20: Talkin’ about a revolution
The team fact-check the science around recent government proposals for climate change “micro-steps”. Our guest is Rob Saunders, Challenge Director for the UK’s flagship Prospering from the Energy Revolution (PFER).
Episode Transcript:
Rebecca: Hello, I’m Dr Rebecca Ford.
Matt: Hi, and I’m Dr Matt Hannon. Welcome to Local Zero.
[Music flourish]
In this episode, we’re talking with Dr Alice Bell. Alice is Director of climate change charity Possible and the author of a new book, Our Biggest Experiment: A History of the Climate Crisis.
Rebecca: We’ll talk with Alice about the work that Possible does and the ways they’re working to stimulate meaningful public engagement with climate change. We’ll also be chatting with her about the insights she shares in her new book which was published in July.
Alice: It’s called Our Biggest Experiment. It tells two interlocking stories; one which is how we got into this mess and how we caused the climate crisis, particularly through building key infrastructures around the fossil fuel industry but also how we discovered it was happening in the first place; how we went from just seeing the air around us air to appreciating it was this complex mix of chemicals, pulling out things like carbon dioxide and realising that they warm the planet.
[Music flourish]
Matt: As always, you can reach out to us on our dedicated Twitter handle. If you haven’t already, go and find us and follow us @LocalZeroPod to get involved with discussions over there. Also email us at LocalZeroPod@gmail.com if you want to share some longer thoughts.
[Music flourish]
Rebecca: As always, it wouldn’t be Local Zero without Fraser, so welcome to the show, Fraser.
Fraser: How are we doing, team? How is everybody?
Matt: Very good. Very excited about having Alice along today. I’ve been wanting to have her on the show for ages.
Fraser: Absolutely. I think it’s going to be a really good conversation.
Rebecca: Me too.
Matt: Yeah, it certainly will.
Rebecca: Yeah, and I really like the way that she can delve really deeply into what could be quite a depressing and devastating topic but somehow manages to draw inspiration and hope and have a far more positive message than I know that I would of the same situation.
Matt: That’s it and I think that shines through in her book as well which we’ll talk more about later which is Our Biggest Experiment. It talks about the history of climate change and is a fascinating book. If you really do want to understand how we got to where we are, go and get a copy and have a read. You really won’t regret it. I think also what I’d like to get out of the chat today is that Alice actually holds a PhD in science and technology communication and public engagement. She’s done the research around this and she’s taught on it at places like Imperial College and elsewhere. She’s also putting theory into action now and so she really is the person to talk to about how we translate some of the dire messaging that we saw from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and put that into action and get people onboard.
Rebecca: Yeah, that’s a really, really difficult topic to get people behind because for most people, they’re just going to be thinking, ‘Oh my goodness! The sky is falling. What’s next?’ There’s a fear reaction to all of that and I think it really takes some skill to take that and take some of that messaging and let’s use this and try and turn it into something positive. Let’s use this to engage people in new ways and get more people onboard with the action that everybody has got to start taking over the coming years.
Matt: So I think that, without further ado, we should bring her in.
[Music flourish]
Alice: Hi, I’m Alice Bell. I am the co-director of the climate charity Possible and I’ve also just written a book about the history of the climate crisis called Our Biggest Experiment.
[Music flourish]
Matt: Alice, welcome. Thank you for making the time to join us today. It’s an absolute pleasure to have you along. What, I guess, we’d like to kick off with is learning a little bit more about what your day job involves with the charity Possible. I’ve been a long-term fan of the work that you’ve done involved with various projects, campaigns and commissioning some really interesting research. As co-director, you’ll be at the helm and I just wanted to learn a little bit more about what the charity does and what your job involves.
