"The only rational approach to dealing with climate change now is to aim for zero carbon emissions by 2030. That's the only means we have of ensuring that greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere remain below the level at which they are bound to cause a climate change catastrophe. A move now towards zero carbon by 2030."

Peter Christoff: I'd now like you to all welcome George and invite his contribution.

Audience applause.

George Monbiot: Well thank you very much Peter, and thank you Cam, and thank you everyone for having me.
Can I just check that you can all hear me ok.

Audience: Yes.

Monbiot: Great thank-you, I am very glad to be speaking to you by video link, because I think this is part of the future and I would like to see as many meetings as possible conducted by this means. It's a low carbon way of connecting with each other.

Of all the predictions for what might take place as a result of climate change, perhaps the most intriguing is one that was volunteered by a reader of mine.

"Dearest Monbiot" he wrote, "thank you for drawing attention to the threat of climate change. It really is extremely serious, if we don't act soon, the whole planet will turn into a dessert."

Audience laughter.

Monbiot:I have investigated this possibility, and I regret to say that the science does not support it. Although, in Alaska there are plenty of islands that do come to mind.

The other predictions for climate change unfortunately, are rather less tempting than that. And I would draw your attention to a new paper published by the worlds most respected climate scientist, James Hansen, in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, just released, which shows that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) predictions for a smooth melting of ice sheets at both polls could be wildly optimistic. In fact the geological record suggests you don't get a smooth melting at all, you don't get gradual melting, you get a sudden flip from one state to another where the ice shelves break down just as fast as the temperature warms and so there's no lag between rising global temperatures and the break up and total disintegration of the ice sheets and the resultant rise in sea level. Now when this happened before, 3.5 million years ago in the middle of the Pliocene, sea levels rose not as the IPCC predicts by 59cm for the maximum this century, but by 25 metres. And Hansen's new analysis of the West Antarctic ice sheet suggests that it could not last more than a century unless very, very drastic reductions in carbon emissions are made.

Now this doesn't just, I say just, have implications for sea level rise; implications incidentally which could flood most of the world's sensitive population, but because as ice disappears the albedo of the planet reduces, that means the reflectivity of the planet is reduced aiding more absorption of heat. And Hansen proposes that that would result in a doubling of the world's climate sensitivity; that means a doubling of the temperature response to rising greenhouse gases. In other words things would be twice as bad in terms of temperature rises as we thought they would be.

What all this now suggests to me is that my proposal that I made when my book first came out, based on what was then the basic science, for a 60% worldwide cut in carbon emissions by 2030, which would mean in the rich nations a 90% cut by 2030, in order to have a high chance of preventing runaway climate change is in fact optimistic. The only rational approach to dealing with climate change now is to aim for zero carbon emissions by 2030. That's the only means we have of ensuring that greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere remain below the level at which they are bound to cause a climate change catastrophe. A move now towards zero carbon by 2030.

Ok, well how on Earth do we get there. The first step in every nation which subscribes to this aim, and it must eventually mean every nation on earth, is to create an overriding national framework which treats everybody equally and which sets as its aim the final cap for carbon emissions which we aim for. Which as we now know should be zero carbon. And I think the most effective means, and indeed the most logical means, of setting that cap and of distributing the right to produce the declining supply of carbon dioxide has to be carbon rationing. And there are three reasons for this.

The first is that its a far simpler means of dealing with the problem than for instance carbon taxes. To have a taxation system which led to a precise cap in the amount of carbon that was produced by a nation would mean a very complex system indeed. And one thing we know from politics is that complex systems do not do well. They are misinterpreted by people, they are deliberately misinterpreted by the media, and they die before they are even born. They just don't succeed as political ideas.

The 2nd reason is that a carbon rationing system applies to everyone equally. It doesn't allow the rich to opt out. For example, with the taxation system the rich say, 'Well, we just carry on spending and spending and spending' and everyone else's allocation gets squeezed.

With carbon rationing everyone starts with the same allocation. If you use more than your ration you can buy surplus from people who use less, but you are transferring your wealth to them in doing so. You are aiding them for the ration they haven't used. And if people are competing very strongly for that surplus ration the price will be very high indeed. So we could see quite a significant transfer of wealth from the rich to the poor here.

The third reason is it makes people perpetually conscious of their impact on the planet because they're seeing their carbon ration ticking away as they are using energy, as they are using carbon and this means that people will have very powerful incentives to start switching towards low carbon technologies without even being forced to do so. You want to keep the lights on in your house without using up your carbon ration, well then you go in and change your light bulbs, you go to energy efficient light bulbs and you're going to start buying your electricity from someone who produces it from renewable power. You don't need carbon police going around to everyones' houses saying have you switched your television off. People will do themselves so as not to use up their ration and so in fact its much less intrusive than most of the other means which have been proposed.

Ok, so we have a system, an overriding system, first proposed by Mayer Hillman and later refined by people like David Fleming and Richard Starkey and Tina Fawcett which could create the framework within which all the other decisions take place. And I'd like, very briefly, to talk about some of these other subject areas and a few of the changes which would take place within.

