Angry Planet - The Climate Doomer Episode

Episode Date: September 18, 2023

We’re taking another look at the climate here at Angry Planet. This week we’re joined by Peter Kalmus of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Talking to a scientist about how hot the planet is getting can be jarring. Kalmus, like other experts in the field, brings a sense of doom to the subject that fits perfectly in the Angry Planet cannon.Kalmus talks about dining with oil executives and shares his thoughts on How to Blow Up a Pipeline. We cover a lot of ground in this episode and we’re happy to have our listeners along for the ride. Next week we’ll try to get back to something more traditionally depressing like Ramzan Kadyrov or Armenia and Azerbaijan.Check out Peter’s research here.Angry Planet has a Substack! Join to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in conflict.https://angryplanet.substack.com/subscribeSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. We are here today to talk about either global warming or climate change depending on your mood. And joining us. We have a theme this summer, I think. Between this is the only fire thing. You know, I tend to call it global heating and then the trolls on Twitter are like, well, it's like, which one is it? Well, so actually the person speaking, I think it's important to note is Peter Kalmas, who is joining us to talk this through. Could you tell everybody who you are on what your background is? Sure. Yeah.

So, yeah, I'm Peter Kalmas. I am a climate scientist and I currently work at NASA's. Jet Propulsion Laboratory. I'm totally speaking on my own behalf here. And I'm also a climate activist. And that's still, unfortunately, in my opinion, sort of a rare combination to be both a scientist and an activist. But when, you know, there's a lot I don't understand about the science. I have my little niche things. And we can get into that a little bit. But when I see the science, just broadly speaking, I personally find it really scary and I care a lot about this planet and I care a lot about my kids and I care about my own future too.

So I can't, I feel like I don't have any choice but to also be an activist and to do everything I can to turn this ship that we're on away from this pathway that we're currently on towards increasing destruction. So that's basically who I am. Can you drill the distinction between heating and warming for me, why it's important to say heating? Well, I think global heating is just like somehow more accurate. Like when you're in a chemistry lab or something, you talk about heating up, you know, a flask as opposed to warming it up typically. And heat is the thing that is, you know, the physical quantity that is changing right now on planet Earth.

In physics, you don't have warm. That's not a physical thing. You have heat. So global heating feels the most accurate to me. And global warming, of course, just from a PR point of view, it sounds like, oh, that's not a bad thing. You know, people up in Canada are like, that sounds pretty good, a little bit of global warming. So global heating is what is happening on planet Earth right now because we've changed the energy

balance by emitting all of these greenhouse gases, most notably carbon dioxide and methane. And so there's basically two primary ways that the Earth interacts energetically with the rest of the cosmos. One way is sunlight streaming in in the visible spectrum. You know, it's peaked around visible. That's why our eyes are tuned to it. And then the other way is infrared radiation streaming back out into space from the Earth as what we call a black body. So every physical object with a temperature, which is every physical object produces. is black body radiation that streams off of it and goes to the far field. And the Earth's,

because of the temperature of like the Earth and the lower atmosphere, most of the Earth's black body radiation is peaked in the infrared. And that interacts. So infrared radiation can't stream through carbon dioxide and methane the same way that visible radiation does because different molecules interact with different frequencies of electromagnetic radiation. So what we have right now is the same amount of sunlight pretty much coming in and less infrared radiation streaming out into space. And so any elementary school kid would be like, well, it's unbalanced. And you've got, you know, this energy building up. And so the temperature has to heat up until, you know, hotter, you know, black body is going to emit a larger amount of energy. And then you'll come back into

balance at a hotter temperature. And that's global heating. And then all of the stuff that we're seeing, like crazy rainstorms and heat waves and wildfires and droughts and all of these impacts that we're starting to experience in this really sort of ferocious way now, those are all the results of that global heating. And so I call that, I tend to call those impacts climate breakdown or maybe earth breakdown because it includes things like species going extinct and forest dying. So it's like the whole Earth is changing as a result of this very fundamental thing, which is global heating. So that actually, there are a couple things.

