It’s not just about the natural world. The side effects of climate change remain relatively unknown, but we can expect a warming world to impact every facet of our lives. In fact, as recent research shows, global warming is already affecting our mental and physical well-being, and this impact will only increase. Climate change could decrease the efficacy of our public safety institutions. It could damage our economies. It could even impact the way that we vote, potentially altering our democracies themselves. Yet even as these effects begin to appear, we’re already growing numb to the changing climate patterns behind them, and we’re failing to act.

In honor of Earth Day, this month’s podcast focuses on these side effects and what we can do about them. Ariel spoke with Dr. Nick Obradovich, a research scientist at the MIT Media Lab, and Dr. Fran Moore, an assistant professor in the Department of Environmental Science and Policy at the University of California, Davis. They study the social and economic impacts of climate change, and they shared some of their most remarkable findings.

Topics discussed in this episode include:

• How getting used to climate change may make it harder for us to address the issue
• The social cost of carbon
• The effect of temperature on mood, exercise, and sleep
• The effect of temperature on public safety and democratic processes
• Why it’s hard to get people to act
• What we can all do to make a difference
• Why we should still be hopeful

Publications discussed in this episode include:

• Rapidly declining remarkability of temperature anomalies may obscure public perception of climate change
• Nighttime temperature and human sleep loss in a changing climate
• Climate change may speed democratic turnover
• Climate change may alter human physical activity patterns
• Weather impacts expressed sentiment
• Empirical evidence of mental health risks posed by climate change
• Temperature impacts on economic growth warrant stringent mitigation policy
• Contribution of anthropology to the study of climate change
• Negotiating adaptation: Norm selection and hybridization in international climate negotiations

You can listen to the podcast above, or read the full transcript below.

Ariel: Hello, and a belated happy Earth Day to everyone. I’m Ariel Conn, your host of The Future of Life podcast. And in honor of Earth Day this month, I’m happy to have two climate-related scientists joining the show. We’ve all heard about the devastating extreme weather that climate change will trigger; We’ve heard about melting ice caps, rising ocean levels, warming oceans, flooding, wildfires, hurricanes, and so many other awful natural events.

And it’s not hard to imagine how people living in these regions will be negatively impacted. But climate change won’t just affect us directly. It will also impact the economy, agriculture, our mental health, our sleep patterns, how we exercise, food safety, the effectiveness of policing, and more.

So today, I have two scientists joining me to talk about some of those issues. Doctor Nick Obradovich is a research scientist at the MIT Media Lab. He studies the way that climate change is likely impacting humanity now and into the future. And Doctor Fran Moore is an assistant professor in the Department of Environmental Science and Policy at the University of California, Davis. Her work sits at the intersection of climate science and environmental economics and is focused on understanding how climate change will affect the social and natural systems that people value.

So Nick and Fran, thank you so much for joining us.

Nick: Thanks for having us.

Fran: Thank you.

Ariel: Now, before we get into some of the topics that I just listed, I want to first look at a paper you both published recently called “Rapidly Declining Remarkability of Temperature Anomalies May Obscure Public Perception of Climate Change.” And essentially, as you describe in the paper, we’re like frogs in boiling water. As long as the temperatures continue to increase, we forget that it used to be cooler and we recalibrate what we consider to be normal for weather. So what may have been considered extreme 15 years ago, we now think of as normal.

Among other things, this can make trying to address climate change more difficult. I want both of you now to talk more about what the study was and what it means for how we address climate change. But first, if you could just talk about what prompted this study.

Fran: So I’ve been interested for a long time in the question of: as the climate changes and people are gradually exposed to this new weather in their everyday life that used to be very unusual but because of climate change more and more typical, how do we think about defining things like extreme events under those kind of conditions?

I think researchers have this intuition that there’s something about human perception and judgment that goes into that or that there’s some kind of limit of how humans kind of understand the weather that define what we think of as normal and extreme, but no one had really been able to measure it. What I think is really cool in this study, and working with Nick and our other coworkers, we’re able to use data from Twitter to actually measure what people think of as remarkable, and then we can show that that changed quickly over time.

Ariel: I found this use of social media to be really interesting. Can you talk a little bit about how you used Twitter? And I was also curious if that — aside from being a new source of information — does it also present limitations in any way or is it just exciting new information?

Nick: The crux of this insight was that we talk about the weather all the time. It’s sort of the way to pass time in casual conversation, to say hi to people, to awkwardly change the topic — if someone has said something a little awkward, start talking about the weather. And we realized that Twitter is a great source for what people are talking about, and I had been collecting billions of tweets over the last number of years. And Fran and I met, and then we got talking about this idea and we were like, “Huh, you know, I bet you could use Twitter to measure how people are talking about the weather.” And then Fran had the excellent insight that you could also use it to get a metric of how remarkable people find the weather by how unusually much they’re talking about unusual weather. And so that was kind of the crux of the insight there.

And then really what we did is we said, “Okay, what terms exist in the English language that might likely refer to weather when people are talking about the weather?” And we combed through the billions of tweets that I had in my store and found all of the tweets plausibly about the weather and used that for our analysis and then mapped that to the historical temperatures that people had experienced and also the rates of warming over time that the locations that people lived in had experienced.

Ariel: And what was the timeframe that you were looking at?

Fran: So it’s about three years: from March of 2014 to the end of 2016. But then we’re able to combine that with weather data that goes back to 1980. So what we can then look at — we can match the tweeting behavior going on in this relatively recent time period, but we can look at how is that explained by all the patterns of temperature change across these counties.

So what we found that, firstly, maybe exactly what you would expect, right, which is that the rate at which people tweet about particular temperatures depends on what is typical for that location, for that time of year. And so if you have very cold weather but that very cold weather is basically what you should be expecting, you’re going to tweet about that less than if that very cold weather is atypical.

But then what we were able to show is that what people think of as “usual” that defines this tweeting behavior changes really quickly, so that if you have these unusual temperatures multiple years in a row the tweeting response quickly starts to decline. So what that indicates is that people are adjusting their ideas of normal weather very quickly. And we’re actually able to use the tweets to directly estimate the rate at which this updating happens and, to our best estimate, we think that people are using approximately the last two to eight years as a baseline for establishing normal temperatures for that location for that time of year. When people think of, look at the weather outside, and they’re evaluating is it hot, is it cold, the reference point they’re using is set by the fairly recent past.

Ariel: What does this mean as we’re trying to figure out ways to address climate change?

Nick: When we saw this result, we were a bit troubled because it was faster than we would perhaps hope. I’m a political scientist by training, and I saw this and I said, “This is not ideal,” because if you have people getting used to a climate that is changing on geologically rapid scales but perhaps on human time scales somewhat slow — if people get used to that as it changes, then some of the things that we know helps to drive political action, policy, and political attention is just awareness of a problem. And so if you’re having people’s expectations adapt pretty quickly to climate change, then all of a sudden a hundred-degree day in North Dakota would have been very unusual in 2000 but maybe it’s fairly normal in 2030. And so as a result, people aren’t as aware of the signal that climate change is producing. And that could have some pretty troubling political implications.

Fran: My takeaway from this is that I think it certainly points to the risk that these conditions that are geologically or even historically very, very unusual — that they are not perceived as such. We’re really limited by our human perception, and that’s even within individuals, right — what we’re estimating is something that happens within an individual’s lifetime.

So what it means is that you can’t just assume that as climate change gets worse it’s going to automatically rise to the top of the political agenda in terms of urgency. And that, like a lot of other chronic, serious social problems we have, that it takes a lot of work on the part of activists and norm entrepreneurs to do something about climate change. And that just because it’s happening and it’s becoming, at least statistically or scientifically, increasingly clear that it’s happening, that won’t necessarily translate into people wanting to do something about it.

Ariel: And so you guys were looking more at what we might consider sort of abnormalities in relatively normal weather: if it’s colder in May than we’d expect or it’s hotter in January than we’d expect. But that’s not the same as some of the extreme weather events that we’ve also seen. I don’t know if this is sort of a speculative question, but do you think the extreme weather events could help counter our normalization of just changing temperatures or do you think we would eventually normalize the extreme weather events as well?

Nick: That’s a great question. So one of the things we didn’t look at is, for example, giant hurricanes, big wildfires, and things like that that are all likely to increase in frequency and severity in the future. So it could certainly be the case that the increase in frequency and intensity of those events offsets the adaptation, as you suggest. We actually are trying to think about ways to measure how people might adapt to other climate-driven phenomena aside from just regular, day-to-day temperature.

I hope that’s the case, right? Because if we’re also adapting to sea level rise pretty rapidly as it goes along and we’re also adapting to increased frequency of wildfires and things like that, a few things might happen; one being that if we’re getting used to semi-regular flooding, for example, we don’t move as quickly as we need to — up to the point where basically cities start getting inundated, and that could be very problematic. So I hope that what you suggest actually turns out to be the case.

Fran: I think that this is a question we get a lot, like, “Oh, well temperature is one thing, but really the thing that’s really going to spur people is these hurricanes or floods or these wildfires.” And I think that’s a hypothesis, but I would say it’s as yet untested. And sure, a hurricane is an extreme event, but when they start happening frequently, is that going to be subject to the same kind of normalization phenomenon that we show here? I would say I don’t know, and it’s possible it would look really different.

But I think it’s also possible that it wouldn’t, and that when you start seeing these happen on a very regular basis, that they become normalized in a very similar way to what you see here. And it might be that they spur some kind of adaptation or response policy, but the idea that they would automatically spur a lot of mitigation policy I think is something that people seem to think might be true, but I would say that we need some more empirical evidence.

Nick: I like to think of humans as an incredibly adaptable species. I think we’re a great species for that reason. We’re arguably the most successful ever. But our adaptability in this instance may perhaps prove to be part of our undoing, just in normalizing worsening conditions as they deteriorate around us. I hope that the hypothesis that Fran lays out ends up being the case: that, as the climate gets weirder and weirder, there is enough signal that people become concerned enough to do something about it. But it is just an empirical hypothesis at this point.

Fran: What I thought was a really neat thing that we were able to do in this paper was ask: are people just not talking about these conditions because they’ve normalized them and they’re no longer interesting or have people actually been able to take action to reduce the negative consequences of these conditions? And so to do that we used sentiment analysis. So this is something that Nick and our other author Patrick Baylis have used before: Just based on the words that are being used in the tweets, you can measure the overall mood being conveyed or the kind of emotional state of people sending those tweets and what very hot and very cold temperatures have negative effects on sentiment. And we find that those effects persist even if people stop talking about these unusual temperatures.

What that’s saying is that this is not a good news story of effective adaptation, that people are able to reduce the negative consequences of these temperatures. Actually, they’re still being very negatively affected by them — and they’re just not talking about them anymore. And that’s kind of the worst of both worlds.

Ariel: So I want to actually follow up with that because I had a question about that paper that you just referenced. And if I was reading it correctly, it sort of seemed like you’re saying that we basically get crankier as the weather falls onto either extreme of our preferred comfort zone. Is that right? Are we just going to be crankier as climate gets worse?

Nick: So that was the paper that Patrick Baylis and I had with a number of other co-authors, and the key point about that paper is that we were looking at historical contemporaneous weather and we weren’t looking for adaptation over time with that analysis. So what we found is that at certain level of temperature, for example when it’s really hot outside, people’s sentiment goes down — their mood is worsened. When it’s really cold outside, we also found that people’s sentiment was worsened; and we found that, for example, lots of precipitation made people unhappy as well.

But with that paper what we didn’t do was examine the degree to which — changes in the weather over time, people got used to those. And so that’s what we were able to do in this paper with Fran, and what we saw was, as Fran points out, troubling, which is that people weren’t substantially adapting to these temperature shocks over time, to longer term changes in climate —  they just weren’t talking about them as much.

So if you think though that there is no adaptation, then yeah, if the world becomes much hotter, on the hot end of things — so in the summer, in the northern hemisphere for example — people will probably be a bit grumpier. Importantly though, on the other side of things, in the wintertime, if you have warming, you might expect that people are in somewhat better moods because they’re able to enjoy nicer weather outside. So it is a little bit of a double-edged sword in that way, but again important that we don’t see that people are adapting, which is pretty critical.

Ariel: Okay. So we can potentially expect at least the possibility of decrease in life satisfaction just because of weather, without us even really appreciating that it’s the weather that’s doing it to us?

Nick: Yes, during hotter periods. The converse is that during the wintertime, in the northern hemisphere, we would have to say that warming temperatures, people would probably enjoy for the most part. If it was supposed to be 35 degrees Fahrenheit outside and it’s now 45 Fahrenheit, that’s a bit more pleasant. Now you can go with a lighter jacket.

So there will be those small positive benefits — although, as Fran is probably going to talk about here in a little bit, there are other big countervailing negatives that we need to consider too.

