nature. and today we're extremely honored to have our guests, the eugene linden and an award winning investigative. and more recently an author of fire and floor the people's history the climate change from 1979 to present welcome linden. very happy to be here. you're doing very, very well. thank you. delighted. be here. now, before we discuss the book, you've been covering the climate or climate change since the 1980. so what prompted your interest in the earliest article you wrote, which i believe was in 1988? and what was the feedback? well, i started looking at climate and i'd been following it actually earlier than that, but i started writing about it. i mean, once you understand climate is the context for all human activities, you know, you can have a climate that's hospitable for humans, a climate that's not hospitable for humans. and the danger we were creating, a self-inflicted wound. they're creating a climate that might not be as hospitable humans as the climate the last 10,000 years, which has been the sweet spot for humanity numbers, having grown from 5 million to now. 7.8 billion. and it's the climate we've had to call the holocene is a rarity in other words. it's not something that comes along often. i mean, it's a product of orbital dynamics and a whole lot of things. and it's, it's been good to us. and so if we're messing with it i wanted to know about it and you just mentioned the holocene just for those people who are familiar with with that word, could you briefly describe what that is and what it means? oh, it's it's just the most recent climate era. and it began after the last eight and the last ice age has ended. and the ice age has began about 2.7 million years ago. they were actually for humanity as well, because human evolution, we probably wouldn't be as smart as we are today without the disruptions of the ice age, because during these periods of cooling and, drying is repeated periods. the specialists died out and the generalists thrived. and so we became successful, smarter. but once we got to where we are, we needed climate as it is or as it was up until the 1990s. and when one of the most startling facebook post i read was by stefan rands or who is the one of the leading climate models in the world of the university of potsdam in germany and just a year ago or so, he put up a post saying, congratulations, humanity, you've left the houghton. and what he meant was that temperatures had risen 1.1 degrees celsius beyond normal variation within holocene for the last 10,000 years. so so just to talk about the book very briefly, as well, just to kind of the kind of influence or what made you write the book and what is what is the reason for 1979? why have you indicated that? well, start with the the the first question of why did i write the book. i think i was triggered that's the word i wrote an article in 1993 for time magazine on the insurance industry and the climate change. and back then, we all thought and i thought that the insurance industry would turn out to be the white knight of climate change, because it would it lives and dies by pricing risk in a climate is a risk. and if they underprice it they go out of business and sure enough, the reinsurance side of the business did do some of the most the best studies i've seen on what climate might do and the economic costs of climate change. it turned out to be a very timid white knight. so forward to 2018 and the campfire was 12 and a half billion dollars in losses and the times had an article they quoted a leading lobbyist for the insurance saying they're scrambling to understand this risk of climate change. and i read it and thought, what you've about this risk for 25 years at that point and not only that then some of the best studies on it and it raised the question in my it's like if the insurance industry is scrambling and is not reacting to climate change even as they know it's an existential risk to their business, it bears trying to understand why no other industry is reacting as well. and and and so i decided i wanted to write a. an account of how we got to where we are because my great grandchild and my peer out of their caves and wonder, you know what? why how did you guys blow it? why didn't you do anything about it? why 1979? well, that was the first time that the issue of global warming attention at the presidential level. jimmy carter commissioned a blue ribbon panel. the panel came back with their recommendations and one of them said, if we don't deal with fossil fuel emissions soon, we will likely see in climate by the year 2000, they were off by 15 years. we began to see changes in the late and the mid eighties and they became indisputable in the nineties. i did read the a report of the cdc report which suggested trying to limit global every temperature to two degrees above pre-industrial levels, which turns out to be precisely the standard agreed by all of the world. 35 years later, in the paris agreement. how did how does that strike you when when when you see that so many years later? well, i mean, is on the one hand, it's infuriating first of all, two degrees is going to be no picnic. we're at 1.1 degrees now. and the last decade saw over $3 trillion in weather related losses the decade before that was 1.5. so it's almost doubling every decade and that is going to continue because of the the momentum, the carbon dioxide and greenhouse gases or carbon dioxide stays in the in the atmosphere for many decades, maybe as long as 100 years. so and it raises the question, you know, of the counterfactual what what could we have done? and i my argument in the book is that the battle was lost in the nineties, because keep in mind, 1990, we're already seeing temperature emissions since then have risen by 60%. this is when it was already a problem, 19 population is up 2.5 billion people since 1990. the average number of emissions per person in this globally is four tons or more. that's 10 billion