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in this climate Gen episode I'm speaking with Professor Kevin Anderson from the universities of Manchester and Upsala we discuss the reconcilable narratives that are dominating the tot down discourse on
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how we respond to man-made climate breakdown instead of making the space for envisioning a better world perpetrators of the status quo instead construct fantasies as a way to deflect criticism And Delay real action thank
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you to all subscribers for supporting this series there are many more episodes in the pipeline as we continue in our efforts to articulate these complex and existential problems thanks all the
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indicators are telling us that we have to change course to address climate change the ipcc has calculated that the world must
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reduce emissions by at least 43% over the next 7 years in order for us to keep 1.5 Within Reach that that is our North Star it is
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in fact our only destination it is simply acknowledging and respecting the science we need a systemwide holistic transformation of
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entire economies economies that currently run on the equivalent of 250 million barrels of oil gas and coal
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every single day these are barrels that need to be either replaced or decarbonized to create a proper yet responsible proclimate progrowth
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future Kevin it's very good to see you and and you too Nick many countries proudly call themselves leaders on tackling climate change the UK US is
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always doing it Canada and Norway Etc and yet most are ruthlessly expanding fossil fuel production at a time when we're told that it locks in climate breakdown with a state-owned Oil Company
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CEO as president of cop 28 how would you characterize this moment now following three decades of these cups I think the the fossil fuel industry and the broader
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high energy use Industries around it have now completely succeeded in corrupting the cop process or processes that we've got to a point
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where this year despite what the science is telling us despite the fact that we are seeing a significant increase both in uh empirically inv visible impacts but also in terms of the response of
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much of Civil Society or many within Civil Society to the challenges that we're facing on climate change set against all of that what we've got is a cop process that has been being
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completely taken over by the fossil fuel um companies and Associated organizations so in in in their eyes this is this is Ultimate
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success and the real success is we're still calling it a cop process we're still claiming that it has some relevance to the issue of climate change this is not about climate change anymore it's about the incumbents maintaining
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power and they have been phenomenally successful ful throughout the cop processes in driving it in their Direction and this year I think epitomizes just just how successful that
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has actually been set against as I said the science and the response of summit to Civil Society Civil Society to the to the challenges that we're facing based on what you said I mean it presents a
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good argument for just turning you back on the whole process and walking away but the most vulnerable nations are typically much poorer and they rely on this process because it is the only place where they sit at the table and to
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a degree their vo is Hur I don't think we can just turn our back on the process Al Gore and Cristiana feras both recently said we need to get the lobbyists out and in fact you know the
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UAE is a very good example of how fossil fuel Executives and political leaders are so tightly knit together do you think this is the big step we need to take oh absolutely and well in the cop
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processes that won't in itself get us anywhere near to living on our Paris agreements but at the moment they are completely thwarting any serious action to to respond to climate change so it is
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a a prerequisite that we remove the lobbyists from these negotiations not just these negotiations other major climate negotiations that go on throughout the year so we can't just focus just just on this single sort of
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once a year cop process cop Grand cop event nevertheless they have to be removed from from what we're going to see in in in end of November and beginning of December that's not going
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to happen this year so that will be another year where the fossil fuel Majors will be significantly influencing the debate by the time we get to the cop next year that'll be another 40 billion tons of carbon dioxide you know it's a
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significant proportion of our um of our we well over 10% of our remaining 50/50 chance of 1.5 degre C carbon budget and so the failure this year
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which is locked in will have impacts on the climate but yes I can understand that particularly the poorer parts of the world feeling this is a forum where they can get their voices heard and indeed they have had their voices heard
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in the past but I think we also have to recognize that that without removing the lobbyists the power and the voices from those poorer communities will be um overshadowed repeatedly by the the
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interests of the self-interest of the wealthy countries you talked a minute ago about those of us who follow the science and Finly enough Al ja the the CEO and president of the next cop
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recently said you know we are following the science for those of us outside the cop and you know there the activists there's a growing number of people in society who are truly understanding now
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what the science is telling us is this a moment do you think where we acknowledge the Ridiculousness of the current cops status
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quo and we start to rethink the future even if it's like a day by day week by week and we look at the Alternatives and see how we can reconstruct where we're headed it hasn't come to something when
