349 : Power, Money and Influence: The Hidden Forces Shaping Climate Action
Who really holds power in the climate transition? In this episode we unpack how money, politics, and influence shape the pace of change - in ways often contrary to common assumptions.
About this episode
Who really holds power in the climate transition? And how do money, politics, and influence shape the pace of change?
In this episode, Christiana Figueres, Tom Rivett-Carnac and Paul Dickinson use some of your most probing questions on the political economy of climate action to unpack what happens behind closed doors and to challenge some of the assumptions that often dominate public debate.
What does lobbying actually look like - and is it always a bad thing? What are we talking about when we refer to ‘fossil fuel subsidies’? And in an age of populist politics and shrinking attention spans, can complex climate solutions still cut through? Or are we drifting toward simpler narratives that are easier to sell, but harder to govern?
From negotiation rooms to national politics, and the economic systems beneath them, these are the forces both loudly and quietly shaping climate progress. And if we want to accelerate action, we first have to understand where power truly sits.
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Producer: Ben Weaver-Hincks
Planning: Caitlin Hanrahan
Assistant Producer: Caillin McDaid
Exec Producer: Ellie Clifford
This is a Persephonica production for Global Optimism and is part of the Acast Creator Network.
Full Transcript
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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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 in the room with Tom and Christiana. It's amazing.
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: We are together in the studio, and today we are going to answer...
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Christiana Figueres: It is a studio.
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: It's a studio. We're all grown up.
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Paul Dickinson: Curtains behind us and cameras and sound checks and regulations.
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Christiana Figueres: Yeah, duly intimidated.
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: I think you'll be fine. Yeah. So today we are going to answer some of your excellent questions on power and politics.
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Christiana Figueres: Not my questions, listener questions.
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: Not your questions, the listener questions.
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Christiana Figueres: Yes.
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: Thank you. Thanks for being here. Okay. So this is the beginning of a couple of days we've got together. And we're going to start off as is often the way we do these things by answering some of the many questions we've had from listeners. Christiana, you and I did a post on social media a few days ago. Paul, you've been posting about this as well. We've been announcing this on recent episodes and we have had so many questions over the course of the last few weeks. They're brilliant and they run the full gamut of all of the different things we're trying to deal with as we face the climate crisis.
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Christiana Figueres: Actually hard to choose.
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: Hard to choose, yeah. And our brilliant production team, Ben and Caillin, have categorized these and today we're going to go through those questions focused specifically on power and politics. So let's go to our first question which is from Eleanor. Let's have a listen.
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Eleanor (listener): My husband and I were listening to a piece about the recent COP on a program called Threshold out of Montana. And the person that was being interviewed is a person who has been an activist. She's from Sudan. And she talked briefly about the impact of the oil companies, the lobbying that has been going on at the COPs. And we wanted to know what really is the content of that lobbying. Are they offering certain kinds of bribes to countries, certain benefits? What ways are they really trying to influence the individual representatives from countries to not try to limit the use of fossil fuels? Thank you. Great.
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: Thank you, Eleanor, for that important question. So, shall I have a stab at that one?
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Christiana Figueres: I would love you to answer, because honestly, it's a good question. Because when you hear about lobbying, you think, is somebody coming, you know, with a wad of US dollar bills and offering, you know, a quid pro quo for affecting the tax? It is a little bit scary. So, can you unscare us?
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: Well, I mean, it is a little bit scary. And also, it's a common question. I remember speaking to many friends who maybe hadn't been inside the cops. And their perspective of them is that they are full, as you say, of these very shady lobbyists trying to prevent a positive outcome. So let me try and address this question in a couple of ways. The first thing is to say, it is evidently clear and a matter of public record that fossil fuel companies have slowed us down on climate for decades. There is no doubt about that. And you can read books like The Carbon Wars from Jeremy Leggett that tell this long story or Watch the Play...
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Paul Dickinson: California lawsuit.
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: Kyoto.
