 Welcome. I am Alison Johnstone MSP, the Presiding Officer of the Scottish Parliament and Chair of Scotland's Futures Forum, and I would like to welcome you all to this online edition of the Festival of Politics 2021 in partnership with Scotland's Futures Forum. This evening's event is in conversation with George Mombio. We are delighted that so many people are able to join us online this evening, and I look forward to hearing comments and questions from our audience as we get into our discussion. I am delighted to be joined tonight by George Mombio. George is an author, guardian columnist and environmental campaigner. His bestselling books include Feral, Rewilding the Land, Sea and Human Life and Heat, How to Stop the Planet Burning. In 2017, George came to the Festival of Politics in person to discuss his book Out of the Wreckage and New Politics for an Age of Crisis. George co-wrote the concept album, Raking the Spell of Loneliness, with musician Ewan MacLennan, and has made a number of viral videos. One of them, as acted from his 2013 TED Talk, How Wolves Changed Rivers, has been viewed on YouTube over 48 million times. Another on natural climate solutions that he co-presented with Greta Thunberg has been watched over 60 million times. George is working on a new book to be published in 2022 about how we feed the world without devouring the planet. There will be an opportunity for you, our online audience, to put questions and views to George throughout the event. If you would like to make a contribution, please enter your question or comment into the question and answer box. Make sure to state your first name and where you were from and willing to get through as many as possible. However, I would like to begin by asking George, what are your hopes and aspirations for COP26? How optimistic are you that world leaders will act swiftly and not do what Greta Thunberg has said as blah blah blah? Well, thank you, Alison, and it's a very pertinent question. After the fiasco in Copenhagen, the COP summit then, I vowed that I was never going to go to another one because it was so depressing. And in fact, there's been 24 disasters so far and one relatively okay outcome, which was Paris in 2015. I am going to come to Glasgow, but not because I've got any great hope, but principally because it's not very far away. And we really are so close now to running out of time that we just have to throw everything we've got at it. I don't come in any optimism really at all. It's presided over by Boris Johnson, who just thinks it's another of his big japes. You can see the way he was talking about it yesterday, just loads of wise cracks and jokes and the rest of it, but almost no substance. What he's done isn't in any way. I mean, not even 1% commensurate with the scale of the task that needs to be enacted in the UK. And if he's leading these talks, well, we're going to see a similar lack of ambition, I think, from the other nations. But it is an opportunity to hammer home the message of, well, we're facing the prospect of systemic environmental collapse. And that means something quite specific because our life support systems on which everything depends, all our hopes and fears and loves and hates and dreams and nightmares, everything that we think is important. They're all complex systems, whether it's the atmosphere, whether it's the oceans, whether it's a soil, whether it's a biosphere. They're all what scientists call complex systems, and complex systems have a consistent set of characteristics. And among them is the fact that they can absorb stress up to a certain point, and they will just absorb it and absorb it and maintain roughly an equilibrium state despite all that stress coming in, but then they'll suddenly reach a point where they can't take it anymore and they flip. They tip over into a completely new state, which also becomes a stable state, but one which is likely to be extremely hostile to human life and much of the rest of life on earth. And the way you know that a complex system is approaching a tipping point is that its outputs begin to flicker. And the closer to the tipping point it comes, the wilder the fluctuations are. And if we look at what's been happening this past year with the heat domes over North America, the massive fires and droughts there, the huge floods in West Africa and China and Germany and Belgium, fires in Siberia around the Mediterranean and many other such events, this looks to me very much like flickering. I think we're very close to the tipping points. And if we pass those points, that's it, it's game over. There's no coming back from that. Once you've flipped into those new equilibrium states and generally one earth system will flip the others so there'll be a cascading collapse if this begins to happen, then you can kiss goodbye to everything you value in life. It's just all going to be gone. And we have to stop that from happening. And we can't do it with this piecemeal incremental approach that governments are taking. It's just not going to work. I mean, we're just too close to the edge here. And they're talking about net zero by 2050. By then it might be all over. They might have flipped. The tipping points might have been passed. The cascading systemic environmental collapse might have happened. And what we need is sudden and drastic action. The kind of action that the US engaged in immediately after Pearl Harbor in December 1941, which is an anniversary coming up very soon, where they just transformed the entire economy and the whole of national life in the course of just a few months. It's perfectly possible to do, but you need the political will. That's what we need to do now. It needs to be a sudden and drastic transformation of just about everything, but nothing remotely resembling that is on the table. You've spoken there off tipping points, and I think it's probably fair to say that we in the global north have experienced more of the extreme weather that populations in the global south, more of the sort of events that make people sit up and take notice. Do you think that the reality off that tipping point is impacting more on individuals now and galvanising them to speak out and make changes themselves? We spoke about Greta Thunberg earlier. There's definitely a younger demographic of activism that's having such an impact on that debate. I know that you've worked with Greta and a lot of other young people. What would your advice be to those who are coming to COP26 to make sure that Governments take