Source: The Guardian
URL: https://soundcloud.com/the-biggest-story/episode-1-keep-it-in-the-ground
Date: 12/03/2015
Event: The Biggest Story: Episode 1: Keep it in the Ground
Credit: The Guardian
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Aleks Krotoski: This is the biggest story in the world...
John Vidal: We will look back on these times, and we will think "What on earth were we doing?"
Aleks Krotoski: ... from the Guardian.
Female voice: This is a story about people. And this is a story about possibility.
Aleks Krotoski: The story the editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger has chosen as his last big hurrah.
Alan Rusbridger: You can't imagine a bigger story.
Aleks Krotoski: His final legacy, before he stands down as leader of the newspaper, after two decades in charge. It's a story that affects us all.
John Vidal: I mean, our children's children will be staggered at our idiocy.
Alan Rusbridger: It's clearly the most important story that we could be thinking about. And yet you scan the daily newspapers and it's almost absent.
Male voice: It is the story.
Aleks Krotoski: And for this podcast, this particular story starts...
Male voice: ... on Christmas Eve, when Alan Rusbridger sent out an email to a number of people.
Aleks Krotoski: Twenty colleagues, or so.
Felicity Lawrence: I think I got round to reading my emails about 10 o'clock, while still packing presents. He wanted to do one last really dramatic project before he finished being editor-in-chief of the paper.
Aleks Krotoski: Alan had been at home...
Alan Rusbridger: Settling into a comfortable armchair, next to my log fire, burning carbon...
Felicity Lawrence: I wondered why he wasn't packing Christmas presents [laughs], whether Lindsay was doing it all for him.
Aleks Krotoski: His email went: "Colleagues, this time next year I won't be the editor of the Guardian. Indeed, well before that, I'll have stepped down...."
Male voice: He told an interesting story about having been speaking to Gordon Brown, when he was Prime Minister.
Alan Rusbridger: And I could tell that he was terribly depressed - I think he thought that he was going to lose the General Election.
Male voice: And Alan asked him "Well, you know, actually you've been given a chance most people would absolutely love - you can be Prime Minister for a year, you know, imagine all the things you could do".
Alan Rusbridger: I tried to turn the conversation around to him, and said "But look, Gordon, you've got a year left, as Prime Minister. Many people, that would be their dream. What are you going to do with that year?"
Aleks Krotoski: "I'm not at all depressed", Alan continued. "This is the right time to be moving on. But I do have an urge to do something powerful, focussed and important for the Guardian, while I'm still here. And it will be about climate change".
Male voice: It was clear he had got the climate bug, in a big way.
Aleks Krotoski: Alan had caught "climatitis", he said, in Sweden.
Bill McKibben: Well, Alan and I were in Stockholm in Sweden, and we were there, oddly enough, to get prizes, this so-called Right Livelihood Award they sometimes call the "Alternative Nobel".
Alan Rusbridger: I met Bill McKibben, who was a campaigner, former journalist, for an organisation called 350.org. And Bill spends his whole life campaigning on climate, and we had lunch.
Bill McKibben: And it was an excellent luncheon.
Alan Rusbridger: I felt a bit guilty, as I always do, about our environment coverage, just because it's one of those things - by the standards of other papers, you could say we do quite well, but I'm conscious that it slips off the agenda. If you could do one thing, what would you do?
Bill McKibben: So I told him.
Alan Rusbridger: "Look, you guys have done fantastic reporting on the environment, on science. But it's no longer an environment story - this is a story where the science is settled and it's now all about politics and economics. So, if you don't mind me saying so, you're a bit old-fashioned in what you're doing." Bill's got a fantastic way of boiling the whole argument down to three facts, which, for someone who's not very good at numbers, like me, is very helpful.
Felicity Lawrence: "Leave it in the ground".
Male voice: The oil in the soil and the coal in the hole.
Alan Rusbridger: That's Bill's simple proposition.
Male voice: It's the only way forward.
Felicity Lawrence: You actually can't use the majority of the reserves that have been identified by fossil fuel companies.
Aleks Krotoski: You have to keep it in the ground. And, as Bill would say, there's a simple math behind it.
Alan Rusbridger: There are really three numbers that you need to know, to understand the argument. The first -
Aleks Krotoski: Number One.
Alan Rusbridger: - is 2 degrees. That is the threshold for dangerous climate change. Really, that's the point at which the kinds of changes that we're seeing around the world will get - start to get really nasty.
John Vidal: The second figure is -
Aleks Krotoski: Wait, hold up. Why 2 degrees?
