Air Date: 8-22-2026

Today we look at how the Republican Party made climate denial its policy more than twenty years ago and is now removing the government's ability to see the problem at all. The Environmental Protection Agency under Bush refused to regulate carbon in 2003, and now the Trump administration is dismantling the science that would help us both avoid worsening the climate emergency and mitigate the inevitable destruction to lives and property now baked into the system.

Full Show Notes

Welcome to this episode of the award-winning Best of the Left podcast.

Today we look at how the Republican Party made climate denial its policy more than twenty years ago and is now removing the government's ability to see the problem at all. The Environmental Protection Agency under Bush refused to regulate carbon in 2003, and now the Trump administration is dismantling the science that would help us both avoid worsening the climate emergency and mitigate the inevitable destruction to lives and property now baked into the system.

For those looking for a quick overview, the sources providing our Top Takes in about 50 minutes today include

Consider This

Democracy Now!

The Hartmann Report

The Rachel Maddow Show

Outrage + Optimism

and Sea Change

Then, in the additional, Deeper Dives half of the show, there'll be more in 4 sections;

Section A, ON THE GROUND

Section B, EUROPE ON FIRE

Section C, THE DELAY MACHINE

And Section D, WHAT COMES NEXT

And now, on to the show. 

All this week, we've been reporting on the catastrophic wildfires happening in Western Europe, especially France and Spain, and now Greece. One line in the media coverage really stood out to me. A European scientist said all this heat and all these fires are likely to only get worse in the future to the point, he said, that we will be, quote, "passing the limits of adaptation."

I wondered what that looks like, so we've called him to ask. Johan Rockström is director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, and he noted that 200-some years since the Industrial Revolution, the Earth has remained fairly resilient, but that is changing. 

Ninety percent of the heat caused by our fossil fuel burning is not in the atmosphere causing the temperature rise which has led us to the climate crisis we see today.

It's in the ocean. Fifty percent of the carbon dioxide from the greenhouse gases we add is not in the atmosphere trapping heat. It's actually stored, half of it in the ocean and half of it on land. So a healthy planet has this extraordinary biophysical capacity to buffer and dampen, basically cool the planet.

We're seeing, unfortunately, increasing indicators of our planet losing this capacity. Not that we've crossed a tipping point, but forest systems are getting weaker and no longer able to take up as much carbon. The ocean is warming faster than we had expected. Ice is melting faster than we had expected.

This is a stress response of a planet that is trying to do everything it can to buffer and dampen change. And when we come closer to the end of this capacity, then of course the risk is very high that the impacts hit back even harder on our societies. 

And what does that look like for humans? If we reach these limits, what do, what does it mean for people on Earth?

To begin with, what it looks like is that we will have more shocks of what we're experiencing right now in Europe. Remember that we are experiencing, in places that have never recorded it before, life-threatening temperatures above 40 degrees Celsius, so that's the first thing. The second is droughts, floods- Fires that risk food security and even social stability.

We are at risk of triggering more disease outbreaks, even pandemics, which then spills over into less and less stable economies and therefore also less and less stable societies, moving into situations of displacement, migration, potentially even armed conflicts. And we see the first indications of this in countries like Sudan, Syria, Chad, where you cannot separate anymore the social conflicts and displacements and people suffering from these environmental changes.

There are, of course, many countries worldwide trying to make changes like emissions reductions, but to what extent do you think those attempted fixes are still enough versus humans are simply going to have to make drastic changes like not being able to live in certain places? 

The window is still open to avoid the most catastrophic outcomes.

And I-- what I mean by catastrophic is the point where Fires, drought, and heat waves become so difficult to handle that, communities simply have to move out. and that is what worries me most today, that we're allowing ourselves to look at these extreme events and continue to kick the can down the road and not acting, and that can take us into real danger.

So what should we do? 

One has to recognize that the transition is challenging. we've been for 200 years powering the global economy with fossil fuels and unsustainable production systems. Now we need to very rapidly move away from fossil fuels, oil, coal, and gas. We need to move into circular economic models, and we need to have sustainable ways of managing our oceans, our forests, our wetlands, our peatlands.

We know all this. We even have solutions on how to scale sustainable production and consumption practices, and still we're not moving fast enough. 

This is a very doomsday topic, but I watched a YouTube video of a lecture you gave on this, and in it you are matter of fact, but you're also fairly upbeat.

How do you maintain that sense of positivity and good cheer when the news you're delivering is so alarming? 

Yeah, that's, the advancements in science and our extraordinary ability today to measure down to the single tree and fish in the ocean, the state of the planet, is a tremendous value.

And that risk assessments is not there to scare us. Risk assessments is to avoid doing the wrong things. 

I assume those risk assessments are also meant to motivate us. 

Absolutely. And, when you think of it, in, in all other paths of our life, health risks, or if it is risks to our economy, or if it's risk to our house burning down, we are concerned.

We buy insurance. We want information. Why aren't we, seeing risk assessments as a way of ensuring that we can hand over a stable, resilient, life-supporting, livable planet to our children? 

We begin today with the wildfires sweeping across the Pacific Northwest, which is facing its worst fire season in more than 30 years due to climate change. In Washington State, firefighting crews continue to battle fires that have destroyed more than 700 homes and structures in the Spokane area.

Nearly 65,000 people have been evacuated from Spokane County. Authorities have arrested one man on suspicion of arson in connection to one of the three blazes that have devastated the area. This is resident Cami Feleg, who evacuated with her husband and children before wind-driven flames engulfed her family home.

we didn't expect it to jump the river, but we knew the winds were high. And, about 30 minutes before it jumped the river, my husband and I were seeing how bad it was, and we told the kids, "We don't wanna scare you, but we think you should start preparing to grab some things." And I grabbed my wedding album, I grabbed the kids' baby books, I grabbed pet supplies, and that evacuation thing that had the photos electronically on, memory sticks and all that stuff.

Put that in the cars, and within a few minutes, the power went out, and it was go now. Go now. 

The National Interagency Fire Center reports there are at least 99 uncontained large fires currently burning across the country. 50 of them are in the Washington/Oregon area. Meanwhile, the US Forest Service says it plans to close 57 of 77 research facilities nationwide.

Our next guest spent 42 years working at the Wenatchee Forestry Sciences Laboratory in Washington State, one of two facilities in Washington marked for closure. Paul Hessburg is senior research ecologist emeritus at the US Forest Service. He's also a professor of fire and landscape ecology at the University of Washington.

Today, he's joining us from North Carolina. Professor Hessburg, thanks so much for being with us. If you can start off by talking about just the scope of the fires, more than 60,000 people evacuated, hundreds of homes burned to the ground. Explain what's happening here as these research facilities, as these fire labs are closed in Washington, where you, worked, and across the country.

Thanks for having me on the program, Mimi. what's going on has developed over many decades, and we're seeing the fruit of a lack of action to curb, essentially, a mounting situation. A- across the West, the mountain snowpack was 30 to 50% of what it normally is. And if you think about it, forests grow in the interior where the snowpack is.

And so if snow is in short supply, forests are in short supply. They dry early. They're available to burn early. When you couple that with the fact that hot, dry, windy weather is increasing under climate change, forests are denser now, there's a constellation of things that are coming together to set the dining room table for more frequent and more severe fires.

And when you think about it, people are moving into those environments right now, and the homes, the communities, they're just not simply prepared for fire. And the short answer is, throughout the West and the East, these are fire environments, and we haven't lived and prepared as though they are. 

And could you explain, Professor Hessburg, you've, talked in your research, on forests and fires, about the fact that today's forests look nothing like what they looked like 100 years ago.

you said a little bit about that now, but if you could elaborate, why is that the case, and what are the impacts on the likelihood of wildfires being more intense and far-reaching? 

That's a great question, Nermeen, and thanks for asking that. So go back in the way back machine 200 years ago, and what you would have seen, especially in the p- Spokane area, is there'd be a, a large number of indigenous people, tribes, family groups that were basically cultivating the landscape with fire.

In the Spokane area, the Spokane tribe, the Colvilles, the Coeur d'Alene, the Columbia Plateau tribes, and the Kalispel tribes were all interacting, intermarrying, culturally burning the landscape for food and material resources. After the Gold Rush in the West, that, indigenous people are marshaled onto reservations.

80 to 90% of those tribal groups were killed by introduced European diseases. Population numbers were down, and fire started to be excluded from those woods. Our indigenous people learned that in order to live safely and securely and providently on the landscape, they needed to burn it regularly. So in the case of the Spokane area, open pine forest became dense, layered pine forest.

Instead of having grassy fuels on the ground, there's a lot of dead wood on the ground. Bark beetles are killing trees. Those trees are falling over. They're now becoming fuel. So when you get ignitions, either arson ignitions or lightning ignitions, the table is set for fires that can spread fast and burn severely.

The Spokane area is no different. People are tucking into those woods in various kinds of developments, and the developments aren't ready for fire, and fire is coming to them. So 

if you could elaborate also, Professor Hessburg, on the fact that you've said about 85% of wildfires are caused by human carelessness.

in this case, one man has been charged with intentionally igniting the largest of the three wildfires. if you could talk about that and whether there's been any, change historically, in the occurrence of this. 

Another great question. human-caused fires are actually on the rise in the United States, and they're changing the ecology of fire across the country.

arson ignitions are on the rise in some years, but they're not the big story. The big story is cigarette butts out the window. There are unattended campfires. There are people pulling over by the side of the road with very hot catalytic converters, and catalytic converters have the ... They're so hot that when they pull over and sit over dry grass, that grass will begin to burn, and if there's a puff of wind, it'll spread beyond the road.

So many fires start against, roads and trails, and very often they're just through human carelessness or accidentally unwittingly starting fires. 

But Paul, they wouldn't have the same effect if it weren't for climate change, right? The heating of the planet. And that's where we're gonna end, this discussion, with everything from the fires across Washington and Oregon to what we're seeing throughout Europe right now, some of the hottest days they have ever experienced, and the massive fires there as well.

If you can talk about what has happened with this intensification of the heat. 

So the, the short answer is that there's increasing incidents of hot, dry, windy days. And, so the climate is warming. it's getting moodier. We get deeper droughts, which we're in right now in the West, and we have pluvials, the opposite of droughts.

So we're getting hot and dry and windy weather. We're putting out 95%, 97% of all fires w- that burn under moderate fire weather. And so the landscape is burning under the worst 2 or 3% of weather conditions, and that's why we're seeing most of the fires are big and hot. So this constellation of accidental ignitions, dense forest, the wrong kinds of fuels on the ground, rapidly changing climate, and people tucking into the woods, has set the table for really difficult circumstances going forward, and we need to start acting like we live in a fire climate and have our homes and our residences ready to go for the coming fires.

60,000 people were, ordered to evacuate from Spokane, Washington, just a little north of us here. We've got a million acres of forest land, that's on fire right now in Oregon.

France, Italy, Greece, Spain are all on fire right now. It's gotta be happening in Russia and China, we're just not getting the reports. And next summer or th- this winter, our time, it'll happen in the Southern hemisphere. What we're seeing is the, the drying out of the planet, as a result of climate change, and apparently the, one of the biggest factors that's really whacking us that nobody was anticipating are these heat domes.

They're basically high pressure systems with clear air that, that just sit there and let the sunlight through. No clouds, let the sun r- really 'cause it's a high pressure system, let the sunlight through, and boom. it just dries everything out, turns it tinder-dry, and then, the smallest spark and you've got a wildfire.

And the heat domes are happening for the same reason that the bomb cyclones were 15 years ago. When I was in r- Washington, DC, we had the first bomb cyclone. It was a brand-new phrase. What the hell is this? It's these wild winter storms that just stay in one place and just pound on you and get insanely cold, and why was that?

It was 'cause Arctic air was drooling down past or through or b- the jet stream. It was pushing the jet stream down to the point where instead of being, the jet stream normally running around Northern Canada, it was drooling all the way down to Texas and bringing freezing temperatures with it and freezing pipes and everything else.

that same phenomena, again, because the jet stream has been weakened, is causing these heat domes to l- to stand in place for long periods of time 'cause the jet stream is what historically has been moving weather around the planet, and the jet stream is produced by the difference, the temperature differential between the arctic cold and the mid-latitude heat.

And when that differential is a big number, when there's a big difference between those two temperatures, when it's really cold up north and it's warmer in the center, then you've got a healthy jet stream. But what's happened is because the arctic is warming six times faster than, than we are here, this differential has collapsed, and the jet stream is no longer this strong, powerful river of air, at 60,000 feet that it used to be, and it's now just this kinda wandering, slowly moving thing that drools around and you end up with these heat domes.

Trump is insisting that hundreds of wildfires burning across the United States, Canada, and Europe are all the result of people not grooming their forests properly or not raking the forests the guy's an idiot, right? but he's not an idiot. he's a tool of the fossil fuel industry, which gave him millions, hundreds of millions of dollars and helped him get elected.

But the World Weather Attribution, this is a consortium of scientists, they say the extreme drought, the drought conditions, the humidity, the wind, all this stuff that is fanning these for- forest fires, and we've got it here. Yesterday here in, in Portland, the sun was orange. You couldn't breathe here There are five big lies that are being used on a fairly regular basis by, mostly Republicans to, justify the theft of our public lands, the public lands that Teddy Roosevelt set aside.

Other presidents have as well. Obama set aside, I believe it was Bears Ears, and already Trump has taken a bite out of that. And so let's just review these lies. Ryan Busse is writing about this, on his Substack. Ryan Busse, R-Y-A-N-D-B-U-S-S-E.substack.com.

Number one, national monument designations were forced on us by DC bureaucrats with no public comment. This is a lie. the, just last month, for example, Mike Lee, the, right-wing guy out of Utah, the Republican senator, marched out this old lie, saying that it's happening under the 1906 Antiquities Act, after Trump rolled back monument designations for 3 million acres in Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments.

The reality is that more than 2.7 million comments were gathered before this decision was made, including statements from more than 300 Native American tribes, conservation groups, religious groups, many of them in Utah. So Mike Lee is just lying about his own, too, and about his own constituents. Lie number two, gotta drill, baby, drill in America because we need energy independence.

Ryan Zinke has been pushing this. He was Trump's first Interior Secretary, before he was, fired for corruption. And he started lying back in 2017 when he was the secretary. He said, "Today I took a s- action to sign a series of directors that put America on track to achieve the president's vision for energy independence."

we reached energy independence during the Obama administration. We don't need that. Lie number three, log it or use it. Montana's Steve Daines, the, the Republican senator from Montana, is wearing this one out. He repeatedly, cites this, y- to push for a sixfold increase in logging on federal lands in Montana last year.

and what happened? the Skillet Fire erupted in Montana on land that had been logged. Logged land is basically dead land, and it's covered with, the, the remnants of the trees, and they catch on fire real easily. So logging is not going to make your forests resistant to, to fire. Lie number four, you are locked out of your land by the elitists.

No one can hunt, fish, or graze livestock on national monuments or wilderness study areas. No, that's a lie. we subsidize hunting, fishing. this is one, Donald Trump said this just, last week. He said, "You can't go hunting, you can't go fishing, you can't do anything. You can virtually not even walk on it."

He's talking about Utah backcountries, but talking about public lands. It's a lie. Thankfully, the New York Times called him on it. They said, "But recreation has been allowed in Bears Ears since President Barack Obama designated the monument in 2016." See, it's, he took 3 million acres away from it to give to his donors, his drilling and mining donors, and logging donors.

And he said he's doing it because you can't use that. They won't let you. it's a lie. It's just a complete lie. Lie number five, oil companies, mining companies, and grazers pay their fair share to profit from our public lands. Actually, no. Under the Big Beautiful Bill, oil companies pay 12 and a half percent royalties on public land, but on private land they typically pay about 25% royalties.

So your and my tax dollars are subsidizing the oil companies by giving them cheap oil. Grazers get a 95% discount on public lands compared to private lands. And the kicker is mining, since it's governed by the General Mining Act of 1872, w- the people who are mining stuff out of public lands, they don't have to pay the government, therefore us, a single penny.

it's just wild. It's just, they just, take what you want. And that's why, of course, again, Trump is trying to give away the country to these people because they take, they make mind-boggling amounts of money, and where does some small slice of that money end up? In Trump's pockets, in the Republican Party's pockets, in the campaigns of Republicans running for the House and Senate

first of all, you should know that in 2021, Greenland passed a national moratorium, a national ban on all future oil exploration. Nevertheless, after Trump got elected to go back and serve a second term as president in the United States, and he started talking about forcibly taking over Greenland for some reason, a new company formed in Texas called Greenland Energy.

That's not Greenland, Texas, it's Greenland as in Greenland, and Greenland Energy said they were going to drill for oil in Greenland. In June, a representative from Greenland Energy turned up in Greenland, in the part of the untouched Arctic, no roads, eastern Greenland, where these guys wanna drill, and they announced to the villagers there that this company, this Texas company, had permission.

They announced that they have permission. They had le- secured the legal right to start bringing their equipment, their oil drilling equipment, to this untouched Arctic area of Greenland. After those remarks in eastern Greenland, the company later apologized and said, actually, they didn't have permits to do that.

They put out a statement correcting the record saying, quote, "Our enthusiasm for the project led us to communicate in a way that created confusion." So forget we said that What really con- created confusion locally was when this happened. This is a picture of a tugboat bringing in a barge to that area of eastern Greenland, and the barge appears to contain about 15, 12 or 15 shipping containers worth of stuff.

These photos were obtained by a Danish investigative outlet called DanWatch. They show this tugboat and this barge arriving full, totally loaded, on the night of Wednesday, July 29th. Then, the same tugboat and the same barge are seen leaving that same place the next morning, except this time empty.

Because all of those shipping containers, all of that equipment that was on the barge heading in, they apparently left all that stuff on land. Now, the, the government in Greenland had said explicitly that this American oil company didn't have, quote, "permission to unload anything at all, to unload anything whatsoever" in Greenland.

In fact, before the pictures were published showing that tugboat and barge leaving empty after apparently dropping off all that material, the minister in charge of mineral resources from the Greenland government did a local interview in Greenland in which he said he was sure, he was absolutely sure this American oil company would never break the law and try to start this drilling project without permission.

Quote, "Should that happen, Greenland has the means to stop their actions." He said, quote, "This is a society governed by the rule of law. So I have some broad-shouldered men in black uniforms in the first instance who can help me deal with some illegal activities if I ask for them." By which he means, I think, the Greenlandic police.

Then he said, quote, "Ultimately, I'm sure that the Arctic Command will also contribute." By which he means the Danish military, he believes, would also intervene to stop this American oil company from trying to drill for oil in Greenland without any permission to do So that's what Greenland's government had to say.

