are problems that have to be addressed.

That's over. And we are really now in a fragmented or divided world. And these issues of geopolitics, of conflict, of tariff barriers, of trade are going to be actually quite woven through the conference because the world has become so much more dependent on supply chains that cross borders, people need to talk about the borderless world. And that's over. And so I think having an understanding of the geopolitical context of what does the world of tariffs mean?

What does the world of export controls mean? What does that mean for growth? What does it mean for the energy transition? What does it mean for global stability and peace? Those questions are now inescapably tied up with energy. And we've seen because of what's happened with Russia's invasion of Ukraine, a global oil market now is a divided oil market.

Russian oil only goes to certain markets. What we've seen is that one of the main avenues for world trade as well as the energy trade, the Red Sea is now a hotspot of conflict and people are having to adjust to it. And so I think people will be trying to understand where are the next disruptions coming that will affect world trade. World trade will affect economic growth, will affect the pace of the energy transition.

So these things cannot be looked at in separate buckets, but they're really tied together. And that's one of the things that we're going to try and do at CERAWeek. But I'll say it was also striking when you saw that wind and solar were the highest levels they've ever been in 2023, but so was oil and coal and gas would have been there except that European gas demand is down 25% because of the war in Ukraine and the disruption of Russian gas supplies.

I was just in the Middle East and Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, they're spending money on developing particularly solar. And they see themselves because they have a lot of sunlight, see themselves as having a new competitive advantage in terms of low-cost electricity. And that is leading to another thing that will be a very interesting topic is to where all of these new data centers being built.

How many will be built in the U.S. and Europe? How many of them will be built in the Middle East to serve, because you have low-cost electricity. So I think one of the lessons I've learned in following the energy sector is that whenever you have a consensus about what's going to happen after a few years, the consensus changes because the world changes in ways, the unlikely scenario becomes what actually happens. I think the other issue that I took away from this recent trip to the Middle East is a sense of the, call it, the rebalancing of the global oil market and the geopolitical significance of that.

I think it's not recognized, I think, widely the geopolitical impact of the change in the energy position of the United States. In The New Map, I talk about where and explain where the shale revolution came from. And then you heard people saying want to ban shale.

Shale is 75% of U.S. oil production, 85% of natural gas. So were you to ban it, the U.S. would have to import because we have all these cars that run on gasoline, 10 million barrels a day or some number like that of oil, and that would be highly destabilizing.

And I think even if you're deeply involved just focused on energy transition, you have to look at the geopolitical significance of the change in the global energy balance. I tell the story in The New Map, the story when I was at a conference before the annexation of Crimea and I asked a question in this conference, this big economic conference of Putin.

And I mentioned shale and he just started shouting at me saying it was barbaric because he knew that ultimately shale would enhance the position in the United States and the world. And secondly, it would compete with Russian gas. In 2022, when he cut off the gas to Europe, he thought Europe was so dependent on Russian gas that it would shatter the coalition supporting Ukraine.

And why it didn't happen was because U.S. LNG, it was a very important part of the overall was there. And I mean, we might be looking at a very different situation in Europe, where the U.S. is not an exporter of LNG. And Putin was prescient from his point of view in being opposed to it.

Lindsey Hall: And just so I'm clear, Putin was shouting at you in this?

Daniel Yergin: Yes. This was a conference of about 3,000 people, big his annual economic conference. And as I say, it's before he annexed Crimea. And I asked the first question that he was on the stage with Chancellor Merkel of Germany. And so they turned to me for the first question, and I was asking him, the question that had been recurrent, what are you going to do about the fact that your budget is so dependent upon oil and gas revenues? But I mentioned shale, and he started shouting to me, and I'll tell you being shouted at by Vladimir Putin in front of 3,000 people was a very uncomfortable experience.

Lindsey Hall: Esther, to my knowledge, Dan is our first guest in about 250 episodes who's ever been shouted at by Vladimir Putin.

Esther Whieldon: Yes. I think you're probably right about that.

Lindsey Hall: As we just heard, there are a lot of key themes that will drive conversations about the energy transition in 2025, and many of these will be in focus at CERAWeek, from geopolitics and the role of China to critical minerals and financing for the transition. We'll also hear about the future of nuclear, the path forward for hydrogen, tariffs, supply chains, increasing grid efficiency, it's a lot.

Esther Whieldon: It's also technology and innovation that will provide solutions to the energy transition and climate change. Many conversations about these key topics happen in the Innovation Agora at CERAWeek. I spoke to Atul Arya, Senior Vice President and Chief Energy Strategist at S&P Global Commodity Insights, who leads program design for the Innovation Agora. Here he is talking about what to expect from that part of CERAWeek.

Atul Arya: So for 2025, there are a large number of technologies we're going to talk about. We're going to talk about where the energy and climate innovation cycle is at, what's really scaling and what's not scaling. And the other thing our audience should know about is that we have more formats in the Agora. So we have the studios, which are like a panel discussion. We have hubs, climate hub, a carbon hub and what we're calling new energy technologies hub, which will talk about the wide spectrum of technologies.

