coe188_revkin.mp3

Speaker1: [00:00:23] Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the cultures of energy space. Welcome back. We're in that culture of energy space, and we've just been reading some harrowing news about the Greenland ice sheet that I was just saying, right? Twelve point five billion tons of ice in one day. Is that melted? Yes. Is that how? Whoa. All right. So Iceland's got 11 billion a year. That is extraordinary. I mean, of course, Greenland's a lot bigger, but still, that's in one day. And this is partly related to the heat waves that have been hitting Europe. That's right, for the last couple of weeks altogether, I guess, right? Oh, it's heroin.

Speaker2: [00:00:59] Well, the good news is that our Democratic candidates obviously placed climate front and center. Or did they?

Speaker1: [00:01:06] Well, I well,

Speaker2: [00:01:08] So many of our new segment is Simone does debate review. Who do you think was the strongest person on climate?

Speaker1: [00:01:14] Well, it's a little unfair because I didn't see the first debate, so I can't even speak to what they said.

Speaker2: [00:01:21] Let's just pretend they said not very interesting or ambitious things. Okay?

Speaker1: [00:01:25] The field of whiteys on board the first time, but now I mean, probably Elizabeth Warren did have something good to say. I just didn't see it on Twitter afterwards. Probably needed to, I guess, say, yeah, he probably did. I mean, the truth of the matter is that the commentators bring it up right in the middle and the doldrums of the debates, which is pathetic to wait until

Speaker2: [00:01:44] People are worn down after two and a half hours. And then they're like somewhere between asking people what aftershave they wear and which Kardashian they like best. They ask them,

Speaker1: [00:01:55] Which is better, a Prius or a volt or something like

Speaker2: [00:01:58] That you are seeing in lifestyle magazine eyeing a Prius. Do you think Prius is the best brand?

Speaker1: [00:02:04] It's like, it's like they wait. Yeah. Well, I was going to say Jay Inslee was probably the most outspoken.

Speaker2: [00:02:09] He shouted the loudest. But was he the most compelling?

Speaker1: [00:02:13] I mean, I don't know. I mean, he's got these. I don't know. They've got they've done some measures in Washington, so maybe that's what he's basing his prerogative on. Well, but I have to say

Speaker2: [00:02:25] I come from somewhere that he's very proud of.

Speaker1: [00:02:27] Yes, right? I think that was Greenpeace and maybe someone else, but it's definitely Greenpeace that gave him the highest marks on climate. And then that other dude went, No. Was it Cory Booker was number two, I think. Yeah. So that's good. So go, Cory. We like that. I don't know. It's just clearly it's not really, really like top priority in the the canon of things that they're thinking about it. It's really just health care all the way down. It's like, that's all we can do. But you know what? Health care? Let's be positive and say, Well, weirdly enough, I mean, almost all elections are centrally worried about economy and jobs and etc. and that's certainly part of this. But this has really been about health care, so it's really kind of taken over as the the letter of the day. So, you know, if we think about it positively, health is also related to climate, so maybe we can take a spin on it that way that, you know, well-being going forward will depend on good environmental conditions for those who either do or don't have universal health care.

Speaker2: [00:03:32] Well, what struck me the most about it was that they got all ginned up. There was a lot of animus on stage when they brought up climate, but it was almost like the words were getting caught in their mouth. All I really heard them saying was like, no more coal, no more coal. Like, I don't want any more coal. Biden wants coal. No, I don't want coal. I hate coal. And the Green New Deal came up briefly, but kind of unspecific. How are you going to pay for these? How are you going to pay for this? How are you going to pay for all these green new jobs, blah blah blah? And then the thing that actually got picked up in social media afterwards was Andrew Yang basically saying, You know what? We're fucked, and here's $1000 to move away from the coast.

Speaker1: [00:04:12] No, I missed that. That's funny. Well, he was also the one who on the gender pay inequity question, said that women should get, I believe, he said, $1000 a month as a kind of stipend because women in vet tend to invest that money into families and businesses and whatever like sort of rather than gambling or drinking it away. Not to be stereotypical, but

Speaker2: [00:04:37] I think

Speaker1: [00:04:39] He I think he made that claim, which was pretty bold. That's a lot of money. Or did I miss here that I don't know. Well, I was busy. I was busy in the kitchen making food for children and

Speaker2: [00:04:50] Not getting paid for

Speaker1: [00:04:51] It and not getting paid a thousand dollars.

Speaker2: [00:04:52] Thank you very much for that. Yeah. Well, maybe you said I think that was part of his.

Speaker1: [00:04:56] I might have misheard. So because I was so busy, like laboring over a pizza,

Speaker2: [00:05:01] He did say something, but I forget the figure. Anyway, the point was I felt as though the climate content was pretty limited. Yeah, pretty sound bites. And it didn't feel like it was getting the kind of prominence at least your two co-hosts feel it deserves so right? I don't know what kind of report card would you give that CNN debate, but it wasn't high.

Speaker1: [00:05:19] C They didn't. They didn't. They didn't. They didn't stay in climate for very long at all, and you're right, when they brought up the Green New Deal, they really went straight into the social justice stuff, which is great if they had given it respect in time to talk about it, but it was almost like they were mocking it anyhow.

Speaker2: [00:05:35] So, you know, in other news,

Speaker1: [00:05:38] In other

Speaker2: [00:05:38] News, Simone, how has the following to report

Speaker1: [00:05:42] Just that. We've been having a lot of really interesting conversations with press folk from various places in North America and Europe and otherwise, and doing lots of interviews and talking about this little glacier, which has been sort of astounding. But now we actually have to get the boots out of the closet and find the hiking socks, and I think I need to replace my fuzzy hat because I haven't seen that for a while.

Speaker2: [00:06:09] You need a new fuzzy

Speaker1: [00:06:10] How important to have a fuzzy hat when you're up

Speaker2: [00:06:12] There on the more important that fuzzy

Speaker1: [00:06:14] Hat, because as August is, it's going to be. And I mean that in both ways up there on top of the mountain. It's still going to be cold. Oh yeah. Yeah, I remember at the top, it's windy and cold. And I think, you know, people who are missing their gloves were suffering. And of course, and now I'm remembering last year, this brilliant Icelandic woman, of course, had brought an extra pair of gloves in each pocket. So she saw that I didn't have any and she's like, Here, have some gloves. Oh, no, no, I don't want to take your gloves. No, no. I have extra pairs in every pocket. So adorable that's being prepared.

Speaker2: [00:06:48] Yeah, that's if you fall in a crevasse, you want to be prepared with extra powers, that sort of thing, for sure. The actual event is August 18th at Yakult and Glacier Tours. So if you think you might still be in the neighborhood want to come, please go to the Not OK Movies.com website and register. And now we're going to introduce our very, very distinguished guest. Andrew Revkin, legendary environmental journalist. You remember him from back in the days at Discover Magazine, one of the first American journalists to write about climate change. Then he broke the story about the muzzling of James Hansen. I think that's why he was the New York Times. He had a very popular Dot Earth blog. He's done so many interesting projects for books, even movies made from some of those books. And the last few years he's been doing a variety of projects, including becoming more of a scholar. I think he still sees himself as a journalist, but he definitely is also doing a lot of work in university contexts now, including Simone is going to announce it.

