Pushkin from Pushkin Industries. This is Deep Background, the show where we explore the stories behind the stories in the news. I'm Noah Feldman. When we all come out from social isolation after the coronavirus pandemic finally ends, and I'm assuming it will, we will emerge changed, and we will emerge into a changed world. Is there a chance that one of those changes will be that we've become more environmentally friendly or at least more environmentally aware. Are there things we could be doing now while everything is on pause that could have a long lasting impact on the health of our planet or our thing is going to go the other way? Is our need to restart our economy and going to overwhelm our impulse to improve the environment. Might the enormous cost of the bailouts were engaged and now actually deter us from investing in a serious way into transformation of our energy system to fight climate change. To discuss these pressing questions, I'm joined by Bill mckibbon. Bill's a central figure in the history of the climate change struggle. He was one of the first people to write and advocate about climate change almost thirty years ago in his best selling book The End of nature. He's been a central figure in the climate change movement ever since, a writer for The New Yorker and the founder of the grassroots climate campaign three fifty dot org, among other distinctions. Bill is also the father of our shore runner, Sophie mckibbon. Bill, thank you so much for joining me. I wanted to start with what is, in a sense, the most obvious question, which is here you are? You spend the better part of your career trying to get the world to sit up and take notice of a profound crisis, and you've done an extraordinary job of it. Yet it's been a struggle every step of the way. Then suddenly, February March of twenty twenty, a handful of people initially die of an obscure virus, and boom, just about the entire world goes into full on crisis mode with almost no indication of what the consequences are going to be. Listening to a handful of experts whom no one had heard of before. Does that seem strange too? Well, it doesn't seem strange in that the immediacy of a pandemic, of a medical crisis, the idea that everyone can quickly imagine themselves falling ill or dying or the people around them that they love. I mean, that's one of the reasons we move fast in these situations. The other is, and it's not to be discounted, the one good thing about the coronavirus is there's not a trillion dollar industry whose business model depends on us all getting sick and dying. There is a trillion dollar industry whose business model depends on us not taking climate change seriously. And that's been, more than anything else, the reason that we haven't done so for thirty years. I want to ask you about the sort of two different pathways, each a bit extremely in the way they're stated, that are being bandied about about what will happen in the aftermath of Corona, assuming there is an aftermath of Corona for us with respect to environmentalism and climate change. The one being well, look, we now know that people can get together and take seriously a threat, and this is extraordinarily hopeful because we could learn from these things and maybe translate them into the climate challenge. And then the other saying very very pessimistically, there's a huge difference between an immediate visible threat and a more difficult to see one. In fact, industry will have a tremendously powerful argument on its side that we should be putting aside long term considerations in favor of short term rebuilding considerations, and this is actually going to make things harder, not easier. So both those things are going to happen at one level or another. There's a powerful desire to get back to normal, and it'll manifest in all kinds of ways, and some of those ways will make our job of dealing with this other overarching climate crisis harder. Look, there's not many people who are going to be eager to jump back on the subway right because it's scarier place than it was six months ago. So there'll likely be a lot of people retreating the use of their private automobiles in a lot of places, and with gas at a dollar forty nine a gallon or whatever it is now, there may well be a kind of booming sale of SUVs and so on. On the other hand, you've got lots and lots of places around the world that are taking this moment as a way to make deep change. The city of London, which we're used to thinking of as the kind of epitome of hide bound old tradition has announced that they're basically close most of the streets in the center of the city to cars henceforth, and it's going to be bikes and buses and pedestrians, so it's cutting both ways. What the pandemic really demonstrates, however, maybe something we haven't focused on yet. We basically shut down the world for a matter of months in a way that you or I would have thought was impossible. Nothing like that's ever happened in our lifetimes, nothing even close to what's ever happened. And yet it looks like carbon emissions probably will go down maybe seven or eight percent this year. That's it. And what that seems to indicate is that an awful lot of what we're doing is less as a result of individual choice than of things being kind of hardwired into the system. That we're going to have to get in the guts of modernity and make some basic plumbing changes if we're going to be achieving the kind of scale of emissions reductions and things that the scientists tell us are necessary. And that's an interesting thing to find out. We could all stop flying and all stop driving and it still didn't really bend this particular curve that much guide us into the guts of modernity. Then I want to understand why the numbers are not down as radically as that. What are the causes of emissions that are remaining so great that only seven or eight percent reduction will be achieved this year. Well, it's because the underlying kind of autonomic systems on our planet, the energy generation that we use every day, the energy generation that you and I have been using to light and heat our homes, to run everything around us, Every building, every piece of the built environment at the moment is plugged into this system that relies mostly on digging stuff up and burning it. And that's what can change, and can change pretty quickly if we want it to. We're at a really interesting moment right now. Now. This pandemic comes at the end of a decade in which engineers have done spectacular work. They've dropped the price of a solar panel or a wind turbine by something like ninety percent to the place where these are now by far the cheapest way to generate power around most of the world. So over time we'll move in that direction. Seventy five years from now, we'll probably run the world on sun and wind because it's cheap. But if we just let