Don't. And so fine.
Could you just start by saying your name and your title?
I am Katherine Hepburn, professor of environmental economics and director of the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment.
Okay, that's great. So just without telling me your entire life history, because I don't think we have time for that.
Could you just run very briefly through your your career to date,
how it how you got from becoming interested in the kinds of things you're interested in to where you are now?
Sure. So I'm Australian. I came to Oxford in the year 2000 on a Rhodes Scholarship, which was triggered by my grandmother's insistence that I.
And I've always been interested in environmental issues. I've done engineering and law and a Diploma of French Melbourne University,
but I've done the Environmental, Engineering, Peace and environmental law as an option.
And I came to Oxford to do an mphil in economics, but again with a focus on environment.
And after meeting my now wife, it started, I would say two years has become 22 years and a doctorate.
And then I went to the LSC for six ideas in the middle to work with Professor Nick Stern of the Ground
Institute at BMC and came back to the Smith School after helping to set it up in the early days,
2007, thereabouts. It was the first deputy director of the Smith School.
I came back as a professor in the school in 2013 and took over as director in 2018.
That's great. As a tell me a little bit about the Smith School for Enterprise and the Environment.
What was it set up to do?
Well, the realisation that Martin Smith, the benefactors for the school had was that we weren't going to solve our major environmental problems,
whether they biodiversity loss or climate change or food systems change.
Water scarcity, pollution, air pollution.
If we didn't align the forces of capitalism with those objectives because you can, for instance, protect different areas of forests.
But if the demand for forest products, the demand for beef keeps rising,
then the markets globally will find a way of destroying something else to deliver on that demand.
So the the kind of core idea is that we need to reorient our economic and financial systems in line with sustainability.
And that means changing a whole lot of crises in the economy, but it also means changing the way we finance what we do,
the way businesses think about their obligations to citizens and to society at large,
how they're organised, how they run, and how our legal and regulatory frameworks are designed.
So because of those interwoven dimensions, we have economists, finance scholars,
business scholars and lawyers all working together with physical scientists and other environmental scientists within the school.
Oh, I think you're muted. And what's been your main focus of research interest in that period?
Well, I'm a bit of a magpie, I'm afraid, on my research interest.
I mean, the school is a good fit for me because I'm interested in many, many issues across the college.
So I'd say of the environmental problems, I do more work on climate change than any other.
Uh, but for instance, we have a programme on plastics pollution.
We have programs emerging on the food and energy systems.
Transitions independent to climate, biodiversity.
And while I am an economist, my doctorate from Oxford was in.
I'm. Comfortable indeed happy working with other disciplines as well to put things together because often these problems don't neatly fit within.
And one kind of, you know, it's a bit like building a house. You can't just use a hammer to build the house, you need a hammer,
but you also need a saw and you need a bunch of other tools to put the house together.
Okay. So let's then let's arrive at covert.
So if no, I suppose we're talking January 2020.
How did you first become aware that there was a pandemic in the offing?
Well, I guess like many people in December of I think it was December 2019, I became aware of of the virus in China.
But I can actually give you the exact date when I became aware it was an issue
because I was sitting at lunch in New College with Professor Ali Province,
who's a massive epidemiologist, was on the 6th of January 2020.
And I had Leo Johnson in my guest, who's the current prime minister, Boris Johnson's brother.
And we are still so, you know, this this thing and we're on.
Is it a problem? And he said, yes, probably it's a very big problem.
And I said, Oh, okay, so you think it's going to come here?
And he said, Yes, almost certainly at home. So we've got a pandemic on our hands.
So probably I said, oh, goodness, how many people are we going to have die from this?
He said. Hard to know. Very hard. Wouldn't like to make you guess.
I said, I'm going to force you to make a guess. And I hope you won't mind me saying because it turned out to be correct, he said.
Between one and 10 million people will probably die from this pandemic.
So I found that is incredibly shocking news at the time.
And within a few days, it basically liquidated all my equities, which turned out to be a very wise move.
But also it made me and others think so.
At that point in time, I was the managing editor of the Oxford Review of Economic Policy.
And along with the other COVID sensitivities.
Over the course of the next month or two, we it began to be very clear to us that this is a major economic phenomenon that was about to occur and that
as one of the world's leading journals on economic policy and as a journal can respond rapidly to events.
We were we have a kind of unique responsibility to start thinking about this now and to collect together a set
of papers on what was likely to happen in a bunch of different domains and how economic policy should respond.
So how did you go about doing that? Did you target people to commission particular pieces of work from.
Yeah, exactly. So the way that General works, as I said,
it's very well set up for this sort of thing because we have monthly meetings where we get together
in person back in the day and have lunch together and talk about what the big issues are.
