1 00:00:00,360 --> 00:00:06,500 Don't. And so fine. 2 00:00:06,540 --> 00:00:09,420 Could you just start by saying your name and your title? 3 00:00:10,380 --> 00:00:17,460 I am Katherine Hepburn, professor of environmental economics and director of the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment. 4 00:00:18,150 --> 00:00:22,920 Okay, that's great. So just without telling me your entire life history, because I don't think we have time for that. 5 00:00:23,250 --> 00:00:26,219 Could you just run very briefly through your your career to date, 6 00:00:26,220 --> 00:00:31,470 how it how you got from becoming interested in the kinds of things you're interested in to where you are now? 7 00:00:32,100 --> 00:00:42,660 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. 8 00:00:43,620 --> 00:00:50,699 And I've always been interested in environmental issues. I've done engineering and law and a Diploma of French Melbourne University, 9 00:00:50,700 --> 00:00:54,540 but I've done the Environmental, Engineering, Peace and environmental law as an option. 10 00:00:55,260 --> 00:01:01,710 And I came to Oxford to do an mphil in economics, but again with a focus on environment. 11 00:01:01,830 --> 00:01:09,680 And after meeting my now wife, it started, I would say two years has become 22 years and a doctorate. 12 00:01:09,690 --> 00:01:17,610 And then I went to the LSC for six ideas in the middle to work with Professor Nick Stern of the Ground 13 00:01:17,880 --> 00:01:25,950 Institute at BMC and came back to the Smith School after helping to set it up in the early days, 14 00:01:25,950 --> 00:01:30,080 2007, thereabouts. It was the first deputy director of the Smith School. 15 00:01:30,090 --> 00:01:37,170 I came back as a professor in the school in 2013 and took over as director in 2018. 16 00:01:38,760 --> 00:01:42,990 That's great. As a tell me a little bit about the Smith School for Enterprise and the Environment. 17 00:01:43,860 --> 00:01:45,240 What was it set up to do? 18 00:01:47,170 --> 00:01:57,459 Well, the realisation that Martin Smith, the benefactors for the school had was that we weren't going to solve our major environmental problems, 19 00:01:57,460 --> 00:02:02,950 whether they biodiversity loss or climate change or food systems change. 20 00:02:02,950 --> 00:02:05,560 Water scarcity, pollution, air pollution. 21 00:02:06,280 --> 00:02:15,639 If we didn't align the forces of capitalism with those objectives because you can, for instance, protect different areas of forests. 22 00:02:15,640 --> 00:02:21,280 But if the demand for forest products, the demand for beef keeps rising, 23 00:02:21,280 --> 00:02:26,410 then the markets globally will find a way of destroying something else to deliver on that demand. 24 00:02:26,440 --> 00:02:35,350 So the the kind of core idea is that we need to reorient our economic and financial systems in line with sustainability. 25 00:02:36,070 --> 00:02:44,530 And that means changing a whole lot of crises in the economy, but it also means changing the way we finance what we do, 26 00:02:44,560 --> 00:02:50,170 the way businesses think about their obligations to citizens and to society at large, 27 00:02:50,440 --> 00:02:56,110 how they're organised, how they run, and how our legal and regulatory frameworks are designed. 28 00:02:56,140 --> 00:03:02,680 So because of those interwoven dimensions, we have economists, finance scholars, 29 00:03:03,490 --> 00:03:10,150 business scholars and lawyers all working together with physical scientists and other environmental scientists within the school. 30 00:03:13,150 --> 00:03:30,730 Oh, I think you're muted. And what's been your main focus of research interest in that period? 31 00:03:32,050 --> 00:03:35,440 Well, I'm a bit of a magpie, I'm afraid, on my research interest. 32 00:03:35,530 --> 00:03:41,290 I mean, the school is a good fit for me because I'm interested in many, many issues across the college. 33 00:03:42,070 --> 00:03:47,800 So I'd say of the environmental problems, I do more work on climate change than any other. 34 00:03:48,370 --> 00:03:52,300 Uh, but for instance, we have a programme on plastics pollution. 35 00:03:52,960 --> 00:03:57,790 We have programs emerging on the food and energy systems. 36 00:03:57,790 --> 00:04:01,540 Transitions independent to climate, biodiversity. 37 00:04:03,680 --> 00:04:08,089 And while I am an economist, my doctorate from Oxford was in. 38 00:04:08,090 --> 00:04:18,399 I'm. Comfortable indeed happy working with other disciplines as well to put things together because often these problems don't neatly fit within. 39 00:04:18,400 --> 00:04:24,639 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, 40 00:04:24,640 --> 00:04:28,270 but you also need a saw and you need a bunch of other tools to put the house together. 41 00:04:31,480 --> 00:04:34,810 Okay. So let's then let's arrive at covert. 42 00:04:34,840 --> 00:04:38,800 So if no, I suppose we're talking January 2020. 43 00:04:38,980 --> 00:04:44,310 How did you first become aware that there was a pandemic in the offing? 44 00:04:45,370 --> 00:04:54,970 Well, I guess like many people in December of I think it was December 2019, I became aware of of the virus in China. 45 00:04:55,780 --> 00:04:59,410 But I can actually give you the exact date when I became aware it was an issue 46 00:04:59,500 --> 00:05:06,250 because I was sitting at lunch in New College with Professor Ali Province, 47 00:05:06,250 --> 00:05:10,270 who's a massive epidemiologist, was on the 6th of January 2020. 48 00:05:11,230 --> 00:05:17,230 And I had Leo Johnson in my guest, who's the current prime minister, Boris Johnson's brother. 49 00:05:18,950 --> 00:05:23,410 And we are still so, you know, this this thing and we're on. 50 00:05:24,110 --> 00:05:29,340 Is it a problem? And he said, yes, probably it's a very big problem. 51 00:05:29,730 --> 00:05:33,050 And I said, Oh, okay, so you think it's going to come here? 52 00:05:33,080 --> 00:05:38,070 And he said, Yes, almost certainly at home. So we've got a pandemic on our hands. 53 00:05:38,130 --> 00:05:43,170 So probably I said, oh, goodness, how many people are we going to have die from this? 54 00:05:43,170 --> 00:05:46,470 He said. Hard to know. Very hard. Wouldn't like to make you guess. 55 00:05:46,710 --> 00:05:52,980 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. 56 00:05:53,250 --> 00:05:57,000 Between one and 10 million people will probably die from this pandemic. 57 00:05:57,000 --> 00:06:02,310 So I found that is incredibly shocking news at the time. 58 00:06:02,820 --> 00:06:08,880 And within a few days, it basically liquidated all my equities, which turned out to be a very wise move. 59 00:06:11,400 --> 00:06:16,290 But also it made me and others think so. 60 00:06:16,680 --> 00:06:20,460 At that point in time, I was the managing editor of the Oxford Review of Economic Policy. 61 00:06:21,420 --> 00:06:26,700 And along with the other COVID sensitivities. 62 00:06:27,630 --> 00:06:37,060 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 63 00:06:37,080 --> 00:06:43,710 as one of the world's leading journals on economic policy and as a journal can respond rapidly to events. 64 00:06:44,580 --> 00:06:52,860 We were we have a kind of unique responsibility to start thinking about this now and to collect together a set 65 00:06:52,860 --> 00:07:01,620 of papers on what was likely to happen in a bunch of different domains and how economic policy should respond. 