S1, Ep3 | 2018: The Wake-Up Call

Mary [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.

Amy [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.

Mary [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.

Amy [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.

Mary [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.

Amy [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.

Mary [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.

Amy [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.

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

Amy [00:01:56] Let's go.

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

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

Amy [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.

Mary [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.

Amy [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.

Mary [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.

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

Mary [00:03:22] We were. (laughing)

Amy [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]

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

Amy [00:04:17] Right.

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

Amy [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.

Mary [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.

Amy [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.

Mary [00:05:47] Right.

Amy [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.

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

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

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

Amy [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.

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

Amy [00:07:31] Exactly right. Exactly.

Mary [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.

Amy [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.

Mary [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?

Amy [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.

Mary [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.

Amy [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.

Amy [00:11:17] Yeah.

Amy [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.

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

Amy [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]

Mary [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.

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

Mary [00:12:45] Yeah, exactly.

Mary [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.

Amy [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.

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

Amy [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.

Mary [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.

[00:16:02] Yeah,.

Mary [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.

Amy [00:16:18] Yeah.

Mary [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.

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

Mary [00:16:38] Yeah.

Amy [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.

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

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

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

Mary [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.

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

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

Amy [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.

Mary [00:18:44] Where where was it?

Amy [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.

Mary [00:19:22] Understandably.

Amy [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.

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

Amy [00:20:00] Yeah, it was nuts.

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

Amy [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.

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

Amy [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.

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

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

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

Amy [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.

Amy [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.

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

Amy [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.

Mary [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.

Amy [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.

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

Amy [00:23:36] Exactly. Yeah.

Mary [00:23:37] And it's called paradise.

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

Amy [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.

Mary [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.

Mary [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?

Amy [00:24:43] I know.

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

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

Amy [00:24:54] Totally. Totally.

Mary [00:24:55] There are some great journalism that came out of. Out of Camp fire in particular, out of the San Francisco Chronicle with Lizzie Johnson.

[00:25:04] Yeah.

[00:25:05] She did an amazing piece that mapped the fire through the experiences of the people on the ground. So when the fire-nado happened, which is like exactly what it sounds like, as I understand day, it is a tornado made a fire. So this whole time we've been worried about shark nados. We should have been worried about fire-nados.

Amy [00:25:26] Yes.

Mary [00:25:27] And it moved fast as hell. And so people didn't evacuate as they should have because they're used to fires moving much more slowly, whereas this was like it moved with the speed of a tornado, which is unpredictable and incredibly fast.

Mary [00:25:43] And I think the other reason that this was the year where like the whole country is paying attention to fires was because of the footage out of L.A.. You know, you're seeing one of the biggest cities in the country, the second biggest city in the country. And it looks like literal hell from There, highways. And the fire wasn't in L.A., but it's visible from L.A. and they're like driving through literal hell. I think that that did something to people. I think like in New York and in especially in the rest of the country where fires don't happen, that often is hard to conceive of coexisting with fire.

Amy [00:26:19] Yeah. Well, and I mean, it's sort of it's it's the image that we see in like every apocalyptic thing. Right. It's like this sort of ashy fire filled the hell scape. So I think yes. It's just you know, that's kind of where your brain goes.

Mary [00:26:37] Yeah. Yeah.

Mary [00:26:38] I think we can bounce back after exposure to hurricanes because people, you know, that's more normalized. But also because water is not nearly as scary as fire.

Amy [00:26:50] Yeah.

Mary [00:26:51] Like there's no safe exposure to fire.

Mary [00:26:53] But speaking of hurricanes and fires, others big disaster and ways to talk about with super typhoon Yutu. Yes. So this was one of the most powerful storms to hit the United States ever. It struck the Northern Mariana Islands, whereas. Was the strongest typhoon recorded in Northern Mariana Islands are in the Pacific near the Philippines. And it also struck the Philippines and there it was known as Typhoon Rosita.

[00:27:20] And even though it was the strongest storm to hit U.S. soil since 1935. Donald Trump never, ever acknowledged it like he approved disaster relief, but needed it. I really think about it now. Never sent condolences, never tweeted about it, ever. And there was this huge media blackout on it. I don't think we talked about Hurricane Maria nearly enough, although we did talk about it a lot. But this one, people barely talked about the storm at all. So I wanted to read a little bit from this piece by Elliott Wang and Lineker Cruz in the Atlantic. It's called Very aptly, the media barely cover one of the worst storms to hit U.S. soil.

Amy [00:28:00] Yes.

Mary [00:28:03] So a little bit of a long excerpt, but I think it's all really important.

[00:28:07] So they say:.

[00:28:09] [wind chime] Despite the tens of thousands of American citizens affected, mainstream U.S. media coverage of Yutu has been woefully limited. This reality is at once disappointing and expected for those living in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands and on the nearby island of Guam. National coverage of Yutu from outlets including The New York Times, CNN, The Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal and ABC News was largely limited to republished stories from wire services such as the Associated Press and Reuters. Many of these papers and networks had few or no original stories about the typhoon and its aftermath. This is The Atlantic's first story about Yutu. A three person team from The Washington Post wrote a couple of longer deeply reported Yutu pieces, and the paper also ran multiple weather related articles. But when the typhoon was covered, stories tended to be cursory or focused more on Yutu's meteorological significance. Considerably less attention has been paid to the realities of recovery for typhoon victims who will be rebuilding for years to come. The Pacific Ocean is just one of many chasms between the continental U.S. and its territories in the Marianas. There are cultural, political and economic rifts, too. Geography may be the simplest explanation for why even epic disasters like Yutu get overlooked. Essentially, the islands are so far away from the rest of the U.S. and so small that they're easy to forget. Even the language sometimes used to talk about these territories certainly frames them as unimportant. This ratio is compounded by limited political representation for citizens in U.S. territories, three of which are still considered colonies by the United Nations. Race and class too may play a role in the Marianas' relative invisibility in political and media arenas. [wind chime]

Mary [00:29:59] The piece also goes on to talk about the importance of local journalism so that people just knew what was going on, right? Yes, pretty sad.

Amy [00:30:09] It is really sad. I definitely do not remember seeing. Much of any coverage of this when it happened? Yeah.

Amy [00:30:17] I saw a little bit of conversation on Twitter about it, but nowhere near what Maria got. And you're right, we didn't talk about Maria enough. So this was just guys.

Mary [00:30:28] It's really pathetic.

