 Welcome everybody. Welcome to the Future Trends forum. I'm delighted to see you here today. We have an incredibly important topic and slightly unusual format to explore, and I'm really, really looking forward to our conversation about this, where we are right now, which is our conversation about higher education in the age of the climate crisis. Now, this is an unusual session today for a couple of reasons. One is we are combining with our online book club. Our online book club has been reading the IPCC report. Explain that in a second. And that's usually blog based and web based, but right now we're adding a live video wing. So people who are reading and thinking about that can join us and talk. But the other thing is this is a session where we don't have a guest. This is one of our community sessions where we put all our brains together and think hard about a particular topic. And in this case, we're trying to think about climate change using the IPCC report as a base. Now, if you're new to that report, if you can't bring it to hand, look at the bottom left of the screen. You'll see there's a Laws in Shape button there that says R-I-Line IPCC reading. And if you click that, that'll take you to all of our blog posts and discussion about it with all kinds of resources there. Now, I'll just quickly introduce the report and then I'm going to start besieging you with your questions to try and learn what you think and what you'd like us to discuss. And by the way, hello to those who just greeted us in the chat. Heather, I see you too, Benzatz by Lightning in Madison. Hello, Vanessa in Northeastern Colorado. Roxanne, hello in Connecticut. Amy in Mesa, Arizona. We seem to be all over the country today, which is great. So the IPCC report is an incredibly powerful document. It's not an easy read at times. The IPCC is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and this is part of the United Nations. And what these folks do is they assemble the work of scientists. By the work of scientists, I mean thousands and thousands of climate scientists. And they basically synthesize the cutting-edge research into a single document. Now, when they first do this, that single document is about 4,000 pages long, which is enormous, of course. Then, and this is where our book club comes in, they squeeze it down even further to the mere 120 pages. And I call that the technical summary. And that is basically the best human knowledge we have about climate change. And in fact, if 120 pages is too much, they compress it even tighter down to the executive summary, which is called the Summary for Policymakers. It's in the government officials and the UNI. And that's near 40 pages. So that's an amazing job of synthesis and scientific analysis and writing. And these documents just really are our distillation of our thinking right now. The IPCC does this process, publishing these enormous reports every few years. And the most recent report came out in three different documents starting in November. The two most recent ones came out this April. They haven't gotten a lot of attention this year because of other events in the world, like the Ukraine War. But they are truly, truly extraordinary. And they are this state of the art, that's where we are. So just really quickly, if you can in the chat, let me know if you've been following the IPCC reports. Have you been looking at their reports about them and other sources, like radio or on the web? Or have you had a chance to read into them yourselves? I'm asking not as a quiz, but to figure out how much background I should share and how much we need to share together. It's just in the chat, let me know. Are you an IPCC hardcore reader? Are they completely new to you? What do you think? Nervous! Partial reader? Somewhat? Shin Lee, I'm so glad that you're here so that we can share that. Excellent. Somewhat. Completely new wrong. Excellent. Excellent. Very good. Bob London does the same thing of reading the Executive Summary. Very good. Heather Short. Bravo! Or I should say brava. I would love to... Let me know, actually, Heather, if your video is on. I'd love to bring you up on stage. Just let me know in the chat if I can do that. Mark is waiting for the movie. So are we all. We actually haven't had a really good climate change movie yet. Thank you to Heather and another Heather C. And let's see. Let me bring this up right now. Hello, Dr. Short. Hi, Brian. How are you? I'm very good. Is it okay if I call you Dr. Short or should I call you Heather? Whatever you want. Okay. Well, since you are speaking in some serious and professional capacity, I'm going to start off with Dr. Short and then see how it goes. You said that you were a close reader and a devoted reader of these. Yeah. It's not exactly fun reading, but yes, I follow them closely. What brought you to that? I'm curious. Well, I've been teaching climate science for 15 years or so, and I think it's important to keep up to date with the latest science. And recently, the reports that came out, especially on the impacts, was really useful because that hadn't been done before, basically. So, yeah. And it's good to know what, because people often ask me questions about what's the latest science and trying to explain what it is. And in this report, the one that came out in the fall on the science was different in that the models have been refined. So, in terms of predicting what possible scenarios we could have for CO2 in the atmosphere in the future, the models were better. And then they also attempted to take into account these large uncertainties called positive climate feedbacks in the climate system, which are extremely difficult to model, to include in the models. But they tried to incorporate them in the technical summary, at least as a sort of long shot possibilities. These are worst case scenario, but not necessarily going to happen, but we should talk about it. Yeah. Well, first of all, thank you for giving us your background. And of course, that's really powerful and very, very important. And we're actually going to circle back to that in a kind of meta way. It's parts of the other reports. And thank you for teasing out the improvements