Alice: Well, like a lot of people, my job is mainly looking at spreadsheets and sending people emails [laughter]. Being a climate campaigner is very similar to lots of other jobs but the work that we do is focused on ways in which everybody in the UK, just a general member of society and not somebody whose job it is to be a climate campaigner, can have a role in thinking about how we tackle climate change. I think it’s something that I personally feel very passionate about and it’s something that is embedded in the approach that Possible takes to climate action which is that we have to completely transform our world in order to tackle climate change and we need to bring people with us on that. It’s not going to work if someone in Westminster just says, ‘This is what you should do,’ because a lot of people will turn around and say, ‘No!’ and that will slow us down. So just to speed us up, we need to involve people but also just from the point of view of democracy, we should be involved in what it should look like. Also, I think maybe something that I think your listeners will appreciate is that, also from an innovation point of view, if we involve more people, we’ll have better ideas. One of the best projects that we’ve done is when we did some work years ago working with communities that had come together because they had to think about fracking in their local area. Back when people decided they might frack in the UK, which they’ve largely forgotten about now but there was a little phase when that was a bit fashionable, there were a few areas that were suggested for testing fracking; the village of Balcombe in Sussex being the first and the most famous. All the fracking drills rolled in and at the time in the UK, fracking was just this weird word that environmentalists said and no one really knew what it was but it caused a lot of discussion in the local community. There were people who came together to be against fracking, there were people who were pro it and there were people who weren’t sure. In the end, the frackers decided that it wasn’t the right kind of rock and they left but the community was left with this new way of thinking about energy that other people hadn’t had. We worked with them to think about what they wanted instead. They weren’t going to have fracking but what did they want instead? They chose solar and we worked with them on solar. We were starting to work with other communities; people who’d been brought together, or divided, or just had a discussion about energy because of fracking. Many of them were saying, ‘We want community-owned renewables.’ Unfortunately, the work that we’d done there was stalled massively and destroyed in places because of the solar cuts in 2015 but there were still loads of ideas and enthusiasm. In fact, in Balcombe, one of the things they’d done when they were looking for where they were going to site their solar farm was... that part of Southeast England has what’s called a grid capacity problem. You’ve got all these places you can install a solar farm, in theory, but there are not enough spaces you can actually plug it into the grid. So they said, ‘Well, where else can we plug in our solar farm?’ They noticed the electric railways. It’s a commuter town and the railway literally bisects the village and they said, ‘Oh, we’ll just plug it into the railway.’ They asked a local electrical engineer if they could do that and he said, ‘In theory but no one has done it. It would be a lot of work, so I wouldn’t bother.’ But because of their enthusiasm, because of their interest and also because the government had destroyed solar funding so they didn’t have many other options, we built what is now a world-leading technology of solar-powered railways. My colleagues are talking to people all over the world about how we can transform that and that innovation wouldn’t have happened if it wasn’t for that enthusiasm and also, in places, the local expertise that came from the local community. That’s the sort of thing we do at Possible which is finding ways that the British public can be involved in what geeks call low-carbon transition but tackling climate change because we know that’s the best way to do it at speed and also they’re probably going to have the best ideas as well.
Rebecca: I love all of this and I love talking about the innovation, inspiration and excitement that can happen when people get really engaged in their communities and in their places and kind of come together to co-create these solutions. A lot of the time when I look at communities like that, there’s always a backstory; whether it’s that there was going to be fracking there and that engaged people in ways that they’d never been engaged with before or whether it’s a community that’s experienced, say, really severe flooding that’s been very closely tied to climate change and they’ve come together and rallied around that. One of my worries is that a lot of the framing around climate change can often feel quite... you can be filled with despair rather than hope and innovation. Have you found, with the work that you’ve been in Possible, that there are ways to engage communities that might not have been engaged through fracking coming to them or some other disastrous event that might have brought them together?
Alice: Well, yeah. Possible started life as a campaign called 10:10 and the aim was to cut your carbon by 10% by 2010. That was in the era of climate action in the run-up to the Copenhagen talks when there was a lot of doom. If you think they’re doom-laden narratives at the moment, it’s nothing on the mid-noughties. We were all going die [laughter]. I mean it’s true. One thing is certain, we will all die but there was a lot of understandable grief, concern and fear and 10:10 wanted to give people a way of lifting themselves out of that which wasn’t to say it’s going to be okay but we can find ways so that humanity can still prosper. We can think of fair ways of doing that but it’s not going to be okay. We’ve already cooked up a degree or so of global warming and that’s not okay. So we’re not diminishing that but it’s about giving people a way of lifting out of that feeling that there’s nothing we can do. We know that one of the best ways of tackling that feeling of climate grief and despair is to take action and so it’s about coming up with things to do, whether it’s building a solar farm or planting trees. We’ve done a lot of work in flood-affected communities, like you mentioned, as well as the fracking group but we’ve also done things like bringing solutions to people of things that they can do. We had a great project called Solar Schools which engaged schools all over England which were lots of different types of schools. One of the things that was interesting about that project was the variety of types of schools and the reasons why they were interested in it. Some of them came to it because there was a Green Club and they said, ‘We’ve done our recycling, we’ve got people to turn the lights off and we’ve got LEDs but what’s next? Let’s put some solar panels on the roof.’ Also, as we’d gone on for a couple of years, stories got around about how great Solar Schools was and what it could do for your school. There were a couple of schools, particularly in small rural areas where they maybe struggled to get numbers for a year and they were worried about the long-term viability of the school, and Solar Schools helped bring the community around the school and helped to strengthen the school’s community and strengthen the school. So people were doing it not necessarily for environmental reasons but for other reasons to do with why the school dropped in numbers, or just simply that it was a nice way of giving the PTA something to do, or it meant that they could make a little bit of money to take people on school trips to help subsidise school budgets while budgets were being cut. People would get a lot out of it in terms of climate action and they’d find that suddenly they could talk about climate change in a way that, especially in a school playground, you wouldn’t want to talk about climate change in front of the children with parents understandably feeling extra fear and anxiety around the idea of climate change. This gave them a chance to talk about it in a way that was positive and they could then later have the conversation and ask, ‘Are you scared about flooding?’ or things like that but their starting point was this wonderful, positive thing they were doing for the school.
Matt: Taking ownership of the problem and taking action, yeah.
Alice: Yeah, and doing something that you love and it was a chance to celebrate something you love. What I’d like us to be able to do is run more projects like that which means being able to have something that is a bit white-label that you can just take to so many different contexts. We’ve tried to grow different ones like that and we have struggled because the government keeps doing things like slashing solar support and putting a block on onshore wind, so we’re in a bit of a constant rush against government policy on things like that.