It turns out on the day this American company, unbeknownst to them, had just that morning dropped off more than a dozen shipping containers full of equipment to get started on their oil drilling operation in Greenland. The American company said they had permission to move in the equipment, then they apologized for that and admitted that they didn't have the permission But then on the same day, the Greenland government said they wouldn't dare.

We'll use our police, we'll use the Danish military to stop them if we need to. That same day, they turn out to have unloaded their drilling stuff anyway. They're just going ahead with it, even though the local government says no, which led to headlines like this in Greenland. This is the, Google translate from the original, w- which I can't pronounce, so I'll just give you the, the English language Google translation, "Oil company moves equipment to eastern Greenland without permission."

That hullabaloo also led to pledges from local hunters and trappers in the area that they would physically themselves block the oil company from trying to land anything else or anyone else on shore. It led to the Greenland government issuing a formal warning to this oil company over what it's apparently trying to do in contravention of local law.

That apparently prompted US President Donald Trump to post this online, showing a l- a, a giant snarling version of himself looming over and menacing Greenland. "Hello, Greenland." A few days ago, this Trump-aligned oil company in Texas sent a cheery, all-smiles letter to its shareholders bragging about how great their talks are going with the Greenland government.

Recent high-level meetings between project leadership and Greenlandic regulatory and oversight authorities have been constructive, and we continue to be encouraged by the progress being made toward the remaining approvals required for drilling. Everything's going great. Greenland government really wants us to do this.

Our talks are really constructive. Turns out that is not at all how Greenland sees it. Headline in the local news, Greenland Department of Resources to controversial US oil company: colon, "Forget test drilling this year." Last week, the oil company Greenland Energy Company issued a letter to its shareholders that painted a rosy picture of the future prospects for the project in northeast Greenland.

In the letter, the company states that its drilling project is progressing rapidly, and its m- and its management expects to be able to begin drilling before the end of the year. But if you ask decision-makers in this country, such as the Minister of Foreign Affairs or the head of the Trade and Minerals Department in the Greenlandic government, according to them, there is no earthly chance of that happening So you put all this together, this Trump-aligned oil company based in Texas saying, "We're gonna drill for oil in Greenland."

Greenland's saying, "Oh no, you're not." The company going ahead and dropping off their drilling stuff anyway. Local residents saying, "We'll fight tooth and nail." Local government saying, "We'll use the police. We'll use the Danish milit-" Ki- you put it all together, it kinda seems like we're invading Greenland this company has somehow hornswoggled itself into a partnership with Dr.

Phil to make what sure looks like propaganda TV shows about this heroic and exciting oil drilling project, which the government of Greenland says is illegal, and they don't have permission to do it. This Trump-adjacent brand new oil company funded in large part by a major Trump billionaire donor, they sometimes admit that they have no permission to be doing what they're doing in Greenland, but they've still gone ahead with it anyway.

In addition to the 12 or 15 shipping containers that arrived in the last couple of weeks that they parked on shore in the last couple of weeks while the Greenland government was threatening that their police or the Danish military should stop that if they tried it, in addition to those 12 or 15 shipping containers, the same oil company now says it's shipping 300 more shipping containers and a whole huge drilling rig that they plan to get there in the next month So honestly, is this how we invade Greenland?

With Dr. Phil doing a ride-along like he did with Ice? All because a Trump donor billionaire says he needs to drill this oil, and who cares what this little country says? And by the way, wouldn't I like to help promote Dr. Phil's TV show about this? The nearest towns to where this is happening, and in fact, towns all over Greenland, have been protesting ever since it emerged that this is the way this is gonna go down.

For the closest locals, I kid you not, the local musk ox hunters are saying that they may use their dinghies, their hunting boats, to blockade the fjord. They'll use anything they can get their hands off to fight off this oil company if it really does try to set up on their coast. This weekend in Denmark, which controls Greenland and defends it, residents of Copenhagen formed a kayak flotilla around the city of Copenhagen, all carrying Greenland flags.

Their way of peacefully protesting against the United States of America menacing Greenland in this way

Donald Trump's war in Iran is a disaster. The only outcome of it thus far that's measurable is thousands of people dead, Iran in control of the Strait of Hormuz. We're basically out of anti-aircraft and long-range munitions, and to no effect because we've still lost this war. Losing this war handily shows adversaries like Russia and China just how long we can go in a war before we start running out of the munitions we need to be able to sustain combat operations and protect ourselves and our allies.

The disastrous war that Trump started with Iran, he started right after he invaded Venezuela and took that country's president, which had the effect of turning Venezuela into effectively an oil co- colony for, I wouldn't, I would say the United States, but it appears to be an oil colony for the Trump administration, since nobody knows where the oil revenue from Venezuela is going.

But it was right after that one that he started the Iran war, which apparently he thought would be easy, but it is six months old now and we are losing, and it is a disaster with no end in sight. So amid that disaster, heading toward the midterms and the w- wild unpopularity of himself personally and his agenda, and particularly his war, maybe he thinks starting a new war for a new oil colony might be right on time right about now?

Might make us forget about the other war he's losing and can't get out of? So yes, eyes on Greenland, eyes on this Texas-based oil company, Greenland Energy, which appears to be playing the role of the United Fruit Company or the British East India Company, companies that have gone down in history as providing the predicate and the means for super dumb, wildly destructive imperial wars

Friederike Otto, thank you so much for joining us on Outrage and Optimism. We've wanted to have you on for a very long time. You run the amazing World Weather Attribution service to help the world understand the fingerprint of warming on various different weather events, and you can certainly improve on the way I've introduced you when you say something about what we're experiencing at the moment.

But what I would like to do is to start off by just highlighting this episode is about this astonishing summer that we've had in Western Europe, the waves of heat waves, the fires in France, in Spain, in, now in Scotland. And the question that we want to address to you is, first of all, very simply, has this been caused by a changing climate?

I think the very simple answer to your first question is yes. So what we see in this Western European summer is very much the fingerprints of human-induced climate change, particularly in the heatwave. So I think France just declared its fourth heatwave this summer, and it's only July, and we would just simply have not seen temperatures of these heights that we've seen this summer in Western Eu- Europe and other parts of Europe as well without human-induced climate change.

Climate change also plays a role in the drought that we are seeing, but it's the key driver behind the heat primarily. 

So if it's that clear, and just give us one level of additional detail on how you know that with that, that level of certainty 'cause maybe people don't immediately follow how do you identify the fingerprint of a warming world on these events.

Yeah. so the basic idea behind the studies that we are doing is actually very simple. So we look at an extreme weather event, be it a heatwave, the drought, fire weather conditions, and we are looking at in the world we live in today, so with global warming of 1.4 degrees that we already have, what kind of weather event is that?

Is it a 1 in 10 year event? Is it a 1 in 100 year event? Because of course the weather that we observe is only ever one realization of all possible weather that we could get under the same climate. And so we look at what's possible weather in the world we live in today, and we use statistical models. We use the same models that are used for the weather forecast, and then we might find that, okay, in today's climate, this heatwave that we're just experiencing, I don't know, for the third or fourth time here in London where I'm speaking from, might be now a 1 in two year event.

So that means not that it happens every two years, but that in any given year you have a 50% chance of such an event to occur. And then we ask the same question, but for what would be possible weather in the world as it would have been without climate change. And because we know very well how many greenhouse gases have been put into the atmosphere since Industrial Revolution, we can take these out of the atmosphere of climate models, and we can also statistically look at how would this weather event look differently in a 1.4 degree cooler world.

And for the heatwaves that we're seeing now, we find that basically without the climate change, this is not only not a one in two-year event, but it's also not a one in 2,000-year event. It's so unlikely to occur that it's basically impossible. And therefore, we can say that for these heatwaves, climate change really only made them possible.

Of course, that doesn't mean that there were never heatwaves without climate change. Of course, there were, but they were not as hot as the heatwaves we are, we're experiencing today. 

That's really helpful. Thank you. So you look at the statistical likelihood of the outcome based on the concentration of greenhouse gases.

I totally understand. Thank you for explaining that. I wonder if there's a missing gap in how we think about climate because we talk about the planet being 1.4 degrees warmer, which feels small, but then the impacts can be tens or hundreds of times worse when it comes to individual instances. So is there a disconnect between the sort of overall broad trend and the specific instances, and are we not bridging that gap in our minds when we think about what's happening to us?

I think there definitely is a- Is it just a psychological problem that we probably all have, that if we talk about 1.4 degrees of warming, that doesn't sound very much because, if you go outside and it's 24 degrees or it's 25.4 degrees, it doesn't feel very different. But of course, these 1.4 are a global average and that means that all the changes in temperature over the cool world, and especially with the huge ocean, is included in that.

And that means that the changes locally in, especially in heat waves, but also in other weather event, are much, much bigger and are just not something that are well-represented at all with this indicator of global warming. And that is one reason of why we started to do world weather attribution because by talking about what's the role of climate change in an individual weather event, it allows us to connect our own and other people's experience of weather with what this really abstract figure of 1.4 degree or, when we started, it was only one degree, of warming means.

Amazing. And then here's the really difficult question, because through your work, we now understand that what we are experiencing th- in these exceptional summers and these terrible wildfires is caused by climate change, which is caused by humans. And yet, we at... This episode is largely about the sort of slightly strange sense that we have that the media is not really telling us the full story.

recent analysis in the UK is that 73% of articles that talk about the heat waves don't mention climate change. So what's your assessment of what's happening there? People might say that's a conspiracy. They're trying to keep the truth from us. Others will say that's not just not how journalism works.

You spend a lot of your time trying to get accurate reporting in the media. Help us understand what's going on. 

This is a really good question, and I'm not sure I have a complete answer to that because, as you said, we've spent a lot of time trying to help the media to report accurately on this event and to explain the full causal chain, not only what happened and what that means for people fro- from a meteorological side, but also why these events happen, and that's because of human-induced climate change.

And we have made a lot of progress actually in the reporting. So when we started this work over 10 years ago, it was basically that every reporter said you can't attribute individual weather events to climate change. And that has, over time, changed. Now every time we do a study, it is reported on and it is accurately reported on actually across the media.

But we still find very often, as you said, that when we haven't done a study or when the study has been two weeks ago and the heat wave's still going on, then that, that climate change angle is getting missed again. And I think a little bit of that is that it still hasn't quite filtered through to all reporting that.

You don't need to wait for a study, especially not when you talk about extreme heat, but also for the droughts that we've seen in Southern Europe. There are so many studies now that show that climate change does make them drier. And also for the fires, heat is a key component of these fires, so mentioning climate change is important, and you can do it without having a study.

And I think that this is part of a broader understanding of you can't only talk about climate change if you actually have a concrete study, but you don't need to wait for the study because the evidence is so strong now. That, I think, is still something that is missing maybe in the understanding of a lot of journalists.

And of course, because climate change has been very politicized, especially in the last couple of years, I think a lot of journalists are trying to be extra careful not to overreach, and therefore then I think really err on the wrong side and not mention this unless they are absolutely dead certain. But of course, we can be dead certain now with these heat waves, but I think that is something that- I think we just, especially to, to journalists and other people in the media, we have to explain that again.

there's this gorgeous poem by the extraordinary Lucille Clifton that is in the chapter about connecting with community and seeing ourselves so profoundly interconnected and across generations.

So both geography and topic maybe makes it seem right. And this is called The Mississippi River Empties into the Gulf. The Mississippi River empties into the Gulf, and the Gulf enters the sea, and so forth, none of them emptying anything, all of them carrying yesterday forever on their white-tipped backs, all of them dragging forward tomorrow.

It is the great circulation of the earth's body. Like the blood of the gods, this river in which the past is always flowing. Every water is the same water coming round. Every day someone is standing on the edge of this river staring into time, whispering mistakenly, "Only here. Only now." 

I see. 

Wow. 

I see.

Lucille, always. 

Yeah, 

always. 

So I wanna talk about kinda, so in the book, you identify way finding as figuring out where we are and where we need to go, and I think that's a really good, starting place to think about things. And so I wanna talk about the where we are piece first. So our listeners have probably heard us use the words like climate anxiety, climate grief, but in your book you talk about how there are many more emotions than that.

So could you talk a little bit about the climate emotions wheel? 

Yeah. Yeah, this is a wonderful tool that the Climate Mental Health Network created based on some fantastic research by psychologists and mental health researchers. And it helps us see that there are all of these different ways we feel about climate change and being human on Earth in this time, and not all of them are heavy.

And what's helpful, I think, about anything on a wheel is it tells you that you're not just stuck i- in one of those, right? A wheel kind of wants to keep turning. And I also think it's an invitation to say however we might feel And I think it's especially important for young people because we know that around the world almost half of young people say that the way they feel about the climate crisis impacts their day-to-day lives.

And it's not just young people, right? We know that this is a much broader experience, es- and especially as we shift from most people experiencing climate change as an abstract thing to, no, this is something happening now, impacting places that I love now. I'm seeing this. I'm feeling this. it's not pre-traumatic stress, it's actual stress.

And that just becomes so much more important. And what I notice is that we have so few spaces to take those feelings, right? Fewer and fewer of us belong to a house of worship, and even when we do, they may not be equipped to hold this. You could have every psychologist and psychiatrist and therapist and social worker on the planet turning their attention to this, and there aren't enough of them- 

to go around. Classrooms are so focused on the intellectual piece, right? A lot of times in movement and in, and organizations, we're so busy on the strategy side, that we think we don't have time for feelings." and I think that is a great risk to us, both as just a human community, but certainly as a movement.

It is terrible social movement strategy not to be thinking about the heart in all of it. 

I see. I see. 

Yeah. Colette, how do these emotions show up in the work that you do with frontline communities? 

Oh, my gosh. I just wanna thank you for the question, Eva, because it's impor- emotions are important, and somehow we have been colonized to think that the intellectual answer is the answer, when some of us know deeply that the spirit has to be part of the answer, and the gut has to be part of the answer.

And I r-really appreciate when Catherine said, "You're stressed right now, and the emotions show." Black and brown and poor folks are demonized when they show their rage for systems that could be designed better, for information that we knew a long time ago, for decisions that c- and political action that could have been made already but have instead been sacrificed for the profits of such a few people when so many people could've been saved.

And, it's hard to fit people inside of that and then expect them not to rage. And so at Taproot Earth, which is the organization I help to co-lead, we make space for rage. We make space for it, Let's deal with some of this stuff. You are not crazy. This is crazy. You are not crazy. And so last year in 2025, we did a Sacred Waters Pilgrimage down the Nile, the Mississippi, and the Amazon.

We went to three of the five largest rivers in the world, and we gathered water and did ceremony and ritual there with the indigenous people of those places. And we asked for our ancestors to join us for this next round of fighting that we were gonna need to do. And we brought that water back to East Africa, where the oldest human remains are found, and we gave that water to the eldest woman of the tribes that are originally are from those places.

And those women who were sitting there, the, of the Kikuyu tribe, were praying for us the whole time we were on that pilgrimage. And, my blood is of the Choctaw nation. My blood is of Africa. And what I got a clear call to do was ritual. Now, what I know is that ritual that I did is the ritual you do before war You pray for peace, but this was to fortify yourself for what is to come.

And the emotions that you get to express when you are in ritual or in ceremony, you get to be sad, you get to be happy, you get to be powerful, and you get to break down. And it is ritual and ceremony that'll get us through a lot of this emotional piece. 

And it'll also inform and guide and protect the strategy.

Yeah. That is so amazing, and I think it's hard because climate change is such a scientific issue that w- a lot of science is going into it, and I'm usually talking to scientists about this. And w- what I hear you saying, Colette, is, we need to move away from that, Western enlightenment type of thinking where it's like science and reason are a separate thing from emotion.

And I'm thinking, the marrying of the two and understanding that there are other ways of knowing, spiritual ways of knowing, emotional ways of knowing, to help us get through this crisis. 

Yeah. and I would say the marrying of the two. it's a interesting use of terms. ... because these things were extracted from our humanity, like oil extracted from the ground.

We used to have all of that together. We're really putting ourselves back together again, and that's really the opportunity. 

I love the way you described, Colette, about ritual, holding, and informing strategy. 

Ashe. 

And what's so interesting, we have research that tells us that the thing that gets women stuck between climate concern and climate engagement is that they think they don't know enough.

And part of what I care so much about is saying, "This is not the only way we know." We sell ourselves short on the deeper knowing that is so present in us just because we're alive, just because we're human. That's right. Just because we are part of this community of life. 

Ashe. 

We've just heard clips starting with

Consider This asking what crossing "the limits of adaptation" means for people, from more life-threatening heat waves to disease outbreaks and unrest already visible in Sudan, Syria, and Chad.

Democracy Now! detailed how forcing Indigenous tribes onto reservations ended the cultural burning that kept Western forests open, so today's fires spread fast and burn severely

The Hartmann Report laid out five falsehoods Republicans use to justify seizing public lands, noting miners pay nothing under an 1872 law and grazers get a 95% discount compared to private land

The Rachel Maddow Show traced how a Trump-donor-backed Texas company landed equipment in eastern Greenland in defiance of the country's ban, as local hunters said they may blockade the fjord with their boats

Outrage + Optimism spelled out how attribution science compares today's 1.4-degree-warmer climate against a world without emissions, finding this summer's European heat waves would have been essentially impossible without human-caused warming

And Sea Change made the case that treating science and emotion as separate is a colonial inheritance, and that spiritual and emotional ways of knowing are essential to surviving the climate crisis.

And those were just the top takes, there's lots more in the deeper dives sections,

If you get value out of the show - and want to make sure we can keep going while getting it delivered ad-free to the new, members-only podcast feed that you'll receive, sign up to support the show at bestoftheleft.com/support - there's a link in the show notes - through our Patreon page, or from right inside the Apple Podcasts app.*

If you have a question or would like your comments included in the show you can record a voice message - re-recording until you're happy with it - by tapping the link in the show notes,

You can message us on Signal at the handle bestoftheleft.01,

or you can simply email me to [email protected]

Today, Instead of commenting on the topic, I want to give you a quick update about the show and explain why I plan to do more of this in the short term in place of my usual commentaries. Regular listeners will have heard me talk over the last few months about the financial struggles the show is going through. They've also heard me describe some plans for expanding what we do in a few different directions to try to help with that financial squeeze we're having.

It's been essentially invisible from the outside, but over the past few months I have been working harder than ever building new systems that are intended to help us do more but nothing I've built has been fully switched on yet.

