Factually! with Adam Conover - Technology Won’t Stop the Climate Apocalypse with Dr. Dana Fisher

Episode Date: May 1, 2024

The climate crisis is unfolding very day, with many inevitable consequences looming in the near future. While we may hope for clean energy or fossil fuel alternatives to save the day, climate change is more than just a technological issue—it's fundamentally a social problem. When tend to view climate change only from an ecological or technological perspective, but we require a sociological view to understand how we can collectively solve it. This week, Adam discusses these complexities with Dr. Dana Fisher, Director of the Center for Environment, Community, & Equity and author of Saving Ourselves: From Climate Shocks to Climate Action. They explore the role of hope in the climate crisis, strategies for collective action, and the possibility that things may worsen before they improve. Find Dana's book at factuallypod.com/booksSUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/adamconoverSEE ADAM ON TOUR: https://www.adamconover.net/tourdates/SUBSCRIBE to and RATE Factually! on:» Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/factually-with-adam-conover/id1463460577» Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0fK8WJw4ffMc2NWydBlDyJAbout Headgum: Headgum is an LA & NY-based podcast network creating premium podcasts with the funniest, most engaging voices in comedy to achieve one goal: Making our audience and ourselves laugh. Listen to our shows at https://www.headgum.com.» SUBSCRIBE to Headgum: https://www.youtube.com/c/HeadGum?sub_confirmation=1» FOLLOW us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/headgum» FOLLOW us on Instagram: https://instagram.com/headgum/» FOLLOW us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@headgum» Advertise on Factually! via Gumball.fmSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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I don't know anything. I don't know anything. I don't know anything. Hello and welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. Thank you so much for joining me on the show again. This week, we're talking once again about climate change. See, a couple weeks ago, Hello and welcome to Factually, I'm Adam Conover. Thank you so much for joining me on the show again. This week, we're talking once again about climate change. See, a couple of weeks ago,

I had Dr. Hannah Ritchie on the show and she made the case that if you look at all these different indices, emissions per capita, the price of renewable energy, deforestation, a lot of things are moving in the right direction and that that is cause for hope. Now, I expressed some skepticism about this and a lot of you did as in the right direction and that that is cause for hope. Now, I expressed some skepticism about this and a lot of you did as well

in the comments below the episode. And that's because, you know, we have made some progress but the progress we have made is clearly insufficient. And even though we've made progress on some solutions that have leveraged the power of capitalism to say, make one kind of energy cheaper than another, sell electric cars and stuff like that. Well, that's kind of the easy solution, isn't it?

To sell clean energy when it's just as cheap as fossil fuels. But getting people, or God forbid, massive corporations to give up fossil fuels is hard. So how do we push powerful interests in governments to overlook short-term profit for the long-term benefits of having a planet that's, you know, habitable? I ask how, because clearly we haven't done it yet.

Climate change is only partially a problem of technology. Primarily, it's a social problem that our entire society caused. And it's an open question whether our collective decision-making institutions are advanced enough to deal with that problem. I mean, it's much easier to make a cheaper solar cell than it is to get all world governments to agree to decarbonize.

But mass decarbonization is what we actually need, right? So if we want to look at how society can change, we need to look at more than just technological fixes. We have to look at the science behind what causes social change and institutional transformation. That is a huge and hard problem, and you can't figure it out just by looking at the science behind what causes social change in institutional transformation. That is a huge and hard problem, and you can't figure it out just by looking at the atmosphere or brand new, awesome, clean technologies. You need to talk to a sociologist.

Well, guess what? On the show this week, we in fact have a sociologist who has written an incredible new book about how we can actually create the massive social change we need to fight climate change in the face of corporate opposition to that change. I know you are going to love this interview, but before we get to it, I just want to remind you that if you want to support this show and all the conversations we bring you every single week,

you can do so on Patreon. Please head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover. Five bucks a month gets you every episode of the show ad free. We've got a bunch of other great community features. We'd love to see you there. And of course, if you like standup comedy and you want to see me perform in a city near you, head to adamconover.net for my tickets and tour dates.

And now let's get to today's guest. I am so excited to introduce you to Dr. Dana Fisher. She's a sociologist and she's the director of the Center for Environment, Community and Equity and a professor in the School of International Service at American University. She's been following the politics and sociology of climate change for decades and her new book is called Saving Ourselves from Climate Shocks to Climate Action. Please welcome Dr. Dana Fisher.

Dana, thank you so much for being on the show. Thank you for having me, Adam. So we talk about climate change a lot on this show. Normally I'm talking to climate scientists, technologists, people like that. You are a sociologist. You have written a book about the climate crisis from a social perspective.

Why is that? Why is that such an important lens to use? Well, I mean, at this point, everybody recognizes that the climate crisis is actually a social problem, right? We created the problem, we society, and the only way to solve it is actually through us. Society is going to have to solve it. It's not like the planet is going to save itself.

We got to do it because we got to fix the problem we created. So sociology makes a lot of sense as a place to look for that because we study social processes. Right, like we can learn as much as we want about the atmosphere or about clean energy technology, but if we don't understand the people who are actually gonna implement those things or do something about it, then we're gonna be up Chits Creek, right? Right, I mean, I think it's worth noting here

that there are a lot of natural scientists and atmospheric scientists who have started talking about policy, have started talking about the social side, because they are social beings and that's great. But, you know, there are those of us who are trained and have PhDs specifically in actually studying the social processes and how they work and have spent our lives and our careers doing that. And I'm one of them. And so we're, I mean, I think that we provide a lot of opportunity to think through based on research, how social systems work and what will be opening opportunities and what will probably not work.

Great, well, let's zoom out and start using that lens. A lot of people have a lot of different stances on climate change. People are techno optimists, whatever. You told me before we started recording, you would describe yourself as an apocalyptic optimist. I wanna know what that means, and how do you frame the problem of climate change,

like most broadly? Okay, so I'm an apocalyptic optimist. That means that I believe that we are in trouble and that bad things are coming and that it is bad, it's getting worse, and nothing we've done so far is gonna solve the problem yet. But I am optimistic because while it's bad and it's getting worse, I believe that we have the capacity to save ourselves and I talk through the book how we're going to do that. But it's all going to come from us, right? It is not going to be like the technology that's going to

fall from the sky and everyone's going to be like, oh, I thought that was going to be bad, but it's okay. It's not going to work that way. It's rather that it's gonna involve struggle and work and we're gonna have to all get angry to do it. With regard to understanding the climate crisis and what it is, I mean, basically in the broadest way it is the fact that the entire world, the entire industrial system is run on burning fossil fuels, which is basically having the unintended consequence of increasing concentration of greenhouse gases. The one that we talk about the most is carbon dioxide

in the atmosphere, which is changing the way that our planet absorbs heat. And also that is then having an effect on all sorts of environmental systems and climate systems and the oceans and the oceans and the holes and the ice caps, et cetera, and so forth. So everything's changing thanks to these concentrations that have built up over decades now. Stopping burning fossil fuels basically means that, I mean, I don't know if this is solar,

but I'm assuming it's not. So all of the electricity that we run our lives, our businesses, most of our transportation, all of that has to change. I mean, and then there's also food. I mean, carbon comes from a whole bunch of things. Yeah. Methane emitted by cows' asses. Yes, exactly.

The ruminants, all the ruminants emit methane. It's just that cows get most of the attention. Goats do it too. So there you have it. All right, well if you're into goat cheese. You're getting birria tacos, like you are also emitting methane. So sorry, but please go on.

But anyway, so the problem is really tricky because we have to change the entire system that we are running our economies on, basically. I mean, there are a couple of countries that have done relatively well because they have the capacity for clean energy. Some countries like Norway, for example, dammed their rivers early on so that 99% of all their electricity is actually coming from clean energy because it's hydropower.

And there were very few people except for indigenous folks who lived up there. So they were able to do it really easily. We don't have that capacity here in the United States. Most countries don't have that capacity. Isn't Norway also a huge oil driller? Like, don't they have a gigantic sovereign wealth fund that comes from oil reserves? They absolutely do.

And in fact, one of the things that's kind of ironic about it is they are using those resources to incentivize people within the country to switch to electric vehicles. Right. But they're still making money. They're still opening up areas for extraction, but then they're selling the oil to other countries. Yeah. See, this is a little bit of a tangent, but I went to Norway a couple of years ago and a lovely country.

One of those countries where you go and you're like, why can't everything be like, oh, they got solar panels. They got windfowl. Oh, everything's so nice here. Oh, my everyone's so polite. Oh, they got public transportation. Everything's good. And then I look around for a little while. What's funding is? This kind of feels like I'm going to my, like a rich kid's house. You know, like I live, like I'm in a neighborhood,

I'm middle-class, but oh, oh, come over to my house. This guy, this kid's got a Super Nintendo. They got like a fridge with an ice dispenser. What's going on? Oh, what does this kid's dad do for a living, right? Like this is, this is wealth that I'm looking at. And where does the wealth come from? They have a gigantic nationalized oil reserves that they're selling to other

countries. So it's a little bit of like underneath the surface, there is a dark participation in the same system that we're all a part of. Absolutely. I mean, and what's interesting is that when folks talk about countries addressing climate change, a lot of them are talking just about what they're doing within their borders, right? But a lot of countries, including the United States, has considered basically addressing climate change internally but then continuing to sell fossil fuels abroad, right?

