 Hi, I'm Henry Gorbar. I'm a staff writer at Slate. Welcome to another social distancing social from Future Tense, the partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University. Today, we are talking about climate change, the coronavirus, and long-term thinking. I'm joined by Beena Venkatraman. She's the editorial page editor of the Boston Globe, Future Tense Fellow, and a former White House senior advisor for climate change innovation. Hi, Beena. Hi, Henry. Great to chat with you. Likewise. So we have seen of late a number of images, some authentic and some doctored, showing what is happening to the earth during the coronavirus shutdown. Dolphins in Venetian canals, elephants rampaging through Chinese villages set us straight here. What is really happening to the earth as these shutdowns go on? Well, I think the dolphins in the canals of Venice was discredited, as far as I know. That rumor turned out to be not true, but I think the pollution, the decline in localized air pollution in cities around the world has been documented. And of course, there are fewer cars on the road. There are fewer transit routes running. All of that, factories running at lower capacity or some not at all. So I think we are airlines, another air travel, way down right now. So I think we are seeing some of the temporary results of that just in terms of cleaner skies. And I think at the neighborhood level, probably lots of people are experiencing a sort of strange juxtaposition of being worried about how your neighbors might be faring because you're not seeing them out. And we know that there's a pandemic spreading, but birds and wildlife reclaiming urban neighborhoods. In my neighborhood here in Greater Boston, there is like a gang of bunny rabbits that have taken over the streets and some birds, a lot of great blue herons and all kinds of interesting birds around that really weren't around very often before. Right, that's very interesting that the animal stuff, does that reassure you that nature will kind of quickly fill our place if we disappear for a moment? Or does it just underline how mutually dependent animals and humans have become and how much their patterns of life depend on ours and change when ours is changed? Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't say that this suddenly makes me hopeful that nature's going to reclaim or nature can just self-correct because if you look at the bigger trend of climate change and planetary warming, the fact that human activity has been able to melt the Arctic, make our summers hotter than ever bring about huge changes to the ocean. The chemistry of the ocean is changing. The oceans, as one report put it, are becoming hot, sour and breathless, becoming acidified, and that's bleaching the coral reef. So the scale of change that we have ushered in the Anthropocene and that is going to continue is kind of not at the level that can be quickly corrected by just a brief pause in industrial activity, even if that was something we wanted to do voluntarily as opposed to do in order to stave off the spread of a deadly contagion. So I'm not necessarily taking great solace in this. I think what's charming, I guess, about having some animal sightings or having people in India talk about seeing the Himalayas from Northern India for the first time because there's less smog in the sky, is I think what it's doing both for people's ability to appreciate and tune into nature in their daily lives and how that might be helping people to deal with the, I think, psychological effects of social distancing and this pandemic, but then also culturally just how, what it means to connect with nature in more of the natural world, what it means to actually appreciate that the skies are cleaner and how that could lead to a greater appreciation of the value of clean air, of the value of wildlife and my hope around that, my sort of the optimistic view of what might be possible going forward is that people come to value that and recognize they value it more and that can usher in some of the change we need culturally and politically. Yeah, it makes me think a little bit about light pollution and the stars and how we have become so accustomed to not seeing the stars in the sky that for, or I should say we, city dwellers, that when you suddenly see them, you're really taken aback. And I think that's been many people's reactions to seeing these clean air photographs of cities like Los Angeles or New Delhi where you didn't even realize how fundamental a part of the landscape it was for the air to be polluted. And in fact, for many people, I think, seeing Los Angeles have some of the cleanest air in the world, which it did last week, feels unnatural. It's such a strange, it just has not happened in so many decades that it's hardly within living memory to have a sky that looks like this. Yeah, and you know, Andrew Morance, the New Yorker writer who wrote this book, Anti-Social, and who's written a lot about social media, talks about how there are really two emotions that drive virality on the intranet, which I think says something about kind of what resonates in our cultural moment. And one emotion, as you might imagine, is anger. And another emotion is wonder. And I think we so often devalue the power of wonder as an emotion. And when it comes to appreciating the natural world and being able to sort of value it in our lives, I think there is some degree to which we all need to experience that wonder in order to deeply care and to be able to