TRIGGERnometry - March 21, 2022


Climate Changeļ¼š Propaganda vs. Reality with Mallen Baker


Episode Stats

Length

1 hour and 8 minutes

Words per Minute

181.05992

Word Count

12,395

Sentence Count

780

Misogynist Sentences

3

Hate Speech Sentences

12


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.700 Broadway's smash hit, the Neil Diamond Musical, A Beautiful Noise, is coming to Toronto.
00:00:06.520 The true story of a kid from Brooklyn destined for something more, featuring all the songs you love,
00:00:11.780 including America, Forever in Blue Jeans, and Sweet Caroline.
00:00:15.780 Like Jersey Boys and Beautiful, the next musical mega hit is here, the Neil Diamond Musical, A Beautiful Noise.
00:00:22.660 April 28th through June 7th, 2026, the Princess of Wales Theatre.
00:00:27.120 Get tickets at Mirvish.com.
00:00:30.360 Part of the problem is people are thinking of it as a green revolution,
00:00:33.920 because the thing that they would most hate is for us to solve the problem of climate change
00:00:40.080 to create a world that looks exactly like it does right now, but without climate change.
00:00:52.200 Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster.
00:00:56.040 I'm Constantine Kissin.
00:00:57.360 And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.
00:01:03.120 Our brilliant guest today is a writer and YouTuber, Malin Baker. Welcome to Trigonometry.
00:01:07.680 Thank you.
00:01:08.440 It's great to have you on the show. Before we get into the conversation, and it's going to be a very
00:01:12.220 interesting one, tell everybody a little bit about who are you, how are you, where you are,
00:01:16.660 what has been your journey through life that leads you to be sitting here talking to us?
00:01:20.580 Well, it's probably a journey of four parts, which is, first of all, was campaigning,
00:01:26.880 because when I was a youngster, we literally thought that global nuclear war was about to
00:01:34.240 break out any minute. So that drew me into campaigning, which led to me living for a period
00:01:40.680 of time in a plastic bag outside the main gate of a nuclear missile base. I mean, we've all been
00:01:44.840 there, man. Exactly, exactly.
00:01:47.000 You were against, I assume, right? Against the global nuclear war.
00:01:50.540 I thought it was a bad idea, to be fair. And that much was certainly true. I would say that I was
00:01:56.600 right and wrong in equal measure during those times, but that's a longer discussion. The second
00:02:01.740 stage then was politics, because I got fed up of campaigning, which is about saying no to stuff
00:02:07.100 all the time. And I thought, surely we should be able to say what we actually want to happen
00:02:11.760 instead. We want to say yes to something. And I was under the strange impression that you went to
00:02:16.820 politics for that sort of thing. I know, I know. I was naive and youthful. So I ended up in the Green
00:02:23.020 Party, became co-chair of the UK Green Party for a while. Once I realised that that wasn't totally an
00:02:29.960 organisation that wanted to make itself fit for changing anything very much, I ended up in the
00:02:35.140 Lib Dems for a while, until the point when I realised that actually I'm not built for politics.
00:02:41.540 I'm a pragmatist, not remotely ideological. I don't enjoy factions. I'm always looking for
00:02:49.480 the objective, pragmatic solutions. So there need to be good people in politics, but I realised that
00:02:56.420 wasn't me. And I have to say that I don't think I feel a huge amount of fellow feeling for either of
00:03:03.360 those parties in their modern incarnation. I've been a floating voter ever since. Third stage then
00:03:10.660 is corporate social responsibility, which was talking to major corporations, some of the top
00:03:17.720 FTSE 100 companies about their environmental impact, about their social responsibilities,
00:03:22.760 not to be confused with woke corporations. There's a distinction that is important, but probably not
00:03:28.120 very interesting. And that was with Business in the Community, which is a membership organisation
00:03:33.380 that has a lot of the top chief executives engaged. So that was an interesting eye on that universe
00:03:40.560 of people making decisions for huge corporations with lots of power and influence, and how sometimes
00:03:48.120 change goes through those sorts of spheres. And then finally now, here I am with the YouTube channel,
00:03:54.820 where I stepped away from that and ended up going back to those principles of becoming curious again
00:04:00.760 about, well, what is really true about what's going on. Having started the channel thinking I was going
00:04:07.980 to be carrying on doing what I'd always been doing, which was supporting change makers who were working
00:04:12.560 in different spheres. Ultimately, I started to do a few debunking videos and then got really curious as
00:04:18.860 to, well, actually, hang on a moment. I thought this was going to be debunking this, but the closer you look
00:04:24.460 at it, actually, there's some real substance to this argument.
00:04:27.360 The lizards really are in charge.
00:04:29.220 Yeah. I wouldn't go quite that far. So I refashioned what I was doing into stepping aside
00:04:39.020 from the polarisation and just asking the questions about, well, what does the research really say?
00:04:45.600 And does it actually mean what people popularly would have you believe? And that has been fed into
00:04:51.520 all sorts of topics and issues, largely where the scientific realities bump into the political
00:04:58.420 sphere, which is increasingly happening, as we all know, and actually is going to become more and not
00:05:04.640 less the factor of the next few decades. So it's where all the difficult dilemmas lie, all the grey
00:05:10.120 areas that I find so interesting.
00:05:11.660 And you've got a great YouTube channel, and I was watching it over the past couple of days
00:05:16.720 for doing research, and you did this brilliant video that really hooked me in on safetyism
00:05:22.120 and the role that safetyism is playing in our society. And before, when I was talking with
00:05:28.560 Constantine, we realised that it also linked in with the main topic that we're going to be talking
00:05:34.560 about, which is climate change. So could we have, first of all, your thoughts on safetyism
00:05:40.320 and how we've seen it rapidly progress from the moment when you were a child, in fact?
00:05:45.920 Yes. It's interesting because over the first 10, 20 years of my adult life, it was always a running
00:05:54.400 joke about, as society changes, you can tell how old you are by how often you moan about how things
00:06:01.380 are different to how they were when you were younger. And there was always a running joke
00:06:05.420 about health and safety. You know, health and safety was always a thing that had gone mad sort
00:06:10.180 of thing. And yet, beyond that, when you looked at where we are now, and the mindset that we have
00:06:19.060 now, you realise, well, it's actually gone beyond a joke. And it really struck home for me, first of all,
00:06:23.860 when I did a video where I was comparing the current pandemic, the recent pandemic, shall we say,
00:06:29.460 with the 1957 Asian flu, which was not identical, but was broadly in the same zone in terms of the
00:06:38.660 harm, the health harm that it created. But of course, how society reacted to it was completely
00:06:43.920 different. Mostly, we just carried on with life as normal. There were some adaptations that people
00:06:49.820 made. But the interesting thing was, it wasn't a political issue. It just wasn't. I mean, there was a
00:06:55.280 vaccine that was produced relatively quickly, and I think government support helped that to happen.
00:06:58.920 There was an election in America the next year, I think, and the incumbent lost. But that was
00:07:04.960 nothing to do with it. It was not a political issue at all. And the reason for that, of course,
00:07:10.820 was that people just didn't have the expectation that government was there to keep them safe from
00:07:16.280 a virus. You know, disease happened. And obviously, if this really serious disease came along, then
00:07:22.420 people would have to organise a way to deal with that. If health services might be overcome,
00:07:28.300 then, of course, the government has to put resources in to make sure that doesn't happen. But otherwise,
00:07:33.400 people just didn't think that that was what it was there to do. Now, that has changed, obviously.
00:07:40.020 And all of the lockdown fever that we've seen over the last couple of years, and the fact that no
00:07:46.380 leaders, even those who started well with the pandemic, have ended well. You know, not even the
00:07:54.960 saintly Jacinda, you know, they are now seriously unhappy there as well. Not even there have any of
00:08:02.420 the leaders come through the whole two years well. And arguably, that is because the expectations now
00:08:09.320 on what the government can and should provide for you as an individual has just gone beyond the basis
00:08:15.020 of what it can actually deliver. And this has gone hand in hand with this view that it's there to
00:08:21.860 keep us safe. You know, the first job of government is to keep us safe. And that was always the case.