Fran: What I like about this paper that Nick and Patrick wrote previously on sentiment, they have these comparisons to it being a Monday or to home team loss. Sometimes it’s hard to put these measures in perspective, and so Mondays on average make people miserable and it being very, very hot out also makes people miserable in kind of similar ways to it being a Monday.

Nick: Yeah. We found that particularly cold temperatures, for example, were a similar magnitude of effect on positive sentiment. A reduced positive sentiment of a magnitude that was equivalent to a small earthquake in your location and things like that. So the magnitude effects of the weather are much larger than we necessarily thought that they would be, which we thought was I guess interesting. But also there was a whole big literature from psychology and economics and political science that had looked at weather and various outcomes and found that sometimes the effect sizes were very large and sometimes the effect sizes were effectively zero. So we tried to basically just provide the answer to that question in that paper: The weather matters.

Ariel: I want to go back to the idea of whether or not extreme events will be normalized, because I tend to be slightly cynical — and maybe this is hopeful for once — that the economic cost of the extreme events is not something we would normalize too, that we would not get used to having to spend billions of dollars a year, whatever it is, to rebuild cities.

And Fran, I think that touches on some of your work if I’m correct, in that you look at what some of these costs of climate change would be. So first, is that correct? Is that one of the things that you look at?

Fran: Yeah. A large component of my work has been on improving the representation of climate change damages, so kind of what we know from the physical sciences about how climate change affects the things that we care about and including the representation of that in the thing called the social cost of carbon, which is a measure that’s very relevant for the regulatory and policy analysis for climate change.

Ariel: Can you explain what the social cost of carbon is? What is being measured?

Fran: So if you think about when we emit a ton of CO2, right, and that ton of CO2 goes off into the elements of the earth and it’s going to affect the climate, that change in the climate is going to have consequences around the world in many different sectors and is going to stay in the atmosphere for a long time. And so those effects are going to persist far out into the future.

What the social cost of carbon is, it’s really just an accounting exercise that tries to quantify what are all those impacts and then add them all up together and put them in common units and assign that as a cost of that ton of CO2 that you emitted. You can see in that description why this is an ambitious exercise in that we’re talking about, theoretically there should be all these climate change impacts around the world for all time. And then there’s another step too, which is in order to aggregate these to add them up, you need to put everything into common units. So the units that we use are dollars, so that’s a critical economic valuation step in order to think about these things that happen in agriculture or they happen along coastlines or they affect mortality risk and how do you take all them and then put them into some kind of common unit and value them all.

And so depending on what type of impact you’re talking about, that’s more or less challenging. But it’s an important number because at least in the United States, we have a requirement that all regulations have to have passed a cost-benefit analysis. So in order to do a cost-benefit analysis of climate regulation, you need to understand what are the benefits of not emitting CO2? So pretty much any policy that’s affecting emissions needs to account for these damages in some way. That’s why this is very directly relevant to policy.

Ariel: I want to keep looking at what this means. In one of your papers you have a sentence that reads, “impacts on the agriculture increase from net benefits $2.7 ton per carbon to net cost of $8.5 per ton of CO2.” I think that seemed like a really good example for you to explain what these costs actually mean?

Fran: Yeah. This was an exercise I did a couple of years ago with coauthors Tom Hertel and Uris Baldos and Delavane Diaz. The idea was that we know now a lot about how climate change affects crop yields. There’s been an awful lot of work on that in economics and agricultural sciences. But that was essentially not represented in the social cost of carbon, where our estimates of climate change damages really came from studies that were either in the late 80s or the early 90s, and really our understanding of how climate change will affect agriculture has really changed since then.

What those numbers represent, the benefits of $2.7 per ton is what is currently represented in the models that calculate the social cost of carbon. So the fact that it’s negative, that indicates that these models were thinking that agriculture on net is going to benefit from climate change. This is largely because a combination of CO2 fertilization and a fair bit of assumption that in most of the world crops are going to benefit from higher temperatures. Now we know that’s more or less not the case.

When we look at how we think temperature and CO2 is going to affect the major crops around the world, we use these estimates from the IPCC, and then we introduce those into an economic model. This is a valuation set. That economic model will kind of account for the fact that countries can shift what they grow, they can change their consumption patterns, they can change their trading partners. A lot of these economic adjustments that we know can be done, and this modeling accounts for all of that. We find a fairly large negative effect of climate change on agriculture, which amounts to about $9 per ton of CO2, and those are kind of discounted paths. So you emit a ton of CO2 today, that’s the dollar value today of all the future damages that ton of CO2 will have via the agricultural sector.

Ariel: As a reminder, how many tons of CO2 were emitted, say, last year, or the year before? Something that we know?

Fran: We do know that. I’m not sure I can tell you that off the top of my head. I would caution you that you also don’t want to take this number and just multiply it by the total tons emitted, because this is a marginal value. This is merely about do we emit this ton or not? It’s really not a value that can be used for saying, “Okay, well the total damages from climate change are X.” There’s distinction between total damages and marginal damages, and the social cost of carbon number is very much about marginal damages.

So it’s like at the margin, how much should we tax CO2? It’s really not going to tell you, should we be on a two-degree pathway, or should we be on a four-degree pathway, or should we be on a 1.5-degree pathway? That you need a really different analysis for.

Ariel: I want to ask one more follow-up question to this, and then I want to get onto some of the other papers of Nick’s. What are the cost estimates that we’re looking at right now? What are you comfortable saying that we’re, I don’t know, losing this much money, we’re going to pay this much money, we’re going to negatively be impacted by X number of dollars?

Fran: The exercise that the Obama administration went through, a fairly comprehensive exercise to take the existing models and standardize them in certain ways to try and say, “What is the social cost of carbon value that we should use?” They have a number that’s around $40 per ton of CO2. If you take that number as a benchmark, there’s obviously a lot of uncertainty around it, and I think it’s fair to say a lot of that uncertainty is on the high end rather than on the low end. So if you think about probability distribution around that existing number, I would say there’s a lot of reasons why it might be higher than $40 per ton, and there’s a few, but not a ton, of reasons why it might be lower.

Ariel: Nick, was there anything you wanted to add to what Fran has just been talking about?

Nick: Yeah. The only thing I would say is I totally agree that the uncertainty is on the upper bound of the estimate of the social cost of carbon, and possibly on the extreme upper bound. So there are unknowns that we can’t estimate from the historical data in terms of being able to figure out what happens in the natural system and how that translates through to the social system and the social costs. We and Fran are basically just doing the best we can with the historical evidence that we can bring to bear on the question, but there are giant “unknown unknowns,” to quote Donald Rumsfeld.

Ariel: I want to sort of quantify this ever so slightly. I Googled it, and it looks like we are emitting in the tens of billions of tons of carbon each year? Does that sound right?

Fran: Check that it’s carbon and not CO2. I think it’s eight to nine gigatons of carbon.

Ariel: Okay.

Nick: CO2 equivalence.

Ariel: Anyway, it’s a lot.

Nick: It’s a lot, yeah.

Ariel: That’s the point.

Nick: It’s a lot; It’s increasing. I think 2018 was an increased blip in terms of the rate of emissions. We need to be decreasing, and we’re still increasing. Not great.

Ariel: All right. We’ll take a quick break from the economic side of things and what this will financially cost us, and look at some of the human impacts that we many not necessarily be thinking about, but which Nick has been looking into. I’m just going to go through a list of very quick questions that I asked about a few papers that I looked at.

The first one I looked at is apparently — and this makes sense when I think about it — climate change is going to impact our physical activity, because it’s too hot in places, or things like that. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the research you did into that and what you think the health implications are.

Nick: Yeah, totally. So I like to think about the climate impacts that are not necessarily easily and readily and immediately translated into dollar value because I think really we live in a pretty complex system, and when you turn up the temperature on that complex system, it’s probably going to affect basically everything. The question is what’s going to be affected and how much are the important things going to be affected? And so a lot of my work has focused on identifying things that we hadn’t yet thought about as social scientists in doing the social impact estimates in the cost of carbon and just raising questions about those areas.

Physical activity was one. The idea to look at that actually came from back in 2015 — there was a big heat wave in San Diego when I was living there, and I was in a regular running regimen. I would go running at 4:00 or 5:00 PM, but there were a number of weeks, definitely strings of days, where it was 100 degrees or more in October in San Diego, which is very unusual. At 4:00 PM it would be 100 degrees and kind of humid, so I just didn’t run as much for a couple of weeks, and that threw off my whole exercise schedule. I was like, “Huh, that’s an interesting impact of heat that I hadn’t really heard about.”

So I was like, “Well, I know this big data set that collects people’s reported physical activity over time, and has a decade worth of data on randomly sampled US, I think about a million randomly sampled US citizens.” Over a million. So I had those data, and I was like, “Well, I wonder if you see the weather and the climate that these people are living in, does that influence their exercise patterns?” What we found was a little bit surprising to me because I had thought about it on the hot end: “Oh, I stopped running because it was too hot.” But the reality is that temperature, and also rainfall, impact our physical activity patterns across the full distribution.

When it’s really cold outside, people don’t report being very physically active and one of the main reasons for that is one of the primary ways Americans get physical activity is by going outside for a run or a jog or a walk. When it’s very nasty outside, people report not being as physically active. We saw on the cold end of the distribution that as temperatures warmed up, people exercised more. That was actually up to a relatively high peak in that function. It was an inverted U shape, and the peak was relatively high in terms of temperature. It was somewhere around 84 degrees fahrenheit.

What we realized actually is that at least in the US, at least in some of the northern latitudes in the US, people might exercise more as temperatures warm up to a point. They might exercise more in the wintertime, for example. That was this small little silver lining in what is otherwise, from my research and from Fran’s research and most research on this topic, a cascade of negative news that is likely to result from climate change. But the health impacts of being more physically active are positive. It’s one of the most important things we can do for our health. So a small, positive impact of warming temperatures offset by all the other things that we’ve found.

Ariel: I know from personal experience I definitely don’t like to run in the winter. I don’t like ice, so that makes sense.

Nick: Ice, frostbite.

Ariel: Yeah.

Nick: All these things are … yeah. So just observationally, if I look out my window, and there’s a running path near me, I see dramatically more people on a sunny, mild day than I do during the middle of the winter. That’s how most people get their exercise. A lot of people, we know from the public health literature, if they’re not going out for a walk or a stroll, they’re not really getting any physical activity at all.

Ariel: Okay. So potential good news.

Nick: A little bit. Just a little bit.

Fran: Yeah. Nick moved from San Diego to Boston, so I think he’s got a better appreciation of the benefits of warmer wintertime temperatures.

Nick: I do! Although, and this is an important limitation in that study, is we didn’t really, again, look at adaptation over time. And what I found moving to Boston was that I got used to the cold winters much faster than I thought I would coming from San Diego, and now do go running in the wintertime here, though I thought I would barely be able to go outside. So perhaps that’s a positive thing in terms of our ability to adapt on the hotter end as well, and perhaps that undercuts a little bit the degree to which warming during the winter might increase physical activity.

This is a broader and more general point. A lot of these studies — it’s pretty hard to look at long-term adaptation over time because some of the data sets that we have just don’t give us enough span of time to really see people adapt their behaviors within person. So, many of the studies are kind of estimating the direct effect of temperature, for example, on physical activity, and not estimating how much long-term warming has changed people’s physical activity patterns. There are some studies that do that with respect to some outcomes — for example, agricultural yields. But it’s less common to do that with some of the public health-related outcomes and psychological-related outcomes.

Ariel: I want to ask about some of these other studies you’ve done as well, but do you think starting these studies now will help us get more research into this in the future?

Nick: Yeah. I think the more and the better data that we have, the better we’re going to be able to answer some of these questions. For example, the physical activity paper, also we did a sleep paper — the self-report data that we used in those papers are indeed just self-report data. So we’re able to get access to what are called actigraph data, or data that come from monitors like Fitbit and actually track people’s sleep and physical activity. We’re working on those follow-up studies, and the more data that we have and the longer that we have those data, the more we can identify potential adaptation over time.

Ariel: The sleep study was actually where I was going to go next. It seemed nicely connected to the physical activity one. Basically we’ve been told for years to get eight hours of sleep and to try to set the temperatures in our rooms to be cooler so that our quality of sleep is better. But it seems that increasing temperatures from climate change might affect that. So I was hoping you could weigh in on that too.

Nick: Yeah. I think you said it pretty well. The results in that paper basically indicate that higher nighttime temperatures outside, higher ambient temperatures outside, increase the frequency that people report a bad night of sleep. Basically what we say is absent adaptation, climate change might worsen human sleep in the future.

Now, one of the primary ways you adapt, as you just mentioned, is by turning the AC on, keeping it cooler in the room in the summertime, and trying to fight the fact that it’s — as it was in San Diego — it’s 90 degrees and humid at 12:00 AM. The problem with that is that a lot of our electricity grid is currently still on carbon. Until we decarbonize the grid, if we’re using more air conditioning to make it cooler and make it comfortable in our rooms in the summers, we are emitting more carbon.