So for example, in the United States, there's a big push to talk about how we could sell our natural gas to other countries because it's cleaner and our labor practices are better, which may very well be somewhat true, but it really doesn't solve the problem. So anyway, going back to the question, so the climate crisis is a really tricky one because it basically involves shifting everything and all the ways that we have industrialized and the ways that we live our lives. And that's one of the reasons that nothing really has been done in the past 25 years

or 30 years since the climate regime began, which is the international kind of efforts to address climate change. But I think with regard to techno-optimism, the reason I'm no longer a techno-optimist is because I have, you know, I have supported and been excited by a number of different fans. In fact, I was just had a friend of mine who reached out and was like, oh yeah, clean hydrogen, green, or sorry, they're calling it green hydrogen now. Green hydrogen, that's the answer, right?

And the deal is that when I was in college, which was in the 1990s, we went through a whole period of time where we're like, woohoo, hydrogen is going to be the future, right? I mean, it's like, and that was a long time ago now. I recognize that. It's just that we, if we keep counting on technology that's not here yet, we're running out of time. I mean, and- Hey, so there's five years away that's going to fix everything.

Right, I know. And then you have to have diffusion of the technology. I mean, it's just, it's not going to solve the problem if you want to save large portions of the world that are basically, I mean, some of them are already going to be lost, right? Lots of small island that are basically... I mean, some of them are already going to be lost, right? Lots of small island states are going to be lost.

Lots of coastal areas are going to be lost. Lots of developing countries are going to have to shift their populations to areas that are cooler or have the resources because a lot of folks are becoming... Areas are becoming resource scarce because of the climate crisis in terms of water, in terms terms of food. And as a result of all of that, we're going to basically have to think about how we address it and leaning into this idea that don't worry, the technology's almost here, right? Is just extremely dangerous.

And it's not just dangerous globally, but it's dangerous for us here in the United States. I mean, look at Arizona. I mean, look at some parts of California this past summer. And this coming summer is gonna be even worse. Yeah. So you said that nothing has been done or very little has been done for the past few decades.

A number of weeks ago, we had a wonderful guest on named Hannah Richie who wrote a book called, Not the End of the World. A lot of the thesis of, and by listening to the episode, if you haven't, it was a wonderful conversation. It's a great conversation. I listened to it yesterday.

Oh, okay, great. So I'd like to put you in dialogue with that because I think it'll be really interesting. Now, her take is, you know, I think a lot of people feel, as I did, you know, I grew up in the Captain Planet era. We have to save the planet. It needs to happen. And then, you know, here I am 25 years later, right?

I'm like, we didn't do it. We didn't save the planet. Sure, things sure seem to be getting worse. What the fuck, right? And a lot of Hannah's argument is like, actually a lot of progress has been made. If we look at these charts and look at these graphs, we can see a lot of shocking,

surprising progress has been made. And we need to continue that and increase it. She's often described by people as a techno-optimist. Certainly people were in the comments of our post on YouTube calling her that. So I'm curious how you engage with that argument. What do you think that argument gets right and what do you think it gets wrong with all respect?

Yeah, I mean, so I would just say that, you know, the analysis is legitimate in that it is true that a number of environmental problems have improved over the years. The problem with climate change, however, I mean, climate change is the issue that I have focused basically my whole career, the past 25 years on, is that climate change is a political issue. In fact, it's a social problem in that we have caused the problem and we, as a society,

are going to have to solve it. And to date, the most valuable measure of success of our efforts to address climate change would be concentrations of carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. And if you look at every one of those charts, it's like a straight slope, right? So- It's not tapering off. It's not like flattening at all.

No, I mean, there was a blip during COVID and we are back on track just like we were before. So yes, there has been a lot of efforts. There have been efforts globally through multiple efforts through treaties. I actually studied a bunch of them. So I mean, I started out, my dissertation was on the Kyoto Protocol, which was like a lifetime ago, which was one of the efforts to address climate change. It was not successful for a number of reasons.

More recently, we have the Paris Agreement where most countries have not yet met and are not going to meet their commitments that they made back in 2015, right? Yeah. So the thing about, you know, the argument is that we, you know, while things are getting better and we are per person maybe emitting less,

we're still emitting more, right? And concentrations of the atmosphere are continuing to go up. And that is the only thing that the earth cares about, right? The earth doesn't care about if each person is emitting less. I mean, sure, that's better. But the population's going up too, right? So, I mean, and so for me, you know,

I'm looking at the bottom line and I also am looking at the politics of it, right? The other thing so I mean, and so for me, you know, I'm looking at the bottom line, and I also am looking at the politics of it, right? The other thing that a lot of people talk about is how we do have policies, right? We have a policy in place here in the United States now, finally, after years, and I have studied all of the failed policies before, so I was delighted to be able to write a paper about a successful policy in the Inflation Reduction Act, but not, you know, still we continue to emit more greenhouse gases every year and temperatures are going up and we got a problem.

So, you know, it's been going on for decades. They've been having these big conferences and everyone's optimistic, right? Right afterwards. I remember I did an episode of Adam Ruins Everything right after the Paris Agreement. And, you know, we covered it as it was covered by basically everyone at the time.

This is the largest step that's ever been taken. It shows international cooperation on a scale we've never seen before. It's, there's such reason for optimism, et cetera, or this is the best reason for optimism that we have. And here we are sitting here, what, seven years, eight years later, just sort of casually describing it as,

ah, well, you know, none of them are gonna meet the targets. Right? So what are the impediments to when, when all of the people at these conferences and all the people running the most important countries, US, European countries, China, all agree about the problem, right? They're certainly not ignorant about it.

Why is progress not being made? Well, I mean, before we talk about progress not being made, I just wanna say, I mean, one of the things that's interesting is that, so they do, they have these meetings every year and people fly all over the world to go to them. And the participation at these events has exploded over the past few years.

And I mean, this past year, they had this wonderful diagram of all the people who took private planes in and came in and I mean, including some well known folks here in the United States who showed up in their private planes. They didn't even carpool. They just they all took their own private planes, showed up and then like we're like, oh, climate change bad. We have to do something about climate change. Yeah. But they're not, oh, climate change bad. We have to do something about climate change.

But they're not actually practicing what they preach. Now, so I just wanna make that- But these individuals are so important that of course their travel is worth, you know, it's a little extra carbon, but you know, Bill Gates, he's gotta be here and there, right? He's gotta be, if he doesn't get from Lisbon to Buenos Aires in whatever, 20 minutes,

then people are gonna die, right? I mean, I would just say, like, let's just start with carpooling, or whatever you call it when it's airpooling. I don't know what the word is, right? I mean, let's just start there. I'm gonna put a little low bar. Let's just say, hey Warren Buffett,

you wanna hit your ride? Like, we're going the same way. We can save gas. And they can join Taylor, right? I mean, she flies all over. She's flying constantly. I mean, there's been a big move around her. They should just have the climate conference where the Taylor Swift concert is join Taylor right? I mean she flies all over she's flying constantly and they're doing a big move around You just have the climate conference where the Taylor Swift concert is happening, right?

If you get free tickets a lot of carbon emissions I mean I would just say that I also would love it if she would think about maybe Cutting down the pyrotechnics a little you know I don't have you been to a Taylor Swift concert. I have kids I've been to many Taylor Swift concert there with you're there with like an air quality sensor going like, guys we're in the purple. Like she said, don't breathe in everybody hold your breath now. I mean, but it's also, you know, it's very consumptive.

Let's just put it that way. But okay, going back to your question. Yes. If I can remember what your question was. Oh, why is it not working? Yeah. Is that the question? Okay, so the reason it's not working is that all of these countries are symbolically

gesturing that they care about climate change. I mean, everybody, everybody cares about climate change now, except for a very small proportion of people in the United States. But that's different from actually acting on it because acting on it is not easy. Like we talked about before. So to act on it means basically committing to phase out fossil fuels and fossil fuels are a huge part of economies of many industrialized nations. We just talked about Norway, the United States, number one natural gas exporter and oil exporter right now. So yay us. But I mean that means that for us to actually follow through on commitments to phase out fossil fuels means there's going to be a lot of folks who have what we call privileged access to resources in the form of access to fossil fuel resources.

They're subsidized, right? So they get subsidized access to our federal lands to drill and take what they can. They also have privileged access to power and they get that because they basically contribute to campaigns. And it's not just Republicans, it's folks across the aisle who take that money. And research shows us that when you take money from the fossil fuel interests, even if you run on a climate sensitive platform where you say you care about climate change, you want to do something about climate change, when you're asked to vote, you will vote with the people who fund you. And so that happens all over the world, but we,

you know, the United States is a great example of it. So there is a very, very strong concentrated interest in maintaining the status quo. And so fossil fuel interests that run countries, run companies, run our industries, they are basically pushing back. I mean, I was a contributing author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for the most recent round, the most recent assessment. We call that the IPCC. I wrote this section on civic activism and engagement for working group three, which is on mitigation. That's the folks who are talking about how to reduce the carbon that goes into the atmosphere. I was so excited to be asked to do this. This is the first time they ever asked people to talk about activism and engagement.

