Is it possible to achieve fair and inclusive prosperity without a green agenda?
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Welcome to the LSE Events Podcast by the London School of Economics and Political Science. Get ready to hear from some of the most influential international figures in the social sciences. Good evening, everyone. It's a great pleasure for me to welcome you to this joint public lecture hosted by the Kenyatta Blanche Centre and part of the Department of Geography and Environment Sustainability Public Lectures. My name is Andres Rodriguez-Posse.

And I am the Princesa de Asturias Chair, I know it's a mouthful, and a professor of economic geography at the London School of Economics. And I am also the director of the Cañada Plan Centre here at the LSE. Now, for all of you that are here, if you hadn't noticed, and perhaps some of you have been locked in a soundproof chamber for the past few days,

Europe is at a massive crossroads right now and this week much more than what it was last week. And not the kind of crossroads where you can just take a casual left turn and hope for the best. This is more like one of those high stakes multi-lane intersections where hesitation is fatal and the wrong move could send us straight into incoming traffic. For Europe,

there are several hard truths that we have to be confronted with. The first one is that Europe has got a competitiveness problem and we just have to see the Dragon Report. In 2000, the EU accounted for about 25% of the global economy. We fast forward 25 years to today in 2025 and that figure has dropped to just 16%. This is not just a rounding error.

This is a significant loss of economic muscle and with it of Europe's ability to influence the rest of the world. Second, this relatively sluggish economic performance is fueling inequality. Today in the European Union there are 60 million Europeans who live in places where GDP per capita is lower in real terms than what it was in the year 2000.

and one third of Europe's population, well of the EU population or 135 million people, live in regions that are slowly but surely falling behind.

This isn't just an economic issue, it's becoming a political time bomb. And finally, of course, there's climate change. Every month seems to break a new temperature record. Droughts, flash floods and relentless heat waves are no longer extreme events, they are simply events. They are no longer the exception, unfortunately they are the rule.

And climate change is here, it's no longer an abstract threat, it's costly and it's only getting worse. So here's the challenge and here's the challenge for Teresa Rivera: How does Europe square the circle? How can we in Europe regain competitiveness in a way that is socially and territorially fair while also accelerating our fight against climate change?

Can we really become more competitive without social equity and environmental sustainability? And can we fight climate change or social injustice without becoming more competitive? To untangle these trade-offs, or perhaps even better, to convince us that there are no trade-offs at all, we have today the great honor of hosting Teresa Rivera, who is the Executive Vice President of the European Commission for Clean, Just and Competitive Transition.

Now, if anyone is qualified in the world to speak about this, it's Teresa. Her career has been defined by a delicately balancing act of economic progress, environmental responsibility and social justice. She has an impressive CV. She has served until a mere three months ago as Vice President of the Government of Spain and Minister for the Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge and as a member of the Spanish Parliament.

Before that, she led key negotiations in climate diplomacy as director of the Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations, and she played a crucial role in the Paris Climate Agreement, from which, unfortunately, the US has withdrawn now for the second time.

She has been Spain's Secretary of State for Climate Change and Biodiversity, a senior public official, an academic, and is a member of the Royal Academy of Science, Letters and Fine Arts in Belgium. I am acutely aware that you did not come here to listen to me. You came to hear Teresa Rivera.

But before I hand over to her, I have to give a quick note on questions, and there will be questions for those of you both in the room and following online. As usual, as in every event at the LSE, there will be your chance to put your questions to Teresa Rivera. For our online audience, you can submit your questions via the Q&A feature at the top left of your screen. Questions would be submitted to myself,

If you're doing so, you have to let us know your name and your affiliation. And we are, as always, particularly keen to hear from our students and alumni. So please let us know if you're one of those. For those of you here in the theatre, I will let you know when we open the room for questions, the floor for questions. If you can raise your hand and wait for the microphone, and there will be microphones around, to arrive...

I will ask then you to provide your name, your affiliation, before actually posing your question. I will try to ensure that there's a range of questions from both our online audience and our audience here in the theatre. And since I anticipate that there will be quite a lot of questions, I will be gathering questions in groups of three for Teresa. However, before we start, I have one warning for all of you. Following what

are going to be, no doubt, very insightful remarks from Teresa Rivera. We would like to have an engaging discussion. But in order to achieve that, we need questions. We don't need mini-lectures. If you have a point to make and you want to make it longer, please go and write a blog post. But don't do it live here.

But I will certainly encourage you to tweet or use social media, or if you want to use X, Blue Sky, LinkedIn, Instagram, or whatever social media you prefer using the usual hashtag #LSEevents. This event is being recorded and will hopefully be made available as a podcast subject to no technical issues. Finally, if you have a question,

Do yourself and the rest of the audience a favour by doing a simple exercise that I always recommend my students. Start the question by why, how, what, which or to what extent. This simple exercise will keep the conversation focused and make it far more productive for everyone. If you don't, I'll cut you off faster than you can say geopolitical uncertainty, which is the word for today.

And as this tradition here at the LSE, students or anyone who looks like a student, so try to disguise yourself as a student, will have priority. So without further ado, and that said, Teresa, the floor is yours.

Thank you, thank you so much Andrés and thanks to you all for being in this room. It's quite encouraging. I have taken good note of the why's, the how's and the how's and the what extent and in fact I feel like doing the same. Ask you the why's, the how's and the what extent because it's true that answering this question is quite a complicated exercise that we try to fix.

