John Gibbons on wildfires, US climate policy and the renewables race

26:55And just for anybody who doesn't know why you would burn the uplands you know for sheep grazing when you burn out the gorse You clear it out and that allows for some growth of vegetation that the sheep can graze. So it makes sense. As long as we allow sheep grazing on our commonages and in our national parks, we're going to have this happen. Now, of course, the short answer, Mario, to it is we shouldn't allow sheep grazing and we should get rid of the deer off our mountains and our national parks and give them back to nature. That would be the biggest, single, easiest, cheapest climate win we could do in this country is to buy out the sheep farmers and to then invest seriously in management of deer, which would include, for example, reintroducing some predators like the lynx.

27:39I think Irish people are probably not ready for the wolf, even though most European countries, including small ones, have successfully reintroduced wolves. In Ireland, we're all scared of the wolf, but we could introduce lynx and they would help to manage our out-of-control herbivores. So we have two types, mostly in Ireland, deer, and we have millions of them, and they are now a major pest species. And of course, we have huge numbers of sheep as well on our uplands. And by the way, no sheep farmer makes money farming sheep. It's sort of tradition, custom and handouts from either the state or the EU.

28:15So we've got to look at a buyout system and give the mountains back to the public and to nature restoration. Okay, if I can just go back a couple of steps. And that was the AMOC again, right? So let's just, an exercise in logic. It happened before. That means it's capable of happening. So this current situation, this conveyor belt can stop. It has stopped before. It precipitated a kind of an ice age situation in northern Europe. It could happen again. Are there any measuring tools that can measure how far you have to go for this to happen? I mean, surely that would be a fairly vital piece of information.

28:58A good start. Sure. obviously the oceanographers study this all the time and there are various sensors and buoys or buoys in the ocean that measure this now we know for example that the current has lost about 15 % of its strength in the last 30-40 years that's a lot the thing about 15 % is you don't need for a system like that to collapse we know that the collapse begins somewhere around about 25-30 % so we're quite close to it we're at 15 % now our friends in the US government have been busily defunding marine research. In fact, I reported this earlier this year. They spent hundreds of millions of dollars to remove marine monitoring equipment, to remove it.

29:40And the purpose here, again, these ideological maniacs is to, you know, there can't be any bad news, Mario, if we stop reporting it. And if we stop gathering the data, then all those whiny liberals will stop going on about how bad things are because we will have cut off the data stream. I mean, if a toddler with a crayon came up with this, you would send them back to kindergarten. But this is policy by the world's most powerful state. Active destruction of our ability to gather primary data. As we've seen in other areas of that state as well. They're trying to subvert the collection of inflation data, economic data, jobs numbers, every single...

30:30And they're bad enough, but the stuff we're talking about isn't in the realm of kind of made-up stuff. Like, you know, inflation is a made-up human concept. Ocean currents and atmospheric temperature and carbon dioxide levels. These are the soup of life. When you stop measuring, you know, what's in the ladle, you've got a whole new level of problems. And it's something I never thought in my wildest imaginings that I would live long enough to see the assault on reason reach this peak. And the reason, Mario, the oceanography part is so critical is that the US is by far the world's largest contributor to global ocean research.

31:13So them pulling it out is wrecking not just the US, but our total understanding. And the likelihood, for example, of us being cut flat by an AMOC shutdown has greatly increased because the monitoring has been so diminished. Now, I can't tell you you'd want an actual oceanographer sitting across from you to tell you the time scales on that. But all we know is that at least one of our eyes has been blinded. So the likelihood of surprises, unpleasant surprises and things we can't put back in the tube has certainly increased. So something like AMOC would be a global disaster. Okay, that would be a global catastrophe.

31:54Sure. Because it would turn large parts of northern Europe into similar climates to northern Canada or Alaska. There's actually way more to it than that. It isn't just that. Another likely impact of an AMOC shutdown would be the disappearance of the monsoon rains. Are the monsoon rains, for example, raining in the Indian Ocean instead of raining over land? So it has all kinds of implications. Think of it this way, right? if vast amounts of heat energy are being drawn away from the equator and they're being taken north. Now, if that system shuts down, that energy, that colossal heat energy has nowhere to go.

32:36So what we then get is a superheating of the equatorial region, which, of course, for life there is utterly catastrophic. That means, for example, a sudden spike in temperatures in the equatorial region would burn down the equatorial forests, the Amazon and the great forests across the DRC in Africa, they would burn in those temperatures because the temperatures would spike up. So it's a very, very complex system we've got going on and all the bits are connected to all the other bits. So the European bit is a very European-centric concern, but other parts of the system are every bit as vulnerable and arguably more vulnerable.

