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it'd be wrong not to mention the multi-multi-billion dollar effort that has gone into distracting us from all this [Music] Mike berners-lee welcome to how the light gets in thank you your latest book is a sort of extensively revised and updated edition of your older book how bad are bananas so how does your new book move the conversation forward how about a banana is the carbon footprint

of everything that's my first book it came out in 2010 it's like a tour of carbon Footprints of like it says everything you can think of and to my amazement 10 years on people were still buying it and I just felt like it needed a total update not just because the numbers had changed but because the whole context has changed you know back then contact UM

climate was just a very serious thing for us to be thinking about now we're in a flat out climate emergency and the whole kind of way that we frame up everything to do with it needs to be different and when I first wrote that book I was very reluctant to tell anybody what to do but of course as soon as I started giving talks about it

first question was always well what should we do so the new version has got a whole section on what should we do not just about climate but about the whole situation that we're in I'm in a slightly weird situation because I've also updated there's no Planet B even a couple of years after it came out which is a much bigger take on the situation that humans

are in of which climate is One symptom but we've also got an ecological crisis and or and all the rest of it and from a technical and scientific point of view the good news is we can deal with all of that but the real question is why aren't we and what will it take for us to be able to so that takes us into questions about

how our economics Works how our politics Works How We Do Life how honest we are how much we respect each other at the global level and all of that so I've got these kind of two books in parallel which are have a different take on the same thing what are some common misconceptions that people have around the biggest sources of carbon emissions or are people now

caught on to what what those things are and or get it right but more and more people understand the big deals so people have always understood that home energy is a deal and sure enough it is and to varying extent you know people have always understood that cars have got because you are missions because you can see them coming out of the exhaust pipe people realize

that flying has got a big carbon footprint but most people don't realize how big a deal it is especially when you look at high altitude factors and and so on food more and more people are realizing that food is a big deal and one of the good developments has been that you know whereas 10 years ago people were talking about food miles the whole time which

are usually unless something's been on an airplane peripheral now the debate is much more centrally focused on the amount of meat and dairy in our diet and how we do that meat and dairy and that's good that's what it should be and also the kind of movement for Less um less stuff you know thinking about what we buy and where it comes from and making things

last and all that kind of stuff and it's great to be at this festival and see you know a whole stand for secondhand shoes and you know all sorts of kind of circular economy type things so that agenda's moved on a bit so moving on to a little bit on there's no plan at B and this kind of question of like why are we not doing

quite enough let me ask you first where do you stand on this question of where the locus of responsibility for climate change for the Environmental crisis lies does it lie with individuals and our individual behaviors you know whether we recycle whether we switch to vegetarian diets or are we never really going to be able to solve this if we're just thinking about the individual and not

the kind of structural problems of the economy and so on well we need to think about all these things where does the responsibility like it's a great question it lies everywhere it lies all of us have a responsibility to do what we can to exert our influence in whatever ways we think we can to bring about this help create the conditions under which human humans can

bring about the big systemic change that we need to see so you know cutting our carbon Footprints is one corner of that and yes we should try and be responsible and so on and by doing so we send out messages to the people around us and we also start sort of learning from our personal experience of the micro about what some of the change in the

macro might look like so that personal stuff does matter you know in terms of our own direct impact but the more deeply you think your way into this it becomes more you know much more to do with how we do Society How We Do economics how we do politics uh how we treat each other the kind of respect with which we the people of the world

do or don't treat each other and the extent to which we value truth so I think you know there's no Planet B's got a chapter or two about about truth and respect in it uh and if I was ever going to write another book I think it would all be about how can we do a better job of making sure that the people in powerful positions

are people who are honest and people who care about all the people of the world because without that we can't get anywhere and I you know I find myself in lots of debates about all sorts of my new Thai questions like how should we do meat and dairy or should we have a new coal mine in the off the west coast of Cumbria and stuff like

that and the art the logic of those arguments is so clear-cut we should have them once and then it should be done and we end up with spending months or years just going around around and the reason for that is because there are so many people in the system who've got the wrong motives and we shouldn't have them there you know and are being and are

being careless with the truth and you know the people of the world you know including the people of the UK uh if we don't want to head for a very nasty place we need to get much much hotter at just stopping all of that from happening and getting the right people into positions of of power and responsibility Let's uh focus a little bit of this relationship

between the kind of individual and the collective or the state level so what do you think explains the fact that people are reluctant to change their behaviors when it comes to driving a petrol car or eating meat or flying when they know that those behaviors can be detrimental onto the environment and yet a lot of us keep doing those things it's not it's no longer a

communities can go up you know Our Lives can feel more meaningful we'll go around happier because we'll know deep down that we're not trashing the place I mean all kinds of things will just get better but we don't spend enough time imagining that that that's the first thing it'd be wrong not to mention the multi-multi-billion dollar effort that has gone into distracting us from all this

pulling the wool over our eyes misinformation but not just uh you know there has been a lot of very cynical deliberate misinformation but there's also the you know the kind of messages that we receive all the time to just carry on as normal if you know any time you turn on the Telly anytime you you know most of the information we streams that we get and