Mary [00:30:29] And as I was reading it, they were talking about, you know, people from these from these islands and including the Philippines to in the United States having to use phone trees to keep one another updated on what was going on and whether or not their loved ones back home were okay or what they needed. And they were having a really hard time placing stories and getting media attention to send to get people to send donations, to get people to send aid, because they desperately needed that. And because no one knew about the storm at all. They weren't sending any sort of help. The need for local journalism really spoke to me because in in those sorts of information, blackouts, rumors start again, like nobody really knows what sort of information is going on. I think Katrina is a great case study for that. Like all of the media chaos for that. And it's really sad that we're seeing more and more disasters that create those sort of information vacuums when local journalism is sadly dying out.

Amy [00:31:30] Yeah, yeah, that's true. That's very true.

Amy [00:31:37] Okay, now it's time to talk about what we call foundational pieces from 2018. So these are pieces that either introduced an important new theme to the climate conversation or tackled the narrative slightly differently. Got people thinking in a different way, maybe asked a question that hadn't really been asked before.

Amy [00:31:59] It's depressing. And that actually is a great segue into what you called the tweet heard round the world. This is actually really funny because.

Mary [00:32:12] Hey, listen, the tweet heard around climate Twitter.

Amy [00:32:14] Yeah, but it's funny because I pulled up the actual tweet, right.

Amy [00:32:19] So this is a tweet from Chris Hayes at MSNBC where he called climate a "ratings killer." And what he said was "almost without exception, every single time we've covered, it's been a palpable ratings killer. So the incentives are not great.".

Mary [00:32:34] Right.

Amy [00:32:36] And there was so much coverage of this tweet and so many people being like, oh, this is why is this why is this why we're not covering it? That's why, you know. But the tweet itself, it only has 86 read tweets and five hundred and seven likes it.

[00:32:52] Not like it's not even like viral status tweet. So I think I find like the media's reaction to this.

[00:32:58] Like, you know, it was a reply to someone else's tweet to Quito, but oh, it's just like I have heard.

[00:33:06] So I have literally heard producers in TV and film point to this as like Arias and I was.

[00:33:16] Yes.

[00:33:17] And part of why it's hard to get TV or film projects that center her some kind of climate story greenlit. So I just it's like it's God, guys, it's important what you say in public.

[00:33:30] And I think, like, OK, it's a ratings killer.

[00:33:34] But like, could it possibly be the way that you're covering it?

[00:33:38] You know, it could totally be that. I think it also can be you know, people don't.

[00:33:44] People need to get normalized to it, like, you know, to normalize the conversation. And so maybe the first couple of times you talk about it. You know, especially if you do it once a year, twice a year. Like only rare. And you're like, jurors are going to me now. Yeah. Or our climate, our once a year, people are gonna tune out because you don't make it normal.

[00:34:06] You don't make it approachable. You make it seem like a visit to the dentist.

[00:34:10] It would be like, oh, great, people are going to tune out for that. Like you. Yeah. You don't make it part of the normal conversation.

[00:34:20] And so. And also talking about climate in isolation is kind of problem because it's never in isolation. It doesn't affect your life in isolation is hard to understand. Right. Isolation. Right. So you know that that's part of the problem. And I think the reason that this tweet has such a huge impact. Even though, you know, it didn't have the the metrics to back it up on rare. Yeah. Was I mean, first of all, I think maybe people were afraid to like it. People are afraid to retweeted it. So there's that. But it's because of who it comes from. Right. Right. We know that Chris Hayes is known for caring about climate. He wrote one of the most groundbreaking essays on climate that I've ever read in the nation. The new abolitionism. Yeah. And so we know that he cares about this. We know him as a progressive media darling. So if he says this is a ratings killer is not because he doesn't want to cover it, is because it's actually a ratings killer, which I know I disagree. I know you disagree. I don't think it has to be a media or a ratings killer. Like maybe it is. Maybe it isn't. And I also think it says a lot about who watches cable news. Well, I don't like that the people who watch cable news are generally older people who we know don't care about climate as much.

[00:35:35] Right. So. Totally, totally. Yeah, right.

[00:35:40] Like people care about climate in ginseng, Genesee. Hardcore people care about climate. In the millennial generation, hardcore and in Gen-X. But in the baby boomer generation, people generally don't care about it and they're watching. Those are the people who watch cable news. The only time I watch it like we've talked about this is when I travel and when I go home to see my mom because she is like a cable news junkie and she's in your life. Yeah. My God, she's such a cable news junkie, like half the time. I don't know. She's watching football or watching the news because she's the one with the TV, because she yells at the TV the exact same way. Yeah, totally.

[00:36:17] Well, that's like how they've done.

[00:36:20] But that's totally like how they've designed it is like to make it like a spectator sport to watch new. Yeah, but that's so that's what I was going to say too. Is that like the whole the entire framing of this also bothers me too because it's like who gives a shit if it's a reading's killer. You're the news. You're supposed to be providing critical information to people. To me, I'm just like, oh, this really speaks to the problem of cable news being, you know, essentially a clown show instead of an actual news provider. Like when when you're when one of the dominant news sources in the country is. More concerned about entertainment and ratings than actually informing the public. That's a problem, you know.

[00:37:06] Yeah, I bet the Nixon impeachment was a ratings killer at first because people thought it was a bummer. But like, it's your job to make it interesting.

[00:37:15] The other thing that I thought was like such a breath of fresh air in 2018 was that there were all of these assaults on the ferry in city is very annoying. Hope troop. Yes. You know exactly what I'm talking about. So when I say the whole trope, I mean the climate community's insistence that when we talk about climate, we have to be hopeful. We have to give a message of hope. It has to be a positive message. Every single time that you talk about it.

[00:37:53] Yeah. One of I think the best examples of someone saying like enough with this already is NASA climate scientist Kate Marvel wrote this great piece called We Need Courage, Not Hope to face climate change.

[00:38:08] It showed up and on being another great podcast, by the way. But they also have a good case. Yeah, yeah, they do. And I'm gonna read. I'll read a little excerpt from it. Kate is like she said, she's like another one. These people where I'm like, really? Look, you're a brilliant scientist and a brilliant writer.

[00:38:27] Ryan Murray. And your last name is Marvel.

[00:38:29] And you're like, yeah, like you're a superhero. Come on. OK. I'm going to read now.

[00:38:39] I have no hope that these changes can be reversed. We are inevitably sending our children to live on an unfamiliar planet. But the opposite of hope is not despair. It is grief. Even while resolving to limit the damage, we can mourn and hear the sheer scale of the problem provides a perverse comfort. We are in this together. The swiftness of the change, its scale and inevitability binds us into one broken hearts trapped together under a warming atmosphere. We need courage, not hope. Grief, after all, is the cost of being alive. We are all fated to live, live, shot through with sadness, and are not worth less for it. Courage is the resolve to do well without the assurance of a happy ending. Little molecules random in their movement add together to a coherent whole. Little lives do not. But here we are together on a planet radiating ever more into space, where there is no darkness, only light we cannot see.

