 Welcome to Tisgy Sour at the World Transformed. We are streaming live tonight, not from our usual shipping container in Bermondsey, but from the gorgeous Onker Gallery, five minutes from the seafront and in front of a live audience. Thank you everyone who's made it down to join us. And it's like TFI Friday in here, I love it. And hello to everyone watching at home. We are gonna take some of your questions as ever at the end of the show. So the start of Labour Party Conference has been eventful, to say the least. But tonight, we are focusing on one thing and one thing. Only policy, in particular, Labour's climate policy in the campaign for a Green New Deal. Of the motions being debated at conferences, this is probably the most consequential and we'll determine whether the planet can cling on to life longer than Tom Watson can cling on to Labour's deputy leadership. I digress. Green New Deal motions have been submitted by 128 constituencies, making it the most popular issue at this year's conference. Yes, even more than Brexit low, one point fuels. Democratic welcomes currently in a compositing process, which means that the 128 CLPs who proposed it, or one person from each of those CLPs, is now in a room trying to merge together a bunch of different proposals which will be voted on the conference floor tomorrow. So there'll be the Labour front benches and CLPs and trade unions in there debating it. So hopefully, someone is watching outside that compositing meeting and listening to what's going on here because I think it will be important for them. Obviously, I am joined by Steve Turner, Assistant General Secretary at Unite the Union, and the UK's second largest union. Unite represents many of the workers. The greening of the economy will affect most directly be that airline cabin crew or workers in coal and gas-fired power plants. Thank you for being here tonight, Steve Turner. No problem. How has the last 24 hours been for you? Relaxing? Relaxing, yeah, exactly. I'm looking forward to the debate starting tomorrow. Today's a bit of an admin day at party conference, so we'll get that out of the way and we'll start the real business tonight, at Spring. Exactly. Sakina Shake is a Labour councillor in Lewisham and is currently running to be a Labour candidate for the Greater London Assembly with her Shake Up City Hall campaign. She is organising for a Labour Green New Deal and Climate Justice. Thank you for joining us this evening. Thanks for having me. And I am joined by James Meadway, who is an economist and former adviser to John McDonnell. James has written for numerous publications on the need for a Green New Deal and what it would look like in practice. Obviously, tonight we're going to be debating the ins and the outs of what Labour should be adopting, what policy platform they should be adopting, whether it's zero by 2030 or 2040 or 2050. First of all, I want James, who's very good at explaining things, to set the scene. So we are obviously debating a Green New Deal at the Labour Party conference because we think what's going on right now is not good enough. Now, the Conservatives like to say that they actually have a decent record on climate. It is the case that the UK has seen its emissions decrease more rapidly than any other OECD country. We've mainly phased out coal. So they do have some reason to say, look, why are you attacking us on climate? It's all going okay. Are the Conservatives on the front foot when it comes to climate change? No, of course not. You're going to have to elaborate. I've been set up slightly for this one, but it's... No, of course not. Look, Theresa May's parting gift to the world was the 2050 net zero target just before she stopped being Prime Minister over the summer. And this is the kind of climate change action that the Tories really like because it's a very long way off and they'll all be dead by the time it actually gets anywhere near to achieving this. And it stops people looking too closely at their actual recording government on this stuff. So yeah, sure. If you take over the last 10, 15, 20 years or so, UK emissions have fallen. This is largely a byproduct of phasing out coal. Now we can get into why this happened and what was going on there. Had very little to do with climate change. It's a sort of accidental fallout from this. It also has quite a lot to do with the fact that we manufacture fewer things and we import more things. And the imports, the emissions from those imports don't count against our total. So in other words, we just export a whole load of emissions over to China instead of qualifying them over here. So this isn't because you're making a really big difference to the world and things are going, well, this is just shuffling the problem around somewhere else. And that's the UK's record here. If you take Tories in particular, I mean, they've been consistently bad on doing what you ought to do if you're serious about, in my 2050, I hope you want to hit a rather, you know, more recent date. They've been consistently bad about it. I mean, what? Within a week of saying 2050, that's our target to get rid of, well, to get to net zero carbon emissions. They whacked up the VAT, the taxes you pay on solar panel installations. They got rid of the feed in tariff. They basically made it very, very expensive for people to install solar panels themselves. It used to be something that was actually becoming quite popular and quite simple to do. If you look at the economics of it, the prices of solar and certainly onshore wind have dropped to absolutely, you know, it's now the cheapest kind of electricity you can get is onshore wind. What is the Tory policy on onshore wind? Absolutely none of it anywhere at all. Thank you very much. They just don't want it to happen. So no, they've been absolutely terrible. And it's worse sort of terrible because there's a great big lump of hypocrisy involved in saying by 2050, this is going to be sorted out, but doing absolutely nothing, in fact, worse than nothing today together. I knew you were good at explaining things. Sorry. Sakina, the fact that there is a debate about the Green New Deal and that there was, you know, a grassroots movement to try and push Labour Party policy suggests that there was something that wasn't quite good enough about Labour's climate policy already. Why do you think there was such a demand to, I suppose, radicalise or strengthen Labour's climate policy? Yeah, I mean, I think it builds on the fact that for so long climate change isn't a conversation that's been taken seriously. And actually, like in global South communities, we see that they're on the front line and this is already killing lives. So it's indigenous communities in America. This is a third of all the dishes under water. Kenyan farmers are displaced. So, you know, I think in terms of Labour members having an international lens and international solidarity with workers abroad and understanding that actually justice can't just be fought for here, is we should have been taking action like yesterday, the day before yesterday. It's already too late for so many people in the world. But actually also now we're seeing, like, you know, with the Ashton fires and the Yorkshire Moor fires, that this is now on our doorstep. And if we don't do something now, we will, you know, the world will change in a way that we won't be able to inhabit anymore. And I think that what's really exciting about the Labour for Green New Deal movement, the strikers, XR, is they're building on decades of climate mobilisations again, predominantly from the global South, that say this isn't just about, like, a few electrical cars. We need wholesale reconfiguration of an economy that's broken, a political system that has allowed it to be extractive to the point of destruction. And we need everything to change, like racial justice, class justice, all of this needs to be part of the package. And I think the Green New Deal have given people, like, a vehicle to have those demands and expand the conversations so that our analysis is intersectional. So, you know, I think it's, like, more than 138 CLPs now. I think one had a sneaky passing of the motion last night. You know, because it's ignited the imagination of in a time of multiple crises, like Brexit is a mess, an international embarrassment of the clown and number 10 has got us in a constitutional crisis, austerity is a crisis, and then we have the climate crisis. We have to use this as an opportunity to mobilise for the world that we know that we can have. There is enough to go around, it's just not distributed properly. And this speaks to the core of our labour values, which is why we have to be the party to lead it. So, wholesale reconfiguration of our economy, it's given people an opportunity to expand how we move towards climate justice so that it does encompass things like housing justice and the living wage for all. So, I think the mobilisations are because people can see that things are so desperately broken, politically, economically and socially, that this has become a vehicle through which we can fight for positive