I’ve learnt the most about climate change from those who deny it — George Marshall — TEDxEastEnd

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: I love, I guess I could call it love, I love talking to people who disagree with me. It's a great time right now to talk to people who disagree with you, because let's face it, we're in a time when there's a lot of argument going on. I like trying to understand what their values are, what makes them tick, why are they thinking the way they are thinking, and what is it that has led them down a different course to my own? Why are the views that they are holding different to mine? This has really been also the journey of my own activism, of trying to be more effective, and as I'll try and explain to you also, trying to incorporate values of real diversity, trying basically to make change. I haven't always been like this. I am a radical environmental campaigner, and I spent a lot of my time shouting at people. This is me in a previous incarnation. G7, heads of state meeting. Not just shouting at people, but also making sure that I'm chained to something, so I cannot be removed from earshot. In this case, plastic garden chain, great, gets past the metal detectors. Shouting is great, isn't it? Everybody, have a shout. Just shout now. Hey! That's fantastic. Doesn't that feel good, to be shouting with people who you know, who you like, who support what you stand for? But listening is a lot, lot harder. And listening to people you don't agree with is truly challenging. And as a radical, because I think of myself as a radical, actually listening has been the most radical thing that I can do. I work on climate change. Climate change is an issue you really want to shout about. Because I'd say of all of the issues we're hearing about today, it's the one where people's attitudes have become most detached from the overall threat. They're kind of like cut away from the ice sheets of scientific facts and sort of floating across the ocean. A little sort of iceberg of self-sustaining positive fantasy. I became so concerned about this, I formed an organization 12 years ago called Climate Outreach. And we are the leading specialists in Europe in talking to people who are normally not engaged with climate change at all. I spend a lot of my time in focus groups, in interviews, sitting and listening to people not like myself who are cut off from the Green Debate. A lot of time with grassroots conservatives, but also of trades union activists, with people of different faiths, of people of different ages and classes and cultures, people who are basically cut off. But I also spend a lot of my time talking compulsively to strangers. I have a target that every day I will speak to one stranger about climate change. And I don't cheat on that because I could count you as a thousand days and that's let me off for three years. And I think you're an easy audience too. Like strangers sitting down talking with me, I live in a small town, two and a half thousand people. I'm starting to get the feeling of people now crossing to the other side of the road and they see me coming because they're worried that they might be in my quota for the day. And I hear all kinds of things. A lot of people are scared, a lot of people are concerned. A lot of people don't want to talk about it at all. Two-thirds of people have never had a conversation with anyone in their lives about really the largest, I would say, existential threat to our futures. Two-thirds of people. That means when I do it, and I hope when you leave here, you will do it too, that could be the very first conversation I've ever had in their lives with someone about this issue. And I hear all kinds of weird and crazy things. You know, oh, climate change, don't need to worry about that. That's not going to happen for thousands of years. Oh, climate change, oh, that's already happened in the past, hasn't it? Oh, it's always happened. Oh, I don't, oh, it's a bit cold today. I don't see much of that global warming you keep talking about. Oh, oh, God, it's nice and warm today. Oh, this is nice. Maybe with climate change, I'll be able to grow grapes in my back garden. Oh, climate change, it's caused by the rich. It's caused by the poor with all their babies. It's caused by the Americans. It's caused by the Chinese. It's, oh, why don't you scientists just make up your minds and tell us what's going on? I hear all of this stuff. And the important thing about this is that it shows that actually people's attitudes are not grounded in the science. They're grounded in narratives. Narratives based around values, attitudes, things that they hear from other people like themselves. That's why we have to understand what makes people tick and the people who don't accept what I work on. So we can try and find a way of meeting that matching point between what they believe in and the truth of it. The other thing is that those views don't come from nowhere. All of these little denial tropes about climate change have actually been planted by people. Because I'm a climate change communicator and out there, there's a posse of climate change non-communicators. Just as I dedicate my life to trying to create action on this, there's a whole world of people out there who dedicate their lives to trying to undermine my work. And you know what? I want to talk to them too because if I'm going to talk to people who disagree with me, I'd better talk with the real arch people who disagree with me. Like this guy here. This is actually a poster that was up all around Paris as one of the number one climate criminals. This is Marnie Bell. He's now lead advisor to Donald Trump on climate change and he is the person who's been put in charge of