But we will cover pretty much everything related to energy, climate change innovation, what we call platform technologies, things which are underlying enabling any large industrial value chain in case of energy, the digital technologies, things like AI, drones and also, of course, mobility, which is a big part of the energy ecosystem, we will cover that as well. The other thing which is getting very exciting, and this is related to AI is that can AI accelerate energy transition. And I'll give you one example of that, maybe two.

So one is around sort of material discovery. So can there be new materials which AI can help discover, which will be cheaper and better and not as much dependent on critical minerals for storage technologies. And we're already seeing the impact of that sort of AI on new material discovery.

So we're going to talk about that. Another example of AI is on power sector, not on the demand side, but on the transmission side. So we know that building new transmission lines, whether it's here in the U.S. or around the world is difficult because people don't want big high-power transmission lines in their backyard. But we have transmission lines already. Can we make better use of them?

So one of the things we are hoping to discuss is how is AI helping us repower the transmission lines? Can you transmit more power through them or do some smart engineering, smart grid type engineering to make them even more efficient. I would say the other briefly, see the carbon capture and storage is a really important technology because we can't really get to net zero without carbon capture, given the current state of emissions already in the atmosphere and some of them will have to be taken out like a negative emissions.

And AI can also help us do faster design. I think everybody knows that AI is going to consume a lot of energy. So we'll talk a little bit about that. But I think that's only 1/2 of the coin or maybe even a quarter because what AI will be able to do to help us transition and do all the other things in health care and education and so on. In my view, we are kind of on the Paragraph 1 in Chapter 1 of that book. And we hope that we can write a few more pages at CERAWeek this year.

There is no shortage of very interesting innovative ideas. It's an experience to be in the Agora, the buzz, the people, a lot of young people come. We have a lot of universities who come to discuss what they are working on, national labs from the U.S. are there.

And don't think about the Agora as just BAU, large oil companies or gas companies or power utilities talking their thing. It's a different experience. And our goal with Agora is to move the conversation, move the technologies and ultimately help companies solve the climate problem while meeting the energy demands.

Esther Whieldon: What's striking about CERAWeek for me is that the conversations can be quite different from those that we hear at more sustainability-focused events we cover. I wanted to understand how do we bridge the gap between the energy and sustainability communities. I pose this question to Atul.

Atul Arya: It is not that CERAWeek is, or the people who organize like myself opposed to energy transition. We recognize the challenges of climate change. I've spent my, a big part of my career working on climate change. And actually, the Climate Hub we have in CERAWeek was really to have that conversation to bring people who may have different perspective.

Actually, last year, as an example, we had a discussion with the world's top three of the top leading climate experts just on the urgency of climate change. We hope to have similar conversations this year. So first thing I would say is that it's not either/or, right? We have to provide energy to people around the world. We also have to address climate change. I was born and I grew up in India. So I've seen firsthand how important energy is to people's well-being.

When I was young, my father built power stations. So I could see immediately the impact of power stations on the livelihood. So we need to do that. But at the same time, and I'm sure in some of the sustainability focused events, people know this that the people who are least prepared to deal with the consequences of climate change are the same people living in places like India or Africa, so they have to have both.

They have to have more energy so that they can be better prepared, improve their livelihoods, but also address climate change. And I think that's what we plan to do at CERAWeek is not just have a discussion about more energy, but energy and sustainability. They have to go hand-in-hand. And it's not that every time there's a discussion, people come to an agreement, but at least they understand each other's point of view. And the beauty of Agora, in particular, relative to executive conference is that we have more opportunities in the Agora to have this dialogue.

I'll just give you one example. We have these things called the learning lyceums. What we do is we have an expert or a couple of experts on a topic. They come in and they provide like a learning opportunity for participants, and there's always a house full there. And there is good debate because people may have a view and then they say, well, I don't agree with your view.

Here is my counter view. So we allow for that kind of debate to happen in a place like lyceum. There are other places in the Agora where we have similar dialogue. Agora studios and the hubs are very open air. They are very interactive. In the Agora pretty much every session, there is opportunity for Q&A. And sometimes the dialogue could be somewhat heated, I would say. But at the same time, it's good discussion. And ultimately, people are interested in driving to some answers, driving to some action.

Esther Whieldon: We just heard how Agora is designed to allow for interplay between the audience and the speakers, which in turn can help bridge any gaps that exist between the energy and sustainability world. Atul also said, it's not either/or. We have to provide energy to people around the world, and we also have to address climate change.

Lindsey Hall: And how do you do both effectively amidst the geopolitical unrest we heard about today from Dan. That is perhaps the big question for sustainability professionals in 2025, and we hope you'll stick with us as we explore the solutions to these challenges. Thanks so much for listening to this episode of ESG Insider. If you like what you heard today, please subscribe, share and leave us a review where you get your podcasts.

Esther Whieldon: And a special thanks to our agency partner, the One Nine Nine. See you next time.

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