TRIGGERnometry - Who Are Extinction Rebellion and What Do They Want？

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00:00:31.000 Broadway's smash hit, The Neil Diamond Musical, A Beautiful Noise, is coming to Toronto.

00:00:36.860 The true story of a kid from Brooklyn destined for something more, featuring all the songs you love,

00:00:42.120 including America, Forever in Blue Jeans, and Sweet Caroline.

00:00:46.120 Like Jersey Boys and Beautiful, the next musical mega hit is here, The Neil Diamond Musical, A Beautiful Noise.

00:00:52.940 Now through June 7th, 2026 at the Princess of Wales Theatre.

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00:01:00.000 hello and welcome to trigonometry i'm francis foster i'm constantin kitchen and this is a

00:01:10.620 show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people our terrific guest today

00:01:16.180 is the co-founder of extinction rebellion roger hallam welcome to trigonometry hi thanks very

00:01:21.040 much for having me on no thank you for coming on we really appreciate it just as we were discussing

00:01:26.660 before we started the show it's great to hear from people on all sides of the various discussions

00:01:31.220 that we have in our society before we get into the nitty-gritty uh tell everybody who are you

00:01:37.940 how are you where you are what has been the journey that leads you to sitting here talking to us

00:01:42.320 well i i've always been interested in politics and the environment i got involved in organizing

00:01:48.540 people when i was about 14 15 i've been in this this game as you might say for a long time

00:01:55.500 In my 20s, I was very much involved in community development work with housing cooperatives and workers cooperatives.

00:02:03.460 And then I was an organic farmer in Wales for 20 years. I still technically am.

00:02:10.000 And during that time, I became increasingly aware of the climate crisis, not least because it was affecting my business and the business of other farmers.

00:02:19.400 and that led me to do research on mobilisation and civil disobedience

00:02:28.980 at King's College in London where I'm still at doing PhD research

00:02:33.660 and through that research I helped to design and do strategic work

00:02:39.720 for Extinction Rebellion which is, as you can imagine,

00:02:42.980 taken over my life somewhat since it exploded into the world in 2019.

00:02:49.400 Mm. And look, as we talked about again before the interview, neither Francis or I are climate

00:02:55.640 scientists or frankly scientists of any kind. Aren't we? I'm pretty sure you're not, mate.

00:03:01.980 But what we did want is to pose questions to you that a lot of ordinary people might have,

00:03:07.600 people who are very interested in this issue, people who are very concerned, and equally people

00:03:11.780 who are somewhat skeptical. So tell us, first of all, why Extinction Rebellion exists. And I know

00:03:18.660 that you don't speak on behalf of it you're just one of the people involved in it but why was it

00:03:23.480 founded and what is the climate crisis as you put it yes well as you say i'm just coming on on this

00:03:30.900 as an individual in extinction rebellion i do a lot of the spokesworks as it were for the

00:03:37.240 organization but in this video today i'm just speaking for myself lots of people may agree

00:03:43.540 with me or may not but i just want to make that clear um as far as extinction rebellion is

00:03:49.400 concerned i think it came about because a critical mass of people at the same time

00:03:59.280 started to realize that the climate crisis was not just another issue out there that it was

00:04:08.440 fundamentally a threat to all our values on the very basis of our society and that realization

00:04:16.320 wasn't rooted in a particular ideology or a particular politics but in what you might call

00:04:22.520 the geophysics that the weather systems around the world are being destroyed because carbon is being

00:04:28.940 put into the atmosphere and that's a straightforward fact of science as you might say and in so much

00:04:36.540 as that's happening, then that's going to threaten all our values and all we believe

00:04:43.100 in. And I think we came along at a time when many people were thinking, well, why isn't

00:04:50.620 anything happening? You know, people have been talking about this for 30 years. And

00:04:56.920 the idea was the politicians and the diplomats were going to sort this out. They'd had numerous

00:05:04.080 conferences. And the horrifying statistic, I suppose, is that since 1990, when scientists

00:05:13.440 around the world officially said, we don't sort this out, we're heading for catastrophe,

00:05:20.180 carbon emissions have increased globally by 60%. So there's been an undeniable abject failure

00:05:27.560 by the powers that be to sort out something that, in principle, everyone wants sorting out.

00:05:34.080 And it also coincided with, I don't know if you remember this, it was an IPCC report.

00:05:41.260 This is the main organisation in the United Nations that tells the world what the state of play is on the climate.

00:05:47.120 And in October 2018, coincidentally, they came out with this mind-blowing report which said we have 10 to 12 years to reduce carbon emissions by 50% in order to have a 50% chance of remaining under 1.5 degrees, which sounds all very technical.

00:06:12.100 But what I'm here to try and communicate, I suppose, and what I think a lot of people don't understand is 1.5 degrees is the threshold of catastrophe.

00:06:25.600 And I can speak a bit more about what that concretely means.

00:06:28.540 And that's really what has created this massive movement around the world, along with Fridays for the Future.

00:06:42.100 and, you know, numerous sort of mobilisations.

00:06:46.720 What I want to try and emphasise here is,

00:06:50.040 and this is what I want to talk about, if it's OK with you,

00:06:52.580 is this idea that the climate crisis traditionally

00:06:57.620 has been very much a fringe issue.

00:07:01.260 It's been, you know, what the diplomatic elites talk about.

00:07:07.200 It's what left-wing people talk about it,

00:07:09.780 for want of a better word.

00:07:10.860 And what Extinction Rebellion was trying to do, in my view, was to bring it into the mainstream consciousness of ordinary people as something that is important for everyone.

00:07:23.400 And that's why we have this slogan of beyond politics.

00:07:27.800 It's not that we don't, we're not political.

00:07:29.840 I mean, I'm broadly left wing, as you can imagine, but that's not why I'm involved in Extinction Rebellion.

00:07:35.340 And the reason why lots of people are involved in Extinction Rebellion isn't because of tribal politics.

00:07:42.680 It's because of a realisation that if we don't come together, we're in danger of betraying the next generation to an unbelievable amount of suffering.

00:07:55.260 And Roger, you've used words like you're betraying the next generation, climate catastrophe, all of this.

00:08:02.240 What does that actually mean?

