69. The brutal truth about net zero and how to vanquish climate populists, with Dieter Helm

27:49And the point that you're making, which is 80 % of RNG is still coming out of fossil fuel. So try to explain in simple terms how both those things can be true at the same time. Well, I'm not quite convinced that Alistair is correct. Sorry, we're not allowed to utter those words on this podcast, Dieter. You'll be forthwith banned from the studio. Yeah, well, I'll wait for that to happen. So I'm not quite convinced of that. Sorry, Dieter, can I be provocative? thing. Let's just, for the sake of argument, say the cost of solar has come down and we're generating more energy from solar and wind than we were in the past.

28:25And that's what gets people cheery. Yes, it's true. Okay, so help the voter understand how it can both be true that the costs come down and we're generating more from solar and wind, and also that we're not making any difference really on parts of the million. What's the experience of the, I don't know what you would call the average voter or the average household or whatever are confronted with these changes? Well, first of all, there's the costs. So part of the argument which reinforces the frame that Alice is putting on the problem is that, you know what? It's not only going to happen, but it's going to make our bills lower.

29:03It's all going to be cheaper. And of course, if that's true, it's like buying the next version of the iPhone. The market will do it. We'll all go out and switch. will say, get out there tomorrow morning, let's get our solar panels in, let's get our heat pumps in, let's buy an electric car. But if you go and do that, if you sit down the pub and talk to people about their experiences of what actually happens, it's really expensive to fit a heat pump. It's very disruptive and you have to have a certain kind of house to make this work. It's no good having an old house needing very large radios, etc.

29:37And you have a different experience of what comes out of it. That's why they're buying gas boilers still. If you want to go out and buy an electric car, unless you're a company director, it's fantastically expensive relative to a petrol car. We're talking about£10 ,000 plus difference, and that may not be much to people on higher incomes, but it sure as matters to people on average incomes. On solar panels, well, yes, If you work out the costs of installing solar panels, and I have a lot of them installed, and you work out the payback period over there, and you've got a household budget where you've got no savings and you're trying to pay the mortgage, you don't have that capital to do that.

30:21And then you look at your electricity bill. And the truth is that a lot of your electricity bill, not all of it by any means, is made up of paying subsidies to these very technologies that are supposed to be so cheap. That is true the gas price went up, but the gas price now is lower in real terms than it was before the COVID event. It's incredibly cheap once you take the inflation effect into account and it's falling in price. And for most of the public, they don't have the luxury of sitting around thinking, like I might, that I'm not going to do this, I can afford to pay that, et cetera, et cetera.

30:57That's not their everyday experience. And that's why what should be happening according to these, quote, optimists who tell you this story about it's all going to be cheaper, bills are going to fall, et cetera. The reason bills are going to fall if they are, particularly for electricity, is because the gas price is going to fall, right? And gas is setting the prices in this frame. So it just isn't people's lived reality. And I would say for good reason, because the story they've been told is not actually true. But you see, I think there is a danger that if you simply keep highlighting the downsides, the problems, the challenges, I'm not saying the challenges aren't real, but if a politician were to listen to this and to take your word as gospel, they probably wouldn't get out of bed because it feels so sort of impossible and they might just start to focus on lesser problems and sort of, you know, get some low hanging fruit.

31:52And, you know, and you did, you did back in the day, I think you were one of those when Tony Blair's government signed up the EU renewables target. Lots of your world said, this is crazy, right? But it has been met. So I think sometimes politicians have to go against conventional wisdoms, go against, they do have to give that bit of hope and optimism. And it sometimes does mean setting out the big picture vision and then doing the hard work to get there. So you were wrong back then. No, no, no, no. Let's get back. So what quite a lot of that 220 renewables target we're discussing in Europe, biomass, things like Drax, right?

32:28What's the carbon footprint of that? Have you really thought through what the components of that framework are? And that's where I started at the time. Is that an argument for not doing it? No, I didn't say that at all. So let me come to the second point. So what would you have me do? I know it's true that we haven't made much progress and I've written about why we haven't make my prose, but I should shut up about that and not mention it and pretend the progress has been excellent. I should go around telling people it's all going to be cheap. It's all much cheaper than fossil fuels. The prices are going to fall.

