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Transcript:
Rob Johnson:
Welcome to Economics & Beyond, I’m Rob Johnson, president of the Institute for New Economic Thinking.
I’m here today with Michael Mann, he’s a distinguished professor of atmospheric science at Penn State University. He does so many things in the realm of climate. So many things that are, how would I say, leadership and visionary. I was very excited to see his new book. It’s called, “The New Climate War.” I guess coming from the world of PhDs and coming from the press, seeing all the obstacles, seeing all the crazy, which we might call fake news, I found somebody that made sense and put a lot of things together. I want to congratulate you on this fine book and welcome you onto the podcast.
Michael Mann:
Well, thanks so much, Rob. It’s great to be here with you.
Rob Johnson:
Extraordinary, some of the things to see you, my colleague and friend Adair Turner works on what do we do with renewables? On the demand side, what has to be changed? How do we convince people? How do we use our institutions, government, media, scientists to facilitate this? It feels like the clock is ticking, you told so much about what you might call disinformation and resistance at the outset, almost using up the clock. It reminds me of the old basketball thing called the four cornered offense.
Michael Mann:
Yeah. I remember that.
Rob Johnson:
Where we could just pass the ball around and nobody would shoot and you try to. Anyway, let’s kick off here. What inspired you to write this book?
Michael Mann:
Well, I’ll tell you, it sort of what you’re alluding to here. We are so close now. We can sort of feel it. So close to finally seeing the action that so many have worked so hard for decades, action on climate. Yet there are these obstacles that are being thrown in our path. They’re not the old obstacles. There are new obstacles, because it’s impossible to deny that climate change is happening. Now, people can see it with their own two eyes. The forces of inaction whom might call the inactive lists in the book, realize that that old tactic of just attacking the science, attacking the scientists, trying to convince the public and policymakers that there isn’t a problem. That’s just not going to cut it anymore. Because people can see that there’s a problem.
That doesn’t mean they’ve given up far from it. But what they have done is to engage in an array of evermore, insidious tactics that have the same sort of intent to prevent us from moving on from, to prevent us from stopping the burning of fossil fuels from which, the fossil fuel industry has profited so greatly for decades. They want us to remain addicted to fossil fuels and they’re willing to use any means possible to ensure that. What that means today is blocking policy efforts to incentivize renewable energy, blocking efforts to put a price on carbon, discrediting renewable energy, attacking it, trying to convince environmentalists that renewable energy is as bad for the environment as fossil fuel energy, which is, nothing could be farther from the truth, dividing the community.
There is denial, but denial is largely given way to division. Dividing climate advocates, getting them fighting with each other about strategy. Getting them fighting with each other about individual lifestyle choices, getting us to finger point at each other in carbon shame each other. Why are you eating meat? Why aren’t you a vegan? Why do you still fly? It’s a great way to create infighting within the climate advocacy community, sort of a divide and conquer strategy. But in addition to division, it also accomplishes another tactic, deflection. You’ll notice an alliteration. These words that start with D, deflecting attention away from the needed systemic changes. Again, subsidies for renewables, pricing carbon, blocking new fossil fuel infrastructure, all these things that we can’t do ourselves, we need our politicians to do for us. They don’t want that to happen because it’s going to hurt their bottom line.
It’s going to hurt their profits. Instead, they want to make it about our individual behavior about once again, our individual choices, our diet, our travel, anything but the fossil fuel infrastructure upon which we’re currently forced to depend, then there is a doom and despair monitoring. If they can convince us that it’s too late to do anything about the problem, it rubs us of agency, and it potentially leads us down that same path of inaction of disengagement is outright denial. These are just some of the insidious tactics that the forces of inaction, the inactive lists are now using to prevent us from moving on. Those are the obstacles in our path, and we need to learn how to fight back and to clear them away because they are the only thing now that stand in our way.
Rob Johnson:
I know what you described in the book, which you might call deflectors defenders of the fossil fuel industry, but you also had a little sliver in there about the non-trusting of governments, therefore, the capture. A carbon price will exacerbate inequality, run into resistance from social one sustainability because of that inequality. Therefore some people on the left haven’t backed carbon pricing. It seems like we need all the tools to be brought to the table to meet this time table. What’s going on there?
