Latest / Saving the World From Bad Ideas / Bad Idea #29 "The Green transition is failing" with Michael Liebreich

Transcript

Bad Idea #29 "The Green transition is failing" with Michael Liebreich · Saving the World From Bad Ideas

• 0:00
  Let's accept 1.5 is not going to happen.
• 0:03
  It was actually never realistic. Doesn't matter.
• 0:05
  But right now it is counterproductive.
• 0:08
  And just very importantly, I'm not saying slow down.
• 0:12
  I'm not saying do all the things you want to do anyway, because
• 0:14
  I'm a believer in the transition.
• 0:16
  Just do them slower so that doesn't annoy as many people.
• 0:19
  I'm actually saying if you want the system which includes
• 0:23
  politics and society and supply chains, etcetera, if you want
• 0:27
  that system to go as fast as possible, then stop trying to
• 0:32
  sort of push it too fast. Welcome to saving the world from
• 0:37
  bad ideas. I'm Mark Linus, and I've had a
• 0:39
  few bad ideas in my time. I used to go out in the night
• 0:42
  time to destroy GMO crops, and I also opposed nuclear power.
• 0:46
  But then when I looked at the science, I found I got it wrong.
• 0:49
  Oops. I've learned the hard way that
• 0:50
  none of us are right all the time.
• 0:52
  So now I'm here to challenge the assumptions that we all too
• 0:55
  often take for granted because the future depends on us getting
• 0:58
  it right. Hello, and welcome to Saving the
• 1:01
  World from Bad Ideas. Today we're rejoined by Michael
• 1:05
  Lebreich. This is a rare double bill, but
• 1:09
  it's one that I think is richly merited because of the very
• 1:13
  interesting work that Michael's been doing recently on something
• 1:17
  which I think really does fit really like perfectly into the
• 1:23
  bad ideas format. Michael does a lot of myth myth
• 1:26
  busting. And Michael, you're the host of
• 1:29
  Cleaning Up and I can see you're in the cleaning up throne room.
• 1:33
  You're sort of sort of on a, on a very nice looking chair with
• 1:35
  some books in the background, none of which are mine, but I
• 1:37
  have to have to complain about that.
• 1:39
  But it's really it's just great to have you back on the show
• 1:41
  again. Thank you very much.
• 1:42
  You know, it's great to join you.
• 1:44
  And yes, this is the original cleaning up throne which I've
• 1:48
  just dusted off actually because I've moved back into my office
• 1:51
  here in London. When we spoke before I was
• 1:53
  actually in in my summer plumage over in in Switzerland, so I'm
• 1:58
  now back in London in the studio here.
• 2:01
  And as host of cleaning up or Co host of cleaning up with our
• 2:05
  friend Briony Worthington, you do this thing at the when you
• 2:08
  introduce your guests, where you make them introduce themselves,
• 2:11
  which I think is somewhat like cheating.
• 2:13
  But it's also quite a good way to get them to tell you, I guess
• 2:17
  what's on the top of their minds rather than what comes up on
• 2:20
  Wikipedia or something. So go and introduce yourself in
• 2:22
  in just 20 seconds. For anyone who didn't catch
• 2:25
  episode 1. Yeah, it is a bit of a cheat,
• 2:27
  you're right, but it it it breaks the ice.
• 2:29
  So I'm Michael Lebreich. I basically do two things.
• 2:32
  I do a load of media and communications work around net
• 2:37
  zero, the transition, clean energy, clean transportation.
• 2:41
  So that would be my podcast, my writing for Bloomberg and a
• 2:45
  bunch of speaking. The other thing that I do is I
• 2:48
  have an advisory business called Eco Pragma Capital, where we
• 2:53
  help companies raise money, grow more rapidly.
• 2:56
  And we have also incubated a business called Pragma Charge,
• 3:00
  which I'm spending quite a bit of time with.
• 3:02
  And our first trucks, our first HGV trucks, big rigs are
• 3:08
  arriving as we speak in Valencia.
• 3:10
  So I'm over there to hand over the keys to the client, to the
• 3:13
  customer and those will be big rig 40 ton plus electric
• 3:17
  vehicles. And we're doing the charging
• 3:19
  across all of Europe. So I'm building cleaning up ECA,
• 3:23
  Pragma capital and actually Pragma charge three businesses
• 3:27
  at once. So not busy at all.
• 3:29
  Amazing. Well, thanks for sparing the
• 3:31
  time to join us today. In terms of the bad idea, as I
• 3:35
  was saying, we were talking about this just before we went
• 3:39
  on the air as it were. And back in the days of the
• 3:41
  Paris Agreement, which we just looked up, there was some
• 3:44
  wording about 1.5, which really became a sort of almost, almost
• 3:50
  achieved a sort of sacred status within at least the climate
• 3:53
  community. And certainly also for climate
• 3:55
  vulnerable countries, small island nations and those who
• 3:57
  really fought for it back at the time of the framing of the Paris
• 4:00
  Agreement in 2015. And the language was to pursue
• 4:04
  efforts to limit the temperature increase above pre industrial to
• 4:09
  1.5°. But you're going to propose
• 4:12
  today that that is a bad idea. And I'm thinking of the slogan
• 4:16
  that these small island States and and developing countries had
• 4:19
  back in Paris, which was 1.5 to stay alive.
• 4:22
  So you're going to tell us that 1.5 to stay alive was always a
• 4:26
  bad idea. And you are going to do this
• 4:28
  within the context of the second, second instalment of a,
• 4:34
  of A2 parter that you've been, that you did for Bloomberg NEF
• 4:38
  on a pragmatic climate reset. So I, I can't wait to get in dig
• 4:43
  into this. I think you also call it a
• 4:44
  provocation, which certainly is how a a lot of, I'm sure a lot
• 4:47
  of listeners will find it. But just give us the very, the,
• 4:50
  the brief summary overall and then we'll dig into some of the
• 4:53
  specifics. OK, so for those who are
• 4:55
  following the story so far, my first appearance on saving the
• 4:59
  world from bad ideas was largely around hydrogen, and I've done
• 5:02
  lots of work on that. But you're absolutely right.
• 5:05
  I've written this big two parts for Bloomberg's 10,000 words.
• 5:08
  Two parts and it's also on cleaning up and the first part
• 5:12
  was really about sort of pushing back on these narratives of
• 5:15
  failure of the transition. So I want to make one point
• 5:17
  first before we go into 1.5 and why that target has has ended up
• 5:22
  being counterproductive. I want to say, you know, you if
• 5:25
  you think that I'm a, you know, you're going to if you can start
• 5:28
  using words like climate denier. If you think I'm the problem,
• 5:31
  please read the first part or listen to the podcast because
• 5:34
  I'm actually very much on board with the need for climate
• 5:38
  action, the need for transition, the need for net zero, and
• 5:42
  actually that we're making tremendous progress.
• 5:44
  OK, So that's kind of the terms and conditions, the caveat So
• 5:48
  1.5 which is essentially congruent with reaching global
• 5:56
  net 0 by 2050. And as you point out, it arose
• 6:00
  out of some wording in the Paris climate agreement where the hard
• 6:07
  target is well below 2°. You can we can talk about what
• 6:11
  weather, you know how big, how well below do you need to be to
• 6:13
  be well below 2° of warming. And this is all measured in
• 6:17
  terms of warming after the, you know, essentially industrial
• 6:22
  revolution, so pre industrial revolution to now.
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  And the hard target was well below 2°.
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  But quite late in the negotiations, there was this
• 6:32
  piece that was introduced, the wording that said pursuing
• 6:36
  efforts to remain to say as close to 1.5°.
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  And you say that it was, it became iconic for the climate
• 6:46
  activists and the the climate community.
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  It actually really kind of went viral, let's call it because
• 6:54
  politicians are, you know, jumped on it and said, you know,
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  1.5°, you look at Alok Sharma at the Glasgow COP 21 meeting, we
• 7:04
  had this keep 1.5 alive. And the whole architecture, for
• 7:10
  instance, within the financial services industry where you have
• 7:12
  the network for the greening of the financial service of
• 7:15
  financial sector, NFGS. So all of the central banks
• 7:20
  around 1.5, the net zero banking alliance, it was all around 1.5.
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  And you know, the whole system asking companies whether they
• 7:29
  had a 2050 net zero plan that is a 1.5 that's all keyed, all
• 7:34
  indexed to 1.5. And the reality is that as soon
• 7:38
  as essentially the Paris Agreement was published and they
• 7:41
  started to figure out, OK, well, we're all supposed to now focus
• 7:44
  on 1.5. I was already saying, well, I
• 7:47
  don't think we can get that. It's not a realistic target.
• 7:51
  And that's just because we were first of all, already at, you
• 7:54
  know, 1.11.2 clearly moving in the wrong direction and with
• 7:59
  enormous inertia in the sense that we were still building
• 8:03
  coal-fired power stations, gas fired power stations, growing
• 8:07
  transport infrastructure, using fossil fuels, and of course,
• 8:11
  industry and continuing to to grow the use of fossil.
• 8:15
  So we were clearly not only were we nearly there, we're also
• 8:17
  heading in the wrong direction. And so I was saying, look,
• 8:20
  realistically, we're not going, it's not going to happen.
• 8:23
  And I do think, just to be very clear, I don't think it was a
• 8:26
  bad thing to spend 10 years, you know, trying to get there and
• 8:31
  exploring how would you get there.
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  But it became this kind of fetishistic target, which is
• 8:39
  it's now apparent we're not going to get there.
• 8:41
  And we got an enormous push back from some of the things that
• 8:46
  happened in the attempt. And so when we look around and
• 8:50
  we see whether it's President Trump's election re election in
• 8:54
  the US or whether we see reform in the UK, or whether we see the
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  push back frankly around, you know, the Anglosphere.
