 This is Rob Johnson, President of the Institute for New Economic Thinking. I'm here today with David Fenton, an activist and the founder of the first progressive activist communications firm, Fenton Communications, which is still thriving to this day. Ined has worked closely with them, and David himself has covered a whole spectrum of issues. He spent some time with my dear friend from Detroit, John Sinclair, and we were neighbors for a time, but David really, really has his finger on the pulse of what's going on in climate and activism. Thanks for joining me, David. Pleasure. Nice to see you, Rob. So, I'm sitting here in the middle of a pandemic. We're in February of 2021. We've got a new administration. We've got all kinds of challenges, all kinds of maladies that have been excavated and now are on the surface. What are you seeing? What are you seeing that you like? What are you not seeing that you wish you were seeing? How are things unfolding? Well, if you don't love the COVID pandemic, you won't love climate change because it will be far worse. This is bad enough, but the impacts of global warming on public health are of magnitudes greater than what we're going through right now if we don't act. I think the good news is that the message that we need to listen to scientists is polling very well right now because we didn't listen to them in preparing for the pandemic and we better listen to them on this other issue or civilization will be really challenged. But I think we're in a much better moment now, of course, because real human beings have gone into the government who actually do understand this issue and have high ambition about acting on it. The question is how much are they going to be able to do? And that's a function of a number of things. As you know, it's a function of the amount of corruption that they face on the other side from the dying but still powerful fossil fuel industry. It's a function of public opinion and how much it's on board doing what's really necessary on this issue. And I'm afraid the public opinion is not yet where we need it to be, by any means. It's a function of the so-called moderate Democrats, in particular Mr. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, a coal state who famously during the last climate legislative debates when Obama first took office did a television commercial where he shot a gun through a copy of the Waxman-Markey climate bill. That was his statement on it. And Manchin now is the head of the Senate Environment and Energy Committee. And so what he decides to do will be very determinate. So we have good things happening. Manchin clearly gets the climate set emergency. He hired John Kerry, who really gets it and is totally dedicated to it, and Gina McCarthy to be the climate czar domestically, and she totally gets it. They're making for the first time climate a focus of every aspect of government and foreign policy. So it's really tremendously great change. The problem is that we're in a race against time, and we have very little time. And most people don't really understand why. I mean, simply put, it's because the carbon pollution that we put into the atmosphere today stays there for hundreds and thousands of years. It just doesn't come down on the human time frame. And there's already way too much of it up there. And we're approaching very dangerous planetary tipping points where things may become irreversible. So it's very good change with this administration and the global leadership that they will show. But there's a lot to do and not a whole lot of time. When you look at what you might call the history of climate change up to this moment, what is it that has impeded, or what you might call, allowed us to proceed more slowly than we needed to and feel comfortable? Well, the main... What are the missing ingredients to the action we should have taken and what can we learn from that? Well, we should have started moving to a fossil-free economy when we learned how bad this was in the late 1980s. And by the way, when Exxon learned how bad it was and started trying to confuse people about it, which is very well-documented. Yeah, the merchant's a doubt. Naomi Oreski's work is beautiful in that regard. They hired a bunch of PR firms that had previously spread the same kind of public confusion over tobacco. And they did the same thing. Scientists don't agree that cigarettes cause cancer. Scientists are in disagreement about whether humans are changing the climate. And most people still think that in the United States. I think the latest figures from Yale are that only 24% of Americans know that all of the climate scientists now agree that humans are heating the earth through our peril. So only 24% know that even now. And when you inform any group of Americans of any political persuasion that all the scientists that know the subject, all the climate scientists agree, support for action goes up 25%. And yet there's no program in the United States to make sure that the whole public knows this. There's very little knowledge about the subject. Ask most people to explain global warming to you simply. They can't. In the studies that I've seen recently, people think it's the ozone hole. Or we have to do more recycling or stuff like that. There's very little knowledge. Like a group I work with just did a survey of coastal property owners in Florida. People that own, not developers, people that own, you know, upper middle class houses, 300, $400,000 houses on the intercoastal. They ask them three questions. Is it flooding more in your neighborhood? Everybody says yes. And are you concerned about the flooding? And everybody says yes. And then when they ask what's causing the flooding, 80% said bad sewage systems and over development. Only 20% could identify the actual reason for the flooding, which is that we're heating the planet, melting the ice, and raising the seas. This is not something commonly understood even now. Now, I post show majorities want action on this, but only 24% of Americans are alarmed about it. Now think about this. This is the most alarming issue human civilization faces. And yet only 24% of our fellow citizens are alarmed about it. You know, 51% of Americans agree that humans are changing the climate. 