Round Table

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Round Table

Here is the Sustainable Futures Report for Friday, 2 August, and I’m Anthony Day.

A few weeks ago, back when Theresa May was still Prime Minister, I had a roundtable discussion with three patrons of the Sustainable Futures Report. This turns out to be one of the longest episodes to date but I hope you find interesting. We’ll probably hold another discussion in September and if you like to take part please contact me via patreon.com/sfr .

We started off with introductions:

Anthony: So Tom, who are you?

Tom: So, I'm Tom. I live in York and I'm a web developer, so I make websites for a living. But I also work in my spare time with York Community Energy. Currently we are focusing less on generating energy and more on saving energy, so trying to insulate people's homes basically.

Anthony: OK. And your interest in the whole climate change issue is what?

Tom: Well I would like the planet to not fall apart and you know, not have food shortages and terrible droughts and floodings and things like that, really.

Anthony: Fair enough, I think we probably agree with that. Catherine, can we ask you to introduce yourself please?

Catherine: Sure. I'm Catherine Weetman. My company is Rethink Global. So there are a couple of us helping small businesses mainly, but small businesses and community groups understand the circular economy and work out how it can help strengthen their businesses, make it more profitable, resilient and sustainable.

Anthony: And Manda, Manda Scott.

Manda: Manda Scott, I used to be a veterinary surgeon and now I'm novelist, although we just moved house. So writing has taken a back seat. Two years ago I did the master's in sustainable economics at Schumacher, which completely changed my view of the world. And shortly after that I read the "Deep Adaptation" paper, which further completely rewired my view of the world.

So I am active in our local Extinction Rebellion group. I am trying very hard to get regenerative farming to take off in my area. I live in Shropshire, which is a big rural farming area because I genuinely believe that regenerative farming can be part of the solution. And I'm quite active in politics on the basis that if we don't get our politics to change we're not going to change in time. I think the timescales, we were talking about tipping points earlier, I don't think the general public has any clue of the time scales. I think there's still a sense that this is something that will happen in our children's old age. We need to change that.

Anthony: OK. Well let's start off. I'll ask this question. Are we reaching the tipping point? Have we actually got to the point where public opinion is on a roll and will that change things? Will that change behavior? Do you want to start with that Catherine?

Catherine: Sure. It feels to me as if we are reaching a tipping point. I'm certainly noticing a lot more conversation on the news, on TV, in newspapers and so on, not just about the problem, but about some of responses and solutions that people are coming up with. So I think it's starting to swing round to not a vision yet, that would be good, but more of how we could live more sustainable lives. And I think particularly the report that came out a week or so ago about the importance of planting trees and the new calculations on just how much difference that could make has started to perhaps make people feel that it doesn't require technological wizardry, it doesn't require a miracle. There are simple things that we could all get behind that would start to head us in the right direction.

I think the other thing that's encouraging is the number of businesses and pension funds and so on really starting to talk about what they need to do differently. And actually businesses canvassing the government and asking for policy changes that support the right behavior, like taxing carbon, taxing the use of virgin resources instead of labor, that kind of thing.

Anthony: What's your feeling, Manda? Are you noticing a change? Do you think we're getting to a tipping point? Do you think we're finally seeing a difference?

Manda: In some ways, yes. Certainly in my teaching I'm finding that students are coming with much bigger questions about how do we fix this, rather than how do I find a better job. I teach shamanic [. ..] so people tend to come with personal questions and now they're coming more with existential questions.

We set up a local Extinction Rebellion group last week and we had 70 people at the first meeting, which for a small town in south Shropshire was very good. But that said, I talk to people in the supermarket queue or other people in the village, kind of people who are not activists and they still look at me as if I'm talking gibberish and they really don't know. I mean they've kind of got the plastic thing, that's got through. And I suppose at least they are aware that climate change is a thing. But in terms of changing their behavior, not yet. But I think what's happened is that the commentariat, is beginning to take notice and it's becoming something that's more remarked upon in newspapers other than just The Guardian and on television. It's not just the lone voice in the wilderness and they're not so busy feeling that they have to get somebody from the denialist movement to balance out every single statement on climate change in the way that they used to.