00:08:28.080 That was the old Hobbesian contract with the state, the Leviathan state, was that it was there to protect
00:08:35.220 us from each other and ourselves. What Hobbes was talking about was, you want to be protected
00:08:42.380 from foreign enemies and from criminality in your own country. That's it. That's what he was talking
00:08:47.660 about. Absolutely. Yeah. But over time, that has become layered up and layered up. And particularly
00:08:52.620 then in the aftermath of World War Two, when we had the creation of a welfare state and everything,
00:08:58.300 you had more and more layers for O non, all of which we then we simply absorbed into our expectations
00:09:03.760 of what government can do for you. And so now we have ended up in this position where we have been
00:09:09.340 officially wrapped in cotton wool for so long that we have become fragile people. You know, whereas
00:09:17.940 before we dealt with adversity by training ourselves to be strong in the face of adversity,
00:09:24.360 by teaching young people how to cope with difficulties and difficult situations, and they read to kill a
00:09:31.020 mockingbird because it made them feel uncomfortable because I was part of growing up, confronting all
00:09:36.100 of these things. And I walked to school and nobody thought anything of it. Probably they were kind of
00:09:42.600 hoping I'd get lost, to be fair, but that might actually just be me. But nevertheless, nobody much
00:09:48.960 commented on that. In fact, the stat that came out of when I did the research of that video was
00:09:52.740 something like, I can't remember the exact number now, something like 78% of kids walked to school
00:09:58.240 when I was seven or eight year olds walked to school when I was seven or eight. And now it's
00:10:03.760 something like 8%. I mean, it's just astonishing. And of course, that's because the traffic got worse.
00:10:10.140 We had all the newspapers telling us about stranger danger and people then wouldn't let their darlings
00:10:15.260 out because they were terrified that there are predators on every street corner. And the process
00:10:21.820 is just as we have seen it. Media hyping up dangers because it feeds clicks, which feeds their
00:10:28.980 advertising model, which feeds into a terror mindset amongst the population, and then looking to authority
00:10:37.200 to defend themselves from that. And that has created a weakened, dependent mindset rather than a strong,
00:10:46.460 resilient citizenship. And that is a real problem for us.
00:10:49.860 Well, politically, it's a big problem because one of the consequences that seems quite inevitable
00:10:57.040 to me out of this sort of approach is that means the government has to do more things. And if the
00:11:02.420 government does more things, it means there are more errors of your life that the government's
00:11:05.560 involved with. And I'm not someone who thinks the government has no role in society at all. Of course
00:11:11.720 it does. But the problem is the government is a very blunt instrument for dealing with lots of
00:11:16.760 issues. You see it in the conversation around freedom of expression, for example. The government
00:11:21.540 can either ban things or it can allow them. It can't have, you can't have the nuanced conversation
00:11:27.220 about, well, you are allowed to be a dick, but maybe you shouldn't be, right? The government can't do
00:11:33.200 that. So if we make the government regulate every element of our relations, every element of our
00:11:38.280 behavior, every element of our safety, you are going to end up with a sort of, at best, soft
00:11:43.100 authoritarianism eventually. That is one of the dangers for sure. And you can add to that the
00:11:49.160 fact that governments are actually just not very good at doing lots of things. You know, why did
00:11:54.880 we get such a rapid vaccine rollout? Well, in this country, it's because they took it out of the
00:11:58.720 bureaucracy's hands and put it into a small panel that brought together the private sector who are
00:12:03.800 used to doing things quickly and to scale. And they managed to do a much, much better job. And then as
00:12:09.280 soon as they handed it back to the bureaucracy of the state, it all gummed up again. So you've got
00:12:13.960 both the tendency of governments to want to push you to comply, you know, if you won't, you know,
00:12:22.440 if you will insist on getting fat, then they'll try and nudge you. And if nudging won't work,
00:12:26.660 they'll push you a bit harder. And then you marry that with the fact that they're actually not very
00:12:30.940 good at executing. And so that you get the worst of all worlds in that sort of sense. But we do have
00:12:37.220 a real danger ahead of us because as we are moving more towards these big global issues that we're
00:12:44.200 facing, that tends towards the technocratic mindset in terms of what are the solutions and how do we
00:12:50.440 deal with them, they tend towards authoritarian solutions. Now, it doesn't mean to say that
00:12:56.920 governments will all naturally give in to that. You know, I don't see that the likes of Boris Johnson
00:13:02.500 or the likely successors have that as an ambition, particularly, but there is a dynamic that you
00:13:08.380 have to actively oppose. You actually have to push the other direction, not to drift that way.
00:13:14.640 And I don't see that they have a sufficient vision currently to do that.
00:13:19.300 Broadway's smash hit, the Neil Diamond musical, A Beautiful Noise, is coming to Toronto. The true
00:13:26.320 story of a kid from Brooklyn destined for something more, featuring all the songs you love, including
00:13:31.580 America, Forever in Blue Jeans, and Sweet Caroline. Like Jersey Boys and Beautiful, the next musical
00:13:37.960 mega hit is here, the Neil Diamond musical, A Beautiful Noise. Now through June 7th, 2026 at the
00:13:44.760 Princess of Wales Theatre. Get tickets at Mirvish.com.
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00:15:04.160 code, which is of course, trigger. I was going to say, man, the thing that worries me is we're
00:15:10.080 talking about authoritarianism and a few years ago, I would have scoffed at that. But what we are seeing
00:15:14.960 is a kind of soft authoritarianism, which ties into the whole safetyism issue. Because you look at what
00:15:21.460 the American government are trying to do to Joe Rogan and trying to silence him.
00:15:25.420 By the time this goes out, he could have been assassinated.
00:15:27.300 Yeah, exactly. R.I.P. Joe. But that would be in bad taste. Anyway.
00:15:31.760 That would be in bad taste if that actually happens, mate. We'll have to cut it out.
00:15:35.020 Exactly.
00:15:35.280 Joe, we hope you're well, mate.
00:15:37.320 But if you look at what the American government are doing, they're trying to silence him. They're
00:15:41.620 trying to de-platform him. And they would argue that they're doing that because they want to
00:15:46.400 inverted commas, keep people safe, so that he can't spread his, in inverted commas,
00:15:52.400 misinformation. And what we're seeing is this safetyism, as far as I'm concerned,
00:15:57.540 being used as a way to control us. It's soft authoritarianism. Do you agree, Mellon?
00:16:04.400 I do. And I'll tell you why it's happening, I think. Which is that we have now come across two big
00:16:10.520 issues where it's very easy for the elites, if you like, the government, but also the mainstream media
00:16:20.800 types and various people in the same orbits, to see that there is a right thing to do and people
00:16:27.560 need to be persuaded to go along with it. So both in terms of a pandemic and now also in terms of
00:16:31.660 climate change, you have got the situation where the population need to be persuaded to do the right
00:16:38.940 thing. And that has turned what used to be streams of communication, streams of information from
00:16:45.840 government, where they were there to tell us what was going on, that has now become streams of what
00:16:54.380 some would describe as propaganda, but in any case is campaign messaging. When I first started out
00:17:00.820 dealing with climate change issues and, you know, I've always, half of what I ever dealt with on
00:17:06.620 the corporate responsibility stuff was showing companies how they had to respond to the climate
00:17:11.380 change agenda. It's something I've been dealing with for decades. However, Extinction Rebellion,
00:17:15.860 as mad as a box of frogs. So, you know, I did a few videos critiquing the extreme campaigner end and
00:17:23.400 some of the things that they were demanding, which just didn't make any sense. And I had various people
00:17:28.900 saying, well, what you say is absolutely right. It's just not helpful to say it at this point.
00:17:33.820 And I have heard that so many times since from other things. You know, I kicked back against the
00:17:38.140 insect apocalypse because the language being used there was overblown apocalyptic language again.
00:17:44.480 And when you look to the research, it didn't support some of the top line messaging. Yes,
00:17:49.400 there were problems with insect declines and the research shows that, but not what was being claimed.
