← The Rest Is Politics: Leading
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Thanks for listening to the Rest is Politics. Sign up to the Rest is Politics plus to enjoy ad free listening, receive a weekly newsletter, join our members chat room and gain early access to live show tickets. Just go to therestispolitics.com that's therestispolitics.com this
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episode is brought to you by Wordsmith AI and increasingly, of course, in all the organizations we work in, we can get massively slowed up by the paperwork, the processes, the forms, the legal advice.
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Wordsmith handles the routine so that the lawyers can focus on the bigger issues. Crucially, this isn't at the moment something that's replacing lawyers. It's something that's taking out the more boring routine task so they can really use their expertise, their experience and their human judgment in the law.
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And it wasn't built in Silicon Valley. It was built like so many great things in history in Scotland now benefiting companies worldwide.
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There's free access to the Wordsmith Academy plus their report on the future of legal skills. Visit Wordsmith AI Politics. Hello and welcome to the Rest Is Politics with me, Alistair Campbell and me Rory Stewart. This is a special episode. We've gone back through all of the interviews we've done and we've cur clips from some of the most interesting voices on the specific theme of the climate and the net zero transition environment.
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Climate change is obviously absolutely central. We are facing a catastrophe in climate and in biodiversity. It's something which is now being weaponized by Trump by the right. There is a total shift now happening in approaches to environmental policy all around the world. We're talking just after a cop process that's been really, really difficult and people have often challenged us for not centering enough on climate.
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So we're going to give you a series of extracts from some of the interviews we've done that have focused a lot on climate. In this first clip from April 2024, you're going to hear from Professor Siddita Helm. He's one of Britain's leading energy economists and he's going to give you what he calls a reality check on climate policy. He describes his approach as being one of brutal realism.
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I'm an unapologetic fan of Dieter because he's doing something very, very difficult in the world. He's definitely not a climate skeptic. He's somebo who doesn't get on planes, is desperately concerned about climate change, but actually believes that the way we're setting about tackling it is wrong. We've got our energy policy wrong, we've got our net zero policy wrong. So he's in this very interesting space of saying, I really want to do something about it. There is a climate catastrophe, but I've got a radically different policy thing which almost everybody else that we're about to hear from will disagree with. And I'd be interested as you listen to it, as you weigh those arguments, do you think you are convinced by Dieter's position or are you more won over by the very different views of people like Ed Miliband?
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Our first guest then is Dieter Howell.
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Our economies are soaked in carbon and this is what makes the challenge of what we have to do so demanding and so important. But it is a huge challenge. You know, think of plastics, think of the world's transportation, think of almost anything you do. Write your daily carbon diary down and then have a look at almost everything in your day and work out how much of it's made up of carbon. Now it's true, we are decarbonizing in the UK and in bits of Europe and indeed a bit of the US electricity. Almost all the gains have been by switching from coal to gas. That's the great thing Britain achieved, that's why we're in the 70s, for the share of fossil fuels in the British economy, not above the 80s. But if you look at where the emissions are going to come from in the future, they're not going to come from the UK, we're 1%. It's about India, it's about Indonesia, it's about China, it's about Brazil, it's about the Middle Eastern countries, it's about sub Saharan Africa, it's about Nigeria, which will have a population bigger than Europe's by 2050. And in these countries the demand for fossil fuels is rising sharply. India is a classic example, a coal based expansion. That's the context because global warming is global, it's what it says on the tin. And we seem to think that global warming is made in Oxford or in, you know, in England.
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A
Don't think anybody thinks that, but we do all operate as whether we like it or not, as nation states. And I think there was a point at which the UK was giving some pretty strong leadership in this area. I think that's been weakened in recent times. So each country has to do what it can do, understanding that we also have to operate internationally. But if you think that. If I go back to this report from Kings Mill Bond, he actually mentions India, talks about the fact that, yes, you may be right, that they can do an awful lot more, but they have at least put this at the heart of their industrial strategy. He talks about Chile, which is building its own hydrogen export industry, talks about Vietnam, which now has a bigger share of solar than the United States. So there is stuff happening. I guess the optimist, which he is, is essentially saying this stuff is happening and we have to push it and encourage it and develop it in that way. I get the sense that, I know this really will irritate you, that you do come across as being quite pessimistic. But then again, you, I think, were very pessimistic about renewables generally. I mean, you were very, very, very pessimistic about the idea that wind could ever be economic. You were quite pessimistic about the idea that rooftop solar and biomass could actually make much difference to decarbonization. But they are making a difference.
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C
So let's unpack it. First of all, this idea that the UK is, Is showing leadership, I mean, again, it's about brutal realism. We've been de. Industrializing. What do you think's going on now? We're going to close Port Talbot, we're going to close Grangemouth and we're going to import the petrochemicals and the steel from China or elsewhere. What happens to global emissions? Do they go up or do they go down? Well, they go up. Right. And so this notion, which the Climate Change Committee trotted out in 2019, that when we get to net zero, we'll no longer be causing climate change. And if only that were true. A lot of those emissions in China are ours for us. So if you measure properly our carbon footprint, which is carbon consumption, not just carbon production, you would get a very different story from the one that's trotted out now. I understand why politically, it's important to say that for politicians, but the reality is not as presented. Now, I come back to your point about optimism and pessimism. There's nothing in what I'm saying that says this problem can't be cracked, nothing at all. And there's plenty of energy. The sun comes up every day the sun produces in about an hour more energy, I'm told, than the world's electricity industry consumes in a year. There are plenty of technologies out there coming down the track. Where I depart from conventional wisdom is while I think that wind and solar have very important contributions to make and I'm very pro both, and I think that both should be subsidized because I don't think they're cost competitive now. I don't think we're going to power the world on wind and solar alone. And indeed, I think that their contributions will always be part play, not total play.