We plan the general two years ahead. So in February of 2020, we would normally have been thinking about the end of 2021 or the beginning of 2022.
But as I say, it was very obvious that we needed to have a rapid response special issue on October.
And I'm just going through my email saying emails going going out in March,
inviting various scholars who we'd identified as being likely to produce good analysis very quickly to invite them to,
to contribute to this general issue. And you were aiming for a more rapid response than the normal?
Yes. So rather than the usual kind of, you know, 18 months lead time, I think in the end, we got the issue published in May.
So it was very quick. And certainly my April of 2020 involved more late nights than I've had in years in one month.
I mean, there are multiple months of working past two in the morning.
To pull together the paper that I was specifically working on, which was on the environmental and climate dimensions of the response to the pandemic.
And by that time, you have put out a report, a statement with Joe Stiglitz and Nicholas Stern.
What was your who was your target for that piece to work?
So what we what we did. So that's the paper I'm referring to is with Brian Callahan and my doctoral student, Nicholas Stern,
who's in I see Joe Stiglitz, who's professor at Columbia and Nobel Prize winner, and Dimitris Angela, who's at Cambridge.
And so the five of us got together to think, okay, well,
last this is this is going to induce an economic and possibly financial crisis that may be current recession.
And what we're going to see is we did, as you always do, as we saw in 2008 and 2000,
is is a wide, wide government response, a recovery and a stimulus.
And given where we are in human history, what we couldn't really afford to have was was a strongly fossil fuels response.
So we could see that coming.
And so well, we we need to seek to understand both the evidence for and against a green response to a to an economic recession.
And also, I mean, I was interested in so so that's a normative question.
What should we do? But I was also interested in the descriptive question, know what are we likely to do?
How are we going to respond? Because, you know, in April, we didn't really know.
And so we designed a survey and sent it to a selection of experts around the world.
I think in the end, we had over 230 responses to the survey.
To get very subjective impressions of these experts on the.
Economic and environmental dimensions of specific stimulus policies.
We did our best not to frame it as an environmental survey, so it didn't have a climate change survey on the topic, but it was neutrally expressed.
And so we were fairly, fairly happy with the response rates and what what the results of that study show was that there was a, you know,
not a perfect but a reasonable degree of alignment in what these officials were often central bank or Treasury officials,
but not always what these officials believed was good for the economy and also good for climate change.
So that enabled us to identify a subset of policies that we thought would descriptively
likely to get support from civil servants in ministries and in central bank.
Can you give me some examples of the kinds of policies? Yeah, sure.
So this, uh, often what you have in response to financial crises is, is infrastructure spend because it gets a lot of people working.
And if you've got a lot of people who are unemployed, then that's a good thing to do.
Now, this is an unusual crisis, this pandemic, because unlike your a classic kind of Keynesian demand trap, when.
Confidence evaporates in the economy. The problem we had over COVID was that people were being prevented from going
to work because the government didn't want it to end up being a health crisis.
So. It's an unusual economic phenomenon because we're causing the recession, but we're also wondering how to solve.
And in a sense, know some people are saying, well, the solution is just to get people back to work and wait for this to go away and get back to work.
But the worry was that and it did happen was that there would be jobs lost because, you know,
some businesses can't survive a year with no revenue, even with the furlough schemes and government full program.
So. So the sorts of things that might help you recover from that damage.
The economy included large scale infrastructure investment on, for instance,
electric car charging points, home installation, scale up of solar and wind deployment.
So those sorts of policies, they were not always so.
One of the good things about much of that spending is that it tends to be outdoors and so it can be done in a socially distanced way.
And even better than those sorts of spends from a COVID perspective is and the restoration
of natural habitat and ecosystems which can sequester carbon dioxide as well.
So you're working on replanting or regenerating or rewilding particular natural landscapes is another obvious win.
There's some less obvious ones that ultimately I think weren't strongly picked up.
So investment in greater research and development on green technologies, you know, tends to be harder to deliver lots of money into that area quickly.
And we didn't really see vast amounts of funds flowing into there.
But then, you know, I mean,
the policies that the economists like the most tended to be supporting are other than the rescue policies like the furlough schemes.
And, you know, livelihood support tended to be policies that related to supporting the health system,
given the strains it was under, and also supporting information and communication technologies, which are in a sense,
green technologies is not not as if we're not using electricity and using material resources here in this conversation on Zoom,
before, I've had to fly across the world to have this conversation and the material on fire.
And of course, given the way we're now working, that made a lot of sense.
So that gives you a bit of a flavour of what came out of that study.
So that was a relatively optimistic outlook from the sustainability point of view.
