Can We Cool The Planet, And Should We Try? | Ep251: Ricken Patel

Ricken Patel

The thing that I find insane, to some degree, is that right now, you can just geoengineer the crap out of the planet, as long as you do it for your own personal profit, right? Stick anything you like in the atmosphere, or the water, or the sea, you know? There's some limits, but not really. You can't do something that kills humans directly, but you can poison our biosphere, no problem. Go ahead. That's called capitalism and growth, right? 

Bryony Worthington

Yeah, and in a sense, I always think about the drive towards ever-larger cars, right? No one said to Ford or Toyota, oh, hang on a sec, this is going to materially change the number of potential accidents, or it's going to use so much more fuel that it's going to drive climate change. There was never any process by which they had to apply to ask, are we allowed to just...

RP

So I sort of understand that. That's just people who grow without thinking about the environment, okay? That's standard. What's crazy is, if you do any of that stuff with any good intention, if you, for example, you talked about the cooling effect of the sulphur emissions from the container ships, if you replace that with saltwater foggers that had the exact same cooling effect, people would be like, ah, geoengineering, disgusting, dangerous, you know? That's insane.

BW

Hello, I'm Bryony Worthington, and this is Cleaning Up. With all the geopolitical upheaval, including the military action in the Middle East and the ripple effects it's had across the globe, it's easy for climate change to be pushed out of the headlines and down people's priority list. But this is a mistake, as we're now in an era of consequences with many known unknowns that will determine how bad things get, how quickly.

In January, the UK's representative body of actuaries, those people tasked with trying to quantify risk, put out a report entitled Parasol Lost. As an English literature graduate, I appreciated the pun on Milton's classical poem Paradise Lost, but the report itself makes for sobering reading. The climate, it seems, could be more sensitive to changes than we previously imagined or hoped.

The report highlights that as we continue to add greenhouse gases to the atmosphere at record levels, we're also stripping out other pollutants that were creating a global sunshield or parasol, counteracting some of the greenhouse gas effect. At the same time, we're also seeing a global reduction in cooling clouds and in snow and ice cover that reflect the sun away. These changes are likely why we're seeing an apparent speeding up in the rise in global temperatures.

To talk about this issue and his lifelong activism, I recently sat down with Ricken Patel, who was the founder and CEO of online activist platform Avaaz. Now living in his native Canada with his family, he's focussing his attention on defending democracy and on promoting more public research into climate stabilisation technologies, sometimes grouped under the term geoengineering. Please join me in welcoming Ricken Patel to Cleaning Up.

BW

Ricken, it's so lovely to be here with you today. And I wanted to start, as we always do on Cleaning Up, by asking you to introduce yourself. Tell us a little about who you are and what you do.

RP

Nice to be with you as well. My name is Ricken Patel and I'm from Canada, but I'm also a nominal Brit. And I'm a messed up international person. My dad and my brother and sister were born and raised in Kenya and kind of have lived all over the world. I am a lifelong activist. I am very passionate about making the world a better place as best as we can.

And I'm a dad. I have four little babies, ages two, four, six and eight. My youngest will turn two in a few days. I'm excited about that. And yeah, that's pretty much all I would say.

BW

Let's just unpack that statement about you being a lifelong activist, because I'm interested. When you started out in your career, how did you start out, you know, if you feel this burning passion to change the world, where do you start?

RP

I guess I always felt it from when I was a little kid, like I was just a weird kid. I read a lot of books from when I was in elementary school and I loved history. And I was in like the IQ challenge, you know, the trivia challenge stuff that all the nerds go kind of thing. And like, I was really into history and countries and science and, and it, and I don't know what alchemy did it to me, but I always had a sense of responsibility for the way the world is and the way it goes. At least that was my read of history, that we make it as we go. And, and so right from the beginning, like in college, I was a big activist and did the oh, very storied campaign at Oxford, where we, we were active in opposing the abolition of the grant and the imposition of tuition fees and top up fees for Oxford and Cambridge, trying to maintain accessibility of education and wrote an alternative funding proposal for, for that, that got a large amount of support among Tony Blair's MPs, it's their biggest rebellion of the Labour government to that point, and almost got sent down from Oxford for encouraging a tuition fees rebellion. And we occupied, we did an occupation of the university offices. 

And then similarly in Harvard, I was one of the leaders of the Harvard living wage campaign, where we did occupy the president's office for something like three weeks. And then we had a tent city in the Harvard yard and, and it was an epic campaign where by the end, we got like major donors that threatened to switch their donations from the university to our campaign and, you know, editorials in the New York Times saying Harvard's Heroes and everything. But from the start, we were completely frozen out, you know, and it didn't look like we were going to win, but it was this multi-billion dollar, second most profitable nonprofit in the wealthy nonprofit in the world, that was denying sort of basic living wages. They'd broken the unions, hired people back, forced them to work two jobs instead of one, you know, and, and the Harvard corporation was this board of just the corporate elite of the world. And they were just denying this nonprofit with a nonprofit mission, basic dignity to its staff, you know? So that was, those are two very early examples of where I felt like we had pretty epic success in a lot of ways.

BW

Yeah. The second one sounds more successful than the first, because I mean, I was the last generation to go to university, perhaps in the same cohort where I had maintenance grants and there was no tuition fees. And it felt completely accessible that I could go there and I'd be, you know, almost on equal fitting, not on equal fitting, but I didn't feel scared by the cost. And I feel like that's probably been lost, right? In the UK system. And it's what's never been there in the US system.

RP

Yeah, you're right. The wins that we won on that campaign were measured. For example, our alternative proposal was a graduate tax. So it was a progressive imposition of that extra money. So you benefited, you paid for your education in proportion to the amount which you benefited from it. And Scotland actually ended up adopting that idea afterwards. And so there were like little wins we could point to. But for a young undergraduate, it was a really big deal to sort of participate in national change in that way.

BW

Yeah.

RP

And I think it gave me a sense of agency.

BW

And the feeling that you don't have to accept the way that, you don't have to accept the world the way it appears, that you can have agency over changing it. And I think that is what makes an activist, right? That feeling of campaigning, leading to a change that you can imagine.

RP

And the experience of doing that then confers a sense of responsibility. That the world actually isn't just happening to all of us. It actually is the product of a sort of vector sum of all the influences of all of us upon it.

BW

Yeah.

RP

And that, yeah, that's a big responsibility.

BW

And so when I first came to know you would have been perhaps during your period where you were running a vase. So talk to us about that and that kind of move from personal activism in your own life to then building institutions to enable activism.