action? There are three things that make movements effective. First is mobilisation, and the second is mobilisation, and the third is mobilisation. We just have to build the numbers. We have to get huge numbers of people registering their dissent against the inaction of Governments, against the total failure to give this existential issue the attention and the resources that it needs. At the same time, we need to outline our alternative vision of what a world that has transformed will look like. As you say, there have been some brilliant movements, primarily led by young people. It's so wonderful to be in a position of being able to follow the young people rather than trying to invoke people to follow me, which I've never been very good at. It's just lovely to say, okay, you are leading this, we're following this now, and that's a great position to be in. What we need to see is these movements becoming much, much bigger, 10-fold, 100-fold, until it's impossible for Governments to ignore them or to defy them. Governments see very clearly that they will not remain in office unless they give us what we want. That's how democracy should work. I have a question from Jason in Suffolk. Jason is asking, what is the single biggest emission from the Government's net zero plan published yesterday? Well, that's a good question and a hard one to answer because there's such a long list, but I would say it's a fundamental emission which is missing from everything, which is the way the economy works. If you have an economy whose aim is to keep growing, then all that growth counteracts any good things you're trying to do. Growth is a central objective of Governments around the world, and yet it is growth which is destroying our life support systems. Endless growth would work if the planet were growing concomitantly, but it's not. The planet is fixed in size, and this growth means moving along ever-expanding frontiers, grabbing resources, burning through them, dumping the waste. We now see them exploring the deep ocean. We hear billionaires talking about going into space and mining the rocks there because they're running out of frontiers here on Earth. Growth demands are constantly expanding frontier of consumption, and it's that frontier of consumption which is destroying this one planet where we can live. Until we address that huge issue, which sits at the heart of all the other issues, we're really not going to tackle this. Governments turn around and say, we're not asking the world here. We would be really happy with 3% growth, and that's a global goal set by the IMF and the OECD and the World Bank. We say 3%, well that means a doubling every 24 years. So all the economic activity we see today, with all the destruction and consumption and pollution that we see arising from it, that would be twice the size in terms of the economic activity twice as much in 2045, and then twice again in 2069, and then twice, and then twice, and then twice. It's like that bit in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, when they go into the Lestrange vault in Gringotts bank to find this Horcrocs thing, and the Gemino curse has been put on the treasure, and the treasure keeps doubling and doubling and doubling until it threatens to crush them to death. That's what we're facing. We're facing the Gemino curse, which is economic growth, and that's what should be at the heart of government plans, is to find other ways of ensuring that we have good lives, which don't depend on constantly expanding gross domestic product. I've got a couple more questions here. One is from Diane Watley in Glasgow. Diane's asking, in the Victorian era, when philanthropists provided money for community projects such as libraries, other public goods, how can we now lobby or target those who have vast wealth to consider philanthropy in the climate change arena? Thanks, Diane, for that. Another good question. I'm very sceptical of philanthropy. I mean, it's better that the rich give their money away than that they just sit in it or spend it on space rockets, yeah, absolutely, but much better still that we tax them until they're not nearly so rich, until they don't have such enormous power, which they might use, and philanthropy is a form of power, one way or another way. With effective taxation, we can actually decide how the money is used democratically rather than having our lords and masters say, oh, well, we will dain to give this money to you and to you and to you. And so often you find that people who set themselves up as great philanthropists have been extremely good at not paying their taxes. And I have come to the conclusion that a wealth tax is far greener than a carbon tax, partly because the rich are massively disproportionately more destructive than anyone else. There's a lot of good work on this in the scientific literature, and it shows very clearly that it doesn't really matter how green you think you are. You can tell yourself that you're a fantastic green consumer and you do your recycling and you put biofuel in one of your 10 supercars and you run your jet with a little bit of bio kerosene mixed in and the rest of it. It doesn't make any difference. Basically, your environmental impact is more or less matched to your level of income and wealth. That's that's a sort of pretty standard rule all the way up the socio economic scale that the more money you have, the greater your environmental impact. And the rich have this massively disproportionate impact. They're taking resources from the rest of us and hoarding them for themselves and then creating levels of pollution of climate breakdown and the rest of it, which they're imposing on everyone else. And while a carbon tax addresses one part of the problem and can be highly regressive, if everybody has to pay the carbon tax and you're hitting the poor as well as the rich, a wealth tax deals with the whole spectrum because it's having that money which enables them to assault every single aspect of the living world. You know, whether they're burning up vast amounts of fuel or eating bluefin tuna sushi or lining their super yacht with with mahogany panels, you know, they're just hitting the living world left, right and centre and a wealth tax prevents them from doing so. And it's greener and it's fairer than carbon taxes. So, you know, absolutely, let them give their money away better than that than that they don't. But actually, let's tax them. On the point of the impact of those with more wealth globally, we have a question here