33:18And one, just for badness, if I can include as well, There's a famous scientist, former head of NASA, called Jim Hansen. He's done a huge amount of research around AMOC, and he was one of the first guys to really ring the bell on it. But he looked at paleoclimatic evidence, and he said that what happens, he said, is that the temperature gradient between the equator and the northern hemisphere suddenly increases dramatically. In other words, the equator is much hotter, the northern hemisphere much cooler. Now, our weather systems are all about high pressure and low pressure. which is essentially air moving from hot places to cold places, from cold places to hot places.

33:57When that temperature gradient increases, you get what are called super storms. And I'm quoting directly from Hansen here. He said, these are storms with the power to level cities. Storms like never been experienced in any human lifetime because we just haven't seen them. and these are storms that are unimaginably powerful storms that will be fuelled by this drastic temperature gradient so it's one of the many surprises in the system like I say you know if you don't want to get there you know then don't keep steaming full steam ahead in that direction there's just too many surprises It seems as if like we're getting there quicker than than we even predicted Yeah And so to that end, what kind of what kind of shorter term?

34:52I think I was trying to ask you this earlier things. Is it possible for us to see now? Maybe we could stress that you're not saying this will happen. Nope. But you're saying that this possibility of this happening has been brought forward. What kind of stuff in terms of of what we can do in a positive sense? No, no, no. In terms of what? First of all, in terms I'm going to ask you about that in a minute. But in terms of, like, I was thinking about, you know, the wildfires in France and everything and the way it's just the temperature is exceeding quicker than we would have thought. Where does that bring bad events?

35:27What kind of bad events does that bring closer than we thought? Sure. So what kind of bad events do we think that maybe we could have envisaged happening 30 years from now, maybe happening five years from now? Sure. Well, there's a very famous graphic that you may have come across. And in 2015, all the meteorological services of the world were asked to put together a sort of a dummy broadcast from July 2050. And the reason they did it in 2015 was because that was in the Paris Climate Accord. And the French Meteorological Service did a graphic of what France could look like in 2050 based on global warming.

36:05Now, France in 2026 has exceeded in almost all of the country, especially in northern France, the temperatures that their meteorological service were projecting for 2050. So that's a very vivid and it's really clear, Mario, because we have the evidence from 2015. This was them, you know, putting on their thinking cap, running some models and extrapolating to 2050. So what we know for sure is that, well, first of all, we also know that Europe is the fastest heating continent in the world. It's heating faster than the rest of the world, and there are reasons for that. And we also know that this whole process is starting to get away from us quite quickly.

36:48I think there is this idea among governments and it's something you encounter with politicians and that is that yeah yeah we've got a lot of other things on our mind at the moment John but you know we're keeping an eye on that climate thing that you go on about all the time and one of these days when things get really bad we're really going to focus on it but at the moment you know there's the economy there's housing there's da da da da da so everybody's too busy you know in the political world and in the world of business they're all too busy doing their thing and climate is considered to be background noise and this is what we deal with and also we have the depoliticization of the issue.

37:25So for example, I was reading my Daily Mail as you do before I came on air today and I read a report from the wildfires in France and I read it a second time to see was there any reference to what could possibly be driving this event. Anything to do with climate change, global warming, nothing. So while they have no choice but to report these issues, the public are not getting the context. Why is this happening? What we get instead is disembodied news. You know, something is happening. Of course, we can't deny that it's happening. What we do instead is we deny the province. We basically say, it's just weather.

38:01It's just what's happening. So to your question, we're accelerating forward into a very dangerous future. As you mentioned, you've got, you know, you've skin in the game in the very literal sense of having kids. I'm in very similar position. My kids are just a little bit older than yours. So, you know, they're going to be middle-aged adults in 2050. And the question really is, you know, what kind of world are they heading into? And, you know, of course, the answer to that isn't we don't know because it depends on what we do. At the moment, it's no mystery as to what's going on. We're dumping about 45 ,000 to 50 ,000 million tonnes of heat-trapping gases into the global atmosphere every year.

38:46And kind of, you know, people might say, well, you know, what do you mean the global atmosphere? Sure, you know, look up on a sunny day and you're looking at infinity. And that's the strange thing. I mean, we're having this discussion in Dublin city centre. And I drove in from Shank Hill today, right, which is, we'll call it Bray. So I came in from Bray today. Now, if you took the, if you got a measuring tape from where we are sitting today out to Bray, and you put that measuring tape, directly over our heads. That's pretty much the depth of the atmosphere. It's only about 20 kilometers deep, effectively, of the atmosphere that's of any use to humans.