Well, first of all, this is an angry planet. And you can see why. I'm Jason Fields. Matthew Galt is also here. So we also now have to worry about space getting colder, if I'm understanding what you're saying, because there's less infrared light actually hitting space. So is that a crisis as well? No. Yeah, space is just doing its thing. Spaces. So I started out as an astrophysicist, actually, and didn't switch into climate science until about 2012. And I made the switch actually because I was starting to get really worried about climate change. And I'm like, I can't, you know, I can't devote my time and energy and talents to astrophysics. As much as I loved astrophysics, I, with a crisis here on Earth, I had to kind of get my head out of the start. and start studying this planet.

And that was my initial feeling was like I got to pitch in and help out with climate science. But yeah, the, you know, space is, uh, space is very cold and,

uh, and very, um, uh, what's the word, um, you know, it doesn't care about us.

Unforgiving. I've always heard. Yeah, it's, it's unforgiving. Yeah, it's just very, uh,

um, uh, what is it when like you just don't care one way or the other you know it's it's a very neutral a large cold neutral entity without a lot of matter on average so and yeah and i definitely and it makes me think of this earth you know carl sagan was really on to something when he talked about the pale blue dot because that's the way i see it too you know good planets are they're hard to come by and uh this is a very excellent one and there's something just uh sort of like like too on the nose. It's like too tragic comic that we have these amazing space telescopes now,

which are finding exoplanets at a furious rate just at the same time as our own planet is starting to get less and less habitable because it keeps heating up like this. And some of those two things happening at the same time, it's like, are we in some bad science fiction novel or something? It's just, I don't know, I find it such a cosmic coincidence that those two things are happening. I feel like the universe maybe is sort of trying to teach us a lesson that we're not, we don't seem to be learning yet. How hot are we talking about? With the UN goal, right, of 1.5 Celsius above the historic pre-industrial temperature of the earth, right?

that number is supposed to be okay. That if we only go up that amount, it's okay. First of all, I was kind of curious if you think that's okay. Second of all, do you think there's any chance in hell that we're actually going to stop at 1.5 anyway? Yeah, so no and no. Yeah, no, I don't think it's okay. I think that was deeply unscientific to kind of put that as a safe level. You know, a few years before that, 2.0 was kind of the quote unquote safe level.

And I think that's very, it's very convenient for politicians because it allows them to keep kicking the can down the road. But no, it's not safe. We're at 1.2 degrees or 1.3 degrees above kind of the 1850 to 1900 average, depending on sort of exactly how you do the running average and calculate the difference. And to me, like, this doesn't feel safe. I mean, whether or not you feel safe, that's a subjective thing. But like, look what happened on Maui this summer and look what happened to the forests in Canada. And look what happened to Pakistan last summer. You know, look what happened in Seattle and Vancouver.

What's going to happen with agriculture? I feel like, you know, we don't talk about crop failure enough. And I'm not totally sure what's going on with that. But to me, that feels like a looming threat hanging over all of it. our heads and I don't feel safe at this level. And I feel like 1.5 is going to be so much worse than anyone imagined when they were talking about 1.5 as a safe level. So yeah, I think we're in for quite a ride no matter what humanity does at this point,

which is such a shame because this was all completely unnecessary in my opinion. And then, yeah, I don't think there's any way in hell that we're going to stay under 1.5. And the reason I say that is largely because of President Biden. You know, if the White House was, we have a Democrat in the White House, supposedly a liberal. And if they were doing everything they could to stop global heating and to pull, put on the brakes. And, you know, then I'd have some hope maybe. I think it would still be pretty tall order to standard 1.5. We probably still fail.

But the fact is that, you know, the White House is still careening, eagerly expanding fossil fuels as quickly as they possibly can. Right. So the Willow Project in Alaska and then the Mountain Valley pipeline, which was really like a, felt like a knife in my back, right? that the White House would kind of kowtow to Joe Mansion. And the thing was stopped the state of Virginia, the court of the appellate court in Virginia had put a stay on the Mount Valley pipeline. The thing hadn't been under construction for years. And then Joe Biden was like, hey, we got to get this thing started again.

And he pushed for it to restart and guess what happened? It's under construction again. And that's taking us precisely. in the wrong direction we need to go, you know. And the White House has just had such a deep track record since Biden got into office of fast tracking, you know, and expanding drilling on federal lands and in federal waters and, you know, begging OPEC to increase production and, you know, basically doing everything that the fossil fuel industry could possibly have dreamt of for any president, Republican or Democrats.

