Why the UK Energy Market Is Broken (and How to Fix It!) | Greg Jackson & Rory Sutherland

29:05Shell and BP will get there in this world probably, but the more pressure comes on them from actually forcing change, the more they'll have to do it in the ways that will actually be beneficial. At the same time, there are enormous new industries. I think you mentioned there, for example, optimisation as an industry. It doesn't really exist in fossil fuel. Hugely important in electricity. There are loads of companies, big and small, and Britain's been a real breeding ground for them, that are now taking optimisation services around the world. If you go to the US, the companies that are working past utilities to try and optimise electrification are often very British.

29:37Because we've got high energy costs, optimisation is more important here. The skills you learn here then work really well elsewhere. I know that when we've had a conversation previously, because maybe I shouldn't be saying this, maybe we'll edit this out, we'll find out. You had to do some work with the cigarette industry many, many decades ago. I've only worked on vaping campaigns. so one of the things I think is important is the concept of harm reduction okay which is sometimes where I would criticize either idealists or sometimes scientists is they design for perfect and anything less than that is considered a compromise and I remember talking to someone it was an academic actually so my influence in the vaping world was going to the government's Behavioural Insights team, crikey, back in the 90s, and saying there's this new technology called electronic cigarettes.

30:31I had two predictions. One, it might be the biggest thing in helping people quit smoking in, well, in ever, okay? My second prediction was that everybody conventional in the anti-smoking campaign groups would try and ban it because they'd see it as an inferior substitute for quitting altogether. And my argument was, fun enough, which Ash also adopted, who are a fanatical anti-smoking group. They simply said, our job is to stop people dying. It's not to stop people consuming nicotine. They're two different things. And one thing I've noticed in this world is that people tend to plan for this sort of perfectionism.

31:09I'm pretty comfortable with a degree, I don't know, with a degree of gas generation, picking up a bit of load from time to time. Doesn't seem to be that problematic. I would prefer it if the money we made was put into innovation and scientific research. because we have a greater comparative advantage in the UK in terms of being able to come up with really good inventions than we do in being able to reduce the world's carbon output. We're only 1 % of carbon output. We're probably over 150 years, 25 % of meaningful world-changing inventions. If you go to the Royal Institution about a quarter of a mile away, in the basement, I don't know why it's in the basement, is Faraday's first electric motor, which should be a source of pilgrimage to people.

31:54So there is a bit of me which goes, I don't particularly want a country that produces 1 % of the world's carbon to get involved in this symbolic hair-shirted act which damages our economy, moves manufacturing offshore to places where they're using even dirtier energy just so Ed's metrics can look cute. So that metric of your own carbon emissions which don't account for imported gas strikes me as just a total nonsense. I mean, you know, the Norwegians are, to some extent, buying all those electric cars on our dollar. You know, OK, we're buying their gas, and they're swanning around in some electric car at our expense.

32:34Can I just say one thing? I presented two times the Norwegian EV Association annual meeting thing when I was on stage introducing the speakers. And the second time I went, I did an amusing skit about the fact that we all hate Norwegians because we give you so much money for your oil and gas while you ponce around in your electric cars. And interestingly, I was never invited back. I think it's taking place. They laughed at the time. Yes. Was it a ha-ha, ha-ha, ha-ha?

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33:42You know that person who said if I came back I'd come back as the bond market because you can do anything you like. If I came back, I'd come back as a country of about three to four million people in the 21st century because no one beats up on you because it's a bad look. You see what I mean? If you're Ireland with tax evasion or you're Norway with fossil fuel production. Everyone loves you. Everyone loves you because there are only three million of you who would look really, really mean to get nasty. And so we do actually let them off the hook to a remarkable extent, I think. So my point would be I'm not sure I wouldn't rather burn our own gas and then tax it and then put the money towards innovation.

34:19Because the other problem, which I do accept from people like Martin Wolf, is that we've set quite a bad example because other countries have looked at what we've attempted to do in reducing our carbon emissions. We've ended up with very high energy costs. So not many people are going to follow our lead. So if our hope was that we're going to set a precedent, my other, I suppose, my, what would my other question be? I mean, I think, no, but I'll leave it at that. It's not a great precedent to set. And actually, innovation is probably a better use of the money than purely self-sacrifice, I think.