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  You look at Canada, you look at Australia, New Zealand, UKUS,
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  but also Europe, not so much Asia, interestingly.
• 9:11
  And we can we can try to figure out why that is.
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  What we see is this push back against climate action.
• 9:17
  And it's not fair to say, Oh well, that's all because of the
• 9:20
  fossil fuel industry and the right wing think tanks and
• 9:23
  populist opportunist politicians.
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  It is also a reaction to what the climate community has been
• 9:33
  proposing and trying to impose and trying to sort of capture
• 9:36
  politicians to impose on people. And so, you know, my saving the
• 9:40
  world from bad ideas is to say can we please stop?
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  Let's accept 1.5 is not going to happen.
• 9:47
  It's was actually never realistic.
• 9:49
  Doesn't matter. But right now it is
• 9:51
  counterproductive. And just very importantly, I'm
• 9:54
  not saying slow down. I'm not saying do all the things
• 9:58
  you want to do anyway, because I'm a believer in the
• 10:00
  transition. Just do them slower so that
• 10:02
  doesn't annoy as many people. I'm actually saying if you want
• 10:06
  the system, which includes politics and society and supply
• 10:10
  chains, etcetera, if you want that system to go as fast as
• 10:14
  possible, then stop trying to sort of push it too fast.
• 10:18
  You know, if, if those of us who remember what carburettors on
• 10:22
  cars are, if you flood the carburettor, there's no point
• 10:25
  pumping the accelerator, right? You're going to make it worse,
• 10:28
  not better. So pushing more, raising the
• 10:31
  alarm more is actually not going to accelerate action.
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  It's going to slow it down. So that's my, that's why backing
• 10:39
  off. The point is not the backing
• 10:41
  off. The point is let's go as fast as
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  possible. And that involves backing off
• 10:46
  from 1.5 and then actually rethinking a lot of the kind of
• 10:50
  policy and a lot of the the kind of sausage making that lies
• 10:53
  underneath that. So that's where I'm coming from.
• 10:56
  Right. I mean, I, I find it really
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  interesting as someone who works with climate vulnerable
• 11:01
  countries and of course the defending 1.5 and the NGO
• 11:04
  community is defending 1.5. It it, there comes a point where
• 11:08
  it's literally indefensible because we've passed 1.5.
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  You know, the average temperature of the planet in all
• 11:15
  of 2024 was above 1.5. Even if you take the IPCC, you
• 11:20
  know, 20 year average definition and you assume that the current
• 11:24
  rate of temperature increase is going to continue more or less
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  linearly, then we'll be crossing 1.5 even by that more
• 11:30
  conservative definition in 2028 probably.
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  So it is literally impossible even as we speak today to keep
• 11:36
  the planet at 1.5 above pre industrial levels.
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  And yet nobody seems to want to seem to be prepared to admit it.
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  And so you've got all these poor negotiators at COP 30
• 11:45
  potentially and then untenable position having to defend and
• 11:49
  ask, which they already know deep down is literally
• 11:53
  impossible. So I'd be keen to talk a bit
• 11:56
  more about that because you you propose in your essay that the
• 12:01
  fall back should be, should be two degrees.
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  But I don't really see any reason why it should be two
• 12:05
  degrees any more than 1.6 or 1.7, other than the fact that 2°
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  was also mentioned as the sort of hard target in in the Paris
• 12:11
  Agreement text. But I also want, you know, I'm,
• 12:14
  I'm Co authoring a piece which which with a couple of climate
• 12:17
  scientists were submitted to a journal arguing actually that
• 12:21
  planetary average temperature targets aren't particularly a
• 12:25
  good idea, a good way of framing this, particularly if they're
• 12:27
  couched in sort of 2100 type language.
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  A because nobody actually by definition experiences planetary
• 12:34
  average temperatures. So it's something which can only
• 12:36
  ever be mediated through experts.
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  B because you only know in in retrospect, like 10 years after
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  the fact. So it's not very good to have
• 12:44
  that as a, as a target which you can't even identify in real
• 12:46
  time. And C maybe because there's so
• 12:49
  many other drivers which determine average temperature
• 12:52
  and not, it's not as if just carbon is just the 11 and only
• 12:55
  thermostat, which, which tells us what the ultimate temperature
• 13:00
  outcome will be. You could also, you know, we're
• 13:01
  also warming the planet up by reducing cooling aerosols from
• 13:05
  shipping pollution and stuff. Or we, you know, we could do
• 13:08
  solar radiation management as we've discussed in previous
• 13:10
  episodes and put it back at the top of the atmosphere, which
• 13:12
  actually is probably the only physically doable way of of
• 13:15
  sticking to 1.5 S For these reasons, I actually don't.
• 13:19
  I think that retreating to another planetary average
• 13:22
  temperature target, the fall back of two degrees is actually
• 13:24
  the right way to go. But tell me if you agree or if
• 13:27
  I'm wrong. Why did I call it a provocation
• 13:30
  and not a manifesto? By by calling it another little
• 13:34
  trick, by the way, like getting people to introduce themselves.
• 13:38
  Because actually as a provocation, I can say right,
• 13:41
  1.5 is a counterproductive target.
• 13:43
  And actually the hard target is 2.
• 13:46
  But now you make a very persuasive argument that global
• 13:49
  average temperatures in 2100 is the wrong.
• 13:53
  Even if you were to choose a relaxed target, then that would
• 13:55
  be the wrong one. And it's a very persuasive
• 13:57
  argument. So, you know, because it was
• 14:01
  only a provocation, I can say, you know, you're right and I
• 14:03
  agree. That doesn't mean that I know
• 14:07
  what is a better target. And it is entirely possible that
• 14:10
  there is no, that the right response is actually not to say
• 14:13
  let's have a target on global average temperature in 2100 or
• 14:17
  maybe we shouldn't have a target on pretty much anything else.
• 14:20
  I don't know. I think that's the discussion we
• 14:22
  need to have. Because if you think about
• 14:25
  what's happening in boardrooms around the world or in, you
• 14:29
  know, in, in, in within the financial system or political
• 14:33
  system is everybody's scratching their head going well, I don't
• 14:37
  want to nail my colours to the 1.5 mast anymore.
• 14:41
  I just think it's absurd to not to do business with people who
• 14:45
  don't have a 1 1/2 degree plan net 02050 when actually that's
• 14:50
  impossible anyway. But how do we, how do we retreat
• 14:56
  from that? Because it is a retreat after
• 14:59
  all the public statements that this bank or that politician has
• 15:02
  made? How do we how does one retreat
• 15:03
  from that whilst remain incredible and how do you
• 15:06
  explain it to all the different stakeholders, to your staff?
• 15:10
  You know how we had all these sessions and we all had to go to
• 15:13
  off sites and, you know, sign up to 1.5 and brainstorm and it was
• 15:17
  in the literature and the front page of the annual report and we
• 15:20
  were turning away business from people who are doing this, that
• 15:23
  and the other. We didn't that wasn't
• 15:24
  consistent. You know, what do you do?
• 15:26
  Do you just say that was last year and we don't do that
• 15:28
  anymore. How do you retreat?
• 15:29
  It's a very I think that's one of the most interesting
• 15:32
  conversations that we have to have now and I don't have the
• 15:35
  answers. I think that is that is in a
• 15:37
  sense that's, you know, that's the that's where we now need to
• 15:40
  focus efforts because that's, you know, we sort of know we
• 15:45
  have to do it. I think pretty much people I
• 15:47
  talk to, they say, you know, agree with everything in your
• 15:51
  climate, you know, the pragmatic climate reset piece.
• 15:55
  But what am I supposed to do? I'm the CEO of a company.
• 15:57
  What do I say next? And I'm like, that's a good
• 15:59
  question. Yeah, well, I can tell you the
• 16:03
  the replacement that we came up with, which is actually to move
• 16:07
  the goal posts and not to have a, as I say, not if you, if you
• 16:10
  don't think having a planetary average temperature target is a
• 16:12
  good idea. What what is a good idea?
• 16:14
  And it's actually to probably have something you can actually
• 16:17
  deliver on a timescale which is meaningful to people.
• 16:20
  And that's probably something like, you know, carbon, carbon
• 16:24
  intensity or proportion of clean energy in your economy or
• 16:26
  something like that, which governments can absolutely do
• 16:28
  and can bring to cop every single year and, and shout
• 16:31
  about. So let me let me go back to the
• 16:33
  first part of my pragmatic climate research piece and
• 16:37
  podcast. By the way, it's also on
• 16:39
  YouTube. What I did in order to dispel
• 16:43
  this narrative that the transition is failing, I built a
• 16:47
  four line model of the global energy system, literally 4 lines
• 16:51
  of Excel. It's not a forecast.
• 16:53
  It was just illustrative because I wanted to show those people
• 16:56
  who said fossil fuel has continued to grow despite, you
• 17:01
  know, 1992 Earth Summit, Kyoto, Paris, Glasgow, and yet fossil
• 17:08
  fuel use and emissions have continued to grow and therefore
• 17:13
  it's a complete failure. There is no transition.
• 17:15
  Everything is linear, everything is additive, everything is
• 17:18
  pointless because demand grows and clean energy can't meet it.
• 17:23
  And that is that narrative is wrong.
• 17:25
  It is, it is demonstrably wrong, which I demonstrated with my
• 17:29
  four line model because if you look at new solutions, they
• 17:34
  don't arrive in the world fully formed at scale.
• 17:38
  So to use auk example, we're going to have to electrify the
• 17:41
  heating for 20 million homes in 25 years.
• 17:46
  Well, you just divide 20 million by 25 and that gives you the
• 17:49
  number of homes every year. And if you don't do it, you're
• 17:51
  failing. Well, that's not how it works.