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this year we're seeing a major oil producer now overseeing the cop process not only overseeing it but in their statements but their statements of course are just similar ones to being said by many ministers in in the US the
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UK and elsewhere where we need more oil to help us have less oil we've got to a position where it it is completely orwellian the structures that we now have and the norms and narratives that
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we have that we can actually have people seriously stand up with a with a serious face reported by journalists that we need more oil to help us have less oil that's the situation we've come to
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we've completely normalized this you know totally bizarre set of narratives and storyline and there is a real role here not just for civil society but actually
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for the journalists to start to be report to report more honestly to do their job properly and I think the journalists with with notable exceptions but the journalist Community has broadly failed
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to seriously address the climate change challenges and report on it appropriately to to society and without the journalists then I think Society can easily be
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misinformed about where we are the challenges we Face the powers that do not want to see um changes in our society and so I think there is there is a the journalists are a key a key player
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in this along with civil society maintaining its nerve at a time when when the powers opposing changes on climate change um are are even more in charge of
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of the formal processes than they have been throughout the past 30 years of of ongoing failure and you mentioned the journalists and especially in the sort of major countries that we're talking
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about there's been a a sort of s radio silence on these issues for probably a decade or so and in a way it feels that that hoodwinks the middle classes who are
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generally wealthier in society to into a false sense of security and do you think that that false sense of security is now starting to sort of evaporate because people are
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seeing what's going on and it's become that sort of who do you believe me or your eyes kind of thing and it you know people are starting to ask hang on this doesn't look good crops are fading there's floods every sing day and heat
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waves every single day somewhere I think there is something in that that the debate around issues of climate change is not just amongst um an exclusive few in the in the climate realm the experts
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and now increasingly people within formal and informal Civil Society groups but beyond that I think there's a much wider discussion on issues of climate change the polling data I think you have to take the polling data often with a
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bit of well have to be Discerning user of it I say a pinch of salt but um I think if you use it with some discernment then it can be useful but polling data typically shows that there's greater concern amongst the public amongst the middle classes for
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these issues as you say we can see some of the impacts around us um and and and indeed some of us are been impacted by uh by climate change more directly as well as
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indirectly I also think we can see how stupid and ridiculous the process is when we see an oil Shake standing up and saying we're really concerned about climate change we follow the science but
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we need more oil to help us get less oil you know that the people aren't stupid they can see how ludicrous that situation is and so I suppose many of the Ducks are lined up
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for much greater Civil Society engagement in these issues which hopefully then can put some pressure on a political process that has broadly been behind the companies particularly the fossil fuel Majors than it has been
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behind the populations that have put them in in power particular in democracies maybe this has been naive and too too hopeful but I think there is potential for some significant change to come about as a combination of a whole
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set of factors but let's not ever underplay the power of the incumbents to control the narrative and in that I include the journalists or senior journalists and the editors and the media Barons and so we can't rest on our
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Laurels here we will only have success if we start to speak out much more for iously and we are seeing that in society but that engagement needs to go much further and much
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wider but before when I was saying about rethinking the way forward and I was really referring to a lot of thoughts coming out of the people I've interviewed they're not from this status
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quo um group if you like but I think it's it's so obvious that the richy sunak type characters are not going to be the the leaders who are going to transform society as the science quite
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clearly states we need to you have often referred in the past to the sort of Velvet Revolution is our best our sort of best hoped course have you given
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thought to how that might play out I have and I have ongoing discussions and disagreements with one of my colleagues that I work very closely with um we have we have some views that we we certainly share but other ones he's
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and I think appropriately very cautious about the V Velvet Revolution being an appropriate metaphor for the changes that that are necessary like all metaphors I would argue that they they they just illustrative that's all they
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are they're sort of horis learning tools then they're not the real thing nothing like it but I think they can provide us some pointers in the right direction perhaps let's focus in on the UK and I did I think I could say the EU because
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it's an area where I know more about the the levels of leadership that we've had are having at the moment these people will not be able to address the climate challenge they are ill equipped at best
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they're somewhere about 1970 to 1980 they're reductionists they're also deeply Elite in their view of society that they have none of what is necessary to understand the challenges