What actually transpired I'm going to ask you something else. This and the phrase build back better started being bandied about quite a lot.
Have you looked into the history of that phrase? It because it's quite interesting that it is now being used by people right across
the political spectrum with not identified with a particular political alignment.
Yes, quite right. We certainly use the phrase build back better in the in the press release that accompanies the release of the working paper version,
this fiscal Oxford version of the paper in the Oxford Review of Economic Policy, which came out a little bit before the publication.
And I think I certainly didn't create the phrase, but there's a group of communications professionals who were supporting us within the university,
actually a network of such people globally, who had recognised that there was going to be a process of building back.
It needed to be building back better because actually we're up against it from a climate perspective.
We've already got more fossil infrastructure than we can afford to use if we're going to reach two degrees alone, one and a half degree.
So we we had to build back better.
Now, there is I mean, if you're there are probably people who can tell you about who precisely came up with the phrase and when.
But I think it was probably around April of 2020.
Actually, it was 2005. Oh, was it? There you go.
Okay. You know better than I did. Look it up. Well, it was Bill Clinton after the Haiti earthquake.
I see. I see. Okay. So it was reformed and recycled from Bill.
But yes, in the COVID context, I guess it was not sure if or when, when.
Probably one of the clever communications folk in this network I refer to came up with it or reimagined and repurposed Bill's quotes.
And yes, as you say, it really did catch on. And I think perhaps because of that phrase, because of the.
So our paper had extraordinary media, which you never can fully believe the sort of media numbers that you get from the sort of platforms.
But we've been told that it's well over a billion getting towards 2 billion.
Now, that doesn't mean is that 2 billion people read the academic paper.
That would be an impossible fancy.
But it means that in the various outlets that covered the research, the circulation or views, etc., added to 2 billion.
Anyway, I mean, if it was 1 million, I'd be happy. It's a it's a very big.
Big impact. And I think partly that's because of the build back better idea and the sense that, you know, it was miserable in May.
People were already getting sick of it, were afraid it was boring being at home.
At least the weather was good in this country. But there was a sense, you know, could something positive come from this mess, that wearing?
And there was a hunger for that. And our paper was the food that people wanted to eat, I think.
And I think that's why. So I'm not claiming that we wrote a brilliant paper so much as it was the right paper at the right
time with the right probably with the right authors and with the right analysis and message.
So presumably you were interested in following up how those aspirations were actually met in over the course of the following year or so.
How did you gather the data in order to make that analysis?
Yeah. So, I mean, as the paper progressed, Brian O'Callahan took more and more of a main role.
Initially, I brought him in as a very able doctoral student who had a background in management
consulting to help oversee some of the research assistants I had on the program.
But as I say, he fairly rapidly took a leadership role in in finish off the paper and then
completely built a quite impressive apparatus to collect all of this data,
you know, under the banner of the Global Recovery Observatory at the Smith School.
I think at one time, Brian had around 20 people scouring the world for different policies.
I mean, I think there are around 10,000 policies now in this database and assessing, you know, so noting what the policy is.
Break it down and work out what the spend is for each of the components and then assessing how clean,
you know, dirty is on a life scale, which is just a five point subjective scale that that policy is.
And that enabled Brian and the team to start to say which countries were leading in both,
how much they were spending on building back full stop and how much was green.
And then the other key thing that the team did was to divide the the stimulus response into rescue sort of policies that were there to
maintain companies profitability or at least solvency and individuals livelihoods compared to recovery policies that were more structural.
We're looking at, you know,
literally building back in many instances because the rescue packages are more or less neutral to the climate or to the environment,
which is to say that, I mean, there's no neutral in the sense if you're continuing the status quo, you are damaging the environment.
But we just put them aside and did a deeper analysis on whether the recovery the recovery policies were greener.
What was the answer? Well, it's quite granular.
I mean, you can look at the data on the Web. It's updated relatively frequently.
The the answer is that overall, I would say I was disappointed, even unimpressed, honestly, by the response of the world to the challenge,
the dual challenges that we were in of dealing with climate and dealing with the pandemic.
A lot of it was business as usual sort of stuff now.
But but on the other hand, you know, is the glass half full or is it glass half empty?
I mean, we did have significant spend on environmental infrastructure, spend of the sort that we hadn't seen in the year before, the year before that.
So, you know, in some instances, it's a more than ten fold increase in spending on the sorts of responses that we need for climate and environment.
But it was still below what we need, not just in a year of big recovery spending, but we need year on year this kind of spend.
I mean, we need multiple trillions to get us on to a net zero pathway in time.
We haven't had anything like that in years gone past and we still didn't even get to the levels that we need to be at during the recovery to cope.
