Is it insane to drill the Jackdaw gas field?

0:00Therapy's biggest impact doesn't show up in some dramatic breakthrough. It shows up in the smallest moments. You bite your tongue instead of escalating. You put your phone down instead of firing off that text. You say what you actually mean instead of what would hurt someone else the most. Nobody applauds those moments, but they quietly change your life. That's what growing feels like. And that's exactly what Grow Therapy is here for. Grow is therapy that works, covered by insurance. Sessions average$21 with insurance, and some pay as little as$0, depending on their plan. There are no subscriptions, no long-term commitments.

0:37You just pay per session. Grow connects you with thousands of high-quality, licensed therapists across the U.S., offering both virtual and in-person sessions, nights and weekends. You can search by what matters, like insurance, specialty, identity, or availability. And you can book a therapy session in minutes and begin in as little as two days, not the national 48-day average. See if you could pay as little as$0 for therapy in seconds at growtherapy.com slash ACAST. That's growtherapy.com slash ACAST. growtherapy.com slash ACAST. Availability and coverage vary by state and insurance plan.

1:20The New Statesman.

1:26Hey George, Olly Doug Moore at The New Statesman. Can't wait to see you later. I'm very excited for our conversation. I mean, somehow we've got to find the time to talk about all manner of things. Most probably pressingly, the global burning over the summer. I'd love to talk to you and get your views as well on El Nino. Perhaps some time for factory farming. What our food chain and food system is going to look like over the next year or so. I suspect there might be a word or two about the war in Iran, fossil fuels. And then I've been, maybe I shouldn't hide the fact that the part of the conversation I'm most excited to have with you is that about bluefin tuna and some of the other megafauna that's returning to British coastlines.

2:08Plenty for us to talk about. I'll see you later. Take care. Bye-bye. Hi, Ollie. Sounds good. How long have you got? Two years should more or less do it. I don't know how long your listeners will tune in for. but yeah, there is loads to talk about. The summer just passed was the hottest on record. Next year, the scientists predict we'll be even hotter. And what will happen between these two infernos? Respite? Wrong. More extreme weather. Storms, droughts and floods will sweep the world in coming months. George Monbiot, environmental activist and author, joins me in this episode to discuss our new climate reality.

2:47How prepared or rather unprepared we might be, and why governments and those in power around the world are still ignoring not just the warning signs, but the unfolding disaster. I'm Olly Dougmore and you're listening to The Exchange from The New Statesman. I hope you enjoy the conversation.

3:06George Monbiot, hello, how are you? Yeah, I'm all right, thanks. I'm sorry to see you in your stricken state with your broken collarbone and all that. But yeah, I am not just by comparison, but I am doing very well. We're soldiering on. The show must go on. I'm really excited to talk to you, as I said earlier. I think maybe we should start with the summer. We're talking in late September now. The forecast for today in London is 24 odd degrees, which is about 6 degrees, 25 % higher than it should be at this time of year. But I mean, even by the summer standards, that somehow feels cool. And more temperate.

3:45I mean, before we start talking about the why, maybe you could just put a little bit of contextual shape on what we have all just kind of experienced as a nation and the scale of the heat wave over the course of the summer. It's weird how we almost come to normalize it. But, you know, we have just experienced something which is completely outside the envelope for people. My generation, I'm 63, have never seen anything like it, anything like it at all, in terms of these repeated heat waves, the sheer scale of them, the length of them, the temperatures reached. All this is completely anomalous. And yet we know it is just the beginning.

4:27We know that the summer we've just had, by comparison to those that are to come, especially for such a young whippersnapper as yourself, will seem cool.

4:41I wrote a column in the New Statesman about it because I've just had my second daughter at the beginning of this year in April and it was warm when she was born and the extraordinary number of 30 degree plus days that she'd already experienced in her short life and then the sort of reflection was and then as far as hot summers go that will be the coolest one that she experienced over the course of her lifetime which is a terrifying prospect um most listeners will know the answer to this question but just in terms of establishing first principles why is this happening well there's a whole branch of science now called attribution studies and what it does is to look at what has driven these extreme weather events and again and again the answer is climate breakdown climate breakdown caused by burning fossil fuels not just that but also animal agriculture land transformation but yeah fossil fuels is the main driver of it and unless we get off them as quick as possible we're not just going to see hotter and hotter years we're going to see catastrophe piled upon catastrophe when you talk about land transformation there's um we have natural carbon sinks right in our in our environment rainforests rainforests the ocean as well yeah wetlands also crucial exactly and and there is this increasing risk and i guess the phrase perhaps would be tipping point at which certain ecosystems habitats tip over and go from being carbon sinks to actually contributing yeah there's this really dire combination of of a couple of factors which is first of all they're being pushed and pushed by rising temperatures and the weird weather caused by climate breakdown.

6:32But secondly, they're simultaneously being attacked by us, the rainforest being cut down, the wetlands being drained, the ocean being attacked by industrial fishing and lots of other extractive industries. And all these weaken the resilience of these ecosystems and make them more likely to tip. And so we see at the sort of low end, carbon sinks, in other words, massive repositories, stores of carbon, losing their ability to hold that carbon and releasing it. So the sinks become sources. But at the high end of the impacts, we see tipping and the possibility of some of these huge ecosystems flipping from one equilibrium state to another.

7:15So if you look at the Amazon rainforest, for example, this vast, vast area of forest, it can flip very quickly into savannah or desert. If the carbon pump, the hydrological pump within it is cut off, it can just turn very quickly. Indeed, these are complex systems. And all complex systems, all the kind that we're talking about, have equilibrium states. And they will stabilise around a particular equilibrium state, and they will absorb a lot of NOx in continuing to stabilize themselves. But you push them too far, and they'll suddenly flip into a new equilibrium state, which instantly becomes stabilized as well, something that scientists call hysteresis.

