Speaker 1: We have to believe except work toward the idea that
Speaker 1: we are going to address climate change in a way
Speaker 1: big enough to preserve the quality of life for billions
Speaker 1: of people around the world. If you go into this
Speaker 1: thinking we're going to get overwhelmed and lose, then we
Speaker 1: will turn it out.
Speaker 2: People.
Speaker 3: Ah fucked.
Speaker 4: I'm Chris Turney, and this is unfucking the future. The
Speaker 4: world today is full of some pretty bad news, and
Speaker 4: it's way too easy to get bogged down by it.
Speaker 4: But there are some incredible people working on climate solutions,
Speaker 4: and I want you to join them so that we
Speaker 4: can fix this crisis together.
Speaker 3: We fucking the future.
Speaker 4: Bill Nice standing in the science lab, well, actually it's
Speaker 4: John Olives studio. Looks like a size lab in front
Speaker 4: of him. He's got a globe, a fire extinguisher, a
Speaker 4: bucket of sand, and a blanket.
Speaker 2: Here.
Speaker 1: I've got an experiment for you, safety glasses on. By
Speaker 1: the end of this century, if O missions keep rising,
Speaker 1: the average temperature on Earth could go up another four
Speaker 1: to eight degrees.
Speaker 4: He brings out a flamethrower and lights for globe on fire.
Speaker 2: What I'm saying is the planet's on fucking fire.
Speaker 1: There are a lot of things we could do to
Speaker 1: put it out.
Speaker 4: Bill points for a bucket of sand and the fire extinguisher.
Speaker 2: Are any of them free? No, of course not. Not
Speaker 2: thing's free. You idiots. Grow the fuck up. You're not
Speaker 2: children anymore. I didn't mind explaining.
Speaker 1: Photosynthenceus to you when you were twelve, but you're adults
Speaker 1: now and this is an actual crisis.
Speaker 2: Got it. Safety glasses off, motherfucker's.
Speaker 4: I don't know who doesn't know Bill Nye, but indulge
Speaker 4: me while I brag on Bill a bit. He's an
Speaker 4: award winning entertainer and educator, engineer at Boeing and currently
Speaker 4: the CEO of a Planetary Society. Bill's TV shows Bill
Speaker 4: Nye Saves the Earth and Bill ny The Science Guy
Speaker 4: have collected over fifty prestigious award nominations, including nineteen Emmy Awards.
Speaker 4: He's written two best selling books on science. Today, he
Speaker 4: spends a lot of his time educating a public about
Speaker 4: the climate crisis and arguing for action. His latest show
Speaker 4: is called The End Is Nigh Now. Something you may
Speaker 4: not know is that before there was Bill ny the
Speaker 4: Science Guy, there was Bill Nye the stand up comedian.
Speaker 1: Well, I mean I tried, No, I middled. That was
Speaker 1: as high as do you know what I'm talking about?
Speaker 1: So comedy clubs typically have three acts in a row,
Speaker 1: the MC as he or she is called the middle
Speaker 1: and the headliner. Middling is as far as I got
Speaker 1: in his day. You know, Jerry signed Field would be
Speaker 1: the headliner.
Speaker 4: Ah see, I ever got to MC. So you're way
Speaker 4: ahead of me, and you and you actually believe it.
Speaker 4: I'm not the second comedian climate activists I've actually spoken
Speaker 4: to for great Adam McKay as well. So I'd love
Speaker 4: to ask you, why do you What do you think
Speaker 4: makes comedians such great climate activists?
Speaker 1: Oh, because we're so much smarter than regular people. Now,
Speaker 1: I think what you're the selecting that you're experiencing. There
Speaker 1: is people who don't mind talking all the time.
Speaker 4: And do you think as well, just given the conversation
Speaker 4: and the seriousness of it, that need for levity as well,
Speaker 4: to sort of cut from the noise and actually get
Speaker 4: people to pay attention.
Speaker 1: Do you think, well, the word you might throw around
Speaker 1: is absurd. There's a certain features of the world around
Speaker 1: us which seems silly or absurd or why does this
Speaker 1: happen kind of thing? Especially where humans are involved. And
Speaker 1: a lot of my friends are humans. A lot of
Speaker 1: people I spent time the individuals that talk to me
Speaker 1: in English generally.
Speaker 4: Are that's reassuring, that's reassuring something. So far you never know.
Speaker 4: I mean, there's a scientist never say never, right. I'm
Speaker 4: always fascinated by how people get to this point in time?
Speaker 4: How do people reach a point where they actually talk
Speaker 4: about climate change? And let's be honest, it's a subject
Speaker 4: and topic that most of us would rather really not
Speaker 4: talk about. What was the point at which you reached
Speaker 4: where you actually felt I need to talk about climate change?