• 17:55
  That would require 800,000 homes per year.
• 17:58
  Well, guess what? Yeah, one, there might only be
• 18:01
  30,000 year 2, there might be 34,000 year three, there might
• 18:06
  be 40,000 year 4. And as long as you've got a
• 18:10
  geometric growth in the number of homes, then you'll get there.
• 18:14
  It's like the grains of rice on the chess board.
• 18:16
  As long as you've got geometric growth going on, you'll get
• 18:19
  there. Now you might get there in a
• 18:20
  very unsatisfying way for climate activists because most
• 18:24
  of what you see will happen in the out decades.
• 18:27
  And that was what my four line model did.
• 18:29
  I just said, you know, the economy keeps growing.
• 18:32
  I really hope it does because there's a lot of people in the
• 18:34
  world really need, you know, continued growth to pull them
• 18:37
  out of poverty. That means that the demand for
• 18:42
  energy, not primary energy, which is a supply metric, but
• 18:45
  actual energy will grow by a bit less because of efficiency.
• 18:49
  And as long as clean energy takes, not takes a bigger and
• 18:53
  bigger chunk, but just grows every year by a few percent more
• 18:58
  than energy demand, then what you do see is exactly that
• 19:01
  pattern of sort of nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing like
• 19:05
  Ernest Hemingway's description of going bankrupt.
• 19:08
  How does it happen? First slowly, then quickly.
• 19:11
  So your your fossil fuel share will shrink first slowly and
• 19:16
  then quickly. So if you have a 3% difference
• 19:19
  of clean energy grows faster than energy demand by 3% per
• 19:23
  year, which is not that much, and we were certainly beating
• 19:26
  that right now. If it keeps doing that long
• 19:29
  enough, then actually there's no space for fossil fuels by about
• 19:33
  2065. Now 2065 is broadly consistent
• 19:38
  with well below 2°. You know, there's we need to do
• 19:42
  some, the experts will do some climate modelling to see if it's
• 19:46
  two point, if that is 2.1 or 1.9.
• 19:49
  And if it's not quite there, you could do some biogenic carbon
• 19:51
  capture or by the way, the 3% delta frankly for the next few
• 19:56
  years we should be able to absolutely easily beat.
• 20:00
  So it should be able to be faster than that, at least in
• 20:02
  the early years, which will very much help because you know that
• 20:04
  that you know, the carbon, the CO2 accumulates in the
• 20:07
  atmosphere. But what the model shows, and
• 20:09
  it's only an illustration, it's not a detailed forecast, it
• 20:13
  shows that you can get a transition consistent ish with
• 20:18
  two degrees by growing clean energy fast enough every year.
• 20:23
  Back to the question, what is a good target?
• 20:25
  Well, maybe a good target is grow clean energy fast enough
• 20:29
  every year and say I don't know about 2100, I don't even know
• 20:34
  about 2065. I don't even know about
• 20:37
  2050203020. All I know is do we have the
• 20:42
  plans in place, the supply chain, the regulatory
• 20:45
  environment, the business models, the technology to just
• 20:49
  grow clean energy at and you need to grow it at sort of five,
• 20:53
  six, 7%, the clean energy output.
• 20:56
  So the, you know, each year grow it by doing enough installations
• 21:00
  to grow the output by 5 or 6% per year.
• 21:03
  And if the answer's yes, guess what, we're on track.
• 21:07
  We're on track. In the end, fossil will be
• 21:09
  squeezed off the system and it get, you know, it gets difficult
• 21:12
  at the end because you have things like aviation and so on.
• 21:15
  But right now the target is keep clean energy growing and whether
• 21:20
  it's cleaning up the grid, electrifying and therefore
• 21:23
  cleaning transportation, cleaning, heating, cleaning
• 21:26
  industrial heat, it could be decarbonizing, you know, making
• 21:30
  the the mix of fuel in the whichever industry, shipping,
• 21:34
  aviation that you know, that can all be part of it.
• 21:36
  But fundamentally it's just are we growing clean energy fast
• 21:40
  enough? And if you accept that as a
• 21:42
  target, it has implications for, for instance, we don't bother
• 21:46
  demonizing fossil fuel providers because what we say is, you
• 21:50
  know, knock yourself out, keep supply, keep the homes warm,
• 21:53
  keep the aeroplanes flying. But we're coming for you.
• 21:58
  We're coming for you with clean energy.
• 22:00
  Might take a while, but we're coming for you.
• 22:02
  I mean, I'm thinking of how, how our channel climate activists
• 22:06
  here and we've had Bill Mckebben on the show, George Monbio, you
• 22:10
  know, and, and I'm pretty sure they've both argued that not
• 22:12
  another cent penny, whatever euro should be invested in, in,
• 22:16
  in, in producing more fossil fuels.
• 22:18
  So shut down all oil exploration and so on.
• 22:22
  Now, I don't think you're supporting that, are you?
• 22:24
  I mean, because you still have fossil fuels coming onto the
• 22:26
  system. Well, so.
• 22:28
  So I mean, shouldn't. Isn't this too little too late?
• 22:31
  Well, you know, if, if you're, if you're completely hung up on
• 22:35
  1 1/2° and of course it's too little too late, but pushing
• 22:38
  harder for it is not going to speed it up, right?
• 22:41
  Maybe you could say that what I'm arguing for is the sort of
• 22:43
  the least worst outcome, which is, you know, as I say, there is
• 22:47
  this system, which is the energy system, the transport system,
• 22:50
  but it's also the financial system, the political system,
• 22:54
  you know, society, how fast can that move?
• 22:57
  And so I'm saying, I don't, I'm not going for purism.
• 23:00
  I'm going for how fast that can move, which by the way, you
• 23:04
  know, is probably fast enough to leave a recognizable planet and
• 23:08
  political, you know, and, and, and economic system whilst
• 23:11
  pulling people out of poverty, etcetera, etcetera.
• 23:13
  Is it perfect? I, I fully admit that it's not.
• 23:16
  There will be people suffering as they are in this world.
• 23:19
  They will be suffering in that world.
• 23:21
  But stating that doesn't open up a way to go faster.
• 23:26
  The more you state it, the more strident you get.
• 23:28
  In fact, you're more most likely to go slower.
• 23:30
  So it's counterproductive to to say, well, I don't like that,
• 23:33
  therefore I'll glue myself to the head office of Shell because
• 23:36
  actually you're not helping. So in terms of investment in
• 23:40
  fossil, if we don't invade, if we said right, no more
• 23:44
  investment, not one red cent more going into fossil, then you
• 23:48
  get a decline rate of the existing assets, which is
• 23:51
  somewhere between 5 and 10% per year, especially unconventional
• 23:56
  oil and gas. You know when you frack, you get
• 23:59
  this burst of gas and oil and then it drops away very quickly.
• 24:02
  So if you don't keep fracking, then that will drop away.
• 24:05
  But even conventional, even though that those, you know,
• 24:08
  the, the huge oil fields in Saudi and the gas fields in
• 24:11
  Qatar and so on, they will fall away if you don't invest.
• 24:15
  And so if you say we do not invest and then you're going to
• 24:19
  get let's whatever it is, let's say a 5%, the low end reduction
• 24:23
  in output every year. If clean energy cannot step in,
• 24:28
  boom tomorrow with the supply chains, with the finance, with
• 24:31
  the skills, with the permitting and planning system that we've
• 24:34
  got. If it cannot step in, then that
• 24:38
  is a recipe for immense energy price inflation because the
• 24:43
  fossil will fall away and the clean is not able to fill the
• 24:47
  gap. Supply and demand inflation.
• 24:50
  Who do you think suffers from that inflation?
• 24:53
  It's not going to be, you know, how can I put this comfortable
• 24:57
  middle class climate concerned, you know, folks like you and me,
• 25:02
  Mark, it's going to be the poor and the vulnerable, whether it's
• 25:04
  the in the global South or whether it's the less well off
• 25:08
  in our own societies are going to suffer from energy price
• 25:11
  inflation. And that is going to mass
• 25:13
  manifest itself in suffering. But it's also going to manifest
• 25:17
  itself in political push back. I'm not going to say that's what
• 25:21
  we're seeing because there's PhDs to write about why, why we
• 25:26
  see populist politicians, why 150,000 people were out on the
• 25:29
  streets in the UK in London for a very far right demonstration a
• 25:34
  couple of weeks ago. But we have to be more
• 25:38
  sophisticated than that in how we drive this system to
• 25:42
  transition as fast as possible. So the IEAA few years ago very
• 25:48
  carefully phrased it and said we do not need in a 1 1/2° world,
• 25:53
  we do not need investment in new oil and gas fields.
• 25:58
  They didn't say you don't need to invest in maintaining the
• 26:01
  output and potentially extending, extending and
• 26:05
  expanding existing ones, right. And that was for 1 1/2° which is
• 26:09
  in the rearview mirror as we've as we've concluded.
• 26:12
  So yes, we do need investment in oil and gas in order to drive
• 26:19
  the system as fast as possible. And you know, this is the oil
• 26:24
  and gas industry has sort of phrased it in a very crass and
• 26:27
  gross way of saying there'll always be a need for oil and
• 26:30
  gas. And we're the grown-ups in the
• 26:32
  room keeping the lights on and you can go off and, you know, do
• 26:35
  your climate thing. And this is the sort of the,
• 26:37
  the, the Dan Yergen troubled transition narrative, which I
• 26:41
  took aim at in my first, the first part of the pragmatic
• 26:44
  climate reset pieces, because that narrative of saying we'll
• 26:49
  always need oil and gas, so that's why we're investing that
• 26:52
  I push back on that I reject. So what when I talk to oil and
• 26:56
  gas folks and I say, I'm not going to demonize you for
• 26:59
  investing, but make sure you phrase it like this.
