Timestamps:
00:00 – 01:08 – Intro
01:09 – 04:08 – Good news story- resilient solar energy in the Caribbean
04:09 – 16:25 – RMI: Building equitable systems through decentralised energy systems
16:26 – 25:00 – Aggregation for scale
25:01 – 27:05 – Investing in communities: Barefoot College India
27:06 – 29:29 – Climate Confessions
29:30 – 36:26 – Outro
Show Notes
Justin Locke – Justin Locke is the managing director of RMI’s Global South Program, which includes three geographical programs covering small island developing states, sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia; and two global programs focused on climate finance access and workforce development in the Global South.
RMS Global South Programme – Ensure communities have access to affordable, reliable, and clean power—while enhancing resilience and addressing energy poverty.
Solar under storm report – The report lays out guidelines for governments, regulators, and developers interested in improving solar PV system survivability to intense wind-loading events.
Barefoot College India – We’ve designed new ways to nurture and support a journey to empowerment, one village at a time, one woman at a time. We demystify and decentralize technology and put new tools in the hands of the underserved, with the objective to spread self-sufficiency and sustainability. With a geographic focus on the Least Developed Countries, we train women worldwide as solar engineers, entrepreneurs and educators, who then return to their villages to bring light and learning to their community.
Transcript
Intro
Justin Locke 0:09
Why did Richard Branson’s Solar System Why did his entire house his entire state be flattened but his solar system was survived and it was producing power during the storm immediately after the storm.
Ben Hurst 0:20
Hello, and Hi friends, we are live from climate week NYC joined by the brilliant Justin lock, the managing director of RMS global south programme, which includes small island developing states, Sub Saharan Africa, and Southeast Asia, where he focuses on climate finance access and workforce development. He’s joining us today to chat all things energy resilience and energy transition, discuss what’s been going on in Puerto Rico recently with Hurricane Fiona. And to tell us some more about these pretty cool things called solar arrays. Let’s get into it.
Justin Locke introduction
Maryam Pasha 0:59
So when you work in climate, you don’t always have really good news stories to tell. But I’m gonna challenge you so by starting us off by telling us a good news story.
Good news story- resilient solar energy in the Caribbean
Justin Locke 1:08
All right, well, I’ll start telling that story with a little bit of bad news but the good news 2017 Right hurricane season I think many of us are aware at least those in North America right you had two hurricane cat five hurricanes between 10 days between each other hurricane Irma and Maria right devastated about five or six islands across the Caribbean global news right it’s all over the news for for for many months obviously headlined by Puerto Rico, you know power down for six months right? Disaster really characterised by impacts to the energy sector, right. So multiple islands lost power for multiple months, primarily, because these are islands that rely on diesel generation right with overhead distribution, transmission distribution lines, right. So highly exposed energy system centralised the whole thing. You know, we also, at the time had several solar arrays that were, you know, powering part of these energy systems in these countries. So solar arrays like a large, centralised, solar, solar plant, generating Yeah, like a solar farm. And several of these solar systems took direct hits by a cat five hurricane, one of which was really in the media in the UK was Richard Branson’s home island of Necker, his solar system was it took a direct hit, right, in his whole kind of estate was was devastated. Well, what we found was that, you know, if the islands are going to move through the energy transition, they have to build systems to withstand the storms, because we know that this is just the beginning, right? This is going to continue to happen. And what we found is that several systems of Well, obviously, several systems completely were destroyed. But then we found there’s actually a number of systems that survived this direct hit. And we we went like, we got to figure out why, like, Why did Richard Branson’s solar system? Why does his entire house his entire state be flattened, but his solar system was survived and was producing power during the storm? Immediately after the storm? Like why they let’s learn from what’s going on what’s going on there. So we commissioned an A study and did a lot of on the ground assessment, and we determined why the the ones that survived, survived, and actually encapsulate that in a in a report called solar under storm, right. That set the industry standards for the design and construction of these assets to withstand these storms in the future. Right. And then we needed to apply that right. So fast forward to the Bahamas. Right. So we worked with the government of Bahamas to instal a one megawatt solar farm, right. So one megawatt is the kind of the size of the power that this system can produce. Designed with these design standards for the first time, first time ever, that these design standards has been applied in a real project. You know, a few years later, Hurricane Dorian, another cat five hurricane rips through the Bahamas, also known as Hurricane alley, because it’s where all the hurricane majority of the hurricanes happen, the entire power system goes down, except this system, the solar array that was built a new one
