this is bbc news. the headlines: the us republican liz cheney, a fierce critic of donald trump, has lost her seat in congress after being ousted by voters in wyoming. ms cheney said she had conceded victory to her rival harriet hageman who was endorsed by the former president. ms hageman supports mr trump's unfounded claims of voterfraud. president biden has signed into law the biggest ever investment to fight climate change in the us. the bill includes more than £340 billion of new spending and provides tax credits for people to install heat pumps or buy electric cars. the world's richest man, elon musk, has teased the prospect of buying manchester united,

in a late night tweet. the football club has been owned by the florida—based glazer family since 2005. now on bbc news, hardtalk. welcome to hardtalk. i'm stephen sackur. we humans face a series of interlinked existential challenges. how do we feed a global population heading toward 10 billion? can it be done without degrading ecosystems and exacerbating climate change to a calamitous extent? well, my guest today, the writer and environmental campaigner george monbiot, has spent decades addressing these questions and framing radical answers. why are so many politicians and voters seemingly unwilling to listen?

george monbiot, welcome to hardtalk. thanks, stephen. you have been a campaigner and writer on environmental issues for decades, warning about the toxic relationship between human beings and our planet. i just wonder how you prioritise? how do you decide where to focus? mm, it's very hard. i mean, every week when i'm writing a column for the guardian, for instance, or making a video, i have a choice of about 20 different topics that i could latch onto.

it's very frightening. i mean, to be environmentally aware, to have an environmental education is, as the great writer aldo leopold put it, to live in a world of wounds. you're surrounded by grief, you're surrounded by the pain of what you're seeing, and surrounded by fear, also. i mean, it's not easy to see how we're going to get through this century, let alone those that follow. your latest book, regenesis, essentially describes the way we produce food around the world as perhaps the single most damaging thing we are doing to the natural world. and yet we all need to eat. mm—hm. and thanks to farming, almost all of us can sustain ourselves with decent amounts of food. why do you see this as such a problem? well, this is the great dilemma we face. i mean, it's notjust a question of seeing it as a problem, there is a huge weight of empirical evidence

showing that farming is by far the greatest cause of habitat destruction, of wildlife loss, of extinction, of land use, which is perhaps the most important environmental metric of all, of soil degradation, of freshwater use, and one of the greatest causes of climate breakdown, of water pollution and of air pollution. so it's notjust a matter of opinion, this is the industry which comes top of the list of all damaging human activities. now, of course, we... stephen chuckles yes, except what you haven't mentioned there is that over that millennia, we humans have figured out ways to feed, successfully feed, more and more and more people. mm, yeah. food production is a success story. absolutely. it's been an astonishing success. in fact, almost too much of a success. we produce roughly twice as many calories as we need, but a huge amount of that is wasted by being channelled through livestock, which is a very inefficient use of calories, or biofuels. and then some of it is just wasted. so we've got this tremendously productive system, but it deeply threatens earth systems

on which we also depend entirely for our survival, and which itself depends upon. agriculture depends on a habitable planet and is already being hit by a series of climate shocks, water shocks, soil shocks, which agriculture is driving as much or more than any other industry. tell me a little bit about the soil, because in the book, you literally and metaphorically dig deep into what is happening to the soil beneath our feet. what is happening? well, it turns out that soil is notjust an ecosystem, it's also a biological structure. it's like a coral reef. it's built by the creatures that inhabit it, from bacteria up to the giants of the soil, earthworms. and that ecosystem is entirely dependent on the life forms within it.

if those life forms disappear, if we wipe them out, the soil literally collapses. its structure, which has been built by those organisms, collapses. and unfortunately, many of the things we're doing in order to produce ourfood, which we obviously desperately need to do, many of the ways of producing it are devastating to that soil from which we receive 99% of our calories. so, for instance, if you apply too much nitrate fertiliser, paradoxically, it can destroy the fertility of the soil, because the bacteria in the soil, if they have too much nitrate, they burn through the carbon, which they use as a cement which builds the soil structure. so the whole structure collapses in on itself. the soil becomes waterlogged and airless and it can actually inhibit plant growth. which is precisely why, within the world of agriculture, more and more farmers across the world are turning to more, quote unquote, sustainable, regenerative forms of agriculture. what you appear to take no account of is the degree to which farmers are changing.

