And then I imagine that people would start… Because it’ll be a global emergency much worse than the coronavirus, say. Mark Lynas: Yeah, but even deserts are ecosystems, and they’re wild areas. And that’s not just sitting around and waiting for it to rain. So to my mind, that’s a reason to be more enthusiastic about nuclear than less, because you can run a highly energy consumptive, developed civilization for centuries, millennia using this sort of fuel without destroying the climate. But the worst case scenarios, which take you to a 4,5,6 degree outcome require us to… We’d have to carry on, we’d have to burn like four times as much coal as we are doing today. Well, go and put some money into ThorCon. We learned that by 2050, the latest UN figures are 9.7 billion by 2050. So you get more of an ethnic phenomenon, really, where certain groups try to monopolize scarce resources within a nation and that leads obviously to conflict, and potentially to a breakdown conflict scenario as a result. Arden Koehler: Well, I guess people talk about a carbon tax or these kinds of things. As an average temperature difference, it may have been in the mid-Cretaceous as much as 10 or 12 degrees warmer than now on average, which is why most life was then at the Poles or certainly in the very high latitude. So let’s say if we get up to six degrees, do you have a guess at how probable it is that we go extinct? I mean, you’re going to change your mind on that magic, tell us which one? But the biggest impacts now have been our natural ecosystems. Thanks for joining, talk to you again soon. ... Mark Lynas. And so it is unlikely that we’ll be able to get back onto that scenario. Mark Lynas: I blame the Green Movement for at least half of cumulative emissions. And those wars can then spill over. Arden Koehler: Then extinction would just happen later if that was all it depended on. Robert Wiblin: On the one hand, that could make you think, “Well, there’s so much potential to do much more than we’re doing now”. And if you add some warming into that picture, you potentially get an accelerating or even a catastrophic fire season where most of the forest actually burns, which is one of the scenarios I paint in the book which is scary, not just for the climate, but there goes up in smoke, a substantial proportion of the Earth’s biodiversity. Mark Lynas: Yeah so that’s in a process of runaway. That wouldn’t have been possible even two or three years ago to get the mileage that it’s now delivering. You’ve already got melting right to the summit of Greenland. So my point is really that, it’s not the three and four degrees that we should be scared about, it’s the difference between 1.5 and two. But where do you think this disconnect comes from where a lot of people say, “This is the most important issue facing the world right now,” but then it isn’t at the top of political agendas? The cost of capitalism is really the main issue with infrastructure projects of that nature, but it’s the same for building a bridge or the Scottish Parliament, or pretty much anything, actually. So I think actually… And there’s so much diversity as well. No, fire away. Or is there something else maybe that people could do if they were passionate about this? Mark Lynas: The only argument against is a political one, that people won’t accept it, or people won’t want it, so nothing to do with engineering. So do you have a guess at what degree of warming we would need to reach for the full-scale collapse of society, perhaps due to very, very widespread famine to have say a 10% chance of happening? And if you want to be in a situation where food crops can still grow in a hotter, drier environment, you’re going to have to change their genetics. Well done Westerners. If you’re going back to first principles, you would not design a nuclear fission reactor that way. It’s about doing something. Prevented mortality and greenhouse gas emissions from historical and projected nuclear power. Mark Lynas is an environmental writer and campaigner whose previous books have drawn attention to the perils of global warming. Mark Lynas: Yeah, we need a pro-nuclear Extinction Rebellion. The hydrogen economy has been expected by enthusiasts since the 1970s and maybe even earlier, and it’s not happened yet. So a lot of the previous big five mass extinctions that have happened have been associated with very rapid degrees of warming. Mark Lynas: Oh, you mean in time in terms of challenging groupthink? In what way does it ever make sense to try and then capture it from the air? And also just to tell the story of what happens if global warming continues to accelerate, and then we don’t succeed in mitigating it. Whether that’s intergroup within nations or potentially between nations, if you’ve got conflict … I mean, people have been expecting water wars for ages already, and you’ve got conflicts between say, India and Pakistan. Mark Lynas’s new Kindle Single e-book, “Nuclear 2.0: Why a Green Future Needs Nuclear Power,” is therefore a welcome, well-grounded argument in support of the view that we simply do not have the luxury of picking and choosing only those carbon abatement options we have an ideological preference for. It would affect how we respond to it as our understanding of how far the situation is now going beyond… It’s actually going beyond our… You get less techno-optimist if you think, “Shit, we’ve pushed the lever so far that we’re now tumbling over the cliff”. So that was large-scale civilizational collapse. Mark Lynas: If it’s not solar which we’ve been campaigning in favor of rather for three decades, what’s the alternative, nuclear? So I was reading your book and you mentioned that one issue with talking about adaptability is that it’s going to be much harder to adapt without burning fossil fuels if we haven’t already transitioned into a carbon-free economy. But if societal collapse means something like the industrial economy is reduced by a huge percentage, and the political systems around the world don’t work anymore. Mark Lynas was an anti-nuclear campaigner who had not examined the facts about nuclear power until at a conference he realized that it is the major source of carbon dioxide free power generation. READ MORE. It’s literally just half a dozen people to start with, but they’ve got an MP elected now who’s a member of the Green Party but has an ecomodernist philosophy. This is what pretty much already happens. Mark Lynas: Well then also it’s true now that the higher your level of development, and the higher your level of emissions and oil consumption, the more resilient you are likely to be to climate impacts. Mark Lynas: And they made the world safe for coal. And you’d rather publish another paper that suggests it’s a problem that we need to do something about it rather than one that suggests that, well, maybe it’s not actually so bad and people shouldn’t worry as much because that feels irresponsible. Mark Lynas: Yeah, so positive feedbacks are wildcards in the system in that the result doesn’t become immediately dependent on our emissions. So, can you answer for humanity going extinct? Well, that’s when you lose the Arctic Ocean ice cap; that’s when 10 million people are flooded by sea level rise. My only reservation about this book is that the future development of fusion power generation receives so little mention when the massive ITER project is being built in Southern France. I told you. So it’s really up to humanity how far we want to push that lever if you like. ENVIRONMENTAL ACTIVIST And with irrigation of course, you have to have a natural fresh water supply, where you can extract water from ground reservoirs or from rivers. And I think that sense of… Even on the most finickity point as well. I actually think the Greenland ice sheet will collapse already, even at the level of warming right now. I’m putting that question to Greenpeace, to Extinction Rebellion, to you, to the Conservative Party, whatever. Actually, it’s not that much. I mean, it’s now in the top 10 for most people’s political concerns, and it’s even been a major factor in elections in some countries, but it’s not really dominating the agenda in a way that will be necessitated if we were to really deal with it seriously. Robert Wiblin: Right. You were talking early on about how we can avoid famines. So you’ve got to try and think of a way through that’s going to allow us to solve the problem in a politically realistic sense. Big round of applause for everyone, I think. So, I saw a survey recently that said that climate change and environmental destruction were rated by millennials as the most critical problems to solve in the world. Because that then does lead to a bias throughout the literature in terms of how it reflects reality, if you like. It’s one thing to put pink boats into the center of London and say, “We’re in a climate emergency”, but then people say to you, “Well, all right. Do you have any take on that? Robert Wiblin: Yeah. It seems like one point that people have emphasized a lot, and very rightly, is that there’s scientific consensus that climate change is real and man-made. It was all meant to be fluffy wind and solar, even back in the ’70s. Well, you won’t understand both of them at the same time. How many people died from radiation? People say, “Well, imagine if”… A lot of Greens say this, “Imagine if one nuclear power plant somehow contaminated another one, you get this cascading fail”. Mark Lynas: Well, to extinct humanity, you have to eliminate the last breeding pair, but it’s a big–. It’s perceived as being the property of a particular political constituency, mostly the Left and the Greens, and everyone knows they’re a bit mad. I mean they happen dynamically, but no one really knows how the economy works. Yeah, I was at an energy conference, I think, where someone from the nuclear industry just said about, I think it was 15% of the UK’s power at that point… I didn’t even know. So that’s India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, parts of China, Indonesia which, coincidentally, all these areas host the majority of the world’s population currently. I remember even when I was doing GCSEs, so back in… God, I don’t know, 1932 or something… I mean, a long time ago now. You’ve got the Thwaites and the Pine Island Glacier. Good luck with that. Mark Lynas: Why would you do it when you’ve still got point sources of emissions, which have really been concentrated CO2 by the millions of tar from single chimneys? So you mentioned four to six degrees. I was never an anti-nuclear activist in the sense… Anything more than the fact I felt myself to be an environmentalist, and therefore I thought nuclear power was bad, because all environmentalists do. I think it’s just a better prospect. Or you get some really rapid increase in the climate effects so that we don’t really have time to adapt to it. Environmentalist Mark Lynas said he "grew up hating nuclear power" but later realised that "continuing to oppose nuclear was a mistake". He is Vice-Chair of the World Economic Forum's Global Agenda Council on Emerging Technologies, a Visiting Research Associate at Oxford University's School of Geography and the Environment, and was Climate Advisor to the President of the Maldives from 2009 … One, why do you think that is? Is there anything else on the energy side that excites you? That’s interesting. The cheapest way to make hydrogen, in fact, the way that almost all hydrogen is currently made is through reforming natural gas. You managed to stop Ugandans having disease-resistant bananas. They’re already in field trials, which could solve that problem basically. You can speed things up a bit if you collapse on marine-terminating glaciers like in Antarctica. So what’s going on? Robert Wiblin: And you can also imagine, just as everyone in March was trying to figure out how the hell do we solve this COVID problem, everyone’s going to be thinking “How can I store food? And there was some forewarning of this in the 2008 food price spikes, which were more related to the oil price at that time actually than the scarcity of food. I came of age really as an environmentalist in the late, well, the early ’90s, really. Arden Koehler: What about the long-term risk of extinction? We need innovators. Arden Koehler: I think some people might think that, in order to get societal collapse, and maybe it’s possible we’re talking about different things here. This is just one topic of many in today’s interview. It’s something which will happen in different times at different places if it isn’t predicted in advance and if adaptive measures aren’t taken. And so there isn’t nothing, but it’s true that it’s very underdeveloped. And look at the political ramifications of that. And then at the same time, we’d lose a lot of food production, again, because crops can’t survive either in this kind of heat and also the drought associated along with it. It’s hard to get a bridge built, let alone a nuclear power plant. So there’s not some day of the dead, where we all run out of water at the same time. Oh, Libya has just gone. Because every calorie looks precious”. And Antarctica, as well. Robert Wiblin: Okay. Solar is now way cheaper than it was, again, orders of magnitude, than it was a couple decades ago, and nuclear can do the same. But that’s contingent on a lot of other factors like the responsible government, which was obviously to try and barrel bomb and gas people, and led to a really horrific conflict with a very large number of refugees. After that we debate some apparent disagreements, starting with the chapter titled ‘Where 80,000 Hours is at on climate change’. It’s this evidence-based environmental movement to try and bring scientific rationalism into the green scene and to be progressive, because a lot of environmentalism actually isn’t progressive. 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