 Thanks very much, Michael, and thank you for the invitation to be here today. Thank you, John, for having me along. Yeah, I read the documents and I know I'm not here to, if you like, to reboot that discussion but rather I hope to bring it forward. I read the document Rethinking Energy Demand, and I guess a few things that swirled around in my mind about it. First of all, it's great that we're having this discussion for so long. It's we've been hung up on things like efficiency and if you like tweaking around the edges, rather than saying okay, this system is really, really broken. And I guess I spent a lot of my time trying, sometimes failing to communicate to audiences, unlike the people in this room. In other words, trying to preach to the unconverted and in some cases the unconvertible. Maybe today is a little bit different, so bear with me, but the issue, I suppose, from my point of view, really is where we start from, right? Degrowth. Okay, what do we mean by degrowth? How does an economy predicate it on endless exponential growth? Degrowth. Short answer, it doesn't. It collapses. We're already in an accelerated global ecological, economic, financial collapse, but collapse, don't think of collapse as off a cliff. Think of it more as falling down the steps of the stairs. Different people, I guess they say the future arrives at a different pace. Some people, farmers in Central America, for example, they're already living in the collapsed future, where the climate system upon which their entire existence is based, that has existed for hundreds of years is gone. Their lives are over. Their new lives are as will be for tens, hundreds and thousands of millions of people. Over the next several decades, their lives will be the lives of the climate migrant, of the displaced, of the destroyed, of the ruined. None of this is in the mainstream debate. This is fascinating to me as a journalist, as a human being. But somehow or other, this is fenced off psychologically, emotionally, and put into a box called the environment. Asher, the Greens are looking after the environment, lovely bunch, harmless poor divils, but they're great. And they're looking after the environment, and we give them two or 3%. But actually, we give them a fifth preference. They're granted, I know your man, you know that fella, he's grand, bit soft, but they're grand, right. That's where environmentalism is in the politics of Ireland today. Real people, serious people, the grownups in the room as we call them, have no interest in this discussion. So, for example, when we talk about say the changes that are happening in our ecological system right now. Right, we all know about the 1.2 degree global average surface temperature. That by the way, on the surface where people live, in other words the land surface is already 1.9 degrees on the land surface. Okay. Now, we know of course where 1.5 average takes us to, but I find, often, it's so difficult to translate that to people and say, Well, that's nothing sure it was, you know, 14 degrees this morning it'll be six degrees tonight. What's the problem? So, again, as a communicator, I try to simplify things, hopefully not too much, but enough. And to say, imagine your kid is sick, and your kid is running a temperature of 38, 39, 40 degrees. That's just a couple of degrees off the baseline of 37. So what happens to your kid? You get them some paracetamol, you cool them down, and hopefully they recover. If you don't, if you can't, then they begin to go into organ failure, because the core temperature, our own body's core temperature, for all the 7.8 billion humans on the planet, our core temperature is 37, give or take. The reason why YouTube leave that basically are into a bad place. And the reason I use that analogy is that I'm sure you're all familiar with the nine planetary boundaries, this whole concept that's come out of the Stockholm Institute of resilience. Now, six of those nine planetary boundaries have already been breached. Some of them very, very badly breached. Can we recover these? Who knows. But what we do know is, if again, as a communicator and try to simplify this, this is the equivalent of multiple organ failure. And the problem, of course, as we know, is that you can be the healthiest corpse on the slab if your liver fails. Every other organ in your body may be absolutely flying, but it doesn't matter, because that key organ takes all the other systems down with it. You're in a situation globally of multiple organ failure. The problem here is, anyone in this room who thinks that we're going to fix it, look around you, look at each other. We're the same people in the same rooms, 10, 15, 20, 30 years later. And by the way, I defer to those long suffering people who've been at this so much longer than I am, I don't know how you do it. I've only had this blight in my life for 20 years, right? And actually I'm only 32, you wouldn't think it. This is what it does to you, right? But look, we can't look away. This is reality. This is what we face. We can't look away. And besides, everybody else is looking away. So we have no choice. Morally, we have to stare into the void. We have to look this thing right in the eye and say, what do we do? Because, as I said about that collapse thing, collapse is already happening in so many different parts of the world. It will continue. But we don't know at what pace. We don't know at what rate. But we do know, like I suppose like a ripple in a pond, those waves are heading out. At the moment, people in countries far away who we never hear about in the news, and we don't really care about all that much, they're already getting washed away by the waves, but those waves are heading faster and faster in our direction. So the notion, the idea that somehow or other, we're going to ride this one out. I'm afraid that's not the case. I suppose I sometimes think of the analogy, if you remember the cartoon of the Road Runner. Remember the coyote and the Road Runner? Yeah, that the coyote invariably ran over the cliff. Look left, look right. Everything was fine. Look down. Boom. I would like to think we're not facing that kind of a cliff, or even like the coyote that we can fall, dust ourselves off and continue for the next cartoon, because there's still absolutely everything to play for. That's the thing. But from my point of view, what's so frustrating is that we're still having, you'll pardon my French, bullshit conversations. The idea that we're somehow going to carry our existing civilization, consumerist civilization into the future with us, as if that was even a good idea, by the way. I'm going to be doing something later on about Halloween, right? About Halloween has become the new Christmas. It's now become this gigantic festival of one single-use waste. And this is happening, by the way, in the teeth of an ecological emergency. These are parents. I'm using their young kids. And these are parents who you would imagine would have such a strong connection to what's coming down the line. And the question, I suppose, that leaves me gasping, is how did we end up so completely detached and disconnected from it? And I suppose I remember going to a lecture in Belfast just before lockdown with George Mambio, who I'm sure most of you know very well. And he was describing the rise of neoliberalism. And he basically said that after the oil shocks in the 1970s, societies were displaced and shocked. And they were looking around for a new idea. And luckily, the neocons have been working away on this for 30 years, and they basically said, here's an idea. And everybody went, oh, okay, we used to think this is completely nuts. But now that you mentioned it, you seem to have thought this out. So we're going to run with that idea. And essentially, that's what we've done for the last 40 years. We've taken neoliberal turbocharged capitalism and blasted ourselves off a cliff at the worst possible time. And the point that he was making when he said that is those who in times of crisis have the best ideas, they win, we have to be prepared. There's a bunch of fascists out there right now, call them eco fascists. I see them online all the time. They're rubbing their hands, by the way, in glee at ecological breakdown. They want to use it to amp up hatred, racism, xenophobia, close our borders, kick the foreigners out, all that kind of stuff that is coming. I think there is that narrative out there, and you will find a version of green that you really, really wouldn't recognize and certainly would be horrified to be associated with, but we're going to be hearing a lot about environmental fascism. So my point is, we need better ideas, much, much better ideas. Now, I think, by the way, in the document, I think we have some of those ideas. Absolutely. Where I was left struggling a little bit. When I was reading that is, it reminds me again of that that that childhood tale of the troublesome cat, the older mice. And they were constantly being harried by the troublesome cat. So they got together and they come up with a brilliant plan. And the plan was when the cat was asleep, they were going to come out and pop a bell around its neck, be brilliant. Until they decide, well, who is going to bell the cat. And that's where that particular plan ran into the ground. I'm still struggling. And I say this with the greatest of respect to people in the room here. I want to know who's going to bell the cat, who's going to get the alarm bell around the neck of the system that is dragging us over the edge. Thank you very much.