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In very kind of simple, direct terms. If you were talking to a voter, explain why you feel that our approach. Right, so we've got this huge problem, but the solution that we've come up with isn't fixing it and isn't going to fix it.
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I'd start off by explaining the facts. So two facts I put over to you in this discussion are a, we're not actually making progress on reducing the increase in carbon content concentration in the atmosphere. Secondly, we're 80% fossil fuel globally and actually thirdly, the main future emissions are going to come from developing countries and not from the UK or elsewhere. So just tell people because I don't think people see it that way. I think people think we're really doing well. We're nearly there, it's almost there. 2:30 net zero electricity. It's all going to be fine.
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B
I keep coming back to this, but we've got to resolve in people's head the gap between what Alistair was saying, which is absolutely true. Right? We're producing solar more cheaply, there's more and more solar, there's more and more wind. And the point that you're making, which is 80% of our energy is still coming out of fossil fuels. So try to explain in simple terms how both those things can be true at the same time.
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C
Well, I'm not quite convinced that Alistair is correct. Okay. But let's just.
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We're not allowed to utter those words on this podcast. You'll be forthwith banned from the studio.
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Yeah, well, I'll wait for that to happen. So I'm not quite convinced of that. And if you look at the experience
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of Can I be provocative, let's just for the sake of argument, say the cost of solar has come down and we're generating more energy from solar and wind than we were in the past and that's what gets. Gets people cheery.
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Yes.
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Okay, so help the voter understand how it can both be true. That the costs come down and we're generating more from sort of wind and also that we're not making any difference really on parts Million.
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C
I was coming to that. What's the experience of the. I don't know what you would call the average voter or the average household or whatever confronted with these changes. Well, first of all, there's the costs. So part of the argument which reinforces the frame that Alice is putting on the problem is that you know what, it's not only going to happen, but it's going to make our bills lower. It's all going to be cheaper. And of course, if that's true, it's like buying the next version of the iPhone. The market will do it. We'll all go out and switch. We'll say get out there tomorrow morning, let's get our solar panels in, let's get our heat pumps in, let's buy an electric car. But if you go and do that, if you sit down the pub and talk to people about their experiences of what actually happens, it's really expensive to fit a heat pump. It's very disruptive and you have to have a certain kind of house to make this work. Okay. It's no good having an old house with needing very large radio, etc. And you have a different experience of what comes out of it. That's why they're buying gas boilers. Still, if you want to go out and buy an electric car, unless you're a company director, it's fantastically expensive relative to a petrol car. We're talking about, you know, 10,000 pound plus difference. And that may not be much to people on higher incomes, but it sure as matters to people on average incomes. Okay, on solar panels, well, yes, if you work out the costs of installing solar panels and I have a lot of them installed, and you work out the payback period over that and you've got a household budget where you've got no savings and you're trying to pay the mortgage. You don't have that capital to do that. And then you look at your electricity bill and the truth is that a lot of your electricity bill, not all of it by any means, is made up of paying subsidies to these very technologies that are supposed to be so cheap right now. It is true the gas price went up, but the gas price now is lower in real terms than it was before the COVID event. It's incredibly cheap once you take the inflation effect into account and it's falling in price. And for most of the public, they don't have the luxury of sitting down thinking like I might, that, you know, I'm not going to do this and I can afford to pay that, etc. Etc. That's not their everyday experience. And that's why what should be happening according to these quote, optimists who tell you this story about it's all going to be cheaper, bills are going to fall, et cetera. The reason bills are going to fall, if they are, particularly for electricity, is because the gas price is going to fall and gas is setting the prices in this frame. So it just isn't people's lived reality. And I would say for good reason, because the story they've been told is not actually true.
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But you see, I think there is a danger that if you simply keep highlighting the downsides, the problems, the challenges. I'm not saying the challenges aren't real, but if a politician were to listen to this and to take your word as gospel, they probably wouldn't get out of bed because it feels so sort of impossible and they might just start to focus on lesser problems and sort of get some low hanging fruit. And, you know, and you did, you did back in the day, I think you were one of those. When Tony Blair's government signed up to the EU renewables target, lots of your world said this is crazy, right? But it has been met. So I think sometimes politicians have to go against conventional wisdoms. Go again. They do have to give that bit of hope and optimism and it sometimes does mean setting out the big picture vision and then doing the hard work to get there.
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C
So what met quite a lot of that 220 renewables target we discussed in Europe, biomass, things like Drax, Right. What's the carbon footprint of that? Have you really thought through what the components of that framework are?
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Is that an argument for not doing it?
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No, I didn't say that at all. So let me come to the second point. So what would you have me do? I know it's true that we haven't made much progress and I've written about why we haven't made my progress, but I should shut up about that, not mention it and pretend the progress has been excellent. I should go around telling people it's all going to be cheap, it's all much cheaper than fossil fuels, the prices are going to fall, you're going to run out and do this stuff, right? And what happens when it turns out that it isn't and people suddenly find that the story they've been told by politicians, by many, isn't actually true?
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Then what happens?
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The reaction is exactly what's going on across Europe now.
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I agree.
