 Good afternoon and welcome. My name is Tom Whipple. I'm the science editor at The Times, and I would love to welcome you to the 2022 Festival of Politics organised by the Scottish Parliament. This year's event celebrates the festival's 18th year of provoking, inspiring and informing people of all ages and from every walk of life to engage in three days of spirited debate. We are delighted that you can join us today to participate in a very timely session. The climate crisis hasn't gone away. And I would like to encourage you to use the question and answer box to introduce yourselves stating on first name only and geographical location and then pose any questions you would like the panel to respond to. If you're keen to continue to throw your thoughts out there, you can do so using the hashtag hash FOP 2022. I am extremely pleased to be joined today by Dr Keith Bell, Lucy Stanfield Jenner and Serena Ahmed. Dr Keith Bell is a co-director of the UK Energy Research Centre, a chartered engineer and a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Lucy Stanfield Jenner is an environmental scientist and professional working to drive the transition to a circular net zero economy. And Serena Ahmed is one of the mighty women on BBC Women's Hours 2020 Our Planet Power List. Serena previously worked at the Council for Ethnic Minority Voluntary Organisations, leading the charge for increasing participation in environmentalism in Scotland by founding the ethnic minority environmental network. There will be opportunities for the members of the online audience to put questions and views to the panel throughout this event. However, to start, I would like to open by asking each of our panelists starting with Serena and then going on to Lucy and finally Keith. When we organised this panel, we didn't know it was going to be quite amid the environment in the UK, certainly in the south of the UK that we're seeing now. Given the unprecedented heatwave warnings and danger to life in the UK and wildfires across Europe issued in July, is this a tipping point? Are the public governments, those in power across the globe, finally paying attention and saying climate change is real and we need to get real? Serena, what are your thoughts? I would say definitely. I think what's happened now is that people's lives are being disrupted. It's costing government, it's costing corporations. So people are now standing up and thinking, oh, we have to do something. This is affecting us now. This is us in the UK. This is us in the global quest. But we do have to remember that people in the global south and in the Balkan countries have been impacted by climate change for a number of years. And governments and people there in civil society have been there, have been screaming and shouting that we've been impacted by climate change. You know, let's do something on where that's been ignored. And it's only now that it's hitting us in the UK that we're starting to feel it that we are now thinking we need to do something. So for me, it's great, but it's also a shame that it's taken this, the current climate and the current environment that we're in for us to stand up and start doing something. Lucy, Lucy, what do you think? Is this we spent sort of, I think most of our lives talking about climate change as being a coming threat? Is it now an arrived threat? And is this the moment when things really start to happen? Yes, this certainly spent the entirety of my life kind of talking about this. I do think we have reached a tipping point, both in terms of the environmental disasters that we're seeing, but both, you know, in terms of people's response to it as well. Climate change is now chief concern for voters in the UK across the political spectrum, even more so than COVID. So people know that it's a threat. They want the government to do more than they are doing on it. As Zerina said, we need to remember that we're seeing these disasters now in the summer in the global north. Of course, the global south has been living with the reality of climate change for much longer than that. So I think we need to kind of make sure that we recognize that. But certainly we're starting to see more action on it. The US is just, well, close to passing a phenomenal bill. So hopefully we're kind of getting there and hopefully it won't be too late. What I am a bit concerned about is people starting to feel that it is too late and feeling overwhelmed with the threats that we are seeing with the wildfires, the heatwaves, the droughts, feeling like we can't do anything about it because that isn't true. And we need to make sure that denial doesn't slip into anxiety and kind of giving up. Thank you, Lucy. Keith, what are your thoughts? That's a really great point by Lucy about not giving up and not being too despondent at the things that seem to be going wrong. I think there are a lot of tipping points, apparently. We talked in this country about COP26 and the coming of the UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow being a great tipping point. It was a fantastic platform for engaging with climate issues. But we've had severe summers before that, previously that this year is the worst, certainly in this country and from many parts of Europe. But we've had bad ones before, but we seem to remember them and unfortunately we seem to forget them. It's similar in other parts of the world. I think it was a couple of years ago, the summer in Australia, lots of forest fires, disruption. A couple of years ago in California, in Canada, it seemed to be a big momentum. People realised that this is real, this is now. And then, somehow, political will seep in a way again. Hopefully, though, what we see is a general ratcheting up of awareness and commitment to action. Even if there's a period when it seems to get forgotten and other sort of political priorities take over, but there's still an underlying trend towards realising that this is serious and it's happening right now. And we've got to do the best we can to mitigate any further temperature rise, but we've also got to be adapted the temperature rise that is already happening. It's sort of unavoidable, unfortunately, to limit it so that it's not completely disastrous. Thank you very much, Keith. All four of us were, at some points, in different parts at the COP conference in Glasgow late last year. And we were discussing before this. I think it's safe to say it is an exceptionally confusing system, as almost certainly it needs to be, and the negotiation is very hard to follow. And inevitably, as a journalist, certainly you're trying to draw slightly simpler messages out of this. But one of the messages at the end, Alex Sharma, Britain's president for COP26, said he was deeply sorry for how the conference concluded. There were last minute changes in the text, which watered down agreements to phase out the use of coal. What do you think, starting with Keith, what do you think about his assessment of those final agreements? Was COP26 disappointing? I think it wasn't as good as we hoped it would be, and not as good as Alex Sharma hoped it would be. On the other hand, it wasn't as bad as it might have been, but there were some positives in there. So, for example, just mentioning coal in that pact at all is progress relative to what we've had in the past. I think another significant bit of progress was the whole other stuff around the Paris Rulebook, which I don't understand, but that's a major achievement. I think one of the big things was the recognition that the nationally determined contribution, and this was a disappointing thing, don't add up to what we need to limit temperature rise to one and a half degrees C. On the other hand, there was a commitment to come back this year, COP27, to give updated nationally determined contribution. Emissions reduction target is 2030. What Paris Agreement had said was that it would come back and do this every five years, but the fact of coming back next year, hopefully to come up with something better, was a positive outcome. On the negative side, since then, I think we've only seen Australia making a statement that, yes, they're going to do better, they're going to come up with an improved NDC. So there's still some time yet, there was a kind of flurry of COP26 announcement to do with net zero targets and so on. So, yeah, let's hope we get a similar flurry of good news in the run-up to an event like that. Yeah, yeah. Lucy, what are your thoughts on, I guess, the