That's what we individuals and those people who are not in the government and not in business is what we can do about the problem. So I was very excited to write that. I wrote this. I contributed like 10 pages. It took three paragraphs, which is how these things work. But when they go from the contribution to what ends up going to the countries, what goes to the countries is what's called the summary for policymakers, right?

It's like the Cliff Notes version, right? So my chapter was over 100 pages long. I think it ended up being like 20 pages maybe. I got two sentences in there. But countries get to approve what goes in there and they took out all reference to fossil fuels. Wow. So, I mean, and so because countries, all countries get a say and countries that extract a lot of oil don't want anybody to know.

So this was a summary that was put up by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change? Yes. And they took out references to fossil fuels when they were summarizing, which is the part that that's what like Biden, everyone else is reading. They're reading the summary. They're not reading the full version. Oh, sure. Yeah. I mean, and so what they did is we had to change it from fossil fuel interests

to what they're called vested interests. And the thing is that this was a huge success that vested interests got in. And so we were supposed to be like, oh, yay, we're so lucky. I mean, so in, if you read the chapter, you'll see the references to the role that fossil fuel interests play, and it's extremely well-documented.

I mean, nobody at this point recognize, like nobody believes that fossil fuels are not playing a big role in contributing to climate change. Of course not. If you are honest about like understanding the science, right? Yeah. But you still can't say it.

I mean, and also, I mean, look at what happened at the most recent round of the climate negotiations. There were a bunch of countries that were pushing to get the countries to agree to phase out fossil fuels, right? And it went and it ended up like dragging on and on and on and a bunch of petrol states that, you know, extract a whole bunch of fossil fuels, push back against it, so it ended up being this like mealy mouth, we should think about at some point, phasing out, you know, maybe fossil fuels, shh. You know, I mean, and that was the end. I mean, and everybody was like, yay.

I mean, and all of these people in policy, all these people in the media were like, finally, we actually kinda said the quiet part out loud. Kind of, but we still didn't. I mean, that's the thing that's crazy about it. And so that's the same thing with the science is that when you have politics and science combined, the way you do for this, because this is specifically like a scientific assessment that's designed for the policy community and is coordinated through the different states. When you do that and you have a bunch

of countries that are basically controlled by fossil fuel interests, you know, it's not surprising that we see this kind of tricky situation, but it means, I mean, and the more we know that a systemic shift away from fossil fuel energy towards renewable clean energy is what is needed. The more these interests are going to like claw and just try to control the dialogue as much as they can. So that everyday people don't recognize that when fossil fuel companies give money

to candidates who are running for office, like in this election that we have coming up, those people, whether or not they say they care about climate change are absolutely not gonna do anything about it. Yeah, because their incentive is not to. But what you're talking about, what you talked about,

the three different pieces of that story is politics, right? Like you, when you are writing and trying to get the right language into the report, that's part of the political process, as is fossil fuels companies giving money to candidates, as is entire countries who are basically bent to the will of the fossil fuel makers. But what do we do about that?

Because a lot of folks when confronted with the existence of politics will just say, oh, fuck, I can't believe politics got in here. Oh, no, there's people, there's corruption, there's people giving money. Oh, the people are who are given money to do something, do the thing that they're given the money to do. Oh, the people who have the most power get to call the shots, right? But unfortunately, politics is just

part of the human condition. Politics simply is, you know, humans in large groups having to make decisions together. And yeah, and unfortunately, people with power get more say, and that's just how the fucking world works. And if you want to do something about it, you have to, like, reckon with the political social system that you live in and figure out how to bend it to your will to do the thing that needs to be done.

So, you know, I don't want this to be one of those episodes where we sit around and go, I can't believe the fossil fuel companies are like, have their finger on the scale, they should stop it, because they're not going to. No, they're not. What do we do about that problem? Well, I mean, I just want to say though,

that what you're just pointing out here is exactly why we can't just say everything's going to get better if we ignore politics, because that's the way decision-making happens. And if you ignore the politics and just assume technology is going to fix everything, well, then you're just going to be really, really sad in like 20 years or even less, right?

Guess who's gonna be in control of the technology? The people with the political power. And if you didn't ignore politics, or if you didn't pay attention to politics, then you're allowing those people to like continue steering the ship. 100%. So what's gonna happen now

or what do we need to do right now? I mean, so, I mean, this is what I lay out in the book is that, you know, the beginning of the book is all about how we cannot count on decision makers to do what is needed, even though they recognize the problem exists. And the reason that that's the case is that we see these interests that have captured decision making and have this privilege access to resource and power, right? So, okay, so that's not the case. And at the other side of it, businesses, some of which are really excited about technological innovation, they're not going to save us either because many businesses are pushing for a clean energy transition. We have a bunch of

other businesses that are clawing their way into extracting as much as possible fossil fuels as they can because they know that eventually they're going to have to stop. And so there's this bipolar pressure between these two. So it's not like we have this monolith of, oh, business is really excited about this technological innovation because they're not. So given that that's the situation, the place where we have to go to get hope is from everyday citizens, you and me, and the way that we ourselves are recognizing how the world is changing, how our lives are changing and how we have to reclaim power.

And one of the beauties of being an American and being in the United States is we still do have a democracy, at least for now. And we should be taking advantage of it because a democracy means that we all have power. We have an imperfect fucked up democracy, but occasionally the will of the people does win. The will of the people can still win, but it's up to us.

And that's, I mean, that's the whole argument on my book is that as unfair as it seems, because we didn't really cause the problem and we are like trapped in a system that is unfair, but we can still take power back. And that's absolutely what we have to do. And so that's the optimistic part of my apocalyptic optimism.

So how do we do that? Because again, Captain Planet generation, right? I grew up with turn the lights off, buy the better thing, right, maybe feel a little bit guilty when you fly on a plane or whatever, maybe get a Prius, those sorts of things. I've covered extensively in my work why that sort of consumer approach

to fighting climate changes, at the very least not gonna get us out of the problem all by itself. So yeah, what do we actually do? So what we need to do at this point is we need to lean into activism and engagement. I mean, and I talk about the reason why, even though all of these individual efforts

like you were talking about, can play a role in addressing climate change, given that it a systemic problem that's not enough, right? Because anyway you're gonna turn on the lights and unless you are completely off the grid or you know you're in a very small proportion of the United States where you're on clean energy you're basically then tapping into the same system, right? There is a really interesting study that I talk about in the book where some students at MIT tried to map out carbon consumption of everyday people, and they ended up mapping out the carbon consumption of an unhoused person in Boston, right?

So somebody who was homeless, who was living on the streets, but was also going to shelters, right? And they found this person who has no, like very few earthly belongings, right? And who is living in a shelter, actually has the carbon consumption level of well above most of the developing world. Wow. Right? Because of the system. So it is a systemic problem.

So this is, if you were to divest yourself of every single energy consuming thing that you have as an American or a Canadian or someone else living in our part of the world or part of the socioeconomic ladder, you literally were living on the street. You would still not be able to get your individual level down to make people elsewhere in the world.

Well, you could live in a bunker and go completely off the grid. You can do that. And then you personally will not contribute to the climate crisis, but the system will continue, right? Yeah, exactly. But if you try everything, for example, we at home, we have electric cars, we have solar panels,

but whenever I go to work, I turn on the lights, and my computer runs on the system, and so even though the electricity at home is clean, it's not clean everywhere else, right? You're out of control of the cloud servers that Apple is using to store your emails and what power they, like you're part of a system. Yeah, and my Alexa that is tracking everything I say.

I even go there. And every once in a while she just speaks up and says, I hear that you are interested in games to play with your children. Can I suggest some? And it's like, shit, no, I don't want you to suggest. And she's burning fossil fuels every time she listens to you.

At home she's burning solar. So at least listens to you. Well, at home, she's burning solar. So at least I have that. Yeah, but the servers. Oh, yeah, but once she backs up, she backs up absolutely with probably coal. So, you know, the dirtiest of them all. Anyway, so the question that you asked was about how we take power back. So I was just saying, so individually, we can't do it alone. We need to work collectively.

Right. And one of the beautiful things about the United States is that we have a really long history of social movements and activism. So one of the things I do in my book is I basically build off of some of the things that we learn from the civil rights movement, which is the most studied movement ever

in the history of the world. So we know a lot about it. But basically what we can do is join collectives and get engaged in our communities, get engaged in climate activism, climate engagement to help to push for social change. I mean, one of the things that I think is most important is to push for social change from our communities up.

So we don't just decide, I mean, and this is something that my students and I are always kind of discussing. I think I've won them over because like the end of the semester is in like two weeks, which is that you can't really do this all by just going on TikTok. And I think a lot of young people and a lot of students learn that the sad hard way with the decision that the Biden administration made around the Willow project, which is this huge fossil fuel infrastructure

project that has been approved by the administration in Alaska. And all of these young people went online and went on TikTok. It was this huge mobilization on TikTok. There was like millions of online signatures onto a petition on change.org. There was a whole bunch of people posting videos about stopping the Willow Project, but there was no in-person action.

There was very little in-person action. And unfortunately, as a result, or not as a result, but unfortunately the Willow Project moved forward, right? So they're building that out. And a lot of young people are recognizing, I hope they're recognizing and learning that you can't just go online and do this. You need to actually work with people.