change. So, big up everyone who's been making it happen. Yeah. Steve, so I read out at the beginning the precise demands from the Labour for a Green New Deal campaign. It's been backed by some of the smaller unions. So, the Communications Workers Union, the Fibre Gauge Union, the TSSA, so one of the transport unions, and the Bakers' unions, they've come out in favour of it, as it's written in the motion. None of the big unions have, so your union Unison and GMB. I was wondering if that suggests that there is some reticence about the precise proposals as they're written down in that document, or where does Unite stand on the Green New Deal, well, not at all, actually. Your assumption is based on the fact that we didn't submit a resolution or support resolution on the Green New Deal. That's because as a trade union movement, we operate collectively, and we had 10 resolutions to submit, and ours weren't on the New Green Deal. As were on other issues that are now going to be debated in conference. But we absolutely support the motion as it is. It will go into composite, and so I don't know how that will end up coming out of that process for a debate on Tuesday afternoon, I think the debate's going to be. But in any event, we support what we're trying to do now. This is a humanitarian disaster that we're facing. And to talk about 2050, to talk about 2040, to talk about any date, actually, is immaterial to the fact that we need to operate and we need to start changing now. And our members, whilst our members work in these industries, and you're right, our members work in the steel industry, they work in manufacturing cement, they work in construction, they work in the auto industry, they work in the air, and they keep our airports flying. I mean, the reality is our members, and these are good jobs. These are decent jobs, these are well-paid jobs, these are unionized jobs, and every wage packet's supporting a family and being spent in a community, not being siphoned off to some tax haven, as the rich would like to see their money leaving the UK. So, yeah, we do have concerns about how we get there, and we don't want to be in a position that we were in the 1980s with the destruction of whole swathes of our society with the closure of the mines, and some of those mining communities, of course, were promised all sorts of things. And they're still as devastated today as they were in the 1980s when they closed the pits, and no money's been spent supporting mining communities or any of those other communities that were directly affected by those changes. So we need to bring working people with us. So while we work in those industries, we also work in the industries that are transforming our economy, and we're designing and researching and engineering new changes that will put us in a far better place when it comes to protecting our environment into the future. Yeah, I was expecting some disagreement on the 2030 target, but you know, for 2030, maybe it's gonna come out just as the Labour for a Green New Deal campaign wrote it down originally. Well, we're not into supporting arbitrary dates. What we want is a plan and a strategy to deliver real change, and we want change coming about tomorrow. But the only way that you're gonna get that change is with a radical socialist labour government. That's the reality of it. If you want a decent thought through strategic plan and industrial strategy that delivers with state intervention, with state investment, with state direction and regulation, which is the way that this needs to go, then we need to elect a labour government that's gonna start transforming our economy, and our politics, by the way, tomorrow. And there are things that we can do. I mean, Labour's talking about four million homes being retrofitted within the first term, and all homes being retrofitted by 2035. That's a really ambitious target, but it creates thousands of jobs and will do a tremendous, go a tremendous way towards greening our economy. I call it a green industrial revolution. I don't think it is a green new deal. I think it is an industrial revolution, and we need to treat it as a revolution. It's a political, economic, and green revolution that we're looking for, and Labour's gonna be at the forefront of delivering that. I wanna get onto a green new deal versus green industrial, green new deal and green industrial revolution and whether that's just how we brand it or whether that has some sort of content to it a bit later on. First of all, I wanna just focus a bit on this date issue, because as I understand it, there is gonna be a bit of a, or a bit of conflict about what Labour settles on. Is it 2030? Is it 2040? Is it 2045? And James, I was wondering if you could explain your thoughts on whether dates do matter. Are they arbitrary? Are they picked out of the air? Or is it important that we commit to something like that? I think, I do share Steve's apprehension about setting arbitrary targets and things. The great advantage of doing it from a government point of view is it sort of tells everyone what they ought to be getting for, right? What they ought to be aiming at. So you sort of set the thing and then you know that everything you're doing is going to be built around that. The point of the 2050 target is that, and it was selected by our government, the foundation of the Committee on Climate Change, as it's basically consistent with Britain meeting its obligations under the Paris Agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Now, the problem with this, and that sounds fine, right? Basically, the Paris Agreement says everybody's going to reduce the amount of greenhouse gas they're producing and we'll get to this point where we managed to restrain hopefully the average temperature rises to one and a half degrees centigrade by the end of this century. That's what the agreement's aiming to do. The problem with this, and the problem with saying 2050 is it's only kind of forward looking. In other words, it's only like the emissions that we could be producing in the future we're going to try and reduce. It doesn't take account of the huge historic contribution that Britain has made to greenhouse gas emissions and to therefore global warming generally. I mean, we are the country of the Industrial Revolution. We're the first place that really went for it in terms of burning coal and then later oil to power the industry that we have. Now, this is a huge transformational event, right? There's absolutely no question it's one of the most important events in human history is what happens here. But the byproduct of it is that we spent 200 years basically burning coal and then oil and this is an enormous contribution to the kind of climate crisis that we now have. In recognition of that contribution we have to set an earlier date. We have to say we need to move this sooner because we contributed more already. In addition to that, if we're saying that we were just going to aim for a 2050 date you're then turning around to a whole load of developing countries and saying, look, we've kind of spent 200 years burning this stuff really sorry everyone, we had all the benefits you on the other hand won't be able to do that. So we need to set an earlier date to create some space for developing countries to continue to grow. And frankly, so they can enjoy some of the benefits we've had or all of the benefits we've had to do that for now that's going to involve an increase in emissions. So if their emissions are going to increase a bit we have to do something a bit tighter. So that's the kind of big picture argument to do it. I think there's also a kind of economic argument on this sort of domestic economic argument which is if you set a tighter target it forces the pace of what you're doing. At 2050, we know that this is the case because the government was quite happy with 2050 target. British capitalism more than happy for 2050. It's a long way off and they'll go at their own sweet pace to get there and everything will, it won't be fine we'll destroy the entire planet before we get there. So we have to set it tighter. We have to pull it in because it forces the pace of the change and it starts to shake up our big corporations, shake up how everything operates in order to get there. Now, Steve is absolutely right. It's all very well saying shaking up is who gets shaken up. And if somebody's gonna get shaken up it needs to be the top 1%, the top 0.1% and not the 99% not the rest of us. And that I think is the nub of this entire argument. Are there any, I mean, I feel like everyone is on the same page about an idea of a just transition and a workers led transition to a green economy. Are there any examples we can draw upon for that? Is there anywhere that this has been done right? It's, I mean, there are countries that have set closer targets in 2050, right? Finland has 2045, Norway has 2030, which is at the moment the most ambitious in the world. And to get there they have a government that is committed to for instance, phasing out petrol and diesel cars by 2025, that sort of thing. So they've been quite ambitious about