The transition to a low-carbon economy is reshaping how societies produce and consume energy, with far-reaching implications for technology, industry, policy, and everyday life. Yet moving away from fossil fuels brings complex challenges around infrastructure, affordability, political economy, and the distribution of costs and benefits.

Recorded on October 14, 2026, this panel brought together advanced graduate students from UC Berkeley whose research examines the forces shaping green energy transitions around the world. Drawing on emerging scholarship spanning energy systems, technological change, environmental policy, and social equity, the discussion focused on how societies can navigate the opportunities and tradeoffs of decarbonization, and what is at stake for communities, economies, and the future of the planet.

The panel featured Nathaniel Dolton-Thornton, PhD candidate in the Energy and Resources Group; Janna Zou Huang, PhD Candidate in Sociology; and August Rud Jacobsen, PhD candidate in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management. Ken Alex, Director of Project Climate at the UC Berkeley’s Center for Law, Energy and Environment (CLEE), moderated.

This event was co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management (ESPM); the Energy and Resources Group (ERG); and the Center for Law, Energy and Environment (CLEE).

Podcast and Transcript

A podcast recording of this event can be found below or on Apple Podcasts.

[Music]

[WOMAN’S VOICE] The Matrix Podcast is a production of Social Science Matrix, an interdisciplinary research center at the University of California, Berkeley.

[CORI HAYDEN]

Hi folks, welcome. My name’s Cori Hayden. I’m director of the Social Science Matrix, and I’m so excited to have you all here and excited to introduce this panel.

This is part of our New Directions series, which is an event series specifically designed to feature graduate students from diverse disciplines presenting research around a common theme. For today’s event, we have got the very timely theme of green technology and energy transitions on the docket. As we all know, the shift to a low-carbon economy is shaping and reshaping how societies produce and consume energy.

With far-reaching implications for everything from technology and industrial policy to everyday life. Now, today’s panel brings together advanced PhD students whose work ranges from corporate climate disclosure and regulation to green industrial policy to the political economy of critical minerals. That’s all incredibly interesting.

I’m very excited to learn from you all. And together, their work will help us understand what it actually takes to move towards decarbonization. Now, before we get started, let me say two things.

First, to thank our co-sponsors, the UC Berkeley Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management, ESPM, the Energy and Resources Group, ERG, the Center for Law, Energy, and Environment. I did all this so I could say CLEE. And before I turn it over to the panelists and to Ken Alex, our moderator, let me briefly mention a couple of upcoming events.

We’ve got a rich lineup coming up here in the next month and a half or so, two months. Tomorrow, in this very same room, really delighted to have a panel honoring Dr. Norma Alarcón. There’s a book out devoted to her work called “Forced by Circumstance,” and a great panel of folks here to honor her work.

October 20th, A new kind of event as of last year, started by my predecessor, Marianne Fourcade, who was director over the last several years. We have a teach-in on October 20th, and this is a kind of event in which we are able to invite members of the wider community as well as Berkeley campus community to listen and engage with Award-winning teachers and instructors from Berkeley campus. So we’ve got a fantastic lecture coming up from Desmond Jagmohan on concepts of patriotism, and he is deliberately promising for that to be polemic and interesting.

Some very timely panels coming up as well, as you can see, and I hope to see you all in this very room for some of these panels coming up. Now, back to our panel. Let me introduce our moderator, Ken Alex.

Ken is the director of Project Climate at UC Berkeley Center for Law, Energy, and Environment. From 2011 to 2018, he was a senior policy advisor to Governor Jerry Brown. He was the director of the Governor’s Office of Planning and Research, and he was the chair of the Strategic Growth Council.

Before joining the governor’s office, Ken was the senior assistant attorney general heading the environment section of the California Attorney General’s Office. From 2000 to 2006, he led the California Attorney General’s Energy Task Force, investigating price and supply issues related to California’s energy crisis. Ken’s a graduate of Harvard Law School and holds a BA in political theory from my favorite place, the University of California at Santa Cruz.

No offense to Berkeley. Without further ado, let me turn it over to Ken. And thank you all so much for being here.

(applause)

[KEN ALEX]

Well, thank you all for being here. This is my first time at one of these, and I’m very pleased to be here because The work that I do, Corey mentioned I was in the governor’s office for eight years, and now I’ve been at Berkeley for eight years. I am very interested in how we move climate solutions from the academic setting to the policy world and to scale.

And I think in the climate context, it’s even more important. When you’re in government, you’re constantly running from one fire drill to the next. You don’t always know what’s going on in the world of academia that really can change and provide answers to some of the issues that you’re trying to deal with.

On the other side of the equation, I think there’s been a history in academia of thinking if you build a better mousetrap, people will find it. That’s also not true. And so I’m interested in seeing how we bridge that.

And that’s part of the work that I’ve been doing at CLEE here at Berkeley for the last number of years. And so having the opportunity to hear some of the research that’s going on with three PhD candidates is pretty exciting, particularly around energy transition, which is probably the most important piece of climate change. How do we move away from fossil fuels, and how do we speed up that transition?

That’s particularly acute right now, underscored by the wars in Iran and Ukraine, issues in Myanmar and Nigeria and other places around the world that are lovely places where we get our oil, including— How many of you know where California gets more of its oil? Anybody?

[AUDIENCE MEMBER]

The Amazon?

[KEN ALEX]

Yes, indeed. Somebody said the Amazon. We get the majority of our oil from Ecuador.

It’s drilled, and it’s even worse than that. It’s drilled in Ecuador. Ecuador sells it to China below market to pay down their debt.

China sells it to California at market. And so it’s a wonderful situation for everybody. So…

What did I want to say? So today we’re going to hear, different approaches to the set of problems from very different perspectives, disparate disciplines, across multiple disciplines. And what I want to do is just, I will introduce all three of our speakers, and then they’ll take it from there.

We’ll have a chance to interact with them, and they with each other. And I encourage you to think of questions. We’ll have some good time for questions towards the end, and we’ll go from there.

So I’ll do this in order of The speakers. Our first speaker is going to be August Jacobsen, or Jacobsen, depending on where you’re from. PhD candidate at the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management and a member of the Energy and Environment Policy Lab.

He studies the political economy of green industrial policy in Europe and the US, with his dissertation examining the interactions between policy design, corporate strategy, and technology choice. His work engages with multiple disciplines, including comparative political economy, sustainable transitions research, and heterodox economics. Prior to starting his PhD, he led the policy coordination unit at EFTA Secretariat in Brussels and supported the Norwegian presidency of the UN Economic and Social Council.

