Why are we more concerned about the end of the month than the end of the world?

28:02I think that's pretty clear. You don't need to be a great, student of American politics to recognize that that decline has been in the offing for some time, but I think it has really burst into the open. And bear in mind that something as toxic as Trump couldn't happen by itself. It had to come out of a context of an already rotten system. Like nothing, no, like a healthy political system could not be collapsed by one creature like that. The system was already rotting and it was rotting through money. Money has marinated the American political system for decades. They flooded money. For example, the Citizens United came in.

28:41This is a Supreme Court, ridiculous Supreme Court ruling in 2010, I think it was, where they removed all limits on corporate funding of politicians. And that was the day that the Trump rot was really confirmed. It's also the celebration of greed. And ignorance. And greed. But the celebration of greed and the protection of greed by the law of the land. The law which says you can be as greedy as you want. Oh, yeah. Are you saying I can own everything? If you can, you are allowed. And you can have as many lawyers as you want to defend you. In fact, we insist, that's one of the things, one of the founding fathers, as they call them, that would insist that you have these lawyers to protect you owning as much as you want.

29:25And that greed, of course, naturally leads to bullying. And bullying, naturally, you know, I'm bigger than you, so I just push you around. I want more, more, more. You get less, less, less. And that's... Well, we know, for example, that the last Gilded Era in America came to a crashing end in 1929 with the Wall Street crash. But the Gilded Era was a dreadful period where the Rockefellers and the Carnegie's and so on, I mean, they made their money off the back of child labor and, you know, and running massive monopolies. And America was highly corrupt and highly unequal. And of course, what happened then, again, we're not doing a full history lesson on this, but what happened essentially was the collapse of 1929 led to the New Deal with FDR.

30:08And we led to really 40 to 50 years of an expansion of the American middle class. When the plutocrats were sort of tamed, marginal taxes in America in 1950 and 1960s were 90%. So basically everything you earned over about$100 ,000 was taxed above 90%. And what that had the effect of doing was preventing the oligarchs from rising. The problem with... Or giving them the incentive to. Yeah. The problem with people accumulating a ton of money is it isn't the money. There's only so many yachts you can get. The greatest thing that they can parlay that cash into is influence. They can buy political influence.

30:44They can buy political institutions. And what we've seen now in America, of course, is the complete corporate capture. and of course even worse than the corporate capture we saw it the other day where the oligarchs the technology oligarchs were in to pay homage to the new king of America so we have the I have to say that is one of the most disgusting things I've ever seen and it made me question an awful lot as well right so you had Tim Cook and Bill Gates basically lap-dogging themselves in front of Trump prostrating themselves in front of Trump Tim Cook made a speech in which he thanked Trump eight times in two minutes but what it brought into my mind was this the celebration of money the celebration of greed even more the celebration of tech bros the celebration of entrepreneurs the celebration of these great minds we revere them we hold them up to be pharaohs we hold them up to be gods right Bill Gates these guys Tim Cook he's in another level and what are they really what are they really they will walk into a room and behave like that so that's what they are that's where you see who they are so they're not what we've been told they are terrified cowards they're just cowards the only thing they love the only thing they care about is their money and their privilege and Trump has basically said you know you play ball you kiss my ring or your money and your privilege is on the line and we saw that for example when early on he attacked the law firms.

32:19He went after some of the biggest law firms in America and effectively gelded them. And they came running to him, hands on knees. And these are the people supposed to, the majesty of the law, the thing that separates us from the beasts is the rule of law. And those law firms, they were more interested in their mansions in the Hamptons than they were in the rule of law in their own country. And to be honest, that spectacle that you've just described, Mario, I watched it as well. And it reminded me when Hitler in the mid 1930s, 1930s, used to have all the industrialists in to pay homage to him and to talk him up and to give him gifts and to give him cars and all manner of things and name factories after him and so on.

