 Good afternoon to all of those joining in Europe and good morning to those joining in North America, including our speaker today, Bill McKibben. My name is Barry Colfer and I'm the director of research here at the Institute of International and European Affairs in Dublin. It's my great pleasure to welcome you to this exciting and tidy webinar on getting past fire, moving fast to a post combustion planet, which is the second event in our 2023 ESB IIA rethink energy series. I just want to thank our speaker Bill McKibben and our chair for this event, Karen Cisleski, the CEO of the Irish Environmental Network, IEN. I of course wish to thank our colleagues at ESB for their ongoing support for this series and for the overall work at the Institute. Before getting down to the main event. It's my great pleasure now to hand over to Jim Dollard, executive director of generation and trading at ESB will make some opening remarks enjoy the webinar. Good afternoon everybody. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the second lecture and the rethink energy series this year. ESB is proud to support this series in conjunction with the IEA series effectively brings experts and top leaders together to share insights on the future of energy. And today we're delighted to welcome Bill McKibben, author, academic activist. Rethink energy is a very apt title for this series. We all can see I suppose with our own eyes now there's very clear evidence of climate change, the negative impact that climate change is having on our planet. And I suppose there's a requirement now in rethinking energy for radical change in a fast, fast being the important word timescale. And I liked, you know, the moving fast to post combustion plan title to the series to this today's event. I think speed is important because the evidence is there. ESB strategy is net zero by 2040. And it's wholly consistent with the government climate action plan and the targets that the government is setting now right across an arrange a range of mirror measures. Net zero is a radical and it is a fast program. The rate of change required in our society to deliver net zero by 2040 and ultimately beyond is huge and will require us to migrate from fossil fuels. And ESB believes the means by which that will happen is primarily true electrification, the adoption of green hydro and other net zero type technologies. It is a huge challenge that's in front of us. ESB is, you know, it's wholly focused now on delivery on that strategy and to I suppose interim targets by 2030 and on to 2040. But it is a war type effort in terms of the level of change and the pace of that change to deliver the challenge. I'm in that context there. I'm really there for I'm really looking forward to Bill's talk and I'm going to hand over now to Karen to introduce the event. Thanks so much, Jim. We're delighted to be joined today by bill renowned environmentalist prolific author and a founder of both 350.org, a global glass grassroots climate campaign and third act which organizes people over the age of 60 in pursuit of climate and racial justice. Bill is widely known for his seminal book, the end of nature, which is often credited with being the first work to communicate the problems associated with anthropocentric climate change through general audience. He launched published 20 books and his latest, the flag, the cross and the station wagon looks back at America's social environmental and political landscape, which is much changed since his boyhood. I'd like to thank bill for being generous enough to take time out of his busy schedule to speak with us and to deliver his keynote address titled getting past fire, moving fast to a post combustion planet. The audience shares my deep interest in hearing those thoughts and insights into the opportunities and obstacles presented by what he's referred to as the next great human adventure, ending large scale combustion on our planet. Please speak to us for about 20 to 25 minutes, and then we'll move to Q&A session with you, our audience, you'll be able to join the discussion using the Q&A function on zoom, which you should see on your screen. So please feel free to send in your questions throughout bills talk as they occur to you, and we'll come to them as soon as he's finished his presentation. Please also participate in a discussion on Twitter using the handle at IEA reminder that today's presentation and Q&A are both on the record. Bill, the floor is yours. Karen, thank you so much. And what a pleasure to get to join everybody here. Look, this is the right week to be having this discussion. We've seen over the last 10 days, the hottest days that we've ever recorded on this planet, beginning with July 3rd, which broke the record set in 2016 during the last El Mino, and then ramping up very steeply in the days afterwards. We saw temperatures go about a half degree Fahrenheit averaged across the globe, higher than we've ever seen them before. Now that data set only goes back 44 years to 1979 when we started measuring this stuff. But in fact, scientists have good proxy records, ice cores, tree rings, things that go back a lot farther than that. The basic consensus among climate scientists is the last week has been the hottest temperatures on this planet for at least the last 125,000 years. That is to say, no human being has ever seen anything like what we're seeing right now. The heat waves, just the sheer heat, have been astonishing. China has been locked in a heat wave that's seen day after day after day with temperatures. I'm an American, so you have to confuse me for mixing Fahrenheit and Celsius and all of this all the time. We would have seen temperatures above 100 degrees Fahrenheit across regions where hundreds of millions of people live day after day