Will Climate Action Go Backwards Under Burnham?

Should Andy Burnham deliver a covid style national emergency briefing to inform the public about the climate emergency? How do we foster cross-party consensus on the climate emergency? And, can we balance the need to build data centres and protect the environment? Join Alastair Campbell, Rory Stewart and Caroline Lucas as they discuss all of these questions and more. To watch Caroline’s four part series on climate as a national security threat, sign up at therestispolitcs.com ⁠⁠⁠⁠Read the redacted Joint Intelligence Committee Report here⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠Find out more about the National Emergency Briefing here.⁠⁠⁠⁠ Producer: India Dunkley Researcher: Evie Townend Video Editor: Josh Smith, Vasco Andrade Social Producer: Celine Charles Executive Producer: Bella Soames General Manager: Tom Whiter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Rory Stewart?

  This episode is brought to you by NordVPN.

• 0:06Alastair Campbell?

  And I must thank NordVPN because on my Grand European Tour with Fiona, I was away from the Hawthorns for West Bromwich against Burnley, but I managed to watch it. There you go.

• 0:19Rory Stewart?

  I actually had a NordVPN thank you. I was in the new Starbucks here in Creef, and of course, the thing flashed up, saying this is an unsecured public network. And I was able to go to my VPN. And it was a little reminder of something we often forget when we're in all those cafes and things, which is actually genuinely, people can do all kinds of weird cyber attacks and spying if you don't have a virtual private network when you're sitting in that Starbucks.

• 0:42Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I think, are you not really sort of proud of me that I managed to do this? Or should I say Fiona managed to do this?

• 0:49Rory Stewart?

  I'm incredibly proud of you. That's a tech transformation. So to get the best discount off your NordVPN plan, go to nordvpn.com/rustispolitics. That's nordvpn.com/rustispolitics. And the link is in the episode description.

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• 2:13Alastair Campbell?

  Welcome to a Rest is Politics climate special with me, Alastair Campbell.

• 2:19Rory Stewart?

  And with me, Rory Stewart.

• 2:20Alastair Campbell?

  And we are absolutely delighted to have with us somebody that members will have been hearing a lot of recently. That's Caroline Lucas, former leader of the Green Party, who has done, I think, and I'm biased, both on the issue and on Caroline, but I think a brilliant series on climate essentially as a national security issue. Rory, why don't you just give us a quick rundown for those who aren't members, haven't listened on what Caroline went through episode by episode? And then we'll maybe talk a bit about that.

• 2:49Rory Stewart?

  Let me just start by a huge shout out to Caroline. So people who don't know her, she entered, I think, Parliament with me in 2010, when she was the only Green Member of Parliament. So she was both the leader of the Green Party and their sole Member of Parliament. She had been a Member of the European Parliament before, which was quite interesting because she came into Parliament with experience, but also, I, maybe Caroline can come back on this, but a slightly sceptical view, which I think, unless I'm being unfair to her, made her think that with some things, the European Parliament did a bit better than us. She struggled with a lot of the mechanics. I mean, how on earth do you work out how the votes work without these huge whipping operations if you're a one-person party? And she's somebody I really, really came to admire. She was both, I think, a really

• 3:34Rory Stewart?

  strong constituency MP, but also, as I think you'll pick up as you listen to the series, an MP who is able to come across in a very natural, uncomplicated, unscripted way. Anyway, that's enough praising maybe Caroline for a second. So so far, there have been four episodes, which I'd really recommend on the climate series. The first one looked at the secret security threat that the government didn't want us to know. This was a joint intelligence report, which named climate and nature collapse as a national security threat. And there she infused a couple of fascinating people, Left Hand General Richard Newey, but also a friend of mine called Arthur Snell, who's a very, very unusual, bright, thoughtful, former colleague of mine from the Foreign Office, who's actually written

• 4:17Rory Stewart?

  a rather brilliant book, where he travelled around the world, looking at the unexpected impacts of climate on global security. So big recommendation for that. Then she did the food security crisis with Professor Paul Behrens. Then she did, and this is, you know, one of the ones where, you know, she and I maybe find ourselves in different sides, but data centres, or drinking water, what matters most. So big debate around data centres, which is spilling from the UK into the US. It's actually one of the biggest American political debates at the moment. And then truth about climate migration, which ties in a little bit to a recent episode that we did with Garry Canales. So really happy to have you with us. And Alistair, we had a number of listeners' questions. Would you like to start with one of those?

• 4:56Alastair Campbell?

  Why don't we start? Because I think this is a useful way of getting into some, if not all, of the themes that Caroline's series addressed. The issue on which we had by far the most questions when we put out a call for questions relates to the issue of a national emergency briefing. And I'll just read out one. We had over 200 people asking vaguely the same question. What do you think it will take to make Andy Burnham do a COVID-style primetime televised climate emergency briefing to the nation to level with the public about the climate and nature emergency and the huge benefits of taking far bolder action? These heatwaves are surely the ideal time. What do you think is stopping

• 5:38Alastair Campbell?

  him? And maybe before we come to you on that, Caroline, just worth pointing out that virtually every conversation anybody is having at the moment in the UK is, oh my God, isn't it wet? In some places, isn't it hot? Isn't it wet? In China, we just had a million people evacuated because of a typhoon. I'm in France, we've got forest fires not far away. Canada, the United States, forest fires, floods in India. It feels like we're talking about climate more, but maybe we're talking about weather rather than climate. And what those questions are about, Caroline, is what does it take to get the government to level with people about just how serious things are? Because that's what your series was about.