Michael Mann:
Yeah, no, absolutely. It’s really a relatively new development look. The forces of inaction long ago, marshaled the political right for their cause. They’ve got conservatives on who oppose regulation who are dismissive of environmental concerns. They’ve long had them on their side. What is so again, insidious and pernicious, is their effort now to actually marshal some on the political left, those who would otherwise be on the front lines advocating for action, if they can convince them, for example, that the solutions that are being proposed are problematic, that renewable energy is going to hurt the environment has a tiny footprint compared to fossil fuels or that carbon pricing, one of the primary mechanisms for reducing demand for fossil fuels and leveling the playing field so renewable energy can compete. They can convince us that it’s inconsistent with issues of cultural and racial justice.
For example, the idea that a carbon price is intrinsically regressive. That it will put undue burden on those with the least income, those with the least resources, that has not been true, where it has been successfully implemented, in Canada and Australia before the conservative government got rid of it, where it was working very well and lower income earners were actually gaining from carbon pricing because the revenue was being returned to the people. The revenue that was raised through carbon pricing was being returned to the people on a progressive basis. More of it went to low-income earners. It all depends on how it’s structured, but the inactivists have been very effective in convincing some progressives that carbon pricing is somehow going to be unjust. That’s going to put undue burden again on frontline communities or that, “Hey, it’s buying into capitalism.”
If you’re buying into capitalism, you’re in bed with the enemy because we have to get away from this whole capitalist system. The idea that market mechanisms like carbon pricing was buying into neoliberal economics and should be opposed for that reason. Look, there’s a worthy conversation to be had about whether our current global economy is in the longterm, fundamentally compatible with the environmental sustainability. There’s some deep questions that we have to ask about, an extractive market-based economy. Can we continue on this course in a sustainable way, but the climate crisis we’ve got to act now, we’ve got 10 years to bring our carbon emissions down by a factor of two. To those who want to remake the global economy and defeat capitalism and have sort of a larger political envision, a larger political agenda let’s have that conversation. But in the meantime, we’ve got to work within the system that exists to solve this problem.
Rob Johnson:
Yeah. I often in these podcasts refer to what I called the tale of two failed romances. The first romance is unbridled faith in the unfettered free market, and then the pervasive, what they call externalities and public goods, it will fail. Maybe for other reasons, like not enforcement of any trust or feedback that comes from money politics, all of that. But the other failed romance, and this is one that’s struggling now. That’s why I teased you a little bit from the left or about the left I should say, is that the other field romance is the belief that government can do it and we’ll do it. That’s where that money politics and that’s where the competency in the training, in the quality of people that choose to work in the public sector is given the disincentives of poor pensions and low pay, et cetera, relative to other opportunities. You have all kinds of reasons to be hesitant, skeptical of any kind of romantic social theory now, but we still got to get on our horse and ride to this finish line. So it’s quite a dilemma.
Michael Mann:
Yeah. We’ve got to sort of go with the horse we arrived on for the time being and we might want to trade in that horse for a different one later on, but I think that’s exactly right. The problem isn’t so much market economics itself, it’s market economics where the rules have been stacked in favor of big corporations and big money, dark money and the fact that politicians can be bought. Once they’re bought, they’re doing the bidding of powerful special interests, rather than the people they’re supposed to be representing. All of those problems are very real. They are part of the politics, the prevailing political atmosphere, and we can’t solve climate change or any other problem without engaging in the political battle. The battle to attain, to Marshall the political will to act on the defining crises of our time.
Bill Gates has a book out right now on climate change as well. He advocates for a very sort of technocratic path. He was asked in a recent interview, what’s the solution to the politics of climate change, climate change denial, and inactivism. He said, “well, I don’t know the solution to the politics.” Well, if you don’t have a solution to the politics, you don’t have a solution. Because right now it isn’t a matter of technology, we’ve got the technology that we need to solve this problem. We’ve been existing renewable energy technology. What we’re lacking right now is the political will. That’s the battle that we see before us here in [inaudible 00:12:51], where there’s gonna be a monumental summit in Washington DC to see where we stand and what we have to do in the remaining months of this year so that by the time we get to COP26, the next major international climate conference later this year in November in Glasgow, we’ll sort of have all of our ducks in a row. The main actors will be ready to ratchet up their commitments and we can start to see ourselves getting on the path that we need to be on to avert catastrophic warming.
