The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway - How to Fix Our Climate Crisis — with Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson

Episode Date: September 19, 2024

Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, a marine biologist, policy expert, writer, and co-founder of the non-profit think tank Urban Ocean Lab, joins Scott to discuss her new book, “What If We Get It Right? Visions of Climate Futures.” She also talks to Scott about what needs to change, the impact of consumerism, the oceans, and how to reach people who don’t care about climate change. Follow Dr. Johnson, @ayanaeliza. Scott opens with his thoughts on TikTok’s fight to stave off a U.S. ban, and then he gets into Instagram’s latest moves to beef up protections for teen users.  Algebra of Happiness™: birthday reflections. Subscribe to No Mercy / No Malice Buy "The Algebra of Wealth," out now. Follow the podcast across socials @profgpod: Instagram Threads X Reddit Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Support for this show comes from Constant Contact. If you struggle just to get your customers to notice you, Constant Contact has what you need to grab their attention. Constant Contact's award-winning marketing platform offers all the automation, integration, and reporting tools that get your marketing running seamlessly, all backed by their expert live customer support. It's time to get going and growing with Constant Contact today.

Ready, set, grow. Go to ConstantContact.ca and start your free trial today. Go to ConstantContact.ca for your free trial. ConstantContact.ca Support for PropG comes from NerdWallet. Starting your slash learn more to over 400 credit cards. Head over to nerdwallet.com forward slash learn more to find smarter credit cards, savings accounts, mortgage rates, and more. NerdWallet. Finance smarter. NerdWallet Compare Incorporated.

NMLS 1617539. Support for the show comes from Fundrise. The Fundrise Innovation fund is trying to change the landscape for regular investors the innovation fund pairs a hundred million dollar plus venture portfolio of some of the biggest names in ai with one of the lowest investment minimums in the venture industry ai is already changing the world but this time you can get in early with the funrise innovation fund you can get in early at funrise.com slash profg. Carefully consider the investment material before investing, including objectives, risks, charges, and expenses.

This and other information can be found in the Innovation Fund's prospectus at fundrise.com slash innovation. This is a paid advertisement. Episode 317. 317 is here. It goes along near the city of indianapolis in 1917 the u.s entered world war one and the first jazz record was released true story i was stuck on an

island with one gun and two bullets there was hitler stalin and kenny g what did i do i shot kenny g twice go, go! Welcome to the 317th episode of the Prop G Pod. In today's episode, we speak with Dr. Ayanna Elizabeth Johnson, a marine biologist, policy expert, writer, and co-founder of the nonprofit think tank Urban Ocean Lab. How did people even end up starting a think tank, Urban Ocean Lab? Jesus. And I have a podcast. We discuss with Dr. Iona Elizabeth Johnson,

her new book, What If We Get It Right? Visions of Climate Futures. I enjoyed this conversation. We hear about what needs to change, the impact of consumerism, the ocean, and how to reach people who don't care about climate change. I am really discouraged over the last few years that climate change has become, or just basically environmentalism has become so politicized. Teddy Roosevelt was kind of the first famous environmentalist, at least in the U.S., and he was a Republican. And all of a sudden, we've decided that to be an environmentalist

means you're a Democrat, and to be a science denier makes you a Republican. And as a result, everyone wants to be thoughtful and realistic about, in my view, what is going to be effective versus just being right. And one of the things that, and we were just talking off mic with our producers, fossil fuels are just the ultimate arbitrage in terms of consumerism and economic growth. And that is, whether it's Bitcoin, whether it's your Nespresso machine machine whether it's your devices that are plugged in all day long whether it's the ability to buy more and more shit for less and less money which is what innovation and productivity offers responds uh the next generation is going to use more energy that is what they do energy consumption is a function of wealth and fortunately over the

medium and long term the world just gets wealthier and wealthier, which means they're going to consume more energy. And the notion that these younger generation is going to call on their better angels and do away with consumerism, or that we're not going to find different ways to use this energy that are really exciting, and we will opt for those. I just think it's sort of irrational and Pollyanna to think that this new generation is going to start investing in renewables unless they think they'll make more money, as opposed to limiting their selection set of investments. And I don't think we're going about this the right way. I think we need to depoliticize it, talk about opportunities for new technologies or how we can make money, what's realistic in terms of pricing beef production or pricing fossil fuels to their actual externalities. But I worry that we are going about this the wrong way and using it as more as a signal for what your political beliefs are and not having a productive conversation. Okay, I just said a whole lot of nothing, a whole lot of nada. Anyways, what's

happening? Let's talk about something a little less discouraging. I'm back in the south of France. That's right. The dog is barking. And when I'm in France, I can just take a big dump anywhere because that's what dogs do. That's an image. That's an image. In the south of France, it's raining today, but it's still lovely.

