A Climate Change with Matt Matern Climate Podcast

Are we headed for a climate and health crisis worldwide? The more each of us commits to this process of living sustainably, working towards getting political leaders that are listening to us regarding climate and acting on it, the better our chances are. Welcome everybody to the 200th episode of a climate change, the next chapter is going to be exciting, and we’re glad you’re with us.

Hey, welcome everybody to the 200th episode of A Climate Change. I’m Matt Matern, your host, and it’s great to have you here in the show. We’re going to kind of recap what we’ve done over the last four and a half years. Got some highlights of interviews, some of the great interviews that have happened, some amazing guests that we’ve had on the show. I think you’re going to love to hear from a lot of different voices and talk about where we’re going as a society. And we’ve certainly covered a lot of ground in four and a half years. Are we headed for a climate and health crisis worldwide, or is there still hope to mitigate these efforts?

I’ve been fortunate to talk to some of the amazing leaders in this climate space over the last four years, and thought leaders and scientists and governmental officials. My takeaway is, yes, we can mitigate climate change. It’s still coming. It’s happening right now. So in real time, we’re experiencing it, the melting up in the Arctic and down in Antarctica, these things are happening. So it’s not that we stop it in its tracks, but maybe we make it less cataclysmic than it could be. So that’s our job is, to mitigate it, lessen the effects of it. The more each of us commits to this process of living sustainably, working towards getting political leaders that are listening to us regarding climate and acting on it, the better our chances are so this is action that all of us have to take on a daily basis.

It’s not a one and done type solution. One of the things that we’ve heard from many of the guests is that their opinion is that the most important thing we need to do is to get out and vote, and that that is the most important thing, because systemic change is possible if we have leaders that are pushing laws that will move us in the right direction. And you can see that where previous leaders from generations, 50 years ago plus had the clean air and clean water act, and that made a huge difference. I agree with that, and I say yes, and and the and is we need to personally go out there and be responsible and take action. As Cesar Chavez said, every dollar we spend is a vote. I think one great example that happened recently as to collective action was the protests at the Tesla dealerships across the world and people just not buying teslas.

I think it sent the message that, hey, if the ownership of Tesla is behind things that are anti environmental, we’re just not going to buy your product. And that sends a message that you better listen to us consumers, which you tend to think of as peons, and we actually have some weight when we work together. And I think that was incredibly powerful. Where ACC fits into this is that we’re on both sides of the yes and the and is that we are inspiring leaders and giving voice to people who are leaders in this space, and also encouraging the audience to be more participatory. That, hey, each of us need to go out there and do the work every single day, and I hope that our work is inspiring people to take small actions as well as large action so Hey, sometimes we get to jump in there and do something big, but many times we’re just doing the little things.

I’m extremely grateful for people, listeners and subscribers. That’s a great feeling that, hey, people are listening to what we’re putting out there. And I think in large part it’s due to this quality of the guests that we’ve had on the show, some amazing folks. This is a story that continues to evolve. The science is changing every single day. For instance, battery technology is increasing every single day. Our ability to harness the sun through solar is changing every single day. Governmental regulations are changing. We need to be actively involved as citizens, and that’s one of the purposes of the show, is to say, hey, we’re kind of curating, hopefully well some of the people that are thought leaders. In this area, and they’re helping us because they’ve studied this for decades.

So they’re the true experts. I want this to be a community creating process, so you get connected to these great scientists and leaders. Follow them on their social media, be a part of what they’re doing, contribute to them, give them money, time attention, give them the fuel to keep doing the amazing work that they’re doing. Because not all of us can be a climate scientist, or maybe not all of us are going to be political leaders, or not all of us are going to be on the front lines every day, but some of us are, and to the extent that we can support those that are on those front lines pushing the technology. We can maybe buy their product, if it’s a good product, we can vote for them. We can do all kinds of things to give them some support. Be the wind beneath their wings. That’s one of the purposes of the show. Is saying, hey, here are the people that are on the cutting edge.

Let’s support them. Let’s encourage them. Let’s learn from them. The story, the first 200 episodes of a climate change needs to include Harry barbarian, our first producer and guest Booker. Harry was a friend and a co creator of the show. He was also my brother’s brother in law, so he was family too. The genesis of the idea to do a radio show came after my campaign for president in 2020 Harry contacted KBC 790 here in Los Angeles about having me on the radio. And they said, Hey, why don’t you have Matt do a radio show? So after the campaign for president was over in 2020 I did my first radio show on January 6, 2021 so as I drove to the studio, I heard that there was rioting at the Capitol, and that people were storming the Capitol.