And the best way to do it is to do it in your community. Well, a lot of people make this argument about online activism. And I see that myself as well, that people tweet and hope it's gonna do something. A lot of people make this argument about online activism. And I see that myself as well, that people tweet and hope it's gonna do something. But I also recognize that the reason a lot of people resort to that is they do not have other systems

in their lives where they feel like they can express themselves. They're not, there isn't a mass movement organization in their area, or they just feel, they feel profoundly alienated from their community. A lot of folks, you know, don't have other outlets. So, you know, that's a real problem that people face. How can people get connected?

Especially because I just wanna add to this that my own experience, you know, following the climate movement is that we have had attempts at mass movement organizations. You know, there's organizations, I believe 350.org is that the name of one? Yeah. The Sunrise Movement, which was doing, I think, incredible work for a couple of years. But in the last couple of years, sort of gone, where are they?

You know, no offense to my Sunrise Movement people, right? Like there's people out there carrying the torch, but, you know, we have not seen, I mean, a year or two ago, there was a giant climate, you know, a mass climate march, I think in multiple cities, barely covered in the press, you know, and so there's been an attempt to build this mass movement akin to the civil rights movement, and yet it has, you know, for at least a decade, and yet it has not really paid off.

So why is that and how can we change that? You're like, you're like in my sweet spot right now. So thank you very much. Oh, I'm so happy to set up a guest. Thank you so much. Okay, so first and foremost, let me just say that this is completely to be expected. Anybody who remembers the period

of the Trump administration, there was this huge resistance to the Trump administration and its policies. Anybody who's interested, I wrote a book called American Resistance that was all about it. It was a mass mobilization. It was the largest sustained period

where people were in the streets and people were active and engaged that we have seen since the civil rights period and the anti-war period. So that was like the 1960s, 1970s, right? So since then, this was like remarkable. Everybody, the Washington Post did this survey and they said that like, what was it?

One in four people had been to a protest in, you know, during the first two years of the Trump administration. And it was multiple types of protests. It was the Women's March, it was the wake of the murder of George Floyd. It was like a bunch of things over a span of years. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So it was a span of the whole Trump administration. So the resistance was amazing. And people were the most civically engaged they have been in decades, right? But so what happens when a Democrat takes office is frequently we see the left kind of sitting back. And I actually wrote, I wrote a- Well, whew, we can take a load off.

Oh boy, Joe's in there. What's on TV? I gotta, you know, I get- Finally, I can catch up on my reading. Where's my new, where's my end-patchet book? Reading, okay. Made me like, I hope so. Reading, I finally I can catch up on my reading. Where's my new? Where's my hand? Read it book reading. Okay I hope so reading is good thing. But um, so so it was not surprising but I mean and I actually wrote a piece that was like

The you know Biden success is the death of the resistance and the resistance the resistance did die So you mentioned a couple of different organizations. I mean 350.org is still around. They do great work Sunrise is still around they do great work um, but these groups have a lot less capacity to mobilize people because the general public on the left When there's a democrat in the white house are like, all right, I think we're good I'm gonna take a load off. I'm gonna pay attention to my kids. I'm gonna i'm gonna catch up on my know my netflix Maybe they're gonna read I hope they're gonna read but you know, Netflix. Maybe they're going to read. I hope they're going to read. Maybe they're going to read your book.

Maybe they'll read my book. Maybe that'll get them back out in the streets. So that's all to be expected. And that's what I talk about in my book is that we know that, first of all, that activism is cyclical and people are going to need something that motivates them to get out in the streets and to connect collectively, especially because most people don't have what we call like organizational infrastructure, which is connections to organizations that are in their communities that help them get active. And we know that organizations play a very important role in channeling people's

concerns, their anger, their outrage into action. So we need that. So how does that then happen? And what I talk about in the book is that it's going to come from the experience of climate shocks. And I can give you, I can give you some evidence around this is that the largest climate march that we've seen since Biden took office. So since, you know, in years now was the March 10 fossil fuels, which happened last fall in New York city. And it was right before the UN meeting where the secretary general said, you have to actually have some sort of commitment or you're not allowed to come to my meeting. And so a bunch of countries, I believe the United States even were not invited. So it was a very interesting, very interesting, didn't really do anything.

A real Regina George move. Yeah, but he was trying. I mean, he was really trying anyway. So 75,000 people marched in the streets of New York City. And one of the things I do is I survey protesters. So I went out with a team of researchers, students who are working with me. And we did what what we call like a a field approximation of a random sample. So we basically went through teams throughout the whole crowd and surveyed

people to get information on who they were, why they were there, et cetera and so forth. You're doing sociology. Yeah, I am a sociologist. Yes, but this is something, this is like a lens that the climate crisis is not often looked at through. It is unfortunately the case. I mean, so it is increasingly looked at through a sociological or social scientific lens.

But one of the things that's really unfortunate is that while we know a whole lot about how the world is warming and how a little bit more carbon in the atmosphere will affect warming and will affect hurricanes and et cetera and so forth, always more accuracy is necessary. We know a heck of a lot less about the people

who will respond and what we will do and how it will matter. And so one of my hills that I'm gonna die on is saying that we need more research funding to support that because social scientists get like pennies on the dollar. Right, we spend so much money researching the hard sciences. We spend so little on researching the people who need to implement, who we need to implement

what the hard sciences come up with, right? Well, I would say it's even worse than that. It's the people who are causing the problem, right? As well as the people who are gonna have to solve the problem. So we know so little about that. And that was one of the reasons that like when I wrote for the IPCC, the rules of the IPCC are you need to be able to prove how whatever you're looking at is associated with carbon.

So people march in the streets, well how does that affect carbon emissions or decisions around carbon emissions? And there's not that much research, there's a lot more we need to know about that. So I mean it would be really great for me to be able to say, okay, if you go into a museum and you throw soup on a covering of a painting, it equals this much carbon.

They want me to be able to say that. I would love to be able to answer that. Are you going to have better effects in terms of reducing carbon emissions if you throw soup on a painting, you glue yourself to a door, or you sit in the middle of the highway? Right? But it's an important question. And how much, I mean, so the reason that folks are doing that kind of activism, which is a lot of what I talk about in the book is because they're trying to get media

attention so it's really like it's like a boomerang right it's an indirect process so you do those things you're going to be in the media and a bunch of people are going to say he sucks for doing it and then other people are going to say he has a point I should join a movement and so they really they will very rarely be like I'm going to throw soup no they're going to say I'm going to go work with like a more, you know, a more benign, a kinder, gentler group. So I may join like a league of conservation voters or Sierra Club, or I may do something around my local elections or something to do, you know, to do something around weatherization

in my community, something like that. Right. So you may get involved in that. But the question is all of that, like, how does that then end up with carbon? Yeah, it would be amazing if we could say, so often folks are presented with a statistic, oh, if you switch to an electric car, you'll save this many trees, this many tons of carbon, whatever. And that's supposedly a hard calculation, even though there's a lot of assumptions and all that within it. But you could, wouldn't it be wonderful if you could tell people, hey, if you were to join a local chapter

of the Sunrise Movement in your area and go to one meeting a month, it would save this many tons of carbon. We could do that. We just need to be able to develop the models and run them. But those models are, let me just say, those models are a lot simpler than the models that are being funded right now

to talk about how sand storms over in Africa are contributing to hurricanes. And there are people doing that research, and it's important. I am not saying it's not important. I think everybody should be funded, but I think that those of us who are trying to answer these questions,

we need to understand that. And we need to be able to think about that. So if I were talking to the general public and you wanna do something, is it better for you to support a candidate who won't take fossil fuel money and is running for office locally in terms of your carbon? Or is it better for you to get electric school buses

into your schools? Or is it better for you to go and try to get your local school, universities to divest from fossil fuels? Or is it better for you to throw soup on something or crazy glue your foot to something and get a bunch of media attention so that everybody starts complaining about you, but talking about the climate crisis because it absolutely works that way. And I mean, we could do those things and I'm hoping, you know, there are

a couple of us who actually wrote a piece for Nature Magazine that came out right before the last climate negotiation. So in the fall, where we basically talked about all the things that we could study and we know a little bit about, but we need to know so much more about. And unfortunately, so far we haven't gotten one dollar to do that work, but we know that work is necessary. Eventually, eventually we will do the work, but I hope it won't be too late because people need to know now what's the best way to get involved. But the take home message of the book is that anything that anybody is willing to do is what you should do because we are in an all hands on deck moment. People need to get involved. They need to get connected.

They should do it in their communities. Oh, I mean, one of the, well, I was going to, like, I wish I had said, I mean, one of the well, I was going to like, I wish I had said, you know, one of the other things that would be really valuable to do is to like do the modeling to say, if you do something on TikTok versus you do something in your own community, which what's the carbon there? And you and I both know how that carbon is going to lay out, right? Because just, you know, the question of how much posting on TikTok actually leads to reductions in carbon or more consumption could be maybe. Right.

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HelpHELP.com slash factually. I wanna return to this point of climate shocks, you said is going to mobilize people because you said, actually let's return to something even earlier. And I didn't even, and I didn't finish talking about what I found from the people on the streets. You dropped so many ideas on us, we're gonna go through them one by one Dana. Okay, cool.