Lets look quickly at the issue of electricity, and in the United Kingdom, or in Europe more generally, over the past few months there have been some very exciting new studies published showing how you could do something which was previously considered to be impossible which is to switch to an electricity system based entirely upon renewable resources. Now it was considered impossible by me, as well as by everybody else before, because of the issue of balancing. You have a surge of demand and if that's not met by a surge in supply, you get a blackout, or less seriously than a blackout, you get fluctuations in supply which crashes all themselves country's computers. So you must have a system which means a steady supply of electricity.
How can that possibly be done with renewables whose supply always fluctuates? You say you want more electricity but if the wind is not blowing, and if the waves aren't rising, and the sun is not shining you don't get it. Well, the new proposals suggest a combination of factors.

Number one is a great diversity of renewable supply. And there's a study commissioned by the German Government which suggests linking up the whole of Europe into a sort of European super-grid which then connects to Iceland, to Scandinavia and to North Africa, pulling in supplies of renewable power from as wide a variety of places and technologies as possible. From Iceland you get geothermal power, from Scandinavia and the Alps you get hydro-electric power, from North Africa you get massive solar thermal power in the Sahara. You link all those together and if one kind of supply of power starts failing you can then switch to reliance on another supply.

Alongside all that of course you have the irregular supplies, or variable supplies, like wind and wave and tidal power. And by integrating that whole network, stretching across different time zones so when one country's demand is really very high and another country's demand is low, so you can draw supplies from that country, you have the potential for some very exciting grid balancing using exclusively renewable sources of power without having to go to either fossil fuels or to nuclear.

That has to be supplemented by energy storage technologies. And there are now some very good ideas for how those storage technologies might be applied.

One is a big expansion in what is called pumped storage. Now pumped storage is where you have two reservoirs, one higher than the other, and when electricity is abundant and cheap, in other words the wind is blowing strongly and people aren't using very much, you pump water up from the lower reservoir into the upper reservoir and it sits there as your store of potential energy. And then when you need more electricity you open the sluice gates and whoosh it comes running down producing electricity. So it's a way of storing something which is always very difficult to store.

Another approach is to say, 'Right, we need to start switching towards electric vehicles running off renewable electricity'. But those vehicles, like most vehicles, will only be on the road for a small amount of time. When they are parked they have the potential to be a very big energy store and their batteries can be used as a means of meeting fluctuations in demand by taking a little bit of power from each battery when its not needed by the car owner then you've got this great bank of, or an electricity store, which can be drawn on when you need it. Then I'm going touch on a couple of other transport ideas which could begin with that and actually make that system even stronger.

And then you have the innovations which have been proposed recently in managing demand. So that you don't say, 'Well the pattern of demand is a fixed thing and we cant do much about it', what you say is, 'Where demand is isn't critical, where it doesn't have to be immediate, you can actually have a fluctuation in supply to those requirements'. So to give you an example which would be for instance peoples' washing machines or peoples' refrigerators. Now you don't have to have a constant power supply going into them. A washing machine can pause for quite a long time before resuming its cycle. A refrigerator can pause until the temperature reaches a critical level at which case the electricity must come back on. But those pauses in supplies or appliances like that can be used to manage the demand for electricity so that if the wind drops for example and the supply drops and you have to start relying on electricity storage then you can ensure that the demand drops temporarily in order not to cause a crisis on the grid.

You put all that together and you begin to see the makings of a robust system based entirely on renewable electricity and this is very exciting not just for Europe but also for Australia because of course Australia as a continent has all the resources we have in Europe apart from the geothermal energy, but you don't need that, you've got quite enough resources already. And the tremendous resource you've got above all else is the potential for solar thermal power. Huge thermal farms in the desert where you've got very high insulation, in other words solar radiation, very low cloud cover, a very regular potential supply of electricity.

Were that to be connected across the whole of your desert region so that you had solar farms in different parts of the desert which would be at their maximum during different time zones you can begin to see how you develop a more robust electricity system than if you had them all clustered just in one place. Added to that you've got great potential for wind energy, for wave energy and for tidal power. There's enormous potential in Australia, quite as much as there is in Europe and yet you have a very small population. So its easy to see how applying some of those lessons which we are now learning in Europe, you too could switch to a zero carbon electricity system.

Now of course this has to be coupled with energy efficiency measures. Though I regret to say that some estimates as to how much energy efficiency you can actually get in say the domestic sector, in the office sector, have been exaggerated. The potential is probably no more than 30 or 40% between now and 2030. But that coupled with a switch to a renewable electricity system is enough to give us zero carbon electricity.

But you can go far, far beyond that. The latest proposal in the United Kingdom is for a switch to zero carbon electricity at the same time as greatly expanding the electricity supply to ensure that it becomes the primary transport fuel and indeed one of the primary means of heating.

I'll just talk very briefly about the heating because in this case electricity is used not as the sole use, because actually there do have to be others as well, but electricity is used as a means of stepping up from one source of power to another. It's used to drive heat pumps. Now the heat pump is the opposite of what you have in your refrigerator.