tonnes of carbon. that is now means that the rock we have to push up a much deeper hill with a much shorter timeline and so we needed to act back then and back then. unfortunately everybody thought we have time. it turns out we didn't have time. so in your book, you mentioned about lyndon johnson, he spoke humans on earth geophysical experiment with the atmosphere. so kind of he was kind of was he the first presidents who really speak out about this. and for carter really influenced president carter to take the actions that he did. well, he had well, first of all, johnson say that and he had brilliant speechwriters. so he he was the he was the first president to talk about. it. my guess is that was -- goodwin, you know, who was just incredibly eloquent and carter, i think, surrounded with very good people in terms of the science, in terms of the science. he was an engineer himself, as you know, a nuclear engineer. i think. and so he was he was partial it. but keep in mind at the same carter's interest, he was interested in climate change. he was more interested in energy because fresh in their minds is of course, the opec oil embargo and gas lines and everything else. and so he wanted and so at the same time, he's saying he has a blue ribbon panel saying we need to act or we're going to see climate change at that very same time. he's also vastly increasing use of coal, but that was in the name of energy independence. so you know he he wasn't speaking consistently, but he did create tax credits and other incentive that dramatically brought down the cost of solar and wind during this period not to grid parity not nearly. but had that continued in the eighties, we would have had a reagan couldn't care less about the issue and of course pulled the coal the incentives and the of the late environmental said it that caller right sold by years but if we go back to the nineties again china and india we're just beginning their industrialization particularly china. 1990 they had half our emissions even though they had a far larger population. now they have twice their emissions are by far the biggest greenhouse gas emitter on the planet and have muted all the efforts have been there have been efforts by, particularly the european union and japan, others using energy efficiency as well as renewables to kind of lower our carbon. and so we've actually done a reasonable job, but it's been completely overwhelmed by the emissions of china, which is now the largest emitter in the world, and india, which is now the third largest, was still the second, i understand the president carter also visited solar panels on the west wing. yes, he did. well, you know, he did i mean, again, i think this is driven more by the issue of energy. and if energy efficiency and energy independence, then my concerns he was concerned about global warming and he did have very good people and, you know, if i had had he been reelected we might we might not be facing what we're today. but the other the other issue, again, in the nineties was we were telling china, you know, you got to leapfrog, you don't have to recapitulate the use of fossil fuels. even as we were pushing fossil fuels. so we were it was a question of saying do as we say, not as we do. and then the other part of this, of course, is we were giving a mixed message because there was well, this is in nineties. well, you know, president clinton was, you know, sensitive to the issue. there were many in our government who were saying, you know, that same issue, that it's a hoax and then the other thing that began in the nineties, which was really unfortunate, was that business interests mobilized to delay any action on climate change, and they were incredibly effective. and they used a playbook that had been invented to dispute regulation on tobacco and then kind of optimize the ozone hole issue to delay action banning ozone of destroying chemicals. and then, you know, they didn't just mobilize, but they mounted a blitzkrieg in the early nineties. and the playbook this feud, the science question the motives the scientists say the consensus doesn't exist and most of all say we have time and so starting in the nineties you know people felt we had time and then in the late nineties the worst possible thing happened, which is the issue became politicized and once an issue becomes politicized, the facts don't matter. if the messenger is deemed to be illegitimate, you're not going to listen to the facts. and that's been the case ever since. so even today there's a recent gallup poll a couple of years ago showed, you know, a large number of people don't believe the climate change or 45% don't believe that climate change will have a serious impact in their lifetimes, even as climate change is a serious impact. and so, you know, without that kind of unity and political will, you're not going to get action. exactly. so throughout the book, you talk about the transitions between a different presidential administrations and you also intertwine this with these the theory of four clocks. could you briefly describe what how that works and what that's about? the four clocks is the device used to tell the story of what's happened since the dawn of the climate change area, which i, i the book goes from 1979. but the term climate change a really began in 1988 when it became a mainstream issue. and so i use these four clocks because it it unpacks a way of understanding exactly happened in the interaction of these different realms. the first, of course, is itself and that's just what's happened with climate, of course, that's been way ahead of anybody's in terms of the rapidity and intensity of the changes, even with the amount of loading of the atmosphere that we've done. the second clock is the scientific and that has a structural lag, a reality of a couple of years because you have to gather data, you have to analyze it now to have it peer reviewed and then publish the third clock is