Hey, welcome to Stand Energy Man. Happy lunch hour. It's my lunch hour again. Thanks for joining me. Stan Osterman here from the Hawaii Center for Advanced Transportation Technologies, and I've gotten the background here today. The Blue Planet Research Facilities on the Big Island in Poova, Ava, and that's a 85 kilowatt PV array on their laboratory designed by Paul Pontio. And it's a beautiful facility, and if you ever get over to that part of the Big Island and can get up there to take a peek at it, Paul might even be there to give you a tour or something. That's a great facility, and that's where I take a lot of my inspiration for the microgrid work we're doing for the Air Force at Hickam and where I swap a lot of ideas and thoughts with him to try and keep things going here in Hawaii. So welcome, and today we're actually kind of Big Island-centric today. A few weeks ago, I was on the Big Island for Energy Storage Conference and ran into a nice young lady who had an interesting last name that seemed to be the last name of somebody I knew when I was a kid, and it turns out they're sisters, so we had a good time talking about, you know, what knucklehead I was when I was a little, you know, 13, 14, 20-year-old guy. But now she's a big practicing lawyer here in Hawaii and doing all kind of great work in the energy world. So I have Linda Kapuni and I-Rosehill here, and she's going to talk to us and tell us a little bit about what's going on in Hawaii, in the energy world, from a legal perspective, and give us an idea of maybe how we can do things better. Because like I've mentioned before, it's great to have a technical background and have a technical handle on all this energy stuff, but you've got to take a holistic approach. You have to have the finances, you have to have the legal background, you have to have a whole lot of different public relations piece, you have to have a lot of those brought into the picture, or you can fail in any one of those areas. So Linda, thanks for being here. Thank you. I really appreciate you coming out, and I think we're going to have a great show today. So why don't you tell us a little bit about your background, what got you started, especially what got you started in the energy side, and maybe a little bit about your connection to the Big Island. Sure. First of all, I live on the Big Island, and I commute back and forth to Honolulu. So my office is located in Honolulu, but I have a little hobby farm with some alpacas and apple orchard and fun things like that on the Big Island. But I grew up and was raised here. I went to Kamehameha Schools, graduated from there, went to UH, graduated from the law school, but to correct you a little bit, I don't do legal work in that arena. What my company does is government and community relations. So my clients come to me to look at legislation that would harm their projects, or legislation that they want to support, because that would encourage the development of various energies, technologies, or other issues that I represent. And for advice on how to deal with the community, if they're doing a new project or if they're having problems, getting their word out, or the education of their community. Nowadays you can't do a project, a large project, without that consideration of how do you talk to the community and who do you talk to in the community? What's the message? And how do you position it so that they understand what you want to be able to accomplish and why this is good for them? Well, thanks for really clarifying that, because if you live in Hawaii any length of time, you've seen a lot of projects that had a lot of hope and good, best intentions go down the tubes because they didn't really have a good understanding of community feedback and how to present to the community. I know as a National Guardsman, we used to work with the active duty all the time and say, hey, look, before you put something out in public, come and talk to us, let us take it out in the community where we have families living and we know the community, and let us help you get a feel for where you're at first before you do it. And that sounds like you do that professionally for folks that aren't military and want to put projects out there. That's important. When energy things are not just technical, there's a lot of components to it. There's financial, the legal, the public relations. There's a lot of components to it. And there's a lot of misperceptions, particularly when you're looking at sometimes new technology that people aren't familiar with. And as you know, being at that conference, the Big Island is just, there's just so much potential on the Big Island. I think if you looked at the studies that have done so far, the Big Island by itself could be a wind or solar power the whole state. It has the resources to be able to do that. Now, nobody's looking at the cable anymore, but you have to remember long-term that's something you want to keep in mind because as the population grows and the urbanization grows, you may not have the ability to do the kinds of projects you've been able to do on Oahu just because there's no ladder, it's too expensive. And we all know that Oahu has the demand and the neighbor islands have the supply. And most energy, when you're talking energy, and that's what was the whole start of the whole cable deal was how do we get the wind power from Maui or Molokair Lanai over to Oahu where we really need the power. And that's a lot of that discussion we had in Kona on the energy storage. That was one of the things that I really pushed hard to have hydrogen as part of the discussion because if you had to move energy between the Big Island and Honolulu in a battery, the battery would be so big you couldn't float it. So there's other pieces to storage, energy storage besides batteries. And that's why I wanted to make sure that, and I work with Greg Barber to make sure that Paul and a lot of the other folks had some input as other ways of storing energy besides just batteries. And for me, hydrogen's a big one and for Paul, hydrogen's a big part of that. And we envision at some point maybe 20 years from now where the Big Island could be making hydrogen, making liquid hydrogen and exporting it to the Orient or to Pacific Islands and it could actually be exporting energy. Can you imagine Hawaii exporting energy like instead of oil but we're exporting hydrogen in liquid form to other countries? Oh, that's incredible. Yeah, so Hawaii could go from an economy that's basically importing all their energy to an economy where we're actually exporting quite a bit of energy. See, and it takes kind of that long-term thinking even though you may not be ready to do it now and it takes a while in the development of the energy processes to get where it's economical or get where it works the way it's supposed to. But it takes that forward-looking thinking to see way out there. I mean, when I started with government, when I came out of law school, Governor Ariyoshi appointed me as deputy director for the Department of Planning and Economic Development and Governor Burns, previous to that, had started NELA. They're not that old. Oh, yes. Fortunately, yes. But NELA was at its beginning stages and NELA happened to be one of the agencies that was under my jurisdiction as economic development deputy director. So I was there when the first pipes were put in and the mishaps that occurred originally with some of them. I saw the first experimentations when they were bringing in the cold water and having the water condense on the pipes and then it would water strawberry plants that at that time John Craven was doing. But now coming back as a board member, because as you know I was recently appointing back to the board, there's so much that has occurred in the 30 years, but it took somebody way back, Governor Burns' time, to envision that that would be a good place to do it, that there was potential in the energy arena and that there was potential in the deep, cold ocean seawater. So back when you were doing that, was there a lot of pushback from the local community on the NELA effort? Not really, not that I recall. In fact, I did the permitting for the host park side of it and it required going before the council and meeting with the mayor and those kinds of political things that you had to do to get the permits through. And no, we did not get a lot of pushback. First of all, you have to remember, that was a pretty barren area, there wasn't much there at the time and you were using a resource that nobody was using at the time so it wasn't a competing issue. I think the only thing at that time that was of concern was that if you put this NELA into position, other developments along the coast, you had to be very careful what they were so that they didn't pollute the water, that you didn't have runoff and you didn't have other things that might affect the purity of the deep ocean sea water for that resource. Well, things certainly have changed and we've had experience recently with SuperFairy and with 30 meter telescope and things get really controversial and it's really frustrating, I know for the business community and for a lot of folks that we spend a lot of energy trying to plan these things out and at the last minute, they get a lot of negative attention and sometimes ultimately fail. How can we do a better job with all your experience? What recommendation can we get from you that we'll get these projects done, start it the right way and head it the right way and get them to fruition so we can actually take advantage of some of these things? The model, if you will, of how you go about these projects has evolved during the years. Early on, developers would come in with a project and it'd be fully developed and then they'd go out to the community and they'd tell them what they were going to do and actually way back, they got away with it because we didn't have a real questioning community. We didn't have the controversy that's out there now and local people don't speak up readily. We have a changing demographic particularly on the neighbor islands. We have people that are a lot more aggressive that speak up more readily so nowadays you really don't want to plan out your whole project. So you get a concept. You kind of know the parameters. You know the kind of timing you want although the timing will never match up with the permitting process and a budget. And what you really want to do is gather up people within the opinion leaders of the community that you're going to be dealing with and fill them out in the very beginning, involve them at the very beginning. Not to say that you have them change your project or build it for you or manipulate how it should be but if you can take into consideration very early on in the project what it is their concerns are you can incorporate those things in and you can mitigate some of those concerns. I think a prime example which came to mind recently was you've been working in hydrogen and they had that hydrogen project that they were going to, the fueling station they were putting at Nelhop. And the next location was up front. At Sopogee. Yeah, by Sopogee. And it was next to the academy, a school. And I had heard about this a while back actually before I got on the Nelhop board. I have friends who worked on the hydrogen project and they told me that there was some issues there. And the issue really was that nobody had talked to the school and the parents at the school and the other community. When they hear hydrogen facility not being familiar with that kind of process or the technology the thought is hydrogen bomb this thing is going to explode. Our kids are right next door. That's a concern. So they didn't do the appropriate lay work to be able to do it where they wanted to do it. As a result, they've changed the location for where it is but you wouldn't have had to go through that you wouldn't have had to or you would have selected a better location from the get-go