In case you're wondering, yes, AI is involved but in our case, it's not being forced on anyone who doesn't want to use it and it's not threatening to replace anyone. If anything, it's what might help save the jobs of the people currently helping to build the show. But also yes, we're very ambivalent about it.

And the most important thing, we're not changing a single thing about the human-driven curation at the heart of what we do. No AI is making judgment calls about what should be considered "Best of the Left." The AI is being made to do grunt work while the humans keep doing the human work.

I began in the spring with the basic question, what would Best of the Left look like if I were to invent it today and build it from the ground up? The answer to that is that, rather than only being a podcast, it would be a multi-platform curation company that heavily promotes on every social network available. The podcast would be only one of our many outlets.

To that end, I've been building a new primary outlet for the curation work we already do, which is a newsletter. For a podcast listener, the newsletter could act as a sort of supercharged version of show notes. It includes details and summaries of arguments that appear in the show but also features far more details about our featured speakers, like articles and books they written, than could ever make sense in the podcast.

For all the non-podcast listeners in the world who will never listen to Best of the Left, the newsletter is designed to very much stand on its own.

I also plan to publish my commentaries in the form of essays with extra details and links to sources that don't translate well to audio.

Additionally, I've been building automated systems to help us create videos and a social media management workflow to help get trailers, clips, mini commentaries, and other promotional elements out through the social media firehose. Though, to be clear, the videos themselves will not be AI-generated, it's only the systems that help keep everything organized and manageable that involve AI.

I would estimate that essentially everything I have planned is more than 90% complete and just needs enough attention to get it to the point that it's ready for public consumption.

However, I found myself running into a constraint that I hadn't foreseen initially, which is that while I'm in the building process, the only thing that takes time is the building part. But once I begin turning these systems on and creating things that go out to the public, the process of quality checking, finalizing, and publishing everything adds to the amount of work there is to do.

So trying to build and publish becomes a double burden and since I've already been working very hard and am basically at my limit, I've been very hesitant to push any of these systems to the point that they're ready for publishing.

Instead of building a system and launching it before moving to the next, I've just been building up everything to the point that it's 90% or 95% ready to launch and then putting it on hold and moving over to something else, repeating the cycle.

And while all that has been happening, I've definitely been suffering from a bit of burnout, which anyone could have predicted based on the number of hours I've been working. Plus, I also have all of the regular complaints that everyone has about what it's like to work with AI too much. It's definitely a contributor to the burnout.

In the long term, the idea is to not have to actively work with AI very much at all. I'm front-loading that work by building systems, but have the hope that once they're built, they'll only need minimal ongoing management.

Which brings me to why I'm telling you all of this now, and specifically why I'm telling you this instead of writing and recording a commentary for today's episode.

With the help of my partner, who is always the first to recognize when I'm experiencing burnout, I decided to reduce the number of commentaries I record each week from two to one because that's one of the few places I have available to really cut my workload by a substantial number of hours. The plan is to use that freed up time to begin pushing the newsletter and our social media strategy out into the world so I can get through this workload bottleneck I'm facing.

The first thing on the list to go out is a beta version of the newsletter. Existing members will be receiving an email from us first, introducing you to the new email system and giving you the option to either stick around while we work out the bugs of the newsletter, while inviting your feedback to help us refine it. Or, you may opt out of the newsletter while still remaining on our email list for our irregular announcements.

Once we feel like we're in a good flow, we'll be able to open it up the the public. So, if you're a member, keep an eye out for an email from us.

The plan is to continue to give you these weekly updates, alternating with political commentaries, so you can stay in the loop while I take the much-needed time required to get Best of the Left to its new form and function.

And now, we'll continue to dive deeper on 4 topics today. First up;

Section A, ON THE GROUND

Followed by Section B, EUROPE ON FIRE

Section C, THE DELAY MACHINE

And Section D, WHAT COMES NEXT

So on the first of August, the National Weather Service in Eastern Washington and in Idaho issued a PDS, a particularly dangerous situation notice.

Fires were already burning across much of the state and across much of the Pacific Northwest, including on the land of the Colville tribes and the Spokane tribe. On Saturday, three fires struck near the north part of the city of Spokane. The PDS doubtless helped some folks prepare. Other folks I'm sure will have missed it entirely.

But very quickly, people went from nothing to level three go now warnings. This was somewhat compounded by things like a large travel volleyball tournament happening in an area which got a level three go now warning. What that means, if you're not familiar, there are three levels of warnings when you are evacuated for a fire, and the level three is the most severe one, that being like you have to leave your home right now.

Several people have related to me, and I want to caveat here that I'm not being critical of the response, which has actually been very good. I'm giving information because more people are going to find themselves in this situation in the future, and I think it's important that people understand that the level three warning that buzzed on people's phones with emergency alert came not very long before they saw fires and even structures on fire in their neighborhood, right?

I think people sometimes think that, someone will come and tell you when it is your time to leave, and that's not always gonna be possible, right? And again, I'm not conveying that to say that, the response here was poor. I'm conveying that to say that people need to understand this, because we're all gonna have to live with fire in the west because there has always been fire here.

The climate is changing, and we are pushing our homes further and further into the wildland urban interface. And that is where this fire began, right? On Saturday, the state was a tinder box, and it was these neighborhoods along the wildland urban interface that caught the brunt of these fast-moving fires that found a plentiful source of fuel and were pushed along by the wind.

Currently, about a third of the two hundred thousand people who live here in Spokane have been placed under evacuations orders, and the community is obviously feeling the weight of that, along with the hundreds of people who lost their homes and all their possessions here. Notable points of the evacuations included buses evacuating people from old folks' homes, and a VA hospital was also evacuated by buses.

And of course, many people left their homes in their cars with their possessions, their pets, their families, et cetera. And of course, that resulted in very slow-moving traffic. Nonetheless, from what I heard this morning, seems everyone evacuated in time at least to save themselves. I know many people will be dealing with tragedies, right?

They've lost their homes. People will have lost pets. People will have lost things that are incredibly important to them, right? I spoke to people out on the Colville Tribes Reservation who were saying they had lost homes that their father, mother, grandparents built with their hands, right? These intergenerational homes that had gone.

That is absolutely tragic. I want to give an update that I got this morning from the public information officer of the IMT that's managing this fire. So we'll drop that in right now. 

My name's Tom Stokesberry. I'm the lead public information officer for California Interagency Incident Management Team Seven.

So right now there's three fires that make up the Spokane area fires. That's gonna be the Fairview Fire, the Old Trails Fire, and the Autumn Lane Fire currently all totaled in the acres is 10,540. but over the last 24 hours, our firefighters have made tremendous progress in putting control lines in around the entire perimeter of all three fires.

Now, that doesn't mean the fire's contained or controlled. We just have those, those management and control lines there. Still have an active firefight, still have active flames in the interior to the point on the Old Trails and Fairview Fire, we actually had a spot outside the line on each one of those that went to about an acre and a half.

But we had the resources in the right place, and they were able to pick those up at about one acre each. so that just kinda proves that there's still active heat, hotspots in this interior, and that's why we have engines in all three of these fires still protecting the structures that have not been impacted yet because the, any kind of wind can throw embers.

And right now the receptive fuels in this area, and by fuels the vegetation that is so dry, right? Your grass, your brush, very receptive to those, those embers. Proof being is the two spot fires. But we have 1,300 firefighters here. We're expected to be over 2,000 by the end of the week. 

I also asked about the number of structures impacted and when people here can expect to return home, and here's what Tom said.

Right now we're well over 700 structures that have been impacted. we do have damage assessment personnel, ordered and en, en route. It's my understanding they'll be showing up today, and we'll have them on the ground tomorrow. So we're gonna start to get a more accurate number of what those impacted structures look like versus, a total loss to just an impacted structure.

And those structures include not only people's personal homes, but garages, outbuildings- Yeah ... sheds. but we're gonna get a better accurate number on those over these next few days, trying to get these communities back to where we can get them repopulated. But in addition to that, there's a tremendous amount of hazmat in there.

We're talking burned solar panels. We're talking, LPG, possible gas leaks, the building materials from homes that have been burned, the stuff that's inside those homes. There is a lot of hazmat. Yeah. So we have to ensure the public is gonna be safe before we repopulate and let them back in there because our ultimate goal is life first, then property.

and that life is not just firefighters. It's the public safety too. 

While I was at the Firebase camp, I also ran into local community members and businesses who were helping out. People were constantly dropping off food and, snacks and, supplies. Here's one local business owner, who explained his efforts to me.

So my name is Tim Codsi. I'm with JK Boots. I'm one of the owners with my brother and dad. 

I asked him what him and his company were doing to support the community. 

On Wednesday, August 5th, we're doing something called Home Front Day. Okay. We're gonna donate 100% of all the profits of that day to the Spokane residents who lost their homes, so they could do that, they could participate.

Just go on our website and just do something. just get something, and that'll go to those people. Yeah. The other things you can do is you can come here and you can, offer to drop off, again, drinks, wipes, essentials. You can look on Facebook. They've posted those things. Okay, cool. The other big thing is just there's other funds that are set up that have, meal trains and...

'cause there's about 60,000 people that are still not b- not able- ... to go back to their homes. yeah. Yeah, 

yeah. What's happening in Spokane is tragic, and it is going to impact this community for years to come. It will take a very long time for rebuilding to happen and probably even longer for people to heal emotionally.

I wanna make sure that we do not overlook the several large ongoing fires that are impacting the indigenous communities around the city, though. Because as resources shift to the fires that burn the city, these communities will see fewer resources, and indeed, they already have seen fewer resources. I spent the last couple of days visiting the Colville Tribe's reservation, Spokane Tribe reservations.

Today, I spoke to folks who had cut their own fire lines around their homes and communities who were prepared to fight the fire, and indigenous people here have lived with fire for thousands of years, right? They have a deep understanding of fire, and people there had decided to stay and to defend their communities even in areas that were impacted by level three evacuations.

Not everybody, right? Some people who were more vulnerable, some people who were not able to participate in that response or didn't feel safe doing so left, and other folks stayed. As resources continue to be diverted to fight these fires in Spokane, and as news coverage will continue to center on the city, folks who lost their homes out in these tribal communities will also need help, and it might be harder for them to find it.

Some of these people are still in their homes. just today, I spoke to several people who are determined to do their hardest to save their homes and hoping that the wind doesn't pick up. They're cutting their own fire lines. In several cases, forestry and mining workers as well as tribal community members who are on contract fire crews have been using their machinery and their skills to clear space and create better fire breaks around their communities.

It's a really tragic and difficult situation, especially when combined with this reporting that I will link to of Red Cross volunteers making racist remarks at shelters that made indigenous folks feel unwelcome there. I don't think I need to repeat those, but I will link to the story if you'd like to read it.

It is also, of course, amazing to see the strength and resilience of communities coming together to take care of one another in these tragic situations. I particularly want to highlight the work of the River Warriors Society. I spent today with them moving supplies from one reservation to another. I will include a link to the Spokane Tribal Network, which people can use if they'd like to donate to support that mutual aid work.

They're really doing excellent work. They're getting people what they need. They're filling those gaps. They're moving more quickly than big organizations or big government things can. Even tribal governments will require paperwork, whereas what they're doing is literally standing at gas stations using cards to pay for people's gas so they can get where they need to go, right?

Getting people hotel rooms, getting people food, getting people the things they need to get through this and to begin healing. Today, I helped load hundreds of pounds of pet food and animal food into a trailer, for instance, so that people who need to feed their animals don't have to drive for hours away from their homes, right when the risk of fire is high, and they want to stay home and do what they can to protect their homes.

they're really doing excellent work, and I would encourage you to support them if you have the resources. 

Some 20,000 people in BC's Okanagan lived those gut-wrenching experiences over the weekend.

Loss of homes, loss of animals, and loss of any certainty of what comes next. Growing wildfires led the province to declare a state of emergency. The entire town of Summerland had to evacuate. The nearby fire is still out of control. Craig Milton is from Summerland. He has a small animal sanctuary there and music venue, all of which has been lost to fires.

We're reaching him in West Kelowna. Craig, thank you for joining us. 

Yeah, good morning. 

I know you're grappling with so much right now. How are you holding up today, Craig? 

doing pretty good. yeah, it's f- doesn't feel real, but, we're doing okay. 

Where are you currently staying? 

I'm staying at my sister's apartment.

She had, rented a new apartment, but didn't, doesn't take possession till, next month. And so fortunately it was just s- sitting here empty, and, we were able to, land there. 

Can you take us back to the weekend and when you realized you would have to leave? Give us a sense of what you've gone through over the last 48 hours or so.

it, yeah, it happened very fast. we live in a, a rural, part of, Summerland, in, in the back of Summerland towards Falder, which of, of course, was almost completely lost. our neighbor came by and honked the horn and said that there was a fire at a, a kind of a c- a camping area about 15 kilometers away called Crump.

And, it was concerning, but it was far away, we just thought we'd pay attention to that. And, the angle that we were at, we couldn't see this giant plume of smoke that was rising up into the air that everybody else could see. it just looked like there was a bit of a dark cloud on the horizon.

So we kinda walked up our hill a little bit to where we could get a better look, and it was pretty obvious that it was a pretty substantial fire. that, I think that was around 5:30. And from that moment on, we realized we had to start, putting out sprinklers around our property in a capacity that might protect our home and, protect some of the animals.

it all happened so fast, that there really wasn't any time to think about it. we just di- got into preservation mode, and, we didn't have an evacuation order. we had no notifica- formal notification. 

What happened to your animals? 

have- we have geriatric dogs. we had a couple reptiles that we rescued.

we ha- we have about two dozen chickens and about a dozen ducks that, that are our residents. We had, seven goats and four sheep. the, the goats and sheep are up on a pasture that had, no combustible m- materials. It was quite green pastures. we filled up n- numerous troughs of water.

it became pretty quickly obvious that there wasn't gonna be time to, to bring in trailers to, to try to catch all the animals and, move them to another location. so we were just basically, in preservation mode. we put large sprinklers that would cover the entire, duck and chicken paddocks.

We left those open. We left the coops open for them so that they could go in if they had to, but that they could also escape if they had to. then it was m- just a matter of g- basically grabbing our dogs, grabbing the, the couple reptiles that we also cared for. my sister had been there 'cause she had a tortoise that we were watching, and she had come to pick up her tortoise when we weren't really that worried at that point.

still had no fire warning, but we started seeing vehicles rushing past coming out of Faulder. clearly people fleeing, something really bad. And, that's when we started to realize that something pretty serious was happening. 

So your property wasn't just your home, right?

You have a live music venue there, too, I take it. what's happened to that property? 

yeah, we work from home. It w- it's, we have about 3.2 acres. we have a home-based, architectural technology business, in addition to the sanctuary. but we also run a, a, a host concert venue. It's, and we have a venue, a sort of an indoor and an outdoor space.

We host concerts for, artists, fr- from across the country, lots of local and BC, western artists. a- and, it's all gone now. it's burn- burned completely to the ground. We have, there's nothing left. 

Wow. I'm so sorry. it's so early days, but have you started to think about what's next for you and whether you'll rebuild?

w- I'm sure people have seen pictures of some of the other places, that where, the entire, it looks like a bomb went off and everything's gone. In our case, we didn't have any coniferous trees on our property. we bordered the forest, which I understand h- has burned substantially.

But on our property it was all deciduous trees. So it's surreal because y- I've seen pictures and the, the houses are all gone, but our entire property is still green and quite lush and intact. w- we w- you wouldn't be rebuilding on a moonscape. we live on a kind of a long street that sort of goes along the foot of the mountain, and we're, our house was the only house that was destroyed.

Our, our neighbor, lost a workshop, which was right along our property probably because it probably caught fire off one of our buildings. And, so we can rebuild and not it'll be much like it was before. 

In Southeast Georgia, the Berry family, farming for generations. Their grandpa, a sharecropper But this spring, drought. 

So your dad said he's 

never seen 

a drought like 

this before. 

Right. 

Have you? No, not in my lifetime I haven't. Never heard stories of a drought this bad either.

If we were to plant r- on schedule in the heart of the drought, we pretty much would have lost all those crops. 

170 miles west, the opposite problem at the 2,400 acre Longleaf Ridge Farm run by sixth generation farmer Casey Cox-Kerr. 

I wanted to come back and build on the foundation that my parents had built.

She too faces drought, though her part of Southern Georgia finally did get rain a few weeks ago, but it was a downpour that menaced the crops. 

Not only does it, it drown some of the, the plants, it also creates disease and pest problems. We're seeing wetter wets and drier dries, and that can be a big challenge with what we're experiencing on the farm.

Wetter wets, drier dries. You won't be surprised to hear this has something to do with climate change. 

It's affecting precisely those things that people depend on for their livelihoods, their food, their water supplies. These are essential. 

Rachel Cleetus of the Union of Concerned Scientists. 

Climate change is, is making these more frequent, both the short duration kinds of droughts that we're seeing in some places, but also the longer mega droughts like the Southwest is experiencing.

The unpredictability of it, you know, the extremes of both the droughts and then the whiplash with extreme rainfall events, that makes it very difficult to plan for these kinds of conditions. 

During drought, ag professor Wes Porter of the University of Georgia says the local soil compounds the problem.

If you look in our region where we're at now in Southern Georgia, we have a really sandy soil. So sandy soils can't hold a whole lot of water. So what that means, we actually evaporated out significantly higher amounts of water than what we had received back in, so we were looking negative. 

Meanwhile, those farmers now face punishing costs like diesel, spurting up almost 50% since the end of February, and some seven in 10 farmers say they now can't afford rising fertilizer costs.

I mean, now we would normally be at market already, and we haven't, haven't been. Things just aren't ready. 

Now, both guys work full-time jobs, Tony at the Port of Savannah, Cedric's an electrician. How much time do you get to spend here as opposed to on your regular jobs? 

for me s- two to three days out of the week.

And for you? 

Evenings and weekends 

They help finance the farm with their salaries. The drought upped the cost. The Berry's usually sell hay, for example. Had to hold some of it back to feed their cattle, their own pasture parched dry. $10,500 in lost sales. 

Fertilizer, fuel, those things like that, that, that money would have covered that for sure.

Is that $10,500, that, is that a substantial- Pit? 

Oh, yes, sir. I mean, if you wanna give me $10,500, then I ask you that question. 

Tony Berry grew up a city boy in Savannah, never dreamed he'd wind up down on the farm. But with cousin Cedric- 

We just naturally came together, and it's like, "Okay, well, let's follow the family tradition and do this."

Back across the state, tradition brought Casey Cox Kerr back, too. 