• 27:03
  A small amount of particularly gas, flexible gas can enable an
• 27:08
  enormous amount of clean energy. And that should be your strategy
• 27:12
  as a gas company. That's a legitimate, ethical,
• 27:15
  morally acceptable strategy for an oil and gas company is to do
• 27:20
  what it takes to maintain the affordability of energy, but no
• 27:25
  more not to what's unethical, unacceptable is to go out and
• 27:29
  promote fossils to go out and you know, and there's a, you
• 27:34
  know, the the Energy Utilities Alliance in the UK trying to
• 27:38
  spark outrage about heat pumps because you want to maintain the
• 27:42
  gas system or to promote, you know, absurd uses of hydrogen,
• 27:46
  which you know, you know, we know, they know, we know, you
• 27:49
  know, they know, we know, we know that etcetera will not work
• 27:52
  right promoting those. So telling people that they can
• 27:56
  maintain, you know, the existing economic system, swap one gas
• 28:00
  for another and continue without pointing out that that would
• 28:04
  cost, you know, 2345 times as much.
• 28:06
  That's unethical, right? But just providing fossil fuels
• 28:10
  is not unethical and, and, and investing them in them.
• 28:15
  I'm afraid for all those, you know, activists listening, that
• 28:18
  is not unethical to invest in something that is keeping me
• 28:22
  warm. Lots of you know, actually, no,
• 28:24
  not me because I'm fully green tariff and fully heat pump in
• 28:28
  this new lovely studio, but it is keeping a lot of people warm
• 28:33
  and I certainly am using fossils still in transportation and
• 28:37
  there's I can't avoid that yet. So demonizing a product or
• 28:42
  service that you use for those out there listening, that's the
• 28:46
  unethical bit. It's the demonization.
• 28:48
  And so I want to tell people, don't demonize, just build clean
• 28:51
  energy faster. Yeah, I, I'd like to talk a bit
• 28:55
  more about the moralizing side because I've always found, well,
• 28:59
  I've always suspected it's counterproductive to moralise
• 29:01
  about people's flights, let's say.
• 29:04
  But I still get this if I, if I'm, you know, I was, I flew to
• 29:06
  New Yorker a couple of weeks ago actually for climate Week,
• 29:10
  ironically. And everyone goes, oh, isn't
• 29:11
  that ironic? You know, you're, you're burning
• 29:13
  carbon to save the climate IU and you get these sort of snide
• 29:16
  remarks. And that's a legacy really of a
• 29:18
  lot of green campaigning, which I've personally bear some share
• 29:22
  responsibility for. I've done some, I've done plenty
• 29:25
  of flight shaming in the past. You'd probably find it on the
• 29:27
  Internet, but I've come to realize actually that that kind
• 29:31
  of moralizing and virtue signalling and stuff actually is
• 29:34
  really counterproductive. It's really alienating.
• 29:36
  And it's also focusing on the bits that we don't know how to
• 29:38
  solve. Like decarbonizing aviation is
• 29:40
  really difficult. But there's a ton of stuff.
• 29:42
  And I think you make this point very well in your essay.
• 29:44
  Like we can get at least 90% of the job done pretty easily with
• 29:48
  current technology that we already know about, but that
• 29:53
  doesn't. So this is something about the
• 29:54
  politics here. It's a kind of left wing good,
• 29:57
  the good guys, bad guys thing where the, you know, the the oil
• 30:00
  companies make great villains. They've got big, highly paid
• 30:03
  CEOs, you know, and then you've got heroic activists being
• 30:06
  dragged away by the police. And, you know, it seems to fit
• 30:09
  the kind of, I don't know, maybe it's post apartheid or, you
• 30:13
  know, some kind of the kind of political moral framework that
• 30:17
  that the left operates in. Tell us, tell us really about
• 30:20
  how you kind of reframe this. What you've got going on there
• 30:24
  is I did actually a lovely episode of Cleaning up with a
• 30:31
  guy called Chris Rapley. I don't know if you know him.
• 30:33
  He's a climate scientist. And he talked about the fact
• 30:35
  that we actually still have this kind of, you know, Neolithic
• 30:38
  brain, despite the fact that we live in the digital world in
• 30:42
  this, you know, with, with extraordinary political
• 30:46
  structures and communication ability and so on.
• 30:48
  But we're basically still very, we're still, you know, we're
• 30:50
  evolved for much simpler times where we believe in stories and
• 30:54
  one of the stories that we're constantly trying to interpret
• 30:56
  and understand using very primitive sort of apparatus up
• 31:00
  here. And by the way, I got news for
• 31:02
  you, AI is probably not going to change that.
• 31:04
  It's going to mimic that because it's going to know that's what
• 31:06
  we want. And one of the stories is
• 31:10
  everybody wants to believe they're a good person and and
• 31:15
  they also want to be validated in their community.
• 31:18
  And So what we've got is, you know what I as a technocratic
• 31:23
  sort of wonk think it's just an energy system is actually also
• 31:27
  throwing off lots of ammunition for these culture war or
• 31:31
  whatever you want to call it, these narratives, the
• 31:32
  storytelling. And so yes, it's very satisfying
• 31:37
  to say that there are 100 companies responsible for 70% of
• 31:44
  emissions. That that that makes me feel
• 31:47
  good because I have got this very black and white.
• 31:52
  Is it the I don't know how to pronounce the word Manichean
• 31:54
  Manichean. Manichean.
• 31:56
  Manichean view of the world, then I'm and I'm on the good
• 31:58
  side because I'm not one of the 70 bad companies now, but it's
• 32:01
  also in suggesting that if we just got rid of those 70
• 32:05
  companies that the world would be a better place.
• 32:07
  Well, sorry, hang on a second. It's really complicated because
• 32:11
  you first of all, some of those companies are not Western based
• 32:14
  oil and gas companies that could potentially be shut down through
• 32:19
  whether it's the legislative process or the sticking to doors
• 32:22
  process, the protesting process. Because you know, the biggest
• 32:25
  oil companies are now not the ones that the names that trip
• 32:29
  off the tongue of, you know, Exxon, Shell, BP, Chevron, the
• 32:34
  biggest oil companies are now, you know, it's the Petronas and
• 32:37
  the Saudi Aramco and Sinopec and so on.
• 32:41
  How are you going to shut them down?
• 32:42
  Notice that none of these protesters ever go and stick
• 32:44
  themselves to the door of Sinopec in Beijing because they
• 32:47
  know they would disappear for 10 years.
• 32:50
  And and so they do it where it's convenient and also where they
• 32:53
  get the press and the validation for other for all those
• 32:55
  narratives that they're really playing to.
• 32:58
  But by the way, it happens both ways, because then the the if
• 33:02
  you're a fossil fuel person, you're in that community,
• 33:06
  whether you work for them or, or you're from a country that's
• 33:08
  very dependent, then you start saying things like, yeah, well,
• 33:11
  but the clothes you wear, they're all made from fossil.
• 33:15
  They're all made from oil, aren't they?
• 33:17
  They're made from petrochemicals.
• 33:18
  And so then you can feel all virtuous because you've called
• 33:20
  out the hypocrisy of people who say that they want to shut all
• 33:25
  this stuff down, but these are all innocent.
• 33:27
  I mean, that's why I think we need to defuse those narratives
• 33:32
  and say, right, nobody gets to demonize anybody unless it's
• 33:35
  really bad behaviour. If you do try and spark outrage
• 33:38
  about heat pumps, then I'm sorry, you are a bad person and
• 33:42
  you you deserve to be treated as a bad person because that is
• 33:46
  misinformation. That's not informing.
• 33:49
  And that is that is actually, that is promoting things that
• 33:53
  are bad for the people you're promoting them to.
• 33:56
  So that's, that's, you know, that is in my book.
• 34:00
  I'm not saying you should demonize people, but I do call
• 34:03
  people out for that. I call people out.
• 34:05
  Also, there was Aston Martin, the head of government relations
• 34:11
  through anonymously through his wife, produced a a booklet
• 34:16
  saying that, well, internal combustion vehicles produce more
• 34:21
  emissions than than than electric vehicles.
• 34:25
  And, you know, I, I caught them at it.
• 34:28
  And yes, I made a big. So it's not that you just sort
• 34:30
  of let people misinform and get on with being, you know, sort of
• 34:34
  crappy people. But what you don't do is suggest
• 34:37
  that shutting down fossil fuels is the solution to the climate
• 34:41
  crisis. The solution to the climate
• 34:43
  crisis will be when we have clean alternatives such that
• 34:47
  fossil fuels are no longer needed.
• 34:49
  And many of them are economic already.
• 34:54
  They won't all be economic even in the long term.
• 34:56
  So one of the mistakes that people have made on the climate
• 34:59
  community side of things is saying, well, solar got cheap,
• 35:02
  batteries got cheap, E VS got cheap, wind got cheap.
• 35:05
  Therefore everything gets cheap if only you kind of pour enough
• 35:09
  money in in the short term and then wait long enough.
• 35:12
  And there are things that will just not yield to that.
• 35:15
  The, the, that these are, this is difficult stuff.
• 35:18
  So high temperature, high temperature, industrial heat,
• 35:23
  gas is just so cheap compared to electricity.
• 35:26
  Why? Well, because you make
• 35:27
  electricity from gas, right? So there are reasons why we may
• 35:31
  need a carbon price or a gap filler of some sort even in the
• 35:35
  long term. But please, let's make that as
• 35:38
  little as possible. That's one other argument that I
• 35:40
  make in the pragmatic climate reset is that is OK as long as
• 35:45
  we're talking about, I don't know, let's call it $100 a tonne
• 35:47
  of carbon, $200 a tonne of carbon.