99 of the advertising is just nudging us to carry on as normal and forget about all that stuff that's difficult to look at and I think the third thing is that people feel very often a lack of agency so when you wake up to the climate emergency uh you know if when the minute you start to think about it properly you realize that it's a big

Global systemic problem requiring a big Global systemic response and each one of us is just one eight billionth of the whole thing and it's easy to feel really powerless and then when you think about it you think well you know I could cut my carbon footprint but you start understanding about things like rebound effects and you realize that actually the direct saving that you think you're

making is going to the Slack's going to get taken up somewhere else that's the way the Dynamics of it all work until we can get the conditions right for a big systemic change and that leaves a lot of people feeling helpless but I think the empowering way to ask the question what can I do is how can I help to create the conditions under which the

global systemic change can become possible and that that actually opens up a much wider agenda it's like what can be my influence on politics what can my be my influence on the workplace every time I spend money I'm sending out a message about the kind of future I want to support or not support I mean it's just it's just a massively more empowering question to ask

and every time you have a conversation you're pushing one way or another let me focus a bit on the first thing you mentioned there which is that we can't quite imagine what future this might lead to and the reason for that is I think that most of the time we are told what the future will look like if we just continue and that kind of apocalyptic

version of the future doesn't seem to be motivating enough so are we just focusing on the wrong side instead of focusing on like the positive effects of action as it were like imagining a kind of positive future yeah we should be focusing on both of those things and and we should be focusing on the difference between if if we carry on as we are and if

we don't carry on as we are so you know I think you know I I'm a great believer in just saying it like it is accurately not trying to dress it up for the purposes of you know motivating people one way or another I think we should stick with the facts right so the facts are if we carry on as we are we don't know with

any certainty that blow by blow how things will go but what we do know with really quite a lot of certainty is that we're in for a very very nasty time and it won't just be those poor people living in countries thousands of miles away who always seem to end up having a hard time you know the the whole of global Society is going to be

in for an awful lot of trouble nobody quite knows the exact mechanism by which that'll happen but it's that's clear-cut on the other hand if we take really strong action really really quickly now which means radically different from anything that we've really begun to see so far it looks likely but not definite that we can broadly speaking get away with this by which I mean the

number of people who die from ecological problems that we've been inflicting will remain in the millions rather than the billions right and for most people the quality of life on Earth could arguably be better than ever right but it really is uh it's a it's a huge change and the stuff that you hear about you know in the sort of normal political rhetoric about Net Zero

by 2050 you know even that is just a sticky plaster on climate change as one one specific thing actually you know we're facing a a rack of ecological uh problems of which climate is just one of them to focus on what you talked about um in your third point the kind of powerlessness and the kind of lack of agency of the individual you did say that

you think structural change at the global level needs to happen so not only should we be trying to influence our own politicians that we have some form of control over through you know Democratic means but somehow the rest of the world as well like what is the what is the medium through which we can enact that change well a lot of it is through our politicians

for most of us and it's about insisting on you know you know the to take the Ukraine for example which is really interesting because it you know it flushes out just how far we are at the moment from the level of international cooperation and trust that we're going to absolutely need throughout the eight or nine billion or however many you know we're going to absolutely need

that we we need it so urgently and Ukraine throws into sharp relief how far away we are from that and you know the ways in which we respond in the UK are influential I know we send out influential messages about you know in all sorts of ways you know it's partly about standing up to Russia okay sure but also uh the for example the way in

which we either do or don't take ukrainians into this country and you know do what we can for them you know that sends out a message about how much we care about people who live elsewhere from us I think the pandemic was another example you know what we missed was an opportunity to demonstrate to the World by spreading vaccine early out to developing countries that we

respect all the people of the world and by kind of you know playing our cars close to our chest and grabbing as much vaccine as we could you know first and foremost you know we sent out a message that we're still not in that mindset that's a real that's such a shame but you know all of this stuff we can influence by pushing our politicians not

just by how we vote but by letting them know in advance of the elections the kinds of things that matter and you know um and by screaming more loudly when we encounter politicians who are being careless with the truth or who are putting up with other politicians being careless with the truth well let's focus on the pandemic um you know climate change is in some ways

for a lot of people something that happens in the future the covert was something that happened to them in the present and as you say we did see that when it comes to crisis people first and foremost take care of the nation-state and then maybe some neighboring countries and then maybe some other countries that we have some kind of cultural ties with and they're kind of