00:08:03.760 good question one of the biggest problems with climate change or the climate crisis or whatever

00:08:10.920 you want to call it is these phrases have been around for a long time and psychologically what

00:08:17.800 happens is if you associate something with a phrase like climate change it tends to stick

00:08:23.880 so because climate change has been talked about you know in the in the 1990s in the early 2000s

00:08:30.840 At that period, quite rightly, climate change was seen as an issue, an environmental concern,

00:08:38.560 something that was being sorted out.

00:08:40.940 We need to gradually reduce carbon emissions.

00:08:43.880 There's, you know, there's some serious implications maybe if it doesn't happen.

00:08:48.360 But what's happened in terms of the science and the real world, as you might say,

00:08:54.360 is that over the last 20 years, and particularly in the last 10 years,

00:08:58.080 the scientists have discovered or reiterated that if it's not sorted out it becomes exponentially

00:09:06.380 more scary to the point of being terrifying because what we're fundamentally talking about

00:09:13.200 here is the basis of all life on earth and i've been trying to think of an analogy so maybe this

00:09:19.720 isn't a good one but here we are i'll try it out on you so if you think of society you can think

00:09:24.720 of a society like as a dinner table and there's you know there's knives and forks there's plates

00:09:31.560 there's the food on the table so that's like society you know there's politics there's culture

00:09:37.240 there's people's personal lives they're all laid out on the table and that's what you might call

00:09:41.880 society and what the climate is the climate isn't another dish you know it's not the peas on the

00:09:48.760 table it's the table itself in other words if you cut off a leg of the table you know it starts to

00:09:56.340 wobble if you cut off the two legs of the table the whole thing shatters on the floor and this

00:10:02.480 is the fundamental point of why the climate crisis has to be at the forefront of our minds because

00:10:09.600 if we lose those two you know legs of the table then that's it it's gone so what i need to tell

00:10:18.160 you for about a few minutes is exactly why that is the case, why we are in the process of losing

00:10:24.900 the two legs of the table, as you might say. So the first thing to say is, if you're going to

00:10:31.700 describe the climate crisis, you really need to talk about numbers. You know, there's no point

00:10:37.740 in me saying, well, it's really serious. People say it's really serious all the time, but we need

00:10:41.820 to know precisely why it's serious. And a good analogy here is when you go to the doctor, you

00:10:47.520 you know, you have a lump in your chest or something, you go to the doctor, you don't

00:10:51.600 want the doctor to say, well, it looks like you might have cancer. What you want the doctor to

00:10:57.060 say is to get the x-ray out and point to, you know, your lungs or whatever, and say, look,

00:11:03.420 they're 45%, you know, diseased, and in 10 years time, they're going to be 75%. And then you're

00:11:10.160 going to die. That's the level of responsibility the doctor has, is to actually give you the

00:11:15.220 probability analysis and the numbers. So anyone who comes on your show and wants to talk about

00:11:21.700 the climate has a responsibility, in my view, to actually give the numbers. And one of the things

00:11:28.420 about the climate crisis is people think it's very complicated. But as it's become more of an

00:11:34.160 emergency, it's actually become reasonably straightforward. And the reason for that is

00:11:40.080 we're basically talking about scientific processes and the most basic scientific process is when it's

00:11:48.240 warm ice melts which is not that complicated so then the question is where is it melting how fast

00:11:57.480 is it melting and what does that mean so the hard science is that the arctic is melting because it's

00:12:05.680 warm no one's disputing that it's two three degrees higher than it used to be so that means

00:12:12.560 it's disappearing and over the last 30 40 years it's disappeared by 70 percent in terms of its

00:12:19.840 volume so this means you don't need to be a genius to work this out but at a certain point

00:12:26.720 and the most recent scientific papers predict it will be totally melted in the summer in around

00:12:34.240 2030, 2035. Now, what I need to emphasise here is the figures I'm going to give you are accurate,

00:12:42.920 but they're not absolute, right? In other words, it's likely, just as when the doctor says you've

00:12:50.220 got six months to live, it could be four months and it could be eight months, but you're not going

00:12:54.580 to be around in two years. You can see what I mean. So it's the same, like the ice could be

00:13:00.200 melted it's definitely going to melt and it's going to be around 2030 maybe 2035 now why this

00:13:08.640 should be terrifying about everybody is because when the ice has gone then the weather systems

00:13:17.260 around the world which are already semi-chaotic because of the climate crisis are going to become

00:13:22.620 even more chaotic and that means two precise things what it means is that it's going to be

00:13:28.540 a lot hotter. And when I say a lot hotter, as a farmer, I can tell you that it being generally

00:13:35.880 hotter doesn't matter. What matters is what you call the long tail. In other words, the really

00:13:42.100 hot days. You know, if it's two degrees hotter, who cares? But what the two degrees hotter means

00:13:48.320 is it's going to be 10, 15 degrees hotter, maybe two or three weeks of the year. Now, if you're

00:13:55.400 growing a crop and it's over 20 degrees more than it should be for two or three weeks of the year

00:14:03.180 then you're going to lose the crop so it doesn't matter that most of the year it's you know it's

00:14:08.560 a little bit warmer than it was yesterday that's not the issue it's like what happens at the

00:14:12.840 extreme so that's the first problem and the second problem is that once the ice is substantially

00:14:20.040 melted in the arctic the temperature difference between the arctic and the equator lessened

00:14:26.220 because it's warmer in the arctic and that difference between the temperatures drives

00:14:32.400 the the the wind patterns around the northern hemisphere so in other words everyone knows that

00:14:38.720 weather in britain is a bit useless in the sense that you know it's raining and then it's sunny and

00:14:43.180 then it's raining well what's been happening over the last few years is what's called winter blocking

00:14:47.460 which means that it rains it rains it rains and then it doesn't rain at all and the reason for

00:14:53.320 this is that the weather systems are slowing down now again if you're a farmer it doesn't matter

00:14:59.440 that it rains and then it's sunny that's what you want what's disastrous for food production

00:15:04.100 is when it rains for seven weeks so like 12 years ago 12 15 years ago in 2006 I think it was it

00:15:11.440 rained every day in Wales for seven weeks and I lost 15 acres of vegetables now I can tell you

00:15:17.140 It doesn't matter how good a farmer you are.

00:15:18.920 If it rains every day for seven weeks, you're going to lose your crops.