from Malia, who says, I'm from the global south and my region southern Africa is heavily impacted by activities mainly carried out by people in the global north. How can African activists be heard in a world which sees little value for their points of view? Well, I'm really glad you asked that Malia. Thank you very much for raising it because, yeah, you're absolutely right. You know, it's the world's poor who get hit first and worst by environmental breakdown. And yet they are the least responsible for it. And it's the world's rich who get hit last and least. And they're the most responsible for it. And there's a fundamental injustice here. And justice should be at the heart of all this. And yet the justice agenda really is scarcely articulated by the rich world's governments who have the whip hand in these negotiations. And, you know, in fairness, a lot of rich world activists are very switched on to the justice agenda and very concerned and outraged by the stifling of voices in the global south. And as it happens, we've throughout the cop talks, we're running something called cop26.tv bringing forward a whole lot of issues. But one of our particular mandates is to provide a platform for people from the global south who are not being heard here. And so we desperately want to make to highlight and amplify the voices which have been shut out. But yeah, you're absolutely right. You know, it's basically colonialism by other means. It's a rich world still instructing the poor world what to do, even though it's a rich world which has caused the problem. And actually, you know, we need to be led by the voices from the global south. Thank you. I've got a question from Ed in Exeter, who is saying that you've previously made a point in your invisible ideology talk about self education, namely that you don't acquire meaningful education by randomly watching videos and following social media feeds. And Ed is asking how you yourself approach studying. How do you gain competence in a given subject? Thanks, Ed. Another great question, and I have to say I'm very impressed by the level of the questions. Thank you very much. So yes, you're absolutely right. You can't gain any real useful insight without determined study. And determined study means, you know, casting your net wide, going to the best possible sources, the most rigorous and most empirical sources, and reading across disciplines, I feel as well. And it's very hard if you're starting out in this because it's just like this avalanche of information. It was said that a well resourced person in the 16th century was just about able to read every major work which had been published around the world and pretty well mop up all the available information. But that was the last possible time and that was the case. And we now see as many scientific papers and books published in a minute as were probably published in, well, it would have been several years then. So there's this avalanche of information and the way I've found useful is to sort of find a way in. What's the angle? What am I interested in? What am I trying to find out? And always I'm just trying to dig deeper and trying to sort of peel back one layer after another. So, you know, we face climate breakdown. So, you know, what's driving climate breakdown? Well, obviously it's a burning of fossil fuels. So, you know, let's find out about that. Who's burning the most fossil fuels? Which industries are most responsible? Who's failing to stop them? You know, it's asking these pertinent questions. And then having asked that, why do we have political and economic structures which allow that to happen? So then you start investigating the political system and you look at the way that parties are basically corrupted by campaign financing and the incredible power of political lobby groups. And then you say, well, how is that possible? And then you say, well, what are the structural political problems? Why is it that democracy doesn't do what it says on the tin? What's stopping it from happening? So then you look at how representative democracy works, how parliaments work, how governments work, how they manage to withhold powers from parliament, how parliament manages to withhold powers from the people, how power is removed from democratic forums into places which we can't reach. So you start to look at these structural issues. And then you say, well, so what's driving that? What are they representing here? What are they trying to champion? And then you think, well, okay, who are the most powerful people on earth? Oh, look, they're the oligarchs. And how did they get rich? Well, they control certain companies which do certain things. But also their money has been enabled by government policy, which they have effectively bought. Their economic power has translated into political power. And then you say, okay, so what's the root of that economic power? And then you start asking questions about neoliberalism. And then when you've started asking questions about neoliberalism, you say, well, neoliberalism obviously is just a variant of capitalism. So then you start asking questions about capitalism. You ask, for instance, what is capitalism? How did it begin? And so you can see this sort of, you know, you start off confronted by just this mountain of homogenous information. You can't find a way in. But if you ask an interesting question, you can then start to tumble through that mountain and you can find the gems in that mountain in a totally non extractive and non exploitative way, of course. And you slowly get deeper and deeper and deeper into these questions. And so I guess what I'm saying is you find your focus, find the initial question, which acts like the key in the keyhole that opens that first small door that leads you to a bigger door that leads you to a bigger door that leads you to a bigger one. But you've got to have that way in. You've got to have that root. And it might be a totally different route to the one I've described. You know, your interest might start in a different place and they might take you in a different direction. And all that is great because we need loads of different minds on this coming at it from different angles. That's absolutely essential. But it's just a question of always trying to get deeper. What lies beneath what lies beneath that is a question. And it's that question which opens up the world of study to you. Now, I say all this with one caveat, and that is that the academic publishing industry on which we rely for a great