Rob Johnson:
I remember years ago, I’m proud to say my friend, Naomi Klein wrote a book called “This Changes Everything.” She was envisioning what I’ll call the notions of doubt to use. That’s right. The tale of two Naomis, but the idea that she brought up was, it’s not that the climate science is to be resists or not. It’s that if you say the private sector needs governance and climate is proof of that, people will then try to bring governments more heavily into interfering in all kinds of marketplaces. Let’s fight it here at the starting gate. Years later, I was meeting with some climate related people in [inaudible 00:14:23]. Somebody in the group asked him very pointedly, “well, if you don’t with climate pricing and what have you make things work, we’re going to get to a place where you will see authoritarian governance and you guys by stalling will have brought it about.” [inaudible 00:14:43] the right then when they fever individual freedom, minimum government of having a calamity based on that system can create the kind of transformation that Naomi sensed that they were going to resist.
Michael Mann:
No, that’s right. I know both Naomi’s and the Naomi [inaudible 00:15:04] is a close friend and colleague. This is a point that she often makes, if you hate big government, then climate change is your worst nightmare because when it comes to the adaptations, that would be necessary to deal with unmitigated climate change impacts, we’re going to need so much more governmental intervention than we’ve seen before.
It is an interesting argument. One that I think does have the potential to bring some conservatives to the table, Grover Norquist, I’ve met with him in the past as well. He’s a thoughtful person, smart guy but he has strong ideological principles when it comes to taxation. It was interesting to see him start to bend a little bit, talking about how he could in fact see himself in support of carbon pricing, if say it was offset. If it was revenue neutral. So you weren’t increasing overall taxation, you levy a tax on carbon, but you lower other taxes, income taxes. What have you to try to offset that? That’s a worthy position. It’s not necessarily one I agree with, I would argue that there is a role for increasing government revenue to deal with this crisis overall. But let’s have that debate. That’s a worthy debate.
Rob Johnson:
Source and uses, the source creates a deterrent to burning carbon that uses social sustainability, energy infrastructure, green new deal. James Boyce has explored that quite a bit in his writing, some of what he’s done for [inaudible 00:16:52]. I did a podcast with him where he really delved into that using the yellow vests as a warning sign from France that we do have to take into account, the social sustainability side of this as well.
Michael Mann:
Absolutely. I talk about the yellow vest protest a little bit in my book as well, because there’s a lot going on there. Some of the same, sort of malevolent actors who have reared their head in the sort of climate inaction movement in recent years. Russia, for example, has meddled in the politics of other countries. The United States, of course now famously and the previous presidential election and the most recent presidential election. But in Canada, and even in France they have used sort of cyber weaponry to try to sabotage policy efforts that they don’t like. They don’t want to see action on climate. Putin has made it very clear. This is their greatest asset right now, where the fossil fuels still buried beneath Russian soil and Russia has worked hard to sabotage global action on climate.
We have to recognize that, yeah, there are villains when it comes to the fossil fuel industry and the front groups that they fund. But they’re also state actors who have been playing a malevolent role. Saudi Arabia, Russia, even Australia in recent years under Scott Morrison. That’s the challenge, right? Going into this next climate conferences, next global agreement to get some of these intransigent actors on board. What I’ll tell you is it sure helps to have leadership once again, in the United States. To have a president who’s leading on this issue, it puts a lot more pressure on other intransigent doctors like Scott Morrison in Australia, who’s feeling the pressure of an American president now who’s leading on climate.
Rob Johnson:
Yeah. I know a number of people that were in the running for being the next head of the OACD. When the Australian gentleman was named, they were very upset on the grounds that that resource-based country would be resistant [crosstalk 00:19:17].
Michael Mann:
Yeah. Mathias Cormann, I spoke out quite vehemently about what an adverse impact that would have on the global politics of climate action. It’s something now we’re going to have to contend with.
Rob Johnson:
There’s a famous book. It’s called “The Life of Poetry” by a woman named Muriel Rukeyser. The first third of the book is called “The Resistances.” The first chapter is called “The Fear of Poetry.” In it, she describes how when things are unfamiliar and she was on a ship that evacuated Europe during Nazi attacks to come to the United States. She tried to cheer people up by reading her poetry. She said, they couldn’t let it in. She was talking about the resistances and poetry being a way to open your mind, your imagination are formidable at times of fear and change. The philosopher, Stephen Toulmin wrote a book called “Cosmopilis” it was really a study from the Protestant reformation, 30 years war to the Cartesian enlightenment, it’s Fault lines and as Ronald Reagan took power. He was talking about how the 1960s were a new vision than a push forward, but there was a reaction.
