This 1% of humanity uses its awesome power to manipulate societal aspirations and the narratives around climate change. These extend from well-funded advertising to pseudo-technical solutions, from the financialisation of carbon emissions (and increasingly, nature) to labelling extreme any meaningful narrative that questions inequality and power.

The Conversation’s senior editor had pulled the piece at the last minute, claiming it was “too polemical”. Unfortunately, the senior editor didn’t elaborate on their judgement (or contact me directly), so I can only guess that they were uncomfortable with my direct language and reference to the “generally supine media” – concerns all too easily hidden behind the façade of “too polemical”.

the actual capture was about 7 million tons of carbon dioxide that's under 2 hours of global C2 emissions now that's after 20 00:02:57 years of the gates of this world being p pushing that technology so we captured was it .198 I think per of our CO2 emissions in 2021 and the global CCS Institute said 00:03:14 that if all of their plans come to fruition then by about 2030 we might capture about 45 to 49 million tons so about 1% of all of our carbon dioxide

we have to be very careful when we respond to climate change we're not exacerbating the other ones that are there and 00:12:34 ideally we want to try and respond to all of these challenges at the same time and there are a lot of crossovers between them but there are also real risks that sometimes you you solve one thing and cause another now in contemporary Society we have been very 00:12:47 good at reductionist thinking of of silos of thinking one bit and then causing another problem elsewhere we we don't have that opportunity anymore we have to start to think of these issues at a system level

This 1% of humanity uses its awesome power to manipulate societal aspirations and the narratives around climate change.

Our choice to fail over the last 30 years has brought us to this position. And a way out of that, a way out of the Marshall Plan, is to say we can have these negative emissions 00:34:42 I think we need to say that, okay that's one way out of it – if they work. Another way out of it is the Marshall Plan. And so we need to open that that dialogue up. but we've... in effect, I think the IAMs have closed that dialogue,. Which is one of the reasons, going back to... It would be interesting to see other parts of the world looking at this, because, I would have a guess, when we say 'that's not feasible', many people elsewhere in the world are saying 'well of course it's feasible, we've been doing... we've been living like that for years!'

t I think there is a risk that we end up being 'activists for the status quo' by being silent.

we have been happy to engage with CEOs, with the senior policy makers, with the 'Davos set'. We've been happy to engage with them – across, generally, the sort of more senior climate change academics. But they haven't delivered for 30 years. But what we haven't... Who we very seldom engage with – the balance, to me, is wrong – with citizenry groups. We haven't engaged... with the climate parliament group. So we haven't lent... 00:58:06 Our support has been biased towards a group who are very much in favor of the status quo.

I hope anyway, it is a hope – that there will be some sort of partnership between bottom-up and top-down that will provide guidance to leaders to put the right things in place.

Professor Büchs said

hese challenges demand an ethos not of technologicalcleverness, but of social prudence, of acting with humility and cautionwhen confronted by risk and uncertainty. The French philosopherHans Jonas calls this the “imperative of responsibility.”

Net Zero

Wealthy countries can create prosperity while using less materials and energy if they abandon economic growth as an objective.

our Focus isn't on temperature we're not really interested in temperature what we're really interested in is the rate of change of impacts 00:05:34 so if the impacts that we're seeing from climate change occurred over a million years so what if they came over 500 years becomes a bit more important if they curve over 20 years it becomes incredibly important so it's the time frame over which the impact's occurring that's really 00:05:47 important and this this language of temperature is just a proxy for the change in impacts

what do we really need to do for real zero for 1.5 degrees centigrade and very much I'm framing this around carbon budgets so if anyone's heard me speak before nothing 00:01:37 significantly changed other than another 40 billion tons of carbon Dockside has been put in the atmosphere