want to do something about it. So Henry, I have to tell you that you are like, I feel like you're on the deck of a boat because your screen has been vibrating up and downs. I just feel like it's like telling you you have food between your teeth if we're like hanging out and having dinner. I appreciate that. Let me adjust the structure here. Yeah. While I'm doing that, I wanna ask you a question. You have this metaphor. It's not even a metaphor. You have this experience in your book you describe where you go and visit Hal Hirschfield's aging booth. Can you tell people what the aging booth is? Sure, yeah. So I wrote this book called The Optimist Telescope and it's about thinking ahead. And while the aging booth was not a physical place to actually visit it, it was a simulation of a virtual reality experience that Hal Hirschfield who's a UCLA economist created with Jeremy Balanson who is a virtual reality expert who built the Stanford Virtual Reality Lab. So Balanson and Hirschfield came up with this idea which was to say, let's create a way for people to see aged versions of themselves, avatars of themselves in virtual reality. So as if you're looking in the mirror but if you're a college student, you're looking in the mirror and then you see an aged version of yourself mimicking back your gestures, your movements. And the experiment that Hirschfield did that I thought was really interesting with this was to see how it changed or whether it would change how college students, their willingness to save money for their own future. And what he found is that comparing it to people just looking at pictures of old people or hearing about the need to save for the future that when people actually saw this version of themselves in the future, it allowed them to have more of an interest in a will to save for their own future. And I think what I found fascinating about that and what I talk about a lot in the Optimist Telescope is the sort of gap we have when it comes to planning for the future. We might have predictions of the future. You might know that you're likely to get older in the future or we might know the climate is warming or we might know a pandemic's coming. But often that information, that predictive information doesn't translate into the real ability to take it seriously or do anything about it. And often what's in that gap I think is imagination. And so that experiment and that experience of the aging booth, which I did. So I just basically fed a picture of myself to an app that spat out an aged version of myself that I was looking at. It was both comforting and horrifying to see an aged version of myself because I just hadn't really brought it into colorful detail. I thought about getting older but not really had to come face to face with myself as an older person. And I think what experiments like that can do or technologies like that can do in their best case scenario is to help us bring the future to more vivid detail. And that same virtual reality lab at Stanford that created those aged avatars of the college students that helped them save also created a virtual coral reef that I did get to swim in when I was visiting and researching the book. And it started out being a lush, colorful coral reef from sort of present day or maybe even from the past. And then it flashed forward. So I was swimming in this reef and then it was suddenly the year 2100 and the reef given current trends of the ocean getting warmer and getting more acidic was now dried out. It was like a skeleton of a reef. There were no fish, there were no colors. And so I had that experience, almost experience, let's say simulated experience of swimming in the changed reef of traveling through time into the future. And in experiments that Balanson has done showing people pictures or documentaries about the threats to the coral reef, telling them, having them read a little narrative about the threats to coral reefs, contrasting that with the experience of swimming in the virtual coral reef that dies. The interest level and concern for the reef is sustained longer in the people who have this virtual reality experience. And I talk about those two experiments not because I think that virtual reality is some panacea that's gonna solve our ability to deal with climate change or ability to imagine the future whether it's a pandemic or something else, but more because I think it's really powerful to think about ways we can bridge that imagination gap. And technology is certainly one of those ways. There are other ways that we need to use as well. Well, okay, so maybe I'm barking up the wrong tree here but it sounds like the fact of seeing an aged version of yourself probably inspires some degree of concern and compassion and above all, I think triggers this kind of imaginative jump where you're suddenly able to envision the future. And I wonder if there's a positive version of this that might be happening right now with air pollution where we can look at these places and something that seemed unimaginable which is say, seeing the mountains from New Delhi suddenly becomes possible. And if that very moment sort of carries forward even when this crisis ends and people keep it with them as a reminder of what's possible. Yeah, I think that's a good, that's a best case scenario or a good scenario that could come from this and we should probably talk about the bad case nurse too but in terms of cultural awareness I think there's a couple of, it's hard to imagine culture changing until it does