Speaker 1: Pushkin from Pushkin Industries. This is Deep Background, the show
Speaker 1: where we explore the stories behind the stories in the news.
Speaker 1: I'm Noah Feldman. When we all come out from social
Speaker 1: isolation after the coronavirus pandemic finally ends, and I'm assuming
Speaker 1: it will, we will emerge changed, and we will emerge
Speaker 1: into a changed world. Is there a chance that one
Speaker 1: of those changes will be that we've become more environmentally
Speaker 1: friendly or at least more environmentally aware. Are there things
Speaker 1: we could be doing now while everything is on pause
Speaker 1: that could have a long lasting impact on the health
Speaker 1: of our planet or our thing is going to go
Speaker 1: the other way? Is our need to restart our economy
Speaker 1: and going to overwhelm our impulse to improve the environment.
Speaker 1: Might the enormous cost of the bailouts were engaged and
Speaker 1: now actually deter us from investing in a serious way
Speaker 1: into transformation of our energy system to fight climate change.
Speaker 1: To discuss these pressing questions, I'm joined by Bill mckibbon.
Speaker 1: Bill's a central figure in the history of the climate
Speaker 1: change struggle. He was one of the first people to
Speaker 1: write and advocate about climate change almost thirty years ago
Speaker 1: in his best selling book The End of nature. He's
Speaker 1: been a central figure in the climate change movement ever since,
Speaker 1: a writer for The New Yorker and the founder of
Speaker 1: the grassroots climate campaign three fifty dot org, among other distinctions.
Speaker 1: Bill is also the father of our shore runner, Sophie mckibbon. Bill,
Speaker 1: thank you so much for joining me. I wanted to
Speaker 1: start with what is, in a sense, the most obvious question,
Speaker 1: which is here you are? You spend the better part
Speaker 1: of your career trying to get the world to sit
Speaker 1: up and take notice of a profound crisis, and you've
Speaker 1: done an extraordinary job of it. Yet it's been a
Speaker 1: struggle every step of the way. Then suddenly, February March
Speaker 1: of twenty twenty, a handful of people initially die of
Speaker 1: an obscure virus, and boom, just about the entire world
Speaker 1: goes into full on crisis mode with almost no indication
Speaker 1: of what the consequences are going to be. Listening to
Speaker 1: a handful of experts whom no one had heard of before.
Speaker 1: Does that seem strange too? Well, it doesn't seem strange
Speaker 1: in that the immediacy of a pandemic, of a medical crisis,
Speaker 1: the idea that everyone can quickly imagine themselves falling ill
Speaker 1: or dying or the people around them that they love.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's one of the reasons we move fast
Speaker 1: in these situations. The other is, and it's not to
Speaker 1: be discounted, the one good thing about the coronavirus is
Speaker 1: there's not a trillion dollar industry whose business model depends
Speaker 1: on us all getting sick and dying. There is a
Speaker 1: trillion dollar industry whose business model depends on us not
Speaker 1: taking climate change seriously. And that's been, more than anything else,
Speaker 1: the reason that we haven't done so for thirty years.
Speaker 1: I want to ask you about the sort of two
Speaker 1: different pathways, each a bit extremely in the way they're stated,
Speaker 1: that are being bandied about about what will happen in
Speaker 1: the aftermath of Corona, assuming there is an aftermath of
Speaker 1: Corona for us with respect to environmentalism and climate change.
Speaker 1: The one being well, look, we now know that people
Speaker 1: can get together and take seriously a threat, and this
Speaker 1: is extraordinarily hopeful because we could learn from these things
Speaker 1: and maybe translate them into the climate challenge. And then
Speaker 1: the other saying very very pessimistically, there's a huge difference
Speaker 1: between an immediate visible threat and a more difficult to
Speaker 1: see one. In fact, industry will have a tremendously powerful
Speaker 1: argument on its side that we should be putting aside
Speaker 1: long term considerations in favor of short term rebuilding considerations,
Speaker 1: and this is actually going to make things harder, not easier.