first i think it's important to remember that net zero is a new phrase it's it's nothing we haven't had newton this language of net zero this framing of net zero is is something just appeared just in 00:11:54 the last few years if you look at the sr 1.5 report 2018 in the summary for policy makers then um it's mentioned 16 times if you look at the ar-5 the previous report from the ipcc and their synthesis report 00:12:06 for the summary for policy makers it's not mentioned once you look in the the committee on climate uk committee on climate change's sixth budget report and it's it's a long report 427 pages 00:12:18 it's on numerous times on every page it's somewhere between it's referred to somewhere between three thousand and five thousand times they use the expression net zero look at the previous fifth budget report from the committee on 00:12:31 climate change in 2015 it's not mentioned once now it is true to say that the language of net cumulative missions in various ways has been referred to if you like within the science but the appealing translation and the 00:12:44 ubiquitous use of net zero by everyone is a very new phenomena and one i think that we've taken on board unproblematically because it allows us to to basically um avoid near-term action on climate 00:12:57 change and we can hide all sorts behind it so it's important to recognize that net zero net zero 2050 net zero 20 20 45 for sweden firstly this is not based on the concept of a total carbon budget 00:13:10 and it's interesting note that the uk previously had legislation that was based on the total carbon budget for the uk as i mean i think the budget was too large but it was deemed to be an appropriate contribution to staying below 2 degrees centigrade but now 00:13:24 that's gone now we simply have this net zero 2050 framing so this whole language it moves the debate from what we need to do today which is what carbon budgets force us to 00:13:36 face it moves it off to some far-off point 2045 or 2050 which we have to think about that in which which policymakers in sweden and the uk will still be policymakers in 2045 and 50 they'll either be dead 00:13:49 or retired as indeed with the scientists that are behind a lot of this net zero language so it's in that sense it's we are passing that net zero is a is a generational passing of the challenge of the buck um to our children and our children's 00:14:02 children it's also worth bearing in mind that net zero typically assumes some sort of multi-layered form of substitution between different greenhouse gases so carbon dioxide for me thing between different sources 00:14:15 carbon dioxide from a car can be compared with agricultural fertilizer and nitrous oxide emissions but these these are very different things but across decades a flight carbon dioxide 00:14:27 from a flight we take today can be considered in relation to carbon capture in a tree that's planted in 2050 that's growing in 2070. this assumption within net zero that a ton is a ton is a ton regardless of different 00:14:40 chemistries different atmospheric lifetimes of the gases in the atmosphere and and different levels of certainty and indeed levels of risk and hugely different things this is this is incredibly dangerous and again it's another 00:14:52 it's another thing that makes net zero attractive and appealing in a machiavellian way because it allows us to hide all sorts of things behind this language of net zero the other thing about net zero is that 00:15:07 perhaps with no exceptions but typically anyway it relies on huge planetary scale carbon dioxide removal cdrs often well that's the latest acronym i'm sure there'll be another one out in the next year or two 00:15:20 um carbon dioxide removal captures two important elements first negative emission technologies nets as they're often referred to and second nature-based solutions um nbs so these two approaches one is sort of 00:15:32 using technology to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and the other one is using various nature-based approaches like planting trees or peat bog restoration and things like this that are claimed to absorb carbon dioxide 00:15:45 and just to get a sense of the scale of negative emissions that's assumed in almost every single 1.5 and 2 degree scenario at the global level but indeed at national levels as well we're typically assuming hundreds of 00:15:57 billions of tons of carbon dioxide being absorbed from the atmosphere most of it is post 2050 and quite a lot of it is beyond 2100 again look at those dates who in the scientific community that's 00:16:09 promoting these who in the policy realm that's promoting these is going to be still at work working in 2015 and 2100 some of the early career researchers possibly some of the younger policymakers but most of us will 00:16:21 will say be dead or um or retired by them and just have another flavor if those numbers don't mean a lot to you what we're assuming here is that technologies that are today at best small pilot schemes will be 00:16:34 ramped up in virtually every single scenario to something that's that's akin to the current um global oil and gas industry that sort of size now that would be fine if it's one in ten scenarios or you know five and a 00:16:47 hundred scenarios but when virtually every scenario is doing that it demonstrates the deep level of systemic bias that we've got now that we've all bought into this language of net zero so it's not to outline my position on 00:16:59 carbon dioxide removal because it's often said that i'm opposed to it and that's simply wrong um i i would like just to see a well-funded research and development programs into negative emission technologies nature-based solutions and so forth 00:17:12 and potentially deploy them if they meet stringent sustainability criteria and i'll just reiterate that stringent sustainability criteria but we should mitigate we should cut our emissions today assuming that these carbon dioxide removal techniques of one 00:17:25 sort or another do not work at scale and another important factor to bear in mind here and there's a lot of double counting that gotham goes on here as far as i can tell anyway is that we're going to require some level of carbon 00:17:36 dioxide removal because there's going to be a lot of residual greenhouse gas emissions not you know not co2 principally methane and n2o nitroxites and fertilizer use um we're going to come from agriculture anyway if you're going to feed 9 billion 00:17:49 people now quite what those numbers are there's a lot of uncertainty but somewhere probably around 6 to 10 billion tons of carbon dioxide equivalent every single year so we'll have to find some way of compensating for the warming from feeding the world's population and certainly there are plenty of things we 00:18:01 can do with our food eating habits and with our agricultural practices but nonetheless it still looks like there will be a lot of emissions from the agricultural sector and therefore we need to have real zero emissions 00:18:14 from energy we cannot be using all of these other techniques nets mbs and so forth to allow us to carry on with our high energy use net zero has become if you like a policy 00:18:28 framework for all and some argue and there's been some question discussion in some of the um journalist papers around climate change recently saying well actually that's what it's one of its real strengths is it brings everyone together 00:18:40 but in my view it it's so vague that it seriously undermines the need for immediate and deep cuts and emissions so i can see some merit in a in an approach that does bring people together but if it sells everything out in that process then i think it's actually more 00:18:53 dangerous than it is of benefit and i think net zero very much falls into that category i just like to use the uk now as an example of why i come to that conclusion

