Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome back to Drilled. I'm Amy Westerveldt. I
Speaker 1: just got back from the cop in Brazil last week.
Speaker 1: We ran quite a few stories on it. If you
Speaker 1: are interested to know some more details about what happened,
Speaker 1: those are all at drilled dot Media. Today we're bringing
Speaker 1: you an episode of the cop Out Podcast from Dana Fisher.
Speaker 1: She's a sociologist that we've had on the show before.
Speaker 1: She's particularly an expert on activism. She's written a ton
Speaker 1: of books on this subject, most recently Saving Ourselves from
Speaker 1: Climate Shocks to Climate Action. Dana has been doing this
Speaker 1: series all around the cop and how and why it's
Speaker 1: broken and what can be done about it. It's very
Speaker 1: very good.
Speaker 2: Check it out.
Speaker 1: We'll put a link in the show notes. In this episode,
Speaker 1: she had myself and doctor Catherine Hayho on to talk
Speaker 1: about climate communication and what happened at COP and what
Speaker 1: we can take from it all. I had a great
Speaker 1: time talking to them both, and I hope you enjoy
Speaker 1: the conversation here it.
Speaker 2: Is Welcome to the cop Out Podcast. I'm Dana Fisher,
Speaker 2: the director of the Center for Environment, Community and Equity
Speaker 2: at American University. This is an opportunity to have apocalyptically
Speaker 2: optimistic climate conversations. And there's lots to talk about today,
Speaker 2: and I am so happy and privileged to be joined
Speaker 2: by these amazing women who do such amazing work. And
Speaker 2: I just thought we would start. I mean, so just
Speaker 2: as a wrap up here, COP is winding down. Literally
Speaker 2: the blue zone set on fire yesterday, perhaps assigned from
Speaker 2: you now, from like from from this, from the gods perhaps.
Speaker 2: And then today the draft text for the final text
Speaker 2: coming out of COP was released, which made no mention
Speaker 2: to fossil fuel phase out, ignored completely the eighty some
Speaker 2: countries that were actually pushing for a fossil fuel phase out.
Speaker 2: So we have lots to talk about. To begin, what
Speaker 2: I thought maybe would be good to do is for
Speaker 2: you each to take a moment to introduce yourselves. You're
Speaker 2: both climate communicators in really different ways, and you have
Speaker 2: really different backgrounds. So maybe talk a little bit about
Speaker 2: how you came to do the kind of climate communication
Speaker 2: you do, just as a start, and of course we'll
Speaker 2: get into COP, we'll get into climate change and the
Speaker 2: mess we're in, but you know, just a little background first, Catherine,
Speaker 2: you want to start.
Speaker 3: Sure, Yes, I love that you talking to Amy and
Speaker 3: I both because we both came from totally different directions.
Speaker 3: So I am a climate scientist, and I actually started
Speaker 3: my career in astrophysics, which is a fascinating feel to
Speaker 3: be in if there's no other dumpster fires going on
Speaker 3: in the world. And so for me, my first inflection
Speaker 3: point was when I took a class on climate change
Speaker 3: as a breadth requirement, and that was where I learned
Speaker 3: that climate change is. I already knew it was real,
Speaker 3: but I didn't realize it was so urgent. I didn't
Speaker 3: realize it was affecting our lives so personally, and I
Speaker 3: didn't realize it was so unfair in that it is
Speaker 3: disproportionately affecting the people who've done the least to cause
Speaker 3: the problem in the first place. Whether it's the fact
Speaker 3: that the richest one percent in the world today produced
Speaker 3: double the carbon emissions of the poorest fifty percent, or
Speaker 3: whether it's the fact that a child born today will
Speaker 3: experience so many disasters over their lifetime as a result
Speaker 3: of the choices that our generation and previous generations made
Speaker 3: that they weren't part of in the first place. So
Speaker 3: for me, my first inflection point was just realizing I
Speaker 3: need to do something about this, and I have a
Speaker 3: scientific skill set, so I will become a climate scientist.
Speaker 3: It turns out the same physics and astronomy I was
Speaker 3: learning is just what you need to do climate modeling,
Speaker 3: because you know it's your's atmosphere, non linear fluid dynamics,
Speaker 3: radiative transfer. So that was my first inflection point. And
Speaker 3: then a number of years later after becoming a climate scientist,
Speaker 3: after getting married to a fellow academic who you know,
Speaker 3: when you're an academic, the dream is that you have
Speaker 3: positions in the same place, and so he was at
Speaker 3: one place, I was at a different place, and then
Speaker 3: he got offered a position in Texas and he sort
Speaker 3: of said, okay, well if you give if you know,
Speaker 3: if you give my spouse a position, we'll both come.
Speaker 3: And we both thought, oh, there's no chance of that.
Speaker 3: Well they did. So that's how I ended up in Texas.
Speaker 3: And then within just a couple of months of ending
Speaker 3: up in Texas, and I was already doing research that
Speaker 3: was intentionally very policy relevant because I wanted to inform
Speaker 3: good policy decisions on climate. Within a few months of
Speaker 3: arriving in Texas, it turns out I was the first
Speaker 3: climate scientist at the university. I was the only climate
Speaker 3: scientist within literally a five hundred mile radius. I plotted
Speaker 3: it out, and so I started to get invitations to
Speaker 3: speak to community groups who were, you know, confused about
Speaker 3: climate change, weren't sure what to think, had heard a
Speaker 3: lot on both saws, and they're like, oh, well, here's
Speaker 3: a climate scientist, let's ask her. And so that experience
Speaker 3: really taught me. And I still do almost one hundred
Speaker 3: talks a year these days, most of them virtual. Those
Speaker 3: experiences taught me that having conversations about not just that
Speaker 3: what I think is the head, which is the facts,
Speaker 3: the data, the ice sheets, the polar bears, but making
Speaker 3: the heart connection my family, my home, the places I love,
Speaker 3: the people and the things I love, is so important,
Speaker 3: and that in itself isn't even enough. We also need
Speaker 3: to make the heart to hand connection because today, in
Speaker 3: twenty twenty five, most people are worried about climate change,
Speaker 3: but most people feel there's nothing they can do about it,
Speaker 3: so they do nothing, and they're actually starting to dissociate
Speaker 3: from the issue as a defense mechanism as the situation
Speaker 3: gets worse. So how do we connect the head to
Speaker 3: the heart to the hands. Well, the first and easiest
Speaker 3: way to do it is through communicating, not like lining
Speaker 3: up all the IPCC reports and just whacking people upside
Speaker 3: the head with them, but rather starting the conversation with
Speaker 3: what people care about themselves. And I've started conversations based on,
Speaker 3: you know, the fact that we're both parents, or we
Speaker 3: both live in the same place, or we both enjoy
Speaker 3: chocolate and that's being affected by climate change, or I've
Speaker 3: even had conversations if we started over the fact that
Speaker 3: we both knit, and then connecting that to hands what
Speaker 3: we can do. So that is what led me to
Speaker 3: my communication journey, because I started to realize that the
Speaker 3: biggest barrier between where we are today and that better
Speaker 3: future that we all need is in addressing the climate
Speaker 3: crisis is understanding what we can do about it and
Speaker 3: getting people to actually be active about doing it. And
Speaker 3: that's not going to be answered by more scientific journal articles.
Speaker 3: That's going to be answered by having conversations.
Speaker 2: Thank you, that's really great. Sorry my computer was being
Speaker 2: annoying for a second. Amy, Why don't you give us
Speaker 2: your journey?
