John Halstead of Founders Pledge Interview

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Every day you and I get bombarded with negative news. Just like the body becomes what we eat, the mind becomes what we’re putting in. It is important to listen to stories that not only give you hope, but also inspire you and uplift you.

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In this podcast, we’re interviewing experts who will break down the solutions to the world’s most pressing problems. And I promise you, if you listen to this podcast, you’ll not only stay informed but you will also feel more energy in your life. Welcome to Great.com Talks With.

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Today, greater calm talks with Founders’ pledge again. This is going.

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This is the second interview we do with an honors pledge and there’s a good reason why we want to do a second follow up. And I’m going to tell you why that is soon. But first, I want to ask you a rhetorical question. So do you who are listening right now.

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If you would have more money than you could spend, what would you do with that money? Maybe you would donate parts of that to charity. That is what the members of Congress pledge is doing. They have agreed to sign a legal contract to pledge to waive part of their money. And so far, they have gathered more than a thousand members who in total have promised to donate over two billion dollars and to really feel and understand how much two billion dollars is. Imagine if you would get a hundred thousand dollars every day to spend for the next twenty five years.

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That is how insanely much two billion dollars is now, and also imagine if the world could use that money to solve the most pressing problems like poverty or climate change. Imagine if we could donate one hundred thousand dollars every day for twenty five years to solve poverty.

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That is what Fonda’s plan is all about.

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And if you want to understand the backstory of this pledge, I recommend you to listen to the previous episode where the founder, David Goldberg, talks about the mindset of effective donations. And in that interview, David said something interesting that we want to follow up on today. David, set up covid-19 is like a wave or a big wave like in Hawaii. But in comparison to climate change, covid-19 is a small way because climate change is like a tsunami. And today, we want to talk about the topic of climate change, and to do that, we invited John Holstead and I could think of no better person to talk about climate change than with John, because John is the head of research for Founders’ Pledge. And so I want to say, John, warm, welcome to today’s conversation and to listen to.

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Thanks for having me.

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You are at the moment in Oxford.

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Yeah, I’m in Oxford, so, yeah, I’ve been locked down for about four months now, which, you know, has its ups and downs. But yeah, it’s a nice place to be locked down.

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It is. Right. And that is the same location as Thomas is also based, studied now we’re based in London, so I usually have to commute in.

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So that’s been one perk of the lockdown is that I don’t have to spend three hours getting into London.

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But, um, yeah, I just live in Oxford because my girlfriend said.

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And if I jumped directly into my first question here, how do you kind of agree with the metaphor that they would use to compare covid-19 and climate change to big waves versus a tsunami?

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Mm hmm.

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Um, yeah, I think that seems pretty plausible to me. I think covid reveals lots of interesting things about climate change. So the first thing is the covid is was really not really like a black swan. It wasn’t this huge, unexpected event. It was more like a grey rhino that people had talked about for. Many years and then rather predictably, happened, so in my last job, I remember reading in the U.K. National Risk Register and it said there’s this one in two between one and two and one in 20 chance of a pandemic, killing hundreds of thousands of people. And I was like, that’s my boss at the time. I said, wow, that’s really high. And he was like, yeah, I know it’s a big deal. And that was in twenty fifteen. So I feel like a SARS like pandemic that we’re seeing at the moment is, was, is kind of predictable and we kind of. We can kind of.

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We should have been better prepared for it, given that I think climate change is this. Much bigger things where there’s like.

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Similarly, people are saying this could do a lot of damage and there’s lots of extreme downside that scientists are telling us about. But the world isn’t really changing course at the moment.

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And I think what covid has shown is that. There are these infrequent events that it’s easy to ignore, like the last time anyone would have experienced the pandemic of this magnitude was in 1918. So almost everyone this is that he would have he would have experienced that. So it’s easy to ignore and it’s easy to focus on other problems that are in the news or that happens to be saving people or things like pandemics and things like climate change, a kind of. They are related to problems that are going to be realized in decades, hundreds of years, which shows that we need to kind of be proactive to to deal with these things.

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So you’re basically saying that there was a 50 50 percent chance that something like this would happen like covid-19?

