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- [00:01]
A
Last summer, Francis and I spent a week with Rolston College students and professors in Greece, and learning about the roots of Western civilization in the very place they emerged was genuinely moving. If you like trigonometry, you'll love the fact that Rolston runs a one year MA in Humanities for anyone with a bachelor's degree or equivalent in any discipline, and there's genuinely nothing else like it. Today the program begins in Greece where students spend two months learning to read and speak ancient Greek while studying the foundational works of the Western tradition, starting with Homer. From there it continues in Savannah, Georgia, with small, serious seminars on the most important works of the Western canon. Ideas are tested properly, arguments are sharpened, nothing is spoon fed. This is education as it used to be and as it should be again. Full scholarships are available. Applications close on 27th February 2026. Apply at Rolston. AC apply, that's R, A, L, S, T O N, AC, forward slash apply. The narrative is as simple as this. The planet is in imminent danger because of climate change. If we don't deal with our carbon emissions right now, then by 20, it depends who you are. 2030, 2035, 2050. But within our lifetimes, within, certainly within our children's lifetimes, we're all going to die, the planet's going to burn. And the only way to deal with that is to immediately transition to renewable energy, get to net zero so that we're not producing more carbon than we are getting rid of and whatever it takes to achieve that.
- [01:50]
B
Oh, but that's the interesting thing, because that's not true. In the polls, people will say, yes, we want action on climate. But then when you ask them how much they're willing to spend on achieving that, they'll say something like £10 a year. Right? It's some ludicrously small amount, but. But they're actually not willing to spend.
- [02:07]
A
But see, it depends how you ask the question. Because if you say to people, how much are you willing to spend? They'll say £10. But if you say, if you say to them, look, your energy bills have gone up and it's because of the war in Ukraine, we won't tell you about the green levies and all this other stuff and by. Oh, green levies, yeah, it's to save the, save the planet. People are actually, a lot of people are on board with that because the money, they don't feel that the money is being taken out of their pocket. That connection hasn't been made in many people's minds.
- [02:33]
B
Well, that's because they've been lied to by policymakers. But people are starting to see through that. In the UK we are only responsible for 0.8% of global emissions. So we could cut to zero ourselves and literally it makes no difference to global climate change. Secondly, our net zero policies measure territorial production emissions by making our energy expensive. We're incentivizing offshoring of manufacturing so we could meet our target tomorrow by just shutting down all our manufacturing. But the result of that is global emissions go up. And this is what annoys me so much about what labor's doing is they just don't seem to be willing to accept that they're making global emissions higher. Miliband repeats time and again we must act because of the climate emergency. All these factories closing, all our steel plants closing. That happens. We then start buying our steel from China and things like girders. And then you have to ship girders halfway around the world in ships that burn bunker fuel, which is like the dirtiest part of the crack. Shipping low value heavy bulk items halfway around the world is a very stupid thing to do. And that creates a lot of emissions. So not only is the production more polluting because they have dirtier energy in China then you have all these emissions that you didn't otherwise have from transportation, but because our targets are just looking at territorial production emissions, then, oh, you can just virtue signal that we're, you.
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A
Know, and British blokes are not getting the job because of it.
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B
Yeah. So we're losing employment, it's bad for the economy, we're having these artificially high energy prices, it's putting more people in fuel poverty and it's making emissions higher. How does that make sense?
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C
And the key word that you use there, because I was going to. That was going to be my follow up question to you, Catherine, is it's a virtue signal. Yeah. Because we're still consuming.
- [04:27]
B
Exactly.
- [04:27]
C
We're just getting somebody else to do it so that we can look good.
- [04:30]
B
Right. So here's the thing. Now they're going to introduce something called a carbon border adjustment mechanism where they're going to tax imported goods that are made with dirtier energy to try and make them equivalent to our emission standards. This is going to be unbelievably inflationary. And so if the economy isn't in the toilet already, it will be when this comes in.