It's lovely here. I just love being in France because the people here just have a passion for beauty and beautiful things, whether it's the butter knife or the food or the towels in your hotel room, whatever it might be. They just have a way with stuff. So I'm happy to be here. I did a birthday party, my 50th, in Aberdeen, Scotland at the Five Arms. I absolutely love Scotland. I think it's this undiscovered gem and convinced about 90 of my closest friends to make the trip to Aberdeen and hang out with me. And it was absolutely wonderful, although I started planning

the trip two years ago. And quite frankly, I was very anxious. And the last couple of weeks, I've been just ridiculously fucking stressed out because when 90 people agree to come to Scotland from San Francisco, New York, Miami, Los Angeles, you really hope they have a good time. And I've been thinking a lot about stress and managing my anxiety. And the reality is that I had too little anxiety

from kind of age to zero to 30. I almost got kicked out of UCLA two or three times. I wasn't worried about it. And you know what? I should have been worried about it. From 30 to 40, I think I had the right amount of anxiety. Now I have too much fucking anxiety. My son is taking a course that may not look good to potential admissions directors at universities. So I'm up all fucking night worried about that. And then leading up to this thing, just thinking about all these people and really wanting it to be perfect and wanting the seating chart. Will they get along? Would this person find this person interesting? I'm just

worried about stupid shit I used to never worry about. Or maybe I'm just getting more thoughtful and considerate. Anyways, absolutely beautiful. The highlight was the activities on Saturday. People did, we did ax throwing, shooting where we shot clay animals. People went fishing. That was a bit of a bust. I guess the fish weren't running. Horseback riding, toured Balmoral where they had tea service.

And then absolutely the hit was putting everyone in a kilt. When you put everyone in a kilt, things get crazy. Things get crazy. But that was a ton of fun. And then I took a smaller set of my five oldest friends with me to the south of France. If I sound like I live a privileged life, I do. But that's the bad news. Then I go to Madrid for a speaking gig. And then I go to Munich to speak at a friend's conference. Then I go back to London. Then I go to LA to be in a writer's room for the new original scripted series from Res Media and Scott Burns on Big Tech. I'm excited about that. I've never been in a writer's room before. I don't even know what to expect. I just like using the term writer's room. So that'll be interesting. Anyways, enough about me. What else is going on? A lot in the world of social media. TikTok had a date in court earlier this week. Just a reminder here, it's facing a potential ban in the U.S. as soon as January 19th. TikTok is upset or claiming that the government is going after its platform' right to freedom of expression. But all the U.S. wants is for it to be released from foreign ownership, that is, the Chinese Communist Party. TikTok says they've

spent $2 billion to protect U.S. data, but the U.S. government isn't so sure the measures they've taken actually prevent the Chinese government from taking a peek. I think this is another example of how the digitization of everything, the combination of the idolatry of innovators, the amount of money these digital platforms create has resulted in an entirely bifurcated world where there are certain set of standards for the analog world and a certain set of standards for the digital world and the individuals who operate or the executives of those digital companies. And the latest call sign or attempt to create a culture of victimization and grievance and they don't get it, we get it, is that anything that's digital now is considered

speech and immediately everyone goes to free speech. So, oh, you're using a digital platform to engage in child pornography? Oh, no, it's speech. It's speech and a guy's pulled off a plane for not cooperating with authorities trying to stop human trafficking or funneling funds to terrorists. Oh, okay. But because it was on a platform, it's speech and we can't do anything about it. Crime is not speech. If I had a hotel or I owned a hotel and terrorists were meeting there to get money from other people, and I was not cooperating with authorities to break up this terrorist ring, I would be in a, justifiably, I would be in a shit ton of hurt and in trouble, as I should be. But if I put it on a digital platform,

oh no, that's innovation. It's speech. Fucking ridiculous. And guess what? Free speech has consistently early and often been trumped by defense threats. If you're working in the CIA or in our Defense Department and you decide to start leaking secrets about a planned invasion of whatever, sorry, that's not your free speech rights, girlfriend. In defense threats, trump the First Amendment. And that's exactly what should happen here. If you want to understand when any video around a specific topic is getting much more oxygen than it would organically or on other platforms, it's pretty simple. Just say, what would the CCP want? It is ridiculous that we would let the equivalent of NBC, ABC and CBS be controlled by the Kremlin in the 60s. That's what this is. And I believe

that, in fact, in fact, the court will find on the side of the DOJ or the White House. What will happen? Is TikTok going to be banned? No. On the eve of the banning, they're going to come to some sort of accommodation. Why? If you ever want to make predictions that mostly turn out right, just follow the money. If TikTok were to take its ball and go home, you're talking about a quarter of a trillion dollars in lost shareholder value, and they're both American and Chinese investors. And so there's just too much money here for them not to, A, quite frankly, spread it around to the whores in the United States Congress who will put pressure on the White House to come to some sort of accommodation. And there's too much money for China and the Chinese government and