in the science. The greenhouse gas emission science is just getting better and the developmental pathways are better and better. And friends, let me just remind you, again, we have that button on the bottom left of the screen. If you click on that, that'll take you to my blog posts, which take you to the documents themselves if you'd like to dive in. I've got to call you Heather now. I've got to do it. It's fine. I feel so convivial and at the same time, formal. It's just a division in my mind. You know, thinking about this, one of the other big changes in the reports is the emphasis on the U.S., we'd say social justice. But I think in the reports, it's more in a sense of kind of global equity as well as following the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. And that seems to be saturating the reports right now. Yes. What would you like to know? Well, first of all, I'm saying this for everybody because this is, I think, a really important development. And it does impact us in education. And I'm also just curious what we think that looks like and how that might play out. So in terms of sort of global climate justice, what that looks like is the fact that not all countries have contributed equally to this climate problem that we have right now, nor are they feeling the effects as equally. So in general, climate justice refers to the fact that the countries that have not contributed to the destruction of our climate and environment are the ones who are actually going to feel the effects first and worst and then have fewer resources to deal with them. So the idea is that if we're going to address climate as an entire species living on this planet, that we absolutely have to take into account justice, the fact that those who are most responsible for the problems that we have right now are the ones who pay the most for it, which means wealthy countries. And then within countries themselves, that also looks like a lot like social justice. It's essentially impossible to extract solving the climate crisis from also paying attention to social justice issues and that in wealthy countries that includes acknowledging that not everybody in a wealthy country is equally responsible for what the crisis that we have right now. So we need to try to take that into account and really one of the, I think the best ways to illustrate this to people and to try to convince people that it's really important to take justice into account when we're looking at the solving the climate issue is the issue of fairness. Fairness is something that is cross-cultural. It's cross-generational. All humans care about being fair. And there's literally no way that we can address the climate and ecological crises without taking justice and fairness into account because otherwise we won't get most people on board. Well, that's a great way of putting it. Fairness is really good. It's hard to be against that. Yes. We're the anti-fairness party. It's kind of hard to say that out loud. It's more of an anti-fairness policy. I mean, Tom in the chat, Tom says, well, how do you define it? I'm just referring to this at the symbolic layer. It's a great phrase to summon them for that. I think there is one study. You're talking about the impact, sorry, the causes of the climate crisis. And I think this also plays out in how we respond. I was looking at a study of building city walls against rising sea levels. And one of the authors pointed out that if you take a city and you build a sufficiently strong wall, it protects the city very nicely. But what happens is that that water has to go somewhere. So it goes on both sides of the wall and then overlaps where the wall stops. So if you've got the city there that's in great shape, well, you're basically making it worse for the areas on either side. Exactly. So that was, I mean, literally, scientifically, that's very, very good, but also I thought that's a pretty nice symbol for injustice and how that could play out. So I think this is a really, really important issue that we have to keep in mind. The climate justice angle. I'm putting that as social justice. The climate is really, especially since this is a United Nations out of the United States document, climate justice is really the way of putting it. There's two responses that humanity is called to do. One is we're called to try to mitigate the crisis and the other is we're called on to adapt to it. And my sense of the mitigation is that the new reports are a little more interested in some form of direct capture of carbon than they were before. That is devices, some which are natural, some which are technological, whose goal is to suck as much carbon dioxide out of the Earth's atmosphere as possible and then hopefully store it in a way that is either useful or better yet safe. And I'm curious, Heather, this is such a contentious topic. It is. I have opinions about it. Please, I'll pop it away. So I'll start off with one of my favorite statistics, which is that at present, the technology that we have globally to suck carbon out of the atmosphere and store it only takes out one 1,000th of the amount of CO2 emitted by humanity every year. So presently, our global capacity to take carbon out of the atmosphere and store it somewhere, we don't even know if we can store it for a long period of time, is minuscule, absolutely minuscule. I like to tell people it's like putting all of your eggs in one basket that's being carried by a toddler for the future because it's all of these plans for direct carbon capture, carbon storage, et cetera, et cetera, are not nearly enough and they're not likely to ramp up quickly enough to avoid passing certain tipping points in the climate system that would then make the job even that much harder. So, yeah, I hate to be the downer, but... The toddler metaphor is amazing. This is a subject we'll be talking about. I was actually talking with a DAC entrepreneur last week and I suggested should campuses have DAC units and he first said no, they're not safe enough right now. You'd need to really be very careful with them, but then down the road, so that's interesting to see if campuses play a role in this. We have a question about the report