Over the last few months we have been asking for YOUR questions about climate change and the environment.
And you might have become a CLIMATE HERO and made changes in your life to help slow down the effects of climate change and made positive changes to protect our earth!
Dan managed to sit down with the UK’s Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, and spoke to him all about COP26, asked him some of YOUR climate questions, and took him on at The Yes/No Game!
Listen to the interview here:
Boris Johnson Answers YOUR Climate Questions:
Dan: How good is the COP26 deal?
PM: Well Dan, that’s the question! The answer is it’s potentially very good…it might be quite good, but it could be pretty hopeless, it depends! It depends on how the countries that signed up to it actually deliver, and they’ve got to make good their promises. They’ve got to stop using cars with petrol or diesel, they’ve got to stop digging and burning coal, and they’ve got to start using alternative, cleaner, forms of energy and planting zillions more trees. So, that’s what’s got to happen. They’ve all made some promises that the UK, us, we’re going to hold them to those promises. We’re going to keep chivvying away.
Dan: What changes have you made at home, in your daily life, to be more green?
PM: Well, before I became Prime Minister, I used to cycle everywhere – that was my big contribution. I was Mayor of London for about eight years, and it was wonderful, I never had any kind of police car that took me around, or any of the stuff I have to have nowadays. And nobody ever shouted at me, it was wonderful. I cycled everywhere.
Imogen, aged 9: Why don’t we ban the use of coal? Instead, you can use solar panels in everyone’s house to make renewable heating systems.
PM: Well, do you know what Imogen? That is almost what we did, and we didn’t get there in the end but what we said was that for the first time, 190 countries said they were going to phase it down. What on earth ‘phase down’ means, you may ask Imogen, but what I think it basically means is they’re going to start to get rid of it, and that’s a massive thing for the world to commit to. The world’s depended on coal for hundreds of years, and there are countries that absolutely need coal to power their electricity stations, to keep warm, for all sorts of things. So, for them to say this is a big, big step, and it’s very encouraging. You can’t tell countries that are very poor, where standard of living is very low, ‘Sorry folks, you can’t use coal anymore’ and they’ve just got to shiver and starve. You’ve got to do it in a sensible way, and what the UK wants to do is help them to adopt cleaner technology like wind, solar, or hydrogen, or maybe even nuclear power if they want to do that – though that’s pretty controversial. There are ways of producing energy that are very clean.
Zeca, aged 7: If technology is making climate change worse, how can it make it better?
PM: Brilliant question Zeca! You’re going to the heart of the debate, because you see there are lots of people who basically think the problem is humanity, and that we’ve become far too industrialised and that we have all these machines, and that technology is in itself wrong, evil, and destructive. This is a very ancient belief, that progress is a disaster and that we should somehow revert to a…lots of green people, lots of environmentalists are secretly hoping to return to a kind of pastoral idyll where we all run around wearing hand knitted clothes, that sort of thing. And I’m not against that – that’s fantastic – but smelling faintly of woodsmoke, I’m all in favour of that kind of thing. But, in the end, it’s not what people want. So what you have to do is use technology, you have to use inventions to fix it, and we can. And we have the technology, as they used to say on the TV when I was a kid, we can fix this thing. But some of this technology is very expensive, and you have to help people to do it.
The PM Plays The YES/NO GAME!
Dan, the self-proclaimed ‘Best Yes/No Player in the Universe’, takes on the Prime Minister in an extra special edition of The YES/NO Game!
What is The YES/NO Game? Well…it’s quite simple, really…Dan asks the contestant a series of questions to which they can’t answer ‘YES’, or ‘NO’. You can say anything you like, as long as you don’t repeat yourself! If you win, you get to shout out anyone in the world! But if you lose…you have to give your shout out to Dan!
You can listen to Dan on Fun Kids every weekday from 1pm-4pm! And you can also hear Dan chat about weird and wonderful science with amazing guests in the awesome Fun Kids Science Weekly, with new episodes every Saturday!