Notably, I was interviewing a guy named Rick Gates, who was Paul Manafort right hand man, and Paul Manafort was Donald Trump’s campaign manager in 2016 and prior to Manafort doing work for Trump, he had represented and been involved with politicians in Ukraine. And it was interesting, the politicians that he was consulting with in Ukraine were pro Russian politicians, and then he ended up being Trump’s campaign manager, a coincidence, I think not. Little did I know, on January 6, that day would live on in infamy as an insurrection to attempt to prevent the peaceful transfer of power here in the United States. So Harry was behind setting up our first guests, and he wasn’t afraid to book some that were a little controversial.

Harry landed Marianne Williamson, Dr Katharine Hayhoe, Captain Paul Watson, Paul Hawken, Michael Mann, who Harry interviewed himself, as well as jigger Shaw and Steve fambro. Many other great guests who helped build the foundation for the show. And many of these guests would say, Well, geez, I saw you had all these other people on the show, so I thought, hey, there must be something going on here. Harry’s contributions are still being felt here to climate change as the show is heard by listeners across the planet, Harry, we love you and we miss you. You left us way too soon. Depression is no laughing matter.

Please, everybody support suicide helpline or other mental health groups that support people going through challenging times. We’ll leave a link for people to do that as part of this episode. So let’s just jump in and listen to some of the clips. Let’s first start off with Marianne Williamson as a spiritual leader in the community. I think that in a lot of ways, this is a spiritual malady that we’ve been suffering from, that we’ve had a lack of compassion and empathy the way that we look at the world, that if we’re looking at the world in a healthy way, we see that consuming mass quantities is hurting our brothers and sisters, and if we can get grounded in how that really affects other people adversely. That could be the basis of a mind shift, which will hopefully help heal the planet.

And everywhere I go in this country, when I say, I would say to audiences, when I was running President, I would say, How many of you either are a young person or had heard a young person say, under normal circumstances, I would probably want to have children, but given the world that they would probably inherit, I’m not going to and everywhere I went in large towns and small enough people would raise their hands and I’d say, please look around the room. Please. Look around, everybody would look everybody was kind of astonished, because they thought it was only them. And I said, Something is very wrong that you have this many young people, not that everybody’s supposed to have kids, but that you have this many young people who, under normal circumstances, would at least consider it.

That’s troubling that young people around the world are saying that. And I think part of that problem is that we’re just not being good stewards of our planet, that they feel so scared that they would be putting their children at risk. I just read something in the paper about young kids in China feeling like, hey, their government is not protecting them from pollution, and that they feel like, why would I have a kid in this environment? So I think we have to go back to those first principles, which are stewardship and compassion for the world that we’ve been given. Being a good caretaker is rooted in religious tradition, but it also is rooted in philosophical ethical traditions, like philosophers like John Locke have talked about it for hundreds of years. So whichever camp you come out of, stewardship is a reasonable and a good thing, and we haven’t been good stewards.

Quite honestly, I think anybody who looks in the mirror cannot say with all the oil and gas drilling and pollution that we have like, Hey, we’re doing a great job at taking care of the planet. We’ve got Gavin Schmidt up next. And Gavin is an amazing scientist. He works at NASA. He took over the position that James Hansen previously had, and James Hansen’s kind of famous in the climate movement, as the climate scientist at NASA that warned Congress back in the late 80s that global warming and climate change were coming, and that was scientifically proven. So Gavin holds kind of that chair at NASA, which is a pretty important place. Gavin and I talked about astrobiology, which I never even heard the word before, but Gavin talked about it, and it’s fascinating.

He’s looking for fingerprints that aliens might have left other civilizations if they were out there, what would it look like? What kind of waste would they leave behind? And then he proposed something that was really interesting, saying, hey, if aliens were out there and they could figure out how to travel long distances, they might have figured out how to do it completely sustainably, because they wouldn’t want to leave any waste behind. And that’s kind of a fascinating thing. And I think it’s an evolutionary leap that we as humans, if we are to survive as a species, we have to reach that point too, that everything becomes sustainable. And that’s a pretty fantastic potential that we have, and that’s what we’re really moving for.

