The Future of Energy - RICHARD BLACK - Director, Policy & Strategy, Ember - Fmr. BBC Environment Correspondent
How and when will we transition to a clean energy future? How will the transition empower individuals and transform global power dynamics? How did China become the world’s first electrostate, leading the drive for renewable energy, and what can we learn from this?
Richard Black spent 15 years as a science and environment correspondent for the BBC World Service and BBC News, before setting up the Energy & Climate Intelligence Unit. He now lives in Berlin and is the Director of Policy and Strategy at the global clean energy think tank Ember, which aims to accelerate the clean energy transition with data and policy.
He is the author of The Future of Energy; Denied:The Rise and Fall of Climate Contrarianism, and is an Honorary Research Fellow at Imperial College London.
Duration:
56m
Broadcast on:
13 Jul 2024
Audio Format:
mp3
How and when will we transition to a clean energy future? How will the transition empower individuals and transform global power dynamics? How did China become the world’s first electrostate, leading the drive for renewable energy, and what can we learn from this?
Richard Black spent 15 years as a science and environment correspondent for the BBC World Service and BBC News, before setting up the Energy & Climate Intelligence Unit. He now lives in Berlin and is the Director of Policy and Strategy at the global clean energy think tank Ember, which aims to accelerate the clean energy transition with data and policy. He is the author of The Future of Energy; Denied:The Rise and Fall of Climate Contrarianism, and is an Honorary Research Fellow at Imperial College London.
The Economics of Production and Cost Reduction
In 1936, [Theodore]Wright published his first academic paper, in the Journal of the Aeronautical Sciences. The contents are as functional as the title, ‘Factors Affecting the Cost of Airplanes’. In it, he lays out his key finding: when the volume of production doubles, the cost comes down. Double it again, and the cost comes down again, by the same percentage. Doubling it yet again produces another proportional price drop.
The reasons why encompass the costs of labour, raw materials and overheads. On the labour side, Wright tells us, his costs fell because the workforce became more proficient as the design became more familiar, and because cheaper, less skilled workers could per- form more standardised tasks. With materials, a larger production run meant the factory could buy things like sheet metal in bulk, and waste less of it. Finally, a bigger operation reduced overheads such as back-office costs. Wright concluded that doubling the production volume reduced the labour cost by 20 per cent and the material cost by a little less.
Operating as the company was, in a competitive market where sales and income were the bottom lines that mattered, Wright went on to surmise that the relationship he described would have a circular effect: ‘Simplicity and cheapness of design will make possible gradual reductions in prices which will make possible the sale of somewhat greater quantities with cheaper prices brought about by virtue of such quantity increase.’
Production at volume brings the unit cost down. A lower cost means more demand. More people buying the planes increases the production volume. The price falls further. People buy even more. More demand, more production, lower prices, more demand, more production . . . the cycle turns, push- ing forward the growth in ownership of any given aeroplane. Sales increase exponentially as prices fall.
Now here’s the point: Wright’s Law applies equally to any manufactured good.
This is not just a theory. Analysts have plotted the sales volumes and costs of washing machines, mobile phones, cars, dishwashers, and many other items. They have looked at both national and global markets. Whatever and wherever it is, it seems that as standard, the combination of a new desirable mass-produced product and a free competitive market leads to an exponential growth in sales accompanied by a symbiotic fall in the cost.
– The Future of Energy, p.25-26
RICHARD BLACK
China's Role in the Clean Energy Transition
The fact is you've got a lot of industrial and political muscle now coming behind clean energy, especially from China, which is the leading country deploying wind energy, the leading country deploying solar, and the leading manufacturer and user of electric vehicles by miles. As one recent report put it, "We have petrostates in the world. China is the first electrostate." And China is on its way to becoming the world's most powerful country. So, where China leads, the rest of the world is almost certain to follow.
Yes, there are massive air pollution problems in China, of course, but I think it's more than that. It's also about seeing that this is the future that the world is going to have. And if these goods are going to be made anywhere, well, the Chinese government clearly would like them to be made in China. And they've set out, you know, industrial policies and all kinds of other policies for, well, at least a decade now, in pursuit of that aim. It's interesting now to see other countries, India, for example, and the United States now sort of deploying muscle to try and carve out a slice of the pie themselves as well.
Why Oil and Gas Companies Can't Contribute Meaningfully to the Clean Energy Transition
My friend and former oil industry employee, Harry Benham, who helped me a bit with the book and has contributed many ideas, has a view, and it's one I share, that the oil and gas companies actually can't really contribute meaningfully to the clean energy transition. Currently, they return pretty high amounts of money to their shareholders.
And if one company says, "okay, we're going to move out of that now, we're going to move into renewables," the actual year-by-year or month-by-month cash returns probably go down because it's just not as cash-rich a business, and you have to have longer time horizons. So the company that does that, and the CEO who drives that, will be outcompeted by these more short-term views. Either the company will start losing market share, or the CEO will get sacked by the shareholders who are not earning as much money from that company as they are from other companies. So, that's why in the book I suggest that they won't play a major part in the transition. And in fact, they're the people that are most likely to try to block it.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST
Help us unpack this statistic. According to the International Monetary Fund, on average, the total amount we pay annually in subsidies to the fossil fuel industry is around 5 trillion dollars, equivalent to about a thousand dollars per year for every man, woman, and child.
BLACK
Yes, when I broke it down for every inhabitant of planet Earth, I was staggered at how much money it is. So, if you take things like subsidies, and they could be consumption or production subsidies, it's less than a trillion. But then if you add in the costs of climate change and other damages done by using the fossil fuels, we come up to this figure of five trillion. And actually, in the last few years, it's been more than that. It's been up six and seven trillion, as well. For example, if we compare it with the amount that the governments of the West are supposed to supply each year in climate finance, which is a hundred billion, it's approximately one fiftieth of the amount that we're actually subsidizing the fossil fuel industry, which is the major cause of the problem.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST
Ending our dependence on fossil fuels is also linked to environmental peacebuilding and conflict resolution, as you’ve wrote about in Environment of Peace.
BLACK
Environment of Peace: Security in a New Era of Risk is a report that I was fortunate enough to take part in writing a couple of years ago, courtesy of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. The report is out there, available for download. It's a landmark report linking environmental destruction to conflict risk through all kinds of mechanisms and linking peace building and environmental restoration. The links, some of them are quite obvious, and others are a little bit more subtle. There are short-term things, and there are long-term things, and there's a role for international institutions, as well as national governments. So, in the short term, let's put a sticking plaster on the issue. The main recommendations that come out of the report, for example, environmental peace building, where you try and tackle an environmental issue alongside conflict resolution and so on, is something that could be used a lot more and United Nations agencies and other organizations can really take this on board and build this into all of their operations. But the longer-term stuff, the number one thing is to just get off fossil fuels. Because all the while we're using fossil fuels, we're going to be emitting carbon dioxide into the air and causing climate change to progress further.
