Big Money Climate Full Interview

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: so there's an argument that makes no sense which was coming out saying um they they were saying that ed milliband the uk's minister for net zero and energy security is a real villain and he's wrecking efforts to industrialize with his push for more renewables now there's a couple of observations i have on that the first is that neither the conservative governments that have been in power in the uk while i have been alive nor donald trump's government in his first term or so far in his second have pushed for more industrialization but secondly if you did want to push for more industrialization surely what you need is is to be able to massively scale up with cheap energy and the cheapest energy you can produce on a large scale at the moment in the uk or north america is solar followed by wind and the other thing to know is that fossil fuels like we've been using fossil fuels to power industry for like 300 years now we're probably done on the technology of developing that whereas solar and wind is being improved the technology has been improved all the time to the point where it's getting more and more efficient so it'll become cheaper and cheaper compared to fossil fuels in the future so i mean what's your take on this do they either it seems to me they're either badly confused or they're lying about wanting industrialization because i see no evidence they do they're lying about what is the best thing for industrialization or both what's your take [00:01:37] Speaker 2: oh yeah i don't i don't think they're they're confused i think political leaders in reform and the conservative party here and then the trump administration in america they're they're fake populists who are trying to appeal to to working class people um and the people who who lead these sort of right-wing political parties i mean they're they're the classic definitions of elites at this conference i was at in london i mean they had classical music playing like greek sculptures everyone's spoken like posh accents and they're all going around like pretending that there's some sort of friend to the working class and so i think when you hear this argument that renewable energy um is making it harder to re-industrialize and it's taking away people's manufacturing jobs i mean that it's that's just totally ridiculous and in fact the opposite is true before trump came back into office for his second term there was an effort called the inflation reduction act to spend billions and billions of dollars on re-industrializing america specifically by building renewable energy projects and that money was going to lots of communities that have lost manufacturing that have lost jobs and one of trump's first acts when he came back into office was to cancel that whole stimulus package [00:03:06] Speaker 1: i mean another i'll actually get your thoughts on another thing that's happening in the uk in a moment but let's first of all so you were at the conference this is it's it's known as the what is it is it it's the association for responsible citizenship or something or the alliance the alliance for responsible citizenship but in reality what it is is a very sophisticated organized attempt to push a particular agenda and and and there's like this seems to me two layers of it there's their distraction agenda so this is where um they push certain culture wars in order to distract people from discussing things that they're actually directly harming people's lives and then the second thing is what they actually want to achieve so what is it they actually want to achieve that they are open with each other [00:03:58] Speaker 2: about wanting to achieve and how are they aiming to achieve it well i this this conference is is really interesting from my perspective because it's attempting to stitch together a few different right-wing into interest groups and unite them in a common campaign and a common sort of call to action so you have really powerful religious right groups mostly from america who are represented there including alliance for defending freedom which helped overturn the legal right to an abortion in the united states they're trying to expand into europe and the uk and they're tightly connected to reform at the moment then you have sort of the ai and tech interests um who want to develop huge data centers in in america and the uk and europe and so they were well represented at this conference and then you have sort of the straight up like fossil fuel interests so oil and gas money was was one of the biggest sources of funding for this event and speaker after speaker at the art conference got up and said this heat that you're experiencing is not a big deal it's not related to climate change we don't need to worry about the climate crisis instead we should be drilling and fracking and burning as many fossil fuels as possible um and and why why it's concerning to me that these these three powerful right-wing interest groups are all sort of getting together is that they'll they'll be more powerful if they can speak with one big coherent voice and so that's why i think we should be paying careful attention to things [00:05:43] Speaker 1: like this yeah the uh i mean where we have i mean we have just to highlight that with the division so i'll come back to that we have a a slight problem in the uk at the moment i'm hoping it's not going to be a massive problem so we're about to change prime minister so of course there's intense lobbying uh there's intense lobbying on the the likely new prime minister andy burnham's agenda particularly on net zero it it doesn't matter that the conservative party in reform uk are attacking net zero what does matter however is the labor party in this country which is strongly affiliated with some large unions and of the three really large unions unison are saying do not water down your net zero commitments which is great but two other massive unions unite and gmb are saying we want you to because it's