The Rest Is Politics: Leading - 69. The brutal truth about net zero and how to vanquish climate populists, with Dieter Helm

Episode Date: April 14, 2024

Is net zero 2030 impossible to achieve - and is it a mistake to pursue it? Should governments be more brutal with climate investment? Are events like COP a waste of time? Rory and Alastair are joined by Britain’s leading energy economist, Professor Dieter Helm, to answer all these questions and more. TRIP Plus: Become a member of The Rest Is Politics Plus to support the podcast, receive our exclusive newsletter, enjoy ad-free listening to both TRIP and Leading, benefit from discount book prices on titles mentioned on the pod, join our Discord chatroom, and receive early access to live show tickets and Question Time episodes. Just head to therestispolitics.com to sign up, or start a free trial today on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/therestispolitics. TRIP ELECTION TOUR: To buy tickets for our October Election Tour, just head to www.therestispolitics.com Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics Email: [e-mail] Producers: Dom Johnson + Nicole Maslen Exec Producers: Tony Pastor + Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thanks for listening to The Restis Politics. Sign up to the Restis Politics Plus. To enjoy ad-free listening, receive a weekly newsletter, join our members chat room and gain early access to live show tickets. Just go to therestispolities.com. That's the rest is politics.com. Welcome to the rest is politics leading, with me Rory Stewart. And with me, Alist and today we have with us Professor Sedita Helm, who is Britain's leading energy economist and therefore right in the middle of the fierce practicalities of climate change and what would be involved in helping to transition Britain and indeed the world to net zero. But he's also something who's profoundly interested, not just in climate change, but in the environment more generally. I came across Dita relatively early on, but worked with him very closely when I was the Minister of the Environment. And in issues that we have actually talked about on the podcast, for example, with Fergal Sharkey around the issues of clean rivers and beaches, but also use of land. Planting of trees, what kind of trees to plant, thinking about peatland, thinking about leisure, thinking about how to create a British

environment which would be better in 25 years time than we have today. So he's very unusual. He's somebody who is fiercely committed to improving the environment and to addressing climate change. So he's absolutely determined to try to make sure that we're going to. we stop filling the atmosphere with carbon, but he's also brutally realistic about what would actually be involved in doing it. He's one of very, very few people who I was able to engage with in government, who's able to both be a serious academic, the professor at Oxford, but also able to communicate to politicians to the public and do that very, very rare thing of finding the intersection

between knowing a lot of stuff and being able to engage with public policy. So, Dita, thank you for joining us. Well, thank you very much for inviting me. Did you can I, can I begin just by setting a bit of the landscape? So we have recently interviewed Mark Carney, the former governor of the Bank of England, who had a very optimistic vision of how much progress had been made and said we were being too gloomy. So he was talking about the fact he thought, he thought, huge progress being made on keeping global temperatures under control. We interviewed Kate Rowarth, who made some very interesting but challenging comments about growth. She seemed to imply, although she never quite came out and said it, that it looked as though we would have to not just

stop growth, but probably reduce the size of the economies in much of the developed world, Europe and the United States, if we were going to allow developing countries to reach our level. And then we interviewed Bill Gates, who, of course, was a real techno-optimist on addressing these issues. So I'm going to step back and just hand over to you and give us perhaps the beginning of your sense of where we are. And then we can get into any number of details, ranging from climate to what it's like dealing with ministers and governments. Well, thank you. First, let me say, I'm somewhat irritated by the idea that we can discuss things like climate change with no disrespect. in terms of whether you're an optimist or a pessimist.

I describe myself as brutally realistic and trying to ascribe to one camp or the other doesn't actually get us very far. And it is really important to always take stock of where you are, not just where you'd like to be, but where you are and how far you've got along the road. So if we look at climate change, 1990 is the base year.

and everybody has been aspiring through endless cops under the UN framework, etc., to do something about climate change. Well, climate change is about the stock of carbon in the atmosphere. It's about how much is going up in emissions and how much is coming out in sequestration, mainly by nature. And the record's terrible. So from 1990 to now, we have added two parts per million every single year. And that really needs to be thought of because if in 1990 you'd said, do you know what?

Success is going to be if we can get the concentration of carbon in the atmosphere up to 420 parts per million or something like that. I mean, it's disastrous. From something like 350, can you, before we talk about parts of million, just help us understand historically where were we, what were things like a few hundred thousand years ago, a few thousand years ago, what do these parts per million actually mean? Well, actually, parts per million means there isn't much CO2 in the atmosphere. It's parts per million, but it really does matter in greenhouse gas terms and the greenhouse

effect what that amount is. And where we are is that we had a level before the Industrial Revolution, something about 275, 250, somewhere around those numbers. And here we are, we've marched up to 375, and now we've marched up. up past 400 and we're like 410, 420. So if you were putting it on a graph, this is a pretty steep graph. And we haven't seen anything like this for a very long time. And we've carried on adding to that concentration of carbon relentlessly since 1990,

all that political effort, all those ambitions, all the money that's been spent. The outcome has been meager. It is now true that I think there's virtually no chance. of achieving the 1.5 degree warming target, and actually, on the current trajectories, we're going to go well past two. So, you know, if you want to be optimistic or pessimistic, good luck, right. I want to be realistic, and I want to say, so why haven't we achieved what we wanted to achieve? Why have we achieved so little for so much so far? And what would we actually need to do if we really wanted to make these numbers add up?

Okay, at the risk of irritating you further by going on to the optimism, pessimism scale, as part of the preparation for this, I read lots about the issue. And I read last night a report by a guy called Kingsmill Bond. I don't even know Kingsmill Bond, but he works for a non-profit in America called RMI. And he was, I would argue, very much on the optimistic side. And one of the reasons was because of what he called this revolution in renewables, in which he basically explained that the costs are plummeting, sales are growing exponentially, capital is shifting away from fossil fuels and very much towards renewables, and fossil fuel use is at best stagnant as peaked, even in China, where China is sort of leading the way now on renewables. and that what this is doing, a little bit how the internet started in one part of the, effectively, you know, it's an American, basically, the American tech giant sort of expanded this thing,

and it's now covering the whole world, that there will be this sort of leadership from China, which is then going to expand around the world. So there's going to be an exponential expansion of renewables. Is that not something to be optimistic about? Well, if you think that's going to happen, and you think it's going to happen in the way that Kingsmill described it, then we can all go home, basically. It'll be like the internet.

We won't need government to do any of this stuff. We won't need any subsidies. It's just going to happen. No, we probably will need that, and I think he says that. Well, but if it's all going in that direction and the costs are tumbling everywhere, then you know, you have to ask yourself, you know, leading politicians tell us in Britain that renewables are 10 times cheaper

than fossil fuels, et cetera. You have to say, well, the market will do this stuff. Now, I don't believe that. You know, if we just take a position, you know, the world's in, 80% of the world's energy comes from fossil fuels, about the same as it did in 1990. Okay, 80%. That's where we're starting from.