32:58It is as craven as that. But the difference is in the 1930s, we hadn't seen this before, right? But you could say to the Germans, well, okay, you didn't know what was going to happen. Now, what's our excuse this time? We are watching the rise again. But the difference this time is Germany in the scheme of things was a piddly little country compared to the power of the US. But to have a dictator surrounded by tech oligarchs, who, by the way, have the ability to basically, they're in all our pockets. I mean, in the literal sense, you know, they're in our pockets and maybe we're in their pockets too.

33:32People talk about, you know, they didn't recognize it happening back in the 30s and it's sort of happening now and we may make allusions to the 1930s again. But it is happening now again, let's face it. And the reason it's happening now is because people refuse to want to compromise their cushy job. Whether you're a congressman or a senator or a tech person or even us, John, and I may say us, I use it, I just look around, it's all of us. it's only when a tipping point is reached that people will actually get out and say no I can't do this that it that that that that the tipping point will stop that the tipping point will start do you know because otherwise people will go I'll be honest with you I'd like to do something but I have a wife and kids and a mortgage sure I mean there's a phrase that says you know people tend to be more concerned about the end of the month than the end of the world and there's truth in that because we're all busy etc etc but sometimes that can also be covered for cowardice especially for the rich and powerful who do have opportunities and I find this like they could all Jonathan like when you watch those guys in the office right one thing that occurred to me I've already told you one thing that occurred to me but another thing that occurred to me was if they really watched it they could all band together they could band together the most part there's only a few of them they could band together and hold a line against this guy and they could hold a line yeah but they don't want to the point Mario is they're like him right?

35:00Mark Zuckerberg, Bezos, these are guys with sunken eyes. They're mostly either, you know, borderline sociopaths and certainly incels, I think is that other lovely phrase used. These are people with very little social connection. And I would say the same for Bill Gates in a different way. I know he's rinsed his reputation with his Bill Gates Foundation, but I mean, you know, you go back 20 or 30 years ago and Bill Gates was considered to be another monstrous oligarch. The only difference is he was hurt enough by being hated that he actually went and spent some money to clean his reputation in the same way that the Rockefellers and the Carnegie's did.

35:40They built libraries. They sponsored cultural events. What are the current oligarchs doing? It's just burn it all to the ground. Yeah, they don't even make a pretence. They do not even care. Where's the Elon Musk Foundation? Yeah, I mean, exactly. And Musk, I think, was an eye-opener for a lot of people because we all bought into his, you know, this genius guy rhetoric. But of course, when you look more closely into it, you realize that, you know, Tesla, for example, he didn't invent. No, he did not. He bought his way in. SpaceX, he didn't invent SpaceX. He didn't, he's not an engineer. He didn't invent PayPal.

36:12No, he's got nothing. He knows nothing about how to land a module. No, but he's a scientist. As if he's a scientist. Yeah, but he carries on like he's some kind of mixture of, you know, Edison with, you know, some of the, Edison meets Einstein. right this sort of entrepreneur genius it's all smoke and mirrors bull and I think he exposed himself delightfully in that and also like his other oligarch friends he exposed himself as a coward a craven coward who will lay down before the biggest bully in the room we veered off a little bit we have a tiny bit let's get back because I wanted to ask you a question right let's get back to 2017 let's get back to brass tacks here let's get back to the the old days which have gone the old days where we actually used to talk about climate in simple terms that people can understand.

36:58I'm going to draw a little pie chart, right? It's just a circle, okay? Try and split up the percentages for me roughly, John. What's the problem on Earth? Carbon and methane. Is it a heat capture? Yeah, in terms of global warming, yeah. Carbon is number one and methane is number two. There are other trace gases as well. That's the main problem facing Earth. The heat capture is leading to all sorts of other problems. Yeah. If, you know, if I was to say, what's the one lever that you'd pull to sort of, you know, stabilize our global climate system, it would be we would cut CO2 input and we would reduce methane.

37:35The problem with CO2, of course, is it's a long acting gas and the CO2 already released, Mario, will continue to heat the atmosphere for hundreds of years into the future. On the other hand, methane, which is more pertinent to the Irish situation, is a relatively, it's an incredibly powerful gas. It disappears. 84 times more powerful per molecule over a 20 year time frame than CO2. But it washes out of the atmosphere much more quickly. So if you put some methane up, it will wash out of the atmosphere in a reasonable time frame. So, for example, if you wanted to hit the emergency brake on global emissions and you ask me, what's the magic thing we do?