00:15:21.580 There's nothing you can do about it.

00:15:23.480 While two years ago, it didn't rain in Wales effectively for 12 weeks.

00:15:28.640 And then I lost all my crops because it was so dry.

00:15:31.660 So hundreds of millions of farmers at this moment in time are literally panicking

00:15:37.500 because they don't know what the weather is going to be like.

00:15:41.360 And the upshot of this is there's going to be a food crisis.

00:15:47.140 There's already been substantial food crises over the last 10 years.

00:15:51.920 And these crises are going to get exponentially more serious in so much as we let the temperature go over one and a half degrees, two degrees.

00:16:02.480 And what that means, to be blunt, is millions of people starving to death in areas of the world where they don't have, you know, advanced social support systems.

00:16:12.660 And what that means is mass migration.

00:16:14.600 and what that means is the end of the global you know the global world order as you might say

00:16:21.360 now we can argue about whether it's inevitable or how inevitable it is i don't think that's the

00:16:27.600 main point here i think the main point for an intelligent conversation is do we want to go

00:16:33.420 there do we want to play russian roulette with our children's lives and what's the morality of that

00:16:39.680 and what just to finish off on this what i mean i can give you a few more facts and figures during

00:16:43.980 the conversation but but i think the fundamental point here is that we're in danger in fact we're

00:16:51.220 in the middle of betraying all human values if we betray our children because whether you're on the

00:16:58.400 right or the left everyone agrees the most shitty thing you can do is send your children into an

00:17:05.220 ecological hell no one wants to do that so what we need to do as a society is to have an intelligent

00:17:12.380 conversation about what that responsibility means and what we need to do in order to minimize the

00:17:19.900 probability of this horrendous thing happening well before we get into the responsible conversation

00:17:25.380 let's have a little bit more of the irresponsible conversation uh just from the angle of the sort

00:17:30.540 of skepticisms that people do have and i'm just talking about ordinary people who like us aren't

00:17:35.900 scientists or whatever. Do you watch problematic content online? Of course they do. They watch

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00:18:55.800 Broadway's smash hit, The Neil Diamond Musical, A Beautiful Noise, is coming to Toronto.

00:19:01.600 The true story of a kid from Brooklyn destined for something more, featuring all the songs you love,

00:19:06.860 including America, Forever in Blue Jeans, and Sweet Caroline.

00:19:10.860 Like Jersey Boys and Beautiful, the next musical mega hit is here, The Neil Diamond Musical, A Beautiful Noise.

00:19:17.580 Now through June 7th, 2026 at the Princess of Wales Theatre.

00:19:21.880 Get tickets at murbush.com.

00:19:24.960 I mean, and the reason I bring this up is I remember when I was at school in the 90s

00:19:32.520 and the early noughties, when I left school, the official consensus was that by, I think,

00:19:37.200 2020, we'd run out of oil. Very soon after, we'd run out of coal. Pluto was still considered a

00:19:43.940 planet. So this idea that science is this great predictor of things to come often fails to take

00:19:50.140 into account technological progress. We now extract oil that wasn't accessible to us before

00:19:54.720 or the same with coal, and on and on we go.

00:19:57.080 So how reliable are these predictions is, I guess, what I'm getting at.

00:20:02.120 Because isn't it possible that some Elon Musk-like character

00:20:05.580 will come along and just come up with some solution

00:20:08.400 of either allowing you to grow crops in a different climate

00:20:12.400 or allowing you to cool the temperature

00:20:14.440 or allowing you to capture carbon or whatever else it might be?

00:20:17.940 Isn't this prediction based on current knowledge,

00:20:21.420 which is never accurate?

00:20:22.400 it well as i said prediction by definition is never absolute right so that's the first thing

00:20:30.160 to say and the second thing to say is when you're dealing with a horrendous risk you have to engage

00:20:38.740 with the proportionary principle you know that's how we need to frame the debate we don't want to

00:20:44.980 frame the debate that because we can't prove it then you know it doesn't matter so a good analogy

00:20:51.840 here is is would you put your children onto an airplane if there was a five percent chance of

00:20:57.080 it crashing well not unless you're a psychopath or you don't like them you wouldn't put your

00:21:03.800 children onto a plane if there was a possibility of you know a 20 chance but we don't really know

00:21:11.060 but it could be a one percent chance you still wouldn't risk it roger but hold on this is a bit

00:21:16.520 of an unfair argument, in my view, because at least my understanding of Extinction Rebellion

00:21:21.940 and other people who talk about the climate is you're asking for very, very drastic changes to

00:21:27.340 people's ways of life. You're asking people to massively reduce their consumption. You're asking

00:21:32.880 for societies to be restructured, all of that sort of stuff, right? So it's not a choice between

00:21:37.380 putting your kids on a plane and not putting them on a plane. It's a choice between putting them on

00:21:42.220 one plane which has a one percent chance of killing them or putting on this other plane

00:21:46.600 which has a hundred percent chance of ruining their life that's how some people might say it

00:21:50.500 let me give you three clear scientific situations right number one at the moment we're at 1.3

00:21:59.380 degrees above pre-industrial temperatures the hottest or the double hottest year with 2016

00:22:05.300 and temperatures have gone up on average by 0.3 degrees of a centigrade between 2010 and 2020

00:22:14.660 between 2000 and 2010 it was 0.2 so there's a broad exponential increase broadly speaking okay

00:22:24.520 so if you do the simple maths on this we're at 1.3 at the moment in 2020 we need to add on 0.3

00:22:33.100 to get what we're predicted to be at by 2030 so 1.3 plus 0.3 is 1.6 now what we've been told for

00:22:44.020 the last you know five years is there's a Paris agreement and we're going to keep the temperatures

00:22:49.540 at 1.5 so the first thing to establish is we're already effectively locked in 1.5 degrees and

00:22:58.300 many scientists and I talk to many of the top scientists in the world are adamant that we're

00:23:02.680 heading over two degrees so that's the first data point right a second data point is is what does

00:23:09.760 this actually mean what it means is that it's going to be increasingly difficult to live in

00:23:16.080 the tropical areas of the world so one one scientific paper has said that at two degrees

00:23:22.500 centigrade a thousand million people are going to be forced to move a thousand million people at two

