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July 11, 2019 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole
48:54
Delingpod 27: Matt Ridley, the Rational Optimist
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Welcome to the DellingPod with me, James Dellingpoll, and I am so excited about this week's guest I have been trying to track him down for a long, long time.
I'm not that difficult to find.
Yeah, yeah, but...
In the phone book.
But you have resisted before, and now here you are.
Lord Ridley, Matt Ridley, scientist, journalist...
Libertarian?
Yeah.
Or classical liberal?
Both.
Both?
Never quite know what the difference is.
No, no, no.
And you fight for good causes in the House of Lords.
I say good causes because I share all the things.
I share your belief system.
I bet you don't.
I bet you're not as big an atheist as I am.
No, okay, I'm not.
But the reason I like God is that God hates climate alarmists.
He wants to smite them with his mighty fist.
Well, that's because climate alarmism is a religion.
It's a rival version of God.
That's absolutely it.
I think there is an argument, isn't it, that the decline of conventional religion, of traditional religion, the melancholy long-withdrawing roar, has created this void which has been filled by this new belief system.
It's kind of Gaia worship, isn't it?
Yeah, there's something in that.
And there's a very good book by Catherine Nixie about the takeover of the Roman Empire by Christianity and how brutal it was, how really, really nasty it was, how it was a cultural revolution of unparalleled viciousness, right?
Unlike what we were taught, which was nice.
Saint Augustine came along and told us to be nice or whatever.
Now, the parallel there, I think, is that when they're young and new, religions can be very intolerant and very determined to drive out rivals.
And I think that's what you're seeing with a lot of this Gaia worship.
And by the way, the chap who invented the word Gaia, Jim Lovelock, is 100 next month and he's still alive.
And I'm going to his birthday party.
So am I. Good!
Isn't that funny?
Isn't it funny?
And he's very sound now.
He was an alarmist on climate change, but he's seen just after the climate gate emails and things, he's seen just how much nonsense there is in this area.
It's not all nonsense, but it's an awful lot of exaggeration and extra panic.
Now, you've come from a scientific background.
You read zoology at Oxford as your doctorate as well.
When was the moment when you became what's known as a climate sceptic?
It's quite complicated actually in my case because I covered climate change when it first blew up in about 1988 for The Economist.
I was the science editor.
I wrote a couple of pieces about how there's this new worry that carbon dioxide is increasing in the atmosphere and that it was likely to lead to warming.
And at the time I completely believed the General estimates of climate sensitivity, which was that this would lead to several degrees of warming and this could be really quite unfunny.
And I held that position for quite a long time.
In the 90s, I began to get a little more sceptical.
I began to say, well, hang on.
And then I saw the hockey stick graph.
And the hockey stick graph made me think, oh my goodness, something really unnatural is happening to the climate.
Compared with, you know, a thousand years of relative stability in the climate, we've got this huge tick up in temperatures.
And I saw that graph and I thought, wow, I've been wrong towards skepticism.
I'm back in the true faith.
And then, of course, I started reading Steve McIntyre and his analysis of how they'd done the hockey stick graph, and it turned out to be about 98% fraudulent.
And maybe that's an underestimate.
And it's not easy stuff to understand.
You have to understand it, but you have to dig into it.
But it is a system of statistical analysis...
This is that leaves out any temperature trend that stays flat and grossly exaggerates any one that shows a rapid uptick.
Now, that was when the scales dropped from my eyes.
And I then began to read a lot more stuff about both temperature records and the measure.
Well, there's two things here.
One is whether or not we're exaggerating the problem.
And the other is whether the solutions being proposed would help at all.
And I think I'm very skeptical on both at the moment.
I'm not a denier.
I think carbon dioxide is increasing.
I think human beings are increasing it.
I think it's...
The cause of quite a lot of the recent warming, possibly most of it, but I don't think the warming is happening at a dangerous rate, and I don't think the measures we're taking are going to do anything but harm, and I think they're already doing harm, particularly to poor people, and I think that's unacceptable.
You, I think, coined the phrase chemotherapy to cure a cold, which I think does rather sum up the situation.
Just give me some examples of the kind of...
Put a tourniquet around your neck to stop a nosebleed was a previous version.
It didn't work quite as well.
Lots of people out there in the middle, they say, well...
Even if climate change isn't a problem, these measures we are taking to decarbonise the economy can't do any harm.
Do you want to explain why actually they are doing a lot of harm?
Yeah, that's very ignorant when people say that, because they really should do a bit more research and find out that one of the measures we're doing is burning forests in Yorkshire, cutting them down in the Carolinas to burn them in Yorkshire, which is not good for woodpeckers and beetles and all those kind of things.
And by the way, it produces more carbon dioxide.
Sure, it'll get reabsorbed by a growing forest in about 80 years' time, but that's when the problem's supposed to be hitting us, so it doesn't help.