So a big improvement, but still not enough is how I'd summarise it.
But then you can go into much greater detail in specific countries and specific sectors.
Yeah. I won't ask you to give me blow by blow, but is it possible to generalise at all about groups of countries perhaps that responded in a way that
was particularly green in their thinking and others where you might have expected them to do better.
And who didn't? Well, I think in some sense, you know, it's no surprise that the wealthier,
often northern European nations tended to be greener for the South Koreans.
In some sectors, I mean, you know, in a sense,
I guess the generalisation is that countries did what they already do and what they were already good at doing with the bits of a grain green.
So if they're already on a path towards a transition towards a green economy,
then they are a better place to continue and to accelerate down that path.
But if they weren't, they didn't push very hard.
I mean, we got a lot of pushback in the U.K. because the numbers suggested that the U.K. would not be especially greening its recovery despite the.
The narratives emerging from from our government.
And it is interesting the pushback tendency.
Well, how do you categorise everything properly now that we got back from a lot of governments?
Actually, hang on. You know what? You should have crossed this is grain when when you didn't.
And then the other one you get from the UK, especially from the Treasury as well.
It's not all about spending, you know, which is true.
It's also about the quality of the enabling policy environment and whether that is is shifting the way the private sector invests.
And we're much more private sector driven economy.
And so those policy frameworks are more significant than than what spent by the government directly.
So to what extent have you been able to act as an advisor on government policies or
have those outcomes fed directly into policies either here or elsewhere in the world?
You have in many countries,
over two dozen countries that you've been in touch with directly and behind that the bulk of this work with, with some exceptions.
And it's quite interesting. Who got in touch. We had.
Sessions with the head of the IMF. Sessions Kristalina Georgieva, the head of the United Nations Environment Programme.
ANDERSON Al Gore was frequently quoting the work.
George Soros, who supports the idea of new economic thinking around the world, was very taken by the study,
and I had him while tapping me quite frequently since the video calls with him
about where we could take the work and which governments would be receptive to it.
We had calls with a number of ministers in different country governments and you know,
at some point Bryan really took that and ran with it and has providing it has been providing a lot of different country governments with with it,
or at least was providing a lot of those governments with advice that most companies.
You mentioned that a lot of these initiatives are in the hands of business rather than government.
The most is certainly national policy initiatives.
What are your links with business like? What was fiscal is as a school has very strong links with business and finance as you would expect.
That in some sense one of our key stakeholders and our mission is to help to get the world to.
Net zero emissions while achieving the Sustainable Development Goals.
And we do that by equipping business and finance with the capabilities and also establishing
the landscape on which they compete so that they're driven toward those environmental goals.
So, yes, we had an awful lot to do with the financial community and the business community,
whether it's kind of elite executive education, work to do, work with with senior executive teams.
Sometimes it's hard because those, you know,
have various ones in mind now that I know it's private that we did that work
with them and then they will make a big announcement about going for net zero.
And we know we've had an impact on all that share, but some of our team were pretty influential in steering the COP26 process towards a good outcome.
Ben Caldecott, for instance, was seconded into that COP26 team on financial issues and and as we saw at COP26,
we had the Glasgow Financial Alliance on net zero funds mobilised and claimed
to mobilise around $1,000,000,000,000 of capital towards environmental loans.
Now there's a big debate to be had about. How much of that is rebadging versus serious?
The new money? There was a lot of engagement across the board, whether it's I mean,
including the water team at the Smith School or in other parts working on
cooling or working on business models and systemic change with with business.
And in addition to direct work with. With companies, including some of the big industrials.
I mean, I sit on the advisory board of Royal Dutch Shell. I'm often criticised by my students for doing that,
but actually I think it's incredibly important that they have voices from a greener perspective on their on their advisory board.
So those sorts of engagements I think were helpful in.
Establishing a business recognition that actually business needed to push for this, too.
And I was at a roundtable with the secretary in the U.K.,
where I was pleased to see perhaps businesses that the average person would be surprised to hear lobbying hard for renewable energy deployment,
such as some of the oil and gas companies, because they could see that this was the right time to do that.
And actually, they're developing businesses in that space today. Those businesses would benefit from stronger policy push in the green direction.
So that was a paper from the school recently on strategic alliances.
If you think of the corporate sector as being constantly in competition with one another,
but presumably shouldn't presume anything, what what was that?
What was the the conclusion of that research?
Is there a is it something that they need to be encouraged to do to work together to try and achieve a single voice?
Yeah. I mean, I think in certain instances,
businesses can and should furiously compete with each other and in others they really should collaborate and cooperate.
