Angry Planet - What's a Planet Worth?

Episode Date: March 6, 2023

As the planet slowly broils, we keep hoping that some technological revolution will save us. Not just carbon capture or seeding the oceans with iron to grow algae that will drink in all the carbon dioxide right out of the atmosphere, but solutions that we can power our homes with and drive around. But what if we’ve put all of our money on the wrong horse? David Ko and Richard Busellato former hedge fund managers, have a different solution, but can it really save the Earth?After you listen to the show, you can check out:https://rethinkingchoices.com/Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. People live in a world with their own making. Frankly, that seems to be the problem. Welcome to Angry Planet. Hello and welcome to Angry Planet. I am Jason Fields. Matthew Galt is under the weather, which is ironic because, that's what we'll be talking about today. As I record this, it's a balmy 60-degree day in the middle of February in Washington, D.C., and that's just not right. To talk to me today about what it means for all of us, I'm joined by Richard Bustilado, and I'm pronouncing that, by the way, properly. Very good for an American. You get nine out of town there. Okay. And David Coe, they're the authors of the unsustainable

truth, how investing for the future is destroying the planet and what to do about it. Well, what does that mean? Which of you guys wants to start? Bridging straight on the, yeah, basically, if you boil it down to its smallest essence, is we are running out of capacity on this planet to keep on doing what we've been doing for quite a long time. And the reason we are doing so is that we've extracted too much. And part of that is that all investments we do requires more of these resources to be used. There are no shortcuts.

Even if you're doing good with your investments, you still require resources to get them off the ground and become productive. So we find ourselves more or less, I think, in a situation now when we're running out of this capacity on the planet. And to us, it's fairly clear that ultimately a problem caused by too much investment cannot really get resolved by investing us further through this transition. We need to look at a different approach of how to safeguard the planet as we know it. Well, and I should say that you are coming at this, both of you from, I guess, say, a different point of view, which is that you both have long financial backgrounds, having worked out. hedge funds? Is that true for both of you?

Absolutely. I think we, I mean, I started off a little bit differently. I started up as a physicist. I was actually a university lecturer at Oxford in physics. And my girlfriend at the time studied Japanese and she was going to go to Japan to look for a job. And we couldn't pay the phone bills. I mean, this was back in 94 and you had phone bills. Now they could do it on Zoom. And so I ended up going into the investment industry. But Richard, he always knew from the age of three, who was going to trade, make money, outsmarting the other guy in the market. But we met up along the way. I think it's really, really important point because we both come from experiences of surviving and managing through financial crisis.

The first firm I joined was a hedge fund called LTCM. I think it was Businessweek that had it as the dream team. And it made phenomenal amounts of money and then it blew up. Yes, I remember this. LTCM was long-term capital management? Absolutely. You know, John Meriwether, you know, we had vice chairman of the Fed. I remember this.

Yes. And we had, you know, the Bank of Italy. We had, you know, the Swiss banks and a colleague of mine in the crisis telling me afterwards, he went back to Switzerland, he was Swiss. and he was a young guy at the time he went back to Switzerland, got off the airport, got into a cab,

and the radio phone in show was all about these evil people at LTCM blowing up their country. You're sitting in the bank then. You know, the driver was asking, what do you do? It's like,

I'm not saying anything. I'm just visiting. Yeah. Well, so, I mean, so, but that gives you, where people always think, When they talk about investments, either, well, I guess there's two things they think.

One, I'm going to get rich quick. But let's put those people to the side. But the other thing is it's about investing in the future. And that by putting money in now, it's something that into whatever you're putting it into, it's going to grow. And it's all part of this whole concept of progress, this very Western, very important concept of progress. Everything, you know, gets better as the time goes on. But, you know, talking to you and working with you guys, that is not what you're saying. You're saying that this, explain how investment, which sounds like a good thing.

