[00:00:10] Hello and welcome to Hot Take, the podcast where we talk about talking about climate. We take a crack at intersectional justice oriented media criticism for climate coverage. I'm Amy Westervelt.

[00:00:21] Right. And I'm Mary Heglar. As we mentioned in our last episode, we're gearing up to going biweekly in 2020, but we're going to spend the rest of 2019 taking a look back at the past few years and how much climate storytelling has changed recently, because it really has. Right?

[00:00:38] Oh, my God. Yeah. I remember when you could barely even say climate change in a story.

[00:00:42] It's really true! And it's really changed a lot. Specifically in the Frump era. And we wanted to do a recap of the whole Frump era. But we'd be here forever. So we're gonna break it up a little.

[00:00:53] Yeah. We really would. In this episode, we're going to focus on 2016 and 2017 and next time we'll look across 2018 and review it and then we'll do an episode on 2019.

[00:01:04] Then it'll be 2020 and we'll be every two weeks! Try to think of these recap episodes as sort of snippets. We're humble enough to know that there's no way that we got our hands on all the great climate writing that's out there.

[00:01:16] Exactly. And if there's something we missed in 2016 and 2017 that you thought should have been discussed, please tweet at us, we're at realhottake and we're bound to miss some great stuff.

[00:01:27] That's right. Okay. Should we get started?

[00:01:56] I felt like a yearlong hangover.

[00:02:02] Yeah, actually, I in 2016, I found myself waking up with more existential dread than I do now.

[00:02:10] Yeah. Actually, climate is a big part of what has been very, very wrong with this presidency. But it like it. It was like barely even discussed in any of the debates. Not in the primary at all, like..

[00:02:27] Do you remember that debate? That was all about that one guy in that red sweater that was like undecided between Hillary and Donald Trump.

[00:02:36] And this is like a real late in the election. And everybody became obsessed with him. And it was like not one word about climate in these debates that I can recall. I do remember being like, really happy when Bernie Sanders brought it up. And one of the debates, it was like his opening statement. I was like, beautiful.

[00:02:55] I know. And even I feel like even the environmental reporters were not talking that much about what he would do to roll back any kind of regulations on the oil industry. You know, he he talked about withdrawing from Paris is like part of his one of his campaign promise.

[00:03:22] So, you know, really, I guess what's disturbing is that I see those exact same people now who are so dismissive and so smug in 2016 being just as dismissive and just as smug today. And so I'm like do you not learn?!

[00:03:39] I think the rule should be if you laughed more than you cried in 2016, you need to listen more than you talk in 2020, that is the fucking rule.

[00:03:50] That is a great rule! You know, kind of in keeping with our subject here, which is climate coverage, there was a huge shift in climate coverage from 2016 and 2017. And I think, yeah, you know, the election definitely played into it. And some of the pieces that we're going to talk about today certainly did too.

[00:04:12] Yeah. So when I was doing the research for this episode, I was struck by a lot of stuff. First of all, one of the things that really stuck out to me is that I was still seeing a lot of articles that were relying really heavily on the individual action frame, which now I don't feel like I see that as much anymore. It's far more widely accepted that we need collective action, that we need political action, that this is the fault of industries and corporations. But when I was looking for articles from 2016, that wasn't all them. What I was finding, I was finding a lot of like you should recycle and you should compost and you should like cut your carbon foot right in these different ways. And even the ways I was seeing for people to cut their carbon footprints were really like not even the biggest things you could do as individuals. I wasn't seeing as much about like stopping flying. It was more about like what you do as a consumer on the day to day level, which I found that really interesting.

[00:05:16] Yeah, yeah. It was still really like around just like buying different stuff, that's the key.

[00:05:24] Yeah, exactly. Because you're a consumer, not a citizen. But we know that that's wrong.

[00:05:29] I feel like some of the pieces in 2016 were like the ones that did talk about climate straight on and talked about, you know, and we're kind of some of amongst some of the earlier ones talking about the path that we are on and what that might look like. And all of those ones were like eerily prescient. I just.

[00:05:52] Yeah, yeah.  For example, ProPublica did this story on Houston's perfect storm and it pretty much predicts Hurricane Harvey

[00:06:02] Yeah, it's crazy. The little map that they have where they're like and then there's these chemical plants and if they get hit ...I was like oh my god, all of that happened, and not that long after that story came out!

[00:06:12] Exactly. They came out and were like, look at science, predicting the future in a very eerie way.

[00:06:21] I know another one that had that effect for me. I want to read a little bit from this by Jeff Goodell.

[00:06:28] And the title is Can New York be Saved in the era of global warming, which I highly recommend everybody going back to read.