and there are always people who are kind of on the vanguard of changing culture and often there are people who are driving social movements or popular culture figures who kind of show us things before they actually become reality and do them for us. And I think what the pandemic is doing, it's by no means a welcome disruption of our lives by no means something we should be celebrating but what I think we can take as a sort of silver lining is that it is giving us a little bit of an experience both of how things might operate for people who aren't, who don't have to go to essential jobs right now who don't have to travel outside their homes and are commuting less, driving less, people who are flying less sort of the sort of white collar workers who don't aren't traveling by plane a lot or gathering in in-person conferences or finding alternatives to that. I think it's a bit of the art of the possible is being demonstrated by just sort of how we're organizing our lives during social distancing. How much of that carries over to the world after the pandemic is anyone's guess but I think what's important is that once you change, once you change some of your practices and cultural norms that possibility becomes much more real and salient than it was before. So I do have some hope that people will rethink, how many flights do I need to take every year? I actually was pretty happy with the lifestyle that I had during social distancing and I didn't fly as much. Some people, some of us fly probably way too much. You know, can different ways of configuring workplaces and teams help us reduce commuting pollution and organize cities more efficiently, organize workflow more efficiently. I think those could be some positive net positive for the climate and even possibly just positive for how we work and how we live, right? Like just finding ways to work that are more humane, finding ways that are also good for the environment. One thing we've seen with climate change is that people even well educated, well-meaning people who believe that human activity is warming the earth and that it's creating a catastrophe seem very reluctant to change their personal lives to do something about it. And there's a lot of debate about whether or not personal behavior makes a difference. But the feeling seems to be that there's people are really interested in technology, helping them preserve their current way of life, which is to say flying all the time, driving 20 miles to work each day. And interested in ideas like carbon capture and electric cars and all this stuff coming along to enable us to continue to do things the way we're doing them now. And I'm wondering if you see parallels with that in the coronavirus, which there's also this sort of expectation of a technological savior arriving in the form of vaccine or some sort of treatment that would enable us to finally get back to normal. And then there's the more difficult question, which is we've really changed our behavior and are we gonna have to change our behavior for months at a time or even for years? It's an interesting parallel you're drawing there. Yeah, I mean, I think it's true. And I mean, behavior change is part of the solution to both of these problems, but they're both also very different. So I think one thing we really need to point out, it's a sort of elephant in the room when you talk about the need for behavior change in either of these spaces is our political institutions and what they should have been doing and should be doing on these problems. So when it comes to pandemic preparedness, and I would take this back decades, there's just been a failure to adequately prepare in this country for a coming pandemic. And certainly in this administration that became very acute even with the pandemic right on the horizon, the response of the Trump administration was really slow and put us in a place where we couldn't just isolate, test and contact trace those early cases coming into the country where we had to get into hardcore behavior change, social distancing to deal with this problem. Now you could debate and if a real epidemiologist were in this conversation, whether we would have had to do some degree of that anyway and now we're seeing second waves of the COVID-19 outbreaks hit Hong Kong and Singapore that are showing us that those early efforts weren't alone enough to stave off the whole pandemic. But I think you have to really look at like what are the investments that governments make in anticipating pandemics and investing in research in vaccines and broader based vaccines and antiretrovirals in making sure that healthcare infrastructure is available across the country. Here we are in the wealthiest country on earth with many rural areas without adequate healthcare, with urban areas not serving minority populations with comorbidities from certain populations. Here in Boston, we have the epicenter of our coronavirus outbreak is happening in Chelsea which is a predominantly Latinx community where there's just been an under-investment in public health and just helping people lead healthy lives. So I think the behavior change is part of what we have to do but I think it's really important to recognize that we have long-term sort of long-term failures and long-term solutions on the table for this. And I think similarly with climate change, there are behavior changes that matter and will continue to matter when it comes to climate change because as much as we can reduce emissions will make a difference. And