Speaker 1: My gosh, Well, I so any people do. I started
Speaker 1: I like The first thing I ever did remotely related
Speaker 1: to climate was just because I needed to pay the
Speaker 1: rent and it was due in two weeks. And I
Speaker 1: had a friend who was an engineer at an engineering
Speaker 1: firm and he was like, well, we have this really
Speaker 1: boring copywriting job that needs to be done next week
Speaker 1: where we need someone to write case studies about some
Speaker 1: of our projects. And I was like, okay, fine, I'm
Speaker 1: in thank you, and I did. And one of them
Speaker 1: was a project they had done for Shell where they'd
Speaker 1: been asked to re engineer offshore oil platforms to deal
Speaker 1: with sea level rise. And this was like a project
Speaker 1: that they had done in the nineties, and I was like,
Speaker 1: that's interesting because I feel like Shell wasn't even really
Speaker 1: acknowledging climate change in the nineties, and so I like
Speaker 1: looked into it. And I was freelancing at the time,
Speaker 1: so I was like, this is an interesting story. I'm
Speaker 1: going to pitch it to an environmental magazine, and I did,
Speaker 1: and then they hired me to do some other stuff,
Speaker 1: and I sort of just like became obsessed with this
Speaker 1: power structure, so totally not the science side of things.
Speaker 1: I was like, that's unfair, These big, powerful companies had
Speaker 1: this information and they were preparing their own industry to
Speaker 1: deal with this issue, and at the same time they
Speaker 1: were telling everybody else not to worry about it, and
Speaker 1: like how did that happen? And then I just sort
Speaker 1: of went from there into like, I very obsessively researched
Speaker 1: climate denial, and then there again was like this is
Speaker 1: a dumb strategy. Why did it work so well? So
Speaker 1: I got obsessed with pr and the whole Like, I
Speaker 1: don't know the way that the fossil fuel industry, way
Speaker 1: before climate change really set in place some fundamental ideas
Speaker 1: about how the environment works and what is nature, and
Speaker 1: how the economy works and all of those kinds of things.
Speaker 1: I have just kind of been down that same rabbit
Speaker 1: hole ever since.
Speaker 4: And at a certain point, when the.
Speaker 1: X on New story came out, and you know, reporters
Speaker 1: at Inside Climate News and the Los Angeles Times and
Speaker 1: Columbia Journalism School published on all of these documents that
Speaker 1: came from inside XON, where the scientists had been trying
Speaker 1: to warn executives about what their product could do and
Speaker 1: you know, how things might change in the decades to come.
Speaker 4: I felt like I wanted to hear from.
Speaker 1: Those scientists themselves, so and I thought that like I wanted,
Speaker 1: I don't know, I was just like, man, like more,
Speaker 1: more people who don't already care about climate need to
Speaker 1: hear this story. So I went out to talk to
Speaker 1: those guys and spent a lot of time like hanging
Speaker 1: out with long retired scientists and having them read documents
Speaker 1: to me and tell me about, you know, their science
Speaker 1: and all of that kind of stuff.
Speaker 4: And that got me obsessed with podcasting.
Speaker 1: So now I have a podcast that I still do
Speaker 1: reporting and I'm still just obsessed with this like hijacking
Speaker 1: of the information ecosystem and policymaking mechanisms by this one
Speaker 1: very powerful industry and a lot of their friends.
Speaker 2: So yeah, they're famous and fancy friends exactly. I mean,
Speaker 2: it's funny. So I never really thought about I mean,
Speaker 2: so I came to climate just because when I was
Speaker 2: doing my PhD, I needed a case study that I
Speaker 2: could study internationally and also at the national level. And
Speaker 2: it was when the Kyoto Protocol was being written in finalize.
Speaker 2: It's so interesting and it was like a perfect case
Speaker 2: for the political questions I was asking. So I actually
Speaker 2: came at it from the politics, and I was. I
Speaker 2: had this grant in Japan and my advisor who was
Speaker 2: who did the Asia Integrated Model for the IPCC, Maria Tunayuki,
Speaker 2: he was like, you should do climate and I'm like, hm, oh,
Speaker 2: this is good idea. This is a good idea. And
Speaker 2: so it was just funny because it all started just
Speaker 2: because it was a good case study for the kinds
Speaker 2: of stuff I was studying. And then well, and then
Speaker 2: down the rabbit, how we go, and here we are, Yeah,
Speaker 2: twenty five years later or whatever, right, more than that now?
Speaker 4: Yeah, So I guess.
Speaker 2: It is funny that you all come from this from
Speaker 2: very different places, but here we are. And so the
Speaker 2: question I have for you next.
Speaker 3: And it all happened in the nineties, which is when
Speaker 3: climate change was not a politicized issue.
Speaker 2: At that time.
Speaker 3: The disinformation engine was just starting to ramp up the impacts.
Speaker 3: The signal was just starting to emerge from the noise
Speaker 3: at that point. But if you look for the signal,
Speaker 3: it was there. And so each of us, for different reasons,
Speaker 3: came into contact with the signal in the nineties and
Speaker 3: that was powerful enough to basically change the entire trajectory
Speaker 3: of our careers.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's fascinating, very true.
Speaker 2: I mean I did go to meetings with the Cooler
Speaker 2: Heads coalition who were part of the case for my
Speaker 2: dissertaine and ended up getting kicked out of their meetings
Speaker 2: because they were definitely birthing some misinformation back then. But
Speaker 2: it was very early days, right, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 3: But I interned at Exon for my master's degree. I
Speaker 3: actually worked on with their full.
Speaker 2: Did they pay? Was it a paid internship at least?
Speaker 2: I certainly hope so.
Speaker 3: Yes, it was paid, and we published peer reviewed papers
Speaker 3: at my research that were you know, with some they
Speaker 3: have some really good scientists. Obviously their scientists have known
Speaker 3: about this and been telling the company about this for decades.
Speaker 3: And what we were studying was related to Kyoto. We
Speaker 3: were studying how when you're talking about reducing emissions of
Speaker 3: greenhouse gases, you have to reduce all of the gases,
Speaker 3: not just CO two, and methane is one of the
Speaker 3: ones that is really powerful, really potent, is responsible for
Speaker 3: somewhere between about sixteen eighteen percent of long term warming
Speaker 3: and a much greater proportion of short term warming. And
Speaker 3: methane is real call that natural gas. Even I know,
Speaker 3: I know FOSCIL gas is what we now call it.
Speaker 3: Massive amounts of it are released during the extraction of coal,
Speaker 3: oil and leaking from gas. So that is a very
Speaker 3: important research area. But it rapidly became obvious, and even
Speaker 3: then what we were saying back in the nineties was
Speaker 3: true with Kyoto, and it's much more true today. There's
Speaker 3: no one thing that if we just did this one thing,
Speaker 3: it would fix it. It was very obvious even then that
Speaker 3: reducing methane was something that we could do super fast
Speaker 3: to really get a handle on this issue while we
Speaker 3: were working on the longer term CO two reductions. And
Speaker 3: if we had done that back in the nineteen nineties,
Speaker 3: we had been a much better spot than the are today.
Speaker 2: For sure. Yeah, I mean that Actually, what I was
Speaker 2: going to ask you both is a foll up question,
Speaker 2: is just how you ended up communicating about this stuff
Speaker 2: specifically within the policy world, or like communicating two politicians
Speaker 2: communicating about politicians that kind of policy nexus. Amy you
Speaker 2: want to go to it, well, I mean, if it's
Speaker 2: a stumper, we don't have to go there.