And that's coal, gas, the oil. Demand for oil is still going up. The demand for gas is rising sharply. and the demand for coal is not yet even stabilized. Dita, can I come in here? So this will be, I think, surprising to many lessons, right? We're told that's been an amazing explosion in the use of solar panels, wind turbines. So why is it that there's been a massive increase in the amount of solar panel,

wind turbine use and other forms of renewable? But at the same time, 80% of our energy still comes from fossil fuels, just as it did in 1990. What's the answer of resolving these two things? Well, if you now look at what the other 20% of that 100% is for the world's energy, the other 20% is mostly nuclear and large-scale hydro. So if you look at the graph, where we've got to in renewable so far is a bit bigger than the pencil line along the top, but it's really quite small. And Deutu, why is this?

Presumably the answer you're giving us is that, yes, there's been a huge increase in the use of solar and wind, but there's also been a huge increase in oil, coal, gas and everything else. Yes, we're on over 100 million barrels a day. But what's the trend here? Which directions are they going in? Well, oil's going up, right? America's gone. America's the big transformation under particularly Obama, but also Biden,

which is the transformation from a country declining in oil output down towards the kind of 7 to 9 million barrels a day, to now being by far the world's largest producer of oil at 13 million barrels a day and rising. And that's because our economies are soaked in carbon. And this is what makes the challenge of what we have to do so demanding and so important. But it is a huge challenge. Think of plastics. Think of the world's transport.

Think of almost anything you do. Write your daily carbon diary down and then have a look at almost everything in your day and work out how much of it's made up of carbon. Now, it's true. We are decarbonising in the UK and in bits of Europe, and indeed a bit of the US, electricity. Almost all the gains have been by switching from coal to gas. That's the great thing Britain achieved. That's why we're in the 70s for the share of fossil fuels in the British economy, not above the 80s. But if you look at where the emissions are going to come from in the future. They're not going to come from the UK. You know, we're 1%. It's about India. It's about Indonesia. It's about China. It's about Brazil. It's about the Middle

Eastern countries. It's about sub-Saharan Africa. It's about Nigeria, which will have a population bigger than Europe's by 2050. And in these countries, the demand for fossil fuels is rising sharply. India's a classic example, a coal-based expansion. That's the context, because global warming is global. It's what it says on the tin. Now, we seem to think the global warming is made in Oxford or in England. I don't think anybody thinks that, but we do all operate as whether we like it or not as nation states. And I think there was a point at which the UK was giving some pretty strong leadership in this area. I think that has been weakened in recent times. So each country has to do what it can do, understanding that we also have to operate internationally. But if you think

that if I go back to this report from Kingsville Bond, he actually mentions India, talks about the fact that, yes, you may be right that they can do an awful lot more, but they have at least put this at the heart of their industrial strategy. He talks about Chile, which is building its own hydrogen export industry. He talks about Vietnam, which now has a bigger share of solar than the United States. So there is stuff happening. I guess the optimist, which he is, is essentially saying this stuff is happening and we have to push it and encourage it and develop it in that way. I get the sense that I know this really will irritate you that you do come across as being quite pessimistic. But then again, you, I think, were very pessimistic about renewables generally.

I mean, you were very, very, very pessimistic about the idea that wind could ever be economic. You were quite pessimistic about the idea that rooftop solar and biomass could actually make much difference to decarbonisation, but they are making a difference. Okay, so let's unpack it. First of all, this idea that the UK is showing leadership. I mean, again, it's about brutal realism. We've been de-industrialising. You know, what do you think is going on now? We're going to close Port Talbot.

We're going to close Grangemouth. And we're going to import the petrochemicals and the steel from China or elsewhere. Okay? What happens to global emissions? do they go up or do they go down? Well, they go up, right? And so this notion that, you know, when we get to net zero will no longer be causing climate change, if only that were true, you know, a lot of those emissions in China are ours for us. So if you measure properly our carbon footprint, which is carbon consumption, not just carbon production, you would get a very

different story from the one that's trotted out. Now, I understand why politically it's important to say that for the politicians, but the reality is not as presented. Now, I come back to your point about optimism and pessimism. There's nothing in what I'm saying that says this problem can't be cracked. Nothing at all. And there's plenty of energy. The sun comes up every day. The sun produces in about an hour more energy I'm told than the world's electricity industry consumed in a year. There are plenty of technologies out there coming down the track. Where I depart from a conventional wisdom is while I think that wind and solar have very

important contributions to make, and I'm very pro both, and I think that both should be subsidised because I don't think they're cost competitive now. I don't think we're going to power the world on wind and solar alone, and indeed, I think that their contributions will always be part play, not total play. So I think one has to be brutally realistic again. I keep coming back to this point, but I'm pushing back against your notion that we must be, you know, happy, clappy and optimistic about this stuff. I've never been a happy clapy. I'm not going to happy clapy. Well, well, but we have to have hope. Look, no doubt there's a psychology involved in this. Yeah. And I'm absolutely certain that if you tell

people, it's unsolvable, then they will stop trying to solve it. That's not my view. My view is that you'll need quite a range of technologies. The technical progress is a very important part of this. Nuclear may well be a significant part of this frame. That the scale of what needs to be done is huge. It's to get from 80 or 70% of total energy globally to something much lower. This is like taking a peacetime economy and making it into a wartime economy and doing it on stips, because after all, last time we did this, we were taking essentially fossil fuel internal combustion engines and using for military purposes as opposed to peace ones. This is a complete transition of our electricity system. You need a new grid, the supergrid to handle this system. You need to put that in place.

That's a big investment. And as to the notion that the costs of renewables will always fall, I hope they will, but let me just point out the costs of offshore wind have just doubled in the North Sea because the cost of capital has gone up quite substantial. Okay, well, that's when everything gets affected by economic factors. But if the cost of solar has fallen by almost 90% over a decade, so the first terawatt of solar power took around about several decades, probably more than half a century, the next is going to take a few years. So there is exponential change.

It's a fantastic achievement. And it's also a fantastic achievement how essentially doing the logistics properly and increasing the size of the blades reduced the costs of producing offshore wind. Nobody wants to detract from that. Okay. That's great.

But you also have to ask why those costs are full before you jump to the conclusion that they're going to keep on falling forever. It's all exponential. Okay. So one thing to say, great step forward. Second step to say is what happens next. Now, the reduction in costs of solar are almost entirely due to the manufacturing cost savings in China, in northwest China, where 80% of the world's solar panels are made.

