 We're back. We're live. I'm Jay Fiedel. This is Climate Change Beyond Outrage here on Think Tech on a given Thursday morning. And we have the original progenitor of Climate Change Beyond Outrage, Anu Hiddle. Hi Anu, how are you? Thank you for coming back and talking to us about climate change. Hi Jay. How are you? I'm good, but I'm disturbed. I'm disturbed about so many things in the world that are existential threats. I mean, you think about it. We have COVID. That's an existential threat. We have the government. It used to be the government was a positive force now. It's an existential threat, including especially our president. We have social disturbance of huge magnitude in this country and with reverberation all over the world. And of course, let us not forget we have climate change all the while. And all the other existential threats are secondary to climate change. Am I right? Well, it's interesting you would say so. Of course, I'm a climate change groupie, so I would say that is the primary threat that underlies everything else. And I'm delighted to hear that you think so as well. I hope and wish all our policymakers would feel that way. Of course, there's a pandemic going on and people are losing livelihoods and jobs and lives. So that's obviously the fire we need to put out right now. But at the same time, there's that other fire that's burning and it's like, what do we do about that? So how do we seize the pandemic to move on? As I told you before the show, we are fiddling while Rome is burning, while Rome is burning, while Rome is burning, it's all kind of burning. And it's all connected. Not necessarily in this sequence, but the sequence that comes to mind is government fails to do anything about climate change. Climate change has an effect on COVID. COVID has an effect on the economy. The economy has an effect on social rest or unrest. All connected, it's all connected. No, I'm not saying solving one solves them all, but they all have to be dealt with. So today I'd like to talk to you about the connection, if you will, between climate change, your favorite thing and COVID. It was quite interesting to find that after the shutdown, all of a sudden carbon emissions were substantially, I mean substantially reduced all around the world. And what's interesting about that is it proves to me beyond the shadow that the human experience has a direct and almost immediate effect on climate change, doesn't it? Yeah, well that's been established a while ago that there's a direct connection. I think the larger question for someone who's been working on climate change issues for a while and for all of us, I think the rest of us, is how does that, how can we make that kind of emissions target, but also without this disaster going on, which is without losing our livelihoods, without losing our lives, carrying on the way we'd like to, which is we'd like to go out to restaurants and bars, we would like to go travel to other countries. So how do we do those things without emitting all the greenhouse gases and changing the world's climate? And how do we adapt to that change in climate? So that's the bigger issue for me, it's not the fact that we've had a decrease in emissions. So when we had our last sort of recession, if you will, emissions did go down, but then they came back up again and so it was just really a blip in time and in fact they came back stronger. So how do we sustain this kind of emissions, level of emissions without losing our lives, our livelihoods and the things we like to do like travel or whatever it is we like to do. So how do we do that? And that's been the essential question all along. So that question has not gone away. Let me throw a wrench at you. Our chief scientist came on Mike Dewart a few days ago and he had researched mortality and life expectancy globally, maybe nationally, but what he found was that during periods of recession and depression, there was less mortality and life expectancy of people born in those periods was substantially longer. And what this tells us is that the normal economy is hard on people. It's stress and it kills them and it makes them either too soft or too hard to live a sustainable life. And so you go back to Andrew Yang, one of the presidential candidates who said, look, we're a prosperous country. Let's be prosperous to a point and give everybody a universal income and they won't stress out. And if they don't stress out, we don't have to have a bigger economy and everybody will live a normal life. What this suggests is we need to reevaluate our quality of life, our quality of economic aspiration, our quality of demand and supply. What do you think about that? I mean, if we did that, Mike's figures would show that we'd have a longer, better life and we would have less of an economy, I suppose, but that wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing. And if we had less of an economy, we'd do better with climate change. What do you think? That's revolutionary. What do you think? Yeah, I think that's one way of looking at it. But I still maintain like, why can't we have the level that we want, the economy that we want with fewer emissions? We can. It's just how we direct our resources and our research and implementation. So I mean, decoupling that economic growth and emissions, I mean, I think that's, that's what we've been trying to do. And we can do it. And we proved that after the 2009 Recovery Reinvestment Act, our after that stimulus, we actually had a significant investment in renewable energy. It leveraged, it was about $95 billion in a $840 or $50 billion of