• 6:15Speaker 04

  Well, it's a very, very good question. And I just want to give a shout out for the whole national emergency briefing initiative, in a sense, because this started off with a huge event in Westminster Central Hall in London at the back end of last year, where some of the country's top scientists briefed MPs, people from the House of Lords, journalists and others, about the seriousness really of what we're facing right now. And then they turned that into a film, but it's a very accessible film. It's kind of done in a way with Chris Packham introducing it, but then it's almost quite amusing from time to time when they kind of go back to the audience and talk about what they're seeing. So there's a way of really engaging people. You don't need to be a complete activist

• 6:57Speaker 04

  to get something from that film. And the importance of showing that film is that it's being done in communities up and down the country. And that means that people are gathering their local councillors, their MP, and having a really important conversation off the back of that film as to what can be done locally. So it's a really engaging process. But the people who are writing and are absolutely right, it would boost it no end if we properly got a national showing of that emergency briefing, if we had it introduced by the Prime Minister. Now, the questioner is asking, you know, what's stopping that happening? And that's an incredibly good question. I mean, if I was going to be a bit cheeky, I might say, well, get Zach Polanski to ask for it to happen, because he was asking for

• 7:42Speaker 04

  a Cobra meeting on the floods and the heatwaves. And we've just heard this week that the Cobra meeting's happening. But it is a serious point, because we need to have a sense shared in the country of the level of risk we face. You know, sometimes we will make comparisons, don't they, with kind of wartime mobilisation. The difference in wartime is that there was a shared understanding of the risk that we were facing. And that's what's collapsed over the past few years. You know, when you've got a leader of the Conservative Party even, who is saying that you can't be a Tory candidate unless you basically absolutely renounce net zero, then we're in really dangerous territory. So it seems to me that this national briefing is more important than ever to kind of establish that common sense of the risks we face.

• 8:25Rory Stewart?

  Maybe it's a chance to bring listeners into this. If you were up on that stage in Westminster Central Hall, how would you articulate the key risks that we face for, I don't know, the general kind of Middle England voter, non-Green Party voter?

• 8:38Speaker 04

  Well, I mean, I think I would lean into those suppressed reports, which put it better than I possibly could in terms of, for example, our food security. And I would talk about empty supermarket shelves, and I would talk about rising food prices, and try to put this in terms that really matter to people who right now are doing 100 other things. They are worried about 100 other things. And if we present this in technical terms, in the jargon of net zero, or biodiversity net gain, or all of this remote, top-down kind of language, then we can't be surprised if people don't engage with it. So I think we need to start where people are at. And I think where I would start would be by talking about how we can get local communities to come together and build resilience in their

• 9:22Speaker 04

  villages, in their towns, and so on, and talk about the benefits of that. For example, people who have their football pitch flooding every single year. So their kids are going up the wall, and they can't get out and play, and everyone's getting really cross. Let's talk about practical ways in which you could actually start with that football pitch, and then lead out from there, lead out from some of the retrofit that needs to happen, which keeps homes cooler in the summer as well as warmer in the winter. So I think I would make it as practical as possible and really underline the positive benefits that come to people as a result.

• 9:52Alastair Campbell?

  Caroline, I had an email last night from a friend of mine who is French, and who saw that we were going to be talking about this, and reminded me I'd forgotten. That he and I had watched the Al Gore film, An Inconvenient Truth, twenty years ago.

• 10:08Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 10:09Alastair Campbell?

  Twenty years ago, the Al Gore, Vice President of the United States, made this extraordinary film. And I can remember it had a massive impact on me. And that felt like a kind of high point. So the question my friend was asking is, is it a failure of the green and environmental movements that the dial has been moved so successfully backwards?

• 10:29Speaker 04

  Well, I don't think it's our exclusive failure, but yes, I'm afraid I would have to say partly it is. And I think that is partly because we kind of bought into a narrative that was very easy to weaponise, if that was your decision to do that, from the, from the parties of the, of the right and the far right. So we did make it sound like a very technical issue. We did make it sound as if you've just got to listen to the experts and trust us and we know best. And we didn't start with where people are at in local communities. And that's why I think, in a sense, this is our last chance to get that right and to really do that. To take it back to the emergency briefing, I think one of the things we also struggle with in this country in particular is a kind of infantilisation of the public. It's almost as if, you know, if you're asking, why won't they show this briefing?

• 11:14Speaker 04

  And why wouldn't they publish that suppressed report? I think part of it is that somehow they don't quite trust the public with that information. And this was really brought home to me just recently when I was reading a fantastic book by David Shookman, you know, who used to be the BBC climate correspondent. And his book is called The Response. And he was talking about in Lincolnshire, how there's real worries about the repeat of the kind of storm surge that happened in nineteen fifty-three and killed three hundred people. And so a lot of people wanted to put some signs up in Lincolnshire, telling people where they should go in the event of such a thing happening again. And do you know what? They, they actually had to end up with signs. If you go to Lincolnshire, you, you can see them. There are these signs that say ER. Do you know what that stands for?

• 11:55Alastair Campbell?

  Extinction Rebellion?

• 11:56Speaker 04

  No, it stands for evacuation route. But they wouldn't put evacuation route on it in case it alarmed people. So you can go around Lincolnshire and see signs saying ER and an arrow. And presumably people thinking WTF, you know what on earth is this going on about here? The idea that we wouldn't spell that out, whereas in Japan, you know, I can promise you, they have a picture of a person fleeing and, and waves coming. It just seemed to sum up for me this kind of, as I say, this infantilisation of the public, where we don't trust them with the real truth of what's happening.

• 12:25Rory Stewart?

  Here's a question from Halacey. What effect did AI data centres have on the climate in comparison to other factors? This relates to your series on AI data centres and their use of energy, their use of water, their impact on the environment in general in the race for AI, over you.