so, my whole book is about the degree to which they are not changing. it is one long account, really, and... well, it's an account simply of the negative. no, no, that's so untrue. i don't know if you've read it, but the entire last two thirds of the book is about what we can do, and much of that involves the extraordinary things which some farmers are doing. well, with respect, much of it involves taking food production away from the land and from farmers and putting it into factories. well, yes, protein—rich and fat—rich foods... i divide the food system into three, grain or arable farming, horticulture — that's fruit and veg — and protein—rich and fat—rich foods. and we desperately need farming to produce arable and horticultural products. but i think by far and away

the most benign thing we can do, and indeed it gives us the best chance we have of getting through this century, is to take the production of protein—rich foods out of farming altogether and into the factory. so, you...without being very specific and blunt about it, you are saying that livestock farming as we know it, right around the world, from the welsh sheep farmer to the maasai herdsmen, has to end. human beings have to stop raising animals for meat. the harsh truth is that livestock farming is the greatest driver of those disastrous impacts which i've already mentioned, and yet, it produces very little of our food, by comparison to the smaller drivers of those impacts, which are the arable and horticultural production. it's obviously an important component, and i'm not saying take away animals from... ..take away animals from subsistence farmers at all, but for those of us who have a choice of diets, yes, we should be getting out of meat—eating, getting out

of milk and eggs, and switching towards notjust a plant—based diet, but i want to see those crucial protein sources replaced by microbial protein, produced through precision fermentation. it's an enhanced form of brewing. not so long ago, we took hardtalk to a farm in the north of england, a beautiful sheep and cattle farm run by james rebanks. now, he cares as passionately about environmental issues as you do. he cares about the quality of his soil. he cares about building an eco—system on his land, which is good for his animals, but good for wildlife, as well. he says he can achieve all of those things and produce meat efficiently. why do you want to put people like him out of business? well, i've read both ofjames�*s books, and they're beautifully written, but they contain not a single useful number at all.

there's nothing on production, nothing on yields. and i suspect, because he hasn't told us, that his farming is extremely low yielding. if that was the way we were to produce our food, we would need several planets to do it and there'd be no space for wild ecosystems at all. in other words, earth systems would completely collapse. we've been dealing in pictures. we've been looking at things which we think are beautiful, when we should be dealing in numbers. we should be considering what the numbers tell us. and what i'm looking for throughout this is forms of food production which are low impact and high yield. now you can point to plenty of forms of food production which are low impact and low yield or high impact and high yield, but it's bringing the two best aspects together. low impact, high yield is what we desperately need to be looking for if we are to feed the world, without devouring the planet. but the detail matters. one of your recommendations, for example, as i understand it, is the perennial crops, replacing those that have to be annually planted and reared. all of the evidence i've seen suggests that by year three

orfour, these perennial crops are yielding in much reduced ways. therefore, your argument about low inputs but high yield, it simply doesn't apply to your own proposals. so, there's only one which has been fully commercialised so far, and that's a rice variety called pr23, which is being widely grown now in southern china. and so far there have been six harvests and the yields are the same, notjust as they began, but the same as the annual rice with which it's competing. now, you can't keep these crops in the ground forever. eventually they will have to be replaced. but by switching from annual grain crops to perennial grain crops, it means much less ploughing, much less establishment of the plants, probably much less fertiliser use, water use and a whole load of other environmental aspects. moreover, because these plants have deeper roots and tougher above ground structures, because they can grow from one year to the next, they're likely to be far more

resilient to environmental shocks. pretty much a decade ago, you wrote a book, feral, which recommended the large scale rewilding of the countryside. you argued, in britain, for example, that thousands of years ago, a whole host of large wild animals, including lions, bison, roamed the land. and you appeared to suggest that if we could only stop farming much of this land and leave it wild, we could expect, in the long run, obviously with careful management, some of these large mammals to reappear, a new wilderness to emerge. is that what you want to happen, and believe can happen notjust in the uk, but around the world? i don't use the term wilderness, but i do want to see very large scale rewilding. i think it could be our only last hope now, because unless we can restore ecosystems on a huge scale, we really have very little hope of stopping the sixth great extinction and also of stopping climate breakdown.