34:52Greg, I can see your mind whirring. Any thoughts? By the way, I mean, the way we charge for electricity is the stupid thing which we could change really quickly, which you know much more about than me. So it seems to be a system where you go out to the pub, and if nine of you order a pint of beer and one of you orders a bottle of Chateau Petrus, everybody pays for a bottle of shatter of Patrice. That's more or less how it works. It's marginal pricing. I think that's the most elegant description of marginal pricing I've ever heard. I tried to tell it with fruit. Yours is better. Yeah. Greg? Well, first of all, I couldn't agree more on the gas point, right?

35:26Yeah. The light really came on for me a few years ago. We talked earlier about the efficiency of EVs. If all of the electricity that powers an EV is coming from gas generation, It still has lower emissions than a petrol car Even more amazing if all the electricity powers a heat pump comes from gas It has lower emissions than a gas boiler uses less gas than a gas boiler. That's how efficient electricity is. Yes, so at the margin honestly if having like when people say Your point about perfection is so important. All right everything that's a new technology in this space You get held to a standard of perfection that doesn't apply elsewhere.

36:07Yes, you're right. They always go like, oh, but not everyone can afford an EV. It's like a gripping fan that can't afford a fucking car. Right. I didn't hear that objection from the car industry. It's unfair if you can't afford a car. By the way, can I just say to everybody listening, because I learned this the hard way. Everybody who tries to get a home charger installed at home. Someone comes along and goes, no way this wiring will take seven kilowatts. But you go, oh, I can't have a charger. Eventually, I rang up my brother, who's an astrophysicist, who just goes, you don't need seven kilowatts for most normal people to be honest if you've got four to be like 3.5 is okay right it's enough for most practical purposes but the people turn up and go no no it's got to be seven kilowatts otherwise it's not a proper car charger i'm just gonna phone our ops director oh exactly yeah we have roughly a thousand people in that every day anyway please do because great chargers though yeah yeah so the um but the standard perfect that everything's held to right you know no not everyone can have a solar panel one of my favorites you know like oh it's not always windy you know we kind of worked this out right and and but you flip it around and it's like every turn of a wind turbine turbine means we use less gas that's great it's cheaper it doesn't need maintenance it's not trashing the planet but when it's not windy until we have other solutions gas as a backup is absolutely fine and you know for me uh another light that came on was i think i might actually i might have learned this from you Robert.

37:29Oh my God. You did an incredible video on the end-to-end emissions of the fossil fuel industry. Oh yes, yes, yes. How much waste, it's not just what happens when you burn it in a car or in a boiler. No. It's from the point of production right through to getting it here. The amount of, like 40 % of the world's fuel is used, shipping fuel. Shipping fuel, yeah. So when you see that and you look at the liquid natural gas industry, and by the way, we now of satellites that can spot leaky methane, you realise that it's brutally inefficient to be shipping gas from Qatar or the US and Australia to here.

38:11So to the extent we've got to use gas, use the nearby one, use the stuff nearby, it's genuinely miles lower emissions, and you can tax it and you can use that tax to reduce energy costs, invest in the future, do what Norway did, which is go electric, right. But I think our current policies really don't serve us well in bringing people what we need, which is super cheap electricity. The biggest barrier to heat pumps is electricity is too expensive. The biggest barrier, I mean, I think we've moved on on EVs now. Public charging EVs are too expensive. Home charging at the moment, thanks to the government's reduction on levies, I think it's currently seven or eight times cheaper just to charge an EV at home.

38:50Never mind the fact that you never get through, I've never needed new brake pads. Maybe I don't drive hard enough, I don't know. But there's just no consumables in an EV. I had a Tesla for three or four years, and I think the total I spent on service was 120 quid. So all those costs, I think people are now becoming aware of it. And just last week, or this week, AutoTrader has said the average cost of an electric vehicle that they advertise is now for the first time ever lower than the average cost of a fossil fuel vehicle to buy. So I think that's working well. But the big thing here is just relentlessly focusing on how do we make doing the right thing cheap?

39:29And you mentioned the marginal price of electricity. Look, it's not even just the marginal price. I mean, I've spent a long time banging on this. I'm worried about being boring. But so far this year, the UK spent about£400 million paying wind farms to turn off and paying gas to replace it instead of just having cheap electricity near wind farms.