and not wasted all that time. What I really liked when we went on the tour the storage energy tour was the demonstration that Blue Planet did about hydrogen. That it wasn't flammable that it rises in the air so quickly that it can't explode. I really think that for that technology for example to succeed in the future I would love to see a program put in place in the schools very early that looks and explains to children and their parents what are the technologies that are coming up in the same way they did with an anti-smoking campaign or sustainability in agriculture so that people, children will eat healthier those kinds of things you need to do the same thing in the energy arena because the energy technologies are changing so quickly unless you can explain it to them so they understand why it's so important and to have it in their backyard we're going to meet resistance all along the way. I did a show actually we went on the tour at Blue Planet Research over in Puvava and I actually videotaped Paul doing some of those demonstrations and put it on the show here just so people could look at it and hydrogen is like any other energy storage component where you put energy together and it does have to be handled properly and you don't have problems with it if you don't, you can have a very flammable mixture and explosive mixture with hydrogen and oxygen but if you handle it properly and if you understand the properties of the hydrogen it's much safer than most people think in fact most firefighters and most engineers that work in that field that I've talked to they would rather, much rather deal with hydrogen and gasoline or even pure oxygen they're terrified of it but they'll work with hydrogen all day long and people go oxygen don't we breathe oxygen, you know it's in the air, you do breathe it but it still can be very dangerous so you're right, it is an education thing and it's something we have to get out in front of we're coming up on a break here we're going to take a quick break and we'll be back with Linda Rosehill in a few minutes and talk some more about Big Island Energy and what we can do over there Aloha everyone, I'm Maria Mera and I invite you to my bilingual show Viva Hawaii every other Monday at 3pm we are here to show you news, issues and events local and around the world join me Aloha, how you doing? Welcome to Ibaachitak I'm here at Gordo the Texar on Think Tech, Hawaii and I'm here with my good old buddy Andrew the security guy Hey everybody, how you doing? Aloha Good to have Andrew here in the house Please join us every Friday from 1 to 10 to follow us up on YouTube and remember as we say at the end of every show How you doing? I pity the fool who ain't watching this show at 12 o'clock on Friday afternoon Stan the energy man watch it Hey welcome back to my lunch hour Stan the energy man here with Linda Rosehill who kind of splits her time between the big island and Honolulu I won't tell her to tell you which one she likes better because guys here in Honolulu might not like it but thanks for being here with us again today You know we did learn a lot at that energy storage conference at Nelha and Nelha's got some interesting things going on there but when I first got into this job here I really thought of energy in a fairly narrow perspective I thought of it as like electric grid power and gasoline and diesel for your cars and as I grew into what I do I began to understand that that energy is all around us it's water on the high end of a hill or whether it's whether it's wind blowing past you or sunlight hitting the ground or just heat from the volcano or the energy is all there it's all in a different form but it's there already so why are we bringing in all this fossil fuel when we have so much energy all around us whether it's geothermal, ocean thermal whether it's solar, wind we have all those things we're so blessed with all these things why are we doing it? so some of the things going on at Nelha in conjunction with that conference was some new breaking energy storage technology are you familiar with any of the things they're trying to do? one of them in particular kind of sticks in my mind because I thought it was novel and it's a project wherein they use the sun's energy focused on mirrors to create heat that then makes energy that's used is put into a storage system the storage system being made up of rocks and then the case that they're looking at it's going to be lava rock you heat the lava rock up and then the lava rock during the night provides the energy so I mean that's to me a perfect example of using a resource that's so abundant and I know the initial description it was much less expensive than PV's and some of the other storage that's available but we talked about flow batteries I learned a lot about batteries, I'm not an engineer so I'm learning a lot but just looking at all those various opportunities and the fact that Nelha has a storage test project where they look at all the various options and see what works, what doesn't work what the parameters are I think that's what we really need that kind of research to be able to go commercial and use it on a bigger scale you know so that's cutting edge of course we have an OTEC project there and OTEC was there from the get go, I mean I remember the original OTEC projects when we started out it's become more sophisticated perhaps more economical and I think they're looking at having commercial application more readily now than it did way back then so you're right we have resources that we should absolutely use, one of my clients on Kauai, I represent Kauai Island Utility Co-op we're looking at hydro pump storage because you have these old reservoirs that were there from the plantation days and you have them at varying elevations where you can use that differentiation and elevation to have the water come down during the day and pump it back up at night and run it down through generators so then it becomes essentially firm power you know and that's always been an issue of course with alternate energy because you've got it doing particular times of the day but you don't have it at night unless you have the storage capability so that's something that's exciting and it actually can be done on all of the islands. Yeah pump hydro is one of those great especially when you need a lot of power and you need it for a long duration I have a great chart that I use when I brief people about different kinds of energy storage and on the quick reacting side you have capacitors and batteries and that gives you like microseconds out to minutes maybe even hours and then you've got your batteries which are more in minutes to hours maybe even a day and then you got flow batteries which start in the hours and go out to maybe more than a day and then get you up to a megawatt but then you have the real long term storage and that's where the hydrogen and the pumped hydro and even compressed air and you mentioned we're fortunate because we have these reservoirs already from the agriculture times that we can use and that's one of the requirements it's like pumped hydro works really well if you've got the topography and if you live in a flat desert pumped hydro is not going to do anything for you but as long as you match it to your local conditions and what you happen to have already pumped hydro is perfect and so it gives you the chance when you have excess energy from all the solar you use it to move the water and then when you don't have the solar power you use the gravity to give to generate your power at night the beauty of it is too that it's a closed system so you're not using the water it's just rotating back and forth within the system so the only thing you use as far as water is what's evaporated which is relatively minor considering most of those reservoirs are open anyway and there's evaporation in this case you're using it to something that's really beneficial and that would bring the cost per kilowatt hour down considerably but you've got to be looking at all of these different options in order to get off of oil if the goal by Hawaii state government and by all of us is to get off of oil or less dependent on oil you have to look at what are all the tools that are necessary and the other thing you need to look at is how do you facilitate those projects within the governmental process whether it's looking at the kinds of permits that are necessary and trying to make it less cumbersome you always going to have some of the environmental issues that you're going to have to address that in and of itself is a mountain to climb and expensive but what can we do in government for example or in government policy making that will facilitate that development for the longest time the PUC for example giving them the resources to be able to move things a little faster on the docket having the community understand some of it so maybe some of the protests that are coming up will be there because they understand it better what are the public policies that need to be put in place long term that will facilitate these kinds of things and one of the things looked at by PUC was should you be separating out generation distribution that has not been addressed yet particularly because we went through the next era deal and I think that had to be handled before you could move on to the planning docket and all the other things that they're looking at but certainly if you're going to separate it out then you have to be able to come out with policies via PUC via legislation or whatever rule making that will facilitate the development of the generation part of it I don't think people understand that connection that you're trying to make because you have a lot of people that really at this point they're a little frustrated especially if they've invested in PV and they can't connect to HECO and their reaction is then get me off and that may sound great at first but if you come off who's paying for the lines that go to their neighborhood anyway it becomes more of a burden for all the neighbors who remain connected that have to pay that cost if everybody migrated away from the grid everybody or even 50% the other 50% would be paying for all that infrastructure and when it's all lumped together in one kilowatt hour rate it's transparent you don't see it and for you know why for example that's been the argument against wheeling for example the utilities control all of the infrastructure and right now you cannot transport electricity across TMKs because you're not permitted to do that in the law if you wanted to for example pursue the idea of microgrids which has been coming up at the legislature and over and lots of people want to be able to do that they need to be able to address the wheeling problem they're going to have to address how do you deal with Hico Helco and all the utilities for the use of those lines the transmission not the production so how do you separate that out what are the appropriate fees so that the utility doesn't go under because the thing you have to remember is that utility as a public utility has a mandate to be able to provide reliable power firm power across the board you know so it's not as easy as just well I want to do this I'll take my ball and my marbles and go someplace else you know we want to make sure that our utilities stay healthy and that there's this balance that doesn't make them go under but at the same time allows for new technologies to come on board and to flourish and to replace oil you know so that's I think the challenge from a public policy standpoint that the PUC the legislature and the rest are wrestling and have to wrestle with but you got to have those discussions now unfortunately some of these discussions should have happened a while back and I got way laid a little bit because of the next era arrangement and all of it being in PUC but now you're playing catch up nobody could come on board tomorrow with a micro grid or anything like that because you don't have the