From Doom to Hope: Katharine Hayhoe on Bridging the Climate Gap

David & Ed chat with renowned scientist, author and Canadian, Dr. Katharine Hayhoe who argues that hope—not doom—is what drives action. 

Dr. Hayhoe is one of the world’s most prominent climate communicators and known for crossing political, religious, and cultural lines to connect with audiences that most climate advocates can’t or won't reach. It's an engaging discussion that delves into the psychology of despair, the limits of data in changing minds and behaviour, and whether hope still has a fighting chance. 

Show Notes:

Available on the episode page on our website.

About Our Guest:

Katharine Hayhoe is an atmospheric scientist whose research focuses on understanding what climate change means for people and the places where we live. She is the Chief Scientist for The Nature Conservancy and a Horn Distinguished Professor and Endowed Professor of Public Policy and Public Law in the Dept. of Political Science at Texas Tech University. She is the author of the book, Saving Us: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World, has given a TED talk with over 4 million views, and hosted the PBS digital series Global Weirding. Katharine has been named one of TIME's 100 Most Influential People, Foreign Policy’s 100 Leading Thinkers, and the United Nations Champion of the Environment.

Produced by Amit Tandon & Bespoke Podcasts

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Ed Whittingham: Hi, I'm Ed Whittingham and you're listening to Energy vs Climate, the show where my co-host, David Keith, Sara Hastings-Simon and I debate today's climate and energy challenges. On July 2nd, David and I recorded a live webinar with a renowned scientist, author, and Canadian Dr. Katharine Hayhoe. We spoke with her about the themes of climate despair and climate communication drawn from her book, Saving Us.

In her more recent work confronting what she calls the new Climate denial Doomerism. You might know Katharine from her TED talk with over 4 million views or from her PBS series, global Weirding. She's one of the world's most prominent climate communicators and known for crossing political, religious, and cultural lines to connect with audiences.

And most of us climate advocates can't or won't reach. We dug into the psychology of spare limits of data and changing minds and behavior and whether hope still has a fighting chance. Katharine is superbly articulate on these and many other topics, so I think you'll get a lot out of our conversation.

Now, here's the show.

Many of the impacts of climate change today were pretty accurately forecasted by climate scientists decades ago and public perception. Of the climate problem has been around for decades too. In fact, it was David who first introduced me to the New Zealand newspaper article called Coal Consumption Affecting Climate That AC accurately predicted the Greenhouse Effect and Climate Change, and that was back in 1912.

In fact, the first time, uh, if memory serves that climate ended up in a New York Times article was in the early 1950s, while the, the scientific evidence for climate change is getting sharper. So too is the despair that many people feel about the problems. It's not hard because the, the headlines can be relentless.

My favorite sports writer, Kahal Kelly in the Globe and Mail, just wrote about the blistering heat at Wimbledon in the context of climate change. And I read it, and all, all I really wanted to know is how no Nova Djokovich did in his first round match. And now lately, I'm noticing a kind of like, what's the point fatalism that's been setting in, and even among climate activists, advocates like myself.

Uh, in May, 2024, the Guardian published an exclusive survey of hundreds of IPCC scientists, many of whom admitted they feel hopeless. Infuriated and scared by the problem and government's failure to get a true handle on the problem. So it does seem like doom is having a cultural moment. And while despair might feel honest, uh, it can be just as paralyzing as denial.

And today we want to talk about that problem, and we also want to talk about the antidote to the despair with one of the world's top experts on the topic. Dr. Katherine Hayhoe is a Canadian atmospheric scientist whose research focuses on. Understanding the impacts of climate change on people and the planet.

She's the chief scientist for the Nature Conservancy and a distinguished professor endowed chair at Texas Tech University. She has received numerous awards, honorary degrees, and recognitions for her work, including being named, named to the Time 100 most influential people in 2014 and a United Nations champion of the Earth.

And Katherine is also the author of the book, saving Us a Climate Scientist Cause for Hope and Healing in a Divided World, which we'll talk about today. So Katherine, thanks for joining us on Energy versus Climate. 

[00:03:32] Dr. Katharine Hayhoe: Thank you. It was such a pleasure to be here with you all. 

[00:03:35] Ed Whittingham: David, before I, I dive in with Katherine, anything you wanna say off the top?

No. Great intro. I was looking forward to Katherine a And sir, maybe just right off the top, Katherine like doom as a new form of paralysis. And, and just so we get our lex con straight, when we say doom or doom, is that the same as, as fatalism in the context of climate? 

[00:03:55] Dr. Katharine Hayhoe: I'm glad you're asking about that because many people who are very concerned about this issue and who seriously doubt whether we can fix it, they often say, oh, well, when you talk about Doomers and you're talking about me, no, I'm not.