But even if we could think that it was a complicated exercise, now it looks like a little bit more complicated. So there may be many issues in my introductory comments that I would like to share with you in a humbling manner, because I expect from you not only raising questions by

But by these raising questions, trying to get some additional input from your side in this house, which has always been well known for its interest in connecting economics, politics and society. And in a moment where we need to combine all these ideas and discussions in order to find the right answers. Because in fact,

How do you say it? Turbulent geopolitics, something like that? That was written before the last weekend, but now after the weekend it is even more volatile and controversial. In fact, it would be a weird thing not to make comments on what we have been witnessing these days. Because to a certain extent we know that, or we feel, as in a turning point for the world,

And for Europe, in the traditional way we have understood the alliance and building with lots of effort a more fair world, based in the rule of law, in cooperation, in the UN Charter, trying to achieve peace and prosperity for all, and of course,

It is not that we have responded to all the challenges, but we thought that we were building a better world. And we thought that there were key partners to do this exercise and to improve the quality of life of most human beings around the world. And now we have found ourselves a little bit shaken by the way

We speak about war and security in the European territory without even taking into consideration those that have felt the force and those that have been supporting and trying to avoid the force being used to impose their conditions.

And I have the impression that it is important to remind ourselves that Europe can cope and take the right pathway to face the challenges. But it will be a little bit more complicated and it will require unity and remind ourselves of the most important priorities, values, principles and rules that have guided

the way we have built our projects and the way we think we can build peace and prosperity. The UN Charter, the rule of law, the spirit of cooperation versus the spirit of conflict and stepping up and defending these values. Silence is not an option. Shadowing is not an option. Feeling that we are subordinated to the force is not an option.

We need to defend proudly what we do. Building the responses based on our strengths and principles, respect to democracy and the rule of law, based on equality and mutual respect, based on human rights and freedoms. It matters. We know. You know. It matters. Among them, there are

such a relevant thing as peace and prosperity and development worldwide, but in a region too, that do connect.

to challenges that we are already experiencing and that are not fake, are truth and have a terrible impact in human suffering and in economic losses such as climate change. So to a certain extent, this question on how we can build alliance, how we can respond in a structured manner, respecting the rule of law, respecting the rules and respecting the others,

That also matters when we try to respond to this very simple question on how fairness, justice, climate and middle class can go along together to build prosperity. And please do not forget about this because we will hear a lot about this. My question to you is why you think that this is happening, why you think that when the polls show that in the group of people between 18 and 25, it seems like...

It is a little bit less important. There may be reasons that we do not understand why or ways we communicate that prevent being conscious of the importance to provide the right answers and to act jointly to provide the answers. I think that what we are talking about relates back to the middle class, the poverty reduction efforts, the prosperity,

the update of the economy and the industry and the services, but it also connects to the economic security and to democracy. In fact, if the institutions are not able to respond to the challenges, we ask ourselves to what extent these institutions are still valid. If we see this rising divide and increasing gap in terms of access to wealth and services and opportunities,

In a society, we wonder why the institutions deserve credit. If we see climate change as a terrible economic threat that can create mass suffer, but we are not able to respond to the climate change and to build resilience, we wonder why we should pay attention to what institutions try to get and to fix.

So I think that it is not only the traditional way that Roderick puts this combination between middle class development and climate change as being difficulty compatible, and after that he took some additional thinking about this, and I think that things have evolved. To me it's not only that the three of them

can only be met if we combine the three question marks. It is that only if we respond in a balanced manner to the three aspirations, we could build economic security and we could strengthen the democratic model. Otherwise, we would be thinking they have performed very well. Oh, it's a pity to lose freedoms and rights, but they performed well. Or, well, it is a pity

to get much more lower social services or opportunities because we need to accept that more freedom or liberty at the expense of not covering all the society may be a model. But we feel reasonably happy in the way in Europe we have tried to combine the social dimension, the economic dimension and the freedoms and rights dimension.

and it is around the middle class that we have managed to improve the quality of our common life, of our societal responses. The fact is none of these aspirations can be achieved in isolation because that could not be matching to the reality of the physics or to the expectations of the people and in fact

It is well known even if sometimes there are people that try to hide this fact, the climate crisis is not just an environmental challenge. It is a prominent economic issue, as the Professor Lord Nicholas Sperling stated a long time ago, and we have learned in real terms and experienced the consequence of not paying sufficient attention to that, but also...

the benefits whenever we tackle that in an adequate manner. In fact, climate change exacerbates poverty by displacing people from their homes, by disrupting agriculture and weakening food security, by damaging vulnerable communities more generally. It weakens cohesion and increases inequalities. It provokes terrible migrations, suffer, I said. The World Bank warns that an additional

68 to 135 million people could be pushed into poverty by 2030 because of climate change and managed impacts. This means this monthly all the efforts we have been working on to eradicate poverty in the recent decades. The climate change takes a significant health toll. Air pollution can create illness and premature death as the world material

health organization states in a very depressing figure that goes up to 6.4 million lives annually with 95% occurring in developing countries with health systems that cannot provide the adequate support to the people. The health related economic cost is staggering amounting to 8.1 trillion per year or 6.1% of the global GDP.

And instead of working in a cooperative manner, so to develop further capacity to deal with climate, to deal with health issues, to deal with food security, to build in a cooperative manner a global governance to solve these problems, we still have to fight to provide good reasons why we should be sticking to this cooperative mood instead of accepting conflict.

But it is not only the most vulnerable groups or the poorest people that do suffer these climate impacts and feel affected. Heat waves, wildfires and floods threaten the stability of middle class incomes. I'm not just speaking about physical security, but it increases the cost of living and the cost of insurance. From 2021 to 2023, the climate related economic losses total 162 billion euros

While catastrophe insurance can help mitigate the impacts in the European Union, so one of the most developed regions in the world, it is only about a quarter of climate-related catastrophe losses that are currently covered. This means that for the rest, either it is the people trying to cope,

or it is the public budget, distracting resources that could be dedicated to education, innovation, health insurance, pensions that need to be reinvested to recover what it existed before the floods, the heat waves or the wildfires took place. For instance, in Slovenia, the estimate was that 17%

of the national public budget had to be dedicated to recover from the flooding episodes of the previous years back in 2024. Not to speak about Valencia, not to speak about Los Angeles.