the public and that has long lag reality by because as i say, even today, large segments of the public don't acknowledge that climate is changing or that there is a consensus among the scientists where there's consensus jelled in the nineties and it's rock solid as bad, as robust as any scientific census we've seen. and then the fourth clock and it's the most underappreciated and perhaps the most important is the business and finance community, because for the first 30 years of the climate era, they were dragging anchor on action. and they're one of the main reasons we haven't done anything, and we can talk about that in the last couple years there's been a sea change and it's ongoing. we're may and most of the multinationals in the large financial institution now recognize that climate change isn't the threat. it's climate change itself. and so they've they've they've got an on board. but i do think that what i discovered was that there's a blindspot in the way we do business essentially the momentum of business as usual makes it very difficult for us to integrate into our business long term threats because and that's why i use the insurance industry. they were incentivized to keep writing policies long after it became clear the climate was changing because businesses live and die at the retail and those who actually and those who actually bring in the business tend to, you know, tend to be at the rewarded. and those who don't tend to be marginalized. let me i'm going to just read a sentence or two from the end of chapter 18 where i say our modern market economy is so ingenious, it's spreading and hiding risk that is very adaptability, has become a threat to its we're so gifted at finding the profit to harvest in every risk and pushing the day of reckoning that. as a society, we have lost the ability to recognize as and just the true danger and that is that is our weak stuff. we have basically created an economy that is designed to drive off cliffs and that has to change if we're willing to address its just to step back to the science ific side of this. so, you know, obviously it's rock solid our understanding of of what has happened but back in the day if understood it correctly, there was a belief the climate wouldn't change at speed. it would take a long time to sue, to adjust to human and human based influence. what you have an analogy in the book, if you pull forward where a codebreaker is reading the letter looking for the clues only to realize that code was contained within the microdot on one of the forces. yes, that's exactly right. what happened was and you're you're exactly right. in the in the seventies and and through much of the eighties, the conventional wisdom client sciences was that it would take decades, if not hundreds of years if not a thousand years, for climate change, which why it's so remarkable that that blue ribbon panel said we'd see changes by 2000. by the way. and the reason for that, going back to the analogy in the microdot that the proxy was, we used to reconstruct past climates weren't precise enough to see the changes, the rapid changes that might occur in the past. and then in. 1988, there are two major ice core drilling projects in greenland started on a european and american project took out these giant two mile cores and, started analyzing them. these cores had a precise record, and other proxies also came, which had a precise record. and what was revealed was that no, climate doesn't change in a safe, stately and gradual way and more likely violent and rapid shifts and seesaw patterns that are highly volatile and and so the old analogy was that climate change was like a dial. it was slowly turned upward. yeah, the new analogy was like a switch. and that's richard alley, a paleo geochemistry is is that analogy. but in any event, that realization, which when the papers were published in 1993 in nature and i think science as well that realization started a paradigm shift the scientists about what about the nature of climate change and the realization that if we push the climate system too hard, it might go into one of these rapid shifts and i think that's exactly what we're seeing right now where climate is shifting. know a sea rises many times the level the rate of sea level rise for the past thousand years etc. etc. and so we you know, we we lose the scientific community to climate side opportunity found itself in the process of studying a rapid climate change even as they were discovering that rapid climate change. and then they look over they look from the data and they say, oh, this is happening now also. and the last time it happened was 12,800 years ago. and the other thing you bring up in the book is that the scientific rigor doesn't match your time in journalism, can you just describe or go into a bit more detail on that? because i that was fascinating in the sense that it the journalists when really reporting on the you know the scientific we're well was what happened mean i may not be answering and i hope i'm your question but scientists are loath to go beyond data and and so there is a conservative and in science. and those who would delay action exploited that conservatism and so for instance in the 1990 this giant the ipcc a first assessment of the state of the climate. they didn't have data from the permafrost scientists, knew back then that if temperatures rose the in the arctic would likely warm faster. they'd also know that permafrost is likely to melt and that there were a hundreds of billions of tons of greenhouse gases stored in the permian sites that might be released. but in the first report, they couldn't mention because they weren't in any research stations. and so it would fail to address that issue, which is actually becoming quite serious. the other thing is that in journalism. there was a tendency to what i would say, coal, it's called both sides as it was, it attended c to or whenever made an assertion about climate to