[00:06:37] Oh, this gives me a chance to debut our new Sound Effect for reading excerpts. Here it is. [wind chime]

[00:06:48] If it is going to survive fortifying New York will require more than just walls. It will require a radical rethinking of the relationship between the city and the people who live in it. If the central role of government is to keep people safe, what happens when people realize they are not? What is the government's role in keeping people out of harm's way? How does the government compensate people whose properties are underwater? The Dutch architect who led the team that designed the Blue Dunes and who has done as much thinking about how to live with water as anyone compare sea level rise to other transformative catastrophes such as the dustbowl, a partly manmade natural disaster that profoundly changed the geography of America and also expanded the role that government plays in ensuring the long term welfare of even the most vulnerable people. We're going to need a new deal, he says. It's going to require a rethinking of the social construct contract in America.

[00:07:47] Does that remind you of anything happening right now? Anything at all?

[00:07:53] Yeah. So I thought that that piece super interesting.

[00:07:57] Another thing I was seeing when I was looking back was that we were just starting to put the pieces together around climate refugees. As it relates to, you know, these waves of migrants coming from Latin America and really all over the world. That was like I don't remember. I started seeing climate refugees as a term in 2017. I didn't see it so much in 2016 and in a lot of journalism. And again, might have missed some stuff.

[00:08:25] Well, it's interesting because climate refugees was a big thing in 2009 and then it totally disappeared. You know, there was this. There were all these stories about it in the run up to the Copenhagen climate summit.

[00:08:41] There were all of these stories about the Maldives and about Tuvalu. And there were activists that were there, you know, like holding signs up about like art, like we're going to be underwater soon, you know.

[00:08:54] And then in the U.S., there was the indigenous village of Kivalina in Alaska. That actually was one of the first big lawsuits against fossil fuel companies because their village was disappearing because of glacier melt and sea level rise. And that was in 2009, 2010 ish. So there was like a bunch of stories around it. And that was also the first time you started hearing about climate reparations like that actually started to come up around Copenhagen. And then it just like totally disappeared within a year.

[00:09:28] The whole like, well, I ... think It was mostly because of the climate gate scandal. So I don't know if you remember.

[00:09:34] I don't remember. It's like one of those things that I keep seeing people mention and I don't know...

[00:09:43] OK. So this is it was it was wild because it was basically like a "hack" of a bunch of high level IPCC climate scientists. So climate scientists who were working on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and its annual reports and like all of that stuff around 2008, 2009 and in in like the months leading up to the Copenhagen climate summit, which was in 2009, there were all these leaks of emails and they were totally like it was all like this completely manufactured scandal where it was like, you know, gotcha scientists like, you know, turns out They're still really uncertain about climate change and they're colluding to try to make it seem like they're more sure than they are.

[00:10:37] And, you know, kind of took like bits and pieces of people's emails and and cobbled them together to to create this non scandal. But it was enough. I mean, at that time, the we had Obama in office and Congress was in control of Democrats. And so it was the the first time in recent history, kind of since Kyoto, that there was a real chance that we might have like a binding global climate treaty. And so the fossil fuel guys were going frickin nuts, like the spending on ads and lobbying and all that stuff is just off the charts in the lead up to Copenhagen. And then here comes climate gate.

[00:11:21] And like honestly, it's totally one of those things where you're like, how did this work? Because it was so obviously bogus and it was clownish. But it worked. And it was it was like the thing that was it was actually like a really key kind of modern turning point on climate action where like it really seemed like something was going to happen. And there again, it's like there were a ton of youth activists. You know, this is why sometimes, too, now when people are like, oh, if we just get Democrats in charge, it'll be fine. I'm like, well, history says no.

[00:11:53] Yeah. I think it's also like why we see people on the .... Well I wouldn't call it the far left like people who want to preserve the plant aren't far anything. BUT  you see a lot of folks in the environmental space, in the climate space, looking at candidates for office really hard. And I think there's a lot of for lack of a better term trauma or I like broken promises. Some people who have really like that, they were gonna get somewhere at some point and then finding out that they're absolutely not getting somewhere. And it's just really hard to believe in political power.

[00:12:36] Yeah. There's some baggage there.

[00:12:37] In case you hear some hissing in the background, I have a very old apartment with a very old heater, which means I'm very lucky to have heat, but I can't control this thing.

[00:12:55] (laughing) But yeah, another one of the trends that I saw in the research for this show that actually kind of cracked me up in a very sad way was all of these people still thinking that Donald Trump might become presidential?

[00:13:11] Oh right, like he was going to rise to the occasion.

[00:13:14] Remember Van Jones, and that whole like the night he became president.

[00:13:18] Oh, I still have. Oh, my God. I have not gotten over that yet. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:13:22] But I think this put a lot in the in the articles about the cop that here the COP of 2016, which was held in Morocco.

