Pablo Torre Finds Out - How to Re-Make the Climate-Change Horror Movie as a Rom-Com

Episode Date: October 4, 2024

Dirty lobster sex! Shirtless Glen Powell! Emily in Compost! Do we have your attention yet? If Hurricane Helene, a litany of facts and general guilt about global warming were enough, then we would've done something by now. Enter the climate culture war. Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson — co-founder of Urban Ocean Lab, marine biologist and author of "What if We Get It Right?" — envisions the future of planet Earth as a group project for 8 billion people, in which we deploy solutions, not dystopianism. How close to paradise can we get? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to Pablo Torre finds out. I am Pablo Torre, and today we're going to find out what this sound is. How can we expect African elephants to effectively erect and artfully insert their 50-pound penises in the conditions of chronic drought that we've created for them? Right after this ad. You're listening to Drap King's Network. I was taking my notes in the audience at the Brooklyn Museum at this big kickoff event for you and your new book. And I look back at it this morning, the morning after, and I was like, lobster plus golden showers.

Can you explain why I'm not the purve for just unilaterally demanding that we talk about this for a sec? There is no better place to start this conversation. So Perrin Ireland is this incredible illustrator, writer, but on Instagram, what she's known for is explaining the sex lives of different species while hula hooping in, like, girls. graphic detail. And like, nature is freaky. Today on Thirsty Science, the magical sea cucumber anus, sea cucumbers use their buttholes. When they're reproducing and they need more oxygen because they're consuming a lot of energy,

they use their buckle to breathe. When I was trying to put together this variety show, I was like, I really need you to do like a climate version of this. Right. Red dress, hula hoop. Explain to us how, climate change is fucking up the sex lives of other species and how it's our job to address the climate crisis

so they can just all fucking peace. Right, right. How are we fucking up their fucking? Exactly. When a lady lobster is interested in a male lobster for reproductive purposes, she lingers outside his den and urinates all over her out of her face.

If he's interested in the pheromones she's producing, she invites him inside. She sheds her exoskeleton, offers him her tender flesh. He clambers atop her, inseminates her, and they go their merry separate ways. But the Gulf of Maine, where these lobsters live, is warming 99% faster than most of the world's oceans now, isn't it? So, Brooklyn, how do you expect lobsters to find love? When Lady Lobsters are in deep channels further and further off the coast, and male lobsters are staying in the Gulf of Maine,

How shall the sacred ancient right of the golden shower persist? This is not what I think people expect when they show up at an event about the future of the climate. Well, it was called Climate Variety Show, and I take variety, like, very seriously. How can we expect African elephants to effectively erect and artfully insert their 50-pound penises in the conditions of chronic drought that we've created for them?

You know, whatever motivates us to get it together, another an act on climate, I'm here for it. Yeah, for me it turned out an NC-17, as it was framed, climate event is right up the alley of Pavlovorto. There we go. We got you in. All right, so it has been one hell of a week for the climate here on planet Earth. Hurricane Helene just carved a terrifying 500-mile path from Florida's Gulf Coast up to the Appalachian Mountains in Virginia and into the top of Tuesday's Vice-President. presidential debate. Let's turn now to Hurricane Helene. The storm could become one of the deadliest on record. More than 160 people are dead and hundreds more are missing. Scientists say climate

change makes these hurricanes larger, stronger, and more deadly because of the historic rainfall. Senator Vance, according to CBS News polling, seven in ten Americans and more than 60 percent of Republicans under the age of 45 favor the U.S. taking steps to try and reduce climate change. Senator, what responsibility would the Trump administration have to try and reduce the impact of climate change? I'll give you two minutes. Sure. So first of all, let's start with the hurricane. The reality of this kind of climate change discussion, the hush tones, the appropriate seriousness and the futility, is that we have all seen this movie before. We have.

