Factually! with Adam Conover - A People’s History of Climate Change with Eugene Linden

Episode Date: April 20, 2022

We’ve known about climate chance since the 80s. So why has action been so slow? Journalist and author of Fire and Flood, Eugene Linden, joins Adam to discuss how climate change went from an issue of non-partisan agreement to one that is highly politicized. They explore 30+ years of climate inaction, and how the novel idea of “going core-ward” could be one solution to carbon emissions. You can order his book here: http://factuallypod.com/books Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Hello and welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. Thank you for joining me once again as I talk to an amazing expert from around the world of human knowledge who's going to blow my mind with all the incredible shit that they know that I don't know and that you might not know. We are going to have a great time together. Now, as always, I want to start off by thanking everybody who supports the show on Patreon. And if you want to join them, head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover. You will get bonus podcast episodes, exclusive standup I don't post anywhere else. And you can join our live community book club where we read a recent work of nonfiction together and discuss it with the author. Our next book club selection, we just chose it, is Never Enough, The Neuroscience and Experience of Addiction by Dr. Judith Grizzell.

And we are going to be talking to her on June 11th. So if you want to join us for that event, head to patreon.com slash adamconover. Or just listen to this podcast, which is and will always remain free. So let's talk about this week's episode. For the next two weeks on Factually, we are going to be talking about climate change, one of the biggest challenges facing humanity this century,

or frankly, this millennium, and a topic that there has been a lot of big news about recently. So we thought it was a great time to do a special two-part episode on this topic. Now, this week's episode, we are gonna be talking about the recent history of climate change, which is necessarily going to be a little bit of a bummer. But next week, we are going to be talking about the new IPCC report that just came out

and the surprisingly optimistic view it gives us of what we can do about climate change. Right now, though, let's talk about the stark reality, because climate change is happening right in front of us right now. It's not off in the future. It is today. And we are not doing enough to stop it. The Paris Agreement was a very promising diplomatic agreement, but then the U.S. pulled out of it. And most countries aren't on track to meet their commitments to that agreement anyway. Policymakers, especially in America, where Republicans often doubt the mere existence of climate change, have paid lip service to meeting our climate goals, but have not done nearly enough. Even when we have a golden opportunity to push our society in a more

sustainable direction, we seem to screw it up. Take the recent spike in gas prices, for instance. Now, you'd think that this would be a golden opportunity to remind folks, hey, you can go buy an electric car. There are electric cars on the market right now. We could maybe massively incentivize people to do that by putting money behind electrification, give folks a big gold rebate akin to, you know, cash for clunkers way back in 2008. Hey, maybe that would help, right? Well, that's not what we're doing. Even in environmentally conscious California, the plan by the government to deal with gas prices is not to incentivize electrification, but to cut everyone a $400 check to help them

buy more gas. The same gas that, you know, while it is powering our cars, is also murdering our children's future. And this lack of action is especially frustrating because we have known about climate change for my entire life. Climate change has literally been national front page news since 1988. That's the year that James Hansen of NASA's Institute for Space Studies testified before the Senate that the Earth was getting warmer and that our use of fossil fuels was the cause.

And it's not like this argument fell on deaf ears. Climate change was actually a nonpartisan issue at the time. The first President Bush even seemed to want to do something about it. But despite that moment of near consensus and seeming willingness at the national and international levels, no major plan took hold. And then the fossil fuel industry began its massive misinformation campaign against climate change and against the science. And now every shitty prediction that we've been hearing since 1988 is coming to pass.

The last eight years have been the hottest ever recorded, and last July was the hottest month ever recorded. Hurricanes are increasing in frequency and severity, and so are wildfires. The mercury reached 108 degrees in Portland last summer. Gloomy-ass Portland, you know, the place where people go, oh, maybe when climate change really hits, I'll move to the Pacific Northwest. Isn't it kind of misty and cool up there? Well, no, it's on fire right now. Now, look, I want to be very clear. Just because we are feeling the effects of climate change already doesn't mean that it's too late to do something about it. It absolutely is not. There are incredible things that we can do today that will change the future climate of the planet massively for the better.

And we always have the opportunity today to build a better tomorrow. That's always open to us, and it is incumbent upon us to take those steps because they're there waiting for us to take them. But if we're going to take those steps, we're going to have to reckon with the fact that we haven't been taking them for the last 40 years so we can figure out why and overcome those obstacles. So let's ask, what caused all of this inaction? What were the chances that we missed? Well, today on the show, we have the perfect guest to answer that question because he has been reporting on climate change since it first became a public issue nearly 40 years ago. His new book is called Fire and Flood, A People's History of Climate Change from 1979 to the Present. And I think you're going to love

this conversation. Please enjoy this conversation with Eugene Linden. Eugene, thank you so much for coming on the show. Pleasure to be here. So when did you start covering climate change? Pleasure to be here. So when did you start covering climate change? Oh, I went back late 80s. I think I did my first article for Time. So I've covered it from the get-go, really. Wow. I was aware of it before then.

I mean, I knew about the blue ribbon panels and stuff from the late 70s. So what was the coverage like at the time? It must have been very different than the conversation we have about climate change today. You say you filed your first story in the 80s. Do you remember what that story was? Oh, I think it was just about how this is an issue that is going to be big in the future. You were right. Well, the thing is, in some ways, the coverage today is very much like the coverage back then, and that's a tragedy. You know, it burst on the scene as a mainstream issue in 1988. And the famous James Hansen appearing before the U.S. Senate on a sweltering day in a summer when thousands of hot temperature records were broken and saying it's 99% certain that

humans are changing the climate. And so then it became an issue for a while. And at the beginning, it was nonpartisan. Famously, George Bush, the senior H.W. Bush, who ran, people tend to forget, he was going to be the environmental president. And he said, those of you who are worried about the greenhouse effects should consider the White House effect. And sometime between when he was running for president, when he became a president, the lobbyist effect came into play. And he had promised to have a

White House conference on climate change. By the time it came time to do that conference, no one from the White House was allowed to mention the phrase global warming, which would be a bit like having a conference on pandemics today and not being able to mention COVID. So from the get-go, this is 88 and 89 when he was in office. He had the conference, I think, in 90. And then again, what had happened was that the business interests, particularly the fossil fuel lobby, had mobilized to sort of cast doubt and delay action on the issue. And they did that with extreme effectiveness for the next 20 years, actually.