So we're heading in the right direction, whether it's fast enough is entirely another question. And whether the incredibly slow pace of change that happens in our political structures will move fast enough to make a difference is also another question. But I hope so. Extinction Rebellion is putting a lot of pressure on. And if we can continue to ramp up the pressure then with any luck we can get the change we need in the timescale that we need.

Anthony: OK. I think we generally accept the government of course has the power and that, well, government and business has the power to do things, while the consumer and the citizen may believe that things should be done, it’s only the institutions which can actually make it happen. Now you're a lot closer to business Catherine than maybe we are, through your work with the circular economy and so on, are you seeing a change in attitude within business?

Catherine: Yeah, definitely. I think big businesses are starting to realize that it's not just about some green messages and things that will hopefully persuade people that they're doing the right thing. But I think businesses are starting to realize that their own futures are at risk. And IKEA put out a really good short video this week. I think somebody shared it on LinkedIn. Mike Berry actually shared it on LinkedIn. And they talked about reshaping their business so that they can meet the needs of future customers. I think they're starting to realize that resource security is a big issue. If we all want more stuff and population keeps growing, then we've got to find different ways to create that stuff, if you like, the resources in the first place.

So having things that last longer can help that, recycling things can help that, but it's an expensive way to do it. And starting to change people's mindsets away from owning stuff, to using it and having access to it can not only help spread resources across more people, but it can be a brilliant business model for businesses. I think even Apple is starting to realize that its planned obsolescence approach is a bit broken. So they're starting to invest more in subscription services and software. They've also committed to a circular future, though with no dates. But it's entirely feasible that Apple could develop a Fairphone type phone that's upgradable, that's more easily repairable and something that people engage with and just upgrade as new things become available, faster processor, a better camera lens, whatever, you can just swap that in. And then Apple aren't risking somebody thinking, well actually, the Samsung one does exactly the same and it's half the price, so why don't I swap?

It's better to keep your customers engaged and I think companies are really starting to see the value of that engagement, which means you can talk directly to the customer instead of having to try and attract new customers through Google Ads or whatever it is that's not very measurable and not very precise and extremely expensive.

Anthony: OK. You mentioned the Deep Adaptation paper there, I'm about a 10th of the way through it. I haven't really got...

Manda: Yeah, yeah, 36 pages.

Anthony: Yes, well alright and they're quite closely written pages. The author, Jem Bendell appears to be a fatalist or what I would call it a catastrophist, who says, alright, it's all going to go wrong, so...

Manda: No, no, no, he says it's all going to go wrong -- if we don't act now.

Anthony: Ah, well that's a much more optimistic reading than I've heard.

Manda: -- we need to act or it will all go wrong.

Anthony: OK. He talks particularly about social breakdown and I think Tom and Catherine are both talking about whether in fact consumers can recognize that things have to be done and accept the things, the changes which are going to have to be made in the relatively short term. So what's his take... What's your take on that?

Manda: Me? Well, Extinction Rebellion grew out of the Deep Adaptation paper. So they convened some gatherings in Devon in the early stages of Deep Adaptation, Extinction Rebellion grew out of that. So that would be my take on it, is that we need to follow this line of nonviolent direct action, because it's the only thing that makes governments pay attention. Because otherwise, I think we risk putting all of the emphasis on what we can do as individual consumers. We stop using plastic straws or we recycle our plastic better, or we stop taking flights, when actually what needs to happen is that the plastics industry needs to cease to exist and the planes need to cease to fly. And if we take what I would always call the Al Gore view of things which is it's down to each of us as individuals, then we're sunk. Which isn't to say that as individuals we can't make a huge amount of change, but probably for me, most of the change we can see is in our immediate social group, in our connected local areas and in really obvious big direct action that makes the government sit up take notice.

