Welcome back to the podcast, bribes, swindle, or steel.

I'm Alexandra Rogge and my guest today is Karina Litvak.

Karina has broad experience with both governance and sustainability.

She served on the boards of large public oil and gas and energy companies

and is the founding chair of the Climate Governance Initiative. Karina, thank you so much for joining me.

It's my pleasure. Thank you, Alexander. You are always a wealth of information on this topic.

So I'm going to start with a big opening question and ask you, what has you optimistic right now

and what are your biggest concerns with respect to climate governance? I'll start with what makes me

pessimistic and then end on a happy note. And that is that obviously the direction of travel politically is not a good one,

whether we're talking about North America, Europe, East and West, with a couple of exceptions,

and frankly, other parts of the world, it really is a depressing picture.

On the other hand, what I find reassuring is that

where companies have come to terms with the inevitability of climate change and therefore the

inevitability of having to reinvent their business models, they're not budging. They're not going to suddenly

roll back major investments that they've committed to. They're going to stay the course and

they're simply going to weather this out. You see this in quite a few cases. You saw it

certainly in the first Trump administration when other

municipal and state governments responded to fill the gap. And I think you're going to see that

in other parts of the world where companies feel fine. You know what if there isn't going to be

leadership at a policy level, we're going to have to show leadership, even if we have to

do it quietly so as not to attract the wrong kind of attention. Is that going to be sufficient?

I hear you when you say that companies are going to quietly do the right thing, but is that going

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