When I say Doism, I'm talking about people who are 100% convinced that nothing, absolutely nothing can be done to even mitigate the smallest amount of the consequences. And even worse, rather than then adopting a pet and going for walks in nature as they should be doing, they instead get back on social media and try to convince everybody else as if it's some new religion fery, that we're all doomed.

So when I talk about doism, that's what I'm talking about, and it is a psychological defense mechanism that gives us comfort and relief when we're confronted with an overwhelming challenge that we don't know what to do about. So it all goes back to the fact that even as we climate scientists, as that survey showed, it's not enough to know what's happening and why it's happening.

If we don't know what to do about it, we can't fix it. 

[00:05:00] Ed Whittingham: Got you. Now I'm going back to probably the question I should have asked off the top. Tell us about your personal journey. You're born in Toronto you've spent your prep professional career in the United States, and also if you can, because you've been public about your faith and how your faith impacts your work on climate as well, which tends to be unusual.

And then I think you called it like stepping outta the closet to say, Hey, I'm a devout Christian, and I I work as a climate scientist too. So just, I'd love to, to to just hear your background and then we'll dive into more of the, the details of, of your writing and your academic research. 

[00:05:32] Dr. Katharine Hayhoe: Sure. Uh, so yes, I'm from Toronto, Etobicoke specifically.

'Cause people always wanna know what part of Toronto it is. Um, grew up there, moved to Columbia, not British Columbia, but Columbia, south America when I was nine years old. Um, spent a lot of time there until I graduated high school. And that was a really formative experience for me because, you know, if you've ever spent time in a low income country, and this was, you know, back in the eighties, in the middle of the, the narco traficante and all of, all of that going on, I had friends and I knew people who lived in homes that they built themselves brick by brick.

When there was a flood, their homes were washed away. When there was a storm, nobody had power, including us. Um, when there was a drought, nobody had clean water. And so it gave me a very different perspective on how impacted we. ER and how insulated we often are in North America to extreme weather events.

So I came back to Toronto to go to school, went to UFT, studied physics and astronomy. And in fact, actually a lot of us who are climate scientists have have backgrounds in, in physics and astronomy. David, what, what was your undergrad degree in instead of curiosity?

[00:06:39] David Keith: Uh, University of Toronto Physics and Astronomy.

[00:06:42] Dr. Katharine Hayhoe: Are you serious? 

[00:06:43] David Keith: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I even, no, I even, it's funny to think about it. Um, I found an old t-shirt from my year that has, I don't know, people dropping an apple and something else off the leading top of that physics tower, right? Yeah. Yeah. That's where I started. 

[00:06:57] Dr. Katharine Hayhoe: That is too funny. And the fact that I didn't even know this will know.

Uh, what year did you graduate, if you don't mind me asking? 

[00:07:03] David Keith: Uh, so I started in 82, so 84, something like that. 

[00:07:06] Dr. Katharine Hayhoe: Okay. So we, we, we didn't overlap, but we were close. Uh, probably took many of the same classes, probably had some of the same professors. And obviously that is a wonderful, wonderful background to being a climate scientist.

So at that time I was certainly learning about planetary atmospheres. I was learning all of the physics that you need to understand what's happening to our planet as you yourself did David as well. But it wasn't until it was my third year, the spring semester of my third year when I needed another breadth requirement.

And that's one of the benefits I think of our university education system is that we're required to take Breads requirements, not just the courses in our majors. And so I looked around and that year there was a brand new course, which would not have been there when you were there, David. 'cause it was just brand new, taught by Danny Harvey, who had just come from the National Center for Atmospheric Research, where he had done a postdoc with Steve Schneider, who was a leader in our field.

And he, there was a brand new class on climate change over in the geography department. And so I thought, well that looks interesting. Why not take it 

[00:08:08] David Keith: so neat to connect these dots up? So Steve ended up being quite, Steve Schneider quite a mentor to me. I've spent quite a bit of time with him. Um, but Danny Harvey, I, I, he came to Toronto after I was there.

I know him a little bit, but not well. Yeah. 

[00:08:20] Dr. Katharine Hayhoe: Exactly. And then I ended up working in California, leading the first assessment for anywhere in North America and one of the first in the world that actually compared the outcome of a higher versus a lower future. So really quantifying human agency and the choices we make.

And Steve was a key member of that team, so I got to, uh, spend a good amount of time with Steve too. And of course he's no longer with us, but he's a tremendous influence on, I think almost all of us in the field. And if anyone hasn't read, if you haven't read his book, science As a Contact Sport, I highly recommend it because Steve was involved in this since the seventies.