32:58You're going to run out and do this stuff. What happens when it turns out that it isn't and people suddenly find that the story they've been told by politicians, by many, isn't actually true? But I've given you an example. Then what happens is the reaction is exactly what's going on across Europe now. We have a really nasty reaction, which is anti-net zero policies, anti-green. We've got farmers on the streets supported by the public who are begging to keep cheap subsidized diesel and to maintain their pesticides and usage and have further subsidies. And they have large support. We have populists all over the place.

33:36The AFD made progress in Germany. Why? Why? Because they were against heat pumps, because the people found them expensive and didn't want to be told to do this. You know, the consequence of what I call, and forgive me for this, but the happy clappy approach to this is to say that when it turns out that people realize what the world is, as opposed to what they've been told, they trust the politicians even less. You get these kinds of backlashes at the moment, which I think are incredibly dangerous for our climate and incredibly dangerous for a natural environment. That's why I come back to being realistic.

34:10Can I come in on this? Because I think you're onto something really interesting for a politics podcast. Of course, part of the reason why I feel an emotional sympathy for Dita is that my lived experience, of course, in Afghanistan and Iraq was I was the person saying, this is all screwed. This isn't working. Look at the facts and figures. And everybody was saying, you can't say that. We've got to encourage the troops. We've got to encourage the public. We've got to keep being optimistic and hopeful. How are you going to motivate everyone? And I was trying to say, like, Dita, look, I think there are things we can do in Afghanistan.

34:41It's going to be much less than you assume. It's going to be more difficult, but the stuff we can do, but don't talk this happy, clapping language. And I guess I feel that it's a really important theme. I sort of slightly feel the same on immigration, that one of the reasons this apocalypse backlash on immigration is that we weren't clear and straightforward enough about some of the challenges involved. And that then means that people lose trust in us. I think it It may be true for actually quite a loss of what we seem to promise in the 90s and 2000s, that politicians were too optimistic. And when people discovered in general that they weren't delivering, it's provided Trump and everyone the opportunity to say, these guys are all a bunch of bullshitters and we shouldn't believe a word they say.

35:21But you see, I agree with Alistair on the following point, okay? It's not enough to point out that what people are being told may not be correct. it is beholden to do the other side of the equation too, which is okay. And I'm surprised you didn't put this question to me, which is, so what would you do? And I have a very clear view about what we should be doing about climate change and how positively we could make a great deal more difference for what we're currently spending. And of course, I think we should spend more on it beyond that point. So, but just first of all, I don't think I'm certainly not happy clappy, because I think this is, you know, lethally dangerous, the whole thing.

36:03I completely understand and agree with you that the populists are exploiting this because the populists exploit wherever they can to promote their own kind of whatever it is that they're promoting, left or right. And, you know, I think you mentioned the economic impact of going over two degrees. And the Office of Budget Responsibility, one of the lesser commented upon aspects of their recent reports was actually that this could lead to catastrophic economic impact if we don't get on top of this. But I guess what I'm doing is trying to highlight the difference in the role of expert advice and politicians who have to give signals of leadership.

36:43So let's just maybe go to your report on the cost of energy, because you had an experience there of what is a little bit more, what it's like to be the politician. You get asked to do something, you prepare a report, you publish the report, lots of people say they like this bit, don't like this bit. Quite a lot of people, you know, attacked it fairly aggressively. And then I got the feeling the government just thought, oh, this is a bit difficult, let's park it. So let me ask you your experience for those of our listeners who are here for the politics of this. What did that teach you about the interaction between the role of advisor and expert and the role of government?

37:17Okay. So, I mean, a lot, right, is the answer to that question. And, you know, there was, first of all, the process of doing the report where you go through what's almost a political process in which various people try to capture the result before you get to writing it up. Yeah. And I did everything I possibly could to make sure that didn't happen, including I wrote the report myself and I didn't let any civil servant or anyone else write. So I was determined to say, here's a question. I will try to give what I think the right answer is to that question. And I will say what you need to do, what the recommendations are to achieve that outcome, knowing full well that the result would be that those who would be losers from the report would be virulently hostile to the outcome.

