To The Best Of Our Knowledge; Confronting Climate Change

It's to the best of our knowledge. I'm Ann Strangehamps. Political leaders from around the world are in Paris, talking about climate change. Islands disappearing, houses sliding off cliffs, brutal storms and floods in some places, drought and heat in others. The thing is, at this point, is there really much anyone can do to make a difference? In this hour, activists, scientists, and environmentalists will share some ideas, beginning with journalist Naomi Klein. She's the author of the best -selling book, This Changes Everything, Capitalism versus the Climate. She's in Paris right now covering the climate summit, and she told Steve Paulson that global warming is an increasingly urgent problem. For a long time, climate change was like this grandchildren problem, but that's really changing, you know, I mean, we are experiencing the impacts of climate change in the here and now. It's gone from being this grandchildren problem to being a banging down our door problem pretty rapidly, and that is changing the discussion because of people's lived experience with extreme weather, and yet we're still denying, and I think we're denying

in this sense of, you know, looking away, right? So we're living with this cognitive dissonance of, on the one hand, being told, and indeed experiencing the reality of climate change in these moments, and on the other hand, living in a culture that is sending us the opposite message through the policies that are all around us, and the culture that's all around us, so we look away. So how much urgency is there here? I mean, let's talk about possible scenarios. If the global temperature goes up two degrees Celsius, which is what, 3 .7 degrees Fahrenheit, something like that, or four degrees Celsius, which is within the forecast, what will happen? So where we're at is we are currently on the road towards four to six degrees warming, six degrees Celsius. So on the high end, around 10 .7 degrees Fahrenheit, above pre -industrial levels, that's a lot of warming. And these projections come from very conservative institutions. This is not, you know, me and my lefty friends.

This is the World Bank, this is the International Energy Agency. This is Price Waterhouse Cooper, says we're on a trajectory towards six degrees Celsius warming. So the reason that we should be alarmed is that when our governments, including the U .S. government, went to Copenhagen in 2009, which was the last big climate summit, our governments agreed to keep warming below two degrees Celsius, because they said anything above two degrees Celsius is catastrophic. And that target itself was extremely controversial. African delegates were protesting in the halls, saying that this would be catastrophic for them, because in Sub -Saharan Africa, it would translate into warming that would be absolutely devastating, because we're seeing, we've already increased temperatures by around 0 .7, and we are already seeing the impact. So we're talking about more than doubling that. But after you go past two degrees warming, the climate models start to break down, really. Four degrees, we're talking about

countries disappearing, we're talking about major cities. Because of the rising sea levels. Because of rising sea levels. We're talking about crop level failures of around 60%. And that's at four degrees. No one even bothers to try to guess what six degrees would look like, because it thinks start to go non -linear. And everybody agrees we do not want to be warming temperatures by four degrees Celsius or six degrees Celsius. And what are the time lines right here? I mean, in terms of some of these mainstream institutions you've mentioned, the World Bank, I mean, given current trends, if things don't change, at what point do we hit four degrees warming? Well, this is really imprecise. I mean, we don't know, but it could be as early as mid -century, it could be by end of century. The exact moment when we would hit certain temperatures, the science there is not clear enough. But what we do know is that there's a delayed response and we have a global carbon budget. And we have already used up a whole lot of it. So we need to start scaling back because we can't sort of slam on the brakes all at once. So this is why we need a sort of

system of gradual emission reductions. And what, for instance, the Tindal Center in Manchester, England, which is one of the leading climate change research institutions says, is that we need to be cutting our emissions by eight to 10 % a year starting now so that we aren't slamming on the brakes so quickly that we would be dealing with a massive economic crash. Eight to 10 % each year. OK, how can we do that? I mean, that sounds pretty unrealistic. The Tindal Center researchers are also saying, OK, our governments also agreed that our approach to climate change has to be based on some sense of historical equity in the sense that the countries that have been emitting carbon for 200 years by burning fossil fuels need to start reducing more quickly than, so -called emerging markets. India and China also need to be cutting their emissions within the next decade, but they have a little bit more time to play with. So that's why we need to cut deeper, faster. So who's responsible here? Is this, are these decisions that have to be made at the governmental level?

