Upstream - A Changing Climate with Amy Westervelt

Episode Date: April 19, 2022

The latest installment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC report, released this month, gives us three years to drastically cut emissions. “It’s now or never, if we want to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees,” the authors of the report warn. But in reality, it's more likely that we’ll double that number. If you haven’t already seen the headlines, the report indicates that we’d need to cut emissions by almost half by 2030 and be at negative emissions by 2050 — that means we’d need to be taking carbon out of the atmosphere at that point — in order to avert the worst of climate change. But these are just the headlines — the actual report is around 3000 pages long, and is a pretty groundbreaking and radical document, at least when it comes to these kinds of reports by typically conservative scientific bodies. The report includes a great deal of research from social scientists, and for the first time, in a major way, debunks much of the economics behind neoliberal climate solutions, even going so far as to name colonialism as a driver for climate change, and even alludes to capitalism as a major contributing factor. To unpack it all, we’ve brought on someone who's actually started reading all of the entire 3000 pages of the report. Amy Westervelt is an award-winning climate journalist, founder of the Critical Frequency podcast network, and host of the podcast Drilled. Is the fossil fuel industry, as they would like us to believe, a demand-driven industry? Or has it really become more of a market looking for a product? Are we getting to a place where mainstream narratives no longer simply call for individual actions, but focus much more heavily on collective and systemic solutions to climate change? And are we finally moving away from seeing global warming as a strictly environmental issue, and instead to seeing it as one more rooted class struggles against systems like capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism? These are some of the topics we explore in this conversation with Amy Westervelt.  Thanks to Bedouine for the intermission music.  This episode of Upstream was made possible with support from listeners like you. Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

Before we get started on this episode, please, if you can, go to Apple Podcasts and rate, subscribe, and leave us a review there. It really helps us get in front of more eyes and into more ears. We don't have a marketing budget or anything like that for Upstream, so we really do rely on listeners like you to help grow our audience and spread the word. And as always, please visit upstreampodcast.org forward slash support to support us with a reoccurring monthly or one-time donation. It helps keep this podcast free and sustainable. So please, if you can, go there to donate. Thank you. Really, this report is all but straight up saying, look, keeping warming to 1.5 degrees

or less is impossible at this point it's saying that emissions have to peak by 2025 which looks highly unlikely given that in the last decade which is also the decade in which we've known the most about climate change and how to deal with it emissions intensity has increased. I mean, the average emissions have increased in the last decade versus going down. So things are going in not just not the right direction, but really precisely the wrong direction. But that to me also speaks to the real need for a total rethinking of what we're actually trying to accomplish with energy use and how the economy actually works and not just perpetuating these economic beliefs over and over

again. You're listening to Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. A podcast of documentaries and conversations that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about economics. I'm Della Duncan. And I'm Robert Raymond. The latest installment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, report released this month gives us three years to drastically cut emissions. It's now or never if we want to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees, the authors of the report warn. But in reality, it's more likely that we'll double that number. If you haven't already seen the headlines, the report

indicates that we need to cut emissions almost by half by 2030 and be at negative emissions by 2050. That means we'd need to be taking carbon out of the atmosphere at that point in order to avert the worst of climate change. But these are just the headlines. The actual report is around 3,000 pages long and is a pretty groundbreaking and radical document, at least when it comes to these kinds of reports by typically conservative scientific bodies. For example, the report includes a great deal of research from social scientists,

and for the first time, in a major way, debunks much of the economics behind neoliberal climate solutions, even going so far as to name colonialism as a driver for climate change, and even alluding to capitalism as a major contributing factor. To unpack it all, we've brought on someone who's actually started reading all of the 3,000 pages of the report. Amy Westervelt is an award-winning climate journalist, founder of the Critical Frequency Podcast Network, and host of the podcast Drilled. Is the fossil fuel industry, as they would like us to believe, a demand-driven industry? Or has it really become more of a market looking for a product? Are we getting to a place where

mainstream narratives are no longer simply calling for individual actions, but are focusing much more heavily on collective and systemic solutions to climate change? And are we finally moving away from seeing global warming as a strictly environmental issue, and instead as one more rooted in class struggles against systems like capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism? These are some of the topics we'll explore in this conversation with Amy Westervelt. Hi, Amy. Welcome to Upstream. It's great to have you on. Thanks for having me. I'm super excited to talk to you. To start, I'm wondering if we can maybe just, if you could give us an idea of what the IPCC is.