Because this is, you're an incredible interviewee. So you talked about organizations. Organizations are really important to get people, you know, mobilized and make things happen. Something I've talked about before in my work that my wonderful research producer, Sam Rauman is constantly reminding me. The reason that NRA is very powerful

is not actually the gun lobby's money. It's the fact that it's a mass, I mean, the lobby, the money is important, right? But it's a mass membership organization that like millions of people are members and they actually get something out of the membership. They take firearms training, they, you know, whatever. They get a discount at the local gun store.

Like it's- And they make friends. I mean, that's the other thing is it's not just that they get something out of it, but it creates social bonds and that builds reciprocity. So that if they're like, hey, the library wants to have this book, you should do something.

Oh yeah, I'm gonna come out because- It's a real membership organization that people feel like they're a part of. That's also part of why in my own personal experience, unions are so powerful because it is, it's an organization that actually matters to your life. It's about your workplace. It's your workplace connections.

You can exercise power and really feel it. It like is really vital in your life. Churches are really important to people for those reasons. The social bonds. I think some of the problem with organizations like a 350.org like, hey, why don't you join the climate movement and come to a thing is it's like,

what immediate relevance does that have to people in their lives, right? Okay, I signed up for a mailing list. Maybe they send me some mailers and stuff like that, but it is lacking that like immediacy of this is an organization that I am a part of and that it interacts with my life in multiple ways. Go ahead. So one of the things that I talk a part of and that interacts with my life in multiple ways. Go ahead.

I was gonna say, so one of the things that I talk about a lot in my last book, in American Resistance, is the way that there has been this shift in the past decade or so as social media and technology has diffused more, where a lot of organizations decided, particularly on the left, decided to do the shortcut where they no longer have members, but they have email lists, right?

And as a result, individuals will be members or connected to many different organizations simultaneously because it's a very easy ask, but they don't get anything out of it. They don't meet in person. They don't actually feel any bonds to anybody else. And I actually, in my last book, I talked about how I am,

my sister and I went and volunteered with Swing Left during the 2018 election. That was like the last chapter of the book where we went out and we decided we were going to go to, you know, an area in Virginia and we were going to like see, I was like, let's experience this, how this is working. Cause this was like a big resistance group that emerged during the Trump administration to try to push back and to try to help take power back. And so I was like, okay, so my sister and I decided we would do it together. And we went there and while we ended up meeting

Terry McAuliffe, who was the former governor and actually ended up running for governor but did not win in Virginia. So we got to meet him and have a conversation with him. We met nobody else the entire time that we did our work with this organization and we walked away, having done stuff, I got one email saying, hey, you guys knocked on our work with this organization. And we walked away having done stuff. I got one email saying,

hey, you guys knocked on this many doors this day. And it was amazing because it was crazy because people were like blocking the street, parking to do this in this one area of Virginia to work on this election, but nobody met anybody. So I felt no contact, no connection to this organization afterwards. There's no reciprocity there. What if they had at the end of that said, hey, let's go out for beers organization afterwards, there's no reciprocity there.

What if they had at the end of that said, hey, let's go out for beers. Hey, here's Pete. Oh my gosh, yeah. And then you make friends, which is something that I've experienced in the labor movement, right? That I have new friends and new colleagues, right? I'm literally gonna go to a labor conference later this year

because I wanna meet more people, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, I would say that it's also valuable. Like in a union, people are very connected because it's connected to your work and to your life. And one of the things that a lot of people have asked me out of the new book is I talk about how we create social reciprocity and how we create resilience in our communities, which is absolutely necessary, right? And so when we think about climate change,

and I know we're going to talk about climate shocks in a minute, but when we think about climate change, we know that communities are going to be hit with extreme events, right? Which I call climate shocks. But we need to address them in terms of thinking about how we environmentally prepare, but we also need to socially prepare. And that's where these kinds of organizations can also play a very important role because

as you get hit with an extreme, like an atmospheric river here or a tornado or a hurricane or a drought or a flood or you know, the list goes on and on and on. Unfortunately, the communities are going to have to respond and having those connections matter a lot. And one of the things that I've been thinking about and a lot of people have been asking me is where do we get those connections? Because we have many fewer of them on the left, which is what you were pointing out originally. And so we know churches, we know other religious groups, we know schools provide that. I mean, certainly one of the ways that Sunrise was so successful is by building hubs within schools.

Right? But another place, and this is something that I'm actually starting to do research on and work with in my team at American University is we're looking at libraries. Libraries are in communities around, you know, in all communities, right? Everybody has a library or almost everybody has a library, thankfully, and they provide information and access to books and knowledge, right? And they could also provide a lot of other things. For example, I mean, I'm assuming here in California too, libraries helped to distribute COVID test kits, right?

Yep. And they provided a lot of other resources. They provided a lot of social services. Right, exactly. And they could provide even more. And in fact, one of the things that we're looking into is the way that they might be able to provide information around climate change that is relevant

for specific communities based on what the demographics or the community are, as well as the kinds of risks that they're facing. Yeah. When you talk about these shocks causing, okay, these organizations to grow and maybe, have a closer relationship with the public, which is what we need. We need climate organizations that people feel connected to

in a more real way so that, they can actually ask something of people, hey, show up and do something. And people go, hell yeah, I will, because I'm a member of this organization. A climate shock, I can see how that might help that happen because if your town is flooding, it's suddenly realer to you

and you need the help of an organization more. Maybe you'll get more involved in the same way that when, you know, if you're being fucked over at work and a union comes to your workplace, you'll feel like you're a member of that union. That's really real. However, if the shocks are happening, doesn't that mean it's kind of late?

You know? We are, it is a very late hour already for, for climate change and for the world. And as a result, there's no question that people are going to lose lives and people are going to lose homes. I mean, we're already seeing it. I mean, insurance companies are pulling out of parts of all over the United States. And then that doesn't even consider developing countries which have contributed the least to the climate crisis, but they're being hit even more and they have

much less social support, right? Yeah. Small island nations are flooding. Australia is taking in people who are climate refugees, basically, right? And that's going to happen more and more. But so it is a very late hour, but it's not too late for most of us to save ourselves. And that's why I start in the beginning of the book by saying, I hope to see you all on the other side, because as much as it sounds kind of glib, I mean, it's absolutely true. And we are not taking seriously the threat.

And that's one of the reasons that a lot of climate scientists I know are starting, these are like the natural scientists, the atmospheric scientists are becoming activists because they're like, we're done doing research. We're gonna scream at the top of our lungs because what the hell else are we gonna do? You guys have to listen to us.

But nobody's listening to the dire message coming from the scientists. But so with regard to climate shocks, what I think is really important to recognize is that there's a lot of research that talks about how after disasters, windows of opportunity open and we can see it after Hurricane Katrina, Hurricane Maria, Hurricane Sandy. I mean, I know a lot of my examples are hurricanes after the wildfires that hit here in California. There are these moments where all of a sudden people can do things and policymaking shifts a lot. And this is what I call an anthro shift in the book.

And in that moment, what we see is, the social system shifts to be able to support people because they know that the people need the help. And that is when we can see the types of systemic changes that are so needed actually happening. Unfortunately, at this point, we don't have examples of that kind of lasting change. And I talk in the book a lot about the example

of the pandemic and the way that all of a sudden when people started feeling the risk themselves, like the risk, oh my gosh, I could die, my kids could die. I could pass on this deadly disease to somebody older in my family. People supported the idea of the world shut down, right? We stayed home, we homeschooled, which was really fun.

We baked bread, we created gardens, right? We garden, we did all of these things at home. We stayed inside for a long time. We wore masks, which- And people got mad after a while, but like, especially for the first couple of months, you know, people were really on board. People were vigilant, right? And our government changed, right?

It supported us. It gave out more resources. It forgave loans. It stopped, you know, people from getting evicted, right? Yeah. It did all of these things. That was an anthro shift. Yeah. But over time, when the risk of the virus it forgave loans, it stopped people from getting evicted. It did all of these things.

That was an anthra shift. But over time, when the risk level went down and people started being like, oh, I already got it, wasn't a big deal, or I got vaccinated, or you know what, it's not worth this. They went back out and we're basically back to normal. And I frequently, when I talk about this and I'm giving, like I'm doing my book tour now

and I'm talking to crowds and I'm like, and I see zero people in the audience wearing a mask, even though the pandemic continues, right? That shows that the shift, we went back, like it's multi-directional and we can go back. And that tells us how bad it has to get before we're really going to mobilize. I mean, one of the hopeful things just going back to my surveying people in the crowd back to sociology for a moment. So I surveyed all of these activists in the streets in New York City, 75,000 people in September last year. And I asked them, for the first time I asked,

one, did you experience a climate shock? And I didn't say climate shock, I listed a whole bunch of things that we know are climate shocks. Wildfire and smoke from wildfire, extreme weather, extreme events, sea level rise, flooding, right? And what was amazing is over 85% of the people in the crowd reported experiencing at least one climate shock

in the past six months. Wow. I mean, in a lot of it, so we were on the East Coast, a lot of it was wildfire and smoke from wildfire, but also sea level rise, flooding, and extreme heat, right? So this is, I mean, so the people who are mobilizing are experiencing climate shocks. And the other thing that I asked them is there's been a lot of talk about emotions and people

feeling like climate anxiety or feeling so despondent from the crisis that they're not doing anything. And so one of the things I wanted to do is see what people in the streets were feeling. What is motivating them to get out in the streets and get off their sofas, right? What is motivating them to get out in the streets and get off their sofas, right? And the top emotions for people in the crowd were sadness, makes sense, right? And anger, no hope. People in the streets were not particularly hopeful.

