"people all around the world their lives are basically dependent on fossil fuels and so the idea that we're going to get people off by making it so expensive that it becomes impossible for them to live..."

"there's a spectrum of belief on the topic of climate change and the landscape of that Spectrum has probably changed over several decades on one extreme there's a belief that climate change is a hoax i..."

"political Center for Center left and center right of course it's very difficult to Define but can you help me Define what the extremes are again as they have changed over the years what they are today..."

"bubbles and beer CO2 carbon dioxide the main greenhouse gas why beer look because I like beer it's also in Coca-Cola well you were talking about Cola before uh and it's so it's innocuous we grew up wi..."

"or not you say well what kind of energy future do you want that's a very different question than stop global warming and um when you look at climate actually I had this Learning Journey on my reportin..."

"right but it also gives you more action points it's like okay well we know how to design better we know that today's coasts won't be tomorrow's coasts work with that and then let's chart an energy fut..."

"to think about it on the other hand that was also where you kind of ended we are stuck in a place where this very much is the conversation right now uh and and so I think in in one sense um certainly ..."

"it's not so much about arcing against the people who are saying it's a it's a hoax that's not really where I am I don't think that's where Andy are really where the conversation is but it is a questio..."

"climate but also on all the other problems the world faces oh yeah and it just empowers people too those who believe this then just sit back even in Adam McKay's movie The don't look up movie there wa..."

"dependencies when it comes to energy and stuff like that that you don't just click magically transition a car Fleet a car built today will last 40 Years it'll end up in Mexico sold on a used car et ce..."

"there's much more majority now at the alarmed or engaged bubbles then just the dismissive bubble does a durable like with vaccination and all lots of other issues there's a durable never anything beli..."

"there were 40 million people in Pakistan today there are 225 million and a big chunk of them are still rural they live in the floodplain of the amazing Indus River which comes down from the Himalayas ..."

"b-o-u-w-e-r um has for I first wrote on his work in 2010 in the New York Times And basically in 2010 there was no sign in the data of climate change driving disasters climate change is up here disaste..."

"where you probably shouldn't be building and and so I think uh a lot of scientists are very focused on saying can we measure whether global warming had an impact which is an interesting science questi..."

"that we need that kind of level of alarmism for people to pay attention and to think about climate change so you said the singular View uh is is not the correct way to look at climate change just the ..."

"to have this discussion I think it's unfortunate and this is just what happens in almost all policy discussions that they end up being you know sort of discussions from from the extreme groups because..."

"don't think entertainment I I wouldn't call it entertainment but giving voice to the extremes isn't a productive Way Forward it seems to you know to push back against the main narrative it seems to wo..."

"sake of getting attention or clicks to me is not any more valuable than watching a an action movie and and again I think also it very easily ends up sort of skewing our conversation about what are the..."

"okay let's go there let's go electric cars okay educate us on uh the pros and cons of electric cars in this complex picture of of climate change what do you think of the efforts of Tesla in Elon Musk ..."

"that it has it's one of these things that become more sort of a virtue signaling thing and again look once electric cars are sufficiently cheap that people will want to buy them that's great and and t..."

"the Reggie or something uh you know you can read this that's the regional Greenhouse yes initiative so you can basically cut it really really cheaply why would we not want to cut dozens and dozens of ..."

"this is a real phenomenon you know getting them in the game there was that documentary who killed the electric car which seemed to imply that uh you know there's there were fights to keep this Tamp do..."

"it too much we all do but uh we all do we usually refer when you say we we humans we Society we the government yeah there has to be some thought and attention put to where you put these incentives so ..."

"Economist would be the types of people who would say is there a smarter way where you for less money can for cut more CO2 and the obvious answer is yes that's what we've seen for instance with uh frac..."

"there is a problem with climate change but it's much more about saying how can we make smart decisions can I ask you about blind spots when you reduce stuff to numbers the costs and benefits is there ..."

"the recent giant legislation the fine print is the front page for me is a deep diving journalist because it says we didn't include any sources of friction meaning right resistance to putting new trans..."