Matt: With that example of the school, it strikes me as quite important... and I think you made this point on Twitter the other day which was to build your climate action around something that you believe in and something that you love. I’ve followed this project for a while and the primary thing feels like it’s the school; it’s the welfare of the students; it’s the welfare of the teachers; it’s about growing that budget so they can do something they otherwise wouldn’t but climate action is kind of cooked into that to improve the welfare so it’s bigger than climate. Is that kind of what you’re driving at?
Alice: Yeah, and it’s a thing that climate comms people talk about as co-benefits. One of the things that we always make sure we do at Possible is... for example, another project we’ve done, and again, we’re waiting on government policy but it will be brilliant at some point, is getting park user groups to install heat pumps in their parks and this will offer a way of having renewable heat in particularly urban areas where ground-source heat pumps might be harder to install because you don’t have big gardens or a field but you’ve got a park. So the park could maybe generate heat for a local school, businesses or homes but also generate income for the park. Parks are under a huge amount of stress because of cuts to local authority budgets so they would have money to employ the staff that manage the park, run special events, have extra activities and spaces and things like that. We could sell that as purely just about the park, just like we could have sold Solar Schools as just about the school but for us, it’s always important that we still talk about climate change. It’s a big part of how we plan projects. There are co-benefits but it doesn’t mean we have to talk about climate change first. We’re not here to stuff climate change down your throat because you probably do care more about your school or your park than climate change but we’re not going to hide it. We’re not going to do the thing of hiding climate change behind the polar bear or the air pollution concern. We’re going to bring it with us too.
Matt: Have the types of projects that you’ve engaged with changed since the beginning of 10:10? So we’re going all the way back to Copenhagen and, I guess, before that and the run-up to that which was - if my memory serves me correctly and if I’ve got my COP history right... I’m talking to a historian here and I hope I get this right – in 2009, I hope.
Alice: Yeah.
Matt: Good. Cha-ching! Possible has been around for well over a decade now, so are you doing different things? Are you having to tailor and adapt to the demands of the citizens that you’re trying to engage with climate change?
Alice: Yeah, a bit. We changed from 10:10 to Possible just under two years ago and we spent a lot of time internally talking about what it meant to be a climate campaign in the 2020s that was different from somebody in 2008 setting up a climate campaign because we didn’t want to have to change our name again [laughter]. We wondered what it meant now. It sounds silly but we spent quite a lot of time talking about how we changed our shade of pink which does sound really trivial but actually, it was quite important. It was symbolic for us because when 10:10 started in 2008, we were pink, not green and that felt important. It was a statement of what we were about. We were a bright pink and a cheerful pink. We were an unexpected pink. We felt that we still wanted to be pink and not green but that we were a slightly darker one. I don’t think it’s fair to say the climate movement has failed but it hasn’t succeeded in the way it wanted to. It’s continued to still be pushed against and delayed. We’re fighting a juggernaut of people who do not want us to take action and there’s a limit to how much we’ve been able to push back. Although, a lot of the fears that people were expressing in the mid to late-noughties are starting to happen and we have to be there and we have to reflect that. We can’t just hide away behind our solar panels and say, ‘Look, let’s get on with it.’ As well as saying, ‘Right, we need to roll up our sleeves and get on with it,’ we also need to create a bit more space for acknowledging the grief. With things like our tree planting projects, one of the approaches to that is we go to a community and do community tree planting. One of the most efficient ways to plant trees is just to get professionals to do it. You don’t want to get the local community to do it but by having community tree planting, you create a space where people can talk about climate change. It’s a bit like Solar Schools could turn the playgrounds into a place where it was socially acceptable to talk about climate change. Those sorts of conversations, particularly because they’re in environments that have been obviously impacted by climate change, you have to be very respectful of how much it hurts and to be a bit more aware of being at that sharp end. When I was writing my book, there were things that people in the 60s, 70s and 80s were saying, ‘In the future, it might be like this if we don’t act,’ and now we’re living that, so we have to reflect that, so I think that element has changed. It always was about not just individuals but how you could work collectively and how, if it was something you might be doing on your own, you weren’t doing it just on your own; you were doing it with others to express a kind of collective action but we’ve got more of a focus on community engagement as we’ve grown and as we’ve developed. Also, we’ve had to shift with political changes, particularly because of the 2015 solar cuts which were incredibly impactful for us and thinking about how we changed our approach to campaigning and appreciate that we had to be a lot more active in the political sphere and letting that happen again.
Matt: And onshore wind which you’ve run campaigns on too.
Rebecca: There are so many different projects that you’ve been involved in and different approaches with the different technologies that you can embed. Obviously, as you say, that has to align with the political agenda, the funding, the incentives and so on. I think this concept of grief is a really interesting one to dig into because I guess there’s grief and acknowledgement about what’s happening through our changing climate but I also think that we can often talk a lot about action and focus on technologies that we can pull in or technological substitutions as opposed to thinking more broadly about the holistic lifestyle changes that we might have to embark on and the potential grief that might go alongside some of that [laughter]. I’m wondering with the programmes that you’re doing and as you’re starting to see more engagement and more dialogue, are you starting to unpick some of these other actions that individuals or communities might need to take that could perhaps be a bit more grating because they’re requiring more fundamental change.