Speaker 4: It's no, no, it's okay.
Speaker 1: The thing I mean, the main I would say, like
Speaker 1: that the main input that that we have had on
Speaker 1: policy is documents. It's like like giving documents to senate
Speaker 1: investigators or to chiefs of staff who are looking at,
Speaker 1: you know, particular issues, or like someone will contact me
Speaker 1: and be like, do you know, do you know if
Speaker 1: there's any evidence of you know, this PR firm doing
Speaker 1: anything and this thing blah blah blah, and I'll send them.
Speaker 4: Uh oh, I'm hearing an echo.
Speaker 2: Now you sound fine from here?
Speaker 1: Okay, great, So yeah, that's the that's the main thing
Speaker 1: for me. And then I know there are some I
Speaker 1: have like met some policy makers who say that they
Speaker 1: have either like listened to the podcast or read stuff
Speaker 1: and shared it with other people and things like that.
Speaker 1: But I think in terms of like a actually communicating
Speaker 1: things that are useful to policy makers, it's it's more
Speaker 1: that like we go find documents.
Speaker 2: Or people will communicate about policy making to the public,
Speaker 2: which they also has that boomerang effect in terms of
Speaker 2: then changing potentially public opinion or political pressure.
Speaker 4: Right, Yes, that's true, that's truly important.
Speaker 1: I was going to say too, that we do so
Speaker 1: often like for whatever reason, I don't know how this
Speaker 1: still happens, but not infrequently. I will be interviewing someone
Speaker 1: who you know is like an operative of some kind,
Speaker 1: and they will just like very explicitly say what they're
Speaker 1: trying to do in terms of like hijacking policy too.
Speaker 4: I'm like, wow, great, thank you for being by job easy.
Speaker 2: There's a lot of doing deep research there.
Speaker 1: Huh.
Speaker 3: It's it's like okay, yeah, Gilver Platter fill it up.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: In fact, actually, I mean even at this COP I
Speaker 1: was at the cop and there were several of these
Speaker 1: like side events that different industry groups were having where
Speaker 1: they were just I guess they just thought they were
Speaker 1: talking amongst themselves, and we're saying some a lot of
Speaker 1: the quiet parts were getting said out loud.
Speaker 2: Why not travel all the way to Brazil to have
Speaker 2: a private meeting? Yeah, exactly, why not with the journalist?
Speaker 4: Yeah, I was like, this is open to the press.
Speaker 4: You guys like, I don't know.
Speaker 3: It's well, it's a measure I think of. They're confidence.
Speaker 3: When people are very confident they're going to win, they
Speaker 3: don't care, and that's really what we're seeing.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Well I love this question, yes, because that's actually the
Speaker 3: very first thing that I wanted to do when I
Speaker 3: decided to go switch from astrophysics to climate science is
Speaker 3: I wanted to make sure I was doing policy relevant
Speaker 3: research because I'm a huge believer in informed decision making.
Speaker 3: I know that our human brains typically do not make
Speaker 3: rational decisions, but I do hope that and I know
Speaker 3: there is sign of an evidence that when we make
Speaker 3: collective decisions with many more people and interests at the table,
Speaker 3: we have a tendency to make better decisions. And those decisions,
Speaker 3: if they're informed by science and by information, can improve.
Speaker 3: And so when I went to look for an advisor,
Speaker 3: because I was finishing up my undergrad degree and going
Speaker 3: on to graduate school, I specifically looked for an advisor
Speaker 3: who did policy bolevant research. And I found this wonderful
Speaker 3: man who's like my academic father. I still talk to
Speaker 3: him on a regular basis. His name is Don Webbles.
Speaker 3: He's at the University of Illinois, and he had done
Speaker 3: his initial research on developing metrics to measure the ozone
Speaker 3: depleting substances so that you could compare how much worse
Speaker 3: or better different ones were. And he worked with the
Speaker 3: FAA and with DuPont and with the EPA to actually
Speaker 3: put the pair the Montreal Protocol limiting ozone depleting substanses
Speaker 3: into effect. And he actually tested all these new chemicals
Speaker 3: that the organizations were coming up with to replace the
Speaker 3: chemicals we used to use in our spray hands and
Speaker 3: even our Nike air shoes of all things, and our
Speaker 3: air conditioners and our fridges to figure out better ones.
Speaker 3: And he had just turned his attention to looking at
Speaker 3: comparing different greenhouse gases too, And so I immediately figured,
Speaker 3: I want to work with this person who's doing policy
Speaker 3: relevant research. Some work I did for my master's degree
Speaker 3: which was literally looking at how much more affordable it
Speaker 3: would be for the US to meet its Kyoto targets
Speaker 3: if it included all the greenhouse gases, not just carbon
Speaker 3: And that work was actually presented to Congress in part
Speaker 3: of the debates over whether the US should be a
Speaker 3: signatory to the Kyuto Protocol. So at that point I
Speaker 3: was like.
Speaker 2: Almost that as part of the bird Hegel resolution when
Speaker 2: they were debating that is that when it was, Catherine,
Speaker 2: I'm just curious.
Speaker 3: Goodness, I actually don't know. That's a good question. I
Speaker 3: know I remember when the date when it was, but
Speaker 3: I don't remember what part of the resolution it was.
Speaker 3: But yeah, but it was definitely.
Speaker 2: Part of it.
Speaker 3: And so at that point I was like, oh, my gosh,
Speaker 3: this is awesome. You know, this is exactly what I
Speaker 3: want to do. Well, then, as you know, all efforts
Speaker 3: to pass mitigation legislation in the US just sort.
Speaker 2: Of went like this.
Speaker 3: And at the same time, I ended up getting pulled
Speaker 3: into after my master's and before my PHG, ended up
Speaker 3: getting pulled into a regional climate assessment. And that was
Speaker 3: where I learned that people who were making decisions on
Speaker 3: how to protect nature and people from climate change were
Speaker 3: working with future information that was years and even decades
Speaker 3: out of date. It was the equivalent to me trying
Speaker 3: to drive down the street without my glasses, and my
Speaker 3: glasses are very thick, like I would just see sort
Speaker 3: of a hazy outline, and if I saw a light,
Speaker 3: I don't think i'd even know if it was a
Speaker 3: stoplight or not. So that was sort of the way
Speaker 3: that people were twenty thirty years ago working with climate information,
Speaker 3: and so that's what made me decide to sort of
Speaker 3: refocus my trajectory to look at climate impacts, and especially
Speaker 3: back then, climate impacts were being qualified as the middle
Speaker 3: of the road scenario. This is what's going to happen
Speaker 3: no matter what. Well, that is a completely disempowering perspective,
Speaker 3: because if it's going to happen no matter what, then
Speaker 3: you know, who cares. We'll just adapt. But what I
Speaker 3: knew is I knew that our choices made a difference,
Speaker 3: and now today we know that our choices make the
Speaker 3: biggest difference in the future. And so I thought, well,
Speaker 3: what if not only we generated high resolution information. So
Speaker 3: if you're working, for example, in the Midwest US, you
Speaker 3: don't have like one grid cell covering the whole US,
Speaker 3: you actually have information for Chicago versus Milwalk, versus Minneapolis,
Speaker 3: versus the other sides of the lake in Michigan because
Speaker 3: the climate is very different in all those places. What
Speaker 3: if you not only had very granular information, but you
Speaker 3: also had information on what's going to happen depending on
Speaker 3: the choices we make. So what's going to happen for
Speaker 3: a lower versus a higher scenario? So I said this
Speaker 3: to the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Ecological Society
Speaker 3: of America that we're sponsoring this Great Lakes Assessment that
Speaker 3: I was working on, and they said, well, it's too
Speaker 3: late to do it now, But what if we do
Speaker 3: another one for California, which is one of the world's
Speaker 3: biggest economies, and we look at higher versus lower emissions there,
Speaker 3: would you like to be in charge of getting that
Speaker 3: information for us? And so I, being very young and naive,
Speaker 3: said yes, of course, I would love to do that.