"all of human history with that one word friction yeah well inertia friction implies there's a force that's already being resisted but there's also inertia which is a huge part of our you know we have ..."

"she used the words she said people go in the voting booth thinking about things that are soon Salient and certain and climate change is complex you know has long time scales and and that really jogged..."

"very costly and there's so many factors that line up to perpetuate that flocking behavior one is Media attention comes in the other is funding comes in the National Science Foundation or whatever Euro..."

"hard to find it's another form of path dependency the the term I used for the breaking narrative capture to me for me has come mostly from stepping back and reminding myself of the basic principles of..."

"in that on as a communicator I I mean there are other things happening at the same time right I'm now 35 years into almost 40 years into my journalism career so I have some Independence I'm free from ..."

"there would be no talk of a climate deal or any of that stuff without him and but when you once you're starting to kind of frame a story in a certain way you carried along and as you said sometimes it..."

"was tough for you it was it was tough for my family you know to me it did generate some interesting calls and stuff on my my voicemail and um but but on the left I was also undercut Roger Pilkey Jr a ..."

"of time frame uh and and and if you challenge that you yes you're outside the flock and you get attacked I've always uh so uh somebody told me once uh I think it's true they say it at the uh Hobart la..."

"at uh and I guess uh I I see my role uh and I think that's probably also how you see yourself is trying to you know get everyone to do it slightly less wrong so let me ask you about a deep psychologic..."

"to be annoyed with me and I would love that not to be the case but what I try to do is you know uh uh so I I try to be very polite and you know sort of not push people's buttons unless they they sort ..."

"the book The Human planet Earth at the dawn of the anthropocene which is the new age when humans are actually having an impact on the environment let me ask the question of what do you find most beaut..."

"system is still profound without with or without global warming so this immense powerful beautiful organism that is Earth the all the different suborganisms that are on it do you see humans as a kind ..."

"do it you know and here's the other side of the European Union uh they're they're saying using their capital P precautionary principle says no we can't meddle with nature right and this is just like w..."

"the fact that you know we should just be joyful of the fact that humans live here uh I think it's incredibly important to remember how much progress we've had uh you know most people just don't stop t..."

"is getting greener uh so we get much more green stuff now I don't know and and this is where I sort of show my Economist uh Roots uh because if you just measure all living stuff in uh in tons uh so in..."

"next one's coming one of my advantages in covering climate is I've covered other kinds of disasters too so it keeps my contexts you know made in touch with other things we can do so I'm walking around..."

"decapitation videos to recruit distributed disaffected young people into extremism and you know there's lots of these systems are not they're just like every other tool right they're just for good or ..."

"satellite it would have laughed out loud so technology plays a huge role if it's kind of you know employed with these the bigger vision and Leadership so Bjorn you wrote one of the books you wrote the..."

"which the human species becomes extinct because of climate change I'm not sure I would want to be able to argue that because it really requires you to have sort of very very extreme parameter choices ..."

"we we're used to one way of doing things so you know we we live in Jakarta because it's right next to the Sea we're used to the Sea being at this level uh we grow our crops because we're used to you k..."

"you could feed India well there there are these kinds of things where you can imagine uh and then that this would be very difficult to deal with and then if you add all of it up you could possibly get..."

"model those kinds of things so there are people who looked at this and and surprisingly again you know most people will move within their country for a lot of different reasons but you know mainly lan..."

"able to what about covid pandemic just said hold my beer uh the response of human civilization to the covert pandemic seems to have not they didn't find the carjacks yeah she seems to have not been as..."

"lot of stupid stuff and a lot of people were really really annoyed but fundamentally we fixed this uh we could have done it better and pretty I mean I I uh rode through uh the covet pandemic in southe..."

"which is really basically still impossible to get in big chunks of Africa to get you through those hard spots but but the heat issue is the one that's most this most base basic element related to glob..."

"and getting back to sea level and Glaciers the the melting point of ice is a is a number yeah and so if you pass that number things change start to change what became known about Antarctica and Greenl..."

"discontinuities where you get a lot more of a sudden isn't to me it's in the realm of what I've taken a calling known unknowables like don't count on another ipcc report magically including science th..."