doing that. There are examples of countries that make transitions to different kinds of economies without having mass unemployment and the rest of it. Because Steve's completely right. You can travel around the country, you can see that have to go very far to seed places that were completely hammered by deindustrialization in the 1980s. Millions of jobs lost. They have never been recovered. These areas have never recovered. And you can't just turn around to people and say, hey, we're gonna have to make a big old shift in how we're producing things because people remember what happened last time. So there has to be a big credible offer on what you do instead. Like I said, the potential examples you might wanna look at on transitions around this sort of thing, the one that springs to mind actually is slightly obscure, but Finland in the 1990s moves under the threat of a massive recession, the class of Soviet Union, which was his major export market, moves out of being mostly a sort of primary goods producer selling kind of agricultural stuff, timber, that sort of thing, into high tech production, it's Nokia, it's Ericsson, that sort of thing. And they do this without the mass unemployment and the real dislocation. It is possible to do this, right? But it requires a government that is committed to do it and that means you need a labor government because the Tories aren't gonna do it. One other thing that's sort of a technical issue, which I think will be a basis of some tensions within that composite meeting is whether we go for net zero or zero. I don't know if anyone can explain the difference between those things to me. I mean, I think net zero is what I would say, we should be work, the government and the labor party needs to commit to net zero by 2030, right? So that we can make sure that the just transition is actually just and is actually fair. And as Steve says, bring working people with us. I mean, just to expand on the point that James was making about 2050 and why it's so insufficient is in order for us to make sure we don't recreate the very dimensions that cause climate change from the extractive economy is to take into account like the neocolonial, the history, the history of colonialism, right? Is we had our industrial revolution and it's global South countries that are currently on the front line. And in COP 21 in Paris, when we had incredible mobilizations, climate mobilizations, we were still debating whether we have global temperatures rise to 1.5 or two degrees. Now there were communities saying two degrees is murder for Africa, right? It's 1.5 to stay alive. So we are always on the back foot with the global North countries dominating the conversation. And I think the reason this particularly frustrates me is when we saw the Amazon fires burning recently, Bolsonaro is a fascist and no one should listen to anything that man says. But unfortunately, he had actually a legitimate stick that he was beating the global North with and he was saying that it's neocolonial for you to come in and tell us how to run our Amazon when actually you've had your industrial revolutions and we need to develop. And because we haven't had conversations about how we ensure our green industrial revolutions and our green new deals aren't neocolonial because we're still aspiring and having conversations around 2050, we haven't developed that nuanced analysis and instead a fascist in Brazil gets to dictate that narrative. So I think it shows the need to rapidly move away from any consideration of 2050. And I think net zero 2030 is about setting political ambition but it comes down to who gets to set that political ambition, right? And ultimately workers need to be at the center of this because if we are phasing out of certain industries and we are re-skilling into new industries, are we sitting down with working people and saying what are your fears? What are your priorities? And how can we ensure we listen to you? I was like really fortunately invited to come and speak to some PCS workers. So PCS is a brilliant union that organizes the civil, predominantly civil servants but they also have members in aviation. And I went and spoke to them and I said, you know, this is the lens of climate justice that I think we need to aspire to that embeds international solidarity. But actually if we're talking about re-skilling your jobs, how do we ensure that they are well-paid, unionized, secure, long-term and based on what your requirements are? And until we're doing that, and I'll be frank because I've been a climate justice campaigner for many years, I think the climate movement needs to do more of that. I don't think we've bridged that gap enough actually. So, you know, that's why I think over the next three days at conference, I welcome the debate and we need to have that debate and it's, you know, long overdue in many respects but actually like being honest about who is setting the political ambition and how we ensure that it's everyone in the labor movement because the trade unions founded our party and we need to make sure that our unified voices how we set a political ambition to reach net zero 2030. And just to clarify, I think net zero means that we will be producing quite a lot of carbon dioxide but we'll be paying for it in the form of forests in the Amazon potentially because you can offset it by sucking out carbon elsewhere. But not offsetting it in the Amazon or in the global south and this is the problem as well, right? And this is why we need to make sure we don't have a neoclonial green new deal where we like outsource our carbon emissions to China or to the Amazon, right? It needs to be, you know, a lot of the renewable a lot of the materials we need for renewable energy like lithium and coal weight come from global south communities and we can't reproduce these very dimensions. So net zero means that actually we need to have a rapid program of greening in the UK as well. Mass planting of trees and, you know, if we have to use technologies like carbon capture, so be it but we need to be setting the political ambition in order for the technocrats and the policy boards to go away and do that work. Right now we're not doing that. And, you know, part of how I think we get there is community organizing and movement building, right? Like Alexandria Cassio-Cortez is, you know ignited the imagination of the world. She's spearheading the idea of a green new deal in the US because she's supported by a movement of people. The sunrise movement have been building for two years. They've been going into communities and they've been saying, what do you need? Do you need housing justice? Do you need a living wage? Do you need mental health services? And then that becomes part of what a green new deal is. And then that's why she has that political support to enable her leadership. So that's what we need here. I might keep real for paper. We're gonna talk about the issue of economic growth in a moment. I'll go to you, Steve first. But first of all, one organization that we know does want economic growth and it won't damage the climate is Navarromedia.com. So please, as you know, Navarromedia, Tiskey Sour is only possible because of your kind donations. If you're already a subscriber, thank you very much. If not, please go to support.navarromedia.com and donate the equivalent of one hour's wage a month. As you know, we love it when you do super chats in the YouTube comments. And if you wanna throw money at us up on the stage, that's fine. No, don't do that. I'll just go on the website. Like it on Facebook, like it on Twitter. The question of economic growth. So there is, I think, two different ways of looking at greening the economy. One is the idea of green growth so that we can decouple economic growth from greenhouse gas emissions and or increasing greenhouse gas emissions. And the other is the idea that we have to move beyond growth potentially to some sort of steady state economy or the idea that would become ambivalent about growth. I don't know where you stand on that question, Steve. Well, I'm not an economist, but I'm a great supporter of a state-led economy. We won't make the transformative changes that we need to make if we're gonna address the climate crisis unless the state is far more interventionist than it is now. I mean, we have a legacy, of course, and it's not a good legacy around the world. And we talk about environmental reparations. Why aren't we using the technology that's already there and giving that free to developing nations? Why aren't we? We are talking now about really transformative change in many sectors of our economy. And our members are at the forefront of delivering it. I mean, we're talking about the removal of the combustion engine, of course. And the technology is already there for that, whether that's four-battery technologies or whether that's hydrogen technologies. Carbon capture actually captures hydrogen. Hydrogen can be used to not just drive vehicles and trains, by the way, also aeroplanes, but remove gas from our houses. Every time we go and switch on a shower, we turn on our tap, we