So, and then you multiply that by all of. of the nations of the world that are basically doing very similar fossil fuel expansion. And so we're still basically, we've, as, as, you know, humanity, we have the pedal to the metal towards ever more fossil fuel production right now at this moment. We're expanding. Yes, we're expanding renewables as well. But that's only half of the battle, right? Like this is caused primarily by fossil fuels, like 80% or so fossil fuels is causing.

in global heating and about 15% industrial animal agriculture. So the main cause is fossil fuels. And if you're accelerating and expanding fossil fuels and doing what these frankly villainous fossil fuel CEOs want you to do as a politician, you're part of the problem. And we're going to get higher temperatures. So yeah, that's why I think there's no chance in hell right now that we could stay under 1.5. from an Earth system point of view, like if somehow humanity could magically stop fossil fuels

overnight, and I should put a footnote that if that did happen, you know, our food system, for example, depends on fossil fuels. So it would there be carnage there too. So we have to ramp down fossil fuels in a very equitable and smart way, but with an emergency mode urgency. But suppose that, you know, for whatever reason, humanity did stop fossil fuels right now, then I think that our system, there's a pretty good chance that it wouldn't go over 1.5 degrees Celsius. So it's really the geopolitics and the corporate sort of profit motive. And this, you know, what I've really started to think of as the death cult of capitalism, you know, multiply by all the people in power and all the people, all the other

people who aren't in power, but don't really think about it or don't care or don't know what to do. That's why I don't think there's any chance we're going to stay under 1.5. And I do hope we get our act together quickly and maybe keep things to 1.6 or 1.7. Every little bit that we stop it from getting hotter is going to be so, so helpful for humanity going forward. Is it worth in your mind even having the argument with people that don't believe this is happening anymore? It's so strange to me that there's still a lot of people who don't think global heating has happened. I don't know how that's even possible. Like, what if there was like, you know, a campfire that was lit and you had 10 people around the campfire and three of them were like like the campfire is not burning?

I mean, what would you say to those people if it was clearly burning? I just don't know. It's the strangest thing. when when a human mind refuses to accept extremely evident obvious facts that are right in front of them, my mind just doesn't know how to relate to them. So maybe someone else does, but it just seems like that's a conversation stopper. And there's really not, I don't know what to do next. That's a firm no from you then.

It's not worth it. It is no longer worth engaging. And I like, I think that's a fair answer given where we've been over the past 10 years. Yeah. Yeah, you know, we each have limited time and energy and capacity, and I feel extremely limited. So I'd rather spend my time trying to convince climate moderates. So these are people who agree that there's a problem. President Biden could be one of these, right?

He says he accepts the science and yet he's expanding fossil fuels. So there's a real problem there. And it does feel like there is a way to engage with those people, right? So, okay, you accept the science. you accept that this is super dangerous and it's being caused by fossil fuels. All right. But you're still expanding fossil fuels. So, hmm, why is that? Let's have that discussion, right? And try to work through that. So that's kind of where I'm more. And there's a lot of support for President Biden, right? There's a lot of people out there, a lot of liberals who still don't see a problem with that.

And, you know, I find that quite strange that they don't think there's a problem with that. I think it's because they don't yet fully understand just what an emergency we're in. So I think that I feel like that's one of my primary roles is like I totally get what an emergency we're in and I'm trying to help more people understand that. And so I have to, you know, I get a lot of, you know, a lot of shade from people who call me a doomer and they're like, oh, we got to give people hope. We can't scare them too much. And I'm like, you know what? I got the science going into my head and it makes me feel afraid. And I just have to be honest. I just have to be truthful. And I'm going to tell the world about that science. And I'm

going to tell the world about how I feel. Because if I hit either one of those things, the facts or the emotions anyway, then I wouldn't be being truthful. And I think it's super important. That's, that's of paramount importance as a scientist. To be truthful, to know what you know and what you don't know, to be ethical. And to me, to try to sugarcoat things is deeply dishonest and unscientific. I think people don't necessarily know what the Biden administration is doing in terms of fossil fuels. I really don't because what most people hear is electric cars and where is lithium going to come from? and you know there which we're pretending is also a crisis of a different kind and it's interesting also because Biden I'm not surprised that he is looking for more fuel because when Ukraine was invaded

gas prices went through the roof people started to freak out and I'm not surprised that as a politician he went out and tried to, you know, drill baby drill. We're not great at long-term thinking. Yeah. That's a, that was the very like, yeah, that was the uncreative, unimaginative, you know, maybe global heating is just another, quote, issue response, right? So, so I think he and his advisors, when they came into office, they're like, all right, yeah, global heating's kind of bad, but it's another issue.

