 This is Rob Johnson, President of the Institute for New Economic Thinking. I'm here today with Michael Mann. He's the Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Science at Penn State University. And he does so many things in the realm of climate, so many things that are, how do I say, leadership and visionary. I was very excited to see his new book. It's called The New Climate War. I want to congratulate you on this fine book and welcome you on to the park, yes. Thanks so much, Rob. It's great to be here with you. What inspired you to write this book? Well, I'll tell you, it's sort of what you're alluding to here. We are so close now, we can sort of feel it. So close to finally seeing the action that so many have worked so hard for, for decades, action on climate. And yet there are these obstacles that are being thrown in our path. And they're not the old obstacles. They're new obstacles because it's impossible to deny that climate change is happening now. People can see it with their own two eyes. So the forces of inaction, we might call the inactivists in the book, realize that that old tactic of just attacking the science, attacking the scientists, trying to convince the public and policymakers that there isn't a problem. That's just not going to cut it anymore because people can see that there's a problem. That doesn't mean they've given up. Far from it. But what they have done is to engage in an array of ever more insidious tactics that have the same sort of intent to prevent us from moving on, to prevent us from stopping the burning of fossil fuels from which the fossil fuel industry has profited so greatly for decades. They want us to remain addicted to fossil fuels. And they're willing to use any means possible to ensure that. And so what that means today is blocking policy efforts to incentivize renewable energy, blocking efforts to put a price on carbon, discrediting renewable energy, attacking it, trying to convince environmentalists that renewable energy is as bad for the environment as fossil fuel energy, which is nothing could be farther from the truth. Dividing the community. So there is denial, but denial is largely given way to division, dividing climate advocates, getting them fighting with each other about strategy, getting them fighting with each other about individual lifestyle choices, getting us to finger point at each other and carbon shame each other. Why are you eating meat? Why aren't you a vegan? Why do you still fly? It's a great way to create infighting within the climate advocacy community, sort of a divide and conquer strategy. But in addition to division, it also accomplishes another tactic, deflection. And you'll notice an alliteration, these words that start with D, deflecting attention away from the needed systemic changes. Again, subsidies for renewables, pricing carbon, blocking new fossil fuel infrastructure. All these things that we can't do ourselves, we need our politicians to do for us. They don't want that to happen because it's going to hurt their bottom line. It's going to hurt their profits. So instead, they want to make it about our individual behavior, about once again, our individual choices, our diet, our travel, anything but the fossil fuel infrastructure upon which we're currently forced to depend. Then there is a doom and despair mongering. If they can convince us that it's too late to do anything about the problem, it robs us of agency. And it potentially leads us down that same path of inaction, of disengagement, is outright denial. And so these are just some of the insidious tactics that the forces of inaction, the inactivists are now using to prevent us from moving on. And those are the obstacles in our path and we need to learn how to fight back and to clear them away because they are the only thing now that stand in our way. I know the proponents of what you describe in the book are the, which you might call deflectors, defenders of the fossil fuel industry, but you also had a little sliver in there about the non-trusting of governments. Therefore, the capture and so a carbon price will exacerbate inequality, run into resistance from social unsustainability because of that inequality. And therefore, some people on the left haven't backed carbon pricing when it seems like we need all the tools to be brought to the table to meet this timetable. What's going on there? You know, absolutely. And it's really a relatively new development. Look, the forces of inaction long ago marshaled the political right for their cause. They've got conservatives who oppose regulation, who are dismissive of environmental concerns. They've long had them on their side. What is so again insidious and pernicious is their effort now to actually marshal some on the political left, those who would otherwise be on the front lines advocating for action. If they can convince them, for example, that the solutions that are being proposed are problematic, that renewable energy is going to hurt the environment as a tiny footprint compared to fossil fuels. Or that carbon pricing, one of the primary mechanisms for reducing demand for fossil fuels and leveling the playing field so renewable energy can compete. They can convince us that it's inconsistent with issues of cultural and racial justice. For example, the idea that a carbon price is intrinsically regressive, that it will put undue burden on those with the least income, those with the least resources. That has not been true where it has been successfully implemented. In Canada, in Australia, before the conservative government got rid of it, where it was working very well. And lower income earners were actually gaining from carbon pricing because the revenue was being returned to the people. The revenue that was raised through carbon pricing was being returned to the people on a progressive basis. More of it went to, again, to low income earners. And so it all depends on how it's structured. But the inactivists have been very effective in convincing some progressives that carbon pricing is somehow going to be unjust. That's going to put undue burden, again, on frontline communities. Or that, hey, it's buying into capitalism. And if you're buying into capitalism, you're in bed with the enemy because we have to get away from this whole