That's why you've got people now saying we can't insure a world like this. And if this world becomes uninsurable because of the intensity, the scale, and the cost of climate induced disasters, then capitalism doesn't work because without insurance, there is no accountable capitalism today. Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, where everywhere in the world. Welcome to episode 237 of the Climate Confident Podcast, the go-to show for best practices in climate emissions reductions. I'm your host, Tom Raftery, and before we jump in a quick word. This podcast now has a subscription option. For just five euros or dollars a month, you can unlock the full back catalog of hundreds of conversations with climate leaders who are actually moving the needle. Subscribers get a personal shout out in episodes plus direct access to me so you can pitch new directions, guests and ideas for the show. Everyone still gets access to the most recent 30 days of episodes for free. But if you want the archive and a hand on the steering wheel, hit the subscribe link in the show notes. Now, let's be clear. Governments talk endlessly about climate action while still handing billions in subsidies to fossil fuel companies. Politicians, water down climate bills, media moguls fuel disinformation, and activists demanding urgent change are painted as extremists. In the middle of all this, the science politics gap just keeps widening. My guest today, Jonathon Porritt, has been at the forefront of environmental activism for decades, whether through the Green Party, friends of the earth or his writing. His latest book, Love, Anger and Betrayal, lifts up the voices of young Just Stop Oil campaigners and makes the case for why civil disobedience is not just legitimate, but essential if we're serious about narrowing that gap and securing a livable future. This conversation is about truth, courage, and the radical hope that another world is still possible. Jonathon, welcome to the podcast. Would you like to introduce yourself? Sure. And thanks Tom for including me in your wonderful podcast. Yeah, so I've been at this business of sustainability for the best part of 50 years since I joined the Green Party in 1974. I'm still hard at it. I suspect I will be till the moment comes when I can no longer go on campaigning like this. And I've done many different things, Tom, which no doubt will touch on during the course of our conversation. Sure. And why, Jonathon, why did you get involved in Greenpeace and you know, all the other topics we'll, we'll talk on? I read a book called Blueprint for Survival in 1973, published by the Ecologist Magazine. Short, very much the point, basically saying if we continue as we are now, don't forget this 1973, expecting more and more growth every year with more and more people demanding that growth every year. On a planet that is still gonna be exactly the same size every year, then we are heading for the rocks. And to be honest, it was so completely compellingly simple. I just thought, well, obviously, why wouldn't anybody gear their expectations of progress and economic activity against that little message? So I joined the Green Party or the Ecology Party as it then was in 1974 and, yeah, I've been at it since then. Wow. And at the time the global population was about two and a half billion, and it's now ballooned to nearly eight and a half billion in the meantime. Yes. People don't like talking about that, Tom, funnily enough, I do not know why, but the issue of population has almost disappeared from the public discourse as in something we should be much more exercised about. The only way we get to talk about population these days is when various experts, as they like to style themselves, demographic experts, tell us that we are in an massive fix because populations are declining in many countries around the world with decreasing average fertility levels. And that, of course, they're concerned about because that, makes them think there won't be enough people to keep old people in the style to which they've become accustomed. I think they're completely misguided, but that's the, that's the sort of population crisis they want to talk about, not the crisis of there being basically too many people on planet Earth. Okay, and we're here to talk about the climate crisis. It is the Climate Confident Podcast. You've said that people rarely hear the whole truth about the climate crisis. What truths are we still hiding from ourselves, do you think? And, and why? I think people have become so accustomed to news about the climate being part of the daily coverage of what's going on out there in the world today. We hear about the latest climate induced disaster or wildfire or flood or whatever it might be. Occasionally there's a big conference. The conference of the parties at the end of every year or a big report, and that might get a little momentary spasm of interest in the media. But inevitably, and I'm not saying this to blame people, it's impossible to keep up with all the news about climate science today. It's actually really impossible, even for scientists in the business and for someone like myself who has to do this because of the work that I do as a climate advocate and activist, it can get astonishing to realise the lack of awareness about two things. Firstly, just how much faster these changes in the climate are occurring now than they once used to do. So no comfort at all that we've got plenty of time to address this stuff, and very little realisation of the gap that has opened up between what the scientists are saying and what the politicians doing in response to that science. I call it the science politics gap because it's that gap, without being too dramatic about it, that basically determines the future of our species on planet Earth. If we can't narrow