You’re listening to A Climate Change. This is Matt Matern and your host, and I’ve got Staci Roberts-Steele, who’s the producer, big time producer and managing director of Yellow Dot Studios. Really looking forward to our time together with Staci. She’s done so much amazing work over at Yellow Dot, some great YouTube videos that have got millions and millions of views and I think are really provocative and thoughtful and I think we’ll engage people in a way that we really need to engage people on the climate. So Staci, thanks for being on the show.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

So tell us a little bit about your background and what led you to the climate movement in the first place.

Yeah, I mean, I primarily was working in film and TV. I mainly pursuing acting, was doing some writing and things like that. And then I started producing several years ago, started just working on Friends, web series and shorts and things like that. And then I eventually made my way over to Adam McKay’s company to HyperObject. And kind of right when got there, one of the first books that came through our projects was Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace Wells.

And that book, I just remember reading it and being like, why is no one talking about this? Like, why is no one addressing climate change? There’s so much happening right now. And so that definitely was the thing that kind of shook me and moved me. And then it really went into hyperdrive when we made Don’t Look Up.

That film in particular, obviously, an allegory for climate change, but also because of that, we were doing a lot behind the scenes, meeting with climate scientists, and especially during the marketing of the film, we did a lot of climate and movie screenings, mixing together and stuff. So that’s when Adam and I started talking about maybe making some sort of climate arm of hyper -object. And so it all started with the Chevron parody ad that we did.

You know, Adam wrote up a quick little voiceover and gave it to me and I worked with an editor to put it together into as much of a fake Chevron commercial as we could. And we threw it online, not thinking much of it. And it got five million views overnight. And so then we were like, wow, we should do more of these. So that’s kind of like the trajectory of, you know, everything working at the right pace at the right time.

Tell us a little bit about the Chevron ad for those who haven’t seen it and kind of what was your thinking behind it and how was it produced?

Mm -hmm.

Yeah, so that one in particular, Adam was always kind of joking about how like, they’re just these Chevron commercials and they have these beautiful pictures, or beautiful images of nature and families together and all these things. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, they’re the ones actively polluting our environment. And not only just polluting it, but speaking generally to the oil companies overall is just, they knew it was polluting.

They knew the damage it was gonna do. Not only did they not say anything, but they tried to cover it up, the whole disinformation campaign. there was just a lot of things where he’s like, isn’t that funny that these commercials have so much beauty to them and emotion, and then at the same time, there’s a lot of darkness behind. So yeah, when he texted me the voiceover for it and we reached out to Lost Planet, which is a commercial house that we work with, a fair amount, and they put together all these great images, and we kind of went back and forth and edited the whole thing.

And the funny thing about that is the voiceover for it was actually a scratch track that one of the editors at the office there did. He just kind of threw it on there.

And we just got so invested in it. By the end, we were like, we’re not going to get another, like a professional voiceover artist. We want to keep this guy. So we just used the editor’s voice and it was, it ended up being

Yeah, it’s a great story. Then did you go from there to the Darth Vader ad?

Yeah, so that was, I mean, yeah, that was right around the time we started putting Yellow Dot together. And we had Jamie Henn from Fossil Free Media reached out to us. And he had seen the Chevron ad, and he just said, let’s do something fun together. I’ve always thought that Darth Vader was a you know, was a villain that parallels a lot to the oil industry.

So yeah, that one we put together very quickly because we realized we had know, six months since the Chevron ad and we were like, we gotta make something else new. So we shot it actually here at our office. We managed to turn it into the Death Star, rent a Darth Vader costume and, you know, call in favors to friends who were willing to throw something together on the cheap.

Yeah, I love the Darth Vader one. It’s just so fantastic. mean, it just for anybody who hasn’t seen it, you’ve got to see this ad and just saying, you know, essentially you, you oil companies, shame me because you’ve brought evil to a new level. you know, how my hats off to you as Darth Vader, you guys out-eviled even me.

Yeah. You Exactly.

And it’s true, mean, the oil companies shamelessly knew that for the last 50 years, that they were polluting the planet, their products, and didn’t disclose this to their shareholders, to their clients, and to all of us consumers, that this was what was happening. And they knew that they were destroying the planet.