Chinese business to give that up, to just give it away. And my Pivot co-host, Kara Swisher, said there's some kind of national pride here where they don't want to be seen as acquiescing to the U.S. government. I would sort of believe that two or three years ago, but the Chinese economy is in real trouble. And Xi, who has dealt or acted with a real heavy hand around corporations, is seeing a government slowdown that could potentially lead to very, or an economic slowdown that could lead to very bad things for him and his colleagues. The Chinese Communist Party still needs to bring bring tens if not hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and without an economic engine uh re reigniting from its sputtering over the last few years they're not going to be able to accomplish that so i think there's going to be a

thaw in the heavy hand they've been placing on corporations and i think if they start kneecapping their thoroughbreds, see above ByteDance, it's not going to play well domestically and will send a very bad signal across global investors, many of whom are describing Chinese companies as uninvestable right now, if they start getting kicked out of certain markets. But I do think this is going to be divested or they'll come to some sort of accommodation. Moving on, moving on. Instagram finally pulled its head out of its ass and made some changes to the way teens interact with the app. All teen-operated accounts will slowly become private and parents will have more insight on how much their time their kid is spending on the app and who they've been chatting with recently. The company also intends to prompt time limits and

improve age verification methods such as asking for the government ID or a video selfie. I think this is a fantastic move. Instagram CEO Adam Masseri told the New York Times, it's definitely going to hurt teen growth and teen engagement, and there's lots of risk, but fundamentally, I want us to be willing to take risks and move forward to make progress. So I hope Adam's right. And I hope that he's not Sandberg-ing all of us and that is saying all the right things and hopefully delaying and obfuscating the issue as more and more teen girls begin cutting themselves. We're proud of our progress. We need to do more. Yeah, thanks for that. So I hope he's genuine. Strikes me as genuine. But I think we need laws and I think we need punishment. I think I'm kind of sick of thinking, oh, it'll be better because Sam Altman, Sam Altman, he speaks in hushed tones and he's worried about AI.

Yeah, okay, why don't we pass some laws that says any algorithmically elevated content that results in defamation or trafficking, that those people face the same consequences as anybody else who spreads misinformation or slander or disinformation or engages in crime in a quote-unquote old-school media company. It's just so fucking ridiculous. Any algorithmically elevated content should lose 230 protection. Anyways, and here's the thing.

We're the idiots. We keep saying at some point they're going to reduce their bottom line to help the Commonwealth. No, they're not. No, they're not. These guys would, quite frankly, sleep with their mothers for an additional nickel as long as we let them. We're the ones at fault. We need to pass laws that hold them to the same accountability as the rest of the offline world. Teens account for around 100 million Instagram accounts globally. As Jonathan Haidt said very eloquently, we overprotect our kids offline and we underprotect them online. We need to begin holding these companies accountable. Come on, come on, enough already. 40 congressional hearings on child safety and social media, zero laws. We'll be right back for our conversation with Dr. Ayanna Elizabeth Johnson, a marine biologist, policy expert, and author of What If We Get It Right? Visions of Climate Futures.

Dr. Johnson, where does this podcast find you? I am in Brooklyn, New York, in a hotel room. It's the first thing I'm doing on publication day of, yeah, What If We Get It Right? Nice. So let's bust right into it. In your new book, What If We Get It Right? Visions of Climate Futures, you provide a curated collection of in-depth interviews with experts in earth science, technology, AI design, and agriculture, as well as activists and journalists to showcase a variety of climate solutions and to help people envision a more hopeful future. So how would you describe, let's go right to the title of your book, how would you describe getting it right?

What does right look like to you? Right looks like actually quickly deploying all the climate solutions we already have. So we already know how to transition to renewable energy. We already know how to do better public transit and green buildings and energy efficiency and better farming and protecting and restoring ecosystems. There's not a big mystery to how to address the climate crisis. There's not a thing where we need to wait for some magical technology to come along. I think that's the sort of blessing of this moment, is that we basically have the solutions we need.

It's just a matter of how quickly and how justly we can implement them. So obviously, we have an arsenal of weapons at our disposal to try and address this. But if you were to stack rank them and say, all right, these are the most obvious things that would have the greatest ROI, so to speak, what would those two or three things be? I think it depends on what level you're asking that question, right? Because if you're asking this for the listener who wants to do something today, that's very different from the broader sort of social and cultural shifts that need to happen apart from democracy, right? We have a huge challenge with the culture

of consumerism in this country, which is holding us back in a lot of different ways. Also, not a quick fix, but something we each have a lot more control over. But one thing that people don't really know is how powerful their money is, not only in the sense of the importance of voting with your dollars every day and every purchase, but thinking about where your savings are, where your retirement investments are. because there was a study a few years ago that came out by Bank Forward and some other organizations saying that if you have, say, $125,000 saved for your retirement, that money, if it's not invested in a fossil fuel-free fund, could be doing more harm in terms of contributing to carbon emissions through the expansion of oil

and gas infrastructure and all the good you could possibly do, just like walking and biking everywhere, eating only plants, etc. And that was very shocking for me to learn that it really, really matters to find a climate-friendly place to keep our money because we have in the U.S. the four biggest banks, Citibank, J.P. Morgan, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America that have collectively funded trillions of dollars towards the fossil fuel industry since the U.S. signed the Paris Agreement saying we were committing to wind down. And so those industries in the U.S. are growing when we actually need to be making this transition. So that personal shift is actually the easiest sort of like in one day what one person with money in the bank can do, the biggest difference. So let me just start off with a common ground.