38:15Cut methane emissions first, right? Because you can get a quick result. How would you do that? You would reduce the leakage of methane from fossil fuels, of course, but also the huge, massive global source of methane is ruminant agriculture. In other words, livestock, the methane from, particularly from cattle and from sheep, but principally cattle, I suppose, especially in this part of the world. And they emit huge amounts of methane as part of their digestive process. They're called ruminants. That's what they do. It's not their fault. It's just a fact. and the issue really with them is that there's just so many of them.

38:54There are billions of these animals and they're spewing out methane and this really powerful gas is warming the atmosphere. Okay, because you can open up X, right? And some dude, Illumina bot, will say, are you telling me cow farts and sheep farts are responsible for this? Well, the first thing I'd obviously tell them is that it's burps, not farts. It's actually part of the digestive process is they burp up methane from their multiple stomachs. And farts? Not so much. Not so much farts. Not really, no. That was even a little bit of a joke in itself. That's just a joke, yeah. It's mainly, it's principally, it's the burping and they burp constantly from the, it's part of the digestive process.

39:37The only way they can exit the methane is to burp it out. I've often had the idea, Mario, that we should fit little lighters to them so they could look, we could flare off the methane and out in the countryside you drive along in the night and it'd look like there's a field full of dragons with these flames going out. But I mean it. If you were to light the breath of a dairy cow, it would be like lighting a fart. It's a massive bird. You'd get a big flame of methane coming out. And so you have billions and billions of cows and billions of sheep. And is there any other livestock that's responsible for this?

40:08Do goats do it? It's all ruminants. I'm not certain about goats to be honest with you. But as far as any animal, essentially that is rumined. But cattle and sheep with the two main ones but I better not put my foot in it and name it for example pigs don't right yeah so so if you're chickens don't as well so if you wanted sort of lower emissions meat and in my own case for example I'm not a vegetarian but I limit my dairy products for example I don't drink milk I switch to oat milk completely but also in terms of meat chicken is a much lower meat pain source So methane emissions you would pick first I would and let's say you have 100 particles of emissions from a fossil fuel station.

40:52We call it coal. What kind of rough percentage are you talking about there? Methane and CO2? Well, okay. If you burn, for example, you know, a kilogram of coal, a couple of things happen. Number one, that coal is converted into, principally, into carbon dioxide. That is converted so that it breaks down and it's released into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. You get a certain amount of soot and so on. but largely you're turning it into, so you're turning the carbon, Mario, that is locked into the coal. So the literal carbon of the coal is turned, it oxidizes in the heat and turns into carbon dioxide.

41:28And that floats off into the atmosphere. Now here's a fact that melts my brain and let me share it with you. Let's say you burn a litre of fuel or a kilogram of coal. And let's say you measure the heat that you get from burning it, right? So let's say we had a coal here and you measure the heat, X number of therms of heat that you get from it. Now, when you convert it to CO2, that will continue heating the atmosphere. But over its lifetime, by the time it's washed out of the atmosphere, it will have caused 100 ,000 times more heating than the initial pulse of heat released when you burn that coal.

42:02That's why it's so incredibly potent. So when we burn stuff, anything, wood, coal, peat, gas, we convert carbon into carbon dioxide. And bear in mind, carbon is a natural part of the carbon cycle. But what we call fossil fuels, the reason we call them fossil fuels is they're from ancient carbon cycles from tens, hundreds of millions of years ago. So we're taking carbon that was buried in the deep earth hundreds of millions of years ago through natural processes that were weathered out of the atmosphere. and we dig them up and go, woohoo, let's set fire to them and see what happens. Yay. We have taken the carbon cycle, the global carbon cycle and blown it to pieces.