Like most things, a little bit of time and perspective made me realize how unique this farm is and how special it is that I get to do this. 

But with the changing climate, what hope is there for family farmers? 

This technology is very vital to- 

Uh-huh

survival. Technology. Like precision irrigation. At a University of Georgia research park, BJ Washington and team are helping farmers conserve their water. 

You can program how much water you put out. You can program where it needs to start and stop in the field. You can speed it up or slow it down within the field to put out more water or less water.

you can do all that from this panel. 

Those big circles you see from your airplane window seat, created by center pivot irrigation rigs like the ones here, sprinkling water over crops slowly and evenly instead of spritzing it all at once. And these soil moisture sensors let the ground itself signal just how much soaking it needs so farmers don't over-water.

Given the drought, it's, it's a huge deal, because we wanna, we wanna be as efficient with irrigation as possible. We don't wanna waste water. We don't wanna irrigate if we don't need to. 

We could not grow what we grow without irrigation because of just the frequency of drought. The new irrigation systems, new technologies, we're, we're doing, we're taking the steps that we're able to take to mitigate the risks that we can.

We have to focus on what we can control. 

Which made me wonder, why isn't everyone doing this? One obvious answer: It's not cheap. The irrigation rigs cost at least $90,000. The sensors, up to $2,500 each. But, says Professor Porter... 

It looks like a big cost, but it, it's costly for us to, to misapply our irrigation.

It's costly for us to lose yields because of that, right? And so I have a lot of return on investment data that show that anywhere from, on the low end, 20 to $30 per acre, all the way up to $150, $200 per acre return for utilizing advanced irrigation scheduling, and that's per acre. 

So maybe data will get the nation's farmers to change their ways, and maybe farm tech will stay ahead of further climate changes.

Man, we've got this. We can, we can adapt. We can change. We've been doing it for a long time. The way we farm today might look different than the way we farm in 100 years But I'm hoping that the work we're doing today is helping build a foundation 

And in the long run, Rachel Cleetus says, there are policy steps worth considering.

And so we should, as a nation, not leave farmers on their own to deal with this, whether they can afford it or not. We've got to invest. We have to make sure that farmers are aware of the options that might be there, and that they get grants or, low-cost loans that they can maybe install some of these technologies on their farms if they need them.

Meanwhile, the Berrys keep on pushing without pricey technology, leaning on a tradition older than the farm. 

We do put faith in our good Lord that He will provide a way, because He has done that all these years before us, and I, I'm a strong believer that He will continue to do that. 

We're doing the job that's important, you know?

Providing the food for surrounding communities, you know, letting people know where the food actually comes from, and we need that. And, you know, just feel like if we're serving that purpose, you know, He will provide. 

Well, He moves 

in mysterious ways. 

Yeah, definitely. 

For the Berrys, though, mystery or not, wetter wets and drier dries are an all-too-present reality.

What more do we know this morning about the size and impact of the Bald Range wildfire?

the size is big. It's 130 square kilometers, so about the size of the city of Vancouver. it is still burning out of control. That just means that forest crew, forest fighter, firefighter crews don't yet have a handle on where it's going and how it's spreading. The news this morning, though, is that we've learned that, during the evacuation on Saturday evening, an 80-year-old woman died in that evacuation.

We don't have too many details about how, but she was in this, just a, a little bit north of where our friend Craig was. And, they, that evacuation happened very quickly, some of it by helicopter, and we understand that she died in the course of that evacuation. So we're waiting for more details from the police and the coroner about that.

The weather, as, Doug mentioned, still hot and dry, windy, last night. We, are expecting an update from the BC Wildfire Service in a couple of hours, in terms of how that fire behavior, has changed in the last, 12 hours or so. 

The fire moved incredibly quickly. I think it doubled in size in only a few hours, right?

Have you ever seen anything like that before out there? 

yes, we have. And it's because the forests are so dry. You heard, the mayor of Summerland, Doug Holmes, talk about the many years of drought. Of course, that is exacerbated by, warm temperatures. The number of days above 30 degrees in this valley has doubled in 20 years, so we're getting more hot, dry weather.

That, of course, driven by fossil fuels and climate change. And so we have seen fires explode like this before, driven by that wind, that comes down off the, plateaus toward the lake in the evening. One, in fact, just a few weeks ago at the other end of Okanagan Lake, where a fire just exploded in size, very similar along, Okanagan Indian Band land.

That fire getting far less attention just because there are fewer people in that area. But I think back, too, to 2023 when the West Kelowna fire exploded out of those hills. It had further to go, in terms of how long it took to get to the town, but it, they, these fires now grow so rapidly. and it's, these people just had moments to get out of their homes.

Just, really terrifying stuff. 

Yeah, the images of this wildfire are just like something out of a movie. And we've- Yeah ... just heard how devastating it's been for some people, as you say, losing their homes. How are people grappling with the speed and the intensity and the loss from this wildfire? 

it's very difficult, and I've known, people who have lost homes in previous fires in this area, and it is a l- is a years-long process, and it's very traumatic.

These are places where people have built their f- their families and their memories, and w- a lot of the times where their, livelihood is centered. And so there's this initial shock about how quickly this happened. That means, of course, that people didn't have time to grab mementos, family heirlooms, things like that.

so the scale of the loss is, really tough, and it will take years now for these people to rebuild their lives, Because of course there's grappling with emergency social services to start with, but then insurance companies and banks, and it, it's a long process. And, we heard that Craig will rebuild where, because h- his property is relatively green- despite the fact that the buildings are gone. But, there will be people who, are going back to a moonscape and will really, think twice about whether they wanna start over again. It's very tough. 

BC Premier David Eby has declared a province-wide state of emergency on, over the weekend due to this wildfire.

There's not just this one, though. There's more than 100 fires burning across the province, more than 20,000 people displaced. How well is the province responding to this wildfire to this point? 

at this point it's, really in the hands of professionals at really the local level. Regional districts, which is a level of government here in BC, in between the province and, municipalities, really take the lead here in terms of getting people into accommodations, getting them the food vouchers they need, and the day-to-day survival.

I have heard, obviously there are, Monday morning quarterbacks who will question, and maybe for good reason, question the province's response here. but f- given the scale of this disaster, w- I have heard pretty good things about how the province is responding. Now, there will be conversations, in the years, d- months, and years to come about how sustained that support is.

Sometimes there's lots of support right off the top, and then when it comes, we saw this with the floods in the Fraser Valley a few years ago. The people are still waiting for federal relief there three, four years on. So the proof of the pudding in its, is in its eating, but so far so good it seems.

Now, there are all kinds of questions, too, about whether the province was prepared and is prepared for these kinds of explosive wildfires driven by heat and forest mismanagement, and those are conversations that are just starting. 

We know that wildfires hit BC, of course, particularly hard, but it's not just a BC problem, right?

What should the rest of the country be thinking about right now? 

I think w- the thing to think about here is the scale of the problem. Th- you will have people who just say, "Clean the forest," or, "Rake the woods," or whatever, right? The scale of the, the forests in British Columbia, n- nevermind the boreal forest in Canada, at a landscape level, I think p- people will need to realize how...

that's impossible, essentially. And that, but that, p- places that are close to, dry pine woods, places like Summerland- ... need far more, attention on the management of the forest in what they call interface areas. That is, areas around populations, so that when these big fires come, because they will- Yeah

they don't come right into town.

Next, Section B, EUROPE ON FIRE

Where have you been reporting from these last couple of weeks, and what does it feel like on the ground?

where was I? I guess putting the global into my job, for better and worse. I was in, France and then Malaysia and then Pakistan and then back to Europe. I was not on the ground for the wildfires, but I was on the ground for the heat waves that were the first domino that, that led to them.

c- basically in the last week, where had I been? I'd been in Rome in my home, but collaborating with the Times colleagues in France and Spain and trying to, wrap our arms around the on the ground stuff and then more from my perspective, like the science and the climate, change aspect of that story.

So talk about the heat wave first. That cracked the news headlines in the United States to some degree, but how hot was it, and how unprecedented was it? 

it is the b- it's basically the beginning of the story of the wildfires, was these heat waves. First, there was one in May, late May. school was still going on, and it was described as unprecedented for that period of the year in France.

in some places it even touched 100 degrees, which never happens in May. Then, about a month later, late June, it was the big one. this was the hottest heat wave that France has had ever, not just in June, but ever. It had back-to-back-to-back days where each of those days was the hottest on record.

and it was also exceedingly hot in Spain. That alone wouldn't have been such a terrible thing in terms of creating wildfire conditions, except that heat, like it went... It receded a bit but never really returned to normal. it was hot for weeks upon weeks, and there was almost no rain.

So at that point, heading into late July, you had conditions that were primed for huge fires if just a single spark happened. and they did. So that's what happened last week, these huge fires unfolding simultaneously in France and Spain. And yes, they have been brought under control now, but it took extraordinary resources, and the fire season normally is just starting now in Europe, so it's not over.

Chico, I gave some of the stats in the intro.

What would you add to how much death and displacement these wildfires have caused across the continent? 

the displacement was huge. Hundreds, 300,000 or more people had to flee their homes during these wildfires just in a week. 

So you had, you had these two events, not just as huge fires, but fires that were... And this I think, what made them stand out, near population centers and in areas that were, that, where cities were threatened. it didn't reach Madrid or Bordeaux, but those were the two cities that were close by and where, you would feel the air quality suffer for periods.

those events were surprisingly not deadly, not so deadly, which is incredible and is a testament to the fact that there was a lot of firefighting resources thrown at these issues. A few weeks earlier, there had been a wildfire that was, that, about a dozen people died. The real deadly event in Europe this year has been the heat, and, and that heatwave that I was describing just a few minutes ago, it leveled a, a death toll across Western Europe that is conservatively in the tens of thou- like, 10,000.

There's been another study that said 20,000 excess deaths. we're talking about mammoth, casualties, which never get the same amount of, headlines that they should because these, these numbers are kind of estimates and abstractions. You're not putting... There's not a list of names.

It's not like a plane crash, where there's this immediate sense. But it's, it's looking at population scale changes in what does an average week of look and what does, what did that- ... week look like. but, if you just step back and consider that, you're talking about, developed Western Europe, where a heatwave comes in and 10,000 extra people die.

That's astonishing. and we can get into why that would happen, but yeah. W- the, the wildfire, suffice to say, pales in comparison to the heat in its ability to be lethal. 

maybe it's worth saying, how do people die from heat? 

it depends. not every place is equally vulnerable. we s- we can start by saying that.

And, and for example, if you had a couple back-to-back days above 100 degrees in Phoenix, which happens all the time, you're not gonna have 10,000 extra deaths. It's a city that has built itself for weather like that. And of course, air conditioning is not the only part of the answer, but it is a big part of the answer.

Also, just what do people's houses look like? how equipped are they to shield from the sun and to, to stay cool? Europe, especially Northern Europe, was never accustomed to heat like this. And, they often don't ... These buildings are, were built for colder climates, and they are built to trap or retain heat.

France and Paris specifically, you think about the beautiful pictures of Paris with these, kind of grayish, bluish-grayish roofs. Those roofs are made out of zinc, and that conducts heat almost like an oven. Huh. So people who live on those top floors are roasting. Now, and then, yeah, and as we know, especially in France, but many European, Northern European countries, air conditioning, the rates, at homes is extremely low.

It continues to be low. so now if you have this combination of hot days back to back, apartments that hold the heat, and no air conditioning, the homes can be so hot that over some days it can become deadly. Now obviously, if it's, if you're a young person, you have, some mobility, you go to a mall, you jump into a pool, you go to a friend's house who does have AC, you take emergency measures.

But if you're somebody who is old, has health, disabilities, you might not be able to do that. and that is the population that suffers the most, people who are already frail, who had preexisting conditions or were elderly. so you have people living by themselves on those top floors, dying alone, and those deaths are hard to note in the moment oftentimes, but they are a marker of heat waves like this in Northern Europe.

One thing that, that you didn't mention but we've seen elsewhere when you talk about how more the northern parts of Europe, often don't have air conditioning because they haven't needed them in the past, I've read that even includes in many hospitals and nursing homes- Yes ... for example. Do you know that to be true?

Yes, it is true. and schools too you should mention because, though once you get into July and August it's not a problem, there were schools in, in France in late May where it was, in the 90s every day inside the classroom, 95 degrees, and kids were suffering tremendously. Like just as elderly are more vulnerable to the heat, so are children.

but yes, it's true that some hospitals don't have AC, and some nursing homes don't have it. this has become a political issue where some politicians, especially Marine Le Pen, who's kind of the vanguard or one of the vanguards of the far right in France, has talked about the need to create a national air conditioning plan such that all of these public facilities are equipped And, I think that the more that France and other Northern European countries experience these heat waves, the more it becomes hard to argue with the need to lay out air conditioning on a more massive scale.

Because these are places that were, yeah, they would experience some heat, but maybe just a couple days where it was really unpleasant. You start to plan differently when a couple days turns into a couple weeks of unrelenting heat, and you just can't feel comfortable. You start to go crazy. I've had those summers too myself in Rome, more because of outages, not because of, of lack of AC at all, just because the AC wasn't working.

And you go crazy after a while. The day-to-day stress and the worrying about your health, or more in my case, my kids' health. You're giving them... dunking them in ice baths. Everybody looks unhealthy. It's 100 degrees in your house. and that's just a couple days in my case. So like I can't imagine how difficult it is, even for somebody who's healthy to just spend day after day in 100-degree house.

That's what happened in France this summer.

You were giving evidence to a select committee on heat waves a few months ago. Since then, we have seen successive heat waves in the UK. We've seen hundreds of thousands of people evacuated from their homes. This year feels different to me. Does it feel different to you? And have we passed over some kind of invisible threshold that we will look back and remember later?

How are you interpreting this summer? 

It does feel different. It feels like the impacts of the three, almost four heat waves, and all the things that have gone alongside it are affecting more people. I now live in Bristol and led the London Climate Resilience Review, and I think when we had 40-degree heat, and it was ba-back in 2022, whilst it was broader than London, it feels like more of the country is having a much more detailed response.

But yes, it does feel different, and there are people asking Suffering, feeling confused about what is happening, and I hope this does cut through in a very different way. But I think it needs us to be organizing in a very different way too. 

Have we heeded any of the warnings that you've been giving us over the years?

I don't think we have got in a place that is ensuring that we're prepared for what scientists and others, including myself, have been calling out for quite some time. And I think it's quite shocking. I do listen to your podcast, and I think we all think back to that first chapter in Ministry of the Future- Yeah

and that has been a reference point for me over many years since I first read that book, and it just feels like it is playing out big time in Europe, here in the UK, and I really do wonder whether our political leaders are taking heed of what it is that we're experiencing, and how this is not just an environmental issue.

This is a health issue. This is a, an economic issue. This is a security issue, and every minister, every secretary of state, every leader at a national level, at a regional level, and at a local level should be thinking about how this could be impacting the work, the communities that, that they are responsible for and help protect them.

It's interesting, isn't it? 'Cause our, I think that many of us have perhaps labored under an assumption that at some point things would get to a point where the costs and the impacts were so evident that the arguments that would be made for mitigation and adaptation would become easier.

But as the risk gets greater, the urgency doesn't seem to be translating. What's... How do you explain that to yourself, why that's not happening in the way that we might have thought that it would? 

If you take heat, I think when you're living the heat wave, it feels so real, but almost as soon as they go away, you forget.

you feel better. I've certainly felt- across the summer that I've been living with a heat wave hangover as my body has not responded particularly well to some of the heat that we've been experiencing, and the relentlessness of it. But it is silent. We don't necessarily see it. We now are seeing it in the fires.

We are seeing it in the dryness of our landscape. And I think that is when it becomes incredibly real. But it's very easy to forget very quickly and go back to the next big thing that a government needs to worry about. I think often the impacts that, and the scale of them, it has taken months to get the economic consequences, the health consequences.

So by the time we are notified by the UK Health Security Agency that there are excess deaths, it's nine months later and we're probably in the middle of a cool period. Yeah. So the news doesn't hit in quite the same way. So I am really pleased to see how some of our scientific organizations are now working a bit like we get with, weather attribution, that after an event, that this is seen to be as a direct consequence of our changing climate, that we start seeing maybe a week, maybe 10 days, two weeks after a heat wave, what an es- early estimate of those economic consequences might be.

Th- that's true, and getting some of the feedback of the economic impact is gonna help us and help citizens to understand what's happening. But, you would be forgiven in, where you and I are both sitting in the UK but this is an issue in many countries, for being quite confused at the moment. I don't know who is doing the headlines and the front page of The Times at the moment, but famously in social media over the last few days, we've had various issues of The Times where there's been a big above the fold piece that says, "Net zero risks blackouts," or something like that, and underneath is a picture of an enormous wildfire and people fleeing from the scene, and these two things are coexisting together.

I'm talking to lots of people. It feels like something else is going on. There's a deliberate attempt to stop us seeing this. Do you buy that, or do you think that we're just struggling to connect the dots in the media? 

I wish I knew the answer. But if I'm thinking of the fires that are playing out in France and Spain in particular, but in other parts of the world, and then take the city of Bordeaux, and knowing some of the industries, the businesses, the security organizations that are present in and around that major city in France, there shouldn't be a single chief exec of a company or a leader of a security group not thinking about the consequences of that fire, not just from the health and the lives and livelihoods of those thousands of people who are being disrupted right now, the 240-odd homes that have been burnt down to the ground, but thinking about the real risk- To those organizations from, whether it is explosions, where heat can damage those businesses.

I think whilst worrying about that, that dialogue, also understanding that maybe there's a whole range of other leaders who aren't necessarily thinking about climate from a, from the perspective that you and I have been doing for many years, but will now absolutely have to be thinking about the risks to their businesses, to their livelihoods, to how profitable they are, looking at their risk registers from something that is playing out in Spain, in France, but could over time start playing out here in the UK as well.

Yeah. No, it's such a good point. And this podcast obviously listened to in many parts of the world and, as you say, this is gonna affect, yes, the UK, but Germany, the Nordics. it's already in Canada. There's lots of different scenarios where this is happening. I'd love to ask you 'cause, as you now look so many things that you, in the leadership that you've shown over so many years with the Environment Agency and the commissions you've been part of, including the, the heat work that you're doing right now, you have made recommendations for policy interventions that should be made by governments to help protect citizens.

And as you now look at how the UK is experiencing this summer, but also France and Spain, what are some of the recommendations that you have made, had they been fully implemented, would've made the biggest changes to what we're now experiencing? 