70% agree the climate is changing, but only 51% agree that humans are the cause. And meanwhile, the industry has also succeeded in painting the solutions as job-killing and expensive. And actually the opposite is true now especially. Solving it will create tons of employment and save everybody money for sure if it's financed properly. So the thing's kind of upside down still and I'm really hoping the administration can seize the bully pulpit and get people informed about this in a hurry. Well, I guess what I'm a bit confused by is how can the public not see this? I mean, you have things like what's the David Attenborough's shows on Netflix. There are all kinds of very vivid stories in The New Yorker or The Guardian or places like that. Are people just closed off emotionally from seeing what's hiding in plain sight? Well, there's some of that. Sure, there's some of that. It's a tough issue to get your head around emotionally. You know, the end of everything, doom, especially if you don't understand how to solve it. But remember, Rob, the Guardian and The New Yorker are not the American public. Those are elite publications. USA Today would be a... Well, basically, most Americans get their information from two sources. The internet and local television news. God save us all. And television, local and network, until very recently and still predominantly, doesn't cover the climate issue. When it reports on extreme weather, it does not connect the dots for people to explain what is causing it. And so people don't know. And meanwhile, online, it's a mess. And especially if you're conservative, online, all you'll ever see is that climate change is a hoax. You won't see anything else. So I think, yes, there's some denial, but mostly I think we have a distribution of information problem. And the other thing I think that people in the movement don't grapple with quite enough is, you know, cognitive science shows that people only learn from the repetition of simple messages, massive amounts of repetition of very simple messages over and over and over and over again. And in our communities of scientists and do-gooders and economists and people who study the humanities, we hate simplifying things. And we hate repeating ourselves. But that's what works. Now, we're up against people in the fossil fuel industry and their political and other agents. And most of them go to business school and they learn marketing and communications and they have to focus on it. Most of them, in their career, is to sell services and products or they don't advance their careers. That's the natural orientation of theirs. And so in general, they're much more focused on it than we are and they're much better at it and they spend money on it and largely we don't. And it's not because our community doesn't have money to do this. We have lots of money actually. But we tend to spend it mostly on what I call the supply of policy, ideas, you know, studies, reports, meetings, conferences. And those are all very valid things. And as a result, we know what to do. We don't lack a supply of policy. We lack demand for policy. And we don't invest in that nearly enough. I remember a gentleman named Rob Stein founded something called the Democracy Alliance years ago and made a presentation where he compared the behavior of left and right think tanks. And I remember him in this presentation saying both sides spend 10% of their money on admin. The left, the progressive side, spent 80% on funding research and 10% on the amplification of research. And on the right, the research funding was 40% and the amplification was 50% of the budget. And the places like Heritage Foundation and others, and they were having a much bigger impact in the years. Rob, I believe, presented this in around 2005 and he was looking backwards 20 years, you know, almost from the time of Barry Goldwater or what have you, or Jimmy Carter, to the end of the century. And it was really quite market. And the other thing which you mentioned about going to business school, the boards of those foundations on the left were people with inherited wealth trust funds and academics. And on the right, it was business people. Yeah, and you know, that's very true. And it goes deeper, you know, the great linguist Dr. George Lakoff, he's laid this out, I think, better than anybody. I saw him once asked, what is the difference between conservative and liberal foundations? And he said, well, at conservative foundations, the dominant paradigm is preserve the system at all costs because we benefit from it. And at liberal foundations, often, the dominant paradigm is invest in many meritorious acts of charity, as many as possible. So that is a different way of doing business and guess who's going to win that? You know, you see another facet of this, you know, the environmental NGOs do a lot of tremendously great work. Unfortunately, not only do they not spend much of their budget on communications of their very large budgets, but they also tend to disperse their resources into many, many, many, many different programs horizontally. And you know anybody that goes to