168. A Climate Special: Populism, Security, and Leadership

29:15But if back seven, eight years ago in Paris, the world was headed to three and a half degrees. Today, we're headed to 2.4 degrees. But realistically, it's probably sub two degrees, given where momentum is on policy. I'll just give you one figure. And this isn't a retail point. I'll get to a retail points in a moment. But five years ago, the world's spending$500 billion on clean energy, okay? $900 billion on oil and gas, conventional, et cetera, a year. last year 1.2 trillion clean energy 900 billion oil and gas this year 1.8 trillion clean energy half of that on oil and gas basically so the the spend on addressing the issue is going through the roof and it's it has almost unstoppable momentum uh and these numbers and i could give you a slew of statistics in and around it but the progress that's being made is much faster than people expected at Glasgow two years ago.

30:11It's much more impactful. It's much more economic. This is where the future is and the future is now. But let me get to the difficult question of the now because you've got to hold the political consensus, you have to reinforce it. I think the first thing is you do need, I'm a big believer in mission, purpose, objective, and having that clear objective. And, you know, if you're Canada, I'm in Canada, you're appealing rightly to pride. We have been an energy superpower. We are going to be a clean energy superpower. Just, you know, that is a core goal of the country. I think the second thing is you need to, and you are both far more expert than this, than I, but you need to see things.

31:00I mean, one of the lessons I learned over time is you see clearest when you see from the periphery. So when you go to people who policies affect, we talked about austerity earlier, you think about climate change and climate change policy. So who is being affected by the energy crisis in the UK right now? It's households up and down the country, households in the Northeast, where the heating bills have been going through the roof, tapped down by government intervention, but they basically have a structure of housing that lays them exposed to this. And so the number one priority should be to address that.

31:39If I were to spend climate dollars in the UK, I would spend it on heat pumps. I would spend it on home retrofits. As Boris Johnson used to say, the UK is lagging on lagging. That's absolutely right. We don't allow Boris Johnson was right statements on this podcast, Mark. I'm sorry. You'll have to rephrase that. Someone once said that. So going into that, because you have to give, as you know, tangible results to people that this is part of the bigger mission. And we're talking, you know, four or five hundred pounds a year of savings for people on their energy bill. I mean, that's real money. Those are climate change committee points or calculations.

32:26And then the last thing, and again, you'll be better judged than I, but I think part of what has to come here is this is about security. It is about geopolitical security, not being hostage to Putin, not being hostage to large petro states, whether they decide to pump oil, but it's about economic security. We've talked a lot about the future of this economy, the UK economy. Look, this is the future. This is a fundamental driver of jobs, competitiveness, exports, growth. And the UK has had a leadership position in this. In my judgment, it absolutely should double down on that position because that's what's going to return some of the productivity that's been lost.

33:18In this March 2024 interview with Caroline Lucas, and Caroline is the former leader of the Green Party. She's Zach Polanski's predecessor. We're looking at the tensions between economic growth and environmental sustainability. I am an unashamed enthusiast for Caroline Lucas. I think she's one of the most thoughtful, nuanced, intelligent commentators on this. And she takes a much more radical view, I think, than almost any of our other guests, because she essentially says that we need to challenge the whole idea of growth. She's with Kate Raworth. She thinks constant economic growth will destroy the planet.

33:54She says that Keir Starmer's objective, which at that point was about having the fastest growing economy in the G7, was leading us down the right path and that the only way to try to deal with it is to completely change our minds about growth and therefore about what we can expect in terms of our living standards. Here she is. Cullen, very central to his vision is growth. He says his number one objective is for Britain to be the fastest growing economy in the G7. That takes us onto something really important and interesting for the next 20, 30 years, because we've interviewed Kate Roweth on the show and this question of endless growth, infinite growth with finite resources, presumably central to your philosophy.

34:38Tell us a little bit about what you think about growth and the problems of growth and the way in which if you were prime minister, you'd be approaching the question of growth. Let me just reflect for a second on what an extraordinary objective that is for Keir Starmer to have set himself, how does that resonate with most people that we are the fastest growing country or whatever? I mean, you know, if he'd said, you know, your kids can get a decent education and we're going to transform housing so that everyone's got a roof over their heads, or if he'd talked about some of the fruits of economic prosperity, then perhaps people could get behind him.