8:01What that means is that if you tip an ecosystem into a new state, the effort required to tip it back is far greater than the effort required to tip it in the first place. It's like a boulder on a hill. It's very easy for that boulder to go down the hill. It's much harder to push it back up again. And if we allow these ecosystems to flip, they don't come back, not within a human scale, not maybe for millions of years. And not only does that mean that we lose these astonishing, wonderful, beautiful places. We also undermine the resilience of the Earth system itself, because that depends on its individual ecosystems.

8:45And of course, we release a vast pulse of carbon into the atmosphere, accelerating climate breakdown and driving these positive feedback impacts where one issue causes the next issue, causes the next, and it can all go down like dominoes. I feel like over the course of this conversation we're going to time and again whether it's talking about agriculture and food production whether it's talking about weather, forecasting, climate and time and again we're going to be talking about systems and their complexity and the balance of them to the extent that you know well I know there is a field of study in and of itself isn't it?

9:26Just on fossil fuels the question about domestic politics Again, I know your answer to this question, but I think it's important for listeners to hear it, particularly New Statesman listeners, as we have a new prime minister. And there's been this live political issue to an extent about North Sea oil and gas and drilling. And whilst we don't know for certain, it is being reported and the noises from this government are not as certain and concrete about blocking new licenses or indeed the drilling of Jackdaw and Rosebank in the North Sea. It seems like Burnham's government may actually go ahead with drilling them.

10:08First of all, do you support the drilling of Jackdaw and Rosebank, George Monvier? Great question, Oli, and a very tough one to answer. The answer's no, ladies and gentlemen. But, I mean, how do you think about that trade-off and that potentially decision that the government's going to take? Well, first of all, it seems pretty clear they have made the decision, but they're holding off the announcement until after the Hoban and St Pancras by-election. Keir Starmer stood down. Zach Polanski, leader of the Green Party, is contesting that seat. They know that this is deeply unpopular with a large section of the electorate, especially the kind of people who live in Hoban and St Pancras.

10:47And that could be a tipping point for them in that it could allow the election of Zach Polanski and that could trigger all sorts of major political changes in this country. They're trying to avoid that. So they're not announcing it until after that by-election. But it's been made very clear that they want to open up the Jackdaw gas field and the Rosebank oil field. Now, these fields in themselves have very little in the way of fossil fuels. There's very little left. We've used up about 90 percent of all the 97 percent, I believe, of the fossil fuels in the British sector of the North Sea. But the real kicker comes with the impact that that has on our diplomatic and international position.

11:33Because Britain, while it has been by no means perfect, has been a leader on diplomatic efforts to do something about climate. But if it is now seen by the rest of the world to be exploiting its fossil fuel supplies more or less to the max, while telling other people that they need to rein back on their exploitation. Well, that massively undermines our credibility there. And it sends a dire signal. It basically says to everybody else, fill your boots, boys. And of course, they'll trot out all these arguments, energy security, energy costs. They're all specious. It does nothing at all for either of those things.

12:14it's a tiny amount of our fossil fuel supply. In terms of energy costs, it won't reduce it by one penny, not at all. The way you reduce energy costs is switching to renewables, which are much cheaper. In terms of jobs, Jackdaw will produce directly 27 full-time jobs, Rosebank 450. They're currently 300 ,000 people employed in the net zero economy. There'll be 400 ,000 on top of that within the span of this government if all the plans work out. There are a further 600 ,000 people employed in the green economy in general. A lot of that is targeted at oil workers because their jobs have been declining very rapidly indeed as the basin declines.

13:00They're probably fewer than 20 ,000 already. The government is looking for renewables jobs for many of those oil workers. So all the arguments being used, even by this government, while it's doing something else entirely with the other hand, are completely ill-founded and specious. What's really going on is lobbying our old friend. And here we have the fossil fuel industry putting great pressure on government. I mean, I'm told by civil servants how this works. They just ring you up all the time. You know, they'll ring you up and you'll think you've fobbed them off. Half an hour later, they ring you up again and people just are worn down.

13:38they give up. But also, you know, successive governments have been total pushovers for these lobbyists. We've seen it with Palantir getting into the NHS. We've seen it industry after industry. What the lobbyists want is what the lobbyists get. And then, having promised it to them, the government has to dress it up in order to sell it to the public. So it comes out with all this stuff. Oh, it's because of jobs. That's why we're doing it. Oh, it's because of energy bills. That's why we're doing it. Oh, it's because of security. It's not about any of those things. It's because of the power of the fossil fuel lobby.

14:13Therapy's biggest impact doesn't show up in some dramatic breakthrough. It shows up in the smallest moments. You bite your tongue instead of escalating. You put your phone down instead of firing off that text. You say what you actually mean instead of what would hurt someone else the most. Nobody applauds those moments, but they quietly change your life. That's what growing feels like. And that's exactly what Grow Therapy is here for. Grow is therapy that works, covered by insurance. Sessions average$21 with insurance and some pay as little as$0 depending on their plan. There are no subscriptions, no long-term commitments.

14:50You just pay per session. Grow connects you with thousands of high-quality licensed therapists across the U.S. offering both virtual and in-person sessions, nights and weekends. You can search by what matters, like insurance, specialty, identity, or availability. And you can book a therapy session in minutes and begin in as little as two days, not the national 48-day average. See if you could pay as little as$0 for therapy in seconds at growtherapy.com slash ACAST. That's growtherapy.com slash ACAST. growtherapy.com slash ACAST. Availability and coverage vary by state and insurance plan. Hey, I'm running out to drop off a stack of letters and packages.

15:35Need anything shipped while I'm gone? Save the gas. Stamps.com lets you print postage and schedule pickups right from your desk. Sync your contacts into the address book, get detailed accounting insights, and get notified the moment your certified mail is delivered. All from my desk? All from your desk. Join the 4 million businesses using Stamps.com right now with code podcast and get your free welcome gift. Stamps.com code podcast. Taxes and fees apply. Really interesting to hear you say that none of the arguments that get put forward for it you find convincing in any way. Because listeners will know I am in agreement with you about this.