killing jobs and that's their problem i mean the answer surely has to come in as as you you mentioned joe biden's inflation reduction act which should have been unfortunately it didn't seem to convince enough americans but it should have been a massive if first and foremost jobs creation program to make sure that people saw that the jobs of the future were in green technologies which which on average in this country at least i'm sure in many others pay more than jobs in the fossil fuel industry which whether anyone likes it or not has to die out at some point because you're mining a finite resource even if it weren't causing climate damage but what's what's the answer in terms of like you know pushing for politicians to do certain things what what what should governments really be doing to to kill this argument because it's causing fractures within their own side you know we talk about the right wing being being united you're trying to form this one voice there's no such voice amongst liberal or left or anything like that because there's too many fracture points i mean yeah that's sort of the the big [00:07:39] Speaker 2: question at the moment that we need to solve um but i i think i think one thing that's really important to point out is that um the right has been engaged in this systemic effort that's been particularly intense over the last few years to make it seem like the average person doesn't want climate action they don't want renewable energy projects they're worried about it taking away their jobs i mean when when you look at the polling um among regular people um in countries all over the world concern for for climate and support for solutions has stayed remarkably consistent over the past few years the only real difference in opinion you're seeing right now is among elites so you have really loud conservative voices saying all the time renewables are going to destroy the economy um they're gonna force us to de-industrialize and i think that has the effect of pulling the whole sort of high level political conversation further towards a point of inaction and so if if i could if i could offer um anything in terms of a a political response to that it would be to for people to sort of isolate and marginalize the conservative elites who who are trashing climate action and to show them to show how marginalized and backed by special interests they really are and then organize as loudly as possible in favor of solutions so that the politicians who should be supporting climate action aggressively at the very least have the political cover to do so or are forced to take a less cowardly position [00:09:29] Speaker 1: in favor of solutions yeah i mean you make the point there it is this is only a conservative elite even big money fossil fuel interests aside understand that i mean there's there's never been more investment in renewables as now because investors understand two things first of all they understand that this is the industry of the future but secondly the climate change is damaging all of their business interests if you have flooding then you are hitting the the productivity of some business you're investing in if you've got droughts or famines you are again so they understand that climate change is harming their investments their overall portfolio and the green technology is is very profitable and and actually ironically because of president trump's actions this year there has been a bit of a premium on investment in renewables because quite aside from the damage climate action is and quite aside from the increasing efficiency of renewable technology you know we've had another lesson and we don't really want to be reliant on a resource that largely comes from countries that can be quite unstable [00:10:50] Speaker 2: yeah i mean absolutely the the attack on iran from the united states has sort of once again given us a global lesson in how expensive and precarious and chaotic our dependence on fossil fuels is um and i i would i would totally agree with you that big money and and most of industry around the world like they they know we're going through this rapid energy transition they can see the huge profits that can be made and and they also really see the the downsides of climate change on their businesses and i can i can give you actually one sort of interesting illustrative example of that i did some um digging around into news corp a few years ago rupert murdoch's big media empire and of course through their um outlets including fox news and british tabloids and and other media around the world they've been pushing this message that climate change isn't real we shouldn't pay attention to it internally at the company they've been taking climate change very seriously as a business threat and i went through a whole bunch of their corporate filings a few years ago which showed that they're carefully monitoring wildfire threats in california sea level rise extreme weather and they're adjusting their business to account for that and so it just gives you um a really good picture of of how much of a fraud this whole discussion is [00:12:23] Speaker 1: around climate change not being real yeah so so when you in a case like that where you've got a group who unders understand that they're deliberately misleading the public what's the benefit to a news organization in doing that do you think you can understand the fossil fuel lobby because even though they have you know they could have put investments into some other things and they might still i mean their drilling technology might be useful for more geothermal for example but you know they could have been early on in developing renewables themselves they could have gotten ahead of china and they didn't for whatever reason but for a news organization what is the benefit in them well i i think for an [00:13:10] Speaker 2: for a news organization there's there's a couple reasons why they might want to actively mislead their their readers and listeners and viewers one of the reasons i think is that right-wing