 Great. Thanks to everyone for coming. It's really nice that you could all make it, and especially there's a lot of people in the room, Richard, so you know that work on energy issues and energy transition, so that's a really nice complement to what I think you're going to talk about. It's a great privilege to welcome Richard Dennis, who's the Chief Economist at the Australia Institute, formerly the Executive Director of the Australia and demoted himself to Chief Economist so that he could concentrate on the kinds of work that he's going to talk about today. I won't spoil the surprise of what Richard's going to talk about, and you can maybe explain also why you're on your European tour as well since it links in. We'll probably have 15-20 minutes of a presentation and then open the floor up for an interesting discussion with all of your expertise, so welcome Richard. Thank you very much for having me today and for coming along and sacrificing your lunch hour. As Aaron said, my name is Richard Dennis. I'm the Executive Director. I've been introducing myself that way for a long time, Chief Economist of the Australia Institute, and we're a think tank based in Canberra in Australia. Most of the staff of the Australia Institute are economists or policy researchers, but unlike most think tanks in Australia at least, we take our media and political engagement work very seriously. I'll talk about that a bit if you want at the end, but to put it simply, I'm an escapist from academia. I like academic research. If I just wanted to write things people didn't read, I'd have stayed in academia. The reason that I like think tanks is I think they're a great way to bring people and ideas together, and in Australia at least, and in some countries I've noticed that often think tanks think about politics after they've finished doing their research. I'll do this in the Q&A if you're interested, but we always think about politics before we do our research. And by that I don't mean our research is done for purely political purposes. We think, well, if we were going to change people's minds about this, whose minds need changing? Which level of government, which people in those governments, which departments need to change their minds? And of all the arguments that we could mount, which one would be more likely to change their minds? Usually people do research and then say to someone, now I'd like to change someone's minds. What should I have done? We asked that question at the beginning. Anyway, what I'm here to talk to you guys about today is the no-new coal mines campaign, but supply-side policy responses to climate change and environmental issues more generally. But this is why I'm in Europe. I'm here for a couple of months. I've been based in London about to spend a bit of time travelling around. But I'm over here talking to people about this. And I met some of your colleagues at a conference in Oxford recently and we certainly shared an interest in the need to focus on supply-side approaches to tackling environmental problems. So again, I'll try and do a bit of both. I don't just want to tell you about our campaign, but I do think it's an interesting way to highlight the political opportunities as well as the policy opportunities that come with looking at the supply side. And I've got to admit for a brown bag lunch, you guys have bought some pretty good looking lunch and I'm getting hungry just looking at it. So let me start with the big picture. Australia has a bigger share of the world-traded coal market than Saudi Arabia has of the world oil market. Has anyone here heard of Saudi Arabia? Yeah, okay, they're big in oil. Yeah, we're bigger in traded coal than they are in oil. We plan to double our coal exports. That is what we are currently working on. We are planning and you're dropping food out of your mouth. You're so shocked that's good. We're not actually at the moment the biggest player in the traded coal market. We kind of take turns with Indonesia depending on whose mines come on. Indonesia is bigger than us at the moment and they too are planning to double their coal exports. So let's clear this up. In the lead up to Paris, when the world is apparently planning to make commitments to tackle climate change, the two largest coal exporters in the world are planning to double their coal exports. Put simply, if Australia and Indonesia, I'm focusing on Australia today, if Australia achieves its objectives of doubling its coal exports, the world will fail to tackle climate change. There is no scenario in which we get to double our coal exports and you get to tackle climate change. Someone is going to lose. But of course the Paris talk specifically preclude this conversation from taking place. Nothing at Paris will talk about the fact that Australia is about to double its coal exports. Nothing at Paris will talk about Australia is subsidizing the expansion of coal. Because for historical reasons that we can go into, Paris is designed around focusing on the countries that buy and consume coal, not the countries that produce it in huge quantities. Now just to give you a sense of huge, and I've got some other pictures I can send you if this one isn't clear enough for you, but has anyone heard of London? The Adani Carmichael mine, the pits, just the pits, are 40 kilometers long. The mine site itself is more like 60. They're 10 kilometers wide. I think, oh no, it's not there. I never use PowerPoint. I think power corrupts and PowerPoint corrupts absolutely. I've actually got a Stockholm picture which I'm going to have to email you when I saw the London one. I got excited. Someone in the office put this together for me. 40 kilometers long. If you went to the top of the tallest building you could find. If you went to the top of the Berlin communications tower, if you went to the top of the London Eye, what's the tallest building in Stockholm? I only got here last night. I guarantee you, it's not that high. You could go to the top of the tallest building in Europe and if you look to the horizon, if this coal mine started at your feet, if