You’re listening to A Climate Change with Matt Matern. I’m your host and I’ve got Dr. Susan Solomon on the program today. I’m really happy to have her on. She is the author of a recent book, Solvable, How We Healed the Earth and How We Can Do It Again. Looking forward to talking with Dr. Solomon about that. She is a fellow Chicagoan, so we have that in common. And she is a member of the National Academy of Sciences. We do not have that in common.

Just for history buffs, Lincoln started, I believe, the National Academy of Sciences quite a while ago, one of his many achievements. In 2008, Dr. Solomon was selected by Time Magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. And in 2007, as a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, she received

half the Nobel Peace Prize along with Al Gore who got the other half. So it’s pretty amazing accolade and I believe that was for her work with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, help measure the damage to the ozone layer which led to the UN Montreal Protocol and agreement to protect the ozone layer by phasing out the use of chlorofluorocarbons.

She got her degree from the Illinois Institute of Technology and then went out, which is where my brother actually got a degree in chemical engineering. So a little crossover there again, Chicagoans, a doctorate at Berkeley in atmospheric chemistry and is currently teaching at MIT. So a list of accolades and awards too long to go into or else that would probably take up the entire show. Congratulations, doctor, on such great work.

Now tell us how do we solve the problem of reducing our emissions to dramatically stave off climate change?

Well, thanks, Matt, for having me and thanks for that very flattering introduction. It was actually a little too flattering, but that’s OK, I guess. I think there’s every reason to think that we will basically start turning the corner on our emissions this year, in fact. What we’re seeing now is that about over 30 percent of global energy is coming from renewables, not from fossil fuels anymore. The rise in

Solar and wind and the actually onshore wind especially is a very effective, cost -effective way to do things. So nowadays, solar and wind energy is actually cheaper than coal. It’s also cheaper than gas. And that’s caused a tremendous growth in those industries. We just have to get them online, which involves things like permitting. Amazingly enough, one of the simple things that needs to happen is for states and cities.

to become more effective at permitting the connection of renewable energies to the grid. I think there’s every reason to think that’s gonna happen. And of course, if you’re interested in helping, you can push in your own locality to try to get those things to happen. And between that and the Inflation Reduction Act, which is providing all kinds of economic incentives, not only for alternative energy, but also for electric vehicles. You know, the future to me looks really bright in the coming couple of years. So, you know, we’ll…

Well, that’s that’s good to hear. I guess I still have some concern, not that I’m a naysayer or anything, but from what I’ve heard and read, there’s kind of a carbon budget that we have to to spend essentially before we get to a point where maybe it’s a tipping point where we don’t know what will happen after we hit that that level. What? Tell us a little bit more about that.

Well, it’s true that the carbon that we put into the atmosphere builds up. And that’s why we can talk about a certain amount that will lead to a certain temperature. What we find is there’s a clear relationship there. So if you want to ask the question, how do we avoid having the planet warm more than one and a half degrees or two degrees, you can actually figure out roughly how much carbon we have left, how much we can afford to continue to to use. So yeah, there is a budget.

But the fact is that what we really need to do is in this decade, turn the corner and stop increasing our use of carbon globally and have it start to drop down. And by 2050, get to what’s commonly called net zero. If we achieve that, we’ll avoid having temperatures exceed certainly two degrees and maybe even if we’re lucky one and a half, although I’m a little more skeptical about that one, but let’s say two degrees. So that doesn’t mean we have to do things tomorrow.

It doesn’t mean that we have to cut our carbon completely by next week. What it means is that we need to start down that curve. And there’s every reason to think that globally averaged we will actually emit less carbon next year than we did this year, which is a fantastic piece of news. So we’re starting down that curve. We need to accelerate it. We need to keep it going. And I really think that the tools are in hand to get there. you know, usually when these things get going, they tend to snowball.

It’s slow in the beginning as the uptake, you know, runs into logistics issues, simple ones like permitting or more complicated ones like, we probably need to also modernize our grid. We need to probably replace existing electrical wires with carbon fiber wires so they can carry more electricity and carry it farther. But you know, those just aren’t insoluble problems. So I think in the next few decades, we will definitely get where we need to go.

I guess my question is, or I’ll try to form a question here, regarding 2030, and that I’d heard a number of people say that our carbon budget is such that if we don’t reduce emissions by 2030 by X amount, that we will kind of hit a tipping point. Is that a misstatement or am I, you know, maybe you could clarify.