Over two decades, Vladimir Putin and his circle of oligarchs played a very smart game. Incrementally, they built up Europe’s dependence on energy imports from Russia, particularly gas. Once oil and gas pipelines are in place, supplying and receiving companies sign long-term deals with the blessing of their governments, and the assumption is that the fuel will always flow. Which means there is no reason to develop a Plan B.
This all worked fine . . . until it didn’t. We use the phrase ‘over a barrel’. ‘Over a pipeline’ would surely be more appropriate.
For every barrel of oil and therm of gas flowing east to west, money flowed west to east, building up the personal wealth of oligarchs and filling Russia’s war chest. Perhaps Putin learned from the earliest years of his KGB career, when the Soviet Union’s international sales of oil and gas funded its Cold War arsenal and the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan. Meanwhile his ambition to re-fold Ukraine into some kind of ‘Greater Russia’ was solidifying. Whether European politicians genuinely didn’t see it or chose not to, who knows. Did reliance on Russian fuel imports make it harder to see?…
While European citizens worried about the lights going out due to lack of gas, in parts of Asia that actually happened, with governments unable to pay as much as Europeans for precious tankers of LNG. The invasion has pushed up food prices across the world, with dire consequences for the poorest…
In a world already running on clean energy, businesses, citizens and governments would only be buying solar panels and batteries to replace those that were getting old. So if a supplier tried this kind of blackmail, we would simply put upgrade plans on hold, give the units a bit of TLC, and soldier on – just as we do now when we can’t quite afford that new car, fridge or T-shirt. You make do.
…So I rest on the contention that in a world that had already gone through the clean energy transition, Vladimir Putin could not have nurtured Europe’s dependence on Russia; could not have filled his war chests; could not have attempted to blackmail the EU into submission; and would not have been able, therefore, to attempt the invasion of Ukraine.
– The Future of Energy, p.73-76
THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST
Tell us about the five-pronged clean energy future.
BLACK
I thought about it, and I was wondering, what do we actually need in the world? Because we don't need petrol and we don't need coal. We need energy to power various things. So, we need these energy services. So, what's the simplest way of providing all of the energy services? And it really seems to me that we can basically do it all with about five different types of goods. So the system of the future I put out in the book is first of all, you have the generation of electricity, which is mainly going to be with renewables, mainly with wind and solar because they are the cheapest and they're getting cheaper thanks to Wright's Law. Then you need energy storage and other means of sharing matching demand to supply. So, storage is the one that people will be most familiar with, which can be batteries, for example. And again, the price of batteries has also plummeted about 85 percent price reduction in a decade. And it continues because, again, we have mounting volumes. In a competitive market, there's lots of innovation going on in terms of battery design, in terms of construction, and all of this stuff, new materials coming into batteries. So, that's your first two, that's your renewable generation and your battery storage.
Electric vehicles will be the main method of transportation. Already, they dominate sales in the two-wheeler market in China and India. They're already eating into global oil demand. They're taking about 1.5 percent of global oil demand already, and the sales are increasing exponentially in China and other countries as well. They are cost-competitive. It's just on the purchase price in some markets with some models now. And it's going to get cheaper again because battery costs will fall. Heating and cooling, which is a big demand for energy. We can use heat pumps, which are super efficient running on electricity. They don't actually generate heat. What they do is move heat from the outside world into your house, rather like a fridge. It moves heat from the inside of the fridge to the outside of the fridge. The heat pump is a bit like that. Very, very efficient low running costs and so on. So with that, you've got, trusty cover, you've got all the things like computers and lights and so on, electric cookers to make you coffee. You've got ways of evening out supplies and demand, you've got transport, and you've got heating. And you've got a lot of industry as well. You can't probably do all of the industry with this with this four-prong prescription, so you need a fifth prong. And the fifth prong is going to be hydrogen. There's a lot of hype around hydrogen, and the idea that the world will be running on a hydrogen economy is just wrong. It's far more efficient to do things with electricity if you can, but those few things which you can't use electricity, probably hydrogen, made from renewable electricity by splitting water into oxygen and hydrogen, that will probably be the fifth prong, but a smaller prong, rather like the little finger on your hand.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST
With the rise of synthetic media and deep fakes, we are witnessing an increasing impact on our elections. So I wonder what your reflections are on AI and its effects on public trust in institutions and journalism? On the other hand, AI could potentially democratize education and open us new educational pathways. As we discuss the end of oil, there’s a parallel emergence of a new great game for the ownership of AI, largely dominated by a handful of major multinationals.
BLACK
Potentially true, but I guess no one needs AI in the same way that we need oil or food. So, from that point of view, it's a lot easier. AI is fascinating, slightly scary. I find that the amount of discussion of setting it off in a carefully thought through direction is way lower than the amount of fascination with the latest thing that it can do. Often fiction should be our guide to these things or can be a valuable guide to these things. And if we go back to Isaac Asimov and his three laws of robotics, and to all these three very fundamental points that he said should be embedded in all automata, there's no discussion of that around AI, like none. I personally find that quite a hole in the discourse that we're having.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST
As you think about the future, the importance of telling stories and the kind of world we’re leaving to the next generation, what would you like young people to know, preserve, and remember?
BLACK
I would like young people to have the sort of growing up experience that allows them to be children as long as they need to be children. It's a very pure way of looking at the world. And I think that childhoods now have become a little bit compressed. By the time it's a good idea for a child to have a mobile phone, then that's already stuff that's now coming into their life that can be a pressure. So, I just want them to have the freedom to grow up basically as kids and just not be forced into an early adulthood. I grew up, as you mentioned, in radio, and really brilliant speech radio is eavesdropping on a conversation where someone is telling the story about something. And in this field of energy and climate change, the contrarians have got the easy job because the ingredients of their stories resonate. "It won't work, it's going to cost too much, they're trying to make you have something that you don't want, let's stick with the old ways, the ones that we know are safe," as opposed to "this can work."
A lot of the biggest insights I've ever had in any parts of my life have come from literature. Literature takes the world and looks at it through a certain window and tells a story in a way that you might not have thought of doing it yourself. And so by engaging in it, you just get richer, I think, in terms of the way that you look at the world yourself.
This interview was conducted by Mia Funk with the participation of collaborating universities and students. Associate Interviews Producers on this episode were Sam Myers and Daniela Cordovez Flores. One Planet Podcast & The Creative Process is produced by Mia Funk. Associate Text Editor was Sofia Reecer. Additional production support by Sophie Garnier.