They were there because they were pissed off. And there is like historical precedent that we know that people who join social movements and like are willing to take a stand, they usually are angry. So- so you know I come to think Of it hope especially in the Obama era guys such a big Big reputation. Oh hope hope that's why we're out there well hold on a second if you have hope Maybe you'll just sit at home and be like yeah, hope things will get better like

Things will probably turn around Don't worry about it. I actually pissed off you might take to the streets and like, you know, start shaking your fist and throwing things. Absolutely, and you might be willing to glue yourself or get arrested, right? I mean, a good piece of evidence on that point is that while we did the survey in the streets, I also worked with a team of folks

who did a nationally representative sample of people who were not in the streets at the same time to see how much they experienced climate shocks and What emotions they were feeling and so they had a lot less experience personally with climate shocks and They were hopeful about the climate change Huh, so people who were not in the streets are hopeful and less angry and people who are in the streets less hopeful Angry, but they're there.

That is so fascinating because I have taken as a thesis for a long time that, look, there's such a vibe out there of the world is ending, right? It's all over. If you scroll on TikTok, you'll see a lot of people who feel that way. Well, hey, this is the, I'm a member of the last generation. So why even bother?

And I always sort of took it as a given that part of, you know, what I should try to do is let people know that there's always gonna be a world tomorrow and you always have the opportunity to make a better tomorrow and shit is being done. And you can be a part of that. And to try to fight against defeatism, which I think is part of hope

and to try to cultivate a bit of hope. Things are really bad. I want us to be real realists, but hey, if we can do it, what you are maybe saying is that maybe that's the wrong approach. Maybe we should just say, nah, shit's fucked, get mad, get out there.

I don't think that they're that different. I mean, I actually, cause I actually think when I hear you talking about it, I mean, like you kind of sound like an apocalyptic optimist too, right? I mean, I mean, it's basic, that's the realistic stance, right? Is that, I mean, if you want to be realistic

about the climate crisis, you need to acknowledge what the natural scientists are saying. I mean, I'm not a natural scientist. I'm not an atmospheric scientist. We got a lot of my colleagues who are, who are saying, we are standing at the precipice and we are looking into it. And some of us are saying, who cares? And others of us are saying, holy shit. I mean, and those people are doing something about it. And in, you know, in the case of the general public, I think it's important to recognize that so that when we hit like summer

2024 is going to suck It is going to suck across the country and anybody who says differently Oh, and then it's gonna go into fall 2024 and they're predicting the worst hurricane system The worst hurricane season ever well I mean and the only I mean and if anybody is wondering about why we know that look at the temperature ocean temperatures now Ocean temperatures are statistically significantly off the charts from any historical record. I've seen this.

And that leads to hurricanes, right? So what- Because it's energy in the ocean that leads to energy in the storm system. Yeah, I mean, basically the storms like suck up the water and the warmer the water is, the more water they suck up. And so while the hurricanes, the wind may not be any stronger. It is not the wind that destroys homes and destroys communities. It is how much rain falls. I

mean, you guys know that here, right? It's all about rainfall and how much your land can actually absorb, right? And that, and that is going to be absolutely decimating this coming year. So we need to be realistic about that, right? And I, I mean, I don't do that research, but I believe my colleagues who do do that research. And so the question is, what do we do about it? And I do think we should be hopeful. I mean, I'm hopeful, but the reason I'm hopeful is because I'm angry and because I know so many people are angry.

And I think that people should not sit with it and be like, you know, you should be like, wow, this sucks and it's getting worse. But we should also think and fuck it,, I'm gonna do something about it. And that's what everybody needs to do. People need to rise up and they need to embrace the anchor and embrace the fact that this is not fair. And it is not fair that it is our responsibility to do something about it.

The only way that our government will do what is needed is if we demand it and we force them to. Otherwise, we will continue on this incremental path to policy making that will do something, but absolutely not enough to address the climate crisis. And basically you may as well kiss like half of Florida goodbye. You may as well kiss most of the coast, goodbye.

And anybody who lives in areas that get extreme heat, like the whole Southwest, anybody who works outside there, anybody who can't afford to have air conditioning, they'll be moving. And, you know, then we're going to be experiencing not just internal migration, but, you know, within the United States. But we're going to be seeing all these people from other parts of the world who can't, you know, can't live where they are, who have no access to water. It's too hot.

They can't survive. And they, who have no access to water, it's too hot, they can't survive, and they're gonna be pushing in. And of course, that makes for a really fun story because as we know, we're not doing so well with migration already. Now imagine all the people who are going to be coming. And the political strife that will come as a result when people freak out about that

and the humanitarian crisis that will happen. And my God. But don't get despondent. Okay. Get angry. That's a great message. I, no, no, seriously. I'm the angry sociologist.

No, that's a wonderful, it's a wonderful message and a wonderful speech that you gave. Hey everybody, I know we're in the ad break, but we're doing something a little bit different today. Today, I'm gonna tell you about an amazing group of people who did not pay us anything to be a part of the show. We just think they do amazing work and we wanted you to know about them. You might remember back in 2018, those heart-wrenching stories of families torn apart by Border Patrol,

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Listen to The Daily Show, Ears is that, you know, on some level, humanity, like our social technology, our social ability to recognize what's happening as a system of humans, and honestly, our individual ability to do so is sort of outstripped by what is happening, you know, I Sling has stuck with me for a long time. I read this maybe a year ago Can't remember whose blog post this was so apologies to the blogger who wrote this but it was that you know Obama had bought a beachfront home on Martha's Martha's Village Martha's Vineyard. Where's it mother's Vineyard? Thank you the island right that he loves so much West coaster Martha's Vineyard. Martha's Vineyard, thank you.

The island, right, that he loves so much. You are a West coaster. No, no, no, I'm not, I'm from, no, I grew up in New York, god damn it. But I just forgot what it was. Oh, fuck, you could, yeah, I have a tan now. Okay, fuck it. I mean, I live in California.

Anyway, so he had bought a house on Martha's Vineyard and whatever reporter or blogger this was looked up like the government's climate change predictions. It was like, this house is gonna be unlivable or unsellable inside of 20 years, right? This is like a, like forget- A terrible investment. Forget livable, it's a bad investment.

And literally I know people, I grew up on Long Island, I know people who have had that problem where it's like their house has gone down in value because it's so close to the coast that people don't wanna buy it because they know about climate change. After Hurricane Sandy, there were communities that had to be relocated.

I mean, yeah, right? So, yeah, exactly. So the point of this piece was that Barack Obama, who certainly should be in a better position than anyone else to know about climate change, very smart man, reads a giant briefing book every weekend, you know, he's not ignorant of the problem. And yet when it came to his own personal choice, he made a choice that was

ignorant because our own ability to sort of see the future in this case and think about how it affects us is limited. Right. It's like a human limitation. And I could, I could list, I don't want to just be like, Obama's a piece of shit. That's not the point. The point is that like all of us do this to an extent, right? Like we have trouble thinking about the future in this way

and making adjustments in our lives. And then multiply that by, you know, eight billion. And you know, you've got a real motherfucker of a problem. And is this just gonna be something where 200 years from now, the remnants of humanity are looking back going, this was just outstripped our ability to do something as a species.

Okay, so first and foremost, yes, I think there is a real risk of that. But second, I do wanna talk about the Obama issue and the example for a second to just say that, well, Obama should have known better. However, he is, I mean, he's a super privileged man, right? He's a former president of the United States. He has lots of resources. He is, you know, he's a super privileged man, right? He's a former president of the United States. Yeah.

He has lots of resources. He is, you know, Michelle has made a lot of money on selling books, right? So they are not suffering at all, okay? So they can afford it. I mean, the people who can afford it, I mean, they may take- They can afford to take a loss on the house. They can afford to take a loss.

And at this point, I mean, it's unclear what will happen with insurance on Martha's Vineyard and in, youyard and in Massachusetts. If they were in Florida, they would no longer have insurance, right? And you know what, someone's gonna buy this house, even if it's like floating in the ocean, someone's gonna be like, you know,

President Obama used to live there, someone's gonna pay too much for it. I mean, maybe, but I mean, what's happening right now is that there are certain communities, and there was this really interesting story that was done in the Washington Post recently about communities in the Outer Banks of North Carolina, where there were these summer houses that basically had, Outer Banks are like these border islands, right? And they had been so taken over by sea level rise

that they basically were no longer able to get access to water, sewage, or electricity, right? Because that all came underground and all got washed away. So the National Park Service paid the owners, and I believe it was $800,000 a house to take them back and demolish them. Wow. And which is, that's just like, that's not sustainable. It's outrageous a little bit.