[00:39:41] Oh, God. Beautiful mean is so beautiful. My favorite is definitely broken hearts trapped together under a warming warming atmos.

[00:39:53] Yes. It took everything in me not to stop there and go. Jesus, what a sentence.

[00:40:02] I love you, but I hate you.

[00:40:05] But yeah, this resonated with me so much because everybody is always like if you don't have hope that you won't get out of bed in the morning and you won't get engaged and people won't, you know, do anything about the problem.

[00:40:19] It's like actually you hope I find to be more immobilizing this fear, actually, because when I when I'm like, wrapped up in hope, I'm like somebody who's got it. It'll be fine, you know? I mean, I need to freak out to get active. And I actually think that that is way more common than people who are activated by hope. Yeah, right. Hope comes away later. Hope comes after you've built the moment. Hope comes after you've got momentum. We don't have momentum.

[00:40:48] Actually, 2013 was the year that we started to get momentum. Yeah. And in part because the people giving up on the hope thing. Yeah, exactly.

[00:40:57] Because of peoples being more honest about their emotions, which don't operate in these binaries, which I was really happy to see Kate talking about. The opposite of hope is not hopeless.

[00:41:09] That's exactly what is very I learned phrasing is normal and is necessary.

[00:41:15] You have to go through a grieving process before you're able to move on, before you're able to do something about it. And I also think that this shift in emotional language and shift and emotional range is indicative of a generational shift.

[00:41:35] I have strong areas. The I give him a little bit of trouble self.

[00:41:41] I am a millennial. I'm 36 years old, so I am one of the older millennials. I'm close in age to Kate. And I saw 2013 as the year that millennials took the microphone and Gen Z took the bullhorn. Yeah, it's like a beauty.

[00:41:58] Full shift, and so I think one of the biggest markers in difference between millennials in our previous generation, Gen X, which is your generation, is that we are way more emotional.

[00:42:14] Yeah, and I don't see that as a problem, honestly. But I when I when I think of my stereotypical Gen Xer, they are more emotionally detached. They see, you know, strong emotions as hysteria or as some sort of weirdness. Yeah, exactly. Like. Oh, you kids are so emotional and like I remember that entering the workforce, you know. So as an older millennial, if I wanted a job, I have to conform to Gen X culture I like. Those were the people hiring me. And I had to, like, tuck my emotions in and be like more logical and objective about, you know, the way I approach communications in my field. And in that case, you don't freak out in public. That is just not done. All right. You don't talk like you talk about communications in this very detached kind of way, which was, you know, very much against my nature. But I learned how to do it because that was why, you know, I had to be done. And I think what I'm seeing now, especially in the climate space by I see it all over the nonprofit sphere. So I built my entire career in nonprofit communications. Right. All of these subjects are being talked about with a higher level of urgency and a higher level of emotion.

[00:43:29] And I think that was a problem with the way they were. They were talked about before that was dominated by Gen X of this. Yeah, like this cool detachment. This like strong commitment to like calm in the face of calamity, I think is what really brought us to the brink of destruction.

[00:43:49] From my perspective, it's not just that millennials are more emotional, it's also that like millennials are more emotionally intelligent and like have been encouraged to express their emotions.

[00:44:02] It's like it's like, yeah, we have more vocabulary for it and Gen Z has way more than us. And I can say this as someone who's worked with the zero hour kids, I actually wish I had more time for them. Sadly, I don't. But I've I've worked with them and seen them tackle these topics that I was like, oh, my God, this is gonna lead to a super mean girl situation. This is gonna like I don't know how they're gonna be able to handle this.

[00:44:26] And they are like so kind to each other. Yeah. And just have such a wealth of emotional intelligence that might come to you. Can you do some workshops, words with people?

[00:44:36] I know it's really easy.

[00:44:39] Gen X was very just get on with that. I mean there was also there was value placed in not giving a shit, you know, like. Exactly. It was being something of a. I'd be like a slacker and be good like disaffected. She get over it and over it. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And so if you're a baby Gen X or. I am I mean I'm a Xenical because I'm 31. So we have this like tiny sliver, which is actually kind of interesting because we are the last generation who actively remembers life before the Internet.

[00:45:15] But also, I think I'm there, too. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you're only five years ago, baby. Yeah.

[00:45:20] I didn't have like an email account that I checked regularly until I was like out of college, you know, more like a phone. I didn't have a smartphone until. Well yeah. In my 20s and like. Yeah, you know. So social media was like not a thing until I was. Yeah. Probably like 30, you know. So. Yeah. So but it's like but we were still young enough when all that stuff came about that we aren't like what is this? You know. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:45:48] So yeah, I call my my sliver of the millennial pie, I call this generation beta. And right now I would say that this is the the folks who are like thirty three maybe to 40 because we're like the. I feel like we're the generation where all this stuff was tried out on us. Yes. Totally.

[00:46:06] Facebook started when I was in college. We were like the last generation to learn the Dewey decimal system and we a lot of us learn how to type on a typewriter. Yeah, because computers weren't ubiquitous when we were in high school. You know, I made a 25 year old I'm 36. Technically, we're both millennials, but like there,.

[00:46:28] Oh, yeah. But there hasn't been much difference. Yeah. Yeah. Totally. Yeah. Yeah. In terms of climate communications, it's like there's been a major leap in the last 10 years and totally actually I definitely feel like this is a room that needed more emotionally intelligent communications because like. Yeah, yeah for sure. Gen X was like but the like. No, just stick to the charts.

[00:46:56] Exactly.

[00:46:56] And I feel like that's what I. A lot of when I'm like, you know, working with editors or when I look at how the conversation was shaped over the past few years, I think I was a lot of that playing out in the debate. Do we freak out about this in public? Yeah. Cause and I think I see a lot of people framing that as a gender thing of like who's being more emotional about it? I see it playing out more along the generational lines. And the Gender Alliance Exxon is super interesting. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because I see a lot of men freaking out about climate change in public and they're generally millennials like.

[00:47:32] Well, that's another big, big difference. I actually I think that yes, for men in particular, I think gender norms change dramatically from Gen X to millennial. Mm hmm. Big time. Yeah.

[00:47:46] Yeah, yeah. You were saying you saw a big change in the past ten years. I saw just a dramatic change in 2013 alone. Yeah. And it paved a different path for the conversation in 2019. But yeah. The generational shift meat meant that the emotional thing just changed completely. And I saw that in language like 2018 was when I started seeing climate chaos and climate crisis as opposed to climate change, like I remember getting scolded for saying climate change in public.

[00:48:17] And my colleague Katie Ross call it what it is.

[00:48:19] And I was like, dude, I think, yeah, I do like that.