Ben Hurst 4:24
the new one
Justin Locke 4:25
right, Dwas producing power not only during the storm, but immediately afterwards, right. So it survived without the hurricane during the hurricane. It was still working, producing power during that so So basically, the proof of concept was proven what was more important, I think the human element of this is that you had, you know, upwards of 90,000 people lose power for multiple weeks. That system that was interconnected with a national stadium, which then became the national shelter. That was one of the few places that had power where, you know, medical supplies could be plugged in, you know, communications could be plugged in and actually was the lifeblood of that Island Nasai, the main island in the Bahamas for several weeks until powers restore, right so you can see the the benefit of a decentralised solar system like this built to withstand and, and how that can be scaled not only across the Caribbean, but you know, the Gulf close to the United States anywhere along the equator, right that is exposed to high wind events, you know, Southeast Asia, you know, other parts of the world, right? So just an incredible it’s so
Maryam Pasha 5:27
I love this choice so much like I, you just, it’s just so illustrates to me how you can take learning and apply it and have a real solution that people need, not like 25 years in the future, but right now, and how it can be scaled. I kind of want to like rewind a bit, because there was this kind of solar array. But you’ve talked about these decentralised energy systems. So I want us to dig into it. Because this is an example of that. Right? So what can you tell us about what they are and what they mean, and why they’re so important? Because this is really like, I love the stories? Yeah.
Justin Locke 6:05
Yeah, I mean, well, it comes down the fact that in developed economies, they followed essentially an energy system architecture of a large, centralised, fossil fuel plant, far away from where we all live in a room probably like we’re in now, like producing power long distances, and it can transmit long distances through overhead lines to where we people consume it, and businesses consume that power. What our founder, Mr. elevens, RMI, right. In the 1970s, during the energy crisis had a different vision of how energy systems should be designed, right, where they actually a more decentralised architecture where you have smaller generating assets, that are actually part of the natural landscape, closer to where people and businesses consume that power fueled primarily, not with fossil fuels, but with indigenous renewable energy. And that the hypothesis in the 1970s, when he invented essentially, this is what we refer to as the distributed energy resource was that that would be a lower cost of electricity, and a more energy secure electricity, right? Because this was during the big energy crisis of the 1970s. Right. And obviously, here we are, again, in another global energy crisis. What Amory didn’t realise at that point, was that that is actually an optimal is a more resilient system, both from a climate impact perspective, and from an economic perspective. And what we’ve demonstrated in developing country context is the optimal pathway for for improved human development outcomes, better health outcomes, better educational outcomes, better, you know, better societal outcomes for their economic benefit. Why is that? It’s because it’s a more equitable system, and a more resilient system. So let’s just unpack that a little.
Ben Hurst 7:57
Yeah. Because I’m not sure I understand the link.
Justin Locke 8:00
That’s the past that a little bit, right. So, centralised, fossil fuel generating plant, right? Long transmission distribution, right. The further you are any business or away from where that power is, is is generated, the more likely you’re going to have a disruption to your
Ben Hurst 8:16
power. Okay, right. Because there’s more things that can happen along the way. Exactly. Right.
Justin Locke 8:21
So you have 20 miles of of transmission line, at any point of that 20 miles, something happens to that line. Yeah, you’re gonna lose power. Yeah. But the closer you are, right, I mean, you have less probability of that happening, right? That’s an inherently inequitable. And what we find in these types of system architecture is that the more storms we have, I don’t care if it’s fires in California, whether it’s floods and storms in the South and the Southeast, whether it’s flooding in the in the in the central part of the United States, the further you are away from where that power is generated, the more likely that you are to have impact to your power, the storms are increasing, and not always the case. But in most cases, that disproportionately impacts the poor, because the poor tend to live in more rural areas further away from where that power is generated. Okay, right. So that is the equity component, the resiliency component is, again, similar concept, the closer you are to where that power is generated, the more likely you’re going to maintain that power during a storm could because the the, the exposure of the system is less in terms of you and where that power is generated. Right.
