[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.

Transcription

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.

S1, Ep4 | 2019: It’s Go Time

S1, Ep3 | 2018: The Wake-Up Call

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, Ep3 | 2018: The Wake-Up Call

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S1, Ep4 | 2019: It’s Go Time