And nothing's really changed. And so what I wanted to do here was talk to an expert who believes that we absolutely should take climate change seriously, but also take ourselves somewhat less so. Dr. Ayanna Elizabeth Johnson was the co-host of the aforementioned Brooklyn Climate Variety Show, the co-founder of the Urban Ocean Lab, a non-profit think tank, a marine biologist, a policy expert,

and the author of the New York Times bestseller, what if we get it right? Visions of climate futures. But maybe most importantly, for our purposes, Ayanna is also that person that people tend to approach while they're out late at a party, maybe a little drunk, with a burning question. So it's late at night at a party and people come up

and they're like, so how f***ed are we? And I'm like, oh, oh, hi. You've had a few drinks and now you're worried about the future of life on Earth. And I'm just like, I don't know, are you going to help or not? This is like the absolute curse

of the group project, you know? You can only carry so many people along with you on a group project and like 8 billion humans. Like, no one can carry that, right? I mean, we're pretty f***ed. But we do still have this range of possible futures and wouldn't it be great to have one of the better ones

and can we stop, please, pretending that it's this binary between apocalypse and paradise? Yes. When did it become clear that the implicit guilt of reality was not going to be enough of a prod to action here? Well, I mean, we've had the science on climate change for decades, right? So, like, if the facts were enough, if the sort of, like, guilt and concern were enough, we would have dealt with this, right? but to overcome the intense, you know, lobbying power of the fossil fuel industry and all the politicians they have in their pockets and the banks that are financing it all, right? We're going to need to win the culture war.

Culture war being the preferred terrain for climate science denialists. It raised a parallel out for me as somebody who covers sports and thinks about culture war because there are only so many, I call them like, you know, big tense left in American life. Sports being a monocultural one, the NFL, Taylor Swift. I talk about this stuff ad nauseum on the show. It occurred to me that an even bigger tent is the actual planet. Also, like, we shouldn't be finding about this. We should be collaborating about this, you know? And I feel like it's only in the last decade or two that this issue has become polarized.

So the vocabulary around all of this is also fascinating to me, because I try to be a student of when and how we are being spun by very clever people who know maybe sometimes better than we like to admit how to communicate to a broad audience. Yeah. So even the choice of the word carbon footprint. The term carbon footprint was actually a marketing campaign that Ogilvy PR firm did for BP. Ogilvy was the PR company that came up with this campaign. basically say, let's put the blame on individuals and call it your individual carbon footprint

and say it's your responsibility to lower it while we keep selling you this stuff. Of course, we should all be doing everything we can as individuals. I don't want to, like, diminish the importance of that. But so many times we don't have the choices we need as individuals because these things are things we don't have control over, right? Like, if you live in an apartment in New York City, you don't get to decide. where your energy comes from when you turn on the light switch. Like, this is a collective problem.

So this individualization of it all, instead of thinking about this as, like, a community, societal challenge, I think is just, like, really slowed us down. Yeah, the acceptance of the terms of the debate in literal senses has slowed us down. And people feel so guilty. Again, I think of, like, the death tax versus the estate tax, this thing that Frank Luntz, famous people, Holster helped Newt Gingrich realize.

And when people challenge it, I have a simple question. John, what triggers this tax? What event triggers this tax when it's applied? Your death. Exactly. And that ends the debate. Franklin also did the shift from global warming to climate change. I was going to ask you about that.

What did that do? What are we, what should we be framing this as when it comes to those very terms. So global warming as a term is accurate and climate change is also accurate, but people are less scared of climate change because it just sounds like, yeah, shit happens. You know, things change. We're all changing. Change is good. But yeah, I mean, that was the shift in that term based on his focus groups that we would have less societal pressure on government to do something about it if we just called it change instead of warming. Right, right. It's a parallel again to like, pro-life as again the default.

Like who's anti-life? It's just amazing to me how effective it is when you have to speak the language that someone else has set up for you. I do clearly think constantly about word choice and I'm always kind of trying to find new and yeah, more welcoming ways to talk about this stuff. So I would be glad for any tips,

any sports analogies or metaphors I could maybe be deployed. Right, right, right. Oh, that's a good. That's a good task for me. I'm really glad to have your help. So I love a metaphor. Everybody who's ever listened to this show knows this.

It's kind of a weakness, honestly. And it does occur to me that the Earth often feels like a team that is trading away all of its draft picks and effectively fucking over its future, as if the world is ending anyway. We're basically the Winnow Phoenix Suns. going all in on Kevin Durant and Bradley Beal and losing spectacularly, while, you know, the actual sun is putting all of us on the hot seat, as it were.

But there is also another way of seeing our future, another relevant statistic, which reading Ayanna's book first opened my eyes to. Because as of today, about 75% of the infrastructure that's going to be in place here on Earth in 2050 has yet to be built, meaning that we do still have a real chance to physically construct a very different kind of home for ourselves. That future has not yet been decided.