media is a wash in fossil fuel money um a whole bunch of prominent outlets like they they get advertising from oil and gas gas companies seed funding um they they might have a vested interest in pushing an anti-climate message but there's there's another aspect of this um where certain outlets including those in in the murdoch news empire are just trying to stir up controversy they're trying to put out content that people are going to argue and yell about they're trying to stoke a culture war because that keeps people angry it keeps them watching it keeps people commenting and then ultimately it drives up their advertising [00:14:07] Speaker 1: revenue so it's ultimately more profitable for a news organization to make sure that people's lives remain bad so that they can provide the reason for their lives remaining bad i mean in a sense yeah that's kind of the the ouroboros why don't you think so we're just mentioning that investors understand the threats of climate change even even murdoch's operation understands the threats to their business interests of climate change and the fossil fuel industry sure has a lot of money and and it throws it around why don't other big investors use some of that money to try and counter it because surely by and large if we think about industries around the world most of them do not benefit from well none of them benefit from climate or not very many benefit from climate change but but none of them would really suffer if we took action so why isn't there not more of a concerted alliance amongst large investors who have the money to influence politics in the media like the fossil fuel lobby to do so in their own interests in their own business interests i mean just one example we've got the world cup at the moment it's a bigger thing in the uk than canada but we've got the world cup at the moment this is being threatened with climate change you know by 2050 the projections say actually a lot of the places where football's really big and it will not be safe to play in lots of days in the summer and there's already people complaining about the hydration breaks so and and the the football clubs understand the threat and they're trying to take action but you know this is a you know football globally is an industry with a lot of say and a lot of money why are they not putting in more effort why are they not working with other organizations who also have a lot of money in order to try and counter the misinformation do you think [00:16:04] Speaker 2: i mean that's a really good question why aren't those companies and and interests um getting better organized to protect their interests my my sense of of how investors approach this question of of climate action um is that they're they sort of they act they act in groups and and they're very influenced by the of political context like we we think of investors all the time as as being these very sort of like careful rational cost benefit actors who are always going to seek out the highest return and have data to justify that but they're they're just as emotional as as most politicians um so a few years ago you know it was there was a huge upswing um among elites that we needed to do something about the climate the head of blackrock um put out this open letter saying larry fink saying um we're we're only going to invest in stuff that's that's aligned with climate you had all these investors coming out um entire new categories of of investing around um climate assets then trump gets into power and starts you know bullying all these um um financial firms and suddenly investors are saying well we have to be pragmatic we need to favor energy security and security and fossil fuels um and i i think at the same time as that you had the the tech industry arguably one of the most powerful industries in the world swing really hard towards trump um and start making huge investments into building these like gargantuan energy consuming data centers all over the place that they want to power with fossil fuels and so i think the the majority of of businesses who are not really you know tied to the tech industry or fossil fuel industry and and want a cleaner energy system there's they're sort of being drowned out at the moment um and they they don't have an outlet to political power the way that the big polluting industries do at the moment or that that would be my read [00:18:27] Speaker 1: on it at least but even the tech industry the tech giants are are building their own power facilities essentially with renewables because it's cheaper i mean if you need a massive amount of energy to power your data center you you go for the cheapest option don't you they're using solar panels some of them [00:18:45] Speaker 2: some of these tech companies are using renewable energy but by and large they're proposing and advocating for huge gas power plants um even though that will cost them more are they going to get some sort of tax break or something for it well they're passing on the cost to consumers and so in the united states right now there's a massive revolt against the tech industry and new data centers because people's electricity bills are now going through the roof because of these new projects and this is actually the the opposition to ai and and big tech is shaping up to be one of the major issues of the u.s midterms but a lot of these debates i know are coming to the the uk all the big tech companies are active here [00:19:32] Speaker 1: yeah i mean what we what we're talking about in uk and europe more widely as well there is not going to be we need to stop ai there is going to be we need to not be reliant on american ai the eu have attempted to foster the idea of european-based tech giants and that hasn't worked they're going back to the drawing board on that one there is a project between the uk and france to try and develop what you might call a more ethical ai but at the end of the day no one wants to be left behind on this um there's multiple problems with it i actually i'm not sure i see the energy