00:17:53.960 And then again, someone came back and said, everything you said was correct scientifically.
00:17:59.000 All the papers you cited were correct. You didn't misinform, but it wasn't helpful messaging.
00:18:05.180 And it just underpinned for me now how much of this has turned into campaign messaging.
00:18:10.900 This is the problem. And this is why people then start to distrust what they're being told.
00:18:16.560 You know, why did we get some stats during the pandemic and not others? Because some stats
00:18:21.340 were considered to be helpful in underpinning the message that says you should be worried about
00:18:26.560 this and therefore you should comply with the measures that we put in play. And some were less
00:18:31.900 helpful in that, although they were arguably more helpful in understanding what the heck was going
00:18:36.160 on, which some of us really wanted to do.
00:18:38.580 What you're really talking about, Malin, is a very good point, which is it's very sneaky what they've
00:18:44.420 done. What they've done is they've traded the science for public health, right? These are two very
00:18:49.100 different things. Science is about finding what the truth is. Public health is about getting people
00:18:52.920 to do what you want, right? And they've said, if you're questioning the public health, you're not
00:18:58.460 following the science, right? These things are not the same thing. And climate change, which is the
00:19:04.240 issue that we were originally going to talk about, and let's get into it now because you've kind of
00:19:08.100 brought us there very neatly, seems to me to be exactly the same, right? Because what you've got on the
00:19:15.180 one hand is a bunch of people running around, gluing themselves to trains, going absolutely
00:19:21.660 apeshit over every tiny little thing that happens. And the science isn't really being talked about
00:19:27.220 properly. What you've got is that extreme end on one end. And there's other people who think it's
00:19:33.640 not happening. And I know I'm not a scientist. I don't know which one of them is right. I'm just
00:19:37.560 saying that I think the messaging is much more like public health than it is like science, the way we're
00:19:44.200 having the conversation about climate change. So what is the truth about climate change? Because
00:19:49.780 you know we've had Roger Hallam from Extinction Rebellion on the show. We've had Patrick Moore
00:19:54.080 who thinks it's all a bunch of horse shit. We've had Bjorn Lomborg who thinks it is happening but it's
00:19:58.360 not that big a deal. Like where are you on that? Yes. So this is one of the frustrations if you get
00:20:05.140 involved with this because of course what you have with most of those characters there is that you have
00:20:10.560 people on the opposite extremes. And people often say well to get the balance of the issue you talk
00:20:16.580 to the one side and then you talk to the other side. The vast majority of this issue lives in the
00:20:20.600 middle. I mean it's not as simple as that but nevertheless let's start there. So the core science, the core
00:20:25.880 science is the planet warming, is the human burning of fossil fuels causing it, is pretty clear.
00:20:32.440 And I mean there are multiple streams of evidence that all point in the same direction. So when
00:20:38.840 scientists say the science is settled they're talking about that basic core which is supported
00:20:44.240 by multiple streams of evidence all of which are very very straightforward and hard to argue with.
00:20:50.100 And most of the sceptics now bar a few of the out and out you know the scientific community is
00:20:56.260 engaged in a conspiracy against us all types. They largely accept that much. The question then
00:21:04.960 really comes through was so what? So what does that mean for what's going to happen in the future
00:21:09.840 and particularly then what does that mean in terms of what we should do about it?
00:21:14.700 And half the problem with climate change is that people conflate the two. So because the extreme
00:21:21.140 campaigners go around trumpeting their version of the science which is cherry-picked for the
00:21:26.760 most doomist elements that they can find, then people will confuse their messaging with the
00:21:35.500 scientific underpinning. And so it's very easy then if you're on a conservative mindset to say well
00:21:41.920 you know that is associated with those wild-eyed loons therefore the whole thing is wrong.
00:21:46.420 And that is a real mistake. What we have had in the UK over the last couple of decades has been a bit
00:21:52.200 of a privilege in that both the conservative end and the socialist end all agreed on the core of
00:21:59.000 reality. This is kind of what's happening and we could disagree about what we do about it. You know you
00:22:04.820 can have a conservative approach to tackling climate change, you can have a socialist approach to tackling
00:22:09.520 climate change, there'll be some commonalities, there'll be lots of differences. That's what we should be
00:22:14.260 arguing about and fighting about for sure. Let's deal with reality and then argue like cats in a bag
00:22:20.460 about what we do about it. Fine. And then in America you had you know something that was quite
00:22:25.060 different and I tend to think it's because Al Gore arose as an early spokesperson and that helped to
00:22:30.640 polarise it because he was a very partisan figure. But for whatever reason you've got one side that is
00:22:37.800 going on the extinction rebellion end of the debate shall we say losing it drifting in that direction
00:22:46.580 and then we've got the other side that's then on the Trumpian end drifting in the other direction
00:22:50.700 and they can't even agree on reality which is a real problem. Now I always thought that eventually
00:22:56.380 what we had achieved would start to drift over there and moderate republicans would start to pull
00:23:03.020 things in. Moderate democrats would start to pull things in. I kind of think it might be happening the other
00:23:08.820 way round. Which is not good news really. And part of that is because of the incompetence of our politicians
00:23:16.980 because we have a conservative government that's not overly conservative and what they are doing on net zero
00:23:25.180 has some good underpinnings but then they are also generally incompetent I'm afraid.
00:23:31.560 And then you've got people within the conservative party who are then lumping in the whole goal of net zero
00:23:38.160 as part of what they dislike in that and it's creating then the same dynamic, same political dynamic
00:23:45.560 that we see in America. That could play out well and it could play out really badly
00:23:51.040 and it's too early to tell which way it's going to go.
00:23:53.840 Manon, I've got this question which I always ask people when it comes to this.
00:23:58.020 On every issue you get your extreme on either side, right? And that always happens whatever issue
00:24:03.780 you take, fine. Why is it that you have the extreme left saying things, you know, we've only got 50 good
00:24:09.760 harvests left, the world is doomed, all the rest of it. Look, they're entitled to their opinion.
00:24:15.060 Maybe they're right, maybe they're not. I don't know.
00:24:16.960 But then why is it that that opinion is then funneled into our kids and it's widely accepted
00:24:22.260 and then the media start talking about it. And we've got this generation of people
00:24:26.820 who are completely terrified because they think one day they're going to wake up and the world's
00:24:31.020 going to be on fire.
00:24:31.900 Well, they probably won't wake up if it's on fire.
00:24:34.020 Yeah, well, yes. This is a real problem. You're absolutely right.
00:24:38.180 And one of the things that I discovered most, that surprised me the most when I started doing
00:24:43.940 the YouTube deep dive videos where I did the research on these, was just how often the campaign
00:24:50.020 messages that I had entirely accepted were standard. And I've seen people like Michael Gove
00:24:55.840 repeating, you know, the government had entirely accepted. As soon as you looked into them,
00:25:00.320 they fell apart. 50 harvests, that has come from nowhere. That has no scientific underpinning
00:25:07.820 whatsoever. I think somebody tracked it back to where it was and it came from a campaign
00:25:12.520 thing that was then misquoted. And it's just not true. Simply not true. And yet it is repeated
00:25:18.340 over and over to the point where through repetition, it has become accepted as fact. And then Michael
00:25:23.780 Gove will repeat it because he accepts that it's a fact.
00:25:26.960 And he is trustworthy as well.
00:25:28.360 Obviously. Obviously. Well, he's such a good dancer. You couldn't possibly...
00:25:32.680 So this is a real problem because then when you start to then take that as a education process
00:25:40.080 for kids, then you are storing up these deeply ingrained attitudes then that become the next
00:25:47.540 generation's instincts, their gut instincts about how they see the world. That is one of our biggest
00:25:53.980 worries. And of course, it's always been the case that the teaching community who do fantastic jobs,
00:26:00.320 many great teachers in there, as a whole, they tend to lean leftwards, as we know.
