Start the Week is a programme on BBC Radio 4 which, as its name suggests, is broadcast at 9am on Mondays. This week’s edition is titled “Climate Crisis: truth, lies and compromise”. Its contents are summed up in the programme blurb on the BBC website. They fall into three parts. First, there’s a section on a play written by Joe Robertson and Joe Murphy about the drama surrounding the Kyoto Protocol – which the BBC website breathlessly describes as “one of COP’s greatest successes”. I should have known that the BBC would find its way to this, since the Guardian has already, rather predictably, featured it at least four times: 15^th June 2024; 25^th June 2024 ; 29^th November 2024; 25^th January 2025.

The second part is a hook to plug Mike Berners-Lee’s latest book, “A Climate of Truth”. The final part also offers a book plug, this time for “In the Shetland Way: Community and Climate Crisis on my Father’s Islands” by Marianne Brown. As regular readers will know, I’m keenly interested in the whole story story of the Viking Energy Wind Farm on Shetland Mainland.

I don’t propose to dwell on the first part of the programme about the Kyoto play, because it was the later discussions that really irritated me. If you’re interested in the play, you can listen to the BBC programme podcast (the link is above). Having said that, the introduction by Adam Rutherford is probably worth transcribing, since it displays the BBC’s bias from the off, so here goes:

Adam Rutherford (AR): Well the science is settled, more or less, and has been for a while – we are in the midst of the climate crisis. [Well, we all know that’s how the BBC sees it, anyway. No dissent allowed]. But the arguments still rage, and we’re paralysed by political disagreement. We will “drill, baby drill” said President Trump in his inaugural speech last week, and then he took the US out of the Paris Agreement on climate change. Mike Berners-Lee thinks it should be called the poly-crisis, not the climate crisis, as the world faces a multitude of problems from plastic pollution to biodiversity loss, from food insecurity to a tidal wave of political dishonesty. His new book “A Climate of Truth” asks what will it take for us to do better? One answer may come in the form of renewable energy, but in her book, “The Shetland Way”, Marianne Brown looks at how a major wind farm has caused deep disagreement in the community, tearing families and friends apart…. [Then he starts the programme proper with the Kyoto play. At five minutes 30 seconds there was a problem with a microphone, so Adam Rutherford moved the discussion to the others].

AR: I’m going to ask Mike, so we are up to COP29, 30 will be, I think it’s Brazil later this year, but I get a sense from you and your work that you feel pretty cynical about the levels of agreement and their efficacy.

MB-L: Well, we have to stand back and look at 29 COPs now, and whilst that process has been going on, every year greenhouse gas emissions have been getting, going up and up, so in other words we’re accelerating into the problem and, if you put a, you know, a line through the graph of carbon emissions, a line for COP1, you know, you won’t find any trace of any evidence at all that that curve has noticed, er, has noticed that those COPs have been taking place. So what I thought was so powerful about the play was just this, er, dramatisation of the flat-out sabotage that went on in COP3. It’s exactly, that sabotage has been going on through 29 COPs now, and it’s the reason why we’re accelerating into the problem still, so it’s quite a difficult watch in a way, but very powerful.

AR: And Marianne, just to bring it back to the very local level, because this is about inter-governmental, you know, countries arguing about these things, but, but that sense of the, the, the subterfuge that’s going on in the room is something that you’ve experienced in the Shetlands [sic] in discussing this major wind farm.

MB: Erm, I don’t know about subterfuge, I mean, I think, er, in Shetland there was, there was kind of, my sense was people kind of did want, it was rooted in similar concerns and similar desire for er, new, something new and good for Shetland. It’s just that, er people had different ideas about what that would be. So, some people thought they needed a massive onshore wind farm and some people really strongly felt that it was too big and in the wrong place. And in the end nobody got what they wanted.

AR: Did you see parallels in those discussions with, with what was happening in Kyoto in the play?

MB: Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think actually probably the most comparable thing is the local media up in Shetland because it really, from my perspective, looked like people kinda shouting at each other over a parapet, you know, using opinion pieces in the local press. And it’s a really great local press, I should stress. They’ve got a really thriving, wonderful local press. And it was serving a good point, but yeah, absolutely, it felt, like opposition, just shouting at each other. There wasn’t really any space for conciliation. At that point the discussion reverted to the Kyoto play. At 17 minutes, they move on].