We're denying funds to Africa for the development of gas as a cooking fuel.
Now, that means that people are cooking over wood, which has two effects.
One, it means they die.
Three million people a year die from the effects of indoor air pollution because they're cooking over wood fires.
And two, it means that they cut down forests.
Well, we don't want them to do that.
So, you know, there's real environmental damage being done by our policies and there's real human health problems.
And then there's the diesel scandal, the pushed to clad Grenfell Tower.
You know, that was because of energy and climate issues.
And a lot of, you know, cowboys jumped on the bandwagon and started selling dodgy cladding and the fire risks were brushed aside.
You know, these are not painless policies.
And they are particularly painful to people in the developing world.
That's where the real pain is being felt.
I think it's been described as eco-imperialism.
And a lot of global institutions are responsible for this problem.
The World Bank, for example, will not fund fossil fuel projects in Africa.
Well, as you say, the result of that is forests chopped down, people, indoor pollution.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Horrible.
Yeah.
And meanwhile, there are real environmental issues.
I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm an environmentalist.
I think what we're doing to the oceans is still shocking, overfishing them, damaging them in all sorts of ways.
I think alien invasive species wiping out rare creatures on islands and things like that are huge.
Huge, urgent issues.
And these are getting drowned out.
So it's not just what climate change policies are doing, it's what they're preventing us from doing by focusing.
I quite like the fact that we're now worked up about plastic, by the way.
such a problem it's 90% of it's coming out of Asia why is there so much plastic in Asia partly because we're exporting it all to Asia so they can so-called recycle it in fact most of it gets dumped or a lot of it gets dumped and why do we do that rather than burn it here because we say we don't want the emissions well actually if we burnt it here we incinerated it we would get the energy back from it we would not be polluting the oceans and it would be a win-win situation
Sure, we shouldn't be using as much plastic in the first place, but that's another issue.
That's what Patrick Moore says as well, the co-founder of Greenpeace.
He says we should be burning plastic after all.
It's derived from fossil fuels.
That would work, wouldn't it?
Yeah.
People were worried about the dioxins that you got from fires that weren't quite hot enough 20, 30 years ago.
That's been solved as a problem.
You can have really high-temperature furnaces that turn everything basically into...
CO2 and DHMO. DHMO is a really nice chemical, by the way.
Do you know about it?
No, tell me.
Dihydrogen monoxide.
It's found in all cancer tumors.
I do know, sorry.
Yes, it's terrible.
In the vapor state, it schools your flesh.
And it can drown you as well.
It can drown you, exactly.
Terrible.
And it's a big greenhouse gas.
It's called water.
Yes, exactly.
Now, Matt, you share my enthusiasm for the natural world.
I mean, like you, I'm a complete nature freak.
One of the most exciting experiences for me recently was going up to St Kilda and seeing my first...
I'm very envious.
Seeing my first puffins.
And not just one puffin.
We arrived and we saw no puffins at all.
And as we were leaving and I was asking our guide, you know, are we going to see any puffins?
And he said, well, you might, you might not.
What time year was this?
It was May.
We saw 2,000 puffins.
Right.
It was fantastic.
Well, I'm going to see 2,000 puffins tomorrow.
Because they probably live on your doorstep.
On an island called the Farn Islands off the Northumberland coast where there's about 45,000 pairs of puffins.
The numbers go up and down at the moment, but they're dramatically higher than they were in the 70s when there were just a few thousand pairs there.
That can't be true though, Matt, because I read in the newspapers that puffins are under tremendous stress.
Well, here's an interesting thing.
Puffins are under stress in the Lofoten Islands in Norway and in parts of Iceland.
They haven't bred successfully for many years and the populations are declining there.
The Farn Islands, which is one of the most southerly colonies in the world of puffins, certainly in the North Sea, it's one of the most southerly colonies, they're thriving.
Likewise, on the west coast of the UK. So the southern end of their range, puffins are doing fine.
The northern end of their range, puffins are doing badly.
That implies global cooling.
It's obviously not the case.
It's because of problems with the ocean, too many, the wrong kind of fish and not enough of the right kind of fish or something like that.
But maybe caused by overfishing by people, maybe by just natural changes, we don't know.
But the point is that people who say that the decline of the puffin is down to climate change need to explain why at the warmer end of their range they're doing fine, at the colder end of their range they're suffering.
Yeah.
Well, you must get rather tired of all these fake news animal scares, where we're told that a population of X or Y is being damaged irreparably by climate change and so on.
How do you persuade people?
Because you must meet people all the time.
You get into conversations and they start relaying this information to you.
How do you let them down?
Gently.
Well, I think it's important to draw attention to what the real causes of species declines are.