That poses something else that Fran and I have talked about and others are starting to work on: the idea that it’s not a one-way street. In other words, if the climate system is changing, and it’s changing our behaviors in order to adapt to it, or just frankly changing our behaviors, we are potentially altering the amount of carbon that we put back into the system and the positive feedback loop that’s driven by humans this time, as opposed to permafrost and things like that. So, it’s a big, complex equation. And that makes estimating the social cost of carbon all the harder because it’s no longer just this one-way street. But if it means emitting carbon through behavioral effects of emitting that carbon causes the emission of more carbon, then you have a harder-to-estimate function.

Fran: Yeah, you’re right, and it is hard. I often get questions of like, “Oh, is this in the social cost of carbon? Is this?” And usually the answer is no.

Ariel: Yeah. I guess I’ve got another one sort of like that. I mean, I think studies indicate pretty well right now that if you don’t get enough sleep, you’re not as productive at work, and that’s going to cost the economy as well. Is stuff like that also being considered or taken into account?

Fran: I think in general, I think researchers’ ideas a few decades ago was very much that there were a very limited set of pathways by which a developed economy could be affected by climate. We could enumerate those, and they were things like agriculture or forestry and coastline affected by sea level rise. The newer work that’s being done now, like Nick’s papers that we just talked about, and a lot of other work, is showing that actually we seem to be very sensitive to temperature on a number of fronts, and that has these quite pervasive economic effects.

Fran: And so, yeah, the sleep question is a huge one, right? If you don’t get a good night’s sleep, that affects how much you can learn in school the next day, it affects your productivity at work the next day. So we do see evidence that temperature affects labor productivity in developed countries. Even in sectors that you think should be relatively well insulated against them, let’s say because there’s work that’s being done inside, there’s evidence too that high temperatures affect how well students can learn in school and their test scores. That has potentially a very long term effect on their educational trajectory in life and their ability to accumulate human capital and their earning potential in the future.

Fran: And so, these newer findings I think are suggesting that even developed economies are sensitive in ways that we’re only beginning to learn to climate change, and pretty much none of that is currently represented in our current estimates of the social cost of carbon.

Nick: Yeah, that’s a great point. And to add an example to that, I did a study last year in which I looked at government productivity, so government workers’ productivity. Because we had seen a number of these studies, as Fran mentioned, that private sector productivity was declining, and I was wondering if government workers that are tasked with overseeing our safety, especially in times of heat stress and other forms of stress, if those workers themselves were affected by heat stress and other forms of environmental stress.

We indeed found that they were, so we found that police officers were less likely to stop people in traffic stops even though there was an increased risk of traffic fatalities and also crime increases with higher temperatures as well. We found that food safety inspectors were less likely to do inspections. The probability of an inspection declined as the temperature increased, though the risk of violation conditional on an inspection happening increased. So it’s more likely that there’s a food safety problem when it’s hot out, but food safety inspectors were less likely to go out and do inspections.

That’s another thing that fits into, “Okay, we’re affected in really complex ways.” Maybe it’s the case that the food safety inspectors were less likely to go do their job because they were really tired because they didn’t sleep well the night before, or perhaps because they were grumpy because it was really hot outside. We don’t know exactly, but these systems are indeed really complicated and probably a lot of things are in play all at once.

Ariel: Another one that you have looked that I think is also important to consider in this whole complex system that’s being impacted by climate change is democratic processes.

Nick: Yeah, yeah. I’m a political scientist by training, and what we political scientists do is think a lot about politics, the democratic process, voting, turnout, and one of things that we know best in political science is this thing called retrospective voting or perhaps economic voting — basically the idea that people vote largely based on either how well they individually are doing, or how well they perceive their society is doing under the current incumbent. So in the US for example, if the economy is doing well the incumbent faces better prospects than if the economy is doing poorly. If individuals perceive that they are doing well, the incumbent faces better prospects.

I basically just sat down and thought for a while, and was like, you know, climate change across all these dimensions is likely to worsen both economic well-being, and also just personal, psychological, and physiological well-being. I wonder if it’s the case that it might somewhat disrupt the way that democracies function, and the way that elections function in democracies. For example, if you’re exposed to hotter temperatures there are lots of reasons to suspect that you might perceive being yourself less well-off — and whoever’s in office, you might just be a little bit less likely to vote for them in the next election.

So I put together a bunch of election results from a variety of countries around the world, a variety of democratic institutions around the world, and looked at the effect of hotter temperatures on the incumbent politicians’ prospects in the upcoming elections: So, what were the effects of the temperatures prior to the election on the electoral success of that incumbent? And what I found was that as you had unusual increases in temperature the year prior to an election, and as those got hotter on the distribution — so hotter places — you saw that the incumbent prospects declined in that election. Incumbent politicians were more likely to get thrown out of office when temperatures were unusually warm, especially in hotter places.

And that, as a political scientist, is a little bit troubling because it could be two things. It could be the case that politicians are being thrown out of office because they don’t respond well to the stressors associated with added temperature. So they could, for example, if there was a heatwave, and it caused some crop losses, maybe those politicians didn’t do a good enough job helping the people who lost those crops. But it also might just be the case that people are grumpier, and they’re not feeling as good, and there’s really no way the politician can respond, or the politician has limited resources and can only respond so much.

And if that’s the driving function then what you see is this exogenous shock leading to an ouster of a democratically elected politician, perhaps not directly related to the performance of that politician. And that can lead to added electoral churn; If you see increased rates of electoral churn where politicians are losing office with increasing frequency, it can shorten the electoral time horizons that politicians have. If they think that every election they stand a real good chance of losing office they may be less likely to pursue policies that have benefits over two or three election cycles. That was the crux of that paper.

Ariel: Fran, did you have anything you wanted to add to that?

Fran: I think it’s a really really fascinating question. This is one of my favorite of Nick’s papers. We think about how these really fundamental institutions that we think when we go to the ballot box, and we do our election, there’s a lot of factors that go into that, right? Even the very fact that you can pick up any kind of temperature signal on that is surprising to me, and I think it’s a really important finding. And then trying to pin down these mechanisms I think is interesting for trying to play out the scenarios of how does climate change proceed in terms of the effects of changing the political environment in which we’re operating, and having, like Nick said, these potentially long term effects on the types of issues politicians are willing to work on. It’s really important, and I think it’s something that needs more work.

Nick: Fran makes an excellent point embedded in there, which is the understanding of what we call causal mediation. In other words, if you see that hot temperatures lead to a reduction in GDP growth, why is that? What exactly is causing that? GDP growth is this huge aggregate of all of these different things. Why might temperature be causing that? Or even, for example, if you see that temperature is affecting people’s sleep quality, why is that the case? Is it because it’s influencing the degree to which people are stressed out during the day because they’re grumpier, they’re having more negative interactions, and then they’re thinking about that before they fall asleep? Is it due to purely physiological reasons, circadian rhythm and sleep cascades?

The short of it is, we don’t actually have very good answers to most of these questions for most of the climates impacts that we’ve looked at, and it’s pretty critical to have better answers, largely because if you want to adapt to coming climate changes, you’d like to spend your policy money on the things that are most important in those equations for reducing GDP growth or causing mental health outcomes or worsening people’s mood. You’d like to really be able to tell people precisely what they can do to adapt, and also spend money precisely where it’s needed, and it’s just strictly difficult science to be able to do that well.

Ariel: I want to actually go back real quick to something that you had said earlier, too: the idea that if politicians know that they’re unlikely to get elected during the next cycle, they’re also unlikely to plan long term. And I think especially when we’re looking at a situation like climate change where we need politicians who can plan long term, it seems like can this actually exacerbate our short-term thinking?

Nick: Yeah. That’s what I was concerned about, and still something that I am concerned about. As you get more and more extremes that are occurring more and more regularly and politicians are either responding well or not responding well to those extremes it may be somewhat like our weather and expectations paper — similar underlying psychological dynamics — which is just that people become more and more focused on their recent past, and their recent experience in history, and what’s going on now.

And if that’s the case then if you’re a politician, and you’ve had a bunch of hurricanes, or you’re dealing with the aftermath of hurricanes in your district, really should you be spending your policy efforts on carbon mitigation, or should you be trying to make sure that all of your constituents right now are housed and fed? That’s a little bit of a false dichotomy there, but it isn’t fully a false dichotomy because politicians only have so many resources, and they only have so much time. So as their risk of losing election goes up due to something that is more immediate, politicians will tend to focus on those risks as opposed to longer-term risks.

Ariel: I feel like in that example, too, in defense of the politicians, if you actually have to deal with people who are without homes and without food, that is sort of the higher priority.

Nick: Totally. I mean, I did a bunch of field work in Sub-Saharan Africa for my graduate studies and spent a lot of time in Malawi and South Africa, and talking to politicians there about how they felt about climate change, and specifically climate change mitigation policy. And half the time that I asked them they just looked at me as if I was crazy, and would explicitly say, like, “You must be crazy if you think that we have a  time horizon that gives us 20 years to worry about how our people are doing 20 years from now when they can’t feed themselves, and don’t have running water, and don’t have electricity right now. We’re working on the day to day things, the long term perspective just gets thrown out the window.” I think to a lesser degree that operates in every democratic polity.

Fran: This gets back to that question that we were talking about earlier: Are extreme events kind of fundamentally different in motivating action to reduce emissions? And this is exactly the reason why I’m not convinced that it’s the case, in that when you have the repeated extreme events, yes, there’s a lot of focus on rebuilding or restoring or kind of recovering from those events — potentially at the detriment of longer-term, less immediate action that would affect the long-term probability of getting those events in the future, which is reducing emissions.

And so I think it’s a very complex, causal argument to make in the face of a hurricane or a catastrophe that you need to be reducing emissions to address that, right, and that’s why I’m not convinced that just getting more and more disasters is going to automatically lead to more action on climate change. I think it’s actually almost this kind of orthogonal process that generates the political will to do something about climate change.

Having these disasters and operating in this very resource-constrained world — that’s a world in which action on climate change might be less likely, right? Doing some things that are quite costly involve a lot of political will and political leadership, and doing that in an environment where people are feeling vulnerable and feeling kind of exposed to natural disasters I think is actually going to be more difficult.

Nick: Yeah. So that’s an excellent point, Fran. I think you could see both things operating, which is I think you could see that people aren’t necessarily adapting their expectations to giant wildfires every single summer, that they realize that something is off and weird about that, but that they just simply can’t direct that attention to doing something about climate change because literally their house just burnt down. So they’re not going to be out in the streets lobbying their politicians as directly because they have more things to worry about. That is troubling to me, too.

Ariel: So that, I think, is a super, super important point, and now I have something new to worry about. It makes sense that the local communities that are being directly impacted by these horrific events have to deal with what’s just happened to them, but do we see an increase in external communities looking at what’s happening and saying, “Oh, we’ve got to stop this, and because we weren’t directly impacted we actually can do something?”

Nick: Anecdotally, somewhat yes. I mean, for example, if you look at the last couple of summers and the wildfire season, when there are big wildfire outbreaks the news media does a better than average job at linking that extreme weather to climate change, and starting to talk about climate change.

So if it is the case that people consume that news media and are now thinking about climate change more, that is good. And I think actually from some of the more recent surveys we’ve actually seen an uptick in awareness about climate change, worry about climate change, and willingness to list it as a top priority. So there are some positive trends on that front.

The bigger question is still an empirical one, though, which is what happens when you have 10 years of wildfires every summer. Maybe people are now not talking about it as much as they did in the very beginning.

Ariel: So I have two final questions for both of you. The first is: is there something that you think is really important for people to know or understand that we didn’t touch on?

Nick: I would say this, and this is maybe more extreme than Fran would say, but we are in really big trouble. We are in really, really big trouble. We are emitting more and faster than we were previously. We are probably dramatically underestimating the social cost of carbon because of all the reasons that we noted here and for many more, and the one thing that I kind of always tell people is don’t be lulled by the relatively banal feeling of your sleep getting disrupted, because if your sleep is disrupted it’s because everything is being disrupted, and it’s going to get worse.

We’ve not seen even a small fraction of  the likely total cost of climate change, and so yeah, be worried, and ideally use that worry in a productive way to lobby your politicians to do something about it.

Fran: I would say we talked about the social cost of carbon and the way it’s used, and I think sometimes it does get criticized because we know there’s a lot of things that it doesn’t capture, like what Nick’s been talking about, but I also know that we’re very confident that it’s greater than zero at this point, and substantially greater than zero, right? So the question of, should it be 40 dollars a ton, or should it be 100 dollars a ton, or should it be higher than that, is frankly quite irrelevant when right now we’re really not putting any price on carbon, we’re not doing any kind of ambitious climate policy.

Sometimes I think people get bogged down in these arguments of, is it bad, or is it catastrophic, and frankly either way we should be doing something to reduce our emissions, and they shouldn’t be going up, they should be going down, and we should be doing more than we’re doing right now. And arguing about where we end that process, or when we end that process of reducing our emissions is really not a relevant discussion to be having right now because right now everyone can agree that we need to start the process.