legacy of COP26? And do you think any progress has been made since or on those pledges? How would you sum the whole thing up? COP26, as Keith said, it wasn't as good as we could do, but it wasn't as bad as we have done previously at COP. I think if we didn't have COP, we would invent COP. We're trying to get an extremely difficult thing to happen, which is to get hundreds of countries to completely change the way their economies have run and do it quickly. So it's the best mechanism that we have, even if it is a flawed mechanism. One of the legacies, I think, of COP26 will be leadership that the UK has shown, and I know that there are concerns and disappointment about what's currently going on on our country's leadership on climate change. Nonetheless, I do think COP26 was good to demonstrate that. Another thing that I experienced, I was there in my capacity as the former chair of the youth-led charity, and it was a lot more democratized than previous COPs have been. There were a lot more different groups there that aren't normally there. There was a lot more effort to kind of explain what was going on, and I think that's really important to you, these are decisions that are going to impact all of our lives. So it's really great to see that wider level of engagement. In terms of progress since then, absolutely. There's progress happening every minute of every day on climate change. It's not always making the headlines. And there isn't, 1.5 degrees is a science-based target, and it's very important. However, there isn't a kind of black or white, the world is over, or it's not. It's very nuanced, and it exists on a spectrum. So it's not kind of all this talk around, we have 12 years to save the world is very damaging, I believe. So I think it's important to recognize that just because it's not necessarily in the headlines every day, there are thousands of people around the world working on climate change every single day. So yes, definitely since COP26 we have made progress. Yeah, I should add. So I was, as a journalist, we were given daily briefings on background by the negotiators, and from the start, from those words about coal appearing on the document, the negotiators' view was they would go. They were there that something that sort of existed so that in the final text something could be jettisoned. It was a simultaneously fascinating and slightly depressing process. I remember one day everything hinged on this list of adjectives that you have, whether something is immediately or very, or there's this approved hierarchy of terms, and it was about swapping out a very for a forthwith or something. Zareena, as someone who was slightly outside the process and on the fringe events and not part of the minutiae of all of these different clauses and sub clauses, how did it look to you? Well, I suppose it goes back to what Keith was saying, that there was positives. However, the negatives, I suppose, from looking at it from the general public's point of view probably the greenwashing that was happening, and it really felt that there was a lot of greenwashing that a lot of organizations and corporations were saying that they are doing things when we know they're not and it's just been greenwatch. Even things around like Glasgow City itself, it all of a sudden became this green city and you're thinking, well, nothing's really changed from what it was like last week and now we're a green city. What's happened? You know, yes, you're right, there are small changes like electrification of the vehicles or the buses. However, that my worry is like how much of the pledges and the things that are happening at that higher level are just greenwashing and how much of it is about economics and growth. But in a sector, that's not going to have an impact on everyday life and everyday people. And that's where my worry lies and my concerns lie and that anxiety comes in, as Lucy was saying. One of the things that was, again, part of the negotiation process, you pull yourself out, you think, well, that's slightly absurd. But one of the things, as I understand it, that was agreed at the end of COP26, was to make more agreements at COP27 and actually that was quite a significant thing. Do you think, Lucy, that what do you hope to be achieved at Charmel Shake when they do appear for COP27? Big question. I think the main thing for me is, as Keith mentioned before, the nationally determined contributions reporting. As Keith said, I believe it is only Australia that has kind of reported on that so far. And so I think that it would be a concern if we didn't see that happening at Charmel Shake. That was one of the, in my mind, that was one of the biggest kind of positively forward that we made at COP26. And so it would be ashamed to backslide on that. Other than that, I mean, my general hope for every COP is that there is progress that can be measured. I think we have moved away from the days where the conferences ended in nothing really happening. I know there was the hope for Glasgow to kind of be, the Glasgow pact to be on the same level as the Paris Agreement and it wasn't. But maybe this year we can get an Egypt agreement or an Egypt pact or whatever they want to call it. But something that is genuinely moving us forwards. The other thing that I would like to see and it seems more likely to happen is the US taking a more leading role. I know that there's criticism of the way that the bill has been watered down, but that is the reality of negotiations and the reality of kind of getting these things to happen. But I think with the assumption that bill will pass, then the US taking a more leading role again and decarbonising their economy, showing that that way forward and showing that a large and complicated country like the US can do it. I think that would be a fantastic outcome. Yeah, yeah. By the way, for those watching, thank you. Please keep your questions coming in. There's going to be a few more minutes of me asking questions and then we'll hopefully have accumulated enough from you that it will be entirely thrown open to the floor. Keith, on Charmille's shake, what are your hopes for it? Yeah, I would agree previously about the NDC's national economic contribution to the 2030 machine production targets. And it's great that the US in a way is kind of backing the game. Although one of the other big issues that I think is going to come up and it was raised by lots of the sort of lower income countries, COP26 and it's still very much on the agenda is this topic that's kind of described as loss and damage. So, you know, they kind of attempt to do something, get help with the impacts of climate change that are already happening. So, you know, it's not just extreme events like storms or floods. It's also the kind of slow impacts where the sea levels are rising and gradually over time you realise you've got to move neighbourhoods in different places or impacts on the type of agriculture that's sustainable as the weather gets hotter or drier. So, yeah, it seems like it is a massively important topic. But my understanding is that the US in particular is one of the parties but resistant to getting this on the agenda or on the formal agenda of COP27. And I suppose that's because, you know, the US is one of the heavily industrialised economies like most of us in Europe who's been causing greenhouse gas emissions for decades, you know, for 150 years. So, we have a legacy really of playing a large part in creating these impacts. So, there is this kind of tension in terms of the action that really doesn't need to be taken financially to be put in place to help us all that. I guess a nervousness about the extent to which the industrialised economies have somehow sort of held to account for past misdemeanours and the current misdemeanours are still major emitters. Yeah. Yeah. And so, I mean, I've been going to conferences since Copenhagen, which I think makes me, I don't know, middle-aged in climate terms. And the big, and this is simply a value, but I don't have any, you know, data for it at all. My feeling at Copenhagen was that the governments were trying to drag business along. Whereas at Glasgow, it felt far more like business was slightly dragging governments along saying, give us these parameters, you know, tell us what's needed and we can find ways to do it. To what extent, I'll ask the surface arena first, who is it who has the responsibility here? We're talking a lot about a government process, but is it multinationals? Is