policies in place to be able to do it that's interesting you mentioned that I agree and we're bringing one other aspect here we've been talking about the grid and we've been talking about 40% of the fossil fuels used other 60% transportation and so that's like my that's where I look at transportation things and I go yeah well now I'm trying to get transportation off of fossil fuel and the grid is starting to become more and more fossil fuel negative I'm starting to compete with renewable energy for transportation how do I solve my energy problems in transportation there's policies in that area that need to come up and there's solutions that work for both transportation and the grid so I'm hoping that the PUC and the government sector overall the energy office and the governor's office they all look at these solutions in a more ecosystem type of look not holistic look not just does it pencil out does it make sense in the long term and do we start changing our policies and maybe changing the way our electric grid is structured and the policies that direct you know rates and changes and infrastructure versus power generation power purchase agreements all those things need to be addressed now it's like trying to solve healthcare without talking about tort reform or something I mean you're just kind of wasting your time you don't always have all the players at the table and that's a big issue I mean very seldom do we have or has government had the forethought or ability to bring the right players to the table to say okay this is what we want to do and I don't mean a plan because my goodness there's been more plans and studies and things in government that you could ever believe but some way to be able to bring these ideas together coordinated in some fashion and have some real direction on what's needed if you want to get from A to B what are the public policies or what are the laws that need to be changed to get from A to B and quite frankly government in and of itself is not able to do it's private sector who's doing those projects who knows what they need to take in the way of money and resources to get us there that has to have input into that discussion okay so now that we have the answer I can go right to Governor Egan and just tell him straight up here's how we do it you got Lindy here me just call us up we'll give you all the solutions because we got to figure it out but believe it or not Linda we've we've gone through a half hour talking about all this stuff and it goes by really quick and I think it's been a great discussion and I appreciate your time here thank you and the perspective that we don't we tend to not avoid but we tend to overlook a lot is not the technical piece but these other pieces the public relations piece the legal piece the bigger policy pieces so thanks very much for being here talking to us about it and we'll have to have you come back again after we have re-energized the PUC and the public sector to get them all together talk about ag I love to talk about ag okay we'll have you back again so thanks Linda I appreciate it


Hello everybody welcome back to another Adobe Illustrator CC 2021 tutorial. In this one I'm going to show you how to create a repeating pattern or a repeating grid as we're now sort of calling it in the Illustrator world. So let me show you how it's done. The first step I've gone ahead and created three shapes. If you don't know how to create shapes just go over here to the shape tool. Select the shape that you want in this case let's select an ellipse and create the shape and that's it. I created three of them and the three different colors. The next step I want to select the three that are going into the pattern. So I'm going to make a pattern out of these three different shapes. I'm going to go to object and I'm going to ungroup them and then I'm going to group them. Basically you have to group the objects. I had already grouped them that's why I ungroup them. So the first step object group. The next step we want to go to object and then we're going to go down here a little bit and you're going to see a few options. One of them is repeat grid. This is the one we want. It automatically starts to fill out the grid for you and it basically just shows you what you can do. So I'm going to show you real quickly here. You can increase the amount in the grid. So let's say I wanted it to go to the edge of the red rectangle and then I want to pull it down. Okay. Now we'll go to the edge of that rectangle. So you'll see here we've now created a grid. We can now move these sliders so that we can expand them out or we can contract them depending on again what your grid will kind of look you're going for. I'm just going to go with a standard one like this. And also you can make a few other adjustments like I can increase the size of it. You can increase and decrease the number of items in the grid. So you can go way down to like cool looking. That's actually kind of good looking or you can go all the way back up to normal let go and you'll see that you've now started creating grids and you're adjusting the grids or the patterns as you see fit in Adobe Illustrator. This is very easy to do now. That's it guys. Thanks for watching this tutorial. Be back soon with some more stuff.


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Clostrum, I'll never stop taking it. I do not regret this product, but I do think. Hey, what's up guys, it's Josh here. Today I want to do a little review on this USA Bread Clostrum that I found on Amazon for pretty cheap. I think it was about like 15 bucks. I don't know if you guys have been following my channel but Clostrum is one of my favorite supplements ever. Clostrum seems to have so many benefits that I could not list them in one video. I've said that several times. It's probably the best thing that I found to naturally help my skin. It almost seems like it anti-ages my skin. And then at the same time, it feels like my joints feel a little bit better. I feel like I have a little bit more strength in the gym. I feel like I have about 10% more endurance. For me, it's just gonna take kind of like as an all over supplement. It helps so many things. Almost every organ in the body, this probably would help. I can't guarantee it, but it probably would. Almost every ailment too. We have this USA Bread Clostrum. Now normally Clostrum, I think it's about 25 to 30% of the amunial globins or something or like the really potent active ingredients within Clostrum. This one only has 15%, which is a little bit lower compared to the other ones. When I was taking this, it did seem a little bit lighter. I don't wanna say that I didn't feel anything. I would take this very much over nothing, but especially with that 15%, it does not surprise me. And on top of that, I usually take it in big scoops. There's a chance that because it's capsules, I will have taken less of it. I don't wanna say this brand is worthless, but I just would probably go with another brand of Clostrum. I would probably look to get like at least 25 to 30% of the active ingredients. They usually list them on there. One of my favorites is sovereign laboratories, as always, as well as pure velvet Clostrum. I really did enjoy that one. I really do highly recommend that everybody everywhere try Clostrum. I mean, I can't really think of a time that it wouldn't come in handy. Apparently it contains every nutrient the body needs ever, which is just a crazy statement to make, but Clostrum, I'll never stop taking it. I do not regret this product, but I do think there's probably a couple stronger products on the market. But anyways, guys, if you tried this USA bread Clostrum, I'd be very interested to see what you think. Have you tried Clostrum? Have you not tried Clostrum? And if you have, let me know a brand you're taking one in the road of 50,000 subscribers and I couldn't do it without any of you guys. I hope you guys are the best. Having a great day out here. Hopefully having a great day at home. See you on the next video. Peace.


Yeah, yeah, you know, I feel like I'm definitely getting a good opportunity, you know, I feel like the coaches believe in me, you know, I just got to keep pushing myself. Some of the advantages I feel like just experience, you know, I got some, I got some good playing time last year. You know, I feel like just learning little, little tricks of the trade. Definitely playing with Dayquan Jones and Jeff, you know, you know, they really helped me out a lot. So just the little things they taught me. Confident, yeah, yeah, I'm feeling a lot more confident in my ability, you know, all the work we put in, you know, just having coaches believe in me makes you believe in yourself more. So I hope the bonus, I mean, I learned, I learned, I learned unbelievable information from Dayquan, you know, just everything. Like as far as playing like the proper hand placement, you know, like the way like my first step, you know, formations, you know, just like, he just, he just took a lot of time to invest into me. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I did play basketball. I played basketball since I was seven all the way up to my senior year of high school. So now I always played basketball. I came from a basketball family. So I always played basketball. I didn't play football until my junior year of high school.


Hello, Columbia, and welcome to This Week in the City, where we bring you highlights from the Public Relations Media and Marketing Department with the City of Columbia. This week in the city, the Economic and Community Development Committee meeting will be held on Tuesday, December 13th at 1 p.m. The meeting will be held at City Hall in the Mayor's Conference Room, located on the 2nd floor. For agenda items, please visit our website at columbiasc.gov. On Wednesday, December 14th, the short-term rental ad hoc committee meeting will be held at 4 p.m. in Council Chambers, located at City Hall, 1737 Main Street. For agenda items regarding this meeting, please visit our website at columbiasc.gov. On December 15th, the Design Development Review Commission will meet at 4 p.m. at City Hall in Council Chambers on the 3rd floor. This meeting will be a hybrid, meaning that you can watch it live via stream on our website and our YouTube channel, or you may attend the meeting in person. For agenda items for the Design Development Review Commission meeting, please visit our website at columbiasc.gov. On December 16th, the Columbia Fire Department will host Firefighters Feeding Families, which is a holiday food drive that will be held from 9 a.m. until 6 p.m. Donated items can be dropped off at Columbia Fire Department headquarters located at 1800 Laurel Street. Again, from 9 a.m. until 6 p.m. on Friday, December 16th, come to the Columbia Fire Department headquarters at 1800 Laurel Street to donate food items that will go to those who are in most need in our community. Friday, December 16th is also time for Food Truck Fridays. Food Truck Friday will be held from 11 a.m. until 3 p.m. at 2300 Bull Street in the parking lot of the REI Co-op. Vendors for this Friday include K&C's Kitchen and also Dogs on the Run. Come out again between 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. to try some delicious treats from local Food Truck vendors. Well, Columbia, that wraps up the highlights for this week in the City. We are happy to bring you highlights from the Public Relations, Media and Marketing Department. Please contact us if you have any questions by calling 545-3020 or email us at pio at columbiasc.gov. You can also use that same email address to join our email list and receive weekly email bulletins as well as our monthly newsletters. You can stay connected also by following us on social media on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram and of course by watching City TV on Spectrum Channel 1301 and on Roku and Amazon Fire TV. Thank you for watching and we hope you have a great week in the City.