after day. The American Southwest has seen temperatures higher than they've ever seen before. Canada is far hotter than it's ever been, and as a result, it's burning at a rate that we've never seen before. Canada has already seen more of its forests go up in smoke this year than in any entire calendar year before. With that, heat has also come extraordinary flooding, because if you want one fact to understand the 21st century, it's that warm air holds more water vapor than cold. That means that in arid areas, you get more evaporation, hence more drought, hence more fire, but it means that in wet areas, you get more downpour and deluge, and that's what's happening. As we speak, Japan is recovering from the largest rainfall ever in its history. South-western Japan is essentially shut down. There are huge floods in other parts of Asia and in big parts of Europe. I'm speaking to you from Vermont in the northeastern United States. The sun came out about an hour ago, but we've had three days of unrelenting rain that's produced the greatest flooding we've ever seen. It's the kind of rain you can only have when the Atlantic Ocean is at absolutely record temperatures that we've never seen before. It puts so much water vapor in the air that huge deluge and flooding is just inevitable. Right now, our capital city in Vermont, Montpelier, is being evacuated. Its streets are head deep in water and there's great fear that the dam that's holding back yet more water may burst in the course of this morning. So it is the moment to be talking about what we've done and what we will do. The first thing to be said, and it's important to say, is that none of this comes as any surprise. As Karen says, I wrote the first book about what we now call climate change, what we then called the greenhouse effect back in 1989. So going on 35 years ago, that's when scientists told us very clearly, very loudly and very publicly what was going on. Their warning was unmistakable and people heard it. I mean, my book came out in 24 languages was the best seller around the planet. It's not like this was a mystery and it's not like we know anything now that we didn't know that the understanding that when you burned coal and gas and oil, you put carbon in the air. And that molecular structure of that CO2 would trap heat that would otherwise radiate back out to space was completely understood the predictions for what was going to happen were spot on accurate. And yet we paid no attention. Human beings have put more CO2 into the atmosphere since 1989 and then all of human history before him. That's largely the result of the almost unbelievably irresponsible campaign of deception and denial and disinformation that the fossil fuel industry carried out. It's passed the point where they can continue to get away with flat out denying climate change, but now their tactics have turned to delay. And they're good at it, and they continue to use their muscle to make sure that nothing changes. Just to give the most recent example, the CEO of Shell Oil, which had promised a couple of years ago at Glasgow that it would begin modest one or 2% reductions a year in the amount of oil and gas that it was pumping has now reneged on that promise. And the CEO of Shell said on July 6, the hottest day we've ever recorded on this planet, that it would be quote dangerous and irresponsible of them to cut back on their fossil fuel production. This incredible abdication of responsibility has put the planet and all the people who live on it in a place from which there is no easy or good exit at this point. We're not going to stop global warming. In fact, we're not going to stop it even with the levels of disruption we're seeing now. This is going to get worse before it gets better. And the next 18 months are likely to be a period of violent and chaotic havoc because as El Nino kicks in, we're going to see those record temperatures go ever higher. It's the consensus now among climate scientists that will almost certainly breach the 1.5 degrees Celsius level that we said is the mark not to breach in Paris just eight years ago. Our task now is not to stop global warming. It's to stop it short of the place where it cuts civilization off with the knees. And that's going to be a very hard task because of the physical momentum in the system once the North Pole and the South Pole have begun to dramatically melt as they have it's very hard to put the brakes on things. That said, the climate scientists have told us that if we act very swiftly there is still some room for change. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change told us two years ago that we have to cut emissions in half by 2030 to have some hope of staying on the pathway that we laid out in Paris. By my watch 2030 is six years and five months away, and that's an enormous task to try and cut emissions, anything like in half. None of our targets are sufficient. They all have to go faster and deeper. And that's not for political reasons. It's not because that's what we want to do. It's because it's what we have to do. This is a different kind of challenge than we used to dealing with. Most of our political challenges we make some progress on, but then we come back and work on them some more in the future and we move in the right direction. In this case, our adversary is not in the end industry or the fossil fuel barons, whatever else. Our adversary is physics, and physics sets an absolute bar that we have no choice but to meet if we want a habitable planet. So that cut emissions in half in six years is not climate sciences talking or environmentalist talking, it's physics talking. The hardest deadline that humans have ever faced, and it's on the bleeding edge of the possible. Okay, that's the bad news. The good news, and