4 Career Mistakes I Made That You Should Not

I joined the workforce just over a decade ago. In 2012, I “began my career”, whatever that means. Three years as a business journalist with Forbes, two as a Yale teaching assistant, three more as a reporter with Power Finance & Risk, and the last three as a marketer & researcher with RMI. Overall I think I’ve done OK: I get paid to live where I like and do what I love. 2012 me would gladly accept 2024 me. And yet I’ve made some poor decisions that have set me back, slowed me down, or limited my options. Here are four career mistakes I made that you may want to avoid.

1.      1. Conversational in several foreign languages, “business fluent” in none

This first one is a no-brainer. I learned French in school for nine years and got pretty good by the time I’d graduated high school. Instead of continuing it at university in England, I gave it up. Perhaps worse still, when I suddenly found myself doing a study abroad year outside Berlin, I studied German twice a week and tried to speak the language to locals as much as I could. I’d accidentally use French grammar in my German classes, but I picked up basic German quickly. On that study abroad year in Germany, I also tried to do informal weekly language exchanges with Spanish and Polish students. Despite having multiple languages floating around in my head, I left Germany able to carry a conversation at a Kreuzberg beerhall. I continued studying German, albeit halfheartedly in my final year of university in England. Then I forgot about German for three years. Then I spoke and studied it again for a year as part of my Masters program requirements and haven’t touched it since. Last year I took a beginner’s Spanish class in New York but again, my interest has waned because I haven’t found friends to practise it with. I like learning languages, not mastering them.

The result is that I can talk to taxi drivers, McDonalds cashiers, and confused tourists in Hindi, French, German and Spanish. I can even discern a newspaper headline here and there. But I can’t use any of those languages to further my career. It feels like effort wasted. I can’t write memos in any foreign language nor negotiate a commercial contract. I should have stuck to French—the language I’d invested nearly a decade learning—and taken it to full, “business fluency”. Le subjonctif be damned. I should have deepened my language skills, not broadened them. French fluency could have opened up a life in France or Europe more broadly. I wish someone had told me at 19 to do study abroad in France, so I’d have learned to love French culture and make French friends—two parts of my study abroad year in Germany that endeared German to me. In foreign language, perhaps more than any other professional skill sets, the world values specialists rather than generalists.

2.     2. Picked the wrong monetizable skills

Speaking of specialization, I think I sadly picked the wrong skills to develop all the way to “monetizability”. My most monetizable skills, I’d posit, are research and writing. Those are things I can do better than a competent, educated generalist and better (for now) than a machine. But, tragically, they are skills that few employers want to pay for and those that do, pay towards the bottom end of the salary spectrum. Media & communications, NGOs, government, maybe some consulting. Beyond that, there aren’t really research and writing careers. I should have picked different, more monetizable skills and acquired the credentials to monetize them. No one really wants to pay for good writing. Writing doesn’t make businesses money any more.

If you want to work in finance, you probably need an MBA and/or a CFA—not to mention securities licenses—to signal your monetizable skills: financial modeling, contract negotiations, closing deals. Doctors specialize early with medical degrees and so on. Lawyers have to pass the bar. Project developers—whether it’s real estate, energy, or infrastructure—build and showcase their project management skills by pointing to steel in the ground somewhere. Accounting firms hire accountants, tech giants hire coders. People who specialize to acquire discrete, monetizable skills get placed into high-paying, stable careers. I guess being a generalist, on the other hand, is more fun and intellectually stimulating. I did my Global Affairs Masters degree—a generalist degree if ever there was one—because I got a scholarship from Yale and I had to stay in journalism after I graduated because it’s the only job I could get a US work visa for. I’m only now starting to build different, more monetizable skills like people management and fund-raising; I should have begun this process years ago. Indeed, it’ll be years till I have achievements to show on those fronts.

3.      3. Applied for jobs when I was stressed

A colleague once told me never to change jobs simply to leave an employer, but rather to go toward something exciting, worthy, better. Twice in the same summer, I forgot that advice. I wanted to leave my job at the time because I was stressed and over-worked. Both prospective jobs were different to what I was doing at the time, meaning I’d need to prepare extra hard for the interviews. In practice, though, I didn’t really have the mind-space to pass those grueling job interview processes. In fact, I messed up two promising final round interviews because I was so stressed and frayed that, in one instance, I misread the final assignment prompt and, in the other, I submitted a simple writing exercise with a glaring, unforgiveable typo.

I felt so ashamed right after I'd hit submit. The one thing I’d been trained to do was read prompts, interpret briefs, write well, and edit better. I’d back myself to do that better than most. But now for both job interview processes, which happened months apart, I did the writing assignments late on weeknights or through my weekends, short of mental, physical, and emotional rest. I’d rushed through them, making simple mistakes. I wasn’t fully present when I was at work, nor when I was at home doing the assignments; when I was at work during the day, I was thinking about what I’d write in the assignment that evening or weekend – and vice versa. In truth, my day job wasn’t that bad, I simply hadn’t put in the effort to remedy it. I was eventually much happier at work just weeks later. Those two sets of job rejections were medicine: bitter and necessary.