capitalist system. So the idea that market mechanisms, like carbon pricing, was buying into neoliberal economics and should be opposed for that reason. Look, there's a worthy conversation to be had about whether our current global economy is, in the long term, fundamentally compatible with environmental sustainability. There's some deep questions that we have to ask about an extractive market-based economy. Can we continue on this course in a sustainable way? But the climate crisis, we've got to act now. We've got 10 years to bring our carbon emissions down by a factor of two. So to those who want to remake the global economy and defeat capitalism and have a larger political, envision a larger political agenda, let's have that conversation. But in the meantime, we've got to work within the system that exists to solve this problem. Yeah, I often, in these podcasts, refer to what I call the tale of two failed romances. The first romance is unbridled faith in the unfettered free market. And in the pervasive, what they call, externalities and public goods, it will fail. And maybe for other reasons, like non-enforcement of antitrust or feedback that comes from money politics, all of that. But the other failed romance, and this is one that's troubling now, and that's why it tees you a little bit from the left, or about the left, I should say, is that the other failed romance is the belief that government can do it and will do it. And that's where that money politics, and that's where the competency and the training and the quality of people that choose to work in the public sector is, how do I say, given the disincentives of poor pensions and low pay, et cetera, relative to other opportunities. So you have all kinds of reasons to be hesitant, skeptical of any kind of romantic social theory now, but we still got to get on our horse and ride to this finish line. So it's quite at the level. Yeah, we've got to sort of go with the horse we arrived on for the time being. And we might want to trade in that horse for a different one later on. But I think that's exactly right. And the problem isn't so much market economics itself. It's market economics where the rules have been stacked in favor of big corporations and big money, dark money, and the fact that politicians can be bought, and once they're bought, they're doing the bidding of powerful special interests rather than the people they're supposed to be representing. All of those problems are very real, and they are part of the politics, the prevailing political atmosphere. And we can't solve climate change or any other problem without engaging in the political battle, the battle to attain to marshal the political will to act on the defining crises of our time. Bill Gates has a book out right now on climate change as well. He advocates for sort of technocratic path. And he was asked in a recent interview if what's the solution to the politics of climate change, climate change denial and inactivism? He said, well, I don't know the solution to the politics. Well, if you don't have a solution to the politics, you don't have a solution. Because right now, it isn't a matter of technology. We've got the technology that we need to solve this problem. In existing renewable energy technology, what we're lacking right now is the political will. And that's the battle that we see before us here in Earth Week, where there's going to be a monumental summit in Washington, D.C., to see where we stand and what we have to do in the remaining months of this year, so that by the time we get to COP26, the next major international climate conference later this year in November in Glasgow, we'll sort of have all of our ducks in a row. And the main actors will be ready to ratchet up their commitments. And we can start to see ourselves getting on the path that we need to be on to a catastrophic one. I remember years ago, my friend, I'm proud to say my friend Naomi Klein wrote a book called This Changes Everything. And she was envisioning what I'll call the merchants of doubt to use Naomi Oreskes in the mix and the kind of things that you... Yeah, that's right, the tale of two Naomi's. But the idea that she brought up was it's not that the climate science is to be resistor or not, it's that if you say the private sector needs governance and climate is proof of that, people will then try to bring governments, governments more heavily into interfering in all kinds of marketplaces. So let's fight it here at the starting gate. Years later, I was in a meeting with some climate-related people in Grover Northquist. And somebody in the group asked him very pointedly, well, if you don't, with climate pricing and what have you, make things work, we're going to get to a place where you will see authoritarian governments and you guys by stalling will have brought it about. So they face dilemmas on the right when they favor individual freedom, minimal government of having a calamity based on that system can create the kind of transformation that Naomi sensed that they were going to resist. That's right. And I know both Naomi's and Naomi Oreskes is a close friend and colleague. And this is a point that she often makes. If you hate big government and climate change is your worst nightmare, because when it comes to the adaptations that would be necessary to deal with unmitigated climate change impacts, we're going to need so much more governmental intervention than we've seen before. And so it is an interesting argument, one that I think does have the potential to bring some conservatives to the table. Grover Northquist, I've met with him in the past as well. He's a thoughtful person, smart guy, but he has strong ideological principles when it comes to taxation. And you know, it was interesting to see him start to bend a little bit talking about how he could in fact see himself in support of carbon pricing, say it was offset, right, if it was revenue neutral. So you weren't increasing overall taxation, you levy a tax on carbon, but you lower other taxes, income taxes, what have you to try to offset that. That's a worthy position. It's not necessarily one I agree with. I would argue that there is a role for increasing government revenue to deal with this crisis overall. But let's have that debate. That's a worthy debate