they include things like driving less or flying less for those who have the privilege of doing those things to begin with and consuming less meat, maybe not going full vegetarian if that's not in your culture but those are kind of some of the things we can do but we have to really look at our political institutions and ask what are they doing to act in time? So I think that's the parallel I would draw is that we have governments who fail to act in time around this pandemic and right now there has been, we are in a moment where we are starting to see just how the lapse in action, how the failure to act in time on climate change is playing out and I don't think we should put everything on individuals to sort of solve this problem. It's sort of requires a lot and where I think, what I think is really interesting to think about is what is gonna change in terms of the political will to respond to this crisis with the pandemic having happened? Like can that change anything about the political will that there is to respond to climate change? So I don't know, did I answer your question? I hope I did, I feel like I rambled about a lot of things. Wasn't so much a question as a prompt. I mean, to me the parallels between, I can't decide if the parallels between coronavirus and climate change make me optimistic or not. I mean, there are a few of them, this idea that we had early warnings and we sort of knew that this was gonna get here sooner or later and that we had to prepare and we didn't. There's been this kind of debate over expertise where you see the people who really know what's going on in some cases being shut out of the room. I mean, who am I kidding? We're talking about the president of the United States, we're talking about certain mayors and governors who probably were reluctant to see reality even if it was when it was staring them in the face. And just generally an interest, and I don't think this is reserved for America's malfunctioning institutions. I think this is true of people too, of just being a little reluctant to even see two or three weeks in the future and being more interested with what my plans are this evening. Absolutely, and that's part of why I wrote a book about thinking ahead because of that very conundrum of finding that we're always right. We seem to get into these problems collectively as a society but even in our own lives where we do things now and don't think about the future consequences even when it's in our own interest to think about the future consequences. And I think here, this parallel around scientific expertise and I mean, I have felt that seeing the response to this pandemic has been a little bit of a, it's a time compressed version of seeing the response to climate change in that there, yeah, there is a devaluing or a distrust. There's been a lot of misinformation put out there including from the White House about the state of the science and that continues to be the case whether it's overhyping particular treatments before they're proven or talking about the time horizon of the epidemic itself. And so I think in both cases, what's really important I think for us as a democracy is to think about how we lift science out of the realm of this partisan sort of controversy so that it can actually serve everyone because this pandemic just put such a fine point on how the use of credible science is integral to people's safety. It's to their public health. And that is very true when it comes to climate change as well. It's just being stretched out over a longer time horizon. The disasters will come in more episodic form and in slower motion than this pandemic, but there's certainly gonna be the same need for everyone to trust the science. And unfortunately, it's not good enough to just say, I trust the science or my governor trusts the science because we know these are transboundary problems that affect all of us. And particularly with climate change, it's a collective action problem, right? The more people who distrust, the less likely we are to sort of deal with the crisis. But I think in terms of political will, I mean, we shouldn't let a good crisis go to waste. So I think there are a lot of opportunities right now to think about whether it's the stimulus packages that are being rolled out for industry or thinking about even just the emboldening of regional leadership, governors. How can you, if you're gonna bail out the airline industry, can you rein in their emissions? Can you force new technologies to come to the fore? If you're gonna have sort of a New Deal style rescue of the economy going forward, can you use it to invest in really truly clean energy technologies and modernizing the grid, the electric grid in this country is just so antiquated and it's controlled by a bunch of feudal lords all around the country. It really could be something that's re-energized in a sort of era where we're willing to rethink and make huge investments, which I think this economic downturn is leading us to the point where that kind of real structural big ideas around how we reinvent the economy is going to be possible and embedding into that ways to reduce emissions, ways to get greener technology, ways to become more resilient in our communities so that when those floods and heat waves and droughts hit communities have stronger ways of preparing in stronger infrastructure. I think all of that is an incredible opportunity we have at this moment because it's a moment which the federal government is going to have to