So that's why I say, in some ways, the coverage hasn't changed that much. What has changed is, of course, climate. And we now are seeing the effects of this and of not having taken action on the issue in the form of, you know, not just the temperature records and the sea level rise, but some ugly surprises, things like what the rapid intensification of hurricanes that go from Category 1 to Category 5 in 24 hours. We didn't see that before. I talk a lot about how on a version of my show, Adam Ruins Everything, we did an episode on climate change. And we talked about how climate change would eventually lead to worsening wildfires. And I thought that was 10 years, 15 years in the future.

It started happening just a year or two after we published that episode. There've always been fires in California where I am, but, you know, suddenly we started seeing every single year, a record fire that we've never seen before. And then the following year it would top that. Well, yeah, I think in 2018, it might've been, there were five of the 10 largest fires in California history. Yeah. I mean, this is why I wrote the book. I mean, what happened was that way back in 1993, I wrote an article for Time saying that the insurance industry was going to be the white knight of climate change. Because... No one really thinks the insurance industry is the white knight of anything, generally. Well, they were the white knight of seatbelts, believe it or not.

Really? And electrical standards, lobbying Congress. Well, because they were picking up the price of not having them. And I thought because that was an existential risk for the insurance industry, if you underprice the climate risk, you're going to go out of business. And indeed, in 92, 12 insurance companies became insolvent after Hurricane Andrew. So I thought they were going to price the risk. But what I underestimated, well, let me fast forward. In 1980, just a year or two ago, after the Camp Fire, which was right in your area, I think, did $12.5 billion damage,

the New York Times was quoting a senior lobbyist for the insurance industry in California saying, yeah, we're scrambling to understand this risk. And I thought, what? You guys have understood this risk from the get-go. And indeed, the reinsurance side of the insurance industry did some of the best reports ever in terms of appraising the various types of risks and climate change and how they'd express themselves economically. So that opened my eyes to the incredible momentum to business as usual. Even in an industry that lives and dies by pricing risk accurately. They'd underpriced risk in California for the fires.

And what that points to is the perverse incentives at the retail end, as opposed to the catastrophic risk end. And at the retail end, you get paid and you get your bonuses and profit sharing by writing policies, even in harm's way, assuming that the risk is in the price. But it wasn't. And so what happened, the real issue is that the insurance industry has a genius for spreading and offloading risk. At the retail end, you can cancel policies every year. As famously in California, they imposed a moratorium. At the end of the moratorium, then can cancel policies every year. Famously in California, they imposed a moratorium.

At the end of the moratorium, then the insurance companies got out. And those that stayed upped the premium sometimes by a factor of 10 and upped the deductibles. I know of one case where it went up by a factor of 30. Wow. So the insurance industry has its ways of offloading risk. And one of the most ingenious came after that Hurricane Andrew in 92 that I talked about, where a guy named Everhard Muller at Hanover Ray, a big reinsurance company in Europe, came up with this idea of something called a cat bond. What a cat bond does is, for investors, is you invest in this bond and you're betting, say, for instance, that there won't be a Category 5 hurricane in Miami in the next three years. Maybe not a great bet.

Well, no, but think about it. Even if the risk has gone from 1 in 100 to 2 in 100, on any given year, that's still only 1 in 50. And this actually, because they pay such a high rate of interest, say 8% or several more percent than a treasury, they were very attractive to institutional investors. What that meant was all of a sudden the insurance industry, which had to backstop all these risks, suddenly could get trillions or hundreds of billions of access to hundreds of billions of dollars of institutional money if they needed it, and offload a good deal of the risk. And that's exactly what they did. To those institutional investors.

They're not the ones taking the risk. Yeah, yeah. And you'd say, why would an institutional investor take a risk that these very smart guys at the reinsurance companies don't want to have? And the reason is, is it's a limited risk, that three-year window. And so, cat bonds exploded. Lots of people were willing to take it. And that meant that a lot of policies could be written in areas that might otherwise not have policies. And so, what that opened my eyes to was the perverse incentives of the way we do business that perpetuate business as usual and make us blind to risks like climate change.

Essentially, we have a business system or an economy that is not designed to run off cliffs because we have no way of representing the long-term risk, such as climate change. And so 30 years and 34 years after 1988, we still haven't done much about this risk. We've talked about it endlessly. I've written about it since then. Others have written about it, conferences, everything else. And yet emissions are now 60% higher than they were in 1990. And in 1990, they were already a problem, as you can tell, because we were already changing the weather back then. Now, we're changing it even more. So that's why I wrote this book. I felt like my great-grandchildren, and they emerge from their caves and peer around at the hot, you know, royal and hot world.

They'll find a copy of your book floating in the water. Yeah, well, they'll want to know how we blew it so badly, right? Yeah. I mean, it seems like we have an endless capacity to deceive ourselves about the amount of risk that's out there. Like, one thing that always stuck with me is, I forget where I saw this. I think it might have just been someone on Twitter who figured this out. But Barack Obama, who I, by the way,

happened to work with on an upcoming show that I have coming out on Netflix called The G Word. It's gonna be out soon. There's a news article, Barack Obama purchased a home on Martha's Vineyard. And someone looked up the flood maps, right? I forget what USGS or whatever it is, the flood maps for the area. And they were like, he's going to have water on his first floor within 20 years.

