 I'm going to move these over. They're going to pick me up. Hi everyone. I think we're going to start now. So welcome to the mansion house. I'll form a home of John Gormley, who I'm sure will know a lot more about it than I do. I do not live here. The mayor herself, the Lord Mayor, is away in EU business and she sent apologies for that. But I'm delighted to be here. And after we've taken your energy demand document, I don't know if it's a launch or if it's just an actual launch. Brilliant. I'm delighted to be here. And it's the right time for a document like this. I'm not going to describe what type of crisis we're in. We already know that the energy crisis, the biodiversity crisis, the climate change crisis. And the most important thing is like we cannot settle for just surviving these crises. We need to seize the opportunity and to create a cleaner, greener and safer community, safer world and safer planet. We need to thrive in spite of the crisis that we're in. And energy is absolutely pivotal when we can actually do this. The Greens themselves, I've been asked to talk a little bit about the Greens. The Greens themselves, since they entered government in 2020, have been saving the opportunity. The people of Ireland have actually provided us and we've grabbed that opportunity with two hands. We are at the centre of the Green Energy Revolution. And just to give you some examples of how the Greens and the government and Minister Ryan is really pushing that clean energy revolution. We have the biggest home insulation scheme was offered under this government. And we know that that reduces obviously people's economic costs and it helps with the energy crisis and also obviously helps long term with the climate crisis as well. We've provided grants for businesses, for schools and for homes to revolutionise their rooftops with different types of solar panels. We've accelerated active travel programmes through the likes of the Pathfinder programme, through BossConnex, also providing funding for numerous kinds of councils out there to accelerate their own active travel plans. And we're electrifying our fleet. We've just bought 120 new electric buses as well. So there's lots and there's plenty, and I'm not going to too much detail, but there's plenty that the Greens themselves are doing within this to try and really seize this opportunity. Clean energy independence is our core objective of the Greens. We've set a target of 80% renewable electricity for 2030. And offshore wind is vital to that. And just last month we had ministers from the North Seas over to sign a huge major EU wind deal, offshore wind deal. As well as that, it's not just about energy as Tommy Simpson has ensured that I also bring in something else as well. We've been doing plenty, Malcolm Noonan around the biodiversity crisis. We've provided lots of funding around the climate. I'll hear myself. The climate fund as well provides lots of funding for different communities and businesses and cancers themselves to do their own, to take that initiative themselves and progress climate programmes within their own community. As I said as well, DCC are doing a lot and I know within my own area, Cabr Glass Neven, we have two SECs. They're providing workshops and beginning to tell people themselves and how they can save energy within their home. They've provided active travel initiatives within the area as well. The council itself has retrofitted our social housing. We've distributed projects in the work as well. There's a huge rise as well that we've seen from people who are flying for the climate action fund in different types of initiatives and projects on the ground around the circular economy, so stuff around fast fashion, stuff around reusable cups. It's absolutely wonderful to see this and this is exactly what we need and I know some of this is outlined in the document. Just to finish up, we're at a moment of real change here. Right now, energy is being used as a weapon. We know this, but we have a real opportunity here to really secure our futures, to really ensure that we're never held ransom again, to make sure we move to clean energy, no one has ever tried to weaponize the sun, no one has ever tried to weaponize wind, and Ireland has a pivotal role to play in that. And that's why I think the content of this paper itself is so important, as it outlines how we can drive this change and seize this chance, ensuring hopefully that something positive comes from this crisis. I really am saddened that I can't stay here myself. I have to go to Lenster Heist, to minister Ryan himself, but hopefully I'll be able to drop in later. And I hope you have a wonderful time here. And I hope you really call me for Leon and something really beneficial comes from this. And thank you to ever who wrote this paper. I'm sorry I didn't get the names, but thank you for putting investing into this. And welcome again to Mansion Housing Dublin. Well, thank you very much Darcy for that warm welcome. And I'd also like to thank the Lord Mayor Caroline Conroy for facilitating this beautiful venue here for this so such important topic. Green Foundation Ireland has worked for the last 10 years. We're coming up to our 10th anniversary on the linked crisis of climate change, biodiversity loss, and now the circular economy, which we have what we have come to call the circular economy, which we used to call dealing with waste, etc. And so we have, we're pleased to again collaborate with Green Green European Foundation, who is our umbrella. We are a part of a global green family of to educate people in the important topics that I've just mentioned throughout Europe. And Cian Hasker from Green European Foundation will talk to you shortly to tell you more about them. And I'd like to thank Tommy Simpson in particular for working with Jonathan and Peter, Johnson Essex and Peter Sims over a long number of years. This is our third major project with them on these important topics, which as you will hear, will focus more on energy today. But we have done other linked work over the past number of years. So we're very, very glad to welcome them here again to Dublin today and to work again with Greenhouse Think Tank UK. We're also glad to see many old friends here and new friends, hopefully. So I'm really, I really just want to also thank Davey, who has collaborated with us on this series of projects with Peter and Jonathan over the last number of years. And to thank, of course, Anne O'Connor and without whom and if everything would collapse around us. So I'm just going to leave it at that and please welcome the participants. And I think I want to welcome particularly the online participants. And I think Cian is going to talk to you now. Thank you for that. Can you hear me? So welcome the online participants. This is a blended event. So it's a little bit more complex than we're used to. So we have a number of online participants who will be asking questions through Zoom. And we have the in-person participants. I just want to give you a sense of the flow today of what we're going to do. So you know where we're going. We're going to start with an introduction to the Green European Foundation, which I'll introduce in a second. Then we're going to have the paper that's been launched today, Rethinking Demand from the Green House. And we have Peter and Jonathan who will be given us an insight introduction to that. We're going to have a response to responses. We'll start with a response from Saif O'Neill and then a response from Orla Kelly. And then we're opening up to responses from the online participants or the room. Now our challenge is if you have a response, if you have a question or an insight to share, you have to come up here just the way it's set up, unfortunately. So once we've done that, we'll hear the responses, then we'll hand back over to the greenhouse just for their reflections on those responses before we take a bit of a networking break. There's an opportunity to get to know each other again or to look at where synergies might be across our sectors. And then we come back for the GFI panel, which is really looking at energy transitions, energy demand in the circular economy. So we start to introduce and go a bit wider into looking beyond just energy. And that panel will be chaired by Michael Smith. He'll come in and chair that panel. And that panel will start with a presentation from John Gibbons and then go into three short presentations from Claire Downey from Rosalind Skelan and myself. And then a little bit of a discussion. And then the minister, junior minister, Oshin Smith will come in and look at circular economy and demand reduction. So we broaden it up a little. After Oshin, we'll take more reflections, questions from the floor and from the online participants. So use the question and answer function if you're on the Zoom on the webinar. And then we'll have a final reflection from Saif again, trying to bring together the different comments, the different contributions that have been made over today. And we'll close at 5.30 with the drinks reception. So that's our flow today. So you know where we're going. And as was said, this is a Green Foundation Ireland and Green European foundation. And we have a Sian Haskar from the Green European Foundation, who's just going to give about an introduction to the Climate Emergency Project that this project and other projects have been done. Sian is the senior project lead at the Green European Foundation and Jeff's coordinator at Rethinking Demand. So I just need to see and can we can use Yes, can you hear me? Yeah, we can't see you properly. Now, some sad not to be there in person, especially now that I hear about the drinks reception, but it is really wonderful to see you all in the room and online. So yeah, hello from Brussels on behalf of the Green European Foundation. We're very happy to be organizing today's event together with Green Foundation Ireland and Green House Think Tank. And before we dive into all of the sessions that David just laid out, I just wanted to take a moment to highlight kind of the European wide debate that we are really trying to foster here. So Jeff, as a European political foundation explicitly has as its mission to be a laboratory of ideas, forward looking ideas, but also to build these cross border European debates on the big topics that define our time, the big challenges, the big opportunities. So for us, the European project is very much about events like these happening all across Europe rather than, you know, top down technocratic debates in Brussels. So I'm really excited to hear what comes out of today. I mean, in this moment of multiple crises, I think thinking together as Europe is more important than ever, whether we're talking about COVID-19, the war in Ukraine, energy crisis, climate emergency, none of these challenges really have national level, you know, can only be addressed