deal of information. I get most of mine from there. I read many, many academic papers every week. It's an absolute racket. And it's run by profiteers, some of whom make almost 40 per cent annual profits. And they do so by putting outrageous paywalls in front of research that we've already paid for. In some cases they'll want $30 to read a single article and yet governments paid for the research. And this model was invented by Robert Maxwell and has been adopted across the academic publishing industry. And I know this sounds really bizarre, but academic publishing is possibly one of the most ruthless industries on earth. It's really, really outrageous how it works. So we've got to find ways around that. And there are ways, there's sort of legit ways such as research gate, which can help. But a lot of the time you can't get your paper that way. And so I use an illegitimate way, supposedly, which is called SIHUB, S-C-I-H-U-B, set up by an incredible, I think she's a Kazakhstan-y computer scientist called Alexandra Albakian, who basically has found a way of pirating academic papers. And so I use a tall browser and I read it that way. It's absolutely outrageous that I should have to do this, that I should have to put myself on the wrong side of civil law. It's not a criminal matter, it's a civil matter. But I put myself on the wrong side of civil copyright laws because I want to know stuff. But there we are, that's the world we live in. You have to fight through the thicket to find what you want to know. Thank you. I think you touched on political structures in your response to Ed's question there. And Ian from Shetland has asked, would you agree that the current climate crisis can't be managed by politicians more interested in, who are more interested in their own party politics if they refuse to lay those interests aside? Well, it's certainly true, Ian, that the way things are at the moment. We are grossly misrepresented. Those who claim to represent us clearly do not have our interests at heart. They tend to have the interests of their corporate lobbyists and their friends in high places. You just look at the contracting scandals surrounding Covid to see just how disgraceful and corrupt those relationships have become. So, yeah, we're in this really, really outrageous position where just when we need good government more than any other time, the worst possible people are in charge at the worst possible time. But that is partly because, and I'm not blaming the electorate for this, but we have failed to mobilise on a sufficient scale. And yeah, there is other reasons for that. The media has been really terrible at informing us about the huge existential crisis that we face. In fact, it has gone out of its way in many cases to prevent us from knowing and to confuse and bamboozle us. But also, we have been lazy. As populations, we have been complacent. Not just lazy and complacent, but obviously also wept up in our own crises because so many people have been thrown into crisis by austerity, by the so-called flexibleisation of labour, the removal of job security, the outrageous terms and conditions that people have to work under. But we should remember that that situation has been faced by many of the most effective movements in history, the democracy campaigners in the early 19th century, many of the suffragettes, many of whom were working in factories or in domestic service and the outrageous conditions, the independence campaigners in India and elsewhere, the civil rights campaigners in the US. But all of these, the sort of main body of these campaigns was composed of people working and living in dire circumstances. Somehow we've lost our fighting edge. We've lost what Jimmy Reid had, you know, this amazing determination to combine, to get people together, create mass movements and create political change that way. Now we're beginning to see it with youth movements such as Fridays for Future, Green New Deal Rising, Extinction Rebellion, which isn't quite so much of a youth movement, but you know, still a really important movement. But we need to see these movements getting 10 times bigger, 100 times bigger, much louder, much harder to ignore. And then we start to get the politicians we need. I've got two questions here, which I'm going to put to you, because I feel they're interrelated. One from Terry. How important is it to relate to the climate change emergency to local need? During the pandemic and subsequent lockdowns, we witnessed how effective and sustainable solutions identified by local people changed climate change from being an abstract concept to an everyday issue. And, you know, a question two from Ian. So many people are living on the edge at the moment. It's taking all their energy just to get from one day to the next. Food heating, rent, close with their children. You know, never mind worrying about climate change. So, you know, it's making sure that everyone is involved. Everyone has an opportunity to be involved. You know, how do we best convince all people of the importance of tackling this? How do we make it possible? For all people to be involved? Because there are other everyday issues that take up a lot of time. Absolutely. No, well, thank you both, Terry and Ian. And of course you're both absolutely right. It is incredibly hard for people who are struggling with these horrendous loads that have been dumped on them. And it's no accident. You know, the governments want to keep people frantic. They want to keep people on the edge. Because then they don't cause so much trouble. You know, if you're just trying to survive from day to day to keep your head above water, then you are less likely to start taking to the streets and devoting the time and energy required to be an activist. And you know, if you've got two or three jobs, if you're having to do two or three jobs to make ends meet, then where do you find that time and energy? So, you know, I'm not blaming anyone here, but somehow we've got to do it, you know, because otherwise they will push us further down and down and down. And there's no limit to it. You know, there's no bottom. You know, they've been repeated and successful attempts throughout history to push people back into servitude. You know, people say, oh, you know, the slave trade ended. And so, and assume that was the end of slavery. Of course it wasn't the end of slavery. There was still slavery all over the world. But as soon as it became impossible for Britain directly to control slaves, either they did