Reminds me a bit of John Lennon’s song. Imagine and imagine all of us doing this stuff, that we produce no waste. Wouldn’t that be an incredible future, the kinds of things that we look for when we go back in time over the earth, you know, we are leaving behind a massive perturbation in the carbon cycle that’s very, very clear in the isotopic signature of the carbon that that we’re putting out where we created global warming, that’s going to be very clear in the ocean sentiment we’re creating a layer of plastic debris that will literally cover the entire ocean floor in A thin and but, but very clear and distinct plastic layer.

We’re changing the amount of minerals and metals that we’re mining, and that’s all ending up in the ocean as well. You know, the the the amount of gold that we’re putting into the ocean because of the mining of gold, and then the use of gold within electronics and manufacturing has increased the amount of gold that’s going into the ocean by orders of magnitude. All of these things will be, will be visible in the future. So if you think about a future paleoclimatologist of some visiting species coming to earth, they will be able to see, even if we don’t do anything more than what we’ve already done, they will see our fingerprint, they will see our signature.

And then I wonder, why the heck were they using so much plastic? Why were they? I think that they will be quite puzzled.

Yes, like when they had alternate materials, they clearly had it within their reach to have cleaner energy and have a cleaner environment, yet they chose to live.

It’s there’s a very interesting kind of consequence of what you just said. Almost all of our detectable fingerprints are in some sense, a waste, right? Sending radio waves into space is a waste of energy. We’re not doing it. Do that right? Filling the oceans with our garbage is a waste. It’s resources that we’re just throwing away. Carbon dioxide is a waste product from the burning of fossil fuels. All of the things that we can detect, they’re accidental. They’re signatures of our unsustainability. If we were to become a society that was much more sustainable, then our fingerprint on the environment, on the earth, on the cosmos, would become much smaller.

Well, as Gavin said, our waste is our own sustainability as a society. So how can we flip the script on that and create the Sustainable Future, and that’s the exciting part, and we’re going to have to rewrite the script and do things differently, and that’s what we’re here on this podcast is kind of examining. How can we do that? And we’re treading on new ground, and it’s exciting, it’s challenging. Nobody said it was going to be easy, but that’s the path that we have to take.

The next guest we’re going to kind of look at is Dr Katharine Hayhoe, and she’s somebody who is an incredible leader out there in the climate space. She’s many times in the media, quoted all over the place. See her name out there all the time, and it’s fascinating, because Dr Hayhoe is not only a climate scientist, but she’s also a dedicated Christian. So she speaks to both these audiences, to the Christian audience, as well as scientists, about these issues, and she remarks, how many in the Christian community are believing political leaders over their spiritual leaders. And many times, these political leaders are misleading them regarding climate change and science, the phenomena of Christians rejecting what science is telling us about, the fact that the planet is warming, humans are responsible. The impacts are serious, and we need to act now. It is primarily a US phenomenon. In fact, outside the US.

I have a colleague who tracks this and has studied it, when we find climate denial in Christian circles outside the US, almost every single time, those ideas can be tracked back to a US source. So, what makes American Christians different than any other Christian? I mean, if you’re Catholic, you have the same Pope, you know, if you’re any type of Christian, you have the same Bible, right? What makes American Christians different? One word, politics. It turns out that when you control for politics, the religious differences primarily disappear, and so for many people today, their statement of faith, unfortunately in the United States, is written, first of all, by their political ideology, and only a very distant second, by the Bible or the Pope or what any religious leader says. And if the two come into conflict, they will go with their political ideology over the Bible.

A recent study showed that 40% of people in the United States who call themselves evangelicals. So if you said, Are you an evangelical Christian, they would say, yes. 40% of them don’t even go to church. So where are they getting their information from? Not church, not the Bible, not religious leaders. They’re getting it from politics. In Genesis, the first book in the Bible, it says God gave humans responsibility over every living thing. And then at the very end of the Bible, in the book of Revelation, it says God will destroy those who destroy the earth. And then, all through the Bible, it talks about loving and caring for the most seemingly insignificant components of nature, and caring for our sisters and our brothers, again, the poorest and most vulnerable, for most impacted by climate change.

I think Dr Hayhoe is uniquely positioned to communicate to this audience, and I’m fascinated by the work that she’s doing, and I think it’s great work, and I think it’s something we need more of, which is telling people in the Christian community, hey, the science backs this, as well as the ethical teaching of the Bible and the spiritual teaching of the Bible says, Hey, we need to protect the Earth. We need to be good stewards. So I was so happy to have Dr Hale on the program, and she’s amazing.