Alice: I think that’s an area that we’re coming into a lot more on. With the 10% challenge, it was asking, ‘Can you cut your carbon by 10% by 2010?’ Most people can do that quite easily and that’s not too hard. It was meant to be a starter. Actually, a lot of people who got engaged in that went a lot further because once you do your 10%, you do a lot more. We then moved into more of the community action stuff and I think we still do an awful lot which is public engagement with technology. That’s my background as well. I used to be an academic in science and technology policy and so I’ve done various amounts of work either studying or looking at other people studying the ways in which the public might engage with often new technology. You get your new technology; how does the public engage with it? Well, actually, with climate action, a lot of it is about how we engage with really old technologies or re-engage with the technologies of oil and gas. What are relationships with oil and gas and how do we have to transform those relationships? Some of it is that sort of stuff and then about two years ago, when we rebranded as Possible, we also had a new strategy. We thought about the key areas we were going to work in and part of our strategic focus for the last few years has been on transport which relates to people choosing whether they’re going to drive or not and also whether they’re going to fly or not. On top of that, there’s also heating and heating, as a whole, is a very messy, difficult and knotty problem but will, potentially, involve quite a lot of disruption in people’s homes. It’s certainly an area where the delayers are really pushing messaging to make it sound like it’s going to be very expensive and very disruptive. I think we’ll see, continually in the next few years, a lot of fights over this. So I feel like we’re moving into areas which are a little bit tougher like that. I know that, for as long as I’ve been at Possible in the last six years, we’ve always tried to combine stuff that sometimes gets dubbed as ‘lifestyle changes’ but it’s a little bit bigger than that which is having conversations with people about how we might change things like the emissions that are created through consumption and transport and then things that are to do a bit more with technology like building solar-powered railways or putting heating pumps in your park which are a little bit more gee whiz. So we kind of intervene in that gee-whiz area to try and make it a little bit more community-minded. Another thing that we’re doing at the moment is we’re involved in a trial of electric motorways which might sound super...
Rebecca: Yeah, what is that? Tell us what means.
Alice: It should be all of our railways and it’s disgusting how slow it is but some of our railways work with electric rails. You got scared at school not to touch the electric rails. Trams have these things above them that they can attach to and some of the first electric transport dates back over a hundred years. They attach to a wire above them to run and get their electricity from. You can have the same thing on motorways. We could have an electric line on motorways which would have lorries and coaches and that would decrease noise pollution and air pollution. It would be great for lorry drivers because, at the moment, they are highly affected by air pollution because they’re sitting on motorways. If we could be decreasing the amount of air pollution created by things like lorries, that would be great for people who live near motorways and also people who work on them and also for our consumption emissions because so much of our stuff is transported around like this. There are parts of the country that aren’t very well served by the railways and so people might want to get around by coach if they didn’t want to have a car, so we’d need to think about that. This is a big innovation project and most of our partners are big technology companies. We’re involved because we think there are ways in which we could grow that technology from the start in a way that would be more engaging with local communities. Potentially, we can be applying some of the stuff we’ve done with our solar railways. We want to be talking to local communities across the UK and saying, ‘You’ve got an electric railway going through your town and we want to run it off renewables. What renewable works for you? Let’s together work out what your renewable resources are in the local area. Do you prefer wind or solar? Do you want it to be owned by you in the local community or are you happy for a big company to come in and build it?’ We want to have those conversations. Similarly, we could be having those conversations about the electrification of motorways and I think it’s really important that we involve the local communities in that and I think we’ll do it better and we’ll do it faster if we do but an alternative vision of it is it’s just a load of big companies go in and make some money out of it and the local people don’t necessarily notice until it upsets them in some way.
Matt: Alice, you’ve mentioned a few key actors here throughout the interview, companies just now and the state before. I know you’ve mentioned citizen civic action or individual action. Ultimately, it’s going to take all of these together in some kind of cohesive, joined-up manner which we’re still waiting for. The IPCC report spells out that action has to happen today, it has to be severe and it has to be rapid. Often, I’m asked by family and friends, ‘What choices should I make?’ and ‘If I make these choices, does it make any difference?’ I think what I’m starting to feel from people I speak to is that they acknowledge climate change is an issue. They’re actually convinced by the media coverage we had on the BBC and others and they acknowledge that the IPCC is probably right. There’s then this kind of Jekyll and Hyde thing where they’re also not taking the necessary actions because they think, ‘What’s the point?’ They’ll then go off on this litany of excuses. How is Possible tackling that? How are they looking to convince those that I think are climate agnostic? They’re kind of sitting on the fence and they’re willing to be convinced to take the action but they’re not quite there yet.