it is good news, is that we have the possibility of moving at that speed. That's because scientists and engineers have done a remarkable job over the last decade, the price of renewable energy, energy from the sun, the wind, and the batteries to store that power have dropped about 90%. We now live on a planet where the cheapest way to produce power is to point a sheet of glass at the sun, and the second cheapest way to produce power is to spin a windmill in the breeze. That is a remarkable gift. That is, well, that is Hogwarts scale magic, and we should be doing everything that we can to take full advantage of it. It's not too much to say that we do have the possibility of rapidly ending large stale combustion on our planet. Human beings have been setting things on fire for 700,000 years or so the anthropologists tell us, and fire has been our friend. Let us cook food, which gave us the big brain. Let us move north and south away from the equator. Neither Ireland or Vermont have been inhabited without it. The anthropologists think that the social bonds that mark our species come in some part from eons of standing around the campfire. When we learn to control the combustion of oil and gas and coal in the industrial revolution, it produced modernity, it produced the world that we know. But we now are in a moment when the costs of combustion are at least as large or larger than the benefits. The most obvious of these is the climate challenge. This is existential. It is the largest thing that human beings have ever done, the largest thing by far. If we do not get it right, then we will severely circumscribe the future for our species and for most other species on our planet. But it's not the only cost of combustion. When you set things on fire, you produce particulates, small and often invisible pieces of soot that lodge in, among other things, human lungs. We now have good data on this. As of about a year ago, the big meta-studies indicate that about 9 million people a year on this planet die. That is one death in five on this planet from breathing the combustion byproducts of fossil fuel. If you're traveled recently to Delhi or to Shanghai, this will come as no huge shock, but it's true around the world. In my country, we have hundreds of thousands of cases a year of childhood asthma caused by breathing the combustion byproducts of fossil fuel. And that is no longer necessary. We not only can produce power from the sun and the wind, we can then use that power to do the things that we need to do to drive ourselves around, either on electric vehicles or better yet e-bikes. We can use it to heat and cool our homes with air source heat pumps, one of the great gifts we've ever been given by technology. We can use it to cook our food. I'm the cook in our house and for a number of years now have used an induction cooktop. I can't explain to you precisely how it works magnets, but I can tell you that it does work just fine. In fact, as with my electric vehicle, it's better than any car I've had before. The possibility of doing that is remarkable and remarkable for a third reason, climate change, human health. The third reason as we've been reminded by events in Europe over the last two years is that as long as we depend on fuel that's only available in a few places, coal, oil and gas come in scarce deposits. The people who control those places end up with way too much power. The biggest case in point at the moment is Vladimir Putin, who has used his winnings to launch a land war in Europe, something we did not think we would see in this century. And who's used his control over the gas spigot to bully Europe into towering submission for a couple of decades. It would be very nice since sun and wind are available everywhere to move past that. So, we face the biggest problem we've ever faced. We have a set of solutions. Those solutions have to be implemented in rapid order to make any difference. The question becomes, why are we not implementing them as fast as we can? Why are we still indulging with CEOs of oil companies and so on and so forth. The reason is because above all of the political power that the fossil fuel industry continues to have. And so the relevant policy and political question becomes, how do we break that political power in time? That's what I've spent much of the last 15 or 20 years of my life doing. Not because it's what I'm trained to do, I'm a writer, but because it's what was necessary. At a certain point, 15 or 20 years ago, it became clear to me that another book was not going to move the needle here. We had already won the argument about climate change. The data were clear. We were just losing the fight because the fight was not about data and reason. The fight was what fights are usually about, money and power. And the fossil fuel industry had so much that it was able to continue its business model even after it had been demonstrated beyond any doubt that it was destroying the planet. So lacking billions of dollars, the way that we can build power is to build movements, and that's what we set out to do. With seven college students, I founded a group called 350.org that became the first iteration of a global grassroots climate movement. 