I'm not so negative around the Paris Agreement. And this is something which is also important because it turns back to the fact that we need to cooperate together, not only to identify the concrete ways forward, which is the main issue that we need to work right now, but also to strengthen and to underscore the value of cooperation. In fact, thanks to the Paris Agreement,

We have gone from an expectation of having temperatures more than 4 degrees over the pre-industrial era to 2.7. Is this enough? Of course not. But pulling efforts together has helped in a decade to transform the reality. And now it is the critical decade. It is the very critical decade. And we cannot be distracted by those challenges

stating or combating the importance of speeding up the rate of the transformation. There is a climate security threshold that we need to meet and it is quite important to understand what happens, to follow the facts and to learn from the experience. So the threat about misinformation is a huge threat. It is a threat against

The capacity of a society to decide on a democratic and well-informed basis on what are the risks that this society is ready to accept or is not in a position to accept,

It is a way to escape from the data that could help to understand who wins, who loses, and what else we can do, and how and who we should be supporting during the transition times, during the time that we change so deeply the way we produce, the way we consume. So I think that this is an important aspect, dealing with those things that we should not allow to happen. But then the question is what we should be pushing for.

there is something which is quite obvious. We can only count on the people being committed and willing to do more if people experience the benefits of the change and understand that it may take time, but that it has an immediate benefit that can be growing up along the years and

evidently when compared with the cost of the lack of action, but there are things that can be beneficial since the very first moment. So, just to say that the way we communicate matters, and just to say that it would be very important to be as concrete as possible in the learning phase and the changing phase where we are going right now. We have been collecting data along the years on the green jobs.

To what extent there are economic sectors where we see that there are figures that improve because the labour market counts on the skilled people that can count on very good jobs and that can create additional wealth in the local communities or can reduce the cost of living because of a different lower cost of energy or an insurance in terms of their own properties.

So the question is to what extent, if we know that this is a relevant issue, to what extent we can avoid the use of the difficulties as the scapegoat to avoid the climate agenda. The combination of the right measures that could provide a good basis for action instead of framing climate policies as an elitist driven initiative.

that does not take into consideration the fear of change for many communities that do not think that can count on the institutions to cope with such a deep change in the way they live, in the way they get their earnings, their day-to-day life. And this may explain some of...

No. This may be explained to certain extent to what Andres was pointing out in his preliminary comments, how there may be many people that still think that this is a threat, that still think that the lack of action could be very dangerous, but that they cannot trust their institutions or their society to count on their own needs to be covered as such. So I think that this turns back

to the importance of the political commitment and the capacity to make alliance, to ensure partnerships between the different parts of the society, the local communities, the national governments, but also the society as such, the workers, the consumers. We have gone through this experience back in Spain when facing down

and I can assure you that it is quite intense in terms of the political energy that we need to dedicate to build alternatives based on the expectations of the local communities, listening to the concerns of the local communities, to acknowledge the fear and sense of loss that can come with change. So it is quite an ambitious agenda that we need to put in place.

It may happen also with the farmers and the availability of fresh water and expectations in terms of what next for the next generation. It may happen with a long list of industrial sectors that need to update in the way they produce, in the way they require different labour skills, in the way the demand evolves in the regional context or in the way the demand grows

in international markets that competes globally and not just in a given regional market. It must remind us that building these opportunities requires to pay attention to what is happening in the rest of the world. I was paying attention to your figures on what is the contribution

of Europe to the global economy and how it has descended in the recent years. I could not say that this is bad news. This means that the rest of the world is evolving and that it is a good thing that happens. And it is a good thing that there have been other geographies that have identified the green industrial products as something that is required. That is not a bad thing as such. We may need to adapt the way the economic...

relationships evolve in different geographies, how we can ensure a level playing field that does not pay attention to the traditional means that we have been using for decades. But I don't think that this is a bad issue. We need much of that. We need much of that of producing differently, consuming differently, and rebalancing global and local in such a way that provides benefits for all.

without creating the sense of being competing against each other just to get an advantage against the other, but to build a much more political and economic stability through cooperation. I could say that that is more or less what we are trying to do in this mandate at the European Commission level.

There has been lots of things that we have done in the previous mandates, trying to identify what are the goals, what we want to achieve, how we should change the different rules and scenarios that we have been building for decades. And yes, we have these reports that underscore the fact that building a single market is something that cannot stop, that we need to keep on deepening in this area.

advantages of being a big market and relying on our neighbors to the provision of goods and moving the goods, the services and the people, the workers in our geographies. And we know that we have a huge capacity in terms of research, in terms of the first attempts to develop these new solutions, new technology solutions, that we have a very educated society

and very modern infrastructures that can provide advantages in order to provide these services and to connect to the rest of the world. But we have a problem, or a couple of problems, dealing with the cost of finance, the cost of energy, retaining talent, building in innovative terms. And this is why the intention is to work through

the existing tools and strengths to find out how we can bet on the clean industry to recover this confidence in our own capacities to produce and to rebalance the relation with the rest of the world, to ensure the level playing field in a well-functioning single market, to upgrade the capacity. We have to identify the skills and the training and the educational opportunities

features that we need to strengthen, to identify how we can use our competition tools to provide the right incentives to speed up the production of clean goods and innovation, or to ensure that we can count on the public procurement to ensure that it is not just the price that counts when taking into consideration the decisions that could provide

the goods and the service and the infrastructures that the citizens require. And over that, how to build a different energy system that responds to what we have already experienced. We don't want to lay or to leave our productivity, our capacity to produce, depending on something that we do not produce. And energy is something that we all need to ensure

and to ensure industrial activity. We have been working quite intensively in this Clean Industrial Deal approach. It is important to underscore the fact that the clean is still the driver to innovate and to update our industrial capacities, and it is important to identify

What is the combination of the different pieces and strengths that have been built for decades in the European Union so to provide the right ecosystem to recover the confidence and to boost this capacity? Of course, it works much better in a world driven by cooperation than in a world based on conflict.

