PassW0rd – 8th May 2018

Speaker A: This program is brought to you by Resonance 104.4 FM. If you like what you hear and want to support our work, please make a donation at fundraiser.resonance.fm.

Speaker C: Hello, I’m Peter Warren, and I want you to listen to this. That’s the sound of no birds singing. No bees buzzing, and no northern white rhinoceros thundering across the plains of South Sudan. We don’t need Greta Thunberg, Sir David Attenborough, or Jeremy Corbyn to tell us there’s a climate change emergency. We know that. In fact, I, along with a lot of other people, have been saying it for years. The question is, what can we do about it? Can technology save the planet? In this edition of Password, we aim to find the answers, and some of them will surprise you.

Speaker D: In China, they are taking out the coal-fired boilers in coal-fired power stations and replacing them with small nuclear reactors and reusing the existing cooling water turbine systems and all the existing connections to the grid. Now, this is a sort of a practical and short-term approach which can solve the problem.

Speaker E: Electric cars are a very good alternative, but they are not zero-emission cars. I consider them as an advanced sewer system. They take the emissions from the city centers to somewhere else where the electricity is produced.

Speaker F: So, you know, if somebody wants to go for a 100% reduction in greenhouse emissions within 10 years, well, good luck with that, because no one’s going to follow you. I mean, even some of the climate change people on the streets of London recently, some of their aims for 2030 are just outlandish. It would mean that none of us ever got on a plane again and flew anywhere. It’s just unreasonable. So even if sort of, I understand that morally they believe they’re right, I think politically you have to have more of a sort of compromise centrist view of this. And again, people might shout at the radio now and say centrism is what has brought us to this sorry pass. You might even have a point, but I just look at things in a political way and think, what is achievable?

Speaker C: Dr. Jo House advises the British government on climate change. She’s a reader in environment science at Bristol University, and her latest thinking is that we need to talk about the environment a lot more so we understand why we have to do something.

Speaker G: I can tell you lots of technical individual things we can do, but I think actually one of the most important things that people can do is actually what you and I are doing now and what your listeners are doing, which is becoming informed about it and talking about it. And that’s really the kind of amazing thing that we see with Greta Thunberg. With the children’s climate protests and with Extinction Rebellion is all these voices saying this is important to us will mean that politicians will take it on board seriously. So we had the situation a few months back where there was a discussion on climate change in Parliament and 12 people turned up, and then Greta Thunberg’s coming into Parliament and suddenly everyone’s turning up. And then the debate that was going on about declaring a climate emergency in Parliament. I actually listened back to some of it on, you know, Parliamentary Question Time, and it was just incredible for me as a climate scientist to hear so many politicians falling over themselves in a really quite well-informed way to talk about how serious a problem this is and how we have to do something about it. And that is because enough voices are saying it’s important. So actually, that’s the fundamental first thing people can do that’s most important, is be informed about it and talk to other people about it. Beyond that, there’s various things that people can do within their lifestyles that, for example, not— I’m not telling people they have to give up meat or anything like that, but people could make choices about eating less meat, about driving cars less and using public transport more, about getting green electricity tariffs which are, you know, as cheap or even cheaper sometimes than regular electricity tariffs. You know, not everyone can put solar panels on their roof, but, you know, maybe just being able to switch to a green energy deal actually might be cheaper than the deal people are already on. So there’s individual things you can do, and then there’s things you do by putting pressure, by industry. If industry thinks it’s important to people, then they’ll come on board with it. We’ve seen big shifts in what’s going on with plastic pollution. Because people care about it and they’re vocal about caring about it and they go into pubs and complain about straws or they go into the supermarket and complain about the packaging and then those businesses take that on board and make changes.

Speaker C: Right, so technological changes though, electric cars, we’ve heard a lot about that. Should we all be looking for electric cars? Do we need the electric car infrastructure in place? Even if we do get these electric cars, we’ve got all of these batteries that we’ll have to dispose of, and that’s an issue.

Speaker G: Yeah, that is an issue, and battery recycling and the chemicals in batteries are an issue. Um, the charging points are very difficult, and it’s that kind of chicken and egg thing— which comes first? You know, do you get your electric car and then you won’t be able to charge up, or, you know, the infrastructure will come on board when there are more cars, but you kind of need the infrastructure there in order to make it happen. And so again, these are things where if the public cares and the government sees the public care and that that’s a priority for the public and that they will vote for, for a government that does more green things, then the government will put more of those things in place. So it’s a little bit— sometimes you want government to drive things, but actually governments often also responsive to what people want in the first place.

Speaker C: But so smart cities, a lot of people were saying, hang on, why do I want a smart city? Yeah, nobody’s asked me whether I want a smart city. I’m pretty happy with the stupid one I’ve got. But what you’re saying is that climate change is going to drive the need for things like smart cities because it’s going to make us more efficient.