spend in order to get us out of this crisis. Many governments across the world are going to have to spend simply to get people, the economy back working and people back to work once they're ready to go back to work and once it's safe. And so I think that's where there could be a great opportunity. Where I'm a little more worried is really the move towards nationalism and through that predates the pandemic, but we're seeing it even in the response, we're seeing it obviously in the way the US has talked about withdrawing funding from the World Health Organization or calling the virus a Chinese virus. All of these different ways of sort of breaking down into our national identities and sort of silos I think are ultimately dangerous and could undermine our ability to deal with climate change, which of course requires global collaboration, requires financing of the countries that are gonna have a harder time going to a green economy. Right, it seems like in either we're still at this moment where you can look at this crisis with an optimist lens or a pessimist lens. And this is true of governance where you can see efforts like these interstate compacts and say, hey, like this is the kind of productive thing we need or you can look at say Victor Orban in Hungary and say, well, this is an opportunity for authoritarians. And I think the same is true for expertise where you seem to feel optimistic about it, but I think other people will say the WHO failed us, the experts were wrong. They didn't know what they were doing and why should I listen to them next time? They didn't understand what was gonna happen here. So why should I have faith in them for climate change? Yeah, well, the World Health Organization isn't necessarily the institution that would be dealing with climate change in one sense, though in the sense of responding to vector-borne diseases, it certainly would be. And we're seeing so mosquitoes as a vector for infectious disease, right there. The range of certain mosquitoes is expanding in a warmer world. And the World Health Organization is gonna need to be activated to help us deal with the next outbreaks that come in a warmer world. But, and I think the criticism of the World Health Organization is a fair one. In this pandemic, I think they did, they weren't sharply getting the information they need to out of China. There might have been some downplaying, but they did. In contrast, if you look back at the Ebola epidemic in West Africa in 2014, 2015, the World Health Organization really dragged its heels. It took something like seven or eight months from when that outbreak was apparently a problem in West Africa to declaring it a public health emergency. And that lesson was really learned. I think Margaret Chan, who then was the head of the World Health Organization, really took some heat for that. Obviously, the leadership has changed, but there was a much quicker move to act to call this a global health emergency, which then triggers different funding mechanisms and different ways of getting national governments mobilized. So I think there's definitely criticism to go all around, as there usually is in these kinds of situations when a disaster unfolds. But I think to gut an international, really the only international institution that's prepared to sort of track and respond to this around the world, when we know that there can be a ricochet effect. And so if we start to see outbreaks and the epicenters move to the global south, the developing world, with travel and movement of goods the way it is today, that can mean all of that is coming back to the countries that like the US, if they wanna bail out of the World Health Organization, essentially what they would be doing, what we'd be doing is undermining our own ability to ultimately keep this pandemic, keep the novel coronavirus at bay. Right, I didn't mean to necessarily single out the World Health Organization. I guess my point is just, I wouldn't be surprised if people don't walk away from this crisis, feeling reassured confidence in the experts. Which, I mean, so who knows? We have some questions here. You can submit questions via the Q&A button at the bottom of your screen. This one comes from Ruth Hartman. And I think, you know, maybe like her question is similar to something you were talking about a second ago, but I'd love to hear about specific ideas that you think that politicians could be proposing. She asked, what strategies might help us use this pandemic to flatten the curve of the global climate crisis? How can we permanently transform patterns of consumption of resource use, particularly in wealthy nations and groups and resist the urge or sorry, resist the urgent rush to return to a disastrous normal? Hmm, I love the way the question's phrased. So thanks for that. And yes, I mean, I think part of it is using investment. So thinking of stimulus, not just as sort of like giving electric shock therapy to the economy, which is how a lot of people tend to talk about it. Or as one friend of mine put it, putting the economy on Viagra, so it can just, you know, kind of go and do what it was doing before, really think about it as building a stronger, a stronger social safety net infrastructure for the country. And I think the new deal is really the best analog we have for having done that in the US anyway. And this is gonna be needed globally for that matter. But to really think about this time of recession, possible depression with the economy going the way it is, as an