itself, which has come up from our good friend Tom Hames and I actually want to bring him on stage because I love being on stage where I'm getting the blue and Texas in my life. Or the blue shirt to match the room. Just for you, Brian. I know, I know, I appreciate it. But you had a question about influences on the report. Yeah, I mean I haven't looked into this to be frank, but I mean I don't know if any of you guys saw the recent frontline series on fossil fuel companies and the let's just say creative information campaign they've been running for the last 40 years. But I'm wondering how much, whether they had more influence on this version of the report than older versions because usually when you start to see these increased mentions of carbon capture, which I'm not poo-pooing carbon capture, I think it can be part of the solution. I think it probably has to be part of the solution. But it's a way of saying, hey, you know what? We can always just go on a diet and lose weight. We just keep eating the chocolate cake now, we're fine. You know, keep pumping that gas out at Exxon. You know, we're fine. We'll just clean it all out later. We've done this before. I mean, look, the Cuyahoga River caught fire in 1973 and now you can not walk over it, I guess. I wouldn't swim in it, but my parents live in Cleveland. But you know, so, but I mean it always, the phraseology around some of this stuff. I mean, the problem with it is it's such a complex issue and you're right, there's no one solution. It's going to be a whole host of solutions that are going to have to be implemented. Some of them are going to be involving individual behavior, some of them are corporate behavior, some of them involve mitigation, some of them involve hardening because we're not going to get away from the effects of it. So, and explaining that in a 30-second stump speech to a political audience who doesn't really understand science, who doesn't understand why you should wear a mask during a pandemic is a huge challenge. And there's plenty of actors willing to throw mud in the water and what we've learned over the last, certainly over the last decade, is that you can accomplish a whole lot by just throwing mud in the water, you know? I mean, mudding the water so that the conversation meanders and you lose focus. Hey, thoughts and prayers, guys, you know? For the planet. Well, that's an unfortunate phrase for this week, for people living in Texas. Yeah, I know. But, you know, I'm one of the people who's living in Texas. It's just disgusted more than anything else. But the point I'm trying to make, though, is that I'm wondering what is it true? And I don't know the answer to this. Did the carbon industry have more of an effect on the reports than in the past? And I want to also be a little cautious about, you know, they need a voice, I think. The problem is they have too powerful a voice generally speaking. But their side of things needs to be heard, because, you know, you talk crazy talk and say we're going to cut it all off in 10 years. That's not going to happen. We don't have the infrastructure to support that. We've got to work on a transitionary solution to keep that, you know, to move the ball in the right direction. This is a wicked problem. This is not something we're going to be able to literally flip a switch and change. So any thoughts or comments on that? I mean, do you know what influence, who influenced, where the fingers were on the scales in the report? I know that there was input by representatives, government representatives. So the thing with the IPCC report is that, yes, the research is all reviewed by scientists. And then scientists write the text. And at the very last minute, like literally like the report in May was really late, because like 24 hours late, because there was a lot of haggling about words. And I know that the scientists who wrote it had originally had a phrase in there that said, we must end fossil fuel use as soon as possible. And I know that that was taken out based on the government representatives requests. So, and a lot of these government representatives are folks who used to be in the fossil fuel industry or still are in the fossil fuel industry. But that's about as much as I know. Yeah. The other thing, you know, Brian, I know you're working on a book on this and what role higher education can play. One thing I don't see discussed very much is a politics for scientists course. You know, because it's scientists. One of my favorite phrases from Norman, design of everyday things. He says engineers think everybody thinks rationally. Right. And that's the big mistake when they're designing things. Scientists think everybody thinks rationally. And they're like, this is obvious. What we need to do. Let's get moving. Right. But then they run up against the political winds and the uncertainties, the cracks. I mean, science is uncertain. That's part of the point of it. You know, there's no final answer with science. We're reducing windows of probability is what we're doing. We're not. There's no everybody thinks science has an answer. We have all these, you know, from the great age of the 1950s, the scientists will come and save us all, you know. And there's still an element of that, too. By the way, you know, when I talk to people who are somewhat against making major economic sacrifices, one of the common things I hear is, well, we'll just develop technology and we'll fix it. Hold on a second time. You asked a great question. And Dr. Heather Short is making a major play right in that field. So why don't you go ahead, Heather? Politics. Yeah. That's probably something that most scientists want to stay so far away from because we just like our data and we want to sit in our labs with our data and feel comfortable. No, I mean, I agree. And I agree with a lot of people are saying here in the chat as well, is that we, this is, you know, science has defined this issue of climate and ecological breakdown, but scientists are not the solution to this. Technology, there's a wonderful phrase called techno optimism, which I like the phrase, but I don't particularly care for techno optimism because it's a false flag. So