[00:48:24] We it's when we started to see a lot of talk about climate anxiety and climate grief and all of these things.

[00:48:33] Yeah, there was another really big shift in the conversation in 2018. People start to interrogate the usage of wheat.

[00:48:43] I like people. Sorry to ask who the fuck is this?

[00:48:48] We are talking about? And I think a lot of that was prompted by that gigantic book with.

[00:48:57] Yeah, magazine story in The New York Times magazine, Losing Earth, which I have not read because I'm sorry, I higher issue. It's the entire issue.

[00:49:09] So I got like very publicly mad about that. You see, I was right about people got mad in public. I'm for it.

[00:49:21] Yes, because so it was. It's called Losing Earth is written by Nathaniel Rich. It's very lovely. Like the writing is beautiful and it's very tight. Well told narrative. My issue with it was that there were a variety of inaccuracies in it which were sort of in service of the narrative. And like, I'm okay with that when the inaccuracies are things like, you know, I don't know, even if even if it's something that's like a slip of a year or so in the timeline. But when it's stuff like you're you're actually misrepresenting the science or you're misrepresenting like what was happening in the the policy realm. Then it starts to be it starts to veer into like dangerous territory, in my opinion. I actually happened to be speaking with a few people that had been interviewed for that story shortly after it came out. And every single one of them was like really pissed off at at like being misquoted, misunderstood. A lot of scientists were like, I feel like this guy doesn't understand science. And like also is too arrogant to ask questions. What was this about? Okay. So it was people like me who didn't read it. Yeah.

[00:50:38] It was focused on this decade of the 80s when we think the story is sort of we almost acted on climate change and then we didn't. And the sort of conclusion that he comes to is like human nature, like we're naturally short sighted.

[00:50:55] There's like, you know, he follows a few key scientists and policy people in their sort of quest to try to convince everybody to act on this.

[00:51:08] And like and there's sort of this build of like, okay, like the press is really covering it. And I mean, this was true. The press was like really covering it. Like, you're starting you're almost when oh, this is like in the in the late 80s, people were covering climate. And really? Yes, it's really it's fascinating as someone who, like, spends most of my time studying climate communications history. I know that it's really interesting what like I see what's happening now as being about like where it was in actually more where it was in like the early 90s, which is like part of my issue with this story. But but yeah, there was this there was like a moment in time before where we had this much momentum and then it just sort of petered out. And so his story was trying to ask the question of why. Which is totally valid and like a great idea for a story. My issue with it is that he he stopped it in the 80s and there was actually like a I think that like the answer to his question was actually what happened in the 90s? And it's like largely to do with the amount of capital that was mobilized against climate action. And he leaves out that whole part of the story.

[00:52:22] It's sort of like he when he turned this into like sort of a novella later and had an intro that talked about how, you know, the fossil fuel industry in the wake of this decade, you know, kind of spent all this money and blah, blah, blah, blah. But they had actually started doing that in the late eighties. And there's just most of that is entirely left out. And it's very much a story that centers white men as the like, default human.

[00:52:56] Is anyone else even included? Now, not really. It's very like, you know, kind of looks at like what all of these different white men were trying to do. And then it says, like, we didn't act because, like, you know, of our nature. And it's just sort of like, OK. But we. Who's we. Exactly. Exactly. I think this story was like the really like the match on the flame of the who is wi fi. Heard that. Exactly.

[00:53:26] Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Which is why I want to read from a piece by Genevieve Gunther, which came out October 2018. So was after the IPCC report. I think it very much speaks to losing earth, which was August 28. Yes. So the title of her article is Who is the we and we are causing climate change.

[00:53:46] Given that climate change is a global problem, the temptation to use, we make sense. But there is a real problem with it. The guilty collective it invokes simply doesn't exist.

[00:53:57] The we responsible for climate change is a physics fictional construct, one less distorting and dangerous by hiding who's really responsible for our current terrifying predicament. We provide political cover for the people who are happy to let hundreds of millions of other people die for their own profit and pleasure. Climate change may well inspire a reckoning for you about what it means to be human and what your mom or your morals are. Fine, but always remember this is a battle against the forces of destruction to save something that is achingly beautiful, utterly miraculous world for your children. The fossil fuel industry and the governments that support it are literally colluding to stop you from creating a world that runs on safe energy energy. They are trying to maintain the fossil fuel economy. As for me and for the millions of people who want to undo climate change, I say we are against them and we are going to fight for dear life.

[00:54:54] Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, a little another a little like anecdote related to the losing earths. I happen to like the week that that came out. I was talking to a like notorious climate denier. In fact, the guy who was in charge of the Trump transition team for the EPA who. Like, you know, has basically just been trying to gut the EPA his entire life. And he was. I can only describe it as gleeful about this story because he was. He was just like, see, this is what we've been saying all along.

[00:55:30] Like, you know, you can't hold anyone accountable because everybody knew and we all didn't act.

[00:55:37] And yeah, this is what we've been saying all along. And oh, my God. When the king of the climate deniers thinks that your climate proves their point, like you did not do a good job, you totally did it.

[00:55:50] I feel like the fossil fuel industry, you know, reacts to climate stories or like There, There, defense on their climate culpability is always whoever smelt it.

[00:56:01] Delta said that whoever supplied it ignited oil, guys. Boom.

[00:56:11] Oh, you're it's hot. You're freaking out about climate change. Well, what about your your life?

[00:56:18] Exactly.

[00:56:19] I notice that you drive an SUV, ma'am.

[00:56:22] I know, right? Yeah. When was the last time you burped?

[00:56:29] Yeah. So, yeah, I Genevieve's article was like built out of this tweet storm that she went on in the immediate aftermath of the of the IPCC report.

[00:56:39] I feel like it was part of this big movement to finally bury this idea that we're all responsible, which was just a huge shift ongoing in 2018. I feel like I don't see anybody making those sort of wee arguments so much anymore. In 2019.

[00:57:01] OK, so there is no great transition to the next thing I want to talk about, which is decidedly dark. I really wanted to talk about climate change and suicide. Yeah.

[00:57:17] So there's a few ways I saw this arising as a theme in 2018 when it was the year that David Buckle, who was a lawyer, his professional life. He worked on LGBT rights and poverty issue, including the case that was the basis for the Boys Don't Cry movie. And he dedicated his retirement to climate action. He was the founder of this really sustainable community garden in Brooklyn in April of 2018. He set himself on fire in protests in Prospect Park. Yeah, what's interesting are very sad about it was that it really didn't cause that much of a reaction.