I mean, it’s outrageous on a level that’s just, it’s kind of mind blowing. It really is. It’s mind blowing. We think of, as an attorney, I’ve lots of cases where we had really evildoers doing some bad stuff and this just makes all of the stuff that I’ve ever seen pale in comparison.

Mm -hmm, yeah, because the damage they’ve done is so exponential that it’s just every year we get further into this, you just kind of look back and say, like, if we had only known sooner, you know? And again, the disinformation is the extra level of it. It’s one thing to, you know, be doing something wrong and trying to kind of figure out behind the scenes how to fix it, but then to actively, you know, go against anyone understanding it is extra evil.

So yeah, so I think that the Darth Vader was a very good parallel in terms of a character.

And just kind of as we talk about it, I’m thinking about part of the climate denier and oil company network is, you know, saying, it’s going to cost so much money to fix all this stuff. And why should we invest all this money to to fix these problems and yada, yada, yada. And you think, well, if you guys hadn’t created this problem, we wouldn’t have to spend so much money fixing it. So.

Right. Well, and also I think it’s look how much money they’re making. That’s the other piece. know, I mean, it’s like they are making so much money off of everyone. It’s like it’s clear that they should be the ones, you know, paying for it, which is a lot of, you know, we’ve been working this year on the Make Polluters Pay campaign again with Fossil Free Media. you know, that’s a lot of this is like all this this it’s going to get very expensive. All this climate disaster as we move.

Maybe you should chip in a lot of money, given you know, further and further along here and someone needs to pay for it. And so it makes sense, the one’s polluting to do

Right. mean, Exxon, I believe, made $9 billion just in the last quarter. $9 billion in 90 days is they made. So they’re making plenty of coin. My understanding is you put some ads in the Houston area and the ad companies were like, don’t say something so negative about our poor little oil companies. They’re nice.

Mm hmm. Yeah, no, we did, yeah, we put up some billboards that are basically, they’re actual images of the floods in Houston from a couple months ago. And it says, the text just says, you’re welcome Houston, love big oil and gas. And we reached out to a bunch of billboard companies and we were really trying to get something like you know, right around Exxon headquarters where all the employees are driving in, you know.

And we just kept trying. We kept getting pushed further and further out because every billboard company was like, we won’t let you say that basically, which was interesting. And we’ve now heard that from several other, excuse me, several other climate groups that also had a similar problem in other cities and places. So we’re up against a lot.

So much for free speech.

Yeah, exactly.

So tell us a little bit about the movie Don’t Look Up and how you started that project and how it went and what do you think the impact has been?

Yeah, yeah, that was great. I was working, mean, Adam obviously wrote and directed it and Kevin Messick was the lead producer on that. But I was there from the beginning. the very first, one of the first scripts, it was first called Boom, I believe, which was just a funny title. And when Adam first wrote it, but he had the idea in the fall of 2019 and we were working on another show. We were actually shooting the pilot for Winning Time, the HBO show.

And he just kept saying, he was like, I’ve got this climate idea, it’s about a comment, all these things. And he just kept talking about it. And I was like, Adam, okay, you gotta finish directing this pilot first, but yes, let’s go do that after. And yeah, and so he went away to write for like three weeks.

And in three weeks, he wrote the entire script and came back and we sent it to Jen Lawrence and she was the first person to sign on. And once that kind of happened, everything started rolling in. And that one in particular, I mean, that was really challenging because that was March of 2020 that we went away to at least start location scouting.

And if you remember, there was a giant pandemic that happened. And so that slowed us down a lot, but it was actually pretty great because we realized through that that a lot of the things that were in the script, now that COVID was a part of our lives, a lot of things in the script didn’t seem as crazy.

And even politically looking at what was going on at the time, it was like, this is a crazy script, but now the last six months have happened, we need to make this crazier. So Adam went back in and changed a bunch of the script just to make it that much more insane. And then we went out in the fall to Boston.

We were one of the first films back to shoot after COVID. yeah, it was a really great process because I think in addition to just like making a great fun comedy, it also just opened up the conversation on set of people talking about climate change and talking about like what’s really happening, what’s the timeline.

And like, that was a really organic part of it of just making a film about climate change to get people to start talking. And then, yeah, in terms of the release, mean, you know, it was controversial, you know, we had people who loved it, we had people who hated it, you know, we had all in between.