at the national level. They require collective buy in and also a democratic conversation to take place. So that brings us to today to our topic of rethinking energy demand and the project that this is all a part of. I think when the project started at, well, early this year, together with our UK, Irish and Belgian partners, none of us could really have imagined that, you know, these conversations around energy sufficiency, large scale reduction plans and our consumption and even topics like rationing and power cuts would suddenly be on the evening news. So the war in Ukraine was definitely a wake-up call for many European countries that our ever-growing demand for energy and materials carries certain risks for the environment but also for the people, for our welfare. So earlier today, we kicked off today's activities with the report launch and a webinar on sufficiency policies for post-growth world. We had a panel of speakers from the UK, Belgium, Germany, Greece, France, some of you might have attended online as well and we had participants from across Europe and what I really took from it and what I also take from the report we launched today and hope will be reflected in some of the conversations and discussions is the importance for the green movement to be at the forefront of this conversation because these crises show that things like reducing energy demand will eventually have to happen one way or another and even other groups and political families are starting to realize that but we need to be at the forefront of those discussions precisely to ensure that they happen in a just, in a redistributive and in a democratic way. So I wish you all an inspiring few hours. I'll be following along online and do, yeah, read the report, talk to the authors in the room and hopefully stay in touch for further conversations across Europe on this very important topic. So thank you, Davey. Thanks, Ian. So it is fantastic to have Jonathan and Peter from the greenhouse with us to launch this paper and to go into it. Jonathan Essex is a member of greenhouse, a chartered engineer, an environmentalist and he's been a councillor in Surrey, a green councillor since 2010. Peter Sims is the chair of greenhouse. His work started in greenhouse, started with his involvement in climate jobs modelling project and more recently he's been coordinating the climate emergency economy programme that you're going to hear a bit more. So welcome Jonathan and Peter to launch this new piece of work. Thank you very much, Davey, for that introduction. So I'm Peter Sims. I'm just going to take you through a bit of a tour of this report. We have paper copies at the back. So if you haven't already picked one up, there's paper copies at the back. It's also available to download online. There's the web links and all the details are on the back of the report. So rethink demand for energy. So this is rethinking demand in general, but this report specifically focuses on energy in the sense of energy that we use day-to-day, not energy embedded in products, but energy that we use on a day-to-day basis, direct energy consumption. So this report has three authors, myself and Jonathan and also Nadine who presented at the online event in Brussels but isn't here in Ireland today. I'm just going to give you a little overview of the project methodology and how we came to produce this report and then we're going to take you on a little tour of some of the key findings and the key points within it and hopefully this will stimulate some interesting reflections from your interesting questions and we can have a bit of a discussion. So as I said, this is a focus on direct energy demand, not wide resource use. We had to limit the scope because there's a huge amount to engage with here and we thought it was really interesting to just focus on energy for now. We've interviewed over the course of this project 30 leading academics and political and elected greens and candidates and various other people and we've got a range of different views that fade into this piece of work. That led to us holding two roundtable discussions. The report is published today and the forward for this report is by Philip Lambert who's an MEP in the Green European in the European Parliament. So that's sort of an overview of how this report came to be. I think it's important to give a bit of context about what we mean by rethinking demand for energy. So we're talking here about deliberately reducing the demand for energy and we're talking about therefore changing the demand for energy services, not just changing how they're provided. So this isn't about swapping one technology for another in order to deliver the same energy services. It's about rethinking what energy services actually matter to us, how important they are, what we want to prioritize and what we actually need and what benefits are well-being. And doing that requires engaging with two pieces of academic research that we've done for part of this. One of them's called social practice theory, but it's basically about daily practices. It's around the way businesses and individuals go about their lives today. And the other one's about systems of provision. So this is the things that determine, the things beyond our own control that determine what demand there is. So this is things like infrastructure, the layout of our public spaces, what's available in terms of shops and services, the relative pricing of different things. All of these things come together to influence and shape what decisions we make about demand and what decisions companies make about demand. So this is what we mean by rethinking demand for energy. We're going beyond just nudge and behavior change and just tweaking, swapping one technology for another, which Jonathan's going to come on to a bit later. So rethinking demand is necessary. So one of the things that we did as part of the research analysis, we interviewed people from the University of Cambridge and they've recently published a report called Absolute Zero and this report makes clear that there is only a limited amount of renewable energy, sustainable energy available. There is a limit to how fast you can build renewable energy, there's a limit to how much land we have, there's a limit around resources and material stuff, which I'm sure we'll get picked up later in terms of the circular economy. So we ultimately have a choice. We either reduce demand for energy or we overshoot our carbon budget and risk going beyond 1.5 degrees. So and the consequences that come with that. So and I think it's important to frame, you know, the situation we're in as a choice. It's not a fate of complete. You know, if we do nothing, effectively, business as usual, the status quo will continue. We have to, if we want to change direction, if we want to limit climate change, we have to, we think we pros and cons proactively choose to rethink demand for energy. And this is a collective choice our society must make. And I think in a lot of senses, it's a choice that we haven't necessarily made yet. And so this almost means we have a choice between the status quo and disruption because rapid change to our ways of our daily practices to our, the ways of business operating, business practices, all of this will, it will be disruptive in the short term. It has, you know, by definition change is disruptive. So we have to make that choice. And we also feel, and this is one of the things we touch on this report is it's also a choice between redistribution. It's a choice for a distribution because if we don't choose to redistribute the limited amount of energy that we will then have, we don't think, we think the inequality will become unacceptable. And certainly the inequality that we've already got will be baked in further. But, you know, to get the political mandate, to get the public mandate and public support for this sort of disruptive change, there has to be redistributive in nature. And so that's one of the points that we explore more in the report. And so I'm going to hand over to Jonathan now, who's perhaps going to pick up a few more bits on this, and then he's going to take you through some of the, the governance section of the report and then the policy section report, and then I'm going to come back at the end of that. So over to you, Jonathan. Thank you very much, Peter. I just want to touch on two things. Firstly, how we need to change the governance and then how we need to change the policies that respond to that. And why in that order? Well, we started this research thinking it was the policies that needed to change, but increasingly we found that it's the wider governance that blocks the policy change that's needed. We found that many places have declared a climate emergency, but it's not just about declaring it, it's about then transforming the action completely that follows. There's an opportunity now to address the cost of living crisis through redistribution of energy resources in ways that frame and direct that emergency response to the climate science. We need to take that on now. It's a challenge for emergency governance changes now, not at some point in the future to be planned for. Well, and what would that look like? What would a change of governance look like that eliminated fossil fuel use globally? How do we avoid those global oil companies and others corrupting the roles of governments that need to enact the policies that we need to limit the demand for energy in the first place, as well as phasing out fossil fuel supply? And unless we do that, the chances are that renewable energy that we install will be in addition to rather than instead of the fossil fuel use we currently use globally. There's a strong motivation now, as we know, for a drastic reduction in demand that reduces our reliance on imports of Russian oil and gas, not just here, not just across Europe, but across the world. And that really shouldn't mean that now is as important time as ever to radically rethink how much energy we use as a better way to improve energy security than securing energy security and somehow in terms of reliance on imports from elsewhere. We need to deal with the cost of living and the energy crisis together. That means we need to deal with excessive consumption alongside fuel poverty, isolation alongside hypermobility, jet-setting lifestyles. But how do we do that? What came through on the interviews is we need to address the vested interests, the fossil fuel companies that sit behind the current government system and hostage our governments to their demands. We need to change that so that we have transparency that's essential for building trust for politicians to be able to make the right decisions in all of our interests. So let's just step back from it and really accept that that is where politics is now. It's holding back the scale and the speed of change that's needed. We've got