Speaker 3: And then then I realized that at that point, the
Speaker 3: global climate models had not even run the higher scenarios
Speaker 3: because physical climate scientists work with physical uncertainty, and physical
Speaker 3: uncertainty is what we call Gaussian or a normal distribution,
Speaker 3: which means it looks like this, which means that the
Speaker 3: middle is more likely to be accurate than the tales.
Speaker 3: So physical scientists had applied this same principle to future scenarios,
Speaker 3: and they had said, oh, well, we'll just run the
Speaker 3: middle scenarios because we don't have infinite computer time in
Speaker 3: the middle scenarios are most likely. But human behavior is
Speaker 3: not Gaussian. Human behavior is completely unpredictable. If anything, it
Speaker 3: might be like, well, we're heading for this scenario and
Speaker 3: then oh shit, look how bad it is. We will
Speaker 3: quickly head for this scenario. So we didn't even have
Speaker 3: the global climate model simulations to look at the higher scenarios.
Speaker 3: Except for in the UK. They were the only ones
Speaker 3: who'd done it. So I had to go cap in hand,
Speaker 3: and this is me, you know, in the nineties as
Speaker 3: a graduate student, go cap in hand to some of
Speaker 3: the biggest modeling organizations in the US, the National Center
Speaker 3: for Atmospheric Research, the Geophysical Fluidynamics Lab, and ask them,
Speaker 3: out of the goodness of their heart, if they would
Speaker 3: be willing to run the higher scenarios. And they did,
Speaker 3: and so for California. In two thousand and three, we
Speaker 3: published the first impact study in all of North America
Speaker 3: and one of the very first in the entire world
Speaker 3: world that actually quantified the difference between if we address
Speaker 3: climate change at scale versus if we don't, what will
Speaker 3: be the impacts on your water supply, your snowpack, your
Speaker 3: wine grapes, your central valley crop harvests, the wildfire risk.
Speaker 3: We actually quantified the impact of human decisions. And two
Speaker 3: years later, the Governor of California, actually one and a
Speaker 3: half years later, the Governor of California, who at that
Speaker 3: time was Arnold Schwarzenegger, who of course is also a Republican,
Speaker 3: signed the first executive order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions
Speaker 3: of any state in the US, and as he signed it,
Speaker 3: he had our California authors standing in a semicircle behind him,
Speaker 3: and they cited our study as evidence of why they
Speaker 3: had to reduce emissions.
Speaker 2: That's political, that's political connection there. That's so interesting. I mean,
Speaker 2: it's funny because my supervisor in my PhD actually was
Speaker 2: famous for saying that when we deal with a lot
Speaker 2: of environmental problems, it's the tail that wags the distribution.
Speaker 2: He loved to say that because it really is, and
Speaker 2: he talked. I mean, he was famous for doing the
Speaker 2: work on disproportionality, which was all about these how these
Speaker 2: extreme actors, the extreme emitters, were the ones that basically
Speaker 2: are driving the entire distribution in a lot of ways.
Speaker 3: Which is just what we see happening with cop today.
Speaker 2: Exactly right. And now, I mean, and now it's like
Speaker 2: he unfortunately passed away a number of years ago, but
Speaker 2: I'm sure that he is rolling in his grave and
Speaker 2: he's like, why didn't anybody read that work that I
Speaker 2: published so many years ago? But I mean, that's why,
Speaker 2: and that's why being a climate communicator is so important,
Speaker 2: because the information has to get out there. But I
Speaker 2: mean that brings us to my question about cup. Right,
Speaker 2: So we have this climate, we have this climate regime
Speaker 2: that basically, you know, all the secrets are out in
Speaker 2: the open, like there you know all. I mean, back
Speaker 2: when I used to go to the climate negotiations instead
Speaker 2: of sitting at home talking to you amazing people like
Speaker 2: you guys, I used to go there and we would
Speaker 2: sit at coffee and we would whisper like, oh, that
Speaker 2: person's actually with you know, they're funded by Exxon or
Speaker 2: they're like they have connections to fossil fuel industry in
Speaker 2: this way. But they all came under cover. Nobody showed
Speaker 2: up and was like I'm here, I'm gonna just stop everything, right,
Speaker 2: and I'm just so like, I can't believe where we
Speaker 2: are today, But I want to know kind of impressions
Speaker 2: on where we are based on what we've seen. I mean,
Speaker 2: I mean, Emmy, you were just there, give us some
Speaker 2: on the ground, you know, perspective.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, well, first of all, like Catherine was saying,
Speaker 1: they no longer feel any compulsion to like pretend that
Speaker 1: they're not there.
Speaker 4: To you know, fart in church. But it's wild to me,
Speaker 4: actually know.
Speaker 1: It was so interesting to me was like how few
Speaker 1: of the people who were you know, with either civil
Speaker 1: society groups or universities or whatever that like to try
Speaker 1: to encourage climate action knew like how many fossil fuel
Speaker 1: lobbyists were there, or how many carbon capture lobbyists were there,
Speaker 1: or how many big agg lobby Like it was like
Speaker 1: a surprise to them, and I'm like wow, Like to me,
Speaker 1: it's like, yes, of course this thing is inundated by industry.
Speaker 2: Last year it was crazy. It's just continuously.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and the I don't know the extent to which
Speaker 1: even if you were to get rid of all of
Speaker 1: the lobbyists, so many of the negotiators in the room
Speaker 1: are doing the bidding of the industry, you.
Speaker 4: Know, either.
Speaker 1: Either from you know, oil states like Saudi Arabia or
Speaker 1: even Norway's entire booth was like equinor employees, you know.
Speaker 3: I read and it says, I'm curious, is this is
Speaker 3: something that you saw that Brazil was requiring all attendees
Speaker 3: to actually disclose who funded them? So oh at this time,
Speaker 3: like the fossil fuel attendees, like previous hosts were petro states.
Speaker 3: Brazil is not a petro stated, though it certainly has
Speaker 3: a lot of natural gas resources. But yeah, I heard
Speaker 3: that that the fossil fuel attendees outnumber all delegations except
Speaker 3: for Brazil, and they're there even though they're required to
Speaker 3: actually disclose their funding. How did you see that?
Speaker 4: Yeah? I mean, well, the thing is.
Speaker 1: It's like the theoretically they have to disclose the theoretically,
Speaker 1: like lobbyists are supposed to badge appropriately and whatever.
Speaker 4: But if they're if they are.
Speaker 1: Like smuggled in through a country's delegation, then like that
Speaker 1: goes out the window. Or if they are you know,
Speaker 1: maybe maybe they're at a university but most of their
Speaker 1: research is funded by the fossil fuel industry, then like
Speaker 1: they're just wearing their university's tag. Or the one that
Speaker 1: we've looked at a lot is IPEKA the God. I
Speaker 1: can never remember what the acronym stands for because they
Speaker 1: changed it to just IPEKA a few years ago. But
Speaker 1: it's the International Petroleum Industry Environmental Conservation Association, which is
Speaker 1: this like weird little entity that was created by the
Speaker 1: UN as part of UNP in the seventies, and it
Speaker 1: was created for the sole purpose of, at the time,
Speaker 1: you know, getting the industry together to coordinate on global
Speaker 1: environmental issues, which was mostly oil spills in that moment.