He holds a master’s in philosophy from the University of Cambridge. And a dual BA from Sciences Po and UC Berkeley. They’re all a bunch of slouches, as you can imagine.

Our second speaker will be Janna Huang, a PhD candidate in sociology at Berkeley. Her work spans economic sociology, organizational theory, science and technology studies, and climate politics. Broadly, her research investigates how organizations navigate uncertain regulatory contexts for corporate climate accountability.

Specifically, her dissertation examines climate disclosure as a lens into how sustainability performance metrics emerge as a solution to regulatory deadlock over corporate climate governance, which is directly some of the work that I was looking at. While climate disclosure is now mandated across major financial markets worldwide, companies overwhelmingly fixate on producing sustainability metrics, which remain decoupled from integrating these metrics into decarbonization. Prior to graduate school, she earned a BS in computer science with honors in science, technology, and society, and an MA in sociology from Stanford University.

And then Nathaniel Dolton-Thornton is our third speaker, PhD candidate at ERG, the Energy and Resources Group. His research examines political economy of critical minerals for energy transitions, with a focus on China and the US. Before joining UC Berkeley, served as an assistant researcher with Dean Kelly Sims Gallagher’s Climate Policy Lab in the Fletcher School at Tufts.

He holds a master’s degree from universities of Oxford and Cambridge and a BS from UC Berkeley. So with that, August, you’re up.

[AUGUST R. JACOBSEN]

There we go. Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for being here today.

It’s really exciting to see so many of you. I’m August Jacobsen. I’m presenting my paper with Michael Lerner and Jonas Meckling, titled “Transition Capacity Drives Corporate Climate Strategy.”

So… In this paper, we address this really, really basic question of why do corporate climate strategies vary? So what explains the different ways that firms relate to the green transition, both politically and economically?

And the reason why I wanted to present this, early paper with you all today is because I think that our answer to this question really starts to get at and can help us getting at this new stage in the green transition, which I’ll talk more about at the end of this presentation. So first things first, What is corporate climate strategy? Well, it is simply a firm’s political and economic response to decarbonization.

And the reason why this matters is not only because firms influence public policy. It also really matters because, and especially in the US, decarbonization ultimately depends on private investment. So one thing that we do know about corporate climate strategy is that it really depends on firms’ assets.

One way that it does this, which has been the focus of the literature, is that if a firm has fossil fuel assets, then it incurs costs from decarbonization, thereby influencing its incentives and thereby its corporate climate strategy. Now, in this paper, we focus on a newer branch of the literature and contribute to it, which argues that firms’ assets also matters in how it shapes firms’ future competitiveness, so firms’ ability to compete in decarbonized markets. So, and more specifically, we assess the relationship between the assets, a firm’s capacity to compete in decarbonized markets, and corporate climate strategy.

In order to do so, we first reviewed the strategic management and innovation studies literatures to understand what enables firms to succeed in technological transitions. And what we found is that what’s really key is firms’ ability to deploy existing assets to enhance their value in this new transition. And then more specifically, we find that, Knowledge assets, firms’ skills and workers is really important in enabling and constraining firms’ transition response.

And what this means more specifically is that for a firm to successfully deploy capital and physical assets, they first need to integrate into their organization workers with the right skills to do this deployment. So this means that if a firm has the right knowledge assets, then that strengthens their market positions, enabling them to embrace the transition, which again influences their corporate climate strategy. So we accordingly define green transition capacity as a firm’s access to knowledge assets for competing in a decarbonized economy.

And then we distinguish between three types of such assets. So one is a firm’s green knowledge assets, so that’s skills and expertise directed to decarbonization work. The second is convertible assets, which can be retasked to decarbonization work.

So to give you an example, that can be an engineer that used to contribute to building internal combustion engine vehicles that then later start working on ICE vehicles. Then third, complementary knowledge assets, which are skills and expertise that indirectly support green activities. So, and it’s not an easy task to estimate the extent to which each firm have such assets over time, and it’s really important that we do so in a good and fairly granular way to really make this point in political science, but also, I think, to inform policymakers.

So what we do is that we create a green transition capacity index, drawing on 55 million online job posts from around 5 million— sorry, 5,000 US firms between 2010 and 2025. And then we use this job posting data to operationalize each of these three different types of assets. So for green knowledge assets, we look at the firm’s job posts requiring at least one green transition skill.

For convertible assets, we look at the percentage of non-green job posts for green convertible occupations. And then for complementary assets, we look at the extent to which a firm has non-green skills that tend to co-occur with green skills in job postings. And what this data enables us to do is to look at within-sector variation in transition capacity.

So what you see here on the y-axis is the index I just described, and then here on the x-axis is a set of selection of key sectors for the green transition. So these violin plots, they show the distribution of transition capacity across different sectors. And the key point to take home here is really that there is a lot of variation within each sector.

So just to give you one example, Tesla, as we would expect, has greater transition capacity than Magna, which is a parts manufacturer, and also Ford. So our claim then for explaining, corporate climate strategy, but also for verifying this index, is that firms engage in multidimensional climate strategies across three types of behavior, and we look at three of them. So the first is market investment, the second political advocacy, And the third, public communications.

And then we hypothesize that for each of these different types of behavior, firms become more likely to engage in them the higher transition capacity that they have. And so this is how we operationalize each of these outcomes, and I won’t get into details about the 10-K reports that firms submit to the SEC, but I’ll say that for political advocacy, we look at firms’ membership in pro-climate advocacy coalitions, and then for public communications, we use net zero targets, and we just got access to much better data on these net zero targets, which we’ll update our results with, which is really exciting. So.

I’m not going to bore you, or perhaps many of you will find it interesting, but with the details of our, identification strategy. But for now, we have run a two-way fixed effects model controlling for emissions and revenue. And what we find is that we find the hypothesized statistically significant relationship for market and investments and political advocacy and public communications.

So just to give you one example of what this shows, so a firm in a sector at the 90th percentile of green transition capacity, Tends to have a 2.4 percentage point greater likelihood of joining a political advocacy coalition than its peer at the 10th percentile of transition capacity in the same sector. And then we’ll see what happens with public communications when we get much higher quality data. In order to test this, we are running a bunch of robustness tests that I’m not going to go through now.

Instead I’ll discuss our future work and where we are going with this. So we’re developing a, or probably developing a shift-share instrument that helps with causal identification, and then we’re looking at the effect of climate politics on green transition capacity. Perhaps, for instance, the relationship between transition capacity and corporate climate behavior really is only relevant after the Paris Agreement.