Well, I think that’s an extreme position. We don’t know that there really are tipping points in the future of the climate system. There are some ideas that have been floated about possible tipping points, but frankly, the evidence for those is not clear.

So using that as a guidepost for the future is really not my way of thinking about it. That’s sort of what I’m going to call the fear approach, which I think is a little bit over the top. A more realistic thing to say is maybe, know, whether there’s tipping points or not, what we certainly know is that heat waves are getting more frequent and severe. We know flooding is getting again, more frequent and severe and that

When it rains, it rains harder. When you have storms like Tropical Storm Debbie that just moved through, dumped a tremendous amount of rain, and that’s very difficult for communities to handle. So there’s ample reason to worry about climate change, quite apart from tipping points, in my opinion. Why bring in something that, you know, I mean, yes, we should think about the risks in the back of our mind, but we should also think about the things that we have.

confidence in and they’re more than enough to get everyone concerned. When you talk about risk, we do have to talk about risk. I completely agree with that. But how you react to different levels of risk is so dependent on your personal values. Some people just don’t view environmental risks as something to worry about. Other people view them as something terribly, terribly frightening, it’s very much a question of your values.

And I can’t tell you what the right values are, but what I can tell you is that heat waves are getting more frequent and intense. And that’s kind of hard to argue with. So getting back to the question of what we have to do by 2030, think as I said, I think we have to turn that corner, which I think we’re gonna do next year. It’s gonna be an exciting day, by the way, when we evaluate how much carbon we emit next year.

And we say, hey, we actually turned the corner. We’re not increasing anymore. We’re starting to go, you know, they’re fairly flat the first year and then starting to go down. That’s going to be tremendous. And then we just have to accelerate it, which I think will happen because the technologies will continue to improve the way they have been doing. Now, that doesn’t mean we should be complacent. Let me just say that. Some people mistake the point of view that I have for for saying, we can just all sit back and relax.

What made that happen is that people began to demand change. They began to see that climate change was personal to them, that it was a threat to them, wildfires, flooding, et cetera, there’s nobody’s idea of a good time. These things were perceptible. And what I’m saying now is we just need to accelerate the practical solutions that we already have. When those three Ps come together, personal, perceptible, and practical, that’s when we solve environmental problems.

It’s what we’ve done every time in the past with every environmental problem you can talk about. I like to think about, for example, what it took to save the ozone layer. Same thing, personal threat, practical solutions, perceptible changes. To get rid of smog, same kind of thing.

Lead in gasoline, lead in paint, you can go down the list. We’ve had so many environmental successes and they’ve all involved those same elements. And we can see those same elements emerging now in climate change.

I guess the question is, assuming that the United States and maybe Europe are doing all they can and they are reducing emissions year on year, we still have China and India that are probably emitting more than they did the year before. What do we do to bring them into the fold?

Well, first of all, we recognize that most of the carbon in the atmosphere causing most of the problem was actually emitted by us in Europe. So, you know, because it’s the total amount of carbon that leads to global warming, most of the responsibility still sits with us. Now, China has been coming up rapidly in how much they emit, but why have they been coming up rapidly? It’s because of development, human development.

So, you know, China is a country that had extreme poverty 25 years ago. They’ve begun to climb out of poverty, certainly, and they’re doing much, much better now. But still, they still have, I believe, about 600 million people living in horrendous poverty in the outlying regions of the country. So I don’t think you can expect them to suddenly stop developing. mean, its development is important. What you want is for them to develop in a clean way, to use non-fossil energy.

And China, by the way, is investing in more renewable energy per year than any other country in the world. So the major investment in renewable energy is happening in China. They are also producing more electric vehicles than any other country in the world. And what they’re talking about is actually that next year they will stop increasing their emissions. They will begin to come down. That’s even sooner than they promised. They promised to do that by 2030. One way to think about this is a per capita carbon budget. know, everybody on the planet deserves some carbon.

I don’t think it’s right to say, because we’ve got ours, Jack, we’ve already developed and we’ve got all of our infrastructure and all that stuff that those guys have to now just not develop to save the planet. That’s not fair. And all of that is built into the Paris Agreement. The Paris Agreement allows for them to continue to develop, but it also requires a greater

Transfer of technologies from the rich countries to the poor countries and a greater amount of international investment in those countries So that basically they can do with energy the poorest of them anyway Can do with energy what they did with phones, know, they they never had landlines. They went from having nothing to having cell phones The same kind of thing they they don’t have fossil fuel energy. Maybe they can go from nothing to having renewable energy and that’s beginning to happen worldwide. I, you know, it’s got to accelerate, no question, but I think we’ll get there.