42:46We've injected hundreds of millions of years of carbon from deep history into a few decades. And it is a catastrophic decision. And that's why I keep doing what I do, Mario, is because we need to keep talking about this. Because I keep hearing people saying, oh, it's very expensive to change. I like the old diesel, right? And I'm not giving up my beef steaks. I'm saying you can accept modest losses and modest, shall we say, trade-offs or we lose everything. And that's the dilemma that we face right now. We're on the cusp of losing everything. Every crumb of the last 10 ,000 years of human development is on the line in the next 20 to 30 years.

43:31What we need to do here in Ireland and globally is really simple. One word for it. Electrify everything, right? So, for example, where do we... One of our big sources of carbon is transport, right? Transport involves... For example, in the US, the number one source of carbon emissions in the US is the transport sector, right? That's everything running diesel engines and petrol engines. So, you electrify transport and you get a sharp reduction in CO2 emissions. So, transport, reducing transport by electrifying transport is a total no-brainer, right? because we now have the electric vehicles. I was actually speaking to somebody this morning who was just pointing out that the range of electric trucks available in Ireland has now gone up to 500 kilometres.

44:14These are trucks, never mind cars. Vans, trucks, boats. Or had they been very low? Oh yeah, they had been maybe 200 or 300 kilometres. They're now usable at that range. So we can electrify our entire transport system. And for people who think electric trams or electric transport is quaint or unusual, check out the Dart in the Lewis right these really large fast moving objects or the TGV in France like these or the bullet trains in Japan these are the fastest land based vehicles in the world and they're all electrically powered so electricity is a fantastic power source it's clean it's quick and it's it's lossless and it doesn't require setting fire to stuff right so that's transport next up housing in Ireland we I think about 10 % of our emissions are related to our housing stock How do we cut our emissions?

45:03Insulation and so on, retrofitting, yes. But the quickest one, Mario, without a doubt, is to take your gas boiler or your oil boiler, throw it out and replace it with a heat pump, right? I've done this myself. And your heat pump means that you're no longer contributing carbon from your house. The best way I can describe it is that for every one unit of electrical energy that you put into a heat pump, you get three to four units of heat energy out. Now, the only other device I can name for you that is that efficient is a bicycle, right? A bicycle can take human energy and multiply it by three or four, right?

45:38Without any additional mechanical input. That's why the bicycle, up until the heat pump, was considered to be the most efficient invention in human history. What about renewables and alternatives, right? On the energy production side, yeah. On the energy production side. So let's talk about, for example, briefly again about wind, right? So I was talking to somebody recently and they were saying wind is bollocks, right? Sorry, I know. Sorry, that sounds very basic. And I went, well, explain, right? And they went, well, two things here. One is, actually what Trump said is true, that wind only works when the wind is blowing.

46:19Right. The person said, hang on. And then the next thing they said was, it's also a scam. And I went, why is it a scam? Well, because everybody's been paid tons of money in incentives to kind of do this wind business. So all this wind farms you see and wind turbines, it's because the only reason people are doing it is because they've been given hundreds of millions by state grants to do it. So answer those questions. Sure. Well, the first thing I'll say is your friend doesn't know much about energy systems generally. I hate to break it to him and I'm guessing it's to him. OK, let's break it down.

46:50First of all, of course, the wind doesn't always blow. and solar critics will point out that the sun doesn't always shine, especially at night. These are all true things. The point about renewable energy is that it's, first of all, once you've installed the infrastructure for it, so once you've created or built a wind turbine, right, essentially the energy to spin that turbine is provided free gratis and for nothing by the earth for the life of the turbine. If you build a power plant, you continue to shovel fossil fuels into that plant for the totality of its life. And by the way, To skip forward briefly on the subsidy thing, the fossil fuel industry receives subsidies annually running into trillions of dollars.

47:30So anybody who thinks that renewables are some big soft scam is, I'm sorry, needs to get off that particular Facebook group, right? It's a nonsense. The biggest subsidy suckers in the world are the fossil fuel industry, just for clarity. Okay, so the point really about wind and solar is that they have increased in ability and in potency phenomenally, Mario, in the last number of years. For example, China has brought on board colossal, and I mean just mind-bending amounts of new solar energy, right? They have rolled out, they produced more solar, they deployed more solar energy in the first half of 2025 than the rest of the world combined, right?

