Climate Change: Propaganda vs. Reality with Mallen Baker

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Part of the problem is people are thinking of it as a green revolution because the thing that they would most hate is for us to solve the problem of climate change to create a world that looks exactly like it does right now but without climate change. [00:00:21] Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kissing. And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. [00:00:32] Speaker 3: Our brilliant guest today is a writer and YouTuber, Malin Baker. Welcome to Trigonometry. [00:00:37] Speaker 1: Thank you. [00:00:38] Speaker 3: It's great to have you on the show. Before we get into the conversation, and it's going to be a very interesting one, tell everybody a little bit about who are you, how are you, where you are, what has been your journey through life that leads you to be sitting here talking to us? [00:00:50] Speaker 1: Well, it's probably a journey of four parts, which is, first of all, was campaigning, because when I was a youngster, we literally thought that global nuclear war was about to break out any minute. So that drew me into campaigning, which led to me living for a period of time in a plastic bag outside the main gate of a nuclear missile base. I mean, we've all been there, Malin. [00:01:15] Speaker 3: Exactly, exactly. You were against, I assume, right? Against the global nuclear war. [00:01:20] Speaker 1: I thought it was a bad idea, to be fair. And that much was certainly true. I would say that I was right and wrong in equal measure during those times, but that's a longer discussion. The second stage, then, was politics, because I got fed up of campaigning, which is about saying no to stuff all the time. And I thought, surely, we should be able to say what we actually want to happen instead. We want to say yes to something. And I was under the strange impression that you went to politics for that sort of thing. I know, I know. I was naive and youthful. So I ended up in the Green Party, became co-chair of the UK Green Party for a while. Once I realised that that wasn't totally an organisation that wanted to make itself fit for changing anything very much, I ended up in the Lib Dems for a while, until the point when I realised that, actually, I'm not built for politics. I'm a pragmatist, not remotely ideological. I don't enjoy factions. I'm always looking for the objective, pragmatic solutions. So there need to be good people in politics, but I realised that wasn't me. And I have to say that I don't think I feel a huge amount of fellow feeling for either of those parties in their modern incarnation. I've been a floating voter ever since. Third stage, then, is corporate social responsibility, which was talking to major corporations, some of the top FTSE 100 companies, about their environmental impact, about their social responsibilities. Not to be confused with woke corporations. There's a distinction that is important, but probably not very interesting. And that was with Business in the Community, which is a membership organisation that has a lot of the top chief executives engaged. So that was an interesting eye on that universe, of people making decisions for huge corporations with lots of power and influence, and how sometimes change goes through those sorts of spheres. And then finally now, here I am with the YouTube channel, where I stepped away from that, and ended up going back to first principles, of becoming curious again about, well, what is really true about what's going on? Having started the channel, thinking I was going to be carrying on doing what I'd always been doing, which was supporting change makers who were working in different spheres. Ultimately, I started to do a few debunking videos, and then got really curious as to, well, actually, hang on a moment. I thought this was going to be debunking this, but the closer you look at it, actually, there's some real substance to this argument. [00:03:57] Speaker 3: The lizards really are in charge. [00:03:58] Speaker 1: Yeah, well, I wouldn't go quiet that far. So, I refashioned what I was doing into stepping aside from the polarisation and just asking the questions about, well, what does the research really say, and does it actually mean what people popularly would have you believe? And that has been fed into all sorts of topics and issues, largely where the scientific realities bump into the political sphere, which is increasingly happening, as we all know, and actually is going to become more and not less the factor of the next few decades. So, it's where all the difficult dilemmas lie, all the grey areas that I find so interesting. [00:04:41] Speaker 2: And you've got a great YouTube channel, and I was watching it over the past couple of days for doing research, and you did this brilliant video that really hooked me in on safetyism and the role that safetyism is playing in our society. And before, when I was talking with Constantine, we realised that it also linked in with the main topic that we're going to be talking about, which is climate change. So, could we have, first of all, your thoughts on safetyism and how we've seen it rapidly progress from the moment when you were a child, in fact? [00:05:15] Speaker 1: Yes. It's interesting because over the first 10, 20 years of my adult life, it was always a running joke about, as society changes, you can tell how old you are by how often you moan about how things are different to how they were when you were younger. And there was always a running joke about health and safety. You know, health and safety was always a thing that had gone mad, sort of thing. And yet, beyond that, when you looked at where we are now and the mindset that we have now, you realise, well, it's actually gone beyond a joke. And it really struck home for me, first of all, when I did a video where I was comparing the current pandemic, the recent pandemic, shall we say, with the 1957 Asian flu, which was not identical, but was broadly in the same zone in terms of the harm, the health harm that it created. But, of course, how society reacted to it was completely different. Mostly, we just carried on with life as normal. There were some adaptations that people made. But the interesting thing was it wasn't a political issue. It just wasn't. I mean, there was a vaccine that was produced relatively quickly, and I think government support helped that to happen. There was an election in America the next year, I think, and the incumbent lost. But that was nothing to do with it. It was not a political issue at all. And the reason for that, of course, was that people just didn't have the expectation that government was there to keep them safe from a virus. You know, disease happened. And, obviously, if a really serious disease came along, then people would have to organise a way to deal with that. If health services might be overcome, then, of course, the government has to put resources in to make sure that doesn't happen. But, otherwise, people just didn't think that that was what it was there to do. Now, that has changed, obviously. And all of the lockdown fever that we've seen over the last couple of years, and the fact that no leaders, even those who started well with the pandemic, have ended well. You know, not even the saintly Jacinda, you know, they are now seriously unhappy there as well. Not even there have any of the leaders come through the whole two years well. And, arguably, that is because the expectations now on what the government can and should provide for you as an individual has just gone beyond the basis of what it can actually deliver. And this has gone hand in hand with this view that it's there to keep us safe. You know, the first job of government is to