Climate Truth in Business: Mike Berners-Lee on the National Emergency Briefing

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Welcome back to Sustainability Sold, where we'll be helping you and your organizations turn environmental challenges into business opportunities. I'm Will Richardson, Head of Networks, Head of Ecosystems at 51toCarbonZero. And as ever, I'm joined by my brilliant co-host, Charlie Luxton. Charlie, how's it going? What's new with you?

Well, I'm fine. Things are good with me. But what's new with you? That's a new sort of new title, new sponsor of the podcast. And what's going down?

It is. It's exciting. We've now transitioned from Green Element and into 51toCarbonZero, AI-powered software platform that helps you report on your emissions. So similar to Compay Footprint, but if I'm brutally honest, a lot, lot better. They've had funding, they've got money behind them, and they've got— I've been brought in to help enhance what it is that we're doing. I'm working on our old ambassador referral network, which is, which is great because it's bringing lots of people together that work within the sustainability space. as sustainability experts and leaders within organizations and getting them to refer 51 to Carbon Zero software platform. Equally, we are building a community. We have a fantastic bunch of referrer— referees. I always struggle with the referees because referees is spelled the same way as referees. I don't know if you've ever noticed that, but I have now.

Recommenders.

I'm good with that.

I'm good with that.

But yeah, so it's building, building on what we were doing before. And like, what's quite nice is I'm not CEO anymore, so therefore I'm actually really able to put a lot of time into this. Can I, can I actually do a quote from one of our old and current ambassadors?

Go on then.

Yeah. So, being a part of the Ambassador Network was incredibly rewarding. Having the opportunity to have open, thoughtful conversations about the challenges we face every day as sustainability consultants really helped me to gain perspective on the work that we are doing. Expertise in the group gave invaluable insights into current trends and reminded me that collaboration is vital in the sustainability space. That came from Amelia Price of Sustainable Film. And I thought it was, it really articulated what we're trying to achieve really well.

Yeah, very good. So exciting times.

Yeah, no, exactly. Exactly. And what about you? Actually, I'll tell you what, last time we spoke, we spoke about your democratization of the business, as in—

Oh, yes, yes.

We are now an employee ownership trust. We transferred the ownership of the business to the employees. So it's now owned by the 13 of us who work here. And we have got our, well, our second sort of EOT, employee ownership trust, Meeting tomorrow, actually, to sort of set the direction and steward the business, steer the business forward. So it's been an interesting time from our side. Really exciting, though.

Well, the reason why I bring it up is because I've been playing around with YouTube, and the YouTube Short that outstripped most of the other ones that I've put out is that one. It's about the employee. Really interesting. It seems that lots of people are really interested in what it is that you're doing with regards to that.

Yeah, it's great for consultancies. It sort of really works for smaller, sort of, I think, sort of intellectually property sort of driven organizations such as design consultancies, structural engineers, you know, those kinds of things which are really hard to sell because it's so much about the people. Um, and, and, and, and there's massive challenges around succession in those businesses. And, and unfortunately, a lot of businesses sort of fall apart when the original founders leave, when there's so much knowledge there. And especially when it's, you know, around sustainability and architecture, we can't afford that knowledge to fall out of the industry. We need to build on it. And it just seems that, you know, the people that work with us are really committed to what we're trying to do. And so, it felt like the right step. And so far, it's been really positive. So, yeah, no, it's good.

It's good.

I mean, despite the sort of the crazy world out there, this seems like, you know, this is going quite well.

It's bizarre what's going on, isn't it, at the moment? But there's a lot of green shoots, I think, that also with what's happening, and I'm seeing a lot of positive stuff that is coming through, probably because it's a fight back to what's also happened.

Yeah. I mean, it has felt very much under siege. And I think today's podcast is going to be, it's really interesting. I mean, the national emergency briefing that we're going to be talking to with Mike Berners-Lee is a really, I think, interesting moment in time where people stop sort of dancing around the edges of the problem and hopefully intelligently and cogently explain the real challenges, the very real challenges of not acting on this area. And I think the problem is a lot of it in the past, it's been very easy to dismiss sort of people making these statements as sort of extremists or, and quite often they have come from extreme fringes of society in the past. But now when you've got ranks of mainstream scientists across all kinds of sectors, ranging from nature to food security to health to economics to weather, talking about how the changing climate biodiversity loss is going to challenge our way of life and the complex system of our economy, government and people will start to listen. But anyway, it's going to be a fascinating chat. I'm really looking forward to it. And clearly, talking to the brother of the man who invented the internet is always going to be a nice way to spend your lunchtime.

Brilliant. Well, I look forward to getting into it.

Yeah. Right. With no further ado, let's have a chat with Mike.

Welcome. Welcome, Mike. Thank you so much for being on Sustainability Solved. Looking forward to chatting to you today. I mean, I wonder if you could give us a bit of an insight into, although you don't really need much of an introduction, do you? We all know who you are, but if you could introduce yourself to those nascent listeners that don't know who you are.

