I’ve never been an environmentalist, I still don't think of myself as an environmentalist.
I’ve lived my whole life in one city: New York City.
I walk down these concrete streets, looking up at these steel buildings…and felt myself
always my whole life that I was living somehow outside of nature.
As a journalist interested in the near future I was just seeing more and more scientific
research coming out about just how scary climate change could be.
It made me realize in a really profound way that modern life is not outside nature, it
is subject to its forces.
When I started working on the subject in late 2016 early 2017 most scientists I spoke to
were more candid more alarmed in private conversations than they were in their own work.
That’s for a number of reasons but in part because there had been kind of communications
conventional wisdom around climate that it was dangerous to scare people.
I think the public was poorly served by that.
Because someone like me who was engaged in the issue but not focused on it, simply didn’t
understand the scope of what we were dealing with and as a result was essential complacent
in my own actions and my political life, I really wish I had been shown the naked truth
so that I could make up my own mind about what was necessary and how to respond.
JOE: Hey guys, Joe here, welcome back to Hot Mess.
David Wallace Wells is a journalist who’s become well known over the past couple of
years for writing about the most dangerous, alarming, and down-right terrifying things
that will happen over the next century thanks to climate change.
His book “The Uninhabitable Earth” is a sober… or maybe even terrifying?…
warning about the worst case climate change scenarios, and it’s notable not only for
how alarming a picture it paints of our possible future, but for how different it is from the
way people “usually” write about climate change.
Because, according to “conventional wisdom” and the advice of people who’ve studied
how to best communicate difficult ideas, fear and alarm are things we should avoid.
But that seems to be changing.
More and more people are getting alarmed, and they’re talking about it.
I think the major event in this trajectory was the UN IPCC report from last october,
what was being presented as a whole lot of terrifying science, is actually maybe better
even than what we can hope for.
And yet it came presented by the scientific community.
In this new kind of language a much more alarmist much more grab you by your collar and yell
at you kind of language.
And I think the response to that has been really remarkable, I mean all of the new political
momentum that we’ve seen about climate over the last 9 months came in the immediate aftermath
of that report.
Greta starting her climate strikes, Extinction Rebellion starting in the UK, Sunrise here
in the US, the fact that we now have a Democratic presidential campaign in which where all the
candidates are in a kind of arms race to produce who can do the most ambitious climate policy
that was unthinkable a year ago and I really think that the UN report had a lot to with
it, Because it was for the first time scientists speaking quite candidly not just about the
science but how scared the science made them when they really looked at it closely.
… and yet I do think their perspective on
the issue has taken on a new urgency… primarily i responded to the science through fear, and
that made me a much more committed much more engaged climate person than I had ever been
before.
JOE: That’s what many people have found so surprising: that fear can actually make
people more engaged.
We’ve talked about that before right here on this channel, when we sat down with Kati
psychologists think fear is good at getting people’s attention, but that
it also carries risks: they might shut down or look away or choose to disengage.
But maybe that’s different when it comes to climate change, at least for some people?
But that doesn’t surprise me and I don’t think it should surprise anyone else, because
fear is an incredibly powerful motivator.
Now I don’t think fear is the only way to tell the story of climate I think there are
many many ways, I think the story is so big we have to understand that it’s kaleidoscopic.
If the science is alarming than it’s okay to alarm readers with it.
In fact I think it’s the only responsible way to respond to that news.
JOE: So what proportion of people do you have to reach, do you have to get engaged with
climate science and the effects of climate change, before we actually do something about
it that will reverse these trends?
Because that hasn’t happened, at least not here in the US.
The US, for good reason, is the focus of much of this discussion about how to motivate people
around climate change, because this country is A) the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse
gases next to China and B)
hugely polarized and divided along partisan political lines when it comes to acting on
it.
But it might surprise you to learn that people’s belief that climate change is happening is
not that divided at all.
73% of Americans believe in climate change.
That strikes me as an amazingly high number, that means that some significant portion of
republicans believe in the issue and given how tribalized how partisan our politics are,
To me if you’re hoping to get that number to 100% you're focusing on the wrong problem,
the much bigger problem is that those 73% don't care enough about the issue yet.
They're mindful of it they’re concerned, they want the government to solve the problem.
But they’re not orienting their entire political world view around this challenge, and they’re
not demanding that their political leaders make policy that reflects that urgency.
JOE: That’s a lot of people that could potentially start paying attention and demand change,
if we could only get them to engage.
But we do have to be conscious of the risk: that fear and doom and talking about all the
bad things that climate change will bring might have an unintended side effect of just
being so awful and negative and hard to deal with that it turns some people off, and instead
of engaging them, it causes them to disengage.
On the other hand, talking about all the bad stuff might get more people who weren’t
paying attention to pay attention…
I asked David how we figure out that trade-off.
There are people, especially those who've devoted their lives to the issue, who may
feel themselves on the brink of despair and fatalism.
And may take an avalanche of bad news and that may push them over the edge and make
them disengaged.
but about that I would say the number of people who are not concerned enough about climate
is so much bigger than the number of people who are at risk of being too worried about
climate change.
And if it were the cost that we turned off a few of these quite committed people by overwhelming
them, but the benefit is we mobilize and motivate many many of these complacent people that
be on net a win.
But even more than that I would say the best antidote to fatalism is progress.
It’s not hiding from the science.
JOE: This brings us to a paradox we’ve come to many times on this show: One person’s
actions don’t make much of a difference when it comes to fighting climate change,
but big collective actions like the sort that we need are made up of a whole lot of individual
people.
And this is a question that lots of people wrestle with, including me: Where should we
focus most of our energy?
Our individual actions or politics and policy?
I happen to feel that basically only politics matter.
Politics are there to solve precisely these types of problems, we don't arm ourselves
to defend against foreign invasion we pay money collectively to form an army, we don't
all educate our children in our homes we pay money so that public school systems can do
that for us.
There’s no reason to think of climate in different terms.
This is what politics are for and it can solve this problem if we empower it to.
If we’re defining real engagement on this issue ya know you can never take a trip on
an airplane you can never eat a hamburger again you can also never think of anything
but climate crisis then you are going to have few soldiers in that war, and because this
is a political war that we need to fight we need a lot of those soldiers so my perspective
is take all comers, even if someone wants to think about climate change for 30 minutes
a week but they want to do it in a politically productive way that’s fantastic.
We need those people as much as the people who want to devote their whole lives to it.
And we shouldn’t holding any of us in to any impossibly high standards.
JOE: In the end, though we mostly talk about climate change in scientific language, and
we focus on scientific evidence and scientific modeling of its effects… climate is bigger
than just science, because everything touches climate, and everything exists within climate.
When you consider we’re talking about basically our whole lives how can you not be alarmed
if you’re paying attention?
And how can you possibly find any hope in that?
This is not a story that’s going to resolve in a neat way like it’s all going to be
okay or it’s all going to be a disaster.
we’re all going to be muddling through a world that is completely transformed by this
force.
change is here, the planet is already 1.1 degrees warmer than it was before industrialization.
it’s almost certainly going to get considerably worse.
But how much worse is ultimately up to us the main driver of this story is how much
carbon we put in the atmosphere, which means that our hands are on those levers and the
choices we make going forward are going to write the story of the next century.
JOE: For me, as someone who I think it’s safe to say thinks about climate change more
than the average person, I’ve found this new focus on fear and worst-case predictions…
it’s actually motivating.
I’ve put a lot of energy into trying to reach people using that old “conventional
wisdom” and nothing much has changed.
And to be honest sometimes it’s discouraging.
This gives me some new hope, even if it is difficult to face.
What do you think?
We’d love to know.