Well, I I question why China continues to build so many coal-fired plants when, as you said, wind and solar energy are actually cheaper than coal. And they also suffer from tremendously bad air pollutions and water pollution. You would think that just from an economic standpoint, they would go with the solar and the wind.

They are beginning to do that, actually. They have built a lot less coal plants than they had been doing. One of the problems they have is the same one we have, permitting. And the fact that the responsibilities for making sure that energy is there and it’s not interrupted actually lie with the provinces.

They don’t have states, they have provinces, but it’s the same thing. Those parts of China, are not following what the central government wants as closely as they could be. And China is aware of this. I expect China to actually take quick action on it better than we have.

Well, we certainly hope that they do. I guess I had seen the Europeans floating and I believe implementing a trade policy, which is going to say if a product is produced not meeting the environmental standards that they have set in Europe, that they would put a tariff on it to kind of equalize and encourage countries, other countries to meet the European environmental standards.

And I thought that something similar to that in the US would be a great idea for us to encourage our other countries such as China and India to make their products in a cleaner and greener way and maybe give some exceptions to countries that are poor.

Yeah, that’s one way to go. And I think right now they’re implementing it for heavy industry products like steel. And they’ll be phasing it in for other products as well. So yeah, that’s a mechanism that Europe is employing to try to put additional pressure on other countries because Europe is trying to accelerate the transition. Europe wants to accelerate the transition, obviously, because they don’t have the kind of fossil fuel wealth that say China does. there’s, should we wait for that siren to be finished?

It’s not mine. think it’s on somebody else’s end. Yeah, OK. So Europe does not have the kind of fossil fuel wealth that a number of other countries have. So it’s definitely in their interests to accelerate the transition. And that’s why they’re providing leadership on this. They’ve been providing leadership on this for a long time.

Actually, the Kyoto Protocol and the initial pressures that built up the the market for solar and wind energy came largely out of Europe. Denmark went completely to wind energy a number of years ago. Germany has a tremendous amount of solar and is continuing to build that up. So yeah, the Europeans have been leaders and kudos to them.

So what do you see as the effects of the IRA and what is the next piece of legislation that would be in your mind needed to continue the US on that trajectory of becoming a net zero country?

Yeah, the Inflation Reduction Act has been the most, by far and away actually, the largest climate related legislation that this country has ever done. It’s kind of amazing. So something like $300 billion worth of investment. And it includes incentives for electric vehicles, for building out chargers. We need to really speed up the build out of the chargers.

That’s been slow and I think it’s slowing down the transition to electric vehicles. But again, what you find when you look at other countries is it’s this inflection point thing that happens when a new technology comes in, there’s a period when it’s slow to be adopted and then it just sort of takes off. And so I think we can look forward to that takeoff. But legitimately, a lot of people are worried because they feel like hey, you I don’t want to go somewhere and not be able to charge my vehicle.

So we need to definitely build out the network of chargers. We should have legislation that improves upon that, definitely. And whether that can happen, well, we’ll see. But even without it, there are many, many cities and states that are doing their own things about trying to improve that. And there are already measures within the Inflation Reduction Act that allow to do it.

So that’s a big one. And of course, the other one is incentives for wind, solar, heat pumps. The future is going to be electric. Incentives for battery development is another thing that’s in there. I don’t know that you could do much better than implementing the Inflation Reduction Act right now. And bear in mind, by the way, the Inflation Reduction Act is an act of Congress. It’s not an executive order.

So no matter who the next president is, they’re not gonna be able to just, you know, with the stroke of a pen, get rid of it. Only Congress can repeal an act of Congress. And I don’t think that’s gonna happen. There’s actually a group of Republican representatives that have recently sent a letter to the Speaker of the House saying, don’t mess with the Inflation Reduction Act. We don’t wanna change it. Why don’t they wanna change it?

Because it’s funneling a lot of incentive money to their states and it’s becoming quite effective. So I’m not, at this time, I think that our main job is to double down on the implementation of the Inflation Reduction Act, not to start trying to come up with something new. It was hard enough to get that act passed. Another one, it’d be pretty tough, but let’s do the job we said we were gonna do.

What about the implementation of hydrogen into the economy? Do you see that as a big path for the future in terms of decarbonizing our country and our economy?