66 00:07:03,830 --> 00:07:09,200 So how did you go about doing that? Did you target people to commission particular pieces of work from. 67 00:07:09,710 --> 00:07:12,110 Yeah, exactly. So the way that General works, as I said, 68 00:07:12,110 --> 00:07:16,730 it's very well set up for this sort of thing because we have monthly meetings where we get together 69 00:07:18,050 --> 00:07:23,240 in person back in the day and have lunch together and talk about what the big issues are. 70 00:07:23,270 --> 00:07:33,890 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. 71 00:07:34,550 --> 00:07:41,560 But as I say, it was very obvious that we needed to have a rapid response special issue on October. 72 00:07:41,720 --> 00:07:46,010 And I'm just going through my email saying emails going going out in March, 73 00:07:46,010 --> 00:07:55,520 inviting various scholars who we'd identified as being likely to produce good analysis very quickly to invite them to, 74 00:07:55,670 --> 00:08:03,230 to contribute to this general issue. And you were aiming for a more rapid response than the normal? 75 00:08:04,190 --> 00:08:15,110 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. 76 00:08:15,740 --> 00:08:27,540 So it was very quick. And certainly my April of 2020 involved more late nights than I've had in years in one month. 77 00:08:27,560 --> 00:08:30,920 I mean, there are multiple months of working past two in the morning. 78 00:08:31,900 --> 00:08:42,220 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. 79 00:08:43,640 --> 00:08:51,890 And by that time, you have put out a report, a statement with Joe Stiglitz and Nicholas Stern. 80 00:08:52,520 --> 00:08:56,930 What was your who was your target for that piece to work? 81 00:08:57,500 --> 00:09:04,730 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, 82 00:09:05,120 --> 00:09:11,900 who's in I see Joe Stiglitz, who's professor at Columbia and Nobel Prize winner, and Dimitris Angela, who's at Cambridge. 83 00:09:12,710 --> 00:09:16,550 And so the five of us got together to think, okay, well, 84 00:09:17,330 --> 00:09:25,820 last this is this is going to induce an economic and possibly financial crisis that may be current recession. 85 00:09:26,360 --> 00:09:31,999 And what we're going to see is we did, as you always do, as we saw in 2008 and 2000, 86 00:09:32,000 --> 00:09:37,910 is is a wide, wide government response, a recovery and a stimulus. 87 00:09:38,540 --> 00:09:48,320 And given where we are in human history, what we couldn't really afford to have was was a strongly fossil fuels response. 88 00:09:49,010 --> 00:09:50,480 So we could see that coming. 89 00:09:51,510 --> 00:10:02,340 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. 90 00:10:03,430 --> 00:10:07,329 And also, I mean, I was interested in so so that's a normative question. 91 00:10:07,330 --> 00:10:13,120 What should we do? But I was also interested in the descriptive question, know what are we likely to do? 92 00:10:13,660 --> 00:10:17,410 How are we going to respond? Because, you know, in April, we didn't really know. 93 00:10:18,100 --> 00:10:25,710 And so we designed a survey and sent it to a selection of experts around the world. 94 00:10:25,720 --> 00:10:29,980 I think in the end, we had over 230 responses to the survey. 95 00:10:30,950 --> 00:10:37,910 To get very subjective impressions of these experts on the. 96 00:10:39,720 --> 00:10:44,640 Economic and environmental dimensions of specific stimulus policies. 97 00:10:45,120 --> 00:10:55,860 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. 98 00:10:57,870 --> 00:11:07,790 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, 99 00:11:07,800 --> 00:11:15,450 not a perfect but a reasonable degree of alignment in what these officials were often central bank or Treasury officials, 100 00:11:15,450 --> 00:11:22,040 but not always what these officials believed was good for the economy and also good for climate change. 101 00:11:22,060 --> 00:11:27,780 So that enabled us to identify a subset of policies that we thought would descriptively 102 00:11:27,780 --> 00:11:32,880 likely to get support from civil servants in ministries and in central bank. 103 00:11:33,840 --> 00:11:37,260 Can you give me some examples of the kinds of policies? Yeah, sure. 104 00:11:37,290 --> 00:11:46,920 So this, uh, often what you have in response to financial crises is, is infrastructure spend because it gets a lot of people working. 105 00:11:47,310 --> 00:11:50,250 And if you've got a lot of people who are unemployed, then that's a good thing to do. 106 00:11:50,490 --> 00:11:58,980 Now, this is an unusual crisis, this pandemic, because unlike your a classic kind of Keynesian demand trap, when. 107 00:12:00,220 --> 00:12:09,190 Confidence evaporates in the economy. The problem we had over COVID was that people were being prevented from going 108 00:12:09,190 --> 00:12:12,940 to work because the government didn't want it to end up being a health crisis. 109 00:12:12,950 --> 00:12:21,610 So. It's an unusual economic phenomenon because we're causing the recession, but we're also wondering how to solve. 110 00:12:22,210 --> 00:12:29,140 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. 111 00:12:29,920 --> 00:12:36,730 But the worry was that and it did happen was that there would be jobs lost because, you know, 112 00:12:36,790 --> 00:12:42,730 some businesses can't survive a year with no revenue, even with the furlough schemes and government full program. 113 00:12:43,690 --> 00:12:50,340 So. So the sorts of things that might help you recover from that damage. 114 00:12:50,360 --> 00:12:55,540 The economy included large scale infrastructure investment on, for instance, 115 00:12:55,810 --> 00:13:03,220 electric car charging points, home installation, scale up of solar and wind deployment. 116 00:13:03,460 --> 00:13:09,730 So those sorts of policies, they were not always so. 117 00:13:09,910 --> 00:13:17,500 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. 118 00:13:17,950 --> 00:13:23,349 And even better than those sorts of spends from a COVID perspective is and the restoration 119 00:13:23,350 --> 00:13:29,260 of natural habitat and ecosystems which can sequester carbon dioxide as well. 120 00:13:29,270 --> 00:13:38,590 So you're working on replanting or regenerating or rewilding particular natural landscapes is another obvious win. 121 00:13:39,790 --> 00:13:44,500 There's some less obvious ones that ultimately I think weren't strongly picked up. 122 00:13:45,430 --> 00:13:55,419 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. 123 00:13:55,420 --> 00:13:58,420 And we didn't really see vast amounts of funds flowing into there. 124 00:13:59,260 --> 00:14:00,790 But then, you know, I mean, 125 00:14:01,000 --> 00:14:07,719 the policies that the economists like the most tended to be supporting are other than the rescue policies like the furlough schemes. 126 00:14:07,720 --> 00:14:14,530 And, you know, livelihood support tended to be policies that related to supporting the health system, 127 00:14:14,530 --> 00:14:22,540 given the strains it was under, and also supporting information and communication technologies, which are in a sense, 128 00:14:22,540 --> 00:14:29,739 green technologies is not not as if we're not using electricity and using material resources here in this conversation on Zoom, 129 00:14:29,740 --> 00:14:33,660 before, I've had to fly across the world to have this conversation and the material on fire. 130 00:14:34,090 --> 00:14:38,640 And of course, given the way we're now working, that made a lot of sense. 