Helen Clarkson: 'The Politics Must Follow the Economics'|S4E13

Helen Clarkson has spent two decades building the coalitions that turn corporate climate pledges into actual procurement, and her argument in this conversation is blunt: the economics have already shifted, and politics has no choice but to catch up.

We get into how to tell a company that genuinely means its climate commitments from one just following the crowd, and why the gap between signing up to something like RE100 and actually buying clean energy is where most companies quietly fall short.

She breaks down why energy security, not conscience, is now the argument moving boardrooms, why policy keeps lagging behind, what business has already figured out, and why she still insists on saying the word climate even when it has become politically inconvenient to say it. There's also a genuinely surprising story about a rooftop solar boom in Pakistan, built entirely from the bottom up, that cut diesel sales by more than a third in a single year.

Helen Clarkson is CEO of The Climate Group and holds an OBE for her work supporting the UK's COP26 presidency. Before any of that, she spent years doing humanitarian fieldwork with Médecins Sans Frontières across conflict zones in Congo, Sudan, Burundi, Pakistan and Nigeria.

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