This Man Found 1,650 Ways to Turn a Profit While Decarbonizing

What role do governments play in this?

It is still allowed today to be inefficient. It’s still allowed to put CO₂ in the atmosphere and plastic into the oceans. So, we need to modernize the legal framework in order to really push the legal need to be efficient. If it is a necessity to use all these solutions, people will use them, and they will come much more onto the market and it will help the startups grow, produce all these solutions for everybody, and it will be a major advantage.

So governments have a very important responsibility.

What about finance? That must be important too.

Something that’s key, I think, are new business models that sell use and not property. So, for example, you have people who want to install a heat pump system in a building—they will make a contract with a producer of heat pumps to buy heat over 20 years, but the pump still belongs to the producer, not the final client, which means that there needs to be a financial institution that pays for it. And this is a business opportunity.

There will be much more leasing than direct sales in the future. Another example that I love very much is a company called Pragma Charge. Big transport companies usually use diesel trucks; Pragma Charge, instead of trying to sell these companies replacement EVs, which are more expensive, sells a service: kilometers of transport with electric trucks.

So the company doesn’t have to handle the energy transition, it just gets the final product?

Exactly, yes. India has done it too with electric buses. The government has bought 50,000 electric buses and put them in different cities and villages. But these places don’t have to buy the vehicles, they only buy the kilometers driven—and this works out 25 percent cheaper than it would be using diesel buses.

We have the goal of getting to net zero by 2050. How confident are you that we’ve got the tools to achieve this?

We are not on the path to get there. And I think the narrative used is wrong. We hear it’s going to be difficult. We hear it’s going to be expensive, that people will have to make sacrifices and renounce a part of their comfort and mobility. I think it’s the wrong narrative because it is not attractive.

In Europe, a lot of political parties and individuals are resisting this goal of decarbonization, thinking it’s detrimental for them, for their business. But if instead you tell people we are going to modernize our country, have more efficient infrastructure and systems, they will be enthusiastic. Instead of speaking of the cost of the energy transition, you have to speak about the profitable investment, new jobs, new business opportunities. People need to understand that it will be an advantage, it gives a better quality of life. We really have to present it this way, otherwise we will miss the target.

Finally, what’s next for you?

I’m launching a new project, which is about flying around the world with a hydrogen-powered airplane. It’s very good to speak about solutions, but to actually make solutions known, we need to attract people’s interest. And in climate action, we also need to restore hope. For that, we have to go beyond the obvious, get out of our comfort zone, and really start to work clearly on new technologies.

I believe hydrogen has a future for heavy transport, where batteries would be too heavy. But it’s not enough to say it—we have to demonstrate it. If we manage to fly around the world nonstop with a hydrogen-powered airplane, people will want to do more with hydrogen. It will make hydrogen more popular. And this is what we need, because today, it’s niche. There’s not enough demand because there’s not enough offer, and there’s not enough offer because there’s not enough demand.

The plane now is under construction. It’s called Climate Impulse. It should make a test flight in 2026, and then hopefully fly nonstop around the world, with zero emissions, in 2028.

Hear Bertrand Piccard speak at the WIRED x Octopus Energy Tech Summit at Kraftwerk in Berlin on October 10. Get tickets at energy-tech-summit.wired.com.