So anyway, so back to UofT. So taking that class really surprised me because. I had sadly, like many of us still do today. I had thought of climate change as a future issue, not a present issue. I had thought of climate change as exclusively an environmental issue, which it is, but I wasn't thinking of it as a human issue in terms of how it affects our food, our water, our infrastructure, our health, the economy, and much more.

And I didn't realize that the exact skillset that I had been developing in physics and astronomy and that you had too, David, was the exact skillset that we actually need to understand how humans are impacting our planet. So after taking that class, I thought to myself, well, here is this. This global issue that is already affecting people today, and it doesn't just affect all of us.

It disproportionately affects the poorest and most marginalized and most vulnerable people who've done the least to cause the problem in the first place. And that, to me, makes it an issue of. Justice. It is not fair that the people who did the most to cause the problem are bearing the brunt of the impacts.

And so for me, that's where my faith came in because I truly believe that we are to love each other and to care for each other, especially those less fortunate than us. And you know, growing up in Columbia, I knew firsthand what that looked like. Like it was not an abstract term. I could put faces and names on exactly who was being impacted and how.

And so I thought to myself, it's such a serious issue. How can I not do everything I can to help fix it? And surely we'll fix it in probably about five or 10 years because that may sound foolish, but it was just coming off the Montreal Protocol. I. So when scientists identified that CFCs and other ozone depleting substances that we were producing were destroying the ozone hole, um, the world acted very quickly to legislate that.

And so I thought, well, you know, give it another 10 years and maybe I can go back to studying galaxy clustering, which was what I was doing at the time. So that was what led me to then pivot to atmospheric science in graduate school, to specifically focus the research I was doing on actionable science. I didn't want to just publish in scientific journals.

I wanted to do research that could actually be used to make decisions. And so initially my research focused on looking at the other gases in addition to CO2 that are contributing to this issue. In 1999, I led a study showing that the costs of the US meeting the Kyoto targets, that's how old this was, the cost of the US meeting, the Kyoto targets, could be reduced 25% if they just included methane along with the CO2.

But then I got pulled into a climate impact assessment for the Great Lakes. Being one of the Canadian representatives on that. And I realized that we already have to prepare for the impacts we can no longer avoid. And people were working with really outdated, clunky, inaccurate information when it came to localized climate projections.

So that was what really started my interest in trying to make sure that people have the information they need to build resilience and to adapt to the changes that are already happening, as well as, as I mentioned we did for California show people, what is the difference in the future impacts, depending on the choices we make today.

Because that ties right into what I was talking about with if we don't know what to do and we don't know what doing it will make a difference. We won't do anything. And if we think that it's all gonna happen no matter what, we have no impetus to mitigate. But if we know that this is gonna happen, if we do nothing, but this is gonna happen if we do everything we can, and there's a huge difference between them that gives us the reasons we need to act.

[00:12:23] Ed Whittingham: Gotcha. I'm now thinking back to, uh, my own dabbling in astronomy. I took a course called Planet Stars and Galaxies when I was at McGill, probably around the same time you're studying at U of T, but I think it would be a stretch for me to draw a link between that course and what I'm doing today. I do want to go back to this comment you made about about your life as a Christian and the science scientists and liking it to coming out of the closet.

What, what do you mean by that? Like what closet in particular are you talking about? 

[00:12:51] Dr. Katharine Hayhoe: Well, so for a long time it's sort of conventional wisdom, especially in the US I would say that faith and science are, are sort of at opposite ends of the spectrum. And the fact that I became a climate scientist, specifically because of my faith-based values, not despite them, and then moving to the US to go to graduate school, that was where it, I finally figured out, it dawned on me, and again, this was back in the nineties, so it was a while ago, it dawned on me that a lot of Christians didn't think the way I did about science in general and about climate change specifically.

And in fact, many people who I called friends or attended church with thought climate change was a hoax. I said to myself, well, why would they think that? What does that have to do with our faith? We're, aren't we reading the same Bible? And isn't that Bible embodies the exact values that led me to become a climate scientist?

So in the US it's true that if you look across the scale white evangelical Christians and white Catholics are at the bottom of the list of those who care least about climate change, or I should say the top of the list of those who care least. But it's really fascinating though, because when you do the social science to delve into why that is, it turns out it's not where they go to church or don't go to church.

It's actually dictating their opinion. In fact, 40% of people in the US who self-identify as evangelical Christian don't go to church. So where are they getting their opinions from? It turns out it is 100% political identity, so it's not as in conflict as you would think. It's just sort of a s, it seems like a surface contradiction.