• 12:45Speaker 04

  Well, this is probably where we're going to come to blows. I mean, I think the framing of the question is important, you know, because if you ask in very general terms, how does AI compare to other industries when it comes to energy use and, and water use? Then probably it wouldn't necessarily look that scary. I think the point about AI data centres is that they tend to be clustered in areas that are already at, at risk. So for example, we know that the government is planning another hundred data centres by the early twenty thirty's. And eighty-four percent are going to be cited in areas that are projected to be water stressed by twenty forty. So I think whenever you look at this question in a kind of averaged out way, a nationwide way

• 13:27Speaker 04

  or a, or a global way, then the true impact of those data centres isn't really realised because you're not looking at the concentration of them, which tends to happen in areas like the southeast of, of, of England, where the demand is greatest for the, for the benefits of the, of the data centres. And therefore you're putting them in already very water stressed areas. And I think that that is a, a major problem. And, and at a time when you've got Water UK, which is the trade body that represents water companies, they themselves are saying that the government's own water forecasts are fatally flawed, not least because they explicitly exclude data centres. You've got data centres now given this special protection. So they're given this critical national infrastructure protection, which means that even in times of drought,

• 14:12Speaker 04

  the water companies cannot legally disconnect them because they are given that extra priority over and above households and, and other kinds of, of uses. So I think, I think we've got the balance wrong. And I think we need far more information from the data centres and from the water companies about how much energy they're going to be using, how much water they're going to be using, what they're going to be used for. One of the things that I thought came out really well from Ollie in the episode was that talking about AI is a bit like talking about transport in the sense that covers everything from walking and cycling through to private jets. AI is a lot of different things. And there's a world of difference between, you know, needing an AI data centre to, for example, come up with new health solutions and when it's just to kind of help us get a very quick response

• 14:56Speaker 04

  to a, you know, a Grok type question. So I, I think it's a more complex answer and a more complex question perhaps than it sounds.

• 15:03Alastair Campbell?

  We did a survey of our listeners. Now, this is probably slanting a little bit more towards Caroline's side of the debate because I'm imagining a lot of the people who took part in this, the people who were listening to the series. But it is nonetheless quite interesting. And Rory, it was really interesting, Rory, give you the figures, how you framed this when you were talking about which is more important, AI or drinking water? Now, I don't think anybody is going to say anything other than drinking water, but that is kind of where the debate is. But let me just say what our listeners and viewers said. The question was, which is more important, AI or the environment? Fifty-six point seven percent say the environment is more important. Thirty-nine point five say they're somewhere in the middle. Three point two percent saying AI should come first.

• 15:48Alastair Campbell?

  Young people more likely to prioritise the environment over AI than older generations, which by the way, is not the same outcome when you're asking more generally about whether people think governments should be doing more about climate. It's actually an older generation, the older generation that's more worried. But Rory, why don't we, as you, as you two have your ding dong, why don't we, why don't we say, you're on the wrong side of the argument here, Rory?

• 16:11Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, well, I, I think the challenge, Caroline, is that with any national infrastructure that is critical for growth, you can come up with a lot of very, very complicated reasons why ideally it shouldn't be built. And, and to some extent, that is the story. That is the story of HS2, that's the story of the Heathrow third runway, that's the story of a lot of our electricity generation. I would be tempted to work backwards. That question that Ollie posed about what exactly a data centre and chips are used for doesn't really grasp how large language models operate. The idea that the UK could actually have any kind of sovereignty or independence

• 16:54Rory Stewart?

  in relation to AI, if it started to distinguish between, oh, this is a good use of AI because this is being used for pharmaceutical discovery. This is a bad use because the data centre is being used to generate Grok images. You are essentially stepping out of the entire world which US and China is in. Now, you can choose to do that, but it is an absolutely enormous risk. Because what will happen is that our entire economy will be built on US and Chinese models. Our entire defence and security will be built on US and Chinese models. There will be an incredible opportunity for Donald Trump to weaponise that dependency, to turn off models and not allow us to access it, to charge us for access to US models.

• 17:38Rory Stewart?

  To outsource these things to other countries and continue to use them, which is what we will inevitably end up doing, is an incredibly dangerous place to be in terms of our national security. The major reason why we have been unable to get any kind of leverage in relation to OpenAI or Anthropic begins with data centres. We can't host models in the UK or Europe. We can't host weights. We don't have chips. We don't have Satas. They're not processing anything with us. So we literally have nothing which would allow us to run these things in the absence of the Americans running them on their own data centres in the United States. And I think we just have to begin with that.

• 18:21Rory Stewart?

  If we start getting into a conversation about exactly what an individual data centre is used for, you're, you're losing the whole geopolitical balance here. And we're going to end up, I think, in a very, very weak and vulnerable place over the next five to ten years.

• 18:35Speaker 04

  Can I tell you what I think our starting point should be? Because the question that you put in the poll, I have to say, I do think is a little bit bonkers. I mean, saying, do you want the AI or do you want the environment? I mean, the environment is not just a policy option on a menu.

• 18:51Alastair Campbell?

  As you know, Caroline, polls are often bonkers.

• 18:53Speaker 04

  Well, they are, but, but, but I think.

• 18:55Alastair Campbell?

  How would you vote in a general election tomorrow? There isn't one.

