309: Too hot to handle? Facing a Future Beyond 1.5°C

Ricken Patel: [00:20:36] Hello. 

Christiana: [00:20:38] I am so thrilled. I haven't seen you in about 3243 years.  More or less. Yes.

Ricken Patel: [00:20:45] Yes. Four children ago.

Christiana: [00:20:46] Four children ago. Okay. Well, congratulations on four children. Thank you. I have no idea how you do it. I think two is already a handful. So, Rick, and for those who don't know you, an ought to. You were the founder and CEO of Avaaz, which in my book is by far the most effective, broadest tent community global movement that there ever was on climate. Would you agree?

Ricken Patel: [00:21:19] Uh, it sounds self-congratulatory, but yeah, and coming from you, that's very high praise. So so thank you for that.

Ricken Patel: [00:21:25] And now you have turned your attention to something that is very difficult and that is climate contingency. So let me just frame this because of the very courageous work, mostly of the islanders in Paris, we finally, almost in the last minute, squeezing it in under the closing door, we got a reference to 1.5, a reference not as a target ceiling, but actually as an aspirational reference. And that, of course, from the point of view of low lying states, means survival. So of course they had to get that in. Now, since then, we have realized 1.5 degrees. If we breached, that is going to have consequential impacts on humanity on the rest of nature, on the planet as a whole, on our livelihoods, on everything. But we didn't know it because we didn't have the IPCC report on 1.5 in 2015. Now, Rick, and you have taken that knowledge one step further, and you have said, what if I think for me, you live in a what if world? What if we're not able to keep temperature under the 1.5 ceiling permanently, because we know we've reached it last year already, but as a permanent temperature increase. So you have moved into the very, very difficult area of climate contingency planning. What is that?

Ricken Patel: [00:23:04] I mean, it's exactly what you've spoken to.

Ricken Patel: [00:23:06] It's asking if we're in overshoot territory. And we know that scientists have told us that that territory exposes us to risks, to potential non-linear trajectories of climate change. And and we've seen very scary movements in those directions. There's a number of tipping points and feedback loops in the climate system and we don't know. It's a it's a realm of uncertainty. The question is, are we prepared for possible eventualities? If we do start to see Amoc slowing in the Atlantic, the the Atlantic Meridional Ocean current that that keeps Europe warmer than than Newfoundland in Canada? Exactly. Um, if we start to see Amazon dieback, there are some scientists that say that we're close to the precipice of losing the Amazon rainforest. If Thwaites Glacier starts to move into it's already moving part of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. If it were to move into the ocean at speed, we would see a three foot sea level rise overnight. I mean, it's an extraordinary set of risks that we're facing in the climate system. I think of it as similar to pre-pandemic kind of environment. We had public health authorities telling governments, we know that something of this type has a high probability of occurring, and we need to prepare for it. And government sort of half prepared for it. And we saw the consequences of that. And now we know we're in dangerous territory. We don't know the probability. We don't know how likely some of these things are.

Christiana: [00:24:21] But we know the consequences are huge.

Ricken Patel: [00:24:23] The consequences are massive, both for vulnerable communities and some of the most frontline communities in the world. Also, for all of us, potentially, the danger of these feedback loops and tipping points is that they can cascade. One can affect the other one. Ocean current stops the entire ocean current system. It can be an unstable equilibrium. And you see this massive disruption. And we've all seen how vulnerable our human communities are to small changes in stressors. What if you have a giant shock? And when I look at the history of civilizations, you see this sort of exponential curve of development and fragility that then outstrips its environment. And then it's the interaction of non-linear feedback loops and tipping points and human and natural systems together that takes down the system. And so it's the care for those human and natural systems together to plan for these shocks and try and prevent them. If we can do early warning and try to be responding to them. That's the. That's the focus of the discussion.

Christiana: [00:25:15] We're going to get to some of the work that you're doing. But before that, I want you to help me understand one thing, Rick, Johan Rockström, who I call Johan Rockstar, and his whole team, the whole planetary boundary team, have been warning us, and we know that we have not just reached, but breached six of the nine planetary boundaries. So help me understand this. If we have breached six of the nine planetary boundaries, and you're talking about catastrophic changes in ecosystems that cascade onto each other, what's the delta between where we are right now, having already breached them, and that catastrophic change that could occur very rapidly, as you say.