39:53in energy, in electricity, we've got two markets. You've got the wholesale market. It now only accounts for maybe 35 % of a typical bill because we're spending so much on inefficient infrastructure. And the plans mean that even if the wholesale price goes to zero, there's every chance that by 2030, electricity bills will be higher than they are now. So it's not only how you set the price, which matters, that's the margin of cost, But it's actually the entire system, design and management, was designed around fossil fuels. And there's a real risk that we end up making electricity expensive, not just now, but for the next 20.

40:31Every decision we're making that's locking in costs, these are all 10, 20 year costs. So if we were to hand you a magic wand and you can just wish, let's cap it at three wishes to kind of resolve some of these things, what would you do? Yeah, I mean, so I've reformed the electricity market. I've talked about the zonal pricing a lot. By the way, it doesn't need to even affect consumer prices in terms of, every region could be the same if you wanted. Why? Why? I'm not saying I'm not agreeing with that. As a Welshman, where Wales is a net exporter of energy, I don't see why the Welsh shouldn't get cheaper power than...

41:07No, ironically, right now, Wales is an expensive area because the fixed cost of the system vary by region and Because there's a lower population density, there's more so More kilometers of cable per person than for example in London. So London has very low fixed costs Wales and Scotland are very high so in Scotland and Wales you currently pay more for your electricity in doing London Even though you generate more than you use Scotland generates three times more than it uses and has among the highest prices in the UK And that's that's that's a grid cost effectively has nothing to do with the actual cost of energy itself.

41:43Yeah, it's just the infrastructure cost being divided by the number of people. Got it. By the way, it's crazy, just to be really clear. And what we don't have is the wholesale cost balancing the other way, which is saying Scotland's generating shed loads. So when it's windy in Scotland, I mean, you literally turn off a turbine, a wind turbine. However you, at least let us get the electricity and use it for something. So right now, I was speaking to one of the biggest data centers. There's all this talk about AI data centers. You mentioned it at the beginning. I speak to one of the biggest builders of AI data centers in the world.

42:13And they said, look, we've got to be within 100 kilometers of London. And I said, well, there's latency. By the way, it turns out data moves very, very quickly. Because when I said to him, if the electricity in Scotland was half price, he goes, we're going to Scotland. Right? Yes. And the thing is, at the moment, because we don't have, if we don't give them that option, they either don't build in the UK at all. So TikTok have just built their biggest AI data center in the world, announced it in Norway because it's got cheap electricity. It's not as a big population, right? They're there for the cheap power.

42:48Scotland could have some of the cheapest power in Europe. And you could, the point we're even though, how you pass the huge savings on to consumers, the savings will be six, eight billion a year, right? You could pass it on to consumers, you could flatten the prices for consumers, start it variable for industry. There's a ton of things you could do. It would just be good to reduce the waste. So number one would be market reform. That's one example and maybe others. The second one I'd do is more onshore wind. So we're told, often the myth is that we built loads of offshore wind in Scotland because it's windy.

43:20And it is. But because it costs a lot of money to build a grid,

43:30the cost per unit electricity delivered is something like one and a half to two and a half times more expensive if you build offshore wind in Scotland than if you build onshore wind in England where you've already got grid right so if you want a cheap electricity system you wouldn't just be building this you know like you know I always think really like if the wind farms weighed something Britain would be tilted like you know Scotland would be going sinking all right and I think we really have to understand that in a renewable world or clean energy and electricity world distributed stuff is really important and the third thing I'd do is use long distance interconnectors if I look at what's happening in places like China they ship huge amounts of electricity very very high voltage from one end of the country to the other our equivalent is connecting us to other bits of Europe to Africa and it is happening so if you look in Saudi Arabia they're currently building four interconnectors because they they know that one day fossil fuel was numbered.

44:26So Saudi Arabia's currently got a plan to build 70 gigawatts of solar power. By the way, the UK as a whole is a 50 gigawatt system across all our power, right? And so for the next five years, Saudi's building one and a half times the UK just in solar and then interconnectors into four different regions of the world to be selling that cheap electricity. So I think something we really miss in the UK is we don't have enough global perspective to see what's happening and specifically really the Middle East, China, and then pockets of the world. Who knew that Nepal is one of the biggest adopters of electric vehicles?

45:00Ethiopia, right? Massive penetration of electric vehicles. And of course, we talk about China all the time. Classic fossil fuel nonsense. They say, oh, it's all coal plants. China's currently building nearly 80 % of all the, 75 % of all of the renewables being built in the world right now being built in China. You know, the US president said China builds wind farms and sells them to everyone else, but they use coal themselves. You know, that's changing so fast, it's unbelievable. I guess I should also whinge that we're not allowed to buy Chinese wind turbines here because they're 30 or 40 % cheaper than European ones.