• 35:50
  But when you start promoting things that cost $500 a tonne of
• 35:53
  carbon, $1000 per tonne of carbon, you know, really
• 35:56
  improbable solutions, those are, they are inflationary and
• 36:02
  therefore they are bad for the vulnerable people in the
• 36:06
  community, but they also get this political Bush push back.
• 36:09
  They're so manifestly stupid that you end up just creating a
• 36:12
  sort of attack surface for the people who want to do nothing.
• 36:16
  So let's keep it. Let's keep it cheap.
• 36:19
  A lot of it will cost nothing. Let's keep it cheap.
• 36:22
  And if there's a bit left at the end, well, let's deal with that
• 36:24
  in, I don't know, 204520482041, whatever, 205526, if it's a
• 36:30
  small enough piece, let's not let that dominate the
• 36:35
  conversations. Right.
• 36:37
  But I mean, to play devil's advocate a bit, aren't we in in
• 36:43
  this clean energy transition thanks to the work that's been
• 36:47
  done by moralizing activists in the past who you're sort of
• 36:50
  denigrating their efforts here. But it's thanks to them perhaps
• 36:53
  that we've now got these vast quantities of cheap solar panels
• 36:56
  and Nevs and the the transition is now technically achievable
• 37:01
  and foreseeable. If there hadn't been these, you
• 37:04
  know, if activists hadn't been lying down in front of, you
• 37:08
  know, cops and blowing themselves to shell, then you
• 37:10
  wouldn't wouldn't be having a clean energy transition at all.
• 37:13
  I completely agree that without the pressure, the societal
• 37:18
  pressure, a lot of we would not be where we are today.
• 37:22
  I mean, by the way, it's entirely possible we might even
• 37:24
  be further along by, by the way, because maybe other players
• 37:27
  would have understood solar and maybe it wouldn't have become a
• 37:31
  dirty word in certain parts of the world to do wind and so on.
• 37:34
  So we can't, it's very hard to establish a counterfactual.
• 37:36
  But broadly speaking, I do agree.
• 37:38
  But I would like to think I'm not denigrating, I'm just saying
• 37:43
  we are where we are, right? We've got this pushback.
• 37:46
  President Trump did win a second term.
• 37:49
  And therefore, the question is what whether you think that what
• 37:53
  was done in the past was perfect, continuing with those
• 37:56
  same narratives, same strategies, same tactics.
• 38:00
  Would that, will that move the system as fast as possible from
• 38:03
  here? And actually, I was, I was
• 38:05
  thinking about this. A lot of the progress to date
• 38:07
  has been by cleaning up electricity.
• 38:10
  It's been, in a sense, technocratic process, right?
• 38:13
  When most people switch the lights on, they don't know
• 38:16
  whether it's 42% coal power in 2012 or 0% coal power in 2025.
• 38:23
  They just know the light came on and they do see that.
• 38:25
  They only see the light comes on and then there's a bill they
• 38:28
  have to pay. That's the only interaction they
• 38:30
  have everything else behind the curtain.
• 38:33
  So there's no changes in behavior required.
• 38:37
  Whereas to go forwards, you do need to deal with
• 38:41
  transportation, heating and industry, which is workplaces
• 38:46
  for a lot of people. And so you're now if you're, if
• 38:51
  your theory of change was win the politics, get the people you
• 38:56
  that elected who will push through the stuff you like, even
• 38:59
  if you win the election by .1%, that's good enough, right?
• 39:02
  Because they can just get the regulations through.
• 39:06
  That won't work now that the solutions that are needed,
• 39:11
  luckily the solutions also that are becoming economically
• 39:13
  viable, they're solutions that everybody needs to implement.
• 39:17
  So another. I'm not sure if I think I've
• 39:19
  phrased it, not necessarily in the articles that I wrote, but
• 39:22
  certainly in the social media banter afterwards.
• 39:25
  Don't piss off the people whose behaviour you need to change to
• 39:30
  achieve your goals. Right.
• 39:32
  It doesn't matter if you pissed them off, if they were 45% of
• 39:35
  the voters and you won the election, you could just, that's
• 39:38
  it. You could have big celebration,
• 39:40
  go to work on the regulations. But now you need those people to
• 39:44
  change their behaviours and therefore the strategy and the
• 39:47
  political, the theory of change needs to keep up.
• 39:50
  And I think that's why the past is not an indicator of the
• 39:54
  future, right? I mean, I guess the the climate
• 39:59
  left would would see the manifestation of Trump and the
• 40:04
  populist right wing. Backlash to climate policies as
• 40:08
  being a result of, you know, I guess lobbying by and dirty
• 40:13
  tricks behind the scenes and media manipulation by the big
• 40:16
  bad fossil fuel industry. And I don't know if it's
• 40:20
  possible to disprove that or whether it's just the storylines
• 40:23
  that run in our heads and our different, different politics.
• 40:26
  I mean, so, so learning from from this experience and
• 40:30
  figuring out what to do in the future going forward and how to
• 40:32
  keep, you know, how, how to sort of detoxify the politics of
• 40:36
  climate change. And I, I don't know, maybe it's
• 40:39
  my politics, but I do slightly blame the left more than the big
• 40:44
  bad oil companies. You know, I'm thinking of Naomi
• 40:46
  Klein's book, You know, what was it called?
• 40:48
  Climate change is everything. Basically, it didn't change
• 40:51
  anything about her politics. It was basically an argument
• 40:54
  that we all have to become radical left wingers in order to
• 40:57
  do anything about climate change and smash capitalism and all the
• 41:00
  stuff that she'd been saying forever.
• 41:02
  And sort of adding it to the, you know, what's what's
• 41:04
  denigrated as the, you know, the Democrat Omni course.
• 41:08
  You know, and you can see this with with Greta now campaigning
• 41:10
  for Gaza, You know, she's, you know, whatever your stance is on
• 41:15
  that issue. And of course she's, she's it's
• 41:16
  up to her to take whatever position she likes.
• 41:19
  But the way it gets folded into climate politics, and I've seen
• 41:22
  this in some of the campaigns I do, I do find actually really
• 41:24
  quite, quite disturbing. So first of all, it is
• 41:27
  manifestly clear that the incumbents have misbehaved,
• 41:32
  right? We know Exxon knew and we know
• 41:36
  that there is misinformation. The Energy Utilities Alliance,
• 41:40
  you know, Mike Foster in the UK, we know that there was, you
• 41:45
  know, misinformation. We know populist politicians
• 41:48
  whip it up. I mean, you know, President
• 41:50
  Trump saying that, you know, wind energy doesn't work and all
• 41:52
  this kind of nonsense. But so we know that.
• 41:55
  But what happens is I think a lot of the climate community
• 41:59
  assumes that they are completely without guilt, completely
• 42:03
  without responsibility for, for instance, this cause being very
• 42:09
  effective for a Nigel Farage, right.
• 42:11
  Why is it a rallying cry for reform in the UK to push back
• 42:16
  against climate change action? And the answer is because it has
• 42:19
  been sanctimoniously rammed down people's throat with no option
• 42:23
  but to agree. It's been it's been a
• 42:25
  transgressive act to say, well, you know, maybe there are other
• 42:30
  goals of foreign policy than just climate action.
• 42:33
  Maybe we should worry more about security or to say that, well,
• 42:39
  you know, maybe energy poverty should also be considered when
• 42:43
  we talk about climate justice. You ask climate activists list,
• 42:46
  what do they mean by climate justice?
• 42:48
  And they'll say things like making sure that communities and
• 42:51
  obviously, first of all, it's the the vulnerable communities
• 42:54
  always get hit first. Also the communities that are
• 42:58
  going to have to sort of do we have sacrifice communities that
• 43:02
  are just going to have to have solar and wind and pylons and
• 43:05
  stuff because they're not wealthy?
• 43:07
  Or is it jobs for people who lose their jobs in the coal
• 43:10
  industry, right? How about climate justice saying
• 43:13
  that everybody needs affordable energy, whether it's to, you
• 43:17
  know, take their kids to school or maybe it's to get a little
• 43:20
  cheeky little holiday, or whether it's to keep their house
• 43:22
  warm or whether it is in the, you know, in the global S to
• 43:26
  finally not have a dirt floor to sleep on, but a nice concrete
• 43:29
  floor and a decent, decent accommodation.
• 43:31
  They don't talk about energy affordability as part of climate
• 43:36
  justice. So what they're doing is
• 43:39
  promoting this transition in ignoring the negative, the
• 43:45
  downside of higher energy prices or diversion of capital, even if
• 43:49
  you think it doesn't cost more, is more investment and therefore
• 43:53
  diversion of capital investment away from, I don't know,
• 43:56
  building a school to maybe, you know, putting more upfront
• 44:00
  investment into wind and solar rather than a cheap, you know,
• 44:03
  coal or gas plant. So they don't accept the
• 44:05
  economic, they don't mention the economics, but what they do is
• 44:08
  mention a whole bunch of things that are, you know, sort of
• 44:11
  favorite causes of the of the left about, you know, having,
• 44:17
  you know, it's all this kind of what do they call it?
• 44:19
  Instead of, instead of just relying on democracy, we have to
• 44:22
  have special citizens climate, you know, meetings and so on.
• 44:28
  Well, we've got local authorities, we've got regional
• 44:30
  authorities, we've got democracy.