131 00:14:38,650 --> 00:14:41,680 So that gives you a bit of a flavour of what came out of that study. 132 00:14:44,540 --> 00:14:50,480 So that was a relatively optimistic outlook from the sustainability point of view. 133 00:14:51,860 --> 00:14:59,450 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. 134 00:15:01,040 --> 00:15:06,559 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 135 00:15:06,560 --> 00:15:10,340 the political spectrum with not identified with a particular political alignment. 136 00:15:11,930 --> 00:15:23,839 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, 137 00:15:23,840 --> 00:15:30,500 this fiscal Oxford version of the paper in the Oxford Review of Economic Policy, which came out a little bit before the publication. 138 00:15:31,100 --> 00:15:44,180 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, 139 00:15:44,220 --> 00:15:54,170 actually a network of such people globally, who had recognised that there was going to be a process of building back. 140 00:15:54,500 --> 00:15:59,989 It needed to be building back better because actually we're up against it from a climate perspective. 141 00:15:59,990 --> 00:16:06,570 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. 142 00:16:06,590 --> 00:16:08,570 So we we had to build back better. 143 00:16:09,290 --> 00:16:17,210 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. 144 00:16:17,390 --> 00:16:21,770 But I think it was probably around April of 2020. 145 00:16:22,400 --> 00:16:25,430 Actually, it was 2005. Oh, was it? There you go. 146 00:16:25,490 --> 00:16:32,720 Okay. You know better than I did. Look it up. Well, it was Bill Clinton after the Haiti earthquake. 147 00:16:32,960 --> 00:16:37,400 I see. I see. Okay. So it was reformed and recycled from Bill. 148 00:16:38,420 --> 00:16:42,980 But yes, in the COVID context, I guess it was not sure if or when, when. 149 00:16:43,520 --> 00:16:53,870 Probably one of the clever communications folk in this network I refer to came up with it or reimagined and repurposed Bill's quotes. 150 00:16:55,700 --> 00:17:01,970 And yes, as you say, it really did catch on. And I think perhaps because of that phrase, because of the. 151 00:17:02,990 --> 00:17:13,370 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. 152 00:17:13,370 --> 00:17:17,840 But we've been told that it's well over a billion getting towards 2 billion. 153 00:17:18,500 --> 00:17:22,930 Now, that doesn't mean is that 2 billion people read the academic paper. 154 00:17:22,940 --> 00:17:26,200 That would be an impossible fancy. 155 00:17:26,260 --> 00:17:37,100 But it means that in the various outlets that covered the research, the circulation or views, etc., added to 2 billion. 156 00:17:37,250 --> 00:17:41,240 Anyway, I mean, if it was 1 million, I'd be happy. It's a it's a very big. 157 00:17:43,670 --> 00:17:50,120 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. 158 00:17:50,570 --> 00:17:56,299 People were already getting sick of it, were afraid it was boring being at home. 159 00:17:56,300 --> 00:18:05,000 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? 160 00:18:05,840 --> 00:18:12,830 And there was a hunger for that. And our paper was the food that people wanted to eat, I think. 161 00:18:13,040 --> 00:18:20,329 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 162 00:18:20,330 --> 00:18:25,250 time with the right probably with the right authors and with the right analysis and message. 163 00:18:27,000 --> 00:18:37,020 So presumably you were interested in following up how those aspirations were actually met in over the course of the following year or so. 164 00:18:37,530 --> 00:18:41,820 How did you gather the data in order to make that analysis? 165 00:18:42,240 --> 00:18:50,940 Yeah. So, I mean, as the paper progressed, Brian O'Callahan took more and more of a main role. 166 00:18:51,600 --> 00:18:58,259 Initially, I brought him in as a very able doctoral student who had a background in management 167 00:18:58,260 --> 00:19:02,610 consulting to help oversee some of the research assistants I had on the program. 168 00:19:03,630 --> 00:19:10,560 But as I say, he fairly rapidly took a leadership role in in finish off the paper and then 169 00:19:11,160 --> 00:19:16,030 completely built a quite impressive apparatus to collect all of this data, 170 00:19:17,070 --> 00:19:21,960 you know, under the banner of the Global Recovery Observatory at the Smith School. 171 00:19:22,500 --> 00:19:30,780 I think at one time, Brian had around 20 people scouring the world for different policies. 172 00:19:30,810 --> 00:19:38,820 I mean, I think there are around 10,000 policies now in this database and assessing, you know, so noting what the policy is. 173 00:19:38,850 --> 00:19:45,170 Break it down and work out what the spend is for each of the components and then assessing how clean, 174 00:19:45,180 --> 00:19:53,520 you know, dirty is on a life scale, which is just a five point subjective scale that that policy is. 175 00:19:53,520 --> 00:20:02,640 And that enabled Brian and the team to start to say which countries were leading in both, 176 00:20:03,390 --> 00:20:07,920 how much they were spending on building back full stop and how much was green. 177 00:20:08,460 --> 00:20:17,520 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 178 00:20:17,520 --> 00:20:27,190 maintain companies profitability or at least solvency and individuals livelihoods compared to recovery policies that were more structural. 179 00:20:27,220 --> 00:20:28,620 We're looking at, you know, 180 00:20:28,620 --> 00:20:36,750 literally building back in many instances because the rescue packages are more or less neutral to the climate or to the environment, 181 00:20:37,470 --> 00:20:43,170 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. 182 00:20:43,670 --> 00:20:52,200 But we just put them aside and did a deeper analysis on whether the recovery the recovery policies were greener. 183 00:20:54,800 --> 00:20:59,270 What was the answer? Well, it's quite granular. 184 00:20:59,300 --> 00:21:04,350 I mean, you can look at the data on the Web. It's updated relatively frequently. 185 00:21:05,150 --> 00:21:18,670 The the answer is that overall, I would say I was disappointed, even unimpressed, honestly, by the response of the world to the challenge, 186 00:21:18,800 --> 00:21:23,450 the dual challenges that we were in of dealing with climate and dealing with the pandemic. 187 00:21:24,670 --> 00:21:28,970 A lot of it was business as usual sort of stuff now. 188 00:21:29,000 --> 00:21:33,970 But but on the other hand, you know, is the glass half full or is it glass half empty? 189 00:21:34,000 --> 00:21:42,819 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. 190 00:21:42,820 --> 00:21:51,730 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. 191 00:21:52,450 --> 00:22:00,429 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. 192 00:22:00,430 --> 00:22:05,410 I mean, we need multiple trillions to get us on to a net zero pathway in time. 193 00:22:06,010 --> 00:22:15,100 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. 194 00:22:15,220 --> 00:22:20,440 So a big improvement, but still not enough is how I'd summarise it. 195 00:22:20,440 --> 00:22:25,240 But then you can go into much greater detail in specific countries and specific sectors. 