[00:57:57] I know. I know. I was going to see that, too, because I remembered when I was reading this, I was like, oh, yeah, I remember when that happened. And it's kind of crazy that there wasn't like a bigger. I don't know, like even acknowledge now from it. Yeah. Yeah. Like when people would do this in the past. I feel like self Emily eating has been like a thing that has been sort of like a big bomb moment in other human rights and civil rights movements. And then yeah, here in the Arab Spring it's almost like it's like barely even registers. Yeah. Yeah. That's so depressing. That person would go to these lengths and then it's like, you know, within a couple hours sort of. All evidence has been cleared and life has moved on. And, you know, the new riot really covers it. Yeah. And the climate movement itself.

[00:58:51] I don't recall reacting very strongly. And I wonder if that was, you know, part of this last vestiges of we must have hope narrative. And if we make a big deal about this and if we acknowledge this and talk about it, then, you know, we have to talk about how serious this is. Yeah. I also saw a lot of people trying to like rationalize it as part of some underlying mental illness. We don't know.

[00:59:16] Maybe he had a mental illness and like, yeah, he was super fucking clear in his suicide. No, I am doing this for this reason.

[00:59:25] Yeah, yeah, yeah. Totally, totally. Another reason I want to talk about suicide as a theme is there's a study in 2018 that showed that hotter days increased the suicide rate and Robinson mayor in it in the Atlantic wrote a piece on him. And what he he also talked about and what the study talked about is that air conditioning doesn't seem to solve this problem.

[00:59:45] No, which I think anyone who's been in an uncomfortably hot city for more than a day can attest to.

[00:59:54] And another way that that shows up is farmers. So there's the ongoing crises of farmer suicides in India and I'm sure in other places where people just can't make a living. The way that they were used to making a living before and they don't know how to make another living. And so it seems like the only way out is suicide. And it's actually really hard to get the data on this since 2000 and since the Modi administration, quite honestly. But it's been going on since at least 2014. And I know The Guardian published a piece in 2017 like, look, at least 60 thousand Indian farmers have committed suicide and it's not hard to link it to climate change. Yeah. Also in 2008 18, there was a study from the CDC. They said suicide rates for farmers in the United States was higher than it was for veterans. And they had to retract because there was a coding error that like that. That comparison wasn't exactly right, but the fact that they had to retract it was actually harmful for farmers because it still remains true that the suicide rates among farmers are alarmingly high. And so because they had to retract, that sort of gave people the impression I like it wasn't that it's not a silver bullet. Yeah. No.

[01:01:12] The first step, I should say, is to destigmatize the conversation. And I think it is mission critical that we destigmatize it within the climate community, because I think the folks who are on the front lines of it, who have been confronting it for a really long time, are probably the people who are quite possibly suffering their silence from these sorts of thoughts and feeling really alienated, because I think the hardest part about having suicidal ideation is feeling alienated about talking about it and feeling like you will burden someone else by talking about it.

[01:01:44] Right. And probably one of the best things that we can do is just talk about it more proactively.

[01:01:50] Yeah, and I think it is. It's another one of those things that people feel like, well, if we talk about it, the more people will do it. And I don't know that I agree with that. And I feel like there,. Yeah, I feel like that's the same way that we've talked about climate change. If we talk about it, then people will shut down and like not given the fatalism and it's actually the opposite.

[01:02:07] Right. Like if we talk about it, people feel less isolated and less alone and like.

[01:02:12] Yeah, yeah, totally. I mean, I do.

[01:02:18] I think that's like a good Segway into, you know, looking at all of the other ways that we started talking about how climate change is making people feel desperate and or putting people into desperate situations. And one of the main ways that that has happened for, you know, a few years now. But I think we just started talking about it a lot more in 2018 is climate and migration. And the idea that a lot of these like mass migrations that we're seeing around the world are being driven by climate change, whether it's drought or natural disasters that are moving people around or, you know, resource scarcity that are creating wars that then drive people out. There's just a lot of this happening. So there is this great piece by Lauren Markham in The New York Times. Called A Warming World Creates Desperate People.

[01:03:14] The hundreds of migrants I've interviewed in the past few years, whether from Gambia, Pakistan, El Salvador, Guatemala, Yemen or Eritrea, are most often leaving because of some acute political problem at home. But I've also noticed something else in my years of reporting. If you talk to these migrants long enough, you'll hear about another, more subtle but still profound dimension to the problems they are leaving behind environmental degradation or climate change. When reporting a story among migrants living in the shadows of a Kenyan slum, I asked a group of men why they left their homes in rural Ethiopia. They were farmers there, like many generations before them. But they told me they could no longer make a living off their crops or even adequately feed their families. The rains had changed. It wasn't just that they had lessened, but that they had become more erratic. No rain when the crops needed it to grow, and then when it was time for harvest, it would rain suddenly and terribly ruining the crops. The men had left for Kenya to find work and send money back to feed their families.

[01:04:22] I think that story is so unbelievably common. I've interviewed U.S. farm workers in California. Same thing like There,, you know, and farmers in California, too, who are like, we can't. There's no predictability to the weather hurting for which. If you're a farmer, that is like, that's disaster for you. You can't have you can't have sudden rains and sudden freezes and sudden droughts that bite you. You lose. I mean, we're seeing actually stories this year about what's how the impact of that in the Midwest and how an upstate New York. I've seen a lot of. Exactly. Yeah.

[01:04:57] And how farmers are dealing with these. This sort of like feast or famine, drought or flood.

[01:05:03] The thing that like you can't actually plan and grow crops around.

[01:05:09] Right. And the same is happening with with fishermen and the fishermen.

[01:05:14] Thing is really. I still I mean, I've seen a few stories about it, but I still don't think it's like quite sunk into people. What's. No, it hasn't. Is that like. Not only are you seeing, you know, massive declines in in fish populations, but these just like incredible migrations of entire species that used to be in one place are now two hundred miles north because they're scrambling to get to colder water. What that does to a community that is entirely built around fishing is is dramatic.

[01:05:47] I mean, I was really happy to see this shift in how we talked about migration because thousand and 18 was a year. It was dominated by the caravan story. Yes. Of these giant caravans of, you know, bad on or whatever coming from from Latin America. And like I remember, you know, it was all about. People are running from gang violence.

[01:06:10] They're running from you know, honestly, if you look at it, it looks like societal collapse. So all these people who are saying like, oh, civilization is not going to collapse until 2050 or whatever year, I'm like.

[01:06:22] I feel like it's collapsing right now, girl. I just use them give a shit because you don't live in that society.

[01:06:27] So but I you know, I'm hearing these stories and I'm like, I bet if I scratch just the surface, just even a little bit, I'll find climate change. And I did.

[01:06:37] It's so interesting to me this idea of like, you know, that connecting climate to those things would be co opting like the immigration story, for example, vs. just, you know, the fact that climate is a like a sort of a force multiplier for everything you do.

