166: No Mud, No Lotuses: The Last Episode of Season 5

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Transcript generated by AI. While we aim for accuracy, errors may still occur. Please refer to the episode’s audio for the definitive version

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UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER — please verify (very first line, no context): Okay.

 

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Paul Dickinson: Well, I hope you're ready. Buckle up because this is going to be a ride.

 

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Tom Rivett-Carnac: Hello and welcome to Outrage and Optimism. I'm Tom Rivett-Carnac.

 

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Christiana Figueres: I'm Christiana Figueres.

 

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Paul Dickinson: And I'm Paul Dickinson.

 

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Tom Rivett-Carnac: Today, we bring you the final episode of season five, where we look back at the season that's gone, the amazing episodes and the incredible guests we've had, and we provide some hints to what's coming in the fall for season six. Thanks for being here. So today marks the completion of another series of Outrage and Optimism. We're today concluding season five, which has been a remarkable privilege and such fun to put this together with both of you, Paul and Christiana and our great team, including Clay and Sarah and others over the last few months. And in particular, we'd like to thank you, our listeners, which is really what makes this podcast possible. And also of course, our sponsors, which is what also makes the podcast possible. But today we're gonna close out by playing some clips of some of our favorite episodes. But just before we do, this is actually rather a special day. Because if you've been following the news, what you will have identified is that over the last few months, we've been really hoping that the US would come forward with something meaningful in terms of legislation. And actually it looks now like it might well happen. Senator Manchin and Chuck Schumer came together to announce a package of legislation that includes much of what we hoped would be possible on climate. And it looks now like they're actually coming together to do that. So that is a remarkable piece of news for us to end our season on.

 

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Paul Dickinson: You want to talk about optimism, Tom? The biggest and most consequential climate change bill ever passed by the Congress, assuming it goes through, and we believe it will. That is absolutely stunning and could change the direction for the whole world insofar as we rely on the USA to provide a certain measure of leadership.

 

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Christiana Figueres: And what I think is absolutely fantastic is that this bill is called the anti-inflation bill. That, to me, is such a recognition that action on climate change is, yes, of course, environmental protection. It's also about international security, et cetera, et cetera. But it is absolutely fundamentally economic growth, safe economic growth. So the fact that they have been able to put it out as an anti-inflation that actually reduces the cost of energy is just fantastic. Because finally, finally, we have understood what decarbonization is all about.

 

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Tom Rivett-Carnac: Absolutely. Jobs, anti-inflation, health. These are the issues that motivate people. So it's great to see politicians now talking in those terms. And hopefully this will land in the coming months. We'll know much more when we come back in September.

 

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Paul Dickinson: A day to celebrate, a day to celebrate.

 

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Tom Rivett-Carnac: It's a day to celebrate. Absolutely. So back to today, it's been quite a year for the global community. We've seen Putin's invasion of Ukraine, start reports from the IPCC, food crises, energy crises, cost of living crises, severe global energy events, and now of course this potential breakthrough in legislation in the US. So there's been some forward progress, some significant headwinds. And today we're going to revisit those months by playing some of our favorite clips and narrating you through them to remind you what the last six months of life on this planet as we try to deal with the climate crisis have really been like. So without further ado, here's the episode.

 