196 00:22:26,470 --> 00:22:34,510 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 197 00:22:34,510 --> 00:22:40,180 was particularly green in their thinking and others where you might have expected them to do better. 198 00:22:40,210 --> 00:22:46,830 And who didn't? Well, I think in some sense, you know, it's no surprise that the wealthier, 199 00:22:47,280 --> 00:22:52,230 often northern European nations tended to be greener for the South Koreans. 200 00:22:54,000 --> 00:22:56,819 In some sectors, I mean, you know, in a sense, 201 00:22:56,820 --> 00:23:05,190 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. 202 00:23:05,730 --> 00:23:11,670 So if they're already on a path towards a transition towards a green economy, 203 00:23:12,210 --> 00:23:15,390 then they are a better place to continue and to accelerate down that path. 204 00:23:15,430 --> 00:23:17,550 But if they weren't, they didn't push very hard. 205 00:23:17,580 --> 00:23:25,890 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. 206 00:23:27,000 --> 00:23:31,800 The narratives emerging from from our government. 207 00:23:32,580 --> 00:23:36,690 And it is interesting the pushback tendency. 208 00:23:36,690 --> 00:23:41,519 Well, how do you categorise everything properly now that we got back from a lot of governments? 209 00:23:41,520 --> 00:23:45,840 Actually, hang on. You know what? You should have crossed this is grain when when you didn't. 210 00:23:46,680 --> 00:23:50,310 And then the other one you get from the UK, especially from the Treasury as well. 211 00:23:50,580 --> 00:23:53,550 It's not all about spending, you know, which is true. 212 00:23:54,540 --> 00:24:03,239 It's also about the quality of the enabling policy environment and whether that is is shifting the way the private sector invests. 213 00:24:03,240 --> 00:24:07,620 And we're much more private sector driven economy. 214 00:24:07,620 --> 00:24:13,560 And so those policy frameworks are more significant than than what spent by the government directly. 215 00:24:15,930 --> 00:24:22,110 So to what extent have you been able to act as an advisor on government policies or 216 00:24:22,260 --> 00:24:28,140 have those outcomes fed directly into policies either here or elsewhere in the world? 217 00:24:28,950 --> 00:24:30,960 You have in many countries, 218 00:24:31,920 --> 00:24:41,310 over two dozen countries that you've been in touch with directly and behind that the bulk of this work with, with some exceptions. 219 00:24:42,960 --> 00:24:47,370 And it's quite interesting. Who got in touch. We had. 220 00:24:49,460 --> 00:24:57,320 Sessions with the head of the IMF. Sessions Kristalina Georgieva, the head of the United Nations Environment Programme. 221 00:24:57,920 --> 00:25:02,270 ANDERSON Al Gore was frequently quoting the work. 222 00:25:04,670 --> 00:25:13,639 George Soros, who supports the idea of new economic thinking around the world, was very taken by the study, 223 00:25:13,640 --> 00:25:18,080 and I had him while tapping me quite frequently since the video calls with him 224 00:25:18,080 --> 00:25:24,530 about where we could take the work and which governments would be receptive to it. 225 00:25:25,430 --> 00:25:31,090 We had calls with a number of ministers in different country governments and you know, 226 00:25:31,100 --> 00:25:40,180 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, 227 00:25:40,190 --> 00:25:43,850 or at least was providing a lot of those governments with advice that most companies. 228 00:25:45,520 --> 00:25:50,679 You mentioned that a lot of these initiatives are in the hands of business rather than government. 229 00:25:50,680 --> 00:25:55,300 The most is certainly national policy initiatives. 230 00:25:55,870 --> 00:26:04,230 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. 231 00:26:04,640 --> 00:26:10,680 That in some sense one of our key stakeholders and our mission is to help to get the world to. 232 00:26:11,940 --> 00:26:15,030 Net zero emissions while achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. 233 00:26:15,030 --> 00:26:21,390 And we do that by equipping business and finance with the capabilities and also establishing 234 00:26:21,720 --> 00:26:27,870 the landscape on which they compete so that they're driven toward those environmental goals. 235 00:26:28,140 --> 00:26:34,020 So, yes, we had an awful lot to do with the financial community and the business community, 236 00:26:34,020 --> 00:26:42,030 whether it's kind of elite executive education, work to do, work with with senior executive teams. 237 00:26:44,070 --> 00:26:47,260 Sometimes it's hard because those, you know, 238 00:26:47,310 --> 00:26:51,540 have various ones in mind now that I know it's private that we did that work 239 00:26:51,540 --> 00:26:54,809 with them and then they will make a big announcement about going for net zero. 240 00:26:54,810 --> 00:27:11,010 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. 241 00:27:12,030 --> 00:27:23,009 Ben Caldecott, for instance, was seconded into that COP26 team on financial issues and and as we saw at COP26, 242 00:27:23,010 --> 00:27:30,329 we had the Glasgow Financial Alliance on net zero funds mobilised and claimed 243 00:27:30,330 --> 00:27:35,520 to mobilise around $1,000,000,000,000 of capital towards environmental loans. 244 00:27:35,790 --> 00:27:41,040 Now there's a big debate to be had about. How much of that is rebadging versus serious? 245 00:27:41,040 --> 00:27:46,230 The new money? There was a lot of engagement across the board, whether it's I mean, 246 00:27:46,270 --> 00:27:50,579 including the water team at the Smith School or in other parts working on 247 00:27:50,580 --> 00:27:57,540 cooling or working on business models and systemic change with with business. 248 00:27:57,540 --> 00:28:04,739 And in addition to direct work with. With companies, including some of the big industrials. 249 00:28:04,740 --> 00:28:10,730 I mean, I sit on the advisory board of Royal Dutch Shell. I'm often criticised by my students for doing that, 250 00:28:10,740 --> 00:28:19,980 but actually I think it's incredibly important that they have voices from a greener perspective on their on their advisory board. 251 00:28:21,180 --> 00:28:25,260 So those sorts of engagements I think were helpful in. 252 00:28:26,890 --> 00:28:32,520 Establishing a business recognition that actually business needed to push for this, too. 253 00:28:33,190 --> 00:28:38,080 And I was at a roundtable with the secretary in the U.K., 254 00:28:38,140 --> 00:28:49,990 where I was pleased to see perhaps businesses that the average person would be surprised to hear lobbying hard for renewable energy deployment, 255 00:28:50,170 --> 00:28:56,889 such as some of the oil and gas companies, because they could see that this was the right time to do that. 256 00:28:56,890 --> 00:29:04,720 And actually, they're developing businesses in that space today. Those businesses would benefit from stronger policy push in the green direction. 257 00:29:06,430 --> 00:29:10,330 So that was a paper from the school recently on strategic alliances. 258 00:29:11,240 --> 00:29:15,250 If you think of the corporate sector as being constantly in competition with one another, 259 00:29:15,250 --> 00:29:21,729 but presumably shouldn't presume anything, what what was that? 260 00:29:21,730 --> 00:29:25,210 What was the the conclusion of that research? 