38:09And they would come in fiercely and try to knock their main conclusions out. And they were, I mean, it's very clear what happened. I said that intermittency is important. I said that, you know, if you want to have technologies which work for between 20 % and 40 % of the time, part of the cost of having those technologies is the backup that's required, as they say in the simplistic terms, when the wind doesn't blow, when the sun doesn't shine. And those costs are real. They exist. They don't go away. Yeah. And I proposed this technical thing called equivalent firm power where people would have to bid, derated by whatever that percentage was.

38:47And that meant that effectively those who caused intermittency would have to pay the costs. That's, by the way, why I don't agree with you about the costs of the renewables. Once you add the intermittency in and the system costs associated, they are not cost competitive at the moment. It is not quite the rosy story that people sell. And that's why I'm very, very adamant they need subsidizing and supporting, right? If you don't believe me about this, then you can be very relaxed about the subsidies because you don't really need them. I think you need them. So what then happens is you have a process in which politics engages and the pushback's very hard.

39:26Subsequently, and this is what I expected, people would try to arrive at the right answer by every other possible way they could than the one I suggested. But in the end, you come back to baseline, which is what I propose is the cheapest way of getting to the results you want to get to. What was your interaction with government post-publication? Well, pre-publication, I had the advantage of having direct support from the Secretary of State who asked me to do it. That was Greg Clark. That's Greg Clark. And he was very keen that this was done, that he was very supportive of the process. And I was really clear at the beginning about the independence of what I did.

40:03You have to get the terms of reference right. I know it sounds techie in politics, but it really matters. Then afterwards, of course, politicians listen to the lobbyists. They all come out of the woodwork. And the more governments involved in these things, the more lobbying there is. Dieter, there's also a political timeframe here, isn't it, which needs to be explained to the listeners. So Greg Clark is a minister under David Cameron and Theresa May. Yeah. And he then, the person who's commissioned the report and who's backing you, then goes when Boris Johnson comes in. So a whole new government comes in with a whole new ideology.

40:37So what does it feel like? Just give us a sense of the difference in tone between dealing with the Theresa May government and the Boris Johnson government when it comes to this stuff. As in energy, I had this in DEFRA and Natural Capital Committee and time you were there, Rory. I mean, I had I don't know how many secretaries of state. You know, I had Caroline Spellman, then I had Owen Paterson, who was very focused on being in a different position. Yeah, like Net Zero and he's up to that. Then I had, I think, Liz Truss twice. Oh, lucky you. And then I had Michael Gove, who was, I'm not political about this, but he was an absolute star, totally ministerial support, Secretary of State support for what we were trying to do.

41:17But he's the guy who said we've had enough of experts. Yes, and I teased him about that a great deal. But I have to say, lots of things I don't agree with Gove about or Conservatives about, Brexit being one of them. But I have to say, he was the most professional minister I ever dealt with. He listened, he read, he thought, and he was prepared to challenge vested interests. But I had them all. That energy was a much more interesting experience in one sense, because I had Greg Clark, who was very supportive, but he disappeared. We then went through the whole shenanigans of all the Brexit deals, and the focus was not on anything other than the Brexit deals.

41:57But I then had the very surreal experience of being Boris Johnson's energy advisor for, I think, two weeks. And I say I think because they never got it organized to make the announcement, and they never quite ended it. But this was an experience of dealing with, in this case, a prime minister, which was complete outside the cosmos that I dealt with before. And what you learn is that if you're a Democrat, and I'm half East German, I care a lot about democracy, it is if you care about public policy, almost your duty to provide independence advice if you're asked to do it by democratically elected people, whether you agree or not with many things they do.

42:44And the lesson I learned was you have to adapt the style by which you engage, but you must never compromise on the content. Because the moment you tell people what they want to hear, which I could have done in the cost of energy review, you lose the plot. So cost of energy review basically said the net zero transition and renewables are going to cost much more than you think. It's going to be more expensive. And you were worried about vested interests who are going to attack you. tell us who those vested interests were, why they attacked you and what they said. So, and no disrespect to them at all, because if I was one of them, I would have done the same thing because we'd moved to a world in which the government is the client for energy generation, not the customer.

43:30That's this world in which we have the CFD subsidies, et cetera. The government's effectively the guarantor. They're your contractor, they're your client. And once you've done that, which is what happened at the end of the first decade and over 2010 and just afterwards. Once you've done that world, you want to get the best terms of contract out of the government for your investors. So those who are having a free ride on the system costs of their intermittency obviously didn't want a world where those costs were recognised. So free ride on the system cost of intermittency means people with solar and wind, and you're suddenly suggesting they pay more because they're not producing energy all the time.

