The Chaser Report - Climate Scientists Sniping Billionaires | Sami Shah

Episode Date: August 31, 2022

Sami Shah joins Dom as Charles journeys off to America for rehab*. Sami gives Dom the rundown on the disasters happening in Pakistan currently, and provides a genuine call to donate whatever you can spare to https://donate.edhi.org for the flood campaign. *probably, idk. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Chaser Report is recorded on Gadigal Land. Striving for mediocrity in a world of excellence, this is The Chaser Report. Hello and welcome to The Chaser Report. Dom Knight here and Sammy Shah is with us today because Charles is jetting off to America to do something glamorous. And I'm sure if he were here, we'd spend half the podcast talking about because that's just how he rolls. Sammy, welcome back. No, thanks for having me. I've always seen myself as a alternative to Charles.

So yes, this works out well. So if you want to ramble about any, you know, toilet paper you've bought and can't sell or anything of the sort of stuff he normally does, you're most welcome to. No, I'm Charles. I'm Charles without the business sense. One thing Charles has that I'm always envious of is his ability to figure out how to monetize things. And I have no such ability at all. He is an amazing hustler. He's been like that ever since high school when he started selling computers.

He would make computers and self, like build them and then sell them under the brand CF-4. PM computer really yeah and so that was his sort of side hustle besides school and then he started the chaser so before he started a largely failed business he did a very good job of you know being a computer guy yeah every group needs one person like that like my like I was never my problem is I'm solo right I've never been part of a group so and and my I just like making stuff but I'm not good at monetizing it so I end up making a lot of things for free or for low money and Charles is one who I needed a child in my group when I was going up.

Well, we did a newspaper for five years that made absolutely no money and, in fact, we lost a fortune on it, but that's okay. Maybe he's not that good at it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think your view of Charles is perhaps a little bit optimistic. But anyway, so let's talk about, I'm going to catch up on the news from Pakistan actually today

after we play this annoying ad break. The Chaser report, now with extra whispers. You could have removed that by signing up atchaser.com.com. at age slash podcast, by the way. Anyway, so there's lots that's happening in Pakistan. There's some political chaos, but also some challenging natural disasters because Pakistan is a country in the world. And it seems like that happens just everywhere all the time at the moment.

Yeah, absolutely. So, well, okay, do you want me to set the picture first with the political stuff or do the natural disaster stuff? Let's do the natural disaster. Let's start with a natural disaster. Yeah, we'll get onto the human anthropogenic disasters soon. Why don't we start with what's happened? Because you've been, I saw on News Weekly, your podcast, you've been raising money.

Yeah, so basically, you know, climate change, the thing that scientists had been warning us about for years and years, and that's saying that it will be catastrophic is now happening, and it is catastrophic. And the catastrophe is unfolding exactly where we knew it would first in developing nations at an unprecedented level of destruction. So, Pakistan has, what, 260 million people and 230 million people I can't remember, and a lot, a lot of people, a lot more than Australia does. And in Pakistan, there also happened to be the largest amount of glaciers outside of one of the poles, like the Arctic or Antarctic poles. So unprecedented rainwater, like the kind of rain that we have not ever seen in the history of the country, or maybe in the history of the region, And also glacier melt at the same time happening because of global warming has resulted in flooding kind of a perfect storm, if you were literally, of floods that have created a massive inland lake in the country that's visible from satellite imagery.

So one of the things that we keep seeing is over a thousand people dead. I've worked in journalism long enough to know that that's always just what we know. The numbers will be way higher than that. They will be much larger than that. That's all we have confirmed dead right now because obviously we can't even survey and access more large parts of the country. 30 million people displaced. That is 30 million people without homes or a place to live and sleep and stay who now have to figure out where to live because their homes are destroyed by flooding, devastating by flooding. The flooding, the pictures that are online are shocking.

I mean, just the kind of stuff that you don't, like I was trying to remember, like we used to see. Remember when this tsunami happened in Japan, the one that went to the Fukushima met down? That tsunami, the footage that came out was, you know, the first time we really saw what tsunami looks like in real time on television. This makes that look mild. Even though it isn't a tsunami, it's a very different thing. But it's just, it's the Indus River has overflown at a level it never has before. Just massive devastation. Houses collapsing, road submerged, cars being washed away.

