What kind of development trajectory do you think India should be taking now?

Let me just use slightly different language to the one you used to describe what happened in China.

You said that that growth enabled them to invest in the green.

Let me put it slightly differently.

I've been working in China since 1988, and I've been working in India since 1974.

I'm very fond of, of both, both countries.

I've been going to the China Development Forum, which is a gathering in March every year, where they gather mostly business people from across the world to meet with the senior decision makers in China.

So can you just briefly explain what William Nordhaus got wrong?

I mean, you know, I know that saying is, uh, not strictly lexicographically accurate, Nick, but it's, uh, it- it certainly the thought occurs that where there is a crisis, you shouldn't waste it.

it.Well, the problem with this crisis is that it, uh, is intense and getting worse.

It's not just a crisis that comes the last two or three years and then you get over it.

This is a crisis where the, uh, climate is getting ever more hostile, and temperatures are going up faster than we thought, and the consequences of any individual temperature is worse than we thought.

We're directly experiencing it now, but if we let this go on, uh, without strong action in the coming decade or two, we're headed for a very violent world climate where hundreds of millions, perhaps billions of people would have to move, and it would be, you know, 50 degrees centigrade in the Indo-Gangetic Plain for extended periods in the year 20, 30 years from now.

And that kills people, and there are hundreds of millions of people there.

It's the kind of droughts and wildfires that we're experiencing right across Europe.

But you're arguing that, uh, in fact, digitization and AI can be a, a tool for combating climate change.

So I guess I want to, how do you think about sort of where to strike the balance between intervening and between sort of letting the market process work?

You've got to start with what you need to do.

And we know because of the basic science that we have to change our emissions quickly.

We have to cut our emissions quickly for all the reasons we've just been talking about.

And we know because of the technology that there are really a lot of options and many of them cheap and attractive.

to doing exactly that, to building the new and transforming our economies.

So you start with what you've got to do.

What do you say to people who say this is the only way to save the planet is to stop growing?

Maybe just to start us off, could you summarize the argument of your book?

Yeah.

The...

It, it's embodied in the subtitle of the book, which is The Economics and Opportunity of Climate Action.

So it essentially argues that the investments that we have to do and the structural and systemic change that we have to undergo will be the driver of the new growth story and that it's an investment story par excellence, quite a lot of investment, of course, in physical capital, but not just physical capital, uh, also human, uh, natural, and indeed social capital in terms of the way in which, uh, we work together, collaborate, the institutions function and, and so on.

So that's the story, the story of, uh, climate action driving growth.

Within that story, um, of course, it's an intersection between AI and the new technologies.

So Nick, first.

Tell us what happened to you.

Yeah, if I can just correct you there, it's not a, I don't know where the idea of the sponge bullet, I saw that in a couple of reports.

It's actually a hard plastic shell, um, bullet.

There's no sponge about it at all, unfortunately.

Uh, yeah, I was down at the protest at Paramount.

There'd been ice raids earlier in the day and the local community had turned out to protest.

Um, they started getting quite agitated with people throwing bottles of water.

What's your take on that?