Yes. And then going into maybe just briefly outlining these last couple of reports before we dive into this final one that was just released. Yeah. So the IPCC is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and it was formed in the late 80s. So there was all this stuff happening at that time. You had in the U.S. James Hansen, who's this NASA climate scientist, testifying before Congress that climate change was here, that the impacts of global warming were already starting to be visible. And then you had the UN starting to, through its environment program, talk about the problem of global warming and what was causing it and the greenhouse effect and all these things and starting to formulate what would eventually become the UNFCCC, which is the UN Framework on Climate Change. And the IPCC, you know, the kind of idea behind it was to bring together the world's scientists to put together these assessments every few years about what was happening with the atmosphere and what kind of impacts were visible from climate

change and then what could be done about it. So it's divided into these three working groups. There's the physical sciences, which is really, you know, okay, here's the state of the science every few years. And then you have working group two, which is focused on impacts and vulnerabilities. So what can we see this doing and what is it likely to do in the next 10 to 20 years? And then working group three, which is focused on mitigation. So really looking at solutions and, you know, what can we do about this problem? What are the various pathways to dealing with it? And then what are the things that are blocking those pathways? So, you know, for the first few decades, I would say of the IPCC report, the focus was really on working group one and then slowly working group two and in the last 10 years it's really been working group three's moment to shine you know everyone is sort of like okay we get it we get the science we know it's happening we can see the impacts already what can we do about this and why are we not acting so that

working group three report is the one that just came out in early April. It's the third of like the three big reports that the IPCC puts out every four to six years. And it is a really interesting report. It's actually more interesting than usual because this time around, they included social scientists and social science research a lot more than they usually do. So social scientists have kind of always been somewhat involved, but not ever really taken that seriously. And there was kind of a push amongst particularly political scientists and social social scientists in the last like, four or five years to try to push the IPCC to include them more. And it worked and you can definitely see the results. Like if you look at this

batch of reports versus the last round that came out in 2018, it's pretty different, you know, it's a pretty different batch of conclusions that they're coming to. It's a pretty different batch of conclusions that they're coming to. Yeah, no, absolutely. And yeah, I really appreciate that you have taken on the task of going through the entire report. I don't think a whole lot of people have have really done that, or at least like done it publicly in a way where you're you're sharing out all that information. And so what an incredible resource that's going to be and already is. And yeah, like, so you mentioned, this most recent report is on, like mitigation, like, what can we do about it? You know, what's stopping us also? And yeah, maybe if you could give us the headlines from the latest report, and also sort of like what you find to be some of the most significant findings. Yeah. So it is a almost 3,000 page report as are the like working group two and working group one reports, which is why very few people read the whole thing. So this time around, there are a couple of really big things. One, there's a new chapter on what they call

demand services and social impacts of climate change. This is like the most boring title possible to give to an actually very interesting chapter, which for the first time really kind of has the IPCC questioning a lot of economics 101 deeply held beliefs about how markets work. And the big kind of question that they're posing here is, are people actually requiring energy and materials, or are they requiring services? So things like shelter, mobility, temperature comfort, or thermal comfort, as they call it. So like, you know, is your house warm enough? But like, can we find the perfect temperature to set people's thermostats at that is, you know, energy efficient, but also comfortable. So that was one of the big

ones to me was like, wow, this is really kind of questioning the values and functions of the economy in a way that I don't think the IPCC is known for necessarily. You know, they're usually pretty conservative bodies. So that was very new and very interesting. So yeah, the fact that that chapter exists and that it's filled with various options for ways to deliver what people need without increasing emissions. And then it hammers kind of over and over again this idea that we can alleviate poverty at a global scale while reducing emissions, which totally flies in the face of everything the fossil fuel industry has been saying for the last 20 years. So that's really big. This is also the first batch of reports that has mentioned misinformation and corporate obstructionism,