that gap, then our future looks extremely rocky indeed. If we can narrow the gap, then we've still got reasonably good prospects to fashion and good life for people on planet Earth. It'll be very different from the life that we have now because of the warming that we've already put into these terrestrial and marine systems. And you've been in the fight, as you mentioned, for, for decades. When did you first realise we'd need civil disobedience, not just policy papers to get through to people? I used to be director of Friends of the Earth back in the 1980s, and we did use some nonviolent direct action. As it happens we were extremely envious about Greenpeace, which used nonviolent direct action much more effectively than we did. It used to piss us off massively, that they were so good at it and we really weren't. So I've been a, a supportive of the use of civil disobedience as part and parcel of securing changes in society and our economy from the start. It's always been part of what I see as the spectrum of tactical responses to an unsustainable situation. But it's only laterally, I guess, since 2018 when Extinction Rebellion burst into our lives and reminded everybody involved in the climate movement that things weren't working out quite the way we hoped they would. The pace of change was too slow. Politicians were adrift in terms of what they needed to do. Investments are still heading in the wrong direction, so capital markets were basically dysfunctional. And if you looked at the cumulative record of decades of climate campaigning, it would have to be said that the outcome of all of that was inadequate to say the the least. So in 2018 Extinction Rebellion and then followed by Insulate Britain and then followed by Just Stop Oil were very close to my heart from the start. I just thought, yes, thank God this is a kind of galvanising moment. Inject a bit of new energy into this stodgy movement that has got used to a sort of pattern of, climate shocks, inadequate response back to normal, which clearly hasn't done us any favors. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And obviously the reason I bring that up is because you've just published a book called Love, anger, and Betrayal about this. What made you want to write it and what surprised you most in talking to the 26 Just Stop Oil activists? The book I wrote before this book, Tom. So this one is called Love, Anger, and Betrayal. The book I wrote before that was called Hope in Hell. And I thought that would be my last serious nonfiction book about the climate, because I persuaded myself at the time that it would allow me to say everything that there still remained to be said about the climate crisis. And once that was out there, I wouldn't need to go back there again. I could actually devote myself to what I really want to do, which is fiction. I have this crazy idea about doing a series of eco thrillers and one day I will get there. However, I don't know what happened, but when I contemplated the reality of what we've just been talking about, the speed of change, the impacts, the massive gap between the science and politics, and then I started looking at the way the UK media, our very right wing media, were responding to the civil disobedience, particularly with the young campaigners working with Just Stop Oil. I was outraged. I, it really, I, I get angry quite a lot, Tom, but that's another matter. But I was genuinely outraged. I thought this was completely unacceptable that they went in for these vicious character assassinations of what I could see even at the time were decent, upstanding, very passionate young people who wanted to make a difference and felt that the system didn't allow them to make the difference they know is necessary. Hence, they opted outta conventional campaigning into civil disobedience. And as I, as I heard more and more about this, I thought, this is intolerable. We, we have a duty of care to all future generations and to young people today. And we are not expressing that duty of care properly at the moment. So then I started talking to them and interviewing some of them, and then I realised, oh, I'm gonna have to write another book about the climate crisis, but I'm gonna do this one differently and I'm gonna co-author it with these young campaigners. And it started out with the idea that I would talk to 10 of them, and then these conversations got more and more interesting and I could see the the need to try and provide a platform for them to explain why they do what they do and the way they do it. And then eventually it grew to 26. So that made for a very different kind of book. And half of the book is written by me about the climate crisis. And half is written by, by them in their own words. So the people can judge for themselves what they think about these young people, what drives them, what motivates them, what makes life work for them? And try and step into their shoes a bit. My God, this is a, a kind of empathy free world we live in sometimes, Tom. Our inability to stand in, step in the shoes of other people and see the world through their eyes is one of the reasons why we see such extraordinary cruelty insensitivity in the way people behave today. And you, you mentioned they being vilified. Just for context, for people listening, can you talk about the kind of direct actions that they undertook and contrast it maybe with the kind of direct actions taken by other campaigns in the past, like the suffragettes or like the US Civil Rights Movement or like Gandhi or like a n other civil rights or direct action campaigns, you know, of the past? There's a whole book in that, you know, Tom so I shall try, I shall try. I mean Just Stop Oil, which existed for three years 'cause it stopped as a direct action organisation in April this year. Three, three years, pretty