We could make it something beautiful, something artistically inspiring, instead of foregone and dystopian. But what we don't do nearly enough of as a pop cultural exercise is even begin to imagine what that could look like. One of the best examples we have in popular culture of climate futurism,

of a society in which we have just deployed the solutions that we have on renewable energy and conserving and protecting nature and green buildings, etc., is Black Panther. We at home. Powered by Vibranium, you have green buildings and trolleys in the city. Yeah, magnetic trains. Yeah, you have lush green landscape with forests and, rolling green hills and, you know, herds of animals.

And then, like, wham, you're in the city. There's no urban sprawl. There's no stupid suburbs, right? There's not a bunch of, like, twisty, concrete highways. It's gorgeous. So how to market this, how to present it to people. You mentioned already movies and film. And it, by the way, reminds me of a thing that I found out in your book,

which is that Adam McKay, excellent, of course, director of Don't Look Up and The Big Short and Anchorman and all this stuff. What Adam says is that he is not allowed to talk about climate change at home. Because, you know, you don't want to be Debbie Downer. Yeah. And so if the movie guy is like, okay, time to figure out how to, how to cinematically present this stuff. I think about the ways in which climate has been presented in Hollywood. Mm-hmm.

The day after tomorrow. Mm-hmm. Which I remember watching Stone in a movie theater and being like, oh, they're doing the thing where they're anthropomorphizing the cold. Like, they're running away from the future in the most, like, literalized way. They are presenting it in the most conventional, like, let's make climate into a monster. And I feel like in your book, what you're talking about is what about, like, rom-coms? How can we expand beyond just the sci-fi horror movie version of this? So Adam's film, don't look up. I really liked it. So I'm going to say this, not to critique him at all. I'm really grateful for his contributions to this work.

adore him. But because I think others who are listening may be able to relate to this, that like, once you're first digging in and learning about climate change and you're learning all the terrifying possibilities and the trajectories that we're on, it's so overwhelming. And you're like, holy shit. Do we even have a chance? And like one of the inflections out of that is like a why bother. And the other one is like running around like, oh my God, did you know about this. Like, we should all be freaking out about this, right? I feel like when we start to get Hollywood involved in this more and more, I mean, I don't think we need more documentaries. I don't think that that's going to help. But I would love more climate narratives in films. And I just really hope they're not

all apocalyptic because it doesn't give us something to work towards or for or imagine being a part of and rolling up our sleeves on and helping to make happen or just part of like the world. we live, like the context within which all of these plots are unfolding, right? So that's when, like, give me some climate rom-coms. Like, give me the meat queued at the composting facility. Yes, Emily and Compost. Emily and Paris, like, going to a city council meeting, seeing some incredibly hot Parisian guy advocating for better bike lane design and being like, swoon, you know? Like, all this stuff is happening in the real world, right? People are making decisions about how to, you know, whether and how and where to have kids based on their concerns about climate change.

People are thinking about what kinds of degrees they want to pursue because they're thinking about the kinds of future they're going to be graduating into, right? Like ignoring all of this is ignoring reality. And I feel like Hollywood's absolutely, you know, TV, you know, scripted sitcoms, etc., have really just had their heads in the sand on this. Yeah, yeah. It's hard to not accidentally pun every sort of conclusion. but I'll continue to do it by pointing out that yeah politics policy is often downstream from culture

from entertainment absolutely and so there's another part of your book where I was like oh this is this is a thing that I need to remember it's the Scully effect approximately two-thirds of women in STEM during the certain period in the last 20 years cite Dana Scully from the X-Files as the reason they got into STEM in the first place right the idea of I want to be that character that I admire think is cool, think is badass. It was not motivated by an infomercial for science and technology. Like back to the future, too, and all these ways in which our technology was inspired by film,

that our career choices can be inspired by film too, and the kinds of solutions that we want to work on in society, right? So Black Panther, I think, is potentially another example of that with the Shuri character, who's like this brilliant young scientist, right? He's coming up with all these cool solutions. Here are your communication devices for Korea. Unlimited range also equipped with audio surveillance system. Check these out. Remote access Kimoyo Beets. Updated to interface directly with my sand table. And then, of course, I turn around and see that actress who played that character in like a Shell Oil ad or something. Yeah. Today I'm meeting four students who are involved in Shell Eon. Eco-Marathon, they have to design and build ultra-energy efficient vehicles. I really want to

understand what it takes to be involved in the STEM movement. I call it a movement because I believe it's very powerful. And I was like, Homegirl, this is not helping. Like, get the bag, but there must be a better way. Yeah, we were counting on you. But now when you re-examine her doing that through what we've just discussed, of course they are clever enough to see that territory in this battle and claim that. But also they are just like putting in the money, right? Like there's no money on the other side, right? Yeah.