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A really nasty reaction, which is anti net zero policies, anti green. We've got farmers on the streets, supported by the public, who are begging to keep cheap subsidized diesel and to maintain their pesticides and usage and have further subsidies, and they have large support. We have populists all over the place. The AfD, the FD, made progress in Germany. Why? Because they were against heat pumps, because the people found them expensive and didn't want to be told to do this. The consequence of what I call, forgive me for this, but the happy clappy approach to this is to say that when it turns out that people realize what the world is as opposed to what they've been told, they trust the politicians even less. And you get these kinds of backlashes at the moment, which I think are incredibly dangerous for our climate, incredibly dangerous for a natural environment. That's why I come back to being realistic.
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B
Come in on this, Elsa, because I think you're onto something really interesting for a politics podcast. Of course, part of the reason why I feel a emotional sympathy for Dieter is that my lived experience, of course, in Afghanistan and Iraq was, I was the person saying, this is all screwed, this isn't working. Looks at the facts and figures, and everybody was saying, you can't say that. We've got to encourage the troops, we've got to encourage the public, we've got to keep being optimistic and hopeful. How you going to motivate everyone? And I was trying to say, like Dieter, look, I think there are things we can do in Afghanistan. It's going to be much less than you assume, it's going to be more difficult, but the stuff we can do. But don't talk this happy clappy language. And I guess I feel that it's a really important theme. I sort of slightly feel the same on immigration, that one of the reasons there's a populist backlash on immigration is that we weren't clear and straightforward enough about some of the challenges involved.
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And.
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And that then means that people lose trust in us. I think it may be true for actually quite a lot of what we seem to promise in the 90s and 2000s, that politicians were too optimistic. And when people discovered in general that they weren't delivering, it's provided Trump and everyone the opportunity to say, these guys are all a bunch of bullshitters and we shouldn't believe a word they say.
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C
I agree with Alistair on the following point. Okay, it's not enough to point out that what people are being told may not be correct. It is beholden to do the other side of the equation too, which is okay. And I'm surprised you didn't put this question to me, which is, so what would you do? And I have a very clear view about what we should be doing about climate change and how positively we could make a great deal of more difference for what we're currently spending. And of course I think we should spend more on it.
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Beyond that point, give us a sense of what Dieter Helm would be doing on the biggest issue facing humanity. How would you set about getting the world to a situation where we don't end up with runaway global warming?
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C
And a footnote is I think the destruction of biodiversity is at least as important a problem as climate change. We're in a really serious environmental mess in this century. Okay, so if it's on climate change, what I want to do is say that every penny that's spent ultimately by British consumers and British taxpayers in the UK is spent with the maximum return or benefit to addressing climate change. Okay, so my starting point is what can we do here? Which is most going to tilt the balance on that 2 degrees or whatever? So I start with what is the unique contribution we can make? And we have two things, at least two things going for us, which virtually no one else has. We have a great site for offshore wind, shallow waters near the coast, well understood seabed, etc. And good wind flows. So we should do offshore wind. And I'm very pleased we've done it and I'm very pleased the costs are lower than I thought they were going to be, but they're not as low as people think they are. But it's a great thing and we should experiment more so floating platforms, etc. So we can help other countries do this. The second thing is we are going to have to need some industrial sequestration and carbon capture and storage, putting the gas back underground. We've got empty gas wells, empty oil wells, we've got pipelines in place. The North Sea is shallow, well understood. And we've got supply size of carbon nearby. Best place in the world to try ccs. So do those two things and export that technology. Give it away anywhere in the world. That's it. Next up is R and D. We're really good at some aspects of research. We're not that good at turning them into production. But when it comes to things like fusion power, when it comes to developing new materials for solar panels, all these things we're going to need We're a great place to do it. But what you can't do is take a pot of jam, which is what we do, and spread it over everything, give everybody a bit of money, Give everybody. We're going to do absolutely everything. No, we've got a limited amount of resources. There's a limited amount the public are prepared to pay, are able to pay, can afford to pay. Let's spend that money in a way that has the maximum effect on global warming. And that's not what we're doing. And that's what I think is a big opportunity. And let's also face up to the carbon consumption that we're doing as opposed to simply pretending that we're the poster child the world, because we've de.
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B
Industrialized carbon consumption is one of your big central ideas. And basically what you're saying is Europe pats itself on the back because it's not burning as much coal or oil as it used to. But what it's really done is we're all importing all our stuff from places like China anyway and they're burning coal a great deal. India's burning a lot of coal as well. And therefore if you actually looked at your consumption footprint, all the stuff in our houses, a lot of it made elsewhere, we need to be taxing that. And you seem to have an idea that what you do is you'd calculate how much carbon is embedded in each product and if you imported, I don't know, some product from China that had a lot of carbon in it, you'd pay a huge tax. You put 70, 80% tax on top. How would we ever get there? Because obviously if Britain started doing that and nobody else started doing that, consumers in Britain would be pretty cross. So presumably you'd have to coordinate that across the world. And why haven't you managed to do it? Given that the logic's there, presumably every economist agrees you've been talking about it since 1990. We're not there. So what's the problem? Why haven't we got there in 35 years?
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C
Well, let's put it context. So what I'm interested in is I don't think the top down cop type process, you know, 90,000 people flying to Dubai or wherever it is they fly to, or Azerbaijan next is going to get there. I don't think in this 30 years the cops have made much difference. That makes me very distinct from what most other people think, which think this is the way we're going to get there. Okay. What I think we have to do is Recognize that people are going to do this unilaterally and then to build a bottom up, unilateral club of the willing. Okay? So when it comes to paying the same price for carbon embedded in imports as we would for the carbon embedded in, say, steel production in lan Verne, or not Lan Verne, Port Talbot now, or wherever, that's a kind of, in my view, no brainer. And we can impose a carbon border adjustment, that basis. Now you might say, well, you know, but the politics, that's not ever going
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to work well because the prices will go up for consumers, right?
