 Aaron Bistani, you have spent the last week or so in Glasgow. What are your main takeaways from what has been achieved at this conference, what hasn't been achieved at this conference? The nature of COP26, is it all a big waste of time? We're at COP26, there have been 25 Cops previously. I think it's fair to say that 24 were failures in and of themselves. There's been positive direction in some instances, less so in others, but 24 were failures. This was the one time it was seen as a success. And then the question is, is this another failure? Probably, yes. So given the historic context and how Cops generally pan out, it's not that bad. It's in Britain. We've had, as a result, far greater coverage of it by the media in this country. And so it's important to underscore how poorly we are doing. Because, of course, they regurgitate the press releases, they like to repeat the positive bluster of people like Boris Johnson. But things aren't looking very good. And it's a failure across multiple nations. And despite what you'll repeatedly hear, that it's a failure because of the likes of China, India, it's generally speaking, overwhelmingly speaking, a failure of the global north of the wealthier countries, particularly the United States, Canada, Australia are the easy climate bad guys, Britain too. And it's important to say that somewhere like China, is at least doing enough to make up for its historic emissions. That's what it plans to do. The likes of the UK, there's basically no country in the West, in the global north is doing that. In terms of the particularities of what's going on in Glasgow, what hit me was that the actual nature of the climate movement has drastically changed in the last several years. It's no longer about polar bears as lovely as they are. It's no longer about species extinction as important as that is. But actually what was being put front and center at COP26 was land rights, indigenous peoples, and habitats that need to be protected from capitalism. And that's not to say that there's an agenda being pushed by the powerful because it's not. But it means that the face of the climate movement has changed quite dramatically. I don't think the media and its coverage of climate change has kept up with the changes in technologies, the changes in renewable energy, and like I say, the changes in the climate movements. The media lagging behind is a big one for me. They're stuck in this quest for permanent optimism. We can do it. We can feel good about ourselves. No. We're in a really dreadful situation and it's important to start with honesty. We're not going to hit 1.5 degrees C. Extraordinarily unlikely. Secondly, I think it's just the brazen mendacity and hypocrisy of the countries involved. For example, Michael is, well, we want to end deforestation by 2030. And of course, the bad guys and all this are Brazil and Bolsonaro and the good guys. Well, as always, you know, Europeans, the lovely progressive liberal Europeans calling on Bolsonaro to stop with his deforestation and tree burning and destruction of the Amazon. And yet the EU sides a trade deal with Brazil to double imports of beef. Now, implicitly, that beef requires deforestation. The Europeans know that they're not stupid. And so on the one hand, you have this hand wringing about what we have to do. And on the other, carry on with business as usual. You know, Germany is going to be burning coal into the 2030s. Britain, yes, we've phased out coal, but you can't say, well, that's leadership on energy. You've gotten rid of coal when we're still we're still drilling for oil and gas in the North Sea in dozens of sites. You've got news sites being prosecuted all the time. How's that leadership? So, yeah, like I say, the two things that really stand out, very poor media coverage. I really think the media is just not informing the public. Some great journalists out there, of course, but by and large, very poor coverage. I think that starts the BBC, actually. Just regurgitated press releases by and large and sprays and mendacity. One of the things that's been all the rage at COP26 has been tree planting. And actually, it's a big part of net zero. You don't have to stop or reduce massively fossil fuel emissions right now because we'll be able to plant trees. They're being called nature-based solutions. And often this is a very, very, very poor strategy. You know, I'm all for reforestation. I wrote about it in my article on China. It can be done effectively. Sometimes it wasn't China, often not. But the idea that, oh, well, we can cut down thousands of hectares of wild forests with biodiversity, indigenous land rights being respected. We can cut that down and we'll just put a plantation of eucalyptus and tea trees, you know, several thousand miles away. And that's basically the same thing, utterly stupid. And I talked to indigenous people from Central India, Aravasti people from Ecuador, from Chile, from Brazil. They all said the same thing. If we want to protect this planet's biodiversity, we have to leave that in the hands of indigenous peoples. And that is not the agenda of Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and the major powers, by which I mean European powers, the US, Brazil, China. That is not their agenda because it's also their economic growth. So all coverage. And frankly, the whole thing is just riven with hypocrisy. And I think it's important to start with that as a premise. On nature-based solutions, which you just spoke about the limits of, I spoke earlier to Kitana Chandrasekharan, who wrote a great article for Navarra Media on this, in fact. So this is what she told me about nature-based solutions and their role at COP26. So all their targets to achieve their mitigation are net zero. And the net means that it is the carbon emissions of your net minus what you're able to draw down from the atmosphere, carbon sequestration or carbon removal. And that's where the nature-based solutions come in, because nature-based solutions are what enables, so