kind of economics dictate the pace, then we'll go so slowly that that world we run on sun and wind in seventy five years will be a fundamentally broken world. So the job is to figure out can we push the pace. And that's where the pandemic is interesting. Given that we have all these now cheap technologies pretty much ready to go, and given that we have a huge now mass of unemployed people around the world who need something to do, it's pretty clear to me that the only task that the world faces that's on that same scale is this task of moving us from one energy regime to another. So retrofitting buildings with insulation and with new appliances like air source heat pumps, building out a network of electric car charging stations, putting up all that sun and windpower. If there was an FDR around today, those are the tasks he'd be seizing on for a WPA or a CCC or whatever it was. And what do you know, it just so happens that we have in hand from a year ago this idea for a green new deal. I have a feeling that that may be one of the ways in which the world grapples with the twin problem as it now faces, And indeed, you can see it's starting to happen. Germany and South Korea and a number of other countries seem to be picking a kind of green New Deal template as their way out of the economic trouble that they're now in. Often when I listen to you, I'm struck by the balance that you have to strike between making us afraid in order to motivates the action and giving us some reassurance. I want to double down on the fear right now, because when I was listening to you just now, the fear I think came when you were saying that we need to make these fundamental, long run infrastructure investments of a new Deal type. And right now we're doing, at an international scale, the most massive instantaneous borrowing against the future that we've done since the Great Depression. So if we're already engaged in this really generational borrowing, how are we going to have the capacity to do it again? For environmental transformation, the first thing to be said is the things that you're afraid of are good things to be afraid of, but the things to really be afraid of to really feel in the pit of your stomach, are in fact the changes that are now expressing themselves on the planet, even in the early phases of climate change. I mean, we've warmed the planet one degree so far, and that's been enough to knock pretty much all our systems a kilter. The devastation that we're already seeing is enormous, and it comes with an almost unimaginable price tag if all you were thinking about was the kind of economic challenge that it presents. The latest study I saw on the price of unabated global warming by the end of the century, who was about five hundred and fifty one trillion dollars, which is considerably more money than currently exists on planet Earth. So that's the scale of the challenge, and that's precisely why we should be making as wise investments as we can right now, even in the midst of the kind of panic that surrounds this pandemic. I mean, I think clearly people will look back and see this as one of the few moments when we really did get a sort of break, a pause in order to reset some of our assumptions about the world. And we're at a place where we can change some of those assumptions and do it in ways that make economic sense. What it really takes is some degree of leadership, and of course right now we're coming up empty there. Our problem is, and this is the thing that makes me scared sometimes at night. Climate change, like the coronavirus, is a problem where the answer has to come fast, if it's going to come at all. They're both time tests, and the time is short. So we failed the timed test part of the coronavirus, right. We took off February from effective policy making, and as a result we were really screwed. And the countries that spent February doing the things that needed doing were by and large ended up better off than we did. With climate change. We took off the last thirty years from offensive policy making, and so now we're in really deep trouble as a result, not only are we going to have significant damage, our only chance of avoiding just sort of civilization scale carnage is if we make huge progress in the next decade. The next decade for climate change is the equivalent of what February was for coronavirus. Our chance to get it at least partly right If we are able to internalize that in some way, then we've got a shot. If we're not, then we'll just aimlessly wander through and we'll be in trouble far forwards than anything we're in now. We'll be back in just a moment. One of the ongoing challenges that the whole climate change movement has faced has been a genuine skepticism by many ordinary people at the authority of science. A sense of scientists is disconnected as belonging to elites who don't have the interest of ordinary people at heart. Do you have a sense that the public reaction to science and to scientific authority during the Corona crisis is likely to make a difference in that conflict, because it does seem to me they are translatable. I mean, for example, if we were to get an effective vaccine for Corona, which I myself I am not convinced as a high probability event from all the experts I've spoken to, but it's also a possible event that could in principle, really enhance the prestige of scientific authority, and if we don't, seems at least possible to me that that could further deflate the authority of the scientific community. Yeah, it's a really good question, and I think actually there's some pretty good signs. The news business being what it is, we have no choice to focus on all the knuckleheads who wanted to go out to the bar or were standing around the Michigan Governor's office with AK forty sevens or whatever it was that people were doing. But for the most part, Americans were like, yeah, Okay, if the doctor says we need to stand six feet apart, we best stand six feet apart. I've been pretty pleasantly surprised by how well Americans dealt with the reality that suddenly was thrust upon them. Most people really did turn their lives upside down. The polling seems to show that most people respected the politicians who told them to do that and worked with them to make it done. We're in a weird political fever dream these last years. You know a place where it's very hard to find a center where up is down and down is up. You know where we live in a world of odd conspiracy theories, whether they're about vaccinations or climate change, or chemtrails, or on and on and on down a long and dreary list. It's possible that this pandemic has been enough of a shock to the system that will will help us wake us out of that fever dream a little bit. I've spent an awful lot of time trying to explain to people that physics and chemistry aren't negotiable. You can't force them to compromise, that