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Yeah, in the next, like. If you if you look at. If you look at projections that were made a few years ago, like people were saying, that this is a pandemic, like this seemed quite likely, like Bill Gates was sounding the alarm and saying a sort of influenza type or coronavirus pandemic is a very predictable thing, given how we interact with animals and given how wet markets are in China. And we’re not very well prepared for that. And even rich countries, as we’re seeing now, are very professional. I mean, I wrote a report about global catastrophic risks last year, and I said even rich countries aren’t going to be prepared for this and there’s not enough ventilators and we don’t have enough search capacity. And yes, I feel it. I feel it was relatively. Predictable thing that we should have been, we should have been ready for the same goes for climate change. The problem is that, like, you know, if you’re a politician. The beneficiaries of any action you take well into the future, so you don’t get you don’t sort of enjoy the political gains you would get from something that provides more immediate benefits. So that’s something we need to overcome as a species, really is like how do we deal with these problems that maybe benefit future generations?

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So if we then talk about climate change and compared to covid-19, did you feel, is there a difference, did you feel less worried or more worried about climate change after covid-19 happened? Is there a difference for you less?

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Well, one thing people point to is that emissions have fallen like that’s a very sort of mundane way in which we might be less worried about climate change. But then if you look emissions and really fall in that much, they fall

into about 2011 levels. And this is in spite of the fact that we’re in this really historic recession. People aren’t allowed to travel like this very limited travel and certainly there’s very limited international travel. In spite of that, we’re still putting more than 30 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere. So I think.

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If you think about the nature of the climate change problem, that the real problem with CO2 is that it stays in the atmosphere for a long time, a concern of CO2 you emit now is in the atmosphere for a thousand years. So it’s this kind of cumulative problem. If you think about what we’re doing with the environment, it’s kind of like if you imagine each billion ton we put into the atmosphere is like a brick and then it’s just you just build this big tower of bricks and then you stop doing it for one year, which is what we’re doing. You still got this big tower of bricks and you need to figure out how to like and stop adding to that forever. That’s the problem we face is not to like having reductions in CO2. So I’m not that optimistic about it from that end. I think what it might do is drive people to realize that there are these. These we need to pay attention to global catastrophic risks that aren’t salient, but the like can occur if we pay attention to the science. I mean, it’s just kind of perfectly analogous, really, to the pandemic that we’re experiencing at the moment is like scientists were saying, we need to prepare for this. And this seems to be coming. And there’s things we could do to impose a lot of costs and investments we would kind of easily pay back by avoiding the costs that are missing at the moment with trillions of dollars of economic costs, which we could have probably avoided if we’d be more proactive. So I think it might change the mindset of how people think about climate change. And since the. This is kind of kind of the same. Most of the costs are going to be felt in the future, but we kind of have a responsibility to not ruin the environment for future generations.

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And just to clarify what you said there, too, are you saying that despite covid and all the changes that have been done in traveling, we are still admitting three billion gigaton a started 30 billion, 30 billion tons?

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So, yes, 30 gigatons and before time, before covid.

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Do you know the number?

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We are about thirty six. So it’s the biggest like in the previous year. It’s the biggest fall in emissions we’ve ever had, but it’s still very mindful. So even though there’s been this huge behavior change and even though people aren’t flying, people are really driving as much. People aren’t like eating out. And also seeing the effects has been quite modest. And we’re just back to 2011 levels and we knew it in 2011 that emissions were unsustainable. So. I think it does illustrate an important truth about climate change, which is that even really demanding lifestyle change isn’t going to get us all of the way, that what we really need to do is have this big energy system change and figure out ways to produce low carbon energy. It is, yeah, this is quite a drastic change, if not quite. That’s quite a modest effect.

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So we could also see this as a test or experiment where the whole world has changed her behavior towards traveling, which has had a significant, a significant but still very low affect in the total.

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So what else then?

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What if changing behavior for the individuals is not going to cut it, then what do you see as solutions or ways to go from here?

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Yeah. Well, there are historical examples of countries that have. Decarbonised electricity systems, even while they’ve enjoyed greater energy consumption and greater economic growth, so in the 1970s, Sweden and France. And shifted their electricity supply to nuclear and renewables. Like nuclear and either nuclear or nuclear and hydro, and then even though the incomes in these countries have increased a lot, living standards have increased, energy demands increased, their emissions have declined substantially. So I think that is the way to tackle the crisis. It’s not to focus on reducing energy consumption or on reducing economic growth. I think what we need to do is figure out a way to have prosperous societies that use clean energy. And that’s especially true when you consider that most energy demand in the future is going to come outside the West. It’s going to come from poorer countries who are trying to economically develop and trying to reduce poverty. And that is this very tight correlation between energy demand and human development. So if insofar as they want to sort of improve the human development in those countries, they’re going to increase energy demand. So what we need to do is figure out a way to avoid them relying on having to rely on fossil fuels to do that. So we need to rely on the low carbon technologies that we have.