How does that work that it's not a good thing? We've come to recognize this investment term is called leverage. Basically means borrowing, basically. You know, when I bought my first flat in London, I had to borrow money. And I actually ended up borrowing from LTCM the year before it blew up. So I was kind of just on the right side of that trade. But the problem with borrowing is there's always a payback. And a lot of the progress and a lot of the ways that things have come about

is because we have basically been borrowing off the planet in different ways. And effectively what made Richard and I step out of the investment in, industry. So recognizing it's becoming much more like a Ponzi scheme. We're borrowing on the weather being staying nice. So when you started off by talking about just the temperature set, two weeks ago, we were reading about how New Hampshire had minus 100 degrees Fahrenheit with wind chill, and Boston was minus 23, and it's just swung right round. And this kind of craziness is what climate change is about. And our economy is just not capable of coping with all these kind of craziness in weather, going about everywhere in the world. And that's where the borrowing has become

critical. And climate change is really like a loan shop coming over and collecting and saying, you know, hey guys, you've been boring for a long time. I want the money back. So it's not so much that investments itself, the idea of somehow doing something, to improve ourselves is a problem. But when we do it, hoping that the climate is going to stay clement, weather is going to stay good, productivity is going to be able to continue, we run ourselves into trouble. So we just can't count on, let's say, a farmer is counting on the idea that when they buy the seed and they rent or borrow the money to get a tractor, they're always counting on the weather

being fairly decent in order to actually be able to pay the money back and then make a profit. And you're saying that something as basic as the literal weather means that if you're borrowing money to do anything, you really might not be able to pay it back. Absolutely. And the farmer is the obvious example. And the U.S. last year, when the Mississippi ran basically dry, was actually the transportation cost shot through the roof. So you grew your coins,

and you couldn't ship it to the ports because the transportation cost goes so much that people wouldn't be able to buy at the other end. And it's not just the farmers, if you take something like semiconductors where we have all this chip problem, it takes about 1 to 2,000 gallons

of ultra pure water in order to make a single wave of silicon chips, 1 30 centimeter waiver. and when Taiwan goes into a drought, you have a supply problem. Because the country is now asking, do I use the water for people to wash themselves? Or do I use it and purify to the ultra-pure state so that I can wash these nanometer size chips that we're using? That's a tough choice. It's one we have to face.

And it's the reality of what's going on. So I think we're not trying to, we don't believe in scaring, but we do believe in actually stating this. These are the facts. And so the choice is one that we will actually need to make. Richard, you look like you had something to say. Yeah, I think all you've said is true. And let us be clear about one thing. We're not anti-investment and we're not anti-capitalism, very, very far from it.

I'm one of these people who truly and utterly believes in capitalism as the by far superior choice. how to govern an economy. But what has been happening increasingly through passage of time and has obviously accelerated dramatically in the last couple of decades, certainly the last few years, is that you cannot detach an economic model from physical reality. And we have been doing that for a long time. Ever since, you know, Thomas Malta's 250 years ago,

whatever said that, you know, we're going to face constant periods of, because that is the limit the planet puts on us. And he was rubbish because he failed to take into account technological advance. There is still a physical limit to what this planet can actually provide us with. And no investment in the world is going to circumvent that physical reality. So it's smarter if we want to safeguard our economic future and our investments actually having a chance to pay back to start respecting that physical reality.

I think that's not something that people are used. used to facing up to. I mean, I think that when you're taught about Malthus, you're basically taught, oh, see, he was, you know, he was really just a worry ward. There was no reason to take him seriously and look at how wrong he was. But when you're talking about Malthus, you're not just talking about starvation. You're talking about other resources as well. well, right? Absolutely. Absolutely. And sorry Richard. No, I mean, we tend to focus on the global warming aspect and the climate change driven by the amount of carbon dioxide we have in our atmosphere. There are a myriad of other issues at play with this planet, which all boils down

to our relative detachment from a physical reality and our belief that everything will stay roughly the same so we can keep on running the economy like we'd be doing. Out of all those, the most pressing one, how we see the world, is climate warming, if you like, and the amount of carbon dioxide that we do emit that causes this heating. Because if we can't really deal with that in an appropriate manner, all the other things will actually not matter too much because this is the overriding concern. But, you know, I have serious issues with the amount of topsoil in farming still remaining, how much water we have in our aquifers, et cetera.

All these things are other examples of how we effectively try to neglect the physical reality. I was going to add to that. I think one of the things that, you know, if you step back and you ask, what does our push for net zero and all these things mean? It means we're building a whole new world, whilst keeping another one going. So it means that our demand for resources is actually increasing in an insatiable way. And this is happening at a time when the shape of our climate and our environment is changing rapidly.