But the people who are most concerned about climate change, even though they know how serious it is, just like aren't investing with the speed that we would want. Right. They're sitting on so much money as if it's like the whole philanthropy thing, right? where it's like you have an endowment, and every year you spend like one to five percent of your endowment, I'm like, if you really believe that the future of life on this planet, for humans in particular, is as tenuous as you do,

then maybe paste yourselves slightly differently, you know? Like, what are you waiting for? The purse drinks. Yeah. Philanthropists, government. Dollars and cents. Yeah, what are we really talking about? What needs to happen there?

Well, we just stop funding the bad stuff and start really funding the good stuff. The thing that blows my mind is the U.S. government is still subsidizing fossil fuels to the tune of millions of dollars a day, which is wildly irrational and obviously counterproductive instead of really investing in this clean energy transition. And banks are a big part of that too. The big banks are still funding the expansion of the fossil fuel industry. So it's one thing to blame the fossil fuel industry, but then it's like the banks that are financing them. And in the U.S., the top four banks, J.P. Morgan Chase, Citibank, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America have, since we all agreed we should reduce emissions, provided about $1.5 trillion of funding to fossil fuel corporations. I would argue that that is going in the wrong direction.

And we should put that money into clean energy and really just embrace clean energy. and energy efficiency and these different ways of getting around and appliances, et cetera, as upgrades. Well, that's the thing. Again, this language question of like, they're trying to take your gas stoves. This is being an abrogation of freedom. Induction stoams are awesome. They boil water so much faster. You're not spewing, like, literal toxins into your home that cause asthma in kids and

leading to very poor indoor air quality, right? Like you're breathing in natural gas in your house. It's also dangerous in terms of combustibility. Like, why would we do that unless we have better options now? Right. If you want the new iPhone, why don't you want the new best version of a stove? Also, electric cars accelerate much better than gas cars, actually. Because less of the energy goes into combustion.

It can all go into forward motion? But can you get those sounds? Can you get... You can, which I really don't want us to. there are electric motorcycles now with fake muffler combustion sounds and I'm like,

there it is. Oh, the worst. Can we just leave that in the bass too? So you don't want to turn the volume all the way up? But I think it's important to mention that there is something that individuals can do on the finance side. If you're saving for your retirement

or you're investing, your money, please think about where you're investing. Because if you don't, if you're just in some general funds, for your 401k or your IRA or whatever, even just your savings account, odds are you're investing in the expansion of fossil fuels because so many of these banks are investing in the expansion of fossil fuels, right? Your credit card company, if it's J.P. Morgan Chase or City or Bank of America or Wells Fargo,

like that money is invested in fossil fuels. You give it to them to hold, and then they put it out the door and invest it so they can make profits, right? And then give you back your piece of it. And so I move my money, my retirement, savings, piddling though it may be, into a fund that's climate-friendly. And we could all do that. It could do more good in reducing the harm you're doing to the climate than all the eating plants and riding your bike could possibly do, because it's that bad to be financing the expansion of fossil fuels. So please, if you've got any money in the bank at all, Bankforgood.org

has some options and greenportfolio.com on the investing side that have like a bunch of different options you can look at. But yeah, I mean, the money question, I think it's something like to reach our climate goals. We'd need to be spending four trillion dollars annually on climate solutions. And let's be clear, there's like plenty of money in the world. It's just a matter of how we're allocating that. Right. Which trillions are going where? And it's, it's government and it's private. It's corporations, it's philanthropy. I mean, there's a whole chapter in here about what corporations need to do to get it right that I co-authored with Corley Kana, who's the head of policy incomes at Patagonia, where I'm on the board. They're trying to get it right. And it's a significant,

you know, outdoor apparel company, but it's nothing like, you know, a Nike or an Adidas, right, these big corporations that are shaping the whole market. And so they can lead by example, but if no one follows them, it doesn't really make that much of a difference. So trying to evangelize and show that it can be profitable to do the right thing. Again, in that overlap, maybe there's a place for sports to actually direct that monocultural funnel of money towards. Absolutely. And there's some great people, I know, like working in places like Nike trying to innovate on the sustainability front. I know some of them. I've collaborated with them, right? But it's hard to shift a global supply chain like that. I respect the challenge of it.