RP

Yeah. Well, after grad school, I had a few years in war zones in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Sudan, Afghanistan. I felt like I became sort of a physician to bodies politic. Like I was looking at acute patients on the operating table where they'd suffered state failure and economic failure, environmental failure, social failure. And then seeing these pathologies in their early stages in a lot of societies. And thinking, seeing the world through that lens. And those were also formative experiences for me, both in terms of how the world works and how you impact it. And out of that, I had advised different organisations and advised governments and things like that. And I became an activist because I just saw consistently how it's not always rocket science, what the right thing is to do. It's a question of how high it is on the minister's priority list. And that is determined by how much media is being written about it, how many constituents are writing about it, how many people that are close to that person have talked to them about it. And I just saw how democracy and lobbying and influence really matter.

BW

I have this phrase that I use, and there's no math behind it, but like 90% of politics is who shows up. And it's so, because it's so short term and the people with those decision making powers are so, there's so many vectors affecting them that if you're not showing up, who shows up changes the outcome.

RP

And they're just people. Like you're a baroness for God's sake, my lady, you know, just people who are trying to do the best they can and have, yes, have their own agendas and have their own interests, but also have decency and have kids, they want to be proud of them. And so that for me is another element of the agency that everyone with power in the world is just another person like you and me. And so, yeah, that led me to become an activist and or I was always an activist, but it led me to sort of think big about that and start Avaaz, which was my kind of passion project of my adult life. And I spent two years conceiving of it and raising the money for it and then 15 years running it as CEO. And it grew to be 70 million people on an email list.

BW

So let's just pause there and say, what is Avaaz? I mean, it's a name I think many people recognise, but just talk to us about what it was, the core product.

RP

The core product was this idea that there's a world that most people everywhere want, actually, when you crunch the opinion polls, like we're not as divided as our media and our politics would have us believe. And that uniting across all divides, across national border divides, across political divides, across cultural divides, like to achieve that world together and to hold our leaders accountable to delivering for us is possible. And that was the core idea.

And then using the technology of just at the time, it was this emerging new technology called email, you know, that we could magically connect people in massive numbers. And that really worked. Petitions were kind of the bread and butter that brought in a lot of those 70 million while it was well over 100 million when you count sort of the churn. But after the petition, you connect people to do things together, to make phone calls, to get together in protests, to fund a world class advocacy team. Like that's what I found was the magic mix was we hired deputies to presidents and White House staff and all kinds of very, very successful changemakers and leaders to then be subservient to a democratic discipline. So I didn't make the final decisions at Avaaz.

I was Suggester-In-Chief, but our membership made all the final decisions about our campaigns. So it didn't matter if I really loved an idea, if the members were like, ‘man, I'm not feeling it,’ I had to go back to the drawing board.

BW

A couple of questions. One was when I first came across Avaaz and quickly after that came this name that everyone gave it, which was clicktivism. This kind of feeling that we can from our bedrooms, you know, use these digital tools, the internet to kind of make our voice heard. But the negative side of clicktivism was, well, how many of these people are real? I can remember someone saying to me, well, Avaaz is just full of Donald Duck at Gmail. How much validation was there? And then also, isn't that just reducing the barrier, like making it too easy almost kind of invalidates it. Did you come across those kinds of challenges?

RP

Those challenges, those kinds of like, you know, it was the media rage, like, oh, is it clicktivism? Is it real? And it's like, it's almost nostalgic. Like, like who now, who has any degree of seriousness would sit back and say, oh, everything on the internet is not real, never has any impact in the real world. Like, and how silly would you be to believe that?

BW

Well, you say that, but now we've got bots and now we've got like the manipulation of, you know, AI generated content and the, and it's the anonymity of the digital that undermines it.

RP

Why do we have such bot networks? Why are people invested? It's not cheap to set up a bot network because it works. People invest billions in these kinds of marketing campaigns. And the corporates do it more than anybody else because people listen to the peer groups that they encounter online. It moves real people. We were never bots. We fought the bot networks, you know, you know, the evidence of our reality was that we raised half a billion dollars online, you know, and we mobilised the largest climate marches in history. And we, you know, made millions of phone calls and all of that stuff. Right. So we were definitely real people. But the silliness was this idea that the internet didn't matter. And I don't think anybody serious takes that seriously now.

BW

And I suppose in a second, so this organisation was growing from a digital platform with petitions into real life kind of manifestations of democratic support for issues. Was it, what was the process by which this, you know, how did things bubble up? Like what were the metrics of, ‘oh, that makes for campaigns, doesn't make for a campaign.’ How did you ground truth the things that got manifested into something bigger?

RP

We had a crack team of like 130 campaigners that were integrated into a vast cross-section of issues and countries and locations. We were, we lived all over the world, we had no central kind of brick and mortar office deliberately. So people were in their own media environments with their own networks. And we had people from all different, you know, environmental people, human rights people, development people, kind of like legal people, media people, politicians, you know, all kinds of folks with different professional sectors. And then we had networks and we were constantly drawing in ideas. And also our members, we had a member generated site where members could start their own campaigns.

So if any member wanted to think that there was a good idea, they could do it themselves. And if it was successful, we could see that that was the case. And then see if we want to pick it up. When we picked it up, then it would get tested. So it would go out to a randomised selection of membership, usually about 20,000 people and see what they thought of it. And that was where we would test like sometimes 20 different versions of a campaign to just, and it was really, I felt a real education, like almost a very special kind of education. I guess now everybody gets it when they do Facebook ads and stuff like that. They test many different versions.

BW

Oh yeah, A-B testing is built into it now.

RP

But for this it was like social change, you know, like it was like, what kinds of arguments do people respond to? What kinds of issues do they care most about? Like I felt we did 2,500 campaigns under my tenure, you know, like, you know, and imagine many versions of those campaigns on so many different issues. So it made me feel like I got a good nose for, like a journalist has a nose for a story. I got a good nose for a campaign. And so I got better and better at being able to just say, people are gonna react this way or that way. But still, I would get surprised a fair bit.

BW

And of those, was it 2,500? What would you pull out as the kind of signature? We changed the world on these issues, like what's your top two?

RP

Top two? Hard to choose. I'd have to go with the Paris Climate Agreement. That was a huge Avaaz campaign. We were very active on all the COPs in advance of Paris, all the G7 meetings, all the advance meetings, and different national policy setting processes. And then we were very active in the UNFCCC process in setting the kind of the idea of a North Star, of a temperature target. It's interesting.

BW

Yeah, we'll come on to that.

RP

That did not exist at a certain time. And when we first started saying we need this because we need to explain to the public what the heck all of this is about, they don't understand all these arcane climate regulations about forests and stuff like that. A lot of people were sceptical. And I think we were able to help steward the whole movement towards A, simple North Stars like that. B) simple asks. Like I remember Copenhagen was very ambitious and binding, you know, like simple formulations of things. And then mobilise large amounts of the public and generate a heck of a lot of media around those targets that we set the sort of bar for what politicians were trying to perform to. And then we evaluated them at the end of it. And so I found consistently we had a lot of impact on climate. 