Okay. How to summarize it? I suppose really all my work is about trying to ensure that humans can continue to thrive in the modern world. So you could say that we're accelerating into a polycrisis at the moment. And it's about a response to that. So one part of that is a climate and emergent climate and nature emergency response. And I work with a lot of organizations on what would it look like to be making an appropriate response to that challenge? And how can we thrive whilst doing so? I'm also a professor at Lancaster University. I write books about things like climate change and carbon footprints and the wider, you know, what, what's going on that climate change is just a symptom of. And, you know, what would it take for us to start getting somewhere on this agenda, despite our failure to date. And most recently, one of the things I've been involved in is the National Emergency Briefing, which has been really a huge step forward for those of us who actually want to see some change for the better to So many years of feeling we're not getting anywhere.

Yeah, this is, I mean, this is the thing we really wanted to focus on, I think, Mike, is the National Emergency Briefing. Could you give us a potted history of the whole sort of cause? And obviously recently you had quite a big event. It'd be great to hear like where it's come from, from your perspective.

Well, the scientific community has been crystal clear for decades now that we've got a climate and nature emergency on our hands. I mean, the science on climate could not have been clearer for all the 30 years that we've been having climate COPs. And yet, if you look at the rate at which we're putting greenhouse gas emissions out into the atmosphere, it's still going up, not down, practically identically to how we might have predicted if we'd never had any of those climate COPs. It couldn't be more ridiculous in a way. And The nature crisis is, you know, we're hemorrhaging our nature and our biodiversity, you know, arguably in an even more alarming way. So if the science is so clear, why aren't we getting anywhere? Well, one of the reasons why we're not getting anywhere is because we're just not being told the story. The public is not being told in a candid way what's going on. And even the politicians aren't getting what's going on. The media just aren't putting it out there. There's all sorts of reasons behind all of this. I mean, there's been some nefarious activity from vested interests, you know, the fossil fuel industry primarily, but we held this national emergency briefing because we're having a national emergency, we're having a global emergency. It's also a UK emergency. And we're just not being told about it. So this was, this was kind of the briefing that we wish the government was having. But in that absence, we'll, we'll do it. So what we did was we brought together 9 top, really top experts, you know, the UK's top, but some of the world's top experts around 9 different interrelated subjects around the climate and nature to talk through the emergency we're in, not just globally, although it did include that, but also nationally, how this affects us right here in the UK. And we're trying to create a wake-up moment from which everyone who's in the room, you know, can't walk away from it and say, well, that was very interesting. Now business as usual. And we tried to get the— we had about 1,000 people, and we tried to get the most influential people we could. I think we had about 85 MPs, about as many peers. We also had top business people, celebrities, all sorts in the room. And we put them in front of people to talk about, you know, Professor Kevin Anderson on climate, Tim Lenton on climate tipping points, Natalie Seddon on nature, Hayley Fowler on weather extremes here in the UK. And then we had Professor Paul Behrens talking about the implications for food security. And then we had Professor Hugh Montgomery talking about the implications for health, and then Lieutenant General Richard Nugent talking about national security implications really seriously for us here in the UK. And then we had a couple of briefings on our economics and how the opportunity from the economic opportunity from getting this right. And we had a briefing on the energy transition and how, I know how that's an opportunity. And it's not the hair shirt that we sometimes get it talked about. One of the— on one of two of the kind of themes running through it all was one is what's been holding us back? Well, misinformation and disinformation, right? Especially particularly around climate change has really been a problem in this. And the other thing is that Everything's connected to everything else. So, what the power of the briefing was that as people started hearing these different perspectives and seeing how it all joined up, it really created such a sense of such a joined-up systemic situation we're in. And I think interestingly, the energy in the room got higher and higher, almost the more stark the situation that we were hearing about became. And why did the energy go up? I think it's partly because everybody already gets it, actually, deep down. We all know we're really careering into trouble, and we've got to do something about it. But the other thing was the sense that, you know what, we might be able to, we might actually be able to do something about this, despite our failure so far. Because if we can wake up, if we can halt the disinformation, if we can properly inform the public, we'll create the political space, and like, change is possible. And that's why it was such a kind of high-energy event. And there were 1,000 people in the room. I asked everybody, I chaired it, by the way, and I asked everybody to put up their hand if they felt that the situation had, A, was about as serious as they'd heard, B, had been fundamentally exaggerated, or C, was more serious than we'd heard. And I really encourage people to be frank and honest about it. And be independent-minded. And not one person put up their hand to say they thought there'd been some exaggeration in what they heard. Not one. And the weird thing is, you know, that's happened down the land. It's like that. We get it. Most people get it deep down that this is the situation we're in. And yet we're all just kind of waiting for everyone else to move. So what we tried to do with the briefing is create a situation in which everybody felt enabled To take proper action that's commensurate with the situation we're in. And, you know, I'm no longer in need of all the defense mechanisms that all of us have really to put this off to some degree or another. So that was the briefing. And I should say, it's the start point. What's next going to happen is a people's emergency briefing. We're turning the briefing into a film, and you can host it up and down the country. And we're trying to really— because the media is not doing a decent job on this. So we're trying to make sure that by putting it out in face-to-face filmings and discussions, literally thousands of them around the UK, we can actually get to the point where the UK public gets what's happening and knows what they can do about it.