business school, you have to have a strategy and concentrate your resources on achieving an objective. You don't scatter it out. Right, you've got to go to scale long term. That's right. And part of what makes these NGOs proliferate horizontally is, you know, every funder has their fashionable idea. And so these groups get funded to do all these different things that wealthy people want them to do rather than, you know, achieve their own focus. Now, there's exceptions to all this. I'm exaggerating for a purpose, but I think it's an issue that we need to confront. But it is changing. There's a new kid in town. There's a new project called the Potential Energy Coalition run by a former corporate branding expert named John Marshall. And he's working on climate change, marketing and communications. He's raised some significant money. He has the pro bono cooperation of scores of top creative and digital marketing agencies. He is a data driven operation. He is learning what kinds of messages and communications work with what audiences and is now delivering to segments of those audiences these messages with sufficient repetition to change their brains basically for the good, to change public opinion. It's still not at the scale that's needed, but it's a very promising development. You know, marketers know that if they discover through research a particular message will sell their product or service if it's seen by the target audience 12 times. They know that if they only buy eight impressions, it'll do nothing. Now, we don't think that way, and we don't like to think that way. But that's how we have to think. We can all hate make America great as much as we want, but that's actually how the brain works. So give you an example. So most people can't explain global warming to you. I frankly don't like using the word climate change. That's a term that was devised by Republican language consultant Frank Luntz precisely to make it sound like it's not so bad. It's combined, yeah. Climate's changed, you know, and hasn't the climate always changed? But there's a metaphor that really works for the public if they would hear it enough, and we put a pollution blanket around the earth with these emission gases that's trapping heat. And it's kind of like when you were a kid, and your mother would come in in the middle of the night and your blanket on you while you were sleeping, and you'd wake up sweating. Well, that's what we're doing to the earth. And the good news is we know how to remove the blanket. We can go to clean energy and change forestry and agriculture and we'll get rid of the pollution blanket. Now, it really works because the word pollution is universally disliked. It activates brain circuitry that already exists that no one thinks is positive. Whereas when you say things like carbon, you confuse people. Most people don't know what it is. But when you say pollution, everybody says, oh, that's bad. We need less of that. So I think that I'm hoping the administration will simplify this for people, create a lot of repetition of the simplicity. We'll always tell people that 99% of the climate scientists agree that we can do something about this. I hope they will always emphasize that solving this in the proper way will save everybody money on their electricity, on their heating, on their cooling, because it will. And I think if they do that, we'll change the public opinion playing field pretty fast. You mentioned a little bit earlier how the conservative foundations talk about what you might call keeping the system that we have. And I'm curious if some of the resistance, there's a poet whose work I follow, he's called NQ, stands for In Question. NQ has a poem called Evidence. And the first line of the poem is, you will always find the evidence for what you want to believe. And the idea, I guess I'm getting at, is if people are filled with dread about profound transformation of the social structure, they may turn off, they may want to deny that awareness, whereas those who are trying to say the current system, whether they're right or wrong scientifically, the current system is resilient and will be there for you, that may be what they want to believe or want to feel. How can we make it so the transformation feels like not just the dread if we don't do it, but there is positive potential, new types of jobs, regions that have been stagnant that are reinvigorated. How do we put that into the mix? Well, we could, because it's all true. Electric cars are better, they're faster, they're fun, they require far less maintenance, they cost far less per mile to drive and they're approaching parity with polluting cars. And retooling the factories to make them and making sure America is a world leader in this technology is going to be great for the country, great for the economy. Electric cars are now California's export and we're just at the beginning of this. So that's very exciting news and General Motors recent announcement which really floored me that they're going to stop making all gasoline powered vehicles in 14 more years by 2035. You know, that was a very smart move on their part and I'm sure that the other companies are going to follow and I predict it will be before 2035 as people learn how fast we have to go. You know, there's a group that I help called Rewiring America and what their studies have shown is that if we electrify every household in America, that is no more gas and oil heating, 100% of their electrons from renewable resources, electric cars parked in their garage, no more gas heating, no more gas cooking, 100% electric, renewable. The average household will save $4,000 a year and 25 million jobs get created doing all