00:23:29.640 degrees centigrade in other words like many of the areas in africa in the central america in

00:23:37.320 india are going to run out of water they're going to have extreme weather events and we're going to

00:23:43.160 have massive migration now what we what we know is that migration without talking about the politics

00:23:51.480 of it but we know sociologically migration is a massively disruptive event both for the people

00:23:56.920 that are migrating obviously and also for the countries that receive that migration i think we

00:24:02.520 received what five million people something like that in europe from from syria now the reason the

00:24:08.600 syrian civil war happened arguably was because that there was a massive drought which was related

00:24:15.400 to climate change so that was a little canary in the coal mine as you might say so that gives you

00:24:21.400 a taste of what's coming down the line if you start moving towards two degrees centigrade

00:24:27.800 and another another um data point is what's happening in green in greenland so it's an

00:24:34.920 established factor no one disputes this so if the greenland ice cap melts it will increase

00:24:41.720 um sea levels by seven meters that's seven meters on average right and everyone agrees that if the

00:24:50.440 If the sea levels rise above two to three metres, you'll have to evacuate all the coastal cities of the world, short of those that are rich enough to build great big walls.

00:25:03.040 In other words, that is a catastrophe on lots of different levels, humanly, economically, socially.

00:25:10.600 And this is the situation, is the scientific papers come out this year that say we are already locked in the melting of the Greenland ice sheet.

00:25:23.360 So what's been happening over the last 10, 20 years is we've handed over to future generations a massive increase in sea level rise.

00:25:32.680 And this will only get worse because there's a lot of dispute around whether it's locked in on West Antarctica.

00:25:37.860 That's another five metres of sea level rise.

00:25:40.600 This gives a taste, you know, I mean, I could talk for half an hour, but what I'm trying to communicate is on multiple levels, we're reaching the point of no return, and we're reaching the point of a non-linear catastrophe.

00:25:56.940 So, Roger, that being the case, why is it that governments around the world haven't done more, if this is the case, if we really are on the edge of a complete, total climactic catastrophe?

00:26:10.600 well there's a number of different ideas on this what what i want to establish is

00:26:17.740 the science is not political what i've just said is not political you know it's it's it's the

00:26:24.160 geophysics it's the biology and i just want to add in if you don't mind i forgot yeah the amazon

00:26:30.220 right let's just throw in the amazon and then we're done the amazon has has been reduced in

00:26:35.980 size by 17%, right, over the last 30 years. So it's 17% less than it used to be. Now, what the

00:26:44.020 scientists are saying is if you cut down more of the Amazon between 20 and 25%, then the ecology

00:26:53.280 of the Amazon goes into a natural dieback. In other words, the Amazon exists because of the

00:27:00.440 rainfall and the rainfall exists because the amazon evaporates water now if you remove those

00:27:06.900 if you remove a certain proportion of the amazon that feedback mechanism doesn't work anymore

00:27:12.500 and the whole thing dies of its own accord in the same way as what's happening in the arctic with

00:27:18.000 the temperature and if you lose the amazon if you lose it all turns to desert and savannah then

00:27:24.920 you've got a massive amount of carbon that isn't being taken out of the atmosphere

00:27:29.340 it so it's a bit like kicking a ball down a hill at a certain point you run after it but it's going

00:27:36.500 faster and faster you don't catch it so that's the terrifying geophysical reality because all

00:27:43.100 these things are interconnected roger but come back to france's point which is you say you say

00:27:48.420 the science isn't political yeah if it isn't political why isn't why aren't governments doing

00:27:53.980 more about it well my answer to why governments aren't doing anything about it is a lot more

00:28:00.020 disputable because it's a subject right you know i mean everyone's got their own theory i mean i'm

00:28:06.880 a sociologist so i can give you some reasons which i hope are reasonably objective as you might say

00:28:13.440 but they're disputable okay but i think there's two main reasons in the literature as you might

00:28:19.560 say on what what is holding governments back so the first the first problem is the collective

00:28:25.500 action problem which is the technical word for i'm not going to do it because no one else is

00:28:30.740 you know and we all know this from our personal lives or you know clearing up the litter in the

00:28:36.320 street you know everyone wants the litter to be cleared up but no one's doing it because why should

00:28:40.180 i do it and and you can see this happening over and over again with competing nation states you've

00:28:47.120 just described the cleaning schedule at the trigonometry studio right exactly exactly yeah

00:28:51.800 the famous washing up situation and student health you know everyone knows it don't they

00:28:56.120 so what's been happening for 30 years is people don't want to engage in what are now substantial

00:29:03.820 costs let's not beat around the bush the substantial costs in reducing carbon in the time

00:29:10.160 we've got in order to not you know minimize this substantial risk and the other reason which is

00:29:16.020 potentially more controversial but i think it's it's the substantial evidence for it which is

00:29:21.420 that the the the world economy is controlled by the corporate companies and the corporate companies

00:29:29.500 are dedicated to maintaining profit maximization and profit maximization depends upon the fossil

00:29:37.440 fuel economy and they have very powerful lobbying mechanisms and over the last 30 years a little bit

00:29:44.440 like what happened with tobacco in the 1970s and 1980s they are very powerful pr machines to to

00:29:51.860 create confusion on what the substantial risks are and that's a massive problem because if people

00:29:59.700 think you know like you just said well if it's if it's not really certain then why don't we just

00:30:06.120 carry on flying to spain you know it's it it creates that that confusion and that's a disaster

00:30:13.020 of course, as it was a disaster in terms of convincing the public about the dangers of

00:30:18.060 lung cancer with tobacco. So those are the two things that we seem to be up against.

00:30:23.220 And I think one of the ways of combating this, as you might say, is to communicate to the general

00:30:29.100 public that it's in everyone's interest as a parent, as a citizen, as a human being to engage

00:30:35.880 with this and pressurise governments to counteract the special interests in society that want to make

00:30:43.460 money out of you know keeping the system in the same way as it has been. But isn't the problem

00:30:49.200 Roger going to be persuading governments but especially persuading third world nations

00:30:54.440 that in order to do this they have to act against their own financial self-interest.

