talk to you about climate I’m going to
talk to you about climate and carbon
emissions and why we’re failing to clean
up carbon emissions worldwide but how
there’s really two very simple things we
could do to make a success out of our
total failure over the past 30 years and
that that is to introduce a simple idea
to make sure that we actually try to put
the carbon we emit back on the ground
which we’ve signally failed to do so
it’s really simple but it’s a very
powerful idea and we have to do it or
else we failed so we know the cause of
climate change we know that the cause of
climate change is producing lots of
carbon out of the ground and putting
that into the air we’ve produced carbon
out of the ground with industrial
processes making cement out of limestone
turning iron ore into iron and steel
using soil in an adverse way
decarbonizing the soil taking the carbon
out of agricultural soil and also giving
ourselves permission to harvest biomass
trees and agricultural wastes and carry
on burning that and putting that into
the atmosphere but the chief source of
our carbon which we bring up is the
fossil fuel resource of coal and gas and
of oil and we’re producing that at a
totally unprecedented rate never in the
history of the entire world since the
world began has so much carbon been put
into the atmosphere in such a short
period of time they’ve been 5 major
extinction periods where life has been
nearly destroyed in the history of the
earth when we know geologically how fast
the carbon came out in each of those and
we’re now doing it about 10 times faster
and to give you an idea of what that
means on this table I’m representing the
carbon resource with some coal at the
moment we’ve taken out this much
and by taking out this much that’s
produced nearly 1 degree of warming in
the global planetary climate it’s
produced a 30% increase in acidity of
the ocean it’s produced a sea-level rise
by melting ice of about 15 centimeters
set to go on to be 1 2 or 5 meters by
the end of this century and it’s moving
belts of ecosystems faster than life can
carry on and will cause extinction if we
do nothing in the next 15 years
we’ll have produced another okay from
1750 to now next 15 years and in by 2040
2050 will be way past the safe limit
okay and to give you an idea of how much
that means here’s a bag of coal we used
to burn but lots of coal in the UK this
is 125 kilo bag on average for all the
energy we use in the world everybody
burns 50 of those bags each year but
because of the disparity of wealth you
probably burn about 500 of those bags
people in India burn five but 50 of
those bags per years the energy you use
just to give you some idea of that and
we need to bring that down just to 1 or
2 bags per person so what can we do
about this we’ve produced lots of fossil
fuel lots of carbon we need to find some
way of catching that car and putting
that back in the ground so what can we
do about that how can we do that we know
as a species as humans were really
really inventive we’re good at working
together we can do impossible things
it took us just 15 years to decide we
wanted to move off earth and go to the
moon to send one or two people to the
moon we did that there’s a footprint ok
we can do strange and unusual things but
clearly climate change and solving that
is much more difficult than going to the
moon because we’ve known about climate
change since the middle 1800s we’ve been
able to scientifically measure the
changes of climate and the increase of
temperature of the world very well since
the 1950s
we’ve been able to understand the
detailed changes of climate belts in
ocean acidification since the middle
1970s we’re still emitting more and more
and more and more carbon each year than
we’ve ever done before but there is some
hope we’re a very cooperative species in
December 2015
197 countries in the world came together
in Paris to talk about climate justice
about the inequality of climate change
about how we could scientifically and
technologically do something about that
at that meeting it was agreed uniquely
that all those countries would pledge to
work together to keep climate change to
less than 2 degrees of warming around
the world and to really try hard to keep
that less than 1.5 one and a half
degrees so there’s an intention but
nobody knows how to make that intention
happen so we’re still emitting more
carbon dioxide now per year than we were
in 2015 here’s a graph which tries to
show that vertically up the left-hand
side is the number of millions of tonnes
of carbon dioxide per year horizontally
is the calendar years the black line
shows us where we’ve come from you can
see there’s a relentless increase year
after year to 2016 and if we do nothing
we follow the red line and that’s the
pathway to extinction and failure and
turning the world into a very different
place that’s a pathway to 6 degrees
warming or even 8 degrees of warming
nobody knows the pledges in Paris add up
to the dashed line in the middle those
pledges are well intentioned don’t know
how to deliver them but they add up to