Speaker 1: But it's very clear in the forming documents of that
Speaker 1: organization that the industry saw this as like the way
Speaker 1: that they were going to have a window into the
Speaker 1: UN processes and make sure that industri's.
Speaker 4: Perspective was clear.
Speaker 1: That was nineteen seventy three, So they've been there.
Speaker 4: The whole time, you know, like the.
Speaker 1: What is it the oh my god, I can't think
Speaker 1: of the expression coming from inside the house, but like anyway,
Speaker 1: it's like.
Speaker 2: Yes, it's just like all is coming from inside the.
Speaker 4: All is coming from inside the house exactly.
Speaker 2: They screen movie. I saw a preview for it in
Speaker 2: a movie theater, so you know, yeah, fah.
Speaker 4: So they're they're you know.
Speaker 1: So IPEKA started in the seventies part of UNIP then
Speaker 1: in the late nineties they spun off to be their
Speaker 1: own nonprofit, but they are still an official observer at
Speaker 1: cop and the IPCC. They're officially listed as a non
Speaker 1: lobbying organization, even though their entire existence is to provide
Speaker 1: cover for industry. So all the industry guys show up
Speaker 1: there with IPEKA badges.
Speaker 4: Nobody knows what that is, you know, And yeah.
Speaker 1: So they they're able to go to, you know, all
Speaker 1: of like the daily coordination meetings between different observer groups.
Speaker 1: They can go into the negotiating rooms, they can you know,
Speaker 1: they don't they can hang out in the hallway and
Speaker 1: wait for delegates to come out and talk to them.
Speaker 1: Like there's absolutely nothing stopping them from influencing things. And
Speaker 1: I and you, I mean, it's like we we see
Speaker 1: the effect of that every year. Just this morning, the
Speaker 1: new draft text came out, and not only has the
Speaker 1: stripped fossil fuel phase out from it, but they've added
Speaker 1: overshoot twice, so like I don't know about that, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: and oh but they've also given a nod to information
Speaker 1: integrity in the same text, And I'm like, how, how
Speaker 1: like how are these two things in the same space.
Speaker 2: So well, just I just want to I'm gonna plug
Speaker 2: episode four, which just came out this morning, where I
Speaker 2: spoke with Freddy Otto and David Hoe, who had a
Speaker 2: whole cont we have a big part of our conversation
Speaker 2: was all about the science behind overshooting, the degree to
Speaker 2: which we know if overshoot will actually work and if
Speaker 2: we could actually yeah, if it will actually be feasible
Speaker 2: but it's of course now the policy makers are like
Speaker 2: or not, I don't know who it is, Like, the
Speaker 2: industry connected policy makers are putting it into text, yeah,
Speaker 2: act putting in like stuff that has no scientific evidence
Speaker 2: that it will actually work, and.
Speaker 4: They're adding it. I mean they're pushed.
Speaker 1: A month before COPP there was a IPCC meeting in
Speaker 1: Lima where there are debating how much like which types
Speaker 1: of CDR to add carbon dioxide removal to add to
Speaker 1: the next IPCC assessment. They're going to have a whole
Speaker 1: chapter on carbon capture and storage.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 1: One one researcher I talked to described it as like
Speaker 1: these sort of science fiction ideas escaping the model and
Speaker 1: getting into.
Speaker 4: You know, into negotiating texts and policy, and it's it's frightening.
Speaker 4: I was, I could.
Speaker 1: I was like lurking in a lot of these like
Speaker 1: weird little industry side groups to kind of see what
Speaker 1: they were talking about, and there were a lot focused
Speaker 1: on carbon dioxide removal, and in one of them they
Speaker 1: talked about carbon dioxide removal and Article six, which is
Speaker 1: like the part of the pair agreement that's set up
Speaker 1: well is trying to like tighten up and better regulate
Speaker 1: carbon markets, and there were ongoing debates about whether to
Speaker 1: include carbon capture and carbon dioxide removal under that, and
Speaker 1: they have now decided to. And they thought that, you know,
Speaker 1: they had at least gotten this like science based target
Speaker 1: for permanence of one hundred years, Like you have to
Speaker 1: show that this carbon is going to stay put for
Speaker 1: one hundred years, and a bunch of people showed up
Speaker 1: at this year's cop arguing to make it thirty years.
Speaker 1: So there was like, but there was a scientist in
Speaker 1: one of these panels who said, obviously, from an environmental
Speaker 1: perspective and a climate perspective, you know, a forestation and
Speaker 1: reforestation are the preferred approaches to carbon storage and carbon removal,
Speaker 1: but the markets don't like them.
Speaker 3: Yes, but this is whole Yeah, so a challenging issue
Speaker 3: because this is something I run into all the time.
Speaker 3: There's all of these when it comes to climate solutions,
Speaker 3: there's no silver bullet, but there's a lot of silver buckshop.
Speaker 3: So immediately if anybody pitches anything as a silver bullet,
Speaker 3: you know your radar should go up. Uh, that's not
Speaker 3: the case. But all of these different solutions. We need
Speaker 3: as many solutions as we can, so I think of
Speaker 3: climate solutions as if you think of the atmosphere as
Speaker 3: a swimming pool, and the level of water in the
Speaker 3: pool is like the level of carbon in the atmosphere.
Speaker 3: And you know, two hundred years ago we stuck a
Speaker 3: giant hose in the pool. We turn the hose up
Speaker 3: every year, so we have to turn the hose off,
Speaker 3: but we can also make the drain bigger, and then
Speaker 3: we also have to learn how to swim because our
Speaker 3: toes don't touch the ground now for most of the pool.
Speaker 3: So we need all these solutions. And none of these
Speaker 3: solutions are inherently wrong or evil in and of themselves.
Speaker 3: And I often see a lot of discussions sort of
Speaker 3: pitching a given solution as evil or wrong. It's how
Speaker 3: they're used or misused that make the difference. So, you know,
Speaker 3: there's people I talk to a lot of people all
Speaker 3: across the spectrum, and there's people, you know, doing direct
Speaker 3: air capture and even planning how we could do carbon
Speaker 3: capture and sequestration or things like that, who are fully
Speaker 3: cognizant of the fact that we're talking about the last
Speaker 3: few drops down the drain at this point are the
Speaker 3: last few drops in the hose, and they're right. The
Speaker 3: science says every bit of warming matters, every drop matters.
Speaker 3: So if you develop a technology that, applied at the
Speaker 3: appropriate time, can take one more drop out, that's great.
Speaker 3: But what's happening is bad actors, Aman, This is exactly
Speaker 3: what you know. All of that bad actors are taking
Speaker 3: these solutions. They're taking everything from the voluntary carbon market
Speaker 3: with nature to geologic storage to you know, you name it,
Speaker 3: and they're using it as a fig leaf to say, oh,
Speaker 3: I don't have to do anything about it because and
Speaker 3: you know, I've even heard companies say, well, increase our
Speaker 3: extraction of fossil fuels because we'll just do, you know,
Speaker 3: carbon capture storage. I'm like, excuse me. We don't actually
Speaker 3: have enough geologic storage areas the entire world to actually
Speaker 3: cover just the carbon that you would be taking out.