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Paul Dickinson: Kyoto.
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: Watch the Play Kyoto. And usually, when fossil fuel companies are trying to prevent countries or an individual country from doing something, they're trying to prevent targets and timeframes. Because once you put in place a target to do a specific thing and a time frame to get there, that affects the policy of that individual country or of collective countries that changes the economic context they're operating in. Now, if you're a fossil fuel company, you will lobby a national government in that way. And you might also lobby at the COP. I have to say...
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Christiana Figueres: You may lobby your national government at home.
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: Yes.
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Christiana Figueres: Even before you get to the COP.
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: Which actually, in some ways, if I was a fossil fuel company, that would be a smarter thing to do. Because actually you can change policy domestically. Once you get to the COP, the people who are there don't always have such a lot of control over national energy policy in each of the individual countries. So I have to say, my own experience of 20 years at the COP, I did have one experience when I was at the UN when Suncor, the Canadian oil sands company, tried to like cozy up to me and persuade me that some of these targets might be a bit too ambitious, which obviously we laughed at them. But I haven't really had many experiences of it. And I do have to say that I think we are suffering a little bit with a perception of the COP that isn't aligned with my own experience. There are reports that come out every year called Kick Big Polluters Out that are looking at how many lobbyists are at the COP. And you probably remember, Eleanor and other listeners from the COP this year in Brazil, there was this big announcement. There are 1,600 lobbyists. It's the biggest delegation of any. Are all there trying to prevent collective action. When you dig into that list, it's a much more complicated story. There are entities like WBCSD, the group looking at sustainable development, C2ES, the very clever intellectual campaigners that are trying to find ways forward.
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Christiana Figueres: They're listed as lobbyists.
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: Dallas is lobbyist. Orsted, the Danish wind manufacturer. Natura.
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Christiana Figueres: Do you think they would self-identify as oil and gas lobbyists?
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Paul Dickinson: Natura would definitely not identify as a lobbyist.
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: BYD, the Chinese electric car company. So there's something strange going on with the methodology. And I think we need to dig into that and do it in an honest and fair way with these NGOs. And I'm not saying there's no fossil fuel lobbying that goes on there. But I sometimes feel a bit sad when you come home from the COP and there are these brilliant people that are working so hard to get to positive outcomes and the public perception can just be, oh, it's all fossil fuel lobbyists. I would resist that assumption because I don't think it's true.
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Christiana Figueres: There are some.
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: There are some.
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Christiana Figueres: For sure. And they probably wouldn't come up to me or to you because they know that that's probably... They would avoid us. And they do choose who to lobby, right? They will lobby those countries that they know will basically agree with them. And they will try to lobby for going a bit farther than those countries might under unlobbed circumstances, let's say. But they are fewer than we think. And their influence is less than we think. Because once you get to the COP, most countries already have their position decided. And they have very little leeway to go much farther than they have been authorized to go by their own national governments.
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Paul Dickinson: I think there's a weird thing going on here, which is the notion of lobbying, maybe quite a new one. And what I mean by that is if you go back something like 30 years, there wasn't really a choice between kind of renewable energy and fossil fuel energy. So it was really just sales and marketing by the fossil fuel industry building on the Industrial Revolution. It's when there became a choice for governments between are we going to go fossil fuels or are we going to go renewables? Sales and marketing became lobbying because of the choice issue. But I think that the key for me is that, you know, it's true that the UAE COP, for example, in Dubai, the president of the COP was also the chief executive of the national oil company.
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Christiana Figueres: And apparently cut some deals on this hike?
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Paul Dickinson: Well, all sorts of things are said. And yes, some people also think like maybe a good result came out of that COP in terms of doubling renewables and tripling efficiency or whatever. So we're tripling renewables and doubling efficiency. Forgive me getting it wrong. But the point being that I don't know. It's complex.