It basically uses the latency of evaporation to concentrate low level sources of heat and turn them into high level sources of heat. So you can have for instance a ground source heat pump. Now, I don't know about in Australia but in Europe, in Northern Europe, the ground has a more or less constant temperature of 12 degrees. With a ground source heat pump you can raise that to about 50 degrees and you get about three times as much energy out as the energy, in the form of electricity, that you put in. And there's great potential, especially for new developments and for developments that need a lot of refurbishment, to start installing these heat pumps driven by renewable electricity which account for a great deal of the heat which we require.
On transport. I think we can go beyond the standard model of the electric car. It is something which is even more exciting than that. Now we know already that the electric car is a totally feasible, viable technology. It already exists. It's been somewhat squashed by the American car manufacturers, but there's nothing wrong with the technology. The only drawback which people perceive is that you can't go very far with your battery full of electricity; and you can't go very far because the electricity runs down after a hundred miles, or 200 miles or so and in a big country such as Australia that's a big issue. So what I propose is that instead of owning your own battery, you lease it from a network of filling stations. And as the battery begins to run down, you pull into your filling station, open the hood of the car, crane comes over, pulls out the old battery, drops in the new one and off you go again.

The battery belongs to the filling station. What you buy is the electricity it contains. Now this ties in very well with the system I've just been talking about because those filling stations can be using night time electricity produced by offshore wind turbines for example which will be turning just as much at night as they are turning during the day but when electricity demand is very low it can use that electricity supply to top up the batteries so you have got a 100% renewable supply for transport fuel and then of course you've got these great big battery banks whose integration with the national grid is much easier than the integration of individual car batteries of individual owners. because you've got these big banks it's much easier to have private wires going from them to the national grid and back. so that they can be handing over surplus electricity which they'd be paid for when they've got surplus and they'd be drawing electricity from the grid when they need it. And so you can see there's a great potential for storage by tying those 2 ideas together.

But of course we can move beyond our dependence on the private car as well and I am sure that in Australia just as in Europe you have many proposals for how to reclaim cities from the car but I'd like to talk about reclaiming motorways from the car. And this is a very radical and interesting idea first proposed by a man called Alan Storkey in Cambridge in the UK. And what he says is as follows, that there is already a very efficient mode of motor transport whose carbon emissions are about one tenth of those you get from a car, even before you switch it over to being an electrically driven one. That's the good news.

The bad news is that its the inter-city bus. Now everybody really hates the inter-city bus; they're slow, they're inefficient, they are dirty, they are uncomfortable, they are a miserable way to travel. But what he proposes is turning them into a very effective way to travel which is actually faster than the car whilst still being massively more efficient than the car.

And he does the following; he says close down the city centre bus stations which are for instance inter-city transport. In other words stop this crazy system where in order to get from Sydney to Melbourne you have into pull into every depressing commuter town along the way in order to pick up more passengers. Instead, extend the... I'm sure they're not all depressing but...

Audience laughter.

...you have this system where in order to be economically viable the bus just has to keep traveling in and out of every town, and from what we've all experienced bus driving is incredibly long and boring. He says extend your urban public transport systems out to meet the junctions of the motorways. Have your inter-city bus stations on the junctions of the motorways, and the buses stick to the motorways, they never leave the motorways. On every motorway they have a dedicated lane exclusively for them, for no other transport, and this means...and they never get snarled up in other forms of transport. They don't get snarled up in urban transport, they don't get snarled up in motorway transport either.

That means that they can go much, much faster. They also get priority at junctions. They have transponders in, like ambulances have, which turn the lights green so that they can go through when the other traffic can't. And you don't even have to sell the idea to people; there they are sitting in their cars stuck in traffic and they see these buses whizzing by on the inside lane so straight away the system commends itself to people because they might wonder, 'What the heck am I doing stuck in my car when I could be whizzing past on a bus'. And of course on a bus you can do all the things with your car but your not allowed to, like going to sleep, talking on your mobile phone, watching a movie, eating your lunch, whatever it might be.

And of course in extending your urban transport out to meet the motorways you're revitalising not just the motorway transport system, but also the urban transport system, because by extending them you can then start to serve the suburbs with regular city buses or indeed with trams, or light rail, or whatever your chosen mode is. Of course all that can be electrified and can be electrified using renewable energy.
Now what jumps out of Storkey's report on coach travel, on inter-city bus travel, is this. He looked at one peri-urban motorway in the UK called the M25. The M25 has 760 miles of motorway lane. It has four lanes in each direction going for a hundred and something miles and it adds up to 760 miles altogether.

He calculated that at full capacity, with cars travelling at 60mph, if you have everyone in a car on that motorway, you get just 19,000 people on that 760 miles. Its an incredibly inefficient means of using the road space. If you put people into buses you'd get a quarter of a million.

We don't need any new infrastructure, we don't need any new spending. We just need to use the existing infrastructure better, we need to have a different mode on the same infrastructure. And in doing that you suddenly find you've got a system which pays for itself from inception. It costs almost nothing to have dedicated coach lanes, to have transponders with priority at junctions. You can sell off the city centre land which the coach stations are on for affordable housing for example and straight away you've already paid for the system. So its something which can be applied almost instantly. There's no technological barrier, there's no economic barrier; the only barrier is political.

Well, I've told you some of the good news. I'm now going to tell the one piece of bad news on this. And this is that there is one thing that we do for which there is no evident technological substitute which isn't worse than they way we do it already. And this is flying.

And the problem with flying is twofold. Number one, that as far as our individual emissions are concerned, it outweighs anything else that we can do. You can live like a saint all round the year, you take one flight to another continent and you've blown it. I don't have figures to and from Australia but I'll give you the example of between London and New York which is a little less than 5000 miles. I think it's about four and a half thousand miles. And a return trip from London to New York is 1.2 tonnes of carbon per passenger in that plane. That equates to pretty well what a heavy car user produces in one year. But you can do that in one day. You take a couple of flights and that accounts for the average carbon use of many people in the developing world. Even one flight is way, way above the sustainable level.