First of all, thank you to Shirar for coming and joining us today. We will appreciate taking time to come and discuss these very important issues with us. I think it is an important issue. There is often an unfair criticism made of Marxist that all we care about is discussing the economy and revolution and class struggles and things like that. As we have discussed over the course of this weekend, Marxism is a very broad set of ideas that looks at the broader, wider questions, and I think the environment is one of the most important questions. It is the future of the planet and humanity. In fact, we can apply a Marxist analysis to the question environment to help us understand the problem and the solution. Actually, the lessons we learn from looking at economic crises, from looking at the class struggles going on today, I think actually help us understand how to analyse and solve the environmental problems. What we can definitely see for sure so far is that capitalism has been completely unable to solve environmental questions, particularly obviously the enormous issue of climate change, which is the focus of today's discussion. I would say not only can capitalism not solve these things, but it is actually really responsible for them in the first place. First of all, we should say what we mean by capitalism. Capitalism, from a Marxist perspective, is a system of private ownership over the technology and the means of production in society. It is a system where basically production is for profit rather than for social needs, where everything is left to the market to decide, the anarchy of the market. There is no overall plan of what is produced, of how we produce, and really it is this anarchy, this competition that forces the different capitalists, despite the best of intentions they may have or what their personal morality is. Despite their individual characteristic, it forces all the capitalists, Marx points out, in capital, to cut their costs at all costs, to drive down not just wages and living standards, but obviously get rid of any regulations, any standards that get in the way of the profits. It is a real race to the bottom really, not only in terms of living standards, but obviously environmental conditions also. So far we see today that the market mechanisms, the attempts to find a solution within capitalism have completely failed. The attempt to commodify carbon and turn carbon dioxide and emissions into a commodity themselves. You have had the complete collapse of trading schemes like the EU emissions trading scheme, where they have attempted to turn carbon dioxide into a tradable commodity. On the one hand there was a massive oversupply of carbon credits because of lobbying and pressure by big business, but on the other hand the recession caused a massive slump in demand and basically the price of these carbon credits collapsed and they have become basically completely worthless and meaningless. Again shows you the anarchy of the market really unable to solve these problems. At the same time I would say we see a complete failure of basically international leaders to be able to do anything. We are constantly meeting at these global climate summits where you fly across the world emitting carbon dioxide to get there, sit in nice air conditioned rooms and then waffle away producing a lot of hot air in the process. All they ever really seem to end up doing is agreeing that they need to agree on agreeing sometime in the future and then when they come to actually try and make a decision they end up disagreeing over how they are actually going to do this. So you see nothing really come of this and I think a lot of people in the climate change movement today can see the complete impotence of these political leaders to address something that is an international problem. All of these leaders ultimately I would say are tied down by one of the fundamental limits of capitalism which is the nation state, the fact that all these different countries are trying to basically protect the profits of their own individual capitalist and trying to export the crisis, not only the economic crisis but the environmental crisis elsewhere, make others pay for the environmental crisis. So you see people talking about how carbon emissions have been reduced in Britain since the early 90s but a large part of that is basically moving production elsewhere and then blaming those countries actually for being high polluted such as China obviously being the obvious case. We pay countries like Brazil or Indonesia to stop chopping down their trees but only so that the main capitalist powers here can carry on polluting. In other words what we have is really an international problem but a barrier of the nation state that means that it can't resolve these very problems. Nation states haven't always existed we should point out, they were a creation of capitalism and it's the creation of nation states to basically their role was to protect and it still is to this day to protect the profits of their own capitalist and if you ever think that globalization has gotten rid of this problem then just ask yourself in 2008 what did the different political leaders do? They basically saved the local capitalists, the big bankers, the big car companies, all of these came running to the protection of the local state and government in order to bail them out. But not only do we see the failure of the market, we also see even the failure of the attempts for governments on a capitalist basis on a top down kind of Keynesian basis if you like to try and resolve the problems. You see green deal politics not really taking anything forwards, Keynesian style measures of taxation spending regulation in order to promote green industries and green jobs and so far this is not really taking off in any meaningful way. The reason is that these kinds of Keynesian green policies suffer from the same problems that Keynesian policies in general do which is that capitalism is in crisis. There has been an enormous transfer of private debt into public debt and governments are already up to their eyeballs basically in this public debt so there is nothing for them to be able to spend on the green technologies and green jobs that we need. So far from being able to invest and spend, actually governments at this time as we see across Europe and in Britain of carrying out massive austerity are being told by the market that they need to chop, chop, chop. Fundamentally it comes down to the problem that governments don't really have any money of their own, they've only got what they can raise in taxes and therefore it comes down to a simple question as with the economic crisis. It's a question of who pays, a class question in that respect, who is going to pay for the things that we need to do in order to avert climate change. Now so far it sounds like I've painted a very pessimistic picture capitalism hasn't done this, capitalism hasn't done that, well fair enough but what's the alternative, what's the solution. Now if you read Marx in particular there's a good quote in his contribution to a critique of political economy where he says quote, Mankind inevitably sets itself only such tasks is able to solve since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation. In other words what Marx is saying here is we only have a really perceived of a problem in society when already the material conditions have grown within society to go about solving that problem. In other words today in regards to the environmental question and climate change in particular it's only when we actually started realising the problems of climate change that capitalism by that point had already created the means by which we could solve these very problems. We have a knowledge now of the problem facing us but we also now have the technologies and the wealth in society to actually go about addressing these problems. For example take the example of money, I've said governments don't have the money to solve this problem but the point is obviously the wealth does exist out there but it's concentrated in the hands of a tiny few of private individuals. One only has to look at the staggering statistics of inequality produced by charities like Oxfam where 85 billionaires I think it was in 2013 controlled as much wealth as the bottom half of the world's population. Obviously that wealth that exists out there and could be used will only be used under capitalism if it can be invested to make a profit. Currently you have something like 600 billion worldwide spent by fossil fuel companies in searching for new sources of oil, gas and coal and so forth and there's 600 billion more actually spent by the capitalist governments across the world subsidising these very industries. That's not to mention obviously the trillions being spent worldwide on military and weapons where what do we do with these? We go and invade countries which have enormous amounts of deserts where we could be putting solar panels but instead we drill below the sand to get the oil underneath and spend millions on the military means in order to invade the countries to do so. And on top of that I would say even more fundamental within capitalism is the fact that there is trillions sitting idle in the bank accounts of these big businesses of the rich that isn't being used, that isn't being invested, that isn't being put to productive use and to solve these societal problems. You have 750 billion in the bank accounts of big business in Britain, you have something like $2 trillion in the US that sits idle, Apple alone sits on $200 billion that it doesn't invest. So the point is under capitalism the money is there, it just sits idle because of the lack of profitability for the capitalist. And I should also say as someone who used to be involved in environmental engineering research, my previous history if you like before being full time revolutionary was as an environmental engineer and I can tell you for a fact that the technology exists to solve these problems. But again it's not a scientific problem, it's the real problem is the question of ownership, it's the barrier of private ownership. Obviously there's the private ownership of ideas themselves, intellectual property rights whereby different companies basically again because of competition different companies are set against each other to create technology and they can't share what should be a global resource, the ideas that humanity has created and rather than coordinating investment and coordinating efforts and intellectual efforts to solve these problems instead companies are set against each other and the only people who ever benefit from that really are the lawyers who make billions in the court cases when these different companies sue each other. The other thing you should add in terms of technology, there is no one technology, there is no one silver bullet that's going to solve these problems rather there's multiple technologies that if integrated together as part of a plan of production could go about solving these things. Whether it's combining renewable energies where obviously the sun doesn't always shine at the same time as when you need energy in your house but if you were integrating houses with electric cars with renewable energies you could store these things and there'd be an integrated plan that could be far more efficient than what we have at the moment. Obviously such an integrated plan requires a plan and how can that be possible under private ownership, under the competition and anarchy of capitalism where everyone is set against each other, all these companies are involved in competition with one another. So the means to solve these problems obviously exists, it's not a question actually of scarcity in society, there's clearly enough food for example in the world to feed the world's population but as Mark's pointed out it's not a problem of production but of distribution. Mark's notes in the Communist Manifesto for example he says the famines we see under capitalism are unique in the history of mankind because there are no longer a case of famine where there's not enough to go around but rather there's too much over production, too much commerce, too much industry, too much means of