you look to the horizon you wouldn't see the end of it. People talk about geoengineering, the tackle climate change. It takes geoengineering to cause climate change. We're doing it right now. This mine just got approved by the Australian federal government last week. Can I point out that this mine, in its smallest iteration, will produce 2 billion tons of coal, which would make a pile of coal a meter deep, 10 meters wide, a bit wider than this room, 200,000 kilometers long. You could get around the world five times on a road of coal a meter deep with the coal from this mine. But fear not, we've got three mines this big currently being proposed in Australia and 50 new coal mine proposals in Australia and again Indonesia is doing stuff at the same scale. Now you might have heard that the low coal price is knocking the coal market around. You're right, there used to be 90 new coal mines proposed for Australia. The low coal price is working, 40 mines are not going ahead, 50 are still seeking approval. Now I'll come back to why people would still be building these mines even when the coal price is low, but I'll give you a hint now. It starts with a word that rhymes with subsidy. Okay, so Paris and carbon pricing do nothing. So the kind of, you know, let's have demand side restrictions, let's have price-based instruments. All of that stuff that we've talked about for 20 years has not stopped coal production rising 50% since in 1991 we first said we're going to tackle climate change. Coal productions increased 50% in the last 20 years and Australia and Indonesia are planning mines this big. It's not working. How come it's not working? Well, what if it was designed to not work? What if you wanted to just sort of drag out talking about climate change for decades so that you could keep selling your coal? Maybe some people, like you can criticise the process all you want, but what if the process is actually delivering for the people who designed it? And I assure you coal exporting countries like Australia paid a lot more attention to the rules and the process of the cop process early on. So big picture, step one, despite or perhaps I'll come to this in a second because of all of the talk about Paris, people are actually planning to invest billions of dollars to do the exact opposite. Now there's a couple of reasons that might happen. As I said, one is the subsidies. Australia subsidised every major coal mine that Australia's ever built. This is true in most countries. The real trick is if you can get taxpayers to build the upfront costs, pay for the upfront costs, the railway lines, the ports, if you can get someone else to cover the fixed costs, then you're only exposed to the marginal cost, the cost of pulling the coal out of the ground. And the good thing there is that that takes most of the risk out of the deal. Because if the coal price is higher than the cost of pulling the coal out, you pull the coal out. And if the coal price falls, you just shut down. You sack your workers for a year or two. It's not the end of the world. But if you've poured $10 billion into the port and rail infrastructure and you're not selling coal, then that's a very risky venture. So getting taxpayers to build the upfront fixed capital is essential to the economics of getting these mines built. Because don't get me wrong, every financial analyst that's looked at this mine and all the similar ones say this is a crazy idea. It shouldn't be built and won't be built. They leave something very important out, brackets, unless it's subsidized. So unfortunately, my biggest problem in Europe is people say, yeah, Richard, that's okay. But I've read all this good analysis that said the mine won't go ahead because it doesn't make economic sense. And I have to say, well, have you heard that the UK is building a nuclear power station? Have you heard they're paying five times as much for the electricity? All countries do stupid things. My country's preferred stupid thing is subsidizing coal mines. All right? The fact that it, quote, doesn't stack up doesn't mean we won't do it. All right? And again, we can talk about the politics of that. How am I going for time? Halfway? Perfect. I always say perfect because I don't really use PowerPoint and I was always going to finish when he tells me to. So here's a green paradox and then I'll move on to the politics of this. I don't know if this metaphor works very well in Sweden, but in Australia we spend a lot of time at the beach and in summertime there are these ice cream trucks that pull up and sell ice cream at the beach. You know, they play bad music and you go buy your ice cream. Do you have that in Sweden? Yeah? All right. So imagine you own one of those trucks and it's full of ice cream and you're selling your ice cream for, I don't know, 20 Kroner a pop and your refrigerator breaks down. What would you do with a truck full of ice cream if your fridge broke down? Think like an economist. Lower your prices and sell it. What would you do if you owned a trillion tons of coal and you thought that in 30 years time you couldn't sell it? Would you build a mine bigger than London, Paris and Berlin combined? You bet you would. Now the economics of this isn't hard. There's a little thing called hotelings rule that kind of tells us what the optimal rate to pull coal out of the ground is. And the optimal rate to pull coal out of the ground changes fundamentally when you think there's a deadline. All right, because if you don't think you can actually sell this coal in 20 or 30 years time, then in 20 or 30 years time it's not an asset. So if you can pull it out of the ground and sell it now, you will. So let's be clear. The demand side stuff we're doing to tackle climate change is probably part of the cause of the flood of new coal mines coming onto the market. For the economists in the room, we always like to do our modeling, ceteris paribus. Anyone know what ceteris paribus means? All our things being equal. Why do we say it in Latin? Sounds so stupid in English and probably in Swedish as well. Exactly. No one else