"How and when will we transition to a clean energy future? How will the transition empower individuals and transform global power dynamics? How did China become the world's first electric state leading the drive for renewable energy? And what can we learn from this?" Richard Black spent 15 years as a science and environment correspondent for the BBC World Service in BBC News, before setting up the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit. He now lives in Berlin and is the director of policy and strategy at the Global Clean Energy Think Tank, Ember, which aims to accelerate the clean energy transition with data and policy. He is the author of the future of energy, denied the rise and fall of climate contrarianism and is an honorary research fellow at Imperial College London. Richard Black. Welcome back to the One Planet podcast and the creative process. Thank you. It's lovely to be, once again, on a program called One Planet because by an incredible coincidence in about 1997-ish, together with my friend and former colleague Charlie Hankeland, we started a program called One Planet on BBC World Service, where we combined the program I was making on the environment and the program he was making on international development and they were now one thing according to the Brooklyn Commission and so on. So we decided, well, let's join the programs as well. So that was the beginning of BBC World Service, One Planet, and it started to be back on a different One Planet with you. Well, thank you for joining us. So I've just been enjoying your book, The Future of Energy, which is highly digestible and formative and I think inspiring for the average citizen as well as policymakers or people who are engaged in the climate transition. But before we dive into the conversation, I believe you're going to share a passage for our listeners. Yeah, thanks to the introduction, Mia, and I certainly hope it is accessible. That's how I intended to write it, so I'm very glad to hear that you found it. So the first piece that I'd like to read for you is something that the first site is tangential to the world of energy and yet is absolutely core to understanding how the economics are changing and therefore why the future is what it is. Okay, here we go. The 1930s in the United States was an era of well-documented hardship for many, but the aviation business was booming owing to the government's procurements with planes for delivering mail and it interacts from all kinds of businesses. Customers were demanding cheaper planes that could carry more people over longer distances using less fuel. It was intensely competitive and aviation companies had to be agile, innovative and forward-looking in designs and production methods if they wanted to survive. In 1922, Theodore Rutt was a young engineer, newly employed at the Curtis Carapagne and motor company in Buffalo, New York. It was already a successful company, good enough to win and then retain the Schneider Trophy, the international race for sea planes and flying boats, making it the only US winner in the racist history. In 1925, Theodore, who by the way was no relation to Wilbur and Orville, right? In 1925, he was promoted to chief engineer. He began to keep records of various parameters of aircraft construction. For example, how the time needed to build each plane would come down as workers built more often. He recorded the ratio of expenditure on parts versus labour, how different approaches to construction favoured either short or long production runs, how mechanisation with changing the economics of both design and manufacture and many other details alongside. In 1936, Wright published his first academic paper in the Journal of the Aeronautical Sciences. The contents are as functional as the title, factors affecting the cost of airplanes. In it, he lays out his key finding. When the following of production doubles, the cost comes down, double it again and the cost comes down again by the same percentage and doubling it again produces yet another proportional price drop. The reasons why this happens encompass the cost of labour raw materials and overheads, on the labour side, Wright tells us his costs fell because the workforce became more proficient as the design became more familiar and because cheaper, less skilled workers could perform more standardised tasks. With materials, a larger production run meant the factory could buy things like sheet metal in bulk and waste less of it. Finally, a bigger operation reduced overheads such as back office costs. It concluded that doubling the production volume reduced the labour cost by 20% and material costs by a little less. Now operating as the company was in a competitive market where sales and income were the bottom lines that mattered, Wright went on to surmise that the relationship he described would have a circular effect. Simplicity and cheapness of design, he wrote, "will make possible gradual reductions in prices which will make possible the sale of somewhat greater quantities with cheaper prices brought about by virtue of such quantity increase". So, production at volume brings the unit cost down. A lower cost means more demand. More people buying the planes increases the production volume the price falls further, people buy even more. More demand, more production, lower prices, more demand, more production and the cycle turns pushing forward the growth and ownership of any given aeroplane. Sales increase exponentially as prices fall. Now here's the point. Wright's law applies equally to any manufactured good, and this is not just theory, analysts have plotted the sales volumes and costs of washing machines, mobile phones, cars, dishwashers and many other items they've looked at both national and global markets. Whatever and wherever it is, it seems that as standard the combination of a new desirable mass-produced product and a free competitive market leads to an exponential growth in sales accompanied by a symbiotic fall in the cost. So, as I said, Mayor, this may not immediately seem to belong to the world of energy, but actually it holds the secrets for everything. Exactly, and I know you've written about contrarians, but unless people are complete climate deniers, they can't help but listen to these facts if I understand your analysis correctly. If wind and solar continue to grow at their current rate, they could generate about a quarter of the world's electricity by 2026, and with ongoing exponential growth, it's possible that by the end of the decade they could supply around half of the world's energy. And then, especially as oil and gas, pee can become more expensive, we can dovetail nicely into a much needed greener and cleaner energy cycle. So then you clarify that at some point, this exponential growth, it has to curtail, of course, as you say, we're in an S-curve, but the end of oil is inevitable as fossil fuels become prohibitive. Yes, and the fact is you've got a lot of industrial muscle and a political muscle now coming behind clean energy, especially from China, which is the leading country to point wind energy, to point solar, the leading manufacturer and user of electric vehicles, ply miles. There's one recent report, put it, we have petrol state in the world, China was the first electric state, and China's way to becoming the world's most powerful country. So where China leads, the rest of the world is almost certain to follow. It is tell us a little bit more. I want to go into your five prongs, your five elements, because we hear so many negative things about China, which many of those things are also true, but they are leading the way just because they need to power this hugely populated country. And it just makes sense for them, manufacturing so much to have clean renewable energy. Yes, there are massive air pollution problems in China, of course, but I think it's more than that. It's also about saying that this is the future that the world is going to have. And if these goods are going to be made anywhere well, the Chinese government clearly would like them to be made in China, and they've set out industrial policies and all kinds of other policies for well, at least a decade now, in pursuit of that aim. And it's interesting now to see other countries, India, for example, and the United States are sort of deploying muscle to try and carve out a slice of pie themselves as well. But yes, when I thought about it, I was wondering, you know, what do we actually need in the world, right? Because we don't need petrol and we don't need coal. We need energy to power various things. We're speaking to each other over Zoom. So we each need electricity for our computer. I've got a light on here. I've just made a cup of coffee before. So we need these energy services. Basically what can provide, what's the simplest way of providing all of the energy services? And it really seems to me that we can basically do it all with about five different types of good. So the system of the future, as I put out in the book, first of all, you have generation of electricity, which is mainly going to be with renewables, mainly with wind and solar, because they are the cheapest and they're getting cheaper, thanks to rights law. Then you need storage and other means of matching demand to supply. So storage is the one that people will be most familiar with, which can be better through example. And again, the price of batteries is also plummeted about 85% price reduction in a decade and it continues because again, we have mounting volumes in a capacitive market. There's lots of innovation going on in terms of battery design, in terms of construction, new materials coming in for batteries. So that's your first two. That's your renewable generation and your battery storage. Electric