Speaking of spiritual leaders in the climate space, we’ve got Captain Paul Watson, who has been on the show a couple of times. And I think what Paul does is that He leads by doing. He leads by action, and he talks the talk, but he walks the walk. So we caught up with Captain Paul right after he had gotten out of jail for being arrested for trying to stop whaling and whaling ships in Japan. So that’s where we talk to Paul and listen in

when I landed in Nook and Greenland to refuel our ship, I was 12 Danish police officers boarded they flew all the way from CO. Copenhagen to do this because Japan had issued a red notice to Denmark specifically to have me arrested on a charge. It was a very minor charge, actually trespassing. Now, you know the red notice for Interpol is that’s set up for major serial killers and war criminals and drug dealers, and I’m the only person in the history of that to be put on there for conspiracy to trespass on a whaling ship. It’s a false accusation on it from 14 years ago, but they didn’t even look at the evidence for two and a half months. I had to appear every 28 days in court, and then it was held in prison.

Between the times, they threatened Denmark with canceling offshore wind turbine projects, hundreds of millions of dollars, unless they turned me over. They threatened France for supporting me. Just two days ago, the Japanese foreign minister called in the Danish ambassador to Japan to reprimand him. Well, what we expose, and what this five months in prison gave me the opportunity to continue to expose, is Japan’s illegal operations. The killing of whales in the Southern Ocean was a violation of the International Whaling Commission’s global moratorium on commercial whaling.

So this is what they wanted, the revenge for Captain Paul hunts down whalers from all over the planet. You can check him out on Whale Wars, and all the work that he’s done is just absolutely incredible. And to me, he’s real action hero. He’s out there doing the work, and he’s putting himself in the line of fire. And countries like Japan and other whaling company, countries like Iceland, would like to have him go away. They don’t want to have this person who is getting in the way of hunting down whales. And as you will hear, Captain Paul talk about this, how integral whales are to the whole ocean ecosystem, and how delicate that system is, and how important it is for us to protect our oceans, and Captain Paul is an amazing steward of that, and he walks the walk, and he talks to talk, and it’s truly incredible the work that he’s doing.

And so proud to have him on the show. We’ve got Bill McKibben up next, and he is clearly a modern day David and a David and Goliath story. And Bill is out there, and he is constantly throwing stones at the powerful Goliath to knock him down, and he’s been doing this for decades. He wrote the book The End of nature in the 80s, which was considered to be one of the most important books regarding the environment that’s been written. And it was a clarion call to people to wake up here. We’ve got this incredible set of environmental problems coming, and we need to wake up. And Bill’s voice is strong, and it’s incredibly well informed, and he’s a great writer and a great thinker.

It took me too long, 10 or 15 years, to figure out that the basic job was not to win the argument about climate change. That was the easy part. And really, by the mid 90s, the world scientific community was in consensus. The hard part was to win the fight, because it wasn’t about reason or data or evidence. It was about what fights are always about, money and power, and the fossil fuel industry had so much money that it was able to lose the argument about climate change, but keep its business model ticking along right to the present day, when having spent 450, $5 million on the last election, it now is getting everything that it ever asked for from Donald Trump. So the story remains the same, and the job is to challenge that power, not with money, because we don’t have it, but with building big movements of people.

Well, there you have it from Bill McKibben, and sign up for his newsletter. Follow him on sub stack. He’s a powerful voice. I often post the newsletter that he puts out on a weekly basis, because it’s just so well written. It’s concise. You can get so much information about what’s happening in the space, and it’s also inspirational. So I urge everybody to sign up for it, to get informed by Bill, and he’s a master. The other thing that bill talks about is people power, and I also encourage you to sign up for either his organization or many of the other organizations out there follow him and get involved, because that’s where we can win. This is by joining together. We’ve got Dr Ray Wynn Grant, who is next, kind of shifting gears a bit.

She is the host of Wild Kingdom Mutual of Omaha, and that’s a big deal for me, because I grew up listening to mutual Omaha’s Wild Kingdom and Marlon Perkins, so I never kind of dreamed in a million years as a kid that I would be interviewing the host. Host of a Wild Kingdom. And it’s was a fascinating conversation to hear her story and how she got involved in the environmental movement, and how she had to overcome obstacles to people thinking that a woman of color should be the host of this show. And it didn’t stop her.