Speaker 1: So both those things are going to happen at one
Speaker 1: level or another. There's a powerful desire to get back
Speaker 1: to normal, and it'll manifest in all kinds of ways,
Speaker 1: and some of those ways will make our job of
Speaker 1: dealing with this other overarching climate crisis harder. Look, there's
Speaker 1: not many people who are going to be eager to
Speaker 1: jump back on the subway right because it's scarier place
Speaker 1: than it was six months ago. So there'll likely be
Speaker 1: a lot of people retreating the use of their private
Speaker 1: automobiles in a lot of places, and with gas at
Speaker 1: a dollar forty nine a gallon or whatever it is now,
Speaker 1: there may well be a kind of booming sale of
Speaker 1: SUVs and so on. On the other hand, you've got
Speaker 1: lots and lots of places around the world that are
Speaker 1: taking this moment as a way to make deep change.
Speaker 1: The city of London, which we're used to thinking of
Speaker 1: as the kind of epitome of hide bound old tradition
Speaker 1: has announced that they're basically close most of the streets
Speaker 1: in the center of the city to cars henceforth, and
Speaker 1: it's going to be bikes and buses and pedestrians, so
Speaker 1: it's cutting both ways. What the pandemic really demonstrates, however,
Speaker 1: maybe something we haven't focused on yet. We basically shut
Speaker 1: down the world for a matter of months in a
Speaker 1: way that you or I would have thought was impossible.
Speaker 1: Nothing like that's ever happened in our lifetimes, nothing even
Speaker 1: close to what's ever happened. And yet it looks like
Speaker 1: carbon emissions probably will go down maybe seven or eight
Speaker 1: percent this year. That's it. And what that seems to
Speaker 1: indicate is that an awful lot of what we're doing
Speaker 1: is less as a result of individual choice than of
Speaker 1: things being kind of hardwired into the system. That we're
Speaker 1: going to have to get in the guts of modernity
Speaker 1: and make some basic plumbing changes if we're going to
Speaker 1: be achieving the kind of scale of emissions reductions and
Speaker 1: things that the scientists tell us are necessary. And that's
Speaker 1: an interesting thing to find out. We could all stop
Speaker 1: flying and all stop driving and it still didn't really
Speaker 1: bend this particular curve that much guide us into the
Speaker 1: guts of modernity. Then I want to understand why the
Speaker 1: numbers are not down as radically as that. What are
Speaker 1: the causes of emissions that are remaining so great that
Speaker 1: only seven or eight percent reduction will be achieved this year. Well,
Speaker 1: it's because the underlying kind of autonomic systems on our planet,
Speaker 1: the energy generation that we use every day, the energy
Speaker 1: generation that you and I have been using to light
Speaker 1: and heat our homes, to run everything around us, Every building,
Speaker 1: every piece of the built environment at the moment is
Speaker 1: plugged into this system that relies mostly on digging stuff
Speaker 1: up and burning it. And that's what can change, and
Speaker 1: can change pretty quickly if we want it to. We're
Speaker 1: at a really interesting moment right now. Now. This pandemic
Speaker 1: comes at the end of a decade in which engineers
Speaker 1: have done spectacular work. They've dropped the price of a
Speaker 1: solar panel or a wind turbine by something like ninety
Speaker 1: percent to the place where these are now by far
Speaker 1: the cheapest way to generate power around most of the world.
Speaker 1: So over time we'll move in that direction. Seventy five
Speaker 1: years from now, we'll probably run the world on sun
Speaker 1: and wind because it's cheap. But if we just let
Speaker 1: kind of economics dictate the pace, then we'll go so
Speaker 1: slowly that that world we run on sun and wind
Speaker 1: in seventy five years will be a fundamentally broken world.
Speaker 1: So the job is to figure out can we push
Speaker 1: the pace. And that's where the pandemic is interesting. Given
Speaker 1: that we have all these now cheap technologies pretty much
Speaker 1: ready to go, and given that we have a huge
Speaker 1: now mass of unemployed people around the world who need
Speaker 1: something to do, it's pretty clear to me that the
Speaker 1: only task that the world faces that's on that same
Speaker 1: scale is this task of moving us from one energy
Speaker 1: regime to another. So retrofitting buildings with insulation and with
Speaker 1: new appliances like air source heat pumps, building out a
Speaker 1: network of electric car charging stations, putting up all that
Speaker 1: sun and windpower. If there was an FDR around today,
Speaker 1: those are the tasks he'd be seizing on for a
Speaker 1: WPA or a CCC or whatever it was. And what
Speaker 1: do you know, it just so happens that we have
Speaker 1: in hand from a year ago this idea for a
Speaker 1: green new deal. I have a feeling that that may
Speaker 1: be one of the ways in which the world grapples
Speaker 1: with the twin problem as it now faces, And indeed,
Speaker 1: you can see it's starting to happen. Germany and South
Speaker 1: Korea and a number of other countries seem to be
Speaker 1: picking a kind of green New Deal template as their
Speaker 1: way out of the economic trouble that they're now in.
