308: Mistakes, Mistruths and Misinformation: Climate's biggest myths debunked

Paul: [00:21:03] Okay, so I've got a I've got a challenge for myself. So I'm now going to I'm going to go with my favorite myth, which is CO2 isn't a pollutant. It's natural. So let's see how we go.

Pundit: [00:21:12] So it's a perfectly natural thing. And in fact we're in a bit of a carbon dioxide famine. Now, if you look over geological history, it's been much higher than now most of the time.

Pundit: [00:21:23] The one thing that drives me absolutely potty is what I hear that carbon dioxide is a pollutant. That's what they tell us. That clearly is absolutely nuts.

Christiana: [00:21:36] Good luck with that one.

Paul: [00:21:39] Co2 is indeed natural, and it's essential.

Paul: [00:21:42] In fact, I once sat down with my dear father, who was a bit of a scientist, and we worked out about 7% of human emissions are humans breathing out. And but we don't talk about that in any of the calculations, because the only way to deal with it is to have less humans. But I'm just throwing that in there to say that we're part of the carbon cycle. But obviously CO2 is.

Christiana: [00:21:59] All life is part of the carbon.

Paul: [00:22:00] All life is.

Christiana: [00:22:01] Part of life. Humans, the flora, the founder, the animal kingdom, the blanket. All life is part of the.

Paul: [00:22:07] Well, maybe not the new silicon life, but that's another whole, another whole conversation. But yes, indeed, I have to agree with you there. Now, the reason I wanted to pick this up now and not talk about my second most favorite one, which is greenwash, is the link to the temperature changes because of course CO2. Yes, it is good for plants and plants to breathe CO2, but it's about the ranges. And I think the key point that I want to make when I was trying to think about this is what we have at the moment is an absolutely excessive amount of CO2. We've gone into the Earth's crust and we've dug up fantastically enormous amounts of coal, oil and gas, and we've combusted that in the atmosphere. It's burnt, merged with oxygen atoms and made CO2 and filled up the sky, such as? We'd gone up from something, you know, that preindustrial 170 to 300 parts per million of CO2 to over 420 today. And it keeps rising. The blanket on the bed keeps getting thicker, the glass of the greenhouse keeps getting thicker, and that is making the world hotter and hotter. So alongside it being natural, the real question is how much pollution do you want in your or your children's lungs? How much airborne particulates would you like in your lungs? How much would you like the world to get hotter? How much would you like the sea levels to rise, the storms to become more intense? How many more heat waves would he like? How many more droughts would you like? It's really. What would you like today? I'll be your server here in planet Earth. Doomsday edition.

Christiana: [00:23:32] Doomsday edition? Yeah, but I think that's really helpful, Paul. Because it's very difficult for people to understand parts per million.

Paul: [00:23:40] Yeah.

Christiana: [00:23:42] I mean, honestly, you know, when you say, okay, we're over 400 and 20 p.m. and we shouldn't be, who understands PM other than it's the afternoon if you just say PM. But that's not what we're talking about. So in fact, even a gigaton of CO2. Who understands what a gigaton of CO2 is? Can we please use concepts that are commonly understood around the kitchen table, not around the lab table? Hmm. Paul, I don't know if I have told you that I actually know the person who invented the term clean coal.

Paul: [00:24:20] A long time ago. You told me, the story told me.

Christiana: [00:24:23] And I thought it was actually both terrible and brilliant. Because if CO2 is a pollutant or it's natural, which is the topic that you're trying to debunk when you take it, then to the dirtiest of all fossil fuels, coal, and you invent the term clean coal, pretending that it is non-polluting, and you put together a whole campaign to get, you know, including little, what do they call baseball caps? Yeah, yeah, big banners and all of this. And the term clean coal is known to all of us, isn't it?

Paul: [00:25:03] We definitely had multiple.