AR: Well, we’ll come to discuss the effectiveness of that Agreement [Kyoto] in just a minute, but Marianne, I want to talk about your book, The Shetland Way, because that’s a global agreement (I’m sort of doing air quotes there) but in Shetland, in your story, you’ve got a very tight-knit community – community is everything on Shetland – the agreement was not forthcoming when it came to this major wind farm.

MB: Yeah, erm, so, so my connection to that story er is very personal. So, my dad is from Shetland, but I didn’t, I wasn’t very close to my dad, I didn’t really grow up with him. My parents split when I was very little, erm, and it was only when he died that, erm, I went up to Shetland and ended up getting stuck there cos of lockdown. I had intended to go for his funeral, and be there for a couple of weeks. I ended up being there for seven months, erm, stuck in his house he’d built on his ancestral croft and just outside the front door there’s a ruin where his grandparents had lived. Across the road from that is a house his dad had built where my dad had grown up, and from the kitchen window you can pretty much see the grave? where are a lot of them are buried. So I was kind of like intensely in this space where oh my gosh there are like Browns everywhere. I can’t escape from the Browns, erm, and then I realised towards the end of my stay there that from the periphery of the croft you could see hills where there’s gonna be this huge dramatic change, and that was going to be an onshore wind farm, which was pitched to be the biggest onshore wind farm in the whole of Britain. And this was gonna be transformational for the islands and it was also transformational for me, because I was like, I had been a journalist involved in the environment, erm, covering environmental issues for years and suddenly, and you know normally I’m like yeah, let’s build wind farms. But then I was just thinking oh my gosh, actually I feel really connected to this landscape now and I, there was a new story emerging, for me it was like, what do I really feel about this landscape, and I really want to understand more about it. So then I kind of went on a journey, thinking right, I wanna, I want to speak to people and understand how they connect to this place, how this story emerged, because it was a really fascinating story this windfarm. It had been pitched twenty years ago as, erm, as a community-owned wind farm. There would be, it was basically a plan to replace oil revenues, because they’d had this great deal in the seventies…

AR: Pitched by whom?

MB: So, erm, some key players, erm, in the Council, politicians, business people, in Shetland folk were already involved in the emerging wind industry, so very canny people….

AR: Shetland’s got this long, long history of association with, of, of energy production…oil, whale blubber….

MB: Absolutely. It’s fascinating, for such a small population in the extreme north of Britain, it’s been really central to energy exploitation for, for Britain, er so in the seventies the Coincil managed to broker this really great deal while the good – it was a deal that changed Shetland, erm, where they basically managed to keep a fraction of the revenues from oil and gas in the isles, and that really transformed the economy. So they, obviously the coffers were going down and, erm, they wanted to maintain this level of wealth, so it’s like what’s the next thing we can do, it’s literally blowing in their faces, you know, this wind, you know, it’s the windiest place in Britain, so let’s do something about it. So they’re like let’s build this massive project – it had to be massive because it’s only a little population, 23,000 people. So they had to build an interconnector, and for that to happen it had to be vast, so this project was gonna service 500,000 people, er 500,000 households, I should say. But there’s only 10,000 households in Shetland, so the vast majority of this is going to be exported. So that’s an issue in itself, but initially it was pitched as the community-owned thing. But over the, over the years, you know, a very vocal sizeable group of folk were like, actually no we don’t want this, we don’t agree with this, erm, it’s in the wrong place, erm, it’s too big, and their disruption derailed the plans, so it ended up being SSE majority owned.

AR: So it’s a very complex disagreement and I know that wind farms and wind turbines, the presence of them is often controversial anyway, as eyesores, the various environmental effects that they have, but there was more to it on Shetland as well. Part of it was the debate about whether the peat that they were building them on was a carbon sink or how that worked, so what were the levels of disagreement?

MB: Oh, so many, erm, unfortunately you probably don’t have time for me to talk about them all. But, but, yeah, peat was a really clear one, erm, I mean, the actual project itself was built on degraded peat, erm, so there was an argument for restoring that peatland, but yeah, of course peat, degraded peat can be a carbon emitter because it’s not storing that peat in the ground…

AR: Otherwise peat is a big carbon sink…

MB: Exactly, exactly, and that’s why we’ve got to look after them, but it’s also at risk from climate change, because it dries out the peat and then it cannot hold the water in. So, yeah that was a huge big thing, but there was also the threat to wildlife, wildlife is so important up in Shetland. You know, we’re seeing species extinction as Mike points out in his book, it’s part of the poly crisis, erm, and in Shetland it’s still a kinda, a home for so many species that haven’t, that are still surviving in the little pockets, erm, and it’s like well we need to protect this. It’s so important to Shetland, so what will the effect of the wind turbines be? Will they, like, slice into the flight paths of these really iconic birds and other creatures, you know.