Yeah, hydrogen’s an interesting one. Hydrogen, I think, has a tremendous amount of potential in heavy industry. Again, things like steel and places where you have a concentrated use of energy to make a particular product. It has to be done with very low leak rates. mean, know, hydrogen is dangerous stuff. So just from a safety point of view, you know.

You don’t want to have places blowing up like the Hindenburg. Hindenburg was a hydrogen vessel, you know. It was kind of an impressive thing when it blew up and lots of people died. So you don’t want that. And I think that everybody recognizes the need for a very safe system. Personally, I don’t see it ever really taking off, for example, in cars. There are some people who think we’re going to be driving hydrogen powered cars. I look at them and I say, no, I don’t think so. Not for me.

But in industry, sure. Because do you want to have a hydrogen tank in the back of your car? mean, you know, it’s scary enough having a gasoline tank in the back of your car. ever seen how they burst into flames sometimes in an accident? No, no, no, no, no, not for me. Maybe I’m just going to this.

Why not?

I’ve been driving a hydrogen car for the last six years. It’s been fine.

I mean, really? My goodness. And where do get your hydrogen from?

Well, California is really the only state that has a good hydrogen infrastructure. So there are a couple of different stations that are within a few miles of my house. So it’s been pretty reasonable to get around. I mean, it’s not something you can drive really out of state. But since most of my driving is in California, it kind of works.

Well, good for you. That’s remarkable. Like you say, it’s not something as long as you don’t have to do any cross country trips, I guess it’ll work.

Yeah, well, maybe with these hydrogen hubs, we’ll see greater implementation and rollout of the hydrogen economy. My thought is that if we really get to a place where we can produce a lot of cheap renewable energy with solar and wind, we could make green hydrogen and then green hydrogen would be a cleaner, a way to navigate around even cleaner than the battery powered cars. But we’ve got ways to go before we get to producing that kind of energy.

And the question is, you know, how big of a demand on our energy system would that be? How much would it leave for other things that need to be done too? This is another question. But yeah, green hydrogen, absolutely in principle could be great. The other thing that it clearly does, which is important, is to bring in the fossil fuel companies. know, they can be engaged with this. It’s the one way actually for them to be engaged in the transition.

And ideally you’d want them at the table trying to help make some kind of transition. Otherwise they’re going to be frustrated because they’re not the ones who are going to make the solar panels. And that’s a bad situation. You want industry to be as engaged with the transition as it can possibly be. That’s what’s worked well in past environmental changes. Industry was really quite engaged in the Montreal Protocol. They were able to be part of the solution by coming up with alternative compounds to the ozone-depleting substances, the chlorofluorocarbons.

So what do you see as say the top five points of how this problem, the climate change problem is solvable?

Well, I believe that we’re going to have an electric future, as I said. So I think we need to be doubling down on renewable energies that are clean and efficient. And we need to make sure that our grid is capable of transmitting them. So that’s true for not only the United States, but also for other developed countries. Number two, we need to be from ensuring that the developing countries have access to those technologies and that there is enough incentive for them to use those things rather than dirty energy.

That takes international negotiation and frankly, some international money. And there’s, as you probably know, under the Paris Agreement, there’s, I believe, $100 billion a year to facilitate that, which is something. It’s probably not enough, but it’s something.

It’s a big start.

Have they actually been distributing $100 billion a year since it was?

I don’t know. I don’t know how much has been distributed. But I believe $100 billion has been collected this year. Now, what that means, I’m not really sure as far as distribution. So those are probably the two main things I could go on.

Dr. Salman, kind of just want to go back to your work on the Montreal Protocols, which was the basis for your winning the Nobel Peace Prize and how that all came together and tell us a little bit about the story behind your involvement there.

Okay, well, the IPCC won the Nobel Peace Prize. Together with Al Gore, was one of many scientists involved in the IPCC, so I can’t claim to be a Nobel Laureate by any means. But I did play a pretty significant role in understanding why we have depletion of the ozone layer and in the work that led up to actually having an agreement that has put it on a path to success.

It’s the signature environmental success story of the 20th century. So what I did was to explain the science of why there is an ozone hole and to basically be part of the international team that communicated with the policymakers about the nature of the problem. And they then incrementally produced this international agreement that

slowly decreased, and actually not so slowly, decreased the concentration of chlorofluorocarbons. So it was a major success story and has been held up as a huge win for the planet, really. If we hadn’t done that, the ozone layer would be in much worse shape than it is. And frankly, the damage to human beings and the ecosystems would have been terrible.