which is wild to me that they have not really gone there in previous assessments. It's also the first batch of reports that has talked about the role that colonization has played in driving the climate crisis. So again, I mean, this to me is like, this is where you really see the fingerprints of social scientists. I think the fact that these things were not included in previous reports is precisely because sociologists and social scientists and environmental sociologists and political scientists, all these people were, you know, kind of given short shrift in these reports in favor of really the physical and natural sciences. Yeah, you can definitely see that influence for sure. And so yeah, you had mentioned that this report turns a lot of sort of traditional economics 101 stuff like on its head. And that's sort of like our bread and butter at Upstreams. Like what we really strive to do is to like undo

a lot of these traditional assumptions. And one of them, specifically this idea that fossil fuel consumption is not driven by demand, which is sort of the common trope that you hear coming out of the industry, the fossil fuel industry and its apologists and its supporters, but you know, that it's actually a supply driven industry. But, you know, that it's actually a supply driven industry. And I'm wondering if you can just kind of get into that a little bit. Like, how is that the case? How does the report sort of outline this and show evidence for it? And flies in the face of this persistently repeated story that the fossil fuel industry tells, which is that, you know, it's just supplying a demand. If we all reduce our energy consumption, that it will reduce production as well, which is just, look, maybe the fossil fuel industry was driven by demand like in the Industrial Revolution or in earlier phases of development. But there's like a very short lived period of time in every community or country where there is actually demand for affordable energy, and that once that initial demand is fulfilled, it very quickly shifts to being a supply-driven industry. So basically, it's this treadmill of production

theory that environmental sociologists kind of coined in the early 2000s, this idea that a lot of industries start out demand driven, but quickly become supply driven, because once the sort of initial batch of customers have met that demand, the industry now has this enormous production apparatus that it needs to feed. So in the case of the fossil fuel industry, I think the most recent example of this is what has happened with excess gas in the wake of the fracking boom and how the industry has pivoted to plastic. So you have energy demand dropping in buildings and in transportation. And as that demand drops, you do not see the supply drop accordingly and you do not see production drop accordingly you see the fossil fuel industry pivot directly into

petrochemicals and single-use plastics you know so this idea that like they will simply follow demand patterns all over the world it's just not proven out by either the industry's behavior or in this report by the data on where that demand is and where the supply and production of the fossil fuel industry is, which is great to have because even though, you know, we can point to all of these examples historically of times when demand dropped but supply didn't, it's very helpful to have this very dry scientific document that says, no, actually, the data says that that is not the case at all. talking point of the industry is that if you deny less developed countries fossil fuels, that you are committing them to eternal poverty. And what this report says really explicitly is actually, if you develop without mitigating climate impacts, that's what is actually miring people in poverty, That's what is actually miring people in poverty, that there actually is no way to develop without reducing emissions or looking at climate impacts because people are experiencing increasing and layered hardships as this problem goes unsolved. And yeah, to circle back to how you began the your response in terms of like,

the demand versus supply, I think you've said it's it's a product looking for a market versus a market looking for a product. Yes. And yeah, this idea that like, getting off of fossil fuels is a net positive for countries and regions that are like looking to develop, it's actually something positive. It's not going to be a barrier of any kind, or at least it doesn't have to. Right. It's all about the decisions that we make. Right. And again, like this report points out that people aren't desperate for fossil fuels, and they're not even necessarily desperate for energy it's like okay people are desperate for you know shelter and mobility and all these other things what are the ways that we

can provide these things in a low carbon way which it sounds so simple and straightforward and is definitely i mean again it's not new. This has been researched over the last decade. But seeing it kind of laid out so dryly, you know, it's refreshing. I should note, too, that there were definitely some very depressing and negative headlines, too, in the sense that really this report is all but straight up saying, look, keeping warming to 1.5 degrees or less is impossible at this point. It's saying that emissions have to peak by 2025, which looks highly unlikely given that in the last decade, which is also the decade in which we've known the most about climate change and how to deal with it, emissions intensity has increased. I mean, the average emissions have increased in the last decade versus going down. So things are going in

not just not the right direction, but really precisely the wrong direction. But that to me also speaks to the real need for a total rethinking of what we're actually trying to accomplish with energy use and how the economy actually works and not just perpetuating these economic beliefs over and over again. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I think it's also really important to keep in mind that it's not like a black and white issue. It's not like, oh, we go over 1.5 or we don't. It's like, incrementally, the more that we do, the worse it will be incrementally. That's right. That's right. And every like 10th of a degree matters. You know, it's not, I think I saw someone on social media saying like, guys, it's not like we just chuck 1.5 and go for two.