We've created this whole economy, supply chain culture based on fossil fuels. And now we have to shift somehow very quickly to a much more regenerative, renewable economy, a clean energy world. And we've never had to do that before as humans. So we're just like making it up as we go along. And I think we need to give each other some grace there. But also, you know. Also, just do it. That was good.

I like that. I'm a little slow on the sports jokes. Thank you. There's another part of your work in this book and at that event at the Book of Museum that did also drive home the point of we got one shot at this. I have been guilty of being enthralled by this initially

the idea of humanity being a multi-planetary species. Oh, yeah. Mars, we should in fact. Mars should be part of our approach here. I mean, it's a cute idea is how I would describe it. But now, given your journey through this, how would you describe Earth and Mars in this? Yeah, we had this game show, Earth versus Mars, with Roy Wood Jr. as the host and Wyatt Cinnack as, you know, rapping Mars and Dr. Kate Marvel, NASA climate scientist, reping Earth. Real name.

Welcome to Earth versus Mars. Where we go toe to to see which planet steals the show. Some people say we need to go to Mars. Some people say that Earth is where it's at. we are going to find out whether or not interplanetary gentrification is the right move. I think it was very clear that Earth is the best planet at the outcome of that. Dr. Marvel, I will start with you. Make the argument for us staying on Earth and not gentrifying Mars based solely on Earth's supply of food and water.

Drama music. We have both of those things. Sure, sure. I rest my case. All right. That is a fair point. Yeah, there is no food or water on Mars at the moment. Wyatt was really dealt a bad hand. Yeah, I mean, he knew when he was signed out for. Yeah, polling was.

I mean, we have an atmosphere where we can breathe. We have 8 million other species. We have this incredible biodiversity. We have like a gorgeous ocean, right? We have everyone we love here. We have all this delicious food here. Temperature, even with climate change, is much better than any other planet. We can actually just walk around outside with like normal amounts of clothing on without a breathing apparatus or a space suit and just like hang out in fields of wildflowers and at the beach and like make art and go look at it. And instead we're like, let's take rocket ships across the void and like live in a weird container where the atmosphere is like, like not suitable for human life and it's like a hundred degrees below zero. Like why would that be an alternative to pursue?

Right. Let's get the people who are posting and consuming these videos on Twitter about how New York City has become a hellscape. Look at this. Look at how they just leave the garbage. So full. They would love going to the place where you would die within a month if you, you would. actually what? I think it's just like such a distraction because we also like really need that ingenuity and those resources spent on this planet solving the problems that exist here.

Because even if we find a way for some people to go live there, like we've got eight billion humans on this planet. Like we're not all going to Mars, right? You know, it occurs to me also that your job of marine biologist. Yeah. I don't actually like scuba, I haven't count fish anymore. It's been a really long time, but that is. But your origin story as that, it's one of those jobs, again, we're both children of the 80s. It's one of those jobs where you'd go around the classroom. Yeah. And kids would say I would like to be a marine biologist.

Total dream job for like elementary school kids. And you are the only person I've ever met who became one. I don't know what that says about me, just like stubborn as hell or something. It's just like, you find something cool. And you're like, maybe I'll be that when I grow up. But that was the first one. And the one that, like, I kept coming back to in different ways. But I made this, I was, I could, because I would say very wise decision to study abroad in Turks and Caicos.

