Source: The Guardian
URL: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/audio/2015/apr/09/podcast-biggest-story-episode4-audio
Date: 09/04/2015
Event: The Biggest Story: Episode 4: Risk
Credit: The Guardian, also many thanks to Geoff Chambers for transcribing this.
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Aleks Krotoski: This is the biggest story in the world. From the Guardian. A podcast series following the newspaper over three months as it tries to make an impact in a traditionally tricky area - climate change.
Now, if you haven't listened to the last three episodes, I suggest you go back and start from the top. They're revealing. The Guardian is letting us behind the scenes to listen in, so you've got a lot of flailing around, arguing, worrying, soul-searching. But, if you want to jump straight in here, or if you need a recap, here it is:
The premiss is this: pretty soon the world will be unfit to live in, if you believe in climate change, as 97% of scientists do. We know this. So do the politicians. Yet, we're at an impasse. Episode One acknowledged this.
Female voice: Leave it in the ground.
Male voice: Keep oil in the soil and the coal in the hole.
Aleks Krotoski: We can't burn all the fuel we've already found. Episode Two reached the conclusion, after a fairly heated debate, that for a global political solution to work, like affecting the Paris summit at the end of the year, you need public pressure.
George Monbiot: If we want to change the world, and I think this is why Alan has brought us together today, then we've got to actually deploy the measures which are going to change the world.
Aleks Krotoski: In Episode Three, the Guardian became a campaigning organisation.
Amanda Michel: I also... think that having multiple... targets... makes this more... complex.
Aleks Krotoski: For climate change, campaigning means divestment, a movement that is growing around the world, calling for large organisations to pull their savings out of fossil fuel companies, to essentially boycott them. The Guardian wanted to focus. It picked two targets to ask to divest. Not the worst kids on the block, nice, liberal ones, a little like the Guardian who are doing good stuff, but shouldn't be in the messy world of oil gas and coal. They were the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Wellcome Trust. All this has been pretty theoretical up to this point, but four episodes in, and we've gone public. Go, go, go!
Amanda Michel: Here's what it looks like on the site.
Male voice [American accent]: Your screen more or less went black.
Alan Rusbridger: Sticky..
Aleks Krotoski: Menacing...
Alan Rusbridger: ...dripping oil jumped in your face as you tried to read something and slid down the screen, sliding down the front page.
Male voice [American accent]: The first thing you saw was: this is not an ad. This is a big thing, you know. We wanted to make this big bold visual statement. We wanted something that was in a digital context the equivalent of what we were doing in print, by wrapping the newspaper and making the statement that this is an important thing, you know. Taking over the home page, covering up the main headlines of the day, that's a really big deal.
Amanda Michel: ... and when it dissolved and you had the choice to go to the petition page.
Aleks Krotoski: ... asking people to sign up to a letter to the Wellcome Trust and Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, encouraging them to divest.
Male voice [British accent]: By the end of the first week, so in sort of five days, we were up to a hundred thousand which I've come to learn is a benchmark of sorts for having some credibility as a petition, so that's great.
Aleks Krotoski: Well done team, and an update. 174 thousand sign-ups now. Phase One completed. Emails collected. But what does the Guardian do with them now? That leads us to: Phase Two, the campaign. It's something that's been troubling Amanda Michel, the Guardian's senior editor for strategy and parterships.
Amanda Michel: I think a really interesting question for us is: what is the Guardian's campaign model? And certainly, you know, er, you know, I'm from the US, I've seen a lot of debate and discussion in the US around this, principally around, you know, what does it mean that a news organisation's campaigning?
Male voice [British accent]: By and large, we're a bunch of journalists who do journalism and don't really have in-depth know-how when it comes to campaigning.
Amanda Michel: As a news organisation we have a really fast metabolism, so what we do today we can forget tomorrow, right? And, you know, a campaign is certainly looking towards tomorrow, but you're also bringing everyone along with you, and so, you know, if we have a petition on the site, it means that not only are we asking people to sign a petition, but we also need to go back to them and explain what has been the impact of the petition, what are we actually going to do now that we have a petition on the site? And so there's, there's a real feedback loop between our work and our readers that's I think new for us.
Aleks Krotoski: Amanda thought it might be useful for Ricken Patel to come and talk to the Guardian. He's part of Avaaz, the world's largest and most powerful on-line activist network. For Ricken though, the subject "divestment" is a pretty tough sell.