• 44:32
  What, what's wrong with that? Well, it doesn't give the
• 44:34
  outcome they like. So therefore we have to have a
• 44:36
  citizen's assembly. So the, but also beyond even
• 44:41
  just being tone deaf to how they also spur push back, there's
• 44:46
  some really obvious things like, and I, you know, I, I mentioned
• 44:49
  I've been long time, I've been banging on about this, but I
• 44:52
  also mentioned it in my pragmatic climate reset piece,
• 44:55
  the way that the climate science community uses extreme scenarios
• 45:01
  uses now this attribution science.
• 45:05
  And I'm going to put for those listening on a podcast, I'm
• 45:08
  using air quotes for science around attribution science.
• 45:12
  And then the way that the climate communications industry
• 45:15
  takes extreme scenarios, even if the academics say, well, it's
• 45:20
  not a business as usual. It's just a high emissions
• 45:22
  illustrative scenario. But then the the journalists and
• 45:25
  the activists will go out and say, oh, you know, all the
• 45:28
  Penguins will be dead by 2100 or whatever they're going to say,
• 45:31
  which is untethered from the science in order to frighten
• 45:37
  people more in order to spur action.
• 45:40
  And, and that is, to my mind, I mean, we are, you know, getting
• 45:44
  to the point where that is as unethical as promoting fossil
• 45:48
  fuels. So if you're if you're
• 45:50
  frightening children using science that is exaggerated.
• 45:54
  And by the way, then you're crying crocodile tears because
• 45:57
  the poor children have got climate anxiety because you've
• 45:59
  told them so many stories based on scenarios that aren't going
• 46:02
  to happen, right? That is, that is, that's just
• 46:05
  the Ying and the Yang. I mean, for every, for every
• 46:10
  narrative that is fake narrative being promoted by the fossil
• 46:14
  fuel, the the anti climate world, the contrarians, you've
• 46:18
  actually got fake narratives that are being promoted by the
• 46:20
  climate community. And you know, I just want to
• 46:23
  say, can we just stop? Can we just build clean energy,
• 46:27
  whatever that takes, Get rid of the bad behaviour on both sides,
• 46:31
  because bad behaviour we we've got no need for, you know, that
• 46:34
  doesn't that doesn't do anything.
• 46:35
  But you know, depolitize the depoliticize the politics and
• 46:39
  build clean energy that is either either will cost nothing
• 46:45
  or will be cheap. Just focus on that.
• 46:48
  That's what I would like to see. And particularly for this
• 46:50
  political cycle, political, you know, just for the, the next
• 46:54
  three, 5-10 years, whatever it is, don't do, don't worry about
• 46:58
  the really difficult stuff, the really expensive stuff, the last
• 47:01
  five or 10%. Let's just accelerate through
• 47:05
  that middle, the middle part of the race.
• 47:08
  Yeah, I feel I should try to step in and defend climate
• 47:11
  science here a bit. I, I think it might be a comms
• 47:14
  issue more than anything. It's useful to have high end,
• 47:18
  high end modelling of, you know, RCP 8.5.
• 47:20
  We have very high emissions because it then distinguishes
• 47:23
  your climate impacts from the background noise.
• 47:25
  And it's a, it's an important way to, to, to generate
• 47:29
  scientific evidence for what the impacts of climate change might
• 47:32
  be. You just don't have to call that
• 47:34
  business as usual as if it's something which is necessarily
• 47:36
  going to happen. That is one of the arguments
• 47:39
  that is used. And I understood I was an, I was
• 47:42
  an academic engineer and I know that if you, you know, you, you,
• 47:46
  you build a building and you want to know how it behaves.
• 47:48
  You know, in wind you might sort of hit it with really, you know,
• 47:52
  you want to kind of work out which bit fails first, right.
• 47:55
  But you wouldn't call that a realistic scenario.
• 47:58
  If you need a sort of 300 mile an hour wind to knock down a
• 48:01
  building, you wouldn't, then you wouldn't call it a Highwind
• 48:05
  scenario. You would call it, you would
• 48:06
  call it, you know, the investigation into failure modes
• 48:09
  of the building. And the reason it matters is,
• 48:13
  first of all, interestingly, all these scenarios arose.
• 48:16
  They, we only use scenarios because logically what we'd love
• 48:20
  to do is model the energy system, model the CO2, model the
• 48:25
  planet, model the outcomes, right?
• 48:27
  Except that that takes so long for the academic community to do
• 48:31
  so that within the IPCC, the, the, the AR system, the
• 48:36
  assessment review system, they kind of said, well, use these
• 48:40
  standard scenarios so that we can then concatenate the
• 48:42
  process. So one lot working on scenarios
• 48:44
  and one lot working on on all the other bits.
• 48:47
  But the scenarios had to be plausible.
• 48:49
  It says plausible. You'll see this word plausible
• 48:51
  within the the way that was all set up, plausible, plausible.
• 48:55
  There is no test for plausibility on the energy
• 48:58
  outcomes. There's no test.
• 49:00
  They just pull a scenario, have a meeting, have a bunch of
• 49:02
  meetings, God knows where, you know, Bali, Acapulco, I'm sure
• 49:06
  in very nice places. And then they say, so we're
• 49:09
  doing this process right now. It's happening.
• 49:11
  The IPCC, there's A and there's C.
• 49:15
  What is it? CC MIP There's a scenarios group
• 49:19
  and they are into comparisons project I think it's.
• 49:22
  Called There we go. Yeah, exactly.
• 49:24
  So they they. Produce the kind of official
• 49:26
  scenarios that everybody use. And it's it's very helpful to
• 49:29
  use the same set of scenarios for everybody because then you
• 49:32
  can compare models, but they're about to use to agree on, I
• 49:38
  think they pretty much have a new high scenario.
• 49:40
  They've got high, medium, and low, and they have reluctantly
• 49:44
  accepted that high. You can no longer use RCP 8.5
• 49:48
  because Michael and others have been so painful about them being
• 49:51
  entirely implausible. And by the way, for those
• 49:53
  listening who don't follow scenarios, which is hopefully
• 49:56
  lots of people because it's very technocratic, right?
• 49:59
  That RCP 8.5 scenario required more coal to be burned, 7 times
• 50:06
  growth in coal use by 2100. So more coal than is actually
• 50:10
  there in the reserves on the planet.
• 50:12
  And that was that was discovered by two researchers, Richie and
• 50:16
  Dalatabadi in 2017. And the climate science
• 50:19
  community did nothing about using those scenarios.
• 50:22
  They continued to use them and call them high scenarios.
• 50:25
  So completely not just slightly implausible, entirely
• 50:29
  implausible. Those scenarios.
• 50:32
  Now the modern version, you want to defend the science community,
• 50:36
  they're still being used. You can go and have a look at
• 50:39
  their and they may not call them business as usual.
• 50:43
  They may call them high emission scenario, but they then use them
• 50:47
  as business as usual in working out.
• 50:50
  For instance, how much money do we save as the economy if we
• 50:53
  deal with climate change, they'll use that scenario as the
• 50:55
  base case. So they might not call it the
• 50:58
  business as usual, but that's the use of it in the in the
• 51:00
  methodology. So now they're going to switch
• 51:04
  off 88.5. I'll, I'll bet you it still
• 51:08
  continues to be used, but they won't use that.
• 51:10
  They'll use something called high.
• 51:12
  And the high scenario. I mean, if you look at
• 51:16
  emissions, how they've grown over surging emissions when
• 51:19
  China was growing lots of coal and they've pretty much reached
• 51:22
  a plateau. And then the high scenario that
• 51:25
  they're about to, to endorse for the next 7 year cycle of the
• 51:28
  IPCC off it goes again towards the stratosphere.
• 51:32
  And you just think, fine, but what you're doing is creating an
• 51:36
  attack surface for the climate contrarians, for the pushback,
• 51:40
  because they will look at that and they will say we are not
• 51:43
  going, we're not going on that route.
• 51:45
  We're sort of at peak emissions. Why are you scaring the children
• 51:50
  with a scenario based on soaring emissions?
• 51:53
  The emissions are not soaring. They're nearly at the peak,
• 51:56
  right? They only, they only went up the
• 51:57
  last few years because of the gas price, pushed people back to
• 52:01
  coal for a few years. So why use a scenario that is
• 52:05
  entirely implausible And and? Of course it produces.
• 52:10
  It gets the signal out of the noise, but in a way that is not
• 52:14
  credible for the majority of the population.
• 52:17
  Maybe they're just calling it the wrong thing.
• 52:18
  I mean, maybe they. It it's what you want is not
• 52:21
  necessarily high emissions, but you want high concentrations in
• 52:24
  the atmosphere in order to generate high, high end outcomes
• 52:28
  for the models, which are useful things to do scientifically.
• 52:30
  But maybe you need to get the carbon from somewhere else.
• 52:32
  Maybe it needs to come out of thawing permafrost or some more
• 52:35
  plausible more plausible source than than burning all of the
• 52:40
  coal, which I agree is is not going to happen.
• 52:41
  But so I still think that's useful to do.
• 52:44
  Maybe they just need to to generate the the high levels of
• 52:47
  carbon from somewhere else. So it's not a semantic problem,
• 52:50
  it's a. It it's absolutely not.
• 52:51
  You can call it what you want. By the time the, the sort of,
• 52:55
  you know, the, the the bucket chain of scientists to science
• 53:00
  commentators to general journalists to the, you know,
• 53:03
  activists in the public goes that it will be called this is
• 53:06
  where we're going and all the Penguins will be dead, right.
• 53:09
  But the other thing is you put your finger on something really
• 53:11
  important. I'm very worried and I.
• 53:15
  Think I suspect you're. Very worried about climate
• 53:17
  sensitivity. In other words, we may be on a,
• 53:22
  let's call it, let's say we're on a two degree scenario, but 2°
• 53:26
  might be really, really, really bad or, or no, let me, let me
• 53:30
  rephrase that. The sensitivity would be we may
• 53:32
  be on an emission scenario that I think is consistent with 2°
• 53:36
  right? Though the median there we go
• 53:38
  where the median outcome is 2°. But actually the worst outcome
• 53:41
  from that because we don't know how the planet responds could be
• 53:45
  3 1/2 degrees. So we could do something
• 53:47
  consistent with two and end up at 3 1/2.