16:18I guess the counter I will try to put forward is that perhaps if we are... It's a green transition, right? So there is an element of transition between where we were before and where we want to get to. and inevitably, well, maybe not inevitably, but the situation we're in is that we are not going to just simply turn off the tap when it comes to fossil fuel use. And therefore, to fund that transition, to use fossil fuels over that period of time, is it not better for us to dig it out of our own ground rather than importing it from elsewhere? I mean, how do you respond to an argument like that? Well, if I'm travelling from my home in Devon to London, as I did today, I don't go to Cornwall first.

16:57It's in the opposite direction. and if you're trying to make a transition to a green economy, you invest in green infrastructure and in green technologies. And what we should be doing, and which really would make energy much cheaper and secure our supplies, give us energy security, is invest in things like grid-scale batteries. Because once you have grid-scale batteries, then you don't need any fossil fuels on your electricity grid at all, because you got that as backup instead. And we know that the price of electricity is so high in this country because it's pegged to the price of gas, because gas is used as a source of last resort.

17:36If the turbines aren't turning and the sun's not shining, then you turn on the gas burners. And it's the very high price of gas, which won't be affected one jot by extra drilling in the North Sea, because the prices are set internationally. It's that which keeps the bills high. But if you get off the gas altogether, and invest instead in the storage of electricity through such technologies as grid-scale batteries, then, hey, you're laughing because you've got your security. Putin can't turn off the taps. No one can disrupt that or is much, much harder to disrupt than any aspect of the fossil fuel economy.

18:12You've got lower prices. You've got massive employment because you need a whole raft of builders and technicians and all the rest of it for these new energy technologies. And it ticks every single box. There are so many ways of doing it. But to say, oh, we need more fossil fuels in order to make a green transition, it's just completely senseless, obviously. how do you um how do you sit the war in iran in in the in this context i mean i'm sort of looking at this wondering whether donald trump has done more to speed up the green transition than than greta thunberg has with you know sending the price of oil skyrocketing and it seems or at least the rational or logical response to what we are witnessing with the choking of the global global oil supply chain via the Strait of Hormuz, that there's this really clear argument for a sort of sovereign, green, renewable energy base.

19:10Yet another very clear argument. I mean, we saw it also with Putin's invasion of Ukraine. You know, so many of these arguments come along. It's like, how many do you flinking need? Yeah, quite. And so, yeah, I mean, it's really obvious. But, yeah, of course, what Trump's action has done is twofold. On the one hand, yeah, it is shown very clearly that our dependence on fossil fuels, which will always mean dependence on other countries producing those fossil fuels, because we've got so few reserves ourselves, will make us highly vulnerable and highly insecure and greatly reduce our resilience. But on the other hand, of course, all the investors in fossil fuels, all the shareholders, they've had an absolute bonanza as a result of this, because they've got this great big wadge of unearned income as a result of the prices soaring so high.

20:02And of course, all that money makes them even more powerful. And they put just a very small amount of it into lobbying, into bending the ear of politicians, into bribing them, into blackmailing, what all the things they do around the world. And that shores up their position. So you've got these forces pulling in opposite directions. And that's why we need to get political. You know, We just can't leave this to technocratic decisions made by governments. We have to be on the streets saying you've got to do the right thing by us. You've got to stop the escalation of climate breakdown. You've got to make sure that we've got affordable electricity bills, which means switching to renewables.

20:46You've got to give us the infrastructure, the energy system, which is going to make us resistant to foreign attacks and the undermining of our systems. All of these things come together. They all mesh together. We can get ourselves into a very sweet spot on all of those things by doing the same thing in every case. Why aren't we just doing that? I'm amazed as well, actually, at the apparent short-term memory of some Americans, not least. I mean, maybe you could give us a little bit of a history lesson here, George. But, you know, the last time the Americans did regime change in Iran in the name of oil, it had some unforeseen consequences for them, didn't it?

21:29Yes. Well, that's right. I mean, it was the Americans who overthrew the government of Mohamed Mossadegh in 1953. But with the urging of the British government, they were hand in glove on it. And the reason for it was that Mossadegh, with great public popularity, intended to nationalize the country's oil supplies. They belong to Iran. They should belong to Iran. But through the colonial arrangement that Britain has stitched up, they belong to an entity which later became BP. And so they overthrew. They launched two coups, in fact, and only the second one succeeded, overthrew Mohammed Mossadegh and reinstated the Shah of Iran, this utterly brutal man with his horrible secret service apparatus and all the killings, the torture, the disappearances, everything that happened following that, which then led to the Iranian Revolution of 1979, which was a direct result of that interference and that imposition of a deeply unpopular regime.

22:52And that led to this another deeply unpopular regime doing terrible things to its own people and causing lots of trouble for other countries. And so now they say, we've got to overthrow that deeply unpopular regime. And it's a classic case of blowback. Yeah. And we just don't seem to learn anything from it. And perhaps the more things change, the more they stay the same. You wrote recently that Britain was importing Trumpian MAGA sensibilities through the medium of vehicles, specifically sort of pickup trucks, four by fours. Explain to me what you meant by that. Yeah, so I think that the culture on the roads bleeds into our wider public and political culture in some very obvious and direct ways.

23:41I mean, driving encourages individualism and it can encourage a particular macho individualism, which has been called petromasculinity. And this is a sort of violent, climate-denying, misogynistic ethos which says it's my road and everyone else must get out of my way. And people show off their machismo by getting bigger and bigger vehicles. So it's not the only reason that vehicles are being supersized. I mean, 52 % of all those on sale last year were SUVs. It's just insane. I mean, this is a crazy, another crazy import from the US. Why? Why? You know, I mean, around me, around where I am, and these little country lanes in Devon, you've got these people and they're huge wank panzer child killers, and they won't back up in case they touch the hedge and the glossy paintwork gets scratched.

24:38These are meant to be off-road vehicles. And it's like, but, you know, you're seeing it. I love those roads down there. I love it. It's a beautiful countryside, and it's that and the caravan. That's the other one as well. Well, at least with the caravans, you can see the point. You can see, you know, and I want people to have holidays and I want them to enjoy the beautiful place. That's great. But what is the point of these things? And then you've got this local culture of people with these jacked up pickup trucks. They're called lifted trucks. And they either jack the suspension up or they jack the whole chassis up and they make them even higher than they were before, which makes them a lot more dangerous.