But we need to stick to these values and to build the solutions with the tools that we count on defending the interests, the values and the boring rule of law that matters in terms of stability, predictability and confidence. Our strengths should also be thinking about the external dimensions of what we do. And I think that this is also relevant in a country like this, who is European, with very...

similar cultural values because the rest of the world will be looking at what we do. We, the United Kingdom, we, the European Union. How we do react in a moment where cooperation, rule of law, common response to global challenges is being challenged.

And of course, we need to ground our response on diplomacy, mutual understanding and respect. But we also need to be coherent and consistent and think overall on the social impact that anything we do may have, not only today, but also in the mid and long run. Thank you so much. Hi, I'm interrupting this event to tell you about another awesome LSE podcast that we think you'd enjoy.

LSE IQ asks social scientists and other experts to answer one intelligent question, like why do people believe in conspiracy theories? Or can we afford the super rich? Come check us out. Just search for LSE IQ wherever you get your podcasts. Now back to the event.

Thank you very much, Teresa. I'm sure there are going to be quite a few questions from the audience, but in order to allow you to think about your questions, I'm going to start with an icebreaker, which is climate change is happening, and it's happening, and you highlighted it very, very clearly, and we have a green transition, but as you also highlighted, the green transition sometimes is not popular.

Why? Possibly because in order to achieve what is going to be a common good and is going to have significant positive economic benefits, in the short run, they're going to be winners and losers. What is the European Union thinking about in order to make sure that we bring everyone on board into this idea that climate change is necessary, that we need a transition, and that all those costs that

some will have to face in the short run are necessary for a common good? Well, I think that the best thing to avoid is to express that there are winners and losers. I think that we need to be aware that this is quite challenging and that we need to pay attention to what are the right measures to avoid the losers or the unfair losers.

I mean, there may be eventual losers that could be no losers if they adapt because their business model has changed or the way they produce or the things that they use or the things that they produce may evolve and there is time to do that.

And this was the reason why we started to talk about just transition dealing with the coal sector, because we knew that coal could be a looser sector and that it was impossible to avoid that it was a looser sector. But that should not mean that the workers or the neighbors in mining areas or in coal plants areas should be losers.

And this requires quite a big effort, because in fact it is not only giving the economic incentive to make the right decision in terms of business,

strategy that counts, but it is paying attention to those sectors of the society that may feel in an unfair manner loses in this transition. And this means mainly workers and consumers, but it may be neighbours in an area that becomes quite affected by such a deep change in the way they have been creating wealth for decades.

And this is what I say that it is quite intense in terms of political energy. It is not going to be solved just because the macroeconomics work. It requires political engagement on the ground. And it requires respect to the people. So to pay attention what they say, how they feel, what they want, and what they fear. And to be credible. You cannot misjudge.

You cannot afford mistrust of these people when you come back after a few years and you have not provided the right solutions because that is going to irritate everybody and to give this contagion effect that may be very critical. And I guess that this is something of, this is one of those things where we need to pay much more attention. For a very long while we have identified, and it is quite impressive what we have identified,

achieved jointly. This is why I don't like to talk bad things about the Paris Agreement, because I think that what we have done collectively is quite impressive. Of course, it is far from being enough, but it is quite impressive. But in the next phase, we need to identify how we go into much more deeper and complicated pathways, where we need the involvement of the people that now understand that the change is real,

and that they cannot live in a nostalgia approach, but that they need to feel that they can count on the support of the society to have the answers. And this is the main mission, I think, from the institutions. And this is why I think that if we fail...

It is democracy what is at stake because the answer would be these people are not able to respond to our concerns. Either they respond to climate in macroeconomic figures or great business opportunities, but they do not care about the people. Or if they care about the people and they feel terrified by the need of change and they do not move, they could be failing in the climate approach. So I think that combining the...

the very concrete aspects on the ground with the consistency in the decisions we take would be very, very important. I'm going to get Hans now, but just one quick reaction in a moment. You said democracy might be at stake, but is democracy not already at stake when

climate change skeptic or climate change denying parties are already targeting these groups of the population. This is why I think that we need to be coherent but to step up. I think that what it is astonishing is that in fact those saying or those claiming I am defending the people and I am defending the people by denying the facts or the need of a response

or insulting, criticizing or undermining the credibility of those willing to act, in fact are working to create more harm and more suffer for the people that they defend. So I think that what we need to do is to remain credible on the right side and to step up to say, hey, do not mistake and do not fool the people. We need to provide the right answers, not to deny the problem.

There's a question over there, so there are a lot of hands now. So starting over there with the golf computer. Hi, I'm Elio from the European Institute, and my question is, to what extent do you think that the EU's attempts to harmonize the taxonomy CSRD and CSDD under an omnibus regulation, to what extent will that affect efforts to reform the SFDR?

Thank you. Let me just accumulate. You started very well. Probably a lot of acronyms, but that's very good. Another hand over here. The first.

Hi, I'm Daniel, chemical engineer working at JM. Hi, Teresa. So I'd like to hear your thoughts on how we can ensure that the European energy policies are truly evidence-based in a way that they prioritize a fair transition for society rather than benefiting all gas industries at the expense of consumers. So I'd like...

really to hear your thoughts particularly around the hype created around truly expensive green hydrogen. Thank you very much. Muchas gracias. Very proud of your commitment. And a third question. Let me see. Don't we have any women from here? I mean, there's only men. Let's go over there. You're behind that. No, no. You have it over there. So, yeah. Yeah. I'm Marcio. I'm in the Department of Government.

And my question is, to what extent can nuclear energy help the EU tackle climate change and meet Paris Agreement's targets? Okay, thank you very much. And you've been all very disciplined. Teresa, the floor is yours. Thank you so much for the questions. I have to say that also dealing with labour...