And so the ability for us to buffer this massive increase in demand is being worn away at the other end. And it was very interesting that Vesta, which is a wind turbine company, reported a loss and it was a substantial loss and it was quite in trouble about it. The year before, all the wind turbine companies almost went bankrupt because copper had gotten so expensive, he couldn't afford it. And it had gotten so expensive because every car manufacturer going for electric vehicle, every power grid in trying to make the transformation, they all demand the copper. And major producer Chili is having drought in the northern part where they produce the copper

and you need several hundred tons of water to produce a ton of copper. So you've obviously got another problem there. But this year, they were reporting a massive loss because of the damages the wind turbines were suffering. These are not just old ones. These are new ones as well. And so you have to ask, well, actually, why is it that the damage, there's so much more damage than what they have planned? Is it just poor workmanship or are they actually suffering from the fact that as the weather gets crazy, things just get damaged more? And so our cost are increasing on the other side.

So not only things are things becoming more expensive, but our cost are also increasing because we're experiencing more damages. So we're investing, as you just said, I mean, if I'm trying to, I'm just trying to make sure I understand it. into new technologies. We're putting money and resources into new technologies. But at the same time, we have to power along with what we already have. Yes. And at the same time that that's all happening, we're working against the impact of our past spending, so to speak. Yep.

Yes. And, you know, and the loan shock is coming along. I don't know if you know that Japanese animation series, Studio Ghibli, with kind of things like spirited away and house moving castles and so on. I've seen one. I can't remember which one, but I do remember seeing. There's sort of like a characterization of things in this sort of hodgepodge way, in which everything seems to muddle along.

And we are kind of like that, basically. And it leaves you in a situation where you feel quite scary about it. And the point about the investment world is saying go faster. When if you're sitting in the middle of that, what you want to say, can I just slow down a bit and catch my breath. But the investment world only knows go faster. Does that mean putting more money into the changeover to new technology? Or what do you mean by go faster in this case? It means putting more money in, make the transition go faster, make everything sort of speed it up.

And it's missing the element where essentially the climate problem is a problem of the amount of the climate polluting gases we're emitting out into the atmosphere. If you emit them slower, then you've got a bit more time to play with. If you go faster, you emit them faster and you've got less time to play with. So it means that you actually have to get everything right first time. we want to go faster. Right. Okay. So let's say that electric cars don't tend to, don't actually provide the solution that everyone's counting on them providing.

Then you end up with a real problem. Then you end up with a real problem. You'd be electrified all your lamp post and everything to be new grids and everything else. And then you find that if you had a repeat of Texas a couple of years ago when the entire grid went down. Or Pakistan, a couple of... couple of weeks ago, three, four weeks ago, just before I went on holiday, the entire power of the country went down. And then you end up in a situation where you say, oh, gosh, everything is now electrical. How do I do anything? Right. Yeah, I mean, we have big issues with

electric cars to start with because a large amount of the carbon dioxide we emit is actually when we make the car. So the break even for an electric vehicle is not exactly a mile zero. It's far, far beyond that. In actual fact, the best thing we could do is trying to run our car park for as long as possible. We don't waste resources getting new cars. But obviously, if you're a car manufacturer, you don't want to see that picture. However, looking at the total, it's pretty clear that the electric cars as such will not be a solution to any of these issues. It's something that by 2150, we will probably be totally powered by electric cars if we're around as a civilization, as we know it by them. But right now, to try to electrify the whole car park in 10 years is simply, there was only one

word for it is stupid. Because we haven't got the capacity to deal with that. And the amount of resources we consume in the meantime is just frightening. And they could be put to better use if we actually want to make the transition in a safe way. And when you talk about the fact that you have to get it right the first time, there are competing technologies like hydrogen, which do have advantages of their own. And I'm sure disadvantages as well. But we're not going to try that, right? I mean, we're just plowing ahead with the one, quote, solution, unquote. Exactly. And it's what Richard talked about, you know, why, about capitalism in the sense.

You know, the classic idea of capitalism is all these things get a chance to be tried out. And you find out which one works and it evolves along that way. But when we get into a state where we panic each other about it and we tell each other, we've got to move very fast in one direction, then all the policies and everything gets aligned into whichever lobby managed to push itself to the forefront. And then these other things don't get to look into. And we've been working with a lot of young people in East Africa,

where they're in the middle of kind of climate-induced droughts and issues and so on in different areas. And it's remarkable when you talk to them, they have so much sun. there's so much of ordinary solar sun energy just from you know the days when you took a magnifying glass out and you burned a little bit of leaf that you can do there's so much you can do in those ways that's not being done at all because there's only one idea of solar which is these highly technical and sophisticated photovoltaic cells the problem with those is when they go wrong they can't afford to fix it okay so I mean I do I do know of alternative solar technologies like where you use mirrors to focus on some sort of molten salt. Yes, that's right. Yeah.

