Climate Change: New Data, New Debate

[00:00:00] Alex Bell: Hello, everyone, and welcome. My name is Alex Bell, and I'm the president and CEO of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. We're delighted to have you all with us here today for another deep dive on what's happening in the existential risk space and why it affects you. So today we'll be discussing climate change and the recent IPCC report about a very slight shift in some models and future scenarios. The report is interesting and useful, but the debate it sparked is also really important to unpack. Climate change is among the most politically polarizing issues we're dealing with today as a society. The overall science is settled. The Earth is warming due to human activity. But there's a high degree of uncertainty in how and when certain effects of climate change will be felt in different parts of the world. And that uncertainty leaves room for some people to create narratives that are at odds with the actual reality. As you all know, environmental research and climate modeling is based in data and facts. The attacks on the science are often rooted in opinion and partisanship. So today we're fortunate to have with us two guests who understand the science, the outlooks, and how to engage in the debate that informs both sides, that educates. And they recently co-wrote an article for us. We'll put the link in the chat. The article was so important and timely that we decided to actually pull this event together just to discuss that article. So our first guest today is Dr. Genevieve Gunther. Genevieve is the founding director of End Climate Science and the author of The Language of Climate Politics, Also Fueled Propaganda and How to Fight It. Her work is focused on engagement around climate, the future of climate politics, clean energy development, and disinformation about climate technologies. And joining us as well is Dr. Michael E. Mann, who is the Presidential Distinguished Professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Mike is a climatologist and a geophysicist and focuses on climate variability and extremes, paleoclimate, tropical cyclones, and climate education and policy. He's the author of numerous books and regularly helps to connect the field of climate science to the general public. We're going to jump right into the conversation, but we'll be monitoring the chat on YouTube throughout, and we'll incorporate your questions during the session. So the recent IPCC report, that's the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, recently released an update on RCP 8.5. So, Mike, can you maybe start by telling us what is RCP 8.5 and why is it making news? [00:02:38] Dr. Michael E. Mann: Yeah, so RCP 8.5, which sounds, you know, very confusing. I mean, what does it mean? There's a decimal point in there. It's not exactly a user-friendly way of describing a scenario, a carbon emission scenario. It actually relates to a very technical term that we call radiative forcing. What's the warming potential of an external agent that warms the planet, whether it's the sun, whether it's greenhouse gases from carbon emissions, human-caused carbon emissions. It's a measure of sort of the forcing. How hard are we pushing the climate system? And it turns out that one of the sort of traditional measures of, you know, the forcing is what we call climate sensitivity. How much warming do you get if you double the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere? Pre-industrial levels were about 280 parts per million in the atmosphere. Doubling would mean about 550 parts per million. And this doubling of CO2 is a standard metric. Again, we call it climate sensitivity. And it is associated with a radiative forcing, if you like, of 3.7 watts per meter squared. That's one watt per meter squared is roughly the amount of warming you get from a Christmas tree light warming one square meter of the ground. So it's a measure of how much, you know, these greenhouse gases are warming the surface. And if we double the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, which originally we thought we would be on course to do by the middle of this century under sort of what we used to think of as business as usual, burning of fossil fuels. That would be 3.7 watts per meter squared. So RCP 8.5, that's a measure of the total radiative forcing. And if you do the math, that's more than twice 3.7. So in fact, it's akin to more than a quadrupling or more than a tripling of CO2 concentrations. 8.5 is, you know, roughly two and a half times 3.7. So that used to be sort of what we envisioned as a worst case sort of business as usual scenario where we failed to take any meaningful action to reduce carbon emissions. If we just continue to extract and burn fossil fuels, then we would not only double the concentration of CO2, but by the end of the century, we'd probably triple the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. And that was the standard scenario that we used to look at sort of a worst case climate scenario. Well, and I think we'll get into this. That looks less and less likely. It looks less and less likely because we're actually making some progress, not because climate change has become any less of a problem. In fact, if anything, we're learning that the impacts of warming are exceeding what our models predicted just decades ago. But this is a measure of the progress we're making. We're no longer headed