Speaker 3: So there's a problem because I feel like so much
Speaker 3: of the discussion is so like it's it's very like
Speaker 3: good and evil and if you espouse the solution, you're evil,
Speaker 3: and if you don't, you're good. A lot of sort
Speaker 3: of almost religious puritism in it. But the reality is
Speaker 3: is it's what we do with these solutions and how
Speaker 3: we use them or misuse them. That's really the key
Speaker 3: discussion that I feel like is often not happening in
Speaker 3: the decision making and policy and even the public circles,
Speaker 3: you know, like on Blue Sky or something like that.
Speaker 4: Totally totally oh sorry.
Speaker 3: We're cutting we keep cutting you off.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: No, I'm just gonna introject one little point here and
Speaker 2: a day should go amy, which is just to say
Speaker 2: that I think, you know, when we think about the
Speaker 2: toolbox of solutions, like, obviously we need to encourage every
Speaker 2: and all solution possible because we're in an all hands
Speaker 2: on deck moment. But I also think there needs to
Speaker 2: be a realistic framing to the degree to which what
Speaker 2: actually can work at what's at the moment given the
Speaker 2: technology and the time where we close our eyes, hold
Speaker 2: our you know, hold our ears in just you know,
Speaker 2: la la la la la, while we say no, we're
Speaker 2: going to just we're just going to figure out you know,
Speaker 2: carbon dioxide removal, and we're fine, We're we're way past
Speaker 2: that moment. And so I think that's where we need
Speaker 2: to make sure that everybody has to be you know,
Speaker 2: we have to call bs on a people who are
Speaker 2: leaning into technology that can't scale the way they're talking
Speaker 2: about like you were talking about, Katherine, Go ahead, Amy, Yes.
Speaker 4: I was just going to say that.
Speaker 1: Actually I spoke with one researcher who is at this
Speaker 1: AR seven meeting in Lima talking about the different technologies
Speaker 1: and stuff, and they they described it really I think
Speaker 1: in a helpful way, which is that you know, like
Speaker 1: prior meetings, these technologies had always been discussed as like
Speaker 1: necessary because the climate crisis is so urgent that we
Speaker 1: want to make sure we have all of these technologies
Speaker 1: available and discussed as like being particularly useful for hard
Speaker 1: to abate industries and things like that, and that this
Speaker 1: was the first meeting they had attended where people were
Speaker 1: some people were very openly describing it as like we
Speaker 1: need to be able to remove emissions here so that
Speaker 1: we can continue emitting them there.
Speaker 4: And it was like, no, no, that's not the way.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So that I want to ask you that the tough question,
Speaker 2: or one of the tough questions, which is so is
Speaker 2: is this this you know, this institutional system that is
Speaker 2: the CUP, which is the climate regime, which has really
Speaker 2: become captured by fossil fuel interests and is platforming fossil
Speaker 2: fuel interests and their perspectives quite you know, clearly within
Speaker 2: the meetings, I mean more and more, like, I think
Speaker 2: it's worse this year than was last year than it
Speaker 2: was the year before, and we weren't even a petro
Speaker 2: state this year, right, So the question is can we
Speaker 2: salvage the regime? Is it fixable or is there another
Speaker 2: way that we should be thinking about addressing the climate
Speaker 2: crisis at this point solve the world?
Speaker 3: Fix it? My answer is yes to both.
Speaker 4: Yeah, same, I have yes.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you guys are going to yes, Amy, I should
Speaker 2: have known, Okay.
Speaker 3: Yeah, because there is incredible value just to bringing everybody
Speaker 3: together to look each other in the faces. When you
Speaker 3: are looking into the face of a small island state
Speaker 3: who could lose their entire country due to unchecked climate change,
Speaker 3: that has a much different emotional impact than when they
Speaker 3: are a green circle on a map or an email
Speaker 3: that somebody sent you. So I think of these cop
Speaker 3: meetings as a global pot look where everybody shows up
Speaker 3: and publicly puts what they're bringing on the table, and
Speaker 3: it is very obvious who made the apple by hand
Speaker 3: and who dragged a frozen chicken nugget out of the
Speaker 3: back of the freezer that's been there for years. And
Speaker 3: also who doesn't even show up to the potluck dinner,
Speaker 3: So there is tremendous value in that. But COP is
Speaker 3: way way overdue for a major reform. It has just
Speaker 3: you know, the negotiations are one thing. Everybody else who's
Speaker 3: not a negotiator getting together is a totally different thing.
Speaker 3: In fact, I know they're splitting it between Turkey and
Speaker 3: Australia next year. In my opinion, I would send the
Speaker 3: negotiators to one of the place and I would send
Speaker 3: the rest of the circus to the other place. That's
Speaker 3: what I would do, because they are really two separate things.
Speaker 3: And then also too really getting a handle on the
Speaker 3: fossil fuel industry being the largest delegation there, that just
Speaker 3: isn't right. But then I would say two, the idea
Speaker 3: that only countries getting together to come to decisions that
Speaker 3: must be unanimous, and expecting that to somehow fix the
Speaker 3: whole crisis, it's not just naive, it's delusional. Anybody you
Speaker 3: thought this would fix the whole crisis has no idea
Speaker 3: anything works. I mean, I'm not even the political scientist, right,
Speaker 3: so it's never been enough and That's why even in Paris,
Speaker 3: the mayor of Paris was holding their own sort of
Speaker 3: COP for all the mayors because a lot of cities
Speaker 3: these days are bigger than our countries and we need
Speaker 3: to have all other organizations brought in, whether it's universities,
Speaker 3: whether it's businesses, whether it's organizations or even religious traditions,
Speaker 3: all of those have to come in. And you know,
Speaker 3: one of the recent announcements just today is that the
Speaker 3: more and more countries and organizations are signing the Fossil
Speaker 3: Fuel non Periferation Treaty. It is the brainchild of SUPPORTA. Berman,
Speaker 3: and so Columbia and the Netherlands are going to hold
Speaker 3: a non Periferation Treaty meeting, which I think will be
Speaker 3: a tremendous step forward in a different direction. So that's
Speaker 3: why my answer is, yes, yes, we need to reform
Speaker 3: the COP process.
Speaker 4: But we also need more.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Amy, I was gonna mention that Columbia meeting too.
Speaker 1: I think it's going to be really interesting.
Speaker 4: And I would just say too that.
Speaker 1: For whatever reason, I mean, I think we all know
Speaker 1: the big systemic reasons, but like I don't think Columbia
Speaker 1: got anywhere near enough attention for the way it showed
Speaker 1: up at this cop which was like the only country
Speaker 1: where the inside people and the outside people were absolutely
Speaker 1: on the same page, like they're just like very clear
Speaker 1: fossil fuel phase out just transition, and like really were
Speaker 1: the ones pushing that message very consistently. And I think
Speaker 1: that like it actually kind of broke through in some
Speaker 1: ways that didn't get picked up like in the media
Speaker 1: or in any of the big conversations. And I think
Speaker 1: that like actually them getting the Netherlands on board for this.
Speaker 2: I was gonna ask you you have insights on how
Speaker 2: the insights on the Netherlands, because that was that's my
Speaker 2: case is way back when.
Speaker 1: So that's was a deal, Like they're that's you know,
Speaker 1: Shell's home country, so like.
Speaker 4: That's a really big deal.
Speaker 1: And then they also said, hey, eighty kun trees that
Speaker 1: signed on to fossil fuel phase out come to our
Speaker 1: party in Columbia.