And so I think not getting too hung up on should it be two degrees, should it be 1.5, but just really focused on let’s do more, and let’s do it now, and let’s start that, and see where that gets us, and once we start that process and can begin to learn from it, that’s going to take us a long way to being where we want to be. I think these questions of, “Why aren’t we doing more than we’re doing now?” are the most important and some of the most interesting around climate change right now.

Nick: Yeah. Let’s do everything we can to avoid four or five degrees Celsius, and we can quibble over 1.5 or two later. Totally agree.

Ariel: Okay. So I’m going to actually add a question. So we’ve got two more questions for real this time I think. What do we do? What do you suggest we do? What can a listener right now do to help?

Fran: Vote. Make climate change your priority when you’re thinking about candidates, when you’re engaged in the democratic process, and when you’re talking to your elected representative — reach out to them, and make sure they know that this is the priority for you. And I would also say talk to your friends and family, right? Like these scientists or economists talking about this, that’s not something that’s going to reach everyone, right, but reaching out to your network of people who value your opinion, or just talking about this, and making sure people realize this is a critical issue for our generation, and the decisions we take now are going to shape the future of the planet in very real ways, and collectively we do have agency to do something about it.

Nick: Yes. I second all of that. I think the key is that no one can convince your friends and family that climate change is a threat perhaps better than you, the listener, can. Certainly Fran and I are not going to be able to convince your friends, and that’s just the way that humans work. We trust those that we are close to and trust. So if we want to get a collective movement to start doing something about carbon, it’s going to have to happen via the political process, and it’s also just going to have to happen in our social networks, by actually going out there and talking to people about it. So let’s do that.

Ariel: All right. So final question, now that we’ve gone through all these awful things that are going to happen: what gives you hope?

Fran: If we think about a world that solves this problem, that is a world that has come together to work on a truly global problem. The reason why we’ll solve this problem is because we recognize that we value the future, that we value people living in other countries, people around the world, and that we value nature and nonhuman life on the planet, and that we’ve taken steps to incorporate those values into how we organize our life.

When we think about that, that is a very big ask, right? We shouldn’t underestimate just how difficult this is to do, but we should also recognize that it’s going to be a really amazing world to live in. It’s going to provide a kind of foundation for all kinds of cooperation and collective action I think on other issues to build a better world.

Recognizing that that’s what we’re working towards, these are the values that we want to reflect in our society, and that is a really positive place to be, and a place that is worth working towards — that’s what’s giving me hope.

Nick: That’s a beautiful answer, Fran. I agree with that. It would be a great world to live in. The thing that I would say is giving me hope is actually if I had looked forward in 2010 and said, “Okay, where do I think that renewables are going to be? Where do I think that the electrification of vehicles is going to be?” I would have guessed that we would not be anywhere close to where we are right now on those fronts.

We are making much more progress on getting certain aspects of the economy and our lives decarbonized than I thought we would have been, even without any real carbon policy on those fronts. So that’s pretty hopeful for me. I think that as long as we can continue that trend we won’t have everything go poorly, but I also hesitate to hinge too much of our fate on the hope that technological advances from the past will continue at the same rate into the future. At the end of the day we probably really do need some policy, and we need to get together and engage in collective action to try and solve this problem. I hope that we can.

Ariel: I hope that we can, too. So Nick and Fran, thank you both so much for joining us today.

Nick: Thanks for having me.

Fran: Thanks so much for the interesting conversation.

Ariel: Yeah. I enjoyed this, thank you.

As always, if you’ve been enjoying the show, please take a moment to like it, share it, and follow us no your preferred podcast platform.

“There are basically two choices. We’re going to massively change everything we are doing on this planet, the way we work together, the actions we take, the way we run our economy, and the way we behave towards each other and towards the planet and towards everything that lives on this planet. Or we sit back and relax and we just let the whole thing crash. The choice is so easy to make, even if you don’t care at all about nature or the lives of other people. Even if you just look at your own interests and look purely through an economical angle, it is just a good return on investment to take good care of this planet.” – Alexander Verbeek

On this month’s podcast, Ariel spoke with Alexander Verbeek and John Moorhead about what we can do to avoid the worst of climate change. Alexander is a Dutch diplomat and former strategic policy advisor at the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He created the Planetary Security Initiative where representatives from 75 countries meet annually on the climate change-security relationship. John is President of Drawdown Switzerland, an act tank to support Project Drawdown and other science-based climate solutions that reverse global warming. He is a blogger at Thomson Reuters, The Economist, and sciencebasedsolutions.com, and he advises and informs on climate solutions that are economy, society, and environment positive.

Topics discussed in this episode include:

• Why the difference between 1.5 and 2 degrees C of global warming is so important, and why we can’t exceed 2 degrees C of warming
• Why the economy needs to fundamentally change to save the planet
• The inequality of climate change
• Climate change’s relation to international security problems
• How we can avoid the most dangerous impacts of climate change: runaway climate change and a “Hothouse Earth”
• Drawdown’s 80 existing technologies and practices to solve climate change
• “Trickle up” climate solutions — why individual action is just as important as national and international action
• What all listeners can start doing today to address climate change

Publications and initiatives discussed in this episode include:

• The 2018 IPCC Report
• The 2030 UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)
• The Solutions Project, led by Stanford professor Mark Jacobson
• Exponential Climate Action Roadmap
• Alexander’s Planetary Security Initiative
• World Resources Institute in Washington
• The Impossible Burger
• VOI Scooters

You can listen to this podcast above, or read the full transcript below. And feel free to check out our previous podcast episodes on SoundCloud, iTunes, Google Play and Stitcher.

Ariel: Hi everyone, Ariel Conn here with the Future of Life Institute. Now, this month’s podcast is going live on Halloween, so I thought what better way to terrify our listeners than with this month’s IPCC report. If you’ve been keeping up with the news this month, you’re well aware that the report made very dire predictions about what a future warmer world will look like if we don’t keep global temperatures from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius. Then of course there were all of the scientists’ warnings that came out after the report about how the report underestimated just how bad things could get.

It was certainly enough to leave me awake at night in a cold sweat. Yet the report wasn’t completely without hope. The authors seem to still think that we can take action in time to keep global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. So to consider this report, the current state of our understanding of climate change, and how we can ensure global warming is kept to a minimum, I’m excited to have Alexander Verbeek and John Moorhead join me today.

Alexander is a Dutch environmentalist, diplomat, and former strategic policy advisor at the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Over the past 28 years, he has worked on international security, humanitarian, and geopolitical risk issues, and the linkage to the Earth’s accelerating environmental crisis. He created the Planetary Security Initiative held at The Hague’s Peace Palace where representatives from 75 countries meet annually on the climate change-security relationship. He spends most of his time speaking and advising on planetary change to academia, global NGOs, private firms, and international organizations.

John is President of Drawdown Switzerland in addition to being a blogger at Thomson Reuters, The Economist, and sciencebasedsolutions.com. He advises and informs on climate solutions that are economy, society, and environment positive. He affects change by engaging on the solutions to global warming with youth, business, policy makers, investors, civil society, government leaders, et cetera. Drawdown Switzerland an act tank to support Project Drawdown and other science-based climate solutions that reverse global warming in Switzerland and internationally by investment at scale in Drawdown Solutions. So John and Alexander, thank you both so much for joining me today.

Alexander: It’s a pleasure.

John: Hi Ariel.

Ariel: All right, so before we get too far into any details, I want to just look first at the overall message of the IPCC report. That was essentially: two degrees warming is a lot worse than 1.5 degrees warming. So, I guess my very first question is why did the IPCC look at that distinction as opposed to anything else?

Alexander: Well, I think it’s a direct follow up from the negotiations in the Paris Agreement, where in a very late stage after the talk for all the time about two degrees, at a very late stage the text included the reference to aiming for 1.5 degrees. At that moment, it invited the IPCC to produce a report by 2018 about what the difference actually is between 1.5 and 2 degrees. Another major conclusion is that it is still possible to stay below 1.5 degrees, but then we have to really urgently really do a lot, and that is basically cut in the next 12 years our carbon pollution with 45%. So that means we have no day to lose, and governments, basically everybody, business and people, everybody should get in action. The house is on fire. We need to do something right now.

John: In addition to that, we’re seeing a whole body of scientific study that’s showing just how difficult it would be if we were to get to 2 degrees and what the differences are. That was also very important. Just for your US listeners, I just wanted to clarify because we’re going to be talking in degrees centigrade, so for the sake of argument, if you just multiply by two, every time you hear one, it’s two degrees Fahrenheit. I just wanted to add that.

Ariel: Okay great, thank you. So before we talk about how to address the problem, I want to get more into what the problem actually is. And so first, what is the difference between 1.5 degrees Celsius and 2 degrees Celsius in terms of what impact that will have on the planet?

John: So far we’ve already seen a one degree C increase. The impacts that we’re seeing, they were all predicted by the science, but in many cases we’ve really been quite shocked at just how quickly global warming is happening and the impacts it’s having. I live here in Switzerland, and we’re just now actually experiencing another drought, but in the summer we had the worst drought in eastern Switzerland since 1847. Of course we’ve seen the terrible hurricanes hitting the United States this year and last. That’s one degree. So 1.5 degrees increase, I like to use the analogy of our body temperature: If you’re increasing your body temperature by two degrees Fahrenheit, that’s already quite bad, but if you then increase it by three degrees Fahrenheit, or four, or five, or six, then you’re really ill. That’s really what happens with global warming. It’s not a straight line.

For instance, the difference between 1.5 degrees and two degrees is that heat waves are forecast to increase by over 40%. There was another study that showed that fresh water supply would decrease by 9% in the Mediterranean for 1.5 degrees, but it would decrease by 17% if we got to two degrees. So that’s practically doubling the impact for a change of 1.5 degrees. I can go on. If you look at wheat production, the difference between two and 1.5 degrees is a 70% loss in yield. Sea level rise would be 50 centimeters versus 40 centimeters, and 10 centimeters doesn’t sound like that much, but it’s a huge amount in terms of increase.

Alexander: Just to illustrate that a bit, if you have just a 10 centimeters increase, that means that 10 million people extra will be on the move. Or to formulate it another way, I remember when Hurricane Sandy hit New York and the subway flooded. At that moment we had, and that’s where we now are more or less, we have had some 20 centimeters of sea level rise since the industrial revolution. If we didn’t have those 20 centimeters, the subways would not have flooded. So it sounds like nothing, but it has a lot of impacts. I think another one that I saw that was really striking is the impact on nature, the impact on insects or on coral reefs. So if you have two degrees, there’s hardly any coral reef left in the world, whereas if it would be 1.5 degrees, we would still lose 70-90%, but there could still be some coral reefs left.

John: That’s a great example I would say, because currently it’s 50% of coral reefs at one degree increase have already died off. So at 1.5, we could reach 90%, and two degrees we will have practically wiped off all coral reefs.

Alexander: And the humanitarian aspects are massive. I mean John just mentioned water. I think one of these things we will see in the next decade or next two decades is a lot of water related problems. The amount of people that will not have access to water is increasing rapidly. It may double in the next decade. So any indication here that we have in the report on how much more problems we will see with water if we have that half degree extra is a very good warning. If you see the impact of not enough water on the quality of life of people, on people going on the move, increased urbanization, more tensions in the city because there they also have problems with having enough water, and of course water is related to energy and especially food production. So its humanitarian impacts of just that half degree extra is massive.

Then last thing here, we’re talking about global average. In some areas, if let’s say globally it gets two degrees warmer, in landlocked countries for instance, it will go much faster, or in the Arctic, it goes like twice as fast with enormous impacts and potential positive feedback loops that might end up with.

Ariel: That was something interesting for me to read. I’ve heard about how the global average will increase 1.5 to two degrees, but I hadn’t heard until I read this particular report that that can mean up to 3.5 degrees Celsius in certain places, that it’s not going to be equally distributed, that some places will get significantly hotter. Have models been able to predict where that’s likely to happen?

John: Yeah, and not only that, it’s already happening. That’s also one of the problems we face when we describe global warming in terms of one number, an average number, is that it doesn’t portray the big differences that we’re seeing in terms of global warming. For instance, in the case of Switzerland we’re already at a two degree centigrade increase, and that’s had huge implications for Switzerland already. We’re a landlocked country. We have beautiful mountains as you know, and beautiful lakes as well, but we’re currently seeing things that we hadn’t seen before, which is some of our lakes are starting to dry out in this current drought period. Lake levels have dropped very significantly. Not the major ones that are fed by glaciers, but the glaciers themselves, out of 80 glaciers that are tracked in Switzerland, 79 are retreating. They’re losing mass.

