Will we hold to 1.5 degrees C? I don’t know but I have a worrying feeling that we won’t.


Having said all that, it is worth dwelling on the brilliant deployment of renewable energy in the UK. This is mainly wind and solar but there are also encouraging developments in geothermal energy sources and of course energy efficiency. At times this is delivering a major part of our energy. Heat is a real challenge as electricity is a very inefficient way of creating heat.


What is staggering is t hat the opportunity has taken so lon g to be seen. The UK is one the windiest countries and yet we have a very low level of manufacture. The UK could and should have been right at the very front of this technology 20 or 30 years ago. After all we have some of the best turbine manufacturers in the world!


We need to accelerate the pace of change.


How integral is science and engineering to a more sustainable future? Science and engineering are fundamental to getting to where we need to go, as is the trust of experts. The whole conspiracy theory agenda and undermining of knowledge is dangerous and could be our undoing, as a species. There are some politicians who should hang their heads in shame for helping this situation develop.


The reality is we all rely on science and engineering all the time and many of us would be dead without it. Just run through a typical day and note how science and engineering are there to some degree behind and within everything we do. Of course, we should challenge things but we should use the scientific method to do so.


Is renewable energy and innovation in transportation and e-mobility the way forward? What will this transition mean for the oil majors and fossil fuel industry? We will end up living in a world wholly powered by renewable energy, we must . That obviously requires huge innovation not only in transportation but in pretty much every aspect of our lives. I do think we need to collectively slow down our levels of consumption and truly value some of our abilities to move around the world. We also need to understand the carbon footprints of all of our consumption and


44 LUBE MAGAZINE NO.168 APRIL 2022


lives and reduce and then value what is important.


For the oil majors and fossil fuel companies they have two choices: They can embrace and maximise the opportunities that the change will bring or they can continue to resist and like a person with an addiction, keep going back to the fossil fuel ways. Those that have a true driven, embedded mission to change have the opportunity to transform and succeed. Those that don’t will increasingly face risks and probably fail as companies. The later you leave it the bigger the risk. Remove the Government subsidies, face a few more, strong legal or shareholder actions and the game will completely change and it could change very rapidly.


Clever companies will pursue the renewable energy future with the same drive that brought them into existence as oil companies in the past. Hopefully they will be a bit more caring along the way for the environment and people. They will be the ones who remain and succeed.


As an activist and campaigner, what has been your greatest success? Without a doubt, helping trigger a £5.5 billion spend on the clean-up of the UK coastline that was spent on full treatment rather than building the obsolete concept of partially treated long sea outfalls. It is summed up nicely in the conclusions of a House of Commons Select Committee Report that I gave evidence to in my role as Director of Surfers Against Sewage:


“...all sewage should be treated to tertiary level at all times and in all places...”


You were formerly special advisor to ex- Minister for the Environment, Rt. Hon Michael Meacher MP; is a political career something you would pursue? I’m not sure I really would have had the skills or determination. Having run a national pressure group, it would have to have been national politics. You’d have to get selected, then elected and then fight your way off the back benches to really start making a difference and living in a city would probably have sucked the passion and drive out of me.


I was once interviewed for the Chief Exec of Greenpeace UK and even at the interview in London I was trying to work out how I’d get back to the coast at weekends.


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