much the day since it was founded. And it was the inheritor of the tactics, the campaigning tactics of both Insulate Britain, which existed for a very short period of time, and before that Extinction Rebellion. And the tactics that Just Stop Oil used were threefold. The first was to go for major disruption of transport systems. So for instance, the demonstrations on gantries over the M25, which caused the passage of cars to be stopped and the motorways just couldn't function in that way. Clearly, very, very disruptive. Secondly, they went in for what were called cultural and sports events where they would invade pitches or, use art galleries to have very dramatic and very highly covered actions. The one that I think attracted more attention than any other were the two young campaigners who threw soup at the glass covering over the sunflowers, the famous Sunflower painting in the National Gallery. And then thirdly, they targeted the buildings of organisations that have contributed to the confusion, the lack of knowledge about the climate crisis today. So a, a lot of organisations like Policy Exchange for instance. Or the Global Warming Policy Foundation, or for some reason based in a street in London called Tufton Street. And they would go after those perpetrators of dishonesty and systematic obfuscation about what we're really up against. So the tactics were in terms of getting it lot of attention, massive amount of coverage, a lot of it very hostile it has to be said. Not just in the right wing media, but their view of things was very simple. In a world where it's getting harder and harder to get people to focus on the climate crisis, what do we need to do to get attention? I was gonna call the book instead of Love, anger, and Betrayal. I was gonna call it For God's Sake, Pay Attention. But then I realised there are so many things that you could ask people to pay attention to that it needed something a little bit more specific to the climate crisis. Now, the, all of those campaigners in Just Stop Oil are incredibly well-informed about really important antecedents in the world of nonviolent direct action. And in particular the civil rights movement, as you mentioned, and the suffragettes. And they would, some of them would favor one or the other, but they would understand the tactics that were used. I think the suffragettes are closest because they had exactly the same approach, which said we don't care if we're making ourselves unpopular. We've had 40 years of polite campaigning to win suffrage for women and men. Largely. The men in the various governments of that time at the end of the 19th century in the start of the 20th century, have said really nice things about it, but have done sod all. So the suffragettes said, we're changing it. We're changing it up. We're not gonna be polite and nice. We're gonna start by breaking windows. And then once breaking windows wasn't enough, well we are gonna start burning down a few buildings. I mean, by any definition today, the suffragettes would be a proscribed terrorist organisation. I'm sorry, but they really would. I know that will offend some people. But if you look at the wording of the Terrorism Act today, that's the 2000 Act. So a bit slightly irrelevant to do it this way, but the actions they carried out. Which were still directed at property, damage to property, not in any way intimidating or threatening people, but they would definitely meet the criteria of a terrorist organisation under our Terrorism Act today. And the damage that has been done by Just Stop Oil and other campaigners is, is absolutely nothing. Insignificant in comparison to the damage the suffragettes did. Yeah. Yeah. And do you think we've lost something now in how society responds to moral protests compared to earlier movements? I am really, yeah, I mean, I am really worried about the response to this erosion in fundamental rights. The rights to assemble, so the freedom to protest and basically the rights to freedom of speech. And it is very noticeable that as, international bodies have reviewed what the previous government, the Tory government and this government now, the labour government have done to try and crush protest through new acts of parliament, through changes in judicial procedures, through making impossible for people to explain why they did something. In court, for instance. I'm really worried at the degree to which this has eroded fundamental rights here in the UK, and I'm worried that not enough people seem to be concerned enough about that because the right to protest is fundamental to the wellbeing and thriving of our democracy. And if you take away the, the right to protest, you begin to move in very dangerous directions towards more authoritarian ways of managing people's expectations, more autocratic processes, more of a police state. And in many respects, if you look at how the police has responded to the so-called threat from Just Stop Oil, it has become a police state. Extraordinary unaccountability in the way they go about their business now. So I'm genuinely very worried about that. It's why my advocacy on behalf of Just Stop Oil has turned into a wider advocacy for these fundamental rights, the human rights that I've been talking about. Protected, by the way, under the European Convention on Human Rights, as everybody knows, and yet, which are now up against astonishing threats from this labour government. And this labour government is as right wing and autocratic in this respect as the preceding Tory administration. So there's no difference between them at all. And in fact, in many respects, particularly in terms of the attempt to proscribe an organisation like Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation, in many respects, worse than the conservatives. I, it is painful to have to say that about a