And I think we're in a new, increasingly more sophisticated world where previous foes are coming together to say, well, you know,
bring in the lawyers and make sure we don't breach competition rules, because, of course, they're legally obliged to compete with one another.
But in some of these, what's called the free competitive space.
Can we not achieve some standards on the environment standards more widely on ESG, environmental,
sustainable social and governance issues to help us all to collectively achieve a better outcome for humanity?
Because that's what our shareholders and our customers and government expects of us as an industry.
And we can compete to deliver better products at lower cost.
But actually, collectively, we've got to join together to solve these big problems.
And what one example? Example I love we're doing a piece of work right now is research with a very large consumer goods company.
Who would really like to. Change the inputs that it sources to reduce the carbon footprint.
But it has inadequate regulatory pressure on it.
And so if it does it voluntarily, it will suffer a cost disadvantage compared to the other players in the space.
It's got together with the others to say, look, you know, can we agree some standards on the on the sorts of inputs we use into the business?
And in this particular case, the competitors said no.
And so they've come to us to say, okay, well. We need to work out how this industry is going to solve this problem.
And if we can't do it collaboratively, perhaps you might have to think about what government ought to do here,
because it's an open space and you know, where we're careful about which corporates we work with and why,
because obviously Oxford University is not here to simply advocate for positions for companies,
and we're here to find the truth and then broadcast the truth, whether those funding like it or not.
But in this particular instance, I think we're all fairly happy that the truth is going to be something that that is,
you know, what society should do here. To progress more rapidly on the green agenda is is going to be in the public interest and is probably going
to end up being in well fitting within the objectives of this particular company who we're working with.
So that brought you neatly round to talking about government again and pressure on government.
I mean, the solutions that you're proposing, one might argue, are rational and technocratic,
and politicians are dealing in a space that often isn't rational and technocratic.
It's much more emotional and based on what they think voters want.
How how do you manage to gain an entry, as it were, given those that that difficulty looking in two ways?
But you're right to point to the distinction. What we do is try to work out what is in the best interests of society as a whole.
What politicians try and do is what is to work out what will get them elected next.
And that's that's in a sense, that's their job. I don't blame them for it.
So in our own kind of. Evidence based research context.
I think we interface most comfortably with the civil service ones who are designing policies for society as a whole.
And know this innocence,
attempting to convert you ministers and the public's kind of sense of what they want into something that actually them is putting to practice.
But then, you know, on occasion, we do interface very directly with, you know, politicians, cabinet ministers and so on.
And there you are, right?
You can't you can't have those conversations the same way. You need to work out who are the interests on the playing field, as it were, here.
And can we find a solution for the general public as a whole that is in the interests of the people who have their hands on the levers of power?
There's no point saying you should do this because it would be good for society if it's not good.
But you know, Vladimir Putin, for instance, if you're in Russia to quite a currently relevant piece of context,
let's try and work out what's what's in their political interests or their objectives as they see them,
and then identify the areas of overlap with the public interest as a whole.
And that that can be hard,
but most of the time it's not as hard as is certainly not irreconcilable because if you're doing something in the wider public interest.
Fundament so naively, you might expect, of course, there are going to be votes in not.
That's clearly not true, because actually voters don't always vote their own interests that are always known as they are.
And even when they do get their own interests, their own interests unnecessarily align with everybody else's interest.
So it's complex. But but you are starting from a fundamental position where if you are making the world better off a large number of people,
there is probably a way of finding a mechanism to get the votes in.
If the current government or whatever opposition person you're speaking with has a way of getting their interest in what you're proposing.
Is there a case or do you attempt to communicate directly with the general public?
Is that a communications channel you use? We do.
Yeah. I mean, the way I like to think about effecting change is this.
There are these mass communication strategies that you're referring to there where, you know,
we see a lot from physical scientists just going out and telling the public what's happening.
Sometimes that can be more or less effective. I mean, if the public's heard that climate change is coming, it's going to be disastrous.
So many times they kind of can stop listening.
Yeah. There's this phrase you didn't miss the first time, so I'm just going to say it again, but louder.
That doesn't actually work.
And one of the things that we know is that if you want to communicate successfully, somebody, you've got to start from where they are.
So start from not not what you think they ought to know, what you think they ought to believe.
But from what they do know and what they do believe and what they might believe is that climate change is a hoax.
And what they know is that they don't trust scientists because for whatever reason, there's lots of distrust and lots of lack of awareness out there.
And if you dismiss that, then you're not going to get anywhere. So I think on climate, environmental issues,
we've had a bit of a failure on the mass communication side of things probably for your decade and a half,
certainly in some countries more than other countries. Australia definitely where those of us who do the underlying science haven't.