4.      4. Comparing myself to others

This last one I need to get tattooed on my forehead so I never forget it. I habitually compare the weakest aspect of my job/career the strongest aspects of my closest friends’. For example, my best friends from grad school are now directors at tech giants, associate partners at consultancies, VPs at global financial institutions, making probably twice what I do, managing entire teams, bringing in millions or budgeting even more. Comparing myself to them is human nature and folly – a surefire way to diminish many of one’s own achievements while ignoring other wins altogether. Most importantly, what your friends do or earn also... doesn’t matter. They are operating within very different constraints—not my immigration & visa handicap, for one. They are older. They have different stressors and working hours. But even that does not actually matter.

I’ve found the best approach for a chronic seeker of self-development like me is to compare myself to where I was a year ago. Or better yet, where I was yesterday. That exercise surfaces so many of my own achievements (big and small). That’s the stuff that matters because that’s what you can control. That’s where to focus. I ended 2023 with an unimaginable new array of knowledge, accomplishments, networks, and competencies compared to where I’d begun it. And now I know what I need to do in 2024. As long as “last year you” is proud of “this year you” and “yesterday you” is proud of “today you”, you’re doing fine.

Conclusion

By the way, there were also some other things which didn’t go as planned, but I wouldn’t call those mistakes per se. I had no control over them. For example, I picked the wrong countries to try to emigrate to: first the UK and now the US both have disastrous immigration systems offering me little near-term hope for stability, never mind residency. I should have moved to Canada and gotten permanent residency like many friend, but I’m now too many years invested in America to ponder leaving for anything other than the “job of a lifetime” elsewhere. Another example is doing my grad school summer internship with an awesome little start-up that couldn’t offer me a full-time role upon graduation, rather than biting the bullet and getting a corporate internship that would almost guarantee a cookie-cutter, well-paying career eventually. I made those decisions with the best information I had available at the time, so I’d call those fair decisions with bad outcomes rather than mistakes.

So, to the students who reach out on LinkedIn for career advice every week: please make notes. To my friends and colleagues who’ve learned from their owns mistakes along the way, please share your wisdom and experiences too. I think career mistakes that teach you things are bitter medicine but medicine nonetheless. What medicine will the next decade of work hold? Nothing tattoo-worthy I hope.

The 3 Best Things I Learned at Policy School

I’ve reached that stage of life where I’m good at giving out advice, bad at receiving it from others, and worst by far at taking my own. Experts call this condition early onset Indian Uncle Syndrome—sadly a terminal condition. Occasionally, however, my advice is solicited.

Every year I do these ‘career panels’ for current Masters’ students at Yale’s Jackson School for Global Affairs, alongside some fellow alums. It’s a 1-hour facilitated discussion where you explain the meaning of life. It got me thinking. The two years I spent at Jackson were among my happiest. My Masters at Yale was sweet redemption for high school and undergrad, when I was lazy, distracted, and underachieving. At Jackson, my work ethic, my ambition, and my self-belief went to another level. I will never be the same. If graduate school changed who I am, studying public policy changed how I think. Here are three big ideas that have shaped how I approach the world.

1.     1. Difficult problems do not have simple solutions

Complexity is so irritating. We want a problem to be solvable by one action executed by one actor. We crave simplicity. We wish a prime minister could fix poverty with a phone call; we want our CEOs to solve pollution by corporate decree. In our intro stats class at Jackson, taught by the peerless Lloyd Grieger, we learned the world doesn’t work like that.

We learned why intractable problems are made up of many, smaller problems. And each of those smaller problems contribute, in varying degrees, to the bigger problem. And each of those smaller problems are addressed by different stakeholders. And none of those stakeholders agree on what to do. So, before one can begin solving a complex problem, one has to understand it. Welcome to “multivariate analysis”.

I remember Lloyd teaching us multivariate analysis using a demographic data set from South Africa. We had stats on a big group of South Africans’ race, gender, education level, and income. We used a software tool to change one variable and hold the others equal; if you compared the average 40-year-old, high school-educated Black South African man to the average 40-year-old, high school-educated White South African man, the Black South African would have a much lower income than his White countryman. If you took a 25-year-old, college-educated Black South African woman and a 25-year-old, college-educated Black South African man, the male South African earned slightly more than the woman. Something like that. You get the picture.

Lloyd taught us to quantify complexity. Suddenly, I could know things about big, scary, structural problems I had previously only felt. Poverty—a systemic problem in South Africa and much of the world—was caused by many different factors. Some factors worsened poverty more than others; some factors worsened it more for some groups than others.

So. How should we, class of 30 naïve public policy students masquerading as would-be South African policymakers, use our limited government budget to improve incomes as much as possible, for as many of the neediest people as possible? Lloyd helped us run the numbers. I think I remember, for example, that helping girls graduate high school yielded the biggest overall net increase in incomes. Maybe the best thing we could do to solve poverty in South Africa was to invest in teachers, build & maintain girls’ toilets, train principals and social workers, fund campaigns on female health and family planning, and so on.

Stats class changed how I saw the world. I realized that basically all social problems are intersectional: if there’s a problem facing society, the most vulnerable social groups would inevitably be worst impacted. Air pollution? Low-income women are usually hit hardest. The “best” solution, therefore, probably centers on them. And even that is only one of many complementary solutions to a tough problem.  