I mean, individual countries saying, OK, we're going to rain in emissions? Well, the United Nations has traditionally been the main forum in which we have developed emission reduction plans and then countries within that framework develop their own plans for how they're going to meet their targets. So which is to say we need to do it all. We need to work together because this is a truly global crisis that does not respect national boundaries. It doesn't make sense for us to only do this as individual countries. Now, one of the points that you make in your book, this changes everything, is that this is a historic opportunity to really shift the way the economy works. And I mean, really what you're talking about is trying to move to, I guess, what we call a post -carbon economy. How could this be done? So the book is making a pretty radical argument that we aren't going to do this within the confines of our current political reality. It will require a profound change, including a profound ideological shift. We've moved very far

in one direction, a direction which has really vilified collective action that has vilified intervening in the market, vilified taxation, vilified public investments. So if you're asking how we do this, we have to do all those things. I mean, we have to make the polluters pay. The money is there. So what does that mean to make polluters pay? Well, it would mean a variety of things. And it would mean higher royalty rates on extraction of fossil fuels. It could mean higher taxes on exports of fossil fuels. It could mean luxury taxes, because the wealthiest among us are also the highest emitters. It could also mean a financial transaction tax. I mean, there's all kinds of ways of getting at that money, but all of them break the cardinal rules of, no, we're not supposed to tax. And even now, in this country, when we talk about, okay, well, what policies should the environmental movement champion now? We tried cap and trade. That didn't work. Now there's a fair bit of momentum behind the idea of cap and dividend, which is the idea of putting a tax on carbon, but

then returning all the money in the form of individual checks to American consumers. So the problem with that is that it's designed to be bipartisan and that it's designed to appease this idea that there is something sinister and wrong with taxation. And it deprives the public sector of the resources needed to make this energy transition, because there have to be massive investments in public transit, massive investments in changing the energy grid, in reducing demand for fossil fuels and redesigning our agricultural system. All of this requires public investment. So walk me through some of these things. So you've just mentioned public transportation. So basically sort of trying to get fewer people to drive cars and instead take public transit. What else does that have to do with that? Well, light rail as well is important, because a lot of people take unnecessary short, half flights because the rail system has just eroded and eroded. So it's sort of reimagining transportation, redesigning our cities. It's not just about public transit. It's also about redesigning our cities in a way

that commutes, long commutes are less necessary so that we live in neighborhoods where the services we need, the groceries we need are walking distance, biking distance. And the truth is this makes us happier. I mean, people hate their commutes. So a lot of what we need to do to address climate change is going to improve our quality of life, is going to strengthen our communities. But it will mean consuming less. But one of the arguments I'm making in the book is that the ascendancy of this ideological project of market fundamentalism has eroded our communities and lots of friends and eroded our public institutions. So we feel the need to shop more because we're feeling avoid in our lives. There's been an explosion in the idea of consumption as hobby, as identity, as pastime, as holiday that is part of this same project. So as we shift, as we strengthen the public spheres, we strengthen communities. We don't need to fill those void with shopping. We can shop for what we need instead of shopping as a way of life. So you're taking on consumer capitalism here. Yeah, yeah. Good luck.

I mean, are you released? I mean, this is why I'm honest, that this is not just about landing on the right sort of technology and the right sort of, is it cap and dividend? Is it cap and trade? So given all that you've said, I mean, the disaster scenario ahead of us, it would seem like it's a pretty depressing time. I mean, are you an optimist or more a pessimist? No, I wouldn't describe myself as an optimist. I see the possibility of transformation. I have witnessed in my life moments when social movements grab the wheel of history and swerve. So long as we can imagine a non -catastrophic outcome here, so long as we can imagine that there is a possibility, I think we have a moral responsibility to fight for it. I don't see it as an odds game. Like, what are our percentages? You know, if we looked at it that way, I think we'd all be depressed. I'm not saying, you know, it's a foregone conclusion. I'm not even saying

our chances are good. All I'm saying is there is still the possibility of acting with enough decisiveness to avoid those catastrophic outcomes that our scientists are warning us about, but it will take tremendous effort. Thank you very much. Thank you. That's journalist Naomi Klein talking with Steve Paulson about her latest book, This Changes Everything, Capitalism, Versus the Climate. And now it's time for a dangerous idea. I'm David Guestner, the author most recently of all the wild that remains Edward Abbey while Stegner in the American West. And in keeping with that book, I would say my dangerous idea is modern day monkey wrenching. Monkey wrenching, to define it first, is environmental sabotage. It's messing with progress and with overdevelopment and with dispoiling, if you wanna call it that. And Ed Abbey was its chief proponent. In his hands it meant sawing down