So we need to increase solar and wind. We need to increase nuclear carbon capture and storage and use all of the tools at our disposal. I think the focus what covid is illustrated is that focusing on reducing growth is just not that promising.

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Even really big recessions don’t really do the job. And people don’t like recessions. So, yeah.

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It seems like the only logical way, right, to to change the system that is admitting, not the. The demand for energy and now if we don’t put that into a relationship with the time frame that we have, so people talk about a carbon pocket, that we have a bucket which is filling up, and we said we’re not going to go beyond one point five degrees in the Paris agreement. So how close are we to that bucket being full with one point five?

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Yeah, so I mean, we’re already past one degree. I think it has to be very, very optimistic to think that that will avoid one point five degrees. The IPCC published a report recently on what would be required and it is like a very, very drastic reduction in emissions. So if you think about our emissions kind of on a graph, they’ve just been steadily trending upwards since the eighteen hundreds, then just got to reduce that to zero within 10 years and then have and then start sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere. So it’s a very big ask, especially given that there’s all this already built fossil fuel infrastructure that we need to think about how to decommission and then transition to a clean, clean energy source. And so, like, would be very, very surprised if we kept warming to below one point five degrees. I’d also be surprised if we kept warming to below two degrees.

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I think.

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Yeah, I’m not completely sure when we do use a positive outlook about the carbon, the carbon budget, but if you look at the two degree scenarios that are very, very drastic decarbonisation and then getting to negative emissions in the next 30 years. And we have to do this in the context in which, you know, nearly a billion people don’t have access to electricity and. By the end of the century, the world economy could be like five to 10 times larger and then there’d be four billion more people.

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So there’s all these factors that are pushing for more energy demand. And that’s traditionally been that by using fossil fuels in the first instance, consistency’s coal, and then they transition to cleaner fossil fuels like gas and oil. But we need to avoid the first step to avoid them getting into fossil fuels in the first place. And it is really big.

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Challenge.

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And I think if it’s sort of smart and strategic about how we do it is feasible, but I’d still be surprised if we kept warming to below two degrees. And then if you look at the pledges and promises that countries have made.

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With the Paris agreement, they imply warming of more than three degrees, so I think even pledges that countries have made are kind of going to do the job. And. Yeah, there’s reason to think that the countries won’t keep their pledges, so. I think climate policy is kind of not going very well at the moment, so we need to think about ways to make it more effective.

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Then let’s talk about some of the effects that we’re probably going to see, that we’re already seeing, that we’re going to see, we reach those targets that we said we’re not going to reach, for example, if we reach one point five and two degrees. Can you say something about what is going to actually happen at those points?

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Yeah, sure, so I think I mean, I suppose I’m most worried about the more extreme levels of warming if like more than four degrees. Yeah, two degrees. Most models suggest that, um. The yields of major food crops are going to decline relative to where they would have been otherwise, like yields will probably still increase U.S. productivity, but then they’ll take this hit from this hit from climate change, which is. Not good, given that you have, like increasing demand for food and.

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And yes, there’s there, there’s that there’s that risk factor.

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There’s definitely concerns once we get to once we get to two degrees of like rising sea levels and then kind of inundation of coastal areas, and then if you mean, especially if you look at the very long term, um. It really is

like huge changes to the earth’s surface if we go past two degrees, unless we start doing geoengineering, this like really multimeter sea level rises over the course of millennia.

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I think this. Fact isn’t really considered that much, um, and then you have to consider. Droughts and things like that are especially going to hit areas, areas in sub-Saharan Africa particularly hard. I think the main worry of that level of warming is basically drying out dry areas and wetter areas getting wetter and the sort of human costs that have.

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I heard Crystal Tumba say that the United Nations are looking at a million refugees who are going to seek shelter and basic needs in other countries by 2050. So would that be you’re saying that if the crops fail, we don’t have food? If we get droughts, we don’t have water? And what effects are not going to cause for the political structure of people needing to seek refuge in another country? Some, yeah.

