Climate Change Despondency is Solvable

0:15Speaker 1:Pushkin. Hey listeners. This special episode of the show was produced with support from Walmart. This is solvable. I'm Ronald Young Jr. Climate challenges are pressing down with more urgency than ever before. In order to hold temperature increases back one and a half or two degrees to meet the temperature targets set in Paris at the Paris Climate Accords, we have until twenty thirty to cut emissions in half. Climate experts say that'll be tough, but it might stave off complete disaster. That kind of hard truth can feel crushing, which is exactly why we need to work actively, keep talking, reflecting, and solving the greatest problem we've ever faced on a global scale. Here at Pushkin, we're lucky enough to have one of the best minds around when it comes to making observations and looking to the future. Malcolm Gladwell, So today we have a solvable episode that is a little out of the ordinary, and I know your guys are used to hearing things out of the ordinary in this time period we've been in. But Malcolm and I talked together and pursue a few thought experiments about where we might be headed and who could take us there. We

1:31Speaker 1:discussed the power of the people and the power of businesses to bring real and rapid change, and even with the topic as heavy as this ever growing global catastrophe, somehow there's a lot of laughter in this episode too. Here's our conversation. Mister Gladwell, Yes, welcome back to Solvable. How does it feel to be back? It made me feel like I went, you know, to a country far away on a mission that took me away from friends and family for many years. I'm being released from that.

2:06Speaker 1:But the point is it does feel. It feels good to be back. That's great. I'm sure some listeners were very surprised to wake up one day and have me on. They were like, wait a minute, that's not very similar. Very similar. People can get us confused oftentimes in the street everyone says that, hey, didn't you write blink. I think listeners are happy to take out an upgrade. That's very kind of you to say, very kind of you to say. So. You know, I recently listened to one of your episodes of Revisionist History, and it's the one where you're riding around in the Waymo those electric vehicles that are autonomous in Phoenix, and I remember one of the things that that struck me there was how effective it'll be actually stopping climate change. Do you consider that or do you think that we're kind of just hey, this is cool, we're an electric car, Like this is like, you know, this is the future. Yeah. I don't know if you know this, but I'm a car guy. Really yeah, yeah, I care all more about cars to almost say anything else. Um, So I've been watching this very closely. What's interesting is the change over to your cars is happening way quicker

3:11Speaker 1:than people thought, Like it's been in the background for ten years or whatever more. But you know, right now, electric cars make up maybe one percent of global fleet. I mean, it's tiny, but all of a sudden, it's possible to see three years out and to imagine that that number would be maybe being a bit aggressive. But there are a whole lot of people who don't believe they will ever buy a gasoline powered car. Again, I recently bought a new car, and I absolutely bought a hybrid, and I as I was driving it, I'm like, yeah, the next one I probably will get will probably be electric.

3:52Speaker 1:I know I'm probably never gonna get a Tesla, but I'm telling you, if one of the major car companies say that there could be a test in your future. Those guys are cool with their with their insane mode and all that stuff that go the bells and hoots that come with that crisis mode. Yet but no, I'm sitting there thinking about it, and I'm just like, I know that there's going to be a point in the future where I get, you know, probably an all electric car. Now, we haven't seen the model T forward point where it's just like here it is, everybody can afford it, everybody goes get one, and we just you know, easily make the switch. Yeah, there's been this really interesting evolution in what people think of as their responsibility, what parts should we play in addressing this ongoing crisis, And a lot of that has to do with our perception of what the crisis is. You know, there was I think there was weirdly a lot more fatalism about climate change. Yeah, you know, what do you what are you going to do if it's driven by fossil fuel use and you look around and you literally can't do anything, can't heat

5:02Speaker 1:your home, can't drive to work, can't fly to visit your parents without burning fossil fuels. Then yeah, you know, what do you do? You just sort of shrug and say it's inevitable, it's coming. But now I feel like there's just been a kind of shift in that thinking. The inevitability that I feel now is that we have to change. That's like I feel like, so for me, like if we just and I know, I'll keep using the example of the electric car, but for me it'll always be I know, eventually I'm going to get an electric car, so that that feels inevitable to me. But when you talk about the shift, what do you mean.