44:15That is included within the cost. So of course they imposed it, and they were really good at it. And I would say they were so good at it, and they probably still are, that they've captured a lot of the government department. And that's really important. It's not just how lobbying works vis-a-vis ministers. It's how lobbying works in its interaction with the civil service. And I think that's incredibly important. I think there are all sorts of dimensions about revolving doors, about career paths, et cetera. And we've lost the ability for ministers to separate in their minds what is advice that's based on interest from what is actually genuine analysis.

44:59because what we've lost, this is my experience in government, is that role for civil servants as giving impartial policy advice to ministers. And I might say so, and Alastair, you might not like this, but the Blair government's focus on delivery stripped out a lot of that core, really competent tradition in the civil service of telling truth to ministers. And I think a lot of that's gone, And it's not just under Labour, it's happened under Conservatives too. And that makes it much harder to get through to good public policy in the public interest, which is what I'm interested in. Well, it won't surprise you to know I don't really agree with that, the part about the Blair government.

45:45I think one of the big failings of this government under David Cameron was not understanding what the role of the delivery unit actually was in terms of driving forward the delivery of policies to which the government was committed. But let's not relitigate the wonderful work of Sir Michael Barber. But you mentioned there about, you know, the interest. And of course, the other thing that happened that made you perhaps feel a bit like a politician during that process was that we interviewed Caroline Lucas recently. And she went on quite a rampage in Parliament because she felt that you weren't declaring your interests clearly enough.

46:24You did do a very general declaration of interest related to the review. and you said that you did have clients right across the energy sector, but it was very, very, very vague. I think you were asked about whether you had oil and gas companies that were clients and you didn't give an answer to that. And Caroline Lucas really went through the parliamentary process trying to get answers and seems to me failed to do so. So one, did you feel there was any conflict of interest? And secondly, or whether you had special interests that you should have declared? And secondly, did that give you any more sympathy towards politicians who have to deal with this sort of stuff all the time?

47:00Well, no, no, no is the answer to your question. It's very straightforward. And in fact, in discussions with the civil servants, I tried to go much further than most people do in these contexts. But, you know, in the end, there is a question. If you want people who've never had anything to do with companies, right, to be involved in these reviews, You're going to find people who have very little understanding what happens in boardrooms and very little understanding of how the world works. My world is the intersection between three different things, academic research, government and policy, and industry.

47:42And I think that if I didn't have a grasp of how the world works out there and what happens in boardrooms, et cetera, et cetera, then it would be a much poorer report as a result. But I think I was completely open. What really happened was that there were a number of politicians who were got at by the renewables industry who realised from some of the things I've written in the past that they might not like the conclusions that came out. And so kill the messenger before the messenger puts the message down on paper in order to discredit before you get the result. And I just walked through that. But I think that's a bit unfair to them.

48:20They're not all doing it purely out of a sort of preordained vested interest. So I think for somebody like Caroline Lucas to be asking whether this guy that the government has decided should lead the cost of energy review, does he have links with the oil and gas industry? Does he take money from them? I think that's a legitimate question. I have no qualm at all with Caroline and the position she takes on a lot of these things. I disagree on many things, but that's perfectly legitimate. And I have never represented the oil industry in any form whatsoever. And there's this attempt to try to find some sort of, you know, something under the stones, etc.

49:03And frankly, it's not there. It's not true. And it had no effect on the outcome or the report whatsoever. You said no in answer to the question whether it felt any more sympathetic to politicians. Did that process of just having that little feeling of what it's like when suddenly you've got people coming at you from all directions, did you not have any more sympathy with the politicians who were getting that in spades all the time? Oh, no. On the contrary, I think it's really important that someone who stands for political office and is elected to do so is open to all these challenges around them.

49:40And it's one of the reasons why in the UK, I think we have one of the least levels of corruption, genuine corruption amongst almost any democracy anywhere. It could be better, but both our civil service and our political class are actually pretty clean. And one of the reasons for it is exactly what you say. Yeah. And people like Caroline are very good at raising these questions. But I think that they deserve robust answers. I gave them a robust answer. I'm completely happy with that. I'm surprised anyone's interested in it, but good on them if they are. Let's then bring you to the solution. So, give us a sense of what Dieter Helm would be doing on the biggest issue facing humanity.