That’s one hypothesis. And then we’re also developing a data paper describing variation in capacity and its causes. And then I’m just going to very briefly show you a little preview from the kinds of things we can show in this data paper.

So here again, you have on the y-axis the transition capacity index, and then now on the x-axis, you see extent to which a firm has fossil fuel workers. So what we see here is that firms that tend to have more fossil fuel workers also tends to have the green transition capacity that we need to decarbonize. So then there might be a misalignment between incentive and capacity, which we think could potentially inform policy.

So then my last slide, so we show that firms do pursue multidimensional climate strategies. That’s a contribution more to the political science literature. And we show that firms consider present costs related to their fossil fuel assets, but they also care about their future competitiveness, which depends on the kinds of assets that we are focusing on.

And then we show that there is a correlation between capacity, investment, and advocacy. So this suggests that there’s A need for public policy to both build transition capacity to enable firms to access these kinds of knowledge assets. I think perhaps Nate definitely knows more about this, but China’s education policy to educate many engineers seems relevant here, but also to activate this green transition capacity where it lies latent, as it appears to perhaps be doing in the fossil fuel economy.

And then I said that I would relate this to what I think is the next stage of the green transition that we’re seeing now. And So in the 2010s, political science and political economy tended to look at climate politics as a collective action problem, with states as actors. Then we moved into a distributive politics paradigm, looking at how social movements, unions, and firms interacted to shape policy adoption.

I think that now, with climate policies having been adopted for a while in many places, we’re starting to see more work and more analysis on how economies and firms respond to these policies. And This paper contributes to that by highlighting firms’ knowledge, assets and capacities as one key constraint for how firms can respond to these policies. I think it’s really important to think about this as people now are starting to think about things like Inflation Reduction Act 2.0.

Thank you.

(applause)

[JANNA ZOU HUANG]

So I don’t have slides, so I’m just gonna talk. But I think August’s presentation was a great segue into what I’m going to talk about more, which is also the role of expertise and knowledge in shaping decarbonization efforts. But I’m actually gonna take it more to the other side, or almost the prehistory of what August is describing in corporate climate strategy.

So this side is about how to actually Reliably measure and collect data on corporate sustainability performance in standard ways, because historically this data is not very reliable. Also, companies weren’t always providing this information because why would they? It relied on many industry or regional level estimates, and so collecting firm level data specific to like a company and its supply chains has historically been very difficult.

And without this information, it would be impossible to benchmark progress to decarbonization goals. So getting this data right is really important. And it turns out that figuring out what data companies should provide and how to create standards and mandates around it, and how companies would even collect this data is all really challenging.

So the emergence of what I’m gonna talk about a little bit today, I think can be characterized as a social movement at both regulatory and organizational levels around data, knowledge, and expertise on sustainability. So that’s what I’ll be talking about. So over the course of my dissertation research, I focus on a centerpiece of this world, which is climate disclosure.

These are rules and standards that require companies to report metrics on emissions, their targets, things like having board governance on climate, what their climate risks are, all kinds of metrics like this, to financial regulators and investors. Over the course of the last couple years, I’ve talked to almost 200 people on this topic and done observations on key non-governmental organizations around this. I’ve analyzed corporate disclosure data from more than 4,000 companies from 2010 to 2025, and as well as policy documents.

So, just wanted to share what I’ve found so far. So. But as a little bit of background, So beginning in around 2023, these climate disclosure rules became a mandate in more than 30 jurisdictions that cover over 70% of global market cap.

So most companies at this point, especially if you’re a publicly held company, they do this. And there are very real institutional levers for this regulation. So climate disclosures is required by securities regulators, which normally, companies don’t want to mess with.

These are their financial authorities. Climate disclosure standards are issued by International Accounting Standards Board, so the same organization that regulates financial accounting. And what companies produce are technically expected to face increasing levels of auditing from the accounting firms.

So today I think we can kind of understand this as a story of compliance, but I think what’s more interesting is if you look at the longer history of how we got here, is the fact that before climate disclosure even became a mandate in 2023, thousands of companies were already voluntarily providing this information. They really were starting in 2005, and it’s really picked up year over year. So by the time it became a regulation, companies were already doing this.

So Why would they do this? Remember, we were talking about actors that are historically reluctant to be transparent about their climate impacts and have even actively thwarted efforts on corporate climate governance. So why were they voluntarily providing this information?

And second, how do companies actually produce this data and make sense of it? Does this data actually become integrated into Reaching their climate targets. And the way I sort of approached this was drawing on science and technology studies, which is where I came from before grad school.

We know that data does not just exist and we go and collect it, but data is actively made by experts and organizational actors. So what are the organizational politics around the production of sustainability data? How is it actually collected by companies, and does this data actually move the needle towards decarbonization efforts?

So… I guess if you take one thing from this talk that has no slides, I would say that this has been, I think, a story of building the plane while you’re flying it. So I’ll explain what that means, and I’ll first describe this at the regulatory level.

So… In terms of coming up with the regulation on corporate climate disclosure, a direct quote from one of my informants said that everyone wants a standard, but nobody could decide on what they want. So the development of corporate climate disclosure, it did not come from regulators first, and then suddenly we have this rule, and then now companies comply, but it actually instead emerged from incremental action from the private sector, starting from environmental and non-governmental organizations and financial institutions that sort of Motivated adoption from companies.

and then as more and more companies were doing this, regulators were like, okay, we’re gonna just codify what was already happening. So to be a little bit more specific, there was this organization called the Climate Disclosure Project, which is a environmental non-governmental organization, and they sort of positioned themselves as a new kind of data platform where companies would report Environmental performance, like their emissions, to investors, which were the primary audiences for this data. So the Climate Disclosure Project, or the CDP, first mobilized financial institutions to begin requesting climate data from firms by framing climate change as a new form of risk to companies.

So it wasn’t necessarily that companies were accountable for the risks they posed on the environment, but the only way for to get investors interested in this was the idea that, oh, the financial cost of climate change, events happening are going to cost their portfolios money. So, in order to assess and manage these risks, investors would need more data from companies. So that was sort of like the first operating logic here.

So as one person from the CDP told me, they said, quote, “We told investors what data they should be looking at. In other words, we engage with investors to try and inform them on the implications of climate change for their assets. And then we say, this is the data you need to be reviewing if you want to have less risk exposure in your portfolios.”

