[英语周刊.docVIP

Are you surprised by the intensity of climate denialism in America, including among candidates just elected to Congress? The scientific community is not skeptical, you know. But let’s assume the odds [of climate disaster] were only 50/50. If you have a 50 percent chance of getting knocked over by a car crossing the road, you’re going to take out insurance, or you’re not going to cross the road. And it just seems to me that at the very least we should be taking out insurance. But more than that, in America I don’t even talk about global warming anymore. I just talk about the fact that the resources are being depleted fast. Even the skeptics must realize that we are fast running out of oil, that we’re only a few years away from demand for oil exceeding supply, which could create the mother of all recessions if fuel goes up to $150, $200 a barrel, and that the West should not be reliant on foreign oil from a stability point of view. So I think whichever way you look at it, we must try to find clean fuels. It’s up to business to innovate, to come up with fuels that can power our planes that don’t emit carbon, with ways of utilizing the sun and the wind at a fraction of what it currently costs. And it’s up to governments to set ground rules that encourage clean energy, home-produced energy, by not taxing it at all whilst the industries are in their infancy and replacing the taxes they’ve lost with slightly higher taxes on the dirty energy. Why did you set up a Carbon War Room? We decided that carbon being the enemy—some people argue that carbon is as big an enemy as World War I and World War II put together, and you could throw in a possible third world war as well—then where is the war room? There wasn’t one. So we used our entrepreneurial skills to set up the Carbon War Room. The idea is to use the carrot much more than the stick to work with industries into trying to get gigatons [billions of tons] of carbon out of industries. One of our approaches is to say if you ca