So I was at a meeting yesterday to discuss what to do about the grey squirrel, which is wiping out the red squirrel.
Yeah.
And the reason it wipes it out is because it gives it a nasty virus called squirrel pox.
And the latest idea is to use gene drive, which is gene editing, which you would release a few grey squirrels who could only produce male babies and their children could only produce male babies and so on.
So you would actually drive females extinct in the population and that would crash the population eventually.
This is a technology that's now beginning to work very well on insects.
It's working in mice in the laboratory, etc.
This could really be helped with endangered species.
Sorry, I've gone off track.
I'm not talking about climate change.
No, I'm liking this.
But you see, on my own farm in Northumberland, I know of three species that have gone extinct in my lifetime.
Well, no, sorry, two and one that's about to go extinct.
The one that's about to go extinct is the red squirrel.
We've still got a few, but we're waging war on the greys, but we're losing.
The native crayfish has gone extinct because of the signal crayfish that came from North America.
And the water vole has gone extinct because of the mink that came from North America.
So, you know, just locally, just say to yourself, look, is climate change causing extinctions locally or is something else causing extinctions locally?
Just try and bring it back to the local for people.
I find that that tends to be helpful.
Because I just think we're looking at the wrong issues.
Wherever you look, all around the world, at conservation issues, why some birds are declining and others are not...
You know, why are curlews doing incredibly well in the North Pennines but not in the Lake District?
It's nothing to do with climate change.
It's all to do with whether you're killing enough crows and foxes.
Yes.
In that case.
Which, of course, is ideologically uncomfortable for the greenies who think that they believe that nature exists in steady state, don't they?
Well, this is, I think, one of the key points is how dynamic nature is, particularly in the oceans, by the way.
You get these huge changes.
I mean, a few years ago, throughout the North Sea, there was an explosion of something called the rat-tailed pipefish or something.
It was a thing like a bootlace.
And it was a bit of a catastrophe because this thing was so numerous.
I mean, you would find it in drifts on the beach.
For about two years, it was extremely numerous, and the puffins took it and fed it to their babies, and so did the terns.
And this thing's got almost zero nutrition in it, so the poor things died with these bootlaces sticking out of their beaks.
And everyone got very worried and said, this is a real problem.
We've got this surge in this species.
It must be something to do with climate change.
Of course.
Well, it went away.
I mean, a couple of years later, you can't find the rat-tailed pipefish anymore.
It may not be called a rat.
It's called something like that.
But anyway...
It's a good name, though, you've invented it.
If it's the wrong name...
It's a description of it.
And that just reminds you that if a species of fish in the North Atlantic suddenly just hits the jackpot in terms of breeding, you know, the conditions are just right, it can have an enormous...
Burst of numbers, and then it can collapse again a few years later.
These things happen all the time, and nothing ever stays the same.
Everything is on the move, as it were.
Species go up, species go down.
I mean, I keep a very keen bird watcher, and my father very conveniently wrote down in 1950 every species that he knew that bred on our farm then.
And I did the same last year and compared the two lists.
And there are about 13 species that bred when he was there in 1950 that no longer breed.
And you know what?
There are 13 species that breed now that didn't breed then.
Isn't that interesting?
Very interesting.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
Now, you probably don't like the new ones, you know, like Canada geese or collared doves as much as you like the old ones like corn crakes and red starts, but that's partly just prejudice.
I mean, actually, there's some rather wonderful ones like oyster catchers that breed now and shell duck, which didn't in his youth.
We seem to see fewer sparrows around now than we did in...
Well, that's no longer true.
There was a huge crash in the sparrow population, in the UK particularly.
Not elsewhere in the world.
I mean, this sparrow is one of these cosmopolitan species found in cities all over the world.
And actually, if you go to New York, you see millions of sparrows.
But the numbers are coming back up now in London.
And nobody quite knows what happened.
It was probably a disease.
I mean, it might have been competition from other birds because so many other birds are moving into cities now.
And, you know, there's a new species of sparrow on the planet.
It's called the Italian sparrow, and it came about as a result of a hybridisation event between the house sparrow and the Spanish sparrow, I think.
And it's now breeding true and not really breeding with either of its parent species.
So that's plus one species in Europe, interestingly.
Right.
A completely new...
Yeah, I mean, you wouldn't fully qualify as a species yet, but there's a very, very interesting book by Keith Thomas, an ecologist at York University, which is all about how actually there are, we're creating species at a surprisingly high rate because of the rate we're disturbing the world.
There's a lot of hybridisation events going on, there's a lot of sort of Isolations, you know, you take a species to an island and it evolves in a different direction, etc.
So actually, in some ways, we're going through a burst of speciation as well as a burst of extinction in terms of the planet.
Where, as an ornithologist, do you stand on what I call bat-chomping, bird-slicing eco-crucifixes?