350.org is organized 20,000 demonstrations in every country on earth except North Korea. We spearheaded the fight against batista and pipeline in the United States, which became the first big defeat for big oil, and has led to lots of people challenging lots of other things. We launched this fossil fuel divestment campaign, which Ireland became the first country to endorse with its public accounts. Many thanks, among others, to my friend Lauren Gold, Trope Care for the remarkable work on this and many other things. That divestment movements now at $44 trillion in endowments and portfolios that have invested their holdings in fossil fuel, and that's been a big help in this fight. That movement has grown much, much, much larger. As you all know, the advent of young people taking the lead in this has been remarkable and important. You all know Greta Thunberg, and you should. She's one of my favorite people on planet earth. I adore working with her. I was extremely happy to get to the center of good wishes on her graduation from high school last month. She would be the first to say there are 10,000 Greta scattered around the planet, young people doing great work. They have 10 million followers. That's how many people were out on school strike in September of 2019 before the pandemic hit. That is magnificent, and it is as one would expect, since young people are going to bear the brunt of this. I'm going to be dead before it gets to its very worst, but if you're 20 right now, the prime of your life. If we do not get our act together, it does not matter what career you're training for, your career will be emergency response until we run out of the resources to do that emergency response. So it makes great sense that they are in the lead, but I heard one or two too many people tell me that it's up to the next generation to solve this problem. That strikes me as both ignoble and impractical, because young people for all their intelligence, energy and idealism lack the structural power to make change on the scale we need in the time that we have. We started organizing this third act operation in North America about 18 months ago, where we find people who have lots of structural power. Those of us over the age of 60, and we need those people backing up the young people in this fight, so that we can move faster and harder in the right direction. It has been great fun to do this work, and we're doing it with real power. For instance, in March we had a day of action across the US, where we shut down in 100 cities, the big banks chase city Wells Fargo Bank of America, but continue to lend money to the fossil fuel industry, even despite their ongoing expansion plans. That was a great day. In Washington DC, where I was, we shut down those banks with hundreds of old people sitting in rocking chairs. The New York Times the next day was calling it the rocking chair rebellion. We know that similar actions are underway in Europe, and we take great pleasure in watching young and old join in things like extinction rebellion to try and push our systems to operate more quickly than they otherwise would. I hope that all of you will figure out ways to join in those kind of efforts, because they are the things that freeze up our political systems to move faster. We need to open space for politicians to move more quickly than they otherwise would. There are lots of good signs happening. I think that the war in Ukraine has galvanized Europeans in a way that I have not seen before, to get them to understand the multiple scales of this problem and to get them moving faster. I imagine that the terrible things that are happening at the moment as the planet warms so dramatically will have some of the same effect. This next 18 months of El Nino warming will have to be the huge catalyst. I think it's the last slap upside the head that we're going to get in a period of time that's relevant to the outcome. Because remember always, this is a timed test, winning slowly on climate change is just another way of losing. But I also think that we need to embrace the idea that this is a great adventure, that humans have the capacity all of a sudden to move away from the thing that's marked our species. We've already said that language and fire were the two things that set humans apart and allow us to move into a world where we rely on the fact that the good Lord was kind enough to hang a large ball of burning gas 93 million miles up in the sky. And now we have the wit to make full use of it. We catch its rays on photovoltaic panels. We take advantage of the fact that it differentially heats the earth, creating the wind that we can harness with turbines. That's amazing. We are capable of powering our world with energy from heaven, not from hell. And if we did, it would be the single greatest step that we could take towards solving the climate crisis, towards improving human health, and towards rebalancing the power in our planet away from autocracy and dictatorship towards true, small scale democracy in as many places as possible. That is a challenge worthy of human beings. It is a challenge capable of galvanizing human beings, but it's one that we have to embrace wholeheartedly. The last time that we faced a challenge on anything like this fail was with the rise of fascism in Europe in the middle of the 20th century. My ancestors had to cross the Atlantic to kill or be killed in that fight as so many Europeans had to. We do not actually have to kill anyone and we do not have to be killed in order to deal with this but we have to bring to it the same focus, the same intensity that our forebears bought to that fight. If we do, then we have a chance and it is the biggest challenge that humans have ever faced. That is a burden that falls on our generation, but it's also an honor that our generation gets to take that on. And if you are involved in this fight, then you are one of the relatively small number of human beings who ever get the chance to say, I'm doing the most important thing I could possibly be doing at this moment. So thank you for being a part of that effort. Step up that effort. Get outside your comfort zone, because as of right now, the planet is a mile outside its comfort zone. Thank you so much, Bill. I'm going to go ahead and start the questions and answers. And there's one here, studies show that you