Ricken Patel: You have a story that says we've got to keep it in the ground to save the climate. How do we keep it in the ground? Well, not sure. Maybe it's a global climate agreement and a legal regulation that keeps it in the ground. How do you get that? Well you need the politicians to come together. What's the problem with that? Well the fossil fuel companies are lobbying the politicians not to do that. Well how we affect that? Well, if we affect branded fossil fuel companies it will limit their influence on politicians. Well, how do we affect that? Well, if we divest from fossil companies it will affect... like, it's a very complex theory of change. I think you can summarise... I think you have done it well, you have, you have done your best on it, um, but that's what I see as part of the challenge in the campaigning messaging around this.
Aleks Krotoski: A question from the editor in chief.
Alan Rusbridger: Our very first discussion was precisely about a much simpler idea which was, in the end it's all going to be decided in Paris or through a treaty. It's going to be government action, not corporations, but we thought (a) What are the chances of that? and (b) that's just not very motivating, because, because people... but you know if we had gone down that route, um, would that have been a motivating campaign? Or, do you think -
Ricken Patel: I think so, I mean that's where we're focussed.
Aleks Krotoski: They're going to Paris.
Ricken Patel: All of our testing has yielded that, that focus. I, I don't wanna, I think the divestment path is good, it's politically smart, I'm just saying from a, from our, all of our testing we've found this, Paris, and particularly the long-term goal, if the world commits itself to a zero carbon world, it will send that signal to the fossil fuel industry that your days are numbered and all those investment decisions will shift. That's the one that we found people get and they're like on for it much more easily.
Aleks Krotoski: Divestment, Ricken was saying. It just didn't really hit the mark with the average Joe or Jane. People weren't all that interested.
Male voice: You know, having the leader of arguably the world's most successful campaigning organisation saying that they had thought about it and decided it was a non-starter, you know, did make me think, you know, what on earth are we doing? I suppose you know the broader goal of all of this is about somehow transmitting to the politicians that there is a civil society movement that really cares about this.
Aleks Krotoski: But the Guardian has picked this course. They are where they are and they need to make the best they can of it. And so it's time for the team to gather, take stock, plan out the rest of the campaign, and take a look at the potential risks ahead. First:
Male voice: Getting run over by the election. Just people will eventually all be thrown at that.
Female voice: But it's resources, as well, isnt it? You go to the picture desk, you go to various bits and everyone's...
Male voice: The graphics...
Male voice [American accent]: Visuals in general are going to be fairly consumed for the next five weeks.
Male voice: We have to have a full time day of Aaron [?] full time designing...
Male voice: There's got to be lot of push in the newsroom, especially as it gets nearer. But that's a shorter term thing. Like the pressure on Aaron's team is now. The pressure on the rest of us will hit two or three weeks before.
Alan Rusbridger: And is that easy to accomodate? I mean, if we could magic the budget, which I think we can, it it it's manageable, I mean, you can manage the people?
Male voice: Yeah.
Alan Rusbridger: Great.
Aleks Krotoski: Then...
Male voice: Slightly out of date numbers. The whole carbon budget, as outlined by Bill McKibben, was based on a now slightly out-of-date paper from five years ago. Quarter of that budget's already gone and the science has moved on. So I just think we need be a bit careful of not framing the entire thing around those numbers.
Aleks Krotoski: And...?
Female voice: Er, not getting, we're not getting anything we can feel internally and externally is a win.
Aleks Krotoski: But what does success look like?
James Randerson: Well, I mean yeah, this is the big question. I mean, we've set ourselves this incredible task...
Aleks Krotoski: Over to James Randerson.
James Randerson: ... and you know, if we're quite honest, we're not sure we're going to win this at all.
Aleks Krotoski: What is the response from our target?
James Randerson: They haven't sort of immediately said: Yes, we'll do everything you want. I never expected that. Gates has come back and said, you know, we respect the passion on show here and we broadly sort of agree with you, but they just don't agree on the divestment route. It wasn't a sort of, you know, complete brick wall rejection, um, and so that feels to me that that is something we can work with, and I hope that, you know, over the coming weeks as we sort of build this argument, and build a coalition, you know I just really hope that they will change their minds.