we need people to challenge this, to just come up with social, be better versed in sociology and social relations and human relations and politics in order to get this sort of movement that we need to see going. But those people also must have a very firm solid basis in science and understand how science works. As Tom was saying that it doesn't provide answers, that it doesn't provide truth, that it's a slow accumulation of evidence, but that it's really the best that we've, our best guess based on some very good educated guesses from some very smart people. So yeah, I would love to see politicians much, much better educated in science. I am a real advocate for climate literacy, which is not necessarily knowing all about the science, but knowing the basics of how we got here and then also the, what's going to fix it, which is not a technological with bang solution. Heck, I'd settle for the scientific method. The representative we have of quote unquote science in the Senate is Rand Paul. Oh, good. Oh, no. He must have gotten through a lot of science courses, didn't he? I mean, you don't care what kind of doctor he is. He's got to have gone through some science courses, right? Maybe. He's not the worst and not the worst. Oh, he's not, but the point is I hold him to a higher standard because he has a medical degree. Yeah. Which in theory is a science degree at some level, right? Right. And I don't think we teach, I don't think we teach astrological medicine anymore as a concern. I'll give it some time. Yeah, that's true. In the 70s and 80s, all of the higher sort of scientists for the tobacco industry who were saying that smoking doesn't cause cancer were physicists, right? So you can be a scientist, but it's really important to be the scientist for the subject, right? Well, but I mean, again, the thing is that I see things coming out of these people's mouths. And honestly, there's a part, and I'm, by the way, just as a disclaimer, I am a social scientist. I'm actually a political scientist, so I look at this from the other perspective. And that, but you see things coming out of these mouths that defy critical thinking and rational thinking. And I don't know, to be honest, whether that's purely hypocritical and politics or whether they're truly ignorant of it. And it's really hard to tell, you know. You don't see them slipping up. I mean, the one thing that makes me think that they're truly ignorant of it is because you don't see them slipping up in the background and going, hey, yeah, these people believe that math thing I pulled on the floor today. You know, you don't see that, right? I mean, I've never seen, rarely do you see that. So I'm thinking it's more ignorance than hypocrisy. So it's what a choice, right? Along those lines in the chat, we have a nice comment from Nafisa who mentions that the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History is opening an exhibition on the environment and climate change called Our Places. And she says, at foregrounds community conversations between scientists, curators, educators, and artists, all leading interdisciplinary education. So thank you, Nafisa. That's a great thing to learn about. And I think that's one gesture from, you know, in the United States, one of the most powerful cultural institutions. And Nafisa says it's not public yet. So another time the future transform gets a scoop. Thank you. Thank you, Nafisa. And here I thought because I couldn't get to it from Texas because we blocked that site. Well, let's focus a bit more on the educational side. We've got a couple of questions that come in. Heather, Tom, can I keep you up for a couple of minutes? Sure. Naomi Toftness asks a really good question. Let me bring, flash this on the screen. She says, what are some things that we can advocate for in our institutions that are heavenly online when all or most of the suggestions for higher ed are focused on physical campuses? I would say curriculum. I mean, seriously, that's, I think that's really, our job is to educate people. And so we need to be thinking critically about what we're teaching and how we're teaching it. And I mean, yeah, the physical upgrades of the campuses, that's nice. And it's definitely something every organization should be thinking about whether they're in higher ed or not. But does, if all the universities suddenly go green, is that really going to make any difference in the grand, in the great picture if nobody else does? I mean, I think the job of the university is to show people, hey, you know what, you know, science is a good thing. It's actually kind of useful to like not die when you're 35. But it's not to get a lot more accomplished. It's not just science that this was. Oh, no, but everything that goes with it, knowledge is a good thing. But yeah, I mean, how do we, that's, to me, that's the big barrier is that we have to convince the rest of the world of a problem that they can't see in front of their face. It's so big, complex, so far away, you know, and of course any scientist worth his salt is going to go, yeah, you know what, Hurricane Harvey really sucked. And maybe it was made worse by climate change. But I can't say that it happened because of climate change or that it wouldn't have happened if we didn't have climate change because honestly he can't or she can't because specific events and weather are not something you could predict from climate change. You could predict patterns of weather and the fact that Harvey popped up out of nothing and surprised us so fast was a direct result of the temperature of the water. But there are other circumstances that are going to produce an equally destructive storm. I mean, the Galveston storm in 1900, which was at the beginning of climate change, you know, was a horrible storm. We didn't see it coming because we didn't have the science to see it coming. Oh, look, there it is. Let me pause you for a second, Tom, because this is a, it sounds like we're wrestling with a key potential for higher education to do and Heather I think is about to pounce all over this. How can we expand our teaching of the climate crisis through higher ed? Well, I think first and foremost that all of the