She just kept going, and she did it, and she’s a great host, and she’s bringing a lot of eyeballs to this problem, or to the environment, and saying, Hey, telling the story of why protecting the environment is so important. And I think that people like her expand the audience of people who are involved in this conversation and find common ground to say all of us really care about these things, all of us want to protect nature at the end of the day. So she has amazing ability to tell stories and be funny, and I think you’re gonna love listening to her.

At this point, I had lived and worked on six of the seven continents, studying wild animals all around the world. And in my postdoc, I decided, let me step up my networking a little bit. And I found a network executive who was at a network that did a lot of nature shows, and they got an informational interview, and I asked for some advice, and this man, who was a white man, said to me, right? You know, I love your ideas, but you’re never going to host a nature show. It’s not going to happen. You’re not a white guy with a beard. Have you seen these shows? Like, it’s all the same kind of guy?

Like, yes, you study lions. Yes, you have been to the furthest, most remote places with these animals. But like, you don’t look like a nature show host, so it won’t happen. And at this point, I had spent my life studying wild animals. I had lived by myself in remote rainforests. I had done the most, and I loved it, and it was purposeful, and it was my fit, and all I wanted was to just communicate the science to anyone listening, whether it was one person or 1 million people. And I was getting this discouragement, not because of my pedigree or my research experience or my knowledge or my exposure, but literally because of my race and gender.

And it was devastating. You know, I know some people get really motivated by haters, and that’s not me. I got really upset. I was sad, I was distraught, and unfortunately, it caused me to think, well, maybe this guy’s right, yeah. I mean, I can control how good of a scientist I am, but I really can’t control whether society will accept me as an expert in the media, and that was a really, really tough moment. So I’m bringing it up to say that like, I’ve had a lot of successes, I’ve had a lot of really magical experiences in my life, and I’ve also had a lot of rejection and a lot of setbacks, and again, many of them have been because of my identity rather than my intelligence or my ideas or what I have to bring to the table.

You heard part of the interview with Dr Ray Wynn grant, and I think it’s so important to the message I take away from that is, don’t stop when you’ve had a rejection. Keep going and her fortitude and her strength to keep going for her dream, we got Paul Hawken coming up next, and Paul is an amazing thinker and doer, and his story is incredible that he spans the arc of working for Martin Luther King in the 60s to starting Erewhon grocery chain to becoming a famous writer and thinker in the environmental movement.

And just writing some incredibly important books, and then starting project drawdown, which is an important organization that has studied what are the most Effective Ways to confront climate change, and how can we mitigate the effects of climate change most effectively? And it’s just an incredible thinker and doer, and has inspired so many people on this journey. So I was delighted to have this conversation with him. He’s just an amazing guy the food system, which is the makers, the farmers, the producers, is the single greatest cause of global warming, and it’s the single greatest cause of human disease.

That is the story, and you parse it, and get down into the details, which I would love to do. And to me, food companies, and I’ll say this brazenly, like Pepsi and other Ultra processed food companies, are committing a crime against humanity by spending $5 billion a year convincing our children to eat sugar, soft drinks and junk food.

Well, I’ll get an amen on that. One. I mean, I believe that the food companies are just poisoning us in so many different ways. They’ve created this torrent of diabetes and diabetics in the United States, the cost alone, I read a few years ago was $330 billion and climbing, and we’re going to have, I can’t remember, 10s of millions of new diabetics because of, you know, the terrible diet that gets fed to Americans.

Yeah, 73% of our food is ultra processed food. 73% and human beings weren’t designed for ultra processed food. And the numbers are worse. You know, we have a $4 trillion so called healthcare industry. It’s not It’s a sick care industry.

So you’ve heard Paul check out project drawdown, and definitely link up to his site or that site and check out his new book carbon, which is an important book, and Paul is always on the cutting edge in terms of his thinking. So I totally encourage everybody to follow his work, support his work, because Paul has been an incredibly strong voice in this area, and somebody that I respect a lot. So you’re going to hear from Michael Mann. Michael Mann is one of the amazing scientists of our time and also great communicators.

I was really proud that we had him on the show in that he’s somebody who’s been quoted by every major publication out there, and he’s a great communicator about information. He has a new book out there, the new Climate War, which everybody should check out. And he talks about the five ds of denial, deflection, delay, division and doomism as being ways that the people who are against change, like the fossil fuel industry, are promoting to prevent us from moving forward with a climate friendly agenda, and Michael Mann is just incredibly eloquent talking about these things. And listen in and you see for yourself.