Kind of, in a sense, humbly started from where people are and and engaged with their fears and their concerns and,
you know, reasonable questions like,
isn't all this warming due to solar flares, which, you know, you can have a conversation about and people can go way to get that?
Well, it's not that I always thought it was.
And it turns out there was a reason to believe that actually the sun does have an influence on the climate, which it does.
It's not a very big one or, you know, another one at the moment.
Well, it's great that you guys think sun and wind is now cheaper than it was before,
but that's not much help when there's no sun and there's no wind, you know, how are we going to heat ourselves?
And life are going to go back to candles now. And of course we're not.
But you then have to have a discussion about the way in which batteries can be used.
And batteries don't solve the problem either in a fundamental sense, they sort of day night variability,
but they don't deal with the seasonal variability and they don't deal with the problems of a one in 40 year event when there's no summer,
when there's no wind for weeks on end. So I think it's being honest, being accepting of people's scepticism and concerns and then communicating.
It's hard. I mean, it's a hard job. It's not no surprise we haven't done it particularly well.
But that mass influencing channel is is an important one.
I would say that at Oxford we're probably better at the elite influencing channel, which is more or less what I was talking about before.
I go directly to the people making the decisions, make sure they're well-informed and that they've got a set of options in front of them.
And ideally, those options are aligned with their own best interests.
And that's how you can now personally have my, you know,
probably just reflecting what I think we're better at, but that's where we play mostly to effect change.
Oh, you're still. I don't think the pandemic is over, but where we seem to be as a country behaving as though it's over.
We've now had two years of this. To what extent do you think it's made your aims easier to achieve or or in any sense made a difference?
I mean, do people look at the world differently now from the way they did before?
Yeah. Uh, I think they do, certainly.
And, you know, right now we're in the middle of a war, too, which is also changing the way people are looking at the world and in particular,
changing the way they're looking at energy because it's being obviously used as a geopolitical tool.
Yeah, but if I try and decouple Russia, Ukraine from the pandemic, I, I think initially we had the sense that actually.
The skies were clear, the streets were quieter.
We saw life returning, non-human life returning to waterways and other ecosystems.
And people found that very pleasing. At least I did.
And others did. But equally. There's a reason we have the way of life.
We do, and it's very convenient. And people like engaging with each other and they like moving around them and it's fossil intensive.
So while there were silver linings in that pandemic clouds, they were just that silver linings.
And actually the clouds went away and you got your old lives back.
So has there been a kind of fundamental change in the way we think about environment?
Maybe, but I'm not completely convinced.
I mean, obviously, there's been this change that we're now far more adept at and accustomed to interacting with each other online.
So the aviation industry is still struggling, which other than for the aviation industry at the moment,
that's probably a good thing because it's very fossil intensive.
It may not be that way in the aviation industry. It needs to sort itself out so that it can function in a zero carbon way.
So that's been that's been a change. But I'm not sure that we've had.
A radical shift in. Beliefs or awareness of the urgency of environmental issues.
Despite our best attempts to use this moment as one that made people because I mean, they're very they're a bunch of similarities.
Obviously, you know, you have scientists warning for decades that actually we're going to be faced with a pandemic.
We need to get ready. There are things we need to do. Part of the problem is human.
You know, with a zoonotic disease, it's the interface between humans, animals and humans.
Expand and expand, expand our economies.
We come into close contact with rarer and, you know, more unusual animals that are that are likely to transmit these disease.
We're also both situations are are complex systems where, you know, people have a real difficulty understanding exponential processes.
It's the whole doubling your grains of rice on a chessboard.
And you still you know, even I can't get my head around just how to to the power of 64 is and and I
think many people have the sense of it was nowhere and then it was everywhere.
And of course that's how exponential processes work.
So you might have hopes that recognising there are these feedback effects and tipping points within within health systems and within
infectious diseases might lead people to a greater awareness that these similar sorts of risks are there in the climate system as well.
And it might seem like everything's fine until some of everything really isn't on.
And the problem is that it's not it's not as if you just kill 1 to 10 million people.
Misery Kill wants 10 million people irreversibly change the life support system on which we all depend.
So unfortunately, I don't think that analogy has hit home in the way that I would have liked it to.
And equally, you could argue that the evidence that by targeting investment massively government investment in things like vaccines
and mass testing and all the other mitigation strategies that were taken without completely breaking basically,
I mean, obviously we've had a bit of a bit of a backslide, but the economies are not broken.
No, they will bounce back that we could make these make much bigger investments without long term damage and to the betterment of what happens.
Do you think that that lesson has been learned either? I unfortunately, I don't think it has.
But I think you're right. I mean, global GDP is 100 trillion. We spent 15 trillion.
