[00:00:00.15] zoom.us: Good morning, good morning Daniel. Good morning, how are you? Very well thank you and good to catch you, good to meet you. Yeah good to meet you too. Oh hang on I haven’t turned my video on. That’s okay. I was, if I look a bit rattled it’s because I was up till three something this morning. I had a training webinar that started at midnight in Indonesia so… Wow! Training for what? Well, AI basically. AI and the use of filmmaking. Wow! Yeah, yeah, yeah. Story discovery and that sort of thing. Well, all sorts of stuff. It’s all very interesting isn’t it? I’m absolutely in love with it. Well yeah, I mean I can do a week’s worth of work in a day now. I know! It’s incredible. Oh my god, oh my god. I had to last night, because we’ve got our new balance project going out. There’s 17 different forests around the UK. – Yeah. – And all of them needed copy done in the tone of voice of how we are, and they’re all written by different people. So I just copied and pasted and add my sentiments in, and I did what I would normally pay a copywriter megabucks to do it, and I did it myself in about four hours. it’s just incredible. – And the thing I find quite extraordinary is how I can write something or abstract something and then I can give it a piece of my writing and say write in my voice, follow my style. – I know. – It’s just brilliant isn’t it? – It’s brilliant. So tell me what’s, how does free conduct… the meeting so what do you need to know should we introduce each other do you want to tell me about you and tell me about me how do we work okay well this is what I would call a discovery call and this is to explore the story space and the characters within it and I have some fairly simple objectives oh that’s gone too big which are to find out, I want to find out some keywords. There are three deliverables I need to create before going anywhere with cameras and so on. The first is I need to understand, I need to understand the story space and be able to make decisions about it in terms of keywords. Now, you might have noticed at the bottom of my email, there are those words. curiosity, justice, perspective, opportunity, and engage. Those key words come from what inspires me, what is different about me or the difference I wish to make, who my audience is, my tribe, what I want what I want to feel with them and what I want to do with them. So I’m inspired by curiosity. I’ll go down any rabbit hole. In fact, I live in rabbit warrens. I am enraged by injustice, so justice is the difference keyword. I’m interested in working with people and talking to people who wish to find the most useful perspective on truth, because what a truth means depends on where you look at it from – one man’s as another man’s freedom fighter, for example, or terrorist. I want people to see opportunity in what we discover, what we tell stories about, and I want them to engage. So those are my personal ones and what we try and do is we try and come up with a set of keywords, well we have to for each. project because that helps us make decisions, even about things like lenses, locations, all that sort of stuff. Lighting, all of that can be driven by using the keywords as a touchstone. The next thing is I have to produce character briefs. I might have mentioned in my, my email to you I’m looking for three things basically I’m looking for desire what you want to achieve beyond everything else the strong desire that you have and that’s because this is all science-backed in that when when we meet somebody who has a very strong desire we tend to empathize with them want them to get it. The second thing is what’s unique about their way of going about achieving it, their unique skill set etc, and what motivated them to it. So I want to find out your desire, motivation and uniqueness because that I can mark out of five each of those and then the story space we look at several different characters and the idea is to find the one with the strongest desire. Because desire matters most. A little strap. So I would normally talk to several people to find the best person to tell the story because most filmmakers sit down in front of a CEO because they’re told you know we want to talk to the CEO but the most passionate person in the business might be the janitor and the best person to tell the story so we try to find the strongest character and then having found that we look specifically want to make an intentional story so we’ve got identification in the empathizing with a character. The next, the other thing we want obviously is we want to get people to be lost in the in the storytelling so we want what they called narrative transportation where the world goes away and you just live in the story world which we all know happens and that’s and that’s where you can change people’s minds, because if you can move their heart, you can move their minds, and evidence of that might be, there are several examples, the most recent of which is Mr. Bates versus the Post Office. That’s even changed the law, and that was a drama that did that. If you want other examples… Uncle Tom’s Cabin, written by Harriet Beecher Stowe. When she met Abraham Lincoln he said, “What a tiny woman to cause such a great war.” So he saw that as an exciting incident. There are so many others, stories that have changed the world, so what we want to be is we want to be in that space because that’s most important. So to get the narrative transportation… what we need is a good set plot. So very simply there are six points that I want to identify. I want to identify, I want a hook at the beginning which would be really interesting. In your case I guess it was when you had that car accident that changed your life. spun it around. Yes, yes. So we can explore that in a minute but I’m giving you just an overview for now. The second plot point is the conflict you ran into and so we, everybody runs into lots of different conflicts in life so we’re looking for the best conflict to resolution pair. Obviously… so many of them. Perfect. Conflict with environment. Now this is really good so we pick the most effective one and we prosecute it by first of all identifying the problem and then what it did and then if you engage with the conflict then there’s a story there because the audience asks, so what happened next? So they’re primed to look, and so we go on a journey then, you engage with the problem, and then you go on a journey, and there are three things that happen on the journey. There are often things like a win, which is something that, a small win perhaps, that encourages you. There is a wipe out, where everything… seems to go pear-shaped, and then there is a wild, which is perhaps where you do something, maybe I haven’t studied your story deeply enough yet, but maybe advising government or speaking to the UN, where suddenly you feel you’ve got a platform and that’s like a wild big win. then there’s a resolution to the problem and we finish off with a thing called a jab which is the learning point or call to action. Okay so my job is in this discovery call and I’m talking far too much is to listen to you because the important thing is that when you see the storyboard, when you see what we want to film, you feel heard, okay? And would it have a storyboard and obviously a script would be written and all that sort of stuff? Well, what I do is I have a script, I have a script in terms I’ve found plot points, and then what I do is I identify questions that we’ll get in the interview. we’ll reveal those plot points okay okay fine yeah right so it’s um so is it a documentary sort of format is that the vibe yeah okay great okay this we can do this short we can do it long I’m in the same process we’ll create an hour-long documentary or hour and a half documentary or it will produce a one and a half minute. Or there could be three parts. There could be a series or several parts, and if we’re smart, what we do is we film, we also organise things like, one of the things that goes wrong, I look at most YouTube channels, my own included, and there are very few views and the subjects are important and so what we can do is we can get social clips out of the interview that will lead so the idea is to use it like presentation on telly so we can get people interested enough to to go to the… the video but yeah it’s it’s it’s a relatively simple but precise activity so on so really so it’s the story of how it all