So, kind of in many ways, companies started reporting this data because it followed the logics of shareholder capitalism. They weren’t doing this, I think, out of altruism of caring about climate, but it was, I think, more of because their investors wanted this data, so they were quicker to respond. I think this is supported by another quote I have from someone I talked to at the CDP who said that, quote, “We ask for this data on behalf of investors, so companies are not refusing us if they don’t respond.

They’re refusing, in fact, the investor community. And if they do respond to us, it’s a legal requirement not to lie to investors.” So I think this kind of helps sets up this question that I first posed about why would companies start voluntarily doing this?

It started with a couple hundred firms doing this, and eventually when firms see other companies in their sectors doing this or their regions. More and more are gonna jump on board because they want to do what everyone else is doing. So that’s how we get from a couple hundred companies in the early 2010s to like 22,000 companies before 2023.

And I think going back to my analogy of building the plane as you’re flying it, getting back to this, I think the goal of the CDP was that they wanted to just get companies to start disclosing any data basically in the first place, even if the data was really bad or inaccurate. They just wanted to get the plane up in the air, so to speak, and then worry about improving this data or adding nice features to the plane when it’s in the fair. So something that came up over and over again when I was observing Corporate climate disclosure was that this idea that you don’t want the perfect to be the enemy of the good, that getting companies to get into the practice of reporting data, even if it’s terrible or super low quality, was better than no data at all, and that over time, with more disclosure experience, companies could improve the quality of this data and maybe even eventually act on it.

So… yeah. So I think That’s a little bit of what’s on the regulatory side.

And I also wanted to touch on the organizational level of this metaphor of building the plane while you’re flying it, because I found that for many of these companies, when they first face institutional pressures to report this data, they also had no idea what to do or where to start. Often, sustainability teams are pretty small, or nobody really takes them seriously inside companies. They’re severely, even to this day, more under-resourced.

And a lot of these companies, so from the people I’ve talked to, they often said that they had no idea where to start looking for this data, and, or where in the company that they could reliably get this information. So a really interesting dynamic that has come out of analyzing emissions reporting processes is that As companies get more experienced in disclosing this information, two things happen. The first is that the sustainability function eventually becomes much more central inside companies, and this isn’t necessarily, again, because companies are, wanting to necessarily decarbonize, or I think, but it actually, I think, is precisely because sustainability has moved from this more PR marketing, softer qualitative function to increasingly a much more quantitative data-driven exercise.

And with the increasing reporting data requirements, that lends to the perceived legitimacy of sustainability. It’s no longer just showing nice pictures of the planet or whatever, or Doing these one-off collaborations with planting trees or whatever, but it’s increasingly crunching numbers in Excel to demonstrate sort of a rationality around data-driven decision-making around sustainability. So… Having to report this data is what made sustainability much more central inside companies.

And you see this with the rise of like chief sustainability officers or sustainability departments increasingly reporting to like boards or the C-suite. And… Yeah, so that’s sort of some of the organizational change that has happened with that.

And this also leads to my second point, which is that one reflection, I think, of this increasingly technocratic approach to data collection around sustainability is the, I think, surprising finding that I came across in my research, which is that companies are actually systematically revising their previously reported emissions. So in their reporting, they have the opportunity to report back on the last like four or five years from that year. And…

Almost more than 60% of firms have revised previous emissions, and I think more surprisingly, most of these revisions actually show upwards changes, so they’re actually saying that they were emitted more than they previously reported. And these revisions are not showing greater reductions over time. So they’re actually showing the trend that they are emitting more.

So why would they do this? And I think building off of what I was saying earlier, I think this builds on actually the idea that revisions are in some ways rationalized because many of these changes come from improving their methodologies or becoming more precise in how they’re collecting data in their companies. So they want to sort of signal that we actually have more accurate information now, even if it means showing that we have higher emissions.

So in some ways… Yeah. These revisions become rationalized as the outcome of improving technical expertise around sustainability.

So again, companies are often starting to report data first to launch the plane, so to speak, but before figuring out how to actually report more accurate data. And this is intertwined with efforts to bolster the legitimacy of sustainability inside firms. So just to conclude, where does this lead us to with this question of the theme of this panel, which is on green transitions?

I think that where we are at now is that companies have gotten pretty good at data collection and reporting, but I think the buck kind of stops there. More and more data is increasingly perceived as the goal, but this has not translated to tangible decarbonization efforts. So one example I have from my work is that You know, with companies that have more experience with disclosure and have all the right sort of processes, like data tools inside their companies, they are more likely to set targets, like climate targets and even more ambitious targets.

But there’s very little outcome with actually reaching their targets. In some cases, some of these targets were set, but just deleted eventually because they’re revising their targets as well. So I worry that…

Sorry, I keep talking about this plane metaphor, but I worry that the plane is now being flown, and we’re adding more and more cool features to it, just collecting more and more data on it. but no one’s really actually remembering what the destination is and what the plane is actually for, which I think the goal of disclosure was that we needed more data so that we can, if companies are not reaching their climate targets, they can be penalized in some way. But none of those… Like regulatory feedback is actually happening.

And we’re at this place now where I think to get companies to even report this information did require lowering the bar, And just this idea of, like, any data was better than none at all. But I think now, I think more effort needs to be pushed to actually making the data mean something, and for there to be actual consequences on not meeting the goals that they state. So, anyway, those are my thoughts, and yeah, thank you.

[NATHANIEL DOLTON-THORNTON]

Great. So hi, everyone. As Ken mentioned, my name is Nate Dolton-Thornton, and I’m a PhD candidate in the Energy and Resources Group here at UC Berkeley.

And this presentation today is going to talk about critical mineral supply chains in China and the United States more broadly. And a number of the different points here I think will feed on some of the things that both August and Jenna had said, so I’m excited for the conversation that follows this presentation. So I’m going to start out with just a quick sense of the outline of the talk I’m going to do today.

So first, I’m going to start out with a quick introduction to myself and my work to help contextualize things a little bit for you all. I’ll give a brief overview of my dissertation as a whole, and then talk about just one little piece of my dissertation, which is specifically looking at oil and gas company involvement in lithium extraction here in the United States. And then last, I’m going to tie that all back to the theme for today, which is what does this all mean for a green transition?

So by way of introduction, my disciplinary background is in geography, and my research sits at the intersection of political economy and political ecology. I use a combination of both qualitative and quantitative methods. So on the qualitative side, I use things like interviews, participant observation.

On the quantitative side, doing things like analyses of financial investments, of business relations, commodity flows, things like that. And most of my research takes place, as the title indicates, in both the United States and over in China. Alongside my university research for the last couple of years, I’ve also been working with a think tank called the Climate and Community Institute, and some of my work there involves working with union organizers and community organizers from across the transportation supply chain as it is electrifying, to look at what that means for workers and communities and to think about what we call supply chain solidarity.

