| By Olivia Rudgard From revolts against green policies in Europe and the US, to backsliding on corporate climate commitments, 2024 provided some rotten gifts for the climate community. This week the International Energy Agency’s revised forecast for coal demand suggests some people might actually want lumps of the dirty fuel in their holiday stocking. The downbeat news inspired Bloomberg Green to approach scientists, authors, business leaders and politicians known for championing climate action to share their wish lists. We were keen to hear their hopes for policies and market trends, but we also asked them to share something personal and fun. Given the grave challenges now being posed to the green transition, many of the responses leaned hard on the former. Yet we did manage to squeeze a few tangible gift ideas out of them. Climate scientist Zeke Hausfather, who went viral last year with his “gobsmackingly bananas” reaction to unprecedented global warming data, has some very serious policy requests for US lawmakers. While Hausfather, the climate research lead at payments company Stripe, is hoping many parts of President Joe Biden’s flagship Inflation Reduction Act survive the Trump administration, he also wants a bipartisan agreement on permitting reform to help speed up installations for clean energy and transmission. But what sort of purchases has he been recently googling? He’s had his eye on an Impulse Labs induction stovetop (although, he added, “any induction stovetop would be better than our current burners.”)  The Impulse Labs induction stovetop. Photo: Impulse Labs Similar to Hausfather, Ari Matusiak, chief executive of Rewiring America, is also wishing for a clean energy regulatory breakthrough in the US. He’d like to see “residential rooftop solar as abundant here in America as it is in Australia.” For his own home, he’s also looking through the kitchen appliances section. He’d like an induction-friendly wok for making his mother-in-law’s special pancit dish without the aid of gas burners. Spain’s former climate minister Teresa Ribera has a long to-do list for her new role as the EU’s anti-trust chief. She’s also in charge of keeping industry competitive during the bloc's green transition. Among the climate fixes she hopes to see happen are adaptation measures for droughts and flooding, which are problems that have individually ravaged her home country. Ribera’s move from Madrid to Brussels this year has also raised some personal green requests. She’s been trying to get to grips with the complex recycling system in the Belgian capital. “I have so far put an explanatory leaflet in my kitchen and consult it when I have questions,” she says — but learning how to do it properly would be a blessing. Ribera’s colleague Wopke Hoekstra, the EU climate commissioner, says he’d like to see a worldwide carbon market with “realistic yet ambitious pricing.” Before that, he’s hoping for some new running shoes. (He wears an EU size 48.)  Wopke Hoekstra in 2018. Photographer: Yuriko Nakao/Bloomberg Carlo Buontempo, director of the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, has had to continually deliver bad news about rising global temperatures in 2024. While it’s completely unattainable, he’d like to equip the whole world with a sixth sense – a “sort of planetary sympathy, that would allow us to perceive the global climate directly. I am convinced this would affect our collective decision-making in ways no scientist can,” he says. His gift wish this year is far more tangible: He’d like a new pair of walking boots. Greg Jackson, chief executive of Octopus Energy Ltd., the UK’s largest utility and a major investor in electrification and renewable energy, also wants new wardrobe items this year. But he has bigger demands after the holidays, calling for UK energy market reforms that would vary the price of electricity based on location. This would help direct investment to where it’s needed, he says.  Greg Jackson Photographer: Hollie Adams/Bloomberg Perhaps inspired by the underwhelming results of the United Nation’s COP process this year, the climate fiction novelist Kim Stanley Robinson wishes that countries would take membership of the UN (“or the WTO or the OECD”) much more seriously than they currently do to help guide action. “And then climate change would have a chance to be solved by us,” he says. What sort of gift would delight a man who writes fictitious outlooks for the future? Something that he knows will grow in the new year. Robinson says he annually plants vegetables on the winter solstice, so he’d like an early gift: Some young lettuce and cabbage plants, a week before Christmas, “so I can hit the real day of celebration in winter, on December 21.” Meanwhile, after a busy year that involved delivering what turned out to be a pep-rally-style speech at COP29 in Azerbaijan in November, Jay Inslee, the outgoing governor of Washington state in the US, wants the world to get some “confidence” in dealing with climate change. For now, though, he’s going to enjoy the quieter moments. He wants to spend time with his six grandchildren on Christmas. “Just seeing those faces light up is kind of magic,” he says. — With assistance from Akshat Rathi, Zahra Hirji, John Ainger, Kendra Pierre-Louis, Coco Liu, Michelle Ma and Anna Edgerton Like getting the Green Daily? 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