happened and where we got to is that what you’re interested in now well there are several different types of story I’m thinking having done a little bit of research thinking that an origin story would be a good one because there is the origin of carbon neutral and where it’s gone wrong, how it’s been repaired and how we got it right which is that’s 30 years work. Yes so that’s a good origin story then you have other stories you can tell same process but you would you would start again if an impact story, there might be a value story, your why, all that sort of stuff, and we include some of those. I don’t want to go too much into detail because it takes us away from the initial exploration, which I think an origin story is a really good one to have, and so. So. I’ve done a bit of research and it seems like you’ve had quite a quite an interesting time. So what is it that you want to create in life? What’s the big thing you want to make more than anything else or experience? Whoa! – Daniel, could I ask you to hit record, then I don’t have to make notes? – Yeah, of course. – Recording in progress. – Got it. Excellent. Okay, so… Yeah, passion, the thing you want. Well, my passion is, my passion is resolution and the environment, and what I wish to create is a continuation of this work to, to have mass action for the creation of biodiversity. That also brings social and economic co-benefits, respect for human rights. and addresses climate change. Boom, boom, boom. So that’s what we have ready. I’ve looked, by 30 years’ work, when we go back into the story, but what I’ve done in order to manifest the, to bring that, what you asked me, what I want to create, what I’ve done is author… a paper and it’s co-authored by myself and James Cameron. James is, he was one of the litigators with the Small Island States for climate action back in the 80s. He’s one of my best friends, he’ll be part of the story, but his actions morphed into what became the Kyoto Protocol. He’s a barrister, so James and then another really dear close friend of mine, Professor Felix Dodds, who’s one of the architects of the United Nations Sustainability Goals. So the three of us have co-authored a paper on how to resolve and deliver what I just described, and then we’ve had it. Um peer-reviewed, anonymously peer-reviewed, and it’s just been published in the International Journal of Sustainable Energy, and it’s a roadmap of how to convert carbon finance into biodiversity creation. So that’s balance. So my new initiative is balance. So what do I want to create? Well, I’ve created and I’ve got clients, but I want to boost. balance to the point where balance is the new word that we own, I’ve trademarked the word balance in the terms that I used to have. I used to own the trademark of the term carbon neutral. So carbon neutral for offset changes into balance for biodiversity. So why do my clients become balanced to create biodiversity? create social engagement, human rights, and also address climate. Boom, boom, boom. So we’re addressing the three big issues in one go, putting it on the money being the carbon that finances those three areas, and the efficiency in doing that is being picked up by UNCTAD, the United Nations Development Organization Bank and a number of countries, including the potential to lobby to redraft Article 6 of the Paris Agreement in order to accept the balance methodology within nationally determined contributions, which means because suppliers of balance units. What that means is that rather than having carbon trading and all the skullduggery and the cowboy boys creating markets, it all becomes compliant, and what happens is that countries create the balance units. They then, we are the agent that sells them on to the corporates who need to buy them, and then we’ve discovered a new natural resource similar. size to the natural resource that caused the problem in the first place, which is the fossil fuel industry, and who are the beneficiaries of it? It’s indigenous people, it’s biodiversity creation and climate mitigation within countries that are very poor, underdeveloped places that have got a huge natural resource, and suddenly they have a massive resource. in the balance project. So that’s what I’m passionate about, is moving the historic 30 years work that’s been a learning curve into a springboard into balance and doing that, and a lot of work is being done and we’re getting taken very seriously. For example, with the peer review methodology, David Blood, who’s partner in a Generation Capital, the climate area, he gets back to me within 24 hours. If I send an email to Lord Nick Stern now, ex-chair of the IPCC, who I know, but he used to take months to get back to me, he’s now back within two days. So we’re on a mission. It’s interesting because, I mean, this is… fundamental issue, mankind operating globally rather than locally, because we tend to optimize locally, don’t we? We have coal, we do this, we make sure we live well, but it always comes at the cost of somebody else. So what you’re, what it seems to me that you’re suggesting is that we’ve got to adopt a global paradigm rather than a local one, which means… that we’ve got to stop wasting stuff we’ve got to start making sure that people are independent giving aid is one thing but giving them independence you know it’s that old thing of teaching a man to fish or giving him a fish. Exactly so what’s going what’s the carbon market turned over 300 million dollars two years ago this year it’s gone up to 2 billion within it going up to two billion and it will rise further quite dramatically but that’s an indication of what’s needed but it’s not scalable and it’s not trusted. If you look at North South Pole who are the 800 pound gorilla of the carbon market, they are going down. The direct has walked away with 12 and 14 their back pocket and they were selling ghost credits so people like people like Deloitte’s were buying carbon credits and not reducing their emissions because they’ve offset their pollution and it turned out the pollution that the credits weren’t real. Yeah. You’ll have read that in the press recently so I mean this is this is the big problem with carbon offsetting isn’t it that people again. They lie, cheat and mislead. Exactly, so I started this whole movement, so I’m going back in to do the housework and clear up the mess I made and then resolve it with something absolutely sorted. So, but that’s balance and I think what I could do is share with you the business plan on that. Just to give you a heads up, the balance methodology, we take carbon credits, we’re not reinventing wheels that are already spinning, we use the existing accreditation system, but we do a separate contract with the project developer in order to clean up carbon credits and turn them into balance units. Note the word units, a credit. suggest that we put the well-being of the planet in the hands of the financial services community, what could possibly go wrong with that? So, a balanced unit is a benign action. A client’s buying balance to create biodiversity and help people and address climate, the three things. So, the balanced unit has six points in the methodology. The first one is permanence. Now, existing carbon credits don’t have any protection after 40 years, right? We have a 99-year contract with a project developer. Now the half-life of CO2 is 50 years and it takes another 50 years to come back down again, so existing credits don’t work because they’re not within the radiative forcing cycle of CO2. We uniquely are, so we resolve that purpose. issue. The second issue that we resolved is indigenous species trees with local genetic stock to recreate natural woodland. The third area is human rights so it’s 40% a minimum of will go to the indigenous community for the money a year one, year three, year five, sign off from the community that they got the money and they’re happy. But we also encourage co-benefits because they need income so we look at permaculture, agroforestry, apiary, a water catchment enhancement for fisheries, forest products, forest firewood and very interestingly biochar because you can bury that back in the forest and create massively increased crop fertility and you’re taking co2 out the atmosphere baking it in low-cost kilns. or recycled oil drums and burying it and getting a massive boost to your fertility. So you’re using carbon capture and storage technology with