There's, we've got, you know, 12 or 15 issues and global heating is one of them. And it's probably not the most urgent and the public doesn't care about it. So, so yeah, that response, the drill baby drill response was the business as usual. This is what presidents have done. This is what my mentor Obama did. Obama was the king of drilling. I mean, he was so proud of expanding fossil fuels. You know, I thought it was really weird when Greta actually went and met with Obama because this was so, you know, like this is the guy that's, you know,

expanding fossil fuels and who knows better. To me, it's almost worse when someone knows better and they know what they're doing and how irreversible the damage is and they do it anyway because they don't have the creativity or the imagination or maybe the courage to do the better thing. So, yeah, I think that I wrote an op-ed when that decision to expand fossil fuels around the Ukraine invasion was made because I felt like that, That was such a pivotal moment when the United States, through the bully pulpit of the White House, you know, Biden could have said like unleashed through just executive orders, right? Not with the help of Congress at all.

He could have been like, all right, here's our plan to really expand renewables in emergency mode. And we're going to, you know, maybe nationalize the fossil fuel industry. You know, they could have done that through legal means, I think, by basically, you know, purchasing a lot of shares, for example. And then they could have released a plan to, once they kind of controlled the supply of fossil fuels, so then they can start ramping it down. But they could have a program where based on income, you know, they kept gasoline affordable for the working class, which is super important. And it's not, that's not a moral issue. You have, however you navigate and engineer this transition that is, you know, the science is so clear that we need. You know, the politics of it is a little less clear.

And certainly will take a lot of creativity and a lot of great legal minds to figure it out. But one thing that couldn't be more clear to me is that you have to protect the working class. If it's unpopular, however you roll out the transition, if it's unpopular or the working class and it causes them pain and they don't know how they're going to pay their bills and they don't know how they're going to get to work, they're going to say this sucks and they're going to vote out whatever politician is doing, that climate plan and they're going to vote in somebody horrible who says it's a hoax and we're going to be, you know, two steps backwards, right? It happened in France with the yellow jackets, the Giegeon, and it would happen again. It's just, it's like a law of nature, right? So however you do this, you've got to do the transition fast, but you have to do it in a way

that protects the interests of the working class so that it's a sustainable, you know, basket of policies. I don't know if, if, I don't know how. while seizing and nationalizing the petroleum industry in America would play. I'm for it, but I agree with Matthew. I imagine that that would not go well. I think, you know, smarter people than me have written some articles about how that might work. And I think there's various ways that it could go.

But, you know, I think the what we have to, the sort of model, I think the precedent is World War II. and kind of the reconverting of factories to kind of help with the war effort, right, which happened very quickly. And there were, I think, emergency powers that were put into play. But the really key difference there, it's not like legal differences. The really key difference is that that transition had public support, right? And the fossil fuel industry has spent the last 50 years. lying to the public and buying politicians to block action. And that's,

and that's a huge part of why, you know, Biden probably can't easily do what needs to be done is because, and other Democrats, they, they accept money from these fossil fuel people and they're friends with them. Like they, I think they go to the same parties, et cetera, right? So, there's still very much in that kind of like business as usual, um, headspace and social space. But the other big problem is that, you know, I think the public really needs to know a lot more of the details of how the fossil fuel industry has literally colluded, has formed organizations like the American Petroleum Institute to literally lie and spread false information about climate science and climate change and to delay action. I mean, it's just, it's the, it's the conspiracy that could bring down our. entire global civilization. And I don't think the public realizes that this was a decision that powerful people have made since the 70s for the sake of getting even more money.

They were already rich, but it wasn't enough for them. They wanted more. They could have said, like their own scientists said, oh gosh, like we're heading towards irreversible planetary destruction because of these products that were selling humanity. The people in terms of, charge could have said, oh, that's not good. Let's let the public know about this. Let's talk to the government and let's work together with society to transition away from this energy source into something else. That's the decision I would have made. But these people didn't make that decision. They said, oh, well, if we do that, you know, we can't just like stick a pipe into the ground and mint money from it. And so we have to keep this quiet.