Speaker G: Yeah, so what people want is the services. So they don’t necessarily maybe think about what I want is a smart city. They might think about what I want is to be able to live somewhere that’s comfortable. I want to be able to afford energy to heat my home, or if it’s going to get hotter, I want to be able to afford to live in a home that’s cool. And so what people want are the conditions where they can go about their daily life. But they can do that in a way that they can be healthy and they can have, they can have affordable energy, uh, without— but that they can also have breathable clean air. And so actually, often it’s about having things in place that enable that to happen, but there are ways that we can do it that are a lot greener. And it’s helping people to make that transition in a way that’s affordable to them, because no one wants to pollute. But actually, people are living tough lives. We’re not— not everyone’s got a lot of spare money to do things. So, you know, not everyone’s going to be able to afford to move to electric car. Not everyone’s going to be able to afford to get rid of their car now. But actually, when it does come time to change their car, can electric cars be as affordable? And if they are, even if they cost a little bit more upfront, can it only be— can it just be enough that they’re still affordable that people can and understand that in the long run it will be cheaper because the electricity will be cheaper than, than petrol and diesel. And so what can be put in place that helps people to be able to get over that hump and invest and then bring the price down, which is what’s happened with renewables. You know, there was a feed-in tariff to encourage take-up of solar, and then the cost of solar’s fallen, and now the feed-in tariff’s been removed, potentially a bit rapidly, and the the feed-in tariffs been taken away, really we could have done with more take-up of solar. But the price has dropped an awful lot.

Speaker C: Not only that, Britain just notched up 1,000 hours of electricity generated without using coal since the start of the year. Mind you, that could be because this April was the hottest since 1949, so of course we weren’t using much power to keep warm. Or even to do the cooking. We were out on a terrace grilling over charcoal. Germany’s coal-fired power stations and all its coal mines will be closed down by 2038. Norway has decided not to drill for oil in its bit of the Arctic. But many politicians are not convinced by the UK government’s recent declaration of a climate change emergency. Graham Stringer’s been an MP for 22 years and is one of only 26 members who actually studied science. He’s a member of the Commons Select Committee on artificial intelligence too. Stringer’s by no means a denier, but he’s skeptical.

Speaker B: If you take the United Kingdom’s position, if you listen to the government, you listen to people who say there’s been a terrific drop in our emissions. Well, yes, there has at one level. There’s two prime causes of that. One is if you start in 1990, then you go straight into the ’92-’93 recession and the closure of the coal mines that happened. So that’s a significant reduction in the amount of carbon dioxide produced in this country. And again, after 2008, recession, you have a drop in economic activity, a drop in industrial production. So a great deal of what has been reduced has been down to the economic cycle. If then you look at what is actually happening, we have exported a great deal of our production to countries where the cost of energy is lower— China, India— and the cost of labor— lower, and we then import what we previously used to manufacture. Often there are more emissions per product produced in China and India, and you have to transfer those products back. So the actual reduction in carbon dioxide over that period is very low, and when you look at the costs, the costs are very high. It’s estimated by Dieter Helm, who wrote the Helm Report for the government recently, that ordinary people and business are paying 20% more on their bills for very little real reduction in carbon dioxide. A figure globally for this country which will reach £100 billion by 2030. So we’ve got very expensive policies that are ineffective and are hitting the poorest harder. So what you’ve got basically is a poverty-inducing policy on energy which is exporting jobs and isn’t doing what people who support it say it is doing. Let’s be clear. You say, or what you appear to be saying is, okay, if climate change is happening, it would appear to be a good idea to do something about it, or to even be cautious about this because in a sense being efficient and helping the environment is a good policy. But what you’re saying is that the policies that are being put in place by governments are not actually solving the issue. What I’m saying is that at the present time I don’t think the evidence actually supports the idea of fairly imminent catastrophe. Some people disagree with that and are pursuing policies to stop what they see as a catastrophe catastrophic change in the atmosphere. If they’re going to do that, then they should do it efficiently and effectively and not at the cost of poor people.

Speaker C: Right, because there seems to be broad agreement that the chief polluters are large corporations and countries.

Speaker B: So if anything can be done, and the sector that is producing most pollution at the moment is the energy sector. China and India are building coal-fired power stations at quite an incredible rate.

Speaker C: And so, and that is therefore the issue.

Speaker B: So if we are to do something, those are the things that need to be addressed. You’re precisely right. This country, even with the small, very small reduction really that we’ve had in carbon dioxide, is more or less irrelevant. China and India are building power— coal-fired power stations at a rate of knots. Until there is an agreement that China and India will reduce the amount of carbon dioxide that they’re producing, then it’s not only that what we’re doing is inefficient, it is irrelevant. Our contribution to carbon dioxide production on a global basis is 1%. So if we produced no carbon dioxide, no increase in carbon dioxide, then it would have only the most marginal impacts. The problem with the Paris Agreement, it is presented as though it is an agreement to reduce carbon dioxide. If people bother to read it, it is not. It is an agreement that is legally binding on all countries to say what they are doing. Nothing more, nothing less.