So people have looked at ways of changing the means of flying. They say let's use a different fuel, let's use hydrogen for example. Now you can already use hydrogen. Hydrogen is a perfectly viable fuel for powering a jet engine. There's only one problem; that it's much less energy dense than kerotene, which is your ordinary aviation fuel. It's about four times less energy dense.

That means that while you can fly a plane with hydrogen you can't do anything else with it. The hydrogen fills the entire body of the plane in order to have enough fuel to do a long haul flight. That means that to get out a hydrogen plane it must be of a new design with an extremely wide body. If its got an extremely wide body its subject to a great deal of drag as it encounters friction as a result of air resistance, and that means it becomes very inefficient. In order to make it viable you have to fly in the stratosphere, rather than in the upper troposphere where most planes fly.

Now, hydrogen plus oxygen, in other words when you've got the combustion of hydrogen, you're burning hydrogen as a fuel, combining it with oxygen, you're oxygenating it, well we all know what happens to it, it forms what is generally a very benign substance called H2O, or water. At ground level water's absolutely great. In the stratosphere water is the most powerful greenhouse gas of all. The Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution in the UK calculated that if you had a hydrogen powered plane flying in the stratosphere its impact on global warming is thirteen times that of an ordinary subsonic jet. So its a far worse solution than the current way that we fly which is burning kerotene in a jet engine.

Now there's very little scope for new efficiencies in jet engines. The schemes which have been recently proposed are just completely nonsensical. For instance, taking the housing off a jet engine which would make it slightly more efficient, but would make it so noisy that it would become completely unacceptable to everyone who lives under a flight path. So there's very little scope there.

Bio-fuels is a complete non-starter. For two reasons. One because of the very high cloud point that they have which means that at just a small drop below freezing they begin to form crystals and that blocks up the fuel lines feeding the jet engine and the plane falls out of the sky. You can only have a very, very small component of bio-fuels, and bio-fuels are themselves are an environmental and humanitarian disaster. I don't have time to go into it now, but if you want ask a question about it we can talk about it then.

And the other options, well they just don't seem to exist as anything like viable technological options. So I am afraid that where flying is concerned there is only one approach and which is hardly to fly at all. We need to cut flights by at least 90% and that's why I am talking to you by video conference rather than turning up in person.

Ok, so we've got some approaches here which together would lead to, very close to, a zero carbon Australia, just as indeed we need a zero carbon Britain, a zero carbon Europe and a zero carbon planet. But while I've talked about the technological and economic measures which would bring this about, I haven't talked about the political measures. And there is a reason for that. And the reason is as follows. Its not up to me to talk about it, its up to you. Its up to you work out how you are going to turn your government around from being one of the great climate criminals of the world, part of the access of evil...

Audience applause.

...and to get a government in Australia which is going to turn the moral issue of the 21st century into the political issue of the 21st century. Which is going to deal with our greatest impending catastrophe with the seriousness that that catastrophe demands. Thank you very much.
Audience applause.

Christoff: Thanks very much George. I think it's fair to say that that was, pun intended, a truly electrifying presentation. The good news for us we can solve the problem, the bad news is that we're all stuck in Australia unless we want to swim a long way or row a long way. That's fair enough. I'd like to now open the floor to questions. We have about 20 minutes and what I'd like you to do, if you're up the back, if you can do it without great discomfort, to come down the front and we'll just see how we go. Very brief questions please and George your response.

Question from audience member: What progress is rationing making through the British political system and is it on the agenda in Europe, outside of England, outside the UK?

Monbiot: Thank you very much for that question. It certainly has got a high presence here and it's quite often discussed in the media and indeed even within the political establishment. The former environment secretary until a few weeks ago, himself advocated this in parliament and at the national conference of the Labour Party. Now it hasn't been put into operation unfortunately, and their all a little bit scared of it, they've accepted the case for it. They've accepted the intellectual case for it. And that's the first big start.

Now, what a lot of people in Britain, and indeed elsewhere now in Europe, are trying to do is to accelerate that by setting up what are called Carbon Rationing Action Groups which is where you set up a voluntary group, get together with other people, set your own carbon ration and start trading amongst those other people. And this is a very powerful political statement because its saying to politicians we are prepared to go further than you are. We are prepared to actually subject ourselves to this austerity which you say we're not prepared to take on for ourselves. Well, we are prepared to do it. And by demonstrating it we're not only showing that there's political momentum behind it, we're actually showing how it can be done economically and technically. And already the software over here is being written, the system is being put into place in a vernacular fashion, its being put into place by the citizens. And the politicians, now all they have to do is to say, 'Right, we're going to adopt this system which already exists'. So, something similar is already happening in quite a few other European countries in fact. Once you start to engage in it you quickly discover that its not nearly as scary as it first appears.

Question from audience member: Thanks George. The next question is has anyone seriously considered zeppelins and the possibly of replacing aircraft with zeppelins?

Monbiot: Thank you very much. Well, I'm very glad you raised this. Its a very interesting question because it has been considered. I don't know whether I'd say seriously considered. I do discuss it briefly in my book. Because the zeppelin straight away even before you look at new potential technologies which could be deployed with it, straight away you're looking at an 80-90% cut in carbon emissions as opposed to an aeroplane.