it through other colonial powers or outsourced arms length, deniable corporations and the rest of it, or they turned to an indentured labor system, which was very similar in some respects to slavery. And, you know, they will push us back that way if they possibly can. You know, that's what they want. That's why they want to destroy trade unions, destroy collective bargaining, destroy terms and conditions by any means at all. You know, when you hear some of these oligarchs talk, they just want to sweep the whole lot away. All workers rights gone. You know, this was a major motivation behind Brexit. So, if we don't fight, you know, and I'm not just talking obviously here about climate breakdown, but if we don't fight for justice as well, which is an absolutely fundamental component of both the environmental and the social struggle that we're involved in, then there will be none left at all. You know, you get only what you were fought for. That's all you are left with what you were fought for. There's nothing else. And this is why we have to combine, why we have to work together. And one of the great transformations of the past 50 years has been to divide us up and tell us that we're not citizens, we're consumers. And if we want to make change, we do it by changing our buying habits. Well, we are extremely weak as consumers. We're extremely weak when we're individuated and atomised in that way. We are powerful and effective only when we combine behind political demands. And this has been the harsh lesson of centuries of campaigning, of centuries of political action. That's the only time we are effective when we come together and combine and make clear political demands and then follow through and don't let go, don't give up until we've achieved those. And to address Terry's side of the question. Yeah, absolutely. A big part of this has to be at the local level. Obviously we're dealing with a global issue, but people can't remain in the global sphere all the time. We live in a place and we live in a community, hopefully, surrounded by people with whom we talk to and work with and do other stuff with every day. And we have to combine and be effective with those people. And in fact, I believe that all political change ultimately springs from the local level, from our own geographical communities and through neighbourhood change. And then ramping it up from the neighbourhood to the borough, from the borough to the city, from the city to the region, from the region to the nation, from the nation to the world. That's how we achieve global change. And in fact, that book I wrote out of the wreckage was all about this. It was all about basically how to build from the bottom up, from the local level, with participatory democracy, with participatory economy based around the commons, remobilising people, bringing people back together. And it was amazing during the first wave of the pandemic to actually see it happening, but then unfortunately it's kind of dissolved as conditions changed. But what we saw was a brief glimpse of how things could be of people going out of their way to help each other, to look out for the vulnerable people in their community, to do their shopping for them, to check up on them, to make sure that they weren't crushed by loneliness. And it was incredible how people came forward. And we can build on that. And we can start to bring in deliberative participatory democracy. And what happens when you do that in a meaningful way, when it's properly structured, not like the stupid EU referendum, which was about the worst possible model of how to do participatory democracy, but when it's done with the proper grounding of information, when it's properly structured, what you tend to see is that people make far more radical decisions than governments do. People are far keener to have social and economic and political transformation than governments are. And the more we can apply the model of direct deliberative participatory democracy alongside representative democracy, I'm not saying it's one or the other, it has to be both, then the closer we come to that moment of transformation. Thank you. Here are a couple of questions on that participation. The first is from Ines. Do you support the recent protests by Insulate Britain? Are they highlighting important climate change issues and getting people to talk about this? Or are their actions counterproductive and turning sections of society against the fight against climate change? And related to that, we have a question from Andrew in Inverness. Is civil disobedience the only viable way forward to addressing the intractable problem that is the climate crisis? Is violence ever justified or must we keep it entirely non-violent? Thank you, Ines and Andrew. These are two absolutely crucial questions. So, I think that our fundamental flaw, the kink in the human brain, is that our instinct for obedience overrides our instinct for survival. Time and again, and history shows many, many cases, people will obey rather than survive. They will do what they're told even if that compromises their life chances, destroys their community, destroys their economic chance. That's our fatal flaw. Other species don't have this. When their survival is threatened, that's what they put first. And there's this myth about humanity that we put our own survival first. In many, many cases we don't. We really don't. We put obedience first, obedience to power first. And this issue of climate and ecological breakdown, of full spectrum environmental breakdown, which we're facing, systemic environmental collapse, this highlights more than anything just how dangerous obedience is. If we go along with business as usual, if we accept what the system is telling us to be the good little consumers we're told to be and carry on spending and buying and getting and gaining and doing all those things we're told to do and carry on getting distracted by bullshit all the time rather than focusing on the central issue. These are all forms of obedience. But if we stick with that obedience, we are toast. That's it. That's curtains. That's the end of the human term on Earth. And we're only going to break out of that and secure our own survival and that of our life support systems on which that survival depends if we disobey. If we stand up against those economic forces and political forces which are driving us towards the cliff edge, driving us towards disaster with the maniacs at the steering wheel, and we have to say no, we're sorry, either we're