I’ve just been to the best talk I’ve ever heard on climate change. Jonathon Porritt, of the Forum for the Future (and many other prolific achievements) was speaking at Cambridge University Department of Engineering on the subject of Sustainable Capitalism.

His entire talk can be summed up in the central paradox that he identified:

That the capitalist system we currently have results in horrendous inequality as power becomes concentrated in the hands of an inaccessible, estranged elite; but that we need this system and big companies to be the midwives who deliver the technological energy revolution we need to tackle climate change.

Porritt argued that while we change the hardware (a revolution in our energy system) we must also change the software – the wider economic system which that change happens within.

Within five years, Chinese companies will be able to provide solar energy at the same market price as fossil fuels, and by 2020 well below that price. Porritt sees this as a hidden, forthcoming revolution.

However, he believes that this change must take place within wider cultural change that addresses the underlying problems associated with capitalism.

He made the case for a well-regulated capitalism in which markets play an important role in solving the problems of climate change.

A round of applause rippled round the room when the question of the certainty of climate change was raised, and Porritt said he never wanted to have to discuss climate science again.

The talk closed with questions on the human race as a super-organism that won’t stop until it has fucked the last seal, and the role that geo-engineering can play.

Porritt was witty, angry and passionate throughout, and this was without doubt the best climate change talk I’ve ever heard, in terms of both content and delivery.