25:13You can't see kids. If you hit someone, a high truck, you do far more damage, far more likely to kill them. And two of them locally have been adapted for what's called rolling coal, which is this horrendous thing imported again from the US, where you got these sort of vertical smokestacks behind the cab. You got a smoke switch, which envelops people in a literally blinding cloud of soot. You can't see a damn thing for sort of 10 yards around. um as a joke it's like sort of ha ha you know and they target particularly electric cars cyclists and pedestrians because we're the real men and we're going to show show show these snowflakes who's boss and and it's it's just like this is unbelievable and i see them driving around often these trucks the police do nothing you know i don't travel around that much the police are on the roads all the time what the hell are they doing it's completely illegal but it's it's like tolerated and you know it's like so we're showing you how we're breaking the law we want you to see how we're breaking the law what are you going to do about it answer nothing it's um i feel like that touches on so much about about sort of britain and what i would view as a traditionally left-wing argument about state capacity and state a lot of people on the left sort of get a bit hesitant about talking about um crime and policing and the police's capacity to crack down on crime which i think is a slightly backwards way of thinking about things i don't think it's a particularly progressive or radical thing to support people committing crimes or that you know the police shouldn't go around stopping them but i think um driving offenses street racing is another example right i mean i'm from the west midlands uh it's it's a um total blight there yeah it's a real it's a real problem um i think you you wrote about wales as well in in the column I'm very similar.

27:07I'm asking you about there as well. And I don't understand really why the left kind of – it seems such an obvious critique to me that someone of a left-wing politics should make a convincing argument that the state should be capable of doing things and that it should do them. Well, look, I mean, the police have given us plenty of reasons to distrust them. Absolutely, yeah. I should be clear. The spy cops, the racism, the rapes, all, you know, So, I mean, there's so many ways in which they have massively betrayed the public interest. There's so many institutional failings. But that isn't to say we don't need police.

27:43We shouldn't have police. And that isn't to say that austerity hasn't actually been devastating for communities because they've lost their community policing. And it's on the roads, but it's also, I mean, fraud. You just cannot get any comeback on fraud whatsoever now. You know, it's just it's a total open field for white collar crime because there is no policing. I mean, my my father in law got got ripped off by some someone who extracted money for some fake insulation job. As it happened, because I'm an investigative journalist, I managed to track this person down and I threatened him that, you know, I would take him to the police.

28:29You know, I got all his details. if he didn't tell me what the scam was, how it worked. And he gave me everything. He gave me the number of the agency, which hires people, contracts people like him effectively, to go out and find vulnerable people who then get fed into the system and ripped off again and again. I found this huge bank of material. It was gold dust. And I went to the police with it. But there was no one to go to. First of all, the first stop, I went to the county trading standards. They'd ceased to exist. They said, I found out I had to go to the Citizens Advice Bureau instead. They said, well, we can't tell you what we can or cannot do with this information.

29:11You know, I just want to talk to the police. I want to talk to the police. The police don't handle this stuff anymore. And eventually I was contacted by, I think it was a deputy chief constable from another county who said, can I please have this material because it's happening nationwide? why but there was just no way no one to report to it's gone completely people are totally defenseless so yeah absolutely austerity has hammered policing in the same way that it's all public services and for the most part that is a very bad thing none of that detracts from the fact that the police could be a very bad thing and that to some extent brendan behan was right when he said that there is no situation so bad that the arrival of a policeman can't make it worse.

30:01Yeah, and it's one of my favourite, another quote of his, that he says something like, I hold everything in contempt that's connected with society except that which makes the roads safer, the beer colder in summer, and the pensioners warmer in winter. And I think that's not a bad place to start for a political philosophy from being. Yeah, I had something similar recently. I took my car to get M.O.T. done, and the garage was like a cowboy garage. They told me it needed£2 ,500 worth of repairs and I sort of went, there's no chance. Well, first of all, I can't do that. Second of all, it's not going to happen.

30:36Took it down and it failed its MOT. Took it down the road to somewhere else and they were like, yeah, no problem with your car. It's passed. You're sort of going, right, okay, then who do I report this to? It's not immediately obvious. You tell them, they're like, well, we might do a random test on them. So like what is going on? On this point about how all these various issues, whether it's lobbying, fossil fuels, the hard right, and they all come together. I just, a pause moment. There's been some recent reports about Reform UK in Britain and some extraordinary political donations that they've received, possibly up to£72 million if the next election falls right at the end of the possible time per table where it could take place.

31:18I mean, we've been talking about the hard right there and it's American context really, but I mean, how worried are you about the hard right in Britain? And I guess maybe as like a follow up, that sort of increasingly transatlantic nature of the politics, which I think maybe isn't necessarily a totally novel phenomenon, but it does seem to be becoming more explicit and more explicit. There is a sort of hard right, far right international at work now. There's massive coordination. I mean, we saw Andy Burnham just today, was it today or yesterday, They're talking about at the UN General Assembly, talking about Russia's role in disinformation.

31:56And you think, yeah, fine. I agree with everything he says. You know, it's a real menace. It's a real problem. But why stop at Russia? You know, what about far right billionaires in the US or a particular far right trillionaire for that matter, who has probably done more to spread disinformation worldwide than any other person or state? Of course, I'm talking about Elon Musk. And, you know, there are many, many of these players now who are massively empowered by their wealth, are pouring money into far right and hard right parties, using their platforms to misinform people about whose interests these parties are operating in.

32:37I mean, reform is a party of millionaires working for billionaires. Simple as that. That's what it is. um and and so that you know many people are given the impression oh these guys are on our side this is this is this this bloke is one of us nigel farage private school educated um former former city trader oh he he's a bloke i'd like to have a pint with yeah yeah only if you can afford afford to drink in in his particular cocktail bars yeah it's like we've been massively misled as to whose side these people are on and it's it's phenomenally dangerous you know so the very people who are who are most responsible for our social dysfunction who have been driving the inequality the austerity the massive social breakdown which we're suffering in so many parts of the world who are the ultra rich they are the fundamental problem um they are the people who are pouring money into a politics which points in the opposite direction which says it's not those people in the mega yachts, it's those people in the small boats.