billboards and pouring sugar and gas tanks and derailing tractors and anything else kind of that was dispoiling the land. But I've thought about that now in our post 9 -11 world. A lot of the things that Abbey advocated would just land you in jail. For a long time probably, it might even land you in Guantanamo because his breed of environmentalist has been long since labeled a terrorist. So I'm really interested in the idea of how do we take the spirit of that? And the spirit was you were never really undermining and destroying progress. It was gonna come anyway. But you were doing something symbolic. In fact, the most famous moment of earth first is they unrolled a depiction of a crack down the Glen Canyon Dam on the Colorado River. So it was all about symbols. So how do we do that now is my question. One answer would be given by Tim de Christopher who in the last year of the Bush administration went into an oil bidding auction in Utah where oil companies were bidding

on land, which Bush was trying to kind of give away in his last months. And Tim de Christopher was inspired to bid on thousands of acres or hundreds of acres of land even though he didn't have a penny in his pocket. And what he did was take the land out of the hands of the oil interest before they could get gobbled up. And then Obama came into office and the land was saved basically. What this led to in Tim de Christopher was a very young man at the time in his 20s was two years in a Denver prison. But what it did was rally all these people and make them aware of the cause of fracking and oil development on these lands. What Tim de Christopher did after he got out of prison was go to Harvard Divinity School. So it's really interesting to me how can we, without ending up in jail, how can we fight for the environment in the spirit of the old days, but not in the exact way? And I went and interviewed Tim de Christopher at Harvard and he really had a great line about this. He

said the essence of the old environmental saboteurs was secrecy. You do it with one or two other people and not tell anybody, well, the essence of today's is the opposite. We reclaim the story. We put a camera on it. And to me, that's a really exciting thing is to think about how we can reclaim a hardcore environmentalism without doing things that are perceived as terrorism. David Guestner is the author of all the wild that remains Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner and the American West. We use technology to fix just about everything. So why not climate change? Coming up the debate over geoengineering could a bunch of people in lab coats with pocket protectors save the planet? I'm Ann Strenchamps. It's to the best of our knowledge from Wisconsin Public Radio and PRI, Public Radio International.

Remember Stuart Brand, he's the guy who launched the whole Earth catalog back in the 1960s and then became a major environmental figure. After climate change, Stuart Brand started to question some of the environmental movement's core beliefs, like the idea that nuclear power is evil, or that geoengineering, the climate is just wrong. Today he's got a controversial eco pragmatist manifesto. So what sparked the change? Oh, probably I got older, but mainly the world changed. Climate change came along. Nuclear technology got better, genetic engineering technology came along and partly because I'm trained as a biologist back when. I've always thought that that was probably good news and now I'm persuaded that it is completely good and it was very green. Still, I guess your conclusions are not remotely those of a lot of the majority of environmental leaders and activists

these days. What do you think you're seeing that they aren't? I'm doing what they're doing with climate, which is paying close attention to the science and insisting that we do the same with these other domains, such as biotechnology and nuclear technology. You know, as they say, those who know the most about climate or the most frightened and those who know the most about nuclear or the least frightened, and I guess I'm trying to match those realities and get the rest of the environmental sun board. How do you lay out the case for nuclear power? The case for nuclear power is double. One is that it's mainly a very carbon free source of energy that's very proven and you know, existing technology has been there for quite a while and it's getting better all the time. People have, I think, lost track of the next generations being so good. But the main point is it's coal versus nuclear as far as getting what's called base load electricity that is the electricity that's on all the time, which solar and wind nicest they are or not, unless

we figure out a way to store their energy when they're not running. So nuclear versus coal, coal always wins in terms of price and nuclear always wins in terms of climate. And I think we're now in a situation where climate Trump's price and that's why governments are setting about making coal very expensive. Well, it's just kind of a hard mental transition for decades being green was practically synonymous with being anti -nuke. Being pro -nuke just sort of seems wrong if you're a pro -environmental. Yeah, and it's one guy, Steven Tyndale, who is head of green peace in the United Kingdom, described as almost a religious conversion to give up on being anti -nuclear. What about the problem of nuclear waste? The problem is political, it's not technical. We've known how to deal with nuclear waste for quite a long time. They're in the Midwest, we park it out back in the parking lot in those dry cask storage and they're fine there. It's a good place to put it while we think about it. We may want to put it in the ground, in which case, the place where we've been putting in the ground in New Mexico down in a deep salt formation is good,

that we may well want to reprocess it or we may even want to use it as direct fuel in the next generations of nuclear reactors called the fast reactors. So you wouldn't mind having one in your own neighborhood? Yes, please. It seems to me that a lot of your arguments come down to pragmatism. In other words, correct me if I'm wrong about you, but I have the impression that you think, you know, it might be nice to rely on solar power or wind power rather than nuclear, but we can't afford to anymore. Do you have a very strong sense that we're just running out of time? Yeah, climate change because of, it's such an unstable non -linear system as they say. It keeps surprising us with things like the Arctic ice melting 40 years ahead of schedule according to the IPCC models. And as that happens, I think a sense of urgency will continue to increase. And it's one of the reasons I think, for example, that geoengineering, direct intervention and climate is something that will come to sooner rather than later. What might geoengineering, intervening and climate look like?