So where we're seeing progress in this country and elsewhere is that mayors are taking action- 

and delivering change. So one of the key areas of, focus from the London Climate Resilience Review, which I was commissioned to do by Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, was to focus on heat. And in the absence of a national strategy for heat, focus on a strategy for London and a delivery plan. Now, I would have loved to...

that to have been implemented immediately, and there were some recommendations that were, including holding an exercise called Exercise Helios, which was inspired off the then mayor of Paris's focus on 50 degree... the potential for 50-degree heat in Paris. This was about having experienced two to three days at 40 degrees, what would London need to do to get ready for a week of 40 deg- degree heat?

So that was implemented back in the summer of 2024. During London Climate Action Week, Sadiq Khan launched Heat Ready London, which was London's response, London's plan to take action on heat across all sectors. It was launched, interestingly, at Islington Fire Station- 

... 

alongside the fire brigade and with the commissioner for the London Fire Brigade.

Because back in 2022, alongside the heatwave when we had a whole range of different impacts playing out, there was a ring of fire all the way around London, and over July 19th, 20th, it was the busiest day for the London Fire Brigade since the Second World War. And what that plan does is... and it's still at its relative early stages.

I think we're going to see, be seeing more details of it come out this summer- Sh- shows what a mayor can do and in the absence of that national vision for a heat strategy. But like many mayors in this country and many mayors around the world, it also depends on the right powers and the right finances being devolved to that local level.

I've almost, internalized that myself to a degree. But like in Italy, if you're, if you have a cold, any, any elderly person will blame it on what they call the colpo d'aria, which is like a hit of air that generally comes from the air conditioning. and they believe that, the vacillation, when here when you go to an airport or a supermarket, it might be 67 degrees inside, and they think that the, moving from that into 100-degree parking lot back into a cold home is gonna make you sick, guaranteed.

Is 

there any science underlying that? 

I haven't looked. I've always assumed that it can't be true, Europeans don't need to use air conditioning the way we do. the people that I know who are f- friends of my parents, like elderly, like A- AC holdouts, they now get it, but they maybe use it for a half hour in the afternoon just to take the edge off.

and then their apartment goes from being, dangerously hot to just hot. To me, that's a great way to use an air conditioning- Yeah ... because you are- For other reasons ... you're not gonna make yourself sick that way. You're gonna avoid getting yourself sick. 

So you reported recently Europe looks to be shying away... Even Europe looks to be shying away from some of its most ambitious climate goals. You have a story from July with the headline, "Europe proposes weaker policy for reducing emissions."

What's happening? 

yeah. it's a proposal, so it has to be still debated, by, by the member states of the European emit- European Union. This would be a change to, something called the ETS, which is essentially like a cap and trade system where the cap shrinks every year for emis- the allowable number of emissions that i- in certain industries.

the EU's idea is to lower the pace at which that cap shrinks. So essentially, that would, allow for slightly more emissions every year for a longer period of time. that's just one of the changes that has happened from Europe on kind of this theme over the last couple years. Like last year, Europe, w- watered down a, a pledge to stop having, stop allowing new sales of petrol four-wheel cars from 2035.

That was, made under heavy pressure from industry where they see that, the, their own European car dealers are not fairing well during the EV transition, especially compared to China, which has a huge advantage in EVs. All these changes, I think they come from the same theme, which is, the, the easy gains of making changes are over now.

And this point of, if you're gonna really hit your goals for, a cleaner economy and, societies and industries, you need to s- make big changes. And if you're not politically ready for that, then you start doing the stuff that Europe is doing. the full context though is that, since the '90s, Europe has done a pretty good job of cutting emissions.

it's a much... it, the amount of greenhouse gases that the EU puts into the atmosphere is about 40% less than, than it was in 1990. And still on paper their goal is for that 40% to become 90%, a 90% reduction by 2040. there's still, some of the same, climate backlash DNA that you see in other parts of the world, especially the United States.

but I think that it's only to a small degree compared to... You don't have, you don't have, the top political figures v- in Europe vehemently saying that this is bunk or, ... the, it's ... What they're trying to do is, this tricky middle ground appeasement of different political factions and industry, and they always end up tweaking things in the margin and making things weaker.

It's not pretty, but that is what's happening. B- it's not an abject rejection either of climate change or of the goals that, we need to bring these greenhouse gas emissions down. So it's k- it's... I think that's the best way to encapsulate it. It doesn't fit pr- pretty, it doesn't fit in a pretty way under, under denialism or under, embracing of the climate goals.

It's somewhere in the middle. 

And I think we have one example on the phones of kind of Europe hitting a, a, a certain degree of climate policy wall. Selma in Brooklyn, originally from Prague. Selma, you're on WNYC. Thank you for calling in. 

Thank you for having me. so I go to the Czech Republic, and, the, while the policies are being, drafted and sometimes signed into law, the, there's a lot of pushback from local communities 'cause we are a, as in Russia, they call it dacha, dacha country, where people go to the countryside on weekends.

They have homes there. And a lot of the sort of liberals, the same ones who push for these climate change policies say, "Not in my backyard." Because it's unsee, no, they don't look good. The solar, it's less bucolic. so that's one thing. But on a upside, what I wanna say, Europe is so much more about prevention, like in health as well, and some of it is just by chance, or by design, before World War...

So the pre-war buildings in the Czech Republic are built very solidly, and if you're in one of those homes, during sum- if there's a heat wave, yes, there's some more heat, but generally, if you build houses out of raw, brick, there's no need as much for, especially if the heating sticks a little bit better, and the coolness stays longer.

And I notice here, that even the new buildings, they are built like, paper basically, just wooden sticks and 

 

And then of course you need air conditioning. 

and more heat. So you're producing more and more. And finally, also the policies of bringing in, better train service, cheaper train service, which is a huge thing for America.

I understand the size of it is a challenge. But even easy routes like between, let's say, New York and Montreal, it's a 14-hour ride where it could be five hours, and it would save so much, money, would be much less. So that's what I have to say. 

Now, Section C, THE DELAY MACHINE

To understand what the endangerment finding is, we must take a step back to 2007, when a Supreme Court ruling changed how the US viewed pollution regulation

Good morning, and, thank you all very much for being here today. Today's hearing will focus on the aftermath of the landmark Supreme Court decision in Massachusetts versus EPA, both within the Bush administration and within Congress. In 1998, in response to an inquiry by then Representative Tom DeLay, the Clinton administration's Environmental Protection Agency said that it believed that the Clean Air Act provided it with the authority to regulate carbon dioxide.

One year later, a group of environmental and other advocacy organizations petitioned the EPA to use this authority to set greenhouse gas standards for cars. But it wasn't until 2003, when the Bush administration had already embarked on a course of denial, delay, and dismissal of the risk of climate change and the need to address it, that the EPA repudiated the Clinton administration's conclusion that carbon dioxide was a pollutant that could be regulated, and denied the petition.

That petition became the case known as Massachusetts versus EPA. 

The voice you're hearing is Ed Markey, a Democrat known for progressive policies and a leading voice on climate change in the US Congress, who served as the US representative for Massachusetts 7th congressional district from 1976 to 2013.

In June 2007, two months after the Massachusetts v. EPA Supreme Court ruling, the House Select Committee held a hearing led by Markey exploring the ruling's implications. Until the 2007 ruling, the Bush administration continued to dismiss what by then was already undisputable scientific evidence of the dangers of carbon dioxide for human health and the planet, asserting that it lacked authority to regulate carbon dioxide, and that voluntary regulations would be sufficient.

The Supreme Court ruling changed that. In a 5-4 vote, the justices ruled that under the plain meaning of the Clean Air Act, carbon dioxide is a pollutant. What that meant was that the EPA now had the duty to regulate this pollutant, as long as it could determine the emissions of carbon dioxide endanger public health and welfare.

That decision was important because, number one, it found that at least states have standing to sue when it comes to climate change issues. It found that greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, are pollutants under the Clean Air Act, and it said that the EPA cannot decline to regulate based just on policy issues.

There's a statutory duty to evaluate under a specific provision of the Clean Air Act whether greenhouse gases cause or contribute pollution which may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or the welfare with respect to new motor vehicles. So basically, you had the Supreme Court back in 2007 telling the EPA, "Look, this is an air pollutant, okay?

We've looked at the text of the Clean Air Act, and carbon dioxide, greenhouse gases are air pollutants, and there's this statutory duty to decide whether there's, endangerment to the public health or welfare. And now you need to go through a process. You need to go through a reasoned regulatory process to come up with a scientific justification for regulating or not these pollutants."

And so that set into motion the process for adjudicating y- or deciding, the endangerment issue 

The process under the Obama administration led in 2009 to what became known as the greenhouse gas endangerment finding. The EPA found that the current and projected concentrations of six well-mixed greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, including the three most known ones, carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide, threatened the public health and welfare of current and future generations.

The EPA also found that the combined emissions of these greenhouse gases from new motor vehicles and new motor vehicle engines contribute to the greenhouse gas pollution that threatens public health and welfare. These findings per se did not directly translate into any requirement on industry or other entities, but they became a prerequisite for implementing greenhouse gas emission standards for vehicles and other sectors.

That became the legal foundation for most federal climate change regulation under the Clean Air Act, and there was a sort of a cascading impact. you quickly get greenhouse gas standards for cars and trucks. It led to a power plant carbon dioxide rule, the Clean Power Plan. It led to oil and methane regulations, and it led to some greenhouse gas permitting under the Clean Air Act, something called a tailoring rule.

Interestingly, many of these programs, probably all of them, have been challenged, and some of them have been subject to some modification by courts. But what you saw was that the endangerment finding did create this cascading impact of regulation of climate change by the EPA under the Clean Air Act. So it was this foundational trigger that sort of continued over time to create new programs for regulating greenhouse 

gases.

And I personally, as I look back at it, I think it was groundbreaking because there was so much congressional stalemate over climate change legislation, and this was a way to break through that And it's also something that I think was important in that the way the court decided Mass v. EPA, and then following the endangerment finding, this became a statu- a fixed statutory duty, really, and something that didn't just change with, you know, political change and political wins.

It became part of the program, as it were. And that was 20 years ago. I also think that had an impact on how the federal government viewed climate change and other administrative agencies, how they considered impacts of climate-related risk. you saw different agencies incorporating that into their decision-making process.

And of course, there's been an impact on industry as they've complied with these programs and relied on these programs in terms of making changes in their business and production and so forth. So there's been, it's been a pretty big impact

Now, I can give you chapter and verse as to why the existence of billionaires in our country, even in what we perceive to be a capitalist system, which it's not, but that's for another day, is evidence of a failed economic and political system.

But it really boils down to this. The left understands the inherent contradictions of capital concentration and how this phenomenon positions capital to control the political process to the detriment of the masses. That billionaire doesn't have to be directly picking the pocket of a person on the left in an obvious way for us to understand the societal imbalance of inequality.

The right, on the other hand, doesn't just tolerate the billionaire, they root for them because they believe that there's a chance they might someday be one. "Someday, I'm gonna get mine. I'm gonna get that bag." And our shared distrust of elected officials ironically bolsters these sentiments. See, the left believes the political class can be bought, and therefore seeks to eradicate the possibility of it.

The right believes the political class is in on the corruption and will steal their bag just like they're coming for their guns. And so we hold periodic charades of political participation known as elections to determine whose narrative is winning this tug of war, and that's why the Republican Party doesn't irritate me in the same way as the Democratic establishment manages to do.

Give you another example. The DNC is still evaluating the psychographic and demographic data from Obama's election in 2008. if we can just win back those Republicans in red states who went for Obama, we can swing the pendulum all the way back to the middle. That's the motivating mantra of the DNC and the moneyed interests that support it.

And the reason those Republicans went for Obama is because the global financial crisis fell on a Republican's watch. That's it. That's the whole fucking story. Millions of Republicans voting in their own self-interest because the neoliberal politics of deregulation and tax cuts for the wealthy failed at precisely the right moment for Obama to ascend to the throne.

The failure to fix this circumstance is also what led to Donald Trump. Now, I'm about to embark on a three-part series handicapping the twenty twenty-eight field of presidential nominees on the Democratic side. So I'm thinking a lot about the conditions that will activate the base of support, and there's no question in my mind that we will be presented with a two thousand and eight-style opportunity as the Trump administration pulls the threads of the stitches that hold this economy together.

This is basically what the UNFCR project is all about. But sadly, social issues don't move politics in the way that we want them to and in the way that we think they do. The politics of endless wars, civil rights, civil liberties, bodily autonomy, even democracy, they are not the principal dynamics in sea change elections.

Good social policies are constructed during the most polarized economic periods, like catastrophe paved the way for Social Security and market regulation. Prosperity, on the other hand, paved the way for civil rights and Great Society programs. Eras of precarity lead to bad decision-making, and they make us susceptible to the loudest voice in the bully pulpit with a bumper sticker answer to very complicated problems.

And right now, we have a confluence of catastrophic issues on a collision course. Ignoring climate change doesn't make it go away. Like David Sirota's Don't Look Up, the meteor is coming whether you look at the sky or not. But the right has won both the propaganda battle and the precarity battle when it comes to this issue.

They've sown doubt in the science, and they've given equal weight to the uber minority of skeptics in the scientific community, many of whom are probably bought and paid for. That leaves the ignorant masses to their own devices to determine who's right or wrong, myself included. I'm not a scientist. So they've also dismantled the economic protections for the working class, thereby leaving even the most interested and empathetic parties too broke, too disillusioned, and too goddamn tired to muster the effort to fight the tide of lies and disinformation.

And the same holds true for the promise of artificial intelligence. The concept of AI has been around for 70 years, and the first glimpses of operational AI, or what we're told has been operational AI, finally delivered in the last couple of years. And if successful, AI will eliminate tens of millions of jobs.

That's the success narrative. If it fails, it'll bring down the economy because of the volume of over-investment into a very narrow sector So either way, it'll have devastating consequences to the environment. So let's dwell on all this for a moment. In the past couple of years, more money has been invested into AI infrastructure than any public or private investment ever, and the sales pitch was 50/50, both bad.

Either we destroy the economy by eliminating lower and middle parts of the workforce, or we flush the largest capital investment in history down the toilet. And in both cases, we're gonna rip apart communities to build data centers that require more energy and more water than we currently produce or have access to.

Again, don't look up. In all the writing that I've done as an admitted non-scientist and somebody who relies on the expertise of things like, I don't know, experts, a few things have become very clear regarding climate change. First of all, we've gone from reversible to resilience. the window is closed to reverse course now that the warming trends have accelerated and are causing extreme weather events.

Second, we'll make it through as a species, but the way that future generations exist will be fundamentally different. There will be mass migration events and population decline due to famines, droughts, displacement, and those type of things. But here's a fun fact that feeds the self-interest of the Republican mindset.

The United States will have one of the best climates for survival. Then again, swaths of coastal regions will just be underwater, and that is according to the naval scientists who've been modeling this since the early 1990s. That's the military, and we all trust the military, right? Another fun fact: We have examples of reversing damage to the environment and the atmosphere, back when science was a nonpartisan affair, of course.

And we did a piece on this. It was the Montreal Protocol an international compact because scientists figured out that's what was responsible for the hole in the ozone layer. And as a child of the 1970s and '80s, I can tell you this was as big of a threat as quicksand.

And guess what? It's almost closed. We did it. Imagine that But we're fifty years past the time when politicians built public policy around science, and this leaves us with the confluence of disasters that will open up a new hole, not in the ozone, but in our politics. And in that, we once again have the opportunity to construct a new politics in the giant hole that Donald Trump is blowing in the economy.

the math on AI doesn't math. The historic amount of capital being deployed into AI infrastructure is chasing something that we already know does not exist. So if you hold one truth in your head about AI, please let it be this one: AI cannot achieve economies of scale. This is the one fundamental economic piece required within a capitalist economy to justify the pain and economic dislocation required to feed the insatiable growth beast.

At some point, any technological or industrial advancement has to achieve economies of scale. At some future date, it has to bend the cost curve. In the 1970s, internal scientists at Exxon proved that burning fossil fuels would increase the temperature of the atmosphere and heat the earth's surface. They knew it, and they buried it.

In the 1990s, the United States military published a report that predicted where and when US military installations would be underwater all over the globe. They knew it, and we all ignored it. So that's not Al Gore saying it. It's not Greenpeace or the Sierra Club. That's the fossil fuel industry and the military.

And there's no tinfoil hat required because these reports have been totally exposed, and the science has been refined ever since. But don't look up, right? So now back to AI. Similar to what we knew about climate change, we know for sure that the current AI infrastructure will be obsolete, not within decades, but within a few years.

And that increasing compute and increasing efficiencies in these frontier models requires even more investment. And the more it grows, the greater the cost. That is the exact opposite of economies of scale. In fact, it might be the single most inefficient and unprofitable industrial revolution ever. And you need be neither an economist nor a scientist to understand how this all unravels in spectacular fashion and in very short order.

And therein lies the opportunity for the Democratic Party to fill this inevitable void that brings together voters who act, yes, in their self-interest and those who vote in the interest of the masses Just like 2008. But the only ones who are prepared for this eventuality, the only ones who have built resiliency into their models, is the financial sector.

don't get me wrong, there will be carnage, but our tax dollars and the power of our central banking authority are at their disposal, and they will not hesitate to deploy them in order to salvage the system. And what's on offer in the Democratic Party? More centrism and a coordinated attack on the left flank of the party, the new Red Scare.

If you do not stand for something, then you stand for nothing, or worse, you allow the opposition to define it for you.

For nearly two decades, the endangerment finding was the legal engine behind US climate action. It wasn't just a policy, it was a mandate that said the government must act. But this all changed this February. 

Hello, everybody. 

Hi. This is a big one if you're into environment. This is about as big as it gets, they tell me.

Under the process just completed by the EPA, we are officially terminating the endangerment finding, a disastrous Obama era policy that severely damaged the American auto industry and massively drove up prices for American consumers. Prices went up incredibly for a worse product. This determination had no basis, in fact, had none whatsoever, and it had no basis in law.

On the contrary, over the generations, fossil fuels have saved millions of lives and lifted billions of people out of poverty and all over the world, and you see it with the blackouts all over where they don't use it, where they went to wind, intermittent wind, which is weak and ineffective and very costly.

Most costly energy there is. 

There is a lot to unpack here, and while that's not the focus of this episode, let's just clarify before moving on that wind energy is now generally cheaper than fossil fuels in most of the world, with onshore wind costs declining over 68% and offshore wind costs declining over 59% over the last decade, according to Harvard data.