it's really worth reading some of the things 00:18:00 that they're saying on climate change now and so what about 2 degrees C that's the 46th pathway that's the thousand Gigaton pathway the two degrees so you 00:18:13 look at the gap but between those two just an enormous that's where where no English edding we're all part of this and that's where we know we have to go from the science and that's where we keep telling other parts of the world begun to try to achieve the problem with 00:18:26 that and there's an engineer this is quite depressing in some respects is that this part at the beginning where we are now is too early for low-carbon supply you cannot build your way out of this with bits of engineering kit and 00:18:39 that is quite depressing because that leaves us with the social implications of what you have to do otherwise but I just want to test that assumption just think about this there's been a lot of discussion I don't know about within Iceland but in the UK quite a lot me 00:18:51 environmentalist have swapped over saying they think nuclear power is the answer or these one of the major answers to this and I'm I remain agnostic about nuclear power yeah it's very low carbon five to 15 grams of carbon dioxide per 00:19:03 kilowatt hour so it's it's similar to renewables and five to ten times lower than carbon capture and storage so nuclear power is very low carbon it has lots of other issues but it's a very low carbon but let's put a bit of 00:19:15 perspective on this we totally we consume in total about a hundred thousand ten watts hours of energy around the globe so just a very large amount of energy lots of energy for those of you I'm not familiar with these units global electricity consumption is 00:19:30 about 20,000 tarantella patelliday hours so 20% of lots of energy so that's our electricity nuclear provides about 11 a half percent of the electricity around the globe of what we consume of our 00:19:42 final energy consumption so that means nuclear provides about two-and-a-half percent of the global energy demand about two and a half percent that's from 435 nuclear power stations provide two 00:19:56 and a half percent of the world's energy demand if you wanted to provide 25% of the world's energy demand you'd probably need something in the region of three or four thousand new nuclear power stations to be built in the next 30 00:20:08 years three or four thousand new nuclear power stations to make a decent dent in our energy consumption and that assumes our energy consumptions remain static and it's not it's going up we're building 70 so just to put some sense 00:20:21 honest you hear this with every technology whether it's wind wave tidal CCS all these big bits of it technology these are going to solve the problem you cannot build them fast enough to get away from the fact that we're going to 00:20:34 blow our carbon budget and that's a really uncomfortable message because no one wants to hear that because the repercussions of that are that we have to reduce our energy demand so we have to reduce demand now now it is really 00:20:48 important the supply side I'm not saying it's not important it is essential but if we do not do something about the men we will not be able to hold to to probably even three degrees C and that's a global analysis and the iron would be 00:21:00 well we have signed up repeatedly on the basis of equity and when we say that we normally mean the poorer parts of the world would be allowed to we'll be able to peak their emissions later than we will be able to in the West that seems a 00:21:13 quite a fair thing that probably but no one would really argue I think against the idea of poor parts the world having a bit more time and space before they move off fossil fuels because there that links to their welfare to their improvements that use of energy now 00:21:27 let's imagine that the poor parts the world the non-oecd countries and I usually use the language of non annex 1 countries for those people who are familiar with that sort of IPCC language let's imagine that those parts of the 00:21:39 world including Indian China could peak their emissions by 2025 that is hugely challenging I think is just about doable if we show some examples in the West but I think it's just about past possible as 00:21:51 the emissions are going up significantly they could peak by 2025 before coming down and if we then started to get a reduction by say 2028 2029 2030 of 6 to 8 percent per annum which again is a 00:22:02 massive reduction rate that is a big challenge for poor parts of the world so I'm not letting them get away with anything here that's saying if they did all of that you can work out what carbon budget they would use up over the century and then you know what total carbon budget