And I mean, I guess some of those things are being tried. But I mean, there are alternate solar technologies that are being tried. But maybe the scale's not right. I think that's very important because we were talking about this. We've been talking more and more about what we coined as emergent economics. Essentially that if you look in any situation, if you look at nature in any situation, life always comes about. So, you know, the more you study a desert, the more you realize, actually there is a lot of life and activity there even. When we look at it and we think, oh, there isn't because we only recognize green things and things.

with kind of four legs and fur as saying being life or something like that. So emergent economics goes closer back towards the idea that actually there are resources and opportunities of every kind there. And when you talk about those reflecting the sun and going to like molten salt and other stuff, well, in a local community, there is a scale for which they can actually achieve some energy, obtain some energy in some way. And when they take it from one community to another, what you're looking for, what life does is adapts along the way. It propagates as opposed to it scales.

And the extractive economics that we started off by talking about is about scaling by changing the environment we want to go into so that our technology can fit naturally into it. But what a propagation does is actually moves along and adapts itself to the new paths. and goes along that way. So it doesn't actually, when you actually force that technology like an electric car to be used everywhere,

you force them to have charge points everywhere in the same way. You force them to have the same voltage years to order things that fits your car. If you actually go along and think about how can electric power be adapted for mobility

in different places, and propagate along and ask that question instead, you have a lot of different varieties, lots of different shapes to the electric kind of car in quotes, as it were. They'll come up looking very different

in different places. It's a bit like seeing, you know, kind of the pictures of India with a very colorful rickshores that they power by running alongside, you know, the sedans and stuff.

Right, right. And I guess actually an electric rickshores. might be the way to, I mean, the practical solution in India, right? Okay. Yeah, as opposed to everybody driving a Tesla. I mean, we also have, when you're talking about something like just Tesla's are an interesting example in that they are so expensive to buy. I'm assuming they're quite expensive to build. Yeah. I think so. I couldn't possibly tell, because we don't have the exact numbers.

But I think it's important here to go back to what we discussed previously. One of the most important things, if we are serious about preserving resources, and if we accept that it's our resource utilization that is driving our sustainability problems, is we need to make things last longer, which then allows us actually to buy more time for the transition. is like running faster is not going to help you here. Titanic navigating among the icebergs is not going to increase speed and have a happy ending. And that's kind of how we're treating it. It's like, oh, this is a bad period.

The faster we go, the faster we're rid of the icebergs, no, the likelihood is you're actually going to encounter something really bad and nasty on the way. So buying time is actually the sensible thing to do in this environment. Sorry. No, I was just going to say, I mean, how in the world do you convince people, though, to change that mindset? I mean, it's the mindset of, yeah, is really towards progress and what people think of as progress, I should say. Because it's not progress if you're actually going faster and faster into a brick wall. Right.

That is not actually progress. No. But, yeah, how do we start talking to people? If that's what we need to do, how do we start talking to people and say, hey, you know, the shiny electric car in front of you is nowhere near the solution of keeping your 10-year-old Chevy on the road another 10 years? Yeah, I think it comes down to. So we have a campaign at the moment. We want to build up this thing is to make 2023 the year we stop climate change. and what a stock and climate change means is to be able to put oil gas and coal production onto a clear schedule between now and net zero.

So they're all committed, everybody knows about it, and that's what it is. If you did that, all of the energy transition we've been talking about, the motor transport and everything, they would naturally fall into place. Because everybody will be able to see, oh, that's what the path looks like. So that's one part. The other part is the campaign itself we're calling it the things that give us. joy. And the reason is really tied up with your comments about progress. If you just go faster and hit a wall, that's not going to give you a lot of joy. You're going to have to go back and actually ask, if you can't have everything, because the lung shark is coming to connect,

what are the things that give you joy? What are the things that's going to give you that's going to give you that courage to go forward and say, you know what, today's going to be a good day. And that's where you've got to look at from an individual side, because that will help you come together with other people and help you actually decide on what are the paths and one of the things that you want. Because if we do put oil gas and coal onto a schedule of production between now and net zero, then a lot of the hyped up investments, especially the high peer part of the investments are not going to be possible. Who does this, though?