can understand. Imagine if the world knew that economic modeling was based on the assumption that nothing else would ever change. So we've convinced ourselves that if you put a small price on pollution or if you introduce binding emission targets, comma and nothing else in the world changes, then we'll be slightly better off than if we hadn't done it. That's true. But if you do something small on the demand side and it causes a flood on the supply side, then you might actually be making it worse, which would be my contention. I think we're making it worse. So step one, Australia is building enormous amounts of coal mines, so are Indonesia. Step two, why are we doing this? Because subsidies really make it worthwhile, even when the coal price is low. Step three, it makes sense for coal mining companies. These are not stupid people. These are rich people that are winning. It makes sense for them to hurry up and dig it up now because they actually realize they might not be able to sell it in the future. Step four, we get to the moratorium. So anyone heard of Paris? I wish I had my Stockholm one here for you. I promise I'll send it tonight. So that's metropolitan Paris there. All right, this goes, there's Versailles, there's Paris. Keep going. You couldn't see the end of it. That's just one mind. So President Tong of Kiribati, a tiny little South Pacific island country. You ever want to hear an emotional speech about climate change? Listen to President Tong. Nothing abstract about climate change for Kiribati, because for Kiribati, under a best case scenario, not all of their islands will be sunk this century. Really what President Tong is aiming for is that some of his islands will still exist at the end of the century. There is no scenario being discussed at Paris that stops his country losing islands. The best case scenario is if we're really ambitious, his country still exists. So it's quite the existential threat for Kiribati and in turn, he doesn't get caught up in pragmatic issues like who might be upset by saying what if we didn't build any new coal mines. So President Tong has called for a moratorium on all new coal mines. He has written to all world leaders, including your prime minister, saying, dear rest of the world, I hear you care about climate change. If you don't act soon, I'll sink. By the way, Australia wants to build coal mines that are bigger than my country. Please join me in helping to stop them. Your prime minister will hopefully write back to President Tong. I'd like to think your prime minister would say yes, we'll support a moratorium on coal mines, but we can talk about the likelihood of that later. But it's not an accident this is happening pre-Paris because all the back slapping coming up at Paris is not going to stop the coal mines that will sink Kiribati from being built. And President Tong pre-Paris is obviously keen to attract people's attention to the fact that we need real action. We need real change if we're going to tackle climate change. Now I'll move on to the politics of the moratorium. So we've now got a whole bunch of South Pacific island states that signed up, 11 extra ones, Bill McKibben, Naomi Klein, Nicholas Stern put out a very powerful statement supporting the moratorium and the economics of it. Let me just shock you a little bit. If we had a moratorium on coal tomorrow, the main beneficiary would be the owners of coal companies. Okay, we're about to pour a flood of new supply into a flat market for coal. By restricting supply, the main beneficiaries are the coal companies. I think this is good because if we don't stop a flood of new supply, the price of coal will even lower. And some coal companies will go bankrupt. And what do the liquidators of a bankrupt coal company do? Say Peabody goes broke. Say Glencore goes broke. What is liquidator the term that you'd use? What's their job? What do they do? They sell off the assets. All right, now this is obviously quite contentious in Sweden at the moment. But someone is going to buy Peabody's coal assets. And when they buy them for a price that was even lower than Peabody bought them for, they'll be willing to accept an even lower coal price because they don't have to cover such big costs. So a moratorium on new coal actually puts a flaw underneath the coal price. The major beneficiary in the short term is the owners of coal. The other beneficiaries include the banks that link to them. The other beneficiaries include oil and gas. The other beneficiaries include the renewable energy industry and the other beneficiaries, people who want to tackle climate change. Sounds like an unusually powerful alliance. Really what a moratorium on coal does is divide the people that want to build new coal mines from the people who own existing ones. What a carbon price does, what restrictions on global demand for coal does is divide the environment movement from all of the coal industry. What a moratorium does is split the coal industry into two groups, the owners of incumbent coal and the people that would like to build new ones. Now the CEO of Glencore hasn't supported our moratorium call yet, but he's quite clear that the world has too many coal mines and needs less. Glencore has reduced coal output by 15% in the last year and Glencore, what's his name, Glassenberg, the CEO of Glencore is regularly out saying the rest of the coal industry needs to do the same thing. The Australian head of Glencore, a guy called Fryberg recently attacked the Australian government for subsidising the Carmichael mine. So not surprisingly, Glencore don't want this mine built. Glencore are the first mining company to ever say in Australia, don't subsidise new mines. Because what's happened is, now that the demand for coal is flat, maybe it'll decline, probably will, but will work on flat to be conservative, every new coal company that opens up reduces the market share of everybody else and pushes the price down. This mine getting built will destroy Peabody in America. This mine being built in Queensland will cost American coal miners their jobs. The problem