The new green jobs are mostly populated by men. So ladies, step up. Also for the questions. No, it's a small joke, but it is also important. So we are speaking about deregulation to be transparent and to report on...

climate and sustainability, the requirements to ensure that there is a strategy to diverge from climate risk, and that we apply a taxonomy that allows the investors to be sure that they invest where they need to invest. And it was a package of regulation that it was very difficult to be agreed to,

And it is one of the first things that has been appointed as aspects where we can simplify. That's your question. What does it mean, simplifying, and what does it mean in terms of staying in course? I could say that what I hear from the president of the commission is that

The targets do remain and that we should be asking ourselves to what extent we can simplify and make easier the way to achieve these targets. And connected to this package, there is the impression and the demand coming from, I was going to say some, many some,

saying this is a very complicated way to report. And I could say that it may be true. I mean, if we need to report in such a detailed manner, then we can go. If we try to agree in this room, we may find out 5,000 different indicators and there may be overlappings or inconsistencies and so on and so on. So I intellectually accept the fact that it may be improved.

and intellectually accept that it may be worthy to try to simplify to ensure that this goes smoothly and we grow up from that. The only thing we should be paying attention to is not to miss the purpose of what we were doing because this was a package that was intended

that we learn to invest in such a way that we build a climate resilient economy and that we do not increase the problem of climate. And coming back to darkness is no way out. Coming back to darkness does not allow anyone to invest and could mean wasting the money.

And then we should combine this demand to be simple and consistent, matching the purpose of the regulation and avoiding, as I said, coming back to darkness. Once I say that, yes, of course, there may be many people willing to use the word simplification, meaning deregulation.

and that is the field where we are still moving with different views and different perceptions coming from the different players. My position, as I think it is the position shared by the Commission, the College of Commissioners, is that we should be quite careful because the line between smart simplification

and the regulation may be very fine and we need to avoid to come across that line. Then Europe prices, energy prices being for gas, hydrogen, you've got lots of things in the same package dealing with energy. Well, I would say a few things about this.

And I come from a country where I would say that we have performed not so bad in macroeconomic terms, job creation, investment in industry, GDP, et cetera, et cetera, thanks to many things, but mainly thanks to the steps forward in the energy transition and how it has mobilized not only the change of the color of the electrons and the molecules, but also all the industrial goods and equipments and services

and skills and jobs creation connected to that. And it is not, I would say it is not easy. There are always additional difficulties in the surroundings, including the permitting, the social license, and not only the environmental license. So it's not so easy. But I think that the overall view is a good thing. I think that this being true, there are things that still require improvement. We were working in a regulatory context

where in order to make it simple, we had a single price. And it worked reasonably well to provide a much more efficient manner to deal with the

with the electricity market, well, there were differences and the cleanest solutions could be benefiting from a better price. Till the moment we started to weaponize the natural gas or to use the natural gas as a weapon in our markets and we started to see those spiking effects. And I think that we have tried to

to reduce this impact and to accommodate but still there is a long way because till the moment the whole energy system is fixed with a much higher set of electrification and a much more efficient than wise use of the energy it could be very very difficult in the meantime there are two things which are very important according to my own reading the first of them is to to be as transparent as possible in the way this

prices are reflected. And there is something which is quite obvious and you know well, which is the price of LNG in international markets that has been agreed, I don't know how long ago, but there is an opportunity cost being reflected that it is ultimately passed not only to the final consumer of natural gas, but also to the electricity. Who gets the profits? We don't know. It is a very transparent market.

So we should be focusing on that too. There are things that we need to improve. For a very long time we thought that there was not such a thing called as an international market on LNG. Now we know that, yes, it is, and that it is very much interconnected. So we deserve some additional transparency on this and how the traders that make huge profits out of this have a very reasonable right to get fair profits and

But maybe we need to protect the consumers, both industrial and households. And then there is a second part in your question, which is if we want to decarbonize the molecules, how we learn to decarbonize the molecules, what are the different possibilities that we can use, and to what extent we should be involved in the future that will be future, but that needs to be built from today. And this is more or less the case for hydrogen.

So it's not that we take for granted that it is going to solve everything. But in fact, we know that unless we start betting on the new things that should come up to solve those things that we still don't know how to solve, it could be very difficult to count on a right answer and a right response. And this turns back to the nuclear energy problem.

and to what extent the nuclear energy is something that makes sense in terms of counting on an energy system that does not emit carbon. And I think that this is...

I would say three things. First of them is that it has become a very passionate debate. We should avoid much passion about technologies, but it is a passionate debate that relies very much on the cultural preference of each society, which is also a given, and there are different options and different combinations, and all of them may be fair. And then there are two other aspects that are important, which is...

How cheap, how efficient, and how we combine the pieces in order to provide the right solution for the existing technology and the new technologies. And which are the deadlines and what is the low-hanging fruit in terms of getting the mass demand

of what we need in terms of decarbonisation in the short term and what is the expected times to deliver in terms of new technologies to be developed. And for the time being, I think that, as I say, the other main question mark is who pays the consumer, the taxpayers,

and who takes the risk. And these are the things that are in the discussion when we talk about nuclear, who is the state that is going to cover, is it taxpayers in that case, when it will be delivering the electricity and how we combine. And I would say that there is not a single answer that fits for all. It depends very much on what are the social preference in each of the societies.

All right, thank you very much. More questions from the audience over there. So yeah, the one with the jumper. Yes. Wait for the microphone. Hi, I'm Andrea Perez. I'm a PhD researcher at the University of Sussex and LSE alumni. I've got two kind of semi-questions that are related to each other. So it's how do we provide the necessary changes to fight climate change and prevent further environmental issues?

when much of this infrastructure that is needed relies on scarce materials, specifically minerals that are mostly coming from the global south and that can drive further conflicts and inequalities. And related to this, to what extent do you believe that behavioural changes around consumption and production need to be part of the green transition, such as we know that increases in efficiency usually can lead to an increased consumption, like through the Jevons Paradox,

So yeah, I just want to hear your thoughts about this. Thank you. One question behind over there. Right behind, on your left.

