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[Music] cleaning up is brought to you by the libric foundation and the gillardini foundation hello my name is michael lubrick and this is cleaning up my guest this week is james cameron not the director of titanic but james cameron the barrister the expert in trade the former chair of climate change capital the bank uh he's a friend of cop 26 and one of the leading figures in the global climate action community please welcome james cameron [Music] so james thank you very much for joining us here on cleaning up cheers my pleasure cheers what are you drinking in there it looks fantastic i am drinking a porter a nice dark beer made by a maid of mine he has a pub in hampshire uh which uh has a little brewery attached to it it's called the flower pots and it's a very fine pint of porter wonderful and do you know what we're going to come back to sort of you as a member of the establishment i think uh later in this conversation okay james now i want to dive straight in because you are something called a friend of cop 26 whatever that is um what is cop 26 and what is a friend of cop 26 give us the short version very good well cop 26 is the conference of the parties it's the 26th conference of the parties which is the parties to the un framework convention on climate change 1992 it was signed at the earth summit in rio negotiations began just before that and it's been going on ever since and it's a kind of rolling international negotiation with all of the countries of the world around a notional negotiating table to try and come up with a a global agreement on how we're going to deal with climate change and this is we had the famous copenhagen cop which was regarded generally as a failure and then we had the paris cop which is what resulted in the paris agreement the paris copenhagen was 15 paris was 20 uh was 21 and this is now you are the friend of 26. yeah we're five yes five years gap to paris and each year there is a president of the process so obviously what's the french in paris it's now us the uk it's been weird because it's covered year and so everything's been postponed suspended to next year in glasgow in scotland and the uk is president it has uh as in all presidents have a kind of triumvir they work with the past president and a future president to try and have some sort of continuity and seamlessness between the roles the role of the president is to shepherd the negotiations towards agreement that agreement is prepared well in advance by the international civil servants in the secretariat which is in bonn in germany and that process is just vast not only is it 190 odd countries but each event every year attracts thousands and thousands of uh observers and other delegates it's a kind of trade fair attached to a formal law-making process attached to a a kind of gravitational pull for people who work on climate change have careers associated with climate change it's a pretty remarkable experiment like a living experiment in how you might do something like global governance not global government but a a a kind of a un process that is open enough to draw in ideas and resources from outside the sovereign states themselves and one of the things that a presidency always does is it separates out its national delegation to focus that delegation on its national interests and builds a presidency team focused on the global interests and they're generally taking advice from outside their civil servants right to them are you a friend of the national lot presidential lot i'm a friend and a friend the first the phrase friends is a way of i think communicating that we're not salaried we're not staff we're not civil servants we have distance but we are friendly to the presidency not the uk delegation but the uk presidency of the whole and the president the the president is well the the individual who is yes the current individual is uh the secretary of state for for our business and uh energy and enterprise and industry uh department who's called alok sharma right right right right okay very good um and and we're going to come back to um your role in i guess in previous cops because uh when you said that the whole process started in uh 1992 with the earth summit but your own involvement in climate uh diplomacy goes back beyond that but we'll get back to that because i want to start off another sort of thread running here and that is trade because uh you've been deeply involved in trade and sustainability really the development of the whole kind of theoretical basis of that uh and this is an extraordinary time is it not because you know we've got the brexit negotiations going on in parallel and i guess in some ways perhaps uh in conflict or in in support of cop26 we've got the brexit negotiations and the uk's first trade deals as an independent nation after 46 or seven years um so i guess that i'll turn that into a question is it in conflict with cop26 or is trade going to support cop26 as a matter of law the there is there is a uh a way of arguing convincingly for trade to support the multilateral agreement called the paris agreement on climate change and indeed another set of commitments that we call the sdgs the sustainable development goals but actually the source of that authority is within the trade regime it's not something externally imposed upon it the members of the wto have developed a practice over the years that recognizes that their members will be members of other international agreements and they need to be taken into account when the disciplines of trade law are applied and there's also always been scope for the members of the wto to set standards which may differ from other members of the wto and therefore cause some trade frictions provided they don't do that in a discriminatory way basically provided they don't abuse that right okay so sorry go ahead i just want to gloss and make sure that i've understood because i'm not a trade law expert although i've worked on a lot of these issues and i'm a member of the board of trade so i want to make sure that i'm understanding this threat so what you're saying is you know the countries enter into something like the paris agreement and the wto then doesn't say wait a minute that goes against trade law what they will actually try to do is adjust the body of