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Christiana Figueres: So before Putin invaded Ukraine, and we began facing what we now understand to be the global energy, food and cost of living crisis, or rather, should I say, the cost of survival crisis for millions of people, we started 2022 with our own collective sense of personal grief at the sad passing of Thich Naht Hahn, the founder of Plum Village Monasteries and my own spiritual teacher since 2013. Now our loyal listeners will have often heard all of us talk about the importance of a mindset shift on this podcast and how personal and spiritual transformation are the essential starting points for tackling this work, how we begin to work inside in order to prepare us for the work that we do on the outside, which means that for us, it is the how we do our work or how we turn up in the world before we can even begin grappling with the what. What are we going to do out there? What is the task in front of us? And for me personally, it is very much part of my journey as a student of Buddhism, and in particular, as a very, very fortunate student of Thai's teaching, Thai being teacher in Vietnamese and what Thich Naht Hahn's students call him. And so in March of this year, as I went to Plum Village to help the monks and the nuns who were supporting the comms around Thai's passing in Vietnam, I agreed to be interviewed by the abbot of Plum Village and by our good friend Joe Confino. And I spoke very openly about how this path of learning has influenced my own personal and professional life. In particular, the teaching that I remember was incredibly helpful to me. There was no mud, no lotus. And I thought, okay, I am drowning in mud, so there better be lots of lotuses here. Where are the lots of lotuses? Because there's a lot of mud. And then later on, what I discovered is it was transformative. His teachings were transformative for the negotiation process. And that's where, you know, that's where I just, I'm in such awe of the power of his understanding, the power of his insight, because the connection, the interbeing between what we have inside of us, what we discover inside of us and what we nourish or, in his words, what we water inside of us and what is possible outside is so interlinked. And that is such a beautiful discovery because we tend to think that, you know, if we are on a path of spiritual development, that only has to do with me, but it doesn't have anything to do with the outside world. And it does. They are just absolutely, you know, it's like it's all completely interwoven with each other. And so I do, I have publicly, in fact, I think an interview with you, Joe, was the first time that I publicly credited Thay's teachings and my understanding of Thay's teachings with the fact that 195 nations were able to come to an agreement.

 

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Jo Confino (guest): I know it's quite an incredible thing to stop and think about. First of all, Christiana, thank you for sharing so deeply, because actually, we were discussing in the last podcast, you know, about, after Thay's passing, thousands of people were getting in touch, and many of them were saying, He saved my life. He saved my life.

 

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Christiana Figueres: Yes, He saved mine.

 

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Jo Confino (guest): And He saved yours, and He, without His teachings, the Paris Climate Agreement, may not have happened.

 

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UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER — please verify (brief interjections during Jo Confino conversation, possibly Jo Confino mistagged): Yes.

 

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Jo Confino (guest): Which is quite an extraordinary thing to be able to say. Christiana, take us a little bit into the journey of the negotiations, in terms of Thay's teachings. So, you know, he talks about deep listening, about compassion, about sort of staying calm. You know, there are many parts of his teaching, but what would you say were the core of the help he brought to the negotiations in terms of that?

 

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Christiana Figueres: Two things I would highlight, not because it's only two, just because for me they were perhaps the most, yeah, transformational. One was the skill of deep listening. And my experience was there were 195 countries that to every single one of the 70-something issues that were under negotiation, they had at least three opinions. So you multiply that, right? 195 times three opinions times 76. I mean, it was just an incredible chess game there. And they had very, very different and sometimes factually and objectively mutually exclusive positions. And in a negotiation, typically what happens is that every country comes with their position to the table. And the purpose of them coming around the table is to inform everybody else of their position. Nobody really comes to listen. And so, I had to do in my role there, I did have to go and meet with government officials from almost every country in their capital city. And if I didn't meet them in their capital city, then certainly when they came to the negotiations. But I made it a really incredibly educational practice to ask them questions and listen to the answers instead of me preaching to them what I thought needed to be done or what somebody else thought needed to be done. So, asking them questions about what their long-term interest was, how they saw themselves growing as a nation, how they were going to protect their people. Many questions that led them to move from their short-term thinking to much more longer-term thinking and more inclusive thinking. And the more they move into the future and into broader thinking, the more there is an overlap and a coincidence of interest. If you stand in your very tiny little short-term nationalistic interest, then you can imagine that there's not much overlap in that Venn diagram. But if you expand that and they really begin to understand what is their responsibility in the future, now the Venn diagram is very different and there begins to be the emergence of common ground. So that was, but that you can only do if you're truly listening to what they're saying and then reflecting back to them. So that they begin to see that there is a coincidence there in that Venn diagram. So the art of deep listening, in addition to the personal work, where I also practice it but for my professional work was incredibly helpful. And the other thing that I wanted to highlight is one of the main difficulties, if not the main difficulty in any climate negotiation then and sadly also now. But at that point it was the divide between the global north and the global south. And the global south feeling very much as a victim to what the global north industrialized countries have done. And there's no doubt that objectively they are the cause of climate change. That's not ideology, that's not a belief, that's a fact. And so the global south countries, the developing countries, to a big degree are very justified in feeling as a victim. The problem with entering a conversation or negotiation as a victim is there's no way you're ever going to agree with anyone on anything. Because if you perceive yourself as a victim, you are implicitly accusing somebody else of being a perpetrator. And that other person who's being accused of being a perpetrator is never going to sit and happily take on the mantle of perpetration. They're going to turn around and say, ah, but what you did is even worse than what I did. And there you go into the seesaw of accusations and blame. And so it was so interesting for me to see that if I saw myself in my personal life as a victim of what my husband had chosen to do with his life, that there was no way that I could go into my professional work and expect anything other than a victim-perpetrator dynamic because of interbeing, because the energy that I carry into that dynamic is there. And I'm only watering the seeds, the wrong seeds of being a victim or being a perpetrator. Whereas if I can walk in with a different mindset and understand, first of all, that I am not a victim, that I have the tools to understand myself differently, and that so does everyone else. And then you walk in with a very different energy. And because of the most amazing concept that, well, so many amazing concepts, but the concept of dependent co-arising or co-dependent arising, depending on which book you read, but is that these seeds, these traits, these feelings, these paradigms, these dynamics, actually evolve at the same time, and they're all interconnected, even if that's not evident. And that was such a lesson to me, such a lesson to me, to understand, okay, my first responsibility is for me to get out of my victimhood. That's my first responsibility. And otherwise, I cannot expect anyone else to do that. And so that put what a bit of pressure on me, right? It's like, oh, okay, you better get your little, your ducks in a row. But I saw it happen. I saw it happen because in the process of me getting out of my own victimhood, then in my conversation with so many other government representatives, I began to see that lift and I began to see the emergence of very, very different dynamic.