it individual people? You know, we also say, oh, fossil fuel companies are banned, but, you know, we're busily trying to eat our homes this winter. Who is it who should be dealing with this? Well, I think it's everybody, but I do worry that when we put it on to individuals that we have to realise that individuals have limited agency. You know, and people say that, you know, individual choices can change consumption demand and that's what markets and that's, you know, how the market works, because if there's demand, there's surprise. However, I just think in the society that we live in as an individual, we do have limited choices. We do have limited agency, right? So I think that that narrative about behaviour change has to shift because I think there's too much pressure on individual change. So and I think we do have to look as a system as a whole, rather than looking at things in silo. And I think we need this whole reform of what our consumption behaviour and patterns are, but that's including economics. It's including policies, including industry. So it's including everybody in that. And for me, one of the things that I really want to say, change to COP 27, is putting people at the centre of climate change, because at the moment the conversations aren't around people and it's all around the planet. But if we start looking at how people and other inhabitants of the planet are affected by COP 20, by climate change, we will have a different conversation. You know, it's putting justice at the heart of it and connecting climate change to social justice is really important. And I think that's where that shift has to happen. Because otherwise, it's so easy to just think of things in silo and work, especially when we're looking at net zero and we're just looking at how do we get to net zero. And in that transition, we're actually maybe doing more damage because we're so in a rush to get to net zero that we're actually having a negative impact on people's lives and on the livelihood of inhabitants on the planet. So I think we need to start thinking more holistically. Lucy, you were nodding for a bit during that. What's your thoughts? Yeah, I was nodding mainly because I agree that we have put far too much emphasis on individual responsibility and we see the same thing happen in other topics, individual responsibility to be more fit and tackle the obesity crisis by just eating more healthily. That's a simple option that people can choose. So yeah, I think individual responsibility has been used as a scapegoat. But however, the answer is everything in life and on climate change is not one thing or another. We need government policy that makes our lives naturally greener. So for example, investing in homegrown renewable energy, in nuclear in my opinion, in an electric vehicle infrastructure. But we also need businesses to lead the way on it as well. And I work in the circular economy and we need to make it easier for businesses to make a more circular and sustainable choice. At the moment, the linear economy of taking a resource and making it into something and then often only using it once and throwing it away is the most economically viable thing to do. But that's because we're not costing in the negative externalities of environmental damage. So it needs everyone to kind of come along. But yes, I absolutely agree that asking, expecting individuals to change is not going to get us all the way there. It definitely will help and we definitely shouldn't be doing some of our most environmentally damaging things that we do. But it's not going to be the whole picture. I guess the final thing I'll just say on the kind of individual question is that we currently glamourise really high fossil fuel lifestyles. So we look up to people on TV who are icons of fast fashion. We admire celebrities who take private flights, you know, all around the world. Bill Gates, massive proponent of climate action but resusely in trouble for taking a nine minute flight from San Diego to Los Angeles. So, you know, we glamourise that kind of lifestyle and we need to kind of think about as a society what lifestyle we want to admire and kind of who those role models should be. And so I think in terms of kind of individual behaviour change that's something that we can do. But yes, I think mainly my focus will be pushing it onto the kind of large businesses and government policy. So you mentioned Lucy, the circular economy. What is going wrong? As I understand it, you think it's too large and this is an incentives problem as well as anything else. What's going on and what can be done? So a circular economy, I'm sure a lot of people here will know, will have heard about it and will kind of know the basics of what it is. But essentially it's a model where you design out waste and you treat everything with a value. So as I said at the moment, our economy is built on a linear model where you take something that's a natural resource at the ground and you build it into something that's a mobile phone. You use that for some time and then you throw it away. Or even worse, perhaps it's the lid of a jogger pot. You use it once and it gets thrown away. And often it goes into land for a while or it gets burnt. In a circular economy, that waste is minimised. So those models are kind of thought about from the beginning about how you can design out that waste and make it a more of a closed loop. And I really believe that a circular model is really important to tackling a lot of the problems that we're talking about here. We know that the leading cause of biodiversity loss is the way that we use our land and our harmful processes of extracting materials and disposing of them. We know that manufacturing construction is a large emitter of carbon and other greenhouse gases. So thinking, going back to the start and thinking how do we actually design our products and our services to minimise that waste and waste including not just a physical thing but also greenhouse gas emissions too. It's really important and it's not easy because as I said, currently there's no incentive to work on that model. I ran my own circular business for a while and it was just as expensive for me to kind of deal with acts and all the kind of things that are involved in running a business as it was for a linear model. There was no incentive for me to be greener and actually my expenses were higher because I maintained an ownership over my products. That meant that I would fix it and repair it rather than relying on the customer to dispose of it sustainably. But there was no incentive for me to do that other than because I thought it was a good thing to do. So we need to be talking about how we can give tax cuts or other incentives to businesses who adopt these models. Keith, from an energy perspective, it's an input in my sort of naive, technotopia view of all this kind of thing is you solve the energy problem, you find a way to get very cheap, very clean energy fusion or whatever and everything else falls into place. You can chuck whatever energy you need at all these other problems and jobs done. Yeah, well, if you've got low carbon sources of energy, that's an essential, where's that thing where they are? Options, Lucy outlined one or two there and you've made that fusion is always 30 years away, or whatever it is. But it's not the whole story because it's still got to be paid for somehow. There's an investment in making that transition of the way energy is produced. But there's also a need to be able to use it in a different way. So to have 100% low carbon electricity is great, but it doesn't help an awful lot if we're still burning gas to eat our homes or we're still burning petrol and diesel to move around. So the way we use energy has got to change it, whether it's the way we produce energy. And that's one of the big challenges now. And coming back to what we were talking about just a few minutes ago, Marina was talking about individuals and it's a great point that it depends on having the option available to you for it to be kind of an accessible option. So one of those options, for example, is to be able to heat your home using the heat pump. So how easy is it to do that? How much does it cost to make that conversion? How disruptive is it? Do you know who you're going to talk to to make it happen? So in this country, it's not easy at the moment. It ought to be easy. There's nothing fundamental about the technology that says it can't work. It's used in