Speaker 1: Often when I listen to you, I'm struck by the
Speaker 1: balance that you have to strike between making us afraid
Speaker 1: in order to motivates the action and giving us some reassurance.
Speaker 1: I want to double down on the fear right now,
Speaker 1: because when I was listening to you just now, the
Speaker 1: fear I think came when you were saying that we
Speaker 1: need to make these fundamental, long run infrastructure investments of
Speaker 1: a new Deal type. And right now we're doing, at
Speaker 1: an international scale, the most massive instantaneous borrowing against the
Speaker 1: future that we've done since the Great Depression. So if
Speaker 1: we're already engaged in this really generational borrowing, how are
Speaker 1: we going to have the capacity to do it again?
Speaker 1: For environmental transformation, the first thing to be said is
Speaker 1: the things that you're afraid of are good things to
Speaker 1: be afraid of, but the things to really be afraid
Speaker 1: of to really feel in the pit of your stomach,
Speaker 1: are in fact the changes that are now expressing themselves
Speaker 1: on the planet, even in the early phases of climate change.
Speaker 1: I mean, we've warmed the planet one degree so far,
Speaker 1: and that's been enough to knock pretty much all our
Speaker 1: systems a kilter. The devastation that we're already seeing is enormous,
Speaker 1: and it comes with an almost unimaginable price tag if
Speaker 1: all you were thinking about was the kind of economic
Speaker 1: challenge that it presents. The latest study I saw on
Speaker 1: the price of unabated global warming by the end of
Speaker 1: the century, who was about five hundred and fifty one
Speaker 1: trillion dollars, which is considerably more money than currently exists
Speaker 1: on planet Earth. So that's the scale of the challenge,
Speaker 1: and that's precisely why we should be making as wise
Speaker 1: investments as we can right now, even in the midst
Speaker 1: of the kind of panic that surrounds this pandemic. I mean,
Speaker 1: I think clearly people will look back and see this
Speaker 1: as one of the few moments when we really did
Speaker 1: get a sort of break, a pause in order to
Speaker 1: reset some of our assumptions about the world. And we're
Speaker 1: at a place where we can change some of those
Speaker 1: assumptions and do it in ways that make economic sense.
Speaker 1: What it really takes is some degree of leadership, and
Speaker 1: of course right now we're coming up empty there. Our
Speaker 1: problem is, and this is the thing that makes me
Speaker 1: scared sometimes at night. Climate change, like the coronavirus, is
Speaker 1: a problem where the answer has to come fast, if
Speaker 1: it's going to come at all. They're both time tests,
Speaker 1: and the time is short. So we failed the timed
Speaker 1: test part of the coronavirus, right. We took off February
Speaker 1: from effective policy making, and as a result we were
Speaker 1: really screwed. And the countries that spent February doing the
Speaker 1: things that needed doing were by and large ended up
Speaker 1: better off than we did. With climate change. We took
Speaker 1: off the last thirty years from offensive policy making, and
Speaker 1: so now we're in really deep trouble as a result,
Speaker 1: not only are we going to have significant damage, our
Speaker 1: only chance of avoiding just sort of civilization scale carnage
Speaker 1: is if we make huge progress in the next decade.
Speaker 1: The next decade for climate change is the equivalent of
Speaker 1: what February was for coronavirus. Our chance to get it
Speaker 1: at least partly right If we are able to internalize
Speaker 1: that in some way, then we've got a shot. If
Speaker 1: we're not, then we'll just aimlessly wander through and we'll
Speaker 1: be in trouble far forwards than anything we're in now.
Speaker 1: We'll be back in just a moment. One of the
Speaker 1: ongoing challenges that the whole climate change movement has faced
Speaker 1: has been a genuine skepticism by many ordinary people at
Speaker 1: the authority of science. A sense of scientists is disconnected
Speaker 1: as belonging to elites who don't have the interest of
Speaker 1: ordinary people at heart. Do you have a sense that
Speaker 1: the public reaction to science and to scientific authority during
Speaker 1: the Corona crisis is likely to make a difference in
Speaker 1: that conflict, because it does seem to me they are translatable.