subsistence. In other words there's poverty amidst plenty, that's the only situation that capitalism knows because capitalism doesn't recognise social needs when it talks about demand, what it means is the ability to pay, the money that's in your wallet, not the needs of the belly and that sense the famines we see today for example are not natural disasters, they're entirely man made and in fact most of the time when you see famines it's actually in countries that are net exporters of food. More precisely they're not man made, they're capitalist made I should add and in fact I would go so far as to say there's no such thing really in society today as a natural disaster, obviously there are certain accidental events in a whoopsie daisy sort of way but as in accidental in the sense of whether a climate event happens here or there or any particular time we can't predict these things. With any particular accuracy but obviously the fact that there are climate related events hitting the planet all the time whether it's flooding or droughts and so forth but the impacts they have are not natural, the impacts they have on society are entirely due to economic development. How is it that you've got a country like Bangladesh where millions of people are at threat of drowning and flooding all the time but a country like Holland is half underwater and no one even seems to notice. The point is it's a question of economic development, the countries like Bangladesh through centuries of colonialisation of imperialism, of capitalism have been kept underdeveloped whilst obviously the advanced capitalist countries are able to resolve these problems more easily as they arise. So the thing I'm trying to emphasise here is that the problem really isn't financial, it's not scientific, the money and the technology exist. The question is as I said earlier a question of private ownership, it's a class question about who owns and controls the wealth and the technology in society. At the end of the day you can't plan what you don't control and you can't control what you don't own. So I would say as a Marxist and Marxist say in general the fundamental question has to be eliminating this barrier. The barrier of private ownership has to be about the fundamental demand has to be to take the wealth and technology that exists out of private hands and put it under a common rational democratic plan of production. This is what we mean as Marxist by a revolution. It means a fundamental transformation of society, a revolutionary change in how we run and organise and plan society. Now there's many good intention climate scientists and environmental activists I would say in the movement today, but the problem is a lot of the time you see the whole approach, the whole strategy of these people is to imagine that we can persuade the capitalists and the world leaders that are out there through kind of motive or moral language and arguments. Basically fundamentally we've got to appeal to people on the idea that an urgent appeal, if we don't act now then it's going to be too late in the future. This is the whole tone of if you read even the official reports from the UN, the international panel of climate change, the latest report is all along this line of we've got to do something now. We urgently need to act an urgent appeal to the world leaders and the ruling class. But the problem is with this approach is that you can't expect to have a rational debate with people who defend an entirely irrational system. I mean look at the irrationality of capitalism that confronts us every day. We have a system whereby we have homelessness alongside empty mansions. We have a system whereby there's mass unemployment alongside people who have to work two or three jobs and 50 or 60 hours a week. We have austerity on the one hand alongside clearly seeing that the rich are getting richer and there's enormous amount of wealth in society. The point is, as I said, capitalism isn't about morality, it's not about rationality even. It's about benefiting the tiny few. We can't persuade really these people with such arguments and even I would go further to say you can't persuade such people with economic arguments either in the sense that you read reports like the Stern report from about a decade ago and other ones such similar recently. It's all about costs and benefits of averting climate change. If we do something now, how much money in terms of impacts would it save in the future? But the problem is that, again, the ruling class doesn't listen to such rational economic arguments. In fact, this was pointed out even by one of the scientists on the international panel of climate change who got admonished for speaking out on his views. But he said, it's a guy called Professor Richard Toll, he's at the University of Sussex. He said, look, you're not going to persuade people with economic arguments about the impacts of climate change because the governments you're appealing to are already making even worse impacts on living standards to their populations through austerity than even the worst predictions of climate change. In other words, how are you going to go and tell the government in Spain, for example, about the dramatic effect of climate change? How are you going to convince them otherwise about the economic costs of climate change when these very same government that for the benefit of the capitalist is already cutting living standards far worse than even these worse impacts? So we can't expect apocalyptic scenarios to divert the actions of the capitalist. In fact, it's by looking at what's going on in particularly, for example, in Greece, that we can see this very problem.  When we look at Greece right now and the events taking place this very moment, we can see that the governments aren't in control of their own economy, of the lives of their own people, that it's all being left down really to the real dictatorship, which is the dictatorship of the bankers, of capital, who really decide all the policies and the real decisions in society, particularly over, obviously, questions of job and investment. Again, you can't control what you don't own. Really, to sum it up, we can't expect to be able to persuade the capitalist to save this planet because they already live on an entirely different planet from the rest of us. They already live in a world of air-conditioned mawls, of sunny beaches and private islands, where they're not going to be affected by these things at all. In that sense, there's really no such thing as responsible or green capitalism. The cuts and austerity we see today aren't ideological. It's not just a question of neoliberalism or the nasty Tories here in Britain. All of the austerity we see across the world today, and Britain as well, is no exception to this. All of this flows from the laws and the logic of capitalism itself. It flows from the question of private ownership, of competition, production for profit, and if you accept capitalism, you have to accept the laws and logic of capitalism. You have to accept the austerity that flows for it. It's excellent, I would say, that the Greens have risen in popularity and membership. It's an excellent development because it shows that there's people looking for something far to the left of labour. Obviously, the popularity of leaders like Jeremy Corbyn for labour is a similar example. It shows that an anti-austerity programme that's aimed at making the rich pay for the crisis. It shows that that is an extremely attractive programme for young people today, and it shows that people are looking for a real left alternative. Obviously, the huge turnout last weekend, which was supported by the Green Party, which itself had an enormous turnout, all of this shows the radicalisation that exists and the people looking for a genuine alternative to austerity and to capitalism. I would also say that a true friend points out the problems that lie ahead. As I said, there can be no responsible capitalism, and we need to go beyond demands for just taxing the rich, which in any case just leads to a capital strike and a strike of investment. We need to be putting forward, as I said, demands to actually take real control over the economy, to nationalise the banks, put these under democratic control, to open up the books on big business to see who really isn't paying their fair share and to put these industries under workers' control in order to do so. The fact is you can't just regulate industry. In fact, Ed Miliband saw that before the election when he tried to regulate the energy industry, promising energy price freezes. What was the result? It was actually the opposite of what he intended, where actually suddenly all the energy companies said, well, if you do this, there'll be no investment in energy and the lights will go out, or we'll just raise the prices before you even get into power. In other words, you see the attempts to regulate capitalism and try and reform it actually just end up leading to the opposite of what it intends to. We need to be putting forward demands to take control over the main levers of the economy and to use these to implement a green plan of production, and that means transport, construction, housing, energy and obviously the banks which have the money to fund them. It's not just about taxing the rich to redistribute the wealth. It has to be about taking over the means by which the wealth in society is created. So we can go about tackling the crisis of living standards and obviously the climate crisis and the crisis of the environment also. I'll leave it there. Thanks very much for inviting the Green Party to speak today. I'm very much looking forward to doing so and to the ensuing debate, and Adam has already provided much food for stimulation and reflection. There are three main areas that I want to cover in this short presentation. Firstly, I'd quite like us to remind ourselves what exactly the environmental stroke climate change problem is and how urgent that's become. Secondly, I'd like to look a little bit about what I might describe as our current social dysfunction, particularly in the guise of overconsumption. And thirdly, I'd like to suggest or have us think about what social transformation might look like. So firstly on climate change itself, I think it's notable that we don't have here on the panel our friend the climate change denier or if we're lucky the climate change skeptic, which isn't quite the same proposition. That's a kind of false bias that the media like to entertain and wheel in. There is a scientific consensus about the happening of climate change, of man made, person made, but generally as men who are responsible for a lot of it, overconsumption and climate change impacts, particularly post industrial revolution. And you can look at the graphs either they're exponential or very exponential in terms of temperature increase and carbon production levels globally. And it's often said that we need to keep ourselves within a two degrees increase, two degrees Celsius increase. Some say that if we stop to all carbon production now, carbon consumption, carbon production, there's enough lag in the system that we're already going over that mark anyway into the future. If somehow the human race regrettable though that would be were wiped out now, we might still already be heading for that greater than two degrees C increase. So the problem is pressing, it's pretty much urgent. I think worth mentioning now under this head is how one central way in which the Green Party differs from a lot of other political parties is our long termism. Our visions, our vision and values are such that we don't think that politics is just about looking after number one. Important that that might be. We're not saying that the well being of the individual in society isn't important, but it's a very limited conception of what politics has to offer. Even moving beyond the individual to their immediate family, we're about a lot more than that. We're about social justice and all that that entails for the quality of lives of our near neighbors, our far away neighbors and the 21,000 people dying a day roughly of malnutrition and preventable disease around the world. Let those plikes of those individuals and what we can do to do