Now when I look at a complex “systems-problem”, like climate change or energy access in my day job at RMI, my mind wanders back to Lloyd’s stats class. When I’m at a big family dinner and verbose Indian uncles explain how Delhi’s smog or Bombay’s slums can be solved by the simple sacking of this bureaucrat or the appointment of that minister, my mind wanders back to Lloyd’s stats class. I wish everyone could take Lloyd’s stats class.

So many other ideas have flowed from that first set of realizations about the complex state of the world. I suddenly saw that in the “real world”, policymakers never have perfect options—only least bad options. Democracy may not be perfect, but it’s the least bad; liberal economics may not be perfect for developing countries, but it’s the least bad. The best leaders use idealism to set direction and pragmatism to steer the way; everything is a compromise and doing something is usually better than doing nothing; policymakers must make the tough decisions that bring the most benefit to the most people in the long run, while somehow staying in office; the best leaders know what to optimize for and that everything is a trade-off—they know how to thread that needle between politics and policy. Meaningful change is hard-fought and incremental.

Each of those ideas are essays/motivational posters unto themselves, but all they flowed from Lloyd’s gospel of multivariate analysis.

2.    2. Any solution starts with empathy

Tim Snyder—as in the historian Timothy Snyder—taught Jackson’s intro history class by making us pretend we were different world leaders approaching an oncoming war. Through this class, he taught me strategic empathy: the idea that to know what to optimize for, you have to know what your counterparts are optimizing for.

Whether it’s financing a nuclear power plant or negotiating peace talks between nuclear powers, it starts with putting yourself in the other sides’ shoes. It’s about understanding their motivations and then figuring out the areas of the most alignment and starting there. And when you’re dealing with a bad faith actor or someone who only interested in being an adversary, you have to be ruthless. You don’t want to use that option, but you must always have it. Just having power changes the dynamic. Tim Snyder’s history class showed me that understanding your allies is as crucial as understanding your adversaries; it starts by learning to think like them and then realizing why they feel what they feel.

Strategic empathy shapes how I think and how I work. As a journalist and marketer, I positioned my stories and messages for my readers and audiences because I knew what they wanted. The stuff I research today—the dire stalemate in international climate finance—makes sense when you view the complex equation from each side’s perspective. If people are not getting what they want, they’re not going to do what you ask them. Strategic empathy has helped me navigate every job interview and every dinner party conversation; when I’m meeting someone for the first time, I try to frame what I’m saying in terms they’ll resonate with. It’s made me a better listener and that’s made me a better thinker.

3.      3. Grad school lasts 2 years; grad school friendships last a lifetime

I’m still alive so maybe this one’s premature, but it’s I think it’s most valuable one of them all. In the five years since I graduated Jackson, my connection with my closest friends keeps getting stronger. Those friendships have sustained me in tough times—especially since I live thousands of miles from my family. Grad school friendships are magical, and I think I know why.

Policy school the most concentrated group of idealistic pragmatists you’ll ever find. The people who select into your policy program are probably more similar to you in acumen and aspiration then the people who selected into your company, undergraduate program or high school. You fit together. The admissions officer has filtered you into a tight little group of fellow nerds who look at big problems in the world hoping we can actually solve them. Though classmates come from vastly different backgrounds—I loved the ex-Marines as much as the ex-human rights activists—they all want to make a difference. They’re generally as curious as you, as well-read and well-traveled, and as passionate about fixing society. So, they can see you. They can really see who you are, what drives you, what scares you, better than almost any other cohort of colleagues you’ll find yourself in. They push you to be better because they know you can be, and they care for you when you’re down because they know you need it.

Then you graduate and you go to their weddings and hold their newborns and watch each other become adults. You help each other get groceries and like you help each other get new jobs. When I was lonely and sick last winter, a Jackson friend brought soup to my apartment. She brought soup! To my apartment! No matter how prestigious your company, they’re probably not bringing you chowder when you’re miserable. They’re not who you call after a bad break-up. Your friendships are more valuable than any policy seminar you’ll take; that love is more precious than any employer can give.

                                                   

There are other useful things I learned too, I’m sure. There are probably useful things I’ve forgotten. I think back to policy school and realize just how lucky I’ve been. If you have the chance to go—especially on a scholarship—you should. Your Lloyd, your Tim, your soup await.

Magic at Your Fingertips

We were robbed of it and it is a crime I do not forgive. Covid, that shameless thief, took away the kind physical touch of even the people we didn’t know at all. Let’s be honest: physical touch is the best of the love languages and ever since the pandemic made us weary of being around each other (never mind coming into contact with each other), we’ve expressed that love language even less than before. I will not stand for it.

Physical touch is a deep, primal bridge into each other’s souls and I want to find it again. We owe it to each other to speak this timeless tongue again.   

Covid stole so much love from us—little moments of unspoken connection with faceless strangers. The gratitude you express when you leant forward and gently tapped the rickshaw driver’s tired shoulder when you'd reached your destination. The pure, implicit trust of the child next to you on the plane, when they fall suddenly asleep and rest their beautiful head on your arm, appointing you the cabin crew for their dreams. The shared delirium when you celebrated a last-minute goal at a bar or stadium and you blindly grasp for the nearest bouncing stranger and hug them and jump together in wild ecstasy. The tenderness of the old lady’s palm when you offer out your hand to help her climb the stairs. The unexpected brush with a kindly stranger every now and then reminded us that we are all human.