So basically thinking about opportunities for solidarity among workers and communities across different parts of the supply chain and in different regions, mostly focused here in the US. And then also have been doing some research, through the Climate and Community Institute, looking at the rise of lithium-ion battery recycling here in North America, and also thinking about that in relation to a just transition. Also for the last couple of years have been reading together with friends and colleagues, including Natasha Shannon, who’s here, doing this green capitalism reading group, which is trying to think through the relationships between capitalism and a green transition, and similarly what all of that means for some of these key questions of equity and justice.

And so mentioning all that just to give a little more context, and as we move into the discussion part of today. But then turning to my core dissertation research, so I’m examining this concept and this increasing focus on critical mineral security and China-U.S. relations, specifically looking at the lithium-ion battery supply chain. And so just to clarify a couple terms there, what is a critical mineral?

A critical mineral is a government term, and it’s basically when a government sees a mineral as being both important for a country’s economic or national security, and then two, it has a supply chain that’s in some way vulnerable to disruption. And then thinking about lithium-ion batteries, these are batteries that are used in a number of different clean energy technologies, the main use being electric vehicles. They’re also used a lot in stationary storage, which is both supporting supply and demand for renewable energy, and also increasingly is being used for data centers to support AI as that picks up.

And these lithium-ion batteries have a number of different critical minerals inside of them, among them being lithium, graphite. Also, some of the main versions have cobalt, nickel, manganese inside as well. And so my dissertation is spanning the supply chain, includes upstream, where you have lithium mining, mineral extraction, the midstream, where you have, companies that are processing, building the components that eventually feed into the finished batteries, on to actually manufacturing the batteries themselves, and then finally looking at recycling.

You’re taking these batteries when they reach end of life, taking these valuable critical minerals out of them in one way or another and feeding that back into the beginning of the supply chain. And so then just turning to the focus for today, I’m going to specifically be looking at, as I mentioned, oil and gas company involvement in lithium extraction in the United States. And this part of the project came from when I was doing a number of different interviews with lithium mining companies, companies in the upstream part of the supply chain, and a number of them kept telling me about how they were getting big investments from oil and gas companies, forming partnerships with oil and gas companies.

And so that, for me, raised the question of what’s going on? Why exactly are oil and gas companies so interested in lithium, and what exactly does that relationship look like? And so here my two main research question is, one, how are oil and gas companies specifically getting involved in lithium extraction?

And then two, why are these oil and gas companies getting involved in lithium extraction? And through this research process, I’ve developed a number of different answers to both of these questions, but for the sake of today’s presentation and the theme of the green transition, I’m going to primarily focus on one answer that I find especially helpful for thinking through this idea of a green transition. So I’m going to start out with that finding and then walk us through the project using that finding as the through line.

So basically, oil and gas companies are getting involved in lithium extraction partly so that they can develop new revenue streams at existing oil and gas sites. And I’ll explain what that means a little more detail as I go through the presentation. So to give a little context, and this is where it gets a little technical, but it’s helpful for explaining the overall argument.

On the technology side, key to this story is what is called direct lithium extraction. And so basically, historically lithium, if any of you remember from the very first photo, was what you tend to see when you see a lithium mine. So it’s like these big above-ground ponds, and basically that’s traditional lithium extraction, which is where, often this lithium is occurring in these underground brine aquifers where the lithium is dissolved in the brine.

What people often do, what companies often do, is they pump the brine up from the underground aquifer into these big ponds. They use the sun, solar evaporation, to slowly evaporate the water, which then concentrates the lithium that’s inside of the ponds. And it takes 12 to 24 months to go through that whole process.

And so a wave of new companies are developing these new technologies that are mostly still under development, not operating at scale in the US, although they are very much at scale in China, which is another Interesting part of the story. And basically those technologies involve pumping that brine up to above ground, using some kind of technology to directly extract the lithium, hence the name direct lithium extraction, then taking the rest of the brine, which now no longer has the lithium, and often pumping that back down into the brine aquifer. So the idea here is you can operate much more quickly, You can operate much more efficiently.

You can get a lot more lithium. And so I found that this type of direct lithium extraction, this new wave of technologies, tends to be the prime focus for oil and gas company involvement in the lithium industry. In terms of methods, I won’t go into this in a lot of detail, but I’ve been doing a number of different interviews with oil and gas companies, with lithium mining companies, a range of different actors, and I’ve also been doing a quantitative analysis looking at oil and gas companies’ specific investments in lithium extraction and related project development.

Turning to results, on the first question, how are oil and gas companies getting involved? In lithium extraction, I found 16 different relationships between oil and gas and lithium extraction companies, including 11 of these direct lithium extraction companies, 12 oil and gas companies, including, I think it was six, out of the top 20 oil companies in the world. And these companies are getting involved in three main ways.

So one, oil and gas companies are partnering to develop direct lithium extraction projects. Two, they’re investing in direct lithium extraction developers. And then three, they’re developing or acquiring their own proprietary direct lithium extraction technologies.

So then, looking at the second question, why are these companies getting involved in lithium extraction? On this point, I’ve identified five main explanations. So on the one hand, we have greenwashing.

We have portfolio diversification. We have expertise, which touches some on August’s presentation from earlier. We have infrastructure, and then we have what I’m going to be talking about in a little more detail, which is these new revenue streams at existing oil and gas sites, which is specifically looking at oil and gas waste.

And so to explain that in a little more detail, basically it seems like oil and gas companies seem to be getting involved in lithium extraction because they see it as an opportunity to find new revenue streams inside of their existing business of oil and gas. And this is because oil and gas production, if you remember when I was talking about this underground brine that has lithium at oil and gas sites, when you’re pumping oil and gas out of the ground, these companies are also often pumping out this briny water out of the ground, which is a byproduct of oil and gas extraction. That briny water also has small amounts of lithium inside of it.

And so basically the concentrations of lithium in that brine, that byproduct, are relatively low, and so they’re too low to be profitably extracted, using this conventional method of solar evaporation. But if theoretically you could use these new direct lithium extraction technologies, it could become cost-effective for these companies to start extracting lithium from essentially the waste from their own oil and gas operations. And so from a number of different interviews I’ve done with oil and gas companies, they’ve confirmed that this is very much part of what they’re trying to do.