consumption has been one if you massively scale upon renewables using water as a coolant is arguably a much bigger one which also isn't strictly necessary but it is a problem isn't it that no one can afford to get left behind if ai is offering solutions particularly to government departments that are effective they'll have to take them and if there's no if there isn't one where the rules are decided by governments who have some public accountability then we're going to end up using the one developed by the world's richest people who have no there's no public accountability with them um do you see any signs of of like a way through for europe on this one because they are trying but [00:20:49] Speaker 2: not successfully well what what i've heard in um in the last week or two through conversations with a lot of energy and tech insiders who focus on europe is that um u.s tech companies are really trying to throw their weight around um they're trying to influence industry associations they're heavily lobbying the eu um they're they're trying to ensure that it's the likes of amazon and and meta and microsoft who get to build all the data centers and compute capacity for ai in europe at the moment and they largely want to do that by burning gas and so i think i think this get that this gets back to your really a question about why why why doesn't business organize and advocate for climate solutions when when we know that these kinds of activities are just going to warm the climate and hurt all of us and and i think that's because the the loudest most powerful business interests in the room right now have have no interest in an energy transition but i think to the extent that we can point out that the majority of the world and and companies would really benefit from cheaper more reliable more self-sufficient renewable energy and clean alternatives and then actually provide the political space for companies and investors to organize and push for that effectively behind the scenes we we might start seeing um a real flip in the way that we're addressing these big existential [00:22:27] Speaker 1: questions yeah i mean i'm my hope in the uk is if we can just ride out another few years and get to the the the government's targets at the moment i think it's an ambitious target but the government's target is 95 of energy from renewables or i think at least not combustible because i think nuclear may be partly mixed but but non-combustible energy should we say um by 2030 which i don't think i don't think experts think we're quite going to hit but if we can get to the point where you you have that and you've completely de-long de-linked the price of energy from um from gas it becomes much more difficult for another government um to try and reverse that i mean i remember i i was actually teaching about small and large scale um energy at the time at which the last labor government in this country left office and the new conservative company and one of the things i used to teach was about you know the various subsidies and so on for solar panels on people's houses and every year i had to change it because they were being removed and but all all they really did was to slow down progress they didn't stop it renewables carried on because it made more business sense um but can we get to a point in a relatively short amount of time if we keep pushing for renewables at least in europe where it becomes impossible for another government to say right we're going full on fossil fuels now because it's like because people's bills will suddenly go up and you know there won't be there'll [00:24:05] Speaker 2: be limited amounts of investment and so on oh yeah i mean absolutely um what what we're seeing right now is exactly that sort of transition that you're describing away from fossil fuels and and the majority of it is just driven by by pure economics um and i mean i was i was reading analysis today that um sales of electric vehicles in the uk have argued arguably bypassed fossil fuel cars for the first time um even even even in the united states i mean trump is is one of the most anti-climate anti-clean energy um political leaders that's ever existed and he's taking aggressive action um against renewables despite that um the renewables industry in the states is is surging including in a lot of the most republican states like texas right now so we're we're we're starting to see these these big sort of macro economic shifts away from fossil fuels that are are going to be really really difficult for any politician to reverse because it's just a ship that's too big for any one person to try to steer in a different direction but the the danger in these sort of transition years is that you have a bunch of companies and their political allies that are still heavily invested in the old polluting way of doing things and and they're not going to give up all of their profits and their influence without a fight um and so they're they're pursuing um something that i've heard referred to as predatory delay which is the to the extent that you can you can delay this inevitable transition as long as possible you're able to carve out um a bit more profits for yourself and hopefully hand over all the losses to the guy who comes next that has to lead your industry [00:26:05] Speaker 1: yeah so so i mean what are you alluding there to individual executives then not so much organized companies with a long-term view but individual people who are thinking well i'll be retiring in 10 years so if i can keep this thing going it's someone else's problem [00:26:20] Speaker 2: is there also a bit of that in the industry you think i mean i think so yeah um and i mean it's you know corporate executives they operate on the same short-term incentive structure as most politicians um they don't be they don't want to be the one that's associated with driving their company into the ground they want to be the one who brought in a record year of profits at the time when everyone was saying their company was supposed to go out