[01:06:57] I mean, it's just like. Right. I don't know. It's a robust vetting or the story.

[01:07:02] Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And so back to the migration frame. Yeah. I feel like after the summer of 2013, which is when this was this piece that you just read from was published after that I started to see sort of blending of the migration beat and the climate beat.

[01:07:21] And I think that was another big theme of 2018, like climate being integrated into more and more topics as people talked about them like it was a it was part of the story as opposed to a whole separate story over by itself, like it at the kids table or like the climate.

[01:07:39] Right.

[01:07:40] You got to sit with the big kids.

[01:07:45] I think we also can't talk about the rise of climate migration without talking about the rise of authoritarianism, which unfortunately with the election of both narrow and in Brazil, an our mad king here in the United States and elsewhere. We can't ignore this trend. So in July 2018, Samuel Miller McDonnell published a piece in the New Republic called Climate Kings that really made my skin crawl.

[01:08:18] Refugee crises, famine, drought. These are material strong men can use to build power already strife and civil instability are spreading throughout the global south, with droughts and floods stoking conflict and refugee crises in parts of Africa and the Middle East. According to a 2016 paper in science, climate change will increase the risk of armed conflict across Africa by 50 percent by 2030. Eastern Africa is particularly vulnerable. The genocidal strife in Darfur is one of the bloodiest examples. But even countries with robust economies and democracies are susceptible.

[01:08:59] And I feel like we've seen that very quickly morph into the conversation about eco fascism. That's happening constantly right now.

[01:09:09] And yes, of course you like limited resources, like you end up with authoritarianism in some ways, just like the.

[01:09:30] So I wanted to talk about this piece by Naomi Klein. In September 2018, 18, she said the title is There's Nothing Natural About Puerto Rico's Disaster.

[01:09:45] Honoring the dead begins with telling the truth. And the truth is that there is nothing natural about this disaster and it isn't even right to call the storm itself a natural disaster. None of these record breaking storms are natural anymore. Irma and Maria and Katrina and Sandy and now Florence and mankind, which battered parts of Asia this week. The reason we are seeing record shattered time after time is that the oceans are warmer and the tides are higher. And that's not God's fault. Either it's the fault of governments protecting the interests of the fossil fuel companies and agro business giants that pay for their campaigns.

[01:10:20] So the reason I wanted to talk about this a little bit is because I've been yelled at for using the term natural disaster to refer to all of these disasters that we see. And I'm like. And people have been like, I'm sure you can figure out why that's a problem. And so here's a fine fat. I can't I can't figure it out. So I thought I would use this opportunity to ask you to explain to me and to everybody else why the term disaster, natural disaster is not applicable to things like Camp Fire and Hurricane Maria.

[01:10:53] I I actually I think this is really, really interesting because I have to admit that before reading this piece, I hadn't really thought about it. It's sort of like, well, yeah. That's the term that we use. But the idea that like, you know, it's not actually nature causing these things. It is manmade climate change causing these things, or at least like in the form that we're seeing them now, you know, that, like you actually wouldn't probably have a fire. Nieto in Paradise, California, without several decades of unchecked climate change and you wouldn't have a Superstorm Sandy or a you two or an Irma or a Maria or any of these things. You know, they would not be impacting us quite as much if there wasn't this sort of extra kind of intensifier of climate change happening, which is not necessarily natural. So, yeah, I hadn't thought of it that way. I don't really know. Like what? I guess the term we just call them disasters and not natural disasters.

[01:11:58] Hey, I think that's actually problematic because I think calling them disasters that can mean anything like a mass shooting is a disaster.

[01:12:06] Yeah, that's true. That's it's a train wreck rages out there and un caused like misunderstood too.

[01:12:12] So, yeah, it sounds like something you can't control.

[01:12:15] I think first of all, I don't think calling it a natural disaster immediately disqualifies it. And I think people actually understand what that term means. And I don't because I don't think it's harmful to call things natural disasters. And I don't think not calling it a natural disaster like suddenly removes any level of harm, actually.

[01:12:34] Right. I think if we're going to change the term, though, we should call them climate disasters. But then doesn't that create the same problem as as natural disaster because it itself didn't cause it right.

[01:12:48] It still seems like something that is not connected to how about a capitalism disaster?

[01:12:56] But then it isn't the economic recession, that capitalism disaster.

[01:13:00] You know, I I wonder if taking the natural out of natural disaster like then people. I think we might be splitting hairs on this term a little bit to be. Yes. Yeah. I'm fine with using the term climate disaster, but I don't think calling it a natural disaster makes people think, well, well, it was just natural. Like that person is going to think that anyway, no matter what you call it, calling it taking natural out of the term doesn't fix the problem.

[01:13:26] So I agree. I agree. I think I think we have bigger fish to fry. To be honest. Yeah, I do. Kendra Peer Louis is at The New York Times now. She used to be a popular science. She's been one of my favorite science writers for a while. I think she has like a real knack for for telling more narrative science stories. But when this story came out, it's all about kelp and how these underwater kelp forests are being eaten by, you know, invasive species. And it's all sort of driven by climate change. I think I really feel like it was the first story in recent time that, like, I don't know, like anthropomorphized, you know, the ocean enough for people to get that, like.

[01:14:13] We are really dramatically changing the ocean and that it is happening relatively rapidly and that it's I don't know that it's like that it's causing this massive shift in the ocean and that that is actually impacting quite a lot of people too. So I'll read this excerpt.

[01:14:30] The story of the collapse disappearance is the story of an interwoven food system breaking down and in the process, threatening people's livelihoods. Some of the first people to sound the alarm about the purple urchins, Dr. Dr. Caetano said, were commercial red urchin harvesters. One of them is Gary Trimper, who has. That's brilliant.

[01:14:52] One of them is now.

[01:15:00] One of them is Gary Trimper, who has harvested red urchins for more than 30 years. Red urchins larger than purple urchins are commercially viable because people eat them or more specifically, their gonads. The delicacy is better known to sushi aficionados as any but the growing purple urchin population out competed the red urchins for the available kelp without kelp. The red urchins starved. So first of all, I love that she got to use the word gonads in New York. That's some real ovaries. I thought she did such a good job in this story of connecting what's happening with fishermen and fishing communities to climate change and also just how much it's shifting entire ecosystems in the ocean and how rapidly climate Twitter like went nuts for this story. And I feel it sort of opened up the opportunity to like to just do more of these kinds of stories where not just the people are alive, but like the ecosystems. And yeah, the animals that are impacted feel like part of the story, too, and like things that you care about. It's hard to make people care about urchins and like, yeah, unless you're doing like Little Mermaid or something.