Speaker 1: Oh, nineteen eighty eight, climate scientists named James Hanson Jim
Speaker 1: Hanson testified in front of the US Congress.
Speaker 4: There's good old Jim Hanson again. He's been mentioned by
Speaker 4: almost every guest on this show. His testimony to Congress
Speaker 4: in nineteen eighty eight was a seminal moment in climate history.
Speaker 4: He's still a massive presence in climate science today.
Speaker 5: Altogether, this evidence represents a very strong case, in my opinion,
Speaker 5: and that the greenhouse effect has been detected and it
Speaker 5: is changing our climate now.
Speaker 1: And that really raised awareness or motivated me to talk
Speaker 1: about it all the time.
Speaker 2: So I'm so old.
Speaker 1: I'm so old that I took one class from this famous,
Speaker 1: famous astronomer named Carl Sagan, and he talked about what
Speaker 1: he called comparative climatology all the time. This would be
Speaker 1: comparing the climates of Earth, Venus, and Mars. And all
Speaker 1: three of these planets have carbon dioxide, which produces the
Speaker 1: greenhouse effect. But on Venus the greenhouse effect has, as
Speaker 1: they say, run away.
Speaker 6: Every planet with an atmosphere has some degree of a
Speaker 6: greenhouse effect.
Speaker 4: That's the great Carl Sagan and the greenhouse effect he's
Speaker 4: talking about is a process where certain gases trapped the
Speaker 4: heat from the Sun in the fs atmosphere. The greenhouse
Speaker 4: effect helps warm our planet to a habitable temperature if
Speaker 4: we didn't have it. For temperature with plummet to about
Speaker 4: minus fifty degrees. A little bit of greenhouse gas is good,
Speaker 4: but adding more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere is driving
Speaker 4: up the temperature, and that's bad. That's a fundamental issue.
Speaker 6: The most spectacular case by far is the greenhouse effect
Speaker 6: of Venus. It's the nearest planet planet about the same mass,
Speaker 6: radius density as the Earth, but it is spectacularly different
Speaker 6: in several respects, one of which is that the surface
Speaker 6: temperature is about four hundred and seventy degrees centigrade nine
Speaker 6: hundred fahrenheit.
Speaker 4: Doctor Jim Hanson and Carl's sake and our trailblazers. Since
Speaker 4: Bill took Carl's class, he's gone on to teach millions
Speaker 4: and millions of kids, teens, and adults about the wonders
Speaker 4: of science and our Earth, Which is why Bill ninety
Speaker 4: is a perfect person to answer some of the big
Speaker 4: questions I get as a climate scientists. But to be honest,
Speaker 4: I want bills help in answering. Okay, I bought in Amber,
Speaker 4: one of the brilliant producers in last show, to share
Speaker 4: some of the most frequently asked questions we get Amber,
Speaker 4: What have you got for us?
Speaker 7: Hey, Chris, it's pretty exciting to be on the other
Speaker 7: side of the mic, I have to say. So. This
Speaker 7: first one is something we talk a lot about behind
Speaker 7: the scenes. How do we keep ourselves and other people
Speaker 7: motivated to keep working on the climate crisis when honestly,
Speaker 7: the shit is so depressing it feels like it's all
Speaker 7: gone to hell. How do we keep people hopeful instead
Speaker 7: of feeling like we should all just run to the hills.
Speaker 1: The hills probably is not the place to run to,
Speaker 1: by the way now. But and the thing is, I
Speaker 1: say the time, you have to be optimistic. I ain't
Speaker 1: gonna win anything here in the States. It was the
Speaker 1: I guess it was. Is that the World Cup or
Speaker 1: semifinals South Africa versus New Zealand and Rugby was.
Speaker 2: On the telly.
Speaker 1: I didn't stick around to find out how that game
Speaker 1: came out. I got distracted by other sporting events here.
Speaker 1: I'm sure somebody won. Along that line, each of those
Speaker 1: teams believed strongly that they were going to win. They
Speaker 1: were optimistic. They did not go into the match thinking
Speaker 1: that they might lose or that they would lose. Rather,
Speaker 1: you have to think you're going to win the match,
Speaker 1: or you're not going to win it for crying a lot.
Speaker 1: And along that line, we have to make big changes.
Speaker 1: And don't tell me we can't make big changes. My
Speaker 1: grandfather was in France in World War One, and by
Speaker 1: all accounts I wasn't there, But by all accounts he
Speaker 1: rode a horse. Everybody from his generation knew how to
Speaker 1: ride a horse well enough. But twenty five years later,
Speaker 1: when his daughter also known as my mother and her boyfriend,
Speaker 1: also known as my father.