towards more than triple pre-industrial levels of CO2 in the atmosphere by the end of the century. The worst case scenario now looks like a little more than a doubling of CO2 concentration. So we've made progress, but that's still too much CO2 in the atmosphere. That's still too much warming. And that's still far too much risk for us to rest on our laurels, which some would gladly do. [00:06:34] Alex Bell: Thanks for that outline, Mike. Genevieve, can you expand on the aspects that led to this shift, particularly on renewable energies, and how has the recent data sort of changed outlooks? [00:06:47] Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, I think what it's useful for non-scientists to understand is that RCP, I'm sorry about the thunder. We, of course, are having a minor episode of extreme weather in New York City at the moment, but that is probably appropriate. [00:07:03] Dr. Michael E. Mann: Let me just say, by the way, that extreme weather events are one of those things that are exceeding our model predictions. [00:07:09] Speaker 3: Yes, that is a really important thing that will come up a lot later, I think. But what is really important, I think, for non-scientists to understand, or was illuminating for me to learn as I researched the disinformation that's arisen around these scenarios, is that RCP 8.5, as Mike said, was understood both as the worst case scenario and the kind of business as usual scenario because it didn't have any climate policy factored into the story that lies underneath this level of radiative forcing. It was just sort of, as Mike said, we're going to dig up all the coal in the world and just burn it. So, around 2019, researchers at this California think tank called the Breakthrough Institute started poking at this scenario, the hypothetical story that underlies this level of radiative forcing, and asking, "Given the price drops of clean energy, given the new economics of climate solutions, is it really plausible that we are just going to dig up and burn all the coal in the world over the course of the 21st century?" And they decided that, no, it wasn't plausible. And they started pushing back against the story that underlies this hypothetical sort of historical estimate or future estimate of what humanity is going to do over the course of the 21st century. So, they started kind of trying to critique and undermine that story, and indeed they did have a point. As Mike said, like, you know, clean energy is much less expensive than fossil energy at this point, almost everywhere on the planet, the world has managed to pass some climate policy, most notably in China, who passed this massive all-of-government, all-of-society climate policy called the 1+N format, which was in tandem with their pledge to have net zero emissions by 2060. So, the way the politics and the economics looks, maybe, at least how it looked before President Trump was elected in 2024, seems like it is no longer the case that we're going to just never have another climate solution implemented either by the markets or by governments. And so, it's not plausible to say that we're going to achieve that much radiative forcing by the year 2100. Now, the problem is, is that the way this was presented initially was extremely polemical. Not only was the title of the paper, which really brought this into the foreground, which really sort of like put this in the eye of journalists and policy makers, not only was that paper entitled, "The Business As Usual Scenario Is Misleading," some of the co-authors who worked on this, including a gentleman named Roger Pielke Jr., who is currently a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, which is on record as saying that the climate crisis is manufactured and doesn't exist and that scientists are alarmists. They used the fact that this story was getting refashioned as an excuse to say that any science that had proceeded using RCP 8.5 to try to model future climate impacts was illegitimate, that it was based on something that couldn't possibly come true. Now this, and we'll get into this later, I assume, but it totally ignores the legitimate scientific reasons to use a high forcing scenario. It also ignores the fact that the new high emission scenario actually, it actually ends up with the same level of forcing in 2150, simply 50 years after RCP 8.5. So we have no guarantee that the world isn't going to heat up as much as RCP 8.5 modeled. Furthermore, and again, we're going to probably get into this more later, the scenario, the forcing itself doesn't take into account climate sensitivity, as Mike was talking about various feedback loops. It's just a way to get you to a certain level of forcing that allows you to model things in your climate models, but it was immediately weaponized by bad actors to suggest that climate scientists were doing something illegitimate and also to say that, oh, we've avoided the worst case scenario now, so we can all relax. We don't need to pass any more climate policy and we can just let the market figure it out because, look, clean energy is cheap and neither of those things are, of course, true. [00:12:16] Alex Bell: So let's let's dig in there a bit. You know, it seems that even when a small change in the outlook appears in climate scientists, the skeptics pile on an attempt to discredit the entire history of climate science, even though the history of science is showing evolution and data and analysis. So, Mike, maybe