00:30:59.020 that is surely a non-argument isn't it it's very difficult i'm not going to pretend it we're not

00:31:07.660 in a complete mess right you know if as a social scientist i would say that the situation is is

00:31:14.860 awful one because we're facing this a terrible threat and also because the human race is not

00:31:21.600 very good at looking after its long-term interests so yes i agree with you but i think what we need

00:31:28.140 to consider here is not you know something doesn't work but more like what is the most effective way

00:31:36.840 of dealing with it relative to other options so it's not acceptable in terms of an argument to

00:31:44.160 say well Roger that doesn't sound like it's going to work you have a responsibility to say what will

00:31:50.440 work other than sitting on your satire on social media just being cynical because what we do know

00:31:55.900 is just sitting on your seat doing nothing guarantees catastrophe you see what i mean so

00:32:02.200 what i'm here to suggest i suppose is it's a long shot but the long shot the most effective way

00:32:09.940 of bringing about political change and let's not forget there's been plenty of radical political

00:32:14.880 change in the past so it's not impossible but in so much as it is possible it requires people to

00:32:21.640 step up into their responsibilities as parents as members of our community as citizens and say to

00:32:30.200 governments this is an unacceptable level of risk regardless of our culture our backgrounds our

00:32:37.080 politics everyone agrees unless you're on the extreme of the political spectrum or nihilist or

00:32:43.400 you know mad everyone agrees we don't want to have this catastrophe locked in because

00:32:49.320 what we need to understand here is that once this goes, it's almost impossible to bring it back.

00:32:57.360 Roger, you talk about responsibility. So we are all three of us sitting here in the United Kingdom.

00:33:03.140 There'll be people watching this all over the Western world primarily.

00:33:06.680 What percentage of global emissions is the UK currently responsible for?

00:33:11.380 It's around 2%.

00:33:12.840 Right. So hold on. Let me pose the question. I know that you know where I'm going, but

00:33:17.680 just so that our viewers get to hear me say it.

00:33:20.360 So if we are responsible for 2% of global emissions,

00:33:25.320 surely with countries like China and India,

00:33:28.200 which are only doing the best, Francis says,

00:33:30.280 the best for their citizens,

00:33:31.540 trying to catch up on the economic race,

00:33:33.940 trying to prevent their children from starving to death

00:33:36.440 from malnutrition and so on,

00:33:38.380 those countries being responsible

00:33:40.780 for a huge percentage of the world's emissions,

00:33:45.240 How does shutting down our level of well-being and consumption and whatever really help anything?

00:33:52.440 That's a question that I think a reasonable question a lot of people will be asking, isn't it?

00:33:56.100 Yeah, well, there's several things to say about this.

00:33:57.980 The first thing to say is how you account for the 2%.

00:34:01.400 There's a little sleight of hand, as it were, statistically, or a large sleight of hand, and it goes like this.

00:34:07.720 in the 1980s and 1990s, a lot of the production of what we consume in this country was based in

00:34:16.440 Britain. And so the carbon emissions from those industries was part of our account, as you might

00:34:22.600 say. Now, as we all know, over the last 30 years, Britain's largely de-industrialized, and a large

00:34:28.960 proportion of what we consume in this country is produced in China and various other countries.

00:34:33.780 So it's a little bit of a problem to say, well, we're just sitting here only producing 2% of emissions.

00:34:40.880 Do you have an estimate for what it should be?

00:34:44.000 No, I can give you an interesting figure, which is a recent estimate is the City of London, our financing produces, the financing that happens in the City of London is around 15% of emissions, which is a slightly different point because, you know, Britain does three things.

00:35:02.580 It produces emissions, it consumes emissions and it finances emissions.

00:35:08.400 So we have to look at all those things. I don't have the figure on what we produce.

00:35:13.400 But obviously, it's not going to be. I don't have a figure on what what the carbon emissions are of everything we produce.

00:35:21.880 But I accept it's not an enormous percentage, which brings us back to the collective action problem, which is I know where you're what you're getting.

00:35:29.160 It's a bit like, why should we reduce emissions if no one else is?

00:35:32.760 Well, because we're on the pathway to hell if we don't.

00:35:37.340 No, but with respect, it isn't that simple.

00:35:41.280 It's not, why should we do anything if no one else is?

00:35:43.980 It's more like, why should we do anything when what we do makes no impact?

00:35:48.580 Okay, so what happens when people, when a country makes a start on something,

00:35:56.100 It often, though not necessarily, but it often triggers other countries doing the same.

00:36:03.540 So you saw this a little bit with the denuclearization of nuclear weapons and that's that area.

00:36:11.220 So what happens is one country decides to make a move and then it encourages other countries.

00:36:17.300 Now, that is not guaranteed.

00:36:20.160 But the point here is, if everyone sits in their corner and says, well, I'm not going to move unless other people do, then we know what happens, right?

00:36:30.380 It's well established in game theory and what have you, is everyone loses.

00:36:34.400 And again, everyone loses big time and potentially forever.

00:36:38.220 So we can't underestimate the situation.

00:36:40.780 There's another issue, though, on a moral level that needs to be considered here.

00:36:44.900 well, two. One is, is historically, the global north has been responsible for 90% of those

00:36:52.420 emissions. It's only in the last 10 years that China has come up, you know, producing many of

00:36:57.960 the goods, of course, for the Western world to consume. So it's a little bit problematic morally

00:37:02.860 for us to say, well, you know, we produce this problem. And now we don't want to bear any

00:37:08.660 responsibility for it. And the other thing is, still substantially speaking, most of the world's

00:37:15.640 emissions are produced and consumed in the global north. So it's still really a matter of Western

00:37:23.020 Europe, North America and China coming together and making this happen. And any pressure that

00:37:29.180 citizens can produce on their governments is going to help this process move along. That's the

00:37:36.120 bottom line it's a great answer roger and it's a very very good point as well because like with

00:37:41.880 anything like you said game theory somebody needs to make the most first move somebody needs to make

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00:39:02.960 Now, Extinction Rebellion very, very much hit the headlines in 2019 particularly.

00:39:08.920 What is Extinction Rebellion?

00:39:10.940 Because I've looked at it and, you know, there's lots of contrasting ideas here.

00:39:15.820 You know, it doesn't seem to be a centralised organisation.

00:39:19.160 So could you explain to us and everybody else,

00:39:21.580 what is Extinction Rebellion and what are its goals?