is this mine will produce a lot more coal than the ones that Peabody mines that will displace. So I know this gets tricky for some environmentalists, but I'd rather keep Peabody open and keep this mine off than let this go ahead so that I can have some shard and Freud when Peabody goes broke. So moving on to the politics now, I'm rushing through this because I want to leave plenty of time for questions, but the politics of moratoria, the politics of supply side policies, I just think are much more attractive and a lot easier than the optimal policy responses generated by economists like my profession. What do I mean by that? In Australia, we had a huge fight about our carbon price. We had a huge fight to put one in. We had a huge fight to rip one out. Australian policy debate has basically revolved around carbon pricing for 10 years. We've lost three prime ministers over it. It's been a nightmare and our emissions are still going up. The carbon price was never going to stop this mine getting built. In fact, Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard, the former labor prime ministers, supported this mine being built. They supported carbon pricing and they supported building the world's largest export coal mines. So if Cedars Paribas would I rather have a carbon price than not, of course they would. Carbon pricing is fine, but in Australia at least and I think around the world, rather than being a magic bullet, I'd suggest it's been a nightmare because to put it into context, the total revenue collected by the Australian carbon price was about half of the total annual subsidies to coal mining. Can I just say that again? The total revenue from our carbon price was about half of the total amount of the subsidies we give to coal mining. So if we think price signals matter, if we think markets matter, if we think money changes things, then surely going after subsidies first would have made more sense. And the politics of attacking subsidies are, I assure you, a lot easier than the politics of imposing attacks on people's electricity bills. You're not wrong, I'm not opposed to putting attacks on people's electricity bills, but when you do that, you pick a pig fight with the kind of disinterested middle. But when you say I'd like to stop subsidizing foreign-owned mining companies and spend more money on schools and hospitals, people like you. So again, sure, optimal policy, carbon pricing, but it's only optimal in an optimal environment that didn't have sub-optimal subsidies. So how did we convince ourselves that the most sensible first step was one of the hardest political steps? I don't know, I wasn't in the room, but it happened. Similarly, regulation. I mean, America's done more with regulation on its coal-fired power stations than Australia's carbon price was ever going to do. I mean, Australia's carbon price was kind of optimally bad in that it actually was displacing gas and increasing the supply from coal. Because the kind of carbon price that you need to be big enough in Australia to bump you all the way from coal to renewables was far bigger than the politicians had an appetite for. So we came up with a carbon price that where it worked at the margin was the margin between coal and gas, not at the margin between fossil fuels and renewable energy. Again, I'm not philosophically opposed to carbon pricing per se, I'm just saying that first we ignored subsidies and then we introduced a carbon price that actually knocked out a lower intensity fossil fuel and increased the supply from coal. And then third, we spent in Australia a fortune subsidizing the polluters for the introduction of a carbon price. Then a new government got in and did what? Ripped up the carbon price. You know what happened? The other kids got to hang on to the subsidy, to the compensation. Remarkable. So yeah, I'm an economist, but I'm very interested in policy. I'm very interested in politics. And I think that when we look to solve environmental problems, there are some history suggests that moratorium type campaigns have been quite effective. History suggests that regulation historically has been quite effective, yet for 20 years when it comes to climate change, we've kind of, and certainly in Australia and I certainly think in the English speaking world at least, been obsessed with this sort of silver bullet in the form of emissions trading or carbon pricing. And I think it's been a political and policy disaster. And to come back to where I started at the beginning, if coal was your second biggest export, like in Australia, an iron ore was your biggest export and you can't turn iron ore into steel without coal. So if your country's exports revolved around exporting fossil fuels or things that needed fossil fuels to transform them, then you might team up with other like-minded countries and work really hard to make sure that people don't do anything about climate change. Because for us, for Australia, Paris is our best customers getting together to potentially promise to buy less of our best exports. Now here's the sick cynical irony of this. People criticise Australia rightly for lacking in ambition in our targets. Our mission reduction targets are, by world standards, pathetically low. People think criticising us for having low targets is useful. Let me just sort of suggest the opposite. What if we wanted to be attacked for having low targets? What if smart people had spent 20 years thinking about how to win this game, where win means not lose because we just have to drag it out? Because every day we don't do anything is a profitable day. What if we want to be attacked for having low targets? Why would we want to be attacked for having low targets? One, it makes you take your eye off the board, doesn't it? Oh, Australia has got, you know, its targets are lacking ambition. The fact that it wants to build a coal mine bigger than the city hosting the talks, oh, that's not even on the agenda. So please keep attacking us for our targets, it's funny. And secondly, what if we wanted to show to all the other countries in Southeast Asia