And so why does this all matter? To me, it raises some interesting, complicated elements of the relationship between fossil fuels, clean energy technologies, fossil fuels, and the green transition. And so there are a number of different examples that we might have heard of how the fossil fuel industry is related to clean energy, fossil fuel companies investing in clean energy technologies, different kinds of political, economic relationships.

To me, I think this is Interesting in that it’s not just that type of entanglement, but it’s also very much— it’s a material entanglement at the resource level, between this essential resource that we use for fossil fuel energy and an essential resource for clean energy and for green transition. And I would also just note here that lithium is not just used for electric vehicles. As I mentioned earlier, batteries are being used for data centers for AI, so there’s not a one-to-one between these resources and particular technologies, but there is a relationship there.

And so if we project this into the future, if we’re going to be getting some of our lithium from oil and gas waste, it becomes harder not just financially or politically, but actually to materially disentangle lithium from oil and gas, and relatedly, therefore, a green energy or a clean energy supply chain, from the existing fossil fuel supply chains. And I think among other takeaways, this raises important questions for the durability of lithium supply chains related to the clean energy transition. Over the last couple of years, we’ve seen a turn away from climate renewable energy ambitions from both governments and companies, including oil and gas companies.

And so if we’re getting a certain amount of our lithium from oil and gas waste, and then an oil company decides that the incentives or the returns on investment aren’t there anymore, it might dip its toe out of the waters of the lithium industry. And I think that in a way we potentially might not see from a pure-play lithium company. And so that’s just a little bit of food for thought, questions to raise as we move into the next stage of this conversation.

[KEN ALEX]

All right, well, thank you for those presentations. I hope people are thinking of some questions. I have quite a number of them, but before I do that, I’m wondering if Each of you, any of you have questions for each other or comments about what you’ve heard?

You don’t have to, but I thought I’d give you the opportunity.

[AUGUST R. JACOBSEN]

So I had one question, sort of, that addresses directly your work, but more from perhaps a political economy angle. So I kept wondering, are firms doing this kind of Privately organized disclosure as a way of preventing public regulation. So I was at a conference recently, and there was a paper by Jonas Fischer that noted that right before Biden introduced the disclosure mandate, you saw a lot of the firms that were lobbying against the mandate, disclosing more than they had done in the past, but he wasn’t really sure, et cetera.

It would be really interesting to hear what you think about that.

[JANNA ZOU HUANG]

Yeah. Oh, hello. Okay.

Yeah, I think… Yeah, so… Yeah, I think in some ways, yes.

I think firms are doing this to avoid the full effect that public regulation can have on decarbonization goals, because I think that basically it’s sort of limited the regulation that we do have to just disclosure itself and not actually penalizing what companies are disclosing on, if at all. So I think, yeah,

it’s not that there is no public regulation, I think, on disclosure, There’s a lot, but it has limited the efficacy and potential of it to what the private sector is already doing. Yeah. Mm-hmm.

[AUGUST R. JACOBSEN]

Thanks.

[KEN ALEX]

Well, let me ask you the elephant in the room question, and picking up a little bit on where Nate ended, how has the Trump administration impacted how you— the research that you’ve done, and how Corporate strategies really have retracted in a lot of ways, at least from my observation. How has it affected disclosure and willingness to disclose? And how has it affected, if it has, critical minerals and how companies are acting?

So maybe we’ll start, Jana, with you.

[JANNA ZOU HUANG]

Yeah, so something that was really surprising, I think, is that I think there’s a lot of companies that are less vocal about what they’re doing on climate, but a lot of them are still doing it. I mean, in the sense of, again, it’s become very limited to specifically sustainability reporting. Sustainability reporting has become kind of the de facto climate strategy, I think, for a lot of companies.

Kind of, again, because even if they don’t have to do it in the US, actually, they now have to do it in California, and also, if they’re a global company, they have to do it for wherever else they operate. So it’s not like these rules have gone away with Trump. I think another really interesting thing that has come up from my research is that, So I think for some companies, they have actually integrated sustainability teams directly into finance, tech, reporting, operations.

And the idea that these people keep telling me is that, oh, this means that sustainability is actually more of a real part of our company because it’s not just having the DEI person or sustainability person where they have the title but maybe no power inside companies. Maybe it actually is more effective if everyone in the company was like, sustainability was part of everyone’s work in their company. So I don’t know.

I’m still trying to understand. How true that is, but in terms of how I think some companies are hiring and sort of reshuffling departments and how they’re rationalizing it, that’s what keeps coming up. But, yeah,

So those are some thoughts. Yeah.

[AUGUST R. JACOBSEN]

So our data can’t really speak explicitly to what happens now under the second Trump administration. Many of the outcomes stop before that, but I will say that two of the kinds of assets we look at are latent. They don’t necessarily need to be used for decarbonization.

So if we expect to see, and we do also have some evidence that this potential transition capacity really started to matter after the Paris Agreement, then I wouldn’t be surprised if future data would show that with the second Trump administration, or even more broadly, as the future is no longer carbon constrained, as some firms and other actors are saying, that firms’ transition capacity again becomes less important for predicting the kinds of climate strategies that they adopt.

[NATHANIEL DOLTON-THORNTON]

Yeah, I think that’s a great question. So, as I mentioned in the beginning, my research is looking at critical minerals across China and the United States. So I’d say one thing is that my research has gotten more difficult and complicated.

And also, it’s changed in interesting ways. One of the things that I do is go to a lot of industry conferences, and one thing I’ve seen recently is you go to big lithium industry conferences, and the conversations have changed a lot. So it used to be everybody was talking about electric vehicles, things like that.

Now you go and everybody’s talking about AI, so talking about how lithium can help support the AI future and how lithium can support the defense industry. So at a recent conference, there was a whole subconference on the defense industry and lithium’s role in that. And related to that, there’s tension within the industry.

So I was at one industry conference, and there was a panel where one of the major lithium companies in the US was basically saying, like, “Look, we need to stop talking so much about the defense industry.” in lithium, because actually the defense industry in total lithium demand is incredibly small. I think he said it was less than 1% of all lithium demand, and still most of their demand is electric vehicles.

And so there’s a way in which if they focus too much on AI and the defense industry, when actually still most of their demand is electric vehicles, then that creates real problems for their own bottom line. So it seems to me like there are real changes happening, and it’s still unclear. And I think the industry itself is still unclear on what exactly that means moving forward.

[KEN ALEX]

So I’ll ask you all an unfair question in that case. So my center has been looking at what the oil industry could become in a transition, not five years from now, but twenty years from now. And there are a lot of different possibilities, but I’m wondering, given The studies that each— yours is most direct, Nate.