stimulus. So, you know, there was quite a bit in renewable energies. Now it leveraged in turn about $150 billion in private and non-federal funds. So, and then, then when you look out a few years after ARA, after 2009, then you start seeing in 2014-15, you start seeing a drop in emissions. So it just shows that an economic recovery can happen and a green one can happen. And in fact, there are, you know, all the sort of Nobel Prize Club, that Club of Economists, Nick Stern and Joseph Stiglitz and those guys. I mean, they've done some research on this and they interviewed, oh, about 200 central bank officials, finance ministry officials, G20 folks, all of those, you know, fancy people. And they looked at about 700 policies and they basically, they looked at speed of implementation, economic multiplier, so that's your economic recovery, and climate impact potential for these 700 policies. Okay. And their findings basically suggest that even if you look at it in economic terms, a green stimulus is better than a brown one. So I think we can do it. You know, I don't think we need to like give up too many things, but I think what we need to do is redirect our resources and our research and our implementation. So I mean, we can do this, you know, we're talking about- We've known that a long time, haven't we? Right, right. So the question is, how do you seize this pandemic? You know, how do you carpe pandemicas to bring this about, right? Well, the question has always been, you know, can you, can you get people together on it? Can you galvanize the, you know, public and thus also political will to do something, you know, to grasp this thing? Carpe, what do you call it? Carpe climate change. Carpe pandemicas who grab the climate. Yeah. Second question is, once everybody is decided, you know, that gee, we better do something about this. It's nuanced. How much are we willing to spend? How much are we willing to commit? Are we willing to put our whole day in all of us? We're just a little bit. And then, of course, with those resources, what's the best course of action? And can you motivate people? Take that action. Can you motivate nation states to take that action? And I submit to you and you can argue with me. I want you to argue with me. I submit to you, we're not doing anything right now. We're not even sure we want to continue COP 21, 2345. We're not even sure we want to do that. Everybody has been distracted by so many other issues that they think are existential and more immediate, more important. And they have forgotten, they've moved on. The fickle finger of media attention, have governmental attention that's moved on. Yeah, you know, the COP 24, 25, etc., those cops for people who are listening in and may not know about cops, aside from them as, you know, police officers, which is another issue. So that's the, you know, the conference of the parties and the parties are countries that have agreed to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. So we sort of call that the UNFCCC, right? And so that's the COP. There's my teacher in me coming out, right? So climate change beyond beyond outrage. If you remember, the title came from my students who were always outraged about climate change. And I wanted to show them, you know, there are things we're doing that you can go beyond that outrage to actually implement climate action, right? So, so, so the cops, you know, the cops are an interesting phenomenon. They've been going 25, 25 years because that's COP 25 that just finished in Madrid. And, you know, they are, they are sort of at the very, very high level of negotiations. These are nation states and their ministers and governments talking to each other, you know. I had to deal with two governments when I was adopting one of my children from India, and that was a nightmare, you know. So I can't imagine dealing with, you know, 200 governments, right? So these are governments moving slowly. And slowly, they're plotting along. But when an elephant moves, everything moves out of the way, right? So even if it takes one step, versus an ant that's like moving really fast but can't do much else, right? So governments can leverage a lot. And I think that COP process, that's what it does. It helps to leverage action in, at the national, at the subnational, at the local levels, you can always hang something on that national and supranational level and say, okay, all the governments got together and they said, we need to keep warming under two degrees. So why the heck aren't we, you know, right? You can say that to your local government, to your neighborhood board. You can say the reality is we're not, we're not doing anything. Oh, I don't think that's the reality. I think we're doing a lot. It's just that are we keeping up with it? Of course, we're not keeping up with it. If we were keeping up with it, we'd have solved the problem all done finished. So we're definitely not keeping up. I mean, that's, and that's the problem, right? So we are doing stuff, but it's too little too late. And, and that's where we need to start speeding up. And that's, that's what we've always been saying, right? Too little too late. Let's hurry up. And then something else comes along and they're, oh, look at, you know, we've got this problem. And of course, now we're coming up on hurricane season. So we'll have another problem. And, you know, there's always going to be an event. There's always going to be a problem. In fact, one of the things that the UN says, they say that it's one of their numerous bodies, you know, that's dealing with this, they say that about 75% of