Are you a fan?
No, wind turbines are a terrible, terrible waste of time, money, energy and everything else.
They can produce electricity, sure, but not when you need it because it's not predictable enough.
And not in sufficient quantities because it's a very low-density source of energy, so you need an awful lot of them.
I mean, David Mackay, when he was chief scientist at DEC, did these calculations about how many wind turbines you'd need to produce a significant quantity of Britain's energy, and it's ridiculous.
You know, you'd need an enormous amount.
And people boast about the fact that, you know, I don't know, last week 33% of our energy came from wind or something.
Well, no, they mean 33% of electricity...
Which therefore means about 5% of energy, because electricity is only 20% of energy, etc.
So they're really making extraordinary little contribution.
And meanwhile, it takes 150 tonnes of coal to build one.
Did you know that?
Probably it uses up more energy to produce them than they actually produce in their lifetime.
Well, not quite.
Sadly, that's not quite true.
It's nearly true.
But the point is, during its lifetime, a wind turbine has got to produce not just the energy to make it, but the energy to make its successor, if you see what I mean, to repair it and to build the next one.
Otherwise, it's not contributing at all.
It's just an energy sink.
And it just about meets that criteria if it can go for 20 years or so.
But some of them are not going to go for 20 years.
I mean, some will go a bit longer.
But, you know, for a decent energy system, when you think about it, The whole of civilization is based on using surplus energy to create improbable structures.
This building, your suit, my spectacles, these are all improbable things.
They all need to be built with energy.
So we've got to have surplus energy.
And in the Middle Ages, there was very little surplus energy.
I mean, you know, there was a little bit left over when you'd...
When you'd grown the grain, you had to keep some back for growing the next crop, and you had to eat some yourself, and then you could give a little bit to the king or the baron or something to build a castle with, and that's your surplus energy to create civilization with, as it were, or the monk or whoever it is.
Now, wind turbines...
I mean, any energy system that doesn't give you back seven times as much energy as you put into it is pretty well a waste of time because of the wastage, etc., etc.
So you need a seven-fold ratio, and wind turbines struggle to achieve that.
So I'm sorry, this is not a sensible way of trying to produce energy.
And environmentally, it's disastrous.
I mean, my home county of Northumberland has far more than its share of wind turbines.
It's an exporter of wind energy.
Some beautiful views, you know, from the Van Islands looking past Lindisfarne to the Cheviots inland.
Now all you see is a Golgotha of these hideous things.
And why?
I mean, poor people are...
I mean, these are immensely profitable for rich people.
You know, either plutocrats in the City of London or landowners in Northumberland are raking it in from these things.
And I could be raking it in as a landowner in Northumberland, and I'm very stupid not to have jumped on this bandwagon in some way.
Were you offered the chance?
Yes.
Men in double-breasted suits like the one you're wearing would come and knock on my door and say, you know, they still do.
Actually, it's the solo ones now.
You know, would you like a million pounds?
And I say, get lost.
And it's rather stupid of me.
But a million pounds is a lot of money.
I mean, it wouldn't always be.
Well, no, I probably, you know, I don't know.
I haven't done that.
I don't do the calculation.
But I could probably be in that bracket.
Well, also, I mean, if you were completely without morals, you could say, well, sod this.
I'm just going to rake in the money and go off to the Caribbean and live off my immoral earnings.
There's an idea.
Yeah, well, there's an idea.
Yeah, but where are you on the damage they do to birds and bats?
I mean, is it a problem?
People say, well, hang on a minute, you know, more birds are killed by flying into greenhouses or killed by cats than they're killed by wind turbines.
Well, not eagles, they aren't.
No.
I mean, the point about wind turbines is they selectively chop up soaring birds.
Yeah.
And whether it's wedge-tailed eagles in Tasmania or white-tailed eagles in Norway or whatever, you know, these are a serious threat to these large soaring birds.
And they don't make life any easier.
And offshore, they are slicing up gannets.
Now, gannets, as it happens, are increasing dramatically in number.
I mean, all the populations around the UK are just booming, the Bass Rock and other ones.
I don't really know why, because you must have seen a lot of St Kilda.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
So maybe it doesn't matter if we kill a few thousand of them with wind turbines.
But, you know, red-throated divers are not doing so well, and they get killed by wind turbines too, offshore, I'm talking about.
So it is an issue.
The bat thing is very interesting, because it turns out that if they get too close to a wind turbine, their lungs explode or implode or something.
Barotraumatisation.
Is that what it's called?
Very nice.
I didn't know that word.
And this is clearly an issue.
As for whether they're wiping out insects, I have my doubts that they're all that significant, but they certainly need a lot of cleaning of dead insects off their blades.
You stick up a huge thing sucking energy out of the wind in a landscape, it's going to make a difference.
