2025-05-19
40 分钟Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet.
I'm producer Mia Sorrenti.
Today is part two of our event with Helen Thompson,
part of our Economic Outlook series, which is in partnership with Guinness Global Investors.
If you haven't listened to part one,
we recommend jumping back an episode to get up to speed with the conversation.
In this half,
Helen continues to unpack the far-reaching consequences of Trump's radical economic policies and explores how these shifts might redefine global power structures going forward.
Let's rejoin the discussion live at Smith Square Hall now.
Let's go back to energy, if we may.
You mentioned the problem of intermittency, of the wind not blowing and the sun not shining,
to be very clumsy about it, and the need to therefore have carbon-based fuel generation on hand.
How at all do the issues of intermittency and net zero, the ambition of net zero, meet?
Well, I think that this is really hard.
And I think that I come back to a point I've made in a number of different places really over the last five years,
which is that it is quite staggering in retrospect how the UK Parliament came to legislate for net zero in 2019.
It was June 2019.
Theresa May was a lamed up prime minister.
It was incredibly difficult, as we might recall,
at times for even standing orders about how votes could take place in the House of Commons to be agreed upon by that House of Commons.