get water, we're burning gas. And that's one of the biggest causes of carbon emission that we face. So we're moving gas from our houses, making sure that we're at the forefront of that technological advance that needs to transform our economy, transform our politics. But that's gonna require a state that's prepared to intervene. And intervene not just here. I mean, in Holland, they're talking about phasing out combustion engines and only selling electric vehicles. People are just going over the border of Belgium and by car, I mean, that's the reality of it. So you need to work your way through this on a bigger scale than we can do ourselves, and that's not downplaying what we need to do ourselves. We're responsible for a lot of this. We're the fifth richest nation on this planet. So don't tell me that we can't do more than we're doing right now because we can, and we need to set ambitious targets. But we're at the forefront of some of that technological advance, whether that's hydro power generation or whether that's wind power generation, the disgraceful fact that we don't produce a single wind turbine here in the UK. We don't manufacture any of this. We import all of this. Cobalt's being imported for batteries into China out of the Congo, using child labour in big open-cast mining communities. So the battery technology that people think is a pioneering, defining change for the automotive industry, of course, is on the back of a lot of child labour and a lot of heavy oil used, shipping this stuff around the world to make battery cells. So that's not necessarily an answer in its own right. We've got huge stocks ourselves in our own country. If you go to the West country, it's huge stocks in... Cobalt's in mines, in the old tin mines. Lithium and cobalt. So, you know, there is an industrial strategy, a directive that can be taken here, but you need a state that wants to intervene, that wants to spend that money that's prepared to pump prime change in the economy and use the technology, offer that technology free around the world. Why should we capture that? Why should those that have got the money in order to develop it own that and then deprive the world of the sort of technology that we need to make the transformative change that we need across our planet to green it? So we should offer that. We should offer that. That is like an environmental reparation. And that's something that we all would be thinking really seriously about, do we? You know what, maybe it's... I feel like let's save the clapping for the end because I just don't know if it's going to sound horrible on YouTube, do you know what I mean? I really feel for my YouTube community, we'll do it at the end for a really long time. Although that was, save it all up. You can count a little stopwatch. I want to go to you on that question of growth. So should Labour be proposing to green growth, to decouple economic growth from carbon emissions or should we be getting the country used to the idea of a steady state economy and moving beyond increased consumption or increased economic growth as a target and an ambition for government? So we'll have to unpack that a bit. Look, you don't want growth just as you want growth, that is nonsense. What we should be saying, and this is a problem with the entire conversation about the economy because it's goes, here's this number, it's GDP, it needs to go up. Now, actually what we ought to be talking about is what are we going to do with this number? What is the economy for? What are we aiming to get? And that's a much more sophisticated thing. It's all very well saying GDP goes up. I mean, historically GDP goes up, broadly speaking, since 1945, the economy grows, most people give or take, get better off, that's what's supposed to happen. Last nine, 10 years or so, certainly since the Tories got in, so it's nine years, GDP's gone up a bit, wages have gone down, right? So your basic GDP will make you better off. Relationship has just fallen apart for most people. That's what's happened. So really, this thing about let's have growth, it will make everything better for most people. It's just not already not working. So let's have a bigger conversation about what the economy is, right? Because if you're talking about the economy, really you're talking about society. And if you're going to talk about society, we should talk about what values we have. Like what kind of society do we want to live in? We want a more equal society. It's not going to damage the entire planet. We want a society, I really like your idea of environmental reparations, of being the technology and the research that we can do here, that we can give to the rest of the world as a gift, in this sense, reparations, right? That you can talk about a society in a economy that looks like this if you don't fix it on this number. So that's how I think we need to be getting to speaking about this. If you're looking at the sort of technical bit on can we get to rapid decarbonisation whilst also driving GDP up and up and up? Well, in the short term, yes. If we have the kind of thing which I completely support and everybody should that Steve is talking about, which is massive state investment to drive this huge shift into a decarbonised economy. And it will be massive, right? That's huge investment in public transport, in new energy systems, getting gas out to people's houses. That is an immense job, right? Solar panels, onshore wind, offshore wind, investment in research, all of this. It's a huge amount of investment that has to take place. If you spend all that money, growth is going to go through the roof, right? But you're not doing it to get growth through the roof. You're doing it because you want to decarbonise the economy, right? So in the short term, look, if we have the £250 billion national transformation fund to spend on decarbonising the economy, and that's going to be the main kind of aim of the thing, and that means investment right the way across the country, really transforming places that we've batted for the last 40 years by neoliberalism, that's what this can mean, and that's how we have to sell it to people. That's what we need to tell people that this is going to happen. Growth will go through the roof, but we're not doing it to get growth through the roof. We're doing it because we want a better society living. Oh, yes, I was waiting for the clap then, but I just remembered that's all you have to do. Very good, well done. Shall we clap your hands? Yeah. Sakina, I want to ask you about movements and the Labour Party. So I know for a while some of my friends who are climate change activists felt a bit frustrated that the Labour Party were dragging their feet. I think if you look at when the Green New Deal became a big issue in the Labour Party, it was actually after, really, the climate strike and Extinction Rebellion had put it on the national agenda. I don't know if you agree that potentially Labour has been dragging its feet and also how should it relate to those movements as it's going forward? I mean, presumably, the demands of Extinction Rebellion are going to look quite different to the Green New Deal that the Labour Party are proposing, but what should that relationship look like? That's a really good question. I mean... I know. I wrote them. Well, I think Labour's definitely heading in the right direction, but as someone who, you know, my natural home is in the rally or on the streets, on the picket line, like, I will always say we can go further and we must continue to go further. And like, you know, as someone who kind of, to be honest, joined the Labour Party because of Jeremy Corbyn, for me, absolutely... It was the one noise you were allowed to make. You know, since becoming a councillor last year in May, it's become very obvious to me something and you already, which is like political change, actually, the last sequence of events is within Westminster or local government or any of those political institutions. Like, the change comes from the streets, the change comes from the rallies and it comes from the movements and that is actually where the creativity flourishes. That's where our solutions come from. So, like, Labour should and always should be open and inclusive of any of the movements and the kind of campaigns that define, that should be defining our agenda, be that climate change or be that any of the other campaigns that many of our movements embody. So, I think that, you know, Labour for a Green New Deal has done a really fantastic job of taking, perhaps, a Labour Party structure that has gone maybe a little bit cold and we're here to shake it up a little bit and they've shown you what actually, what power we can do with this kind of, like, this mass mapping of collective organising. And I think, yeah, we've just got to continue building on that momentum. But, you know, I think crucially as well. So, and again, this was something that Jeremy pushed for really strongly, is community organising. So, he set up the community organising unit and it was something that would probably give Blair the heebie-jeebies, but what