We have to spread disinformation when independent scientists start to say the same thing. We're going to cast doubt upon it. And that's exactly what they did. And I can't imagine it's kind of hard to imagine something more evil than that. But here we are. And they're still doing it, right? There was a congressional testimony, I think it was in 2021. on and for the big, like the oil major CEOs were being drilled by Congress.

And they were literally asked by Congress, will you stop spreading disinformation? And they did not agree to that. They did not say, oh, yeah, okay, maybe it's time to stop spreading disinformation. They filibustered. They spouted word salad. And the, you know, congressional committee was like, all right, well, we take that then. you're filibustering and that means you're not willing to stop spreading disinformation. And again, I think the public needs to know about that.

Like, this has been happening since the 70s and it's still happening right now. Where do you think they're planning to live? I just, I don't know. The crazy rich people, do they not want to visit Dennis ever again? It's just like, so. I would do. I would ask why so many of them have sought citizenship in New York. Zealand?

I just don't know. I can't understand their psychology. It's the weirdest thing. I really think you should get a few of them on the show. I had lunch with a couple of fossil fuel CEOs because there was this weird thing where they wanted me to come to some conference. I think they wanted to use me as greenwash. And then they were like, all right, let's see the slides you're going to present.

And I was just like, you know, talking like this, like this is kind of what I would have told them all and told them. that they should feel ashamed of themselves, you know? And so they're like, all right, we're not going to have this guy come. But like somehow in planning for that, I ended up having lunch with a couple fossil fuel executives. And their main, they were, they were, they was pretty weird. I won't, I won't lie.

And their main thing. And I didn't let them buy my lunch because that would have felt super weird. But they were like, we'll go as fast as the public goes. You know, like we're just giving people what they want. on. That's it. They are like, we don't have any responsibility. And I think that's how they think of it is like, you know, they probably convince themselves that global heating is not really that bad. And the world needs fossil fuels right now. And so we're going to supply it. And we're spending, you know, half a percent of our revenues looking at alternatives. Right. It's just, it's so crazy. But they, I think they give

themselves little psychological outlets so that they can somehow keep going. But it's just, you know, the human mind is super good at the sort of rationalization, right? And that ability of the human brain to to rationalize is not serving us well right now. All right, angry planet listeners. We're going to pause there for a break, unless you're on substack, of course. All right, Angry Planet listeners, welcome back. I want to go back to the World War II metaphor. I want to point out that that kind of war footing happens after a disaster, right? It was a reaction.

It was a reaction to something to an attack that happened. And I've often thought with this, and I don't know what the final tipping point will be, but it will take something big and pretty dramatic, I think, for there to actually be a public reaction. I get the sense that you may feel that once we hit that, once we have that moment, it's probably going to be too late. Do you think that that's accurate?

Well, I don't think, I don't think there's ever a time when it's too late. I just think we lose more and more, the longer we delay. So literally every day it takes us to start this transatlantic. in earnest. And again, like, sure, you know, the Inflation Reduction Act had some okay stuff. Like, sure, it's good to increase the charging network for electric vehicles. All that stuff's fine. But that's not, that's not the transition in earnest. That's the business as usual transition. What is the transition in earnest? What does it actually look like? What concrete things need to? When, when airplanes start flying less, you'll know the transition has started in earnest. That is the litmus test.

Now, the commercial aviation, it's not the biggest cause of global heating, but it is a luxury that we've gotten very used to. It is one aspect of fossil fuels where no one will die if we shut that off. So, like, it's much harder to get fossil fuels out of the global food supply, right? Or to, you know, get out of electricity, right? Because we need electricity in hospitals and whatnot. But once we start treating this like an actual emergency, we'll say like, all right, what's more important? being alive and having a habitable planet and having sort of a somewhat stable future for our kids or jutting off to Paris for the weekend.