other countries, very widespread. So there's nothing fundamental. We need to get the market going with a losing experience from the kind of business going in the circular economy. It's not always easy. So there is that role then for government for setting the context and the incentives, helping to make sure that there was encouragement and support for individuals to go and retrain an experienced, knowledgeable bitter of these sorts of appliances. Making sure that over time the cost does come in. It creates a market that the cost will come down. But in the meantime, it is difficult for householders, especially if you've not got much capital behind it to make these changes. So the role of the government is, I think, to make it easy to use government industries to do that. But also to set these targets and objectives very clearly, very firmly. That's one of the things, I think, that has influenced the growth of the electric vehicles over the last few years. The market is responding to it. But it's in large part because governments in the UK and other countries have said, right, we're phasing out sale of fossil fuel vehicles by 2030 or whatever it is. And we very clear the direction of travel then. Yeah, yeah. At the beginning, I think we talked about how, in the UK and in Western Europe, we're now clearly experiencing the effects of climate change. I think we smashed England's record for its hottest day by two degrees this year, almost two degrees. Zarina, the latest IPCC report, though, warns that actually, you know, it's the people of ecosystems who are least able to cope who are being hardest hit. Given something now, what do you think should be done to protect and support these people and ecosystems? And it's going back to what Keith was talking about loss and damage. So is that finance to help and support those developing countries? Because most of them are developing countries. Not all, but there are a lot of developing countries that are hardest hit by the climate impact. It's helping those to then put in the infrastructure to do the climate adaptation that they need to do. Now, my only worry, I mean, with loss and damage, this is about compensation money. But there's also climate finance, which was a COP26 which was pledged by a number of countries from developing countries to the more underdeveloped countries. Now, my worry there is that that climate finance isn't always a grant. It's a loan. So when we talk about climate finance, are we going to start talking about climate debt and getting more countries into climate debt? And that, again, can, not just thinking about it in a global context, but even bringing it home, thinking about what Keith was talking about, which was like the SOC pumps, every home having an SOC pump in Scotland, and that's on the agenda for the Scottish Government at the moment. But again, who can afford it? And for those that can't afford it, does that mean they have to take out finance and get themselves into debt to get SOC pumps? So these are the real concerns, the real light every day concern, is about how much is it going to cost, especially when we think about the cost of living that's rising in the UK, but also globally. It's like, well, and it's a comment that somebody Kirsten made in the chat that I'd like to just quickly address now, is that why sustainability, such a middle class, left you concerned? Well, most of the time it's a middle class concern because the middle class already have and that they can then sustain their lifestyles to a more greener sustainable lifestyle. And it's those that don't have then aspire like Lucy was saying that, but what are the role models in life? Everybody wants to aspire to be better. So even like the developing countries aspire to be like the global West, because they already have and they want to also have. So it's like, how do we change that kind of mindset and that global thinking about well, what is it that we're all aspiring to be? Thank you very much, Serena. One, before I open up one last question for me, a question's very close to my heart having spent two years just writing about viruses. It sort of struck me during COVID that this is in a sense a similar problem that preys on similar human weaknesses. There was plenty of times where there was a benefit to acting early when things didn't seem so bad because that meant it cost less in lives and money than acting late a lot harder when things were bad. I'll go to Keith first. Do you draw hope from our response to COVID from the amazing technologies from the fact that we sort of got through it to an extent or are you depressed by 200,000 dead in the UK to achieve that? I'm very depressed by that bit. Tom, you've covered this in great detail for two years so we could spend the rest of the time and more discussing all of the sort of policy failings and policy successes, I think. Failings are a few more numerous than some of the successes, but I think it does show the potential for human ingenuity. It does show the potential for us to change the way we do things. We're linking back to some of the things we talked about already. Many of us, not everybody, and this is because we kind of pick up that point about last lefties and whatever. Some of us have the luxury of being able to work from home. Other people, their jobs, you've got to get out and be exposed to various real serious threats, especially at the beginning of the pandemic. But maybe this could change the way we did things and it has its challenges, but we do it. Energy use reduced, the streets were quieter, I think much nicer in many ways. Less pollution, any kind of positive signs there, but the capacity to change what we do. I think we can hold on to that. I'll be afraid of the idea that some kind of technical solution is suddenly going to turn up to solve all our problems. It's amazing the way that these vaccines did turn up really quickly, but they were based on research that had gone back a number of years. They weren't just coming out of nowhere. This is true of so many technologies. It's actually taken, often, decades, developed. The technologies that are going to help us to change the way we do things across the whole economy, they already exist. Yes, innovation can help to reduce the cost or to make the performance better or to use more sustainable materials and so on, and that's all good stuff, but we should not pretend that we can just wait for some unicorn to turn up and save the day for us. The other big lesson is about preparedness. I think it's a big lesson for adaptation being ready for the impacts of climate change that are coming. We should not wait, we need to get ready now. Lucy, what are your thoughts? What lessons, if anything, would you take from Covid? I think one of the most positive things that came out of the pandemic was how science was cool again, and people were willing to listen to experts with a laser pen and a slideshow every night to say what they should do and how suddenly we all realized, actually, we do need experts, we want reassurance, we want the people who know what they're talking about to be in charge. I think that was fantastic and I really hope that we can have the same for climate. Do you think that is happening a little bit? Yes, I hope that continues. One thing that I'm concerned about that I think could potentially be a negative outcome of Covid in terms of thinking about the climate is there's this kind of co-opting of the narrative that what all us net zero freaks want is for everyone to be living like it was Covid times again, so we're not traveling, we're not going anywhere, we're kind of living these miserable small lives with no flights, nothing that we enjoyed. I worry that we don't want to let the narrative end up like that where actually what we need to do to tackle climate change is to live like we did in the pandemic because nobody wants to live like that. And as Keith said, that lifestyle was only available to those who had the types of jobs that we helped have where we can sit at home. So, yeah, I think there's things to learn and there's things to do better next time but in general it was fantastic to see science being listened to again and I hope that can continue. Okay, I'm going to be the cynical one here. I'm going to talk about the negatives. All right. So I think the first thing that was really just about circular economy is at the heart of the work that I do. And it was things like the reduction of plastic and the reduction of