There is the potential which has not as far as I know even been technologically investigated, so I'd love to see some studies on it, but it looks to me given the sort of loading that a zeppelin has that there would be the potential for an electric propellor motor.

There's also a possibility, a very interesting one, which has only been discussed as a footnote in one paper that I've read discussed by Kevin Anderson at the Tyndall Centre in Manchester in the UK for a hydrogen-fueled zeppelin where the hydrogen in the balloon is gradually drawn down and used as a hydrogen fuel cell which powers it. So that the hydrogen is a floatant, but it is also a fuel and the interesting thing about this is that one of the problems zeppelins have is that as the fuels is used up, helium for example, it becomes less controllable because the density changes and in fact you have all sorts of problems with buoyancy and Kevin Anderson's proposal by drawing away some of that hydrogen appears potentially to deal with that problem. But that's only on paper at the moment but it's a very intriguing idea.

So yes, there is potential. However, drawbacks for zeppelins are twofold. One is public perception which in fact is completely unfounded but unfortunately the Hindenburg disaster 100 years on still looms very large in peoples' consciousness. Quite why is hard to fathom. Its a bit like the Titanic; it was one of these things that grabs peoples' imagination and they've been very scared of the technologies ever since. Its a perfectly safe technology so no more dangerous than an aeroplane.

The next one is that there's real trouble when the winds are high, taking off and making way against it. And while this doesn't stop a zeppelin from traveling it does mean that you can't schedule it, you can't timetable it, in the same way you can an aeroplane. Hey, if its the only way to travel people might well put up with that. The other issue is that its a lot slower than aeroplanes. Maximum speed is probably about 140 to 150 kilometres per hour while a jetliner, a Boeing 747, does about 940 kilometres per hour. So an Atlantic crossing from the UK to New York, instead of being about 8 hours, will be about 45 hours or so.
But none of these are insuperable issues, if people desperately want to travel abroad maybe that is the way to go.

Question from audience member: George, my name is Matthew Wright from Beyond Zero Emissions. We basically agree with your full zero emissions strategy with the exception of, you didn't mention going to vegetarianism, which is the equivalent of pretty much that flight you talked about.

And secondly with transport you seem to have an obsession with buses. Now fixed rail can be powered directly from renewables and adding additional renewables to the grid actually reinforces the energy security for the rest of the system. In fact even on a preference system you can cut out the washing machines and the refrigerators and the hot water heating first and you can even slow down the transport second before you cut out the computers. So it actually reinforces the energy security and it can be fully powered by renewables and its the safest way and the most zero emissions way of doing that so why would you go to buses which need a fuel source which would probably cause emissions or land degradation or something when you could do fixed rail?

Monbiot: Thank you for that. The first thing to say is that buses don't have all fossil fuels. Why not an electric bus on an electric battery just like you own an electric car?, and it already exists. Its a perfectly viable technology. The second thing to say is that unlike rail, buses do not require new infrastructure. And the problem is that we have to switch very, very quickly from the way we use fuel today towards zero carbon fuels. And to do that whilst substituting rail for roads, that means you basically have to tear up all the existing infrastructure and replace it with a new one.

Now that's economically extremely difficult. You're talking about 100's of billions of dollars. Its also politically extremely difficult because you're talking about driving new railroads through peoples' gardens and through their land and through their houses and all the rest of it. You know the land [transcriber's note: recording unintelligible at time 00:46:15] if the route doesn't already exist, its very, very hard and it requires a huge amount of carbon in the construction of that railway system as well.

But there are several other issues here too. The first one is that the bus is actually a more efficient means of transport than the train. Now the efficiency of both can be improved, but even with the very primitive means we have of driving buses and of driving trains the bus beats the train by quite a few kilograms of carbon per kilometre.

You've raised the issue of demand management with using electric trains but I'm afraid that in this case it just does not work because you cannot have a train system without time-tableing. And if you are going to say, 'Right, we're not going to run this train because electricity supplies have dropped'. Well, you're going to have enormous difficulties then, you're going to cause huge problems and I've not seen anything which says you can have a battery powered train. It basically has to be direct power straight off the line and that means that unlike the bus the train can't be powered up when you've got an abundance of electricity and then used later. The train is using electricity in real time and so only way in which you can have demand management with the train system is to tear the timetable up and then it just cannot work as an integrated national train system. And even with very small timetable disruptions here in the United Kingdom, which you get from time to time, the whole system grinds to a halt.

Question from audience member: In your previous book, sorry your last book, you considered nuclear power as a very low option to supplement renewables in transition. In Australia both major parties have been open slather for mining companies to export uranium. Howard is considering potentially building more power plants in Australia. Do you consider that a completely dangerous diversion from actually the real goal of trying to get on to renewable energy?

Monbiot: Well, not only is it a diversion from that goal, its even more dangerous than that. If you look at the history of nuclear proliferation since the Non-Proliferation Treaty was signed in 1968 you find that every country which has developed, or sought to develop, a military nuclear capacity has done so by diverting fissile materials from its civil nuclear program. Israel, Iraq, Iran, India, Pakistan, South Africa, Brazil, North Korea, Every country which has tried at some stage in their history, or currently, to develop a nuclear weapons program has done it with the help of its civil nuclear program. The more fissile materials you generate by digging them out of the ground and refining them then the greater the danger of nuclear proliferation and the greater the danger of nuclear war.