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: Yeah, it's complex. And I think that it avoids simple solutions. So we should get into this. I mean, one other small example is on that list is also the state grid corporation of China who without question use their transition lines to transmit energy generated by coal. But also, if you're going to electrify China, the company you really need is the state grid corporation of China making a shift. So we need to be careful not to tell specific one-sided stories. So I think it does merit more thought.
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Christiana Figueres: It's interesting that I definitely am the first culprit of this. When I hear the word lobbying, I immediately go to what are the baddies lobbied for. The fact is that there are many people lobbying for what we would call the good thing. More ambition, more trees being planted, more renewable energy, that's also lobbying. It's just that we have taken, as generally, we have taken the word lobby to be lobby for issues that are, let's say, against the common good or against the health of the planet. But do we lobby? Could we say that this podcast sort of lobbies?
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: Yes, that's true. I mean, you're right. The name, the word has a dirty association, probably coming from tobacco lobbyists and other things from other sectors. But that is exactly what we try to do, at least. How successfully, I'm not sure.
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Paul Dickinson: The law says, apparently, charities shouldn't lobby. But on the Parliament UK website, it says people who lobby parliamentarians are typically charities. Oh, really? And companies, of course.
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Christiana Figueres: OK, shall we move on?
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: OK, so next, I think we have a question from Lisa. So let's have a listen to that.
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Lisa (listener): I wanted to ask if you guys were going to be doing any Pacific States or EOSIS, small island states, kinds of impacts and analysis in terms of the COP30 text and decisions, given that, you know, these are the islands on the front line. So I was just very keen to see if you guys were going to do that, as well as cover off on the politics of hosting a COP and why it is that, you know, two countries can kind of hold the whole system to hostage. It just really interests me. Thank you.
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Christiana Figueres: Okay, can I take the lead here? I think you're definitely most qualified. Thank you, Lisa. Thank you, thank you, thank you for this question. So first of all, Lisa, I am assuming, but maybe it's a false assumption, that you did listen and enjoy the several episodes that we put out about the ICJ case, about the role of the Pacific Islands in getting that legal case all the way up to the highest court in the world. And if you haven't, if any listener hasn't listened to those episodes, we're going to put them in the show notes because they are really brilliant and they are really a testament of the leadership of Pacific Islands. Now, to come fast forward to, Lisa, to your question about COP 30. Wow. Okay. I have never seen so much of a, and here's my technical term, so much of a mess about deciding who's going to host COP 31. It was just amazing. As most listeners will know, the candidates were Australia and Turkey, and they had to sort of decide between the two of them who was going to host. It was basically a diplomatic mess on both sides. And what ended up in the very last minute, because they had to decide before the end of the COP, was a very, very odd compromise that I have no idea how they're going to implement. That Australia is going to be the negotiating president of the COP. Okay? And that Turkey is going to be the hosting president of the COP. That is really odd.
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: And overall president.
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Christiana Figueres: Yeah. And overall president. So, who is actually going to be doing, you know, the political heavy lifting that frankly should have already started, because the incoming presidency, in this case, we have to say the incoming presidencies. This is quite unusual.
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Paul Dickinson: Sorry, Christiana, I'm at the airport. And it says, you know, this is your captain speaking. Well, kind of your captain, but also the co-pilot sort of the captain as well.
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Christiana Figueres: Yes, exactly.
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Paul Dickinson: If the plane gets into some trouble over the Atlantic, we'll negotiate who's in charge. Could have mediated to come into the cockpit.
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Christiana Figueres: Well, that's exactly right. And just, you know, to pepper that, we already discussed in a previous episode that Brazil, as the sitting president, is actually going to be taking a very decided political role throughout this whole year. So the fact is, do we have the three presidents here acting at the same time? I mean, I have no idea how this is going to work. But your question was, what did the small island states get out of this? Because the quick assessment is, since Australia is not going to host and have, let's say, full responsibility, full presidential responsibility, that is a huge loss for the small island states, because Australia had promised that this would be not just an Australian COP, but that it would be a Pacific region, including the islands. And they had really worked very, very carefully to ensure that all of the interests and needs and urgency and emergencies of the small island states would be not just taken into account, which is what usually happens in the best of all cases, but then would be front and center. So one could argue, to a certain extent, that the loss of Australia as the one and only COP presidency was a huge loss for the Pacific Islands. That is an argument that can be made. On the other side of the coin, one could say, well, actually, the Pacific Islands already got something out of this messy negotiation, because A, they will host the pre-COP, which is the meeting that takes place maybe a month or a month and a half before the COP and that.