You know, it's like, this is like, it's a mathematical certainty that, you know, it's like a house on the beach. And, you know, the question that raises house on the beach. And, you know, the question that raises is if a man who certainly has had the highest level of briefing about climate change certainly knows as much about the problem as anybody else is going to make a bad investment, right? Not even like, not even saying, hey, it's a problem to buy a house. It's like, it's not a good investment to buy that house because that house is on the beach. If he makes that mistake, what hope do the rest of us have? Like, it seems like we as a species have a difficulty taking this problem as seriously as we should. I don't know what your view is.

Well, absolutely. I think another excellent example is Miami, the hottest city in America, which by almost every measure of climate change, and it's not just winds and floods and sea level rise, it's also temperatures and everything else, is going to be an almost unlivable city in 20 to 40 years. And yet, people are flooding into it from all over the country and all over the world. I think one of the reasons is a lot of the people flooding in are actually quite wealthy. And given the tax advantages, for instance, I heard of one case where a very expensive condo would be paid for in three years if they lived in Miami. In other words, and so they're playing with the house's money, so to speak, and they don't think whether, you know, if something happens over the next 20 years, it's not that they don't care.

It's just they care more about living there now. Because people are living and moving into harm's way everywhere. Even after the fires, of course, the real estate markets are still smoking hot in coastal California. And so, yes, we have a capacity for denial. California. And so, yes, we have a capacity for denial. And it's hard to process a thing that is unfolding on it, you know, even if it's unfolding before our eyes, we can't really imagine where it's going at this point. And one reason we can't imagine it is that where we're going is to a climate that humanity has never experienced. Even if we abide by all the terms,

and every nation on Earth abides by all the terms of the Paris Agreement, the estimates are temperatures would rise from pre-industrial levels between something like 8 and 11 degrees Fahrenheit. That hot hasn't happened on the planet since before the ice ages, three or four million years ago. And it's open to question whether a climate that hot could support the agriculture to feed 7.8 billion people, much less the two billion that are going to be added.

That's where we're headed. No one, you know, people don't grasp it. That's where we're headed. No one, you know, people don't grasp it. That's why I kind of like the movie Don't Look Up, where, you know, an asteroid is hitting the planet in a matter of weeks, right? And the producer on their science show says, you know, our audience likes science, but keep it light. It's like, it's the same thing with climate change. It's like, oh, yeah, yeah. Intellectually, I think we're not prepared to grasp it. And clearly, you know, people have more important things or seemingly have more important things on their lives. One instance I like to give is that, you know, everybody says, well, we'd have to lower our standard of living to deal with climate change. You know, but climate change could eliminate our possibility of living. And I would say that game is worth the gamble, right? Yeah. I mean, we're nothing is going to lower your standard of living like, you know, temperatures

that are too hot for you to safely go outside, like fires that force you from your home, like, you know, mass migrations of people from one area to another that, you know, are overwhelming and difficult to handle humanitarian-wise. Those are all standard of living issues as well. Right, exactly. Switching to an electric car and having to charge a little bit more often is, or maybe taking the bus, you know, is a small price to pay compared to all of that. Well, also, I mean, quality of life. I mean, COVID showed us or showed the residents of New Delhi what life would be like without air pollution.

They could see the Himalayas for the first time in their lives. You know, Beijing had clear skies, all of the most polluted cities in the world. LA was so clear. It was incredible. Right, right. All of this. So, I mean, it's not just the standard of living. It's a quality of life issue. And I mean, the switch to renewables is a big plus in many ways. 8.7 million people

around the world have premature deaths because of air pollution each year. That's not a climate change issue. It's another issue. But they're all together. And so, you know, there was this mystery of why we didn't act. And I thought maybe it'd be worth unpacking it. And I use this device of four clocks in the book. The first clock is reality, what actually has happened. Get back to that. The second is the scientific clock. And, you know, the scientists were faced with an impossible task of basically understanding a phenomenon even as it's unfolding. And there's a built-in lag in science just because you have to gather the data and then you have to analyze it and peer review it and publish it. And so there's a couple of years behind reality.

And then there's the public, which is still basically in the 1980s. A Gallup poll a couple of years ago said that 45% of the respondents said they would not see serious impacts from climate change in their lifetimes. Wow. This is at a point, of course, where we're already seeing serious impacts from climate change. I mean, there's already places where it doesn't snow, you know, it doesn't snow where it used to.

It doesn't, the lake doesn't freeze over anymore. Like in, you know, living memory, it has gotten warmer. And people still believe that they won't see it in their lifetime, but they certainly already have. I'm sorry, please. No, in the West, you're in the most intense drought in a thousand years. Yeah. And one of the reasons is climate change, because a warming globe basically has left

a lot of the Southwest in a rain shadow. The whole, the rain belt has been shifted poleward. That's one of the reasons you're not getting the rain now. But then, you know, my fourth clock was business and finance. And that turns out to be the most underappreciated, but also the most important, because for the first 30 years of climate change eras, which I date to 88, they've been a drag anchor and extraordinarily successful in delaying action on the issue. And why is that? I mean, maybe there's an obvious answer to that, but as someone who's been following it for decades, you said that, you know, we knew as early as the late

70s that climate change was real and that it was a bipartisan issue until the lobbyists got started on it. And why? Well, for the first 30 years or so, most of the business community, not just the fossil fuel lobby, but the business community at large, saw regulation to deal with climate change as a threat to profits. Only recently have the multinationals and the large financial institutions recognized that climate change itself is a threat to business, not just profits. So for most of the time, they saw, and they had this playbook, which was developed to fight tobacco regulation and then optimized or improved

to fight action on the ozone hole and then optimized to fight action on climate change. And the playbook was deny the consensus, demonize the scientists, and most of all, say we have time, which means we need to study this thing. Because if you want to delay action, the best thing you can do is study it. Form a blue ribbon panel and come back to us in five years, study it, study it to death. And that's exactly what's happened because in the early 90s, unfortunately, that giant scientific consortium, the IPCC, gave the business community a gift on a gold platter of by saying in its first assessment in 1990, you know, much needs to be done, much needs to be studied. And I, in the book, I say, ironically, the IPCC was actually a force for delaying action rather than taking action in its early assessments.