Ben Hurst 9:35
Margin of Error is smaller.
Justin Locke 9:37
Exactly. Yeah. And and our concept towards building a true resilient society is what do we rely on as a society for everything right is power, right? But it’s really our critical facilities. So our health facilities, our education facilities, our telecommunications, right? How do you get money out of the bank, right? It’s wired through an electronic system that
Ben Hurst 9:59
right all right, yeah. it does actually happen everyone.
Justin Locke 10:02
So, if you look at it a society are critical facilities are what allow us to function and provide equity to us right for that those services. Every one every critical facility should have a decentralised energy resource that is interconnected with it to ensure that if anything happens to the central system, that power is still maintained through that distributed energy resource.
Ben Hurst 10:26
So when you say when you say a decentralised energy, resource, you mean a locally centralised energy resource?
Justin Locke 10:36
Correct
Ben Hurst 10:36
Okay
Justin Locke 10:37
A local, but I mean, it’s distributed in terms of the system
Ben Hurst 10:40
Yeah
Justin Locke 10:41
but yes, centralised and that can be wind that can be solar, that can be battery storage, it can be combination of those things. Right. Taking point Puerto Rico, Puerto Rico is just got hit by Hurricane Fiona. Right? We’ve been deploying these, what we call microgrids. So solar and storage, interconnected systems to these critical facilities, right. We all know, Puerto Rico has lost most mostly lands lost power right now. All this critical facilities that had interconnected systems, these distributed, distributed resources are all up and running right now.
Ben Hurst 11:12
Oh, my gosh
Maryam Pasha 11:13
it really makes a difference in in like actual people’s lives, right.
Ben Hurst 11:17
That is so important.
Maryam Pasha 11:18
But hospitals, like I just been thinking a lot about like, people are in hospitals, people who rely on refrigeration for the medication, all of these things.
Justin Locke 11:27
Let’s take this what during COVID, right, say here in New York, where we are right now, these hospitals were maxed out in the early stages, right? What if any of those, those hospitals lost centralised power? Yeah, sure. They may have some diesel backup, but what we find is that that diesel runs out pretty quickly, right? You should every hospital should have a have an interconnected system, a Distributed Resource that ensures that power supply no matter what happens, designed for the elements.
Ben Hurst 11:53
So when you say interconnected, you mean it’s got its own solar panels, for example. So it’s whatever power system, and then it’s also connected to all the other hospitals that also have that?
Justin Locke 12:02
Well, I’m saying it’s interconnected with the grid. So okay, so So the electrical grid that’s providing power to that hospital, that school, whatever, this system is actually interconnected, and it’s working with that system. So it’s actually during normal times of operation, it’s actually lowering your cost of electricity, because you’re using renewable energy to power majority of your system and then supplementing that with the grid. When that power when that centralised power is cut off. You have that power source that’s providing you all the necessary power that you need. Yeah. Then that’s, that’s, that’s real resiliency. And look, we all know where the climate is going. And these storms are just going to intensify. Yeah, we have to relook at our mental model of how we develop our energy systems. And we think Amory’s original vision of the soft energy pathway, distribute energy resources are a great way to get there to ensure an equitable society is built from the ground up, and that maintains our health, our education, our telecommunications and our economy.
Ben Hurst 12:58
What’s the soft energy pathway, sorry.
Justin Locke 13:00
So that that is actually Amory’s original vision of what he refers to as like the distributed
Ben Hurst 13:06
when you said it was built into the landscape
Justin Locke 13:09
his original hypothesis of this distributed energy system, instead of this centralised energy system, the 1970s. It’s coined the soft energy path. Okay. Right. The heart energy pathways, the centralised fossil fuel system architecture,
Ben Hurst 13:24
and the soft one is everything we’ve been talking about. Right, right. Okay.