00:39:25.380 Okay, well, Extinction Rebellion is a civil disobedience organisation. It exists to create

00:39:33.540 civil disobedience. So I need to explain civil disobedience a little bit. Civil disobedience

00:39:40.280 is often misunderstood as, you know, unpleasant people causing disruption for no good reason.

00:39:47.940 OK, and what I need to get to get to the heart of the matter, what civil disobedience does is it challenges society to engage morally with an issue when there's a substantial violation of society's morals.

00:40:08.160 that's when it where it primarily works and we all know the example of martin luper king

00:40:14.940 in in the american south with the racism in the 1960s and what the the martin luper king's

00:40:23.020 organization decided to do after 70 years of asking for their rights was hang on a minute

00:40:28.920 you know we can't wait any longer people need their rights and they engage in civil disobedience

00:40:34.580 sitting in the road and such like getting arrested going to prison and what that did was it produced

00:40:41.160 the headlines it produced the national debate on what it meant to be american what it meant to have

00:40:46.720 equal rights and over seven or eight years the attitudes in america changed from you know those

00:40:53.140 blacks down in the south you know whatever through to no this is an absolutely important issue and

00:40:59.740 our self-respect individually and as a nation is at stake and racism is intolerable so what

00:41:05.820 Extinction Rebellion is is set up to do is to produce a similar process on climate change which

00:41:12.740 is climate change is no longer just a little issue a little bit like what it was in America

00:41:18.100 in terms of black rights it's not a peripheral issue it's central to our conception of moral

00:41:25.340 self-respect as a society. We're in a society where our fundamental value is we respect human

00:41:33.300 life, we respect our children, we respect giving people, you know, not shitting on people for no

00:41:40.760 good reason. Roger, if I could just push back on you just ever so slightly there. So I'm really

00:41:46.980 glad we talked about the civil disobedience thing. I remember an incident, I think it was in 2019,

00:41:51.940 where there was an Extinction Rebellion protester

00:41:55.640 who got on top of a DLR train at Canning Town

00:41:58.720 and I used to be a teacher around there

00:42:00.920 and the fury that was unleashed at that

00:42:05.160 at what seemed to me in particular

00:42:07.660 to somebody who had worked in that area for many, many years

00:42:10.860 was that it was a type of deafness

00:42:13.960 to the people who lived and worked in that particular community

00:42:18.460 who were primarily working class.

00:42:20.720 the moment you start interfering with their way of getting into work that means they're not going

00:42:25.900 to get paid because a lot of them are zero hours contract so doesn't this type of political

00:42:31.280 disobedience alienate the very people that you're trying to win over the fact of the matter is when

00:42:38.760 people engage in civil disobedience they end up upsetting a lot of people and the reason that is

00:42:44.940 because a lot of people quite understandably don't want to deal with the cognitive dissonance

00:42:51.320 of believing one thing and something else happening. And there's a process, there's a

00:42:56.860 well-established process, which is people hate them when they start off and then they start

00:43:03.260 thinking, well, I still think that what they're doing is terrible, but I have to accept they have

00:43:07.520 a point. And then they go through to the process of going, actually, you know, these guys are

00:43:12.820 right you know we're we're transgressing our basic values here now that's not a smooth process we're

00:43:19.640 living in the real world here and in every civil disobedience campaign there's going to be off

00:43:25.580 moments and you know difficulties and things which aren't tactically appropriate as you might say

00:43:31.740 but the substantial point here is there's no way of changing society in a fundamental way

00:43:39.620 without upsetting people but the the key point here and this is often misunderstood

00:43:45.240 about civil disobedience civil disobedience isn't a process of shutting down debate and this is one

00:43:52.740 of the reasons i wanted to come on today was is to make this argument that civil disobedience when

00:43:58.320 it's done well right you know we all know things can be done well and done badly but when it's

00:44:02.960 done well what civil disobedience is about is not just disruption it is disruption because the

00:44:09.040 disruption is required to get attention but once you've got that attention the idea is there's a

00:44:15.940 whole other side to the equation which is dialogue you sit down with your opponent and you engage in

00:44:22.740 respectful communication in order to find a resolution so what i want to communicate is this

00:44:29.640 is at the heart of our democratic culture which is you disagree with people you talk to them

00:44:36.460 And through talking, you come to some common ground.

00:44:40.700 Now, the reason civil disobedience is necessary, and obviously a lot of the time it's not, you know, a lot of the time you can sit down and resolve things.

00:44:48.440 But sometimes in society and in history, as we all know, there's entrenched power, there's injustice.

00:44:55.020 And it's right, as we all agree with the suffragettes or the civil rights movements or the early trade unions, it was right for them to engage in civil disobedience.

00:45:03.780 if it was properly done and engage in this dialogue.

00:45:07.820 And that's one of the reasons I go around talking to people about this

00:45:13.200 because the communication is vital in order for us to come together.

00:45:18.580 Otherwise, you'd spiral into this over-polarization, as the phrase goes.

00:45:24.820 And that leads to all the problems that we see in society

00:45:28.680 in many ways at the moment, not least in America, of course.

00:45:32.160 Roger, you're almost giving me goosebumps here,

00:45:34.400 the idea that people from different sides can talk rationally

00:45:37.620 and discuss things and have these conversations.

00:45:41.520 You mentioned earlier when we were talking about the climate issue directly

00:45:45.760 that you feel that a large reason for government inaction

00:45:49.100 is that they're heavily influenced by corporate lobbyists and so on.

00:45:54.080 Do you think that if that is true,

00:45:57.880 there will be a lot of interference

00:46:00.900 with what Extinction Rebellion is doing

00:46:03.120 from those sorts of organizations

00:46:05.560 because if big tech companies don't want this to happen

00:46:07.980 if big corporations don't want this to happen

00:46:10.000 well as we've seen recently

00:46:12.220 they have the power to take people off their platform

00:46:14.600 they have the power to stop people from communicating

00:46:17.380 from organizing, from doing all sorts of things

00:46:20.180 so are you concerned about

00:46:22.860 the interference of big corporations

00:46:26.120 into our politics, into the sort of discussions that even we're having here today?

00:46:31.700 Well, it goes without saying that when societies engage in terrible activities,

00:46:38.500 then it's very difficult to change them. And it's going to be a battle. And our history is

00:46:44.180 full of battles for justice, for rights. And if you look at that history, it's not a straight line.