waste and recycling. I think we've got to just before Covid, we as a society would get into this place where there were and even policy, there were policies getting put into place about single use plastic. That all went down the bin. It just all went to here. Even recycling centres shut down. Even some of the recycling centres are still not fully recycling. So all that hard work that people have been doing around waste and recycling, I think took a really back step. We might not be producing because we weren't consuming as much but I think there were things that went drastically wrong for the environment during Covid. And then the other thing, I think it was that narrative that we're all in it together was something that I found really quite didn't sit right for a lot of people because we might all be in the same storm but we were definitely not in the same boat. So again, it's just being aware of some of the narratives that were coming out of Covid. And yes, that was the two things that I found very, very negative during Covid. Thank you very much everyone. I think we're now, we've had a lot of good questions. I think we're going to start to go to them. Please, that's no reason for people to not ask more questions. But we'll kick them off with a question from Jennifer Welch and I think probably Lucy who we got this because it's something that you mentioned slightly touched on the artificiality of the 1.5, the binaryness of it. But what Jennifer Welch presents is the world will still be here even if world temperature rises beyond 1.5. It's human and other species extinction slightly to curve. I think probably, I mean, I think probably would be a bit higher for humans. But do we need to change the way that we talk about this? Are these sort of single targets useful? I'll start my answer by saying, I do not think that humans are going to get extinct at all. There is no scenario that says that's the case unless we do it to ourselves through some other thing that isn't the climate crisis. So I'll start by saying that. But yeah, I mean other species, you know, the rate of extinction that we're causing to other animals is increasingly high and that is a real problem. Do we need to change the narrative? It's a really good question. I do think I am concerned about what happens in a few years time when we breach that 1.5 degrees because we're going to and we will temporarily breach that in the next decade. I'm concerned when that happens that people will say it's over, we can't do it. You know, there's no point. And I think as you know, reflecting what I said earlier, if I thought there was no point that I wouldn't get up and do my job every day, you absolutely have to believe that there is lots that we can still do. So do we need to change the narrative? Perhaps we need to talk more realistically about the fact that the future is nuanced, the future is unknown, the future is in our control and it's not going to be that we'll just fall off a cliff and the human race will go extinct in 12 or 11 years time now. We have a series of progressively worse futures but we can have a series of progressively better futures too. And we know that once we start reducing the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that our climate will stabilise. So it's not, we don't have to have this kind of permanently hot, horrible world a lot more in our control than we think and so I think that's the narrative that I would like to see coming out a bit more, a bit more of a positive one not to be too much of a kind of tech and optimist to have had that accusation level that we before but I do think we need to have slightly more positive narrative coming in there. Zarene, you put up your hand, what are your thoughts? Yeah, and I agree with Lucy that we should have positive narratives but at the same time that we can't ignore that lives are being lost because of climate change and the impacts of climate change. I mean if we look at India and Pakistan I mean the temperatures there at the moment are like 55 degrees and lives are being lost and right around the globe there's lives lost every day because of climate impact. So yeah, as a human race we might not get extinct but there are lives that have been prematurely lost so we do need to have that bit of urgency we do need to think about climate change in terms of human lives and other inhabitants of the planet. Yeah, Keith, I mean if we're being honest I haven't, we still talk about keep 1.5 alive and all this, I haven't actually talked to anyone who believes we have a hope in hell of staying under 1.5 and I think in terms of breaching it we'll breach it for quite a long time and getting under it will require technology that we simply don't have. I mean is this something that, as Lucy said we should prepare people for or are you in fact hopeful that we can stay under it? No, those are really, really good points. I think because of the IPCC it's a big assessment report the things that we've been coming out over the last month it's most optimistic scenario is that we go above 1.5 and then we come back I think in the optimistic side we can come back quite quickly but as Lucy said, we're going to breach it it's very unlikely we will stay completely within that 1.5 so you probably might not know if it does need to change a bit because as Lucy said every tenth of a degree counts in terms of the difference it makes the impact on the planet and it's doing the same, it's impacting us right now so the effort is still going to be there but you're right, the idea that we kind of temperature rise goes above 1.5 and that's it, we're all doomed and we give up now I mean that's continued the wrong sort of message I think having a clear target helps because of focusing minds and focusing efforts and what we're trying to get to but I mean I think it is not too early to give up on 1.5 I think the COP26 the president's right to try and keep it alive because every tenth of a degree counts we can get very close to it and we still need to do everything we can to achieve that, you know the cost of the mitigation measure of reducing emissions are our ways, the kind of negative consequences of failing to emission so it is something we've still got to do even if perhaps as we just discussed there's a bit of a challenge to do exactly how we frame the narrative Yeah, yeah, and Keith I think the next question is probably best to start with you which is and this is I suppose as much a geopolitical question now as an environmental question this is from Ronnie in Dumfries what could the UK and Scotland do to provide an independent and secure supply of fuels and Ronnie says fuels themselves are an interesting bit but I guess more broadly energy as well without having a negative effect on climate Yeah, well, I mean we've got this enormous potential in the UK for renewables based on weather, so wind and solar but a certain amount of hydro capacity as well we want to make full use of them the extent to which is complimented by other technologies is still open to debate but one of the things we've definitely got to deal with is of course the variability of wind and solar resources so if we build the 50 gigawatts of offshore wind farms that British Energy Strategy talks about very recently we will have times when we will have a big surplus of electricity from renewable sources relative to the demand for electricity at that moment in time and we won't be able to use all of it at that moment the ability to use that surplus we can export it to our neighbours or to change the time at which we do things such that we can kind of adapt when we charge our vehicles or wash our clothes or whatever to when it's windy and sunny that helps a lot, but it only helps a bit it doesn't get the whole way there so then I think the question for Ronnie about fuels I think is really interesting because we've got the potential to use this surplus manufacture fuels, low carbon fuels that can be stored to the times when it's not windy and sunny and also for use in applications where you haven't got access to a wind farm it can't get the wires there lorries, ships, aircraft tend on sort of concentrating the energy then it's relatively lightweight stores of fuel that you can carry around with them but also we can store the energy through to the days when it's not sunny and windy different ways of doing that but hydrogen looks like one of the kind of mechanism and then you get into what sort of debates about exactly how much