It's going to make a difference to wind speed, it's going to make a difference to the ecology, it's going to make a difference to the Peat that it's sited in, etc.
Much better to have very, very localised and focused and high-density sources of energy like power stations.
We only need a few of them, whether nuclear or fossil fuel, and then you can leave the rest of the countryside to nature.
And that's what we should be doing, is sparing land from this.
We shouldn't be using the landscape to make our energy.
That's a medieval approach.
So how do you square the fact that...
Renewable energy in its various forms is doing so much environmental damage and yet the people who are pushing for this stuff claim to be speaking for the environment.
It's a paradox, isn't it?
Yes, I do think that there is a genuine hypocrisy here and for some reason the environmental movement and most of the media is now wholly in hock I mean, the hydro industry hasn't got a big influence.
No, presumably we couldn't have much of a hydro industry.
Well, yeah, we've maxed out on hydro.
If we did a bit more, we'd ruin all our lovely rivers.
So it's not a good idea.
But...
You know, if you're worried about global warming, then you're in favour of wind power, is the unthinking equation of the likes of the BBC and everyone else.
And it just doesn't follow.
I mean, I've been making the case recently that if we're saying, OK, we want net zero by 2050, let's agree that whether we like it or not, that's going to be our aim.
There's no way we can get there with renewables.
I mean renewables can't do 10% of that.
I mean they're doing 3% of world energy at the moment, which is about the same as it was 20 years ago.
The reason it's about the same is because biomass has gone down a bit and wind and solar have gone up a bit.
But I mean it's a trivial contribution.
And the cost is immense.
I mean, it's billions of pounds a year.
It's driving people into fuel poverty.
And so if you are genuinely panicked into thinking that we definitely need to be net zero as a world or as a country by 2050, then forget renewables.
The only way you're going to do it...
Because, by the way, nuclear is declining at the moment too, and the cost of nuclear is astronomical, and it requires public subsidy.
There are ways of solving that, but we don't seem to be interested in doing them.
So the only way we're going to do it, therefore, is either by telling people, sorry, you can't go on holiday ever again, and you can't turn up your central heating.
You've got to live in a sort of medieval fashion in your own village and stick there.
Well, that don't work.
See Australian elections, see American elections, see protests in France, etc.
Or you've got to say we've got to find a way of using fossil fuels but decarbonizing the emissions that come from them.
Which means carbon capture and storage.
Which, by the way, I think we could make work in the North Sea.
It wouldn't be cheap.
And the only way we're going to find out is by setting up a sort of market system that'll solve this problem through discovery and experiment.
But don't pretend you can have reasonable living standards in 2050 without...
I personally think that, you know, displacing coal with gas makes the most sense.
And by the way, that's not in my interest, because I have got a vested interest in the coal industry, not for much longer, but I have.
So you're saying we should frack baby frack?
Definitely.
The shale gas revolution is the biggest energy breakthrough of the last 20 years.
It's an amazing story.
It's a remarkable discovery of how to get gas out of tight rocks.
Just 10 years ago, it was conventional wisdom that gas was going to be the first of the fossil fuels to run out.
That it was already peaking and likely to decline as a source of energy.
Genuinely, that's what everybody agreed, the International Energy Agency, everybody.
Certainly the Committee on Climate Change, which had these forecasts of ever-rising gas prices, which would make renewables look cheap, and of course gas prices went through the floor because of this enormous glut of gas we now have coming out of shale, because we've been able to get it out of the source rock instead of out of the few places where it had pooled in loose rocks.
So the shale gas revolution is a really, really big story.
And it resulted in America being the most efficient cutter of emissions in the Western world.
It's not extraordinary.
To everyone's horror and fear, because CH4 has less sea in it than coal.
You know, it's a low carbon fossil fuel, as it were.
It's relatively clean.
It's very easily transported.
It's relatively safe.
We've got fantastically good shales under Lancashire and Yorkshire.
And friends of the earth have lied through their teeth to get people to oppose this, as a result of which we're importing gas from other parts of the world, where it's produced to much lower standards with much higher fossil fuel footprints, I mean, carbon footprints, etc.
So it's mad.
Our opposition to this is mad and it's based on ignorance and fear.
Well, let's talk about that ignorance a bit.
You and I have both discovered that, and Christopher Booker and a few others, Have discovered that this is a target-rich environment for any vaguely investigative journalist.
I mean, there's so much low-hanging fruit that so many nonsense stories to explode.
Why is the media not covering this scandal properly?
I quite agree.
And I was a Times columnist for five years.
And every now and then I would write a column saying, don't believe the hype.
Global warming is not as bad as you think.
Here's the evidence.
And a lot of my sort of Times colleagues would get very cross and say, you know, why on earth are we letting him write this nonsense?
But what makes me cross is that none of them were prepared to take this topic on one way or the other.