00:26:07.200 I would say they're very left-wing.
00:26:09.300 Well, yeah. And they were when I was brought up.
00:26:12.820 Yeah. He's just too attracted to that profession.
00:26:15.300 Most of us survive our upbringing perfectly well. And most kids are very quick to spot a certain
00:26:21.480 amount of bullshit in their education. You know, there's a certain amount you can just relax a little
00:26:26.620 bit. On the other hand, when it comes to something where they are absolutely encouraging your deepest
00:26:32.660 insecurities and fears by saying, you know, the climate is going to hell in a handcart.
00:26:39.140 There's one Extinction Rebellion person who goes to kids and says, you know, the issue isn't whether
00:26:44.860 you're going to grow old, it's the issue of whether you're going to grow up. There's no science to
00:26:49.160 support that whatsoever. But nevertheless, this is being pushed to kids.
00:26:53.360 Have you seen millennials these days? They haven't grown up. We are millennials as well. So I'm just
00:26:59.440 we're testament. But look, you haven't quite addressed my earlier question, which I think
00:27:03.620 is important to do if we're going to have this part of the conversation, which is what is the truth
00:27:07.960 about how dangerous climate change is, how quickly it's happening, what sort of measures might be
00:27:15.440 sensible to consider in response, etc. Tell us that because I think that's really the answers that
00:27:21.480 everybody's looking for is like, we keep being told there's a disaster. I don't think there is a
00:27:26.400 disaster coming in the next 12 years, as AOC said, we're all going to die. You know, all of that's not
00:27:31.100 happening. So how urgent is the problem? How big is the problem? And what are some of the reasonable
00:27:36.400 solutions that we might consider to it? Okay, the reason why this is so confusing is because media has
00:27:42.920 pushed extreme scenarios. Now, the IPCC, the body that collects together the science and publishes it and
00:27:49.480 reports every few years, they produce a number of scenarios based on what we do, because you can't
00:27:56.460 predict the future without settling for how many fossil fuels are we going to burn in the meantime.
00:28:02.440 On the basis of what we kind of said that we're going to do, and the fact that we won't do all of
00:28:07.340 it, but we'll do some of it, you know, we're on a midstream scenario. The extreme worst case scenario
00:28:13.820 is what tends to get often quoted. And that's one of these problems, I think called RCP 8.5,
00:28:18.360 as it was. And that has been one of the problems that always the clickbait journalism will talk
00:28:26.780 about the extreme cases. And so everyone thinks that this is going to happen imminently. That
00:28:32.160 doesn't mean that there is no capacity for things to go seriously wrong, you know, in a timescale that
00:28:38.700 we would care about. Yeah, that is absolutely a possibility. Is it a high probability? Not on the
00:28:45.980 current basis, but there's a high probability that there will be some problems that we need to deal
00:28:51.580 with. Like what? So one of the challenges that we have is that we have grown as a population onto
00:28:57.140 this planet. The population is starting to even out, but it is very, very high for the state of
00:29:04.120 the planet that we have on. And we are currently now using all the agricultural land, as much land
00:29:09.680 space, agricultural land, as we're likely to have ever going forwards. So we have hit a barrier
00:29:16.480 there. We can make it more productive, but we're not going to have any more. Now, the question is,
00:29:21.700 when you have 11 billion people, as we will end up having, dependent on particularly a number of
00:29:26.940 breadbasket regions that have to be highly productive to feed all those people, you become
00:29:31.840 very vulnerable to shocks to the system, because you don't have very much resiliency left in the
00:29:36.000 system. Okay, so you might be able to create new agricultural land further north as climate
00:29:42.540 changes, but then you will lose some in the tropics as they become less suitable for growing.
00:29:49.400 We're not going to have a lot more than we've got. So then if you get extreme weather events,
00:29:55.180 which we expect to get more of, you may well have several years in a row where you get severe shocks
00:30:00.900 to food systems, which will then have big knock-on effects throughout human society. Those are the
00:30:06.480 sorts of things that are hard to map, because they depend on certain shock events that will become
00:30:11.880 more frequent, happening in an unfortunate sequence, and then the consequences could be very serious.
00:30:18.060 Those are examples. Then, of course, there's the things like the rising sea levels and how much of
00:30:22.680 human habitation is on coastal areas and the amount of disruption and cost that's going to cause and
00:30:28.860 so on. I'm less worried about that, because that will be expensive, it will be a pain in the backside,
00:30:34.100 but that's not life-threatening in the way that some of those other sort of key things are.
00:30:39.180 Now, what should we do about it? Well, net zero is a policy goal that we absolutely have to do.
00:30:47.520 Why?
00:30:48.440 Because, ultimately, carbon dioxide stays around in the atmosphere for quite a long time. You have to
00:30:54.780 stop adding to the natural carbon cycle. You know, it is relatively in balance without our contribution,
00:31:02.020 but so long as we keep adding to it, it's like an overflowing bath. You know, you put more in and more
00:31:08.960 in and it overflows. And until we stop adding to it, then it won't stabilise. It will always continue.
00:31:17.100 Now, timescales, you know, should be as fast as possible, but not faster.
00:31:21.700 And this is where we get the overlap into where people conflate the science with the policy.
00:31:29.160 Because we've had a committee on climate change that have looked at all the different aspects of
00:31:34.440 the electricity grid and industry and so on, and what has to happen to change all of those.
00:31:39.400 They did a reasonably good, pragmatic, practical job of looking at all of that. And they came up with
00:31:46.100 this. We could get to net zero by 2050 with our system, the way that it is, working correctly.
00:31:53.820 So not laying waste to the economy in any way, shape or form, which is what we want.
00:32:02.140 Maybe it's going to take a bit longer than that. I would expect it to take a bit longer than that
00:32:06.080 because circumstances and humans, imperfect. We will go there imperfectly and messily and
00:32:12.060 two steps forward and one step back. That's kind of how we are. Nevertheless, that timescale
00:32:16.980 is a reasonable one if we do it properly. Another 10 years is reasonable if we do it properly.
00:32:24.280 The question is, we shouldn't try and do it faster than is feasible. And the danger is that people are
00:32:31.080 seeing it as a one variable problem, just like the pandemic. They saw the pandemic was a one variable
00:32:36.400 problem, COVID cases. And we had to upend every single thing to bring COVID cases down, which
00:32:42.260 obviously didn't work anyway. But in any case, if the problem had been maximum human welfare,
00:32:48.860 then COVID is one variable amongst a number of variables. And you're weighing up the cost of
00:32:53.400 the different things that you're going to do about each of those different things. And maybe you'd
00:32:57.520 have ended up doing exactly the same. Probably not. But at least you had been weighing up those
00:33:03.040 different factors. It's the same here. You know, the single variable in this case is CO2.
00:33:08.780 But of course, it isn't. What we want is for human society to continue to flourish,
00:33:14.300 for people to be able to achieve their ambitions for themselves and to live out lives while preserving
00:33:19.740 the natural world, which keeps us alive. It's our life support systems and also keeping the climate
00:33:25.320 within the bounds that will support our future going forwards.
00:33:30.460 Malin, what would you say to the Bjorn Lomberg argument, which is that if we introduce this,
00:33:36.720 what's going to happen is that energy prices are going to go through the roof for the average person.
00:33:41.460 That's going to give rise to ever more populist leaders who will then push back on it. And then
00:33:47.400 everything is doomed.
00:33:48.340 I don't think you said that, Bob. You just added that from yourself.
00:33:54.200 Yeah, I was nodding along. That's a tabloid journalist in me. We're all fucked. No, carry on.
00:34:00.300 Bjorn asks some very good questions. And the challenge I have with Bjorn is some of his
00:34:09.960 evidence that he uses for his specific answers. But he asks absolutely some of the right questions.
00:34:15.760 And when I say that net zero is a policy objective, not a policy, the point is there is no,
00:34:22.420 if you do this, energy prices will go up because there's 20 things you can do. And if you do it
00:34:27.500 properly, you should be able to do it in a way that means that energy prices don't go up.
00:34:32.280 And when you say properly, what do you mean by that?