it does is it doesn't just concentrate on knocking on doors when it comes to election times, but it goes into communities and, again, a lot of the communities in the northern parts of the UK that have been forgotten and left behind from decades of a neoliberal new Labour austerity programme and says, you know, how can we rebuild trust with you guys? Like, what are your needs and how can we uplift your campaigns? How can we resource you and you build those relationships based on trust? And I think that's how Labour will win eventually. Like, that's how we'll be in government, not just for, like, whenever the next election is, but in the long term, because, you know, actually we are at the heart of it. We are absolutely the heart of the workers and we are the majority and we should be in power representing those voices. So we need to double, I think, the support for the community-organising unit. We need to, and I think within our own spaces as well, like, how do we ensure that our movement remains intersectional, that our politics remain sharp, that racial justice and class solidarity are embedded in our very ideas, is by going into spaces and having other communities, traditionally non-political communities, define our agenda and then we'll see our spaces change, then we'll see our Labour meetings change in terms of who's sitting in the room and what we're talking about. I mean, even just looking at climate justice, for instance, and the Green New Deal, you know, it's taken a long time for us to talk about the fact that climate justice is about migration and migrant justice, right? And it's actually like climate refugees or the narrative around, or even resisting the hostile environment locally is inherently intertwined with achieving climate justice, right? It's the very same structures of oppression that killed, for instance, Ken Sarawira, a Nigerian dissenter who was hung by shell, well, he was hung by the Nigerian government, but shell were found to be leaning on the Nigerian government in order for Ken Sarawira to be killed. So this is like abusive human rights abuses by shell. It's the same power, it's the same structures of white supremacy internationally, for instance, that link it back to, say, for instance, Stephen Lawrence's murder and the disposability of black and brown lives that sees refugees and asylum seekers drown in the Mediterranean. So absolutely, Labour has to always be led by the movements because that is where our politics are sharp. That is why we're now talking about a Green New Deal that inherently embeds a decolonial lens and migrant justice at the centre of it, and that's the only way we'll win. Um... APPLAUSE It was just too good, no, it's fine. LAUGHTER Steve, I want to know how the politics of climate change have developed within the trade unions because the reason we're talking about this here today is because the Labour Party, which is a huge democratic organisation, is debating and will be voting on a Green New Deal and what form it should take and weighing the pros and cons of different targets, etc. And United is also a democratic organisation. And the traditional thing to say about a trade union when it comes to something like climate change would be that jobs now are valued more than imaginary jobs in the future. And the danger of... Or something that I think is probably inevitable, actually, with a Green New Deal or a genuinely transformative one is that many jobs that exist now won't exist in 10 years' time and they will be... But many jobs that don't exist now will exist. And so ultimately, there should be the same amount of jobs, but there'll be different ones. And I don't know how much that has created a tension in your union or how much you've got pushback from people organising in certain industries, which the union's overall climate policy might have a somewhat conflicted relationship to. Well, not really. I mean, we're a democratic organisation. We have certain interests within the union that could, on paper at least, counter against our overall policy position around the Green Industrial Revolution. But the reality is we've been at the forefront of transformative change. Wherever that's come from, I mean, we're talking just now about struggle, community protest and building community organisation. Well, the whole history of social progress is one of social struggle. The trade union movement's been at the forefront of that since trade unions have first emerged well before political parties emerged. It was a trade union movement that fought for many of the changes that we now take for granted. And we take for granted our peril, to be fair. So we developed a just transition strategy for the automotive industry before the automotive industry was thinking about transitioning away from combustion engines. We know where we need to be in 10, 20, 30, 50 years. What we need is businesses to come with us and we need the technology to be deployed now to enable us to reap the benefits of that change. I mean, we won't be assembling cars in the UK. The car industry has been the jewel in the crown for export, all on the basis of combustion engines right now. Much of it diesel, of course, the government bastardised diesel, not so long ago. And the practical reality, this is the rule of unknown consequence, was that people stopped buying new diesel cars and new diesel engines are much more efficient and much less polluting than old ones and started buying petrol cars. And now, for the first time in decades, we've seen an increase in carbon from vehicles because carbon comes from petrol vehicles, not from diesel. Particulates come from diesels and the average age of a diesel on the road now is 12 years, whereas before it was about seven years because fleets aren't changing them. So we're countering against some of the progressive change that's been taking place in our industries right now by the way in which we approach it. So we do see huge job opportunities, actually, and good jobs, decent jobs, sustainable jobs, apprenticeships. These are skilled jobs that we're talking about here and they offer apprenticeships to the next generation of kids that want to go into a decent job, not be exposed to the sort of zero hours but carry this employment that so many are facing right now. And they need to be sustainable jobs into the future. So we're at the forefront of that. We're supportive of that. Yeah, do we organise in the aviation industry? Of course we do. We organise workers that design and engineer aircraft engines that are now designing them to be less noisy, less polluting, more efficient at Rolls Royce and elsewhere. We do that, employs tens of thousands of people. We also employ people that crew them in the air and keep our airports open, whether they be porters or cleaners or restaurant workers or whatever, in the airports themselves. So we do need to transition. And it is this question about how we transition. From where we are now, we organise in the steel industry. It's a heavy polluting industry. Understand that, but if you want steel, you've got to produce steel. We can't just offshore that somewhere else and get somebody else to pick up the bill, the green bill for that. We have to take responsibility for that. But we can carbon capture, but of course the government have removed all incentives to do that. So we do need direct government intervention. If we're going to make the sort of differences that we need to make, if we're going to create the jobs that we can create, and there'll be hundreds of thousands of them on the basis of a Green New Deal, the reality is government needs to step up and the Tories will never do that. The Tories will never transform our economy to the sort of extent that we need to transform our economy. They're driven by other interests other than human interests. So, you know, whether it's our human rights, whether it's social rights, whether it's social pro, all of that will only come around with a transformative socialist labour administration. And that's what we've got with Jeremy Corbyn in labour. And that's what we need to elect just as soon as we can get around to getting these bastards out of power. It was hard to resist that, wasn't it? Right, I've got a series. This is going to be my last questions and then we're going to go to the audience here and the audience at home. So you can start typing your questions in. Someone in the room is going to WhatsApp me some of those questions because I don't have my laptop on me. These are going to be yes-no questions because the government or the Labour Party is hopefully going to be in government soon and they're going to have to make some decisions which involve basically approve or cancel, right? And so I want to just go through what some of those are. Nuclear power. Does a Labour government approve new nuclear power stations? Yeah, I think you need a balanced energy policy and I think nuclear is part of that mix. That's going to turn a lot of people off, but the reality is we have to keep the lights on. We have to generate electricity that's going to be required to transform our economy. We