going to jump out of this vehicle or we're going to grab that wheel and turn the car around because we do not obey your command to commit mass suicide. We're not going to do that. And so how do you disobey? How do you disobey most effectively? Well, you do it in structured and highly effective, well coordinated movements who have to be visible and they have to be noisy. Otherwise, it doesn't work. If you just write letter to your MP and leave it at that, then nothing's going to happen. Writing letter to your MP is a perfectly legitimate activity as long as it's embedded within a whole suite of other activities which makes your movement impossible to ignore. So is what insulate Britain is doing the right thing or the wrong thing? Now, look, I can totally understand why people get wound up by it and why it's so controversial. Unquestionably, there is real harm has been caused to people, albeit inadvertently. But it's a very difficult one, isn't it? Because every effective civil disobedience movement, and basically, you're only going to get political change if at least part of your movement is engaged in civil disobedience, has done things which have really pissed people off. Whether it's a civil rights movement, Martin Luther King, during his lifetime, was one of the most unpopular men in America. Nowadays, we look back and say, oh, everyone loved Martin Luther King because we all love him now. They didn't love him while he was alive, not in the least. The suffragettes were considered totally beyond the pale, just utterly outrageous because of the sometimes very violent direct action that they took as long as alongside all the nonviolent. They really went full spectrum into violence with firebombs, one of them threw a hatchet at the Prime Minister and actually sliced open the ear of one of his ministers when she missed. There were lots of attempts at assassination, all sorts of stuff like that, which I can't endorse violent protest, I can't because it's got to be based on respect for all life. But where does the line fall? Where do you say, right, this is too disruptive, but then on the other hand, where do you say this is too ineffective? Somewhere there's a line between the two, and it's really hard to find that line. And it's really hard to know in advance exactly where that line lies. And so you do have to try different models, different ways of doing it and see what works, what sticks. And I can't blame anyone in Insulate Britain for the way they're going about it because they're desperate. They're literally desperate. I'm desperate. I've been working in this field now for 36 years and it's been 36 years of banging my head against the wall, trying to get people to wake up to the fact that we're facing the greatest catastrophe human beings have ever faced here. We've faced a lot of really bad stuff of the human species, war and famine and genocide, the most terrible things, but as a species we've come back from those. Huge numbers of people haven't, but the species itself has come back from those and we've regrouped and we've regrown and we've collectively survived. But we don't come back from this. You know, if earth systems flip, there's no coming back from that. And you know, we need to express that desperation in ways that are effective, in ways that are noisy, in ways that are eye catching. I don't have a perfect set of formulae for how to do that. And I don't know always whether they're doing it right or whether they're doing it wrong or whether I'm doing it right or doing it wrong because I'm involved in lots of different movements. You know, I get arrested from time to time for taking direct action. I don't always know. And sometimes you'll only know in retrospect. So it's a really hard question to answer because really only history will be the judge and the way we'll know is whether there is any history after this. That's the criterion for success. George, can I ask—well, we have a question from Breege, who is asking if there is any country or government that is impressing you with their policies regarding climate change. Thank you, Breege. Another great question. Short answer, no. I mean, some are obviously better than others. And there's been some really interesting initiatives either in the past or now from Costa Rica, Ecuador, Maldives, particularly a lot of the vulnerable states and particularly vulnerable frontline states on facing the prospect of total climate break down. But still it sort of takes second, third, fourth place to other priorities. You know, if there's anyone around to look back on this, I'll say, why wasn't this front and centre of everything? Why wasn't this the issue which circumscribed all others? The defining issue of its time because it is the defining issue and yet it's not treated that way. And there's no government coming anywhere near. I mean, we're talking orders of magnitude. So I wrote a column that was published today about what happened when the US joined the Second World War. I mentioned this before. December 7, 1941, Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor. By the following day, Roosevelt had secured a declaration of war from Congress, right? And then he had already sort of put forward these plans for building an arsenal democracy, which everyone said was impossible, just impossible. But he and the very brilliant administrators around him just set about completely transforming the nation. I mean, it's almost unbelievable what they did between 1942 and 1945. The US government spent more money than it did between 1789 and 1941. I'll just say that again. Between 1942 and 1945, it spent more money in current dollar terms than between 1789 and 1941. I mean, it's mind-blowing, the scale of it. The military budget rose 42-fold. The whole economy was turned round. People went in with jackhammers into these massive motor manufacturing plants in Detroit and places, and they just hammered out all the equipment out of the foundation within a couple of weeks in some cases. Completely new equipment was in there, and these factories were turning out fighter planes. They were turning out artillery pieces, tanks, munitions, the whole suite of things. There were toy manufacturers making gyro-compasses for warships. There was a lot of holstery nail manufacturers making ammunition clips. Everything changed within a few months, and the whole nation was mobilised, and everyone had to change their behaviour. Car sales were banned just like that in February 1942. No more car sales until the war had