Select text to annotate, Click play in YouTube to begin
00:00:00
are you offsetting your own personal emissions with that and what can you give us a sense of the scale of that uh it's you know like 10 million a year okay uh and and just it's a variety of things the climbworks is part of it you
00:00:12
know buying uh electric heat pumps for low-income housing where they get the benefits of lower monthly bills and I'll I take the carbon credits for those things you know there's uh you know solar panels there's a a huge variety of
00:00:23
things I don't use some of the uh less proven uh approaches such as uh I don't plant trees I mean are we the science people are we the idiots which one do we want
00:00:36
to be uh it was interesting because he referenced Kim works and his massive amounts of money he gives them to offset his carbon footprint or invest in their technology but really the technology is
00:00:49
nowhere near something that you could honestly prescribe to people as a meaningful thing to do for climate change or for ridic that's what it's for that's not it's not it's not a doing that I mean the people doing the actual
00:01:03
technology work the engineers working on it that's how they may think about it but the bigger broader frame Bill Gates doesn't think of it as something that can help us to address climate change it's to help him feel that he's not the
00:01:15
bad person that he actually is that he and a small cohort of people like him are responsible for a very large proportion of the missions and then there's the next sthe down in terms of if you looked at the sort of the priority order in terms of equity the
00:01:27
next could sway down and responsible for another significant proportion of the emissions and this group of which of course many many senior academics like myself are in this group needs to
00:01:41
find some way that we can maintain our status quo our way of living and we are fully aware that we can't do that through techniques that
00:01:53
would actually work so what we have to do is to evoke things that that we that actually in our in our quiet honest moments we know cannot succeed at the scale that's
00:02:06
necessary in the time frame we have but we don't have many of those Quiet Moments most of the times we are desperately trying to delude ourselves and therefore others and I think this is evident when you look at the numbers people like Gates who make some claim to have some been numerically
00:02:20
cogent I may question that but um in 20121 I think the capture at a global level of carbon dioxide capture and store storage let's be clear capture and storage there was lots of capture and
00:02:33
release where we captured some carbon dioxide and we used it to push out more oil out of oil and gas reservoirs enhanced oil recovery that was about 45 million tons of capture and release if you like but that doesn't do anything
00:02:44
for the climate of course the actual capture was about 7 million tons of carbon dioxide that's under 2 hours of global C2 emissions now that's after 20
00:02:57
years of the gates of this world being p pushing that technology so we captured was it .198 I think per of our CO2 emissions in 2021 and the global CCS Institute said
00:03:14
that if all of their plans come to fruition then by about 2030 we might capture about 45 to 49 million tons so about 1% of all of our carbon dioxide
00:03:26
and the bit that people like Bill Gates deliberately I assume it's but I presume he not stupid enough to not think about this you know deliberately miss out is time it's the time frame the timeline that we have to deliver the changes that
00:03:40
means these exotic Technologies whilst I would argue we should research and develop them and and deploy them if they meet stringent sustainability criteria that's social and ecological criteria if
00:03:53
they meet those there fine deploy them but in terms of cutting our emissions just cut our emissions as if these things do not work because they will not work at scale in the time frame that we have to address the challenges that we
00:04:06
face you cannot roll these things out fast enough and so it comes back to the fact is we've got to we've got to do the things that we know how to do today which is what these people like Bill Gates want us to avoid because that will
00:04:20
mean things about his lifestyle his Norms his expectations and so I think there are this narrative going back to this narrative this narrative and all these little bits of Technologies for the
00:04:33
future I mean geoengineering even more so these are just storylines to maintain the status quo that's all they are for most of the people involved that's not to criticize the
00:04:45
engineers working on these particular things and I say as I say I'm not against doing some research and development development into them but you cannot in any way assume that these things are part of a response to climate
00:04:58
change maybe they will be in years to come maybe but they may end up just proving to be far too little far too late so we have to start to respond
00:05:10
using the things that we have available the Technologies the policies that we have today think we're going fast enough to actually hit the targets that were set out in the Paris agreement no we won't
00:05:22
hit hit the aspirational targets well you can do the math on 1.5 uh and you know even
00:05:33
2.0 uh isn't that likely now fortunately if you stay below three a lot of the ill effects that people have heard about don't happen unless you really are irresponsible and let it get up to the
00:05:47
the higher range the gates of this world and I say I have I have absolutely no interest in Bill Gates on climate change I don't know why people focus on what he has to say I mean if I want to know about the abuse of Monopoly powers with
00:05:59
a sort of b-rated bit of software I go to Bill Gates if I want to know about any other facet of life he knows no more about that than anyone else so I have no interest in in what he has to say there
00:06:13
and okay people say he made lots of money well to me you've got the burners Lee who effectively for free has given us the internet and you've got Microsoft
00:06:24
who's made a fortune out of selling well whatever however you may think of it various levels of software I know where the value is in those two and it's in the former not the
00:06:38
latter um so I'm not interested in what he has to say on climate change I'm not interested in what schwarzer has to say on climate change or musk you know any more than I am someone who works in my
00:06:50
local butcher shop or someone else who um Works behind the pub in my local Village I mean I might listen to them I might listen to Bill Gates I mean there's no I I I don't know why we are
00:07:02
privileging these people and worse than that I think there's also something and I wrote about this in the book in in the Greta tberg climate book that you see when you see if you go to like a cop
00:07:16
you'll see all the journalists and other scop fants following these people around and I think we're giving them too much air um you they are part of the problem
00:07:29
so let's discuss with them as being part of the problem but let's not discuss with them about the solution space it's not one that they have any comprehension of or indeed desire to time respond
00:07:47
[Music] [Music] to [Music]
End of transcript