33:40It's not those people who won't pay their taxes, it's those people who are taking too many benefits. You know, it's always kicking down, kicking down constantly, distracting us from the real threats. And there's an endless list of scapegoats, whether it's asylum seekers, whether it's Muslims, whether it's trans people, whether it's women, whether it's disabled people, whether it's public service workers, whether it's the Wokarati elite in the universities, whatever. It's just as endless. In this room. Now, George, we are the Wokarati elite. Right here. We're the ones. We're the ones who have caused the cost of living crisis.

34:17We're the ones who have sold off the council houses. We're the ones who have cut the NHS to the bone. Yeah, dead right. It's us. Of course it must be. Who else could it possibly be? Let's talk about the cost of living thing, as you mentioned it there, particularly in Germany, actually, and the far right AFD. very fruitful political campaigning by them on net zero specifically as a political issue very often that campaigning relates to cost sometimes as a sort of consent element to to that that political campaigning and i think you're seeing reform ape and adopt that part of that political platform now reform has received really significant sums of donations from fossil fuel interest so i don't think you have to be sherlock holmes to figure out where their interest in in in opposing this sort of stuff comes from but at present at least there is a there is a valid point of contention there isn't there that for example electric cars still really quite expensive as compared to others um yes you can get a heat pump with a degree of government subsidy but again it's still a it's still a significant capital financial outlay if you want to get rid of your boiler and bring in a heat pump.

35:30There is a bit of a soft spot for people who advocate for that course of action, isn't there, right now, particularly as acute as the cost of living crisis is, to pursue that course of action. Yeah, I mean, the upfront costs are high, the capital costs are high, the running costs are much lower. And somehow that gets lost in translation. You know, you just hear about the upfront costs and the Daily Mail with its campaign against heat pumps. Now it campaigned against new light bulbs. I mean, it campaigns against every single green technology, always uses the same claims. You know, they're too expensive, they don't work, they, et cetera, et cetera.

36:03You know, it doesn't matter what the technology is, it's always, it's too expensive and it doesn't work. And then of course, suddenly it's cheaper and it works much better, but they ignore that bit. And so, yeah, I mean, obviously, you know, as, you know, if we're genuinely making an energy transition, rather than transitioning towards fossil fuels, You transition by helping people to buy these initially more expensive technologies with the promise, of course, that they'll be much cheaper to run once you've got them. And I mean, God, the difference now between running an electric car and running a car with an internal combustion engine is just off the scale.

36:46I mean, it's so, so much cheaper to run an electric car because it's just much cheaper to fill it up with electricity than it would be to fill it up with petrol or diesel. And, you know, there's a lot of smug EV drivers circulating. But of course, yeah, you know, to begin with, it is more expensive. But there's been decades of massive subsidies for the fossil fuel industry, for the automotive industry, for the aviation industry, all the rest of it, not just in startup. But for, you know, it's still going on today. Well, yeah, you know, governments fund the things they want to fund. Why aren't we putting more generous funds into these green technologies and taking them out of the subsidies for damaging technologies, which in many cases we're still paying?

37:35Let's throw forward now. It's an El Nino year. First of all, could you explain what El Nino is? And secondly, what's the outlook for the one that's building in the Pacific Ocean right now? Yeah, so it's an oscillation in sea surface temperatures. You get El Niño followed by La Niña. And it's the sea surface temperature in the Pacific, which then drives a whole series of climatic changes around the world. Now, this has been going on since God was a boy. it's it's it's a very uh old and a natural phenomenon but it's been supercharged by climate breakdown because layered on top of those changes are the changes that human beings have caused by doing all the things that we do and all the things we should stop doing um and um and so what we got get now is these these very very potent al ninos and they cause massive temperature anomalies There's massive rainfall and floods in some places, huge droughts in other places, sometimes whiplash effects.

38:46And climate whiplash means that you go from one extreme to the opposite extreme. Bang, bang, drought, flood, drought, flood, instead of this much steadier weather, which people of my age are used to. And so, you know, what we're seeing now is some really damaging, dire effects in many parts of the world. I mean, we've felt a sort of tale of it here in the UK, but this is nothing to what people in South Asia, Southeast Asia, parts of Latin America, for instance, are going to be hit with in the coming months. We're going to see a lot of disasters, very big ones. Yeah, there was a really significant one, El Nino, that is, in 1877, that was sort of laid on top of already pre-existing droughts that then led to scientific estimates.

39:36It's like millions of people died as a result of the famines that that inculcated. I've read there are academic papers that have, I won't necessarily say convincingly argued, but have suggested the French Revolution was at least in part instigated by El Nino, damaging French wheat harvests and doubling the price of bread. I've seen others suggest that, you know, the rise and fall of pharaohs is to do with El Nino as well. Like it affects the way that we live on this planet. Now, you know, whilst I don't think people are necessarily suggesting or expecting that three to 4 % of the global population may die as a result of this, as was the case in 1877, we are already at a time, particularly in the UK actually, where it is really acute, where our food systems are stretched and under pressure.

40:20And there is a real chance, is there not, that in these places where, for example, they're expecting rainfall and they instead get drought in places where they're expecting to be dry and there is flooding, that our food systems are going to come under really serious pressure over the next few months. So for about 20 years in the scientific literature, there's been talk of what I call multiple breadbasket failures. And this is where you get a massive reduction in the size of your harvest in several significant parts of the world which are very important for grain production all at the same time.

40:56We haven't yet experienced such a thing. We've been very lucky due to the globalisation of food supply partly. We've been able to balance out harvest failure in one place by importing from another place. But if it's happening everywhere or almost everywhere, all at the same time, suddenly we find we can't do that. Now, we're especially vulnerable to this because governments, by and large, with one or two exceptions, have stopped keeping strategic food reserves. We used to have strategic food reserves in this country, not very big ones, not very effective ones, but we had them. Switzerland still has them, China still has them, Norway still has them, but we decided to leave it all to the market.