But back to the automotive industry. The Trump administration and supporters of the repeal say the finding's repeal would make cars cheaper, bringing down costs for automakers by some $2,400 per vehicle. Environmental groups are skeptical of the potential cost savings being touted by Trump. They argue the repeal will instead result in additional fuel costs for consumers to power what effectively will be less efficient and higher polluting vehicles.

Not to talk about the health impacts. One analysis by the Environmental Defense Fund, an advocacy group, found that the repeal will result in up to 58,000 additional premature deaths and 37 million more asthma attacks between now and 2055. Even President Obama, who is rarely seen publicly commenting on the Trump administration's policies, said in a statement that Americans will be less safe, less healthy, and less able to fight climate change because of it.

Also, that the fossil fuel industry can make even more money The fingerprints of the fossil fuel lobby are indeed all over this administration's climate policy. the industry has seen a direct return on its investments, thanks to the systematic rollback of environmental protections and regulations by the Trump administration.

Since the repeal was announced, Trump administration officials also revived the long-debunked myth that carbon dioxide isn't dangerous. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said CO2 is actually not a pollutant, arguing that plants need it to survive and grow, and the more CO2 there is, the more plants thrive So what's next?

On April 20, the endangerment findings rescission took effect. But like many of Trump's policies, the future of the 16-year-old scientific funding is in the hands of the judiciary. Four days before the deadline, 16 health and environmental groups, including EarthJustice, the Union of Concerned Scientists, and the American Public Health Association, filed a petition with the EPA urging the U.S.

Courts of Appeals of the District of Columbia Circuit to send EPA back to the drawing board. The petition outlines what the groups describe as severe flaws in its rule to appeal the endangerment finding and motor vehicle climate pollution standards. It focuses on the repeal's claim that reducing climate pollution from U.S.

cars and trucks is, quote, unquote, "futile." The group said that, and I quote, "It's an especially flawed and problematic assertion given that these vehicles are the largest source of climate pollution in the U.S. and one of the largest in the world, and given the clear evidence that reducing this pollution will deliver enormous benefits to American families."

They go on to say that the flawed claims in the EPA's initial proposal are based on findings from a wildly discredited report. What they're talking about is a report that pretty much downplayed the risks of global warming, contending that mainstream climate science is exaggerated and overlooks the positive effects of climate change.

It was written by a panel made up of five climate change skeptics that the Department of Energy secretly formed shortly after Trump took office last year. The petition also identifies how the EPA systematically undervalued the benefits of reducing climate pollution from cars and trucks, and came to the conclusion that the impacts of vehicle emissions are small by comparing them to what they said are phantom numbers and flawed metrics.

For example, some of the metrics the EPA identifies do not appear in the sources cited by the agency. In other cases, simple maths errors seem to have led to some wildly inaccurate estimates, as much as 86% higher than they should be, according to the petition Environmental groups have also filed lawsuits.

In March, a coalition of 24 states, alongside a dozen cities and counties, sued the Trump administration, arguing that the rescission was illegal, and seeking to reinstate both the finding and limits on standards for motor vehicles emissions. Before them in February, more than a dozen environmental justice nonprofits, many of which were also behind last month's petition, filed a similar lawsuit.

In a statement in response to that lawsuit, the EPA said it carefully considered and reevaluated the legal foundation of the endangerment finding, and revoked it to comply with the law 

The main argument is gonna be that this directly contravenes Mass v EPA. Mass v EPA decided that this is an air pollutant, that the repeal says, "No, it's not."

That you can't address... The Clean Air Act wasn't designed to address global pollution and global issues. It was designed to address localized pollution issues. And so also that Mass v EPA said, "Look, you're not supposed to neglect or decide not to regulate based on policy considerations when it comes to climate change.

You need to go through this endangerment process, and your decision needs to be based on a scientific causal relationship." And so naturally, the question of whether Mass v EPA should be revisited is gonna be teed up, and I think that's what the EPA was ultimately trying to do. I think there's a lot of good arguments that can be made that this is directly inconsistent with Mass v EPA.

You can make certainly arguments under the Administrative Procedure Act that this is not lawful administrative rulemaking, that it's arbitrary and capricious. Those are good arguments. However, since Mass v EPA, there have been significant legal developments. The Supreme Court is considered, a conservative Supreme Court, and there's six conservative justices, and they've been more willing to be active in pursuing an ideological agenda that's consistent with a conservative ideology.

And there's reason to believe that there may be more willingness to upset Massachusetts v EPA, or sidestep it altogether. And so these arguments may be received in a different way once it goes all the way up to the Supreme Court. I think it's highly likely this case is gonna get taken up to the Supreme Court.

And it's not just that there's a different composition on the Supreme Court, it's also that there have been doctrinal changes in administrative law. You have the West Virginia v EPA decision that says, major questions should need a, that, that are being addressed by an agency need a clear congressional mandate, that an agency shouldn't just decide those issues without direction from Congress.

And you could see based on those sort of doctrinal developments that the Supreme Court could try to both uphold, or say that its decision is not necessarily directly vitiating Mass v. EPA, but that it is somewhat consistent with Mass v. EPA, which did ultimately say it is up to the EPA to make this endangerment finding.

So the Supreme Court could try to justify a policy reversal in affirming the EPA's repeal. But in order to do that, it's going to be very difficult not to basically just overrule precedent, but it's definitely reasonably likely that the Supreme Court could do just that.

This week, the Trump administration said it would stop funding the Arctic Report Card, a longstanding effort to synthesize the latest research about the fastest warming place on Earth. Now, scientists are scrambling to find a way to publish this major annual report anyway, to continue to track how climate change is transforming the Arctic, impacting everything from glaciers to native communities to global fishing and shipping routes.

This decision is the latest in a series of moves by the administration to curtail scientific research into the impacts of climate change, which the administration argues is plagued with misinformation and alarmism. For more on what this means, we are joined again by glaciologist Twila Moon. She's been a lead editor of the Arctic Report Card, and she's the deputy lead scientist for the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado Boulder.

This conversation is part of our ongoing series, Tipping Point. Twila Moon, so nice to have you back on the program. The administration argues that the underlying research will continue, will not go away, just their support of the synthesis of it into this report. I-if that's the case, w-what does it matter if the report goes away?

unfortunately, the simple existence of data does not mean that people are finding that data and being able to access it, use it, and understand what it means. So the Arctic Report Card has played a really important role in bridging the gap between raw data, which is really difficult for most people to understand or work with, towards something that can serve non-scientists so that they can be making good decisions with proper up-to-date environmental awareness.

Can we step back for a second and explain why we care about what's happening in the Arctic? Because to, to many people in the lower forty-eight, they might think this is just a distant place that they'll never go to, and who cares really what happens up there? Why is it gonna impact me? 

what happens in the Arctic does not stay in the Arctic.

Changes that we see happening with permafrost or frozen ground, also changes with sea ice that forms on the surface of the Arctic Ocean, those changes actually themselves influence the weather we experience down here in the lower 48. But we can also see because the Arctic is warming so quickly, we're seeing a lot of increase in geopolitical tensions and increased attention to security and military activity in the Arctic, and that means that the Arctic has become a US administration priority in regards to paying attention to security, international relations, changes with shipping, and also economic development in the area.

we have seen other instances like these former NOAA staffers who out and then started their own independent website called climate.us to maintain a repository of climate data. Do you think that's something that you and your colleagues are gonna have to do now here?

myself, the other lead independent editors, and our incredible authors, we have usually more than a hundred authors from a dozen countries. This is an international effort. We're gonna do everything we can to get those data to the people who need them for making decisions and having environmental awareness.

But I wanna point out that simply being able to do this in another space does not mean that it's going to have the depth, all of the resources and tools, that people expect. So there's a real, loss in moving this to being something that's no longer supported by NOAA, where we have spent two decades building tools, resources, and a really trusted resource for folks.

as I mentioned, a- and as you well know, the Trump administration has taken other steps like this. They've dismissed scientists who were working on the National Climate Report. They put a climate change skeptic in charge of that document. They've dismantled the, the preeminent atmospheric research center, NCAR, in Colorado.

They've stopped updating the federal database that tracks the cost of hurricanes and floods and things that we know are driven by climate change. The, the president argues that climate change is a hoax. Members of his administration argue that all of this work is full of, alarmism and is just meant to terrify people.

A- as someone who does this benchmark science, what-- how do you respond to that? 

the Arctic Report Card and all of the science that we're reporting in it is specifically emphasizing direct observations of changes. So this is not a report that is projecting about the future or making inferences about what's happening on the ground.

This is a resource that is providing real, accurate, and complete peer-reviewed, trustworthy information about what is actually happening in place, and there's no arguing with reality. It's not a political, position. It's a scientific, re- resource. I 

mean, I know you have spent a lot of time on Capitol Hill talking to legislators and their staff about the importance of this.

We have seen in the past pushback by Republicans and Democrats to certain cuts to climate research. What is the argument that you make to, to legislators, and how do they respond to you when they see substantive cuts like this going on? 

I think that many representatives really clearly understand how valuable environmental intelligence is for making decisions right now, especially in a world that is changing quickly and giving us many different risks and hazards that we have never faced before.

And so I honestly hold on to hope that we may still have a pathway to see the Arctic Report Card as a NOAA report. but like I say, we are going to do our darnedest to ensure that this data is getting to those people who need it because there are many people, within the US, within states, local communities, Alaska, our Arctic state, and also folks in other country who look to this report for getting information, making decisions, and educating their students and workforce.

Right now we're living through a pretty important, significant weather event in Britain. I live on the South Coast. I think it last rained in Portsmouth on June the 26th. 

True. 

It might not rain again till August the 5th, which is about 40 days. 

Yes. Yeah. 

Why has that happened?

In all probability, I know, you know- Okay. 

yeah. 

This is when people say, it happened once in 1896," or- 

Yes. Yeah, and you can never say climate change causes one particular event. But if you remove yourself from all of that, it's basic physics, and we're putting a lot more energy into the atmosphere.

And if you do that, you change climate, you change weather patterns. And we've been knowingly doing this for a long time. this is nothing new. so if you go back to Fourier working on it in 1827, or Eunice Foote in 1849, and Tyndall in the early 1850s, and Arrhenius at the end of the 1800s. There's no...

It's nothing particularly new. I think some people think that this new thing called climate science. It's just physics. It's just chemistry. It's biology. It's what we've been doing post-Enlightenment, and people have been working on climate change for 150 or more years. so we have a really good understanding, which improves as time goes on, of how the science underpinning the climate and the weather works.

and we're putting... We know we're putting a lot more heat into the atmosphere, so there's a lot more energy in the atmosphere, and that means we get a lot more unpredictable, sort of weather patterns and extreme climate situations, which is what we're witnessing, already witnessing around the globe.

But I think it's worth pointing out, a lot of people refer to this as the new normal. This is, this really misunderstands where we are. This is not a new normal. On average, this is the least extreme weather That I, you, and anyone else listening to this will ever live through. It's going to get worse and worse every single year until we stop burning fossil fuels.

Not reduce burning fossil fuels, stop burning fossil fuels. So celebrate this as our least extreme weather year that we're gonna live through. It's going to get worse. 

We'll reflect back on the, the inclement and chilly days of, 32 degrees in London. 

Yes. 

Yeah. before we were growing mangoes and bananas.

Yeah. But to be, just to be clear, we, weather is what happens on top of a, a long-term climate signal. So we might still get a, a cold winter or next summer could be- 

Sure ... 

back to what we're typically used to. But on average, we are definitely seeing this significant trend now, at a global level.

Can you put some numbers in terms of, you said right at the top of the answer, we're putting lots of energy into the atmosphere. Yeah. So can you put some numbers on that? 

In terms of CO2 emissions and- Yeah, 

CO2 emissions, Okay ... parts 

per million, et cetera. 

Yeah. Okay. So the reason we're w- how we're warming the climate, primarily how we're warming the climate, is we're significantly increasing the amount of carbon dioxide, but a- also other greenhouse gases from agriculture and so forth, and in- and industry.

We're increasing those in the atmosphere. And for those who like to play around with numbers, s- since the Industrial Revolution, we... At the Industrial Revolution, before we started burning fossil fuels, we were at, the unit we use is parts per million, we were at about 280 parts per million of carbon dioxide, and now we're at about 430 parts per million.

That's happened almost overnight. And I think what's also important there, if you were to plot out, the last 10,000 years or so, which is the time when, human society's really flourished, if you like, so it's when modern society has r- really developed. During that time, we've had an incredibly stama- stable climate, and temperature and carbon dioxide level, so hardly any fluctuation at all.

About 20 parts per million fluctuation in 10,000 years. Overnight, imagine in 10,000 years, the end of that little plot, you put 1850 was when we started burning fossil fuels. Between there and now, which would be basically a straight line up, we've gone from 280 to 430 parts per million. And the physics tells us, the scientists I was mentioning before, the physics tells us, as we put more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, we trap more warmth in the atmosphere, and I say other greenhouse gases as well.

and so that's what we're doing. we've increased this blanket, if you like, of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, the concentration of it. That's trapping in more warmth. And until we actually stop burning fossil fuels and pumping the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, till we stop, the levels of meat consumption, 'cause that has a major, greenhouse gas implication in terms of methane primarily.

Until we stop those things or at least stop fossil fuels and significantly reduce meat consumption, then the temperature will just keep going up. The parts per million will keep going up, and we'll get warmer and warmer. 

And methane is a greenhouse gas alongside CO2. 

That's another very, very powerful greenhouse gas.

It doesn't last so long in the atmosphere. Yeah. Nowhere near as long as carbon dioxide. but it's very powerful. So in the short term, it's actually more, much more powerful per molecule than carbon dioxide. but it doesn't last as long. But if you're talking about this, we'll probably come onto this later.

If you're talking about this, the agreements that we have about what temperatures we want to hold below, 'cause we think above that is too dangerous, then methane plays a really important part in that timeframe, 'cause th- those temperatures we're reaching already. So the short term is so important from a climate perspective.

So methane emissions need to dramatically reduce, and we need to eliminate, carbon dioxide emissions- Yeah ... which is basically fossil fuels. 

And methane, obviously, as you said, comes from animal agriculture, but also it's a big part of fracking, which is one of the arguments 

against fracking. it does come...

Yeah, there's a lot of it from fracking, from the oil and gas industry more generally, from, also from coal as well. So the oil industry has a lot of methane. It puts a lot of methane emissions into the atmosphere. Fracking's particularly bad amongst the fossil fuels, but also there's a lot of methane that is produced naturally.

And as you warm up the climate- Yeah ... you increase the amount of what we might call natural, production of methane. s- so there are other issues. As you warm up the, the peat and the tundra in, in, in Russia and so forth, you're gonna see large quantities, very large quantities of methane increasingly put into the atmosphere.

And also, as you heat up the oceans have far more carbon dioxide in them than the atmosphere. Yeah. As you warm the oceans, just again, O-level physics will tell you that you can't hold as much carbon dioxide in it, in the oceans, and they will start putting that into the atmosphere. So at the moment, the oceans are a really important carbon dioxide sink, but that is looking that we're getting towards the point where those could turn from being a, a sink to a source of carbon dioxide.

Yeah. 

Which is almost too disturbing to contemplate. 

So there are people like Nigel Farage or the median Reform voter, and I hope they're watching this, and they'd be saying, "These people are catastrophists." But what you're saying is, if we get to two degrees or three degrees, and this is very well documented, there is a very p- Decent chance of this cascade of feedbacks where methane is emitted from Siberia, methane hydrate from the world's oceans, and all of a sudden- yeah

we go from four to five to six. 

certainly significant increases in temperature. And, I wouldn't say when you get to t- the, w- some scientists saying that's, we think that's occurring already. So we're starting to see s- there's some thought that we might be seeing early die back in some parts of the Amazon, possibly in some parts of the Congo, but the data's really poor on the Congo.

So we're starting to see certain sort of collapses of key, s- sink structures around the planet, which are really important for keeping the balance. So we're starting to see that now. and some scientists think we've probably crossed some of those, what people refer to as tipping points, non-linearities in our fancy climate language.

But tipping points, we're starting to cross those now. But the problem with this is that, though science is very clear on the, on the causes for all of this, the actual t- exact timeframes are always ... you mustn't put too much precision on them. Of course. and so some scientists think we're just getting to that point now, as others think it'll be

It's a few more years away. But by and large, none of them are disagreeing. we are putting this energy in the atmosphere, which is going to have the, which is gonna bring about these natural sets of feedbacks, which in the end make whatever we do almost irrelevant. the, the system will move to a new equilibrium.

It might move to a new equilibrium that we're not in, and probably be a damn sight better without us in some respects. we've caused ... At least in post-Enlightenment, we've caused a lot of, climate issues, but also broader ecological issues. We haven't found a way yet, post-Enlightenment, of large populations of humans living in any sort of harmony with this sort of, yeah, the natural processes of the planet.

and we are deeply reliant on those natural processes. we're destroying our own home

The other thing you should keep your eye on is that we have now added a new kind of gambling market to our gambling on things that are not traditional gambling industry, which is, the only growth industry in the country aside from data centers. There's now a bunch of different services that are letting people gamble specifically on wildfires and where they hit and how much damage they do.

Oh, Jesus. 

Yeah. Yeah, and I wanna quote from an article in Oregon Live. "As Oregon surpassed its wildfire acreage record over the weekend with more than two million acres burnt, Oregon lawmakers also raised a new wildfire concern Monday as prediction markets continue to allow people to place bets on wildfires, saying it could lead to more human-caused fires."

"In a letter to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which regulates prediction markets, Senator Jeff Merkley led lawmakers from other w- wildfire-stricken states and Senator, Ron Wyden in urging the agency to crack down on wildfire-related contracts. The group warned that the markets could create financial incentives for arson."

And that's the big deal is that, if you're letting people gamble on this shit- 

Yeah ... 

firefighters- ... might be incentivized to fuck with stuff. Regular people could be incentivized to fuck with stuff. We've seen this happen already. I reported a couple months ago about that Israeli journalist who, posted a video of a missile failing to get intercepted and, hitting into some trees, and he started getting death threats because people were gambling on, like, how, whether or not it would be intercepted, and his reporting was inconvenient to them.

Shit's gonna be happening like that with fires in addition to people trying to start them if this is allowed to go, right? Polymarket lets people bet on not just wildfires but a variety of natural disasters. People can choose yes or no on, as to whether or not they think a category five hurricane is going to hit the United a volcano is going to erupt.

It's just a really bleak thing, and there's, one of the things that I read recently is there's a, there's even a new market s- focused specifically on gambling on California wildfires called Wyldfire, W-Y-L-D-F-Y-R-E. Jesus Christ. The company tagline is, "You can't predict wildfire, but you can trade on it." And I wanna quote, from High Country News in an investigation into this company.

