Hello, and welcome back to Drilled. I'm Amy Westerveldt. I just got back from the cop in Brazil last week. We ran quite a few stories on it. If you are interested to know some more details about what happened, those are all at drilled dot Media. Today we're bringing you an episode of the cop Out Podcast from Dana Fisher. She's a sociologist that we've had on the show before.
She's particularly an expert on activism. She's written a ton of books on this subject, most recently Saving Ourselves from Climate Shocks to Climate Action. Dana has been doing this series all around the cop and how and why it's broken and what can be done about it. It's very very good.
Check it out.
We'll put a link in the show notes. In this episode, she had myself and doctor Catherine Hayho on to talk about climate communication and what happened at COP and what we can take from it all. I had a great time talking to them both, and I hope you enjoy the conversation here it.
Is Welcome to the cop Out Podcast. I'm Dana Fisher, the director of the Center for Environment, Community and Equity at American University. This is an opportunity to have apocalyptically optimistic climate conversations. And there's lots to talk about today, and I am so happy and privileged to be joined by these amazing women who do such amazing work. And I just thought we would start. I mean, so just
as a wrap up here, COP is winding down. Literally the blue zone set on fire yesterday, perhaps assigned from you now, from like from from this, from the gods perhaps. And then today the draft text for the final text coming out of COP was released, which made no mention to fossil fuel phase out, ignored completely the eighty some countries that were actually pushing for a fossil fuel phase out. So we have lots to talk about. To begin, what I thought maybe would be good to do is for
you each to take a moment to introduce yourselves. You're both climate communicators in really different ways, and you have really different backgrounds. So maybe talk a little bit about how you came to do the kind of climate communication you do, just as a start, and of course we'll get into COP, we'll get into climate change and the mess we're in, but you know, just a little background first, Catherine, you want to start.
Sure, Yes, I love that you talking to Amy and I both because we both came from totally different directions. So I am a climate scientist, and I actually started my career in astrophysics, which is a fascinating feel to be in if there's no other dumpster fires going on in the world. And so for me, my first inflection point was when I took a class on climate change as a breadth requirement, and that was where I learned that climate change is. I already knew it was real,
but I didn't realize it was so urgent. I didn't realize it was affecting our lives so personally, and I didn't realize it was so unfair in that it is disproportionately affecting the people who've done the least to cause
the problem in the first place. Whether it's the fact that the richest one percent in the world today produced double the carbon emissions of the poorest fifty percent, or whether it's the fact that a child born today will experience so many disasters over their lifetime as a result of the choices that our generation and previous generations made
that they weren't part of in the first place. So for me, my first inflection point was just realizing I need to do something about this, and I have a scientific skill set, so I will become a climate scientist. It turns out the same physics and astronomy I was learning is just what you need to do climate modeling, because you know it's your's atmosphere, non linear fluid dynamics,
radiative transfer. So that was my first inflection point. And then a number of years later after becoming a climate scientist, after getting married to a fellow academic who you know, when you're an academic, the dream is that you have positions in the same place, and so he was at one place, I was at a different place, and then he got offered a position in Texas and he sort of said, okay, well if you give if you know, if you give my spouse a position, we'll both come.
And we both thought, oh, there's no chance of that. Well they did. So that's how I ended up in Texas. And then within just a couple of months of ending up in Texas, and I was already doing research that was intentionally very policy relevant because I wanted to inform good policy decisions on climate. Within a few months of arriving in Texas, it turns out I was the first climate scientist at the university. I was the only climate
scientist within literally a five hundred mile radius. I plotted it out, and so I started to get invitations to speak to community groups who were, you know, confused about climate change, weren't sure what to think, had heard a lot on both saws, and they're like, oh, well, here's a climate scientist, let's ask her. And so that experience really taught me. And I still do almost one hundred
talks a year these days, most of them virtual. Those experiences taught me that having conversations about not just that what I think is the head, which is the facts, the data, the ice sheets, the polar bears, but making the heart connection my family, my home, the places I love, the people and the things I love, is so important,
and that in itself isn't even enough. We also need to make the heart to hand connection because today, in twenty twenty five, most people are worried about climate change, but most people feel there's nothing they can do about it, so they do nothing, and they're actually starting to dissociate from the issue as a defense mechanism as the situation gets worse. So how do we connect the head to
the heart to the hands. Well, the first and easiest way to do it is through communicating, not like lining up all the IPCC reports and just whacking people upside the head with them, but rather starting the conversation with
what people care about themselves. And I've started conversations based on, you know, the fact that we're both parents, or we both live in the same place, or we both enjoy chocolate and that's being affected by climate change, or I've even had conversations if we started over the fact that we both knit, and then connecting that to hands what
we can do. So that is what led me to my communication journey, because I started to realize that the biggest barrier between where we are today and that better future that we all need is in addressing the climate crisis is understanding what we can do about it and getting people to actually be active about doing it. And that's not going to be answered by more scientific journal articles. That's going to be answered by having conversations.
Thank you, that's really great. Sorry my computer was being annoying for a second. Amy, Why don't you give us your journey?