45:32But anyway, we'll talk about the point is we should be focusing relentlessly on cost. I want to pivot for this last section to electric vehicles, because as we have painted very eloquently on this panel, the pursuit of doing less harm, the pursuit of the beautiful elegance of electric vehicles that can be fueled by anything, and just how efficient they are without wasting energy as well has become very, very clear. But for whatever reason, and I think you can tell by how impassioned this panel is, they're still quite politicized. There's still quite a divide in the perception of EVs, even though we start to see the economics stack up.

46:08And I wonder in this last section, If we can iron out a few things, a few bits that are missing from how electric vehicles are currently being marketed and what we can do to fix it. And I know that you, Rory, in particular, will have some thought. I mean, there's one fantastic bit of good news, by the way, which is by no means universal in many, many categories, which is no one who, well, not quite. Very, very few people who make the transition ever avert. There is a tiny minority. I think it's less than 10 percent, isn't it? Probably 5 percent. Less than that. I mean, the only real guide in human behaviour, I would argue, is repeat purchase.

46:45Because it's based on what you have experienced yourself. Do you do it again? And that's, you know... Now, there are lots and lots... Here on Oxford Street, about 50 yards away, I used a mobile phone in 1989 on the street and two people shouted abuse at me from passing cars. OK? So this isn't new, by the way. I mean, most of you are too young in the room to remember the stage when people would say, I don't want a mobile phone. Why would I want to make phone calls on the street? Which was a standard phrase. And so it's not uncommon for new technologies to be met with disproportionate scepticism and hostility because we don't like changing our behaviour.

47:25You know, fundamentally, and if you've just bought a gasoline car a year ago and you're effectively being told you were wrong, it's hardly surprising that people react to that. It's a kind of cognitive dissonance, if you like. You know, there's natural reactance to that kind of thing. What is really interesting about human behavior, which is where I'm really optimistic, is just as in a digital camera, you have a default mode, you know, shutter speed priority. And after we first fiddled around with our new digital camera for a bit, we basically leave it on auto, don't we? The human brain's two automatic behavioral things are basically habit and social copying.

48:03Do what I've done before and do what everybody else does. So when you come up with something that's genuinely new, you're asking someone to go against both of those defaults. You're asking them to do something they haven't done before and which not many people they know are currently doing. And that's why you always get this sigmoid curve in the adoption of any new technology. It's slow at first, then it reaches an inflection point and gets faster and faster. So one of the most interesting thoughts, I work with a company called Herdify, who look for herd effects, social contagion in buying behavior.

48:36and Tom Ridges made a brilliant point he said if I sold solar panels I'd rather sell to the spare of my finance director I'd rather sell five solar panels to five people who live on the same street than 12 solar panels to 12 people who live 20 miles apart because fundamentally the way in which human behavior goes is that we are massively comfortable doing things that other people are doing because we're a herd species basically you know we're comfortable doing things that lots of our friends do i'll be honest with you people ask me why did you buy your first electric car and i came up with a load of bullshit answers the real reason was my brother had bought an electric car first and therefore he he knew all the physics stuff so i was comfortable enough to do it myself had my brother not bought an electric car would i have bought an electric car five years ago No, probably not.

49:28Didn't know enough people. Simple as that. And actually, you know, the most important advertising medium is each other to a large extent. And so one of the things you'll see is that the whole thing will become easier and easier and easier. And that sort of natural mobile phone reactance. I mean, literally, I was making a call. It was a thing like a brick. I didn't ring anybody because it was too embarrassing in 1989. But someone had rung me, put the phone to my ear. someone pulls down the back window of a London taxi, wanker! It could have been unrelated to the phone, I suppose, yeah. But, I mean, we shouldn't be surprised by this.

50:05And also the great thing, but the great thing is that people... Now, actually, I'm going to be a little bit naughty here. The fact that it's a bit of a pain in the arse transitioning to electric is actually a loyalty mechanism. It's like the IKEA effect. Because I've invested all this time and effort becoming proficient in using six charging apps and, you know, knowing what a kilowatt hour is. And I've wired up my house. Now I'm actually disproportionately inclined. Invested in it. Yeah. Invested in the thing. And I'm reluctant to go back. It's called the IKEA effect because once you've been to IKEA and you've driven to Croydon and you've gone and walked through a serpentine corridor, you've got to at least buy a set of tea lights because otherwise you'd feel your whole journey was totally wasted.