ended. None at all. They were all completely shut bombs so that the whole economy could focus on military production instead. It was unimaginable. Roosevelt afterwards called it the miracle of production, but it wasn't a miracle. It was a well-laid plan, and this was one of the best-laid plans which actually came to fruition because they meant it. They intended to win that war, and they did win that war. I know that environmental breakdown isn't a war, but that's some lessons to be learnt from that. What governments and societies can do when they want to, when we choose to be competent. This is a choice. We can carry on being feeble and pathetic and incompetent and pissing about when we face unprecedented global crisis, the worst thing that humanity has ever faced, or we can choose to be effective and competent. That's what they chose in 1941. They chose to be competent. We need to choose the same. I'm aware of time. I'm going to try to get as many questions in as possible. The next one is from Katie. Do you think that Scotland would be better able to tackle the challenges of the climate emergency as an independent country? Thank you, Katie. Yes, I do. I think that already Scotland is leading the way in a whole lot of ways. The penetration of renewables into the electricity system, the way it's taking control of land issues, of political issues. I mean, there's a whole load of ways in which now we in England look to Scotland to show the way forward. Because politically speaking, really, this country is dead from the neck down, looking at it on the map. It's all happening in Scotland, but there's very little happening south of the border. And I feel that there's an energy, a spirit, a political determination in Scotland, which is really missing from most of the rest of the UK. And I feel that with independent Scotland will be even more effective and even more powerful and even more of a global beacon of a great example for the rest of us to follow. But also, like just seeing it from the point of view of the Scots, why the hell would you want to be chained to this sinking ship? Nothing good has come out of Westminster for a very long time, and nothing good is likely to come out of Westminster unless we can somehow create this massive mobilisation for a very long time. So, yeah, it's just Scotland, you're better off doing it yourselves and unleashing the opportunities which breaking away from Westminster will grant to you. And then I think that puts us in England in a much clearer position where we say, well, we can't rely on the Scots to bail us out. Labour used to rely on Scotland, basically, for its survival and became very lazy. It became lazy in England because it was like, oh, the Scots can bail us out. We can't rely on that anymore. And we can't just muddle along, basically having Westminster Parliament, but no English Parliament. Basically, sort of devolving all the questions about the English nation to the United Kingdom and fudging the issues as a result. And I think actually independence would be good for everyone. And so, yeah, I think Scotland could be even more effective in environmental terms, but I think it might in a weird way galvanise the other nations of the UK. A couple of questions here from a perspective to do with legislation and politics again. From Hannah in Glasgow, there's growing interest in things like green criminology and environmental crime prevention and prosecution. Should there be more emphasis on things like liability for ecocide and destroying the climate as an international crime? And if so, how? And another question from Diane in Glasgow. Given the length of political terms in the UK, the prospect of a wealth tax to address climate change, that might not be a very attractive prospect to a party who may be concerned about their election prospects. So how do we change that? Thank you very much, Hannah and Diane. To address the second question first, I think a wealth tax could be extremely popular, especially if you reduced other people's taxes and shifted the taxation to the richer people, which basically justice surely demands that we should be doing that anyway. I think a lot of people would get behind that if it was made very clear to them who we are taxing here. What always tends to happen is that a party will propose a wealth tax or a higher rate of income tax for the very rich, and then the Daily Mail will say they're coming for you. And you is a whole lot of people who aren't affected by that tax at all because you're not rich enough to be affected by the tax, but the whole trick, the great trick of capitalism is to tell us that we're all temporarily embarrassed millionaires, right? It's going to be you next, you know, the lottery finger is going to point at you and you're going to be a beneficiary of the system when you're patently at the moment, not a beneficiary of the system, but you are going to be because you're just a temporarily embarrassed millionaire. Anything done to the wealthy is being done to the future you or they fudget and pretend that you are going to be a subject of this already, that you're going to be subjected to this wealth tax when it's patently not true. And they do this again and again. Let's stop being fooled by this. Let's be very clear who we're talking about. You know what what the level of income and wealth is being targeted by a wealth tax and you know an effective wealth tax should go for the genuinely rich people the 1%. So let's define who are the 1%, who are not the 1%, who is not going to come for and make out totally clear and then it could be a very popular tax indeed, especially if you say to the 99% this means you'll be paying less because they'll be paying more. And you know it's hard to see if you pitch that right how it could not be a popular form of tax. And to turn to Hannah's question, I think an international law of ecocide is absolutely essential and after all, ecocide in a way is a crime of crimes because we have nothing without our life support system. Everything else that we depend on and value has gone if we lose those. And so arguably it's a bigger crime than any other international crime because it pulls the rug from under our feet. And so these big oil companies and mining companies and fishing corporations and the other bodies which are destroying earth systems on a huge scale. And that's what ecocide is confined to as formulated by the wonderful Irish barrister unfortunately is no longer with us Polly Higgins, who did so much to turn this into