Christiana: [00:25:04] Occasions until my good friend invented this. It is really, to me, just astonishing how pollution can be disguised as being natural and in this case, even being clean. Because if there is one fossil fuel that is the highest pollutant, the highest concentration of carbon, it's coal. And if there's one thing that is a total oxymoron is the term clean coal. And yet we don't use it. You and I don't use it, but it is very popularly used adjacent to natural gas, right? Yes. Coal is a natural result of the fact that huge dinosaurs and all of the trees that existed then died and decomposed into coal. Yes. One of the results of the decomposition of prehistoric life is this gas? So yes, they're both natural because they come from natural sources, but that doesn't mean that they're non-polluting. So you see, that's the difficulty that we begin to confound what is natural and what is polluting. So it's about putting these concepts apart and understanding that what we are being faced with is very, very smart people, very smart people who are manipulating our understanding or in fact, manipulating our learning curve because we're still learning about all of this and because it is not clear to all of us, certainly not to me yet, and to no one, then they take advantage of the fact that we're still learning, we're still trying to understand, and they manipulate our process of going up the learning curve.

Paul: [00:27:05] Is this the Outrage and Optimism podcast? Because if it is, let me tell you my little bit of outreach here. I mean, you can stick any two words together. You're going to have friendly murder or nice murder, but I don't think those two words are necessarily going to cause people to start going off murdering people. You can say tasty poop or scummy poop or something, but I don't think that's going to cause people to go off and start emptying their toilets for for dinner. But but I do think that clean coal takes enormous liberty with the trust of what I'm going to call the business system. You know, typically you have a sense that businesses are only going to communicate in a, in a sort of fairly responsible way. I mean, you know, if you make claims for, you know, some unsafe product, that it's safe, you can get in trouble. If you ever want to see the government really coming to terms with this. Go into one of those little cigarette sections of an airport, duty free, and you walk and you have to go round a corner.

Paul: [00:27:56] And then there are just pictures of ghastly human tumors from, you know, people dying horribly. And that's what we've done with cigarettes, because the governments really have decided that cigarettes are a bad idea and they want to discourage you. But if an industry comes along and says this kind of coal or this kind of coal burning is clean coal, or if natural gas, which has got a funny history as a term, but if today everyone's saying natural gas, natural gas, natural gas, you trust them that it's good or at least must be better in some way. And it clearly isn't isn't. Just use the words. And was it not client Earth that managed to get that Polish company to stop using that term eco coal or something? They had a kind of coal that was in small chunks in green packets and it was called eco. So I'm going to say that the the mother issue here is corporate integrity. And our assumption that that the corporate voice has integrity, or at least some basic sense of right and wrong.

Christiana: [00:28:49] Who is assuming that one?

Paul: [00:28:51] Well, once I, a younger person, wrote a book called Beautiful Corporations in 2000, uh, published by Financial Times, Prentice Hall, and and that person was me, but I had I had hoped I had hoped that there might be better angels in the business system that could be found and expected.

Christiana: [00:29:11] And in all fairness, there are corporations who are being very responsible and truly doing their absolute darndest to bring down their emissions and their pollution that they are contributing to and have a really clear baseline and are bringing, bringing that down. So let's not fall into the simplistic habit of just putting all private sector into one basket. All corporations, they're not all this double faced. There are some whose respect has been earned.

Paul: [00:29:46] Okay. So now we're going to go, if we may, to a completely different kind of outrage.

Christiana: [00:29:50] Okay.

Paul: [00:29:50] Go for it. And I'm going to channel a very, I think interesting and admirable public relations expert. What this person said to me is the greatest myth and the most damaging one is the real problem is corporate greenwashing and lies. He said that the most enormous damage has been done by people in the climate movement battering corporate action. The problem, however, is that that, combined with now what Trump has done, has created this enormous backlash where corporations and investors are saying, wait a minute, there's no upside here for this. There's all downside. We can be attacked. We can be attacked by the government, we can be attacked by civil society, we can.

Christiana: [00:30:36] Be.