is for two degree 00:22:16 centigrade and you can say what's left for us the wealthy parts of the world that seems quite a fair way of looking at this and if you do it like that what's that mean for us that means we'd have to have and I'm redoing this it now 00:22:28 and I think it's really well above 10% because this is based on a paper in 2011 which was using data from 2009 to 10 so I think this number is probably been nearly 13 to 15 percent mark now but about 10 percent per annum reduction 00:22:40 rate in emissions year on year starting preferably yesterday that's a 40 percent reduction in our total emissions by 2018 just think their own lives could we reduce our emissions by 40 percent by 00:22:52 2018 I'm sure we could I'm sure we'll choose not to but sure we could do that but at 70 percent reduction by 2020 for 20-25 and basically would have to be pretty much zero carbon emissions not just from electricity from everything by 00:23:06 2030 or 2035 that sort of timeframe that just this that's just the simple blunt maths that comes out of the carbon budgets and very demanding reduction rates from poorer parts of the world now 00:23:19 these are radical emission reduction rates that we cannot you say you cannot build your way out or you have to do it with with how we consume our energy in the short term now that looks too difficult well what about four degrees six that's what you hear all the time that's too difficult so what about four 00:23:31 degrees C because actually the two degrees C we're heading towards is probably nearer three now anyway so I'm betting on your probabilities so let's think about four degrees C well what it gives you as a larger carbon budget and we all like that because it means I can 00:23:43 attend more fancy international conferences and we can come on going on rock climbing colleges in my case you know we can all count on doing than living the lives that we like so we quite like a larger carbon budget low rates of mitigation but what are the 00:23:54 impacts this is not my area so I'm taking some work here from the Hadley Centre in the UK who did some some analysis with the phone and Commonwealth Office but you're all probably familiar with these sorts of things and there's a range of these impacts that are out there a four degree C global average 00:24:07 means you're going to much larger averages on land because mostly over most of the planet is covered in oceans and they take longer to warm up but think during the heat waves what that might play out to mean so during times 00:24:18 when we're already under stress in our societies think of the European heat wave I don't know whether it got to Iceland or not and in 2003 well it was it was quite warm in the West Europe too warm it's probably much nicer 00:24:31 in Iceland and there were twenty to thirty thousand people died across Europe during that period now add eight degrees on top of that heat wave and it could be a longer heat wave and you start to think that our infrastructure start to break down the 00:24:45 cables that were used to bring power to our homes to our fridges to our water pumps those cables are underground and they're cooled by soil moisture as the soil moisture evaporates during a prolonged heatwave those cables cannot 00:24:56 carry as much power to our fridges and our water pumps so our fridges and water pumps can no longer work some of them will be now starting to break down so the food and our fridges will be perishing at the same time that our neighbors food is perishing so you live 00:25:08 in London eight million people three days of food in the whole city and it's got a heat wave and the food is anybody perishing in the fridges so you think you know bring the food from the ports but the similar problems might be happening in Europe and anyway the tarmac for the roads that we have in the 00:25:19 UK can't deal with those temperatures so it's melting so you can't bring the food up from the ports and the train lines that we put in place aren't designed for those temperatures and they're buckling so you can't bring the trains up so you've got 8 million people in London 00:25:31 you know in an advanced nation that is start to struggle with those sorts of temperature changes so even in industrialized countries you can imagine is playing out quite negatively a whole sequence of events not looking particulate 'iv in China look at the 00:25:44 building's they're putting up there and some of this Shanghai and Beijing and so forth they've got no thermal mass these buildings are not going to be good with high temperatures and the absolutely big increases there and in some parts of the states could be as high as 10 or 12 00:25:56 degrees temperature rises these are all a product of a 4 degree C average temperature