And you know, and those people, I know they took a loss, but you know, hey, that's not so bad. We should all hope that we get that kind of bailout. We should not expect that to happen. So I would just say, I think those people who can afford summer homes and stuff like that, and more and more, they're gonna buy homes

without being able to get insurance, because that's what's happening, is the insurance companies are on the forefront or the vanguard in terms of thinking about this, because it's their pocketbook that's what's happening is the insurance companies are on the forefront or the vanguard in terms of thinking about this because it's their pocketbook that's going to have to cover. In that position of privilege are the ones who are calling the shots.

They're the ones who are running the oil companies. They're the ones who are senators and et cetera, right? Right, I mean, for now, I mean, the nice, that's one of the things that's nice about our country is you could actually run for office and hold office and not come from like oil companies but you know people have to support but it's much more difficult. I saw a stat recently from I believe more Perfect Union that like a very small percentage of people in office are from working-class backgrounds most of them are well-paid lawyers and things like that they're

from the upper crust. Yeah yeah yeah so I mean sure so those I mean and those people are going to have the least they're that. They're from the upper crust. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, I mean, sure. So those, I mean, and those people are going to have the least, they're the least at risk from the climate crisis, right? They are not part of frontline communities. They are not, most of them don't come from communities of color either. And that means that they have like some distance from experiencing this. But, I mean, but I think that the other point that you made in this, the example around Obama that I think is really important to think about is that because of the way climate change works, which is right now we emit CO2, carbon, greenhouse gases, they go into the atmosphere and they

build up there. And it is the process of them getting up there and sitting up there that then affects thermal radiation coming from the sun and how much actually gets back out. And that's the greenhouse effect, right? That's how it works. And that then has this effect on all these patterns, et cetera, that the natural scientists are talking about. It is a slow process, right?

We know, for example, if tomorrow, everybody stopped burning fossil fuels and everybody just turned off the lights, we would not see an effect in terms of all of the effects of climate change. The climate shocks would not see an effect in terms of all of this, the effects of climate change, the climate shocks would not stop immediately. So given that delay, it makes it even harder. Not only is it, we've got these folks in positions of power

who are controlling all the resources that are making decision-making slow, but it's also that it's like, there's a delay there. And that means that this is such a tricky problem that there is just no question in my mind that we are gonna have to get a lot more apocalyptic before we're gonna get to the optimistic side. Because we need people to experience this firsthand

to get angry enough to make those kinds of decisions to change their behaviors. And a lot of those decisions and those changes, they're not gonna be fun. I mean, some people will be able to buy a Rivian. Congratulations to you, right? But most people were talking about having to take public transit and hope that it becomes electrified.

And that is, you know, having tried, right, like, you know, having tried to get around on public transit here in LA, I can tell you, it sucks. I do it every day. Oh, well, it's, look. If you planned it that way, right? You planned it that way.

I planned it that way. I've molded my life around public transit in LA. And go to a major city in Texas and tell me that public transit in LA sucks. Like at least we fucking have it here. I'm serious. Okay, fair enough, fair enough. Like Los Angeles has second highest

public transit ridership in the country because there are buses. A lot of cities in America do not have them at all. But, you know. I saw speed, I know about the buses in LA. Well taken, that like you, it is, the system is simultaneously, you know, too spread out, buses run too rarely, too uncomfortable,

not enough shade, speaking of climate change. You know, there are all these problems with the system. And they're not electric. Yeah, and they're not electric. Makes it far more uncomfortable and unpleasant and inconvenient to ride than it should be despite the fact that it's a better option than many people in this city think that it is.

But it almost seems like you end up not rooting for the shocks but saying like, hey, things are going to get worse. But in a way that's a good thing because it may finally cause the societal response that we need where people are really fucking getting out there and getting angry and saying, protect us because we are actively dying. Right. I mean, and that, but that, unfortunately that process is the only way I see it working right. Because the government's not going to step in and save us because they basically are going to lose. I mean, the folks in power are going to lose those funders who fund their campaigns.

And that's how our political system works, unfortunately. But that is how the system works. Right. So that's not going to change. The businesses, some of the businesses are going to push for clean energy. But a whole bunch of businesses are going to say, say, hey, maybe we can extract more natural gas and send it to other countries. And we'll make money on that. So they're gonna do anything they can to stay the course. So systemic change is hard, we're gonna have to push for it.

And it is true that we're gonna need to have, I mean, I'm not rooting for climate shocks. I am being just realistic about what's coming. I mean, I just hope there are some people, some scholars who are talking about these like cascading effects and not knowing how it's going to have huge effects on the, in terms of thinking about how weather patterns will change, how the different ocean currents will change. And then, I mean, there's a, this is all people who do stuff that I do not do.

And I don't know a lot about, but I read when I see the pieces come out in top journals, those things could really change the whole way that weather and temperature and climate works all over the world. And we don't know. I mean, it could mean like droughts happen in places that never were dry before and floods and places are inundated in ways that were never before. But we should expect that these kinds of things are coming. So I just, my feeling is we just should take whatever is predicted and assume that it could be

as bad as that, and we can hope it won't be. But that is where people are going to start to get angry because it's when you have the personal experience of the risk that gets us mad and gets us motivated. And then we work through the organizations that exist or build our own organizations to put pressure on those in power. And it's only when those in power actually feel at risk of losing power that they finally make a difference and they make the changes that are needed.

And that means we learn this from the civil rights movement. Those are perfect example there. I mean, you actually are giving me hope that is weird. You give me a weird kind of hope that like as things get worse, that creates the conditions for things to get better, that there's there's a natural sort of countervailing force and that honestly sounds more plausible to me than like, hey, you know, the price of solar is going

to get so cheap that eventually the problem is gonna solve itself. Like I can hold that a little bit of hope there too, but also, you know, I think things are getting a little bit worse, but the idea that that is going to, you know, cause change and cause a mass uprising of the sort that we need is believable. And it seems to be, you know, born out by history

that, you know, it's when people are under the most intense pressure that, I mean, look at the labor movement, right? That like the labor movement was born out of the incredible depravity of the late 19th century. The incredible misery forced people to stand up and fight back. And then the labor movement worked and, you know, in, you know, starting in the middle part

of the century, the last century, we had the rise of the middle class and like safety protections and the 40 hour work week and all these things. And then everybody got comfy and the companies started fucking everybody again. And now people are rising up again. Like this is kind of how it works a little bit. And so, you know, we're starting to have the fact

that the climate crisis is actually happening is waking people up perhaps. Well, yes, certainly that. I mean, there's no question that the labor movement is also reemerging after recognizing how the extension and expansion of inequality in our country is basically leaving so many people behind, right? So that's happening simultaneous.

And one of the things that simultaneously, one of the things I talk about in the book though is that historically, labor and the climate movement have not worked well together. I mean, and in fact, part of that is because much of the clean energy transition so far has been people by non-union labor. And that means that folks in unions are like,

no, no, no, no, no, we would like to stick with our fossil fuel expansion project because that is unionized. And there have been some, I won't call them out, but there's been a couple of unions I know here in Southern California that have been like against, you know, different climate change regulations. Hey, let's electrify.

Well, hold on a second. If you work in the gas industry, maybe you don't like that so much. Of course, of course. And that's, it's understandable, but it is, you know, it is against, it's people following their incentives as one does, but it is bad in the overall.

The good news is things are shifting. I mean, for example, there was one, there's one really interesting case that happened recently where, so for people who build cars that are fossil fuel burning cars, most of those factories are union labor, right? The folks who build the batteries for electric cars

historically have not been union labor. And so if you want to push for more EVs, you're pushing away from using union labor. But there are now efforts, and there's some really good people who are working on trying to work together to unionize consistently so that that is not the challenge of the worker because it's not really fair and because that is really necessary to help to merge these movements together.

And a far-sighted union leader would need to see that as I think some in the auto industry are finally. Yeah, they're finally starting to do that. And I think that's going to continue. I mean, I would just say that the other reason that we shouldn't have a lot of hope so far about the clean energy transition is that so far we've seen an expansion in consumption of clean energy in the United States thanks to a lot of federal funding from the Inflation Reduction Act, et cetera. And the price of renewable and clean energy has gone down quite a bit.

But what's happened is actually our overall energy consumption has just grown. So we continue to still burn and consume as much fossil fuels, but there's more. The percentage is better, but the actual literal amount of fossil fuels being burned has not gone down. And that's why the carbon concentrations continue to go up. So you said earlier, it was almost a good way to end the podcast, but I had more I wanted to ask you.

You remember before when you were like, get angry and get out there, right? How should people do that? Like how should people join the movement? If we would like to make sure we don't need quite so many climate shocks before we do something, right? We wanna get started early so that we have to go through less of those.

What do people do? Yeah, that's exactly the argument that I make is that the more people reclaim their power and mobilize and start working together, the less climate shocks will happen and the less people will lose life and lose their livelihoods, right? Because that's basically where we're going. So, I mean, the book ends with three points. Great. Three things that we can all do to save ourselves.

And two of them are for people who want to be activists. And one is for, you know, your everyday people. So I'll just talk to the activists first. First and foremost, and this is actually building off of what we were just talking about, activists need to create community and true solidarity. And the solidarity needs to come across movements, across different issues.

I mean, we need to see more intersectionality. We need to see more intersectionality. We need to see more people coming from all different identities and orientations engaging in climate activism. Historically, the climate movement, which has spun off of the environmental movement, was really quite privileged.