they're not going to meet you halfway. And that's why these kind of issues are so difficult for our political system. I mean, even at its best, even when it's working correctly, political system is set up to favor compromise. Right. You get groups of people with different opinions about topics and they have to somehow kind of meet in the middle. That's not what coronavirus or climate change are like. They set the terms. If the microbe says stands six feet apart, stands six feet apart. If the carbon dioxide molecule says we can't keep burning stuff, it's getting too hot, then you best pay attention. So there are no silver linings in a pandemic. But if we're going to go through this much trouble, we might as well learn something. And a basic bottom line thing to learn is that reality is real. Doesn't matter if the president stands it is electern and tries to proudbeat the microbe into submission. It could care less. And in a world where we've spent the last twenty thirty years ever more firmly entrenched behind our screens, where reality seems mutable and adaptable and easy to play with, and so on and so forth, this is a pretty good reminder that that's actually not how reality works. At some level. I'm very sympathetic to everything you've said. I see myself as a believer in science. I haven't been out in a bar, nor have I marched on the State House with my a R. Fifteen. That said, I think I might have some subtle philosophical difference with you with respect to how I think about the motivation of the people who did both of those kinds of things. I think, with respect to people who are going to a bar, they're expressing a fundamental human instinct, a towards sociality, towards being with other people, and be towards some desire to look straight in the face of something like corona and say it actually wouldn't be so bad if we individually got it. Then, with respect to the people who are you marching, sometimes even armed. They're expressing what I would call of the libertarian impulse that is distrustful of the way that power functions in the world that we have. And I see both of those impulses the kind of impulse to human sociality, and let's just all get the disease and the libertarian impulse to be distrustful of government authority as important ways of interpreting the world. Now, I agree with you that the laws of physics don't change based on what we would like them to be. But we're talking in all these cases about what we should be doing from the standpoint of policy, and their political judgment does come in. So the standing six feet apart isn't I don't think dictated by the virus. That's a regulatory response to how we should address the underlying question. And we could say, let's let everybody get this virus, and that we'll have terrible consequences for some people, and it might overcome our healthcare systems, it may lead to many, many deaths, but we make the judgment that we shouldn't do that. I mean those to me fall in the realm of human judgment, and I think that responses to climates similarly do I mean, we're talking about very complicated cost benefits, and although I happen to come down on your side of the coin, I do nevertheless see it as a realm of negotiation and discussion and cost benefit where we should do that in the shadow of real science. So on all kinds of counts, I agree with you, But I think the really interesting political question you raise is the one about kind of libertarian impulse. You and I have lived our lives in the shadow of Ronald Reagan, hence in the idea that markets solve all problems. That's been the most powerful impulse political impulse I think of our time on this planet, and I've been suspicious of it from the beginning for a lot of reasons, but I think those suspicions get more powerful all the time. Reagan's great laugh line, as you'll recall, was the nine scariest words in the English language are I'm from the government and I'm here to help. Well, I don't think those are words in the English language. I think the scariest words are we've run out of ventilators, the hillside behind your house is on fire, and those are not problems that you're capable of addressing. By trying to maximize your own wealth. Those are problems that you're capable of addressing when we come together to do things jointly. That's always been the interesting philosophical dilemma around climate change. The reason that the right had so much trouble dealing with it and has been forced to deny it really over and over again, is that there was, at least at this point, no real way to deal with it without strong joint action. I mean, I think the syllogism that formed in a lot of conservative minds over time was markets solve all problems. Markets aren't solving climate change. Therefore climate change is not a problem. That's not a very good syllogism, but it's emotionally comforting. If you spent the last thirty years, you know, marinating in Russia, Limbaugh, then it's an appealing idea and one that an awful lot of people stuck with, including the President in the United States. I want to ask you about the way people form their commitments to bake picture questions like climate change and its relationship to the political tribe that they belong to. I've been struck in recent conversations I've had with friends. There are people who are sort of left science skeptics. For example, they might be skeptical of vaccines. There are antivactors left and right, but there is a thing of skeptical of certain respects of science people on the left, and yet those same people tend to be very clear that climate change science is real, whereas on the right, I would expect a pretty close affiliation between people who are skeptical of science on say, vaccination, and are also very skeptical of climate change. So there's a kind of fascinating mismatch there. My working hypothesis, and I have no idea if there's anything to this about why that might be. So, is that people form their beliefs in this tribal way, almost in the way that they form religious beliefs. Well, I think that actually you have an interesting kind of natural experiment here with climate change about where the source of some of this all comes from. If you look at around the world, very very very few places, really none have this level of skepticism around climate change that we do here. It was really only in the US that climate denial became a serious thing. You know, look at conservative leaders and other parts of the world. Angelo mercal conservative and yet very powerful voice for action on climate change, and you can have a dozen different examples. I think that it's pretty clear in retrospect, thanks to a lot of great investigative reporting, what the source of that is. Thirty years ago we now know the fossil fuel industry knew everything there was to know about climate change. Exxon, biggest company in