Right now the answer to that question is jetting off to Paris for the weekend because most people don't like the first part, they don't take it seriously. They're like, oh, like how bad could it be really, right? So they don't accept that we're in an emergency yet. So once enough people do, we'll probably first start. CNN to private jets, then we'll see probably policies that, you know, make it more difficult to fly, you know, several dozen times in a year, right? So maybe a policy, for example, that made increased, like an increased tax for a number of miles that a person flies in the year. So the more

miles you start to rack up, the more expensive it starts to get. And then eventually probably a hiatus on commercial aviation, at least until we have some way to fly planes that doesn't produce. carbon dioxide. And that's not currently on the horizon, right? So to me, that's the litmus test. And I know that's a weird thing to say, but every time I hear a plane and no matter where I go, I basically constantly hear planes overhead. I'm like, all right, well, we're still not an emergency mode. We're still in business as usual mode. And we're not treating this like an emergency. And then once we kind of agree collectively that this is an emergency, that I think there's a lot of other policies, which will start to follow quite rapidly.

And, you know, we could talk about what some of those are, but that's not, that's not really my expertise, but I think a lot of them are fairly obvious. So anything that can start to reduce the use of fossil fuels while protecting the working class would be like a kind of policy that I think would come in an emergency mode transition. Will you unleash your full terror and anxiety on us? Will you paint the picture of worst case scenario? What happens to the planet? What the world looks like?

What is the thing that is when you're up at night trying to go to sleep is running through your brain that is worrying you? You know, it's such an interesting question. So I have a pretty serious meditation practice and then also being an activist. those two things keep my own personal anxiety at bay. And like over the last few years, there have been a few times when I've stopped meditating just because like anyone else. So this is like an hour in the morning and an hour in the evening of meditation. So sometimes like I might, you know, there have been times where I got started to get a little anxious and then I would scroll through Twitter or something and watch Netflix.

And because of that, I would wake up late and then I wouldn't meditate in the morning. And then it just kind of erodes like that. Because I'm human like anyone else. And then my, if I stop meditating because of that, my anxiety and my anxiety starts to pour in. And so like now I'm, I've realized that and I'm more committed than I ever have men to keeping my practice. Because when I have that climate anxiety, I basically can't function very well.

I can't do work very well. I can't write. Science gets a lot harder. And I will say that doing the science is getting harder and harder for me because it just sort of feels like, all right. So another paper about coral reefs that hardly anyone reads when they're like kind of dying in real time. I mean, you know, another paper that basically says, yeah, here's another reason we need to ramp down fossil fuels really quickly. I mean, do we need, there's already thousands of those.

Do we, is another one of those really the best use of my time, right? So, so it is my job, but I constantly am wondering about that. But yeah, I, you know, I study extreme heat. It's still a fairly new field for me. And I don't think we're going to avoid at this point heat waves that basically kill a million plus people over the course of a few days. Right. So there was a heat wave in 2003 in Europe where almost 100,000 people died over the course

of a few days. And if you have an even more intense heat wave and there's a blackout because everyone's running their air conditioners, for example. And so the power grid fails. I can easily imagine, you know, a heat wave where just it's so strong, so much humid heat that people's bodies just can't deal with it. And their core temperature rises to a fatal level. And then you just get, you know, it's like the first chapter of ministry for the future. And it won't stop there. Right. So the physics of planetary imbalance is doesn't, it's not, you can't negotiate with it's not merciful.

It just follows physical laws, right? So then, you know, a few years later, I don't know exactly when, but, you know, I'm trying to nail that down with a little bit more precision, right? Like how this is going to play out in the future. But I don't really know yet. But, you know, then if it gets even hotter, you get even more humid heat and you end up with the heat wave where 10 million people die and, you know, over the course of a few days, maybe in India or, you know, maybe somewhere in China or maybe in North America, I don't

know where, maybe in Phoenix. So that is something that really terrifies me personally and would like to see that not happen, but it seems like maybe President Biden kind of had the last chance to keep that from happening. I think he might have had the last chance to keep things under 1.5 degrees Celsius. I mean, it would have taken kind of a miracle, even if the United States had started to transition into emergency mode, like would that have triggered other nations to do it as well? So even that, it might not have worked. But I do feel like we've sort of lost that chance now. That door is probably closed.

And then the other thing that really brightens me right now is global food insecurity. So multiple simultaneous crop failures and the geopolitics that would accompany that, you know, so what sort of conflict would we get set off when you have climate famines, basically, and large, large numbers of people trying to cross borders. You know, it just doesn't seem like, especially with the invasion of Ukraine, it's not clear to me that sort of world geopolitics is stable enough to, to kind of absorb those sorts of gut punches gracefully. You know, I worry that we're not, if the universe has a lesson to teach us here, it's probably that we need to help one another. and we need to, there's like more than enough resources to go around on this planet if we stop hoarding. Like most other species don't, no other species hordes the way that humans do, right?