Pretending to be a volcano. Climateologists love this one because it's what they call an existence proof of natural experiment. In 1991, a volcano in the Philippines named Mount Pinotubo blew up and sent 20 million tons of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, 20 miles up. And suddenly the next year, the whole Earth was half a degree Celsius cooler. You had more ice in the Arctic. You had, as a result, more polar bears. The cubs were born that year, were referred to by a biologist as the Pinotubo cubs. And they ran the models and realized that if you had a Pinotubo over a year, you could cool a planet by three degree Celsius, which is a lot. Okay, so wait a minute, I'm not sure. I totally get this. We would sort of create a volcano that would pump sulfur into the air. Well, one of the schemes, Nathan Mervold in Seattle is working on is basically a garden hose pumping liquid sulfur dioxide up to 10 ,000, 12 ,000 feet where it's getting into the

stratosphere and hanging it off of wedge -shaped blamps. And not very much expense. It's a few hundred million dollars to do that a year. So compared to the costs of all the other things we want to do about climate, it's pretty small. And it could really work? What it does is it puts sulfur dust into the stratosphere where it does slightly dim the amount of sunshine reaching the Earth's surface. And so it's just a by -time deal. It's a form of global dimming. But doesn't it make the world darker and then reduce the amount of sunlight for crops? Because remember when Mount St. Helena blew, people said there were serious climate changes as a result. No doubt with that approach, as we had with Pinotubo, there's some side effects you don't like. And that's one of the reasons you don't do it unless you feel like you have to. You know, on the one hand, there's something so hopeful and optimistic about thinking that science and technology may actually be able to improve the climate. But it also makes me nervous. Doesn't it seem like an example of exactly the kind of arrogant big

science that got us into the mess we're in now? Dangerous and crazy comes to mind. And you would only do it if you were absolutely head your back against the wall. But if we need to use it, you need to have schemes you're pretty sure will work. And so that's why we need to put serious money, a serious engineering, as well as serious science into moving ahead on these schemes, deceiving and finding any that can work if we need to use them. And then let's keep them on the shelf until we get desperate. Have you gotten a lot of flak for this book or are you finding that it's generally being applauded by your old environmental colleagues? Very is a lot. Most of the kind of the knee jerk freak out response like it is in relation to the nuclear stuff. I guess because it is a semi -religious issue like we suggested. And there's a little bit of that with the genetic engineering. There's a certain amount of, oh my God, now what? Does thinking this mean I have to think that and the sort of working through the process? And then some flat out applause. Do you see it

as a book that is more optimistic than pessimistic or the other way around? I guess I'm really asking, which are you optimistic about the future of the planet or not so much? My sense is that the situation is headed towards sufficient desperation that people will rise to the occasion. And there's quite a lot of us. And in the developing world, there's quite a lot of very smart people who are developing the skills and now enough prosperity to act that I think there's no end of innovation and resourcefulness out there. Once we get it all pointed in one direction, it could well rise to the occasion. And that's the source of my optimism. But that's against a frame of pretty deep worry that we may be headed toward what James Lovelock expects of a five degree Celsius warmer world in which there's carrying capacity for maybe a billion, billion and a half people. And how we get from where we are to there is basically people kill each other off

fighting over diminishing resources. Stuart Brand is the founder of the whole Earth catalog. And today he's president of the Long Now Foundation. Mimicking the effects of a volcanic eruption to block the sun's rays is just one of a whole lot of crazy ideas people have come up with to stop global warming. There's also a proposal to put space mirrors into clouds to deflect the sun's rays or another idea creating sodium trees to suck carbon dioxide out of the air. Australian economist Clive Hamilton gives us geoengineering 101. There are two types of geoengineering technology, solar radiation management, but also carbon dioxide removal on these sodium trees or so called it's big misleading, they're sort of giant metal boxes, contraptions that would suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and then pump it somewhere and bury it underground. There are other