BW

So I want you to come on to your second favourite. But let's just stick on this one for now, because there was a period in which this kind of phrase, 1.5°C to stay alive, kind of emerged out of the conversations and kind of got debated by the negotiators. And then some form of words like working towards 1.5°C kind of came into the text. But how do you feel about that now where we're bumping up against that? Actually a true reading of that target is stabilisation goal by 2100, right? So it's almost a very hard goal for us to evaluate in real time because you’ve got to wait till the end of the century to see if we hit it. But here we are breaching into kind of like the 1.5°C zone already, which means we're going to have to do a heck of a lot of work to come back out because we're going to overshoot. Do you feel like, do you think it was right to try and push us into that narrative almost knowing we might fail?

RP

So we didn't adopt 1.5°C until the very late stage. So we were late adopters of 1.5. 

BW

Where did it come from, do you think? 

RP

Well, in my experience, everyone was aligned on 2°C. And then a series of small island nations primarily, but obviously working in very close conjunction with activists who were all close friends of mine and sort of said, look, this two degree threshold, while it does match some of the global climate risk thresholds, it's not going to save the small island states. Their agriculture is going to salinate at 1.5 degrees. So are you going to save the least of us?

So you're going to be concerned with the most marginalised communities. And that was the argument made. And the Paris Agreement sort of fudged it, it said 1.5 to 2. So I think that's the background for that. But from my point of view, the world we were operating in, I cannot tell you, I met with climate ambassadors from major G7 countries in 2013, 2014. We're like, this isn't an issue. The public does not care. It's too long term.

BW

In climate at all, let alone what thresholds?

RP

No, climate is not an issue. It's not on anybody's top five. No one cares about this. And so we were in a world where Copenhagen had failed and everybody was feeling completely in the doldrums. And and, you know, I was like, we need to rally the troops, like we need to drive here. And I remember I wrote in the Guardian in 2014. I said, we are going to organise the largest climate march in history. And you're going to see. And I said, we're going to put up a lightning rod and you're going to see how many people care about this issue. And we did it. And indeed, it was one of the largest climate marches in history. And we had millions of people come out all around the world.

BW

And this is in the period between Copenhagen and Paris.

RP

This was the two years as we were trying to say Paris was coming And we were like, we're not even sure heads of state are going to go to Paris. You know, that's where the world was at. So in that world, we needed to mobilise political will and attention. We needed simple, inspiring goals. We need to make the core argument and we needed to mobilise a lot of people. And the goal of that mobilisation, we had learned our lesson from Copenhagen, because in Copenhagen, we had set fair, ambitious and binding.

But the Americans really weren't behind a binding treaty. They didn't think they could get it through the Senate or anything like that. And the Bush administration previously made the argument they thought tech was going to solve this, you know. And, you know, one of the humble admissions for me is that at the stuff we were pushing for at that time, a global binding treaty like Kyoto that was updated. That's it. That's always been a dead letter. And you could argue that that's because the US made it a dead letter. But they weren't kidding when they said that's a nonstarter.

BW

And partially it was because from a US perspective, you have Annex 1 and Annex 2, right? This bifurcation of the world into the so-called rich countries and the so-called poor countries, which came right away from the founding UNFCCC convention, which basically put the US on one side and China on the other camp, which wasn't bound, didn't need to do anything. And of course, fast forward to 2009, China was already emerging as a global economy. It was already a big emitter. And it just did not seem to work like the mechanics of the convention was just breaking down.

RP

Yeah, there was a number of problems with governance legislating the solution. And in Paris, we had sort of quietly internally acknowledged that to some degree and said, this is not a governance like this is a rally. This is an enthusiasm rally. I remember working with the UN Secretary General's office in advance of it and everything and like the way we structured the poet that delivered the, you know, Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner, who delivers the poetry. And it was about rallying momentum to say an energy transition is coming to send a signal to markets. Yeah.

So George W. Bush kind of won that one, you know, like it was largely a market signal that drove technological change that is having an outsized impact on some of our climate outcomes. The NDCs matter, the national commitments matter.

BW

Yeah. So these are nationally determined contributions, which fundamentally the reason Paris succeeded was because we flipped the script from, well, take a really top down look at this and allocate everyone allowances. And you have to stay within all these limits to, OK, right, everyone comes to the table with what they think they can do. You put that in a nationally determined contribution and it'll be, you know, none of this is binding. We all understand that enforcement was never there anyway, even under Kyoto. And we're going to try and aggregate that and ratchet that up so that we have this kind of hope that we under-promise, over-deliver and we keep going. That was the Paris breakthrough.

RP

Yeah. And I think that was a wise architecture for governance, for the times and for the realities we were in. So I'm not saying it was all signals to the private sector, but also the governments, there was no like it was a rallying point for governments to do what they chose to do individually, you know, and in some ways that was the adaptive answer. Like you weren't going to force governments to change their energy supplies. You know, it had to be driven from the bottom up with the citizens in those countries and the constituencies in those countries and had to be responsive to how much that push was succeeding. So, yeah, all that's to say that all of those targets and all that stuff, they were tools to rally, to motivate, to focus. And I think in that sense, maybe they weren't precise or even the right ones, but they succeeded in accomplishing that goal.

BW

So I can remember post the Paris breakthrough and it did was one of the very few moments on climate where you feel a sense of joy, right? And it did manage to create that sense. And I can remember going on a TV interview with George Monbiot, the UK writer of The Guardian. And my instinctive feeling at the time was he was really shocked and appalled that, you know, as far as he's concerned, Paris was a sellout even then. And I was like, well, look, just try and put it in the perspective of this is a symbol. This is a communication to the world that we were able to come together and agree on something. And no one's going to read the details of all, you know, all the get out clauses. And it's the symbolism of having got to win in the same way that Copenhagen really was just the symbolism was just a lot of defeat. And, you know, but actually in the real economy, things kept moving on.

RP

Yeah, I have to say, man, like I was not popular with radical climate activists leading into Paris because they wanted to burn the process down. They wanted they said the UN is discredited. We need to not plan any marches in advance, but plan to march afterwards to declare it a failure. And I just said we're going to choose to hope. I think that's where citizens are. And that's what the planet needs. And we're going to mobilise and rally for that hope.

And no, we didn't fix all the problems of the world in one summit. But we made really important progress that has driven a really important level of energy transition. And no, it has not been enough. But the game's not over yet. No, it's not over.

BW

And where do you see that energy now? Well, first of all, you know, you saw that through. You were in Avaaz And how long after that did you kind of move away from that big enterprise that you built? And was it that process that got you hooked on a climate climate agenda? And how much is climate still a focus of what you do?