the world in the nineteen eighties, had a great scientific staff. Their product was carbon. Of course, they set out to understand it, and understand it they did. They've discovered in their archives graphs that show with unerring accuracy what the CO two concentration and temperature would be in twenty twenty. But of course what they didn't do was tell any of the rest of us. Instead, the industry spent a huge amount of money building the kind of architecture of deceit and denial and disinformation that kept us locked for thirty years in a totally phony debate about whether or not global warming was real, a debate that both sides knew the answer to at the beginning. It's just one of them was willing to lie. And when you're willing to lie in that way and poison the debate in that way, and when you have unlimited funds, when you're able to go hire everybody who told the same lie about the tobacco industry and put them to work in this new context, well you get things done. The Koch brothers, who are the biggest influences in our political system probably over the last twenty or thirty years, are also our biggest oil and gas parents. I mean, that's how they had the money to buy a political party and take physics and turn it into a part as an issue. So I think that it's worth always bearing that in mind, that we've been guided down this path by people who knew precisely what they were doing. So I just want to close by asking you, do you feel more optimistic about climate change than you did when you first began to write and advocate about the subject. I feel way less optimistic, I fear, than I did back in nineteen eighty nine, when I wasn't very optimistic then. I mean, I wrote the first book about this, and its cheerful title was the End of Nature. But I would not have predicted either how fast change was going to come. It turns out that scientists are conservative by nature and dramatically under predict not overestimate change one faces, and I would not have predicted just how sclerotic our political systems, especially the US, would be in response that we would be warned powerfully of a huge crisis and then do nothing about it. On the other hand, the thing that makes me hopeful that at the very least will make a fight out of this has been the rise over the last decade of movements to try and do something about it, because that's clearly what it's going to take now. I tried to help start that process with one of the first iterations of this three fifty dot org, which became the first kind of global grassroots climate movement, and that's made really, really really gratifying for me to watch the emergence of so many others in the last few years, to watch extinction rebellion, to watch the Green New Deal in the Sunrise movement in this country, to watch the almost miraculous emergence of this cadre of millions upon millions of high school students and junior high school students around the world demanding change. So I don't know what that adds up to in terms of optimism and pessimism. We're in a very difficult place where we have to move very very fast, and as with coronavirus having delayed this long, there's no longer any outcome that doesn't involve lots and lots of trauma, lots and lots of damage. But we know what to do in the broadest terms. We have the resources, the technologies and things that we could employ, and we've built movements that can try and push political will in the right direction. It's a titanic battle, maybe the most titanic battle that human beings have ever engaged in, and we don't know the outcome. It's not like other political questions where over time you had some sense that the right thing was eventually going to happen. We don't know that we can do it fast enough. We're going to find out, and the only variable we can affect is how many of us push how hard for change, and that's why we push hard. Bill. Thank you very much for your analysis of where we stand on climate in the moment of Corona, and thank you much more fundamentally for all of your work over these years to draw attention to the immediacy of much. Reflecting on my conversation with Bill, I wish he had been able to end in a more optimistic place than he did. I myself walked away from our conversation shocked by one fact and scared by another. It turns out that not driving too much, not flying too much really don't have the transformative degree of impact that I might have imagined otherwise. And I'm terrified by the reality that the only way to transform our global emissions is by a major, long term generational investment in the transition to solar power and to win power. Because that would have been challenging under the best of circumstances. But at a moment when the world is borrowing against our future in unprecedented ways in order to avoid an immediate crisis of depression like magnitude, it's going to be much more difficult to muster public support for a long term, extremely expensive investment in the transformation of how we generate and store energy. Contrary to what sometimes may seem to be the case in the middle of this crisis, there actually be some finite limitation on the degree to which we can borrow against our future, and the moment we start thinking to ourselves that there might be some trade off between how much we borrow and what our future looks like we're going to see a softening of willingness to make major, long term generational investments in climate change. If there's a glimmer of a hint of something positive to say here, it's that we are all recognizing in the midst of this coronavirus crisis that we do need to listen to scientists, and we do need to rely on governments in order to coordinate our action. Coordinated action and reliance on science are going to be crucial to any kind of productive response to the climate change challenge that we face. I wish I could conclude with something profoundly optimistic to say, but if Bill couldn't, I certainly can't either. Until the next time I speak to you, be careful, be safe, and be well. Deep Background is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. Our producer is Lydia gene Cott, with research help from Zooe Winn and mastering by Jason Gambrel and Martin Gonzalez. Our showrunner is Sophie mckibbon. Our theme music is composed by Luis Garratt. Special thanks to the Pushkin Brass Malcolm Gladwell, Jacob Weisberg and Mia Loebell. I'm Noah Feldman. I also write a regular column for Bloomberg Opinion, which you can find at Bloomberg dot com slash Feldman. To discover Bloomberg's original slate of podcasts, go to Bloomberg dot com slash podcasts. And one last thing. I just wrote a book called The Arab Winter, A Tragedy. I would be delighted if you checked it out. You can always let me know what you think on Twitter about this episode, or the book or anything else. My handle is Noah R. Feldman. This is deep background