I guess getting back to what you had said before, the personal, the perceptible and the practical, and there seems to be a little bit more of a disconnect than where we were back in the 80s when you had worked on this in terms of a political divide. Back in the 80s, there was more bipartisan consensus regarding the science. Maybe everybody wasn’t all singing from the same hymn book, but for the most part, both parties were listening to the scientists on certainly regarding the chloro -fluorocarbons and the need to reduce them to save the ozone layer. What do you see is how we can shift the storytelling or shift the conversation in a way that gets people to to pivot on this a bit.

Yeah, I think the pivoting is already happening and it’s happening because the, it’s kind of sad, it’s happening because climate change has now become personal and perceptible to people. You know, 20 years ago, even 10 years ago, a lot of people were following down the line that, hey, you know, we don’t even know if this is real. We don’t know if it’s going to be harmful. You know, you don’t hear that kind of talk anymore simply because it has gotten so hot. So it’s sad that it had to come to that.

But if you look at opinion polls now, over 60 % of Americans actually think that climate change is a real problem and that we need to do something about it, that they’re in favor of renewable energy, they’re in favor of making changes. So I don’t think the divide is as fundamental as one might portray it to be. It can be when people can’t see for themselves what’s going on.

That’s when it’s easy to confuse people, to tell them different stories about, you know, the scientists don’t know what they’re talking about, et cetera. We’re past that right now in climate change, I believe. When it came to the ozone layer, you know, you’re probably right that there was more belief in what scientists were telling people. But on the other hand, the thing that really catapulted the problem to a solution wasn’t just sort of a belief in what scientists said, it was also the Antarctic ozone hole. So the ability to actually show people, my goodness, there’s this massive hole in the ozone layer that wasn’t there before. That was shocking.

And you’re probably too young to remember, but I do, the on the TV news there, they would show these incredible videos of the ozone hole opening up. And, you know, mean, it’s twice the size of the continental United States. It’s massive. It’s a huge problem. So it’s when people perceive things for themselves, when they feel personally threatened in the case of ozone, you couldn’t be more personally threatened than by skin cancer. You know, the big C is just about as bad as it gets. So people always feared ozone depletion.

Now I think people have come to fear climate change in a very serious way. So I think the pieces are all there. And as I said before, we do have practical solutions and we’re starting to implement them in increasingly extensive ways. I think we have to be serious about it. We have to continue what we’re doing, but it’s not time to give up by any means. And yeah, the partisan divide, you know,

It sort of vanishes when people see things for themselves.

I guess I have a concern that even though it is 60%, that 40 % is a fairly substantial number and that it needs to be closer to 70%, 80%, 90 % before the more serious actions may be taken. What’s the risk of a second Trump presidency given his first round in terms of dealing with climate change?

And of course, we kind of touched on it before, if the Republicans took hold of both the House and the Senate, potentially of rolling back the IRA, even though as you discussed, there are a lot of centrist Republicans who might not really want to go along for that ride.

Yeah. Well, Trump will talk about a lot of things, but actually doing them is another matter, I think. That’s true for many aspects of politics. But certainly, in his first presidency, was gung-ho. He was going to bring back coal. No, he didn’t bring back coal. No one can bring back coal because it’s not economic. It’s too expensive.

He’s probably going to make those same noises again, but he’s not going be able to do anything. When it comes to stopping the Inflation Reduction Act, I don’t think it’s going to happen, not just because there are centrist Republicans, but because it’s working and because it has incentives built into it for their districts and their states. So, you know, I don’t know that it needs to take 70 or 80 % or 90 % of Americans to agree on something to get it done.

I’m not sure we ever agreed at that level, even back in the 70s and 80s in the heyday of, if you will, agreement. Not too many things get that kind of level of approval. But I think that there are a large number of Americans who, as long as it’s not too expensive, are perfectly on board with making a change. And it isn’t that expensive anymore. So I just don’t think there’s a way to stop it.

And there’s industries who don’t want it to be stopped. That’s another thing that’s going to be in favor.

I do think that it was a act of political brilliance by the Biden team to make a lot of investments in what are red states with the IRA. And so that it makes it a lot more difficult for those congressmen, those senators to vote against projects that are delivering billions and maybe even tens of billions of dollars to their states and supporting their industries. And of course, big investments made by the car makers in a lot of southern states that are building out electric cars in those states. So that is a smart move on their part.