try and find somebody who disputed it even after the consensus was solid and rock solid. and that also led to confuse and belief that in the public that there wasn't a scientific consensus about human climate change long after was it was as though if long after we knew to cigarets cause cancer that anybody who asserted some new cancer finding you'd have to go find somebody and no, they don't cause cancer. we don't do that. but we did it with climate change and well into the 2000 when when the reagan administration came into power, that they quickly on did a lot what president calls was putting in motion. but at the same time you mentioned the ipcc came into came being so that that was in nature way it was set of cause a lot of challenges didn't they. you just describe it that also. right. right. i mean the ipcc was formed i think 88 and the first report was in 1990 and it was meant to be, you know, the assessment of the best science. but they brought into the tent policy makers, government representatives and which in a group which included a lot of people who had no interest in taking action, climate change and so. well the chapters of these early reports reflected the state of art science at the time to, to a large degree, the summaries introduce, all sorts of hedges and things that made them the most bland reading could imagine. and the problem that was, once again, those who would delay action took it and run with it. i'll give you an example. an economist named william nordhaus is trying to model the economic costs of climate change, and he was using the ipcc and so he took one one thing, which was that the statement of thermal inertia. the oceans was going to dampen any signal of climate change well into the next century century and said looked and came up with these absurdly low estimates of cost to gdp of climate change in the year 2100. so. so one of the estimates was a quarter of a percent of gdp. in other words, 1%. in other words, no one is going to go jumping out of their chair and saying we've got to do something. if 120 years later or 110 years later, sorry, there was only going to be a quarter of a percent hit. the us gdp. one of the assumptions behind those low estimates was truly absurd, which is 87% of the us economy estimated occurred indoors and thus was insulated from climate change. well, tell that to the people of houston during hurricane harvey. tell the or or the industries in houston. the industries in the port of new orleans during katrina or any other businesses in the fire zone in california and oregon during the the epic fires we've had over last few years. but in any case, once he's a distinguished scientist, he actually was given the nobel prize a couple of years ago for his work on climate, which in my craw but he william this scout who was then head of the conservative economists head of the cato institute, a libertarian think tank, goes congress cites nordhaus worth saying you know, it looks like the impact on the economy is going to be very modest and not much in the long run. so we have time. and so everything conspired sort of delay action back then. and we're living with the results now. what do you think we learn from or what can the global community learn from our experience? the cfc and the ozone layer, and also with the denial effect that dupont kicked during the reagan administration right. i wrote an appraisal of action on that over time, way back when. and what was interesting was that during the carter years, they were moving towards a ban because the discovery that cfc is these chemicals used as refrigerants and other things could cause harm ozone atmosphere goes on upper stratosphere it goes on dates to 1974. it comes out. and so carter is moving towards ban then and dupont, the world's largest maker of cfc at that point, starts research on the alternatives, expecting that the chemicals are going to be banned. but the next thing that happens is reagan's elected and the cfc industry lobbyists realize reagan's not going to ban these chemicals. and so they stop. dupont starts work on the alternatives and they and they started lobbying to to not have these chemicals banned then a year or two later, in the early eighties, joe farm and then the british antarctic survey discovers the ozone hole. not only were these chemicals destroying ozone, there was actually a hole in the layer. the side of a continent. and the danger, of course, is i'm most of you know, is that without ozone layer, you have dangerous uvb radiation would hit the surface of the earth as one nasa's scientists put it, it would sterilize the planet. so this is like a life threatening thing. and but it's still very decent. they they through all these arguments, this is the industry and dupont in particular saying, oh it's a mature market, it's not going to be rising as they knew refrigeration exploding internationally. and these chemicals going to get with any case. then nassau goes in in 87, i think it was in discovery as its own as its own and discovers the ozone hole, the smoking gun, as it was called back then. and dupont realized the jig was up and and then they supported action on banning the chemicals because they knew they had the alternative. well, you know, that kind of success with climate change and, you know, we're going to be living in a sauna 150, 50 years because because ozone was one class, a chemist. if ozone was a molehill, if the were a molehill, the amount of the fossil fuel industry is everest and, you know, it is so profuse. we're autonomy. then almost everything we do contributes in some way. 2 billion tons of steel made each year, 8% of the emissions going up there concrete. another several pretend 10%. i mean, everything transportation a huge number. so it was what we realized or what. at the end of that article, i gee, there's going to be real trouble with that same playbook that was used to delay action on the on the ozone. ozone is used with climate