AR: The rain geese.

MB: Yeah, so can I, will you forgive me if I try and do my rain goose impression?

AR: I would love you to:

MB: OK, right, so prepare yourselves, it kinda goes, erm [impression], and that wasn’t an angry chicken, that was me trying to be a red-throated diver, yeah.

AR: Well, I’ll take it on trust that that was accurate, but the arguments that wind turbines, erm, are very damaging to birds, bats and various other flying creatures, that’s a long-standing argument but it was specific, not just for their flight paths, but also for their nesting grounds…

MB: Yeah, their nesting grounds are really important, and red-throated divers, they’re such amazing beautiful birds, and what I really wanted to do was talking about their story as well, was just, try and understand how the landscape and connection to place isn’t just one view. It’s kinda like, like a kaleidoscope you’re turning around, it’s a million things all at once, and it’s changing all the time, but everything’s still connected, so that’s kinda what, what I was using the rain goose for, erm, so the rain goose is really important culturally in Shetland because it’s associated with changes in the weather and there’s a phrase which, oh, I’m gonna try and remember what it is, oh my God, erm….it’s to do with the call and it’s either going to be a downpour, or it’s either gonna be light rain and either you can stay on land or you’ve, you can go out to sea and it’s all to do with that. So that kinda connects actually with how dangerous the land, the land was not that long ago, you know, in the mist you might fall off a cliff, or end up being drowned in a peat bog and these symbols in the landscape are important.

AR: In the complexities of the arguments – because you talk about how families and friends were, were, driven apart, and maybe those rifts will never heal is part of the implication – but, but it’s not binary, it’s not NIMBYism necessarily, there are so many factors involved. How do, I mean, how do the arguments unfold?

MB: Yeah, that’s a good question. I mean, I think from my impression, I wasn’t there, but from piecing together afterwards and talking to people, it was really erm, in sort of 2008 a few years after the initial plans had been put into place that a group of people, a big group of people, they’re called Sustainable Shetland, so they were the main opposition group, they said no we don’t want this, we feel like we haven’t been listened to, and this was a really key theme throughout the book. It was listening, which is really interesting because that’s a lot of what your play talks about as well, Joe. Erm, so it’s, they really felt they hadn’t been consulted, so they were like, nah, and they said they disagreed with the planning process, so they took, erm, they took the Ministers to Court. And that was initially upheld, so there was a big delay in how the project went on, and then eventually it went to appeal, and then it ended up….

AR: But it did happen.

MB: Of course, yes, yeah, the wind farm is operating right now. It went online in the autumn and I went up there and saw the turbines turning away.

AR: Joe, you look like you had something to say.

Joe Murphy [one of the Kyoto playwrights]: I’m not suggesting that what I’m about to ask will solve the particular problem of the Shetland Islands, but I do sometimes wonder if one of the, erm, problems with wind turbines, which I love aesthetically, is that everywhere they are, they’re the same white wind turbine. White, big, huge. And I wonder if part of the community decisions that you’re talking about could be to, to change the colour of them, to design them. Would that be something that would shift the dial slightly?

MB: Er, I don’t think so, I think – I don’t want to speak for everyone in Shetland, obviously – but I think it’s I think the visual aspects are really an interesting question, and I think that it would be a different conversation if we could see the carbon emissions, you know, if carbon emissions were bright pink, and we saw the stuff that was like pumping out of SUVs and pumping out of planesand going into our children’s lungs [digression, it’s CO2, not carbon, and it won’t do any harm to your children’s lungs – though I concede that other things pumping out of SUVs and planes might do so] I don’t think we’d be so fixated on what the wind turbines look like. But, there’s also an aspect of looking at a turbine and, you know, and seeing what you feel, so it’s like, if you look at a turbine and you think this is exporting all the energy, all the profits away from me, this is like an imposition in my landscape, I hate it, I don’t want it here, erm, you know, that’s an obvious connection. But if you see it, and you’re like, I own it, that I get the direct benefits from this, I have control over this, I have agency, it’s a different conversation.

[Digression. I am aware that Marianne Brown interviewed many Shetland people as part of the process of writing her book – certainly more than I have spoken to – but I can’t help feeling, based on my own conversations, that her final comments above completely miss the point].

