Name: How to Be a Climate Optimist
Uploaded: 2022-09-30
Duration: 9 min 56 s
Description: Katharine Hayhoe is a leading climate scientist and a strong believer that the first defense against climate change is conversation and a heavy dose of optimism. She will share her latest research and her thoughts on how businesses can lead the charge in bringing awareness and action to combat the effects of a changing global environment

Katharine Hayhoe is a leading climate scientist and a strong believer that the first defense against climate change is conversation and a heavy dose of optimism.  She will share her latest research and her thoughts on how businesses can lead the charge in bringing awareness and action to combat the effects of a changing global environment

How to Be a Climate Optimist

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Katharine Hayhoe is a leading climate scientist

Katharine Hayhoe is a leading climate scientist and a strong believer that the first defense against climate change is conversation and a heavy dose of optimism.

Catherine, thank you so much for joining us. We just had a great chat in the green room. I hope we get to have the things that we we talked about there. Um so to start this, this is going to seem like an obvious question here. But I think it's really important for the framing of our conversation and that's how do you describe climate change? That is a very good question and I describe it using two words that were coined by the U. S. Military which may surprise you and those words are threat multiplier. Nine times out of 10. Climate change is not creating a new problem that has never existed before. Rather it is taking an existing challenge and amplifying magnifying or exacerbating it. And what we're seeing with hurricanes and typhoons this week is a classic example, hurricanes are normal and natural but what's not normal and not natural is to have them wrapped shooting Almost overnight from a tropical storm to a category five hurricane and dumping this much rain on people not just Ian which just hit Florida yesterday Fiona which went through Puerto Rico before going all the way up to Newfoundland but also typhoon Nauru which devastated an island in the Philippines and then hit Vietnam with hundreds of thousands of people having to be. So climate change is a threat multiplier which means that wherever we have weak spots wherever we have achilles heels, they could be in our um supply chains, they could be in our distribution network, they could be in you know manufacturing of certain items that we need. Those are the places nine times out of 10 where climate change will hit us hardest. So, okay, this all sounds very dire. Um, and how do we remain hopeful? How do we feel like there's actually something that we can do about this? So we don't just sort of curl up in a ball and say, okay, oh well, I guess it's gonna happen anyway. Well, here's the thing if we do, which were very tempted to of course when we see the headlines curl up into a ball, pull the covers back over our head and say, oh, it's gonna happen anyways, we'll just deal with it in that case, if we do that, the worst will happen. And I'm a scientist who studies what the future holds depending on our choices. And I can tell you that there is a world of difference between a future where we do everything, we can to cut our emissions as fast as we can to make the the drain bigger. So to big help nature take up the carbon from our atmosphere and put it back in the soil and ecosystems where we want it where we build resilience to the impacts of a changing climate. That is a world where our civilization, our economy, our society continues and can even possibly improve. There is the potential for a better future. But if we just say, oh, it's too big, we can't do anything that is a future where the entire future of our civilization as we know it is seriously under question whether we can maintain our transportation systems, our electricity or water systems, our economic systems in that future where we don't do anything and we just say, well whether when it comes, when it comes, there's a big question mark on that. Whether we're even able to do that or not, Okay, well you didn't make me feel better, but that's okay, but I can't I can't please please do that next. Yes. So, so, so often we think of climate action as a giant boulder that's sitting at the bottom of an impossibly steep cliff with only a few hands on it. Patagonia is there, Sir? David. Atten berg, you know, Greta thunberg, we feel like there's a few people trying to push that boulder up, but it's not budging even an inch. So if I had my hand, even our whole companies hand, it won't make a difference. But when we look around and we see all of the people, all of the organizations, all of the cities, all of the states and provinces and companies and businesses that are taking action, we realize that giant boulder is already at the top of the hill, it is already rolling down the hill in the right direction and it already has millions of hands on it and if we had our it will go faster. I work at the nature Conservancy of their chief scientists as well as at texas Tech University as a professor there. And one of the things that I'm most excited about that, that makes me most hopeful is when I see how companies are joining up with organizations to help act on climate, protect biodiversity and invest in people and to