still 4 degrees of warming ok twice
what’s necessary what we need to be on
is the blue line we need to be on the
blue line to get our carbon emissions
down starting now to go down and down
and down and as you can see from the
right hand side to actually become
negative to actually recapture carbon
from air that we’ve already emitted
because we’ve already emitted too much
carbon
we’ve already stacked
the earth to warm to more than one
degree maybe even and in ten years time
it will be more than one and a half
degrees so we have to do things quickly
we need to reduce our carbon dioxide
emissions quickly and we need to take
car already emitted carbon out of the
air that’s difficult we don’t know how
to do that but I think we’ve got at
least two ways of doing that I’ll
explain in a minute
an example of what we can do is actually
here in Scotland Scotland is one of the
leading countries in the world the top
six countries in the world to be
successful in reducing its carbon
dioxide emissions where we came from
on the left in 1991 we had about double
about 80 million tons a year of carbon
dioxide emission we’re now in 2017
halfway down our trajectory about 40 to
45 percent down we’ve reduced an immense
amount of carbon emission and we’ve done
that by changing our energy use by
changing the way we generate electricity
for moving away from coal and gas moving
into renewables and generating
low-carbon electricity but we can’t get
down that graph just by generating
electricity more and more electricity
because what’s left if some is energy
that’s predominantly heating our houses
some is transport some is agriculture
and the way we use land and fertilizers
some is the big industries and the way
we make plastics and fertilizer and
paper and glass and some is residential
houses we all know we’ve got very poor
quality leaky heat housing so just
making more electricity’s not going to
be good enough so we can capture more
carbon and change these processes but
what we can also do as well as reducing
the positive emissions and catching
those we can increase our negative
emissions we can increase the recapture
of carbon we can increase our recapture
by using biomass and forestry burning
that and capturing the carbon taking the
carbon out of the air into trees putting
the tree putting the carbon underground
we can increase our carbon capture by
increasing our peatland
by locking up carbon in peat we can
increase our carbon capture by putting
carbon
back into agricultural soil with biochar
with long live charcoal we can do that
by capture carbon by increasing the
weight of rate of weathering of rocks
which naturally capture carbon says lots
of things we can do and in Scotland if
we wanted to I’m sure we can get down to
zero carbon emissions by 2040 so there’s
plenty of things we can do but we need
to make it happen so how are we going to
make it happen
well we know where the culprits are we
know our main culprits are in big
industry petrochemical plants like in
Grangemouth in central scotland big
combustion plants worldwide like this
one in England we’ve closed down a lot
of our big ones in Scotland but still
plenty in Germany United States China
and we also know that we burn gas in our
houses we can’t we can not carry on
doing that burning methane gas that
emits carbon we cannot carry on burning
petrol and diesel in our cars that emits
low carbon so but if we want to carry on
using the benefits of those carbon fuels
which have brought us immense wealth of
brought us immense transport ability we
have to then be able to burn those fuels
and capture the carbon and put that back
in the ground we have to put a lid on
our carbon ok so in principle that’s
what we need to do the first thing we
need to do is reduce our emissions by
catching the carbon and putting that
underground and again more good news
that’s already being done since 1996
between midway in the North Sea between
Scotland and Norway the oil companies
Statoil has been producing oil from the
Red Rock underground in this cross
section of the earth produces oil up
those bore holes brings the oil to the
surface in the oil rig on the seabed
there and strips out carbon dioxide from
that oil and then re-inject that carbon
dioxide into the horizontal blue layer
which is a salt water filled sandstone
one kilometre down so that capture
separation of carbon dioxide
pressurizing it 270 atmospheres the same
as a pressure in the fire extinguisher
re-injecting that liquefied carbon
dioxide into the ground is
straightforward we know how to do that
it’s been operating for 20 years without
any faults whatsoever
and cane that captures and injects 1
million tons of Europe so that’s good
great job 10 out of 10 for doing that
all we need is a thousand of those ok we
also can capture carbon from air with
machines we can recapture carbon from
air we can do it with trees we can do it
by weathering rocks but here in
Switzerland is one of the very first
machines to do that so this machine
takes in normal air through that battery