Speaker1: [00:07:48] The Earth Institute at Columbia University to talk about August's wonderful and the wonderful city of New York. It is called the Initiative on Communication and Sustainability, and so the impetus for this was to bring together experts and thought leaders such a corporate or thought leaders. That's my word, not Andrew's word, to think through the thorny issues of our time and figure out ways to communicate those in ways that are accessible, compelling, useful for different populations. And so he's done all this wonderful environmental journalism and knows how to speak to people right to people in ways that make the power of these stories felt, and also can uncover some of the underpinnings that we need to understand in order to move our climate in a better direction and our energy transition in a better direction. And so the institute is still newish, but they're beginning their work, and it looks like it's going to be a wonderful series of engagements throughout.

Speaker2: [00:08:53] One thing I wanted to mention about the interview itself, and I hope people listen through to the very end. I think it's a pretty compelling interview anyway, but he makes this really interesting point where unfortunately we really didn't have time to pursue it as much as in retrospect, I think we might have. And that is this really interesting idea that universities, as part of their kind of unmet responsibility for engaging more in climate understanding and action, could actually look back thinking of like the land grant. Public universities in the United States could look back to their origins, and in the 19th and 20th century, these pretty enormous agricultural outreach programs that they had, and I'm thinking of Cornell, where I used to teach where both of us used to teach as a matter of fact where, you know, they had the satellite campuses that were in all these small towns and programs that were scattered around upstate New York that were kind of connecting the research work on campus in the AG school to actually like helping people improve their farms. And what he's suggesting is why not do that for energy? Why not do that for renewable energy and have universities, you know, leading major outreach efforts in their regions to help this energy transition happen, not just in big cities, but in kind of everywhere in small towns and medium sized towns, and that universities could take the lead as kind of helping what are they call knowledge transfers from those people who are involved with? The technological and infrastructural elements and the social science elements to the the communities that could benefit from that. So I think it's a really brilliant idea. I've never heard it before and I actually think that would be a marvelous thing for universities to do, right?

Speaker1: [00:10:36] Well, we could begin right here at our very own little university.

Speaker2: [00:10:39] Sure, we try. The disadvantage of trying to do that in Houston is the towering, shuddering juggernaut of fossil fuel interests. Hey, you know, we had an explosion yesterday, too. I mean, we can talk, we can talk about melting ice caps in Greenland, and it's important. But we had another refinery explosion in Houston. And you know, the cool thing was Harris County, where we live first thing this morning, walked in and filed a lawsuit against ExxonMobil. Wow. Explosion, they did not wait. They just said, We're going to get suing you guys right away on this because it's actually the second explosion at that facility this year. Wow. And it's it's a facility that has been violating clean air and water x numerous times in its existence. And I think it's really good to see Harris County, who's apparently going to triple the number of prosecutors they have on this beat now to really get serious about it. So I'm hearing some signs. We'll see what happens. But that's a that's kind of a hopeful sign for our neck of the woods. But I'm saying, like in that world, the idea of energy outreach still important. But we've got a ways to go, and rice frankly has a ways to go in terms of building the kind of expertise base for renewable energy transitions that needs. We don't have a lot of people working on wind and solar here or geothermal or anything. We still have way too many people working on fossil fuels.

Speaker1: [00:11:56] Yeah, that's true. So that's what they would propagate.

Speaker2: [00:11:59] Given the chance, I guess they will propagate the fuck out. Yeah, right. Sorry, folks. Yeah, sorry, folks.

Speaker1: [00:12:05] Yeah. Well, good points. All except scary. Yes, another excellent explosion. There's always something on fire here.

Speaker2: [00:12:12] Simone, where's your head at today? You're floating around here. Did you just get some good news or something?

Speaker1: [00:12:16] No, I'm just looking at some of the smart things that Andre said that I noted down because I liked them so much. He, you know, we were talking about the internet and the kind of democratization of news and everyone's a newsmaker and the kind of opinion world that that fuels the internet. And I really liked this moment when he said, my opinion is that reality matters. Yeah, that was brilliant because I think people do get sometimes, you know, maybe in the popular media, more than an academic world get caught up in this idea of, you know, my opinion is holy and my opinion can contradict what science says. And so I think shaping it in that way. My opinion is that reality matters is a really pithy, smart way of seeing it. Also, I love this credit card analogy that he has where talking about the carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas load that's already in the atmosphere, it's like reducing your spending on your car, for example, on your credit card. Reducing your spending doesn't do away with your debt. Yeah, like just because you quit using the card doesn't mean that that debt goes away. In fact, it compiles. So these were really nice takeaways that we're straightforward and that I will use in future conversations.

Speaker2: [00:13:30] Andrew Revkin is a man of many compelling analogies and great ideas, and we are about to hear from him as soon as so many House says, Go Andrew.

Speaker1: [00:13:57] So, Andrew, I notice on your website, you point out one of the first pieces that you did, I don't know if it was that first you can tell us if it was or wasn't, but that was in Discover magazine, which was a trailblazing moment in the history of environmental reporting. And you note that it came out so long ago. The science magazines were still running cigarette ads. Oh my god. Is that true? Yeah, sure enough, you can see it right there. I think its merit merit cigarettes, as seen pictured here. But Dominic and I both remember, well, Discover magazine. It was this beautiful object that you could hold in your hands at the newsstand. I never had a subscription, but I admired it a lot, and you've been doing this work for a long time. And one of the questions that you must be asked repeatedly when you're a trailblazer such as yourself is how did you get started in this world of environmental and science reporting?

Speaker3: [00:14:49] Well, it started really growing up in Rhode Island, where I was lucky enough. I lived in kind of suburbia, but I could walk through the backyard of the house, the den. And when I was seven to 12 years old and kind of up through the back of this suburb into a little patch of woods, and there was just enough stuff there rabbit tracks and squirrels or whatever, you know, to make me connect with nature. I was a Boy Scout, but that wasn't part of it because the Boy Scout, the scout leader we had, was such a jerk that he was actually bringing cigarettes for some of the kids. Not your typical Boy Scout experience, so that wasn't part of it. And I grew up on the water. My my family always had a sailboat of some kind. And then along came Jacques Cousteau and on TV every Sunday night, I think it was and the wonderful world Jacques Cousteau and got my best bar mitzvah present ever was was a U.S. divers mask and snorkel because that was his company. You know, he was an inventor and had the patent on some scuba gear. And so having his mask and snorkel made me feel great, went underwater on Rhode Island and saw I think it was when I saw a scallop swimming like I'd never thought of, like clams that swimming.

