Climate Crisis
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Hi everyone, Thomas Small here. I'm coming to you from deep undercover. Literally. I'm sitting on my bed with the covers pulled over my head, trying my best to recreate the conditions of a recording studio. You see, the episode you're about to hear was recorded before lockdown, but before we kick it off, Eamon and I have a favor to ask.

As we come to the end of Season 2, we're doing a survey to find out what you, dear listeners, enjoy about the show, what you want more of, and where we can improve.

The survey will only take about 5 to 10 minutes to complete, and let's face it, you're at home twiddling your thumbs, waiting for this global pandemic to end. So why not just click on the link in the show notes below, or go to bit.ly slash conflictedq. That's all lowercase. Bit.ly slash conflictedq.

And as a thank you, anyone who completes the survey will be in with a chance of winning a copy of Eamon's book, Nine Lives, My Time as MI6's Top Spy Inside Al-Qaeda. Now, on with the show. Welcome to the last episode of this season of Conflicted.

I am Thomas Small, and of course, Ayman Deen is here with me. Hi, Ayman. Hi, Thomas. How are you doing today? Don't say you're still alive. People are getting sick of that joke. I noticed that there's more gray hair in your beard. Is that the toll of being a jihadist or the toll of being a father of two young children? I can tell you, I've been through, you know, many wars, and I can tell you nothing prepares you to raising children. Raising children is worse than actually going to war.

All right. So, so far we have been on a long journey of tracking the rise and demise, potentially the demise, of America's new world order. In the last episode, we turned our attention to how the collapse of the American economy, or near collapse of the American economy, in 2008 rippled around the globe. And today, to conclude the season, we're going to talk about the collapse of the American economy.

How is the history of the environmental movement connected to the history and politics of the New World Order? And what does the global climate crisis mean to the billions of people who don't live in what we call the Western world?

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says there are only a dozen years left for global warming to be kept to a maximum of 1.5 degrees Celsius. We're seeing the end of capitalism, the end of capitalism as we know it, and I say good riddance. What is at stake is more in one small country than you will do in a three-minute run.

So we've been talking about the end of the new world order, the end of liberal democracy, the end of capitalism. But with the climate crisis, are we actually witnessing the end of the world itself? This is potentially

potentially, Eamonn, not disconnected to the question of the success of global capitalism, which along with its arguable benefits has also, or so the scientists tell us, had a pretty huge negative impact on the environment. Now, before we get into this, I want to say that this is a topic that many people today feel really passionately about. And I'm going to be honest,

I don't always know what to think about it because there's so much conflicting information out there, not so much about the problem itself, about which the science is pretty settled, but about the best solution, which is where, of course, science takes a backseat to politics. People are truly conflicted.

So, Ayman, we've discussed this issue a hundred times, and some of your views might make people think you're a climate change denier. Are you? No, definitely not. I'm not a climate change denier. I am more or less skeptic about the solutions that some quarters are putting forward. So I am someone basically who believes, while I'm not a scientist,

I believe that the total disruption of human economic activity all across the globe is not the answer. Right. Okay, good. So you're not a climate change denier. And we will discuss later your views about the more radical suggestions that some voices have about how to deal with the crisis. But before we get there, I just think it's good to offer a brief history of the environmental movement. And the first thing to point out is that movement is actually very old.

Its roots lie in the 19th century, the Romantic movement, really, which coincided with the Industrial Revolution. Poets and philosophers began to grow uneasy about the rising pollution that resulted from industrialization, not to mention the social and spiritual dislocations that followed. Legislation in Britain and elsewhere from the Victorian period onward, primarily over air pollution, was passed.

Plus, conservation societies were founded all across the world. In 1962, Rachel Carson's hugely influential book, Silent Spring, kicked off the modern environmental movement. And the first Earth Day was celebrated in 1970. So the movement has really deep roots. But it was really the establishment of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 1988, followed by the first UN Earth Summit.

held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, where global action on climate change began. The Rio summit was actually expressly a post-Cold War effort to bring countries together so they can discuss how to cooperate on development issues, which involved what was then called sustainability, sustainable development. The countries wanted to make sure that prosperity rose, but they were concerned that with rising prosperity would be an increasing environmental impact.

degradation. This all eventually resulted in the Kyoto Protocol of 1997, which has struggled to be ratified by the countries of the world, to put it lightly. Especially the United States has been an outlier. They have not signed the Kyoto Protocol. This has all led in recent years to lots of activists being fed up with what they consider to be global inaction on a pressing problem.

and the growing popularity of green political parties and what's called the Green New Deal and other such policy proposals. So that's the history and we can see that really the era of the New World Order, which has seen this explosion of capitalism and economic growth everywhere, has been shadowed all along by a growing concern that it is not sustainable in the long run and that the earth is suffering as a result of all our prosperity.

Now, before we focus on the politics of climate change in the West, I'd like to talk about the Middle East. Ultimately, listeners come to you, Eamon, to hear about the Middle East. So how has the climate crisis and the facts around the climate crisis been a factor in everything that Conflicted has been discussing over the last two seasons?