vehicles will be the main method of transportation already. I mean, they dominate sales in the two-wheeler market in China and India. Already eating into global oil demand, they're taking about 1.5% of global oil demand already and the sales are increasing exponentially in China and other countries as well. Cost-compassitive, it's just on purchase price in some markets with some models now and going to get cheaper again because battery costs will fall. Heating and cooling, which is a big demand for energy. We can use heat pumps, which are super efficient running on electricity. They don't actually generate heat. What they do is move heat from the outside world into your house rather like a fridge. It moves heat from the inside of the fridge to the outside of the fridge. The heat pump is a bit like that, very, very efficient, low running costs and so on. So with that, you've got trusty-covered, you've got all the things that computers and lights and so on, electric, because to make a coffee, you've got ways of evening out supplies and demand. You've got transport and you've got heating. You've got a lot of industry as well. You can't probably do all of industry with this four problem prescription, so you need a fifth problem. The fifth problem is going to be hydrogen and there's a lot of hype around hydrogen and the idea that the world will be running on a hydrogen economy is just wrong. It's far more efficient to do things with electricity if you can, but those few things which you can't use electricity, probably hydrogen, made from renewable electricity by splitting water into oxygen and hydrogen, that will probably be the fifth prong, but a smaller prong, rather like the little finger, or on your hands, it's a finger, but it's smaller. I'm excited to go more into that too. I mean, particularly those solutions for green hydrogen. For aviation, because that is the one problematic area, and I guess that Airbus has a goal to transition and to bring to market the world's first hydrogen-powered commercial aircraft, some time around 2035. I spoke about this with Bhatampika, the aviator who is now preparing for the first round the world's green hydrogen-powered flight in partnership with Airbus, so I'm hopeful about the possibility of green hydrogen-powered flight. Yes, aviation is difficult because the sort of energy density in aviation fuel is so high. You need a relatively small amount of it to go a very long way, so you can't really use batteries, they're just too heavy and so on. So it's not quite clear to me what the future of aviation will be. Certainly, short-haul aviation hopping around Europe is going to be done by electrically powered planes. I'm pretty sure of that. There are already some commercial services and very short distances that are starting up with electric planes, and ease and jet along with this engine manufacturer has got a goal to produce electrically powered planes capable of doing the short hops within Europe. Really soon, the longer haul, it will probably be some kind of synthetic fuel that's mainly made from hydrogen and something like this. That's a really tantalizing prospect for innovation, but there is a lot of hype around hydrogen and a lot of it comes actually from the gas industry because you've got people who extract gas on the ground and you've got companies that pipe gas through pipes. Both of them, obviously, stand to lose if we move to a system that's all electric, so they are basically trying to keep alive this idea that we should do this with hydrogen. We can make hydrogen from natural gas with capturing the carbon dioxide that's released in that process and storing it underground, and then you can pipe the hydrogen down to people's homes and they can have a boiler so you don't need to change that much in your house. So it's kind of a superficially attractive vision until you actually look at the numbers and you realize it's about one's sick as efficient as doing the whole thing by electricity. So, are you talking about fossil fuel companies or diversifying into these other newer fuel industries? How do you read through the greenwashing and how does the average consumer, someone who's not deep in the weeds of it, understand what's actually being done as opposed to the PR of it? If the oil and gas companies, they go through phases of promoting themselves as sort of green and players in the energy transition and then they go back in the other direction as well. So most famously BP once called itself beyond petroleum, and actually it's not. It's still firmly petroleum and gas. So my friends and former oil industry employee, Harry Bennan, helped me a bit with the book and has contributed many ideas down the years, he's few. And it's one I share is that the oil and gas companies actually can't really contribute meaningfully to the clean energy transition because currently they return pretty high amounts of money to their shareholders. And if one company says, "Okay, we're going to move out of that now," the actual year by year or month by month cash returns probably go down because it's just not as cash rich a business and you have to have a longer time in horizons. So the company and the CEO who drives that will be out competed by these more short term views. Either the company will start losing market share or the CEO will get set by the shareholders who's not earning as much money for that company as they are from other companies. So that's why in the book, I sort of suggest that they won't play a major part in the transition. And in fact, they're the people that are most likely to try to block it. Yes, indeed. And yet we continue to subsidize them as you outline whether they're indirectly through taxes or what you say. It just help us unpack the statistic that you say according to the International Monetary Fund, the total around $5 trillion per year on average is what we pay at an individual at level that's about $1,000 per year for every man, woman and child that's helped subsidizing the fossil fuel industry. Yes, when I broke it down through every inhabitant of planet Earth, I was staggered at how much money it is. But there it is. So if you take things like subsidies and they could be consumption or production subsidies, it's less than a trillion. But then if you add in the costs of climate change and other damages which are done by using the fossil fuels, we come up to this figure of $5 trillion. And actually in the last few years, it's been more than that. It's been up to $6 trillion to $7 trillion as well. So if you compare it, for example, with the amount that the governments of the West are supposed to supply each year in climate finance, that's $100 billion. So that's about $150 of the amount that we're actually subsidizing the fossil fuel industry, which is the major cause of the year. Indeed. So many wars that are also fought due to this, you outlined so many benefits to the transition. And I know there is, of course, a big push here in Europe and around the world, of course, but it's hard to understand sometimes why it's not a faster push as you outline. We need to transition for just air pollution, the health benefits, the new green jobs that are being created and the fact that you have to pay for more things like health care insurance and the infrastructure. So how can we as individuals or working within organizations change that and accelerate it? Yes. I mean, sometimes you can actually change what you do yourself. And I know that each individual action has a very, very minor impact on emissions, but sometimes you can make sure this is you can change your electricity provider or put solar panels on your roof and see that your home or whatever it may be. And it seems that in Europe, the number of people who are doing these things is increasing. I don't think we know why, but we saw, for example, the last couple of years, sales of heat pumps, increasing exponentially in a number of European countries, including some very cold ones. Why this was happening, is it because of the return of a climate change, did they want to get ahead of the game? Was it some kind of response to Putin's attempt to subjugate Ukraine? I don't know. But it does seem that these two in Europe, more people are making these kinds of decisions for themselves. So that's one thing, another thing, of course, is talk to your elected representatives. Whatever you want to do, that's what they're there for. I think there's also an extent to which just discourse matters. Conversation matters. Ideas get internalized that can be completely wrong. The idea that, for example, wind and solar are expensive. There will be some people that still hold that for you, but it's, you know, five or six years out of date, things move on. So just engaging in conversation with people that maybe don't quite see where we're at, it's just a useful thing to do and quite easy to do. But you're right, the chief of benefits, the more I thought about it for the book, the chief of benefits is quite extraordinary long. You mentioned jobs. One of my favorite stats is that there was a forecast done in 2020 of the fastest growing job sectors this decade in the United States. And two of the top three were in renewable energy, basically solar and wind in stores. The fact that came out from the US government during the Trump administration fills me with joy every time I look at it. And then there's the air pollution. And there's also something about just democratizing, I think. Because if you think about it, oil and gas, they're almost perfect product for oligarchs. Basically, you can make enormous amount of money quite quickly. And once you've done that, once you own the means of production, the people need oil and gas. It has to arrive every day and coal as well. Otherwise, things