change and indeed, that's exactly what's happened. and there has been real trouble. so just for our viewers, if you have a question for using, please feel free to pop it into the q&a section on youtube. and and we'll get to those in about 15 minutes. and just to add to to go back to the insurance industry, so as you mentioned, you know, you thought that they were going to be the white knights of the business community. you know, they were going to, you know, detect the risk. and you talk about the perverse incentives with the insurance known for their actual risk assessment should profess to have been blindsided by events. its own risk assessors. when you see in our house and play now and slaughter there in california. yeah oh let me say i mean you know i was wrong back then and i was wrong for a couple of reasons. one, i underestimated the momentum coming from the retail side of the industry. and, you know, they live and die by writing policies. the thing i was wrong about was their genius at offloading and spreading risk. for one thing, insurers as in california, are now discovering they renew policies annually. and so if big time fires happen, they can either try to pull out or they can try to up the price. and i've heard of premiums rising by a factor of ten in some parts of california and deductibles rising by a factor of 30. that kind of thing most homeowners can't afford. and so then the state, of course put in a moratorium, then only last a year, then as soon as they could hightail it, they did pull that. the other part of this in spreading risk was after hurricane andrew in 1992, which $50 billion in losses and put about a dozen insurance out of business. the industry realized they picking up all this risk and then a guy named eberhard mueller in hanover ray, a big reinsurance company in germany, had brilliant idea he created this thing called a cat bond. and what bond is, is you buy that bond, you're getting a nice interest rate, say 8%, much higher than you get from treasuries or a corporate and all you're doing, you're betting that there's not going to be a category five hurricane hitting miami in the next five years. so even if the odds of that hurricane hitting him doubled from one and 100 to 2 in a 100 to 1 in 50, you you're still got 49 chances in the next three years that it's not going to hit. and institutional investors love this bond because it's what's called as non-core related to their other assets in other words, the market could fall through the interest rates could go completely. you'd still get your nice 8% so long as the hurricane didn't hit. and so what it did for the insurance industry was it gave him access to hundreds of billions of dollars in institutional. they didn't have to backstop all the risk. and so the combination of the incentives, the retail and an ingenious spreading risk and also they can pull out, which they did a lot of in florida and what happened when they pulled out the state picked up the risk the state in other words socialize the risk. so the in effect the state entity which very quickly became the largest insurer in the state which shows you that they were underpricing risk because no private insurer would compete with them. if that goes bankrupt because of a windstorm, the the middle income taxpayers in the middle of the state are going to be picking up the tab for the more wealthy people living on the coasts. and you know something similar was happening in california with the fair program. but if all of these things enabled insurers to either leave markets or underprice risk, knowing that somebody else would pick up the risk, the net effect of all of that together is that millions of people since 1990 and since the issue became known have moved into harm's way, into the zones that are most at risk from climate change on the coasts, into the fire zones and in the west and indeed, miami is like the hottest real estate market in the country at the moment. and it is one of the counties most at risk for all in the aggregate effects of climate change of any counties in the country palm beach county, too, and other red hot real estate market. and so we're setting the stage for a potential financial crisis that dwarfs. 2008. and i had a front row seat in the crisis because i, a chief investment strategist for a hedge fund and watched unfold and actually we we were involved in trying protect ourselves and the same as something parallel could happen similar with a a climate the financial crisis that might come down the road and two would involve real estate. you know, to be triggered by people not being able to get insurance or not being able to sell their home or not being able to get a mortgage because they can't get fire or flood insurance, things like that, or wind insurance. and and finding that there aren't buyers and certainly, you know, the rhodium group, propublica and the times did, a study of the rhodium group did the study of every county in the united states county wide study assessing them for climate risk. and they had four different types of risk more but they had a wet bulb temperature. absolutely temperature, sea level rise, floods, fires, you yields and some of the wealthiest counties in the country are when you aggregate all these risks or they estimate. from 2014 to 2016 will become near uninhabitable. in other words. so are teeing up a rather large crisis that might happen. even the worst effects climate change are upon us. so the gorgon idea insure or state owned insurance for all of these citizens property insurance, is that correct? that's right. so you think that the creation of an organization like that has created a false sense of security for people moving into florida and buying property? well, it's made it. yeah, because the price it if you're underpricing risk you're essentially providing an incentive for somebody it's not simple issue keep in mind the florida keys are entirely on tourist industry. if they