I believe that climate change is an existential crisis. I'm worried about it. I think every parent that has kids are concerned for the future. You know, this is a four or five car alarm, whatever the term is. We need to get on this. Where I would push back is, so consumerism, out of control consumerism, and the basic notion that we just need to be more thoughtful about how much we consume. I think that's a, I think it's a really solid argument. I see no evidence that's going to happen, has happened, or will happen. Every generation, we assume that they're more noble than us,

more concerned about the earth, and there's some sign they're more socially aware. But generally speaking, as the economy becomes more productive, people take advantage of it and want to consume more for less. And I don't see evidence of that, and I feel like it's pushing a rock up a hill. I would also argue that asking consumers to invest in something that, when you limit the universe of your potential investment options, you just naturally, as a function of math, reduce the ROI. And it feels like there's such politicized pushback on these efforts that I worry that these two things aren't going to be effective, that they actually aren't realistic in terms of things individuals, corporations, governments, etc. can do. I guess my question to you is, if we're not willing to change anything about our behavior that's significant, why would we expect the five alarm fire to go out? That's a fair point.

Well, I'll give an opinion. I think we need to appeal to people's greed glance, that there's huge opportunity here for new technologies. There's huge opportunity to invest in renewables, that nuclear is a fantastic, in my view, I don't know how you feel about it. I'll use this as a question, but nuclear energy presents an enormous opportunity for both not only climate change, but just a more efficient way of producing power. I'm just so disappointed that this whole conversation has been politicized, and I'm trying to figure out a way to make arguments that appeal to both sides of the aisle such that we have an easier time getting stuff done. But I don't... Well, I think the thing with nuclear is that's

also not a quick fix, right? It takes a decade at least to develop a nuclear plant, to get it permitted and built, right? So we're talking about a scenario where we need to get our emissions cut by half this decade. So nuclear is already part of our energy mix, may continue to be part of our energy mix, But that alone is not enough to get us there, right? We don't have fusion yet. And so I think, you know, one of the things that I found really exciting is that we have now, because Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act, the Infrastructure and Jobs Act, all this funding going to changing the way we build and do things in the U.S. We have all these, for example, battery manufacturing plants going up primarily in red states with

great green jobs. We have Iowa and Texas as the largest producers of wind energy in the United States. That's not because they're hippies, right? And, you know, I think modernizing the grid is very important. We can't even bring all of this renewable energy into the mix in some places, right? Because our grid is so antiquated. And so, I mean, if that's political, then I guess that's political. But like, we're going to have to make some significant changes to the way we use energy, the way we grow food, the way we get around in order to have these reductions in carbon pollution that we need to see. And of course, there's an economic argument we made for this. I mean, people are making a lot of money off of this transition. And last year marked the first year that the major banks actually invested

more in renewables than fossil fuels. It was still in the U.S. over a trillion dollars on each. So not as big a difference as we'd like to see. But when you're talking about sort of like what individuals can do, it's certainly not build a nuclear plant in their backyard, right? And so I think to answer your question of what we can do, like it really matters the scale, right? There's political change that needs to happen because corporations aren't all volunteering to do the right thing. There needs to be some bar set. Or just laws, right? They're not good enough, right? And they're not enforced often.

We had under the Trump administration the rollback of over 100 environmental regulations for clean air and clean water, etc. So setting a minimum standard of environmental quality is something that, you know, the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, the Endangered Species Act, they were all signed under Reagan in the 70s with bipartisan support. So the politicization of environmental conservation and climate in particular is actually quite new in U.S. history. And I would like a short-term time machine to just go back not even that far. I mean, I think a lot of people who are close to nature, whether they're farmers or hunters or hikers, know that things are changing in the wrong direction and want to be a part of fixing that. Like Ducks Unlimited, Trout Unlimited,

these folks are active conservationists, right? Because they know that their hobbies, their passions require healthy ecosystems. So I personally don't think any of this has to be political. Like, we all actually want a good future for our children. And there's polling that shows that the biggest motivator for people to act on climate is love for future generations. It's actually not profit, which I found to be surprising. It's not any number of other things. It really is like, I want to leave a better world for my children. And the biggest thing that could convince conservative men to care more about climate change is their daughters saying, you're setting our future on fire and I'm scared. And that sort of instinct to protect our daughters, our children