indigenous local people, using Mother Nature that removed two gigatons of CO2 last year, whereas we’re putting two or three billion into carbon capture and storage mechanisms that do 4,800 tons and it’s never stream by 2050. So a real one that does work and it brings income to local people. The fourth thing in the contract is monitoring because the client’s becoming balanced to create biodiversity. So as white-tailed eagles or orchids or squirrels or nice things happen, that comes back to us. We send that as an annual report to the client so they can show customers the benefit. then there’s force majeure if there’s a natural disaster and an additionality address meaning that the money hadn’t arrived, the project wouldn’t have happened. That’s half a balance unit. To make it a whole balance unit we do a third thing that comes back to your Act, I think Global Act Local, we plant a sister tree married to to the distant tonnage near you and your customer, which means that you’re creating migration corridors from urban to rural in country, and you’re also, as you go to work, or you’re loyal to a balanced business as a customer, you can see the distant wonder of the project and the local people benefiting online, but you also can see your schoolyards around. and so I was getting green and that’s a balance that’s a balance unit and that we’ve just I’ve just just kicked that off and we’ve got some lovely clients and that’s rolling on that’s my new business which is a resolved issue of what went wrong with carbon. So you’re building a mechanism to address the fundamental problem plus addressing human nature. We’ve built the mechanism. – Yeah. Okay, so let’s look a bit more at your journey. So you were playing Space Invaders back in the, back in- – Back in the day. – Back before the Falklands War, in fact. – Well, no, no, it was back, I was in the ’70s, ’78, ’79, ’80. I lived in Tuscany and my father was, he’d retired a few years earlier. He’d done quite well. He was the managing director of Tesco. My mother was a Shakespearean actress and a speech therapist. Anyway, a lovely environment in Italy, and I fell in, I used to play pinball. I learned, so my three things from Italy was, pinball, ride most cyclers and kiss girls. Gentleman’s education. Exactly, exactly. But I went to I went to a progressive vegetarian free St. Christopher’s. It was a boarding school in England for a few years. But anyway, so I lived in paradise and I went to a heaven of a school, and I have, anyway, la-di-do, machine, pinball machine gone, Space Invader in, fell in love, wow, went to the back of the machine, found the logo of the manufacturer and their address and went to see them in Arezzo and said, “Listen, I think I can sell these back in London for you, I was 17.” give me 10 of them and I can sell them and I’ll pay for when I’m sold. He said, “You alright there?” “Yeah, see, see that and you’ll be pepped in.” So, I arrive at 17 with a truckload of 10 machines and I sold to Rutherford & Deeth, Associated Leisure, they were all at 60 and 80. By the time I was 18 I had about 2.33 million pounds. pound turn over business. Boom. Yeah, and in 1990, though, what was it that interested you about that? I mean, was it the entrepreneurial thing or was it the actual game itself or what? It was a combination of what it was, it was entrepreneurial and the game, but it wasn’t a space invader. It was Galaxian, it was Asteroid, it was Pac-Man, it was all over. cool arcade games that are sort of icons now, you know, that was my gig, and then I built up a big company that was selling them, and then I also got myself a Section 23 gaming license and I had fruit machines and pool tables and I had 700, 900 pubs would rent my, would put my equipment in. of cats going around, you know, taking the money out and bringing it through and loading it up. So that was my first business, and that must have seemed pretty good. Right, it was quite good. So what got in the way? What got in the way? Yes. What stopped it? Well, you know, I was… I had girlfriends, I had sparse cars, lovely flats. I mean, I was, you know, I was, I was in, in a, in a… – Bright, yeah. – Right, right, right, royal, and rock star mates. Hugh Cornwall was one of my… Peter Gabriel was my sister’s friend and I introduced and he… I met through Peter, I met Hugh Cornwall at Peter’s 30th birthday party. I was 18, and Hugh Cornwell became one of my best buddies. We had a little casino in his den in Box, the Holy Bank of Ambrosia, we called it. So that’s when the stranglers were kicking off, and one night, Hugh says to me, “Let’s go out for a drink.” And I said, “Okay.” Monday night, Moulds Club bath, very quiet. Hugh and I walk in, Hugh had fallen down a manhole cover, hurt his back. I was the joke, as he’d been hanging around anyway. So, anyway, we’re at the bar and, you know, I wouldn’t have recognised this character, but, excuse me, I’m just plugging in my power. But what happened, which stopped the whole bloody thing, was Hugh spotted this… man at the bar said, “Oh my God, what are you doing here?” It was Tony Thompson who was the drummer from Shake who, you know, basically took David Bowie from being a cult band into a stadium act. So Tony was there and Tony said, “Well, Hugh, yeah, hi, I’m in Bath. I’m at a rehearsal, but it’s the final rehearsal before we actually…” were getting out on tour and I’ve become the drummer of a band who lost their drummer and I’ve replaced him and he said oh who’s that? And he said well come and meet them and it’s Robert Plant and John Paul Jones are sitting there. Anyway so I’m in a scenario with those cats and And what happened was, Q went home because he wasn’t feeling too good, I’m in rock and roll heaven, and it’s like 2 o’clock in the morning and they’re shutting the bar, what shall we do now? Let’s all go back to my place. This guy called Pete Byrne, not dead or alive, but an American singer comes in and he’s like drunk and all excited. John Paul Jones and Plant get into their car to go and wait outside my flat, but Pete Byrne, we all get into his rental and he spins on black ice. I’m in the back of the car, he spins on black ice, he takes our electricity piling in through a little old lady’s apartment. Boom. It was the same night that the space shuttle blew up. and I get a, Pete breaks his jaw, he’s a singer-songwriter, Hilary, the trumpet player from The Stranglers, breaks his lips, Rachel, a girl, smashes her face, Tony Thompson breaks both his arms, and then I get serious head injury and die in a car accident, and I’m out there for three days. So, the story’s… what would you rather have, a reformed Led Zeppelin or carbon neutral? So I go, you know, I do my, I got my out-of-body experience, a lot of this extraordinary stuff happens, but it’s, you know, imagine the best you’ve ever felt, and then times it by at least a thousand, that’s how good it is, and all sorts of wonderful stuff happened in my head injury, but then I came back, I recovered and went to live in Barre, in, Castle Kerry, and then went into a recuperation. It took me three years to get better. Obviously that tanked and crashed my business, and then what I did is I got myself better and I went to a willow tree over the River Brewery and I sat in the tree and I read books, studied philosophy, you know, started to do a bit of it. a bit of philosophy and then after three years of getting better, I come down every night, I go up the tree every day. Most people get a long contemplative period at the end of their life, I had it in my early 20s. Then what happened is as I left the tree, I’d read a report by this NASA scientist in 1988. called Hansen and he had done this thing about how bad co2 could be and I’d read it that day and I’m sitting there meditating in my tree and I just really walked from the tree and I go my god I made a hundred percent recovery I’m not better but my head injury 90% of people get really cognitive problems for the rest of their life it’s what’s called a serious head injury but a rare group get a cognitive uplift and I was in that group and so what happened was I left the tree and I was like oh my god I’m I’m better but I’m not just better I feel great and I looked at the tree and I said thank you and uh and in a meditation you know in a word thank you tree I said what can I do for you? tree said to me, go and plant as many trees as you can. So that’s how, Future Forest, that’s how, so