that we want to build coal-fired power stations so we can sell coal to them? What if we wanted to show those countries that it's okay to get criticised for having low targets? We'll take the pain for you. We'll be the umbrella. We'll be the lightning rod. Everyone will single us out for being bad guys. You'll be off the hook. And you'll see that getting called names, getting called recalcitrant, getting called, you know, whatever it is that diplomats call you, doesn't matter. We'll do it for you. So it's in Australia's diplomatic interests for people to ignore what we're doing. So criticising is for having low targets. Yeah, we can take that. But we're also trying to train other countries that it's okay to get criticised for having low targets, you know, and in fact, we're a rich country, so people will pick on us, you know. So as long as they're picking on us, they won't be picking on you. So you'll be off the hook. So to wrap up, that's why we think a moratorium call is so important is because we want a whole bunch of countries around the world to basically call it out for what it is. It's shameful. It's immoral. It's inconsistent with the science. And it's not even good for the coal companies. Bizarrely, this is better for the people that build coal mines than it is for the people who sell coal. This is better for politicians that think they get local job effects from construction, not long-term economic benefits from coal mining, because again, it's going to push the price of coal down. Aaron's on his feet, so I think I'll shut up now. So thank you very much. I just know there's a lot of inquisitive minds in the room that want to ask some questions. And while you guys think quickly of a question, I had a couple of things that I wanted to clarify a little bit about the economics and the politics of how a moratorium works. One is to do with coverage. So since it's a global coal market, does it make any difference if one country imposes a moratorium, if Australia imposes a moratorium, and they take their coal out of the market, doesn't the rest of the market just respond? And the second question is about the permanence. So I mean, presumably the way the economics works is you restrict supply, prices for coal go up, which is the sort of carbon price signal effect. But doesn't that then change the political economy of the decision to leave the fossil fuels in the ground to begin with and therefore countries that agree to a moratorium at the beginning now no longer think it makes as much sense. No, thank you. Look, think of it this way. To some extent, the moratorium call is the diplomatic equivalent of keep it in the ground. All right, it's actually asking nation states to make a clear statement about the kind of world they think we need, whether the country itself has coal is actually irrelevant. All right, in fact, that's part of the strategy is to get, you know, there's 190 or so countries in the world depending on your definition, and the vast majority of them have no coal export ambitions. But in Australia, our prime ministers and our resources ministers say things like we have, quote, a moral obligation to export our coal, right? I'm not joking, am I? This is what Australian, we have a moral obligation, moral obligation to export our coal. We owe it to poor people around the world to export our coal to them and cause climate change and kill them with their pollution. Praise the lord. Praise the lord. We're here to help. We might be cutting our foreign aid budget right now, but we're so concerned with poor people that we need to give them more coal. Of course, when rich people wanted to buy coal office, we sold it to rich people at high prices. Now that rich people don't want to buy coal office, we've found a moral obligation to sell it at low prices to poor people. So my point is that a lot of the moratorium is about actually changing the global debate about the supply of cider coal. And the only way to enforce a moratorium is with tanks. Let's be clear, if some country wants to build coal, then no matter what agreements have been signed, unless another country wants to roll tanks in, then they'll be doing that. But that's not the way the world works. And similarly, the political case for subsidising mines like this in Australia, the political case of building these mines in Indonesia, will be devastated by hundreds or more countries saying, we have to move on from this. And the same way that the problem is people saying, they think that's what Paris is. People think Paris is everyone saying we have to move on from this. The opposite is happening. Paris is the cover story for this. So it's the legal implementation issues of a moratorium are significant, but the political turbulence that countries admitting this is what they need is in the short term the main game. Can I throw it out then to you guys? I saw one hand up the back before, or has that covered your question, Rob? So first of all, thanks for a very interesting and inspiring talk here. One question around the moratorium and the politics around it, and to get it actually going and signed, hopefully. Of course, politicians react to populations. That's what they need to do. And they also react to influence for big corporations, call among them. But of course, corporations are also in other businesses and other sectors. So the question is quite broad. You're saying, how is this perceived in the wider corporation group? And of course, there is a small, you can outline the fossil fuel oil and gas sector, which is also always shaking hands or trying to fight, depending a bit on the decade. The coal industry. So just an open question to that. I'll test your memory by collecting a couple. Okay. Marcus. Yeah, thanks. Interesting to hear this piece of strategy. My question is whether you know where the overall discussion about eliminating subsidies for fossil fuels sits right now and whether there's any sort of a move to split off coal from oil that would take them one at a time, rather than trying to get the whole package at once. Because it seems like