[00:13:32] [record scratch noise] COP is short for conference of parties. It is the decision making body responsible for monitoring and reviewing the implementation of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. But when people say things like, you know, the COP in Morocco or the COP in Copenhagen, they mostly refer to these global climate conventions where representatives from various countries are trying to come up with a global treaty. The COP has met annually since 1995. So that's how long people have been trying to get some sort of global agreement on climate policy. The Kyoto Protocol was the first agreement to come out of a COP that seemed like it could actually move the needle globally on climate change. It was torpedoed by the efforts of industry and various Republican groups. And George W. Bush pulled out of it officially in 2001. And the only one that has been drafted and actually stuck is the one that was written in Paris. And then, of course, the United States pulled out of it. [record scratch noise]

[00:14:43] I saw a lot of article saying like, oh, he might rise to the occasion.

[00:14:46] And then I was also seeing these articles that were saying that the U.S. was going to become a pariah state and that Donald Trump attitude toward the climate might turn out to be a good thing by motivating everyone else to take action. And we know how that turned out.

[00:15:04] But it just it almost seemed like people weren't even believing it when they were saying it. They just sort of had to find some silver lining, some way to find something. Yeah.

[00:15:15] Yes. Speaking of outrage, remember Scott Pruitt?

[00:15:18] Who? God Scot Pruitt, Jeff Sessions, Rick fucking Tillerson, Rex Tillerson. My what I will never, ever, ever forgive him for is making Rex Tillerson not that bad of a guy like I remembered there was one point where, like, he seemed like the adult in the room, like Rex Tillerson is going to save us. And I was like, what kind of gaslit-ass shit is this?

[00:15:49] Yeah, totally. Yeah. Yeah. Rex Tillerson, who's who's like most recent public appearance, was testifying in the Exxon fraud trial jury about the time that, you know, he was CEO of Exxon as they were like lying about climate change impacts. Yeah, I mean that guy. But then Scott Pruitt and his and his his secret phone booth. Oh my. Remember. Yeah. I don't remember if that came out Probably hadn't come out yet in 2016.

[00:16:23] No, it came out in 2017. Scott Pruitt was out of office the summer of 2017. He did not last long. All of this shit happened really, really fast and that's why we all have whiplash now. [**Correction: Pruitt resigned in 2018].

[00:16:40] I got to say that we started to see some real strides in climate storytelling from 2016 2017 and starting with the summer of 2016. There was this flurry of major climate coverage. It thought it seemed like what Donald Trump was elected. There was a rush to cover the subject and take a lot more seriously like I was seeing article after article after article and really big news organization. It was also a really big year for climate action. That's the year Amy Brady's first climate fiction column came out in the Chicago Review book. So I think that was a pretty big milestone.

[00:17:23] Yeah. Totally. That was huge because before that I feel like, you know, CliFi, climate fiction existed, but it was sort of like it was just it was kind of like a niche thing and honestly. OK. So there was one guy that pitched me on CliFi like years ago, like starting 10, 15 years ago. And he always just seemed like a little bit nutty. So I feel like 2017 was sort of the year that climate fiction became a real thing.

[00:17:54] With like real plots, just like a variety of types of story. Yeah.

[00:18:01] And I think that also was the year that The Great Derangement came out, which is Amitav Ghosh's really great essay collection about why is climate not in all of our stories. It was published in 2016. So you're kind of in the same same time frame.

[00:18:23] 2017 was also the year that we started to see more people talking about how we talk about climate change, especially on the emotional and psychological front. Doctor Renee Lertzman has been talking about that for a long time and she wrote a piece in Sierra magazine called How Can We Talk About Global Warming?

[00:18:46] Yeah You know, she wrote a book a little while back called Environmental Melancholia. That was sort of talking about tackling climate grief and then and then has kind of focused on this space of of the psychology of environmental news for a while. Anyway, I feel I feel like 2017 we start to actually see more of these kinds of conversations start to emerge in the coverage on climate, which we hadn't been necessarily seeing much.

[00:19:21] Yeah. And the the range of emotions, which means the range of language got much, much, much bigger. And yeah, it was a groundbreaking year for climate coverage. a lot of people did some really amazing work.

[00:19:40] Before we get into that, I think we also got to recap some of the issues that caused a lot of that shift to happen. With so much happening, so much shit like Donald Trump and his fucking goons like come into office and with a straight god damn face and were like, you know what, fuck y'all, y'all clean water and clean air, you're fucked again.

[00:20:05] We're going to get rid of the EPA.

[00:20:08] We're going to poison ourselves to own the fucking libs. Hard to get this shit like they pulled out of Paris. They straight up tried to eliminate the EPA.

[00:20:18] They deregulated every fucking thing totally. I know the guy that was in charge of the EPA transition team for Trump is this guy named Steve Milloy, who has been basically trying to kill the EPA since it was born.

[00:20:36] The moment that haunts my dreams the most is when he pulled out of Paris and he had like that big reception on the Rose Garden and it was crazy fucking hot. And there was a band that played the whole time. Yeah. And it just felt so much like the Titanic.