Speaker 2: Were in World War Two.
Speaker 1: Nobody who was serious about it was riding a horse,
Speaker 1: and so everything changed. In twenty five years, everything changed.
Speaker 1: So we got to change everything.
Speaker 2: Let's go.
Speaker 4: I really like that. So what I'm hearing is we
Speaker 4: got to keep obviously basick, but we can actually do
Speaker 4: this and believe it and actually that sense of we
Speaker 4: know we can do a massive change. We've done it before,
Speaker 4: so we just but step all.
Speaker 2: We have to accept that it's a massive change. It's
Speaker 2: not just screwing around.
Speaker 4: It's taking that iedgies or anything like that.
Speaker 1: Hope is not a so both of those teams pad hopes,
Speaker 1: but they also had plans about how to win the match.
Speaker 4: The other thing for me is to find easy ways
Speaker 4: to get activated. It's not enough to say something is
Speaker 4: an issue. We have to be solutions oriented when we
Speaker 4: talk about climate change. So I'll just give an example
Speaker 4: right now in Australia, we've got massive flooding going down
Speaker 4: the East coast. But there's not enough to talk about
Speaker 4: these things. Try to connect the conversation to what we
Speaker 4: can do to solve it. We can't immediately stop the flooding,
Speaker 4: but we can have a conversation about how to make
Speaker 4: our homes more visilient to flooding. And those kinds of
Speaker 4: conversations can make our friends and neighbors feel safe and
Speaker 4: less worried about the future, and that in turn can
Speaker 4: make people feel motivated to actually do something rather than
Speaker 4: wallowing in the worry. All right, Amber, what else ficult fuss?
Speaker 7: Okay, this wants to settle an argument in my household?
Speaker 7: Am I supposed to recycle?
Speaker 5: I've been told.
Speaker 7: By a lot of people that I should just not
Speaker 7: recycle at all because so much of it doesn't actually
Speaker 7: get recycled, which is super disappointing as someone who thoroughly
Speaker 7: washes out all my cans, all my bottles, everything so
Speaker 7: that it can be recycled.
Speaker 4: So is it true?
Speaker 2: No, No, recycling is not a bad idea, not another tool,
Speaker 2: but it's not going to solve everybody's problem.
Speaker 1: It's just there's two things you don't want, or three
Speaker 1: maybe you don't want to waste those resources. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's so much less energy to make aluminum out from
Speaker 1: aluminum cans than it does from box site from the
Speaker 1: stuff you mind I mean, it's what is it ninety
Speaker 1: percent less energy? Maybe ninety five percent, So let's not
Speaker 1: be throwing aluminum cans away. And then the other thing,
Speaker 1: you don't want this material to end up in the ocean.
Speaker 1: It's a huge problem with plastics it and so there's
Speaker 1: a few things about the plastic in the ocean that
Speaker 1: are troubling. First of all, there if you're a sea
Speaker 1: turtle or somebody eating plastic is not nutritious, then there
Speaker 1: is struggling things where the plastic kills you as an
Speaker 1: ocean creature. But the other thing that's not known is
Speaker 1: all these tiny pieces of people nowadays are called microplastics.
Speaker 1: Nobody exactly knows what's gonna what effect that's going to
Speaker 1: have on living things in the ocean. But you got
Speaker 1: to think it's bad. It's intuitibly it's gotta be bad.
Speaker 1: So don't throw stuff away. Let's recycle this remarkable material. Yes,
Speaker 1: but while you're doing all that, you're not cutting greenhouse emissions.
Speaker 1: I mean, or rather a tiny amount they're cutting greenhouse emissions.
Speaker 1: The problem is much much bigger than that. It's all
Speaker 1: the stuff we're in the air.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, I mean, that's ultimately what it is is,
Speaker 4: I mean one of the things that people can do
Speaker 4: day to day lives, basically to try and actually cut
Speaker 4: their emissions.
Speaker 1: Well, I want people to talk about climate change, so
Speaker 1: we do some vot and then.
Speaker 2: Vote yeah, oh yes.
Speaker 1: Combining your errands in the States, the biggest investment you
Speaker 1: can make to reduce or to address climate changes whatever
Speaker 1: car you drive, whatever vehicle you choose.
Speaker 4: To drive, which brings us to our holy fuck segment.
Speaker 4: Every year, Americans drive trillions and millions of miles. That's
Speaker 4: trillions with a T. In the nineteen eighties, Americans drove
Speaker 4: a modest one hundred and thirty five billion miles on
Speaker 4: the interstate. That's just the interstate. But in twenty seventeen
Speaker 4: they drove two one hundred and fifty billion miles the interstate.