• 53:51
  And then by the way, we could think that that means XYZ for, I
• 53:56
  don't know, sea level rise and that could be worse as well.
• 53:59
  So what I want is for science to examine the sensitivity.
• 54:04
  I, I don't want to say, because if you say, well, so let's just
• 54:07
  pretend that we're not on that energy scenario.
• 54:10
  Let's pretend that we're on this different energy scenario,
• 54:13
  massive misallocation of resources, right?
• 54:16
  Because then what you're saying is, well, let's focus on, you
• 54:19
  know, the issue is the emissions and we're not understanding that
• 54:24
  actually what what is causing that sensitivity?
• 54:27
  Is it aerosols? Is it something that changing
• 54:30
  the fuels that we use in the shipping industry?
• 54:33
  Or, you know, do we have a chance of changing the
• 54:36
  emissions? Maybe we should be looking more
• 54:38
  at geoengineering. We it's bad science.
• 54:41
  If the problem is sensitivity, then blame sensitivity.
• 54:46
  Understand sensitivity don't blame it on on something else
• 54:50
  that's like saying look I can only get funding for research
• 54:54
  into prostate cancer if I pretend that everybody who gets
• 54:57
  prostate cancer dies within one week, right because all that
• 55:02
  happens is people just say well prostate cancer many people live
• 55:05
  with prostate cancer for many many years So what you're saying
• 55:08
  is rubbish so therefore you're not going to get your grant
• 55:10
  proposal so that the way to get understanding and funding and
• 55:16
  attention of the public and so on is to have better science not
• 55:19
  to have an you know worse, worse science pretending that the
• 55:23
  problem is is A when it's B and I want to come back to this
• 55:26
  point about the permafrost and the tipping points because this
• 55:33
  is exactly why you. Don't want to pretend we're.
• 55:35
  On this improbable scenario, our science, our understanding of
• 55:41
  tipping points is almost exclusively based on running the
• 55:46
  RCP 8.5 extreme scenario through the system, right.
• 55:51
  So let me give you an analogy, which is you're making yourself,
• 55:54
  you want to make yourself a cup of cocoa.
• 55:57
  And so you put the pan of milk on the stove and you want to
• 56:00
  know how quickly can you make your cocoa.
• 56:03
  So it's very important to know at what electricity mark.
• 56:07
  Because I'm sure you're using a. Ceramic hob.
• 56:10
  At what electricity mark does it boil over?
• 56:14
  And so I tell you. Well, stick it on. 10 Boil it
• 56:18
  over and that will tell you, except it doesn't tell you
• 56:22
  anything of. The sort, right?
• 56:23
  Because. All you find out is that it
• 56:24
  makes a hell of a mess. When you put the electricity up
• 56:26
  to 10, it boils over and it makes a mess.
• 56:30
  It doesn't tell you what would happen.
• 56:32
  You can't say, well, that took two minutes to boil over.
• 56:34
  So if I put it on five, it would boil over in 4 minutes because
• 56:38
  it's a non linear process. It could be the on on
• 56:41
  electricity mark 5, it never boils over.
• 56:43
  It could be on 5.5, it never boils over and it could be on 6
• 56:47
  and it boils over just as fast as on 10 because it's all to do
• 56:50
  with the the physics and the thermal transfer within the
• 56:54
  fluid with bubbles and so on. So if you want to understand
• 56:57
  when your cup of when your pan of milk for your cup of cocoa
• 57:00
  boils over, you've got to explore that area around 4 four
• 57:05
  and a half 5/5 and 1/2 and start looking for precursors of like
• 57:10
  bubble formations on stick it on 10 RCP 8.5 or the high scenario
• 57:16
  they're now going to adopt. It doesn't tell you anything
• 57:19
  about tipping points other than they're really ugly when they
• 57:22
  happen, what they're like when they happen.
• 57:25
  And of course you have the new in the nuance.
• 57:27
  There'll be lots of journalists. You know, that bucket chain
• 57:31
  won't say, well, I've looked into the supplementary materials
• 57:35
  and although the permafrost all melting would be really, really
• 57:39
  bad from this paper, you can't actually conclude whether it
• 57:45
  would happen if we followed A realistic energy emissions
• 57:49
  scenario. You simply can't tell that.
• 57:52
  What you'll do is you'll write a piece that says, you know,
• 57:55
  permafrost will melt unless we take dramatic climate action and
• 57:59
  allocate all of society's resources, you know, to climate
• 58:02
  change and climate action. And that's that's bad science
• 58:07
  driving massive policy mistakes. So the whole tipping points
• 58:11
  discussion needs to be wound back.
• 58:16
  They're they're real. I'm not saying there aren't
• 58:18
  tipping points. I'm just saying that sadly,
• 58:20
  we're not really finding out much about them by throwing
• 58:22
  these extreme scenarios at them. The 300 mile an hour wind knocks
• 58:26
  the building down. Fine, That's not news.
• 58:30
  News is we might have a 60 mile an hour wind and with climate
• 58:35
  change you might have an 80 mile an hour wind or 110 mile an hour
• 58:38
  wind. Let's let's be let's make really
• 58:41
  sure that we know how the building is going to perform in
• 58:44
  in the plausible world. So we're heading into.
• 58:48
  Cop 30 in Belem, pretty soon. One of the proposals you make
• 58:55
  actually in your essay is that we should have smaller cops with
• 58:58
  only 5000 beds on an island or something.
• 59:01
  Belem looks disturbingly like that.
• 59:03
  Actually, from what I've heard from lots of delegations, they
• 59:06
  aren't able to book accommodation.
• 59:08
  And I think it's going to be a lot smaller than previous cops
• 59:10
  have been in places like Baku and Dubai.
• 59:12
  And I guess you'd argue maybe that's a good thing.
• 59:15
  I think what's, you know, I've, I've been to a lot of cops.
• 59:20
  I'm that nerdy and it's but, but I've, I've have to say, I've
• 59:24
  pretty much hated all of them. They're exhausting, they're
• 59:28
  uncomfortable, But more importantly, there's a kind of
• 59:31
  negative energy that goes alongside the negotiations where
• 59:35
  the dynamic is, it's kind of a prisoner's dilemma dynamic
• 59:38
  really. It's like, I won't because you
• 59:40
  won't, you know, And it's like, you know, we used to have
• 59:43
  phrases like burden sharing and sacrifice and things, and it was
• 59:46
  always presented as something which was inherently undesirable
• 59:49
  that we're going to have to do as little of as possible.
• 59:52
  And now we've, we should be able to flip that surely, because
• 59:55
  we're in a clean energy transition.
• 59:57
  China's roaring ahead with getting incredible competitive
• 1:00:01
  advantages now in many of these different technologies, as
• 1:00:05
  you've chronicled so well. Can't we now move somehow into a
• 1:00:09
  situation even at COPS where everyone's vying to be winners
• 1:00:13
  in this, in this new teen energy economy?
• 1:00:15
  And if so, how do we go about doing that?
• 1:00:18
  Well, there's lots there. So first of all, in terms of the
• 1:00:20
  COP. And the size, I think there's a
• 1:00:21
  big difference between sort of with LM, I think it's got 18,000
• 1:00:27
  beds, but sort of chaotically downsizing with no thought about
• 1:00:33
  the structure of what those 18,000 people are going to do
• 1:00:36
  and who they should be. What I'm saying is that there's
• 1:00:40
  a pretty good sort of five year rhythm that we fell into with
• 1:00:45
  Paris. Well, actually Copenhagen which
• 1:00:47
  failed five years later, Paris five years later, Glasgow is
• 1:00:51
  actually 6 because of COVID and, and what they've done now is
• 1:00:56
  say, and I think it came out of Glasgow.
• 1:00:58
  No, no, countries need to make their pledges every year.
• 1:01:02
  We're going to tighten the screw every year now there's an
• 1:01:06
  interplay between the politics, what a head of state or a
• 1:01:12
  finance minister can, can countenance and can put on the
• 1:01:15
  table and what the real economy can deliver.
• 1:01:18
  So why did Copenhagen fail and Paris succeed?
• 1:01:21
  Well, there's lots of reasons. You know, people like French
• 1:01:26
  macaroons more than they like, you know, Danish, I don't know,
• 1:01:31
  smoked fish, diplomacy was brilliantly managed in Paris,
• 1:01:35
  blah blah blah. But the big difference was
• 1:01:38
  renewables had become cheap. And so suddenly you could put
• 1:01:44
  something on the table, you could as a, as a head of state
• 1:01:46
  or finance minister, you could comfortably say, yeah, we can
• 1:01:48
  probably reduce our energy intensity or our carbon
• 1:01:51
  intensity of our energy system because this stuff kind of,
• 1:01:54
  we've seen that it works. And then you've got a further
• 1:01:57
  turn of the screw between Paris and Glasgow.
• 1:02:02
  The problem is the the real economy to deliver those sorts
• 1:02:05
  of changes in the weather. They that takes time.
• 1:02:08
  So now you've got this system where you go to a cop and you
• 1:02:12
  know, you made your commitment, your nationally determined
• 1:02:15
  contribution, and you go home. And then it's like, right, you
• 1:02:19
  get a week off and now you're supposed to prepare your next
• 1:02:23
  nationally determined contribution.
• 1:02:25
  But the real economy hasn't absorbed what it's supposed to
• 1:02:27
  do, hasn't innovative, no capital has formed, no new
• 1:02:31
  products have been launched, no new projects, no planning.