need to get away from fossil fuels. We need to get away from gas. If we're going to do that, you need to do that with electricity. So you need to generate electricity. Right now we can't generate enough electricity using those alternative environmentally friendly methods. So we do need to think about how we do that, whether it's popular or not popular. I'm not here to have that debate and I'll probably have a pint later with a few people. But the reality is for us, it's a balanced energy policy and nuclear is part of that mix. No one gets out of the yes, no questions. Well, even by sort of fudging it or something, I say, oh, well, you know. I don't, look, it is at least technically feasible to get a long way on renewables, right? We know this, right? We're going to get very long way. There are technical presentations like the whole of Europe going to 100% renewable. We know we can technically get there. The difficulty is can you do this in actuality and can you do it on an accelerated timetable to get to zero carbon? That's where the nuclear issue becomes, I think, really, really difficult. And the truth is the new generation nuclear power plants are significantly better in all sorts of ways than obviously the older generation. There has been progress in these things. So I think that is going to be a difficult one, right? I think we should aim to not have nuclear, but if you're going to be serious about actually getting to net zero carbon and doing it rapidly is what we want to do. Then we also have to be serious about there might be some point where you need this. I think Germany got really nuclear and replaced it with cold in there, which is kind of backwards there. Yeah, it's the key in a nuclear. Yeah, I mean, it just doesn't, like it could be part of the transition, the just transition, but it doesn't really have a place in our future. Like it's not part of the renewable energy revolution and building something to dismantle it in five or 10 years time doesn't seem to make sense to me. So I think ultimately conversations around nuclear are a distraction when we've got so many other things to be talking about in terms of how we build 400,000 jobs that labor is promising to do and how we phase into them and re-skill our workers and install solar on every 2.7, 1.75 million homes. Like I think there's so many more progressive conversations to be having that I think it ultimately a distraction. Fracking. Is it easy? No. No. Consensus on that one. Why don't you do that one first? Yeah. Airport expansion. No. No. I don't think we can meet our climate targets if we're gonna have, we can't meet our climate targets if we have an expansion of airports. Steve? Well, I'm sitting here representing hundreds of thousands of airport workers. So the reality is these are good jobs that support families and communities again. And there's a plus side to expansion at EFRO not for a debate right now, but if you stop stacking. We can if you want. Well, if you stop stacking in it. Most fuel burn is in taxing on the airport and then take off and land in. The reality is EFRO operates at about 99.6% capacity. So you get stacks everywhere. They can't land. And that emits an awful lot of fuel burn and it also emits a lot of noise and pollution into the atmosphere. And we need to deal with that. And if a third way, runway is a way of dealing with that. Coupled with air quality standards, noise reduction capacity, restriction on flights and a whole series of other things that we're very supportive of, by the way, and need to be introduced. So they need to be done positively. You need to have a government in there that understands the need to deal with these issues but puts in very tight regulation to ensure that it meets its targets. And if it meets its targets, then we're not opposed to it. Can't blanch, we're not opposed to it. And they're our members. I mean, that is one of the pressures inside the union, of course. And that's always going to be there. But the reality is there's some plus that comes out of a further runway at EFRO. Any response? I mean, what I would just say is again, like just in terms of how, where we steer the direction of conversation is, things, I think the contention sometimes, and again, I think it comes back, if we let's, to be frank, it comes back to what I was saying earlier about the climate movement historically not really putting the priority on developing a proper substantial substantiated program of what new jobs look like, right? Like 400,000 jobs, great. Break it down for me, show me where they are, show me that the union is, show me that secure. I mean, already with renewable energy infrastructure, right? Like offshore wind that's taking place on the North Sea oil. Because it's 12 miles out of the coast, the workers don't get minimum wage because it's 12 miles offshore. Like this is really basic stuff, right? Like right now, and the unions aren't given the space like legitimacy to organize in those spaces. So I think, you know, the contention will fall, any contention that exists will fall by the wayside when we as a movement like actually substantiate what protection for our workers looks like. No, I mean, just on that. Because I completely, like, if you're in a union, it's there to protect your jobs and you're a night member of yourself, right? And if anybody not in a union should join one, you know, it's absolutely essential it's there, it's fundamental to what you do. And of course, therefore you're gonna argue for protection of jobs and the workers who work at Heaker are gonna say, actually, we want our jobs protecting, they're entirely correct to say this. But that means I think we have to a bit more develop conversation about it, building what Sakina said in particular, that we have to get to the point of saying, look, can we give ownership to groups of workers, two big workforces, take Heathrow, I mean, was it 60,000, it's huge, right? Can we give ownership to them what a transition looks like? And in other words, can we say, what would we be doing instead? And then mind, you know, I'm gonna talk about 400,000 jobs, God knows where, right? It's gonna be, what would it look like if everybody at Heathrow was doing something different and it was contributing to reducing carbon emissions? And that I think is where there ought to be more unionization in workplace, because it's not just the bread and butter defending the jobs. You can start to get into a really interesting conversation, the kind of stuff you saw in the 70s around, you know, alternative plans for Lucas. Yeah, yeah, that kind of thing. That's what you can start to get into. Once you have good, solid union organization there, and it's not just, you know, two people sort of staring at each other with potentially conflicted demands. I don't think there's a real conflict here. I think if we're gonna have a transition at all, if it's gonna happen really, it's gonna happen with the consent of the people who are gonna make it happen, which, who are the workers, right? That's how this one is gonna have to work. So it has to be something like going to people Heathrow and saying, what would we all be doing if it was something that was a good job doing something different that was contributing towards this big social goal we all wanna achieve? Because we do want to achieve it, right? Yeah, absolutely. Can I just be cheeky and add one other thing as well? Because I think, like again, why the Green New Deal has been so exciting for so many people, it's a positive vision, right? It's forward-facing. And we have so many exciting ways of moving into that future already on the table, right? John McDonnell talks about alternative, God, it's late on a Saturday night, alternative forms of democratic ownership. So like if we do nationalize, not if we do when we nationalize our energy systems, when we regionalize them, how do we actually transform the very structures of ownership so that workers are embedded in owning that space rather than there being this kind of extreme hierarchical system? So I think, again, that the positivity and the vision, the ideas are there, so let's focus on getting there. We're gonna go to audience questions. So I've got one from Frostbite85. Frostbite. Anne Petrefour suggested that a Green New Deal won't work without a change to the global financial system. What do people think about that? Yeah, I see where she's coming from. I don't think she's quite right in this one. Look, the interesting bit about what we got in Britain, and I think somebody just touched on this, is that we actually have this extraordinary concentration of capital from all over the world, sitting in the city of London, right? It's basically the world's largest market for money dealing in one form or another. So if that's sitting there and there are literally trillions of pounds flowing in and out of the thing every day, every month, every year, this is a potentially huge lever to change, decisions that are made right across the rest of the world. So when John McDonnell was talking over the summer about wanting to green the city, this is an enormous potential