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Yes, for some things, yes. And for a country like Britain where we're importing all this carbon, the reality will come home to roost. Okay, so coming home to loose teeth,
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I'm sorry just to be tough about this, but the reality coming home to loose is that households would be paying a lot more for the basket of goods that they are accustomed to getting. Right?
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C
Be careful whether it's a lot more. But basically, you can't get away from the fundamental fact that we are all living beyond our environmental means. That's why we have environmental crises, because we don't pay for the pollution we cause. We merrily go on doing it because we'd rather pollute and let the next generation clean up the mess. Right? So you can't have it both ways. If you don't want to pay for the pollution you cause, you want to go on in an unsustainable way. And as I put it in my latest book, the legacy that we leave the next generation is that an unsustainable world will not be sustained. And that's what the 2 degrees or the 3 degrees is all about. Now, on the carbon adjustment at the border, I advocated this point with colleagues in 210, 211, 212, okay, it's a decade later. The EU has imposed a carbon border adjustment. It started okay, it's the recording year this year. We are now going to do the same. That is a coalition of about 20, 22, 23% of the world economy. If the United States were to join, we would get there because everybody else would realize that it's a hell of a lot better to pay a carbon tax to their own government than pay it to HM treasury. Because think of the practicality. The ship turns up in Southampton docks, it's full of steel from China. The customs official goes down to the boat and says to the captain, can I see your payment of the carbon border tax for the carbon? They say, can I get out of it, yes, of course you can show us a certificate to show that you paid the carbon tax back in China. And the captain says, she says, okay, I'll go back to China and make sure they levy it. It's a no brainer. The Chinese in such a world would levy a carbon tax domestically in order to avoid that tax being paid to the British government rather than themselves and everybody else. This is an example of a practical bit of politics which is working with the grain and saying, let's build a unilateral coalition of the willing and, and actually do something about climate change. That's what I want to do and I think that's doable. And I'm delighted we're finally getting into the nitty gritty of arguing exactly what this carbon border adjustment will be, rather than pretending that we could just ignore imports, close Port Talbot, close Grangemouth, close the fertilizer industry, close the aluminium industry, pretend our emissions have fallen and we're the poster child of the world, as the Minister puts it, and just happily let us absorb and benefit from pollution in China and elsewhere and pretend it's not our responsibility. That doesn't work. That's why we haven't achieved very much.
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Next up, November 2024. We spoke with Mark Carney, who all of you I'm sure will know, is currently the Prime Minister of Canada, who previously had been governor of both the bank of Canada and the bank of England. And he is much more optimistic about the net zero transition, though we'll see, maybe the next time we see him we'll find him whether government is a harder place for that. But he makes an optimistic case for net zero transition. He argues that the vast amounts of money going into renewables will drive that transition and that nations should embrace it as a means to achieve economic independence. And that is a view, of course, profoundly challenged by his near neighbor, the President of the United States. Anyway, here's Mark Carney.
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B
The politics of climate change. I mean, in some ways, I guess a bit like Alistair and me, you are a product of the optimistic world of the 90s and early 2000s. We're now in a very different age. Since 2014, we've been in an age of populism. And one of the big things that's becoming clear is that entrepreneurial politicians around the world are beginning to sense that the public is reluctant to take many of the steps required to address climate change, partly because the earlier steps were kind of lower hanging fruit. And now the stuff is really hitting people in their fuel bills or through ultra low emission zones. And that's causing a big, big problem politically. How do you find a way of reconciling science, your technocratic instincts, your desire to clean up the environment with the raw, brutal politics of the fact that politicians around the world, voters around the world are becoming extremely, I don't know, reluctant to reach deep and take the economic pain to make the climate change targets?
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E
Yeah, it's in many respects the question, and I'd say the following, first is I think it is important to underscore just how much progress is being made and there's various ways to package that. Maybe we don't have time for me to do all that, but if back, you know, seven, eight years ago at Paris, the world was heading to three and a half degrees, today we're headed to 2.4 degrees. But realistically it's probably sub two degrees given where momentum is on policy. I'll just give you one figure, and this isn't a retail point, I'll get to a retail point points in a moment. But five years ago, the world's spending $500 billion on clean energy, okay, 900 billion on oil and gas, conventional, etc a year. Last year, 1.2 trillion clean energy. 900 billion oil and gas. This year, 1.8 trillion clean energy, half of that on oil and gas, basically. So the, the spend on addressing the issue is going through the roof and it has almost unstoppable momentum and these numbers, and I could give you a slew of statistics in and around it, but the progress that's being made is much faster than people expected at Glasgow two years ago. It's much more impactful, it's much more economic. This is where the future is and the future is now. But let me get to the difficult question of the now because you've got to hold the political consensus. You have to reinforce it. I think the first thing is you do need. I'm a big believer in mission, purpose, objective and having that clear objective. And you know, if, if you're Canada, I'm in Canada, you're, you're appealing rightly to pride. We have been an energy superpower. We are going to be a clean energy superpower. Just, you know, that is, that is a core goal of the country. I think the second thing is you need to, and you are both far more expert than this than I, but you need to see things. I mean, one of the things that struck me, one of the lessons I learned over time is you see clearest when you see from the periphery. So when you go to people who policies affect. We talked about austerity earlier. You think about climate change and climate change policy. So who is being affected by the energy crisis in the UK right now? It's, it's, you know, it's households up and down the countries, households in the north, northeast, where the heating bills have been going through the roof, you know, tapped down by government intervention. But they basically have a structure of housing that lays them exposed to this. And so the number one priority should be to address that. If I were to spend climate dollars in the uk, I would spend it on heat pumps, I would spend it on, on home retrofits. As Boris Johnson used to say, the UK is lagging on lagging. That's absolutely right.
