Thom Yorke on The Big Ask

Thom Yorke speaks to camera for the Big Ask, the Friends of the Earth campaign he is helping to launch, which wants a climate change bill holding the British government to a 3% cut in carbon emissions every year. Voluntary effort won't do it, he says. A law tells everyone where they stand, and a gradual cut gives people time to get used to it, where ten more years of waiting would mean sudden, drastic measures and might come too late. The best of it, for him, is losing the powerlessness he had felt about the subject for years.

He first found the global warming figures on a research institute's website while Radiohead were making Kid A, and has followed the science since. What finally pushed him was hearing one too many people put on air to dispute it. The worry stopped him working for a while. His son loves wildlife and draws polar bears. “Every time he draws a polar bear I want to tell him that they probably won't be there by the time he's my age.”

He would decommission the coal-fired power station at Didcot, near his home, and he doesn't want nuclear power, which he doubts will be built, since the government has no idea where the money would come from. Whenever it is put as nuclear or wind farms, he says, remember that it is “the last-ditch attempt by a dying industry to save itself”. Markets won't save us, he argues; a law would make the economy work out how to profit from cutting carbon. Britain is ahead of the rest of the G8, and has made such a balls-up of it so far, that it is the one country in a position to set the example.