 

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UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER — please verify (brief interjections during Jo Confino conversation, possibly Jo Confino mistagged): That's your lotus.

 

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Christiana Figueres: Those are the lotus. Yes.

 

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Jo Confino (guest): So, Christiana, thank you.

 

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Paul Dickinson: This was the episode that got the most feedback from our listeners, Christiana. An example comes from Andy Clea who writes, wow, what a fantastic episode. For me, it links so many of the themes from previous episodes, connecting our heads and hearts and enlighten self-interest in particular. The timing is perfect too, as I've been thinking about my future pathway and how I, as a 50-something, help my community and our young people in particular, build the world they want. I now have a clearer idea of my role. Somewhere in there is an opportunity to heal nature and ourselves. And thank you, Christiana, not only for your amazing work, but for being so brave and honest with us in this episode. The problem that remains, however, is that outside of these incredible groups like Plum Village and Finthorn, which I love very much, how do we communicate the threat and opportunities to a wider audience, especially in the face of such a barrage of disinformation?

 

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Tom Rivett-Carnac: Paul, I so agree with you. I completely share the perspective that this is just one of the critical issues that we have not yet made the progress we need to make, and that is a jump that's going to have to come in the coming months and years. But it also refers back to actually what turned out to be one of my favorite interviews this year, and that was with the Hollywood director Adam McKay, just after his film Don't Look Up, which starred Jennifer Lawrence and Leo DiCaprio and so many others, smashed Netflix records after its Christmas Eve release last year. It was a self-referential film in many ways, acknowledging the difficulties of using the tools of popular culture, like the news, social media, film and art, to try to communicate an existential threat, of course, in this case, represented by an asteroid that was on a collision course with the Earth, not unlike, of course, our increasingly extreme weather, that of course has become that much more extreme, even than it was when this film came out. And Christiana started the interview by asking him if it was true that the 2018 IPCC report really led to the script of Don't Look Up, which had become a kind of urban legend when the film came out.

 

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Adam McKay (guest, director of Don't Look Up): But with that IPCC report, what became glaringly apparent, and I'm sure a lot of your listeners know, the IPCC report is very conservative. There are dozens and dozens of countries that have to approve those scientific findings, so it gets filtered and filtered and filtered. So for that report to be that alarmist and that concerned really shook me. And I had two, three nights where I couldn't sleep. As I started, as the whole picture started to come into focus. And because of that report, I started reading a lot of other books, talking to a lot of other people. David Wallace Wells is a friend. I read his book, Uninhabitable Earth, which added to my poor sleeping habits. And...

 

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Paul Dickinson: It's kind of in the title, Adam.

 

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Clay (podcast producer, live in studio): It's in the title.

 

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Christiana Figueres: I'm sure that came as no surprise.