that’s how I then walked to Castle Perry to go and get some dog food and I’m thinking, how am I going to deliver on my promise? So it was called carbon sequestration. So I said to Maureen who runs the pet shop, Maureen, can you let me have your… utility bills and I reckon I can figure out your carbon footprint. I’ve got a science background to some degree and she said, you know, I said I can make, you know, I can sequester your carbon for your business. She said, you’re right Daniel, how much is that going to cost me then? And she said, I said, well give us three quid. So she did and I planted the very first trees, Castle Kerry path. There’s a tree there that’s the first ever tree planted for climate and carbon and they’re all around the Castle Kerry Primary School and massively over-planted, and that was, Maureen was the first business to have her carbon sequestered, and then I went to London and I’m with a girlfriend and I say to her I’ve sequestered Maureen’s carbon in the Globe Club and in Portobello at four in the morning as we’re walking home, and she said, “What?” I said, “I’ve sequestered Maurice’s carbon.” “No, Dan, what have you done?” I said, “Well, I think I’ve neutralized her carbon.” And Rima Sands said, “Oh, that’s carbon neutral.” So that was how the words, so I co-coined the term carbon neutral. So that’s kind of like the origin story of how, of the first run, as it were. – Right. So, this is fascinating stuff. So, how did that become a sort of life’s work? Was it by bit or…? You know, that was basically what I wanted to do. So then I went to the AA and I got this guy called Stephen Huxley and I’ve got all the letters and I went to… British Airways, I went to Birkin, and I’m saying look, you know, I want to make you carbon neutral, I’ll make your customers carbon neutral, and so that was in 1989, I’ve got letters dated ’88, ’89, talking with the AA about being carbon neutral, and the AA bought the idea from me for seven and a half grand, because every time I’ve… had an idea I’ve written it down so this was just in my mind it was one of many great ideas for for getting stuff out there but it was a real the environment the passion and the trees going back back to planting trees in Israel going back to planting trees in Tuscany and I was always climbing trees I just love trees um so my this was the big one anyway nobody ever went with it and it kind of I bought it and I had to buy it back because I wanted to be able to promote the idea. I took it to Virgin, they fucking, they nicked it, put it on the front cover of Inflight magazine. I got congratulated by people for getting me the idea that I didn’t even know about. I get back to that, I did it under confidentiality agreement, a guy called Will Whitehall, and I got back to him and said it’s a fundamental breach of confidentiality. they pulled it. Anyways, all that sort of, I went, nobody ever said no, nobody ever said yes, it just went on and on and on, and then Michael Evis, who’s a friend, I lived near him, and he gave me tickets to the festival, and I met Joe Strummer, and Joe, I said, you know, Joe, I’ll talk to Joe about what we’re doing, he said, “Ask the musicians,” and we knew what we were doing, do it. What can we do? I said you can plant some trees. You could become first carbon neutral citizen. He went yeah let’s do it. So Joe became the world’s first carbon neutral citizen and that’s really how it how it got off. What I was doing from from 89 to to to 94 95 was um how I I made my money was I was getting music from record companies and putting them into advertising sinks for commercials and I did seven Guinness commercials I did in Ireland with HHCL I did a global Adidas a big Honda commercial the one that I liked the most was the Blackcurrant Tango where we got a number three on the back of it. You know, the Pugerista, where he’s having a boxing match on the White Cliffs of Dover. So that was how I was making my money as a production company, doing music scene. But I wanted to get the trees. So the trees took over really when Joe kicked in, and then when Joe did it, he turned up to an opening of an envelope. So Dave Grohl did it, the Foo Fighters. massive attack. There is a Ronnie Wood in Argentina. There is a Sex Pistols. The Sex Pistols have got a Filthy Furious Forest on the verge of the N25, and it just kind of grew like that. Pink Floyd became carbon neutral. They’ve got four projects. So a boom in the music community. It was really cool. Joe was a great friend of Damien Hirst. So Damien became… came really close and he did a big artwork with a big cage full of CO2 canisters and David Gamble who’s a – I met Warhol when I was in New York in ’84 but anyway, the Warhol estate went carbon neutral and we got a Warhol forerunner. So it’s Hearst, it’s Warhol, it’s Stromar, it’s the Rolling Stones, it’s it’s a really, really… Pink Floyd, it’s a big cultural exercise that’s going on, and then Julian Temple, who’s a friend, I said, “I’m going to LA, Julian, “can you help me out with a concert?” He gave me Lawrence Bender, and Lawrence loved it all, and he said, “You’ve got to meet this lady, Irma Lynn.” You know, mums are quite important, women in these sorts of things. She runs lots of green stuff in LA and it’s Herbiline DiCaprio, so it’s Leo’s mum. So she hooks me up with Leo and he becomes close and he becomes America’s first carbon neutral citizen and starts to promote the fuck out of it, and then I get unsolicited checks from a Mr. B. saying I want to go carbon neutral too. Because– Leo had been socialising at dinner parties and la-di-da. Anyway, the day after tomorrow, Roland Emmerich and New Line and boom, LA Film. – Can I stop you a second? I need to go to the door. Can I just be about 30 seconds? Something like that? – Yeah, I’m just gonna grab a quick cup of coffee. – Oh yeah, perfect. (static) Bye bye. Bye bye. So, yeah, we’ve got, yeah, we’ve got all sorts of cool stuff going on, and we’ve got a lot I’ve got it. Danny, what I’m interested in, these all sound like really great movies. Oh, sorry. Hang on. I’m in my father’s house, he died in October and we’re demolishing the estate. I normally live on a boat, solar panels and no connection to the grid, anything. like that it’s a sailing boat so I can sail places I don’t need to fly so yes in the same mindset or similar anyway I just look at cruise ships and feel offended because they are just a very inefficient way turning crude oil into money melting steel and all the rest of it. Anyway, I prejudice. What I’m kind of interested in is, there must have been things that attempted to block your purpose along the way. Oh yeah, I was getting to that. So, sorry, I’m getting… going a bit much on the celebrity and the building angle but it was all rock-and-roll, carbon neutral, a lot of people don’t know that but then what happened is Chairman of Mazda calls me and says I want to go to carbon neutral because the Rolling Stones are and then I think well this is turning into a really serious business and this is just what I did. anybody with a dot-com after their name could raise venture capital. Venture was very primitive at that stage and to say the least and so what happened is I raised three million quid from a venture fund and me and my teams we took on over 250 blue chips and it kind of grew up into a big business but the ventures marbles under my feet, making me miss milestones. They had a preference in the stairs, they had ratchets, they had milestones. Every time we missed a milestone, they’d grab more stock and basically they just engineered it to oust me as a founder, and then they took that. back over and turned it into what’s a company now called Climate Impact Partners with over a 200 million pound turnover. It’s the biggest, 800, it’s the biggest lethyphen in the carbon trading area. So I was unceremoniously ousted for my passion for the environment. wanted to be a carbon trader. The last board meeting Felix von Schubert, the venture capitalist, said to me, “Daniel, I can’t seize your point in the Rolling Stones being carbon neutral,” meaning, “Why the fuck are you talking to these guys? Why don’t you go and talk to Unilever?” So that was a big blow. That was a major blow. I lost my business for that. That was. economics, purely economics, just seeing it in terms of financial value, killed the idea, basically. It didn’t kill the idea, but it perverted it. No, it perverted it. In