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Yeah. Would that be already an effect at two degrees.

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Um, it’s very hard to predict. I mean, definitely one of the main things I’m worried about, um, with respect to climate change is, is climate refugees and mass migration. I think. Like there is literature sort of suggesting that even recent climate change has driven certain migration flows like people say that it contributed to. Problems of drought in Syria, then you really only ever going to get probabilistic attribution there, so you might be able to say climate change, increase the probability of this drought happening by this percent. So I’m cautious about saying that with this many climate refugees, it’s very hard to judge.

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I think at higher levels of warming you are kind of looking at.

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It is called into question the habitability of quite large areas of the planet, like if we get to six degrees, which, you know, on some models is not that unlikely.

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Vast areas of the tropics would be much less habitable than at present. And then you’re thinking, well, there’s going to be potentially millions of millions of people and on the move and then there would be huge political problems. It’s very hard to say how that would wash out because it’s never happened before.

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But.

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The sign seems strongly negative. So, yeah, I would say high levels of warming, like past four degrees, past six degrees, there’s definitely you definitely looking at lots of climate refugees at two degrees. It’s kind of.

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It’s. Much like a photoresistor million millions and millions of people at two degrees, I think. It’s less clear, but definitely I think that could be a substantial number of climate refugees in sub-Saharan Africa and maybe in the low lying areas like Bangladesh and coastal cities.

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So by four to six degrees, it would be more certain that we probably are going to see those mass refugee kind of flood, so people need to change, but at two degrees, it’s kind of we need to be careful to protect them because we’ve never seen this kind of scenario in the world before.

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Yeah, I mean, it’s. Yeah, it’s just much more clear. Four degrees, I think that I think that’s fair at four degrees or six degrees, you’re looking at like lots of countries becoming a bit more like Dubai and that you kind of need air conditioning to be able to sort of live normally.

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So in lots of countries you like. Pakistan and India, it would be hard to go outside if warming were that high, and then that would probably mean that lots of people would kind of be on the move and then the international tension from that. So I think that is like my main worry about climate change is that this heat stress just causes. Like political turmoil, and we don’t really have the international institutions to deal with at the moment.

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Clarify, what would that look like to have those international institutions?

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Well, you saw it with the refugee crisis in the European Union. Like the European Union is supposed to be something that kind of manages the international crises like this, but. There was no sharing of the burden of refugees across countries, so certain countries and received a lot of refugees like Italy and Hungary. And then this goes like lots of anti refugee sentiment in these countries and created political tensions between the recipient countries and other countries that had less of a burden.

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And then.

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Yeah, like that just seems to be this dynamic of voters, not like not liking accepting a lot of refugees, that’s happened in Germany to some extent, the far right rising as a result of that. Um, but it would be that on a much bigger scale, because there’d be potentially millions and millions of people on the move. And then it’s kind of that the UN doesn’t have any systems in place to be able to be able to deal with that. At present, we basically pay countries in low and middle income countries to take refugees like European countries and others like Turkey to to take refugees from Syria. And I think similar things happen in Africa. It’s just whether that would be sustainable when the number of people is like an order of magnitude higher, it seems like. And how to know how we would actually deal with that.

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So the tension will be, one, the tension building up for every degree ever increasing. That is one of the main concerns is are you saying that it’s really something that we should be taking seriously in this?

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Yeah, I mean, that’s that would be that’s my main concern. There’s a good book recently published called Six Degrees by Mark Lynas, where he goes into the impacts of different levels of warming, each degree of warming, what happens at each degree. And, yeah, like this, this heat stress factor does seem to be a really important and really important thing that we’re, like, not set up to deal with at all at the moment.

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Can you recite part of that, like what happened at three, three degrees, four, five, six? And is that even a point to talk about? Higher than six?

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Yeah, well, so I suppose I’ve looked most of what he says about like beyond four. Yeah. It’s kind of, I suppose, similar to where we are now with more with more droughts and more deadly heat waves.

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Um.

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You know, and then when you get into when you’re getting to four degrees, there is this heat stress thing that starts to be a concern and that would be like. That would start to be habitability questions and some of the tropical countries.

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So that’s what that’s the point at which you’re starting to worry about mass migration from drought and from heat stress and then six degrees.