You know, like that half a degree is very meaningful. And the more that we can, you know some suite of these things to reduce the demand for energy while providing people what they need and improving quality of life and all of these things we can also avoid having to completely rely on carbon removal technology which right now this report and a lot of governments are basically saying like, oh, well, we'll figure out some way to suck CO2 out of the air. And that'll do it. Have you seen Snowpiercer? Yes, yes, yes. Yeah. So like what the, one of the coordinating lead authors on this chapter is a woman named Joya Shree Roy.

She's an economist in India. One of the things that she has talked about is that, you know, in doing all these things, it would enable us to really only need the like low tech versions of carbon dioxide removal. of carbon dioxide removal. So like reforestation, afforestation, stopping deforestation, all that stuff versus technologies that are either nascent

or are not scalable or that don't exist yet, you know, so which would also save a lot of money too for the traditional economists out there, you know? Um, so yeah. And I want to put a pin in the demand driven stuff that the report outlines because I do

want to get to that, but I want, I want to stick on some of this, uh, I guess you could call it like related to the more supply side question. But one thing that just recently happened is that Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee had a bunch of folks from the fossil fuel industry on and they're kind of grilling these executives and blaming them for price gouging and really laying into them. And of course, a lot of that is probably pretty performative, but still it happened. And of course, on the other side, their Republican colleagues did the opposite and sort of praised the big oil companies for providing, again, an essential service. And some of them even saying that what we need to do to lower oil and gas

prices is to increase production. Yeah. In fact, a lot of Democrats were saying that we need to increase production too, which is unfortunate. And of course, that happened, what, one or two weeks after Biden announced this big deal with the European Union to build out more gas infrastructure. And to this, this part is like really, really killed me because, you know, it's being framed as this short-term solution or a solution to an immediate problem. But part of that deal guarantees demand from Europe for American gas till 2030. So that's not great to lock in that kind of infrastructure until 2030 for supposedly a short-term fix. And yeah, I don't know. That hearing was interesting because A, there's a lot of stuff to unpack around what's happening with gas prices right now. One is that it has

very little to do with actual supply and demand on the ground. You know, it has mostly to do with energy markets. And also, yes, how oil companies are pricing wholesale. And they are really talking out of both sides of their mouth. One minute, they're saying, oh, the Biden administration is tying our hands. And, you know, if Keystone XL were functional and if we were allowed to drill more offshore, this wouldn't be a problem. And on the other hand, are telling their shareholders, don't worry, guys, we're not going to increase production no matter how high the cost goes, because we're going to keep paying you guys these sweet, sweet dividends. So I don't know, the whole thing is just, it's theater from a lot of different

angles. But I also think that it's not super helpful to have Democrats who are supposedly supporting climate policy, trying to make sure that they get commitments from the oil executives to increase production. Because the other thing there is, again, that is not a short-term solution. Production increases that happen right now will not impact the actual supply and demand of oil and gas for another, you know, six to 12 months. So the idea that that's some kind of quick fix is just not true. And then also, again, this is a supply driven market, right? Like they don't just like reduce production once they increase it, especially if the price per barrel stays high, which it may well do. So yeah, that whole charade really ticked me off for

multiple reasons. Not least of which is, you know, it happened in the same week that the IPCC report said very clearly, this is another big headline of this report, we cannot have any new fossil fuel development. And we need to start decommissioning the fossil fuel infrastructure that exists. That is laid out in no uncertain terms, even in, you know, the most sort of diplomatic parts of the report. So to have that happening on Monday and then through the course of the week, Democrats saying, we need to increase production to make sure that these gas prices can go down is just, I don't know. The problem is not that Europe is hooked on Russian gas. The problem is that the whole Europe is hooked on Russian gas. The problem is

that the whole world is hooked on fossil fuels. I understand that there are geopolitical realities and that pulling the plug on fossil fuels from one day to the next is not necessarily an option. But I think there's a way to address the actual short-term problem without locking in new fossil fuel infrastructure for a decade or more. Yeah. It's always just so frustrating to watch these sort of, as you mentioned, charades happening and you don't know how much of it is incompetence or just nefarious. Yeah. I'm just coming more and more into thinking that there doesn't really seem to be a capital P politics solution to climate change. It's just a failure. Well, I think the problem is that climate change doesn't fit into the way US politics,

