Thom Yorke on FM4

Thom Yorke talks to FM4 on the day he helps Global 2000 and Friends of the Earth launch The Big Ask in Brussels. The campaign wants 17 EU countries to commit by law to cutting carbon emissions year on year, with strict penalties if they miss, and asks people to write to their MPs to push their governments. It follows the British campaign whose bill is due to pass in the next few months. Without legal structures, he says, every firm commitment will unravel, and once a law is passed governments must follow it, since “apparently we have functioning democracies in Europe”.

The mayors of London, Paris and Barcelona are acting, and so are people on the ground. Governments are the last to move because the polluting industries lobby them hard, and British politicians are “getting very adept at saying they're doing something when they're doing nothing”. Like friends of his with children, he wakes in the night thinking about the climate, and looks at his own hoping they will not grow up with fuel riots and constant floods. If doing something about it just means writing a few letters and meeting his own MP, he says, that would at least be a novelty, and something good might come of it.