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A
We don't allow Boris Johnson was right statements on this podcast. Mark, I'm sorry, you'll have to rephrase that.
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E
Someone once said, someone once said that. So going into that, because you have to give, as you know, tangible results to people that this is part of, of the big, of the bigger missions and we're talking, you know, four or five hundred pounds a year of savings for people on their energy bill. I mean, that's real money. Those are climate change committee points or calculations and then the last thing. And again, you'll be better judged than I. But I think part of what has to come here is this is about security. It is about geopolitical security, obviously not being hostage to Putin, not being hostage to large petro states whether they decide to pump oil. But it's about economic security. We've talked a lot about the future of this economy, the UK economy. Look, this is the future. This is what, this is a fundamental driver of jobs, competitiveness, exports, growth. And the UK has had a leadership position in this. It abs, in my judgment, absolutely should double down on that position because that is part of what's going to, that's, that's what's going to return some of the productivity that's been lost.
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B
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- [34:28]
B
Terms apply in this March 2024 interview with Caroline Lucas. And Caroline is the former leader of the Green Party. She's Zach Polanski's predecessor. We're looking at the tensions between economic growth and environmental sustainability. I am an unashamed enthusiast for Caroline Lucas. I think she's one of the most thoughtful, nuanced, intelligent commentators on this. And she takes a much more radical view, I think, than almost any of our other guests because she essentially says that we need to challenge the whole idea of growth. She's with Kate Roworth. She thinks constant economic growth will destroy the planet. She says that Keir Starmer's objective, which at that point was about having the fastest growing economy in the G7, was leading us down the right path and that the only way to try to deal with it is to completely change our minds about growth and therefore about what we can expect in terms of our living standards. Here she is. Karen. Very central to his vision is growth. He says his number one objective is for Britain to be the fastest growing economy in the G7. That takes us onto something really important and interesting for the next 20, 30 years because we've interviewed Kate Raworth on the show, and this question of endless growth, you know, infinite growth with finite resources, presumably central to your philosophy. Tell us a little bit about what you think about growth and the problems of growth and the way in which, if you were Prime Minister, you'd be approaching the question of growth.
- [35:58]
D
Let me just reflect for a second on what an extraordinary objective that is for Keir Starmer to have set himself. How does that resonate with most people? That we are the fastest growing country or whatever? I mean, you know, if he'd said, you know, your kids can get a decent education and we're going to transform housing so that everyone's got a roof over their heads, or if he talked about some of the fruits of economic prosperity, then perhaps people could get behind him. But the idea that GDP growth is by and of itself the objective, that is what I find so problematic. Because just knowing that you've got the fastest GDP doesn't tell you who's benefiting from it. It doesn't tell you who's getting it, it doesn't tell you how it's been caused. We know that a big pile up on the is fantastic for GDP growth because everyone has to go out and spend money repairing their cars or buying new ones. So GDP growth as a main indicator of anything very much I think is well past its sell by date. So let's instead have a well being economy. Let's measure things in terms of well
- [37:02]
B
being and the environmental costs. I mean, where are you in relation to Kate Raworth and the more radical critique which is that actually in the end we've got to stop having growth at all.
- [37:12]
D
I don't think she quite. I was re listening to her the other day, the great interview that she did with Hugh and I agree with her, but I don't think, I mean, I remember you had this debate about whether she's agnostic about growth or whether she's anti growth. I think what she's saying is don't make growth the be all and end all of your economic policy.
- [37:32]
B
Bit more than that, I think Caroline, but I think she is a bit, she's a bit more radical. She's saying there's planetary boundaries and basically she's saying our resources are finite and that if you actually multiply what 2% growth would be over 20, 30 years, you are rapidly using up the finite resources and you're leaving other places. So ultimately the logic of that has to be that a time comes when you stop growing and you start distributing more to poorer countries.
- [37:58]
D
Yeah. The reason I'm sort of pushing back a bit on this idea of stopping growth is that it means it sounds as if everything just gets pickled in aspic tomorrow. Whereas Kate would say, as I would say, that some things need to grow, we need some massive growth in renewable energies, let's say, and if you're going to do that, then absolutely you need to stop growing in other places. So I would say no more new roads. And while we're at it, let's not have any new airports. Thank you very much. But I think the framing of it all in terms of whether or not it's GDP growth doesn't really resonate with ordinary people and doesn't really tell us very much about whether or not the economy is allowing people to have meaningful, thriving lives on a planet that is not being destroyed. And the concern I have right now is, and the one that she has, is, of course, that our economic model right now is trashing the planet and isn't even in the process doing very much for the poorest people either, because the people who are reaping the benefits of the kind of extractive economy that we have are the richest, not the ones who actually need the resource. So I think it's slightly more complicated than you say, but certainly I would be among those who would say that infinite growth on a planet of finite resources is not possible. And if you needed just any more kind of ways of looking at that, we need to decarbonise by 2050, at the absolute latest. By 2050, the global economy is due to be about three times the size that it is now. It is going to be hard enough to decarbonize an economy the size of the current global economy by 2050. The idea we're going to be able to do it with one three times the size. However, your heroic assumptions are about how much you can decouple energy use from output. It's not going to happen. It can't happen. So let's start preparing for it now and have a transition that is fair, that has workers at its heart, that makes sure that the price for. For that transition is not paid by the poorest people, but rather by those who can afford it. All of those things are the things we should be discussing now.