Speaker 1: I mean, for example, if we were to get an
Speaker 1: effective vaccine for Corona, which I myself I am not
Speaker 1: convinced as a high probability event from all the experts
Speaker 1: I've spoken to, but it's also a possible event that
Speaker 1: could in principle, really enhance the prestige of scientific authority,
Speaker 1: and if we don't, seems at least possible to me
Speaker 1: that that could further deflate the authority of the scientific community. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a really good question, and I think actually there's
Speaker 1: some pretty good signs. The news business being what it is,
Speaker 1: we have no choice to focus on all the knuckleheads
Speaker 1: who wanted to go out to the bar or were
Speaker 1: standing around the Michigan Governor's office with AK forty sevens
Speaker 1: or whatever it was that people were doing. But for
Speaker 1: the most part, Americans were like, yeah, Okay, if the
Speaker 1: doctor says we need to stand six feet apart, we
Speaker 1: best stand six feet apart. I've been pretty pleasantly surprised
Speaker 1: by how well Americans dealt with the reality that suddenly
Speaker 1: was thrust upon them. Most people really did turn their
Speaker 1: lives upside down. The polling seems to show that most
Speaker 1: people respected the politicians who told them to do that
Speaker 1: and worked with them to make it done. We're in
Speaker 1: a weird political fever dream these last years. You know
Speaker 1: a place where it's very hard to find a center
Speaker 1: where up is down and down is up. You know
Speaker 1: where we live in a world of odd conspiracy theories,
Speaker 1: whether they're about vaccinations or climate change, or chemtrails, or
Speaker 1: on and on and on down a long and dreary list.
Speaker 1: It's possible that this pandemic has been enough of a
Speaker 1: shock to the system that will will help us wake
Speaker 1: us out of that fever dream a little bit. I've
Speaker 1: spent an awful lot of time trying to explain to
Speaker 1: people that physics and chemistry aren't negotiable. You can't force
Speaker 1: them to compromise, that they're not going to meet you halfway.
Speaker 1: And that's why these kind of issues are so difficult
Speaker 1: for our political system. I mean, even at its best,
Speaker 1: even when it's working correctly, political system is set up
Speaker 1: to favor compromise. Right. You get groups of people with
Speaker 1: different opinions about topics and they have to somehow kind
Speaker 1: of meet in the middle. That's not what coronavirus or
Speaker 1: climate change are like. They set the terms. If the
Speaker 1: microbe says stands six feet apart, stands six feet apart.
Speaker 1: If the carbon dioxide molecule says we can't keep burning stuff,
Speaker 1: it's getting too hot, then you best pay attention. So
Speaker 1: there are no silver linings in a pandemic. But if
Speaker 1: we're going to go through this much trouble, we might
Speaker 1: as well learn something. And a basic bottom line thing
Speaker 1: to learn is that reality is real. Doesn't matter if
Speaker 1: the president stands it is electern and tries to proudbeat
Speaker 1: the microbe into submission. It could care less. And in
Speaker 1: a world where we've spent the last twenty thirty years
Speaker 1: ever more firmly entrenched behind our screens, where reality seems
Speaker 1: mutable and adaptable and easy to play with, and so
Speaker 1: on and so forth, this is a pretty good reminder
Speaker 1: that that's actually not how reality works. At some level.
Speaker 1: I'm very sympathetic to everything you've said. I see myself
Speaker 1: as a believer in science. I haven't been out in
Speaker 1: a bar, nor have I marched on the State House
Speaker 1: with my a R. Fifteen. That said, I think I
Speaker 1: might have some subtle philosophical difference with you with respect
Speaker 1: to how I think about the motivation of the people
Speaker 1: who did both of those kinds of things. I think,
Speaker 1: with respect to people who are going to a bar,
Speaker 1: they're expressing a fundamental human instinct, a towards sociality, towards
Speaker 1: being with other people, and be towards some desire to
Speaker 1: look straight in the face of something like corona and
Speaker 1: say it actually wouldn't be so bad if we individually
Speaker 1: got it. Then, with respect to the people who are
Speaker 1: you marching, sometimes even armed. They're expressing what I would
Speaker 1: call of the libertarian impulse that is distrustful of the
Speaker 1: way that power functions in the world that we have.