So my last book was a new Climate War. It was really about the sort of the politics of climate and climate action and the obstacles that we face today as we move away from denial, because it’s not tenable. It just isn’t credible anymore. You know, you still have some people out there and Twitter, there’s some there’s amplification of climate deniers. So you would think that there are a lot of them out there because of how amplified they are on certain social media, like Twitter, with their new algorithm. But the reality is, there aren’t a lot of climate deniers out there, because we are all seeing the impacts of climate change playing out in real time. That doesn’t mean the battle is over.

We’ve moved away from denial, but we’ve moved on to sort of these other tactics that polluters are using because they don’t care what prevents us from taking action. They just care that we don’t take action, and so if they can’t do that through denial, then they’ll happily use other tactics like deflection. We don’t need policies. We don’t need legislation, carbon pricing, anything like that. We just need individuals to be better stewards of the environment. We need individuals to change their behavior voluntarily, to decrease their carbon emissions. It’s a classic tactic that we’ve seen used over and over in the past.

The beverage industry did this. The tobacco industry has done this. Blame it on individuals to take the pressure off of politicians to pass legislation to solve the problem systemically. We’re not going to solve this problem because individuals decide to change their behavior. We’re going to solve this problem, because the incentives are going to be there for people to change their behavior. They’re going to want to change their behavior, because there’s a positive incentive for them to do that.

Well, Michael Mann just talked about his new book, which is The New Climate War. Check his website out. Follow him on social media. Promote what he’s doing, because he clearly is somebody who is a leading figure in the environmental movement and deserves our support. And I think he’ll also inspire all of us to take action. You’re going to listen to Senator Ben Allen next. And Senator Ben Allen is one of my heroes here. He is a state senator in California, and He’s authored some of the most important legislation against plastics and other things that promote the environment, but particularly in the area of plastics.

He’s been an environmental leader, and we talk about how California has been in the vanguard, and by California leading on these things, the entire country has moved in that direction, and then ultimately the world has moved in that direction. One of the examples that Senator Allen refers to is clean vehicles and the technology of catalytic converters to take out the pollutants so kids can breathe. And their lungs are bigger. This is amazing what good public policy can do.

I think it’s what 1617, other states have followed California’s lead, which then represents what 60% of the market, which creates a huge national coalition, which leads, we move markets and in a way, and let me just give it a very tangible sense of how important that is. Back when I was born, kids growing up in certain parts of urban LA, for example, were growing up with half of the lung capacity compared to kids growing up in rural parts of the country because of how bad our air pollution was, and California said, Enough is enough automobile industry, we know you have the technology to do better, and yet we also know that you’re not going to do it unless you get pushed to do it.

And so we’re going to force you to clean up your act and reduce pollutants that are leading to the untenable levels of smog that choke the air of Los Angeles and make it hard to even see the Hollywood sign. So we did that. We changed the rules. The automobile industry had to clean up its AGS. It actually made cars burn cleaner around the world, because once they adopted our technology that we forced upon them, other jurisdictions forced it upon them, and then, by then, they were already producing the cleaner cars, and everyone wanted them. And so it actually made things better.

So in fact, now you look at LA, there are actually far more cars on the road in LA than there were in the 70s. That’s another problem we can talk about. But the air is significantly cleaner. And the question is, do we want? Is that is so much, and as a result, kids now have larger lungs than they used to have, because we have it’s my it’s mind blowing. It’s just mind blowing that good legislation can lead to such positive outcomes across the planet because of, you know, far sightedness well, because the industry is not going to do it themselves. They just won’t.

So this just goes to show that state politicians and local politicians can make a difference, and we should hold them to account, and we should support them, and that’s why I encourage you all to get out there and vote and to engage with the politicians and say, Hey, take a look at this legislation that’s maybe in a different country, in a different jurisdiction, and talk to your local Politicians, your state politicians, your national politicians, and say, Hey, we want our country, our locality, our state, to have these measures so that our children are healthier and we’re healthier. So this is why it’s so exciting to talk to people like Ben Allen to see what he’s up to and how he’s helping improve the lives of all of us.