kicks in, in this way that's actually beneficial for the planet. So there's a lot of certainly like psychology and economics and politics and policy, et cetera, and culture all at play here. What if we said, okay, we're going to stop subsidizing the beef industry and we're going to do what a lot of Western nations done recognizing that fossil fuels you know are bad for us over the long term there's been an incredible economic arbitrage but there's real externalities here and we put a you know a five dollar a gallon tax on gasoline in the u.s and we started we stopped subsidizing all the water and things that create beef unnaturally inexpensive what what about just straight economic pricing to address or to foot

to the externalities? That would absolutely help. I mean, just eliminating the subsidies would be a great start. The U.S. still subsidizes fossil fuel corporations to the tune of millions of dollars a day. I could think of better things to spend that money on, right? It has never been a level playing field for clean energy in this country. And so the fact that clean energy is growing as fast as it is, is sort of a miracle and proof that just catching photons from the sky is much more efficient with a piece of glass pointed at the sun than drilling and fracking and all this other stuff. And so I think, you know, this energy transition is going to happen regardless. It is much more efficient. It is more profitable. It's just a matter of how fast,

how long that takes. And this really is a race against the clock. What do you think of the idea of trying to, wealthier nations trying to bind together and figuring out a way to either subsidize or encourage developing nations who look at us and say, okay, you've enjoyed this great fossil fuel arbitrage. As people become wealthier, as nations become wealthier, they kind of engage in things that, quite frankly, just create a lot of emissions. And when we say, don't make the same mistake we did, they say, well, okay, easy for you to say you're already wealthy. What role do we have, or is there a role, or do you think it's feasible for us to bind together wealthy nations and try and figure out, well, I don't know if it's direct economic subsidies, to say, all right, please don't go down the route of coal. Please don't go down the route of beef.

What role do we have? And does this exist? Well, this exists through the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. At the last conference of the parties, annual climate conference, countries agreed to establish what they called a loss and damage fund to help countries deal with the impacts of climate change. You're talking more about, you know, the reducing emissions side, but it's hitting so hard in the tropics, right, with hurricanes and floods and droughts and like insane heat waves, temperatures like 130 plus degrees that is just humans are not built to withstand. And so that fund has been set up, but wealthy countries just are not making the contributions that they promised, that people expected. And there's a question, of course, of how to best distribute that because there will never be enough funds for all the need that there is.

But what you're talking about sort of jumping, you know, away from coal to renewables, there's this question mark of what's called leapfrogging. So I interview in my book, Professor Kelly Sims Gallagher, who runs the public policy school, Fletcher School at Tufts University, and worked in the White House under President Obama, brokering the first deal between the U.S. and China on climate change that set the ball rolling to get this global agreement. And basically, the only way we were able to get that agreement was because China was seeing how polluted it was, how dirty the sky was. It was really a risk to public health. It still is, right? And their citizens were like, we've got to clean this up. And so there was that internal political will built from the public health and citizen pressure.

And the only way they could get the agreement, though, is that it was each country just committed to whatever they felt like they could commit to. So we have this current framework of what's called nationally determined contributions, where every country in the world that's a signatory to the Paris Agreement gets to make up their own commitment. And every five years, there's a conference where you can ratchet that up, where you can commit to more, where there's an evaluation of how are we doing, what else can we get together and do. So we actually have a really good framework in place through the United Nations to do this, but it really depends on who's in office in these countries, who's president, who's prime minister. Is Congress actually appropriating the funds to put into this loss and damage fund, right? Because

the president can't do that. Unfortunately, a lot of this does come back to politics because you need the leaders of nations to agree to do something. You and I could be the best environmentalists with the lowest individual carbon footprints in the world, but we still live in these systems where for most people you turn on the lights and you don't get to choose where electricity comes from. Most people don't own their homes or have the chance to afford the transition to renewables as individuals. So this has to be part of a bigger shift. But I think we should also be framing this as a straight up upgrade. 9 million people dying a year because of air pollution, because of fossil fuel burning, right? Like even if there's no other benefit than having cleaner air that doesn't kill us, I'll take it. I don't know if you've ever listened to any of our work, but I'm a glass half empty kind of guy. I just naturally come at all this shit as a pessimist, which is one of my many flaws.

And one of the things I find really discouraging is that the level of excitement around cryptocurrency, specifically Bitcoin, and around AI just overwhelms the inconvenient truth that the incremental energy production because of Bitcoin is basically the electricity consumption of Argentina. We've added Argentina such that we could figure out a new store of value and a new form of money, which to me just seemed entirely unnecessary. And then on the AI side, AI queries are 13 to 17 times the energy consumption of a Google query, and yet there's no slowing AI down. There's not even really a discussion around, in my view, around a tax to foot again to the AI. feels like in many instances, we're actually headed the wrong way with some of the most popular technologies.