actually price risk for the floods and fires of floods and winds and sea level rise in the florida keys to to it's true level none of the people who work in those industries will afford to live there. you know, the ultra wealthy can self-insure. you know, if they have their house for the next 20 years, they might be happy their condo, even if they it's a total loss down the road. but most people don't have that kind of backstop and i'm already we're seeing people migrate from some of the fire zones. in california, for instance, why you just had an article on this moving in new england, which is perceived to be safe and indeed that rhodium study said that new england might be the one place that has positive migration because of climate change, because it is better insulated from aggregate risk than all the other in the country. electric vehicles become an extremely popular now. so what's your view on those and and also, could we discuss the kind of flip flopping of it, like the general motors, where they've gone from supporting the b technology to, then going back to the gas. well, i think evs have expanded far more rapidly than anybody expected, expected. and one of the reasons is ironic and, that is that the exploit fusion of smartphones in the first decade of the 2000 led to innovation in battery technology, which led to more efficient and longer lasting batteries. extending the range of these, and that's one of the tributary is to why they become so wildly popular. i think $7 gas and california is going to make them even more popular. now, some of the major auto companies started work on evs back in the nineties or even further behind. but i always had the impression that what they were trying to do was prove that evs were impractical back then. then, of course, tesla comes along and has a market capitalization that is larger than all the other auto companies put together. it's tremendous slack for that industry, and now they're all struggling to get into the business on the other hand, they they have mixed motives. i mean, i use the analogy. it's somewhat like ibm giving away the system to bill gates or giving away. yeah. and and the personal computer because they didn't want to jeopardize their their legacy business the core obviously. 95% of all the cars and gm sells are gas powered and they don't want to kill that business even as they don't want they want to be in the ivy business. and i think that battle is going to be fought. but probably going to be won by the heavy side in the long run. the money is flowing into it, and the longer they wait in terms of coming out with a low cost tv, the more entrants you'll see into the market. look at rivian coming in with a huge market cap, i think larger than gm's basically sold 200 of these pickup trucks, but there were electric pickup trucks and amazon is going to buy a ton of them and others are going to buy a ton of them for add ons. something like 24 and ten or 20% of the company. and so ford actually has an investment in the b side through apart from its own initiatives. but i think the thing is, is here to stay in what's going to what we're going to see happening, the limiting factor, to my mind right now is the build out of charging stations and, you know, they'll be next batteries coming along that are going to have even bigger ranges. and, you know, i think the other thing, you know, military these and renewables is sort of came from covid, which was in many cities around the world for the first time. and and there's residents lives had clear skies first time covered to shut down new delhi to the point there were people who lived in the city had never seen the himalayas now they had seen the himalayas all the this same thing in china. and so it's a quality of life issue. it's not just a, you know, a climate change issue, just a switch back to kind of presidential elections and the way candidates kind of kind of lobby to be president. so i was kind of surprised that john kerry, al gore, didn't run with climate, say, on on their ticket. did you get a chance to watch them? why that was. well, i did. and i noticed it. and i know exactly what was going on, that they were afraid of losing the auto workers union for. so when i went up to gore, i actually wrote an article back during his election saying, tell us who you are. al gore for msnbc, because i couldn't believe that he wasn't mentioning climate change, having sort of lived in that issue throughout his years in the clinton administration and afterwards, i came up to him again and he gave a talk at the beacon theater in new york and i said, why didn't you do it? and he said, about the uaw, at least he was honest you know, he was saying and their strategists telling them this is not a winning issue, carry the same thing all over. when i challenged kerry on it at a at a brookings institution, he went ballistic. and i talked to all of that of change. but i defy you to find one account of his campaign which says he it a major part of his campaign. he didn't and the sad thing is his strategists were right. look at what happened when tom steyer, you know, who spent millions trying to become the of climate change and really got nowhere. jay inslee, washington former governor, washington think he did the same thing for whatever reason, it has not been a voting issue and that is part because it has become politicized and. it became politicized in the late nineties after the kyoto treaty passed and business said we can't let this happen. and so they became lots and pouring lots of money into lobbying efforts to paint it as a part, the liberal liberal agenda and know it was sort of it captured some of the energy behind the wallace movement later by trump which is that these elites want to tell you how to live your life. and you know tony lee's era which the pollster on climate change said that it's funny that the denier movement took hold most in former colonies of england all of which