power that we have to start to save people. Actually, you can trade here, you can do things here if you're going to do this. If we're gonna set some of the conditions about how you operate here in order to get to a sort of green transition elsewhere. That could be quite a big, powerful international tool for us starting to reshape the financial system. So I don't think Anne's quite saying this. I don't think she's saying we have to wait to change the entire global financial system and then we can do a Green New Deal. I'm pretty certain that's not her argument. But we do have this big, powerful thing here. If a government was committed to saying we're gonna deliver this green industrial revolution and we're gonna internationalize it, you've got quite a big lever that you can get hold of. Yeah, I'm gonna sort of do it, oh, yeah, go quickly, but I was gonna just keep getting different questions and you don't have to answer the same one, but go for it first, yeah. Yeah, no, no, I agree. We've got James was just saying. I mean, the reality is you can't just rely on private capital. Capital will only work towards its own interests. You're ignoring the state and the role of the state and public procurement. We spend hundreds of billions of pounds a year of taxpayers' money, our money, and how you spend that. The choices that you, but these are political choices. The choices that you make about how we spend our taxes, how we spend public money are gonna be hugely important. So green in the fleets, for instance, across our emergency services, our local authorities, our parliamentary system, central government fleets, whether or not that's ambulances that become electric or hydrogen. There are choices that can be made and can be made now that will create jobs as well as spend public money to pump prime whole sectors of the economy that need to pump prime in in order to make the transformative change. So we don't just need private capital. We do need private capital, of course we don't. We're gonna have to wrench it off of them as well because they ain't gonna give it up, you know. So we're gonna have to get old of it somehow. But the reality is we don't just have to rely on that. All right, Sakina, one, two dog asks. One, two dog. Is it, I don't know, L2 dog, I don't know. Is it possible to transition to renewables and meet targets without a reduction in consumption and perhaps a reduction in living standards? How do we convince people to vote for this? I mean, yeah, like, I think there's absolutely, we're at a point where living standards can only but increase. Like, we are, we've reached the bottom, I think. Like, this government is disgusting. Like, as a local counselor in Lewisham, when I'm having to choose between children's mental health services and like whether elderly folk get 10 minutes or 20 minutes with their carers are making inhumane decisions. So the living standards that people are in, I think it's like poverty levels are that of the Victorian times. Like, one in three children where I'm a counselor are in poverty. Nurses are going to food banks. Like, we all know this. We know the stats. It's disgusting. And the stories are as, you know, we are one of the richest countries in the world. So I think that people are desperate for anything but what we have right now. Like I said, we're in a series of multiple crises and austerity has shown the kind of like, the deep disconnect that the political elite in this country have. Like, I think it was Ash, wasn't it? On Newsnight, she said, this has not been a bloodless balancing of the books. Like, this has been 120,000 lies lost from an economic program that we are paying for because of the bankers' mistakes. And I think that that narrative is finally coming through to kind of ties into almost, you know, the question from, what was that interesting? The first person's name, the weird, oh, not weird, very lovely username. Look, Frostbite85 is a great name. Frostbite with the great name. There's nothing wrong with that name. Which is like, you know, our economic system, neoliberalism, the international economic system, like it's not just a word now. It's people see Grenfell burning when we talk about neoliberalism because it's lives being lost. So, you know, how will we get people to vote for it? People are ready to vote for it. People are ready for an alternative because what we have right now is inhumane and completely unacceptable. And the Tory should be assigned to the, like the bins of history and never be elected again into government. So, you know, Labour government all the way and let's make that happen. Yeah. Hey, hey, hey. Hey. Come on, I'll take some questions, though. Yeah, go on. So, I'm gonna try and summarize that into the microphone so that people at home can hear it. And then if I butcher your question, you can give me a dirty look or something. So, I was, or you can intervene if it's really bad, it's a real butchering. I think if, so I think for the audience, if I've understood correctly, the audience at home, it is about if there's any tension between this idea of transferring our technology to other countries whilst being a leading force in the export of green industry. Might we want to, and might, especially the trade unions, if what we want to do is build up jobs in Britain, keep some of that technology to ourselves? It's good enough, right? Yeah. It's a really good question. I think it should, it is possible. If you look at, if you take sort of manufacturing now and particularly the kind of manufacturing you might be talking about, right? Let's get into this sort of decarbonized world where you're talking about very, very advanced manufacturing, very efficient, 3D printing, that sort of thing. So, it's a different kind of manufacturing you're doing, first one. That's often going to depend on very small scale local production. So, for instance, we're talking about producing loft insulation, right? We're going to have, what is it? 200,000 people employed to go and insulate every loft in the country that isn't insulated properly. Part of that is going to have to involve producing like cut bits of loft insulation that will fit into weird shaped old houses that we have in this country. So, that's a small scale local production thing. So, you can do that here. You can't really do that somewhere else and then try and sell it here. You have to do it here. So, that's the kind of manufacturing we're talking about. It's a more sort of localized version of it, first one. In terms of then giving away the sort of the know-how and how to do this. Well, if we're producing something here that's going to fit for the conditions here and we tell someone else roughly how to do it where they are, they can produce conditions over there. Do you see what I mean? So, in other words, if you start to sort of localize what manufacturing looks like, if you start to have smaller scale production, batch production, different kind of production than what we're used to, it's not like massive factories employing hundreds of thousands of people. It's not like Foxconn in China, 400,000 people on a single site. You're talking about something quite different here. That's what it has to start to look like. And then it works. Anyone else? Yeah, the lady at the back. A huge amount of work that we've been doing is all about creating jobs in order to, you know, that's the work that I see is now in the space. So, look, what is the, like what is, yeah, we'll ask more about that kind of relationship between decoupling, economic growth, and technological differences. It's never happened. I don't think it's possible. I don't think it's happening in this household. Yeah, so that was... We're not Lib Dems, huh? That was for the people on YouTube. A question sort of pushing the panel on the question of whether you can have green growth even in the short term. And also, I think about the difference between a green industrial revolution and a green new deal, if there are any, how that relates to that particular question. And also, it's handy, because this is also a question on YouTube, how this relates to work. So there are many people on the left at the moment, there is a division between people who want a post-work economy and people who want to be creating new green jobs. So I don't know how they're, who wants to take that one? I'll kick it around. I think we will get growth. We certainly get growth in the short term. And, you know, as we've spoken about earlier in terms of redeveloping our economy and transitioning our economy, it's going to create growth. But it does go fundamentally to the future of work. And I don't see work in the same way as we see work today, of course. We're not going to be working till at 65. Why aren't we talking about early retirement? Why aren't we talking about shorter working time? Why aren't we talking about the 20 hour week? About job share, about, because this gets to the heart of the question about redistribution of wealth. And it used to be a theoretical question in the 1970s and it governed a lot of our time. I mean, the reality was we didn't have the