families and entire villages being completely wiped off and everyone's just kind of watching not knowing what to do because we didn't listen to the scientists when we had the chance and now we're fucked so one in seven Pakistanis is currently displaced which again in the in a country that size is huge the cost of rebuilding is currently valued at a minimum minimum of 10 billion dollars 15% of the country's population currently is displaced and yeah it's it's a horrific thing so I've been asking people to give donations everyone's been doing the donation thing that's all you can really do the problem is with a lot of these countries particularly in Pakistan there is a lot

corruption there is a lot of political opportunism the way there is in most developing nations and so as a result you want to be careful who you give the money to you don't want to give the money to someone where it just ends up in a politician's pocket as they buy themselves a new helicopter and the only organization that is a hundred percent trustworthy, completely recommended, is one called Edie Foundation. That's E.D.H.I. Edie. And it was created by a man called Abdul Tatar, which is, and you know, one day I can tell you about him. He's a remarkable human, he was a remarkable human being. He died a few years ago. It's the world's largest

voluntary ambulance service. And they have proper flood relief plans. They're doing everything from providing pads to women, sanitary pads and everything to women in this flood relief areas who no longer have access to any health care stuff they're also providing just food and shelter and all these things so if you go to donate dot edh that's edh

dot com I'm pretty sure it's dot com or is it no dot org so donate dot ed dot org and if you donate money it goes a long way and because of the conversion rate I think one Australian dollar right now is equal to

let me just see one Australian dollar currently as of this recording is about 150 or 151 Pakistani rupees that's a good amount of money you could literally give 20 or 30 dollars

and and miss a couple of cups of coffee and save a life properly make a massive difference so I don't see why you wouldn't so at CS donate.eduHI.org and the first link there is for the flood relief campaign but I'm fascinated by the idea of glaciers because we talk so much

much about glacier melt and how it's going to devastate the Pacific. Certain figures in Australian politics have joked about that at various points in time. But we know that, you know, when the Antarctic continues to melt at a pace, when the Arctic does, that's going to raise sea levels. But I hadn't previously thought about what happens to the ice that is on land. And, of course, in that region, you've got the Himalayas. There must be a vast quantity of frozen water, which is also melting. So what's happened, we, I guess, saw the headlines about record heat in the north of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, the whole region over the summer that's kind of coming to an end now.

What's the status of these glaciers? Is this going to keep happening every summer that the, that there's extreme heat and then just all that locked up ice is just going to continually release till there's none left? Well, I mean, yeah, there's a lot more ice still to melt. I mean, this is just the tip, literally the tip of the iceberg, if you will. But the other thing is, yeah, this is what scientists have been saying is going to happen, and it is happening exactly the way they described it. And this is a mild level. It's only going to get worse.

Like, I'm at that point now where I don't understand why we aren't skinning and hanging billionaires from light poles, why every climate scientist isn't currently a sniper on a rooftop taking out conservative politicians and newscasters because every single thing that they said will happen, which was dismissed by, you know, for shareholder value is coming to pass. And countries like Pakistan, which, you know, Pakistan's got a lot of problems. I'm not saying that it is a country that is blame free when it comes to a lot of the issues that faces. Of course it does. But it contributes one percent of global pollution. You know, one percent. Countries like, Dubai and countries like America and countries like, you know, all of these places contribute

significantly more and they are not going to experience the side effects the same way places like Pakistan and India and stuff are. And so it's pretty bizarre when in Saudi Arabia you've got a notion for this 170 kilometer long continuous city that's a total white elephant. Apparently, when we talked about it the other week, they're going to build, they are going to build like some sort of stage of it to just prove that it's a stupid idea. A proof of a concept, you know, proof against concept as it will turn out to be. When you compare that absolutely extraordinary waste of money and sheer egotism with the relatively

cheap cost of, you know, remediating disasters like this that just keep happening, and we've just seen, you know, we know in Australia we've had this whole notion of one in one hundred year floods happening a couple of times this year, but we don't have glaciers on our, you know, on our continent, ready to just absolutely melt and downs us? So what on earth do you do about that? Like I'm saying, I think you've got to start killing people. I don't know. Like, I don't know what else to do.

But people are dying, right? The point is killing people is on the table, and it's not those responsible for this, or at least responsible for failing to do something about it, who are in the crosshairs. And so we have, it's quite surreal when you look at what's happening globally. We've got Liz Truss about to become PM in the UK, where her own the ideas that really seems to be cutting taxes, in Australia, we're not really taking action on oil and gas exploration, despite all the claims to, you know, the stuff that Labor is doing to try and address climate change more than before. We're just nowhere with this problem, aren't we?

Yeah, we're not. It's, it's, I honestly don't know. I look, I'll be honest, I was a person who much like everyone else has tuned so much of this out, right? We get caught up in, in, you know, in Barnaby Joyce, wanking on a desk to whatever, or... And there is space for that. There's got to be space in the narrative for desk wanking, or we just can't enjoy ourselves. I know, of course. Absolutely. The Chaser Report, news a few days after it happens. Maybe what we need is more glaciers in Canberra melting.

If we stuck a glacier on top of the parliamentary flagpole that slowly melted and just dripped water down, but that would actually be a call to action. Look, one of the only ways we ever get politicians and billionaires to take anything seriously is things like, you know, when it directly affects them. I always think back to like Daniel Andrews in here in Victoria, who suddenly became pro-Euthanasia laws because he had to see his mom or his grandmother. I can't remember. I think his mother going through that kind of experience.