We've got freaking billionaires and then we got people that are basically making a dollar a day and don't have enough to eat. So I think that's a lesson we're learning, but it seems like if anything, we're going towards closing borders and more autocracy and more guns on top of walls. And that's why I say I'm not sure we're learning the lesson that maybe we're, it's being asked of us to learn. So those are the things that concern me a lot, I would say. Are you saving for retirement? Yeah, I do. I still do a lot of the things just kind of habitually that we do because that's what we do. I certainly wouldn't buy real estate in low-lying areas of Miami or Phoenix right now, though.

But people are still doing that too. So, yeah, I mean, maybe that's another, that'll be another indication that we're going into emergency mode when the real estate market actually starts to take into account to price in climate, global heating and climate impacts, which I don't think it's really done yet. Or maybe when the insurance industry and reinsurance finally throws up their hands and they're like, we can't do this anymore. We're bankrupt. And then that'll have huge economic ramification. So maybe that'll be another indicator that we're finally going into emergency mode. But yeah, right now, everyone's still doing a pretty darn good job of pretending that everything's fine. It's like that famous cartoon with

the dog sitting in the fire. right. Yep. It's fine. I'm fine. It's all fine. Yeah, I don't know if I'll ever cash in on those retirement savings, but yeah, I'm still doing that. But yeah, I do, I do, you know, a few, just a few years ago when we had the two degrees was a safe level, right?

The whole narrative was like, oh, we got to do something and stop this because of our grandkids. Now the narrative is sort of, oh, like our young people are in big trouble and we have to do this to, you know, so that they have a future, right? So it's moved up a generation. And I would argue that it's, it's in the process right now of moving up yet another generation because I personally think that even us Gen Xers, there's a pretty good chance that we could end up, you know, feeling, experiencing climate impacts very personally and in a very bad way, right? Possibly even some of us, you know, eventually that's how we might lose our lives. So I just, I don't feel. like we are personally that we are in a safe space right now. And, you know, and I don't,

and I don't pretend to know what's going to happen. But, but people who say, you know, stay calm, you know, Kalmas is, he's being too alarmist. It's going to be fine. You know, we've got the IRA and electric cars and, you know, we're going to roll out carbon capture. Those people are being deeply unscientific because they do not know that. They have no way of knowing that things will be fine. So to me, I see deep uncertainty in the future and I see extremely large levels of risk that we are not in the process of mitigating right now. So I do feel like if, you know, we continue day by day to expand fossil fuels instead of ramping them down. And yeah, I do think billions of lives could be potentially at risk.

I do think that we will kind of go deeper into biodiversity loss, deeper into the sixth mass extinction, and that, you know, and into a hotter planet, which will stay hot for a very long time. So these, the heat and the impacts, you know, they do, even if we did, like, say we got to two degrees Celsius and it was terrible. It was like sort of, you know, the tropics were uninhabital or whatever, right? So get all these bad impacts, let's say, and we finally stop burning fossil fuels. It's not like the planet suddenly cools back down to pre-industrial levels because the CO2 stays in the atmosphere for such a long time. So suppose we do get to two degrees Celsius. And I should say right now, the Paris Agreement kind of posits a what, like, do you guys remember? It's like roughly a three degree Celsius world.

And right now, you know, and those are non-binding agreements. And it looks like we're on track to an even hotter planet than that. But whatever, the point is, whatever it gets to, whatever the peak temperature is, it's going to stay that hot or almost that hot for a very, very long time. And that's, and again, I don't think the public fully appreciates the irreversibility of, of what we're doing right now. Just so we can, you know, I don't want to be flipping about it, but, you know, a lot of it is. so people can just fly to Paris for the weekend.

Yeah. Faced with this dilemma, how then do you feel about the morality of more extreme actions? I'm not talking about like going to a museum and throwing paint at something or like laying down in front of cars on a highway. I don't think that that stuff, I think that stuff gets headlines and annoys people. I don't know how effective it is. I'm talking about somebody reading or watching how to blow up a pipeline and taking it to heart and doing something. Yeah. So I read Andreas Malm's book and I broadly agree with him.