My gosh, Well, I so any people do. I started I like The first thing I ever did remotely related to climate was just because I needed to pay the rent and it was due in two weeks. And I had a friend who was an engineer at an engineering firm and he was like, well, we have this really boring copywriting job that needs to be done next week where we need someone to write case studies about some of our projects. And I was like, okay, fine, I'm
in thank you, and I did. And one of them was a project they had done for Shell where they'd been asked to re engineer offshore oil platforms to deal with sea level rise. And this was like a project that they had done in the nineties, and I was like, that's interesting because I feel like Shell wasn't even really acknowledging climate change in the nineties, and so I like looked into it. And I was freelancing at the time,
so I was like, this is an interesting story. I'm going to pitch it to an environmental magazine, and I did, and then they hired me to do some other stuff, and I sort of just like became obsessed with this power structure, so totally not the science side of things. I was like, that's unfair, These big, powerful companies had this information and they were preparing their own industry to deal with this issue, and at the same time they were telling everybody else not to worry about it, and
like how did that happen? And then I just sort of went from there into like, I very obsessively researched climate denial, and then there again was like this is a dumb strategy. Why did it work so well? So I got obsessed with pr and the whole Like, I don't know the way that the fossil fuel industry, way before climate change really set in place some fundamental ideas about how the environment works and what is nature, and how the economy works and all of those kinds of things.
I have just kind of been down that same rabbit hole ever since.
And at a certain point, when the.
X on New story came out, and you know, reporters at Inside Climate News and the Los Angeles Times and Columbia Journalism School published on all of these documents that came from inside XON, where the scientists had been trying to warn executives about what their product could do and you know, how things might change in the decades to come.
I felt like I wanted to hear from.
Those scientists themselves, so and I thought that like I wanted, I don't know, I was just like, man, like more, more people who don't already care about climate need to hear this story. So I went out to talk to those guys and spent a lot of time like hanging out with long retired scientists and having them read documents to me and tell me about, you know, their science and all of that kind of stuff.
And that got me obsessed with podcasting.
So now I have a podcast that I still do reporting and I'm still just obsessed with this like hijacking of the information ecosystem and policymaking mechanisms by this one very powerful industry and a lot of their friends.
So yeah, they're famous and fancy friends exactly. I mean, it's funny. So I never really thought about I mean, so I came to climate just because when I was doing my PhD, I needed a case study that I could study internationally and also at the national level. And it was when the Kyoto Protocol was being written in finalize. It's so interesting and it was like a perfect case for the political questions I was asking. So I actually
came at it from the politics, and I was. I had this grant in Japan and my advisor who was who did the Asia Integrated Model for the IPCC, Maria Tunayuki, he was like, you should do climate and I'm like, hm, oh, this is good idea. This is a good idea. And so it was just funny because it all started just because it was a good case study for the kinds
of stuff I was studying. And then well, and then down the rabbit, how we go, and here we are, Yeah, twenty five years later or whatever, right, more than that now?
Yeah, So I guess.
It is funny that you all come from this from very different places, but here we are. And so the question I have for you next.
And it all happened in the nineties, which is when climate change was not a politicized issue.
At that time.
The disinformation engine was just starting to ramp up the impacts. The signal was just starting to emerge from the noise at that point. But if you look for the signal, it was there. And so each of us, for different reasons, came into contact with the signal in the nineties and that was powerful enough to basically change the entire trajectory of our careers.
Yeah, that's fascinating, very true.
I mean I did go to meetings with the Cooler Heads coalition who were part of the case for my dissertaine and ended up getting kicked out of their meetings because they were definitely birthing some misinformation back then. But it was very early days, right, yeah, exactly.
But I interned at Exon for my master's degree. I actually worked on with their full.
Did they pay? Was it a paid internship at least? I certainly hope so.
Yes, it was paid, and we published peer reviewed papers at my research that were you know, with some they have some really good scientists. Obviously their scientists have known about this and been telling the company about this for decades.
And what we were studying was related to Kyoto. We were studying how when you're talking about reducing emissions of greenhouse gases, you have to reduce all of the gases, not just CO two, and methane is one of the ones that is really powerful, really potent, is responsible for somewhere between about sixteen eighteen percent of long term warming and a much greater proportion of short term warming. And methane is real call that natural gas. Even I know, I know FOSCIL gas is what we now call it.
Massive amounts of it are released during the extraction of coal, oil and leaking from gas. So that is a very important research area. But it rapidly became obvious, and even then what we were saying back in the nineties was true with Kyoto, and it's much more true today. There's no one thing that if we just did this one thing, it would fix it. It was very obvious even then that reducing methane was something that we could do super fast to really get a handle on this issue while we
were working on the longer term CO two reductions. And if we had done that back in the nineteen nineties, we had been a much better spot than the are today.
For sure. Yeah, I mean that Actually, what I was going to ask you both is a foll up question, is just how you ended up communicating about this stuff specifically within the policy world, or like communicating two politicians communicating about politicians that kind of policy nexus. Amy you want to go to it, well, I mean, if it's a stumper, we don't have to go there.