Well, don't forget, you know, we in the Middle East are the source or the largest source of this pollution. Because of the oil that you're pumping out. Oil and gas. So basically, we've been pumping oil now for almost 100 years to the rest of the world. You know, basically, the two-thirds of the world energy exports, basically, you know, they are coming from the Middle East, of course. So if you look at Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, UAE, Iraq, Iran, Libya,

Libya, the production levels basically are just tremendous. So, of course, we are the producers, but we are not necessarily the polluters. Well, you do consume a lot of petroleum yourselves, but of course it is, it's the West and more recently China.

And India. And India, yes. So the source is the Middle East, but then from that source, the pollution is created everywhere. Yeah. So when I talk to people, whether it is in Saudi Arabia or Iraq or Iran or Yemen or wherever, basically, they say, look, you know, the world is angry about OPEC being one of the biggest polluters in the world because OPEC, you know, the Organization for Petroleum Producing Countries. The global petroleum cartel, really. Exactly. Exactly.

to the point where there were even environmentalists who were shouting that OPEC is a terrorist organization. Yet another terrorist organization from the Middle East. Gosh, you guys can't help yourselves. No, we can't. Because, you know, it should have been disbanded and assets seized and all of that. Because, unfortunately, with...

with the environmental message from the West that is actually seeping through to the people in the Middle East is extremely negative. And they feel that basically the environmentalists are hostile towards the Middle East

because of so many what I call intersectionalities of causes, you know, that are dumping more and more of the world's problems on the Middle East. Well, if rising carbon dioxide is seen as the major problem, then petroleum is the source of that problem. Aha, but someone from the Middle East will say, well, excuse me, we were living, you know, basically nomadic lives or semi-urban lives. You know, we were agricultural or pastoral or basically having livestock, you know, going around.

until you guys came, discovered the juice beneath our feet, and you decided to extract it and give us the money. Well, let's not talk about the pollution itself. I want to talk about the effects of this pollution, i.e. climate change, and how climate change has influenced the things we've been talking about on Conflicted. I mean, it's absolutely true that in the first decade of the 21st century, there was widespread drought in countries like Syria and

In Yemen, these are the countries that became hotspots for the Arab Spring and, of course, civil war. Has climate change played a role in that? Of course. There is no question, basically, that as the climate changes drastically, you start to have areas and pockets where drought follows and crops fail.

Of course, not entirely the environment's fault, but also the management of the countries, basically. Yemen and Syria are poorly managed as countries. Because of the drought, Syria specifically, a huge influx of rural residents moved into the cities. So there was a burgeoning population explosion in the cities. There weren't enough jobs for these people, which created the unrest that to some extent led to the Arab Spring and the civil war there. Exactly. And actually, in...

You know, by pushing more and more rural people into the urban centers, these became the foot soldiers for the rebellion that followed in Syria and also for the civil war that followed in Yemen. The urban population of Syria increased by 50% in a decade preceding up to the civil war. Exactly, because of the fact that the crops were failing because of rising temperature as well as less water and rainfall.

The same thing happened in Yemen and Lebanon, for example. Lebanon was affected also. Lebanon now is becoming more and more a narco economy. Drugs. Drugs, yes. Do you know why?

No. Because with water becoming more and more scarce, so what would you rather basically plant? Because if you spend so much on water, you might as well plant something that actually have more intrinsic value, you know, like, you know, marijuana and coke and opium, you know, than, you know, basically tomatoes, potatoes and peaches. You can maximize your profit.

And the same thing in Yemen. They also turn to drugs instead of coffee. Especially Qat, this very famous Yemeni drug where you see Yemenis with a big sort of bulb and a bulge in their cheeks. They're constantly stoned. Exactly. So what happened is it affected the population.

they became more and more lazy, drug addicts, you know, they're becoming more and more reliant on the fact that this is a new source of income, but it is either criminal or semi-criminal, and it's not sustainable.

So actually, the shortage of water and the rising temperature caused both Yemen and Syria, you know, partially to become failed states and caused Lebanon to become a narco economy to some extent. You know,

The ISIS phenomenon also involved water. It's not often talked about, but one of the things that ISIS managed to get a hold of during their conquest of much of Syria and Iraq were several dams up the Tigris and Euphrates River, which have...

seen in the last couple of decades, a precipitous drop in water levels. So water was involved in the struggle with ISIS as well. Indeed. In fact, if you go back to the Yemen episode in the first season, we talk about the fact that the entire Yemen war from the Saudi perspective was based mostly on the fact that it is about water security for Saudi Arabia. And that's why, for example, if you look at countries like Oman, Oman is going to run out of oil.

In just 20 years or less. And what will they do? And already, basically, they are enlisting the help of Saudi and Kuwaiti companies that specializing in building, and this is the new innovation, in building solar power plants on the sea that also does water desalination.