- [40:03]
A
Right now, I guess it's time to hear from the politician, given this is. The rest is politics. Who is chiefly responsible in the UK government for this policy area? And that's Ed Miliband, who's the Secretary of State for Energy and net zero. And we talked to him about the huge political battle that now rages over climate policy, and in particular the attempts by the populist right to turn the net zero transition into yet one more culture war. One of the things I'm really interested in on the politics of all this and populism and so forth is how well how successfully the right, the populist right, have weaponized net zero. And I just wonder what your reflections were on that, whether you've got the right strategy for dealing with that or whether actually there is a sense that you're kind of on the back foot the whole time now. Absolutely not.
- [40:57]
F
We're not on the back foot and we're going to win the argument. So I'm in this odd position where I did the job before 2008, 2010, as climate change Secretary under Gordon. Under Gordon, yeah. You know, introduced the Climate Change act, started by my brother, you know, seen through by me, world leading act. So over the last five years we've constructed a big argument around climate, which I think is the coalition building in the right argument, which is a climate argument and also an energy security argument and a jobs and growth argument. And I think what is really important is it's absolutely in Kir's DNA. Indeed, he said the other day, it's in the DNA of the government. This is the route to secure energy, energy independence, this is the route to lower bills, this is the route to the jobs of the future and it's the route to doing the right thing for future generations. And it's a really important thing here, which is there is a right wing ecosystem that wants to say net zero is terrible and that's not where the public is. Talk to any of the pollsters and they say the same thing, which is the attempt to create a successful culture war around net zero to undermine the government is not going to work because it's not where the public is. Now that isn't to say we don't need to be careful. And that's why allying the climate argument with the security and bills argument is so important and the jobs argument is so important. But we absolutely can win and are going to win this argument.
- [42:24]
B
I wonder if you can reflect though, on the way in which we talk about this and why people feel anxious about it, because it can be seen as part of that whole story of the 90s and 2000s that you could group it with international development, spend interventions, markets as being something where experts had a very clear consensus. Everybody agreed, everybody was doing the right thing, all the parties converged and somehow the public began to become a little bit alienated and anxious. What do you think made some people in the public feel a bit anxious?
- [43:04]
F
But the thing is, Rory, I will sort of answer your question, but just to be really careful on the premise here, because people are trying to persuade you of the premise that there is a Big Net zero backlash out there and there just isn't the evidence for this. Yes, there is a political party.
- [43:19]
A
Trump winning. Drill, baby, drill. Farage pushing net zero.
- [43:23]
F
Well, hang on.
- [43:24]
B
The afd. I mean, there's a lot of political sense.
- [43:27]
F
Well, hang on a minute. I mean, different things going on. I'm talking about Britain here. Let's start with Britain. And my lesson, which I would apply to Britain and apply elsewhere, is if you say to people, in order to tackle the climate crisis, you, an ordinary person suffering from the cost of living crisis, is going to have to pay thousands of pounds more. It's not going to work. Right, but that's not our argument. And here's the two big things have changed since I was last climate change secretary. First, the situation has got far worse. The emergency has got far worse. It's really important to say that 10 hottest years since 2015, extreme weather events all around the world from Doncaster to California. But secondly, there's been this dramatic thing that has happened, which is the fall in the price of renewables. So they're now cheaper than fossil fuels, not just for Britain, but for two thirds of the world. Solar, wind. Solar cost down 90%, wind costs down 60%. And Russia, Ukraine showing our dependence on fossil fuels is what ruined family finances, business finances and the public finances. And so what's changed is you can ally the energy security bills argument as well as the jobs opportunity with climate today and tomorrow.
- [44:39]
B
To be cheeky for a second, I would say that the way you're talking now is exactly the way Alastair would have wanted you to talk. You're defending the record, you're not conceding the criticisms of the opposition. I mean, one of the reasons it's so strong is that you're not tempted to say, well, you know, we got a lot wrong about the way we used to talk about climate change or lessons that we've learned. And here's the new thing you're saying absolutely unambiguous. In fact, you were refusing to accept my premise that there was stuff that we got wrong.
- [45:05]
F
Look, I think it's a slightly different category of things.
- [45:07]
A
He's defending the present.
- [45:08]
F
Well, I'm defending the present and the future. The other thing is we'll get onto TB and his intervention.
- [45:14]
A
Well, should we read out the messages you sent to me when TB intervened in the net zero debate?
- [45:20]
B
We were going to deny.
- [45:21]
C
I don't know.
- [45:23]
B
Can I just explain this? So, yeah, and there'll be a lot of the two of you explaining. He didn't quite mean it, but. So the Tony Blair Institute released a report called the Climate why We need to Reset Action on Climate Change. In the forward, Blair argued that voters are noticing the credibility gap between being asked to make financial sacrifice, sacrifices and changes in lifestyle whilst knowing that their impact on global emissions is minimal. Blair also believes that limits to fossil fuels in the short term are doomed to failure.
- [45:54]
G
Q.