39:21So all that junk that we're dumping into the atmosphere is going into this incredibly thin envelope over our heads. But it's one of those unfortunate illusions that when you look up, the atmosphere looks infinite. And I think we've treated it like a gigantic garbage can. the assumption being sure look it's too big to break it's like the oceans Mario we've used them as dumps as well sure look you know and there was an old saying back in the 70s and 80s that said the solution to pollution is dilution just dilute it throw it in the river it'll take it away it'll end up in the sea it'll wash away it'll go somewhere and what we're now seeing on this on this circular world of ours is there is no away back to our original my original question to you which was about that photo on the beach and the photo on the beach then triggers need to talk about indifference and the indifference it isn't just because the couple are looking at the fire off the at the fire the indifferent the indifference stems as well from a kind of a helplessness the helplessness stems from a feeling that the world has changed politically completely in the last 10 years and that the changes that that political change has wrought are all negative in terms of anybody trying to hope to deal with climate change and so the feeling of helplessness is complete that you're going the debate about climate change has been practically wiped from the surface of the earth.

41:12The debate is now looked at with eye rolls. Not this shit again. Yeah. Don't bore me. We have bigger problems. Sure haven't we covered it already? Haven't we done this already? And furthermore the depth of that debate then is clouded by the fact that the biggest country in the world the most sophisticated economic power the biggest funder of global oceanic research is completely withdrawing from the world. And it can leave you feeling... And that's what I'm asking. So it can leave you feeling... I mean I remember speaking to you and I remember speaking to you on the Sunday roast years ago, 2018, 2019 and I remember we used to have one or two discussions about catastrophizing, which were fun in a way.

42:00We were using your knowledge as an environmental commentator and to catastrophize with my prodding for a point.

42:12But now it seems infinitely more depressing in terms of not just the outcomes that we could have, but the concept of even trying to get to grips with it. How do you get to grips with it when we've got the political situation that you have? It's not just Trump, it's Xi, and it's the it's Modi Xi Putin Trump it's all of the main powers of the biggest countries you know okay I'm gonna just because it's you know in the nature of a discussion I'm gonna offer a counterpunch okay I think as you've laid it out there I think that's it's hard to argue with it but there actually is something else going on at the same time at speeds that I would never have anticipated and that is the renewables revolution came out of nowhere, Mario, in exactly the same decade of despair that you've just outlined, what we've seen is that the best estimates of the International Energy Agency have been blown out of the water year after year, especially by solar.

43:17Not just by solar, but also by battery technology. Now, wind is pretty good too, but solar and batteries are changing the face of the energy system globally. And I mean, to put this in very briefly in numbers, right, In 2004, globally, one gigawatt of solar power was deployed worldwide. In 2010, one gigawatt of solar was deployed every month. In 2025, one gigawatt of solar was deployed every 12 hours. There has been nothing like it. I mean, if the climate emergency is moving fast, renewables are moving even faster, right? So we have an incredible... And where is that coming from? Well, mostly from China, because China has been working on energy independence.

44:01China is a major importer, first of all, of coal, but also of oil. And they've been acutely aware of how vulnerable that makes them geopolitically. And they've been driving this renewable. They have been driving the renewable thing like crazy. So, inadvertently, they are, in a sense, could save the world. Well, okay, we won't get ahead of ourselves, but I'll give you a quick micro example. Pakistan, there's a marvellous photograph, a collage from about eight years ago that shows a section of, I think it's Lahore in Pakistan, a whole area of the city, and then a satellite photograph, and then the modern one beside it from 2026.

44:38And the difference is every rooftop in 2026 in this city has got its own solar panels. So people are essentially taking control of it themselves. It's cheap and it's cheap because the Chinese have invested billions. The Chinese are odd this way. They spend money on infrastructure, their Belt and Road project. They spend it on technology. They've raced ahead in electric vehicles. Their battery technology is world leading. The Americans have taken similar money and spent it on blowing stuff and people up. That's the big difference between the two, the world great powers. The Chinese spend trillions on building stuff.

45:11The Americans spend trillions on blowing stuff up. Right. So two different philosophies to put it to put it at its simplest. Now, this isn't, by the way, to say that everything about China is wonderful. Not not not in the slightest. Of course, just this is a technocratic state that is led by experts rather than just politicians and ideologues who wish to do for their country what they regard as the best way forward. Sure. Yeah. And they want to develop their country. They have a colossal population they have to manage. And also they know how vulnerable they are to having, for example, their oil cut off by like Iran was the number one supplier of oil.