trees and forests or soil carbon, for example, draws down carbon from the atmosphere. But what they're essentially saying is that they're going to achieve net zero, which means what they are going to do and what they're already doing at the moment. Corporations, 1,500 corporations, rich country governments, are going to keep emitting, according to their trajectories, expand fossil fuel extraction. The UK itself has 40 new fossil fuel projects, but will then use land in the global south, forests and trees to offset the emissions that they're going to emit. And that's what nature-based solutions here is about. So it's actually in the COP test now, not as the term nature-based solutions, but as the term nature as net carbon sink and enhanced carbon removals from nature. So there's a lot of definitions you'll hear for how lovely nature-based solutions is and what it is, but this is what is actually the politics of nature-based solutions. Aaron, do you agree with that? Do you think, I mean, you've talked about some of the ambiguities about nature-based solutions. I mean, we are going to need significant extraction of carbon from the air though, aren't we? Because, you know, as far as I understand, our carbon budget is going to be used up in six years, unless, you know, we really, really have a dramatic transformation in sort of how the world deals with this kind of thing. What's your take? This is quite hard for some people to understand, Michael, because I think, my God, look, the green movement has been talking about deforestation for decades. We're saying, here's more trees and it's still not making you happy. Maybe you're being, you know, contrarians. We thought you were tree huggers, but it's a bit more complicated than that, Michael, because if you don't plant the right trees in the right place, it doesn't just not solve the problem. It can actually make things worse. So examples, for instance, of trees being planted in certain areas, you know, pine trees in Latin America and they take up too much water and actually they do nothing for biodiversity. They might not live very long. Often the initial deforestation efforts in China, trees were dying, about half of the trees being planted were dying. And of course, the worry is if you have reforestation where you chop down some trees, which will continue for at least 10 years and you plant them elsewhere and elsewhere they're sucking up precious water reserves or most of them are dying and they've got no biodiversity, it's still a massive net loss, Michael. I think we have to get this really through as political commonsense. If we're serious about expanding the forested parts of the planet, which we have to do, you're absolutely right. It's a critically necessary thing to do that has to be led by Indigenous peoples. That's not some woke thing I'm trying to say to score brownie points and to look cool or to knock Western governments. These are the people who presently administer, I believe 70 to 80% of the world's rain forests and habitats like that. They're very good at maintaining these places. And so if we're going to adopt that strategy, Michael, which was saying rightly that we have to do, you have to center Indigenous peoples. And it can't just be, you know, the UK says, I'll give you an example. We're going to plant 30,000 hectares every year after 2025. How many trees per hectare? What kinds of trees? These are hugely important questions. Secondly, you also have all these commitments around planting trees. When you actually break it down, it often looks like there isn't really enough land. And that's before you sort of ask questions about, well, people live on this land. Where are you going to put them? Obviously conflicts between agricultural land and we need to use land for agricultural purposes. And you're saying also we need to use it as a carbon sink. I mean, that's something that Bill Gates says. I kind of agree with him. You know, he says there's an important conversation here. We need to feed the planet equitably and in a far healthier way than we presently do. That's a lot harder than it sounds. So the reforestation thing is good. It's positive. It's a really positive thing that we're here. But the likes of Bill Gates, the billionaire class, are attracted to it for a reason. And the reason is, actually twofold, the first is it allows them to carry on burning fossil fuels for a little bit longer, the second half of the century, which should not be happening for developed countries. And secondly, this, of course, provides a whole new area of financialization because you can trade the carbon, you can create futures markets. And actually the idea of nature being a commodity is why we're in this situation in the first place. And I find it very hard to believe it will therefore be part of the solution. Criticism of tree planting reforestation, they may sound strange initially, but it's being adopted and it's all the rage at COP26 for a reason because it means we don't talk about the thing that matters the most, which is stopping fossil fuels. We can't drill any more oil and gas wells. And yet in this country, we're doing it in dozens of places. China, which I think is doing considerably better than the United States or any European country, is still gonna open dozens of new coal-fired power stations over the next decade. If we're serious about 1.5, none of that would be happening, but it is. So the idea of net zero reforestation to sort of redress carrying on with this business as usual, and at the same time saying, well, we can stick to 1.5, 1.5 to stay alive, it's 2.4, it's three degrees C. And three degrees C is really concerning. Today, well, the last 24 hours, I think we had about 1,200 undocumented migrants come here in the UK over the English Channel. Look, in a world of three degrees warming, that's a walk in the park. You're gonna see displacement of billions of people. And so 1.5 is still very possible, but net zero is an agenda, I think, kind of locks in us going far beyond it.