50:26How would you set about getting the world to a situation where we don't end up with runaway global warming? First thing, just in a footnote, is I think the destruction of biodiversity is at least as important a problem as climate change. We're in a really serious environmental mess in this century. Okay. So if it's on climate change, what I want to do is say that every penny that's spent, ultimately by British consumers and British taxpayers in the UK, is spent with the maximum return or benefit to addressing climate change. So my starting point is, what can we do here, which is most going to tilt the balance on that two degrees or whatever?

51:10So I start with, what is the unique contribution we can make? And we have at least two things going for us, which virtually no one else has. We have a great site for offshore wind, shallow waters, near the coast, well understood seabed, et cetera, and good wind flows. So we should do offshore wind. And I'm very pleased we've done it. And I'm very pleased the costs are lower than I thought they were going to be, but they're not as low as people think they are, but it's a great thing. And we should experiment more. So floating platforms, et cetera, so we can help other countries do this. The second thing is we are going to have to need some industrial sequestration and carbon capture and storage, putting the gas back underground.

51:54We've got empty gas wells, empty oil wells. We've got pipelines in place. The North Sea is shallow, well understood, and we've got supplies of carbon nearby. Best place in the world to try CCS. So do those two things and export that technology, give it away anywhere in the world. That's it. Next up is R &D. We're really good at some aspects of research. We're not that good at turning them into production. But when it comes to things like fusion power, when it comes to developing new materials for solar panels, all these things we're going to need. We are a great place to do it. But what you can't do is take a pot of jam, which is what we do, and spread it over everything.

52:36Give everybody a bit of money. Give everybody a spot. We're going to do absolutely everything. No, we've got a limited amount of resources. There's a limited amount the public are prepared to pay, are able to pay, can afford to pay. Let's spend that money in a way that has the maximum effect on global warming. And that's not what we're doing. And that's what I think is a big opportunity. and let's also face up to the carbon consumption that we're doing as opposed to simply pretending that we're the poster child of the world because we've de-industrialized. So carbon consumption is one of your big central ideas.

53:12And basically what you're saying is Europe pats itself on the back because it's not burning as much coal or oil as it used to. But what it's really done is we're all importing all our stuff from places like China anyway, and they're burning coal a great deal, or India's burning a lot of coal as well. And therefore, if you actually looked at your consumption footprint, all the stuff in our houses, a lot of it made elsewhere, we need to be taxing that. And you seem to have an idea that what you do is you'd calculate how much carbon is embedded in each product. And if you imported, I don't know, some product from China that had a lot of carbon in it, you'd pay a huge tax.

53:50you put 70, 80 % tax on top. How would we ever get there? Because obviously, if Britain started doing that and nobody else started doing that, consumers in Britain would be pretty cross. So, presumably, you'd have to coordinate that across the world. And why haven't you managed to do it, given that the logic's there? Presumably, every economist agrees. You've been talking about it since 1990. We're not there. So, what's the problem? Why haven't we got there in 35 years? Well, that's pretty context. So, what I'm interested in is I don't think the top-down COP type process, 90 ,000 people flying to Dubai or wherever it is they fly to or Azerbaijan next, is going to get there.

54:24I don't think in this 30 years, the COPs have made much difference. That makes me very distinct from what most other people think, which think this is the way we're going to get there. What I think we have to do is recognize that people are going to do this unilaterally and then to build a bottom-up unilateral club of the willing. So when it comes to paying the same price for carbon embedded in imports as we would for the carbon embedded in, say, steel production in Port Talbot now or wherever, that's a kind of, in my view, no-brainer. And we can impose a carbon border adjustment on that basis.

55:02Now, you might say, well, you know, but the politics, that's not going to work. But because the prices will go up for consumers, right? Yes, for some things, yes. And for a country like Britain, where we're importing all this carbon, the reality will come home to roost. And the reality coming home to loose, I'm sorry, just to be tough about this, but the reality coming home to loose is that households would be paying a lot more for the basket of goods that they are accustomed to get. Well, let's be careful whether it's a lot more, but basically you can't get away from the fundamental fact that we are all living beyond our environmental needs.

