Robyn Williams: The Science Show began exactly 44 years ago this week, actually on 30 August 1975. And this was one of my first interviews in The Science Show number one, with a member of the House of Lords, and winner of the Kalinga Prize for science communication. Just listen:

I wonder how many of you will know the name Ritchie-Calder, Lord Ritchie-Calder, with hyphen, as he now is. His son Nigel Calder became the first editor of the New Scientist, and has since produced several scientific blockbusters for BBC television. Lord Ritchie-Calder came to Vancouver to talk about energy problems, a subject he knows all about, having sat on countless advisory panels over the years.

Peter Ritchie-Calder: In the course of the last century we've put 360,000 million tonnes of fossil carbon into the atmosphere. On the present trends the accumulated requirements between now and 2000AD will come out as something like 11,000 million tonnes of coal a year, 200,000 million tonnes of crude petroleum and liquid natural gas, and 50 million million cubic metres of natural gas. Now remember, this is coming out of the bowels of the Earth, and now we are taking it out and we're throwing it back into the atmosphere and into the climatic machine, into the weather machine, where it is beginning to affect the climate itself. Now, this is a very serious matter, and to me there is no question that our climate has changed.

Robyn Williams: Do you expect the limitation to this ever-expanding use of fossil fuels as an energy source to be due to either running out of them or to this second question of climate effect?

Peter Ritchie-Calder: I think what is going to be…it definitely will be governed by environmental factors, that you will simply be confronted with a situation which will make life virtually intolerable. It also reminds us of the enormous stupidity of our whole scientific policies over the last 40 years.

Now, we were very emphatic in 1963, that's 12 years ago…you know, these are the years that the locusts have eaten, we've really wasted our opportunity. In 1963 we were talking in the Rome conference, the UN conference, on new sources of energy, which is rather sardonic because we weren't talking about atomic energy at all, we were talking about the older sources of energy, which is the sun and the wind and the water and geothermal energy. There is nothing that we are now discussing with such alarm and despondency as a result of the oil situation that we weren't discussing over the last 25, 30 years. We've been in this game, some of us, in the UN and elsewhere, for all that time, but the people that came up with the ideas couldn't influence the politicians, the politicians were highly sceptical. The salesmanship of science is likely to persuade politicians to make the wrong choices because they are the gimmick choices.

Now, the serious choices, you know like putting up a windmill or putting on solar heating and so on, this is below contempt, you know, this is something that you didn't do anything about. You went for the big installations, you went for the atomic megawatt stations and all this sort of thing, you settle for the short-term and often it's not even for the short-term. I've had furious arguments in the House of Lords, we've been discussing energy. What have we been discussing? North Sea oil. Now, North Sea oil to me is something which is an incident in time, and I'm not joking. I don't know how long the resource will last, perhaps a generation, two generations. But it is not the answer to the energy problem.

Robyn Williams: Lord Ritchie-Calder.

In The Science Show number one, exactly 44 years ago. And here we are, still.