in taking action in its early assessments. And part of that had to do with its very structure, because it was not just a bunch of scientists getting together. Policymakers, national representatives also were part of it. And there were a hell of a lot of countries that did not want to see action on climate change. Think Saudi Arabia, the oil exporting countries, a whole lot of countries. And so most people don't read these many thousands of pages, even policymakers. What they read in politicians is the executive summaries. And those executive summaries were very ambivalent even, for instance, because they exploited the natural conservatism of scientists who were loathe to go beyond the data. So in the first assessment, there's virtually nothing about the melting of the permafrost,

which could contribute tens of billions of tons of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere and already is contributing quite a significant amount. They were very modest in all over-the-map estimates of sea level rise. modest in all over the map estimates of sea level rise. There was even mentioned the possibility that the ice sheets would grow larger, not that they would begin to collapse as we've seen in Greenland and in the West Antarctic ice sheet. And so these assessments weren't helpful, and they were a gift from God to those who wanted to delay action. And I'll give you a specific example. An economist named William Nordhaus was trying to model economically the economic impact of climate change.

And his early papers took the IPCC findings and specifically had the thermal inertia of the oceans would delay a warming signal, which was ironic because we were already seeing warming, until well into the next century. And his early estimates back in the 90s for a hit to GDP in 2100 from climate change were that one estimate in an article called Rolling the Dice was to the US economy, it was a quarter of 1% of GDP. No one is going to jump out of their chair and say, we got to take action on something that 110 years later is going to have a quarter of a percent hit to GDP. The actual hit

to GDP is likely to be well over 14%, according to the major insurers and such who've done some of these studies and Moody's analytics. And that's global GDP, which is greater than any Great Depression we've ever had. And it's probably far larger than that because the derivative effects of a warming that's strong are going to be what you mentioned in terms of mass migration, societal breakdowns, things like civil wars. And a financial crisis that dwarfs the 2008 that would be repeated every year. It wouldn't just be a one-off. Why do you say that? Why would that financial crisis occur from? Well, think about California. People have a house, right? They've had that house. They've had fire insurance in that house. They have a mortgage in the house. They're an empty nester.

They want to sell the house and move. They can't get fire insurance. And the guy who wants to buy the house can't get fire insurance. How do they get a mortgage? And what is the price at which they will have to sell? Somebody pointed out to me, well, they can just stay in the house. Well, that's not an option for a lot of people. And real estate markets are driven at the margins. There's only 1% or 2% of that that's sold and traded every year. And if you can't sell that, percent of that that's sold and traded every year. And if you can't sell that, think of what happened in 2008. That's exactly what happened in the overheated markets of Las Vegas and Arizona and Florida. Yeah, but it's a different kind of overheated market this time. Yeah, right. And then, of course, people abandon them. And then, of course, it's a banking crisis because you don't own your house.

You'll usually if most of your house, if you have a mortgage, it's usually the bank that owns most of your house. So if their collateral is underwater, that, you know, then we what we saw in 2008. Again, underwater, literally. Yeah, well, yeah, or on fire. Yeah, well, yeah, or on fire. And so what is already beginning to happen is that WIRED just had an article on climate migrants, you know, moving out of the fire zones in California because either their house burned down or they're having trouble with the insurance or something to what are perceived to be safer places. New England is being one of them, which is very interesting.

Yeah, but I mean, that's a great point. So, because I think a lot of people have this facile idea that like, well, some places will become uninhabitable, but you'll move. But if you're living in a home that is subject to rising sea level rise, you're living on the coast.

If you go down to Malibu Beach in Los Angeles here, people have built houses directly on the water, directly on the water, you know, 20 feet, 30, 40 feet from the waves. You know, sea levels rise. Those houses are unlivable. Well, they can't sell them to anybody. Like if you own that home, you know, who are you going to sell your house to that's going to enable you to move? And so that's an asset. The value of that asset becomes zero. And yeah, you're right. That is just like the housing crisis of the financial crisis of 2008, because suddenly all these assets that everyone has been balancing their books on have suddenly evaporated.

Well, exactly. But 2008 was a one-off, it was an overheated market and a collapse. This is not going to be a one-off because the next year is going to be worse. Yeah. And the Rhodium Group, ProPublica and the New York Times did a study. The Rhodium Group did the study of 50, all counties, every county in all 50 states. And they did five types of climate risk. They did sea level rise. They did floods. They did five types of climate risks. They did sea level rise. They did floods.

They did wind storms. They did crop yields. And they did wet bulb temperatures. What happens is when there's a combination of heat and humidity, if it gets above 95 degrees on what's called a wet bulb, which is what you drape a wick over a thermometer, and then that temperature is the lowest temperature at which there can be a evaporation can keep it cool. So once you get above that in wet bulb temperature, the human body can't sweat enough to cool itself down and you die of hyperthermia. That's the temperature at which there's a level of wet bulb temperature at which

humans literally just cannot survive outside. Not outside, right. For long periods of time, or even relatively, because you can't sweat enough to cool off. Sorry, just to give people a vision of this, because you're probably familiar living somewhere where, oh my God, it's so hot out. I'm not going to go outside today. I'm going to stay in the air conditioning. Imagine if it's so hot outside your home that if you go outside, you'll die.

That's what we're talking about. So I'm sorry, please go on. For any length of time. Well, in this study, there's quite a number of counties. Oh, and then they give a number for each of these risks for each county. And so you not just have one risk. Let's say like in Miami-Dade County, you have flood risk, you have a sea level rise, you have wind risk. And they aggregate these risks and give a score to each of these counties. And quite a number of counties, including some of the most affluent counties in the United States, are going to be unlivable, basically, not that long term.