I mean, who actually sets us on that path? I mean, there is no global authority at this point, and you guys are pro-capitalism anyway. So even if, let's say, the UN could enforce, you know, skis-haping. No, they wouldn't do that. We wouldn't advocate them doing that. And the idea is we do. So the idea is we transform, the ownership, of oil gas and coal.

We're capitalists, we think that things that you invest in financial assets, they should ultimately help people. But every bit of oil gas and coal that you burn actually harms people. They are necessary, but they still harm. So they shouldn't be considered financial assets. So the plan is a transformational ownership as a mechanism where everybody can, everybody is supporting transformational. ownership is a part of the process, and it calls on businesses to use a fraction of the money,

contribute a fraction of the money we all spend with them as a fee to maintaining the planet. You can then take this money to buy out the oil, gas and coal companies. So the only sensible is you have to buy it out. They are assets. So confiscation goes down all sort of crazy paths. But you buy the whole of it. So if you look at Exxon, the whole of Exxon, with all the other, all the other. the bits and pieces. Now, in order for us not to be corrupted by the money motivation as you buy

it, you actually have to take the profits and think, what do we do with it? We give it to everybody on the planet. So the baby in Somalia, the granny in New York, the auntie in Malaysia, they all get the same. Once you strip that profit motivation out, you left pure responsibility for all gas and coke. You brought in the businesses by saying you contribute, and we'll love you for doing so. You're now bringing government by saying, make your net zero targets realistic and aggressive. And we will get the production on a schedule to make sure they're kept. But no one will be able to cheat along. So everybody who wants to be part of this is now a transformation owner. It's a hero. And anybody who doesn't want to be a part of it has just

made themselves into a villain. It's very clear. If you're outside of it, you're greenwashing governments are the ones who are going to punish you because they've set the net zero target and you're trying to free ride to avoid it. The rest of you, you know, all the young people who wants to sue companies for greenwashing, they are the ones there. You know, get the really big damages. Go for it. And as for ourselves, you know, if we want to protect the things that give us joy, use the companies within the community and shy away from the ones outside of it. And so it becomes a choice for everybody and an action we can all take. And it lets capital markets to work. So how do you collect the money?

I mean, who, again, you know, I'm really curious about the practical mechanisms. Yeah. Absolutely. I think, you know, so we were, we've been working in the investment industry for 30-odd years. You know, we've had, we've worked for funds like described before and so on. So for the money to go to be collected, the easiest form is set up a global, a single and global fund in that way. So companies can contribute to long into it and pay into it. But it's not the company who's the owner, it's us, it's the people who uses the companies, who uses them.

That's where it goes to. And the fund is set up with a very simple mandate, and there's only two elements to it. One is the money that is contributed to it, it uses to buy out the oil gas and coal company, and the profits that flow into it are distributed to everybody on the planet. You're listening to Angry Planet, and we'll be back. And welcome back to Angry Planet. And today we are talking with Richard Bessalado and with David Coe about, well, the bad news and how we're going to do something about it on climate change.

So, all right, Richard, I'm going to come to you and ask you, again, how do we do this in, since there's no global entity, how do we in a capitalist world actually get people to agree to limit? How do we do it fast? Because you're talking about slowing down in so many other regards, but this has to happen quickly. Yeah, the runway is not terribly long. We have, depending a little bit, what mats you go with, it's something like six to ten years before the whole carbon budget has been used up. And then we have, probably according to the scientists, pretty significant, irreversible damage happening.

So, yeah, the runway is short. Because I'm a capitalist, I believe in the buyout solution of these entities, because they're actually not suited for capitalist portfolios. the good news we have is that actually is very cheap to buy these companies out. You look at the global equity index. Energy is the smallest component of all the 11 sectors. It's like 4% or something of your whole global equity market. Yes, there are a few state-owned companies on top of that.

But the numbers are actually fairly small. If you think about your overall wealth and your overall portfolio and your future financial well-being, you need to figure out how I'm going to deal with this cuckoo in my portfolio or for a better way maybe a cancer that actually is damaging all my other portfolio companies down the road and will no doubt bankrupt me in 20, 30, 40 years time. So buying them out and I'm getting a fair price for it. I'm getting market price. We ask all the businesses because as owner of those businesses, we can instruct them to make a contribution towards this fund that will manage the transformation by buying up all the companies that are fossil fuel producers.