I think we're going to circle back, I think, into the kind of impacts on business. But one thing I just wanted to focus on before that is fundamentally the media. What is your take on the role of the media or the lack of the role in the media? Well, in fact, often as a negative actor in getting this story across. I mean, is it purely sort of about the fact that it doesn't sell newspapers if you constantly bang on with the bad news? Or is it— are there other things at work here?

There are other things at work here as well. And for a start, on the bad news thing, you know, there's lots of good news that could be talked about in this. So the economic opportunity for a clean energy transition is that we'll all be richer and warmer. And yet the storyline that is pushed in most of the media is that we'll be colder and poorer. It's a complete load of rubbish. And so What's happening with the media, far too much of it is owned by billionaires who have got a track record of trying to, sometimes successfully, swinging elections for their own vested interests. Some of them pushing the far right at the moment. But lots of it, for example, Rupert Murdoch has got a long track record of using his media empire to swing British politics for his own vested interests. And he's not alone. I could give example after example. And there's other media that we, you know, we absolutely need a BBC, we need it to be fantastic. And in some way, but it's not doing its job either of putting us in the picture here. And partly because it's being pressured and kowtowed to, it's kowtowing to all sorts of pressure from interests that are, you know, you can trace a lot of it back to fossil fuel industry. So we, the public, are not getting the service that we need from 90-plus percent of our media. You have to be really quite careful if you want to get media that will do even a basic decent job on this.

That's—

so the media has been central in all this. There's a kind of a triangle, a trinity between the media, business, and politics. Those 3 groups need to be supporting each other in helping each other to raise the game. And actually they've been pulling each other down far too much of the time. It's not that some good things aren't going on. There are some great politicians, great businesses, and some great media if you look around. But between them all, those 3 groups, they've been pulling each other downwards and we've got to snap out of that.

And I mean, The Guardian are a media company that, you know, always, I think, have been quite pragmatic, pragmatic, but also forward-thinking with regards to the way that it disseminates what's going on in the environmental news. But I do feel that they're almost pushed aside as a left-wing paper because they're pragmatic, which doesn't make sense.

Well, yeah, I mean, they get put down by chunks of the media that are owned by nefarious billionaires that have a track record of saying things that aren't true in that media and not saying important things that are true. You know, in order to push vested interests. So The Guardian gets, you know, gets, gets put down in that way. I'm not going to say The Guardian is perfect, but there are some tests you can do.

I should—

I'm just going to have to, since it's come up, I'm going to plug my book, A Climate of Truth, right, which is all about this, right? It's all about standards of honesty in politics, media, and business. And one of the things that, you know, I put down is some criteria by which you might assess your media. One of them is, One of those criteria is who owns it? Does that ownership enable it to do a better job of putting out reality, you know, as best it can be discerned? If you look at The Guardian, you know, it's owned by the Scott Trust. It's been very carefully set up to give it editorial protection, all the rest of it. Not perfect. And then if you also look, you know, another criteria is what is the track record of honesty and correcting the record when they found out not to be honest and not to have got something right? And The Guardian comes out much, much better on that front. Than some of the other papers with a really strong track record of investing in journalism and all the rest of it. So, you know, I don't want this to be a Guardian advert. I actually don't think it's perfect either, but I do think it does a lot, lot better than a lot of the media. And then, you know, in my book, I've got a whole appendix of other media that, you know, that you could also go to, you know, for example, the Byline Times, which very carefully makes sure its funding doesn't come from It doesn't come from advertising except for little bits that it's very careful about. And, you know, gets its funding from lots and lots of different small sources rather than any single big sources. So it stays out of the pocket, stays out of the influence of those sorts of things. But we just need to be very discerning. And I've only talked about traditional media. When you look at social media, of course, you have to ask really, really carefully, what's the track record? Who owns it? Do I want to be anywhere near its influence? And if not, switch.

So obviously the media is one of the challenges. And maybe growing out of that, we have a political class that doesn't seem to be quite grasping the challenge, or at least acting on the scale of the challenge that you very clearly set out. And just to say, listeners, it is really worth looking at the National Emergency Briefing website and checking out some of the briefings on there. It is eye-opening and sobering. What was the kind of feedback from the politicians that you had in the room? And where do you think the political classes are letting us down?