Rob Johnson:
A counterrevolution of resistance and his theme of the book in many ways was right when you can see that your system’s not working, that your ideology is not working, that your habits are not working. It’s exactly when you become afraid of the familiar, and these merchants have doubts, the kind of people you’re talking about, your book, you have many illustrations of how they reach to those places. I’m reminded, that I was talking about abstract philosophical work, but I’ve read a number of things. He had a book out last year about making a better world, very short little pamphlet.
I think he’s written three books this year, but he’s a systems complex guy, but he makes a little statement that I wanted to quote to you. “Today’s crisis has not been faded. Its outcome is not predetermined. It is sensitive to our perceptions, values, and aspirations, and the behaviors inspired by that.” What I’m getting at is the psychological terrain, which you keep excavating. It’s not about a mystery that the science is go into the laboratory and have to figure out how to do this. It’s about changing our ideas, our habits, our modes of collective organization and the resistance are formidable just like Muriel Rukeyser experienced on that ocean liner.
Michael Mann:
Well, sure. We saw that in the reaction to the Obama presidency. That’s what the Trumpism essentially was. It came to a full boil with the insurrection in January, which was really about the grievance of those who feel left behind as our society becomes more diverse, as we become hopefully more enlightened about issues of justice and racial equality. This is a threat to a certain segment of the population. They’ve been weaponized, what’s so pernicious, to use that word again, is how they have been weaponized by the forces of inaction. They are basically the ground troops that have been used to advocate an agenda of deregulation, of environmental deregulation of inaction on climate, an agenda from which these individuals don’t actually benefit, but they’ve been fooled into thinking that they do. That’s part of the tragedy of what we’ve seen unfold over the last decade in this country.
Rob Johnson:
Then on the other side of the ledger, are people who are trying to reach to what you might call philosophical precedence. Black help speaks, maybe a lot of native American lore some Eastern philosophy to try to see things from a different vantage point. Are there particular landmark works that have inspired you over time?
Michael Mann:
Certainly there are the writings of Carl Sagan have been very influential for me. He was a scientist, but he was a science communicator and really a philosopher by some measure and wrote profoundly about environmental issues, but also just about sort of the struggles that we face when it comes to the role of rationality and science and fact-based discourse. Some of his most feared prophecies have come to fruition in a sense over the last decade. He sort of pre-saved with foreboding back in the demon haunted world back in the mid 1990s, I think it was published in 1995. He foreboded a future where people would become disconnected from the tools of a rational discourse and unable to litigate for themselves what’s wrong and what’s right and how dangerous that would be at a time when we have great technology that can be leveraged for good or for bad.
He was of course, very worried about issues like nuclear proliferation at the time, but he also foresaw the threat of global environmental crises where you would have a citizenry that is ill equipped to again to litigate these matters and falls prey to the victims. He was very concerned about us falling prey to pseudo science, fortune telling, faith healing, et cetera. What I think he didn’t quite realize was that actually anti-science, ideologically motivated, anti-science, directed anti-science would be a far greater threat than mere pseudoscience, but it is where we are. We realizing some of his worst fears. I also do like, the genre of [inaudible 00:26:20] of science fiction, climate themed science fiction. I did an event not too long ago with Kim Stanley Robinson. [crosstalk 00:26:27].
Amazing guy. Really interesting approach to creating narratives that are fictional narratives, but they have the ring of truth to them. In some ways his latest book “The Ministry for the Future” while it’s a fictional narrative, tells a very similar story from “The New Climate War.” We need fictional narratives and storytelling to help communicate the gravity of this threat to the public. I think it’s great that people with different backgrounds and tools and approaches are all again, bringing them to the table to see if we can marshal them in the greatest challenge that we face, the greatest fight that we face, the fight to address climate change before it’s too late.
Rob Johnson:
Yeah. I’ve had the good fortune of knowing the television commentator Bill Moyers, whose work with Joseph Campbell explored the nature of myths. I remember there was one called, The Hero’s Journey where Campbell said, I am told on a radio show that a myth is a lie. Then he goes into the myth is a metaphor. It’s not a lie. But this tension. When he brought it up, what I thought was fascinating is you just described is how anti-science grew because science was to wean you off of superstition. Some of the things that feared, but then anti-science was to say, you’ve embraced the false scarity.