maybe you can start unpacking these political attacks and then Genevieve follow on, you know, to talk about how the fossil fuel industry industry interests sort of affect this debate more broadly. [00:12:52] Dr. Michael E. Mann: Yeah, well, I think I thought Genevieve sort of laid it out there pretty nicely. I mean, part of the problem here is that you have these bad actors, right? You have individuals who have, you know, seeming credentials once as, you know, academics, but have now sort of laundered those credentials into the world of conservative think tankism and aligning themselves with conservative think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute, which, as Genevieve said, you know, has, you know, this is an organization that has essentially dismissed climate change as a hoax or an overblown problem. And the irony to me, and I'm interested in Genevieve's thoughts here as well, but what seems so ironic to me is that the only reason that these new scenarios look a little better is because we're making progress in decarbonization and moving to renewable energy and initiating policies that start to get us on the right path. Despite all the attacks and all of the efforts by these very same bad actors to thwart any climate progress, to thwart any transition away from fossil fuels. So here they're taking what is actually a success of climate policy, the fact that to some extent we're actually listening to what the scientists have said, and that has spurred an effort globally to move away from fossil fuels. I think 86% of all new power generation in the world this last year was in the form of renewable energy. So that's real progress. The problem is we still have a lot of legacy fossil fuel energy. It isn't adequate to just be adding more renewables than fossil fuel energy. We have to be retiring fossil fuel infrastructure. And if you look at these new scenarios, in either the high scenario, the new, you know, SREP 7, again, an acronym, I won't even try to explain what it means, but it's a new set of scenarios that try to reflect sort of the facts on the ground, the progress that we're making. And there's a high scenario, which still, as Genevieve said, looks really bad. It's the same warming we were talking about with RCP 8.5, just delayed 40 years, which is a short amount of time when we're talking about that degree of warming. If you look at that scenario, or even the medium scenario, which sort of says, yeah, we've made progress and we're going to sort of retain the progress that we've made. The high scenario is sort of, as Genevieve alluded to, a trumpier scenario where we actually see backsliding on the progress we've already made. But the medium scenario is sort of, we lock in the progress we've made. We don't necessarily make a whole lot more progress. Well, that's a scenario where carbon emissions remain at about 40 billion, 40 gigatons, that's a billion tons of carbon dioxide pollution every year. Just sustaining that, when we know we've got to reduce carbon emissions now by more than 50% within the next decade, if there is any hope, and that hope, frankly, has probably slipped away of keeping warming below a dangerous one and a half Celsius, three Fahrenheit. Now we're really looking more seriously at two degrees Celsius, trying to keep warming below that level. And things look a whole lot worse than if we had been able to limit warming to 1.5 Celsius. To do that, we have to dramatically bring down carbon emissions over the next decade or two. And these scenarios, which these conservative think tanks and their, you know, the talking heads that sort of espouse these, you know, that have been behind these attacks on the IPCC and climate scientists, if we were to listen to them, we would basically just be keeping those carbon emissions where they are. They seem happy with a medium scenario where we keep carbon emissions where they are for, you know, the rest of this century and eventually warm the planet well beyond three degrees, four degrees, possibly five degrees Celsius, nine degrees Fahrenheit. So, you know, there's, there's no, there's no end of irony in, in, in the nature of these attacks, where they're coming from, and the fact that the very same people who are attacking the progress we've made were the ones trying to stop any progress at all. [00:17:35] Alex Bell: Mm-hmm. Genevieve, you want to expand on that? [00:17:39] Speaker 3: Well, I mean, I think that was perfectly said. I don't really have anything to add to that in particular, but I would just like to point out that these kinds of attacks, how they're proceeding, isn't entirely new. So, you know, we tend to think of disinformation as a kind of lie that gets lobbed from the extreme right wing or the extreme anti-science crowd. But the problem is, is that these very talented propagandists, if I may call them that, these very skillful, slick climate deniers who are actually trying to thwart progress, as Mike said, while acknowledging, of course, that climate change is real, they do something a lot more subtle. And that's what we're seeing here. So let me start with an example. The concept of the carbon footprint, for example, this was like a perfectly legitimate concept in sustainability research, because you want to understand, you know, how a group of people like a nation, say, uses resources, but you might also want to disaggregate those numbers into kind of individual citizens or