 Over the weekend this really quite terrifying footage went super viral. It's a gas leak from an underwater oil pipeline in the Gulf of Mexico and it literally set the ocean ablaze. So you can see the fire on the surface, flames leaping out of the water. Rather serially, you can see the little fire extinguisher boats putting out the fire with what looks like more water there. So the fire took about five hours to put out, having begun in an underwater pipeline that connects to a platform at Pemex's flagship Koo Maloub Zap oil development. And Pemex is the Mexican state owned oil company. And it's got a particularly awful record for industrial accidents. In 1992 the company was found to be at fault for a series of 10 explosions that occurred in Guadalajara, caused by gasoline in the city sewers. The explosions claim the lives of about 252 people, though one study claims that the death count was actually as high as 1,000 fatalities. In 2012 an explosion at one of the company's gas plants in Reynosa killed 30 people and injured 46. In 2013 there was an explosion at the company's offices in Mexico City, the cause of which has never been confirmed. At least 37 people were killed and 126 injured. But in 2016 there were two separate incidents, explosions and fires at the company's plants and oil tankers that resulted in the deaths of 28 people. And in 2019 80 people died in an explosion after hundreds of people tried to get fuel via an illegal pipeline drain at a Pemex pipeline in Hidalgo. And the response of the Mexican state was really quite disgusting, really callous. In a statement that was released to the public officials said that the explosion was an example for fuel thieves across the country. So not just uncaring but gloating. And the ocean fire over the weekend thankfully didn't kill anyone. But I think when footage from actual reality starts to resemble some CGI monstrosity from Pacific Rim, maybe it's time to acknowledge that as a species we done fucked up somewhere along the road. Dalia, what did you think of this footage when you saw it? You know, it makes sense to me somehow that having to watch footage of Matt Hancock gripping us and the ocean being on fire would sort of happen at the same time. It's kind of the same era of immoral chaos. But you know, it all seriousness. Like, you know, there's a term that that comes to mind when I watch this. It's apocalyptic infrastructure. And it's a term that was coined by Lala Khalili. And it describes the construction of these kinds of massive endemic scaled up infrastructures done as rapidly as possible with the purpose of basically generating rapid returns, right? With no kind of accountability or responsibility for social and ecological consequences. There is, you know, very little oversight, very little accountability. And it results in these exact kind of spectacles in sort of cataclysmic destructive failure that once it's sort of set in motion can't really be contained. And, you know, the destruction that it causes can't really be contained. It's the kind of thing that connects, you know, Grenfell to, you know, the water crises of Flint, Michigan and Beirut to the scenes that we are seeing in the Gulf of Mexico. And at the heart of this, you know, what lies at the heart of this is, is why, despite having all of the knowledge and the understanding of what it would take to get out of the ecological breakdown, it feels like not only are we not doing anything, but we are actually continuing to march down the path to ecological destruction and destruction that will be, that is going to become irreversible at some point. And that includes, you know, most recently through the granting of a license to build a new fossil fuel project, a deep coal mine in Cumbria. And so it's kind of happening in our own government as well. And it's sort of the end point of this sort of unfettered involvement of the fossil fuel industry in policymaking. And it's the breaking of that contract is absolutely essential to putting a stop to this. It's not actually a scientific problem. We know the science. We know the science of how we got here. We know the science of how we get out. The solution is actually to address the political economy of this crisis, because that is the reason why, despite everything that we know, we can still switch on our TVs or switch on our news feeds and see these kinds of scenes of the ocean literally being on fire. One of the common responses, both in the UK and in other European countries, when people talk about the climate crisis is to say, well, look, we're actually really good at reducing our emissions. We found plastic straws. It's the big dirty polluters in the global south that are the problem. But here's the thing. While the UK is decelerating its emissions domestically, not fast enough to actually meet our own legally binding net zero targets, we're actually the biggest net importer of carbon dioxide emissions per capita in the G7. Outstripping both the US and Japan, because we keep buying goods which have been manufactured abroad. So we're basically just outsourcing our carbon emissions to other poorer countries. And at the same time, British banks are still busy financing dirty fossil fuel projects with Barclays, HSBC, NatWest, Lloyds and Standard Chartered investing a combined 40.4 billion pounds into the coal industry. Between 2018 and 2020. So we might be putting up a few more wind turbines. We might be wearing, you know, rocking those like woven tote bags everywhere to the shops, but we're still leading the way indirectly in polluting the planet. So, Dalia, what do you think it will take to jolt the government out of its lethargy when it comes to dealing with this country's impact on the climate crisis? The science is there, you know, the evidence is there. It's not a problem of deficit of science or deficit of solutions or deficit of awareness. It's a deficit of political will. Right. So this alone, these images alone are not going to jolt the government into action, especially because, you know, we are already in the grips of the climate crisis. We have witnessed this kind of catastrophe many times over the past several years. We're already at that stage. So the primary thing that we need to do is to basically force that political will. Right. And this is especially important for us in the UK because COP, which is sort of the major global climate negotiations are taking place in Glasgow this year. So, you know, right on our doorstep. And, you know, in that in these negotiations, our government will try and posture as sort of climate leaders for all the reasons that you've outlined. We have to basically not allow them to take that position when they don't have the actual action to back it up. And so I think there are kind of the major priorities for how we politically organize around these issues is firstly to resist both solutions. Right. So that includes these kind of hypothetical like techno futurist solutions that, you know, this idea that we can pollute and pollute and pollute as much as we want. Because sort of the linear development of technology means that by the time it becomes a problem, which it already is, by the way, we will just sort of have the technology will have naturally developed the technology to reverse it. You know, that kind of belongs more in like science fiction world than, you know, in any kind of serious engagement with climate breakdowns. But that also means the kind of more benevolent, so false solutions that are sort of put forward by particularly, you know, governments in the global north who hold the most responsibility for the crisis. And they try to kind of put out there to sort of greenwash their own responsibility. It's things like, you know, carbon offsetting, which sort of doesn't address the core issue of emissions. And but it actually just kind of focuses on creating this false economy of carbon, carbon credits and carbon debits. But it also involves, you know, I think it's really important that you mention, you know, the involvement of the British government in importing that the importing system being upholding sort of fossil fuel economies. But also the city of London is absolutely instrumental in financing and ensuring fossil fuel projects. You know, the fossil fuel economy would not exist without the financial and insurance infrastructure of the city of London. So we can't allow the government to get away with saying, oh, it's fine because, you know, we're not building new fossil fuel projects, which they actually are. Whilst that is still, whilst the city is still so instrumental in actually the survival, the continuing artificial survival of this economy. But we also need to really focus on breaking those political and financial bonds between, you know, the policymaking process, the political process, the governments and the fossil fuel industries. You know, for years now, the global climate negotiations, the terms of those negotiations have been set by fossil fuel industries, by the very industry that got us in the position that we're in. You know, the 2015 COP negotiations is often, you know, declared to be the sort of watershed moment in global cooperation around climate change. But none of the actual terms agreed upon in those discussions are legally binding. Why do you think that is? Because of the restrictions placed by the fossil fuel industry who are given way too much power in these negotiations. And at the same time, the people who are most impacted by the crisis are shut out of the political process, often through violent repression. So breaking that political bond has to be the first and most urgent step in actually getting real, not only getting real solutions on the table, but actually getting those real solutions in motion.