Speaker 4: Next next year. So that's really interesting.
Speaker 1: I talked to Kumi Naidu, who's running the nonproperation treaty now,
Speaker 1: and he was saying in Zuppora too that like they
Speaker 1: have modeled this after the landmine decommissioning treaties and that
Speaker 1: in that case you know, it was only twenty countries
Speaker 1: that actually signed on to that, but it created enough
Speaker 1: like momentum and pressure to get the rest of the
Speaker 1: world now. Of course, like fossil fuels and land mines
Speaker 1: are very different things. No one is like I can't
Speaker 1: get to work without my landmine, but like you, however,
Speaker 1: it's an interesting strategy, so I despite, I think so yes,
Speaker 1: but it's an interesting strategy, and I think we're starting
Speaker 1: to see that, like, Okay, that could really bear fruit.
Speaker 1: Another thing that came up, like on the ground there
Speaker 1: was that there was there was there was like a
Speaker 1: kind of an open letter from a bunch of different
Speaker 1: society groups really saying like, hey, it's time to actually
Speaker 1: organize around addressing this ridiculous consensus thing and like actually
Speaker 1: changing some of the processes at cop and those kinds
Speaker 1: of things. And then other people I talked to were saying,
Speaker 1: you know, yeah, like the negotiations, sure, the like trade
Speaker 1: show beyond them, like nobody needs it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yes, well I think we do need those opportunities,
Speaker 3: but I don't think it has to be COPT. So
Speaker 3: for example, I personally I've gone to more New York
Speaker 3: Climate Weeks than COPS because that's where I feel it's
Speaker 3: much more a democratic process because it's all sort of crowdsourced.
Speaker 3: It does need to be a bit more organized, in
Speaker 3: my opinion. But you know, climate weeks are springing up everywhere.
Speaker 3: So my home city of Toronto has a Climate Week. Now,
Speaker 3: this is the first year. London Climate Week has been
Speaker 3: happening for a while. There's all these regional climate weeks.
Speaker 3: Africa had a big Climate Week a year or two ago,
Speaker 3: so that's where the discussions are happening, and they're much
Speaker 3: more solution focused because they're more regionally focused.
Speaker 2: I would just say, I mean, I agree with you, Katain,
Speaker 2: but I also would I would highlight the fact that
Speaker 2: the Climate week's the beauty of the Climate week, although
Speaker 2: there is some paid to plainess there which I think
Speaker 2: is problematic. But the climate weeks are also locally embedded
Speaker 2: so that all of a sudden it really is for
Speaker 2: the mayor's the regional leaders rather than this like everybody fly.
Speaker 2: I mean, I have to say, the last time I
Speaker 2: was at a cop I ended up at an event
Speaker 2: where there were people from Brookings and people from a
Speaker 2: whole bunch of other thing tanks from here in DC.
Speaker 2: And I was like, I can't believe I flew across
Speaker 2: the world to sit in a room so that we
Speaker 2: could all present to one another. I mean, we could
Speaker 2: have done this. I mean we could have done this
Speaker 2: by all taking the metro. There's no reason to do that,
Speaker 2: and that kind of the whole you know, three wing
Speaker 2: circus part I think that has to go. I know
Speaker 2: some of my colleagues are very upset with my making
Speaker 2: that statement, but it's just like that could happen at
Speaker 2: a regional level. That is much more valuable for decision
Speaker 2: making at at the scale, and I you know, I'm
Speaker 2: all for that. I mean, obviously I believe in taking
Speaker 2: what we have in our scientific information and getting out there.
Speaker 2: But I'm not sure that getting it out there, there's
Speaker 2: nobody from the regime that's going to be like, oh,
Speaker 2: I was at that panel with all those people from Washington,
Speaker 2: d C. And now I'm going to change everything we're doing.
Speaker 2: It would make a lot more sense. For like, we
Speaker 2: just started Climate Week d C, which they unfortunately scheduled
Speaker 2: it for a really bad time last year, but I'm
Speaker 2: hoping they'll have it. I think maybe it'll take off.
Speaker 2: It was right after you know, Trump made some interesting announcements,
Speaker 2: so it was really oddly time. But you know, this
Speaker 2: kind of a regional effort I think can really help
Speaker 2: to build climate community in ways that could be much
Speaker 2: more helpful.
Speaker 3: Mm hmm, yes, I completely agree because that's where we
Speaker 3: that's where we are today. Yeah, yeah, we need And
Speaker 3: the thing is this COP was built as the implementation COP.
Speaker 3: Well we need implementation at every scale and in fact
Speaker 3: implementing and Italy and the C forty network make this
Speaker 3: very powerful. They're the city networks. You know, Implementation of
Speaker 3: the municipal scale is in many ways much easier than
Speaker 3: at the national or federal scale because the scale of solutions,
Speaker 3: the scale of decisions, the speed at which those decisions
Speaker 3: can be made.
Speaker 2: As much impacts too. Remember right, people are experiencing the
Speaker 2: climate crisis in their communities, and it's varied, very varied
Speaker 2: based on where you're based.
Speaker 3: So absolutely exactly, and even with in the US, where
Speaker 3: climate change is so polarized, one of my colleagues research
Speaker 3: has shown that the closer we get, like the closer
Speaker 3: we bring impacts to home, like you just said, the
Speaker 3: less polarized they are, because we're talking about our shared
Speaker 3: home and our shared neighborhood or our shared city or
Speaker 3: town that we all went through the flood together. So
Speaker 3: it's really like sub national action and engagement in communication
Speaker 3: I think is almost like the secret I don't want
Speaker 3: to call it the secret tool. I don't want secret wepons,
Speaker 3: no weapons, secret sauce. Yeah there secrets that is not
Speaker 3: really unlocked by a cop is starting to be organically
Speaker 3: unlocked by these regional efforts. But more more deliberate focus
Speaker 3: on that I think could really catalyze things and move
Speaker 3: the needle forward faster.
Speaker 1: I have.
Speaker 2: So I have one more question, because I know we're
Speaker 2: running out of time. Unless I didn't want to make
Speaker 2: sure Amy, you didn't feel like I was cutting you off,
Speaker 2: not okay, no, no, no to the last question is you
Speaker 2: know is the big one? So what is what's your
Speaker 2: visiting for the future? What do you think, what do
Speaker 2: you think is possible? What do you hope for? And
Speaker 2: what do you think is most realistic when we think
Speaker 2: about both climate policy making but also where we are
Speaker 2: in the climate crisis and where we need to go.
Speaker 1: Just that.
Speaker 2: Little bitty question, just.
Speaker 3: Well, I I think that we are what we are
Speaker 3: seeing now. When you know I live in Texas and
Speaker 3: I'm from Canada, where our carbon price, our target price
Speaker 3: on carbon just got removed, and we're seeing the impacts.
Speaker 3: I mean, Texas is actually the most vulnerable state in
Speaker 3: the US to climate impacts, and Canada has seen the
Speaker 3: massive wildfires in recent years like we've never seen before.
Speaker 3: So all of the resistance that we're experiencing, the dismantling
Speaker 3: of climate science and research and solutions and sharing of
Speaker 3: information and all that, it reminds me of the you know,
Speaker 3: the line rage, rage against the dying of the light,
Speaker 3: rage against the dying of the fossil fuel powered light.
