That was until I found myself listening to a fascinating interview with him on a Guardian podcast. He is still a comedian but since moving on from his partnership with Baddiel he has got much more involved with being what I guess you could call a ‘climate change activist’. He makes some fantastic points – I’ve mentioned them here before – but his video, originally shown on More4 articulates them in a much slicker way. For example, he makes the argument that World War I was originally a land-grab for oil (the British and Americans did not want the Germans to have access to oil from Baghdad via the Berlin-Baghdad railway that was under construction) and that the British and Americans have always had control of oil fields as military objectives ever since we started to use it as a fuel. There’s so much stuff of interest here – I had no idea, for example, that OPEC decided in 1971 that all oil transactions would need to be undertaken in US dollars; Iraq decided a few years ago to switch to the Euro and that must have frightened the pants off of the Federal Reserve who would have started to see the demand for dollars (and therefore its price) decreasing…
Watch it!
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