5:38Speaker 1:One of the most important is the number of people who are taking steps to do something about climate change is growing, and the kinds of people is changing. So you had a situation twenty five years ago where it was, you know, my dad who was a huge environmentalist in the seventies, and you know, he would do things like chop down wood with an axe and not a chainsaw because you didn't want to use gastling. Okay, And as I and one of my one of my podcasts, I talked about how my mom didn't want to use the dryer because it used too a chenergy, so she would hang her clothes outside even in the middle of a Canadian winter. That was kind of phase one. It was like weirdos like my parents doing quirky things. But you know, you're never gonna get anywhere with Joyce and Graham Gladwell, you know, cutting down trees with axes and hanging her close outside. But if it's I, it's no longer individual.

6:35Speaker 1:If it's no longer weirdos in rural Ontario and it's companies, large corporations or governments, then you begin to say, Okay, a car company is willing to invest ten billion dollars in building a fleet of electric vehicles like General Motors is doing right now, then you say, okay, that that's different. Yeah. When I think about my own circle and I think about my own area of influence, my parents robed cr Peggy Lee. You know, for a while, I was like, yalk out of a cycle recycling? Did it there for cycling?

7:09Speaker 1:Why are you recycling? By Dad's like sudden, the recycling isn't even and I'm like, now you gotta recycle, and I'm just like so they start recycling and the recycled truck would barely show up. They wouldn't show up on time. So I felt like I failed when it came to converting one set of people. And at the time, you know, the focus was individual responsibility. So here I am trying to convert as many individuals as possible. But now we've shifted into more urgency. We need to address this on a larger scale, Like we need military level, national level, corporate level, We need bigger involvement in order to actually make the changes than we want to see. Yeah. Yeah, during the Trump administration, there was a hearing on Capitol Hill.

7:48Speaker 1:We're a very senior Pentagon official testified before Congress. But how there were so many military bases that were, you know, near water, and they had so many valuable things that were vulnerable to rising seas or even to flooding or all those kinds of things that they were undergoing to study. They had to kind of like reconfigure all these military bases around the world. So you have like a senior hardcore military guy talking about climate change, not in this kind of ideological way, but in the kind of like I got, you know, a nuclear tipped warhead that I really don't want that thing submerged in water next time there's a hurricane, And like that, I remember listening, I was thinking, man, that's different, that's a whole new conversation.

8:39Speaker 1:There's also this idea that you know, we've been talking about the problem for a long time, and there's a point at which talking about the problem repeatedly I think starts to backfire. Climate change is a word about our global warming, well words about the problem, and I think what's happening, you know that's really encouraging me is that now people are talking much more about solutions. Yeah. And I love that you're plugging solvable unsolvable, because that is what we do here. We talk solutions. We actually talked with Rachel Stroyer on an episode of Solvable and we talked about regenerative agriculture and specifically about using perennials over annuals because perennials come back every year, they're harder to kill, and they you don't deplete the soil in the ways that you do when you use annuals. So, thinking forward to the future, how can we use regenerative concepts to think bigger about addressing climate change? Yeah, yeah, Well, the concept of regeneration as it's used in agriculture think beyond you know, the growing season. It's right in front of you.

9:53Speaker 1:You can also use that same concept in terms of how businesses operate. For example, I did I did a in an episode of Revisions History this year on cold water tide without producturing Gamble. They had a massive audit that they did of their carbon footprint producing tide and really a carbon footprint of a load of laundry and trying to figure out what are all the components that go into the environmental consequences of doing your laundry. You know everyone realizes used to be when you bought tide pods, they came in a hard plastic container. Now more and molar in soft plastic bags. Yep. They ran the numbers and they thought they realized, oh, the carbon footprint and putting it in a plastic bag is a lot lower than in a hard plastic tub. And every one of the plants that produce tide is powered by wind energy because they realize, oh, our manufacturing plants are in places where you know, wind energy and other sources of renewable power can do the trick. That kind of that's regeneration.

11:00Speaker 1:They're thinking about building a process of making your tie that either your laundry with that is sustainable. Yeah, that's the same kind of principle that we were talking about earlier in agriculture. What's really interesting is just how many corporations are engaging in that kind of very focused analysis of all of the steps that go into what they do. I mean, it sounds very optimistic. I mean, and I think it sounds like we can maybe we can count on some corporations. I felt hard that you run you're such a you're such like an old school like you can like you can take your plaqueer to go and pick it somewhere after this is over. Like, come on, man, you saw that you you saw that happening in me as I was attempting to even hilarious. I No, corporations are run by people like you and me. I mean, like by people who are who are also simultaneously citizens of the world, who who drive home in a terrible rainstorm, and who you know, who who like observe around them all the same things we're observing. So it's not surprising to me that they take those same ideas and impressions to their off Yes, I mean that goes back to