keep us safe. And that was always the case. That was the old Hobbesian, you know, contract with the state, the Leviathan state, was that it was there to protect us from each other and ourselves. [00:08:08] Speaker 3: What Hobbes was talking about was you want to be protected from foreign enemies and from criminality in your own country. That's it. Exactly. That's what he was talking about. [00:08:17] Speaker 1: Absolutely. Yeah. But over time, that has become layered up and layered up. And particularly then in the aftermath of World War II when we had the creation of a welfare state and everything, you had more and more layers thrown on. All of which we simply absorbed into our expectations of what government can do for you. And so now we have ended up in this position where we have been officially wrapped in cotton wool for so long that we have become fragile people. You know, whereas before we dealt with adversity by training ourselves to be strong in the face of adversity, by teaching young people how to cope with difficulties and difficult situations and they read To Kill a Mockingbird because it made them feel uncomfortable because I was part of growing up confronting all of these things. And I walked to school and nobody thought anything of it. Probably I was kind of hoping I'd get lost, to be fair, but that might actually just be me. But nevertheless, nobody much commented on that. In fact, the stat that came out of when I did research that video was something like, I can't remember the exact number now, it was something like 78% of kids walked to school when I was, seven or eight-year-olds walked to school when I was seven or eight, and now it's something like 8%. I mean, it's just astonishing. And of course, that's because the traffic got worse. We had all the newspapers telling us about stranger danger and people then wouldn't let their darlings out because they were terrified that there are predators on every street corner. And the process is just as we have seen it. Media hyping up dangers because it feeds cliques, which feeds their advertising model, which feeds into a terror mindset amongst the population, and then looking to authority to defend themselves from that. And that has created a weakened, dependent mindset rather than a strong, resilient citizenship. And that is a real problem for us. [00:10:20] Speaker 3: Well, politically, it's a big problem because one of the consequences that seems quite inevitable to me out of this sort of approach is that means the government has to do more things. And if the government does more things, it means there are more errors of your life that the government's involved with. And I'm not someone who thinks the government has no role in society at all. Of course it does. But the problem is the government is a very blunt instrument for dealing with lots of issues. You see it in the conversation around freedom of expression, for example. The government can either ban things or it can allow them. You can't have the new one's conversation about, well, you are allowed to be a dick, but maybe you shouldn't be, right? The government can't do that. So if we make the government regulate every element of our relations, every element of our behavior, every element of our safety, you are going to end up with a sort of, at best, soft authoritarianism eventually. That is one of the dangers for sure. [00:11:17] Speaker 1: And you can add to that the fact that governments are actually just not very good at doing lots of things. You know, why did we get such a rapid vaccine rollout? Well, in this country it was because they took it out of the bureaucracy's hands and put it into a small panel that brought together the private sector who are used to doing things quickly and to scale. And they managed to do a much, much better job. And then as soon as they handed it back to the bureaucracy of the state, it all gummed up again. So you've got both the tendency of governments to want to push you to comply, you know, if you won't, you know, if you will insist on getting fat, then they'll try and nudge you. And if nudging won't work, they'll push you a bit harder. And then you marry that with the fact that they're actually not very good at executing. And so that you get the worst of all worlds in that sort of sense. But we do have a real danger ahead of us because as we are moving more towards these big global issues that we're facing, that tends towards the technocratic mindset in terms of what are the solutions and how do we deal with them, they tend towards authoritarian solutions. Now, it doesn't mean, say, that governments will all naturally give in to that. You know, I don't see that the likes of Boris Johnson or the likely successors have that as an ambition, particularly. But there is a dynamic that you have to actively oppose. You actually have to push the other direction, not to drift that way. And I don't see that they have a sufficient vision currently to do that. [00:12:49] Speaker 2: Are you tired of using bulky old wallets, giving you a bulge where you don't want it to be? My old wallet was massive, so it brought all the ladies to the yard, which was a huge distraction and got in the way of my esteemed work on trigonometry. [00:13:05] Speaker 3: Ridge wallets have an incredible solution for you. This is mine, sleek, stylish, and with an industrial look to it. It can fit 12 cards with cash on the back using a clip like this one or a strap. We've got one for the whole team. I've got one, Francis has one, even our producer, Anton, has one. But he's from Liverpool, so he flogged his on the black market. [00:13:27] Speaker 2: The great thing about Ridge is that they give you a lifetime guarantee, which means if you want, you can have only one wallet for the rest of your life. [00:13:36] Speaker 3: Ridge are so confident in the quality of their product, they will give you 45 days to test drive their wallets. That means you can get the wallet, use it, and if you don't like it, you can return it within 45 days. [00:13:48] Speaker 2: Because Ridge are such great guys, they're going to give you 10% off and free worldwide shipping and returns. [00:13:54] Speaker 3: To take advantage of this incredible offer, go to ridge.com forward slash Trigger. That's ridge.com forward slash Trigger. And use our special code, which is, of course, Trigger. [00:14:06] Speaker 2: I was going to say, man, the thing that worries me is we're talking about authoritarianism, and a few years ago, I would have scoffed at that. But what we are seeing is a kind of soft authoritarianism, which ties into the whole safetyism issue. Because you look at what the American government are trying to do to Joe Rogan and trying to silence him. [00:14:24] Speaker 3: By the time this goes out, he could have been assassinated. [00:14:26] Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. R.I.P. Joe. But that would be in bad taste. Anyway. That would be in bad taste if it actually happens, mate. Yeah. [00:14:33] Speaker 3: We'll have to cut it out. Exactly. Joe, we hope you're well, mate. [00:14:37] Speaker 2: If you look at what the American government are doing, they're trying to silence him. They're trying to de-platform him. And they would argue that they're doing that because they want to, inverted commas, keep people safe, so that he can't spread his, in inverted commas, misinformation. And what we're seeing is this safetyism, as far as I'm concerned, being used as a way to control us. It's soft authoritarianism. Do you agree, Mellon? [00:15:03] Speaker 1: I do. And I'll tell you why it's happening, I think. Which is that we have now come across two big issues where it's very easy for the elites, if you like, the government, but also the mainstream media types and various people in the same orbit