Speaker 1: And I see both of those impulses the kind of
Speaker 1: impulse to human sociality, and let's just all get the
Speaker 1: disease and the libertarian impulse to be distrustful of government
Speaker 1: authority as important ways of interpreting the world. Now, I
Speaker 1: agree with you that the laws of physics don't change
Speaker 1: based on what we would like them to be. But
Speaker 1: we're talking in all these cases about what we should
Speaker 1: be doing from the standpoint of policy, and their political
Speaker 1: judgment does come in. So the standing six feet apart
Speaker 1: isn't I don't think dictated by the virus. That's a
Speaker 1: regulatory response to how we should address the underlying question.
Speaker 1: And we could say, let's let everybody get this virus,
Speaker 1: and that we'll have terrible consequences for some people, and
Speaker 1: it might overcome our healthcare systems, it may lead to many,
Speaker 1: many deaths, but we make the judgment that we shouldn't
Speaker 1: do that. I mean those to me fall in the
Speaker 1: realm of human judgment, and I think that responses to
Speaker 1: climates similarly do I mean, we're talking about very complicated
Speaker 1: cost benefits, and although I happen to come down on
Speaker 1: your side of the coin, I do nevertheless see it
Speaker 1: as a realm of negotiation and discussion and cost benefit
Speaker 1: where we should do that in the shadow of real science.
Speaker 1: So on all kinds of counts, I agree with you,
Speaker 1: But I think the really interesting political question you raise
Speaker 1: is the one about kind of libertarian impulse. You and
Speaker 1: I have lived our lives in the shadow of Ronald Reagan,
Speaker 1: hence in the idea that markets solve all problems. That's
Speaker 1: been the most powerful impulse political impulse I think of
Speaker 1: our time on this planet, and I've been suspicious of
Speaker 1: it from the beginning for a lot of reasons, but
Speaker 1: I think those suspicions get more powerful all the time.
Speaker 1: Reagan's great laugh line, as you'll recall, was the nine
Speaker 1: scariest words in the English language are I'm from the
Speaker 1: government and I'm here to help. Well, I don't think
Speaker 1: those are words in the English language. I think the
Speaker 1: scariest words are we've run out of ventilators, the hillside
Speaker 1: behind your house is on fire, and those are not
Speaker 1: problems that you're capable of addressing. By trying to maximize
Speaker 1: your own wealth. Those are problems that you're capable of
Speaker 1: addressing when we come together to do things jointly. That's
Speaker 1: always been the interesting philosophical dilemma around climate change. The
Speaker 1: reason that the right had so much trouble dealing with
Speaker 1: it and has been forced to deny it really over
Speaker 1: and over again, is that there was, at least at
Speaker 1: this point, no real way to deal with it without
Speaker 1: strong joint action. I mean, I think the syllogism that
Speaker 1: formed in a lot of conservative minds over time was
Speaker 1: markets solve all problems. Markets aren't solving climate change. Therefore
Speaker 1: climate change is not a problem. That's not a very
Speaker 1: good syllogism, but it's emotionally comforting. If you spent the
Speaker 1: last thirty years, you know, marinating in Russia, Limbaugh, then
Speaker 1: it's an appealing idea and one that an awful lot
Speaker 1: of people stuck with, including the President in the United States.
Speaker 1: I want to ask you about the way people form
Speaker 1: their commitments to bake picture questions like climate change and
Speaker 1: its relationship to the political tribe that they belong to.
Speaker 1: I've been struck in recent conversations I've had with friends.
Speaker 1: There are people who are sort of left science skeptics.
