- David, welcome to Waterstones - Thanks for having me
It's quite a sobering read and
there's a lot of information quite near the beginning of the book actually which
I found to be very very effective in explaining just how bad climate change
really is. But what also struck me is that in order for us to do anything
about it we need everybody involved and of course there are huge
swathes of people who just deny that this is actually a thing. What can you
say to them to convince them that it is a problem and that we need to do something about it.
Well for me I think extreme weather is already teaching them
quite powerfully. The unprecedented heat wave last year, all of the wildfires that
we've seen in California, hurricane after hurricane in the Caribbean. We just had
the first February typhoon in the Pacific in history. And I do think that
public opinion is moving there actually quite dramatically as a result.
So I know the American case best but 73% of Americans now believe that
climate change is real and happening now. That means 27% don't, which is
probably too high, I wish it were smaller, but 26% of Americans believe that
aliens live among us. So I think we're actually at a point already now where
denial, while too big, is small enough that we shouldn't let it have a veto
over our collective action. The question is why fossil fuel interests
and skepticism in general has a hold on our policymakers. And I think that is a
bit of a different question. I think it has to do in part with direct reliance
on money from people who have an incentive to not take action on the
problem. But I also think it's because we generally and in particular in our
politics have a kind of status quo bias. Where we don't want to take action. And
because up until quite recently there was economic conventional wisdom that
suggested that action on climate would be very expensive. That logic has
actually been reversed just in the past few years. Most economists if you ask
them now would say it'll be much better for us economically to take action
faster rather than slower. I think policymakers haven't yet
adjusted to that new conventional wisdom but when they do I think we'll see much
more action and we'll see the force of deniers shrink quite radically.
Especially as we enter into more and more extreme weather; we see more
wildfires, we see more hurricanes, we see more droughts and famines.
I think it'll just become hard to look at the world and not recognize that it's
changing. There are all these other impacts though beyond the direct impacts
that I think we haven't yet really begun to reckon with, even those of us who take
climate change seriously. I think our politics is already being shaped by
intuitions of resource scarcity. I think that will continue in the decades ahead.
I think our culture - the way that we relate to technology has changed, the way
we relate to capitalism has changed and will continue to change. And those are
some of the non scientific subjects that I tackle in the book. Not just what
climate change will do to us but what it will mean for the way that we live in
this new, transformed, in most cases deformed world.
I think anybody finishing the book will feel empowered to do something about it and
so I guess that the simplest question is what can an ordinary person, like you or
I, do in their everyday life to actually make a difference. Because whilst we wait
for the people in power to effect big change what can we do?
I think there are a number of features of our lives that have carbon footprints.
Actually practically every feature of our life. So how much electricity you use, how
much we drive, how much we fly, what we eat. All of these things we can relate to
more responsibly and behave in ways that make our own carbon footprints smaller.
But ultimately I think that policy is by far the most important driver. I
think we won't get to a stable, livable planet just because a number of
well-intentioned people, especially in the wealthy West, decided to eat a few
less hamburgers a year, I just don't think that adds up to much. What we need
is our governments to prioritize this at the highest level and ultimately that's
up to us. We live in at least representative democracies, we can make
those voices heard, even beyond how we vote, through protests, through
organisation. And again, I see actually great optimism there, a great reason
for hope. I think that grassroots movements have been moving very quickly
over the last few years and the number of people who are more concerned about
this than they were 10 years ago, that number is you know it's
astronomical. We now have to leverage that into policy and we need to put
pressure on our leaders, not just to make rhetorical gestures about climate, but to
really commit to climate change as the overarching, all-governing political
challenge of our time. And to orient all of our policy in that direction. Because
no matter what you care about in this world politically, no
matter what you want to see happen, it will be affected in some way by climate
change. And that means that if we want to say address wealth creation or income
inequality, if we want to address you know conflict, violence against women, you
know, drought, famine, social instability...
Absolutely everything that you might care about in the world is impacted by
climate. If you want to take action on those issues we need to solve climate
change first, otherwise we'll have very little hope of doing what we can on those
other metrics. I think we really need to think of climate as a top-order
political priority and make our leaders behave as though it is.
It's a very empowering message as I said David. Thank you for doing the work of
assembling all of this information and putting it in such an accessible book.
It's a powerful read and a very sobering one, so thank you.
Thank you for having me, great to talk to you.