we had. What is the worthy debate? Sources and uses in the source creates a deterrent to burning carbon, the uses social sustainability, energy infrastructure, Green New Deal. James Boyce has explored that quite a bit in his writing, some of which he's done for Inet. And I did a podcast with him where he really delved into that using the yellow vests as a warning sign from France that we do have to take into account the social sustainability side of this as well. Absolutely. I talk about the yellow vest protest a little bit in my book as well, because there's a lot going on there. Some of the same sort of malevolent actors who reared their head in the sort of climate and action movement in recent years. Russia, for example, has meddled in the politics of other countries. The United States, of course, now famously in the previous presidential election, in the most recent presidential election. But in Canada and even in France, they have used sort of cyber weaponry to try to sabotage policy efforts that they don't like. And they don't want to see action on climate. Putin has made it very clear this is their greatest asset right now, where the fossil fuels still buried beneath Russian soil. And Russia has worked hard to sabotage global action on climate. We have to recognize that, yeah, there are villains when it comes to the fossil fuel industry and the front groups that they fund. But there are also state actors who have been playing a malevolent role, Saudi Arabia, Russia, even Australia in recent years under Scott Morrison. And that's the challenge, right, going into this next climate conference, this next global agreement to get some of these intransigent actors on board. What I'll tell you is it sure helps to have leadership once again in the United States, to have a president who's leading on this issue puts a lot more pressure on other intransigent actors like Scott Morrison in Australia who's feeling the pressure of an American president now who's leading on climate. Yeah, I know a number of people that were in the running for being the next head of the OECD. And when the Australian gentleman was named, they were very upset on the grounds that that resource based country would be resistant to the climate climate change. I spoke out against, yeah, Matthias Corman, I spoke out quite vehemently about what an adverse impact that would have on the global politics of climate action and it's something now we're going to have to contend with. Are there particular landmark works that have inspired you over time? Oh, certainly there are. You know, the writings of Carl Sagan have been very influential for me. He was a scientist, but he was a science communicator and really a philosopher by some measure. And, you know, wrote profoundly about, you know, environmental issues, but also just about sort of the struggles that we face when it comes to the role of rationality and science and fact-based discourse. And some of his most feared prophecies have come to fruition in a sense over the last decade. He sort of presaged with poor voting, you know, back in the demon haunted world back in the mid 1990s. I think it was published in 1995. He foreboded a future where people would become disconnected from the tools of rational discourse and unable to, you know, litigate for themselves what's wrong and what's right and how dangerous that would be at a time when we have great technology that can be leveraged for good or for bad. He was, of course, very worried about issues like nuclear proliferation at the time, but he also foresaw, you know, the threat of global environmental crises where, you know, you would have a citizenry that is ill-equipped to, again, to litigate, you know, these matters and falls prey to the victims. He was very concerned about us falling prey to pseudoscience, fortune telling, faith healing, etc. What I think he didn't quite realize was that actually anti-science, ideologically motivated anti-science, directed anti-science would be a far greater threat than mere pseudoscience. But it is where we are. We're realizing some of the worst fears. I also do like, you know, the genre of clarify of science fiction, climate-themed science fiction. I did an event not too long ago with Kim Stanley Robinson, who's a powerful story. Amazing guy, really interesting approach to, you know, to creating narratives that are fictional narratives, but they bring of truth to them. And in some ways, his latest book, The Ministry for the Future, while it's a fictional narrative, tells a very similar story from the new climate war. And we need fictional narratives and storytelling to help communicate, you know, the gravity of this threat to the public. And I think it's great that people with different backgrounds and tools and approaches are all, again, bringing them to the table to see if we can marshal them in the greatest challenge that we face, the greatest fight that we face, the fight to address climate change before it's too late. What I thought was fascinating is you just described is how anti-science grew, because science was to wean you off of superstition, some of the things that Sagan feared. But then anti-science was to say, you've embraced the false security and the people who provide that false security have deceived you on behalf of a narrow elite. The fight then is not a different science. The fight is using the anger at those people for deceiving you with what you thought was comforting. And they go to a different mythology to regain their comfort. And it's just really, it's emotional fabric that's very torn up. And it makes it very hard to navigate in an urgent time like this. And I thought this, I thought that we might call the strands of all of that was so evident in your book, like it was like you were seeing an extra dimension other than and interpreting, you were seeing the pattern of that dimension. And I thought that was really extraordinary, really. Well, thanks. I mean, I think, you know, I found myself on the front lines of this battle, sort of unusual combatant in a political battle as trained as a scientist. But the science that I did led to the publication of the now well-known hockey stick curve back in the late 1990s. And it took on sort of iconic significance in the climate change debate. And I