And Extinction Rebellion has worked so far. We've got a government that a year ago didn't even know what a citizens assembly was, agreeing to set one up. It doesn't mean they will do it. And it doesn't mean they'll listen to it, but at least they're thinking about it.

Anthony: Yes, yes. OK. Tom, can you envisage a world where people accept that they can no longer fly?

Tom: I don't know.

Anthony: Where are you going for your holidays?

Tom: We're going to Bristol. We're not flying to Bristol. It's a very tricky question and it's something that I've been thinking about a lot and been thinking about, how are people going to feel about not having cars and things like that. I mean the easy answer is what other choice do we have? If at the end of the day it's that or death essentially. So I think it's one of those things where as people come to realize the urgency of the situation, then they might start to reevaluate it. And the thing that I don't have the answer to is, will they realize in time?

Anthony: Yeah. OK. Catherine, can you envisage the plastics industry closing down or do you think that the circular economy will actually stop that from need to happen?

Catherine: Can I come back to plastics in a sec and just chip in on the plane thing? Because Dr. Wayne Visser, who you might've heard of, he posted something on LinkedIn a couple of weeks ago about, should we all stop flying? His view was that as it was only 2% of carbon emissions, it was a bit of a futile gesture. So it engendered did quite a bit of debate and I chipped in with my view that those of us working in sustainability should be the ones saying, we're not going to fly because if we're not prepared to do it, how do we convince other people to even think about it? So I wasn't saying nobody should fly, I was just saying, you know, this is my view, I haven't flown on holiday for over 10 years, and I've now stopped flying for business. So last week Holland, took Eurostar. I've turned down speaking invitations to Cape Town and Australia in the last couple of weeks because, I couldn't see the points of the flying, said I do a web conference.

But I think lots of people are still, you know, that's the point of having something taken away from you. So there was a lot of quite strong, the usual kind of Twitter/LinkedIn debate with people saying, you can't stop people going on holiday and all that kind of stuff.

But my view is the more of us who choose not to fly, the more pressure that puts on the airline industry to find clean fuel, if there is a clean fuel. If we all carry on and say, it's up to them to do it, but we're not signaling that with our pound vote, then why will they hurry up and do it? The more they feel a threat of losing their business, the quicker they'll do something about it.

In terms of plastics, I've written a few blog posts on this. Plastics are a fantastic invention, they're in everything around us. We're probably all surrounded by plastics. I'm looking at the furniture in some of those webcam shots and polyester fabrics and all the plastic packaging that helps keep things fresh. So if we banned plastic, that would be a retrograde step. But I don't see why any company should be allowed to put plastic into the market that isn't recyclable. I think there are enough options that everything should be able to be recycled. We don't really need laminates, crisp packets, they could just be a single film.

And if you are going to put something complicated in, you need to pay for the costs of that being recycled. In the UK, the packaging waste levy only covers 10% of the costs of local councils doing the recycling. So we're not giving anybody a fighting chance of putting good recycling systems in place. But I do think we need to rethink it and we need to put the costs where the causes of the costs are. People shouldn't be able to just make society pay for something that's an advantage to their business, but a penalty for everybody else.

Anthony: Well, I don't know whether you saw the BBC's "War on Plastic" programmes recently, but Michael Gove, who's currently the Environment Secretary was asked that very point about why does the producer pay only 10% of the cost of recycling? And he said his plan was to make it 100%. Now, whether he'll be in office long enough to actually do that is another question, but...

Manda: And banning petrol and diesel cars in 2040, because if he's planning to do it by 2040, it's not soon enough.

Anthony: Oh, absolutely, no, no. I was smiling a bit when you're talking about flying. I've just been watching the prime ministerial debate. That makes it sound far more important than it is, but anyway, and Jeremy Hunt said yes without question he would support the third runway at Heathrow. So we've got a long way to go I think to persuade our politicians. Manda, do you fly?