• 18:58Speaker 04

  But in this case, I think it reveals an underlying source of tension, which kind of explains why Rory and I are coming at this from different angles. Because if you treat the environment as just one other policy consideration to be borne in mind while you're weighing up other considerations, then you don't see it as the absolute bedrock upon which everything else depends. And the whole point of the mini-series in a sense was to say that everything that we build, our whole economy and every aspect of it, is intimately and inextricably and inevitably linked to whether or not we have a thriving natural world. Because if we don't, then we don't have any of those other things. So that would be my starting point. And I guess the second point would be simply to say, the conversation that we're having just now

• 19:43Speaker 04

  is being repeated in, in, in Amsterdam, in Seattle, in New York, and, and around the world. Everyone is being told that if we don't get in there now, someone else is going to win the race. And yet we know that there are other conversations that are also happening, which we could also give some time to, which is the fact that in New York State, for example, they have just introduced a temporary moratorium while they wait for regulation to catch up in a sense. That in everywhere from Amsterdam to Dublin to Seattle, they've done the same in many other places. And one of the reasons that I think people are doing that is because we just simply do not have the transparency, accountability and regulatory framework that we need to be able to ensure that the data centres that we do need, and I'm not saying we don't need any,

• 20:27Speaker 04

  of course we do, but to make sure that they are operating within the constraints of a very, very fragile planet.

• 20:34Rory Stewart?

  But Karen, let me push back a little bit. Look, yes, there are conversations happening in Seattle and New York.

• 20:40Speaker 04

  There's a moratorium as well.

• 20:41Rory Stewart?

  And the context, the context of that is what percentage do you think of the, the data centres and chips in the world currently exist in the United States? What percentage of these chips are there?

• 20:51Speaker 04

  I have, I have no idea. Huge, a huge number.

• 20:54Rory Stewart?

  Pretty close to ninety percent. So you can have a moratorium in New York and Seattle, and you're not going to have a remote impact on the basic truth, which is we don't really have any of these things in Britain or Europe. So we're having a fight about a totally different thing. In the US, these things have been built out at huge scale. And there's a fight happening about whether more of them are built in New York while there are these colossus things in Texas and elsewhere. In Europe, we can't build any. I mean, all these projections, when you say the government is saying it's going to build a hundred data centers, it can't get planning permission for any of them. Right on on current projections within the next five to 10 years, Europe will simply not be able to participate at all in this AI race. It will all be happening in the US and China.

• 21:39Rory Stewart?

  So a moratorium, a pause, a let's think about it, let's get more analysis, let's get more evidence is essentially saying we are giving up on the entire industrial revolution, which will be powered from the US and China, and we will find ourselves having to run all our public services, all our defense and security, most of our economy on the back of US and Chinese systems with the consequences.

• 22:03Speaker 04

  So can I ask you then what you think the solution is, given the level of dissent and concern that is exactly the thing that is stopping planning permission in many places, not just in the UK, but more further afield? If you think that having a moratorium to try and get the regulation in place first is the wrong answer, if you're not terribly bothered about some of the issues around transparency and accountability, then how are you going to build that consent? How are you going to stop there being yet more anger and polarization in this country, which can scant a forward yet more of it?

• 22:33Rory Stewart?

  I mean, obviously, I'm not going to say that I'm not bothered by accountability and transparency. I think a lot of these companies are terrible. I think a lot of them have behaved extremely badly, and I think there's a lot of reason to be angry. I just put a little footnote, though. I mean, I was very, very closely concerned in Cumbria with the campaigns against wind turbines, and it's astonishing how similarly statements about moratoriums, regulations, transparency, accountability were being used against the people building any type of infrastructure that people don't want. You raise the question of water-stressed areas. One of the biggest fights at the moment is happening in a pretty sparsely populated

• 23:14Rory Stewart?

  and well-rain-fed area of Scotland, because people don't want an enormous data center near their village.

• 23:21Speaker 04

  And another battle's happening in Slough, where people are already feeling the increased heat as a result of that data center, and it's already the center of them.

• 23:27Rory Stewart?

  So logically, you're totally right that if we think about this in terms of national strategy and national planning, we should be building the data centers more in areas like Scotland that have more water, that are cooler, that are less water-stressed. There are some questions about latency and access to cities. But the reality is we're not building them anywhere. I mean, this story about transparency and accountability and moratoriums adds up in the end to us not building them. And so I'm obviously, I'm not going to stand up as the kind of demon and say, I support evil companies who are non-transparent or non-accountable. I'm just saying we need to build these data centers. If Britain doesn't have enormous data centers in the next three to five years, we are going

• 24:12Rory Stewart?

  to be like a 19th century colonized country facing the industrial waste of Europe. We're going to be in a completely different universe.

• 24:20Speaker 04

  I mean, if you can just hang on a minute and just go back for a second to some of those conclusions and forecasts and concerns from the Joint Intelligence Report that was also telling us that every single ecosystem that we depend on is on a pathway to collapse, that life as we know it right now might not continue the way that we think it will, and that things could be incredibly dangerous in the times ahead. And it feels to me that there's a moment here for a much bigger, wider conversation about what kind of economy is going to be compatible with an earth that is being constrained in all kinds of ways, whether that's water or heat, wildfires and so forth. And that, you know, one of the questions for those pushing hardest for AI might indeed

• 25:05Speaker 04

  be for them to think themselves, well, what happens to AI when the systems it depends on themselves begin to fail? So it just feels to me that trying to assume that that next year is going to be the same as last and so on and so forth, that's not the point that we're at right now. It's much more critical.

• 25:21Alastair Campbell?