AR: There’s a technological aspect to this as well, though, because we, you’ve described how we’ve reached the point where the turbines are generating much more energy than is useful for the local environment, but it can’t be stored, it’s, it exceeds exportation, and so the government [no, actually it’s the poor long-suffering taxpayers – the government doesn’t have it’s own money] is now paying them to turn them off, which feels like a Kyoto-style absurdity, because the tech just doesn’t exist.

[Digression – imagine a world in which BBC Verify investigated the billions of pounds being paid to turbine companies in constraints payments. Imagine a world in which the BBC thought to ask whether SSE might have jumped the gun with Viking Energy, in the knowledge that it would make loads of money out of constraints payments because it knew full well that the grid wouldn’t be able to cope with the electricity from Viking from August 2024. Just a thought].

MB: Well, that’s really interesting, as well, like, er, constraints payments, they’re called, erm I was reading a report by an organisation called Regen? And they were saying actually the vast majority of constraint payments go to gas power plants to produce more in order to balance the grid. So we’re not hearing that story, and you talk about the right-wing press Mike, a lot and truth, obviously, the truth is a lot more complicated than wind farms receiving benefits to switch off. The truth is the, the electricity network needs to be functioning properly, also needs renewable energy [er, it doesn’t need renewable energy], and in order for it to catch up, it’s go to pay wind farms to turn up. It’s also got to pay gas plants to produce more, so….

[Imagine a world in which a BBC interviewer interjected at that point to explain that the owners of gas generators are paid to run them inefficiently because they are relegated to a subservient role on the grid – behind unreliable renewables, with the consequence that not only do we pay wind farms to switch off but gas power plants also cost more than necessary. This isn’t a bug, or a glitch, it’s a feature of a grid which incorporates increasing volumes of unreliable renewable energy. One can dream. Instead:]

AR: Mike, are there technological solutions to this, can we develop storage devices, batteries, that will mean that we don’t, when the wind’s not blowing, it’s all good.

MB-L: Yup. The good news about the whole of the climate crisis and the rest of the wider poly crisis is that from a technical perspective it’s challenging, but we can deal with all of that. It turns out not to be the technology that’s the problem. I mean, you know, what I love about your book, Marianne, is – one of the things I love about it – is the way that you unpick, you know, all the detail and complexity that’s required to make a high quality decision, erm, around, around all this. It’s such a different way of making decisions from the way, you know, the way we’re classically talking about the climate crisis.

[Note, he hasn’t answered the question].

AR: Before we get onto the tech, which is a big part of the conversation with you Mike, I just wanna ask Marianne where, where it stands in Shetland right now. It’s operating, it’s generating energy, how’s the community?

MB: How’s the community? Well, I haven’t been up there, erm, for a while but, I mean, in speaking to the, the journalists up there who’ve been interviewing me, I think the importance of this book is that it’s starting a conversation again, and because I don’t take a side in it it’s quite, it’s been encouraging that this might be something that, you know can be a positive point of er discussion.

AR: OK. Well, Mike, you’re the scientist, the climate scientist and have been all of your life [sic]. Climate of Truth is your book, erm, you’ve just mentioned that the, the technology exists. We are not in a, in a point of time where the climate crisis [do they get paid extra for inserting the words “climate crisis” at every opportunity?] just cannot be dealt with because we don’t know how to?

MB-L: No, there are still some little gaps for complete clean energy transition, but it’s not the technology that’s the bottleneck at all. So, I’ve been working away on, on climate for, erm, probably 20 years I guess, so full time on it, and you know, we’ve been going round this circle of the scientists screaming, you know, talking ever more loudly about how much trouble we’re in and how serious it is and how urgent it is, and the politicians, you know, broadly speaking, erm, you know, continuing not to take much notice [sic]. If you look at climate, at emissions curve, it’s just going up and up and up as if we had never noticed, if humans had never noticed a climate crisis, so what I don’t want do is get to my kind of death bed saying well I’ve spent my life, you know, er, just, just going round in circles on this, or you know, and I don’t want to, I don’t want to be saying well, I told you so. So, we have, if we’re gonna start getting anywhere, then we have to face the fact that we’re not getting anywhere. It’s not that, erm, you know Antonio Guterres and the UN said, you know, er er, we’re making progress but not fast enough. Actually, the facts are against him. We’re not making progress. We are, every year we’re making the world worse by a larger amount than the year before.

[That last is a good point, but he still hasn’t answered the question about how technology solves this for us].