And what about the camaraderie of a packed Bombay local train car, where the same mass of bodies that moved you—helpless—from platform to carriage, now collectively contorts and parts to let an old man reach the doorway as we near the next station? As individuals, we are each tensed in discomfort; but as a collective consciousness, we instinctively relax our torsos and let ourselves be finessed into new patterns of commuter choreography. A new station looming in window, a new heave and sigh of passengers, a new arrangement of connected limbs forgetting to be uncomfortable. It was one of those innocuous instances of physical touch that Covid took from us. We had taken it for granted and it was taken from us.

We are capable of such profound love and then this evil pandemic stopped us sharing it. It took two years from us – from others, it took many more – but it cannot steal our memories. For seared into our skin is the memory of healing touch from our fellow human beings. We have magic at our fingertips that we must remember again.

Whale Song

I knew I was going to throw up. It was a question of when, not if. I could feel the telltale signs well up from my insides, an unmistakable queasiness I could taste in my mouth. 

We were pitching agonizingly back and forth in our 100-person whale-watching boat off New Zealand’s South Island. I was 14 and I just remember everything being grey. A dazzling grey blur: the inside of our stale old boat was a pathetic plastic grey, the sky above us—visible through great clear glass ceilings—was a chequered grey of thunder clouds and driving rain, and then there was the sea. A glowering grey of dark tumult, heaving and frothing and throwing punch after saltwater punch at our defeated vessel. One more punch would do it. One more punch and I’d empty the contents of my stomach.

I was sitting next to my sister in the middle row of seats, my parents—who were far less groggy than the two of us kids—were glued to their window seats with alert eyes scanning the horizon for a breaching behemoth. It was perhaps a week into our New Zealand holiday in December 2004, just a few oblivious days before the great Tsunami that would change the world. We were doing a classic Bhat Family holiday: driving a modest rental car around a faraway country for 2 weeks, stopping every couple days at a new town to shack up in a quirky youth hostel. I don’t even remember which town we were doing our whale-watching from, I just remember being about to puke my guts out.

The boat would tip backward on the way up a big wave and I’d feel my body rock back. Then the boat would crest the wave and slowly, torturously lurch forward and gastrointestinal plumbing would somersault inside me. I grabbed a paper sick-bag from the pouch in front of me. Another wave and on the way down I felt the air get sucked out of the crowded cabin, my self-control giving way. I felt my lunch come flying up my throat, that awful taste and gagging sensation. I felt so alone in that moment, with half the seated patrons looking outside the windows for whales and the other half looking deep within their souls wondering why they had gotten onto this chunder bucket. 

And then I felt a hand on my forehead. A beautiful, cool, soft palm gently settled on my face and I was not alone any more. The woman next to me, a total stranger, was smiling at me with one hand on my sweaty forehead and the other lovingly patting my back. I will never forget the feeling of her hand, the pure love in her touch.

I looked at her: She must have been in her mid-50s, a little older than my mum. She had short, thinning, greying brown hair—the only grey I remember fondly that day. She wore thick-rimmed glasses and had a colorful shawl slung across her shoulders. Her husband, sitting in the next seat, was also looking at me with concern and care. I don’t know what made her reach over and hold me, but I thank her with all my heart. I thank her to this day.

“Shh,” she said reassuringly, “It’s OK. It’s OK”

I never got her name, I wasn’t even able to splutter a “thank you”. I just glanced at her every few seconds when I would open my eyes for a moment. She made sure I was OK for the rest of that afternoon. She wouldn’t let the storm take me. 

When I feel like life is throwing me around and I’m dodging punches from the deep, I think about how nice her palm felt in that moment. A bolt of the peaceful light that cut through the grey cacophony. That moment, that feeling, has stayed with me for many years because she showed me how humans’ capacity for unconditional love and kindness can rescue us from the churning grey seas. 

A Grandfather’s Lullaby

My ajoba was my first best friend. By about four years old I knew that he, 60 years my senior, was also actually just a silly boy like me and that we would be friends forever. My ajoba—my paternal grandfather—and I had an unspoken bond that I cling to even now, years after he’s passed. My ajoba taught me not just how to climb trees and how make bows & arrows from sticks & string, but why it was so important to run and jump and explore and stand up for those who have less. Whatever positive masculinity I have in me, I attribute a lot to my ajoba. 

We would visit him and my grandma—my dadima—in Bombay every year around Christmas. Up until I turned 10, ours was the perfect friendship. He was still young enough that the youth in his body could keep pace with the youth in his spirit. And I was young enough that I didn’t care for today’s electronic opiates or touchscreen narcotics. This was a time before eye phones and face books. An afternoon at Juhu beach was enough. We would find games to play, we would create little challenges to complete. Bombay was our playground and we would play till the sun went down. 

And then the evening came around and Shambhu and I would be pampered by our two doting grandparents. Even the modest rice-and-daal meal was dressed up to make us feel special. After dinner, after singing our evening prayers, it was time for bed. It was time for the biggest treat of them all. 