But I think the thing that always, you know, a lot of these, especially now working more in climate and all of these different events and things we go to, I mean, the number of people that come up to us and they’re like, thank you for understanding, like scientists, especially that I’ve met with now that are just like, I feel understood, you know, so I think for us, like the biggest victory was that, just hearing that it was for the scientists and the fact that they loved it was a victory for us.

Yeah, that’s huge. Because I think scientists are, I have interviewed a number of scientists and they’re great people, but I don’t think their voices are being heard in Main Street media. mean, like they’re just not out there convincing people…

Mm -hmm.

…idiots are out there on whatever channels promoting falsehoods because those those are like quick clips of 30 90 seconds versus science takes like a little bit of time to understand.

Yeah, absolutely. I think also the thing to remember too is like scientists, it’s not really their job to be the ones communicating the information. I mean, they deliver the information, but it really is the media that needs to take that information and make sure it’s out there accurately and things like that.

And I think even with, in the entertainment industry too, it’s like, it’s now our job to, we don’t have to make every movie climate disaster film, but it’s important to start making films that really address the world that we’re living in.

I mean, just the extreme weather changes we’re living in right now, it’s like that kind of needs to be a part of the character of everything we’re seeing in entertainment. And then on the positive side too, just looking at having a character that’s walking to their car is one way of doing it, but if they walk to their car and unplug it, it’s a little mini signal to the viewer of like, hey, this is normal.

This is what people are doing now. We’re driving electric cars, we’re composting, we’re all those things. so I think it is, scientists have a job to get us the information, but then it’s kind of the job of the people to sort of start talking about it and normalizing what we need to do.

Right, so you had a number of pretty name brand stars in Don’t Look Up. Did they work for free or scale or how do you?

Yeah, they were totally free, which is great. No, not at all. You know, it’s a Tollywood. No, but but I think I do think, though, that, you know, without saying particularly who, but like certain ones, they did it because they’re passionate about climate, you know.

And so I think that in and of itself, I mean, we’ve even seen that at Yellow Dot with the short films we’re making and sketch sketches and things like that is, you know, working with people that we maybe haven’t even worked with before because they’re just passionate about climate and they want to get this message out, which has been really fun.

I know Leonardo DiCaprio is a big climate activist, I assume that he… That’s great. That’s great, because yeah, it’s a pretty big budget to pay his salary, his normal salary.

Yeah, worked for free, yeah.

Yeah, exactly. Well, if the oil companies would pay it, it would have been a lot easier. So maybe we can get them to pay for this too. It would be great.

Yeah, yeah, they do. That’s that’s another bucket that they can start to pay off because quite frankly, that’s going to move the needle farther and faster entertainment wise to get people educated about the nature of the problem before the cleanup even occurs.

Yeah.

Yeah, well, because even looking at like, you know, we’ve been working a lot with Rare, which is the organization who, you know, they kind of, their entertainment lab is, you know, just getting people to talk more about within Hollywood, within the scripts or within filming things to kind of showcase more of this, of green energy and things like that.

The idea of like doing a big, you know, crane shot into a city and you’re seeing solar panels, it’s like that moves the needle in some way because people that’s, it’s similar to like if your neighbor gets solar panels and then you go over there and you’re like, how did you do that? How much did that cost?

It was that like an annoying process. wow. You don’t pay any more energy bills. know, so like, I think it’s just like getting it out there more is the job of the entertainment industry and you know, media because again, it’s like we just have to start making it part of the conversation on a daily level.

Yeah, I noticed an ad that you had put out about the CEO of Exxon that was excellent. I really liked it a lot. Tell us a little bit about that one.

We’ve done a few, but I think you’re, you talking about the Exxon parody ad? That one? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So yeah, we did that one recently. And yeah, I mean, that was similar. We got the voice of Ron Perlman for that, which was really fun. He was very excited to, you know, take it to the oil companies. And it was a similar idea of Chevron in that, like, we really just wanted to say all the bad things that Exxon has been doing.

Yeah, the Exxon parity add and be able to just say it in a very honest way, because everything in there is true, but then we put it towards, put it against visuals of people going out camping and exercising and all those things. But it is a way when using like parody is a really great way to be able to say things that you could just say flat out, but it doesn’t have as much of the emotional twist to it. Giving it a little bit of comedy, think draws people in a little.