[00:20:51] Another big political event going on in 2016 and 2017 was Standing Rock.

[00:20:59] And I've got two pieces that I want to talk about from that phrase. I want to acknowledge that there are some really great coverage on Standing Rock from Unicorn Riot and Mother Jones. I think they might have teamed up, actually. Yeah. And Unicorn Riot covered every second of it. It was really fantastic and really brave because it got extraordinarily violent on the part of the state. Yeah. Against protestors, you know.

[00:21:30] And the piece I want to read from is the eviction letter to the Army Corps of Engineers by Harriet Frazer of of the Sioux Nation.

[00:21:43] [wind chime] I take your letter as issuing a direct and irresponsible threat to the water protector. It appears to further empower the militarized police force that has been brutalizing and terrorizing our water protectors while imposing the blame and the risk on unarmed, peaceful people. We have pleaded for the protection of the United States. Your letter makes a grave and dangerous mistake. Federal efforts to de-escalate the violence should be aimed at the wrongdoers, not at our peaceful peace people.

[00:22:16] And. I just wanted to read that piece. And in the words of someone actually on the ground there of.

[00:22:26] The disproportionate violence and the disproportionate blame for that violence, because they would straight, do stuff that was caught on camera, and then claim they didn't do it.

[00:22:35] And then the footage came out and it was like, oh, you just straight up lied.

[00:22:41] And it was just totally far cry from what you see at most by climate marches or invite Earth Day. You know, demonstrations and what happens basically when it's mostly white people.

[00:22:55] And actually, this Standing Rock, I mean, I think it's really important for people to kind of like look back at these stories and we'll post links to these in the show notes, because this is the origin of what we're seeing now, where you have pipeline companies working with groups like ALEC, which like writes, you know, legislation that they then just give to politicians and actually passing laws that criminalize protests. This was the thing that made them kind of start thinking this way, that we really have to crack down on these protests because guess what? If oil companies don't have access to as much cheap indigenous land as they want, which is pretty much like what they've done for decades, they keep this whole thing of running pipelines this way, in that way all over the country, in between Canada and the U.S. and wherever doesn't work anymore.

[00:23:48] Right. And where these pipelines go missing, indigenous women tends to happen.

[00:23:55] Yeah, right. Yes. Yes. You end up with these things that they call "man camps," which are like these giant camps of, you know, workers. And there's a huge incidence of women being assaulted, battered, raped, gone, missing, murdered. All of that.  Sometimes it happens as a result of protests. Sometimes it happens just as a result of there being like large groups of men isolated in an area where there aren't that many women. And they kind of take women, you know.

[00:24:28] Right. And it's not just like they take women. They take very vulnerable, unprotected women, women who are marginalized, who they know the police don't care about. Basically.

[00:24:39] Right. Right. That they won't be tracked and they won't be prosecuted.

[00:24:44] Yeah. Yeah. The other piece I wanted to read from is by Julian Brave Noyce Cat in The Guardian.

[00:24:56] It's called I Was Arrested for Protesting and a reason I wanted to read from that. So Julian is an indigenous man from, I believe, Canada by way of California.

Transcription

What happened in climate coverage in the lead-up to and aftermath of the 2016 election, how natural disasters rocked our world and our stories in 2017, Standing Rock, pieces that changed the narrative forever, and more.Stories discussed in this ep:ProPublica, "Houston's Perfect Storm" 

https://projects.propublica.org/houston/Rolling

 Stone, “Can New York Be Saved in the Era of Global Warming?” 

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/can-new-york-be-saved-in-the-era-of-global-warming-240454/Sierra

 Magazine, “How Can We Talk about Global Warming” 

https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/how-can-we-talk-about-global-warming

https://chireviewofbooks.com/2017/04/13/11-climate-fiction-authors-favorite-books/Standing

 Rock; Eviction Letter to the Army Corps of Engineers by Harold Frazier of the Sioux 

http://nativenewsonline.net/currents/cheyenne-river-sioux-tribe-reacts-u-s-army-corps-engineers-eviction-notice-letter-makes-grave-dangerous-mistake/The

 Guardian, "I Was Arrested for Protesting," 

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/may/03/i-was-arrested-for-protesting-my-idealism-did-not-prepare-me-for-that-experience

 Mother Jones, "“This is How Puerto Ricans are Talking about Climate Change” 

https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2017/09/heres-how-puerto-ricans-are-talking-about-climate-change/New

 York Magazine, "The Uninhabitable Earth," 

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-earth-too-hot-for-humans.htmlThe

 Atlantic, "Democrats are Shockingly Unprepared to Fight Climate Change" 

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/11/there-is-no-democratic-plan-to-fight-climate-change/543981/Inside

 Climate News, "Finding Middle Ground" series 

https://insideclimatenews.org/content/middle-groundThe

 Nearly Now, "The Smokestacks Come Tumbling Down" 

https://thenearlynow.com/the-smokestacks-come-tumbling-down-c03ba1294522Bitch

https://www.bitchmedia.org/article/least-convenient-truth/climate-change-and-white-supremacyIsland

https://www.taswriters.org/wildcare-winner-harriet-rileys-essay-endlings

Mary Annaïse Heglar

[00:00:06] Welcome to Hot Take, the podcast where we talk about how to talk about climate change and how to make it more intersectional and touching, in other words, how to make it better. I'm Mary Annaïse Heglar.