Speaker 4: I mean, that's a fucking enormous number. And we're not
Speaker 4: asking you to ditch your car completely, but driving less
Speaker 4: can make a huge difference. By some estimates, if the
Speaker 4: average American drove just thirty miles less per week, that's
Speaker 4: ten percent, it would reduce for US's carbon footprint by
Speaker 4: about one hundred and ten million metric tons of carbon dioxide.
Speaker 4: That's like removing twenty eight coal power plants.
Speaker 1: This is in the US where we have everybody has
Speaker 1: bar and roads or everywhere.
Speaker 2: So pick an efficient car.
Speaker 1: And the reason everybody talks about electric vehicles electric cars
Speaker 1: is because they are inherently more efficient. Well, if the
Speaker 1: electricity comes from a dirty coal fired power plant, you
Speaker 1: got I know, yes, you're right, But the car doesn't
Speaker 1: know in the anwer from morphic sense where the electricity
Speaker 1: comes from. So as we make our electrical generation systems
Speaker 1: renewable from renewable electricity, or if you all want, if
Speaker 1: you all want efficient nuclear power plants, the car doesn't
Speaker 1: know it. The car is still more efficient. And even
Speaker 1: driving around an electric car with electricity made in a
Speaker 1: coal fired power plant, you still come out ahead in
Speaker 1: greenhouse gases because of the efficiency of the car, and
Speaker 1: you're not spreading the pollution all over the place. You
Speaker 1: can potentially control the pollution at the generation source, you know,
Speaker 1: a filter, a bag house they call it.
Speaker 4: Okay. I love Bill's point here, and I think we
Speaker 4: should all focus on it. You often hear the argument
Speaker 4: for the electric cars, it's just shifting which detty carpetsles
Speaker 4: are power comes from. So what's the point. But Bill's
Speaker 4: absolutely right because the efficiencies are so much higher on
Speaker 4: the electric and fossil fuel, everything else being equal, it's
Speaker 4: still saving on cop in the missions.
Speaker 3: We're fucking the future. We're fucking the future.
Speaker 4: This is really fun. I feel like I'm letting some
Speaker 4: good talking points too. What's next?
Speaker 7: Amba, Yeah, I mean, I'm having a great time, So
Speaker 7: bear with me on this one. And I'm just sort
Speaker 7: of playing Devil's advocate here. One thing I sometimes hear
Speaker 7: from people, especially here in Florida, is that the science
Speaker 7: is always changing, that it's not settled, and that we
Speaker 7: really don't know for sure that climate change is human cause.
Speaker 7: So how am I supposed to respond to that kind
Speaker 7: of comment?
Speaker 1: Well, it's settled, amazing. I remember being four years old.
Speaker 1: But one kid says, is so. The other kid says,
Speaker 1: is not? Is not as too?
Speaker 2: Is not? As to you.
Speaker 1: Climate deny or sorry, science is so settled, it's settled
Speaker 1: on top is settled.
Speaker 2: Certainly, ninety seven.
Speaker 1: Percent of the world scientists agree, if not one hundred
Speaker 1: percent with or how about ninety nine point nine with
Speaker 1: a less than point one percent trace percentage of scientists
Speaker 1: who are not on board it's just weird. I mean,
Speaker 1: in science, you seldom get ninety percent agreement on anything.
Speaker 2: I know, right, gravitational constant.
Speaker 1: People don't even probably don't come out with that many
Speaker 1: significant digits come on you guys. So and it's all,
Speaker 1: as I say, all this doubt has been introduced by
Speaker 1: conservative media. And a question I have for conservative me is.
Speaker 2: Why are you doing this? Why are you ignoring the facts?
Speaker 2: What is it?
Speaker 1: And just seeing well they're doing it for the money.
Speaker 1: What money we're all going to if you keep this up.
Speaker 1: So what I say to Fox News and all the
Speaker 1: news Maxis and all these other guys is just cut
Speaker 1: it out, just stop it.
Speaker 4: I've seen you talk, we've climate denis as well. Have
Speaker 4: you ever managed to well, let's call them climate contrarians.
Speaker 4: You have you ever mentioned actually ten any of them
Speaker 4: mound the tool have any of a comeback to you
Speaker 4: and said, oh, I've reflected the way he said, Bill.
Speaker 1: It takes you know, I tell everybody, somebody's not going
Speaker 1: to change his mind her mind.
Speaker 2: Just hearing it once.
Speaker 1: But it is time I think to get back to
Speaker 1: we in the States, we have several, of course nutty
Speaker 1: climate deniers, but I bet each of these two guys
Speaker 1: ten thousand dollars that the decade twenty ten twenty twenty
Speaker 1: would be the hottest on record, and they wouldn't take
Speaker 1: the bet.