I agree with you. And I'm actually not an optimist. People read the title of my book, What If We Get It Right, and assume that I think we will get it right, which is just not true, right? There's a question mark at the end of that. Like, I don't know if we're going to get it together. I know that we could make a much better future than we have, than we're on track for right now. Like, I'm a scientist. I'm a realist. I see the projections. I know that we are on track for several more degrees of warming, which means much more ice melting, which means much more sea level rise, which means much more heat waves and more droughts and floods and wildfires. All of that is on the horizon. I don't want to sugarcoat any of that. The stakes areuleiman, who is now the head of AI at Microsoft, and talking to him about it. I mean, I personally am not a fan of AI, but we can't put the cat back in the bag. So it's a question of how do we best manage that industry and leverage it for good? But one of the statistics I learned while researching this

book, and of course, these are moving targets as new data comes out, but the latest was that data centers in the U.S. already consume about two and a half percent of the U.S.'s total energy demand. That was as of 2022, and that's expected to triple to 7.5% by 2030, right? We're talking about being on track for 10% of our energy being used by data centers. On the Ezra Klein show, you discussed how the climate crisis is an ocean's— God, that was like 10 years ago. We do our homework here. What did I say? You actually said something really interesting. You said that you thought that the climate crisis is an ocean's crisis.

What did you mean by that? So, yes, I'm a marine biologist by training. I always think about how the ocean gets neglected in all of this. We know that the ocean has absorbed about a third of the carbon dioxide that's been emitted by burning fossil fuels and that's made the ocean more acidic. Can you explain how that happens? Like what is it in the ocean? It's just this chemical reaction on the surface. I thought it was the krill or whale poop or something. No? Oh, there's a broader carbon cycle in the ocean. There's like half of the, you know, some estimates are that about half of the oxygen we breathe comes from the ocean because of photosynthesis of phytoplankton in the ocean.

Whale poop is a big part or was when there were more whales, a big part of the carbon cycle because their poop sinks to the bottom of the ocean. All this sort of marine snow, it's called, just like a bunch of animal poop in the ocean, is heavy enough to sink. And that ends up sequestering a significant amount of carbon through these natural cycles. But as we overfish the ocean, of course, we're disrupting all of that, which is also a risk for deep sea mining, disturbing all that carbon that has been sequestered down there potentially in the quest for the metals for making batteries. So all these things are complicated and have trade-offs that we need to consider. But on the ocean climate side, I think there's two sides, right? There's the ocean as bearing a lot of the brunt of this. So the ocean has become about 30% more acidic because it has absorbed so much carbon dioxide. So the pH of the entire ocean has shifted, which of course makes it harder for

things, the shells and skeletons, corals to grow and shifts the way that animals navigate by smell and the seawater's changing, right? Because the chemistry of it has shifted. And then you have the fact that the ocean has warmed about a degree Celsius because it's absorbed about 90% of the heat that we've trapped with all these greenhouse gases emitted by burning fossil fuels. And so without the ocean absorbing all that heat, the planet would be about 97 degrees Fahrenheit hotter, obviously unlivable. So we owe a big debt of gratitude to the ocean. But it's also estimated that on the solution side, the ocean could be about 40% of our climate

solution. When we think about offshore renewable energies, currently that's mostly wind power, but looking at wave and tidal and other sorts of energy in the future as that technology develops, thinking about how to decarbonize shipping, which is still a huge emitter. Yeah, people don't talk about shipping. Isn't it like 8 or 12% of total carbon emissions? Something very large. But there's a tricky thing with shipping where it also emits all of this soot because they've tended to use really dirty crude oil, which actually helps to create like shade and soot, which may have decreased warming. And so by cleaning up shipping, you're actually maybe making things hotter, which is like this counterintuitive, which is all to say like, you know,

you pull on one thread and you see that it's connected to everything. But ocean ecosystems, for example, can absorb three, five times more carbon per acre than a rainforest. And so we think so much of only forests. Whenever I do carbon credits, they show a picture of a tree. They should be showing a picture of a reef or something. Mangroves, seagrasses, wetlands. I mean, I think they're just as sexy, but maybe other people think it's just a bunch or something. Mangroves, seagrasses, wetlands. I mean, I think they're just as sexy, but maybe other people think it's just a bunch of mud. Given you're a scientist and you study this, is there any one technology that you think is underrated in terms of the impact it could have

or innovation that you think it holds more promise and it's getting press on? Does composting count as technology? Sure. It's a process, right? Food waste emits a huge amount of methane, which is a greenhouse gas, something like, depending on what timescale you look at it, 30, 80% more potent than carbon dioxide. So anytime you throw food in the trash

and it ends up in a landfill and it's emitting methane, that is very bad. So composting food waste, that technology of nature breaking things down, and then we have all this soil to grow new food and flowers and all that stuff. I think on the energy side, I actually don't want to pick a winner in technology because as Jigar Shah says in this interview with him in the book, He's the head of the loan program office at the Department of Energy, which has something like $400 billion in loans that they can put out to energy companies

to help support the innovation of new technologies. His perspective, which I share, is like, we're always going to need a mix. We wouldn't want to rely on all nuclear. We wouldn't want to rely on all solar or all wind, right? It is that diversity that makes the system more resilient. And so I personally like, great. I think renewables are exciting. I think we should have that mix. One technology I would really like to see, especially in America, is high-speed trains. Like, why are we so behind on this, right? We're all flying short distances. It's like, if we could have trains from city center to city center that were actually fast, that would be faster than flying, going through security, getting there early, whatever. It would save us time and be such a more luxurious way to travel. I mean, that's not maybe the high technology you were thinking of, but I think that would be transformative in significant ways, especially for a country as large as ours.