law or the practice of it to support these this other uh they have their own rules and their own practices which allow them to align trade law with the commitments that their members make in other foreign like climate change now it's not to say that that just declaring that takes away all conflict right it doesn't in fact there are dispute settlement mechanisms inside the wto that have been grappling with these conflicts between trade and environment regimes for years and sometimes with real difficulty because the trade-offs are hard to do and you would appreciate that sometimes the departments of state uh even the individuals that do one set of negotiations don't do the other and they have turf battles and so you have a kind of conflict between perfectly legitimate arguments in two separate branches of international law and they need to be resolved all i'm saying is that they they can be resolved they should be resolved and the trade regime is perfectly capable of supporting the commitments made under the paris agreement and consistent with the sdgs and that there are dispute settlement mechanisms to deal with those circumstances when that conflict is too hard to resolve without the appellate body of the wto which is the supreme adjudicative body in the wto deciding on which side to fall on your particular case james let's start with the easy stuff right which is around trade liberalization because there the goals of the paris agreement and the goals of the wto are very much aligned right because there's if you whether you take wind turbines electric vehicles solar panels they all benefit from these global supply chains the free flow of technology talent finance they push down the costs it helps the paris agreement and the wto love it because it's all about trade right so that's the easy bit um do you see lots of is that a is that a position that's well understood and and um you know are there initiatives around the world that are sort of trying to harness the power of trade to help achieve the sustainable and climate goals look there's no doubt that trade liberalization a properly regulated global regime to facilitate trade to enable supply chains to work effectively and they do that in many different ways some very technical very dull and very precise rules that have to be implemented that makes it much easier easier in the sense of quicker and we are in a race with climate change and better in the sense of cheaper and available to more people around the world to use the technologies that we know can reduce greenhouse gas emissions and in all sorts of ways whether it's power systems or more efficient products that are traded every every day so it's it's really clear that there is that alignment of interest between the two regimes and it's also true that the wto can do more to continue to reduce ludicrous barriers to trade where they exist and some really are quite mad and can also use other devices trade facilitation managing supply chains more effectively etc etc all can be done and indeed there have been some real advances on the way trade can uh if you like clear away the barriers to the deployment of the technologies that we need to deal with with the climate change issue it doesn't always work though because i was very involved a few years back trying to shepherd through from the world economic forum agenda council right the way through uh this environmental goods agreement and the wto actually stepped in put its shoulder to the wheel but failed to produce an agreement and now i believe there's something called accts which is the agreement on climate change trade and sustainability being pushed but by a very small group of nations isn't that right yes that's true and and it's it's true there are there are some there's been some real failures to deliver on good ideas that was one of them i remember very clearly i remember i remember being with you at the world economic forum when those ideas were advanced and they're good ideas and it's true that even in seattle some people on this might remember the riots in seattle the tear guy i got tear gassed in seattle trying to get into the building when i was doing work as a kind of independent advisor running between the delegations of the eu and the us actually partly because of my my role at yale and you know we very nearly got an agreement on environmental goods and services then and it was actually agriculture that prevented the the overall agreement in seattle and there isn't a good enough appreciation i don't think amongst those who are advocates for action on climate how much is delivered by an effective trade regime a highly positive contribution to the delivery of that public good however it isn't straightforward the wto is a weakened institution today it's not functioning as well as it could do it's not agreed uh any major new agreement for years and we actually need it to be made stronger and more effective and one of the ways i'd like to see it made stronger and more effective is to take some of these ideas on what the trade system can do for sustainability and really go for it and really drive it i mean take away fossil fuel subsidies for example that's that should be happening the wto should do that in principle it can in practice it has not and it does strike me that there's a bit of a sort of pr war to be won because there is um this sense that trade is bad for poor countries and for the poorer people within countries and you know i um a couple of days ago i pulled the sustainable development goals the actual texts down in the details and you know where trade is mentioned there's a bit of sort of generic waffle about you know trade is good trade bring you know trades a good thing we need a framework for it but a lot of the mentions the specific mentions of trade are all about how developing countries need to be sort of almost like protected from the ravages of trade it's not kind of okay let's plant our our tent on this piece of land that says trade is one of the ways we're going to make people wealthy and deal with climate and sustainability the sustainable development goals are very um very very luke not even lukewarm they're cold on that to be honest cold but the the the language is often um compromised you know there's a subordinate clause that weakens the effect of the first part of