Absolutely. I mean, it’s not just difficult to reverse that. It’s probably impossible to reverse that. People will howl if you try to cut that stuff off. It doesn’t matter whether they’re Republicans, Democrats, or who knows what.

Yeah, I kind of looked back at the early environmental movement in the 70s and it was kind of surprising that the Clean Air and Clean Water Act passed with practically unanimous support by both parties. There were maybe one, two, three votes against it in both those cases. And you think how far have we come from that point in time?

Yeah, well, what caused that? I mean, the Clean Air Act, I’m not sure what the number is for the Clean Water Act, but the Clean Air Act passed unanimously, actually, which is pretty amazing. Why did that happen? Because there was massive public outcry that it needed to happen. Why was that public outcry there? Because we were in a period when pollution was terrible nationwide.

And when there was definitely a movement in American society around change, a lot of things were changing. The place of women was changing in the 60s and 70s. People wanted to get out of Vietnam. Civil rights was happening. There was an atmosphere of social change going on that certainly fostered the kind of outcry about pollution that

that happened and that facilitated this change. I think what you’re seeing now, which isn’t perhaps as strong, but it’s definitely there, is a movement towards environmental justice. And that is also fostering people to become much more interested in seeing environmental changes happen. So I’m optimistic. That’s all I can say. I don’t think it’s all gloom and doom. You’re a gloom and doom guy, Matt, I can tell that.

No, actually, I’ve heard a fair amount of gloom and doom from number of people that I’ve had on the program. I’m kind of not to recycle gloom and doom, but I also kind of like, you have some questions about it. I’m kind of optimistic by nature. So I prefer to be optimistic about it. But I’ve had a number of people say they are very concerned that we are not moving fast enough. I guess that’s the question. It’s not that we’re not moving in the right direction. The question is, are we moving fast enough?

Well, moving in the right direction is definitely the first big step, wouldn’t you say? Getting it to be fast enough, I think it’s clearly accelerating. And I think there is no doubt that it will go through the sort of inflection point of beginning to be much, much faster over time. you know, I think it’s too soon to panic. It’s not time to give up because we think that we’re not getting there. I think that gives you all the more reason to double down on doing things.

I guess one of the things that’s been raised with me is say the changes in the Arctic and the Arctic ice receding and things of that nature and that the Arctic ice reflects so much energy back up into the atmosphere. And if we have a tremendous amount of Arctic ice melt, that could be disastrous. What’s your thinking on that front?

Well, the Arctic is warming faster than the rest of the world, and Arctic ice is receding at a rapid rate. I don’t think there’s any reason to think that we’re gonna go back to the climate that we used to have. That is going to be pretty much impossible. I think everyone would agree with that.

What we’re trying to do is stop it from getting so bad that millions and billions more people are damaged by it and ecosystems are irrevocably changed in ways that are negative for us and for the planet. So is the Arctic lost? Maybe the Arctic as we know it is going to be, it’s going to be different. We’re already in a situation where the ways of life of say the Inuit people who for certainly millennia have been dealing with the environment in a certain way.

They’ve been going out on the sea ice and living that kind of lifestyle. That’s just not really happening anymore. Not only because of changes in civilization, but also because they’ve, you know, they don’t have the ice that they used to have and some of their villages are under tremendous threats. So yeah, there’s not going to be the Arctic that we knew, but is that going to cause the rest of the world to go over into some sort of disastrous state? I don’t think there’s good evidence that that’s the case. We just have to hold it to a level that is livable.

And the number that most governments and scientists would agree on is we don’t want to go above two degrees, but can we hold it to two degrees? That’s what the Paris Agreement wants to do. I think we can do that. We’ll have a different Arctic, no doubt.

Well, I guess the concern is that that kind of creates this potential tipping point and say, for instance, up in the areas of northern Russia and probably in Alaska, we have permafrost up there and that when the ice melts, there is a tremendous amount of methane that gets spewed out into the atmosphere on top of all the methane we’re already spewing and that could be extremely problematic.

Yeah, that’s been raised as an issue, but you know, one of the things that’s really interesting, the last time the Arctic was warm was about 130 ,000 years ago. In the last period between the ice ages, it got actually very warm, warmer than it is today. And yet we don’t see a big methane spike at that time. And there’s a lot of discussion around this.