to see that there is a right thing to do and people need to be persuaded to go along with it. So both in terms of a pandemic and now also in terms of climate change, you have got the situation where the population need to be persuaded to do the right thing. And that has turned what used to be streams of communication, streams of information from government, where they were there to tell us what was going on, that has now become streams of what some would describe as propaganda, but in any case is campaign messaging. When I first started out dealing with climate change issues and, you know, I've always, half of what I ever dealt with on the corporate responsibility stuff was showing companies how they had to respond to the climate change agenda. It's a thing I've been dealing with for decades. However, Extinction Rebellion, as mad as a box of frogs. So, you know, I did a few videos critiquing the extreme campaigner end and some of the things that they were demanding which just didn't make any sense. And I had various people saying, well, what you say is absolutely right. It's just not helpful to say it at this point. And I have heard that so many times since from other things. You know, I kicked back against the insect apocalypse because the language being used there was overblown apocalyptic language again. And when you look to the research, it didn't support some of the top-line messaging. Yes, there were, you know, problems with insect declines and the research shows that, but not what was being claimed. And then again, someone came back and said, everything you said was correct scientifically. All the papers you cited were correct. You didn't misinform, but it wasn't helpful messaging. And it just underpinned for me now how much of this has turned into campaign messaging. This is the problem. And this is why people then start to distrust what they're being told. You know, why did we get some stats during the pandemic and not others? Because some stats were considered to be helpful in underpinning the message that says you should be worried about this and therefore you should comply with the measures that we put in play. And some were less helpful in that, although they were arguably more helpful in understanding what the heck was going on, which some of us really wanted to do. [00:17:37] Speaker 3: What you're really talking about, Malin, is a very good point, which is it's very sneaky what they've done. What they've done is they've traded the science for public health, right? These are two very different things. Science is about finding what the truth is. Public health is about getting people to do what you want, right? And they've said, if you're questioning the public health, you're not following the science, right? These things are not the same thing. And climate change, which is the issue that we were originally going to talk to you about, and let's get into it now because you've kind of brought us there very neatly, seems to me to be exactly the same, right? Because what you've got on the one hand is a bunch of people running around, gluing themselves to trains, going absolutely apeshit over every tiny little thing that happens. And the science isn't really being talked about properly. What you've got is that extreme end on one end, and there's other people who think it's not happening. Look, I'm not a scientist. I don't know which one of them is right. I'm just saying that I think the messaging is much more like public health than it is like science, the way we're having the conversation about climate change. So what is the truth about climate change? Because you know, we've had Roger Hallam from Extinction Rebellion on the show. We've had Patrick Moore who thinks it's all a bunch of horse shit. We've had Bjorn Lomborg who thinks it is happening, but it's not that big a deal. Like, where are you on that? Yes. [00:19:01] Speaker 1: So this is one of the frustrations if you get involved with this because, of course, what you have with most of those characters there is that you have people on the opposite extremes. And people often say, well, to get the balance of the issue, you talk to the one side and then you talk to the other side. The vast majority of this issue lives in the middle. And it's not as simple as that, but nevertheless, let's start there. So the core science, the core science is the planet warming, is the human burning of fossil fuels causing it. is pretty clear. And, I mean, there are multiple streams of evidence that all point in the same direction. So when scientists say the science is settled, they're talking about that basic core which is supported by multiple streams of evidence, all of which are very, very straightforward and hard to argue with. And most of the sceptics now, bar a few of the out-and-out, you know, the scientific community is engaged in a conspiracy against us all types. They largely accept that much. The question then really comes through, well, so what? So what does that mean for what's going to happen in the future? And particularly then, what does that mean in terms of what we should do about it? And half the problem with climate change is that people conflate the two. So because the extreme campaigners go around trumpeting their version of the science, which is cherry-picked for the most doomist elements that they can find, then people will confuse their messaging with the scientific underpinning. And so it's very easy then if you're on a conservative mindset to say, well, you know, that is associated with those wild-eyed loons, therefore the whole thing is wrong. And that is a real mistake. What we have had in the UK over the last couple of decades has been a bit of a privilege in that both the conservative end and the socialist end all agreed on the core of reality. This is kind of what's happening and we could disagree about what we do about it. You know, you can have a conservative approach to tackling climate change. You can have a socialist approach to tackling climate change. There'll be some commonalities, there'll be lots of differences. That's what we should be arguing about and fighting about for sure. Let's deal with reality and then argue like cats in a bag about what we do about it. Fine. And then in America, you had, you know, something that was quite different. And I tend to think it's because Al Gore arose as an early spokesperson and that helped to polarise it because he was a very partisan figure. But for whatever reason, you've got one side that is going on the Extinction Rebellion end of the debate, shall we say, losing it, drifting in that direction. And then we've got the other side that's then on the Trumpian end drifting in the other direction. And they can't even agree on reality, which is a real problem. Now, I always thought that eventually what we had achieved would start to drift over there and moderate Republicans would start to pull things in. Moderate Democrats would start to pull things in. I kind of think it might be happening the other way round. Which is not good news, really. And part of that is because of the incompetence of our politicians. Because we have a conservative government that's not overly conservative. And what they are doing on net zero has some good underpinnings. But then they are also generally incompetent, I'm afraid. And then you've got people within the conservative party who are then lumping in the whole goal of net zero as part of what they dislike in that. And it's creating then the same dynamic, same political dynamic that we see in America. that could play out well and it could play out really badly. And it's too early to tell which way it's going to go. [00:22:53] Speaker 2: Man, I've got this question which I always ask people when it comes to this. On every issue you get your extreme on either side, right? And that always happens whatever issue you take. Fine. Why is it that you have the extreme left saying things, you know, we've only got 50 good harvests left, the world is doomed, all the rest of it. Look, they're entitled to their opinion. Maybe they're right, maybe they're not. I don't know. But then why is it that that opinion is then funneled into our kids and it's widely accepted and then the media start talking about it and we've got this generation of people who are completely terrified because they think one day they're going to wake up and the world's going to be on fire. [00:23:31] Speaker 3: Well, they probably won't wake up if it's on fire. [00:23:33] Speaker 1: Yeah, well, yes. This is a real problem. You're absolutely right. And one of the things that I discovered most surprised me the most when I started doing the YouTube deep dive videos where I did the research on these was just how often the campaign messages that I had entirely accepted were standard and I've seen people like Michael Gove repeating, you know, the government had entirely accepted. So as you looked into them, they fell apart. 