this work, insulating all these homes, rewiring or changing the electric grid and the net result is permanent economic stimulus because people will save money forever. So it's kind of a no brainer, there's a lot to be excited about and the flip side of it is we can avoid the total collapse of the insurance markets which we are facing if we don't act. We can avoid the redirection of enormous amounts of wealth to building sea walls and protecting coastal cities so we can avoid tremendous costs from extreme weather you haven't seen anything yet. So this is why I laugh when these senators from Wyoming and these people are like oh it's too expensive and like yeah, okay well you people through inaction and business and usual will wreck the economy and be wrecked. I mean imagine the global economy when you have to abandon all the coastal cities of the world when the Himalayan rivers are seasonal so you can't irrigate crops when the sea levels in Asia have flooded out all the rice fields try having a global economy then that is not a joke that is our fate over the next 50 years if we don't act soon. So it's very urgent it's very solvable, it's very massive it requires a world war 2 global economic mobilization in a hurry. I remember Eli Pariser who used to work with move on.org and then found it up worthy wrote a book called the filter bubble and in the filter bubble it was essentially somewhat like what NQ said people go out and they find what you might call the sources for information that confirm what they want to believe and this as the new movie what's it called the social dilemma the social dilemma has emphasized how the advertising model which boosts the revenue of these big internet platforms is built on that kind of what you might call reinforcement of what you want to believe they find out what your characteristics are and the subset of the information they have is transmitted to each side how how do we break out of that how do we get back to I don't know what to call it the fairness doctrine or whatever the the how do we create these platters and also I'm going to ask for the benefit of our audience what are the five things everyone should read or watch in your mind to get on track with the right vision okay well let's first look at the filter bubble so Tristan Harris who's featured in the social dilemma which everybody should watch on Netflix he calls it the attention economy these tech platforms are trying to keep your attention because the more they keep it the more advertising they sell and they have found that what keeps your attention the most is the most controversial conflict oriented salacious crazy stuff and what happens is that their algorithms are programmed to boost that kind of material so I think that these algorithms must be regulated or we're not going to have a democracy as we've seen with the virus and all the skepticism about it online and on the vaccines and on wearing masks we're not going to have public health if we don't regulate these algorithms and we certainly won't have a climate so I think that the thing about the audiences within the filter bubble is it's too simple in my view just to blame the victims of that technology garbage in garbage out people are victims of their information flows yes of course they have certain predilections and prejudices and biases that's all true but you can predict a lot of what people are going to think and answer in polls if you just examine the information flow to them and if you watch fox news listen to right wing talk radio and facebook has pegged you as a conservative you know the truth is no longer going to reach you basically and so I think that the country has to do some things about that and my personal view is that Biden should create a presidential commission on disinformation to do about it and seek to forge a national agenda with first amendment experts, social scientists people from tech and the media and I think that the algorithms have to be regulated because again the problem is not people posting something let anybody post any goddamn thing the problem is the boosting of the crazy false posts to mass audiences so that these companies can make more money and have more power that's the problem and yes we had a fairness and equal time doctrine of the FCC until Ronald Reagan repealed it in the 80s and we should bring that back and in my opinion apply it to cable and hopefully social media and again their imperfect systems as all regulatory systems are but the fairness doctrine required that you couldn't present just one side of an issue and keep your broadcast license and the equal time doctrine said that you couldn't just give all your airtime to candidates of one political party and keep your broadcast license so in other words it had we had those in effect there'd be no rush limbo and there'd be no right wing talk radio and had we applied it to cable and if it was trickier legally but I believe could be done you'd have no fox news and you shouldn't you know why should Rupert Murdoch and Mark Zuckerberg's power and profit be more important than us having a just and decent and healthy society I just don't accept that you know that but you have an organization like PBS they are not very often very alarming about the climate they're not they're certainly better than others and NPR does a pretty good job that's true but again they've been frightened you know Republicans have frightened them and pressured them but it's not just them you know until recently and even now CBS, NBC and ABC will almost never say the words climate change and it's because they're afraid because they get beat up by the right and by the way they don't get beat up by