people who work in higher education need to be trained. This issue is so huge, as Tom was saying, is so huge and it's so enormous and outside of ourselves and the system that we live in has got us all trained to get up, do our job, go to work, come home, blah, blah, blah, so that we need a new kind of education that sort of crosses institutional boundaries and crosses sort of hierarchical boundaries within the institution itself. I was teaching in a college where my students ended up knowing far more about the climate crisis and what to do about it than all of the other teachers that they went to in their classes after mine and they knew more than all of the administrators. Really what the students need most from us is they need acknowledgement and support. They need to have adults in their lives acknowledge that yes, this is really bad. Yes, this is really scary. And we're worried too. So that's the one big key picture that young people aren't getting from grown-ups. So that sort of starts, it's almost like, I hate to be morbid here, it's almost like a grieving process. It starts with knowing, with understanding, and then it moves into feeling loss and because this is not just a scientific issue, this is absolutely involved human emotions and emotional processing. It's absolutely necessary for students to have educated adults in their lives and that means that institutions in order to be able to learn this stuff and then learn how to be agents of change in their own lives in whatever the future is going to bring. So I would advocate for climate literacy training for all people who work at higher institutions. We should, Heather, maybe we should do that. Okay. Because, I mean, Tom was very kind to mention my upcoming book, which is in the proof process right now. So I'll be talking about it soon. But it's all about higher education and the climate crisis. And I think this is a crying need someone's got to provide it. And maybe this is something that we can organize. Great. I'd love to. And Roxanne is right. She says, you know, you got to start early. We can't wait until college. And I agree. But at the same time, we should be, we teach the teachers. So we should be teaching the teachers how to teach third graders about climate change in those states where it's not illegal yet. Well, that's all there. It's got to be a full court press, I think. There's a key point that came up in the chat. I just want to make sure we got this. Not to be pedantic. But Shin Lee Wong and Shin Lee, I'm trying. My Chinese is so bad. I'm really working on it. She said, is it so far away? A short visit to India, southeast Asia today should be more than enough to convince people that climate change is real. Lisa Durf has, it is now. I actually was asked to work with a group of East Asian universities. And they told me not to speak about climate change too far off in the future. So it's definitely a divide along these lines. So Naomi, that's a great question. And we have a really, really clear answer. Thank you. We have another question that comes in from Amanda Burbage. And Amanda asks, I'd love to hear how I can become a climate literate. And I think that's higher education context and how I can bring climate literacy into my courses. We talk about climate justice, but it feels very far away from my students. Amanda, just really quickly in the chat, if you could toss in what you teach. That would be great. What do you think? I'll put that back up in the stage again because it was a very powerful question. Health professions. Amanda teaches health professions. Thank you. So how do you become a climate literate? And then we hear this someone called Heather Short in the chat. I don't know who this is. It's an asynchronous climate literacy course. If that's available for people outside of Sterling college students. Throw in a link and that would be great. Yeah. No, just dawned on me. I don't want to be one of those creepy people who's trying to promote themselves. But I'm just saying, I don't get paid anymore for this course. They paid me to make it. But the whole idea was that it's a climate literacy course for adults who are not in college. it's continuing. It's not no credit. It's just for lifelong learning. Very nice. I will put in thank you. Yes, all right. I'll put in the link somewhere. Shin Lee Wong mentions family in Singapore in the heat. Oh god, yes. Yeah, I've been there in the summer. It's getting too often and too extreme, getting worse. And thank you Amanda. I would think that in health classes, there's all kinds of angles. We talked about, for example, changing disease patterns, as well as the direct impact of increasing wet bulb temperatures on the human body. I mean, offhand, I think those would be really, really striking. We're always seeing the possibility of diseases moving around geographically as biomes begin to change as a result. And let's not forget mental health either. I mean, I think that needs to be a discussion too. I mean, the mental health of people who are under stress and strain because of climate change, there's sex and things like that. In psychology, there's already a series of research efforts trying to name this process. Some have called it climate grief. Some have referred to solestalgia, that sense of trying to think about the place where you grew up. I mean, Shin Lee's point about 10 years in her life, that difference, that's pretty strong, how you can grapple with that. That's a great point, Tom. I just want to add, Nafisa brings in yet another country as a Bangladeshi American. She knows climate change feels like a very urgent for family back in the motherland. That's absolutely where the Bangladesh is right on the Indian Ocean. It's not just right in the Indian Ocean, but it infiltrates quite a bit within the shore. Amanda Burbage adds a little further. I totally agree with the connections, but they are so focused on writing educational objectives, teaching wound care, refining rubric, et cetera. It's like the climate crisis is in a box. I'm wondering whether you have to put that at an earlier stage than what Amanda is. I mean, that it needs to be part of a more of a general education requirement, and