It's no, no, it's okay.
The thing I mean, the main I would say, like that the main input that that we have had on policy is documents. It's like like giving documents to senate investigators or to chiefs of staff who are looking at, you know, particular issues, or like someone will contact me and be like, do you know, do you know if there's any evidence of you know, this PR firm doing anything and this thing blah blah blah, and I'll send them.
Uh oh, I'm hearing an echo.
Now you sound fine from here?
Okay, great, So yeah, that's the that's the main thing for me. And then I know there are some I have like met some policy makers who say that they have either like listened to the podcast or read stuff and shared it with other people and things like that. But I think in terms of like a actually communicating things that are useful to policy makers, it's it's more that like we go find documents.
Or people will communicate about policy making to the public, which they also has that boomerang effect in terms of then changing potentially public opinion or political pressure.
Right, Yes, that's true, that's truly important.
I was going to say too, that we do so often like for whatever reason, I don't know how this still happens, but not infrequently. I will be interviewing someone who you know is like an operative of some kind, and they will just like very explicitly say what they're trying to do in terms of like hijacking policy too.
I'm like, wow, great, thank you for being by job easy.
There's a lot of doing deep research there.
Huh.
It's it's like okay, yeah, Gilver Platter fill it up.
Yeah.
In fact, actually, I mean even at this COP I was at the cop and there were several of these like side events that different industry groups were having where they were just I guess they just thought they were talking amongst themselves, and we're saying some a lot of the quiet parts were getting said out loud.
Why not travel all the way to Brazil to have a private meeting? Yeah, exactly, why not with the journalist?
Yeah, I was like, this is open to the press. You guys like, I don't know.
It's well, it's a measure I think of. They're confidence. When people are very confident they're going to win, they don't care, and that's really what we're seeing.
Yeah.
Well I love this question, yes, because that's actually the very first thing that I wanted to do when I decided to go switch from astrophysics to climate science is I wanted to make sure I was doing policy relevant research because I'm a huge believer in informed decision making. I know that our human brains typically do not make rational decisions, but I do hope that and I know there is sign of an evidence that when we make collective decisions with many more people and interests at the table,
we have a tendency to make better decisions. And those decisions, if they're informed by science and by information, can improve. And so when I went to look for an advisor, because I was finishing up my undergrad degree and going on to graduate school, I specifically looked for an advisor who did policy bolevant research. And I found this wonderful man who's like my academic father. I still talk to him on a regular basis. His name is Don Webbles.
He's at the University of Illinois, and he had done his initial research on developing metrics to measure the ozone depleting substances so that you could compare how much worse or better different ones were. And he worked with the FAA and with DuPont and with the EPA to actually put the pair the Montreal Protocol limiting ozone depleting substanses
into effect. And he actually tested all these new chemicals that the organizations were coming up with to replace the chemicals we used to use in our spray hands and even our Nike air shoes of all things, and our air conditioners and our fridges to figure out better ones. And he had just turned his attention to looking at comparing different greenhouse gases too, And so I immediately figured, I want to work with this person who's doing policy
relevant research. Some work I did for my master's degree which was literally looking at how much more affordable it would be for the US to meet its Kyoto targets if it included all the greenhouse gases, not just carbon And that work was actually presented to Congress in part of the debates over whether the US should be a signatory to the Kyuto Protocol. So at that point I was like.
Almost that as part of the bird Hegel resolution when they were debating that is that when it was, Catherine, I'm just curious.
Goodness, I actually don't know. That's a good question. I know I remember when the date when it was, but I don't remember what part of the resolution it was. But yeah, but it was definitely.
Part of it.
And so at that point I was like, oh, my gosh, this is awesome. You know, this is exactly what I want to do. Well, then, as you know, all efforts to pass mitigation legislation in the US just sort.
Of went like this.
And at the same time, I ended up getting pulled into after my master's and before my PHG, ended up getting pulled into a regional climate assessment. And that was where I learned that people who were making decisions on how to protect nature and people from climate change were working with future information that was years and even decades
out of date. It was the equivalent to me trying to drive down the street without my glasses, and my glasses are very thick, like I would just see sort of a hazy outline, and if I saw a light, I don't think i'd even know if it was a
stoplight or not. So that was sort of the way that people were twenty thirty years ago working with climate information, and so that's what made me decide to sort of refocus my trajectory to look at climate impacts, and especially back then, climate impacts were being qualified as the middle of the road scenario. This is what's going to happen no matter what. Well, that is a completely disempowering perspective, because if it's going to happen no matter what, then
you know, who cares. We'll just adapt. But what I knew is I knew that our choices made a difference, and now today we know that our choices make the biggest difference in the future. And so I thought, well,
what if not only we generated high resolution information. So if you're working, for example, in the Midwest US, you don't have like one grid cell covering the whole US, you actually have information for Chicago versus Milwalk, versus Minneapolis, versus the other sides of the lake in Michigan because the climate is very different in all those places. What if you not only had very granular information, but you also had information on what's going to happen depending on
the choices we make. So what's going to happen for a lower versus a higher scenario? So I said this to the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Ecological Society of America that we're sponsoring this Great Lakes Assessment that I was working on, and they said, well, it's too late to do it now, But what if we do another one for California, which is one of the world's biggest economies, and we look at higher versus lower emissions there, would you like to be in charge of getting that
information for us? And so I, being very young and naive, said yes, of course, I would love to do that. And then then I realized that at that point, the global climate models had not even run the higher scenarios because physical climate scientists work with physical uncertainty, and physical uncertainty is what we call Gaussian or a normal distribution, which means it looks like this, which means that the middle is more likely to be accurate than the tales.