Speaker3: [00:15:59] But scallop can clap its shells and, you know, jet around. That's the kind of stuff focused me on the environment. Then I got righteously pissed when I was a little older. There was because I was walking through the woods behind our next house and there was a bulldozer near this tree I liked and I had my first activism moment where I put a basically I scribbled a death threat and put it on the seat of this bulldozer, saying whoever destroys these trees will be whatever punished. So that's where my sort of passion for conservation began, and then I stumbled into journalism. I got a biology degree at Brown and was doing field work in fisheries science in Rhode Island. And I didn't really think about journalism until after I was out and I got around out in the world, I got a fellowship. So the Pacific Ocean saw big changes underway in Asia. This is right out of college. I was on a sailboat. I got to be crew on a boat. It didn't cost me any money and something turned to the world that made me want to be a journalist. And then and then I once I got into journalism, it was the heyday of magazines, the nineteen eighties science magazines, you know, science digest, where I started around nineteen eighty three and my first big feature story.

Speaker3: [00:17:04] I was a copy editor, but the editor was kind of a smart guy. He liked to get the most out of his staff. And for us, that was a great because even though we were underpaid and it meant we got to write, I did a feature story that built out of some sporadic reporting I was doing on this herbicide called paraquat, which was best known at that time because the USDA and its early days was spraying paraquat on marijuana fields in Mexico, and so everyone was worried about the health impacts. But it turned out to be a pretty interesting investigative story. My first article, my first feature story for a magazine on thousands of accidental deaths of people who ingest it in developing countries and here got an investigative reporters and editors award and one of the big gongs you hope to hit in your career. I got my first feature story out of journalism school and then I was on the environment track and the mid eighties, so we were in the depths of the Cold War. Well, maybe we're getting there again a little bit, but nuclear winter was in the wind and was asked to do a story on what is nuclear winter. How likely it is that this was this idea that if you burn enough cities and a nuclear exchange, there was this idea emerge that the schmutz up in the atmosphere would chill the planet, cause mass famine, disrupt ecosystems.

Speaker3: [00:18:15] And that was my first story on climate and humans was not about climate change. It was about greenhouse gases. It was about nuclear winter killing of the planet. That was a cover story in nineteen eighty five and kind of it also had cigarette ads and liquor. And yeah, and it was a weird story. It was this story. My first experience was something that was a pattern that I've seen a lot since, which is a story that starts out kind of stark and scary, you know, nuclear war. Not as bad enough, but we're going to end life as we know it because of the killing of the planet, then Steve Schneider and Starlee Thompson to pretty top notch climate scientists who were in Boulder at the time. Ran the numbers a little more thoroughly and found out it would be more like nuclear autumn. And, you know, as a journalist, where's your headline in nuclear autumn? It kind of doesn't have that ring to it. So it also taught me that sometimes more science makes things more complicated, not less. Oh, absolutely. And then I went on from there, you know,

Speaker2: [00:19:13] Yeah, it was staying on the seasonal theme. I was going to say that Discover piece the one that that you wrote after James Hansen's testimony in 88 The Endless Summer one, you know, I just feel like that's something we should touch on today, given that we are today breaking heat records in London and Amsterdam and Paris. Insane, insane

Speaker1: [00:19:33] Temperatures in places where people don't have a lot of air conditioning, if at all.

Speaker2: [00:19:37] No, no. And so the

Speaker1: [00:19:38] Fans, I mean, we're yeah, I mean, how many households in Paris have a fan?

Speaker2: [00:19:42] And obviously this was incredibly prescient, and I just wanted to, if you can kind of take us back to that moment. Did you have a sense already in the eighties after you heard Hansen's testimony that this was going to be as big a deal as it was? Or was it just kind of one one kind of environmental story among many?

Speaker3: [00:20:00] That's a good question. I think it felt bigger because, you know, as a reporter, when you dig in or is anyone when you dig in on the physics and the atmospheric chemistry and all that you realize it's not like our father's pollution. There's a fun. Fun is not the right word. I did it in my interview with a couple of really smart veterans at MIT. It's on YouTube several years ago in which I asked them to describe, you know, what are the things that people don't really get about this problem, even people who who are worried about it? A few years ago, I did a video interview with a couple of really smart earth and climate scientists at MIT who've been at this as the scientists a little bit longer than I've been at it as a journalist. And I asked them, So what are the things about global warming that even people who are worried about it misunderstand the most? And one of the big ones is inertia. He says, you know, standard pollution, if you stop today, it's out of the atmosphere. In seven days, CO2 carbon dioxide lingers for decades. It actually stays in circulation for centuries. And the cumulative nature of it means it's not like solving the smog problem.

Speaker3: [00:21:05] It's not. It's not like the ozone challenge has the same characteristics, but there are reasons why this is much harder than the ozone problem. Even that story in nineteen eighty eight has a line in it that's really nails that that I I circled back to years later when, oh yeah, I forgot about that. And that line was from a Dutch guy who's a Dutch environmental policy minister at the time who said, You know, you can get all the manufacturers of CFCs, those ozone eating chemicals into one room. They're like thirty six of them, he said. With CO2, it's everybody in the world, every taxicab and power plant and fire and the like. And so it's not like that either. And I kept the more I kept realizing, it's not like this, it's not like that. It's I kept thinking initially, Oh, it's just a pollution problem, and we need a treaty or law. And no, it's not like that either. It's tied to energy use, which is a fundamental human drive. And so the consequences, the scope of it, both both the geography and time and permanence built and built, the more I looked into it. And that's not the way other stories had gone.

Speaker1: [00:22:09] Mm hmm. I'm glad you brought up the ozone hole question because that is something that comes up in media and conversations and in teaching and learning about climate change is that's a kind of optimistic moment in the history of a kind of global community to combat a serious environmental issue of the time, right? But as you point out, we're talking about thirty six corporations we're talking about essentially, you know, one set of propellants that were causing this problem and climate change is so much broader and less tractable than even the CFC. So it's a difficult balance because on the one hand, we want to laud that moment and say, Look, we can do it, we can come together, solve these problems. We did it with ozone hole, but it was a whole different scale and a whole different quality.

Speaker3: [00:22:56] So yeah, well, and I hate being the curmudgeon who's always saying yes, but yeah,

Speaker1: [00:23:01] But but that's how it is. Yes, I know.

Speaker3: [00:23:05] And you know, like David Roberts, who I really like, I consider him a friend. We don't see each other a lot when he was at Grist and a little bit of Vox since, you know, he's a great blogger, a great thinker on these issues. He's dug in a lot. But back in the day, he was punishing me pretty relentlessly with tags and the early days of Twitter and I was a VSP, which is something you don't want to be. It's a very serious person. So VSP was like a negative label and a hippie puncher. If you Google for hippie puncher in my name, you know, among my other aspects of my life, I played music with Pete Seeger for 20 years, the ultimate hippie. And so calling me a hippie puncher really pisses me off.

Speaker1: [00:23:43] Fake news, fake news.