stop working. And there's probably nothing else other than food and water that we need every day just to keep society running. So it's totally a seller's market. Whereas by contrast, once you've got your solar panels installed, the producer's electricity for you don't buy anything else and replace them when they grow old kind of thing. And the same thing's true of hate pumps and so on. So long as you've got your electricity being supplied by wind and solar or hydro or nuclear active, rather than by gas and coal, via power stations, you're fine. You don't need this endless supply. So it's far less easy for oligarchs and a despot to make a killing off fossil fuels. There's something about this democratization argument that I find quite compelling. Yes. And I want to go into some of those options in terms of retrofitting of those of us who are living in older cities. You've mentioned their reliance on petrol states. And I believe you had this very compelling passages in your book if you'd like to share about Putin. Yes. Well, the more I thought this through, and I certainly checked it with a few other people that know the game. This thing to make sense. Basically, the arguments I set out is that in a world running on clean energy with those five things that I described earlier, running the energy system, there's no way that Vladimir Putin could have melted his assaults on Ukraine. So I'll go through that if I may then from the book. So, over two decades, Vladimir Putin and his circle of oligarchs played a very smart game. Incrementally, they built up Europe's dependence on energy imports from Russia, but secure any gas. Once oil and gas pipelines are in place, supplying and receiving companies signed long term deals with the blessing of the governments and the assumption is that the fuel will always flow, which means there's no reason to develop a plan B. Now, this all worked fine until it didn't. We used to phrase over a barrel, arguably over a pipeline would be more appropriate, but every barrel of oil and thermal gas blowing east to west from Russia into Europe, money flowed west to east, building up the personal wealth of oligarchs and filling Russia's war chest. Perhaps Putin had learned from the earliest years of his KGB career, when the Soviet Union's international sales of oil and gas funded its Cold War arsenal for the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan. Meanwhile, his ambition to re-fold Ukraine into some kind of greater Russia was solidifying. Whether European politicians generally did see it or chose not to, who knows, did reliance on Russian fuel imports make it harder to see? Events offered Putin a leg up. The COVID-19 pandemic reduced oil demand globally, producers turned down the taps for spoken maintenance and slowed the development of new fields. Then, a cold winter boosted demand beyond expectations, prices rose and across Europe, citizens and consumers, and both words are important in this context, felt the pinch. Russia squeezed supplies, claiming maintenance issues on the Nord Stream pipelines, prices rose further, OPEC plus, the cartel of producers, which conveniently includes Russia, opted not to increase production to bring prices down. Then on 24th February 2022, Putin began his attempt to take up over the Ukraine. If the calculation was that the EU would crumble before energy price spikes and the spectra of shortages, it was obviously wrong. But the disruption to living standards and the wider economy has been the most important geopolitical event in Europe since the opening of the Iron Curtain, and of course the impacts have been felt elsewhere too, while European citizens worried about the lights going out due to lack of gas. In parts of Asia, that actually happened, with governments unable to pay as much as Europeans for precious tankers of liquefied natural gas. The invasion has pushed up food prices around the world, with dire consequences for the poorest. So, in a world that had already gone through the clean energy transition, how would things have played out? Virtually every country would be powering itself using mainly wind and solar electricity. Batteries, electric vehicles, heat pumps and electrolyzers would complete the system alongside wires, transformers and so on. All of these components are simple to make, and as free of security concerns as touchsters and TV sets, they can be made anywhere and traded everywhere. Now, if one country or one company controlled global production of the world's solar panels or batteries say, then it could, in principle, withhold exports or massively hike up price. But in a world already running on clean energy, businesses, citizens and governments would only be buying solar panels and batteries to replace those that were getting old. So if a supplier tried this kind of blackmail, we'd simply put our upgrade plans on hold, we'd give the units we have a bit of TLC and we'd solder on, just as we do now when we can't quite afford that new car, that new fridge or that new T-shirt. You make do. As you carry on, they can do for as long as you need to, a year, two years, five years. Meanwhile, the country or company attempting to hold you to ransom has gone bust because it isn't selling anything, while entrepreneurs in neighbouring towns have set up factories and are busy filling the market for you. And it could, in principle, be a raw materials blockade, whether this would have an adverse impact on manufacturers, but again, customers could, to a large extent, ride it out while manufacturers found other sources of supply, including from recycling. It might not be ideal, but it would be manageable. So I rest on the contention that in a world that had already gone through the clean energy transition, Vladimir Putin could not have nurtured Europe's dependence on Russia, could not have filled war chests, could not have attempted to blackmail the EU into submission, and would not have been able, therefore, to attempt the invasion of Ukraine. Well, it's a very compelling argument, and I think, as you say, it's completely feasible, it's desirable. And it's something that you also have expanded upon with your policy report for the environment of peace. Yes, this is a report that I was fortunate enough to take part in writing a couple of years ago, courtesy of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. The report's out there, available for download, it's called Environment of Peace. And it's, I think, a landmark report linking environmental destruction to conflict risk through all kinds of mechanisms, and linking peace-building and environmental restoration. And in total, the reports run to many hundreds of pages, but there's a 50-page report that I wrote it in. And the links, some of them are quite obvious, and others are a little bit more subtle. So if you have, let's say, a conflict situation, and you have refugees who set up camp in a new area where there are already people, the refugees and the people may be in conflict for some resource that's very basic, such as firewood. So then you have the risk, not only a more strife between the two communities, but more to degradation, through more taking of firewood, which then exacerbates deforestation, you get problems with water causes, all of this kind of stuff. So that stuff, I think, is fairly easy to understand, but there's other things that are a little bit more subtle. If we go back to 2010, there was an event in Russia, not a political event this time, and an event in the US that both contributed to conflict risk in another area of the world. So in Russia, there was a major heat went, decimated the wheat harvest. So much so that Russia decided to ban wheat exports to ensure that there was enough wheat for Russians to consume, and Russia's one of the major wheat exporters in the world. The United States, meanwhile farmers and production companies were being encouraged through subsidies to turn more agricultural production into biofuel, which again meant there was less wheat available to go on to the global market. So these two things together, plus some speculation by traders in wheat, caused the international wheat price to spike. This put up the price of bread and things in North Africa, that part of the Arab world, were already pretty febrile because people were getting fairly fed up with their governments. So the price of bread was a catalyst for the outbreak of conflict in some of these countries. So here you have a heat wave in Russia, which actually was linked to climate change by scientists. So climate change made the seat wave more likely, made the wheat shortage more likely. Over in the US, we had a response to climate change. The idea of stimulating biofuel production policies weren't introduced terribly well, were terribly thought through, but nevertheless, without climate change and the burning of fossil fuels wouldn't have had a need for this kind of policy, and they elevate the conflict risk in the Arab world. So that's an example of the types of complex compound risks that we're likely to see more of as climate change progresses, along with deforestation, changes to the water supply, reduction of fish stocks around the world, and all the other aspects of environmental decline that we see today. Yes, fish and other seafood products provide vital nutrients for more than 3 billion people around the globe. But yeah, it's so complex. Then what are the difficulties faced by these traditional political parties in terms of adapting to new climate realities? And I'm thinking now we've just had, well, there's a kind of compound question. We just had the majority of labor in the UK election, but maybe answer that question first. Yes, there are short-term things, and there are long-term things. And there's