Greenwash. Greenwash, I used to think, was something that was the polder of BP or Shell Oil Company claiming to have the future all cleverly wrapped up in their advertising campaigns. But increasingly, it's also a tool of government that's papering over the cracks, the chasms, if you like, between the talk and the action. I'll just give you one example from the UK as that's what I know best. The UK government has just passed a new aviation policy. It's called Jet Zero. I imagine it may be started as a ministerial joke of someone who likes to sit on, have I got news for you? Because it rhymes with Net Zero. But what it does is allow the aviation industry to have plans to expand every single airport in the UK and expand the scale, the distance of freight and passengers around the world, driving airport expansion there as well as here at the time when we should be acting on climate change with the promise that somehow the some technical solutions will fly in or some biofuels will be grown elsewhere around the world to somehow buy us out of trouble later. And then we have this mythical idea of hydrogen and electric planes, which really only will work on the short haul, which at best will cover something like three or four percent of the emissions of flights. So there's a growing integrity gap that's papered over. It needs to be addressed. We need an honesty. And that means we also need to move away from a financial focus of politics to have such as a Ministry of Investment, which was suggested to us as a way to oversee and deliberate and arbitrate between government departments on climate grounds. We need to establish the state of emergency, more like that we have within in the Covid pandemic that allows us to act and react quickly. We need to develop a real mandate to sustain that over a period of time, such as through direct democracy and real empowerment at the citizen level. Because I think we really need to localize government and bring government such that it's held by and held to account by individual people. Next, I think on the side, we're talking about this idea of disruption. I think that's really, really important. We need to accept that rethinking energy demand means changing the status quo, not blindly hoping that renewable energy will somehow power a continuation of our current lifestyles, our current scale of energy and material use. That's what the size of the economy is all about. That simply is not possible. We need to drastically reduce the scale of our material and energy use to deal with the climate and connected biodiversity emergencies. That requires change and that means that the future is going to be different. Disruption will be inherent, but we can work through that through things like a just transition to provide the security and the new jobs we need across all the different sectors. We need to share the burdens, but it will mean that some businesses will decline, they'll need to shift, they'll need to pivot and they've got currently their hands on our governments and we need to address that. But crucially, disruption shouldn't just be about helping people through jobs. It should be about helping the most vulnerable to be supported through that change. Those with the greatest need, those in fuel poverty. And if we don't do that, it won't be just a failure of justice. It simply won't work. Just think of what happened to Macron when he proposed changes in fuel prices in France without any measures to address the inequality. The yellow vests came out. We need to take everyone with us. And that means we need to have a change of our current lifestyles. We need to plan support across our economy. We need governments to intervene in a planned approach to universal basic incomes, but really extending that to universal basic services that extend far beyond the NHS into transport, into energy, into other areas. That's the kind of future we really, we really need. And what does that mean? That means we need to think about changes, not just in terms of individual sectors in transport, in energy and health and so on, but also across the whole economy. We need to shift from growth being the focus of our economy to post growth being our accepted reality of where economics is. And that means we need to change the metrics, the objectives of our economy. And what happens if we move from a growthist approach to an acceptance that we are beyond that growth stage in the history of humanity? It means that to address the growing inequalities of today, we need to redistribute through the economics that we have. So a post growth economics we would argue, and it's come out so strongly in our interviews, I can't not emphasis them up this enough. A post growth economics is an economics of redistribution. And yeah, and that means we really need to overhaul our systems of governance. Everything needs to change. It isn't a question of somehow delivering on the climate emergency, reducing our scale of energy use by having a set of individual policies within our current governance systems. It won't work. We need to declare a state of emergency. We need to involve people far more actively participating, deliberating, holding our politicians to account, understanding and evaluating what works and really making sure we continue to evolve and adapt our politics going forward. So what do those policies mean? So this slide comes directly out of this year's IPCC climate mitigation report, chapter five, which is about changing demands within society, focuses on avoid, shift, improve as a policy framework to reduce the scale of energy use to address climate change across our society. So why avoid, shift, improve? Well, it's about, it's like the energy equivalent of reduce reuse recycle, if you like, we need to avoid the need for energy in the first place before we shift to more efficient production and sorry, more efficient consumption. So that will be things like public transport. You'll be about shared services rather than individual consumption. So there's a cultural change, there's a huge cultural change in the shift. And then improve is about using technologies to deal with what's left. It's about renewable energy supply. It might be electric vehicles, but the status quo is very much focused on the improved stage. It's all about electric vehicles, solar panels and wind turbines. That's what we hear from our politicians. We don't so much hear about the need for the cultural shift. We don't so much hear about the need to stop our dash for growth, our dash for evermore infrastructure and resource use in the first place. So let me elaborate slightly more on that. So avoiding energy use will mean things like banning private jets. It'll mean stopping airport expansion. It'll also mean reducing the amount of energy use in the home. And one thing that struck me from the conversation with the leading sociologists is 18 to 21 degrees, the average temperature in a house. Why is that? That's because that's the design temperature for comfort based on a male wearing a suit all year round indoors. Sometimes people wear less in the summer, sometimes people wear more in the winter, and there's a much more diversity of people than that research suggests. But that is locked into building regulations that's been promulgated around the world. We need to address that demand. We need to challenge some of those embedded rules that get locked into what we think of as acceptable and normal. Shifting, I mean, I think the big shifts are things like public transport. It's about retrofitting all of our buildings. It's the cultural shift that you don't see in the energy security strategies of the UK, which solely focuses on energy supply. And what's the benefit? It's also this avoid and shift before improve. It means we can do it faster, avoid and shift to things. It's far quicker to change culture, believe it or not, than it is to build wind turbine. And if you do those two first at scale and at speed, then the amount of renewable energy, the amount of technology investment, the amount of lithium and cobalt to be mined to go into batteries is one huge amount less. Let me move on. We need to join up policies. We need to think of packages of policies rather than individual policies. We need to bring together the enforcement sticks with the the carrots of incentives at an economic level, but we also need to link together supply and demand. So for example, in the food sector, yes, we need to move away from industrial agriculture at the consumption end, which can be about incentivizing shifts in terms of what we buy. But at the same time, we need a just transition of agriculture to support it. We need to join up the supply with the demands. And we'll find that in all of these policy areas, that there's a spectrum of policies you can have from the fairly soft nudges all the way through to progressive pricing and then rationing and then outright bans. What's acceptable at any moment in time in any sector is going to be different in any place. But what we found in our research was that participation, involvement of people in decision making will shift the bar as to what's acceptable in any one of those areas. So if we want rapid change, if we want transformational change, we need to bring people with us and we need to involve them actively in the decision making pro process. I think that's absolutely crucial. I think finally what I like to say is, and I think it's really to emphasize a point that Peter made earlier on, is that involvement in participation is also about not just involving people to increase what's possible, but it's also to better inform government of the impacts of policies that's having and the need for these policies to be redistributed. I mean, universal basic services, shared public transport, that's going to require public sector investment and public leadership and stronger regulations to direct where we want private sector to go. That's a really big ask for policy makers of today. And that's why I think it is that transformation of governance that passes a patriot approach that's moving the moving away of us in interest that I think is going to be the really big thing that we need to unblock to allow this kind of thing to happen. Back over to you, Peter. Thank you very much, Jonathan. Now, there's a lot to digest there. There's a lot of different things in terms of, you know, this report tries to capture a very broad range of different angles on rethinking demand for energy and, you know, give an overview to frame the whole debate. So, you know, Jonathan has talked about the governance challenge, the challenge that our current governance systems aren't up to scratch. And he's talked about the, you know, what the policies look like and what the interventions might look like and how they might need to fit together. I'm now going to talk very briefly to wrap up about how we talk about this. What are narratives? What's