Well, it's interesting, isn't it? Because, you know, we had 15% of all MPs in the room, we think. 85 signed up, and then we had some spontaneous extras on the day. We probably had some no-shows. I don't know. But you know, that, and there's probably a lot more again, you know, I've had one or two MPs ask me for a personal version of the, of the NEB. I gave one to Tim Farron the other day, you know, other people had the same. So there are a lot of MPs that we know are right behind this. And it's, you know, quite a big proportion. And yet, if you look in Parliament, it's not carrying on in a way that is commensurate with the situation we're in. So why is that? Then we're into kind of human psychology of this. It's weird, isn't it? We all like to be like everybody else. The culture is we're not acting on this, so we're not acting on it. You turn on— you've got to be very strong at the moment. To act in a way that is commensurate with this, because you turn on the radio in the morning, maybe you turn on Radio 4, and whatever you hear, you won't necessarily hear, we're not in an emergency, a climate emergency, it's all a load of lies. But you will hear a sort of subliminal message that tells you that the appropriate way to carry on in life is business as usual. That is absolutely not right. And we know it's not right. And we've got it. But at the moment, it takes a lot of strength of mind to go and act differently from that. And that's what we need to— that's the bubble we need to burst. But it's so interesting how that bubble is waiting to burst. I mean, you know, that's why the energy in the room was so high at the briefing. And I've also, you know, I've done talks for tens of thousands of people now in all kinds of different contexts, including a lot of business contexts. And I often ask that question. I present the situation we're in and I ask, and I don't hold back and I And I ask people, have I exaggerated, or is it about right, or is it even worse? And I barely ever, you know, about maybe half the time, I'll maybe get 1 or 2 hands up saying they think I've exaggerated. And usually it's because they've misunderstood the question or English isn't their first language or something. You know, honestly, we get it. You know, deep down, we get it. And we're just waiting for everybody else. It takes so much courage. I think that's the thing. We've all got to be more courageous. And it's a pain, you know, sometimes we've got a challenge. If we're in a meeting and something's being talked about, and it's being talked about in a way that is not commensurate with the fact we're in a climate and nature emergency, then we need to challenge that. You know, that takes— if you feel like you're the only one, that's draining, right? But actually, we're not. We've always been.

I mean, what I find slightly extraordinary is that there seems to be a lack of scrutiny for a lot of the comments that are made around climate, around energy transition by certain right-wing parties that are sort of emerging. And it does feel like the media are not prepared to, to hold, you know, to question that. Or so it feels like they, you know, there's a, it's almost not a collusion, but there's an abdication of responsibility, I suppose, of both politicians and then media. And that's creating a toxic sort of void that, that, that business as usual filling.

Yeah, well, for me, there's a bigger picture than this, even on climate and nature, right? So I talk about a polycrisis. One of the things that's going on in our politics is it is much too— it's far too acceptable to say things that are either not true or are misleading. So, you know, I'll just— I know this podcast is not about my book, but I'm gonna have to mention it.

No, get it in there.

Climate of Truth, because actually, it doesn't matter what you care Whether you care most about immigration or whether or not we should be in the EU or levels of inequality or food banks or whatever it is you care about, we're not getting the honest enough discussion that we need. We need the clearest view of reality that we can possibly get in order to make high-quality decisions that work for everybody. And if you've got anyone in the decision-making mix Saying things that they don't themselves believe to be true, or trying to make other people think things that they don't themselves believe to be true, even if it's not quite a lie, then that's just sabotaging the process. Whether you write something on the side of a bus or whether you just say something that you know is not true and don't correct the record. I mean, and it's— there's become far too culturally normal.

And acceptable.

Acceptable.

Acceptable.

It needs to be showstopping for your career if you're found to have done that. It's abuse, right?

Yeah.

We're off about high time. We're kicking us off about some forms of abuse that have been prevalent in some parts of our society right now. And that's great. We're laying down a standard, but we need to lay down similarly. We need to lay down a standard on honesty in politics, media, and business because we can't get anywhere with any of this stuff until that's in place.

So just one more question before we kind roll into the sort of slightly more business sort of focused area. How do you see the— and it's probably a terrible analogy— but how do you see the oil tanker turning around on this one? How do we turn around inaction and lying and lack of scrutiny and lack of publicity and lack of discussion? How do we actually get that to come back to the center of our kind of cultural conversation?

Great question and great analogy because the answer is And it's not like turning an oil tank around. Turning an oil tank around, you heave and heave and heave, and it gradually slows down and all this. What happens here is we push and push and push, and we think we're getting nowhere. And then we reach a tipping point at which we have created the conditions under which actually there's a very, very dramatic turn. And the culture switches. And the culture says, whoa, what the heck is going on? The emperor's not been wearing any clothes for ages. We've all suddenly realized the emperor's walking down the street with no clothes on. My goodness. Suddenly it's so embarrassing to be the emperor, you know, and that's how things are going to change. How close are we to that moment? We could be pretty close. It's very hard to tell. What's the mechanism by which we achieve that moment? Well, a big part of the process is this National Emergency Briefing, which is going to become the People's Emergency Briefing in the form of a film rolled out literally thousands of times around the country. And anyone who wants to host it or be involved in some way supporting it, go to nebriefing.org and you can find out what you can do. It's not just going to be showing a film. It's going to be showing a film, having a discussion, enabling people to think things through, not telling people what to think, but helping people to work out what to think, and to not telling people what to do, but helping people to work out what they could do if they wanted to do something so that we have a big national wake-up on this level of the people. And that creates the political space. We're working with politicians while we're at the same time That creates a nationwide insistence on all this. And when you know, if if I was in politics at the moment, you know, if I was all my work is beyond party, you know, I really tried to transcend party politics. But if I was, for example, in the government at the moment, I would absolutely be begging for the political space to be able to just take. I mean, they need to be braver anyway. But you know, the political space to be able to do this stuff with less bravery—that's what we're enabling. And it's actually it's an economic opportunity. It's a well-being opportunity. opportunity. It's a, you know, it'd be, you know, what's not to like about it?