Manda: I haven't flown since 1996 exactly for this reason, until this year when I did a huge... This is going to be too long. My shamanic work appeared to require me to be teaching in America and I thought, there's no way because I don't fly. And two days after I had that particularly event, I was invited to go to America. So I went, with great regret and I have to say I will never do it again. Flying was such an unpleasant experience. It was quite enough to put me off. But I didn't think it was justified in the first place and I think I was right, I still don't fully understand why it was necessary for me to go. So no, I don't fly. But I have family members. One of the things that worries me a little about the whole recycling plastics, I have members of the extended family who are fanatical about recycling plastic down to the toothpicks, but still fly on holidays three times a year. It's giving people something that they can funnel their care into, but still then having the blinkers about the rest.

We need somehow to have a coherent narrative that explains why that doesn't work. And I have to say that I'm not wholly convinced that recycling plastics... Are they actually recycled still or do they get shipped out to China where they throw them in the Yangtze? I want to know what's actually happening to the recycling and whether the embodied energy, whether the carbon required to do it is useful. Because otherwise we need to stop. It's not beyond the wit of humanity to produce things that function in the way that plastics function and don't have a lifespan of 10,000 years.

Anthony: Right.

Catherine: I think the key to it though is charging the right amount for the recycling because that would then persuade producers to use less plastics, simple plastic, naked packaging, all the rest of it to avoid the penalty. But recycling is much more effective than continuing to make plastics from petrochemicals and bio-materials are not the answer either, because as you probably know, we have enough pressure on land as it is without trying to grow materials to make bio-base plastics.

So there are lots of issues, but I think it's just this thing of not allowing companies to externalize costs and that goes for food as well as for carbon and that kind of thing. We're allowing companies to get away with selling us rubbish that makes us fat, ill, have cancer, all the rest of it and society has to pick up the cost. There's a lot of broken elements to the system that we're living in.

Anthony: Right. It's interesting what you were saying about bio-plastics, because I went to a lecture on that this week, perhaps it was last week. But they were making bio-plastics out of food waste, in other words, out of sugar cane. What's left after the sugar is being taken out. Out of coffee grounds and out of other things like that. One interesting point though that the plastics they were making weren't necessarily recyclable.

Manda: But were they biodegradable?

Anthony: Well, some but not all. And of course they made the point that if you put biodegradable plastics in the waste stream with other plastics, you can contaminate it and you can foul up the reprocessing or the recycling process of those plastics. So we need to sort it all out. And I think as you were saying, Catherine we need to control the use of plastics that are being put onto the market. It's the circular economy principle, isn't it? At the design stage you've got to think of what's going to happen to the product when it's actually finished with, otherwise you end up with a massive rubbish, which is what we've got at the moment.

Tom: I think also, sorry, can I just add? I think also we've just got to generally move away from a kind of takeaway single use culture in general. Like we went to Temple Newsam this weekend and with our lunch that we bought, they threw in a load of wooden knives and forks and it's like, well, it's still waste. It's still going to be used once and then thrown away. We're just generating all this waste, whether it's plastic or not, it's the whole attitude that that needs to shift really.

Anthony: Yeah. So as well as our reusable cups, we should be taking our reusable knives and forks, shouldn't we when we'd go out perhaps?

Tom: Yeah, possibly.

Catherine: There was a Guardian study a few weeks ago, 11 billion items of packaging waste a year generated by our lunch on the go habit in the UK.

Anthony: Oh dear, oh dear. Yes. Well, how are we going to get the message forward? Tom, are you involved in any way in Extinction Rebellion? Do you approve of it? Do you support it?