the sentence that are afraid is the consequence of trying to negotiate those rules around 190 countries at very different stages of development with very different points of view actually i don't think you can come to a categoric you know trade is favorable to development in all circumstances i mean we've got loads of examples from our own economic history when actually protectionism was quite useful for fledgling industries um and i i don't think there is a it's a fundamentalist position worth holding on to here but i do agree that there's a lack of coherence in some of the critique when you have a look at uh particularly when you see where power is shifting in the world right now uh the geopolitics of trade has shifted dramatically not least since china's joining the wto and the the power of those uh large so-called developing countries are actually many have many stages of development within them all of those countries are now major players in the trading system and have an effect on how the system is run and yet sometimes they're treated this is their poor poor poor developing countries and they need somehow to be looked after by somebody else which i think is pretty patronizing there is a there is a straightforward dilemma though there is a constituency that fears trade because it fears the competition in trade and there's another constituent that fears trade because they feel like it undermines other social values or environmental values that are that require protection in law and communities need to be protected from competition because their welfare will not be advanced and you know that this is often split in a kind of ideological separation which i would really like to break down and i i this long history in this let's face it you know look at look at the 19th century battle is over over trade liberalization uh and the conflicts between yes yeah i mean i i don't know whether you're ready for this but i've i've threatened to bring out tom paine at this stage oh bring out tom paine i bring out tom paine absolutely so so you tom payne a scourge of monarchists um and you know a genuine revolutionary not just in the uk but in france and in the us where he was highly influential on the us constitution but if i just read a passage to you from tom payne 1782 right which i think is directly relevant to how we should conceive of the value of trade or commerce with a capital c as it's called in his pamphlets right so you know he's they're sitting right in the heart of the american revolution and explaining that commerce trade was among the more powerful forces shrinking the world and binding together its nations as never before the peaceful unifying effects of commerce within nations had been noted by others pain but few had seen the parallel civilizing effects of commerce among nations of the world commerce on a global scale for instance between countries like france the united states specializing in the production and export of certain commodities had made it clear that the sea was the world's highway and the war among states was senselessly destructive world trade was also beginning to multiply citizens wants taste buds and fashions are slowly becoming cosmopolitan this necessitated their satisfaction through tighter integration of national economies international business quote in itself a moral nullity close quote was having the paradoxical effect of laying the foundation for a new cosmopolitan morality of freedom and equality of citizens in all lands once again you know tom payne bloody marvelous language the point of entry for me fabulous because i see trade as a force for unifi unifying people for bringing people together in commerce for creating a greater distribution of wealth prosperity and the advancement of the human condition i think it's a hugely positive force and it is not often expressed that way in the context of environment and uh and climate change issues and i agree entirely i angry i'm totally on board with that um that that perspective i guess um when i sort of critique the sdgs all i'm looking at saying well you know it'd be nice if that was the sort of overarching vision and then because trade does have some you know it's not all good i'm not talking about just sort of unregulated in all at all times in all places but it'd be nice if it was kind of trade is good and then let's deal with the you know the minority of situations where it doesn't work rather than trade is to be feared trade is bad i suppose we have to put up with a bit of trade uh let's not make it too painful yeah um no i'm with you in that but if you interrogate the language of trade law which can believe me having done it and been in those trials is quite a stretch for most people but if you go to the general principles which actually is what decides the main cases people should know that yeah the stuff that the limitless schedules and econometric analysis of who's done what where and what that's tough to access but but non-discrimination yeah but you know abuse abuse of positions in the marketplace right unfairness and and you know really shoddy arguments for protecting an interest against another who should have the capacity to you know they're not difficult to understand yeah and most of the big cases are about that right now um let's come to one of those situations which might not be quite so straightforward where you might have one country that's really pushing ahead dealing with climate has priced carbon and is off on a net zero trajectory and there's another one that hasn't and so now there's a lot of discussion about carbon border adjustments and the eu has said that they're going to propose some early next year and implement them by 2023. uh president-elect biden i can now say that because he's now been pretty much it's now pretty certain uh has previously said that he's likely to do the same um does that worry or how do we make sure that that is not something that kind of leads to a spiral unwinding of trade and all the good things that you've just listed and and quoted the great uh uh thomas paine about yeah that's a very real a very real very live political and legal problem that's going to have to be resolved it's not new it's been talked about for many many years in principle the idea works so do we need i mean let's start with do we really need carbon