Comedy of the Week - Carbon Lifeforms

Episode Date: November 3, 2025

Jon Long and Dr Tara Shine join forces for more of the hybrid comedy-magazine show that emits jokes and facts that (carbon) capture all things climate to demystify the issues and offer advice on how to make positive choices in our everyday lives.This week - The Carbon Cost of Tech, The Internet and AI with special guests Chris McCausland and Mike Berners-Lee.In previous episodes, we’ve covered Food, Travel and Christmas, so what’s next? Well, it turns out that our previous episodes did not solve the climate crisis on their own. So, for this series, we will be looking at the topics of Tech and AI, Waste Management and Recycling, and The Fashion Footprint.Expect new in-studio guests and on-location experts, more games, more practical advice, more cold hard stats, and the return of Greenwash of the Week to shout out the heroes and villains of the climate crisis.Presenters: Jon Long and Dr Tara Shine Guests: Chris McCausland and Mike Berners-Lee Producer: Laura Grimshaw Executive Producer: Jon Holmes Live Sound: Jerry Peal Post-production Sound: Tony ChurnsideAn unusual production for BBC Radio 4.

Fellow Carbon Life Forms, please welcome John Long. Welcome everyone to Carbon Life Forms. Today we'll be discussing technology. A new bit of tech is exciting and a good way to judge up the old climate crisis, which is rarely a fun topic. Like when the Tesla first came out, that was good news for environmentalists.

It was the first time an electric vehicle had been a bit sexy. because a milk float. It's not sexy, is it? But we'll be focusing mostly on the ICT side of technology, your computers, devices, and what you use them for. So less Tesla and more GROC. GROC, if you don't know, is an AI chatbot launched by Elon Musk.

It's like ChatGBT's Wayward Younger Brother. In fact, we tried to use GROC to write this episode. But by the end of the monologue, it denied climate change three times and called the audience a bunch of cuck bitches. I'm so sorry. I don't think your bitch is. So after abandoning AI,

I turned instead to some real intelligence to help me navigate this, frankly, too big a topic. Will you join me in welcoming my incredible co-host? She's a climate scientist, an author. She's always talking about saving the planet. I think she's in love with it or something. It's Dr. Tara Shine, everyone. Thank you, Charlie.

Hello, Tara. So we've got lots to get through today. We do indeed. We'll be discussing your devices, the hidden cost of the internet, and if AI will be a help or a hindrance in finding solutions to climate change. With social media destroying the average attention span, we were a bit worried that the audience wouldn't survive such a broad topic. So we've brought along a celebrity guest to jangle in front of you like a set of keys. And today's guest is a high-profile one for us.

Yes, he agreed to this a long time ago and has since gone on to win strictly Anna Bafta. So we're as surprised as you are that he's actually here. Would you please welcome the incredible Chris McCausland, everyone? And we were so happy to have you here because we thought your qualifications made you just the perfect fit because you have a degree in software engineering. Well, yeah, it's a fancy way I'm saying I've got a degree in computing.

But I'm 48 years. and I got my degree in computers when the internet was five years old. So that's like having a degree in medicine but from when everything was leeches. I mean it's completely unusable in this day. Like trying to get a job at a newspaper when you can only speak Latin. We were also lucky enough to get an interview with renowned sustainability expert Mike Berners-Lee. Not to be confused with his brother Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the World Wide Web. Mike, on the other hand, is one of the four of the four

most experts in carbon accounting, just as exciting. It's two of the sexier words, isn't it, put together, carbon accounting. And has written several bestselling books such as there's no Planet B and a climate of truth. And most recently, can you stop going on about my sodding brother? John recently spoke to Mike about the topic of tech, and we'll be hearing their conversation throughout the show. I mean, I got into carbon accounting 20 years ago. It was very hard for a company to work out where the carbon was in its...

supply chains or for anyone to work out what the carbon footprint of a product was. It's better than it was. But unfortunately, what's abundantly clear is that knowing the carbon numbers isn't enough to deal with the climate crisis. Because there's a lot of information we've known for a great deal of time that hasn't been acted on. There really is. What you're also looking at now, not just how to get the information, but turn that into change.

