Well,

yes, I explained it and I started off to say, you know, we have like, We separate our garbage into 10 different categories.

And obviously not all of those garbage cans are everywhere, but you really have to sort of sit there and say, where does my waste wrapper from this ice cream go? And of course, look, this is well-intentioned.

People want to do good by recycling.

And there's something, and yes, exactly.

And there's something to be said about recycling because it's a good idea to not just throw everything away and just throw it certainly into the ocean and throw it into an unguarded garbage camp or something.

The reality is that we are now way beyond that.

state

Are we having a different debate all over the Western world now?

Oh, there's certainly a lot of realization that going net zero or even doing a lot about climate change is phenomenally expensive.

It was easy for politicians to make all these promises 10, 20 years ago when it was 10, 20 years ahead.

But now, of course, the bill is coming due.

Britain has the highest electricity prices for industry.

You have some of the highest electricity prices in general.

But across Europe, when you have focused a lot on climate, you get very high electricity and energy prices.

So how do we balance the fact that net zero for countries like mine is absolute lunacy, is deindustrialising us and ruining us and making us poor? How do we balance that with concerns about emissions and concerns about rising temperatures? Because somehow there's a balance there that has to be struck, isn't there?

We have no sense of how many people we've lifted out of poverty.

So over the last 25 years, it's in the order of almost a billion people.

So every year for the last 25 years, we could have had a headline in every paper in the world everywhere around telling us yesterday 138,000 people were lifted out of poverty.

How come you never hear that? That's just an astoundingly amazing thing.

And yes, there are still many problems.

Yes, there are still many poor people.

And so, well, I'm curious about

what you think about that.

So, overall, a warmer planet, not to downplay it, but a warmer planet actually reduces the death toll from weather.

Yes.

So this is one of the great examples of how we're being misled by only hearing the bad side.

So first of all, heat waves are dangerous.

If you're in a heat wave, you should definitely take care.

You should have enough water.

You should get to a place where it's cooler.

Surely nuclear energy is the sensible, dense and proven technology that can underpin our economies and our societies without devastating large areas of landmass.

[laughing]

We live everywhere.

We live on ranges that are much grander than anything climate can throw at us, and that's because we already adapt.

This is the stuff that we're really good at.

We know this across a wide range of areas.

So we have good studies that show that we adapt to all of the negative impacts from climate change, so both for heat waves, for droughts, for s- storms, and for floods.

We've become better and better at handling these problems.

So I would look at, at the total return on your investment, and mitigation is it.

Is net zero the answer? Should we be trying to bend our energy policies to get to that by 2050? What is the benefit of net zero and what are the risks here?

So absolutely if you want to fix climate change, the only way to do that in the long run is to cut carbon emissions dramatically and essentially go to net zero, which is just a fancy way of saying that we won't be emitting any more, uh, greenhouse gases in the long run.

That makes technical sense.

If you're just looking at the problem of climate change, we should go net zero.

We should go net zero tomorrow.

But of course the real problem is there's a significant cost involved in this.

And so, uh, th- surprisingly, as you say, a lot of governments have promised, uh, to go net zero.

Hmm

Should we move away from it? And is it ultimately something that is good or bad? So

global warming, which is really the concern around fossil fuels, is real.

It's a man-made phenomenon, and mostly it'll have negative impacts.

So there is a problem of global warming.

But of course, what you have to remember, and I think we've started forgetting this, is that you have to ask, what am I giving up to avoid this problem, right? Because obviously if you can solve the problem of global warming for very little resource loss, that's great.

If it ends up costing you a lot, maybe you've actually made a really bad bargain.

And we need to have that conversation.

Should that be the way that people that are concerned about emissions and climate change should be advocating for?

So do you think the media is intentionally giving people the impression that wildfires are on the rise? And if so, what is their motive?

Well, there's certainly some intent in saying that.

So again, remember, news media will always show you where it is burning.

You never see a journalist say, hi, I'm here and there's nothing burning, right? You just don't see that.

So the point is, we constantly see stuff that has a problem, but we're not well informed if we don't also have news media telling you.

But actually, this is somewhat of an exception.

In most of Europe, it's actually burning less.

So even if the West does achieve a carbon neutral economy or environment, how much of an impact would that actually have on the global climate? And what are we seeing from China and others in the East?

Hmm.

Now, the reason why climate change is a problem almost everywhere- Is because our infrastructure is not adjusted to anything but what it was in the past.

So both if it g- got colder or warmer, you would have a substantial cost because you actually have to retrofit your house.

That's true in England, that's true in Spain.

But remember, most people live, uh, or a very large s- uh, part of people live below Spain, so closer to the equator.

You know, if you live in Ethiopia, it's mostly just not a good thing that it gets warmer.

And that's why net global warming is a problem.

Okay.