fact, if you look at why have we got a dodgy skull daggers carbon market, I don’t know if the idea of morphic resonance, if I got fucked and then everybody else went and copied And boom, that was the origin of the first bug in the carbon market, frankly. It’s what economists… this is why I’m absolutely convinced there are no political or economic solutions to mankind’s problems. It’s got to be on the next level. If somebody asked me 20 years ago, what causes climate change, I’d have said CO2, you silly. But actually it’s not, it’s greed. Yeah. So that was a major blow. That was a major blow. The other thing was this whole idea of planting trees to absorb CO2. it’s an offset. What I was doing was passionately trying to make a deal with my tree to do lovely things but the green community also regarded offsets as being immoral, like why are you offsetting, you shouldn’t be creating the pollution in the first place and it’s a distraction and it genuinely it is but there are unavoidable emissions that can be dealt with and there’s a big philosophical debate which is why I’ve moved from balanced carbon neutral for offset biodiversity. It’s resolved the sentiment in what we’re doing now but the experience I got that was the other showstopper was um was um the anti-offset brigade in the in the green movement who regarded trees What happened in the Kyoto Protocol before Paris and everything, what happened way back was that as the market became compliant, America, before it dropped out, said we don’t need to reduce our emissions, we’ve got these standing forests, and TEPCO logged a rainforest and put fast-growing eucalypts in to try and claim carbon credits to experiment with this new market, and so there was all sorts of weird stuff, and then the George Monbiot and the Jonathan Porricks were like alarmed at the business aspect of offsetting rather than dealing in it, and they’re absolutely right. But it kind of got into a, you know, I got pulled on the Today program to, you know, please create me thing. We need to chop the.inaudible The paper was on a review program and it says in the journal, from where the methane comes from, we do not know. Which means it could have been anthropogenic EGFO from a scientist in a laboratory. thing, it was extreme, the anti-reaction to trees, which was odd because it was coming from the green and the left-wing community, and then there was the awful aspect of the business community wanting to nick the idea and pretend that it was great greenwash. So I’ve got capital markets fucking it. I’ve got NGOs hating it. got a greenwash happening and businesses doing everything for the wrong reasons, and then of course because I started a popular movement of carbon neutral and actually I was the flagship of a movement where I just felt well this is just nuts because it’s all gone wrong. Yes, I can see why it’s juggling because I remember at the time the misrepresentations of a change in behaviour to make it economically acceptable seemed to be a problem, as I said. it misrepresented what you were trying to do and made an argument against it which I guess is what the environmentalists were concerned about because we turn everything… Well that’s exactly right but you can see how the DNA of all of that experience is in the resolution of balance because you know the sentiment, the business… aren’t going offset, they’re not going carbon neutral to offset, they’re becoming balanced to create biodiversity and do the social engagement and address climate. So that’s where this design comes from. So if you haven’t gone, you can’t come up with a solution. I mean, existentialism and response is kind of interesting. because if you’ve got an existential crisis in your life, then your reaction to that can be really interesting, and that’s exactly what happened to me. – Interesting, and I can see shades of Kant versus Bentham in this, and maybe the judge of Aristotle, you know. – Oh no, absolutely, absolutely. So the hero’s journey and all of those… going off in the disaster and the so now we’re in disaster and we’re in ruin and I mean it was a personal story it’s um I got out of my business my partner left me decided the house belonged to her I had my dog die and it all hit me all at once, on a very personal note and I’m happy to talk about it with you now, I don’t know if this goes in the film, but when I had my head injury I got blood plasma put in in 1986 and then as I decided I went through this being kicked out of my business, dog dying, house going to the gutter. It’s like a country western song. I go for a check up at the doctor and they say, “Oh yeah, and you’ve got hepatitis C.” Oh, wonderful. From my accident. Yeah, right. Boom, boom, boom. Incidentally, I was one of the people that they experimented on to create Cephosporin, the new drug. Okay. It’s like, you just take one 30 days and it’s like a hepatitis C is a disease, as a historic disease, and I’m very proud to have been one of the people that they went through. I went through the testing and all that sort of stuff. So anyway, that was another resolution thing. But the point being that that was a disaster, and then, so one of the points to… I picked myself up, and I am in organisations with an organisation called Global Cool, so I thought the resource I’ve got is I’ve got the Rolling Stones, I’ve got the Foo Fighters, I’ve got Pink Floyd, I’ve got Damien Hirst, I’ve got all of this resource, let’s do a campaign. by one, tonne by tonne, seven, I think it was eight, seven billion people on the planet at the time, I think it was, yeah, it was, yeah. Six billion can’t do much on it, one billion can. If everybody reduced by a tonne, that’s a gigaton, that pushes a tipping point into the future and we can, we can, the, the, us public can create time for industry and, and, and, and political to catch up. Um, anyway, so that was an idea. I took it to, um, I’ve got a project for a company called Green Power, who sponsor it, but Green Power came up with a budget and we worked with Moinge. This is… something’s going wrong. A live outside concert, one in Japan, one in Europe, one in America. Okay, and get the message out, and they were going to give £5 million to get the thing going, and then, and a huge budget, it’s on a… poster hoardings and cinema and advertising and it was a really big deal and what Green Power was, was Lord Brown, who’s the BP CEO, he was going to convert BP, and I’ve got the business plan, he was going to turn BP into one, he was going to split it into a one third was going to become a renewable energy company as a hide-off, nothing to do with fossil fuel. It would have been the biggest corporate shift in history, and what happened is that Green Power got the green light and they were off, they were gonna go. I had lunch at Harry’s Bar with Lord Brown and my data on that had… by lunch was Alan Yentob because Yentob was clearing the BBC schedule for that summer for the BBC show and I want to join the BP, not Green Power the series and then it all it all collapses again because Green Power pull out and Lord Brown gets his legal thing happens and it’s all like a basically stop him from doing his great big converting into into a into a green company. Anyway, so then what happens I take the plan and my friend James introduces me to Stanley Fink and Harvey McGrath. Stanley’s the CEO of Mann Financial and Harvey’s like the chair and I go into Mann Financial like literally six… weeks after being kicked in the teeth by Green Power, who then ended up being not Green Power but B-fucking-P. Why would I be sitting in a climate meeting with B-P? And anyway, so I get myself into Man Financial’s office and I’m there explaining what’s going on with the climate to these two cats, the CEO and the chair of the world’s biggest hedge fund, and we’ve got an hour meeting. quarters of an hour through the meeting, Stanley I see picks up the phone, I thought he was distracted, he calls his secretary in and she brings in two checkbooks, they say okay you need five million quid, well we’re going to give you 250,000 pounds each because we need to get you going and it’s going to take us about three to four months to do our due diligence on you but you’re in a hurry. So I, you know, I actually walk out of my first meeting. these guys with half a million pounds boom so i’ve got one of the world’s big hedge funds behind us that kicks off we get steven fry you know sienna