So physical scientists had applied this same principle to future scenarios, and they had said, oh, well, we'll just run the middle scenarios because we don't have infinite computer time in the middle scenarios are most likely. But human behavior is not Gaussian. Human behavior is completely unpredictable. If anything, it might be like, well, we're heading for this scenario and then oh shit, look how bad it is. We will
quickly head for this scenario. So we didn't even have the global climate model simulations to look at the higher scenarios. Except for in the UK. They were the only ones who'd done it. So I had to go cap in hand, and this is me, you know, in the nineties as a graduate student, go cap in hand to some of the biggest modeling organizations in the US, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the Geophysical Fluidynamics Lab, and ask them, out of the goodness of their heart, if they would
be willing to run the higher scenarios. And they did, and so for California. In two thousand and three, we published the first impact study in all of North America and one of the very first in the entire world world that actually quantified the difference between if we address climate change at scale versus if we don't, what will be the impacts on your water supply, your snowpack, your wine grapes, your central valley crop harvests, the wildfire risk.
We actually quantified the impact of human decisions. And two years later, the Governor of California, actually one and a half years later, the Governor of California, who at that time was Arnold Schwarzenegger, who of course is also a Republican, signed the first executive order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions of any state in the US, and as he signed it, he had our California authors standing in a semicircle behind him, and they cited our study as evidence of why they
had to reduce emissions.
That's political, that's political connection there. That's so interesting. I mean, it's funny because my supervisor in my PhD actually was famous for saying that when we deal with a lot of environmental problems, it's the tail that wags the distribution. He loved to say that because it really is, and
he talked. I mean, he was famous for doing the work on disproportionality, which was all about these how these extreme actors, the extreme emitters, were the ones that basically are driving the entire distribution in a lot of ways.
Which is just what we see happening with cop today.
Exactly right. And now, I mean, and now it's like he unfortunately passed away a number of years ago, but I'm sure that he is rolling in his grave and he's like, why didn't anybody read that work that I published so many years ago? But I mean, that's why, and that's why being a climate communicator is so important, because the information has to get out there. But I
mean that brings us to my question about cup. Right, So we have this climate, we have this climate regime that basically, you know, all the secrets are out in
the open, like there you know all. I mean, back when I used to go to the climate negotiations instead of sitting at home talking to you amazing people like you guys, I used to go there and we would sit at coffee and we would whisper like, oh, that person's actually with you know, they're funded by Exxon or they're like they have connections to fossil fuel industry in
this way. But they all came under cover. Nobody showed up and was like I'm here, I'm gonna just stop everything, right, and I'm just so like, I can't believe where we are today, But I want to know kind of impressions on where we are based on what we've seen. I mean, I mean, Emmy, you were just there, give us some on the ground, you know, perspective.
Yeah, I mean, well, first of all, like Catherine was saying, they no longer feel any compulsion to like pretend that they're not there.
To you know, fart in church. But it's wild to me, actually know.
It was so interesting to me was like how few of the people who were you know, with either civil society groups or universities or whatever that like to try to encourage climate action knew like how many fossil fuel lobbyists were there, or how many carbon capture lobbyists were there, or how many big agg lobby Like it was like a surprise to them, and I'm like wow, Like to me, it's like, yes, of course this thing is inundated by industry.
Last year it was crazy. It's just continuously.
Yeah, and the I don't know the extent to which even if you were to get rid of all of the lobbyists, so many of the negotiators in the room are doing the bidding of the industry, you.
Know, either.
Either from you know, oil states like Saudi Arabia or even Norway's entire booth was like equinor employees, you know.
I read and it says, I'm curious, is this is something that you saw that Brazil was requiring all attendees to actually disclose who funded them? So oh at this time, like the fossil fuel attendees, like previous hosts were petro states. Brazil is not a petro stated, though it certainly has a lot of natural gas resources. But yeah, I heard that that the fossil fuel attendees outnumber all delegations except for Brazil, and they're there even though they're required to
actually disclose their funding. How did you see that?
Yeah? I mean, well, the thing is.
It's like the theoretically they have to disclose the theoretically, like lobbyists are supposed to badge appropriately and whatever.
But if they're if they are.
Like smuggled in through a country's delegation, then like that goes out the window. Or if they are you know, maybe maybe they're at a university but most of their research is funded by the fossil fuel industry, then like they're just wearing their university's tag. Or the one that we've looked at a lot is IPEKA the God. I can never remember what the acronym stands for because they
changed it to just IPEKA a few years ago. But it's the International Petroleum Industry Environmental Conservation Association, which is this like weird little entity that was created by the UN as part of UNP in the seventies, and it was created for the sole purpose of, at the time, you know, getting the industry together to coordinate on global environmental issues, which was mostly oil spills in that moment.