Paul: [00:30:37] Attacked by everybody. And what we do is simple plan lets turtle pull our legs in, put our head in all under the shell. Get rid of the Chief sustainability Officer. That person is the person who's going to get in trouble around here and just do nothing. And that's what's happened. So I want to assert here that we really need to think deeply about the fact that corporations, many of them, have made numerous commitments. They are under no obligations whatsoever to keep. And we've said your commitments aren't good enough, and we've tried to sort of stamp on their feet. I don't know, how does it seem to you?

Christiana: [00:31:10] Well, this is reminiscent of the series that Paul and Fiona McGrath did, which was entitled momentum Versus perfection.

Siri: [00:31:20] I wasn't able to share that for you.

Paul: [00:31:22] Thank you Siri. What you were actually doing there and I hope the mic caught it is pointing out that was Tom and Fiona McGrath rather than Paul and Fiona. Thank you Siri.

Christiana: [00:31:32] Okay. I didn't even know that Siri was on on this computer. Yes, it was indeed Tom and Fiona McGrath. In that deep dive, Tom and Fiona speak to many different people about this. What is more motivating to take the actions and implement the investments and the policies that are necessary? Is it the expectation of perfection? Or is it the recognition of constant improvement, otherwise known as momentum? To be very transparent on this podcast, we happen to have chosen to support the momentum argument because we actually think and in our experience, and I think this is very parallel to the CDP experience, to our experience in global optimism, certainly what we have discussed on this podcast. We actually think that there is more motivation to become a more responsible actor if your efforts are recognized, honored and measured with integrity. The fact is, there is no perfect human being. There is no perfect corporation. There is no perfect institution. There is no perfect United Nations. Well, Where does this expectation of perfection come from? I just find it very unhelpful. But to be honest, Paul, I was a perfectionist for many years, especially expecting perfection from myself. And over the years I have learned it's not helpful to me, and it certainly is not helpful to expect perfection from anyone else. Because you know what? We're not going to get it. So to recognize that there's constant improvement, that we're putting left foot forward, then the right foot, then the left, and maybe we take two steps back and three forward. But the fact that a corporation, a person, a city or country is making sincere efforts to deal with a very complex issue to the best of their ability under the circumstances that they are dealt. In that moment, I think it deserves recognition and appreciation and not whacking them on the head, but that's a choice that we have made and not everyone agrees with us.

Paul: [00:34:02] And I think there is a difference between whacking them on the head and what I'm going to call sort of gentle encouragement. My general evaluation of corporations, having worked with them collectively over a couple of decades, is that they are a herd species, and you want to move the herd and you don't want to smash the herd up. So it breaks up and goes disparate. I believe that the greatest coaches of corporations are the corporations, and they will lead each other in a direction if they are supported and encouraged to do so. But if you go start saying, well, you're a fool and that's rubbish and you're evil, then the herd will break up. And some of the most potentially powerful in actors of the changes we need to see will be gone from us for five years, ten years, 20 and we can't afford it.

Christiana: [00:34:44] We're doing it right across the the space, right? We we certainly do it on a corporate level. And the accusations to corporations of Greenwashing very often do not recognize the efforts that are ongoing. We have to recognise that they are insufficient, but we should also recognise that there are efforts being made. Same thing for individuals because we again, we hold ourselves to the expectation of perfection. And so, you know, anybody who I don't know takes a flight. I take quite a few flights for my work. Anyone who drives, even a.

Paul: [00:35:24] Car, has more than two children.

Christiana: [00:35:26] Or has more than two children, thank you. Or even has one child. You know, we do get to some extremes that I guess we decide what perfection is for ourselves, and then we hold other people up to those standards. And that's unfair in my book. It's wait a second, where were you one year, five years, ten years ago? And how much have you progressed? And that, to me is what counts. Not are you perfect now? Because as I said before, there is no perfect human being. I do not see anyone who's sprouting little white wings from their back because they're angelic and they have absolutely no footprint on this planet. We will always have a footprint. The question is, how deep is that footprint and how deep was it yesterday and how deep will it be tomorrow? And if we are constantly moving in the direction of a less and less deep footprint, a lighter footprint, then we're making progress.