labour government but boy. I, don't think, I don't think this counts as, as a serious labour government given the way they behave on these things. And am I being a bit of a conspiracy theorist in thinking that a lot of this between the media coverage and between the political response is because media and politics have been captured by fossil fuel money. I think you're being too conspiracist or paranoid about that at all, Tom. I think that lies at the heart of so much of what doesn't work in society today. And when I was much younger, campaigner one of my great heroes, intellectual heroes, who I read a lot of was a man called Noam Chomsky. And Chomsky was a, well, in fact a philosopher and linguist, but then a political activist. And he wrote an absolutely compelling book where he said, it's bad enough when politicians and business get together and start stitching things up to favour the elites to make it easier for the already privileged in society to to do even better than they're doing anyway. But he said beyond that, if we ever get to the point where we have a three corner triangle where we have business elites, corrupted politicians, and then the media, we are in serious trouble. And our democracy then is very vulnerable. all sorts of eroding tendencies. And of course that's what's happened. And with the fossil fuel in, industries, they've been able to buy the politicians basically. I mean, in the USA, there is an asking price for whatever particular level of representation you want to seek. We know the asking price for a president, for instance, of the United States. It's around a billion dollars. So there you go. Put it out there, Donald. Why not? But every one of those house of representatives, members or senators, they all have their price. It's legal corruption. So the fossil fuel industries have systematically over decades corrupted the body politic all around the world. And that includes the media. we now have the media in the hands of incredibly powerful, media oligarchs themselves, hugely rich people in their own right billionaires often, and of course, taking the position favoring the existing incumbency of the fossil fuel industry and doing everything they can to stop the opposition to that incumbency, making sure that fossil fuels remain dominant in the global energy economy, for instance. So I think that's all in the public domain. This is all factually acknowledged. The extent, for instance, of global subsidies that governments pay out. Our money, our taxpayers money, the billions and billions and billions of dollars every year that governments choose to put into the hands of the fossil fuel industry. Nobody disputes any of that. It's there for us all to see. We seem incapable of actually stopping that abuse happening. Even though every time there's a G7 meeting or a G20 meeting, there's another mealy mouthed rhetorical flourish that says, yes, we will do whatever we can to stop fossil fuel subsidies. Well, whatever we can means, sod all. The Just Stop Oil campaign have paused their direct actions now. What do you think is next for that energy, that movement? This is a big area of inquiry right now, Tom as you can imagine Just Stop Oil still exists. It exists to support those people who took action in the name of Just Stop Oil over the last three years. People don't really understand this, but there are hundreds of cases still to be prosecuted in the crown courts of the uk. Over the course of the next couple of years. People who've been charged their cases were deferred. A lot of them don't face their trial until 2026 and some will wait until 2027. So some of the Insulate Britain campaigners, for instance, who were charged won't have their cases heard until 2027, which is for one, one person it'll be eight years after the action that they undertook. And what kind of actions are we talking about? Well, Insulate Britain were the ones who blocked the slip roads to motorways and their campaign was one of the best things we can do to address the climate crisis is have a full bore campaign to insulate people's houses. Because fuel poverty in the UK is horrendous. We have some of the most inefficient housing stock in the whole of Europe. Impacts on people's health are shocking on quality of life, et cetera, et cetera. So that was their campaign thing. And they, think the difficulty for people was that that tactic of blocking slip roads to motorways and the campaign goal, which was get all the housing in Britain properly insulated, didn't add up. People couldn't make the connection between the one or the other. And actually that's, I think how I can answer your question because the campaign tactics used by Insulate Britain and by Just Stop Oil have been divisive. They have been polarising. There's no question about that, and I have supported Just Stop Oil and understand why they've adopted those tactics and would support their right to continue to use whatever organisation comes next, continue to use tactics like that. Though I think that what we will see now is a much more direct reckoning with those who are perpetuating this crisis. And for me that means, of course, the fossil fuel companies themselves. It means the investors, the banks, the insurance companies, all of those who manage the assets of these large organisations. It means going to the heart of the problem of the evil incumbency as I call it, somewhat dramatically perhaps, but the evil incumbency that is the, fossil fuel industry in our lives today. And to bring the campaign much more directly facing them and their moral turpitude today, and the fact that they are destroying the prospects for for humankind on this planet. It has to be more direct.'cause I think that's what people now expect. I want to see a, a really powerful campaign for instance, picking up on what Insulate Britain