35:13But the idea that GDP growth is by and of itself, the objective, that is what I find so problematic because just knowing that you've got the fastest GDP doesn't tell you who's benefiting from it. It doesn't tell you who's getting it. It doesn't tell you how it's been caused. We know that a big pileup on the M5 is fantastic for GDP growth because everyone has to go out and spend money repairing their cars or buying new ones. So GDP growth as a main indicator of anything very much, I think, is well past its sell-by date. So let's instead have a well-being economy. Let's measure things in terms of wellbeing.

35:51And the environmental costs? I mean, where are you in relation to Kate Raworth and the more radical critique, which is that actually in the end, we've got to stop having growth at all? I don't think she quite, I was re-listening to her the other day, the great interview that she did with you. And I agree with her, but I don't think, I mean, I remember you had this debate about whether she's agnostic about growth or whether she's anti-growth. I think what she's saying is don't make growth the be all and end all of your economic policy. She's saying a bit more than that, I think, Caroline. I think she's a bit more radical.

36:24She's saying there's planetary boundaries. And basically, she's saying our resources are finite. And that if you actually multiply what 2 % growth would be over 20, 30 years, you're rapidly using up the finite resources and you're leaving other places. So ultimately, the logic of that has to be that a time comes when you stop growing and you start distributing more to poorer countries. Yeah. The reason I'm sort of pushing back a bit on this idea of stopping growth is that it means it sounds as if everything just gets pickled in aspic tomorrow. Whereas Kate would say, as I would say, that some things need to grow.

36:58We need some massive growth in renewable energies, let's say. And if you're going to do that, then absolutely, you need to stop growing in other places. So I would say no more new roads. And while we're at it, let's not have any new airports. Thank you very much. But I think the framing of it all, in terms of whether or not it's GDP growth doesn't really resonate with ordinary people and doesn't really tell us very much about whether or not the economy is allowing people to have meaningful, thriving lives on a planet that is not being destroyed. And the concern I have right now is, and the one that she has, is of course that our economic model right now is trashing the planet and isn't even in the process doing very much for the poorest people either, because the people who are reaping the benefits of the kind of extractive economy that we have are the richest, not the ones who actually need the resource.

37:49So I think it's slightly more complicated than you say, but certainly I would be among those who would say that infinite growth on a planet of finite resources is not possible. And if you needed just any more kind of ways of looking at that, we need to decarbonize by 2050 50 at the absolute latest. By 2050, the global economy is due to be about three times the size that it is now. It is going to be hard enough to decarbonize an economy the size of the current global economy by 2050. The idea we're going to be able to do it with one three times the size, however your heroic assumptions are about how much you can decouple energy use from output, it's not going to happen.

38:30It can't happen. So let's start preparing for it now and have a transition that is fair, that has workers at its heart, that makes sure that the price for that transition is not paid by the poorest people, but rather by those who can afford it. All of those things are the things we should be discussing now.

38:51Right, now I guess it's time to hear from the politician, given this is the rest is politics, who is chiefly responsible in the UK government for this policy area. And that's Ed Miliband, who's the Secretary of State for Energy and Net Zero. And we talked to him about the huge political battle that now rages over climate policy and in particularly the attempts by the populist right to turn the net zero transition into yet one more culture war. One of the things I'm really interested in on the politics of all this and populism and so forth is how well, how successfully the right, the populist right, have weaponized net zero.

39:35And I just wonder what your reflections were on that, whether you've got the right strategy for dealing with that or whether actually there is a sense that you're kind of on the back foot the whole time now. Absolutely not. We're not on the back foot and we're going to win the argument. So I'm in this odd position where I did the job before, 2008, 2010 as climate change secretary. Under Gordon. Under Gordon. You know, introduced the Climate Change Act started by my brother, you know, seen through by me, world-leading act. So over the last five years, we've constructed a big argument around climate, which I think is the coalition building and the right argument, which is a climate argument and also an energy security argument and a jobs and growth argument.

40:17And I think what is really important is it's absolutely in Kier's DNA. Indeed, he said the other day, it's in the DNA of the government. This is the route to secure energy, energy independence. This is the route to lower bills. This is the route to the jobs of the future. And it's the route to doing the right thing for future generations. And it's a really important thing here, which is there is a right-wing ecosystem that wants to say net zero is terrible. And that's not where the public is. Talk to any of the pollsters and they say the same thing, which is the attempt to create a successful culture war around net zero to undermine the government is not going to work because it's not where the public is.