 

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Adam McKay (guest, director of Don't Look Up): And then, you know, social media is, for the most part, a destructive hellscape. But one of the great, great things on social media is you can talk to a lot of renown climate scientists. And I've gotten to know them through the years. So I reached out to a bunch of them and started asking questions. And the answers I got were far from comforting. So from that point on, my whole world view shifted. And I felt an urgency in my bones. And I started looking at the world around us in a very, very different way. And ever since then, I've been operating under the assumption that this is coming. And then the most recent piece of information I heard was a climate, a piece of climate modeling from a group called Climate Analytics that said that by the year 2030, half of our days will be once every 100 year heat events. And I can't shut up about it. And everyone I talk to in the media, I just say, why are you not reporting on that? I mean, that is massive, massive news. So yeah, it's been quite the journey. It's not been pleasant, but at the same time, I'll always choose being awake over being asleep. And the good news is it led to this movie. I felt after I had this awakening that it just, I don't know if I can ever do anything ever again that isn't at least related to the biggest story, empirically speaking, the biggest story in human history. So yeah, this is the biggest story in human history. It's the greatest threat to life in 66 million years. And I feel a little bit like I'm living in a crazy house, a crazy world because I turn on the news and they don't talk about it. You see our leaders and you can tell they don't really feel the reality in their bones of what we're facing. And so it's really changed my life.

 

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Christiana Figueres: Well, just hearing you say that... We will return to Adam's interview in a minute. But first, let's just compare the impact that the 2018 IPCC report had on Adam to what is happening actually right now. The IPCC published in the first half of this year two reports that are the second two parts of the first part that they released in August of last year for their current cycle. And it's really interesting that those reports, the sum total of those reports had the same stark effect on both the climate and economic and political communities that Adam reports from his reading of the 2018 paper on the 1.5 degrees. This year, the Secretary General of the United Nations has called or has summarized, rather, the reports from the IPCC as being an atlas of human suffering. And our guest, Patrick Furkoin, told us in his interview that the fundamental research of the report was adapt or die. The second IPCC report focused on mitigation, and we invited our good friend, Co Barrett, on to the show to explain in no-nonsense language the urgency of this report's findings. But it seems to me, Co, that the time has always been such a, a frustrating component and factor of climate change. There is a time lag between that, which we must do now, and the evidencing of the impact of those measures or those policies. And so that's the other piece that I find so, so challenging about time because the time lag between the actions that we take and the evidencing. And yet time is what we exactly don't have. Because as this report has told us, yet again, we have to front load all of this. It's not like we can just say, okay, well, we're going to do this, and we have plenty of time to do it, and we can back load it because, you know, our timeline now is 2025 or 2030 or whatever. It's front loading, it's front loading to today. And how is the new IPCC dealing with that front loading of the efforts that need to be made?

 

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Co Barrett (guest, IPCC): Well, first of all, I need to just totally agree with your sense about this issue of time and the lack of it, the lack of time that we have to solve this problem, just front and center in this report and also in the other reports we've put out this cycle. I mean, it is really clear, if we're gonna peak emissions in two and a half years or three years, I mean, there is no time. And then as you say, Christiana, it's not like when we make those changes, there is an immediate benefit that stops climate change in its tracks. So, and all of that is really apparent in this report, but can I hit on a piece of the time thing that I found really interesting as we go through these IPCC reports in the last three years? You know, the Paris Agreement asked us to do the report on 1.5 degrees. It was in the decision. And at the time when we were putting that together, we thought, okay, we're gonna do the best we can. Hopefully we have enough information to respond to the UNFCCC. I had no idea how that report would basically have focused the world on the idea that the time is absolutely now to make these changes. Because you know, I think when you talk about two degrees in the future theoretically, it's very easy to think, okay, yeah, we have time, we have time, that's far in the future. But the minute you start looking at 1.5 degrees, as this report does and others in this cycle, the only conclusion you can come to is that we have got to act now, we should have acted yesterday, and we better get our butts in gear.

 

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Paul Dickinson: The message from Coe and the IPCC scientists rang loud in our ears. We better get our butts in gear. But if Adam McKay himself had experienced an apathetic response in the face of such clear science, what could we do to get the people motivated? We realised, however, perhaps it was not the people who were suffering from apathy. Let's hear from Adam on what happened when Don't Look Up went live.