If you look at the labor conditions there, if you look at the organization of that labor, if you look at the role of the Uyghurs in this, including those who are in these camps, yeah. to be controlled, etc. If you look at the intensive coal that's used to produce those solar panels because they're very, very coal intensive to produce, the story is slightly different. Is it such a bad story that you think we should

not be taking that stuff from China? Well, if you're ESG, you should take into account the human rights of the people there on what's happening to them. In the same ways you should take into account when you drive your electric car, the child slave labor in the

Congo mines, right? So you should take care. But what I would say is the real hope for solar is moving beyond the materials that are currently used. That's really exciting. When it comes to offshore wind, okay, you can make them float, but you can't make the blades much bigger. And it's not unreasonable to say that the considerable cost savings have been made have possibly largely been made. Now, other technologies, fusion nuclear, etc., these may be completely transformational. So I want to give a lot of money to developing those new technologies. That's really important to me, and that's where I'd put more focus rather than trying to fix some arbitrary targets for how many gigawatts of this and how many gigawatts of that's can be produced. And I'm very

optimistic about those technologies. Okay. Can I step back for a second and bring listeners back to the sort of big picture? So firstly remind us why net zero is something that we should be aiming for. So remind us why you care about climate change and why that's a big policy objective. And once you've done that, I'd like to just sort of bring down to the sort of the policy implications of this. But firstly, tell us why this is something you want to do and why we should want to do it. Okay. So I want to do net zero carbon consumption. So I don't want to do net zero territorial carbon production because what happens to be emitted in the UK is, is not a measure of what you and I in the UK are contributing to climate change.

That's why in one of my earlier books I said, people should construct their own carbon diaries. Work out how much of what they're doing is laced with carbon, right? And then work out what it would be like by 250 not to include that. And we know that the numbers, for example, for the UK for carbon consumption are much higher than carbon production. Another blip in this, that, you know, we don't even include Drax power station in our emissions because we're We believe that they're going to grow some trees in the United States to offset this stuff. So, you know, these numbers are not the right net zero numbers. And indeed, they can be perverse.

They can produce the result that you actually increase emissions by buying the steel from somewhere else and importing it and not counting it, etc. But that said, the reason we want to get to this proper measure outcome is because we do not want the climate to go above two degrees because that has real consequences. really serious consequences, and not sort of just nicely pedestrian, it just gets a bit worse year by year. These things have tipping points too. So this is a really serious challenge. I don't think it's quite existential.

Dieter, if we were writing a carbon diary now, what are we doing now that might go into our carbon diary? I mean, the second. Right. So if I think about what we're doing now, there's a lot of energy used in the communications technology. you were currently using, a lot of it. In fact, ICT will be the huge growth in electricity demand over the next two, three decades. It's going to be really big, AI, et cetera, all of that stuff which lies behind our modern communications.

But, you know, look at the clothes you're wearing. Look at all the carbon in those. What did you have for breakfast? Or, you know, are you going on an airplane later? I mean, I don't fly. You never fly? I stopped flying, right? Because, you know, we're all hypocritical.

We're all, you know, engaged in all sorts of virtue signaling, etc. But, you know, I made that decision. And remind us, Dieter, in quite stark terms, how much carbon is in a passenger flight from London to New York? I don't know the number off the top of my head, but it should be enough to worry you quite a lot. Right. engagement with lots of politicians. I always find it quite difficult to place you politically. I hear you sometimes talking about market solutions and I'm thinking, oh, this guy's, you know, he's quite out on the sort of Tory on this Tory side on this. Then I hear you talking about we need

to tax more to invest and consume less and you sound a bit more kind of on the, on the Ed Miliband's side of the argument. I mean, am I being rude in asking you where you actually lie on the political spectrum. Well, I'd be horrified if you could place me because the idea that these problems that I'm interested are going to be better solved on the left or the right. Seems to me to abstract from the reality that we're all in this and we're all in it for the long run. But I would say as an aside, there's hardly any difference in this country between Labor and Conservative energy policy, and there's hardly any difference in their position on borrowing GDP, growth, ambitions, etc. Actually, I think in my lifetime, I've never seen two major parties actually agree

on virtually all the component parts of this. We talked a lot on the podcast about what seems to be a kind of shift in strategy, well, certainly in rhetoric, if not in strategy after the Uxbridge by-election, which both kind of horrified both Rory and me. Do you think that was just a bit of politics and that actually the fundamentals have not really changed in this debate? I mean, I'm not an apologist for what the government's doing or an advocate of what Labor's going. But let me look at the things that have happened, which are supposed to be this kind of turning away from net zero politics, etc. I mean, it's nonsense, right? So we're not going to hit the boiler target with regard to heat pumps and boilers.

Is that a supply chain issue? Well, it's everything. It's the cost. I mean, you know, last year, over a million new gas boilers are fitted and a few tens of thousands, if that, of heat pumps are done. It's very expensive, it's very difficult. The infrastructure isn't there. Okay?

So what conservatives have done, and I'm not an advocate at their position, is simply to recognize reality. And that's why the Labour Party didn't oppose that. Secondly, on the electric cars, everyone can see the problems all about the charging networks that aren't there and the rage, anxiety, etc., etc. And so is it really realistic to go absolutely flat out to finish this job in five years? Is it going to happen? Probably not.

It's a tweak on the line. When it comes to low emission zones, etc., and traffic, etc., and the political parties are all over the place on this, depending on whether it's a rural constituency or an urban one, etc. The realities is, if you do not carry the local population with you to the extent that they're actually going to make it the main issue in a by-election, you have a... made a mistake somewhere along the line. You have not explained what you're doing properly, you haven't done the adjustment properly, and you haven't taken account of the losers in your policy. And even you come down to the issue of gas and unabated gas, both major parties, energy policy in

Britain is offshore wind, nuclear and gas. And it's very interesting that Labor did not disagree with any of the substantive points that were in the Conservative Secretary of State speech. And it's not a bad thing we agree. It's a really quite good thing that we have a stability of what we're trying to do. The rhetoric's completely different. And that and my personal view is unhelpful on both sides. Okay, quick break. Hi, everybody. It's Dominic Samaruk here from The Rest is History. Now, some of you may have heard me on your show, The Rest is Politics when Rory was away and I was filling in and enjoying Alistair Campbell's tremendous banter. And I'm back to tell you about our new series on The Rest is Politics. rest is history, which is all about Britain in the 1970s, a period with a lot of uncanny resemblances to our own. So right now we're living through a moment when oil shocks generated by war in the Middle East are rippling through the world economy, when Britain feels like it's sunk in a bit of a malaise, people are arguing about Europe, the government

has got a few issues with the trade unions, and we have a kind of, I suppose you'd say governing elite, a kind of political class that is really struggling to come to terms with all of these issues. And people are asking if Britain is governable at all. So there are a lot of parallels between that Britain that I'm describing, which is our Britain and the Britain of the mid-1970s. So in this series that's coming out on the rest is history, we'll be looking at these and other issues. We'll be talking about the rise of Margaret Thatcher, obviously a colossal figure in our political life even now, whether you love her or loathe her. And we'll be talking about the very first Brexit referendum of 1975, a subject that I'm sure Rory and Alistair will have strong opinions about.