border adjustments is there a way around it or are we going to have to go there sooner or later all right let's let's deal with stages the the situation you suggest is is a real one where there are differences between countries on how they implement their international obligations under the paris agreement what methods they choose and there are there are consequences on trade certainly if you price carbon and you put sometimes you put your industry at risk of a competitive disadvantage with another country and you trade with that country across your border you might want to equalize uh the difference between your regulated industry and theirs by putting a tax on that product when it crosses your border and you can do that it is a legitimate defense if you like and i and i know it is going to be reached for by those countries including the eu probably the uk too who want to do that who've got you know we've got a climate change act we've got a net zero strategy and we want industry here to feel like it can compete fairly with industry in other parts of the world okay the practical application of a principle like that is really quite hard because you've got to be very accurate about what it is that you're targeting and much of what you're concerned about is generally taking place in that other jurisdiction i mean how they make the product as opposed to the product itself crossing your border and that's always been difficult uh for the trade system to accommodate because this isn't just it's this is it it's steel it just looks like steel but they've made it in a different way and somehow you therefore need to extend your your information all the way back into another country correct and actually information is a nice thing to pick up on there because in in in one sense the country that is not regulating uh the pollution associated with making the steel is effectively subsidizing the steel and we the rest of the world are picking up the price for them not regulating the emissions because we have one atmosphere and we all experience the consequences of climate change wherever we are in the world so it's clearly wrong in principle for there to be a trade between the country that's not dealing with the problem and trade with the country that is but doing it in practice is not straightforward because you're effectively you are requiring that country to do something and it's really difficult for you to enforce it and and actually also many of the things that are if you like the methods of producing those products um you know are just beyond your control they're in that other country and you've got to get them to regulate it and you're not going to send in some enforcement mechanism to force them to do it and so you have you have to track the flow in those goods and not all the things you would be worried about are actually crossing your border anyway steel might be one of them aluminium might be one of them uh other forms of chemical production with cultural produce because that's going to be you know in in a sense steel aluminum that's quite relatively simple because there's only a few you know there's only a few commodities like that ceramics maybe but then when you get to agriculture i mean that goes across the borders all the time in terms of in the form of food and agricultural commodities and of course that's you know farmers don't have there's not a lot of fat in that system um you know so if if somebody's being undercut by relatively small amounts that's it they can no longer produce their margins are horrendous and they're feeling very vulnerable right now and you will know here in the uk that is a live everyday editorial of the times yesterday uh problem that that we are experiencing because we are regulating our agricultural sector we are re-incentivizing the stewardship and management of land in this country after brexit we're establishing our own rules after we've come out of the common agricultural policy and we're trying very hard to make that set of incentives advantage nature-based solutions to climate change carbon sequestration in soils using public money to pay for public goods and it that is a whole new regime with new costs uh and and and the the agricultural sector is very nervous about taking on that change whilst we're negotiating trade agreements with the rest of the world and we are doing that do you want to you are going to ask a question just coming back to yeah i want to come back to border carbon border adjustments in agriculture because in a sense if we're paying farmers to sequester carbon and we're paying them to do whatever you know uh biodiversity uh things that help that biodiversity and so on do we still need carbon border adjustments to protect them because shouldn't they be being remunerated through that system so they can then still produce their commodities at an affordable price and shouldn't need then a protectionist you know mechanism or a mechanism like carbon border adjustment or am i missing no no you're not i mean of course it's a complex story it depends what it is and and the percentage of the value of the uh of the of the the sector which is associated with trade and its vulnerability to the importation of of goods um that they can't compete with on price so the this it's a very complex space and so yes we are going to provide public money to help them do those things that we want them to do for public goods purposes like nature conservation but equally uh they're about to be exposed to to a kind of competition with the us for example where in some parts of the agricultural sector the standards are very different um and we will struggle to compete uh on on cost certainly so these are these the fact is that you can use ball attack adjustment you could even use bullet tax adjustment with a carbon element because a lot of inputs into agriculture that are carbon based everything from you know diesel to to fertilizers and the like you can do that in a non-discriminatory way you can also negotiate a treaty uh trade treaty with the u.s that ensures that there isn't a race to the bottom on standards right so and and nafta the north american free trade agreement has such a provision that that says you can't just drive standards down and try and compete with the lowest possible standards and we don't want that so you