of business because of a shift to renewables so i think there's there's definitely that sort of um aspect um holding up this whole transition [00:26:55] Speaker 1: i suppose that could also explain why these massive companies with huge r d budgets didn't just make sure that they were the ones providing the energy of the future because they the fossil fuel company they didn't have to be for they're just they're just energy companies aren't they just provide source of energy they could have been the ones decades ago who i think some did start and then decided was it was that just because the executives in charge at times that well we personally won't see the benefits because it's going to take too long i mean i don't know i would [00:27:24] Speaker 2: love to talk to some of those executives about it um maybe over a beer somewhere where they could be a bit more candid um but yeah we we do know that these these big oil and gas companies um they they studied climate change long before the general public um i mean d smog has done a lot of historical research on this going into archives finding the documents that show it um shell for example they set up climate units um decades ago they had a very clear idea of what the risks to the climate in the world would be um from continuing to burn fossil fuels and and you're right they had with with that kind of you know innovative world-leading knowledge they they would have had a huge advantage over all of their rivals um in transitioning aggressively away from their core business model and yet we we didn't see that um i guess they decided that in in the short term it was just more um profitable to keep investing in in fossil fuels that they knew were wrecking the climate i mean every every couple years well i wouldn't say every couple years every time there's a surge in climate concern among the world you see all these oil companies say actually maybe we should transition maybe we should set caps on the amount of oil we produce i mean shell was an example of that bp a few years ago and now they're just back to saying well we have to drill as aggressively as humanly possible because that's what everybody else [00:28:58] Speaker 1: is doing right i mean it's um i mean what what's the what's the advice for just sort of all members of the public here then because even when you've got because it just seems strange to me i mean it was an academic called professor tim bale in this country who was remarking on the fact that so we have reform uk here you had you had an equivalent in canada in the 90s and um and now we have the conservative party who are attempting to occupy the same ground as them by just moving towards them so the conservative party who again i i don't think their climate credentials were particularly good but they they used to at least treat it as a virtue they would say that they are in favor of more renewables even though they were blocking quite a lot of renewable projects and and they would say that they need to tackle climate change and now they're not and that's happened really very quickly and and what professor bale has suggested is that there is now no longer an organized center right in the uk because you don't hear from it i mean they they said nothing during the brexit years when they knew that that would be a disaster there they're now allowing the conservative party which is supposed to be the relatively moderate center right party in this country or they like to say so and they are now they are now pushing fossil fuel interest really very heavily to the point where they don't even just take the money and advocate policies that will help them they now openly say do you know what there's nothing to worry about oh it's a bit hot oh it's summer what do you what do you want um you know i mean do you think there's a sense of that do you think that actually the center right of politics in countries like the uk is being destroyed you know is it absent is it gone yeah i mean i absolutely think the the center right [00:30:52] Speaker 2: um in the uk and in other parts of the world is a really sort of it's almost the fringe position now um on the on the right whereas the the actual fringe the sort of more extreme positions of the right those are rapidly blending into the mainstream and and becoming the mainstream and so there there isn't sort of this like moderate close to center position you can appeal to anyway on the conservative side like those those voices have been driven out um or or they've themselves have transitioned to a more extreme position like you've seen with the the conservatives here i mean it's it's kind of remarkable that the conservatives were supporting climate action and net zero and all that and i mean when i saw um kemi badenock speak at the art conference um she said that was a huge mistake and if if she becomes prime minister one of the first things she's going to do is rapidly roll back the uk's entire net zero plan but in terms in terms of a way out of this mess um i was i was reflecting a bit on this while i was in the the art conference because i i just kept hearing all these speakers go up and say the climate crisis climate crisis isn't real um just deal with this heat um heat is not that important anyway it's the cold that's important we need more fossil fuels to heat people's homes and i looked around this convention center um at the the olympia in london and and everyone is really hot like the the 4 000 or so delegates they're sweating in their suits like there's visible sweat dripping down their faces they're slumped against the walls some of them have literally picked up their printed program guides and they're using them as fans to try to cool themselves down and i i sort of had this this moment where i was like so who is this climate denial message aimed at most of the media covering this was right wing media and and i realized that you know to the people that are still really invested in in fossil fuels they they see it as a threat that even even their own base even even