Dr Charlie Gardner is next. And Dr Gardner is an amazing advocate for the environment, and I think he hits the nail on the head when he says that scientists need to act as if this problem that they’re talking about is real, and if it’s truly real, that the situation is dire, they need to act as if it is. And he makes a brilliant point. He’s just an amazing communicator. And I think that you’ll all be inspired by as well as you will learn something from listening to Dr Gardner.

Here he is, and I believe that scientists have a particular power and responsibility to do more than just publish our research and publicize scientific warnings, because I believe we have a duty to act as if the truth is real, and I believe that our actions are much, much more powerful than Our words. You know, as as social animals, we we pay attention to what other people do more than what other people say. And I think the the lack of urgent action and the lack of of political engagement by the scientific community is actually quite dangerous, because it sends the wrong signals.

I think you know, if I was to tell you now that I can smell smoke coming from up the stairs and I think the house is on fire, but then I was just to consider continue recording this chat with you, then, of course, neither you nor your listeners would believe me when I say the house is on fire, because my actions just don’t they just make it seem like I don’t even believe my own words. Well, I think this, to some extent, is, is what the scientific community is doing now. We’ve all sort of been brought up to believe that our role as scientists is just to provide the information and to leave the decision making, leave the policy making to others. You know, where we’re just supposed to be neutral here. But I think you when, when we say it’s an emergency, and we we proclaim that everything must change. Change, but then we don’t get up and do anything ourselves. I think that sends a very dangerous message.

Well, you heard from Dr Charlie Gardner, and he talks about the moral obligation of scientists to come out there and speak out. And I think we all have a moral obligation to do our part to address climate change, from individual action to group action and collective action, and everything that we can do moves the needle. So that’s, I think, my takeaway from talking to Charlie Gardner is we’ve got to get out there and really act as if this is real, and take substantial actions move the ball as much as we can, because this is an existential threat, and because it is an existential threat, we need to act like it is. That’s how we’ll be persuasive to other people. Is when we start acting in accord with what we’re saying.

Our next guest is Steve fambro, a founder of Aptera, a new car company that’s coming out with a kind of world changing car that has solar panels embedded in the car, so it charges up to 40 miles of charge just sitting out in the sun, which could revolutionize transportation and have cars of the future that are basically charging out in the sun. So if you look at the car online, it looks like something out of George Jetson. And I know some of the you may be too young for the Jetsons, but it was a futuristic cartoon back in the 60s and 70s, and you’ll not see any other car like it out on the road. The NASA scientists who studied the drag factor on the car, were just shocked that these scientists over at avtera had created a vehicle that had so little drag. So Steve is an incredible guy, and listen in see what they’ve done. It’s a great story, and I think it’s going to potentially change the world.

And we needed to validate the design. We needed a stamp, something that when we were talking to investors, that they would believe us. And so we hired NASA Langley to simulate our vehicle in their low speed wind tunnel, CFD processing center. Back then, CFD was a really big deal. Required lots and lots of computers. Now it can be done on a desktop or Amazon servers. It was the first check we wrote starting a company was like $15,000 to NASA to do this study back in 2006 and they said there’s some problems, and they wanted to get us on a call. And so Chris and I were on a conference call with like 10 NASA engineers, and they said, What wizardry are you guys using? How is this possible?

We know there’s no way the drag of this vehicle can really be 0.12 or whatever it was at the time. And we said, You’re NASA, you’re the experts. You tell us, you know, that’s why we hired you. And it was, it was one of those aha moments where we said, you know, these guys are very smart. I don’t mean that in a negative way. I mean, they’re NASA, right. They can put people on the moon. But we realized that, as a company, this was something we couldn’t outsource.

We had to own it. We had to have aerodynamicist in house. We had to build a cluster, you know, Linux servers to run the CFD software. Because NASA was so perplexed, we said, we just have to know everything about this. We have to own this segment. We did the same thing with solar, you know, basically creating this entire department for solar electronics and everything else.

Okay, you’ve heard from Steve Fambro, founder of Aptera motors, and the world changing technology that he’s come up with with his company is truly inspiring, and I urge you to follow him online and check it out, and who knows, maybe you’ll go out there and buy an Aptera. Our next guest is Esteban Gast. And Esteban is a very funny comedian. Had a pleasure of interviewing him on the show, and got a lot of great laughs out of it, and also very insightful.