But once you start to dig down and you listen to what Pope Francis has said, said about climate change, and of course the new Pope Leo, what the Archbishop of Canterbury or patriarch by Fon says about climate change. You realize that if you actually read the Bible and you take it seriously, I think you'd be at the front of the line demanding climate action.

And increasingly, a lot of younger Christians are. 

[00:14:44] Ed Whittingham: Mm-hmm. I think in just my own career, I've on many occasions been invited to speak to, uh, to faith-based groups, and I found there's a, such a, a natural hook in when you talk about it, just about care and compassion and stewardship of, of the earth and of oneself.

Let's diving now into, and I should say doom. Doism, same thing. Do you have a preferred term? 

[00:15:08] Dr. Katharine Hayhoe: Um, Doomerism, I think. 

[00:15:10] Ed Whittingham: Okay. Let's have the r let's add the er. So what evidence is there for Doism being on the rise in society and let's sort of, I. Let's, uh, limit it to say North America and evidence like the coverage in mainstream media or public opinion polling or just what we see in pop culture, how do we know it's on the rise relative to, you know, even just five, 10 years ago?

[00:15:33] Dr. Katharine Hayhoe: That's a great question. So, um, although I followed the public opinion data very closely, and it is very useful in categorizing dismissive, for example. So there are people at the far end of the spectrum who say climate change isn't real. It's just to hoax. There's nothing we can do to fix it. Ironically, it's not a spectrum.

It's really sort of a circle because I feel like in terms of the results of their convictions, doism and dismissive are, are almost the same. But I haven't yet seen an analysis where, where they explicitly separate out the people who are absolutely a hundred percent convinced. Nothing we do would make a difference.

So why do I feel like it's on the rise? Well, um, I spend a lot of my outreach time on social media, um, originally back on Twitter in the day and now, um, more on like LinkedIn, blue Sky Threads, Instagram, substack, you name it. And it was really interesting because I think it was about, when was it? I, it was in a January and I feel like it was about three or four years ago in a January where, um, I, being a scientist, I monitor what I see and what I hear on social media very carefully.

I see it as sort of the, the, the first bits of signal emerging from the noise. Typically, I get a lot of attacks on social media. It's very common for me to get attacked on social media, but most of the time it's people who say climate change isn't real. Now that January, I remember I started to see to the point where it was about 10 to 20% of the attacks I was getting started to be from people who were saying, there's nothing we can do about it.

You're a hopium pedler, you are lying about climate solutions, that type of thing. And I remember being so shocked. I'm like. You are calling a climate scientist who spends their entire life telling people how bad it is. A hopium pedaler, like, I'm not sure. I'm the one who wrote the National Climate Assessment chapter on all of the things we know we don't know and how much worse it could be than what we actually think it is.

And I'm like, that's hopium. So I remember being totally shocked by that. But unfortunately since then, it's just increased. And today, sometimes 50% of the attacks I get are from people who say, uh, there's nothing we can do about it. You're selling false hope. You know, you shouldn't be telling people that there, that, that we can fix it.

Um, so I would love to see more hard data on it, but just anecdotally, I have absolutely seen a rise, as has Michael Mann, who also spends a lot of time online as has have many of my other colleagues. 

[00:17:56] Ed Whittingham: Got you. I, I, I think of Sarah Palin's comment, uh, after Barack Obama's win when she asked, uh, rhetorically, how is that Ty Hope working out for y'all?

But yeah, for me and attacks as well. Uh, typically I've been attacked and I just had, cause to re-listen, I'd save this to a voicemail. I, I ran the Pembina Institute, which is the national, uh, environmental group, and I listened to a voicemail with someone who was, just haranguing and abusive and whatnot.

I'd saved it in case we needed it for the cops. And, uh, it was all about sort of being the, the Doism and you're a peddle of Doom and Dismay. I had a colleague named, uh, Simon Dyer, and, uh, he would get most of our media hits, and I jokingly call him Simon Dyer, DIRE, because he would just sort of trigger people, and I will, full disclosure, Katharine in the lead up to this show, uh, at Energy Versus Climate, we both got a raft of new followers.

But we did more than in recent memory. You as a guest, we got some people saying, oh, and, and attacking you for exactly what you say, you know, pedalling, pedaling, uh, what did you call it? Hopium. Hopium 

[00:19:04] Dr. Katharine Hayhoe: Hopium. 

[00:19:06] Ed Whittingham: Hopium, that's right. Sorry. Peddling hopium. Pedaling hopium. 

[00:19:09] Dr. Katharine Hayhoe: That's a really good, that's a really good metaphor, by the way.

[00:19:13] David Keith: You smoke that in a hopium pipe, I believe. 