new diseases are zoonotic, right? They come from animals, born of pathogens that are, that are zoological in nature. So, so that means that, you know, that's a problem because we're, this is not going to be the only pandemic. This wasn't the first, it's not going to be the last. And as we, and this is one of the things about a green recovery as well is that we keep the green green. We keep the wild wild. So we need to keep those green spaces. We need to keep those forested areas because it's at that intersection as we humans encroach on those forested areas, right? That, that we're starting to hang on. I know you're going to cut in with another question. So hang on a second. I just, just wait for it. So it's those green areas that it's that intersection that's creating so many more diseases and our interaction with those animals and those viromes that we wouldn't have come in contact with otherwise, right? So it's, I mean, there is also this stuff about the wildlife markets. And yes, they need to be regulated. And in fact, you know, whatever, whatever we need to do with that, but that's a different issue. But I think that, you know, just the fact that we're a naive being when it comes to these viruses, they can just sort of take over, right? So, so, and that's what it's doing. That's what this current virus is doing. It's just taking over. We have no immunity to it. We've never seen it before, because it resided in a bat, and that bat never interacted with us until we started to decrease its habitat. And then it started hanging out under our, I know this one was, you know, not exactly like this, but I'm just, you know, taking a little liberty here. But imagine, you know, there are all these different bats now hanging out under the eaves of different houses that are near the forest, right? That never happened before. They had their own niche and so on. So, so that's one of the things about a green recovery is we keep, we keep ourselves, we need to keep it green. We need to keep the wild, wild, you know, and that's one thing we could be doing. So I know I took us off in another little bit of no, no, no, no, that's exactly what I wanted to cover here on this show. Exactly right on your spot on. On the one hand, you know, climate change is affected by COVID. COVID, you know, declines our economy and the decline of our economy improves the situation worldwide for climate change. Okay, that's pretty clear. We knew that. We knew that reduced economic activity reduces the, you know, the on the oncoming climate change. But the other thing is much more interesting because we haven't really been thinking about it. And it's that humanity lives in a world of viruses and a world of pathogens, actually, any, any, any of those potential pathogens could be a viral pathogen, very disruptive, and could affect our existence. And so, you know, we can come up with therapeutics and vaccines, that's nice. But we're still going to have another, another epidemic, another pandemic going forward. How do we really deal with this? We have to understand the relationship of human kind and virus kind, and how we have to live, you know, in the same world. And we have to respect, you can quote me on this, we have to respect the virus. We have to understand our relationship with the virus. And that means, and the further thing, which I think you'll probably agree with me is that it's not just that we have to appreciate climate change, we have to appreciate humankind's position is placed in the permanent of our natural world. It's environmentalism, you know, up and down and across. And so, we have to appreciate our relationship with animals and pathogens and the weather and the environment. We have ignored that. We have steamed ahead in the industrial revolution. We have steamed ahead in the 20th century and now that the 21st century, without even thinking about that, and it is catching up and it will continue to catch up because of all the people in the world and all the damage we've already done to the environment. So, I mean, it's not just that we have to deal with climate change. That's one part of the problem. We have to deal with the entire environmental ecology. It's that human nature balance, right? And that's what's very precarious. And this has highlighted that precariousness, right? And because we are out of balance, because we are out of balance with our environment and with the natural forces, this is one of the symptoms, one of the effects, right? And it's a very immediate and very obvious one and it's hitting us all, right? So, and climate change is more sort of insidious in some ways because it's there, but you can't quite see it all the time. And when you talk about say sea level rise, you're talking about, oh, you know, two centimeters. I mean, oh, I don't really care about that, you know, those kinds of things. It's been, I think that fire has been smoldering rather than roaring. And so that's the issue, right? Because there is, we are sort of on that kind of, you know how Yellowstone is sort of on this thin sort of crust of lava, basically, ready to blow. I mean, I kind of think of climate change like that. We're on this very thin crust. And it's about, you know, it blows from time to time, not even about it blows from time to time. This is one of the times, hurricanes will be one of the times, different things, wildfires and so on, different things in different places, right? So there are these eruptions of disaster events versus the ongoing march of what's going on. So that I think that balance and that's where we really need to be thinking. Another