Justin Locke 13:27
Exactly.
Maryam Pasha 13:30
It’s good, because you know, the thing that really the reason why this captures my imagination as well, so much is, so you’ve got the resiliency piece, right, you’ve got the other the adaptation piece, you know, that’s happening. But the thing that I think is really exciting about this is also the applicability of it in places where there isn’t a grid. Right? Where there isn’t existing power that’s reliable. And I’m wondering, you know, just you have a programme that works all over the world, globally, mainly in the Global South. What is the potential there to just stop communities that don’t have access to power right now, from instead of going down a fossil fuel path going down or alternative?
Justin Locke 14:09
Yeah, well, the good thing about the global south developing countries is that they’re developing their economies for the first time now, right? So it’s not like we’re waiting for these big fancy classes to to be decommissioned and replace it. They need to build energy now. And that’s where all the global growth of energy is going to happen. Right? Right. So we often say the global climate crisis will be won or lost in the Global South, right? And distributed resources are that optimal pathway to develop and what we refer to that as like, this is a leapfrog opportunity. You can leapfrog from the 20th century fossil fuel systems to the 21st century distributed energy resource systems that we’ve been talking about, right. And every country context has a different application of those. So you know, we talked about the Caribbean and the ability to build climate resilience using distributed energy resources in Africa. Rika we have, you know, the majority of the unelectrified population of the world, right? 650 million people live in Africa without any access to electricity. Now, the way we address this in the Global North, what we did in our countries where we live is that we subsidise this energy build out of transmission lines to all everyone living everywhere in our countries where we live, right? That was all subsidised by taxpayer dollars, extending long transmission lines into remote areas, distributed energy resources, you don’t need to build out that infrastructure. You can just provide that electricity on site with no interconnection decentralised grid, and electrify, and it is the cheapest way and most sustainable way to electrify the 650 million people globally currently living without power
Ben Hurst 15:43
and the way that survives natural disasters.
Justin Locke 15:46
Exactly, and there’s we also have found during COVID, when there was a lot of economic contractions is the energy systems anywhere in the world that had more distributed energy resources on the grid, also operated better during that time of economic contraction, when inherently you know, we had shifts from everyone working in the city. And all that power had to be shifted to the suburbs. Yeah, distributing your resources helps shift that power demand right and meet it sustain in sustainably and more effectively, as all that power demand was was was was moving to different locations.
Ben Hurst 16:25
Right.
Aggregation for scale
Justin Locke 16:25
Right. So it’s actually a much more economically resilient system, climate resilient system, and optimal form of providing energy access to the electrified people of this world.
Ben Hurst 16:35
And then in the Global South, where for like, places where they don’t have electricity at the moment, you say it’s a leapfrog opportunity, because there’s no transition necessary. It’s just building of new,
Justin Locke 16:47
what you’re using 21st century technology run solar or battery energy storage, right, rather to pop a grid. Right. Yeah, rather than extending, you know, a transmission line 250 miles in the middle of nowhere. 400 people? Yeah. Right. It doesn’t make any economic sense.
Maryam Pasha 17:04
Yeah, I guess the idea like, because we we’ve, you know, we talked earlier with with with a number of different people talking about and so the question again, so we’ve heard earlier, how, when you build fossil fuel infrastructure, it takes a long time to build, it’s really expensive. And then it’s there for like, 70 years. Right. So I guess if I’m understanding this correctly, what you’re saying is that there are parts of the world where there is no, there is no plant already, there is no fossil fuel infrastructure, and instead of like building it, and like then having to transition away from it, you can just jump from wherever you are now, to a really an electrified future that is renewable, and it’s clean, and it’s local, and, and lower costs.
Justin Locke 17:45
Yeah.
Maryam Pasha 17:46
Which is pretty exciting. Because I feel like we often talk about how we know the solutions, like we know that we have all the solutions we need. We don’t just do them. But actually we never really talked about sometimes. And this, for me is like a very tangible, proven solution. That seems like a no brainer.