Ricken Patel: [00:25:58] I find I need to qualify any kind of scientific question with that I am not a scientist. I talk to scientists and I actually find a wide range of responses. And I think it's the uncertainty that I'm most concerned with. I think about actuarial responsibility. Like, are we mitigating risk? Are we managing this risk responsibly if the worst happens? What will we tell the people we're responsible for the people we steward our children. What did we do to prepare for this? That's the kind of realm that I operate in, I don't know. Honestly, there's a wide range of views. And some people call some of the views on this stuff alarmist. And some people say it's, um, realist. Naive. Yeah. And some people say it's realist. And I just think, regardless, we need to be thinking and preparing because we spend billions of dollars on meteor risk, you know, asteroids hitting the Earth. But as far as we've done the rounds and we've talked to a number of governments and just the whole system on this, there's almost nothing happening. There's almost no point. 

Christiana: [00:26:54] So what are you doing about this Rick?

Ricken Patel: [00:26:55] So what we hope we can help to do is have a reasonable, science led, evidence based conversation about the risk, and then a conversation about how we mitigate that risk. How we detect and do early warning and plan and mitigate. And there are many different risks and that we try to evolve a new part of the climate sector. If that's if that's one way to say it, you might call it a type of adaptation, an adaptation to non-linear near-term climate risks.

Christiana: [00:27:25] That goes beyond loss and damage. I mean, if you think about adaptation, right, there's adaptation, sort of what I call now traditional adaptation. Then there's loss and damage that we're still very, very incipient on. And then we get to the area that you're working on. Is it fair to say that that is the increase of consequences?

Ricken Patel: [00:27:46] Yeah. I mean, sometimes I think, oh, I shouldn't say adaptation because some people are very attached to words and how you frame things. Maybe we don't want to put that this work in that, in that basket. Maybe we do. Maybe we don't I don't know, maybe.

Christiana: [00:27:56] It's a different basket. Is that what you're saying?

Ricken Patel: [00:27:58] Possibly. Some people might want to put it in a different basket. My point mainly is that I feel this is climate work, like essential climate work. I mean, we've been there together. I remember sitting across from you and bawling my eyes out in front of the UN Secretary general.

Christiana: [00:28:11] Before.

Ricken Patel: [00:28:12] Before the crisis. Yeah, yeah, I think.I saw you teary eyed at that moment, too, right before the Paris summit, you know, before it opened. And, you know, we've been in the trenches, we've been in the streets, we have fought this fight, and it has been a good fight. We've achieved many things. It is no small task to change the the source of energy of human civilization, you know, and we have made much progress on that task. But we know we've been against the clock the whole time, and we know that we need something. There is no plan B, plan A, we have to reduce the emissions that are coming out. There is no other sustainable, safe solution to climate change. We need something to buy us some time that allows us to mitigate the worst possible effects of this overshoot territory that we are entering in order to get there.

Christiana: [00:28:51] For those who have not used the word.

Ricken Patel: [00:28:53] Just that if, as the IPCC has defined sort of 1.5 degrees, for example, as a threshold of where we can allow warming to levels that avoid some of the worst catastrophic impacts or the risks of some of these non-linear trajectories. Once you're over that threshold, as we as we did cross, maybe it's a blip, maybe not. That's the uncertainty. That's the that's the uncertainty. And once you're over, you're now in overshoot territory. And that's high risk territory. We're in dangerous territory. I think this is not none of us got into this work to be emissions mitigation specialists or activists. Right? We got this work because we cared about people and planet, and our people and planet are at risk right now. And we need to be responsible and we need to adapt and evolve. You know, like when when my kids have trouble with something and they're like, I can't get this right. I'm having so much trouble that I either say, try harder or try different, like try harder. First see if we can deal then. But it's not working try different. And again, there's only a plan A for fixing climate change. There's only emissions mitigation. But we also need to be flexible about how we get this fight done. There might be some other things we need to bring in to bias the time.

Christiana: [00:29:59] So when you went out there basically to do, let's call it an inventory of work. In this space. You basically found nobody's really everybody has the sinking feeling, I would say, but nobody's actively doing anything about this. Is that is that.

Ricken Patel: [00:30:15] When we toured governments, we found that governments are really not doing much, although.