What demographic do you think you’re hitting with your ads and what demographic would you like to hit and what demographic do you think you need to hit?

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think we’ve always shied away of worrying about, like, we’re not worried about climate deniers, you know? I mean, it’s already been shown that the number of people who don’t believe in climate change is just going down a lot. So we don’t feel like we’re going to reach them, nor do we need to.

So we really are trying to kind of get that movable middle. People that are aware climate change is happening, but maybe the people that think, this is a problem for my grandkids and getting them to realize, no, no, it’s not a problem for your grandkids.

It’s a problem for them, but it’s a problem for your kids. It’s a problem for you. Because even just looking at the way weather has changed the last two years, I have family in Iowa, like looking at tornadoes and things like that. then obviously people in coastal cities where there’s, you know just flooding and fires and all this sort of stuff, it just becomes more and more every year.

So I think we’re really trying to speak to that audience that knows it’s happening, but needs to understand it’s on a much quicker timeframe. And also to understand that it is, know, majority of the damage is the pollution from oil companies. And then there’s lots of other factors within, but that’s a big one that if we were able to transition off fossil fuels that we’d be in a much better place.

I think one of the things that you hit really well in that is the gaslighting of the oil companies of saying, essentially it’s you consumers fault for this and we’re just producing the product and you guys are not changing your habits and it’s really shame on you for this crisis rather than any shame on us.

Right. Yeah, exactly. that because yeah, the Exxon parody ad did come from a quote from Darren Woods at the CEO of Exxon, know, initially saying basically like it’s it’s you who needs to be cleaning this up type of thing. and the thing is, is that, you know, individual actions, I think, important, but they’re more important so that people can be seeing action being taken.

But at the end of the day, individual action is one of the smaller things on the list. It’s really pushing oil companies to change, but also legislators to start changing policy and laws and things like that because me composting is not going to save the world. It’s helpful, but it’s not going to be the one thing.

Right, mean, as consumers, we change our habits. We buy non -fossil fuel burning cars and things like this. And that does start to move the needle, but it’s the public policies that say different states and the feds have had which say, hey, we’re going to shoot for a target of X amount of alternative fuel vehicles.

And that that is what moves a needle because otherwise, I’m not going, you know, lot of people are not going to buy them if their neighbors aren’t buying them as well. Like we all have to be obligated to make this change. Everybody needs to make these changes together.

Mm hmm. Well, and I think that’s the important thing, though, is that we all can’t do everything, right? Like, there are some people who can’t afford a new car right now, period, let alone an electric car, let’s say.

But, you know, there’s also people that are way better at, you know, going to protests. Or there are people that are really good on the phone and really good at calling their senators. Or, you know, maybe you really like, you I don’t know, customer service.

So you can call your bank and figure out like, hey, how can I move my money away from my bank that is funding all these fossil fuel companies and find a bank that is better? There’s an organization called Green Portfolio where you can put in your bank info. Don’t worry, it’s safe.

They’re not gonna steal it. Put in your bank info and it’ll tell you how bad or good your bank is and then recommends like, you know, other banks and things like that. And so there’s just things like that that I think we can all be doing whatever is I would say just out of our comfort zone. Do what’s comfortable, but also give it little extra push. And it’s gonna differ for everyone, but there really are a lot of things that we can all be doing.

Well, the beauty is that the price of these electric vehicles has gone down dramatically. So some of them are even cheaper than the gas vehicles that we all had been driving for ever.

My husband just bought an all electric, two year old all electric car. So he went for that because there’s a lot of leased ones out there. And it was literally the same price as a gas car. And he was like, this is great. Cause now I’m saving money on gas and he doesn’t have to go to a gas station and get his hand all dirty, you know, when putting it on the gas pump. So it’s a win.

Absolutely. So which climate groups are you working with at Yellow Dot and which ones do you think are the most powerful ones out there that you kind of recommend all of us tuning into?

Yeah, mean, think we usually like to go, it’s funny, I’m hung on the word when you said powerful. I think it’s more like we go to the ones that are definitely like in line with what we wanna do. so I think, know, Fossil Free Media is someone I mentioned a lot, but we’ve been working on a lot of different campaigns with them. think they have a similar sort of edge to them of like really calling out the oil companies. So we really love that.