Speaker 2: And it was wow, and so they wouldn't. They won't
Speaker 2: take the bet. They know better now.
Speaker 1: I think that's the troubling thing. They're just hoping it's
Speaker 1: not true. But hope's not a plan, people.
Speaker 4: No, it is not a plan. I mean, that was
Speaker 4: the warmest decade on record. Each year is getting harder
Speaker 4: and harder.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 4: You often hear this, You hear this fantastic conspiracy fod
Speaker 4: scientists are in.
Speaker 2: Scientists or in the conspiracy? Have you hung out with
Speaker 2: these guys?
Speaker 4: You can't agree with anything.
Speaker 1: Honestly, I agree on anything, and I would hope one
Speaker 1: of them was rich.
Speaker 4: If I knew, if I had for proof actually this
Speaker 4: was not real, I would be singing it from the
Speaker 4: actual top of the buildings. I would be out there screaming.
Speaker 4: I'd be getting loads of money, maybe a Nobel, maybe
Speaker 4: even a Netflix show bill. You never know, right, you
Speaker 4: never know, but you would be so famous for proving
Speaker 4: it wrong. And I'd love it to be proved wrong. Honestly,
Speaker 4: you'd get a Nobel Prize if you proved it it happened. No,
Speaker 4: it's just sadly it's not.
Speaker 1: I think there are fewer of them than the battle bit. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's right, there's still too many.
Speaker 4: And look, you can't change someone's mind overnight. But that
Speaker 4: first thing that Bill said is so important. Over ninety
Speaker 4: nine percent of scientists agree that the climate crisis is
Speaker 4: human caused, but only twenty five percent of Americans believe
Speaker 4: that there's a scientific consensus on climate change. The bottom
Speaker 4: line is, the carbon pollution from fossil fuels that we're
Speaker 4: putting into the atmosphere is causing the planet to overheat dangerously.
Speaker 4: That science is ironclad.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I feel like it's so important to lay it
Speaker 7: out there like that. Now, this next question is about
Speaker 7: how close we are from all of humanity falling apart.
Speaker 7: I saw a headline that said we only have ten
Speaker 7: to fifteen years to really stop global warming. But something
Speaker 7: I hear from my friends is that it feels like
Speaker 7: we've been seeing these headlines for years. So first, please
Speaker 7: tell me we have more time, And also, why does
Speaker 7: it like we've been hearing these headlines for so long?
Speaker 1: The latest study that I'm familiar with is Michael Mann.
Speaker 1: You know Michaelman the hockey Stick graph, The lead author. Well,
Speaker 1: his latest book is This Fragile Moment, and he, based
Speaker 1: on his latest modeling, points out there's almost certainly not
Speaker 1: going to be a tipping point.
Speaker 4: Just to pause for a second, the hockey stick curve
Speaker 4: is a really important piece of climate change science. Basically,
Speaker 4: the idea is that there was a warm pier during
Speaker 4: the medieval age, and then the Earth cooled down a little,
Speaker 4: and now, thanks to all the carbon we're pumping into
Speaker 4: the atmosphere, we're on the up and up and up.
Speaker 4: It looks like a hockey stick. The thinking is there's
Speaker 4: not necessarily a tipping point, but rather the idea is
Speaker 4: that the Earth will just get hotter and hotter until
Speaker 4: it's totally out of control. Well Bill says it better. Instead,
Speaker 4: it's just.
Speaker 1: Going to get hotter and hotter and miserable or and
Speaker 1: miserable for everybody, or and so it's not like there's
Speaker 1: this moment where it clicks. You can make arguments about
Speaker 1: one and a half degrees celsius that indeed could be
Speaker 1: six years, but it's just if you go beyond, when
Speaker 1: we go beyond one and a half, It'll just lower
Speaker 1: the quality of life for more and more people. It's
Speaker 1: not like there's a light switch and everybody dies. It's
Speaker 1: just going to get worse and worse. Which is let's
Speaker 1: get to work people, doesn't mean let's relax. It means
Speaker 1: let's get to work. In a sense, the situation is
Speaker 1: more desperate than ever. In another sense, we have all
Speaker 1: the time we'd ever need. It just depends how bad
Speaker 1: you want things to get for how many people.
Speaker 4: To me, this kind of mentality is one of the
Speaker 4: biggest obstacles standing in that way this whole We've got
Speaker 4: five years to turn things around. It's honestly, really unhelpful
Speaker 4: for everyone. There's a risk of making people feel like
Speaker 4: we don't have to act now, and if we miss
Speaker 4: that target, is it really all over? It also makes
Speaker 4: people feel like five years from now there'll be some
Speaker 4: gigantic tipping point, but as Bill mentioned, it might not
Speaker 4: play out that way, and when it doesn't, it could
Speaker 4: erode trust in professionals and experts. All right, next one, Amber.
