Robyn Williams: And this is The Science Show on RN, and our next guest also has strong associations with us in the south, despite being based in England. Jonathon Porritt's father was Governor General of New Zealand and he lived there for some time. Now he's leaping to the future, being like a kind of Doctor Who, sending messages from the middle of the century about what life is like. The book is called The World We Made, the future of planes, food, energy, climate, life. And, Jonathon Porritt, you're very much upbeat, aren't you.

Jonathon Porritt: Yes. I'm pretty depressed at the way in which the sustainability agenda always goes straight to the doom and gloom, straight to the despair, straight to apocalyptic visions for humankind, as if we didn't have a choice any longer. And the one thing I feel absolutely certain about is we still have a choice about our future. We shouldn't be lapsing into some kind of determinist sense that it's already written in our stars what's going to happen to humankind, grizzly as it will be.

If we start doing things over the next five, ten years we have a really good future still available to the whole of humankind, not just the rich world, that's an important point, but the whole of humankind, still by 2050. So I did start from that premise, it's true, and there wasn't any open-ended inquiry; do you think it's going to be a good world in 2050 or not? I wanted to make a point that this is still a potential future for humankind which we can make ours if we get on with it. If we don't get on with it, I'm not sure for how much longer it will be available.

Robyn Williams: Right. Before I get into some of the details of what 2050 might be like, I happened to be listening to a program on BBC radio starring James Burke, and during this interview what he did was say that the future will be completely different, so much that you can't even begin to describe it. This is a techie way of doing it, saying that 20 years ago you had no idea that there would be things like iPhones and tweetings and so on. That in many ways is a copout. Were you at all bothered by that copout problem of being told by the techies that it was not imaginable at all?

Jonathon Porritt: That's really difficult, because it is true that when I wrote the chapters about what's happening with the internet and IT and all the rest of it, I realised I was struggling to think what it was going to look like in four years, five years time. So doing a 2050 take on that…laughable. So I didn't try and do a high-tech story of that kind…

Robyn Williams: No, sorry, implicit in that remark is that the magic of the techies will fix it all anyway.

Jonathon Porritt: Ah, now that's a different one, and of course our great environment sustainability world has been dogged over 50 years really by this debate between the lovers of technology and the haters of technology. And the debate has been if we put too much faith in technology, so we techno-fix our way to a more sustainable world, then we're going to fail to do all the important things we need to do on the economy, on justice, on society, on health. It is true, I have always been more techno-sceptic than I should have been, and I was so unnerved by crazy cornucopian techno obsessives, I couldn't relate to them and their worldview was a nightmare to me. Actually because I couldn't stand them, I didn't work hard enough on understanding technology. And writing this book took me right back to understanding more about technology. In every one of the areas I've had to go and research and research and research and look what the innovation pipeline looks like and make a call, for me; what is the level of confidence we can have in that genuinely coming to our support and making brilliant, compassionate, humane, dignified futures, lives possible for people? That's what I've had to do. And I haven't done that work for 30, 40 years.

Robyn Williams: One thing I was surprised to see there, quite respectably, and something that might be an option, and that is geo-engineering, using ways in which you might do things in the sky that could reduce the effects of climate change.

Jonathon Porritt: Yes, there are going to be lots of things in this book that lots of people are going to take exception to, that's for sure. So obviously like most people I've done the maths on the build-up of these greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and I'm not a scientist, so I take my guidance on this from organisations like the Royal Society and other scientific establishments around the world, because if you're not a scientist you don't try and play fast and loose with the science, you basically go with where the best scientists are.

So I read all this, I follow it, I look at the build-up of gases, I look at the concentrations, and I know what those concentrations translate into in terms of warming effects. We've already put enough stuff up there, the greenhouse gases, to ensure that we are heading way beyond this notional threshold of a safe two degrees centigrade, we are going way beyond that already.

So by the time we get the hang of how destructive that is, we will inevitably have to get some of it back out of the atmosphere. Not only will we have to decarbonise, stop using carbon based energy sources, but we will have to get some of the stuff that we've already put up there out of there. And that means it comes under the catchall phrase of geo-engineering, using different techniques to reduce the total burden in the atmosphere.