Christiana: [00:30:19] They have a sinking feeling that this might be a possibility

Ricken Patel: [00:30:22] We did find a number of surprisingly high level officials who said, I have raised this again and again, and my electeds stamped down on it. Um, it was viewed as too politically sensitive.

Christiana: [00:30:34] Correct? Yes.

Ricken Patel: [00:30:35] And I think that's, you know, my fault and other activists fault because. We were just so worried about moral hazard. We're so worried about do not take the pressure like it's this feeling of impending doom that is driving the politicians. And, you know, in some cases, people to act on this topic. So do not say that there's anything but emissions reductions in order to, to meet this problem. And we were ferocious about that. And I think that created a culture of fear. Not a lot of responsible civil servants that have wanted to work on this topic and felt like they should be working on this topic, and so that's something we need to take responsibility for and try and rectify, because I think it if we hit some of these points, hundreds of millions of the world's most vulnerable people are at risk. And and we need to be serving them.

Christiana: [00:31:21] And so beyond identifying this as a huge gap in the climate community, what first steps have you taken about this and what reactions are you getting?

Ricken Patel: [00:31:32] So we started. We're baby, we're babies we just started in January. So we've been doing a listening tour. Basically, I started and we started with a lot of agnosticism about this. We just start with the problem. You know, somebody said the other day, don't be in love with the solution. Be in love with the problem. That's what you're focused on. And then be agnostic about the solutions and principled but open. And so we've done a listening to her, and I've got around a lot of my old friends in the climate movement and done some listening and done some hey, where are you at on this? And I think there are two questions that are catalytic for everyone I'm talking to at every part of the system. Number one, are we on track? Are we on track to get the job done to avoid the kind of catastrophic climate change that we all have been working so hard to avoid?

Christiana: [00:32:12] I bet I know what the answer to that question.

Ricken Patel: [00:32:15] Pretty much universally. I haven't met anyone who said that we're on track. Not not a single person.

Christiana: [00:32:20] And the second question then, is the second question is?

Ricken Patel: [00:32:22] Okay if we face that fact, if we accept it, what's the plan? And I think it's almost healthier to begin with that question and not try and offer an answer at this stage and just let us all bloom, because some people say the plan is to double down on the gas, on emissions mitigation. We've lost the politics for this moment. We need to get it back. And that's actually honestly what I spend most of my time working on, you know, is, is the politics around ecological politics and democracy and trying to rectify the threat that authoritarian populism is made to our democracies. But a lot of people have other answers that we also need to listen to. And I think we need to have a kind of a principled agnosticism, not a kind of wild embrace panic. Embrace any solution that comes up along, but something that's open minded and reasonable in science that we've we've constantly been telling people to be led by the science, and we need to be led by the science on this stuff.

Christiana: [00:33:13] And where do you see your next steps going?

Ricken Patel: [00:33:15] So I think part of what we need in this field, and I didn't mean when I said we did the rounds and didn't find much happening. It was among governments. There is a nascent, brave, beautiful field of people that are working on climate contingency planning, mostly scientists and engineers and researchers who have just been curious or idealistic and motivated. And they're real heroes because often they have sacrificed their careers to work on these topics. You know, it's not sexy, not funded, vilified, sensitive often. And they've made some real progress in many areas. Thank goodness. Our sense is that the field needs to be expanded, that we need a leveling up of funding and sources of funding for research to just understand, okay, how do we detect. How do we warn? What are the risks? What are our options for responding? What types of forms do they take. What are the implications of that? How do they affect different parts of the world? What kind of equity implications are there for these different options? What have adverse consequences are? There's a bunch of questions we have. If the the proverbial shit hits the fan, you know, that that our policymakers are equipped with the essential knowledge they need to make wise decisions.

Ricken Patel: [00:34:23] The alternative is that we leave this to the people in our planet that are less thoughtful and less principled, who will no doubt respond, because this is these are national interests engaged. We already know that the Saudi government, that the JD Vance has asked for a series of options on these fronts. We know a series of things about governments that are likely to act in ways that will not be principled. And so part of our listening tour has generated this sense that we have deep concern about moving, not just the moral hazard, concern of taking the foot off the gas of emissions mitigation. But what are the consequences of doing anything else? You know, but if we can articulate criteria, if we can search for safe, sustainable, just effective, equitable, nature based solutions, even, you know, nature mimicking the Earth has survived many rounds of this CO2 surge. And it has processes. The question is, will those processes kick in fast enough to safeguard humanity? Is there a way we can enhance those processes, speed.