Yeah, so my last book is called A Climate of Truth, and it's called that because if you look at all the bad decisions that have been taken around climate and all the good decisions that haven't been taken. What's been stopping us getting on top of the problem? It's been dishonesty. There's so much greenwashing and false information around this. And it's totally getting in the way of quality decision making. We thought we start with the devices themselves. So phones and your laptops, right before we get onto what they can do. So what are the carbon impacts of those, Tara? Well, your phone is full of all kinds of. of precious metals. Gold.

Frankencents. Mur. There's more gold in a ton of mobile phones than there is in a ton of gold ore. It's like 300 times more. Like it makes much more sense to mine electronics at this point than the ground. We've already got all the precious

metals we need now out of the ground. Yeah, to get them out of the drawers, recycle them then they can become a new mobile phone or part of a battery or a computer or whatever. Yeah, because mining's always a big issue, particularly when it comes to the batteries, isn't it? Yeah, so the batteries have this thing called cobalt in them, and cobalt, most of it in the world comes from the Congo, where it is mined in quite poor conditions for those people

who are mining it, and we don't have a whole lot of it. If we can reuse the cobald that we have over and over again, just like lithium, we don't have enough of it to make lithium ion batteries. That's all the better than going, digging up more land and mining fresh stuff. I sent the notes of the show to Chris, and he went, sorry, I'm the comic relief on the subject of cobalt mining. I'll be honest. I haven't got a lot on cobot mining. I mean, I don't know if this is a message we want to be putting out. I mean, mobile phone thefts are already a real problem on the streets of especially London.

Do we want to be putting out the message that, oh, these also contain lots of gold, by the way. And silver and platinum. Stop, stop, stop. To be honest, I think the only saving grace here is none of the criminal underworld are listening to Radio 4. Swiping phones, listening to the shipping forecast. I find it's best to team yourself up with someone who's like an early adopter into tech. And my husband, he likes to have the news thing. And then once he moves on, I get the old one.

So gold digging in a very real sense. From hardware to software. I think it's less about the devices nowadays and more about what they're doing, the hidden cost of the internet. What is the cost from an environmental perspective? It's all the stuff we store in the cloud, right? So all those old photos unsorted, all those emails, all that stuff is up there sitting in the clouds.

You can't see it, but it's all taking up space inside a data center. And then every time we ask AI a question, that it uses energy as well. So every prompt is another bit of energy. It's great if we're using it for good uses, but if you're just getting it to write like poems for birthday cards or write the jokes for your stand-up, Maybe it's not such a good use.

But you said data centres, so we never see data centres. What are their impact? So they're the most ugly, boring-looking buildings. They're big square blocks. They're generally quite huge. And in Ireland, where I'm from, in case you hadn't figured it out, 20% of the electricity in the country is used by data centres right now. So we have a big problem because we're not going to have enough electricity for people in their houses

because it's all going into data centres. See, 20% of Ireland's electricity goes to data centres up from 5% in 2015. So this is a new booming part of our economy. And for context, in the United States right now, data centers are just 4.4% of national energy consumption. So figuring out how we get this balance right is going to be really important. But also, like, how much stuff are we storing in those data centers that's not needed? The amount of dickpicks.

One or two AI-generated images uses the same amount of energy as charging our phone. And a 20-30-promp conversation with AI uses the equipment. equivalent of a leader of drinking water. So it's the water and the energy that we're using lots of every time we have to give it water to drink. You have to, yeah. Data centers use lots of water. They're very thirsty. Wow. This is how they're going to kill us all. We thought they were going to like invent weapons and like turn them all on us. They're just going to drink all the water. And also sometimes you think, well, that's actually that much. But then you've got remember that just chat TBT that has about a billion queries a day. Because it's free at the moment.