we've now left it too late merely to decarbonise our economies. we will exceed 1.5, probably 2 degrees of global heating, even if we totally decarbonise all of this, all of the industrial economy, because we've left it so late. we also need to draw down much of the carbon dioxide we've already released into the atmosphere. and by far the quickest, cheapest, most benign way of doing that is restoring ecosystems. as the trees come back, as the wetlands come back, they absorb vast amounts of the c02 that we've released into the atmosphere. so, this rewilding isn'tjust something nice to have, though it is nice to have. it's notjust nice to have. this is about our life support systems. this is about whether we and the rest of the living world survive. how do you think this plays politically right now, at a time of global food price inflation, shortages of food in many parts of the world, not least because of the impact of the ukraine war?

here you are telling the world that we have to abandon one whole sector of food production, that is livestock farming. we have to put our faith in lab—based, factory—based food production of the future, which some in the farming community have called "nothing but sludge". and you're saying that we have to do all of this right now, when people go to the supermarket and they can barely afford the food they used to eat. well, the food system is in danger of collapse. it's looking very much like the global financial system in the approach to 2008, and i explore the reasons for that. we anticipate... i mean, i wrote this long before the invasion of ukraine, but it's playing out very much as i was proposing it would. it's deeply frightening. and what we see is countries at the end of the food chain, which are highly import—dependent, particularly in the middle east and africa at the moment, which are at very serious danger of mass starvation because of failures in the food chain.

they desperately need protein—rich and fat—rich foods, ideally, which they can produce themselves, but they've got very little fertile land, many of the most food—insecure nations, and very little water. how do you do that? the only conceivable way in which they can detach themselves from that catastrophic import dependency is to be producing their own protein rich—foods through technologies like precision fermentation. a danger is that you actually exacerbate a problem that already exists, that there will be tech companies that move into the sectors you are talking about, bacterial proteins, building them in labs, then producing them in factories with a lot of intellectual property involved. and that will become the monopoly property of certain very successful global companies. and you will exacerbate the corporatist control of food production around the world. this is a genuine danger, and this is why instead ofjust saying, "0h, we don't like the technology,"

we've got to get in there fast and make sure that the technology belongs to the world as a whole. well, that's a very easy thing to say. how do you do it? you do it through strong antitrust laws and weak intellectual property laws. now, we need that in lots of different sectors, particularly throughout the existing food sector. i mean, we have four corporations controlling 90% of the global grain trade. this is extremely dangerous. this is one of the reasons why the global food system has lost its resilience. so... but that isn't to say we should get rid of the global grain trade, it's to say we should regulate it differently. and the same applies to the new foods which are now coming onstream. let's broaden this argument away from just food, because you've already said, you know, food production is one key element in the emissions problem that we still have and that we're not actually successfully grappling with. you write and you campaign week—on—week, year—on—year, telling the world it must regard this climate emergency as something that threatens all of us now. why do you believe politicians and, it seems, voters in so many parts of the world

simply aren't prepared to listen? it's a really good question. and i have to say, i struggle with it every day. it's like, "what about this are you not seeing?" you know, "why is this not so obvious?" is it because you're framing the message in the wrong way? i've been at this for 37 years and i've tried every which way, and notjust me, you know, many of us within this field which have... maybe we're being too harsh. maybe we're being too soft. maybe... maybe we need to be more direct. maybe we need to be less direct. there isn't a magic formula. i mean, basically, our problem is we're facing a wall of money. you know, vested interest, legacy industries, they've got so much money, they've been pouring it into climate denial, pouring it into electing the politicians they want to thwart the effective change that we need. money is the great... money in politics is the greatest threat to democracy, but also arguably the greatest threat to life on earth. and solving the political funding problem would get us a long way towards where we need to be.