consumers. And so sustainability researchers came up with the term carbon footprint as a kind of measure with which to do research. But BP, or at least the PR firm that BP hired, recognized that the concept of the carbon footprint does something really insidious. It makes every one of us feel like we are responsible for climate change. And we are responsible for solving it by somehow suspending our participation in the economy, in the culture, in the system we have right now, as if we could solve climate change if we just never left our house, never took another plane, never had another hamburger. And of course, individual action is a really important element in this overall systemic problem, especially because we want people to understand that it's cool to care about climate. But even if everybody never left our houses, we still have a whole system burning fossil fuels. Even in COVID lockdowns, our emissions only dropped by, I don't exactly remember what the number was, but it was something like between 7 and 14 percent. It wasn't even close to the sort of full net zero reduction of carbon emissions that we need to see. But they don't want us to be pressuring our governments to mobilize public resources to solve this problem. They want us all to feel guilty, overwhelmed, and you know, just throw up our hands and feel like this is something we can't solve. They want us to be doomers. So what this is called in discourse research, which is basically what I do, is called appropriation. You have one group in a sort of ecosystem of discourse that takes a term out of another like group's vocabulary and, as Mike said, weaponizes it to try to make the public feel or think things that will prevent us from phasing out fossil fuels and bringing our economies down to net zero emissions. So this is what's happened in this case too. It is a legitimate piece of political, cultural, economic, and scientific progress that now we have a narrow band of scenarios, estimates about what's going to happen in the future, right? And that extra 40 years before we get to RCP 8.5, that's not a lot of time, but it's also two generations. So this is absolutely progress. But what they're trying to do is extract this truth and weaponize it first to make people think that, oh, we can relax. We have avoided the worst case scenario. We don't have to pass any further climate policy. There's no more need for protests. There's no more need for any kind of like for us to exert our agency. We can just sit back and relax and do other things because climate change isn't going to be that bad. And as Mike was suggesting, this is absolutely not true. And then the other thing, as I mentioned, that they're trying to do is question the legitimacy and the trustworthiness of climate scientists by calling them essentially alarmists. And they are doing this because scientists actually remain the most trusted communicators culturally and especially about climate change. [00:22:35] Dr. Michael E. Mann: So yeah, I mean, yeah, there's this, you know, again, Genevieve has laid it out there so nicely. And in a previous book of mine, The New Climate War, I introduce a set of words that all begin with D besides because there are these tactics in the new climate war is denial becomes increasingly difficult, becomes increasingly difficult to people to tell people that they can't believe what they're seeing with their own eyes, although there's an effort to do so. There has been this effort by these bad actors, polluters and petrostates and plutocrats and that ecosystem that has worked against climate action for decades. There's been an effort to sort of move to these other tactics away from outright denial to doomism, as Genevieve mentioned, weaponizing doomism and despair, deflection. This is, you know, this idea that it's all about individual behavior. The climate problem is your fault because you're not recycling and putting it all on the individual. That's a way to deflect attention away from the systemic problem that requires policy action. The fact is, you know, as Genevieve said, BP wanted you to think that the problem was all your fault, when in fact, 70% of our carbon emissions come from 100 polluting companies, 100 fossil fuel companies and polluting companies. And so in the end, you know, there has been in this effort to weaponize what the scientific community has done in an act of almost judo to turn it against the climate community. Another example we could talk about, and we could have had a whole conversation about geoengineering. Once again, there's sort of a core valid scientific basis to talk about possible interventions that we might at least investigate, not necessarily deploy, but we might think about, is there a way to, you know, if we really find that we're unable to prevent catastrophic warming through mitigation alone, are there other things that we can do that might offset some of that warming? There's a worthy scientific conversation to be had there, but that too has been entirely weaponized by bad actors, by polluters who want to say, look, we can just geoengineer our way out of the problem. Trust us. We will figure out how to fix this a decade or two down the road. So let us continue to extract and sell and burn these fossil fuels in the meantime. And I'm sure Genevieve and I, you know, could come up with a dozen examples of this, but this is just another one. And this latest gambit, this effort to weaponize the new