But it's very clear in the forming documents of that organization that the industry saw this as like the way that they were going to have a window into the UN processes and make sure that industri's.
Perspective was clear.
That was nineteen seventy three, So they've been there.
The whole time, you know, like the.
What is it the oh my god, I can't think of the expression coming from inside the house, but like anyway, it's like.
Yes, it's just like all is coming from inside the.
All is coming from inside the house exactly.
They screen movie. I saw a preview for it in a movie theater, so you know, yeah, fah.
So they're they're you know.
So IPEKA started in the seventies part of UNIP then in the late nineties they spun off to be their own nonprofit, but they are still an official observer at cop and the IPCC. They're officially listed as a non lobbying organization, even though their entire existence is to provide cover for industry. So all the industry guys show up there with IPEKA badges.
Nobody knows what that is, you know, And yeah.
So they they're able to go to, you know, all of like the daily coordination meetings between different observer groups. They can go into the negotiating rooms, they can you know, they don't they can hang out in the hallway and wait for delegates to come out and talk to them. Like there's absolutely nothing stopping them from influencing things. And I and you, I mean, it's like we we see
the effect of that every year. Just this morning, the new draft text came out, and not only has the stripped fossil fuel phase out from it, but they've added overshoot twice, so like I don't know about that, yeah, yeah, and oh but they've also given a nod to information integrity in the same text, And I'm like, how, how like how are these two things in the same space.
So well, just I just want to I'm gonna plug episode four, which just came out this morning, where I spoke with Freddy Otto and David Hoe, who had a whole cont we have a big part of our conversation was all about the science behind overshooting, the degree to which we know if overshoot will actually work and if we could actually yeah, if it will actually be feasible but it's of course now the policy makers are like or not, I don't know who it is, Like, the
industry connected policy makers are putting it into text, yeah, act putting in like stuff that has no scientific evidence that it will actually work, and.
They're adding it. I mean they're pushed.
A month before COPP there was a IPCC meeting in Lima where there are debating how much like which types of CDR to add carbon dioxide removal to add to the next IPCC assessment. They're going to have a whole chapter on carbon capture and storage.
You know.
One one researcher I talked to described it as like these sort of science fiction ideas escaping the model and getting into.
You know, into negotiating texts and policy, and it's it's frightening. I was, I could.
I was like lurking in a lot of these like weird little industry side groups to kind of see what they were talking about, and there were a lot focused on carbon dioxide removal, and in one of them they talked about carbon dioxide removal and Article six, which is like the part of the pair agreement that's set up well is trying to like tighten up and better regulate carbon markets, and there were ongoing debates about whether to include carbon capture and carbon dioxide removal under that, and
they have now decided to. And they thought that, you know, they had at least gotten this like science based target for permanence of one hundred years, Like you have to show that this carbon is going to stay put for one hundred years, and a bunch of people showed up at this year's cop arguing to make it thirty years.
So there was like, but there was a scientist in one of these panels who said, obviously, from an environmental perspective and a climate perspective, you know, a forestation and reforestation are the preferred approaches to carbon storage and carbon removal, but the markets don't like them.
Yes, but this is whole Yeah, so a challenging issue because this is something I run into all the time. There's all of these when it comes to climate solutions, there's no silver bullet, but there's a lot of silver buckshop. So immediately if anybody pitches anything as a silver bullet, you know your radar should go up. Uh, that's not
the case. But all of these different solutions. We need as many solutions as we can, so I think of climate solutions as if you think of the atmosphere as a swimming pool, and the level of water in the pool is like the level of carbon in the atmosphere. And you know, two hundred years ago we stuck a
giant hose in the pool. We turn the hose up every year, so we have to turn the hose off, but we can also make the drain bigger, and then we also have to learn how to swim because our toes don't touch the ground now for most of the pool. So we need all these solutions. And none of these solutions are inherently wrong or evil in and of themselves. And I often see a lot of discussions sort of pitching a given solution as evil or wrong. It's how
they're used or misused that make the difference. So, you know, there's people I talk to a lot of people all across the spectrum, and there's people, you know, doing direct air capture and even planning how we could do carbon capture and sequestration or things like that, who are fully cognizant of the fact that we're talking about the last few drops down the drain at this point are the
last few drops in the hose, and they're right. The science says every bit of warming matters, every drop matters. So if you develop a technology that, applied at the appropriate time, can take one more drop out, that's great. But what's happening is bad actors, Aman, This is exactly what you know. All of that bad actors are taking
these solutions. They're taking everything from the voluntary carbon market with nature to geologic storage to you know, you name it, and they're using it as a fig leaf to say, oh, I don't have to do anything about it because and you know, I've even heard companies say, well, increase our extraction of fossil fuels because we'll just do, you know,
carbon capture storage. I'm like, excuse me. We don't actually have enough geologic storage areas the entire world to actually cover just the carbon that you would be taking out. So there's a problem because I feel like so much of the discussion is so like it's it's very like good and evil and if you espouse the solution, you're evil, and if you don't, you're good. A lot of sort of almost religious puritism in it. But the reality is is it's what we do with these solutions and how
we use them or misuse them. That's really the key discussion that I feel like is often not happening in the decision making and policy and even the public circles, you know, like on Blue Sky or something like that.