00:34:34.580 Well, so at the moment, what we're doing is we are creating a morality around the use of fossil fuels.
00:34:44.100 It just says fossil fuels bad, morally bad. So you want to open up a new thing in the North Sea
00:34:50.640 for gas? Bad. Don't do it. New coal mine? Bad. Don't do it. And yet, if we are going to make any
00:34:58.800 kind of sensible progress through to net zero by 2050 or 2060, then it's a taper. And we're going
00:35:04.820 to be using a lot of fossil fuels, a declining amount of fossil fuels over a period of time.
00:35:08.360 Now, managing a declining industry is perfectly possible. And companies can make perfectly good
00:35:14.260 profit out of a declining industry. They've done that all the time through history. But it has to
00:35:19.280 be a managed decline. Because as I think the head of BP said to the COP26 summit, if you try to reduce
00:35:29.120 the supply of a thing before you've reduced the demand, then the prices go up. And arguably,
00:35:36.400 it's not the only thing that's been happening over the last year with energy prices, but it's
00:35:41.240 certainly been a big part of what has driven up energy prices. So this approach that the ideologues
00:35:47.740 have, and sadly, some of the ideologues are in government as well, which is simply to push away
00:35:53.620 anything to do with fossil fuels, rather than saying, well, we've got a plan. Over the next 10
00:35:58.180 years, we're going to use this amount of fossil fuels, and it's going to decline to that. It's going
00:36:00.920 to decline to that. How do we supply this in the most cost effective way, in the way that gives us
00:36:06.540 most energy security, and so on and so on?
00:36:08.760 But isn't that the problem, Alan, that essentially, you're trying to reduce the demand for something
00:36:12.420 that will never be reduced because of the population for energy, not for fossil fuel energy,
00:36:17.200 but for energy. And you haven't got a ready made replacement that is cheaper. That's Bjorn's point is
00:36:25.320 you have to invest in technology to make alternative forms of energy cheap enough that you don't then
00:36:31.380 need the levers of government to introduce it, because people are just going to buy this cheaper
00:36:35.340 energy wherever it comes from. But we don't have it yet. Do you see what I'm saying?
00:36:39.880 Yes. Although I don't think that that is entirely true in that, you know, certainly some of the
00:36:46.460 alternative forms of energy have become cheaper.
00:36:48.740 Like what?
00:36:49.480 Well, the renewable forms of energy have become cheaper.
00:36:52.360 So wind, solar?
00:36:53.880 Wind and solar.
00:36:55.460 They're cheaper than burning?
00:36:57.600 Yes.
00:36:58.280 Really?
00:36:58.920 However, the flip side of that is that you need to, they are intermittent forms.
00:37:04.100 Yes.
00:37:04.260 So you need to either be able to store the energy that they create.
00:37:07.040 Yes.
00:37:08.180 Or you need to find a way to fill in when they're not produced.
00:37:12.380 So that's what I mean. Overall, as a package, it's not cheaper at this point.
00:37:16.680 Or we don't have the way to make it work without fossil fuel. Whatever way you want to put it,
00:37:20.580 it's not a viable alternative that is cheaper as well.
00:37:23.920 If you are taking all of the pros of all of the different energy sources and all of the cons of
00:37:29.740 different energy sources, and you factor in the impact of the use of fossil fuels into that equation,
00:37:36.000 then it drives you necessarily to forcing the pace on some of the alternatives. Now,
00:37:41.760 some of the alternatives are perfectly workable and will become better, we know, if we drive them.
00:37:47.460 So nuclear technology, for instance, stood still for 20, 30 years because we got scared about it
00:37:53.320 after Chernobyl and we froze the development of that technology where it was. You know,
00:37:58.480 the existing nuclear power stations are using 30-year-old technology, basically.
00:38:02.760 That's reassuring.
00:38:03.400 Fourth generation, absolutely. Fourth generation nuclear solves a lot of the problems that we
00:38:09.300 were worried about. You know, if something goes wrong, plants will shut down safely rather than
00:38:14.380 melt down. You know, they don't create very much nuclear waste. In fact, they can use nuclear waste,
00:38:20.460 old nuclear waste as fuel. As with anything, if you work a technology to scale, then you gradually
00:38:27.500 make it better and you solve the problems. So if we work nuclear technology to scale,
00:38:33.260 as the Chinese are doing, because they can see that this is the technology of the future,
00:38:37.680 if you push yourself as pioneers into that space, you become the providers of that technology to the
00:38:42.880 world. So then what you've done by putting money into it when it was less cost effective is you've
00:38:47.940 invested in the new technology, which you then recoup the cost of that investment from by selling it
00:38:54.100 to the world. Because the world will go net zero in a blink of an eye when you've got the cost
00:38:59.820 effective technology that works. But how do you get that? You get it by investing in developing that
00:39:06.180 technology. We already know that nuclear works. It's just that we've got ideological stuff going on
00:39:11.860 that has said that, you know, even though we say that there's a climate crisis, we're also going to be
00:39:17.100 anti-nuclear. And you sit there and say, how could you ever come to that conclusion if you're simply
00:39:22.140 thinking this is a pragmatic problem to be solved? It's not. It's an ideology that is driving these.
00:39:28.740 Why is Germany shutting down nuclear power stations right now and ramping up coal when it says that
00:39:34.300 it's going to be a climate leader? And by the way, making it extremely vulnerable to Russia, which is
00:39:38.780 why the current situation with Ukraine, Germany can't do shit because they've closed all their
00:39:43.160 power stations. And this is the challenge. So net zero, if it's taken as a pragmatic engineering problem
00:39:49.320 to be addressed, then there's a certain amount of investment in technology that makes sense.
00:39:54.200 And you can plan in a way that will avoid the problems of massive energy price spikes and so
00:40:00.600 on and so forth. But that's not how we're doing it. We're doing it in this weird, ideological,
00:40:07.100 knee-jerk, technocratic way where we are making decisions based on how difficult they are politically
00:40:15.960 more than we are about what's going to get the job done. And that is going to lead to exactly what
00:40:21.500 you described, what you ascribed to Bjorn, whether he would have owned it himself.
00:40:26.220 No, he did say you're going to get more Bolsonaro's if you carry on down this path.
00:40:29.680 Exactly so. That was his exact words.
00:40:31.160 Absolutely right. Because the technocrats who are pushing the solutions at the moment are doing a
00:40:36.260 really bad job of pushing their case. You know, they are tending towards the authoritarian,
00:40:42.940 authoritarian, which we don't like, and telling you whether you can or can't eat meat and all those
00:40:49.080 sorts of things. And again, if you were being pragmatic about this, you'd start by saying,
00:40:54.140 what do people most value? How do we reduce the impact of those things? So people value travel.
00:41:01.660 They value what they eat. And as soon as a country comes out of poverty, what do they do? They start
00:41:07.360 eating more meat. It's highly prized, highly nutritious. So you would start with a pragmatic
00:41:12.700 question of how do we reduce the impact of the things that people value, which makes them more
00:41:17.360 likely to come with us on the journey that we need to go on. But that's not what we're doing at all.
00:41:22.840 No. What we're doing is, you know, we start this with an ideological preference, which is that people
00:41:28.940 consume less, they travel less, they drive less, they eat vegan, they do whatever it is that we think
00:41:34.820 is a good lifestyle. And what we're going to do is we're going to cram that down on them. That is not
00:41:41.020 a winning proposition, I would suggest. And yet, the BBC, you know, as soon as the BBC is talking
00:41:48.120 about climate change, it takes seconds before they've gone on to meat eating, or they've gone
00:41:53.200 on to flying, they can't keep away from it. And yet there are massive impacts in all sorts of areas
00:41:59.260 that are much more important to talk about, because there are bigger impacts that have systemic
00:42:05.960 engineering challenges that can be done at scale. Why wouldn't you do those things first? Why wouldn't
00:42:13.600 you focus on those things first? And persuade people that actually, you're working on their behalf,
00:42:19.880 you're working so that they can have more of the things that they value long into the future,
00:42:25.020 and that their kids can have those things as well. And then if at some point in the future,
00:42:30.060 if you have to turn around and say, we really wanted you to be able to have this, but actually,
00:42:34.500 we can't get this to work. We can't get flight that works anymore. You know, we tried it for 20 years,