That’s having impacts, and in terms of extreme weather, just this last summer we saw these incredible – what Al Gore calls water bombs – that happened in Lausanne and Eschenz, two of our cities, where we saw centimeters, months worth of rain, fall in the space of just a few minutes. This is caused all sorts of damages as well.

Just a last point about temperature differences is that, for instance, northern Europe this last summer, we saw four, five degrees, much warmer, which caused so much drying out that we saw forest fires that we hadn’t seen in places like Sweden or Finland and so on. We also saw in February of this year what the scientists call a temperature anomaly of 20 degrees, which meant that for a few days it was warmer in the North Pole than it was in Poland because of this temperature anomaly. Averages help us understand the overall trends, but they also hide differences that are important to consider as well.

Alexander: Maybe the word global warming is, let’s say for a general public, not the right word because it sounds a bit like “a little bit warmer,” and if it’s now two degrees warmer than yesterday, I don’t care so much. Maybe “climate weirding” or “climate chaos” are better because we will just get more extremes. Let’s say you follow for instance how the jet stream is moving, it used to have rather quick pulls going around the planet at the height where the jets like to fly at about 10 kilometers. It is now, because there’s less temperature difference between the equator and the poles, it’s getting slower. It’s getting a bit lazy.

That means two things. It means on the one hand that you see that once you have a certain weather pattern, it sticks longer, but the other thing is by this lazy jet stream to compare it a bit like a river that enters the flood lands and starts to meander, is that the waves are getting bigger. Let’s say if it used to be that the jet stream brought cold air from Iceland to the Netherlands where I’m from, since it is now wavier, it brings now cold weather all the way from Greenland, and same with warm weather. It comes from further down south and it sticks longer in that pattern so you get longer droughts, you get longer periods of rain, it all gets more extreme. So a country like the Netherlands which is a delta where we always deal with too much water, and like many other countries in the world, we experience drought now which is something that we’re not used to. We have to ask foreign experts how do you deal with drought, because we always tried to pump the water out.

John: Yeah I think the French, as often is the case, have the best term for it. It’s called dérèglement climatique which is this idea of climate disruption.

Ariel: I’d like to come back to some of the humanitarian impacts because one of the things that I see a lot is this idea that it’s the richer, mostly western but not completely western countries that are causing most of the problems, and yet it’s the poorer countries that are going to suffer the most. I was wondering if you guys could touch on that a little bit?

Alexander: Well I think everything related to climate change is about that it is unfair. It is created by countries that generally are less impacted by now, so we started let’s say in western Europe with the industrial revolution and came followed by the US that took over. Historically the US produced the most. Then you have a different groups of countries. Let’s take a country in Sahel like Burkina Faso for instance. They contributed practically zero to the whole problem, but the impact is much more on their sides. Then there’s kind of a group of countries in between. Let’s say a country like China that for a long time did not contribute much to the problem and is now rapidly catching up. Then you get this difficult “tragedy of the commons” behavior that everybody points at somebody else for their part, what they have done, and either because they did it in past or because they do it now, everybody can use the statistics in their advantage, apart from these really really poor countries that are getting the worst.

I mean a country like Tuvalu is just disappearing. That’s one of those low-lying natural states in the Pacific. They contributed absolutely zero and their country is drowning. They can point at everybody else and nobody will point at them. So there is a huge call for that this is an absolutely globalized problem that you can only solve by respecting each other, by cooperating together, and by understanding that if you help other countries, it’s not only your moral obligation but it’s also in your own interest to help the others to solve this.

John: Yeah. Your listeners would most likely also be aware of the sustainable development goals, which are the objectives the UN set for 2030. There are 17 of them. They include things like no poverty, zero hunger, health, education, gender equality, et cetera. If you look at who is being impacted by a 2 degree and a 1.5 degree world, then you can see that it’s particularly in the developing and the least developed countries that the impact is felt the most, and that these SDGs are much more difficult if not impossible to reach in a 2 degree world. Which again is why it’s so important for us to stay within 1.5 degrees.

Ariel: And so looking at this from more of a geopolitical perspective, in terms of trying to govern and address… I guess this is going to be a couple questions. In terms of trying to prevent climate change from getting too bad, what do countries broadly need to be doing? I want to get into specifics about that question later, but broadly for now what do they need to be doing? And then, how do we deal with a lot of the humanitarian impacts at a government level if we don’t keep it below 1.5 degrees?

Alexander: A broad answer would be two things: get rid of the carbon pollution that we’re producing every day as soon as possible. So phase out fossil fuels. The other that’s a broad answer would be a parallel to what John was just talking about. We have the agenda 2030. We have those 17 sustainable development goals. If we would all really follow that and live up to that, we’d actually get a much better world because all of these things are integrated. If you just look at climate change in isolation you are not going to get there. It’s highly integrated to all those related problems.

John: Yeah, just in terms of what needs to be done broadly speaking, it’s the adoption of renewable energy, scaling up massively the way we produce electricity using renewables. The IPCC suggested there should be 85% and there are others that say we can even get to 100% renewables by 2050. The other side is everything to do with land use and food, our diet has a huge impact as well. On the one hand as Alexander has said very well, we need to cut down on emissions that are caused by industry and fossil fuel use, but on the other hand what’s really important is to preserve our natural ecosystems that protect us, and add forest, not deforest. We need to naturally scale up the capture of carbon dioxide. Those are the two pieces of the puzzle.

Alexander: Don’t want to go too much into details, but all together it ultimately asks for a different kind of economy. In our latest elections when I looked at the election programs, every party whether left or right or in the middle, they all promise something like, “when we’re in government, they’ll be something like 3% of economic growth every year.” But if you grow 3% every year, that means that every 20 years you double your economy. That means every 40 years you quadruple your economy, which might be nice if it will be only the services industry, but if you talk about production we can not let everything grow in the amount of resources that we use and the amount of waste we produce, when the Earth itself is not growing. So apart from moving to renewables, it is also changing the way how we use everything around and how we consume.

You don’t have to grow when you have it this good already, but it’s so much in the system that we have used the past 200, 250 years. Everything is based on growth. And as the Club of Romes said in the early ’70s, there’s limits to growth unless our planet would be something like a balloon that somebody would blow air in and it would be growing, then you would have different system. But as long as that is not the case and as long as there’s no other planets where we can fly to, that is the question where it’s very hard to find an answer. You can conclude that we can not grow, but how do we change that? That’s probably a completely different podcast debate, but it’s something I wanted to flag here because at the end of today you always end up with this question.

Ariel: This is actually, this is very much something that I wanted to come back to, especially in terms of what individuals can do, I think consuming less is one of the things that we can do to help. So I want to come back to that idea. I want to talk a little bit more though about some of the problems that we face if we don’t address the problem, and then come back to that. So, first going back to the geopolitics of addressing climate change if it happens, I think, again, we’ve talked about some of the problems that can arise as a result of climate change, but climate change is also thought of as a threat multiplier. So it could trigger other problems. I was hoping you could talk a little bit about some of the threats that governments need to be aware of if they don’t address climate change, both in terms of what climate change could directly cause and what it could indirectly cause.

Alexander: There’s so much we can cover here. Let’s start with security, it’s maybe the first one you think of. You’ll read in the paper about climate wars and water wars and those kind of popular words, which of course is too simplified. But, there is a clear correlation between changing climates and security.

We’ve seen it in many places. You see it in the place where we’re seeing more extreme weather now, so let’s say in the Sahel area, or in the Middle East, there’s a lot of examples where you just see that because of rising temperatures and because of less rainfall which is consistently going on now, it’s getting worse now. The combination is worse. You get more periods of drought, so people are going on the move. Where are they going to? Well normally, unlike many populists like to claim in some countries, they’re not immediately going to the western countries. They don’t go too far. People don’t want to move too far so they go to an area not too far away, which is a little bit less hit by this drought, but by the fact that they arrived there, they increased pressures on the little water and food and other resources that they have. That creates, of course, tensions with the people that are already there.

So think for instance about the Nomadic herdsman and the more agricultural farmers that you have and the kind of tension. They all need a little bit of water, so you see a lot of examples. There’s this well known graph where you see the world’s food prices over the past 10 years. There were two big spikes where suddenly the food prices as well as the energy prices rapidly went up. The most well known is in late 2010. Then if you plot on that graph the revolutions and uprisings and unrest in the world, you see that as soon as the world’s food price gets above, let’s say, 200, you see that there is so much more unrest. The 2010 one led soon after to the Arab Spring, which is not an automatic connection. In some countries there was no unrest, and they had the same drought, so it’s not a one on one connection.

So I think you used the right word of saying a threat multiplier. On top of all the other problems they have with bad governance and fragile economies and all kinds of other development aspects that you find back in those same SDGs that were mentioned, if you add to that the climate change problem, you will get a lot of unrest.

But let me add one last thing here. It’s not just about security. There’s also, there’s an example for instance, when Bangkok was flooding, the factory that produced chips was flooded. The chip prices worldwide suddenly rose like 10%, but there was this factory in the UK that produced perfectly ready cars to sell. The only thing they missed was this few-centimeters big electronic chip that needed to be in the car. So they had to close the factory for like 6 weeks because of a flooding in Bangkok. That just shows that this interconnected worldwide economy that we have, you’re nowhere in the world safe from the impacts of climate change.

Ariel: I’m not sure if it was the same flood, but I think Apple had a similar problem, didn’t they? Where they had a backlog of problems with hard drives or something because the manufacturer, I think in Thailand, I don’t remember, flooded.

But anyway, one more problem that I want to bring up, and that is: at the moment we’re talking about actually taking action. I mean even if we only see global temperatures rise to two degrees Celsius, that will be because we took action. But my understanding is, on our current path we will exceed two degrees Celsius. In fact, the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration Report that came out recently basically says that a 4 degree increase is inevitable. So I want to talk about what the world looks like at that level, and then also what runaway climate change is and whether you think we’re on a path towards runaway climate change, or if that’s still an extreme that hopefully won’t happen.

John: There’s a very important discussion that’s going on around at what point we will reach that tipping point where because of positive feedback loops, it’s just going to get worse and worse and worse. There’s been some very interesting publications lately that were trying to understand at what level that would happen. It turns out that the assessment is that it’s probably around 2 degrees. At the moment, if you look at the Paris Agreement and what all the countries have committed to and you basically take all those commitments which, you were mentioning the actions that already have been started, and you basically play them out until 2030, we would be on a track that would take us to 3 degrees increase, ultimately.

Ariel: And to clarify, that’s still with us taking some level of action, right? I mean, when you talk about that, that’s still us having done something?

John: Yeah, if you add up all the countries’ plans that they committed to and they fully implement them, it’s not sufficient. We would get to 3 degrees. But that’s just to say just how much action is required, we really need to step up the effort dramatically. That’s basically what the 1.5 degrees IPCC report tells us. If we were to get already to 2 degrees, let’s not talk about 3 degrees in the moment. But what could happen is that we would reach this tipping point into what scientists are describing a “Hothouse Earth.” What that means is that you get so much ice melting — now, the ice and snow serve an important protective function. They reflect back out, because it’s white it reflects back out a lot of the heat. If all that melts and is replaced by much darker land mass or ocean, then that heat is gonna be absorbed, not reflected. So that’s one positive feedback loop that constantly makes it even warmer, and that melts more ice, et cetera.

Another one is the permafrost, where the permafrost, as its name suggests, is frozen in the northern latitudes. The risk is that it starts to melt. It’s not the permafrost itself, it’s all the methane that it contains, which is a very powerful greenhouse gas which would then get released. That leads to warmer temperatures which melts even more of the permafrost et cetera.

That’s the whole idea of runaway, then we completely lose control, all the natural cooling systems, the trees and so on start to die back as well, and so we get four, five, six … But as I mentioned earlier, 4 could be 7 in some parts of the world and it could be 2 or 3 in others. It would make large parts of the world basically uninhabitable if you take it to the extreme of where it could all go.

Ariel: Do we have ideas of how long that could take? Is that something that we think could happen in the next 100 years or is that something that would still take a couple hundred years?

John: Whenever we talk about the temperature increases, we’re looking at the end of the century, so that’s 2100, but that’s less than 100 years.

Ariel: Okay.

Alexander: The problem is looking to, at the end of the century, this always come back to “end of the century.” It sounds so far away, it’s just 82 years. I mean if you flip back, you’re in 1936. My father was a boy of 10 years old and it’s not that far away. My daughter might still live in 2100, but by that time she’ll have children and maybe grandchildren that have to live through the next century. It’s not that once we are at the year 2100 that the problem suddenly stops. We talk about an accelerating problem. If you stay on the business-as-usual scenario and you mitigate hardly anything, then it’s 4 degrees at the end of the century, but the temperatures keep rising.

As we already said, 4 degrees at the end of the century, that is kind of average. In the worst case scenario, it might as well be 6. It could also be less. And in the Arctic it could be anywhere between let’s say 6 or maybe even 11. It’s typically the Arctic where you have this methane, what John was just talking about, so we don’t want to get some kind of Venus, you know. This is typically the world we do not want. That makes it why it’s so extremely important to take measures now because anything you do now is a fantastic investment in the future.