Christiana: [00:35:22] Them up and take us to the scale we need?

Ricken Patel: [00:35:24] Exactly. Exactly.

Christiana: [00:35:25] It's both speed and scale.

Ricken Patel: [00:35:26] Yeah, but that criteria is sort of where we hope aspire to ground the conversation, to make sure we have responsible contingency planning as we go forward.

Christiana: [00:35:35] Ricken so explain to me exactly what you're talking about when you talk about climate contingency planning. Take that down a couple of levels. What options do we have there? Do we have a smorgasbord, if you will, of different options that are available to us and or do we need to develop more?

Ricken Patel: [00:35:56] We have some initial ideas, but I think the field is nascent. I think there's a lot of room to develop the options that we have available to us. If I would categorize the sets of options that we have right now, the problem is too much CO2. One solution is mitigation, where you just stop putting more CO2 in there. But the amount we have, we've already signed up for a lot more warming. That blanket that's over the earth is going to keep warming us up, warming us up.

Christiana: [00:36:18] Even if we stop CO2 emissions today?

Ricken Patel: [00:36:20] Even if we were at zero today. We've signed up for a lot of that overshoot territory baked in.

Christiana: [00:36:25] So what do we do about that?

Ricken Patel: [00:36:27] So about that we have carbon dioxide removal. We try and figure out ways to pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, out of the oceans. There's a number of ways the Earth naturally does this. Like rock weathering, the sort of erosion of coastal rock. It has an alkalinity effect on the ocean. It absorbs CO2. Could you speed up that process? Is there ways to safely, sustainably speed up that process. So there's this whole category of carbon dioxide removal. What else? So, you know, one of the things is what is the carbon sink of the planet. You know, how much can we rewild territories in a way that it starts to absorb a lot more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere? What kinds of nature based solutions, either natural organisms in the ocean or plants on land, can eat up that carbon dioxide? That's the kind of general direction of the of the thinking of the options. And then there's a whole category of stuff that says, well, also a natural earth effect, but the Earth and people don't often know this, that we have a reflective shield as well as that blanket, the CO2 that's keeping it in. We also have CO2 in the in the atmosphere. Natural occurring gas comes from volcanoes and stuff like that. And that reflects a lot of the sunlight that comes to the Earth. About 30% of it, I believe is.

Christiana: [00:37:34] Which is different than the albedo.

Ricken Patel: [00:37:35] Yes. And so another reflective aspect is, is is the Arctic and Antarctic albedo. So ice and sulfur dioxide both reflect sunlight. So how can we look at enhancing that reflection. And there's there's a whole range of creative stuff here. I mean, some the mayor of Freetown, for example, has suggested in Sierra Leone has suggested painting rooftops white in order to increase the reflectivity of the city. You know, there's all kinds of things we can think about.

Christiana: [00:37:59] So many trees that she wants to call it Tree Town

Ricken Patel: [00:38:02] Yeah. Tree town.  I Lived in Freetown for a while, so that's exciting for me..

Ricken Patel: [00:38:08] So, you know, I think these are the general categories. You can either you can stop emitting, you can remove carbon dioxide from from the equation, or you can try and reflect more sunlight. Those those are...

Christiana: [00:38:18] The Reflection of sunlight. Does that fall into the geoengineering bucket?

Ricken Patel: [00:38:23] Yeah, I think I don't know where that term starts and stops. You know, at some level, I think we've been massively geoengineering the planet for 200 years plus right now. Like, I mean. Yeah. And this is where some of the complexities of this come in. Right. Like some of that massive geoengineering has been we've been putting a ton of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere from our coal fired plants and our shipping emissions. And now the phasing out of those, The reform on shipping, which is which was a great struggle and many people fought hard for it and won and phasing out coal fired plants. Many scientists are telling us that that removal of that protective gas is going to warm the Earth by 0.5°C, and so we, by our own actions, have potentially catalyzed a massive acceleration in climate change in the near term. This is where I feel like, you know, we have to take responsibility for our impact on this planet. We are massively geoengineering this planet right now, and we just need to face that fact, take responsibility for it and ask ourselves, how do we how do we hold that responsibility wisely? How do we minimize our impact and footprint on this planet? How do we enhance its natural heat shield and ability to absorb carbon dioxide? That's the next phase of our environmental movement of really thinking holistically and not being too in love with solutions, and being more in love with the earth and the people on the planet, and being responsible for it.