And all of a sudden, it changed his politics on it. politicians at the end of the day are devoid of human empathy they're just incapable of basic human functioning and and the only way to put them make them change their minds and things is to put them through the suffering so yes i am not against taking all of the politicians currently in charge of most nations to a place like pakistan right now and just drowning them in glacier melt and then letting the next batch of politicians go that's the warning to you because what else there's no other option. Where are we going to go from here? I'm very glad that the tech billionaires

are Scott Farkar and Mike Cannon Brooks who started Atlassian together. They both bought adjoining waterfront properties in Sydney in Point Piper, right? Right there on the water. They're in the firing line. If something doesn't happen and admittedly, you know, Mike Cannon

Brooks has been pretty vocal on climate stuff, but unless something happens, those very valuable mansions, I think one of them cost $100 million or something, they're going to be underwater. Well, they're clearly putting their money where their mount is. Malcolm Turnbull lives just down the road on the water. Maybe that's why he was more aware

of this, not that he managed to do much about it during his time as Prime Minister, but maybe, yes, maybe if everyone had to spend a month in Nauru or somewhere where this was imminent, I mean, these places are going to submerge in short order. Yeah, it's I don't know, I've been, I've been in, you know, in 2010

there had been massive flooding in Pakistan, which at the time was seen as one of the worst floods, you know, in the country, in the country's history, and little did we know, because that was 10% of what's happening right now. But at the time, I had been out there as a reporter covering the floods and seeing the devastation and stuff, but that is pales in comparison to what we're seeing now. I think the difference is, whenever we do movies about natural disasters and stuff, like the day after tomorrow or 2012, movies like that, we always have a wave coming over the

statue of liberty or we'll always have like this San Andreas fault opens up and the headquarters of time warner collapses inside or something we have recognisable landmarks what we need to do is show people you know

things in Pakistan or India and these places that are recognisable to them and then tell them what happens when climate change comes we need a tidal wave coming over the Taj Mahal for people to go oh wait we're going to lose that as well for them to finally start giving a shit

yeah and the thing that's most painful about all this to me and I acknowledge a lot of people have suffered is having to acknowledge that Dan Illich was actually right to focus on climate change for so many years to basically start to start a comedy empire focused on climate change it you know it seemed maybe a little bit self-righteous at the time but yes it actually was the greatest moral challenge of our time and we've utterly skipped it feels so utterly and completely this is this is not that different from like us looking at the start of World War II and going now what if we just don't do anything.

Well, to be fair, we've also got fascism on the rising end at the same time. That's true. It's not like that's one's all dead and buried. I mean, if Donald Trump becomes a president again. Which I am hoping for. I'll be honest, I am hoping for that. The only thing that would make this more at least enjoy, the end of the world is nigh. I'm not, it's too late for us to save ourselves.

At the very least, America should go full clown and allow us to have some entertainment. So the one billion you don't want to drown in glacial melt is Donald Trump. I'm a little surprised, Sammy, to be honest. Because you're making it sound like not having Donald Trump will somehow save us from the glacial melt at this point. We pass the point of, yeah, it's way, we're way past the finish line. We are well into the stands at this point. The chance to turn back was ages ago and we did nothing.

And I'm doing nothing. What am I doing? But also, I'm just the other thing, by the way. You're podcasting. Yeah. You're raising awareness. Stop blaming me. Stop blaming me.

Stop making me feel like I have to buy keep cups and metal straws to save the world. I can't do shit. So I'm making my responsibility to do anything. All I can do is wave from the sidelines as massive corporations continue to do this to us. And here we are. But as against that, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are doing really well with getting humans off the planet. I mean, a very small number of them. They're not even doing well with that.

There's no one off the planet still. They have yet to land someone on Mars. And the debate most recently has been about whether it technically even counts as spaceflight when you go up such a short distance. But nevertheless, they're focusing on something. There's a little bit of last days of Rome about all this, if it were rather than just the Roman Empire falling entire planetary devastation. It's the human empire falling.

Yes, exactly. The barbarians are at the gate. Barbarians this time are floodwater. Yeah, no, it's really bad. So, yeah, all I can say is, again, please donate to donate. Dot E.D.org. That's E.D.H.I. It will make a massive difference.

And you don't need the money. What are you going to do with the money? Buy yourself for the fucking Apple product. You lose a stop fucking wasting your life on shallow material bullshit. Are you talking to? Are you talking to listeners or to me? Is that really, frank? To listeners.

To listeners. But also to you. Thank you and me. Thank you, Sammy. Look, you're here for the next couple of episodes. Let's catch up on Pakistani politics shortly. I just want to hear the Ballad of Imran Khan at this point because it seems like a strange one. What a story.

All right, that's next. On the Chaser Report, our gear is from Road. We're part of the ACAST. Creator Network. We'll catch you next time.