2040 to 2060 was their timeframe. Numbers of counties in Louisiana, a number of parishes in Louisiana were going to be wet bulb temperature unlivable, raw temperature unlivable in some counties in Texas and Arizona. And so on and so forth. Hilton Head, you know, great destination for tourists, was going to be another unlivable one. Palm Beach County. And so, you know, these are the highest priced counties there are. And then, of course, in the Midwest, you know, crop yields and flood and things like that.

There's a question where if you move out of that county, you know, no one is going to buy your house, right? And so it's just what you said. So, I mean, very quickly, and I say quickly, in a matter of years, we could see climate risk expressing itself as a real estate crisis and then a financial crisis. Unbelievable. Well, we have to take a really quick break to read some ads, which is a funny thing to have to go do

in the middle of a conversation about a financial crisis, societal collapse. But we got to go do it. We'll be right back with more Eugene Linden. Okay, we're back with Eugene Linden. Your book is called Fire and Flood, A People's History of Climate Change from 1979 to the Present. I do want to talk about that history because you're in a unique position of having covered climate change for almost that entire period. Is it that is one of the reasons that progress has been so slow that we didn't really understand the scope of the problem back then? Or did have we really known the whole time how bad climate change is going to be?

Well, we've known some of the number of people known the whole time has expanded dramatically over the years. But there's still a significant number of people who don't even believe it's real. And one of the problems has been that in the late 90s, the issue became politicized. And once something becomes politicized, facts don't matter. If the messenger is deemed to be illegitimate, then they're not going to tune in. And the best example of that, of course, is very recent. It's COVID. It became politicized instantly, and people are dying of the disease and denying that it exists. Well, if a virus can become politicized and somebody can deny it exists even as they're dying of it, it's very easy to tune out from climate change once that became politicized.

And it seemed like what happened, I think, in the late 90s was that after the Kyoto Agreement came into effect, which we didn't sign, by the way, ratify the U.S., the business interests felt we got to stop this. felt, we got to stop this. And so a concerted campaign began to sort of paint action on climate change as part of a liberal agenda, which was going to be imposed. Now, you know, it's physics. It isn't liberal. It isn't conservative. You know, a former prime minister of Australia put it, they've taken a matter of physics and turned it into a question of values. They've taken a matter of physics and turned it into a question of values. But that's, if you wanted to lay action, that's brilliant. Because all of a sudden, it's just those liberals wanting to tell you what to do, like Trump using it. You've created an argument. You've turned something that wasn't an argument into one that becomes, hey, you can do an infinite number of talking head debate shows about it,

when in fact, it's a topic that does not need to be debated. It's a topic that is simply a matter of science. Well, exactly. And the media sort of fell into this trap as well, because this curse of both sides-ism. I mean, when you't have, when you have a story about cigarettes and cancer, you don't bring in somebody who said that they don't cause cancer. And yet you did bring in somebody who says the scientists, there's still active debate

long after the consensus was rock solid. But so here's a great question I have for you because you've mentioned cigarettes a couple of times and cigarettes, you know, the debate over tobacco, it's a very early memory of mine hearing about that in the news, you know, hearing about the tobacco executives going in front of Congress and, you know, claiming that their product didn't cause cancer. And the thing about that is, like, we won as a society, You know, we beat the tobacco executives. People still smoke, obviously.

People still die of lung cancer at an alarming rate. But there's a general societal agreement about smoking and lung cancer. Those companies were, you know, punished in many ways. They're, you know, they're anathema in polite society, et cetera. Like it's not as though we eradicated the problem, but the denialism ultimately lost the war and the forces of science won. And it took decades, but it did happen.

But that was around the same time that climate change started coming up as an issue. We're talking about the 80s and 90s. So why is it that the climate denialists in business have been so much more successful than the tobacco industry denialists? Well, I think that simply put, everybody had in every but every family in America had somebody who died 20 years early of lung cancer or heart disease or any of the other, you know, derivative diseases of tobacco. Whereas climate change is so spread out and amorphous, you know, and it has hit people and parts of the country episodically. And I think that is some part of the answer is that the price still seems to be off in the future. And as a society, we're just brilliant at not paying attention to things that aren't happening to us immediately. And that's why I say we're an economy designed to run off cliffs, because long-term threats

just don't matter to us. They're overwhelmed by the momentum of business as usual. But the strange thing is that it is happening to us immediately, just very slowly. The New York Times, I believe, did a map a couple years ago where you could plug in your zip code and you could see how the climate has changed where you live over the past few decades. And pretty much throughout most of the country, you plug it in, it's gotten at least a couple of degrees warmer. And, you know, I've read stories of people saying, you know, I forget where, but just someone saying, oh, I've lived in New Jersey, this town my whole life, and the lake used to freeze over and we would go ice skating and it hasn't frozen over in 20 years.

Like basic stuff like that is happening to us, but we're not cognizant of it because the, you know, the timeframe is so long. It's where the, I hate to use the cliche, but where the frog being slowly boiled in water, except the frog, I think frogs do actually notice. We're not. The fallback position for the deniers since climate change became undeniable is that it's natural cycles. I did a radio show just the other day and it was call in and one of the questions was, well, I mean, have you considered this might be part of a natural cycle? Think about that question. It implies that the 10,000 climate scientists on the planet who've gotten PhDs and studied this their entire lives never considered

that it might be part of a natural cycle. It's the very first thing that any climate scientist is going to consider. And so you, of course, all the modelers and everybody else take into account all the different cycles ranging from the many hundreds of thousands of years, orbital cycles, down to the decadal and down to the annual cycles like El Nino and, you know, the North Atlantic Oscillation, things like that. People take these things into account. And then the signal for climate change comes out even stronger. Sunspots, everybody brings that up. It's like all these issues have been addressed exhaustively.