Christiana: [00:39:40] Back to nature. I don't know how many times and how many conversations of mine end up with that conclusion that actually the rest of nature, because we're also part of nature, but that the rest of nature holds so much of the solution and that we haven't really helped nature to help us.

Ricken Patel: [00:39:59] Yeah, yeah. There's a there's an analogy to sort of the human body, like how we think about human health. The body has all these vastly sophisticated systems for, for maintaining its own health. And the more we can kind of have a natural medicine approach as opposed to like a strong pharmaceutical approach, you know, the way we can just small tweaks that enhance the body's own natural defenses. You know, that's the kind of paradigm that I think we can approach the body of Mother Earth with and, and see if we.

Christiana: [00:40:24] Can help to think about it. Yeah.

Ricken Patel: [00:40:26] We can. Thank you so much.

Christiana: [00:40:28] Thank you. It's so nice to see you. Exciting work. Yeah. I have the feeling that we're going to come back to you to know, once you finish your rounds and begin to put several pieces of the puzzle in place, we will want to know what that is.

Ricken Patel: [00:40:42] Yeah, looking forward to it.

Christiana: [00:40:43] Thank you so.

Ricken Patel: [00:40:43] Much. Cheers.

Tom: [00:40:47] How wonderful to hear Richard's voice again. As you said before the interview, he was incredibly important. Part of the road to the Paris negotiations. How did you feel leaving that discussion, Cristiano?

Christiana: [00:40:56] Well, as I mentioned, right at the top of this episode, since I have been on a personal journey myself, I was really touched that Ricken has not only been on a similar journey, but that he's actually focusing his analytical capacity now on this, which in and of itself is a statement. The fact that he has moved over to be doing this.

Paul: [00:41:21] I mean, the only thing I would add is reflecting on our conversation earlier in the interview. I wonder if there are any medical practitioners or people who've been with very ill people who will recognize some of these discussions and the character of them, that none of these solutions look good. Perhaps action needs to be taken, but the cost of action is so great. Perhaps inaction is better. What it's telling me, I'm afraid to say, is that our planet has very significant health problems that are starting to manifest, and we are in moving into the sort of world where, you know, heroic surgery was a phrase I was once introduced to, which was an idea that very, very ill people would have sort of extraordinary complex operations that, you know, could save their lives or kill them or have tremendous consequences. And, you know, I just don't want our planet going anywhere near heroic surgery, if at all possible. So I guess whilst on the one hand, we have to acknowledge that there are, you know, major nations who are in complete denial about the principal problem of national and global security in the 21st century. Yet we've got to probably judge these interventions with our better angels of wisdom regarding the optimal outcome, which is my long winded way of saying I don't know what to do for me.

Christiana: [00:42:45] Beginning to think about these things is not giving up. It's not about giving up. It's not about defeatism. It's not about throwing my hands up in the air. And I think that your comparison to human sickness, Paul, is very helpful. If we have someone that we love dearly, or barely know or even don't know who has a very severe sickness, we don't throw our hands up and go like, okay, there's nothing we can do. We explore all kinds of possibilities to bring that person back to health, and that's what we're doing here. We are not saying, okay, we are condemned to disaster. What we're saying is we are very far advanced in this global planetary Unhealthy process. What can we do? What can we consider in order to bring us back to a healthy, stable climate? And that that is the attitude that we should be looking at this with?

Tom: [00:43:51] Yeah. I mean, I think that's right. I completely agree with that. And I also take the sort of yeah, I know you come from a medical family, Paul. So, you know, the point you were making there is that you reach a point in an illness where sometimes the intervention carries a lot of jeopardy, and you make the intervention in the hope of solving the problem, but you end up with these invidious choices between intervention that increases risk and not intervening, that has risk. And that really resonates for me. I think that's a very powerful analogy, that there we're there because of course, we mobilize to try and save the patient. But at the same time, we are becoming much more involved in the health of whether or not the planet continues in a good way than we really should be, right? And once you start intervening as to take your medical analogy further, you often have to intervene again. Yes, that does become quite complicated. Actually, I like that.