  Rory, can I just jump in before we come back to that? Because there's a question from Izzy Cohen, which I think goes to the heart of this discussion. I don't know if enjoy is the right word, but I'm watching very with great interest. Izzy Cohen, how can we create, maybe recreate as a better answer, cross-party consensus on climate change action? I get the feeling at the time when the Al Gore film was doing the rounds and Greta Thunberg was becoming a global household name, I get the feeling that you two would have been a lot closer in the way you talked about these issues than you are now. And I think it is AI that has that has sort of pushed Rory in one direction and probably cemented Caroline in another. So what do we have to do to get to get you two closer together?

• 26:04Rory Stewart?

  Well, I think there's a lot of things going on, and I'd be very interested in Caroline's point of view. But one of the biggest things that's gone wrong is that we were operating in an environment in which we were assuming that the action that we took in Britain and Europe was driving a global consensus, in particular, driving big change in places like the United States. After all, it was the US Vice President who put this together. And most of the problems that we're talking about, particularly the problems of climate, are global, right? And Britain's impact on it is quite minimal. So there is a real risk that we've seen over the last 20, 30 years, which we're still trying to digest, which is that we essentially export our problems to other countries, right? AI is just another example. It's what we've done with our steel industry.

• 26:49Rory Stewart?

  It's what we've done with almost all our manufacturing. We still consume more carbon than we've ever done. We just have the T-shirts manufactured in China, the coal-fired stations operate in China. It's the same with AI, right? We're going to try to run our whole economy off models which will be run in other people's countries. And I had the same in the Lake District, right? We don't want to keep sheep on Lake District hills because sheep are damaging to the environment, so we import them from New Zealand, so the sheep can damage the New Zealand environment instead, right? So a lot of Caroline's arguments were much more powerful when there was a big global consensus and where we were not simply offshoring our problems to other people.

• 27:31Rory Stewart?

  The problem with offshoring, though, has become even worse now because of sovereignty, right? That's the second problem. Offshoring felt hypocritical, but in a world of globalization, it still felt safe. Now we realize that offshoring all our industrial manufacturing, offshoring all our AI and being dependent on US-China for these things create choke points, allow us to be blackmailed.

• 27:55Speaker 04

  I think one of the reasons that some of the consensus has begun to come apart is because sometimes there have been green measures that have been introduced in ways that are not wise or intelligent. And I'm thinking of the famous example of the Gilets Jaunes, for example, in France, but there are similar things where people fear that people on the lowest incomes are going to be the ones who are going to be asked to pay the most for the transition. And it feels to me that one of the things we absolutely need to make 110% sure of is that that is not the case, both because of the morality of that position, but also because if you do that, then you certainly don't bring people with you. So I think in order to get us closer together, I think we could listen to more citizens assemblies and to make sure that citizens assemblies on climate are genuinely representative of the communities that they're in.

• 28:39Speaker 04

  So it's not just, you know, people who think like me, but a genuine cross-section of the public who, by and large, when they're asked these questions, actually do come together with quite bold policies, much bolder than most governments, and do kind of point the way forward. But if I could just come back on one thing, though, because I'm, I get so frustrated when it's kind of said, well, you know, the UK only accounts for 1% of emissions, so why are we kind of so bothered? I mean, first of all, I would agree with Rory, actually, that offshoring, if that means also that, for example, China is the country that then has to put the emissions associated with the products that it's making for us on their account sheet, that is fundamentally wrong. And so we should take account of our consumption emissions, the emissions that are associated

• 29:24Speaker 04

  with what we import, as well as our production emissions. But secondly, we're also responsible for historic emissions, and they matter. You know, the UK was the first into the industrial revolution. I think we've got a responsibility to be one of the first out of it into something better, because those emissions that we emitted many years ago are still part of the problem. They have heated the environment, they didn't go away. And if you look at this issue about the number of countries who could say, wow, we're only responsible for about 1% of total emissions, around 194 countries can claim to be less than 5% of the problem. But together, if you add them together, they're responsible for just under half of the world's yearly emissions. In other words, we have a responsibility that goes far beyond that 1%.

• 30:09Alastair Campbell?

  Okay, Caroline, Rory, quick break and then back for more.

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• 32:01Alastair Campbell?

  There's a question here from Liam Green. If other countries have no intention of achieving net zero, aren't our efforts futile, which goes to the heart of what you two have just been describing. Caroline, I know you certainly don't think that they're futile. And also, there is a role for leadership in any international debate that requires international solutions. But how do we break down the cynicism that that breeds, that we think, well, there's no point me doing anything because nobody else is going to do it? How do we do that? Because I feel to me that's what we've lost.

• 32:31Speaker 04

  Well, I think we need to make it so much clearer and so much more evident that the measures that we need, by and large, to address the climate crisis are ones that will benefit people's lives. And by that, I mean more affordable public transport, for example, better air quality. Well, we can probably have an argument, I can foresee, about about costs. But right now renewables are cheaper than fossil fuels. There are more jobs in a green economy than in the fossil fuel economy that it replaces. So if we can talk about some of the benefits, the kind of co-benefits, if you like, that come from moving in a greener direction, rather than the framing that still crops up again and again in terms of sacrifice and why are we kind of doing this, then I think we've got a hope of kind of positioning that better. But also just reminding people

• 33:16Speaker 04

  that even in a place like the US with with Trump in the president's office, you know, there are states even like Texas who are now massively going for renewables, not because they've suddenly had a damascene conversion to the green economy, but because renewables make more sense economically. So in many ways, the economics is doing the hard lifting for us.

• 33:37Rory Stewart?

  Can I just come in on that? If the economics does the hard lifting, right? If the market itself does it, if the renewables don't need to be subsidized, we're in the sort of position that Texas is or in Spain's in, why do we need all these complicated subsidy structures, incentive structures? Why don't we just step back and let the market do it? Presumably because actually these things aren't cheaper.