Female voice: Two degrees is -
Bill McKibben: Well, 2 degrees is -
Male voice: The history of the 2-degrees target is -
Bill McKibben: Two degrees is one of those flat numbers.
George Monbiot: Well, 2 degrees is a pretty arbitrary target.
Male voice: It's a political construct.
Bill McKibben: Emerged in the 1990s, as scientists were first trying to understand exactly where the thresholds were, with climate change.
George Monbiot: I mean, it's by no means an ideal one, because 2 degrees of warming is likely to do an awful lot of harm to a lot of people in a lot of places.
Bill McKibben: The trouble is, we're on a pathway at the moment, in the way that we're emitting carbon now, the way we're burning coal and gas and oil, to raise the temperature 4 or 5 degrees Centigrade, this century.
George Monbiot: That's this century - it doesn't stop at 2100. When you consider that the difference between today and the last Ice Age is 4 degrees...
James Randerson: I mean, this is not about polar bears. This is about real effects on human beings. We're talking about water scarcity, we're talking about food scarcity...
George Monbiot: Many parts of the world are likely to become uninhabitable, unfarmable - there'd be too much water in some places, too little water in others...
Male voice: So we might, you know, set something in motion which eventually would destroy New York City, would destroy London, would destroy most of the world's great cities.
Male voice: Perhaps the neatest summary is from a man called John Schellnhuber. He said the difference between 2 degrees Centigrade and 4 degrees Centigrade warming is "civilisation".
Alan Rusbridger: The second figure is -
James Randerson: 565 gigatons -
Aleks Krotoski: I'll say that again. [Sound of tape being played backwards, at speed.] Number Two - 565 gigatons.
Male voice: Now that's the amount of carbon dioxide that we can safely release into the atmosphere, and still have a reasonable chance of staying below 2 degrees. That is, kind of, a carbon budget, if you like - that is the amount that we have to stick to, or try to, before things start getting really bad.
Aleks Krotoski: We just get to release 565 more gigatons of carbon dioxide. That's it. Any more, and we're in danger of going over 2 degrees. But guess what...
Alan Rusbridger: The third number...
Aleks Krotoski: Number Three.
Male voice: And this is kind of the scary number, is 2795 gigatons. Now that's the amount of carbon dioxide that would be released if all of the fossil fuel reserves that we know about already were dug up and burned. The amount of carbon that is the basis for the value of all the big oil companies that are already there, and of course that value is based on the assumption that all of that carbon is going to get burned. You will have noticed that 2795 is a lot bigger than 565 -
Aleks Krotoski: In fact, about five times more.
Male voice: And so the real challenge here is: how do we keep that amount of carbon in the ground?
Aleks Krotoski: Leave it in the ground.
Male voice: One last point, and that is that we're spending billions looking for new reserves, going to very often very difficult places to dig up fossil reserves - in the Arctic, trying to extract tar sands in Canada, even at the time when we've got far too much that we can burn already. So there is a real, sort of, intellectual disconnect, there.
Alan Rusbridger: Bill's simple proposition and his urgent plea was: this stuff has to be kept in the ground. It cannot be dug up. And therefore, if you want one focus for what the Guardian should do, it should be about keeping the stuff in the ground.
Aleks Krotoski: Keep it in the ground... The journalists kept reading...
Male voice: This is fantastic...
Aleks Krotoski: ... hearts beating...
Male voice: Great...
Aleks Krotoski: ... scrolling down.
Male voice: I was absolutely delighted.
Female voice: I thought it was really exciting, I thought it was something I wanted to be a part of.
Alan Rusbridger: This is the first time in my experience that any editor of any national paper - anywhere in the world - has taken climate change really seriously, as a major issue and has understood it to be an existential problem, literally a problem of existence.
Felicity Lawrence: This is something I've been passionate about for a long time. If the weight of the Guardian - which is a really formidable, exciting organisation - could swing behind this, we might actually manage to change the political climate.
Alan Rusbridger: "So, in the New Year I'd like a group of us, including those I'm copying this to, to meet and brainstorm what exactly we can do, to have the most effect. I want the focus to be narrow and forceful. So of course there are numerous other angles, important angles one could plausibly do, but I would like this to have a single focus, if we agree this is the right one. So, between now and then, firstly, if you have thoughts on how we might do this, please drop me a note, over Christmas and New Year. Do you agree with the main focus, as proposed by McKibben? And secondly, I'm going to assemble a team to do this. Do you want to be in on it? It's obviously a bit urgent, in more sense than one. But that's sometimes how we do our best work. So - see you in 2015 and, apart from reading these pieces I've attached - have a great break. Alan."