RP

Yeah. So towards 2021, Avaaz is increasingly working on democracy because all the roads to all the changes that people wanted to see, including climate, just ran through democracy. And, you know, democracy is a very precious and adaptive and fragile system of government that is anomalous in human affairs. You know, we had on and off for 180 years in ancient Greece and then not much for another 1800-2000 years.

BW

Interestingly, though, like now anthropology is saying looking back through the prehistory stages and there's the evidence of these urban cities that predate that kind of modern era of history, which is, you know, which is uncovering actually different ways of doing looking after the global common and and making decisions like throughout 10,000 years of human history, we've been trying different ways out. And it seems to cyclically flow through. We need an autocrat. Someone needs to be on high telling us what to do to. Oh, my God, that was terrible. Let's throw it over and try a completely different decision making distributed decision making system. And there's this pendulum, I think, that goes through human history.

RP

Yeah, I think that's right. And I think, you know, I've written about this, that the kind of our indigenous governance systems and some of the governance systems that persist in some of those terrible places in like Sierra Leone, like at the village level, very deliberative democratic governance, you know, still quite gerontocratic, still quite patriarchal, but quite deliberate, democratic within those constraints and quite innovative and imaginative.

BW

Right. We I suppose in those things weren't solidified down into one definition, but you know, prehistory, I remember going to Mali and into the Dogon country and the way they made decisions, they had this common square they would sit in and the roof was deliberately low so that no one could stand up and start fighting. Like it was like a really interesting kind of expression of how do we physically create a space in which, you know, and there was a lot I think there was a lot of experimentation. And I guess we're still in that. But it feels like, well, how are you feeling about where we are today?

RP

Just as an aside, like actually one of the breakthroughs in the Paris negotiations was importing the Indaba technique from South Africa, which was a deliberative democratic that where people didn't sit behind podiums of Mr. President, Madam Chairman, you know, like they had to stand up in a circle, talk in a circle. And it was a short lasting thing to try and travel together. And that actually was a breakthrough in the process. It was a massive leap forward on UN normal negotiating processes, you know, that I think helped deliver Paris. 

So this is part of why I think we have an ancient technology and tradition that is sort of baked into some of our psychology and some of our and that's part of why we contend back towards democracy. But it's fragile, history teaches us it's fragile, you know, so and I feel we're in a moment right now, a very serious moment where only about 30 percent of the world is under democratic government and we're in a recession, like we're back to 1989 levels of democracy. We went over 50 percent of the world under democratic government of some form, but we've been declining and we have this new playbook of authoritarian populace that's threatening our democracies. And so that was the problem I saw coming in 2021 and I left Avaaz and I focused 100 percent on that problem. So that's part of the story of where I've gone since then.

ML

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BW

Here we are today and something you said earlier about wanting to be embracing solutions. We are both here at a meeting in Mexico where we're looking at climate again. So you're back in the climate space. Tell me a little bit about how you're thinking about climate now and the work that we're looking at.

RP

The bridge for me from democracy back to climate was just, I think, a lot about civilisations and how civilisations tend to fall through nonlinear feedback loops between natural and human systems. So the Mayans lose their water, the Romans deforest the Italian peninsula. And this is all kind of Jared Diamond's books and things like that, like environmental shocks.

BW

Some of which has been challenged, right? The whole Easter Island concept has been challenged.

RP

A lot of it is pretty bog standard that environmental stress of various kinds of civilisations triggers a certain level of human fragility and the two take each other down in a spiral. And that's what I'm worried about now. We've built a very interconnected, very interdependent, quite fragile civilization.

I mean, your breakfast this morning probably came from all four corners of the planet. And it depends on these wonderful human inventions of advanced social connection and contract law and all kinds of stuff, right? And even small shocks, you can see like some inflation for a bit, can really hack at the roots of that democratic society and that system.

And I'm worried that the shocks we may face in the next generation or so may be ones that our human systems can't adapt to. It's not that it's theoretically possible to get it out, it's that we won't. And so I feel like there's a need to both make our human systems more resilient and get ahead and try and prevent some of the worst catastrophic shocks that we may face.

BW

And are you thinking of the kind of most immediate impacts on politics of today for example, might be fear of immigration, right? That there's this inherent instability in countries that are already poor and unresilient or non-resilient are getting less resilient so that the population is having to move or it's triggering resource wars and kind of aggressive action between member states pushing populations. And that then is undermining the politics of Western democracy, certainly. It feels like that's been a, I mean, it's been, but to what extent has it been overplayed, I guess, because that's the other thing. These shocks can be real, but they can also be weaponised and turned into a kind of, you can drive fear into a population quite easily, right?

RP

Yeah. I think there's both perennial human weaknesses and like cognitive distortions that our thinking is just swimming in cognitive distortions and negativity bias and confirmation bias. And like, I do think we don't make it as a species unless we get a little bit better at how we form our judgments and opinions. Like we're meaning makers, but how close our views are to an accurate understanding of the world really determines how healthy and happy we are as individuals, as groups, as societies. And so I do think there's a journey to be walked in terms of our culture.

BW

And do you think, because now the new wave of tools that are being used to sort of capture our attention and provide information, I mean, they've become completely deregulated. There's no longer any concept of a publisher or an editor or a truth guardian. It's all just like whatever you want to say. And also now this algorithmic drive towards the most, you know, what bleeds leads, like the most shocking things and the most extreme positions, the most kind of eye-catching ways of presenting information, regardless of truth, right, are driving the commercial models for these platforms. So how much of that is part of the problem?

RP

That's where, when I said we were focussing on democracy at a buzz in our last years there, that was our biggest focus was big tech algorithmic reform and fake news and stuff like that. I mean, there was a peak in 2016 where, for example, there was more fake news on the Brazilian social media Internet than there was real news. It really spiked. And you asked me about what was my top two, right? And climate was the top one. And I don't know what I would put as two, but definitely a candidate for them.

And I hesitate to mention it because we've lost it now, you know, but it was one of my proudest things that really from soup to nuts, from top to bottom, we looked at the problem with Facebook, Meta, Instagram, et cetera, and said there is we are awash in demonising, divisive, fake, weaponised information. And the answer to that is not censorship, not corporate censorship, not government censorship. That will play into the hands of the autocrats eventually if you give those tools to them. The answer to that is more information for citizens to be able to navigate this mess, this swamp.

BW

So this is the inoculation theory that you can educate people to spot this?

RP

What we went for was corrections.

BW

Corrections, meaning?

RP

So we pioneered this model. Facebook initially dismissed it, said, no, corrections don't work. And we commissioned a bunch of academics. We ran a bunch of studies. We A/B tested a bunch of different models and we found a model for correcting information that worked.