Tom: I'm not actively involved in it. I did go to the Citizen's Assembly in York a couple of weeks ago, which was excellent actually. I thought they did an amazing job. And they were able to sort of conduct a democratic exercise which was reasonably represented. I think they said there was like 300 people there. They did it and managed to sort of herd cats, effectively. There were lots of people with strong opinions all trying to speak and they managed that really well. I thought the whole thing was amazing and moved at lightning speed compared to government or local government.

Yes, I approve of what they're doing. I think like we said before, they are getting the message through in a way that other people have failed to do and if they ruffle a few feathers, then so be it. At the end of the day, some feathers need ruffling because we've tried being polite for decades and it hasn't worked. The fact that they explicitly commit to being nonviolent is absolutely crucial because some people might say, oh, well, when are they going to turn around and become violent? And it's written in from the start that that is not what this is about. I think that's incredibly important. All the protests in London were so good natured and everyone looked like they were just having a big party and it was really good fun. There's a bit of positivity there and they're getting the message across and so, yeah, that's given me more hope than anything in a long time.

Anthony: Good. Well, you may know that they're planning to paralyze Leeds and several other cities next week. Let's hope everybody retains their equanimity and good spirits.

So actually they had three demands didn't they? One was to get the government to do something about it and the government has actually said that it's going to reduce the target for 2050 from 80% to 100%, if you see what I mean.

They asked about a citizens assembly and the government has said there's going to be a citizens assembly. The other thing they want is to de-carbonise by 2025. That's a challenge. But maybe if they all continue to push for that. But that is a challenge.

Manda: It's a net zero though which isn't the same as... Net zero isn't the same as stopping all output. I think that's quite important.

Anthony: You're right, you're right. And the calculations of net zero have got to be scrutinised very carefully, because you can write calculations which say that Drax Power Station is clean. I don't you think a lot of people would really believe that.

Manda: Also I think... It may be that one of your listeners can answer this. My understanding is that military output of CO2 and use of embodied energy is not in anybody's calculations in any country of the world. If it's not, then we can do all we like as the civilians and all they have to do is send a couple of hundred jets on training missions and we've blown everybody's carbon budget in a year.

Anthony: It's probably a military secret.

Manda: I think it probably is and that doesn't stop it being incredibly damaging and really important that we begin to do something...

Anthony: Yeah, that's something else to consider. So, I came across a couple of websites, which I shall mention in the podcast this week. One's called Climate Optimism and the other one is called something very similar to that. And I think we do need a bit of optimism. It's always a balance. It's a balance between scaring people to death, to the extent they think -- well, it can't be that bad, it won't happen, I don't want to know. And telling people -- well, we can do something and it's under control. And they think, well, I don't have to bother it because it's under control.

I think we tend to err on the catastrophe side, so therefore, if you can actually talk positively and optimistically about the progress to climate mitigation, then it's going to be easier to get the message across. Any thoughts on that?

Catherine: I was just reading a post on LinkedIn from, I think it was somebody who had organized a conference of investment companies, pension funds and that kind of thing. And he was talking about the curse of gradualism and doing things gradually isn't going to gets us where we need to be in 12 years time. They'd focussed the whole conference around this and trying to get people to think about what they could all do in their roles. And they'd concluded that a collective voice was much stronger than just individual companies and so on. So they'd done a a group letter. And I think that can be quite powerful from a company point of view.

But I think going back to Manda's points, people do feel hopeless and are focused on the things that they can do that are this week and more visible so that plastics recycling and cutting down on what you buying in plastic, that kind of thing. But Manda is also right that, that's not enough. So I think perhaps more awareness of what your typical carbon footprint looks like. And if we know that flying, driving and eating meats are the main causes, breaking that down a bit so that people can start to see that, well actually, in the UK say the average person takes, I don't know what it is, one long haul, one short haul flight, that might be the average. So why not do your long haul once every three years and your short haul once every other year and then do staycations. So instead of making it.... And I know that's not enough, but that would start to get people thinking differently. And once people start taking staycations and just considering different choices, then I think it becomes easier to take the next step.