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: Sorry, Australia will host that?
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Christiana Figueres: No, one of the Pacific Islands.
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: Oh, okay, right.
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Christiana Figueres: One of the Pacific Islands, TBD, which one? Because they have to decide that among themselves.
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Paul Dickinson: That's to be determined for those people who don't like acronyms.
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Christiana Figueres: Thank you. So, one of the Pacific Islands will host the pre-COP and they will decide who. But if the pre-COP is going to take place on one of the Pacific Islands, it doesn't take much imagination to know how that agenda is going to be crafted, right? So, that is definitely a win that they have. Furthermore, because of all of the mess, the only ones that set sail and maintained the path throughout that whole mess were the Pacific Islands. So, they actually got quite a bit of political visibility out of the whole messy negotiation there. Quite a few countries, non-Pacific Island countries, came forward with offers of, okay, well, in this case, we are actually going to be much more careful about responding to the needs of the Pacific Islands. And, there were promises of more adaptation money of a much stronger. Here we go. My favorite acronym. Are you ready? NCQG. Oh, my God. New Collective Quantified Goal, which is how much money is actually going to go into supporting developing countries to deal with climate change. And, perhaps the one that very specifically got a huge boost was the Pacific Resilience Facility that is a very interesting insurance scheme for the Pacific and that got already and will continue to get more donor contributions. So, arguably, you could say the mess between Australia and Turkey meant that the Pacific Islands don't get the prominence that Australia had promised. On the other hand, they already got a lot of prominence out of the mess. So, where are we? Do they get more or do they get less than they wanted?
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: I mean, I think it's good to hear that they got these specific things, which obviously more adaptation money is good, although I'm sure it's not enough if we look into it. Because it never is. The new Collective Quantified Goal, I'm sure that's good, but it's not enough. And as the emergency unfolds and as all of our collective attention goes towards the craziness happening in the developed North, particularly Donald Trump, I just think it's... Who? Good, well done. I think it's worth just remembering that they are likely to not get much visibility now because Turkey are going to want all of the visibility for themselves. They want to host it. They want a head of state summit. I'm sure that when we get down to the COP itself, they are going to want all eyes on them to play a role on the international stage. Australia still want to be involved in some way. So I fear a bit for the Pacific Islands.
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Christiana Figueres: Presumably, is the negotiating president. I mean, we all know.
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: But that could also be fairly invisible inside the process.
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Christiana Figueres: That could be invisible.
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Paul Dickinson: A senior former UN diplomat described the situation as a mess recently. So I'm kind of like, you know, I don't think we can be clear about it. It is wonderful. The AOSIS, the Association of Small Island States, they represent this frontline spirit because they're existentially challenged. Imagine if the COP was being hosted by the elderly and the sick, you know, that would be a better COP because they would be the ones most likely to suffer from the heat stroke. So I kind of think it was important that somehow, how we can all try and help ensure that the small island states go into this mess and find a way to put their sort of surfboard on top of a lot of noise and that we recognize that, you know, countries are in an existential position right now.
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Christiana Figueres: Absolutely. Yeah.
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: So that's a good point. We're going to have to really work hard to ensure that stories are prominent because at the moment they're just getting lost in the global media noise. Okay. Should we move on? There's a really interesting question on fossil fuel subsidies, which is something that comes up a lot. And Paul, I think you're well positioned to answer. So let's listen to this question from Eduardo.