Speaker3: [00:23:45] But I am kind of a slave to reality. You know, I'm just like one of these people who, you know, I can't really campaign for something if I don't feel that the data. I understand them, support it, and just even when I when my blog much later dot Earth, when when it moved in 2010 from being something I invented as a news reporter to being an opinion column, the first piece I wrote was, You know, my opinion is the reality matters. I'm like an evangelist campaigner for reality. But we're, you know, we're in a media environment where that's a small chunk of the audience. People don't really like nuance.

Speaker1: [00:24:20] Well, I'm glad you brought this up, too, because when you were talking about the kind of the difficulty of a good aesthetic headline, that's the the nuclear autumn, right, that it doesn't work. And you're saying that the subtlety of science, the complexity of science can sometimes make it difficult to to reduce to a punchy headline or, you know, a quotable. And so I'm curious as to, you know, within your journalistic practice how you work with that subtlety, with the complexity, because at the same time, you don't want to dumb it down or have it be misinterpreted. And yet, no, journalists, I don't think, can fully convey all the complexity of every detailed study. It's just it would be endless, right? It would be a bog. So how do you how do you kind of approach that subtlety while still providing clarity and emotional punch and and messaging? That's that's totally critical as well.

Speaker3: [00:25:13] Well, with global warming, particularly what I have begun to do and began to do pretty fairly recently, maybe the last seven years or so is to parse it out. It's become, you know, everyone. There's been this move to stop calling it global warming or climate change and call it climate emergency, climate breakdown, climate, whatever. And I think that's a big mistake because it's all still about this general concept called global warming that everyone and his mother and father have a different definition for in their head. Quite often when I speak about this these days, I'll distribute Post-it notes to an audience, not a small group like in a classroom. And I'll say, OK, quickly scribble on one side of this piece of paper your shortest definition of global warming. And then I say, flip it over and scribble one or two words about how it makes you feel. And then I throw them all into a hat, so no one knows who wrote which one. And then we start reading them and they're all over the map, you know? And so rather than try to get people more engaged on a word, a phrase that really has no meaning ultimately, because it has so many meetings, if you break it into the pieces that matter to people that it feels like it's more tractable, and realistically, that is what you have to do. So the piece is the main pieces are reducing vulnerability to things in the climate system that suck.

Speaker3: [00:26:34] That's one. What sucks? Why do we care about climate? Well, you know, we care about whether you turn on the radio every day or whatever to know if you should bring an umbrella. But with weather patterns, the climate, the things that matter are extremes. If it's going to get unbelievably hot, that's really bad. But the things that are hitting us now, you know, flooding the wildfire as a reporter or as a citizen, it's beneficial to stop. Just hit the pause button. Say, OK, here I am. Let's pretend I don't know anything about anything, OK? There's just been a year of mega fires in California. What do I know about what caused them? What do I know about what caused the losses? The things that matter are not so much. If there's a fire. The things that matter? Or do people die? Did trees ecosystems get wrecked? The air filled with noxious pollution? And then and then you say, So what are the drivers of the thing that just happened? And in California, it's a robustly understood that the main factor driving losses, death, destruction is where and how people have built these. These ecosystems were evolved to burn the sequoias. Seed pods don't open unless they burn everything in Northern California, and in the chaparral in Southern California is different. But it's still a fire adapted landscape. And we are not a fire adapted society.

Speaker3: [00:27:53] So that is a climate crisis, right? Without with or without climate change, where the West has a fire crisis and there are things you can do today that can start to ameliorate those the risks and losses, you could even see it in paradise. The houses that didn't burn there was a really good story in The Washington Post. After all the stories about the fires and was climate involved, there was a good story just looking in depth of the houses that didn't burn. And lo and behold, people built differently. Even though the code didn't require it. They had soffit vents so that with the netting netting over them, so embers can't get inside your roof. And that's a classic way houses burn down. And yet in California, as I wrote over and over again on Earth, like there, there were places in Southern California where mansions had been burned to the ground, beautiful grounds around them with the swimming pools and the palm trees. And I was talking to a firefighter and he says, You know, I sure wish they would get rid of these palm trees. There's no there's no palm tree that is native to California. And the palms that you usually see in these decorative locations are. Our Canary Island date palms or something like that, and go on YouTube and look for Burning Palm Tree. And they're basically like giant Roman candles. Yeah, and they burn and burn and burn, and they send out just shards and shards of sparks.

Speaker3: [00:29:11] And you told me about places where the million trillion dollar house burned down and they put the house back up and they planted more palm trees. Like so so I have, you know, this is not a global warming problem. Global warming, then, is absolutely an amplifier of this wet, dry pattern that leads to more fuel and more combustible fuel. But then I started to get frustrated when the dynamic of the politics because everyone's so eager to get global warming action that they overstressed the climate change component and it kind of lets communities off the hook. If you just say this is all because we're not globally decarbonising, that's not why the houses are burning down. So that's a great story. And those are accountability stories. Those are good, old fashioned journalism stories. Why these communities built over and over again in vulnerable ways. Vulnerability reduction, same thing in poor places, at different dynamic. And and then there is the energy challenge, the energy. That's it's a separate story. Yeah, it has to be because of the time lag, you know, even if we heated these powerful calls from Greta and Christiana Figueres and Al Gore tomorrow in the world just said, OK, we're going to turn everything off and we'll do it at a pace that's like even better, let's say even better than 1.5 degree kind of curve.

Speaker3: [00:30:26] The climate system won't notice that for decades. And what are we doing in the meantime? We're building and growing, and we're heading toward nine point nine billion, nine point five 10 billion people all want a decent life, and if they're building vulnerability, then you're exacerbating the part that hits us hardest right now, which is the losses, whether it's coastal flooding or wildfires, the same dynamic. But then finally, it's tractable. You see, it's like you can write the energy stories I can write in the Hudson Valley about. We've had real fundamental change here in New York, and as in California, here now a community can choose to join other communities and become a bulk buyer of renewable power from utility. It's community choice aggregation that doesn't exist. That option did not exist ten years ago, and it evolved and you know, whether it would have evolved with or without the climate change. One of the drivers, I think it's probably the case that it wouldn't have come about to have that choice if there hadn't been this background push around decarbonization. So that's a great story to focus on their stuff we can do right now. And how do we amplify that and spread that awareness and make sure that regulations and rules are such that it's doable, not just in New York and beyond? Those are good stories as well. They're just not solve the climate crisis.

Speaker2: [00:31:39] Yeah, no, I know. And you know, those stories have often, you know, an optimistic tinge to them, even if you know there's a lot to be concerned and even just downright fearful about in those topics, you kind of building on this, but also looking backward a little bit. I wanted to talk about what's obviously one of the big headwinds we're facing in terms of both understanding, but especially action, which is, of course, this kind of anti-science mood that we live in today. And this is something a lot of the climate scientists on our podcast have talked about Michael Mann, Katharine Hayhoe, other people who come on and just, you know, a good amount of their time is spent fighting trolls on Twitter, it seems like, which is not really the best use of their time as scientists, but also it's important public work because you know, this idea that that the climate changing itself is being questioned and this was a great, you know, Stephen Colbert line from back in the day that people want to have their own facts. Now everyone gets their own facts according to their own ideology. This must be something that you've wrestled with over the years. And I mentioned, I want to mention this because it also to acknowledge that you are somebody who broke some important stories going back to the Bush administration about political interference with scientific research. Just to put in context that this isn't necessarily something that just happened yesterday, right? But what's your thought about that today and how how important do you think the political headwinds that we're facing are in terms of advancing climate action?