48:11This is what happens when you have a technocratic society not run by maniacs. They might be unpleasant people. They might be dictators, but they're not maniacs and they're not controlled by the fossil fuel industry. Thing about China is they're backing the technology that works the best. That's why the Chinese are killing the world with, sorry, killing it, I should say, in the world with electric vehicles because they're not hogtied by fossil fuel interests. Okay, so I would have said, just back to wind again, right? I would have said, in my ignorance, I would have said, Ireland is a great place for wind.

48:42Where in Ireland, it is very windy. It's off the West Coast, you know, the West Coast especially, I would have thought. Oh no, it certainly is. So it's great. Yeah. But if the wind stops blowing, sorry to be Trumpy about this, but if the wind stops blowing, can you store the energy? Yeah. Can you though? But that's not as easy as it sounds, is it? No, it's not. A couple of things, right? First of all, we're in the process. We already have interconnectors. to Northern Ireland, to the UK. And I think next year, 2027, we'll have our first direct interconnector to France, right? That means we can, as we overproduce wind energy on this island, It's farmed out.

49:16It gets pushed across to France and so on. So we join effectively a European super grid, right? That's the first thing. The second thing is there are different ways of storing excess wind energy. The great thing about wind energy is when you go offshore, first of all, the wind speeds offshore are much better than onshore because of lack of obstacles. Also, the turbines are bigger. So offshore wind blows most of the time, right? There are very rare anticyclonic periods offshore with massive turbines. And also, I'll give you this little test, right? We're at ground level today, Mario, right? Well, just about.

49:48Let's say that you and I finish this interview on the top of Liberty Hall, right? Out on the balcony, right? You'd be saying to me, Jesus, it's, how does it get so windy? It's an ordinary day at ground level. There are what they call the prevailing winds just up there, right? And that's what wind turbines do. They go into the prevailing winds. So when you're at ground level, you're not experiencing the kind of wind energy that is up, you know, a couple of hundred feet or a couple of hundred meters, right? And these wind turbines, by the way, are much taller than Liberty Hall, right? So these are huge things designed to harvest it.

50:19So number one, they're really good at harvesting energy. The second thing you can do with that is you can obviously store it in battery form. There are limits to that. But for example, what has been looked at as well is to use wind energy and all the cheap electricity, well, free electricity you get from it, to use a process called hydrolysis, where you essentially split water into hydrogen. You then pump that hydrogen into offshore storage, for example. You know the depleted, what do you call them, the gas fields off the coast of Cork, right? They're depleted, but they're empty fields. You can pump them with hydrogen, right?

50:55Now, what do you do with the hydrogen? Hydrogen is a useful, it's a tricky gas you can't use it for central heating you can't use it to run your car because it's too slippery and too tricky but on an industrial scale you can turn wind energy into electricity via hydrolysis into green hydrogen then when you need it that green hydrogen is pumped back up to run a power station and the output from it by the way what happens when you burn hydrogen it turns back into water right so you get no greenhouse gases released in it so hydrogen mass green hydrogen is one of the solutions. But the issue here is we have to focus on solutions.

51:33We don't have the luxury. For example, pumped hydro. We know about pumped hydro where you use excess wind energy to pump water up a hill. We have one in Wicklow. I'm trying to think of the name of it. It'll come back to me. We're looking at building one of the silver mines as well in Tipperary. It won't be a mass solution in Ireland, but there are ways of storing energy from intermittent sources. We know, for example, that wind tends to blow stronger in the winter. We know that solar works better in the summer. So you combine those two and you also connect and extend to European grid. If you'd asked me 30 years ago, I'd have said, by the way, we should also add a nuclear power station, maybe down in Currensworth Point.