50:47okay it's sunk cost so one of the other things is that the electric car buyers once they've actually overcome the hump of adoption will become disproportionately loyal because actually it's a bias but we're happy to exploit it because of their sunk cost in terms of effort and mental investment so you won't see much reversion which is the main thing it's like air fryers basically once you have one no there's no going back oh i finally transitioned to an air fryer i resisted You saw the light. You see, why did you resist it? I'm intrigued. I think you're going to, you'll be like, oh, of course. It takes up room on the side.

51:25It's only a matter of time before there's a Chinese EV with a built-in air fryer. Exactly. You don't even need to stop for a snack. Don't bother with vehicle to load, just vehicle to air fryer. Take your food, exactly. Yeah, absolutely. But this is, by the way, bizarre, because the world is being, I worked a bit with John Roberts at AO, And I think female territorial ownership of kitchen surfaces is holding back the consumer electronics industry. OK, seriously, you go, where would you put it? Right. You go, well, maybe on those six acres over there. The interesting thing for me was when I got a heat pump, the last thing left I had that was gas was the hob.

52:05And an induction hob was the greatest life change. I actually phoned my mum while I was cooking. Interesting. And she said, I've got one too. And we were swapping notes on how easy it is. But honestly, I think the induction hob is actually one of the greatest benefits of electrification. It's extraordinarily efficient, of course. And it's so easy to clean. And you can't even burn yourself if you try. It's genuinely brilliant. Well, I wonder, also. Apart from the controls. The heat pump problem, though. Yes. An induction hob with knobs would be quite good. It's a German interface. I'm not saying anything about German design.

52:37But I mean, the heat pump thing is interesting because I'm absolutely convinced that there's a wonderful reframing here, which is you allow people to access their pensions to create effectively an energy pension. OK, right. Now, if you think about it, one of the daft things they do with solar panels is they say it pays back in nine years. OK, that's typically what they say, the payback time. And it's always the question that we get on our videos. The point is I'm getting an 11 % return, which is a lot better than I'm getting from a bank. Okay. So actually taking some money out of your pension and punting it into a heat pump or a solar panel.

53:14I'm literally opening my app, not my app, my phone, because yesterday one of the guys in charge of helping customers finance heat pumps, solar panels, and EV chargers sent me a chart. And then actually, let's have a quick, 7 % of our customers who install solar panels say they pay for it from their pension. and 3 % their heat pumps. And they're just doing that organically without any... You bang on to a point. And actually, if you've got people to reframe it as I'm buying a source of income, which you are. You're effectively protecting your retirement by investing this money out front. You mentioned the spectator earlier.

53:51The interesting thing is, again, I have to work with all media and all politicians. And by the way, surprises happen all the time. There's always surprises. One of the surprises is the telegraph, which our team always get really upset about the way they cover heat pumps and to a degree electric vehicles. And the spectators in the same world. But the interesting bit is they love solar panels on roofs because they've got so many readers who are living on a fixed income, on a pension, for whom exactly what you say applies. And I think the interesting bit for me is I think the EV may be the next thing.

54:24Because if as a sort of retired solicitor reading the Telegraph, you're now proudly the owner of solar panels. The ability to fill a car cheap, like the price going forward is fixed as well, is really powerful. But I think you do get these surprises when you look at what the behavioral drivers offer different people. There's no correlation between EV ownership and concern for the environment, apparently. No, in fact. It's slightly reversed. It's slightly reversed. Yeah. You asked that question about when you do marketing EVs, right? I think there were two very quick thoughts for me. the first one is we've got a business in Texas and we got them to do massive billboards promoting EVs as freedom cars right because I think the whole prepper world the most kind of I'm assuming largely going to be quite right wing quite you know anti-liberal for them solar panels get their whatever they call their back garden in America, fill it with solar panels, get a cyber truck.