Speaker 7: Okay, we couldn't do this episode without bringing up the
Speaker 7: cowburps and the cow farts. Are cowburps really that bad.
Speaker 7: What are the greenhouse gases we need to be worried about?
Speaker 7: Is it just carbon dioxide? And how about is methane?
Speaker 7: Can you just kind of walk me through all of
Speaker 7: the greenhouse gases.
Speaker 1: Methane is a much much stronger greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.
Speaker 1: The reason everybody talks about carbonoxide is it's so there's
Speaker 1: so much of it that overall it is still the
Speaker 1: most significant one. But and rather, both carbon dioxide and
Speaker 1: methane methane are carbon. The carbon with two oxygen's carbon
Speaker 1: with four hydrogen. They're both carbon. That's why people talk
Speaker 1: about carbon capture, carbonness, carbon net, carbon reduction is because
Speaker 1: both of those greenhouse gases have carbon at the middle
Speaker 1: of the molecule.
Speaker 4: And I think people realize that methane is eighty times
Speaker 4: more heat absorbing a carbon dioxide. So for you know,
Speaker 4: at least for twenty years or so, it's a and
Speaker 4: it breaks down and then its.
Speaker 1: Carbon dioxide with ultrabiolet light from the sun. But it's
Speaker 1: just these got you, guys. These are huge problems.
Speaker 4: Okay, if that sounds a little complicated to you, I'm
Speaker 4: going to break down bills breakdown of this issue.
Speaker 2: What the fuck are you talking about?
Speaker 4: Molecule for molecule methane is so much worse for them
Speaker 4: farm than carbon. Dark side oil gas and coal mining
Speaker 4: all produce as shitloads of me fane gas and a
Speaker 4: lot of it comes from leaks. But as we know,
Speaker 4: those farting belch and cows are also at fault. Farming
Speaker 4: is thought to be one of the largest sources of
Speaker 4: me fane gas getting into the atmosphere. The good news
Speaker 4: is we can get me fane levels down and fast
Speaker 4: if we stop using fossil fuels, we can turn off
Speaker 4: a massive tap of mefane. What the fucking talking about?
Speaker 7: Okay, Bill and Chris, let's talk about the new technologies.
Speaker 7: This is everything from the vitamins food composter I keep
Speaker 7: seeing on my Instagram ads to the giant machines that
Speaker 7: are supposed to suck CO two out of the air.
Speaker 7: Are the machines going to save us?
Speaker 2: Well?
Speaker 1: This would be the idea that we would manage the
Speaker 1: climate of the planet. Top down technocrats would think deep
Speaker 1: thoughts and change the atmosphere, change something radically in the
Speaker 1: top down fashion. And the famous thing that people talk
Speaker 1: about is putting a compound of sulfur very very high
Speaker 1: in the atmosphere, stratosphere sulfur which would reflect which is yellow,
Speaker 1: which would reflect sunlight back into space. And this nominally
Speaker 1: would work, they say. And furthermore, it would produce diffuse
Speaker 1: light like a cloudy day, and farm plants, agricultural crops
Speaker 1: respond better to diffuse light than direct light. Really, okay, anyway,
Speaker 1: who's going to be in charge of that? Who's going
Speaker 1: to put these airplanes in the stratosphere spewing sulfur compounds.
Speaker 2: Who's going to control that?
Speaker 1: We're going to put it up over the UK, over
Speaker 1: Africa and it's going.
Speaker 2: To blend and blow around the world. WHOA Everybody's going
Speaker 2: to be affected? Is that good or bad?
Speaker 1: But with that in mind, I encourage everybody, voters of
Speaker 1: all ages, to think of things of the world, a
Speaker 1: humankind's relationship to Earth differently than we have thought about
Speaker 1: it for centuries. And that is we are in charge. Now,
Speaker 1: this was not a job that we went applying for.
Speaker 1: But humans, the human race is so big, there's so
Speaker 1: many of us breathing and burning this atmosphere so aggressively
Speaker 1: that we are changing the climate of an entire planet.
Speaker 1: Nobody you can argue We didn't mean to do that,
Speaker 1: but we're doing it, so.
Speaker 2: We have to.
Speaker 1: So when it comes to geo engineering, it is nominally
Speaker 1: a nutty idea to think that you could spew enough
Speaker 1: stuff in the atmosphere to control the climate of a planet.
Speaker 1: And if you reflect all the sunlight back into space,
Speaker 1: wouldn't that screw things up? Wouldn't that be a bad
Speaker 1: just inherent there's less heat, less sunlight. Just intuitively, it
Speaker 1: seems like a bad idea, but it may get people argue,
Speaker 1: it may get to a situation that's all we got
Speaker 1: that aside.