55:34That's why we have environmental crisis, because we don't pay for the pollution we cause. We merrily go on doing it because we'd rather pollute and let the next generation clean up the mess. So you can't have it both ways. If you don't want to pay for the pollution you cause, you want to go on in an unsustainable way. And as I put it in my latest book, the legacy that we leave the next generation is that an unsustainable world will not be sustained. And that's what the two degrees or the three degrees is all about. Now, on the carbon adjustment, the border, I advocated this point with colleagues in 2010, 2011, 2012.

56:13OK, it's a decade later. The EU has imposed a carbon border adjustment. It started. OK, it's the recording year this year. We are now going to do the same. That is a coalition of about 20, 22, 23 percent of the world economy. If the United States were to join, we would get there because everybody else would realize there's a hell of a lot better to pay a carbon tax to their own government than pay it to HM Treasury. Because think of the practicality. The ship turns up in Southampton docks. It's full of steel from China. The customs official goes down to the boat and says to the captain, can I see your payment of the carbon border tax?

56:54They say, can I get out of it? Yes, of course you can. Show us a certificate to show that you paid the carbon tax back in China. And the captain says, she says, you know, okay, I'll go back to China and make sure they levy it. It's a no-brainer. The Chinese in such a world would levy a carbon tax domestically in order to avoid that tax being paid to the British government rather than themselves and everybody else. This is an example of a practical bit of politics, which is working with the grain and saying, let's build a unilateral coalition of the willing and actually do something about climate change.

57:32That's what I want to do. And I think that's doable. And I'm delighted we're finally getting into the nitty gritty of arguing exactly what this carbon border adjustment will be, rather than pretending that we can just ignore imports, close Port Talbot, close Grangemouth, close the fertiliser industry, close the aluminium industry, pretend our emissions have fallen and we're the poster child of the world, as the minister puts it, and just happily let us absorb and benefit from pollution in China and elsewhere and pretend it's not our responsibility. That doesn't work. That's why we haven't achieved very much.

58:07There's quite a few contradictions in there, though, because on the one hand, you're saying we can't do this on our own. But on the other hand, you're saying that countries kind of do have to do this stuff. On the one hand, you're saying that we can't force people to change their lifestyle, change the things that they want from the world. And on the other hand, essentially saying that we should. All that speaks to is just how difficult and fraught this is. But I guess my final question, if I may, and by the way, I'm glad, I think I detected in your earlier answer to Rory that you accept that you were probably wrong in 2012 when you said that windmills in the North Sea would never be economical.

58:45You think that is going to change? That's changing? Well, look, every single prediction that any sensible person makes in this territory is a prediction. and I am almost certainly going to be wrong about almost everything that I project for, but so is everybody else. Okay. And I am utterly delighted that the cost of North Sea Wind came down more than I expected, but it has now just doubled. And so I think people on the other side should also say, I'm sorry I got it wrong. It's actually much more expensive than I thought it was going to be. Okay. So you're trying to push me in a corner, which I don't accept.

59:22Okay. That was a parenthesis. Parenthesis. The question was this. Yes, individuals can't achieve that much on their own, but actually there is a lot that we can. But you've said one thing specifically that you've done. You've stopped flying. I've definitely cut back on flying. I can't pretend I've stopped, but I've substantially cut back. Just give us maybe five things that as individuals we could do that would help cut down on our own personal carbon footprint. So it comes back to have a look at your carbon diary. Find out what you're actually doing and then work out what are the easy things to do which would improve the position because we all individually have a responsibility in this frame too.

1:00:04It's no good telling the world to do something different and then not be prepared to make some steps oneself. Yeah. So that's the first thing. Okay. So in that carbon diary, food is really important. What are you eating? What's the packaging in it? how much of it's coming from depleted rainforests which are no longer sequestrating carbon, etc. Okay? And you'll rapidly discover that you can live a more healthy life and a better life and reduce your carbon footprint. What sort of things would that mean, not eating and beginning to eat, that maybe don't eat now? I don't want to go through a whole nutritional guidance here.