40:59Now, that isn't to say we don't need to be careful. And that's why allying the climate argument with the security and bills argument is so important. And the jobs argument is so important, but we absolutely can win and are going to win this argument. I wonder if you can reflect though on the way in which we talk about this and why people feel anxious about it, because it can be seen as part of that whole story of the 90s and 2000s, that you could group it with international development spend, interventions, markets, as being something where experts had a very clear consensus, everybody agreed, everybody was doing the right thing, all the parties converged, and somehow the public began to become a little bit alienated and anxious.

41:49what do you think made some people in the public feel a bit anxious the thing is roy i will sort of answer your your question but just be really careful on the premise here because people are trying to persuade you of the premise that there is a big net zero backlash out there and there just isn't the evidence for this yes there is a political party winning drill baby drill farage pushing net zero well hang on the afd i mean there's a lot of afd and he sensed well hang on One minute. I mean, different things going on. I'm talking about Britain here. Let's start with Britain. And my lesson, which I would apply to Britain and apply elsewhere, is if you say to people, in order to tackle the climate crisis, you, an ordinary person suffering from the cost of living crisis, are going to have to pay thousands of pounds more.

42:34It's not going to work, right? But that's not our argument. And here's the two big things have changed since I was last climate change secretary. First, the situation has got far worse. The emergency has got far worse. It's really important to say that. 10 hottest years since 2015, extreme weather events all around the world from Doncaster to California. But secondly, there's been this dramatic thing that has happened, which is the fall in the price of renewables. So they're now cheaper than fossil fuels, not just for Britain, but for two thirds of the world. Solar, wind, solar costs down 90%, wind costs down 60%.

43:13And Russia, Ukraine showing our dependence on fossil fuels is what ruined family finances, business finances, and the public finances. And so what's changed is you can ally the energy security bills argument, as well as the jobs opportunity with climate today and tomorrow. To be cheeky for a second, I would say that the way you're talking now is exactly the way Alistair would have wanted you to talk. You're defending the record. You're not conceding the criticisms of the opposition. I mean, one of the reasons it's so strong is that you're not tempted to say, well, you know, we got a lot wrong about the way we used to talk about climate change or lessons that we've learned.

43:47And here's a new thing. You're saying absolutely unambiguous. In fact, you were refusing to accept my premise that there was stuff that we got wrong. Look, I think it's a slightly different category of things. He's defending the present. Well, I'm defending the present and the future. The other thing is, we'll get on to TB and his intervention. Should we read out the messages you sent to me when TB intervened in the Zero debate? I don't know. I'm not going to deny. I don't know. Can I just explain this? And there'll be a lot of the two of you explaining. He didn't quite mean it. So the Tony Blair Institute released a report called The Climate Paradox, Why We Need to Reset Action on Climate Change.

44:25in the forward, Blair argued that voters are noticing the credibility gap between being asked to make financial sacrifices and changes in lifestyle, whilst knowing that their impact on global emissions is minimal. Blair also believes that limits to fossil fuels in the short term are doomed to failure. Q, he didn't quite mean that. It's been taken out of context and none of you disagree with Tony Blair. Over to you. I'll check it. I'll check it against the Alastair and I had a spirited exchange on the day where we agreed, actually. Although I then noticed on the podcast you sort of said it was a timing issue, which was an extremely sort of, you know, chicken shit way out, if I may say so.

45:06Look, basically said, what the F is he up to now? Yeah, OK. The report itself, because he wrote forward to the report, the report itself is perfectly unobjectionable. That's what Alastair said. Well, he didn't quite say that. He just said there was a timing problem. The report itself. What's disappointing about Tony's forward, and I have huge respect for Tony, is I think it's incredibly defeatist, which is not what Tony is. It's really defeatist. Not to say that fossil fuels... Well, it sort of says we're not going to succeed and we're not going to achieve 1.5. The whole thing is it's all going badly.

45:41Let me just give you some context to this. When I was climate change secretary, nobody mentioned the word net zero. I didn't know the term net zero because our ambition was for 80 % reductions in emissions by 2050. Pre-Trump, but still a majority, 90 % of the world was covered by net zero targets. Now it's something like, well, it's a majority of the world. Right? I was looking back because I'm an absolute bloody nerd at a document you both won't be familiar with called the UNEP emissions gap report. We did an emergency project. I'm sure we did. Right. In 2010. Actually, preparing for this made me think about this.