emissions. Oh, I'm sorry, can I also ask and that folks give their name and the organization that you represent if you represent one. So this question comes from the energy researcher with the study show that you emissions have dropped by 0.3 billion tons between the Paris Agreement of 2015 and 21. During that time, however, emissions in India have risen by nearly half a billion tons, while they've risen in China by over 1.5 billion tons. How can we ensure that the emissions reductions achieved in certain parts of the world are not offset by increases in carbon elsewhere. Well, we can work hard to make sure that places elsewhere have what they need to make that transition. Obviously, neither China nor India are as responsible as Americans or Europeans will ever be for the climate damage that we face, but also obviously we need them moving in the right direction. China, I think, is making serious strides there, installing more renewable energy than any place on earth. One hopes that this decade will see the peak of their fossil fuel combustion and a quick downward slide after that. India is a fascinating case. It's on the same place on its energy curve that China was 15 years ago. It could become the first really big economy to largely bypass fossil fuel in its path towards modernity because it's occurring at a moment when renewable energies become so cheap. It's cheaper in India to build a new solar farm than it is to just buy the coal to keep a coal-fired power plant operating, but India has an enormous coal lobby. Modi ran for office campaigning on the corporate jet of the Adani Corporation, the biggest coal miners on planet earth. So don't expect it to be easy and do expect it to be. I mean, our colleagues in India have been put in jail for trying to do work on this stuff, same in much of the rest of Asia. One of our closest colleagues, a woman in Hong who led 350 in Vietnam for many years is in prison now for daring to speak up against their coal industry. It's much the same the world over. The power of the fossil fuel industry is what we have to break and we can only break it with concerted mass action. And as we do that, I mean, the UN, one of the few places where the UN negotiating process perhaps holds out some hope is in encouraging the countries of the global north to live up to their clear moral and practical imperative to make it easier to do decarbonization in the south. Part of that is, you know, government aid, but there's not enough government money in the world to make that happen. The other thing that needs to happen is that we need to use the global financial institutions, the IMF, the World Bank, to take enough of the risk out of renewable energy investing in the global south with the vast pools of money in pension funds and things in the global north can be brought to bear here. One of our problems is that most of the money has accumulated in the global north and most of the need is in the global south. And so we have to figure out how to make it possible for some of that money, a lot of that money to flow there in ways that produce returns for people who need it but that mostly produce the possibility of a clean future for the whole planet. Thanks so much, Bill. And I have another question here from Emanuele Ferrari, a student and CEOs in Shell and other corporations are aware of the latest science and predictions. If they keep doing business as usual, is it because they believe they can still operate in a burning planet? One would imagine they would be the first to change. And now from great investigative reporting that Shell, for instance, knew everything about climate change back in the 1980s. There were internal documents, or is it internal study from 1989 where their scientists told their CEOs, told their executives, climate change, they predicted exactly how much it was going to warm. And then they said, this will produce waves of refugees as indeed it has. And they said, and here was the bottom line, civilization is a fragile thing, and it may be overwhelmed. That's what Shell knew in 1989. So their immoral behavior across this industry in the decade since is the greatest scandal in human history. It's cost us the one thing with desperately needed time. You would think Emanuele that they would, you would have thought that knowing what was coming, they would have used the opportunity to seize the technological imperative and own this energy transition. They didn't. They did everything they could to hold off suddenly instead of to pioneer it. And if you think about it, I'm afraid that the reason why is pretty clear. You can make money doing solar power and wind power. People are going to make a lot of money putting up solar panels and wind turbines, but you cannot make Shell or Exxon kind of returns for a simple reason. The reason is that once you have the solar panel on your roof, the sun delivers your energy for free every morning when it rises above the horizon. If you're the CEO of Shell, that's the stupidest business model of all time, because you've gotten rich by making people write you a check every month for 100 years to get a new delivery of energy. Now the sun's going to do it for free. We're going to have to stop that. And they have stopped that effectively. And they use every possible reason to try and make this point. The CEO of Shell said last week in an interview in the BBC, two things. He said, it would be dangerous and irresponsible to reduce the amount of oil and gas that we're pumping because it might lead to inflation and a higher cost of living next year. Compared with the damage that we're talking about, that seems absurd. One thing he said, and this really got me going, he said, well, if we don't, then school children in places like Pakistan where he came from will have to be studying doing their homework by candlelight. This is absurd. What you're worried about is light for children to do their homework by. There are efficient solar lamps available that cost a dollar a piece. If you charge them for three or four hours during the day in the sun, they produce light all night. You could stay up all night studying doing your homework. If you charge the dollar a piece, which means that, given Shell's profits last year, Shell could afford with one year to purchase 40 billion of these things. That's five for every man, woman and child on the planet. Meanwhile, Pakistan, which is what he was referencing, last year suffered the single biggest flood we've ever seen on our earth. 