to combine these two issues and perhaps you could speak about well you know i became a i became a green a long time ago i was unemployed i had dropped out of college where i was studying nuclear physics and i had washed up in berkeley and i got a job at the recycling center so that's how i started the community recycling center and you know those were pretty radical times in berkeley and so the two things went naturally together and i never separated them i never made a career in the environmental movement because i couldn't find a place in it i was frankly unmoved by what i call sometimes techno legislative environmental ism it didn't do anything for me so so for me it's a natural thing and now now that i'm a full time climate guy and work on the international negotiations i basically am entirely focused on the justice question when people ask me what i do my one liner is i work on trying to find the way to a climate treaty that's fair enough to actually work so it's not for me just a question of values a question of what's right and what's wrong though obviously that's extremely important it's a question of what will work i could go on if you'd like me to go on well it seems a vet is the key question and every year we have these climate talks and every year you hear the developed countries don't want to sign an agreement where the developing nations are given leeway to are not held to the same per capita standards as they are and it seems that that's the key issue the blocks or if you can well you know the phrase that go ahead you know the per capita thing is a bit of a problem because people have a sense that what would be fair would be to cut the pio up into equal shares but the thing is that the carbon pie has already been eaten it's a very difficult problem because we are already over and you know the question is whether we can bring her bring her to flatline and then you know at four fifty and then bring it down again right and you know we have we have a manifest warming now of less than one centigrade and we've already had hurricane sandy and right now we have a terrible i don't know if you know but there's a terrible hurricane in the philippines right now that's killed more people than sandy  i believe it's killed more people the latest body count is three hundred eighty there's never been a philippine philippine hurricane this late in the season at such a low latitude so you know we had less than one degree of warming and things are getting very very hairy there's a there's a planetary drought there's a drought on all major continents and there's some terrible and terrifying things going on in the arctic with with the melting of the polar the north pole and and that's only less than a degree centigrade of warming we're we're we're the question now is if we had a global emergency mobilization could we hold the warming down to two degrees and could we even hold the warming down to one and a half the reason i'm sorry this is all in center grade of course and you know that's the question and it's going to be the hardest thing we ever did in so it's not rocket science to realize that we're not going to be able to do it unless we're in a high cooperation world i mean cooperation is really the secret sauce we can do this if we are in what is effectively a wartime mobilization but can you cope can you have a high cooperation society that is economically polarized as a society that we have now you know can you have a high cooperation society on a planet where by best estimates thirty two trillion dollars of his is it is in tax shelters you know where where virtually all of the additional growth and profits of all of the of the growth of the last ten years has been appropriated by the top one percent of the of the of the earners in is no way there's no way you're going to be able to  to to negotiate the transition so you know green jobs is part of it part of it is technology sharing globally part of it is cost sharing globally part of it is the wealthy paying to help the poor and the vulnerable adapt to the storms of the storm surges in the desert if occasion and part of it i mean to tell you where we're at in all this is about what's now called loss and damage which is that even in the best case scenario now where we had a global emergency mobilization and we had a high adaptation world and a high resilience world and all those great things that  that the local greenies love to talk about building up or is resilience they're still going to be vast vast areas of the planet are no longer inhabitable and you know what do we get what do we do for those people you know is everybody on their own it's kind of sort of like the democratic in the republican conventions the message of the republican convention was you know we are the job creators everybody a parasite and the message of the democratic convention which i was surprised by how good it was was we're all in it together so when i talk about equity i'm not just talking about something like you know shearing because sharing is good i'm talking about a hard nosed appraisal of a very terrifying situation and a judgment that not hardly the only person who has reached this conclusion that we're going to have to have a much fairer world or we're not going to be able to negotiate a transition point though that's basically what it comes down to you  q twenty five dollars a day as a as a global equity as a target about well over nine thousand dollars a year oh yeah that's debts of interest so what you're talking about is is is a all that that myself and my partners my research partners have made which is called green house development rights which was just called by jeffrey sachs of all people very famous guy the  influential equity based proposal in circulation now and and what it basically says is that we have to start with the justice principles and that and the justice principles are ambition it has to be a high stringency very ambitious treaty transition because it has to keep the temperature down and if the temperature spikes nothing else you do is going to make the transition fear because it's going to be the poor in the vulnerable they get hit the most right then it's got to be based on responsibility and capability because those are the two fundamental justice principles that are baked into the united nations framework convention which we signed and ratified in one nine hundred ninety two the u n framework convention on climate change and then the last and most difficult and most essential equity prince principle is what is now called equitable access to states sustainable