[00:00:21] And I'm Amy Westervelt. This episode is part of our Frump era review and we're taking a trip back down memory lane to 2018, which even though it was just last year, I think you'll be as surprised as we were at just how much the climate conversation has changed in that amount of time.

[00:00:38] Yeah, I mean, I was blown away. If you missed it, our last episode took a look back at 2016 and 2017, which were also groundbreaking years for climate coverage. And our next episode is going to take a look back at 2019. So look out for that in early January.

[00:00:55] Right. And after that, for the rest of 2020, we'll be looking at climate coverage in real time every two weeks. So make sure you're subscribed.

[00:01:04] And then another exciting thing for 2020 and we're going to start taking listener questions. So if you've got a question about kind of storytelling, make sure to e-mail us at Hot Takes at Critical Frequency dot org. Yes, that's hot takes plural.

[00:01:20] Yep. We're especially interested in questions from climate storytellers. So if you're working on a story or an idea and you're not sure how to make it intersectional, please reach out. We love that stuff.

[00:01:29] We do. And before we kick off our 2018 a review, just a quick reminder to think of these episodes as snippets and highlights. There's no way we're going to cover everything.

[00:01:39] That's right. All the articles we talk about here are gonna be on our show notes and on Twitter, too. And if something's missing tweeted us, we're at Real Hot Take and we love hearing from you.

[00:01:51] All right. We've got a lot to cover. So to quote Beyonce. You ready?

[00:01:58] (laughing) You let me get away with way too much

[00:02:05] So 2018 was a big-ass year wasn't it?

[00:02:08] Oh, my God, I just. It does. I mean, I know that like this has been said by many people already, but every year since 2016 feels like 10.

[00:02:19] It does. It has. It's hard to believe. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So just till I give a few highlights. 2018 team in the summer, Zero Hour youth climate group marched on Washington. They were founded in 2017 by Nadia Nasar and Jamie Margolin. But they organized this huge march on Washington and in New York City, and they had other satellite marches all over the country to demand climate action. That was in July. And in August, Greta started her first school strike in Sweden.

[00:02:58] It's so crazy to think that that has only been going on for like a year and a half. That's really. It is. Yeah.

[00:03:05] Scott Pruitt resigned that summer. I know the last episode. I said he resigned in the summer of 2017, but he actually resigned some 2018. That's how Whiplash works. People, you can't keep it straight.

[00:03:19] We were stuck with him for a year or longer.

[00:03:26] [record scratch] Scott Pruitt was Trump's pick to lead the EPA. He resigned in 2013 amid various ethics scandals. There were accusations that he kept a secret calendar to hide meetings with industry people. He had a private phone booth installed in the EPA to keep his conversations secret before he got to the EPA. Scott Pruitt was the attorney general of Oklahoma, and he actually sued the EPA more than he sued anyone else. It's pretty widely known climate skeptic, big friend of the oil industry and didn't do much but roll back environmental regulations as EPA administrator. [record scratch]

[00:04:10] AOC announced her longshot run for the Congress out of Queens and ran on a green new deal.

[00:04:18] And then there were the yellow jacket protests in France.

[00:04:21] Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting that when I feel like there's you're still seeing little kind of pockets of that happening. Yeah.

[00:04:29] Let's take that way back because I'm a little hazy on what yellow jacket protests were. I'd bet a lot of people are.

[00:04:37] OK. Here we go. So the yellow vests that they were wearing are these like neon yellow kind of safety vests that drivers are required to carry in their vehicles in the case of roadside emergencies. So Macron, as part of a larger group of policies, put a tax on gas and around two hundred and eighty thousand people protested across the country in response, calling for him to remove this tax. It was going to make gasoline go up by around 12 cents per gallon on diesel and twenty eight cents a gallon on unleaded gas and then to kind of continue going up. Initially, he refused to reconsider the tax because he said it was part of reducing France's dependance on fossil fuels. So that's super interesting because there's definitely a kind of a conspiracy theory that does sort of hold water that that, you know, fossil fuel companies were sort of fanning the flames of this protest because this is like exactly what they say will happen if anyone tackles climate change.

[00:05:47] It's like, oh, you're just going to impose costs on people who can't afford it. And it's going to be bad for poor people, which I often find somewhat amusing, because the idea that like oil companies are in business to solve poverty is like absurd.