50 harvests, that has come from nowhere. That has no scientific underpinning whatsoever. I think somebody tracked it back to where it was and it came from a campaign thing that was then misquoted and it's just not true. Simply not true. And yet it is repeated over and over to the point where through repetition it has become accepted as fact and then Michael Gove will repeat it because he accepts that it's a fact. And he is trustworthy as well. Obviously. Obviously. Well, he's such a good dancer. You couldn't possibly... So this is a real problem because then when you start to then take that as a education process for kids, then you are storing up these deeply ingrained attitudes then that become the next generation's instincts, their gut instincts about how they see the world. That is one of our biggest worries. And of course, it's always been the case that the teaching community who do fantastic jobs, many great teachers in there as a whole they tend to lean leftwards as we know. [00:25:06] Speaker 2: I would say they're very left-wing. [00:25:08] Speaker 1: Well, yeah. And they were when I was brought up and yeah. He's just who's [00:25:13] Speaker 3: attracted to that profession. [00:25:14] Speaker 1: Most of us survive our upbringing perfectly well and most kids are very quick to spot a certain amount of bullshit in their education. You know, there's a certain amount you can just relax a little bit. On the other hand, when it comes to something where they are absolutely encouraging your deepest insecurities and fears by saying, you know, the climate is going to hell in a handcart. There's one Extinction Rebellion person who goes to kids and says, you know, the issue isn't whether you're going to grow old, it's the issue of whether you're going to grow up. There's no science to support that whatsoever, but nevertheless, this is being pushed to kids. I don't know, [00:25:53] Speaker 3: have you seen millennials these days? They haven't grown up. We are millennials as well, so we're a testament. But look, Manon, you haven't quite addressed my earlier question, which I think is important to do if we're going to have this part of the conversation, which is, what is the truth about how dangerous climate change is, how quickly it's happening, what sort of measures might be sensible to consider in response, et cetera? Tell us that because I think that's really the answers that everybody's looking for is like, we keep being told there's a disaster. I don't think there is a disaster coming in the next 12 years as AOC said, we're all going to die. You know, all of that's not happening. So how urgent is the problem? How big is the problem? And what are some of the reasonable solutions that we might consider to it? [00:26:37] Speaker 1: Okay. The reason why this is so confusing is because media has pushed extreme scenarios. Yeah. Now, the IPCC, the body that collects together the science and publishes it and reports every few years, they produce a number of scenarios based on what we do because you can't predict the future without settling for how many fossil fuels are we going to burn in the meantime. On the basis of what we kind of said that we're going to do and the fact that we won't do all of it but we'll do some of it, you know, we're on a midstream scenario. The extreme worst case scenario is what tends to get often quoted and that's one of these problems thing called RCP 8.5 as it was and that has been one of the problems that always the clickbait journalism will talk about the extreme cases and so everyone thinks that this is going to happen imminently. That doesn't mean that there is no capacity for things to go seriously wrong, you know, in a timescale that we would care about. Yeah, that is absolutely a possibility. Is it a high probability? Not on the current basis but there's a high probability that there will be some problems that we need to deal with. Like what? So, one of the challenges that we have is that we have grown as a population onto this planet. The population is starting to even out but it is very, very high for the state of the planet that we have on and we are currently now using all the agricultural land as much land space, agricultural land as we're likely to have ever going forwards. So, we have hit a barrier there. We can make it more productive but we're not going to have any more. Now, the question is when you have 11 billion people as we will end up having dependent on particularly a number of breadbasket regions that have to be highly productive to feed all those people, you become very vulnerable to shocks to the system because you don't have very much resiliency left in the system. Okay, so you might be able to create new agricultural land further north as climate changes but then you will lose some in the tropics as they become less suitable for growing. We're not going to have a lot more than we've got. So then, if you get extreme weather events which we expect to get more of, you may well have several years in a row where you get severe shocks to food systems which will then have big knock-on effects throughout human society. Those are the sorts of things that are hard to map because they depend on certain shock events that will become more frequent happening in an unfortunate sequence and then the consequences could be very serious. Those are examples. Then, of course, there's the things like the rising sea levels and how much of human habitation is on coastal areas and the amount of disruption and cost that's going to cause and so on. I'm less worried about that because that will be expensive, it will be a pain in the backside but that's not life-threatening in the way that some of those other sort of key things are. Now, what should we do about it? Well, net zero is a policy goal that we absolutely have to do. Why? Because ultimately carbon dioxide stays around in the atmosphere for quite a long time. You have to stop adding to the natural carbon cycle. It is relatively in balance without our contribution but so long as we keep adding to it it's like an overflowing bath. You put more in and more in and it overflows and until we stop adding to it then it won't stabilise. It will always continue. Now, timescales should be as fast as possible but not faster and this is where we get the overlap into where people conflate the science with the policy because we've had a committee on climate change that have looked at all the different aspects of the electricity grid and industry and so on and what has to happen to change all of those. They did a reasonably good pragmatic practical job of looking at all of that and they came up with