46:21They said that this was after the Copenhagen climate summit, which didn't go well. They said that the pathways from Copenhagen through to 2100 imply temperature increase of between 2.5 to 5 degrees, right? We were heading for potentially up to 5 degrees. Now, we are heading for something like 2.5, maybe 3 degrees. Don't get me wrong, 2.5, 3 degrees, very bad. But it's just not true to say the world hasn't made progress. The world, in its very difficult way through the multilateral process, which is kind of a nightmare, has made progress. India has a net zero target. China has a net zero target.

46:59The UK has a net zero target. Now, you know, is China and India doing everything right? No. Is Britain doing everything right? We're trying to. But, you know, it's not true that the world isn't taking this seriously. Why? It's because of self-interest. It's self-interest and economic opportunity. They think they see the dangers of climate, what it's doing, and they see that actually there is a path through. To channel Tony Blair for a moment, right? I mean, surely he's right. There is a kind of credibility gap between the changes in lifestyle that are being demanded with the fact that actually, as he points out, the impact on global emissions of what you're doing is going to be minimal.

47:38Well, okay, two points. One, I don't like the phrase changes in lifestyle. We're going to have better lives for people in the net zero world, right? The Climate Change Committee in their seventh carbon budget published earlier this year says that moving to net zero will cut people's energy bills by£700, will cut people's motoring costs by£700. That's a better life for people. Warmer homes, tackling fuel poverty, green spaces, good jobs. They're all good things about it. And secondly, I think you, if I may say so, in that question, are being far too defeatist about Britain. We passed the Climate Change Act 2008, started by my brother, completed by me, countries around the world, we're the first to do it.

48:19Countries around the world emulated us. Lots of countries around the world. We've got this mission, Clean Power by 2030. If we achieve that, and I'm absolutely determined we do, other countries will say, look, look what Britain's been able to do. We can do that too. So let's not have a diminished view of Britain. We really matter in this. So many countries come to me and say, you've got a really important responsibility here. There's many, many other people that we've interviewed, which we'd love to refer you to. So I'd love you to go on leading and listen to what Christiana Fageda says about this, or indeed what Bill Gates says about this issue.

48:57But we're going to finish with an interview with Emma Pinchbeck, because she is the chief executive, the CEO of the Climate Change Committee, and the former CEO of Energy UK. So she really is trying to hold the ring for UK policy, and is talking about why the UK needs to decarbonise as much as other nations. that pollute more aggressively. Why the UK, instead of getting caught on the fact that it's only, let's say, contributing 1 % of global warming, needs to be more than doing its part in terms of global leadership. And it'd be wonderful to hear back from listeners about who really won you over.

49:31These are five very different voices. Are you won over by the views of Emma Pinchbeck, who you're about to hear, or Caroline Lucas on Zero Growth, Mark Carney looking at private finance, Ed Miliband right there in the seat of government trying to do it as a Secretary of State, or Dieter Helm with his cold economic analysis of where he thinks we're going wrong in policy. Please tell us which of these five voices appealed to you more. And here's Emma from the CCC. My final question, I want to ask you, you know, you said a couple of times you've got a young family, and I know people who have been putting off having children in part because they're absolutely terrified about climate change.

50:11You know, the question, can you really bring children into a world that feels like it's sort of burning to hell? On a sort of one to 10 scale, where one is honestly sleep easy at night, nothing to worry about, it's all going to be fine, and 10 is we're doomed. Where are you most days of the week? I think that there is a lot to be concerned about. with climate change, and I think the public know that. I think it's really important we don't patronise people into the idea that the British public don't understand that climate change is happening or that the global population don't we're all seeing and feeling and experiencing it.

50:51And we've just put out our climate adaptation report in the UK which says something like a quarter of UK households might be affected by flooding in a world where we don't tackle climate change, where we'll have potentially tens of thousands of people dying in extreme heat waves by 2050. that there are real impacts to this, that we will all experience more human populations moving, less stability in food, less stability in energy systems, just a less stable world. And of course, I thought about that before having the children. But for the last five years of my life, I've been working in the private sector with companies who are investing in the alternative.

51:30And those companies care about the environment for all the reasons I just mentioned, but they also can see where the economics of energy are going. And I am very confident that we're moving into an age of electricity. And because the economic signals are there, that gives me hope that even when the politics around climate change vary, we will continue to decarbonize. Now, the speed is the thing. And that is what government needs to do, is set the framework for this change to continue to happen. But in as much as there are sometimes reasons to be worried, there are also very clear reasons to hope.