Male voice: I think I might have been a little too drunk to respond to that email, at the time, but I did have a think of it over Christmas, and had a bit of time to read a couple of things, to familiarise myself with books that I'd meant to read - yeah, and sent him a response.
Aleks Krotoski: Then - the cold light of day.
Alan Rusbridger: The problem with this story, which is why journalism has - if we're honest about it - failed, is that it's so big and it doesn't change much from day to day, so - you know, journalism is brilliant at capturing momentum or changes or things that are unusual. If it's basically the same story every day, every week, every year, then I think journalists lose heart.
Male voice: In ways, I'm not the best person to ask, given that I've been embedded in the existing narrative for the last 6 or 7 years. Certainly this is something to which a lot of thought is given. A lot of the narrative around climate change has been around catastrophe, disaster, drought, flood... I think that is an important place where a new narrative could be very useful, but it's been difficult to establish that new narrative.
George Monbiot: We've been really bad at changing the story, where climate change is concerned - we carry on flogging a load of dead horses and flogging them in exactly same way, with exactly the same whip, and you know, it doesn't work. And so we have just constantly to be reinventing our storytelling capacity.
John Vidal: It may be reinventing the wheel for new audiences, in the sense that there is very little of journalism that hasn't been done. We know, we know what's going on in Africa, we know the science, we've faithfully been to every meeting. So in a way, it's a matter of how do you present it in such a way that it is fresh and gives new impetus to, to um, to a new generation of people. Because the danger is that, you know, everyone thinks "We know about climate change, yuh-yuh-yuh... [mumbling]". But the reality is that we don't know that much and we forget very quickly.
Alan Rusbridger: So that's the challenge - what can you do that lifts this beyond something that people are bored with reading about or can't bear to read about? What can you do that will force them to sit up and pay attention?
Aleks Krotoski: Some might say that Alan should have thought about this a while ago. He's had 20 years in power, editing the paper. [Alan Rusbridger is laughing in the background.] Now he's only got 6 months left.
Alan Rusbridger: At last!
Aleks Krotoski: Is it too little, too late? And is there really a new story to tell? A golden bullet that will shake up the world?
John Vidal: There is a remarkable similarity - I mean, the number of world leaders who, when they leave office, suddenly become environmentalists is quite extraordinary. I've seen it happening around the world. Every, every great Prime Minister becomes - in a trice becomes a great environmentalist.
Aleks Krotoski: But Alan, just 6 months... It's really quite brave - do you think you can do this?
Alan Rusbridger: Yeah, maybe it's something you just do at the end of your editorship, when it doesn't matter so much.
Male voice: He wanted it to be his valedictory campaign for the paper. I can't think of actually a better campaign to go out on, really - it is the story.
Alan Rusbridger: Because, on any reasonable analysis, this is the most important story of our lifetime. If you're actually talking about this being our final century, as a species, and that what we do in the next 10 years could determine the future of the human race. And so maybe, at the end of that, you think "Well, who cares if we don't win this one?" It's better to have tried, and really awful not to have tried.
Aleks Krotoski: If Alan and the team do this right, this could change the world. But if they don't, it could bring down the editor and the paper, hitting its reputation and maybe even its finances. We're letting you in, no holds barred. We've got microphones everywhere. Alan's office is tapped. Editorial meetings, pitches for resources, for commissions, for advertising campaigns. We'll make mistakes, you will hear them. We know so many people have tried this already - us too - and we might not succeed. And we're letting you hear, so you learn what we learn, know what works and what doesn't. Next week the team gathers, to choose a direction.
George Monbiot: We want to change the world, and I think this is why Alan has brought us together today, then we've actually got to deploy the measures which are going to change the world. And that's only going to happen through acting at the political level, to lay down regulations which say those fossil fuels are going to stay in the ground.
Alan Rusbridger: One of you, make your mind up...
Male voice: One of my concerns is there's quite a lot of crossover between ownership and governance. I mean, Russia owns most of the resources that are underground - changing Putin's view in the next 12 months is going to be a bit of a hard one.
Aleks Krotoski: And if they make the wrong decision, then they'll have taken a wrong turn right from the beginning... The biggest story in the world is narrated by me, Aleks Krotoski. It's produced by Alannah Chance, Lindsay Poulton, Matt Hill, Nabeelah Shabbir and Lucy Greenwell. Original music is by Pascal Wyse. Head of Audio is Jason Phipps, and the executive producer is Francesca Panetta. We'll be back next week - subscribe!