Pushkin from Pushkin Industries. This is Deep Background, the show where we explore the stories behind the stories in the news. I'm Noah Feldman. When we all come out from social isolation after the coronavirus pandemic finally ends, and I'm assuming it will, we will emerge changed, and we will emerge into a changed world. Is there a chance that one of those changes will be that we've become more environmentally friendly or at least more environmentally aware. Are there things we could be doing now while everything is on pause that could have a long lasting impact on the health of our planet or our thing is going to go the other way? Is our need to restart our economy and going to overwhelm our impulse to improve the environment. Might the enormous cost of the bailouts were engaged and now actually deter us from investing in a serious way into transformation of our energy system to fight climate change. To discuss these pressing questions, I'm joined by Bill mckibbon. Bill's a central figure in the history of the climate change struggle. He was one of the first people to write and advocate about climate change almost thirty years ago in his best selling book The End of nature. He's been a central figure in the climate change movement ever since, a writer for The New Yorker and the founder of the grassroots climate campaign three fifty dot org, among other distinctions. Bill is also the father of our shore runner, Sophie mckibbon. Bill, thank you so much for joining me. I wanted to start with what is, in a sense, the most obvious question, which is here you are? You spend the better part of your career trying to get the world to sit up and take notice of a profound crisis, and you've done an extraordinary job of it. Yet it's been a struggle every step of the way. Then suddenly, February March of twenty twenty, a handful of people initially die of an obscure virus, and boom, just about the entire world goes into full on crisis mode with almost no indication of what the consequences are going to be. Listening to a handful of experts whom no one had heard of before. Does that seem strange too? Well, it doesn't seem strange in that the immediacy of a pandemic, of a medical crisis, the idea that everyone can quickly imagine themselves falling ill or dying or the people around them that they love. I mean, that's one of the reasons we move fast in these situations. The other is, and it's not to be discounted, the one good thing about the coronavirus is there's not a trillion dollar industry whose business model depends on us all getting sick and dying. There is a trillion dollar industry whose business model depends on us not taking climate change seriously. And that's been, more than anything else, the reason that we haven't done so for thirty years. I want to ask you about the sort of two different pathways, each a bit extremely in the way they're stated, that are being bandied about about what will happen in the aftermath of Corona, assuming there is an aftermath of Corona for us with respect to environmentalism and climate change. The one being well, look, we now know that people can get together and take seriously a threat, and this is extraordinarily hopeful because we could learn from these things and maybe translate them into the climate challenge. And then the other saying very very pessimistically, there's a huge difference between an immediate visible threat and a more difficult to see one. In fact, industry will have a tremendously powerful argument on its side that we should be putting aside long term considerations in favor of short term rebuilding considerations, and this is actually going to make things harder, not easier. So both those things are going to happen at one level or another. There's a powerful desire to get back to normal, and it'll manifest in all kinds of ways, and some of those ways will make our job of dealing with this other overarching climate crisis harder. Look, there's not many people who are going to be eager to jump back on the subway right because it's scarier place than it was six months ago. So there'll likely be a lot of people retreating the use of their private automobiles in a lot of places, and with gas at a dollar forty nine a gallon or whatever it is now, there may well be a kind of booming sale of SUVs and so on. On the other hand, you've got lots and lots of places around the world that are taking this moment as a way to make deep change. The city of London, which we're used to thinking of as the kind of epitome of hide bound old tradition has announced that they're basically close most of the streets in the center of the city to cars henceforth, and it's going to be bikes and buses and pedestrians, so it's cutting both ways. What the pandemic really demonstrates, however, maybe something we haven't focused on yet. We basically shut down the world for a matter of months in a way that you or I would have thought was impossible. Nothing like that's ever happened in our lifetimes, nothing even close to what's ever happened. And yet it looks like carbon emissions probably will go down maybe seven or eight percent this year. That's it. And what that seems to indicate is that an awful lot of what we're doing is less as a result of individual choice than of things being kind of hardwired into the system. That we're going to have to get in the guts of modernity and make some basic plumbing changes if we're going to be achieving the kind of scale of emissions reductions and things that the scientists tell us are necessary. And that's an interesting thing to find out. We could all stop flying and all stop driving and it still didn't really bend this particular curve that much guide us into the guts of modernity. Then I want to understand why the numbers are not down as radically as that. What are the causes of emissions that are remaining so great that only seven or eight percent reduction will be achieved this year. Well, it's because the underlying kind of autonomic systems on our planet, the energy generation that we use every day, the energy generation that you and I have been using to light and heat our homes, to run everything around us, Every building, every piece of the built environment at the moment is plugged into this system that relies mostly on digging stuff up and burning it. And that's what can change, and can change pretty quickly if we want it to. We're at a really interesting moment right now. Now. This pandemic comes at the end of a decade in which engineers have done spectacular work. They've dropped the price of a solar panel or a wind turbine by something like ninety percent to the place where these are now by far the cheapest way to generate power around most of the world. So over time we'll move in that direction. Seventy five years from now, we'll probably run the world on sun and wind because it's cheap. But if we just let