the role of narratives? What's the role of communication? How do we, you know, take this message forward? And I think to start that, we need to step back a bit. We need to not go, so therefore I need to, you know, work out what the sound bite is to communicate this. We've got to step back a little bit because, actually, if we're talking about changing culture, we've got to look at what influences culture as a whole. It's not just about, you know, what we message from our organisation or any other organisation or political party or otherwise. What influences culture? What influences values? What influences the way we people understand the world? It's a huge range of things from advertising to, you know, even the layout of, you know, the way services are provided has all sorts of influences on how people understand the world and how people process things. So, rather than looking at narratives from the this specific narrative here, we have to look at the narratives overall that are portrayed and permeated and propagated by society. And, you know, that might mean restricting certain vested interests and incumbent industry's ability to influence cultural narratives, do things like advertising, as well as making space for alternative narratives and crafting alternative narratives. So, I think the other, it's also important to recognise the limitations of messaging. You know, we, if you think in terms of, you know, Covid and, you know, a lot of governments have, you know, public information campaigns, which is often what people think about in terms of, well, how can we get communicate all this rethinking to our message? Well, maybe we need public information campaigns, but there's a real limit to what you can do with public information campaigns. And there are some, there's some academic research about that and reference in the report to do with too often public information or any sort of top down one way messaging focuses on what the instructions and glosses over the why it's much harder to, to build understanding and comprehension around the why we need to do things and why is we thinking about important and what are the dynamics of that choice we have to make through one way messaging. And this again comes back to that point that this has to be a collective choice, you know, even if not everyone can be involved in every part of it, there has to, we have to build a sense of agency. We have to build a sense of control, a sense of people, you know, have some agency to shape what this looks like and that we all have some degree be part of a collective choice. And that requires look at these deliberative forms of democracy. So why matters not just what, and we also have to stop this tendency to sort of, well, because we've got to get it through the one way sound bite, we've got to simplify all of this complexity of a 36 page report down to, you know, a two sentence sound bite. And unfortunately, you know, that just obscures it means that we will never really get to grips with the real debate that needs to happen. So we have to trust people with the reality and the complexity and we have to, you know, not shy away from having those difficult conversations. So there's a role for deliberation. So the report, as well as having that sort of general conversation about what the role of narratives is, it also, you know, it does say that, you know, here are some things where we need to build consistent narratives. So we need to have a consistent narrative that what we're aiming for is perhaps well being for all, you know, energy security for all, it's not economic growth, that might be a means it might not be a means the economy is a tool, it's not a destination in its own right. We maybe need to have consistent messages about what humanity is placed in the world, you know, that we are interdependent with other life on earth with e-planetary systems and that we have an intergenerational dependency as well. And we have to convey and reinforce values like empathy and honesty and we, you know, if we're going to take that redistributive approach Jonathan mentioned, we need to, you know, proactively be thinking about well what's the impact of XYZ intervention on this community and that community and therefore how can we mitigate against that? How can we, you know, build into the proposals ways of compensating, ways of both, you know, redistribution isn't just economic, it's also, for instance, universal basic energy allowances to show if energy prices go up everyone can afford their basic energy needs, things like that. So narratives need to be differentiated as well as they need to be consistency in some areas. They also need to be differentiated in some sense. They need to be sensitive to different cultural areas and different geographic areas and they need to evolve with time. There's no, you know, here's the five narratives that are going to communicate all of this to every audience in Europe. That just doesn't exist. We don't, you know, we have to accept that there's a degree of complexity there and work with that. So I'm going to end with this quote from the report. There's no time left. We need a metamorphosis, not a transition or a transformation. We need to change everything. I think that brings to mind a number of key points and the one that stands out for me is this idea that we can't possibly know what the end result is going to look like, what the destination is going for until we've started. The change that we're going to be required in order to rethink energy demand, you know, if we're going to make that choice to rethink energy demand and limit global temperature rise rather than pursue the status quo, we're going to have to have a leap of faith almost. We're going to have to make some decisions and head in a certain direction and we won't know exactly what the society we're going to create is going to look like until we've got there. And we just have to accept that. And we have to, you know, perhaps talk about that too. So thank you very much, David. I will hand back to you and I'll just go back to the beginning. Excellent stuff. Thank you, Jonathan and Peter, the greenhouse over in the UK. So we're going to have a number of Irish responses, then an opportunity to take responses from our online participants and on the floor. As I mentioned, we have a constraint where you'll have to come up and make your comment, reflection or ask a question. So we're going to have two responses and then we're going to hear these other questions of response, then bring back the greenhouse before we go to a break. So our first responder is Saif O'Neill. Saif is an assistant professor at DCU, School of Law and Governance in Climate Change Policy and Politics. Saif, your response please. Thank you so much, David. Which way? I have to stand here. Thanks very much, David. And for the organizers for inviting me, it's a real honour to be back here in the Mansion House after some time and to be with you to talk about what is a really important contribution to a debate we're not having actually in practice. So just to put a little bit of Irish focus on it, our per capita CO2 emissions are about 7.11 tons of carbon dioxide per person per year. And if you add in other greenhouse gases, that rises to about 13 tons of CO2 equivalent. And we know that the planetary fair share of the global greenhouse gas budget, specifically the carbon dioxide budget is something like 1.6. So we are way overshooting what is our fair share of a very finite and shrinking resource. We would need at least 2.8 planets if everybody consumed natural resources at the rate that we do in Ireland. Now, people might say, well, it's not individuals or households that are doing all this consumption, but as a proxy for what's happening in the economy, it's important to have rough figures like that to work with. So one of the points I would make just in relation to the report is that when we talk about energy demand, we do actually need to be quite numerically literate about it because it's the numbers that matter. The numbers are telling us what the threshold is, what the barriers, what the potential are. So we do need to kind of start to quantify what's possible and what we ought to be doing, as well as obviously measuring and monitoring where we're at. And that of course takes you away from the conversation at the moment in Irish policy, which is very much about percentages, relative reductions, percentages of renewable penetration into the system, for example. Don't address the overall issue of energy demand that's continually growing and it's expected to continue to grow right out to 2030, complicated by the fact that not only is the Irish economy growing, but the population is growing as well. And so household formation, all those kind of basic ingredients add to energy demand and it's a complex process. So I think any serious political program for degrowth, for managing energy demand for an Irish context really needs to grapple with their numbers, because that's the starting point from which we can backcast and look at the kind of scenarios that might work and the different kind of policy instruments that might work. So the other thing I wanted to say was that degrowth is not necessarily the only thing this report wants to talk about and it's a great piece of work by the way. Thank you so much. But it's important that we point to some issues with it because it's actually a cluster of lots of different things. On the one hand it's a kind of a causal or positive theory about the way the economy works, but it's also a theory about the way the economy ought to work. So a kind of a normative program of the way things should be. But there's also a third dimension to it, which is kind of, I'm going to call it rhetorical, but I don't mean it in a dismissive way. I mean it's the kind of way that it might enter into political discourse as a kind of narrative, just as you were telling us Peter. And I don't mean it dismissively at all. But the reason I'm identifying that third strand is because for preparing today, I had a look at the Oroctus website. And I did a search. Now the Oroctus website archives go back a few decades. And there were just three entries for the word degrowth. Two of them are from this year, one from Senator Rosine Garvey, Green Party Senator, who was talking about it in the context of circular economy bill. The second was very interesting contribution by also Green TD Mark O'Coughisey in relation to the sick leave bill, which was all around working time and workers rights. So he was interested in raising the issue with the minister, the relevant minister in the context of four day working week and the kind of shift automation and the implications for work. So the third entry is from 2019, Previous Toil. And it was another TD entirely from a very left wing party. And interestingly, Joan Collins, the TD in question, really advanced the