We're using it for all sorts of things. People are too. lazy to Google anymore. And it's wrong 20% of the time, but I think what you realize is the convenience is worth just being wrong 20% of the time. But sometimes it's wrong quite spectacularly, though, isn't it, Chris? So I use AI for everything.

I have conversations with AI, and it persuaded me to delete 4,000 emails two weeks ago. I was trying to set a mail rule up to manage my email. It told me how to do it. I told it, it was wrong. It said it was right. I said, no, if I do this, it's going to delete all my mail that's over seven days old. It said, no, that's not how Apple Mail works.

I said, but it is how Apple Mail works. It said, it's not how Apple Mail works. If you do this, it will do what you want. So I did it, and it deleted all my emails. It persuaded me, me, with a 25-year-old degree in computing, that it was right and I was wrong. And now I know that all these old emails take up energy. Maybe it's done the world a little bit of good.

4,000 emails. Well, there's a lot of counter-arguments about AI. We're talking about all the negatives of it. It's very useful. Yeah, it's going to be a huge climate solution. So those climate scenarios that we run to know what's it going to be like in 2060. Can't do those without AI.

We can't do early warnings of like floods or droughts or wildfires without AI. We can't know where there are methane leaks or water leaks in the world without AI. So it's also going to help us in our houses to be really much more energy efficient and move the energy from one part of the house or one part of the neighbourhood to another part of the neighbourhood

according to our demand is. So loads of great uses. It is going to be an ally in that way. And it's particularly good at making things more efficient, making processes more efficient. This sparks debate on the Jevons Paradox. Here's Mike Berners-Lee to explain. The Jevons paradox dates back to William Stanley Jevons in the 19th century.

He wrote a thing called the Cole question. He worked out that, as the UK became more efficient in its use of coal in everything from steam engines to factories and all the rest of it, it would result in us wanting more coal, not less. And that same principle just plays out everywhere unless we do something to stop it. If you look at the impact of the whole of computing, over the last 50 or 70 years, I mean it's got so much more efficient. It's millions of times more efficient.

But unfortunately, we are doing billions of times more of it. so the carbon footprint of it is going up. So if you look within ICT, the basic dynamic is the more efficient it gets, the amount more of it we do goes up faster than the efficiency improvement and therefore that efficiency leads to a rise in total impact, not a fall in total impact. So we end up doing more of everything by a larger amount than is justified by the efficiency improvement.

And that explains why our carbon emissions are just going up and up and up and up. despite the fact that practically everything you can think of is in life we are more efficient at than we were 50 years ago if you were to actually for the first time put a constraint on the carbon a proper high carbon price the role of efficiency wouldn't lead to more carbon coming out of the ground because that would be constrained by the carbon price it would just lead to us being able to do more of the things we love in fact we'd be even more hungry for efficiency improvements than we are now because it would be the only means by which we do

more with the things that we want to do. Energy use is going to rise, and we need to know how we're going to deal with that. Now, people like Jeff Bezos is talking about how we might need to go nuclear. Is that feasible? Not completely, and it wouldn't be the most cost-effective thing to do. Like, we've got all that free sun and free wind, even free waves. You might start there first. Okay, so you reckon renewables is the way to go. Absolutely. And a lot of tech companies already say that they're run on renewables. But then when you scratch the surface of that, a lot of that is carbon offsetting, which is what we're going to discuss in our section called Greenwash of the week, please don't greenwash and be a bastard.

So an investigation recently revealed that major tech companies, including Google, Microsoft, Meta and Apple, have all been underreporting their data center emissions by relying on renewable energy certificates, which are basically carbon offsets. So what does that mean, Tara? To give you an analogy for a carbon offset, say, for example, I wanted to have an affair, but I wanted to have a guilt-free affair I might decide that I would invest in marriage counselling for Juan and Julia in Guatemala

so I would invest in a plan through like a website where I would spend money to pay for their marriage counselling and then I could have a guilt-free affair carbon options are in-perperperic. Now this is an idea that I think does appeal to the writing of four audience. All right.