Sometimes we would sleep on the bed in the second bedroom, sometimes on the rickety old cots in the living room, and sometimes on a gadda right on the floor—it would depend on how many people would be in the Bandra house that evening and it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter because wherever we would sleep, dadima would tell us bedtime stories and ajoba would send us off with one final indulgence: his fabled head massage. 

For generations, my ajoba has given these magical head massages to kids in the family. My dad got them, my aunt got them, and we got them. Ajoba had these hands, you see. They were powerful and meaty—the base of his thumb like a chicken drumstick. But they were also soft and full of love. So, when he put his hands on your head, something magical happened. You would be asleep before you knew it. Out like a light, before your mind had enough time to fathom dreaming. 

He would spread his fingers through your hair and bring them back together again. He would squeeze all tiredness from your shoulders and pour it into your sleep, like someone ringing the water out of a washing cloth. The best ones were when he put coconut oil in your hair at night. Ajoba’s head massage was the ultimate expression of love to his kids, his grandkids, and anyone else lucky enough to be his friend. I don’t know who gave him his head massage, but I do remember one day being lucky enough to return the favour.

I wish I had given him more when he was around—just a little bit more than I did. I wish my hands could remember what it was like to send him off into blissful starlight, the way he dispatched us. 

At the end of a hard day, when I am full of anxiety, sadness, anger or confusion, I try to remember ajoba’s magic head massages. I try to remember being a boy, sleeping next to Shambhu on a balmy Bandra evening, knowing that I would wake up again, tomorrow, to another day of endless love form doting grandparents. Ajoba’s head massages were telling a child that they are held, today, tomorrow and forever. His hands ruffled through your hair, whispering that the playground is open tomorrow as long as you let your inner child out to play in it. I remind myself, when I can, that I am still my inner child and that there is always a playground open tomorrow if I let myself seek it. 

All the peace you’ll ever need

And yet all those lovely feelings–the stranger’s kind palm on my forehead and my grandfather’s doting head massage and everything else–do not even come close to the cosmic comfort of laying in bed holding close a woman you love. It is the greatest feeling in the world and there aren’t enough words in all the love languages to describe it. There is no safer refuge in this universe, no moment more utterly transcendent. It is all the peace you’ll ever need.

The gentle curve of her hips, the quiet small of her back. How you can whisper something in her ear and feel her sigh in happiness and cling to you that little tighter. I love the smell of her hair when she rests her cheek on your shoulder. How nice it feels to kiss her forehead. In those intimate moments, lit only by the glow and drizzle of the distant city out the window, the two of you are all that exist. You hold each other for long enough and your bodies connect at a level your minds couldn’t fathom. Human beings were designed to touch each other, to hold each other. You learn how her breath sounds when she’s smiling; you don’t need to open your eyes. I love the sound of her smile.

I have no story to tell because it’s a feeling that needs no story—not one bound by words anyway. If you have someone to hold tonight, just hold them that little closer and make them smile. How lucky you are.

3 Ways “Normal People” Can Fight Climate Change

When you work at a climate NGO, you get asked the same question by your ‘non-climate’ friends and family: “So, what can I do to fight climate change?”

It can seem like a daunting question, until you break it down to specific groups of people: what a Fortune 500 CEO can do is very different to what 'ordinary' people can do. School teachers and truck drivers and accountants and dentists and tattoo artists and midwives have a different role to play than a Prime Minister. (If you’re a CEO or a Prime Minister and you’re somehow reading this, please close your browser immediately and have your staff call me – we need to talk.)

For everyone else, here’s my (slightly controversial) 3-step guide to saving our climate:  

1.     Enjoy your life

Please enjoy your life. The world is trying to heal from a horrifying pandemic, Europe is at war, the new Lord of the Rings TV series sucked, and we all face myriad personal traumas in our everyday lives. Many people are burnt out, struggling to get through to the end of the day, week, month. You are not responsible for the climate crisis so do not feel responsible for it. You are also not responsible for decarbonizing the global economy, though if you want to work in the climate space, consider joining a climate-focused organization.

The reality is a handful corporate and political leaders made the big decisions that got us here – and there’s a handful who can get us out. Let go of your climate guilt. Live responsibly and in a way that feels right to you, but please be kind to yourself and give yourself a break. The climate movement needs you feeling happy and excited about the future we're building.

Please book the holiday that gives you something to look forward to. There’s no point in foregoing a holiday because you feel guilty about your flight’s carbon emissions; airline CEOs have watched as their planes fly literally thousands of empty aircraft just to keep their landing slots. They should feel guilty about their aviation carbon emissions, not you.

Go on that holiday. Be present and care for your friends and family. Please enjoy your life.

2.     Campaign in your workplace

You may have read one of the many “What can you do to fight climate change?” listicles that prescribe taking fewer flights, using paper straws, composting and so on. You should do these if they bring you joy.

But their message is somewhat misplaced, in my opinion, because it shifts the onus of solving climate change from powerful organizations to you (the individual).