development we're not going to get into a post green we're not going to have a sustainable world in which some people eat other people go eat where some people have energy services and transportation services and a warm and safe play to to sleep and other people don't there's a baseline there's a if you look at the statistics it basically goes to about seventy five hundred dollars per person per year and and it and what we're saying is that you can model a fear climate regime as one in which people are as effectively taxed right they're not individually taxed but that what the problem we ha the fundamental justice problem posed by the climate transition is who's going to pay to avoid it utter catastrophe right and think about hurricane sandy t understand the problem that the damage costs are about eighty billion dollars now what who's going to pay him the fact is we as a society are able to pay these after the fact damage costs but what we actually need to do is pay both for the catastrophe to allow to get beyond fossil fuels to avoid the catastrophe so then we have to figure out what are the fear sheer that each country pays and what we're saying is you could estimate the fear the approximate fear share for each country based on the responsibility and the capacity of its citizens but when you estimate the capacity which is basically of correlative wealth don't count the first seventy five further of the amount above that so that correlates to one third of their responsibility to help them the e u is about a quarter yet the united states is an extremely rich country right it's very hard for poor people to understand that we are an extra remotely rich country you know we can afford to pay all our share of the global costs of the transition  but it shouldn't be the poor people in the united states that are paying the u s is share it should be the rich people in the united states that are paying the u s a share and similarly the poor people the poor people in china  shouldn't have to pay but there but china should have a responsibility in capacity that is a function of the wealth and responsibility of its elite classes now it's only classes are not nearly as large as our early classes but they do exist right even in india which is an extremely poor country even compared to china there is a small number of people who have a lot of money and you know and that should count it should count as part of the mix with the bets basically the long in the short of greenhouse development rights so where is the world are going to it's going to be sending music divisions there bills well you that you know people like to say that nothing has happened in the climate negotiations but it's really not true a lot about a lot has been worked out about how this could be done in practice in a way that doesn't violate national service sovereignity in a way that isn't structured is a tax that is in a way that doesn't allow oligarchy used to just grab the money and put it into swiss bank accounts you know to guarantee that half the money goes into adaptation so it's not just all about energy sector you know green jobs you know solar arrays windmills but but but the rest of it goes into you know water supplies and seawalls and village health services and low impact agriculture you know i mean or it can't just be the energy sector right if we have to rebuild the infrastructure is within which people live and there's a there's at this point but the problem in the climate negotiations is we've got now this thing called the green climate fund it took three years to negotiate it has a democratic governance board that consists of some people from the rich countries and some people from the poor countries it's got all of these these rough mechanisms in place for how countries will make a proposal for you you know we'll take this much money out of the green climate fund in and we'll use it to build wind farms in the southern part of pakistan for something if that but there's no money in it there's no money in the fund right and and you know we're doing this interview now when we wake up tomorrow is going to be the last day of the doha negotiations which is the big meeting this year and it's it's pretty pretty tense in doha right now and and the united states has not help at all the united states you know most of americans would be appalled by how uncooperative the american negotiating team but you know it's money the obama people are terrified of the republicans right he's a lame duck president he's got to lose because it because it has to do with us being obligated to send money to other parts of the world and and the united states has never tolerated international mean look we just refused to sign the united nation treaty on disability rights two days ago right came up with who led the charge against the ratification of the disability treaty the stuff that he came up with it's it's so hypothetical it's so phantasmagoric in terms of five years of this world government you know they just become very sad about america leaving the world i know you know that's a good point that's a really good let's talk about america leading the world you know it's a good point because you would think if you were an american patriot you would think if you were conservative that you would be a patriot and you would think that if you were a patriot and you would want to defend the interests of your country in this chaotic twenty first century greenhouse world and you would think that you would be rational enough to admit to yourself that the only way you could defend those interests is by is to deny the problem that you know globalisation its whole is all around you know shipping fruits around the country and you know that guiding story perpetual growth it's it's just not going to happen growth is a problem right i mean we you have nations the legitimate we need to grow yes correct and then us have these economies that are producing a lot of luxury items a lot of items that are certainly not necessities and so what you're talking about is for the developed countries to to acknowledge these seventy five dollars per person you know it's it's important to stipulate in that that that i'm not talking about the expropriation of the rich right why not because because it isn't necessary i'm only talking about saving the world or more precisely saving human civilization right it might only cost let's say hypothetically real numbers rough numbers say it cost us a trillion dollars a year for fifty years to save human civilization let's just say so my first question to you is would it be worth it you