Now like most of the world's people I want to see total, multilateral nuclear disarmament. And its become absolutely clear to me that that is impossible while we still have nuclear power. Getting rid of nuclear weapons means getting rid of nuclear power.

Audience applause.

Question from audience member: I'm just interested in terms of the carbon rationing, how you actually measure it. I understand your electricity at home you can time it that's easy enough but for example when people purchase energy intensive computers or cameras or any of a number of other things how do you keep a tab on peoples' consumption?

Monbiot: Sure, well thank you very much for raising that. It's a very important question and I should have explained the rationing system in more detail. But the ration applies to the energy which we use directly. So that is, as you say, our electricity, its our heating fuel, and its our transport fuel which we buy directly. That's about 40% of total energy use. The rest of it is also capped with the same national cap and that's auctioned off to corporations which then use energy on our behalf in making those computers or in growing strawberries or in doing all the other things which lead to our indirect use of energy.

Now the price they pay for that depends on what the scarcity, of the availability, of carbon that's been allocated by the government. The lower the cap the higher the price becomes, and as you head towards zero carbon the price becomes astronomical. So in other words there's a very powerful economic incentive for corporations to then switch to zero carbon supplies because they'll find it a lot cheaper to do that than to buy carbon allocations.

Now superficially that sounds similar to the European Emissions Trading Scheme, (EU ETS) but its not. The trading scheme we have here in Europe is grossly unfair because what it did was to give away carbon allocations to companies on one basis alone which was how much carbon they'd used in the past. The polluter has been paid and an act of enclosure has taken place where something which belonged to all of us, the right to use a diminishing pool of carbon dioxide, has been given to these corporations and given to them on the completely wrong basis. So we need a fair basis for allocating it and that's got to be an auction and they must pay the market price for it, and that market price must be very, very high by setting the cap very low.

Question from audience member: Quick comment and then a question. Just on geothermal, Australia has a massive potential for geothermal in two major areas. Biggest one in the desert. Geodynamics drilling at Innamincka are proving this. Its estimated that a six billion dollar investment would supply Australia's electricity from geothermal. On biodiesel, what's the current climate, what's the current feeling politically towards biodiesel in Europe? I hear that the Netherlands are looking to tax biodiesel from palm oil to discourage its use.

Monbiot: Thank you. I must apologise for getting it wrong about the geothermal. I didn't know you had those supplies and I am very glad to hear that you do.

On the biodiesel issue I'll just very briefly say what the issue is. Its twofold. Number one, that you set up a direct competition between feeding cars and feeding people, because much of the world's biodiesel, and indeed bioethanol, is being produced on land formerly used for food production. And even though far less than 1% of the world's transport fuels comes from bio-fuels we've already seen a doubling in the price of corn, and a near doubling in the price of wheat as a result and this has devastating implications for the poor and if we move to 5% or 10% or 15% it would cause mass starvation. Its a grossly unethical way of powering a vehicle.

The second issue is this, that biodiesel is also being grown on rainforest land, and indeed other land currently occupied by rare and biodiverse habitat. And the classic case is in South East Asia where in Malaysia and Indonesia palm oil planting for the European biodiesel market has become one of the primary causes of deforestation. It turns out that because of the cutting down of the great big dipterocarp trees there and the degrading of the peat soils in which they grow one barrel of biodiesel made from palm oil can cause ten times the carbon emissions of a barrel of petroleum. Its a far worse fuel in terms of carbon, as well as in social and other environmental terms.

So we have to stop this development. The only ethical biofuels that could be conceived of are second generation ones made from straw and other waste and forestry trimmings and things like that but the potential for those might not be as great as some people have suggested.

In Europe, the fact of the matter is this. I got a float [transcriber's note: recording unintelligible at time 00:55:16] about this in 2004 no one took it seriously at all but now there's a very big groundswell of discontent about the switch to biofuels. At this stage in the Netherlands the government has started taking it seriously. Unfortunately that isn't the case with any other European government and there's a major lobbying issue going on now to try to block what is supposed to be a carbon cutting measure which is the Renewable Transport Fuel Obligation, (RTFO) that we have in Europe. We are trying to stop that legislation from coming into force so that it doesn't cause the mass destruction of habitats and mass starvation.

Christoff: George, Peter Christoff here just taking facilitator's license. I just wanted to take you back to the politics and the economics of the timetable that you're setting. In Australia the debate about climate change has been incredibly conservative because its focused predominantly on the economic discourse and one of the latest claims of the prime minister was that any slight interim target would be a recessionary measure. So how in 23 years will we move to a zero carbon economy? What would happen to consumption levels, what would happen to employment? What would the nature of government intervention look like in your view?

Monbiot: Okay. Well if Howard believes a slight reduction in consumption is a recessionary measure he ought to see what a total reduction of land area would be as a result of the melting of the west Antarctic ice sheet. The two things are just completely out of proportion.

Yes, we do need a reduction in consumption, and yes that will lead to economic slow down but I see that as a good thing, not a bad thing. And how much money do we need? How much economic growth do we need? We are currently making use of a system which is inherently unsustainable. A system which is based on infinite growth on a finite planet. It just simply cannot be sustained. Capitalism in its current form is a pyramid scheme whose apparent economic health today depends on unsecured loans from the future.

