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Lindsey Hall: I'm Lindsey Hall, Head of thought leadership at S&P Global Sustainable1.   

Esther Whieldon: And I'm Esther Whieldon, a senior writer on the Sustainable1 Thought Leadership Team   

Lindsey Hall: Welcome to ESG Insider, a podcast hosted by S&P Global, where we explore environmental, social and governance issues that are shaping investor activity and company strategy. 

Esther Whieldon: Welcome to our special series of on-the-ground coverage from COP28.

Lindsey Hall: That's right. I'm here in Dubai, where I'm conducting interviews on the sidelines of the UN Climate Change Conference, known as COP. Over the next couple of episodes, I'll be talking to attendees about some of the big themes emerging from this global gathering. 

First off, though, a bit of scene setting. So this main event is taking place in Expo City in Dubai, which is enormous. Many people are getting around this big campus on golf carts or scooters or bikes. The UAE estimates that the venue is expected to attract more than 70,000 participants over the course of COP28.

And I've been slightly odd and overwhelmed these past few days by the sheer size and scale of this event. It's also very heartening to see so many thousands of stakeholders coming together from across the world to try and solve some of the world's toughest climate challenges. Just in my first hour at COP, I met a world food program representative who works in Iraq, while I was waiting in the security line, I'm at a doctor who studies the intersection of climate and health and who actually grew up just one town away from me while I was buying coffee. And I met an Australian ambassador in the bathroom. She and I got to chatting because she liked my shoes. 

So the main COP venue includes 2 zones. The blue zone is open to accredited party and observer delegates, and that's where the formal negotiations and discussions take place. Then the green zone is open to everyone, and it's spread all across Expo City. Today, for example, I visited the Technology and Innovation Hub, the Climate Finance Hub and the Energy Transition Hub. And in each of these, you have a whole host of nonprofits and companies from around the world, across industries with booths and interactive exhibits and panels. 

And I've got to say this whole thing is kind of what I imagine a Scifi futuristic city would look like. There is something called a Garden in the Sky, for example, which is this enormous rotating tower with a tree-lined observation deck that you can ride 55 meters, or about 180 feet, into the air. It's all of it surreal. So that's the lay of the land. 

But what's actually happening here? Well, in the first few days of the conference, we've seen some big announcements right off the bat at COP28 several countries and the EU pledged more than $420 million to a new Loss and Damage fund to help developing nations deal with climate change. And many people are heralding this as an early success for COP28 negotiations.

But then we've also heard some skepticism. For example, I heard the President of the Council of Ministers of Italy, Giorgia Meloni, say that while there are reasons to be optimistic, the main goal remains far off. 

So today's guest is definitely someone I would put in the optimistic camp. 

I sat down with Henk Rogers, the founder of the nonprofit Blue Planet Alliance. You may also know him as a man who helped make the 1980s video game Tetris into a household name. Yeah, that Tetris. Hank's video game background is the subject of the 2023 movie called Tetris, and he's played by the actor Taron Egerton. 

Blue Planet Alliance has a mission to get islands and countries around the world to legislatively mandate a commitment to 100% renewable energy by 2045. In the interview, he talks about how his organization is working to meet that goal, the importance of changing public mindsets to change energy strategies and the role that younger generations will play in that process. Okay, here's the interview.

Henk Rogers: My name is Henk Rogers. I'm a recovering computer game designer and entrepreneur. And now I'm on my mission to end the use of carbon-based fuel, and I have a foundation and several foundations to that end. One is the Blue Planet Foundation. We put Hawaii on track to 100% renewable energy by 2045, 12 of the states have copied us. And so it's moving across the U.S. and I have a newer organization called the Blue Planet Alliance. And we're doing the same thing we did in the U.S. but for other countries, starting with Island countries.

Lindsey Hall: Okay. And which countries in particular are you working with?

Henk Rogers: Well, we started in the Pacific. We started with Hawaii. So the countries that we're focused on right now, Palau, Tonga, Tuvalu, Micronesia and — they're not countries, but — American Samoa, Guam, Northern Marianas, and we even had an outlier, the Cayman Islands, came to our conference. 

We had a conference in Hawaii about a month ago where we brought three people from each island, one from the government, one from the utility and one from the private sector to show them what we did in Hawaii, which has put Hawaii on track. Hawaii used to spend $5 billion a year on oil, $1 billion on coal. And because of our mandate, Hawaii is today already 36% renewable.

Lindsey Hall: Okay. What are some of the steps that you're taking to make that shift?

Henk Rogers: We tried all kinds of things. We started by talking to the utility and to the governor and so on and they were "why are you talking to us about this? We make electricity from oil." It was hard. And so we realized we needed to get the people on our side. And we did a bunch of things to get the people on our side. 

One thing that we did is we had elementary school children go door-to-door and exchange 300,000 light bulbs. And while there have a conversation with the adult of the house about energy efficiency, which is going to save them money, and about climate chage, which is the important reason why you need to reduce your energy consumption. 

We had junior high school students draw on sidewalks where high tide would be in a 1 meter rise in sea level, thereby bringing awareness to sea level rises to everybody, and we were on the news. 

And we help people on the other outer islands, get energy saver refrigerators. So we -- all this things to get the people on our side and then the people push the politicians and then a politicians pass the mandate. So Hawaii was the first state in the country to have a mandate of 100% renewable energy?

Lindsey Hall: All right. Thank you for setting the scene for us. And now we're here at COP28, what are you hoping to achieve at this gathering?

Henk Rogers: So I'm here primarily to find more countries that are ready to make the commitment. First of all, there's got to be a commitment, and there's got to be a deadline. Those 2 things. And the commitment in my mind, the only interesting commitment to me is 100% renewable energy because you set a date, and it doesn't matter how far in the future as long as you have a date. 