then it will filter down. But yeah, I agree, that culture of, and this is a problem in general. I mean, this is a societal problem in that we fight the problem that's right in front of us. The problem that's right in front of us is I can't afford to fill out my gas tank. Or I can't afford the fact that mayonnaise went from $3.50 to $5 a bottle in two weeks in the grocery store. Well, you've got to stop using mayonnaise. That's obvious. Okay, fine. But you get the point. I mean, these are the things that people are going to be voting on this fall. If anything, it's going to be an anti-climate change vote, because I'm stuck with this giant truck that I've got that gets eight miles to the gallon and costs me $100 to fill up, and I'm mad. I am mad because I can't afford to drive this truck. And that's my personal freedom there that you're attacking, trying to take my truck away. Well, Heather, this is a question I've been thinking about a lot, which is... Sorry, I live in Texas. I do not have a truck. I will say that. I've never had a truck. You heard that you were being true-liquizing. But I wonder, this is a broader political question. It includes government, but also beyond that, which is how do we urge people to take this seriously in a way that doesn't feel like it's abridging their personal liberty? We're experiencing this with the vaccines. Of course, in public health in general, it's going to be similar. How do we do this? Or should we basically suck it up and say, it's World War II. We're going to organize. Well, I'd start by saying that we don't have to convince everybody, but we do need to convince a good chunk of the population. For folks, and I totally understand people who need to and can only think about their day-to-day lives because they're barely getting by. I totally get that. What we need to explain to people is, well, first, we need just general education, like absolute government sponsored, although people are pretty itchy about governments across-the-board education about what's at stake. I like to tell the story as a diagnosis, prognosis story, where you say, okay, look, everything that we have come to know and live on and depend on in your whole entire way of life is at risk of, it basically is going to go away. And it's going to go away possibly quite suddenly in a very bad way. What we can do, and this is serious, this is like getting a cancer diagnosis. We follow that up with prognosis. Say, okay, you've got cancer, but if we treat it right now immediately and aggressively and you get lots of support, you will have a livable future. And that's how we have to treat this crisis and then also all of the other crises that are caused by continuous growth capitalism on a physically finite planet. What we have to do is to say, hey, this is going to be hard, this is really going to be terrible, but if we do this and we do it together and we do it in a fair way, then your children will have a livable future. And of course, some people are going to say, whatever, or your liberal scientist weirdo wants to control everything. But I think we have to appeal to people's own intelligence and we have to appeal to people's sense of responsibility for their kids because most people like their kids, most of them. But that takes trust. And so we need an organization, whether it's the government, whether it's something else that can develop and sustain trust with a large majority of the population. And that's not really easy to do. But it's crucial. So yeah. Just one thing on potential wildcard that I've been following for a while is the possibility of a religion of some sort that might appear. As I just threw a link in the chat to a scholarly book on the subject, Tom just threw in a link to a science fiction take, both of which are very powerful. And that would be hopefully non-governmental. But this is a huge effort. Also in the chat, Nafisa put up one that really develops this point a little further. Let's share this. How do we make people care more about the collective good in our curriculum? Interdisciplinary curriculum without cultural critique? A post-colonial approach? And then she likes the World War II and all. But how do you... I don't keep this question up, because this is as usual from Nafisa, this is a powerful one. How do you do that? When if you're an undergrad or a grad, you know, say, and you're thinking, so taking professor hands in this government class, because I got to pass it in order to get my degree. Or, you know, thinking Dr. Short's environmental studies class, because I got to get my nursing degree somehow. How do we make that as a collaborative collective good? Is that something we can do in higher ed? I think that would be absolutely awesome to have a class that is required for everybody, you know, sort of like a liberal arts curriculum that does exactly that. That advocates for a post-colonial perspective building, at least in wealthy countries, so that we understand a bit how we got to the place we are, and we understand what needs to change in order to get us through this. You're going to run up against ideology there as a problem with that. That's it. But no, of course, people freak out about that stuff. And yet, the United States right now is not really the best place to be promoting different sorts of ideas. But the thing is, is that if you look at the empirical evidence, if you look at the evidence about what is happening to all of our nine planetary boundaries right now on earth, really the only way through this is to examine how we got here and examine how we're going to ramp everything down. We cannot continue to grow our economies. It just cannot happen. And it's going to self-destruct anyway. So the more we talk about that, the more that we talk to our peers about that, the more likely that will be acceptable. But we also have to offer a solution, which is taxing the hell out of the rich and using that money to create social programs. Well, what I do in my class, the other group we really have to talk to is our students. They're going to be the ones living this in a much more real way than we are. What I do in my class, my class is challenge-based. My students pick a