Now of course politically it is difficult and it would be very hard to go to the government and say, "We want and end to capitalism, we want an end to the market economy." We can't do that realistically. But we must be prepared to say, "Yes, it will lead to a slow down. Yes, there will be less economic growth under this system." But it doesn't have to be a shut-down, not least because there has to be a great deal of economic activity in managing this switch to a zero carbon society. We need to deploy these new technologies on a very, very large scale and that in itself does generate economic activity.

But at the same time we have to do something which is harder to sell to the Access-of-Evil, which is shutting down the existing energy economy. To build renewable power plants without shutting down fossil fuel plants is a bit like saying, "I'm on a diet. I might have eaten four Big Macs today and a whole bowl of ice-cream and a chocolate fudge cake, but I also made a salad." You've got to get rid of the one energy system at the same time as you're introducing the second one.

Christoff: I think that's what's known in the trade as a Dorothy Dixer of a question.

Question from audience member: G'day. I have a related question to that one regarding energy. Energy is one of the biggest hurdles we face in this growing population today. Number one, what do you think about a reorganization of the complete monetary system along the lines of what Franklin Delarno Roosevelt had accomplished in the build out of the Depression. The particular chance of that happening, particularly with the impeachment of Dick Cheney, which may be a reality. If you've been following the situation there the heat's building. But also this question of fusion energy. I know there's a major push towards thermo-nuclear fusion. England itself has the state-of-the-art Jet fusion reactor, but from my study in economics. I'll make this quick.

Audience laughter.

We need a high energy flux density mode of producing electricity to produce that baseload in order to have the ability to manufacture these swathes of solar panels, or whatever. You need a baseload for that. You also need that same amount of energy to make the breakthroughs in fusion. To harness the energy of the sea, the ocean, surely that's where humanity has to head.

Monbiot: Okay, um, well, first of all we'll start with fusion briefly and say that at the moment as far as a viable energy supply technology, fusion is completely speculative. I went to see the Jet reactor, (Joint European Torus fusion reactor) and I talked to the people who have built it and I had a very interesting tour round it, and by the end of the day they completely contradicted what they told me at the beginning of the day. As I spoke to the technicians rather than the public relations people I found that actually its much, much further away from viability than I was first told.

Now I'm not hostile to it inherently as a technology but its not a solution on the timescale we require. We need to go to zero carbon within less than thirty years. Now the first fusion reactor to operate on a commercial scale is not going to be up and running in thirty years, let alone switching the whole electricity supply system to fusion by then. Its on a different timescale altogether. Possibly in a hundred years time, but that's too late to prevent runaway climate change.

We need to start reducing runaway climate change right now and what that means is that we need to use the technologies which are available today, and everything I have been talking to you about uses only technologies which are available today. I'm not calling for the use of speculative technologies which aren't even yet in demonstration phase, I'm talking about technologies which are already commercially viable and can be rolled out with a snap of a finger, if only the government says that its going to happen.

As for the issue of the density of energy sources. As far as the production of electricity is concerned you don't need a dense energy source. You can have a range of diffuse energy sources like wind power for instance, like solar power. It creates the same electricity. Its the same stuff which comes through the wires. Now what you do with the electricity at the other end as far as turning it into a dense energy source through industrial processes, that's not affected by the means of generation, or even by that matter the means of transmission. So you've got a great deal of flexibility in the way in which you can generate electricity.

There is an issue though with high grade heat and that's something which does need to be looked into by industrial technicians to find means of generating high grade heat without the use of fossil fuels. Now those means do exist. They are expensive at the moment, but there needs to be more work in accelerating zero carbon high grade heat for industrial processes.

Question from audience member: Hi George. Tod Halstein from Engineers Without Borders. Being an engineer, I love all of this talk about technology to solve all of these problems of the future. But with the exception of air travel, which you've decided that we possibly can't do, you've given technical solutions to everything else. I'm not quite convinced that's going to be possible?I mean what about all of the embodied energy in all of these millions of batteries you're talking about producing to have all of these cars and so on? Don't we just need to use less stuff?

Audience applause.

Monbiot: Well, of course we do need to use less stuff and actually, if you like, there's an intellectual embedding of that idea here. Embedded, or embodied, in the proposals that I am talking about is the use of much less stuff. For instance, switching from cars to coaches means that you've got far fewer vehicles on the road and you need much less manufacturing altogether. But of course there has to be a reduction in consumption. I don't disagree with you at all about that.

Unfortunately, you also have to persuade people that this transition is politically viable and that they can still maintain what they consider to be a high quality of life. Now, I am perfectly happy, and I'm sure you're perfectly happy, and I'm sure that most of the audience in Melbourne is perfectly happy to contemplate a lower quantity of life, to have far less stuff in our lives. Most of this stuff that we have in our lives just gets in the way. It just trips us up. And I've managed to purge quite a lot of stuff in my own life and I'm sure you've all managed to do the same.

But unfortunately, that's not where most people are at and the majority of people still equate a high quality of life with a high quantity of life. And so to some extent we have to accommodate that. Not all the way by any means. We're not saying let's just carry on with this crazy system of economic growth, but if we say to people, "I'm sorry, you can't have a TV anymore, you can't have a sound system anymore, you can't have a means of transport anymore", then people are not going to accept that system. We have to be able to persuade them that they can still have what they consider to be a comfortable and a pleasant quality of life and yet also have a zero carbon society.