00:42:41.760 and we failed. And you're not going to be able to fly as much. And people say, well, we trust that you
00:42:46.640 did try. No one's going to say that now. Because what they see is a bunch of people whose first
00:42:53.120 preference is to cram down lifestyle restrictions on people. First preference.
00:42:58.760 And it's also as well, Malin, you're not going to win hearts and minds in doing that. And if you
00:43:02.860 really want this green revolution, as it is, to work, you're going to need that. You're going to
00:43:09.240 need ordinary people to buy in. But if you're saying to people, oh, you can't fly, and you're
00:43:14.060 not going to be able to eat meat, yet you see the elites doing that very thing, flying around the
00:43:18.580 world, and doing the things which you aren't allowed to do anymore, people aren't going to
00:43:22.700 buy in.
00:43:23.340 Yes. And part of the problem is people are thinking of it as a green revolution. Because the thing
00:43:28.440 that they would most hate is for us to solve the problem of climate change to create a world
00:43:35.480 that looks exactly like it does right now, but without climate change.
00:43:39.640 This is what I was going to ask you, Malin, because I tell you what I see in it as well.
00:43:43.880 There is a broader thing going on in Western society, which partly I cover in my book, which
00:43:50.320 is there's a sort of self-loathing in the West. And the reason I think a lot of people feel
00:43:55.820 quite antagonistic to this green shit is that it's like you want people to suffer. You want
00:44:02.960 to take away from people the things that they enjoy because we are bad, because of colonialism
00:44:08.600 and industrialisation and whatever else that the West is, you want us to suffer for that.
00:44:14.660 And this is your punishment. We're going to raise your energy prices. You're not going
00:44:17.820 to have any meat. You're not going to travel anywhere. There's a sort of like, they love
00:44:21.980 that shit. They love to feel like they're taking things away from people that we must be punished
00:44:27.540 for our sins. I think it feels like that to a lot of people.
00:44:30.480 And COVID did as well.
00:44:31.540 And COVID the same.
00:44:32.720 Yes. But the important thing is not to confuse that mindset, which is alive and well in the
00:44:40.000 heads of the extreme environmental campaigners, and then a number of other mouthpieces. I mean,
00:44:46.220 you will see echoes of that in various places, definitely. You still have to divorce that from
00:44:52.040 the actual core science that says, yeah, we still have a pragmatic problem that we have
00:44:56.160 to do something about. And the challenge is always when people conflate the two, because
00:45:00.600 it's very easy to fight back against that mindset and to believe that then that's the whole
00:45:05.480 thing.
00:45:05.620 No, but I'm with you. I'm like, look, if you need, if you want to raise my taxes to invest
00:45:09.940 in better nuclear energy, go for it. If you want to raise my taxes to make sure that the
00:45:15.680 energy we use is used efficiently and we're not wasting, like to me, resource depletion
00:45:19.960 is a big problem. Pollution is a massive problem. Go for it. I'm happy to pay more money
00:45:26.620 if that's what I need to do for those things to be addressed. What I don't like, though,
00:45:31.140 is that tinge of punitive action for the sins of my forebearers. I don't know. And I think
00:45:38.380 maybe you're right. It's about the way it's being marketed, perhaps.
00:45:42.260 Yes, yes. And it's the sense that, as we said earlier on, that all the communications
00:45:47.660 are now campaign communications. And of course, we've seen this finesse to a fine art with the
00:45:52.320 pandemic with the use of a nudge unit to manipulate us gently and subtly to complying. And this
00:46:01.740 is a real problem because they've already started producing documents looking at, well, how do
00:46:08.280 you start to nudge people into the right behaviours on climate change? Now, on the one sense, it's
00:46:13.680 a fair question and discussion to have to say, well, if people's behaviours are less than optimal
00:46:22.600 for themselves, how would you encourage them to address that? How would you encourage to change
00:46:28.380 that? You know, if a higher percentage of America is obese, then really should be the case and is the
00:46:35.840 case anywhere else? Why is that? And actually telling them that they're dreadful people and they
00:46:40.900 should change probably isn't going to work. So what would work? Asking the question of how you
00:46:45.680 persuade people, that's one thing. But manipulating them in a way that they don't even notice you're
00:46:52.140 doing. Marketers do it all the time, but there's got to be a line. Now, marketers do it all the time.
00:46:58.380 You go into a supermarket, you probably won't even notice there's a smell of freshly baked bread in the
00:47:03.760 air. And it won't occur to you that there's no bakery in that supermarket because they've worked out
00:47:08.880 that if there's that lovely scent or freshly ground coffee, people buy more. And they're
00:47:16.080 subtly influencing you to buy more. Okay, so we know that corporates are sort of borderline evil,
00:47:21.660 but at the end of the day, that is relatively harmless, relatively harmless. I don't mind that
00:47:26.520 particularly. Maybe some people do. But if they're going to work out...
00:47:30.000 You can go to a different supermarket if you want, or not shop in supermarkets. You can't go to a
00:47:33.480 different country, not really.
00:47:34.620 No, that's true. But you go into the supermarket, you don't know that's what they're doing.
00:47:39.020 It's all very subliminal in that sort of sense. But if they're going to use subliminal techniques
00:47:43.960 to scare you because of the pandemic, and they want you to stay at home, and then suddenly
00:47:50.280 everyone is so terrified, they want the government to lock down again. And so the government locks
00:47:55.620 down again, because that's what everybody wants. But everybody wanted it because the government
00:47:58.880 scared them in the first place. What the heck is going on with that? If you're going to do
00:48:03.320 that with climate change, then yes, you are going to have populist reaction, and deservedly so.
00:48:09.720 Hey, Constantine, do you love Trigonometry?
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00:49:07.020 and the pinned comment below. See you there, guys.
00:49:10.940 You know, I said to Roger Hallam, we were joking about, you know, my time in my peace movement days,
00:49:17.580 and, you know, lots of me and my colleagues were in jail, like he's going to jail now. He said,
00:49:22.800 oh, Malin, you should get back into that. I said, it's fine, Roger. When you take over,
00:49:26.380 I'll be in jail soon enough. And I absolutely hold to that. Where we are going, the rise of
00:49:36.400 the soft authoritarianism of ultimately where this takes you, there are some real confrontations
00:49:44.480 coming.
00:49:45.460 And that's such a good point because there is. I remember talking with a friend who is
00:49:50.060 conspiratorial in nature. And at the start of the pandemic, I'd say he's a conspiracy theorist,
00:49:54.840 but now it just looks like he's sort of a prophet, if I'm going to be honest with you.
00:49:59.060 And he actually said to me, can you imagine in five years or 10 years or maybe even 20 years,
00:50:04.320 can you rule out lockdowns for climate change? And then I thought about it and I was going to
00:50:10.760 scoff at him and I thought, after everything that's happened, I genuinely can't.
00:50:15.460 Yeah, I think I still would. I'm still holding onto reality by my fingernails.
00:50:20.920 That's what I think I'm doing anyway. I might be kidding myself.
00:50:24.840 Largely because it's such a slow burn thing. It wouldn't make sense.
00:50:30.380 Now, OK, there's quite a lot of things that we've done over the last couple of years that
00:50:34.120 didn't necessarily make sense. But nevertheless, with a virus, with a pandemic, it is demonstrably
00:50:39.480 a short term thing. You get short term waves and so on. But there is nothing to do with the
00:50:45.980 release of CO2 into the atmosphere that is that short term, where locking down is going
00:50:49.980 to make a huge amount of difference. And it didn't.
00:50:51.640 Well, lockdown is a word. What you could say is, and by the way, I'm not his conspiratorially
00:50:56.260 minded friend. I'm just playing devil's advocate here. But you could say, look, you know, there's
00:51:00.780 no lockdown. You just you can only drive a certain number of miles a year without a special permit.
00:51:06.640 And you can only have one flight a year unless you're going to visit a family member who's on
00:51:14.400 their deathbed or for a funeral. Or you can only have X number of kilograms of beef, chicken,
00:51:21.020 pork, whatever, a year. Like, all we're really talking about is restricting people's freedom
00:51:26.940 to do what they think is the right thing for them based on the argument that we've got,
00:51:31.620 you know, X number of years.
00:51:33.020 That vision, that vision is definitely a possibility. And for me, this is a possibility in the same