Speaker C: In Graham Stringer’s Manchester constituency, fuel poverty affects many people on low incomes, and they share his sense of indignation that they should be made to pay more to head off global warming. It’s a response that psychologist Dr Stuart Capstick also encounters in his work on the public understanding of climate change science. He’s a research fellow at Cardiff University weighing up the value of offshoring—that is, getting other countries like China to do our heavy manufacturing—and offsetting. Some commentators believe carbon offsetting is a con. It’s even been compared to the indulgences that priests used to sell, giving people permission to commit sins. —not a get-out-of-hell-free card, but a paid ticket to offset each peccadillo. Stuart Capstick says, in the global economy, we must accept responsibility for our offshore carbon emissions—in China, for example.

Speaker H: The coal that’s burnt, the electricity that’s generated in China, for example, is to produce those very products that we do consume. So we are kind of umbilically linked to these economies, these systems of energy generation. I mean, that’s the point, isn’t it?

Speaker C: A lot of people say, oh, the UK, look at them, they’re wonderful, they’ve been reducing their carbon footprint and they’re not putting as much CO2 into the atmosphere as they used to because they’ve cut down on their industry. Well, no, our industry’s gone to China.

Speaker H: We’ve exported that. My expertise doesn’t lie in the kind of number crunching behind those figures, but clearly when the government and advocates of— now, there’s a whole argument around what should be included when you account for these figures, and so on and so forth. But if our industry has, if the sort of production of these products has gone elsewhere, this kind of offshoring process, then I think we have to recognize that it’s not quite as impressive as that 40% reduction. I think it might be nearer 20% reduction. So, and the UK’s Climate Change Committee does acknowledge that in its report. So it points out that it’s actually very hard to pin down what are the emissions linked to these supply chains, getting stuff from China, which is one of the reasons why accounting tends to be territorial. But yeah, we can’t ignore that.

Speaker C: That’s going to be one of the big issues though, isn’t it? Because they’re going to say these are the weasel words. When people talk about carbon offset, some people say ‘Hey, I’ve gone on a plane, but it’s okay, I’m planting a tree, don’t worry.’ Well, that’s fine, isn’t it? But so long as everybody else on the plane is also planting a tree. This economics of the carbon offset, this economics of, ‘Oh, I’m all right, Jack,’ that is going to have to be very, very closely examined.

Speaker H: I mean, I think if, if you are buying viable, realistic carbon offsets that do something that wouldn’t otherwise happen, plant trees that wouldn’t otherwise be planted, then it’s better than not doing it. There is a kind of— I mean, in psychology, we talk about this idea of moral licensing, which is a sense that, well, I can do this kind of thing, which I know is not ideal, is a bit harmful, like flying, as long as I sort of pay for this indulgent, this offset. The concern I have is that we risk kind of saying, thinking that we can balance out or cancel out the harmful things we do with these sorts of offsets. And it’s not as simple as that, because apart from anything else, carbon emissions that come from our flight go straight into the air straight away, whereas those offsetting schemes are more nebulous.

Speaker C: George Monbiot has likened the system to the word that you tried to dodge there: indulgences. He’s likened it to buying to pay for your soul in the afterlife.

Speaker H: Well, I don’t know about soul in the afterlife, but I wouldn’t, yeah, I wouldn’t dodge the word indulgence. I think that there is a fairly straightforward analogy there. I mean, look, if I think, take for example, someone who has to fly for whatever reason, whether it’s for work or family, et cetera, you don’t have a choice or, you know, you just deserve a holiday you haven’t had on for a couple of years, whatever your circumstances. Now, if you’re going to fly, then it’s probably better to buy a decent offset than not buy one. But as I say, I think the concern is that if offsets are started to be viewed as, oh, well, I can cancel this thing out and I can do what I want to anyway because I’m just canceling it out, buying an indulgent, that’s where it becomes problematic, I think. And also, you know, in terms of the technology, where this sort of carbon dioxide is coming out and being taken back again. We should be— we know from these reports, the IPBES report and various climate change reports, we need to be planting huge numbers of trees anyway to be drawing down carbon dioxide. So to be using the fact that we’ve paid for a couple to offset something we’ve done seems to be a little bit awry when this is something we should be doing anyway.

Speaker C: You’re at this centre in Cardiff with a number of other universities and one of the things that you’re meant to be doing is telling us how we should change. How are you going to do that?

