Editor's note: China's "dual carbon" goal has been a heated topic during the on-going "Two Sessions." What role can small and medium-sized companies play in this path of sustainable development? How can the institutions help the businesses? Robert Weisenmiller, a former chair of the California Energy Commission, gave us some clues during an interview. The views expressed in the video are his own and not necessarily those of CGTN.

The reality is that climate change is having a great impact now, and responding by going to Zero Net Energy will have great impacts on both of our economies. Going to Zero Net Energy means decarbonizing our economies, which means a real transition throughout the economy in our businesses and our industry. On the one hand, that means there's an opportunity for whole new industries to come up.

It is going to be really great new industries to give a lot of opportunities for new jobs and economic growth.

At the same time, that means that some traditional industries will be in turmoil.

The example I tend to think of is governor (of California) Newsom has talked about zero sales of internal combustion engines starting in 2035, but that, on the one hand, is a phenomenal opportunity for zero-emission vehicles like cars and trucks.

On the other hand, that means the traditional cars are gonna have to totally revisit how they operate. That also means that gas stations on every corner are gonna have to be converted to charging. So that's a phenomenal transition, with lots of opportunities and challenges.

But at the same time, that's in response to climate change. And certainly, climate change, with or without us going to zero net energy, is gonna have huge impacts on both our countries.

I will say that the small and medium-sized companies are among where a lot of that innovation comes from. So we did two things to help there. One is obviously we had a lot of grants. And we do those based upon merit. So if we got a proposal from a small company, frankly without a track record, but it was clear it had a very good idea. We will fund it. Not all of those are gonna work, but giving people the opportunity will help drive innovation through California. We also put money into what is called incubators.

And so what we did is that we gave money to organizations that would set up office space for those new entities. And they would have combined facilities for them; they would have machine shops; they would have chemistry labs; they would basically have all kinds of equipment, which those new innovation companies could then use.

And at the same time, they had a lot of backup things for them. They had legal support; they had people who would help them train to become managers and help them develop their ideas, trying to get those to the point that we could go out and market those.

Now every idea is gonna pan out, but you can imagine if you took some of your best and brightest students, who are graduating, who had bright new ideas, and you gave them an opportunity to grow those into businesses. That again, there's a lot of benefits. So it's important to really look at the small and medium businesses, look at what they need and figure out ways to really harness that energy and innovation.

Obviously, when we first talked about going forward, the idea was to get the best and brightest from Berkeley, UCLA – from UC system in general – dealing with the Chinese universities, particularly Tsinghua, to really bring together joint teams track climate issues.

Essentially, we need to come up with the next generation of technologies or institutions or creativity to deal with climate change.

Interviewer: Yang Chuchu

Cameraman: Zhao Jing

Video Editor: Feng Ran

Producer: Wang Xinyan

Supervisor: Mei Yan

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