progressives because we don't pay attention to the media and the right does so if you're going to be beat up only by one side what side are you going to be always looking over your shoulder at? and with PBS like you said the appropriations for keeping them in existence could be threatened by a strong movement filibuster, blockage, whatever that comes from the coalition defending the fossil fuel industry you know it has a very small audience you know the real issue is ABC, NBC, CBS which while they have less audience than they used to their combined newscast still reach 35 million people and they're getting better there's this effort called climate now and certainly CBS and NBC have improved ABC has not and I've been urging environmental groups to go after Disney which owns ABC and insist that they do a better job of this and hopefully that will happen now you asked me what people should read? yeah if you said they tuned into you and we're talking about false information this and that and you want to go right to the bullseye with this audience what are the things that they should read, listen to, or watch? well there's a great new organization called Science Moms sciencemoms.com or .org I forget it's climate scientists who are mothers and they're posting clear accurate information in a very accessible way so I would look at that um the you know Elizabeth Colbert's writing in the New Yorker and her books Colbert K-O-L-B-E-R-T they're among the best things ever written about this totally accurate totally reliable so that would be a good place to go you know the New York Times news side does a great job of covering climate change unfortunately the opinion side does not yet and I hope that will happen so the stuff in the New York Times Science section is completely reliable and very good and some of the graphic material they're doing online about climate change is really outstanding the refugee problems all of this you know on the solution side there's a paucity of good material but the best organization to follow in that regard is the Rocky Mountain Institute uh RMI.org RMI.org and they're at the forefront of showing how you can transform to a carbon free energy and materials and transportation economy in a very positive way for the economy was that Amory Loven's organization well he founded it see now take Amory Loven so Amory has a house he built in the 1980s at 7000 feet in Snowmass, Colorado that house has a big green house he grows two banana crops a year at 7000 feet in the cloudy environment in Snowmass Massachusetts he calls it the banana farm in a house that has never used a drop of fossil fuels of any kind using 1980s technology it's 100% renewably powered and massively insulated and passively constructed it's a net zero house using 1980s technology where he grows bananas at 7000 feet so we can do it I'm sitting in a house here in California that uses no carbon energy whatsoever we have electric heat pumps and solar system and our Tesla power wall batteries we put in super insulating windows that massively lowered our heating costs we have all our hot water comes from an efficient electric heat pump tied to the solar system and the batteries and basically PG&E pays us money for our excess solar power and that was financed with a 20 year loan that made it net positive right away our utility bills became lower even while paying back the loan than they were before we decarbonized now the problem is that took a lot of work the industries we need the service industries to help people easily transform their homes don't really exist yet at scale or efficiency and that's a big problem that the government needs to address back to the sources you talked about the various websites is there a book that's the kind of title that illuminates the dangers that we face that you would point people to I forget the name of Elizabeth Colbert's book on extinction but that's the book I would read that's a very good book sure and you know if you the intergovernmental panel on climate change reports they're a little wordy but you can read them and that's the UN science group from around the world and they're pretty scary even though their predictions keep proving too conservative but even so this stuff is scary I mean like the Greenland and West Antarctica ice sheets are melting much faster than they ever predicted and if they both were to melt you'd have 40 feet of global sea level rise and we are on course to them to melt completely if we don't hurry up and you know we don't only have to reduce emissions we have to take carbon out of the air and we can do that but these ice sheets you know once they move past a certain point we don't know how to stop them you know there's methane under the sea frozen and it's been in the air before in the Earth's history if you warm the seas past a certain point that methane is going to go back into the atmosphere methane is a hundred times more powerful molecule for molecule in trapping heat than carbon dioxide 100 times over the first 20 years which is all we have it goes down to like 37 times in 100 years so we heat the oceans enough that that methane escapes from under the ocean and it's also there's a lot of it in the frozen Arctic tundra which is melting you could get a runaway heating situation on this planet that is not a joke there's really nothing more important you know if we don't solve this we won't get to solve our social, economic, racial justice problems because there'll just be too much chaos the distress will overwhelm every other mission structure wow that's tough but it's solvable and it's solvable profitably I mean I think Lord Nicholas Stern's last prediction was what a half a