at least generally work. It's not a short-term thing. It impacts multiple different industries and is driven by multiple different things. And it's not a quick fix. And it's also not something that can deliver like a campaign-ready solution. I don't know. It actually requires that politicians behave as civil servants, which they seem to have forgotten how to do at least in this country i don't know it requires like actual care for the public and concern for for the long-term viability of not just this country but the world in general and that is not something that politicians are used to having to actually think about.

You're listening to an Upstream Conversation with Amy Westervelt, climate journalist, founder of the Critical Frequency Podcast Network and host of the podcast Drilled. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. One of these days, our love ignites We're gonna get it and get it right One of these days If I'm talking sweet to you, you know I'd like to hear it too It's funny, I hardly think it's a passing phase

I think it's a passing phase But if I feel alone in the morning view I start to see new shades of blue One of these days You know I'm gonna set our hearts ablaze If it's the last thing I do That was One of These Days by Bedouin. Now back to our conversation with Amy Westervelt. So let's jump into another part of the report. We were talking a little bit about how the report outlines some demand driven changes that could actually reduce emissions by something like 80%.

So I think that like this tension between demand driven and supply driven changes is a really interesting one. And like, what I like about the report is that it turns a lot of this sort of mainstream neoliberal thinking in terms of like, climate change being something that we need to solve on the individual consumption level on its head. I think that's a refreshing shift from that narrative in this report. But there is also, I mean, that doesn't mean that there aren't demand driven changes that could be done, as long as you know, the onus isn't put on the individual, but they're sort of like facilitated through systemic shifts, right? And so, I would love for you to sort of unpack that a little bit and what your thoughts are on that

idea. Yeah, actually, the way that it's tackled in this report is so interesting, and I think does such a good job of really focusing people in the right direction on that individual versus systemic debate. So it particularly highlights the fact that the top 10% of people globally, in terms of wealth, have an outsized impact on both the problem and the solution. So this idea, because I often will see, and you know, I have kind of argued against too much of an emphasis on individual consumer choices, in particular, as some kind of great fix for this problem. You know, it's very much been a tactic of the fossil fuel industry to kind of put its costs off on the public and blame the public for various problems and point to consumer

choices and all of that stuff. But what this is talking about is not, hey, everybody should just get an electric vehicle or, you know, like avoid using straws or any of that kind of stuff. They're sort of like, look, the top 10% globally by wealth have an enormous influence. And they specifically get into all of the things that are not consumer choice, which I love because that's another thing that irritates me about that whole debate is that individual action often gets boiled down to just consumption and not like organizing, political action, influence. Blowing up a pipeline. Parody. Blowing up a pipeline.

Exactly. Yes. Just kidding. Totally kidding. Career choices. All of that stuff. Like there's a ton of things that we do that we have control over in our lives that don't have anything to do with spending money. And I think that a very neat trick of neoliberalism has been to get people to forget that. So this report really is like, no,

actually, it particularly talks about social influence and how, you know, if you are a role model of some kind in your community, that actually research shows that, you know, you can help to drive cultural shifts that are helpful in creating the enabling conditions for systemic change. So it really, it does this amazing job of tying all of the individual choices to systemic change, and then also pushing for systemic change that enables more choices for individuals. So like, for example, improving public transit, so that people have an option to not use their car or to, you know, have some combination of walking and biking and public transit. It talks about development choices and creating, you know, denser cities and multifamily

housing and community housing options that enable people to share energy services, for example, or share mobility services. So it talks about, you know, policy shifts that would enable kind of a sharing economy approach to a lot of the things that people need. So yeah, I really, I don't know, I appreciate the way that it kind of turns the whole individual choice thing on its head to even in terms of diet, like, there's actually quite a bit in this report about how much shifting to a plant-based diet would maybe eat like one less meal with meat a week? Or, you know, how do we provide options that deliver the same amount of protein but without meat? And I don't know. It's like it's and how do we like disincentivize concentrated animal?