Do you think the political environment, my sense is, unfortunately or discouragingly, I feel as if the last one or two years we've actually regressed as opposed to making progress. What are your thoughts about the current political environment and the support we need to try and address these issues recently? Yeah, I mean, Trump is a candidate who periodically says climate change is a hoax, right? Like, that's a pretty hard scenario to be in when you're trying to advance solutions. And I think it's important to remember that, you know, we had Newt Gingrich and Nancy Pelosi agreeing that we needed climate policy, right? Not that long ago, and like making a TV ad about it together. But I'll also say on this political polarization piece that I don't debate climate science deniers. I just, I'm not the right messenger for that, right? Like, I'm not going to

change anyone's mind on the internet by telling them science facts. Like, that's not how this is going to get fixed. And so I think there's a big part of this where we can actually skip talking about the problem, right? Like, let's go back to that example of wind energy booming in Ohio and Texas. It's not because there was some big debate statewide and they were like, okay, climate change is a problem, we should develop this industry. It's just because it makes sense and they're good jobs and it's profitable and we don't even have to talk about the why and the details, right? And I think we can kind of gloss over a lot of the problem and just agree on the solutions. We'll be right back. Dr. Johnson, you have a lot of influence at a very young age. You've got a big following. I mean, I'm 44. I'm not that young. like, again, from an outsider's perspective, everything looks great, but it strikes me you have just the coolest job and you're doing something that you appear to really enjoy. We have a lot of young people listening to the podcast. What were some seminal moments for you

in terms of figuring out you wanted to do this and sort of key break or key kind of turning points or your kind of break? And that sort of leads into what we typically offer as a last question here. What advice would you have to your younger self? I mean, many, many inflection points, of course. I think the thing that I keep going back to is falling in love with nature. And when I was five, we went to Key West, Florida, and I learned to swim and snorkel. And I saw a coral reef for the first time, and I was just like gobsmacked that there was this super colorful, dynamic underwater world. And I was like, how come no one told me about this? Can this be my job to just hang out with these weird fish. And that sort of started me off on that path.

But I had many, I mean, marine biologist is a pretty common dream job for a five-year-old. Yeah, it's literally something my son has said, that he'd like to be a marine biologist. It's an actual job. We could use the help. And I think, though, that my dreams professionally evolved a lot, right? Like a lot, we each, when I was 10, I wanted to be, I was learning about the civil rights movement.

I wanted to be the lawyer that got the next Martin Luther King out of jail. I was like, let me, I want to support people who are fighting for justice. And then I thought, um, you know, I started camping and backpacking and I was like, I could be a park ranger. Like I could get paid to just hang out in the forest. Like clearly that's the best job. And then I started to get a little more savvy about the policy and politics of it all. And I was like, oh, maybe environmental lawyer is a good thing. And then when I was ready to go to grad school, I thought, you know, there's a lot of lawyers in the world. Maybe I could approach this question from the science side and like meet the lawyers and policy folks in the middle. And so that's what I decided to do.

But always it was this interdisciplinary approach of science and policy and politics and economics and culture because it's that crazy puzzle that we have to solve, complicated and unlikely, though it may be. But the advice I guess I would give to my former self, which I now actually give to everyone, is to really think about what you specifically can do, not just what needs to be done. The way that each person can contribute to addressing the climate crisis is going to be different. And so I have this concept, this framework of a climate action Venn diagram. And the idea is just three circles. And the first circle is, what are you good at? So like, what specifically are you bringing to the table, your skills, your resources, your networks, right? Like, what do you have to offer? And the second circle is, what work needs doing? What are the climate and justice solutions you want to focus on? Like, maybe fusion is your thing, right? Maybe your thing is making sure, you know, we have people's votes be counted in this country so we have a better chance of getting climate policy, et cetera, et cetera. So, and then the third is what brings you joy. And that's going to sound like, you know, silly

probably to a lot of your listeners who are like, give me the glass half empty version. But I think the opportunity is that this is really work for the rest of our lives to sort of turn this mess around. And so if we choose to do something that's miserable, even if we're good at it, it's just going to be awful. And there's so much that needs doing. Why would you pick something that's not pleasant in some way or satisfying, gratifying? And so doing this actual exercise with colored pencils myself was how I ended up co-founding Urban Ocean Lab, a think tank for the future of coastal cities, as a marine biologist and a policy nerd and a girl from Brooklyn concerned about coastal cities getting impacted by climate change and someone who finds a lot of joy in changing the rules of the game and design and