BW

But the problem with any kind of disinformation tools is you have to define ‘truth’. And that's so subjective. So hard. So what were you doing? You're creating a kind of a democratic correction process a bit, you know, what's interesting about X, you know, people criticise X, but the community notes actually is bounded by quite a good theory.

RP

Yeah. I actually think, you know, again, I regret suggesting this might be our number two for a number of reasons. But what was good about it is, A, it did work like Facebook interlinked it. And I've advocated all the way to the top Facebook, you know, and went through all kinds of rounds of battle. You know, like I was banned from the Facebook campus, like the heads of WhatsApp and the, you know, Nick Clegg had to come outside and meet me in the parking lot because I wasn't allowed to enter the building. You know, that's how vicious it got. Yeah. But we wanted Facebook to implement our model of corrections across their entire platforms. And as a result, you don't see in 2020 anything like the same level of fake information as you saw in 2016. Or in 2024, you know. So it shifted to memes and kind of...

BW

Well, it's shifted from Facebook to probably WhatsApp or Instagram or something that's less, I don't know, it feels like in private groups. 

RP

Yeah, exactly. It started to hide in private groups, but it couldn't get away with it anymore. In the public. And that mattered, really mattered. You saw a level of sanity return to some of the politics. Like I tell individual stories that take too long. But now Facebook repealed all of that. 

Sadly, part of the reason they repealed all that is the fact checkers kind of sold us out. Like Zuckerberg wasn't wrong when he said. We trusted the fact checkers to be like independent journalists, that they'd be like devoted to their craft, you know, and it was one of the skepticisms of our model was like, you know, is this going to be true?

Are they going to really be trustworthy? Factoring more like… take a diversity of them, you know, rank them against each other. A lot of them in 2020, just they went biassed, ideologically biassed, and they had their own internal dynamics that just I don't want to plaster all of them, but a lot of them went that way such that…

BW

But this is the difficulty, right, that ultimately truth is so hard to define and then maintain and not allow it to become a group think kind of ideological path that you go down. And ultimately, that's why, you know, in a sense, you do have to come back to balance, you know, like it's a distribution curve. We're trying to keep everything in the middle. But you can't just like, yeah… it's very hard to just say that's completely wrong. I mean, there is some, but this is that this is a big debate. There are some things like, you know, the Holocaust did happen. Maybe that's where you draw the line in historical facts. But even that seems to be now being questioned.

RP

Yeah, that's where I think, you know, you can either go the Apple direction and Apple is just like, forget this. We're going to have human curators of our content. We're going to rely on mainstream media and trustworthy sources. And yes, we'll get things right when everyone gets them. We'll get things wrong when everyone gets them wrong. But we won't allow all these things to circulate. I think there's space for that, like society should have some of those voices around, you know, like gatekeeper voices. But I wouldn't want all of our information to be like that, because so many of the important views that need to surface start out fringe or radical and make their way into the mainstream. And that's progress. So I like the community notes model better to just signal to citizens, hey, this is disputed. Here's some of the views you might see around it. It does parallel some of our corrections model. We just relied on fact checkers to do that. And here you're relying on ordinary citizens to do it. And it is a more scalable model. So I will humbly admit defeat. But I wish that all of them were implementing community notes across all the different platforms. I think it would be better if they did.

BW

OK, so working on democracy, but you've come back to climate because it's one of those shock forcing factors that can really disrupt everything that we might see. And there are some people who would say that the current moment that we're in in climate is one of the biggest destabilising events that we're living through for two reasons. One, you've got these people being a little fearful of the future, like no longer feeling confident that their children's lives will be better than theirs. Creates a kind of bunker down, fearful mentality. But also on a you know, if you want to be more conspiracy theorist about it, we're going through an energy transition where the power of literal power of the energy holders of energy today, which are the fossil fuels, the petro states, the Russias, the Saudis, to a certain extent, the U.S., the big fossil fuel dominant countries starting to feel that power kind of they're losing that power because suddenly energy shifting, suddenly China's emerging as an electro state. Demand for oil is weakening. And there's a lot of power and money wrapped up in that fossil system. And in the history of climate going through all the negotiations, there's always a powerful lobby that's telling us, hey, don't worry about it. There's nothing to see here. Climate is not a thing.

And that, you know, that shifted from, you know, trying to deny the science. Now, a huge amount of effort is going into challenging the solutions like, you know, renewables don't work, electric vehicles are terrible. And but it's, you know, so that the sort of forces of disinformation are surfacing, which is addressing politics. And, yeah, so climate is right in the heart of all of this, really, isn't it?

RP

A hundred percent. But I think on climate, I would, maybe it's because I'm a campaigner. And I think sometimes a positive attitude determines reality. Like Henry Ford said, if you think you could do a thing or if you think you can't do a thing, you're right. And there's a certain amount of like reality distortion field that it's not just a distortion. It's actually like a reality shaping field. You know, there was some British lord who had a quote like nothing splendid was ever achieved by anyone who didn't believe that something inside themselves was superior to circumstance.

BW

I like that. very British. There’s another one, where the inventor of the personal computer who said the best way to invent the best way to predict the future is to invent it, you know, like a similar sort of feeling.

RP

Yeah. So on climate, I guess I feel like I'm with Bill McKibben. Like I think the sun is coming. Like we're seeing what we hoped for. The market was sent. The signal was sent to the markets. Enough public investment was put in place that we got the solar cost curves down enough that the market will take care of it from here. If Trump wants to stand against capitalism, you know, he can do that, which he is. We'll see how long that lasts, you know, maybe for a while. But yeah, but I think the world's gonna look more like Pakistan going forward in terms of how much solar uptake there's been. And that gives me hope.

BW

So solar plus batteries, right, is the other unlock, right? That suddenly you can move the sun around in the way that's affordable. Yeah.

RP

And transmission technology. And, you know, and also I think we can sometimes overdo what's happening in the United States and to a lesser extent Europe on climate. Brazil is, you know, under Lula, Brazil is still strong. India is still fairly strong. China is still fairly strong. A lot of the world is still fairly strong on it. So I think it's not as bleak as it felt in 2014. You know, there's enormous infrastructure, including corporates and lobbies and investment lobbies and clean tech and stuff that are driving the energy transition. That makes me think that if we do have the capacity to keep going hell for leather on emissions mitigation. Yeah, we have to. And we do.

BW

And it's less of a campaigning need, right? I think my campaigning has shifted over the years to the sort of fringes of the next wave. So, you know, I'm really excited about the transport transition because it's now kind of China's made it inevitable, really, with their battery investments. And it's just going to be cheaper and better and easier for countries to invest in this. And citizens are going to enjoy the clean air that they experience. There's a lot of factors pushing into that. So I'm like, OK, transport's not done, but, you know, we could see a pathway. What are the next frontiers that still need a campaigning mindset that aren't about delivery and just enabling investment through capitalism? It's more like still a contested space. And that's kind of where we've joined forces. We're at the frontier of a new type of climate intervention.