And then we stick to the schedule that's out there and has been universally agreed. That gives us the time, but it needs to happen very, very quickly because the longer we drag our feet, the less maneuverability we have left. But it's worth remembering that this is a really, really cheap solution for, dealing with a problem that's going to come and infect all your businesses you're owning in your portfolio and it will eventually no doubt lead to complete financial disruption and destitution in your book because you cannot fight climate change by the conventional tools you need to address it at the core of the problem so so richard sort of says about the cost but i think the the

question you're asking is how do we actually line up the ducks basically i i am curious yeah i mean Who, how do you, right, it sounds like it comes from the investors that investors can demand as the shareholders that companies behave in a certain way and say you must come up with money to then spend in a particular way, right? I mean, because it is a democratic as well as capitalistic process. Yes, it's absolutely. And so the most important thing is to make sure everybody knows. It empowers individuals to know that they have a real choice and they can take an action that has a real effect. So the way we're going about it is we're going to, we want to get to all the events in the year. If we want to make this happen 2023, so we've been very ambitious. You know, kind of my daughter would tell me you're mad, but give you a go anyway and see what happens.

And she's quite sensible because she's the one who told me last year in the summer, while we're driving on a particular hot day. She said, you know, Dad, we all stopped all the driving and all the emissions. The weather's not going to change back, is it? And she's absolutely right. That's the whole thing about climate change. It doesn't go back. So each year we make it worse, that's how it stays.

And however bad we take it to net zero, that's what happens. So it's very important you put all gas and coal production onto a schedule. It's very important people know that, and that we can do this. So our campaign is about getting people to use the things that give them joy as the means by which we should bring people together. So if you're organizing an event of fun run or whatever it is, and that gives you pleasure in being able to go out and do that, use that as the way to reach out to others and think about what does it mean if now you're running in 40 degrees heat.

Ain't going to be so much fun anymore. Really, it's just thinking about it in that way. So reaching out with the things that give us joy, and importantly, we're reaching to young people everywhere and really want, if you've got young people around listening to this, join us along in this, which is really important, because for majority of population in the world, that starts with being able to have a livelihood. And we talk to young people in particular because a lot of them are at this point where they think, how can I get my job?

What do I do? And they care passionately about the climate and all those things. We're speaking to, I mentioned earlier, about groups in Africa, we're talking to them about how to turn their climate action. So one group is going to have a cleanup of waste in Africa. in an area, Kisarian in Kenya. And they were showing us about the rubbish that's lying around, and they've collected. And they're saying, what are these, rotten plastic, feces, bits and pieces, stuff like that. I'm saying, well, they also grow a lot of saplings.

I'm saying, well, actually, what happens if you use this to juxtapose the saplings? Just make a little contrast, you know, kind of like you have stones you put around a tree, basically. But they get trench with it. put the rubbish in there to juxtapose against it and put a placard that says, you know, waste is not waste. Why are you throwing it away? And plant the tree there and have the tree be something like a fruit tree. So people can actually benefit from it. And then maybe you can actually start to build an economics out of doing that.

So that's the way in which you can actually bring livelihoods, connect that up with things that give them joy in simple ways, and actually reach out in that form. then we want to make a film later on in the year by calling on all communities everywhere to contribute clips of things that give them joy. And Richard and now we're talking about this, I had in mind that kind of a crossover between train spotting, which is a film way back in the 80s, of a group of young people facing their lives of what to do.

And Lord of the Rings, which is this epic story of good versus evil, How do you come together? And as a promotion for transformational ownership. And we have in this room in our idea, you know, two brothers, Killian and Lionel. And they are young people facing climate change. And their father is estranged from them. He runs an oil company. How do they come together?

How does transformational ownership decide for you as to whether you want to come together? or you want to keep yourself away. It becomes an epic story made with clips of things that gives us joy, along with that. And communities that contribute can then take this back to their people and their businesses and ask if a billion people were to contribute and support it. And if a trillion dollars from businesses have been pledged, would you support it? Would your business be part of that pledge too? And basically to take it around the world in a series of rallies,

as a challenge to all of us and to the COP processes and says, which side do we want to be on? Do we ought to be on the sign that puts a schedule out for all gas and co-production? So it's to give ourselves time. And knowing if you do that, then everything you do makes sense, whether it's the investment or whether it's the mitigation and adaptation effort, or whether it's just to try and find an asteroid or another planet to try and go to instead. it all makes a lot more sense once you have that schedule for production in place.