forms of carbon dioxide removal and perhaps the main one or the one receiving most attention is so called ocean ion fertilization. The oceans have the capacity to absorb a huge amount of carbon dioxide, but the way you get it down into the deep oceans where it could be stored for a long time through what's known as the biological pump. And the idea is if we spread ion on the ocean, you get a bloom of algae. As all of these algae grow, they suck up carbon dioxide and then when they die, they'll take it to the bottom of the ocean. That's the plan whether it works or not is another question. Okay, so that's one way to reduce greenhouse gases. Another way might be to deflect the sun's radiation so it can't heat up the atmosphere. So one idea is to put up a cloud of space mirrors that would be oriented in a particular way to deflect enough sunlight away from the earth so that the earth is cooled. Another is so called marine cloud brightening and this

is quite a serious proposal which would involve building a fleet of special ships that would roam the oceans, spraying micro droplets of water into the air, which would help the formation of low -lying marine clouds. And if we can have more of these clouds and make them brighter, then they will reflect some of the sunlight back into space. Some geoengineering ideas are more serious than others, but don't you think we should know what we're doing before we start mucking around with the entire planet? We're talking about trying to manipulate the earth system as a whole because the climate is not just the climate and so when we start interfering in one bit of it, it's absolutely guaranteed that other parts of it, some of which are very unpredictable will be affected. So for instance, the early studies that have looked at sulfate aerosols sprang surrounding the earth with this layer of sulfate particles to cool it down will have a range of other effects, for example, it won't just cool the earth, it will also affect

rainfall patterns around the world. One suggestion is that it may shift the Indian monsoon from over India, Pakistan, perhaps down to the southwest towards Africa. And of course, that would affect food supplies for a billion people or more. When you start to think about this program or this idea of modifying the global climate, effectively installing a global thermostat that would allow whoever has their hand on the thermostat to turn down or up the global temperature and therefore to affect climatic conditions around the world, you start to think, well, this has huge strategic implications. I mean, we already know in the past that a lot of generals and military people have thought about controlling the weather as a military operation. But if you're talking about a global thermostat, then it has tremendous

implications for conflict, for nations fighting over whether it should be done and who should have their hand on the global thermostat. And so immediately you start to think, well, the militaries are going to be involved in this because of a strategic implications and because, in the case of sulfate aerosol spraying, if you have a fleet of specially equipped aircraft that have to go up every day and spray sulfate particles into the upper atmosphere, then the logistics of that are such that it's probably going to be the military involved in some way. There is no natural anymore. Every cubic meter of water, of air, every hectare of land now has a human imprint on it. So we've become global managers. The key question is what kind of managers are we going to be? Are we going to see ourselves as the Promethean masters of the earth to go out and transform it technologically so that we

use it to suit our needs? Or are we going to be what might be called satirians after the Greek goddess of care, of caution, of preservation? And step back and say, look, it's enormous hubris for us to imagine that we can act like God and control the earth in totality. That's my concern that if we try to intervene and be masters of the earth, then we're going to find that we can't control this vast, complex, powerful system and we're almost certain to come to grief. Clive Hamilton is a professor of public ethics in Canvara, Australia and the author of Earthmasters, the dawn of the age of climate engineering. Remember back when no one was really talking about climate change and then one very prominent public figure put

it on the map? The former vice president, Al Gore. He wrote his book An Inconvenient Truths which then became an Oscar -winning film. Then he won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on global warming. Steve Paulson talked with him a couple of years ago and since we're dipping into our archives this hour, here's an excerpt. You say something in your book that I found really kind of startling that we need to make the solution to the climate crisis the central organizing principle of global civilization. What do you mean? Well, 85 % of the energy consumed by earth ink is carbon -based fuels. For more than 150 years since the first oil well was drilled and oil joined coal as the two principal sources of energy, we have constructed a global economy that is based on the assumption that we have a limitless supply of relatively cheap fossil energy. The problem is we're already seeing in these big downpours and floods and droughts and rising seas and stronger

storms. We're seeing a taste of what could be in store for us if we do not organize our civilization to quickly decarbonize the economy, introduce much higher levels of efficiency. The future of human civilization depends upon that. But the response that you get, even from a lot of people who agree with you is fossil fuels are simply the most efficient source of energy out there. I mean, renewable sources like wind and solar are great but they just can't compensate for what fossil fuels can give us. Well, that's just not true. The predictions for years about the speed with which the cost of solar and wind would come down and the speed with which these installations would spread, these predictions have not only been wrong, they've been way wrong and the growth has been absolutely stunning. In Germany, which as a country probably gets less sun on average than the US, they were