If you look at risks on other things, Dick Cheney a couple of years ago said, if there’s only 1% chance that terrorists will get weapons of mass destruction we should act as if they have them. Why don’t we do it in this case? If there’s only 1% chance that we would get complete destruction of the planet as we know it, we have to take urgent action. So why do it on the one risk that hardly kills people if you look on big numbers, however bad terrorism is, and now we talk something about a potential massive killer of millions of people and we just say, “Yeah, well you know, only 50% chance that we get in this scenario or that scenario.”

What would you do if you were sitting in a plane and at takeoff the pilot says, “Hi guys. Happy to be on board. This is how you buckle and unbuckle your belt. And oh by the way, we have 50% chance that we’re gonna make it today. Hooray, we’re going to take off.” Well you would get out of the plane. But you can’t get out of this planet. So we have to take action urgently, and I think the report that came out is excellent.

The problem is, if you’re reading it a bit too much and everybody is focusing on it now, you get into this energetic mood like, “Hey. We can do it!” We only talk about corals. We only talk about this because suddenly we’re not talking about the three or four or five degree scenarios, which is good for a change because it gives hope. I know that in talks like this I always try to give as much hope as I can and show the possibilities, but we shouldn’t forget about how serious the thing is that we’re actually talking about. So now we go back to the positive side.

Ariel: Well I am all for switching to the positive side. I find myself getting increasingly cynical about our odds of success, so let’s try to fix that in whatever time we have left.

John: Can I just add just briefly, Alex, because I think that’s a great comment. It’s something that I’m also confronted with sometimes by fellow climate change folk, is that they come up to me, and this is after they’ve heard me talk about what the solutions are. They tell me, “Don’t make it sound too easy either.” But I think it’s a question of balance and I think that when we do talk about the solutions and we’ll hear about them, but do bear in mind just how much change is involved. I mean it is really very significant change that we need to embark on to avoid 1.5 or beyond.

Alexander: There’s basically two choices. We’re going to massively change everything we are doing on this planet, the way we work together, the actions we take, the way we run our economy, and the way we behave towards each other and towards the planet and towards everything that lives on this planet. Or we sit back and relax and we just let the whole thing crash. The choice is so easy to make, even if you don’t care at all about nature or the lives of other people. Even if you just look at your own interests and look purely through an economical angle, it is just a good return on investment to take good care of this planet.

It is only because those that have so much political power are so closely connected to the big corporations that look for short-term profits, and certainly not all of them, but the ones that are really influential, and I’m certainly thinking about the country of our host today. They have so much impact on the policies that are made and their sole interest is just the next quarterly financial report that comes out. That is not in the interest of the people of this planet.

Ariel: So this is actually a good transition to a couple of questions that I have. I actually did start looking at the book Drawdown, which talks about, what is it, 80 solutions? Is that what they discuss?

John: Yeah, 80 existing solutions or technologies or practices, and then there’s 20 what they call coming attractions which would be in addition to that. But it’s the 80 we’re talking about, yeah.

Ariel: Okay, so I started reading that and I read the introduction and the first chapter and felt very, very hopeful. I started reading about some of the technologies and I still felt hopeful. Then as I continued reading it and began to fully appreciate just how many technologies have to be implemented, I started to feel less hopeful. And so, going back, before we talk too much about the specific technologies, I think as someone who’s in the US, one of the questions that I have is even if our federal government isn’t going to take action, is it still possible for those of us who do believe that climate change is an issue to take enough action that we can counter that?

John: That’s an excellent question and it’s a very apropos question as well. My take on this is I had the privilege of being at the Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco. You’re living it, but I think it’s two worlds basically in the United States at the moment, at least two worlds. What really impressed me, however, was that you had people of all political persuasions, you had indigenous people, you had the head of the union, you had mayors, city leaders. You also had some country leaders as well who were there, particularly those who are gonna be most impacted by climate change. What really excited me was the number of commitments that were coming at us throughout the days of, one city that’s gonna go completely renewable and so on.

We had so many examples of those. And in particular, if you’re talking about the US, California, which actually if it was its own country would be the fifth economy I believe — they’re committed to achieving 100% renewable energy by 2050. There was also the mayor of Houston, for instance, who explained how quickly he wanted to also achieve 100% renewables. That’s very exciting and that movement I think is very important. It would be of course much much better to have nations’ leaders as well to fully back this, but I think that there’s a trickle-up aspect, and I don’t know if this is the right time to talk about exponential growth that can happen. Maybe when we talk about the specific solutions we can talk about just how quickly they can go, particularly when you have a popular movement around saving the climate.

A couple of weeks ago I was in Geneva. There was a protest there. Geneva is quite a conservative city actually. I mean you’ve got some wonderful chocolate as you know, but also a lot of banks and so on. At the march, there were, according to the organizers, 7000 people. It was really impressive to see that in Geneva which is not that big a city. The year before at the same march there were 500. So we’re more than increasing the numbers by 10, and I think that there’s a lot of communities and citizens that are being affected that are saying, “I don’t care what the federal government’s doing. I’m gonna put a solar panel on my roof. I’m going to change my diet, because it’s cheaper, it saves me money, and it also is much healthier to do that and with much more resilience,” when a hurricane comes around for instance.

Ariel: I think now is a good time to start talking about what some of the solutions are. I wanna come back to the idea of trickle up, because I’m still gonna ask you guys more questions about individual action as well, but first let’s talk about some of the things that we can be doing now. What are some of the technological developments that exist today that have the most promise that we should be investing more in and using more?

John: What I perhaps wanted to do is just take a little step back, because the IPCC does talk about some very unpleasant things that could happen to our planet, but they also talk about what the steps are to stay within 1.5 degrees. Then there’s some other plans we can discuss that also achieve that. So what does the IPCC tell us? You mentioned it earlier. First of all, we need to significantly cut, every decade actually, by half, the carbon dioxide emission and greenhouse gas emissions. That’s something called the Carbon Law. It’s very convenient because you can imagine defining what your objective is and say okay, every 10 years I need to cut in half the emissions. That’s number one.

Number two is that we need to go dramatically to renewables. There’s no other way, because of the emissions that fossil fuels produce, they will no longer be an option. We have to go renewable as quickly as possible. It can be done by 2050. There’s a professor at Stanford called Mark Jacobson who with an international team has mapped out the way to get to 100% renewables for 139 countries. It’s called The Solutions Project. Number Three has to do with fossil fuels. What the IPCC says is that there should be practically no coal being used in 2050. That’s where there are some differences.

Basically, as I mentioned earlier, on the one hand you have your emissions and on the other hand you have this capture, the sequestration of carbon by soils and by vegetation. They’re both in balance. One is putting CO2 into the air, and the other is taking it out. So we need to favor obviously the sequestration. It’s an area under the curve problem. You have a certain budget that’s associated with that temperature increase. If you emit more, you need to absorb more. There’s just no two ways about it.

The IPCC is actually in that respect quite conservative, because they’re saying there still will be coal around. Whereas there are other plans such as Drawdown and the Exponential Climate Action Roadmap, as well as The Solutions Project which I just mentioned, which get us to 100% renewables by 2050, and so zero emissions for sake of argument.

The other difference I would say with the IPCC is that because you are faced with this tremendous problem of all this carbon dioxide we need to take out of the atmosphere, which is where Drawdown comes from. The term means to draw out of the atmosphere the carbon dioxide. There’s this technology which is around, it’s basically called energy crops. You basically grow crops for energy. That gives us a little bit of an issue because it encourages politicians to think that there’s a magic wand that we’ll be able to use in the future to all of a sudden be able to remove the carbon dioxide. I’m not saying that we may very well have to get there, what I am saying is that we can, with for instance Drawdown’s 80 solutions, get there.

Now in terms of the promise, the thing that I think is important is that the thinking has to evolve from the magic bullet syndrome that we all live every day, we always want to find that magic solution that’ll solve everything, to thinking more holistically about the whole of the Earth’s planetary system and how they interact and how we can achieve solutions that way.

Alexander: Can I ask something John? Can you summarize that Drawdown relies with its 80 technologies, completely on proven technology whereas in the recent 1.5 report, I have the impression that they practically, for every solution that they come up with, they rely on still unproven technologies that are still on the drawing table or maybe tested on a very small scale? Is there a difference between those two approaches?

John: Not exactly. I think there’s actually a lot of overlap. There’s a lot of the same solutions that are in Drawdown are in all climate solutions, so we come back to the same set which is actually very reassuring because that’s the way science works. It empirically tests and models all the different solutions. So what I always find very reassuring is whenever I read different approaches, I always look back at Drawdown and I say, “Okay yes, that’s in the 80 solutions.” So I think there is actually a lot of over overlap. A lot of IPCC is Drawdown solutions, but the IPCC works a bit differently because the scientists have to work with governments in terms of coming up with proposals, so there is a process of negotiation of how far can we take this which scientists such as the Project Drawdown scientists are unfettered by that.

They just go out and they look for what’s best. They don’t care if it’s politically sensitive or not, they will say what they need to say. But I think the big area of concern is this famous bio-energy carbon capture and storage (BECCS), which are these energy crops that you grow and then you capture the carbon dioxide. So you actually are capturing carbon dioxide. There’s both moral hazard because politicians will say, “Okay. I’m just going to wait until BECCS comes round and that will solve all our problems,” on the one hand. On the other hand it does pose us with some serious questions about competition of land for producing crops versus producing crops for energy.

Ariel: I actually want to follow up with Alexander’s question really quickly because I’ve gotten a similar impression that some of the stuff in the IPCC report is for technologies that are still in development. But my understanding is that the Drawdown solutions are in theory at least, if not in practice, ready to scale up.

John: They’re existing technologies, yeah.

Ariel: So when you say there’s a lot of overlap, is that me or us misunderstanding the IPCC report or are there solutions in the IPCC report that aren’t ready to be scaled up?

John: The approaches are a bit different. The approaches that Drawdown takes is a bottom up approach. They basically unleashed 65 scientists to go out and look for the best solutions. So they go out and they look at all the literature. And it just so happens that nuclear energy is one of them. It doesn’t produce greenhouse gas emissions. It is a way of producing energy that doesn’t cause climate change. A lot of people don’t like that of course, because of all the other problems we have with nuclear. But let me just reassure you very quickly that there are three scenarios for Drawdown. It goes from so-called “Plausible,” which I don’t like as a name because it suggests that the other ones might not be plausible, but it’s the most conservative one. Then the second one is “Drawdown.” Then the third one is “Optimum.”

Optimum doesn’t include solutions that are called with regrets, such as nuclear. So when you go optimum, basically it’s 100% renewable. There’s no nuclear energy in there either in the mix. That’s very positive. But in terms of the solutions, what they look at, what IPCC looks at is the trajectory that you could achieve given the existing technologies. So they talk about renewables, they talk about fossil fuels going down to net zero, they talk about natural climate solutions, but perhaps they don’t talk about, for instance, educating girls, which is one of the most important Drawdown solutions because of the approach that Drawdown takes where they look at everything. Sorry, that’s a bit of a long answer to your question.

Alexander: That’s actually part of the beauty of Drawdown, that they look so broadly, that educating girls… So a girl leaving school at 12 got on average like five children and a girl that you educate leaving school at the age of 18 on average has about two children, and they will have a better quality of life. They will put much less pressure on the planet. So this more holistic approach of Drawdown I like very much and I think it’s good to see so much overlap between Drawdown and IPCC. But I was struck by IPCC that it relies so heavily on still unproven technologies. I guess we have to bet on all our horses and treat this a bit as a kind of wartime economy. If you see the creativity and the innovation that we saw during the second World War in the field of technology as well as government by the way, and if you see, let’s say, the race to the moon, the amazing technology that was developed in such a short time.

Once you really dedicate all your knowledge and your creativity and your finances and your political will into solving this, we can solve this. That is what Drawdown is saying and that is also what the IPCC 1.5 is saying. We can do it, but we need the political will and we need to mobilize the strengths that we have. Unfortunately, when I look around worldwide, the trend is in many countries exactly the opposite. I think Brazil might soon be the latest one that we should be worried about.

John: Yeah.

Ariel: So this is, I guess where I’m most interested in what we can do and also possibly the most cynical, and this comes back to this trickle up idea that you were talking about. That is, we don’t have the political will right now. So what do those of us who do have the will do? How do we make that transition of people caring to governments caring? Because I do, maybe this is me being optimistic, but I do think if we can get enough people taking individual action, that will force governments to start taking action.

John: So trickle up, grassroots, I think we’re in the same sort of idea. I think it’s really important to talk a little bit, and then we will get into the solutions, but to talk about not just as the solutions to global warming, but to a lot of other problems as well such as air pollution, our health, the pollution that we see in the environment. And actually Alexander you were talking earlier about the huge transformation. But transformation does not necessarily always have to mean sacrifice. It doesn’t also have to mean that we necessarily, although it’s certainly a good idea, for instance, I think you were gonna ask a question also about flying, to fly less there’s no doubt about that. To perhaps not buy the 15th set of clothes and so on so forth.