Water desalination is so important throughout the peninsula. I mean, I think something like 50% of Saudi drinking water comes from desalination. 95%. 95%. Saudi Arabia alone produce one third of the entire world output of desalinated water and the UAE produce one fifth. So the reality is that the entire peninsula produce almost...

you know, 60% of the entire global consumption of desalinated water because there is that entire big peninsula, the size of India, not a single river or lake. So, you know, the water sources are very scarce and therefore,

Any drastic change in the environment could have negative effects, as well as some other positive effects we'll talk about later. But the negative effect is the scarcity of water and rainfall. So here is a problem for Oman, which will be the first oil-rich Arab country to run out of oil in the near future. 20 years is nothing, basically. We will see it in our own lifetimes.

that in less than 20 years, the last oil tanker leaving Oman to export oil, we will see it. And they'll be waving it away with tears on their faces, wondering what does the future hold. So from now they started using solar power

To desalinate water. Solar power to run desalination plants, but those plants require huge amounts of energy. Can solar power power them? Yes, if you have enough concentration. If you produce roughly between 500 and 600 megawatts of power per day,

Then that's it. You have it. I'm glad you brought up the subject of solar energy because green energy in general, as it increases in its sophistication and as the West especially begins to rely more and more upon it, has an economic effect on the Middle East because as demand for oil and gas decreases in the West, that will affect the economies of a country, say, like Saudi Arabia. Are they aware of this? What are they doing to benefit?

to prepare for this. Why do you think Saudi Arabia is frantically trying to diversify their economy as soon as possible by relying on religious tourism and expanding it from basically $16 billion per year to $63 billion per year in 2030? Why do you think basically they are trying to, you know, rely more on extraction of other minerals like gold, silver, uranium, phosphate, bauxite and other things? Why do you think basically they want to build these

Tourism cities like Amala on the Red Sea and other places and using their cultural sites and opening the visa system so anyone can visit Saudi Arabia. Why do you think they're doing it? Because basically they know that there will be a time when ships will sail away with the last bit of oil. Or oil will become not valuable enough. Actually, many people are telling me oil will not become valuable enough. And I will say basically that is still far away in the future. Why? Why?

Because still there are two modes of transportation that cannot be powered by electricity yet. Maybe by natural gas, but not by electricity. Not yet. Which are those? Aeroplanes, commercial aeroplanes and commercial ships.

So commercial shipping, you know, there is no engine unless if you place nuclear powered engines on the big ships, which is most likely impossible to do that, like, you know, for thousands of tankers and, you know, massive container ships. I can imagine your old friends in Al-Qaeda would love to get their hands on a huge tanker with a nuclear bomb on board. Exactly. It's a security hazard. So you will still have to rely on diesel engines.

and also in kerosene engines for the aircrafts for a generation to come because no amount of electrical batteries can actually power a 777 plane to fly from London, let's say, to New York. It's impossible. So oil will remain in demand for the time being. Yes, but the question is,

What other parts of the economy that we can, you know, basically remove the fossil fuel from? So we're talking about power generating so we can use solar, we can use wind. Well, Saudi Arabia has been investing tremendously in green energy itself, actually, especially solar power. I believe they're building right now the largest solar farm in the world. Yes, because why? We have an area in Saudi Arabia called the Empty Quarter.

The empty quarter, basically, is nothing but the emptiest, most desolate and inhospitable desert in the world. But you invoke the empty quarter and it gives me all sorts of romantic ideas. Ah, Thessinger? Yes, Wilfred Thessinger walking across the empty quarter to the mountains of Oman. Oh, gosh, those were the days. Exactly.

For the listener, Wilfred Thesiger, the last of the great British explorers, in whose fantastic book, Arabian Sands, I really recommend this book, Arabian Sands. He describes his journey across the empty quarter to Oman, and it's just a magnificent book. I totally agree.

Funny enough, you mentioned this just now as we speak, Saudi Arabia and Oman finishing in the last touches on the road that actually track the Thissinger, you know, journey from the empty quarter basically to Oman. So you can take it and you can basically bask in the beauty of the empty quarter. Oh, Eamon, I hope you and I can maybe take that journey together. We will do. I have a car in Dubai in a park there. So basically we can go and take it and do it. I'm going to hold you to that. So basically, you know, the reality here is that the empty quarter have people

a huge amount of, you know, basically sunshine throughout the year. You know, the rainfall there basically is extremely negligible and cloud cover is almost non-existent. So, and what they do basically is that, you know, the new technology with the solar farms, some of them basically make them 400% more efficient in terms of production. So, Saudi Arabia basically could, you know, do two things basically. Wind farms for the night because at night the wind pick up in the deserts.

and in the day the sun is shining. So basically you have two sources that are almost complementing each other throughout. And once you add the fact that the battery technology, thanks to the efforts of people like Elon Musk and his teams, the battery technology, if it becomes more and more efficient,

then whatever is produced during the day that is in excess can be stored so it can be utilized during the night from the solar power. Also, Saudi Arabia controversially is investing in between 17 to 18 what they call mini nuclear reactors. Mini nuclear reactors. Why? Again, it's the water security issue here because you said basically that solar can produce, you know, solar power in intense production can desalinate water.

The problem with water desalination is that it requires intense source of power. So while 500 megawatt or even 1 gigawatt can produce enough desalinated water for 200,000, 300,000 people, so it's good for Oman, it can power a province with it and give enough drinking water for a province. The problem here is, you know, in Saudi Arabia, the population in 2030 will hit 40 or 45 million.

So what you need is intense source of energy that is continuous in order to generate that. Also the Saudis, and this is not in the public domain, but this is ideas basically being floated by ministers and deputy ministers, and I've heard one from a deputy minister there, they are toying with the idea that the nuclear energy output could actually

desalinated so much water that you can basically pump an entire river into the interior of Saudi Arabia to change the climate.