Then the people who provide that false security have deceived you on behalf of a narrow elite, the fight then is not a different science. The fight is using the anger at those people for deceiving you with what you thought was comforting. They go to a different mythology to regain their comfort. It’s emotional fabric that’s very torn up and it makes it very hard to navigate them in an urgent time like this. I thought that you might call the strands of all of that was so evident in your book. It was like you were seeing an extra dimension and interpreting, you were seeing the pattern of that dimension. I thought that was really extraordinary.
Michael Mann:
Well, thanks. I mean, I think, I found myself on the front lines of this battle, sort of unusual combatant in a political battle is trained as a scientist, but the science that I did led to the publication of the now well-known hockey stick curve back in the late 1990s, and it took on sort of iconic significance in the climate change debate. I quickly found myself in a completely different arena, not in the world of science, simply in the world of science, but thrust into sort of the public battle over climate change and what to do about it. I again, for more than two decades on the front lines of that battle. As I say it in the book I’ve come to recognize the enemy quite well. I know its tactics, I’ve seen it’s evolving tactics in the warfare that it has been advancing against climate action. I hope that there’s some wisdom that I’ve been able to derive from having been on the front lines of that war that I’m able to share with readers.
Rob Johnson:
Well, I think it’s that what you might call a fusion of art and science. I’m smiling because I’m a old Detroit guy that played hockey, and I see your book, “The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars” over your right shoulder. But it’s really extraordinary that, I guess science is somewhat tribal and anthropological. When they’re under pressure, it’s a normal human thing to what you might call circle the wagons and defend yourself. But when those boundaries become less supple at a time when we’d have to evolve, science can harm itself by staying in that circle, the wagons kind of posture. I want to applaud you for seeing beyond that in the role of leadership. I have many young scholars, we [inaudible 00:31:05] 15,000 young scholars that I know and I love to, which I might call excavate in these kinds of conversations, the kind of leadership that your example creates for them. I think it’s very important.
Michael Mann:
That’s very kind of you. Again, it’s not what I signed up for to be in this battle, but I feel privileged to have found myself in a position to influence the larger societal conversation over what is arguably the greatest challenge that we face. It’s the last thing I envisioned doing when I decided to double major in applied math and physics as an undergraduate and go off to graduate school to study theoretical physics. But my journey ultimately took me in a completely different direction from the one I intended. Despite that, if I had the opportunity to do it over again, I would make the same choices because even though it’s not what I really wanted to do, what I signed up for, I went into science because I love doing science. I love solving problems. But I have an opportunity to do something, to contribute to something even more important. I could embrace that.
Rob Johnson:
I remember a gentleman I once listened to speak at Berkeley. His last name was Kepler, physics and systems thinking the web of life.
Michael Mann:
Yeah, no relation to Frank, as far as I understand.
Rob Johnson:
That’s right. Different sourcers. But I understood he was quite influential in the opening of, how do I say, the bridges between physics and other dimensions in his career. The other person I recall, I believe was Carl Sagan’s wife. I thought I remembered I read your book a few weeks back, that a woman Lynn, I think. Lynn, is it.
Michael Mann:
He had several wives at different points in his life. His first wife was Lynn Margulis, who was a brilliant scientist in her own. Made some of the most important advances in biology and ecology of the last half century. The concept of endosymbiosis, how the origin of chloroplasts and plant cells or the mitochondria and the source of energy in animal cells allows us to metabolize oxygen, came about through the symbiosis of two different organisms. That was long considered sort of heretical. It’s now accepted as fact. She was pushing at the boundaries of science. It’s sort of fascinating to look at the careers of the two of them and sort of this brief, but important period during which they were partners. I sometimes imagine what the dinner conversations must have been like in that household.
But yeah. Some of our notion, the theory of Gaia, the idea that the earth in some ways behaves like an organism in terms of sort of a homeostatic processes that maintain earth within a range of parameters that allows for life, that is the conducive to life. It was a theory jointly put forward by her and the great biologist James Lovelock. Lovelock and Margulis, very influential principle in ecology. Carl Sagan was a great scientist, too. He’s largely remembered as a science communicator, but as an earth scientist when you’re trained in the science you come to understand what fundamental contributions he actually made to climate science decades ago.