Yeah, I've actually signed up to host the film where I live, but as a side. So now bringing it back to, obviously our listeners are business, we're in business, and what I'd like to do is explore how, um, the National Energy Briefing impacts businesses. I mean, Obviously for us, we can see it easily, but I'd like to see if we can articulate it. I think one of the things that Professor Tim Lenton warned about is the AMOC tipping points. So AMOC, for people that don't know, is the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, which is a crucial ocean current that plays a significant role in global climate stability. And what he talks about is the collapse of that circulation, which would then freeze the UK and decimate our agriculture. He argues that the only way out is positive tipping points like the rapid rollout of electric vehicles and renewables. And for business leaders who aren't in the energy sector, what is their role in triggering these positive tipping points? Is it purely procurement, buying green energy fleets, or is there a deeper strategic shift that's required to sort Stop their organizations from being stranded assets?

Okay. Yes. What businesses can do is much more than that. So this agenda affects everything that all of us think, say, and do. And that absolutely applies to every business. So I think really critical for every business is their narratives, like what they say to all their stakeholder groups. How do they communicate with their customers, with their supply chains, with their industry, how do they lobby government? All of that is really important in all of this. And I've had, you know, I've had some businesses say to me, well, you know, now that Trump's in power and so on, well, we're going to keep trying to do the right thing, but we're just not going to talk about it because it's not so fashionable at the moment. That is absolutely the wrong response. The most important thing to do is to keep the narrative, is to raise the narrative on this. We've got to make it normal To talk about this stuff as though it's a huge deal all the time and make it abnormal not to get it. Make it look ridiculous if you don't get it, because if you don't get it, then you're obviously somebody who can't see the— isn't good at reading the big picture, isn't good at facing the facts, doesn't have good analytical skills, wouldn't be good at strategy. We've got to make it. It's got to be out there. So that's probably the first thing I'd say for businesses. And the second thing I would say is, Have a careful look at your business model and ask yourself, in a world that is properly responding to the climate and nature emergency, ask yourself carefully what that would look like. So it's going to be a much more circular economy. It's going to be a clean energy economy. We're going to be having less material stuff. We're going to be focused more on things that really matter. We're going to have stronger communities. We're going to be probably buying new trainers less often. Yeah, whatever. Ask yourself what that world would really look like, and then ask yourself, would that be overall a net opportunity or threat for this business? And if your answer is it's an overall threat, then the number one priority, and nothing else matters till you've done this, is to change the business model until such time as it's a net opportunity. And then your business will be coherent with that transition. And that for us, in all the businesses, I spend most of my life working with businesses, and that's the killer question strategically.

And there are tools out there to help with that. So Fit for the Future is a great tool that articulates a business on how to do exactly what you've just talked about, Mike.

But let's also— we've just been working with a company who do this sort of an ethical investment company. They would probably deny that. They just say they invest in companies that are fit for the future and changing regulation and economic climate. And they were doing very well until the AI situation and the AI sort of situation has That's thrown a massive, massive spanner in the works in terms of stability of the business environment. So not only are businesses facing this enormous challenge around sustainability and transition, they're also facing a twin challenge of what is their role within the new AI-enabled world. And that seems to me to be drawing the life out of business transformations, if you like, because of the pure focus on on this potential bubble or realignment? I mean, how do you know? There's more than one challenge, isn't there?

There really is. I mean, we're getting— the more we discuss this, the more inescapable it gets that we need a bigger and bigger and more and more joined-up conversation about everything that's going on in the world. So that's why in my books, I write about a polycrisis, and I flesh out what's going on from lots and lots of different dimensions. And there are lots of physical things going on like climate and nature and so on. And when you look at those, and plastics and all sorts of things, but when you look at those from a technical point of view, there's nothing stopping us from solving them all from a purely technical point of view. So that takes you into needs to be what needs to change in order for us to be sorting things out from a technical solving these technically solvable challenges. Well, that takes us into how businesses work, how politics is done, what our values are, levels of inequality, and one of the Key things it takes us into is what is our relationship with technology, right? Because technology's brought us all these wonderful things. Here we are recording this podcast, and that's thanks to new technologies and all the rest of it. But it's also true to say that technology has taken us to the very dangerous place we're in at the moment. And AI is one of those technologies. And at the moment, we don't usually have anything like the deliberate agency that we need to have over the trajectory of these technologies. We have a kind of dynamic that says a technology comes along, it offers an efficiency improvement, somebody adopts that in a market economy, therefore everybody feels the need to adopt it as well. And the next thing you know, we're all using this technology, whether or not it's in the interests, the overall interests of people and planet. Well, that's no good, right? If we're humans, developing this technology, we've got to have the say-so of when and how it's developed. And so what I would say for all businesses is to ask those questions really carefully. Is the technology that I'm deploying and the way that I'm deploying it good for people and planet? And if it's not, do something different. And there are specifically around AI, I work with People are using AI for all kinds of health and environmental benefits and so on. And that's great. That's targeted use of AI for the good of people and planet. And there's— but the majority of use of AI just isn't for that purpose. Not when you think carefully about it. And we, you know, it's not good enough to be able to say, oh yeah, this technology can be used for good things. You have to be able to say, and we know how to stop it being used for bad things. So there is, you know, there's a deep, you know, the more you, the more we think about this, the more it takes us into the question of how much of how we do life needs to be thought through from quite, you know, how much needs, how deep is the systemic change that we need?