we hydrogen across the economy but there's definitely in my mind a massive role for it, quite how big for discussion, but it's not perfect it costs energy to manufacture the hydrogen and then turn the hydrogen back into you but yes, that allows us to have a self-sufficient self-contained energy system when we can use the renewables put them into sort of forms of storage or other types of fuel that we can then use at the times when it's not windy Yeah, yeah Lucian Zarina, do you put up your hands if you have anything you feel you want to add so that otherwise we'll move on to the next question maybe the next question for Zarina then oh, Keith Yeah, I'll just add a quick thing on that sorry, a chosen specialist subject but yeah, I mean it's an interesting thing that I think might come up in the last week or two about the report in the news that Norway, which has got fantastic hydro resources might be rationing its exports of the electricity to its neighbours so over the last 20, 30 years we'll be building these interconnections and we can share our surpluses and deficits and smooth things out over time so, you know, we've got lots of wind energy so actually we can help the Norwegians to conserve their water resources actually they don't need to generate the hydro electricity when it's windy here we can export our surplus to them and in turn we can use their hydro electricity when it's not so windy and sunny here so that's something that's actually come up in the news in the last week or two actually, sorry, I know that this is going to be Keith-heavy but I have one question I've always wanted to have an answer to relating to energy, things like that which is why haven't, I don't know, Morocco, Algeria put a really big cable to Europe and just fill their useless desert with solar panels which is there the cheapest way of generating electricity you know, why aren't they already doing that? I think the simple answer is probably funding and Lucy is going to come up with another answer as well but there have been projects that have proposed it you know, quite serious projects come to quite advanced stages in terms of you know, the engineering for example of the cables under the Mediterranean or there's a project that's on the table now, I can't remember who the backer is proposing to bring a cable from North Africa just all the way to Britain without going through the main continent of Europe so the ideas have been there I guess there are sometimes there's also a kind of geopolitical uncertainty you know, we've seen this now in respect of imports of gas from Russia not to join the analogy with quite what the regime is like there but there are these kind of elements of nervousness about imports from regimes that might be perceived as being unstable or where you're not quite sure about the actual firmness of things Yeah, Lucy I guess I just wanted to pick up on the useless desert phrase so I do a bit of research into land use and the kind of various benefits and trade-offs and a lot of that kind of thinking of kind of empty unproductive land was why we now have a devastated upland in the UK that's just they call it the phrase sheepwrecked it used to be lovely carbon sequestering peatland and temperate rainforest and that's post-cropped grass and covered in sheep so I guess I'm not an expert on desert landscapes but I think we do need to think carefully about what other benefits those landscapes might be providing in terms of livelihoods and biodiversity before we kind of use them for renewable energy but it may be that yeah, covering them in solar panels is the right way forward in terms of the overall benefits of the climate but I think it's an interesting question Yeah, yeah, fabulous Well, that's something wrong Oh, Serena, okay, yes, brilliant Yeah, and it's just to respond to that as well because that useless desert may also hit nerve with me as well and it's also just to remember that that useless desert might look useless in the West but however, for somebody living in Morocco that might be the part of their culture and their heritage and for nomads that could be their home as well so it's just thinking about what use that desert is to other people I am duly trust-ised and in fact this leads... I'm educated and that leads us into the next question which is a question from Betsy King and I think probably is a really good take on that How important do you consider the role of education to be in relation to sustainability and climate change? Yeah, I think definitely we need to have sustainability in our education system and we need to really have a reform of the education system because one of our education system one of the flaws is how it feeds into a competitive narrative and what success looks like and success is based on materialistic things rather than looking at success based on sustainability but it's giving from a very young age an alternative view of what the world could look like and what we as society could be like as well and I think sustainability has a definite place in the education system from a very young age right up into higher education as well because sustainability even in higher education is not featured very highly and within community education as well so there's different layers of education and recognising and valuing what education is is also an important part because there are cultural heritage, knowledge that can be used in the formal education system as well and that can actually have promote sustainability Yeah, yeah, fabulous unless either Keith or Lucy have... oh Keith Yeah, I mean the simple answer to the question is how important, very and yeah, I mean it's very much right to kind of challenge any of us involved in education as to what we're doing to address it and so I've got colleagues certainly I'm at the University of Strathclyde I've got colleagues who are working very hard making sure that actually it's not just about climate issues but a whole kind of broader set of issues around sustainability and the sustainable development goals which is touching on some of the things that we're talking about just now about culture and livelihoods and environments and so on that these things are touched upon I teach in an electrical engineering department and it's absolutely essential that the engineers we are educating are aware of this broad set of potential societal impacts and benefits it's both and it's very difficult to have anything that doesn't have some kind of adverse impact because we're seeking the benefits and trying to get the balance right and how it plays out across the range of the sustainable development goals and it becomes just a natural way of thinking about how we do, in our case how we do engineering so we're working on it we're not there yet it's still progress to be made in terms of making sure that the educational framework is right so the next questions are extremely pertinent to all of this which is we're going to global slump we're certainly going into a UK slump the economic outlook is pretty bad I think if you look at what's going on in sections of the Tory party the idea of net zero is now being seen very much as a socialist indulgence so there's a question from Cassie which is how do you see the current economic situation impacting climate action from government and business there's been talk about removing green levy from energy bills and lots of businesses tightening their belts how do we squares how do we keep climate action happening and amid this economic crisis and I think maybe Lucy if we start with you or Matt yeah it's really interesting and I would love to see data on what happened to climate action during the previous processions that we've had I don't actually know what the answer is there so if anyone has paper on that please send it my way I think to be honest I think a lot of the chat amongst the Tory leadership at the moment is a bit of a smoke screen I'd be astonished if we backpedaled that much on the climate leadership that Boris Johnson did show for all of his faults and so I'm not too worried about it I think we actually have an opportunity in tackling the cost of living crisis particularly when it comes to energy to kind of kill two birds with one stone in that if we become less dependent on fossil fuels we are reliant on then building up our own energy system as Keith talked about earlier so actually it's a win-win I think the bigger concern for me is that and there's been some conversation in the chat