miller becomes the poster girl there’s josh hartnett there’s dicaprio i mean it’s like a big it’s a big resource we kick the whole thing off in in fuji rock in japan within 86 96 2006 or a bit with a view to doing the show in 2007. I become an advisor at Downing Street during the Bay Area government, and just like nuts stuff happens, like Perry Farrell, who’s Jane’s Addiction’s lead, takes me into a corner in LA and plays me this tape, and it’s Jim Morrison. It’s like an undiscovered Jim Morrison track. So Perry says, “I’m going to give you this. I’m going to rework it and give it to you as your anthem.” And anyway, I’m in Downing Street and Tony Blair asked me for a private meeting, and he said, “I love what you’re doing. What can I do for you?” And I think, “Fuck, the Prime Minister in power? What can I do for you?” So I said, “Lend me Downing Street for a party.” All right, that’s a great idea. Wow. So we get down in the street for a party and I give Stanley and Harvey the guest list and they bring in all their hedge fund mates and Stephen Fry does the after dinner speech and David Minivan, who I really liked, was a cool cat, and we did the speech there. Anyway, we kick the whole thing off and Perry launches the first playback of this. Jim Morrison track in Downing Street, and it’s a bit ropey as a track, and it was also a magical like a shaman’s exercise that went a bit lost within Downing Street, and then we all went out to the Colony Club afterwards, which was kind of cool but so that was all, Global Cool was doing really well, and then and then Kevin Wall, who was the was the guy who produced Live Aid, who’s allegedly, allegedly, a lot of the money from Live Aid didn’t go where it should have done, and he also did, it was a bit of a skulldugger assault, and anyway, he was going to do the American side of the gig, and he found out our dates, 28th, 29th of July, because that was harmony. Fuji Rocks Festival’s happening and then we need to have two other small shows around the planet and we’ve got an existing thing with a no carbon footprint because it’s already happening with a massive lineup and many of the artists were carbon neutral anyway so it was a low, it had Craig. What he did was he nicked our idea and he turned it into Live Earth and did the whole thing. in partnership with Al Gore, so I got gored and basically Madonna’s on stage everybody say the climate you want to jump up and down and the pussycat dolls will go on stage and say you know what’s this climate change thing and Dow chemicals you know the Bopar thing was disaster that was in India so Dow were a sponsor as were Chrysler was a fucking disaster so that’s again another big kick in the teeth I lost that and also the hedge fund guys who are backing me got predatory and wanted to get on stage with the red hot chili peppers and wanted to be in the meeting with Sienna Miller and you know Dan’s the boss and I’m not the boss and so there was a whole big political fuck-up there but anyway that was that ugly was greed. So then after that I started up CAS, the Carbon Advisory Service, which is a sustainable energy company doing, when buildings get to 18, 20 years old, they get refurbed with new versions of old equipment, heating, cooling, ventilation. My engineers are putting new versions of new equipment. So. kick that off of the business. We’re doing spas in the Far East, a lot in Indonesia, certainly the Maldives as well, which is kind of nice. But Shell Oil becomes my biggest client. I actually refitted their head office in Inverness with a heating, cooling and ventilation system. My engineers do feasibility studies and make it low emission and best in class. We saved them £260,000 a year on their energy bill and about 30,000 tonne CO2 reduction across their business. So the very place where oil extraction is being planned as oil as ice sheets retreat is a is interestingly a retooled building that that I did. So that was That was that was carbon advisory. Then my other one is Craig Sam’s Green and Black Chocolates founder. He was the chair of the Soil Association. Dear friend, it was actually his daughter that I came up with carbon neutral with Arima. He says, I’ve read this book called 1491 about how did the Amazonian Indians create such large catchments for urban population. That’s a lot of what. Populations without any evidence of intensive agriculture and the answer is terra preta black earth black biochar So Dan, what about this one? So Craig and I co-found carbon gold, which is the first modern biochar company So we’ve reimbursed some ancient Amazonian IP and that’s got that one away And then we move on to this current one, which is which is balance and this is the thing I’m really working on now which has got the lessons learned and there’s a there’s three elements in balance one is balancing business which is businesses become balanced proportion to carbon footprint and then the second area is balance my life which is a consumer second and that supports businesses with clients with customers and and membership as a consumer I often call balance my life and the third thing is called chant with balance which is an app where you’ve got a band puts a profile of a gig into the app or a pre-release piece of music the audience pays to get their voice included in the show or the track, they get trapped back afterwards, they’re mixed in, and 20% of the revenue after all the rights holders, everybody’s been paid off, 20% of the revenue goes to plant trees, so you’re singing trees to life, and that’s the marketing back for the whole consumer and the business aspect. So that’s the three aspects of the Balance Initiative, and that kind of brings us up to date. I mean, you do seem to exist in a probabilistic singularity. Yes, that’s a very good point. One thing that occurs to me, have you come across the economist Kate Raworth? No, I haven’t. Donut Economics. She does, she’s Sophie… Sophie Raworth’s sister, who is a newsreader on BBC News. Oh right, yeah. But Kate Raworth came up with donut economics. Basically, if you take a radar plot and you have areas that are good for humanity going in and good for the planet going out, there’s kind of like a toroid of a sustainable area to live and that’s why it’s called Donut Economics and it’s really good. I’m very very familiar with toroids and the fields of energy of feedback that can be helpful, yeah absolutely. But what’s nice is that, well I say what’s nice is that it’s quite clear that we’re… are using, we’re doing stuff that is bad for the planet and bad for ourselves and we need to get back in the donut. So I’m just thinking someone to comment, really we need various different voices since much of this is about economics, it’s about business, it’s about the use of money which is We’ve completely screwed money up. You know coming off the gold standard all those sorts of things. It’s a mess. It’s just numbers you write in in ledgers. So having an economist look at it. I think someone like Kate Raworth maybe Carol Williams the guy who’s into foundationally foundational economy. and that’s basically where you know the government gave a lot of tax breaks to Panasonic to go into Wales and set up a factory so they did and employed loads of people but as soon as the tax breaks weren’t as good as breaks they could get elsewhere they left leaving everyone without a job. Carol Williams is very much about setting up butchers, bakers, candlestick makers in villages so that everyone does business together. It’s like the kind of Bristol Pound, all that sort of thing. Yeah, yeah. Well, there are a number of different views that I think come into this. But first, I think what we what we need to do is to work out what the objective, what we want this film to achieve or this story to achieve, first of all. because it seems to me from what you’ve said there’s a lot of perception that is wrong in the industry about what you’ve been trying to do around the world you know. Carbon neutral has been dissed by the environmentalists. not only that, but also… – Including me! Including me, right? I’ve come up with a new word, I’m saying it’s done, it’s finished, we’ve got to get a new paradigm that works. – And it’s all about behaviour and things like that, the way individuals behave. I mean, one of the things through… I’ve come to the conclusion that actually big things like governments and so on have… find it really difficult to