Peters out is it realistic to think that we are capable at a state level to express this kind of radical altruism towards everyone else in the world yeah when we wake up yeah I mean if it you know to look at good things that come came out of the pandemic I mean it showed us that we can change it shows actually changes pretty you know much

more changed than we had thought it's actually pretty easy you know the pandemic was um an unpleasant experience for most people but the actual change part of it wasn't wasn't particularly difficult if we were to implement that level of change in a way that was designed to look after people and Planet at the same time so that it wasn't a bad experience I mean it would

just you know it would be a lot a lot easier that you know the difficulty is you know we woke up to the pandemic because people could imagine what it would be like to catch covid or to have a loved one catch covered and die you know and it so we had a strong emotional reaction to it as humans we're much uh we're much less good

at having a powerful emotional reaction when we think about something that uh might not be happening within the next few weeks and it's easy to imagine might not affect us it might only affect other people and by the way I think that shows a real paucity of imagination anybody who kind of thinks about climate change is something that's not really really going to hit people in

the UK I think they just haven't properly worked through how fragile Global Society is and I think you know what if there's something healthy about the pandemic it reminded people of my age for example that uh civilized you know the sort of stability of civilization that I have always known you know my neck of the woods Society has been a very very stable thing you can

you know you could just you could just ignore those environmental Nutters and it's fine you know prove decade out to decade it's fine and the pandemic showed us you know it's we can't take that kind of thing for granted actually we should we should fight for it but let me challenge you a little bit on the claim that well it was easy to change behaviors during

the pandemic and so we can do it again I mean in some ways change happened because like literally the state banned certain activities so we stopped flying around the world because well we couldn't it was illegal to do so is that is that going to be what's required for dealing with the climate crisis is it going to require kind of mass legislation that bans social activities

well what happened in the first lockdown at least was that you know the government took in the end strong action and the people were broadly speaking behind them so they could get away with it and they could make things against the law and there wasn't going to be writing on the streets and anyone who stepped out of line was more often than not put back in

line not by the government but by the people around them who you know thought they should be doing the right thing and the government had some credibility when it you know when it when it um when it pushed for that change and I think if we can get to the same situation on our response to the climate and ecological crisis then you know our governments aren't

our leaders in the way that we might you know we might possibly want them to be or you know they in a way they follow they follow us so when for example uh Extinction rebellion and the and the school kids taking to the streets you know pre-pandemic this you know when that happened it was pretty clear-cut that they opened up the political space for politicians in

the UK not to go all the way on everything they should do on climate change but to take one or two really important good steps in the right direction and I think it illustrates the point that there's a kind of you know there's if you like there's about three key groups in this there's the politicians there's the business community and there's the public and um each

one of those influences the others and gives space to the others and makes it easier for the others to go and take the next step so that's those three groups need to move together ideally it was about another dis uniformity with the pandemic which was we were always told this is a temporary situation these measures are not forever these will last for a few months maybe

a year but they ended up lasting a bit longer than that but they weren't forever so what do you think people would be as receptive if we told them well you're never getting on a plane again ever we don't need to say that uh you know the pandemic was uh you know for most people the you know the changes in behavior that we had to do

were fundamentally unpleasant the changes in behavior that we need to do in order to have a lot more sustainably are fundamentally unbalanced not unpleasant they don't need to be you know we can a lot of us can get away with uh can get away from aspects of our jobs that we actually hate aspects of society that we hate spending time in traffic jams you know uh

you know all kinds of there's all kinds of stuff you know a proper built environment will be one that's actually not only a lot more energy efficient but more pleasant to live in you know actually what's not to life what's not to like you know the the quality of our community engagement will go up uh or you know all sorts of things will be improvements in

a way that we couldn't have with the pandemic so whilst there's a lot of change it's not fundamentally a bitter pill you could if you look at what we had to do for the pandemic we had to swallow a bit of pill so we didn't die if we're smart about this we're going to swallow an unusual pill but actually you know once we've had it we'll

figure oh guys you know this is good so given that we haven't seen the radical change that we need so far what do you think needs to change how do you see the shift happening both at individual level that most people take up habits like eating less meat traveling less by plane but also at the collective level or the level of Estates what are we expecting