technology at that point to be able to make that a meaningful discussion. Now we do. Now we do. So it is really a question about who benefits from the productivity gains of the technology that now exists. Is it just those big finance capital institutions, those big corporations that can afford to invest that maximise their profits from that technology? Or is it about society overall, seeing real gain? Seeing us fulfil our potential as human beings for the first time probably in our existence that enables us to share work, that enables us to retire at 55 and actually live as part of a community and transform our communities in a different way. Value work in a different way. Challenge ourselves as to what work is. I think a lot of unpaid voluntary work right now is not recognised as being work. There's no value on it. Yeah, absolutely it's work. Of course it's work. And it should be valued and it should be paid. So it's about how do we redistribute the wealth that is in society to have a meaningful way of sharing that work out. So it's not all about growth on the basis of a 35 hour week or whatever it looks like today. It may transform the world of work as well as the way in which we challenge ourselves around our economy and our politics and all of that. And I think all of that is mixed into what Labour's trying to do right now. It is about a radical transformation of our politics, of our economy, of our society. And that's something that only Labour can do. Only a radical Labour government is going to do that. Start that debate. It's not a finished debate. It's an emerging debate. But it's one that we've got to have. And there's real opportunities that come from that. Can I just add quickly a little bit as well? I've just got two quick things, which is I think ecological sustainability I think is one thing you said. And I think it's worth at this point also drawing out the fact that like Indigenous communities around the world are stewards of 80% of the biodiversity of our planet that keeps us turning, it keeps us in harmony and it keeps our home, the planet Earth, like nurtured in the way that we need it. Not it needs us, not we need to save the planet. Like the planet's fine without us, to be honest. We're the ones messing it up. Like we need it. And actually like that harmony, that kind of connection to nature, that kind of re kind of, it's almost like a lens, it's a mindset, right? Like capitalism, neoliberalism is about extracting, it's about taking and actually like where does balance and harmony come into ecological and achieving ecological sustainability? We've got so much to learn from like generations and generations of Indigenous communities. And you know, one, I think it's like on average, one Indigenous woman is killed by the excesses of the fossil fuel industry. Like we've just seen very recent, like minor examples of it be that like the Dakota Access Pipeline or the burning of the Amazon fires. So like again, in terms of embodying our climate justice politics, like we need to be in solidarity with global South communities and in solidarity with Indigenous communities who have been for years building and harboring kind of knowledge that allows ecological sustainability. We need to learn from them, not in an extractive way, but in a harmonious way. And I think the second thing I wanted to say as well was, you know, I've been asked a lot about growth and where the growth is compatible and like, you know, the extractive economy has to change. Like in its nature, it is no longer compatible with the future. But I also just think we need a new vocabulary. Like growth is a term of the past and it has no place in our future as something that defines how we measure success. You know, even the person, the man who came up with GDP as a measure of how successful our economy is, never imagined it to be used in the way that we use it nowadays. It doesn't take into account happiness or, you know, people's ability to connect with one another or live fulfilling and flourishing lives. So, you know, and I think, you know, we need to build a new vocabulary and I think it comes back to that point of community organizing. The way we'll do that is by diversifying and building the mass movement of people in our rooms, defining our narrative, defining our politics and, you know, again, the solutions often are at the margins. So, like, how do we liberate the margins, you know, center the margins? And I think, again, the community organizing is doing a great, great thing with a great mechanism and if the Green Industrial Revolution is the framework and the tool through which they can go into a game, particularly like northern communities and have those conversations, then more power to them. We've got, it's not a question, but it's a comment from online. So this is from... Michael, I really, oh no, say something on that one, can I? Yeah, go on, it's not like I'm not supposed to or anything. You can speak when you want. That's it, come on. So just jump up. Well, now I feel bad, now I feel bad. Oh, no, because he was a really good question. No, I'm gonna say this because you're silencing Alex McIntyre, who's on his laptop at home. He can't budget, he hasn't got a microphone. And then you can hold your fort and you can give it up to it, please. All right, I'll sneak it in. All right, so Alex McIntyre at home just says, just went to see Corbin at the opening rally at TWT and he called for zero carbon much sooner than 2050. It's fairly ambiguous there, it leaves you a lot of room coming over. He was obviously listening to us. A bit of wiggle room there. 2049, yeah. He's been cheating in. Sorry, James. Yeah, all right, okay, do you want me to respond to that? No, no, you're supposed to say this. Oh, right, that's the thing I was gonna say. You kindly held onto. Oh, sorry, yeah, okay, fine, sorry. No, it was a really good question. It was a brilliant question. It was also a really annoying one because I thought I'd carefully sidestep that whole light. Do we avoid, you know, do we believe in the end of growth or whatever by talking about the short term rather than the more interesting what happens in the long term? I mean, look, basically the best argument you've got, can you have green growth and can you have growth continuing whilst not actually massively ruining the entire planet and the environment? The best simplest argument, I think is Tim Jackson's Prosperity Without Growth, which we necessarily agree with the conclusions of it, but his argument is every single pound of GDP you produce carries with it a whole load of greenhouse gas emissions, right, and if you want to stop damaging the environment, you have to dramatically reduce the greenhouse gas emissions you get out of every pound of growth you produce, and if you don't have the technology you can do that and plausibly we don't have any technologies that can so rapidly reduce the amount of damage each pound does, you have to say there's a problem with just continuing growth, right, that's the kind of the long run issue that we're up against here. And that I think is quite a serious one because it gets you into what does the world look like when you are no longer thinking about not just growth is not what we're aiming for, but growth is starting to look like a serious issue just full stop, right? You are then into a serious overhaul of what society is. Now, my version of that would be something like, okay, we've got 10 years, and we do have, let's be generous to be honest, but let's say 10 years, try and decarbonise and get to a better place here. That is five years of a real massive effort to completely transform the fundamental energy structure of this society. That's kind of the getting the gas out to people's houses, installing renewables everywhere, getting everybody into public transport, that sort of thing. Growth goes through the roof, but then you've got five years or so of, like, what does a new society look like where we're not pursuing growth and probably not pursuing profit in the way that we used to, that we have a much wider, broader set of values. That I think is what we need to talk about. That is where actually a lot of the people who talk about post-work I think have quite a good handle on this because it is going to have to be a conversation about not, you know, here we are, get up, go to work, that's it, repeat until you retire if you're lucky, age 70 or something. It's nonsense. We can live better than this. We have the technology to do this. We just have to apply it more smartly, and that means socialism, by the way. Absolutely. You can clap now if you want. Go on. All right, we're coming to quarter past nine, so I think we should wrap up there, and we can continue all these conversations in the pub if you're watching on YouTube. You can continue these conversations in the comments section. As I close every show, I won't differ today. You're watching Navarra Media. You're watching Tisgy Sal, which is only possible because of your support. So if you're already a subscriber, thank you very much. 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