That's, that's pretty good. And so I just, like, spent a semester snorkeling, hanging out with fishermen, like, learning the Latin names of all these Caribbean. Well, played. Coral species. And trying to understand, like, how, what would sustainable fisheries, management actually look like. And so it's just so amazing to get to have that be part of my world and think about all the work I did with fishermen on different islands in the Caribbean after my PhD research and for my PhD research, just really trying to understand the human part of this,

what people who spend their whole lives and have generations worth of knowledge about what these things are supposed to look like, how these ecosystems are supposed to work and how off balance they are. I mean, my favorite question to ask fishermen is if you could write the rules to manage fishing, what would they be? What were the things they would say? Oh, all sorts of stuff that I would not have anticipated

because so often the blame gets put solely on them for the decline in fish populations, right? And I was guilty of this too. But in reality, of course, there are many different factors, climate change being one of them, pollution being one of them. They blame cruise ships and jet skis for all the noise

and pollution is so dissuade with that, scaring fish into deeper waters or further offshore. They're talking about big fishing boats from other countries coming in with big nets. They're talking about tourists with tons of sunscreen on, just like slathered on right before they jump in the water. And then you see like this iridescent sheen of like oil slick on the surface. And they're like, the fish don't oil.

like that. Right? So they're seeing all these different factors and then the one policy put in place is like, we're going to regulate fishing. And they're like, fuck off you guys. We didn't cause this by ourselves, right? We're down to be regulated as part of the suite of solutions, but we're not down to be scapegoated as like the only problem here. It's not quite that we are solving the problem of climate change. What instead are we trying to do? We're trying to just create the best possible future, right? And in that spectrum of options that exist still, this perfect, this perfect world as we imagine it with like nothing changed, no pollution, that ship has sailed, right? We also do not have to have complete apocalypse. And so how close to paradise can we get,

right? I think it's so important to actually value those increments because they are major. It's not like a tiny, like the difference between, you know, three degrees Fahrenheit of warming and five degrees Fahrenheit of warming is a huge fucking deal, right? We're talking about major differences in sea level rise and storms and droughts and wildfires and heat waves associated with that. You know, we have the challenge of communicating about both things that seem really, really, really big, planetary and really, really small, like,

a tenth of a degree. And how do those things match up and like, how do we communicate about them? And my answer is, I usually avoid it and just talk about the solutions. Like, okay, so we know we're in this planetary pickle. Where do we go from here? Like, how do we each figure out our roles and just do this building of the future together instead of like just worrying all day about worst case scenarios? It reminds me of a larger problem that we always, I think, are grappling with in politics and culture, which is how do you make your self-interest feel immediate enough to act upon?

And I should acknowledge that we are technically a sports show. Yeah, let's talk about sports. I'm ready. If you're a sports fan, this is something that you want to go well, the whole adapt to the climate future you're describing thing. Yeah. Because sports, we need the outdoors. A lot of sports happen outside. I mean, watching the Olympics this year, I mean, Paris is not known for its heat waves, but it is now a place that has heat waves, right?

And it was so hot during the Olympics, like, athletes were wearing ice-packed vests before and after their events to just keep their core body temperature at a normal level, right? Not ideal if you're the competitor. to have to do that. Crazy. And having to change literally the rules of the game to give people longer breaks or more water breaks because the human body is just not built

for these kinds of climates like extreme exertion in these temperatures and levels of humidity. And on the Winter Olympics side of things, we're talking about very few places left where you can reliably have Winter Olympics quality snow. I'm not trying to watch a Winter Olympics

that takes place inside of a sound stage. Yeah, not as cute. No, no, no. And I'm also not trying to watch a summer Olympics where the river, the Sen, is too dangerous for at least some of the competitors to want to actually compete in. And I think about air pollution associated with that too, especially like the neighborhood I grew up in Fort Green didn't really used to have a lot of traffic. And now it's constant bumper-to-bumper traffic going by all those ball courts. And I'm just thinking about people exerting themselves, breathing all that in, all of that pollution, which is just burning fossil fuels, right? And so there are lots of benefits to dealing with the climate crisis, and one of them is like we could just play more sports outside.

So when it comes to the political choice at hand, I do want to make this immediate in the context of this election. Yeah. in your mind, how compromised is Donald Trump when it comes to fossil fuel? Actually, I get that he's not your preferred candidate nor mine. The reason I meant that was my reaction was because there's a very specific thing he's done during this campaign season that shocked even me. And I have very low expectations for that man, right? So he literally said to fossil fuel executives, if you donate one billion, to my campaign, I will make sure that you get regulations lifted on your industry when I am back

in the White House and you will make like a hundred billion dollars in return. He's selling federal policy to the highest bidder, which is so disgusting and so dangerous, right? I mean, the last time you was in the White House, he rolled back the federal agent. sees he, you know, was in charge of, rolled back over 100 environmental regulations, clean air, clean water, safety around fossil fuel extraction and practices. The deep water horizon, oil spill kind of stuff with the valves. He's like, whatever, who needs safety valves? Like, those kind of regulations were rolled back as well. Took the United States out of the UN Climate Agreement, which is like, we don't, we don't want to participate in this collective effort to address this crisis.