[00:19:17] Ed Whittingham: Yeah. But, but why is doism, why do you or others liken it to being the new climate denial? Because on the outside, to the outside, I, it would seem that there are two very different things. And then what do you think, or who do you think is really driving that shift?

[00:19:34] Dr. Katharine Hayhoe: So I've spent a lot of time studying climate denial, studying the arguments that people use, which can be broadly categorized into five groups. It's not real, it's not humans. It's not bad. We can't fix it. And then number five. It's too late. So what these, these sound different on the surface, but if you look below, what is the goal of every single one of these arguments?

The goal is to do nothing. That's the goal. People who say the science isn't real. They fly in airplanes and they use stoves and refrigerators every day. And it's the same nonlinear fluid dynamics and thermal mechanics that explains the, the heating of the climate system and the response of the, of the climate patterns to that, that explains how those normal everyday things work.

So they aren't, their goal isn't actually to get people to reject basic physics. Their goal is to prevent us from implementing solutions. You mentioned earlier how we've known for so long the digging up and burning coal and gas and oil produce, heat trapping gases that are building up in the atmosphere, wrapping an extra blanket around the planet.

The first calculations, the first climate model was calculated by hand by Pontis in the 1890s. And the numbers he got for how much the whole world would warm, as well as how much each individual band latitude band would warm were right on, uh, compared to what we get outta the most powerful supercomputers today.

So we've known this for a long time, but when did people start? To question the science. When did they start to say, oh, it's not real. Or You scientists are lining your pockets, or your Swiss bank account with government grants, or CO2 is plant food or warmer is better. It wasn't until the 1990s. 

[00:21:15] David Keith: Yeah, that's my impression too.

[00:21:17] Dr. Katharine Hayhoe: Yeah. The eighties and nineties was when climate change moved from a future issue that you could comfortably ignore to a present issue. Um, the really bad heat waves In the 1988 Jim Hansen from NASA testifying to Congress that climate change is real. The first IPCC report came out in 1990. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change was signed in 92.

Denial raised its head when there was a risk of solutions being implemented. So that's what Doism has in common with denial is the end result is the same. If you can't fix it, if it's too late, why do anything? That is what all of these objections have always been out since about, since the beginning is making sure we don't do anything until it truly is too late.

So David, you mentioned you've sort of seen that too. How, how would you add to that? I 

[00:22:06] David Keith: think certainly when I was first involved in climate science and policy stuff kind of starting in the late eighties, you really didn't hear much of that and there was this kind of way in which it was even connected to the mainstream policy communities.

It was a small thing, but it wasn't denied in the same way. And the denial really got going more in the, in the mid nineties. I think partly there were these funded efforts. It's one of them actually Exxon funded that targeted me and others after we did that first expert elicitation on climate sensitivity.

So yeah, I think that's when it, I started to notice it. 

[00:22:41] Dr. Katharine Hayhoe: Ironically, I was actually collaborating with some of the Exxon scientists who were doing the work on the non CO2 greenhouse gases, and they were excellent scientists and the work was excellent showing how other gases besides CO2 could also help reductions, but really there's no way around it if we don't tackle CO2, which is what a lot of your work focuses on today, right?

Oh, 

[00:23:00] David Keith: yeah. Exxon had a bunch of great people. I worked with Harun, uh, Khashoggi pretty closely, and he was one of the same ones I really appreciated. Yeah, no, I think they had Exxon. Exxon actually had a much stronger central research arm in general than any of the other big oil majors, so it's not surprising they had more depth.

[00:23:15] Ed Whittingham: So Katharine, this reminds me, I've been talking about denial in a similar, slightly different way, and I'd, I'd always say there are five stages of denial that people go through, and particularly companies who I've seen and, and those, especially in oil and gas, is with climate, that they, they deny there is a problem than they deny that they're part of the problem.

Then they deny that there's any technology to fix the problem. Then they deny that they have any money to pay for the technology to fix the problem. But the fifth one was always, and then finally they agreed to start fixing the problem. You're instinctly replacing that fifth one. They replaced it with denying that there's still time left to fix the problem.

[00:23:54] Dr. Katharine Hayhoe: That that is definitely sort of a variant of it, or here's a solution that doesn't actually work. So yes. 

[00:24:00] David Keith: One thing that's great puzzling is, is you're talking about this happening just at the time that it feels to me like real action. The problem is moved up. So I mean, the. Extraordinary pace of spending on clean energy, solar and wind and, and batteries and nuclear as well.

And the sense that actually emissions are probably gonna peak about now. That's really different than a few years ago. Much, much larger efforts on decarbonization and also on adaptation in different ways. So that feels very different, and yet it's the same time that people are saying there's no solutions.