I mean, you’ve talked a little bit about it, and maybe you have some more thoughts, but it also has implications, Jana, for what gets disclosed and how it’s disclosed and what that future looks like. And then certainly for the corporate strategy on marketing and public relations, et cetera, what happens? What does this look like over the course of 20 years as we try to transition?

So maybe we’ll go the other direction this time and start with Nate.

[NATHANIEL DOLTON-THORNTON]

Yeah, also a good question. I think… I guess I would say, yeah, that’s very much a question that came up for me in doing this piece of the project that I was just talking about, oil and gas companies getting involved in lithium.

And I think for me, I’m not 100% against oil and gas companies getting involved in lithium. And I think there is a possibility that it somehow becomes a launchpad for these companies transitioning into Lithium or clean energy. I think at the moment, the scale of their involvement in lithium versus the scale of their remaining fossil fuel assets and involvement in fossil fuels is very, very small.

And so I think on the current trajectory, it seems very unlikely that any of these fossil fuel companies will somehow become a clean energy company and stop being a fossil fuel company. I think to have something like that happens, to have a real sort of phase out or phase down alongside an uptick in lithium and clean energy, we would need regulation, basically. We need some sort of policy structure in place and probably various kinds of, Public voices that are really steering that actual transition, as opposed to just a kind of diversification that seems to be happening.

[KEN ALEX]

You mean Congress may need to actually do something?

[NATHANIEL DOLTON-THORNTON]

Somebody needs to do something.

[AUGUST R. JACOBSEN]

Yeah, I think this gets to this really fundamental question of what is it that we are seeing right now? And some of you might be familiar with this emerging discourse that we are not in a transition, an energy transition, we are in an addition, with the argument being made by Jean-Baptiste Fressoz that every single energy transition we have seen so far has not in fact been a transition. You just see all these different kinds of entanglements between different energy regimes.

And then you see consumption increasing, and that does not drive decarbonization. So I think that’s the framing of it. And this used to be something that was talked about on the climate left, and I was at a talk a while ago, where one of the editors in The Economist started the whole conference with this line.

So I think, to follow what Nate said, we have seen Especially over the last years, a lot of public policy being focused on providing carrots, various subsidies for firms. I think one interesting question is whether these kinds of carrots really then drive, various kinds of hybrids, and then whether some kinds of sticks, I’m not gonna say carbon price, but that’s one version of it, would change that and to a greater extent create a different kind of Of transition or an actual transition this time around?

[JANNA ZOU HUANG]

Yeah. Yeah, so I think something that’s interesting that’s happening with oil and gas firms is that I think because climate strategy In many ways, it’s like an accounting exercise now. You see these high-emitting sectors like oil and gas, basically moving their assets off of their direct balance sheets.

So they’re doing things like selling them and just selling them to shell companies or different ownership, but still, they’re still in operation and still doing business with them. So I think that’s one way they can do it because even though technically, not to get nitty-gritty about it, but even though technically if you’re still Buying from someone else’s, an oil and gas refinery that someone else owns, that’s still in your supply chain accounting, but there’s very little scrutiny that goes into your scope 3 or supply chain. So people only really, if they are looking at what you’re reporting, they are looking at your direct assets.

So a lot of them are just writing them out of their balance sheets, basically. And then… Yeah, and then I think with the oil and gas sector and these other high-emitting sectors too, I think, again, this logic of any data is better than none at all is very true.

I think they tread especially carefully with these more sensitive sectors because they don’t want to scare them off. They want these sectors to participate, and in some ways, that is a good thing. It’s good that we have at least some oil and gas companies disclosing any data at all, but I think they’re almost too afraid to, like you said, implement more sticks, because, yeah, they’re just happy that they’re in the room.

[KEN ALEX]

Yeah.

[AUDIENCE MEMBER]

Hi. Hi, thank you for the presentation. I have a question for Nate, actually, about the lithium.

Two-part question. One is, my understanding is especially in China, there has been some evolution with sodium batteries, and… The evolution of technology in this space is so fast.

How is that going to change the balance and the incentive and the interest to continue to extract lithium? And then you mentioned that you look also at recycling. I think the recycling aspect of batteries is really an important one for sustainability.

So if you could talk a little bit about what you found out and in respect to the transition, that would be great. Thank you.

[NATHANIEL DOLTON-THORNTON]

Yeah, thank you for the question. Yeah, sodium-ion batteries. I think… In some ways, I guess, big picture, thinking about new technologies in these batteries, so far it seems like sodium-ion batteries will probably be an example of what August was just talking about, that it’ll be additional.

[AUDIENCE MEMBER]

Yeah.

[NATHANIEL DOLTON-THORNTON]

It won’t 100% replace lithium-ion batteries. That’s partly because lithium-ion batteries are able to be more compact and so space efficient in that way. So it seems like probably sodium-ion batteries, which are already very much, yeah, Exist, operate at scale in China.

I visited sodium-ion battery manufacturing factories there, are more likely to be used for stationary storage applications, so to support renewable energy, to support data centers for AI, less likely to be used as much inside of electric vehicles. And so potentially what you’ll see is an increased sort of division of the market where lithium-ion battery will be used for some things. I didn’t get into a lot of details, but there are two main types of lithium-ion batteries, and those themselves also tend to be used for different things in different contexts.

And so I think sodium-ion battery will become, and is already becoming an important part of the picture, but is unlikely to replace lithium-ion. So we probably won’t see a big turn away from lithium-ion with sodium batteries coming in. And on the recycling front, so that is a big focus of my overall research, has been spending a lot of time looking at recycling, which I think is very much an important part of the solution, or a solution, which is thinking about You know, one is, I think, thinking about how much of this extraction do we really need?

So looking at, okay, I think on the one hand, recycling is a way to resolve that by saying you can extract it once, and then you can take a battery, you can take apart the battery, you can get out these valuable minerals, and in that recycling process, theoretically, you can get essentially all of the minerals back. And so I think that is an important component. I think we need to think about how that recycling is taking place.

Recycling is itself also Generally, either chemically intensive, energy- and emissions-intensive industrial process, which has its own host of implications. So I think we need to think about how recycling takes place. And also recycling can only handle batteries that essentially have already been extracted and made and reached their end of life.

And so I think alongside recycling, we also need to be thinking about what I was saying before of how much of this do we really need? So also I think public transportation, biking and walking are all ways to also Reduce extraction alongside recycling.

[KEN ALEX]

There’s a new sodium-ion facility, manufacturing facility in Sacramento.