52:11And I suppose on the day that I decided to have my children, it was the day where I was feeling particularly hopeful. And my final question, which I guess is probably one you get too much, but the anxiety is we decarbonize in the UK. In other words, we don't pump as much carbon into the atmosphere from the UK. But we continue to consume huge amounts, you know, our clothes, our toys, everything, which are produced in other people's countries who are pumping carbon into the air. You know, we buy the stuff from China. So in terms of our carbon footprint, it remains really, really high. And so I guess the anxiety would be from a UK only point of view, all we're doing is getting rid of our own industry, but continuing to support carbon polluting industries and other countries through our buying patterns.

52:58And then the second point, which I guess is Alistair's bigger point, which is we're a drop in the bucket. And unless there's a big international carbon pricing scheme that really has big ratchet mechanisms on carbon consumption that takes in China, the US, India, you know, you could meet all your targets and it wouldn't have any effect on climate change. A few things in that. Firstly, I checked before I came to do this, but our consumption emissions in 2024 are down. And of course, a lot of our consumption emissions from trade come from Europe, which has a carbon price and a net zero target. So in terms of our own imports, they will be decarbonizing over time.

53:41China, of course, looks like its emissions will peak and then start declining in the 2030s because of the investments they're making far more than the rest of the world into renewables and into things like electric vehicles and clean technologies. So China, no question, is a key economy in decarbonizing the globe and has moved ahead and watching it is important. But I would expect to see our consumption emissions come down as those economies change too. There's a thing in this about why don't we talk more about lifestyle change and resource management more generally, and that comes back to the mandate of the Climate Change Committee, which is our job is to show that it is possible inside the existing economic framework to do this, that you can do it and grow GDP, you can do it and have your manufacturing GVA increase, you can do it and keep the way that we live pretty similar.

54:31So you'll still have a warm home, you'll still drive a car, but those technologies will change. There is some necessary behaviour change in our analysis, but again, it's driven by choice rather than just forcing people to do things. And generally speaking, especially in an age when people are tired, when the economy has been challenging, when you've got some more children that wake you up at night, I think the idea that you can put the emphasis on individual change rather than system change and the energy transition is probably not what I would stake decarbonizing and looking after the planet on.

55:04And then lastly, why should we, when emissions are small? Well, something like a quarter of global emissions come from countries where their national impact is about 1 % of those global emissions. We are all in it together and we all need to do our bit, and that is behind the international framework on climate action, the idea that we all do our part. And industrialized economies that have more resources go first and invest in these technologies early. And I suppose I often think about this again in relation to what it's like to parent a three-year-old. There's a kind of moral thing here in that if you can see the right thing to do, you don't go for the lowest common denominator.

55:45I don't say he can poke his sister in the eye so long as his friends are doing it. I say poking your sister in the eye is just the wrong thing to do, so we're not going to do it. And we know that climate change is a problem. The public knows that in poll after poll after poll After poll, they tell us they want politicians to do more, but they do want it to be fair. They do want it to be straightforward. They want to be able to do it whilst living their lives straightforwardly. And they want clarity from government about what they're being asked to do. So I think there is actually a very simple, if long answer to the thing that I get asked all the time is why should we try?

56:21And very lastly, I think I said this when I did Question Time with Alistair. This is a challenging decade for the energy transition because there's more competition and there's global supply chains and there's the kind of conditioning global markets we've all talked about. But ultimately, the energy transition is going in one direction. If you care about growth in the future of the economy, you're going to have to adopt electric technologies and get on board with cheap electricity. And the countries that do that early, which China and others certainly have moved to do, will get the most industrial benefits.

56:46That's what happens in economic revolutions. We are in one of those moments now. So whether you care about climate change or not, whether you call it industrial policy or social policy or your energy policy, fine, but you are going to end up doing a lot of the things that we're proposing that you do in order to meet the UK's carbon budgets. Good. Well, thank you. Thanks for your time. And I think you did say that. You did. I remember it. The world felt a bit more optimistic then, though. This issue felt a bit more optimistic. Yeah, possibly. But equally, Alistair, the technologies have continued to improve, right?

57:17So we've halved the costs of achieving net zero between the last time we invited government, which was around that time, and now, because the technologies have continued to improve regardless of what's happening in the politics. Yeah. Well, listen, I hope you enjoyed that. As Rory said earlier, there are plenty more interviews where we've talked about climate and net zero transition, and you can check those out. But these are the ones that we thought were worth bringing together in this special episode. So I hope you enjoyed it. See you soon. Bye-bye.

57:51Thank you.