For example the conundrum that earth had a habitable temperature at a time when the sun was dim enough that it should have been a frozen planet. Sagan a reason that there must have been a stronger greenhouse effect. That now is sort of a canonical as well. It’s part of the Corpus of our scientific understanding. Yeah, these people were scientists, but they were also philosophers and Sagan interacted quite a bit with philosophers and peoples political scientists, sociologists. He was a true sort of Renaissance individual. In a way, he was sort of, it’s a breed, an academic breed that’s gone extinct to some extent the sort of truly transdisciplinary approach that he took to science and to science communication.
Rob Johnson:
Yeah. I remember I went to MIT as an undergraduate. I minored in creative writing and the advisor said you’ve got four semesters to do, pick a couple people. I surprisingly, I guess in retrospect, but I feel fortunate was with their guidance. The two I picked were Martin Luther King Jr. and Albert Einstein. It was more of Einstein’s philosophical and humanistic writing. Obviously King, who was a minister, became a theologian with graduate degree at Boston university and sort of seeing them each from their base reaching in different direction, not to each other, but it created a feeling of lateral mobility in me.
Michael Mann:
They were both in their own ways, brilliant communicators. That’s a commonality coming from completely different directions, that’s something that you find in the climate space, too. People who come from very different directions, but sort of meet in the middle when it comes to the common effort to communicate the science and its implications to the public.
Rob Johnson:
I think there’s a reference in the formation of your book, but I remember toward the end, you were talking about what I will call the eyes of a child, the fresh ice of Greta Thunberg and the youth movement. How is that contributing to the impetus in a constructive way?
Michael Mann:
Well, it’s been transformational as far as I’m concerned. Because for too long, we allowed climate change to be framed in very cerebral terms, purely cerebral terms, the mind, but not so much the heart. Science, economics, policy and politics, and what Greta and the other hundreds of thousands of youth climate advocates around the world have done is to re-center this issue as a matter of ethics. Intergenerational ethics, but also distributed ethics when it comes to sort of the industrial world versus the developing world. The ethical conundrum that those who had the least role in creating this problem are the ones who will suffer the greatest consequences if we fail to act. I think that Greta and the others have really accomplished something fundamentally important to recenter this as an issue of ethics. Of an ethical obligation to act before it’s too late.
I argue in the book that that is really a game changer and that we need to support them in their efforts and provide and defend them in their efforts because they are under attack. Greta has fixed on her and the other youth climate advocates because of the threat that they represent to the status quo, to the fossil fuel industry. The fossil fuel sort of disinformation machine has set its sights on them, has worked hard to discredit Greta Thunberg and the other youth climate advocates. They’ve helped open a door, but the rest of us have to walk through. We can’t put it entirely upon them to solve this problem. We now have to step in, those of us who were in a position to have a direct influence on policy and politics have to step in and do our part. Yes, they’ve provided a foot in the door, but the rest of us now have to walk through.
Rob Johnson:
I want to share with you a little episode in my own life. I mentioned to you that Naomi Klein and her husband, Avi Louis are friends of our family. I have a daughter, I have two daughters, nine and 11 younger, young and one that’s much older, but the two younger daughters at the time when they were, I believe six and nine were inspired through Naomi from her alerting us to who Greta Thunberg was to go to the climate strike from school. I went with my daughters and we marched, and we came home and probably seven weeks later, I was in the middle of doing some work with the team around Pope Francis, which involved climate and social sustainability issues among other things. I had a subset of my board come over to the house for dinner. One of, my daughters called pizza man, because he’s taught them how to make pizzas from scratch, well, pizza man and a couple of the others started speaking ominously about climate change.
She’s seen the strike. She knows this. Saw Greta speaks inspired by Naomi, but she became a very quiet on that day. At that dinner, she was sitting at the table, she knew these people. The next day she went to school, was very quiet when I drove her to school, which was uncharacteristic. After her second period, I got a picture of a poem that she wrote and I’ll read it to you. It’s called “[inaudible 00:42:30] Everything” by Sarah? “What is everything, is it all essence or is it all answers? Is there more? Why am I all covered up, never seeing past present or future? Is that all an illusion? Why is it all collapsing, destroyed? All those lives not knowing, will we ever know?” I was kind of saddened to see that come across my radar mean she’s quite artistic and poetic.