i just wonder whether you feel you understand politics. for example, in the uk right now, rishi sunak and liz truss, two senior conservative politicians are vying for the leadership not just of their party, but for the keys to number 10 downing street, to run the country after the resignation — or the looming resignation — of borisjohnson. now, in their campaign, both have made a point of saying they will get rid of some of the green taxes that have been mooted. liz truss is saying — and this is a paraphrase of what she said the other day — we don't want the paraphernalia of solar farms on our land, we want more farming, more livestock on our land. this is a response to voters worrying about food prices, and that's day—to—day politics. they're not responding to voters. i mean, they're currently trying to appeal to 160,000 people out of a population of 67 million people. they... they are using attack lines straight out of the dark money—funded think tanks.

we don't know who's paying for these people, but those are the messages that they're coming out with and are feeding straight into liz truss�* speeches, rishi suna k�*s speeches. they're reflecting the agenda set by the billionaire press. do not try to pretend that they are representing the population as a whole, because they are not. so what you're describing... well, what you're describing in very passionate, powerful terms is a country which is entirely, in terms of its democracy, broken. well, yes. so is that your view, that the reason your arguments aren't getting through and that the actions absolutely necessary now aren't being taken, is because even in the democratic world, governance is corrupt? yes. and that leads to similar problems with inequality, with economic dysfunction. i mean, right across the board, we've seen governments corrupted by money, corrupted by money of donors, corrupted by the billionaires who own the media, corrupted

by influences other than the democratic representation of the people. so, democracy is incapable of meeting this challenge? no, democracy needs radical reform. we need to get the money out of politics, number one. that is the first thing we need to do. we need to prevent a few very powerful financial interests from determining what politicians say and think. i'm just imagining notjust politicians listening to you, but many voters as well. you appear to be impugning all of their integrity, you appear to be saying that they've been bought hook, line and sinker by vested interests, particularly in the fossil fuel industry. if you believe that, then you have to be a revolutionary, don't you? there's no point working inside the system that you say is so utterly broken. i don't even know, in a way, why you're sitting here. why do you not sort of begin revolutionary action, subvert the system ? because according to you, the system cannot deliver.

advocacy is one aspect of revolutionary action. you see yourself as a revolutionary. yeah, we have to be. i mean, we do have to be. we're facing a downhill drive towards the cliff edge at the moment, and no—one�*s putting the brakes on. and to believe that business as usual, that the system as it stands is going to save us, is going to stop us from careering over that cliff edge, that's to live in fairyland. so we have to demand revolutionary change to our political systems, to our industrial systems, to our agricultural systems, if we're going to get through, if we're going to survive, if we're not going to become victims of the greatest predicament humanity has ever faced. i wonder where this ends. i think in 2019, you were arrested on an extinction rebellion protest. protests have continued, roads have been blocked, we've seen the public suffer as a consequence. we've seen people unable to get to funerals,

ambulances unable to respond to emergency call—outs. how far are you prepared to take that sort of action, which, of course, impacts upon the system and upon the public? well, nonviolent civil disobedience is the bedrock of democracy. in fact, just about every freedom we enjoy, whether it's the freedom to vote, whether it's weekends, just about anything which enables you and me to have a free conversation right now, arises from nonviolent civil disobedience. what's your limit? oh, my limit is nonviolent civil disobedience. that's. .. but you've been at that for years, and it's not working. well, you know, wejust need more people at it, basically. i mean, that's the same with any democratic challenge. you know, you just have to stick with it and wait for the opening. now, there's some very interesting science on this, which shows that if you can reach 25% of the population with a new idea, you will achieve a tipping point and things will

change very quickly. and we've seen that with many other issues. marriage equality, a classic example. you know, in the course of a few years, it went from, "that's absolutely atrocious. "it'd be the end of civilisation as we know it" to "well, of course, why not? "who would be such a fool as to be against marriage equality?" and we can see these great turnarounds have happened in politics again and again and again. but how do they happen? they happen by bringing more and more people into radical action, into civil disobedience, into demanding system change, not incrementalism, but systemic change in the way we act. maybe one of the reasons that you haven't had the traction you feel you need... well, you definitely need to make a difference, is that you're, again, you're running up against human nature. some psychologists have talked about climate trauma. the kinds of bleak messages that you've delivered to me today have an impact on human beings not to necessarily activate them, to get them out on the streets in the way that you want, but actually to make them almost frozen with fear. well, you could argue it