"you know it's more complicated than that and we the journalists the media pundits don't pay attention to that stuff so and actually which is why I've started to develop kind of a dictionary like I cal..."

"scientist at Carnegie Mellon Destiny knock she just was the lead author on a study um what poor and prosperous households do in a heat wave when they have access to air conditioning in a poor househol..."

"many other ways and then at the end of it it is it's not just about making sure that we focus on this one problem but it's recognizing that these families and and have have lots of different issues th..."

"and you can start to build a Tokyo had the same thing in the 1930s so we're also withdrawing a lot of water way too fast uh and and so you know one of the obvious things is maybe you should stop withd..."

"devastated category five came ashore in the panhandle of Florida leveled that much photographed Town Mexico Beach and um people are actually the Tallahassee National Weather Service said unprecedented..."

"of the fundamental dynamics of the Gulf of Mexico and these storms come off of Africa it's a place where they would come now the question of global warming impact is subtle there are aspects of hurric..."

"by the vulnerability building vulnerability in these areas you know if there's a marginal change in a storm and you've quadrupled or sex tupled how much stuff and how many people are in the way and if..."

"you if you're out of intensity you know it's it's let me just get into this a tiny bit more I mean hurricanes I grew up with them in Rhode Island in the new and you know in my youth and there was a ve..."

"the United States it's because of the smog was changing the behavior of the Sahara Desert which is just south of Europe and and the Sarah Harrah does it kills hurricanes sand and dust coming off the S..."

"the century because of global warming and for me you know that's a lot of information but if I'm in a bar I start with what what do you care about you care about safety you care about security you car..."

"to me it was it's kind of a transformational uh potential to go into a bar maybe I should print these things 100 and I should go ahead with you more often they should be coasters and bars because that..."

"real issue here all the other things the fact that people are much more vulnerable is is just vastly outweigh this which is why if you look at the impact of hurricanes and impact of pretty much everyt..."

"difference and this is what I find really hard to communicate climate change is not this oh my God everything is going off the off the off the charts and we're all going to be doomed kind of thing cli..."

"tell people look if you want to live where hurricanes sit maybe you should be more careful yeah by the way what I was saying about um past storms the Paleo tempestology past fires it's the same thing ..."

"to describe a lot of it because this is really what is the main Drive of what we worry about uh climate change seems a little diffuse but you know it's convenient to when you talk about climate all th..."

"focus on on on dealing with climate change whereas I think we would say no it's about stuff that actually works and you know doing that first right and and by making it about carbon dioxide you're imp..."

"I'm I'm sure you have but I'm pretty sure a lot of climate journalists have never sort of looked past the uh at least the uh the summary for policy climate panel they do like us they do predictions as..."

"years left 12 years and that's the one this was the uh the idea that there's a point we're gonna if we don't cut emissions in half by whatever it was 2015. we're doomed that emerged from that specific..."

"that whole dynamic they latch onto the climate science and they they you know so they're there and they're very handy quotable people and you have a Justice angle you have bad guys and good guys which..."

"all in the journalists I think because there's a lot of if I were to think about what did you call it front page thought there's a lot of really um narratives that uh result in destruction of the huma..."

"part of it as that's mainly because nobody else you know it was just the US and and Europe and a few others have put out CO2 in the in the 20th century so we used to be big but in the 21st century wil..."

"would never argue that you shouldn't done I've plenty of time said we should stop that but we should also recognize these are mostly regimes that are not going to be taken over either by my argument o..."

"about where do you take your models from I try to do and and again this is not possible everywhere I try to actually take the average of all of the economic models so there's a there's a group called ..."

"that's oh yeah yeah and there's many many many more I think the the point here is to say that if you take the average of all the best model is a sort of aggregated for instance at the Stanford energy ..."

"do is like what are the sources for the different models and and just very briefly I mean I'm I'm laying it out very transparently where I get these models of where I get these estimates from in the b..."

"want to do that right so so it's it again it's a little bit the you know flock of birds it will look some at something else and and what I think is that given that we're paying for at the end this is ..."

"um you know I've been reading for various reasons but mostly because I've been traveling to Ukraine and thinking and just about the people's um suffering through war I've been reading a lot about Worl..."