We'll be talking about the fall of the Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson, and we'll be talking about one of the grimest moments in Britain's economic history, the moment in 1976 when we had to go cap in hand, as people said at the time, to the International Monetary Fund, the IMF, for a then-record bailout. Now, if that sounds good to you, how could it not sound good to you? Of course it sounds good to you. We have a clip for you to listen to at the end of this episode. And if you want to hear more, just search for The Rest is History wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, so Dita, you told us why we should be very, very worried about climate change.

You told us about why you believe we should be radically reducing our carbon footprint and what you're doing about it, for example, on flights. Now give us the other side. in very kind of simple direct terms, if you were talking to a voter, explain why you feel our approach. So we've got a huge problem, but the solution that we've come up with isn't fixing it and isn't going to fix it. Well, I'd start off by explaining the facts. So two facts that I put over to you in this discussion are A, we're not actually making progress on reducing the increase in carbon content concentration. the atmosphere. Secondly, we're 80% fossil fuel globally. And actually, thirdly, the main future emissions are going to come from developing countries and not from the UK or elsewhere.

Just tell people the fact, because I don't think people see it that way. I think people think we're really doing well. We're nearly there. It's almost there. 230, net zero electricity. It's all going to be fine. I keep coming back to this, but we've got to resolve in people's head the gap between what Alistair was saying, which is absolutely true, right? We're producing solar more cheaply, there's more and more solar, there's more and more wind, and the point that you're making, which is 80% of R&G is still coming out of fossil fuels. So try to explain in simple terms how both those things can be true at the same time. Well, I'm not quite convinced that Alistair is correct, okay, but let's just... Sorry, we're not allowed to utter those

words on this podcast, Tito. You'll be forthwith banned from the studio. Yeah, well, I'll wait for that to happen. So I'm not quite convinced of that. Sorry, can I be provocative? Let's just, for the sake of arguments, say the cost of solar has come down and we're generating more energy from solar and wind than we were in the past. And that's what gets people cheery. Yes. Yes, it's true. Okay, so help the voter understand how it can both be true that the costs come down and we're generating more from solar wind and also that we're not making any difference really on parts of million.

What's the experience of the, I don't know what you would call the average voter or the average household or whatever, confront. with these changes? Well, first of all, there's the cost. So part of the argument which reinforces the frame that Alice is putting on the problem is that, you know what, it's not only going to happen, but it's going to make our bills lower. It's all going to be cheaper. And of course, if that's true, it's like buying the next version of the iPhone. The market will do it. We'll all go out and switch. We'll say, get out there tomorrow morning. Let's get our solar panels in. Let's get our heat pumps in. Let's buy an electric car.

But if you go and do that, if you sit down the pub and talk to people about their experiences of what actually happens, it's really expensive to fit a heat pump. It's very disruptive. And you have to have a certain kind of house to make this work. Okay. It's no good having an old house with needing very large radio, etc. And you have a different experience of what comes out of it.

That's why they're buying gas boilers still. If you want to go out and buy electric car, unless you're a company director, it's fantastically expensive relative to a petrol car. We're talking about, you know, 10,000 pound plus difference. And that may not be much to people on higher incomes, but it's sure as matters to people on average incomes. Okay, on solar panels. Well, yes, if you work out the costs of installing soda panels, and I have a lot of them

installed, and you work out the payback period over that, and you've got a house. or budget where you've got no savings and you're trying to pay the mortgage, you don't have that capital to do that. And then you look at your electricity bill. And the truth is that a lot of your electricity bill, not all of it by any means, is made up of paying subsidies to these very technologies that are supposed to be so cheap. That is true. The gas price went up, but the gas price now is lower in real terms than it was before the COVID

event. It's incredibly cheap. you take the inflation effect into account, and it's falling in price. And for most of the public, they don't have the luxury of sitting around thinking, like I might, that, you know, I'm not going to do this and I can afford to pay that, etc., etc. That's not their everyday experience. And that's why what should be happening according to these, quote, optimists who tell you this story about is all going to be cheaper, bills are going to fall, etc. The reason bills are going to fall if they are, particularly for electricity, it's because the gas price is going to fall.

and gas is setting the prices in this frame. So it just isn't people's lift reality. And I would say for good reason, because the story they've been told is not actually true. But you see, I think there is a danger that if you simply keep highlighting the downsides, the problems, the challenges, I'm not saying the challenges aren't real. But if a politician were to listen to this and to take your word as gospel, they probably wouldn't get out of bed because it feels so sort of impossible and they might just start to focus on lesser problems and sort of, you know, get some low-hanging fruit.

And you know, and you did. You did back in the day, I think you were one of those when Tony Blair's government signed up to the EU renewables target. Lots of your world said, this is crazy, right? But it has been met. So I think sometimes politicians have to go against conventional wisdoms, go against, they do. do have to give that bit of hope and optimism. And it sometimes does mean setting out the big picture vision and then doing the hard work to get there. So you were wrong about it then.

No, no, no, no. Let's compare it. So what quite a lot of that at 220 renewables target we're discussing Europe? Firemass, things like Drax, right? What's the carbon footprint of that? Have you really thought through what the components of that framework are? And that's what I've discussed in time. For not doing it?

No, I didn't say that at all. So let me come to the second point. So what would you have me do? I know it's true that we haven't made much progress, and I've written about why we haven't making my progress, but I should shut up about that, not mention it, and pretend the progress has been excellent. I should go around telling people, it's all going to be cheap. It's all much cheaper than fossil fuels.

The prices are going to fall. You're going to run out and do this stuff. What happens when it turns out that it isn't? And people suddenly find that the story they've been told by politicians, by many, isn't actually true. But I've given you an example. Then what happens is the reaction is exactly what's going on across Europe now. I agree.

We have a really nasty reaction, which is anti-net-zero policies, anti-green. We've got farmers on the streets supported by the public who are begging to keep cheap, subsidised diesel and to maintain their pesticides and usage and have further subsidies. And they have large support. We have populace all over the place. The AFD made progress in Germany. Why? because they were against heat pumps

because the people found them expensive and didn't want to be told to do this. You know, the consequence of what I call, forgive me for this, but the happy, clappy approach to this is to say that when it turns out that people realize what the world is, as opposed to what they've been told,

they trust the politicians even less and you get these kinds of backlashes at the moment, which I think are incredibly dangerous for our climate, incredibly dangerous for a natural environment. That's why I come back to being realistic, Can I come in on this, because I think you're onto something really interesting for a politics podcast. Of course, part of the reason why I feel a emotional sympathy for Dita is that my lived experience, of course, in Afghanistan and Iraq, was I was the person saying, this is all screwed, this isn't working, looks at the facts and figures, and everybody was saying, you can't say that. We've got to encourage the troops, we've got to encourage the public, we've got to keep being optimistic and hopeful, how are you going to motivate everyone?