Well, this sounds like fantasy. This sounds like something out of Dune or something like that. But funny enough, if you look at the numbers and if you look at basically the energy output from a nuclear reactor on the Red Sea and how it could basically pump water in huge quantities into the interior of Saudi Arabia, building oases in the desert that can actually fundamentally change the environment and fight desertification, then you see basically that we can fight climate change

You know, but in the Arab way. Very entrepreneurial and very radical. Well, maybe the Arabian Peninsula will become heavily forested before I die. Wouldn't that be amazing? That's what the Prophet Muhammad himself said. The Prophet Muhammad said that? He said that the end of days won't come until the land of Arabia...

become once again lands of meadows and green hills and rivers. Another prophecy. Always prophecies with you, Ayman. What can I say? I mean, I grew up in Saudi Arabia and then I joined Al-Qaeda. It's just nothing but prophecies there. But in order to convince the Arab world, which is very climate skeptic, by the way, to convince the Arab world that actually it is in their interest, it's

you know, to look for greener sources of energy, even including nuclear. And I know it's controversial, but remember, you know, in the Western world, there is abundance of water in that Arabian Peninsula, which is the size of India. There is no water. So nuclear is the safest and the greenest guaranteed source of power they could have in order to make sure they have enough water. Otherwise,

If water isn't available in quantities enough for the population to drink, wars and, you know, ugly, you know, ugly situation will emerge. Mass destabilization. Exactly. So the Saudis and other Middle Eastern states are pursuing policies in response to climate change. What about more widely? So what to say the high level people outside of the Middle East, but not in the West? So China, India, etc. What?

What sort of things are they telling you about the climate crisis? What is their attitude in general towards climate change? The problem with India is that they, you know, India and China, they are gripped by this idea of a conspiracy theory that, you know, that the environmental movement is nothing basically but a ploy by the West in order to derail their economic progress. That's what I hear in China. They're convinced of this. And I hear also from other Indian entrepreneurs in Dubai whenever I meet them that, you know,

Well, the environmental issue, they're trying basically to strangle our economies by saying, well, it's all the environment. You have to reduce your carbon footprint. But the problem here is when you talk, especially Indians, they say basically that on a government level, on a central government level, on New Delhi level, the initiatives are just really bureaucratic talk.

The real initiatives are taken by small towns, villages and individuals who are installing solar panel on their rooftops. Even sometimes in shantytowns they install, you know, not because it is environmentally friendly, but it is pocket friendly. So, you know, it turns out basically that, you know, some of the charities that donate solar panels to these villages and towns are actually doing the right thing.

But, you know, here is the problem is that it's really a drop in the ocean. You know, you need to have a massive production of solar panels in India, as well as in China and other places in order basically to convince them that, OK, this is economically viable and the government can do it.

I want to return to what you were saying, how Indians and others, they have this conspiracy theory about the climate crisis and the politics of the climate crisis being exploited by the West to undercut Eastern prosperity and development. Because it's... I mean, I'm not saying that it's right, but geopolitically, the politics of climate change have been taking an interesting turn of late. For example...

You know, it is Western leaders and Western people in general who care most passionately about climate change. And it might be possible to spy within that concern something like cynical power politics going on. For example, the president of France, Macron, and other leaders of, you know, what? Let's face it. These are, relatively speaking, shrinking powers at the moment. France and Britain and even the United States, relatively speaking, shrinking powers. The president of France threatened...

to spike a major EU trade deal with Brazil unless Brazil put an end to rainforest clearance. And some analysts are beginning to wonder, so just as the threat of the Soviet Union used to be invoked to unite the West around ideas of human rights as a means of

projecting and shoring up their global power in the 20th century. The question is, is the climate crisis now being invoked by primarily Western powers to do something like the same thing? If the West can rally around climate crisis, can they force the Eastern world to adopt policies that might protect Western power?

That's what I hear in places like Beijing, in places like Delhi and Bombay or Mumbai, as I call it now, and in places like Riyadh and Dubai and Abu Dhabi. And in your analysis, is there some reason to worry about this? They say that the way they are doing it, you know, which is do it now, impose taxes like this. We will impose taxes on carbon. We will impose taxes on plastic. We will do this. This is that.

I mean, they believe basically that this is all designed in order to assert Western hegemony. That is the problem here, is that, you know, for many of them, and especially when you talk to policymakers in the East, whether from China, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, or in the Middle East itself, they will tell you basically that the problem here is that the message that is coming from the West is rather confused and aggressive at the same time.

It's like we're going to die. But we look around and we don't see that the changes are so drastic that we're going to die, you know, so that the world will end. But we don't see this around us. We're not seeing anything in the horizon approaching slowly that basically with the word doom written in cloud formation. So we don't see it. So, you know, but nonetheless, they are, you know, doing it in a way to try to push us

around to adopt certain economic and regulatory standards. And of course, basically, we have to push back because what they say, we already are taking measures to reduce our dependence on fossil fuel, not because of the climate change, but because fossil fuels will run out eventually. So we need to start from now. So it's an economic imperative. That's the first thing. The second thing is a health imperative. In China in particular,

You know, they are in a hurry, actually, to replace as many of their coal power stations, which they are already building still. But they are trying to replace them, especially around the big cities, with, you know, either natural gas, solar, wind and nuclear. But this is to protect people's health. Exactly. Because air pollution is a huge problem in that part of the world. I mean, every time I go to Beijing and I go to Beijing a lot every year.