concept. She put it right out there in the context of the kind of whole economic system needing to change, to adapt to climate change, to kind of redistribute wealth resources, and to kind of address all of the problems that you've identified. And the reason I'm mentioning this is because she explicitly adopted it as a socialist ideal. And the challenge for you as Greens of various hues is to try to find a way of explaining to the public what this concept is and what sort of concept it is. Is it a socialist idea? I mean, you might say, oh, God, that's just so irritating to be always dragged back into that kind of spectrum. But in terms of public opinion, I don't think it's going to be enough to just entice people with citizens assemblies and participatory democracy. We need a much more sophisticated level of political discourse from the top. And unfortunately, even for a small political party like the Greens, it falls to the Greens to do the leading on these issues. And the question is, is anybody going to lead out the conversation in this way? Is it helpful to do it starting with a concept like degrowth? Or would it be better to look at scenarios for different sectors and say, right, let's talk energy, let's talk models, let's talk scenarios, let's do what, you know, do the framework, but very sector specific, and then talk about the transport sector and other areas of energy demand and of course, through systems slightly separately, package it in a way that isn't so daunting, perhaps, for the public. And I'm not being as prescriptive as I sound, really, I haven't worked this out for myself. Because the reason I think is that there are a number of really significant elephants in the room here. There are really huge taboos around limiting personal freedoms, and advertising. I mean, you address all these in the report, but translating that into a coherent political program, like how do you even start? Yes, we could do it with the advertising industry. We have the tobacco example behind us, which has worked. But there are also the kind of really emerging constraints that we're going to have to address. The limitations on energy use, whether it's through pricing or through caps, through rationing, whatever, we have to somehow initiate this kind of conversation. It is entirely absent from political discussion. And, you know, you know, I don't think well being for all covers that ground. I don't think we are being honest enough with the public about the risks associated with both our insecure energy situation and with climate change. The third point is that information to the public is not to be taken for granted. One of the reasons why there was a public acceptance of the COVID measures is that there was a bombardment of the public with scary information about the risks of this, that and the other, and what you needed to do. There was no let up in the instructions we were given, and they were updated and justified. But the interesting thing is they were also legitimized. Now, you do raise the question of legitimacy in the report and the different types of mandates that are required for different types of measures. But the legitimacy critically that COVID told us worked, admittedly, we felt like we had no choice, was firstly parliamentary oversight. There was very, very deep scrutiny of all the measures that were taken. And secondly, everything had a sunset clause, and that if you're restricting people's rights in any way, civil liberties, that kind of sunset clause is very important. Otherwise, you're just giving the government sweeping powers to have police at every roundabout, which we wouldn't want in perpetuity. So I think when we're talking about participation and what's acceptable and what's feasible, we have to broaden the conversation past the whole deliberative democracy piece. And I know that that's something Greens will feel comfortable with, because you lead from the top anyway on this. But representative democracy is still very, very important for providing those kind of institutional checks and balances. And I think the rule of law and institutional mechanisms to address governance is also a really critical area. And so governance is like we have ways of making changes happen and building institutional mechanisms and regimes. We have some experience of doing this and we should work with what we know has worked. So apologies if I've gone out a bit long and look forward to any other questions later. So online participants, if you want to make a reflection or ask a question, if you can use the question and answer function. Everyone here, we're going to have a second Irish response to the greenhouse paper from Orla Kelly. Orla is assistant professor in social policy at the Department of Social Work and Social Justice at UCD. And our research areas include social dimensions of climate change, sustainable human wellbeing, and eco social policies. Orla. Okay, first of all, thank you very much for inviting me to be here. It's such a great report. So a couple of things, I'm just going to pick up on a couple of things that are in the report and relate them to some of the policy and research agenda that I'm involved in here in Ireland and that are happening more generally. So firstly, in terms of the tone of the report, and I think this is reflective of how things are moving on the whole in terms of both national and international policy briefs and policymaking and that there's a real urgency, there's a shift in tone to be reflective to acknowledge the appropriate urgency of our current situation. As Antonio Gutierrez said just this year, delay is death and that is really where we are now, you know, where the time for delay and incremental change is really passed or summarized at the end of your report. The other kind of tone shift in the report that I think is also reflective when we see it in the IPCC report is it's this reappropriation of the notion that we need to also change demand side policies. So there was right partly in response to the kind of appropriation of individual action by fossil fuel interests, you know, it was all about measuring our individual carbon footprint so that structural change wouldn't be necessary or happen. Even as a green movement or an environmental movement, there has been kind of a reluctance to take that back for fear of kind of playing into that narrative of incremental and individual change. But as was mentioned earlier, we see the shift in the latest IPCC report and we see it in reports like this and others that actually individual action, collective and be it as a person, a community or as a constituent demanding of our policymakers must be coupled with this kind of policy making to have an opportunity structure that allows people to make decisions in relation to energy demand or others, the so-called provisioning systems that we need to allow agency in terms of energy use and other things. So that's the first thing. The second, the kind of three teams of the report governance. First of all, in terms of addressing vested interests, again, this is something that we're seeing much more, much more open and honest acknowledgement that where we are, where we are not by accident, but because people who are benefiting from capital accumulation have stalled and progress, have stalled policy making and have sold seeds of division within our society, thereby limiting the political mandate of those parties that would make progress and make change. So this kind of acknowledgement of vested interest I really like and thought was great. In terms of just a research project that we're doing here in Ireland at the moment, colleagues and I at Northeastern are looking at lobbying over the last 10 years by interest groups here and what narratives they've used to really delay climate action by sowing seeds of division and doubt and how those have fed inadvertently or otherwise into Irish media coverage, be it the Farmers Journal or more mainstream coverage. So I'm just kind of getting into these nitty gritty a little bit to kind of give you examples of how it is, how we can move forward from a research and policy making agenda to taking these big ideas of degrowth into actual actions. The second part in terms of narrative or policy and this picking up on this movement towards sufficiency and I think I really like side points of this well-being for all is true and you know it's what we need to focus on but what is that you know it's such a huge concept. We do have a lot of work to do and I think there's a lot of there is a lot of research happening in terms of demand side, what it is the numbers that I was talking about, what it is that is a good life, what is a decent provisioning system, what changes that the government need to do, where's the baseline you know we're all familiar with this donut economics of this safe operating space for humanity. How do we reach a social floor where everybody has an equitable standard of living but we're also not transgressing these planetary boundaries and we're starting and a research agenda to get more into the nitty gritty in terms of numbers and policies that facilitate this change. If there's also a redistribution piece what how do we redistribute energy and carbon throughout the world and within society but there's a bigger question here too so I just finished research on a trial a six-month trial of reduced work times of starting companies in Ireland results to come another report launch next month but the the idea here is it's looking at you know how if we if we frame the environmental question as an individual environmental loss and we allow the narrative to to be positioned that environmental needs and meeting social needs are somehow oppositional as opposed to mutually constitutive that's an issue and reducing work time is one of those policies that has within this kind of broader post-growth policies and agenda that has the propensity to allow people to have this better standard of living in ways that isn't so ecologically intensive. Now to get to another point of the report this needs to be part of a unified social and ecological framework if everybody is taking working four days a week and we're allowing Ryanair to offer flights for 10 euro you know we're going to have some problems so if but it gets to the point that you know this needs to be a unified social and ecological. So that's my final point because I know everybody's probably dying for their break by now I'm enjoying being the last speaker but is to be conscious of our framing and I think that this certainly we need overarching changes to how we frame narratives and and and how people need to understand the urgency and the danger like what Saib was saying you know we were bombarded with messages about how you know the danger to our well-being that COVID was offering but where is the equal urgency and consistent messaging when it comes to the climate crisis