was about to speed up this business of retrofitting people's homes. It is utterly scandalous that millions of people live in homes that are completely unfit for human habitation, often very cold, very moldy, causing terrible impacts. As I've just said, I wanna see a direct action campaign around that. I did suggest to Just Stop Oil slightly mischievously, that their next campaign should be Just Stop Mould. But unfortunately, my advice was ignored Tom. I don't know why. I thought that would really catch the public attention, because honestly, if we could get rid of mould in housing in the UK today, I can assure you it would do more for people's wellbeing than any other single health related campaign we could do. And just for context as well, Jonathon, can you explain to people listening why Just Stop Oil decided to stop their direct action? Yes, and this is difficult because obviously Just Stop Oil doesn't want to say we're shutting up shop because we can't go on any longer because of the police action and the legal context in which we operate. But that's the truth of it. This is an organisation that was policed into extinction, as was a phrase that was used at that time. Now, for some people that didn't cause them any regrets. In fact, they celebrated the fact that Just Stop Oil was policed into extinction. But it's a pretty shocking thing that an organisation that was going about its business using nonviolent direct action tactics in the way that we've already explored, could no longer operate. If I put it bluntly, they ran out of people Tom, they actually ran outta people to do frontline protest roles. So even the campaign they had, which was called slow marching, where small groups, often small groups of 10 max would step into the street at a certain point and temporarily block the passage, the cars in that part of the road. Very eçffective for a while, government introduced new legislation to make it even more difficult to do that, and up to the, the penalties involved in that through the Public Order Act. When Just Stop Oil started, its campaigning, if you did something like that slow marching the street, you would've been found guilty. You would've faced the consequences of that. You would've been probably given a fine, maybe a conditional sentence, maybe a community sentence. But you certainly wouldn't have been sent to prison. For slow marching these days you can go to prison for 2, 3, 4 years. So you can understand why a lot of people who felt passionately about the climate crisis and wanted to express their concern through involvement in actions of that kind were prepared to accept the weight of the law when the sentencing seemed reasonable. But when you contemplate spending x number of years in prison as the price you have to pay to express your views as a citizen, it becomes extraordinarily difficult to go on recruiting people to do that. I mean, there's a limit to what people can do and I think about these young, Just Stop Oil campaigners a lot in that regard.'cause a lot of them did have pretty stiff sentences. A lot of them got sentences for a year, two years, some even for four years. And you look at that and you just think you've already done something so deeply, morally based, so courageous. They hate being described as courageous or anything like that. But anyway, in my book, they're pretty damn courageous. You've already taken that action. You've paid the price as you accepted, you would have to pay the price. But to lose your liberty for an extended period of time for doing what needs to be done now to get people to focus on the climate crisis, that's a tough course. So Just Stop Oil could not get enough people recruited to do this, and that meant that the rationale for Just Stop Oil was no longer valid. So they had to acknowledge that they would move into a different phase. And I assume as well as a custodial sentence, they would've a criminal record. Indeed. And for a lot of young people, that criminal record weighs very heavily on them. Lots of jobs they can't now get some places they can't travel to. People often mention the United States in that regard, and I think, well, there's no great loss. I mean, but even so, I'm being slightly irreverent about that. But who'd want to go to the USA at the moment? Maybe it'll be different in the future, but these are, yeah, these are impacts on their lives and a, a lot of them. I mean, I make no bones about this, Tom. Most of them are, middle class well educated young people. Almost all of them doing a degree of one kind or another. So a lot of them gave up their degrees so that they could actually undertake this kind of very onerous direct action campaigning. And so they don't necessarily have a university to go back to. Some will go back to the university if they make that possible. Some won't. And could that energy that they have be kind of redirected into some kind of legal activism, local politics, or something even more radical? There's a huge debate right now about if you're not even allowed to do publicly accountable civil disobedience to this kind where nobody's making any secret of it. These are not secret organisations. They're out there. They always used to tell the police where the demonstrations would be. They would accept that they'd be arrested, et cetera. But there's a big debate about now. what happens now, which is are we gonna see a different kind of campaigning, which won't be in the public domain? It will be secret, it'll be covert. It may include much more direct violence against property, which people won't own up to, won't accept the need to go through the legal process in the way that Just Stop Oil has always done. I don't know how, how much weight to put on that. People often talk about the book called How to Blow Up a Pipeline by a Swedish author called Andreas