45:50But you're saying this, you're saying this, if you like, to use maybe an incorrect metaphor, but this tsunami of renewables may be one of the tools by which it almost overtakes fossil energy or just replaces it. Yeah, but for no better... Makes it extinct. Yeah, for no better reason, Mario, that it works. That's what I mean. Yeah, because we had the situation and the knockers have been saying for years, oh, you know, the wind doesn't always blow and the sun doesn't always shine. And these are correct. But mass battery technology is completely changing the game now. Store the energy. Yeah. I was down, for example, in Ahada, the ESB facility in Ahada a few days ago, looking at their battery array.

46:31They have 150 megawatts, which is like a small power station just of batteries on the ground in a six acre site. It's an incredible thing to view. Each of the individual packs is only about the size of a battery in a Nissan LEAF but they're daisy chained together in like what looks like Lego blocks. You put the whole thing together and you have an instant power station available to support the national grid. Now, that's 150 megawatts. Scaled it up nationally, we already have over a gigawatt of battery available. The plans are to roll that out to 10 gigawatts. I was in Holland last month as well, looking at their energy and agriculture systems.

47:07And these are things, Mario, that fill me with optimism. Yeah, that is optimism. So, for example, in Ireland, right, we've done okay in Ireland. We've gone from zero solar to about two gigawatts. And a gigawatt, roughly speaking, is a very large power station. So think of Money Point. So that's what I mean by gigawatt. So we've gone from zero solar to about two gigawatts peak. Now, in the same time frame, the Dutch, with a fraction of our land, have gone from, again, a couple of gigawatts to 32 gigawatts of. So they've got the equivalent of 32 enormous power stations just of solar power because they cover lakes, they cover all their agricultural buildings.

47:46Half of all the private houses in Holland have solar energy today. In Ireland, it's about 5%. So we need to wakey-wakey, right? This revolution is happening really fast. And also, apart from, you know... It's working. economically? It's working. These are highly advanced countries. I mentioned Pakistan earlier. I hear people say, oh, that poor country is one. It doesn't. Highly advanced countries like Denmark, like Holland, they're jumping all over this thing. Isn't it amazing? And in Ireland, for some reason, and I've quoted it before, but I'll say it again, you know, a couple of years ago or a year and a half ago, Micheál Martin stood up in the Dáil and berated solar energy on the grounds that it was going to change our four green fields into four grey fields.

48:30Now, if you took the entire national objective for 2030 which is 8 gigawatts which by the way we will not get there but if you rolled out 8 gigawatts of solar tomorrow in Ireland it would use one quarter of 1 % of our farmland and yet we have our own Taoiseach saying this is going to ruin rural Ireland so unfortunately we have politicians who are stuck in the 1970s who need to get out need to travel more as I'm doing go visit countries go look at their systems go talk to their experts Why don't they participate in more public debates? I don't mean being quizzed by Matt Cooper on The Last Word or Mary McCallaghan I mean that there should be fora for public fora for people to sit down conferences for for for people to with good faith for there are leading decision makers to sit in groups of people with good faith and to come like they have their stupid think tanks yeah well I they're not their stupid think tanks they're thinking weekends oh yes those away weekends those away weekends those stupid things that they do where they just drink and do impressions of me all and my heartache well that's what they used to do anyway I sadly haven't been invited to any of those but I've made my way along to a number of these so called public events say in Dun Laoghaire and elsewhere of people concerned citizens asking questions about the offshore wind array off the coast of Dublin and Wicklow.

50:06And the last one I was at, I was treated to a complete and absolute misinformation. These are your local NIMBYs who don't want those things out there coming up with all manner of reasons, including my favourite one was they put up a slide on the screen claiming to show what a wind turbine would look like when viewed from, say, Kalani, right? And they were all, you could hear the visible gasps in the room. Mostly elderly people, I should add. But when I say elderly, I mean older than me, of course. But a few young people, but mostly older people and concerned about their property prices and the view.

50:46Now, I asked the guy who put the slide up the simple question. I said, I said, that's your killer slide. That's your visual. I said, you've obviously had that created by an engineer. or an engineering firm, and you can certify that that is an accurate reflection of the view. Silence. So I asked again, more silence. Just pure scaremongering. And again, people more concerned about what they perceive to be, you know, something that wasn't there before, the view, the inconvenience. Even though these are 10 kilometers, Mario, off the coast of Dublin, there are still people getting themselves in a twist.