Robyn Williams: And much to my surprise, even though you've got a record of being anti-nuclear, the nuclear industry does not actually play a big role in your forecasts. They do a running jump and then collapse.

Jonathon Porritt: I've never been a great enthusiast for nuclear. Most of my reasons for that are to do with cost and ethical issues to do with waste. I've always subscribed to the view that one generation should not dump its problems on the next generation. If we can't find a solution to the things that we are dealing with, we shouldn't expect the next generation to deal with our inability to find those solutions. So I've never been an enthusiast for nuclear.

I went to a meeting four years ago in America where there were a succession of different security experts talking about vulnerability now to cyber terrorism and the degree to which different parts of our industrial infrastructure had created new forms of insecurity that we had hardly began to realise. And they talked specifically about an attack on a nuclear power station and what might happen and why wouldn't terrorists do this? After all, we are still in the business of having a foreign affairs strategy around the world that is creating huge numbers of very bright young people who would like nothing more than to bring so-called Western civilisation to its knees.

So the chapter on nuclear is premised on a rather scary prospect that I heard at this meeting that eventually terrorists will stop using conventional bombs and will start using cyber terrorist weapons, which of course now they are already doing in very large measure. So essentially the terrorists takeover the operating software for nuclear reactors in both America and the UK, and should that ever happen or should there even be a sniff of that being possible, you can imagine what society would say; that's it, we've had it, we're not going there any longer. The likelihood of terrorists attacking the nearest windfarm or having a go at the solar panels on my roof is very small, very small. But having a crack at big nuclear power stations or even big coal-fired power stations, unfortunately getting worse and worse every day.

Robyn Williams: You're fairly gentle on GM, that is genetically modified crops, you just to give a dismissive flick rather than talk about some sort of ghastly scenario that has resulted from their use, you just say they are kind of irrelevant, didn't work. But you do have in places like Africa a huge increase in the amount of agriculture. How is that actually managed from a fairly bleak standing start?

Jonathon Porritt: It is bleak at the moment, although I think any agronomist would say that the potential in Africa is astonishing. The story is how are we going to tap into that potential? And of course there is a whole bunch of people who are out there saying GM everything. And I've spent a lot of time looking at this issue. I've really worked hard at getting my head around GM over the years, and I've been little bit more upbeat about it than you're saying, Robyn, because there is one area where I actually think GM could make a big difference, which is nitrogen fixing in crops that currently don't do this. And when you look at the savings in terms of greenhouse gases by avoided fertiliser use, because the crop can do it itself, wheat could do it itself, rice could do it itself, just like legumes do today, clovers do today, the saving in avoided fertiliser use is so massive, you think to yourself, oh my God, keep working at it guys, because if you can really come up with that one, we are all, including me, no great enthusiast for GM, we are going to give you a big pat on the shoulders here. But that's not what sustainable agriculture for nine billion people looks like in 2050, it actually looks much more about increasing yields by relying on the combination of absolute state-of-the-art science today.

And don't forget, as many breakthroughs are coming from selective breeding of different crop types as are coming from GM. In fact most agriculturists would say we're getting more breakthroughs now through accelerated selective breeding techniques, selective marker-assistance, all this kind of stuff which has been going on off the media radar because people are just obsessed about GM. I keep saying, look at the other technologies that are going on out there, they are amazing. And if you look at the potential in Africa to use high-tech of that kind, coupled with that incredible local knowledge about what makes for productivity using the soil, using the climatic conditions, using the right kind of mix of bio-diverse different agricultural techniques, mixed cropping et cetera, the scope for Africa having a huge agricultural success in the next 30 years is astonishing.

Robyn Williams: And there's no more food waste. Well, you know that food waste in places like Australia, some people say it's a third of the food. Lots of people say it's half, and you could say the same about other rich countries, which is absolutely obscene, whatever your views on sustainability.

Jonathon Porritt: The food waste story is obscene, there's no question about that. Very different food waste issues of course in developing and emerging countries where unfortunately the food very often doesn't get from the farm to the plate. The food waste issue in the rich world is it gets to the plate but then it gets wasted after the consumption moment, as it were.