Alice: A lot of it is just normalising it. Some of it is the fun, techy thing; it’s a new technology and that brings people in like the e-motorways or the opportunity to improve something in your local community. So you’re like, ‘Alright, I can support my school or my local park.’ But I think it’s also just doing it as a collective. There’s a key psychological principle that a lot of people involved in climate activism pay attention to and the people at CAST (Centre for Climate and Social Transformations) at Cardiff University have been emphasising recently which is when you hear a fire alarm, that’s not what makes you take action. It’s when you see other people reacting to the fire alarm. I mentioned that CAST has been looking at this and they’ve been looking at it with respect to Covid and are saying that people responded to Covid regulations not just when they were told to do it but when they saw politicians taking action when those rules actually came into place. I think we all probably saw it. We heard the stories of Covid and thought, ‘Should I be staying at home? Should I be wearing a mask?’
Matt: Yeah, this is serious now kind of thing.
Alice: In terms of what the government said, lockdown happened after several key institutions did it and those key institutions started to close. Wellcome was very early in doing that and they’re very authoritative, then another museum shut, then another big company sent their staff to work from home, then the government said something and you thought, ‘Oh, I have to do something.’
Matt: Yeah, it’s serious.
Alice: The same pattern works for climate change and so that’s the sort of thing that we take into how we run our campaigns. On the simple question of whether you’re going to fly less, we know from research that’s been done at places like Cardiff that if you cut down flying for environmental reasons and you tell your friends that, not only are they likely to cut down their flying too but they’ll also support policy changes that will make sustainable transport easier for everyone. So we want to make sure that people know that that research is true, so they know that if they tell their friends that they’re not flying, they’re not just doing it as virtual signalling or to annoy their friends. That will have an impact. They can play a role in cultural change but it’s also about just creating spaces where people can signal that to each other. I think that was the great thing about the 10:10 campaign back in the noughties in that it was just about lots of people putting their hand up and saying, ‘I’m doing it,’ and that normalised it. I think that was true also with Solar Schools. I remember when I first started, the woman who used to run that gave me a briefing and she mischievously said, ‘My favourite thing about it is this just makes it normal.’ It’s not this weird green stuff that your hippe friend talks about. It’s just what you do in your school. So for all the kids and the families, it wasn’t just the solar that was normalised; I think it was just talking about climate change that was normalised and the idea that you were taking action wasn’t seen as weird. Although I think you’re right that people need to feel like what they’re doing is having an impact, and that’s on all of us to show that, I think just making it culturally acceptable and having those cultural signals is vital too. That’s one of the ways that people will see it’s having an impact because they’ll think, ‘Oh, I’ve cut down on meat but I can see that this is also something that all my friends are doing.’
Matt: It’s akin to mask-wearing as well, I guess. What I’ve really picked up from the pandemic is that science backs it up and people think wearing a mask is a good thing but basically, most of us are doing it out of sheer kind of social shame if you don’t. I guess what you’re driving at is that there’s this normalisation of actions which we know are positive but there’s also a kind of cultural attachment to them.
Alice: And it breaks down so quickly too. I don’t know what it’s like for you around Glasgow but I’m certainly finding, in London, that it’s very speedily breaking down.
Matt: Yeah, fragile.
Alice: The signal was now that you don’t have to wear masks and even though on London Transport they’ve said you have to, it’s really noticeable that it’s decreased. It just takes a few people not doing it and you’re like, ‘Oh, it’s okay for me not to do it too.’ [Laughter]. I mean that change is fragile and so even if climate activists can build that in areas, we need to make sure we maintain it.
Rebecca: I think part of that is the consistent messaging, strong messaging and not suddenly changing the story. For me, if we’re talking about it from a Covid and mask-wearing perspective, that’s always been one of the challenges and thinking, ‘Hang on a minute. They’re saying that and they’re saying that. What do I do? Where do we want to go?’ I think you can completely see that that has happened in the climate change sphere over the past few decades. The recently released IPCC report has, in one respect, for me been absolutely brilliant at really emphasising and strengthening the narrative about what is happening and how we need to respond but I think we need to remember this isn’t new. This has been something that’s been going on for many years and climate change scientists have been coming together for years and years. This is actually a topic really close to your heart and something that you dig into in your new book. We’ve been talking about the future but maybe we can just kind of reflect a little bit on the past. Can you share with us some of the insights that you’ve been digging up?
Alice: One thing is that we have been talking about climate change for a long time. We’ve had an IPCC report and some people are saying, ‘Oh no! It’s an IPCC report! I must change everything.’ [Laughter] Those of us who are there to capture that feeling say, ‘Yes, let’s take it somewhere useful.’ But I do remember, often, the same people were having the same reaction which they seem to have forgotten about seven years ago when we had the last report and maybe seven years before that. You can see this all the way back to the beginning of the 20th century. Basically, bits of humanity get scared about climate change roughly every five to ten years and have done for about the last 150 years and I think each wave seems to get bigger, with greater intensity and have more lasting impacts. That’s the positive side. The other context to that is that climate change is also coming at us harder and with greater impacts each time and in greater ways and whether our interest in climate change can keep up with climate change itself, I’m a bit concerned about. When I’m feeling a bit grumpy, I do sort of look back on the historical bit of it and think, ‘We’ve been here before.’ Every time I see them say, ‘David Attenborough is doing this thing on the BBC,’ and I think, ‘Yes, that’s about the third time he’s done that.’ [Laughter]
Matt: I really liked, at the beginning of your book, how you kind of set the scene initially that we’re getting interested in climate change for the opposite reason and that it’s potentially getting too cold and concerns around that. The two big things that kind of popped out to me in the last chapter were that you said, and I quote, ‘one of the key lessons I took from researching is that we’re not very good at thinking about the future,’ which I think we’ll just come back to in a moment. That’s such a key line. The other was that we’ve kind of detached consumption from production. I think if there were two key lessons from the book, they feel like big ones. I just wondered whether you might reflect and expand upon those and what we do with those lessons.