and where we are. So we absolutely need that but we also need to be to to kind of put out there that it's there are many double dividend wins out there be it four day week or something else where we can experience gains in human well-being in ways that are not ecologically intensive and and finally part of that kind of engagement and messaging is just like Saib and and the authors of this report have laid out in detail that there's an engagement piece. So we've got a research project in UCD now at the moment with students to ask that we know that their levels of eco anxiety and grief are are going higher like all of us know I don't think anybody who works in this sphere and you know has two eyes in their head can really feel okay about our trajectory but in addition to asking them you know what it is how are they feeling what is the level of anxiety how concerned are we about climate change we know we're concerned but but it's also this this kind of notion of well what can the university be doing to how can we reform our provisioning systems be it in the education or policymaking or whatever it is to allow people to act to have the agency to act in you know less energy demanding ways this kind of reforming of our social institutions in ways that that allow for individual agency to act in our self-interest while also kind of laying out this bigger structural role for policymakers be it in government or institutions like universities to provide an opportunity system to to bridge this this gap between behavior and and this gap between how people want to act and in less eco eco intensive ways and being facilitated to do so um so thank you for the report it was great it's really thank you for this thing thanks orla it's uh we now have time for bringing the intelligence in the room so if people want to indicate if they've got a question or they want to come up so we have three or four um we are going to have to come up to the podium to make this so the online participants see us as well can I ask you to come up first then yeah and online participants there's a few of in the question and answer function I've asked some questions or a readout so hi everyone um how great to be in a room the oak room the oak was the symbol of wisdom and strength and unity in ancient Ireland and under parallel as well uh my name is brian mcdonnell I'm a statistics advisor to the WHO on the covid response but if I may just take two or three minutes to answer the question you you brought up there about how we can use covid to um to engage communities in that's okay so in the covid response the global response it was like a grandfather clock was like 10 different different circles next to each other the central one is uh coordination and the second one is risk communication and community engagement and I was the statistics advisor on that one so we we have been thinking then about how we can use what we've learned on engaging communities in emergencies to to climate change and we're we're developing a paper on it and I won't take too long to go through it now um I think when we're looking at emergency responses Ireland was very strong in risk communication but we wouldn't see it as a model uh the place that really stands out as a model for me is Congo with the Ebola response Ebola is a frightening disease it's really good with communication people have been told what the story is what's happening what to do but the communities lead so everything currently not cause the context is Congo there's not not a lot of facilities but and so many things like communities organize the funerals which have been done very carefully they do the surveillance they look after the people you know so the communities are actually leading the response it's so impressive you know and of course that provides the agency you know so I think like we do have a vision for that climate change is a crisis you know so and we think what we have can be applied broadly to the climate crisis just so many things you're talking about is what we also are working on ourselves behavior change trust participation community supports and for engagement and then risk communication and you were mentioning as well the infodemic greenwashing and so forth how we deal with that you know in there in Geneva we wrote guidance during the crisis on risk communication community engagement and it was all about the systems building so we have actually now very detailed guidance for the first time on what we mean by each component of risk communication community engagement systems and what we're trying to do now is look at how that can be applied to climate change so I just go through things very very quickly and so much of the is already there that we have it but I think what we don't have and what you're always saying you're saying as well side is just the sense that professional support community's lead you know it's about community leadership because we won't get there otherwise you know that's for sure so things like participation with the aris convention also the doll I think that's such a fundamental point the doll is representative body and director marcusy is confident about what are the supports that we need for communities for them to be able to act you know for all of us myself as well all of you members of community and then on risk communication for instance on infodemics and greenwashing what is the system we're going to put in place to deal with that you know what are the components you know we have to start talking technically about these questions so like I said that I'm going to stop there we're writing a paper on it at the moment I've actually been in contact I'm in the green party and John hello I'm in contact with our colleagues in the green party average that in the questions that government bar and does have an interest in it but can't say anything more than that you know it's just very early discussion but also from personal point of view would like to be in contact with you and I hope maybe we can look at this paper together and it'd be great to start detailing what what system is you know so that's a thanks very much yeah it's wonderful to see the synergy and connections between different sectors and where the common interests are and so there's a few more let's take a woman if we can so you're looking at this camera here just to give the online participants fine okay first of all I want to congratulate the authors on this report it's incredibly important it's a step in the right direction it's what we all should be doing you should be moving toward degrowth I fully agree with what they put forward what bothers me the most and I'm a sociologist by training my name is Glinda Chimino what bothers me the most is that as someone mentioned the elephant in the room of limited personal freedom the other bigger elephant in the room which is never dealt with is war and the military the amount of energy they use the amount of resources they use the amount of damage they do and as an American living in Ireland 50 years by choice I have I'm very aware that the biggest influence in this whole area is the American military which uses as much as if it was a country be using the 47th country in terms of energy use but we have a vicious circle here because we know that climate change can cause wars through a competition for resources feeling exist existentially threatened by nuclear weapons can also cause wars all these things are things we need to look at but alternatively wars cause climate change in a very very big way and we can't keep writing reports and producing reports in which we act as if that doesn't exist if every single person in Ireland brought their usage down to 1.6 a fair share it would not solve anything we need a world solution to a world problem it's not just the military is not just the wars it's the aftermath of wars it's the rebuilding the use of concrete the use of it's the agricultural lands with mines on them and unable to be used okay I'll wind this up we have I believe at the moment 222 million people in over 53 countries and territories who are experiencing severe food insecurity many of these are in famine already if you can imagine one mother watching her child die from starvation multiply that by several millions and you'll see what we're ignoring in the world I just want us to find a world solution to end war eliminate nuclear weapons and then this will be possible thank you there's definitely a lot to do so I'm gonna as our next in-person speaker comes up I'll just read out a couple of the questions for Peter and Jonathan so Reinhard Huss asks should there be a shift from an economic to an ecological focus it's the ecology stupid rather than the economy and there's a few more okay hi my name is Manuel Salazar I'm from the global south but I'm also a marriage person I've been here for 17 years and experienced you know in South America also how what all all companies do you know what they're and one of the things that I've seen in all this time is that we are as pieces than more reactive than we are proactive and unfortunately we deal with the situation is when it's an hour you know in our own steps so the eight out of ten people here in other things than climate change is not really a threat for them because they haven't you know suffered as it is but it's very different when you go to Klum tarf and you talk to people who Klum tarf and they say oh yeah we got a problem because they you know have all these floods all the time so I suppose one question that I would have for you guys because I've read the model of the reports is if we have an example where we human beings have been proactively you know acting on try to address a situation where you know obviously it's going to affect us at some point but we don't see it anymore right so and the covid situation for example so we all think that it was just a you know sickness and comes to us at some point but in reality it was we human beings you know and threatened wildlife taking wildlife animals and bringing the disease to us the cost of living for example so everything things then is because you know prices are rising but it's our dependence in oil and gas that are you know bringing those prices up because everything depends on international markets and the solution is to switch into renewables so those connections over there we climate and the situations that we are suffering are just not there so then we have somehow to be more proactive as a species actually to address in those issues that are going to be a problem in the future but at the same time make those connections that we are suffering right now and it's also linked to uh climate change somehow so it's basically a question and also you know lay down this version yeah so i think um anyone else in the room what i've got and so there's a couple other ones here uh paul leech is asking uh paul leech is asking discuss the