SREP scenarios is just the latest effort to try to weaponize the scientific community and to call, as Genevieve said, the credibility of scientists into question. That's a big part of this, to accuse us of alarmists, to discredit us in the minds of the public, which then makes us far less effective in communicating the problem to the public and policy makers. [00:25:56] Speaker 3: And they don't even have to prove their claims, right? As Naomi Oreskes wrote about nearly 20 years ago, I think it's 20 years ago at this point. [00:26:08] Dr. Michael E. Mann: Sounds about right. Yeah. [00:26:09] Speaker 3: All they have to do is manufacture that glimmer of doubt. Wait, I heard that scientists were exaggerating a little bit, maybe. So it's much easier for them to plant those seeds of doubt, to muddy the discourse, than it is for scientists to communicate these technical, complicated concepts and then help people see how important they are. That's, you know, that's like unicycling on a, I don't know, what are those strings call that you wrote on a tightrope while trying to juggle? I don't know how Mike does it, honestly. Anyway. With the two of these, they do. [00:26:56] Dr. Michael E. Mann: Oh, sorry. I was just going to say. Yeah, with the two of these. Yeah. [00:26:59] Alex Bell: Sorry, go ahead, Mike. [00:27:00] Dr. Michael E. Mann: I just want to put an exclamation mark after what Genevieve just said. You know, it's much more difficult to build something than to tear it down. Exactly. It's much more difficult to educate and inform than to confuse and disinform. And that is the fundamental asymmetry in this battle. [00:27:17] Alex Bell: Yeah. Would the two of you say, though, that the number of critics, skeptics, people engaging in purposeful disinformation, is that group expanding? You know, even as younger generations seem to accept the reality of climate change and want to do things, are they gaining ranks or are they simply getting better at what they're doing? Mike, may I take this one? [00:27:43] Dr. Michael E. Mann: Please. [00:27:48] Speaker 3: I don't think the core group of climate skeptics has changed at all in a generation. So, Trump's Department of Energy tried to release a scientific report on the state of the science to justify their rescindment of the endangerment finding because you're not allowed to make sort of moves like that as an agency, an executive agency, without having scientific justification. So, they tried to write this report, which was just, I mean, it didn't follow any of the norms of academic integrity and was completely ripped to shreds by a 400 -- [00:28:29] Dr. Michael E. Mann: To call it garbage would be doing a disservice to garbage. [00:28:33] Speaker 3: Well said. So, it was the same seven people who wrote that report that had been testifying in Congress, invited by Republican climate deniers, et cetera, for, you know, 20 years. The difference, however, is that now the right wing with the rise of social media and the rise of AI generated platforms or AI-generated content, at least, is that this core group of skeptics are able to produce messages that now get disseminated much more broadly than they used to when we had a sort of mainstream media that everyone kind of consumed together. Not that the mainstream media is always, you know, clear on what people's interests are. Like, for example, in the New York Times article about this controversy over RCP 8.5, they called Roger Pielke, Jr. a scientist and talked about the scientific debate around this. And, you know, I realize that there is some, you know, genuine disagreement about whether political scientists or economists or, you know, sociologists or scientists or not. But in that context, they really should have made it clear that he is a political scientist who has left academia to work for the Air American Enterprise Institute. And so, you know, that in their attempt to be kind of judicious and fair and to credential all the people that they write about, sometimes they do the discourse a bit of a disservice by giving, you know, these bad actors a little bit too much authority. But the real problem is, of course, the rise of social media and the fact that once you've, you know, established yourself on a social media platform, the algorithm is just going to give you the same content that you are interested in over and over and over and over and over and over. So there's, it's just the amount and the first principle of any effective climate communication is, you know, short, clear messages repeated ad nauseum. And so that's what these people are getting. They're getting short, clear messages of climate denial repeated ad nauseum on these social media platforms. So that's the problem. But that's a bigger structural conversation about the news media and, you know, how the so-called reality-based community haven't really shifted yet. They haven't really understood that placing op-eds in the New York Times is no longer how you really drive voter engagement or the political conversation in the United States and Europe for that matter. So, you know, you brought up administration policies. I want to shift this to a question. I want to shift this to a question. I want to shift this to a question. I want to shift it to a question. I want to shift this to a question. I want to shift this to a question. [00:31:08] Alex Bell: And I want to shift it to a question. They want to shift it to a question. policies. I