- [45:55]
B
He didn't quite mean that. It's been taken out of context. And none of you disagree with Tony Blair? Over to you.
- [45:59]
A
I'll check it. I'll check it against the text.
- [46:01]
F
Alistair and I had a spirited exchange on the day where we agreed, actually, although you. I then noticed on the podcast you. You sort of said. I said it was a timing issue, which was an extremely sort of, you know, chicken shit way out, if I may say.
- [46:17]
A
So, look, basically said, what the F is he up to now?
- [46:20]
F
Yeah, okay, right. The report itself. But he wrote forward to the report. The report itself is perfectly unobjectionable.
- [46:26]
B
That's Rusta said.
- [46:27]
F
Yeah. In general. Well, he didn't quite say that. He just said there was a timing problem. The report itself. Look, what's disappointing about Tony's forward, and I have huge respect for Tony, is I think it's incredibly defeatist, which is not what Tony is.
- [46:41]
A
It's really defeatist not to say that fossil fuels.
- [46:45]
F
Well, it sort of says we're not going to succeed and we're not going to achieve 1.5 and that the whole thing is it's all going badly. Let me just sort of give you some context to this, right. When I was climate change secretary, nobody mentioned the word net zero. I didn't know the term net zero because our ambition was for 80% reductions in emissions by 2050. Right. Pre Trump, but still a majority, 90% of the world was covered by net zero targets. Now it's something like, well, it's a majority of the world.
- [47:16]
B
Right.
- [47:17]
F
I was looking back because I'm an absolute bloody nerd at a document you both won't be familiar with called the UNEP Emissions Gap Report.
- [47:25]
A
We did emergency funds.
- [47:27]
C
I'm sure we did.
- [47:28]
B
Right.
- [47:28]
F
In 2010, actually preparing for this made me sort of think about this.
- [47:32]
E
This.
- [47:32]
F
They said that this is after the Copenhagen Climate Summit, which didn't go well. They said that the pathways from copenhagen through to 2100 imply temperature increase of between 2.5 to 5 degrees.
- [47:47]
B
Right.
- [47:47]
F
We were heading for potentially up to 5 degrees. Now we are heading for something like 2 1/2, maybe 3 degrees. Don't get me wrong. 2 1/2, 3 degrees, very bad. But it's just not true to say the world hasn't made progress. The world, in its very difficult way, through the multilateral process, which is kind of a nightmare, has made progress. India has a net zero target. China has a net zero target. The UK has a net zero target. Now, is China, India doing everything right? No. Is Britain doing everything right? We're trying to. But it's not true that the world isn't taking this seriously. Why? It's because of self interest. It's self interest and economic opportunity. They think they see the dangers of climate, what it's doing, and they see that actually there is a path through
- [48:34]
B
to channel Tony Blair for a moment. Right. I mean, surely he's right. There is a kind of credibility gap between the changes in lifestyle that are being demanded with the fact that actually, as he points out, the impact on global emissions of what you're doing is going to be minimal.
- [48:49]
F
Well, okay, two points. One, I sort of don't like the that fact phrase, changes in lifestyle. We're going to have better lives for people in the net zero world.
- [48:58]
B
Right.
- [48:58]
F
The Climate Change Committee, in their seventh carbon budget published earlier this year, says that moving to net zero will cut people's energy bills by £700, will cut people's motoring costs by £700. That's a better life for people. Warmer homes, tackling fuel poverty, green spaces, good jobs. They're all good things about it. And secondly, I think you, if I may say so in that question, are being far too defeatist about Britain. We passed the Climate Change Act 2008. Started by my brother, completed by me. Countries around the world were the first to do it. Countries around the world emulated us. Lots of countries around the world, we've got this mission, clean power by 2030. If we achieve that, and I'm absolutely determined we do, other countries will say, look, look what Britain's been able to do, we can do that too. So let's not have a diminished view of Britain. We really matter in this. So many countries come to me and say, you've got a really important responsibility here.
- [49:58]
B
There's many, many other people that we've interviewed which we'd love to refer you to. So I'd love you to go on leading and listen to what Cristiano Figueres says about this, or indeed what Bill Gates says about this issue. But we're going to finish with an interview with Emma Pinchbeck because she is the chief executive, the CEO of the Climate Change committee and the former CEO of Energy uk. So she really is trying to hold the ring for UK policy and is talking about why the UK needs to decarbonize as much as other nations that pollute more aggressively. Why the uk, instead of getting caught on the fact that it's only, let's say, contributing 1% of global warming, needs to be more than doing its part in terms of global leadership. And it'd be wonderful to hear back from listeners about who really won you over. These are five very different voices. Are you won over by the views of Emma Pinchbeck who are about to hear or Caroline Lucas on zero growth? Mark Carney looking at private finance. Ed Miliband right there in the seat of government trying to do it as the Secretary of State? Or Dieter Helm with his cold economic analysis of where he thinks we're going wrong in policy. Please tell us which of these five voices appealed to you more. And here's Emma from the ccc.
- [51:09]
A
My final question I want to ask you, as you know, you said a couple of times you've got a young family and I know people who have been putting off having children in part because they're absolutely terrified about climate change. The question can you really bring children into a world that feels like it's burning to hell on a sort of one to ten scale where one is honestly, sleep easy at night, nothing to worry about, it's all going to be fine. And 10 is we're doomed. Where are you most days of the week?