able for some periods last summer to get 50 % of all their electricity from solar and wind. Here in the United States, the number one source of new electricity generation last year was wind. And around the world we're seeing a continued sharp drop in the cost of renewable energy and a continued sharp increase in the installations. Are you saying that we're getting to a point where renewable energy can compete in the global marketplace? I mean, this is not just you have to be altruistic. Well, in the world, electricity from solar and wind is now cheaper than electricity from coal. Are you thankful that you are living at the time that we are now living in now? I mean, would it scare you in some hypothetical sense to be born a hundred years from now? Well, I'm an optimist and I believe that as human beings, we have the ability to rise to this challenge and I think we will. So I

find it a privilege to be alive in a time when such consequential developments are taking place and when we have the opportunity to shape the future. But you know, it's up to us as human beings and particularly us as Americans to take hold of this challenge in ways that ensure the preservation of human values. But realistically, a hundred years from now, there will be significant changes because of climate change. I mean, even if we start to sort of get things under control, probably there will be some fairly dramatic changes, don't you think? Well, yes, the scientists tell us that you know, of the 90 million tons, we're putting up there today and every day, 20 % of it will still be warming the earth 10 ,000 years from now and sea levels will continue to rise and other effects will continue to unfold. There's no question about that. But we do have the opportunity and the mandate to stop making it

worse and to avoid the worst consequences which would not be survivable. Previous generations of Americans have accepted similar challenges and we've always risen to the occasion. I'm convinced we will do so again. That's former Vice President Al Gore. He was one of the recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize back in 2007 for his work on climate change. Coming up, where do we look for hope in the age of climate change? I'm Ann Strange -Champs. It's to the best of our knowledge from Wisconsin Public Radio and PRI, Public Radio International. I'm Ann Strange -Champs. Earlier, we were talking about ways we could tinker with the atmosphere to fix the climate. But how about just not polluting,

cutting way, way back on those dangerous greenhouse gases? Gus Speth is the founder of the World Resources Institute and co -founder of the Natural Resources Defense Council and he knows that in the world of real politics, that is a tough sell. We told Steve Paulson the problem is, we have a really hard time imagining an economy without growth. We have this growth fetish, which I think is a very important feature of our political and social and economic landscape. When you say growth fetish, economic growth? Yes, GDP growth in particular. I think a lot of people would say that is the mark of a thriving economy. Most people would say that, but look at the facts. Since 1980, GDP has grown by over 125%. The economy is more than doubled in size. And during that time, poverty mounted, inequality mounted, 42 ,000 manufacturing plants, closed their doors, wages

flatlined, life satisfaction flatlined, trust went down, depression went up, and the environment declined. I mean, this is what happened in the context of really high rates of over time of economic growth in our country, even today. We have economic activity measured by GDP, which is simply the sum of all the economic transactions, good, bad, and indifferent in the society. GDP today is larger than it was before the 2008 recession, but we still have maybe 15 % of the workforce unable to find full -time jobs. Will you talk about a post -growth economy? What does that mean? Well, it means a place where the overwhelming priority is not to grow GDP. It may grow one year, it may not grow one year. That's not important. What's important is whether you're growing the things that the society really wants to grow. So we have to ask what's the economy for? And if we had a good measure of sustainable economic welfare,

monetized, like GDP as a monetized measure, that would be great. We could look at it and try to grow it, but GDP is not something you particularly want to grow just for the sake of seeing it growing. My friend Herman Daley has a great phrase, uneconomic growth, basically over time, the benefits of additional growth declined, the cost go up, and pretty soon the cost of extra growth are more than the benefits that you reap from it. So are you saying that it's entirely possible that we could have a thriving country, even if our GDP was declining year after year? Well, I'm certainly believe that we could have a prosperous, happy, well -to -do society far more equal and pleasant than the one we have today with poverty almost all eliminated if we pursue the right policies. Yes, but you know what it requires? It requires a real government, a government that's

sufficiently capable and competent, a government that is rigorously democratic, and in which we trust, and are willing to work with government at different levels to achieve social and environmental ends. So government to some degree is the answer. I mean, of course, that's been a huge issue in our political debates. So over the decades, it's pratcheted up, a lot of people would say, you can't get past the sort of bureaucratic nature of government. You're saying that's not true. No, I don't think it's true. We see government all the time doing important things. You just look at some of the great things that government have done, the whole civil rights movement and the laws that undergird to that. The initial phases of the environmental movement, I think a lot of steam has gone out, but in the 70s, when Ed Musky wrote the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act with bipartisan support, they've made a huge difference in our country. You have to conclude, I think, that we