And as such, we did not see a lot of people of color or people coming from working class backgrounds involved in it. We still don't enough, but we need to see that happen more. And one of the things in terms of thinking about creating community and building community within the movement, I think is really interesting, is I talk about in the book a lot, lessons from the civil rights movement. And one of the things, and I talk a lot in the book about kind of this growing radical flank of folks who are starting to be more aggressive, even though it's like, it like air quote aggressive at this point in that they're being, you know, confrontational

by throwing soup on plastic covers and gluing themselves to things or disrupting the US open and then getting carted away in the US open continues. Right. So I mean, sure, it's a nuisance, but we're not talking like this isn't radical like the suffragettes who blew up like a building a month at the height of women's suffrage you know the struggle for women's suffrage so you know it's still quite tame radical but when we talk about the radical flank like everybody doesn't have to be involved in radical flank when we think about creating community one of the things that's a really interesting lesson from the civil rights movement is that during the civil rights struggle a

radical flank also emerged right where people were becoming more confrontational and they engaged in sit-ins and they engaged in blockades and it continues from there. Everybody probably knows some of the stories about that. What was very interesting about it is that as the radical flank, which was mostly young people during the civil rights period, emerged, a lot of the elders who were active in the movement were not happy with these young people who were starting to be more radical, breaking laws, they were risking themselves also because there was a lot of racism in our country. Even then there was racism, right?

Let me say that differently. Back then there was racism, but it's worth noting that racism continues today in our country. Of course. So even though the elders were not happy with this, the black churches created a home for these activists and created a space for them to organize and created resources to bail people out of jail, et cetera. And it is that kind of community that created support and this kind of organizational infrastructure for activists, no matter whether they were being, you know, doing more legally oriented work and focusing on trying to get the vote through institutional channels or they were out in the streets causing,

you know, good trouble. Right. It's what people call a diversity of tactics. Exactly. And there was solidarity between all the people who were pursuing the, Hey, I don't know if I like you, what you were doing, but you know what? I'll bail you out of jail or I'll make sure we're on the same side. Still. They were on the same side. I mean, they were still like the solidarity was, there was solidarity, but but you know what, I'll bail you out of jail or I'll make sure we're on the same side still. They were on the same side. I mean, they were still like the solidarity was there was solidarity, but they argued.

I mean, certainly, and there were factions and they didn't agree all the time and you know, and they didn't, you know, everybody had their opinion, right? So it was, it was an uncomfortable coalition to some degree, but it was also all rooted in the black community and within the black churches. And so they really had a lot more organizational infrastructure than the groups do today. And as we were talking about, that is really necessary and important. So building that through community and solidarity is valuable.

That was number one. Number two is taking advantage of moral shocks and capitalizing on violence against activists. And this is really, we haven't talked that much about civil disobedience. Civil disobedience is becoming a more common tactic amongst activists. I mean, I, well, I'm gonna just say,

like everybody has heard of Greta Thunberg and Greta just got arrested again in the Netherlands last week. She is a perfect example. And I talk about her quite a bit in the book because she started out doing this very kind of very simple tactic where she was just sitting on the parliament steps, right, holding her sign and skipping

school. Right. It was not confrontational. And she has become increasingly confrontational and she has basically become part of the radical flank of the climate movement. So her personal trajectory is like a really good example because we're seeing that for activists around the country and around the world, right? But what's interesting is that many people then say, oh, these activists, they're gonna get violent.

There's very little reason to believe they're gonna get violent. What is much more likely, and I talk at length about this in the book, is that people are gonna get violent against them. They are going to be repressed by law enforcement. I mean, we're seeing that. We've seen a little bit of that in the United States.

We're seeing that more and more around the world, but we also should expect that there are gonna be counter movements that will rise up and be aggressive and violent against the activists. And it is an unfortunate reality. But it happened during the George Floyd movement, right? That where you had the police violently attacking protesters, and then you had vigilante showing up

with guns and shooting people and saying, oh, that's because the protesters are violent. Exactly. So that's a wonderful example. I mean, the other thing worth noting here is, and I talk in the book about the moment when President Trump basically had all of these peaceful protesters tear gassed

in Lafayette Square in Washington, DC, for his photo opportunity. But the thing is that, this is a perfect example of how activists can capitalize on violence, is that these were non-violent protesters and members of the media who got tear gassed and they were harmed physically

and they drew attention to this and the protest the next day was like twice the size. And that is how it works, capitalizing on these moral shocks and the violence. I mean, and there are other examples from the civil rights movement where we saw, you know, dogs called on activists, people beaten up, et cetera, and so forth, it just list goes on and on.

Those were the iconic moments of that movement. Exactly, and those were the moments when people who were sympathizers to the movement mobilized in solidarity. And it is those moments of solidarity. I mean, the George Floyd, the moment when we saw the protests after George Floyd was was murdered were moments of solidarity. And one of the reasons we saw so many people, white people in the crowd and people

who were coming out because of their intersectional motivations is because they were not willing to sit down after observing and witnessing an unarmed black man being murdered by a policeman on social media. Right. So that was like a moral shock that motivated people and they got angry. Right. Yeah. But so that's number two. That's number two and number three. And finally, and this is for people who don't want to do activist activism. You do not have to be an activist to help us save ourselves, right? You can be just an everyday citizen. And that's the final one, which is about cultivating resilience. And as I said before, when I talk about resilience,

this is about building our communities so that they can withstand the climate shocks that are coming and come. They will. Right. So we know they're coming. And depending on where you live, you know what you're in for, whether it is extreme heat or extreme weather, atmospheric rivers, tornadoes, et cetera. When those things hit,

first of all, we need to rebuild in ways that we can handle that more because we know they're gonna keep coming. Places that experience sea level rise, you need to make sure that your community is capable of handling flooding, the kind of flooding that's going to become regular. I mean, and hopefully the flooding that will, you know, will not overpower your community.

But still, there are things you can do. So you need to be environmentally resilient. But more importantly, I would say we need to be socially resilient. I mean, I've been talking with a lot of groups that are working on disasters and they keep telling me about how what they basically have been funded to do mostly is what they call disaster response. And that is the number one thing that a disaster response is, is it's mucking and gutting, which is really, really not glamorous work at all.

Mucking and gutting out after floods, after fires, etc. Right. That is the response. But the problem is that you need to also think about the recovery. Right. And recovery is rebuilding in a way where your community is more resilient. And when you do that, you really need people to be connected to one another so that those who get unhoused have support, those who need food, those who need resources, etc. Those who need jobs because their place of work no longer exists because it gets just washed away or burnt down.

And so the resilience is really important. And that's something that we can all do by getting more connected and embedded in our communities, be it through our local unions, be it through our, you know, whatever religious groups there are, or our schools, or our libraries, right? I mean, I love it as such a holistic vision

of like how we can build- Save ourselves. Save ourselves, the title of your book. I mean, it's a huge task, but it's like, that's all we can fucking do is to do this. Like we have to do it. We have to do it. We will do it.

I mean, like as an optimist, right? We will do it. The question is how bad is it gonna get before we do it? And hopefully it won't be too late for most of us. I mean, I really believe, I believe in people power. I believe we can do it, but I believe we need to all embrace the anger and get involved.

I mean, people power got us here, right? Literally fossil fuels are people power. It's a kind of power that we fucking came up with. We created the problem. We have the power to fix it. We are the only ones who are going to fix it. And we're the, you know, that kind of, the kind of power you're talking about

is the only kind of power that's ever done fucking anything. Yeah. I mean, and as, as I say, the last line of the book is actually, as unfair as it seems, nobody's coming to save us. We're going to have to save ourselves. And so this is, this is the opportunity, but this is the moment now where it still can really matter. It will matter in the end, but it'll matter more now.

So. And that's such an opportunity. I mean, look, I'm as angry as anybody. I can't believe we have to fuck. You know, Greta Thunberg going like, I'm a child, I'm a child. Like, yeah, no, we get it. But yet, you know, this is the position that we are in

and we can see it as an opportunity to have a huge effect Like, yeah, no, we get it. But yet, you know, this is the position that we are in and we can see it as an opportunity to have a huge effect on the world around us by stepping up and doing these things. Absolutely. I mean, one final thing I would just say is that, you know, there are lots of young people who are just angry and upset and, you know, feel the same way that Greta did

and she did that iconic speech, right? One thing that I think is really nice to see though is that we see all of these, what we're calling them like the climate elders, the climate grannies who are coming out and are basically setting an example and are providing support for young people and working with them in solidarity.

We got the like rocking chair rebellion. We've got all of these amazing elders who are also joining the movement. So it's not all on young people. And I think we just need to support everybody who is doing everything they can to save ourselves because it's gonna take all of us. Dana, thank you so much for being here.

It's been incredible to have you on the show. Thank you for having me. This is such a great conversation. Well, thank you once again to Dr. Dana Fisher for coming on the show. If you for having me. This is such a great conversation. Well, thank you once again to Dr. Dana Fisher for coming on the show. If you want to pick up a copy of her wonderful book, you can do so at factuallypod.com slash books. That's factuallypod.com slash books.

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and we'll see you next time on Factually. I don't know anything. That was a HeadGum podcast.