41:39And we closed the last of them, late 70s, early 80s, saying the private sector, the supermarkets and others, they've got their stocks. Well, it just happened that they were beginning at that time to move away from stocks to flows towards this just-in-time production and delivery model, where instead of holding warehouses full of food, they're just taking food which is being moved along the global transport chain. And it turns out nobody has these stores. There aren't any stores anymore. And so straight away, a country which is dependent on imports, such as ourselves, such as indeed most of the countries on earth, finds itself vulnerable.

42:23But this isn't the only vulnerability, not by any means. The world has been polarising into super exporters and super importers. So there's a handful of countries, the United States, Canada, Russia, Ukraine, Brazil, for example, which are absolutely critical to the world's food supply now, and a huge number of countries which are dependent on those exporters to keep them alive. We've already seen how supply from some of those exporters can be severely disrupted, as we saw with Russia's invasion of Ukraine is just one example, a major drought simultaneously hammering North America and Europe, for example, and Brazil, which is entirely within the realms of possibility, unfortunately, suddenly you find there isn't any food.

43:18On top of that, the global food system is also a complex system, and it also has tipping points. And it has many of the vulnerabilities that were exposed in 2008 with the global financial system. It's highly concentrated in just a few hands. One estimate suggests that just four corporations control 90 % of the global food trade, grain trade, for example, global trading grains, 90 % in the hands of four. It's become very homogenous. It's all the same containerization model, exactly the same thing done everywhere. That makes the system more fragile. It reduces the resilience of a system. It's lost a lot of its redundancy, such as food storage.

44:03It's become highly efficient, which makes a lot of sense for each individual component, but reduces the resilience of the system as a whole. In one way after another, it bears all the hallmarks of of systemic fragility. Now, governments were able to stop the collapse of the banks in 2008 through this massive bailout. What they did was to issue future money, what we call quantitative easing. If the food system starts to go down, you can't bail it out by issuing future food. the danger is off the scale it's it's existential and yet there's been almost no discussion of it let alone action about it if you say to people the food system is is in danger people might think of the climate crisis you know yeah that's great and we definitely should be thinking of that in that context but the actual system itself the greatest threat to the food system is the food system is its loss of systemic resilience, is this extreme concentration, extreme homogenization, extreme synchronization, the loss of diversity, the loss of redundancy, the loss of backup systems, the loss of effective circuit breakers such as government regulation.

45:22All of those things have been lost one after another. That gives you a highly fragile system which could tip at any minute. And we don't know what the tipping point is. This is the thing with complex systems. You know they can tip, but you don't know where the tipping point is until you've already passed it, by which time it's too late. And if the food system does tip, and if we don't have food reserves, we don't have any capacity for riding that out, well, social breakdown happens almost overnight, and then you never get that food system back. We're in an inherently fragile situation because we have over 8 billion people on earth.

46:01And there's been an almost miraculous ability to feed those people because of high yielding crops, the globalization of trade, of aid, of flows of food, all sorts of things have defied the predictions which were made when I was born. I was born in 1963. There were widespread predictions of disaster that those two events are not connected. And everyone was saying, you know, here's the population growing, the food supply is not growing, everyone's going to starve, right? And it didn't happen, And it didn't happen because of these huge transformations in the food system. But now that food system, partly as a result of those transformations, turns out to be highly fragile, highly susceptible to collapse.

46:45And if that goes down, rebuilding it is, I mean, it's that hysteresis again. It's pushing the boulder back up the hill. How the hell are you going to do it when in a situation of social collapse? We're going to take a short break. Stay with us. We will be back after this.

47:30Thank you. covered by insurance. Sessions average$21 with insurance and some pay as little as$0, depending on their plan. There are no subscriptions, no long-term commitments. You just pay per session. Grow connects you with thousands of high-quality, licensed therapists across the U.S., offering both virtual and in-person sessions, nights and weekends. You can search by what matters, like insurance, specialty, identity, or availability, and you can book a therapy session in minutes and begin in as little as two days, not the national 48-day average. See if you could pay as little as$0 for therapy in seconds at growtherapy.com slash ACAST.

48:14That's growtherapy.com slash ACAST. growtherapy.com slash ACAST. Availability and coverage vary by state and insurance plan. you talk about it reminds me of a book by um nicola twilley frostbite which is all about the cold chain and the way that she sort of it's a nice device in the intro she sort of poses that human beings have created like a fifth environmental state which is basically this massive sprawling chain of frozen environments that we use to transport food between different places sort of human cryosphere exactly yeah yeah yeah and you know i'm this is off the top of my head but i believe it's something like you know the total volume of that space exceeds the total volume of mount everest it is like sprawling extraordinary and that but then obviously entirely reliant on um energy and electricity to power it we used to to keep things cold we used to sort of huge huge pieces of ice out of frozen frozen habitats and then ship them on trains to to other places and extraordinary way things have changed just on this point about resilience then And let's make it specific about the UK, because you mentioned Switzerland, China.

49:22It's believed that I think that the Chinese have a year's worth of grain to feed their population. I mean, the extent to which they would be fed, but certainly, you know, a degree of food. You mentioned we don't have that in Britain. But what would a more resilient, perhaps more sovereign way of feeding ourselves look like? Because I already, you know, for example, over the last, I think it's four years, the sort of the impact on our own farming yields has been so severe that you can basically chalk up an entire year's worth of harvest in Britain in terms of the loss of food growing, whether it's been too hot, too wet, etc.

49:59What do we do about it? What does a more resilient UK food system look like? Well, the first thing to say is everything's difficult from here on in. I mean, it's not easy because of this wild weather, the fluctuations we've had, this climate whiplash. It's just hammering farming left, right and centre. However, there are various things we can do. First of all, food waste. Now, people think of food waste as being the half-eaten pizza you put in your bin. That's not the real source of food waste here. The supermarkets aren't the real cause of food waste. The real cause of food waste is animal farming, because 51 % of the entire land area of Britain is devoted to raising livestock, not to feeding human beings directly.