55:32It's got vehicle-to-grid, basically, right? You go off-grid. You're self-reliant. You're self-reliant. You prep, like, it goes with your cans of beans, right? So I think that there's a genuinely, there's a really interesting case for people who distrust authority, distrust the man, distrust governments. They should all be fully solar and fully EV, right? so anyway we've been genuinely playfully trying this idea because I think it's got legs well we've very interestingly we've got Mike Murphy coming back on the podcast in a couple of weeks time if you're not familiar with Mike Murphy he runs a campaign which is Republicans for EVs and it's so fascinating how not just with EVs but I think clean energy as well the opposite ends of the political spectrum are definitely coming full circle Robert I feel like We can do a little live show plug because the success of our electric vehicle test drives has been pretty profound.

56:29Phenomenal. I think we've passed 145 ,000 test drives that we've facilitated around, I can say, around the world. But that is amazing because I have no idea because I'm usually at the other end of whatever we're doing. So there's some stuff. The test drives are down there. I don't see it. But that is an incredible number of people have been in the electorate very often for the first time. And can test things back to back, speak to the experts, make those side by side comparisons to different models. And we've done them. We can never say it without going into voiceover mode. But in Harrogate, Twickenham, Cheltenham, Netherlands, Vancouver and our shows down under in Sydney.

57:11anyway um but also Robert I just coming back to the point around actually it's about your the people that you know who have EVs and I think there's two things here actually all of you now need to move to the same street but secondly your wife's book club okay they have all adopted electric vehicles as a concept no not all of them no because some of them don't drive but no so there's eight so it's very briefly there's eight women in my my wife in the same book group including her uh and uh just a completely cross-section of very amazing women and i never heard any of this until every year or two years some of the husbands who are still hanging on are allowed to have dinner we all have we all meet up you know so and one of the women said to me you know you're well i know we love our test they got a test it's a few years ago and she said we couldn't believe it and every time we saw Judy she would she we tell was that one of Robert's special cars and she said I'm not here to talk about cars you just plug it in like a phone I don't want to talk about it four of those women have now got electric cars so that when I went of the hours I've spent going maybe we should consider it and I mean think about the environment and what it says about you and then all you need to say is it's just like a phone shut up there's more too which is that obviously current electric cars look very much like conventional cars because you have to manage people across that transition but the real I mean the real excitement might be in micro mobility of all sorts of kinds because you can miniaturize an electric motor in and also you can have self-driving and autonomous vehicles and the Heathrow pod and everything else with it with electricity in a way you can't do with an internal combustion engine so I mean I'm quite pleased to see Renault deciding basically to have fun with the whole thing because you will eventually be able to be much more experimental with the vehicle you buy much more eccentric actually with the design it's almost like the swatch rescuing the swiss watch industry i think it will go highly eccentric and there'll be a kind of cambrian explosion right in terms of different kinds of of mobility and there is that place on kensington high street isn't the micro lino place i'm not allowed to go to kensington high street drunk because my wife's convinced i'll just wander in and buy one on impulse um but but actually i mean they're one of the most exciting things i mean we should mention scooters and bikes we haven't mentioned them i mean in large parts of the uk uh the i'm the dirty secret of a bicycle is that going uphill it's not much faster than walking a conventional manual bike OK, now, if you live in Bath or any of those places which are just deeply hilly, OK, the electric bike is a complete game changer suddenly, because it's not really a very effective mode of transportation in anywhere, you know, anywhere remotely mountainous.

1:00:03And now suddenly everything changes. Very, very interesting. And so the very small modes of transport are just as exciting, I think. I think an incredible thing when you visit China now, and I think, by the way, the government in January did a visit with the Prime Minister of China, and I thought one outcome we should have done there is we should have agreed that we'll do like 10 ,000 students or school kids going both ways on research visits, because you learn so much. But one thing that you experience now is on the streets of Beijing and Shenzhen and Shanghai, all of the two-wheel vehicles are now electric.

1:00:39Yeah, they all are, aren't they? They all are. So, the streets are still thick with them in places, with two vehicles, and yet you'll hear more noise in London from mopeds and delivery vehicles and stuff like that, and in any UK town or city, than you do in China, because they're silent. And it is an absolute pleasure, the change in road noise. Of course, by the way, all the buses are electric pretty much, all the taxis pretty much. 25 % of the HGVs sold in China so far this year. That's incredible, 25 % of trucks. That's the pace of change there, on specific electrification of transport. And I think we need to take a global view because we have these little arguments in Britain and you forget other people are doing it and we can just see how it works and learn from them.