33 million people were displaced. UNICEF said in late June that 20 million Pakistanis, including 9 million children, are still dependent on humanitarian aid after that climate change caused flood. So the, the, the, I lack the proper words for it. The, the immorality of the fossil fuel industry has to be one of the things we just take for granted as a factor in this fight. They're not going to change. They will only change when public policy literally forces them to change. So that's why we have to rally people and build power bigger than the power that they have. I wanted to ask as well, this question is from Tara Kelly of the ESB. Thank you for your valuable insight. Could you please share your opinion on the potential solution of direct air capture technologies that extract carbon dioxide from the air? So that's the first question. And the second question is from Ashlyn McCann at the IEA. And you've touched on this a little bit, both in a recent article that you wrote from other Jones and today about the development of green infrastructure and adopting a YIMBY or yes in my backyard mindset. And this is, as in many places around the world, a big challenge here in Ireland. And how important do you think it is to provide financial incentives to encourage community buy-in when it comes to developing green infrastructure? For example, the provision of a certain amount of electricity to houses. Sure. So good questions. Let's answer them in order. Direct air capture and other carbon capturing technologies are some of them may prove to be useful as the century wears on. At the moment, obviously, they're too expensive to do much help and they're always going to be pretty expensive because the task is a hard one. Carbon dioxide is only 420 parts per million in our atmosphere. That's enough to wreck our climate, but it's not enough to make it easy to pull it out of the air. You have to build a machine that's capable of doing something that's hard, taking a very diffuse gas and removing it. So the one thing that these technologies should not ever be used for is as an excuse to put more carbon in the air now. At the moment, that seems to be their main use as a kind of rhetorical effort to allow us to continue to do stupid things currently in the hopes that our children or grandchildren will be able to offset them with technology that once you've broken the planet's climate system, getting that stuff out of the air won't be an enormous help anyway. So our job at the moment is to concentrate what power we have on building out green energy. It's a very good idea to go on researching and developing things like direct air capture, but it's not going to be our salvation. If we have a possible salvation, it's immediate application of solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries, all of which are available and affordable map, which goes to the second question around to how we build this stuff out fast enough. And I think that the questioner is very astute in their understanding of the politics here. It makes it much easier to do this stuff if there's some community ownership and buy-in. Humans are resistant to change everywhere. I mean, I live in Vermont, which is a green and progressive state. It's where Bernie Sanders comes from. But, you know, the state motto in certain ways might as well be change anything you want once I'm dead. And I think that that's true across many parts of the world. So there are people who do not want to look at wind turbines or solar panels, and they come up with an endless series of reasons why all of them, or most of them, spurious wind turbines are not going to cause cancer as Donald Trump predicted, you know, on and on and on. But those are powerful objections to moving at the speed we need to go. And one way to overcome them is to give as much ownership as one can to local communities. One of the reasons why places like Denmark and Germany were able to move so quickly was that there was a lot of public ownership. There were churches owned, wind turbines, local councils owned, and labor federations owned, and so on and so forth. And what do you know when people are getting a return on things? It is less of a problem. It's also a good thing to do for reasons of, as I was saying earlier, just democracy. I mean, it's dumb that we all write check every month that ends up in, you know, the pockets of Vladimir Putin or the king of Saudi Arabia or the Koch brothers or whoever it is. And we do not want to be emulating precisely that model when it comes to sun and wind. It's cleaner, but it would be politically and in other ways cleaner too, is to the degree that we could have it locally owned and controlled. We can't let the enemy, you know, the perfectly the enemy of the grid here. The biggest task is to build stuff out fast, whatever that requires. But it's important to try and do it. It'll make it easier to do it if we do it in more community minded ways. Let me add here that the other set of objections that's non trivial to clean energy is that it comes at an ecological and human price. Mining