[00:24:31] Dr. Katharine Hayhoe: That's absolutely correct, and I mean, I live in the state of Texas now, which has more wind and energy than any other state. Their neck and neck with California for the most utility scale solar of any state. They've got five different battery. Its storage technologies on the grid. They've got deep geothermal going in.

I mean, the solutions are all over the state of Texas, which is the traditional home of the oil and gas industry, and speaking of Canada, Pakistan installed more solar energy last year than Canada has in its entire history. China installed more solar the year before than the US has in its entire history.

So there's no question that solutions are, are going gangbusters. And so it actually makes me think of that famous line rage, rage against the dying of the light. It's like the closer we get to the societal wide tipping point towards a clean energy society, the more strongly those who have controlled the balance of power and wealth in the past, which include not just the fossil fuel industry, but also um, politicians whose entire base is based on them, the more they try to prevent this tipping point from happening.

And I actually feel like that's what we're seeing in the United States right now. 

[00:25:34] Ed Whittingham: Mm-hmm. I also think of the expression, I'm mad as hell and I'm not gonna take it anymore. 

[00:25:38] David Keith: I'm more skeptical that it'll be a full tipping phenomena. I think, I think I see this more about sort of, I. Complicated political batteries and battles and technology diffusion curves.

And I think we're at a stage where getting uh, intermittent renewables into electricity grids looks really good economically. It makes a lot of sense and, and are doing it. Electric vehicles are easy, but then there's gonna be parts that are gonna be harder decarbonize. So I expect more like a classic scur and not a tipping point.

[00:26:05] Dr. Katharine Hayhoe: I should be specific. I think the tipping points are sectorial. 

[00:26:08] David Keith: Yeah, fair enough. 

[00:26:09] Dr. Katharine Hayhoe: Yeah, and, and some, you're right, like some, some might not be tipping points, but for example, penetration of electric vehicles, they've shown what the percentage tipping point is for and things like that. And you know, if you look at the price of solar plus storage, there's a cost based tipping point which can vary country to country based on the cost of literacy, not country.

So yeah, there's definitely refinement. There's no one global tipping point, but we're reaching more and more of those points I think. 

[00:26:32] Ed Whittingham: And I wonder, so we do have the world moving on climate. Uh, we had a good conversation with David Wallace Wells late last year, just about the US Of course, it's an important, but global action doesn't hinge on the US anymore with everything that China's doing.

And now it is directly incentivized to make sure the world gets serious on climate change. But from your research and thinking of the perception of risk and then data around that risk and the psychology of belief and behavioral change, what. Actually changes his opinion, what changes opinions, and then what changes behavior.

[00:27:10] Dr. Katharine Hayhoe: That is the trillion dollar question, ed. Um, and I remember when I was working on that assessment of the Great Lakes when they, they brought in somebody who was an expert in messaging and framing to speak to us, and this was over 20 years ago. And up until that point, I had adhered to the classic scientific perspective that the facts and just the facts are more than enough to get everything done that you need.

Just tell people how bad it is and everybody will do the right thing. And when I learned about the science and that there even was a science to messaging and framing and human behavior and how we reacted track information, I remember feeling like scales had fallen from my eyes. So two of the leaders in that field are Tony Litz at Yale and Ed Mayback at George Mason University.

And Ed just reminded me the other day of how I just, you know, went on the internet, looked for anybody who was doing anything related to this. I found Ed's name and I just cold called him and he remembers picking up the phone. I introduced myself. I said, I need to know everything you know about how to effectively communicate about climate change.

Because if we don't fix this thing, we are screwed. And so I am willing to do whatever the science says needs to be done. Now, typically, most of us still think, well, you know, load on the doom, tell people how bad it is, how much worse it's getting, how absolutely catastrophic and disastrous it's gonna be, and everybody will do the right thing.

We've been doing that for years and even decades, and here we are. 

[00:28:38] David Keith: Yeah. I, I kinda wanna jump in. I mean, how much of this is really caused by the overreach and over claims of the kind of climate science community? So, partly was the focus on 1.5 with the messaging that 1.5 was actually some global tipping point.

So if you really believe the messaging that IPCC helped to get out there, that I, there was a sort of sharp tipping point at 1.5 that was scientifically determined, which of course isn't true. If you believe that and we're past 1.5, then. And it's actually rational to say we're doomed and there's nothing to do.

And, and I think those two messages can't be untangled. I've been thinking a lot about, I have a, uh, I'm writing a book, I'm going back to some of this stuff. I have a taught energy in climate classes for decades, and I have a standard quiz zero where I ask students both estimate total damages from climate change is a fraction of the economy late in the century and what we should spend.