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Eduardo Gonzales (listener, France): Hi, my name is Eduardo Gonzales. I'm calling you from France. And it's great always to listen to your podcast. Keep pushing that. And I have a question about the, how the oil and gas are subsidized. I mean, I read a lot about this, but for me, it's difficult. And I mean, in the industry, I would like really to know more how governments are getting this subsidized to them. You know, getting the examples and letting everybody knows how the money flows to them would be probably a nice way to start to put pressure on governments.
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: What an excellent thought, Paul, over here.
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Paul Dickinson: Well, I mean, this is so strange, right? Because the oil and gas industry obviously makes money, you know, drilling for oil and gas and selling it around the world. And yet the International Monetary Fund would say that oil and gas subsidies are $7 trillion in 2022. So what's going on? Is fossil fuel profitable or is it subsidized? That's such a big and complicated...
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Christiana Figueres: I have a question. $7 trillion in subsidies out of what is the value of the industry?
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Paul Dickinson: So the global market is also estimated to be like about a bit more than $8 trillion. So it would seem that 90 or 80, 85% of the market is subsidies. It's a bit more complicated than that.
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: If you give me a $7 trillion subsidy, I'll build you a $7 trillion industry. I think that's fairly...
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Paul Dickinson: Well, in the entrepreneurial spirit of Tom Rivett-Carnac. All right, let's unpack this a little bit, because what we really need to appreciate is that these subsidies come in some quite significantly different categories. I'll call them like extreme subsidies and more kind of at one end and more kind of conceptual subsidies at the other. So the pretty extreme subsidies are where...
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Christiana Figueres: The bag number one.
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Paul Dickinson: Bag number one, the extreme subsidies is where a state might take taxpayers' money and literally give taxpayers' money to an oil and gas company to drill, to encourage the sort of kick-starting of an industry, or might subsidize the cost of oil and gas for political expediency. Everybody loves the government because petrol or something for our cars seems so cheap. Well, actually, it's being subsidized by the government to win the voter support. So, that's bag number one, actual taxpayers' cash going to support oil and gas drilling. The second category is a little bit more nuanced, and it's kind of like all industries are taxed, you know, pretty much in most countries. That's how the government gets their money. Well, what if you had lower tax for the oil and gas industry and you say, well, we have very small tax or no tax or something like that? And then the third...
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: So, that one is revenue that should go to the government but doesn't.
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Paul Dickinson: Exactly. And then the third category, the more conceptual category, and I think is probably the large parts that the IMF are referring to, is the actual cost of oil and gas in terms of the impact it has, in terms of extreme weather events, climate damage and the societal cost of burning fossil fuels and heating up the atmosphere. Kind of like cost of global warming, which is a gigantic cost of climate change, if you will. So, I'm not really answering the question very specifically, but I did want to draw a distinction between hard cash in, deferred revenues and the conceptual cost.
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Christiana Figueres: Which an economist would call externalized cost.
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Paul Dickinson: Exactly, externalities. That's a good bit of jargon that we've not sort of offered up enough advice on.
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: In terms of those three buckets that your bags that you just set out, Paul, what is the rough size of those in terms of the subsidy to fossil fuel companies?
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Paul Dickinson: Well, I'm glad this is not a court of law, because if I were to swear on earth, I'd say these figures are all over the shop and there's many different ways of measuring it. I mean, you could say something like a billion of hard cash goes to support an industry, which, of course, what happens is the government puts in a certain amount of money, but then there's a much bigger revenue coming out of it. So you've kind of got to speculate to accumulate. So government's putting that kind of money into the hard cash. I would say maybe the deferred revenues are sort of one or two trillion, and then not factoring the cost of climate change is the bulk of it, is most of what people are saying.