part of what you're the moratorium would be achieved in some sense if you could actually get people to stop subsidizing. Let me throw one more to Rob and then I'll give it back to Richard. Hi, Richard. My name is Rob and the director of communications here at SCI. I had one short observation and any question? The observation was you said you weren't sure why it was that people chose to focus on politically the focus was placed on trying to get a carbon price instead of dealing with subsidies. And I think that the answer may be in some of the examples you gave, which is that it's this political obsessional priority placed on competitiveness. And that, you know, if you can put a subsidy in which increases the national competitiveness, either that's in terms of securing local jobs or by meaning that the coal mine from Carmichael is cheaper per tonne than the stuff coming out of the US, then that's competitiveness. And that's what drives I think those sorts of choices. The question I've got is what's your thoughts about how a moratorium might stand with the more grassroots campaigns around divestment? And if they're grassroots or not, what you might call a sort of financial moratorium? Couldn't the fossil fuel subsidies be sort of a WTO issue? I hear I'm about the first person. Yeah. Okay. Look, thank you. I'll take them in the order they came, but they overlap quite nicely. To some extent, to answer your question, this is, you know, there's a lot of moving parts to this campaign, but it's also only at the very beginning. And while pre-Paris is a nice opportunity, people are thinking about climate change, people are, you know, engaged with the issue. It's also a problem because people are obsessed with the Paris process. It's very hard, not impossible, it's very hard to get environment groups and environment ministers to say, oh, I'd like to distract you. I've got something else I'd like to talk to you about, you know, this whole Paris thing, you've kind of forgot the main game. So it's an opportunity, it's also a problem. But the strategy in part is to use Paris as a kind of proof of concept process. You know, step one, could we get ahead of state to call for it? Yeah, Kiribati has been very strong on this. Step two, would other countries sign up? Yeah, we've got 11 South Pacific island countries now. You might think that's easier or obvious, but understand Australia's aid budget is a major proportion of the budgets of these countries and it is non-trivial for these countries to say to Australia, we don't want you to build those comets. So step one, we've got a champion country, step two, we've got a whole bunch of other countries already signed on. Step three, we've got people like Nicholas Stern and there'll be a whole bunch of public letters coming out, which will also be sent to all heads of state pre-Paris, basically saying, I hear you've got a letter from Tong, we don't think he's crazy, and those ads will be in prominent newspapers as well. So if you've got good ideas for who might sign up, let me know. But post-Paris is the real fun. Post-Paris is the great communications opportunity to some extent because when everyone's, we know it's going to be a success. Have you heard it's going to be a success? I hear it's going to be a success. We've all got the memo, it's going to be a success. The funders won't be happy if it's not a success. So it'll be a success. So while everyone's patting themselves on the back saying, hey, we've made a big step forward, what better reality check to put to those people than well given that we've all agreed to tackle climate change, surely it's non-controversial to support a moratorium on new coal mines. Because if we've all just agreed that we're going to do this, we're all going to tackle climate change, everything's good, then how could your country not support a moratorium on new coal? I mean, actually it's kind of almost banal to support a moratorium on new coal mines, because what you've already achieved is so ambitious and so important. So really what we're trying to do is set up a post-Paris conversation about coal using the hypocrisy, really, of the whole Paris process. Or alternatively, if Paris is a failure, then we need to try something new, so want to do something simple like a moratorium. So step one, we're really at the very beginning of this, we're trying to get people to see that the economics and the politics and the campaigning opportunities of a moratorium make sense. Post-Paris is really the time to try and roll that out. Look, subsidies, yeah, look it is all about subsidies, and I have actually been talking to some people about strategic litigation in the World Trade Organization or elsewhere. It's very expensive and slow, but the good thing about court cases is that it brings a lot of information to the table. Blowing out on Trumpet, we won quite a big court case against Rio Tinto in Australia. They'd claimed that a mine would create 44,000 jobs in the Hunter Valley. It's only half a million people in the Hunter Valley. I was an expert witness in the case and I argued that I wasn't quite sure how many jobs it would create. They actually said like 43,728 or something. It's always precise. And I said, I can't be as precise as them, but I think it will create about zero jobs. And we won. We won that case. And the economists in the room, zero was actually a good number to pick. It was an extension of a coal mine in a mining region in the middle of a coal boom. How many unemployed miners do you reckon were around just hoping a new project would go ahead? It's crowding out. The construction of the new mine was simply going to suck skilled labour out of manufacturing, et cetera, et cetera. Point being that court case and the admissions that the company had to make under oath have been very valuable from a communications point of view. And now whenever I'm debating someone on TV or radio and they make ridiculous claims about jobs, so that's funny because you don't say they're under oath. That's really odd because lying to a journalist is funny and lying to a judge