opportunity to invest in clean infrastructure, great new technologies, battery storage technologies that are gonna help us get renewables like wind and solar are mainstreamed, putting people back to work, working to modernize the electric grid. Agriculture is another area where I think it's just really, it's a huge contributor to climate emissions. So can whatever reinvestment is done to sort of bring back farms? You know, there's a lot of farms that are struggling now because the restaurant industry's demand for food has plummeted. And so can we, in reinvigorating agriculture in this country, put into place real admissions reductions, you know, thinking about carbon storage in the soil and what's known as regenerative agriculture, reducing the fossil fuel inputs that go into farms. And that takes political will and it's sort of like the kind of thing that would be a third rail when Congress goes to debate the farm bill every year or every, every couple of years. But right now, right, like the moment that we're in creates the, I think the possibility if the right leaders come in and if people demand it, if there's enough political will from people and if there's enough leadership and vision in Washington to accomplish this, to actually rethink how we do things, how we, and transit can be one of those as well and air travel. So I think it is like, it would be a pity to see this wasted. Do I know whether it will happen this way? I don't, and I haven't seen any single person come out as like the clear architect of what that looks like going forward. And I think that's one thing I hope will emerge soon. Right, yeah, I would add that one really easy concrete thing that's long overdue is raising the gas tax, which we have a golden opportunity here where gas is like 99 cents a gallon and nobody seems to be using it and the world has too much oil and it just seems like a great time to both discourage further gas consumption and encourage people to sort of buy more efficient cars and think twice about their airline travel, but also potentially use it to raise money to build the things that we need to get away from having to drive everywhere. Absolutely, yeah. And yeah, I mean, that's kind of my hobby horse as a guy who's writing a book about parking, but they just, are you really? Oh, that's great. But yeah, the gas tax is a great example, right? Because yeah, there's both a reduced need for fuel and also the prices are so low. I'm glad you brought up that example. There's another good climate change question here from Ralph Brown who asked, could this pause in human economic activity allow us to obtain a quantifiable measure of human cause climate change that can be extrapolated to better understand what's required to achieve our carbon reduction goals? That's a great question. I mean, I know that I'm not a climate scientist, so just that caveat. I do know that there are some people who are modeling this moment who are trying to look at what this creates in the climate models. I mean, I don't think that we've had trouble as a society. I don't think that climate science has struggled to quantify the impact of human activity on the warming of the planet. I think that it's been pretty well mapped just from the point of view of parts per million in the atmosphere mapping to temperature rises and modeling out what temperature would have looked like without in the absence of that. That said, I think that there are people studying, people much smarter than me who are actually studying what's happening now and what influence it's gonna have going forward. So I think it's a reasonable question. I'm just not sure I'm the right person to give you the details on that. Yeah, I think that it might be more likely that we would be able to ascertain like localized effects of reducing say air pollution. Like we don't have to, it doesn't have to be a hypothetical anymore about how long it would take the air to get cleaned in Los Angeles if traffic was reduced by 60% or something like that. And while that may not be exactly the same as achieving global decrease in carbon dioxide use, it does let us think about how to basically what we would need to do to make those policies happen. And I think that the window for imagination has just opened a little wider here. Yeah, no, I think that's a great way of looking at that question. Yeah, absolutely. If there's a way to better demonstrate to people the art of the possible, because I do think, I mean, this is one thing that's been really difficult with this problem is that people feel a lack of agency to do anything about climate change. It feels like this runaway problem often, especially with the projections of where we're headed. And I think if this moment can be used to help articulate and sort of paint the scenario for people of what our agency looks like, what does it look like when we make choices? Oh, it looks like this, like look out your window, but also here's a model of what would happen if we did this for longer. Let's decide collectively whether we wanna do that and let's hold our leader accountable for making it possible. Anna Miranda has a question. I work with cities and many of them understand the value of investing in resilience efforts, but local and state governments are going to be hit hard by this. How can we reinvent and invest in innovation when local governments are fiscally insolvent? And I guess I think the hope for all of us would be that Congress recognizes the crisis in states and cities and comes forth