a reality. We're looking at the really big crimes and the perpetrators of those really big crimes. And actually it's just an extraordinary omission that we don't have such a crime in international law. It's urgently required. Probably going to try and fit in our last couple of questions, George. From Bella, you often say that inaction is a failure of the imagination. Could you tell us how you imagine a sustainable future? Is it possible to close the development gap? And from Chloe, what is your vision of the future? How do you stay motivated, inspired and positive? I suppose that we're asking, are you optimistic about human kind's future? Thank you very much Chloe and Bella. Really great pertinent questions to finish with. So I guess I'm pessimistic about what we do, but optimistic about what we are. Because we're much better than what we do. When you look at, there's a huge range now of psychological studies, behavioural studies showing that we all have a bit of selfishness and greed in us. No one's morally pure, but these are the great majority of people are much lower down our list of priorities and other stuff like altruism, empathy, family feeling, community feeling, the need for belonging. There's a whole load of other values, which are much bigger in our psyches than selfishness and greed. Unfortunately, for some reason we keep electing people who are psychological outliers, who are basically don't have that level of empathy and altruism. So broadly speaking, we're a society of altruists governed by psychopaths. Somehow we have to change that. We have to stop doing that, stop electing these very psychologically unusual people to represent us and elect people who share our good nature. And we have to allow that good nature to come to the fore. We have to express that good nature and bring it forward so that we recognise that actually we are capable of being much better than the way we usually tend to act. We are driven by economic and political forces. We are good people doing bad things. I'm optimistic about us. I'm optimistic about what humans are. And I think there are frameworks which will bring out the best in us. And the one which I'm most enthusiastic about is what I call private sufficiency public luxury, which I think has the potential to start addressing quite a lot of these issues. The fundamental issue is this, that if we all seek private luxury as capitalism tells us to do, we very quickly run out of resources. In fact, we very quickly run out of physical space. If everyone in Edinburgh tries to have their own swimming pool and their own tennis court and their own playground for their kids and their own art collection and their own parking for their multiple cars, then Edinburgh would cover most of Scotland. If everyone in Scotland tried to do it, Scotland would cover the whole UK. If the UK tried to do it, it would cover the whole of Europe. Where would everybody else live? There's just not even physical space, let alone ecological space for everyone to pursue private luxury. And the only reason some people can pursue private luxury is that they're in a minority. It's a small number of people who've got that spending power to have their own swimming pool and tennis court and collection of luxury cars and all the rest of it. So we can't do it. It doesn't work. Even if somehow miraculously we could, we would just cook the planet in minutes if we all became millionaires. So the promise of capitalism is fundamentally deceptive, but we can pursue luxury in the public domain. We can have fantastic public swimming pools and public tennis courts and public parks and public libraries and a public health service and a public transport system and a whole load of public resources. Some of them run by the nation, some run by the city, some run by the community. You know, there's lots of different ways of doing public, but where we share that luxury where in order for me to have luxury, I don't take it away from you. I have that luxury at the same time as you have it. And it goes much, much further if we share it. One public tennis court can be used by thousands of people across the year as opposed to one family and their friends. And so you don't need to build loads and loads of tennis courts. You don't need loads and loads of swimming pools because you can share them. And this really, I think, gets us a long way towards dealing with our environmental crisis, but at the same time, of course, it takes us a long way dealing with our economic and social justice crisis, a crisis of inequality. But at the same time, private sufficiency, you know, I'm not saying everything should be in the public domain. We should have our own modest domains, our own small homes and our own small amount of good stuff within those homes, but not try to expand and expand and expand that domain until we crush other people out of existence, which is what we're doing at the moment. When we want to spread our wings, we do it in the public sphere. Private sufficiency, public luxury. Thank you for all your contributions. It's fair to say that George's appearance has inspired many questions, and unfortunately we've not had time to get through them all, but I'm sure you will all have been just so delighted with the time that George has given us this evening. I'd like to thank George very much indeed for giving up his time to take part. I'd like to thank everyone for joining us online today, this evening, for making such a big contribution to this excellent in conversation event. I'm sorry that we have to end there. I know from the volume of questions coming in we could have carried on for at least another hour and probably then some. Can I just take this opportunity to remind everyone watching that the festival continues for the next four days? If you enjoyed George's event, I'm sure that you'll also enjoy listening to Professor Suzanne Simard on Saturday night, the subject of a forthcoming Hollywood biopic with millions of TED talks viewers. Professor Simard's work has transformed the world's understanding of trees. All that plus panels on climate activism in This is not a drill, safe and resilient cities, and tomorrow we will discuss everything from what will power my home to radical solutions to poverty and fast fashion. I do hope that you can join us, but thank you so much for being with us this evening. Thank you so much Alison, and thanks everyone for your great questions and for listening to my rant for so long. I really appreciate it. Great to meet you all.