is a crime. How come when we're in court, your experts don't say these? And they back away quite quickly. So I do think WTO type strategic litigation would be important. The G7 and G20 are committed to getting rid of quote, inefficient subsidies. It was Australia that pushed hard to get the word inefficient in. It was. Sounds good. But it's actually a fantastic riggle room because when you ping us for a subsidy, you know what we say? It's not inefficient. If the language had to just be no subsidies, that would be a lot better. But some people fell for a rhetorical flourish, which was actually a strategic excuse. So the G20 are already there on subsidies, allegedly. But to give you an example, when the G20 agreed to get rid of subsidies, step two was that each country had to write to the G20 and list the subsidies they already had that they were going to phase out. We got our homework in straight away. Dear G20, we have no subsidies. So there's nothing to phase out. No, we just lie. We're good at it. Competition with subsidies. Yeah, but interestingly, Australia, conservative governments for 20 years in Australia have said we shouldn't subsidize manufacturing. Every other industry has kind of had the kind of boot on their heel, the boot on their neck, saying we have to get rid of subsidies. And no one's ever said, and we should subsidize mining. They're more powerful than that. They've just denied that they got them. So you're right. But in Australia at least, they never won a fight that they were good. They were too powerful to even have the fight. Grassroots and divestment, sorry, my answers are a bit long. What we're trying to do all around the world, there are individual campaigns to stop individual mines. And there's no reason for the Swedish government to care about Shenhua wanting to build a mine in the Liverpool Plains in Australia. There's no reason for the Swedish government to care about a coal mine being built in the Transvaal in South Africa. But there is a reason for the Swedish government to support a global moratorium on all new coal mines. So really, what we're actually trying to do is give a whole bunch of grassroots organization a meta diplomatic thing to call because it seems odd, but most countries don't have coal and most countries don't intend to use their coal that they don't have. And no one's using their diplomatic way. Now, Sweden's a bit mixed because you've got some exposure to coal. But you see my point, just because there's a whole bunch of countries out there who can be incredibly powerful diplomatically, but they can't divest if they don't own. They can't leave it in the ground if they don't have any. But they can call for other countries to stop doing it. So yeah, that's the link to the grassroots. There's a couple of questions from the online viewers. Actually, two of our colleagues in the York office who are watching. One is about how does this discussion pan out in the context of the Trans-Pacific Partnership? So in this recently agreed trade deal, how are coal subsidies and carbon prices affected by the provisions of that deal? Should we be focusing more on post-trans-Pacific partnership than post-Paris? And the second one is about what's been the reception of governments outside Australia to this call. Tim Slyada. Very similar kind of question, but I'm just wondering who are the main opponents to this? Obviously, Australia is a key one. You talked about Indonesia. But Indonesia is an interesting case because it's a fast-growing sort of lower middle-income country. I've been working in Vietnam, which is a very fast-growing middle-income country that is planning to put to build a lot of coal plants. So exactly. And Julie Bishop, their foreign minister, has been over there saying we're open for business, and that's driving a lot of the development aid in that region. But so I'm just interested, could Vietnam stand up and say no, because if we agree to a moratorium, the price, as you say, will go up. And therefore, the whole energy planning that their development is pinned on is under threat. So who else is involved? And maybe another one just tying back to the subsidies thing. Indonesia recently agreed to reduce subsidies, but I think that's only demand side. So this demand and supply side is the confusion possibly. To the Americans, if I were Bernie Sanders, and I said I wanted to transition out of coal, a moratorium would be a great way to protect US coal jobs from Australia's planned expansion. Like, US will be in the firing line when the price falls. So I would think it's great domestic politics for Hillary or Bernie to support a moratorium, because it will actually help protect the US coal industry from the new expansion. They'll still phase out over time. They won't phase out quite as quick, but we avoid a flood of Australian and Indonesian coal, and they get to do something big and symbolic and actually helpful, I think from an environmental point of view. As for TPP, look, we'll have to see. I mean, I haven't seen the full text yet. I've only read scary bits of what other people have said. The Australian Institute, where I work, had been very actively involved in free trade agreement negotiations and the politics and policy of them, including the Australia-US Free Trade Agreement, which tried for the same sorts of things. Look, in a nutshell, international law is a nice idea, and I've never seen any evidence of it, like the people with the tanks win. World Trade Organization and TPP create new forums where debates can be had. I see that as an unexplored opportunity for environmentalists to some extent. I'd rather not have these secretive deals, but we shouldn't just panic about them. There is plenty of distortions in plenty of markets, and I think there might be some opportunities there, but it wasn't designed to make our lives easier, and I doubt it will. I've forgotten the second bit of the question, though, from the Americans. TPP and... Just the receptiveness of different governments and their ideas. Yeah, look, I mean, it's only really started. I've been in Europe