00:51:41.820 way.
00:51:42.880 Can I have that spliff now, please? At least I'll feel better about it.
00:51:47.560 The alternative possibility on the other wing is the Trumpian future, where the populist
00:51:53.700 backlash means that we say, sod all that. We don't believe any of it anyway. So we're just
00:51:58.540 going to, you know, burn while we can. And there is somewhere in the middle on all of
00:52:05.880 this. But ultimately, if the middle bit fails, if the centre fails to hold, as they say, one
00:52:11.140 of those two is the extremes we can lurch to. And maybe we'll lurch to the one and then in
00:52:16.660 reaction to that, we'll end up being pulled back to the other. But ultimately, the game is
00:52:22.100 to avoid either. And that means really trying to bring us back to, away from the polarised state
00:52:30.360 that we've become in, back to the sensible centre. This country used to run. Does it still run? I think
00:52:39.000 it still runs. I'm not sure anymore. It used to run on the centre. Because our electoral system works.
00:52:46.480 Yes. So we vote for a government. They get in. There's a lot of counter evidence to that lately,
00:52:51.360 I have to say. But you're right. You're absolutely right. But they govern. I'm just joking. You're
00:52:55.820 absolutely correct. They have power. And then if they mess it up, we can then boot them out. Yes.
00:53:00.100 Now that pushes people back to the centre. Yes. By and large. And the various parties, their fortunes
00:53:06.340 have risen and fallen when they've tacked to the centre and when they've been competent. And most of the
00:53:12.320 elections have been fought and lost on competence. Every now and then we'll get one where we've got
00:53:17.760 two incompetents. That doesn't happen that often. Whereas in America, they can't govern. They've got
00:53:25.100 gridlock so bad that basically whoever gets in, they're not really governing at all. So they never
00:53:31.100 have consequences because they can always point to the other side and say, we would have done great
00:53:35.340 things, but they stopped us. And that therefore has created the incentive for them to drift further and
00:53:41.100 further to the extremes. Whereas if you were able to govern, if Biden was elected, and they say,
00:53:47.040 okay, you run the government, you want to do stupid stuff, you can do it. You're the government now.
00:53:52.640 And that would actually sort them out pretty quickly because then they will be held accountable for
00:53:58.280 their actions. And that would be a very sobering thing. Now, we have had that, I think, over the last
00:54:04.580 few decades. Are we still there? I don't know. The Brexit, non-Brexit dynamic, the populist movement
00:54:12.600 stuff. It's very hard to see where our core now is. But if it's still there, as I think it is,
00:54:21.220 then there's everything to play for in tacking to the centre. The problem is we have a government
00:54:25.440 that won't fight for its vision. When Margaret Thatcher first talked about climate change,
00:54:30.260 she argued the case why Conservatives were the natural home for those who care about the
00:54:35.820 environment. And you could agree with her case, as you could not, but she put forward a Conservative
00:54:40.600 case why they were better on the environment. And the Labour Party would put forward their case why
00:54:45.400 they were better. And you understood the visions that were being put forward. What vision has the
00:54:50.920 current government got around net zero? Well, that's more vision as the current government got
00:54:54.960 around anything. It's because you don't have any Margaret Thatchers anymore. That's why.
00:54:57.780 So you've got the extremist campaigners saying the world is going to end and we have to do all this
00:55:02.580 stuff. Who's arguing with them? When I was there arguing for nuclear disarmament in my naive,
00:55:09.240 charming way, the government was saying, don't do what he said. He's an idiot.
00:55:14.480 And they were kind of right, although I had a point as well. But they put the case,
00:55:19.540 they made the argument. They said, if we don't address this argument and explain why we need to do what
00:55:25.720 we need to do, the public won't understand why we're doing it. And we're just simply not doing
00:55:31.200 that. The Conservative government has no Conservative vision for net zero. So the Conservatives in the
00:55:38.540 party are saying, what's this net zero stuff about? This isn't Conservative. And then the people on the
00:55:44.120 outside are looking at Extinction Rebellion. And they're thinking, well, that's what net zero must be
00:55:49.080 about. And that's one of the reasons why people are conflating the science with the extreme campaign
00:55:55.220 solution. And the problem is, as well, is if a government doesn't have a clear vision, then it
00:55:59.940 gives credence to all the nutters at the far left and far right. Well, I think that was the point that
00:56:03.960 you were making. And this is, like I said, if you had a government, whether they were Labour or Tory,
00:56:09.660 frankly, went, look, we've got this problem. The science is pretty clear. We've got this problem
00:56:14.740 that's looming. We need to invest in technology to solve this problem, right? And that's why
00:56:20.820 a portion of our budget will go towards what is the best form of nuclear energy? How do we get wind
00:56:26.900 and solar? How do we design better batteries? Elon Musk here is a grant, whatever, right?
00:56:32.820 What sensible person would go, no, actually, I think this is all bollocks? I don't think anyone would.
00:56:40.020 I mean, some people would, of course, but the vast majority of people will be like, well,
00:56:44.000 okay, that's fair enough. I mean, we spend a billion here, a billion now and other stuff.
00:56:47.620 If we threw a few billion at finding new technology, that's going to address some of these issues.
00:56:53.360 But that isn't the way the conversation has been had. And you're right. It is on the government
00:56:57.260 because they're not engaging aggressively with this nonsense and going, look, we think the climate
00:57:05.160 is important and here's our plan to deal with it. And Greta Thunberg needs to go back to school,
00:57:10.920 right? If they did that, you would have a much easier time of convincing people to get
00:57:15.700 support behind the cause.
00:57:17.220 Yes, absolutely. And of course, Greta is now old enough to be wrong. So this is interesting.
00:57:24.460 At the COP26 conference, it was the first time when she wasn't invited onto the main platform,
00:57:30.320 you'll have noticed. And she said her usual thing about, oh, they're all going blah, blah,
00:57:35.040 blah, and they're not doing anything. And the first time there were news stories that were appearing
00:57:38.720 saying, Greta, you know, it was very gentle and it was very respectful, but it's saying,
00:57:42.680 actually, we think Greta might be wrong about this. I thought, well, she's come of age now.
00:57:47.000 She was saying whatever she liked before and people found it charming. But if you're these
00:57:50.760 people in that conference hall who have been working and slaving, trying to make this thing
00:57:55.480 work, trying to make, you know, it's really genuinely difficult. What we are trying to do
00:58:00.600 has never been done before. It is incredibly difficult. And they're going to make it, make mistakes
00:58:05.080 and get it wrong and do all sorts of things. Nevertheless, they've been really trying to
00:58:08.580 do it. Having someone say, what you do equals nothing. Charming when they're 15, not so much
00:58:15.440 when they're 19, which is why she's outside the conference because that's where outsiders
00:58:19.920 live. And it's up to her because they would let her in as part of a process. But you have
00:58:25.840 to stop being an outsider if you're going to do that. And she can't do it because she's
00:58:31.000 become part of that extreme campaign group community. And their messages are not the
00:58:37.840 messages of the insiders trying to work solutions. They're not interested in solutions.
00:58:42.560 What does Extinction Rebellion want to happen? They can't tell you. They won't tell you.
00:58:48.700 They won't point at a policy because there are no policies that would deliver zero emissions
00:58:54.340 in five years, that wouldn't throw hundreds upon hundreds of millions of people into poverty.
00:58:59.260 Again, if you were looking at it as a multivariable problem, you would have way more people dying
00:59:05.040 if you did what they say, than climate change would ever be killing. Poverty has killed way
00:59:10.500 more people through history.
00:59:12.500 Manon, what would you say to this argument? And I'm not for Extinction Rebellion at all.
00:59:17.560 But what they have done is they've brought this issue into the forefront of everyone's minds.
00:59:23.860 They've publicised it. We now talk about it. They're on the front page of every newspaper.
00:59:30.100 Isn't there something to be said for that?
00:59:32.640 Not really. That's largely recency bias. We were talking about it before. We were. Go back and look.