261 00:29:25,420 --> 00:29:31,300 Is there a is it something that they need to be encouraged to do to work together to try and achieve a single voice? 262 00:29:32,650 --> 00:29:34,629 Yeah. I mean, I think in certain instances, 263 00:29:34,630 --> 00:29:41,110 businesses can and should furiously compete with each other and in others they really should collaborate and cooperate. 264 00:29:41,120 --> 00:29:51,420 And I think we're in a new, increasingly more sophisticated world where previous foes are coming together to say, well, you know, 265 00:29:51,670 --> 00:29:57,130 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. 266 00:29:58,030 --> 00:30:00,880 But in some of these, what's called the free competitive space. 267 00:30:01,480 --> 00:30:07,480 Can we not achieve some standards on the environment standards more widely on ESG, environmental, 268 00:30:07,480 --> 00:30:15,670 sustainable social and governance issues to help us all to collectively achieve a better outcome for humanity? 269 00:30:15,670 --> 00:30:20,080 Because that's what our shareholders and our customers and government expects of us as an industry. 270 00:30:20,740 --> 00:30:23,760 And we can compete to deliver better products at lower cost. 271 00:30:23,760 --> 00:30:29,180 But actually, collectively, we've got to join together to solve these big problems. 272 00:30:29,220 --> 00:30:40,640 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. 273 00:30:42,020 --> 00:30:51,010 Who would really like to. Change the inputs that it sources to reduce the carbon footprint. 274 00:30:52,020 --> 00:30:55,980 But it has inadequate regulatory pressure on it. 275 00:30:56,640 --> 00:31:03,780 And so if it does it voluntarily, it will suffer a cost disadvantage compared to the other players in the space. 276 00:31:04,290 --> 00:31:12,000 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? 277 00:31:12,810 --> 00:31:16,080 And in this particular case, the competitors said no. 278 00:31:17,780 --> 00:31:25,360 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. 279 00:31:25,690 --> 00:31:30,880 And if we can't do it collaboratively, perhaps you might have to think about what government ought to do here, 280 00:31:31,000 --> 00:31:37,780 because it's an open space and you know, where we're careful about which corporates we work with and why, 281 00:31:37,780 --> 00:31:44,290 because obviously Oxford University is not here to simply advocate for positions for companies, 282 00:31:44,920 --> 00:31:50,050 and we're here to find the truth and then broadcast the truth, whether those funding like it or not. 283 00:31:51,100 --> 00:31:58,210 But in this particular instance, I think we're all fairly happy that the truth is going to be something that that is, 284 00:31:58,450 --> 00:32:08,339 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 285 00:32:08,340 --> 00:32:13,500 to end up being in well fitting within the objectives of this particular company who we're working with. 286 00:32:16,910 --> 00:32:21,620 So that brought you neatly round to talking about government again and pressure on government. 287 00:32:23,380 --> 00:32:32,410 I mean, the solutions that you're proposing, one might argue, are rational and technocratic, 288 00:32:33,250 --> 00:32:38,799 and politicians are dealing in a space that often isn't rational and technocratic. 289 00:32:38,800 --> 00:32:42,640 It's much more emotional and based on what they think voters want. 290 00:32:43,300 --> 00:32:53,740 How how do you manage to gain an entry, as it were, given those that that difficulty looking in two ways? 291 00:32:53,740 --> 00:33:02,500 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. 292 00:33:02,890 --> 00:33:07,440 What politicians try and do is what is to work out what will get them elected next. 293 00:33:07,450 --> 00:33:10,960 And that's that's in a sense, that's their job. I don't blame them for it. 294 00:33:12,370 --> 00:33:18,990 So in our own kind of. Evidence based research context. 295 00:33:19,560 --> 00:33:26,340 I think we interface most comfortably with the civil service ones who are designing policies for society as a whole. 296 00:33:27,290 --> 00:33:28,429 And know this innocence, 297 00:33:28,430 --> 00:33:37,550 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. 298 00:33:38,420 --> 00:33:45,830 But then, you know, on occasion, we do interface very directly with, you know, politicians, cabinet ministers and so on. 299 00:33:45,980 --> 00:33:49,370 And there you are, right? 300 00:33:49,580 --> 00:33:58,310 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. 301 00:33:58,910 --> 00:34:06,470 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? 302 00:34:07,100 --> 00:34:10,910 There's no point saying you should do this because it would be good for society if it's not good. 303 00:34:10,920 --> 00:34:17,600 But you know, Vladimir Putin, for instance, if you're in Russia to quite a currently relevant piece of context, 304 00:34:17,970 --> 00:34:23,390 let's try and work out what's what's in their political interests or their objectives as they see them, 305 00:34:24,410 --> 00:34:30,770 and then identify the areas of overlap with the public interest as a whole. 306 00:34:31,280 --> 00:34:33,559 And that that can be hard, 307 00:34:33,560 --> 00:34:41,960 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. 308 00:34:43,660 --> 00:34:47,470 Fundament so naively, you might expect, of course, there are going to be votes in not. 309 00:34:48,190 --> 00:34:54,400 That's clearly not true, because actually voters don't always vote their own interests that are always known as they are. 310 00:34:54,730 --> 00:35:00,190 And even when they do get their own interests, their own interests unnecessarily align with everybody else's interest. 311 00:35:00,190 --> 00:35:10,150 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, 312 00:35:10,780 --> 00:35:14,559 there is probably a way of finding a mechanism to get the votes in. 313 00:35:14,560 --> 00:35:23,050 If the current government or whatever opposition person you're speaking with has a way of getting their interest in what you're proposing. 314 00:35:24,300 --> 00:35:28,710 Is there a case or do you attempt to communicate directly with the general public? 315 00:35:28,720 --> 00:35:31,930 Is that a communications channel you use? We do. 316 00:35:31,970 --> 00:35:37,540 Yeah. I mean, the way I like to think about effecting change is this. 317 00:35:37,620 --> 00:35:41,690 There are these mass communication strategies that you're referring to there where, you know, 318 00:35:42,440 --> 00:35:48,180 we see a lot from physical scientists just going out and telling the public what's happening. 319 00:35:50,350 --> 00:35:56,700 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. 320 00:35:57,420 --> 00:36:00,870 So many times they kind of can stop listening. 321 00:36:01,500 --> 00:36:06,540 Yeah. There's this phrase you didn't miss the first time, so I'm just going to say it again, but louder. 322 00:36:07,020 --> 00:36:08,190 That doesn't actually work. 323 00:36:08,820 --> 00:36:14,280 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. 324 00:36:14,850 --> 00:36:19,200 So start from not not what you think they ought to know, what you think they ought to believe. 325 00:36:19,200 --> 00:36:24,750 But from what they do know and what they do believe and what they might believe is that climate change is a hoax. 326 00:36:25,620 --> 00:36:35,640 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. 