can you can negotiate a clause that prevents a race to the bottom and that's got to be the kind of where the real clever resides is is turning the trade system into something that engenders a race to the top that doesn't come from trade because then we lose all those benefits that tom payne and you have been so eloquent about but you know if we do have it just as a race to the bottom the cheapest this the cheapest that and and damn the standards we can sort of just many of the good things about this planet goodbye so there's a lot of clever there's some clever hacking to be done right and the way you put that is ideal because because that explains the elevation of the the planetary boundaries natural systems on which life depends uh climate change if not uh dramatically the risk dramatically reduced puts all of us at risk that's why you can elevate that up and say your trade disciplines need to support a well-regulated regime but let me push you in practice and we i don't want to run out of time in practice can you name a few of the things that you therefore do and i'm thinking about okay what do you do when you're negotiating with the us what do you do also when you're negotiating with a developing country um you know who might see a carbon border adjustment or something else as a kind of rich man's protectionist mechanism you know we're uh a way of keeping out our you know sugar our wheat our you know whatever the commodity might be so two so give us a few things uh that you can build into these deals so you you make sure that the the entire agreement is oriented around uh delivering these commitments that have been made at the global level on climate change and sustainable development goals that's just general principle won't get you the solution then you reaffirm the well-established principle that you you can adopt non-discriminatory measures at your border to ensure that the trade that you have between states operates fairly in in the full sense of that word and helps deliver those objectives you can include a avoidance of pollution haven or race to the bottom clauses so that you don't drive standards down you could establish you mentioned before information flows you can have information requirements for products across borders that disclose uh if you like that components of your product either labeling or esg standards or things that help inform the consumer are you building those things into your ftas your free trade agreements or your trade agreements or are they are you doing sort of are you doing stuff at the wto on a different platform okay old dilemma i happen to be a very committed multilateralist but as we're about to find out i'm also interested in getting stuff done and sometimes you do that in smaller groups so this is an old and difficult dance between the truly global and the wto has principles called most favored nation principle for example that encourages any bilateral agreement to be multilateralized however because in the last few years the wto has not been a very effective institution we now have dozens of these dam agreements everywhere bilateral agreements regional agreements and it's a bit of a mess so i would love it if the wto was reinvigorated and its dispute settlement system reinvigorated which is the best protection for the weak against the strong if that rather less powerful country in the trading system is outraged at an abuse of an environmental protection measure and they know it's nothing to do with the environment it's to protect an industry and they're being unfairly kept out i want them to go to the w-chair i used to represent developing countries in the wto that system works but it needs investing in well it's it's a difficult time for that system because yeah they've been you know there have been voices uh some very powerful voices in fact one the most powerful voice in the world who's now no longer the most voice in in the world he's actually busy uh filling couple boxes um but who's been trying to undermine that system on the on the premise that it is an infringement of sovereignty uh is the wto and there are voices in this country who think that the wto is an infringement of sovereignty and you know we're out of the eu and we need to be out of the wto or we need to pith it and turn it into something useless what do you say to those people you can't eat sovereignty it's sovereignty is a concept the rule of law is a better concept to think about if you want to have good effective trading relations you have to make and keep a contract that has to happen at a private level but also at a governmental level you have to honour those contracts they have to be enforced there's no point making promises you don't intend to keep so you have to build robust institutions to do that if you want a global trading system that functions effectively you have to invest in the institutions including the law making and law enforcement part of those institutions your sovereignty can be pulled shared distributed you don't have a hundred of sovereignty and you lose five if you do a trade agreement and and then sovereignty is not the same as power if you want power in the world and you don't have all of it yourself you combine with others and if you are really serious about tom payne type delivery of well-being and prosperity to your citizens you want to increase your power by participating in a system a trading system that delivers you real world everyday food on the table benefits yeah and it strikes me that you know as we leave the the eu in the uk um you know we don't want to be in the u.s block we're not in the eu block we don't want to be in the u.s block i would suspect we very much don't want to be in the china block and so and and then it seems a bit fanciful to think we can be in our own block on any sort of equal so therefore the more there's a rule-based system the more we can sort of use it we're quite good at kind of manipulating we've got good lawyers don't we got people we've got your former colleagues at uh baker mckenzie and all over the place that are pretty good at this stuff right but but you know yes with a capital y in emphasis exactly as you describe it but that regime that we helped to build we put a lot of effort a lot of time and lawyers and economists and much diplomacy and much much care for the whole of