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C
So what are the products that we're talking about that are going to be taxed with this?
- [04:55]
B
Everything.
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C
Sorry, I know this is going to sound like. What do you mean by everything.
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B
Clothes, steel, cars, concrete, wind turbines, solar panels, everything.
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C
Excuse my language.
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D
Are they mental?
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A
Yes.
- [05:18]
B
But this comes back to this. How is it that you can have this widespread ideological failure, if you like, but this has happened many times in history. Look at the Reformation and the Spanish Inquisition. You had a society then that believed that if you didn't follow the true faith and different people disagreed about what the true faith was, you would burn in hell for eternity. Now, if that's your belief, then you can justify going to just about any length to try and convert somebody to what you think the true faith is. You can justify any type of horrible torture to convert them, to save them from eternal damnation. So now we would look back at things like the Spanish Inquisition, the English martyrs and all that stuff, and we'd say, that was ridiculous. That was horrific. How could they crush people under doors that were loaded up with rocks just because they were Protestants instead of Catholics and vice versa? Well, that was the reason why. But everybody believed it. Nobody thought that was crazy.
- [06:23]
E
If we had a technology that said, we can stop emitting carbon dioxide tomorrow and it won't cost you a penny, fine, no problem. You then have to say, well, how difficult is it to stop emitting carbon dioxide? And we've tried for 30, 40 years now to do that. And what? Today, 82% of the world's energy comes from fossil fuels. The year 2000. 83%, roughly. We've hardly changed. It's gone up a bit and then down a bit. May have got to 84 at one point, down to 81 at one point, but we can't find a replacement for fossil fuels that is both reliable and cheap. And just think about heating your home or driving your car or whatever. You know, it ain't that easy. And if you're. If you're living in Burkina Faso and you're burning brushwood, which you've collected from the. From the surrounding forest or scrub, to keep yourself to cook food at night. And the World bank says you can't have money for a bottled gas program in that country because it's a fossil fuel. Then I think you should be pretty cross about that because your burning fire is killing your kids. Indoor air pollution kills 4 million people a year. It produces more carbon dioxide than burning gas. It steals the wood from beetles and other creatures who want to eat it, whereas gas doesn't do any of those things. So that's the reality of our obsession with trying to stop using fossil fuels, is that we are doing genuine harm today. And you have to Put that in the balance against the potential future harms of runaway warming.
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A
What are the policy implications of what you're saying, Matt? If you were the chief scientific advisor or chief advisor to blah, blah, blah, would you go full Trump drill, baby, drill, no net zero, scrap all of that stuff. Should we be trying to reduce carbon emissions at all?
- [08:38]
E
I think it's relatively simple. The advice I'd give was don't set a deadline. I mean, 2050, net zero, UK only country doing it, we only produce 0.87% of the world's emissions anyway. It won't make a damn bit of difference whether we hit that or not. And the technology to do that, as I say, is not here. And it might come along in 2051 and then you'd look a fool, wouldn't you? You'd spend a fortune trying to get rid of emissions and you could have done it for free. So I think that's a crazy way of going about it. I think what the UK has done, unbelievably foolish and we should tear up net zero, get rid of the climate Change committee and instead fund research into energy technologies that might be able to solve the problem in the future. Because if you could get fusion going economically five years earlier than it would otherwise by bit more funding, or if you could get small nuclear reactors cheaper five years sooner, that would make far more difference than heat pumps and electric vehicles and all these kind of things. So for me, it's about researching the problem to find solutions, rather than enacting deadlines today.
- [10:01]
C
Liam, it seems to me you've painted a very grim, yet accurate picture of our economy, which leaves me scratching my head when I go, well, why are we pursuing net zero? Isn't that just a fancy name for deindustrialization?