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Like he discusses in some depth whether that could make us extinct. And this is this debate in the scientific literature about whether. That could be like a runaway greenhouse effect, like they have on Venus and all the oceans boil off, or does this more moderate thing called moist greenhouse where the. The surface of the earth would basically be sanitized. We would go extinct there and the water would be stripped off from the earth. And he said he thinks like he argues that it’s kind of like. Possible, but probably pretty unlikely that that could happen, but it’s not a risk that we’d want to impose on ourselves. I mean, we’re emitting like the rate of emissions now is much faster than it has been at any point in history, really. So this is a bit of a bit of an experiment we’re doing and. That is that it brings risks of its own and then like if we really go to higher ends of the missions, like going past six degrees. He thinks there is this small risk of like. Others are becoming extinct. I don’t know, maybe I’m, like, more optimistic than him about that. Um, but. Definitely want to avoid secrets just for all the political reasons that we’ve discussed.

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So, yeah, I’m not sure whether I completely buy into the idea that we’re going to go extinct this century or something like that, like six degrees will probably happen. Next century, just give us more time to adapt, but it’ll be extremely bad. Yeah.

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If I change direction a little better, I.

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And listen also to another thing that gratitude versus and I refer to her because I assume that she has a lot of evidence based like people who are really smart to help her when she’s talking. And she said that the political system, we’re not going to solve climate change in the political system because all the agreements that already have been made of the future emissions that are about to come in the next five, 10 years are so locked in because it’s a low agreement. And unless we are managed, unless we find a way to just rip those apart, it’s just going to continue.

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The production in the same system is just continuing the emissions. So.

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It’s not your world to us, well, that we’re kind of stuck in a situation where our current political system is blocking us from solving it, but we’re trusting the current political system tools to solve it, which is impossible.

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Mm hmm. And I may be a bit more optimistic than that, but not that I’m not particularly optimistic, I suppose. Yeah, I think. I suppose the only way you could change the political system to make it more proactive on climate change would be to have some mechanism to incorporate the interests of future generations. And that’s. Quite. Difficult to do and execute. Some countries have tried, they’ve had like I think essentially Sweden had a minister for future generations, but it’s hard for them to have a lot of influence and.

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So.

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Yeah, and there’s that side of things that maybe, like some people say, we need to change the economic system and have maybe we need to get rid of capitalism or something like that, which seems sort of a difficult and sort of, I suppose, be undesirable insofar as you think like capitalism, just to put food on the table for lots of lots of people that has excesses. In the case of climate change, we need to figure out how to deal with those issues. And then I suppose.

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I think this to Broadways, you might think about solving climate change within those constraints, so I think the first one is. If rich countries kind of get their act together, if Biden wins and imposes some serious climate policy in the US and the EU starts to have more serious climate policy. Maybe then you can have what economists call a climate club, so you have basically tariffs on carbon intensive inputs. So if there’s a factory in China that produces lots of CO2 to produce steel. Then there’s like a tax on that which incentivizes China to reduce their own CO2 emissions, and that could be a way to solve this big global collective action problem, which has stopped serious action on climate change. If you have enough, if the major powers are serious enough to. To do something like that, I think that could cause a major shift in the trajectory that we’re on the other way, that could affect emissions in developing countries, which are going to be most emissions in the future. And our most emissions now are through making clean technology cheap. So this is sort of, I suppose, the technological approach to solving climate change. And this is an example of the fact that Germany and China have subsidized solar panels a lot, and that’s driven down the cost of solar panels over the last few decades.

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So as a result of that, this technology, it’s not just it’s not just emissions reductions in Germany and China, what that’s driven is emissions. It gives the whole world low carbon technology that they can, um, they can then use. And you can see a similar thing with electric cars. So California and Norway have various ways of incentivizing electric cars. So they like mandates that producers have to sell a certain number of electric cars all day.

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Yeah, you got kind of credits for selling electric cars if you’re a producer. Um. And then, like Elon Musk has exploited that and kind of set up Tesla and that has this, that’s helped to drive down the cost of electric Cosla. And what that does is gives this low carbon technology and makes this low carbon technology available for poor countries. So you can see like India is mandating that car sales, I think, in 2050 have to be or have to be electric cars. So that’s and that’s like 10 percent of emissions is like duty transport something on the order.

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So that.