thing I think is that it's highlighted, this pandemic has highlighted the cracks in our social structures and so on. And climate change too has those issues. So you cannot go ahead on climate, making progress on climate action without making some progress on equity and action on equity, you know. So it's going to get hotter. Who are the people that will be affected? I mean, you and I could probably turn on our air conditioning, right? When it gets hotter. Well, maybe not you. I know I've got an air conditioning unit. It's a rented house. I wouldn't have had it otherwise. Just a disclaimer. Someone in India who's got or even here in Hawaii, if you are a certain income level or may not, I mean, electricity costs a lot here. So if you're going to air condition your house using electricity that we are using, you know, that we're generating from fossil fuels here, that's three times the price of anywhere else in the nation on average, right? So someone that's lower income level, those are the people that are going to suffer. It's going to be hotter for them. It's going to be harder for them to just turn on the air, think of other nations. I mean, so equity has a huge issue, has a huge impact on how we move forward. And I think that's the other thing with the green recovery is that we have to address those equity issues, whether we like it or not. And I think we should like it because we're looking at, you know, you think about, I think it highlighted, you think about the people who are sort of stacking our shelves on the, you know, on the grocery stores and all of the jobs where we've just sort of let people, let people, you know, stay in those jobs for various reasons because it it obviously benefits some of us, benefits all of us, but some of us more than others. I mean, what if those are people who are traveling by bus and what if buses aren't safe anymore for them to travel by? Or what if we need to make buses safe, you know, shouldn't we be thinking about things like that? Well, I think I think there's two sides to this problem. You've touched on both of them and touching on, you know, the social side of things. We have defects and these existential threats have revealed our defects. They seem more visible now. And our inability or unwillingness to address them and solve them seem more obvious now. And we really need to do that because they're, you know, I had to tell you this, but we're all mammals. And being a mammal is a special situation because it's flawed. It's driven by some kind of biological motivation that isn't always rational. We are not always rational because we are mammals. Okay, so that's one thing. We have to manage our mammalian instincts, if you will. And the other side of it, you knew this already. On the other side of it, okay, is science. And we try so hard to learn about science. And, you know, the body of science, which is, you know, not all of it, but a lot of it is indisputable. This is the 21st century. We've learned and we know how to learn. And we have systems where the world can enjoy what the, you know, the peer-reviewed science has been. So what we don't follow it. We don't we ignore it. Okay. The social side, the mammalian side ignores it. And so we have a real defective system. And where it comes together, where it should come together, is in leadership. Because, you know, I would say that the mammalian experience teaches us that we do respect leaders. If a person somehow emerges to a leader for good or bad, we're going to listen. And he's going to, or she's going to take us to a better place or a worse place because we're going to follow in large part. And so what we have now in the world, and we've seen this in the 20th century a lot, we have leaders that are not so good. They don't respect the science from one thing. But ideally, if we had a way to select leaders who were positive, who respected the science, who understood this global ecology we've been talking about, we'd be much better off. And we would, as a species, we would be able, we'd have a much better chance of surviving. So I don't know how you fix that, but I think those are the, that is the one primary thing is leadership. It's picking a leader who respects the science and is able to deal with the, what do you call it, mammalian, mammalian biology. Right. I mean, I see where you're going with that. But I also wanted to say that the reason I brought up the social cracks and so on was that I think that those can, those go, you know, hand in hand, like the pandemic, they go hand in hand with climate change action. And that if we can address some of those issues, we'll get further along on our climate goals and vice versa, that they both affect each other and can affect each other positively. Well, I thought we were making pretty good progress there until Trump. And Trump has had a negative effect not only on the United States, but the whole world, in terms of the initiative to have climate action, don't you think? So well, I don't want to go into federal politics. There seems to be only one side to it, basically. So, you know, there isn't a controversy there. So, you know, I think though that the more productive side of this is to look at, you know, what would a recovery look like? What would a green recovery look like? You know? And why do we need to get, I sort of resist trying to say back to normal because we didn't like that normal. I mean, maybe some of us liked it, but it wasn't going in the right direction. We need to flatten that curve too, that bigger greenhouse gas emissions curve. In fact, we don't even know where the flattening