With Wellcome it's been, the response is slightly more fleshed out. Jeremy Farrer the CEO got back to us with a comment piece in which he explained his thinking. His line of argument is around engagement, and he says that we do think about these things deeply but we, we believe that it's better to engage with these companies and have a presence than it is to just leave. I mean he sort of referred to divestment as a grand gesture that you can only do once, and then after that you have no influence, and inevitably other people will buy the shares, and you know, your ability to shape things is lost.
Aleks Krotoski: Now the team needs to come up with some solutions.
Male voice: We sort of say this was, this was a focus, this was one thing that we're doing, and we're sure they've got to think about it harder and be made to think about it harder, but we've given unprecedented focus to an issue that's huge. We've got all these people together in all these different places, these other organisations in that time have divested or said they're investigating it, and lots more will happen off the back of this. It's the start of something, and this is an issue that needs fixing over the next generation.
Male voice: Yeah, so, and I mean I was terribly depressed to sort of see the headline on the response of the Wellcome yesterday, but then reading it more closely, they're papering over some positions there that they've already taken that we can tease out from them, or we ought to be able to, particularly they say, they accept that they do consider environment when they make their investment decisions. Now, why aren't those considerations public? The other thing I would say is, is on the engagement point they make, you know, they say we've, you know, we believe in engagement, right? It wasn't so long ago they were invested in Exxon. How did that go, and how's their engagement going with BP? I really think that there's tons of sort of cracks if you look for them in that letter that I think we can go at.
Amanda Michel: I think in the bigger picture, the reason why we called on them was we're asking them to exert leadership, right, and that we wanted them to have a ripple effect on industry, and so I think to the extent that there is a move they can make to demonstrate leadership that would be sufficient. And so that, what you were suggesting I think is one way of doing, I feel like we should be able to reframe this around, like these are two very powerful organisations that should take much more of a demonstrable stand on the environment. And that they can, and in doing so can persuade others that more can be done and more can be done quickly. And one may be actually asking Gates to make the environment much more, I don't know, I'm not sure how to frame it, but actually have him take a stand on making it a key issue or appeal to him enough that he would give it more focus.
Alan Rusbridger: Erm, just to add to the things we might think about, as our targets are Gates and Wellcome, it's possible that GMG may not go in the direction that we want, erm, so we might just want to sort of think separately about how we would react and as a paper how we would handle that in terms of trying to persuade GMG to change.
Well I can't promise that GMG are going to do what we would like them to do, so, so, in, in so that, that obviously creates a problem for the campaign. Readers will react in a way they, they they may want to start their own campaign against GMG er, where does that leave the journalists?
Aleks Krotoski: Alan sounds worried, doesn't he? He said last episode he'd run this campaign even if GMG didn't divest. But he's right. It certainly makes this campaign harder for all if they don't. An email from the Guardian Media Group's chairman Neil Berkett. He wants to meet - in the studio.
Female voice: ... one tiny bit more from you just before..
Alan Rusbridger: Yeah, I've just had avocado on sourdough for my breakfast. I don't know what Neil's had.
Neil Berkett: I had muesli...
Alan Rusbridger: You had muesli? I can't believe it!
Neil Berkett: I had muesli, I had raspberries, and I had goat yoghurt.
Alan Rusbridger: God.
Neil Berkett: I'm absolutely genuinely serious, that's what I had for breakfast this morning.
Aleks Krotoski: Enough small talk. We're recording.
Alan Rusbridger: So Neil, I think GMG is making an announcement today. Do you want to tell us what that is?
Neil Berkett: We have made the decision that we are aiming in the medium term to divest of all fossil fuels within our £800 million portfolio, and we aim to invest pro-actively in terms of ensuring that, you know, we support new investments that are supportive of climate change.
Aleks Krotoski: The Guardian is divesting. A smile from Alan.
Alan Rusbridger: I must admit even, even I was a bit surprised by the, by the speed of the decision making. Can you just talk a bit about why this was something you were able to decide pretty quickly on, in the end?
Neil Berkett: We wanted to make a decision one way or the other in a pretty tight time frame, for obvious reasons.
Aleks Krotoski: I.e., the Guardian's Keep It In the Ground campaign.