1:01:27One thing I just wanted to say, because it's very relevant to all the things we've been saying, and it's a piece of news, so I don't know how well researched it is, But effectively, the report, I think it was in Electrac originally, and then it got picked up a lot, is that the total number of electric vehicles in the world, which is now well over 100 million, which includes two wheels, very importantly, because they all used to use petrol. And they don't anymore. Two-strike, yeah, really bad. But what it's done is displace the equivalent of 70 % of Iran's fossil fuel output in total in the world.

1:02:03So the world now consumes that much less. And I think this is what we're harking back to what you said. There's some alarm bells ringing in some boardrooms of some fossil fuel companies because they've actually witnessed for the first time not a pandemic or a war or anything else. People are using less of their product and they're going to get nasty. I think they are getting nasty. I think when you talked earlier about their sort of hysteresis curve, their adoption curve, it gets steeper and it's I think a lot of time Silicon Valley kind of taught us about it's not where you are today it's not even the rate of change it's the rate of change of the rate of change and the acceleration in the electrification in many countries really is causing this problems like if you look at Latin America now if you look at Southeast Asia huge explosion electric vehicles and the other report those have come out is about LNG the long-term decisions of China and Asian countries that had said we're going to be using LNG a lot because it's cleaner than coal.

1:03:07And they've gone, oh, shit, we're not going to use that. It's not going to come here. So let's reinvest in renewables to a hugely greater degree, which is, you know, makes economic sense. Well, it also just, you know, reminds me that you did a podcast this week with the wonderful Jan Rausenau, who many of you may be familiar with. That is coming out on Monday. And for anyone listening to this podcast it is already out and the fact is is that you know if we have a world which is about 70 70 electrified then we have the overall energy requirement i think that's something that's become abundantly clear there's one really quick thing you'll hear this a lot now what happens is each time each defense layer of the arguments placed by the sort of fossil fuel lobby as each layer gets demolished they come up with new ones right now you will see a lot of people saying well only 20 % of our energy use is electricity maybe 25 % right first of all when I mean China is north of 30 % it's happening but the interesting bit is that as you electrify you just reduce your total energy use so every percentage point the electricity increases it takes down the fossil fuel percentage point percentage by maybe two or three points i.e if you don't look at the amount of energy consumed but you look at the amount of work being done by the energy then you would see electricity is a much higher proportion of the work the work of movement or the work of lighting obviously yeah if you take lighting okay how much I mean the whole oil industry started with lighting didn't it okay now if you take so there's a brilliant podcast Saul Griffiths Australian guy if you come across him on the cleaning up podcast he's terrifying right his basic point is to electrify everything yeah by the way one thing I will have a dig at government for is dicking around with symbolic actions which just irritate people for no real benefit so the classic example of that is making vacuum cleaners a bit rubbish okay I just bought one of these coffee machines and which said it's terrible for energy consumption I'm going it's on for like three minutes a day okay a vacuum did if it's an industrial vacuum cleaner being used all the time there is a significant benefit to you know increasing energy efficiency or whatever but those things which simply irritated people by you know by effectively and you know but by just imposing i don't really understand the eco setting on my dishwasher because it basically says you know um uh it says it's going to take five hours to wash your dishes and it'll use a bit less water and i go i live in the uk and it's december for god's sake right and i think there's an awful lot of just as there's green washing which is bogus green activities, which don't really mean a damn thing.

1:05:48What I used to call planting a flower bed on the Death Star. You're a huge oil company, but you do this one cute little thing and talk about it all the time. There's also the opposite, which is symbolic. It's like when you read those press releases about how much carbon emissions come from your email, not deleting emails. Yes, that's right. It's utter horse shit, right? The things that use energy are the things that move, big weights, vehicles, and heat. Yeah. Pretty much everything else is irrelevant. Yeah. Well, I am super aware that we are desperately running out of time, that some of you need to catch trains, that there are probably questions, which I'm afraid we don't have time for.

1:06:26However, you can approach these guys as we sort of turn the cameras off and enjoy a couple of drinks. So honestly, I can't believe how much time has flown. Thank you so much for joining us for this discussion. Thank you so much to everyone here in the audience. And for those who are listening on Spotify or Apple Podcasts or whatever, thank you for listening. So what do we say at the end of these? Please do like and subscribe. Yes, and tell your friends about it, and particularly your annoying uncle or aunt. Yes. And Daily Telegraph journalists in general. The old Daily Telegraph journalists. It's worth doing it just for the laughs.

1:07:01And if you have been... Thank you for watching.