What is that? CAFOs? What's CAFO short for concentrated animal feed operation that sounds right to me okay that's it that's what it is now anyway so it's it's really looking at how do we create the conditions necessary to make these big social and cultural changes so that they're really not dependent on any one individual making different choices themselves. And so another really interesting finding was in the report was this idea that colonization has exacerbated the impacts of climate change. And you brought it up very briefly at the top of our conversation.

But yeah, I mean, who would have thought that the IPCC would release a report that talks about colonization and cap, or I shouldn't say capitalism because I don't think they ever explicitly say that. But- They definitely like hint at it in a lot of ways. So it's quite surprising to see.

Yeah. Yeah, but they do explicitly talk about colonization. And I think that colonization, along with capitalism, are the primary causes of climate change. And I think that it's really great that, you know, sort of these mainstream scientific bodies are sort of catching up with this, at least publicly catching up with it. And so yeah, I'm wondering what your thoughts are on that. at least publicly catching up with it. And so, yeah, I'm wondering what your thoughts are on that.

Yeah, I mean, I totally agree. And this came up in the Working Group 2 report as well around impacts, just really clearly saying, look, colonization not only helped to drive the climate crisis, it also destroyed some of the ecosystems that would help us to, you know, sequester carbon if we hadn't destroyed them. So it's not just that it contributed to the crisis by taking land from people that were protecting it and living on it in a different way, and also imposing all kinds of structures and ideas on the economy and society in ways that absolutely delivered this crisis. But also, it limited the solutions that we have available now. So a big part of them actually finally talking about that was also including Indigenous people in the IPCC process as observers. There's been a big push to include more Indigenous leaders at what they call the Conference of the Parties,

which is like these annual meetings where all of the government officials get together to talk about what they are and aren't willing to actually come together and do about this problem. So I do think that there's been a big improvement there. I also think that it indicates, I don't know, sort of a willingness from this body to shift the way that it has always operated too, which I think is good. You know, I think the fact that they're really starting to point to these big underlying structural drivers of this problem bodes well for other people taking these reports and running with different types of solutions. running with different types of solutions. I also think that it like, I hope that it finally puts to rest this argument from some corners of the climate movement, that things like indigenous sovereignty and labor rights and equity have nothing to do with climate.

I think, because you see it actually in the mitigation report, you see it coming up in a couple places. There's a part in chapter 13, which is focused on policy, where it talks about how the inclusion of marginalized groups leads to not just more political engagement on climate, but also more effective climate policy, which is very, very interesting. But then you also see it coming up in the context of land and land use and, you know, how to maybe rethink the way that governments are looking at land and how it's being used and how it's being looked at in terms of carbon sequestration and climate. So, yeah, I don't know. I think it's interesting. And I really hope that it will get rid of the last few holdouts that are like, no, it's only about energy.

That's it. So, yeah, it was nice to see in both the Working Group 2 report and then this latest one. I mean, it seems like climate change has moved out of being kind of, I know this sounds kind of silly, but like being an environmental issue, right? Like it's really a labor issue. It's a labor struggle. It's a struggle against imperialism and colonization and like, yeah, all of those things. And I almost feel like forming a union at your job or like the land back movement is more of a significant potential solution to climate change than like, I don't know, voting or like,

I mean, I'm being a little bit like I'm exaggerating a little bit here, but also not so much. But these ideas are also sort of, it's good to see them getting into the mainstream a little bit more. And I know that Gavin Newsom, our governor here in California, recently proposed giving Native American tribes in California $100 million to purchase and preserve their ancestral land. So sort of like a land back rematriation kind of thing. And it's part of a larger program that's intending to sort of ensure that around I think a third of California's land and coastal waters are preserved by 2030. So it's like literally, you know, it's like a climate policy. Yes. Like land back is a climate policy. Land back is absolutely a climate policy. Yes. Yes.