But there are people who are still bringing it up as though this is something, gee, these guys have a blind spot. They haven't considered natural cycles. And that gives you an idea of what happens when an issue is politicized and that things that make no sense all of a sudden make sense to a part of the population just because the messenger has been disparaged. And that's part of the, you know, one of the prices of the disparagement of expertise over the last few decades has been a loss of credibility among the people that we used to

look up to, you know, to try and understand these issues. I mean, when you tell that story about George H.W. Bush saying, you know, if you're worried about the greenhouse effect, you should learn about the White House effect and him being, you know, a climate president to some degree. You tell that story and it's so tantalizing. It feels like, oh my God, we were almost there. Like, you know, we had this president who the scientist said, Mr. President, we have a problem. And he said, well, as the president, I should solve the problem. And it almost happened. Can we talk more about that time? I mean, were there real options at the time that could have been taken, things that could have been done back in the late 80s, early 90s, missed opportunities? Yeah, that's a very interesting question. I'll give one and then give a broader answer. One of the first things Clinton did was try to have a BTU tax. And, you know, a British thermal unit. And basically, that would have been, it wasn't meant for climate, but it was meant for energy efficiency.

So like a tax on what? it was meant for energy efficiency. So like a tax on what? It's somewhat similar to a gas tax or a carbon tax, but it wasn't. But in any case, it might have had the same effect. Tony Leisowitz, the pollster on climate, said that that was one of the reasons that swept Newt Gingrich into power. The business lobby and fossil fuel lobby, they targeted all the key congressmen in the various constituencies on the committees and such and said, it's going to cost these jobs in this area, these jobs. And Lee's always said, Clinton almost lost his ability to govern. And of course, they did lose control of the Congress. There were other reasons for that as well. But that gives you an idea of how powerful this lobby was. But let's go back. One of the major things that didn't happen in the, because what I try to write about is not

just what happened, but what didn't happen that could have happened. And that's your question. What didn't happen was we did not get China, India, and the other big developing nations to sort of leapfrog technology, leapfrog fossil fuel technology, and power their industrialization with things other than fossil fuels. Everybody talked about it, but no frogs left. And why didn't that happen? And before saying that, the consequences of that not happening is that China, which emitted half the greenhouse gases that we did in 1990, now emits twice what we did, what we do now, and indeed has more emissions than the entire

European Union and G20 countries combined. And that's all since 1990. So all that growth happened since 1990. And so they could have powered their economy with solar or whatever. Well, it's not just solar, it's others. Now, the counter argument to that, which is a serious argument, was that renewables weren't ready. Well, I use the analogy in the book that renewables weren't ready back then is like having a football coach who shoots his star quarterback in the leg and then benches him

because he's not ready to play. Carter administration started to try and increase innovation on renewables. Reagan set back solar by 10 years by eliminating the tax credits and other things for renewable energy. And it's been start and stop ever since. Go back to the end of the 19th century, every renewable we're using today was part of the energy portfolio because people, it was a period of rampant innovation. Thomas Jefferson talked about, not Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Edison talked about harnessing the power of the Gulf Stream. You know, 8 billion gallons a minute, 15 miles off the Florida coast, that water that could drive impellers and you could deliver power. This is the end of the 19th century. There were solar farms in Egypt.

There were wind power was being tried in Italy. One of the oldest forms of power, wind power. Yeah, geothermal. And indeed, I quote a writer named Robert Thurston who wrote for the Smithsonian institution an article in 1901 saying that you know we really have to deal with fossil fuels or it might change the weather and we expect that there will be solar power well what happened something better came along something incredibly incredibly cheap, incredibly portable, and just packed solid with energy, and that was oil. And so research and development of renewables went into a coma for about 70 years, came out of the coma briefly during the Carter years,

went back into a coma. If we actually encouraged China and India and other developing countries to try and leapfrog and really meant it. The economies of scale are such that grid parity would have been achieved vastly sooner. I'm not saying don't use any fossil fuels. Just focus on building out distributed power rather than a grid. Things like that. It could have happened. It didn't happen. And so the counterfactual is real. And we're living with the consequences

right now. The other part of that and why they didn't develop that way was that the West was presenting, and particularly the US, a mixed message on climate change. On the one hand, we're saying, do as we say, not as we do. And we're, of course, using coal willy-nilly back here, and we're telling them not to use it or not to use it as much. And so these mixed messages were that these guys can't, if you're a Chinese policymaker, you're saying, you know, get your act together before you come to us and tell us what to do. And we weren't willing to help them. We weren't willing to subsidize any of it or incentivize any of it as well.

And so what could have happened didn't happen. And then the other part of your question is, yeah, back then it was a matter of physics. It was bipartisan. Of course, you know, the Republican Party has always been the party of business, so they were much more open to being influenced by lobbyists and the various interest groups that came at them from the fossil fuel industry. Well, let's not let the Democrats off the hook. No, no, they're not off the hook either. I mean, one of the tells about how far we've got to go Look at, I mean, one of the tells about how far we've got to go is that it has never been a voting issue in a presidential election.

Al Gore didn't run on it, even though he was identified with the issue. He was afraid of the UAW and losing Michigan and Illinois. John Kerry, our climate negotiator, didn't run on it. He would have been great on it had he been elected. Both of them would have been, but, didn't run on it. He would have been great on it had he been elected. Both of them would have been, but they wouldn't run on it. Jay Inslee and your guy, Tom Steyer, ran on it and got nowhere. No, he's not my guy, but sure. California. He's from California, but I don't endorse everybody from California, to say the least.

But yeah, sure. Tom Steyer, I remember him. Yeah, but he ran on it. Didn't get it. Didn't get, didn't get off the blocks. And think famously in the 2020 election, Biden did make it an issue and to his credit, brought it up in the debates and said, we're going to end fracking in Pennsylvania. God, Trump jumped on it and said, you've just lost Pennsylvania. And then instead of saying, yeah, we have to do this at some point, his spinmeisters started furiously backpedaling, this is Biden's, saying, oh, it's going to take

a really long time and we didn't really mean it. I mean, come on. If you can't if you can't own up to saying we've got to move away from fossil fuels in 2020 after 30 years of information and just everything happening that was predicted and happening, when is it ever going to happen? And well, and, you know, by the way, after Biden got into power, there were some attempts at some very big climate bills that would have been incredibly massive, and they were killed by a Democrat who owns a gigantic coal business. He's a millionaire many times over because of his coal business. That shows you how fragile the consensus is. The recent Gallup poll said that lots and lots of people are worried about climate, you know, across the country and support action on climate. And yet one senator, well, basically two, Sinema also wasn't really helpful on it, you know, can delay action on it. And so, yeah, I think we've got to look to, you know, consumers are 70 percent of the economy. I mean, consumers, if they really do care about it and start thinking about making purchases and lifestyle choices with one eye on climate, the politicians will follow.