Speaker3: [00:33:02] Yeah, I just couldn't tell if you were saying that, that those are forces that were impeding progress or

Speaker2: [00:33:09] But then also just how important you think it is today when obviously we're in the era of consequences now. How important is it that we kind of try to break through these, you know, politically motivated and often disingenuous efforts to just undermine the facts surrounding the climate?

Speaker3: [00:33:24] It's this is such an interesting arena, the information wars aspect of this. You know, I did a lot of reporting through that bush period and a little bit even after on these efforts, that disinformation and there were early stories where I was suckered by some of them way back. I quoted Myron Ebell from the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Off and on whose clear job was to slow movement toward these toward taking carbon seriously. And. I always indicated he was from an institute that's against environmental regulations and sometimes would say industry funded, but but he would creep into stories almost unavoidably when they're about policy and actually quasi almost appropriately, you know, policy stories are not stories. If you're talking about what do you do about climate change or how do you pay or who pays or how much you pay? That's a story that engages industry and even entities that you or I might not like in terms of their libertarian or conservative angle. They belong in those policy stories, but when they bleed into a story on the science that gets really problematic, and I way back in 2005, I wrote a book chapter on environmental reporting, and I did another one in 2007 on climate reporting. And I said, the key thing, if you're a journalist, is to make sure, you know, if you're writing what kind of story you're writing today. If it's a story about sea ice, then I would almost routinely only talk to people who are in the peer reviewed literature writing about sea ice in a warming climate. If it's about carbon tax, then it really is. That's kind of the scrum, you know, right? That's everybody. It's not convenient. It's not fun. It's their voices in a story like that that will be disagreeable, but it's that is America.

Speaker3: [00:35:09] What then happened with social media? And as things got into this more Instinet mode, which I called it once on Earth, it gets really problematic because these, you know, people can flood the zone and and distract and dissemble. And and then one of the sad saddest things, I think, is then the public just pulls back, you know, if a fight is just raucous and loud and it doesn't feel like it's going anywhere, and then that tends to turn people off entirely. So and I got this sense through my reporting when I was still a news reporter, that the politics was way too often the dominant framing around stories about climate in ways that tended to distract from the basic science that has already been well established that, you know, we're in for centuries of climate change and centuries of sea level rise, and the gas is a cumulative one. So it's like a credit card. Reducing your spending doesn't take away your debt. You know, those basic facts have been there for a long time. And when it gets cast as a political story, then the public kind of feels it's, oh, it's one of those like, you know, it's like health care or something. We're just complicated, wonky. I could just tune out and they miss the so. And then at the same time, the stories that got me on the front page most often were politics stories. You know, it was the story of the muzzling of Jim Hansen that was the most read news article on the web in the New York Times that year. I think it was January 26. That was the most read story, period. Oh, actually, I think it was number two. There was a macaroni and cheese recipe.

Speaker1: [00:36:39] Oh wow, it's hard. I'm pretty sure. Chicken cheese.

Speaker3: [00:36:43] No, I know it was an internal data. I don't know if that was a republic, but it was at any rate it was. That was. But it was, you know, it was the story about the politics, and I began to worry that the politics was almost a distraction, especially when you realize that the scope of this means that mostly it's about decisions in China and India going forward and about foreign policy. You know, are we going to help them transition away from coal or do we think China is too much of a competitor? We're not going to help China do anything now, so. So that that's off the table. But what about India? Do we owe India, you know, helping them work their way to a clean energy future? I think there's a good argument that we do, but there's a big chunk of America that would say no to that. So even even those basic aspects of it are hard. But if it gets perceived as us versus then them story that there's some magical. If we win, then the climate will be safe. It's just so much faster than that that that led me to a whole different chapter of how I write about it. I mean, it's

Speaker1: [00:37:42] Interesting that you have the advice to kind of up and coming journalists when writing about environment and climate change to know what kind of story you're writing. Is it a science story about sea ice, as you said? Or is it a political story about carbon taxes, for example? Because I think reflexively, I think in the contemporary era, maybe especially there's no science story that isn't inflected by politics and no political story that isn't inflected by a changing climate and environmental catastrophe. If we want to think of it that way. So do you do you feel like there's a place for a hybridization or are you ever tempted to not so cleanly cleave the different sectors between science and politics, but to to kind of blend them together to be or to explicitly speak about them as overlapping processes?

Speaker3: [00:38:31] Well, I think what I've been, what I try to do, what I would try to encourage people to think, whether they're news consumers or writers, is to just step back. Like I said earlier in confronting a fire, a wildfire or a coastal flood and just do something. The former science editor at the Times, Cornelia Dean, she used to say, OK, let's review the bidding meaning. Like, where are we here? You know, amid all the noise and all the instant many stories and all the, you know, you get paper after paper after paper coming out on on new science related to climate. And guess what? They diverge sometimes. So it's like, OK. Sea ice is retreating. Everyone's breathlessly waiting for the new record for something and stepping back and assessing where we are, what's known about where we're headed. And on the policy end, what are the things that would have to change to build a safer relationship with climate and energy? That exercise is vital. If you don't want to be suckered into doing a quick hit story that distracts or or takes you off takes the reader away from the true scope of what's going on. It's OK to do that, you know, as long as there's some way to set it in context. And I think one thing that led me to blogging, which I started when I was a news reporter in 2007, was that it was a way to try to build a relationship with readers. That was a continuum. You know, most of the you don't have that pleasure. You don't know which reader is there on one day or another and whether you're kind of having a learning curve with your readers.

Speaker3: [00:40:04] It felt like it was a good fit for a story as complex as this where, you know, as I said, the basics are clear, but there are fundamental aspects of the climate challenge that are still deeply uncertain, including the most basic things. How is it going to get the sensitivity of the system to CO2 remains about what it was 30 or 40 years ago? The range of possibilities. Sea level rise. We just had a meeting at Columbia on this concept of managed retreat. What do you do in the face of relentless sea level rise in coastal communities and the latest science presented there? Is that the range of possibilities is a little bigger than people thought earlier, meaning it could. Maybe it could be two meters by 2100, but the uncertainty is deeper. So it's like, yeah, so that doesn't really help a coastal mayor very much, does it? What a mayor wants to hear is, do I have to replace LaGuardia or not? And science doesn't answer that. So those things and then that leads to good stories. But they're not like the winning losing story. They're not they're not necessarily the politics story. There are some aspects of it are like de Blasio is trying to save New York by adding more acreage. It's kind of a scam. You could see it in one way and just having the rigor to step back and not be. I started a hashtag a year or so ago narrative capture like you don't want to be captured by narrative. I would hate to be suckered into being captured by someone else's narrative.