51:23And my argument back to them is, look, you know, don't you people care about the future? Don't you care about your children? And the funny thing is a lot of people in the room are absolutely passionate and they're concerned, for example, about preserving the sand. They had some sand expert out to talk about the effect of wind turbines on the movement of sand in Dublin Bay and how will that affect marine life. And I said the number one destroyer of marine life in Dublin Bay is trawlers. I said, does your group have a position on trawlers? Oh, no, we're just looking at wind turbines. I said, you're wasting your time.

51:58So stop pretending to be here having an environmental discussion. You're here having a we hate wind turbines discussion. Now, so that unfortunately is the kind of public fora that we do have in Ireland. And we need more politicians and expert groups in these rooms. because otherwise if you don't fill that information vacuum well then Facebook and X and God knows what is going to fill it for you with an awful lot of rubbish and a lot of passionately misinformed people. Well I think that is a great piece of that is a great development the whole idea that renewables have accelerated exponentially of their own economic import and of the to the self advantage of some of the main players in the world, namely China.

52:46The only downside to it, Mario, is that what we should be doing is have a grandfather rule, which says that every time you put a gigawatt of renewables onto the grid, you retire a gigawatt of fossil. That's the only way this works. Otherwise, we're simply making more energy available. And I'll give you an example. Here in Ireland, we've sort of stalled our penetration of renewables on our grid, even though we've done quite well, because we've allowed data centres to munch up 23 % of all the electricity produced in Ireland is now munched up by data centres. The European average is about 3 or 4%.

53:21Now, I'm regularly lectured by people about how vital data centres are to the country and all the tax revenues and how we have to suck up to multinationals and all the rest. But, you know, to my mind, the renewable revolution in Ireland is more important than feeding data centres. Finite energy. We also have a finite grid. What people don't get about the grid, our grid is very well managed by AirGrid, but it's very complex. And you can fill out that grid and overload it to the point where you can no longer add. Then you say, right, we need to build a whole bunch of pylons. We've got to run pylons.

53:59And guess what happens? People don't like pylons. So that runs into planning issues and objections and so on. And what we're doing at the moment is we're taking our grid capacity and we're soaking it for data centres. If you took the data centres out of the picture, Ireland, we're stuck at about 40 % renewable electricity. We could be at 60 % now. We could be well on the way, but we instead got diverted. And bear in mind, Mario, 10 years ago, data centres were 1%. So this has come out of left field, you know, and the Irish government dropped their pants and said, data centres, come on in. We're open for business.

54:34Now, you know, I'm not a Luddite, I'm not anti-technology, but it has to be in its place. And it has run riot across the country here. And there's lots of people who cannot get grid access in Ireland because of data centers. And I think it's just crazy. Also, a lot of the newer data centers are building their own adjacent gas-fired power stations to go off, basically off-grid. and even some of them have these gigantic diesel engines beside them so that they can spin up these monster-sized, like these are shipping-sized diesel engines that fire up and you can imagine the pollution load associated with those.

55:16So that's somewhere we could, you know, I think it's a turn, a wrong turn, I think we've taken in Ireland and I think the current government are pushing it like crazy and they're also trying to dismantle the planning system, the ability of people to object to this so-called critical infrastructure. There's lots of critical infrastructure, but I'll eat my hat if somebody can convince me that another data centre in any way represents critical infrastructure for this country. Okay, John. Well, listen, thank you for a second there. I was getting optimistic and then typically you just crushed every little last nodule of optimism out of me.

55:50You led me up the garden path. You brought me to a place I thought I was going to see something totally unique. I was going to leave smiling. John Gibbons ending on renewables but then you you took me to the woodshed. Sure, but I must stress this there are solutions they are scalable. We are in a tight spot but until we grasp the crisis that we're in we're just going around in circles and we'll continue to sort of snatch defeat from the jaws of victory and that's the thing, we have the tools to make the transition what we're lacking is the political will. Thank you and it was interesting and something I didn't really, because it sort of happened by mission creep, I hadn't really realised until you said it that this present government, this present incarnation as opposed to the one which was slightly affected by the Greens, has, in your opinion, visibly lurched to the right?

56:44Oh, like, on almost every front, yeah. And it's such a shame because, you know, I would have thought people like Michal Martin would have learned their lesson from the disaster of 2008 that they were so heavily implicated in and came back as a chastened, more mature politicians who were going to lead the country responsibly, I was wrong and I apologise. Okay, John, thank you for coming in. Thank you, Mario.

57:11And my thanks to John Gibbons for coming in and talking to me today as usual. You can contact me directly, MarioRosenstock at gmail.com and my thanks as always to Hum Finance for supporting this show. But the most important element, you. Thank you for listening. Tell one other person if you can. See you same time, same place next week. Bye bye.