Malm. It's a great book, by the way, but I'm not recommending it for people, by the way. It's not a primer for you to become, an engaged activist. Don't worry about that. But it sparked a debate about are we going to see violent, direct action violence against property, not violence against people, but, who knows?, I don't think that's gonna happen. I know for a lot of these young people, they saw the connection between what they were doing and the connection of people campaigning about the genocide in Gaza and Just Stop Oil had a youth wing, which became something called Youth Demand and Youth Demand worked very closely with Palestine Action to heighten awareness about the genocide in Gaza, and particularly about the UK governments utterly heinous complicity in that genocide. So a lot of the Just Stop Oil campaigners by extension became campaigners for human rights, and in particular, the rights of people in a country devastated by what the Israeli Defense forces and what the Netanya government are now doing. So many of them now see themselves working in a wider context around people's rights to have a, a decent life and not to be threatened with that risk of extermination in the way that Israel is doing to Palestine today. So I, I know a lot of 'em will remain very involved in all of that. It's been a pretty I wouldn't call it traumatic time for them, but it's certainly been, difficult to deal with. The emotional gamut they've had to go through to cope with this is, is enormous. So I don't know what'll happen, Tom and I talk about them as if they're a collective. They're 26 young people. They all have completely different views about things. They all have their own lives and their own challenges and their own problems that, you know, it was quite funny sometimes to end up talking to them about their love lives and about difficulties in relationships and why won't my mother understand me? And you think, yep, yep. You're just a normal young kid, basically in that regard. But you've made things slightly abnormal for yourselves by taking this path and more power to your elbow for doing that. Much of this is rooted in the UK context, and this conversation has been rooted in the UK context, as a result. What can people concerned about climate in other parts of the world take away from this story? It's really important that one recognises this spectrum of campaigning tactics about the climate crisis. And although I've obviously written this book to advocate for the importance of civil disobedience, I've not said that every other way of addressing the climate crisis is irrelevant and flawed. And you should forget it. And you should all, we should all go up there and start doing kind of actions that Just Stop Oil were doing. I'm not saying that. And in every country around the world, Tom, what you'll find is that there's the same sort of spectrum of organisational and individual responses to the climate crisis. And sometimes that will include a civil disobedience part of the movement as a whole, for the most part, the campaigning is still very well understood, very conventional in that respect. A lot of lobbying, a lot of policy based advocacy, a lot of consciousness raising, a of practical engagement, particularly at the local level to try and make things actually work better. And I, I think you'd find that spectrum in almost all countries. The response of business to this, however, is a little bit different because we've seen that the business community in Europe has very definitely taken the lead on addressing many of these sustainability issues, whether it's the climate or biodiversity in nature, or of course a whole host of social issues, diversity, inclusion, equity, et cetera. And, up until up until a year or so ago, I think it was fair to say that the business community in the EU was definitely setting the pace for the rest of the business community. Now it's pretty much slowed down the pace of change. And in some cases, even in the EU, it's now going backwards. You can't deny the power of the political backlash, and unfortunately, a lot of that backlash of course, originates in the USA and has spilled over the Atlantic and is contaminating, sorry to use a tendentious word, but is contaminating the whole corporate sustainability movement in, Europe. So business responses are a bit different from civil society responses, but you know, business is representative of civil society in all sorts of ways as well. No, that's fair. And I mean, we've seen as well articles written by executives in the insurance industry talking about how the insurance industry is facing a meltdown. What role do you think financial risk will play in accelerating actual change? I hope it will play a massively important role. This is for me, I. You know, I'm in a, a difficult position when it comes to trying to cheer people up and make them feel positive about all the good things happening in the world, Tom, because there are lots of good things happening in the world, and I'm still involved in a lot of them, and I support them, and I desperately want them to thrive and do really well. But at the back of my mind, I know that we are facing a calamitous crash in the way that we see progress, in the way that the economies around the world work and physical impacts on people's lives involving hundreds of millions of people. We can't avoid that now, that dislocation, partial collapse is going to happen because of what we put into the the warming through the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. We can't stop that, even if we stop fossil fuel consumption tomorrow, which obviously isn't gonna happen. So, live in a different psychological space to most people, which as I've accepted very regretfully the inevitability of that kind of collapse. So most of my thinking about the future