We're about 20 trillion now on recovery measures. You know, at some point, these numbers stop, seem big ten trillions.
And with 1 trillion, we could provide clean energy access to the entirety of the world.
So for those who don't currently have access to electricity, that's according to the United Nations.
Sustainable energy for all to clean up the entire global economy so that we run on a climate stable way probably requires an extra $3 trillion a year.
Now requires that in a sustained way. But that's that's investment.
It's not money going down the drain. You then get a return on that investment.
So we can totally do this. I mean, we have a sense that it's not as if you don't have enough money, nor is it as if we don't have the technology.
We just don't have the collective will and the collective awareness that actually, you know, it's crazy not to be doing this.
But I think we're getting close. I mean, I'm you know, it's not as if we've got a lot of time.
I mean, we're already locked in a sense. We're going to have to if we're going to.
Meet net zero.
Within the sorts of timeframes that we need to meet it, we know we're going to have to scrap existing capital stock before the end of its lifetime.
That's now. No, we don't done a lot of work on that question in Oxford.
And, you know, from about 2015 onwards, we've been building stuff that we shouldn't have been building,
and we are still building new coal fired power stations a lot less.
But we should be net retiring now. So we still we still haven't fully got the massive.
Yeah. So I'm just going to get go back now really to kind of how was it for you?
Did you how how much of a threat did you find the pandemic itself personally?
I mean, did you where did you live in fear of the infections for yourself or your people near people that close to you?
Well, I'm probably like a lot of people.
I was struggling to understand what it would mean for me personally, watching the stats, looking at the, you know,
gender and age demographic info and the stats on what proportion of people were having serious illness and deaths from it before.
Many of those stats came out, I thought, well, maybe I should just go and get this thing and get it over and done with.
That was a thought that didn't last very long. Once I looked into the evidence and thought, No, that's really not a very good idea.
And then some of my medical friends said, You really don't want to be hit by a disease in the first cycle of a pandemic,
because correctly they pointed out, we learn an awful lot about how to deal with the symptoms and how to manage it.
And what normally happens is that these things become endemic over a period of time the less severe, more transmissible variants take over.
So Cameron just, you know, so that was all very good advice.
And we did hold our horses. Our family was very careful.
We didn't get it in the first wave. We didn't get in the second wave. In the end.
My children got it from school at the end of last year, but my wife and I managed to not catch it from them,
even though we had it in the house for two weeks and we were looking after
them by wearing 52 masks in the house and keeping the windows and doors open.
So we were wearing big puffer jackets indoors, which I'm sure some people would find ridiculous and extreme.
But we took the view either either we were going to get it with them and we'll just have it at the same time.
And cross our fingers or we've got to make a concerted effort to avoid it.
And in the end, we did. So so far I haven't had it.
And I've had my three vaccines and. Well, taking risks.
It's not as if I'm not taking risks. But life is about taking risks.
And at some point you did anyway.
So, you know, I went to a 50th birthday party in London on the weekend that could well have given me kind of a few notes.
We'll find out soon.
But, yeah, it's it's interesting how there's such a variety of different responses to the risk from the Astley Cavalier to The Petrified.
I guess I'm probably probably more towards the cautious end of that spectrum.
But. But, no, but.
And how did the pandemic and the and the restrictions that were brought in across the university in how you were able to work affect you?
I mean, I could see your work to me working at home now. Yeah.
And as somebody presumably who's mostly computer based, most of the time, I'm actually too difficult a shift to make.
No, I mean, it wasn't. I've been sitting I feel like I've spent a vast amount of time just box in the garden, which,
you know, when we put it in a few years ago, I had no idea it was going to be so heavily utilised.
But no, it has been relatively straightforward. I mean, for me, there have been upsides.
So I used to have to have to I used to choose to get on a plane, you know,
probably a dozen times a year for different international conferences or what have you.
It's been honestly delightful not having to do them and being able to do them from this chair.
I've put my kids to bed virtually every night for two and a half years, which has been wonderful, really, really great.
And the other thing I used to do was cycle around madly between meetings in Oxford on a day to day basis and in those gaps between.
So I haven't been getting that exercise. It's been fun, frustrating, but in the gaps I've been.
So my piano is the best it's ever been and that's been a huge pleasure.
So there's some from for me personally,
there've been there have been benefits as well as the obvious drawbacks of, you know, lots of social interaction.
And, you know, actually sometimes it is nice to go to different parts of the world, even if it is an emissions intensive activity.
You just use it? I went the wrong way. Given that you're now given the area that you're working, working in,
do you and the people who would normally be flying around the world to have meetings with
recognised that perhaps you needn't do that quite as much even if there isn't a pandemic going on.