We’ve also worked with Gasleaks, a similar thing. They’re doing, you know, really interesting content around climate and comedy. And I mean, we work with so many. my gosh, I should just look at my calendar. But yeah, we, mean, I think like groups like that that are pushing the sort of the communications around climate is very important.

Because I think for a long time, it’s maybe been, you know, you need to recycle or, you know, there’s just been this narrative that sort of the stereotype of people think. And so we’re trying to kind of work with these groups that are pushing the envelope a little more. And I was gonna say something else too and I totally forgot. But yeah, those are some of the main groups we work with.

But I think like overall, I mean, we’re down for anyone who is ready to kind of like work outside the box a little. And then we also work with places like the Climate Emergency Fund where they fund nonviolent civil disobedience, climate defiance and things like that. Those are a lot of the groups that are more like on the streets out doing stuff that we really love to work with as well.

Any particular group of scientists that you’ve worked with?

Yeah, I mean, we work with Peter Kalmas, who we’ve worked with since the beginning. Dr. Ayanna Johnson is also a great resource. We love, I mean, there’s so many different organizations and groups of scientists that work together, but we kind of love to talk to everyone because I think the really interesting thing we found early on, when we first started Yellow Dot, coming from the film and TV world, we were like, okay, let’s really get the lay of the land of what’s happening.

And we met with tons of scientists and it was really interesting to hear how they all had a similar narrative. It wasn’t like there was these conflicting views. It really was like, we have a handful of years to really turn this thing around before it’s too late. And we kept hearing that and I think that was the thing that gave us the sense of urgency.

So what’s next? What’s next on Yellow Dot’s?

Boy. Well, we’re heading out to climate week. And so we’ve been gearing up for just a lot of things there. We’re going to be doing a live comedy show there and we’re doing a game show with comedians and scientists at Solutions House, which is fun. And then we’ve also been working on a monthly live show here in Los Angeles at Dynasty Typewriter. Our next show is August 19th. We just booked.

Hannah Einbender from Hacks. She’s gonna be doing a stand -up set. that show, the show in particular, we bring together some stand -up comedians to kind of do climate, I mean, to do comedy, anything they want. It doesn’t have to be necessarily climate related. But then we weave in a climate theme with our host. And, you know, we’ve done things around make polluters pay. We’ve done things about different legislation that’s happening in California, just to, you know, give people the lay of the land.

We have some things coming up about moving your money away from fossil fuel banks. We’re just kind of like hitting up all the different areas that we can. So the show is a really great way to kind of focus in on a theme, but also bring people together in a room to see comedy. And we live stream it. So even if you don’t live in LA, you can see it. Yeah.

That’s great. So how would they, any of us want to see the show live stream? How would we do that?

Yes, just go to dynastytypewriter .com. Dynastytypewriter is the venue and it’s August 19th, so you can get tickets there. And then also, I imagine our social media manager will be blasting our socials all this week and next, so it’ll also be there. Yeah.

Okay, fantastic. What about a show on climate change, kind of a weekly or frequent show that you might put on kind of mainstream channels?

Yeah, I mean, we’ve definitely been talking about some of the projects that we’ve worked on over the last year, developing them into more long form television shows. You know, I mean, the easy one that a lot of people reach out to us about is Cobell Energy. That was our office comedy about an oil family that we did. It was a short form series that we did for TikTok.

And that one we’ve talked about a lot that would be a really fun one to kind of elaborate and have a more long running show. We also do a, this is non-scripted, we do a extreme weather report every single week where we go through and kind of pull all of the crazy disasters that are happening around the world and they’re not things that are like, this happened months ago.

It’s literally things that have happened this week and every week it’s incredibly easy to find at least six, seven huge events that people aren’t talking about.

So we’ve talked a lot about developing that into an actual news show or getting those clips somewhere more in the news because that’s the crazy thing. If you watch even one of those, it’s just really eye -opening to see like, we are living in this climate crisis right now and we need to start taking more action.

Well, and one of the things that has happened over the last few years or so is that climate scientists have been able to affirmatively link these extreme weather events like the Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico to climate change from the oil companies and that type of thing, which is fueling kind of case, legal cases against them.