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we face let alone then put in NE put in place the necessary responses so we will fail if we continue with that inapo roate y toe leadership We are failing
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with them do they have to be the people that drive this process no they don't of course they can in democracy they can be changed but are they changed for someone else who's just this just you know very
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similar just a different Hue really a different shade that's all um or can there be changed for someone who genuinely is more interested in the prosperity of the citizens of their
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society or the well-being of those people that run the fossil fuel companies and the other major players who are reluctant to to see the necessary levels of Social and Technical
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change that we that we need to address the climate challenge how do we bring about that change I don't think we know until afterwards no doubt clever people afterwards will say oh I saw how we had
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to do that but actually I think all we can really say is that we have to play our role as best that we can and we don't know exactly what that role is but it's one of honesty Integrity of
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standing up of not being held back by what the establishment is telling us not been held back by corrupted journalists and indeed often academics so it needs courage it needs some sort of levels of
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collectivism even if we don't agree with each other we should be we should be supporting other each other to to to stand up and and be countered and to have the courage to of our own convictions I think we're starting to
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see some of that and I think that could well play into a change either either an active change of leadership whereby the the current incumbents are replaced by people who
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are equipped for the job and have some moral thread that runs through them which a lot of the current leaders do not have and certainly not courageous could be replaced or perhaps some of the ones in power and we can't always think
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that it's easy again with the UK um to think of just the senior ministers but often often that process of them getting there means that they are the least ill equipped people to be proper ministers and the other the other the backbenchers
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the other MPS across the parties there are some very good people there who want to see Progressive change in our society across the parties and perhaps lending support to those voices is really
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important so do not t all policy makers all politicians with the same brush there are there are very there are there are big differences within parties and across parties so I
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think we can work to some degree with the system but the current incumbents that are leading it I think are simply ill equ equipped for the challenges that we face in some ways this takes us back to this thing about the lobbyists
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because removing them from the cop process and also from National politics you know the PO political decision making would create a void that perhaps would l in those new voices and and
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Trigger some of those different connections or conversations from all of the data we see in someone like the UK and again I'm sure this is the case for most of the the other major industrialized nations the door is revolving for the oil Majors for the
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heads of the airline companies and so forth but it's not there it's not revolving I mean occasionally someone from some of the other sort of Renewables or Nos and so forth are let in but basically the voice that they hear all the time is is that of the
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fossil fuel majes and their acolytes so I think you have to remove those from the thinking within government and that again requires politicians with a spine and we we don't have those the ones we have are locked into the status quo so
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yes those those lobbies need to be moved moved out of this process but let's also be clear that these lobits are not just what we see going backwards and forwards Through The Swinging Door they they're much more entrenched in the system so
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you'll find government departments whereby some of the people working there will be seced from the oil companies who very kindly are paying their salaries for these people to work in government Ministries one way or another yeah they're not doing that neutrally they're not doing it altruistically they're
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doing it because they know that they can undermine the process of change and whilst the oil majors are fully aware of the climate science as we've seen repeatedly I mean they've lied about what they've known for years they are on
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top of the climate science what they are trying to do now is to claim that they they appreciate the climate science they understand the climate science they realize how important it is but what they really trying to do of course is delay the legislation that's going to
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require us to stop burning fossil fuels and they're doing that at every turn that they possibly can so don't just think by stopping the physical lobbyists going backwards and forwards that that would be enough the tendal of these oil
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majors are in every facet of of life you know the advertising in sport the in the Arts the running of organizations the sponsoring of all sorts of events as well as paying for some of our policy
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makers indeed and indeed recently I heard on Radio 4 that one of the senior presenters of the major news program actually speaks at um oil events and
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gets paid to speak at oil events and then does interviews on climate change and other Associated issues so at every level of society the oil Majors have their tendrils fused into those it's not
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just about the avert lobbying that really does come back to this idea of a revolution in a way because you have to you have to gut the system system so much that the politicians with spine generally don't get to the top because
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they're not siop fantic enough or whatever the the requisite skills are to to get up to the top and it seems like we're not we're not really geared up for that anywhere at the moment I mean