 

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Adam McKay (guest, director of Don't Look Up): And the second they flicked that switch and it went live, it was the most incredible, borderline, beautiful thing, because what you saw, and usually this doesn't happen with comedies, comedies don't cross cultural and national lines, but the movie was number one in 87 different countries. It was number one in Nigeria, it was number one in Pakistan, Brazil, Peru, Argentina, Cambodia, Canada, the US, France, like on and on, you know, 87 different countries. And what I realized at that moment is, you know, we like to think that most people are living under a rock or don't care, but it's the exact opposite. And it was really a wonderful thing. And just a reminder that no, no, no, people get it. They do in their muscles, in their soul, they know the truth. And it was incredible. It was really a wonderful thing.

 

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Tom Rivett-Carnac: So, I think that final point from Adam is so critical, that actually people are increasingly aware of this issue, but many people kind of don't know what to do. And that problem is made worse by the wall of media silence and disinformation and confusion that is being spread by some of the biggest media companies supposedly reporting on the climate crisis. So, this tension between what the people want and what leaders and the media report is something that we heard Ben Goldsmith and Chris Skidmore talk about on our recent episode that was related to Boris Johnson's resignation as Prime Minister of the UK. So if the people were aware of the crisis and wanted action from their leaders, what movement or campaign could unite us with a clear directive?

 

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Paul Dickinson: And here on Outrage and Optimism, when looking at the progress of tackling the climate crisis, we try and ask, as Christiana encourages us to do, not, what is the ideal situation and how do we create it, but rather, where is the needle and how can we move it? Now, the celebrated writer, historian and friend of the podcast, the very wonderful Yuval Noah Harari, takes this very approach with his campaign, hugely practical campaign, 2% more, which he came on the podcast in February to explain.

 

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Yuval Noah Harari (guest): You have this one number, very important number, that got a lot of attention, 1.5 degrees Celsius. We need to prevent global temperature from rising above 1.5 degrees Celsius. But then when you look for the price tag, it's extremely difficult to find it. And not just me, but like, I mean, an entire team spent weeks going over all kinds of reports and panels and articles and so forth. And it turns out that there is a number, or there are numbers. And of course, you know, it's easy to play with numbers. It's a lot of speculations and guesswork, but almost all the numbers, they are in the single digits, low single digits of global GDP. Many of them are around 2% of global GDP. And this is like a wonderful piece of news because it means it's a feasible political project. 2% of global GDP every year is of course a lot of money, but it's exactly the kind of project that modern political systems have been built to deal with. We don't need to invent a completely new kind of politics. Politicians, this is their typical job, but they wake up in the morning, they go to the office. What do they do? They move 2% of resources from here to there.

 

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Christiana Figueres: I love that description of the life of a politician.

 

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Paul Dickinson: By the way, just a little thing. I think on COVID, they went to the office and they moved about 15% of GDP for about a year. Yes. In the UK, where I live, one in 500 people died of COVID and they moved 15% of GDP. So, it's interesting. I used to work in the kind of logo business or there are these powerful symbols like the cross or many agencies ban the bomb symbol. Maybe, and I always laughed when US politicians started wearing like a US flag, like I'm sure they know where they live, you know what I mean? But could we have a 2% badge? In fact, can listeners start making 2% badges and we all start wearing a 2% badge and we will all be saying to each other, come on, 2%, let's do it.

 

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Tom Rivett-Carnac: We better do it soon, though, before it goes to 3%, which will happen at some point.

 

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Yuval Noah Harari (guest): Absolutely, yes.

 

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Christiana Figueres: I can hear the new call of young people, you know, the activists out on the street. Yeah. 2% for 1.5. There you go. 2% for 1.5.

 

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Tom Rivett-Carnac: So as you can hear there, we love this idea for this campaign that Yuval Noah Harari came up with and the slogan that we created through that conversation, we felt potentially could be an amazing campaign for changing the world. But he also touched on something deeper at the heart of the problem of stirring people to action that Adam McKay also spoke about in his interview. The power of stories that we use to define ourselves and our values.

 

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Christiana Figueres: You know, Tom always picks up on this story and narrative idea. Have you noticed that? That is one of Tom's light motifs in life.