Right. appointed a literal fossil fuel executive as the head of the State Department, right? These are the kinds of things that we can expect him to do again. Like when people show you who they are, believe them. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Rex Tillerson. Rex Tillerson. That's the dude. He seems nice. I mean, there's been an analysis of what could we expect as far as U.S. greenhouse gas emission trajectory. if we have a re-election of Trump versus if we have a Harris administration. And it's diverging futures. And it matters so much because the U.S. is not anymore the largest annual emitter of carbon pollution, greenhouse gases, but it is the largest cumulative emitter in world history. We're responsible for something like a quarter of all greenhouse gas pollution, just the United States.

We are the Michael Jordan of emitting greenhouse gases. I was hoping for. I finally are going to be helpful to you. But like, and also a lot of other countries look to us to either meet the standards we are setting or turn to us to say the U.S. isn't doing this, so why should we? So it actually really, really matters how we show up on the world stage. And I'm just really worried about, yeah, what a Trump administration would mean. And I also think Harris doesn't get nearly enough credit for her leadership on climate, right?

Spanning decades of her career. I mean, she has taken fossil fuel companies to court and extracted many millions of dollars and damages from them for their malpractices. Established a climate justice office when she was working in California was, you know, one of the original signatories to the Green New Deal back when that was initially introduced, which was not immediately a popular thing to do. And was the deciding vote on the Inflation Reduction Act, which was signed two years ago and resulted in like $370 billion invested in climate solutions by the U.S. government really spurring something like 170,000 new clean energy jobs in the last two years because of that legislation, right? But I do want to say that local elections also really, really matter in that climate rom-com way. Like where are we having the meatcutes at the community composting facilities? if we don't have city council members

who are creating those, right? And the like, the cute side eye glances in the bike lane when you're stopped at the red light, like, who is that hottie peddling next to me? Like, if you have protected bike lanes. Right. It happens to be a local comptroller, Glenn Powell, who is shirtless and glistening with a sweat

that can only be generated by someone who has been biking around for a very long time. I mean, I think there's a lot of fodder here for plots, is all I'm saying. You know, when it comes back around then to any sort of lesson here about how to message this stuff. Yes. In terms of like what actually does work with a broad population, what have you found out because the stuff that we've been trying for decades clearly has not worked? Love for future generations. That is the winning argument.

I have to say, I've been hearing people talk about this for a long time, like use that messaging for so long. And as someone who knows that the problem is here and now, I'm like, why are we pretending this is a future thing? And it was just one of those things where I was just like, I don't know about all this mushy love stuff, you guys. But it's like 12 times more effective as a message in the polling. It's an echo of what we had seen from the right wing when it came to, you know, no child left behind. When it came to let's just hammer the idea that we are in favor of kids, that we are the ones protected. the children. And what it turns out is that, yeah, it's not fear versus hope, it's love for the people who will actually inherit this thing. And that's really a normal thing when you're exposed to nature

to just think it's cool. And so wanting to keep that around, whether that's whales or elephants or lobsters or whatever, just be like, wouldn't it be great to just not screw these other species over either. Right, right. Wouldn't it be great if this lobster could pee on another lobster in peace? In peace, and then just like have some hot sex and make more lobster. But like not too hot. Well, I was going to say. Yeah. I was going to say. Hot sex, not hot ocean water. Let me just be really clear about that. That's right. Soft shell, temperate, not too hot water. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Dr. Ayanna, Elizabeth Johnson, thank you for

proposing a different way to, you know, get it right. Thank you for having me. Pablo, let's do this thing. Pablo Torre finds out is produced by Michael Antenucci, Walter Avaroma, Ryan Cortez, Sam Daywig,

Juan Galindo, Patrick Kim, Neely Loman, Rob McCray, Rachel Miller-Howard, Ethan Schreier, Carl Scott, Matt Sullivan, Chris Tumenello, and Juliet Warren. Our studio engineer

by RG Systems. Our sound design by NGW Post, our theme song, as always, is by John Bravo, and all of us will talk to you on Tuesday.