this we could get to net zero by 2050 with our system the way that it is working correctly so not laying waste to the economy in any way shape or form which is what we want. Maybe it's going to take a bit longer than that I would expect it to take a bit longer than that because circumstances and humans imperfect we will go there imperfectly and messily and two steps forward and one step back that's kind of how we are. Nevertheless that timescale is a reasonable one if we do it properly another 10 years is reasonable if we do it properly the question is we shouldn't try and do it faster than is feasible and the danger is that people are seeing it as a one variable problem just like the pandemic they saw the pandemic was a one variable problem COVID cases and we had to upend every single thing to bring COVID cases down which obviously didn't work anyway but in any case if the problem had been maximum human welfare then COVID is one variable amongst a number of variables and you're weighing up the cost of the different things that you're going to do about each of those different things and maybe you'd have ended up doing exactly the same probably not but at least you'd have been weighing up those different factors it's the same here you know the single variable in this case is CO2 but of course it isn't what we want is for human society to continue to flourish for people to be able to achieve their ambitions for themselves and to live out lives while preserving the natural world which keeps us alive life support systems and also keeping the climate within the bounds that will support our future going forwards [00:32:29] Speaker 2: Malin what would you say to the Bjorn Lomberg argument which is that if we introduce this what's going to happen is that energy prices are going to go through the roof for the average person that's going to give rise to ever more populist leaders who will then push back on it and then everything is doomed I don't think you said that you just added that from yourself I was nodding along that's a tabloid journalist in me we're all fucked no Bjorn asks some very good [00:33:01] Speaker 1: questions and the challenge I have with Bjorn is some of his evidence that he uses for his specific answers but he asks absolutely some of the right questions and when I say that net zero is a policy objective not a policy the point is there is no if you do this energy prices will go up because there's 20 things you can do and if you do it properly you should be able to do it in a way that means that energy prices don't go up and when you say properly what do you mean by [00:33:33] Speaker 3: that [00:33:33] Speaker 1: well so at the moment what we're doing is we are creating a morality around the use of fossil fuels that just says fossil fuels bad morally bad so you want to open up a new thing in the North Sea for gas bad don't do it new coal mine bad don't do it and yet if we are going to make any kind of sensible progress through to net zero by 2050 or 2060 then it's a taper and we're going to be using a lot of fossil fuels a declining amount of fossil fuels over a period of time now managing a declining industry is perfectly possible and companies can make perfectly good profit out of a declining industry they've done that all the time through history but it has to be a managed decline because as I think the head of BP said to the COP26 summit if you try to reduce the supply of a thing before you've reduced the demand then the prices go up and arguably that it's not the only thing that's been happening over the last year with energy prices but it's certainly been a big part of what has driven up energy prices so this approach that the ideologues have and sadly some of the ideologues are in government as well which is simply to push away anything to do with fossil fuels rather than saying we've got a plan over the next 10 years we're going to use this amount of fossil fuels and it's going to decline to that how do we supply this in the most cost effective way in the way that gives us most energy security and so on and so on [00:35:07] Speaker 3: 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 as 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 [00:35:38] Speaker 1: yes although I don't think that that is entirely true in that certainly some of the alternative forms of energy have become cheaper like what well the renewable forms of energy have become cheaper so wind solar they're cheaper than burning yes however the flip side of that is that you need to they are intermittent forms so you need to either be able to store the energy that they create or you need to find a way to fill in when they're not produced so that's [00:36:12] Speaker 3: what I mean overall as a package it's not cheaper at this point or work without fossil whatever way you want to put it it's not a viable alternative that is cheaper as well [00:36:23] Speaker 1: 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 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 that's reassuring 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 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 there's a climate crisis we're also going to be anti nuclear and you sit there and 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 [00:38:36] Speaker 3: 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 [00:38:43] Speaker 1: 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 so forth but 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 [00:39:25] Speaker 3: no he did say you're going to get more bolsonaros yeah yes exactly that was his exact words [00:39:30] Speaker 1: absolutely right because the technocrats 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 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 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 [00:41:57] Speaker 2: and it's also as well you're not going to win hearts and minds in doing that and if you really want this green revolution as it is to work you're going to need that you're going to need ordinary people to buy in but if you're saying to people oh you can't fly and you're not going to be able to eat meat yet you see the elites doing that very thing flying around the world and doing the things which you aren't allowed to do anymore people aren't going to buy in [00:42:22] Speaker 1: yes and part of the problem is people are thinking of it as a green revolution because the thing that they would most hate is for us to solve the problem of climate change to create a world that looks exactly like it does right now but without climate change [00:42:38] Speaker 3: this is what I was going to ask you melons because I tell you what I see in it as well there is a broader thing going on in western society which partly I cover in my book which is there's a sort of self-loathing in the west and the reason I think a lot of people feel quite antagonistic to this green shit is that it's like you want people to suffer you want to take away from people the things that they enjoy because we are bad because of colonialism and industrialisation and whatever else that the west you want us to suffer for that and this is your punishment we're going to raise your energy prices you're not going to have any meat you're not going to travel anywhere there's a sort of like they love that shit they love to feel like they're taking things away from people that we must be punished for our sins I think it feels like that to a lot of people and COVID did as well and COVID the same [00:43:31] Speaker 1: yes but the important thing is not to confuse that mindset which is alive and well in the heads of the extreme environmental campaigners and then a number of other mouthpieces I mean you will see echoes of that in various places definitely you still have to