And I was trying to say, like Dita, look, I think there are things we can do in Afghanistan. It's going to be much less than you assume it's going to be more difficult, but the stuff we can do, but don't talk this happy, happy language. And I guess I feel that it's a really important theme. I sort of slightly feel the same on immigration, that one of the reasons this apoculist backlash on immigration is that we weren't clear and straightforward enough about some of the challenges involved. And that then means that people lose trust in us. I think it may be true for actually quite a loss of what we seem to promise in the 90s and 2000s, that politicians were too optimistic. And when people discovered in general that they weren't delivering, it's provided Trump and everyone the opportunity to say these guys are all a bunch of bullshitters and we shouldn't believe a word they say.

But see, where I agree with Alistair on the following point, okay, it's not enough to point out that what people are being told may not be correct. it is beholden to do the other side of the equation too, which is okay, I'm surprised you didn't put this question to me, which is, so what would you do? And I have a very clear view about what we should be doing about climate change and how positively we could make a great deal more difference for what we're currently spending. And of course, I think we should spend more on it beyond that point. So, but just first of all, on the, I don't think I'm certainly not happy, Clappy because I think this is, you know, lethally dangerous the whole thing.

I completely understand and agree with you that the populace are exploiting this because the populace exploit wherever they can to promote their own kind of whatever is that they're promoting left or right. And, you know, I think you mentioned the economic impact of going over two degrees. And the Office of Budget Responsibility,

one of the lesser commented upon aspects of their recent reports was actually that this could lead to, you know, catastrophic economic impact if we don't get on top of this. But I guess what I'm doing is trying to highlight the difference in the role of expert advice and politicians who have to give signals of leadership. So let's just maybe go to your report on the cost of energy, because you had an experience there of what it's a little bit more, what it's like to be the politician. You get asked to do something, you prepare a report, you publish the report, lots of people say they're like this bit, don't like

this bit, quite a lot of people, you know, attacked it fairly aggressively. And then I got the feeling the government just thought, oh, this is a bit difficult, let's park it. So let me ask you your experience, for those of our listeners who are here for the politics list, what did that teach you about the interaction between the role of advisor and expert and the role of government? Okay. So, I mean, a lot, right? Just the answer to that question. And, you know, there was, first of all, the process of doing the report where you go through what's almost a political process in which various people try to capture the result before you get to writing it up. And I did everything I possibly could to make sure that didn't happen, including I wrote the

report myself and I didn't let any civil servant or anyone else write. So I was determined to say, here's a question, I will try to give what I think the right answer to that question, and I will say what you need to do, what the recommendations are to achieve that outcome, knowing full well that the result would be that those who would be losers from the report would be viriantly hostile to the outcome, and they would come in fiercely and try to knock their main conclusions out. And they were, I mean, it was very clear what happened. I said that intermittency is important. I said that, you know, If you want to have technologies which work for between 20 and 40% of the time,

part of the costs of having those technologies is the backup that's required, as they say in the simplistic terms, when the wind doesn't blow, when the sun doesn't shine. And those costs are real. They exist. They don't go away. And I propose this technical thing called equivalent of power where people would have to bid, derated by whatever that percentage was. And that meant that effectively those who caused intermittency would have to pay the costs.

That's, by the way, why I don't agree with you about the costs of the renewables. Once you add the intermittency in and the system costs associated, they are not cost competitive at the moment. It is not quite the rosy story that people sell. And that's why I'm very, very adamant. They need subsidising and supporting, right? If you don't believe me about this, then you can be very relaxed about the subsidies because you don't really need them. I think you need them. So what then happens is you have a process in which,

politics engages and the pushback's very hard. Subsequently, and this is what I expected, people would try to arrive at the right answer by every other possible way they could and the one I suggested. But in the end, you come back to baseline, which is what I propose is the cheapest way of getting to the results you want to get to. What was your interaction with government post publication? Well, pre-publication, I had the advantage of having direct support from the Secretary of State who asked me to do. That was Greg Clark. That's Greg Clark.

And he was very keen that this was done, and he was very supportive of the process. And I was really clear at the beginning about the independence of what I did. You have to get the terms of reference right. And it sounds techie in politics, but it really matters. Okay. Then afterwards, of course, politicians listen to the lobbyists. They all come out of the woodwork. And the more governments involved in these things, the more lobbying there is.

And Dita, there's also a political time frame here, as you, isn't that? Which needs to be explained to the listener. So, Greg Clark is a minister under David Cameron and Theresa May. Yeah. And he then, the person who's commissioned the report and who's backing you, then goes when Boris Johnson comes in. So a whole new government comes in with a whole new ideology. So what does it feel like? Just gives the sense the difference in tone between dealing with the Theresa May government

and a Boris Johnson government when it comes to this stuff. As in energy, I had this in death for a natural capital. Committee and time you were there, Rory. I mean, I had, I don't know how many Secretary of State. You know, I had Caroline Spellman, then I had Owen Patterson, it was very focused on being in different position. Yeah, like Net Zero and he's a position of that. Then I had, I think, Liz Trust twice.

Oh, lucky you. And then I had Michael Gove, who was, I'm not political about this, but he was absolute star, totally ministerial support, Secretary of State support for what we were trying to do. But he's the guy who said we've had enough of experts. Yes, and I teased him about that a great deal. But I have to say, lots of things I don't agree with Gove about or conservatives about, Brexit being one of them.

But I have to say, he was the most professional minister I ever dealt with. He listened, he read, he thought, and he was prepared to challenge vested interest. But I had them all. That energy was a much more interesting experience in one sense, because I had great Clark, who was very supportive, but he disappeared. We then went through the whole shenanigans of all the Brexit deals, and the focus was not on anything other than the Brexit deals. But I then had the very surreal experience of being Boris Johnson's energy advisor for, I think, two weeks.

And I say I think, because they never got it organized to make the announcement, and they never quite ended it. But this was an experience of dealing with, in this case, a prime minister, which was complete outside the cosmos that I dealt with before. And when you learn is that if you're a Democrat, and I'm half East German, I care a lot about democracy, it is if you care about public policy, almost your duty to provide independence advice if you're asked to do it by democratically elected people, whether you agree or not with many things they do.

And the lesson I learned was you have to adapt the style by which you engage, but you must never compromise on the content. Because the moment you tell people what they want to hear, which I could have done in the Cost of Energy Review, you lose the plot. So cost of energy review basically said the net zero transition and renewables are going to cost much more than you think. It's going to be more expensive.

and you were worried about vested interests who were going to attack you. Tell us who those vested interests were, why they attacked you and what they said. So, I'm no disrespect to them at all because if I was one of them, I would have done the same thing because we'd move to a world in which the government is the client for energy generation, not the customer. That's this world in which we have the CFD, subsidies, etc. The government's effectively the guarantor. They're your contractor.