Speaker H: Well, first of all, I would be very careful, and this comes back to your point about the kind of holier-than-thou thing. I think we have to be very careful as researchers taking a position that we are telling people how they should change. I mean, that’s probably the quickest surefire way to get someone to tell you where to shove it, basically. So I— well, yeah, but okay, so, but the point is, I think the first thing that we want to be doing with people is to try to figure out what are the most acceptable, really most realistic, credible ways that we could be living differently. So we’ve talked a lot about flying, for example. Now, let’s say that when we start talking to people as part of our research, this this is a complete red line, people don’t want anything, you know, say for the sake of argument, I’m not sure that will be quite the case, that people don’t want to have anything to do with that. Now, that’s not for us to say, well, you should do, you don’t have a choice in this, you have to cut your flight. Are there other ways that we can, that are maybe more acceptable and feasible to reach these sorts of reductions? Maybe people aren’t willing to cut their flying so much, but they may be willing to change their diet. What are the conditions that need to be in place for dietary change to happen? What are people willing to— what adjustments are people willing to make in the way they travel, for example? So I think these are issues that they can’t be purely technocratic. There is a role for kind of experts saying, well, you know, if you plan a city this sort of way, that can help with active travel, for example. But we have to sort of talk these issues through with people themselves to see what is feasible with them.

Speaker C: As Stuart Capstick says, there’s a wide gap between most people’s recognition that humans are contributing to climate catastrophe and their willingness to actually change their way of life to correct it. We know our cars are pumping out greenhouse gases. We know our rubbish is sitting in landfills generating methane. But do we switch to cycling and recycling? No. We simply can’t be bothered and hope someone else will sort it out. That switch is what Phil Corbell at the Carbon Literacy Trust is trying to achieve. He’s been explaining how they do it to Password reporter Jane Wyatt.

Speaker I: There is such a thing as fact. You know that the scientific process is a contested one where, you know, scientists, researchers score points off one another by tearing down each other’s theories. It’s the whole peer-reviewed process. And there’s been such a massive concentration of scientific effort about nailing down the science of climate change that this the fact of climate change, the very significant role of, of man-made fossil fuels in creating climate change, is as near as you can possibly get uncontested now within the scientific community. Part of this comes down to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC, which is possibly one of the largest scientific endeavors ever, where All the published research on climate change is put through a process, a 5-yearly review process with hundreds of experts involved in the review process. They condense, they summarize all of this published science, and then that’s put through a further filter through governments. This is all knocking off the contested corners, the sharp edges, possibly the more scary stuff is knocked out of this filtering process. And even so, the IPCC report of last October is positively petrifying about the impacts of what’s going on and the pace of change, the scale of change that’s required to head off what is an existential threat. At the foundation of all this, you can argue around the periphery, at the foundation of all this is the fact, capital F, that carbon dioxide is an extraordinarily effective insulating gas within the atmosphere. This is why we talk in terms of parts per million. We’re up to a scary level of 405, 410 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and that, even at that scale, is having this extraordinary impact on our climate. So the science of climate change human civilization’s role in accelerating it to a dangerous level, that is pretty much uncontested within science. What is much more contested is the speed and scale of impact. But then we look to the precautionary principle, that if something is likely and catastrophic, you don’t sit around saying, oh no, I need those odds to go up a bit more. No, I think 70% certainty, that’s not enough. No, we’re not going to mobilize We need 85% certainty before we mobilize to head off civilization-scale calamity. No, the precautionary principle comes into play and you act.

Speaker D: So that’s a very big part of the picture. What could a government do? What could a town hall, what could a mayor do to actually make any difference?

Speaker I: Well, let’s look at What started as potentially a bit of political rhetoric, declaring a climate emergency, I was a bit cynical of that while sympathetic, but actually if you declare an emergency, then that gives you permission to do the extraordinary, to break out of the usual thinking and to mobilize. Climate change affects everyone in every field, and yet we’ve got into this mindset that it’s for the environmentalists, the scientists, and the governments to sort out. Now, if it’s an emergency and the notion of mobilization comes through, then yeah, we’re all in this together, etc. All these things have to come to the fore because without that mass mobilization, at best, radical climate action is something that’s done to people instead of with. This is, again, this is the part of the rationale for carbon literacy, if we understand why it’s so urgent and why it’s a pressing existential threat, then we’re going to be a bit more amenable to some of the radical changes that are needed.

Speaker D: But surely, Phil, surely a government-imposed state of emergency is what Donald Trump did in order to get the wall built to keep the Mexican immigrants out. It’s what President Erdoğan did in Turkey 3 years ago, and it’s still going on. It’s an excuse for repression. Rather than a way of getting people on board to tackle a common problem.

Speaker I: I think that that’s a dangerous parallel to draw. Acting on climate change is unequivocally necessary if we are to head off societal collapse. It has to be depoliticized. It can’t be a creature of left and right. We have to have everyone on board for this. And I think crucially, the acting on climate change has to bring and will bring other fundamental societal benefits, particularly around health and growth. The notion of a Green New Deal is fundamental to solving this. It’s a level of mobilization and centralized investment that can unlock huge economic growth. Even if you think about a housing retrofit, a housing insulation plan at scale, the number of jobs and investment that comes into that is fantastic. And then, of course, warm homes means less sick people. It’s really quite simple. Less fossil fuel-powered vehicles on the road, less air pollution. Less sick people. And of course, the people that suffer in cold, damp homes, the people that suffer most from the appalling air quality in British cities, are those least able to afford solutions.