Alice: Yeah, I was tracing through the history of oil and reading up on the history of the Samuel brothers who built Shell which is a fascinating and amazingly weird story anyway. They actually got into oil because they were traders. They were from the East End of London and they were sort of like the Del Boy Trotter and Rodney of the 1890s [laughter]. They started trading anything that fell off the back of a boat in the East End. That’s unfair actually. They were already quite rich with incredible networks of trading in and out from Britain to Southeast Asia. They then got asked by the Rothschilds and a couple of others to start thinking about transporting oil and from that grew this company and now you can’t think of them as anything other than an oil and gas company. They started off as traders and so much of the oil industry was about transport. Actually, one of the things that was interesting about Marcus Samuel, as an innovator in the oil industry, was that he knew transport. He was also one of the first people who appreciated that oil would then become the fuel of transport. So when he started, he was moving oil around because he was into transport but he was moving it on coal-based ships and trains and that oil was being used for lighting. The origin of the oil industry was all about lighting and was about replacing whale oil and coal-produced gas for gas lighting... when we talk about gas lighting and those old technologies. He then watched these cars and thought, ‘Oh...’ I mean with the first cars, you could choose when you were thinking about a car whether you would have a steam-powered car, an electric car or one of these new-fangled petrol-based cars. There are other alternative universes out there where we’ve taken different options and we didn’t necessarily go the way of oil being for transport. Also, Marcus Samuel, who was involved with Shell, was really big on pushing the idea that the British Admiralty should switch over to oil-based ships as well. Through World War One, we had innovations around planes which were very much from the get-go all about oil. So this link between the development of the fossil fuel industries is connected to just shipping stuff around and how that grew this big connection of moving stuff around. That’s all tied in with our worry about waste and waste totting up. I did some work before I started writing this book. I took a bit of a pause between making notes for the book and then actually, in earnest, writing about it. I did a long read for the Wellcome Trust on plastic waste and I was reading up on plastic waste and thinking about this weird culture that we have set up where we have all this plastic waste in the West that gets produced and then we put in tankers and move it to Asia. They then empty out the waste and then they fill it with more plastic stuff that they’ve made and bring it over to us. It’s disgusting but most consumers don’t see any of that. We’re so disconnected from these very complicated patterns of consumption. I also was reading these early criticisms of the industrial revolution from people like William Morris and their critiques on how we went around making stuff and our connection to making things is quite intimately connected to us unravelling the climate crisis today.
Rebecca: What you’re talking about is this connection with the things that we’re using, whether it’s the supply chain and the whole life of our plastic goods or whether it’s how energy is generated, where the materials come from and what happens to them when they are disused. I’ve seen some horrific pictures of child labour to produce the raw materials that go into battery technology which we’re hailing as a really critical future technology for our energy systems but actually when we start to think about that whole life cycle, there is a huge disconnect there. You could say the same for our food systems as well. I mean the number of people that eat foods that they would probably shy away from if they were part and parcel of the whole chain of events. For me, that’s a really, really key message which is actually, this disconnect leads to really bad choices because we’re just not seeing the whole of the system. Do you think that that’s something that we need to really drastically address if we are going to have a hope in hell of doing something about the climate crisis?
Alice: Yeah, I think at the very basic level, we need to think about curtailing consumption as well for other environmental reasons as well as climate change. It’s one of the areas that we’re keen, at Possible, to do more on. In fact, we’ve just put a bid together at the moment to do some work on that. When we relaunched as Possible, we set up a set of ten bold ideas which was just me and my co-directors sitting around saying, ‘If someone gave us loads of money, what would we do? No one is going to give us loads of money but what would we do if we had it?’ One of the ideas we had was to have fixing factories and we said, ‘Every high street should have a fixing factory. There are all these clothes shops but maybe we could convince the councils to let us have them for a peppercorn rent and we’d encourage more fixing.’ There are lots of campaigns that already exist for encouraging products to be made to be more fixable. One of the challenges we have is that a lot of our products are not fixable and that’s the sort of thing we’d be really keen to build and it’s something that we do need to do quite a lot of work on. We’ve also been collaborating with the New Weather Institute to do some stuff on advertising and how we don’t necessarily need to buy as much as we do and thinking about what pressures are put on us to buy stuff that we don’t need and how that’s part of the climate problem, particularly in rich countries like the UK.
Matt: Alice, you’ve covered centuries of history with your book. What are you hoping the impact of the book will be?