And they, they really do talk about existential risk and they really think that climate change will, some of them even cut the economy in half. Uh, you know, whereas typical esters are more like a few percent that century or later half of the century. And I think that that oversell is part of the reason the DOR resin is there.

[00:29:41] Dr. Katharine Hayhoe: Well, um, I agree with some of what you said, but let me, let me push back on a bit of it. So first of all, totally agree. 1.5 is not a tipping point. Um, there's no evidence suggesting that that is a specific tipping point, but there is evidence suggesting tipping points exist. We just don't know precisely where they are.

And the further and faster we push the planet, the closer we get to specific tipping points in the climate system. Now, the IPCC had a report called the 1.5 Degree report that basically assessed what's gonna happen at different amounts of warming. And I really like their conclusions, and I think you probably do too, David.

Their conclusions were, every bit of warming matters, every action matters, every choice matters. 

[00:30:19] David Keith: That's what the text says. I think for my part, I lost a lot of faith in IPCC and I think a lot of other scientists did too. That's what the text said, which is true. But the way that it was rolled out with European Climate Foundation, others with the knowledge and agreement of of IPCC leadership was this kind of eight years to save the narrative.

So of course they'd been given the 1.5 number politically and they just assessed 1.5 versus two and showed every little bit matters, which we knew before the assessment. Big deal. But the whole framing of the narrative was that it was, you know, a scientist says thing, and I think that certainly backfired.

It made me, that's when I left, stopped being involved in IPCC, 'cause I feel like it fundamentally turned IPCC in an advocacy shop, non assessment shop. 

[00:31:07] Dr. Katharine Hayhoe: You are absolutely right that there is no scientific basis for that. And in fact, I had a, a Twitter thread back in the day that w that basically explained how it is that we have eight degrees until we reach some ledge that we fall off of.

And that messaging is completely counterproductive because when, when you reach the ledge, people think it's all over. And the same with the climate countdown clock and things like that. In fact, I, I have a little, um, YouTube series called Global Weirding, and I even have a, you know, is, is Two Degrees the Magic number?

No, not even Two degrees is the magic number. But what the text actually says, which we agree on is every bit of warming matters. And so it's true that some in the scientific community, even more in the activist community and many in the media, emphasize the negative results only because our human brain is built to share negative.

Information. And so there's more to it than that, David. It turns out that, you know, most of our media sources these days are for profit. I mean, we have the CBC, there's the B, B, C, but most news sources, they want the clicks and the eyeballs to get the ad revenue. And back in the day, as they said, if it bleeds, it leads.

And these days, a brand new study across 60, sorry, I saw you last year across 64 countries. It's just, you know, showing that humans are humans no matter where we live. They found that information about bad news, about climate change. Perfectly true, bad news. But you know, this white glacier or the, you know, the glacier collapse in Switzerland, or terrible news about the, you know, whatever latest studies come out about the Atlantic Murano over c turning, circulation, bad news incentivizes sharing on social media.

So part of the business model is sharing bad news. But what this study found, and, and let me just reiterate what I said. If bad news was enough to get it done, I would be sharing bad news with the best of them. I could be the absolute queen of bad news. I mean, that's what I do. But what this research showed is that the bad news gets people to share information, but it actually is the absolute worst at getting them to do something about it.

So then the researchers say, well, what actually incentivizes people to act. And they found across 64 countries that knowing what to do and seeing examples of positive solutions, which, uh, builds what they call efficacy. The idea that if I do something, if we do something, will it make a difference?

Efficacy coupled with. Positive emotions, not negative emotions we're the most effective at incentivizing people to support policy, call their representative, join a climate action group, have a conversation about climate change, make decisions about whether to keep their finances, all of the individual actions that scientists have identified that make the biggest difference when an individual does them.

So this sounds totally counterintuitive to a lot of people though, and then that's why they accuse me of sharing hopium. But what I'm actually doing is I'm sharing the science and what's fascinating to me, and I know this is a bit provocative, is that a lot of people who accept the physical science of climate change, they deny the social science of how humans absorb information and use it to make decisions.

[00:34:10] Ed Whittingham: You know, it kind of reminds me. Of a project that you're involved in the Alberta Climate Narratives Project, and I'd like to talk about that because many within the EVC audience were in Canada, many are in Alberta, work in or adjacent to the oil and gas sector. And this is a place in my sort of pop cultural understanding is where you have high levels of cognitive dissonance, where we've got people who are in a sector and they read it, they understand the science, and they know, you know, by unearthing more fossil fuels and helping to combust them, that's making the climate.