If you use a paper straw instead of a plastic straw, and then millions of other people miraculously also eschew plastic straws, perhaps it’ll send a market signal to Big Straw, which could maybe decide to make less plastic straws and stop lobbying for plastic straw tax breaks and maybe even find a way to recycle them. But that sequence of events may take years. It may not have a big climate impact. It may not happen at all.

You know what’s faster? If Big Straw – or airlines CEOs or environment ministers or whoever – chose to act today.

Business leaders always had the power and now they have the impetus. From their funders and their employees to their children and their customers, many corporate executives have been given a thumping mandate by their stakeholders. You can give them an extra push, by campaigning for your employer to make smart business decisions, like buying their electricity from cheap, renewable energy projects. Here’s one such “Personal Guide to Corporate Climate Action”.

Figure out, without risking your job, how you can help your company’s leadership take climate action. Nudge them as best you can. After that, it’s on them.  

3.     Vote for climate leaders

If you are lucky enough to live in a democracy, you should vote for the political candidate that has the best climate plan. Ask candidates how they plan to reduce their constituency’s emissions 50% by 2030 and go to 'net-zero' emissions by 2050. Is their plan backed by scientists? Is it going to bring long-term investment and good jobs to your community?

Around election time, search for online resources comparing candidates’ climate plans, and then cast your vote and/or campaign for a candidate with a robust climate-plan. If your leader is a climate laggard, vote them out.

Remember that you can only do so much to save our planet. This doesn’t mean you’re powerless. It just means that you should focus your efforts in ways that are realistic and nourishing. You should trust that powerful leaders (prodded by plucky climate NGOs) can pull the big levers of change. And meanwhile, you should optimize for your kids' happiness.

Dispel that climate doom. We’re going to solve this together.

(And if you’re a CEO or a Prime Minister and you’re still reading, please call me right now.) 

5 Big Bags of Money that Could Fight Climate Change

I think about climate finance in terms of “big bags of money”. These are sources of capital where a relatively small number of decision-makers control relatively large sums of cash. (Please forgive the public policy student in me for applying the 80:20 rule to everything.)

The biggest misnomer in climate finance is that we don’t have enough money to pay for all the wind farms and seawalls and microgrids and crop insurance and jobs training and political campaigns and electric cars and lithium mines and transmission lines and Netflix documentaries that we’ll need to fight climate change. Don’t get discouraged. We actually have plenty of money.

From Monday to Friday I try to steer the $100+ trillion that the world’s largest financial institutions have committed to “net-zero emissions”, to net-zero emissions. Getting that money out of a bank in Singapore and into a solar project in Senegal is really hard because we don’t seem to have climate-focused projects & companies “ready” to receive it. If you want to do something about it, I suggest you start or join a renewable energy project developer like Enel Green Power, EDP Renewables, etc.

Today though, let’s forget those big global financial institutions and their armies of lawyers, accountants, and consultants. Let’s just daydream about how much money is twiddling its thumbs on the sidelines.

Bag 1: The New York City Police Department (NYPD)

I live in New York—and you probably live in a big city too—so let’s start local. The NYPD has an annual budget of $11 billion. New York City (population 19 million) spends about the same amount on its police as Poland (twice the population) spends on its entire military. There are many nuances to consider, but you can see the point I’m making. New Yorkers do not need the equivalent of the Polish army to protect us.

There is clearly excess in the system and the Mayor of New York should invest that excess in protecting us against climate change. They figured out how to cut $300 million from education and social services, while growing police funding. So, let’s imagine we took even $1 billion off the NYPD budget every year (leaving them with $10 billion) and put that towards climate investments. Experts estimate, for example, that New York needs at least $1 billion/year to help low- to moderate-income households decarbonize their homes.

Think about your city’s budget and all the funds that could be better used. We have the money. Let’s put it to work.

Bag 2: The S&P 500

The 500 largest companies on the stock market are sitting on $1.9 trillion in cash. This is not money invested in new factories or given back to those few lucky enough to be their shareholders. From what I can tell—and I’m no stock market expert—almost $2 trillion just seems to be loitering on their balance sheets, earning a pretty meager return.

$2 trillion is an unfathomably large amount of money. Our brains are not designed to think about numbers that big. Let’s put it in context: it would cost us $5.2 trillion – $6.1 trillion to decarbonize the world’s entire iron & steel sectors. Just think about those enormous mines and furnaces and steels mills and then the galaxies of wind & solar farm’s we’ll need to power them; half of that could be paid for with the cash sitting in 500 corporations’ checking accounts right now. I’m sure there are nuances I’m missing; I’m sure there are reasons why CFOs are reticent to invest their cash in climate solutions. But let’s not pretend like we don’t have the money. That’s not an excuse.

Bag 3: University endowments

The top 10 American university endowments total around $280 billion. Auditors forecast that the collective endowments of the prestigious Ivy League universities could surpass $1 trillion by 2048. They are set up as “charitable non-profits”, meaning they get federal, state, and local tax benefits that you and I probably don’t. Despite their incredible bank accounts, cozy tax status, and generous financial aid policies, they still charge many students tens of thousands of dollars a year: Ivy League students in 2019-2020 paid an average of $22,500 after financial aid.