to improve their lives or what we're failing to do, let those questions weigh in our consciousness as politicians would be politicians or members of society who give a damn. But it's not just about human beings, it's about other than human animals who at the moment we're using human civilisations are using unrelentingly for their agricultural production or in animal experimentations. We don't think that animals can be put solely to the use of human beings and that they have value in their own right. Not simply that they have the capacity to feel pain but they're sentient creatures and we should be thinking about our treatment of them as well. And moreover, the countless other species that we share this beautiful planet with, that's what politics has to engage with as well. In fact biologists can't put a number on the number of species on the planet but we know that given a fairly modest figure of 10 billion or so and a 0.01% extinction rate that we're responsible for as a race, as a species rather. That contributes towards some tens of possibly millions of species extinction a year and some of those species maybe we don't fancy being around much longer like the Ebola virus but there are plenty of others I think which we should care about and would have some intrinsic value. Climate change as I've already been suggested is a justice issue so let's just see what that means. People UN regularly produces figures now showing what the climate change impact is on particularly those in low lying coastal areas like Bangladesh. They are at the sharp end of the negative consequences of the west's overconsumption activities and there's a double injustice there. Firstly these people are least responsible for those climate change impacts. They don't have or enjoy that right to over consume or that entitlement. They're not the ones engaging in rights as the superstores on Black Friday ahead of Christmas and moreover they are least able to afford the remedial action required to contend with those negative impacts so there's a double injustice there if ever there was. Just to take issue which I hope there will be an opportunity to because although we're to some extent amongst like minded individuals it's good to have a little bit of dissent. In so called I think Adam put it advanced capitalist societies like the United Kingdom know we aren't very good at protecting ourselves from the climate change impacts that we've already been experiencing. Chukesbury and Boss Castle try and saying that to them in terms of the investment in levees or flood defences we're not doing that either. So climate is a justice issue. Stern which I think was although it might feel like a decade I think it's half a decade now. Stern did try and frame the issue in terms of expense expenditure. The economic system and what it would cost to carry on like businesses usual scenario and how it would be not just more profitable but good for the bottom line to pursue a path of sustainability. I put it to you that that is a false way of framing the issue. It's not radical enough and I'll come to that in a moment. So what is our biggest secondly problem in western societies and there's also a question here about what rights we have to suggest to others in the so called developing countries not to pursue our same economic development that developmental pathway. There's a risk of being neocolonialist or postcolonialist in suggesting to other people even China and India that you can't pursue this path of economic growth like there's no tomorrow which is a kind of American dream that we've been sold a lie about. And why is that a lie? Because even public attitude survey in this country arranged information. If you ask people about their earnings they'll tell you that the more they earn the more they think they can't afford what they really need. Now the more you earn the more you think apparently you can't afford what you really need. It can't be because you don't have more capital with which to buy more stuff. It's just that you find that when you get that stuff that you've satisfied your desire and you just generate and create ever more insatiable, more increasingly difficult to satisfy desires. And that's the kind of a trap which capitalism and overconsumption gets us into through advertising and all the rest of it. But moreover the lesson there is that these goods don't actually make you happier by your own admission. They just have a tendency to keep you dissatisfied. And that's something worth bearing in mind. And if anything it's not that we're asking others not to pursue our development path because it's good. It's hopefully that we're in a position to say it ain't as good as you've been told. That's the lie. It's not something which is better than your current developmental path or that you aren't already managing to achieve quality of life that is without this kind of economic system. If you look at the recent joiners to the European Union for example, even going far back as Poland, there are many farmers there who had their lands then taken over by multinational supermarkets and all the rest of it. And they then found themselves more impoverished because they weren't able to earn enough to be able to afford to buy back food that they themselves were able to grow on their own land to feed their families. And that is just shows up the ridiculousity, the preposterousness of our economic system, that it's not actually enabling people those basic needs in society, which is what social justice socialism is and should be about. Now to bring in maybe even Marx at this point and I think many of the things that Marx talks about and the way that political theorists and contemporaries and people before him, Hobbes, Rousseau and others, the way that they frame their debate is not just one in terms of political legitimacy and due accountability of our leaders and the structures which they, God forbid, seek to impose upon us, but it's also entailing human nature assumptions and there's a great line in Marx actually, which I think gets overlooked and he talks about this. The more you find value in external things, the less you find value in yourself. The more you find value, I tend to see today to repeat myself when I think something's very important. So the more you find value in external things, the less you find value in yourself and I think that's a great psychological insight actually. And it does bear out in current society the kind of emptiness, I know that's a kind of a metaphor for what people can feel, but you do find that amongst people, even those who are presumably rich and very able and capable of insulating themselves from the so-called antisocial behaviour of society and the crime and all the rest of it through gated communities, how are they actually living? They're living a kind of an asocial existence, an atomised existence, we're at risk of becoming like them if we think that they're worth imitating. But that's an emptiness about life and that, our economy encourages that because it commodifies and it fails to value things according to their true worth. We can talk about negative externalities as somehow our helping ourselves to all the goods that nature has to offer without paying nature back. There's no way at the moment in which those goods are properly recorded. We're not going to be paying our debt back to planet earth. But the real problem here, another constituency of interest if you will, spoken about our immediate neighbours, people half way around the world, other human animals and other species, another constituency of interest is future human generations. People who aren't around yet, 50, 100 years into the future, we can't identify them, we can't name them but we know that if they're lucky there'll still be a home for them on planet earth and there'll be a set of people like you and me if the genetic engineering hasn't had its way. But what are we leaving behind for them? Are we leaving as Locke might put it as much and as good for them? We have finite resources on the planet, land being one of them. How are we carving it out? How are we distributing it? Are we concentrating that wealth effectively a convention, a power elation in the hands of a few, the 1% as opposed to the 99%? That's exactly what we're doing. So overconsumption I think is a trap, it's a trap of our own making, it's something that in our better moments we actually realise it doesn't make us happier and the things, the common or garden things that we all need, those basic needs, health, housing and education, those rights, the things that build our personality and character and make us appreciate the things that are really important are not valued through capitalism. The sight of a beautiful sunset, all the things which can assail our senses on a good day that we increasingly find ourselves insulated from, we're destroying at a rate of knots. So what then finally is our predicament. As I say, however you want to put it I could be at risk of sounding alarmist but I think that's the wrong word. Alarmist sounds like an exaggeration but these are just facts, these are just facts about our human situation which may be alarming but that's quite different. That's objectivity. We need to be objective about a situation so that we can overcome it. I think a common response unfortunately to the gravity of the situation which we are co-responsible for is to deny it and there are many ways of denying it. You can invent a kind of a carbon offsetting regime for example which manages to solve your consciousness whenever you take a flight or in Cameron's case you can go and do a photo op with a husky in the Arctic. God knows whether that piece of ice is there anymore. Some years ago he became leader and that's his way of showing that he cares but he doesn't. So there are many artifices, ways of denying and saying that there's business as usual like there's no tomorrow but somehow we actually need to get a grip with it. If I can just add here, this is not necessarily green party policy, it's just my own thought at this point about how I think we get into this trap of denying and for sure that's a common problem. I think there's a kind of a tendency to over-psychologise our predicament to say somehow that it's too painful to admit it and what we're doing then is a kind of a post Freudian tendency to reduce everything including the problems that we ourselves have caused in the world to reduce it to a kind of subjective state in us. That then allows us to beg off on our responsibilities and say well it's too painful for me to deal with and in my world I'm just going to have to ignore it or forget about it. But what we're really doing there and what we have to get better at is to say no, that isn't going to prevent us, the fear of listening or understanding what we're co-responsible for. That difficulty, that psychological difficulty isn't going to stop us from telling it as it is and moreover it isn't going to prevent us from tackling the problem which we ourselves are responsible for and what really have we become that we're prepared to say that it's too difficult to look at, that it's too difficult to see the consequences of our actions compared to the negative impact and deaths that it's actually causing today. So the economy then, I'm sure you wouldn't dissent from this but I think it's worth debating how we change it. The economy is a convention as far as I'm concerned. It's a piece of paper sometimes, it's a trust, it's a bond with the state and it's something which depending on how that economic system is organised the Bank of England may be more or less politicised and be instructed to print some more money, call it quantitative easing if you want, sounds good, it's going to trickle down and help those who are most impoverished, not at all. But it's a convention. You can't eat a string of zeros or a string of debt zeros, you can't eat that even though it might be concentrated in the hands of a few, it's not going to get to you when you most need it. You can re-establish that convention, you can reform it. If you look at transition town movements, which is where I'm going to get to in a minute in terms of where is the politics of the day and what kind of transformation do we require to