of that curve is right now. We have not peaked in our emissions, right? So we are still emitting, and it's still on an upward trajectory. So it's like we're still having new cases, like a lot of cases. That's how it would be for the pandemic. So, you know, a green recovery would be addressing some of these issues like it would be looking at putting investments into our green infrastructure because we want to not get back to normal. Not even a new normal, I feel like, but a better normal. So, you know, because a new normal could just be a bad one. Well, I agree with you. I think most right-thinking people that I know call it the remnants of the liberal world order, as we used to know it, those people, they would totally agree with you on this. Where we get stuck and where I would like you to go for the last couple of minutes of our discussion is, what do we do now? What do we do now to get on the track? What do we do now to make this an important priority? Well, I think we need to focus on what some of our leaders are saying. So some of our leading economists are saying, make it a green recovery. Okay, put your mind to do it. If you're going to do infrastructure, do all these two furs, you know, put in your ventilation systems that will help your workers with their health and will help us with our greenhouse gas emissions. You know, so a two-fer or a three-fer or a many-fer or something. I don't know, Jennifer, I don't know, whatever. So you've got a green recovery that incorporates green infrastructure for buildings, for transportation, for whatever. All right? So if there's monies coming down, use it for that, I would say. A second thing I would do is looking at to address some of these inequalities, looking at green jobs, higher quality, better jobs that are green jobs, and for people who didn't have those kinds of jobs, perhaps. So that's the second part of it. And what I first, I'll come back to the beginning, which is keeping the wild wild. So keep our green, green. So it's all green, green, green. That's my, to seize that. You're talking about a revolution from where we are now. How do we conduct the revolution? I always love that song. I know you're a hippie, I know that. But how do you conduct the revolution? Is it a political revolution? Is it an educational revolution? Is it a leadership revolution? Is it crowds in the street? I mean, a protest, such as a protest we're having now, except a protest about climate change. I mean, that seems appropriate to me. How do we conduct this? How do we re-energize, and that's maybe the perfect word for it, re-energize our climate change initiative so that we actually get together on it. We all agree that science has to be respected and B, we actually do stuff. We could do a lot. If I gave half of my day, you're already giving half of your day. But if we all gave half of our day to advancing various initiatives and to deal with climate change, we'd have this licked. But we're not doing that. We're chasing other dreams and being distracted with other existential problems. And so the question I leave you with, I might have asked you this before, is what do we do now? Anu Hiddle, what do we do now? I think we take the lead of some of the folks who are already there, and we do what they're saying. And I don't think that every one of us has to give up and do climate action. I think we just need a few key people. Not everybody went and said, let's invent an iPhone, and here it is, taking over our lives. Not everyone went and said, hey, how about an Uber or a Lyft? And that cloud technology brought it together. So I don't think that we need everyone to be on board, but I think we do need the key few people to be on board and the leadership. So all those protests out there, if you can do that, I'd say that's great. Our climate strike youth, those Greta Thunbergs in Hawaii, go for it. And the rest of us, do what you can. Think about what's the twofer that you're doing. But I really think it's not just all of us, but it is those few key people that will light that fire and then keep it going. So I really don't think it needs to be everybody. I think it just needs a few. And I think it also needs to be more of a market-driven approach and incentives, and you just provide the incentives, and people will find ways of taking advantage of those. You know what I'm hoping? I'm hoping that that millennial energy that we see in the streets around the country now, and there is a lot of legitimate, constructive, clear-thinking, moral millennial energy. We don't fully understand it. Not on the streets, Jay. I don't think millennials are on the streets anymore. They're in offices now. They're in their 30s. Okay, wherever they are. They're the generation. I think it's the generation after that, the Gen Xers or whatever they are, or Gen Z, I don't know. It's those guys. It's the 17, 18 high school age kids who are out there, Greta Thunbergs, who are out there. There's a lot of energy to be harnessed, but I also think that we could be doing more than only protesting. We need those key leaders to follow the people that are saying this is the way. We need that. You know what else we need? We need shows like this. Yes. We have to show the community this is something they cannot forget. And we have to have it back on. We'll do it again. We have to do it again. You're on. Always. We have to do it again and again. Anu Hiddle. A half hour goes by quickly. A philosopher, an altruist, a complete and total altruist on climate change, and she's beyond outrage. Thank you, Anu. Thank you. Nice to see you. Namaste. Namaskar.