00:46:51.380 It's very difficult and often they fail and then they come back and maybe they, you know, become corrupt and they collapse and then they come back.

00:46:59.120 It's not a straight line thing. But what we know is two things, right?

00:47:04.180 Number one is the powers that be never give up power without a fight. That's just the way it is.

00:47:10.320 And secondly, if you mobilise enough people power, it's possible, it's never inevitable, of course, but it's possible and it's happened many times that you can win.

00:47:23.180 And there's a good quote from Gandhi on this, who obviously knew a thing or two about, you know, changing things, not least with regard to the British Empire.

00:47:31.420 But he said, first of all, they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you and then you win.

00:47:40.320 So those of us that are involved in civil disobedience globally have that on our wall, because what we know is when the corporations and people that have special interests in maintaining carbon emissions tell lies about us and try and turn people off of us, we know we're getting somewhere because we're ruffling the feathers.

00:48:02.000 and the name of the game of course is to persist in our activities until we start winning and

00:48:10.560 that's really the the strategy of extinction rebellion and what would you say to those people

00:48:15.740 roger go look the planet is warming up that's indisputable but it's not man-made this is just

00:48:21.420 part of what the planet does it goes through ice age then it goes through warmer it goes through

00:48:26.140 warmer periods and what you're essentially trying to do is trying to stop a natural phenomenon

00:48:31.440 yeah well i think with all due respect that's one of those sort of flat earth theories at this stage

00:48:37.860 of the game and obviously lots of people various psychological reasons might want to believe that

00:48:44.320 the earth is flat and so do it but intimate as democratic debate is about you know basing

00:48:50.160 our discussions on what's real what the science says then the issue is beyond dispute at this

00:48:56.520 stage. 99% of scientists around the world say that climate change is caused by human activities.

00:49:03.620 So the debate has largely moved on in terms of anyone that's interested in what's actually

00:49:09.440 happening. And the real issue now is how bad is it? At what point is it going to be a situation

00:49:17.200 of no return? And how exactly is this tragedy going to play out if we don't get our act together?

00:49:24.540 Roger, I'm curious what you think, because I've always thought that given the situation

00:49:31.600 you've described, I don't understand, and I say this as someone whose wife was essentially

00:49:38.620 evacuated from the Chernobyl area, so I'm aware of the risks, but I don't understand

00:49:43.740 why nuclear power isn't seen as a large part of the solution.

00:49:48.160 Where are you or Extinction Rebellion on that issue?

00:49:51.660 Okay, so it's important to understand that Extinction Rebellion does not exist to take over the world.

00:50:00.800 It's a relatively humble proposition.

00:50:04.300 Just canning town.

00:50:07.480 That was only for two hours.

00:50:11.200 Okay, so everyone does something wrong for at least two hours in their life, let's put it like that.

00:50:16.680 The point of Extinction Rebellion is that we see ourselves in the heart of what you might call the open democratic tradition in the Western world.

00:50:29.820 And what that concretely means is we engage in respectful civil disobedience, and I've described why and how that works.

00:50:37.760 But also, we don't engage in some sort of Leninist project that we're so important that we can tell the British public how they're going to respond to the climate crisis.

00:50:50.240 That's not our job. It's the job for the democratic process.

00:50:54.280 Our job is to say to society and say to the government, we have to massively reduce carbon emissions because that's what the science dictates.

00:51:03.060 that's not an issue of politics it's an issue of morality and basic common sense now how we do it

00:51:10.380 is not our job because we're not experts in nuclear power we're not experts in in knowing

00:51:17.580 the collective mind of the british public maybe the british public wants to support nuclear power

00:51:22.380 maybe it wants to you know do renewable energy so i've got my own personal views on it but i don't

00:51:29.120 think that's what I'm here to say. What I'm here to say is that what Extinction Rebellion is

00:51:34.840 suggesting is that what I think is a genius solution to the very emotional debate that we

00:51:46.760 need to have around what needs to be done. It's not going to be easy. Everyone knows it's not

00:51:52.000 going to be easy. It's a big decision to be made. And that solution is the Citizens Assembly.

00:51:56.960 And what a citizen assembly is, it has a technical definition, which is you select people randomly from the country to sit in an assembly.

00:52:07.280 And a little bit like a court, people provide concrete, empirical evidence on what the situation is and what the options are.

00:52:15.980 And then those ordinary people in the country, as representatives, as you might say, of the common will of the country, decide what should be done and how it should be done.

00:52:26.000 So in other words, like if, for the sake of argument, 60% of the British public are working class, there'll be 60% in the Assembly.

00:52:33.600 If 20% of the British public are people of colour, then there'll be 20%.

00:52:37.880 If 30% come from the north of England, there'll be 30%.

00:52:41.680 If 1% of the population is super rich, they don't get to say what happens.

00:52:46.340 There's only 1% of those in the Assembly.

00:52:48.200 So it's profoundly democratic.

00:52:50.300 but in terms of you know the things you've been talking about in your videos what i think's

00:52:56.040 interesting here is the process of deliberation which is when you bring people together and this

00:53:03.920 has been empirically shown by the research if you put people in the room and you give them several

00:53:09.220 hours to communicate where they're at you humanize the relationship people are looking at something

00:53:15.660 on twitter they're not you know just having a knee-jerk reaction something they read in the

00:53:20.120 tabloid they're talking to real human beings eye-to-eye contact and within half an hour

00:53:25.720 and i've personally done research on this within half an hour an hour people are all you know best

00:53:31.420 of mates you know because no one likes to be an idiot right in front of someone else people

00:53:37.480 naturally want to agree with each other when when they're sitting down assuming you know they're

00:53:43.200 reasonable people which most people are and what that produces is a sense of common purpose

00:53:48.860 that we're all here we've all got our differences but we're all human beings we're all british

00:53:54.480 we're all part of a similar national community or whatever and through that process you come

00:53:59.960 up with a consensus and what that does is is reduces the polarization in the country between

00:54:07.780 those that say you know we don't want to do this we do want to do that because once you've seen

00:54:12.460 like a bus driver from Birmingham, as you might say, come out on the steps of thousands

00:54:17.980 of parliaments and say, you know, these 300 people from around the country have considered