with mining cobalt some of the other things we need. We need to be doing those things as humanely and as environmentally soundly as we can, but we should not make the under any illusions that that they're somehow equal in their danger to the dangers from fossil fuel. Forget the climate for a moment, because you only have to mine lithium once in order to produce a battery or a wind turbine or something. It's the effect just of mining will shrink dramatically when we stopped using coal, which you have to mine every day because once you mine it you set it on fire. That's a big difference to get a sense of the scale of that. Remember that about 40% of all the ship traffic on planet Earth is simply carrying coal and oil and gas back and forth across the planet to be burned. And never forget those 9 million people here concentrated in the poorest and most vulnerable communities who died. Choked to death as it were on the particulates that come from burning fossil fuel. They don't have a series of advocates usually in quite the way that others do because they're scattered and disparate but their numbers are enormous and worth all is bearing in mind. The next question I'm going to give you to again together if that's okay with you, Bill. And the next one is from Rachel Ingersoll at the Department of Foreign Affairs and direct action is important and imperative, but it doesn't seem to be landing in the attention spans of those who we really want to take notice. Raising awareness amongst everyday civilians is one thing, but how can we better deliver direct action so that it better lands with local national and international decision makers. That's the first question. And the second one is from Olivia Freeman, a lecturer at Technological University Dublin, Greta Thunberg boycott at COP 27 and Naomi Klein has called for a boycott of COP 28, as it is being held in a UAE, one of the world's largest oil producers. What are your thoughts around recent cops, and are you pessimistic or optimistic about the next. Direct action movement building nonviolent movement building was one of the great technologies of the 20th century. I think it'll stand alongside the solar panel is the most important invention of the 20th century. It came from the margins, Gandhi, Dr. King, the suffragists, millions of others whose names we don't know, but who figured out this kind of alchemical way to allow the small and the many to stand up to the mighty and the few. But it only works if there are a lot of people engaged in it. It can't just be an eccentric few who are out doing whatever it is. And if you can get large numbers of people engaged in those fights and you can make a huge difference. You know, when we look at what happened during the Indian independence movement. It was pretty much everybody in India joining in. That's why they were able to beat back the British Empire. If you look at the civil rights movement in America, it was millions upon millions of people involved. We need activism on that scale. The first Earth Day in the US was in 1970 20 million Americans, we think we're in the streets that day, about 10% of the then population of the US, probably the biggest demonstrations in the history of America. They were enough to change the political calculus so that in the next two years, the Republican president Richard Nixon signed the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act and the Endangered Species Act that became the template for environmental regulation across planet Earth. That's what happens if you get 20 million people in the street. If we were able to do that, it wouldn't have to be a few isolated people throwing tomato soup with paintings, or you know, sitting down in motorways or something. It would be having effect on the scale that we need. As to the cops. This is a perfect example of the capture of too many of our institutions by the fossil fuel industry. It is ludicrous. And I mean, I mean, with every fiber of my being that the chair of this year's cop is also the head of the Abu Dhabi oil company, which has announced plans to expand its oil and gas production by 30% in the next decade. If you were a scriptwriter writing a script about this, you wouldn't do it because everybody would think that was absurd and wouldn't believe it. But that's what's happening. And that doesn't mean that the UN, or at least parts of it aren't doing all that they can. Antonio Guterres has emerged as alongside Greta Thunberg, the great prophet on climate change, and he has been calling people out in the least diplomatic and most accurate terms possible. He said to the fossil fuel industry earlier this year, he said, your core product is our core problem. So the UN, at least Guterres is doing everything that they can. But the cops are run by governments, and those governments are run in too many cases by the fossil fuel industry. Co-opted at least by them. So I do not think that the cops are likely to produce huge breakthroughs in the years ahead. I think they're becoming forums for greenwashing and for obfuscation and delay. That is a great change. But my guess is that Paris is going to stand as the high watermark of that process, and that our job around the world is to use the things that we won through great mass action in Paris to try and hold governments and corporations as accountable as we can. I don't think I'm going to go to the one in Abu Dhabi this year, because I think it's a joke. Thanks, Bill. Another question from Bernard Harbour, former head of communications with the force of trade union. And you've touched on this a little bit in terms of talking about direct action and climate action. And one problem Bernard says, despite the fact that most voters want climate action, it's not high enough on their list of