Alice: I wrote it partly for people who are already interested in climate and I think they might be interested in their history but I also wrote it because I thought there are probably a lot of people out there who maybe read about the IPCC report at the beginning of the month or they just had this nagging thing at the back of their mind that they should know more about climate change. One of the reasons why they’re not taking action on it is that they feel like there’s all this knowledge that other climate geeks have that they don’t have. If you go looking for climate knowledge if you google what is climate change, you just get a lot of graphs. That tells you a lot and the graphs are great. There are loads of really important climate graphs. I have a tattoo of some data from a climate graph on my shoulder.
Matt: Yeah, we were going to ask to see your tattoo by the way [laughter] because it’s on the bio.
Alice: I love it [laughter].
Matt: We had a kick-around before and Fraser said, ‘Oh, I’ve got one too.’ [Laughter] So we’ve seen that.
Alice: Yeah, graphs are key to understanding the climate story and they’re stories in themselves. I love looking at a climate graph but not everybody is going to be attracted to that and not everyone is going to get that. I think there is a larger story of the climate crisis which will appeal to different audiences if it’s told as a history as well as just adding loads. I certainly felt it filled in a load of gaps for me. As someone who’s spent a lot of time worrying about climate change and reading up about climate change, I felt there were gaps in the story that were filled. One of the reasons I bothered to write it as opposed to doing something more useful like spending more time at Possible was that I thought that it might speak to a group of those people who feel like they need a catch-up [laughter]. I think it’s quite reasonable to think, ‘Everyone else has been studying this. What’s going on?’ I’d hope that the history of the story, centred on people, could bring in a new audience.
Matt: You bring us right up to the present day and I guess the best indicator of the future is often the past. Finally, just to finish on this, if you were to look into your crystal ball, which is essentially your book in a weird way, what does it tell us about how things play out from here? Because you’ve said you’ve seen these cycles of action, inactivity and action and so where do we go from here?
Alice: I don’t know where we go.
Matt: [Laughter] Oh, damn! I thought you were going to give us the answer.
Alice: Historians can’t tell you about the future. There are no lessons from history. The only lessons you take from history are the ones that you’ve already decided and you read morals from today on to the stories of the past. One thing I would say is that occasionally when I was more depressed, I’d look at it and think, ‘Here we go again.’ On a less cynical model, I did also see a lot of examples of where we had choices. I said earlier about when cars first started which was a choice between an electric car, a steam-powered car, or a petrol-based car and we’ve had these choices. Anyone who’s ever studied sociology or technology will have read this amazing essay called How the Refrigerator Got Its Hum which is about the big fight between gas fridges and electric fridges. It’s a classic study. There were all these forks in the road. It’s like VHS and Betamax where one technology won over another. We made choices that were sometimes positive and often, as it’s turned out, not so positive and that’s something that I think we need to take to the future. We need to think about which technologies we take to the future. At the moment, the British government loves talking about how we need a green industrial revolution. I get why they use that phrase but do we really want to build this new transformation that we need to have as a mirror of the industrial revolution? I think the industrial revolution sounds like a terrible blueprint for us to build any change in the future. It was based on slavery and caused a lot of unintended environmental problems. We should be thinking about what our new future will look like. Do we want it to be one that is Boris Johnson’s idea of the industrial revolution or do we want it to look like something else? That, I think, is the thing that we need to think about in terms of the future which is about technological choice.
Matt: Some hard choices to make.
[Music flourish]
Okay, Alice, thank you so much. It’s been an absolute pleasure. I hope you will stick around for our next section which is Future or Fiction? with our esteemed Fraser Stewart. It’s a little game we’ll play and I normally get it wrong anyway, so you’ve got the option of winning [laughter]. Without further ado, I will hand over to Fraser.
[Music flourish]
Fraser: I thought that conversation was absolutely bang on, by the way. Dead interesting. So skipping over that conversation, we’ll get to the actual important stuff now [laughter]. For the uninitiated, Future or Fiction? is a game that we play with our esteemed guests in every episode where I present the panel with a new technological innovation which fits very nicely with the theme of the conversation at the end there and they have to decide if they think it’s real, i.e. they think it’s the future, or if they think I have just pulled it completely out of my backside. This week’s innovation is called... High as a Kite. That’s High as a Kite. Becky, stop laughing. So we know that renewable wind technology can come in lots of different shapes and sizes but how about this? Researchers have designed a wind energy technology around the size of a small crop duster that flies like a kite while generating clean energy. Propellers keep the kite afloat where bigger rotors generate energy and send it back down to a base unit via a cable which looks a little bit like a kite string. Do we think it’s the future or do we think it’s fiction?
[Music flourish]
Who’s coming in?
Matt: Well, I’m feeling a little smug about this one because I might actually know this [laughter]. In the last episode, Episode 21, I got two wrong. I think this is a thing, okay? I will pause there and let our other panellists have a discussion.
Fraser: Alice, I don’t know how familiar you are with Future or Fiction? but generally, when Matt says something is a thing [laughter]...
Matt: It means it ain’t [laughter].
Alice: I mean I think this sounds like something that might be someone’s idea but whether it works... it doesn’t mean it’s fiction but whether it’s actually a viable technology is a different matter.
Matt: This is where Becky and I get quite upset because we’re still not really clear on the rules of this game [laughter]. We’re not quite sure whether the fact that if it’s sitting in a lab or even in somebody’s head somewhere whether it constitutes as a tick from Fraser.