• 33:57Speaker 04

  I don't think there are that many subsidies that are left for those kinds of of technologies. In the early days, so when I first put solar panels on my roof, I was very lucky. I got extremely generous tariffs in the feed-in tariff, because that was at a time when what was needed was to build confidence in the market, to get more and more people into the market, so that it would be a sector that could grow and stand on its own feet. But it pretty much is standing on its own feet now. And if anything, if you're looking at where the subsidies are going, far more of them are still going to fossil fuels than than are going to renewables.

• 34:30Rory Stewart?

  Sorry, I mean, not to overdo this, but I just, a loss of the additional money that is on people's bills, and some of this moving on to taxation, is to do with the distribution and transmission networks and facilities being built to deal with moments where sun isn't shining or the wind isn't blowing. So one of the problems in the accounting is it's absolutely true, if you simply take a panel and compare it to a gas boiler, a solar panel is cheaper in terms of generating electricity. But when you look at where those turbines are located, where the panels are located, and the kind of networks and transmission

• 35:14Rory Stewart?

  infrastructure that the UK needs to build, it turns out that it is costing us an enormous amount of money, partly because we're not Texas, partly because we don't have the type of hydropower that they have in the Nordic countries. And this is one of the reasons why Andy Burnham has got anxious about where Ed Miliband was going.

• 35:31Speaker 04

  I just don't think that's true, Rory. I think that, yes, at the moment, the energy market is completely skewed, and it is not fit for purpose, and certainly not fit for for an economy that is more and more being powered by renewables. But one of the reasons that our energy bills are so high is because electricity prices are dictated to, as a result of gas prices, because gas comes onto the grid last, it's most expensive, and that sets the price for all of the energy on the grid. That is bonkers. That should not happen. And there are people who are going away, coming up with ways of working out how we could get rid of that. The whole point of so many of the kinds of policy costs

• 36:10Speaker 04

  being put on electricity bills, again, is incredibly regressive. In other words, it doesn't take into account how much people can afford to pay. If you took those costs off our electricity bills and put them on to general taxation, that would be a far more progressive way of tackling this.

• 36:27Alastair Campbell?

  Rory, can I just jump in with a, you mentioned Andy Burnham's position. And again, to give you the results of this survey that we did, I think neither Andy nor Zach Polanski should be very happy about these findings. 66.8% say they are not sure what to make of Andy Burnham's position on climate. Now, that I imagine is because they've not heard him say much about it since he became prime minister, or as he was becoming prime minister, which in itself is a signal, I guess. And then 14.9 disagree with his position, assuming they know what it is. 14.8% agree, so they're very, very close. 52%, and I don't think this would have been the case when you were leading the Green Party, Caroline,

• 37:09Alastair Campbell?

  are unsure about the Green Party's policies on these issues under Zach Polanski. Of those who have a view, 28.7 agree with the Greens' policies, 15.3% disagree. Both of those findings, to me, speak to what we've already been discussing. This has just gone far too low down the political agenda. What's your sense, both of you really, what's your sense of of what Andy Burnham's climate position is? He's the prime minister. We ought to know. What is your sense of it?

• 37:37Speaker 04

  I mean, my sense so far, if I look at Manchester, is that, you know, he gets it. I mean, I think he does understand that climate change is a real and present danger. I worry that he's now coming under enormous pressure to be pragmatic. That is the new word of choice, it seems, that's coming out of Number 10. So he has to be pragmatic. And so that's what we're told. That's the approach he's going to take to, for example, the decision on Rosebank and Jackdaw, these two as-yet unexplored oil and gas fields off the North Sea. Now, if he were to give the green light to either of those, I think it would just be the most damaging, the most unforgivable thing to do, partly because

• 38:21Speaker 04

  it would just send such a terrible message to the rest of the world, that all of that climate leadership that we used to feel so proud of, that we used to be well-known for, is now not something we're going to pursue. And if we, as what are we, I don't know, the sixth or seventh richest country in the world, are not going to stick our necks out and do that, then it feels very difficult for us to have any moral authority to say anything to the rest of the world about what they should be doing.

• 38:46Rory Stewart?

  I think, and most listeners, I think, will be on Caroline's side. So I'm speaking in that awareness. But let me try to play devil's advocate. In a way that I think neither Caroline nor Alistair are comfortable with, many, many people in government and many people in the Treasury thought that Ed Miliband had gone too far. He'd become too rigid. Some of the signs of that were on the drilling. Alistair and Caroline tend to focus on the question of emissions or cost, but people are also interested in the question of sovereignty, and pointing out that we find ourselves in the straightforward moves and in relation to Russia, in a terrible situation, simply how we actually access this stuff in the

• 39:28Rory Stewart?

  first place. We're now increasingly dependent on the United States. And so I think there would be people in the National Security Council saying, it's a bit odd that we have this stuff sitting in our own waters, and we're continuing, and this is part of my general story. It's not that we're not using it, we're just bringing it in from other people. We're just not prepared to use our own resources, which is a sovereignty problem. I think the other stuff, this is both the targets on electrical vehicles, some of the pushes on net zero, some of the climate direction Ed Miliband's gone in on, we can clearly see the beginnings of Andy Burnham reversing it. Why? Well, I'm afraid, notwithstanding what we're told, the Treasury calculations think that Ed Miliband's vision was going

• 40:13Rory Stewart?

  to be damaging to the British economy, that our industrial energy prices are too high. And two final things, just to come back on Caroline. We've heard for many, many years that the problem is that the electricity price has set off the gas price, and somebody's going to fix that. It never gets fixed. It never gets fixed because actually there are very good reasons why the electricity price is fixed off the gas price to do with the fact that you still need the gas when the electricity is powered by gas and the wind isn't blowing and the sun isn't shining. So if it was actually the case that Ed Miliband or Caroline or anyone had actually reset the way that energy was priced at any time, this would be a more sensible argument. My guess is that in three years' time, it's still going to be set in