to happen that's actually going to shift gears that hasn't happened so far I think it'll happen from everywhere at once I think it's like a systemic change that will have you know it's not that one thing will precipitate the changes in other things I think the conditions will become right and then everything will fall into place probably you know simultaneously and I think you know at

the moment there are little bits of dietary change and there are a few people around who are flying less and so on but if you look at the amount of meat that's being consumed at the national level it's not really changing much anything right so we're not at that point yet and the question is are we starting to see you know for us with a system

change you can push and push and push you feel like you're getting absolutely nowhere and then you see a couple of cracks in the old system and it can be a very short space of time indeed before the whole thing flips over so the question is how close are we to that huge Tipping Point when if you look at the kind of you know if you

look at the sort of material measures of how we're doing you know it's spectacular really pathetic if you were if you were on Mars looking at data on planet Earth to see how we're getting on with climate change you know you look at our emissions curve going up and up and that's still rising and as in the amount of emissions every year is still by and

large bigger than the year before you'd you'd notice that humans have had a pandemic if you look to that curve you'd notice that the USSR got dissolved you'd notice that we had a client a an economic crunch in 2008 right but you wouldn't see from that curve that humans have woken up to climate change like not at all so you know materially we're absolutely miles away

but how are we seeing the first cracks that tell us we might only be a very short distance in a way I think the pandemic put us back uh in some respects because I think with the traction that some of the protesters were getting and the sort of General momentum behind things I think pre-covered there was quite a clear pathway in a in a way to

getting the change we needed to see in the and the pandemic confused all of that and I think Ukraine is confusing all of that um as well which is uh dangerous so you see the change not happening gradually but basically there being a kind of moment of Reckoning and then suddenly what happens gradually is that is that the systemic conditions become right for the change and

you start noticing that in sort of you know the way that all sorts of things the way the BBC talks about it the kind of things that politicians feel they can say you know out loud I notice it I run a company that works with businesses the kind of conversations we're having those with those businesses used to be sort of little conversations about how can we

cast our carbon footprint now they're much more conversations about we get it there's a there's an emergency going on we get it that this affects everything about how every business when every business thinks says and does you know and businesses are coming to us asking for a much more holistic assessment of everything they could and should be doing to exert that influence for systemic change that's

a that's a changing conversation right now it's only in a few leading businesses and all the rest of it but you know these things can take off suddenly you've said climate change isn't a technological problem it's a problem of values so do you really think that values are going to change and lead to this kind of shift or is it going to be more a kind

of reaction to self-preservation and a realization that we are under threat our way of life is under threat the planet is under threat and so it won't really be values that guide our change of behavior but really a very selfish reaction to what's going on well you can sort of construe everything is as selfish if you if you really put your mind to it you can

be cynical about anything but I mean I think it's clear-cut just you know just from a practical point of view we are eight billion of us on this fragile Planet together and we will either deal with the situation together or not at all it just it can't be done without a level of global cooperation I was in Ukraine I was in Kiev at a conference about

eight months ago zielinski gave the opening talk and everybody was all the wise people were saying oh he's a nice man but a bit of a weak leader and uh but you know with that the conference was all about uh climate and security and China and Russia an artificial intelligence those are the kind of big themes that came out was like a big strategy conference and

half the parliament was there and so on and the the big underlying question that I I think was going through the conference was can humans fundamentally come to a point where they collaborate at a global level in a way we've never seen before can we radically uh you know can we make that radical Evolution right now and there were two schools of thought in the room

there were the near liberals I was a one-hearted professor in particular you know seem to be really enjoying himself telling everybody that you can't trust anybody in this world it's a it's it's a dog eat dog world uh and there was me you know making a different case and one or two others Rook to bregman was there the author of humankind you know and but you

know my take on it is that if you look at the historical evidence and the social evidence and the neurological evidence you know the the real evidence tells us that humans are capable of uh through deliberate effort cultivating a set of values the the values that we need to see us through Living Well in the anthropocene so it's doable we are you know we are capable

of that level of cooperation what we haven't yet managed to do is scale it up to the global level because we haven't yet got good we we've we've we've globalized we've reached a point at which everything we do in our lives has Global implications but what we haven't yet managed to do is get to the point where we have emotional reactions about those implications that a

commensurate with you know with the kind of impacts that we have so that's something we need to learn you know quickly Mike burners Lee thank you very much pleasure for more debates talks and interviews so subscribe today to The Institute of Arts and ideas her IAI TV [Music]