 

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Tom Rivett-Carnac: There were several years in which you really didn't like the word story, Christiana, but I think you're quite comfortable with it now.

 

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Christiana Figueres: I've been pushing back on you, but actually I've decided that is not a battle that I want to pick with you. So I have totally embraced your concept of story and narrative.

 

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Tom Rivett-Carnac: So is that because you actually think it's useful or because you just don't want to have the conversation anymore?

 

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Yuval Noah Harari (guest): I'll give another example from the Middle East. In Jerusalem, there is a certain wall, and near the wall, there is a certain building. And if anybody would say take one stone out of the wall, or one stone out of the building, or blow them up, all hell will break loose.

 

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Christiana Figueres: Indeed.

 

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Yuval Noah Harari (guest): We are talking about millions and hundreds of millions of people all over the world that have never been to Jerusalem, are rising up in arms. And this is just about one wall, which they never even visited. And then you think about the Great Coral Reef, which was built not by a bunch of people 2,000 years ago, but by billions of organisms over millions of years. If you think about the Amazon rainforests, and they're in danger, and people say, yeah, it's bad, but I'm not going to do anything. Why is it that the kind of this wall has so much more emotional power than the Great Coral Reef or than the Amazon rainforest? It's not because one is acute and the other is chronic. It's because some people at least have been raised on stories about this wall and not about the Great Coral Reef. But it's in the end, in the stories that we are told, and that create this kind of emotional engagement. If we can create the same type of emotional engagement with the Great Coral Reef or with the Amazon rainforest, then yeah, you can mobilize a lot of people to take very strong action. Stories need to be kind of engaging and simple. One of the reasons to focus on the 2% number is that it's a simple number. It's easy to grasp it. So whenever we try to create powerful stories that will get translated into political projects, we need powerful symbols and we need to keep things as simple as possible.

 

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Tom Rivett-Carnac: Yuval, that is such a beautiful...

 

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Christiana Figueres: Yuval closed the interview by referencing the threat of Putin invading Ukraine and the effect this could have on our collective efforts to stop climate change. But let's remember, Putin had not yet invaded Ukraine. And here is Yuval already foreseeing the impact on climate change efforts.

 

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Paul Dickinson: Yuval's words turned out to be prophetic. He is so smart. I think he might be able to predict the future. I mean, he did. Because on 24th of February, Putin did give the order for Russian troops to invade Ukraine. And the rest of the global community began to react to the threat of sanctions on Russian oil. And it quickly became apparent just how reliant much of the global community was on Russian oil and gas. And energy prices began to spike, causing alarm throughout the world. The road ahead forked into two paths, both claiming to offer routes out of the global energy crisis. One path called for more fossil fuel production, and the other saw this as... Yeah, well, exactly, exactly. Thank you, Christiana. This is like, you know, we've got to cheer the team, right? And the other called for...

 

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UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER — please verify (brief interjections during Jo Confino conversation, possibly Jo Confino mistagged): Get ready.

 

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Paul Dickinson: The perfect moment to double down on the transition to green energy.

 

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Christiana Figueres: Yes, yes, yes, yes.

 

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Paul Dickinson: And people may be unsure which path we were promoting, but actually, clearly, this is the moment to get ourselves off that crazy dinosaur slurp called oil and gas.

 

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Tom Rivett-Carnac: Let's kick off with you. How do you see this situation?

 

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Christiana Figueres: Well, analogies, as we know, are always imperfect and incomplete because realities are so much more nuanced and intricate. But a possible analogy that we could use to understand where we are could be the following. So let's entertain the scenario that I am a patient that has been diagnosed with lung cancer caused by smoking decades of smoking. The cancer is not yet terminal, but getting very close. And I have all kinds of medical warnings about that. In addition, on top of that, I learned that the provider of the cigarettes that I've been smoking is a terrible bully and is using the money that I pay him, in this case, it is a him, for the cigarettes to do horrible things to other people, literally kill other people. So here is the question. How do I react? How do I respond? What are my choices? So one option, of course, is to decide that the problem that I'm actually facing is the bully himself, and that I need or want to continue smoking. So the solution to that problem is for me to start planting tobacco in my own backyard, and to start my own little home rolling industry so that I can produce my own cigarettes. And that way, I don't have to buy from the bully. I'm not giving him my money. But I continue to smoke despite the immediate threats to my health. That is one option, and that is being put forward as an option to the Russia-Ukraine crisis by some white people. The other option that we have is to say, whoa, wait a minute, I can actually use this moment to choose to break my addiction to smoking, despite the fact that it has had me in chains for decades. I can choose to break the addiction altogether and move to healthier habits. That means I no longer pass my money to the bully, I starve the bully of his income, and I save my own life because I stop smoking and put myself into the recovery treatment that gets me to much healthier status.