52:12But we didn't do that, right? We'd have had a lot of clean energy, like the French, but we didn't do that. And quite frankly, it's too late now to go back down the nuclear route. It's too late. I mean, you know, it would cost 20 or 30 years to get through the planning in Ireland, to get it built. It would cost probably 20 billion. And knowing Ireland, it might cost more than 20 billion. And everybody would object to it. So I've given up speaking in favour of new nuclear. But what I speak instead is, don't shut down the existing nuclear. The French, for example, 70 % of their electricity, clean electricity, is produced by nuclear.

52:43And you know what the biggest threat to their nuclear power stations is the rising water temperatures in the French rivers. Those nuclear power stations are almost all located on rivers. The reason they are is they need cold water, river water for cooling. The rivers are getting so warm that they've had to shut down some of the power stations during the summer. And I'm sad to say, I'm sorry to say, over the next 10 to 15 years, I believe many of those nuclear power stations will go offline because the water is just too hot. Which means, even for the French, they need to be pivoting away from nuclear power.

53:15Don't shut them down, but don't be wasting money on new ones. Okay. One thing I heard you say recently, so I'll have two more things to ask you. And the book, John's book, of course, The Lie of the Land, A Game Plan for Ireland in the Climate Crisis. And this pertains to Ireland. And it was that, obviously, you know, there's a lot of kickback continually from the agricultural sector. But you pointed out that the agricultural community, the agricultural sector isn't a monolith. It isn't a monolithic opinion. Will you explain that? Sure. I think the voice of the agricultural sector in Ireland tends to be monolithic.

53:47It really does. it tends to come through, you know, farm organizations who tend to do the speaking, and they do tend to speak with this monolithic voice. But the reality is it's not. It is obviously fractured. We have, for example, extremely prosperous dairy farmers on the one hand at the moment, many of whom are, I think, the average dairy farmer income in 2025. And this is net income over 100 ,000, like well over 100 ,000 per annum. And for obviously for some farmers, way more than that, right? So some of them are really high on the hog. On the other hand, your average beef farmer in Ireland is getting his income is about a tenth of that.

54:21It's way below the minimum wage. And if you took away the subsidies from that, those beef farmers would be out of business. Now, many of them, of course, are doing it part time. Many of them have all farm employment as well. Sheep farmers are only surviving on subsidies. There is no money to be made in sheep farming. And in fact, I've made the point in the book that a good investment of taxpayers' money would be to buy out sheep farmers, particularly hill farmers, get them off the hills and let's reforest and rewild our hills because the sheep on the hills are causing ecological wreckage as are deer, as are goats.

54:55But do you find any sympathy for your views within the agricultural community? Limited. I mean, I would say I've had some people have approached me over the last while from groups, for example, like Talof Byo who are involved in what we call a more ecological forms of agriculture. So people in the horticultural community for example, I'm often approached by tillage farmers and they often make the point to me, Mario, that they're sick and tired of being blamed for high emissions and high pollution and rivers being poisoned. And they say, no, no, no, that's not us. You need to talk. It's the livestock guys, right?

55:29The same for the horticulture farmers. They're saying we're super efficient at producing food and you're always criticising Irish agriculture saying it's food inefficient. And so, yeah, the livestock sector is, we, of course we should have a livestock sector. It should be a fraction of its current size, Mario. And I made the point again in the book that Holland, with 40 % of our land mass, produces seven times more food for human consumption than Ireland. So that is a disgraceful statistic, right? Why do they do it or how do they do it? High technology, science-based, and they're not producing, you know, they're not dedicating millions of hectares to just produce grass.

56:08We have this incredibly inefficient system where we cover the countryside, in grass. We lash on the chemical nitrogen and the pesticides and then we get animals to eat the grass and then we eat the animal products. But what you need to do with food production is to cut out the middleman and eat the food directly yourself. So if you put down a hectare of potatoes or a hectare of turnips or whatever you like, the amount of food that that will produce in market gardening terms is colossal. The same hectare covered in grass and converted into meat or dairy. Won't feed anybody really. That's why with all this huge agricultural sector and these large exports, we're still food insecure on the island of Ireland.