I would actually maybe even go one step further and argue that those sorts of. So it's tricky, right? This culture hasn't really caught up with these ideas yet. So it feels very dangerous to talk about them. But I think if you take a step back and you just try to look at the facts of the situation, we have inanimate objects, equipment, you know, things like pipelines that are being built right now that are threatening the lives of billions of people. And I think that's a fact.

At the same time, it's really tricky because. We do need some, we can't just suddenly turn off fossil fields because a lot of people would die. But, you know, if you imagine your granddaughter in the year, you know, 2080 or something, or 2070, she'd probably kind of wish that some of us had been a little less polite, if that makes sense. So I think once things break down, like once we don't have food to feed everybody and, you know, coastal cities around the world are underwater and, you know, heatways are killing a million people at a go. then the sort of social calculus around, you know, sort of stopping this infrastructure by harder means will be completely different. And it's, so it's hard when you see that future coming, but it's not here yet.

And, you know, culture hasn't caught up with that yet. But, you know, I don't know. It's just, it's so hard to see world leaders taking us in the wrong direction like this and corporate leaders profiting from it. And, you know, the most powerful industry pretty much on the planet, the fossil fuel industry, kind of having all of its chips down on continuing business as usual and putting as many pipes into the ground as possible and fracking for all that fossil gas. and they show I see no signs that they're willing to even slow down, let alone kind of ramp things down. And I find that deepoo concerning. So, yeah, I think we are, we're kind of at a transition point, I think, in terms of how we think about this. And it's really unclear to me how that's going to play out.

Well, I'd say that's the kind of down note we like to end on. Oh, gosh. Can I end on just a little bit of an up note, which is kind of. Wait, wait, wait. Yeah, I thought you said that that's, that's not something we should be doing. But go ahead. Oh, well, I mean, cheer me up. Okay, but I think it's realistic, though. I would never give anyone false hope because I think that's actually, that just stops the movement, right? That makes the movement slow down. The thing that I, that kind of keeps me going. Two things, right? One is that the movement is strengthening pretty fast. More and more people are becoming climate activists. I urge anyone who hasn't become a climate activist to do so. That doesn't mean reducing your own emissions, and it doesn't mean playing it safe. So being a climate activist means taking risks because we have to shift social norms. And this is starting to happen more and more.

And I'm seeing a lot more people doing civil disobedience. I think when, you know, the actions I've done, the civil disobedience I've done, a lot of people have told me, like, it's inspired them to do civil disobedience. And that's kind of how it works, right? The more people who do it, the more it sort of becomes sort of, it seems possible. for other people. So that's number one. And number two is that we've barely even tried to stop this. Right. Like I like to point out that the climate provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act amount to something like 6% of what the United States spends on its military every year. So like we're still, we're, you know, we're dealing with trying to stop, you know, the,

breakdown of Earth's habitability at it's only 6% as important to us right now as, you know, spending on the military, which is already the most powerful military in the world, right? So that's what I mean when I say, we barely even started to address this. And if we did, I think we really surprised ourselves at how fast we could make this transition into emergency mode and save what can still be saved. So, yeah, my message is you got to fight. If you don't fight, then we kind of risk losing everything pretty much. So we're not going to get this for free.

It really kills me that these powerful people aren't willing to do the right thing. I started to really think of them as ignorant. We tend to think of billionaires and presidents and people in power as somehow especially smart, but they are not. They are acting so incredibly foolishly and so ignorantly right now. It kind of breaks my heart. And it means that we got a fight, which also breaks my heart because, you know, as a scientist, we, and I think, you know, I started out as a scientist thinking like this.

And I think a lot of scientists did. We're like, we're going to do the science. And then the politicians will do the right thing, right? And that sort of felt like how it was supposed to work. And that's not how it worked out. All right, good. I think it was a good mix of hope and despair. Peter Thomas, thank you so much for joining us today. And we really appreciate you taking us through all this.

All right. Thanks a lot, Jason and Matthew. It's great talking to you. Thanks for listening to another episode of Angry Phenagher. The show is produced with love by Matthew Galt and Jason Fields with the assistants of Kevin Medell. This is the place where we ask you for money. If you subscribe to us on substack.anggrayplanet.com, it means the world to us. The show, which we've been doing for more than seven years now, means the world to us, and we hope it means a lot to you. We're incredibly grateful to our subscribers. Please feel free to ask us questions, suggest show ideas, or just say hi.

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