Thom Yorke, lead singer of Radiohead and climate activist, met with George Monbiot, a prominent columnist for The Guardian and one of his sources of inspiration. The COP21 summit? According to Monbiot, we should not hold our breath.

Twelve years, Thom Yorke, the British lead singer of the bands Radiohead and Atoms for Peace, has been lending his voice to the NGOs Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth or art.350.org, through art performances and events on a planetary scale. He will be among the stars performing at the Trianon in Paris for two exceptional evenings of concerts and debates alongside the COP21 summit (Pathway to Paris, December 4th and 5th).

For Yorke, who is now 47, it has also been fifteen years of quoting from the best selling books of the British writer and Guardian columnist George Monbiot, 52. This champion of social justice is also a wildlife and environmental activist and most notably took part in the peasant protest movements in the Amazon in the 80’s.

Thom Yorke, a restless mind tormented by guilt but steadfastly optimistic, leads one of the rare world-famous bands who have refused to make a Faustian pact with their artistic freedom. He had never debated with his mentor in the media. We made him take a break from the recording sessions of Radiohead’s ninth album and spent the afternoon with him in his home town Oxford.

How and when did the two of you meet?

Thom Yorke : It was in 2000. I had just finished reading George’s Captive State. This book really brought home to me a lot of the suspicions I had had about lobbying and the way politics was working in Britain. I had just been banging on about it in an interview. Then George got hold of me because we both lived in Oxford. To me he’s the most coherent political writer in Britain.

George Monbiot : And of all the politically engaged artists out there, Thom, along with Brian Eno, is by far the best informed.

TY : I never seem to know what I’m talking about though. The first really big thing that I was involved in was Jubilee 2000 with Bono from U2 and Ann Pettifor, an economist. That was one of those situations where I realized very quickly that if I didn’t get my shit together, there’s no way I could do an interview because debt cancellation is an extremely technical subject.

When did you become aware of climate change?

TY : I remember one of the first debates I had heard on the BBC was between a misinformed scientist and a climate-change sceptic, in other words a paid professional liar. That was probably in the late 90’s. It got me so angry and that's when I started getting sucked into it.

GM : I was mad about wildlife almost before I could walk. 1987 was the year I started working for the BBC doing investigative and environmental programmes, so I was tuned in and ready to hear this stuff. But it began to feature a bit larger in my life when James Hansen from NASA did his presentation to the US Senate in 1988, which was a seminal event. Suddenly it became a legitimate topic for the media to cover. Though of course it also unleashed a great wave of corporate-funded denial from fossil fuel companies like Exxon, Big Coal or Koch Brothers, for which we still pay the price.

“The music business is an extremely high energy consuming industry”, Thom Yorke

Thom, in 2003, you became a spokesperson for The Big Ask, a campaign launched by Friends of the Earth to encourage the government to make legally binding year-on-year cuts in UK carbon emissions.

TY : With the music business being an extremely high energy consuming industry, I thought I was absolutely the wrong person, but Friends of the Earth managed to convince me. It was a bloody difficult decision to make, partly because it was rife with personal attacks. The Sunday Times camped out in front of my parents' house all day, attempting to get my friends to dish the dirt. Then it got into this big fight with Tony Blair’s advisors and a whole black mail scenario ensued. We were in the midst of the Iraq War and The Big Ask campaign was proving very successful. So Blair said: ‘‘I should meet this guy’’. Then Blair’s advisors tried to blackmail me, saying: ‘‘if you don’t agree to meet the Prime Minister, Friends of the Earth will be denied all access to him.’’ because of the Iraq war, I didn’t want to do it. I felt it was morally unacceptable for me to be photographed with Blair. That was the last time I got involved in such a way. But I would do it again if it felt right.

How has climate change affected your daily lives?

GM : I’ve made a few changes, flying no more than once every three years.

TY : Oh my god! How the fuck do you do that?

GM : Luckily I can make a living by sitting at home.

TY : I found that a bit more tricky.

GM : Yeah, kayaking to the US takes too long… I also cut back massively on animal products. I add milk to my tea and that’s just about it now. I avoid all animal-based products because we now know that live stock farming has a huge impact on climate change.

TY: At least I tick that box, being a vegetarian…

“Guilt is good! It’s the flip side of empathy. Who are the people who have no guilt? Psychopaths”, George Monbiot

In 2008, Radiohead started organizing ‘‘carbon neutral world tours’’ (the band used a 100 % LED lighting touring system, put emphasis on festivals and venues that offer excellent public transport links, etc.). Was it difficult to implement?