about it is that a lot of the solutions that a household can do to lower its energy bills at the moment are only available to those who can afford the outlay of getting solar panels or getting a heat pump or getting an electric vehicle etc but I think that's my concern as it will slow down the uptake of those things without government investment but I think the train is running and I think it would take a lot to kind of completely stop it but as I said I don't know what has happened to climate action in previous sessions and so that would be really interesting to find out Yeah, yeah I mean one thing speaking personally one thing that I find interesting is that yes the UK has shown leadership in climate but one of the things that happens it feels like we often have this debate in the absence of acknowledging that other countries are doing things as well we talk about what are we doing going for net zero when China's building coal plants and of course China is building coal plants but it has also as I understand it pledged that from 2030 its emissions are going to go down and by 2060 it will be net zero but this seems entirely absent from the UK debate where it feels like we're doing this sort of futile loan dash towards the target no one else is going for but Keith what do you think how is the recession going to impact some things Yes, I mean very good to tell because this seems to be a kind of an unusual recession in that there are these sort of supply side traits that are kind of slowing everything down I mean how to see how that plays out is kind of different from what we were expecting those in the worst periods of the Covid crisis but I think as Lucy said it ought to be a boost for climate action because the relative cost of low carbon energy is so much lower now because the alternative high carbon energy is so expensive but the challenge again as Lucy said is sort of the profile of the cost is different, there's this big upfront cost that in your savings accumulates over time so it's difficult to finance it as well as the sort of ensure of a change in planning an electric vehicle depending on what kind of mine that you do if you can afford the car in the first place then it's cheaper on average per mile because the electricity and the kind of efficiency of the vehicle is so much better cheaper electricity and the energy efficiency is much better than the combustion but it's getting that up as Lucy said meeting that up upfront cost and not everybody can afford and one of the things in the chat about homes and private rented accommodation you almost got nowhere there's a whole raft to think they've never dealt with for decades to do with private rented accommodation and how affordable it is and how energy efficient it is and so on and so forth so yeah as I said because a high carbon lifestyle it won't be using for weeks option of a low carbon lifestyle yeah the last question which I'll go to Zarina for first and if she has any thoughts on that other one do do those as well it's a question from Keith Irving can the panels say what a just transition to a net zero economy means to them so not just are we going to get to net zero but are we going to do this in a just fashion yeah as I spoke earlier on about this I am concerned that our move to a net zero is not going to be just in terms of just what I mean by it's not going to be fair it's not going to be equitable we're not bringing along everybody and again relating it back to the last question I think that we could like the cost of living is so high at the moment that this could be a great lever to think about the climate debate in a low carbon but a low cost lifestyle right and it's thinking about well what is a low cost lifestyle but without making people feel that they have to do without because I think previously a lot of people when they think about a low carbon lifestyle they think that they have to do without it's giving people alternatives that are low carbon but are cost effective as well and that's what's really important about a just transition it's like who are we having when we talk about net zero but who is this net zero four is it just for the country to meet its targets or is it for the people of the country and if it's for the people of the country then we're having a different discussion and we're talking about a just transition about making livelihoods for everybody much more fairer, equitable and accessible and I think we have to keep that at the heart of all kind of negotiations that's really important Yeah, yeah Lucy, yes your thoughts on this and also maybe at the same time because I think they're pretty closely linked there's a question from Beverly which is what might be the key government actions needed to bring communities together towards positive climate action and away from individualism and consumerism if indeed that is something they feel quite linked so give me your thoughts on either both, one, the other Yeah first I'm just going to pick up and say no transition in the history of the human race has been just, if we think about the industrial revolution that got us into this mess that wasn't just, lots of people got left behind if we think about the agricultural revolution before that that wasn't just it often just fed the kind of leaders of society and left other people much worse off so I think it's not unique to the climate crisis and I think the fact that it's even being talked about as on the same agenda is really really good and other than that I totally agree with what Zerina said to tackle the second question, Tom you must have read my master's degree dissertation because it was all about community ownership so yeah absolutely I've done a bit of work with communities who want to take climate action and the number one thing that I learned from that is that first of all having this kind of central target to galvanize around so in this case it was a community who wanted to buy out some land to plant a woodland really got everyone thinking in a community minded way and really brought people out of their shells and out of their kind of individual focuses to head towards this target so actually having a goal like that is super important for communities but the number one thing that they asked for was that the government didn't make it so damn hard to do it relied on a number of passionate motivated retirees who had time on their hands to be able to drive it forwards it was like a series of never ending obstacles to kind of get funding to make it happen and to bring everyone together so I think if we want to see more communities doing things like this and kind of yeah developing that community spirit if it is a specific project that they need funding for that needs to be made much easier and that's where the government can help and actually the Scottish government is doing quite a bit around that particularly when it comes to land so yeah great question thanks Beverly Keith do you have thoughts yes you do you've got a handle on it yeah I want to chip into this I think the first question what is a just the tradition for me it's one in which the costs and the benefits are shared fairly in kind of my very simple definition of it but in practice it's much harder to achieve when you get down to real real policies so for example in Scotland we're going to have to face up to what happens to the oil and gas industry and as we've already talked about how do we enable those choices, those options of having a heat pump in your home or if you need a car you can have an electric car and be able to rely on it so it's great it's quite easy to express as a very simple kind of catch line that it's very difficult to implement but it has to be done otherwise we're not going to retain public support and but even though the industrial changes as Lucy was saying is very hard to manage if industries grow and others contract there are winners and losers we have some real policy challenges I've got a lot of sympathy with the policy makers I've got to make the decisions on that I do slightly worry about the language actually so again it's maybe picking up there was a point that we made earlier about middle-class lefty concerns or not just middle-class but just this is a concept that means quite a lot of things to different people Serena has set out a lot very very well I'm posting my sign-up to a lot of that I think I'm quite comfortable with it for me but there is a part of the political spectrum that doesn't like that language