deconstructing the Environmental Protection Agency. I had a great afternoon of Marnie Bell. Listening, I have to say. Listening. I said, Marnie, listen, we're not going to agree on any of this stuff. But you know what? You're a communicator. I'm a communicator. Tell me what you know. Tell me how you have gotten to be so good at this. Let's face it, everybody likes to be flattered. You are so good at what you do. Tell me everything. I'd learned so damn much from that meeting. Of course, he said a lot of rude things to me as well. He had a pile of, a stack of papers in front of him when we met in his offices. And it turned out that they were printed from my blog. Every single rude thing I'd ever said about Marnie Bell, which he then sat there and read to me, page after page. And can I say, if any of you write obscure blogs and you wonder if anybody reads it, I cannot tell you how satisfying it is to have it read back to you by the very person that you've been slagging off all of these years. Now, Marnie Bell. The meeting with Marnie led to another peculiar thing, which was an invitation. An invitation to be the guest speaker for the Mid-Texan Tea Party. Always happy to meet new people. Sure. Why not? My hostess, the lovely Deborah. Deborah. Deborah, the hostess with the mostest small arms. This actually photograph is not by me. This is the photograph which was on her advertising campaign materials when she run for the governorship of Texas, which she got an alarmingly large number of votes for. I'm there in front of a, I don't know, 40, 50 well-lubricated Texan libertarians on a ranch in the middle of nowhere with plenty of space to hide the bodies. Tell me, I said, because I'm always up for listening, tell me what you think about climate change. Well, they said in an accent that was probably rather more Texan than my home county's. Well, they said, it's a lie. Whoa, whoa, whoa. They started going, it's a lie created by extremists, socialist, environmentalists. Whoa, whoa. To undermine the American way of life. To destroy and take away our resources. To take away our fundamental constitutional freedoms and extend the power of government. Whoa, whoa, whoa. They're all going, [00:07:59] Speaker ?: Oh. Oh. [00:08:02] Speaker 1: Oh, thank you. That's very interesting. I found when I listened back to the tape, I'd go, oh, Terry Thomas. Have I read? How interesting. It's very bracing. But whilst it's funny being up with a room of avidly, passionately opposed people, it's not easy either. I mean, there's a lot of things in their values and their politics which I fundamentally and utterly disagree with. But I'm not going to find that out unless I go and meet them and talk with them. And I took other things from that meeting as well. One thing I took from it was that these were not bad people. These were politically engaged, active, community activists of a kind which I have worked through all of my life on community-based campaigns against open-cast coal mining, against new supermarkets, against forest destruction. The other thing was that they had formed a set of narratives around their values. And that there was an alternative world in which it could have been a very, very different narrative. They could have been just as passionate in their campaigning for action on climate change. There's nothing in climate change that inherently makes it a left-wing or a right-wing or a socialist or a libertarian issue. There was an alternative narrative that climate change was the greatest threat to their freedoms, to their security, to their property, to their opportunities, to God's creation, to their landscape, to the rights of the unborn child. There was an alternative narrative that could have been there that dealing with it was the biggest opportunity. It could make America great again. It could provide jobs. It could provide new opportunities, security, world leadership. These are not my values. I don't like most of these narratives. These are their values. And the point is, there was a world in which there could have been narratives which fitted with who they were. But the problem was that people like myself, my colleagues, blessed them in the environmental movement of the people who are active on climate change, had never bothered to even talk with them. Most of my friends thought I was insane even going there. But why the hell are you talking with them? Because in truth, not only did they not talk with them, but they despised them and everything that they stood for. That creates a void. And into that void moves people like Marnie Bell. The people who move into that space are the ones who poison the world. And have poisoned it for a generation now. And this is deadly for climate change as an issue. Every single Republican candidate in the US fundamentally denied climate change and climate change science. It has become such a mark of conservative belief in the United States that now climate change, your attitude on climate change, is a better predictor of your politics than any other single issue. Abortion, gun control, capital punishment, none of these issues are as divided as climate change. We're not that bad yet, but we're getting there. You are twice as likely to think that climate change is a myth if you are conservative than if you're left-wing. You are twice as likely to think that climate change is the real major threat that it is if you're left-wing than if you're conservative. So, I guess what I'm saying here is actually much bigger than climate change. It's that we're at a very important point in history at the moment. as activists, as campaigners, as change-makers, we really have a choice about where things can go from here. We can go back into our shouty mode, mount