Once you've had a good holiday in the UK, you might think, well let's do this again next year, let's not fly. Because actually we felt quite good about not having those, whatever it was, three tons, four tons of carbon. And the same thing with meat. How little meat do you have to have to considerably reduce the carbon footprint? And what about eating grass fed meat so you know where it's coming from, instead just buy it from the supermarket and it could've come from Brazil and been raised on the feed lots and caused deforestation because of its soy consumption and all the rest of it, than having local pasture fed meat. That kind of thing.

So giving people a bit more information and an idea of what would be a better choice instead of it just being, wear a hair shirt, you can't have anything, your life's going to be miserable -- who's going to buy that?

Anthony: Absolutely. Absolutely. Yes. Yes. Incidentally I read somewhere that if we actually gave up livestock and we ate all the food ourselves, we could support a population 50% greater than it is already.

Manda: No, no, no, no, no, no. We have to get on top of this. If we don't change farming methods and you decide that everyone's going to be a vegan, you're going to have a series of monocultures which will destroyer our biosphere faster than we are currently destroying it. If you think that you're going to support a bigger population. We have to move away from monocultures back to polycultures, or climate change is not going to be the biggest of the problems that we face. The crashing biodiversity is going to crash even faster than it's crashing at the moment, which is why pasture fed beef, particularly... Regenerative farming is my thing and I will endeavour not to go on about it too much. But the whole movement is moving towards sequestering carbon and increasing biodiversity. And we need pasture animals to do this. And if we all move on to veganism and we're growing carrots in great big monocultures then we can forget it. It's not the answer.

Anthony: Well that's really interesting and that's something I'd like to explore in more detail. We've got six minutes left...

Manda: --- but really...

Anthony: Want's to say something as well?

Catherine: Yeah Manda, just to clarify, so are you saying it's not so important to fixate on whether you're going to give up meat or be vegan. It's more about not having processed food and choosing things that are locally grown, regeneratively grown and so on. And then it wouldn't matter if a fair number of the population decided to go vegan, because you wouldn't be buying this kind of mass produced... How many grains is it that we.... It's like six plants, isn't it, that comprise 80% of our diet. So it's more important to have stuff that's local and a wide variety of plants, legumes, pasture fed meat, whatever it is, OK.

Manda: Yes.

Anthony: OK. OK. Well I think we're coming close to a winding up point now because it's....

Manda: Haven't heard from Tom recently, I'm aware he's gone very quiet.

Tom: Lots of interesting points being raised by the rest of you.

Anthony: Yes. Well, have you any thoughts that we haven't covered or anything you'd like to add because we have left you in the corner there because you've got a blank screen, we forget you're there.

Tom: It's such a huge topic, isn't it? I mean the area that I'm trying to focus on, I guess is energy and there's a huge task there and if we don't deal with our energy production, then it's just not going to work basically. I just despair when I hear about these oil and gas companies are continuing to explore for new resources and I just find it incredible. At a time when we just need to stop burning fossil fuels altogether and start this huge rapid transition to renewables, how can they still be talking about looking for new reserves, never mind using up the ones that they already know about?

Anthony: Yes. And there are plans to open a new coal mine in Cumbria aren't there? Is it called cognitive dissonance?

Tom: So I don't know, I just think so much of this...

Catherine: It’s all about party donations.

Manda: Yeah.

Tom: And so much of this is driven by money, obviously. And again, coming back to the flights and all that business and the fact that the companies aren't really paying for the recycling. If the price of flights reflected the true cost, let's actually make people pay the tax on the fuel for a start. And then look at the other costs associated with it. Because we talk about a free market and the free market will resolve everything, but then fossil fuels are being subsidized, left, right, and center, while the subsidies are being cut for solar and wind and things like that. So it's not a fair fight and it's not just being left to market forces. There are people intervening in the wrong direction.