And so that's kind of the plan, that's the campaign of the things that give us joy. We rely on everybody to try and get in touch and say, you know, come along, help us with this. Most importantly, it is about just asking ourselves what are the things that give us joy, to use that to bring people together and make that the reason why we want to do this. So basically Marie Kondo will save the world. Exactly. She's everywhere. And my daughter tells me, you've got to get the Kardashians.

And I'm like, oh, wow, yeah. So what do you see as immediate next steps? And also, you know, is if I, when I get off this interview with you guys, not only what do I immediately go and do, but how do I expressly work with you guys to do it? I mean, if I agree with your plan, and it sounds like a good plan, and I am still trying to figure out who the executive will be, you know, who will take over this oil company. that are, you know, energy company and work to shrink it. But I'm just wondering, you know, I mean, some of this, the practicalities really are kind of what's sticking my head. So, so what do I do? I mean, not everybody is going to be able to call you, Richard. I mean, I think that, you know, your phone would be ringing off the

hook and that might be a bit much for you. Richard? No, no, of course. There is a limit to what two people can do and we need all the help we can get. And the starting point is that people recognize we have given a blueprint for how we can actually deal with this. And I think once you get momentum and knowledge that this is the only feasible alternative you have out there to safeguard a carbon budget and ensure that we can keep climate change somewhat in check. And like David says, it's not going to get better. This is how it's going to stay. Then everything else will fall into place by itself in terms of the practical. who is going to run the vehicle, where will it be registered, etc.

For me, that is right now it's very secondary to actually acknowledging that we do have something in place that gives us clarity about the future emissions of carbon dioxide and how we can deal with it. So into what you say also, the first thing to recognize is whatever you're doing, it is something that will be better if you actually support putting a schedule onto all gas and co-production. Unless, of course, what you're doing is to try and increase orgasm co-production for as much as you want, in which case, then, sorry, mate, you're on the other side. But if it's not that, then the first thing, the immediate thing you can do is simply to talk

to people about the fact that there is a mechanism, we can't bring a mechanism, and we can bring a new governance for oil gas and co in place. It doesn't have to be owned in the way it does. And we say that Richard and I, because we are used to the world where people take over companies. We are used to the world where people strip this bits of money out of that bit of cash flow and put that bit of responsibility onto that part of things. So that's what hedge funds do.

And that's where that's the world we come from. And that's why for us, this is like bread and butter, basically. for us in terms of this. But for other people less used to that, it's really recognizing we have a governance, we can actually have a new governance to all gas and coal. And if people want to know about better grounding of those things

than just too greedy hedge fund owners, as it were, two important things to recognize about this, Eleanor Ostrow, back in 2009, got a Nobel Prize in economics for making a statement that actually people do come together to come up with really novel ways to govern common resources so that they are not exhausted. And this case is our climate that isn't going crazy

that we want to make sure it's not exhausted. And the thing we need to govern is the production of oil, gas, and coal, and we can come together and do that. So the first thing you can do when you come out, leave this show, is actually to talk to your friends and says, hey, we can have a different governance to oil, gas, and coal. We can just buy them out in a common ownership, where the companies, we buy the whole company.

We're not winding down the whole company. We're winding down the production of oil gas and coal. And if you think about trying to say, how do you balance between this company's production of oil and that company's production of gas, if you don't put it under one ownership, you're never going to do it. Because they'll be competing with each other.

It's only if you put it under one ownership that you'll be able to say, turn that well off, open that to make it a little bit more to compensate while we still have the schedule that we are abiding to. And we can get to where we need to get to. So let me ask you,

either of you, this is kind of a, I think just, comes to my mind as a real obstacle. And there are a couple of different entities involved. One, I've actually met Thomas Fanning, who runs Southern Company in the United States, which is a big energy company and utility. And without getting into my impressions of him, I would say that he doesn't want to sell.

