00:04 Amy Gilligan: Okay. So I think what we need to start from is that the motivation under capitalism is to make profit, and I think that's quite a crucial place to start, and it's where I'll end up. I think from that point it means that the ruling class has differing attitudes to climate change. Some of them deny it's happening — so we had, when there was the flooding earlier this year, Nigel Lawson, former Chancellor of the Exchequer, being interviewed on Radio 4, sort of trying to say, well, you know,
00:36 maybe it's not really happening and we don't really see any warming, and we have to adapt anyway, and so it's all fine. But there's others who realise that it is happening and the consequences of climate change will be bad for their ability to make profit, as well as obviously sort of some side effects for the planet and people on it. So we have — so, this week for example, the Obama administration announced new measures about carbon pollution from power plants.
01:07 This has been, like, quite a long-awaited announcement from a government that sort of promised for the last five and a half years that they were going to do some things around climate change. But the aim of it is to cut carbon emissions by 30[%] from the 2005 levels by 2030. Even if that did happen, that's not enough. I think the way that it's being carved out is that individual states can decide what they do, so in theory
01:39 some might decide to close down all of their coal-powered power stations and stuff, like put lots of solar and wind power there — but they could also do things like carbon trading, so that means that energy producers don't have to do anything and they can just offset it in some other ways. And you get these sort of market solutions there. And the Republicans in the US are obviously very opposed to even this sort of small measures,
02:10 sort of talking about a "war on coal", and they're sort of coming up [with] very bizarre arguments which are sort of claiming that they're championing the underdogs against a sort of elite that wants to stop the planet being destroyed. And then we've seen over the last — well, for many years actually — various climate summits which haven't gone anywhere near [far] enough. So Copenhagen in 2009, the Rio+20 summit a couple of years ago, which
02:42 didn't implement a time frame to do anything, [which] Monbiot [in the] Guardian [?] described as the greatest collective failure of leadership since the First World War. And I think that they're doing things like setting the limits too low, and even in those situations it looks like people aren't coming anywhere near those. There's the conference in Paris in 2015, which I think is quite an important point to return back to — maybe we can discuss [it] a bit in the
03:12 discussion — because I think that where we have seen movement on anything, it has been through the putting [of] pressure from below. I think one thing that many governments try and do around climate change is shift the blame onto individuals, and some environmentalists will go along with this: so consumerism is the problem, people wanting to buy various things. And so then the solutions often suggested become individualistic, so it's things like turning the lights off, using energy saving light bulbs, recycling, getting locally produced food. And obviously these aren't bad things, and,
03:42 like, if you're in a position to do them then you should, but it takes away [from the fact] that lots of people aren't in a position to do that, and that the impact of doing these things on their own is quite limited. The things that really will have an impact on climate change are on a much bigger scale. Like, even if we did all of these things it wouldn't be sufficient to reduce carbon emissions, to deal with climate change. People also talk about
04:13 that we need to decrease the population, and this is obviously something [that] isn't just suggested by the ruling class, but it's an idea that they promote, coming from the ideas of Malthus in the 18th century, who was saying that populations grow geometrically and food production arithmetically, [and] so then we'll run out of food. But actually Marx and Engels, for example, argued against this. And I think you can see that people don't have enough food not because there isn't enough food to be produced — we could produce much more food than we actually do, and vast amounts that we do [produce go to] waste — [it] is because
04:45 the ruling class creates scarcity. And while population is growing, it's growing at a decreasing rate. So it increased by 140[%] from 1950 to 2000; in the next 50 years it's predicted to increase by 50[%]. So the rate is decreasing. Now, there are other, like, bigger scales of scientific solutions to climate change as well. So these include things like CO2 removal techniques, things like carbon capture and storage, where you have your
05:15 coal or oil or gas power station but you capture the carbon as it's coming out of it and store it underground. Now, these things exist and it's possible to do that. The problem is they're quite expensive, and so trying to get people to build power stations like that is something that doesn't happen. And then there's a question about how do you store CO2, [and] what will be effective if you put it somewhere — whether there might be earthquakes [and] it escaped, and that kind of thing. So there are problems with that, and it probably won't happen on the timescale
05:46 that we needed to happen to deal with climate change. There are other things like geoengineering, which at some points can sound a bit fantastical, and probably are. So some of these focus on trying to change things about, like, the reflectivity of the surface of the earth — so that's called the albedo, where you get the energy that's coming from the sun [and] you want to reflect more of it back up into the atmosphere off the surface of the earth, and try and cool the planet that way. So doing things like painting tops of
06:18 buildings white, covering the Sahara with sort of shiny material, or putting salt crystals into clouds and making them more reflective and whiter. The problem with this is both the feasibility of these things, but also that they don't deal with all the problems of increased CO2. It's not just warming, but it's also things like acidification of oceans, for example, which means that you can't store as much CO2 in the oceans in the first place, and so it increases the effects of the problems of that, as well as