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history is littered with times and policy makers have stood up to be counted but they haven't done it in isolation they've done it when there's there's a whole set of other voices around them that have driven that so you know the policies that we have on I mean
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saying that these things have being resolved but certainly the policy we have on Race on gender on universal suffrage and voting and so forth and on many other aspects as well I mean we have environmental legislation we have
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lots of other social legislation as well these things have been put in place overtime ultimately by the policy makers but they haven't done that in a vacuum and sometimes they've been very reluctant to do that but they've been
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required forced by by pressures within Society to do the right thing and so let's not give up on the political process but let's not also rely on the political process why this
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this idea the re Velvet Revolution it's not something that is top down it very much has strong elements of bottom up as well and I know I use this language quite regularly but and I know it's not some people don't like it particularly
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but I still I very much see it like this that there is this very messy and emergent partnership between bottom up and top down and that ultimately change comes out of that messy partnership in
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one way or another and so there's a role there for wider groups of citizens to come together to try and drive that process to provide guidance examples of what is necessary to lobby with evidence
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I think is what's important here you're not lobbying on the basis of just self-interest which is what I think the oil majes and so forth are doing you're you're lobbying here with interests for for the well-being of society today and indeed in the future so there's a really
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important role for society to do that but then there's also an equal important role for Leaders with Integrity to to listen to those voices and start to say how do we put policies in place that can bring about the rapid
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changes that are necessary Ju Just to reiterate how rapid these changes need to be we are on the point of failing even the weekend of the Paris agreement you know the the well below two degrees Centigrade which now the science is I
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think from the from the science is fairly clear that that if we go towards two we are really at risk of some very very s impacts and we were seeing impacts occurring at at 1.2 de Centigrade roughly where we are today
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and we know that impacts get considerably worse as the temperature gets higher and higher but if you look at what carbon budget that we have left the amount of carbon dioxide that we can emit if we get to stay below say 2 degrees Centigrade it's it's so little
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the implications of that for countries like the UK mean we have to change our our way of doing things over the next one two three years if we don't start to make those rapid changes is then we simply will not be in a position whereby
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we can drive emissions down fast enough to stay within the carbon budgets so the the implication of this I think is is really important we have an election coming up now unfortunately I think at the moment the most likely two main
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parties in it are singing a very similar song Some slightly you adjusted verses but broadly it's a very similar tale of growth steadying the ship business as
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usual and a mixture of growth and future Technologies will somehow respond to the climate agenda and that is just lies and nonsense but that is true from both of our main political parties at the moment that doesn't mean to say that all the
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people in the parties agree with that but certainly at the leadership level it's just about who can manage that decline most successfully given what you've just said about the the carbon budgets and the level of impacts we're getting now and where we're actually
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going I mean two degrees I mean a lot of the people I've been speaking to it is now these backtack years of impct acts which are really just decimating ecological systems which actually
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underpin everything and a lot of people starting to starting to realize this and are panicking and there's a report coming out next week on risk tipping points the UN University are putting out and
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they're citing biodiversity loss water collapse for crops and collapse of the insurance industry these and these are much more integrated tipping points within with in our Earth system do you
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think that it's going to be shocks like those that create the sort of space for the so-called Velvet Revolution yeah it's interesting this because um as you're speaking then I'm also thinking about the discussion I had recently with
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Yan roxom which is videoed and and available for people to listen to and Y is well versed in these sort of system level integrated challenges these planetary boundaries as he refers to them and the the Tipping elements and
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tipping points these sorts of combined sets of impacts which make the sit situation much much more dire than simply looking at Carbon emissions and carbon budgets so when you put those other things there the situation looks far worse because the resilience of the
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system on which we have relied for the last few billion years is been deeply eroded in literally just just a handful of decades by by contemporary society and so they've been eroded so those
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those those elements of resilience that are embedded in nature if you like and the Dynamics of nature we have undermined those and we continue to undermine them which which makes the situation look much worse yet at the
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same time in the interview with Y and other people can make their own judgment on this I'm trying not to be unfair of his position I I feel he he demonstrates the level of deep cognitive dissonance
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that actually a lot of experts have here so he is and I completely believe him he's deeply concerned about the situation that we're in today and I think he understands and recognizes that