of fans passes the air across chemicals
to absorb the carbon dioxide and
captures 600 tons of carbon dioxide
every year again we can do that that’s
the first in the world to do that it’ll
become quicker for the camisa it’ll
become cheaper that’s how technology
develops but we know we can recapture
carbon from the air with lots of
different ways so why isn’t this
happening here’s a map around the world
showing all the carbon dioxide capture
test pilots scientific tests which have
worked at ten one tonne 10 tonnes a
hundred tons a thousand tonnes and have
then stopped we know how to do this all
those pilots have worked we’re now
capturing 40 million tons a year of
carbon dioxide from the air and putting
from industrial processes and putting
that back underground but we need that
to be a hundred times faster 200 times
faster and 200 times bigger and what’s
stopping it is that nobody makes any
money so clearly people need paid lots
of money to capture the emissions which
they’ve got paid to produce they need
paid to capture those and put that back
underground nobody’s going to save the
planet for charity so this means
thinking about money so governments are
good with money they make lots of rules
they make it very complicated so this is
what Europe does Europe said across all
of Europe will regulate the co2
emissions what we’ll do is we’ll make
you pay a certain amount of money to
carry on polluting the atmosphere if you
want to put a ton of carbon dioxide in
the atmosphere
we’ll make you pay for a certificate an
allowance
if you can’t pay if you’re an industry
which can’t pay like cement claims they
can’t pay we’ll give you a certificate
so you can carry on putting a ton of
carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and
we’ll also then let companies trade with
each other so if company a has invested
in making their plant more efficient and
has reduced their carbon dioxide
emission they’ve got some spare
allowances so they can sell those to
Company B who’s not bothered to be more
efficient it’s not bothered to clean up
so company B can pay a few hundred euros
and carry on emitting the carbon dioxide
this is the wrong way round you
shouldn’t be buying allowances to carry
on behaving badly
you should be penalized and made to put
the carbon dioxide back in the ground
this scheme is a total failure in terms
of achieving the result it’s
economically terrific but it’s
environmentally useless two out of ten
no use okay at UK what does the UK do UK
were great at taxing stuff we like tax
the UK had the benefit of billions of
tons of coal and carbon dioxide for our
industrial revolution since 1750 we dug
that up emitted that were culpably
responsible for more carbon dioxide
emissions than any other people in the
earth we then discovered oil and gas in
the North Sea and since the 1970s here’s
our production our tax take from the
North Sea the government taxed that
carbon production from the North Sea
that’s about 80 percent so on average
we’ve gained about 10 billion pounds a
year from that tax during the North Sea
production from the middle 1970s up till
today okay the government gained a huge
amount of money and it’s spent and
recycled on climate mitigation and
cleaning up the climate it’s spent
approximately zero so what happens is
the government finds a resource and gets
a company to develop and produce the
resource it could be oil it could be
cold it could be shale gas in the future
a government taxes that production and
then takes the money and does whatever
it wants with it it could spend it on
hospitals or schools and
it’s good it could spend it on wars and
roads which is less good but what it
doesn’t do it does not recycle the money
back to mitigate and remove the effects
of the bad effects of that environmental
effects of that carbon production so the
message is that you cannot trust the
government with money the government
takes your money and spends it on
whatever it wants to do and what we need
to do is find a way to that money does
not go into other topics we need to put
that recycle back into climate tax does
not store carbon tax just creates money
what we need to do is get away from
money not let the government near it and
we need to use law instead of tax so
here’s my proposition the proposition is
we need to invent something which
balances extraction of carbon with
injection of carbon ok so that’s the
very simple proposition so we know where
the carbon comes from it comes from oil
it comes from gas it comes from coal it
comes from shale gas and we need to find
ways of transferring all of that
extraction into being injection to be in
balance we also know who does this we
know that 108 fossil fuel producers big
companies household names are
responsible for 62 percent of the global
greenhouse gas emissions since the
beginning of the Industrial Revolution
so we know who they are
we know where they live I’m very keen on
paying tax for environmental cleanup I
like to have my rubbish taken away I’ve
got a wheelie bin I sought out my
rubbish into recycling bits and it gets