Speaker 3: I feel like those who have built their power and
Speaker 3: wealth on the history of fossil fuels in our society,
Speaker 3: they understand that their days are numbered. They understand that
Speaker 3: it is not going to be the fuel source of
Speaker 3: our society over the next hundred years. And countries like
Speaker 3: China are already light years ahead of the US in
Speaker 3: making that clear. And so this is their last ditch
Speaker 3: fight to put off that tipping point as long as
Speaker 3: they possibly can, to make sure that the quarterly returns
Speaker 3: are as high as possible for as long as possible,
Speaker 3: before they take all their gains and go off to
Speaker 3: their bunkers. And what that really means is we're getting
Speaker 3: closer to winning, but it is darkest before the dawn,
Speaker 3: and it is very very dark right now. I'm a
Speaker 3: hopeful person, but that's because I practice hope like an
Speaker 3: Olympic sport. I'm not an optimistic person. I expect the
Speaker 3: worst and then I can always be pleasantly surprised if
Speaker 3: it doesn't happen, or grimly validated if it does, which
Speaker 3: is more the case these days. Lots of grim validation
Speaker 3: these days. So the arc of justice, as they say,
Speaker 3: really is bending in the right direction. But man, it
Speaker 3: is a a brittal situation out there right now. And
Speaker 3: what breaks my heart is that the science says that
Speaker 3: every bit of additional warming we put in place has
Speaker 3: an impact, and it will have an impact on the
Speaker 3: people who've done the least a cause it that had
Speaker 3: no say in that decision actually being made. And so
Speaker 3: that is why doing everything we can to accelerate our
Speaker 3: social tipping points is so important. And so that's why
Speaker 3: full so go back. I spend so much of my
Speaker 3: time as a scientist doing communication because the social science
Speaker 3: says that that is one of the tipping points we need,
Speaker 3: and I feel like that's the one where I can
Speaker 3: help the most.
Speaker 2: Such an apocalyptically optimistic perspective, Jess, for you all about that,
Speaker 2: woo okay, so Amy, what have you got?
Speaker 1: I would say, well, I think that, you know, to
Speaker 1: Catherine's point, like there is I do feel like we're
Speaker 1: seeing them fight so hard because they know that they
Speaker 1: only had so much time left and they're going to
Speaker 1: try to make as much money off of their assets
Speaker 1: as they can before they can't anymore. Like of course
Speaker 1: that's happening, you know, but it is to a certain
Speaker 1: degree unstoppable. Like there's there's so much renewable energy penetration
Speaker 1: in so many places. Even the IEA, which like you know,
Speaker 1: historically was was not super optimistic about renewables, came out
Speaker 1: with its report you know, this this week saying, yeah,
Speaker 1: fossil fuel use is going to peak in I think
Speaker 1: they said, oh god, I don't want to misquote it anyway,
Speaker 1: the peak is coming soon coming up. And they looked at,
Speaker 1: you know, how much renewables are growing, and I think like, actually,
Speaker 1: one thing that was interesting about this cop was the
Speaker 1: fact that the US not being there was a good thing.
Speaker 1: You know, it cut back on some of the obstruction
Speaker 1: that was happening.
Speaker 4: I think that.
Speaker 1: It probably cleared the path for some of these other
Speaker 1: countries to get together and say, you know what, like
Speaker 1: now you know, not only are we going to have
Speaker 1: this meeting in Colombia in April, but I think it's
Speaker 1: twenty nine countries now have said that they are going
Speaker 1: to veto the cop presidency text unless they put fossil
Speaker 1: fuel phase out back in. And we're talking like the UK, Australia,
Speaker 1: these you know, like of course Global South countries as well,
Speaker 1: but like some of the bigger fossil fuel countries to boot.
Speaker 2: So you know, I think I actually committed to that.
Speaker 4: I don't, yes, they did.
Speaker 1: I have a little theory about this, which is that
Speaker 1: Australia's and this is totally because we have an Australia
Speaker 1: reporter who gives me all the hot goss on Australian politics.
Speaker 1: But Australia's environment minister was really hoping to get COP hosting.
Speaker 1: He wanted to like, you know, kind of preside over
Speaker 1: the negotiations and be more involved in all of that.
Speaker 1: And their primary minister, you know, like didn't turn up
Speaker 1: to cop kept telling the press they didn't want it,
Speaker 1: all of that stuff, and so yeah, he thinks he's
Speaker 1: like I kind of wonder if like this guy didn't
Speaker 1: just do this as a little bit of a like
Speaker 1: screw you to his boss back.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I know that and all the coal industry and Australia.
Speaker 2: So that's interesting.
Speaker 4: But yeah, it's pretty interesting.
Speaker 1: The fact, I mean Netherlands co hosting a fossil fuel
Speaker 1: phase out meeting with Columbia very interesting. Like, I think
Speaker 1: there are starting to be countries that are getting on
Speaker 1: board with this idea. The other thing that I feel like,
Speaker 1: especially in the US, we're not looking at at all
Speaker 1: is how big of a deal it would be if
Speaker 1: the UK were to actually follow through on phasing out
Speaker 1: north Sea oil, because that would they would be the first,
Speaker 1: like developed fossil fuel based economy to get off of
Speaker 1: fossil fuels.
Speaker 4: People always say, what about Norway.
Speaker 1: Norway's suckling at the teat of the fossil fuel funding trust.
Speaker 1: I know, yeah, they're still you know, very dependent on
Speaker 1: on that wealth fund and in a way that that
Speaker 1: the UA would not be, which is why I think
Speaker 1: again you're seeing the fossil fuel they are spending so
Speaker 1: much money trying to take down renewables in the UK
Speaker 1: right now.
Speaker 4: They're even putting.
Speaker 1: Like I have a couple of reporters there there are
Speaker 1: like they're like putting up fake candidates in little community
Speaker 1: elections that they know won't win just to get like
Speaker 1: anti renewables talking points out there.
Speaker 2: Taking a page of playbook over here is what they're doing, right, I.
Speaker 4: Mean, I know, I know.
Speaker 1: Anyway, Yeah, I'm like watching that as like a potentially
Speaker 1: quite like because to me, I actually feel like as
Speaker 1: effective as the science denial was, the economic argument against
Speaker 1: action I think has been much more entrenched and like
Speaker 1: more success ful in a way and is much harder
Speaker 1: to push back on. So for a very developed, very
Speaker 1: fossil fuel tied country to decouple from fossil fuels as
Speaker 1: their economic engine would be a huge, huge moment, and
Speaker 1: we could see it in the not so distant future.
Speaker 4: So that's how helping.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's very hopeful. Well that I feel like we
Speaker 2: should we should wrap up on that to just say,
Speaker 2: I mean, I think, yeah, I mean, it's very likely
Speaker 2: that the worst is still in front of us as
Speaker 2: the death now continues for the fossil fuel interest. But
Speaker 2: I think that there are these amazing glimmers of hope
Speaker 2: and opportunities for us all to do more, and to
Speaker 2: do it in a strategic way that hopefully pushes back
Speaker 2: against some of this, including the misinformation. So I applaud
Speaker 2: all of your efforts and all the work you both
Speaker 2: are doing with your climate communication, because it's even more
Speaker 2: important now than I think it was, you know, five
Speaker 2: ten years ago. And thank you so much for coming
Speaker 2: on the cop Out podcast, and I look forward to
Speaker 2: continuing our conversation in the future. Likewise, maybe in Colombia. Yeah, Oh,
Speaker 2: that'd be fun.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna go. I'm nearby, so it's easy. I'm like, I'm.
Speaker 2: Looking at Columbia right now.
Speaker 4: I can see it from my window. No, not really,
Speaker 4: the col