 

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Tom Rivett-Carnac: That's great. Let's devolve this down to a clear, rational argument about what we think the way forward is. Christiana, I love your analogy. In that analogy, of course, the idea of planting tobacco so we can continue smoking when it's killing us, of course, is insane. What you're describing there is the tendency in some countries to now increase domestic production so they can keep consuming. You said at the beginning that no analogy is perfect. Of course, the one there is nobody needs cigarettes, but we do need energy to a certain degree. What we need to do is actually shift it to a cleaner source of energy. But from what we said already, the moral case to ban as far as we can in the West, to ban imports of Russian gas and oil is overwhelming. Indeed, the Ukrainian climate scientist who serves on the IPCC spoke out recently and specifically said that Russia is using the money the West has spent on fossil fuels against Ukraine in the war. But Europe is currently resisting the idea of a complete ban. So the moral case for ban is clear. The economic case against a ban is clear because it would lead to a massive spike in energy prices and potentially blackouts. What's the climate case? From a climate perspective, do we think it makes sense to ban Russian sales of oil and gas into Western Europe and North America?

 

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Christiana Figueres: Well, let's start by underlining that it really is our addiction to oil and gas that has paid for Russia's invasion for the Ukraine. That is quite different to other fossil fuel related geopolitical confrontations that we've seen in the past where there is an attack in order to protect either the provision of or the transport of fossil fuels. That's quite different. This is not about that. This is the funding that is being used for the invasion of the Ukraine is coming straight from our pockets, we who are addicted to oil and gas. To put it very clearly...

 

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Tom Rivett-Carnac: And actually, not to start to interrupt your flow, but we've also financed the Saudi strikes in Yemen by the same logic, right? And most conflicts throughout history have been based on this kind of dynamic.

 

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Paul Dickinson: And then all these kind of thoughtful people are saying, well, we're in a new kind of the great game of world powers and we've got to drill and give ourselves energy independence. And that's rubbish. It's absolute rubbish. And I ask myself this question, why do we feel so powerless? What is this great force that stopped us believing in anything? Which is where I feel we are at the moment. Once again, you look at your media and you see already 2.6 million Ukrainians have had to leave everything, their homes, their country, their friends, their family, their lives, their work, and just run away across the borders to get away from the war. And why I think so many people love President Zelensky of Ukraine is because he believes in something and by believing in him, we begin to believe in ourselves again. And that's an important kind of muscle that we've not exercised for far too long. Putin, this kind of evil puppet master, has been manipulating our democracy and doing all kinds of crazy stuff. And I'm not going to talk about that. We all know how much evidence there is of that. But look, here the puppet masters come out from behind the scenes and started blowing up our neighbor's children. In front of us, with our money, so we wake up now.

 

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Tom Rivett-Carnac: That's the moral case, right? Absolutely. So in addition to our own views on the subject, we invited two former Secretaries of State for Foreign Affairs of the UK, William Hague and David Miliband. Of differing political parties, William Hague, of course, a conservative, David Miliband, a Labour politician, to add their analysis to the crisis that was unfolding from a defence point of view. So here's William Hague first.

 

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William Hague (guest): I have to do, and as you know, people often when faced by higher energy prices, some people make the argument, well, we can't afford then at the moment to invest in cleaner energy. And you hear that argument in the United Kingdom sometimes, I'm ashamed to say. So there is some negative effect, and Germany confronting its dependence on Russian gas could easily end up burning more coal, which is the worst thing of all to do from a, as you have often pointed out from a global point of view. But of course, in the longer term, well, this is, none of this would be happening if Russia was not a country based on a corrupt pyramid of financial and political power based on oil and gas revenues, and other countries dependent on its sale of those things. So we can really see that we can free ourselves from some of the causes of conflict in the future if we encourage the energy transition.