is dominated by how do we stop that partial collapse becoming a total collapse. And when I think about that, I don't have sort of dreams about mass insurgency and millions and millions of citizens rising up outta their current apathy and inertia and saying, enough, enough. We're gonna stop this. Now you have to get rid of these links to the fossil fuel industry. We've gotta stop all this stuff before it's too late. I don't have any faith in that, unfortunately. But what I am fascinated by is the idea of this particular model of capitalism which is a particularly vicious and destructive form of capitalism, imploding within, and that will only happen through the capital markets and that will not happen through banking and asset managers who remain as venal, short sighted, and utterly reprehensible representatives of capitalism as they have always been. But it will happen through insurance. And the reason for that is that as many leaders in the insurance industry are now uncomfortably having to come to terms with their industry and its business model is less and less viable. I don't wanna exempt the insurance industry completely. Banking, asset management and insurance were a troika of hugely destructive forces in the world. And the insurance industry used to say, we are not worried about climate change. You know, we'll just jack up the premiums. It'll be fine. It'll still work. It doesn't work any longer. And that's why you've got people now saying we can't insure a world like this. And if this world becomes uninsurable because of the intensity, the scale, and the cost of climate induced disasters, then capitalism doesn't work because without insurance, there is no accountable capitalism today. So I have this weird dream where the, where the impacts the insurance related payouts become so onerous, so great that the industry itself eventually says enough. Just as as citizens are saying enough, they say enough because we can't make our business model work. And if we can't make our business world model work and the world is now increasingly uninsurable, then this model of capitalism won't work either. Those are the voices I want to hear a lot more of. They are out there. They tend to be They tend people who've held senior positions in the insurance or reinsurance industries and have now stepped down from those senior roles, but they are still there out there. But what we need to see now is the industry as a whole stepping up and saying, no, this has gotta stop. That's what we need. Okay. Jonathon, you've been called angry hopeful, idealistic, radical. What would you say is the emotion driving you most today? Okay, well we've already discounted the anger bit of it. That's just part of who I am. I do get quite angry about why we make such a massive mess of this stuff and, and why we allow very self-interested, shortsighted, selfish people to get in the way of what I think the vast majority of people in society want. So I can't help but acknowledge that, that that elite makes me very angry, but that isn't really the dominant emotion. In fact, I probably make more of that than is the truth of it. But what really drives me still is this sense of hopefulness that we've got a good future for humankind available to us still. It won't be an extension of what we've got today. It'll look very different. There'll be much less emphasis on the trappings of wealth, of growth, of consumption, but it will be a society in which people are much more concerned about how we live well together in our communities, in our homes, in our workplaces, and it'll be a much more compassionate and gentle society than the one we have today. And I've, right from the start, subscribing to that kind of alternative worldview has been what drives me on, and I'm still completely connected into that sense of possibility of a better world. So, although I've now obviously very involved in a lot of campaigning work and political work, for me, the advocacy around what a better world looks like is still crucially important. So I just made some disparaging comments about corporate sustainability. Well that doesn't mean to say I don't still see that as being absolutely crucial and it being necessary for all of us to undertake, those initiatives through business in order to allow them to play a full part in this better world that I think is still available to us. So it allows me to stay hopeful, but perhaps in a different way from where most people are now as they still think that we can temper, or mitigate, make less destructive this particular version of our capitalist economy. I don't believe that. I think we won't be able to do that by reform and, and gentle change. There will be traumatic dislocation and it's through that and the other side of that, that we can then begin to work out how to make our world work better for the vast majority of people, rather than work almost exclusively in the interests of the ultra rich, the 300 and is it nine three hundred and twenty three hundred twenty nine billionaires? If I can recall the latest Forbes analysis of how many billionaires we have in the world with their latest article that focused of course very exclusively on who is gonna be the world's first trillionaire.'cause that obviously is a subject to conjecture that matters enormously to the world's billionaires. Oh, yeah. It doesn't bear, it doesn't bear dwelling on Not really uh, I, like the idea that we could have a Star Trek type future as opposed to a Blade Runner type future. Indeed, and it would be really difficult to carry on doing this work if you not only accepted the inevitability of some dramatic dislocation that I've said, but you then went on further to say that you accept the inevitability of Blade Runner. That we are definitely going down and we are going down and down and down on an unstoppable