Not for the past months, just for disclaimer, because of the coronavirus. But every time, my poor wife has to deal with the fact that every time I come back from Beijing, I suffer for two or three days from nosebleed. From the pollution? From the pollution. And so, you know, the pollution is...

stabbing inside my nose, basically. So, of course, that's why they want to do it. They want to make sure that their skies are clear. This is also what they're trying to do in New Delhi also. So the pollution is a health issue.

And that's how I think we should be selling this to the rest of the world. It's an economic issue as well as it is a health issue. Well, instead of selling it in that way, in the West at the moment, people who are increasingly concerned about climate change, they have adopted a different rhetoric, a rhetoric which

which I think... Doom and gloom? A doom and gloom rhetoric, let's call it. And I think that this rhetoric is, at the moment, particularly associated with this movement Extinction Rebellion, you know, the global environmentalist movement.

Which, you know, depending on your point of view, is either notorious or inspiring, which started actually here in London. And I actually can remember first encountering Extinction Rebellion when in April 2019, they took over Oxford Circus, a big sort of roundabout in the center of London near where I work.

And I would come up from the Oxford Circus tube station and I saw them there. They'd sort of camped out in the middle of this huge intersection. They directed tents and they created this sort of platform. And there was sort of clownish hijinks going on. It was a very strange, rather phantasmagoric scene of, on the one hand, political activists, on the other hand, what? Sort of hipster entertainers. It was weird. And their rhetoric was certainly very, very...

I would say extreme, trying to encourage us all to panic. They were saying the end of the world is nigh. We haven't done anything really to address it. We must start doing so now. Now, I'd like to talk about the way Extinction Rebellion is organized. It's very interesting. There was a quote from The Economist that says, whereas the Occupy movement, which, as it happens, we discussed in the previous episode...

a similar outfit became bogged down in cumbersome people's assemblies, Extinction Rebellion has adopted an approach called holacracy. Holacracy claims to spread power across employees by ditching traditional management hierarchies in favor of semi-autonomous circles. In Extinction Rebellion's case, this amounts to what are in effect franchises of the main brand,

which plan and carry out their own protests following a loose set of rules set out by the main group. Now, when I read that, I thought, I must ask Eamon, because that sounds a little bit like the way Al-Qaeda is managed. Are Extinction Rebellion just terrorists, Eamon? I mean, look at the similarities between the two, you know, from a rhetoric point of view. I'm not talking about action. I'm talking about rhetoric.

Both are saying that the world's gonna end. Both have prophecies of doom and gloom. Both believe that their cause is righteous and anyone basically who deny their cause is, you know, basically, I mean, a monster or, you know. So, you know, the problem here is, and both of them have a defined enemy. My problem is that they believe somehow that the enemy is the human race.

And, you know, the use of rhetoric that the world is going to end, that we will have

an environmental catastrophe on biblical proportions in 12 years time and that we will all die if we don't do anything right now. I don't believe that even if the entire world decarbonized tonight and we all went to the Stone Age again tonight that it will slow basically the climate change in 12 years if there is a catastrophe that the catastrophe wouldn't happen.

So it's kind of irrational. Yes, Al-Qaeda and Extinction Rebellion both think the world is going to end. One difference, to be fair to Extinction Rebellion, is that they're basing their prophecy, if you like, however perhaps exaggerated it might be, on scientific facts, unlike Al-Qaeda, who are being inspired more by religious texts and religious prophecies.

The thing about Extinction Rebellion and other such groups is that though they are responding to a scientific consensus about climate change, they are themselves actually a political group, a political activist group, which is why their organization is actually interesting.

So if we're going out on a limb here and saying that Extinction Rebellion, at least in its organizational structure, is similar to a group like al-Qaeda, I want to ask you, what do jihadists think about climate change? I'm sure the listener will be baffled by the fact that Osama bin Laden wrote a letter to Barack Obama asking him to take the environmental crisis seriously.

In fact, it's true, Ayman, and in that letter, Osama bin Laden actually calls on the American people to launch a revolution in the name of the environmental crisis. Ayman, so no one should actually berate us for comparing Extinction Rebellion with Al-Qaeda. Look, Ayman, when it comes to Extinction Rebellion, I admire what they do. I understand why they're doing it. And it's a great cause. It's an honest cause. It's a noble cause. I don't doubt their intentions.

But unfortunately, I doubt their methods. And there is a lot of naivety also there. You know, Extinction Rebellion was founded initially by an organization called Compassionate Revolution, whose web page states that it was birthed in the Occupy movement.