327 00:36:36,300 --> 00:36:44,760 And if you dismiss that, then you're not going to get anywhere. So I think on climate, environmental issues, 328 00:36:44,760 --> 00:36:50,700 we've had a bit of a failure on the mass communication side of things probably for your decade and a half, 329 00:36:50,700 --> 00:37:00,720 certainly in some countries more than other countries. Australia definitely where those of us who do the underlying science haven't. 330 00:37:01,700 --> 00:37:11,750 Kind of, in a sense, humbly started from where people are and and engaged with their fears and their concerns and, 331 00:37:12,340 --> 00:37:14,060 you know, reasonable questions like, 332 00:37:14,840 --> 00:37:22,060 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? 333 00:37:22,070 --> 00:37:24,170 Well, it's not that I always thought it was. 334 00:37:24,170 --> 00:37:29,080 And it turns out there was a reason to believe that actually the sun does have an influence on the climate, which it does. 335 00:37:29,090 --> 00:37:32,600 It's not a very big one or, you know, another one at the moment. 336 00:37:33,020 --> 00:37:36,799 Well, it's great that you guys think sun and wind is now cheaper than it was before, 337 00:37:36,800 --> 00:37:42,560 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? 338 00:37:42,560 --> 00:37:46,760 And life are going to go back to candles now. And of course we're not. 339 00:37:46,760 --> 00:37:51,020 But you then have to have a discussion about the way in which batteries can be used. 340 00:37:51,530 --> 00:37:57,439 And batteries don't solve the problem either in a fundamental sense, they sort of day night variability, 341 00:37:57,440 --> 00:38:03,410 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, 342 00:38:03,530 --> 00:38:13,370 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. 343 00:38:13,610 --> 00:38:18,530 It's hard. I mean, it's a hard job. It's not no surprise we haven't done it particularly well. 344 00:38:18,560 --> 00:38:22,010 But that mass influencing channel is is an important one. 345 00:38:22,550 --> 00:38:28,160 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. 346 00:38:28,280 --> 00:38:35,929 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. 347 00:38:35,930 --> 00:38:39,290 And ideally, those options are aligned with their own best interests. 348 00:38:39,290 --> 00:38:43,429 And that's how you can now personally have my, you know, 349 00:38:43,430 --> 00:38:48,980 probably just reflecting what I think we're better at, but that's where we play mostly to effect change. 350 00:38:51,730 --> 00:39:02,190 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. 351 00:39:04,080 --> 00:39:17,610 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? 352 00:39:17,910 --> 00:39:21,060 I mean, do people look at the world differently now from the way they did before? 353 00:39:22,720 --> 00:39:26,050 Yeah. Uh, I think they do, certainly. 354 00:39:27,640 --> 00:39:33,640 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, 355 00:39:33,640 --> 00:39:39,910 changing the way they're looking at energy because it's being obviously used as a geopolitical tool. 356 00:39:40,120 --> 00:39:49,300 Yeah, but if I try and decouple Russia, Ukraine from the pandemic, I, I think initially we had the sense that actually. 357 00:39:51,600 --> 00:39:55,020 The skies were clear, the streets were quieter. 358 00:39:55,620 --> 00:40:01,079 We saw life returning, non-human life returning to waterways and other ecosystems. 359 00:40:01,080 --> 00:40:04,319 And people found that very pleasing. At least I did. 360 00:40:04,320 --> 00:40:10,890 And others did. But equally. There's a reason we have the way of life. 361 00:40:11,220 --> 00:40:19,290 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. 362 00:40:19,560 --> 00:40:26,250 So while there were silver linings in that pandemic clouds, they were just that silver linings. 363 00:40:26,250 --> 00:40:30,380 And actually the clouds went away and you got your old lives back. 364 00:40:30,390 --> 00:40:36,750 So has there been a kind of fundamental change in the way we think about environment? 365 00:40:37,980 --> 00:40:42,270 Maybe, but I'm not completely convinced. 366 00:40:42,280 --> 00:40:50,160 I mean, obviously, there's been this change that we're now far more adept at and accustomed to interacting with each other online. 367 00:40:50,850 --> 00:40:57,389 So the aviation industry is still struggling, which other than for the aviation industry at the moment, 368 00:40:57,390 --> 00:41:00,750 that's probably a good thing because it's very fossil intensive. 369 00:41:00,840 --> 00:41:06,130 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. 370 00:41:08,970 --> 00:41:12,660 So that's been that's been a change. But I'm not sure that we've had. 371 00:41:14,280 --> 00:41:22,970 A radical shift in. Beliefs or awareness of the urgency of environmental issues. 372 00:41:24,140 --> 00:41:33,170 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. 373 00:41:33,380 --> 00:41:40,840 Obviously, you know, you have scientists warning for decades that actually we're going to be faced with a pandemic. 374 00:41:40,850 --> 00:41:46,489 We need to get ready. There are things we need to do. Part of the problem is human. 375 00:41:46,490 --> 00:41:51,690 You know, with a zoonotic disease, it's the interface between humans, animals and humans. 376 00:41:51,710 --> 00:41:54,680 Expand and expand, expand our economies. 377 00:41:54,680 --> 00:42:05,120 We come into close contact with rarer and, you know, more unusual animals that are that are likely to transmit these disease. 378 00:42:05,900 --> 00:42:16,340 We're also both situations are are complex systems where, you know, people have a real difficulty understanding exponential processes. 379 00:42:17,540 --> 00:42:20,659 It's the whole doubling your grains of rice on a chessboard. 380 00:42:20,660 --> 00:42:29,360 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 381 00:42:29,360 --> 00:42:32,540 think many people have the sense of it was nowhere and then it was everywhere. 382 00:42:32,600 --> 00:42:34,880 And of course that's how exponential processes work. 383 00:42:35,450 --> 00:42:45,499 So you might have hopes that recognising there are these feedback effects and tipping points within within health systems and within 384 00:42:45,500 --> 00:42:53,810 infectious diseases might lead people to a greater awareness that these similar sorts of risks are there in the climate system as well. 385 00:42:54,380 --> 00:42:58,310 And it might seem like everything's fine until some of everything really isn't on. 386 00:42:59,420 --> 00:43:03,470 And the problem is that it's not it's not as if you just kill 1 to 10 million people. 387 00:43:03,560 --> 00:43:12,230 Misery Kill wants 10 million people irreversibly change the life support system on which we all depend. 388 00:43:12,230 --> 00:43:17,900 So unfortunately, I don't think that analogy has hit home in the way that I would have liked it to. 389 00:43:19,080 --> 00:43:28,170 And equally, you could argue that the evidence that by targeting investment massively government investment in things like vaccines 390 00:43:28,170 --> 00:43:38,549 and mass testing and all the other mitigation strategies that were taken without completely breaking basically, 391 00:43:38,550 --> 00:43:43,470 I mean, obviously we've had a bit of a bit of a backslide, but the economies are not broken. 