- [10:15]
F
Well, a lot of the trade unions in the UK think that there's a huge rift now between this Labour government and the trade union movement, because the trade union movement can see that pursuing net zero, the way we are, as zealously as we are, is massively hollowing out our industry. We've just closed, you know, Britain's largest refinery up in Grangemouth. We've just shut down our last two blast furnaces in Wales at Port Talbot, which of course make virgin steel, which is very important for defence applications, other construction applications. It's really hard to get virgin steel in the UK because, you know, the Red Sea's closed because of Houthi rebels. It just seems madness to me. Look, I'm all for a better environment and I'm all for moving away from fossil fuels in a way that isn't economically ruinous. But I think the way we're doing it is economically ruinous. And I think a lot of mainstream politicians now are waking up to that until very recently. To even question net zero is to be, you know, you might, you're accused of, you know, slaying the firstborn. You're accused of being Herod. You know, it's crazy. And just the use of the word denier I think is disgusting. Because of course Holocaust denial is a crazy thing, a disgusting thing. But that's the phrase that it kind of tries to echo. You are that unreasonable? No, there are many, many, many scientists who, they just don't get airtime. But you know, Nobel winning scientists who really do question net zero, the whole thing. Okay, I'm not here to do that. I'm here to say I do want a much cleaner environment. I do think it makes sense over a period of time to move away from fossil fuels. I do believe in renewable forms of energy being better for the world. I think wind is the least efficient. I believe in hydrogen. I think that's a wonder fuel that we are deliberately suppressing. Vested interests who are making a huge amount of money out of renewables subsidies are deliberately dissing hydrogen as a viable option. You know, JCB have just built an incredible internal combustion engine that runs on hydrogen, the only emission of which is water. Right? So, and if you use renewable winds to do the electrolysis that generates the hydrogen in industrial quantities, and then you use that hydrogen and it emits water, you have perpetual clean energy. Right? And that will really undermine the businesses of lots of people. That's why it's so little talked about. But I believe in that. So I'm by no means not interested in this agenda. But what I would say is that unless this net zero agenda, which was introduced in the UK so many other countries with no debate, it was put into law, it was waved through Parliament, just a handful of MPs protested against it. Unless it starts delivering pretty soon for people in terms of cheaper energy bills and doing less damage to people who are least able to shoulder that economic damage, then the political consensus behind it is going to be crushed. So take for instance, electric vehicles. You know, we have in the UK the most stringent electric vehicle introduction laws in Europe, even more stringent than in the eu, even though we've left the eu. And at the moment, now I talk to lots of people in the car industry or they talk to me because they can't get A hearing with many other journalists, you know, very senior people in the car industry and they are now saying this is going to completely wreck Britain's entire car industry, which employs a million people. Right. And then 500,000 more in related industries, often in parts of the country that don't have many decent jobs.
- [14:07]
E
Right.
- [14:08]
F
You know, the fact that we now have a situation where car makers in the UK 22% last year, this year, 28% of the cars they sell must be pure electric vehicles, not hybrids. Pure electric vehicles. But guess what? The punters don't want them. The punters don't want them because the charging network is really ropey and really expensive. They don't want them because the second hand market for electric vehicles is awful. They don't want them because in many cases they're unreliable. So carmakers can't actually sell enough vehicles to get to 28%. And under our rules in the UK, insane. They're charged a fine of £15,000, you know, getting on for US$20,000 per vehicle. That is below that 28%. So what they're doing, they're rationing. They're not making petrol and diesel vehicles ahead of the 2035 ban on new petrol and diesel vehicles. Which means the new petrol diesel vehicles are going up in price. People can't get them and they're laying off workers. So UK car production, it went down 14% last year. In the first two months of this year it's gone down another 14% from that much lower base. And the car companies are laying people off BMW because of our electric vehicle rules, you know, imposed by Ed Miliband, who is completely out of control and needs to be, I think, reined in. I think he's actually dangerous with some of his policies at the moment. BMW are now not building the electric vehicle, electric Mini at Cowley in Oxford, right. Cowley has been a center of car manufacturing for over 100 years. This is one of the most sophisticated car plants