Yeah. It 100% is. And honestly, yeah. I mean, like the fact that colonization and colonialism are showing up in IPCC reports is huge. But I almost feel like, and this is probably why those things are showing up. probably why those things are showing up it's it's actually like a bigger thing that the sort of body itself has has created kind of pathways for more indigenous leaders to be part of the process and like to like has specifically sought out more indigenous authors to contribute to the reports too that the fact that there's that kind of like structural change in this body that exists

to kind of help governments and the public understand this problem, to me is like a really big indicator that there's a significant shift that's happened just in the last, you know, five to 10 years in how at least some folks are thinking about this problem. And that kind of, it's a good segue into, I wanted to ask you a little bit about the process behind the IPCC reports a little bit more specifically. So yeah, I'm curious about sort of like the politics, like what goes into these reports and talk a little bit about the pressure coming from, I don't know, states or industry to shape how these reports are written. And like, I know that you had mentioned before we started actually names corporate obstructionism. It talks in several places about misinformation. It talks about how the media has been weaponized as a

distribution mechanism of science denial. It talks about how they call corporations vested interests and status quo interests in this report. But that shows up throughout that status quo interests have worked against climate policy or have deliberately tried to mount a defense against climate policy. called the climate counter movement which is like you know polluting industries and the politicians that they pay you know who who work against any kind of effective climate policy so that is a big new thing however any mention of that stuff got scrubbed from the summary for policymakers which is this kind of initial piece of the report. It's the first thing you see when you open up a report. And it's usually the first thing that's released to media, which is important because, again, we're talking about a 3,000 page report.

And the IPCC is honestly terrible at dealing with media. They're trying, I guess, but they released the report in the middle of the night on a Sunday to media under embargo. It's like 3 a.m., here it is under embargo, and then they released it to the public at 9 a.m. So it's ridiculous. No one has time to read this report before the embargo lifts. And of course, the ideal way to cover it is to cover it across multiple pieces over time and be able to process the report and whatever. But like, that's not how media works anymore. You know, the vast majority of people, if they're getting assigned to cover this report at all, are going to be assigned a story the day that the report drops. And all they're going to be able to do is read that summary for policymakers because it's like 65 pages and, you know, is supposed to summarize

the whole report. However, it's also the only piece that the government representatives from all 195 countries that are part of the IPCC get to weigh in on in like a major way. They all have to agree on the language and the content before it's released. So in this particular case, it actually, it was the longest approval process that they've ever had in IPCC history. They almost delayed the release of the report by like a day. I think they delayed it by about six hours because they couldn't agree on language. And part of that was because the representatives from oil producing countries, particularly Saudi Arabia in this case, they wanted mention of the need to shut down fossil fuel developments to be kind of watered down. They wanted more inclusion of carbon removal technology. There

was a push earlier on to scrub any mention of vested interests from the summary for policymakers. So I don't know, it's this really weird thing where right now, I mean, the summary for policymakers that they ended up putting out honestly reads like the summary for a totally different report. It's so just sort of, I mean, you can imagine like anything that 195 people edited is not going to be great. I'm just imagining that Google Doc. I know. It's a nightmare. Like every single line they go through and, you know,

the word choice and all of that stuff. So I kind of tell people to skip the summary for policymakers and go to the technical summary because they usually release that around the same time as the summary for policymakers. And it sounds like it's just going to be where all the charts and graphs live, but it's actually the summary that the authors themselves come up with and they have like the final say over what goes into that. So it's way more straightforward.

It reads just like the rest of the report. It doesn't sound like a totally different thing. And it includes a lot of these things. Like it includes mention of misinformation. It includes corporate obstructionism. It includes like a lot of the demand and supply stuff. It talks about how, you know, we could feasibly deliver decent living, which this is like a new kind of index that's been around for the last decade or so. It was developed by a team at Yale

under a guy named Narasimha Rao. And it's called the Decent Living Energy Project. And they've come up with this formulation that's like, okay, here's what we define as decent living. And it includes shelter and access to food and a decent amount of mobility and all these things. And it looks specifically at how we can deliver that while reducing emissions. And what they found in this report was we can deliver decent living for the world at half of the current energy use. So that is in the technical summary, all of that stuff. But in the summary for policymakers, if you, yeah, if you read it, it's just sort of like a sad trombone. Yeah.

And then on top of that, the IPCC has always included employees from oil companies as authors. oil companies as authors. And for a long time, it was, well, I mean, initially in the 90s, you know, a lot of the people who were doing the most research on climate science worked for oil companies, right? So there was that. And then there's been this kind of thinking that, well, they have all this technical knowledge and, you know, they signed these conflict of interest forms, so it's okay. But I think even there's quite a few IPCC authors now who are starting to kind of sound the alarm about this. Like, okay, look, at this stage, given everything that we know about what these companies have done and given what a central role they play in this problem, it's just not tenable for a scientific report like this to have people from that industry working as lead authors. If anything, it's just a really bad look. It's a bad look. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah.