Speaker 2: Do not count on it.
Speaker 1: Now, Look at all that we have done to the
Speaker 1: climate by accident.
Speaker 2: And then who you're going to put in charge Vladimir.
Speaker 1: Putin, Like, who's going to be in charge of doing
Speaker 1: sulfur into the atmosphere?
Speaker 2: Anyway, you guys, geoengineering is not going to solve a problem.
Speaker 1: On the other hand, this idea that nature is separate
Speaker 1: from us is that's an old idea.
Speaker 2: We can't do it.
Speaker 1: When we go camping in the wilderness, we're going just
Speaker 1: to a different part of the planet that we control.
Speaker 4: I totally agree with Bill that these big pie in
Speaker 4: the sky geoengineering ideas are kind of scary and likely
Speaker 4: to introduce all sorts of problems we can't predict, not
Speaker 4: to mention, they raise a lot of forny political questions.
Speaker 4: That said, I do want to touch on what Amber
Speaker 4: said about the giant machines that suck carbon dioxide out
Speaker 4: of the atmosphere. These machines, along with other natural methods
Speaker 4: of capturing carbon, like in coastal restoration projects, might actually
Speaker 4: save us at this point. We need to slash our
Speaker 4: emissions while also removing a carbon we've already pumped into
Speaker 4: the atmosphere, and there are a lot of cool innovators
Speaker 4: working on projects that do just this. That's what we
Speaker 4: mean when we say carbon capture.
Speaker 3: We're fucking the future. We're a fucking the future.
Speaker 4: Bill sees this has all hands on deck situation. He
Speaker 4: says we need to prioritize free things.
Speaker 1: Three big ideas clean water, renewably produce electricity, and access
Speaker 1: to the internet for everybody in the world.
Speaker 2: When you have.
Speaker 1: Access to the internet, you can have education. When you
Speaker 1: have education, you can raise the standard of living of
Speaker 1: women and girls. When we raise the stand of living
Speaker 1: of women and girls, everybody is better off easy to say,
Speaker 1: hard to do.
Speaker 4: You might wonder what the hell has to do with
Speaker 4: the climate crisis, but it actually has everything to do
Speaker 4: with it. We talked about this in the Sabrina Elber episode,
Speaker 4: but for gist of it is, prioritizing women and girls
Speaker 4: has an outsize impact on our world and for the better.
Speaker 2: I would invest in electricity transmission. Someone got to do.
Speaker 1: When I say invest, I'm not just talking about the
Speaker 1: engineering and the towers and the lines and stuff, but
Speaker 1: the legal right of ways and the deals made and
Speaker 1: the financing has all got to be figured out. And
Speaker 1: then I am very interested. Yes, let's continue to have
Speaker 1: some people messing around with making nuclear fission less scary
Speaker 1: where the public will accept it in a way they
Speaker 1: won't accept it right now. But also I want people
Speaker 1: us it to invest. I'm not joking you guys to
Speaker 1: invest in nuclear fusion. There's so many organizations universities working
Speaker 1: on this right now.
Speaker 4: This isn't an episode of Bill n I, the Science Guy.
Speaker 4: But you watched it in middle school when you had
Speaker 4: a substitute teacher in for the day, So we're not
Speaker 4: going to get too vol into a nucleifusion. But what
Speaker 4: you should know about nucleiffusion is that if we can
Speaker 4: do it, we would create unlimited energy without fossil fuels.
Speaker 1: I think the next less than twenty years somebody's going
Speaker 1: to figure this out, because we can now control magnetic
Speaker 1: fields with much faster computers than we ever had in
Speaker 1: previous decades. And controlling a magnetic field would enable, hypothetically,
Speaker 1: theoretically enable you to control the.
Speaker 2: Plasma. This is a gas where all.
Speaker 1: The electrons are off on their own, they're not associated
Speaker 1: with any atoms. So anyway that's in the background. But
Speaker 1: clean water, noble electra and so let's get swind and
Speaker 1: solar electrical storage, less efficient, heavier, cheaper batteries in the
Speaker 1: basements of big buildings that don't rely on lithium and.
Speaker 2: Get or done.
Speaker 1: Then also world peace would be good because all the
Speaker 1: wars that are going on, you're just inefficient people just
Speaker 1: through in the States, just around the expression supply chains,
Speaker 1: your supply chain, and you disrupt everything and you it
Speaker 1: has knock on effects worldwide.
Speaker 2: And so this is all stuff we got to get done.
Speaker 1: Let's go, let's get her done.