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: It's an excellent question, though, from Eduardo, because he's making the point that we should make this more visible to people. I mean, regular listeners will remember that my family is in oil and gas. My dad has always been in oil and gas. And I would occasionally bring those numbers up to him and say, look at these enormous numbers. And he would always dismiss it. He would say, we're entrepreneurial, we make money, we can find oil. It's profitable because the subsidies are so baked into the system in ways that are hidden. Then even if you're working in the oil and gas industry, you're so used to it that you don't actually see it as a subsidy. So I think it's a really good point that Eduardo makes, that actually, alongside the big campaigns to remove them, almost the first steps are just to help people understand where they're coming from and the fact that fossil fuels are massively subsidized. And that's a big part of why we're stuck with them.
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Paul Dickinson: And just a last thought is cigarettes. What's the cost of cigarettes? Well, a pack of cigarettes in the UK costs at least 14 pounds. I'd be rather surprised if it costs more than one pound to make. So we've got to a point where we're saying, well, the true cost of cigarettes is sort of 95% the damage to society and only 5% the cost of manufacturing the cigarettes. And that's where we sort of need to get to with fossil fuels if we're going to deal with climate change.
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Christiana Figueres: I have heard the argument that in a fossil fuel driven economy, especially in a developing country, the fossil fuel industry needs subsidies in order to provide for electricity to the bottom of the pyramid. That those who can least afford electricity need to have very cheap electricity and that the only way that they can get cheap electricity is if the fossil fuel industry is subsidized. So, if you take that on face value, I would say, is that a noble subsidy?
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Paul Dickinson: Well, I mean, you might also say that to get that a noble subsidy, such a hard question. Is that a leading question, Your Honor? I believe the witness is leading, but the barris is leading. Look, you enjoyed that question.
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Christiana Figueres: I can tell.
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Paul Dickinson: I did.
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Christiana Figueres: I did. I'm going to enjoy your answer even more.
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Paul Dickinson: Well, it may well be the case.
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: I thought you were defending coal in Africa.
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Paul Dickinson: It may well be that, you know, people below a certain purchasing capacity for electricity would also need subsidy for renewables, even renewable energy with battery storage. It may well be, and it tends to be the case now, that renewables, even with battery storage, are cheaper than fossil fuels. But you're asking different questions like, do governments need to support the very poor with their electricity purchases? Yes, they do. Whether that's with gas, for example, in electric generation, or whether it's with battery and engine storage, perhaps less so, but possibly also.
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: And the other point that I would make is that fossil fuel companies have been telling us for maybe 100 years, certainly 75 years.
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Christiana Figueres: That they are the solution to poverty.
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: That they are the solution to poverty. A bit more public money, a bit more support with the grid and their, you know, remove the pollution controls and give them permits to build their power plants wherever they like, and they will solve poverty problems. And if they were going to do it, it would have happened by now. Yes, there have been huge quality of life increases as a result of access to energy, but what remains is a billion people.
00:24:47.680 --> 00:24:48.700
Christiana Figueres: 500.
00:24:48.700 --> 00:24:51.020
Tom Rivett-Carnac: Right, I was going to say a billion people without access to sufficient electricity.
00:24:51.020 --> 00:24:54.580
Christiana Figueres: Well, that is also true, but 500 million without any electricity.
00:24:54.580 --> 00:24:55.500
Tom Rivett-Carnac: Without any.
00:24:55.500 --> 00:24:59.640
Christiana Figueres: In the year 2026, Aminidash is just scandalous.
00:24:59.640 --> 00:25:01.880
Tom Rivett-Carnac: We're not going to do that with fossil fuels. We're not, yeah.
00:25:02.860 --> 00:25:08.580
Paul Dickinson: Although if you talk to the US Energy Secretary, Chris Wright, he spent his whole career like fracking in the USA and fracking in the USA. And he's talking about climate change. He's like, cooking stoves in Africa are my biggest concern. And it's like, really? Is that why you're running around the USA drilling gas? Maybe, maybe.
00:25:16.840 --> 00:25:27.860
Tom Rivett-Carnac: And I mean, just to highlight this point, where we need to be investing is we've talked a lot on this podcast about how the investment that needs to go into renewables is not reaching the most vulnerable countries. Only 2% of investment into renewables goes to Africa, largely for issues around currency risk and political risk and other different things. But we need to crack that, because that is the way.