Totally totally oh sorry.
We're cutting we keep cutting you off.
You know.
No, I'm just gonna introject one little point here and a day should go amy, which is just to say that I think, you know, when we think about the toolbox of solutions, like, obviously we need to encourage every and all solution possible because we're in an all hands
on deck moment. But I also think there needs to be a realistic framing to the degree to which what actually can work at what's at the moment given the technology and the time where we close our eyes, hold our you know, hold our ears in just you know, la la la la la, while we say no, we're going to just we're just going to figure out you know, carbon dioxide removal, and we're fine, We're we're way past
that moment. And so I think that's where we need to make sure that everybody has to be you know, we have to call bs on a people who are leaning into technology that can't scale the way they're talking about like you were talking about, Katherine, Go ahead, Amy, Yes.
I was just going to say that.
Actually I spoke with one researcher who is at this AR seven meeting in Lima talking about the different technologies and stuff, and they they described it really I think in a helpful way, which is that you know, like prior meetings, these technologies had always been discussed as like necessary because the climate crisis is so urgent that we want to make sure we have all of these technologies available and discussed as like being particularly useful for hard
to abate industries and things like that, and that this was the first meeting they had attended where people were some people were very openly describing it as like we need to be able to remove emissions here so that we can continue emitting them there.
And it was like, no, no, that's not the way.
Yeah.
So that I want to ask you that the tough question, or one of the tough questions, which is so is is this this you know, this institutional system that is the CUP, which is the climate regime, which has really become captured by fossil fuel interests and is platforming fossil fuel interests and their perspectives quite you know, clearly within the meetings, I mean more and more, like, I think it's worse this year than was last year than it was the year before, and we weren't even a petro
state this year, right, So the question is can we salvage the regime? Is it fixable or is there another way that we should be thinking about addressing the climate crisis at this point solve the world?
Fix it? My answer is yes to both.
Yeah, same, I have yes.
Yeah, you guys are going to yes, Amy, I should have known, Okay.
Yeah, because there is incredible value just to bringing everybody together to look each other in the faces. When you are looking into the face of a small island state who could lose their entire country due to unchecked climate change, that has a much different emotional impact than when they are a green circle on a map or an email
that somebody sent you. So I think of these cop meetings as a global pot look where everybody shows up and publicly puts what they're bringing on the table, and it is very obvious who made the apple by hand and who dragged a frozen chicken nugget out of the back of the freezer that's been there for years. And also who doesn't even show up to the potluck dinner, So there is tremendous value in that. But COP is way way overdue for a major reform. It has just
you know, the negotiations are one thing. Everybody else who's not a negotiator getting together is a totally different thing. In fact, I know they're splitting it between Turkey and Australia next year. In my opinion, I would send the negotiators to one of the place and I would send the rest of the circus to the other place. That's what I would do, because they are really two separate things.
And then also too really getting a handle on the fossil fuel industry being the largest delegation there, that just isn't right. But then I would say two, the idea that only countries getting together to come to decisions that must be unanimous, and expecting that to somehow fix the whole crisis, it's not just naive, it's delusional. Anybody you thought this would fix the whole crisis has no idea
anything works. I mean, I'm not even the political scientist, right, so it's never been enough and That's why even in Paris, the mayor of Paris was holding their own sort of COP for all the mayors because a lot of cities these days are bigger than our countries and we need to have all other organizations brought in, whether it's universities, whether it's businesses, whether it's organizations or even religious traditions,
all of those have to come in. And you know, one of the recent announcements just today is that the more and more countries and organizations are signing the Fossil Fuel non Periferation Treaty. It is the brainchild of SUPPORTA. Berman, and so Columbia and the Netherlands are going to hold a non Periferation Treaty meeting, which I think will be a tremendous step forward in a different direction. So that's why my answer is, yes, yes, we need to reform the COP process.
But we also need more.
Yeah, Amy, I was gonna mention that Columbia meeting too. I think it's going to be really interesting.
And I would just say too that.
For whatever reason, I mean, I think we all know the big systemic reasons, but like I don't think Columbia got anywhere near enough attention for the way it showed up at this cop which was like the only country where the inside people and the outside people were absolutely on the same page, like they're just like very clear fossil fuel phase out just transition, and like really were
the ones pushing that message very consistently. And I think that like it actually kind of broke through in some ways that didn't get picked up like in the media or in any of the big conversations. And I think that like actually them getting the Netherlands on board for this.
I was gonna ask you you have insights on how the insights on the Netherlands, because that was that's my case is way back when.
So that's was a deal, Like they're that's you know, Shell's home country, so like.
That's a really big deal.
And then they also said, hey, eighty kun trees that signed on to fossil fuel phase out come to our party in Columbia.