And we interviewed somebody who’s an, who’s suing over Hurricane Maria and they’ve got experts who are able to say, the ocean heated up in this area because of all the CO2 emissions.

Yeah. Mm hmm. Yeah, and that’s the really, that’s the interesting connection I think that’s also our job is to, you know, even some people that know the weather is changing, they don’t really know it’s because of warmer temperatures, you know, in the ocean, in the atmosphere and things like that. And so I think like making that connection of weather is climate change, know, weather is the climate crisis is really

Right, it’s that link and some people were deniers or just skeptics will say, well, you know, it’s hotter, but I’m not so sure it was caused by the oil companies or whatever. And I think now the scientists are proving that and we need to get that message out there that this isn’t just conjecture, this is scientific fact. And…

Mm-hmm. Yes. Exactly.

So we’ve got this election thing coming up shortly. You guys involved at all in this Harris versus Trump?

Yeah, we were directly, we were hired actually to get Tim Walz as the VP pick. So we did that. That was great. Yeah, we were totally involved. Kamala called us and was like, figure this out. So we called Tim, we got…

That was nice. Well done. Well done.

No, we are also a 501c3, so we’re not allowed to say anything. No, but we are involved in the sense that we are doing a few things around the get out the vote, just getting people registered, making sure that people that are registered actually vote.

I think even people who feel disgruntled about the election or voting in general, it’s really about looking these sort of climate candidates that are doing things that are actually helping the future. And I think that’s sort of the more important thing is getting out there to vote to, you know, vote for the people that are actually gonna make a change in the right direction for climate.

Yeah, it’s kind of highlighting. Well, here are two things, chocolate and vanilla here. You know, which do you want to choose? Here’s Trump’s record on the environment, which is zero. And then you have somebody else who actually cares about the climate, which…

Yeah. Yeah, you’re right. Right. And it’s not really chocolate and vanilla. I would say like chocolate and dirt flavored ice cream maybe. Yeah, exactly.

Ha ha!

Yeah, dirt and worms. Yeah, that’s probably a better analogy. So tell us a little bit about who are your climate heroes if you had a Mount Rushmore of climate heroes. Who’s on that for you?

Wow, mean, Johann Rockstrom is a really cool scientist that we always love. He’s also just got a cool name. Climbing heroes in general, mean, Jane Fonda is a big one. She’s out there really pushing for, I mean, has her janepack .com, that’s her climate pack, and she’s really out there, as I was saying before, finding the people that are these great climate champions.

And I also think just the way that she delivers everything, you you just, you want to hear it from Jane Fonda. She’s so fantastic. And then, you know, I mean, some of them are just people that we’ve also worked with who I love, like, know, Rainn Wilson, you know, comedian, actor extraordinaire, you know, it’s also been very fun to, you know, he’s someone who’s actually like using his voice in a way that, you know, it’s not always easy.

I think it’s a hard thing. Like even when we talk to people about looking at celebrities and things to talk more on climate change, they do get nervous that they’re putting something on their brand and everything. And Rain has been really amazing of just game to do anything and he’s very passionate about the cause. And yeah, mean, so I’m kind of down with anyone who is ready for the fight. That’s who we like working with.

So any collaborations coming up in the future that you can talk about?

Yeah, I mean, I don’t know if I can totally talk about them because they’re not 100 % finalized, but I guess I’ll say we have some really fun things coming out around climate week in September that if we pull it all together, it’ll be very fun.

But yeah, we’re definitely trying to just work with more and more creators that are, you know, kind of, that have a following and have a voice out there and can kind of bridge the gap and all that sort of thing. So yeah, I can’t say anything specifically, but I hope we’re gonna have a lot of things come together in the next couple of months.

Well, a friend of mine was saying he’s going out to Climate Week and he works with a group in Hollywood that tries to get writers to write things related to climate into scripts. And so, as you were saying, it’s super important work that can move the needle in a big way.

Yeah, yeah, no, I think that’s like, it’s definitely the thing when people say, I can’t do anything. It’s like, you work in a world where you’re getting ideas out there, there’s big, you know, heavy lifts that you can do, but there’s also very light touch things that I think, yeah, just kind of opens the awareness to people. So that’s great.

So if you could change one thing about the public perception of climate change, what would that be?