So there certainly is an element of that, although the positive side of that is the circular economy. In fact, these solutions, it’s not a question of no growth or less growth, but it’s a question of different growth. I think in terms of the discussion in climate change, one mistake that we have made is emphasized too much the “don’t do this.” I think that’s also what’s really interesting about Drawdown, is that there’s no real judgments in there. They’re basically saying, “These are the facts.” If you have a plant-based diet, you will have a huge impact on the climate versus if you eat steak every day, right? But it’s not making a judgment. Rather than don’t eat meat it’s saying eat plant-based foods.

Ariel: So instead of saying don’t drive your car, try to make it a competition to see who can bike the furthest each week or bike the most miles?

John: For example, yeah. Or consider buying an electric car if you absolutely have to have a car. I mean in the US it’s more indispensable than in Europe.

Alexander: It means in the US that when you build new cities, try to build them in a more clever way than the US has been doing up until now because if you’re in America and you want to buy whatever, a new toothbrush, you have to get in your car to go there. When I’m in Europe, I just walk out of the door and within 100 meters I can buy a toothbrush somewhere. I walk or I go on a bicycle.

John: That might be a longer-term solution.

Alexander: Well actually it’s not. I mean in the next 30 years, the amount of investment they can place new cities is an amount of 90 trillion dollars. The city patterns that we have in Europe were developed in the Middle Ages in the centers of cities, so although it is urgent and we have to do a lot of things, you should also think about the investments that you make now that will be followed for hundreds of years. We shouldn’t keep repeating the mistakes from the past. These are the kinds of things we should also talk about. But to come back to your question on what we can do individually, I think there is so much that you can do that helps the planet.

Of course, you’re only one out of seven billion people, although if you listen to this podcast it is likely that you are in that elite out of that seven billion that is consuming much more of the planet, let’s say, than your quota that you should be allowed to. But it means, for instance, changing your diet, and then if you go to a plant-based diet, the perks are not only that it is good for the planet, it is good for yourself as well. You live longer. You have less chance of developing cancer or heart disease or all kinds of other things you don’t want to have. You will live longer. You will have for a longer time a healthier life.

It means actually that you discover all kinds of wonderful recipes that you had never heard of before when you were still eating steak every day, and it is actually a fantastic contribution for the animals that are daily on an unimaginable scale tortured all over the world, locked up in small cages. You don’t see it when you buy it at a butcher, but you are responsible because they do that because you are the consumer. So stop doing that. Better for the planet. Better for the animals. Better for yourself. Same with use your bicycle, walk more. I still have a car. It is 21 years old. It’s the only car I ever bought in my life, and I use it maximum 20 minutes per month. I’m not even buying an electrical vehicle because I still got an old one. There’s a lot that you can do and it has more advantages than just to the planet.

John: Absolutely. Actually, walkable cities is one of the Drawdown solutions. Maybe I can just mention very quickly. I’ll just list out of the 80 solutions, there was a very interesting study that showed that there are 30 of them that we could put into place today, and that that added up to about 40% of the greenhouse gases that we’ll be able to remove.

I’ll just list them quickly. The ones at the end, they’re more, if you are in an agricultural setting, which of course is probably not the case for many of your listeners. But: reduced food waste, plant-rich diets, clean cookstoves, composting, electric vehicles we talked about, ride sharing, mass transit, telepresence (basically video conferencing, and there’s a lot of progress being made there which means we perhaps don’t need to take that airplane.) Hybrid cars, bicycle infrastructure, walkable cities, electric bicycles, rooftop solar, solar water (so that’s heating your hot water using solar.) Methane digesters (it’s more in an agricultural setting where you use biomass to produce methane.) Then you have LED lighting, which is a 90% gain compared to incandescent. Household water saving, smart thermostats, household recycling and recyclable paper, micro wind (there are some people that are putting a little wind turbine on their roof.)

Now these have to do with agriculture, so they’re things like civil pasture, tropical staple trees, tree intercropping, regenerative agriculture, farmland restoration, managed grazing, farmland irrigation and so on. If you add all those up it’s already 37% of the solution. I suspect that the 20 is probably a good 20%. Those are things you can do tomorrow — today.

Ariel: Those are helpful, and we can find those all at drawdown.org; that’ll also list all 80. So you’ve brought this up a couple times, so let’s talk about flying. This was one of those things that really hit home for me. I’ve done the carbon footprint thing and I have an excellent carbon footprint right up until I fly and then it just explodes. As soon as I start adding the footprint from my flights it’s just awful. I found it frustrating that one, so many scientists especially have … I mean it’s not even that they’re flying, it’s that they have to fly if they want to develop their careers. They have to go to conferences. They have to go speak places. I don’t even know where the responsibility should lie, but it seems like maybe we need to try to be cutting back on all of this in some way, that people need to be trying to do more. I’m curious what you guys think about that.

Alexander: Well start by paying tax, for instance. Why is it — well I know why it is — but it’s absurd that when you fly an airplane you don’t pay tax. You can fly all across Europe for like 50 euros or 50 dollars. That is crazy. If you would do the same by your car, you pay tax on the petrol that you buy, and worse, you are not charged for the pollution that you cause. We know that airplanes are heavily polluting. It’s not only the CO2 that they produce, but where they produce, how they produce. It works three to four times faster than all the CO2 that you produce if you drive your car. So we know how bad it is, then make people pay for it. Just make flying more expensive. Pay for the carbon you produce. When I produce waste at home, I pay to my municipality because they pick it up and they have to take care of my garbage, but if I put garbage in the atmosphere, somehow I don’t go there. Actually, it is by all sorts of strange ways, it’s actually subsidized because you don’t pay a tax for it, so there’s worldwide like five or six times as much subsidies on fossil fuels than there is on renewables.

We completely have to change the system. Give people a budget maybe. I don’t know, there could be many solutions. You could say that everybody has the right to search a budget for flying or for carbon, and you can maybe trade that or swap it or whatever. There’s some NGOs that do it. They say to, I think the World Wildlife Fund, but correct me if I’m wrong. All the people working there, they get not only a budget for the projects, they also get a carbon budget. You just have to choose, am I going to this conference or going to that conference, or should I take the train, and you just keep track of what you are doing. That’s something we should maybe roll out on a much bigger scale and make it more expensive.

John: Yeah, the whole idea of a carbon tax, I think is key. I think that’s really important. Some other thoughts: Definitely reduce, do you really absolutely need to make that trip, think about it. Now with webcasting and video conferencing, we can do a lot more without flying. The other thing I suggest is that when you at some point you absolutely do have to travel, try to combine it with as many other things as possible that are perhaps not directly professional. If you are already in the climate change field, then at least you’re traveling for a reason. Then it’s a question of the offsets. Using calculators you can see what the emissions were and pay for what’s called an offset. That’s another option as well.

Ariel: I’ve heard mixed things about offsets. In some cases I see that yes, you should absolutely buy them, and you should. If you fly, you should get them. But that in a lot of cases they’re a bandaid or they might be making it seem like it’s okay to do this when it’s still not the solution. I’m curious what your thoughts on that are.

John: For me, something like an offset, as much as possible should be a last resort. You absolutely have to make the trip, it’s really important, and you offset your trip. You pay for some trees to be planted in the rainforest for instance. There are loads of different possibilities to do so. It’s not a good idea. Unfortunately Switzerland’s plan, for instance, includes a lot of getting others to reduce emissions. That’s really, you can argue that it’s cheaper to do it that way and somebody else might do it more cheaply for you so to speak. So cheaper to plant a tree and it’ll have more impact in the rainforest than in Switzerland. But on the other hand, it’s something which I think we really have to avoid, also because in the end the green economy is where the future lies and where we need to transform to. So if we’re constantly getting others to do the decarbonization for us, then we’ll be stuck with an industry which is ultimately will become very expensive. That’s not a good idea either.

Alexander: I think also the prices are absolutely unrealistic. If you fly, let’s say, from London to New York, your personal, just the fact that you were in the plane, not all the other people, the fact you were in the plane is responsible for three square meters of the Arctic that is melting. You can offset that by paying something like, what is it, 15 or 20 dollars for offsetting that flight. That makes ice in the Arctic extremely cheap. A square meter would be worth something like seven dollars. Well I personally would believe that it’s worth much more.

Then the thing is, then they’re going to plant a tree that takes a lot of time to grow. By the time it’s big, it’s getting CO2 out of the air, are they going to cut it and make newspapers out of it which you then burn in a fireplace, the carbon is still back to where it was. So you need to really carefully think what you’re doing. I feel it is very much a bit like going to a priest and say like, “I have flown. Oh, I have sinned, but I can now do a few prayers and I pay these $20 and now it’s fine. I can book my next flight.” That is not the way it should be. Punish people up front to pay the tickets. Pay the price for the pollution and for the harm that you are causing to this planet and to your fellow citizens on this planet.

John: Couldn’t agree more. But there are offset providers in the US, look them up. See which one you like the best and perhaps buy more offsets. Economy is half the carbon than Business class, I hate to say.

Alexander: Something for me which you mentioned there, I decided long ago, six, seven years ago, that I would never ever in my life fly Business again. I’m not, as somebody who had a thrombosis and the doctors advised me that I should take business, I don’t. I still fly. I’m very much like Ariel that my footprint is okay until the moment that I start adding flying because I do that a lot for my job. Let’s say in the next few weeks, I have a meeting in the Netherlands. I have only 20 days later a meeting in England. I stay in the Netherlands. In between I do all my travel to Belgium and France and the UK, I do everything by train. It’s only that by plane I’m going back from London to Stockholm, because I couldn’t find any reasonable way to go back. I wonder why don’t we have high speed train connections all the way up to Stockholm here.

Ariel: We talked a lot about taxing carbon. I had an interesting experience last week where I’m doing what I can to try to not drive if I’m in town. I’m trying to either bike or take the bus. What often happens is that works great until I’m running late for something, and then I just drive because it’s easier. But the other week, I was giving a little talk on the campus at CU Boulder, and the parking on CU Boulder is just awful. There is absolutely no way that, no matter how late I’m running, it’s more convenient for me to take my car. It never even once dawned on me to take the car. I took a bus. It’s that much easier. I thought that was really interesting because I don’t care how expensive you make gas or parking, if I’m running late I’m probably gonna pay for it. Whereas if you make it so inconvenient that it just makes me later, I won’t do that. I was wondering if you have any other, how can we do things like that where there’s also this inconvenience factor?

Alexander: Have a look at Europe. Well coincidentally I know CU Boulder and I know how difficult the parking is. That’s the brilliance of Boulder where I see a lot of brilliant things. It’s what we do in Europe. I mean one of the reasons why I never ever use a car in Stockholm is that I have no clue how or where to park it, nor can I read the signs because my Swedish is so bad. I’m afraid of a ticket. I never use the car here. Also because we have such perfect public transport. The latest thing they have here is the VOI that just came out like last month, which is, I don’t know the word, we call it “step” in Dutch. I don’t know what you call that in English, whether it’s the same word or not, but it’s like these two-wheeled things that kids normally have. You know?

They are now here electric, so you download an app on your mobile phone and you see one of them in the street because they’re everywhere now. Type in a code and then it unlocks. Then it starts using your time. So for every minute, you pay like 15 cents. So all these electric little things that are everywhere for free, you just drive all around town and you just drop them wherever you like. When you need one, you look on your app and the app shows you where the nearest one is. It’s an amazing way of transport and it’s just, a month ago you saw just one or two. Now they are everywhere. You’re on the streets, you see one. It’s an amazing new way of transport. It’s very popular. It just works on electricity. It makes things so much more easy to reach everywhere in the city because you go at least twice as fast as walking.

John: There was a really interesting article in The Economist about parking. Do you know how many parking spots The Shard, the brand new building in London, the skyscraper has? Eight. The point that’s being made in terms of what you were just asking about in terms of inconvenience, in Europe it just really, in most cases it really doesn’t make any sense at all to take a car into the city. It’s a nightmare.

Before we talk more about personal solutions, I did want to make some points about the economics of all these solutions because what’s really interesting about Drawdown as well is that they looked at both what you would save and what it would cost you to save that over the 30 years that you would put in place those solutions. They came up with some things which at first sight are really quite surprising, because you would save 74.4 trillion dollars for an investment or a net cost of 29.6 trillion.

Now that’s not for all the solutions, so it’s not exactly that. In some of the solutions it’s very difficult to estimate. For instance, the value of educating girls. I mean it’s inestimable. But the point that’s also made is that if you look at The Solutions Project, Professor Jacobson, they also looked at savings, but they looked at other savings that I think are much more interesting and much more important as well. You would basically see a net increase of over 24 million long-term jobs that you would see an annual decrease in four to seven million air pollution deaths per year.