Speaker C: Smog and particles in the air make it easy to visualise dirty, old heavy industry and heavy traffic’s contribution to global warming. Mining fossil fuels like coal and oil and burning them is the major cause of global CO2 emissions.. And it generates a confusing picture. China, with its vast population of 1.38 billion, produced 9,040 million tons of CO2 in 2015. India, with a similar population, produced 2,066 million tons, while the US, with a population of 372 million, produced 4,997 million tons, and the UK, with its 66 million population, 389 million tons. But if you break that down by the number of people, it changes so that per person, the worst offender is Saudi Arabia at 16.8 tons per person, followed by the world’s industrial heart, China, at 6.59, the US at 5.5, the UK not too far away at 5.9, and India limping along at 1.58. Our problem is that we love energy, and digitalization, the fourth industrial revolution, now also plays a large and increasing role in our demand for electricity. Take data storage. The cloud. Alex Rabbits of the European Data Centres Association tells me that it is unfairly singled out as a major contributor to greenhouse gases.

Speaker D: But blockchain, however, has a growing appetite for power.

Speaker H: There is no question that data centres use huge amounts of power.

Speaker A: I don’t think that can be disputed by anybody.

Speaker H: But the question The question is whether that power is better used in a data center or whether it’s better used elsewhere. So, I mean, by way of example, if you were to go out and buy the latest Lady Gaga CD, someone’s going to have to have gone and extracted minerals from the ground, transported them, made them into plastics, gone and got more minerals to make plastics for packaging, transported the plastics to a factory to go and print a CD using huge amounts of power to print and or indeed manufacture, wrap that up, send it to a distribution center, distribution center sends it to a shop, and then you go and buy it.

Speaker C: Or the alternative is download it from iTunes.

Speaker A: So reality is, you know, that data centers are doing a huge amount of good for the environment, it’s just that they are perceived not to be.

Speaker C: Alex Rabbits. I’m Peter Warren, and this is Password on Resonance FM. After this, you can hear DJ Ritu with A World in London. Billion. And this is a power-hungry world. So electricity generation needs to increase whilst cutting emissions. And we should be able to come up with a solution. One leading expert I talked to, who didn’t want to be named, calculated that we could generate all of the power the world needs if we covered an area of the Earth 335 kilometers by 335 kilometers with solar panels. Even with the moderate efficiencies easily achievable today, it will provide more than 17.4 terawatts power. So that area would account for 43,000 square miles. The Great Sahara Desert in Africa is 3.6 million square miles. And it’s a prime location for solar power—more than 12 hours of sunshine per day. That means that 1.2% of the Sahara Desert would be sufficient to cover all of the energy needs of the world. But that’s not the only answer. Systems engineer David Leal’s company, Caesar Systems, is based in London but operates Europe-wide. He says we’ve known about climate change since the days of the Cold War in the 1950s.