communication and collaboration. All of those things came together in that way for me. But of course, like not everyone should start an ocean policy think tank. So that's my recommendation is like really think about like your bespoke offering to climate solutions. Dr. Ayaan Elizabeth Johnson is a marine biologist, policy expert, writer and Brooklyn native. She is co-founder of the nonprofit think tank Urban Ocean Lab and the climate initiative, the All We Can Save Project. She's also the co-creator of the podcast How to Save a Planet, Dr. Johnson's new book, What If We Get It Right? Visions of Climate Futures is out now. She joined us from her hometown of Brooklyn. Dr. Johnson, we are rooting for you. We appreciate your time. Thank you. Thanks for having me. algebra of happiness i just celebrated a big birthday as a reference to the top of the show and i had essentially the 90 people have been more important to me than anyone else on the earth

come to scotland and celebrate uh how old i am and just some general observations, uh, from that weekend and around relationships. You know, if you could give your kids anything, you'd want them to have a good peer group. We like to think as parents that we are engineers and engineer the sheep and that we have a big impact on them. And this is not true. My dad gave me the gift of storytelling just genetically. And my mom gave me a little bit of substance. And I think my mom valued her friends. I think I got that. But the two biggest influences on my life, at least growing up, were my closest friend, Adam Markman, who I met in the fifth grade, and my friend, Lee Lotus, who I met in college. And Lee is incredibly ironic and incredibly supportive and sort of generous and unchecked with his emotions. This is a guy

who used to call me. When I got a job at Morgan Stanley, two people called me, my mom and Lee. And Lee said to me, and this is like the age of 22, he said, Scott, I'm just so proud of you. And 23-year-old men don't say that to other 22-year-old men. And I think I became much more generous and much more in touch with my emotions and just a little bit more of a kind of a loving friend. He's also just ridiculously fucking funny, and I think I got a lot of my humor from him. And my friend Adam was always really kind. He was this really handsome, dapper guy. Get this in high school. His parents were wealthy. Mine were not. Adam was not only handsome, but dressed really well. He was a bit of a fashion plate. And he drove, get this, an Austin Healy Mark III.

I mean, it was like, here's this good-looking 16-year-old kid driving a James Bond car. And I was just not in that weight class of cool. But this is the kind of guy Adam was. We were friends. And I couldn't find a girl to go to my prom with. I asked a couple of girls to go to my prom at University High and they said no. And Adam controlled a friend of his who didn't have a date to ask me to their prom. And he was just really kind. And I think a lot of the more things I like about myself are just like least

or a function of the people I hung out with. So if you could do anything for your kids, and I don't know if we can, it's really about their peer group. Also, I had a lot of friends there from Florida, and a lot of friends that are actually quite conservative. And as I've gotten older, while I've become more progressive in my political viewpoint, as I realize how blessed I am, and I have an obligation to try and help people who aren't as blessed as me, which I think is sort of the definition of someone who's maybe a bit more progressive. It's also really informed my thinking about having conservative friends, having friends that go to church, both of those things do not describe me, and recognizing that I do not have a monopoly on the truth.

And I need to surround myself with people who have a much different viewpoint than me because I'm consistently discussing with these people things that we disagree on and recognizing that I absolutely sometimes am so fucking arrogant that I don't know even what I don't know. So bringing people that just in your life that just have a different viewpoint than you. Also, as I've gotten older, I realized how important it is to make sure as you get older, you keep the lanes wide. And that is, as I've gotten older, I'm an introvert. It would be very easy for me. My life is sort of getting a little bit narrower in terms of the things I want to do and the people I want to see. I'm just getting very comfortable with what I'm comfortable with and very uncomfortable with what is uncomfortable. And I've made so many good friends by moving to London, by hanging out with some

people who are a little bit more extroverted than me that has forced me to engage in new relationships. And I looked around the room and some of the people I value the most are people that have literally come into my life recently. Then the other thing I would say is in terms of who you decide to partner with the rest of your life, the biggest decision you'll make is who you have kids with. And what you would want for your kids and what I've figured out has been tremendously rewarding for me, not even rewarding, just really fortunate, is to have a partner who has good judgment around your kids and just around life. That a series of good decisions, no matter how much money you make, no matter how cool you are,

if you're partnered with someone who consistently makes a series of bad decisions and doesn't make your life nicer and isn't kind to you, isn't supportive of you, you're just not going to really enjoy yourself. Anyways, that's all I have. Happy birthday to me. This episode was produced by Caroline Shagrin. Jennifer Sanchez is our associate producer. And Drew Burrows is our technical director. Thank you for listening to the Prof G Pod from the Fox Media Podcast Network. We will catch you on Saturday for No Mercy, No Malice, as read by George Hahn.

And please follow our Prof G Markets pod wherever you get your pods for new episodes and every Monday and Thursday. And by the way, our new brand extension, Raging Moderates. Oh, my God. 200,000 views, 200,000 downloads. That's right. That's right. Spreading the word. The dog is everywhere. The dog is paying on everything.