with further aid for them. But the question seems like a larger one, which is whose job is it to think about this stuff? You mentioned our broken institutions earlier. I wonder if this crisis changes, whether you think this falls more on technologists or on governments or on individuals or what? Yeah, I mean, I think the federal government is just gonna be so important and of course, what I think is a tragedy is that doing a massive tax cut in 2017 has put the federal government in less of a position than it was to run up the deficit. But I think there's still plenty of room for the federal government to shore up cities and states. And in fact, it's basically, I think as the question sort of hints at, it's basically the only option because states are gonna be struggling a lot and localities are gonna be struggling a lot. So from the funding point of view, I think the federal government is going to be critical. I do hope the philanthropic and business sector step up a lot in this era, especially those who took those lucrative tax cuts and did share buybacks and didn't reinvest in the economy. And I'm hoping that this next round of stimulus as it goes to the private sector is really scrutinized for how those funds go out and the sort of accountability around what the companies do with it, right? They should be keeping their payrolls, keeping people hired, reducing their emissions, all kinds of things. They should not be buying back shares, should be reinvesting it in innovation. So I think all of that's gonna be important but I also think you can't, we can't like expect the philanthropists and business leaders of the world to somehow save us in this moment. I think we need leadership, sometimes the leadership is gonna come in the form of the sort of moral clarity, sometimes it's gonna come in sort of the pragmatic designs, being architects of designs. And what I think is interesting about the sort of state, the governors who rallied together in just the last day on the pandemic, last day or so. So we have a group of West Coast and a group of East Coast governors, it's kind of like rap battles. But they're getting together and basically saying, we're gonna decide based on the evidence, what the data show around the number of cases we have, our hospital capacity, and whether we, where we are in the course of the epidemic, whether we're gonna, how we're gonna bring our economies back online, reopen, relax, special distancing measures. And I think that kind of leadership of state governments, state leaders saying, we're gonna look at the science and make sound decisions and we're gonna come together in coalition. So there's already a model for that around the power industry, power sector, electricity sector here in the Northeast, there's something called the regional greenhouse gas initiative where governors have already gotten together, states have already gotten together since 2009 and reduced their emissions. But much more of that could happen across the country and indeed across the world in terms of regional leadership where people who have, leaders who have certain kinds of jurisdictions can come together and use their collective, whether it's purchasing power or regional coordination as a way of addressing climate change, whether that's setting up better transit, that's greener and cleaner modernizing and reducing emissions in the power grid, investing in new technologies. So, and I think that's something hopeful is that in least the US right now, people are looking to those governors, they're looking to them as real leaders and looking for that kind of leadership, not just from the White House. And I think in some ways that might actually be a more sustainable course of political action, because often what a state starts investing in and doing can create a lot of momentum that sort of sustains itself with the private sector and all of that. Absolutely, and we saw that with California leading on vehicle emissions. I mean, interstate compacts are absolutely big enough to force the hand of the private sector. If a company wants to play ball in New England, which is a massive market, then they need to do X or Y, that seems powerful. I wanna turn to two combined two questions. This one, one's from Ellen Meyers about plastics and the other's from Donald Carlow about mass transit. Both the sort of recent trend in mass transit use in big cities and sort of move to rely less on single use plastics and more on reusables have been challenged by this crisis. You're seeing, obviously transit ridership has fallen through the floor. We have no idea when it's gonna come back. And we're also seeing some of these plastic bands get undone as cities tell people actually don't bring renewable grocery bags. We're gonna go back to single use plastic bags. And I'm wondering if that, does that feel like a blip to you? Do you feel a sense of pessimism about that? Yeah, I think that the plastic bags, I feel a little bit differently about the two problems. So I think on the plastic bags issue, I hope it's a temporary blip. That said, I think there's gonna be a period of time where this just culturally changes as people are gonna be more afraid of reusable bags or they're just gonna want more products that are wrapped in plastic, right? Like some of us, like when I buy vegetables, I bring my own reusable bag even for those vegetables, but people are gonna buy more packaged things because they're afraid. And I think I hope that that's a more temporary sort of lapse in our