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That’s another way of doing it. So you’ve got the kind of political trade based solution and then you’ve got the technological solution. And yeah, I’m kind of optimistic about both, um, and I think that as long as, like, the environmental activists and philanthropists think strategically and carefully about what has actually worked and what’s going to succeed in the future, I think this could potentially be good ways forward.

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And we’ve found this place. We’ve looked at charities that are advocating for this like carbon tariff approach, which I think could be game changing. But it’s maybe a bit too early in the US were like a lot of the Republicans are climate skeptics. So, um. So, yeah.

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Let’s see if I can summarize what you just said there, so to take away capitalism would probably lead to people not having food on their tables and that’s going to increase other kinds of problems. So instead, how can we within the current system either add some kind of tariff when we’re emitting carbon dioxide or can we create the technology that other countries can replicate so that we have a.

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In. We kind of.

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I don’t find the word I’m looking for, but we have clean energy, and I guess that’s what you’re saying, to replicate in a big enough scale so that we make it in time until we reach that point.

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Yeah, that’s right.

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Yeah, and it’s kind of like making clean energy cheap enough and good enough so that people in developing countries want to use it anyway, and it’s making it competitive with the current kind of polluting alternatives, which is like, yeah, electric cars and solar power. Big success stories on that front. And we need to do that for all the other technologies that we need as well and to find ways to make cheap hydrogen. Make carbon capture and storage cheap, make negative emissions cheap, wind power cheap, and potentially make nuclear power cheap.

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That that’s like.

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That’s that’s one lever we can pull, the other one is, is this trade based thing, I suppose one other option would be. Like policy leadership, so demonstrating certain that certain policies are effective. I think the dynamic that’s been seen over the last 30 years is that economists say a carbon tax is the best way to deal with this. It’s the most efficient way to deal with it. And that’s what we should do. And then the sort of that’s kind of pumped into the political realities and. Carbon taxes either have to be imposed, as we’ve seen in the US, like on the federal level, or they have been really low, like the global average carbon price is like less than ten dollars per tonne, which is really low. But some countries have crafted a more pragmatic approach and they’ve combined smarter regulations, more efficient regulations with carbon pricing, and they’ve like that’s allowed them to decarbonise, that’s kind of what’s happening in the U.K. Like emissions have fallen a lot in the UK recently as a result of carbon pricing, a modest carbon pricing and also regulations like flexible regulations. And the thought is maybe that kind of policy policy leadership could be applied in developing countries. And they say this is like a politically feasible way of decarbonising the economy. So that would be another there’ll be another route where you could actually decarbonise emerging economies.

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Could you clarify what you said about the U.K. economy being able to reduce emissions? How has that been possible and how much are we talking about?

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Yeah, well, they’re now very low, I think that sort of.

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Lower and lower than they have been since the 19th century. They recently passed that threshold and that’s basically as a result of. Um. Like aggressively trying to retire the coal fleet, and you can do that with a carbon price floor, which is sort of making producing coal really expensive. And they’ve also kind of done various regulations, imposed various regulations which have made running cold, just not profitable. So they’ve sent a clear signal to the market that we’re getting coal off the grid and retiring coal. And then that’s been replaced by gas, which is less polluting and also by biomass and by renewables. And we’re also building more nuclear power plants. So I think it’s kind of an example of climate success, I suppose we’ve really reduced emissions quite a lot like emissions per head in the U.K., I think are on the order of like six tonnes per person or something like that, which is which is quite low in the context of high income countries. And it’s lower than some middle income countries, like maybe lower than China. I’d have to check that. Like this is in South Africa, countries like that are much poorer, but, um, have higher emissions but have quite high emissions per head.

[00:40:28]

Ok, thanks for the clarification, can I ask you then, Mr. Attorney, terminology or aspects of climate change that you

would like for more people to understand, is there anything that you think would be necessary for us as a population to understand about this phenomenon?

[00:40:46]

Yeah, I suppose the main thing would be that. The atmosphere is a bit like a bathtub like that, that would be my number one thing for people to understand and I think even kind of.

[00:40:59]

Undergraduates are studying, I don’t necessarily understand that that’s how it is.