Christiana: [00:44:48] Totally agree. But the point is, we started intervening 1500 years ago, right? This is not the beginning of our.

Tom: [00:44:55] We started smoking and now this is.

Christiana: [00:44:57] And now, you know, here we are faced with lung cancer. So at this point, ignoring the risk doesn't reduce it at all. Facing the risk and beginning to see what options we have could take us down the path of one intervention and then another, and then another, as it does in a medical situation. But the question is, do we have the option to ignore the risk?

Paul: [00:45:19] I haven't I have a dream, I have a dream and you know, you have to have a dream. Then I have lunch in the year 2100 with the world, and the world is saying, oh, do you believe it in 2025? I was in so much trouble. They were talking about putting sulfate aerosols in my sky to stop me getting too hot and stop my Thwaites glacier melting and stopping the Gulf Stream shutting off. And now I'm fine. Took a few decades, but after about 2060, 2070 I got back to rude health. Now my ecosystems are coming back and and I look back and think, well, what a perilous time that was. But I'm fine now. That's what I want the world to tell me when I have lunch with it in 2100. And it's possible.

Christiana: [00:45:59] Can I get an invitation to that lunch?

Paul: [00:46:01] You're most welcome, Chris. I'm sure you'll be there without even realizing.

Tom: [00:46:05] Ben would love to hear any reflections you've got as well.

Ben: [00:46:07] I just wanted to look at it maybe a little bit differently.

Paul: [00:46:09] Not having lunch with the planet.

Ben: [00:46:11] Know that I wasn't going there. I wasn't going there. There are a number of reasons to look at, for instance, carbon removal in particular. One of them is that our 2015 net zero target is very difficult without it, particularly if we're going to maintain things like steel production, cement production, aviation shipping, that kind of thing. We can go a long way with decarbonizing those industries, but we're very unlikely to go all the way in the next couple of decades. And so one of the reasons to think about CDR is to remove that carbon that those industries are still producing for 10 to 20% of our emissions, that we're going to really struggle to remove. And I'd say that's the pragmatic short term reason. But there's also a more optimistic long term reason, which is when we think about 2080, 2100, when quite probably there will be people listening to this who will still be alive then. And do we really want to accept that whatever temperature we're at when we hit net zero, is the temperature that those people and future generations are going to live in. And it'll come down very slowly over centuries through these natural sinks. Or do we want to try and reclaim this broadly, very comfortable climate that humanity has grown and flourished under?

Christiana: [00:47:27] Such a good question, Ben. Yeah, such a good question. I love that question.

Paul: [00:47:33] Thank you. And fun fact you may know that if humans stopped all emissions tomorrow of greenhouse gases from our activities, sea level would continue to rise for 300 years. So we've clearly got to.

Christiana: [00:47:43] Excuse me. Is that a fun fact?

Paul: [00:47:45] Yeah. You should come on to the unfun facts later in a special podcast called Doom Now, which I'm releasing with the Devil Engine.

Tom: [00:47:52] So I think it would be good for us to just finish this conversation by talking a little bit about the moral hazard of talking about contingency and what that might do to mitigation efforts. We touched on that before we brought Revkin in, but just before we do, on a more personal basis, I mean, Christiana, you and me and Paris and Paul as well. And in this podcast, we talk a lot about optimism and stubborn optimism and continuing to go, we're now talking about this contingency of the fact that despite all of our best efforts, it may or may not be enough. And you know that not everything's going well for us to feel this level of comfort that we're getting to where we need to go. What does this mean for us? I mean, are we changing our view? Does does what we've said before? Still carry relevance?

Christiana: [00:48:35] Good question. Paul, you want to go first?

Paul: [00:48:38] Um, I personally find it extremely hard to kind of give up on anything when there's still people buzzing around with lots of opportunities, lots of capabilities. You know, I'm nowhere near calling time on anything.