in Europe. And BMW are probably not going to come back. They're not saying that now, but they're probably not going to come back. And look at the ban on drilling for new oil and gas in the North Sea. Again, insane. Because what we're doing instead, France is even the Climate Change Committee, which is our kind of in government think tank that has the legal rights to tell ministers what to do effectively. Even the Climate Change Committee says that by 2030 we're going to still use oil and gas for 50 of our energy. It will actually be much higher even by 2050 it'll be 25% of our energy. It will actually be much higher. So even, you know, the most woke green civil servants say we're still going to need lots of oil and gas even if we hit net zero by 2050. So why not use our own oil and gas? Because if instead of using North Sea oil and gas, by the way, the North Sea oil complex employs about 300,000 people, many of them unionized, which is why the unions are upset. We are importing liquefied natural gas from Qatar and America on ships that uses five times the carbon emissions. Because you've got to pump the gas, right, you got to liquefy it, which is a very intensive, energy intensive process. Stick it on a diesel ship, go 3,000 miles across the Atlantic, re gasify it here, which is a very energy intensive process when we've got oil and gas in the North Sea. To close that down just for ideological reasons, because labor wants to appeal to their trendy urban electorates who are very wealthy, is madness. Because they are not only really now, I think threatening the energy security of this country, but they are also hammering their traditional blue collar base that works in these industries. And that is why that blue collar base is increasingly looking for alternative political representation.
- [17:43]
A
The one thing you will need to do if you want to re industrialize Britain is go from having the highest industrial electricity prices in the developed world to producing lots and lots of cheap, reliable energy, which means you just have to say net zero in the bin, day one. We're going to make energy in Britain, we're going to produce our gas, et cetera. Is that the plan?
- [18:05]
G
Yes, yes. So the reforms policy, which I've advocated for some time as well, is the aim of British energy policy is energy abundance. Let's go for cheap and reliable energy and we'll do that however we can. If there's treasure in the ground or, you know, in our seas, we should make use of it. So as much as we can get from North Sea oil and gas, let's use it. You know, if there is fracking that can be done in a way where there's commercial interest and it's safe, we should do so. We should be honest enough to say that gas is here to stay for the foreseeable future. And yeah, there will also be a role for renewables like offshore wind and so on, but it won't be massively subsidized to the detriment of other things. And we should be going for broke on small nuclear reactors. That means completely changing the planning system. And so we tried to do what other countries have done elsewhere in the world, like South Korea here, so that we can build them as fast as possible. And that will be the bedrock of our economic policy. Because, you know, there aren't that many levers that government can pull to get economic growth going again. It can change the planning system so you can get the country building again. It can change our education and skills policy. And so we send less young people to university and more put through the route of genuine skills for apprenticeships.
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F
But the most important of all will.
- [19:35]
G
Be having a different energy policy. We've basically just got to do everything that is necessary to lower energy prices for consumers and for energy intensive industries. And although there's been a lot of de. Industrialization, there's still almost 2 million jobs in the country in energy intensive industries. And those jobs will be lost. I mean, they will go in the next 10 or 15 years and they're good jobs, mostly outside of the southeast, which are incredibly important to communities as well as to our national interest. And we have to save those jobs.
- [20:10]
A
But isn't that the problem, Alan, that essentially you're trying to reduce the demand for something that will never be reduced because of the population for energy, not for fossil fuel energy, but for energy, and you haven't got a ready made replacement that is cheaper. That's Bjorn's point is you have to invest in technology to make alternative forms of energy cheap enough that you don't then need the levers of government to introduce it because people are just going to buy this cheaper energy wherever it comes from, but we don't have it yet. Do you see what I'm saying?
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D
Yes, although I don't think that that is entirely true in that, you know, certainly some of the alternative forms of energy have become cheaper.
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A
Like what?
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D
Well, the renewable forms of energy have become cheaper.