be. I mean, look at COP. It’s so slow. I’ve been to 18 COPs. Have you? I did a balanced side event at COP28 in UAE. Yeah, I’m really integrated with the COP process. The Prime Minister of Bhutan took me to one side and he said, “Oh my God, Daniel.” this is crazy you know we want to create benefit and good and everybody here is trying to figure out we’ve got an existential crisis and everybody is just trying to figure out they can make as much money as they possibly can yes this is this is just nuts can the market resolve this and I said probably not but in Bhutan becoming one of our planting parts partners. So there’s a big thing going on between us and Bhutan right now. But yeah, I mean, you know, the insights that we can get into COP through my access and what’s been historic, but also there’s Bacar coming up in November, COP 29. you know, and I can, you know, I can get accreditations, I can get, I can get crews, I can do all that sort of stuff, you know, there’s, there’s, there’s, there’s some really interesting stuff we can do at COP. Well, I think if we, if we adopt the approach that great stories can change the world, what we have to do is tell some great stories, and it’s, it is. simple. There is science to back it as I said. So in terms of an immediate objective it strikes me that although you’re in plain sight it’s not connected up. So people don’t know that the history you’ve had with some quite big organisations and people and the way that money’s tried to screw you over and so forth. So if we tell an origin story that is a good start and I think we should be aiming at something that’s maybe three to five minutes long. that in? You get it commissioned, is that the way it works? No, well to be honest with you I looked after my mum got dementia in about 2008 when I was running a small production company and so I had to stop work and to look after her because that was only fair. So, I spent a long time and I wasn’t able to do a lot of work, come, she died Christmas Day 2019, we think that was her sense of humour, my dog died 2018, I bought a boat, you know what that feels like. I know, oh my god, it’s mums and dogs, I’ve lost my mum as well, 97. so I know exactly how you feel. My dad, 97 and a half, yes. But I also lost a little sister just before Covid. She died in the bath. She was damaged. She had MS and was making very bad decisions. So mother, little sister, Covid, and dog. Dog, and now my dad. in October last year, so it’s been quite a reset. Emotionally it hasn’t done too much damage because I’m, you know, I’m big and tough. Well I’m lucky with death because I’ve already died. You’ve done it once. I’ve done it once already. I kind of got a first. I know how brilliant I am. it is, so I’m not that worried about it. But yeah, it is awful. I also, during that time, I did some training. I worked at the BBC, had a BBC career, film editor, won awards, all that sort of nonsense, but was never very satisfied with it, and certainly not satisfied with the way television goes. I’m on a committee with the Royal Television Society and it’s a technical committee and everybody’s just focusing on the technology, the new tinier shinier pixels which of course mean nothing. The thing that’s important is storytelling so I got into some training during lockdown with this company. called Muse in Portland in Oregon and they have a storytelling paradigm very simple run by a guy called Patrick ex-psychologist or psychologist graduate and it’s a completely different view on doing things so I’ve been adopting it and I’m now setting out to go. What part of that was to come up with a vision? And I decided that what I wanted to do was to weave several strands together, one of which is storytelling, one of which is sailing, and one of which is environmental stuff. Because I live on the boat and the river stinks of shit. Southern water dumping it in the river. Oh no! That’s Brexit’s cause. Yeah, and we’ve lost the… the seagrass, 90% of the seagrass around Britain’s gone. Kelps disappeared. Where are you based? Where are you? Southampton. Well, you’re not that far from me. I’m in Somerton, near Glastonbury. Oh. Well, perhaps, er… Not in Somerton. I’m in Compton, London, which is a tiny village outside Somerton. Okay, well I’ll tell you what, at some point ping me your address and maybe I’ll come down with it. We should have a chat. We should have a Sunday lunch or something like that. Yeah, there’s a lot of shit to be talked through. But my, my, the reason I’m sort of interested… what you’re doing is because you precisely fit my vision of what I should be doing and the keywords, because I’m curious about what you do. There is huge injustice here. Oh, there is. Perspective. We’ve got to get the right perspective on it. This comes from Emil Zola, who wrote a thing called ‘Mes Ains’, my hatreds, as I guess. authors do, and in it he defined art as a corner of reality viewed through a temperament. Well that’s really interesting you should say that because what’s happening next, so balance kicking off, but The first and the last bastion of the capacity to change consciousness is art. Yes. I say the first because often it’s a seed point, and then the last is when the conflict kicks in. It’s the artist who can show the endeavors for what? they are. So I’ve worked with a situationist curator called Martin Sexton, who’s a sort of KLFE, and Martin and I have got a long relationship, over 25 years, and we’ve created an art book that’s finished. years work and we’re turning the 3 million hectares of land that got planted as a result of this project into a land art initiative, a situationist land art initiative, and we’re saying the whole project, it was actually an artwork and it’s taken 30 years to grow, and so all the mad stories that I’ve kind of alluded to are within the book, but not like a laundry list of celebrity. But when we deal with the Warhol project, we look at where the forest is. We go to tribe, we go into human rights in America and indigenous people’s rights, and the Morrison story has got an incredible artist. We’ve got a picture of Downing Street with them. Yeah, we’re calling it. Morrison Hotel across on 10 Downing Street. We’re planting a sequoia at a speaker’s corner, and so what we’re doing is we’re creating, we’re doing a pun or a. Situationism, we’re turning situations into art and creating tropes that go on sale, and the app is coming out as a situationist. project a digital art project and so that element of of this whole journey on the springboard to the next level is you know I’m free now I don’t have to be beholden to venture capitalists I’ve got nobody telling me how to market how to come across do I have to be careful about how a big corporate board will think about this guy who’s actually doing something that’s artistic, as well as grating all these solutions, and if it rubs up people’s feathers, well, fuck ’em, and that’s really, that’s really, really where we’re at now. So art is a big part of where we’re going forward with this. Perfect, and when you think about it, satire… was something that, you remember, not you remember, but in ancient, in the Greek polis states, they used to have maskers who would take the piss out of the city fathers on a weekly basis. They’d run a sort of satirical show, lampooning their decisions. This is where, you know, the happy face, sad face stuff, and there was one… story where a group of city fathers had been horribly offended by something that an island state nearby had done so they sent a big ship with some big rough-de-tough blokes to go and rape, loot and pillage to sort of kill all the men and the boys, enslave all the girls and women and you know that was their way of dealing with it. Anyway, so So along comes Friday night or whenever it was that they had the satire and a whole bunch of masks. They wore the masks so that nobody would know who was actually lampooning who, because it was a safety thing. But they took the piss horribly out of the decision that had been made and showed that it was pure ego and tantrum and all the rest of it, with the result that a very fast vessel to catch up and say no no no no no no no we don’t want to do that at all and i just think it’s an example of storytelling which of course is art um yeah exactly but it’s um yeah the power the power sorry karen i interrupted your apologies no no it’s all right dude this is one of the um the power the power