392 00:43:43,950 --> 00:43:53,850 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. 393 00:43:54,960 --> 00:43:59,430 Do you think that that lesson has been learned either? I unfortunately, I don't think it has. 394 00:43:59,520 --> 00:44:05,310 But I think you're right. I mean, global GDP is 100 trillion. We spent 15 trillion. 395 00:44:05,790 --> 00:44:14,099 We're about 20 trillion now on recovery measures. You know, at some point, these numbers stop, seem big ten trillions. 396 00:44:14,100 --> 00:44:18,690 And with 1 trillion, we could provide clean energy access to the entirety of the world. 397 00:44:20,250 --> 00:44:25,469 So for those who don't currently have access to electricity, that's according to the United Nations. 398 00:44:25,470 --> 00:44:39,750 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. 399 00:44:40,290 --> 00:44:43,349 Now requires that in a sustained way. But that's that's investment. 400 00:44:43,350 --> 00:44:47,010 It's not money going down the drain. You then get a return on that investment. 401 00:44:48,040 --> 00:44:55,840 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. 402 00:44:56,800 --> 00:45:05,080 We just don't have the collective will and the collective awareness that actually, you know, it's crazy not to be doing this. 403 00:45:06,910 --> 00:45:11,900 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. 404 00:45:11,950 --> 00:45:16,810 I mean, we're already locked in a sense. We're going to have to if we're going to. 405 00:45:17,820 --> 00:45:18,970 Meet net zero. 406 00:45:19,050 --> 00:45:25,950 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. 407 00:45:26,070 --> 00:45:30,959 That's now. No, we don't done a lot of work on that question in Oxford. 408 00:45:30,960 --> 00:45:36,810 And, you know, from about 2015 onwards, we've been building stuff that we shouldn't have been building, 409 00:45:38,520 --> 00:45:42,750 and we are still building new coal fired power stations a lot less. 410 00:45:43,890 --> 00:45:49,320 But we should be net retiring now. So we still we still haven't fully got the massive. 411 00:45:54,440 --> 00:45:59,620 Yeah. So I'm just going to get go back now really to kind of how was it for you? 412 00:45:59,630 --> 00:46:07,550 Did you how how much of a threat did you find the pandemic itself personally? 413 00:46:07,550 --> 00:46:14,490 I mean, did you where did you live in fear of the infections for yourself or your people near people that close to you? 414 00:46:16,250 --> 00:46:19,309 Well, I'm probably like a lot of people. 415 00:46:19,310 --> 00:46:25,960 I was struggling to understand what it would mean for me personally, watching the stats, looking at the, you know, 416 00:46:26,000 --> 00:46:37,100 gender and age demographic info and the stats on what proportion of people were having serious illness and deaths from it before. 417 00:46:37,100 --> 00:46:43,040 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. 418 00:46:44,300 --> 00:46:49,640 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. 419 00:46:49,650 --> 00:46:56,959 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, 420 00:46:56,960 --> 00:47:05,120 because correctly they pointed out, we learn an awful lot about how to deal with the symptoms and how to manage it. 421 00:47:05,690 --> 00:47:16,820 And what normally happens is that these things become endemic over a period of time the less severe, more transmissible variants take over. 422 00:47:17,270 --> 00:47:21,169 So Cameron just, you know, so that was all very good advice. 423 00:47:21,170 --> 00:47:26,330 And we did hold our horses. Our family was very careful. 424 00:47:26,990 --> 00:47:30,620 We didn't get it in the first wave. We didn't get in the second wave. In the end. 425 00:47:30,620 --> 00:47:40,549 My children got it from school at the end of last year, but my wife and I managed to not catch it from them, 426 00:47:40,550 --> 00:47:43,940 even though we had it in the house for two weeks and we were looking after 427 00:47:43,940 --> 00:47:49,999 them by wearing 52 masks in the house and keeping the windows and doors open. 428 00:47:50,000 --> 00:47:57,110 So we were wearing big puffer jackets indoors, which I'm sure some people would find ridiculous and extreme. 429 00:47:57,110 --> 00:48:02,090 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. 430 00:48:03,050 --> 00:48:08,030 And cross our fingers or we've got to make a concerted effort to avoid it. 431 00:48:08,030 --> 00:48:11,450 And in the end, we did. So so far I haven't had it. 432 00:48:11,450 --> 00:48:17,740 And I've had my three vaccines and. Well, taking risks. 433 00:48:18,520 --> 00:48:22,860 It's not as if I'm not taking risks. But life is about taking risks. 434 00:48:22,870 --> 00:48:24,310 And at some point you did anyway. 435 00:48:24,320 --> 00:48:29,770 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. 436 00:48:30,010 --> 00:48:30,790 We'll find out soon. 437 00:48:32,140 --> 00:48:44,020 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. 438 00:48:44,650 --> 00:48:49,750 I guess I'm probably probably more towards the cautious end of that spectrum. 439 00:48:49,770 --> 00:48:51,350 But. But, no, but. 440 00:48:53,250 --> 00:49:02,490 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? 441 00:49:02,520 --> 00:49:06,030 I mean, I could see your work to me working at home now. Yeah. 442 00:49:06,540 --> 00:49:13,770 And as somebody presumably who's mostly computer based, most of the time, I'm actually too difficult a shift to make. 443 00:49:15,030 --> 00:49:20,130 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, 444 00:49:20,280 --> 00:49:26,730 you know, when we put it in a few years ago, I had no idea it was going to be so heavily utilised. 445 00:49:28,950 --> 00:49:32,400 But no, it has been relatively straightforward. I mean, for me, there have been upsides. 446 00:49:32,520 --> 00:49:39,780 So I used to have to have to I used to choose to get on a plane, you know, 447 00:49:39,810 --> 00:49:45,180 probably a dozen times a year for different international conferences or what have you. 448 00:49:45,570 --> 00:49:51,090 It's been honestly delightful not having to do them and being able to do them from this chair. 449 00:49:51,900 --> 00:49:59,280 I've put my kids to bed virtually every night for two and a half years, which has been wonderful, really, really great. 450 00:50:00,030 --> 00:50:08,270 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. 451 00:50:08,280 --> 00:50:13,320 So I haven't been getting that exercise. It's been fun, frustrating, but in the gaps I've been. 452 00:50:13,950 --> 00:50:17,790 So my piano is the best it's ever been and that's been a huge pleasure. 453 00:50:17,820 --> 00:50:20,129 So there's some from for me personally, 454 00:50:20,130 --> 00:50:27,570 there've been there have been benefits as well as the obvious drawbacks of, you know, lots of social interaction. 455 00:50:29,370 --> 00:50:34,950 And, you know, actually sometimes it is nice to go to different parts of the world, even if it is an emissions intensive activity. 456 00:50:37,690 --> 00:50:44,910 You just use it? I went the wrong way. Given that you're now given the area that you're working, working in, 457 00:50:45,610 --> 00:50:49,480 do you and the people who would normally be flying around the world to have meetings with 458 00:50:50,020 --> 00:50:54,730 recognised that perhaps you needn't do that quite as much even if there isn't a pandemic going on. 459 00:50:55,060 --> 00:51:01,780 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. 