TY : You can do a lot to tour differently, but what became obvious very quickly is that if you’re not supported by an infrastructure, it’s like pissing in the wind. If you have a Radiohead show where 20 000 people turn up, happy to see you play, and it’s the only venue in the area and yet the promoter is saying: ‘‘the only way to get there is to drive’’, you're faced with this decision and you're going: ‘‘ok, do we blow out because there’s no support or public transport and we deprive the fans of a concert in order to reduce our carbon footprint?’’ I mean, initially, it kept me awake at night – which sounds really stupid –, especially when my second child arrived, in 2004, I got unhealthily obsessed with it. But when I started to get involved in doing something about it, that helped me a lot. But I always have the impression that I am not doing enough at all.

GM : But guilt is good! It’s the flip side of empathy. Who are the people who have no guilt according to you? Psychopaths.

TY : Ha ha! That’s the quote of the day.

Does comparing your commitment as an artist to the artists’ commitment during the Vietnam War make any sense?

TY : Ah but artists were in a very different position then! Now, if I decided to imitate John Lennon and Yoko Ono when they did the bed-in for peace thing back in 1969, if I were to lie in bed for a week, I don’t really expect someone to come along and make a video. In the 60’s, you could write songs that were like calls to arms, and it would work. Well, kind… ish. It’s much harder to do that now. If I was going to write a protest song about climate change in 2015, it would be shit. It’s not like one song or one piece of art or one book is going to change someone’s mind. However, things happen gradually and accusatively and that is when it snowballs.

GM : You’ll never change someone’s perspective on life through facts and figures alone. To attain another level of consciousness, we need to trigger the imagination through music, poetry, narrative, etc. But the second role is to create an almost subliminal sense of change throughout society; a sense that something has shifted and that if you don’t go with that flow, you’re going to be stuck in some twentieth century backwater, you’re going start looking very old fashioned. It’s this cultural power that creates a sea change.

“Any great work of art is, in itself, a form of resistance against a sense of powerlessness”, Thom Yorke

How is climate change reflected in your music, Thom?

TY : I just think these things are part of my everyday existence. I read George’s articles, I read stuff that Greenpeace sends me and I guess that gets sucked into my work, but not in an obvious way. The first problem is how it flows into your work and whether it has a place in your songs or whether you should just talk publically about it. I believe that any great work of art is, in itself, a form of resistance against a sense of powerlessness. The struggle against this feeling and the dissonance between our deepest feelings and what we are being told: these are the things that have always had a place in my lyrics. I am really fundamentally interested in the difference between – for want one of a better phrase – people power VS other power. I am fundamentally fascinated about the relationship between government and people, and those who perhaps control the way we think or try to and those who resist that. That has always been deeply fascinating to me, since I was 11 years old and read 1984.

Do you consider yourself a political songwriter?

TY : I don’t think I’m that political. Banksy is always political. I like his work because it’s implicitly or explicitly political and always slightly silly at the same time. But music is different. Music goes in phases of being completely brain dead or not. I went through a period where music was actually very political. That was when Radiohead participated in the Tibetan Freedom Concerts organised by the Beastie Boys, in 1998 and 1999. They were my heroes because they did things really independently but yet they were on a big label. The passive resistance, the way they dealt with the media… it was really influential. It was like you can do this and not be Live Aid or Live 8. The motivations of the organisers of these big events were absolutely pure but unfortunately it didn’t live up to expectations. To be honest, I think that trying to organise an event on the scale of the Tibet thing would be a lot harder now. So I’m happy with the Pathway to Paris thing because it feels like this is on a manageable scale for me. It’s not like a big scary thing for me.

In march of this year, The Guardian’s former editor, Alan Rusbridger, decided to call climate change a ‘‘threat to earth’’ and put it front and center. So, up to this point, what had it been like at The Guardian?

GM : The way Alan Rusbridger explained it, was he met Gordon Brown during his last year in office, in 2010, and he said to Brown: ‘‘you're probably not going to get in the next election. Imagine, you’re prime minister of the UK and you have free rein, what would you do?” And apparently Brown had no answer at all, he just mumbled and fumbled. And Rusbridger said to him: ‘‘Well, in my last year as editor of The Guardian, I’m going to have a project’’, but he was still casting around for what it was going to be. And it was only last year, when he went to Sweden to pick up the European Press Prize, that he decided to bring climate change to the fore in The Guardian. The founder of art.350.org, Bill McKibben, was also there, they talked and that’s what sparked it off. Before this big shift took place, it was definitely a supportive environment and I was being published quite well, but it wasn’t getting on the front page. We had some debates at The Guardian. I went to this meeting where we were discussing what exactly the focus was going to be, and my aim was very strongly that the focus should be on fossil fuel companies and on stopping the extraction of fossil fuel and I got that through to an extent, but it mostly came out that they were going to focus on divestment.