The other thing I'll just note, too, is that there is this thing called the earth news bulletin that comes out like the week after the ipcc report that um it like basically spills the tea on the whole process like who was arguing for what behind the scenes oh cool it's excellent so i was yeah that i was actually thinking about that that it would be really great to know about yes like what was going on yes it's great so i'm gonna i'm posting a summary of that tomorrow because again, it's like this very long and wonky report back, but there's a lot of really interesting stuff in it about kind of, you know, who's arguing for what.

And so that'll already be published by the time this goes live next week will be when this happens, which will be the week that people are listening to it. So yeah, that'll be available. So awesome. Well, I would love to wrap up by sort of asking you the question that we, when we remember, try to ask most of our guests, which is sort of this upstream question.

I'm not sure if you're familiar with the upstream metaphor. It is used in like public health and in other contexts, but it's just really this idea that, well, I guess it's sort of a story, say you live by a river and one day you go down to the river and you notice that there's, you know, you see a body coming down the river and it's a person who's drowning. And so you'd like jump in to save that person and you pull them to shore. And then like the next day you see another body and then like the bodies just keep coming and coming. And like the whole, you know, your whole neighborhood is like trying to pull these bodies out. And at some point, it's important to go upstream to figure out what the source of these drowning bodies is.

So it's kind of like this idea of going to root causes. And just, it's a very broad question. So just feel free to take it however you want. But like when you go upstream, what do you sort of see as the root causes of not just climate change, but I mean, even if you want to go farther upstream, just to a lot of the struggles

that are intersecting with climate change and just, yeah, broadly, like what do you see when you go upstream? Yeah, I mean, I think that, so that's actually like the focus of everything I'm interested in around climate change. Because to me, the thing I want answers to is like, how do you get a problem as big as climate change

where sort of a small handful or a small community of people have been able to make decisions that put not just one country, but all of humanity on this course, you know? And to me, the answer is this mix of capitalism and colonization and patriarchy and all of these systems where power is concentrated in the hands of a few people. And those people are incentivized to make decisions that maintain and grow their power. I don't think that you get climate change without those systems coming first. And I don't think that you solve it without addressing sort of the core issues inherent to those systems, which are basically issues of

equality. And I think that there's a reason that the U.S. in particular is the biggest driver of historical emissions and has been the biggest obstruction on climate action for a long time. To me, I think there's a lot in the sort of American obsession with hyper individualism and competition that makes it sort of a natural fit to play that role in the world. So yeah, those are kind of all the things. And I did want to just mention kind of related to that one more related thing on the economics issue and what we're seeing in this report, which is that back in the 80s and 90s, as industries were starting to get very concerned about what it might look like for greenhouse gases to be regulated, they hired various economists. And it's sort of this small group of economists who all coalesced around this model that only looked at the negative economic impact of regulation and didn't look at the impact of

climate change on the economy. And some of those same economists have in recent years actually come out and said, those models were deeply flawed. And- No shit. Yeah. No shit, buddy. Deeply flawed. There's a researcher at Stanford University named Ben Franta, who actually did a paper last year that's incredible, called Weaponizing Economicsning a lot of the discussion around climate that only looks at what will regulation cost and not what will not acting cost, what will inaction cost. And so I don't know, I do feel like there's this way that the actions a small community of people can have that much of an impact in a bad way, then perhaps the opposite can also be true. But yeah, you really see, I mean, the impact of these industries coming together. I just wrote about a new paper that came out this week that found that this industry group called the Global Climate Coalition, they were really talking amongst themselves in like 94, 95. Like, oh my god, you guys, this is getting out of control.

There's so much momentum behind international policy. There's gonna be mandatory emissions reductions. What do we do? We have like 18 months to get a handle on this. And it's like, holy shit, like they did it. So, you know, we have three years. Maybe we can do something. Yeah. You've been listening to an Upstream conversation with Amy Westervelt, climate journalist, founder of the Critical Frequency Podcast Network, and host of the podcast Drilled.

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