Mm-hmm.

And I think, you know, for me, the question it takes us into, well, here humans are now in the Anthropocene, by which I mean we are the most powerful thing affecting this planet. That is a new context for humanity to be in. It is unsurprising that a lot about how we do life, how we do society, and how we do business that was put together in the Holocene, you know, before the Anthropocene, it's unsurprising that huge chunks of that are actually in their current form, not fit for purpose. And we're going to be in a lot of trouble if we don't rework them. So, you know, people talk about the psychology of denial. I think there's less denial these days of the absolute physicality of climate change, for example, But there's much more denial of the depth of change that is required in order to be able to get on top of the problem.

You go for it, Charlie.

No, I suppose it's quite interesting. It feels that within our politics, there is a sort of a parallel crisis. I think the truth, the point of truth that you mentioned, is the crisis that we're facing, I think, that is being driven by new media forms. And so you're right, I suppose the question is, how do we galvanise a systemic response to such a fundamental systemic problem?

I mean, it comes from us all. When people ask, where does change come from? You know, it comes— some people say, oh, it has to come from government, it has to come from politics, it has to come from business, it has to come from people. You know, we, you know, we the public can influence all of that. And businesses can influence all of that. You know, whichever part of the system you're in, you, you can push it. The change actually comes from everywhere all at once. It's a systemic thing, right? The conditions become right, and then the whole system changes. So the question for all of us as being a little part of the A little cog in it all is to ask, what can I do that helps create the conditions that make the systemic change that we so badly and urgently need become possible? And if you are running a business, for example, then that's one kind of question. And a huge part of that question is, what can this business be saying and doing? And what sort of business should this be? And for some businesses, That's really quite challenging over the kind of reinvention that would be required. For us other businesses, it's a bit more of an easy tweak.

But I worry slightly with how that change is going to happen. When you look at a classic small business owner or business owner, they are really running like they're like a swan, you know, they're trying to elegantly go along the water and then flapping their legs underneath, trying to keep the business afloat in this current economic climate. And to then say, by the way, you also need to be looking at the way that you do your business, you need to be looking at this. It's adding much more pressure to them. And granted, they should be doing it. I'm not saying a get-out clause, but how do we help them do this? How do we orchestrate that change?

Okay, so, you know, I'd say stand right back. It's hard to do that when you're working hard in a business. I mean, I know that myself. I run a business. Sometimes when you're working hard, it's hard to stand back. But ask the question, well, why am I in this business? Why am I in business? Well, we all need to earn a living. That is true. We all need to earn a living. For most of us, and if that's what you are struggling to do, just to get the money that you need for you and your family to thrive, then okay, you're kind of, then consider, then at least face it. At the moment, you are bonded into the economic system. You're a bonded laborer in the economic system if that's your situation, in which case at least accept that's the reality and try to find ways of reducing that bondedness. But if you've got some spare capacity, then use that spare capacity to say, well, why am I in business beyond meeting my basic needs? What is the purpose of this business? Why does it exist? Ask that business Really carefully. Do corny things like imagine yourself on your deathbed talking about your life to your kids, you know, or talking about your life to yourself and ask yourself, what kind of thing would I have been proud of? You know, because I think, you know, we need to do that stuff now because this is a critical moment for humanity. It really is. I know it's tempting for every generation to say, oh yes, our generation is critical. But this generation, honestly, there is, you know, there is a clear logical reason why this moment really is critical. It's because we've been in the Anthropocene for a little while. We've had a few decades of getting away with living as if we're not in the Anthropocene. And right now, the hard physical facts are telling us that the world is going to fall apart if we don't make the transition to an Anthropocene-fit way of behaving.

One of the things that I've been quite interested in, and, you know, we've been focused on climate change, I think, a lot as a culture for, you know, 20 years, let's say. But actually, the the nature crisis seems to be really coming to the fore, and a lot of people are starting to now articulate that in a way as a kind of critical infrastructure and a kind of critical infrastructure failure. I know Natalie Seaton talked, you know, talks in The Briefing about the role of nature and how its degradation is actually really damaging the— just focusing on the UK, on the UK's potential for abundance and wealth and happiness. How do we see that sort of manifesting itself again, and how do we see that playing into the roles and the decision-making that's going within business?