“I’m not going to Paris. I can say the things I want to say about climate change without having to go to a place where no one is going to listen to me”, George Monbiot

In retrospect, what does the COP15 summit mean to you?

TY : It was really bleak, terrifying. The only way I could get in was by I pretending to be a journalist. For days, I would go around talking to people, but they were like a bunch of Martians who were talking legal jargon. When I got there, they kicked all the NGO’s out. I was there and I watched America and China both storm out of the meeting, and it just completely collapsed. I don’t think I’d ever actually go into the arena again. It’s like a natural disaster… you don’t want to repeat it.

GM : It got off to a bad start for me with the train journey there taking me three days, and three days to get back because of massive snow storms. The hardest part was that my 70 years old uncle, the Canon of Norwich cathedral, cycled the 150 miles to Copenhagen, and dropped dead the night he got there. During the event, I just felt like we were spectators. I found it completely disempowering. We were just treated like vassals outside the castle walls. We could make as much noise as we wanted outside in the streets, it made no difference – we remained unheard. I was depressed for two months after that and I vowed not to go to another of those conferences again. So I’m not going to Paris. I can say the things I want to say about climate change without having to go to a place where no one is going to listen to me.

How is it possible to build a global climate movement in our postmodern society were disenchantment is so embedded, in the kind of corporate society that you refer to in Captive State or that is referred to in albums like OK Computer (1997) or The Eraser (2006)?

TY : This society is still run by a bunch of misguided priests who are willing to sacrifice the people on a high altar in order to maintain the economic status quo. The sacrifice is going on up there, everyone is being dragged up one by one, and you have your head chopped off and your entrails pulled out, and everyone at the bottom is going: ‘‘hmm something’s not right here’’. And the priest on the top is going: ‘‘everything’s fine, we just carry on like we are’’, and they’re arguing among themselves, and we’re going: ‘‘this ain’t right. Why are they killing us all?’’ To my mind, the sense of powerlessness comes from the fact that the 7 billion of us have accepted the fact that resources are limited without acknowledging that we have an economic system based on unlimited growth. Mobilizing people to get back into politics will only come about when we realize that economics and the environment are two sides of the same coin one and the same thing.

GM : The first thing to be aware of is that the people whose actions are destroying our ecosystem are a tiny minority. It is our failure to some extent that we have not managed to mobilize 7 billion people against the few hundred who are making this happen. Where hope lies is in the thought that it is surely possible to overwhelm the interests of these few hundreds: those who run the fossil fuel companies and the professional liars they hire to try to persuade people that climate change either isn't happening or is no big deal.

“We need a positive environmentalism of which rewilding is a part”, George Monbiot

George, in your last book, Feral (1), you show that rewilding ourselves and nature can change the way we engage with nature and with climate change.

GM : We need a positive environmentalism of which rewilding is a part. It’s also about freedom. We do not exercise the freedom to punch someone else in the nose. We should not exercise the freedom to poison their lungs through pollution or destroy the planet through climate change. But in return for denying people this freedom, I believe we should instead give them the freedom to explore areas where there is extraordinarily magnificent wildlife.

TY : In Britain, instead, you have landowners who refuse to let you walk over their land. It’s fucking difficult to ramble in this country and not end up on the sharp end of a farmer’s tongue.

Thom, do you miss spending time in wild areas when you’re stuck in a studio for too long?

TY : Well, it goes through phases but the happiest times have been ones where I’ve done things similar to George; where I disappeared for days on end along the Cornish Coast, or got lost on Dartmoor. Since I was a kid, it’s been really important and it’s a fight to keep doing that. Other than that, my friends and I try, every year, to go and live in the woods for three or four days. I always find the first 24 hours very frightening. In fact when you hear a swarm of bees and the sound of them coming towards you, it’s just terrifying. But when you come out of it after a few days, you feel so different, there’s an odd sense of peace.

GM : That sense of well being comes from leaving your ego behind. There is a letting go involved. And knowing that things are much bigger than you are is reassuring. It’s reassuring to know that the world does not survive or fail according to what goes on in your own head. Unless you have contact with nature, several bad things happen. One is it limits the scope of human experience and human imagination because nature opens you out in a way that almost nothing else does. Secondly, I believe that we get ecologically bored. I think we have an innate desire, which comes about through our evolutionary history, to engage with fascinating ecosystems or fascinating animals within those ecosystems and when we don’t have that, that desire goes rotten inside us and we find all sources of other outlets, some of which are quite self destructive and perverse.