turn this around. If you look at transition town movements such as in Lewis or even in Brixton, some of them have inaugurated their own note. Have you heard about the Brixton pound note? Now I'm not sure how that's been going lately. I think one of the potential mistakes that they made at the outset was they allowed, somehow they must have had a relationship going with the Bank of England, they allowed the Bank of England to back up that currency. For sure I think that did make it a far less bolder statement and a far less bold initiative. What you really needed to do was to say that in this community we're going to accept this piece of paper authenticated as it is as our means of bartering. We're going to say we're not going to accept this. This note is not going to be accepted amongst a certain set of multinational companies so you can't pay there. We're going to decide which group of independent retailers or whatever sustainable retailers that we're going to be able to shop with. It's got nothing to do with the Bank of England and from there we proceed and we have some trust in what this is worth and we have some knowledge. But it's all a convention. It's a linguistic convention, it's a social convention, it's an economic convention and at the moment the convention isn't working for us, it certainly ain't working for the planet. So finally, there is a gross lack of political will. I don't think that the solution is technological as such although there are things that we can be doing to actually improve our energy generation in terms of use of renewables, wind, wave, solar and this country although it's on paper at least maybe the six richest country is bottom five in the league table across the EU for use of renewables and that's deplorable. But we also need to fix our overconsumptive habits that are necessarily going to be easy particularly when we've got other people around us carrying on like there's no tomorrow. But that takes a certain amount of will, political will. And some of that can be brought about through leaders and we don't think the Green Party does believe there is a role for sure for electoral politics if only because at the moment it's like one step forward, two steps back or less or sorry more that's become fairly ludicrous situation. But the political will that I think ultimately is going to get us out of this trouble is social. When we look at the Occupy movement, when we look at the vitality of all generations getting involved in that having critiques, having set up lectures outside St Paul's and other places and to say post election for example to say that enough is enough and that we need to ensure that we have a society which governs for the good of all. That politics is where the vitality is. That's where the social change and transformation is going to come from. We can look to the Paris talks in December but remember how we looked to Copenhagen it was in 2009 and where did that get us? We must not and we cannot get sucked into this perpetual postponement as James Lovelock has put it actually although we don't agree with all his politics in terms of renewable energy and just trying to buy time through the use of nuclear we don't think that should be an option either. James Lovelock has described it as a war footing. That's the kind of situation that we're faced with. So it's not about just finding better ways of generating energy. It's about reducing our consumption. It's about energy efficiency. It's about a green new deal, green jobs, trying to roll out energy efficiency but also living within our means and having a proper reckoning of what that means. So I hope there's plenty to debate there not just in terms of our vision and value which I hope is reasonably persuasive and something that I think we need to be able to do to try and overcome the current mess and for sure crisis that capitalism has contributed to in the planet. Very interesting discussion. I think I should just not correct but qualify. I don't think I was claiming and I couldn't have because I was saying how woefully inadequate our use of renewable energies was. So I do want us to invest in wave wind and solar and that does require technology. I think the thing that I was criticizing was an assumption which perhaps Adam didn't mean either but when he opened up with the idea about technology that tends to ring alarm bells for me and here's why because technology is often used as a kind of way of carrying on business as usual. Whether you're talking about fracking, for example, as a more actually energy intensive fossil fuel industry, it's a way of buying time or carrying on business as usual. And so and I also I don't withdraw from the claims about overconsumption being the problem because although I will challenge this idea that it's marginalizing the poor, I think that's a ludicrous connection to want to make. The trouble with overconsumption, whether it's in built redundancy or us being made to feel that our mobile phones need replacing, gone are the days when the mobile phone would actually ring when you needed it, so I keep telling my life, but the thing is is that overconsumption requires raw materials. In addition to the energy which you're expending to put to bind those things in addition to the plastics which you're using, those technologies are being used wholesale and if we're trying to find other means of energy generation and we're trying to develop technologies which allow us just to carry on at that level of consumption and carbon consumption, then anything that we've saved in one area through the actual energy generation is going to be lost through the continued consumption. And I think we do need to bite the bullet about how much is it actually affecting the quality of our lives deep down when we are carrying on in that way and aren't we actually alienating ourselves from the things that give quality to our lives. And again, I don't think that Marx, although he may carry on to talk about in his own day those particular class problems, a lot of which still persists today, I don't think that the generalisation he was making was not by him intended as one about human nature and that's what human nature assumptions and generalisations generally are. There are problems about us as a species in how we think psychologically and the difficulties that we're prone to succumb to. So I think you're selling Marx short there by claiming that we can't generalise his claims and in terms of this kind of battle that we're facing, this struggle, again I don't think that you want to think of it even imaginatively as turning everything upside down as such. I've said, you know, if you went through what I've been saying, I probably talked about social transformation quite a lot. I even alerted you to it right at the beginning and by that I do not mean turning society on its head. No, that's not good enough. That's not enough and that just reproduces and replicates a different kind of inequality. Why would I want to do that? Why would I want to do that? I think at the heart of what I'm saying here is that people, everybody, you and I, people in groups who are currently misguided pursuing wealth at the expense of others who need help, they're misguided. I don't think that they're morally unreachable. I might even be persuaded to shake Tony Blair's hand if I think it might save one Iraqi life or bring short, cut short bombs raining upon innocent's heads. So no, I think we need to be more radical than that. We're not just talking about, so how is it social transformation to turn things upside down? All you're doing is you're changing the position of people in society. Egalitarianism, social equality, even as such that I have the model that I gave you about carbon quotas, it's not saying that you can't fly necessarily. And for sure we'd want to try and develop technologies which reduce those carbon emissions. It's saying that it's not okay for some people in society to enjoy such obscene wealth that they can go and they can fly at the expense of the rest of the planet as much as they like. So it's egalitarian in that sense, but it is putting the responsibility in the right place. It is saying, unfortunately, we might all have to look not just as a society but as individuals at our carbon consumption. So technology, it does have a use but we have to be careful. It's not, the point I was making is that for me right now it's not about trying to develop and harness new technologies. Even the renewable technologies are still here. It's about political will. Even tackling global poverty, that's the question of political will. Well, we have the biomass there. We choose to feed it to cattle in order to eat meat due to our addiction to meat. How many of you, if you're walking the walk, are fond of coffee? Do a little bit of research about how people, farmers around the world are at the clutch of the West's addiction, the West's addiction and overconsumption of coffee. So, you know, we're all responsible here, as ethical consumers if you like, but more than that, structurally, we need to be clear that it's not simply about changing position with people. And that's where the idea potentially of envy comes in. It's not to do with changing position and having some other people below us. Why would we want to do that? That's not enlightened. What we want is to create a society which everybody can agree upon is fair.  Where you were born, that you would happen to be born in the wrong place at the wrong time, you would want to make it guaranteed for everybody who was about to be born that they would have able to live a minimally decent life. Finally, there's so many questions. Oh, green tie. Yeah, I'm glad you knew about that. That was pulled, and I think there's a problem here. In the same way, there's a conflict. I agree. Come to green tie in a minute. But we're producing literature, general election literature during the election. We're putting stuff and things through people's doors. Parties tend to think there's a bit of a correlation between the amount of literature they stick through your door and the number of votes they like to get. That's unfortunate, because every time, whether it's for sustainable resources or whatever, we are using paper when we do that. You might say, well, that's not pure enough. That's not pure enough for the Green Party, yes. You shouldn't be using any paper at all. Just stick to social media, internet, all the rest of it. But we do. So there's a compromise. So I think what we're, the problem that you, sorry, was it you about the green tie? I think that the problem there with, you might say we shouldn't be using paper whatsoever because it's contrary to our principles. The problem there is that, okay, we'll use it spherently. We won't go overboard with it. Same with raising funds to be able to launch a credible campaign. You might say that we shouldn't be going to donors who happen to have money that they want to commit to us and trying to get them to a meeting. I think the main problem, a dinner, the main problem with that and there was a lack of proper, I think, internal communication on that one and that's why we pulled that event. But I agree with that. I agree with the pulling of the event because one of the things, and it's not just a PR thing. It's not just that it would look bad. The very idea that you would have people coming to a meeting like that and potentially having greater access to key people in the party. I'm not sure whether I was even invited, but anyway, that's another story. But I think the thing is, is that, yes, you're right. But we need to think. It's not easy. It's not easy yet.  I think the real difficulty in politics is to work within a system which we know is bankrupt and failing us and to try and reform it from within, without ourselves getting tarnished, not just tarnished, but corrupted. That is the real danger. That is how power corrupts. We've seen it in the best of people. I think I tend to hold, I quite have quite some esteem for Tony Blair, Tony Ben. Not Tony Blair. Tony Ben, yes. Well, Tony Blair even actually, if you read his book, you should, a journey. It should be called entitled, subtitled, The Man Who Lost His Way. Here's somebody who was engaging in deep debate philosophical data, I think, with Gordon Brown in his university days, which of course he had fees waived and all the rest of it. You can see how, you can see it happening.  