the system yes we were good at it and we had a a several hundred year history of successful trading sometimes sometimes with the barrel of the gun but we but we did understand that you need to build effective institutions that you do need the rule of law the wto has a permanent civil service which is actually offers a really good service to those countries that may not have um much in the way of trade resource themselves i i for a while represented sierra leone in the wto they had no mission they that the poor guy i work with had to take the night train from brussels to go to the event i did it pro bono but he could rely upon the secretariat to give him really valuable material to help him represent his country so i i want that institution strengthened i'd love the uk to be a part of that strengthening i'd like us to really commit to it and then you can build coalitions of interest within it yeah including on this subject build a bill try and get fossil fuel subsidies removed by working with new zealand and switzerland and other countries you want that to happen james you bring up a really good point uh about well you use the example of sierra leone and you know as we build this very sophisticated system that has trade at its heart but taking into account climate taking into account biodiversity the other planetary boundaries isn't there a risk that that effectively acts as a a barrier to countries like sierra leone or countries in the developing world and what what do we what is our responsibility to them within the global trade system to make sure that doesn't happen i'm thinking of things like aid for trade but i don't yet know exactly what that means yeah i'm a bit wary of that phrase because it's freighted and comes with a long history of disagreement um i would say there's two answers one we've touched on before if you build a good robust the cliche you're afraid it's often used rule-based rules-based system if you build the driver built strength in wto to settle disputes on behalf of the weak against the strong to run efficient processes to have a civil service there to help countries uh better look after their interests that's all very good i also think they those countries who have very little representation there do need to be supported uh they need to build up their capacity to look after their trade interests the more they do that the more effective they will be the more they'll be able to join in that system and and not be at a disadvantage the other thing is that the wto comes with all sorts of other methods and means to facilitate trade at the global level and that needs investing in you know we have we have some great institutions uh in this country uh that can really help there you know we have the crown agents and not people know about the crown agents but they do amazing work you know connecting uh procurement and supply chains for countries like sierra leone for example uh they they do a brilliant job and they'll be doing a brilliant job in the next period of time delivering vaccines uh to to people who are in need so there's a there's a whole once you properly understand that the moral virtue and and day-to-day value in an effective trading regime which will have rules attached to it which is not a free market in any sense of the word it's a regulated space for commerce and allows countries to give full expression to their hopes of a more prosperous uh and and and you know a life extending beyond their current circumstances through the ability to trade with others so i i wanted to get on to uh for those nations also you know we talked about border carbon adjustments carbon border adjustments um and of course in an ideal world um those countries would be helped to invest in their own production so that their their production will be as low carbon as ours and we wouldn't have to apply the border adjustment um but rather than dive into that in the interest of times i suspect you would you would agree that that's a a good thing to do but in the interesting time i want to actually take a step back because you've done more than just trade in your career and um i want to take this opportunity and if we go back to when you and i first met you were a banker who created an investment business with a mission and purpose focused on climate change called climate change capital i was very careful actually or the people other people call me a banker and i i don't mind it just isn't really real i i just wanted an institution to exist that would channel uh capital and provide good advice to those who were interested in dealing directly and and and effectively with the climate change issue and that was that climate change capital for those who you know for those who are sort of relatively new to the space because it's not around in its own anymore but it was a pioneering was the first bank totally focused on um on getting assets to work that would accelerate climate action and you did a whole bunch of really pioneering deals did you not yeah yeah we did we did we were formed in 2002 um we had we had an amazing growth it's a great story actually you know yale yale school of management to have a case study on climate change capital lots to learn from it including you know ups and downs and you know how not to do the end game but there is a there is a uh there's a lot of very good stories of very talented people brought into it who and who who still stay connected you can you know there's a climate change capital alumni that's amazing and they talk to each other and and do business together and they've done some have done amazing things since uh we everything we did was the first of its kind uh we had the first private sector uh investment fund focus on the price for carbon global fund a lot of the month a lot of that money went went to china and we probably invested over a billion dollars in emission reduction projects of all different types across china uh we had the first uh climate change themed property fund we had a climate change themed private equity fund focused on technology and we had a thriving advisory business that uh did a lot of the early renewable energy deals oddly enough usually selling bits out of big energy companies like shell and bp um but also uh building portfolios of renewable energy assets for investors that was great and here's