So, yes, it's offsetting your guilt to a degree. It's pretty well all greenwashing. Here's more from Mike Berners-Lee. There's no such thing as a carbon-neutral tech company. They all use a lot of energy, and that energy has to come from somewhere. And if they are using renewable energy, then that renewable energy cannot be used for decarbonising another part of the global economy, such as the transport system or heating homes or whatever. So there's always an opportunity cost.

So it's bogus to say you're neutral, carbon neutral because of your renewables. And then you get into the offset idea. You know, it is true that we need to do the right thing with our land, preserve our forests, plant new trees in some places and all the rest of it. But we need to do those things anyway. We need to do that at the same time as we reduce our global energy use. So any part of the economy that is increasing its energy use definitely can't call itself carbon-neutral.

I think a lot of companies do want to do the right thing and they would like to run their companies on renewable energy, but any of us, even in our homes, you might choose a green plan from your electricity provider. It doesn't mean that all the electricity coming in the wire into your house is solar or wind energy. It's a mix of everything. It's a way of expressing a preference in the market for green energy.

So they use these renewable energy certificates. We choose the green plan. It's all trying to send a signal back to the market, like give us more. renewable energy, but I guess that demand needs to be heard, and we need a whole lot more renewable energy. But we'll get there, we'll get there. AI continues to

grow at an alarming rate. It scares me, and I know it does, because of how incredibly polite I am to chat GPT. All pleases and thank yous. It's from watching too much Terminator growing up. I have visions of being captured by cyborgs in the future, rounded up for some mass human execution. When they finally get to me, just before they pull the trigger,

a robot will step in and say, wait he was always kind to us you're not alone I say thank you too and in fact according to open AI CEO Sam Altman people expressing gratitude to chat GPT has cost the company tens of millions of dollars and they say manners cost nothing there's always been a fear over modern technology and through the years people have tried various coping strategies yeah one of the most extreme cases of this would be the Amish, who have an inbuilt skepticism for new technology, something

I talked about with Mike Berners-Lee. What they do with a new technology is they don't necessarily not adopt it, but they kind of get somebody to test it out, and then they watch very, very carefully, what is the effect on this person?

Does it make their life better or worse? Does it make them a better or worse part of this community? So they ask this question of technology extremely carefully before they adopt it. Now, in our culture, we don't do that. And that's disastrous for us. Part of this big evolution for humanity that I've been saying that we need now is we need a new relationship with technology. We need to be much more discerning about which technologies we adopt and how we adopt them and which ones we leave

on the shelf and which types of deployment we make sure don't happen. I don't think the Armature is genuine as we all think though. I think under the surface, all them horses that they use really robots. Someone's fallen, are you okay? No, it's... Someone decided to get rid of their phone already and the episode's not even over. The demand to become armish

is just instant, John. Do you know how much gold is in a robot horse? And you don't get any criminal gangs on electric bikes running around and stealing robot horses. But also, the other problem... You can take a robot horse to water. But you're probably going to damage it

because it's not IP 69, right? That was niche. There's four people around the country listening to Rear4 going, oh, how's very drool? I mean, as waterproof horse jokes go, you're not going to get any better. And there's no water anyway because the data centers drank at all.

But a lot of people have blind faith in new technology. It's a bit offensive, I know, sorry, as I said that. What is it better turn of free? A lot of people have unwavering faith in new technology. And also many people have this tech optimism, it's called, where they think we don't need to worry too much about, you know, recycling and doing our bit for the planet, because tech will have a solution.

It's going to fix everything. Believing in a magic cure for the climate crisis is nothing new. And has led scientists and involved. to propose some rather eccentric ideas over the years. It's time to play a quick quiz. We found news stories about some of these crazy ideas. And we're going to read out the headlines with one crucial word missing.

And Chris, you have to guess what the missing word is. In a round that's nothing like, have I got news for you's missing words round. It's the redacted headline section, everyone. Question one. Giant Cannon to Fire Assault at what? Huge mutant slug. If it's not giant mutant slugs, John, what is it?