00:59:40.580 We were talking about this already to the point of nauseam before this happened. And it's the same
00:59:48.020 with any campaigning movement. You know, I was in the peace movement when they got rid of nuclear
00:59:52.120 cruise missiles. The people in the campaign was, ah, we did that. And I looked at it, I thought,
00:59:58.600 nah, we didn't. There was all this geopolitics as to why that happened. And then ultimately,
01:00:03.700 the Soviet Union collapsed because we outspent them. There were those dynamics that led to that
01:00:08.460 outcome. Peace movement actually had very little to do with it. They kept the issues alive in the
01:00:13.980 general population. If that was a vehicle for change in that particular instance, then yeah,
01:00:19.500 that would have been fine. But it wasn't. And it isn't. So in this case, constantly reminding people
01:00:25.840 about climate change. How does that help particularly? The government was already working on the
01:00:33.380 Committee on Climate Change process. That predated Extinction Rebellion forming. They produced their
01:00:41.240 report then after they just started. And the government said, yep, we will sign up to that
01:00:47.280 report that's been three years in the making. And Extinction Rebellion said, yes, we did that.
01:00:51.900 No, you didn't. No, you didn't. Not at all. Now look, I don't want to decry it because I was there
01:00:57.820 and most of the people who sign up to the movement are doing it because they're scared for the future.
01:01:03.340 And that's not an irrational thing to be. You know, you can be pushed too far with that.
01:01:09.220 Nevertheless, as a young person, it's correct to be concerned. And they just want to do something
01:01:14.620 and to be heard. That doesn't go for the likes of the political activists behind the movement.
01:01:22.040 And, you know, I interviewed Roger and he's a very nice, amiable guy. But, you know, he is a
01:01:26.520 political activist. He's a far left activist who wants to overthrow the state. Hasn't got a hope in
01:01:32.560 hell of doing it. But nevertheless, that's his modus operandi. That ain't going to create the sort of
01:01:37.800 change that is going to make anyone's lives any better. And I think the sooner you call that out
01:01:43.180 and say, yes, the issue is important, but this process that was going on before isn't being
01:01:49.640 pushed by that movement per se, then we can start to have sensible conversations about, well, what
01:01:54.600 actually needs to change? Because what they are doing is distracting attention. They're saying
01:01:58.620 something big needs to happen. And something is already happening. And the question is,
01:02:04.240 no one's paying attention and holding that accountable because they're involved with this
01:02:10.680 cartoon level discussion that's going on over here. So at the moment, the government isn't being held
01:02:15.280 accountable for net zero. Why is that? Because none of the opposition parties disagree with the
01:02:21.080 objective of net zero. And because all communications are now campaign communications, they won't
01:02:26.900 criticise them on this because it won't be helpful. Now, that's not how political opposition
01:02:32.240 is supposed to work. The only people who are providing real political opposition at the moment
01:02:36.240 are the anti-net zero people, the people who wouldn't do any of it at all, who have done things
01:02:43.460 like demanding the Committee on Climate Change release their costings for their programme. And they
01:02:50.200 refused to do it. So they took them to court and they were able to say, well, look, some of these
01:02:53.700 figures don't add up. And that should be happening. Because of course, they're probably
01:02:58.680 cutting corners and doing things that people do when they think no one's looking. Because that's
01:03:03.960 what happens. That's not a political thing. It just happens. Bureaucracy, politics, everyone gets
01:03:09.640 away with what they think they'll get away with. That's why you have scrutiny. And so if the political
01:03:16.700 parties are not going to scrutinise the government on this area, because it's all campaign messaging,
01:03:21.460 that is a real problem for us. And then Extinction Rebellion are over there saying, well,
01:03:26.020 we need to overthrow the government doesn't actually help that conversation at all.
01:03:29.700 I don't know, mate. The longer this shit goes on, the more I start to agree with them.
01:03:34.020 But Mellon, it's been an absolute pleasure, really, genuinely. And to have this conversation
01:03:38.380 from a sensible perspective is quite reassuring, frankly, in some ways. So thank you for coming
01:03:44.880 on. Before we ask not only our last question on the interview, but also our special questions
01:03:49.600 for locals, tell everybody where they can find your work online and follow up on this chat and
01:03:54.200 find more of the things that you're putting out there.
01:03:56.400 So most of my content goes on to my YouTube channel. If you just simply search on YouTube
01:04:01.000 for Mellon Baker, that will come up. And I also have a website at mallonbaker.net.
01:04:07.800 And then little bits dribble out there. I'm on Twitter at Mellon Baker.
01:04:12.580 Thank you very much, Mellon. Before we go to our local questions, we always have our one
01:04:18.840 final question, which is, what's the one thing we're not talking about, but we really should
01:04:22.780 be?
01:04:23.640 Well, I think that we're spoilt for choice, to be honest. I'm going to give you two quick
01:04:27.540 ones rather than just for one. So one quick one is how different the economic dynamic is
01:04:34.840 going to be as we move on to a stable or declining population base. Our thriving economy of the last
01:04:43.480 50 to 100 years has been based on a rapidly increasing population. Already, you know, with
01:04:49.140 China, because they don't allow a huge amount of immigration, they're now suddenly confronting
01:04:53.860 the real constraints that a stable population is going to throw. They are an emerging superpower.
01:05:00.040 They're about to overtake America. And suddenly, they're bumping in to this democratic real
01:05:05.260 issue. And that is going to change all these equations. It's all very well Bjorn Lomborg
01:05:09.600 coming on here and saying, well, of course, in 100 years, with the economic growth that's
01:05:13.320 going to be happening. Yeah, but all of that is based on what happened in the past. And what's
01:05:16.680 coming in the future is demonstrably going to be different, because we can't negotiate our
01:05:20.540 way around that. We can't have 20 billion people in 100 years. So that is going to make
01:05:25.260 a big difference. The other thing I would say is the huge difference that
01:05:30.020 the emergence of artificial intelligence is going to make on the battlefield. So military
01:05:36.400 technology with artificial intelligence is pushing us logically into where we were 30
01:05:44.560 years ago with nuclear weapons. It's just that it will be very easy for us to miss the fact
01:05:51.180 that we've entered a new paradigm of destruction before we unleash it. You know, with nuclear weapons,
01:05:59.400 we worked out very quickly that this had achieved the scale where the disincentive to use them
01:06:06.740 kicked in. You know, generally, if we had it, we used it and it kicked in to say, ah, no, maybe we
01:06:13.720 shouldn't. We nearly did. We came very close, but we didn't. Artificial intelligence on the battlefield
01:06:19.740 is going to the same singularity, particularly what the Chinese want to do, which is to use artificial
01:06:26.520 intelligence to mean that things move too fast for humans to keep up with, to understand what's going
01:06:32.720 on. You know, the West is saying we do not want that to happen. We always want a human decision
01:06:38.300 maker to be the one who decides whether somebody dies. You do not want AI making that decision.
01:06:46.540 The Chinese are saying, well, that's the wusses. The whole power of AI is going to be that it can think
01:06:51.960 a lot faster than human beings ever can. And you start to build that into a swarm of a thousand tiny
01:06:59.000 drones, all sorts of things that can completely change the nature of what we think of as a balance
01:07:05.620 of power in the world as we understand it at the moment. We should probably be talking about that a
01:07:09.920 little bit more than we are. Well, that's cheered me up. Yeah, it's great. It's basically like YouTube's
01:07:13.940 algorithm with drones. Yeah. That's what you want. Yeah. Fantastic. Exactly. Malin, it's been an
01:07:20.060 absolute pleasure. I'm sure we'll have you back to talk about more stuff. We've got to wrap up here
01:07:24.500 though. So thank you for being here and thank you for watching and listening. We will see you very
01:07:29.560 soon with another brilliant interview like this one or all show. All of them go out at 7pm UK time.
01:07:35.660 And for those of you who like your trigonometry on the go, it's also available as a podcast. Take care
01:07:40.520 and see you soon guys. State level communism has been terrible for the environment by and large
01:07:48.820 whenever it's been pushed to scale.
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