50:41And either those animals are being produced at tiny numbers on vast areas of land, which really should be better off being rewilded, letting the forests, the wetlands and the rest of it come back for all the reasons we've already discussed. or they are packed into factories and fed largely on imported grain. There can be more soya in chicken than in tofu, but that's just one of many of the things that the chickens are being fed on, which makes us, again, highly susceptible to imports. The more meat we eat, the more susceptible to imports we are because those animals have to be fed. It also means that huge areas of land producing grain in this country, that grain is going to feed livestock instead of feeding humans directly one thing you can massively do to increase resilience is to promote plant-based diets it just means we need far less to keep ourselves alive and then you have some land in in hand you have some redundancy back in the system because you have some land which isn't being having six bells knocked out of it in order to to produce as much food as possible because we don't need so much so you can greatly reduce your imports, you can greatly increase your resilience that way.

51:55Something you can do to supplement that is to invest in new protein technologies, such as precision fermentation, where instead of growing multicellular organisms like animals and plants, you're growing microbes, which turns out to be far more efficient. You can do, again, far more with far less. You need much less land. In fact, you just need a small amount of land for a factory to sit on, much less in the way of inputs in water and soil and all of those things, and much less in the way of outputs of pollution, pesticides, fertilizers, all those things getting out because you can create more or less closed systems.

52:40And you can produce tremendous amounts of protein very easily, very cheaply, if you get the go ahead. But there's been massive lobbying from the livestock industry to stop these technologies being adopted. And there's huge regulatory barriers have been raised against them. We need to take those regulatory barriers down. We also need to see a great investment in horticulture. We produce far too few of our own vegetables and fruit. Yeah, it is susceptible to where there are course it is. But we make ourselves even more vulnerable by being so reliant on imports for our veg and fruit. So get out of animal farming, get into fruit and veg growing, get into microbial protein production.

53:29All of these things will greatly help us to weather the weather. But whether we can weather the weather, of course, you know, there are still many question marks surrounding it. What do you make of that? There'll be people I suspect who have a great deal of sympathy for the arguments you're putting forward. And if they know very much about agriculture, chances are that they're sort of more likely to be aligned with regenerative farming. And as a concept, which for people who are listening, I'm familiar with, you know, it's essentially a farming system that tries to achieve a degree of symbiosis between living animals and its plants.

54:07So restoring health to soil by grazing certain animals on fields, putting them out to pasture, letting them meadow, turning their animals onto them. And via a series of cycles, you sort of, via the animal's own waste, you refertilise the soil. It makes it more productive for you to grow on the next year. And you can sort of create these, often actually combined with agroforestry, to create sort of new habitats or a sort of self-fulfilling system. Why aren't you as compelled by those arguments and those ideas? Well, the first thing is it's got a massive land demand. So we're back to the problem that we started off with, that you are using more land to produce a given amount of food.

54:42And that means that that is all land which could be supporting wild ecosystems, which we desperately need. You know, the world is as short of wild ecosystems as it might be short of food. You know, we shouldn't be playing the two off against each other, especially given that there are just much more effective and efficient ways, particularly of producing protein. You know, this is a big problem. Really, the problem is protein. You know, grain growing, we can do that. We can do it much better as we improve our knowledge of science and soil science in particular. I've been very heavily involved.

55:18A couple of us stumbled into a scientific breakthrough and I've been involved in setting up this organization called the Earth Rover Programme to develop that. We now employ about 17 scientists. It's very exciting. All sorts of great things are happening there. But because soil science can greatly reduce our dependence on fertilizers, on pesticides, on the rest of it, we only understand soil better and its interaction with plants. We can greatly improve our agriculture. That you can see how that can quite easily be done. It's not that easy, but it can be done. We can massively improve and increase our production of fruit and veg.

56:00but it's the protein which is the issue because we are highly dependent still on livestock. Yeah, we should be growing more beans and peas, more pulses. We should also be investing in microbial production. But if you have anything involving livestock, you just need a huge area of land or you need them to be produced intensively, which requires a huge amount of grain to be grown and imported feed. And so regenerative farming is very poorly defined. There's some elements of it which are great, but the livestock dependency of many kinds is just an absolute disaster because it actually causes agricultural sprawl.

56:40Now, we talk about urban sprawl. We're very aware of cities spreading and we all think it's a bad thing. It's bad for the cities. It's bad for the countryside. But it's nothing by comparison to agricultural sprawl. I mean, cities occupy 1 % of the world's land area. Agriculture occupies 40%. And the majority of that is for livestock. The great majority of it is for livestock. And the more animal products we eat or the more our farming depends on animals, the more land it occupies because it's just a really, really inefficient way of using land. And land is a metric which has been hugely neglected by environmentalists.

57:22You know, we talk about parts per million of carbon dioxide. and we talk about this amount of pollution, we talk about that amount of plastic or whatever it might be, but land. We should be counting the hectares we use because every hectare that we use for our own purposes is a hectare which cannot support wild ecosystems. And sure, you can have farming which has got a bit more wildlife on it than other kinds of farming, but that's really not the same as a wild ecosystem. And the great majority of species cannot live even on the best farms. But we're coming towards the end of our time together, George.

58:00And I would like to sort of try and strike us slightly more optimistic or, you know, find a slightly more positive component of the conversation because a lot of what we've been talking about is quite intense for a lot of people. I mean, you just mentioned wild ecosystems there. There are some signs, maybe smaller, but nevertheless there, of some good news stories happening, not least as regards, megafauna in this country, particularly around our coastal regions. I mean, maybe we could just start to talk a little bit about the return of some animals that we've seen around the British coastline, not least bluefin tuna and orca.

58:41I mean, if we start with the tuna, I mean, tell me about them. Why are they back in the UK? Because there used to be a lot of them, and there hasn't been for a long time. Well, megafauna are the default state of all ecosystems on land and at sea. There were megafauna everywhere. I mean, in the last interglacial, which had a very similar climate to ours, on land we had hedgehogs and foxes and blackbirds and magpies and all the things you're familiar with and rhinos and hippos and lions and hyenas and straight-tusked elephants. Yeah, oh, yes, yes, those things too. Walking around Hampshire. Yeah, that's right, they were.