They're your client. And once you've done that, which is what happened at the end of the first decade and over 210 and just afterwards, once you've done that world, you want to get the best terms of contract out of the government for your investors. So those who are having a free ride on the system costs of their intermittency obviously didn't want a world where those costs were recognized. So free ride on the system cost of intermittency means people with solar and wind, and you're suddenly suggesting they pay more because they're not producing energy all the time? That is included within the cost. So of course they imposed it. And they were

really good at it. And I would say they were so good at it, and they probably still are, that they've captured a lot of the government department. And that's really important how, it's not just how lobbying works vis-à-vis ministers. It's how lobbying works in its interaction with the civil service. that's incredibly important. I think there are all sorts of dimensions about revolving doors, about career paths, etc. And we've lost the ability for ministers to separate in their minds. What is advice that's based on interest from what is actually genuine analysis because what we've lost, this is my experience in government, is that role for civil servants as giving impartial policy advice to ministers.

And I might say so, and Alistair, you might not like this, but the Blair government's focus on delivery stripped out a lot of that core, really competent tradition in the civil service of telling truth to ministers. And I think a lot of that's gone. And it's not just under Labor, it's happened under conservatives too. And that makes it much harder to get through to good public policy. in the public interest, which is what I'm interested in. Well, it won't surprise, you know, I don't really agree with that, the part about the

Blair government. I think one of the big failings of this government under David Cameron was not understanding what the role of the delivery unit actually was in terms of driving forward the delivery of policies to which the government was committed. But let's not relitigate the wonderful work of Sir Michael Barber. But you mentioned there about the interest. And of course, the other thing that happened that made you perhaps feel a bit like a politician during that process was that we interviewed Caroline Lucas recently. And she went on quite a rampage in Parliament because she felt that you weren't declaring your interests clearly enough.

You did do a very general declaration of interest related to the review. And you said that you did have clients right across the energy sector. but it was very, very, very vague. I think you were asked about whether you had oil and gas companies that were clients, and you didn't give an answer to that. And Caroline Lucas really went through the parliamentary process, trying to get answers and seems to me failed to do so. So one, did you feel there was any conflict of interest?

And secondly, or whether you had special interest that you should have declared, and secondly, did that give you any more sympathy towards politicians who have to deal with this sort of stuff all the time? Well, no, no, no is the answer to your question. It's very straightforward. In discussions with the civil servants, I tried to go much further than most people do in these contexts. But, you know, in the end, there is a question. If you want people who've never had anything to do with companies, right, to be involved in these reviews,

you're going to find people who have very little understanding what happens in boardrooms and very little understanding of how the world works. My world is the intersection between three different things. Academic research, government and policy and industry. And I think that if I didn't have a grasp of how the world works out there and what happens in boardrooms, etc., etc., then it would be a much poorer report as a result. But I think I was completely open. what really happened was that there were a number of politicians who were got at by the

renewables industry who realized from some of the things I've written in the past that they might not like the conclusions that came out. And so kill the messenger before the messenger puts the message down on paper in order to discredit before you get the result. And I just walked through that. But I think that's a bit unfair to them. They're not all doing it purely out of a sort of pre-ordained vested interest. So I think with somebody like Caroline Lucas to be asking whether this guy that the government has decided should lead the cost of energy review, does he have links with the oil and gas industry, does he take money from them? I think that's a legitimate question.

I have no qualm at all with Caroline and the position she takes on a lot of these things. I disagree on many things, but that's perfectly legitimate. and I have never represented the oil industry in any form whatsoever. And there's this attempt to try to find some sort of, you know, something under the stones, etc. And frankly, it's not there, it's not true, and it had no effect on the outcome or the report whatsoever. You said no in answer to the question whether it felt any more sympathetic to politicians. Did that process of just having that little feeling of what it's like when suddenly you've got people coming out of all directions, did you not have any more sympathy with the politicians who were getting that in spades all the time? Oh, no, on the contrary, I think it's really important that someone who stands for political office

and is elected to do so is, you know, open to all these challenges around them. And it's one of the reasons why in the UK, I think we have one of the least levels of corruption, genuine corruption amongst almost any democracy anywhere. It could be better, but both our civil service and our political class are actually pretty clean. And one of the reasons for it is exactly what you say. And people like Caroline are very good at raising these questions. But I think that they deserve robust answers. I get a robust answer.

I'm completely happy with that. I'm surprised anyone's interest in it, but good on them if they are. Let's then bring you to the solution. So give us a sense of what Deidahelm would be doing on the biggest issue facing humanity. How would you set about getting the world to a situation where we don't end up with runaway global warming? First thing just doing a footnote is I think the destruction of biodiversity is at least as important a problem as climate change. We're in a really serious environmental mess in this century. Okay.

So, if it's on climate change, what I want to do is say that every penny is spent, ultimately by British consumers and British taxpayers in the UK, is spent with the maximum return or benefit to addressing climate change. So my starting point is, what can we do here, which is most going to tilt the balance on that two degrees or whatever? I start with what is the unique contribution we can make? And we have at these two things going for us, which virtually no one else has. We have a great site for offshore wind. Shallow waters, near the coast, well understood seabed, etc., and good wind flows. So we should do offshore

wind. And I'm very pleased we've done it. And I'm very pleased the costs are lower than I thought they were going to be, but they're not as low as people think they are. But it's a great thing. And we should experiment more, so floating platforms, etc. So we can help other countries do this. The second thing is we are going to have to need some industrial sequestration. And a carbon capture in storage, putting the gas back underground. We've got empty gas wells, empty oil wells. We've got pipelines in place.

The North Sea is shallow, well understood, and we've got supplies of carbon nearby. Best place in the world to try CCS. So do those two things and export that technology. give it away anywhere in the world. Next up is R&D. We're really good at some aspects of research. We're not that good at turning them into production. But when it comes to things like fusion power,

when it comes to developing new materials for solar panels, all these things we're going to need. We are a great place to do it. But what you can't do is take a pot of jam, which is what we do, and spread it over everything. Give everybody a bit of money. give everybody's what we're going to do absolutely everything. No, we've got a limited amount of resources.

There's a limited amount the public are prepared to pay, are able to pay, can afford to pay, let's spend that money in a way that has the maximum effect on global warming. And that's not what we're doing. And that's what I think is a big opportunity. And let's also face up to the carbon consumption that we're doing, as opposed to simply pretending that we're the poster child of the world because we've deindustrial. So carbon consumption is one of your big central ideas. And basically what you're saying is Europe pats itself on the back because it's not burning as much coal or oil as it used to. But what it's really done is we're all importing all our stuff from places like China anyway. And they're burning coal a great deal. India's burning a lot of coal as well. And therefore, if you actually looked at your consumption footprint, all the stuff in our houses, a lot of it made elsewhere. We need to be taxing that. And you seem to have an idea that what you'd do is you'd calculate how much carbon is embedded in each product. And if you imported, I don't know, some product from China had a lot of carbon in it, you'd pay a huge tax. You'd put 70, 80% tax on top.

How would we ever get there? Because obviously, if Britain started doing that and nobody else started doing that, consumers in Britain would be pretty cross. So presumably you'd have to coordinate that across the world. And why haven't you managed to do it, given that the logic's there, presumably every economist agrees. You've been talking about it since 1990. We're not there. So what's the problem? Why haven't we got there in 35 years?