06:48 destroying a major sink for CO2. There's also the issue that I don't think we know enough about the climate system to know how potential feedbacks would interact if we did this sort of thing — although obviously trying to do research on it is quite important. Another sort of geoengineering solution is to do things like adding iron to the ocean. So particularly in the Southern Ocean around Antarctica there's potential there for lots of phytoplankton, small organisms in the oceans, to
07:19 exist, and these can take in carbon. At the moment they're limited because there isn't enough iron in the ocean, so there's an idea that you could put lots of iron in the oceans, and this would mean that you get more phytoplankton, and therefore when they die they sink to the bottom of the ocean and that traps carbon. But — to make this work in terms of reducing CO2, we need to keep the carbon below a thousand metres for a hundred years, [and] a recent study published a couple of weeks ago
07:49 showed that — that didn't just take [the] chemistry of the ocean into account but also things like physical processes around upwelling and circulation [?] — showed that the majority of the carbon would resurface after only about 40 years. And so there's problems with that there. And there's also then a wider problem about if we [treat] a potential solution to climate change [as] something in a vacuum from society [?], as if it's just some sort of scientific fix, and it doesn't take into account the reasons that we're having climate change
08:20 in the first place. And I think that sort of means the kind of solutions that we do actually need — so, tackling the biggest CO2 producers around transport, agriculture and power generation, and to do things like renewable energy, high-voltage cables, reducing [inaudible] use, changing transport — they don't happen, and they're things that we will have to fight for, because they're against the interests of some of the most powerful companies and the ruling class
08:50 in the world, because they've invested huge amounts of money in the economic system which is based around oil and things like that. I think while the ruling class do have an interest in stopping climate change, because it threatens the stability of global capitalism, they're not able to provide a solution to this without sort of damping down the momentum of capital accumulation. And therefore you see that capitalism has always led to environmental degradation, and the
09:20 natural environment under capitalism gets used as a way to make profit, or as a rubbish dump for the things that the system doesn't need. And it means, because businesses take short-term decisions that then have longer[-term] irrational consequences, that we see the damage that causes to the environment, we see overproduction and waste and things like that. And that means that we won't find a solution to climate change within the system, capitalism,
09:52 that's causing it in the first place. And so I think while we need to put pressure on the ruling class to adopt solutions that might go some way to reducing the devastating impacts of climate change — which means that we have to be at things like the Paris [conference] in 2015 [?] — we have to sort of keep on putting that pressure there. Within those campaigns, and within what we're doing there, we have to raise arguments against the capitalist system which puts profit before people and planet, and [be] able to say that there is
10:22 a different system that we could have in place that would be better for both people and planet. Thank you very much.
## Corrections
- "**nigel wilson** former chancellor of exchequer" → "**Nigel Lawson**" — his Radio 4 appearance during the February 2014 floods is the episode she is describing; there is no Chancellor named Nigel Wilson. - "**mumbo jordan romeo** described as the greatest collective failure of leadership since the first world war" → "[which] **Monbiot [in the] Guardian [?]** described as..." George Monbiot wrote of Rio+20 that it was "the greatest failure of collective leadership since the first world war"; her word order differs slightly and is kept. The attribution is marked because the captions are too corrupt to be sure how she phrased it. - "the **rio 20 plus** summit" → "the **Rio+20** summit". - "very **obsessed** about even this sort of small measures" → "very **opposed** to even this sort of small measures". - "food productions are **athenatic**" → "food production **arithmetically**" — the Malthusian claim she is about to reject, and unintelligible as the captions give it. - "the **reeling** class creates scarcity" and "pressure on the **reading** class" → "the **ruling** class" in both places. - "the natural environment **in underclassmen**" → "the natural environment **under capitalism**". - "it increased by 140 from **950** to 2000" → "from **1950** to 2000". - "trying to get people to build **positions** like that" → "to build **power stations** like that". - "the reflectivity of the surface of **the air**" → "of **the earth**" — she names it correctly as the albedo in the same breath. - "both the **visibility** of these things" → "both the **feasibility** of these things". - "destroying a major **sync** for co2" → "a major **sink** for CO2". - "profit before people and **plant it**" and "better for both people **on time**" → "people and **planet**" in both places; the phrase is the point she closes on. - "we see it **over production**" → "we see **overproduction**". - Marked and uncertain: "physical processes around upwelling and circulation **[?]**" (captions: "or students like physical processes"); "if we **[treat]** a potential solution ... **[as]** something in a vacuum from society **[?]**" (captions: "if we fill a potential solution ... or something in the vacuum"); "things like the **Paris [conference] in 2015 [?]**" (captions: "things like the power company in 2015"), which matches the Paris talks she flagged earlier in the talk; and "reducing **[inaudible]** use" (captions: "reducing that physically use").