taken away and I pay money for that and
that’s fine and I pay money for that
also because that avoids landfill tax
was 20 years ago
all of that rubbish went into landfill
we now charge landfill at 75 pounds of
turn we’d pay tax on that by charging
money that’s not driven everybody out of
business that’s created lots and lots of
jobs in recycling doing the right tax
for the right reasons creates wealth so
if we do nothing and it fails we have
rubbish in the street and we’re told
that
has to pay i’m the polluter I should pay
but actually in Europe the people who
make the stuff have to pay for the
cleanup so it by law in Europe if I make
a washing machine or I make a car and
I’m the company doing that I have to
design in the recycling I have to take
responsibility for the cleanup I have to
take responsibility for the
environmental damage so I say that the
producer pays not the polluter the oil
and gas and coal companies should be
active in cleaning up the damage so I
propose key proposal as well as
capturing carbon we should certificate
carbon so we create a certificate which
creates a market for co2 storage this is
the missing market worldwide nobody gets
paid for storing carbon we need to pay
people for storing carbon so here’s the
certificate you give this certificate to
every tonne of carbon extracted as coal
gas oil or biomass carbon that’s a
national certificate that we in the UK
give to the company who then as an
environmental certificate we give it to
them where it’s free of charge it’s not
a tax if any carbon gets extracted in
our country if any carbon gets brought
into our country each ton has a
certificate free of charge but with the
certificate comes an obligation and the
obligation of that certificate is that
you the company have to store a
percentage of that carbon and we the
government will decide on that
percentage it’ll start off very small
but it’ll increase that it’ll increase
to be something meaningful so to expand
on that on the left hand side if you’re
producing coal or oil or gas and then
you make something and you store the
equivalent carbon in China or in South
Korea no problem
nobody know money changes hands that
good deed is done if you bring those
goods in or especially if you bring the
carbon into our country we put that
environmental certificate on where
enters the European Union or enters the
UK if you store the carbon at our
prescribed rate no money changes hands
you’ve done the right thing you’ve
created a carbon market you found the
cheap
way and the best way of storing that
carbon but if you don’t do that we
charge you big money the tax on the top
okay if you don’t behave properly you
get fined so we start off small we ask
companies to store 0.25 one quarter of
one percent of the carbon they bring in
or extract one quarter of one percent
and that’s chosen because that’s one
borehole storing 1 million tonnes a year
that borehole in the North Sea I talked
to you about
it’s very easy to do that because we’ve
done it for the past 20 years we start
off small
it’s a tiny amount of money but we can
grow that after that’s been working
established and working two years later
three years later we do we want to store
1 percent of the carbon three years
later we store five percent of the
carbon three years after that we can
store 10 percent of the carbon we can
hit our carbon reduction targets really
easily by doing this progressively
slowly predictably it’s what companies
always say they want they want certainty
so here’s certainty we’ve got the
information we know where the carbon is
coming from we know who imports it it’s
a very direct and controllable action
the government hardly needs to employ
anybody to do this it’s competitive
companies compete for the cheapest
possible storage cost of carbon because
that’s creating their effective carbon
market they’ll be better than the next
company and of course that’s least cost
to all of us and of course what that
does is it stores the carbon and it can
apply to the recaptured from air carbon
as well any stored carbon is good carbon
so this is an easy thing to do but it’s
a bold thing to do and it’s so bold and
so simple that the government will not
want to do it but it’s so bold and so
simple that how can we avoid it okay so
to finish off and say what I’ve said we
have to puncture this carbon bottle
bubble we have to make one turn out
equal one turn in to go into balance
we’ve been spectacularly successful at
producing gas and shale gas at producing
oil at producing coal feeding that into
the bath of the common atmosphere
we all share worldwide which is
overflowing with carbon dioxide and what
we now need to create through this
certificate scheme is a way of taking
that carbon dioxide out of the bath and
putting that back into the ground where
it came from so certificates of storage
to create the storage carbon market or
what’s needed and I propose that all
governments should do that and that is a
way of meeting their Paris agreement
easily cheaply and on the right time
scale thank you very much
[Applause] [Music]