AR: OK, so before, before we get to what you argue are the real problems, just briefly can you tell us what the technological fixes are that, that could dig us out of this crisis if we got our act together.

[Credit to Adam Rutherford for noticing that the question hasn’t been answered and sticking to it].

MB-L: OK, so the first thing that we don’t talk about enough is we need to use less energy at the global level [oh, does that mean that there isn’t a technological fix?]. Er, then, when we’re doing that, we need to constrain the fossil fuel coming out of the ground. The climate doesn’t care actually how many wind turbines we have, what the climate cares about [er, the climate isn’t a sentient being, it doesn’t care about anything at all. Shouldn’t a climate scientist know that?] is how little fossil fuel we’re burning, and the wind turbines on their own don’t leave the fossil fuel in the ground, so we need a constraint on fossil fuel usage. And actually – and extraction – and that’s what the climate COPs have so far failed to deliver, and the reason we don’t have a carbon price or a constraint on fossul fuel is because the very powerful fossil fuel er lobby understands erm that er we’ll allow policy-makers more less to say and do anything they like as long as it won’t constrain the fossil fuel coming out of the ground.

[Did you notice? He still hasn’t answered the question. And it seems to have worked. Adam Rutherford is side-tracked in his next question].

AR: Just unpick this idea that the more renewables, the more wind turbines, that we have, that doesn’t have an effect on keeping fossil fuels in the ground. This is Jeevens Paradox.

MB-L: Jevens Paradox, yeah. So, the dynamics of growth when you and I explore this in some depth in the book are that when you add, er, a new energy source, you know, you create, er, you create a rise in energy demand and you create, as we become more efficient with things, we also tend to do more of it at an even faster rate than we become efficient at it. So, unless you constrain the actual environmental impact, erm, what you find is that the dynamics of growth are, things like wind turbines, we just have them as well as the fossil fuel. So at the moment we’re growing our, we’re growing our renewable capacity, but we’re also growing our fossil fuel extraction at the same time and that’s not good for the planet.

[I still haven’t heard what the technological soultion is].

AR: You’re asking people to radically change their lifestyles, you’re asking governments to behave in entirely different ways. And, I, you know, and most right-thinking people don’t doubt that the climate crisis is real and is indeed an emergency [cheers, Adam, that’s me on the naught step, then], but you have to have some sort of notion of human nature to say that we can, that we are capable of changing our lifestyles in significant ways.

MB-L: Absolutely. Absolutely. So, erm, so my book is about saying well we’re not getting anywhere so we have, if we want to understand what it will take to get somewhere, we have to stand right back from the problem. We have to see it in new ways from the ways we’re classically looking at it. And we have to dig right underneath the surface, right down through the layers of the reasons behind the reasons why we’re not getting anywhere. Learn from our failure, join up all different parts of the issue and see where that takes us to. And, you know, the big picture is that we’ve arrived in this era – some people call it the Anthropocene – in which it’s suddenly humans that are the big powerful force, erm, on affecting the ecosystem. And yet everything about how we do life, how we do economics, how we run our politics, how we make our decisions, all of that has been honed in a previous era in which the world was a robust place – robust compared to anything we could do to it – so it’s unsurprising that we need to do some, some re-engineering of how we do life. It’s a deep and fundamental change. We have to see that.

[Did he actually say anything there? I’m still waiting for the technological solution].

AR [who definitely seems to have given up on trying to get an answer]: It struck me that this is a core theme in the disagreements in Joe’s play in Kyoto, particularly the argument between America and China, where the Chines – then a developing nation – were saying you’re asking us to not have the joys that you’ve enjoyed for the last 200 years, and not have economic progress as a result of that.

JM: Absolutely right. You know, China was saying, you’ve become a super-power because of fossil fuels and now you’re saying that we can’t have that chance, that’s insane. And you can understand that there is a certain logic within that….

[At which point I also gave up. Nobody will criticise China; I don’t know why. It seems that only the developed world has to change its ways. We were promised a technological solution that would make it OK, but instead I was told that we have to use less energy. The technological solution wasn’t forthcoming, despite numerous attempts by Adam Rutherford to elicit it. I have a lot of time for Adam Rutherford. I even have one of his books on my book shelves. But I ended that programme (or as much of it as I could be bothered to listen to) wondering why he did this. Yet another BBC climate crisis piece of propaganda that really enlightened us not one jot. I also hoped for a deeper exploration of the Viking Energy debacle on Shetland, but I didn’t get that either. Not many marks out of ten, I’m afraid].