- [20:54]
A
So wind, solar. Wind and solar, they're cheaper than. Than burning.
- [20:59]
D
Yes.
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A
Really?
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D
However, however, the flip side of that is that you need to. They are intermittent forms.
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A
Yes.
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D
So you need to either be able to store the energy that they create.
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A
Yes.
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D
Or you need to find a way to fill in when they're not producing.
- [21:14]
A
So that's what I mean. Overall, as a package, it's not cheaper at this point or we don't have the way to make it work without fossils. Whatever way you want to put it, it's not a viable alternative. That is cheaper as well.
- [21:26]
D
If you are taking all of the pros of all of the different energy sources and all of the cons of different energy sources and you factor in the impact of the use of fossil fuels into that equation, then it drives you necessarily to forcing the pace on some of the alternatives. Now some of the alternatives are perfectly workable and will become better, we know, if we drive them. So nuclear technology, for instance, stood still for 20, 30 years because we got scared about it after Chernobyl and we froze the development of that technology where it was. The existing nuclear power stations are using 30 year old technology, basically.
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A
That's reassuring.
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D
Fourth generation. Absolutely. Fourth generation. Nuclear solves a lot of the problems that we were worried about. You know, if something goes wrong, plants will shut down safely rather than meltdown. You know, they don't create very much nuclear waste. In fact, they can use nuclear waste, old nuclear waste as fuel. As with anything, if you work a technology to scale, then you gradually make it better and you solve the problems. So if we work nuclear technology to scale as the Chinese are doing, because they can see that this is the technology of the future, if you push yourself as pioneers into that space, you become the providers of that technology to the world. So then what you've done by putting money into it when it was less cost effective is you've invested in the new technology which you then recoup the cost of that investment from by selling it to the world. Because the world will go net zero in a blink of an eye when you've got the cost effective technology that works. But how do you get that? You get it by investing in developing that technology. We already know that nuclear works. It's just that we've got ideological stuff going on that has said that even though we say that there's a climate crisis, we're also going to be anti nuclear. And you sit there and say, how could you ever come to that conclusion if you're simply thinking this is a pragmatic problem to be solved? It's not. It's an ideology that is driving these. Why is Germany shutting down nuclear power stations right now and ramping up coal when it says that it's going to be a climate leader?
- [23:38]
A
And by the way making it extremely vulnerable to Russia, which is why the current situation with Ukraine, Germany can't do shit because they've closed all their power stations and this is the challenge.
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D
So net zero, if it's taken as a pragmatic engineering problem to be addressed, then there's a certain amount of investment in technology that makes sense and you can plan in a way that will avoid the problems of massive energy price spikes. And so on and so forth. But that's not how we're doing it. We're doing it in this weird, ideological, knee jerk, technocratic way where we are making decisions based on how difficult they are politically more than we are about what's going to get the job done. And that is going to lead to exactly what you described, what you ascribed to Bjorn, whether he would have owned it himself.
- [24:28]
A
No, he did say, you're going to get more Bolsonaros if you carry on down this path.
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F
Exactly.
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A
That was his exact words.
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D
Absolutely right. Because the technical democrats who are pushing the solutions at the moment are doing a really bad job of pushing their case. You know, they are tending towards the authoritarian, which we don't like, and telling you whether you can or can't eat meat and all those sorts of things. And again, if you were being pragmatic about this, you'd start by saying, what do people most value? How do we reduce the impact of those things? So people value travel, they value what they eat, and as soon as a country comes out of poverty, what do they do? They start eating more meat. It's highly prized, highly nutritious. So you would start with a pragmatic question of how do we reduce the impact of the things that people value, which makes them more likely to come with us on the journey that we need to go on. But that's not what we're doing at all. No, what we're doing is we start this with an ideological preference, which is that people consume less, they travel less, they drive less, they eat vegan, they do whatever it is that we think is a good lifestyle. And what we're going to do is we're going to cram that down on them. That is not a winning proposition, I would suggest. And yet the BBC, as soon as the BBC is talking about climate change, it takes seconds before they've gone on to meat eating or they've gone on to flying. They can't keep away from it. And yet there are massive impacts in all sorts of areas that are much more important to talk about, because there are bigger impacts that have systemic engineering challenges that can be done at scale. Why wouldn't you do those things first? Why wouldn't you focus on those things first and persuade people that actually you're working on their behalf, you're working so that they can have more of the things that they value long into the future and that their kids can have those things as well. And then if at some point in the future, if you have to turn around and say we really wanted you to be able to have this, but actually we can't get this to work. We can't get flight that works anymore. We tried it for 20 years and we failed and you're not going to be able to fly as much. People say, well, we trust that you did try. No one's going to say that now because what they see is a bunch of people whose first preference is to cram down lifestyle restrictions on people. First preference.