now for eight weeks. I've been talking to people at the government level for four. I've got some meetings with parliamentarians here in Sweden tomorrow, but it doesn't help for me to tell everybody who I've spoken to and what they think, because they all are delegates on behalf of other people. Look, to be honest, a lot of people have suggested to me that Sweden, or certainly Scandinavian countries, but Sweden in particular, would be one of the more likely countries to sign up for moratorium. Whether that's true or not, I don't know, but pretty much every country I've spoken to, and I've spoken to quite a lot now, leaving aside Australia, which I'll come back to, pretty much everyone has said, that's a good idea. I didn't realise it was as bad as it is. That would be a provocative thing for us to do, but it's not a crazy idea. No one wants to show leadership. They just want to be called leaders. Being the first European country to do this will be hard. Once the first one does it, a bunch will say, I was just about to do that too. All the meetings I've had have been positive, supportive, and encouraging me to talk someone else into doing it first. We'll keep playing that game for a while. I have been talking via intermediaries to representatives of coal and oil and gas. They get it. Again, just read what the CEO of Glencore is saying. We need less coal. There's a reason for that. We need less coal. I think that's the thing, and I've been talking to a lot of investors and finance sector types in London. The trick is to explain to people that when the market was growing, the coal companies didn't see each other as rivals. They thought their threat was environmentalists. Now that the market is flat, they see each other as rivals. They see the environmentalists as an ally, because keeping it in the ground is good for people who currently have the right to get it out. Once you explain that to people, that the politics shifted when the demand flattened. A lot of people who would usually fob you off invite you back for another meeting. We've got time maybe for one, possibly two if there are short questions before we wrap up. Calle. Hi, thanks for an interesting presentation. We've been looking at another side of the story. It's the growing demand in China, which has explained a lot of the rising exports of coal from Australia. It's a very particular story that starts six, seven years ago, with rapidly rising imports in China. Those imports, it shows when we look at the numbers from China, shows to have been driven by supply-side politics in China as well, and very, very big subsidies into heavy manufacturing, for example. You say that none of this is really driven by market or by demand, right? So the end user here, China, they have actually subsidized it over supply in heavy manufacturing. It's actually roughly a third of the total capacity. So it's massive. Arguably, this would also add a lot of argument here. Where is the new demand going to be for the coal? Because it's not likely to come from China anymore. How are you discussing that in Australia? Because if you want to deliver coal somewhere, you have to also make sure there is someone building the coal power plants. So are you having discussions, or are your government having discussions, for example, with coal power plant manufacturers in China, to induce new wave of new cheap coal power? Call it environmentally friendly coal power? Look, I flicked this slide up before. Non-Australians won't get the significance, but the Sydney Morning Herald is kind of the best-selling broadsheet newspaper. The guy who's picked you at the top, Ross Gittens, is by far Australia's most well-respected economics commentator. Ross Gittens wrote a column last week in the Sydney Morning Herald, his big column for the week, basically supporting a moratorium on coal. It was covered pretty much everywhere. A move away from coal, a move away from more mines adds up was the headline, his final sentence. When you think it through, the case from moratorium on new coal mines has a lot going for it. Five years ago, if you'd suggested in Australia that a significant economic commentator, let alone Ross Gittens, would say there's an upside to a moratorium, you'd have been laughed out of the room. Like it really, the debate has changed so much, and it's because China's not buying it. Again, when the demand, well it was on demand curve, when the demand forecasts were looking like that, then we were happy to chase them. And what's happened now is there's this lag, the demand for coal has done that, but the political debate is still actually assuming that. So we're in this kind of bizarro land where there are politicians in Australia that want to build coal mines to help the coal industry, while Glencore's saying, don't you dare, and you can't subsidise it. So the debate has really shifted, but there are long lags in politicians and indeed in environmental advocacy that haven't caught up with the new circumstances yet. Look, as for China, I just never underestimate the Chinese. I've said you shouldn't underestimate Australia's negotiating strategy on climate. We've played a hard game for 20 years, and we've won, by the way. We've got everything we wanted. We're still selling a lot more coal. We're winning. I think the Chinese are even better at it than us. And what the Chinese have done, and I haven't spoken to the Chinese government about this, but I think it's pretty obvious, I think they brought 30 years' worth of emissions forward on purpose. We laugh at them for building empty cities that no one's in. They'll fill them up. They brought 30 years' worth of emissions forward to massively improve their negotiating position in the climate and the baits. Right? And it's worked. So I think economists have got nothing to say about geopolitical strategy, and people keep asking economists, and it's terrifying. Look at who's winning. They're the ones that are good at it. I think it's just about right out of time. So thank you very much, Richard, for taking the time to come visit us. Really a pleasure.