Next next year. So that's really interesting.
I talked to Kumi Naidu, who's running the nonproperation treaty now, and he was saying in Zuppora too that like they have modeled this after the landmine decommissioning treaties and that in that case you know, it was only twenty countries that actually signed on to that, but it created enough like momentum and pressure to get the rest of the world now. Of course, like fossil fuels and land mines
are very different things. No one is like I can't get to work without my landmine, but like you, however, it's an interesting strategy, so I despite, I think so yes, but it's an interesting strategy, and I think we're starting to see that, like, Okay, that could really bear fruit.
Another thing that came up, like on the ground there was that there was there was there was like a kind of an open letter from a bunch of different society groups really saying like, hey, it's time to actually organize around addressing this ridiculous consensus thing and like actually changing some of the processes at cop and those kinds of things. And then other people I talked to were saying, you know, yeah, like the negotiations, sure, the like trade show beyond them, like nobody needs it.
Yeah, yes, well I think we do need those opportunities, but I don't think it has to be COPT. So for example, I personally I've gone to more New York Climate Weeks than COPS because that's where I feel it's much more a democratic process because it's all sort of crowdsourced. It does need to be a bit more organized, in my opinion. But you know, climate weeks are springing up everywhere. So my home city of Toronto has a Climate Week. Now, this is the first year. London Climate Week has been
happening for a while. There's all these regional climate weeks. Africa had a big Climate Week a year or two ago, so that's where the discussions are happening, and they're much more solution focused because they're more regionally focused.
I would just say, I mean, I agree with you, Katain, but I also would I would highlight the fact that the Climate week's the beauty of the Climate week, although there is some paid to plainess there which I think is problematic. But the climate weeks are also locally embedded so that all of a sudden it really is for the mayor's the regional leaders rather than this like everybody fly.
I mean, I have to say, the last time I was at a cop I ended up at an event where there were people from Brookings and people from a whole bunch of other thing tanks from here in DC. And I was like, I can't believe I flew across the world to sit in a room so that we could all present to one another. I mean, we could have done this. I mean we could have done this by all taking the metro. There's no reason to do that, and that kind of the whole you know, three wing
circus part I think that has to go. I know some of my colleagues are very upset with my making that statement, but it's just like that could happen at a regional level. That is much more valuable for decision making at at the scale, and I you know, I'm all for that. I mean, obviously I believe in taking what we have in our scientific information and getting out there.
But I'm not sure that getting it out there, there's nobody from the regime that's going to be like, oh, I was at that panel with all those people from Washington, d C. And now I'm going to change everything we're doing. It would make a lot more sense. For like, we just started Climate Week d C, which they unfortunately scheduled it for a really bad time last year, but I'm hoping they'll have it. I think maybe it'll take off. It was right after you know, Trump made some interesting announcements,
so it was really oddly time. But you know, this kind of a regional effort I think can really help to build climate community in ways that could be much more helpful.
Mm hmm, yes, I completely agree because that's where we that's where we are today. Yeah, yeah, we need And the thing is this COP was built as the implementation COP. Well we need implementation at every scale and in fact implementing and Italy and the C forty network make this
very powerful. They're the city networks. You know, Implementation of the municipal scale is in many ways much easier than at the national or federal scale because the scale of solutions, the scale of decisions, the speed at which those decisions can be made.
As much impacts too. Remember right, people are experiencing the climate crisis in their communities, and it's varied, very varied based on where you're based.
So absolutely exactly, and even with in the US, where climate change is so polarized, one of my colleagues research has shown that the closer we get, like the closer we bring impacts to home, like you just said, the less polarized they are, because we're talking about our shared home and our shared neighborhood or our shared city or
town that we all went through the flood together. So it's really like sub national action and engagement in communication I think is almost like the secret I don't want to call it the secret tool. I don't want secret wepons, no weapons, secret sauce. Yeah there secrets that is not really unlocked by a cop is starting to be organically unlocked by these regional efforts. But more more deliberate focus on that I think could really catalyze things and move the needle forward faster.
I have.
So I have one more question, because I know we're running out of time. Unless I didn't want to make sure Amy, you didn't feel like I was cutting you off, not okay, no, no, no to the last question is you know is the big one? So what is what's your visiting for the future? What do you think, what do you think is possible? What do you hope for? And what do you think is most realistic when we think about both climate policy making but also where we are in the climate crisis and where we need to go.
Just that.
Little bitty question, just.
Well, I I think that we are what we are seeing now. When you know I live in Texas and I'm from Canada, where our carbon price, our target price on carbon just got removed, and we're seeing the impacts. I mean, Texas is actually the most vulnerable state in the US to climate impacts, and Canada has seen the massive wildfires in recent years like we've never seen before.