One of the reasons may be the fact that as the methane tries to seep out of the soil, that it’s taken up by bacteria in the soil. So I’m not saying it’s impossible for there to be an Arctic tipping point and for there to be massive amounts of methane. Yes, that’s a conceivable risk. But the evidence doesn’t really support it happening at relatively low levels of warming, like two degrees, anytime soon. So I think, yes, we always have to worry about risks. Extreme risks are going to be out there, but we need to put them in context too. I don’t think the historical data supports the idea that this one is a major fear.

Well, one of the things that I’ve had some people on the program, Derward Zulke and others who’ve been working towards a Montreal -like protocol for methane. And have you been involved in any of those discussions and what are your thoughts?

I know those guys, but no, I haven’t been directly involved in that. No.

So what do you think that that’s workable and do you think that’s something that should be a high priority area of concern for us to rein in methane?

Well, certainly, yeah, mean, controlling methane would be great for one reason, just the fact that it only has about a 10 -year lifetime in the atmosphere. So as soon as you stop emitting it, it starts going away. And its influence on global warming is significant. It’s maybe, I believe, a quarter to a third of the total global warming that we have today is thought to be due to methane. So it’s not chicken feed by any means.

If we could do a better job at controlling leakage out of things like oil wells and gas wells, that would be tremendous. And certainly that’s something that’s doable. There’ll be a lot of incentive to do that coming up here in the next few years because there’s going to be a satellite flying around that’s going to actually be able to see individual oil wells and gas wells that will be the ones producing the big leaks.

It’s a brand new satellite and I it’s up there and I think it’s working so very soon We should start to see that data and you know when you see big methane leaks in your backyard Yeah, that would be something that I would imagine you could start to talk about having a an international agreement that would control that the question is Do you need a separate agreement or do you keep it as part of the Paris agreement with some modifications? I think those are the kinds of discussions you can have But yeah, nothing would be great to control.

So who would you put on your Mount Rushmore of environmental leaders, top four or five people?

That’s a tough one. I’ve never thought about that before. Top Mount Rushmore. Well, environmental leaders, you got to put Rachel Carson on there. We wouldn’t have an environmental movement without her. I think you’ve got to put, well, maybe you have to put President Biden on it, given the Inflation Reduction Act.

Sure, I’m going to leave people out. Whoa, what a tough question. I would be tempted to put Al Gore on there because he’s done some amazing things. But going outside the United States trying not to focus only on climate, to actually think a little bit more broadly than just climate. If I think about just climate, names like Christina Frugeros comes to mind. I mean, there’s lots of people who’ve contributed so much to where we are today. It becomes almost impossible to choose. Who’s on your list?

Well, I think that’s a good question. I would say Gore and Biden have done a lot on the political front, I guess to make it bipartisan, maybe George H .W. Bush with the Clean Air Act II, that he did some good work there.

He wanted to be the environmental president. I would have liked to have seen the Republicans continue in that vein to be competitive in the environmental space to.

Amen to that.

You know, that they would want to be as good on the environment or better than the Democrats as they were really the beginners of the movement with Lincoln starting the national parks and Teddy Roosevelt and then, you know, Nixon was EPA and Clean Air Act 1 and clean water.

Yeah, but you know, what, why did Nixon do that? In his later years, lot of the statements that he made, made it very clear that he was no environmentalist at heart. He did it only because of the massive public demand that something be done. That’s, that’s the beauty of exactly what I was talking about earlier. It’s when people demand change that you get change on environmental problems. And in the case of Nixon,

Do you know what made him decide that he had to do something? Now there’s good evidence, interviews with, I believe it was Ehrlichman, one of his aides, that he looked out the window and he saw the people streaming to the National Mall on the first Earth Day in 1970. And he said, I need to be a player in this, make me a player, because he could see, literally, the level of public interest was massive.

And at that time, you know, he thought he was running against Ed Muskie, who might by the way also be a candidate to be on that Mount Rushmore. Ed Muskie was the architect of the US Clean Air and Clean Water Act. So again, if we’re thinking just America, we could definitely put Muskie up there. But Muskie was a guy who had environment in his heart. He thought that was gonna be his opponent.

Environment was easier than doing something about Vietnam. So Nixon decided he was going to try to do something about environment. And frankly, in later years, he said that the EPA had run amok, and that it was doing way too much, and that people were way too concerned about the environment, which I don’t think any of us would agree to now. So I don’t put Nixon, I don’t put Nixon up there.