a um a a little a little known biographical detail of my own which is that when i launched new energy finance um we didn't have an office i was actually working out of my garage and a friend's uh um not living room but uh conference room and i needed a place to launch and um one of your co-founders uh uh gareth hughes who's also an investor in new energy finance um he offered your conference room and i remember sitting there looking at your artwork which would cost more than the entire database behind new energy finance so i do feel that we've been really closely linked in this journey we have since 2000 and this was true i wish i'd invested i wish i'd invested but the the thing is that the that that was part of the community that we had we really wanted to help anybody who had a good idea that could be advanced that we thought would we know would make a difference in the world and yours was one of those ideas and we were very canny about our properties we were very good very good at finding properties um at the right time at the right price and so and we you mean rental you mean office properties you you know because there's a thing there isn't that you know what we didn't want when we started we did not want to look worthy and and deeply deeply green and nice right we thought why the hell should we do that this is about investing in the future and as if it mattered and so we'll play that game we'll make sure we're situated even though we haven't got a beam we've just started we're going to present ourselves as being in the world of do you remember do you remember um you know we had this we had a lot of fun also in the early days too it was a great fun organization to be in it was a really good atmosphere that we built there and we had this byline or or you know theme for our philosophy i didn't know called creating wealth worth having right and it started as a joke amongst ourselves um but actually it kind of worked and it worked in other languages in china for example that's so funny because we had on this show uh shah i think it was episode 15 or sometime around then and he had this saying which was uh creating climate wealth and he was very focused on the financial wealth that that uh he and his business models were to create uh but there was you in mayfair pretending to be a a very mainstream member of the establishment i told you would get back to that uh uh and um and meanwhile i was on the kensal road with about 15 interns crammed into a former chocolate factory entering all this data into computers and hoping nobody would notice that that that we didn't you know own a suit between us my old suits from mckinsey had got holes in them a very different way to build a business yeah but you could do very radical things in a suit if you want to and you know frankly it was part of how we wanted to present ourselves uh and and we wanted to we wanted to stop this trading off of uh environment versus economy we were proud of creating wealth worth having wealth is a good word it's a word you know think adam smith you know adam smith properly read not adam smith you know affiliated for what anyway you know that wealth is a strong word it's a word of generosity yeah and and it appears across borders you know it's understood in other languages it's not a mean thing at all but that phrase you've just used doing radical things in a suit i mean that's almost that's almost your strap line is it not because you go back to your legal days you were you know with one of the great uh firms but you were doing radical things in a suit weren't you because you were writing you were writing uh opinions for greenpeace on on all sorts of things you you law review articles on stuff that nobody'd ever thought about i mean yeah now it's important to point out that i did all of that as an independent barrister i would not have been able to do all that radical stuff if i'd been a partner in a law firm i was of counsel to baker mckenzie and i kept my independent status but i did something very unusual which is that i helped build a business within a business i i saw the baker mckenzie venture as just that an entrepreneurial venture within a law firm and i couldn't have done it without martine wilder and rick sainz and others but i did help build that sense that we our group our practice group on clean energy and climate change was doing something more worthwhile than merely collecting billable hours and i'm convinced that that worked you know i couldn't have done i couldn't have been it wouldn't have been successful if the others didn't know how to play the game inside the economy of a law firm i had the luxury of independence i could go and do something else i always taught law and i always practiced law as an independent barrister and i could i had immense intellectual freedom which meant i also created my own organization so the center for international environmental law foundation of international environmental law development even the ones that were not about law carbon disclosure project there was some sense in which my professional background was helpful to those enterprises and yes i did i wrote the first law review article on state responsibility for climate change i built up the coalition with my colleagues of the alliance of small island states and negotiated the international treaties all of them all from the very beginning and yeah i did that in a suit but everything everything i did what was effectively a form of advocacy and i would argue that even today the things that i do even with the businesses the startups that i work with they're all a form of advocacy when you say advocacy of an advocate has got a it's a fabulous word right but i tend to avoid it because i want to be seen as an analyst and somebody very you know if i were using advocate everybody say oh you know he's just promoting this promoting that but but you're sort of promoting this promoting that but advoca you know an advocate is also a legal um yes a legal person is an advocate right that's right and there's a certain amount of expectation um that you will be uh accurate and disciplined and authoritative when you speak yeah and so i i felt that that was an important attribute to promote i i wanted to be independent i wanted to be capable of being listened to by someone across a divide i think of