And there are, as you say, ideological similarities. Both movements reject capitalism. They both believe that capitalism is incompatible with democracy as they understand it. And the Occupy movement was also explicitly environmentalist at times. And Extinction Rebellion slogan is system change, not climate change, only

Only revolution will save us now. So if we're talking about ideologies, as we often do here on Conflicted, this is, as a political ideology, revolutionary. And that's why their message has been, you know, the most harmful to the environmental cause. No group that ever advocated for

you know, combating climate change has done more harm to the cause of combating climate change like the Extinction Rebellion. Because of the panic they're trying to foment. Because of the panic and because of the message and the intersectionality of the message. The problem is the intersectionality here, where you have vegans, you know, basically uniting with animal rights movements, uniting basically with anti-capitalist movements, united with the pro-environmental movement, and then basically have them all together

threatening, basically, the system that sustains the global economy as it is. And the problem is, basically, when you try to sell this to people in India or Africa or the Middle East or China or Southeast Asia or Pakistan, I'm talking about the most, and Bangladesh, the most populous nations of the world, two-thirds of the humanity, when you try to sell these ideas to them, it's not just only coming as, you know, the single issue of the environment, it's a whole package of

you need to stop eating fish, you need to stop eating meat, you need to stop eating honey even. You shouldn't wear leather, you shouldn't eat dairy, milk, ice cream, whatever. And so basically someone from Saudi Arabia or someone from the deserts of Africa basically will look at you and say, okay,

You know, it's not green where I am, you know, unless if you actually make it rain 24-7 so I can grow tomatoes and cucumbers, you know, then I'm going to eat the desert animals, you know, like the camels and the goats or whatever that feed on scarce desert vegetation, which is not suitable for human consumption.

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So extinction rebellions rhetoric isn't really landing in the developing world, but in the West. It's rejected, but only landing is actually it's viewed as a joke. But in the West, it is not viewed as a joke. I mean, anecdotally, I can just say based on friends of mine who are really

passionate about this and Extinction Rebellion's message is really landing with them. They are scared. They are panicked. And they are changing their lifestyles in response to this. They really are. The amount of vegans, the amount of people who they no longer buy things from Amazon. They no longer buy new things at all. They go to charity shops more and more. They just, you know, it really is a movement. It's almost like a spiritual movement.

And that's a problem. It's becoming like a cult to some extent. Well, that's a negative way of putting it. But I actually am often very impressed by especially my younger friends who are able to summon the will from within them to live in a more sustainable way, which, after all, is not a bad thing. I find myself not as able to do so. Yeah. But the problem here is you can't, you know, come from an environment like Europe and North America, which is lush, green.

abundance of water, abundance of vegetation. And already post-industrial. Exactly. And demand that two-thirds of humanity who have access to none of these, basically, not abundance of water, not abundance of vegetation, not abundance of... You know, we're talking here about, you know, three billion people depend on the ocean, basically, for their livelihoods in terms of food and protein intake. Because you can't go to the coast of Somalia, Mozambique, Madagascar, the Maldives,

Indonesia, Malaysia and all of these places and tell them stop eating fish. To be fair to them, they are mainly lobbying their own governments and their own politicians to implement new and more radical policies. But

Ultimately, what they would like is for those politicians to create a global strategy for combating the climate crisis along the lines they wish. And that would entail the Western world ganging up to some extent on the rest of the world. Look, I have lived a life where I've spent years in four different war zones and then I spent years in the banking sector.

I spent years in multiple countries, you know, from the west to the east. And, you know, I've been in different jobs from the spiritual to the economic to the semi-scientific when I was actually building, you know, chemical weapons for Al-Qaeda. So basically, so in a sense, you know, over 40 years lifetime, you accumulate some knowledge.

You know, I won't call it wisdom, but I will call it basically... Perspective. Perspective. And the perspective here is this. Climate change is a crisis. That I accept. What I don't accept is panic. So how do I propose to deal with it? Exactly. How do you propose? Two principles that you always apply in business and you apply in your own personal life and you can apply to every situation, including governance. The first one is...

Crisis management. And the second principle is business continuity. How can these two principles taken from business help us address the climate crisis? Okay, let's say basically that we have a factory that, let's say, makes ice cream. And

And suddenly there was a hurricane that affected the dairy farm that was actually supplying the factory. It affected some of the employees. The supply chain has been disrupted. The supply chain has been disrupted. So what do you do? Already there is a plan. There is a contingency that should the supply...

chain be disrupted. Okay, do we have enough in reserves for a day or two or three to keep the factory running? If there are a shortage of employees, do we have any people basically who can come and fill the capacity? You know, what about the road network? Can we take alternative roads? You know, because you need to stay in business. Even if, you know, okay,

If we have to reduce capacity because basically we are really affected by the catastrophic climate disaster, how do we do it? So basically we reduce the capacity by 10 percent, 20 percent, 30 percent, even 50 percent. But let us actually keep working at 50 percent capacity in order to recover later.

So this is called crisis management and business continuity. So basically the world needs to come together and say climate change is real, but in order to establish as much continuity in prosperity that we can, we need to manage this crisis, not freak out about it and adopt radical revolutionary solutions. Yeah, because imagine two scenarios here. Okay, let's say basically we are in a concert.

And some terrorists basically pulled out a knife and started stabbing others basically there in the corner of that concert. I can imagine that happening. It's happened, unfortunately. So what happened is...