Paul: [00:36:29] Yeah, well, you know, Tom is not here to make fun of me, but you do know I like to end these matters always with a quote from Churchill, which I think typifies this. And I hope you'll like this one. He said, we are so few. The core is so great that we cannot afford to weaken each other in any way. Okay, Christiana, do you have a myth?

Christiana: [00:36:47] You know, one thing that I hear very often, Paul is climate is such a systemic issue. It is such a huge, huge challenge that humanity has never had the scale of a challenge like this that wouldn't earth can lonely little me. What can I do about it? So many people feel overwhelmed by the scale of the issue and then fall into denial or flight or freeze, which is our typical for.

Paul: [00:37:23] None of them. Tremendously helpful.

Christiana: [00:37:24] None of them tremendously helpful. But it's the three reactions that we humans have honed over hundreds, if not thousands of years.

Speaker12: [00:37:34] China, India and the US contribute to more than half of global emissions. Australia just 1%. If Australia went green tomorrow, I don't think it's going to make any difference.

Pundit: [00:37:42] Now let's get to Greta Thunberg.

Pundit: [00:37:44] This is a young girl who has done nothing and I just need to really reiterate this. She's famous for doing nothing other than sitting outside the. I think it was the Parliament building. Right. So she's got no credentials, no education. She's a professional activist from the age of, you know, a teenager. When I say no education, she's not a PhD. She hasn't done years of in-field study. She's simply a teenager.

Christiana: [00:38:07] So all of those reactions actually only need to paralysis. Whether we fight or freeze or flee, it only leads to paralysis. Because we lose our ground, we lose our anchor in those three. And so for me, it's very much about, okay, where's my anchor? What can I do here? And the fact is that if you look at history, change has always started with individuals. Maybe the way that it was communicated to us or the way history tells it in the history books? It doesn't start as individuals. It starts as, you know, big movements and shifts, et cetera, etc. but individuals play a huge part in having a vision of what is possible. Being consistent in their action, in the direction of what their vision is, and then inviting others to join. And you see that in all the great leaders, political leaders, social movement leaders, environmental leaders, they do they they set out the vision of where they think we ought to go, and then they invite others to follow because they understand that there is an ever expanding ripple effect that they can cause through their vision and their determination to stay on course. And then one person becomes 10 or 100 or 1000. 800,000. And that's how these positive tipping points actually occur. Now, because we are running out of time on climate change, we need both that leadership at the top of corporations, at the top of countries, cities, families.

Christiana: [00:40:04] We need both that leadership from the top as well as behavioural change from the bottom. We need both because we've run out of time. If we were talking 20 or 30 years ago, we would say, okay, what we need is leadership. Yes, we need the leadership, but we also need the behavioural change that each of us can undertake. And hence, in so doing, become leaders for ourselves and for our friends and families and neighbours. So there is at this point, honestly, no. No space. I think, for anyone to say there's nothing I can do. Question what type of energy are you buying? Question What kind of food are you consuming? What are you teaching your family in terms of food consumption? In terms of energy? Where are your savings? Do you know where your savings are? Are they in fossil fuels? Are they in clean technologies? How do you vote? How do you vote at the community level? At the regional level? At the national level? How are you voting? Are you actually in touch with community action that is happening all around you in your neighborhood? It's very easy now with the internet to find out who is the closest person who's actually doing something on climate and and the numbers of actions on climate at the individual or the communal level are practically limitless.