1:00:39No, but it's kind of – give us a bit of detail. So we know that if you, for example, are an intensive meat eater, and you reduce that meat consumption a bit, you will make quite a large difference compared with you reduce other things. If you buy stuff which is ultra-processed, involves products from all over the world, palm oil in particular, you will be having a bigger carbon footprint than otherwise. Next up is what you're wearing. How many times do you do fast fashion? If you look at some of the numbers on fast fashion, it's just truly extraordinary. Then it's about traveling. It's not just about flying okay and I'm not perfect in flying I mean there are occasional very short flights one or two a year that I might take but basically long haul all that stuff's gone this technology that you and I are talking about revolutionized that possibly makes it much cheaper for me to give that up than it would be five ten years ago when I need to fly everywhere but what are you doing daytime travel are you using public transport using private transport Are you walking?

1:01:43Are you cycling? All this stuff, which is good for you and loads of environmentalists, not just activists, you know, spell this out on a daily basis. And what's more, you know, for all the sackcloth and ashes and the costs that people like me as economists exhaust, you know, life will be a lot better for you too, right? You'll be healthier. You will have a more enjoyable life. I'm totally on board with this one, 100%. Just do it, right? But don't think it'll solve climate change. It will make you feel better about it. It will make some very trivial marginal difference. But the big stuff, the big stuff is about thinking about what big contributions we can make to addressing those global problems.

1:02:24Get on with CCS. Get on with R &D. Get on with offshore wind. These things and transfer them to the world and help them take stuff forward rather than spread jam on every single policy and every single lobbyist you can give. and each bit of jam is too thin to make a difference. Dieter, to finish then from my last question, what's your fear about an incoming government? In your nightmares, a British government comes in next election. What should they not be doing? What would be a really rubbish way of spending the next 10 years if your objective is to address a cataclysm of the environment and climate?

1:03:03So in the UK, promising to achieve ludicrous targets in an incredibly short period of time, which cannot be met and would involve really quite large costs to try and rush them through. That would be a mistake. People going around saying they're going to do net zero electricity by 2030. I don't know anybody quite privately who actually thinks that's going to happen. And I can tell you all sorts of reasons why it isn't. But if you put all the feet on the accelerator and you rush it all through quickly, it's going to be very costly. And if you tell people at the same time their bills are going to go down and then they might not, that's a mistake.

1:03:43So let's have a serious building on what is actually a cross-party consensus on what we're doing. That's a great achievement in Britain. We've got rid of the coal industry. That's a great achievement. Let's sit down and work out how to build a grid and a modern electricity system, which is going to carry an enormously larger amount of electricity in it because of all these new demands and do it in a sensible, pragmatic way towards 250. Now, you're the politicians. Getting politicians to depoliticize stuff is very important for the expectations and the costs. I'd love to do it for the health service, for social care, and a number of other things too.

1:04:28But in this territory, let's be grown up, realistic, tell the customers the truth. Do not expect things to be delivered in no time at all. Do it measured. Do it efficiently. Because if there's a limited amount of money to spend, then people need to know that money is best spent to the objectives that we have in mind. For a rebuttal of some of the points in that final answer, I recommend Ed Miliband's recent speech to the Greed Alliance. I think we should probably have Ed on at some point anyway on the podcast. But Dieter, thanks for giving us so much of your time and your thinking. And thanks for your continuing contributions to the most important issue of our time.

1:05:09And Dito, yes, for me, thank you. And I'm not going to go with the meliband rebuttal. I think all my experience working with you, you talk an enormous amount of sense, and I reckon you're almost certainly on the money. You definitely brought an enormous amount of knowledge, wisdom, and experience to this, which is unique. We've done, I think this is probably our fifth climate and environment focused interview, and we're really, really grateful for all that you brought to it. Thank you. Well, thank you very much for having me on. Thank you. All the best. See you soon. Bye-bye. so what was what was your sense uh i do think there's something going on there between this conflict between expert and policymaker because on the one hand there's the parts of that interview where he was almost talking like a politician yeah you know in particular he's talking about you know we need to we need to change how we live you know we need we need to embrace this and then at the same time saying but we can't really do very much yeah no i think he's somebody who's obviously thought about this stuff all his life, has got, I think, quite set views about some of it.