ethos of flourishing in a green perennial economy environment society shauna farrell uh just a statement localize government uh and larkin lion says what role do you see for energy efficiency gavin thank you um in response i think to cyve's point around measurements i was wondering if you had taken into consideration david mccleary's paper from 2011 sustainability without all the hot air i think one of the really interesting insights from that paper was a calculation that he made which estimated the uk per capita and i don't like using per capita because it's such a bland number it doesn't allow for the differences in wealth which could be up to 700 percent in my opinion between the richest five percent and the the poorest five percent but it was calculated in the uk per capita energy use is 125 kilowatt hours per person per day so i think that's a really interesting number to kind of work from that is our energy use and if we're talking about this demand size management you know what is an acceptable number below 125 kilowatt hours per person per day i mean a question like that is at least i think because carbon is such an abstract figure it's such an it's an invisible gas we can't smell it we can't see it it's a very difficult thing to relate to the kilowatt hour actually is a very valuable tool 125 kilowatt hours is like leaving 125 40 watt light bulbs on 24 hours a day so you know you could just imagine that you can see it it can relate to but do you have a sense as to what is the number we should be aiming to as per kilowatt hour per person per day i mean and i didn't i didn't notice the word kilowatt hour in the report at all okay before i hand back to the greenhouse just check in if anyone else wants to make a statement ask a question eric do you want to come up conroy from the uh green party you just want to raise the word degrowth and it seems to be a word we don't use very much so i've used it we tried to get a policy in the green party where degrowth which wasn't acceptable the two guys mentioned economic growth i was wondering about that it wasn't a reference to degrowth but certainly if we're to reduce energy consumption it must mean degrowth so we need to move to a degrowth situation also orla mentioned about working a four-day week when people talk about a four-day week they never talk about well we need to reduce the income of a four-day week uh it shouldn't just be about a four-day week for the same five-day salary we should be reducing our income people don't want to hear that but to me that's what degrowth is about it's all the adding of all the economic activity including all our salaries so we need to reduce our own personal salaries obviously we need to pay for housing but and so we need to get degrowth out there so i'm glad it's been raised here today thank you okay there's a few more questions uh megan karmodi from coalition 2030 it strikes me that we're using a number of different languages to talk about this issue there's degrowth of course but there's also the well-being index which nesq is looking at donor economics orla mentioned that which is increasingly doing downscale to city and business level the municipalities like amsterdam are now using the kate rayworth's framework to look at the the city's development into the future and the sdgs which i know have sdg eight uh decent work and economic growth although in the recent national implementation plan that's the sustainable development goals national implementation plan and it is noted that looking beyond just economic growth is important and i know that 11 ministers including the three party leaders launched this plan that was just i think last week and last week the future generations commissioner in wales gave a talk about the um talk about the future generations act how do the speakers suggest the above are integrated for policy coherence as an aside this weekend an eco festival in the irish museum of modern art workshops and donor economics took place they were extremely popular and thank you so that was uh megan permody uh antony joseph borgan EU ministers in september agreed on new emergency measures to tackle the energy crisis including a mandatory target to reduce electricity consumption by only five percent of peak hours is it true to say that the EU level policymakers have not yet embraced demand reduction despite geopolitical situation instead preferring a shift to alternative fossil fuels like lng nick armstrong how do we counter the techno optimists the eco modernist analysis the climate change can be solved by much more low zero carbon technologies this will appear much more acceptable to the public than reduced wealth and redistribution that was nick armstrong and he's also nick as well how do we counter the tech oh it's the same one so just checking before i hand back to jonathan peter any other comments reflections in the room okay jonathan peter back to you for your reflections on the reflection thank you very much for those very interesting selection of points so i'm going to try and pick off some of them and make some points and response to them and then jonathan's going to come in with some extra points so um there was a point about needing to talk into some numbers and quantify things i think that's absolutely correct we do need to move from the you know so this is the direction so therefore how you know how much and so we talk in the report around well what would sufficient reduction look like what sort of rate you know maybe it's not worth getting a head tap over whether it's six percent or seven percent or 20 percent or 21 percent but you know the scale of change requiring getting some feel of the scale change really important um so for instance one you know just two numbers that might be of interest from the numbers point of view the ip cc reckoned that just from doing behaviour change trying to nudge people to make different choices you can get that five percent reduction in energy whereas if you take the full sort of um changing systems provision changing social practices approach then you can potentially get reduced energy by up to 70 percent so they're really not by taking that big of you there is a huge scope to reduce energy arms and rethinking that um so jumping around a little bit um so there's definitely a need for political leadership that i think the point on needing uh you know we've got to start having these conversations that requires people to start you know broaching these conversations and people with political platforms to start broaching these conversations that is really important um i think we also need to talk about what we want as well as how we're going to get there we need to if we're going to start to get you know so people mentioned flourishing and you know you know how about what future generations and how do we balance the intergenerational aspect of it um uh you know we we need there needs to be a discussion we need to have the discussion about what we want to value you know what really matters to us what is well being for what which bits of you know what we want to prioritize energy use for there's there's some really big conversations there and we do need to start having those conversations and deciding in communities in societies in cultures what you know what matters to us um interesting point about sunset clauses that was um you know emergency governance by definition is temporary you know if you're going to suspend current governance and say for this period we're going to have an emergency thing that by definition needs to have some sort of end on it people can't you know it's very difficult to expect everyone to sort of suspend for a long period of time so there's a there's a tension there because we are it's going to take years to do you know compared to the pandemic the respondents and this could take longer so how do you balance that was definitely an interesting tension um uh when it was coming the points were raised around and governance reform in fact you know we do have systems to do some of these stuff and we've you know we prove that you know some countries better than others and the proof that they have got structures in place to respond to different sorts of emergencies um and that you know there's clearly more work being done to to work out what some of these systems would look like um and I've been really fascinated to see some of these papers on um you know learning some of the lessons from emergency responses to the pandemic but my reflection at least from the UK is that there's a there's a lack of coherent talks about proposals for governance reform you know there's talk about tweaking around the edge of all we that we'll have you know in in in England it's about what you're not changing the voting system but you know there's proposals for tweaks there's you know uh campaign groups coming out and saying we want to sit assembly but actually you know coherent proposals for how we could overhaul governance and what bits of what we've got in the moment are really useful and we want to keep and what bits we need to add on and there's a lack of that conversation is not very well established I would say um so and that comes back to this point about bold ideas you know until someone has laid out well I think the way to deliver universe basic services to you know a universal engine allowance looks like this then people can't disagree with it until there's a a current comprehensive proposal on the table and so for instance I was looking at advertising in another piece of work recently and you know there's lots of proposals where we could restrict advertising for our children or we could we've already used the advertising around smoking maybe we should restrict advertising for high-carbon products but there was no one who's sort of gone let's step back and what's a comprehensive proposal so there's a report of the greenhouse published um a few years ago about what would a comprehensive reform look like you know if you did the whole thing and I think there's that need to be bold the need to you know how do we get away from incremental change will we stop going well we've got this let's see if we can make it a bit better we've got a step back and go ahead a minute we've got not there's all this stuff maybe we need to look at what the step changes and that requires that bit of distance that bit of stepping back right last few different bits um shift from economy to ecology I think that links to another point in terms and Jonathan I think we're going to pick up on the point about degrowth and what language want to use but um we need to talk about what we want and we need to talk about what we think matters and if we spend all our time talking about the economy and whether you know we have this amount of economic growth or that amount of economic growth and we talk about the economics of it all the time then we give the overall impression and