Speaker3: [00:41:27] You know, that's what we call. That's that's being manipulated as a reporter. Mm hmm. And and I would hate to be stuck in the narrative of my own creation. And unfortunately, newsrooms have had a habit sometimes of creating their own narrative guardrails. The New York Times bought into the bush vision of what was going on in Iraq, and we were I was reporting on that after 9-11, on the anthrax and other things. And and it was hard for us, the technical reporters doing stories about those letters after 9-11 that were sent with anthrax in them. Those of us working on the technical question were rebuffed in the newsroom because the Washington based reporters were getting front-page coverage on Oh, this is likely this anthrax had to come from some sophisticated lab like something like Iraq would have, you know? And they were being fed that narrative. But it was a great narrative and we were suckered by it. And, you know, I didn't want to be captured by that. And on climate change, you know, there are narratives of all kinds that get built around it and it takes rigor and it can be a headache and you can get you punished. But especially as a journalist, and I would think the average person doesn't want to be suckered either. Most people I know don't want to be conned, you know, find you some skill sets, some reference points. So you can, as a news consumer or as a reporter, can remind yourself, let alone others, that the reality is over here somewhere.

Speaker2: [00:42:46] I wanted to ask you, Andrew, this is a bit of a journalism nerd question. But before I started doing research on energy and environment issues, I actually worked on news media for 20 years. So this is something that I have a stake as an anthropologist and in

Speaker3: [00:42:59] A way, cool. We could we could do a whole day on that.

Speaker2: [00:43:01] Yeah, I'm sure. But just to narrow it down to one question, I mean, you, like we did, grew up in the era of a set of media institutions that were basically set up in the the middle of the 20th century, you know, big broadcast publics. We all watched the evening news together. We all read the same news of record newspapers. And then you made the transition obviously into the internet era, which was a huge disruptor, but in some ways also a liberator of certain kinds of journalism, especially opinion. And now we're in this social media era, which seems even more, more dizzying and kind of hard to hard to grasp what's happening in the news cycles are moving so quickly, and there's so many people in the game in terms of writing and communicating and informing people about climate issues. I just wondered whether you had any observations from your own personal experience about maybe the advantages and disadvantages of those different moments, because it seems to me like on the one hand back in the day. A, you had a bigger podium, you had a bigger loudspeaker, but fewer people were in the game, and so it was harder for people, you know, just regular citizens to participate in news making. But now today everyone's a newsmaker basically of one kind or another. We're all we're all involved in that ecology. And yet there's so much noise it's really hard to get the signal out, and that seems to be a huge issue. Plus, the news cycle turns over so fast.

Speaker3: [00:44:17] Well, this is one reason I'm at Columbia University now, and it's also one reason I'm not at the journalism school, which I love. I went to the journalism school, got out in 1982 when that old model dominated, and we wrote very simple set of stories or feature stories. There were news stories, there were investigative stories and and then, as you say, the weaknesses. There were weaknesses in that model, though, you know, I always sort of crystallized it around Walter Cronkite's. That's the way it is, which the last day he said that was sometime in nineteen eighty two. I think there was a I show his that clip. Sometimes when I speak about this and the challenge now is that the way it is comes out us through the filters that we create or that Google and Facebook create for us through algorithms, and it does lead to a whole set of different challenges. There were challenges in the old days. The front page thought is, that's another hashtag. I started writing about the front page thought the the tyranny of the front page thought back in 10 years ago. That was a term of art in the newsroom at The New York Times. So to some news, some new paper was coming out in the journal Science and on an acceleration of glacial erosion and Greenland. And you'd tell summarize, the days would look like a news story for your science editor. She'd go into the front page meeting with the editor, looking at some stock market trauma and something happening in the Middle East.

Speaker3: [00:45:42] And maybe there's an earthquake in Turkey and and the Yankees are falling out of first place. And so the question is, where's the front page thought in that meaning what? What are you telling me in this story that we didn't already know? We didn't. We already write something about Greenland last month or last year, and it became a very hard to have a story that was true to the evolutionary nature of understanding of climate change and would also satisfy the strictures of how something gets on the front page. And I got tired of playing that game, so I would often structure more of my stories as features that would run in the weekly science section, knowing that it was a compromise because in that old fashioned newspaper, people either read the science section or not. You know, the front page is that bully. That's the plaza that everyone visits. And so not getting on the front page means you're missing the general audience who might stumble on your story and get engaged with it. And then you moved into the science section more. And then as you as I mentioned, I moved into blogging as a way to for those who are already engaged and sometimes who might stumble there through search, I offered a kind of more of a conversational journey about these issues.

Speaker3: [00:46:52] And and there, you know, the noise factor is huge and social media even more so. And this is when from 2010 to 2016 was when I began teaching at Pace University full time, that was I left the staff of the times. I took a buyout the day after the climate talks ended in Copenhagen. Well, it was, you know, in the works that I was going to be leaving and I had a great new position at Pace University and I even got to invent it and call it senior fellow for environmental understanding. I like Nice and C because I'd moved from sort of a journalism as production of knowledge mode to trying to realize what makes people understand something about the environment and maybe change. So it was more exploratory. It was more like my blog. I taught courses in environmental writing and blogging, online writing and filmmaking that class for six years, where the students went on trips and did films about sustainability issues. And it was great to see their eyes light up when they realized when they were interviewing fishermen in a poor village in Mexico who were drowning turtles in their nets unintentionally. That that it's hard to sell them on stopping fishing their way if it might have saved some turtles, but it's going to make them go broke because they can't get halibut, that there are these fundamental drivers of people wanting to get out of poverty that can lead to environmental damage.

Speaker3: [00:48:17] And those films were really neat, and what I liked about them was they these were students who were not environmental study students. They were communication students, some of whom would end up doing films for corporate video. Some would go to MSNBC. Some would go elsewhere. But they all got a sense of what sustainability is just by doing these production courses on the road. And I realized, by the way, around that time that all through my journalism learning, we were never really taught, you know, sociology or behavioral science of how information moves. Maybe some journalism schools taught it at the. I never got that at Columbia. You were just taught how to write a story the way we knew how to write them, you know? You know, the lead, the nut graft, the kicker. And we knew by working in newsrooms what made the front page and we knew what made a career. And you know, and I did all that. I touched all those stones and I won all these awards and started writing my books. And then but then I just became I stumbled into the behavioral science sort of twenty six, twenty seven. And that was when I started blogging. And that's really what led me out of the newsroom toward being more exploratory about how does information matter there were suffused with it were drowning information. We're drowning in digital dots and dashes and and it's like TMI is not just a hashtag, either, it's a fundamental reality, and it requires a new skill set, not not of the writer.