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better than most people actually because that's the realm he works in yet at the same time he makes the point in that interview that we can't drive massive social political change so therefore he's deeply
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reliant on future Technologies to resolve the challenges that we face today and those positions I would argue are incompatible and but that is very common
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I think amongst the expert class that we can imagine future Technologies often these people aren't particularly adep technically I mean they're not that as stute and understand how engineering and Technology work it's very different thing to
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science yet they evoke Technologies because they have made a judgment call about an area which they have no more expertise than anyone else that we cannot drive rapid deep political change and so I think there's
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a real issue here that the expert Community is actually probably IL equipped to understand the implications of what their own expertise actually suggests is necessary so we look at the
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sort of work from Johan and and lots of other people on these systemic levels of challenges that are coming together at the same time this sort of Perfect Storm to some degree and yet they still can't
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see that that is going to require some major political social upheaval as well as technical change if we're to respond to them they're still hanging on to the hope that we can deal with this purely
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through technical adjustments to business as usual that was a fascinating conversation I will link to it in that there was a point where you did mention the negative emissions Technologies
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which I think you're referencing which are embedded in these integrated assessment models which they've been used to guide policy can you unpick a little bit your main concern with that
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in all of the scenarios all of the high level scenarios an intergovernmental panel on climate change so working what's called working group three of the ipcc all of their scenarios and indeed really all of the all of the major Global high
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level scenarios and these are you know um scenarios about the future in terms of C usually terms of energy and Emissions they all rely on some form of carbon dioxide removal and we these
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terms now chip off our tongue as if they're perfectly reasonable things to discuss carbon dioxide removal negative emission Technologies and increasingly even the language of geoengineering but these things aren't material particularly the negative emissions in
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the geoengineering they're not they're not actually material things you can go out and get and buy at scale they are at very best very small pilot schemes that you know that capture a few thousand tons here and there you know but set
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against the fact is we're emitting around about 36 to 37 billion tons of carbon dioxide every year from burning fossil fuels these Technologies are just capturing you know just a few thousand
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tons there's absolutely no way that you can scale these things up from just being you know very small pilot schemes often with with you know a very checkered technical history that you can
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scale these things up in a timeline that matches the carbon budgets that come out of the science that relate to 1.5 and 2 degrees centigrade and yet we evoke them as if somehow they are they can be aligned they cannot be aligned in fact
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they've undermined The Narrative I would argue for the last at least 10 to 15 years if not 20 years so the adoption of these sorts of Technologies and it's not they're not the only ones not only these technologies that that are planned to
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remove our our carbon dioxide to suck the carbon dioxide hundreds of billions of tons you know up to sort of half a trillion tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and bury it securely underground in a timely manner that the
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Assumption of that has actually done the oil company's job for them it has allowed us to postulate ongoing fossil fuel use to avoid major profound
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political um social change and I have made this point before I think the the big what I've often referred to as integrated assessment models whilst I think a lot of the modelers are are good people doing as objective work as they
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can the boundaries they work within are deeply subjective and they have actually done you know the job of Exxon for the last 20 years by undermining the narratives we've needed to have to start
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to address climate change and I think that these have been so normalized now that when you talk about them and they may not work as is assumed you almost seem to be an extremist so you're an extremist because you're pointing out
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that these technologies that barely exist are completely relied on the models that seem to be the extreme position rather than the extreme position being how on Earth can it be that virtually every single model run
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that we have rely on these either Technologies or some of use of what you know the awful term of nature-based solutions yeah the language we use it sort of captures something and makes it all sound so neat that we can simply put
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it into the accountancy spreadsheet that under underpins these models and hey Presto we can evoke wonderful low carbon Futures that occur almost overnight it's and the journalists have allowed this to happen a lot of the senior academics
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have allowed this to happen and I think it comes back to them my point earlier that actually often as experts we're very good at reductionist thinking but we're not very good at systems thinking maybe why the Civil Society is much better at systems thinking than we are
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actually as experts there's a telling point in the conversation because when you're talking about this very thing Yan does say that if you take if you don't put the Nets in the negative emissions Technologies it starts to look very
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scary and I think that there was a sort of moment there is that well if they don't work then surely we need to actually look at scary straight in the face it's not as if they don't work they cannot work in the timeline that we have