You would also see the stabilization of energy prices, because think of the price of oil where it goes from one day to the next, and annual savings of over 20 trillion in health and climate costs. Which comes back to, when you’re doing those solutions, you are also saving money, but you are also saving more importantly peoples’ lives, the tragedy of the commons, right? So I think it’s really important to think about those solutions. I mean we know very well why we are still using fossil fuels, it’s because of the massive subsidies and support that they get and the fact that vested interests are going to defend their interests.

I think that’s really important to think about in terms of those solutions. They are becoming more and more possible. Which leads me to the other point that I’m always asked about, which is, it’s not going fast enough. We’re not seeing enough renewables. Why is that? Because even though we don’t tax fuel, as you mentioned Alexander, because we’ve produced now so many solar panels, the cost is getting to be much cheaper. It’ll get cheaper and cheaper. That’s linked to this whole idea of exponential growth or tipping points, where all of a sudden all of us start to have a solar panel on our roof, where more and more of us become vegetarians.

I’ll just tell you a quick anecdote on that. We had some out of town guests who absolutely wanted to go to actually a very good steakhouse in Geneva. So along we went. We didn’t want to offend them and say “No, no, no. We’re certainly not gonna go to a steakhouse.” So we went along. It was a group of seven of us. Imagine the surprise when they came to take our orders and three out of seven of us said, “I’m afraid we’re vegetarians.” It was a bit of a shock. I think those types of things start to make others think as well, “Oh, why are you vegetarian,” and so on and so forth.

That sort of reflection means that certain business models are gonna go out of business, perhaps much faster than we think. On the more positive side, there are gonna be many more vegetarian restaurants, you can be sure, in the future.

Ariel: I want to ask about what we’re all doing individually to address climate change. But Alexander, one of the things that you’ve done that’s probably not what just a normal person would do, is start the Planetary Security Initiative. So before we get into what individuals can do, I was hoping you could talk a little bit about what that is.

Alexander: That was not so much as an individual. I was at Yale University for half a year when I started this, but then when I came back in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for one more year, I had some ideas and I got support from the ministers of doing that, on bringing the experts in the world together that work in the field of the impact that climate change will have on security. So the idea to start was creating an annual meeting where all these experts in the world come together because that didn’t exist yet, and to make more scientists and researchers in the world energetic to study more in the field of how this relationship works. But more importantly, the idea was also to connect the knowledge and the insights of these experts on how the changing climate and the impacts impacts has on water and food, and our changing planetary conditions, how they are impacting the geopolitics.

I have a background, both in security as well as environment. That used to be two completely different tracks that weren’t really interacting. The more I was working on those two things, the more that I saw that the changing environment is actually directly impacting our security situation. It’s already happening and you can be pretty sure that the impact is going to be much more in the future. So what we then started was a meeting in the Peace Palace in the Hague. There were some 75 countries the first time that we were present there, and then the key experts in the world. It’s now an annual meeting that always takes place. For anybody that’s interested, contact me and then I will provide you with the right contact. It is growing now into all kinds of other initiatives and other involvement and more studies that are taking place.

So the issue is really taking off, and that is mainly because more and more people see the need of getting better insights into the impact that all of these changes that we’ve been discussing, that it’ll have on security whether that’s individual security, human security of individuals, that’s also geopolitical security. Imagine that when so much is changing, when the economies are changing so rapidly, when interests of people change and when people start going on the move, tensions will rise for a number of reasons, partly related to climate change, but it’s very much a situation where climate change is already in an existing fragile situation, it’s making it worse. So that is the Planetary Security Initiative. The government of the Netherlands has been very strong on this, working closely together with something other governments. Sweden, for instance, where I’m living, Sweden has in the past year been focusing very much on strengthening the United Nations, that you would have experts at the relevant high level in New York that can connect the dots and connect to people and the issues to not just raise awareness for the issue, but make sure that in the policies that are made, these issues are also taken into account because you better do it up front than repair damage afterwards if you haven’t taken care of these issues.

It’s a rapidly developing field. There is a new thing as, for instance, using AI and data, I think the World Resources Institute in Washington is very good at that, where they combine let’s say, the geophysical data, let’s say satellite and other data on increasing drought in the world, but also deforestation and other resource issues. They are connecting that now with the geopolitical impacts with AI and with combining all these completely different databases. You get much better insight on where the risks really are, and I believe that in the years to come, WRI in combination with several other think tanks can do brilliant work where the world is really waiting for the kind of insights. International policies will be so much more effective if you know much better where the problems are really going to hit first.

Ariel: Thank you. All right, so we are starting to get a little bit short on time, and I want to finish the discussion with things that we’ve personally been doing. I’m gonna include myself in this one because I think the more examples the better. So what we’ve personally been doing to change our lifestyles for the better, not sacrifice, but for the better, to address climate change. And also, to keep us all human, where we’re failing that we wish we were doing better.

I can go ahead and start. I am trying to not use my car in town. I’m trying to stick to biking or taking public transportation. I have dropped the temperature in our house by another degree, so I’m wearing more sweaters. I’m going to try to be stricter about flying, only if I feel that I will actually be having a good impact on the world will I fly, or a family emergency, things like that.

I’m pretty sure our house is on wind power. I work remotely, so I work from home. I don’t have to travel for work. I those are some of the big things, and as I said, flying is still a problem for me so that’s something I’m working on. Food is also an issue for me. I have lots of food issues so cutting out meat isn’t something that I can do. But I have tried to buy most of my food from local farms, I’m trying to buy most of my meat from local farms where they’re taking better care of the animals as well. So hopefully that helps a little bit. I’m also just trying to cut back on my consumption in general. I’m trying to not buy as many things, and if I do buy things I’m trying to get them from companies that are more environmentally-conscious. So I think food and flying are sort of where I’m failing a little bit, but I think that’s everything on my end.

Alexander: I think one of the big changes I made is I became years ago already vegetarian for a number of good reasons. I am now practically vegan. Sometimes when I travel it’s a bit too difficult. I hardly ever use the car. I guess it’s just five or six times a year that I actually use my car. I use bicycles and public transport. The electricity at our home is all wind power. In the Netherlands, that’s relatively easy to arrange nowadays. There’s a lot of offers for it, so I deliberately buy wind power, including in the times when wind power was still more expensive than other power. I think about in consumption, when I buy food, I try to buy more local food. There’s the occasional kiwi, which I always wonder it’s arrives in Europe, but that’s another thing that you can think of. Apart from flying, I really do my best with my footprint. Then flying is the difficult thing because with my work, I need to fly. It is about personal contacts. It is about meeting a lot of people. It’s about teaching.

I do teaching online. I use Skype for teaching to classrooms. I do many Skype conferences all the time, but yes I’m still flying. I refuse flying business class. I started that some six, seven years ago. Just today business class ticket was offered to me for a very long flight and I refused it. I say I will fly economy. But yes, the flying is what adds to my footprint. I still, I try to combine trips. I try to stay longer at a certain place, combining it, and then by train go to all kinds of other places. But when you’re stuck here in Stockholm, it’s quite difficult to get here by other means than flying. Once I’m, let’s say, in the Netherlands or Brussels or Paris or London or Geneva, you can do all those things by train, but it gets a bit more difficult out here.

John: Pretty much in Alexander’s case, except that I’m very local. I travel actually very little and I keep the travel down. If I do have to travel, I have managed to do seven hour trips by train. That’s a possibility in Europe, but that sort of gets you to the middle of Germany. Then the other thing is I’ve become vegetarian recently. I’m pretty close to vegan, although it’s difficult with such good cheese we have in this country. But the way it came about is interesting as well. It’s not just me. It’s myself, my wife, my daughter, and my son. The third child is never gonna become vegetarian I don’t think. But that’s not bad, four out of five.

In terms of what I think you can do and also points to things that we perhaps don’t think about contributing, being a voice, vis a vis others in our own communities and explaining why you do what you do in terms of biking and so on so forth. I think that really encourages others to do the same. It can grow a lot like that. In that vein, I teach as much as I can to high school students. I talk to them about Drawdown. I talk to them about solutions and so on. They get it. They are very very switched on about this. I really enjoy that. You really see, it’s their future, it’s their generation. They don’t have very much choice unfortunately. On a more positive note, I think they can really take it away in terms of a lot of actions which we haven’t done enough of.

Ariel: Well I wanted to mention this stuff because going back to your idea, this trickle up, I’m still hopeful that if people take action that that will start to force governments to. One final question on that note, did you guys find yourselves struggling with any of these changes or did you find them pretty easy to make?

Alexander: I think all of them were easy. Switching your energy to wind power, et cetera. Buying more consciously. It comes naturally. I was already vegetarian, and then moving to vegan, just go online and read it about it and how to do it. I remember when I was a kid that hardly anybody was vegetarian. Then I once discussed it with my mother and she said, “Oh it’s really difficult because then you need to totally balance your food and be in touch with your doctor, whatever.” I’ve never spoken to any doctor. I just stopped eating meat and now I … Years ago I swore out all dairy. I’ve never been ill. I don’t feel ill. Actually I feel better. It is not complicated. The rather complicated thing is flying, there are sometimes I have to make difficult choices like being for a long time away from home, I saved quite a bit on that part. That’s sometimes more complicated or, like soon I’ll be in a nearly eight hour train ride in something I could have flown in an hour.

John: I totally agree. I mean I enjoy being in a train, being able to work and not be worried about some truck running into you or the other foibles of driving which I find very very … I’ve got to a point where I’m becoming actually quite a bad driver. I drive so little that, I hope not, but I might have an accident.

Ariel: Well fingers crossed that doesn’t happen. Amd good. That’s been my experience so far too. The changes that I’ve been trying to make haven’t been difficult. I hope that’s an important point for people to realize. Anything else you want to add either of you?

Alexander: I think there’s just one thing that we didn’t touch on, on what you can do individually. That’s perhaps the most important one for us in democratic countries. That is vote. Vote for the best party that actually takes care of our long-term future, a party that aims for taking rapidly the right climate change measures. A party that wants to invest in a new economy that sees that if you invest now, you can be a leader later.

There is, in some countries, you have a lot of parties and there is all kinds of nuances. In other countries you have to deal with basically two parties, where just the one part is absolutely denying science and is doing exactly the wrong things and are basically aiming to ruin the planet as soon as possible, whereas the other party is actually looking for solutions. Well if you live in a country like that, and there are coincidentally soon elections coming up, vote for the party that takes the best positions on this because it is about the future of your children. It is the single most important influential thing that you can do, certainly if you live in a country where the emissions that the country produces are still among the highest in the world. Vote. Take people with you to do it.

Ariel: Yeah, so to be more specific about that, as I mentioned at the start this podcast, it’s coming out on Halloween, which means in the US, elections are next week. Please vote.

John: Yeah. Perhaps something else is how you invest, where your money is going. That’s one that can have a lot of impact as well. All I can say is, I hate to come back to Drawdown, but go through the Drawdown and think about your investments and say, okay, renewables whether it’s LEDs or whatever technology it is, if it’s in Drawdown, make sure it’s in your investment portfolio. If it’s not, you might want to get out of it, particularly the ones that we already know are causing the problem in the first place.

Ariel: That’s actually, that’s a good reminder. That’s something that has been on my list of things to do. I know I’m guilty of not investing in the proper companies at the moment. That’s something I’ve been wanting to fix.

Alexander: And tell your pension funds: divest from fossil fuels and invest in renewables and all kinds of good things that we need in the new economy.

John: But not necessarily because you’re doing it as a charitable cause, but really because these are the businesses of the future. We talked earlier about growth that these different businesses can take. Another factor that’s really important is efficiency. For instance, I’m sure you have heard of The Impossible Burger. It’s a plant-based burger. Now what do you think is the difference in terms of the amount of crop land required to produce a beef burger versus an impossible burger?

Alexander: I would say one in 25 or one in 35, but at range.

John: Yeah, so it’s one in 20. The thing is that when you look at that type of gain in efficiency, it’s just a question of time. A cow simply can’t compete. You have to cut down the trees to grow the animal feed that you ship to the cow, that the cow then eats. Then you have to wait a number of years, and that’s that 20 factor difference in efficiency. Now our capitalist economic system doesn’t like inefficient systems. You can try to make that cow as efficient as possible, you’re never going to be able to compete with a plant-based burger. Anybody who thinks that that plant-based burger isn’t going to displace the meat burger should really think again.

Ariel: All right, I think we’re ending on a nice hopeful note. So I want to thank you both for coming on today and talking about all of these issues.

Alexander: Thanks Ariel. It was nice to talk.

John: Thank you very much.

Ariel: If you enjoyed this podcast, please take a moment to like it and share it, and maybe even leave a positive review. And o f course, if you haven’t already, please follow us. You can find the FLI podcast on iTunes, Google Play, SoundCloud, and Stitcher.

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