Speaker3: [00:49:41] It does require it for writers and content creators, but definitely audiences. And this is like to me, this question you raise is the most profound one is in this new environment. What are the what are strategies for surviving and maybe thriving and maybe tweaking things toward better outcomes? And that's essentially the position I've built for myself now and that the great new director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University embraced the idea. You know, let's explore this information environment just like it's a new ecosystem that just emerged, exploded. Some asteroid just hit the Earth and covered it in an information ecosystem. We don't know. Wow. Look at this. There's all these things I can Skype with someone in New Guinea. And you know, and we have my friends at National Geographic have ROVs that can I can control from my laptop. And wow, you know, so what do we do with this National Geographic, where I was for a year as I probably up to 110 million followers on their Instagram feed and and therefore, you know, that's the, you know, those are the new frontiers. And that's kind of I'll be writing and working with others at Columbia and elsewhere to try to clarify pathways through this new jungle.

Speaker1: [00:50:51] So do you want to tell us a little bit more about that jungle or that new ecosystem that the asteroid has created? It's you're calling it the initiative on communication and sustainability and as you it's located in the Earth Institute at Columbia. So what are the what are the goals? What are the parameters? Who's doing the work? What are the objectives that you have in mind?

Speaker3: [00:51:11] Well, you know, the big objective, as I said a minute ago, is can you make information matter more than it does now in service of sustainable outcomes on this planet and sustainability? I do. You know this the SDGs, the Sustainable Development Goals have their problems, but they are a pretty good way to sort of at least get an idea of which way progress lies. You know, we want people to be more literate, more connected, less unhealthy, and then you can start asking, Well, OK and Location X, what are the sources of disease and how you get at that? And in each case, when you go to any of the SDGs and certainly with climate and with energy transitions, there are these focal points where to me, to my reading, the missing factor is some lack of communication, like two disciplines that aren't talking to each other, sociologists and ecologists and considering conservation plan for Madagascar political scientists. You need everybody in the room to create a conservation plan for Madagascar, not just biologists. It's not just building fences. So that's a form of how do we get disciplines to talk to each other, even within Colombia? How do we get dispersed scholars in their own niches to step back, review the bidding and have a conversation with someone in a field you never talked to before about a new way to convey information or. And so some of this is at that level, literally getting people who already engaged on questions to talk to each other more clearly.

Speaker3: [00:52:37] Some of this is still about just innovative methods of storytelling and engaging with them in new ways, especially when I was at National Geographic Society. You know, they're on the forefront of 360 video and AR and VR and and mapping in real time. And there's many, many, many ways to foster progress by integrating an indigenous tribes awareness of incursions in its territory with remote sensing. And how do you help an indigenous community tell a story better to the outside world, but tell it in its own way? Not not being patronizing. That requires co learning and co sort of cotesting of ways to to convey information. I'm not saying I'm going to be actively doing all this, and initially we'll be looking at these these arenas to see where an innovative approach, a different approach to trying to address a problem, a different conversation, a different kind of conversation can make a difference. That's a model that really excites me is and there's a whole bunch of people. There's a team at Colombia I didn't know existed until I got there. It called the Advanced Consortium for Cooperation, Conflict and Complexity. Hmm. Pretty interesting name AC for and it's Peter Coleman. And Joshua Fischer and others, and they among the things that Peter Coleman does, he has what's called the difficult decisions laboratory. They study the dynamics of debate and decisions and conflict.

Speaker3: [00:54:06] It grew out of peace and conflict studies, but there's a subunit sort of a subset of people there now focusing on sustainability questions. You know, how do you shift corporate culture to be truly thinking about social and environmental responsibility as opposed to making it just some add on hashtag, you know, CSR? And that is a cool. I love what they're doing, and it relates to some evolving forms of journalism that I really like and the solutions journalism space of which I am a fan. It's where journalists are not just going out in the world anymore with pads and notepad and taking transcribing what three City Council members say about the opioid crisis when in Ohio this rebooted. The Akron Beacon Journal has started an initiative a few years ago called Your Voice Ohio, where they do the convenings they hold the town meeting, they bring in experts, they they help the community, they enable community conversations that then drive their journalism. That's an approach that can be applied to a bunch of environmental issues in ways that conventional media have really not addressed yet. So I'm going to be working to sort of test and spread models like that. I'll be writing, You haven't had time. I've just been on the ground there two weeks, and the initial plan is really just getting the architecture of this wonderful place, which includes the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, four hundred people up the Hudson River, just north of the George Washington Bridge.

Speaker3: [00:55:31] The groups there, among other things, are the ones who really elucidated the El Nino La Nina cycle, you know, in the eighties. They do. It's one of the great hubs of the ocean coring work that's revealed really important climate history that if you don't know climate history, you can't really understand where we are right now. And there's the Law Climate Law Group. Mike Gerrard and his team, the Sabin Law Center, they've got this. They're the ones who created this climate deregulation tracker after Trump was elected, and it's they're really fantastic and they're producing stuff that journalism could produce. They did a report a few weeks ago. I believe the number was that Trump has tried regulatory interventions, something like one hundred and sixty eight or nine environmental regulatory rollbacks, and they thoroughly reviewed all these case files. And so far, none of them have succeeded. Trump has undone a lot of, you know, presidential orders and the like, but he hasn't had any success at regulatory rollback. And that's news. But it's actually hard to find that news in a newspaper, but it was out on social media and I tried to push it around. So, you know, I can start to sort of help facilitate foster the connectivity between these hubs of specialized knowledge and journalists and publics. And that's all really exciting.

Speaker2: [00:56:47] Yeah, it is. And I think, you know, one of the things we learned this week with our own good fortune to be in the middle of a news cycle with our Glacier Memorial Plaque project is that, you know, sometimes if you if you have just a simple, captivating image or a message or an event, something like that, you can really bring together a lot of people you wouldn't expect to come together around these issues.

Speaker3: [00:57:08] So that was a pretty cool that was a pretty cool project.

Speaker2: [00:57:11] Yeah, no. I mean, you know, we were thrilled, of course, and we'd been working at it for several years. But yeah,

Speaker1: [00:57:16] But still has yet to happen. It still is yet to happen, instantaneous when it actually appears on the mountain.

Speaker2: [00:57:22] So, I mean, the plaque exists. It's out on the mountain yet, and that'll be something else. But I do think we've learned a lot in that process about how a news event unfolds these days and how it spreads and the kind of backlash you get and the kind of embraces you get. And but I think that, you know, part of what made it work is that there was a kind of emotional pitch there. It connected at the level of feelings for a lot of people, it seemed to me. And I think that's maybe one of the ways you can cut through all of the informational chaos around us is, you know, kind of connecting in on an idea that that is something that can communicate across cultures even because we need those, we need those events and those ideas to connect so that we can build, you know, international action. As you said, it really regardless of whatever Trump does here and in some ways, regardless of what the U.S. does, the the battle for climate change is going to be won or lost in Asia, and that's something I don't think we're thinking enough about.