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B
Do you support the government's efforts to reach net zero by 2050?
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D
Broadly.
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F
I mean, it's such a difficult thing to say yes or no for something like that.
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A
Probably yes.
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F
But it's not as simple as just saying net zero, bad or good. It needs to be reasonable and it needs to be controlled. It can't just be something that we cut off all fossil fuels and just expect it to carry on and not affect anyone badly.
- [27:22]
A
Constantine, can I just first of all, ask Douglas and James, what percentage of global carbon emissions is Britain responsible for? Historically or in present times?
- [27:30]
F
Currently about 1%.
- [27:32]
A
1%. So if we reduce carbon emissions to zero and destroy our economy even more than we already have, we will reduce global carbon emissions by 1%. That's what we're talking about now. That's what we're talking about. Right. And the promise of net zero was, well, it doesn't matter that it's 1%, because Britain is a global leader. We will inspire the world. If we destroy our industry and hand it over to China, who's going to make the same things that we still need, but dirtier, and then we ship them back here on ships that use the dirtiest fuel, imagine imaginable. If we do that, the Chinese will be inspired to come commit industrial suicide as well. The Chinese clearly not as stupid as our leaders, so they haven't committed industrial suicide. That is what net zero has done. We have the highest industrial electricity prices in the developed world. That means we basically cannot make anything in this country anymore. And we will not be able to make anything in this country anymore until we let go of this ridiculous idea that we will inspire other people to jump off a cliff like Lemon, because we did, it doesn't work. It's not going to deliver prosperity. And James talks about we need a strong economy and we need net zero. Those two things are incompatible. You can't have both. So either you choose to make your people prosperous or you choose to pursue. If that's not what you said, then forgive me. I thought what you said is we need both of those things. And I'M saying we can't have both of those things. We are going to have to abandon completely the idea of net zero. We can definitely continue to invest in new technology, and we should be, and we should be pursuing newer, cleaner, cheaper forms of energy. But the number one priority of government policy going forward should be to deliver the cheapest possible, reliable, abundant energy that we can so that a our industry can thrive and b so that you are not paying ridiculous electricity and gas prices because we have some of the highest energy prices for consumers in the world as well. Net zero is industrial suicide, and we've been committing it for far too long and it has to end.
- [29:41]
C
I don't say this lightly. Last summer Konstantin and I spent a week with Ralston College students and professors in Greece, and it's genuinely something that needs to be seen to be believed. I couldn't recommend it more highly. If you love trigonometry, you're gonna love this. Ralston College runs a one year MA in the humanities unlike anything else. Students begin in Greece, spending two months learning to read and speak ancient Greek while studying the foundational works of the Western tradition, starting with Homer. From there, the program continues in Savannah, Georgia, where students take on the most important works of the Western canon in small, serious seminars. Ideas are tested properly, arguments are sharpened. This is education as it used to be and should be again. Raulson accepts students with a bachelor's degree or equivalent in any discipline. Full scholarships are available. Apply by 27 February 2026 at Raulson. AC apply that's R A L S T O N.AC forward/apply.