Francis Foster

It's partly an economic view.

I also think partly it's a political and cultural view because you are seeing results in the real world, which is increased populism because energy being expensive ruins economies.

And when economies are ruined, people get upset and that has political ramifications.

But I think it's also about...

The conversation around net zero has shifted dramatically in the Western world in the last two or three years.

And a lot of people are now coming out and being critical of it for political reasons.

They essentially sense which way the wind is blowing.

I think there's a lot of that going on as well.

Well, that being the case, I think it'd be interesting to talk about, you mentioned that we are likely to revert to the mean, which is warmer, wetter, as I think you said, and you said a third thing as well, warmer, wetter and something else.

Higher sea levels.

Warmer, wetter and higher sea levels.

which I would argue, based on my very rudimentary understanding of just human society as it is today, given the number of people living on the planet, those things will be disruptive.

And if they are inevitable, all that money that we've been spending trying to stop the inevitable change in climate and sea levels ought to be being spent on making adjustments to the way we live and creating...

all sorts of, you know, the sorts of things they do in Holland to manage sea levels, to protect towns and cities.

Isn't one of the things that's really the tragedy here is there's been a huge misallocation of resources that has impoverished Western countries at the same time as leaving them vulnerable to the very thing that they are trying to prevent but can't.

Well, I took my mum the other day to Pevensey Castle, which is just down the road from London on the south coast.

And you go to one of the towers and they say, this was, you know, this is where they would defend themselves from the sea.

You can't see the sea because it's now seven miles inland or two, I can't remember how many miles, but you can't even remotely even imagine the sea being there because it's so far away.

So this process is natural.

But what I'm asking you Ian is, I think one of the big challenges is we've got to redirect our attention from, oh, we've got to stop runaway climate change to realizing we can't stop climate change because we're not causing it.