myself as an empathetic person are probably very idealistic at root about the capacity for human beings to to to be uh fundamentally good and i and i am trusting and sometimes that's difficult in commercial negotiations or diplomatic negotiations but i believe it's allowed me to access a wide range of differing points of view and to avoid being captured in a particular box or to or to be overly comforted by a tribal view of the answer to things and one of the things i like very much about working with you or associating with you is you are hyper rational and analytical and you ask hard questions and you don't like softness of thinking i i work really well with people who have complementary skills to me i i have an optimism bias i work quite well with people who are skeptical who want to ask that extra detailed question when i've already felt good about the answer and and building enterprises beyond myself has allowed me to experience that and that's why i i'm still very fond of enterprise building otherwise i just i would have stayed a barrister an academic i've been on my own which is less satisfying so you say very kind things about me and it reminds me that we must find ways of doing more stuff together before we finish though i want to you talked about uh building some new new enterprises or and there's just one more that i want to measure to mention because um in your doing radical things in a suit you've gone through law you've gone through finance and banking you've gone through the negotiations the diplomacy the trade expertise and so there's one other that we cannot finish without mentioning and that is you were also involved in what is essentially the invention of sustainability and climate disclosure as well and that's the carbon disclosure project you know now everybody talks about disclosure the question's not whether we should do it it's just you know there's some details still to be tied up but you were in there right at the beginning how did that work i know i've got a lovely little little plaque up there which the boys the the two pools who paul dickinson all simpson paul dickinson and also the much missed and much loved tessa tennant yes of course they are the real founders but they rather sweetly include me as a co-founder because they came to me right at the beginning with their idea and i i persuaded them that they had to think of this as a global enterprise from the start that it wasn't much it wasn't of interest to me if they just went around a few uk pension funds and said you really ought to ask questions about climate i said no build something that's actually fit for a global capital market where you could actually track investment in companies all over the world and ask the questions that provide the information that a marketplace should have in order to make good sensible decisions about where to allocate their capital and um they went away and they did that i mean i know their origins are a bit like you in in uh kensal rise their origins in farringdon were not not glamorous um but they've done phenomenally well now it's a serious institution i was very proud to chair it for many years after tessa and you know it's done great work of course it needs to everything needs to push on now these metrics need to be applied they need to be relevant the data needs to be actionable every day in the financial system whether you care about climate change or not just because that's what you should do to make a decent judgment and we haven't quite got that but we are way way better off than we were when we started uh 20 years ago and of course the carbon disclosure project is part of the foundational architecture that's in place it's not perfect but it's but it's there and and can be uh can be perfected over time another little uh biographical note which is uh when they decided to put all of this data into a proper database they actually came to me and said i don't know how to do we don't know how to do that and it was my programmer who helped the new energy finance um yapsek who actually helped them to create the first web accessible data sets that uh that they then distributed yeah and obviously their relationship with bloomberg bloomberg's very important as well yes of course and you know and we now have uh mark carney and others around the bank of england still in the bank of england today and and other central banks saying we simply have to have disclosure as a mandatory requirement for belonging in our marketplace and and we always thought that that would be the point where cdp could retire yeah but actually cdp's gone on done other things with forest and water and it is essentially about getting better quality data analytics the raw information you need to understand how to make investments in the real world where these are factors that affect uh all of our allies and capacity to to live with you know within a system that needs capital to flow effectively james we're reaching the end of the time that uh we can expect anybody to watch or listen in to a conversation between the two of us uh i could continue for for hours no question you've done so many radical things in those those snappy suits of yours um so i'd like to thank you though for joining us here on cleaning up and i look forward to the next time our paths can cross in person after this damn pandemic is over wouldn't that be great well yes cheers cheers to that cheers bye-bye james so that was james cameron barrister trade expert advisor social entrepreneur talking about doing radical things in a suit we're nearing the end of this first series of cleaning up i started it over the summer at the height of the covid lockdown in order to connect with some of the great friends i've made over the years and share their stories with a broader audience we'll be back next year we've already got some amazing guests lined up so make sure you rejoin us for great conversations via youtube or your favorite podcast platform but before then we've got one more episode we'll be looking back at some of the great conversations that we've had over the past four months please join me for a festive episode next week of cleaning up if you've enjoyed this conversation please leave a review on your podcast platform give us a five star review if it's 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