challenge and they run with that challenge for the entire semester. And then we spend the semester trying to figure out how to define the challenge and then also how you would go about navigating some ways of dealing with that challenge through either the U.S. or the Texas political systems, depending on what the challenge is and so on and so forth. And quite a few students have done some versions of climate change or CO2 mitigation. I mean, I try to get them to be more specific than fixed climate change. There's no way to do that politically. And one of the things that I think we have to be very mindful of is that they're very powerful systems that we have built over the years, over the last 200 years, to defend these industrial status quo because they've given us this prosperity. I mean, we can't ignore the fact that we wouldn't be where we are without oil. And that may or may not, that may be a great thing in one level, but at the same time we're going to have to figure out a way to deal with that reality. So what I have to do with my students a lot of times is to say, okay, yeah, I mean, we want to fix climate change, but where do we start? You know, what can we do? And I make them look for very real policies that certain places have put into place and say, can you figure out whether or not these things actually work? Do they make a difference? And in terms of CO2 emissions or whatever variables that they're looking at, I'd like to say that it's 100% successful. I still have, I mean, my course is a required course that everybody has to take. And I will be brutally honest about this is that I still have a very large percentage of my students who are just sort of checking boxes and are just saying, yeah, yeah, whatever. On the other hand, I also like to bear in mind what my grandfather told me when I was first starting out teaching. I was very depressed because I had decided all these papers and after a certain point the students never seem to get any better at it. And he's like, look, you're not going to get any gratitude, you're not going to get any, you're not going to see an effect of what you're doing. But 10 years from now, some of those students are going to stop, some of those students are going to stop and say, you know, I could write this because of what Professor Haynes taught. They'll never hear about that. But I think that's actually very valid when you're talking about climate change because these effects, we like to think, well, these are things we have to deal with now and we do. But what we're going to have to deal with in 10 years is going to be that much more urgent and that much more critical. And so if they can then go start from at least a period of perspective of, oh yeah, I did think about this one time in college and we argued about how it's very hard to define these things and how do we go about solving problems and defining problems. And then at least to have something to work off of as I go around my community trying to make things better or working, you know, work with groups or whatever. That's the best I can hope for. And it's one class. Tom, it's interesting. Nobody has yet in our discussion today drilled down to the point of assessment. And that's what we might be better off not having done that. What you're describing is a kind of long-term educational project where you want the students to take a class and pass or pass an exam and get that degree, whatever. But what you're talking about is there should also be a long-term impact that we have done the road. I wanted to share with you a quote if I could from the IPCC report from the third document. I want to ask everyone what they thought about this because this is one of the few places where the IPCC actually held higher education directly. And this had to do with their focus on resilience and that is the idea of helping change society so that societies can better handle the crises that are being thrown at us from rising sea levels and desertification and so on. And here's the quote. Climate resilient development is facilitated by international cooperation and by governments at all levels working with communities, civil society, educational bodies, scientific and other institutions, media, investors and businesses on quote. So this they're calling on us in higher education to participate in climate resilient development and not just for ourselves obviously but for the entire society where we are. And I'm curious how can we do that? Would that be for example scientists consulting with local cities and counties and states and regions and provinces in order to help them be more resilient? Would it involve say a climate conservation corps that students of one dimension can join? Would it be something larger than that? I'll just throw this quote in a chat so people can see it. But please, would everyone think about this and starting with you two folks that I've pinned to the table? I think a climate conservation corps would be great and be a really good way to get more people involved, the more young people involved, then the more they talk to their older people in their lives about this. But in the IPCC report itself, their goals of sustainable development based on the UN sustainable development models are really only taken into consideration the climate crisis. So they don't actually look at the material throughput that's necessary in order to continuously grow our economy to then develop the rest of the world to lift people out of poverty. So even what the IPCC report recommends in terms of sustainable development is probably pushing the boundaries on other planetary limits in order to do that. So and they're still like I remember I was saying that the report itself is written by scientists but the final wording is tweaked by government representatives and they're very, very, very intent on maintaining this idea of unlimited economic growth. And really when you sit down and you look at the numbers, it's not possible because if we want to still develop economies and expand economies indefinitely, we will eventually run out of stuff. And that's like literally where we are right now. We are at that limit. We cannot push the boundaries