The great thing about writing a book from the perspective of 2050 is you can conjecture a little bit about what might swing it, what might change things, and I've become really fascinated by the role of religions and the evangelical right in the United States. And I think, again, people might have a question mark about this, but for me the breakthroughs on both climate and issues like food waste in the States come because good God-fearing upright American citizens suddenly say, actually, this is not what God wants us to be doing.

So food waste is sorted out by an uprising on the part of evangelicals in America who say this is sinful, these are the fruits of God's earth that we now just abuse by only eating a third of what's on our plate or wasting stuff in factories or in restaurants, whatever it might be. So in America the evangelicals rise up and they pretty much eliminate the problem of food waste across the entire country.

Now, okay, I can see a tiny look of scepticism creeping across your face here, Robyn, but you tell me where the logic flaw is there. Because if you are serious about your obligations to God and treating God's earth properly, you need to be serious about the wonderful bounty we get from the earth.

Robyn Williams: The book is in fact a letter really from 2050 by Alex. Alex is not a man, nor a woman, I can't tell…

Jonathon Porritt: Good.

Robyn Williams: And that letter is very personal and it's written for anyone to read, old or young, educated or otherwise, packed with ideas. And finally, one really startling thing about it is that you look upon the rich world—that is Australia, America, Britain—as kind of un-rich. Their day in the sun has sort of lapsed, and you describe the other parts of the world as driving things in a different way. How do you see that happening?

Jonathon Porritt: I think there is a real world trend already happening which is more of the economic power flowing to China, India, Brazil, we know that. We may not yet have fully worked out the implications of that for our own economies. I do happen to think that what I call the once rich world, the countries you've just mentioned, haven't properly factored in how quickly our economic prospects will change, and we will need to find very different ways of creating prosperity which cannot be generated by rates of economic growth that compete with the likes of China and India.

But I'm also absolutely persuaded…and I'm travelling a lot at the moment trying to understand how sustainability looks the countries like China and Brazil in particular…I'm absolutely persuaded that need will force change in those countries faster than in the rather complacent countries that you and I know very well, particularly Australia and the UK I might say. We've grown very lazy and complacent. We don't really any longer take much concern about the future, we don't think it through systematically, we don't seem to have a lot of really deep passionate concern about the interests of young people today. It's not true in other countries. And in China the debate about what is going to happen when a 1.3 billion people can't make their way in the world using conventional growth models, that debate in China is infinitely more sophisticated than the debate going on in Australia or the UK.

So I've written it so that China becomes the world leader on sustainability, not because I have a sentimental thing about China coming to our rescue, but I know two things about China; one, most of its politicians are engineers and scientists, that means to say they basically don't spend a lot of time arguing about the laws of thermodynamics because they kind of bought into that. So the science of climate change? Nobody argues about the science of climate change in China, why would you, what a complete waste of time. How we deal with it? A big story. How we source enough energy to make the world good for 1.3 billion people? Big story. So that helps a lot, having politicians who are scientifically literate and understand this.

And secondly, the opportunity in China is enormous because China still wants to grow its economy. Fastest growing section of the global economy? The green economy, the high-tech economy, the low carbon economy. And guess what, in China they have a target for the percentage of that economic sector that they want to control by 2030. Do we have a target for that in Australia? I don't think so. Do we have one in the UK? Forget it. Maybe in America they keep looking back over their shoulder and in the words of one famous lecture 'that used to be us', but it ain't any longer.

So I look to China and I think they are hungry, they're ambitious, they work unbelievably hard, their knowledge, their science base…okay, they are not a democracy, this is a big hassle for the sustainability lobby. But I look at that and I think who is better placed to turn this set of threats into opportunities and good outcomes? Who's better placed? And my honest read on it at the moment is China is better placed.

Robyn Williams: And that is indeed the cover story of the Economist magazine this week, 'the weakened West', as they put it. That was Jonathon Porritt who arrives in Australia this week, and whose delightful book written from the year 2050 is called The World We Made.