So all of the resistance that we're experiencing, the dismantling of climate science and research and solutions and sharing of information and all that, it reminds me of the you know, the line rage, rage against the dying of the light, rage against the dying of the fossil fuel powered light. I feel like those who have built their power and wealth on the history of fossil fuels in our society,
they understand that their days are numbered. They understand that it is not going to be the fuel source of our society over the next hundred years. And countries like China are already light years ahead of the US in making that clear. And so this is their last ditch fight to put off that tipping point as long as they possibly can, to make sure that the quarterly returns are as high as possible for as long as possible, before they take all their gains and go off to
their bunkers. And what that really means is we're getting closer to winning, but it is darkest before the dawn, and it is very very dark right now. I'm a hopeful person, but that's because I practice hope like an Olympic sport. I'm not an optimistic person. I expect the worst and then I can always be pleasantly surprised if it doesn't happen, or grimly validated if it does, which is more the case these days. Lots of grim validation these days. So the arc of justice, as they say,
really is bending in the right direction. But man, it is a a brittal situation out there right now. And what breaks my heart is that the science says that every bit of additional warming we put in place has an impact, and it will have an impact on the people who've done the least a cause it that had no say in that decision actually being made. And so that is why doing everything we can to accelerate our social tipping points is so important. And so that's why
full so go back. I spend so much of my time as a scientist doing communication because the social science says that that is one of the tipping points we need, and I feel like that's the one where I can help the most.
Such an apocalyptically optimistic perspective, Jess, for you all about that, woo okay, so Amy, what have you got?
I would say, well, I think that, you know, to Catherine's point, like there is I do feel like we're seeing them fight so hard because they know that they only had so much time left and they're going to try to make as much money off of their assets as they can before they can't anymore. Like of course that's happening, you know, but it is to a certain degree unstoppable. Like there's there's so much renewable energy penetration
in so many places. Even the IEA, which like you know, historically was was not super optimistic about renewables, came out with its report you know, this this week saying, yeah, fossil fuel use is going to peak in I think they said, oh god, I don't want to misquote it anyway,
the peak is coming soon coming up. And they looked at, you know, how much renewables are growing, and I think like, actually, one thing that was interesting about this cop was the fact that the US not being there was a good thing. You know, it cut back on some of the obstruction that was happening.
I think that.
It probably cleared the path for some of these other countries to get together and say, you know what, like now you know, not only are we going to have this meeting in Colombia in April, but I think it's twenty nine countries now have said that they are going to veto the cop presidency text unless they put fossil
fuel phase out back in. And we're talking like the UK, Australia, these you know, like of course Global South countries as well, but like some of the bigger fossil fuel countries to boot.
So you know, I think I actually committed to that.
I don't, yes, they did.
I have a little theory about this, which is that Australia's and this is totally because we have an Australia reporter who gives me all the hot goss on Australian politics. But Australia's environment minister was really hoping to get COP hosting. He wanted to like, you know, kind of preside over the negotiations and be more involved in all of that.
And their primary minister, you know, like didn't turn up to cop kept telling the press they didn't want it, all of that stuff, and so yeah, he thinks he's like I kind of wonder if like this guy didn't just do this as a little bit of a like screw you to his boss back.
Yeah, I know that and all the coal industry and Australia. So that's interesting.
But yeah, it's pretty interesting.
The fact, I mean Netherlands co hosting a fossil fuel phase out meeting with Columbia very interesting. Like, I think there are starting to be countries that are getting on board with this idea. The other thing that I feel like, especially in the US, we're not looking at at all is how big of a deal it would be if the UK were to actually follow through on phasing out north Sea oil, because that would they would be the first, like developed fossil fuel based economy to get off of fossil fuels.
People always say, what about Norway.
Norway's suckling at the teat of the fossil fuel funding trust. I know, yeah, they're still you know, very dependent on on that wealth fund and in a way that that the UA would not be, which is why I think again you're seeing the fossil fuel they are spending so much money trying to take down renewables in the UK right now.
They're even putting.
Like I have a couple of reporters there there are like they're like putting up fake candidates in little community elections that they know won't win just to get like anti renewables talking points out there.
Taking a page of playbook over here is what they're doing, right, I.
Mean, I know, I know.
Anyway, Yeah, I'm like watching that as like a potentially quite like because to me, I actually feel like as effective as the science denial was, the economic argument against action I think has been much more entrenched and like more success ful in a way and is much harder to push back on. So for a very developed, very fossil fuel tied country to decouple from fossil fuels as their economic engine would be a huge, huge moment, and we could see it in the not so distant future.
So that's how helping.
Yeah, that's very hopeful. Well that I feel like we should we should wrap up on that to just say, I mean, I think, yeah, I mean, it's very likely that the worst is still in front of us as the death now continues for the fossil fuel interest. But I think that there are these amazing glimmers of hope and opportunities for us all to do more, and to do it in a strategic way that hopefully pushes back
against some of this, including the misinformation. So I applaud all of your efforts and all the work you both are doing with your climate communication, because it's even more important now than I think it was, you know, five ten years ago. And thank you so much for coming on the cop Out podcast, and I look forward to continuing our conversation in the future. Likewise, maybe in Colombia. Yeah, Oh, that'd be fun.
I'm gonna go. I'm nearby, so it's easy. I'm like, I'm.
Looking at Columbia right now.
I can see it from my window. No, not really, the col