[00:41:03]

What I mean by that is that unlike in normal times, the removal of CO2 and additions from CO2 imbalance, so the trees grow and they sequester CO2 and then they die and then they release CO2 and then they grow again. And there’s this kind of pattern that you see in atmospheric CO2 concentrations. And then that balance is kind of upset by anthropogenic emissions. So once you start burning fossil fuels, then this kind of imbalance in the system and. The CO2 that leaves your car exhaust goes into the atmosphere and stays there for more than a thousand years, like about 40 percent stays there for more than a thousand years, and that CO2 is not not not removed from the system over a very long time period. So what that means is that as long as the type of emissions on the bathtub continues to fill up, CO2 concentrations continue to rise and the challenge we face is not likely to turn down. It’s not to reduce emissions from where they were last year. It’s to sort of turn that off. So that’s like no emissions from planes, trains, ships, cars have so much industry. So I think that gives an idea of the scale of what we’ve got to do. Is this just a huge technological political challenge? Um, so, yeah, that would be the main thing. I’d kind of want people to understand that the atmosphere is like a bathtub and they have to sit on top of.

[00:42:36]

So it’s more important to turn the top off than to take a bucket and try to get, uh, well, there is that as well.

[00:42:46]

I mean, if so, if we start removing CO2 in the atmosphere, which we could do with negative emissions technology, then we wouldn’t necessarily have to get to zero emissions.

[00:42:57]

But the problem with that is that it seems expensive at the moment. So if you look at most scenarios, we’re looking at kind of decarbonising electricity decarbonizing and then electrifying lots of the economy, so. You know, that’s more than half of emissions, and then we have to think about how we decarbonise cement, steel and chemicals, and that’s like a big fraction of emissions. It’s really hard to decarbonise, which is about 20 percent. And then we have to start doing negative emissions if you want to avoid going past two degrees. But yeah, I like looking to the future we really need. We need zero emissions electricity. Zero emissions transport. It’s a really big challenge, like if we built one of the largest nuclear plants ever every week for the next 20 years, it would still take 20 years to replace the current stock of coal fired power stations. So that’s like that gives an idea of the magnitude of the challenge that we have.

[00:44:06]

Just to clarify again, are you saying that it’s more probable at this stage time, is it more effective to try to turn off the top?

[00:44:14]

That’s a smaller challenge than to try to get the polluted air or the polluted CO2 away from the bathtub. Yeah, that’s right. OK. Now, I’m thinking for us to start and listen to you today, and I would like to do that by doing a scenario kind of game where if you imagine yourself in five different scenarios, how would you have dealt with that scenario? Are you able to play that small game? Yeah, so.

[00:44:56]

I’m going to give you the first scenario here is if you were an individual who didn’t have space to think about climate change, what would you do?

[00:45:14]

What would I like, what other problem would I work on?

[00:45:18]

So basically you are now you acknowledge that climate change, yes, we need to solve it. But at the moment at the time, right now, I don’t have space in my life to to think about it. I just need to continue my life because it’s already enough to deal with. How would you do anything in any way? Is there anything that a person like that could do in that situation? I don’t have time to invest into thinking about climate change. What would you do?

[00:45:46]

Oh, right. Yeah, I think I would. But one thing is voting for environmentally friendly politicians. If I was in America, I think it was very important for me to. Both Biden and, um, yeah, advocate for.

[00:46:07]

For that and trying to get the Republicans to shift their stance, like the climate skeptics stance, would be one thing. Another thing would be donating, I think is really important. People don’t often think about when they’re thinking about being climate friendly. Decisions that they can make, but then you have to be very careful about what you donate, because I think there’s really big differences between charities and the sense of the impact they have.

[00:46:30]

Um.

[00:46:32]

So Refunders Petrusich would be my advice on that front, if you’re looking to donate. Yeah, so we have to recommend the climate charges that probably increase over the next few months.

[00:46:45]

Yeah, I probably look at donating to charities and I want to highlight one of those is Clean Air Task Force that that’s the one right there.

[00:46:56]

They would then work with extracting carbon from the from. Right. So they’re trying to solve this challenge by just taking down what we already have released.

[00:47:10]

Um, there’s an aspect of that, I think that working on many parts of the problem so that they advocate for.

[00:47:21]

Climate legislation in the US like pragmatic climate legislation, and they try to support neglected low carbon energy technologies like carbon capture and nuclear and zero carbon fuels. And so you’re kind of funding an advocacy campaign that has some probability of paying off an.

[00:47:40]

Yeah, OK, thanks. That was the first scenario, if you don’t have to, that much time to think about climate change.