I am a grateful graduate of one of those institutions, Yale University. Yale provided me a generous partial scholarship to attend graduate school from 2015 to 2017. Five years later, Yale’s endowment has grown to a staggering $42.3 billion—and they never miss an opportunity to ask us alumni for donations. What is all that money for? When will it be enough?

Some simple, silly math to make a point: a 7% annual return on $40 billion is $2.8 billion. Yale has 6,494 undergrads, 8,031 grad students, 5,118 faculty, and 10,534 staff. That’s 30,000 people. Yale could afford to give each of those 30,000 people $93,000 a year just using the $2.8 billion interest accrued, and still keep its $40 billion. America’s biggest offshore wind farm—pretty close to Yale on the North Atlantic coast—will cost $3 billion. Yale could fund one of those magnificent projects entirely on its own every single year and still keep its $40 billion safely tucked away for a rainy day. That is the scale of the money sitting across endowment portfolio managers’ fingertips, while students sit in elegant classrooms drowning in climate anxiety.

Bag 4: Billionaires

There are 2,668 billionaires on earth and their collective wealth is $12.7 trillion. We need $125 trillion of climate investment by 2050; one tenth of that could come from billionaires alone. 2,668 decision-makers. 2,668 decisions to do something extraordinary, the way Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard just decided to give away his $3 billion fortune to fight climate change, or the way MacKenzie Scott has given away a sensational $12 billion to many worthy causes in just a couple years.

They don’t all need to give away all their wealth. Maybe they all just agree to cap their wealth at $1 billion and give anything on top of that? A billion dollars is more money than someone could spend in five lifetimes, let alone one. If you gave me $1 million I would be pretty chuffed, and my already comfortable life would be even easier. I honestly cannot think what I could spend 1000 x $1 million on or why I’d just hold onto it. The thought of Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, having $250 billion makes my head spin.

The 20^th poorest member of the Forbes rich list, Charles Koch, has $53.4 billion. So, everyone above him could give away $50 billion and each have over $3.4 billion remaining. $50 billion multiplied by 20 is $1 trillion. That’s enough to fund all of Africa’s $190 billion/year climate & energy investments between 2026 and 2030.

Many of these billionaires would tell us not to equate net worth with annual spending, that their businesses already do lots of climate action, and that governments should be solving climate change. Respectfully, I disagree with all of that.

Bag 5: The US military budget

I am so excited about the US passing the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which should put $369 billion towards climate investments over 10 years. For context though, the US has spent more than that on its military each year, for the past 20 years. Again, perspective here is crucial: the US government will direct on average $37 billion for climate annually while spending close to $800 billion on its military next year alone. We must examine our priorities.

I have two degrees in international relations; I understand the role of the US military in the world. The US military budget may be the biggest, most controversial money bag of all, because unlike the last three bags we dreamt about, this one gets emptied and refilled every year. Since I moved to America, I’ve come to realize that the US military is a domestic jobs program, providing steady employment to millions of people from all over the country. The US military’s appetite for taxpayers’ money has been insatiable: the defense budget increased 1.08% in 2016, 5.53% in 2017, 7.6% in 2018, and 5.98% in 2019.

The 2023 budget request of $773 billion is a $30.7 billion (4.1%) increase from 2022. Think about what that $30 billion could do instead of building fighter jets. $30 billion could alleviate flood damage in Pakistan, where 32 million people are now displaced, for example. The US has provided $50 million in disaster assistance to Pakistan; that’s million, with an “m”. I wish I lived in a world where that “m” was a “b”.

 

The time has come to redirect these big bags of money by directly engaging with the few people who hold the purse strings. It will need to be done pragmatically, by placating those who must be placated and starting with the lowest hanging fruit. But it must be done. I am tired of being told we don’t have enough money to make the world better. Let us be honest: we don’t have enough will.

3 Game-Changers that Give Me Climate Hope

Welcome to the 2nd quarter of the Decisive Decade—the 10-year period between 2020 and 2030 in which we need to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 50%. Though we’re still far away from transforming global energy systems, three recent game-changing developments should give us hope. These are examples where the “rules” governing a system just went out the window and our assumptions must be re-evaluated. It’s not a market cycle, it’s the market shifting altogether.

1.      Renewables freed from the PPA: US solar developer Intersect Power has done something that fellow renewables developers have been dreaming of and few have achieved. Intersect has convinced its investors that it can build and finance solar projects without long-term power purchase agreements (PPAs). The rule for renewables development had generally been that private financiers need stable, long-term PPAs in order to lend against a project. Not anymore, it seems.

PPAs basically ensure a project will always get paid for the electricity it generates, essentially guaranteeing investors they’ll make their money back if the project delivers. PPAs have been the lifeblood of renewable energy revenues around the world. However, many other types of physical infrastructure are financed without long-term revenue contracts. Take real estate (or even fossil fuel-fired power plants), where funding is provided on the basis of projected (rather than contracted) revenues. In the power sector, selling your electricity based on real-time market prices is called selling “merchant”, and financiers have thus far been reluctant to give any credit to volatile merchant revenues, preferring to stick to the safe waters of PPA-backed cash flows. Intersect’s recent fund raise means that investors are willing (or perhaps forced?) to credit merchant revenues too. Let's hope Intersect sparks a new wave of merchant finance!