And I read it because I'm constantly calling for Blair's try being on an international criminal court. And I just wanted to check from the man himself that he wasn't going to produce some argument or something that I had missed. And it's quite interesting because, you know, he's got a brain, he's got a political brain. It was probably him pulling the string that asked the camera and all the rest of it. So it's insightful in terms of how politics worked. But when it got to that point, I was partly relieved. I wanted him to be able to say something and he had the intellectual capacity to produce an argument, but he didn't. But at that point I thought, at least I would now not, I would not foreclose the option of speaking to the man at some stage and saying, look, by your own likes, with your own rationality and empathy, do you not see? Do you not see as George Galloway might have put it? You would have seen the guilt written on his face as they went to Iraq. It seems there's something deep down. That's what I'm interested. I don't think that people, we should think of people as morally beyond reach. We want to use our rationality and persuasive skill to say, you need to come with us as well. This is a journey, this is a journey unlike him, the man who lost his way, that we need to pursue together. So back to Tony Ben, Tony Ben, the late Tony Ben. He often said that this is not a protest. Have I got ten minutes left? I already have ten minutes. Wow, I wasn't even planning to have ten minutes, so that's great. This is not a protest. This is a demand. That's the kind of fatality we need back in politics. Through you, I don't know if many of you may be at university. A university is not about the more you learn, the more you earn. It's about the more you learn, the more you learn. Because what you bring to your minds and to your vision of the world, that's incredibly more important than your bank balance. Because that will enable you and people, your contemporaries and people after you, to change society for the common good. I just want to thank Shirar again for coming. I think it's been an excellent discussion and of course it's a discussion that's ongoing. I hope to see you on a panel again at future events. The main question I want to come back on is not so much the overconsumption thing. Let's put to the side whether it's us in this room who are responsible for living beyond our means as it was put. Even if we accept that fundamental premise, which I actually disagree that we are the ones responsible, that we're the ones living beyond our means. But let's put to side that first premise and say, say we are, say all of us here are living beyond our means, all of us in the advanced capitalist world are responsible. How do we go about resolving this? How do we go about actually tackling that problem? How do we go about deciding what is produced, how it is produced and in what quantities and what living standards we have?  And I think that is the fundamental problem that we face, is that we who might be the ones who might be, let's suggest it's true, might be the ones who are over consuming. How do we go about actually tackling that problem? And I would say the key barrier in this respect is the question of ownership, it's the question of private ownership, it's the fact, and that is a class question at the end of the day, that even if we wanted to do something about our living standards, even if we wanted to do something about changing the way in which we lived and the way in which production was run and so forth, we have no control over that process, we have no say in that whole element of society. The only real decision making we can do as individuals is what we buy and who we vote for, really, at the end of the day. That's the main decisions we have in capitalist society. And on the question of what we buy, well, I mean, if we were to all just consume less, then that's basically a recession. Under capitalism, if we all decided to stop consuming tomorrow, then what would happen?  Basically, the minute all these commodities that capitalism is churning out aren't sold, that is basically a recession, that is capitalism going into crisis. So we wouldn't actually feel the benefits of it and if anything we would send society into just a bigger slump. I agree that we should have an economy where the goods that are produced, basically the amount they're produced and how much they cost should reflect the environmental pollution and so forth that's contained within them. But under capitalism, that isn't the case. Under capitalism, capitalism is a system where production is for profit, where the commodities that are out there, the prices, it's a race to the bottom, as I said earlier. It's competition driving down costs, actually, and trying to pollute more where it means making cheaper. So really the only way to have this economy where things are based around their actual environmental destruction would be to fundamentally transform the whole laws of the economy, which is obviously what socialists call for. But the key problem with choosing by how much we buy is obviously the fact that it's not an equal choice. Those who have more, or in terms of wealth, obviously get a lot more say in society. So what's the other way in which we can decide? Well, we can choose who we vote for. But as I said earlier, the problem even then is, even if you vote in a government that wants to really make a difference and even has the best of intentions on the environment and any other social questions, we see that actually it's not governments that control industry and finance, but it's industry and finance that control governments. I mean, point to one point in the programme of Syriza, a radical left party whose programme on the surface of things isn't that dissimilar from the Greens, actually, in terms of living wage, key questions of pensions and housing and so forth, public services doesn't fundamentally differ at the Syriza leadership from that of what the Green Party puts forward in their manifesto. But they haven't been able to carry out a single one of those demands in Greece because at the end of the day they have held by the throat by the bankers, by the people who really control society, which is the bosses and the bankers. So how do we go about really deciding then what our means are and who gets what? I think, for a start, go back to even that premise. Again, I would refute it because 90% of landfill, for example, 90% of waste that goes to landfill is not produced by households, it's produced by industry, it's produced in mining and all these basically giant corporations over which we have absolutely no control. There is obviously many people living below the decent living standard in terms of 5 million people on fuel poverty, but if we wanted to reduce the amount of energy we consume in our homes, what would that mean? It would mean a mass investment in insulation, a mass investment in energy efficiency technologies and who's got the power to do that? Most people can't afford to spend the thousands that are needed to reduce those energy costs from their homes. If we all wanted to take public transport in order to reduce emissions from transport, well, again, how can we do that when actually prices of public transport are going up when there's less and less investment in public transport and all these things? In other words, all the key questions of how we could actually go about reducing our energy consumption, of how we could go about tackling this problem of overconsumption if indeed it even existed, all of these are actually beyond us as individuals because we fundamentally are not in control of our own lives of society and I think it goes back to a point that Cheryl made actually about the fact that we are alienated. We are only basically connected in society through commodities, through prices, through the market. We relate to each other and to the whole of the world around us as money basically, as commodities. We're completely divorced from our world. We're alienated from our surroundings and the way to tackle it is to give people a sense of control all over their own lives and that means a sense of economic control. I mean, just a couple of anecdotes, actually. I was in Egypt just after the Arab Revolution had taken place and I spoke to some people into Heir Square and they said to me, what I thought was very profound actually, they said, you look around today and to Heir Square is very clean, it was very tidy, there's no litter anywhere, no graffiti other than revolutionary murals and things like that. And they said it wasn't always like this, this city used to be filthy, it used to be disgusting because it wasn't our city, it didn't belong to us, we had no control over it, we didn't feel like it was where we lived even though obviously it was them who suffered from all the pollution, the litter, the traffic and so forth. But they said what the revolution, because of those weeks they spent into Heir Square, it became their city, it became their square and they took ownership over it. They started to self-organise, to clean the communities, to keep a tidy environment to live in because it was fundamentally them who were suffering but it was that revolutionary act of coming together of consciousness changing through struggle that gave them a sense of overcoming that alienation. You see the same thing in occupied factories, in Venezuela for example, there was a factory that made ceramics and the ceramics factory used to pollute the entire surrounding village and again it was the working people in that factory who had to suffer it and their families because of this dust that caused all sorts of diseases and health problems. But that factory was closed down, the owner said it wasn't profitable, the workers took it over, they occupied it as part of the wave of factory occupations as part of the Venezuelan revolution and what it did was it profoundly changed consciousness. The first thing those people did when they occupied was tackling the pollution, was tackling the dust because again it was affecting their communities whereas the rich, the previous bosses lived in entirely different mansions far away from the pollution. In other words once you give working class communities, once you give ordinary people the actual ability to go about solving these problems they do it but the first thing is required is actually giving them the control and the ability to do so. That's why as Marxist we call for the fundamental question has to be this question of private ownership, has to be tackling that problem because we're not saying that after a socialist revolution everything's going to be green the next minute that we're going to solve all the problems. We'll have resolved the fundamental problem that stands in the way which is the class struggle and the question of class ownership but we'll still obviously have that contradiction of man versus nature, we'll still have to overcome the problems of scarcity where they exist, we'll have to overcome the problems of environmental destruction and pollution where they exist and after the first time we'll have removed that barrier that stops us now from overcoming those problems and Cheryl made one comment about supporting small businesses and local producers and so forth and I would just say well yes obviously we need to support those middle classes who've been impoverished by capitalism who are crushed by big business but I think the way to go about it is not to boycott the big businesses but rather to say let's take these businesses over, let's put them under a rational plan of production where we can actually go about solving problems there's already an enormous level of planning within these firms the only problem is at the moment it's used so that they make bigger profits whereas we would use it to address social needs to get rid of the anarchy of the market to get rid of the competition of capitalism and to once and for all be able to set about on a path where we can actually solve the real fundamental problems facing humanity