• 1:02:34
  You can't get through the planning cycle in any in any way
• 1:02:37
  in that time period. So therefore you're just asking
• 1:02:41
  the same question again a year later.
• 1:02:42
  And it's a huge waste of everybody's time, frankly.
• 1:02:45
  So I suggest smaller cops every every year, which are more
• 1:02:50
  technocratic meetings around sectors.
• 1:02:52
  What are you going to do in steel, shipping, aviation, glass
• 1:02:57
  making, whatever tourism industry stuff that we do need a
• 1:03:01
  forum because these, this is what drives the emissions is
• 1:03:06
  what are we actually going to do with heating?
• 1:03:07
  What are you going to do about heating?
• 1:03:08
  What are we going to do with heating?
• 1:03:10
  How do we protect vulnerable countries?
• 1:03:12
  By the way, energy producers as well as energy energy users have
• 1:03:17
  those meetings, but have them amongst a smaller group of
• 1:03:20
  people. And then every five years, well,
• 1:03:22
  let's go and celebrate the progress or smack people around
• 1:03:25
  for lack of progress. But that would be a rhythm that
• 1:03:28
  I think would work much better. Also get rid of this absurd way
• 1:03:33
  of decision making consensus where, you know, the the chair
• 1:03:38
  at the end says, right, we've got an agreement sort of 321
• 1:03:41
  going, going, gone and gavels it down.
• 1:03:44
  And then you've got these countries saying, you know, I
• 1:03:46
  wasn't happy I had my hand up because it's supposed to be,
• 1:03:49
  it's supposed to be unanimous move to qualified majority
• 1:03:53
  voting. And don't pretend that these
• 1:03:56
  meet these outcomes are binding. They're not binding.
• 1:03:59
  You can't enforce any of them. So why do you need unanimity?
• 1:04:04
  Just move ahead coalition of the willing, go as fast as the
• 1:04:07
  willing. You know, the majorities on
• 1:04:10
  these different subjects want and we and by the way, if you
• 1:04:13
  did all of that, you could restrict them to one week, which
• 1:04:16
  would make them look less absurd and less, you know, with the
• 1:04:19
  kind of there's the two weeks you're going to you're really
• 1:04:22
  going to go off to Baku and there's a two week meeting and
• 1:04:25
  and and so on. So anyway, that's there's some
• 1:04:27
  thoughts there, but there's also, you know, you've now got
• 1:04:33
  the US which has stepped out of that process.
• 1:04:35
  So if there was ever a time to reform around coalitions of the
• 1:04:39
  willing, now would be a good time to do it and sectoral and
• 1:04:43
  approaches. But to your question about do we
• 1:04:47
  need any sort of, you know, do we need the COP at all because
• 1:04:52
  this stuff is so manifestly obvious.
• 1:04:54
  Well, obviously it's not that obvious because the US is off
• 1:04:58
  doing it's own, you know, pushing back and saying not just
• 1:05:02
  we're not going to do clean energy, but saying it does not
• 1:05:05
  work. And going out of it's way, the
• 1:05:07
  current administration going out of it's way to destroy the wind
• 1:05:10
  industry in the US and trying to do as much of that as possible
• 1:05:14
  around the world. My own belief is that you give
• 1:05:17
  it another five years and the, the, the success of China's, the
• 1:05:23
  long term strategic investment in electrification in the
• 1:05:27
  Electro stack, Electro tech is going to become so obvious that
• 1:05:31
  I think under any president of the United States, any political
• 1:05:36
  party, they're going to have to admit that that is the future of
• 1:05:39
  the energy system is largely clean with a bit of maybe, you
• 1:05:43
  know, gas to keep the lights on and provide resilience,
• 1:05:46
  pragmatic climate reset style, rather than waking up from the
• 1:05:51
  fever dream of renewables and and electric vehicles and going
• 1:05:55
  back to fossils, because that's the only pragmatic grown up
• 1:05:58
  thing to do. So once it becomes obvious that
• 1:06:02
  electrification is the game, then the politics might change,
• 1:06:06
  but right now they haven't changed at all.
• 1:06:08
  So I think we need, we do need to, you know, continue those
• 1:06:15
  meetings and coordination. I just want to come back to your
• 1:06:18
  point about the, the, the prisoner's dilemma, the kind of
• 1:06:21
  I'll do it if you'll do it, but actually nobody will do it
• 1:06:24
  because nobody wants to be the, the idiot that does it.
• 1:06:26
  And that's the narrative of reform in the UK.
• 1:06:29
  Why is the UK doing anything when nobody else is?
• 1:06:32
  By the way, notice that China has probably reached peak
• 1:06:35
  emissions and has committed to reduce them.
• 1:06:37
  So the old story that why should we do anything when China's
• 1:06:40
  doing nothing is about to be absolutely, you know, you know,
• 1:06:44
  shown up as ridiculous. But and actually the whole thing
• 1:06:50
  is it's not a prisoner's dilemma that you play once where your
• 1:06:54
  strategy is do nothing, talk a big game, do nothing and let all
• 1:07:00
  the other idiots do all the work.
• 1:07:01
  That's fine. If it's a prisoner's dilemma.
• 1:07:04
  The problem with climate action is you're going to be back next
• 1:07:07
  year. You're going to be back the year
• 1:07:08
  after, you're going to be back the year after that.
• 1:07:11
  We're going to be talking about climate change for as long as
• 1:07:14
  well, as long as there's a climate and as long as we emit
• 1:07:18
  fossil fuels, as long as we met CO2 and other greenhouse gases.
• 1:07:22
  So it's a repeated prisoner's dilemma.
• 1:07:25
  And there's a brilliant book called The Evolution of
• 1:07:31
  Cooperation by a guy called Anatole Rappaport.
• 1:07:36
  Yeah, it's Rappaport. I may have got the first name
• 1:07:38
  wrong, haven't read it for a while.
• 1:07:41
  But Rappaport looked at what is the right strategy for a
• 1:07:45
  repeated prisoner's dilemma, And it's called the evolution of
• 1:07:49
  cooperation. You start by taking action.
• 1:07:52
  So it's nice, retaliatory, forgiving and clear.
• 1:07:56
  You start by assuming everybody's on board.
• 1:07:59
  If they're not, you retaliate. You punish them.
• 1:08:03
  If they then say fair cop, actually I am back on board.
• 1:08:06
  You say, fine, come into the tent, we'll forgive you.
• 1:08:09
  And then clear. You tell everybody what you're
• 1:08:11
  going to do because there's no way of gaming it.
• 1:08:14
  There is no way of gaming it, gaming it by defecting and
• 1:08:17
  you'll get the retaliation. So that model is actually very
• 1:08:22
  close to when climate action works.
• 1:08:24
  That's what it looks like. A bunch of countries get
• 1:08:26
  together, they agree to do something right.
• 1:08:29
  When countries don't do it, I think we're probably, how can I
• 1:08:32
  put this if we're weak, it's at retaliation but forgiving and
• 1:08:36
  we're not that good at being clear.
• 1:08:38
  But that's the role of the COP meeting is actually to create
• 1:08:43
  the framework for countries to be nice, retaliatory, forgiving
• 1:08:47
  and clear in climate terms. That all sounds very easy.
• 1:08:52
  You've also got geopolitics, you've got AI, you've got
• 1:08:55
  conflicts, you've got wars and so on.
• 1:08:58
  So it's not simple, but if we try and think of climate
• 1:09:01
  strategy for any country as being nice, retaliatory,
• 1:09:05
  forgiving and clear and EU NS job is not global policeman,
• 1:09:09
  it's not imposing global governance.
• 1:09:13
  It's not Agenda 21, Agenda 30, it's not woke ISM.
• 1:09:19
  It's just saying let's enable countries to pursue the climate
• 1:09:23
  strategies that are in their own interests.
• 1:09:26
  Nice retaliatory, forgiving and clear is in individual and
• 1:09:30
  collective countries interests and that's what that that's
• 1:09:33
  that's what the cop meeting should be structured around.
• 1:09:36
  Wonderful. Well, look, I could talk to you
• 1:09:38
  all. Day, Michael, but I think
• 1:09:39
  producer Rob has to pick up his kids from school and we almost
• 1:09:44
  need a, you know, what's the third part of a of a double bill
• 1:09:48
  because I'm sure you've got so much more to say and write about
• 1:09:50
  this, but we'll have to think we'd have to think of another
• 1:09:53
  bad. Idea.
• 1:09:54
  So that was 1 1/2° as a bad idea.
• 1:09:57
  And, you know, we didn't even get into what you would need to
• 1:10:00
  do, what you would have needed to do had you even started down
• 1:10:04
  1 1/2°, you know, back at the time of the Paris Agreement.
• 1:10:06
  So, you know, in terms of stranded assets, in terms of the
• 1:10:10
  carbon price of the things that would make you do.
• 1:10:12
  So we, we the way we did also on hydrogen, we strayed into a
• 1:10:16
  whole lot of other topics. But hopefully we we killed the
• 1:10:19
  idea that that we all have to just rally around 1.5° with more
• 1:10:23
  and more strident rhetoric. Hopefully we killed that one.
• 1:10:25
  We'll have to think of something else for the next episode.
• 1:10:28
  Oh, there's plenty of bad ideas. Although that we can come back
• 1:10:32
  to, I'm sure. But anyway, Michael, thanks.
• 1:10:34
  Thanks again so much. It's been a pleasure to have you
• 1:10:36
  back. Thanks, Mark.
• 1:10:37
  Thank you very much. Thanks so much for listening to
• 1:10:43
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• 1:10:44
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• 1:10:48
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• 1:10:50
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• 1:11:00
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• 1:11:06
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