"true or not so it's this weird weird world because I I ultimately bigger than climate my hope is to have institutions that can be trusted and that's been very much under attack um in as as part of the..."

"they're young entrepreneurs in Nairobi who are selling ingeniously using nairobi's digital currency uh propane the fuel that's in our backyard barbecue grills which comes out of gas Wells but it's a s..."

"for us so but that only is considered if they're in the conversation so connectivity full connectivity digital access so so those entrepreneurs are in the mix of people when they're thinking about sub..."

"thing and the media you know are not doing a good job um because of this front page thoughtism um but we can all you know I work partially in Academia Colombia on an initial initiative partially in co..."

"can I can I just follow up on that because one of the things that I try to do and and so my day job is actually something else I work with I think thing called The Copenhagen consensus uh where we wor..."

"works because we're terribly inefficient so they're literally lots and lots of amazing things you can do out there there's a lot of little hanging fruit and there's a lot of not terribly great things ..."

"and certainly not terribly High you know even if you're very optimistic it'll be like two or three whereas many other things are just fantastically better Investments like the thing I've been advocati..."

"shows you how few times we do it it's like we just don't do it therefore you can bang that drum your work is valuable but it's really constrained because show me in the world where that does happen an..."

"consider ourselves incredibly lucky if they actually do one of them so you wrote the book how to spend 75 billion dollars to make the world a better place so on can we just list some of the things if ..."

"have done this way before we're just simply proving that it's a good idea um it turns out that if you put this on eBay essentially so if you do an e-procurement system where bidders can come in sudden..."

"some corruption there'll still be corruption but less corruption Ukraine has actually been big on this they I have talked to them I talked to the digital transformation Minister it's kind of incredibl..."

"you know it's morally wrong that people are starving uh but it also turns out that it's a really really dumb thing not to get kids good food because if you get them good food their brains develop more..."

"conversation that we could have uh then it turns out that for every dollar spent you do 45 dollars worth of good again remember about a a third of all kids that go to school right now just don't learn..."

"to solve why don't we start with solving the easy and effective ones and this of course Bears them that whole conversation on climate change because in some ways you know that's that's also Andy's poi..."

"brought up would you mentioned that word moral before I wasn't alleged on it because it relates to these time scales that really are immeasurable if you know it's going to take decades to confirm the ..."

"what you're talking about in terms of in Ukraine with the trust and lack of less corruption and stuff was in India for all of his issues Modi um recognized that middle class people in India Cook on LP..."

"previously where the woman would spend hours collecting firewood Smokey fire cooking clean the pots and start all over again but it's all built on trust all built on the digital economy and the same t..."

"so which uh for climate change which policies work which don't which are when we look at this formula of one dollar in forty five dollars out for climate change what dollar in what policies for dollar..."

"physical and the digital infrastructure the point is that people are really good at doing this already because they have a strong incentive to do it so the extra thing that governments can do outside ..."

"done everyone will just switch not just Rich well-meaning Americans or Europeans but also the Chinese the Indians everybody in Africa the rest is uh Indian subcontinent that's how you fix these issues..."

"while it possibly Works in some pockets of the US and I I think actually in large parts of Europe at least it used to uh the this uh the the war in Ukraine is definitely sort of changing that whole pe..."

"and what's happened now is well the United States this big chunk of money is designed to take us over a Finish Line that was started with not just Innovation but with the production efficiency too thi..."

"actually I interviewed Bill Bill Gates uh we had to spend an hour with him in Seattle in 2016 um was when he was rolling out his breakthrough energy thing I got to spend it was 45 minutes me and Bill ..."

"the other part too the that end how do you how do you innovate at the household level of the village level it's much more of a distributed problem we used to think the one the one big change I've had ..."

"solution um the Nevada politicians were successful in saying not here not here not Yucca Mountain and um but my wife who I've been married to well I met 30 years ago and she lives with me she's an env..."

"most of the world and that's of course course why we need to focus so much more on the Innovation so that we can get to the point where we no longer need fossil fuels as soon as possible but to say to..."