00:54:22.680 climate change, and this is what we think happened, then everyone's going to go, well,

00:54:27.000 most people are going to go, fair enough, mate, you know, if he's said that, and he's

00:54:31.000 a normal person, he's not one of those men in suits, then you can see how this can help

00:54:36.120 to heal you know divisions and what we're heading for is the mother of all divisions on the climate

00:54:43.320 crisis because every month and year that goes by the more difficult you know uh the decisions are

00:54:50.260 going to be have to be made and you know this has a uh implications really more generally for the

00:54:57.820 polarization that we see in our society today and roger do you think this is a battle you're

00:55:03.460 going to win because you're up against some pretty big opponents let's be fair you've already just

00:55:07.540 said you know these huge multinational corporations they've got billions and billions of dollars and

00:55:13.840 all the rest of it and the best lawyers in the world backing them yes well the answer to that

00:55:21.280 is yes I think we will win and the reason for that is because it's over there's overwhelming

00:55:28.380 evidence now that this is a terrible terrible threat that violates all human values and

00:55:34.640 violates everyone's life whether they're rich or poor or wherever they live in the world

00:55:39.060 but the caveat is whether we make that decision in time right that's the really scary thing here

00:55:46.540 but this is the important thing to understand we're not dealing with a social issue here

00:55:51.260 we're not dealing with you know slavery or human rights or trade union rights where if you don't

00:55:57.460 sort them out this year they're going to be you know just as bad next year but not lots worse

00:56:02.560 what we're dealing with with here is a geophysical situation we're dealing with a meteorite coming

00:56:09.780 towards the earth you understand what i'm saying in other words if you don't deal with it that

00:56:14.480 today it's going to be 10 times worse tomorrow and if you don't deal with it tomorrow it's going

00:56:19.240 to be 100 in other words we've got no time and that's not an ideological you know pressurizing

00:56:24.280 statement it's it's the physics of it in the same way as you go to a doctor and you say look if you

00:56:29.940 don't deal with this cancer you go too late you're dead right that's how nature works that's how

00:56:34.720 physics works so that's the really important thing to communicate to people and the last thing I want

00:56:41.740 to say is you know for myself and for many people involved in extinction rebellion and for many

00:56:47.000 people I think in the country as well the issue really isn't at the end of the day will we win

00:56:52.920 won't we win it's more an issue of I have respect for myself as a citizen as an upright person and

00:56:59.800 I don't want to be you know on my deathbed going well I knew about the climate crisis but I just

00:57:05.840 sat on social media you know being cynical about it and doing nothing I felt whatever happens I

00:57:12.400 need to step up and make a stand and in our history that's really the reason why many people

00:57:19.000 get involved in trying to improve society

00:57:21.220 is because they want to feel the self-respect

00:57:24.520 of being a citizen, being a parent

00:57:26.760 and all the rest of it.

00:57:28.600 And that's, you know, that's my invitation,

00:57:30.460 I suppose, to people listening to this

00:57:32.360 and maybe to the two of you.

00:57:34.840 You can come down to Extinction Rebellion

00:57:36.980 and interview people, right?

00:57:39.400 I'd love Francis to be at the forefront of that effort.

00:57:42.560 Yeah.

00:57:44.520 But Roger, thank you so much.

00:57:46.440 It's been a wonderful and genuinely insightful interview.

00:57:50.180 We always finish our interviews with the same question, which is, Konstantin?

00:57:54.640 What's the one thing we're not talking about as a society other than climate change that we really should be?

00:58:02.500 Well, I think what I've been trying to allude to, as you might say, in this conversation is there's a broader issue here,

00:58:11.880 which I know you guys have been talking about, which is how we can create a society where people

00:58:18.320 can have differences, but not dismiss people and try and cancel each other and try and destroy each

00:58:25.220 other. And that's a 5,000 year debate, as I think you probably know. So probably we're not going to

00:58:32.100 totally sort it out. Well, what I would like to suggest, I suppose, is what Extinction Rebellion

00:58:38.160 is pointing towards is several mechanisms through which we can create that that more healthy society

00:58:45.920 through respectful civil disobedience where things are definitely going up the rails and also through

00:58:51.720 citizens assemblies where people sit down and have dialogues with each other and quickly realize

00:58:58.480 we're all human right we all make mistakes we all do cunning streets you know we're all we're all

00:59:05.500 in the same boat and we're all going to be dead soon so you know we've only got one live so let's

00:59:11.920 get things in perspective and work together and that's the most enjoyable way to live anyway isn't

00:59:17.880 it as far as i'm aware it is it is roger and uh we really genuinely thank you uh for coming on the

00:59:25.000 show and for talking about all of this i think uh you know frankly whether people agree with you

00:59:29.900 on everything and disagree with you and i think everybody would have to recognize that history has

00:59:34.780 been made by people like you. Whether they like that fact or not, that is reality. People who

00:59:41.620 have strong convictions believe in something, whatever that is, and try and encourage others

00:59:49.200 to do the same. And in my view, whatever people's political views or views on this issue, as long

00:59:55.320 as everybody is coming at it from a place of trying to have a discussion, having a civil

00:59:59.760 conversation yes you can do a little bit of civil disobedience and disruption as well if you feel

01:00:04.820 that strongly about it um i think that's all for the best frankly uh irrespective of of what those

01:00:11.340 people are actually saying frankly so the methods uh i i think are perfectly legitimate and i i'm

01:00:17.260 really pleased to have had you on the show for people to see where you're coming from absolutely

01:00:22.060 roger and if people want to follow you on social media i know that we've been trashing it for the

01:00:26.240 last hour or so or if they want to get involved in your cause what is the best way to do that

01:00:31.240 yes if you look up extinction rebellion on social media it'll put you in all the different social

01:00:36.320 media channels and um yeah there's 400 groups around the uk i think there's 700 groups around

01:00:42.320 the world so yes get involved and um come and do your bit thanks very much thanks roger and

01:00:50.020 thank you for watching we will see you very soon with another interview or a live stream all of

01:00:55.100 at 7pm UK time.

01:00:57.000 Take care and see you soon, guys.

TRIGGERnometry - March 24, 2021

Who Are Extinction Rebellion and What Do They Want？ - Roger Hallam

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