More from a complete nut who was mayor of London

Ken Livingstone: the interview (Part 2) - 21st Century Socialism

...but the much bigger thing that is going to hit all of this is the environmental catastrophe that is going on. We have had all this talk about there being a tipping point of irreversible climate change, which is going to be in four years or ten years time. I think it has already happened.

We are heading for catastrophic climate change; if we are lucky, tens of millions dead globally, if we are unlucky, hundreds of millions. There is a real possibility that human civilization doesn't make it to the end of the Century. I think you can avoid that, and therefore the question of green politics becomes fairly central. What that green politics is about, is planning and sharing. It really reverts to the fairly traditional agenda of the left. You can use market mechanisms to come up with some solutions, but the market won’t do it without state direction, effectively.

Shell came to see me, saying they want to do work with you on hydrogen fuel cells, and they'd given up on the government and so on. But then you've got other companies like Exxon Mobil, who have been climate change deniers all the way through, and they prop up Bush in the White House. So if you actually look around - the last time I went to New York, the Mayor was preparing there for their first force 3 hurricane, and two million New Yorkers would have to be evacuated, and they are building these vast shelters. Because they can’t do a Thames Barrier thing across the mouth of the Hudson, the chasm is very deep.

And so as the North Atlantic temperature rises... they have had force 1, I think they have had force 2 hurricanes, and a force 3 will inevitably happen. It will be stunning for America to have an evacuation of one third to almost forty percent of New York, and it covers Wall Street as well. All the areas that the world knows and understands in New York are all in that vulnerable area.

So there has to be sharing of resources, there has to be, in a sense, an energy democracy. That each of us as a human has the right to a certain amount of energy, with the resultant carbon emissions. And you just can’t have a super-rich elite of billionaires with their own private planes and half a dozen homes, and John McCain not even knowing how many houses he owns and all this nonsense.