00:25:36.820 --> 00:25:40.060
Christiana Figueres: Having huge potential resources of renewables.
00:25:40.060 --> 00:25:40.820
Tom Rivett-Carnac: Huge potential resources. And there are brilliant people like our friend Jacqueline Novogratz, who runs the Acumen Fund, who is really trying to address that. There are people trying to do this. That degree of investment needs to scale, because that's how we're going to actually bring people the resources they need to live good lives. OK, should we move on?
00:25:55.740 --> 00:25:56.520
Christiana Figueres: Let's move on.
00:25:56.520 --> 00:26:03.560
Tom Rivett-Carnac: We also got lots and lots of questions on social media, but also on the different platforms, including Spotify, and many questions on Venezuela. So I'm just going to turn to one here. Christiana, do you want to read this one out? This is from Daniel.
00:26:07.920 --> 00:26:13.360
Christiana Figueres: Populism doesn't become the right answer when it has progressive elements. Venezuela is a case in study on how a progressive government increased a country's dependency on oil exports as a lazy way to fund populist policy, and in doing so, destroyed a country's economic future.
00:26:29.300 --> 00:26:35.060
Tom Rivett-Carnac: Yeah, so I can maybe just provide some thoughts here, but I think we should maybe all layer in on this one because it's such an important point. And we did actually, if you both remember a while ago, talked about the need for progressive populism because we're seeing a lot of conservative populism. I do think that we need political leaders who can cut through with progressive ideas. And we've seen people like Zach Polanski, AOC, Yasmin Ansari, others step up with progressive ideas that can try to shift what we call the overton window, the window of possibility towards something that can represent the solutions that we so badly need as society. Any form of populism can be a very dangerous game. Because if you are just trying to follow that rabbit down the hole of doing something that can elevate people's expectations and build momentum towards it, it makes it harder and harder to make the tough choices in society. And there always are. And in particular, I think what Daniel's question points towards is, anytime you have a populist government and significant resources, the resource curse is a very well-established principle that actually, if you have significant resources, you will generally find that your country will be more full of strife, more full of war, more full of political populism and authoritarianism.
00:27:44.120 --> 00:27:44.680
Paul Dickinson: Corruption.
00:27:44.680 --> 00:27:45.240
Tom Rivett-Carnac: Corruption. And that has been consistent across history. So I think one of the things in Venezuela is yes, populism, but it's also the resource curse that has just played out so heartbreakingly on Venezuela for so long.
00:27:56.000 --> 00:28:08.200
Christiana Figueres: I'm interested that he uses the word lazy because, yes, it's a resource curse to have the largest confirmed oil reserves in the world. But where the laziness comes in is the mismanagement of it, just to extract without any degree of even entrepreneurial responsibility about how do you keep that resource. So it's a resource curse, not just because it's there, but in this case, they've doubled the resource curse because they have totally mismanaged and it makes that resource today uninvestable. It's uninvestable because of its current state. So I think he's very right in saying, it's a lazy way to fund POP because it's basically extracting whatever without investing into the continual flow of that resource. So totally agree with him. It's a lazy way to fund populist policy. Is it also corruption? Question mark. Is it also an interesting subsidy?
00:29:05.100 --> 00:29:06.740
Tom Rivett-Carnac: Oh, subsidy for?
00:29:06.740 --> 00:29:09.680
Christiana Figueres: For a particular political ideology.
00:29:09.680 --> 00:29:10.880
Tom Rivett-Carnac: Right, exactly.