[AUDIENCE MEMBER]

Oh, really?

[KEN ALEX]

Recently opened. So the US and California are getting into that, And there’s also California rules on recycling. Yes, sir.

[AUDIENCE MEMBER]

I take it as an article of faith. I don’t know why. I’m too old to have religion, but I do take it as an article of faith that from the 35,000-foot level, everybody looks down and says, “There’s going to be a green transition, or the place is going to burn up.”

So I’m working backwards from that transition, and one of the things that I can see is if I was a director of an energy company, I’d be scared shitless that my company is going to evaporate under me or be regulated out from under me if I don’t get ahead of the green transition wave. One of the things I’d do is I’d start looking like I was getting ahead of that wave, which is collecting a lot of disclosure information and shoving it out, but not using it because I don’t know how to use it. The proposition that everybody, whether they’re in the 90% or the 10% quartile, is high up in the communications and advocacy, but only the people in the 90% bracket are high up in the investment, is the tell.

Some people are doing it. Everybody’s talking about it. You seem surprised that the energy companies are the place where activity in this lithium extraction is occurring.

Why would you be surprised? It’s the same. If you look back at electric automobiles, yes, it’s true that Tesla tried to get ahead or maybe got ahead of the curve, but every automobile manufacturer on the planet is trying to figure out how to make an electrical vehicle that will sell because they’re figuring at some point we’re not going to be able to sell the other ones.

They’ve had problems. They’re not very good at it. They weren’t very good at figuring out how to do safety changes.

At some point, the government came in and said, “We got to do this. You’ve got to do this, and we’re going to mandate that everybody’s got to do it so that nobody is disadvantaged by it.” Seems to me, if you roll all that together, the inevitability of transition, the fact that everybody’s collecting information, but only some people are investing in it, The fact that some people are going to lose their industries if they don’t get on top of it.

The thing that’s missing is government saying, “You must do these things. You must reach these standards. You must reach these plateaus.”

[KEN ALEX]

Well, actually, in California, there’s a requirement for no combustion engines by 2035. So that was

[AUDIENCE MEMBER]

Well, it’s something like that.

[KEN ALEX]

overruled by the Trump administration, that’s now being litigated. But let me ask… Janna, about stranded assets.

I mean, the coal industry did not report the fact that a lot of their assets on their spreadsheet ended up, at least in the US, being fairly stranded. Have you looked at all within fossil fuel set of issues around whether reporting on stranded assets and what that might mean and how companies look at those things?

[JANNA ZOU HUANG]

Yeah, I haven’t done a lot of in-depth on that because, the focus of my more sectoral analysis is specifically more on utilities versus finance, but I haven’t looked as much on coal. But I think, just from talking to experts, in the field, I think there’s sort of two things. So one is basically, no, the stranded assets are just kind of going unreported.

There’s very little… Yeah, there’s, I think, definitely a lot of undercounting that’s happening. And then actually something that I was thinking about too is that from the investment side, because I think I was describing about how investors got on board with wanting this information.

It seems like investors want to go green, and that’s just definitely not true in actual investment portfolios. They’re kind of having it both ways, kind of the additional… What is it, like, not transition, but green addition kind of thing where the like green index funds are like tacked on to existing, like investments in oil and gas and like coal and more like fossil fuel- based industries.

And so, yeah, because I think there was a period where like some of the like more activist investors like wanted to like go all green. That was just not super, not as profitable at all compared to, you know, like the fossil fuels. So they’ve kind of like tried to do both.

Still mostly like fossil fuel, I think, at this point. But… Yeah, so I think, I guess my conclusion, with this is that I think there was a wave where investors were more curious about this information.

I think now, at the end of the day, yeah, we have to have an environmental regulator actually regulate this data because the only regulator we have for this is still the financial community, and they’re also not experts on climate.

They’re finance guys at the end of the day. So, yeah, it’s like everyone’s doing something, but no one is an expert. Yeah.

[SHAILA]

Yeah. Thank you so much for the amazing presentation, and thank you. Congratulations on your research.

So I’m Shaila. I’m a student of Master of Climate Solutions with Rausser College of Natural Resources. I’m also an environmental lawyer.

I have long experience working within the UN mechanism, particularly, especially on the sustainability, bringing the ESG governance perspectives, but I basically worked with MDBs, the multilateral development banks, but on the development side of this part. So… I have questions both for August and for Zena.

So I was just thinking the green transition related capacity that we are discussing at this moment, how much those are actually the just transitions and whether the corporate climate strategy, they are considering equally the community aspects and the environmental impacts that is happening because of their climate-related Interventions, I mean, within their whole supply value chain of any products. And at the same time, I’m doing an independent research, especially about the climate risk disclosure. So I was just looking into the deeper of the SB 261 from California, the climate risk disclosure from the regulatory aspects, and also the SB 253 about the emission reporting.

So I was just trying to see, because till now the disclosure is at voluntary level, but who In fact, are responsible to act on this. We are talking about maybe there should have a role of the duty bearer. Maybe like within the corporate, I mean, within their supply chain, who is basically responsible?

I mean, they are coming up with the sustainability reporting. But I was looking into the wildfire situations and also found that the insurer and insurance company, they are exempt from the SB 261 and also from SB 253. So when any incident happen, actually, we don’t have any duty bearer to act on this, even for the sustainability reporting.

I mean, this is totally on part of the company’s side. And also, this is a little bit frustrating that at this moment SB 261 is hold by the Ninth Circuit decision. So what the future awaits and How do you see that this disclosure can create a kind of practices or kind of implications that this should link with some sort of act, even from the public agency or from the corporate?

So just a broader questions, but like to know your thoughts on this. Thank you.

[AUGUST R. JACOBSEN]

Yeah, so just very briefly, we don’t focus too much on the extent to which firms consider community interests, and my general sense of this, not really being an expert on it, is that To really understand that aspect of the green transition, one have to look partially at unions and their ability to create, to demand just transitions, procedural justice, and these kinds of elements, which you have seen in Spain and other places. Then in the US, then obviously the federal government and the Democratic Party is very important. There were several Really interesting parts of the Inflation Reduction Act, and even the CHIPS Act to a certain extent that had these community provisions.

So yeah, I would be happy to discuss afterwards, but I think that’s more where it’s at.

[KEN ALEX]

So I think we’ll wrap up there and join me in thanking the panelists.

(applause)

Thank you all.

[AUGUST R. JACOBSEN]

Yeah.

(“Music: 80/90” by Arjun Sen)

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