Christiana: [00:41:31] So we do have to make a choice. For me, it really is a choice here. We have to choose whether we're going to You just go with the flow with the default, which currently is a very highly carbonized society economy, behavior. If we're just going to go with the flow or if we're going to decide that we want to make a difference because we have to make that difference until that difference becomes the mainstream, until it is normalized, it is not normalized yet. We have many isolated cases. And when we talked about everything that is going on or went on at the London Climate Action Week, we had such a great list of innovators. Cynthia, who we interviewed, who was one of the 27 students who brought the ICJ case, etc., etc.. So we have many isolated cases of change, of courage, of determination. But low carbon or no carbon is still not mainstreamed. And make no mistake. We need more internal energy to stand up against the mainstream, because status quo is always much easier and more comfortable. You just stay in your comfort zone to make a difference. You have to conjure up more effort and more determination so that that for me, Paul, is a daily choice. Where do I want to put my energy?

Paul: [00:43:04] And I want to offer to two tiny little points on this. One is do you want to be the future you choose, as it were? And how do you want to choose the future? If I can quote the title of the wonderful book you and Tom wrote. But we do accept this principle in a very fundamental way at the ballot box, because essentially no election ever really gets one by one vote. And yet millions of us troop off to the ballot box, because we know there's a bigger principle at stake, and our one vote is part of a bigger principle that we are happy to adhere to. And you've heard me before, perhaps talk about the film pride as a very amazing film. You know, I worked in lesbian and gay equality in 1988. In 1984, there was nothing happening in lesbian gay equality, and a brilliant activist called Mark Ashton. Started supporting the miners in the UK. Lesbians and gays support the miners that were fighting the government. Wonderful film. I think everyone would really enjoy watching, which is based on the true story.

Christiana: [00:43:56] Surprising coalition.

Paul: [00:43:57] Surprising coalition. Point of the story is, you know, many years later, Labour Party conference is looking at enshrining lesbian gay rights into law. It's the miners union that back. So you can make these connections. You can build coalitions across so many different domains. I remember the first time I went as a climate change worker to the Flexitarian Summit conference, and there were all these animal rights people who wanted to get meat out the food system. And there's I'm a climate change person. I want to get meat out of the food system. And we were kind of like, hi, buddy. We we're from different places, but we've got shared goals and finding those connections. Yeah. There's no limit to that. Yeah. Good. Okay. I think we're almost coming to the end. I think I've got one more myth that I wanted to share with you.

Christiana: [00:44:39] Go for it.

Paul: [00:44:40] It's that tackling climate change is too expensive.

Pundit: [00:44:43] You know, at the moment we have this huge burden of of net zero on the whole economy. It is holding everything back.

Pundit: [00:44:52] And that big consulting firm KPMG, just the other day, they confirmed that the cost of net zero to every household would be around £1,000 extra per household every year.

Pundit: [00:45:05] There's a lot of people who accept that climate change is a problem, and that there should be some government action to deal with it. Who nevertheless are realising that the cost of the approach we're taking via net zero is just too much to bear.

Paul: [00:45:16] So my view about tackling climate change is too expensive. If we just start with some simple facts, every $1 spent on climate change adaptation yields up to $4, an economic benefit. Climate disasters are already costing hundreds of billions and are changing the property values around the world. And, you know, spoiler alert I'm just going to keep saying this probably for the rest of my natural life, because that's how we're going to really feel climate change financially. But also, I just want to kind of draw attention to that sentence. Tackling climate change is too expensive. And there was a wonderful economist philosopher called E.F. Schumacher wrote many books, including one called Smallness Beautiful, which is very good. And he said that if an activity is deemed uneconomic in inverted commas, it's right to exist. It's not merely questioned, but actively denied. And I think what he was referring to is that we get confused about money, and we think that things like safety don't have a value, but that, you know, I don't know, some kind of utility like a bigger car or, you know, bigger house or something does have utility. So there are various complicated economic principles here. One of them is that we will be richer in the future and therefore better able to deal with the problem. And this is the so-called discount rate idea. And it suffers from catastrophic Confusions like, for example, that we will be better at doing big engineering in the future than small engineering. So many of the advances in our economy are based on small engineering things like iPhones and stuff. But climate change is causing things like sea level to rise, or is causing the acidity of the oceans to change.