56:49And that's something to me, one of the strongest reasons that got me to do this, this particular project is to bang the drum that we are food insecure and in a world of deepening climate change and climate breakdown, geopolitical uncertainty and destabilisation, we need to be able to feed ourselves on this island. And today, Mario, We're importing about 85 % of all the food that we eat. And I don't just mean bananas and coffee. I mean 75 ,000 tonnes of potatoes, for goodness sakes, imported. A million tonnes of fruit and vegetables imported. This is criminal. We need to back our tillage and our horticulture sector and our organic sector.

57:27The last question I just want to ask you, because I haven't got to it yet in the book, is what was the Pat Kenny bit? Why does he not want you on the show? I suppose myself and Pat, we came... Did I rate Pat Kenny? Oh no, I mean he's a fine broadcaster, one of the finest broadcasters we ever produced, without a doubt. And unfortunately he and I came to blows, so to speak, not physically, but pretty close, a number of years back when he was still with RT, where we kind of had a very, we had an off-air argy-bargy that was very unpleasant, extremely unpleasant. Yeah, I had sent Pat, I've detailed it all.

57:59I sent him, I'd been listening to his output on the radio and I was concerned about the climate skeptic kind of line that I was hearing from him. This is back 2008, 2009. And I sent him a list of questions, like 10 or 12 questions, just to sort of tease it out. Obviously, I annoyed him deeply with the questions because I remember this morning, I was at my desk and he rang me. And, you know, I didn't, I wasn't expecting a call. It just came out of the blue. and you know John it's Pat Kenny great I'm honoured what can I say and he laid into me for an hour For asking questions Well no you know how dare I you know and who do you think you are etc he was giving me the big man job right a real a real weapon and so this altercation if I can call it that went on for a solid hour and the only reason Mario had ended is it ended at 2 minutes to 10 because he had to do his radio show at 10 o 'clock and I actually spoke to a colleague of his in RT recently who said that he was in the room because he was in the newsroom doing this and he said we were all going oh my god it was literally merger on the dance floor right and so yeah I also went into studio with Pat a couple of weeks afterwards to continue the row and it was very unpleasant so you know we're probably not going to be besties at this stage Has it just because that's fascinating but has has his have his views changed at all since 2008 Nate.

59:23I think so, yeah. I've been in studio with him as recently as 23 I think and, you know, I think he's backed off the kind of hardcore climate denial stuff and he's now much more about, well, you know, I'll put it to you John, there's no point in us doing anything in Ireland because look at China, right? Which, by the way, is a legitimate journalistic question, right? And so and that's where we left it really. But he no longer is an advocate for outright climate denial which I'm glad about. But I think that ship has not only sailed, that ship has sunk. Fantastic that was an interesting tidbit John thanks very much good luck with your book The Lie of the Land did Matt give you a good speech?

1:00:01Matt was fantastic Was he? Was he good? John now is a great person now Yeah he was But Matt has been a great advocate for the No he has and I've had the regular weekly slot with Matt now for four and a half years for about 220 episodes I listen to it all the time and he you know he puts me through my paces he you know and so on and it's never a love in despite what some of the the textures have to say it never is he's always rigorous he always keeps me on my toes but that's good because I like that too but he's kept the door open in terms of you know promoting environmental issues and I'm grateful for that but more to the point he was great at flogging the book brilliant well John thanks very much pleasure Mario and my thanks to John Gibbons most regular contributor to the Mario Rosenstock podcast for telling me about his new book The Lie of the Land in all good bookstores now and good luck to John with that, with his very important message and of course as we sort of said in the interview, it's kind of gone out of fashion a little bit almost, hasn't it, in the last while, but such such an important issue, maybe the most important issue.

1:01:06My thanks to you of course, the listener, if you can tell one other person about this podcast, please do and my thanks to the great DeluxeBathrooms.ie their Autumn Super Sale is now on ends towards the end of September, 70 % off, get in there, Europe's biggest bathroom brands, the Autumn Super Sail. I'll see you same time, same place next week, folks. Take it easy.