kind of economics dictate the pace, then we'll go so slowly that that world we run on sun and wind in seventy five years will be a fundamentally broken world. So the job is to figure out can we push the pace. And that's where the pandemic is interesting. Given that we have all these now cheap technologies pretty much ready to go, and given that we have a huge now mass of unemployed people around the world who need something to do, it's pretty clear to me that the only task that the world faces that's on that same scale is this task of moving us from one energy regime to another. So retrofitting buildings with insulation and with new appliances like air source heat pumps, building out a network of electric car charging stations, putting up all that sun and windpower. If there was an FDR around today, those are the tasks he'd be seizing on for a WPA or a CCC or whatever it was. And what do you know, it just so happens that we have in hand from a year ago this idea for a green new deal. I have a feeling that that may be one of the ways in which the world grapples with the twin problem as it now faces, And indeed, you can see it's starting to happen. Germany and South Korea and a number of other countries seem to be picking a kind of green New Deal template as their way out of the economic trouble that they're now in. Often when I listen to you, I'm struck by the balance that you have to strike between making us afraid in order to motivates the action and giving us some reassurance. I want to double down on the fear right now, because when I was listening to you just now, the fear I think came when you were saying that we need to make these fundamental, long run infrastructure investments of a new Deal type. And right now we're doing, at an international scale, the most massive instantaneous borrowing against the future that we've done since the Great Depression. So if we're already engaged in this really generational borrowing, how are we going to have the capacity to do it again? For environmental transformation, the first thing to be said is the things that you're afraid of are good things to be afraid of, but the things to really be afraid of to really feel in the pit of your stomach, are in fact the changes that are now expressing themselves on the planet, even in the early phases of climate change. I mean, we've warmed the planet one degree so far, and that's been enough to knock pretty much all our systems a kilter. The devastation that we're already seeing is enormous, and it comes with an almost unimaginable price tag if all you were thinking about was the kind of economic challenge that it presents. The latest study I saw on the price of unabated global warming by the end of the century, who was about five hundred and fifty one trillion dollars, which is considerably more money than currently exists on planet Earth. So that's the scale of the challenge, and that's precisely why we should be making as wise investments as we can right now, even in the midst of the kind of panic that surrounds this pandemic. I mean, I think clearly people will look back and see this as one of the few moments when we really did get a sort of break, a pause in order to reset some of our assumptions about the world. And we're at a place where we can change some of those assumptions and do it in ways that make economic sense. What it really takes is some degree of leadership, and of course right now we're coming up empty there. Our problem is, and this is the thing that makes me scared sometimes at night. Climate change, like the coronavirus, is a problem where the answer has to come fast, if it's going to come at all. They're both time tests, and the time is short. So we failed the timed test part of the coronavirus, right. We took off February from effective policy making, and as a result we were really screwed. And the countries that spent February doing the things that needed doing were by and large ended up better off than we did. With climate change. We took off the last thirty years from offensive policy making, and so now we're in really deep trouble as a result, not only are we going to have significant damage, our only chance of avoiding just sort of civilization scale carnage is if we make huge progress in the next decade. The next decade for climate change is the equivalent of what February was for coronavirus. Our chance to get it at least partly right If we are able to internalize that in some way, then we've got a shot. If we're not, then we'll just aimlessly wander through and we'll be in trouble far forwards than anything we're in now. We'll be back in just a moment. One of the ongoing challenges that the whole climate change movement has faced has been a genuine skepticism by many ordinary people at the authority of science. A sense of scientists is disconnected as belonging to elites who don't have the interest of ordinary people at heart. Do you have a sense that the public reaction to science and to scientific authority during the Corona crisis is likely to make a difference in that conflict, because it does seem to me they are translatable. I mean, for example, if we were to get an effective vaccine for Corona, which I myself I am not convinced as a high probability event from all the experts I've spoken to, but it's also a possible event that could in principle, really enhance the prestige of scientific authority, and if we don't, seems at least possible to me that that could further deflate the authority of the scientific community. Yeah, it's a really good question, and I think actually there's some pretty good signs. The news business being what it is, we have no choice to focus on all the knuckleheads who wanted to go out to the bar or were standing around the Michigan Governor's office with AK forty sevens or whatever it was that people were doing. But for the most part, Americans were like, yeah, Okay, if the doctor says we need to stand six feet apart, we best stand six feet apart. I've been pretty pleasantly surprised by how well Americans dealt with the reality that suddenly was thrust upon them. Most people really did turn their lives upside down. The polling seems to show that most people respected the politicians who told them to do that and worked with them to make it done. We're in a weird political fever dream these last years. You know a place where it's very hard to find a center where up is down and down is up. You know where we live in a world of odd conspiracy theories, whether they're about vaccinations or climate change, or chemtrails, or on and on and on down a long and dreary list. It's possible that this pandemic has been enough of a shock to the system that will will help us wake us out of that fever dream a little bit. I've spent an awful lot of time trying to explain to people that physics and chemistry aren't negotiable. You can't force them to