You know, they would just say, oh, that's for the environmental correspondent.
Or, I'm not a scientist.
I'm not a scientist.
Exactly.
Well, sorry, as soon as scientists say, we want you to change society, then all of us have not only a right, but a duty to cross-question, challenge, and investigate the evidence on which they're basing this recommendation.
And I'm very shocked by how opinionated journalists who feel that on the basis of one news story they can weigh in on whether Amazon is good or bad for the world or Whether Saudi Arabia is doing the right thing or something like that, simply won't tackle this topic.
And the really shocking thing was the reaction to those Climategate emails 10 years ago, which were very, very obviously showing...
Climate scientists, certain climate scientists, not all of them, putting their thumb on the scale to try and make the evidence look stronger than it was, and trying to keep skeptics out of the literature and all this kind of thing.
And the world reacted with a brief burst of horror, followed by, well, hang on, we can't let people think that there's a problem here, so we'll sweep it under the carpet, we'll have a whitewash inquiry or two, And then we'll say, oh no, no, it was just taken out of context.
And journalists go along with this.
I mean, what happened to the journalist profession?
You know, I mean, you and I were brought up to challenge everything.
Well, you know, I mean, I was on The Economist and, you know, what you do is you look at the facts and you say, okay, Mr.
Sick, you say your profits are going to go up next year.
Where's your evidence?
Because your profits went down last year and your market share is decreasing and somebody else, your competitors are doing better.
You know, you don't say, oh, I see.
Right.
Okay, I'll write that.
Yes.
Why would you even become a journalist if you didn't want to be a naughty boy chucking stones at Waspnest?
I mean, isn't that the job?
That's a very good way of putting it.
Otherwise we could have gone to, you know, got proper jobs in the city or somewhere.
Should have done, really.
Well, I think so.
I'm very, very ashamed of my profession.
And I blame them in part for this disastrous policy that has just been introduced as her farewell.
Theresa May.
What's her last move?
To gain her legacy as Prime Minister, she's decided to poison the wells, salt the earth with this zero, what's it called, net zero carbon...
2050 target.
I think...
Without a cost-benefit analysis.
And yesterday the government announced that the Treasury would do an analysis of the costs of this.
But it would be published after the target had been enacted.
This is barking mad.
You know, you don't...
I mean, Philip Hammond got criticised for saying this might cost a trillion dollars.
But actually, if you look at most estimates, even that was an underestimate.
It's likely to cost more than that.
You know, it's going to cost tens of billions a year.
And that's if we get there at all.
And we probably won't...
We'll probably spend that money and not even achieve net zero.
I mean, you've got to decarbonise not just electricity, obviously, but heating and transport and the cement industry and everything else.
How are you going to do that?
I mean, there's just no practical suggestion how to do that.
And the idea that setting the target in itself will either...
Incentivise industry to solve the problem, or we'll somehow shame the rest of the world into following suit, is shocking.
We've driven all our...
You know, we were boasting about having zero coal for a week or so recently.
Not true.
We were getting a gigawatt through a connector from the continent where the main source was a power station in the Netherlands burning coal.
Out of sight, out of mind.
What would it actually...
Suppose we're going to take this seriously.
What would we have to do to decarbonise our economy by 2015?
What would it...
Well, we'd...
We would have to...
Basically, you know, if we want...
Take air transport.
The pious hope is that somehow we can all grow maize in our back gardens, which we can turn into ethanol, which we can put in the tanks of aeroplanes.
Now, A, do the calculation, how many acres do you need, you know, for one transatlantic flight?
It's gigantic.
I mean, it's ridiculous.
We haven't got nearly enough land in the UK or anywhere else to do that.
So that's the first problem.
B, well, hang on, when you burn ethanol, don't you get CO2? Yes, you do.
So that is an emission.
Ah, yes, but you're going to grow the crop again next year, so that counts as net zero.
Well, not if you take into account the fact that the tractor has got to plant the maize.
What's the tractor running on?
Oh, well, it's running on the ethanol too.
Oh, right, so we need more fields for that, you know.
So, you know, you start running through the numbers and you get into the most ridiculous situation.
I mean, apart from anything else, we would need to retrofit our housing stock In such a way that it could run on electric heating rather than gas heating, that it was much better insulated, etc.
Well, you and I know that Britain in particular has a huge stock of relatively drafty homes because we didn't get invaded or bombed quite as much as other places, built 150 years ago, which we're quite proud of.
I mean, my house is 300 years old.
It's a very beautiful house.
I don't want to have to...
Knock it down and build that sort of...
Or putting those horrible windows in.
I quite like UPVC, double glazing windows.
On your house?
Well, I wouldn't be allowed on my house because it's listed.
But see, there's a problem.
So you have to change all that.