and he truly believes that for whatever reason that oil, gas, and coal are, they're just the way to go. I don't think the future is something that's very important to him. I don't know. I don't know if he just doesn't have children. I honestly have no idea, but that just doesn't seem like the futures is his thing. how do you work against someone like him in a position of power and then and I think this is related how do you deal with some an entity a country like India where they currently are making the argument that they should be able to continue to actually ratchet up consumption because

they haven't had a fair chance to ruin. the world, you know, ruin the world. Ruin the world. Yeah, they have no fair chance to do it because they're coming into the situation late. How do you deal with that, either of those, you know, people or entities? Well, this is where it's a community, and it's very important to recognize way back in the day. The worst thing that happens is you get exiled from your community. Because your chance of survival plummet when that happens. So for people who don't want to sell, when you have a community, a transformational ownership community,

you then, everyone who are part of that community, then has a choice of whether they use the product from those people, whether they use businesses which use products from those people or not. And governments have the choice to go along and say, and this is where the electorate and the political process comes in, to say these people are clearly making a mockery of your net zero targets. So, you know, they deserve levies at least 100% of their revenue, because they are making a mockery of your net zero targets. So they can keep pumping the stuff out, but what this should happen is that you will find that those stuff that comes out has no market.

Literally simply has no market for it. because you have chosen to exile yourself out of the community in that way. And for countries like India and so on, the essence here is that the whole of India national company, which is a national co-company, if India wants to sell its generic medicines in the same way too, and if the world wants it to do so, needs for Co of India to be part of the whole production of oil gas and coal, comes under a schedule. And when you put coal, gas, and oil under a schedule, you have lots of different places where you need to go and make those reductions. You don't go and reduce every one of them at the same pace, because you've got some places which are more capable,

where there are more other resources for emerging economies to arise, to take over, and you have others which don't along. But India suffered 50 degrees heat. They banned the export of wheat last year because it couldn't get enough harvest. That moved on to banning the export of wheat flour because the market shifted to export the flour instead of the wheat and it caused prices to rise up internally by so much. And it understands and it has continued rolling power cuts because of the heat generated and the demand on power that creates. So it understands that it is not going to be able to manage climate change.

So a lot of these stories, a lot of these persuasions are not our persuasions to make, because climate change will make that for us. The crazy weather will simply go around and make those persuasive arguments for us. Okay. I would add one thing that's coming to mind quite late. I'm a slow in many respects. So it took me a while to come around this. I had a discussion with an old friend last week, and they said,

you know, we have now what can be described in many ways as some of the most precious resources or the natural carbon sinks because of the function they actually do on the planet. And he said, how long do you think it will take before the strong and mighty in the world actually start seeing these as strategic resources where if you decide not to do some good things and do bad things, you will probably see the likes of the US and China intervene

because they are the military superpowers left in the world. And it opens up a whole other perspective as well. Not only can you apply economic pressure and social pressure on the guys that effectively don't want to play a ball. There will, I think, going forward also be a very, very clear and present military threat because to me it's inexplicable that anyone still does not really believe that climate change is the main driving force of the economy we have today. The cost of living crisis that people complain about says it's supply chains and Ukraine. It all comes from one single element, which is climate change is drying up our resources.

So you're moving into a world where I think we need to start looking very differently at the aspect of what climate change does to big picture geopolitics. No, that makes sense. And we actually hear that Angry Planet did an episode a little while ago about actually the cost to the environment of militaries around the world. I mean, if you want to look at something that pollutes, take a look at a tank. No one was thinking about emissions when they were thinking about how to move a tank across a field, you know. Well, yeah, that's the sort of resource war that, you know, come out of science fiction, and we've all been those of us who care about things like the future in science fiction worry about for a long time. Ultimately, all wars are about resources.

And then it's history that has defined how we view those resources. I think that's the perfect kind of down note that we like to end on at Angry Planet. It's what we're famous for. But I think you have actually given us some reason for hope. And I think that, you know, or at least I hope that the plan comes to fruition. And I personally help however I can. So thank you both so much for coming on the show and talking us through all this. Thank you.

You know, check out link tree slash rethinking choices. So that's kind of like the tree of links. So that will get to us. And thank you very much. And, you know, we love being on the down note. It makes us appreciate all the things that give us joy. Exactly. Thank you for having us, Jason.

It's been a real pleasure. Thank you. Thanks for listening to another episode of Angry Planet. The show is produced with love by Matthew Galt and Jason Fields with the assistants of Kevin Medell. This is the place where we ask you for money. If you subscribe to us on substack.angoryplanet.com, it means the world to us. The show, which we've been doing for more than seven years now, means the world to us, and we hope it means a lot to you. We're incredibly grateful to our subscribers.

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