a role for international institutions, as well as national governments. So in the short term, let's put a sticking plastic on the issue. The main recommendations that come out of the report are, for example, environmental peace building, where you try and tackle an environmental issue alongside conflict resolution is something that could be used a lot more, and you meet United Nations agencies and other organizations can really take this on board and build this into all of their operation. So that's some of the short-term stuff, but the longer term stuff, the number one thing is to just get off fossil fuels, because all of our using fossil fuels, we're going to be chucking carbon dioxide into the air and causing climate change to progress further. And with climate change, you've got the impacts that you kind of know about that are fairly predictable. So sea level rise, for example, the disappearance of glaciers in mountain ranges, which is going to affect water availability for farmers and just people to drink, for example, which is relatively predictable, but you also bring in new risks that, by definition, you cannot foresee people who build computer models of the climate and try and project what will happen in the future. Once you get to a certain level of climate change, once you get beyond about two-ish degrees, it's just really hard to predict, because you've got nothing to calibrate it against. And I'm not sure that what your computer models are chucking out is sensible or not. So you've got these known risks and they've got these unknown risks as well. And the only feasible way to reduce that long-term risk is by stopping burning in fossil fuels. Simple as that. My name is Daniela. I study psychology and women's and gender studies at Columbia University, and I see much of my learning and involvement in extracurricular activities linked to how individual bodies and minds connect, to develop, enrich, and advance collective efforts with implications for our larger communities. In review of what has been discussed, I find myself fascinated by the democratization of access to energy through the use of renewables like solar and wind power. This would definitely bring about change in the fundamental ways a society relies on its governing body and suppliers. It would alter the power dynamics that, as Richard Black states, large corporations and oligarchs wield over the geopolitical scene and individual's lives. This statement makes me think of a cause I took during my freshman year of college, which showcased brilliant theory connecting numerous movements throughout history, such as the feminist, indigenous, queer, and environmental liberation movements. I find that the content of today's podcast relates to the de-growth movement as well, which focuses on leaving a smaller ecological footprint by reducing mass consumption and reinforcing local economies and communities. While there is, of course, a remarkable opportunity for market innovation and transition, I hope that in moving towards clean energies, we also learn to discern what and how much is being manufactured and how it is being distributed. To ensure less waste and more equal access to products that provide quality living, Richard Black's significant contribution to climate activism and policy through creating the energy and climate intelligence unit, and now, in his current position at Ember, communicates that the work is ongoing and worthwhile. As citizens who engage in a plethora of causes, it is vital to think of problem-solving and contribution, a circular and not linear paths. This also applies to the arts. As a dancer, I think viewing a piece as an evolving manifestation of thought and feeling holds much more power than expecting to create a finite and therefore limited pattern of its movement. And now, back to the interview. So you were a director and you're still a senior advisor at the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit in the UK, and you're also a senior global advisor in the Clean Energy Think Tank Ember. So are you optimistic about in labour winning the popular vote in the UK, and how do you think it will affect or advance climate policy? Yeah, so it was interesting. While writing the book, I was freelance at the time, hence, I was able to do things like write the Environment and Peace Policy Report. But during the course of writing the book, I took up a full-time job with Ember, which is a global clean energy think tank, working on the cutting edge of understanding the energy transition. And as you said, I do still retain an associate status with the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit. The thing was, isn't it UK? Well, I was running the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit since 2014. We saw the Conservative Party, which was in power for the whole time I was running the organisation, really embrace clean energy. And they did so for a number of reasons. The economic arguments transmitted. They got a hearing. They realised that these were the industries of the future, particularly offshore wind. And they wanted the UK to be at the cutting edge. They saw that it would bring down energy bills, basically. And there was also an element of global solidarity. Theresa May government, for example, very principled politician wants to do the right thing by other countries. This was part of her sort of profit on global solidarity, European solidarity as well. They also realised that it was popular across the country. opinion poll after opinion poll keeps coming up. People love renewable energy. They really don't like fossil fuels. And they really want Britain to be a leader in climate change. So until the end of the Theresa May government and into the Boris Johnson government, which of course included the hosting of United Nations Climate Summit in Glasgow, COP26, all that time the Conservatives were at least as far advanced on this a bit later. Obviously, there have been a couple of years of what one could only politely describe as turmoil in the government headed by Liz Truss and Rishi Sumer and indeed the last days of Johnson as well. I think what we saw was a certain element of the Conservative Party basically trying to use clean energy and climate change as a wedge issue that we're trying to use it along with everything that they described as woke to create a sort of difference between them and the Labour Party and the Lebdense and so on. I always found this was a really crazy tactic because just look at the opinion polls. Manning firstly obvious that if you want a large chunk of the British public to vote for you, you better be putting forward policy measures and rhetoric that are actually in tune with what they actually think. But somehow they persuaded themselves that scrapping clean energy schemes was a politically good idea. It never was. And so that's the reason why Labour coming into power is potentially very progressive for the UK. You know, five years ago, it would have made no difference. Parties through exactly the same place, but it's because of these two years of this really crazy anti-woke stuff that we're in a much better position and already just in the first few days of Labour coming into power, they've talked about lifting the de facto ban that there's been in place on onshore wind power, for example, which is a very, very sensible thing to do. You'll see lots of other interesting bits of policy coming forward as well, because for sure they've had a long time to think about this. Well, I'm looking forward to that. Well, yeah, it doesn't make sense not listening to what the voters are telling them. And this is just a bit of sidebar, but I discovered some things in your book like the Green Tea Party, which we were talking about woke in the combination of green policies. I had never heard about that, but that was just interesting. Yeah, they were fascinating to me. And again, got me thinking about the different ways in which clean energy brings advantages. So the Green Tea Party, I'm not sure if it's really still a thing, but a few years ago, it was a particular division of the Tea Party, which was the ultra populist, generally Republican alliance movements. So these are not people generally who really care that much about climate change and may not even accept climate change. What they dislike is big government and big corporations. Yeah, if you equip yourself, for example, with a solar panel, with a heat pump, with a storage battery, and with an electric vehicle, you don't need to be connected to the extra steep grid. You don't need the big corporations to supply you with oil and gas and heating oil or whatever it may be. You can become totally self-sufficient. And this was the real appeal to the Green Tea Party of clean energy. You get to make decisions, not the government and not the corporation, you yourself. So fascinating thing. And that got me thinking, is this an advantage for other people as well? And absolutely it is. Utility bills are pretty high in a lot of countries. Energy bills make up a substantial chunk of people's outgoings. All the while we're in the fossil fuel world, the ultimate prices are set by the fossil fuel companies. The major oil and gas companies globally, it's a cartel. They set what the oil price will be. And everyone who needs an oil product basically has to pay it. If you can afford to make the upfront investments, you equip yourself with, you know, the solid palm of the battery, the heat palm of the electric vehicle, not the hydrogen and electrolyzer, that's a bit special. If you have all those four things, you can live largely independently of the utility. And you won't need to go to a petrol station to fill up the car. You can fill it up at home or sit in my car park or whatever. So