Yeah, I don't mind it on other people's houses.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, you're in the Lords.
So you spend a lot of time in the company, for better or for worse, with politicians.
Yeah.
Why do they not get this?
Because they live in a very small, in our case, SW1 glass bubble with a filter bubble place where they're hearing their own views back to themselves, is the principal answer to that question.
And every now and then, they get an electoral shock rather than electric shock from the electorate about this.
So Macron got it from the Gilets Jaunes.
The Americans delivered one to Hillary Clinton.
Notice she didn't dare raise climate change in the 2016 election, even though Trump was running as an out-and-out, not just sceptic, but, you know, it's all a hoax type, sort of ultra-sceptic, which is, by the way, a position he adopted not because he believes in it and sits up late at night reading papers about climate sensitivity, but because that's the way to win the Republican nomination.
Right.
Well, good luck to him.
Exactly.
The Australians, etc.
So I think in Britain, the politicians are underestimating the number of people out there in the country who think this is exaggerated nonsense designed to feather the nest of crony capitalists, which it is.
And there's a huge wellspring of support to be tapped out there if we have the courage to ignore the BBC and And the Guardian.
And David Attenborough.
Yes, well, you know, David Attenborough's a great, great figure and I hugely admire him.
But I, you know, some of the stuff he's said in recent programmes like walruses jumping off cliffs because of climate change is just silly.
You know, I mean, please stick to some facts.
But people trust, he's an authority figure that people trust.
Well, the argument from authority is a big problem here, is that we've put people on pedestals and they, you know, what was it Richard Feynman said?
Something about, I've forgotten it, but science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.
In other words, it's the facts that count, not the opinions.
And in this complicated area, we're talking about an extremely...
The complex system of the climate in which CO2 is one factor and there are many other factors.
The idea that there's only one answer to this is nonsense.
And science has always kept itself honest by being very decentralized, notice.
You know, lots of people in different universities, so they can challenge each other.
And Professor X speaking nonsense is what they love to say.
But on this, no, suddenly they must all say exactly the same thing.
Now that's unhealthy.
Well, absolutely.
I mean, hasn't it discredited not science, the whole of science, but it's damaged its credibility?
Well, I'm a huge fan of science.
I've written about science all my life.
It's been my career.
I've written biographies of scientists.
I think science is the greatest human achievement, bar none.
The wonderful knowledge, you know, deep geological time, the double helix, you know.
Everything is just incredible, what's been discovered by science.
And I still am a huge fan of science as a philosophy.
But science as an institution has behaved so badly in the last 10 years that it has lost my support.
So how do we...
I suppose we look to America, don't we?
The example of Trump and Bolsonaro.
There is a backlash finally starting in the world.
Well, I don't know quite how...
Every time I think that the tide is turning on this, it seems to get worse.
And by the way, it's only when unemployment's really low and everything's fine that people get really worked up about this.
The sad thing is that it'll probably take a recession before people...
Start seeing through some of this.
But I think you're right that Trump and, you know, after all, before him, John Howard in Australia and Stephen Harper in Canada both showed that you can be pretty sceptical on this stuff and very electorally successful.
Tony Abbott likewise.
So it's a shame we've never really tried it in this country, where we are very, very much enthralled to the environmental movement.
And the problem you've got is the huge power of the NGOs in this area.
I mean, Greenpeace, World Wildlife Fund and Friends of the Earth between them, which are three big multinationals, you know, with...
Highly paid CEOs and investment policies and all this kind of stuff.
And doing a lot of currency trading.
There's no difference between them and Goldman Sachs, really.
Their annual income, collectively, is over a billion dollars a year.
That's a lot of money to spend on putting pressure on politicians.
We are so on the wrong side of the argument.
I know.
Think how rich we'd be.
We could still be.
If you change your mind, then they'd give you every prize in the book, James.
Think of it.
I've just seen, before you came, I was watching Sky, Sky News, and you had Bill McKibben, Adam Bolton was just sitting there with his tongue hanging out, listening to his every alarmist claim, in much the same way that Michael Govenko responded when Greta Thunberg arrived.
What's that about?
Well, it's a form of cultural revolution that's going on here.
And it's not just about climate change.
It's with the trans issue, etc.
This business of bullying people into a particular view of the world and trying to drive out alternative views.
As I say, it reminds me of the early history of Christianity.
But it reminds me also of what happened in Cambodia, what happened in China, etc.
Now, we thought that was because they were authoritarian regimes with communist parties in power.
That suddenly, you know, people were denounced for having the wrong views and children were telling on their parents and getting them arrested and things like that.
You know, really nasty things happened in the Cultural Revolution in China.
But I think we're now discovering that that kind of thing can happen in democracies too.
And I do worry that the lack of...
challenge to some of this stuff is getting really extreme.