Speaker D: We became worried about the possibility of climate change through the work of Charles Keeling from the Scripps Institute, who had his laboratory on Mauna Loa. The US Department of Defense wanted to know what was the chemical composition of the atmosphere as part of their spying operations on China and the Soviet Union. If they had a baseline chemical composition, then then when they ran spy flights over Russia or China, they could sniff at the atmosphere and perhaps work out what industries were taking place underneath. What Charles Keeling discovered was, first of all, that the Earth breathed in and out and that every summer the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere went down as all the plants grew on the continents of the northern hemisphere.. And every autumn and winter, the level of carbon dioxide went up. The second thing that he discovered was that every year, the peak amount of carbon dioxide went up a bit. And so there is this sort of sawtooth curve of annual increases in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It was immediately clear that this would have an effect ultimately on the temperature of the Earth’s surface because carbon dioxide absorbs infrared radiation and acts as a sort of blanket over the Earth. And in some ways, it’s quite impressive that going from academic observations and indeed military-funded academic observations in the 1950s and ’60s, by the time we got to the ’70s and ’80s, this was a major political issue, but was still a political issue and a theoretical issue. It is the succession of very hot summers in the last decade, which have made the thing a real problem, and that people are taking notice and believing that if these changes to our weather continue, we’re likely to have real problems with world food supplies. I mean, those of us who work in the energy industries have been worrying about the change in chemical composition of our atmosphere for some decades. And Our thought initially was that by the time this was actually noticeable in terms of weather, it would be too late. Things would start to change very rapidly. Fortunately, we’re having— having these succession of very hot summers is a wake-up call that disaster has not happened yet. But already the change in chemical composition of the atmosphere is affecting our weather. Why do you believe nuclear power is a good option in terms of reversing man-made climate change? We are in a crisis situation and we don’t know how long we’ve got, and we certainly don’t have time, or we don’t necessarily have time, to experiment with untried technologies. Now, the— in the very long term, hundreds of years, we have to go to renewable energy. But how long it will take us to develop renewable energy systems which can supply all the energy we need is unknown. To make a small contribution to the energy we need by putting up windmills or wind turbines or solar panels, that’s fine. But because these sources are intermittent, to rely 100% on these sources is not something that we can do with current technologies. Nuclear power, for all its problems, is a technology which exists, that the small nuclear reactors used in submarines and in American aircraft carriers, they’ve been in existence for 50 years or longer, and they work reasonably well. They’re not dreadfully expensive. They could be mass-produced to provide the energy we need. And in China, China, this is the sort of approach that they’re looking at. They are taking out the coal-fired boilers in coal-fired power stations and replacing them with small nuclear reactors and reusing the existing cooling water turbine systems and all the existing connections to the grid. Now, this is a sort of practical and short-term approach which can solve the problem. We don’t have a lot of time, and being a mature technology, we can cost going nuclear, we can plan for it, and we can set up production lines to do so. There are many, many drawbacks, but this is a solution which we have that we know we can implement, and, and we can implement within a known timescale. If in 50 years’ time it turns out that this was entirely unnecessary, well then great. But we don’t want to get ourselves into a position where we have renewable energy systems which have reduced our CO2 emissions, but not nearly by enough, and the crisis is already upon us. Surely you must fear that nuclear power stations could also become weaponized through cyberattacks. Nuclear power stations are potentially dangerous. You can’t deny that they are— contain radioactive materials and are very hot inside. Clearly, they’re dangerous things, but I don’t think they’re especially vulnerable to things such as terrorist attacks or cyberattacks. Our cities are very complex organizations these days, relying on sewage and water and electricity supplies, and are potentially very vulnerable And so the damage that could be done by a cyberattack on the country’s— on a city’s water supply is quite comparable to the damage that could be done with a cyberattack on a nuclear power station. That is a problem. And, you know, this is part of the design of the power station is designed to eliminate this. And power stations are designed to operate very slowly so that changes come slowly so that operators can intervene and to minimize such risks. There’s also the problem of proliferation. It’s part of the reason why I think, why I wish the whole world would abandon nuclear weapons and as many countries as possible support the United Nations Treaty for the Abolition of Nuclear Weapons, which was passed last year.

Speaker C: So is Britain’s nuclear deterrent just a suicide pill? Can we save the world with nuclear power as a clean green energy source? That might raise some eyebrows and even some hackles. How can it be clean when the waste products stay radioactive for over 20 years? Is it really safe given that Windscale, rebranded now as Sellafield, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima power stations have all experienced catastrophic accidents, polluting large regions with fallout for decades. Here’s another shockwave: an expert who believes electric cars are even worse than petrol and diesel engines. An electric car gives off no noxious gases and has no exhaust pipe. Still, the electricity has to come from somewhere, and that somewhere is usually a power station, filling the atmosphere with fumes. The car acts as a sewer system, transferring the carbon dioxide from the city to the countryside. As we’ve heard, India and China are now producing a lot of carbon, and that is coming from coal-fired power stations. The coal-fired power stations that produce the electrical energy. But what if cars could run on fuel that doesn’t give off such harmful vapours when it burns? Dr. Alice Bulcke is the managing director of Global Bioenergies, and his experimental biomass plant has successfully managed to produce renewable fuel for cars from sugar, corn, and even sawdust.

Speaker E: In our process, you start with the sugar. The bacteria produce isobutene, so it’s much more predictable what you get out. And we have done a number of analysis of various fuel mixture, like when we had 20%, 30%, 50% renewable gasoline. And what is interesting, that with increasing components of our renewable gasoline, we would reduce the particle emissions by 50-60%. So basically, you’re burning much cleaner because you have a limited number of components in the fuel, so you can tweak your engine firing angle and all those angles to really completely burn. So you don’t have the char, you don’t have the particle emissions, so you burn much cleaner. And we’re just discovering that our fuels are very top performance, so we’re considering them for race cars that really improve the performance, that you really— it’s like a medicine, exactly. You put this, this, and this to have the optimum performances.

Speaker D: And how much more will it cost?

Speaker E: We As we said, we are just preparing the design of commercial plant in France. Existing tax structure and requirements and penalties that are in use are already making this renewable fuel additive where we can replace up to 20% of today’s gasoline with our renewable ETB, which is a mixture of ethanol and isobutene. It shows that the business case shows that it’s already economical. So if we would have a more, a bit more regulatory favorable situation elsewhere in Europe, we can really do it and move with number of plants and producing the renewable gasoline today.

Speaker D: So would you be paying an extra 10% at the pump, 20% 10%?