1:06:13I mean, you know, everything I've read and heard from him, the sort of focus on research and development, the belief that sort of the market has a role, plus the subsidies, which I kind of agree with. But I've, you know, I've thoroughly enjoyed it. And I hope he didn't mind me reminding him of some of his past statements that didn't necessarily turn out to be right. I thought he handled that surprisingly well. I mean, it is interesting. I mean, Obviously, there's some psychological syndrome here, but I very, very much remember when I was trying to, particularly in the US, speak out against the Afghan search, how much I met three responses.

1:06:51One of them was, you're too pessimistic, and where's the hope? The second was, you've got a conflict of interest here. You're somehow a shill for the Taliban. The third was, and you've got predictions wrong in the past. You said something else five years ago and why are you getting it wrong? I think that is always the case if you're trying to challenge what is now a multi-trillion dollar initiative by governments and say, you've set off down the wrong path. There will be a lot of very, very smart people going out to take you on. But I thought he was very good. I loved his response on Caroline Lucas.

1:07:28He loses temper. He didn't say it's all bullshit. What he said is she's absolutely right to challenge me and I'm going to be very robust and straightforward, which, to be honest, it reminds me a little bit of the way you deal with it. If people raise the Iraq war and you lying and this sort of thing, you say, yeah, well, it's just not true. So I like him pushing back on that. I mean, and, you know, he's quite spiky in the way he communicates and very, very straightforward. And I always like that. The other thing he doesn't do is he's not remotely close to the sort of the denial stuff, which, you know, I think the problem with this debate is there aren't that many people between what he calls the heavy clappy and the kind of…

1:08:09Denial people. Yeah, yeah. But I do, I actually, I think there is, I think there has emerged something of the breaking of the consensus. I think when you see people like John Gummer, who, you know, been massive in the climate debate for decades, and is now very central to this climate change committee. you know it strikes me that he's quite worried about the direction of travel and inside the conservative party and the conservative government whereas i think labor are in a different position so i'm not sure i quite buy the idea that there's this the same consensus that there was one of the challenges i think again that politically you face if you're dita is that people will worry about your motivations they'll worry that you're trying to push gas or they and they'll also worry that you're giving arguments to the wrong side.

1:08:56So, I mean, it would be like somebody who was a loyal member of the Labour Party saying, I disagree publicly with 20 things in the Labour Manifesto. And you might be like, well, hold a second, you're basically just handing us over to the Tories here, right? So, I think that's a real issue. But I don't think you can get around his fundamental point, which is just so powerful and radical, which is that reducing the amount of carbon we produce in the UK while continuing to just import stuff from China and India. So, actually overall production globally is going up to feed our clothes, our cars, totally daft.

1:09:34I think his second point, which is really radical and difficult, which we didn't get into, but I was talking to National Grid last week. The challenge on sorting out an electric grid and batteries and transmission is kind of beyond imagining. I mean, you would have seen in the newspapers recently that there's something like 300 gigawatts of applications in at the moment on renewables and the stuff can't get through planning because our grid can't deliver it for 10 or 15 years and and i don't think we're really you know it's great to get someone who's making a stare at these things rather than just sort of slip past them interestingly i didn't push back on this but when he said that nobody believes that we can get to net zero for the power sector by 2030 i think the national grid on record is saying that it's very very ambitious but it's doable.

1:10:18And so are Octopus Energy. And there's a couple of the think tanks as well that have said they think it is doable. We didn't really get into, in fact, we didn't get at all into the American response to the Chinese leadership on this, you know, the Inflation Reduction Act, which has been such a big part of that. And Europe has then started to respond. So I think there is something, this report, we should put it in the newsletter, this report from this guy, Kingsmill Bond, which is a great name. My name is Bond, Kingsmill Bond. but he really does sort of set out the graphics on China and its dominance in some of this stuff is just absolutely mind-blowing so what's happened is China has shown this leadership role America has felt the need to respond it's responded Europe has felt the need to respond it's responded and I think it is having that sort of something of a chain of hair I also really liked his idea of the and this is something which I hope a Labour government could if it happens could listen to and pick up this thing about the coalition of the willing I thought was very interesting concept well thank you alice thank you uh it's a small footnote the the head of energy at the world bank for a long time was also was actually called james bond oh yeah um poor guy that's that's not being that's like being called david beckham or yeah it's exactly donald trump well alice thank you for that i thought that was really good to make people think about the toughness of policy and the toughness of choices and i hope we'll get a lot of responses thank you again all the best take care

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