RP

Although I would say mitigation still needs heavy duty campaigning, you know, like it's going to be a massive lift to keep that engine moving and running and accelerating. But yeah, I think that the realisation that I think I've come to and I think we've both come to is that we've done some fantastic work on emissions mitigation. It's no small task, you know, to change the energy source of civilization. But the whole reason we're doing that was that 1.5 to 2 degree threshold, where beyond that, we are in very, very dangerous territory. Like our Earth can only handle so much heat stress before certain systems start to break. And that's why those thresholds were set. That's why we talk about the scientists gave them to us and said beyond this threshold, we're not sure what happens. We might not be able to take it.

BW

And you know, I'm sure our listeners will know this, but those temperature targets are global averages and no one experiences the average rate. So already the poles are three times warming faster. Three times. And also within that, there's a huge amount of variability of experience like the heat dome in Canada, which really for me went, oh, I did not have that on my climate impact bingo list that we were going to have deaths in Canada due to extreme heat.

RP

Me neither. Yeah, I was in that. Yeah. Yeah. And sub-Saharan Africa, another example, like.

BW

But all of the boreal forests suddenly being on fire, like this is not what I was expecting to get in 2025.

RP

And not factored into some of the projections, you know, like and this is it. I think there's three things. Like one is we for all that we've done, it's not enough. We are not on track to avoid catastrophic climate change that threatens human civilization.

BW

The risk of catastrophic climate change is still on the table, right?

RP

Yes. Still on the table. We have not avoided that risk. And so, you know, I think part of what we need to do is look really clearly at what those risks are and understand them better and monitor them better and risk assess better. So things like AMOC, you know…

BW

Go on, tell us what that acronym stands for because we've got an acronym.

RP

It's an ocean current that goes from the South Atlantic to North Atlantic around Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation. And it brings cold water from the South Atlantic. It's cold, warm water from the South Atlantic to the north.

So it warms the North Atlantic, warming Europe and drags the belt of warm, moist air where all the monsoons and all the rainfall happens, drags that north. And AMOC is some of our leading scientists like Jim Hansen are telling us that AMOC may be critically slowing. And if it does, it's slowed a couple of times over the past 20,000 years or so.

And we can see what happened when it stopped pulling all that warm air north. And so what happens is Europe freezes and drops eight to 10 degrees and a billion people in Africa and India and Asia lose half their rain. And you get a dieback of the Amazon rainforest almost certainly. So the Amazon rainforest dies off. Those are all of them catastrophic impacts on human civilization that are at the level that I think we wouldn't be able to adapt to or even handle without a collapse of civilization. They're too big a shock that the system we know now would not be able to adjust.

BW

Certainly not at the current population level. Right. I think it's going to be such a but so yes, there are those sorts of risks which feel incredibly impactful. Still a lot of uncertainty. Exact like when this might happen.

RP

That's the worry. We don't know. I don't know. Who knows whether this is going to happen and when. But no one knows.

BW

But also we also know that the Earth system is volatile and it has tipped and flipped and done different things without this many people relying on it being the status quo.

RP

Taking a sledgehammer to the Earth's biosphere with like an enormous amount of CO2. Yeah.

BW

And it is an experiment that we set in train that we're continuing to run. Like it's a global experiment in how and I can remember James Lovelock saying, you know, what we've got to realise is that Earth is like middle aged. You know, it's not as perhaps it's like, you know, when you're getting older, you know, if you fall off a step and you twist your ankle, it takes like a week for it to recover. Like a middle-aged Earth is actually less resilient to some of these things. So we're doing this experiment with its atmosphere, knowing that it has in the past been a lot more, you know, it's had different states at just the time when it might be most vulnerable.

RP

Yeah. And this is a relatively unusual sort of 10,000 year stable period in Earth's climate history.

BW

So yeah, we're just cranking up the dial of like, ‘oh, let's see what happens when we do this.’

RP

So even if you don't, even if by some crazy circumstance, you don't believe that humans are contributing to climate change, you sort of have to acknowledge that this climate instability and it is deeply, profoundly threatening to us. And we better figure out what we're going to do about this.  You know, the AMOC is one example. We've got Thwaites Glacier. If that is moving, it's a gigantic piece of the Antarctic ice shelf. And like that's moving into the ocean at a very slow speed. We don't know. Could it speed up? How fast could it speed up? But if it does, that displacement could raise ocean levels, you know, three feet.

BW

Yeah. And the other thing that I found quite compelling as I've looked into this again in terms of, you know, GHG emissions concentrations notwithstanding are a massive problem. There are two other factors that I thought was it's this reflectivity element, right? 

Where the function of how much heat we experience is a combination of how much heat gets trapped by the gases, but also how much do we bounce sunlight back into space safely without heating the planet? And that reflectivity has been waning, like we've been losing reflectivity. And that's led to things like, you know, loss of we're losing clouds.

We're losing the cooling layer of clouds. And just when I was looking at it, I was thinking, I don't know how many policy makers are really in tune with that. They might still be really, you know, focussing on energy transition, which is great. We want their attention there. But we also want them to be thinking outside of that. What are the other risks that we know are there? We just don't know how risky they are. Shouldn't we be paying a little bit of attention to that?

RP

Yeah. Yeah. I don't know if it's too simplistic, but the analogy I think of is like it's a really hot day. You go outside. You choose a white T-shirt because it's going to reflect the heat. You'll be a bit cooler.

But we're in the middle of being really, really hot on a really hot day. And we're putting on a black T-shirt, you know, like it's just going to. Because the information I've seen is that over the past, and this is early information, you know, it's just figuring this stuff out over the past 30 years, we've lost up to five percent of our cloud cover of our reflectivity from clouds and the radiative forcing of that, like the amount by which it changes how much sunlight is being absorbed or reflected from the earth is equivalent to all of human emissions since industrialisation. That's an extraordinary thing.

And so this is an example of the feedback loops. If there's a feedback loop between temperature and cloud cover. Holy mackerel, we're in uncharted territory about how sensitive our earth is to temperature and how we may be way off the charts of what IPCC and other scientists have predicted would be the pathway of climate change. So that just means we need to think new because emissions mitigation is not going to protect us against those scenarios, no matter how fast we get it done.

BW

Yeah. And the other element of the reflectivity is, of course, when you emit fossil fuels, especially coal and heavy fuel oil alongside the CO2 comes a particular matter, you know, like little dust particles, traditional pollutants, which were basically phased out for air quality regulations. So we said, let's take the sulphur out of coal first, you know, stop the acid rain problem. But, you know, that essentially removed a kind of co-emission that was helping screen some of the heating effect of the CO2, which did the same with heavy fuel oil in shipping. And it seems as if, and again, error bars here and disputes in science, which is what science does, always pushes back.