Speaker E: What are we thinking of? All the refineries are mixing between 10% and 20% of eTP in today’s gasoline to improve the performance of the gasoline. This so-called fuel additives or octane booster can be made fully renewable. And basically the difference between renewable versus fossil eTP would be 30-40% difference, but because it’s it’s only 20% of the fuel. And because most of the fuel that you’re paying is taxes, it’s really, you’re really talking a few percentage difference that would make that possible and economical all over Europe.

Speaker D: Have you actually experienced driving with this fuel?

Speaker E: Yes, in Montlhéry racecourse south of Paris, because we have a nice joint development project with Audi where we are one of the potential suppliers of so-called e-fuels. So with Audi, we tested this 34% renewable gasoline in the regular Audi car on a racecourse, and my experience at the racecourse was fabulous. But I cannot correctly judge because it was accelerating. But basically the drivers told us that this gasoline performed extremely well. And we have a proof in single-cylinder test benches where we showed that our renewable gasoline is performing as the best available fuels on the market. So how did it feel? Accelerating. It was great, you know, driving at 236 kilometers an hour.

Speaker C: So, so it was quite fun. Driving down emissions is not only a question of moving to renewables but also one of conservation, keeping what we’ve made and using it again. Simon Ellen of the Recycling Association tells me he believes technology will rescue us.

Speaker A: Right at the forefront of this, you know, brackets Brexit, have been the European Union. You know, they’ve recently, the last couple of years, have released their circular economy package and their ambitions for us to move to a more circular economy. And, you know, in that there are hundreds of thousands of jobs jobs being created. There’s millions of pounds of wealth going into the system, a massive CO2 savings. You know, it’s all been scientifically modeled, very, very clever stuff using, you know, all the latest sort of, you know, algorithms and technology out there. And, you know, it’s scientifically proven that if we can get there, then it doesn’t just benefit the environment, it benefits us as individuals because, you know, it does create wealth and it does create jobs Will we need to use the Internet of Things in this new circular economy?

Speaker C: Will we need to put sensors on everything so we know where everything is so we can keep it in this economy?

Speaker A: You know, and again, absolutely this is going to happen. You know, I think it’s going to be, you know, technology-led. And you know, I came across— it’s actually one of my members that developed this the other day— a really, really clever little piece of technology. Technology, and it’s whereby every little product is microchipped. So let’s say, and I’m just using this off the top of my head, let’s say a Head and Shoulders shampoo bottle has a microchip in it. So we use that in the household and then put it in our recycling bin, and it then goes to the recovery facility. You’ve then got a chip reader in that facility,, and therefore you can track right from cradle to grave what happens to that Head Shoulders bottle. And, you know, Head Shoulders can say, well, actually only 60% of our material has been captured for recycling at the moment. Why is that? And put in changes. You know, I think blockchain technology, which, you know, to enable us to sort of just again, just sort of monitor and check everything from cradle to grave, know where it’s produced, where it’s going to, how compliant it is, how it’s recycled. Yeah, I think technology is going to be right at the—

Speaker C: right at the forefront of all of this. This optimism and faith in artificial intelligence is quite touching, but the reality is that whatever we do here in the UK, the planet will continue to overheat as long as India and China China continue to power ahead with their own industrial revolutions. And I shall not be the only cultural commentator to point out the hypocrisy of telling these tiger economies that they must be tamed. Why shouldn’t the Chinese and Indians also enjoy all the trappings of 21st century life? Fast cars, fast food, fast internet connectivity, and so on.. It’s not fair to insist on that. Tim Marshall is the author of Prisoners of Geography, a book of maps that takes a global view of how the lie of the land and the prevailing winds affect political power structures.

Speaker F: He says the Paris Treaty on climate change proves that nation-states can work together on this. There is an example of cross-borders. Nearly everybody signed up to it, and I know you’re going to say the United States didn’t, But the individual states in the United States did sign up to most of the protocols of the Paris Climate Change Agreement. For example, California has signed up to it, and California’s economy would make it something like the fifth biggest economy in the world if it was a nation. So this was an example of the planet coming together. The scientists are another example of the planet coming together. You doing your recycling and me is an example of, you know, every little drop actually does help, even if it’s, you know, 0.1%. I mean, you know, the UK is not one of the world’s biggest emitters of greenhouse gas emissions anymore, and a lot of work has been done to reduce, and it will continue. But while we’re working on this, and while people are right to be saying it could be catastrophic, at the same time, industrialization is going to continue. And To be negative again, I think that the movement of peoples, and part of this is about climate change, for example, the conflict in Sudan, in Darfur, was partially triggered by herders from the north of Sudan whose livestock would roam over large areas. Well, when that became more desert, desertification due to climate change, it’s thought they started to move down into the Fur people’s area Darfur, and that helped trigger, and then that sort of conflict triggers movement of peoples as they flee conflict, which then puts pressures on everywhere where they’re going, and then by the time you rock up to southern Europe, people start building huge great fences, or in the American example, walls. And they’re not the only one, the Bangladeshis have fenced off Myanmar. India has fenced off Bangladesh, all 2,500 miles of it.