on ecological destruction anymore. So I think what we have to do is really rethink what we mean by development. How do we bring up people's quality of life? Globally, fairness, this is the whole idea of fairness. And really, I think the empirical evidence really points to degrowth, to scaling back our economies and sharing the wealth. And I know that sounds political and I know that sounds ideological, but it is literally the only way that we are going to be able to continue living on this planet. It's a huge, huge task. If I could just narrow that down because we're almost out of time. Heather, how do we take that message of degrowth? All just universities where on the one hand, many of them see and their students and the community see their mission is preparing students for careers in a growth economy, but also our finances. I mean, how a university president would tell me, you want me to do more work and the same time you want to cut my budget? How do we take that message to higher ed? Right. Well, that's a tough sell, honestly, because we're all used to this and we've all grown up in this system and this culture and this political culture and we've been rewarded by it, right? And to say that it's not working anymore and to try to convince people it's not working anymore and it's actually going to lead to our overall destruction is really, really hard. So I think one of the things that we can go through and I see somebody mentioned donut economics in the chat, we have to instead of thinking of economics and continuous growth as the only way forward, we have to instead take a step back and look and think of how can we make an economy, a global economy on this planet that actually respects the physical limitations of our planet? And before I started reading about economics, I was like, wait, it doesn't do that. Right. Yeah, so fundamentally, I think universities need to think about how can we prepare students to go out into the world in a way that's still going to make sure there's a world to live in? Like, how do we organize our cultures and societies and economies so that we don't end up using up everything on the planet? And at this point, we're at a crisis point. So we really need to, like you were mentioning, Brian, I think, sort of take on a wartime kind of attitude, although I hate that terminology and say, yeah, and just say, look, okay, emergency time, everybody, we need to just stop business as usual. There you go. We need to stop business as usual for a few years here and get everybody reoriented to thinking very, very, very, very differently about what they want for their lives and what we expect for their lives. And then we can work on regeneration. Yeah, you know, I go ahead, Brian. Well, honestly, that makes higher education this kind of an engine and transformation a very different way than we have been. It's I hate to go back to the World War II analogy, but just temporally, it makes me think of the role of higher education in, say, the Soviet Union. I don't mean this as a criticism, but just saying that higher education has that explicitly, we will reform and redesign society mission. I'm sorry, we're at the end of the hour. We're going to... Yeah. I would just leave you with one quick thought here, and that is that, you know, this is a paradigm shift in how we think about success. And that's really what Donate Economics talks about. Exactly. Unfortunately, our educational systems are based on these same kind of motivators like grades. Grades are just like money. We've trained all of our students to acquire grades just like we expect them to acquire money as a measure of success after college. I was a high school graduation last night when my twins graduated. There wasn't a single mention of any sort of limits to growth. It was onward and upward. You're ready to succeed and take over the world until the world takes over you. Correct. Well, and this is what an essential part of climate literacy is that is we have to redefine what success means for our kids and for us and for everybody's life. And there's not even a start to that. That's such an ingrained thing in our systems, and I don't know how to crack that one. It doesn't mean it's impossible. It doesn't mean it's impossible, and I'm going to keep trying because I'm stubborn. Well, you're stubborn and you're a great person in this community, Tom. Thank you. And Heather, you're a, in many ways, a trailblazer for a lot of us. Awesome. Thank you. And I'll be in touch afterwards by email. Okay. Thank you, Heather. Thank you. Thank you, everybody, for a great conversation. We ended at a huge moment of higher education as the driver of enormous change. There's a lot going on in this topic. We're going to make this a theme for the Future Transform. We're going to keep coming back to this. And I'd love to hear your thoughts. Please contact with your requests, your, if there's guests that you think we should haul on stage. And if you want to say more, this forum is for you. Thank you to people who couldn't join us on stage, like, oh, gosh, all of us, all of you, Lisa Durf, John Hollenbeck, Sarah Sangre-Gorio, Vanessa Ville, you all shared so much. Roxanne, thank you. Thank you all. In the future of time, let me wrap this up. If you want to keep talking about this, you'll find that I've been talking about this up a storm on Twitter, so you can tweet at me or use the hashtag FTTE. And I blog about this consistently at brinoxair.org. We're starting to make this into a major topic. And of course, we've been talking about higher education in general for years now. So please take a look at tinyurl.com slash FTF Archive for our previous sessions. We have other topics coming up as well. Just go to forum, thefutureofeducation.us to see more of those. And if you have been working on the climate crisis or anything else that you'd like to share, please just ping me. And I'd be delighted to share your own work. Thank you all for this very sobering, very intense, absolutely necessary conversation today. I'm delighted to be exploring this vital topic with all of you. Thank you so much. In the meantime, take care, everybody. Be safe, and we'll see you online. Bye-bye.