• 40:56Rory Stewart?

  the same way and we're still going to be raising our eyebrows when people say, well, this is just an accounting problem to do the way it's set. Whereas in fact, I think the Treasury would say, it's very difficult to come up with another way of pricing it that reflects the real price. Final thing, I'm absolutely with Caroline on the idea that we should be paying for our consumption, not our production, right? But nobody's doing it. There's absolutely no attempt for us to be honest about the fact that we pat ourselves on the back for deindustrialising, for getting rid of all our own manufacturing, and we're still consuming just as many goods and China's doing the emissions. It's a ridiculous thing to boast about our emissions if we're still consuming all those emissions from other countries.

• 41:38Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, I want to hear more from Caroline on this, but just to say to listeners and viewers that when we interviewed Dan Jurgensen, the European Union, the Commissioner on Climate and Energy, he answered some of those points, not to Rory's total satisfaction at the time.

• 41:51Speaker 04

  I think first of all on the issue of sovereignty. I mean, if you take Rosebank as an example, 80% of the oil at Rosebank is exported because it's not appropriate for the kind of oil refineries that we have. So the idea that that's going to help us with sovereignty, I think, is just misguided. At the end of the day, these are resources that get sold on global markets at international prices. And just because it gets extracted from the North Sea doesn't mean to say it gets used in the North Sea unless and until we're talking about, you know, some kind of state-owned oil and gas companies, which I suspect Rory is not talking about. So I think the sovereignty argument actually leans exactly in the opposite direction. It leans into more renewables. And what we need to

• 42:34Speaker 04

  do to be able to change the way the electricity market works is to have yet more renewables and more battery power. So we don't need gas in the same way as the kind of the supplier of last resort. We need to be able to have smart grids. We need to be able to balance electricity needs, you know, across things like the cars that are parked outside our homes that have electric batteries. There are all kinds of ways we can do this without extracting yet more oil and gas. So the first point, I think, is around really saying that sovereignty is not on the side of people who want more fossil fuels. You know, in terms of the decoupling of gas and electricity prices, I think the reason it's not happened is because under many models for making it happen, it does require the government to

• 43:18Speaker 04

  step in. It does require the government, for example, to be quite a player in the market. And that has run counter to the kind of neoliberal consensus that we've had, you know, across the Western world for the last several decades. But I don't think that means it's not possible. And I think, I just want to come back to my point that, in a way, the point of the mini-series was to say we are at a critical inflection point. And I don't think the future is going to be the same as the past in terms of the kinds of threats that we face. And if we don't get this right, then precisely those warnings that those security forces, the MI5, the MI6, the GCHQ, who are now kind of shouting at us to take notice of this stuff, are simply going to get ignored. We've got a moment

• 44:01Speaker 04

  here where we can make decisions that could make sure that we have a livable future going into the future.

• 44:07Alastair Campbell?

  Rory, you know what the thing I really do find strange at the moment is that despite most days, the weather is kind of leading the news around the world at the moment, but it doesn't seem to be moving the debate. And I just, I wonder, maybe this is a question to ask both of you, how much do you think Trump is the driver of this? I mean, Drill Baby Drill, and here we have Richard Tice with his net stupid zero. And the politics of this have become much, much more difficult for people like Caroline, I think, to navigate.

• 44:43Speaker 04

  I mean, I would come back to, well, two things really. I think the media, I know it's easy to blame the media, but, you know, even now, when the world is burning and when we look outside our own windows and we can just see the parched earth, again and again, the stories about the fifth heatwave this year, where around 3,000 people, I think, in the UK alone have died from the last couple of months as a result of the heat. We're still having images that go alongside that story of people having a lovely time on the beach or dancing in front of fountains or something. You know, we're not getting consistent, serious narrative, which comes back in some senses too, to the need for this national emergency briefing. But the second thing I would say is I would come back to all of

• 45:26Speaker 04

  the work around adaptation and resilience. And I'm doing some work with an organisation called the Climate Majority Project. And what they are doing is trying to work with communities at the grassroots level to make a difference, a positive difference, to the resilience that they have, whether that's in terms of having more local food growing or whether it's in terms of addressing flooding through nature-based solutions and local solutions. You know, this debate is not the one that Richard Tice would have you believe. It's all not being driven by elites. It is actually about improving people's quality of life right now on the ground.

• 46:00Rory Stewart?

  I'm really with Caroline on that. I think focusing on people's lives on the ground, focusing on nature is very, very powerful. Focusing on air quality is very powerful. And I think part of it is that nature is hugely beneficial in terms of climate. I mean, trees, as we know, absorb a lot of carbon dioxide. But we also know that nature has huge other benefits in terms of the same tree also in a city, keeps the temperature down, absorbs air pollution. It is a beautiful place to visit. And one of the things that Caroline's written about quite well is the way in which we need to talk about beauty and human experience and communities engaging with these things. At the same time, there is a bigger problem that we talk about a lot, Alistair, on the show, which I'd like

• 46:45Rory Stewart?

  to come back to you on, which is that it's a very, very big world. And national governments and countries like Britain have less and less control about what happens globally. Climate change is just one example. AI is another. Global supply chain is another. Defence and security is another. Where we do feel a bit powerless, where we slightly do feel horrible things are coming our way. But almost whatever we do alone in Britain is not likely to shift that very much. And that's a terrible, terrible feeling. And I think the way to address it in Britain is to focus on nature, not to pretend that what Britain does is going to stop global climate change, that we can save ourselves

• 47:29Rory Stewart?

  from heatwaves when we're 1% of the problem.