The politicians will never, ever lead on this. That's the lesson. Well, the problem is that, you know, first of all, I'm a big believer that the idea that our individual consumer choices can solve climate change is a fantasy and that we need, you know, more systemic change. And I think, uh, uh, here's something I've been thinking recently about, uh, the, the renewables market. And I'd love to get your point of view on it because, you know, for the last couple of years, it's been, Hey, electric cars, electric cars are going to be big. You know, we got Tesla, we got the, you know, solar panels in your home on your rooftop, all that kind of thing. And it's starting to look more like, just talking about the auto industry, for instance,

that they are building electric cars to a certain extent because they know they're supposed to. They sort of need to get out ahead of it to a certain extent. But they're very content to let that be 1% of the market. For the Ed Begley juniors of the world, right, the rich 60- 60 year old white guys who want to own an electric car, they can buy a Tesla, they can buy, you know, a Nissan Leaf, whatever it is. But at the same time, the car company is going to keep pumping out for everybody else, cars that get, you know, 20, 15 miles a gallon. And, you know, I mean, I, you know, I have friends saying I talked to a friend and, you know, she said, hey, when our gas price is going to go down.

And I said, jokingly, when you get an electric car. And she said, well, I can't afford an electric car. My car payment would be too high. And my thought is like, you know, these these fuckers could, you know, Toyota, if they felt like it could make a twenty five thousand dollar electric car, but they don't feel like it. Well, I think that's changing. And I think GM and the others are going to be coming out with that.

Here's what's going on is what happens with every major corporation when there's a technological change. Think back to the 80s when Microsoft gave the operating system to Bill Gates. And all of a sudden, Microsoft has a larger market capitalization than IBM. Sorry, IBM gave the operating system to Bill Gates. Yeah, they said, we don't want to make the operating system.

Here, Bill, you handle this part. And they also gave away the personal computer. And big companies are loathe to jeopardize their installed base and their money-making engine. Because whoever is running the money-making engine usually has sway in a big corporation. And as a consequence, Tesla has a larger market capitalization than every automaker in the world combined. I mean, that's ridiculous. It sells, it's like 1% of the, less than 1% of the market, as you say.

And yet, the investors are saying it's a more valuable company than all the others combined. That's absurd. And so that lesson gets through to the other companies. I agree. I think for most of their history, they wanted to show that electric cars were impractical. And then they got their ass handed to them by Tesla. And now they're all struggling to catch up. And they will. But what's interesting to me is that with high gas prices, you're absolutely right. That people are buying electric vehicles because of hybrid or plug-in hybrids. But not nearly as many as you would expect. You

would expect to see we have sky high gas prices. You'd expect to see on the cover of every car buyer's guide how to buy an electric car. You would expect to see all these companies coming out with cheaper electric cars as a result. But Elon Musk,, Elon Musk, for instance, said, you know, hey, the government needs to reduce the price of gas. That's what we need to do to solve this crisis. And I was like, that was weird. That was a weird thing for him to tweet, right? Because he runs an electric car company. You would think he would see this as a huge opportunity to sell more electric cars. But it looks like maybe he's taking more of an Apple strategy, right? Like Apple doesn't want to dominate. They don't want every phone sold to be an Apple, right?

They don't want every phone sold to be an iPhone. They're very content to sell 25, 30% of phones in the world, but they get the higher margin. They get the, they sell to the rich people. And it looks to me like, you know, that's what Tesla is very happy to do. Tesla doesn't need to sell the Toyota Corolla or the, you know, Honda Fit of electric cars. They're very happy to sell. Tesla doesn't need to sell the Toyota Corolla or the Honda Fit of electric

cars. They're very happy to sell the sports cars and the SUVs of electric cars to the rich folks. And I worry about the prospects for that for actually electrifying the transportation system. Sorry. Go ahead. Well, I think you raise an interesting furrow. First of all, Elon Musk is a totally weird guy. To say the least. He's also a contrarian, as you noticed on other things. But there may be a logic to his thing, which is that I get these massive margins on my cars, and if GM gets into it, I'm shit out of luck. And so maybe he thinks, well, lower gas prices and GM is not going to get into it. But I don't understand what goes on his head. I do think that, look, we've only had these super high gas prices for a matter of months now. So you can't expect an instant switch.

I do think there's a lot of anecdotal evidence that there is a lot more consideration for, you know, a Toyota plug-in hybrid, which gets 70 miles to a gallon now that a gallon of gas costs, what, seven bucks in California. on a ski trip, borrowed his mother's car, which is a plug-in hybrid, because it saves him $60 on the round trip, you know, than using his beater, which, you know, gets half the gas mileage. The other part of it is the build-out of charging stations. And that is almost metastasizing. I mean, it's going very rapidly. And then battery technology is improving by leaps and bounds. One of the interesting things, one of the reasons, like, to put this in perspective, there's a guy named Sokolow at Princeton University who famously came up with this idea of wedges about 15, 16 years ago of what we have to do to get to lower carbon emissions to save the planet. One of his wedges was a shift to EVs. I interviewed him for the book, and he said that one of the positive surprises was that

the shift to electric vehicles is vastly faster than he expected way back then. vehicles is vastly faster than he expected way back then. And one of the reasons for that, and it gets, is really counterintuitive. And that is that the smartphone led to tremendous innovation in battery storage. And all of a sudden, battery storage for EVs became far more of a viable thing as a result of the smartphone battery storage. You just scale it up. Lithium-ion batteries and others. And there's tremendous ferment and innovation in battery storages right now.