examples that I really like the fact that we're working with um a beer company, you probably didn't see that one coming. And Hauser Bush to look at protecting water, which is very important, you need water to make beer, but we also need water on a changing climate to provide to local communities and to invest in the quality of that water which is um subject to pollution as well as also being contaminated from runoff, more severe storms. And then there's the example of walmart has teamed up with the Nature Conservancy for sustainable tuna production in the south pacific Okay, okay, so we are going back to the community which is phenomenal because those communities are in dire need of economic development and investment, but it has to be done the right way in a way that protects them from the impacts of climate change. So when I look around at, you know, churches that are divesting from fossil fuels, when I look around at universities and schools that are creating whole schools of climate and sustainability and going carbon free themselves. When I look at how governments are investing in nature like the like Belize and Gabon and the Barbados that just restructured their national debt And use all the interests they save to protect 30% of their ocean area. I mean that's a genius way to use the economy for good. And all of those examples give me hope. So you are a climate scientist in west texas. Um So I know this is something that you've thought a lot about, but how did this issue become so political? Right? It is one of the most divisive issues out there. How did that happen? Has it always been this way? It turns out it has not always been this way we've known since the 1800s that digging up and burning coal back then and oil and gas today produce heat trapping gasses that are building up in the atmosphere, wrapping an extra blanket around the planet, causing it to warm. And in the 1990s, when you asked in the us Republicans and Democrats, you know, how worried are you about global warming? You would get the same answer from both groups. So what happened in the last 30 years somehow the number that a thermometer gives us became a political issue. Why? Well, I studied this question because it occurred to me as well. In fact, I still remember the first time I taught a class at Texas Tech University now, lubbock texas is a very conservative city. It's officially the second most conservative city in the country after provo Utah and I'm speaking at Brigham Young University in two months. So the first time I spoke, I gave, I taught a class at texas tech. I gave a long talk on the geologic history of carbon in the earth, you know, history and the carbon cycle. And the last two minutes of talk, I talked about how humans are disrupting the carbon cycle by digging up and burning coal and gas and oil. And so afterwards I stopped hopefully. And I asked her questions and one young man in the middle put his hand up right away and I thought, oh, a question. He was paying attention. He stood up and he said, are you a democrat? And I was so shocked, I didn't know what to say. I said, no, I'm a Canadian. And then I started to realize why would they think I was a democrat. And what I realized is for a long time climate change was a future issue. It was something that scientists knew about. And scientists studied, even scientists that oil and gas companies and car companies and government scientists and research scientists. We all knew that this was gonna happen. But the chickens had not come home to roost. It wasn't until the 1990s that we started to see the heatwave, we started to see the floods. We started to see the stronger hurricanes and storms and when it became a now issue rather than a then issue, that means we have to do something about it. And when we have to do something about it, that's when it gets political very quickly. Because I'm very sorry to say that a number of companies, 90 companies are actually responsible for 70% of heat trapping gas emissions since the dawn of the industrial era. A number of companies, especially coal companies and some oil and gas companies decided it's gonna be a lot cheaper to just take a leaf from the tobacco industry's playbook and put money into questioning and dismissing science. Our scientists have been studying for decades already than it is to say that we need to change our business model. And there's a really interesting book and documentary called merchants of doubt that I highly recommend to you if you haven't seen it yet. That talks about how professional disinformation was you to muddy the waters on tobacco and smoking and lung cancer on flame returns and mattresses, which I have no idea about and on climate change. But the reality of course is hurricane does not knock on your door and say excuse me, Who did you vote for in the last election or what campaign did you donate to before it floods your home or your neighborhood or your facility or disrupt your supply chain. So we need to have discussions and even arguments over what the best solutions are because there is no best solution. There's a whole bunch of silver buckshot. There's no silver bullet. But we don't need to be having arguments over whether this is real and it matters because it does and everything we as human value is at risk. Catherine thank you so much for chatting with us and thank you so much for giving us a little bit of hope in all this, too. So thanks for the time.