It is clouds, Chris. Marine cloud brightening involves spraying fine particles of sea salt into low-lying ocean clouds to make them brighter and more reflective and sending more sunlight back into space. Does that mean we get salty rain as well? Salty rain. Salty rain with the tears of God.

Question two. What? to be wrapped in giant blankets. Well, I mean, any fan of the Christmas dinner would hope it's giant pigs in giant blankets. We'd all forgo the Christmas dinner itself if we just got given one big giant pig in one big giant blanket.

Unfortunately, it's not the correct answer. The real answer is glaciers. Ski resorts in Switzerland are covering glaciers with blankets known as geotextiles to try and slow down their melting. Seems wrong in a way, isn't it? It does work, bizarrely. It keeps it cool, but the problem is it's really, really expensive.

It's the kind of thing that only Switzerland could do. It does highlight, though, the wealth disparity. You look at that enormous glacier wrapped in its own geothermal blanket and you can't help but think, so this is where the Nazi gold went. Okay. Question three. Are you ready? I'm ready, Tara.

Inventor wants to what? The ocean. Inventor wants to invent the ocean. He lives in a landlocked environment. He's never been near the coast. seen the ocean, doesn't know it exists and he's come up with the idea and he thinks it'd be a good place to keep fish. And he's had this idea, someone needs to tell him it already exists and no one's got the

heart to break it to him yet. I think that's the actual answer to that one, Tara. The real answer is in fact stir. An inventor wants to stir the ocean. Yeah, in the mid-noughties, inventor Philip Kittle claimed he could use giant underwater pumps to stir the ocean and bring cold, nutrient-rich water to the surface, boosting carbon dioxide absorbing plankton. But the proposal fell through because it turns out that marine life doesn't really like being stirred. It's not all failure for Philip.

He went on to make the world's largest cup of tea. Enough crazy proposal. Time to focus a little closer to home. And when it comes to the climate crisis, many people feel guilt and shame, which we like to alleviate. We encourage our guests to confess to an eco-sin, which we will then absolve them of in a section called...

Bless me, Tara, for I have sinned. So, Chris, what would you like to confess today? Well, I'm afraid that I do have a bit of a problem, Tara, and I am addicted to plastic. What kind of plastic? It's a very specific type of plastic, Tara. It's not single use. No, but it is used for singles.

I have a lot of it at home. I pay for people to bring it to my house, and it collects dust. I have an addiction to vinyl records, Tara. Vinyl records. Yeah. How many of you got? How many of you got? I've got a lot, too much to count.

I've had to start shipping it off into storage so that my wife has no idea how much I've bought over the years. But if she ever sees it all in one room, oh, I'll be wishing I was deaf instead of blind. And what's the attraction? I mean, I love music and it's something to collect. It's a bit of an obsession. I think vinyl these days as well, they don't make many of them

like they used to, so there's like a fear of missing out there's only a thousand of them made across the world and then you have to buy it before it sells out and then you realise that it was actually a thousand in burnt orange and then there's a thousand in green and a thousand in purple but I like the active experience of putting music on and digital music's quite disposable

and I like sitting there and opening it up and smelling the vinyl and the dust that it's collected that I think I'm in love with vinyl Tara everyone assumes that if it's physical versus digital physical has to be worse Well, you'd think so, wouldn't you? I'm thinking that collecting, buying things on vinyl, when we've got the opportunity to just ask a speaker to play the song, surely it's got to be more environmentally unfriendly.

There's a huge hidden cost, though, to streaming in particular, with all the data centres we've talked about. Yeah, so every time you ask your speaker to play something for you, every time you're back in your Spotify, that has to go up in the cloud and generate and use energy in order to send you back out the answer. So if you have your vinyl record, and you put that in your turn, it's just the energy to power the turntable and this is the good news for you if you

listen to each of your many many thousands of records at least 30 to 100 times what i mean then that is less than the carbon footprint of streaming so have you listened to them all about 30 times tarrah i've got the ghostbusters two soundtrack on vinyl i don't think i'm ever going to listen to that 30 times i think if i was to listen to all my records 30 to a 100 times each, we would first need to develop a way of getting humans to live to approximately 378 years old. And do you pass any of them on? No. Do you sell them? Are you part of the circular economy?

