Ian McEwan on Solar and Climate Change

There's an interesting ten-minute video interview with Ian McEwan over on the Friends of the Earth website where he talks about his new novel, Solar, climate change, spending time in the Arctic and what it's going to take to tackle global warming.

He covers a lot of ground in the ten minutes and makes some good points, particularly when he notes that tackling climate change is going to also mean tackling some of the least admirable qualities we possess as human beings:

We're being asked to do favours for people we'll never meet...for people not yet born. This requires a scale of long-term thinking which lies outside our biology, so it's a particularly interesting challenge.

Yet despite this, his hope is that "our cleverness might win through" and save the day.

Mmm, perhaps.

Anyway, the interview is definitely worth a look, particularly as an antidote to John Crace's predictably sarcastic Digested Read of Solar from today's Guardian.