"Currently, Wyldfire users can only simulate trading, but according to the site, the ability to bet with real money is coming soon." 

Oh, gosh. "

The platform purports to be the first prediction market of its kind, pricing county and city wildfire risk in real time. 'California burns every year, and it's getting worse.

The question isn't if, it's when and where,' the site reads." Wildfire frames its platform as providing a public good. "Wildfire turns collective intelligence into better wildfire forecasting, one trade at a time," the site reads. 

Oh my God. 

But entities with a real need for wildfire forecasting, including federal and state firefighting agencies, say they aren't interested in prediction market data.

"The Forest Service does not use- ... information from prediction markets for wildfire forecasts." No. Why? And they don't even need to go, "It's useless." Yeah. "It's useless, and everyone saying this is an idiot and a liar." 

It's insane. This, this whole thing, it's like we can chart, the world's collective knowledge- No

because money- 

People are fucking morons ... 

money is, is- Yeah ... speaks more truthfully than just words. It's just complete nonsense. 

No. People are gonna burn down their own neighborhoods to get rich. 

Yeah. if you look at, like, how much prediction markets have been wrong about a sequence of, high-profile elections just in the past year- 

Yeah

shows that this is not useful or r- reliable data. There is no, hidden truth that prediction markets can find through the, quote-unquote, "wisdom of crowds." And, this, this specific thing on these wildfires is, a two-pronged issue. One, kind of evil, right? To just, win money based on the deaths of- Oh, 

yeah

however many people in natural disasters. 

The destruction of their lives- Jesus Christ ... their everything they've built- Yeah ... the fear. Yeah. Yeah. 

death markets is, one, one aspect. the o- other, aspect is if someone has a lot of money riding on a certain wildfire hitting a certain location, then yeah, there is financial incentive to maybe cause a fire to hit a certain location.

Or try to pay someone else to. Yeah. Yeah. 

There's, that aspect as well. 

It's evil for so many reasons. 

Obviously should be illegal. Yeah. it's insane.

I remember when arguing over whether the market is an information processor that, as you're saying, has, like, all of this collective intelligence from market signals, and it's, the most efficient information processor versus arguing that it's a gambling den.

that used to be an academic debate. Yeah. And now it's just "Oh, no, we're doing this on fires." And it's just, God, e- every, every- everything that was once metaphor is now literal, and all of the metaphors suck 

Yeah, this is pretty fucked up. th- this was a concern that was talked about with, the LA fires- Yep

last year or two years ago, 'cause I, I know there was Polymarket or, Kalshi betting on those, and th- that, that created, a little mini news cycle of, talking about this maybe being a problem. But, the scale in which this has, accelerated is crazy. 

Again, I used to do, sports gambling ads, 'cause I don't have a problem with gambling, like ethically.

the same way I don't have a problem with liquor and whatnot. And then it just became very clear before too m- oh, wait, no, this isn't your father's gambling. This isn't going to fucking... things are well beyond he- heading to Vegas for, a weekend or playing cards online with your friends. This has turned into, everything.

this is the omniculture. It's almost the only recreational activity a lot of Americans have anymore. 

In my realm, I think that is one of the biggest concerns I have, is that my academic, lots of my academic colleagues, not m- maybe my immediate ones in Manchester, but certainly more widely, y- yeah, how many of those will postulate all sorts of future technologies?

And they, and it ... they flood the climate space with carbon capture and storage, negative emission technologies, all these things that out in the future are going to solve climate change for us so we can maintain business as usual today. that agenda has not only flooded the discourse on climate change, and there are huge numbers of papers on these things, but if I go look at my colleagues, what they work on, far more people are working on carbon capture and storage and negati- negative emission technologies.

Almost no one is working on radical emission reductions for climate emergency. Virtually no one I know works at that sort of level. But at the other level, at all these technologies, whole swathes of technical people, social science people, all sorts of people are working on those. So you've normalized a narrative about technology that barely exists, and literally, barely exists.

It's just out the laboratory for most of this stuff. and we normalize it as if it will, as if it exists. So when, the Labour Party had their conference a couple of years ago in, Albert Dock in Liverpool, I went along there. The biggest, the, the biggest, stand there was for carbon capture and storage by the oil and gas industries.

they- they're s- they're selling snake oil again, and of course, they're wearing suits, and it looks like there's a few calculations involved there and the odd bit of kit they can show that somehow that, that ... that we're gonna deliver this in the timeframe we have. And I can give you the numbers on this.

There is virtually no carbon capture and storage globally. It's .03% of all fossil fuel emissions have been captured. After 30 years of the industry telling us it's just around the corner, and it's affordable. Now, we do need it on things like cement, and we haven't got into that detail, but there are things that, where it'd be useful.

On the oil and gas industry, it's a scam to maintain the oil and gas industry, and the academic community has fed into that by doing all this work on it, by pretending it's there, by creating these scenarios and narratives and the Committee on Climate Change, the International, Energy Agency and all these other groups, which then feeds into the Global Justice report, f- following the IEA scenarios.

All these scenarios that are wedded into technologies. Technolo- They're not technologies. They're pseudo-technologies. They're delaying technologies. They're designed to delay legislation. They're not designed to deliver. And so it's not just about the politics that sells, that floods the world with information.

It's the, the academic community on climate change, the bit I know about on the mitigation side, about doing something about reducing emissions, that is awash with pseudo-technologies all designed to maintain the status quo. And often you get a, get academics working quite objectively on these things, but the boundaries within which they work, within which they're funded, are deeply subjective.

So it's not just an issue of the media. It's a, it's an issue of the expert class as well. And we've swallowed this hook, line, and sinker on the climate realm, and it's true for the Committee on Climate Change. It's true for Ed Miliband's view on climate change as well, and for his advisors on climate change.

so I hold the academic community as culpable for this as I do the media 

So you talk about these as, delay technologies- Yes. Yeah ... and you put them in contrast to timely technologies. So let's return to that binary in a second. You can explain what- 

Okay. 

Yeah ... timely technologies are. But this idea of, information war being in this space as well, it's interesting.

people know the word PSYOP, psychological operation, but the idea that basically carbon capture is a psychological operation by the oil and gas industry seems obviously true. I remember Gordon Brown being the prime minister talking about this stuff- 

Yeah ... 

before 2010.

Yeah. 

And now we're in 2026. 

I've got colleagues that have been working on it for over 20 years. Some of them- Wow ... almost now a quarter of a century. 

Wow. 

So been working on carbon capture storage for a quarter of a century, looking at what's been going on and the rest of it, and now we still have almost none in 2026.

That's a success story It's a success story for the oil and gas industry. It has managed to delay legislation and deliver nothing. Virtually nothing. And even last 

year, Starmer was giving money to this. 

Oh, hoping to give money to it. Yeah, we, it's, we weren't quite sure how that was gonna work out, but yeah, it looked like public money- They 

were talking a billion pounds 

maybe

They were. Yeah, it did look how that was gonna go in- into this. And, there are... I'm not saying that all CCS technologies are a scam, but some of them are gonna be necessary. On things we talked about the cement before, there are things you can do about cement and we- 

Or bricks, right? And bricks.

You put CO2 into 

bricks. Bricks. So there are, so C- so carbon capture storage for capturing the process emissions from cement, which is about 4% globally- Yeah ... mostly from countries that are rapidly developing, and they definitely need these technologies to capture that CO2. So there are things we can do about it.

Challenging, but we can do something about it. On the fossil fuel side, there are alternatives and they are way cheaper. 

Yeah. 

But they haven't got the same... there's an, there's a whole other story in this. The reason that renewables are challenging for the incumbent energy companies, there's no rent.

If you've got, if you've got fossil fuels, you've got rent. You've got to produce the oil and gas every minute of every hour of every day of the year for, decade after decade to keep the car running. That's not true for renewables. Once you've actually built the bloody thing, the wind pops in and the solar, the sun hits the panel.

And so there's no rent. 

And if you've got a model that's built on rent and your power is built on rent, your prestige is built on rent, everything you have is built on rent, and it comes, someone comes along with another model with no rent in it, that's massively challenging for you, which is why BP went from...

remember for a while it went to Beyond Petroleum, then it quickly realized that wasn't gonna work, so it's gone back to as much oil and gas as it can get out the ground and forget the renewables. never trust the executives in the oil and gas companies. and so that, that shift from one to the other means that, we have to find ways that we can reconcile oil and gas industry with the challenges we have, which is why we've been sold this pup of CCS on energy.

So whilst it might be important on cement, on energy there are alternatives, but those alternatives do not fit into the current economic, financial, and power model that is fossil fuels. And so they will go down kicking and screaming because they've done so well, and I don't mean the people working on the rigs.

the executives and the senior shareholders who have done so well out of these industries. 

Brett Christensen wrote a great book, about actually renewable energy and, he's saying that the way to understand this in terms of its adoption within a market system is not about the, the price even.

I think price was in the name of the book. It's about the rate of return. And another thing besides rent is, of course, that, renewable energies are deflationary, right? That a lot of this stuff is getting cheaper every year. It might not happen forever- Yeah ... but it's happened for a long time. It's called Swanson's Law with regards to photovoltaic cells.

Yes. 

yeah. 

it's happened for a long time. It's gonna happen for a long time to come, and if you're trying to find a high reliable rate of return, you don't really wanna be in a sector which is deflationary. yeah, this stuff is already t-touched on. I quickly wanted to get from you this, this binary of, Delay technologies, the pseudo technologies you call, which is basically they serve the purpose of delaying meaningful action on climate change, and timely technologies.

So what are timely technologies? 

Yeah. So the timely the less sexy end of the spectrum if you like. retrofitting our houses. And you say you just sit here and, having just strolled around where your office is here, you can see the properties that are just crying out for retrofit.

so th- these are all over our country and these sorts of property. where I work in Manchester University, we're surrounded by, thousands of terrace houses that desperately need to be retrofitted just for the current climate and also just for, to allow the people to live in them well rather than living in them as damp and full of fungal spores and so forth, which is bad for everything.

so retrofitting houses, we know how to do that. We know how to build buses, so having buses and trams. We know how to do local planning. So there are all these things that we know how to do. None of them are particularly sexy. They're important. They require lots and lots of labor and quite a lot of technology.

And in doing retrofit well is really important. So you can... Anyone can build a low-quality house. Building a house that's gonna be efficient is actually quite difficult. So there are the skills of the builders in this, and the quality of the inspection are really important, 'cause if you get... You get little cold spots which make it so that retrofitting can be quite challenging.

s- but these sorts of technologies, which are not big, shiny things you can show at some Labor Party event, and have lots of wealthy blokes wandering around in suits showing you bits of kit. These are not that exc- exciting. Oh, buses. Oh, trams. Oh, e-bikes. e- e-bikes to me might well be a game changer in terms of localized transport.

E-cars are, electric cars are. And I'm not s- I'm not opposed to EVs, but the idea we're gonna have one-for-one substitution for EVs. I just think... and that, that's a good example again about this idea of thinking differently. and again, that's an industry that has come to dominate the discourse.

So we're all gonna move to EVs. There are 30, roughly 35 million cars in the UK. 33 million are basically petrol and diesel and a few hybrids. The rest, the other two million are electric. If we're gonna swap them all to electric as the Committee on Climate Change broadly say, that's about another 33 million electric cars.

Let's imagine they're 30,000 pounds each, which is probably about an average for new electric cars. And given there aren't many secondhand ones, they're gonna have to be new. That's roughly a trillion pounds we're gonna spend if we're gonna follow the government and the Committee on Climate Change cl- tran- local transport or, sort of transport agenda.

That's roughly a trillion pounds on new electric cars. And then if you look at how often the car is used, about 96% of the time they're idle. So cars are used between 4 and 5% of the time. So society's gonna spend £1 trillion of its resources on a technology that is only gonna be used for about 4% of the time.

It could alternatively spend it on trams, buses, local planning, moving factories and industries to nearer where people work. So all sorts of other things we could do. Instead we've normalized business as usual. And no one's questioning it. And EVs just seem to be good. I'm not against EVs. If you're gonna buy a car, buy a bloody EV, not a petrol or diesel one.

But the idea you just swap them out one for one, and the rest of the world tries to follow that, is utter nonsense. And this is my point about system thinking. You've got to step back from it. the idea of us spending 1 trillion on these cars is, we... this, that's... What's that? Four times what we spend on the NHS every year.

One third of the current, global J- UK GDP. And our plan is, in the Committee on Climate Change scenarios and the government scenarios, is literally to spend that trillion on cars that are hardly ever used. rather than rental cars, carpooling, all those sorts of things. We might have buses, trams, all those other things that we could have that could use the resources in a far more worthwhile way.

In addition to that, of course, there's no constraint on the size of these things. look at, look how large they are. And the assumption that somehow that they're zero emissions, an electric car has roughly the same particulates as a diesel or electric car. So if you're using them in the cities, you're still gonna have the people there suffering from the particulates.

And because they can accelerate so fast, electric cars are much faster accelerating, can be, then you've got much more tire wear, much more road wear, and actually you could have more particulates than if you had these well, well-maintained diesel and electric. 

Also potholes, right? 

Oh, 

my God. Because they're, 'cause they're heavier- 'Cause they 

accelerate.

Yeah, heavier, they accelerate very fast. Now, hopefully the weight can come down. There are technology things you can do about this. You can drop the weight, some of the new batteries that are coming out now look like they could have an energy density that's almost twice what the current ones are. But they only drop the weight if you're prepared to have a battery of the same range.

If we then increase the range, the batteries go back up, and that's of course what we will do without regulation. And a lot of all... Much of what we've talked about here comes down to the idea government has to have the guts to put the regulation in place. My argument to ministers and MP's is, when the financial directors of any organization come to you, put your fingers in your ear.

Let them squeal, and then let them go away. Just don't listen to them. Listen to the engineers. and by and large, the engineers will deliver if you put the regulations in place. Everyone will moan at the time, and then people afterwards will say, "Would you like to go back to what you had before?"

no, we like the level playing field." So regulations are always opposed, but often welcomed afterwards, as long as they've been well thought through.

And Finally, Section D, WHAT COMES NEXT 

you can't pass a law by yourself. But a relatively small number of people can actually pass a law together, like that very trite, never doubt that a small group of people can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.

I think that's Margaret Mead. it's actually very true. take me, for example. I wasn't even a US citizen when I was doing a lot of this work. I became a citizen in the middle of sort of this campaign work. and yeah, I'm a professor. I'm a little fancy, whatever, but I'm also just, a person.

I'm not, I'm not Chuck Schumer, I'm not Joe Biden, I'm certainly not Joe Manchin. And so what I wanted to do was tell a story of how policy change happens from the street level, from everyday people. So the other characters in the book follow the policy process from different vantage points.

So we know that people on the streets and, in the academy, activists, outside organizers can be part of policy change. This is obviously a big part of the civil rights movement, and I wanted to show how that can work in climate policy. So that's the storyline that I'm part of and others like Varshini Prakash and Sam Ricketts, et cetera.

But then, of course, Congress matters a lot in writing laws. And I have a friend named Adrian Devenney, who at the time was, Senator Chuck Schumer's lead negotiator on climate. And so he tells the story from inside Congress with a bunch of other folks inside of Schumer's office, like Jerry Petrella, who was his policy director, and others, and even, Keene Bhatt in the House on the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

And then, of course, the White House and the Biden administration matters too. And so to tell that story, we follow Sonia Aggarwal, who worked in the White House at the newly formed Climate Policy Office. And The narrative basically moves between these three different vantage points to give people a sense of how change happens in a democratic system.

It happens, from the legislature, from the executive branch, and of course, from outside of government, people pushing from the streets. 

I also really appreciated not just that academics are human people, I like to claim that as well, but, the fact that, even people, as you say, without tremendous wealth or political power who also have families and kids.

the, one of the neat through lines was that as you were all working on this, you were all entering that stage of life, of parenthood and the challenges and the difficulties and the stress and some of the crises. and it's a helpful re- reminder that the way the country and the world involves people who, they have other problems, too.

and it is, there's a lot of sacrifice and burden and stress, and all the more important then to have solidarity and collaboration and, be there for each other, I think. Part of the, the vision, I think, on the left has to reinforce the solutions, even though there's policy and political, fixes that are out there, really also involves the kind of solidarity and humanness that we all share that is, fundamental to the vision and the approach to making it happen, I think.

I completely agree with you, and I feel again, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is such an amazing embodied example of this. I was ... I went down a Googling rabbit hole the other night because she's doing her IVF so publicly right now. 

and I was like... And she talks about how she saved up for it, so I was like, "Oh, let me research, like, how she makes money."

I was just curious as a person, and she is such a high integrity person. She only makes her salary in Congress. She takes absolutely no outside money, and the salary's about $174,000 a year, which, isn't low income. But she has to maintain a house in both New York and DC, which are, like, the highest cost of living places.

And, she's gotta look nice all the time. She has expenses just to be her. And, I think it's just really cool to see people being willing to tell that story from such a public way about what it means to, be a person in the middle of your life and, becoming a parent. And so that's really the story that the book also tells.

At the time when I was working on this policy, I was having a very high-risk twin pregnancy, and the story of that pregnancy is interwoven with the policy. And that might seem a little strange, but climate change is also about future generations, and a lot of people wonder today, it's such a common question.

Ezra Klein has said that when he doesn't ask me anything, the number one question is, w- "Why did you have kids given climate change?" And so it's a real common question so many young people have. And so what I tried to show in the book is that the way of thinking about that question is not the way that I would think about it.

It's not first of all, we're not doomed. We can still deal with the climate crisis. Every degree of warming that we can stop matters for all living beings. And secondly, there's also this paradigm, the carbon footprint paradigm, that every single person is responsible for a certain amount of pollution.

It's a very neoliberal concept. we take all the pollution, even if it's, the US military, and we divide it by all humans and in the United States- Yeah ... and then they're responsible. So even your baby being born would be responsible for pollution. And so people sometimes think that, oh, if the kid exists, they're just gonna perpetuate this messed up system, as opposed to taking a step back and saying, what if we could not have a messed up system?"

what if we could break the power of the fossil fuel industry and not hand off a fossil fuel economy to the next generation? And I think that kind of way of thinking is, can be common in the left, but so can a doom, a doomerism within the left too. So we have different threads in, in that area and ways of thinking.

but that's what I wanted to show to people, that, parenthood is a big part of the story when it comes to climate action. 