percent of world GDP you know as my grandmother would say BOPKIS exactly so in the context of all of these stresses let's itemize what you might call what the sector what I'll call the general of the war against climate deterioration has to look at we probably have transportation systems how you produce electricity home insulation the nature of agriculture I understand Adair Turner a fellow at INET has been talking to me recently about how the weaning of the world from too much eating of meat can actually help in this process take me through something like that well I'm not a scientist I'm a high school dropout who never went to college so you might want to take all this you bet I want to check it I think there are these guys like Bill Gates who's got Steve Jobs these guys didn't finish college either they did okay but you hung around in Ann Arbor you got some osmosis I hung around with Abby Hoffman that was quite an education yeah man so so let's see you have to decarbonize electricity you have to go to 100% electric and possibly solar produced hydrogen vehicles and you have to do it fast so in agriculture you have to stop tearing down the rainforest and the primary driver of rainforest destruction is clearing land for animal feed for meat so the global appetite for meat is definitely killing the planet and people will need to eat less meat I eat meat but I maybe eat it once a week three times a month and I've been experimenting with the impossible burger and the new meat substitutes and they're really good and they're getting close to cloning meat in the lab so we won't have to produce it using agriculture but yeah meat's a big problem because it cuts down rainforest and the this over dominance of cows now is producing a lot of methane which as I've told you traps way too much heat on earth this is not a natural amount in agriculture there are other things they need to do like no-till plowing that doesn't they're gonna have to get rid of dependence on fossil fuel fertilizers and that's the dominant fertilizer in agriculture but you really you can convert to organic agriculture that builds up soil and by building up soil microbes and fungi you actually take carbon out of the air and put it into the soil which is a much better place for it to be so you need to do all that but then even that won't be enough because there is I think 415 parts per million carbon dioxide in the atmosphere now when the industrial revolution started I believe it was 275 parts per million and anything above 325, 350 parts per million is a catastrophe long term for example at the current level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere the last time we had this much in the earth's geologic history which is long before humans existed the seas were 15 meters higher so if we don't take some out nobody can tell you exactly how long it will take but enough ice will melt that the seas will be 15 meters higher again which means I think civilization basically gets destroyed small roving bands in the mountains doesn't sound like a civilization to me so yeah this is the job of the next 20 years is doing this you know a lot of the oil wells and gas wells are leaking tons of methane they all have to be capped Biden has been talking about how we need to put oil workers to work doing this so yeah all of the above it's a massive restoration transformation project but you know better than me, Rob and people in your audience every major infrastructure wave in history set off great periods of prosperity the interstate highway system the Roman roads, the Erie canal the internet infrastructure transformation is a great thing I would go to the late Felix Rowett in Besmelebeke he wrote a book on 13 episodes called bold endeavors which was about exactly the theme of how the vitality that came from the transformation the auto industry depended upon the highway system so the construction of the systems, what we call the public goods and then how the private sector reacts in a complimentary way with an E to take advantage of those platforms and just recently at INET we made a course on venture capital and the economics of innovation with Bill Janeway, one of our co-founders and Bill went through the history of the relationship between the state and the private sector in transformations and the state often for major transformations to that are obviously really beneficial the state has to play a leading role at least for a time the advent of the internet the so called Silicon Valley Revolution is underpinned by people like DARPA the NSA the intelligence community and others the highway system as you mentioned or for that matter even the war preparation the famous activist Naomi Klein older brother Seth recently wrote a book called The Good War it's about the analog between the transformation of Canada now in the energy world because they both have demand and supply side considerations get because fossil fuels are a big source of the supply side production GDP what you call it I believe that Canada is one of the six largest energy fossil fuel producers in the world so they need a big change and what Seth did is he studied how the Canadian society rose to the challenge of supporting the allies in World War II they entered three years before the United States and he puts that together the critics of the book are concerned that the notion of what you might call a war preparation creates anxiety about centralization and authoritarian control and so some of your kind of libertarian conservatives are very concerned some who in recent months feared Donald Trump's authoritarian style sure feared a war preparation analogy but nonetheless that marshaling of the state