I mean, the biggest thing I think is timeline. I think it’s actually, it’s pretty crazy how little we talk about that we’re in a handful of years situation. Scientists, they say it’s anywhere from, think right now they’ve said two to seven years. like, mean, it’s like we gotta get moving.

So I feel like that is one thing that I wish was talked about every day and, you especially things that like policymakers were talking about on a regular basis because 2050 is a great idea, but we really got to do stuff before then, you know? So yeah, timeline.

Yeah, I think that that is a big thing and the kind of the budget they say the carbon budget and that we only have a certain amount of carbon emissions to emit before a tipping point occurs. And the question is kind of how close are we to that tipping point? And unfortunately, humans are just not great at waking up before disaster strikes like.

Mm hmm. Yeah, it’s true. It’s true. But I actually think that’s kind of what’s happening right now, though, is that we are having more and more of these bigger disasters. You know, we’re spending more money, you know, every year on climate disaster. And, you know, I just hope that those types of things start to wake people up, you know, now.

Yeah, absolutely. It is just a ginormous problem and we’re not talking just about the US, but we’re talking about China and India and all over the world developing coal -fired plants and just there’s a lot going on. I mean, AI is sucking up huge amounts of energy. Cryptocurrency is sucking up huge amounts of energy. You know, how do we address those types of things on such a large scale?

Yeah, well, that’s another wish is if we had a magical carbon removal machine that not just carbon capture, like something that actually was just like made it all go away. That’s another dream light switch because it is challenging. It’s like, you know, we’re up against more and fossil fuel oil production, know, more drilling and all that stuff every year.

And it’s like, we definitely got to curb that. But on the other side, we also have to start figuring out a way to get carbon out of the air because it’s, it’s really a twofold approach.

Yeah, it’s certainly going to be challenging to do that from what I’ve talked to people who seem to be in the know that carbon capture hasn’t had the kind of technological breakthrough that, say, solar or wind energy have had in terms of bringing it on the cost curve dramatically. Like, solar and wind have had dramatic reductions in costs, whereas carbon capture just hasn’t had that kind of breakthrough yet.

Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. And I mean, the one thing I will say is that when you look at solar and wind, and I can’t remember the exact statistics, but we went and saw Al Gore give a talk on kind of like where we are now. And we’re actually, I think it’s 34 times where we thought we would be in terms of solar, like how much solar we put out there.

It’s 34 times where we thought we’d be this year. So that’s really encouraging because I think things like that that are more mass scale, like that’s something that gives me a lot of hope, is just things like that, that we’re just pushing bigger and bigger.

Yeah, no doubt we have done a lot and there’s a lot more to do. I mean, that just tells us we can do this. There are states that have 50 percent of their power from renewable sources. That’s phenomenal. you know, like if you had said that 10 or 15 years ago, people would laugh at you like that’s ridiculous.

Yeah. Yeah.

And some of these states are red states producing just tremendous amounts of renewable energy. So that’s a great thing.

Yeah. Yeah, well, they’ve got the sun. mean, we have the sun that is producing way more energy than we need every single day. So it’s like, we should use it.

Yeah. So thank you so much for being on the show and really greatly appreciate your time and all the great work that you’re doing. And if you can give a shout out to the listeners as to where they can find you and see all the great work that you’re doing on Yellow Dot.

Yeah, yellow .studios .com is our website. You can find all of our videos, info about our live shows, and then we’re on social channels at weareyellow. And yeah, check it out. We’ve got lots of stuff.

Well, again, thank you, Staci. It’s been great talking to you and I really appreciate all your great work. And I’ve gotten a lot of great laughs out of the videos as well as sharing it with lot of friends and family. And I’ve gotten incredible feedback from the type of work that you’re doing.

And I just feel like we just need more of that to wake people up. And I think the way that you’ve done it is really in your face as to the oil companies and not just pulling the punches. And that’s really necessary to just get real with them.

Yeah, well, thank you so much. Thank you for having me. And same to you, Matt. I mean, it’s great to have people that are actually highlighting all the great things going on and even the not great things going on so we know what we’re up against. So right back at you. Thanks.

Thank you. Well, you’re listening to A Climate Change and check us out at aclimatechange.com and you can check out our episodes at Spotify as well as YouTube and all the other places where you get podcasts like Apple.