Michael Mann:
It’s almost an extended…
Rob Johnson:
Yeah. But it was such an energy of dread. At some level, what caught fire in my mind is Greta’s awakening and reaching her is a contribution. But we, as the adults have to take the lead on this thing now, because she said, listen to my board members and me talk about this, and had intensified dread. It was as if the problem, the call to action was there. Then the elders were fearful not seeing the light at the end of the tunnel.
Michael Mann:
No, that’s right. It’s why, again, the major message of the book, “The New Climate War” is the importance of both urgency and agency. Awareness that we have the challenge on our part, but we can do something about it. Too many of our children have fallen into despair. I think we see that there in that poem out of this sense of helplessness, that there’s nothing we can do. We have to make it clear that there is something we can do. We have to provide that agency. This is again, a good week from that standpoint, because we’re seeing a degree of mobilization that we haven’t seen in a long time. We’re late to the fight, it’s late and we’ve gone much farther down this path than we should have ever allowed us to go, but it’s not too late. That’s an important message here. That’s one that I hope will sort of catch fire this week, this earth week. An awareness that, yeah, we’re late to the game, but we’re not too late. Let’s do it. This is our time.
Rob Johnson:
I loved in the end of your book, you talked about the role of hope, that at some level despondency and resignation is ally of our enemy. Whether it’s extermination or the fossil fuel industry, or people on the left that don’t want to do carbon prices. You can pick your own enemy, but resignation rather than hope feeds on itself. It’s an amplifying feedback. Because the more resigned, the more interaction, the more difficult it is to meet the timetable, the more resigned, et cetera, in that despondency.
Michael Mann:
Like a lot of feedbacks that connect in both direction, hope also then feeds on itself. We see that we’re able to accomplish something, that we make a difference in our lives. We see it as a positive impact. That leads us down this path of engagement, where we realize, well, I can do this too. Why don’t I do this? This is well understood actually in of all fields, it turns out in marketing, in the world of marketing, this has long been understood this idea of the path of engagement. You get people to do little things, and it potentially leads them to larger and larger stepping stones that ultimately can really result in the sorts of actions that we need to see collectively.
Yeah, I do think that that’s really critical. It is the note that I end on in the book and it’s sort of fortuitous because the book went to press in August. I didn’t know with confidence where we would be when the book came out this last January, after the election, but I had a sense at that time of where we were headed. I sort of envisioned a future where, there was restorative leadership in the presidency of the United States. That’s where we are now. We’ve got a real opportunity. What we can’t do is squander it.
Rob Johnson:
Before we started, I was telling you about, I attended a meeting on African development as a preparation for COP26 at the group of 30, the Central Bank alumni put forward. They were very energized. As I thought about Glasgow, I thought about it that I had taken my staff to Glasgow in honor of a time where I was in crisis in my life. My best friend took me up onto a mountain in Idaho. He turned me on to a song by a Scottish Band called The Waterboys. The name of the song is “The Whole Of The Moon.”
Before this morning, before recognizing The Waterboys whose T-shirt I wear, I remember that my friend passed away recently that his birthday is this week. But before all of that was, I was reading your book. I’m often informed by lyrics. That’s like my Holy spirit. What am I thinking and feeling, comes down to me. I sang harmed the first verse of the song. This is three or four weeks ago, but I understand now why. It said, I pictured a rainbow. You held it in your hands. I have some flashes, but you saw the plan. I wandered out in the world for years, while you just stayed in your room. I saw the Crescent, but Michael, you see the whole, the moon.
Michael Mann:
Wow. That’s very kind of you.
Rob Johnson:
The way you bring the pattern on its elements, you’re not playing in the subset. You’re playing in the whole grid. You’re seeing obstacles, you’re seeing the possibilities, and you’re seeing what’s necessary to call upon us to do. This is a very valuable book.
Michael Mann:
Thank you. That’s very kind of you.
Rob Johnson:
I’m very grateful for your doing it, for you coming on. For your allowing me to celebrate Rob, what would have been his 64th birthday, for a couple of moments.
Michael Mann:
Let this be his legacy to help energize us at this critical juncture.
Rob Johnson:
He was a political activist, he was a culinary artist living in Durango, Colorado. Before that Sun Valley, Idaho. But that’s where I started getting interested in climate was from my childhood friend.
Michael Mann:
It’s clear his spirit lives on in you, my friend.