trajectory into this apocalyptic hellhole that awaits us. I don't know how anybody could do the work that needs to be done with that in their mind. I think you probably be better off trying to do something else, frankly. And await that inevitability. So it's very important to me, and I think for a lot of people in this movement, that we retain that sense of what I call authentic hopefulness. I'm not much impressed by shiny technology driven optimism.'cause mostly that comes from people who don't know what they're talking about in terms of geopolitics and world futures. And I'm not much impressed by really gloomy pessimism where people just say, oh God, well, there's nothing we can do about that, is there, so I'll just get on with my life as if nothing is gonna change. I don't like either the optimistic view or the pessimistic view. What I want is radical, authentic hopefulness. Because I think that's the route to getting things looking better for the future. Okay, good. And a left field Question for you, Jonathon. If you could have any person or character, alive or dead, real or fictional as a champion for direct climate action, who would it be and why? I'm gonna stick my neck out here and just say that I am still a massive supporter and admirer of Greta Thunberg., Maybe it's cos I'm 75 years old, but when I look at what she has achieved since the first day, 2017, I think, when she held up that sign outside the Swedish Parliament a school school strike for the climate. And I look at how the movement then grew and grew and grew from that point to the largest ever expression of opinion by young people. A million people on the streets of cities all around the world, just one year later. And I look at what she's doing now and the courage with which she makes the connections between the climate crisis and the genocide going on in Gaza with total integrity. She's an extraordinary young woman. And I admire her leadership enormously. The fact that so many people don't, for all sorts of reasons that I think are really pretty abhorrent just keeps me focused on her as a model of leadership that matters enormously to young people, matters enormously, to people like me who can see how that leadership is still going to mobilise, inspire, motivate millions of people in the future. That that would probably work as well for me as anybody else at the moment. Good. Yeah. Tend to agree. Great. Jonathon, we're coming towards the end of the podcast now, is there any question that I haven't asked that you wish I had or any aspect of this we haven't touched on that you think it's important for people to be aware of? I think we covered a lot of ground. I think probably the only thing I would mention that is slightly different in my life right now is the prospect of the prosecution I face having been arrested in Parliament Square on the ninth and charged under section 13 of the Terrorism Act and it, I am still finding a bit weird Tom. It has to be said surreal, even. you, congratulations. You are the first person who's been charged with terrorism that I've had on the podcast. I think I have to just caveat that a little bit. I'm not charged with terrorism. I'm, I, I suspect I will be charged with supporting a terrorist organisation, namely Palestine Action. I am still finding it a bit odd and, and kind of having to rethink my life a bit in that regard. But there came a point when I just couldn't, I couldn't bear watching what was happening in Gaza any longer. And for me that was a real turning point. So it probably will shape my life now, my working life, campaigning life in ways that I hadn't anticipated three, four years ago, I must admit. So I guess that's the only element we didn't, touch on, but it's an, it's a sort of logical progression of many of the things that I've been involved in for years. I guess the connection is very simple Tom. I worked with these 26 young people for a year, 18 months. They were brilliant mentors to me. And let's never forget that the notion of reverse mentoring. Young people helping older people get their head together. They were brilliant mentors for me. I was able to dig back into my more radical roots in the Green Party and in Friends of the Earth and to see how relevant that still was today and that's been hugely inspirational to me. So I just, I could encourage everybody find themselves a young, radically inclined mentor and just see what happens to your worldview as a consequence. Fantastic. Great, Jonathon, that's been fascinating. If people would like to know more about yourself or any of the things we discussed on the podcast today, Jonathon, where would you have me direct them? I do have my own website www.Jonathonporritt.org. And the book Love Anger and Betrayal. I would love to say it's available in all good bookshops, but it's probably not 'cause most of 'em think it's too radical to stock on their shelves. But there is a website for that where you can order it directly, www love anger betrayal.com. Fantastic. And I saw it's also available in Amazon if people want to Yes, for inter, yes, for international purchases, in particular, the e-version is available the dreaded Amazon. One can't avoid it entirely. Great. Jonathon that's been fantastic. Thanks a million for coming on the podcast today. Thanks, Tom. Enjoyed it. Okay, we've come to the end of the show. Thanks everyone for listening. If you'd like to know more about the Climate Confident podcast, feel free to drop me an email to tomraftery at outlook. com or message me on LinkedIn or Twitter. If you like the show, please don't forget to click follow on it in your podcast application of choice to get new episodes as soon as they're published. Also, please don't forget to rate and review the podcast. It really does help new people to find the show. Thanks. Catch you all next time.