Who's still panicking about climate catastrophe? The Davos crowd? European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen didn't mention the climate even once in her 2026 annual address, unlike in the past.

U.S. voters? Americans rank climate change at number 28 of 30 problems, and according to the Searchlight Institute, voters in battleground states are prioritizing pocketbook issues over climate.

Canada? Prime Minister Mark Carney once championed radical climate policies, but now wants to increase oil production.

The Europeans? After worrying intensely about climate change for years, they have other things to worry about.

Sky-high energy prices, low growth, and the war in Ukraine.

In their latest ranking, climate hit a new decade low.

The 12 solutions that we come up with, they will in total cost about – I'm giving you a rough estimate here because there's different ways to measure.

It will need about $35 billion a year in funding, and that funding could come from from rich people like Elon Musk and Bill Gates.

It could come from our development agencies, USAID or GIZ or whatever.

We're spending $175 billion in development aid every year, so surely we could afford $35 billion.

This is, as you mentioned, a drop in the bucket.

It really is a rounding error.

This

is a terrible world.

And so, so while I'm, I'm curious about what you think about that.

I, I, I think it's a very good metaphor for, you know, how, how the world, uh, in, in many ways have come to work.

I, I, I think you're, you're absolutely right.

It's a very sort of, uh, stimulating and very, uh, easy message to fall into.

The world is terrible, but here's how we can help.

And, and the story very easily become, I'm gonna help by cutting tons of CO2.

Now, again, I bring my data points to this.

Yeah

Now, if that is your starting position, it's hard to argue with these people.

Everything is justified, of course.

And that's exactly why it is so important to keep the worry turned up to max or even 11.

But the reality is this is not an emergency.

This is not the end of the world.

It is a problem.

But there are many things that are problems and we fix them typically by being smart.

What was the tipping point that we went from common sense to all-out madness on this? And who decided? Where was this collective of individuals, of brains, that said, if we don't do this, we're all going to die? Was there a moment?

but the Labor government and others, as you know, just say, "Shut up, don't talk about it." And if you even speculate on the motives, uh, you'll go to prison, uh, much faster than the killer.

So I think I, I, I want to share with you two important things.

One is that we need to recognize that people will tell you that solar and wind is incredibly cheap, and that's technically true.

This is why it's such an insidious argument.

So everybody has seen this graph of, you know, over time, how solar and wind has just come down in price, and they're very cheap right now.

So people will tell you, "Solar and wind, some of the cheapest electricity on the planet." But what they don't tell you is, yeah, when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing, but-

Right.

... otherwise, it's the most expensive power on the planet because it's infinitely costly.

Yes.

Uh, so it's, it's not a con job.

Uh, there is a problem.

Uh, and, and actually, uh, in, in some sense, uh, bizarrely as it may sound, uh, you know, the world is, is built, all our infrastructure is built to live at the temperature that we've had for the last 100 or 200 years.

That's true in Los Angeles, that's true in, uh, Boston, uh, it's true everywhere in the world.

And so if it get colder or if it gets warmer, that will be a problem.

So there is an issue here, but obviously it's vastly exaggerated when people then talk about the end of the world.

Hm.

Right. What countries are doing better at this now? What countries are incorporating some of the policies and, and solutions that you've been talking about?

So unfortunately, I think we're not quite there yet. I think Trump's intuition can be very, very good that, you know, get rid of a lot of the crap, as he would probably say, and then let's start doing smart stuff. So very clearly, you want to make sure that there's a lot more fracking, that there's a lot more gas. Gas is both cheap, it's available, it can help a lot of countries around the world, and it also has a lo- much lower CO2 emissions. So this is absolutely the way to go in the short run. This is why the US has been leading the world in cutting its carbon emissions. Not because of Obama, not because of Trump either, but because of a lot of gas producers have just simply made gas much cheaper than coal. You need to do that also for Europe, also for the rest of the world. Obviously, Europe has put itself in a very precarious situation. We got all addicted on Russian gas.

Yeah.

Not, not a lot, a lot not in the sense that it's really... Everything is big in China. Uh, but yes, they are building more, uh, nuclear power than anywhere else in the world in China. And again, China can actually make this fairly cheaply. But everywhere else, because we do it in start-stop fashion, you know, uh, we, we don't design it as an industrial product but, but rather like this one unique opera house that we're building and, you know, it all has to be perfect and then, of course, the costs escalate to the point where third generation nuclear, the current generation, is just not commercially com- uh, viable. And so what you really need is to get fourth generation nuclear power going. So the idea is, and this is still a sales pitch, I'm not totally sold on it, uh, but it's, you know, make these modular small nuclear power plants that you just simply you get them signed off on, on the, uh, on the, uh, uh, factory level and then you just churn out 100,000 of them. You sell them everywhere and you just plug them into existing networks and they run. They're built to be inherently safe and there's no nuclear proliferation issue. You can't make a weapon out of it.