are in a system which just doesn't prioritize people and place and planet. And I would put right at the top of any list the absolute necessity of dealing with the climate problem, the climate change issue. If we let this climate thing spin out of control, and it's on the verge, I think, of doing that, it will be all so all -consuming. You're talking about cutting way back on fossil fuel use for starters. For starters, that's the big thing though. I mean, that is the big target is a dramatic reduction in our fossil fuel emissions. I mean, basically, we ought to be moving out of the fossil fuel business by mid -century. I mean, that's just what it's going to require. And that means, you know, really serious change in how we run our energy systems and how we use energy. What do you see as the most promising renewable fuel sources? Honestly, we tend to neglect the most promising thing, which is dramatic

increases in energy efficiency. You know, it's more attractive in many ways to talk about renewable sources. But I think the, you know, well, right now, the price of solar cells has gone down dramatically, and the payback period is much shorter. And wind is catching on all across the country and in Europe in a big way. You know, these are important developments. But, you know, efficiencies, particularly efficiency in the use of fossil fuels. I mean, we ought to have a price on carbon. I mean, it ought to cost those who are putting carbon into the air a lot of money to do it. And when that happens, you know, things will move in the right direction. You're saying once that happens, then the price of creating renewable energy is incredibly competitive. A lot more competitive. It'll be very attractive economically. And people will conserve, reduce their use of fossil fuels, efficiencies, and all kinds of equipment and homes and automobiles and other things will go up dramatically. You know, this is an old story. We haven't really gotten on the right path yet. Things are better. But it's,

we have a long, long way to go to really ring the carbon out of our economy. You know, it strikes me as I'm listening to you that we can come up with all these kinds of policy recommendations, but ultimately, what you're really saying we need is a change in values. I mean, the kind of discussion that we would have in a presidential campaign, for instance, to put some of these kinds of values you're talking about really on the front burner. Well, I don't think we just sit around and wait on values and call to the change and then expect everything to work out. These things have to move together in parallel. Patrick Daniel Moynihan had a great phrase. You know, he said, the central conservative truth is that values really matter and culture really matters and determines the fate of societies. But the central liberal truth is that a society can change its values and its politics can help change its culture and save it from itself. And I think crises, which we will have more of in the

future, can be tremendous learning experiences as the great depression was. And if we're prepared for them, so to speak, transformational leadership is important in value change and cultural change. Telling a new story, telling a different story, a narrative about how we got into this mess that we're in. And the great things that are going on in the country at the local level, the whole sustainable communities and food, the whole food movement and other things, those are the examples of bringing the future into the present and reality and seeing is believing. And when people see those things and see that it works and see that it's attractive, it can change minds. That's the longtime environmental activist Gus Speth talking with Steve Paulson. Gus's books include America the Possible and the Memoir Angels by the River. You know, when you keep hearing bad news

about the earth's rising temperatures, it's hard to hold on to any hope. I mean, it does kind of seem like the climate is toast. But maybe that's the wrong message. Frances Morelope has been at the forefront of the sustainability movement for decades. Ever since she wrote her landmark book, Diet for a Small Planet. And she thinks it's time to tell a different story about climate change. She even remembers the day she realized that. I walked out of a enormously impressive climate conference a few years ago where all these top speakers, my heroes all presented. The audience kept dwindling as the conference went on. And I walked out the door on the last day and I thought, wow, has led planted in my bones. I could hardly move. I was so paralyzed. And I thought, wait a minute, this isn't working. And so I set out to reframe the challenge. And that had a lot to do with reframing hope itself. Well, so for example, one of the constant

refrains when we talk about climate change is the planet has limits. There's a limit on how much CO2 we can pump into the atmosphere. There's a limit on how many pesticides or fertilizers we can wash into the oceans before everything starts to collapse. What's a more hopeful or productive way of talking about that? Well, this hitting the limits is really very negative and it's inaccurate because it's not the earth's limits that we've hit. We've hit the limits of the disruption that human beings can cause without enormous loss. And the alternative is a frame of alignment. Let's align with the laws of nature. We know how to do that. And with food, which is a centerpiece of my life's work, I realize that as we align with the laws of nature, we actually can increase output we're needed. We can do so in a way that is not harming us, the farm workers, the farmers with chemicals, and we can protect biodiversity. I'm thinking about what we're learning,