[00:06:02] Right. But it went on for it went on for several weeks. And like I got violent,.

[00:06:11] It got violent. There were big, big riots. There was like a lot of damage being done.

[00:06:18] It was also really harrowing from TV. It did like it made it look really violent.

[00:06:23] And also the unions got really involved, too. So that which is another kind of classic conflict, you know, labor has actually been one of the biggest obstacles to climate action for the last several decades. And partly that's because the industry has gone out of its way to sort of befriend labor. There's there's actually quite a bit of evidence around some of the top oil kind of communications people specifically being like, you know, as one of the points in their strategy is like befriend the labor unions so that they're here. And it's yeah, I don't know. There were also, you know, this at this time to like Marine Le Pen had lost her sort of. Alt right run at leadership. And so there was some speculation that her camp was also kind of trying to stir this up as a sort of an f you to Macron.

[00:07:26] Yeah. Then they also designed the policy in such a way that the burden fell on the wrong people.

[00:07:33] It wasn't that it was climate action. People are against paying for other people's sins because that's what it really is.

[00:07:41] Well, yeah. When this was happening, I was like, why are people saying, oh, no, this is what might happen here instead of, oh, no. This is what happens when you make the people pay instead of the polluters.

[00:07:55] Yeah. Yeah. But the big thing that happened before that, the resounding alarm bell wakeup call of 2018 was the IPCC report in that October, the first IPCC report that I think has ever made national headlines, certainly the first one that I have ever heard of. And I actually work in like officially officially in the environmental movement. Yeah. So before we dig too far into this actual report, can you explain a little bit about what the IPCC is?

[00:08:33] Yes, it's an international body of scientists and policymakers, and then they actually let a certain number of NGOs and industry groups and all sorts of people with some kind of an interest in climate policy. Weigh in. But the fact these final reports are written and peer reviewed and I mean gone over with a fine tooth comb by the global climate science community. And they come out they come out every four years. They have a big assessment and they make a bunch of. Policy and scientific recommendations based on those assessments, and they have always tended to be extremely conservative. In fact, actually there's there's there's this moment maybe 10 years ago where the the activist community was was really annoyed with the IPCC and the oil companies started to embrace the IPCC because they were sort of like not really tepid. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So this report where they're saying, you know, this is the report that that has the information and recommendations in it that have made people ever since, say, things like we only have 10 years to act on climate.

[00:09:52] So it really changed the the landscape of of the conversation. It changed the vocabulary of the conversation. And I'll say so. I remember before that people were talking about like, how do we limit things to two degrees? How do we limit warming to 2 degrees as the allowable limit? And after that report came out, which really laid out a gruesome and grim detail, what two degrees looks like and what one point five degrees looks like. People are like, oh, absolutely not.

[00:10:18] We have to limit it to one point five degrees. And the understanding that one point five degrees is not cute and is a death sentence for a lot of people and that a lot of people have already died because of where we are right now. Like that cat got out of the bag and to a huge degree, it democratize the conversation like people were actually able to understand these things that I feel like people have hidden from the public for a really long time of like we can't tell them how bad it is because then you get really scared and then they'll shut down like you do. They're already shut down, you know? You know what? Fuck it. Let's try something else.

[00:10:56] I think it actually helped people feel like, okay, this IS really bad Yeah. And they they they just came right out and said, like, nothing we're doing is anywhere near enough.

[00:11:09] Yeah, it pulled the veil back. Paris is not enough. Those Paris agreements that everybody was out all crunk about really not going to cut it, girl.

[00:11:18] Really not. Yeah. I mean they straight up said. Like the emissions targets in Paris will not get us to where we need to be by 2030.

[00:11:25] And like not even not get us there. Not even come close. Yeah, right.

[00:11:31] [record scratch] So when we refer to Paris, that is the EU and Paris agreement was reached in December 2015. All of the nations that are part of these global climate conventions into a common agreement to undertake efforts to combat climate change and adapt to its effects with an aim at limiting the temperature increase to below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase even further to one point five degrees Celsius. Several climate scientists, in meantime, have said that the targets in the Paris agreement were too low. And the IPCC itself said that in 2018. [record scratch]

[00:12:21] And they also pulled the veil back on the companies responsible or actually I've been scolded about this on Twitter. So I think that that quote that everyone uses, about 71 percent of the emissions today are our by 100 companies. I think that came from another report that came out. But it's still true.

[00:12:42] The Carbon Majors Report by Richard Heede!

[00:12:49] And so that veil was pulled back and I think it was the death knell for the individual action frame. You remember in the immediate wake of this, seeing a lot of those traditional stories about and here's what you can do about climate change and again, about recycling again is about, you know, eating less meat. And, you know, all of these really like baby steps. And people blasted those articles with the stat that it was a hundred companies with the stat that the Paris agreement wasn't enough, with the stat that we need a World War II style mobilization. That was another line from this report that was like a mic drop moment. And people were like, oh, I get it now.

