If you support environmental causes and organizations like Extinction Rebellion,
people, especially ones in the public eye, want to cry, "Hypocrite, look at him,
he's wearing clothes, he's wearing clothes and he's pretending to care about the environment."
- The clothes that you're wearing owe their existence to oil.
- You've got a nice wooden thing behind you, what's that made of?
- Oh, Piers, don't do this. You did this to Skeena about TVs, it's stupid.
- Just asked you a question, what's it made of?
You're gonna be called a hypocrite because you live in the modern world rather than in a piece of
hessian sacking, I think, as George Monbiot once said, in a ditch. Unless you do that,
no one will believe you can. And of course, if you do do that, they'll think you're just a weirdo.
But the fact is, reasonable people, I think, understand that something has to be done
about fossil fuels, most of all, about our insatiable appetite for them.
- We are on a fast track to climate disaster.
Major cities under water, unprecedented heatwaves, terrifying storms, widespread water shortages,
the extinction of a million species of plants and animals. And this is not fiction or exaggeration.
It is what science tells us will result from our current energy policies.
- [Stephen] We should remind ourselves why fossil fuels are painted as the
bandits in this particular episode.
- These gasoline molecules are untamed and unruly.
Well you can't, in our world, burn fossil fuels without producing carbon dioxide,
which flies up into the atmosphere and acts as a barrier, stopping heat, infrared, and other
things getting out and dissipating in space, and therefore creating what's known as a greenhouse
effect 'cause like a greenhouse, which is glass, it keeps the heat trapped in. And so, the climate
goes up. And when the climate goes up, even by the smallest amount, it affects everything.
We live in a very balanced kind of world, over hundreds of millions, thousands of millions
really, of years that this planet has established its balance that allows for the life it has now.
Of course, if it goes and we don't do anything about it, we will start again and some other forms
of life will be able to thrive, but not humans and not mammals and not most of the creatures
and landscapes that we know and love, we'll be wiped out. And it would be our fault 'cause we
are the ones who burn the fossil fuels. And our whole society and way of life is based on what
we call the carbon economy really because our cars and our power, our fuel, the things we use to make
everything, even with something like this pullover, which is made from a sheep's wool but
the electricity and the effort and the transport and the whole thing is based on carbon fuels.
And who are we to deny it, especially to developing countries, you might say.
So great is our demand that we're looking for new energy in places once considered sacrosanct.
We're looking for under explored areas in the world with the potential for
large discoveries of oil and gas. And Namibia came out very high on
that list. We took a license for that area and now we're moving ahead to explore it.
And that's my point. We have to talk about this and we have to plan. It's no good just
saying everybody give up carbon use because we can't. Ultimately, it's up to governments.
I apologize for the way this process has unfolded. It's also vital that we protect this package.
You need to get them to recognize that this is the most serious crisis that humanity
has ever faced and that therefore we should plan, we should plan in a friendly way,
a way that involves all of humanity as brothers and sisters together. And I know this sounds naive
and I know that recent history shows that apparently we don't regard each
other as brothers and sisters, and we've never shown greater animosity but it is possible,
and deep down inside us, we know that that's what we want. I've got godchildren and I've got nephews
and nieces, and I care about the world they're gonna live in. And it strikes me as obscene,
not that they're gonna have a lower standard of living and harder time buying houses because all
that's bad enough but that the very fabric and structure and feel of the world will be
awful for them unless we start to take steps, real steps. And they're the ones who are leading us
to taking those steps and they're doing it in a very impressive way, I think. It's loud and
it's disruptive. We should stop and think about the word disruption for a moment.
Do you remember when Facebook started? Zuckerberg said, "Move fast and break things."
Break things is Anglosaxon for disruption, disruption just means breaking. Disruption
can can be an awful thing, it can ruin the way the world is. But there's another form of disruption,
which is to stop the world going down the wrong path, to disrupt a destructive journey.
And that's what Extinction Rebellion, for example, does. And, of course, it's maddening. Who wants
to be stuck in a traffic jam, not being able to cross a bridge, not being able to use a motorway,
not being able to get home for this holiday or to see their family or all kinds of
legitimate and utterly reasonable excuses for being maddened by Extinction Rebellion?
Just put yourselves 10 or 15 years in the future and look around a ruined landscape where there's
violence and unpleasantness and instability and a kind of Mad Max horror threatening.
And then say, damn, it was a nuisance when I couldn't cross that bridge,
hmm? The fact is you sometimes have to sacrifice the present
to save the future. And all that's being asked to sacrifice is some of the conveniences that will
never exist if we don't act now. I don't suppose that what I've said is likely to
change the mind of somebody who finds Extinction Rebellion maddening. But maybe it might just
encourage some people who aren't sure whether or not this is the right direction of travel,
this kind of disruption, this kind of fury. I would suggest it is. And I'm an old man whose
time has passed. But you are likely statistically to be younger than me so you've got more at stake
and you've probably got more energy and sense too. So bless you and good luck.