Well, let's put it in context. So what I'm interested in is I don't think the top-down cop type process, you know, 90,000 people flying to Dubai or wherever it is. They fly to or Azerbaijan next is going to get there. I don't think in this 30 years the cops have made much difference. That makes me very distinct from what most other people think, which think this is the way we're going to get there. What I think we have to do is recognize that people.

are going to do this unilaterally, and then to build a bottom-up unilateral club of the willing. So when it comes to paying the same price for carbon embedded in imports, as we would for the carbon embedded in, say, steel production in Port Talbot now or wherever, that's a kind of, in my view, no-brainer. And we can impose a carbon border adjustment that basis. Now, you might say, well, you know, but the politics, that's not ever going to work. But because the prices would go up for consumers, right? Yes, for some things, yes. And for a country like Britain, where we're importing all this carbon, the reality will come home to roost. And the reality coming home to loose, too, I'm sorry, just to be tough about this, but the reality coming home

to loose is that households would be paying a lot more for the basket of goods that they are accustomed to getting, right? Let's be careful where it's a lot more, but basically, you can't get away from the fundamental fact that we are all living beyond our environmental means. That's why we have environmental crises because we don't pay for the pollution we cause. We merely go on doing it because we'd rather pollute and let the next generation clean up the mess. So you can't have it both ways. If you don't want to pay for the pollution you cause, you want to go on in an unsustainable way. And as I put it in my latest book, the legacy that we leave the next generation is that an unsustainable world will not be sustained. And that's what the two degrees or the three degrees is

all about. Now, on the carbon adjustment of the border, I advocated this point with colleagues in 210, 211, 212. Okay, it's a decade later. The EU has imposed a carbon border adjustment. It started. Okay, it's the recording year this year. We are now going to do the same. That is a coalition of about 22, 23% of the world economy. If the United States were to join, we would get there because everybody else would realize that it's a hell of a lot better to pay a carbon tax to their own government than pay it to HM Treasury. Because think of the practicality. The ship turns up in Southampton Docks.

It's full of steel from China. The customs official goes down to the boat and says to the captain, can I see your payment of the carbon border tax? They say, can I get out of it. Yes, of course you can. Show us a certificate to show that you paid the carbon tax back in China. And the captain says, she says, you know, okay, I'll go back to China and make sure they levy it. It's a no-brainer. The Chinese in such a world would levy a carbon tax domestically in order to avoid that tax

being paid to the British government rather themselves and everybody else. This is an example of a practical bit of politics, which is working with the grain and saying, let's build a unilateral coalition of the willing and actually do something about climate. That's what I want to do, and I think that's doable, and I'm delighted we're finally getting into the nitty-gritty of arguing exactly what this carbon border adjustment will be, rather pretending that we can just ignore imports, close port-torbert, close Grangemouth, close the fertiliser industry, close the aluminium industry, pretend our emissions have fallen and we're the poster child of the world, as the minister puts it, and just happily let us absorb

and benefit from pollution in China and elsewhere. where and pretend it's not our responsibility. That doesn't work. That's why we haven't achieved very much. There's quite a few contradictions in there, though, because on the one hand, you're saying, we can't do this on our own, but on the other hand, you're saying that countries

kind of do have to do this stuff. On the one hand, you're saying that we can't force people to change their lifestyle, change the things that they want from the world, and on the other hand, essentially saying that we should. All that speaks to is just how difficult and fraught this is. But I guess my final question, if I may, by the way, I'm glad I think I detected in your earlier answer to Roy that you accept that you were probably wrong in 2012 when you said

that windmills in the North Sea would never be economical. You think that is going to change. That's changing. Well, look, every single prediction that any sensible person makes in this territory is a prediction. And I am almost certainly going to be wrong about almost everything that I project for, but so is everybody else. And I am utterly delighted that the cost of North Sea wind came down more than I expected, but it has now just doubled. And so I think people on the other side should also say, I'm sorry I got it wrong, it's actually much more expensive than I thought it was going to be.

Okay. So you're trying to push me in a corner, which I don't accept. Okay. That was a parenthesis. The question was this. Yes, individuals can't achieve that much on their own. own, but actually there is a lot that we can. But you've said one thing specifically that you've done. You've stopped flying. I've definitely cut back on flying. I can't pretend I've stopped,

but I've substantially cut back. Just give us maybe five things that as individuals we could do that would help cut down on our own personal carbon footprint. So it comes back to have a look at your carbon diary. Find out what you're actually doing and then work out what are the easy things to do which would improve the position because we all individually have a responsibility in this frame too. It's no good telling the world to do something different

and then not be prepared to make some steps on one side. So that's first thing. So in that carbon diary, food is really important. What are you eating? What's the packaging in it? How much of it's coming

from depleted rainforests which are no longer sequestrating carbon, etc. And you'll rapidly discover that you can live a more healthy life and a better life and reduce your carbon footprint. What sort of things would that mean not eating and beginning to eat?

I maybe don't eat now. I don't want to go through a whole nutritional guidance here. No, but it's kind of give us a bit detail. So we know that if you, for example, are an intensive meat eater and you reduce that meat consumption a bit, you will make quite a large difference compared with you reduce other things. If you buy stuff, which is ultra-processed, involves products from all over the world, palm oil in particular, you will be having a bigger carbon footprint than otherwise. Next up is, you know, what you're wearing.

How many times do you do fast fashion? If you look at some of the numbers on fast fashion, it's just truly extraordinary, okay? Then it's about traveling. It's not just about flying. And I'm not perfect in flying. I mean, there are occasional very short flights, one or two a year that I might take. But basically, long haul, all that stuff's gone. This technology that you and I are talking about, revolutionise that possibly,

makes it much cheaper for me to give that up than it would be five, ten years ago when I need to fly everywhere. But what are you doing daytime travel? Are you using public transport? Are you using private transport? Are you walking? Are you cycling? All this stuff, which is good for you, and loads of environmentalists, not just activists. You know, spell this out on a daily basis.

And what's more, you know, for all the sackcloths and ashes, and the costs that people like me as economists, it's sorts. You know, life will be a lot better for you, too, right? You'll be healthier, you will have a more enjoyable life. I'm totally on board with this one, 100%. Just do it, right? But don't think it'll solve climate change.

It will make you feel better about it. It will make some very trivial marginal difference. But the big stuff, the big stuff, is about thinking about what big contributions we can make to addressing those global problems. Yeah. Get on with CCS. Get on with R&D.

Get on with an offshore wind. These things and transfer them to the world and help them take stuff forward rather than spread jam on every single policy and every single lobbyist you can give and each bit of jam is too thin to make a difference. Dita, to finish then from my last question, what's your fear about an incoming government?