460 00:51:02,530 --> 00:51:10,690 Last year we ran a large forum on climate neutrality at Oxford and we ran that as a hybrid meeting. 461 00:51:10,750 --> 00:51:22,270 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. 462 00:51:23,680 --> 00:51:29,830 And so people congregated in these regional hubs rather than flying to one location, and we hooked them up. 463 00:51:30,780 --> 00:51:33,120 Between each other. I'd say it worked reasonably well. 464 00:51:33,390 --> 00:51:39,240 I mean, there's no denying that if you could magically beam everybody in the same room at zero emissions costs, 465 00:51:40,050 --> 00:51:46,379 which perhaps we'll be able to do in 50 years time, it would be it would have been significantly better being a person. 466 00:51:46,380 --> 00:51:50,010 But it's not that. And I mean, 467 00:51:50,010 --> 00:51:59,370 the other benefit is we've got many multi-institutional projects kind of cool earlier this morning on a project to take greenhouse 468 00:51:59,370 --> 00:52:09,150 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. 469 00:52:09,980 --> 00:52:13,120 And regular meetings online and now really straightforward. 470 00:52:13,880 --> 00:52:17,400 Everybody's used to and they work really effectively. They're very efficient. 471 00:52:17,420 --> 00:52:24,950 So I think there has been a change in the norms, their professional norms, and that's for the better. 472 00:52:25,040 --> 00:52:30,650 But the flipside is we also had when we did have a conference recently in Oxford. 473 00:52:32,580 --> 00:52:36,150 I opened the conference by saying, Welcome, everybody. 474 00:52:36,270 --> 00:52:40,260 Isn't it nice to be in a room with other people in person again? 475 00:52:41,010 --> 00:52:46,120 And I hadn't honestly expected the response that I got from that room. 476 00:52:46,140 --> 00:52:56,220 It was a real roar of kind of enthusiasm, delight, joy, even in some kind of slightly aggressive, 477 00:52:56,790 --> 00:53:01,920 aggressively happy role that we all wanted to be in-person again. 478 00:53:02,250 --> 00:53:05,340 So, you know, I think there is something very. 479 00:53:06,320 --> 00:53:12,550 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. 480 00:53:12,580 --> 00:53:16,490 Maybe it will be a huge hit. But I think I think people do like seeing other people in person. 481 00:53:18,290 --> 00:53:20,000 This is the final question you'll be glad to hear. 482 00:53:20,270 --> 00:53:30,020 So has the experience of going through the pandemic and working on aspects of it changed your attitude to your approach to your work? 483 00:53:30,020 --> 00:53:43,639 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. 484 00:53:43,640 --> 00:53:53,870 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. 485 00:53:54,230 --> 00:53:59,960 Notwithstanding what I just said, even in Oxford, you know, it's just more convenient to be sitting here than to be shopping. 486 00:54:00,020 --> 00:54:05,610 Like, I lose 10 minutes. Getting there in 10 minutes, getting back. My attitude to my work. 487 00:54:09,180 --> 00:54:12,210 I mean, the environmental challenges that we face are as pressing as ever. 488 00:54:13,050 --> 00:54:17,130 Uh, I. I still think it is very important, I guess. 489 00:54:21,090 --> 00:54:30,520 Perhaps it's given me. Great your appreciation of just how much I enjoy spending my time with my family, which I knew. 490 00:54:30,670 --> 00:54:32,590 I mean, obviously I love spending time with family, 491 00:54:33,010 --> 00:54:39,010 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. 492 00:54:39,010 --> 00:54:44,130 That's been a real pleasure. And I don't think I would want to. 493 00:54:47,030 --> 00:54:50,270 You know, to be working at the same intensity as I was five years ago. 494 00:54:50,480 --> 00:54:55,459 But I guess that that was true before the pandemic. I appreciate that. 495 00:54:55,460 --> 00:54:59,060 There are times in your lives as in March, April. 496 00:55:00,130 --> 00:55:11,230 May of 2020 where you just have to pull out all stops and work until you work past midnight constantly because. 497 00:55:12,880 --> 00:55:16,330 There's a need, there's a social without getting grandiose about it. 498 00:55:16,360 --> 00:55:23,470 If you if you think there is a very urgent issue on which you have something significant to contribute. 499 00:55:24,910 --> 00:55:29,080 Sometimes the question is, well, who else is going to do this if we don't? 500 00:55:29,740 --> 00:55:35,410 And they say without being too over-the-top about it, we're in a very privileged position. 501 00:55:35,670 --> 00:55:40,060 So the world will listen to us when we speak. And that. 502 00:55:40,970 --> 00:55:43,790 That privilege comes with responsibility? I think so. 503 00:55:43,850 --> 00:55:52,400 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. 504 00:55:53,180 --> 00:55:57,590 But that's juxtaposed by this desire to spend even more time with my family. 505 00:55:57,600 --> 00:56:05,510 So maybe maybe it's an even greater awareness of the critical trade-offs that you have to make in life. 506 00:56:06,560 --> 00:56:11,000 Perhaps a greater awareness of risk, too. I mean, there is always risk around this over time. 507 00:56:13,630 --> 00:56:19,940 The. The relativities are often missed in public discourse. 508 00:56:20,270 --> 00:56:24,890 People seem unaware that 4 to 7 million people a year die of air pollution issues. 509 00:56:25,610 --> 00:56:30,240 So, you know, we've had massive global shutdown of our economies. 510 00:56:31,440 --> 00:56:37,320 And, you know, maybe five. Forget where up to now 5 million people have died of COVID. 511 00:56:38,190 --> 00:56:44,700 We lose that many people every year from environmental issues and because they're dying in a hospital. 512 00:56:46,040 --> 00:56:51,620 In the regular turn of events. You know, we just don't notice or don't do anything about it. 513 00:56:53,210 --> 00:56:57,080 So that that kind of stark reality is. 514 00:56:58,070 --> 00:57:04,700 Quite striking and in no way to belittle the scale of the challenge that we have right now in Russia and Ukraine. 515 00:57:06,680 --> 00:57:11,809 It's an order of magnitude, many orders of magnitude smaller than the scale of the challenge we have from climate change. 516 00:57:11,810 --> 00:57:17,840 And yet, of course, naturally enough, it is going to dominate thinking and discourse in the headlines and the policy response. 517 00:57:17,840 --> 00:57:20,239 So, so yeah, I'm rambling a bit, 518 00:57:20,240 --> 00:57:26,970 but I guess what I'm saying is an even finer appreciation for how we misunderstand the relative importance of different things. 519 00:57:28,260 --> 00:57:32,350 Yeah. Great. Thanks very much. 520 00:57:33,660 --> 00:57:36,960 Thank you. That was helpful. Yes. 521 00:57:38,400 --> 00:57:41,420 Okay. I've stopped recording a lovely. Thank you very much indeed. 522 00:57:41,570 --> 00:57:46,280 That was great. My pleasure. And have a lovely afternoon. 523 00:57:46,490 --> 00:57:50,090 The whole project as well. Thank you very much indeed. Okay. 524 00:57:50,490 --> 00:57:56,360 I will send you a release form, email it to to of course, we'll be happy to sort that out. 525 00:57:56,600 --> 00:57:59,300 Okay. Thanks very much for stopping by.