not sitting back and waiting as economists would say for the price system to tell us what to do deciding what to do when using public resources to drive the pace and the design of the transformation we must and the danger of authoritarianism is much worse from climate and refugee chaos than it is from transforming the economy we have to do these things and we can and it will be good for us but again time is running to run out this is the big problem and looking World War II in what four years we transformed industry not one private car was manufactured and sold in this country for four and a half years not one the arsenal of democracy got to work and the heads of all those companies were given quotas to meet by the government and very favorable contract pricing and they all made more money than ever and they civilized and built things at a scale that they didn't even think was possible so of course it can be done and the alternative is unthinkable so if we don't save ourselves it won't be because we can't it will be a failure of imagination and it will be a dominance of disinformation this is what I'm concerned about I think the analogy of state led preparation for war you could almost imagine climate changes like a Martian attack on earth and if a UFO came now we'd probably mobilize together pretty quickly you know a friend of mine wrote a book about the psychology of global warming he called it don't even think about it why our brains aren't wired for climate change and he said apropos what you were talking about and he said so imagine this scenario the story comes out that the CIA has discovered that the North Korean government is pumping a dangerous gas into the atmosphere that is raising global temperatures and causing extreme weather and melting ice and flooding our cities what would people say go deal with those MS do something and then you say oh that's global warming or you know scientists have discovered a giant asteroid headed for the earth and it's going to hit in 10 years and wipe us out what would everybody say get those rockets up there and knock that thing up of course but for various reasons you know the thing about carbon pollution is you can't really see it you can't taste it you can't see the enormity of how much we've put in the atmosphere it appears to be a future rather than a present risk which is not true but that's how our brains are perceiving it so we're not acting but you know I actually am very old fashioned I have a lot of faith that the majority of the American public and the global public if they actually knew about this enough in simple and accessible terms would demand that we act and the big part of the problem to me is the public is not sufficiently informed about this so they are not demanding action I want to take exactly what you said to a new a new frontier in this conversation we have seen the exploitation related to globalization frightened a lot of people feeling like governance is in tatters and it is spawned a reaction a nationalist reaction it is in my view absolutely essential that nations cooperate for the global public good in meeting the challenge of climate change you take a poor country like India people need food they need employment they need health care and they burn a lot of coal it is what we now have to do is get to a place where the world comes to the financial aid of India to transform their energy structure not just for the Indians but for the air that you breathe in Norway yeah in other words we have a stake in their succeeding and we should join them this is going to require a re-starting of the notion of the importance of global cooperation when after WTO and trade and all these other things and the US-China rivalry things have really been an unraveling trajectory for quite a bit of time well I think you're probably going to see what John Kerry now the international climate global envoy a big focus on getting cooperation with China and on exactly this you know but this is also why it's important that people understand or be taught the simple truth about this because you put carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from anywhere on earth it doesn't matter where it comes from it traps heat for all of us and so we have to help these poorer countries transform and what drives me crazy is that if we did it properly it would be good for us they'd buy a lot of our stuff and their economies would grow and they could pay a bunch of it back so the Chinese are a big problem right now because they wind down their domestic coal industry because of air pollution they I'm afraid are exporting coal plants to the third world to keep their state run enterprises going in the coal sector and this is frigging suicide that's suicide and I'm sure some of the Chinese leadership know this so hopefully there'll be more debate about this now as Kerry starts trying to engage them again but and by the way India is moving to solar very fast because solar is now the cheapest form of energy on earth and by the way it is guaranteed to keep getting cheaper you know there's a Moore's law in electronics manufacturing and it says that every time volume of production orders doubles prices go down 18% and this is what's been happening for years now with solar and it's now happening with batteries and it's happening with wind the Moore, as Avery Lovens likes to say the more of these things you order the cheaper they get and the cheaper they get the more of them that you order so this is a virtuous cycle and we're not anywhere near the end of it so it's just crazy not to do these things because it will result in very cheap energy and once the batteries are cheap which is coming