Speaker 1: For example, they might be skeptical of vaccines. There are
Speaker 1: antivactors left and right, but there is a thing of
Speaker 1: skeptical of certain respects of science people on the left,
Speaker 1: and yet those same people tend to be very clear
Speaker 1: that climate change science is real, whereas on the right,
Speaker 1: I would expect a pretty close affiliation between people who
Speaker 1: are skeptical of science on say, vaccination, and are also
Speaker 1: very skeptical of climate change. So there's a kind of
Speaker 1: fascinating mismatch there. My working hypothesis, and I have no
Speaker 1: idea if there's anything to this about why that might be. So,
Speaker 1: is that people form their beliefs in this tribal way,
Speaker 1: almost in the way that they form religious beliefs. Well,
Speaker 1: I think that actually you have an interesting kind of
Speaker 1: natural experiment here with climate change about where the source
Speaker 1: of some of this all comes from. If you look
Speaker 1: at around the world, very very very few places, really
Speaker 1: none have this level of skepticism around climate change that
Speaker 1: we do here. It was really only in the US
Speaker 1: that climate denial became a serious thing. You know, look
Speaker 1: at conservative leaders and other parts of the world. Angelo
Speaker 1: mercal conservative and yet very powerful voice for action on
Speaker 1: climate change, and you can have a dozen different examples.
Speaker 1: I think that it's pretty clear in retrospect, thanks to
Speaker 1: a lot of great investigative reporting, what the source of
Speaker 1: that is. Thirty years ago we now know the fossil
Speaker 1: fuel industry knew everything there was to know about climate change. Exxon,
Speaker 1: biggest company in the world in the nineteen eighties, had
Speaker 1: a great scientific staff. Their product was carbon. Of course,
Speaker 1: they set out to understand it, and understand it they did.
Speaker 1: They've discovered in their archives graphs that show with unerring
Speaker 1: accuracy what the CO two concentration and temperature would be
Speaker 1: in twenty twenty. But of course what they didn't do
Speaker 1: was tell any of the rest of us. Instead, the
Speaker 1: industry spent a huge amount of money building the kind
Speaker 1: of architecture of deceit and denial and disinformation that kept
Speaker 1: us locked for thirty years in a totally phony debate
Speaker 1: about whether or not global warming was real, a debate
Speaker 1: that both sides knew the answer to at the beginning.
Speaker 1: It's just one of them was willing to lie. And
Speaker 1: when you're willing to lie in that way and poison
Speaker 1: the debate in that way, and when you have unlimited funds,
Speaker 1: when you're able to go hire everybody who told the
Speaker 1: same lie about the tobacco industry and put them to
Speaker 1: work in this new context, well you get things done.
Speaker 1: The Koch brothers, who are the biggest influences in our
Speaker 1: political system probably over the last twenty or thirty years,
Speaker 1: are also our biggest oil and gas parents. I mean,
Speaker 1: that's how they had the money to buy a political
Speaker 1: party and take physics and turn it into a part
Speaker 1: as an issue. So I think that it's worth always
Speaker 1: bearing that in mind, that we've been guided down this
Speaker 1: path by people who knew precisely what they were doing.
Speaker 1: So I just want to close by asking you, do
Speaker 1: you feel more optimistic about climate change than you did
Speaker 1: when you first began to write and advocate about the subject.
Speaker 1: I feel way less optimistic, I fear, than I did
Speaker 1: back in nineteen eighty nine, when I wasn't very optimistic then.
Speaker 1: I mean, I wrote the first book about this, and
Speaker 1: its cheerful title was the End of Nature. But I
Speaker 1: would not have predicted either how fast change was going
Speaker 1: to come. It turns out that scientists are conservative by
Speaker 1: nature and dramatically under predict not overestimate change one faces,
Speaker 1: and I would not have predicted just how sclerotic our
Speaker 1: political systems, especially the US, would be in response that
Speaker 1: we would be warned powerfully of a huge crisis and
Speaker 1: then do nothing about it. On the other hand, the
Speaker 1: thing that makes me hopeful that at the very least
Speaker 1: will make a fight out of this has been the
Speaker 1: rise over the last decade of movements to try and
Speaker 1: do something about it, because that's clearly what it's going
Speaker 1: to take now. I tried to help start that process
Speaker 1: with one of the first iterations of this three fifty
Speaker 1: dot org, which became the first kind of global grassroots
Speaker 1: climate movement, and that's made really, really really gratifying for
Speaker 1: me to watch the emergence of so many others in
Speaker 1: the last few years, to watch extinction rebellion, to watch
Speaker 1: the Green New Deal in the Sunrise movement in this country,
Speaker 1: to watch the almost miraculous emergence of this cadre of
Speaker 1: millions upon millions of high school students and junior high
Speaker 1: school students around the world demanding change. So I don't
Speaker 1: know what that adds up to in terms of optimism
Speaker 1: and pessimism. We're in a very difficult place where we
Speaker 1: have to move very very fast, and as with coronavirus
Speaker 1: having delayed this long, there's no longer any outcome that
Speaker 1: doesn't involve lots and lots of trauma, lots and lots
Speaker 1: of damage. But we know what to do in the
Speaker 1: broadest terms. We have the resources, the technologies and things
Speaker 1: that we could employ, and we've built movements that can
Speaker 1: try and push political will in the right direction. It's
Speaker 1: a titanic battle, maybe the most titanic battle that human
Speaker 1: beings have ever engaged in, and we don't know the outcome.