political and social priorities to force politicians to treat the challenge as urgently as they should. Despite lots of lip service, it remains a peripheral political priority against the backdrop of a growing political backlash against climate action. So far, activist groups have been unable to move this. What do you think would help besides 20 million numbers on the street? I think you've talked about the numbers. Yeah. I mean, that is what will help. And there's no shortcut around it. There's no magic thing that credit timber can do, you know, to flip this switch. If people are serious about having a planet worth living on, then they have to join in this fight. And it's our job to make it possible for them to do that. To figure out how to inspire people to join, to give them the organization's movements, whatever to allow them to join. That's why we're busy building things like third act to allow people to magnify their power. We live in the West in an individualized world for our first impulse is to think, what can I do in my home? What kind of car should I drive? Those things are important, but the most important thing an individual can do is be a little less of an individual and join together with others in movements large enough to change the economic and political ground. That is hard. And it may not work. There is no guarantee that we are going to win this fight. And at the moment we are losing this fight. That's why we need more people moving out of their comfort zone and pushing hard. And, you know, we need trade unions doing trade unions spent most of the last three decades just sticking up for their existing industries, and not pushing hard to make change happen around climate. And we've got to move past that in part because there's more jobs to be had building green energy than fossil fuel, but in part because there's no jobs to be had on a planet that burns up the way that ours is threatening to do. So, everybody needs to be engaged in this fight and they need to make that's why I was using that World War two analogy. And to make it a priority over whatever else they're working on. That's what happened during the war people set aside other tasks to concentrate on the paramount one. That's what needs to happen here. And one more question we have is, and I'd like to to wrap up, that's okay with one of my own, and that I'd really love to hear your thoughts on. And this is from Michael Sankey department of fart affairs. What is your view of Elon Musk and the influence he and people like him can wield, given the success of his EV company Tesla. Well, Tesla Tesla was a good idea. You know, it's not like he invented the car, but he's, you know, did some good marketing around it. But he's undoing that. His ownership of Twitter has been an unmitigated disaster. His rehabilitation of every climate crank on the planet is, you know, destroying our discourse and destroying the democracy that we need in order to act. Truthfully, I think the best outcome would be if Elon Musk and several of his other billionaire friends actually did manage to make their way to Mars, leaving the rest of us behind to deal with things around planet Earth. And thanks so much, Bill. And I have one final question. And this one is for me, if you don't mind, and that is you talked a lot about the importance of building movements. And I love what you've started to do in a really wonderful way in terms of intergenerational movement building to think is so important. How do we instill hope in younger generations, while dealing with the truth, and that things are only going to get more and more challenging for young people. I think that the reason young people one reason young people are so despairing, and I get letters, emails every day from people saying should I have kids, which is a terrible thing to make people have to worry about. I think one reason young people are so despairing is because they feel as if they have been abandoned by the rest of us that they're going to be left to deal with this more or less by themselves. We have found an extraordinary sense of relief from the young people that we work with that we back up when older people show up to help. I'll tell you a little story as we end the first of these bank protests that we did was about 18 months ago against these big banks that a morally from the fossil fuel industry. It was our local chapter of Fridays for the future in the US that kind of first asked us to help out. They said we want to take on these banks, but most of us aren't even old enough to have a bank account or a credit card, so will you help? And we said yes, the first big march we did was in Boston. And there were hundreds of high school students there because they completely get it, and they're somewhat spryer than, you know, those of us of a certain age so they were at the front of the march. But at the back of the march there was a big group of us older people with a banner that said fossils against fossil fuels. All the young people who saw it started laughing, and all of them were extraordinarily pleased and relieved to know that somebody had their back. That's the least that we can ask of older people. We do not want to be the first generations that leave the planet in much worse place than we found it. We can play a big role in backing up young people in this fight, and darn it we should. So, that's a good place to end and just to say enormous thanks for your very good questions Karen and everybody else and ESB and everybody for doing this. This was, we're at a hinge moment in the planet's climatic history. This week, this summer, this year. It also has to be a hinge moment in the planet's political history. This week, this summer, this year. Thank you so much though and thanks to everyone for joining us.