want to shift this to a question from YouTube. And Mike, I drop in on the previous question, too, and maybe you can start with this one. How have recent federal cuts to scientific research affected the climate research community? How will it affect the climate research community into the future? [00:31:29] Dr. Michael E. Mann: Yeah, it's a great question. And yeah, just to tie up that last thread there, I think it's even worse than, you know, how Jennifer just characterized it, because sort of even in a neutral environment, this this the advent of social media would make it far more challenging to communicate, you know, climate clearly to a large audience in the way, you know, that we used to be able to do when there were trusted, you know, small number of trusted voices that everybody sort of listened to, we all had the same facts, we could agree to disagree about what the those facts mean, but we had a common set of facts and we've lost that, if that's tough enough, but then we have that the bad actors we're talking about, you know, Elon Musk, with the system from Saudi Arabia and Russia to Petra States buying Twitter and weaponizing it for the mass dissemination of anti science on climate on COVID-19 and vaccines. And that was the topic of my recent book with Peter Hotez, science weaponizing it for the mass dissemination of anti-science on climate, on COVID-19 and vaccines. And that was the topic of my recent book with Peter Hotez, Science Under Siege. You know, in both of these arenas, we've seen sort of the weaponization of AI, the takeover of social media, and even many of our so-called legacy media outlets being bought by conservative plutocrats. So look at what's happened to CBS News, the Washington Post, and we could go on down the list. So it's even worse than, you know, it isn't just the structural changes in the media in a neutral sense. It's also the fact that we have a small number of extremely wealthy plutocrats, often tied to fossil fuel interests and conservative interests that have taken over our media and weaponized it for mass disinformation. Now the question you just asked, you know, the cuts in funding for science and sort of the elimination of certain climate science laboratories, just in the last month, you know, there was, we heard about this effort to defund ocean measurement platforms that allow us to measure the warming of the ocean. Fortunately, there was such fierce pushback, not just from climate scientists, but from a large cross section of our population of our community, that it looks like they're backing off that. And that tells us something important. It is important to push back to fight to not just accept that this is the way it needs to be. And the midterm elections will be our most, the best opportunity that we have, in fact, to do that to express that in a way that translates meaningfully to policy and politics. But it's having an impact. I think it's demoralizing the climate research community. I think that's the intent. I don't think it's a coincidence that the institutions that they went after were, you know, the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies laboratory and, you know, in the upper west side of Manhattan, famous because it lies above the Seinfeld diner, Tom's diner. That's where NASA GIS lies. It's this, and it's just this famous institution where James Hansen decades ago did simulations that first demonstrated that we could see the impact of warming on the planet. He announced that in the Senate hearing that sort of launched this new era of concern and awareness about climate. So they went after NASA GIS. They went after the Mauna Loa laboratory in Hawaii, where we've been measuring CO2 concentration since 1958, which shows that ever rising trace that indicates how much we're continuing to increase the concentration of carbon pollution, the warming that it's causing. And so they have selectively gone after institutions that sort of lie at the heart of the scientific, the climate science community. I believe it's an effort to demoralize the community. And again, there's been enough pushback that, you know, that none of these things yet are a done deal. And, you know, we still, you know, as Genevieve alluded to, [00:35:55] Alex Bell: we do have agency and we have to remember that. So Genevieve, what are the points of, you know, of positive progress? Mike talked earlier about 86% of new energy, I believe was the phrase, being produced by renewables. Obviously, as people continue to contend with high gas prices here in the states, you know, the sort of interest in when are we going to see this tipping point where renewable becomes the way of the future. Are we are we close? You know, is it coming? Is it going to start being [00:36:32] Speaker 3: affordable for everyday Americans? I mean, clean energy is already affordable for everyday Americans. Granted, there are sort of outlays and initial investment that you have to make if you're a homeowner and you want to say put solar panels on your roof and batteries in your basement or switch out your methane gas heater for a heat pump. But it's already affordable. And that was the point of the Inflation Reduction Act to help people make those initial investments. And then you would recoup your costs within a very few years. So the problem, there are two problems. The first problem is that, as Mike was saying, it's not just about sort of adding renewable energy as new