Speaker 4: And so that leads to very much to the last
Speaker 4: bit about what can people do meaningfully to make action themselves.
Speaker 1: Become politically active in your community and advocate for climate change.
Speaker 1: Vote for people who are going to address climate change.
Speaker 1: And here in the US, if you're a third party candidate,
Speaker 1: don't do it.
Speaker 6: You know.
Speaker 1: I used to say the most important election in my
Speaker 1: lifetime was the year two thousand when in the US
Speaker 1: George Bush became president, even though al Gore had more.
Speaker 2: Votes popular votes.
Speaker 1: This is an old system, very well intending founding fathers
Speaker 1: that things out. It's outlived its usefulness, the system. Anyway,
Speaker 1: It's important election ever in history is twenty twenty four.
Speaker 2: That's it.
Speaker 1: Whether or not you live in the US. Yes, this
Speaker 1: is the most important election. You can hate the US
Speaker 1: whatever it is, but the US is so influential globally,
Speaker 1: It's most influential culture. And so this is it, people,
Speaker 1: twenty twenty four?
Speaker 2: Is it? Do you want to talk about turning points?
Speaker 2: This is the point of turning.
Speaker 4: Bill Nye, the science guy, the man is a legend
Speaker 4: for a reason. I mean, he told so many of
Speaker 4: us about science, but he's now teaching us about how
Speaker 4: to teach others about the science of climate change. I
Speaker 4: wanted to bring back Maggie Beds discuss how we can
Speaker 4: take action on Bill Nye's three Big Ideas?
Speaker 3: What fuck can I do?
Speaker 4: Hey, Maggie, Hey Chris Well, I don't.
Speaker 5: Know if I could follow Bill, but I will do
Speaker 5: my best.
Speaker 4: I'm surely he'll be pretty What of your golfers is wee? Maggie, Chris?
Speaker 5: I was thinking about how Bill so effectively breaks down
Speaker 5: complicated ideas into something easy and fun. So in that spirit,
Speaker 5: our action this week is to lead with joy. Yes,
Speaker 5: the climate crisis is extremely serious, and so bringing in
Speaker 5: a little humor to the conversation helps us reach people
Speaker 5: and make complicated topics more easily digestible. So if you
Speaker 5: would like to try to bring more humor and more
Speaker 5: effective communication techniques into conversations about climate, there is a
Speaker 5: great article that we will put in the show notes.
Speaker 5: Check it out. But it all leads up to the
Speaker 5: big takeaway here. Instead of focusing on the doom we
Speaker 5: might experience, let's try to envision the better world we
Speaker 5: could have. Let's all try to be.
Speaker 4: More like Bill Gosh. I love that, Maggie, thanks so
Speaker 4: much on the stay. And that's what the fuck you
Speaker 4: can do for this week?
Speaker 7: What fuck? Can I do.
Speaker 4: Oh fuck, that's all for this episode. Next time, on
Speaker 4: Fucking the Future, we talked to Glennis Humphrey, a fire
Speaker 4: a cologist who wants us to use fire to prevent wildfires.
Speaker 8: What we're seeing is different from the past.
Speaker 5: We've seen basically.
Speaker 8: A change in the intensities of fires, the frequencies of
Speaker 8: fire that we haven't actually seen before.
Speaker 5: When you see a change where.
Speaker 8: Fires occurring where it didn't occur before, or it's occurring
Speaker 8: at a much bigger scale than it did occur before,
Speaker 8: I think that's what's alerting us that something is off.
Speaker 8: That's a warning to say things are changing because it's
Speaker 8: different from.
Speaker 4: The past until then. I'm Chris Turney signing off from Sydney, Australia.
Speaker 4: Thanks for joining me and I'm Fucking the Future.
Speaker 3: Fucking the Future.
Speaker 4: I'm Fucking the Future is produced by Imagine Audio and
Speaker 4: Awfully Nice for iHeart Podcasts and hosted by me Chris Turney.
Speaker 4: The show is written by Meredith Brian. I'm Fucking the
Speaker 4: Future is produced by Amber von Shassen and Rene Colvert.
Speaker 4: Ron Howard Brian Grazer, Carral Welker and Nathan Chloke are
Speaker 4: the executive producers from Imagine Audio. Jesse Burton and Katie
Speaker 4: Hodges are the executive producers from Awfully Nice. Sound design
Speaker 4: and mixing by Evan Arnette, original music by Lilly Hayden,
Speaker 4: and producing services by Peter McGuigan. Sam Swinnerton wrote our
Speaker 4: theme and all those fun jingles. If you enjoyed this episode,
Speaker 4: be sure to rate and review Unfucking the Future on
Speaker 4: Apple Podcasts or whether you get your podcasts