- [51:43]
G
I think that there is a lot to be concerned about with climate change and I think the public know that. I think it's really important we don't patronize people into the idea that the British public don't understand that climate change is happening or that the global population don't. We're all seeing and feeling and experiencing it. And we've just put out our climate adaptation report in the UK which says something like a quarter of UK households might be affected by flooding. In a world where we don't tackle climate change, where we'll have potentially tens of thousands of people dying in extreme heat waves by 2050, that there are real impacts to this, that we will all experience more human populations moving, less stability in food, less stability in energy systems, just a less stable world. And of course, I thought about that before having the children. But for the last five years of my life, I've been working in the private sector with companies who are investing in the alternative. And those companies care about the environment for all the reasons I just mentioned. But they also can see where the economics of energy are going. And I am very confident that we're moving into an age of electricity. And because the economic signals are there, that gives me hope that even when the politics around climate change vary, we will continue to decarbonise. Now, the speed is the thing, and that is what government needs to do, is set the framework for this change to continue to happen. But in as much as there are sometimes reasons to be worried, there are also very clear reasons to hope. And I suppose on the day that I decided to have my children, it was the day where I was feeling particularly hopeful.
- [53:28]
B
And my final question, which I guess is probably one, you get too much. But the anxiety is we decarbonize in the uk. In other words, we don't pump as much carbon into the atmosphere from the uk, but we continue to consume huge amounts. Our clothes, our toys, everything which are produced in other people's countries who are pumping carbon into the air, we buy the stuff from and China. So in terms of our carbon footprint, it remains really, really high. And so I guess the anxiety would be from a UK only point of view, all we're doing is getting rid of our own industry, but continuing to support carbon polluting industries and other countries through our buying patterns. And then the second point, which I guess is Alastair's bigger point, which is we're a drop in the bucket. And unless there's a big international carbon pricing scheme that really has big ratchet mechanisms on carbon consumption, that takes in China, the us, India, you could meet all your targets and it wouldn't have any effect on climate change.
- [54:33]
G
A few things in that firstly, I checked before I came to do this, but our consumption emissions in 2024 are down. And of course, a lot of our consumption emissions from trade come from Europe, which has a carbon price and a net zero target. So in terms of our own imports, they will be decarbonizing over time. China, of course, looks like its emissions will peak and then start declining in the 2000-30s because of the investments they're making far more than the rest of the world into renewables and into things like electric vehicles and clean technologies. So China, no question, is a key economy in decarbonizing the globe and has moved ahead and watching it is important. But I would expect to see our consumption emissions come down as those economies change too. There's a thing in this about why don't we talk more about lifestyle change and resource management more generally? And that comes back to the mandate of the Climate Change Committee. Which is our job is to show that it is possible inside the existing economic framework to do this, that you can do it and grow gdp, you can do it and have your manufacturing GVA increase, you can do it and keep the way that we live pretty similar. So you'll still have a warm home, you'll still drive a car, but those technologies will change. There is some necessary behavior change in our analysis, but again, it's driven by choice rather than just forcing people to do things. And generally speaking, especially in an age when people are tired, when the economy has been challenging, when you've got small children that wake you up at night, I think the idea that you can put the emphasis on individual change rather than system change and the energy transition is probably not what I would stake decarbonizing and looking after the planet on. And then lastly, why should we when emissions are small? Well, something like a quarter of global emissions come from countries where their national impact is about 1% of those global emissions. We are all in it together and we all need to do our bit. And that is behind the international framework on Climate action, the idea that we all do our part and industrialized economies that have more resources go first and invest in these technologies early. And I suppose I often think about this again in relation to what it's like to parent a 3 year old in that there's a kind of moral thing here in that if you can see the right thing to do, you don't go for the lowest common denominator. I don't say he can poke his sister in the eye so long as his friends are doing it. I say poking your sister in the eye is just the wrong thing to do. So we're not going to do it. And we know that climate change is a problem. The public knows that. In poll after poll after poll after poll, they tell us they want politicians to do more. But they do want it to be fair, they do want it to be straightforward. They want to be able to do it whilst living their lives straightforwardly and they want clarity from government about what they're being asked to do. So I think there is actually a very simple, if long answer to the thing that I get asked all the time is why should we try? And very lastly, I think I said this when I did question time with Alistair. This is a challenging decade for the energy transition because there's more competition and there's global supply chains and there's the kind of conditioning global markets we've all talked about. But ultimately the energy transition is going in one direction. If you care about growth in the future of the economy, you're going to have to adopt electric technologies and get on board with cheap electricity. And the countries that do that early, which China and others certainly have moved to do, will get the most industrial benefits. That's what happens in economic revolutions. We are in one of those moments now. So whether you care about climate change or not, whether you call it industrial policy or social policy or your energy policy, fine. But you are going to end up doing a lot of the things that we're proposing that you do in order to meet the UK's carbon budgets.
- [58:13]
A
Good. Well, thank you. Thanks for your time. And I think you did say that you did. I remember it. The world felt a bit more optimistic then, though.
- [58:21]
G
This issue felt possibly. Yeah, I am possibly. But equally, Alistair, the technologies have continued to improve. Right. So we've halved the costs of achieving net zero between the last time we invited government, which was around that time, and now because the technologies have continued to improve, regardless of what's happening in the politics.
- [58:42]
A
Yeah. Well, listen, I hope you enjoyed that. As Rory said earlier, there are plenty more interviews where we've talked about climate and net zero transition, and you can check those out, but these are the ones that we thought were worth bringing together in this special episode. So I hope you enjoyed it. See you soon.
- [58:57]
B
Bye. Bye.