Justin Locke 18:03
I mean, you would think so.
Maryam Pasha 18:05
evitable question. Right. If it’s a no brainer, why is it not just everywhere? Well,
Justin Locke 18:11
I mean, one, there is an inherent political economy that is inherent in the fossil fuel economy that is maintaining the status quo, where few companies and individuals are benefiting from that, that want to keep it the same.
Maryam Pasha 18:23
Yeah.
Justin Locke 18:23
Right. And, you know, you can argue that certain political parties have aligned with that to protect those interests.
Maryam Pasha 18:30
Right.
Justin Locke 18:30
So that’s one issue. And I think that’s a solvable issue. Right. The other issue is, you know, to the example used earlier, if you’re, say electrifying, a village of 100 people right in the middle of the South, that’s a pretty small system. So the cost of getting that small system out into the middle of nowhere, is gonna have a much higher logistical cost and therefore an overall cost to get it there. Right. So there’s, there’s often investors that just don’t want to make that investment, because it’s just, it’s too expensive. It’s too small scale. And if you’re financing a project, which most of this has to be commercially driven, has to be able to be financed.
Ben Hurst 19:10
Yeah.
Justin Locke 19:11
You know, it’s just as much work for you to underwrite a small little tiny system, and it is a massive one, right? The the underwriting of the of the transaction. So the whole financial system architecture is designed around big projects, right? And how do you so how do you change that system go? Well, actually, we need these little projects, finance too that nobody wants to find us because they’re a lot of work. And the return on investment is not as high.
Maryam Pasha 19:36
It’s a mindset shift, isn’t it? It’s really about moving from thinking that bigger is better, centralised is better to realising that there are some things that we can solve much more effectively in this decentralised smaller way. That’d be that’s how I feel because
Justin Locke 19:53
I absolutely, and I mean, there’s also things that we’re doing to make it more attractive to finance here. So rather than just saying Hey, we want to electrify this little community out here, or we want to we want to create a, a resilient micro grid at this hospital in Puerto Rico, here’s like, why don’t we look at a portfolio of investments. So 50, 60, 100 communities, let’s aggregate these, they may be in completely different locations, but lets aggregate these, and we package it as one project, so that we bring in one, what we call an engineering procurement construction firm. So that who’s actually going to build the thing?
Maryam Pasha 20:27
Yeah
Justin Locke 20:27
You bring in one to do all of them, which so you minimise your kind of your overhead. And then you have one financier financing one project that may be actually 50 projects and 50 different locations, but they’re packaged as one, one project. And that’s, that’s a term of referred to as aggregation, aggregation for scale. Right?
Maryam Pasha 20:47
I love it, because it feels like we have the climate solutions, what we need to do is change direction. And so it’s all about figuring out ways to take people from just stopping moving in the same direction, the same thing and shifting them to move in a slightly different way. Which I don’t know how you feel about them, but feels like a much more doable thing.
Ben Hurst 21:04
Yeah, it feels it feels very practical and manageable. Yeah. Especially especially because you said that the underwriting of any one project is the same regardless of the size, we’re gonna work. Right. Right. So is that reduced by putting a bunch of small projects together?
Well, it makes it more attractive to the financier, right, because it’s less work for more scale. Right, and then more opportunities for return on investment. And the IEA put out a report a few weeks ago on the state of the energy workforce, Global Energy workforce, a couple of things, some nuggets from that. One is that for every million dollars have invested in clean energy. So distributed energy resource, clean energy projects, you produce 7.6 jobs.
Maryam Pasha 21:56
Thats a lot.
Ben Hurst 21:57
So wait, say the numbers again, sorry.
Justin Locke 21:59
So for every million dollars invested in clean energy projects, yeah. The the the job benefit is 7.6 jobs for every million dollars invested. Right, right. For every fossil fuel project. Every million dollars invested in a fossil fuel project. 2.4 jobs are created.
Ben Hurst 22:17
Oh, okay. So it’s just basically fossil fuels are just trash like it doesn’t doesn’t actually help anyone ever?