If the ushers and the security manager of the venue is clever, he will announce quickly on the megaphone that, you know, ladies and gentlemen, please proceed to the gate. There is an emergency. It's only an accident. There is nothing to worry about, but just proceed to all the emergency exits in order in orderly fashion.

Now, of course, basically, it's a calming, calm measure thing. You don't basically disclose the entire information because people will panic. You don't shout, attack, attack, flee for your lives. What's going to happen? The stampede will kill 10 times more people than the stabbing incident itself would have killed. So these are the two differences here. Panic kills. But the people who are advocating, well, let's say the people who are panicking say, look, there is no solution. We just need to stop with

with all of our consumption, stop with all of our industry, stop with all of our resource extraction. We need to stop. Okay. If not, what do you suggest? What do you put your faith in to save us from what you acknowledge is a climate crisis? Technology. We should put our faith in technology, in

innovation going forward. Because just as I was talking to you minutes ago when I said basically that in Saudi Arabia they are actually experimenting with new solar power technology that is 400% more efficient. And if we are seeing that roads can be built from plastic waste,

and even install solar panels on these roads so actually a static infrastructure become more useful. If we are looking at carbon capture technology, which one plant alone will replace basically the need for 40 million trees to suck the carbon out of thin air basically and sequester it,

or use it as when you mix it with hydrogen, it becomes a carbon neutral fuel. These are technologies now. And in the last episode, I told you basically that the technology in the past 10 years is greater than the technology of the previous 100 years put together. And the previous 100 years greater than the previous 10,000. Exactly. So what's going to happen in the next 10 years?

In the next 10 years, when humans feel the need, and they say that the need is the mother of all inventions, when humans feel the need to come up with solutions, they will come up with solutions. Bill Gates is one of the great investors in this new technology of carbon capture. And carbon capture technology is proving to be more and more efficient than just basically just only planting trees. I actually am all for planting trees. But one plant...

over 3 or 4 acres of land could actually basically, you know, suck more carbon than 600,000 acres of forested area. That's a lot of carbon sucking. Exactly. Which we can sequester it in the ground

safely, especially in empty oil fields, in empty previously extracted oil fields, or we can basically mix it with hydrogen and basically it becomes a carbon neutral, to some extent, carbon neutral fuel. So you put your faith in technology, but

But, Eamon, you're a Muslim. You're supposed to put your faith in God. And here you are sounding like some Silicon Valley techno-futurist bro. Well, you know, in my own personal belief, I believe it's God who guided us towards this technology. You know, basically, God is merciful. Yes, he saw basically that how we...

are destroying his beautiful creation. But at the same time, basically, he is whispering into our minds the solutions for it. So I'm not saying basically Silicon Valley, you know, is receiving like a direct star link from God. But I'm saying here is that there is a solution. And the solution is technology and human innovation. Those who say, those who say stop everything right now,

Unfortunately, they are actually dooming us even further. Not actually providing any solution. You can shout in the streets all you want. You can shout until your lungs explode.

But shouting will not get us anywhere. Panicking will not get us anywhere. Blockading airports and roads and bridges and, you know, subway trains and underground trains will not get us anywhere. Well, I agree with you. I think that panic isn't the solution. But as for your faith in technology...

You might be an optimistic Muslim, but I think I'm more of a pessimistic Christian. And I'm not sure that I put my faith in Silicon Valley and men like Elon Musk. I just can't bring myself to do it. I sort of think we probably are going to be soon facing a much more catastrophic change in political economies, change in our levels of consumption.

I mean, if you ask me, I tend to sympathize with those voices from the 19th century romantic movement that sees as a consequence of this industry and the consequence of our rising prosperity, see something like,

like an essential spiritual problem at work there that is now manifesting itself outside of ourselves. And for me, a spiritual problem really has a spiritual solution. I don't know what that solution is, and it probably just muddies the water even further to bring it up. But the part of the Extinction Rebellion movement that, beyond the panic, is encouraging people really to spiritually transform. They might not think of it in that way, but

Consume less, buy less, save, live in greater harmony with the environment. That strikes me as at least part of the solution. I agree, but still I have to say that this message does not transcend the borders of the Western world. It's still a Western mindset, a Western mindset.

white man savior mentality. I'm sorry to say that. Oh, no. It's still... I mean, I'm just saying from the point of view of people I talk to in the Middle East, in China, in India, in Africa, people just basically are not buying it. The climate crisis is the new white man's burden. And we're going to bring the light of revolutionary environmentalist change to you brown and black people who don't know any better. Exactly. That's so depressing. I know, but that's the reality. Like when you talk...

When you talk to an Arab, basically, they are very optimistic. They will say, oh, look, basically, we are using, yes, we are getting the hydrocarbons basically out of the ground. We are extracting. We're making money. But what we are doing with it, we are saving. We are investing. We are basically buying more technology to replace our petrol-powered electricity generators with solar, wind,

and nuclear, so we may survive and we have water. So basically, whenever you tell them, yeah, but the West is saying, they will immediately wave their hands dismissively and say, let the West shut up. They have all the water, we have none. So they should shut up. Because we have far more pressing problems than theirs. And we know how to deal with ours, let them deal with theirs. That's the message I'm hearing!