consciousness that was really growing around using less plastic. I think it's unfortunate that there have been industry advocacy groups that have really seized this moment of crisis and exploited the crisis to try to fight those bands. And I think it's gonna be on sort of both political leaders and local people organizing to really bring all that back as we can turn our minds away from the pandemic. On mass transit, I'm much more concerned. I do think just financially, again, there's a huge problem. And then there's also the fear factor and the culture factor. So how do you bring people back to using mass transit when mass transit can be viewed as a place that's dangerous from a public health point of view where people gather a cluster? And I'm interested in, and maybe there are people who can put in the comments if they know of any models of how do you restore faith in a public transit system after a devastating event. So obviously London had the underground attack, the tube attack, the Tokyo underground had the chemical attack. And so how do you kind of get people back to using transit because I think that's gonna be a big part of how we do this of the long-term. And here in the Northeast, like between New York and Boston, these big urban centers that I'm the most familiar with, there was already like a huge need to invest in this transit infrastructure before any of this happened. And now we're facing budgets that are gonna be constrained, ridership that's gonna be down. And so I think again, here's where a New Deal style investment could really say, public transit is the priority going forward. We need to just shore up public transit. We need to get commuter rails so that we're thinking of the city connecting beyond the city so that there's affordable housing for people. So we need some visionary architects of the next chapter of our society to kind of rise up in Washington to get us through this, I really believe that. Right, I like that point that it's not actually about whether it's safe, it's about whether people think it's safe. And that goes not just for transit, but for so many other things that are not city things at all. It's true going to church, it's true of going to a baseball game or a concert. I mean, there are just plenty of people who live very far from cities who enjoy collective activity. And if it's not safe, then we have bigger, maybe bigger problems than bus routes. To end with, I have this, there's this question from Sharon Burke, which seems like a good one and one that's applicable to both the coronavirus and climate change. She asked, how do we avoid foresight fatigue? That there are so many things to worry about, but only so many dollars and so much time. It's a great question and hello, Sharon. So I think that one thing is figuring out how do we triage between problems? So it's almost like we're triaging over a longer period of time. And I think one of the criteria for that should be, what's the probability of these kinds of events that we're looking at? And what's the impact? How big of an impact are we talking about? And so I think that's part of it, is to focus on the problems that have the highest impact and highest probability, but not completely neglect those low probability events, give them some sort of other tier of investment or our attention. And I think the other thing for foresight fatigue, I mean, to me that's kind of connected with the psychology of how people, and this in the Optimus Telescope, I kind of researched this question of, why do people turn away from the future? Like why does the future become so overwhelming for people? And often it's the case that there is a sense that there's doomsday on the horizon and that you have no power agency to do anything about it. And that's a, you know, why not drink like there's no tomorrow? That's what you think the prospects are. So I think it's really important in order to be able to engage with the future to carve out areas of agency where you feel like there are steps you can take in your life, in your community, in your business, in your role professionally, in your society even that get you towards a future that you actually want. So a vision of a future that looks better and then steps you can be taking to bring it about that give you the sense of putting one's foot in front of the other. And I think in a small, the microcosm of that that's happening right now is people who are sewing masks for their friends and family members or even just practicing social distancing by making it easier for others sending their friends, you know, videos of their activities and reinforcing that this cultural activity that we're doing of keeping distance is contributing to something collective and meaningful for the long run which is protecting public health. I think we need versions of that for climate change where we are, can each be doing something that's part of something a bit larger where we can see it contributing to a collective whole. I like that idea to end on. It may fall to big institutions to enact policy changes but in terms of each of us having some degree of hope and optimism, it does feel good to ride a bike or use a reusable bag assuming it's coronavirus free. Right. So, and with that, we'll wrap up. Thank you, Mina. And thank you to everyone who joined us today. There are more future tense social distancing socials on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Bye for now and have a great evening. Thanks so much, Henry. Thanks, everyone.