59:20And, you know, when Trafalgar Square was excavated to build Nelson's Column, they found the bones of elephants of hippos of rhinos and of lions there were lions in trafalgar square long long before landseer got lot got to work um and and this this was everywhere and the only reason we think of these animals as exotic is because we wipe them out everywhere else and we used to have gray whales in all our estuaries we used to have huge pods of sperm whales just offshore we had massive runs of sturgeon and salmon up almost every river i mean The abundance was unbelievable. I mean, right in our coastal waters, there were halibut the size of barn doors.

59:56The cod were six feet long. I mean, these aren't fishermen's tails. You know, it's now well documented. The abundance was unbelievable. The size, the diversity of everything was just incredible. And now we've reduced it to this tiny residue, largely through industrial fishing. We don't talk about it nearly enough. We just turned seafood, animals into seafood. That's how we see it. You know, the whole ecosystem is just stocks of seafood. And, you know, let's start seeing it as wildlife and ecosystems instead and populations of wildlife. Anyway, yeah, delightfully, some of the bluefin tuna have begun to return.

1:00:34Slight easing of fishing pressure on them, increase of some of their prey like garfish and sawry and pilchard and stuff, some of which aren't very interesting to commercial fishers. and and yeah where i live in south devon uh you can go down onto the rocks particular part of the coastline at a particular time of the tide at the particular time of year which is now as it happens and the tuna are jumping so close that sometimes you get a face full of water it's just unbelievable these beasts for 500 pound creatures just just coming out the water all shimmering with iridescence with these yellow serrated fins down their tails and these great long crescent tail flukes hurtling out the water sometimes catching fish in midair what you'll see is all these little fish suddenly popping out the water and then you know the tuna are herding them out together and it's very exciting because the next thing you see is this huge mouth coming out followed by this great gigantic bullet almost the size of a car coming out of the water as it rushes up pinning the fish against the surface and then overshoots and often grabs them in mid-air right in front of your face and if you're in your kayak well it's even more exciting and and so this is this is one of the greatest natural phenomena on earth you can go anywhere around the world and not see better this is it's absolutely mind-blowing i was there a few days ago there were hundreds of gannets diving into the water and all these tuna lunging out of the water a lot of the fish were being driven into into the rocks right by our feet where the seals were then picking them off and god it's amazing how quick a seal can move when it's when it's got a fish in its sights and it was just this explosion of wildlife this incredible wildlife spectacle friend of mine marine biologist was down there november before last same place and he saw three orca herding the tuna into the rocks, the orca eating the tuna.

1:02:37So it's just like, this is what we want to see. This is what I live to see. And it makes me so happy. I spend half my life with my kayak out at sea. Earlier in the summer, you could be surrounded by dolphins. There can be a pod of 50 common dolphins. There can be Rissos dolphins leaping out the water. They come and play with the boat. It's like a plastic bath toy for them. And you hear them calling to each other under the water. You feel the vibration as they echolocate you and size you up. It's mind-blowing. Yeah, it sounds beautiful, and I can see how excited and happy it makes you. A friend of mine, he described when the tuna breached like that, he said it's like it's raining phone boxes when he's out on his boat.

1:03:25It's like all of a sudden something comes crashing through the water, you're not paying attention. And it happens. I mean, you mentioned the orca there as well. I mean, just how dire was until very recently, actually, this situation. I mean, it still shouldn't give people the false impression that it's good right now. But for a long time, we thought that the West Coast community of orca may well be these two bull orca, John Cohen Aquarius, that they might actually be the last native orca in Britain. And particularly over the last couple of years, there's actually been increased sightings, particularly around the Northeast, hasn't there, of these new orca pods turning up?

1:03:58Yes, I don't think any of them are resident yet. I think that one of Western Scotland is the only resident pod we've still got. But yeah, they do turn up. There was one in Cardigan Bay for quite a long time, for a few months in Wales. Yeah, we see them from time to time. I mean, whether we can induce them to stay. I mean, just let's just stop hoovering up all the fish. Yeah, we've even knocked mackerel onto the red list now. It's so mad. I mean I go to a place called Cod Rock which is very close to where I live there hasn't been a cod there for decades I shouldn't laugh sorry but yeah it's be you laugh or you cry I mean just briefly both tuna and I know I know you need to go so making my last question both tuna and orca are apex predators I mean can you just talk about the importance for apex predators for ecosystems what you know why why are they keystone species why are they important yeah no they're absolutely crucial because you know they can regulate that the whole system they they they the the way that they um the sort of prey impacts that they have can then allow other species to move into to the niches um you take those species out and the whole ecosystem changes that's how it is you know and there are many of these keystone species which are absolutely critical in building ecosystems i mean some of the great whales turn out to cycle carbon in an extraordinary way because they feed at depth then they bring the nutrients up to the surface they can't poo at depth because of the pressure they have to poo on the surface so they produce these great poonamis and and that fertilizes the plankton in the upper layers and then the plankton when they die fall down to the ocean floor taking the carbon with them.

1:05:46And so, you know, they have these enormous effects. Large marine animals moving up and down through the water column, according to one study, cause as much circulation as the wind and tides combined. And that circulation is absolutely essential for the redistribution of nutrients, oxygen, all the rest of it. So, you know, we tend to write them off as They're just ornamental. They're nice to see. They are. They're delightful and heartlifting and beautiful to see. But they're also really important. George Monbiot, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it. Thanks, Oli.

1:06:29You've been listening to The Exchange from The New Statesman with me, Oli Dugmore, and my guest, George Monbiot. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. The podcast will be back next week.

1:07:07Print postage for certified mail, registered mail, and packages in seconds. Then schedule a pickup right from your home or office. For a limited time, go to stamps.com and use code podcast for a free welcome gift. Taxes and fees apply.