divorce that from the actual core science that says yeah we still have a pragmatic problem that we have to do something about and the challenge is always when people conflate the two because it's very easy to fight back against that mindset and to believe that that's the whole thing [00:44:04] Speaker 3: but I'm with you I'm like look if you need if you want to raise my taxes to invest in better nuclear energy go for it if you want to raise my taxes to make sure that the energy we use is used efficiently and we're not wasting like to me resource depletion is a big problem pollution is a massive problem go for it I'm happy to pay more money if that's what I need to do for those things to be addressed what I don't like though is that tinge of punitive action for the sins of my forebearers and I think maybe you're right it's about the way it's being marketed perhaps yes [00:44:41] Speaker 1: and it's the sense that as we said earlier on that all the communications are now campaign communications and of course we've seen this finesse to a fine art with the pandemic with the use of a nudge unit to manipulate us gently and subtly to complying and this is a real problem because they've already started producing documents looking at well how do you start to nudge people into the right behaviours on climate change now in the one sense it's a fair question and discussion to have to say well if people's behaviours are less than optimal for themselves how would you encourage them to address that how would you encourage to change that you know if a higher percentage of America is obese than really should be the case and is the case anywhere else why is that and actually telling them that they're dreadful people and they should change probably isn't going to work so what would work asking the question of how you persuade people that's one thing but manipulating them in a way that they don't even notice you're doing marketers do it all the time but there's got to be a line now marketers do it all the time you go into a supermarket you probably won't even notice there's a smell of freshly baked bread in the air and it won't occur to you that there's no bakery in that supermarket because they've worked out that if there's that lovely scent or freshly ground coffee people buy more and they're subtly influencing you to buy more okay so we know that corporates are sort of borderline evil but at the end of the day that is relatively harmless relatively harmless I don't mind that particularly maybe some people do but if they're going to work out [00:46:28] Speaker 3: you can go to a different supermarket if you want or not shop in supermarkets you can't go to a different country not really [00:46:33] Speaker 1: no that's true but you go into the supermarket you don't know that's what they're doing you know it's all very subliminal in that sort of sense but if they're going to use subliminal techniques to scare you because of the pandemic and they want you to stay at home and then suddenly everyone is so terrified they want the government to lock down again and so the government locks down again because that's what everybody wants but everybody wanted it because the government scared them in the first place what the heck is going on with that if you're going to do that with climate change then yes you are going to have populist reaction and deservedly so hey Konstantin [00:47:10] Speaker 3: do you love trigonometry of course incredible interviews hilarious live streams hard hitting satire plus my handsome jawline [00:47:18] Speaker 2: whatever takes away from your hairline but if you do love trigonometry and you want to support us there's only one place to do that and that's on Locals [00:47:27] Speaker 3: yes Locals is a brilliant platform that has been incredibly supportive to our show and other problematic creators [00:47:35] Speaker 2: the great thing about Locals is that it's a community for people who love trigonometry [00:47:40] Speaker 3: that's right it's a place for you to hang out with like-minded people share thoughts memes and discuss the show you can enjoy it for free but it also gives you [00:47:48] Speaker 2: the option of supporting us for as little [00:47:50] Speaker 3: as $7 a month and if you want to give more you can we have incredible rewards for our higher tier supporters as well we've got everything from mugs monthly group calls and one on two chats with me and KK get in join our community by hitting the link in the description and the pinned comment below see you there guys [00:48:09] Speaker 1: you know I said to Roger Hallam we were joking about you know my time in my peace movement days and you know lots of me and my colleagues were in jail like he's going to jail now he said oh I'm Alan you should get back into that I said it's fine Roger when you take over I'll be in jail soon enough and I absolutely hold to that where we are going the rise of the soft authoritarianism of ultimately where this takes you there are some real confrontations coming [00:48:44] Speaker 2: and that's such a good point because there is I remember talking with a friend who is conspiratorial in nature and at the start of the pandemic I'd say he's a conspiracy theorist but now he just looks like he's sort of a prophet if I'm going to be honest with you and he actually said to me can you imagine in 5 years or 10 years or maybe even 20 years can you rule out lockdowns for climate change and then I thought about it and I was going to scoff at him and I thought after everything that's happened I genuinely can't [00:49:14] Speaker 1: yeah I think I still would I'm still holding on to reality by my fingernails I think that's what I think I'm doing anyway I might be kidding myself largely because it's such a slow burn thing it wouldn't make sense now okay there's quite a lot of things that we've done over the last couple of years that didn't necessarily make sense but nevertheless with a virus with a pandemic it is demonstrably a short term thing you get short term waves and so on but there is nothing to do with the release of CO2 into the atmosphere that is that short term where locking down is going to make a huge amount of difference and it didn't [00:49:51] Speaker 3: well lockdown is a word what you could say is and by the way I'm not his conspiratorially minded friend I'm just playing devil's advocate here but you could say look you know there's no lockdown you just you can only drive a certain number of miles a year without a special permit and you can only have one flight a year unless you're going to visit a family member who's on their deathbed or for a funeral or you can only have X number of kilograms of beef chicken pork whatever a year like all we're really talking about is restricting people's freedom to do what they think is the right thing for them based on the argument that we've got you know yes [00:50:31] Speaker 1: well that vision that vision is definitely a possibility and great for me this is absolutely it's a possibility in the same way that [00:50:41] Speaker 3: can I have that spliff now please at least I'll feel better about it [00:50:46] Speaker 1: the alternative possibility on the other wing is the Trumpian future where the populist backlash means that we say sod all that we don't believe any of it anyway so we're just going to you know burn while we can and there is somewhere in the middle on all of this but ultimately if the middle bit fails if the centre fails to hold as they say one of those two is the extremes we can lurch to and maybe we'll lurch to the one and then in reaction to that we'll end up being pulled back to the other but ultimately the game is to avoid either and that means really trying to bring us back to away from the polarised state that we've become in back to the sensible