Climate change is a never-ending struggle. How is it possible to continue this struggle?

GM : This is intensely emotional. In order to survive the sense of disappointment, we need more effective safeguards so that people don’t burn out. And we already have to prepare for the inevitable failure of COP21. Any expectation above rock bottom is self-deception. So, even on its own terms, if it succeeded, it would still fail to address climate change.

“The dangerous element is also the media”, George Monbiot

And then, what’s the next step?

GM : I definitely support protests and not only in Paris, elsewhere as well. And we have to refocus it, we have to reframe it. The protests have to focus on fossil fuels the coal mines, the oil wells, the tar sands, and the fracking sites. For me, very clearly, the focus has got to be on keeping the fossil fuels that have been identified and mapped underground. In Paris, the carbon emissions of seven billion people will have to be dealt with and meanwhile, industrial lobbying will be taking place in the background. We need to change things as they currently stand by dealing with the carbon coming out of the ground, by limiting the amount that’s extracted or by taxing it at source. That way you’re just dealing with a few thousand entities around the world rather than with 7 billion people. And so it makes the task much easier.

TY : Rather than saying: ‘‘you’re not talking about the problem, fuck this’’, don’t you think it is better to start by a collective commitment?

GM : We have been signing agreements for twenty-three years and they haven’t added up to changing the way things are. The dangerous element is also the media. They become the arbiters of whether a meaningful deal has been struck or not, and then there is no point arguing anymore.

TY : That’s why you need to go around shooting your mouth off.

Thom, you don’t seem to be as pessimistic as George about the COP21 outcome. Are you?

TY : I think that the leaders are not going to get away with it this time. There are two things that I would want to resist physically and protest against: the fact that COP15 didn’t take into account the offer of aid to those countries which will be affected first – like the small Island nations. To me, it’s morally unacceptable. The second thing is the power of the lobbying groups. Those people we hate who are still getting access to those meetings when we are not. I think that a collective agreement on the financing of infrastructures would send out a powerful message to the multinationals and these fucking lobbyists who only see us as irrational, hysterical people. It’s like the ship’s going down and the people are running around, freaking out, and they keep saying: ‘‘there’s no problem, what d’you mean the ship is not going down. There’s no ship, we’re fine’’. Recently, I tweeted a video of COP19 in Warsaw where The Chief negotiator of the Philippines responds very emotionally to the devastation caused by Super Typhoon Haiyan and everyone around is like nothing is happening. I think we need a little bit more hysteria, a few more tears on the UN floor.

George, are there signs out there, in english civil society, that makes you think that change is still possible?

GM : Change never or very seldom comes from the political centre. It’s rare in history. There is undoubtedly a great hunger for a better world, in this country, as elsewhere. But the Anglo-Saxon nations are peculiar in terms of the depth and breadth of their denial. I think that is because of the tradition of neoliberal extremism among the ruling elite of these countries and the very high concentration of media ownership, that is used to impede public understanding. The major shifts are probably going to take place elsewhere. I do retain a general optimism about the human capacity to change destructive policies and destructive trends though. This is because a wide array of findings from behavioural, social and neuro-sciences show that we are an astonishing species, inherently predisposed towards kindness and altruism. We are good people, constrained by the structures within which we live which lead us to do bad things. It's not human nature that needs to change; it's the institutional framework that surrounds us. And that framework is controlled by very small numbers of people, a high proportion of whom, unfortunately, are psychopaths. We don't have to allow them to prevail. We can create better frameworks, better institutions, that allow empathy and connection to flourish.

Thom Yorke

October 7, 1968 Born in Wellingborough, England.

2006 The Eraser, first solo album released. The artwork is inspired by the 2004 Boscastle (Cornwall) flood and an article by the environmentalist Jonathan Porritt comparing the British government’s attitude to climate change to the legend of King Canute who failed to command an ocean.

November 27, 2010 In Brighton, 2 000 people gather to participate in an eco-art experiment conceived by Yorke and art.350.org, to form a massive picture with their bodies in order to demonstrate public consciousness of global warming.

George Monbiot

January 27, 1963 Born in London

1995 Nelson Mandela presents him with a United Nations Global 500 Award for outstanding environmental achievement.

2006 Publication of Heat: how to stop the plant from burning. The book demonstrates how a modern economy can be decarbonized.