Yeah. So one of the themes of the National Emergency Briefing was that it's not just this is a global thing, which it absolutely is, but it is also a real here and now UK serious threat as well, by the way, as a comparative opportunity. If we, if we do the right things, it's absolutely a huge opportunity. But so Natalie Seddon did her sort of thing on nature. And then Hayley Fowler came in and talked about extreme weather events here in the UK right now that are running decades ahead of the climate modeling. And we're talking about— and Paul Behrens talking about food security also made this point. You know, we're talking about farmers who, you know, were maybe flooded once in the course of their career, and they're getting flooded most years. And they're just thinking this farm is getting totally untenable. We're talking about Hayley Fowler talked about national infrastructure going down in the face of an extreme event in a cascading kind of way. You know, we've got dams that were built over 100 years ago to withstand what is— what was then thought to be a 1 in 1,000 year event, a several percent chance per year that these things, that those kinds of events will take place. Well, what if we had, you know, an event that took down a load of dams and a whole load of the electricity supply and a whole load of whatever, and maybe it hits the the London Tube or whatever. And it could really bring the UK down, the whole of the UK down, not just one little bit of the UK infrastructure that the rest of the infrastructure can all work to put straight, but a whole load of things going down together. Could take the whole country years to come back from that in a very basic way. And during those years at which we're putting ourselves back together again, we might have another one of those events to take us back to square one again. So we're really talking— and Hayley Fowler's message was absolutely clear. This is a severe and material risk to the UK right now, and we are emphatically not ready for it because we've got our heads in the sands. So businesses should be saying really carefully, we've got something like, is it 9% of new housing's been built on land that's now at flood risk?

Yes.

I mean, all this stuff going on all over the place. And if you're in business, you've got to ask yourself, Am I resilient to this? And then on food, you know, we talked about food security and there's a popular sort of head-in-the-sands view that, you know, we'll always be all right in the UK because we just, I don't know, just always have been. And some people say, well, you can see from COVID how resilient our food system is. COVID was absolutely nothing, you know, on threat to food supplies, absolutely nothing compared to what we could be facing. So at the global and national level, it's really clear what needs to happen. And Paul was clear on this in the briefing. I mean, when you look at the science of climate and nature and, and the efficiency of food production and the resilience of food production, one thing stands out from all those perspectives. One simple thing stands out crystal clear. The evidence could not be more clear that the single biggest lever to pull is to change the ratios of meat and dairy compared to plant-based that we eat and transition in the direction of a much more plant-rich diet. And just by the way, that's good for health for most of us if we do it in the right way. And there's nothing not to like. It's an economic opportunity because it's such a more efficient way, dramatically more efficient way of producing every kind of nutrition you can imagine. And back to the disinformation agenda, you know, the reason why we're confused about that is because elements of the food industry have got their sleeves rolled up, sowing doubt over the crystal clear science That is saying we need to transition towards a much more plant-rich diet.

So what businesses do you see from your professional career that are sort of managing these very clear risks well? And how, as a, you know, as a business, larger business owner or medium business owner, do you start to factor in the, you know, the kind of relatively cataclysmic kind of scenarios you paint?

Well, we've talked so far in this podcast more about Catastrophe than an opportunity.

Exactly.

But there are, there are massive opportunities in here, right? It is fundamentally more efficient to produce a more plant-based diet. Therefore, somebody somewhere gets to be better off, whether it's the end consumer or the supermarket or the food processor or the farmer or the government. Somebody somewhere gets to have an economic opportunity out of this. And we can debate how you share around where the benefit comes from, but it's there to be had. What's not to like? If I was the government, I would definitely be pushing for it because it makes the UK more, not only more resilient, but more efficient at producing its basic needs. So there's that. If you're a restaurant and you can find a way of making a more plant-based menu at least as attractive as a more meat-based menu, then you will, there will be a margin improvement for you as well. Okay, you've got to get the menu right, you've got to position it right, you've got to make it look attractive, you've got let people understand that they're also more likely to live longer if you're doing your ingredients in the right way and all the rest of it. Right. But it's an opportunity there to be had. Similarly, the energy transition, you know, more efficient homes are nicer to live in.

Healthier.

Healthier to be in. If you can talk, if you can persuade your, your new homebuyers that when they think about the cost of having a mortgage, they shouldn't just be thinking about the the cost of their mortgage, they should be adding the cost of the mortgage to the cost of their predicted energy bills and using that as their equation. Then suddenly the value of a more energy efficient house goes dramatically up. And then the financial incentive for producing a house that's actually fit for the 21st century goes up. And then so, but that's about how you— that's about narrative. So I'm not saying there's no requirement for imagination in this. There is. You've got to be, you've got to be able to make your case. But the case is absolutely there to be made. When we had the briefing on economics at the National Emergency Briefing, the big thing was that we have been sold bad arguments for why do economics as normal. We've been sold the idea that it'll make us richer. It'll make us poorer and colder, and it's not true. Absolutely clear economic analysis, if you look at sort of impartial, away from vested interests economic analysis, is it is an opportunity. To get a clean energy transition. It's also a massive jobs opportunity. You know, the idea that we can't afford to do it, it's completely wrong. We can't afford not to do it. So all this, you know, so businesses, you need to do your own independent thinking. You need to get a clear view of proper facts on this. And then you need to be a bit imaginative about working out how that economic business opportunity pans out for you. And then you go and then you've got to go and take it.