centre this country used to run does it still run I think it still runs I'm not sure anymore it used to run on the centre because our electoral system works so we vote for a government they get in there's a lot of counter evidence to that lately I have to say but you're right [00:51:52] Speaker 3: you're absolutely right but they govern I'm just joking you're absolutely correct [00:51:56] Speaker 1: and then if they mess it up we can then boot them out yes now that pushes people back to the centre yes by and large and the various parties their fortunes have risen and fallen when they've tacked to the centre and when they've been competent and most of the elections have been fought and lost on competence every now and then we'll get one where we've got two incompetents that doesn't happen that often whereas in America they can't govern they've got gridlock so bad that basically whoever gets in they're not really governing at all so they never have consequences because they can always point to the other side and say we would have done great things but they stopped us and that therefore has created the incentive for them to drift further and further to the extremes whereas if you were able to govern if Biden was elected and they say okay you run the government you want to do stupid stuff you can do it you're the government now and that would that would actually sort them out pretty quickly because then they will be held accountable for their actions and that would be a very sobering thing now we have had that I think over the last few decades are we still there I don't know the Brexit non-Brexit dynamic the populist movement stuff it's very hard to see where our core now is but if it's still there as I think it is then there's everything to play for in tacking to the centre the problem is we have a government that won't fight for its vision when Margaret Thatcher first talked about climate change she argued the case why conservatives were the natural home for those who care about the environment and you could agree with her case as you could not but she put forward a conservative case why they were better on the environment and the Labour Party would put forward their case why they were better and you understood the visions that were being put forward what vision has the current government [00:53:50] Speaker 3: got around net zero well that's what vision has the current government got around anything it's because you don't have any Margaret Thatchers anymore that's why [00:53:57] Speaker 1: so you've got the extremist campaigners saying the world is going to end and we have to do all this stuff who's arguing with them when I was there arguing for nuclear disarmament in my naive charming way the government was saying don't do what he said he's an idiot and they were kind of right although I had a point as well but they put the case they made the argument they said if we don't address this argument and explain why we need to do what we need to do the public won't understand why we're doing it and we're just simply not doing that the conservative government has no conservative vision for net zero so the conservatives in the party are saying what's this net zero stuff about this isn't conservative and then the people on the outside are looking at extinction rebellion and they're thinking well that's what net zero must be about and that's one of the reasons why people are conflating the science with the extreme campaign solution [00:54:54] Speaker 2: and the problem is as well is if a government doesn't have a clear vision then it gives credence to all the nutters at the far left and far right [00:55:02] Speaker 3: well I think that was the point that you were making and this is like I said if you had a government whether they were Labour or Tory frankly went look we've got this problem the science is pretty clear we've got this problem that's looming we need to invest in technology to solve this problem right and that's why a portion of our budget will go towards what is the best form of nuclear energy how do we get wind and solar how do we design better batteries Elon Musk here is a grant whatever right what sensible person would go no actually I think this is all bollocks I don't think anyone would I mean some people would of course but the vast majority of people will be like well okay that's fair enough I mean we spend a billion here a billion now and other stuff if we threw a few billion at finding new technology that's going to address some of these issues but that isn't the way the conversation has been had and you're right it is on the government because they're not engaging aggressively yes with this nonsense and going look we think the climate is important and here's our plan to deal with it and Greta Thunberg needs to go back to school right if they did that you would have a much easier time of convincing people to get support behind the cause [00:56:16] Speaker 1: yes absolutely and of course Greta is now old enough to be wrong so this is interesting at the COP26 conference it was the first time when she wasn't invited onto the main platform you'll have noticed and she said her usual thing about oh they're all going blah blah blah and they're not doing anything and the first time there were news stories that were appearing saying Greta it was very gentle and it was very respectful but it's saying actually we think Greta might be wrong about this I thought well she's come of age she would say whatever she liked before and people found it charming but if you're these people in that conference hall who have been working and slaving trying to make this thing work trying to make you know it's really genuinely difficult what we are trying to do has never been done before it is incredibly difficult and they're going to make it make mistakes and get it wrong and do all sorts of things nevertheless they've been really trying to do it having someone say blah what you do equals nothing charming when they're 15 not so much when they're 19 which is why she's outside the conference because that's where outsiders live and it's up to her because they would let her in as part of the process but you have to stop being an outsider if you're going to do that and she can't do it because she's become part of that extreme campaign group community and their messages are not the messages of the insiders trying to work solutions they're not interested in solutions no what does Extinction Rebellion want to happen they can't tell you they won't tell you they won't point at a policy because there are no policies that would deliver zero emissions in five years that wouldn't throw hundreds upon hundreds of millions of people into poverty again if you were looking at it as a multivariable problem you would have way more people dying if you do what they say than climate change would ever be killing poverty has killed way more people through history [00:58:11] Speaker 2: what would you say to this argument and I'm not for Extinction Rebellion at all but what they have done is they've brought this issue into the forefront of everyone's minds they've publicised it we now talk about it they're on the front page of every newspaper isn't there something to be said for that? not really [00:58:32] Speaker 1: it's largely recency bias we were talking about it before we were go back and look we were talking about this already to the point of nauseam before this happened and it's the same with any campaigning movement you know I was in the peace movement when they got rid of nuclear cruise missiles the people in the campaign were saying ah we did that and I looked at it I thought nah we didn't there was all this geopolitics as to why that happened and then ultimately the Soviet Union collapsed because we outspent them there were