I really like that, just because the left often has a kind of skeptical, melancholic, ... or just, so just because you're being really, cool, skeptical, or a doomer, doesn't mean you're not also falling into the trap of individualism, right?

Yeah. 

Yes. No, I think that's true. I write about the carbon footprint paradigm in the book, and people probably don't know, Rebecca Solnit has written about this in The Guardian. I really love her article about this. But the carbon footprint as an idea, which I would imagine every single listener right now knows what it is.

That's amazing. Just think about that. This is, kind of a academic, weird idea, and it is so pervasive in the way people think about the issues, and that is because the fossil fuel company BP spent upwards of $100 million a year during the mid-2000s, when An Inconvenient Truth, that movie that Al Gore made, came out, when climate, attention was really growing for the first time publicly in the United States, 2005, '6, '7.

They spent that much money every year advertising the idea of a carbon footprint, and they put a carbon footprint calculator on their website so that people could, go and, almost like a confession booth, like pay their penance for, the plane flight they took or, the fact that they eat meat.

oh my God, do you drive to your job? You should feel bad about that. A- and of course, it changes the whole way we think about the problem from A structural issue towards an individual issue that you're supposed to solve by yourself, and that is just fundamentally wrong. The fossil fuel economy is over 100 years old.

My grandparents were born into a fossil fuel economy. The goal needs to be to break the cycle and not pass it on to the next generation, and the only way we can do that is through collective action. So the carbon wave as an idea is the inverse of the carbon footprint. It's the idea of a group of people joining together to change the structure of society, not an individual isolated by themselves trying to, reduce their own individual impact.

And so the book really tells a story of how that works in practice. and I'll say, too, I, I have a website for the book, thecarbonwave.com, and you can go to thecarbonwave.com/calculator, and I've made my own carbon wave calculator to get people thinking about what does structural change look like, and how could I participate in structural change?

Because especially in progressive spaces, we do know that structural change is what we need to do the most. Like, when we think about racism in society, or we think about inequality, climate change, these really big structural issues, we know that it's not about an individual doing a thing. But very often, we end up defaulting to these individual solutions.

oh, we're gonna need to anti-racist train one another as opposed to changing the structure of policing in this country, right? And and that's partially because it's, easier to understand the sort of consumerist individual action than it is to understand the structural change. And what I'm really trying to do is provide a template and an explanation of what structural change looks like.

And it can even look like consumerist behavior, but it's not turning off the lights. It's buying an electric vehicle when you need to get your next car. It's getting a heat pump, and replacing your furnace, or getting your community center to do it or a school to do it or a church or some, or your city hall, right?

Like all the buildings that your city government runs or the state government, right? It is, there is structural things that have to happen that sometimes involve buying things, but they are not like buying a T-shirt. They are buying a heat pump. So that's the kind of structure of the fossil fuel-based energy system that everyday people can try to target, and that's what I want people to be pushing towards.

And Katharine, in one part of the book you have a chapter that's about solutions. And one thing- ... that really stuck with me is the fact that there's so many different solutions to climate change, and that itself can be, like, overwhelming and- ... make you feel like you don't really know what to do. And what I love is you drew on James Baldwin to help figure that out.

I always go to James Baldwin- ... in times of crisis, 

It's al- it's always a good idea. 

Can't lose. You can't lose with that one. You can't lose with that one. 

Yeah. So could you talk a little about that and what you- borrowed from James Baldwin? 

Yeah. Yeah. there was a lecture that he gave that then evolved into an essay in a book, but the line from it that really just has stuck with me over the years is, "We made the world we're living in, and we have to make it over."

And it's so simple, but it's so profound. And, we can do a lot of pointing fingers about who's gotten us here, but this sense of, stepping into our agency, stepping into a sense of responsibility for the future and making the world over. And this overwhelm. In another life, I worked on the Project Drawdown team, wrote most of that book, Drawdown, that shockingly is almost 10 years ago.

and it's a compendium of solutions, and you might flip through it and go like, "Oh, wow. There's so much here. I have no idea where to begin." And that work came from the, the mind of the analyst, right? let's do the math. And it's helpful. That data gave us a grounded narrative of possibility that I think we, we really needed.

But for a person who only has so many hours in the day, so many years in a life, like, where are you gonna focus? Certainly not on 100 climate solutions probably. that the spirit of the artist can come in, right? that's what I hear in James Baldwin's words. what solutions do we wanna be in creative relationship with this world-remaking effort?

And I think that's an invitation to curiosity, to wonder. Like, where is our energy taking us? Because this is a long slog we're in. this is long-haul work. And so you've gotta find a piece of it that, makes your heart kinda pitter-patter a little bit, right? it's gotta be a piece that you really have some excitement around to be able to keep showing up again and again over time.

And Colette, I'm wondering how... Do you ever feel, overwhelmed by the amount of solutions- ... and, like, how do you kinda get through that? 

this is where I make lots of friends who are Black and brown and poor, and lots of enemies who are not. 

and I think we're looking at solutions the wrong way oftentimes.

I think we're making it easy for privileged Global North country residents to think that a new way of purchasing or consuming is gonna get us out of this, when really- ... we have to be much more honest about what the problem is, and it is our consumption patterns to begin with. And so Taproot has really begun to understand that a root cause of the climate crisis is a philosophy of extraction.

And the philosophy of extraction is in almost everything that we have built in our U- US system for sure, I would say Western civilization systems. And a solution to a philosophy of extraction that it drives a capital-based system is to actually shift our economic system away from extraction into repair.

Now, listen, I'm telling you, half the room likes me now, and the other half is "Oh, no," because we participate in this capitalist system. We maintain it. We manage it. We uphold it, and then we wonder why we're in this state, and we look for somebody to blame. If you wanna really deal with the problem, we have to deal with ourselves, and I'm not even a rich American.

I'm just a regular one, and living in the middle of the bayou. We are socialized to consume without any care as to who we just took that from. As to where that just came from, including all of the critical minerals that are gonna be needed for the wealthy Americans to all shift over to electrification and renewable energy.

We will cause war and death and more problems in other places, and we won't care. And we'll feel good about ourselves when we do it because we went electric or we went off the grid or we went whatever. We are misunderstanding the problem still, and I am sad about that because it's going to require a lot of middle-class Americans to actually say, "Okay, what's the problem?"

The problem is we live, we have learned, we have all been socialized into a system of extraction to take to a, a level of harm that either cannot or will never be repaired, and then we try to build on top of harm, and then we wonder why what we produce is more harm. This is why you have to bring in that spiritual work.

This is why you have to bring in that cultural work or else you will believe that the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions gets us to a climate solution. It will not. It will get us to reduce greenhouse gases, but we will have the same imbalances and the same problems at the societal level that you get- with disaster Those are the systems we have in place right now, and we believe that it is, the job of somebody else to stop drilling, which I believe we should stop oil and gas drilling, and I'm saying that from South Louisiana. I know what that means. Everybody's scared. All of our jobs are gonna go away.

But how many jobs does it actually create? And look at the billions they're making to create this imbalance, and can't we think of anything else that won't blow up our boys? Can we think of anything else that won't poison our babies? Can we think of anything else to invest in? And why should we sacrifice things that we love?

I love these trees, man. I love this bayou. I love them, those gators out there. I see them every morning. I love all of them. Why should we sacrifice that so a few companies can make billions of dollars? We gotta rethink this And it's not gonna be as easy as we think it is. It's not gonna be recycling. I'm sorry, it's not.

That's not good enough. Taproot is working to identify frontline communities right now who are building climate solutions around the world in the Gulf South, in Appalachia, and in the Black diaspora. And the solutions are not just how much carbon can you sequest. The solutions are, is the community involved?

Is there a democratic and collective decision-making process? Are there values and principles that are driving this thing? Are you using alternative methods of resourcing? Is the community in control collectively of its resources? Are things being privatized? That gets to solutions. 

And so this is where I'm still, I'm working on making friends even in, I- They, 'em up a little bit.

They don't always like that, this part of my conversation. But I still believe we can do something. 

I love, Colette, that in the book, I unpack a little bit, don't do anywhere near the justice it deserves because it is I think, a sacred text, Donella Meadows' work on leverage points- 

... 

in a system.

And you're just going straight for paradigms, right? Which are the most powerful, the ability to shape- Can you 

explain the, what those two things are? 

yeah. So Donella Meadows was a systems theorist, and she looked at complex systems, both, ecological systems, but she might look at a city like New Orleans.

She might look at a corporation like Patagonia to understand, how does change in these systems happen? And she breaks it down, and she puts them in rank order, and they're not the things that we are often told are solutions, right? they're on there. Changing laws is on there. Shifting capital, that's on there.

But the most powerful thing is what she calls paradigms, which are basically our shared beliefs about how the world works and what's good and what's right, and the ability to reshape paradigms, right? so a very classic paradigm that has existed in this country for a long time is that it is economy versus environment.

that's, goes straight to the heart of what Colette's talking about. And if we can't, rattle ourselves out of that paradigm, that these things are in opposition to each other, and that actually at the end of the day, there is no economy without an Earth. 

Say again, 

sister. And- Say it again.

and that is about questioning these fundamental values that we hold, and I think a lot about- Something I heard Sherry Mitchell, who's also has a Lighting the Way story in the book, she's an amazing author and teacher and Wabanaki leader, and she's "It is so much about enough." 

I see.

What is enough? And I've been thinking about that so much with this data center build-out. my God, what is enough? And the truth is that in our economic system, nothing. 

Nothing is enough. 

The answer is that nothing is enough. That's right. And so we, if we wanna move out of extraction, if we wanna move back into reciprocity and all the repair that Taproot, I think, talks about so beautifully, in this consumer culture, we've gotta have a reckoning with enough, I think.

did you see much in the way of, collaboration or discussion among, you know, different groups related to the problem with envi- environmental harm done through war? 

Yeah. So I, as I said, I think social movements, Peo- a lot of people who are outside of protest or social movements, which I mostly am, I'm very connected to those groups, but I don't do that.

that's not my superpower. But I have a lot of respect for what those people do, and there's other pundits and commentators, they will remain unnamed, but I imagine you know who I am saying, who are really disrespectful to social movements, the Sunrise Movement in particular. And they don't participate in those movements.

I don't either. But they also don't respect them. And, there are things that the Sunrise Movement has done that maybe I wouldn't do strategically, but I also don't have the arrogance to say that I have a crystal ball and know everything about strategy and tactics and the future, and I know how to run a social movement better than they do, which some people seem to feel comfortable doing.

But, that, the Sunrise Movement did put a bunch of its attention into issues around Gaza, a- as did Greta Thunberg, who ran the Fridays for Future and really ran the global climate activism social movement. she really, she, and joined a flotilla, and she really did a lot of work connecting the war and, carbon pollution.

and then the other, where Sunrise has since gone, and we did an episode of our podcast, A Matter of Degrees, about this, it's really interesting, is they've gone into a lot of anti-ICE activism in the past year or two. And some people outside of social movement spaces look at Sunrise and look at them sort of change, air quotes, from a climate organization to a Gaza, pal- pro-Palestine organization to a anti-ICE, pro-immigration, And they're like, "What are you doing? You have no focus," and, "You," "I thought you were a climate organization." And I think they fundamentally don't understand how social movements work. I didn't tr- just to be clear, I didn't change into those other things, but I can also understand why a social movement would do that.

Because they view these issues as interconnected, and it, if you wanna be recruiting people and doing protests and doing work in solidarity, and that's where the energy and attention is, then that's, it's understandable that a social movement does that over time. So yeah, there has been a lot of shifts over time, and there have been connections between war and carbon pollution made by people like Greta Thunberg and the Sunrise Movement.

The, I wanna make sure before we run out of time, my, the most interesting part of the book, I thought, was the discussions around how you actually got this bill over the finish line, and particularly the behavior of Joe Manchin. Yes. 'cause it, it's just such a classic, DC story.

the... it reminded me very much of an episode of Veep. instead of it being like Veep, where, which is just this ultra-cynical thing where sort of n- the stakes are incredibly low and not really much ever happens and nobody cares about anything, is that you have a similarly comedic set of pratfalls where sort of the country stumbles ass backwards into what?

The biggest climate bill in American history. A trillion dollars. Like- Yes ... what was that story? 

Oh my gosh, yeah. The, I don't know if 

people have watched the British version of Veep, what comes before. It's called The Thick Of It. Yeah. Have you guys seen that show? If you haven't- Some episodes, yeah ... you need to binge it tomorrow Malorie Tucker

because the, the Scottish actor who's in it, I don't remember his name, but he has the best swearing of any television character in all time. he just makes up swear words. and it's, and the opening episode of that show involves a minister, 'cause it's the parliamentary system, so it's a secretary of, energy or whatever equivalent.

He's g- but he gets demoted to, being a really silly minister, like the Minister of Social I- Affairs or whatever. And he is supposed to go and do a really big announcement, and so he drives in his car with his advisors, and when they get to the announcement place, they discover they can't make the announcement anymore.

So they're like, we have to announce something. All the press is here." And so they decide they will announce pet passports, that pets will now have passports. And it's the dumbest, and everybody there is like, "What?" 'Cause anyway, that, that exact scene was totally in 

my 

head in the period where people, remember in July 2022, the bill falls apart.

It's really dramatic. We're all very sad, and I tell this story in the book. And then Biden decides he's gonna do executive action because, if they're not gonna do it in the Congress, he's gonna act, and he's gonna go to Massachusetts and announce this climate emergency, which is what the most progressive, most lefty activists in the climate space want.

And he's gonna stand at the, in this wind turbine manufacturing component cable place at the, on a river, and he's gonna make this rousing speech, and then the whole thing just gets canceled except the press thing is still happening. So he goes into this place, and he just says, "Emergency," like six times but never declares a climate emergency.

And all the climate emergency campaigners are, like, so angry. They're like, "What is he doing?" And even the people in the climate policy office who, wrote the speech for him are like, "What is happening?" I interviewed Gina McCarthy, who was the national climate advisor, and she was sitting at that event watching the speech like, "What is this speech?"

And then she told me that Biden winked at her. And that was how she knew that something must be going on in the background. Because when the, as I tell in the book, it's actually really, even when I read this part of the book, even though I wrote the book, it's fun and exciting and interesting and even when I read it 'cause I interviewed people who lived it and got to learn all the behind-the-scenes stuff.

But, basically the bill falls apart on a Thursday- Everyone is very depressed. And then on Monday, Manchin secretly goes back to Schumer, and I tell all the in-the-weeds ways of how that happened, and says, "Are you mad at me?" Like- ... "Can we still do this?" and so that speech that I'm talking about with Biden is supposed to happen two days later, but they don't tell anyone.

it was a crazy walled-off secret where nobody was allowed to know. So even Gina McCarthy didn't get told. All she got was this strange wink from the president. So it's this... I really love telling that story because it's a behind-the-scenes thing that people don't know, and I did a lot of reporting about it, and it's just so interesting.

And Joe Manchin, yeah, as a character, I don't know. It'll be, I'll be... I really am curious when people read the book to hear what they think of it. Maybe you guys can tell me what you took away. 'cause I feel like I tried to make him a person and to understand where he was coming from, not just like a cartoon villain.

And- ... even though I don't agree with him, obviously, many things. But other people who've read it say that when they go through this emotional rollercoaster of what he's doing, "Yeah, we're doing it. No, we're not doing it. Yeah, we're doing it. No, we're not doing it," that they're really angry with him, by reading the book.

So I'm, I don't know, what did you guys think? 

I was angry at him at the time and in advance think you're, you humanize him in a certain way and reveal a more complex set of motives behind his actions. and, w- when you say Ryan, like I... S- so obviously I've always considered him to be bought off, by multiple lobbyists and being a kind of, narcissist.

And I wasn't sure how much he bought into his own, bootstrapping ideology that, thinks that they're, like Romney's there's the takers out there, the, the makers and the takers. we're not gonna- ... give people hor- affordable housing. They're just gonna pay people to sit on their butt on the couch.

We're not gonna- 

Yeah ... 

all that kind of stuff. So that, that was my picture of him going in. but it's clear to me from the accounts that he, like you said, that secret meeting with Schumer, he does care if Schumer is mad at him and he does, I think, want to get credit for getting something done and maybe he has mixed motives, certain things as long as it, helps his constituents.

so I think it is a more complex picture that I... And I thought that was interesting. Another thing that, that I didn't think about at the time or don't remember being aware of at the time is how Putin's invasion of Ukraine- Yeah ... reopened up his interest in an energy bill. So that's something- Yeah

maybe we could discuss, 'cause that, that I either missed it or forgot about that. yeah. 

That's like the story of every energy policy in history. and I am a professor, like I've written academic books on how policy change happens and papers, and one of the key things from our field is that you only get action during energy crises.

So when the energy prices go high, as they are right now, courtesy of, Trump's insane war with Iran, that is when Congress feels the need to actually do something. And prices were already rising in January before Putin invaded Ukraine in February 2022, and me and Sam Ricketts on the outside were talking about this.

I said to him like, "Look, we're starting to see rising energy prices. That could provide a window of opportunity." Because when you think about it, the Energy Policy Act of 1992, this was passed under George H.W. Bush, a Republican, and it created the production tax credit, which boomed wind energy across this country, including of course in Texas.

The 2005 Energy Policy Act created the investment tax credit, which c- created a huge boom for solar, again under George W. Bush, a Republican president. When energy, Pr-- when we have energy crises, that is when we tend to see action on clean energy, on climate action, and I think that was a really big reason why, Manchin was willing to come back to the table and get it done 

That's going to be it for today.

As always, keep the comments coming in.

You can record - and re-record - a voice message by tapping the link in the show notes,

You can reach us on Signal at the handle bestoftheleft.01,

or simply email me to [email protected]

The additional sections of the show included clips from;

It Could Happen Here

The Current

The PBS NewsHour

The Brian Lehrer Show

Outrage + Optimism

Climate Court Voices

Unf*cking The Republic

Downstream

Left Anchor

and Sea Change

Further details are in the show notes.

Thanks to everyone for listening, thanks to Deon and Erin for their production work for the show, thanks to Amanda for all of her work behind the scenes, thanks to our editors and thanks to those who already support the show by becoming a member, purchasing gift memberships, or making one-time donations.

You'll find the link to support us in the show notes along with links to join our Patreon and Discord communities for free where you can also continue the discussion. And don't forget to follow us on all the social media platforms as I prepare to relaunch our social media strategy!

So coming to you from far outside the conventional wisdom of Washington, DC, my name is Jay! And this has been the Best of the Left podcast, coming to you twice weekly, thanks entirely to the members and donors to the show, from bestoftheleft.com.