Maryam Pasha 22:25
I mean, I’m not gonna say,
Ben Hurst 22:27
I mean, well
Justin Locke 22:29
They’re going to be part of our lives for a while. Yeah. They do play a very critical role.
Maryam Pasha 22:32
Future, right. and job creation? That is a that is not there’s no, yeah, it’s significant. That’s almost there’s three times as many jobs and
Justin Locke 22:41
to kind of extrapolate this to bigger numbers, right. So in order to reach 50%, reduction in global emissions by 2030, right, so the decisive decade, we need to create 14 million new jobs globally. And another 16 million jobs need to be transitioned from the fossil fuel sector into clean energy. All of those require training. I don’t know about you guys, but we can’t we the labour market, we can’t hire people. Right? There’s this. There’s no, there’s not a people. So we need to create 30 million new jobs. We’re not talking about this. When we talk about like, why isn’t this happening? We don’t have the workforce to build the stuff. Right.
Maryam Pasha 23:22
Yeah. Which is something that no one really talks about. Right, which is actually is like a big thing, because you can have all the solutions
Ben Hurst 23:28
This is the first time I’ve heard it
Maryam Pasha 23:28
Yeah, and me too, like you could have all the solutions, but
Justin Locke 23:31
energy transition, We have to build all this new infrastructure, We need engineers, project managers, you know, project developers, we need the workforce to do that. We don’t have right now. We don’t.
Maryam Pasha 23:45
And in a way, it’s exciting, right? Because it feels like that’s a good thing, like having more jobs is a good thing and meeting more people is a good thing is that these are good jobs, right? These are not dangerous jobs. They’re not like you’re mining coal down a shaft that’s going to kill you in 40 years, you know? But yeah, if we don’t have them, if we don’t think about it, then we’re going to be stuck because we have all these solutions and everything that could work, and then no one to actually do the work.
Justin Locke 24:10
Yeah. And it’s it’s not it’s equitable job creation. I mean, we all saw what happened in our politics, you know, over the last few years, like, you know, the urban populations are growing and wealth, and the rules, populations are stagnating and growth and economic growth. And that’s creating a lot of friction. Yeah. And it’s, it’s dwelve into our politics and is the primary driver of all these different frictions. I don’t care if he in the US and UK everywhere else seen it. This isn’t a way to create jobs, equitably. good paying jobs equitably across all those different prisms, economic prisms, rural urban, you know
Ben Hurst 24:45
Because everybody needs new power.
Justin Locke 24:47
Everyone needs new decentralised power, right where you live.
Ben Hurst 24:51
Yeah.
Justin Locke 24:51
And it’s a way to invest in your commute your commute.
Ben Hurst 24:54
Oh, yeah, cuz it’s local. Yeah, yeah. This is a good one. I mean, this is a good one.
Maryam Pasha 25:00
Yeah, I love this. It reminds me so much about a story I heard years ago about something called Barefoot College in India, right?
Investing in communities: Barefoot College India
Justin Locke 25:08
Barefoot College in India.
Maryam Pasha 25:09
Yeah, where they basically, they train local people who do not have like university degrees if you’re not allowed in the university college if you have any kind of degree. And often people who cannot read or write in, like, what one of the big things they do is they train solar engineers from all around the world, and they only hire grandmothers, they bring grandmothers from all around the world to India, and they train them to instal and maintain solar arrays in their local communities. And they found that they’re by training grandmothers, everyone gets in line, well, everyone gets to be those grandmothers don’t move out of the community. They don’t just like train them, send them back. And then that person moves to the Capitol, they stay in the local community, maintaining the solar arrays providing power and like training up people around them. And it just it like, it’s so reminds me of that initiative of when you when you break apart your thinking. And you start to think about like, real solutions, and how can we how can make this a positive on multiple dimensions, and you remove your assumptions of who can and cannot have or do things, you can come up with these incredibly beautiful solutions that benefit everyone,
Ben Hurst 26:22
because grandmothers are the real hubs of knowledge in any community. They’re the people that hold and pass on knowledge to next generations.