00:29:10.940 --> 00:29:13.020
Paul Dickinson: Linking me to our previous question. Look, I think Daniel's calling us out here, actually. I said a kind of prediction that populism with the left and populism with the right was the future. I didn't actually say it was a good idea. I might have implied it by accident. So Daniel, thank you for correcting Tom. You said we need progressive populism. But I think Daniel's saying, do we? Because in a sense, populism is sort of saying we're going to dumb down debate here. I think that there is an issue that, for example, you could say, you know, a kind of mother problem is a lack of redistribution of wealth or, you know, progressive taxation that kind of, you know, helps even up the pie cost of living crisis versus a cost of wealth crisis. But maybe populism isn't the answer for the left or the right. And we need to try and win back some centrist politics. I'm stating the obvious here. But I mean, I'm inspired by Zohan Mondami. You know, he comes in and he's just he's got this populist message that is closer to where I grew up, you know. But actually, it may be populism isn't the way.
00:30:00.260 --> 00:30:17.400
Tom Rivett-Carnac: To broaden the question out a little bit in today's era of shortened attention spans, focus on, you know, the next interesting thing, all of our addiction to devices, complex public policy solutions to shared challenges aren't really having their day in the sun. So I think sometimes one of the things that we have struggled with in climate, and this might be true more broadly across progressive politics, is that solutions are too complicated and they should move more towards populist narratives in order to build momentum, because without that, we're just going to keep losing. Do you think that's possible?
00:30:34.980 --> 00:30:39.060
Paul Dickinson: Silence breaks out in the studio whilst Christiana and I think...
00:30:40.740 --> 00:30:41.800
Christiana Figueres: Yeah, scary.
00:30:41.800 --> 00:30:42.440
Tom Rivett-Carnac: Scary, right?
00:30:42.440 --> 00:30:42.960
Christiana Figueres: Yeah.
00:30:42.960 --> 00:30:56.560
Tom Rivett-Carnac: If you can only cut through with simple, easy messages, whether on the left or the right, and all of the nuance of the complexity of governing and managing complex transitions is excluded, how the hell do you manage a country?
00:30:56.560 --> 00:30:59.760
Christiana Figueres: And that complexity is closer to the reality than the simplicity.
00:30:59.780 --> 00:31:03.220
Tom Rivett-Carnac: Yeah, I mean, you know, easy and wrong always beats complex and right.
00:31:03.220 --> 00:31:04.040
Christiana Figueres: Yes, exactly. Thank you for summarizing that.
00:31:05.940 --> 00:31:13.720
Paul Dickinson: You know, I had to go on about sort of Churchill's fine phrases to motivate the nation, but actually that was representing a government of national unity with all the parties represented. I think so long as government is this sort of ferocious contest between these increasingly divided, I am kind of hopeful that humans are smart, maybe machines are smart. We can find ways to heal this and do well by healing.
00:31:28.760 --> 00:31:30.520
Tom Rivett-Carnac: I think this is a really interesting area, right? Are we just being nostalgic for an earlier era of simplistic, easier policy making, where complex things were explained to people and there was more honesty in public office?
00:31:41.340 --> 00:31:45.660
Christiana Figueres: I love that you asked it that way because it leads us exactly to the next question.
00:31:45.820 --> 00:31:47.040
Tom Rivett-Carnac: Not unexpected. It does lead brilliantly into the next question.
00:31:50.880 --> 00:31:54.100
Christiana Figueres: However, you are going to tell us that we are out of time.
00:31:54.120 --> 00:31:55.540
Tom Rivett-Carnac: We are out of time. I realize our production team are probably going to kill us, but we are halfway through the questions we wanted to get to in this episode. And so I think we are going to have to split it in half. So I'm not going to tell you what the next question is. You have to come back next time. So let's leave it there. Thanks for joining us. And then this time next week, there will be the second half of these questions.
00:32:12.480 --> 00:32:13.040
Paul Dickinson: To be continued.
00:32:13.040 --> 00:32:14.400
Tom Rivett-Carnac: I can't wait. All right. Should we leave it there?
00:32:15.880 --> 00:32:17.480
Christiana Figueres: I guess so.
00:32:17.480 --> 00:32:18.680
Paul Dickinson: Thanks everyone. Bye.