 

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Tom Rivett-Carnac: William, I mean, you've answered part of this already, but I'd love to just ask you, I mean, Putin is now dragging the world into an era of higher defense spending, more military priorities right at this moment in the middle of this decisive decade. Whatever happens next, a large amount of the bandwidth of foreign ministers and defense ministers and energy ministers is going to be directed towards this. What, I mean, what do you think people can do to try to ensure that climate doesn't get lost in that mix? It feels like it's happening far away and there's not much we can really do about it. But what would you say will make the difference? Because now it feels like we need to just push on that right now.

 

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William Hague (guest): Well, it's just crucial to make the argument in every forum at every level that these things are related. Solving the problems of climate change can't be just ignored while this is going on. We don't have to focus on that because we've got this immediate priority. They are actually linked. A world which has more decentralized provision of energy and more renewable, sustainable provision of energy wouldn't be in this situation. And there isn't going to be other answers.

 

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Tom Rivett-Carnac: And here's David Miliband approaching the Ukraine invasion from a defense and humanitarian perspective.

 

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David Miliband (guest): Which is dangerous. Now, I've said about the humanitarian situation. We, the world, have got to be able to walk chew gum and play the violin at the same time. That we've got to be able to address starvation in Afghanistan, a breakdown in Ethiopia, a tragedy, a crime in Yemen, coups in the Sahel, and address the Ukraine crisis. I think that if you want me to just throw one thing into the pot, what could, rather than predict the future, say, well, what could shape the future? I think the people PowerPoint is real. Big change happens when there's government leadership, business and NGO innovation and mass mobilization. But they don't have to happen in that order. The lesson of this crisis may be that people can move first, or businesses and NGOs can move first, and then governments run and catch up, but then they end up leading, because they've got legitimacy and power. And so I don't want to just say, well, we've got to redouble our efforts. That feels a bit pathetic. But I do think that this is interesting to hear the army generals say, morals and morale are the most precious commodity in war.

 

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Paul Dickinson: Oh, yeah.

 

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David Miliband (guest): And that's about people.

 

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Paul Dickinson: And so, look, David, it just seems like there's an extraordinarily kind of teachable moment in the world at the moment. I mean, all these sanctions, and I can't even believe that the airspace of the USA and the EU is closed to Russian aircraft. I mean, it's extraordinary what's going on. We've talked about national security and energy independence now being the same thing. You know, maybe I'm being a bit pan-glossy and a bit over-hopeful, but could the world's democracies be in a moment of sort of rediscovering their values?

 

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David Miliband (guest): Yes. I mean, I think that I said at the beginning that this was an attempt to rewind the clock by 30 years by Putin. What I also say is, it may well be the moment when not that the clock is rewound to 1990, but the spirit of 1990 is rediscovered, tempered by all of the failings that have happened since 1990. And that will be the ultimate irony, because remember the pictures of people scaling the Berlin Wall, those were incredibly inspiring because they were people standing up for human values. And that's really important. So could this be a moment that galvanized, has this been a moment that's galvanized the West? It has. There's no question. And it's galvanized Switzerland to move into this space as well. It's moved Ireland to constructively support the deployment of EU military material. So that is significant. And we have to build on that with the unity and the humility, but also the clarity about what's at stake.

 

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Christiana Figueres: Well, what a moment, David and I.

 

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Tom Rivett-Carnac: So, buoyed up by David Miliband and William Hague's quiet optimism that within the depths of this crisis, they could also potentially be an opportunity for consensus and solidarity. We invited Kingsmill Bond on the show. We knew from the recent articles that he'd published that he very much saw the opportunity and the economic logic of doubling down on the green energy transition in the face of volatile prices and Putin's aggression. And his analysis really was making the point that anyone that believes that using this moment to go further into the oil and gas economy was just deluding themselves with short term signals rather than really seeing the trends that were unfolding. However, we decided minutes before the interview that even though we agreed with him in order for our listeners to have faith in this route and having no doubt that despite all the media claims to the contrary, we'd at least need to put it to the test and the robustness of his arguments. So cue the newly titled Dane Christiana Figueres probing his arguments and first and God help us hopefully last, appearance of Paul's deeply disturbing oily alter ego.

 

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Paul Dickinson (in character, "oily alter ego" bit): Yes.

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