But what seems to be emerging is that that particularly was a big intervention because where those emissions were occurring, which is you were basically ships ploughing the ocean, creating these little particles, which would create cloud cover, like they would be the nucleus around which a cloud could form.

RP

Or would brighten those clouds.

BW

Yeah. Yeah. So we've kind of created a termination shock of the sort of screening that was coming alongside our greenhouse gas emissions. And actually, by switching from those heavy polluting fossil fuels to gas, we just added this extra bit, which is methane, which is the opposite, right? It's a forcing factor. So we've gone so-called clean gas comes with associated methane emissions, which, you know, much higher short term warming. So it's like the worst possible thing we could have done.

RP

Yeah. Yeah. This is where I guess my journey on this has been to a recognition that we are terraforming this planet in real time. Like we are there is no way around it that we are having a massive just our existence one way or another. Even our environmental regulations are having these massive impacts on our climate, our safety, our people and planet. And we've got to take responsibility for all of those impacts. Like this is where I find sometimes we are blinkered or just have tunnel vision and we only look at one piece of the Earth system or one impact that we're having. And actually, we have to think holistically about all the stuff that we're doing for good or for ill and think, does this make us safer?

BW

And by saying we've got to take responsibility, are you saying, and this is perhaps me putting my thoughts into you, but I think of it in terms of human agency, like we evidently have agency because we've done all this stuff, right? We've changed our atmosphere. And therefore, we've got to lean into human agency to be it's incumbent upon us to embrace science, embrace research, think imaginatively about the range of solutions that we need to bring. Is that similar?

RP

Yeah. For me, the tension there between is it OK, is it just we need nature to solve it or is it that we need to figure out the solutions to it? You know, I would liken it to the tension in medicine.

So my sister writes books about alternative health care. She's very naturalistic, health orientated. My brother is a professor of medicine at the University of British Columbia, two poles of the spectrum. And I feel like both poles have wisdom. You know, nature has wisdom, like listening to your body's rhythms, not getting on the intervention highway and doing too much to it and, you know, relying too much on drugs and stuff has wisdom. But also if we didn't have like a C-section kind of thing, my wife and my kids would be dead. You know, like I am so grateful to conventional medicine and it has done wonders for humanity. And that's just straight science messing with nature, you know.

BW

So I mean, humans always mess with nature because in the early days, like to survive, you had to do that. Nature is not some benign thing that, you know, is there to nurture us. It can't, you can follow its rhythms. But ultimately to say that we have no agency and we haven't benefited from harnessing science to manipulate things or benefit, like that seems like completely crazy.

RP

The thing that I find insane to some degree is that right now you can just geoengineer the crap out of the planet as long as you do it for your own personal profit. Right. Stick anything you like in the atmosphere or the water or the sea. You know, there's some limits, but not really. Yeah. You can't do something that kills humans directly, but you can poison our biosphere. No problem.

BW

Go ahead.

RP

That's capitalism and growth.

BW

And, you know, in a sense, you know, I always think about the drive towards ever larger cars. Right. No one said to Ford or Toyota: Oh, hang on a sec. This is going to materially change the number of potential accidents or it's going to use so much more fuel that's going to drive climate change. There was never any process by which they had to apply to ask.

RP

So I sort of understand that. I don't think it's that crazy, you know, like that's just people who grow without thinking about the environment. OK, that's that standard. What's crazy is if you do any of that stuff with any good intention, you know, if you if you, for example, you talked about the cooling effect of the of the sulphur emissions from from the container ships, if you replace that with saltwater foggers that have the exact same cooling effect with saltwater being spread over oceans. Right. So it's much more healthy. No acid rain. No like no effect on the ozone layer. You know, just like people would be like, ah, geoengineering. Disgusting, dangerous, you know, like that's insane. Like you can do the worst to our to our to each other as long as it's for profit. If you do anything with good intentions, you're a nasty, dirty person. You know, that's the kind of double standard that I'm like, OK, this is nuts, people like we need to stop this.

BW

But I like what you're saying about your family experience of the two extremes of the homoeopathic that shall never take a vaccine to. Oh, you know, I'm a surgeon who believes in lots of intervention. I feel like I'm always in the middle of that tension, that kind of there's a pragmatism to trying to just use on balance common sense and evidence of what works.

And unfortunately, because of what we discussed in terms of the media environment, these big extreme views are driving attention. You know, they're pulling. It's it's it's it's much more interesting in some ways for these extreme views to be polarising us. And the boring, oh, well, let's just take a pragmatic, sensible line here. I think most people are there. Yeah, I absolutely believe most people are there. But we've got a challenge trying to get to them and get their attention.

RP

Yeah, I think it is pragmatic, sensible. But I also think. It's very idealistic, like in the sense of it's very principled and human, right, like if you care about people and the planet.

You know, what are you going to do in this situation? Like we don't have a plan to stop catastrophic climate change that could kill hundreds of millions of people, some of the world's most vulnerable people. So what are you going to do? It's not principled or idealistic to sit back and say, ‘well, too bad, so sad. I'm just going to do emissions mitigation.’ You know, we have a responsibility. None of us got into this game to do emissions mitigation. We got into this game to protect people and planet, and they need our protection now. So we need to think better, you know, like and this happened when we when people introduced adaptation in addition to mitigation. A lot of people were like, don't do adaptation. That will have a moral hazard and people won't do enough emissions mitigation. It'll distract people.

And that never happened. Like no one admitted less because we're doing adaptation to my knowledge or admitted more. And I think we need to think about what options we have beyond mitigation and adaptation now to protect people and planet. And that's a moral responsibility for every citizen to consider right now.

BW

Yeah, I agree. I mean, there's still lots of uncertainties, right? I mean, the term that we're skirting around here is geoengineering. It's like, how can we make positive interventions to cool the planet or buy some time to sort of slow down some of these impacts? It's an emerging field, right? And but if we stop researching it, if we try and ban researching it, I think that would just be the most immoral thing.

RP

Insanity. Yeah.

BW

Yeah. So that's so that's a common goal. I guess that's what's brought us together here today is like asking countries and citizens of those countries to embrace the fact that researching this is the morally responsible thing to do.

RP

Yeah. Yeah. I don't think there's a few things that people might call geoengineering. I don't know. I mean, the word is really weird and it's unclear what it applies to. But let's say things you do to try and fight climate change, you know, that aren't emissions mitigation.

You know, there are some things that are real no brainers. Like you could rewild, for example, you know. You know, take deserts and turn them into grasslands where it sequesters carbon. Like who's against that? You know, that is terraforming the planet, but it's kind of more natural impact. You know, carbon dioxide removal where we're sucking carbon dioxide out of our air, our soils or our oceans.