And when you put a 16-year-old girl with Asperger's up and say, don't you dare criticize her because that's impolite to a disabled child.
Yeah.
I'm sorry, but if she's making political points, then we need to challenge them.
And she was making political points.
It's an extraordinary situation we're in.
I would like this podcast to go on for several days because you're an endless source of fascinating information.
But just to round up, because I've got to go and see Priti Patel, as you know.
Lucky you.
Priti's great.
She's great.
She's a star.
And she's sound on climate change, isn't she?
She's sound on everything, yeah.
Suppose I am a typical kind of punter in the street who believes in what David Attenborough says and is very concerned, or I'm like the hedge funder I heard of the other day who's given money to Extinction Rebellion.
What would your message to these kinds of people be?
How would you address their arguments?
I would simply say, what is your view on the level of climate sensitivity?
What do you think the correct number is?
And if they would say, I'm sorry, I'd leave that to the experts.
I would say, well, no, sorry, this isn't good enough, because this is the absolutely central number behind every calculation made about whether we're facing a minor problem or a major problem.
And it's a very uncertain number.
We do not know the number.
The IPCC hasn't been able to narrow the range in which they think the number is.
But lots of lots of good evidence has shown that it's a lot lower than we thought it was 20 years ago.
Do you agree with that evidence or not?
And they would say, look, sorry, I don't read those kinds of scientific papers.
It's not my expertise.
Well, I'm sorry, that's not good enough.
You should.
Go and do a maths degree first, if that's what it takes.
And then read the papers.
Go and read Nick Lewis's papers and see whether or not you agree that climate sensitivity is low.
Because if you don't agree that it's low, then you've got to give me evidence as to why you don't think it's low.
And so, you know, I would just go straight to the heart of the numerical issue.
Now, I'm not very good at maths, and I'm not very good at climate science, but I jolly well made myself get under the skin of this subject to the point where I can assess the arguments.
And on my assessment, climate sensitivity is likely to be, not impossible that it's not, but is likely to be low enough that we are not facing a major problem, let alone extinction within a few years.
Have you come across Ronan Connolly?
Ron Connolly he was on the podcast a couple of weeks ago he's an independent scientist in Ireland and his father was also an independent scientist and they just they just love the science both on the left And so Ronan, naturally predisposed towards believing all this climate stuff, he and his dad spent five years reading up all the papers that had ever been written on climate change.
And I said, well, what did you conclude?
And he said, well...
He said, I think there probably is an anthropogenic element in climate change, but it's mainly to do with the urban heat island effect.
Correct.
He said there's really no strong evidence, well, no evidence, I think was what he said, to suggest that actually we're heating the planet in a catastrophic way because of CO2 emissions.
Science doesn't support it.
Right.
And by the way, look at the evidence on whether or not it's changing the weather, which is, after all, what we're supposed to worry about.
Roger Pielke has shown that there is no increase in storms.
The percentage of the world in drought is generally trending a little downwards, which is consistent with it getting a little bit warmer, so there's a bit more moisture in the air and that kind of thing.
And by the way, we haven't touched on global greening.
You must mention it's so important.
Because it's been completely dropped from the subject, but it's enormously important.
The extra CO2 in the air is the reason we now know from really good scientific work done by NASA and Beijing University and other organisations...
No, really.
And that's over 30 years.
And that's feeding a lot of people, I presume.
Well, it's responsible for an increase in crop yields, particularly, again, in arid areas, which tend to be poor areas.
But it's also responsible for being more food for caterpillars, more food for birds, more foods for rabbits and deer.
So how does the other side respond when you point this out?
They say, yeah, yeah, sure, but A, we knew about that.
Or they say, yes, but that effect is going to fade later in the century and it's going to go into reverse.
And you say, on what evidence?
On a model.
Well, what was fed into the model?
RCP 8.5, which is the scenario that assumes that we go back to burning coal in a big way and assumes that the oceans boil and there are 12 billion people on the planet living very rich lives but not inventing anything.
You know, it's a sort of bonkers scenario.
Right.
Matt, will you promise me that when your next book comes out, you come back on the podcast, A, to plug the book, and B, to give us more of the benefit of your wisdom and knowledge?
I will, but the book is not about climate change.
It's about innovation.
No, that's cool.
I loved your last one.
Well, it was the last one.
Evolution of Everything.
Oh, I hadn't even done that one.
Rational Optimist.
Nobody has.
Nobody read it.
Did they not?
No, Rational Optimist was very successful, but Evolution of Everything, I thought was a brilliant title, and I thought it was a very clever book, but nobody else agreed.
It got good reviews, but it just didn't catch the public mood for some reason.
I'm going to have to read it.
But the next one's called How Innovation Works, and it comes out this time next year.
Brilliant.
Well, you're coming back then.
Thank you very much.
Definitely.
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