Or do you think you'll go back to flying 12 times a year? No, I don't think we'll go back to the same level of engagement.
Last year we ran a large forum on climate neutrality at Oxford and we ran that as a hybrid meeting.
So that was a hub in Oxford, a hub in Milan, a hub in Brussels, and one other one which I'm embarrassed of in Berlin.
And so people congregated in these regional hubs rather than flying to one location, and we hooked them up.
Between each other. I'd say it worked reasonably well.
I mean, there's no denying that if you could magically beam everybody in the same room at zero emissions costs,
which perhaps we'll be able to do in 50 years time, it would be it would have been significantly better being a person.
But it's not that. And I mean,
the other benefit is we've got many multi-institutional projects kind of cool earlier this morning on a project to take greenhouse
gases out of the atmosphere and to lock them up in the lithosphere or the biosphere that has six universities at least involved in it.
And regular meetings online and now really straightforward.
Everybody's used to and they work really effectively. They're very efficient.
So I think there has been a change in the norms, their professional norms, and that's for the better.
But the flipside is we also had when we did have a conference recently in Oxford.
I opened the conference by saying, Welcome, everybody.
Isn't it nice to be in a room with other people in person again?
And I hadn't honestly expected the response that I got from that room.
It was a real roar of kind of enthusiasm, delight, joy, even in some kind of slightly aggressive,
aggressively happy role that we all wanted to be in-person again.
So, you know, I think there is something very.
I don't know what it is, whether that's the pheromones or the, you know, the physicality, how the metaverse is going to go.
Maybe it will be a huge hit. But I think I think people do like seeing other people in person.
This is the final question you'll be glad to hear.
So has the experience of going through the pandemic and working on aspects of it changed your attitude to your approach to your work?
And how would you like to see things change in the future? You're like, it might be too early for me to answer that question.
I mean, I'm sure it obviously has changed my approach to work because I'm far less likely to take a physical meeting now than I was.
Notwithstanding what I just said, even in Oxford, you know, it's just more convenient to be sitting here than to be shopping.
Like, I lose 10 minutes. Getting there in 10 minutes, getting back. My attitude to my work.
I mean, the environmental challenges that we face are as pressing as ever.
Uh, I. I still think it is very important, I guess.
Perhaps it's given me. Great your appreciation of just how much I enjoy spending my time with my family, which I knew.
I mean, obviously I love spending time with family,
but I got to I've had the the joy of spending an awful lot of it with my family in the last two and a half years.
That's been a real pleasure. And I don't think I would want to.
You know, to be working at the same intensity as I was five years ago.
But I guess that that was true before the pandemic. I appreciate that.
There are times in your lives as in March, April.
May of 2020 where you just have to pull out all stops and work until you work past midnight constantly because.
There's a need, there's a social without getting grandiose about it.
If you if you think there is a very urgent issue on which you have something significant to contribute.
Sometimes the question is, well, who else is going to do this if we don't?
And they say without being too over-the-top about it, we're in a very privileged position.
So the world will listen to us when we speak. And that.
That privilege comes with responsibility? I think so.
I think I have as acute a sense of responsibility as I have maybe more acute sense of that responsibility than than I had before.
But that's juxtaposed by this desire to spend even more time with my family.
So maybe maybe it's an even greater awareness of the critical trade-offs that you have to make in life.
Perhaps a greater awareness of risk, too. I mean, there is always risk around this over time.
The. The relativities are often missed in public discourse.
People seem unaware that 4 to 7 million people a year die of air pollution issues.
So, you know, we've had massive global shutdown of our economies.
And, you know, maybe five. Forget where up to now 5 million people have died of COVID.
We lose that many people every year from environmental issues and because they're dying in a hospital.
In the regular turn of events. You know, we just don't notice or don't do anything about it.
So that that kind of stark reality is.
Quite striking and in no way to belittle the scale of the challenge that we have right now in Russia and Ukraine.
It's an order of magnitude, many orders of magnitude smaller than the scale of the challenge we have from climate change.
And yet, of course, naturally enough, it is going to dominate thinking and discourse in the headlines and the policy response.
So, so yeah, I'm rambling a bit,
but I guess what I'm saying is an even finer appreciation for how we misunderstand the relative importance of different things.
Yeah. Great. Thanks very much.
Thank you. That was helpful. Yes.
Okay. I've stopped recording a lovely. Thank you very much indeed.
That was great. My pleasure. And have a lovely afternoon.
The whole project as well. Thank you very much indeed. Okay.
I will send you a release form, email it to to of course, we'll be happy to sort that out.
Okay. Thanks very much for stopping by.