That is not controversial from a scientific point of view. Like the IPCC sort of says there's no way we fix climate change without CDR. So it's for weird reasons. It's still controversial among some circles, like partly because we haven't figured out how to make it work and make it work in safe ways and stuff like that.

BW

And it might just be slow, right?

RP

I mean, it might not be fast enough to protect us, you know, but we have to figure that out. I haven't heard any argument for why we don't have to figure out how to do CDR safely, justly and sustainably. And we can, you know, like it's the challenges.

BW

And this comes back to, you know, the ways in which we introduce policy. Is it at some point we all got economists, you know, macroeconomists got a grip of the of the narrative and said, oh, the best thing to do is create a market and all this stuff, make everything fungible. And, you know, the price will settle out and it'll all be perfect.

And, you know, old fashioned kind of macroeconomics with Newtonian physics underpinning it, which turns out not to be at all how the world works. And we've created a sort of we have created, unfortunately, a kind of zero sum game like you invest in rewilding. If you sell the so-called carbon that you've emitted, you've saved an emitting fossil fuel emitter. What's the game? All that you've got is one very certain impact of a fossil emission, which will be in the planet in the atmosphere for a thousand years against a somewhat uncertain hope that the carbon stored in a tree. Those things are not fungible. I truly I've worked on carbon markets for a long time. I feel like that was a classic misunderstanding of the complexity of the problem.

RP

I think there are plenty of bad ideas and bad solutions on the road to finding good ideas and good solutions. Yeah. But what we need to be is science led and evidence based. And open minded in the search for them and be critical, you know, of how these things, whether they work or not, do they sequester carbon sustainably? What impact do they have on different parts of the world? Do they disadvantage certain people unfairly? How they can be governed? What kinds of impacts they have? Like, I think the moral hazard injection could be could be serious in certain cases. You know, like so I think all of these things, what we need is a healthy conversation about this topic that is focused on protecting people and planet and science led and evidence based.

And that's where I think we haven't yet been. Like we've been stuck because a lot of climate activists like me kind of stamp down on thinking beyond mitigation because we didn't want anybody to focus anywhere else. We just needed to get that job done. And we were worried about focussing anywhere else.

BW

Yeah. And actually why we can think more expansively, I think, is because some of that is now in train, right? It's not going to happen at the timescale we might want. But we as activists no longer need to tell people that solar is cheap and that you should install batteries. But I think that's just got its own course now, which is not requiring a kind of big campaign intervention. There's going to be bits of the margin where you can speed it up.

But it's got a kind of arc, but it's not enough. It's just going to play out over two to three decades. And actually because of these sort of near term risks that seem to be occurring, that the speed with which we're seeing some of these temperatures increases. That's why, in a way, I think we can create this space to have this conversation.

RP

Yeah, I'm a little bit less. I wouldn't operate from that logic for myself. Like partly because I don't think we yet have a no-brainer, safe, just and sustainable alternative to mitigation that's going to get the job done, that's going to make people or planet safe. I think we need to be hell for leather in the search for those solutions and be really open minded about, you know… 

BW

I'm just saying that if I think about my own working life, I still spend probably two thirds of my week on mitigation.

RP

Right.

BW

And I have one day a week where I think about adaptation, where I'm interested in resilience and natural resilience and human resilience. And then I have one day a week when I'm like, what about the moonshot kind of big picture science ideas that might buy us some time? And I feel like that's good.

RP

It's a good balance. Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. Because there's still a lot of campaigning and political advocacy work to do to sustain the emission and accelerate the emissions mitigation trajectory we're on. Because it's the only long term thing that works and to apply it to the hard to abate emissions. Like I think so it's going to take care of some of the easy to abate, but the high heat stuff and, you know, aviation and fuels and eco fuels.

BW

Yeah, but it's going to be a lovely cascading in the same way that some of the risks cascade. Right. So, you know, we raise the temperature. Positive feedback loops, which started 20, 30 years ago with personal computers and lithium ion batteries. It's like, you know, that's tipping into transport, which is going to mean that eventually electrification will find its way into lots of the economy. Yeah. So I'm yeah, I don't want to be glib. And the reason the Cleaning Up podcast exists is, you know, we need people to see that this is possible and viable and the electrification and the clean electrification story still needs to be told. Yeah, we're up against some headwinds, but there's quite a lot of tailwinds.

RP

And the thing that really keeps me up at night and part of why I'm focussing a bit of my time on, like, my allocation is different from yours. I'm actually spending more time on the outlier solutions than the emissions mitigation. I'm still spending a big chunk of my time on democracy because I just think we lose the whole game if we lose our democracies.

But the reason I'm focussing on the outlier stuff is I really think it's a neglected area that these bands of uncertainty in the IPCC projections are conservative bands. Like it's a conservative institution. And all the evidence of the sensitivity or the temperature of the stuff the IPCC doesn't factor in suggests the band is much wider than that. The earth may heat much more than is projected currently. And if it does, the threat to humanity becomes much greater, even over the near term, potentially, even within the next generation. And so if that's the case. We need a new set of tools. And we need them fast.

BW

And we need a risk based approach. Like it's a risk to risk assessment in those cases. Well, listen, it's been a delight to speak to you. We're going to wrap it up here. I'm sure we could go on for another hour.

RP

But such a pleasure, my lady. 

BW

Thank you, Ricken. Thanks again once again for all your work. And that was truly lovely to hear that story from you and learn a bit more about what you do. So thank you for coming on.

RP

Thank you. 

BW

So that was Ricken Patel. As always, we'll put links in the show notes to relevant materials, including the report Parasol Lost and our recent episode with Zeke Housefather, where we dove into the most recent climate science. My thanks, as always, to Oscar Boyd, our producer, to Jamie Oliver, our video editor, Kendall Smith, our head of operations and to the rest of the Cleaning Up team and the amazing Leadership Circle members who make this podcast possible. And thanks to you for listening. Please join us next week for another episode of Cleaning Up.

ML

Cleaning Up is proud to be supported by its Leadership Circle. The members are Actis, Alcazar Energy, Arup, Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners, Cygnum Capital, Davidson Kempner, EcoPragma Capital, EDP, Eurelectric, the Gilardini Foundation, KKR, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, National Grid, Octopus Energy, Quadrature Climate Foundation, Schneider Electric, SDCL and Wärtsilä. For more information on the Leadership Circle, please visit cleaningup.live. If you're enjoying this episode, please hit like, leave a comment and also recommend it to friends, family, colleagues and absolutely everyone. To browse our archive of around 250 past episodes and to subscribe to our free newsletter, visit cleaningup.live.