quickly found myself in a completely different arena, not in the world of science, simply in the world of science, but thrust into sort of the public battle over climate change and what to do about it. And I, again, have been, you know, for more than two decades now on the front lines of that battle. And as I say in the book, I've come to recognize the enemy quite well. I know it's tactics I've seen is evolving tactics in the warfare that it has been, you know, advancing against climate action. And so I hope that there's some wisdom that I've been able to derive from having been on the front lines of that war that I'm able to share with readers. I think there's a reference in an affirmation of your book. But I remember toward the end, you were talking about what I will call the eyes of a child, the fresh eyes of Greta Thunberg and the youth movement. How is that contributing to the impetus in a constructive way? Well, it's been transformational as far as I'm concerned, because for too long we allowed climate change to be framed in very cerebral terms, purely cerebral terms. The mind, but not so much the heart, science, economics, policy and politics. And what Greta and the other, you know, hundreds of thousands of youth climate advocates around the world have done is to recenter this issue as a matter of ethics, intergenerational ethics, but also distributed ethics. You know, when it comes to sort of the industrial world versus the developing world, the ethics of the ethical conundrum that those who had the least role in creating this problem are the ones who will suffer the greatest consequences if we fail to act. And so I think that Greta and the others have really, you know, accomplished something fundamentally important to recenter this as an issue of ethics, of an ethical obligation to act before it's too late. And I, you know, argue in the book that that is really a game changer and that we need to support them in their efforts and provide, you know, and defend them in their efforts, because they are under attack. Greta has the, you know, eye of Sauron fixed on her and the other youth climate advocates because of, you know, the threat that they represent to the status quo, to the fossil fuel industry. And they, the fossil fuel sort of disinformation machine has, you know, has set its sights on them, has worked hard to discredit Greta Thunberg and the other youth climate advocates. They've helped open the door, but the rest of us have to walk through. We can't put it entirely upon them to solve this problem. We now have to step in, those of us who are in a position to have a direct influence on policy and politics, have to step in and do our part. And so, yes, they have, they've provided a foot in the door, but the rest of us now have to walk through. I loved in the end of your book, you talked about the role of hope, that at some level, despondency and resignation is how I say the ally of our enemy. That's right. Whether it's extermination or the fossil fuel industry or people on the left that don't want a new carbon price, you can pick your own enemy. But resignation rather than hope feeds on itself. It's an amplifying feedback because the more resigned, the more inaction, the more difficult it is to meet the timetable, the more resigned, et cetera, in that despondency. And like a lot of feedbacks that can act in both direction, also then feeds on itself. And we see that we're able to accomplish something, that we make a difference in our lives and we see it as a positive impact. And that leads us down this path of engagement where we realize, oh, well, I can do this too. And why don't I do this? And this is well understood actually in all fields of all fields, it turns out in marketing. In the world of marketing, this has long been understood. This idea of the path of engagement. You get people to do little things and it potentially leads them to larger and larger stepping stones that ultimately can really result in the sorts of actions that we need to see collectively. So yeah, I do think that that's really critical. It is the note that I end on in the book and it's sort of fortuitous because the book went to press in August. So I didn't know with confidence where we would be when the book came out this last January after the election. But I had a sense at that time of where we were headed. And I sort of envisioned a future where there was restored leadership in the presidency of the United States. And that's where we are now. We've got a real opportunity. What we can't do is squander it. Before we started, I was telling you about, I attended a meeting on African development as a preparation for COP26 at the group of 30, the Central Bank alumni put forward, and they were very energized. And as I thought about Glasgow, I thought about that I had taken my staff to Glasgow in honor of a time where I was in crisis in my life. And my best friend took me up onto a mountain in Idaho. And he turned me on to a song by a Scottish band called The Water Boys. And the name of the song is The Hole of the Moon. And before this morning, and before recognizing The Water Boys whose t-shirt I wear, I remember that my friend passed away recently, that his birthday is this week. But before all of that was I was reading your book. I'm often informed by lyrics. That's like my Holy Spirit. What am I thinking and feeling? It comes down to me. And I sang Hummed the first verse of this song. This is three or four weeks ago. But I understand now why. It said, I pictured a rainbow. You held it in your hands. I had some flashes, but you saw the plan. I wandered out in the world for years while you just stayed in your room. I saw the crescent. But Michael, you see The Hole of the Moon. It's very kind of you. The way you bring the pattern. All of its elements. You're not playing in the subset. You're playing in the whole grid. You're seeing obstacles. You're seeing the possibilities. And you're seeing what's necessary to call upon us to do. This is a very valuable book. Thank you. And I'm very grateful for you're doing it, for you're coming on, and for you're allowing me to celebrate Rob K. Berry's what would have been his 64th birthday with you there for a couple of moments. Let this be his legacy to help energize us at this critical juncture.