Speaker3: [00:58:14] No, I agree. What I really loved about, or at least the seeing the plaque and understanding the project is how it plays with time. And one of the things that again, getting back to that conversation with my MIT buddies, one of the biggest challenges in concretized or really getting people to integrate the understanding of what the climate problem is, is the dimensions. The time dimensions of it are extraordinary. It's building phenomenon that you know, our climate today is the result of decades of emissions, not to mention the natural variability in the background, but decades decades of emissions building when our parents were in the boom days of the baby boom. And. Post-war era and and again, there's no quick fix, so the payoff from our actions now will be for generations to come. So it really is about Gretta and her grandchildren more than than us. Anything you see out the window now is is a function of mostly of where and how we've built so far. It's not a function of climate change yet. So those things create these profound ethical questions and require a sense of understanding of what you can change, who it can benefit and being comfortable with that. It really is a legacy. The decarbonisation part of what we do, the climate benefit, if it is a legacy that we leave for generations to come.

Speaker3: [00:59:35] The vulnerability reduction we can do now, especially in poor places and the most vulnerable communities around us, is a real time gift to humanity that makes lives better right now. And those deserve equal vigor. And yet the vulnerability reduction, climate adaptation, whatever you want to call it, is often disparaged when it really is a primal part of that ethical responsibility. So the timeline is really the thing that rings bells for me. And looking at that plaque, I tweeted about this. I don't know if you saw my tweets because it reminded me of in 1995, I went to Switzerland and wrote an article for Conde Nast Traveler. It was just before I started at the New York Times on the receding glaciers of Switzerland and how they were changing Swiss identity. And I learned from a Swiss scientist how it 18 18. There's a town there where they didn't put up a plaque, but they every year they started planting a cross at the snout of the glacier, looming over their village to pray for it, to stop coming toward the village. Because that was that was the Little Ice Age. It was still the tail end of the Little Ice Age and the glaciers were advancing and the prayers were to stop the glaciers from expanding.

Speaker3: [01:00:48] And of course, the story that I wrote for Traveler is now, of course, the Swiss are praying for their glaciers to stop retreating, but it gets at this time scope. You know, there are things that are set in motion, including human development, the way we're unfolding right now. You can't stop humanity from going to nine or 10 billion people because of demographic inertia momentum. It's just part of who we are and and our nature is such that we really do like energy, you know, and it makes life better almost everywhere. So getting off making a transition like this is the hardest thing we've ever tried to do. Because if you look at energy history, it's usually a more convenient form of energy or something that's cheaper or better in terms of real time benefits. And we're trying to kind of cobble a pathway away from those things that created everything around us and do it quickly. And it's like really hard. It creates these really puts it in a special place in terms of thinking about where you have to get comfortable with it somehow with both the urgent feelings and the patience it takes to deal with something that's going to unfold over lifetimes.

Speaker1: [01:01:53] Yeah, I think it's very hard for people to capture that long future, illogical time horizon and also act now quickly and efficiently in the present. It's just it's almost like we're tripping over ourselves conceptually with both of those things. And yet that's precisely what we need to all be doing so.

Speaker3: [01:02:13] And by the way, recognizing that time scales and that it's not easy for many people to transition quickly off of all color oil turns the camera back toward innovation and the need still for research to make batteries even better or panels even better, or nuclear power that does eat its own fuel. And it's compact and self-limiting. And and I can't think about I was one of the early folks writing starting in 2006, a front page story in the Times about how our basic research and development investment in this country and elsewhere actually was declining in energy. Even in an era of rising concern about global warming, we were were asleep at the wheel on science that's needed to underpin the Elon Musk's of the world. You know, everything in a Tesla didn't just he didn't. He didn't invent any of those things. He invented the application of them. And that's where this guy from Rice University was profoundly influential for me as a reporter, and I think it was around 2003. Richard Smalley, the novelist, came through New York City and gave a lecture at Columbia, his Energy Challenge lecture, where he had done the numbers. He's such an interesting man. He does this. It's all online. I actually made a playlist of these videos and the one I saw is online, and he said he methodically went through, you know, what are the things that matter for development? What are the things that matter for humanity and its education and health care? And he said, What's the one string that thread that ties them all and its energy? And he said, we needed a methodical look at the terawatt challenge.

Speaker3: [01:03:45] I think he call it, how do we get trillions of watts with no carbon? And he had his own pathway, but it was really a call to arms. And to the importance of renewing our our investments in basic science that we had pursued during the space race, you know, the Apollo achievement, the science push that went into that was a big deal. The basic technologies were there to take us to the Moon, but there was a $30 billion a year pulse of that's in like modern dollars of investment in R&D. That was the space race and these graphs that I kept throwing up over and over again on Dot Earth on my blog showing you that how big that is and how small how dribble like our investments in clean energy science are. And it was Richard Smalley who really got that into my head. I swung back and was in touch with him off and on quite a few times before he died way too young. But so Rice University has an important history point in all this.

Speaker2: [01:04:40] Our own little little part of the story is so I'm just looking. I'm looking at the time, Andrew, and saying, you know, we should probably let you go, but we'd love to keep this conversation going, obviously. And if there's any way we can help you to advance your initiative at Columbia, please let us know. We, we do. We know some, even other folks at Columbia. We should get you in touch with who are working on environmental issues beyond the ones you mentioned. And I think it is important that in New York, which is a city again, that both represents the kind of culmination of one kind of American civilization, but also the the vulnerability and precarity that the next century is going to bring through. You know, your susceptibility. We just saw that with the floods in Brooklyn right the other day and so forth. And and so it seems like a particularly apt place in the same way Houston is to explore some of the paradoxes and possible routes forward.

Speaker3: [01:05:30] Well, yeah, and I do think I've been tweeting about this the last week or two, the when you look at what universities are and are not doing on climate and energy and resilience, I think there's a huge opportunity. You could say it's an unmet responsibility so far or an opportunity for universities to do for energy what we did over the century or two in agriculture through extension services. Why aren't universities more outward facing when it comes to helping communities or states pursue the aggressive targets and those that have chosen them, like New York and California? I think universities could band together into a bit of a coalition to say our doors are open. Here's our Dropbox for questions. You know, some of this is regulatory. Some of this is legal. Some of this is science. Some of this is how does a community do an energy audit? That's actually a hard thing. It turns out I tweeted about that, too. And if universities are not more engaged than they are now, if this is a question of the ages, if this isn't one of our grand challenges and it is, then that has to be reflected in how universities operate, if not us, then who? Right? And there are some efforts underway again, if someone wants at Google for extension service. Rivkin on Twitter. Whatever you search, where you see recent examples are pretty interesting, but I think it's a great big opportunity for universities to collaborate, to connect with each other and then with the outside world and not always focus so much on the breakthrough paper is on making breakthroughs for communities around them to deal with this issue.

Speaker2: [01:07:02] Word word. Yeah, right on man. Pete Pete Seeger is smiling down at you. That's all I want to say.

Speaker3: [01:07:09] Ha ha. Yes, I like that.