capacity, we do have current fossil fuel infrastructure that will need to be retired before the end of its useful life. And that is a kind of public policy challenge that isn't going to be entirely, I don't know, solved by the market, especially because we're currently seeing an administration that was put in place by the fossil fuel industry who donated almost half a billion dollars that we know about to Trump's campaign, leaving aside all the other right wing politicians that it put into Congress and in state houses. And the reason it can't be left to the market entirely is because as I'm trying to say, we have now seen this government who is clearly willing to intervene in markets and act illegally to try to prop up the fossil fuel industry, despite the fact that it is more expensive for consumers, despite the fact that actually if, you know, it was responding to rational signals, it would be doing everything to transition away from fossil fuels and, you know, disperse clean energy everywhere. So we do have a problem with our politics that needs to be solved so that prices can actually act like the signals that they are. So that's, you know, one question. But the other question is that, you know, a lot of people who understand that climate change is real and who are very concerned about it, even alarmed about it, still don't always understand that we actually do have to phase out fossil fuels. So this was something that I worked on in my book, The Language of Climate Politics, this contradiction that even among Democrats, at least, you know, in 2023, only a minority supported the phase out of fossil fuels, which is really what we need to see to get our emissions all the way down to net zero. So, and that is a more of a cultural thing. It's a, it's an expression of disinformation, because in some sense, fossil fuels have been at the center of American culture, and people don't always understand that they're dangerous, they're poisonous, and they're at the center of climate change. So there was just a new poll released by a polling firm called Searchlight, and it asked Americans what their favorite types of energy were. And number one was solar, number two was wind, but number three was something they called natural gas. And natural gas, of course, is a fossil fuel that is absolutely contributing to climate change. And indeed, we shouldn't call it natural gas, this was like a branding thing that the fossil fuel energy industry came up with, we should be calling it methane gas, because that is at the core of this stuff that we're burning in our homes, despite the fact that once you burn it, it becomes carcinogenic. It's highly explosive when you pull it through pipes. And it's extremely expensive. It's the what sets energy prices for us. So if our bills are going up, that's because of this methane gas. But Americans still like it, because they've heard from everybody, not just the fossil fuel industry, but also from, you know, Democrats in some cases, that natural gas is a climate solution, it lowers emissions, blah, blah, blah. But this is, of course, only relative to coal. And this still isn't actually what we need to be going for. We don't need to just lower emissions, we need to zero them out. So how you talk about that can be complicated, because of course, most people don't like to hear that they can't use something that they're used to. But you can get around that in 1000 different ways, again, by, you know, emphasizing the economic benefits of clean energy, the health benefits of clean energy, the fact that, you know, we have the solutions, and we can substitute them if we get the sort of, you know, fossil fuel industry, so supported governments out of office, so all of which is to say, we are closer than ever before, at being able to do this, we actually could do this today, we have all the solutions we need, what we need is to take enough power, so that we can actually use our public institutions to make the kind of big systemic changes to help us with these investments, so that we can phase out fossil fuels, move to clean energy soon enough to halt global heating at a relatively safe level. [00:42:07] Alex Bell: Absolutely, absolutely. I was just going to say, we're about out of time, but a quick thought from [00:42:11] Dr. Michael E. Mann: you, Mike, and then a final question to both of you. No, I just wanted to put another exclamation point of what Genevieve just said, and as I like to say, the obstacles aren't the laws of physics, they're the [00:42:22] Alex Bell: flaws in our politics. Yes. So, I think we could keep going forever, and I actually, you guys both talked about, you know, just because we've seen some, you know, potential good news doesn't mean we can take our foot off the gas, and that's certainly something that I've experienced in the nuclear space. You know, in the nuclear space, I think a lot of people at the end of the Cold War thought, oh, glad that's done, and now here we are 30 years later, and it's actually worse than it's ever been, and going in the wrong direction, so I think there are lessons that we can apply from these other existential risk areas, but it is summer reading season, movie season, you know, if people watching this want to know more about this, but maybe in a way that's accessible, what is a movie recommendation or a book recommendation you have for our listeners, and Mike, we'll start with you. [00:43:20] Dr. Michael E. Mann: Oh, well, you