I always question whether spending $8 billion on a legacy technology, lithium-ion batteries, was a great idea for Musk because the next generation might make that obsolete. But all these things are happening. And if they're happening faster than Sokolow expected, who's been living this for his entire research career, it's a tell. I think, for instance, I'll give you an example. The promised land for renewables, in my mind, is what's called deep geothermal. Five to 12 miles below the Earth's surface is an infinite source of 1,000 degree heat.

You drill down to it. Yeah, good point. It's very hot in the Earth. Yeah, thank you. Right. We've known this forever. The trouble is it's really, really hard to get the earth. Yeah, thank you. Right. We've known this forever. The trouble is it's really, really hard to get to it. Yeah. A group out of MIT and the drilling industry has teamed up, and they're using a technology

developed for fusion research for superheating plasmas, and it's called millimeter beam wave beam technology. And what they can do is, you know, when you get down five miles, the rock is incredibly hard, five to 10 times harder than sedimentary rock. That's been the stopping point to get to the DP. They can vaporize that rock using this, these millimeter wave beams. And they proved it in the lab. They're going to have a pilot project next year in two operational plants in 24. It's called Quaze Technology, Q-U-A-I-S-E.

It's a private company. I'm not invested in it. No, no, this is not me talking my book. But it's me talking the future because 61% of the electricity in the United States comes from steam turbines. That is dozens of terawatts of electricity. Any one of those things, if they can drill this hole, and it costs competitive, and it is, in 100 days, it raises the possibility of retrofitting basically the majority of electric pants in the United States to a source of steam from deep heat.

Wow. At prices that are better than not only all renewables, but all fossil fuels as well. So we just tap the heat at the core of the earth and use that to power. Well, you're not getting to the core. You're only going five. You're not even getting to the mantle but it's hot as hell you know i mean i know you go a little bit towards the core you're going coreward you're in the going forward yes you're going there but um you you don't have to go that far you just have to go farther a little farther than we've been able to go and now this

looks like it can take us there. Wow. I've never heard of this before. That's incredible. No, there hasn't been a lot of play on it. It vaporizes the rock, literally vaporizes it. And it vitrifies it. In other words, the hole is lined by glass, which is formed from the vaporized rock. And so the technology is conventional.

It's 100 years of drilling technology with this special sauce added at the end to get down that deep. So the possibility, 75% or 80% of the electricity worldwide comes from steam turbines. So it's not just the U.S., it's everywhere. Think about what that could do. That could be the sort of deus ex machina that gets us vastly lower emissions very, very rapidly. All we need is, I would say, throw money at these. They say they have enough money to do these wells. One of their big investors is a major drilling company called Neighbors, which made its name in drilling for oil and gas. So it would be the height of irony if oil and gas technology helps eliminate the need for oil and gas. Wow. Well, let me ask you

on this note to end that I expected you, based on how this interview began and based on what I know is the subject of your book, I would expect you to be a deep pessimist because you have had a firsthand seat at the failure of us doing anything for decades and decades. But you are really striking an optimistic note at the end of this interview. So I'm curious about whether you feel that you are an optimist or a pessimist on climate change overall. And what do you think the correct calibration to have is? Well, I'm a realist.

And what that means is that we are in for it because we're already in it. And we're already, you know, from 2010 to 2019, there was $3 trillion in weather-related damage, nearly double the weather-related damage of the previous decade. So we're already in it. The question is, are we in it to getting to that uninhabitable world that I mentioned at the beginning of business as usual? We're going to pay a price for ignoring it for 30 years. But I do think because there are ways that we could drastically reduce our burdening of the atmosphere and even take out carbon from the atmosphere, that I have to believe we will do that. The problem has been the essential blindness of our

economic system to long-term threats. And so what I'm hoping is, is that money talks and that if there's a cheap source of electricity, the world, you know, it's a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to its door and it'll save us in the process, even if we're oblivious to the real long-term threat. That's my hope. So I don't know whether that makes me an optimist. I mean, I very much hope that you're right. And, you know, I myself was a bit of a skeptic about the technological change being the deus ex machina. But then when you propose that, right, when my first time hearing about this technology i'm like i god i hope that's right god i hope that works i could match you step

for step and being a pessimist on the uh on technology will save us but every now and then it comes along and it does yeah i'm not and to be clear about antibiotics very true yeah think about uh sanitation you couldn't have a city over a million people until sanitation was invented Think about antibiotics. Very true. Yeah. Think about sanitation. You couldn't have a city over a million people until sanitation was invented because disease would knock down the population. So every now and then- Tunneled under every single one of our cities to start moving water around to stop people from dying of cholera.

Yeah, it's true. We do really, humanity does do huge things when we have the proper incentives to do it. Technology is the only reason we have a population of more than 200 million people on the planet. That's the only reason. It's agricultural technologies first, and then mechanization and industries. I mean, it has in the past. The trouble is we're running out of runway. And by the way, we won't solve the climate crisis, but we mute the edges. We still face like five other environmental crises that we have to deal with. Well, maybe in the future, we can have

you on to talk about some of those. I'm happy to do that. I can't thank you enough for coming on, Eugene. The book is called Fire and Flood, A People's History of Climate Change from 1979 to the Present. As always, you can get it at our special bookshop at factuallypod.com slash books. Thank you so much for coming on, Eugene. Well, thank you. I've enjoyed it immensely. Thank you. Gene. Well, thank you. I've enjoyed it immensely. Thank you. Well, thank you once again to Eugene Linden for coming on the show. If you want to pick up his book, Fire and Flood, once again, you can get it at factuallypod.com slash books. I want to thank everyone who supports our show at the $15 a month level on Patreon. That's Adam Simon,

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