it confers on you this ability to be independent and make your own decisions about what you're going to do in a way that you can't really do in a fossil fuel economy. And also briefly, you explained there's a misunderstanding by many of the gileijon movements, which people face broadly as like being an anti-green movement, but really, it's more like the forgotten. So the contrarians and the energy contrarians and their friends in the libertarian think type world are very quick to seize on anything and paint it as an anti-green measure. And this is what we saw with the gileijon movement in France. The spark for it was basically a doubling of the price of diesel, huge rise, which was brought about by two factors. There was a spike in the international oil price, which got very little attention, and there was a new tax, which government in France put on, which was the focus of attention. And people took the street and there was some pretty serious riots and so on. But when you actually unpick what the gileijon were protesting about, it wasn't anti-green at all. The manifesto has many things in it that are green and almost nothing that's anti-green. Really what it's about is the people who feel marginalized, who felt forgotten, that Brazilian elite didn't care about their lives, didn't do anything for them. And it was the diesel price spike that just was the catalyst that turned all of this from frustration into violence. And there have been a few academic papers that have been written reviewing the gileijon and actually showing it wasn't an anti-environmental movement. The point about covering this in the book is that the gileijon has spooked politicians certainly in Europe and has lead to even some people in the green movement, saying, "Oh, I've got to be very careful. You can't do things like that. You'll upset people." And actually, we need to understand that it wasn't an anti-green thing. It was spun as an anti-green thing by the very people who are always making anti-green arguments and are very smart in terms of how they go about it. Exactly finding unlikely alliances and communicating, perhaps taking advantage of certain political parties, not listening and then seeing that as a way in to capture hearts and minds. On a personal level, and I know you're in Berlin and we are in these older cities. I don't know if you're in a contemporary building or an older one, but my building is over 400 years old, so I still have to wait and I'm still reliant on largely nuclear energy and very efficient. My consumption is really low, but how could we advance towards being completely renewable and our energy consumption? With a city, a city always needs to import energy in some way, but of course, there are things the one can do. I mean, making the buildings more efficient, so they waste less energy. This depends a lot where you live. So here in Germany, in my flat, we're very energy efficient. Most of the buildings in Berlin have thick walls, very, very good double glazed windows. They have blocks of flats anyway, rather than houses. They tend to be quite efficient. The house I used to have, in North London, completely different, leaky, terrible in terms of energy efficiency. So how you retrofit things, how you deal with this, it depends very much on where you are. One of the best things to do is to get it right from the beginning and actually to build buildings that are not only just energy neutral, but actually generate more energy than they actually use. But yes, so on transport, there's no rocket science about this. It's public transport with electrified buses running on green electricity, solar roofs, and it's if you like cycling, then it's cycling. If you like walking, it's walking, but there's no one-size-fits-all prescription for this. Yes, and you talked about overcoming the political and economic challenges and the complexity of having this unified and proactive approach to secure a better clean energy future. Yes, interesting to me, if we look back at the 1970s, which was when the Arab oil states sort of first flexed their muscles and had embargoes and so on, the arguments that were being deployed at that point in terms of energy efficiency and renewables were largely around the security of supply. So basically, if we use wind and solar panel, we need to import less and it's more reliable and so on and so forth. That kind of argument then went out of fashion, I would say, and the arguments have always been about climate change and with electric vehicles, about air pollution and so on. So it's been very interesting just in the last few years, basically, since Vladimir Putin sent his tanks across the border, to see some of these other arguments re-emerging and perhaps the most startling example of that was where a couple of years ago, when Frustian Lintner, who is the finance minister of Germany and comes from the Free Democrats, which are a very libertarian party, he referred to renewables as freedom energy. Now, he subsequently had to walk back on that in rhetorical terms because it wasn't popular with someone in his party, but he's totally right. He's 100% right, if Germany ran on a 100% clean energy, and by the way, it's not doing badly, we're really getting up to 60%, so it's not there. If Germany ran on clean energy, we'd have had none of this nonsense of doing deals with gas, problem, and Russia to long-term deals to import gas. That would have meant Germany's could have been far more independent in its foreign policy and sort of act against Russia when it actually needed. And so you just get the age where you're just able to make utter decision as a government because you don't need this endless supply of oil and, yes, coming into your country, the country runs perfectly well without it. And you focus primarily on the most efficient, the fastest growing solar and wind, and you discuss also some of the difficulties or the reasons why the other option to hydropower or some people talk about next-gen nuclear, what you could discuss those other energy options, the renewables primarily, and perhaps also next-gen nuclear. Yeah, so wind and solar are getting cheaper all the time, and especially solar panels, you can just make them anywhere, basically, and the competitive market is something that's really important here. Hydrogen, you're limited by geography. You can only build hydrodams where you've got the right resource. Many of the best areas in the world have already been taken. Climate change is affecting rainfall patterns in some parts of the world. There is social unrest connected with building dams. So hydropower is never going to have that unlimited potential that solar does. Plus, the fact that a hydrodam is basically a huge wall of concrete with a few big machines in it. You don't see the same kinds of price reduction that we've seen with wind and solar because they don't obey rights law. Nuclear, if a country has nuclear reactors, it's very sensible to keep them running as long as possible before closing them. But nuclear, there are really hardly any countries in the world that are really serious about nuclear. China is the only country in the world whose plans include more than 10 new reactors currently. The other countries tend to be the ones that have nuclear weapons because you need to keep each skills and so on there. All the sort of deals done to export from those countries to a few others. But, you know, just for cost reasons, the cost of nuclear power has not really come down itself. It's gone in opposite direction. The cost of hydropower has gone slightly in the opposite direction. Even if thermal is getting slightly more expensive. Meanwhile, wind and solar and batteries just keeps going down and down and down. Nuclear is already substantially more expensive than wind or solar. It's really hard to see. That's all the other concerns around it, how it's going to be a major player in the future. And just talk about some of the new battery technologies that are being developed, you know, to rival lithium-ion batteries in terms of efficiency, cost and sustainability. Yeah, there are just stacks and stacks of new battery designs. In part, it's to make them more efficient, to make the manufacturing process more efficient. In part, it's to avoid using copious quantities of materials where there could be supply chain issues. Lithium, for example, is one where deposits are not super abundant in the world. Copper is another thing you need copper for wiring and stuff as well. So do you want that? What about cobalt? So some manufacturers have deliberately tried to steer away from those materials. And so you've got a combination of cutting-edge scientific research in the lab and development and entrepreneurialism and so on. Just as one example, which I mentioned in the book, lithium batteries are the standard. Also, they're in most electric vehicles, but they're not now in all electric vehicles. The biggest Chinese manufacturer BYD introduced a car called the Seagull last year, which has a sodium battery. And I think we're just going to see more and more diversification. One of the ironies about it is that if you are a free market advocate and users love capitalist competition, you should be totally inanimate of what's happening in the battery world. The best example I can think of in any industry where you've got innovation, competition, and just improvement of products as a result. So it's an exciting place to look at. And so people are more divided than ever with certain segments of the media exploiting our differences, which undermine our ability to tackle challenges large and small. So what are your reflections on the future of journalism in a post-truth world? And how can we combat misinformation and restore trust in institutions to foster a