Thom Yorke questions London mayor Ken Livingstone

From this article:

TY: So squaring up to climate change, it's a moral duty on your part?

KL: Moral isn't the right term. We face a huge catastrophic climate change. We're close to the tipping point. Stern says four to two years. I met Dr Pauchari [chair of the IPCC, the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change, and recipient of last year's Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore], when I was in India, and he thinks we're now past the tipping point and you've got to come up with technologies that will mitigate the effects. If that's true, sometime over the next 10 years we'll have to rejig the whole of the economy, like we did in the Second World War.

TY: But how does that tally with the City itself? In the context of economic growth, for instance, I would imagine there is some level of resistance to these proposals from the City?

KL: Well, no. It's quite interesting, most of big business realise they've all got to change because they realise what's coming. Small business doesn't - they don't have the researchers to figure it out. But big, mega-business, they've got 20-year strategies.

TY: This is interesting to me, in terms of working with Friends of the Earth and the Climate Change Bill: what we're totally up against all the time is government inertia on drawing up a legal structure to put all these things in place. But are you telling me that business is behind it?

KL: There's a chunk of big business which is quite progressive on all of this, and there's a chunk that's deeply reactionary. Small business really isn't engaged, and they don't want anything to change because it costs them money. Our problem is persuading government. If I were running the country, tomorrow I'd ban plastic bags, I'd ban incandescent light bulbs. I'm quite prepared to have a nanny state if it means we survive. I'd rather have a nanny state and live than we all burn in some catastrophic climate change disaster.