conservatives are being like whacked in the face with the climate crisis right now it's just like it's it's so obvious this unprecedented heat and so on the conservative side they're they're trying to do everything they can right now to keep their own base from from worrying about this from advocating for solutions and and so i would say one way forward through all of this is is to try to really divide the right right now on climate action and um to create a space where all of those conservatives who who are kind of worried in the back of their mind about the climate crisis where they have some sort of outlet or political influence but then i i think on the other side you know the the general public really cares about this stuff especially in in london these days and all over the uk their trains are delayed they're sweating it out they don't have a really great outlet either to to learn that all of their all of the sort of the fellow people in their community or their city also really care about addressing this crisis um and so i mean this is this is a big question we're talking about but i i think you know divide the conservatives on this issue and give the majority of the public who cares about this stuff a big media outlet a big political outlet and then i think you could see the politics of all this start to shift pretty fast [00:34:45] Speaker 1: yeah i mean i i spent years just wishing you know i mean we've been i mean i personally have been keyed into this transatlantic organization through brexit you know it was sort of discovered that they were you know americans and people in britain and parts of europe were organizing over brexit people like steve bannon for example quite influential in the brexit campaign in this country and um but there's no such organization for climate action there's no big and it would be difficult admittedly because as you say with the me a lot of the media on side they will happily report the things that come out of it and the media aren't on side will report the things that are in it to try and counter it you won't get the same universal reporting on such a a conference here but at the very least organizing people whenever i've seen people trying to organize for some sort of progressive thing it just tends to be a load of people in the room networking sharing linkedin and like we do this we do this it's like okay so what you're going to do together um but what what was their plan so just going back to them so in this conference what was their objectives for this conference was it is it just something they do now and they're just it's like tick box or was there a specific strategy you think that they [00:36:03] Speaker 2: were working on at this conference i mean i think a lot of it is is conservatives wanting to come from all over the world and like party and network and all hang out together and take selfies as nigel farage is speaking it's definitely like that aspect to it um but i i do think there is a genuine effort to craft a global political narrative um and a big part of that narrative is opposing net zero anywhere around the world but also fusing that to rapid tech ai data center development and also fusing it to the religious rights um political advocacy so um this group alliance defending freedom from the states for example um wants to come into the uk and europe and attack the right to the abortion and impose stricter socially conservative policies all over the place so stuff like that is is part of the um the political strategizing that is happening um at a conference yeah i mean that fusion for me it's always occurred [00:37:18] Speaker 1: to me you have this as you say this fusion of people who i mean the anti-abortion stuff is ultimately it's an anti-women's rights it's just it's you know it's it's one bit and then there's another bit and another bit and another bit so it's anti-women's rights combined with fossil fuel interests and and and it would be really easy to fuse it the way because climate change disproportionately harms women because it disproportionately harms those on lower incomes which tend to be women in lots of western countries well indeed any country and it's a shame that there's no great campaign fusing those two things together as well because it's literally half the population if you can if you can get people on on the rights of half the population you've got a foot in the door but i mean there's there's i mean my worry is that the tech side of it is my big worry and i don't understand even though you've you explained various bits i still don't get from their point of view why when it makes no sense for them to want to have to buy fossil fuel even if they can pass the savings on at some point they must have to um have some competition for their services but that is a worry because no country is going to do without those tech solutions so if we can't produce them more ethically then we're going to be over a barrel but then i also think is you know is there some good news is the fact that donald trump is taking a lead on this sort of an advantage because he's so deeply unpopular everywhere because everything he touches turns to shit yeah i mean and in this in the united states right now [00:38:52] Speaker 2: there there is a massive massive backlash building to to trump and a lot of it is driven by this tech angle um so trump has aggressively thrown his weight behind um artificial intelligence data centers i mean trump has done a lot of other stuff too um but right right now um one of the biggest bipartisan issues at the grassroots level in the u.s is opposition to big tech in opposition to big energy and water guzzling data centers there's something like seven out of ten americans who are opposed to that which in in the states that is like you you don't have that yeah it's really polarized yeah and and it's not just like the lefties versus the tech companies like there's a huge republican contingent to this um trump voters but that's at the grassroots level and that hasn't necessarily worked