Christiana: [00:48:49] I think that examining all the possibilities that we still have, and many more that we're going to invent and don't even know is part of the optimism, is part of not giving up, is part of saying, okay, we've tried this. It got us that far. Now let's try something else. It'll get us a little farther then maybe something else. It'll get us a little farther. That's the stubborn optimism that in my book that we need about not throwing our hands up and going, like, okay, the entire world and humanity and all of the other 8 million species are going to hell in a basket. No. Everything is changing constantly. Constantly. And we know that we are the species that has caused this problem. Therefore, we should conclude we are the species that should correct this as soon as possible. And there are many, many correction measures that we have not even attempted or thought of before. So it's hard. I think for me, it's part of the commitment to continue to uncover more and more options to address this.

Tom: [00:50:00] Hmm.

Paul: [00:50:01] Just to close it out, Tom, you have to respond to your own provocation.

Tom: [00:50:04] Well, I mean, I would go back to your analogy, Paul. I mean, you know, okay, so we've been smoking for many decades, and now the moment of consequences has arrived. And we've sat there and the consultant has said to us, you might want to get your affairs in order. You know, this is going to be tight. You're not optimistic at that point by saying, I'm going to pretend I haven't got lung cancer. You're optimistic by saying what I can do? I'll try to do. There are interventions I probably need to make. There are also things I need to do around my lifestyle. Those things I need to do around my relationships.

Paul: [00:50:33] That's the word treatable, treatable, treatable.

Tom: [00:50:36] And that optimism happens within the context of reality. As soon as an optimism supersedes reality, then it becomes naive and Pollyanna ish. But once it happens, within the context of reality comes first and the optimism comes second. And if that were to flip the other way around, then it would actually be irresponsible. So let's just talk about the moral hazard. And I know we don't have long before we have to end the podcast, but do you both sort of worry and Christiana. Let me start with you. I mean, you know, if you think about the degree of grit that was required to get governments together in Paris and many other moments, would they really have done that if they felt that actually maybe there was just a kind of geoengineering solution that meant they didn't have to bother, you know. Is it going to remove some of the collective determination?

Christiana: [00:51:18] There's always that risk. There is always that risk. But the fact is, many of the technologies that reduce emissions have now so much wind behind them and are already and will continue to be deployed on their own because they're more competitive, they are more predictable, they have, etc., etc., etc. or all the arguments that we have made here. And and we know that even the maximum deployment at this point, the maximum deployment of all of those technologies, is not going to give us the guarantee of staying under 1.5. So that's why we're opening a new chapter. It doesn't mean that we pull back from that, which is already an amazing set of opportunities to provide more energy, cleaner energy, cheaper energy, More predictable energy to the humans who are here and who are coming. And in addition to those, we have to start thinking about other things, and it's not too early to do so.

Paul: [00:52:34] I think you've raised the question perfectly, Tom, about it. Does it put people off? I was thinking about this 50 million that the UK government has allocated to looking at geoengineering, and I think that's a good idea. But I think you have to also put 50 million into the risk that fossil fuel interests are undermining national and global security. You don't want to look at just one and not the other. You know, we've got political problems. We've actually got a resurgent right wing in the UK under this Nigel Farage character who's, you know, talking about, you know, net zero is impossible. And we should give it up immediately. We've got we've got a problem with the sky and energy being trapped on the earth. And we've got a problem with politics whereby people are taking advantage of ignoring national security issues, and they're very different problems, but they've got the same outcome risk.

Tom: [00:53:18] Yeah. Yeah. I think that's actually a very good note to end, because I think we're at the point where we sort of say, look, you know, we have to accept the reality as it is. And of course, many of us, all of us would hope, would wish it would be different. You know, we all wish we lived in fully intact ecosystems. And none of this had happen. But we have to. The first step in trying to deal with this is to face the reality that we have in front of us, and trying to hide from that is just to arrive at it unprepared. So I think that's what we have in front of us. This has been a really interesting episode. I think actually we should probably do more on this topic. So I think many people are thinking about it. I think us naming it, looking at this reality is going to be an important part of the contribution we can make. So if you liked it, if you haven't liked it, if you're angry with us, if you think, thank God they're finally talking about this issue, please let us know. Thank you for listening. Thank you for Ben for being our special guest alongside him.

Christiana: [00:54:04] I was going to say I'm willing to do more conversations with this only if Ben holds us by the hand.

Tom: [00:54:10] Thanks, everyone. Lovely to see you. Bye.

Paul: [00:54:12] Bye bye.