"one of the other projects on their list as the World Bank kind of gotcha like how dare they give money was for a new for a fertilizer Factory in Bangladesh that is designed to get three times as much ..."

"ways to look at the same basic effect in the United States Democrats younger Americans identify dealing with climate change is the top priority U.S adults 42 say uh 42 say that dealing with climate ch..."

"other is the public perception that has that's uh polluted or affected by political affiliation and then there's uh whatever is the uh narrative that's communicated by the the media they will also hav..."

"do I just spend my time writing more explanatory stories that explain the science better no do I dig in on this work to understand what brings people together and then these same surveys the same scie..."

"well I guess I'm asking is there polarization on policy no well well there again the bipartisan infrastructure law that was passed last November that was bipartisan all of Congress said yes and that's..."

"you to then come and regulate it heavily yeah uh so it's because they don't like top-down government yeah and also because they don't want another tax and you know there's lots of of so it's it's real..."

"what's the role of a journalist in that context so climate change is a large number of people that believe one thing yeah that believe another thing uh it turns out even with people that Society deems..."

"kind of person that actually understands in the full Arc of History you need to empathize I find that journalists a lot of times perhaps they're protecting their job their reputation their sanity are ..."

"happened over and over again um so if I had left it if I'd gone into the terrain of the fight over CO2 some journalist friends might say oh that was good mashup you know match up and but I found these..."

"or you can find these nuggets that are everyone is a human being I can't play the mind game of what I would have said asked to Hitler but um I played that mind game all the time but that's that's for ..."

"of stuff let me ask you about presidents American presidents um what who had a positive or negative impact on climate change efforts in your view Clinton Bush Obama Trump Biden or maybe you could say ..."

"when China came in with his huge growth and Emissions that that created a bit of a recarbonization blip but that was this huge growth in their economy they pulled a bunch of people out of out of pover..."

"emitters let's this isn't about 200 countries it's about basically eight or ten countries let's get them into a room and let's have these little sub rooms on like electrification on mining on whatever..."

"because what it tells you is all that we're doing is not even on the margin it's sort of smaller than that and I'm not sure what that is but you know we're basically dealing in you know so for instanc..."

"have any sense of how hard this is actually going to be and that's of course why I would go back and say look the only way you're going to fix this is through Innovation because if you have something ..."

"of it but you know it's an amazing progress that you've stopped worrying about your you know your parents dying and you worry about your cows dying and when I was talking about social Innovation the o..."

"so I think and and this really you know pretty well reflects the whole conversation we've had we've got to sort of take the the uh the catastrophism out of the uh of the climate conversation uh and an..."

"there's a lot of different places you can do I mean the obvious thing when you're talking about climate is what if you could become the guy that you know develops fourth generation nuclear up it's ver..."

"what if you develop that so the the truth is not only can your life be much better when you sort of ditched that uh that doomerism but it also becomes much more possible for you to be a positive part ..."

"totally and and to me there's never been a better time to be effective as a young person because the internet connectedness you can brainstorm with someone in another country just as easily as you can..."

"parts of curriculum from like kindergarten on or parents can do the same thing that there's a woman at URI University of Rhode Island Renee Hobbs who teaches a course in propaganda literacy and she sa..."

"everybody an opportunity like there's something for artists scientists poets everybody needs to get into the game I just spent some time with Kim Stanley Robinson who wrote that book Ministry of the f..."

"completely freaked out urgent but when you realize energy transitions take time then you have to sort of find patience or whatever your word is for that yeah I think you have to oscillate back and for..."

"so the the two of you have been thinking about some of the biggest questions which is life here on Earth the history of life here the future of life here on Earth of Earth itself and how to allocate o..."

"difference yeah see those three properties are really important right now some aspects of this we know absolutely what we can work on cutting vulnerability energy transitions take time science can hel..."

"or at least a less bad one in terms of how we get through it and you're also a musician so in context one one of my favorite songs of yours an album a very fine line I should mention that with the str..."

"fine line yeah I'm glad you walked in with me today gentlemen you're brilliant kind beautiful human beings thank you so much for having this quote-unquote debate that was much more about just explorin..."