As my friends in the comedy area have said, that comedians are new philosophers, and as Esteban points out, from George Carlin to Lenny Bruce, these comedians have shown the way, lit up the future and talked to us about the toughest issues that we’re facing. So it’s kind of natural that comedians talk about climate. So you hear Esteban talk about it, and it’s powerful because he can reach an audience that maybe others aren’t reaching, and comedians are able to break down walls that maybe scientists don’t do as capably.

Comedy is such a uniquely powerful and effective tool for talking about climate, because I think it’s just a powerful tool for talking about and reflecting and communicating really big ideas. It has always been used as that. If you and I google best stand up specials of all time, we’ll see George Carlin talking about very heavy things, you know, like American and people. Realism. We’ll see Chris Rock talking about race. We’ll see whatever Louis CK talking about divorce and like, we’ll see all these comedians. Dick Gregory is this amazing comedian.

Oh, yeah, I know Dick Gregory, yeah, I saw him it when it was in Tulane in New Orleans. Oh, no way. Wait, that’s great. But I mean, he was making jokes about segregation, as America was still segregated, like, that’s one of the things that brought him into, let’s say, the mainstreamer. And I think you look at you go, how can you be possibly making jokes about this? You’re actively, for those who don’t know, Dick Gregory is a black man. It’s like you’re actively being discriminated against, systematically, and you’re doing jokes about it. And I think what you find is like that just has always been the role of comedy like that makes sense.

It illuminates hypocrisy. And I think you found what Dick Gregory did so effectively is, I think, galvanized people who are marginalized, and also pointed out how absurd it was for white people or for people who are benefiting from this system, like how just like deeply absurd the system of segregation wasn’t I think like, when I think about climate, or when I think some of the work that I’m doing, I feel very comforted, because I just have to look back at any comedian that I admire and go, Oh, that’s how they talked about this, or that’s how they talk about it. Now, how is Jon Stewart talking about a political situation now that is very scary and feels very heavy. Oh, that’s how he’s talking about it. So I think just comedy has always served that role.

Well, you’ve heard a little bit about Esteban and his role as a comedian. I urge you to listen to the entire episode, because I think you get a number of laughs out of it, and you also get his perspective as a comedian, of how he approaches this, and I think it’s fascinating and so important. So follow Esteban on all of his social channels and other comedians that are supporting the work of climate change, these are voices out there that I think are particularly powerful and important. So thank you for all listening in and checking this out.

I’ve been very blessed to have so many great guests on the show and learn so much from all of them. And I hope you all who have been able to follow along have also felt the same way that you’ve learned so much from these amazing people that are on the front lines and doing incredible work. When the show first started, we weren’t entirely focused on climate change, but we saw that this was an urgent need. We saw it as an opportunity to communicate on this most important issue, and we dug in. And as we dug in, we started to see more and more important issues that weren’t being covered enough in our traditional news media, and things that we wanted to bring to a wider audience.

So this was the impetus for continuing the show as a climate centric show. The show has always been aimed to meet the moment, to provide thoughtful, honest and sometimes unexpected conversations about the climate crisis. But as we look ahead to the next 200 episodes, we’re going to do a few new things. You may notice some different styles, some different formats. Why are we doing this? Well, we want to be flexible, we want to be more creative, we want to be a little more personal, and we’re excited to explore and tell these new stories.

And the show will be evolving right alongside what’s happening in real time. We’re going to make things a little more interactive, so we’ll be opening more opportunities for you, the audience, to join in, to participate and tell us what are the issues that you care about most, and what you want us to see us covering, and maybe even how to cover it. What are the ways you’d like us to look at things? So keep an eye out. Don’t be shy about letting us know what matters most to you, the mission hasn’t changed.

We’re still here to elevate the voices and the solutions that can move the needle. But how we do that may look a little bit different. We’re growing, we’re adapting. We’re energized about what’s ahead. So if you like what you’re hearing now, now is a great time to subscribe to the show, leave us review, share an episode with a friend. I want to give a shout out to our production team, which includes Brian Aguilar, Chris Felax, Julia Cottrell and Amy over at Fame, and all of the folks there who have done amazing work in getting our show out to a wider audience and getting great guests for the show and setting us up for really provocative, important conversations. I clearly couldn’t do this without you.

So thank you. The next chapter is going to be exciting, and we’re glad you’re with us.

Here’s to another 200 episodes to learn more about our work at a climate change and how you can help us reach our goal planting 30,000 trees in the Amazon this year. Visit aclimatechange.com don’t forget to subscribe to our podcast on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you liked this episode, please share it with a friend. See you next time.