[00:13:32] Yes, yes. Totally, totally. That's it. This is interesting, too, actually, timing wise, because you had the IPCC report, the carbon majors report, and then you also had in 2018, you started to see a bunch more of what they call attribution science reports coming out, which is a relatively new branch of climate science where they can basically say this percentage of sea level rise is 100 percent due to anthropogenic, so human-caused climate change, human caused emissions, and therefore, like we can look at, OK. For example, Superstorm Sandy, what would have happened if we had like 10 percent less sea level rise and therefore like 10 percent less storm surge and whatever, and then started to actually look at not just the responsibility of, you know, OK, this company is responsible for this. This amount of emissions. And we know that emissions were responsible for this percentage of the damage from this storm. So how do we then start to hold companies responsible for specific dollar amount damages, which really hadn't been capable of doing before? I do think that that report sparked a whole new wave of activism, too. So then, you know, you see extinction rebellion coming out in October 2018.

[00:15:06] The same exact month (laughing)

[00:15:07] And then the sunrise sit in at Pelosi's office was in November. So it definitely like you started to see these kind of almost immediate actions related to it.

[00:15:17] Right. And zero hour gets a lot louder. Greta, schools strike. I mean, it's hard to believe that that just started in August in 2018  because by August of 2019, you know, like she's world famous.

[00:15:32] She's Time's Person of the Year. It's crazy.

[00:15:35] Yeah. And same thing for zero hour. Like Jamie Margolin is all over the news now. And no one had ever heard of Zero Hour before this summer of 2018. The other giant thing is that AOC's long shot for Congress. She got into Congress on a blue wave in November of 2018. All right. Several other climate champions who surprise, surprise were mostly women of color.

[00:16:04] Ilhan Omar, Rashida Talib, Ayanna Pressley, you knonw, the squad. So, you know, it was a huge year for climate action. It just really seemed like a giant wakeup call that year.

[00:16:19] At the same time, there were some not great things happening in  two thousand eighteen starting well not starting with but including the Bolsonaro election in Brazil.

[00:16:32] Right. Right. Yeah. We're still dealing with the consequences of that today.

[00:16:39] You know big people here were running on on a plank of like, you know, climate policy and he one of his client, his campaign promises was to like lift environmental regulations, especially in the Amazon You know, and so.

[00:16:55] And not one centimeter of land for indigenous community.

[00:16:58] I know. Yeah. Yeah. Which is. Yeah. GROSS.

[00:17:11] And then there is all of the disasters that we saw in 2018 There, as Hurricane Michael, Hurricane Florence.

[00:17:22] There was a forest fire in Greece in addition to a medication which I had never heard of. And if you're like me and you've never heard of a medication, what it is, is a hurricane in the Mediterranean where there are not hurricanes. And here this storm also hit Tunisia and Turkey. There was Typhoon Jet I in Japan, Typhoon Mang Kert in the Philippines. Yeah, floods and landslides in Japan and India. Earthquakes and tsunamis in Indonesia.

[00:18:00] And no one can forget about the wildfire season that year in California. Just the wildfire year in California.

[00:18:06] Yeah, it was so it was really, really, really bad. Yeah. Yeah, there was the Camp fire. Malibu was evacuated.

[00:18:16] And then in December of 2017, you had the Thomas Fire in California, down in Southern California, and it actually burned for six months, which is like it's just hard to even imagine that. But yeah, in June of 2018, the news outlets started running, stories like the Thomas Fire is finally out. That fire started in December of 2017. That's frickin nuts.

[00:18:45] This was in Southern California, Ventura County.And Santa Barbara, which is like two hours north of L.A. and the super weird thing. So I know a lot about this fire because my family lives down there. And we had just been there for Thanksgiving. And then it was shortly after we left that the fire kicked off. And my mom had actually like more than one friend who lost their house in that fire. And a couple of them, it was like the second time they had lost a home in a fire. And they were just like, that's it. I'm done with California.

[00:19:25] But then the big problem also was that about a month later, you started getting these unbelievable storms with really, really large volumes of rain in a very short amount of time. So you had mudslides that wiped out like entire houses, like you would. It was crazy. The footage from that was like, you know, someone would be like, OK, the storm's pretty bad. The streets are flooding. And then they'd be like, oh, my God. And all these houses would just be like falling down a hillside. It was it was just it was crazy.

[00:19:58] I didn't even know a house could do that.

[00:20:02] I remember seeing Oprah talk about us like, OK. So it's affecting Oprah!