Speaker 1: It's not like other political questions where over time you
Speaker 1: had some sense that the right thing was eventually going
Speaker 1: to happen. We don't know that we can do it
Speaker 1: fast enough. We're going to find out, and the only
Speaker 1: variable we can affect is how many of us push
Speaker 1: how hard for change, and that's why we push hard. Bill.
Speaker 1: Thank you very much for your analysis of where we
Speaker 1: stand on climate in the moment of Corona, and thank
Speaker 1: you much more fundamentally for all of your work over
Speaker 1: these years to draw attention to the immediacy of much.
Speaker 1: Reflecting on my conversation with Bill, I wish he had
Speaker 1: been able to end in a more optimistic place than
Speaker 1: he did. I myself walked away from our conversation shocked
Speaker 1: by one fact and scared by another. It turns out
Speaker 1: that not driving too much, not flying too much really
Speaker 1: don't have the transformative degree of impact that I might
Speaker 1: have imagined otherwise. And I'm terrified by the reality that
Speaker 1: the only way to transform our global emissions is by
Speaker 1: a major, long term generational investment in the transition to
Speaker 1: solar power and to win power. Because that would have
Speaker 1: been challenging under the best of circumstances. But at a
Speaker 1: moment when the world is borrowing against our future in
Speaker 1: unprecedented ways in order to avoid an immediate crisis of
Speaker 1: depression like magnitude, it's going to be much more difficult
Speaker 1: to muster public support for a long term, extremely expensive
Speaker 1: investment in the transformation of how we generate and store energy.
Speaker 1: Contrary to what sometimes may seem to be the case
Speaker 1: in the middle of this crisis, there actually be some
Speaker 1: finite limitation on the degree to which we can borrow
Speaker 1: against our future, and the moment we start thinking to
Speaker 1: ourselves that there might be some trade off between how
Speaker 1: much we borrow and what our future looks like we're
Speaker 1: going to see a softening of willingness to make major,
Speaker 1: long term generational investments in climate change. If there's a
Speaker 1: glimmer of a hint of something positive to say here,
Speaker 1: it's that we are all recognizing in the midst of
Speaker 1: this coronavirus crisis that we do need to listen to scientists,
Speaker 1: and we do need to rely on governments in order
Speaker 1: to coordinate our action. Coordinated action and reliance on science
Speaker 1: are going to be crucial to any kind of productive
Speaker 1: response to the climate change challenge that we face. I
Speaker 1: wish I could conclude with something profoundly optimistic to say,
Speaker 1: but if Bill couldn't, I certainly can't either. Until the
Speaker 1: next time I speak to you, be careful, be safe,
Speaker 1: and be well. Deep Background is brought to you by
Speaker 1: Pushkin Industries. Our producer is Lydia gene Cott, with research
Speaker 1: help from Zooe Winn and mastering by Jason Gambrel and
Speaker 1: Martin Gonzalez. Our showrunner is Sophie mckibbon. Our theme music
Speaker 1: is composed by Luis Garratt. Special thanks to the Pushkin
Speaker 1: Brass Malcolm Gladwell, Jacob Weisberg and Mia Loebell. I'm Noah Feldman.
Speaker 1: I also write a regular column for Bloomberg Opinion, which
Speaker 1: you can find at Bloomberg dot com slash Feldman. To
Speaker 1: discover Bloomberg's original slate of podcasts, go to Bloomberg dot
Speaker 1: com slash podcasts. And one last thing. I just wrote
Speaker 1: a book called The Arab Winter, A Tragedy. I would
Speaker 1: be delighted if you checked it out. You can always
Speaker 1: let me know what you think on Twitter about this episode,
Speaker 1: or the book or anything else. My handle is Noah R. Feldman.
Speaker 1: This is deep background