compromise, that they're not going to meet you halfway. And that's why these kind of issues are so difficult for our political system. I mean, even at its best, even when it's working correctly, political system is set up to favor compromise. Right. You get groups of people with different opinions about topics and they have to somehow kind of meet in the middle. That's not what coronavirus or climate change are like. They set the terms. If the microbe says stands six feet apart, stands six feet apart. If the carbon dioxide molecule says we can't keep burning stuff, it's getting too hot, then you best pay attention. So there are no silver linings in a pandemic. But if we're going to go through this much trouble, we might as well learn something. And a basic bottom line thing to learn is that reality is real. Doesn't matter if the president stands it is electern and tries to proudbeat the microbe into submission. It could care less. And in a world where we've spent the last twenty thirty years ever more firmly entrenched behind our screens, where reality seems mutable and adaptable and easy to play with, and so on and so forth, this is a pretty good reminder that that's actually not how reality works. At some level. I'm very sympathetic to everything you've said. I see myself as a believer in science. I haven't been out in a bar, nor have I marched on the State House with my a R. Fifteen. That said, I think I might have some subtle philosophical difference with you with respect to how I think about the motivation of the people who did both of those kinds of things. I think, with respect to people who are going to a bar, they're expressing a fundamental human instinct, a towards sociality, towards being with other people, and be towards some desire to look straight in the face of something like corona and say it actually wouldn't be so bad if we individually got it. Then, with respect to the people who are you marching, sometimes even armed. They're expressing what I would call of the libertarian impulse that is distrustful of the way that power functions in the world that we have. And I see both of those impulses the kind of impulse to human sociality, and let's just all get the disease and the libertarian impulse to be distrustful of government authority as important ways of interpreting the world. Now, I agree with you that the laws of physics don't change based on what we would like them to be. But we're talking in all these cases about what we should be doing from the standpoint of policy, and their political judgment does come in. So the standing six feet apart isn't I don't think dictated by the virus. That's a regulatory response to how we should address the underlying question. And we could say, let's let everybody get this virus, and that we'll have terrible consequences for some people, and it might overcome our healthcare systems, it may lead to many, many deaths, but we make the judgment that we shouldn't do that. I mean those to me fall in the realm of human judgment, and I think that responses to climates similarly do I mean, we're talking about very complicated cost benefits, and although I happen to come down on your side of the coin, I do nevertheless see it as a realm of negotiation and discussion and cost benefit where we should do that in the shadow of real science. So on all kinds of counts, I agree with you, But I think the really interesting political question you raise is the one about kind of libertarian impulse. You and I have lived our lives in the shadow of Ronald Reagan, hence in the idea that markets solve all problems. That's been the most powerful impulse political impulse I think of our time on this planet, and I've been suspicious of it from the beginning for a lot of reasons, but I think those suspicions get more powerful all the time. Reagan's great laugh line, as you'll recall, was the nine scariest words in the English language are I'm from the government and I'm here to help. Well, I don't think those are words in the English language. I think the scariest words are we've run out of ventilators, the hillside behind your house is on fire, and those are not problems that you're capable of addressing. By trying to maximize your own wealth. Those are problems that you're capable of addressing when we come together to do things jointly. That's always been the interesting philosophical dilemma around climate change. The reason that the right had so much trouble dealing with it and has been forced to deny it really over and over again, is that there was, at least at this point, no real way to deal with it without strong joint action. I mean, I think the syllogism that formed in a lot of conservative minds over time was markets solve all problems. Markets aren't solving climate change. Therefore climate change is not a problem. That's not a very good syllogism, but it's emotionally comforting. If you spent the last thirty years, you know, marinating in Russia, Limbaugh, then it's an appealing idea and one that an awful lot of people stuck with, including the President in the United States. I want to ask you about the way people form their commitments to bake picture questions like climate change and its relationship to the political tribe that they belong to. I've been struck in recent conversations I've had with friends. There are people who are sort of left science skeptics. For example, they might be skeptical of vaccines. There are antivactors left and right, but there is a thing of skeptical of certain respects of science people on the left, and yet those same people tend to be very clear that climate change science is real, whereas on the right, I would expect a pretty close affiliation between people who are skeptical of science on say, vaccination, and are also very skeptical of climate change. So there's a kind of fascinating mismatch there. My working hypothesis, and I have no idea if there's anything to this about why that might be. So, is that people form their beliefs in this tribal way, almost in the way that they form religious beliefs. Well, I think that actually you have an interesting kind of natural experiment here with climate change about where the source of some of this all comes from. If you look at around the world, very very very few places, really none have this level of skepticism around climate change that we do here. It was really only in the US that climate denial became a serious thing. You know, look at conservative leaders and other parts of the world. Angelo mercal conservative and yet very powerful voice for action on climate change, and you can have a dozen different examples. I think that it's pretty clear in retrospect, thanks to a lot of great investigative reporting, what the source of that is. Thirty years ago we now know the fossil fuel industry knew everything there was to know about climate change. Exxon, biggest company