Fraser: Generally speaking, the rules of the game are that it’s something that’s, at the very least, still in development today and it hasn’t completely flopped or whatever.
Alice: But is it greenwashed?
Matt: Mmm, could be.
Rebecca: So Alice, could you see this sitting in the backyard of the schools that you work with and instead of solar-run schools, we’re going to have schools as high as kites?
Alice: I mean there are a lot of these mini-wind turbines. In fact, I live near some. They were built into a building not far from where I live but they don’t very well... but they’re real [laughter]. They’re in the building but [whispers] they just don’t work very well.
Rebecca: So I have young children and because I have young children, that means we have a number of kites in our house...
Matt: Of course, yeah.
Rebecca: ...all around the place.
Matt: It comes with the package.
Rebecca: Comes with the package. I’ve never been able to get a single one in the air [laughter] and it’s pretty windy here. I’m really struggling to visualise this... but how do you get it in the air and then what happens if the wind stops? Does it just fall out of the sky?
Fraser: It’s in the air through propulsion. There are rotors that keep it in the air. You don’t just fly it and then it drops down and comes up again. The idea is that it generates enough to offset the power that it uses to stay afloat.
Rebecca: Ah, so it’s almost like a little drone...
Fraser: Kind of, yeah.
Rebecca: ...on the back of which is some sort of...
Fraser: Yeah, that’s a good way to think about it.
Alice: How much would it power? Is it just something you’d use to charge your phone like those solar backpacks or would you use it to power your home?
Fraser: In my mind, it’s a relatively big size and so you could power something more substantial.
Matt: [Laughter] I love how Fraser’s got to delicately put this on the fence by saying that it could be both nonsense but also... ‘I’ve researched it so it’s a real thing.’ [Laughter] Anyway, cards on the table... this is definitely the future. I know companies who have done this. This is the future. I’m not saying we’re going to see them but people have tinkered with this at scale.
Fraser: Okay, okay.
[Music flourish and low, steady beat]
So now that Matt has given such a compelling answer, is anyone convinced?
Alice: No, I agree. I think that they exist. I’m just not convinced they’re a good idea.
Fraser: Becky?
Rebecca: No, I’m going fiction. I absolutely cannot see this happening. Maybe I just have a really bizarre vision in my mind and I just can’t get over that.
Fraser: You have no faith in Matt whatsoever [laughter].
Matt: That’s fair. The stats don’t lie. They’re not good [laughter]
[Music flourish]
Fraser: The answer is... it’s fiction. No, I’m only kidding [laughter]. It is the future. Of course, it is.
Matt: Goodness! I’ve had such a dry spell [laughter].
Fraser: Yeah, there are a few companies who have done it but the most successful and who have trialled it even offshore recently are Google-affiliated innovation outfit Makani. They have trialled the system in various different contexts. It is about the size of a crop duster plane. They say that because it uses a string rather than like a big turbine tower, it uses way less material but also it can generate more efficiently or, at least, so they claim. Yes, High as a Kite is the future.
Matt: Yeah, although it’s worth noting Google have dropped it now. All the knowledge around the innovation is open source out there for somebody to pick it up but there are other companies out there doing similar stuff. There was one in Glasgow, Kite Power Systems. People are doing this and there are good reasons for it which we don’t have the pod time to explain [laughter] but maybe another day.
Rebecca: For those interested, what is the proper name of this technology?
Matt: Airbourne wind energy systems.
Rebecca: Gosh! You really do know about it [laughter].
Matt: AWES [laughter]. It’s one of the few things I’ve actually researched of late. Listen, this is a one in a 20-episode phenomenon this, Alice. Normally, I crash and burn... no pun intended.
Alice: Can I give you a little history fact just on that?
Fraser: Please.
Alice: You said that they failed but they’re open source or they’re not funded anymore by Google and it’s all open source. One of the first experiments on really big winds, rather than just having a little wind turbine in your back garden to power a few lights but proper grid capacity wind was in the States either side of the Second World War in the 1940s. It failed spectacularly in the end and it got dubbed ‘the blade that failed’ because a big blade from it fell off, flew through the air and landed at the feet of the great innovator [laughter]. He ended up saying, ‘Wind is terrible. It’s not going to work. It was a silly idea,’ and he was then very pro-nuclear but his funders made him write a report on how he did it all. In the energy crisis in the 70s, when a few other people said, ‘Maybe we could go back to wind technology and do it at scale,’ they used his research, came back to it and solved some of the problems. Maybe we all think this idea is a bad idea now but it’s great that it’s open-source because maybe, in a few years, we’ll all go back to it.
[Music flourish]
Fraser: Amazing, amazing.
Matt: Exactly and therein lies a lesson. We’ve got to share our knowledge, otherwise, innovation doesn’t happen. Right, listen, that brings us to the very end and so thank you for listening, thank you for your time, Alice. You’ve been listening to Local Zero. We’re @LocalZeroPod on Twitter, if you want to join the conversation and until next time, thank you for listening and see you soon. Bye bye.
Fraser: Bye, bye, bye, bye.
Rebecca: Bye.
[Music flourish]
Transcribed by
PODTRANSCRIBE