If the rest of the market (i.e. both developers and investors) also move in this direction, we’ll have a much bigger renewables market. Developers will no longer be constrained by having to secure long-term PPAs (often the most difficult part of project development). They will be able to find a good site, get their permitting, and take their chances on the open market, betting that power demand will go up as we electrify everything from cars to homes. They will be able to raise more money from more investors and hopefully construct more renewables. This would be a net-positive for the climate.

2.      Banks are giving out renewables development loans: The rule was that banks really only wrote cheques for wind & solar projects when they were "fully de-risked", but that is hopefully changing. Banks are risk averse; they don't really care if a project increases in value, they mainly just want to be paid back. And so they used to finance renewable energy plants only when the project had been de-risked and was "shovel-ready", i.e. when the developer had secured a PPA, finished permitting, and everyone was ready to start construction. But this left developers with a big problem: where would they get the money to de-risk projects? To take projects to construction?

A renewables developer has a very difficult job. To get a project ready for construction and set for project financing, they must walk a years-long tight-rope, pulling together the exact right set of documents and approvals at exactly the right time, in exactly the right way. There are expensive feasibility studies and costly engineering reports, non-negotiable PPA deposits and steep grid interconnection fees. Doing all that unsexy "development" work takes time and money. That money usually comes in the form of equity from their owners and that equity is limited and expensive. They would much rather have flexible, low-cost debt from their banks.

Banks have largely been weary of giving out these development loans because they are riskier than loans backed by advanced-stage, contracted, shovel-ready projects. What if a developer's early-stage project pipeline doesn't come to fruition and the bank foreclosed? It doesn't want to own an early-stage portfolio; it's not in the business of developing renewables projects! It would rather not foreclose on anything, but if it had to, at least an advanced-staged project would be easier to sell onto someone else and get over the finish line. Well, with Arevon securing its $400 million green loan, that dynamic might have changed. It seems there's more and more pressure on banks to fund renewables and so developers might finally get their development loans. This would enable them to build more clean energy projects and that would benefit us all. Let's hope the Arevon deal opens the floodgates!

3.      The US is building factories again: As long as I can remember (and I’m a millennial... so it’s not that long), the rule was that you didn’t build factories in rich countries like the US because labor was too expensive. On the back of your iPhone it said, “designed in California, made in China”. American multinationals reaped the benefits of globalization by outsourcing labor-intensive manufacturing to the developing world. For years, shareholders, corporate executives, and consumers rejoiced, while American labor faced decreasing real wages and former industrial regions were abandoned. We all saw the political backlash materialize in 2016.

But now American factories are back and they’re set to spring up in her heartland. According to a recent Bloomberg report, “the construction of new manufacturing facilities in the US has soared 116% over the past year”. And these billion-dollar factories of tomorrow can help us fight climate change:

• LG and Honda just announced a $4.4 billion US electric vehicle battery factory while Toyota is planning a new battery plant in North Carolina.
• The US Department of Energy’s Loan Program Office recently announced a $2.5 billion loan for a battery manufacturing facilities in Ohio, Tennessee, and Michigan, belonging to General Motors and LG. It is an example of the US government directly supporting domestic manufacturing. Long may it continue.
• A slew of massive new solar manufacturing facilities were announced both before and after the landmark Inflation Reduction Act. It shows this trend began even before policy support really kicked in.

Factories like these are often accompanied by welcome announcements of job creation – a boon for local politicians, especially leading up to mid-term elections. However, those very policy-makers are also sometimes criticized for giving away too much taxpayer money to attract these hugely profitable, multi-multi-billion dollar global corporations. What is the right balance? When does the tax break justify the job creation? How much should American households pay to bring back factory jobs from China? From an emissions perspective, subsidizing electric vehicles and renewable energy is a far better (and far smaller) use of taxpayer money than the $5.9 trillion that goes to subsidize fossil fuels every year. As a US taxpayer I’d want my taxes subsidizing climate-focused manufacturing. And if those clean energy factory jobs get politicians re-elected, great. It'd show democracy functioning.

Which rules can we break next?

Many rules are being re-written and this is a sign of effective advocacy, policy-making, and corporate decision-making over many years. We need to see rule-changes in other seemingly intractable systems too. There are many "rules" I would like to see broken:

• Politicians can’t win election (or re-election) on a platform of climate action
• Building transmission lines will continue to be an expensive nightmare
• Solar panel efficiency will remain stubbornly stuck at 20-odd percent
• EV charging will never be profitable
• New nuclear plants are too expensive and complex to build
• Batteries can only store power for a few hours
• Carbon capture doesn’t work nor scale.
• Earth doesn’t have the minerals in the ground (or processing capacity) to build the renewables/cars we need.

The list is endless and I'd love to hear your suggestions. Rules are meant to be broken and these are all rules that we must break. We are at the foothills—the ankles—of many an S-curve and that’s why progress can seem slow and things can feel hopeless. Do not lose hope. These three game-changers show how fast systems can transition when their constituent parts are lined up correctly. With smart policy-making and proactive corporate citizenship, we can change the game, defeat climate change, and build a better world. Buckle up for Q2 of the Decisive Decade. What rules are you going to break?