Paul: [00:46:52] Now, people don't appreciate humans are not going to be able to build machines that lower sea level. So are sort of alleged. Increasing wealth is a myth when it comes to very large global engineering problems. And therefore tackling climate change today is absolutely the most cost effective thing to do. And it is ludicrous to say it's too expensive. And I mean, if I can use a sort of clumsy medical metaphor, you know, if somebody has approaching the end of their life, they are normally prepared to spend a very large budget on extending it. That is typically where people are. And I think we need to recognize that we're in very bad health as a planet, and we can't afford not to address climate change. And actually, as increasingly has been shown, the tipping points in the technology have been reached. Solar is 99.9% cheaper than it was in 1975. It's got down 90% in the last ten years. Electric vehicles are clearly better than petrol vehicles. The grids are now running off the sun free of charge. And this this movement is incredibly exciting. So we can be very positive about the future both economically and socially and environmentally. But we have to understand that the notion of too expensive is is an absurd notion. It's like saying, well, it's too expensive to educate your children or it's it's too expensive to to insure your house against the fire. No it isn't. And these are things that people do every single day because they care about the future and they care about each other.

Christiana: [00:48:18] I'm reminded of the stern review. Yes. You know, Sir Nicholas Stern was a brilliant economist who brought out his 700 page.

Paul: [00:48:28] Should it be 900 pages? But he snipped it down to 700 to get it through that little window box.

Christiana: [00:48:33] And it was published in 2006.

Paul: [00:48:35] Yeah, I know, it was a brilliant piece of work.

Christiana: [00:48:36] Oh my gosh. It was so groundbreaking at the time because he was looking exactly at this issue. He was saying, is it really true that it is more expensive to tackle climate change than not? And his conclusion was, you know, pretty clear. He said, basically without action, the cost to society, the economy, to humans, etc., etc. the cost of climate change will be equivalent to losing at least 5% of global gross domestic product each year. Wow. Each year. Whereas addressing climate change would cost at that time 2006 1% of global GDP. So then several years later, he actually upped it and said, well, you know what? Since you haven't done any progress, my friends is now going to cost you 2% of GDP. The point is that no one is arguing that we don't have to invest into the new technologies, into the new economy. But what we are arguing is that that investment is a lower cost investment than paying the price and the cost of the destruction of human lives, infrastructure, environment, natural environment. That cost is always going to be much greater than investing into the into climate action. But Paul, here's my question to you. That is true at the macro level. Is it also true at the individual level?

Paul: [00:50:17] Oh well, we're going to get into quite deep philosophy quite quickly here.

Christiana: [00:50:20] Well sorry about that. But maybe we have to.

Paul: [00:50:24] I'm a human and I'm part of the replicating organisms on this planet. And I am. We are strong and happy and are able to do lots of things together. You get me entirely on my own. You put me on little desert island. I'm going to last a week. I'm going to last a day. I'm going to fall apart. So I am intimately part of this system. And so, although I may tell myself that if I pile up a whole bunch of money in some kind of bank account and I can kind of, you know, move myself into some kind of golden castle, it's bullshit. I'm entirely dependent upon the system. So I think the answer to your question is that by considering my own welfare and the welfare of my society and living things on earth, I am protecting myself. And it's not an act of selflessness to think about society. It is selfish to think about the broader society because it sustains me. That's my answer to your question.

Christiana: [00:51:16] Okay, I'll take that.

Paul: [00:51:18] But thank you, Christina. This has been an absolutely fascinating conversation, reflecting upon the frustration I know we all feel when the reality of so many people sort of perceptions are completely odds with reality. But I think one of the things I think I've learned from you in this conversation is that there are reasons for that, that are maybe to do with our subconscious and the way the world operates. And that doesn't mean that we can't fix them, but it means we do need to be aware of them.

Christiana: [00:51:43] Awareness. Number one.

Paul: [00:51:45] Awareness is everything.

Christiana: [00:51:46] Well, it's not everything, but it's certainly the first step.

Paul: [00:51:49] See you.

Hosts: [00:51:49] Next week. Thanks, Paul. Bye bye.