more robust and ethical for the state? Yeah, it's a fascinating, really fascinating question. Donald Trump challenged journalism in a way that I've never seen it quite challenged before. We've always been used to politicians needing sort of media favors and wanting to be regarded well by the media. And therefore, to a certain extent, playing by the rules and opening themselves to scrutiny, Donald Trump said, "I don't care about the mainstream media. I just don't care about them." And he found other ways of getting to his supporters, which were obviously very, very effective and disregard for truth, was a major challenge to newspapers who wanted to be fair and unbiased and weren't used to having the stuff to deal with. It took the American papers a couple of years, I think, to work out how they were going to deal with them. When you combine this with the fact that anything goes on social media, we've got deep fake photographs and deep fake voices and all this kind of stuff, it is, I think, of concern. It absolutely should be of concern. But on the other hand, it's not as though we had unbridled truth and fairness in the old media world. If you look at a lot of the British papers that I've had to do for much of my career, they're not seeing things through an independent lens at all. They don't lie in the same way that Trump lies, but there's definitely a point of view and there are things that will not find their way into some of the major papers. We can look at the way that some of the right-wing papers now in the UK will cover the first days of Sir Keir Stalmer's government. You can already see what the attack lines are, you can already see how this is going to be sort of relentless in quiz days when they saw and so forth. So it's not like we're coming from a perfect world, that's for sure. What I think it does is for anyone who cares about this stuff, it plays a real reliance on the kind of institutions that have to be generally accurate and generally fair and independent for whatever reason. So you've got public service broadcasts to set it kind of obvious ones where, like the BBC, that are working within a charter that basically prescribes independence. I'm very, very fortunate that I spent pretty much all of my journalists that create in the BBC, very, very free place to work. You've got other newspapers that basically newspaper supplies a niche and so there is a niche out there of people that are reasonably well informed and they want stuff to be broadly accurate and interesting as well. So in the UK context, for example, you've got the times that fits into that term niche. People subscribing to the times, it seems to me, don't want falsehoods. They want intelligent analysis of important issues, stuff that's relevant to financial institutions, such as the financial times or voices, they, again, have to be pretty much on the money because their audience is well informed and they're not going to pay for rubbish. So there are definitely a lot of islands of sanity out there. Meanwhile, perhaps the most worrying aspects of this whole thing is the number of people that don't engage with news at all. My mum has quite a few acquaintances like this who simply are not interested at all in what the news is and if that grows, then that becomes a massive problem, I think. Indeed. And with the increase of synthetic media, we'll be seeing this growing influence on our elections. I'm of two minds of it and I'm wondering what your reflections are and AI and how that's changing our faith in institutions and journalism, but at the same time, then there's also maybe democratizing education and maybe allowing educational pathways for others. So how do we govern that and ensure that we minimize the risks and there's so many things there, but it's heralding perhaps also with it being a new, great game. We're talking about the end of oil and there's the new, great game for AI being owned by a handful of major multinationals. It's actually true, but I guess no one needs AI in the same way that we need oil or we need food. So I think, in that point of view, it's a lot easier. No, for me, I find AI fascinating, lightly scary. I find that the amounts of discussion of setting it off in a carefully thought through direction is way lower than the amounts of fascination with the latest thing that it can actually do. Often fiction should be our guide to these things or can be a valuable guide to these things. If we go back to Isaac Asimov and his three Lords of Robotics and all these three very fundamental points that he said should be embedded in all automas there, there's no discussion of that around AI, like none, I personally find that quite a hole in the discourse that we're having. Oh, that's so interesting and I'm glad that you brought up the arts there because we've been talking so much about like existential risks and I'm wondering in your pathway to becoming a journalist, what are your reflections on the importance of the arts and of telling stories? Oh, well, journalism is really about telling stories and the sort of pinnacle of journalism I think is where you can take something that's serious and important and impactful and you can put it in a form that will engage people. This is really the secret of it and yeah, I grew up as you mentioned in radio and really brilliant speech radio is eavesdropping on a conversation where someone is telling the story about something. So it's very, very important to everything that's done. And I think in this field of energy and climate change, the contrarians have got the easy job because the ingredients of their stories resonate. So it won't work. It's going to cost too much. They're trying to make you have something that you don't want. Let's stick with the old ways, the ones that we never say as opposed to this can work. And here's an explanation of how it can work. And yes, it may be more expensive, but we know the price is going to come down because of XYZ and climate change. This is the increase in risks that's going to come. It's a much more difficult story to tell and that's one of the reasons why the contrarians have been relatively successful in the past. But it's also turning around now because of all the other advantages of the clean energy system that's cheap, it's popular. You can do it. So the story of clean energy is turning around much more, but it's just where you came in. I mean, there's been a lot of music in my life. I can't draw for Toffee, but I can play musical instruments and it's been a constant joy throughout my life. And I'm still listening to new composers and new musicians and enjoying all of that and I hope that never goes away. So it's very enriching and in a lot of the biggest insights I've ever had in any parts of my life have come from literature, literature takes the world and looks at it through a certain window and tells the story in a way that you might not have thought of doing it yourself. And so by engaging in it, you just get richer, I think, in terms of the way that you look at the world yourself. Indeed, it increases that sense of empathy, that internal landscape, I think, with literature. That's what I value most about it, and then with music, I feel it's also another way of tuning into the sonic landscape of the natural world as well and all the beings that we share this planet with. And finally, as you think about the future, the importance of education and the kind of world we're leaving for the next generation, what would you like young people to know, preserve and remember? I would like young people to have a sort of growing up experience that allows them to be children as long as they need to be children. There's something very, very pure about the curiosity of a toddler and the way they interact with the world and the open eyes, amazements of seven and eight-year-olds as they discover things that they hadn't seen before, their first big waterfall, their first encounter with a giraffe, whatever it may be. It's a very pure way of looking at the world, and I think that child bits now have become a little bit depressed by the time it's a good idea for a child to have a mobile phone, then that's already stuff that's coming into their life that can be a pressure. We know the kind of pressures this exerts on teenagers, so I just want them to have the freedom to grow up, basically, as kids and just not be forced into a sort of early adult, if that makes any sense. Well, I think it absolutely does, and what we want is the pureness of having a curious childhood where we can experience the beauty in one of the natural worlds. That's a very important message, so thank you Richard Black for all you do to educate and inspire individuals, corporations, policymakers, and people of all ages by awakening a desire to take action, regenerate the planet, and restore human connections with the rest of nature we can improve well-being and create a better tomorrow. We all live on One Planet We Call Home. Thank you for adding your voice to One Planet Podcast and the creative process. Thank you very much for having me on, it's been an absolute pleasure. One Planet Podcast is supported by the Jan Michalski Foundation. This interview was conducted by Mia Funk with the participation of collaborating universities and students. Associate interview producers on this episode were Sam Myers and Daniela Corlois Flores. Associate text editor was Sophia Rieser. One Planet podcast is produced by Mia Funk. Additional production support by Sophie Garnier. Theme music is written and performed by Juan Sanchez. We hope you've enjoyed this program, if you'd like to get involved in One Planet podcasts and be part of the climate change solution, just drop us a line at team@oneplanetpodcast.org. Thank you for listening. (soft music)