in the world in the nineteen eighties, had a great scientific staff. Their product was carbon. Of course, they set out to understand it, and understand it they did. They've discovered in their archives graphs that show with unerring accuracy what the CO two concentration and temperature would be in twenty twenty. But of course what they didn't do was tell any of the rest of us. Instead, the industry spent a huge amount of money building the kind of architecture of deceit and denial and disinformation that kept us locked for thirty years in a totally phony debate about whether or not global warming was real, a debate that both sides knew the answer to at the beginning. It's just one of them was willing to lie. And when you're willing to lie in that way and poison the debate in that way, and when you have unlimited funds, when you're able to go hire everybody who told the same lie about the tobacco industry and put them to work in this new context, well you get things done. The Koch brothers, who are the biggest influences in our political system probably over the last twenty or thirty years, are also our biggest oil and gas parents. I mean, that's how they had the money to buy a political party and take physics and turn it into a part as an issue. So I think that it's worth always bearing that in mind, that we've been guided down this path by people who knew precisely what they were doing. So I just want to close by asking you, do you feel more optimistic about climate change than you did when you first began to write and advocate about the subject. I feel way less optimistic, I fear, than I did back in nineteen eighty nine, when I wasn't very optimistic then. I mean, I wrote the first book about this, and its cheerful title was the End of Nature. But I would not have predicted either how fast change was going to come. It turns out that scientists are conservative by nature and dramatically under predict not overestimate change one faces, and I would not have predicted just how sclerotic our political systems, especially the US, would be in response that we would be warned powerfully of a huge crisis and then do nothing about it. On the other hand, the thing that makes me hopeful that at the very least will make a fight out of this has been the rise over the last decade of movements to try and do something about it, because that's clearly what it's going to take now. I tried to help start that process with one of the first iterations of this three fifty dot org, which became the first kind of global grassroots climate movement, and that's made really, really really gratifying for me to watch the emergence of so many others in the last few years, to watch extinction rebellion, to watch the Green New Deal in the Sunrise movement in this country, to watch the almost miraculous emergence of this cadre of millions upon millions of high school students and junior high school students around the world demanding change. So I don't know what that adds up to in terms of optimism and pessimism. We're in a very difficult place where we have to move very very fast, and as with coronavirus having delayed this long, there's no longer any outcome that doesn't involve lots and lots of trauma, lots and lots of damage. But we know what to do in the broadest terms. We have the resources, the technologies and things that we could employ, and we've built movements that can try and push political will in the right direction. It's a titanic battle, maybe the most titanic battle that human beings have ever engaged in, and we don't know the outcome. It's not like other political questions where over time you had some sense that the right thing was eventually going to happen. We don't know that we can do it fast enough. We're going to find out, and the only variable we can affect is how many of us push how hard for change, and that's why we push hard. Bill. Thank you very much for your analysis of where we stand on climate in the moment of Corona, and thank you much more fundamentally for all of your work over these years to draw attention to the immediacy of much. Reflecting on my conversation with Bill, I wish he had been able to end in a more optimistic place than he did. I myself walked away from our conversation shocked by one fact and scared by another. It turns out that not driving too much, not flying too much really don't have the transformative degree of impact that I might have imagined otherwise. And I'm terrified by the reality that the only way to transform our global emissions is by a major, long term generational investment in the transition to solar power and to win power. Because that would have been challenging under the best of circumstances. But at a moment when the world is borrowing against our future in unprecedented ways in order to avoid an immediate crisis of depression like magnitude, it's going to be much more difficult to muster public support for a long term, extremely expensive investment in the transformation of how we generate and store energy. Contrary to what sometimes may seem to be the case in the middle of this crisis, there actually be some finite limitation on the degree to which we can borrow against our future, and the moment we start thinking to ourselves that there might be some trade off between how much we borrow and what our future looks like we're going to see a softening of willingness to make major, long term generational investments in climate change. If there's a glimmer of a hint of something positive to say here, it's that we are all recognizing in the midst of this coronavirus crisis that we do need to listen to scientists, and we do need to rely on governments in order to coordinate our action. Coordinated action and reliance on science are going to be crucial to any kind of productive response to the climate change challenge that we face. I wish I could conclude with something profoundly optimistic to say, but if Bill couldn't, I certainly can't either. Until the next time I speak to you, be careful, be safe, and be well. Deep Background is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. Our producer is Lydia gene Cott, with research help from Zooe Winn and mastering by Jason Gambrel and Martin Gonzalez. Our showrunner is Sophie mckibbon. Our theme music is composed by Luis Garratt. Special thanks to the Pushkin Brass Malcolm Gladwell, Jacob Weisberg and Mia Loebell. I'm Noah Feldman. I also write a regular column for Bloomberg Opinion, which you can find at Bloomberg dot com slash Feldman. To discover Bloomberg's original slate of podcasts, go to Bloomberg dot com slash podcasts. And one last thing. I just wrote a book called The Arab Winter, A Tragedy. I would be delighted if you checked it out. You can always let me know what you think on Twitter about this episode, or the book or anything else. My handle is Noah R. Feldman. This is deep background