Yeah, I don’t want to put Nixon up on the Mount Rushmore, but I did think that he at least got behind it. And of course, he was truly self -interested always, it was not that he had it in his heart.

George H .W. Bush, by the way, he did, I think it’s fair to say, do a lot to solve the acid rain problem. Definitely the Clean Air Act amendments of 1990 did a huge amount to solve the acid rain problem. So yeah.

Right, I think he actually had a place in his heart for the environment as he was somebody who liked to go out and fish and be in nature and things like that. And so I think that that tends to make somebody a bit more of an environmentalist. Though that didn’t do it for Reagan because he kind of liked to be out in nature, but he didn’t seem to care about the environment too deeply, unfortunately.

Yeah, not until he got skin cancer on his nose and that’s when he decided that yeah, he was going to sign the Montreal Protocol.

Yeah, I think it’s interesting how when things get personal, then you wake up.

Mm. Personal, perceptible, practical, and that’s the three P’s are always there.

Yeah, well, on that note, I think we’ll wrap it up. It was great having you on the program, Dr. Salman, amazing history and great work over decades that have really shifted our society in a dramatic way. And your work at the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration and all the work on the UN Montreal Protocol is really spectacular. And I’m privileged to have you on the show and great to have your voice as part of the conversation here. And I do appreciate the optimism because that’s good to hear. It’s good to hear that we’re on the right track and if we can do this.

Well, thank you. It was lovely to talk with you. And I’m so happy to hear you have a hydrogen car. I’m so impressed by that. I’ll have to look into what it takes to have one of those.

Yeah, well, hopefully others can join in this experience. I think that one of the reasons it didn’t roll out, say in New York, they were so afraid of one blowing up in one of the bridges or tunnels that they kind of freaked out. Toyota has made it so they encased the tank in Kevlar. And so you could shoot at it with a high-powered rifle and it would just bounce off.

Well, yeah, I don’t know. I feel like that’s what they told those people who went down in that thing that got to the Titanic and then blew up. But I really hope your car is safe and good, so enjoy.

So far so good, so I think it’s okay.

Okay. Well, thank you and we’ll have to keep in touch after the program to keep working on pushing these solutions out into the stream of conversation.

You know, you didn’t ask me what the ordinary person can do, and maybe we should just do that real quick.

Yeah, let’s do that.

I I think there’s a lot that people can do. People can make choices, for example, to eat less meat, which is probably good for you anyway. It dramatically reduces your carbon footprint of food. People can, like you have, make choices to have alternative vehicles or to use public transportation. All those things put pressure on the industry. People don’t realize that these industries now, they’re operating on percentages of profit.

So, you 5 % per year, 6 % per year is a good profit margin. If we turn that corner down to 10 % loss, hey, they’re going to notice that. And so there’s a lot of things we can do. The other thing we can do, at least in America, most of us have retirement accounts, we can make choices for where we put that money. And we can put it into things that don’t support the fossil fuel industry and instead support alternatives.

I’m not making specific financial advice here because I’m not a fiduciary financial advisor. I would never do that. But I will tell you that I’ve done that with my own investments and they’re doing just fine. I’ve made great profits off of them. So, you know, there’s, there’s so many options that, you can choose. And of course, the number one thing you need to do is vote. The number two thing you need to do is talk about climate change with your friends, with your neighbors, in your schools, in your churches.

And if they’re the demonstration, you know, pick up a sign and peaceably demonstrate. Get out there just like we did convincing Nixon that he had to be a player and convince politicians they need to be a player in changing our climate. So those are the kinds of things we can do.

Well, thank you for the practical advice. It was funny. I was getting coffee with a friend this morning, and we were looking at the effects of going vegan versus vegetarian versus eating meat. And I think it was something like 10 kilograms a day that a vegan would cause less in climate in emissions than somebody who’s eating meat. And then the vegetarian was somewhere around five or eight kilograms less than a meat eater. So yeah, definitely has an effect. And I guess you don’t have to be a full vegan or vegetarian to do it, just eating less meat and maybe a couple of days a week not eating meat could make a difference. Yeah. Yeah.

Right. Meatless Mondays. That’s a way to get started.

So yeah, it’s a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. So just for today, we can take those steps.

Yep, you bet.

Okay, thank you again, doctor. It’s been a pleasure having you on the show and appreciate your amazing work and continued efforts to help our planet and help our society.

Well, thank you so much for having me, Matt.