What may be required, therefore, is a significant reduction of societal demand for all resources, of all kinds.”

An in-depth 2021 study by Simon Michaux at the Geological Survey of Finland illustrated this inconvenient reality. It calculated that to replace a single coal-fired powered plant of average size producing seven terawatt-hours per year of energy would require the construction of 213 average sized solar farms or 87 wind turbine array facilities. Renewables just have to work harder. The global economy currently operates 46,423 power stations running on all types of energy, but mostly fossil fuels noted Michaux. To green the sector up and still keep the lights on will require the construction of 221,594 new power plants within the next 30 years.

They also ignore that it took 160 years to build the current energy system at a time when petroleum and minerals were abundant and cheap. Now they propose to “electrify the Titantic” as ecologist William Ophuls puts it, at a time of expensive fossil fuels, indebted financial systems and mineral shortages.

The indicative potential of demand-side strategies across all sectors to reduce emissions is 40-70%15by 2050 (high confidence)

“low-hanging fruit”

let's stop let's just stop doing it and let's let's find other ways of measuring quality of life other than being flooded 00:21:22 by this great tide of plastic and metal and electronics 99 of which we simply do not need to live a good life

this is a fundamental issue of justice and equity so the top one percent uh in 00:09:22 terms of wealth around the world use 15 produce 15 of the greenhouse gas emissions which is twice as much as the bottom 50 percent whose total 00:09:34 emissions are just seven percent of the total so we're looking at uh a very small number of people grabbing the lion's share of natural wealth they claim to be wealth creators they're actually taking 00:09:47 wealth from the rest of us they're saying we're going to have all this atmospheric space for ourselves and incidentally all these other resources all the mahogany and the gold and the 00:09:58 diamonds and the bluefin tuna sushi and whatever else that they're consuming on a massive scale and this is driven by to a very large extent by their remarkable disproportionate use of aviation 00:10:12 there's one set of figures suggesting that the richest one percent are responsible for 50 of the world's aviation emissions but also by their yachts for example the average 00:10:24 um commonal garden super yacht um kept on standby for a billionaire to step onto whenever he wants um produces 7 000 tons of carbon dioxide per year 00:10:38 if we're to meet even the conventional accounting for staying within 1.5 degrees of global heating our maximum emissions per person are around 2.3 00:10:49 tons so one super yacht is what over 3 000 people's worth of emissions this is just grossly outrageously unfair and we should rebel 00:11:01 against the habit of the very rich of taking our natural wealth from us

um kevin anderson 00:12:43 if you can talk more about this issue both you and george assad raymond and so many other climate activists talking about this issue of wealth 00:12:55 you say per capita is a flawed metric as most polluting industries have been moved to developing nations so it's not reflective of the rich nation's emissions take all of this on 00:13:09 yeah i mean that's a really key issue and i think if i focus in here on the uk where i know it's a place obviously i know much better that what we've done in the uk we've closed down a lot of our industry and then we import the manufactured goods from elsewhere in the 00:13:22 world and then we turn around to those parts of the world and then we blame them for the emissions in manufacturing the goods that we are enjoying and that's everything from our electronic goods to parts for our cars as our clothes so you know the uk is 00:13:35 effectively moved to a bar and banking culture and and and offshore virtually everything else and so we when we looking at our total amount of emissions we have to take account of the carbon footprint of our lifestyles and that 00:13:47 does include the emissions that we associated with things that we import and export i mean you take that into account you tend to find that most wealthy countries have a much larger carbon footprint than when you just look at the energy they use within their 00:14:00 boundaries and i think it's really key again when we think about these issues of equity we we that we take this what's often referred to as a consumption-based accounting method we take that into account because it is unfair to be 00:14:12 penalizing poor parts of the world for them making things to help us have a better quality of life over here and when we do that then the challenges get even more striking in terms of what we have to do and it also also brings out 00:14:25 even further the issues of equity the disparity between the richer parts of the world and the poorer parts of the world but i also think on the equity point it's really worth bringing out that it's not as if everyone in the uk is even 00:14:37 there isn't just one public in the uk there are multiple publics there were those of us who are the wealthy ones in our own country that are responsible for the lion's share of missions within the uk that will be true chain for the u.s for germany for japan australia and so 00:14:50 within all of our countries there are large swathes of the country who are the average and below average consumers and for them the response to climate change is very different from those of us who are in our own countries are responsible for the lion's share of 00:15:03 emissions so i think we have to differentiate not just between countries but even within our countries and my concern there is that who are the people that frame the climate dubai debate they're the climate scientists and the academics they're the 00:15:14 entrepreneurs the business leaders the journalists the barristers they're all the people that are in the very high emitting category so we frame the debate and we never ever frame the debate with equity at its core and with regardless 00:15:26 of our maths or our moral sorry regardless of our moral position the maths tell us if we are to deliver on the commitments then equity has to be a key part of our responses but we never talk about that because we are in that 00:15:38 high emitting group