cherished the individualistic and don't like top down instruction. that's australia, the united states to a degree. canada. and that's where the denier moments for most movements are most firmly lodged in europe doesn't have as much denier movement in terms of climate, and they've done actually a lot more trying to address the problem. and the biden administration in the last election, how well do you think they represented the climate issues? well, they tried. and then i mean, to me, the most dispiriting moment of the entire election was in the debates when biden said, you know, we've got to end fracking in pennsylvania. and trump jumped on him and said, you just lost the state. and his spinmeisters go in a furious backpedaling and saying, no, you know, it'll take a long time. get out of fracking. if in 2020 a presidential candidate can utter, boldly say, we have to do something about fuels. i mean, we're lost because we have to do something about fossil fuels. you know, if don't win ourselves from them, the earth is likely to wean us from the planet. if you look at the projections from now on, you know, even if everybody abided by the paris accords right. temperature rises expected to be between 2.7 and 3.7 degrees celsius since like 8 to 12 degrees fahrenheit. something in there climate hasn't been that hot for 3 million years before the ice ages. and, you know, it's plenty of ice back. there weren't any humans and it is seriously open to question that temperatures rise three degrees celsius between now 2100 where their agriculture could support 7.8 billion people, much less. the 2 billion are going to be added between now and then. and so it's not matter of choice. if you can talk about, gee, taking action on climate will lower our standard of living. well, climate change will lower our standard of living to the point where it might not even living. so, i mean, choose your poison. and i also disagree disagree that the transition to a fossil fuel free economy is going to lower anybody's standard of living. i think between renewables and carbon free technologies, it it can be, you know, relatively seamless and even profitable. you could you know, we didn't we the train the transition from desk phones to handheld didn't throw us into a great depression, you know, in fact, probably most people don't know economic from it, even though you gave a hit to at&t and the other phone giants. so we'll just move on. so we've got two questions from viewers. so jamie snowden, how is technology today? change and how are things? i'm how is technology today change how things were done in the 1970s? well, for one thing, the renewables are many orders of more efficient. i mean, we reach grid parity. let's go back to when jimmy carter came into office, a solar cell like $100 a kilowatt hour. you know, i mean it enormously is. and he brought it down by an order of magnitude during his administration. but since then, you know, you're now down to pennies per kilowatt hour, it's great. you know, they're competitive with any fossil fuel. wind power is as cheap, any fossil fuel. and there's a promise of new technologies on the horizon in the near term horizon that could produce electricity for, a house and a kilowatt hour. so in terms of technology, it was a seesaw pattern from the seventies, as we discussed, where we on again, off again during the reagan years and again a bit during the clinton years, off again during the bush year, you know, the there was a problem terms of like consistency, support for renewables throughout that era and but even despite that things have happened, the other thing i think is really interesting is that with the shift in focus to wanting to deal with climate change, some technologies have been dusted off the shelf that have been around forever but just weren't deployed because coal was so, one of which is, for instance, grew out of mit, came up with a way of creating steel, zero carbon steel using iron oxide and running electric current through iron oxide and some other metals. the method was developed by an mit scientist named sadoway decades ago. he was thinking of trying produce aluminum in that way. in other words, it didn't require a technological breakthrough. it's just it required a focus on, gee, maybe we need to move away from fossil fuels to dust that off and and that's the case with a lot of technologies by repurposing existing technologies, we can get a long way to drastically reducing fossil fuel emissions. i'll give you one example, which i think is on the near horizon, and that is deep beneath the earth's cloud, not earth's surface of the earth's deep, 5 to 12 miles down there is this almost infinite reservoir of heat, 400 to 500 degrees centigrade, so an thousand degrees fahrenheit, right. it's been inaccessible because. oil drilling technology only you so far to go through sedimentary rock. but when you hit the really hard down there, it's 5 to 10 times harder sedimentary. the conventional really can't do it again. a group of scientists out of mit teamed up with some veteran drilling experts from the oil industry and they are combining the two technology rigs using a technology that was originally developed for fusion research to create high temperature plasmas to actually it's called millimeter wave beam technology. those beams can be focused and actually vaporize that deep rock extent leading to accessing their deep in as little as 100 days and drilling and since time is money in drilling, you can imagine that once that source of steam is accessible. 