No, I keep them all because they take up space. It annoys my wife and that in itself gives me immense pleasure. Well, I want to encourage you to pass on out into the world the ones that you no longer want. Share the pleasure with someone else. So, yeah, the best format, if you download all your music to your phone when you're going to be listening to it, rather than streaming all the time. That's the best way. But, you know, it's still okay with vinyl.

It's not as bad as you think it is, especially if you listen to them lots. Well, my wife will be delighted that I can keep on buying it guilt-free. Chris, I hope you feel unburdened. And in terms of repentance, I've got two vinyals for you. I want you to listen to Hail Mary by Tupac and Cliff Richard's Millennium Prayer 30 times each, just to offset the streaming. Do you know what? You can keep the records.

I'm feeling cured, Tara. Are you? It's a miracle. Richard strikes again. We're nearly out of time for this episode and the planet generally. But before we go,

we often like to include handy tips for how you can lower your own carbon impact at home. We asked Mike Berners-Lee if he had any such tips choosing dark mode on your phone, perhaps, switching to a less energy-intensive internet browser, but his answer was a bit simpler.

For me, it's all part of a wider de-junking. So, you know, the carbon footprint of an email is tiny, and the carbon footprint of even an AI Google search is still pretty small. But as with all junk, the less of it, the better, both from the point of view of your own life and from the point of view of the planet. So it's a win-win. Most people will be a bit happy if they spend,

maybe a bit less time attached to their smartphones and a bit more time in the real world and sending and reading fewer emails and a bit more time talking to real people instead of asking chat GPT what it thinks. Yeah, limit your use. Yeah, just turn the thing off for a bit. Turn the bloody thing off.

Mike's right, it's probably wise for us all to get off our devices when possible and engage in the natural world. And we don't mean your new forestry app with its Shazam for Woodland Fungi. Not to say tech is the enemy and indeed new technology may be able to help us in our fight

against the climate crisis but it'll never provide a silver bullet cure. AI will continue to improve our tech's efficiency but the Jevons paradox shows us that energy consumption will continue to rise. So as ever, it comes back to getting a handle on the energy crisis and our current reliance on fossil fuels.

And in the meantime, each of us at home can do our little bit by limiting our own energy use. Including the time spent on our cobalt-sustained, energy-hungry and attention-sapping devices. We may be able to learn from the Amish. I'm not saying go full-armish, just Amish-ish-ish-ish. Perhaps you can start by turning off whatever device you're listening to this on. Yeah, have a whole week off.

Well, six days, 23 hours and 32 minutes. And then get right back on here and join us for next week's Carbon Life Forms. Carbon Life Forms was presented by John Long and Dr. Taras Shine with special guests, Chris McCausland and Mike. burner's leaf. It was written by John Long with additional material by Cameron Locksdale. It was produced by Lord Grimshaw and it's an unusual production for BBC

Radio 4. Hello, it's John Long here. If you enjoyed the episode you've just heard, you can listen to more on BBC Sounds. Join me and Tara as we tackle fashion with Bo Carter and Waste and Recycling with Athena Coblenu. Just search for carbon life forms. Political language

can seem archaic. It's like the light from one of those stars that actually died. Sometimes bamboozling. It's a theme park with a five-foot log flume from one thought to another. And very often, beyond words. I don't mean how to describe the language I use. I'm Amanda Unucci. I'm all reset and turbocharged to stress, test to destruction,

used and abused buzzwords and phrases from the world of politics. I come with a dazzling array of guest presenters and I'll be exploring the verbal tricks of the political trade, the intentions behind them and the effect they have on all of us. The new series of Strong Message Here with me, Amanda Yonucci from BBC Radio 4. Listen now on BBC Science.