then the storage issue goes away and I'm sure by the way that that's Elon Musk's strategy he's out to replace the utilities because a lot of people just be able to produce their own power in their own house and store it in their own house and feed it into the grip yeah I think Elon Musk has done more than anybody on this the cars are amazing I just wish, I just don't know about his Mars thing, I mean let's save Earth the likelihood we're going to survive on other planets biologically is low let's save Earth it's a pretty amazing place well one of the last themes that I'd like to explore with you and it relates to your concern about if we don't engage in climate displacement of people and migration and so forth can be dreadful we have a group called the commission on global economic transformation at INET that is led by Joseph Stiglitz and Michael Spence and there are about 22 people from around the world that are part of this group and we have been looking at the sources of disruption technology and the future of work globalization financialization and climate but as we started to explore we saw something very very powerful on the horizon and that is the continent of Africa has a very young population the international office of migration projects by 2070 the African continent will have a population of close to 5 billion people it will be on par with Asia in terms of size but it's an equatorial region climate change an underdeveloped economy depends very much on subsistence farming climate change will destroy arable lands and drive people off of the farm because they can't provide for themselves like it's happened already in Guatemala we don't have what I'll call the East Asian development model manufacturing, infant industry led protection and learning by doing and you got 5 billion people that if there isn't a coherent development plan and there are lots of positive elements in this I know Jack Ma the Lujan Academy in China working on the deploying of technology and forms of enhanced education for people who are needing to understand more about agriculture there are a lot of good strands but the really interesting thing to me is if we don't address climate you can ignite an outward migration with a base of 5 billion people and as we've seen all around the world migration of others to your system people find frightening not of course it's often my understanding from people like John Ralston Saul who works on this that the frightening part is that it's just people with different customs different religious traditions different ways of behaving that you don't understand intuitively and as they get to be larger in your system it's people become afraid they become hostile polarized but the magnitude of what climate change can do to ignite global migration out of Africa is really really a powerful scenario that adds to many of the things you brought up tonight about why we have to take big decisive global action now yesterday it's almost impossible to really grasp how the magnitude of the suffering that we're going to cause if we don't act in Africa all the coastal cities of the world I mean yes arable land is going to get destroyed some of these migrant caravans coming up from Guatemala and El Salvador this is people who can't farm anymore as you know the Syrian Civil War you know prolonged droughts taking people off their land played a big part in that and this is just the beginning of this but imagine you know Mumbai and Karachi they're very threatened cities a quarter of Bangladesh will be underwater in the next half century if we don't hurry up and do something about this and even back home you know Miami cannot be saved there is nothing we can do to save Miami because Miami is built on porous limestone former coral rock and so as the seas rise it comes from below no seawall can save Miami and anybody buying property in Miami is out of their mind unless they have a you know 5 to 10 year time horizon only so the massive nature of the refugee flows to come are unimaginable and in Asia too I was in Shanghai a few years ago it's a very vulnerable coastal city of 24 million people it's right on the water and the water there is canals and it's interlaced through a bunch of the city and I tried to find one person in the week I was in Shanghai one person who knew that if we don't act Shanghai is underwater in the next 30 to 50 years and nobody had ever heard that and that's not just because of the information control of the Chinese Communist Party if you went to Miami try finding people that know that it's not savable you can barely find anybody that knows that so this is not only an information problem but it sure is one yeah well David you and I spent some time in Michigan and we've also spent time around the music scene and whenever I do a podcast I always try to think what would be the theme song and I think I think I can go to that Southeastern Michigan for this one and Martha Reeves in the Vandellas nowhere to run, nowhere to hide nowhere to hide we got a deal with this climate change now and if we do then we can have dancing in the streets there we go touche beautiful David thank you for joining me a pleasure, nice to see you Rob come back perhaps in a few months and take another look at things as the Biden administration unfolds and we see some of John Kerry's work or Jennifer Grandholm former Governor of Michigan is the Energy Secretary she's great there's an interesting team Janet Yellen at the Treasury she's got a group tuning up to be part of this and I welcome your return to help me and our audience success whether we're moving forward and keep working those information systems teaching us all thank you very much