 The release of the latest IPCC report on Monday was one of the few occasions where climate change got the attention in our mainstream media that it deserves. It did get basically wall-to-wall coverage. It should get wall-to-wall coverage most days. It got it this Monday. That was because that historic report was released. It's also fair to say, though, that some of the decisions made by our broadcasters when it comes to who to platform to discuss that issue were a little odd. The oddest was probably the environmentalist platformed by BBC Newsnight. Where we are in the moment facing what we face, I see one really important thing the government to do and that is to go strongly down the ridge of carbon taxing. This is the polluter base principle. We all signed up to it when I was in the EU way back in 1970. We actually had a legal instrument which the UK applied as well. We have to go there. Part of that, of course, is also to have carbon border taxes. Yes, we will impose our own standards, our own taxes, our own charges, and that will generate so much money that we can help the white van man. We can help the disadvantaged sectors of society through the extra funds raised. It's a crucially important instrument which is not being adequately emphasised at the moment. That environmentalist invited onto Newsnight's climate change special had a fairly familiar face, a fairly familiar voice, and a familiar surname. That's because, as well as being an environmentalist, he's Boris Johnson's father. I think he has expressed concern about the environment in the past, but he's clearly not one of the leading environmentalists in the country. Why didn't they just put that on the tagline? Prime Minister's father who we've invited on because the Prime Minister is too terrified to talk to us. The whole thing was just completely bizarre, wasn't it? What is the repeat performance of what we saw in the 2019 election, Michael? You might remember Channel 4 had a climate debate. Boris Johnson refused to turn up. I believe in the end it was Rishi Sunak versus Rebecca Long-Bailey. She destroyed him, by the way. She was the most eloquent labour performer on climate change as she's not even in the shadow cabinet, which is unbelievable. Guess who turns up instead? It's Stanley Johnson. He demanded he be allowed to talk on stage and he wasn't. Wow, it's pretty dysfunctional, Michael. It's not just the Prime Minister isn't willing to actually be scrutinized to the policies. He's outlining on one of the biggest, I think the biggest, but I think even if you don't think it's the biggest, it's one of the biggest political issues of the day and his dad turns up instead. By the way, good for Channel 4, they said, please go away. Now, the BBC are indulging it. There's a great quote, which is ecology or environmentalism without class struggle is gardening. And that to me just sums up somebody like Stanley Johnson. It's true that he's been involved in I think the best word is conservation for decades. The World Wildlife Fund and the RSPB and all this stuff. So, yes, he has an interest in conservation. He has an interest in nature. But I think it's time, Michael, given the wildfires that we're seeing at the moment, it's probably time we had a more informed conversation than Boris Johnson's dad. Right now, we're seeing the worst fires in Greece, Italy, Turkey in decades. Yesterday in Algeria, 65 people died. We're seeing the biggest wildfire in the history of California. All of that combined is still small in the amount of surface area covered by wildfires right now in Siberia. We're seeing something truly extraordinary. And the BBC, the public service broadcaster of one of the world's most powerful, wealthy countries, is getting the prime minister's sort of bumbling dad on, which is terrifying, frankly. And the thing he said, by the way, was also what he said was completely nonsensical about, oh, well, we'll have a carbon tax and help the white van man. The one argument against the carbon, I would favor a carbon tax, but I would actually have it as my number two below creation of a carbon coin or quantitative easing to pay for decarbonization. You have to have that first because the worry with a carbon tax is the primary way of addressing this, Michael, is of course, it's a regressive tax. And like with a tax on smoking or alcohol, it can be very effective, of course, of changing behavior, but it's not equitable. And the worry is, you might think, well, so what? Sorry, this is a bigger problem than that. The worry is, if you look at the Gilles-les-Jean, you could see mass movements against the kinds of change we now need to deliver to tackle climate change in the face of this stuff because of these unfair taxes. So carbon taxation, really important, obviously part of the mix, but I think fundamentally he's wrong there, too. The BBC is meant to be better than this, Michael. I mean, Christ, you're about to show us why, but I thought it was a spoof at first. There's been a few of those this week. Especially the environmentalist tag that gives it that spoof quality. I want to bring up a tweet from Neon. Neon are the new economy organizers network. There's a network of people who pitch academics and activists to TV shows. We often use them on this show. And they tweeted, dear BBC Newsnight, over the last four days, we have been pitching eight different diverse climate scientists, policy experts, academics and activists with many decades of climate experience between them to discuss the IPCC report. There was no need for this to happen. I think that's a good reminder. Stanley Johnson was that someone else could have been in that place who was far better qualified to have the discussion he was having, but who didn't happen to be the father of the Prime Minister's really odd style of democracy, whereby being related to an elected politician, you get to have such a loud voice. We shouldn't pretend there weren't experts on that show, though. And that's what made this particularly surreal because Stanley Johnson was on the sofa with two people with really significant expertise. One was the economist Vicky Price. We've had her on the show before. The other was Kate Roeth, who is the author of a book, Donut Economics. Roeth made an interesting argument about growth and climate and the relation between one and the other. Let's take a look. I think it's time to deeply think again about the essentials of our economies. Nothing on planet Earth thrives by trying to grow forever. And we've inherited a 20th century framework that believes that endless economic growth is the sign of success. And yet nothing on Earth does that. It's time to get beyond this deep dependence on endless growth and reach an economy that can thrive. And