know, I mean, it would be gratuitous of me to suggest my books and Genevieve's books. We've, of course, written quite a bit about everything we just talked about, but, you know, we also write op-eds. I've been very fortunate to have the opportunity to publish a number of commentaries for Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists over the years, and in fact, earlier when you were asking, you were talking about, or we were talking about sort of the challenges that we face in the Trump, the era of Trump 2.0, despite the fact that there is progress being made. I wrote an article for the Bulletin called "Welcome to the American Petro State," and it's really about, as Genevieve was saying, how right now we have an administration which is acting as a petro, the United States is a petro state under Republican rule, and every bit as much as Russia or Saudi Arabia, and we have to recognize that, and we have to recognize that the only way that that changes is if we turn out in large numbers and vote out the politicians who basically are apologists for fossil fuel interests, rather than, you know, genuinely concerned about the needs of the people they're supposed to represent. [00:44:44] Alex Bell: Yeah, and certainly I think what we want to see is a shift to a more non-partisan view of how we manage these policies together. There's no single elegant solution, and we actually are going to need all sides participating, and countries participating, to actually make the steps, you know, that we need. [00:45:02] Dr. Michael E. Mann: Well, let me just say, I'll very quickly say that some of my biggest heroes are actually Republicans. John McCain, in my book, was a climate hero. He actually came to my defense when we were under attack by climate deniers decades ago. Our friend Bob Inglis, a conservative Republican from South Carolina, who travels around the country talking about conservative climate solutions, and why conservatives should care about conserving the planet. And so there are good people, and I absolutely mean that, on both sides of the aisle. We have to create space for those Republicans to come back into the fold, and to not be afraid to challenge the current orthodoxy of their party. [00:45:45] Speaker 3: Genevieve, book or movie, Rick? Okay, I am not as humble as Mike is. I have no compunction against recommending my book, really just in this case, because in the first chapter of my book, which is about the disinformation that if you talk about the dangers of climate change, you are alarmist. In that first chapter, I do go into the deep history that began in 2019 of this talking point that the RCP 8.5 scenario was illegitimate and sort of proves that climate scientists have no credibility. So if you're still interested in that after this conversation, you can look at that in chapter one. And then the book that I'd like to recommend today is not actually a climate science book. It's a novel, and it's extremely bleak, but I find it absolutely necessary to reread every couple of years. And I find it incredibly inspiring. And it's entitled The Road by Cormac McCarthy. And it's about a father and a son who are walking essentially from some unnamed landscape to the coastline after what seems to have been a nuclear conflagration that has created a nuclear winter. And there's no food anywhere to be found. And humanity, at least in the area where these men are living, has fallen into cannibalism. And so the father is trying to get his son to the coastline safely, but also with his own goodness and his own humanity intact in the midst of just unimaginable barbarism. And, you know, I read this novel and I tell myself that any despair I might feel about setbacks in climate progress or the election of climate deniers to the highest office in our nation is just, you know, it's not minor, but it's something that can be overcome because the father says to the son repeatedly, we hold the fire in us, we hold the fire. And that is something that I think we all should remember that we can actually be a light and a force for good, even in moments when things seem to have backslid or it's challenging because you never know what's going to happen next. And we need to be ready to step into power when it's our turn. [00:48:17] Alex Bell: No, thanks for that. And it certainly reminds me, I find all these nuggets from Einstein, one of our founders in the archives. And one of the things he said in 48 was that no one had the right to withdraw from the world of action. Exactly. Humanity faces its greatest test. And here we are again with a number of tests in front of us. And certainly we need people in on the action. Unfortunately, that's all the time we have today. This will certainly not be the last time we're discussing this topic and would certainly love to have the two of you back. Fighting climate change, the effects of climate change is central to the bulletin's mission. So to stay up to date on the threats, the science and the great work that experts like Genevieve and Mike are doing, please visit our site, sign up for the newsletter, subscribe to our YouTube channel, follow us on social media and consider subscribing to learn more, donating to support the bulletin's mission. So lots of work ahead, but glad to have experts like you in the fight. Thanks so much to Genevieve and and to Mike and thanks to all. Thanks to you all for coming. And now we're adjourned. We'll see you next time.