[01:16:28] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[01:16:29] Now that she does a great job of like making get an actual narrative and an actual story and not a data dump me like it comes alive. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's a really great piece. Mm hmm. And the last piece I wanted to talk about really quickly is Flood Thy Neighbor. It was in ProPublica and I was like a combination or partnership with Reveal, which is a great podcast. And they do really great investigating investigative stories. So this is by Lisa Song and Patrick Michels and August 2009, 18. It's about the levee system on the Mississippi River.

[01:17:08] Who gets flooding and who doesn't?

[01:17:10] An engineer for the Corps. The Army Corps of Engineers, St.. Lewis district in chief of this hydraulic engineering section, said he still stands by the Army Corps 1993 calculations. When ProPublica and Review asked the Corps whether it ever Texas predictions of levee induced flooding against more recent data, a spokesman from the agency said The verification process that you described is not a practice. The Corps uses as a result, levees that are meant to last for decades, even a century, are built based on maps and modeling technology from another era.

[01:17:45] So why it's why I picked this piece as a foundational piece is because, first of all, this piece is not strictly about climate. In fact, climate is just like a section.

[01:17:55] That's like there is a section of the this very long article that does talk about climate change, but it's also interwoven throughout the entire narrative about this town suffers super serious flooding and this town doesn't. That's just across the river. And the Army Corps of Engineers is basically deciding who gets flood it and who doesn't. And like all of these different warring factions among these neighbors across the river from one another. And so I thought it was a really great example of integrating climate into the larger narrative and also investigating our levels of preparedness. Right. Because we were talking earlier about the fishing permits aren't keeping up with the warming oceans. Right. We built a whole society. We've built a whole civilization built on predictability. And that predictability is now being shaken at its very core. And we're ready.

[01:18:46] Yeah, totally. I know this happens with water in California a lot, too. Like water in California is like a whole boondoggle. But. But there are all these reservoirs that are completely engineered and managed according to precipitation patterns from like 30 years ago. It's like and they don't match with what's happening now. So what ends up happening is like the reservoirs will get flooded sometimes. So you end up wasting a bunch of water that could have been captured.

[01:19:17] And then they're not like they're not you know, they're not lit, like releasing it when they need to. They're not really built to store it when they need to. And it's this whole thing. And, you know, we're we're just like, why hasn't this system adapted for the kind of weather that we're seeing now, especially since, you know, we're seeing exactly what climate models predicted 30 years ago. Exactly.

[01:19:41] So if anything, they've been underselling it. Yes, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.

[01:20:06] All right, now we're ready to talk about our stand out pieces. These are pieces that we just loved that made us feel something that stood out as just really excellent examples of climate writing in 2018.

[01:20:21] OK.

[01:20:21] So I I feel like kind of Mark saying that I picked a Rebecca Solnit as a so easy, too easy. But I do love her and I'm excited that she is starting to write more and more about climate. And she actually wrote I mean, OK, first of all, it is damn hard to write something interesting about an IPCC report. Oh. If you've never read one, they do this thing after every single sentence where they put in parentheses, like the level of confidence they have and what they're saying. So it's like, are you serious? Yes. It's like they're like this, like, you know, this year, blah, blah, blah. Medium confidence next year, blah, blah, blah. Very high confidence. OK. They're hard to read. So they're very hard to write about. And Rebecca Solnit wrote this great and sort of inspiring essay called Don't Despair. The Climate Fight is only over if you think it is. And this I'm going to read the part that made me feel like, OK, I get it. I can keep going. OK.

[01:21:32] The future hasn't already been decided. That is, climate change is an inescapable present and future reality.

[01:21:39] But the point of the IPCC report is that there is still a chance to seize the best case scenario rather than surrender to the worst. Natan Sharansky, who spent nine years in a gulag for his work with Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov, recalls his mentor, saying, quote, They want us to believe there's no chance of success. But whether or not there's hope for change is not the question. If you want to be a free person, you don't stand up for human rights because it will work.

[01:22:08] But because it is rights, we must continue living as decent people.

[01:22:14] And then she goes on, Right now, living as decent people means every one of us with resources, taking serious climate action or stepping up what we're already doing.

[01:22:28] So, A, I like that she has the caveat with resources because I hate this. This is like one of the things that bothers me the most about the individual narrative is that it assumes a level of, you know, abundance, like a lot of people have, you know, a high level of ability, right?

[01:22:47] Yeah. A whole straw ban. Yes. And yet, like, you can't use a straw. And then there's these stable communities for whom they need those. Exactly right. Exactly. Everybody should take the action that works for their lives, right?

[01:22:59] Exactly. Exactly. And again, like, you know. Individual action isn't just about consumerism. It can also get is about activism. And like the industry really likes for people to forget about that. But it's not just about the shit that you buy. It's also about like the stuff that you do and the things that you say. And like you can have influence that way, too. So anyway, I liked. I really liked. I like any climate story that connects to other human rights and civil rights movements because I feel like, you know, we still don't do enough of looking at those movements. And, you know, like you've written about this a lie and how how like, you know, the civil rights movement was not, in fact, driven by hope.

[01:23:46] Yes. And also, like you don't like.

[01:23:50] You feel like you're creating something from scratch, but you're not you know, I mean, someone did this before, like these playbooks exist. Yes. So, yeah, you know, this was a really great piece.

[01:24:01] I remember it resonating with a lot of people helping them like claw their way back off the ground. So. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[01:24:07] Yeah, definitely. Okay. Your turn.

[01:24:10] I know it because I know like you were asking on Twitter, like, where is this piece? I can't find this species.

[01:24:19] I remember I loved this essay so much. It made me cry so many times. And because I'm a glutton for punishment, I went back and read it over and over and over again because it takes you through this emotional roller coaster of just like down in the depths and then back up to the mountain top. And it's so beautiful. It is called the Sons of the Pre Apocalypse by Brian Merchant in Vise. And it came out in November 2018, which for a little bit more of access right after the IPCC report that we keep talking about, because there was so groundbreaking and in during the horrible wildfire season that year, which is like pretty much as a character throughout this entire piece. So I'm going to try not to cry as I read it now, but we'll see what happens.

[01:25:08] So no one wants to deliver a child into the onset of an apocalypse, but at least it's not certain yet whether those days just feel like the beginning of the end or the end of something anyway. What is certain? The fires burn worse every year. The climate is changing. The science has been crystal clear for so, so long. But you have to be worse than a dope to live in California. And that just feeling intuitively now. The droughts no longer. The temperatures higher, the snowmelt lessen, the brush drier, the fires likely bigger and better fuels. But I'm not writing all this because I'm despairing or fuming, though both are part of the mix. I'm writing this for a maybe teasingly optimistic reason, but I will take cheesy optimistic and I will cling to it with a bloody death grip right now. My sons are going to live in cities on fire, in nations led by men who don't care, and they are going to have to learn to tackle the problem as we are. If I can in any way help them tap into that capacity that I felt last night. If they can help me and if others can, and if that relation can help topple power in denial, then maybe we can sustain this pre apocalypse. Whether it takes another blue wave or 9 a political revolution, mass hallucinations or something else. If we can relate that goodness where applicable and confront power whenever possible. My sons may not have to live their adult lives in omnipresent fear of fire. People are basically good. Power corrupts but is not de corruptible and there is a lot of work to do. At least that's what gave me hope that week as I watched my world burn literally and figuratively, but most literally as my beautiful new ward eked out his being amongst the smoke.