its way up into elite political discourse um and so i i i do see huge backlash building um to to trump some of it motivated by environmental reasons i mean i i hate to predict the future because i'm always wrong but we'll we'll see what happens in the in the u.s midterms this year and that that could start to shift the politics of all this climate stuff globally but actually there was there's one more point i wanted to make about all of this which is this this conference that that i was at are in a lot of ways this was a byproduct of conservatives and anti-climate voices jumping into digital media or new media or whatever you want to call it um years earlier than the pro-climate side and um with with arc it's it's really explicitly tied to to new media because one of the founders of that event is jordan peterson and he's he's sort of this right-wing public intellectual who built up a massive following on youtube after he was largely shut out of legacy media and and then he began to parlay that into real world political influence through the organization of events like arc but i i do think that the the pro-climate side the progressive side whatever you want to call it is sort of getting its its act together a bit more in terms of new media i mean the fact that i'm i'm speaking with you on your channel and you've you've built up a um a a big following um doing this type of work i think there's a huge potential for disruptive pro climate digital media that can start to kind of cut through um a lot of the bad information that we've [00:41:38] Speaker 1: all been getting yeah i mean i i've said on my channel many times one of my frustrations is you know you the the lack of take up from progressives on social media um you know you can you look at the the the ones who are on the side of the fossil fuel lobby and they get if they have huge like proper huge followings and if i look up greenpeace on youtube and nothing there's not there's no presence and you know so that is always disappointing i i would like to think that progressive at some point will cotton on because it is there's an increasing number of people particularly young people who are getting their news from social media in general not just youtube it includes youtube um and that you know i am a big believer that is one thing that needs to be done there needs to be more more focus on on social media and getting these messages out but also you know in terms of the calls to action as well i mean it needs more people the way my channel works for example i mean i you know everything's an echo chamber on social media i'm there's not a lot of climate denialists watching me they don't watch me for punishment but the people who do watch me they get you know listen to experts such as yourself or or me get information which they can then use to talk to friends and colleagues and family and things like that um so it can be quite it can be quite powerful and i i do sort of wish more organizations like greenpeace as well as political progressive political parties would understand the power of social media because you know you need to get that message out because you you talk about the fact and you're right i mean i've seen recent surveying on this in europe there are overwhelming numbers of people in countries all over europe including the uk who understand climate change they understand some of the effects of it they understand it's something the government needs to actively intervene in but the saliency is quite low they're really easy to be knocked off course by saying oh but it'll cost you but that was an argument when i was growing up in the 80s it's not now it's cheaper to do something and whenever and this is a message i keep trying to get across whenever someone like reform uk says oh we're spending this amount on net zero so many tens of billions on net zero we should spend it on this instead it says no we're not because if we don't spend that money it costs us more in dealing with the fallout and also what we get out of it pays back anyway it's not even just that it's the lower cost we get a return on it in the form of cheaper energy in the future because we're there are some things i mean i know one thing you won't like is uh carbon capture but um but i see that as a jobs creation thing again it goes back to this idea of to because of the fragmentation in this country amongst unions which is centered around jobs if you can if you can make it clear to everyone that the better jobs and the more sustainable jobs are links to green technology and not fossil fuels i think you make a massive you win a big chunk of territory [00:44:52] Speaker 2: yeah i mean i i i totally agree um and i think in in terms of a a call to action that we can kind of end um on a more hopeful note um there's there's been a lot of emphasis in the climate movement around big mobilizations so um you know attention grabbing protests you know filling the streets of of london um hundreds of thousands out marching and i mean that's that's all well and good there's a place for that but i think the pro-climate side should get better and more strategic now about actual um organizing and so what i mean by that is um people running um for for local elections people taking over like very accessible low-hanging fruit political positions in their communities um school boards um local utilities and anywhere that's like accessible to you and and it's some sort of institutional level of power if you can start getting a bunch of pro-climate people um in those positions you can start to institutionalize all of these pro-climate arguments we're talking about and and the right knows this very well i mean reform isn't very active at the local level in the states a huge part of the trump agenda bubbled out of um hardcore um right-wing activists taking over positions in their communities and then scaling that up to the national level and so i i think that's a that's a way for people to really act in their own backyards in a way that can build up to systemic change