those dynamics that led to that outcome peace movement actually had very little to do with it they kept the issues alive in the general population if that was a vehicle for change in that particular instance then yeah that would have been fine but it wasn't and it isn't so in this case constantly reminding people about climate change how does that help particularly the government was already working on the Committee on Climate Change process that predated Extinction Rebellion forming they produced their report then after they just started and the government said yep we will sign up to that report that's been three years in the making and Extinction Rebellion said yes we did that no you didn't no you didn't not at all now look I don't want to decry it because I was there and most of the people who sign up to the movement are doing it because they're scared for the future and that's not an irrational thing to be you know you can be pushed too far with that nevertheless as a young person it's correct to be concerned and they just want to do something and to be heard that doesn't go for the likes of you know the political activists behind the movement and you know I interviewed Roger and you know he's a very nice amiable guy but you know he is a political activist he's a far left activist who wants to overthrow the state hasn't got a hope in hell of doing it but nevertheless that's his modus operandi that ain't going to create the sort of change that is going to make anyone's lives any better and I think the sooner you call that out and say yes the issue is important but this process that was going on before isn't being pushed by that movement per se then we can start to have sensible conversations about well what actually needs to change because what they are doing is distracting attention they're saying something big needs to happen and something is already happening and the question is no one's paying attention and holding that accountable because they're involved with this cartoon level discussion that's going on over here so at the moment the government isn't being held accountable for net zero why is that? because none of the opposition parties disagree with the objective of net zero and because all communications are now campaign communications they won't criticise them on this because it won't be helpful now that's not how political opposition is supposed to work the only people who are providing real political opposition at the moment are the anti net zero people the people who wouldn't do any of it at all who have done things like demanding the committee on climate change release their costings for their programme and they refused to do it so they took them to court and they were able to say well look some of these figures don't add up and that should be happening because of course they're probably cutting corners and doing things that people do when they think no one's looking because that's what happens that's not a political thing that just happens bureaucracy politics everyone gets away with what they think they'll get away with that's why you have scrutiny and so if the political parties are not going to scrutinise the government on this area because it's all campaign messaging that is a real problem for us and then Extinction Rebellion are over there saying well we need to overthrow the government doesn't actually help that conversation at all [01:02:29] Speaker 3: I don't know mate the longer this shit goes on the more I start to agree with them but Melon it's been an absolute pleasure really genuinely and to have this conversation from a sensible perspective is quite reassuring frankly in some ways so thank you for coming on before we ask not only our last question on the interview but also our special questions for locals tell everybody where they can find your work online and follow up on this chat and find more of the things that you're putting out there [01:02:55] Speaker 1: so most of my content goes on to my YouTube channel if you just simply search on YouTube for Melon Baker that will come up and I also have a website at malonbaker.net and then little bits dribble out there I'm on Twitter at Malon Baker [01:03:11] Speaker 2: thank you very much [01:03:14] Speaker ?: thank you very much [01:03:14] Speaker 2: Malon before we go to our local questions we always have our one final question which is what's the one thing we're not talking about but we really should be [01:03:22] Speaker 1: well I think that we're spoilt for choice to be honest I'm going to give you two quick ones rather than just for one so one quick one is how different the economic dynamic is going to be as we move on to a stable or declining population base our thriving economy of the last 50 to 100 years has been based on a rapidly increasing population already with China because they don't allow a huge amount of immigration they're now suddenly confronting the real constraints that a stable population is going to throw they are an emerging superpower they're about to overtake America and suddenly they're bumping in to this democratic real issue and that is going to change all these equations it's all very well Bjorn Lombel coming on here and saying well of course in 100 years with the economic growth that's going to be happening yeah but all of that is based on what happened in the past and what's coming in the future is demonstrably going to be different because we can't negotiate our way around that we can't have 20 billion people in 100 years so that is going to make a big difference the other thing I would say is the huge difference that the emergence of artificial intelligence is going to make on the battlefield so military technology with artificial intelligence is pushing us logically into where we were 30 years ago with nuclear weapons it's just that it will be very easy for us to miss the fact that we've entered a new paradigm of destruction before we unleash it you know with nuclear weapons we worked out very quickly that this had achieved the scale where the disincentive to use them kicked in you know generally if we had it we used it and it kicked in to say ah no maybe we shouldn't we nearly did we came very close but we didn't artificial intelligence on the battlefield is going to the same singularity particularly what the Chinese want to do which is to use artificial intelligence to mean that things move too fast for humans to keep up with to understand what's going on you know the West is saying we do not want that to happen we always want a human decision maker to be the one who decides whether somebody dies you do not want AI making that decision the Chinese are saying well that's the wusses the whole power of AI is going to be that it can think a lot faster than human beings ever can and you start to build that into a swarm of a thousand tiny drones all sorts of things that can completely change the nature of what we think of as a balance of power in the world as we understand it at the moment we should probably be talking about that a little bit more than we are that's cheered me up yeah it's great it's basically like YouTube's algorithm [01:06:13] Speaker 3: with drones that's what you want yeah fantastic exactly Malin it's been an absolute pleasure I'm sure we'll have you back to talk about more stuff we've got to wrap up here though so thank you for being here and thank you for watching and listening we will see you very soon with another brilliant interview like this one or or show all of them go out at 7pm UK time [01:06:34] Speaker 2: and for those of you who like your trigonometry on the go it's also available as a podcast take care and see you soon guys [01:06:41] Speaker 1: state level communism has been terrible for the environment by and large whenever it's been pushed to scale you