• 47:32Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. I mean, you remember when Tony Blair wrote his long essay about the future of the Labour Party? And I took issue on a couple of things. But one of the things I took issue on was him making that point, because it ran totally contrary to the point that he used to make, for example, about overseas aid and development. And he said that, you know, just because we're not as big as China and just because we're not as big a donor as America, doesn't mean we can't lead the world. And that's kind of where I think we should be on climate. I think there's a sort of hysteria about Ed Miliband's tenure as Energy Secretary. Caroline, where you're right, it's a big world and lots of these issues interconnect. I wonder, for example, whether one of the reasons Andy

• 48:15Alastair Campbell?

  Burnham hasn't yet addressed the climate issue, even as parts of the country literally burn and we all walk through Hyde Park and think, my God, it's just yellow now, it's not even green, is because he probably is thinking, well, even though I don't want to get as close to Trump as Gias Darmo tried to, I've just got to kind of be a bit careful. So therefore, we might be just parking the North Sea issue for the time being. That's realpolitik. And that does get in the way sometimes of, I guess, what we might all call idealism. Where I think Caroline's series has been most powerful, and I think this is coming through and what she's saying today as well, is that we have to embed this debate

• 48:58Alastair Campbell?

  in kind of every aspect of our national strategic security life. So here's one for you, Rory. Let's try and get you a bit closer on this one. If there were to be this national emergency briefing, and if you had beaten Boris Johnson and you'd become Prime Minister, how would you frame it to the public? How would you say to the public, listen, we've got to get serious about this and it's going to mean this cost for this bit and this cost for these opportunities. How would you frame it? In the last few days, Rory, you've been the spin doctor for Gianni Infantino, you'd be the spin doctor for Pete Hegseth, now be the spin doctor for the planet.

• 49:36Rory Stewart?

  Okay, spin doctor for the planet. I'd probably begin by making a lot of the speech about nature, about how we make Britain a green and pleasant land, and talk about quality of life, talk about our trees, talk about our children, talk about our water quality, our air quality. And then I would lean very, very heavily into the international, the geopolitical. I would come straight out and say, we are only going to solve this problem if we stop behaving as though we're a little island floating in the sea and we actually lead a global movement. So here is a massive increase in the international development budget. Here is a massive increase in our foreign service. And this is exactly the

• 50:17Rory Stewart?

  plan for how we work with Europe and use our relationship with Europe and others in the Middle Powers to lead this change. So I imagine a world in which there are the US, there's a China, and there's a middle power world. And that middle power world is going to be green. It's also going to have some sovereign control over AI, and it's also going to have some independence of US and China, so we don't get screwed over by them. But we're going to be about democracy, we're going to be about rights, we're going to be about nature, we're going to be about the environment, we're going to be about the climate, and we're going to lead outwards. We're not going to bankrupt ourselves at home pretending that by wearing a hair shirt, that's going to change the activities of people.

• 51:00Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, Rory, you had us both in the palm of your hand. And you came with this nonsense about hair shirts.

• 51:11Speaker 04

  I mean, that's such a shame. I was with you. I was with you till right at the end. I was going to give you the job, but now I'm not.

• 51:17Alastair Campbell?

  No, there was a lot in there you did agree with. I could see you nodding furiously.

• 51:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, and I really agree with, I mean, I agree with that idea that, you know, we've had a leadership role before and we can again. And I love what Rory was saying about the natural world. And I think, you know, just looking back over the past hour, I think we haven't spoken enough about about that in a way. It's been very much framed about climate. But in fact, in terms of these two reports, they're actually talking more about ecosystem collapse than they are even around climate change. But nature is what really speaks to people's hearts. It moves their souls. It engenders love. You know, I love that phrase from, I think it was Richard Lou, who said, we won't protect what we don't love. And we won't love what we don't know. And we won't know what we don't touch and smell and taste and feel and hear. And so giving people the access to nature, which is still very unequally spread out across the country, making sure more people have

• 52:06Speaker 04

  got that access to nature, making sure that more people can take the wonderful GCSE in natural history that I think is now going to happen. You know, that is what connects people to the world. That's what makes them love the natural world. And it speaks as well to, I think, those people who are minded to vote for Nigel Farage or Restore Britain. I mean, it's something that can go across parties. Maybe not to their leadership, but it goes across parties. It's something that speaks to us, I think, in a very, very elemental way.

• 52:33Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, well, I think you both got the job. You could maybe do it together. And I think who we put in charge of the overall campaign might be Rory's friend, the King, because I think he's, I think he's pretty sound on a lot of these issues. Well, anyway, look, with apologies to the thousands of listeners to whose questions we did not get, we got to quite a few, but I think that was a very, well, I enjoyed watching the two of you go at it hammer and tongs. I think you agree a lot. You agreed, agreeably, disagreed, agreeably where you disagreed. But Caroline, I really hope this is not the last time we have you on the rest is, the rest is whatever, rest is climate, rest is nature, rest is trees.

• 53:17Speaker 04

  Thank you.

• 53:17Alastair Campbell?

  Rest is water. And I think we've one thing, we're recording this the day before the Clacton by-election. It's going out the day after the Clacton by-election, but whatever the resulting Clacton, we can all agree that water company executives should be forced to swim in the rivers for which they have responsibility.

• 53:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 53:39Rory Stewart?

  Caroline, thank you very much. That was wonderful. Thank you.

• 53:41Speaker 04

  Thank you.

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