Hi, my name is Himanshu and I'm studying regional and urban planning here at MSC. My question, basically I'm from south of India from this place called Bangalore and they're doing some very interesting thing which is they're sending out their treated water from the city to the outskirts. What this has done is that this has increased the groundwater level in the hinterlands of the city

And this has also activated ancient communities, especially women, who were building a lot of wetlands and were working on a lot of gardens around those wetlands. What this has done also is that they get paid to work on these wetlands, and at the same time, they've improved the groundwater levels as well.

These are essentially sort of the climate jobs, you know, they don't know that they've actually made the green transition in that sense. So my question is, what's your opinion on looking at these small-scale climate wins that not only benefit the ecology but also, you know, marginal communities are making money out of this, which is a very important thing. And

your opinion on climate, small-scale climate wins and the extrapolation of those learnings to possible larger scales. Okay, and we're going to get one from the online people. So since it's related to the first question, this is from Vijay, who is a former LSE student. Will Europe have to rely on Russia and China for rare earth minerals to meet its green agendas by geopolitical tensions?

Given that some EU countries are already bypassing their own sanctions to access Russian minerals and energy, does this highlight a contradiction in European policies? Well, I think that the bold question into that is we need to be... We are wondering ourselves if we can define...

a different pattern in terms of consumption. That was your question dealing with the behavioural change and to what extent we can accommodate being much more efficient and to what extent it is perceived as a loss of opportunities for many people. So there is a question of cultural approach in terms of how we understand prosperity, how we understand wealth. And it is not easy.

There's an aspect dealing with education and priorities and sentiments that is important, and in fact this is reflected in the IPCC report

not only studies but composition of the different disciplines that take part of the exercise. There is an increasing number of social scientists and psychologists trying to explain why this type of behaviors do count a lot in terms of how we respond and how we can anticipate and avoid climate impacts. So

You are saying in a bold manner, in a broad way, you are right. There is a point here that we need to take into consideration and it is difficult because at the end it relates very much of the social models that we identify in a given geography, in a given culture and sometimes it changes all of a sudden but this is not normally the case.

and is relevant. Then we come back to the availability of raw materials and minerals and where these raw materials are or who has sealed the deal to have access to these raw materials.

And I could say this is one of the issues that we are trying to address from the European Union for already for a while, because I think that the first thing coming back to your question is how many times we can use the same material and how many times or how efficient we may use in the use of this material. So how the circular economy and the footprint in terms of goods being used and not only in terms of carbon,

may be reflected in the way we introduce circularity and we improve and innovate in our own continent to

the dependence from abroad. The second thing is, yes, fantastic, but we may need more because what history shows us that for the time being, we have not been very able to adjust our consumption to our capacity to count on our own material. So how we can...

how we can ensure this availability of materials and on which basis. And this is here where I think that we should be much more committed to develop partnerships and not so much on a commercial day as full stop. For a large extent of...

countries, it could be interesting to ensure a co-development approach. You may be interested in materials that are in my territory. I'm interested to have the capacity to deal with the first refinement and the first process so that there's an industrial and add value before leaving

my territory and you can help me in this. So I think that this is an approach that we need to work much more and it is fair.

I think that this is a win-win approach that should be promoted. And then the third thing is to what extent there is a long list of these raw materials that come from certain geographies or have already been contracted by certain countries. I could say, connected to that, first, we need to avoid vulnerabilities linked to countries

extreme dependencies on very few suppliers that we have learned. It has been hard, but we have learned. And the divestment and diversification has taken, I would say, at a high speed, even with all the things that do not work yet, but a very high speed. But we should avoid changing one dependency by a different one, by a new one. And then the third thing is...

Obviously, it depends. There may be geographies where there are good reasons to build these balance agreements, and there may be geographies where, obviously, for the time being, it doesn't look like a good piece of advice to try to reach one of these agreements. So I could say that there is not...

a silver bullet response to your question, but to your questions, because this was coming from someone in the streaming version. But I think that this is part of what we are also

at the highest speed. The external dimension or the consistency in the external policies when we try to respond on how we can be more competitive in industrial terms, how we can count on secure availability of what we need and how we can...

play in a way that is consistent with our own principles, but also consistent with the expectations of the partners. So this is part of the big efforts that we will need to shape in this decade and what we are investing in. And then there is the question of

coming from Bangalore on the small climate communities or the small communities doing small efforts dealing with climate. I could say that, as you say, even if it is not known even in many circumstances by the players of these small scale decisions, it is quite important.

For a very long while, climate action was something strange, specific, and to be included in a short menu of things to be done. But it has to be the normality. It has to be the normality in...

in any of the activities that we develop, either if it is financial activity, industrial activity, urban services and infrastructures, energy, or as your colleague was saying, what type of behavior we take when being clients, consumers, and we are conscious or not conscious of what we do. So I think that this...

Small scale responses are very, very important, not only in terms of reducing emissions, but also, as you said, in terms of ensuring that we make good use and efficient use of scale resources, fresh water. So I think that this is quite key. The question then to me is how we can ensure that this is enlarged in a quick manner, and

and how we develop something which is quite beneficial, which is experience the benefit but experience the recognition too.

So that there are different reasons to promote, to incentivize this type of response and one of them is recognition, recognition by the broader community. So to be replicated or to be improved in the nearby or in other geographies. Okay, thank you. Let's take a question from over there. The woman in the white shirt. Yes.

Hi, I'm Helen. I'm also from the Regional and Urban Planning Studies Program. You mentioned a lot the fact that we have to emboar the most vulnerable ones in this transition for climate change. And I was wondering how you're creating the more efficient incentives for member states to

to invest in these most vulnerable regions. All right, so here in the white shirt. Thank you, I'm Owen, I'm an alumni of the European Institute here. In your opening, you spoke about the events of the last week, the risk to democracy, competitiveness and the importance of freedoms.