know we're also going to save the corals and and you know in the end the rain forest so maybe we can count that too even if you're not a fan of human civilization right these numbers are all are there are obstructions yeah but the point is you know you just get out your balance again and obstruction against the natural world and so it's out of the answer is obviously yes yes we obviously should pay for it but then the question is how do we do it and and and the the point in this is also a point makes is that the right no the right wing knows what's at stake you know people on the left are very timid and they talk about this is being a question a value and a question of you know loving mother earth or whatever i mean i shouldn't trivialize this but there's still a lot of that stuff going around but the right knows what's at stake from the very beginning when the limits to growth was published in one thousand nine hundred seventy one the the the neoclassical economists knew that if there were indeed limits to growth it was going to require economic distribution so to be very precise and to sort of jump to the chase the problem is not that saving human civilization would be too expensive we have the money the science the technology and just to bearly the time to do it the problem is we cannot do it without a significant amount of economic redistribution and political will and political will that is a pretty high level of political will because sustained over generations right that 's a long shot while you know the thing is if we actually began a sustainability transition an honest to god real sustainability transition people's lives would improve so there would be a huge constituency for contempt for continuing it if you believe the techno optimists and there's a lot of reasons to believe them within limits it wouldn't actually cost that much once we started getting the price right and and we were just getting rid of all capital bulldozing old capital old coal plants and stuff that really should have never been built in the first place if you price it all properly it's not actually going to cost that much it's just  be losers right and losers have a lot of political power and you know one one thing in terms of situating this conversation in time is that this is only a month now since the do the math tour was was was launched by three fifty and mckibben and all the rest of the great people working on that project and they're focused on universities well they're are this could very well be something that could be sustained over generations that's out let's stay better is what we're staying with right right which is that is that they look at the same elephant but they're looking at a different side of the elephant right and the side of the elephant they're looking at is that there is this gigantic cartel which is got its its its tentacles around human civilization and lips for lack of a better term let's call it the fossil fuel cartel and it's and it's it's it's countries and it's companies and it's and  implicated in its operation because raul it depended on its infrastructure right and and it and if we allow it to do what it needs to do in order to be maximally profitable we are toast because the the oil companies already have enough coal and oil on their books to blow us so far past according to the to death set of numbers there's a there's another set of numbers that were just released two weeks ago by the international energy agency that has it is only being three times but you know still who's counting and you know what i mean the point is they can't burn it right and so this is oil it's out of the ground or is you know it's as if if this is reserves this is a dent if i had reserves not resources that are already priced into traded so that if in the let me put it this way in the on likely chance that we decided not to commit civilizational suicide it would cause a crash in fossil stocks so they actually have a baked in interest in civilizational suicide  negotiation you know national sovereignity international taxation how the hell are we going to pay for and coordinate a global transition in a context where the world is divided between the rich and the poor problem is over here but then we've it's not the only thing in the picture the other thing that's going on is that we have this this carbon bubble all do the math movement carbon divestiture movement which is also not going to go away and it's coming more up from the grassroots whereas this this this game that i'm working in is more of a international policy game  and then there is these are not the only things that are happening either but the big third thing that needs to be brought into this conversation is that the earth itself that is to say the climate system is also making some big moves right negotiable and they're absolutely non negotiable and this whole dynamic is in play now and so i would just hesitate to say that we can't get our arms around it that we're not going to be able to deal with the situation because then you're more optimistic than you were well i think there's a question i think this question of i've become convinced i work with a lot of religious people because i work on the on the question of climate equity and for historical reasons a lot of the people who believe in justice also believe in god and i don't have a problem with that you know  up just before cops six so that was twelve years ago with the goal of trying to bring the international it just this debate into the united states and we still haven't done a very good job with that the truth of the matter is that we've been very busy now for over ten years but almost all the work we've done is international and it remains to be worked out how to talk to americans about international solidarity and global fear shares americans are never going to be able to to take up and fulfill their international obligations unless they also take up or perhaps have already taken up their obligations to to each other you know we you know and it's a new it's a new era now you know the the republicans may never be able to put together a functioning electoral coalition again occupy is now a year and a half in the past the storms are getting worse the demographic transitions are occurring and we all know the science now i mean not all of us but many of us know the science we're go something the only question is what we're going to do and if we're going to do it with with anough commitment to have a chance of success going ok all right well tommy ok thanks for coming no worries and thank you for watching good night