Anthony: Yes, yes. Catherine, anything you'd like to sum up with?

Catherine: No. It would be great to hear more on your podcast sort of aimed at the average person, average citizen, where do you start and how do you find helpful resources that you can kind of share with your family that aren't going to naff off the people who are thinking, but I like my family holiday every year. You know, speaking as someone who has intelligent friends and who just don't get the no flying bit either, but either, it would be good to be able to point people at ways to kind of calculate what was their footprint is says and what are the main things you can do as a person to kind of cut it down? I know you featured somebody a while ago, but I think the number one thing was don't have kids and that might already be too late for lots of people.

Anthony: That's a very controversial study.

Catherine: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Anthony: A lot of double counting and things in that. You're talking about helpful resources for the average person. There's a lady on LinkedIn called Zoe Cohen. I don't know whether you've come across her, but she's done a very interesting article, I think 10 points on how to be a climately responsible, but it's a very well written article. So have a look for that. Manda, where do we go from here?

Manda: Well just to answer Catherine, I just put into our chat on the zoom, there's a book called, "There is No Planet B" by Mike Berners-Lee, who's the brother of the guy who invented the internet. And it's kind of the antidote to Uninhabitable Earth, because he goes through system by system what's wrong and what we can do personally, what we can do to ask our councils to do and what the government can do and what needs international action. It's incredibly useful and really nicely written and he's obviously got a brain the size of the planet and if we could get him on the podcast he would be really interesting.

I think that we need massive structural change in the economy. I think Tom was right that money is pushing us in the wrong direction. Capital is pushing us in the wrong direction. We need fundamental structural change, but we won't get that until enough people realize that we need it so that we can create the political change that we need. But I think the kind of modern economics and the ways... People like Kate Rawoth are looking at how we could shift the economy in a way that doesn't necessarily leave everybody destitute, or leave us in societal breakdown, but changes from a system where we have growth, whether or not people flourish to a system where people flourish and the planet flourishes, whether or not we have growth.

So I think that's immensely important. And I think something that Paul Mason said a long time ago is pick one thing and become really, really expert at it so that you can talk with authority and with intelligence and in a way that uses the kind of emotional intelligence that Extinction Rebellion is bringing. We need to kind of raise the level of our interactions to the point where we're not fighting amygdala to amygdala, midbrain to midbrain, where we're actually having some kind of open hearted, compassionate discussion amongst ourselves, away from the tribalism that has marked pretty much all of our evolution. So it will be hard, but I think we have to do it and I think if we don't do it now then I think Deep Adaptation is on its way. So I would like to believe it's still possible.

Anthony: Yes. Well let's hope the Brexiteers will see reason on the climate change if they won't be open to discussions of other political points.

Manda: This has been fun, let's do it again.

Anthony: Thank you all very much. I think that's been very useful. It's been very interesting. And as I said, I'd like to publish it as an audio tape, on an episode, very soon. I think I'd like to come back to you individually and perhaps take up some of the points that you've brought up and develop them as well.

In fact, as Tom said, it's a big area, it's very complicated. I think I've got 10 topics in this week's podcast. There was only one in last week’s, but there were 10 in the one the week before. And I'm still cutting things out and saying that'll have to go in next week. There is just so much.

But anyway, thank you for your contribution. It's so important and it's so useful. So thanks to you all.

Group: Thank you.

Manda: Thank you for hosting it, well done.

Anthony: OK. You must go and shut up the chickens now.

And there we left it. Thanks for listening and we’d really like your feedback. Please let's have your ideas either via Patreon or MAIL@ANTHONY-DAY.COM . 

That was the Sustainable Futures Report for 2 August and yes I know it's August but there'll be another one next week and I've got plans for another one the week after. There may not be one the week after that, but that'll give you time to catch up.

Have a great weekend, have a great holiday if you're having one and please don't fly too far.

I’m Anthony Day and that's it for now.