12:24Speaker 1:what we were talking about earlier, which is that the nature of our understanding of the problem is changed. You know, it's not this It used to be this kind of abstraction and now we're interesting. No, no no, no, it's it's making everything weird, yeah, and sort of scary. And that's we can't know. We can't. You can't hide from it by moving to north in Canada. Again, I say it as a Canadian. That's always my my backup plane is always to go home. Oh. There, there's gratification in knowing that corporations now do have instructions on how to move forward, but there's still I still feel sub sub sub sense of the kids say saltiness, Now what it what it thinks of, like what it took to actually get corporations to change. But I am excited that they are changing.

13:10Speaker 1:That is helpful. Yeah. The other limiting factor on corporate evolvement in a lot of this is technology. So if you think about the airlines for the longest time, I am sure there were many people who were involved in the senior leadership of airlines who recognize the incredible contribution airlines make to climate change, But their questions, well, what is our what choice do we have? There's no you know, where we've put sixty years or no more thnant it, you know, seventy five years of research into the jet engine.

13:45Speaker 1:I don't have an alternative that I can turn to. And what's interesting is you're finally starting to see a real conversation about what a technological alternative to a jet engine might be. You know, could it be hydrogen? Could is it possible to fly electric planes? Maybe not, maybe not commercial airliners, but like small, I'm not going to be the first. That's exactly the kind of thing that discourages them. You should be saying, Ron And if you do a plane that doesn't have a conventional jet engine, I will be the First's my number call me. Look, Malcolm, if you want to get on first. I'm like, I like, there's just something about being first anything that I'm just like, oh, I'll be a second. I will totally be first. I love that. I'm I'm all there, funny like they're there.

14:38Speaker 1:If you kind of like root around in the kind of popular literature on on aviation right now, people are starting to talk about this. That's a function of the fact that the technology is catching up. That's another sort of exciting difference. What do you want to see next? From corporations, like, do you think there are actionable steps in the world of doing, which is what the corporate world is, that notion of whether something whether it's a case to be made for something right. They're in the business of making a case for action or inaction, and so having something concrete to say this is a direction you can go in. That's also what's sort of new and interesting and exciting about the direction the climate change debate has gone. Unlike those of us who don't work for big corporations, these people can actually do something about it. Yeah, bit power. I mean, we can talk all day long, but you know, Malcolm, Globble and Rundally Young do not have any power. But yeah, I mean, Miles, that's like one of us has a little bit more than the other.

15:51Speaker 1:But you know what else not real I mean, but these people about power, I mean, that's what's happening here is the intelligent application of power with the goal of solving this problem. And that's exciting. Malcolm, thank you so much for stopping by and coming back from your long journey away and joining us to get here at Solvable. Thank you so much. It's been really fun. Ronald, Malcolm Gladwell is the host of our sister podcast here at Pushkin Revisionist History, and though I may be asked on the street, he's the actual author of Blink, among many other best selling books, including my personal favorite, David and Goliath, and if you stay tuned to the Solvable feed, you may hear another conversation between me and him about that book.

16:39Speaker 1:Our cultural and corporate thinking about climate change may finally be shifting, and that is due in part to the extremely hard working scholars, activists, and policy experts working on this every day. There's no single solution to climate change, so be sure to check out our past episodes, which explore in much more detail how to address not only regenerative agricultural practices, but also clean water access and wastewater treatment. In a conversation with visionary Catherine Coleman Flowers. We have a great episode about world reef bleaching and marine biodiversity with Sarah Hamlin, another about innovation and scientific incentivization with Anusia and Sorry, one about wildfire management with Eric Apple, smart transportation with Laura Showell, and a fantastic conversation with longtime climate scholar and activists Bill mckibbon. Links to all those Solvable episodes can be found in our show notes.

17:35Speaker 1:Thanks to our sponsors who made this episode possible, and to Pushkin's Royston Reserve for the custom content production. Solvable is produced by Joscelyn Frank, research by David Jah, Booking by Lisa Dunn. Our managing producer is Sasha Matthias. Our executive producer is mil LaBelle. Special thanks to Heather Fane, Carl Migliori, Eric Sandler, Maggie Taylor, and Nicole Morano. I'm Ronald Young Jr. Thanks for listening. Eight