then the overall narrative that it's the amount of money and economics that's what really matters whereas if we talk about the things that really matter then we might shift that overall balance and some of this starts to link into work around values which I won't go into um I'll just someone mentioned something that just led me to think we the precautionary principles really you know really needs to come out of this point so you'd be the idea of making that choice between the status quo and choosing disruption choosing redistribution and choosing to either end to mine it's effectively choosing the precautionary approach you know you know we could bet on future technologies to come along and save us we could bet on us to develop some new way of doing it or we could take the precautionary approach and go let's reduce engine demand to what we know we can deliver with renewable engine now so there is a you know it's almost the safe bet um I think I will leave it there um oh the only other last thing I'll say um which links to the point about invested interests is incumbent industries change creates opportunities there were some business models that um that were on some business orders of change and we we need to stop thinking about it all aggregated together as growth or not growth we need to start thinking well you know we're going to have a different economy and there's going to be some bits that are bigger and some bits that are less and we can't allow the incumbent industries who've got a good little deal and we quite like to keep it to allow us you know to to stop us reconsidering what matters to everyone as a whole we have to restrict the political influence of incumbent industries because the the the industries that will benefit don't have the same financial resources that the ones that are currently incumbents do um Jonathan thank you I just want to try and pick up on a few different points hopefully apologies for any overlaps firstly um Brenda you talked about elephants um it's green I think it's always good to talk about elephants um but I think your elephants were around personal freedom I would add in I think population growth was mentioned as another elephant we don't really talk about much and then about the the war and freedom freedom in terms of what happens in terms of security internationally I think we do need to talk about international stuff the whole climate framing of of COP the conference of parties that happens each year is about territorial emissions so I think you said war was 47th country globally well I would add in aviation and shipping internationally which I think ranked as something like six and 10 or 11 um also completely omitted from most UK government policies most Irish government policies because we as governments are not required to do anything we haven't agreed to do anything internationally we've left that as voluntary frameworks for other people to address so yes I think we do need to talk about that we need to integrate it um I think to focus on the global uh or international government systems is a is a whole another area of work um but a very important one in terms of the the the questions of numbers and David Mackay 125 kilowatt hours per day I wonder if that includes the embodied energy of imports or not because I think that's quite significant and important to consider in western countries how much of our energy use is that that's effectively borrowed from other other countries a carbon and energy use I mean the numbers that we looked at were two firstly Julian Allwood leaves a research program based out of Cambridge University called UK fires they looked at the rate in which you could feasibly deliver renewable energy installations to 2050 the likelihood of carbon capture and storage and other um uh fanciful technologies being mainstreamed and economically viable by that date and therefore you know how much energy budget we would have by then and compared it to how much energy we would need to be provided by renewables if it was a hundred percent renewable economy and they said basically we need to cut we need to cut by at least 40 percent so 40 percent off your 125 as the start of the 10 if you think though go look at other work so um Tim Jackson professor of economics very much focusing on on on post-growth at University of Surrey said well what do we need to do to get to zero carbon how quickly do we need to get zero carbon his paper look it up is called zero carbon sooner and he says between 2025 and 2013 if you think the constraint on energy total is about how quickly we can install renewable energy capacity then I would argue we should be looking for some something more aligning to the IPC C's estimates of a 70 percent reduction in total energy use on to the 125 as a as a number to aim for degrowth um why don't we talk about it a bit more I would argue to talk about post-growth we should basically frame capitalist economics current growthist economics as passe so rather than having a debate about which term we should use or whether it's good or not just like climate change let's not debate with the deniers let's move the debate on to how we're going to deliver what we know is necessary so let's talk with confidence about post-capitalist thinking recognize that vested interests are corruption that embed capitalist growthist ideologies within the economic development strategies that exist globally as well as within countries in terms of where degrowth fits in with this debate I would pitch to you in response to all as a question about how do we make sure that the the climate the environment and the social and the justice elements are seen as mutually consistent I would say that what we try to do in this this report in terms of the rhetoric I think question was to sketch out a link between climate and justice and I would say between the words climate and justice consider three extra words energy and then degrowth or post-growth pick which one you like and then redistribution so climate emergency means we need to reduce energy use accepting the causal link between energy use and the size of the economy that's going to stagnate to degrow or accept that growthist economics is is now passe that means that the only way we deal with the inequality within society that exists and is growing is to have redistribution and then redistribution delivers you the justice that's the if you like the narrative pitch that underlies this report aim and be great to follow up on info demics and greenwashing I think that's that's an area where we really need to do more on and when we research this this report we really try to find some good examples of what climate emergency governance looks like today and it feels like that's an area where a lot more research a lot more lesson learning a lot more sharing is required. Finally I think a few comments back from I think Shive's comments yeah I think we need to transform representative democracy and that's what a whole piece around sort of vested interests and reform is needed but at the same time I think we need to strengthen the missing bit of democracy which is the bottom up the deliberative democracy not to suggest that it in any way replaces that but we need to balance the top down with a bottom up and that's also reflected in our policy research so on the one hand we've got people have researched the idea systems of provisioning and replacing the idea that the systems of infrastructure we have lock in forever more dependence on what we have already about locking in business as usual locking energy energy use locking carbon emissions we need to have different systems of provisioning but we also need from the bottom up to have different daily practices different norm norms of culture so I think rather than thinking if this is sort of individual behavior change this is about making that a culture change making a collective of individuals so all of us change our individual behavior together I think the distinction between the 5% and the 70% is a distinction between a nudge on those who are likely and wanting to respond on their own to about all of us responding together and then in terms of how we put degrowth into practice in policy terms I would only give one example which is my experience in conservative led Surrey we went through a process of declaring a climate emergency we decided and chose to have a university to give us the rates of fair reduction the curve if you like of getting to zero carbon that we need to stay within which is the pathway that the council is working to we got a void shift improved to be embedded within their climate emergency strategy and then they accepted that 40% or 41% of the emissions in Surrey are the responsibilities of road transport for which they are the highway authority so they're then okay well if a void shift improves the framework in our climate emergency strategy that should govern our transport strategy and the government requires every local council this year pretty much in in the UK to update its local transport policies so we now have a hierarchy in Surrey which has reversed the car plus a bit on the extra for others to first of all we need to remove the need to travel and that allows you to do the walking and cycling then we need to upscale our investment in in bus travel particularly as well as decarbonizing buses and trains before we look at cars that's now starting to impact things like a junction improvement modelling so the transport modelling is now claiming that it can and should model bus traffic to a junction before the number of cars so we can now argue the case policy wise for priority bus lanes to go in all the main high routes now where that's been done in Brighton um not green led but often green assisted or or green influence but currently now green led Brighton that the let the amounts of priority bus routes in Brighton has led to a doubling of bus routes doubling of bus bus patronage so I think that yes we can put degrowth into policies at a national and a local level it's more than just a an economic band praise there are things that sit underneath them and I think this report hopefully starts to sketch out what some of those may be but I think it's it's worth just finally just emphasizing the need for governance change as well as the policies themselves thank you so thank you Jonathan and Peter and I would say that we've launched in Ireland the rethinking energy demand is going to open up a lot more questions we're going to go for a break now for 20 minutes online participants we're back at four o'clock and we have John Gibbons we've got Minister Ocean Smith and we've got a panel that Michael Smith will be introducing so the objective of this uh networking break is to get to know some people you don't get to know maybe find some synergies between sectors and the the copies and teas we served through this door here thank you thank you everyone