So, Eamon, extinction rebellions rhetoric isn't appealing to the non-Western world, as you say. So how could Western environmentalists change their message to appeal to the East? You mentioned earlier that they could perhaps position their message along the lines of the

health of human health? What they need to do is to focus on the environment and the environment only. First of all, there is no need for the intersectionality of causes like, you know, veganism and socialism and all of these things. You just drop it. It's not going to sell in the rest of the world. That's the first thing.

Second thing is to tell the people basically that it is for their own health. And the second thing is for their own survival. So, for example, if I'm going to convince the government of Bangladesh, for example, that it is in their own interest of the government of Bangladesh...

to implement environmentally friendly policies because they are one of the first countries that will suffer if the sea levels rises because they are a very low country in a way the possibility of flooding that could you know displace tens of millions. This is the strategy that has largely been pursued by the UN and other global bodies. Exactly because it's a calm measured strategy.

way of approaching this. So on balance then, you're actually rather, you're not antipathetic to the environmentalist movement more generally, the moderate bureaucratic almost way that it has been pursued over the last few decades. It's these more radical voices that have sprung up in recent years that you don't really think are on the right track. Because you can't go to people basically in developing countries and tell them that

sorry, you will never reach the prosperity that we ever achieved because you know what? The world is about to end. Sorry, you missed your spot. Sorry, you missed your time. But that's it. We're going to switch off the tab of prosperity, you know, and you have to live in the Stone Age.

This is a message that is coming into the rest of the world and the rest of the world is giving the middle finger back. So, Ayman, what do we do? Just don't panic. My fear, Thomas, here is that I've been in an organization that is classified as terrorist, which is Al-Qaeda. And what I'm afraid is that as movements like Extinction Rebellion and others are framing the human race as the enemy,

And with the rhetoric going about how humans are going to doom the world and end the world, there would be some young minds who are genius and clever but nonetheless isolated and full of conspiracy theories in their heads.

they might basically just decide together to develop a virus and just release it into the population in order to reduce the human population or even end it. And they see this as a favor. Already there is a university professor here in London

You know, she came up with a book just recently where she argues that we should stop all having babies and let the human race die so the planet might survive. Ideas like this are becoming normative. It's true. I mean, I think you do encounter such ideas more and more regularly. And I can imagine that certain impressionable people...

Maybe the same sort who might initially get involved in a mosque study circle to increase their own piety and then they hear more and more of this sort of conspiratorial apocalyptic rhetoric from the Islamist.

right or left or whatever you want to call it. And it might, you know, they might find themselves on a road that leads to ever more extremism that sometimes does result in violence. In fact, whenever I talk to my clients, you know, basically either in the private or public sector,

when it comes to counterterrorism issues, they actually express the fact that they are seeing the embryonic stages of environmental terrorism because their rhetoric is so vicious right now from a minority of environmental activists. A huge minority of them. But just like Muslims, a huge minority of Muslims get involved in Islamist violence. But it causes a big problem.

A small minority, not a huge minority. That's an interesting question semantically. A very small minority of Muslims are seduced by Islamist violence, but it causes a big problem. Exactly. The same thing with the environmentalist movement. We will have a small minority who would actually most likely end up resorting to violence and terrorism in the future, possibly the near future, because if we have this deadline of 12 years, unfortunately being propagated by politicians who should know better,

you end up basically pushing agitated people towards violence. And we need to, this is why I'm saying we shouldn't panic anymore.

People, just please calm down your rhetoric. We're not going to die. We will survive. Don't worry. We will survive. So if it is true that it is the climate change political rhetoric that might unite a diminishing West and allow them to claw back some of the power they've been losing of late, it might be that, weirdly enough, environmentalism becomes the ideological underpinning of the new world order.

We are certainly living in a world very different, Eamon, from the one that we grew up in. George H.W. Bush's New World Order didn't turn out as he planned, but nobody can doubt, compared to the Cold War, when the globe was split between the two superpowers of America and the Soviet Union, or even to the 90s, when for a brief moment, America was totally dominant,

Today, following everything we've touched on over the course of two seasons now, 9-11, the war on terror, the rise of China, the return of Russia, the clash between Iran and Saudi Arabia in the oil-rich Gulf, and the twin crises of global capitalism and climate change, we're in a much more multipolar world than we were, a world that remains conflicted.

Dear listener, thank you so much for sticking with us throughout this season of Conflicted. We hope you've enjoyed it and we'll keep listening when we come back for our third season. And don't worry, you won't have to wait very long this time. To hear the details as soon as we announce them, subscribe to the show in your podcast app and follow us on social media. You can find us on Facebook and Twitter at mhconflicted.

And of course, once again, you can win a book connected to this episode. It's called Wilding by Isabella Tree, and it is a beautifully written description of a pioneering rewilding project, a reminder of the power of nature to heal itself if human beings step back and let it happen. To have a chance to win it, join our discussion group on Facebook before the 29th of April. You can find it by searching Conflicted Podcast Discussion Group

Conflicted is a Message Heard production. It's produced by Sandra Ferrari and Jake Otajewicz. Edited by Sandra Ferrari. Our theme music is by Matt Huxley. Thank you again. My name is Thomas Small, and Eamon and I will be back soon. Stay tuned. Goodbye. Goodbye.