this is, in fact, the existential economic question of our times. And I think what's stopping a lot of the action that we already know we need on climate change is government's endless addiction and dependency on creating growth. So we need to put this question at the center of reframing our economies now. And you, of course, have been very influential on extinction and rebellion. But just explain what does a post-growth economy actually look like? What's the difference? Tell me how it would operate. Oh, it's an economy that no longer assumes the absurdity that it must get three and a half percent bigger every year, year on year on year on year. I mean, the absurdity is the idea of an economy that grows forever. That's the one that needs to be explained. We live in one of the richest economies in the world at the richest point of humanity. This country is richer than almost any country has ever been in the history of humankind. How is it that our politicians and our economists think that success depends upon yet more growth forever? That is what needs to be explained. Everything in nature grows and grows up. And that is how we come to thrive from our own bodies. And in other bodies, if we try to grow endlessly, we call it cancer and we know it is death to our body. We need to take what we know as human body and take it now to the planetary body. It's pretty surreal seeing those two incredibly distinguished experts up on the screen and then it pans to Stanley Johnson sort of gafforing as he leans back. And I showed that clip because I was actually particularly interested in what your take was on it. Fully automated luxury communism. What's its take on growth and the climate? What's the line? What's the line? Good question. That's the question, Mike. I'm glad you asked. Before I answer that question, Mike, it's important to say what Kate Rayworth is saying there about growth. What does a post-growth world look like? Hey, Kersti Walk, we've only really talked about macroeconomic growth as a priority since the 1940s. The concept of GDP was created in the 1930s. It's been around there. We had capitalism a long time before we had this obsession with GDP growth. Actually, capitalists are more interested in profit than growth. As we've seen, by the way, in the last 10 years, many, many more billionaires, despite the fact that many economies, including Britain on a per-head basis, were broadly stagnant. We've produced lots more billionaires. What does a post-growth world look like? Well, we know because that's what we lived in until this became the prevailing orthodoxy. About 80 years ago, it wasn't 10,000 years ago. They weren't making stone tools in Mesopotamia saying, oh, we need to increase production this year by 5% and we'll compound that over 10 years. It's very new. In terms of where fully automated electric communism is on this, Michael, we obviously need to move beyond GDP. GDP is a very, very, very important. This is so hackneyed. Do you say it so many times? Do you think everybody knows this? Of course, our viewers know this. I think instinctively, most people know this, but I'll give you a classic example of GDP growth. Great quote, by the way, from speech rather, from Robert Kennedy on this. No radical, really. He was trying to get the Democratic nomination for U.S. president, the brother of John F. Kennedy. He talks about how GDP measures everything, but that which makes life worth living. I'll give you an example. If you have 10 houses all next to one another on a street, and each of those houses has a kid, right? Two parents and one child, right? Very sorry. It's so stereotypical. Two parents and one child, and they all look after their own children. Both parents raise the child equally. There's no cash transactions going on there, right, Michael? There's no money changing hands. There's no growth. Now, if each house knocks on the door next door and says, I want you to look after my child and I'll pay you 10 pounds an hour to do it, and they all do that, we're in the exact same situation where each house is looking after a child. It's just not their own one and they're being paid to do so. Now, in the world of GDP, that is fantastic for the economy because you've just added a huge amount of demand into the economy and you've just expanded all the economic transactions in existence because what is GDP? GDP measures all the economic transactions in some, in a particular territory, in a particular year, in a given year. That tends to be what it means. So the GDP of Britain for 2021 is around, I don't know, two trillion US dollars, something like that. And that's comprised of all these transactions between individuals, between firms, etc. So that should make it quite clear that actually, in and of itself, this isn't a good thing. For instance, we could legalize drugs. You might not think, I don't think drugs are a problem, but you might not like drugs. We could legalize drugs and they will be part of GDP. And overnight, which is what would happen, you'd have a pretty, quite a big increase in GDP stats because all this stuff previously in the black market, heroin, cocaine, cannabis is legalized and now these are regular economic transactions. GDP would go up. It's questionable if that would actually be good for society. So GDP is not a measure of how successful or prosperous society is. Clearly, it needs to be part of some broader indicator, which has multiple aspects, literacy, life expectancy, I think self-reported happiness, I think carbon emissions, time off, leisure time. So you want some sort of aggregated metric by which to judge society. I think clearly we want to judge success, right? As Peter Drucker said, you can't manage what you don't measure. I think clearly there's a socialist, you want to measure things, but I don't think GDP is a particularly good measure. And that's not just me saying it, by the way. Simon Kuznet, the person who invented the measure in the 1930s, never intended GDP to be treated like it is. Never, ever, ever. He said, this is completely odd with what I've done, not his own words, but he effectively had created, he was Dr. Frankenstein, he'd created a monster. So there's a place for measuring economic transactions, but if it's just GDP and not happiness, not CO2 emissions, you have big problems, and that's where we are. We've got big problems. We're not even measuring the things we should be measuring, which is why, Michael, right now we've got Sicily, 49 degrees C, we've got a place in Syria, 49 degrees C, because we don't have an economic system which says, well, what are we prioritizing here? Right now it's just economic value expanding, expanding, expanding. And we're destroying the planet in the meantime and ourselves.