Neil Berkett: When we started the review, if I had to guess what the outcome was going to be I would not have guessed the outcome that we arrived at. You know, our initial view, when you and I first started to talk about it was: "Oh my goodness me, this is hard." And as time went on, we decided that we actually had to be braver, because the economic and social arguments became more and more compelling. You know, the further you delved into the analytics in them [?] the more we started to understand the role that we could play in changing industry. But I think we were thorough.
Alan Rusbridger: What was the process? Because this is something I remember we first talked about this a couple of months ago. What have been the nature of the discussions, and what were the factors that you had to balance as chair of the organisation?
Aleks Krotoski: Was it a vote? Who made the final call?
Neil Berkett: Yeah, it's the right question, because it's been complicated. Um, there's been lots of debates, as you can imagine. How can we be responsible as a board, where our principle accountability is to fund the Guardian in perpetuity, and how could we go about putting the annuity stream that comes from our investment at risk? But as we started to analyse our portfolio, we got to a point where we felt you could see that you could generate at least equal returns...
Aleks Krotoski: So in theory, the Guardian won't be worse off.
Alan Rusbridger: Can you just talk a bit about the investment committee, so, what were the kind of people that made this decision? I mean, you confessed that you had muesli for breakfast this morning, but the people sitting round that table, if I can use crude stereotypes, are not necessarily your stereotypical muesli-eaters are they?
Neil Berkett: Um, no they're not. I mean I can actually remember when the Scott's [sic] Trust interviewed me to chair GMG, and I said: "If you're looking for somebody, you know, stereotypically Guardian reader, left of centre, I'm not your person." I said politically right of centre, and I think there's a reasonable spread of political bias across the GMG board, as you would expect.
Alan Rusbridger: In an earlier episode of this podcast series, I was asked what I would do as editor if GMG decided not to shift, um, let me try the question the other way round. Um, if the Guardian had carried on its campaign and you had felt strongly as an investment committee that you didn't want to move, presumably you'd have felt the same. You'd have thought: well, the Guardian can think what it likes. Our job is different.
Neil Berkett: Um, yes it is. I think to make a decision, a black and white decision, excluding the content of the asset that we ultimately fund, i.e., the Guardian, is a bit naive. But if we reach the conclusion that right now to divest for example was too great a risk and that we felt that it just didn't allow us the flexibility to get the sort of returns that we think we need to fund the Guardian in perpetuity then we would have made a different decision, um, and that would have been a bit awkward, wouldn't it? Um, I guess we're fortunate that we don't have to have that debate.
Aleks Krotoski: A complex process for the board, but a win in a programme full of risks. Neil leaves the room. Alan leans back, takes a sip of water.
Female voice: How do you feel, Alan?
Alan Rusbridger: Well, I, um, er, I thought that was a rather remarkable, er, conversation. I got mixed messages last week, sooooo, I'm relieved, obviously 'cos, erm, the thought of the Guardian being on collision course with GMG is not a happy one, so I'm relieved that we're on the same path, and I feel it's rather, I hope this is a sort of inspirational moment for others, because, you know, as Neil was saying just then, you know, the people who sit round the investment committee are not woolly liberals. They're all extremely experienced businessmen and women, and you can be sure that the decision they've reached is not out of any sentimental grounds, it's a hardnosed business decision, and I think that a fund of this size moving will have quite important ripple effects.
Female voice: And do you think this will, em, affect our own campaign with Wellcome and Gates?
Alan Rusbridger: I mean, you know, come back to the end answer [?] I mean, if you were Wellcome or Gates looking at this, and looked at the calibre of the people sitting round the investment committee and the sort of people they are, I think you'd be impressed by that, and if they can do it, then why can't we?
Aleks Krotoski: Next week, we dig into the numbers of all this. If you decide to leave two thirds of all the fossil fuels in the ground worth trillions of dollars, what does that mean to the world's economy?
Larry Elliot: That would be the equivalent of the sub-prime crisis. It would be probably worse.
Aleks Krotoski: Economics editor Larry Elliot has been tasked with finding a way to prevent that crash. The biggest story in the world is narrated by me, Aleks Krotoski. It's produced by Alannah Chance, Lindsay Poulton, Matt Hill and Lucy Greenwell. Sound and mixing is by Chris Wood, and head of Audio is Jason Phipps. The executive producer is Francesca Panetta. We're on iTunes, SoundCloud, you know the rest. Search for the biggest story in the world, and subscribe.