I'm pleased that Alok Sharma the top president has used the language as just a tradition that's really good but a lot of his members have the same political party he doesn't find that term at all in the net zero strategy whereas on the other hand there's lots of buy-in to this idea of fairness everybody can relate to that and everybody can feel that it's a really important feature so I think it's still important to retain the political consensus that still largely exists I mean Tom you were talking about the Conservative Party earlier but I understand the majority of the Conservative Party are still in favour of climate action so let's make use of that level of political consensus across the spectrum make sure that costs and benefits are shared fairly and we do achieve this transition to a low-carbon society so the last question and thank you very much for your time all of you the last question before I get you all to maybe start thinking about this as well to sum up in a minute what you think we've learned to what's pertinent but before that Kimberley in Edinburgh is making you in a paraphrase a dictator of the country or perhaps even the world you have the power to do one thing right now for an urgent result so what would that be what would you do you can ride over all democratic processes and do one thing and let's go to Zerina first oh god no not me go what would I do oh I would probably want to have a reform like a people's revolt yeah a people's revolution and think about our whole political system and think well what is our political system what is it feeding into change the power dynamics yeah I think I would want a people's revolution excellent so your dictatorship will create a lasting dictatorship Keith what about you very difficult isn't it to narrow it down to one thing all of this of course very long shopping lists of things that we think need to happen and I think that are very positive things to happen actually that's not just about hair shirts and the points that we see very really important we can have a enjoyable healthy lifestyle and the points that Zerina made about pertaining a political system I found it really interesting looking at what some of the climate assemblies have been doing and the way of getting engagement and decision making but in one sense the idea of few people coming and taking time on behalf of the rest of us think seriously about issues get information from the experts and then make a judgement on the behalf of the rest isn't that what the Parliament is supposed to do anyway think more kind of pragmatically as me as a kind of energy system background so just to pick one thing I think I would try to make sure we'll try to help us to be more efficient than our use of energy so you know home is in the way we move about and that also comes down to things we can do and I think that's a very immediate thing we should be getting on with Lucy? Oh dear, my answer is much less democratic I would invest really really heavily in carbon removal to stabilise our climate and then move on to bring Zerina and Keith onto my dictatorship panel and invest in community assemblies and forming a new people's revolution but after we've stabilised the amount of carbon in the atmosphere and got it back down to a livable level Well I'm going to maintain a MacGarbe style dictatorship for myself, I'm absolutely not from the problem but I think I would possibly and this is going to cut me out as maybe naive maybe overly utopian I would invest heavily in fusion it feels to me like it has gone from being a fundamental scientific problem to an engineering problem and as we saw with things like the Apollo missions you can brute force those so I find it utterly flabbergasting that we're not just brute forcing the problem and then when we have our fusion we can get all of our carbon sucking devices and I can maintain my lovely western lifestyle without having to worry about the hippies in the people's assembly I've successfully alienated the audience now but it doesn't matter as we come to an end as we come to the end could I ask each of you as I warned to maybe have a sort of a minute closing statement and the roulette wheel of doom will fall on Keith roulette wheel of doom well I want to counter that message of doom I think it's the main kind of closing message I think there are lots of benefits that come from tackling climate change from reducing emissions being kind of adapted to the climate changes that's already happening lots of benefits for us locally lots of benefits for people across the planet and we can do it I really believe we can do it if we've got the fusion energy that works safely, reliably we can deal with it there is still a bit of radiation involved as I understand it but we can deal with all of that and great, that's fantastic but we have technologies even now that do work, we can do this it has to be made to work for people as Zareena and Lucy were saying earlier and that means making it affordable and making the choices easily available and accessible that's a connected endeavour I think Lucy yeah I would summarise with a similar message of optimism I think when I was in school we were still debating whether global warming as it was called whether it was human or not and now we've made a lot of progress on that and it's unanimous and young people today are demanding much more action so we know that change can happen really quickly as I said before what I'm concerned about is that anxiety overtakes us and that prevents us from taking action so I totally agree with Keith I think it's definitely within our grasp and that we have a moral duty to make sure that we achieve it and as Zareena said it's already bad for people all around the world so time is of the essence so we need to throw everything that we have at it but ultimately when we do that we won't just tackle climate change but we'll have created a nicer world for us all to live in with greater biodiversity, nicer lifestyles and more equality so I think there's a lot to look forward to Zareena I think for me it's hope I always have to have hope and if it should have hope we have the technology we have solutions we have the will we just now need people to come together the last people from all parts of society including policy makers, decision makers corporations industry to start to collaborate and think of this as a global issue for all of us that we're all in it we all need to solve it and come together and that gives me hope to compete with one another that we're not going to get thank you all I will end with a very short maybe slightly more moderate thought which is I've been covering climate conferences since Copenhagen and since I started everyone's been saying how rubbish and depressing climate conferences are and they've sort of to an extent been absolutely correct but in Copenhagen, going into Copenhagen we're looking at worst case scenarios expected case scenarios on the basis of current emissions pledges of 5, 6 degrees going into Paris I think it was 4, 3.5 degrees and now I think coming out of Glasgow it's 2.4 degrees obviously there's loads that needs to be done to make that work but I think that's an astonishing achievement for a very hard problem so we heard everyone was going so well sharing beautifully right up until that moment he disappeared I'm sure his closing remarks were very enlightening I will just step in here from the Festival of Politics team because as you were saying it was going so smoothly until the last moment Tom was just wrapping up so I will in his place thank the panellists Keith, Lucy and Serena for their excellent contributions thank Tom in his absence he's maybe come back, excellent Tom we lost you for a second I'll let you do the final bit Sorry, I apologise for that I'm not sure what happened but I'm back and just say thank you to our panel Dr Keith Bell, Lucy Stanfield Jenner and Serena Ahmed all of you in the audience for joining in I'd just like to take this opportunity to remind you that there are many more Festival events taking place at the Scottish Parliament today and tomorrow including a rehearsed reading from the National Theatre of Scotland and discussion about care experienced people in care, love and understanding that's followed by the best selling poet Lem Sissay talking about his memoir My Name Is Why other panels include Do You Trust Politicians and the State of the UK Union I do hope you'll be able to join us Thanks everyone Thank you, bye