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that just is not possible you know let's imagine that we can Tech technically we can make them work you can't you can't put them in place fast enough and this is true for not just for the negative emission Technologies in the UK we're
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obsessed at the moment with hydrogen not with hydrogen because we're going to produce it from Renewables and that's a very small part of the UK's low carbon hydrogen strategy I mean the focus of of hydrogen is that we can carry on burning
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fossil fuel so we can continue to use natural gas and we'll get the hydrogen out the natural gas and if you unpick all of that it's still it's firstly it's it's still very high carbon emissions
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hydrogen has a very high indirect global warming impact if you're doing it from methane you've got a lot of emissions from getting the methane out of the ground the leakages and so forth so that also still has a very high impact um so there's a whole lot of again smok and
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mirrors in the hydrogen debate which are really just there to perpetuate the fossil fuel industry so it's not just the negative emission Technologies it's lots of other technologies that are out there and the point about all of these Technologies is that they are necessary
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or at least pseudo Technologies because they're not actually there at the moment at scale and let's be clear you know as an engineer I think one thing I can I can say with certainty is that taking something that's that's a
00:32:04
very small pilot scheme and assuming you can scale it up to huge sort of global planetary level completely misunderstands what engineering does there are a whole set of problems you can't just multiply something up and
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assume that that is something you can simply do because you you've managed to do it in a laboratory or in a small test lab somewhere or a small facility as you multiply things up new engineering challenges arise we don't know what they
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are until until we start to do it so yes let's try these things but relying on them means that we haven't opened up the Pandora's Box about social political and
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Equitable change and that is what these things are there for they are to maintain the current power structure they're not there as real material things they are there to maintain a
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particular political status quo that has been phenomenally successful and that's my concern that we in the climate realm particularly those people have de developed these large models about what we need to do have undermine the
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narrative for 20 years so we haven't discussed what does this mean politically what does it mean socially what does it mean equitably within our own countries let alone equitably across the world those questions aren't really
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asked because they don't need to be because we've evoked some technical response that's going to allow business as usual to carry on but just with a green facade so let's not pretend that the only
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obstacles we have to overcome are the oil majors and Senior politicians that have no courage or spine actually a lot of the expert Community I think has also played into their terrain has undermined
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the need for thinking more widely more systemically about these challenges but as we're going forward now and other narratives they are out there the people are talking about
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degrowth and and you ecological economics all these sufficiency with something that is a word that crops up do you think that the these will get traction or do you just think we just
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crash into impacts and then have a sort of meltdown which is you know another narrative that's out there by people who are very worried about climate yes yeah I mean I think if you a betting person
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you'd say the chance of them getting getting genuine traction is very slim but again that chance is not just a random chance that is chance that we we play into that we can make that we can
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construct so if we don't start to and we I mean The Wider Society doesn't start to push these other narratives as well then of course they will fail the trick at the moment I think we have to be really careful about this is the power of the status quo of the of
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the current Elites if you like the real trick for them often is to is to give the impression that you take them on board and then you can stop them really developing and that's that's not a new
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technique that's something that the incumbent power has done throughout history so if we see working group three of the ipcc now working group three for those on where that's the section that
00:35:13
looks at these sort of Futures so it's not if you it's not the science of climate change it's not looking at the impacts and vulnerability it's talking about what we can do about climate change or in my view it's looking about how we can avoid doing anything significant about climate change that's
00:35:25
the principal goal of many if not all of the senior people in no not all many of the senior people in the ipcc what they've done now is to allow a little discussion around sufficiency as it and that that some
00:35:39
sense is dangerous because it almost looks as if they're allowing that now they're now thinking about those issues seriously but of course they're not when you look for their at their summary for policy makers it's not there so you allow some
00:35:52
some chapter on sufficiency or discussion of sufficiency to disappear into into the thousands of pages that you actually produce that EV no one gets to see and will make it nowhere near the debate that's been had by the summary
00:36:04
for policy makers of those do documents by the executive summaries so let's be careful that the incumbent power structures and I say these are people often that are CL quite close to us not just the billionaires or the oil and gas
00:36:17
Executives they are much more embedded in our system I think that we we like to really acknowledge the trick of that incumbent's power is to give the impression that they are taking notice of things like degrowth of sufficiency
00:36:28
of these other narratives and by doing that they almost thwart the development of those narratives so we need to be very aware when these other narratives
00:36:40