[00:47:47]

Now, if you did have time, but you don’t know where to start, you were talking about donations. Would that be a recommendation or anything else if you did want to invest more time? What would you do?

[00:47:59]

I think I like learning about the problem. Would be a good place to start and. And. Yeah, learning about the problem and learning about the solutions and I recommend various books that people could read, I suppose we’re trying to condense them into one report and our new climate report, which should be done in September. And, um. Yeah, I think if you want to actually like to take action, as I said for the previous question, I do that if you want to learn more, there’s lots of great books out there like. Climate shock is a great book by Wagner, There’s Six Degrees by Mark Lynas, um, David Macci, sustainable energy without the Hot Air. So I think there’s lots of lots of good books out there where you can kind of learn more.

[00:48:56]

I’ll make sure to link down in this episode, so if you want to check those out and link those in this episode. OK. The third scenario, then, let’s say that you are an individual now that is highly worried and you recognize the problem. Now you want to go all in for the climate. You really want to bet your life on this. What would you do?

[00:49:19]

Yes, so then I suppose you’d be looking at me, one option would be earn lots of money and then donate. So, think about ways you could, like, make lots of money without, of course, doing harm while doing that. Another option would be.

[00:49:34]

I suppose working for. I’m running, running, running for office would be one like getting involved in politics and suppose it’s especially valuable in places where there’s resistance to climate action by the US. And then another one would be working effectively. And nonprofits say like getting a job at the Clean Air Task Force or the Environmental Defense Fund or something like that, then. I suppose it depends how early you are, how early on you are in your career, um. And yeah, there’s, I suppose, lots of ways you could approach that, like you could go into energy systems modeling, you could, um. Yeah, got a legal background and work on climate legislation type stuff. So, yeah, those would be the main parts that explore.

[00:50:32]

The fourth scenario so far, though, was the three first, so the fourth one is if you were a teenager today, if you were a teenager, what would you do?

[00:50:41]

Yeah, if I was a teenager interested in climate change, I think, um. I’d probably get a quantitative degree would be my advice, like I say this as someone who did. That did philosophy for a which is not conservative, obviously, but I think that open gives you more options. So if you did something like climate economics or if you did climate physics, I think that gives you more scope to like and have a big influence in your career when you decide what to do. And then even if you wanted to earn lots of money, like there’s lots of jobs for people who are quantitatively minded. And then I think when you’re that young, just like. You should spend a lot of time reading and thinking about it. What the right way to tackle things is, I think a big problem in climate is that lots of people are worried about it, but they’re not sure what to do about it. So you need to think really, really carefully about how I can actually use my time to have the most impact on this problem. And not much of that goes on. I think people are motivated, but then like. Spend their time sort of advocating for things that aren’t necessarily the most impactful way to approach it or if it might be detrimental to the cause. So. Yeah, I’d like to make lots of efforts to try and be try and be rational about about the problem and to learn a lot.

[00:52:15]

Ok, thank you. The last question is, if you would be a politician that felt that you actually have some kind of power to do some kind of change, what would you do with that kind of power?

[00:52:28]

Um, I suppose it would depend where I am if I was in the US, I would.

[00:52:36]

Yeah, I suppose it depends how much power it got, but how much power do I have in this situation? I’m constrained on my.

[00:52:44]

You are not a top dog who really can make the decisions you’re not, but you are in some you’re in the hierarchy where you can actually affect people. Who’s going to see how you tackle the situation? Yeah.

[00:53:03]

Uh.

[00:53:06]

Yeah, I think it would depend a bit where I am, so if I was in Europe.

[00:53:11]

I think.

[00:53:13]

Like electricity. So if I was so if I was if I was a politician in the UK.

[00:53:19]

Electricity emissions are already quite constrained, like the sort of limits on how much the UK can just because we have climate targets, and that’s true in other European countries that we’re in the European emissions trading scheme. So this kind of limits on how much the electricity sector can emit in a given year. So I probably wouldn’t focus on that, I probably focus on. Either advocating for the carbon tax idea that I mentioned before, the EU is looking into at the moment as a way to kind of spur international action on climate or I would focus on. Supporting neglected low carbon technologies, so figure out ways to I think the most important neglected ones are probably carbon capture and storage, advanced nuclear and then cheap ways to make zero carbon fuels like hydrogen. So I’d like advocating amongst my colleagues to push for like research funding for those and also making a market for those products.

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