Question from audience member: I'll be very brief. As you probably know Australia's largest export commodity is coal, most of which goes to China. Our contribution is actually less than one percent of the overall coal intake that China is currently using. I've heard on good account that they're actually building coal-fired power stations at the rate of one a month. I'm not sure what the percentage of output is of those particular coal-fired power stations. This is along with plans to build six cities the size of Shanghai by 2030. They seem like a runaway kind of, um, they have no agenda which kind of relates to what western concerns are. And all of those modifications that you're putting forward for an overall energy reduction system in Europe might mean nothing at all in comparison to what China is doing. It seems that if there's not a major international effort to control what China's output is, then there's going to be virtually no purpose in doing a lot of domestic kind of modifications.

Monbiot: Ok, well, let me say there's a few things to start off with here. First of all, its not one a month, I'm afraid its one every four days. Actually, its[transcriber's note: recording unintelligible at time 01:08:13] than you think.

Secondly, I want you to start by bearing in mind that the average production of carbon dioxide per person is about one eighth of that per person in Australia. So before pointing the finger at China and saying those people are...

Audience applause.

...and we in the rich nations are in no position to lecture any other country on cutting their carbon emissions until we have shown we are serious about cutting our own. We cannot turn around and start lecturing countries like China unless we can prevent them from turning to us and saying, "Well, why should we take any lessons from you?" And at the moment that's what they are going to say.

There's another thing to say. Well, actually you mis-characterize the Chinese government. Now I carry no water for the Chinese government. It's a deeply unpleasant, dictatorial, repressive government. But actually its slightly more progressive in terms of its awareness of the issue of climate change and the need to do something about it than your government is, which of course is also a deeply repressive...

Audience applause.

...and it's a shameful thing to say but China is actually more alert to the issue and doing slightly more about the issue than the John Howard administration is doing at the moment. But there's this massive growth taking place.

Another thing I want you to consider is this, that part of the growth, and a major part of the growth, is in manufacturing goods for our markets. So its not just the Chinese who are responsible for that growth in China. Its us who are responsible for it too. Its our demand for more stuff, which takes us back to the previous question. And I think we need to start accounting our own national carbon budgets beyond our own national borders. We have to start being aware of the carbon which we use in paying for other people to produce stuff for us, and in order for other people to produce energy for us. The carbon emissions caused by oil extraction and gas flaring and all the rest of it in other countries for our markets are also very great and they should be counted towards our totals, rather than the totals of the people who are producing it.

All that being said, there is no doubt that the very rapid growth in emissions in China is a threat to planetary survival. So having put our emissions in the right trajectory, and having shown that we are deadly serious about making those cuts, we'd have to collaborate with the greatest energy, determination and diplomatic force that we can in bringing China into the same system as all the rest.

But let me say this, that Alexander Downer and John Howard, in collaboration with George Bush, have spent much of the last two years going to China and India and saying, 'Do not join the Kyoto Protocol or any successor to it. Do not join those international efforts to have a mandatory, binding target for cutting greenhouse gas emissions. Instead join our Asia Pacific partnership, which is completely useless, doesn't have any mandatory targets and just has some vague aims about new technologies.' They have quite deliberately undermined efforts in China and India to cut carbon emissions there, as well as to cut carbon emissions in your own countries. And then they turn round and say, 'Well, we can't do anything because China and India aren't doing anything'. It's the greatest concatenation of political nonsense you're ever likely to hear. Its just pure cynicism and hypocrisy on the part of men like Downer and Howard.

Audience applause.

Question from Audience member: Hello there, George. I'm not a physicist, but I'm going to attempt a question which takes in physics. I'm quite fascinated by the energy fields produced by the sun. The protons, neutrons and electrons at the large body level, and also the atomic level. I'm very interested if there's been any research or science into somehow tapping into the magnetic fields that exist on the planet, without increasing the magnetic fields, but actually tapping into the existing fields, given that the universe itself functions on magnetics. So I'd be interested in your view on that.

Monbiot: Well, thank you for raising that. Um, I'm afraid that it's a question that I know absolutely nothing about it, so I'm not qualified to give you an answer...

Audience laughing.

...but possibly there's someone in the audience who can say something about that.

Audience laughing and saying "No".

Monbiot: Then I'm pleased to say that I'm not alone.

Peter Christoff: George, I'm pleased to say that this is the right place for us to end this conference because we've finally found a question which you can't answer. Sadly you can't see the audience.

Monbiot: You haven't even scratched the surface of what I can't answer.

Peter Christoff: [Laughing] Oh, we can't prove that! There are at least 200, probably more than 200 people, here who are on the one hand I think humbled by the very important perspective that you offer from outside Australia of how Australia is actually perceived internationally. Secondly, at a time when a lot of us feel that climate change is a bit of tightening noose you're actually showing us how it's a [transcriber's note: recording unintelligible at time 01:14:08] of opportunities. And I think in this particular context it's a very important message to deliver. So thank you very, very much.

Audience applause.

Peter Christoff: And for the perhaps one or two people in the audience who have not yet read George's book 'Heat', please go out and get it. I'd like to now hand over to Cam Walker to close proceedings for tonight and again thank you very much George for your time, patience and very lucid commentary.

Monbiot: Thank you very much.

George Monbiot's spoke via video conference address with thanks to Friends of the Earth at Melbourne University in July, 2007.

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