Speaker C: You know, it’s a global issue. That’s going to be the issue, isn’t it? Because I think, well, some 90% of people live on the coastal margins. And with climate change, with global warming, with sea temperatures rising, those people will be forced to move. And they will be forced to move inland to areas that they haven’t fertilized. So they’ll be forced to move. And then that migration will continued.

Speaker F: In fact, it was something that David Cameron’s defense plan warned about years ago. Well, yeah, and the DOD, the Department of Defense in the United States, and in fact the national security advisors of previous administrations have actually called climate change a strategic threat to the United States of America. And yes, it’s a strategic threat to everybody. Bangladesh is a good example of what you just said. The bottom third is at threat over the next few decades. And what is it, about 180 million people live in Bangladesh. The reason that the Indians have fenced off the entirety of Bangladesh is because about 15 million Bangladeshis have moved across into the border states, places like Assam, and that has triggered some ethnic unrest there. So they built this massive fence It’s election year there. It’s simply not an issue. They’re fine with their fence. If the modeling is right and more of the bottom third of Bangladesh is increasingly flooded each year, then you can’t live there because even when the floods recede, the land is salinated and you can’t grow any crops. So of course you move. So yes, I believe with some confidence that the movement of peoples has not yet peaked. And this is part of why people are moving, and that is going to put pressure on. And I’m afraid that the walls and our divisions between us are going to continue to grow until we work out how to sort it. There are examples, as I said, India and Pakistan have never fought over water because of the Indus Treaty. Singapore has come to a very equitable agreement with Malaysia to share the water. I think they actually buy it from them. Senegal has some very good treaties with its neighbors about how to share water. This is doable at the same time as we all work on the lowering the emissions.

Speaker C: So more populist anti-immigration MPs, sorry, political representatives are going to come, more Trumps, more Farages.

Speaker F: And yes, yeah. And you, you, I mean, you obviously, because we are Western here, we tend to concentrate on Western examples. It’s quite normal. But this populism is global. You’ve got Duterte in the Philippines, also known as Duterte Harry. You’ve got Modi in India. I’m just looking around the map I have on my desk here, and there are many other examples. This is the era of the strongman. It’s the era of populism, and it is partially driven by population movement, which in itself is partially driven by climate change and the potential for water conflict. You know, I mean, I started out by saying I don’t think geography is the determining factor. It is a determining factor in what happens, but it’s the one for me that’s overlooked. And I’m not saying that climate change is the reason why you have President Trump, but within climate change, there are elements of what happens because of it that actually does feed into electing the populists who say, I feel your pain, I’m going to do something about it.

Speaker C: So the only solution to all of this is we have to get much more environmentally conscious. We’ve got to be much, much better. We’ve got to be nicer people. That puts pressure on the politicians, and that tells people like Prince Charles not to live in a big house and have a big car.

Speaker F: Well, Prince Charles, of course, has done an awful lot for the ecology, apparently.

Speaker C: Talks to plants and all sorts. That’s the solution.

Speaker F: Hair shirts and lots and lots of preaching. No, because hair shirts and preaching doesn’t really work. But what I think you need is the sort of reasonable, rational, and I’m afraid compromise arguments. Because if you do just go around flagellating and wearing hair shirts and saying, you must do this, you’ve got to understand that most people won’t do it. So what’s the point? I think you’ve got to come out with, look, we need an economic industrial policy that takes into account this, this, and this. And the thises are not just, oh, that we’re all going to end up in a, you know, consumed in a massive fireball, which we probably are not. It is also that we have to have economic growth to keep people’s livelihoods at a certain level, because for all the issues, people will not accept a serious reduction in their living standards. They just won’t accept it. And so if you take that as a given, and I do, then formulate your policies within that. So, you know, if somebody wants to go for a 100% reduction, in greenhouse emissions within 10 years. Well, good luck with that because no one’s going to follow you because of what it means. I mean, even some of the climate change people on the streets of London recently, some of their aims for 2030 are just outlandish. It would mean that none of us ever got on a plane again and flew anywhere. It’s just unreasonable. So even if sort of I understand that morally they believe they’re right. I think politically you have to have more of a sort of compromise centrist view of this. And again, people might shout at the radio now and say centrism is what has brought us to this sorry pass. You might even have a point, but I just look at things in a political way and think, what is achievable?

Speaker C: That’s all from this edition of Password. It was produced by Blue Buffery with that’s reporter Jane Wyatt, and I’m Peter Warren. We’ll be back next month with more news, good and bad, about the ramifications of technology in society. If you want to find out more, go to our website, www.futureintelligence.co.uk. Thanks for listening, and to play us out, here are the bell ringers of St. Lawrence’s, Catford, chiming in with churches across England to sound the alarm on climate change.

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