What is your simple message to Europeans who, after the events of this week, might be feeling a little bit uneasy, who say that we need to rebalance our priorities to defence economic competitiveness and strength and that sustainability shouldn't be something that we prioritise because there are more important things first? What do you say to them?

Since this is a question about trade-offs, and I'm sorry, I will go back in a moment, but there's one from Beth, who's a researcher also online, which goes in the same direction, so about trade-offs. How might efforts to address trade-offs

Inequality and sustainability might undermine each other. So if we go for inequality, are we not undermining sustainability? And if we go for sustainability, why not? We increase inequality. And how both in turn might undermine economic progress, if at all.

So my main message, just starting by this, my main message is that we make a big mistake if we try to put this in terms of trade-offs. We cannot cheat the people, but we cannot avoid dealing with climate and sustainability, and we cannot think that there is an economic prosperity that can last forever.

if it is based on wrong premises and wrong premises not taking into consideration the physical reality, social sustainability, environmental sustainability or not paying attention to the social impact because at the end we owe our efforts to the society and to the people. And this is an exercise that to me it's more obvious in theoretical terms that in

walking the path. But this is very precisely why when walking the path, we need to remind ourselves every single day that we should not be biased when taking our decisions. Or we cannot think that because there are nice figures in the macroeconomic world,

that is going to reaffirm and to make people feel quite comfortable when they have the feeling that you have forgotten about them, that they have not access to the services, that they cannot count on opportunities in their lands, or that they don't care about what it may happen 10 years from now when they don't have the way to make their earnings possible.

to reach the end of the month. So I think that this is very precisely the combination that we need to... And as I said, I add, and in case we fail, we risk democracy because we risk the lack of confidence, we risk the confidence of the population on the institutions to solve problems. So it may be quite appealing, yes, they perform so well because they decide what to do, at what cost.

and who pays that cost. We are not in a position to accept that. We have not been grown up to accept that because we want to enjoy the freedom, the rights, and the way we decide our opportunities. So I think that this is something that could only work if we engage, not only in the macroeconomics and the big thinking, but also in the very concrete terms. And then I come back to...

to the regions and how we should be investing on that. I'm very happy to be sitting next to Andres when this question is being raised because that is the issue that he knows much better than me and that he enjoys understanding and explaining because I think that this is a very critical aspect. I think that...

Again, it is more conceptual than practical, but it is important. For a very long while we thought that, well, there is some money to compensate those regions and local communities that are far away from the wealthiest areas. But if we take this as a compensation instead of as a commitment to invest to create opportunities, it is not going to work. Nobody...

is driven by compensations. We all want to have opportunities. And in addition, compensations do not work because compensations do not ensure that the services are going to stand, that the wealth is going to be sufficiently appealing to count on more people coming to your region or to count on...

level playing field in terms of the cost of living in any of the regions. So I think that we need to rethink in terms of the cohesion policies in Europe to, of course, not to get rid of that or to lower the level of funding that we dedicate to territorial cohesion and to cohesion in general.

but to be much more effective in terms of how we can create opportunities and to ensure that services can be provided at the same level than the services that take place in urban areas. And this is not easy because, in fact, it is more expensive per person probably because, in fact, there are efficiencies that do not play in the same manner when we are handling...

any problem in a metropolitan area than when we are talking about a remote rural area. But I think that this is an effort that deserves the full attention. It's part of this social license that we need to win and the benefits that we need to win. And my final comment on this is that there are things that require some social innovation and things that can be

supported by digital services. I remember cases on how you could help in order to count on education facilities for kids in rural remote areas and the transportation from the area. You cannot provide everything in every single tiny

But there may be a kind of Uber system being provided to a certain extent by the public budget that can help to count on this thing. So I think that there are things that can be dramatically rethought in order to ensure that the...

the approach is balanced and that there is not this feeling of being second row citizens because you live in a rural area, rural remote area and not in a big urban metropolitan area. Thank you very much. I'm very conscious of the time. So one question over there. So yes, right behind, no, well, fine. The woman over here and then the man in blue.

Hi, thank you for your talk. I'm an undergraduate at LSE. I do economic history and geography. Can you say your name please? I'm Shiny. I wanted to know how do you see us achieving a well-functioning, cooperative, single market when currently global integration and global value chains are laden with quite high power and financial disparities between countries?

Okay, thank you. The man in blue at the back, there. Hello, I'm Michael. I'm studying environmental policy and regulation. About 500 students from LSE are currently making plans for after the university, probably applying for jobs in finance and legal and consultancy firms, while, as you say, democracy is...

breaking apart caused by politicians that represent very different agendas than the one you represent here and we talk about here. So now when you respond with words such as silence is not an option or we proudly need to defend climate action, democracy and rule of law, what is your message to us, the students and future graduates from LSE and in which movements or organizations or firms

Does Europe need us? And what can we do in the next five years to save the Green Deal, as you say, and Europe's democracy? And the one in blue behind you...

Hello, my name is Jeanne. I'm a third year student in environmental policy with economics. And my question for you was how to balance the challenges of stricter environmental regulation for farmers in the EU with the increased competition from countries that don't have the same environmental standards such as those in the Mercosur. Thank you. Okay, so we start with the single market and the rest of the world and then we go to the expectations of you.

and fighting and thinking how we can work further. Well, I think that the single market is an achievement that is always ongoing, which is good, and I think that we need to keep on dipping into that. And I think that it cannot be a bubble that is not open to the rest of the world. And I think that happily...

We have seen an impressive trend to grow up in many different geographies, as I said, and there is an appetite to exchange flows and to invest here and there.