for example, with agroforestry, which is simply the integration of trees with cropped land. We could sequester carbon equivalent to about a third of greenhouse gas emissions in 2007. Agroforestry, it has re -greened an area the size of Costa Rica in southern Niger, which has looked almost desert -like a few decades ago. And now it's 200 million trees growing there. With crops, they have achieved food security for about 2 .5 million people. This is not some new technical fix. It's about absorbing the lessons of nature and going with that. Well, and going back to storytelling and the way we frame the story, why don't we hear more of the success stories? They kind of get drowned out. I know, I wish I knew the answer to that. I think it, you know, I'm sure have heard if it bleeds leads in journalism. And I think there's an underappreciated hunger for solution stories. When we tell a story of

solutions, people are riveted and they want to share that. So these stories of possibility, like the one I just shared, about knee share. One of the most hopeful threads that runs throughout your book, Eco Mind, about how addressing climate change might mean empowering people around the world to make a difference. You know, for example, maybe by putting solar panels on their homes to sell electricity into the grid, that might actually wind up shifting how political power is distributed around the globe. Can you explain? Well, it could be that solar got monopolized, but it's very much more difficult. I mean, when you think about oil is concentrated in the ground, it takes millions, billions to bring it to the surface and to distribute it that has led to a very highly concentrated industry where solar is virtually everywhere and we can all be producers. So there is an inherent in renewable energy and inherent kind of democratic element

of distributed power. And another aspect of this that I think is so important from a food perspective, presently our agricultural system contributes about a quarter of all greenhouse gas emissions. And yet we know that agriculture can be a great carbon absorber. So the poorest people on earth, that is farmers in the global south who would make up the majority of the world's hungry, they can be encouraged and enabled through just initial, small loans and education to learn better ecological farming practices that store carbon in the soil. They are part of the solution. They become the climate heroes. In rural India, I've been so excited about reading there of thousands and thousands of villages moving to non pesticide agriculture. Yes, it's ending hunger, ending poisoning by

pesticides, but it also is equestring more carbon. Are you suggesting that humanism needs to be part of environmentalism in a way that it hasn't maybe been in the past? Well, I'm suggesting that we haven't really thought of ourselves like organisms, other organisms in the ecosystem and that we too respond to our context. I often fear that people who are gripped with fear and despair about the climate crisis believe that somehow we have to change human nature. We're too materialistic, we're too greedy, that something about our nature has gotten us into this situation. We have to step up and say, okay, what are the conditions that bring out the best in this species? And it's pretty clear to me the dispersion of power, transparency and human relationships. We all do better when things are transparent and when we all take mutual accountability and drop the blame, blame, blame game. Frances, I know you've spent your life working on

change, but I'm curious, do you yourself personally, privately at night when you're all alone really feel hopeful about the future? Hope is, hope is not maybe not the right word for me. I have a sense of always a sense of possibility. You know, one of my favorite stories that does relate to climate change is when Garmethi, when Garmethi planted seven trees on Earth Day in 1977. Her husband divorced her because the kitchen was too messy, too many seedlings growing because she started this green belt movement, planting 20 million trees in Kenya, villagers all over the country. Once, when Garmethi was given the Nobel Peace Prize, her stature rose and she connected with the UN Environmental Program, they started a plant for the planet program of one billion trees a year. And I thought, oh man, that's so optimistic, they could never do that. Well, you know what, that was 2007 and we're now at 13 billion

trees, planted by people all over the Earth. And I go back in my mind and think, well, that was when Garmethi, 1977, planting her seven trees. So, you know, I keep that alive in me, that sense of, you never know. So... Francis Morlope's books include eco -mind and diet for a small planet. And in case you'd like to hear one Garmethi in her own words, you can find an interview with her on our website. That's at ttbook .org. So, that's it for our show today, but there is always more in our podcast feed. To sign up, visit iTunes or Stitcher and search for to the best of our knowledge and don't forget to leave a review that helps other people find the show. To the best of our knowledge

comes to you from Madison, Wisconsin, and the studios of Wisconsin Public Radio. This hour was put together by Steve Paulson with help from Craig Ely, Raymond Tungacar, Doug Gordon, and Charles Monroe Kane. Our theme music comes from Steve Mullin at Walk West Music. Our technical director is Carille Owen and I'm Ann Strangehamps. Thanks for listening. P -R -I Public Radio International.