[00:20:06] Right? Because Oprah has a house in Montecito. Yeah so Santa Barbara is a pretty wealthy town. Monticello is like this extremely wealthy, little like village just outside of Santa Barbara. And a bunch of celebrities have houses there, including Oprah. So, you know, it was getting probably more attention than it normally would have.

[00:20:34] Yeah, I believe the Kardashians have a house there.

[00:20:39] A lot of people. A lot of people. And so. Well, and then, you know, between that and Malibu that year, it was like the year that that climate change started to really like hit celebrities literally where they live. Yes. So. Yeah, but anyway. Yeah. That was the largest fire in California's history. The Thomas Fire. Yeah.

[00:21:02] And then a lot of people think it's camp fire.

[00:21:04] Yeah, I know. Then you have the camp fire, which is the fire that takes out paradise.

[00:21:10] Right. Explain a little bit more about that for folks who might not remember.

[00:21:13] So that one, too, is I mean, just it was massive and it started up in 2018, actually, almost exactly a year after the Thomas fires. It was November 2018 and it sparked from an electrical line Yeah. Yeah. It was an electrical fire. So it was, you know, basically poorly maintained transmission lines, which is another. This is like a big thing in California right now, as you know. What role do the utilities play? And of course, what's happening now in part in response to the camp fire is that PG&E and Southern California Edison are doing these massive planned blackouts. So they're like, it's going to be windy.

[00:22:01] And like our transmissions lines suck because we haven't maintain them for decades. So we're just going to shut off the power until the wind goes away. At first, people were like, well, this is what we have to do and it's better than dealing with wildfires and all of that stuff, which. Yes. But also there's this whole piece to it that's like, OK, but what happens if, like, you know, your business barely makes ends meet.

[00:22:30]  Or you need an oxygen machine or.

[00:22:33] Yeah, exactly. It's like how did how do people who have any kind of reliance on help like healthcare machines cope with, like surprise? You don't have power for a week, you know, so ugly.

[00:22:47] Yeah. And those are people who generally have a fraction of the income that most people have. Yep. Their earning power is extraordinarily compromised. So it's not like they can just. All right. My power is out. So now time for me to get in my car, which I don't have exact drive to stay somewhere where there actually is power. Yeah. It's extremely hard for people on those sorts of margins to make plans. But just like as you're talking about this, what I'm realizing is that I think 2018 was the year that California's fires started to become national stories.

[00:23:22] I think that's because of paradise. I feel like when you have a fire that burns an entire town like the town of Paradise is it's like, you know, 17 ish thousand people. It's not I mean, it's small, but it's.

[00:23:34] And it was a retirement community.

[00:23:39] Called Paradise. So that was pretty evocative.

[00:23:45] So the Thomas fire is the largest fire. The Camp fire was the deadliest and most destructive fire in state history. Yeah.

[00:23:51] It moved crazy fast in the footage out of it was was harrowing to see the look driving through what looked like hell and reading the escape stories of people. I read one where someone was trying to drive out of the fires, couldn't get out because there were like burn trees on the road and couldn't drive out. And so they took off there. They started running and then their shoes were melting onto the pavement. So take their shoes off and then they are running and running and there's nowhere to go anymore. So they have to swim through an island to an island in the middle of this body of water. and just hope that the wind doesn't blow, you know, a branch on fire over there.

[00:24:36] And they wound up making it. But how do you really go on with like what are your nightmares like after an experience like that?

[00:24:47] How do you Just like go back to normal after something like that.

[00:24:50] That is some that's like war trauma.

2018 brought massive change to the ways we talk about climate. Global climate scientists put out the most alarming report yet on climate change impacts and projections, and media covered that report with the seriousness it deserved. The climate movement finally started moving past the hope narrative, and with megastorms ramping up and a town called Paradise burning down, climate change became impossible to ignore.

Hot Take S1

S1, Ep3 | 2018: The Wake-Up Call

S1, Ep2 | 2016-2017 in Review: The Hangover

Hot Take is a holistic, irreverent, honest look at the climate crisis and all the ways media and society are talking—and not talking—about it. Hosted by real-life friends Mary Annaïse Heglar and Amy Westervelt—an essayist and a journalist— Hot Take offers a unique perspective on the issue of climate change. With a breath of fresh humanity and humor, conversation moves swiftly from cackling about the bad week an oil company had, to speaking seriously and passionately about the unequal distribution of climate impacts and our own experiences of climate grief. And then washing it down with a round of dad jokes! Every week, we’ll connect you with the latest climate news and with the journalists and storytellers trying to make sense of this complex issue to help you see the world through climate-colored glasses. We ended production on Hot Take at the end of 2022, but you can still access episodes here, or 

A holistic, irreverent, honest look at the climate crisis and all the ways media and society are talking—and not talking—about it.

S1, Ep2 | 2016-2017 in Review: The Hangover

About This Episode

Transcript

Next Up

S1, Ep3 | 2018: The Wake-Up Call