And the main question right now, or one of the main questions, is how we can use and build this in a healthy and fair manner so that these flows work in a transparent and open way, but without...

betting only on pricing, not taking into consideration other relevant aspects that we want to ensure, such as, as I said, environmental standards or labour standards. And to what extent there may be companies or investors willing to take part in this single market, but not so...

committed to this type of standards and that can create a tension with those that produce this type of goods respecting the standards and feeling that they may be threatened by this lack of commitment.

And I guess that there are two things that we need to pay attention to. The first of them is how the trade flows do work and how we can improve. And this is not a good moment in history to talk about the improvements of the trade flows and the trade regulation.

But how we can keep on doing around this, not only taking into consideration, as I said, the big figures, but also the impacts that go beyond the profits, and to what extent we can deal with the competition tools to ensure the level playing field in the internal market, including the subsidised goods or the waste we produce. And this is, I would say, a phenomenon which is relatively recent, because...

for a very long time, these global trade flows were not as intense and as open as they are recently. And so we didn't feel like taking care of this type of standards because it was not such a huge volume of exchanges.

And we should be thinking also in terms of how we can develop a much more levelized relation with these other markets.

Well, it depends, I would say, very much on the geography and on what type of standards we are speaking about. If we are talking about environmental standards dealing with biodiversity losses, or if we are talking about carbon footprint, or if we are talking about labour rights, and it is not always easy, I would say. But this comes back to what you said. I think that...

it is the politician that creates the problem or it is the society that

chooses the politician because it reflects the preferences. So I think that this comes in circle. I could not say that it is because the politicians, whatever. But the politicians have a responsibility. And the ones being in the institutions have a responsibility to ensure that we are trustful and that we have the capacity to provide sufficient information to ensure an educated debate and an informed debate in public.

And very honestly, this was why I was trying to catch your attention on why we are witnessing more and more that voting preferences or social preferences are driven by 20 seconds messages being repeated once and again when we know that we are living in an era of misinformation.

but we know how we can get the good information and contrast information. And I think that this is a strong plea back to you, because we should not be accepting that. We need to find ways to communicate in such a way that it may be simple and short, but it should be sound and we should not be accepting whatever. Otherwise the quality of the democracy will keep on going down.

Till the moment we are so confused that we don't recognize anything and we accept whatever. And after a while, it will be very difficult to remake what we have lost. So yes, of course, we need you coming from engineering, environmental science, social science, economics or geography to join efforts to match how we can get these ways forward

that take into consideration the complexity of the challenges that we experience in a world that has been discovered as a very small world, much more interrelated than what we could expect in the 19th century or in the midst of the 20th century, but where everybody has certain expectations and the planet cannot survive if we do not accommodate our expectations to this physical reality. And we accept that.

global governance and cooperation as a method to provide the right answers, or we accept, on the contrary, that those having more capacity to impose get their way forward. I don't think that this may last very long because that can create a messy reality in the future.

a certain time frame, but that is not good news either. I mean, having a messy reality is not good news either. It creates a much bigger problem. So I could say that to me the most compelling thing is how we can respond to the reality, the real fact that those using populism and fakes get much more support

along the years than what we could think if we apply a minimum reason way to identify the problems and assess the eventual solutions. And hey, this is quite scary in terms of how the

The other day there was someone, apologies for this because it's a small story, but I think that it is quite real. I have three daughters, 25, 23, 21. And the one being 23, a few years ago told me, Mom, I don't know where you are and where your party is, but we are once and again being bombarded by messages of violence.

these far-right parties, the people in my generation and my colleagues at the university and so on. And I see more male friends than female friends that they find quite appealing. "No, this is not true, this is stupid, they want to impose us." You are not present in those networks and your message is not coming through. And my colleagues are going to vote being ignorant

by making up their minds according to this type of communication. And I think that probably this is, well, this is a signal of our times that we communicate differently and that we do not have so much time to pay attention to the different ways in a political debate people may exchange views on how to get solutions to their problems.

But we need to find ways to solve this equation too. How we can communicate respecting facts and truth and debating our substance without promoting a short and passionate answer even if it is not connected to the reality. So I think that yes, of course, you have a very important role to play, not only in terms of

how you can play in a professional way, as engineers or civil servants or as whatever, but also in terms of how we relate to each other, how we can build a society, and how we can have very intense and difficult discussions with our friends and colleagues, where everything can be said, but it should be said in such a way that makes sense, not just...

Short message, and sorry, because I've been a little bit too long on that. But I think that it is a point of concern. I think that we don't have the... We have not identified how to communicate on the importance of what we have ahead of us, because it is terrible. In fact, when you look at the figures and the expectations and what the modelling says, you cannot believe that people are not saying, hey, guys, where are you going? How you are not acting much...

in a much more brave manner. But it is because perceptions and passions do count on this, and we are losing that capacity to track how to create positive passion around this and how to avoid this deny in terms of "I don't like, I deny."

It's not reason. It's not intellectual reasons. I don't like, I deny. All right, so on that note, I think we should thank Teresa Rivera for coming here. Thank you.

And let me just wrap up by two things. First, thanking all of you and all of you online for coming here and sharing this time with us. Apologies to the many people that had raised their hands but have not managed to ask a question. This is a good indication. You actually raised a lot of questions and there's a lot of people that want to talk about the topics that you're dealing with.

And finally, I would like to say keep on following us. The LSE events are keep on going all the time.

We have at the Cañada Plant Center a lot of other events coming. Of course, the Department of Geography and Environment, which is public lecture series, will be following. So please keep on tuning and joining us. And thank you very much, especially to Teresa, for coming here in what must be one of the most difficult weeks ever and being able to engage, as she has done, with all of you in such an open manner without any sort of filters. Thank you very much.

Thank you for listening. You can subscribe to the LSE Events podcast on your favourite podcast app and help other listeners discover us by leaving a review. Visit lse.ac.uk forward slash events to find out what's on next. We hope you join us at another LSE Events soon.