Because I know the guys who run Wild Farms, which is regenerative agriculture produced grains. I was meeting up with one for coffee. And in the morning, the headline came out that it had been the worst harvests for 40 years or something because of mainly water and then drought. And I said, God, that must be tough for you. And they went, nope, because our soil's better. We do better when everyone else really suffers. All the petroleum-based agriculture guys really suffer in a drought. We're actually doing okay. It is amazing, these unforeseen benefits. And I think you put it very clearly and very thoughtfully that basically it's a case of bad accountancy. I always think this in all of these things, like lack of sustainability is just a lack of good accountancy. You're just cutting off margins and defrayed costs and assuming they have no value, and it's nonsense. But getting that message back to industry is absolutely critical. And the storytelling, I think, is a wonderfully sort of powerful way of making that transition.

I mean, I do think there's another thing I just, I just want to say for the sake of being honest about what this looks like for a business analysis, is that if all you're interested in is maximising your financial profits, there will be some situations in which you might find that you can actually make a bigger killing by doing the unsustainable thing. Right. And that's the trouble with the fossil fuel industry at the moment. It is profitable, sadly, at the moment. So you do actually need a business culture that says, you know what, business is about more than just— we're proper full human beings and we care about more than just money. And we should be unembarrassed about saying that has to be in the business culture. And anybody who's listening to this, who works in a business where it's kind of routine to talk in management meetings as if money is the only thing that matters, Actually, I know it's uncomfortable, that needs challenging because it's so unfit for the modern world.

I think that is being challenged. You can see that with the take-up of B Corp and purpose-driven businesses and the fact that so many more businesses are not even going down the B Corp route, but they're thinking about the purpose-driven nature of running their businesses. Sadly, I think we've come to an end today. But thank you so much for talking to us, Mike, about such an important issue. I mean, what takeaway should we be— should we be getting businesses to host the film? What takeaway do you think we should be doing or saying to businesses?

Yeah, so for anyone, any business leader out there, so first of all, go and get yourself properly informed on what's going on, and you could do worse than going on to the nebriefing.org website, and there you'll find recordings of All the 9 briefings that were made and just go and watch the lot. It'll take you about an hour and a half and, you know, to get yourself— that's the 101. And even if you think you know it all already, I bet you'll find some interesting things. And anyway, it will sharpen your awareness. So that's step number 1. Secondly, if you're working in a business and you would like your staff to engage with this agenda and create a culture in which we all get it and just makes it so much easier to operate in a way that coherently is in line with it, Then host an event within your business, or maybe multiple events. Put everyone in front of the People's Emergency Briefing film that's coming out. It'll be out from the 7th of April. And not only that, but have a discussion around it that goes, you know, what does this mean for this business? What are our opportunities? How do we want it to play out for the business? Engage your staff in this. If you really want to get energy, if you want the support of your staff, in doing the right thing. You know, if you need support of other stakeholders such as investors and so on, then put— maybe host an event, put them in front of it. So those are 2 simple calls.

Brilliant. And yeah, definitely watch the briefings on the website. They are very impactful. Very impactful. Mike, thank you so much for joining us today. That was fantastic. Really, really interesting.

Great pleasure.

Well, what'd you think?

Well, he's a very impressive man doing a very important thing. I mean, I really hope that they can get the traction and cut through the kind of seemingly universal media sort of downplaying of this issue to really fundamentally get the facts in front of people and make people actually understand. And you would've thought they're in the right place. I mean, we've just had the wettest period of weather ever in this country, you know, since records began. And that is absolutely to do with climate weirding. And so hopefully, and again, that's been talked about in the media and no one sort of seems to have really talked about the fact that's completely climate change driven at all. So, you know, I think what they're trying to do is incredibly impressive. I think it's really needed. And what I really enjoyed was, well, A, the conversation around opportunity. I think he's absolutely right. But I think that has to be a conversation between businesses and government. So, you know, obviously I'm involved in architecture, housing, and energy consumption within buildings and how you get the dislocation of in-use energy and the construction costs because you have people that build and then sell to tenants and there's no benefit for them making the energy use low and there's no way of valuing that. So he's absolutely right. There's opportunities, but we need to change the debate. And the second thing I was really taken by is that at the very core of this is this issue of truth in media and in public life and in business. And I think that is actually almost the most problematic thing we have at the moment is the kind of rolling away from the need for truth in public life. And that's hugely problematic.

I think Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart need to have him on Rest Is Politics because they talk about that within their— when they talk to leaders in the political world, they should definitely be talking to him on that. Yeah, I think, I think you're right. I think that what shows such gravitas is the people that they had and have with the National Emergency Briefing. You know, the fact that they have Lieutenant General Richard Nugent, Professor Natalie Sutton, You know, they've got such industry leaders and people that I wouldn't have thought about having an army person in climate change. But that just shows how important and how, you know, how much we do need to be taking stock of where we are and what we need to do.

Well, the People's Emergency Briefing will be out on the 7th of April. And I suspect this is a subject that we should be coming back to. And you'll probably be hearing from us about this as we get some showings going. Will's got one organized. We're going to definitely organize one. around where we are. So thank you very much for listening, and we will be back soon with another episode of Sustainability Solved.

Thank you very much. Thanks for listening.

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