exactly the other way around. if i were to lie to you, if i were to say, "actually, it's not so bad, yeah, i'm sure it'll be fine, "you know, wejust had to make a few little micro consumerist tweaks here, stop using plastic straws, stop using cotton buds, and then that'll be fine", that would also put people off because people would say, "well, i'm not being spoken to honestly here, and i don't believe that what you're advocating is in any way commensurate with the scale of the problem that you're describing." we have to be straight about this. we have to tell the truth about the greatest existential crisis humanity... i understand you're determined to do that. i just wonder whether you would reflect on what caroline hickman, the psychologist i was talking about, says. she says, "the human psyche is hard—wired to disengage from information or experiences that are overwhelmingly difficult or disturbing." do you think there is some truth in that? oh, yeah, no, i'm sure there is truth in that. and that's why we have to be endlessly creative to try to reach people. and what you find within civil disobedience,

and within the whole movement of which i consider myself a part, is a great flowering of creativity. people constantly trying to find new ways to break through. and sometimes we do. you know, if you look at the tremendous success of fridays for future, which was stifled by the pandemic, but right up until that point, when the pandemic came along, it was just growing and growing and growing and reaching parts of the media and parts of the political machine which other movements hadn't reached, and it did so through tremendous creativity. george monbiot, we have run out of time, but thank you very much forjoining me on hardtalk. thanks very much, indeed. thank you, stephen.

hello there. a north—south divide across the country today. northern areas looked largely dry with plenty of sunshine, but again, across england and wales, closer to a thundery low than we're likely to see these thundery showers developing. again, they could be heavy enough to cause some localised flooding, especially from the midlands southwards. you can see that thundery low to the south, a ridge of high pressure building in across the north. this weather system will arrive across northern and western areas on thursday. so again, for large parts of england and wales, we'll see the clouds bubbling up, thunderstorms breaking out pretty much anywhere, but certainly across the midlands, in towards south, southeast england. further north, widespread sunshine around, light winds too. a very pleasant day, with temperatures reaching around 18 or 19 degrees, england and wales. little bit cooler, still quite humid in the southeast, top temperatures 20—23 degrees. as we move through wednesday night, the showers and thunderstorms continue to rattle on across to east anglia and the southeast. and then eventually, they'll clear away and we start to see some wetter weather and breezier weather pushing into scotland and northern ireland, so temperatures recovering here. a few chilly spots

under the clear skies, northern england, 11—15 across the south and east. here's thursday's pressure picture, then. this weather front bringing outbreaks of rain into scotland, northern ireland, perhaps western england and wales through the day. some heavy bursts mixed in there, quite a lot of cloud, generally. across the east and southeast of england, though, apart from the odd shower around, we should see some good spells of sunshine, so a quieter story here. a little bit warmer with more sunshine in the southeast, up to 25 degrees. around 20 or 21 as well across scotland and northern ireland. into friday, looks like that weather front eventually clears away from the southeast of england. we've got further sunshine and showers, scotland and northern ireland, northwest england, but quite a bit of sunshine, i think, across central, southern and eastern england. and again, quite warm — 25 degrees. around the high teens in the north and the west, these sorts of values closer to the seasonal norm. we hold onto the run of westerly winds as we head into the weekend, this feature bringing an area of wet and windy weather across scotland. as we move through saturday night into sunday, though,

we'll look at the next system, which will bring a spell of wet and windy weather across the whole of the uk during sunday. so for saturday, then, it looks like it's northern areas which will see the showers. drier further south. sunday, though, looks unsettled across the whole of the uk, with outbreaks of heavy rain in places.

this is bbc news. i'm samantha simmonds with the latest headlines for viewers in the uk and around the world. voters in the us state of wyoming oust the trump critic, republican liz cheney, from her seat in congress, replacing her with a candidate who supports mr trump's unfounded claims of voter fraud. tonight, harriet hageman has received the most votes in this primary. she won. i called her to concede the race. this primary election is over. president biden signs on the dotted line — the biggest ever investment in green energy passes into law, with more than 300 billion dollars of new spending. this bill is the biggest step forward on climate, ever — ever — and it is going to allow us to boldly take