[01:26:56] I know this was this one maybe tried to eat like it had like the context is that like, you know, he has just had a newborn.

[01:27:05] Yeah. And and like these fires are just like raging all over California and it's like this crazy thing of like holding the future and the president at the same time.

[01:27:18] Exactly.

[01:27:19] And being pissed that at whoever put your life and your child's life in this type of danger. Right.

[01:27:26] It's supposed to be a happy moments that bring your newborn back home and it can't be. Well, I mean, he is happy at the exact same time. He has like this huge mix of emotions. Like he's young, old about his new son. Yeah. But also terrified about the world that he's brought him into. Yeah. And you know, I don't have children. It's like not necessarily something I'm thinking about, but I do have children in my life that I really care about. And so I'm always interested in these stories about, you know, how to balance those emotions. And he just does such a beautiful job here of dealing with that. Just emotional confusion.

[01:28:08] Yeah. Yeah, it is.

[01:28:10] I was just talking to someone about that the other day that it's this really because parenting like involves so many very simple, specific present day to day tasks like, you know, wiping butts and making lunches. You know.

[01:28:27] But like to be doing that stuff while also constantly having this like film reel in your head of like what the future might hold. Right. It's just it's weird. It is a very weird feeling.

[01:28:38] Right. And not being able to take your infant outside because they can't breathe the air. Exactly. This this I say was just so touching and so beautiful and so necessary at the same time.

[01:28:50] And I feel like it was really brave of him to talk about like the need for, you know, his need for optimism and that.

[01:28:58] And just like, I don't care if it's cheesy, I'm gonna hold onto it with everything that I have.

[01:29:03] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And in a way that's like like. So the optimism that he gets is like from having just like sort of a moment of joy in like a family, you know, like simple family moment. And that to me I think also was really was useful because I kind of feel like, OK, we do have to sort of hold on to these moments of, you know, human experience that deliver little shot.

[01:29:29] So he lets you live in in despair all the time and like. Yeah. And that like optimism can come in the form of like those little moments versus a sort of, you know, we're gonna win. What's going on. Yeah.

[01:29:45] Yeah. I think what we need to be practicing is trying to learn to feel things more deeply and that includes the good and the bad. Right. So when I see a beautiful day, I try to like memorize every sensation from that day because there are gonna be days that aren't beautiful. Right. There are gonna be days where is terrifying. And the weather is acting absolutely bizarre. So like it, there's a beautiful winter day where New York feels that way. New York Shaw feel in January.

[01:30:14] I try to hold on to that day. Yeah. And I think we all need to try to do that as much as possible.

[01:30:40] Well, that was a lot to do with that.

[01:30:47] I'm a high key, proud of the climate movement in 2018, to be quite honest.

[01:30:53] Yes, totally. It feels like it grew up in gruesome balls finally. Or gonads.

[01:30:58] Exactly. Yeah. There was a lot more work to be done, but 2013 was a major transformation.

[01:31:06] Yeah, it really was. And we'll definitely talk about that more in our 2019 episode coming up in early January. So make sure you stay tuned for that.

[01:31:15] Definitely. And remember that all the articles we talk about here are going to be up on our Twitter and in the show notes. And don't forget to leave us a review or rating, if you like, the show where it is that really helps us grow as a podcast. Amy, can you explain why?

[01:31:29] Yes. The more readings we get, the more we show up in people's feeds as like I suggested. And so it helps us chart in the different platforms, too. So it does actually like it's a it's kind of a key thing for the algorithms that run behind all the different podcast platforms. So do it. It helps us. Yeah. I mean only do if you like the show. Yes. I love that you keep reminding people not to leave negative for reasons we don't need el leader.

[01:32:01] Yeah. You don't need to go your way for that is fine. But I can't let us in this episode without congratulating the fuck out of you for winning at week's podcast Network of the Year for your company. Critical Frequency.

[01:32:15] Yeah. You know, that was such a big surprise. We're like we're pretty scrappy independent network.

[01:32:24] So that was awesome. We have you know, we put out various other shows, including Drilled. We have, you know, about mothers called the Double Shift. We put out the first album as a podcast. It's called Peace of Mind. And we've got a bunch more shows coming next year, too. So and there's no place like home with no place like home is a new addition to the network this year.

[01:32:53] So another great climate show, we're kind of we're trying to corner the market on like good women like think of it as the feminist answer to cricket media.

[01:33:05] And there's also deep democracy. What's my favorite Critical Frequency?

[01:33:10] Yeah. Yes. Me too. Like I get to produce that show and it's always fun for me to listen to in advance. Exactly. Yeah. I love them.

[01:33:20] A proud moment to be part of this family. And can you remind everybody when our big sister, Pope Castro, comes back? Because I cannot wait.

[01:33:28] Yes. And I have changed the date on this a couple of times because I keep meeting a little bit more, but it's giving back. I mean, it's a big season. Oh, my God. It's so much. It's coming back. The week of January 20th, it's gonna be a little bit of a return to the season. One kind of historical narrative of how we got here. We're looking at the very specific people who helped to build the propaganda apparatus that got us to where we are with fossil fuels. So we're calling that the Mad Men of climate denial and yeah, coming the week of January 20th.

[01:34:08] Exciting.

[01:34:10] So one last reminder to send us your climate storytelling questions at Hot Takes at Critical Frequency dot org and tweet at us. If we missed anything. I'll be nice about it though.

[01:34:20] Yeah. Yeah. Only nice tweets. Also, make sure to send us your favorite pieces from 20 19 as we get ready for that show.

[01:34:28] All right. We'll talk to you again soon and take care of yourself.

[01:34:41] Heartache is written and produced by Mary Annie's Hagler and me Amy WESTERVELT. It's distributed by the Critical Frequency Podcast Network. Our theme song is New Frontier by Flashing Lights. You can find us on Apple podcast, Google Podcasts, Spotify Stitcher or wherever you get your podcasts. Email us at Hot Takes at Critical Frequency. Dot org that's hot takes plural with your questions about climate storytelling or articles you'd like to see discussed on the show. Thanks for listening.