our barricades, say, "You are idiots, we're not talking to you. Go to hell." And let's face it, we have the most polarizing president in American history at the moment. This is his strategy. This is how he runs his politics. We can do it by his game, or we can do it by our own. And our own, I suggest, involves actively listening. We talk a lot about listening, but in the end, we find it very hard to do. This is not easy. This is hard. Listening to people who are not like ourselves, not necessarily liking them, not agreeing with them, not finding necessarily a consensus, but listening to them and understanding that they need to see the key issues of our times in their terms, not ours, with narratives based around their values, not necessarily our values. And I'll give you four reasons, I guess, why, as an activist, I think, that this is so important. I think, firstly, because on the issue I'm working on, climate change, we don't have a hope in hell of dealing with climate change unless everybody is on board. So, any pretense that we can just talk within one group and one bubble and not extend out with the challenge of speaking to people across the spectrum is delusional. I think that a second reason is that if we don't do this, we'll pay a very high cost. If you don't listen to people who are not like you, you don't learn things. You know, there's only really two people who tell you the things you really need to hear. The people who love you and the people who can't stand you. I'm always very happy to have the people who can't stand me telling me what they think because I know that I might hear some truths there that are useful. You know, it was an enormous mistake in the 1930s for the conservatives not to listen to the socialists who were warning about the rise of fascism. But I suggest, actually, it was an even bigger mistake for the socialists, for the activists of their heads buried in the Morning Star not to listen to the warnings and the very clear evidence of what Stalin nightmare was turning into because that was coming from the pages of the Daily Telegraph. And the Second World War is an important parallel for what we're working on because it is the proof that as a society, as an economy, we can completely retool and rebuild ourselves once we have recognized there is an overarching threat that we need to all work together on. Climate change is an overarching threat. It needs a complete reconstruction of society and the economy. And what was relevant in the Second World War was that it did not involve the left and the right and all of the different shades of opinion reaching a consensus, agreeing with each other, liking each other. All they had to agree on was that they were all going to play their part against an overarching threat. They had different ideas, different values, and at the end of it, very different visions about where the world was going to go. And that, for me, is the model of change because the third lesson is to say change has always been diverse. change, political change, however much different sides might like to airbrush out the complexity of it, has always been about people from across the board learning and supporting each other. The anti-slavery, slave trade campaign was led by a number of evangelical conservatives. Campaigns for, campaigns against apartheid, campaigns for social rights, for justice, for gay rights, for gender, have always drawn on people, unlikely partners, coming together and learning from each other. And I guess that brings me to the final point on this, which is that I believe passionately in diversity. Diversity is a source of enormous strength because the strength comes from the difference. I support diversity in all of its forms of gender, of ability, of sexuality, of race, of faith, and so on. But I think my colleagues in the wider movement have an enormous blind spot when it comes to the diversity of politics, of political worldview. And on the issue I work on, that is the most deadly, right down the middle, polarizing force of all. And that's why something needs to cross over. Now, we all know this. This is all sort of, oh, I don't want Deborah up there the whole time. We all, we all know this intuitively, don't we? We all know when we deal with our neighbor that we're going to find common ground, we're going to get along, we're going to like them, we're going to find similar things to joke about. We all know that when we're working on a community campaign, I don't know, heavens, we've got so many to fight for now, haven't we? to fight for our local hospital or our local school. We know there that we're going to find common ground with the people because we're all facing a similar problem. And we know that when we form a community-based campaign like that, that actually diversity is strength. We want people from all different walks of life, different ways of seeing things to come together because we know that we'll learn together. But when we get bigger, we lose sight of that. When we deal with these large, huge, overwhelming challenges, we all start to get kind of tribely. It's not like feeling groovy, it's like I'm feeling sort of tribely behind our banners, rah-rah. And that's where, for me, to share with you as an activist, the greatest learning and the greatest challenge has been how to take the common sense from the smaller scale to the larger scale to learn across, to spend my time not just thinking about it but actively going and finding the people I disagree with, sitting down, listening to them, respecting that they have a point of view and trying to learn from it. So, do you agree with me? Good! Good! Right answer! Thank you very much. Thank you very much. [00:17:34] Speaker ?: Thank you very much.