Once you have a date, then everybody starts to think how am I going to do this? How are we going to do this? And I tell Island leaders or leaders anywhere, I said, do not ask your experts, the experts or, especially the engineers, basically, what you need to do as a leader is you tell them what needs to happen and by when. They understand that. I want this building built in 2 years. I want this whole expo built in 3 years, and they'll make it happen. It's not like we don't have the technology. We do. It's not like we don't have the money. We do. All we're missing is the willpower.

Lindsey Hall: So we're a couple of days into this COP gathering. What kind of things have you been hearing so far? What kind of conversations have you been having?

Henk Rogers: Well, I just arrived last night. So I -- so far, I've met with the President of Honduras and the President of Paraguay. Paraguay is already at 100%. And this is the one thing that people in the world don't realize is that there are already countries that are 100% renewable, like Paraguay, like Bhutan, like Iceland, In fact, there are 7 countries that are already at 100%. 

And when you listen to the news, it's doom and gloom and we can't do this and so on and so forth. But it is happening. I want people to understand that it's happening. We will fix climate change. There's no doubt in my mind. 

It's just that we need to go from the Wishy-washy. "I don't know, and I hope." We have to switch from hoping that it's going to happen to having determination. So people ask me if I have hope and I say, "No, I don't have hope. I have determination." That's all. And that's all I need everybody here to have is determination.

The whole COP process in their moment of glory, they passed the Paris agreement. Paris agreement doesn't go far enough, and there's nobody that's actually on track for the Paris agreement. So it's not a top-down thing without the people, the bottom up, the United people, the United Nations. Without the United people, we are not going to be able to fix climate change. The people have to rise up and say, "This is what we want." And I think this -- the people started with, frankly, speaking, young people because people -- my generation, they're sort of like you ask them and they say, "Well, I'm not going to be around when it gets really bad." And I said, "Well, don't you have children and grandchildren. What about them?" You can't just be thinking about -- we're genetically predisposed to think only about ourselves. That is the real problem. And if you go back in time, things didn't change so fast, so you could do things generation to generation. People used to think multigenerational. But people, things change so fast now that we've even lost contact between the parents and the children in the same that are alive today. So yes, the young people are going to rise up and say, "No, we're not going to put up with it. This is our world that you're destroying with your carbon dioxide emissions, and you need to stop it."

Lindsey Hall: Okay. That's a refreshingly optimistic take, I would say, on COP. So I definitely appreciate that. Is there anything that would make COP a success from your first perspective?

Henk Rogers: Yes. Sure. The people in the room can make big decisions. They can make decisions. The big decision gets made. The problem is that the countries need to follow up. So then the people need to get behind it.

I used to be a young person demonstrating when I was younger, we used to demonstrate like against war in Vietnam. And now young people are demonstrating to fix climate change. People need to listen to them, first of all, and they need to take action. 

I think the young people need to take their parents or the adults in the room, so to speak, and hold them responsible. I say it this way. Someday, I'll be on my death bed and my grandchildren be asking me "Grandpa, when you knew that climate change was going to destroy our climate in the future, what did you do about it?" My answer is not going to be nothing.

Lindsey Hall: Well, thank you so much for sitting down with me here. Is there anything I haven't asked about that you think is important for our listeners to understand about Blue Planet Alliance and your presence here?

Henk Rogers: Yes. So the answer is that we are going to do this. There's no question in my mind. And the quicker everybody just gets around to that mindset that not only are we already doing this, but we're going to be successful in this. We've never failed this kind of thing before. I mean we've fought wars to save democracy. 

This is a much bigger deal than democracy. This is the very life of the planet. So just get your mind to the point where we can find out, no more hope, just determination. So the vision of the Blue Planet Alliance is to create a world in which humanity and nature live in harmony. And I would like that to happen. I would like all of us to get to the point by 2045, which is the 100th anniversary of the United Nations, where everything that we've stolen from nature, we've given back everything that we've broken, we fixed. We can take all the plastic back out of the ocean. We can take all the carbon dioxide back out of the atmosphere, and we can fix this, and we will.

Lindsey Hall: So you heard Hank talk about the need to shift to mindsets as part of meeting energy transition goals. And he sees a key role for individuals in reaching those goals. And I think Hank's optimism and determination is representative of most of the energy and attitudes I've encountered so far at COP28. And that's certainly not to say the event doesn't face criticism.

For example, the conference has faced critiques because it's being hosted by an oil state and because the man who holds the COP presidency is also CEO of a state-owned oil company. But most of what I'm hearing so far is more in that optimist camp. So we talked earlier in the episode about the Blue Zone and the green zone at COP28. And that's not even the entirety of what's happening here in Dubai. There's a whole other zone located in another part of the city, and that's called the Climate Action Innovation Zone. 

That's also where S&P Global hosted an event on December 3, which I emceed. And while he was on stage, I asked the audience of a few hundred people for a show of hands. "Who is optimistic that this COP gathering is going to result in meaningful progress toward the energy transition?" And the answer I got was pretty unanimous, almost everyone in the audience, which included representatives from many different industries around the world, raised their hands. So I think we'll end on that note for today.

Esther Whieldon: Thanks for listening to our special series about COP 28. We'll be back with more interviews from Dubai and upcoming episodes. So please stay tuned.

Lindsey Hall: Thanks so much for listening to this episode of ESG Insider and a special thanks to our producer, Kyle Cangialosi. Please be sure to subscribe to our podcast and sign up for our weekly newsletter, ESG Insider. See you next time.   

This piece was published by S&P Global Sustainable1, a part of S&P Global.

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