In your nightmares, a British government comes in, next election. What should they not be doing? what would be a really rubbish way of spending the next 10 years if your objective is to address a cataclysm of the environment and climate? So in the UK, promising to achieve ludicrous targets in an incredibly short period of time, which cannot be met and would involve really quite large costs to try and rush them through. That would be a mistake. People going around saying they're going to do net zero electricity by 230, I don't know anybody. quite privately who actually thinks that's going to happen. And I can tell you all sorts of reasons why it isn't. But if you put all the feet on the accelerator and you rush it all through quickly,

it's going to be very costly. And if you tell people at the same time their bills are going to go down and then they might not, that's a mistake. So let's have a serious building on what is actually a cross-party consensus on what we're doing. That's a great achievement in Britain. We've got rid of the coal industry. That's a great achievement. Let's sit down and work out how to build a grid and a modern electricity system, which is going to carry an enormously larger amount of electricity in it because of all these new demands and do it in a sensible, pragmatic way towards 250. Now, you're the politicians. Getting politicians to depoliticize stuff is very important for the expectations and the costs. I'd love to do it for the health service, for social care and a number of other things, too. But in this territory, let's be grown up, realistic, tell the customers the truth, do not expect things to be delivered in no time at all. Do it measured, do it efficiently.

Because if there's a limited amount of money to spend, then people need to know that money is best spent to the objectives that we have in mind. For a rebuttal of some of the points in that final answer, I recommend Ed Miliband's recent speech to the Greed Alliance. And I think we should probably have Ed on at some point anyway on the podcast. But, Dita, thanks for giving you so much of your time and your thinking. And thanks for your continuing contributions to the most important issue of our time. And Dita, yes. For me, thank you. And I'm not going to go with the Miliband rebuttal.

I think all my experience working with you, you talk an enormous amount of sense. than I reckon you're almost certainly on the money. You definitely brought an enormous amount of knowledge, wisdom and experience to this, which is unique. We've done, I think this is probably our fifth climate and environment-focused interview, and we're really, really grateful for all that you brought to it. Thank you. Well, thank you very much for having me on.

Thank you. All the best. See you soon. Oh, bye. Alison, what was your sense? I do think there's something going on there between this conflict between expert and policymaker. Because on the one hand,

there's the parts of that interview where he was almost talking like a politician. Yeah. You know, and particularly he's talking about, you know, we need to change how we live.

You know, we need to embrace this. And then at the same time, saying, but we can't really do very much. Yeah. No, I think he's somebody

who's obviously thought about this stuff all his life has got, I think, quite set views about some of it. I mean, you know, everything I've read and heard from him,

the sort of focus on research and development, element, the belief that sort of the market has a role plus the subsidies, which I kind of agree with. But I've, you know, I've thoroughly enjoyed it. And I hope he didn't mind me reminding him of some of his past statements that didn't necessarily turn out to be right. I thought he handled that surprisingly well. I mean, it is interesting. I mean, I obviously this is sort of some psychological syndrome here. But I very, very much remember when I was trying to, particularly in the US, speak out against the Afghan search, how much I met.

sort of three responses. One of them was, you're too pessimistic and where's the hope? The second was you've got a conflict of interest here. You're somehow a kind of shill for the Taliban. And the third was, and you've got predictions wrong in the past. You know, you said something else five years ago and why are you getting wrong? And I think that is always the case if you're trying to challenge a, you know, what is now a multi-trillion dollar initiative by governments and say you've set off down the wrong path. There will be a lot of very, very smart people going out to take you on. But I thought he was very good. I loved his response on Caroline Lucas and loses temper. He didn't say it's all bullshit. What he said is she's absolutely right to challenge me. And I'm going to be very robust

and straightforward, which to be honest, Alist. It reminds me a little bit of the way you deal with it. If people raise the Iraq war and you lying and this sort of thing, you say, yeah, well, it's just not true. So I like him pushing back on that. And, you know, he's quite spiky in the way he communicates and very, very straightforward. And I always, I always like that. The other thing he doesn't do is he's not remotely close to the sort of the denial stuff, which, you know, I think the problem with this debate is there aren't that many people between what he calls the happy, clapy and the kind of denial people. Yeah. Yeah.

But I do, I actually, I think there is, I think there has emerged something of the breaking of the consensus. I think when you see people like John Gummer, who, you know, been massive in the climate debate for decades and is now very central to this climate change committee, you know, it strikes me that he's quite worried about the direction of travel inside the Conservative Party and the Conservative Government, whereas I think Labour are in a different position. So I'm not sure I quite buy the idea that there's this same consensus that there was. One of the challenges, I think, again, that politically you face of your Dita is that people will worry. about your motivations, they'll worry that you're trying to push gas, and they'll also worry that you're giving arguments to the wrong side. Yeah. So, I mean, it would be like a kind of somebody who was a loyal member of the Labour Party saying, you know, I disagree publicly with 20 things in the Labour manifesto and you might be like, well, whoa, hold a second, you're basically just handing us

over to the Tories here, right? So I think that's a real issue, but I don't think you can get around his fundamental point, which is just so powerful and radical, which is that reducing the amount of carbon we produce in the UK while continuing to just import stuff from China and India. So actually, overall production globally is going up to feed our clothes, our cars, blah, blah, blah. I agree. Totally daft. And I think his second point, which is really radical and difficult, which is we didn't get into, but I was talking to National Grid last week.

The challenge on sorting out on electric grid and batteries and transmission is kind of beyond imagining. I mean, you would have seen in the newspapers recently that there's something like 300 gigawatts of applications in at the moment of renewables. And the stuff can't get through planning because our grid can't deliver it for 10 or 15 years. And I don't think we're really, you know, it's great to get someone who's making a stare at these things rather than just sort of slip past them. Interestingly, I didn't push back on this, but when he said that nobody believes that we can get to net zero for the power sector by 2030, I think the National Gridron record is saying that it's very, very ambitious, but it's doable. And so are Octopus Energy. And there's a couple of the think tanks as well that have said they think it is doable. We didn't really get into, in fact, we didn't get at all into the American response to the Chinese leadership on this, you know, the Inflation Reduction Act, which has been such a big part of that. and Europe has then started to respond.

So I think there is something, this report, we should put it in the newsletter, this report from this guy, Kingsmill Bond, which is a great name. My name is Bond, Kingsmill Bond. But he really does sort of set out the graphics on China and its dominance in some of this stuff. It's just absolutely mind-blowing.

So what's happened is China has shown this leadership role. America has felt the need to respond. It's responded. Europe has felt the need to respond. It's responded. And I think it is having that something of a chain of fact. I also really liked his idea of the, and this is something which I hope a Labour government,

could, if it happens, could listen to and pick up. This thing about the Coalition of the Willing, I thought was a very interesting concept. Well, thank you, Alisa. Thank you. Small footnote, the head of energy at the World Bank for a long time also was actually called James Bond. Poor guy.

That's like I've been called David Beckham or Donald Trump. Well, Alice, thank you for that. I thought that was really good to make people think about the toughness of policy and the toughnessy choices. And I hope we'll get a lot of responses. Thank you again. All the best. Take care.