are been taken up by the existing Powers just don't assume that they are automatically doing it because they think they're worthwhile they may be doing it because they think they want to close down to what to them is a dangerous set of narratives that that raise questions about the current power
00:36:53
structures which they don't want to have raised but that's not to say that we shouldn't pursue these things we should and we should push them very hard and actually I think these narratives can be structured and I think more than that I
00:37:05
think then they can be structured but I think they also are often ones that that go very well with improving the wellbeing of the majority of citizens in our society so it's not as if these
00:37:17
narratives are bad for the majority and I think this is a really important element that we've not really yet developed that responding to climate change to these broader social and political narratives as well as through
00:37:30
technical change is actually better for many people in our societies including within wealthy societies and I don't just mean the poorest in our societies often actually the mode the median even the average the mean and the patronizing
00:37:43
language used by policy makers in the UK you know the hardworking families they always sort of pretend that they're concerned about that most of those hardworking families will do much better with this sort of more social political
00:37:56
element of responding to climate change than they would do out of the status quo there are many and I'm reluctant to use this language because I can know lots of my colleagues will winse at it but almost like win-win situations for large
00:38:08
sedes of our society but they are at the cost of the power and the material wealth of a relative few who drive the agenda and take most of the resources from our society and it's interesting
00:38:21
because we're struggling or you're struggling there to almost articulate it and that back to what you're saying about journalists they're not going to articulate who owns the journalism I mean who that's a yeah who who owns
00:38:34
those so there are good journalists out there but they're often held back by the media Barons by their editors so you know good journalist pieces are often
00:38:46
undermined simply by some of the sort of clickbait subtitles um that are that are used that's if they're allowed to put those those pieces into papers at all I hear this from journalists some of the
00:38:58
journalists that I engage with I mean they are quite damning of the Elites in the journalistic process that that stop good journalism occurring but I think others are also very happy because they they're doing very well out of the
00:39:10
system and when you look at something that sets the narrative in in at least sets some of the news agender in the UK that comes out of for instance the BBC Radio 4 program that I listen to almost every morning the today program when you
00:39:22
have people that are paid a quarter to a third of million pounds every year plus all of the after dinner speaking and all the other things on top of that you know they're not going to be opening up these narratives about Equity so if you like
00:39:35
the news narrative is already thwarted by the types of people that we have that are setting the media agenda in this regard I think social media might be more
00:39:47
helpful because it it does allow a wider set of voices to be heard so I think the media takes an important role here but then I think think Academia does as well is that we we by and large as I said before we've been reluctant to open up
00:40:00
that those issues around the sort of social and political changes that are necessary if we're to deliver on climate change and as you said the narrative could be quite easy to to think about here is that we have huge numbers of
00:40:11
houses in the sixth richest countries in the world in the UK that are in fuel poverty that means that the children living in those houses will be having as more asmatic problems and bronal problems as well as their parents and of course grandparents as well because of
00:40:24
the fungal spores that live in the air in those houses that are very poorly heated very poorly constructed are very damp that will affect those children's educational attainment they probably live in the poorer parts of town they
00:40:36
have very busy roads where the wealthy people will be driving backwards and forwards in their larger cars sometimes SUVs making the the air quality poorer for these people responding to climate change is good at every single level they can live in more comfortable homes
00:40:50
they can afford their heating their children will have better education because the air quality is better the roads outside will be much cleaner at every level you know the public transport would have to be there to replace the use of cars if we're going
00:41:01
to reduce our emissions and so the narrative for many people in our society about climate change is really so positive but those of us who have
00:41:14
disproportionately benefited from the from the productive capacity from the the labor and the resources in our society we don't want that because that means we will have to forgo a lot of the wealth that we have become accustomed to
00:41:27
and who is that we well it is people like me it's the climate it's the climate senior climate scientists and people engaged in these issues it is the senior journalists it is the policy makers it is the business CEOs and the
00:41:38
and the managers we so often normalize our lives and like to think ourselves as the average and we are usually getting paid even the you know two three four times the average if not far more than
00:41:50
that and so without the pressure from Civil Society we cannot rely on on people like me and the journalists to drive a more Progressive narrative Civil Society is absolutely key in this this
00:42:03
partnership is absolutely key and I think the more that Civil Society engages in these issues in its many ways the greater scope that gives for other people early career academics other
00:42:15
journalists and other people to come out and be more honest from our expertise so to avoid those cognitive dissonances those dualities that I think are evident as as I said in the in the interview
00:42:28
with Johan but indeed I think many of us in the expert Community actually have it allows us to be able to speak more openly and more honestly do I think any of this will bring about the evolution the chances are slim but if we don't push really
00:42:41
hard in a very short time time frame then we are guaranteed to fail not just on 1.5 but on two degrees centigrade and that means we may be failing on on much higher temperatures and certainly the impacts then start to look absolutely
00:42:53
dire as you play out all these tipping points that Johan roxom Tim Lenton and many others have been been um developing an understanding of from the science well on that rather cheerful note we can
00:43:06
we can finish but thank you very much it's been really insightful oh thank you very much Nick it's always good to talk to you I always feel a little bit depressed afterwards thank you for listening a reminder that episodes appear weeks
00:43:21
earlier for YouTube and patreon members this is due to my work schedule however support for the enables this work to continue thank you
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