of humor Well, having a laugh at weird situationism, turning it into situations that become art, turning Downing Street, my old company, the £200 million company that I founded, Future Forest, now the big £800 million company, we’re turning it into an artwork, I mean how satisfying is that? And there are bits and pieces I’ve got of it. I can sell in white cube or whatever. But here’s the interesting thing. Daniel Morrell, you know, the carbon neutral guy who then had an engineering company that got Shell Oil as a client and actually went in there and re-engineered the very heating, cooling ventilation systems of their head office where they plant all their oil extract. right, but managed to get them a little reduction on that, and they’ve got all the documents. So Martin and I had taken the engineering drawings, so we framed them, and we’re doing the Venice Biennale, we’re doing an oil room with an oil floor, and then we’re doing a shell, Venus de Milo. Yeah? Yeah, and that’s the thoughts of Botticelli, but Venice is a… one of the most threatened places in the world, and then we’re planting a tree outside Shell’s head office in Inverness to make the art trove come real, and I’ve got a relationship with Just Stop Oil through my creative side who are willing to participate in the artwork, shall we say. There’s some brilliant… You’ve just… to my mind there’s an architect in Italy I think his name is Cuccinelli, Mario Cuccinelli. Right, I’ve heard of him, he’s a big fella. Yes, he’s been doing something absolutely fascinating. There’s a company called Wasp also in Italy that does 3D printing but they 3D print houses out of clothes. not out of concrete, but out of clay. If you look up, I’ll find the link, but if you look up 3D printed clay, Tecla, T-E-C-L-A, if you look up Tecla House, they are extraordinary and they don’t use concrete and you just use the local clay from the airy you end up with a hole in the ground which you can then put water in so you can do reed processing sewage etc all of that sort of stuff so it’s like Earthship on steroids but the thing is they’re cheap to build and you can virtually do it in solar power it’s like a two-bedroom house in maybe a week maybe a week and a half something like that Yeah, I think I’ve seen them online, yeah. But those sorts of things, it’s behavioural changes and taste changes and it has to come from individuals, doesn’t it? There has to be pressure, like Mr Bates and the post office, when everybody in the country… Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, we’ve got the capacity to be quite deep because… The misappropriation of the carbon market, that’s now 300, you know, Vera, the credits, 90% of them in the press a couple of months back, don’t work, you know, I mean, the misappropriation and the indigenous, there’s two types of carbon credit in, well, there was three, there was the renewable energy credits that were allowed in, in. in because everybody hated forestry because the NGO’s hated forestry because that was the first offset and that’s where I first got it in the back. Anyway so what happened is that they they everybody went for renewable energy offsets and then in 2012 there was what called the CNDM, the Clean Development Mechanism Collapse, and it turned out that the renewable energy offsets only three percent of them delivered. on the carbon they said they were gonna do and 60% of the money was split between the brokers and the investors. It was the biggest collapse, one of the biggest financial collapse in human history. It’s not in a market, in an individual market. Most corrupt thing. So everybody then went, “Why forget renewable energy? They don’t work due to additionality. They don’t work. Let’s get back into nature-based solutions. It sounds great.” So nature-based solutions have become that the hip thing. So all these carbon credits of which there’s 16 or 17 different The particles are of accreditation bodies. All of them have only got a 40-year protection So nobody’s thought to take it to 100 years. They don’t work, right? It just doesn’t go in harmony with the up-down cycle of CO2. But here’s there’s avoidance credits and then there’s removals. 80% of the market is avoided. where you pay people not to fell forests yeah wonderful idea but imagine the logging companies giving the mates a bit of land and we’re yeah we’re gonna fill that forest so lots of forests are getting paid for that wouldn’t have been felled but here’s the worst thing poor old Taylor Swift and Gucci and a number of big corporates bought these avoidance offsets last year, and what do they do? Because indigenous people were making fires and chopping wood within the forest. That was regarded as a threat to the carbon quantity of the forest. So they cleared the indigenous folk out of the forest last year. To create carbon credits. projects that were standing for anyway and then the and then the removal projects I’ve just done a year of procurement only 1.5% of the removal projects would go through our balance I under the rest of the monoculture crop so what you do is you plant you gain money to make it cut to get a carbon credit and you can’t gain the money up front you have to go out and buy the and get it all done and then get it accredited. It takes two to three years. So you don’t buy a carbon credit and then somebody goes out and plant you a tree. Au contraire, you buy a credit from a stock exchange. What happens is that the only way you can get the money to plant the trees is independent other finance. So what you’re gonna get is monoculture crops. So you then create monoculture, industrial scale monoculture. of farms that do very little good for the biodiversity so the whole carbon credit system is doing more harm than good and it’s really really really serious. Look there are a number of things this is beginning to tie together quite nicely. I’ve got a friend in Los Angeles and she’s making a film in the remit of human-wildlife conflict. She’s looking at Zambia, where a whole load of people from Malawi have come in. They want farms, they put up farms, they grow maize. Elephants traditionally live there. They come and chomp the maize. So their solution was to tell the poachers where the elephants were. So the elephants get predated, and so there’s a whole lot of stuff going on, and I could probably send you a film. She’s looking for finance, but there are a lot of these things that could be tied up, and because it seems we need, if we’re going to be telling stories, we need to be telling different ones that tie up, and your links with celebrity are actually quite useful because- – Well, I mean, I’m gonna have to dash now, because I’ve got to jump on a train to London from Castle Kerry at 12.27 So it’ll take me 20 minutes to get there, I’ve got to get changed, so I’ve got to dash, but one of the things you’ll be really pleased to hear Is during the Global Cool project, when I had that budget, one of the things that we commissioned is a film crew So it’s an HD camera and a sound man and a director, and they followed me around for about, they were getting on for a year. So a lot of that was actually captured. – Right. – And I’ve got a never released. So I’ve got all that material. – Perfect. – And I’ve got Joe Strama and, you know, I’ve got film of Downing Street and I’ve got film of the year. I mean, a lot of the story I’ve. I’ve told we’ve got archive footage of that’s that’s the thing I’m saying. Daniel can you send me the link for the download of this of this audio? Yeah sure of course I can yeah I’ll send you the link after this. Thanks and what we obviously need to do is we need to pick up again. up again but I can also I can also send you I’ve got a I’ve got a list of all the archives and then digitize and send over I’ve got a list of everything we’ve got as well. Right I kind of had a rowing boat in mind and now we’ve built a super tanker I think we’re gonna have to divide it up into bits. space ship. It’s probably not, it’s probably a two or three part series isn’t it? Oh there’s no, there’s a never-ending, this is a story. There’s never-ending yeah yeah, and there’s plenty coming out. All right, well look, I’ll send you that material and then maybe, maybe we should have lunch or something maybe next weekend or the weekend after. Yeah yeah, when, when, whensoever. Okay, cool. Perfect. Alright, let’s go. Okay, perfect. Thank you. Lovely to meet you, and you.