Maryam Pasha 26:30
And they’re not just concerned about themselves. Yeah. So it just reminds me of that, because I think there’s a there’s an opportunity here to, to like, invest, invest in communities in different ways. Yeah. So I think that’s really exciting. I’m so excited that Justin, you came and shared the story with us. This is one of my favourite.
Ben Hurst 26:47
Yeah, it’s just so positive, and are in my I’ve got a new grandma training.
Justin Locke 26:55
We want to see, we might look into that.
Maryam Pasha 26:58
Yeah, that would be amazing. The division of grandmothers. Before we go, we have one last thing we want to ask you.
Climate Confessions
Ben Hurst 27:04
And now it’s time for our climate confessions. Let’s fess up to the bad habits, we just can’t it kick.
Justin Locke 27:16
So this is clearly something that I don’t want to give up or something that
Maryam Pasha 27:21
Yeah, something that you do that, you know, you should maybe shouldn’t do, but you’re not gonna stop.
Ben Hurst 27:25
We would tell you we would share but we’ve done this for four seasons now. So I mean,
Justin Locke 27:29
I mean, you know, it may or may not, I actually have a pretty low footprint, honestly, like I don’t drive an electric vehicle, right, I should drive an electric vehicle. And I often like I remembered like being on the freeway and dropping my kids off and like you’re in traffic, and all you see is dislike pollution going into the air, and I can’t even like see the mountains and I’m like, Why the hell am I driving this petrol car? and I’m like, oh, it’s because I’m gonna drive him to the ground. And then I want to buy electric vehicle. I’m like, Just pony up, man. And buy an electric Vehicle.
Maryam Pasha 28:04
Very interesting. This, we’ve been doing interviews now in the US. And this is everyone’s climate confession. That’s fine. But it’s interesting, because it’s like indicative of a system that is really. In this country, we’re finding difficult to change, because also, you’re living in places with good public transportation. Yeah. So it’s not like you can just not have a car. Right? And so everyone has a car. And it’s so interesting
Ben Hurst 28:29
and for this, I think for for this generation, right? There’s, there’s been this paradigm of like, aspiration, which is like having a nice car. Yeah. And having a petrol car, like having a like of cool.
Justin Locke 28:41
Well, I mean, I mean, I’m a little bit more practical about it, but it’s like, so my thing is, like, I only buy Certified Used Cars, right? I probably represent like, 70% of people in the world only buy Certified Used Cars, right? Because it’s, it’s makes the most sense. Yes. I mean, there are that, you know, like that there’s only buy brand new cars, right. But as soon as he dropped that off the lot, it’s worth $5,000 Less. I’m like, I want to buy a Certified Used DV, but it’s like, you know, you’re not spending there. Yeah, I mean, and you know, so you just kind of it’s one of those things where it’s just like, just pony up.
Maryam Pasha 29:15
This is this is a shout out for our friends over at the EV movement who we’ve who we’ve interviewed to start looking at used EV market. Yeah, this is cool out. You know who you are. You’re listening.
Ben Hurst 29:28
I want to say names. So badly
Outro
Maryam Pasha 29:30
thank you so much for spending this time with us. It has been a real pleasure. And just I don’t know, I feel really I feel really good.
Ben Hurst 29:36
Yeah, I’m optimistic. Yeah.
Maryam Pasha 29:38
I remember. Stay curious.
Ben Hurst 29:41
Thank you for joining us this week. We really hope you enjoyed this episode.
Maryam Pasha 29:45
If you did, please hit the Follow button to make sure you get next week’s release.
Ben Hurst 29:49
We are now officially crowdsourcing climate confession. So please leave yours in the ratings in the review section. And we’ll shout off you next time. And shout out to our fabulous team behind the pod.
Maryam Pasha 30:02
This episode was produced by Josie Coulter comms written by Tess Lowry. Designed by Rebecca Ming is curation by Marian Pasha mixing engineers by Ben Beheshti music
Ben Hurst 30:14
also by Ben Beheshti presented by Ben Hurst and Maryam Pasha. Remember, stay curious