60% of us electricity is generated by a steam turbine. if you could drill, you can substitute and retrofit one of the fossil fuel fired plants in the country if you wanted to. and the cost would be cheaper than you're getting from natural gas or coal. and so what i'm saying is that's one of the reasons i think this transition doesn't necessarily have to be as painful as everybody is saying, because once we focus our massive innovation, talent on this problem, these problems get solved. and i will use other we use let's use the analogy of covid. it's both a negative analogy and a positive analogy. the negative side is it shows that once an issue gets politicized, it's covid did. it's almost impossible break through because the message is to indulge. and if people are dying of the disease and don't recognize it. are how are you going to convince my clients in the positive side of the covid epidemic is that we developed a vaccine in a year where the past previous vaccine took seven years. you know, and so if in fact you can develop focus the world's an innovative talent on on some of these problems going to be we're going to be amazed we have to do it we have no given that scenario is century 2100 we just can't get there and so we are going to be have to take action sooner or later. i think the biggest impediment course is going to be breaking through the politicized ation of the issue. guys, thank you so marconi asks what, do you see as the edge cases of what the world be like in 50 years feeds and worst outcomes regarding sea level rise, acidification and agriculture. i don't think you want to hear it. i mean, that's that's the issue. i mean, where we're heading is a bad enough case without action. in other words, 2.7 to 3.7 degrees, the sea level rise, you know, it is exceeded all expected nations in terms of the rapidity of which sea level is rising. and also you go back to 1990, the first ipcc assessment said there was an even chance that the ice sheets would get bigger, not smaller now. we know that the west antarctic ice sheet is collapsing, greenland is melting far faster than anybody expected and it's more than 40% of sea level rise. so a lot of the world's coastal cities are going to be there. people are going to have to move out. you know the cap, we're in jakarta is already got a major throughout the city. they're going to have to move, you know, in bangladesh, elsewhere, you know, it's 100 million to 150 million people at risk for the expected sea level rise. and probably a much larger number than that. the acidification of the oceans. we can only hope. i mean, that was one of the ugly surprises, climate change, which is the oceans have been sort of most of the excess heat and a lot of the carbon dioxide. and it forms carbolic acid in the ocean and course, then these little tiny things that the basis of the food chain can make their shells and you get starvation and down the line so that is the danger. i mean, there are all these ugly surprises that have come out, but one of the ones is a very interesting is what we've seen is a greater number of hurricanes rapidly intensify from category one to category five and as little as 24 hours. that hasn't happened before. i mean, that i don't know that anybody predicted that that would rapid intensification. the other thing the storm systems and cold spells everything else tends to linger and that has to do with the like. well it's related to the discipline, the disappearing disappearing, the depreciating contra gas between the arctic in the lower latitudes without the temperature. contrast the jet stream slows down, it kinks in these storms, like one storm hit south carolina a few years where it was going so slowly that a pedestrian could walk faster than it and when you have a situation like that we get these astonishing rainfall potentials, i remember way back in the seventies, there was an article in the new yorker about rain storm that produced ten inches of rain. and it regarded as biblical and epic. well, you had something like 60 inches of rain in one out of harvey and one of the houston suburbs just. and these numbers are coming through storm after storm after storm ten, 15, 20 inches of rain that never happened before. and so we're getting all these ugly surprises and you have to that the acidification of the ocean doesn't proceed because that jeopardizes the entire food chain. thank you so down to 5 minutes and i'd like to hand it over to you. you get any final remarks that you'd like to make? well, i'd like to be. and that is, i think we have to be realistic. we're in we're already in a climate change event. climate is already changing. and it's going to continue to change. we have to take in it. our foot is on the gas. the first thing to do is to take it off the gas and the next thing to do is put it on the put it on the brakes. if there is any good news in this, i do think that these transitions going to happen very rapidly, that the technologies, once the money there and it is money is flowing into all these things and renewables and alternatives and the things can happen. spectacular fast and they have to the other thing is at the policy side, at the international level, we desperately need a universal action that us, every country on the planet reduce their emissions. i think that's doable. i propose that in the end of the book, i don't have the time to go it, but i it can't just be ad and it can't be piecemeal now because we saw what happened with piecemeal with china and india mooting all the efforts of every other country. so i do think that we can avoid the worst aspects of climate change, but we have to start right now. i mean, we it's everybody is saying that and people say yeah well and then they go back to their lives. we don't that luxury or we are creating a world that our children, our grandchild never forgive us for. okay. well listen, thank you so much for writing your book and sharing and sharing your story. your your work is extremely important. and we wish to thank you for helping continue our tradition of hosting enlightened conversation. 419 years it's been a pleasure. thank you. take care on about books we delve into the latest news about the publishing industry with interesting insider interviews with publishing industry experts. we'll also give you 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