Problem worse. But then they themselves want to do something about the climate problem. Many of them are, but then some people get into this cognitive dissonance or the state of disequilibrium where it's hard to hold those two opposing notions in one's head, and as a result, you shut down and then that leads to inaction.

Or it can lead to doism or it can lead to denial of the problem. But maybe tell us a little bit more when you worked with George Marshall, uh, who you've called a, a close colleague about the Alberta Climate Narratives Project, and what do we need to know about communicating climate in, in particular in oil and gas producing jurisdictions like Alberta?

[00:35:19] Dr. Katharine Hayhoe: Well, it was fascinating to me when George was working in Alberta, because of course I live in the Alberta of the United States, which is Texas. I would say that it's hard to put an exact number on it, but somewhere between 99 and 99.9% of, of what we perceive as rejection of the science is actually solution aversion.

We think that the solutions pose a far greater risk to us than any potential impacts. So we think that the solutions pose a, a financial risk to what puts food on the fam on the table. For our family, we think they pose an ideological risk. We think that they are opposed to our values. And it was really embodied by I think some conversations I've had in Texas over the years.

I was speaking to a group of farmers a number of years ago about how we see these trends in both natural variability and in more extreme rainfall, longer, more extreme droughts, shifting seasons. And their smart people, they follow the data and they were tracking. And at the end, I'll never forget this one farmer came up to me.

He said everything you said makes sense. But if I agree with you, I have to agree with Al Gore and I could never do that. So I'm not gonna. And then I remember a talk I gave at a local college where an instructor followed me out to the car and was arguing about how do we know it's not the sun or volcanoes or natural cycles?

And that actually applies to a question people have in the chat. So here's a, a link you can share with to address the question of how do we know it's humans? But then as I refuted his points one by one, then he said, well, you know, the EPA just wants to take away my wood-burning stove. That was his real objection.

So what we have to do when we have these conversations is I think it's actually more important to talk about the solutions than it is to talk about how do we know it's real or it's faster, it's humans and. I love the fact in the, in the chat there's a question about skeptical science. So let me just tell the story of John's dad because I think that sort of embodies how to actually do this, right?

So John Cook is the founder of Skeptical Science, and John Cook is an Australian who had a background in physics, but he wasn't a climate expert. But every time he went home to have dinner with his dad, his dad, who was very conservative and and saw climate solutions as being opposed to who he was, his dad would be like, well, John, there's more polar bears now than there ever were so much for global warming.

Guess that ice isn't melting, is it? So John being a persistent person, decided that he was going to research all of the objections to climate change, and he created skeptical science, which is this exhaustive list of over 200. But what about questions with fully annotated and cited scientific answers to them?

John also went back to school and got a PHD in cognitive psychology. He became one of the world experts in science denial, including COVID denial, vaccine denial, climate denial. John has published exhaustive scientific analyses of the typologies of denial. Do you think any of this changed his dad's mind?

[00:38:22] Ed Whittingham: Uh, I'm guessing no. 

[00:38:25] Dr. Katharine Hayhoe: No, but the story doesn't stop there. So his dad's values were, you know, he lived in a rural area, he was very independent, he was very thrifty, and he didn't mind sticking it to the government if given the opportunity. So after John had done all of this one day, he noticed there was a rebate on solar panels in this sunny remote rural area of Australia where his dad lived.

So he shared this with his dad and talked about the cost savings and the fact that the government was gonna be subsidizing this, and the fact that his dad could have his own energy source if the power went out. So his dad. Saw the reasons for that, got the solar panels, and pretty soon, every month he was like, oh, John, look how much money I've saved this month.

So after about two years of how much money I've saved, how much more thrifty I am, how much more independent I am, how much more foolish the government is. After about two years of this, John was home for dinner and in the course of conversation, his dad said, oh, global warming. It's such a serious issue, and I've always thought so.

And John said he almost fell off his chair. He was like, not only did he change his mind, which he suspected he would, because he was showing his dad there was a solution compatible with his values. That in the words of George Marshall helps make him an even more. Genuine version of who he already is. So not just thrifty, but more thrifty.

Not just independent, but more independent. But he didn't even think his dad would forget that he, you know, previously said it wasn't real. And the, the epilogue to that is his dad did have to move into assisted living and was enraged that they were wasting his money by not having solar panels on the roof of the assisted living place.

So, so that, that's something I think we really have to understand. It's not about arguing about the science of is it real? Is it us, is it humans? It's about getting to the meat of the issue, which is, is there a solution consistent and compatible with your values? And most of the time, not every time, but most of the time, the answer is yes.

And when the answer is yes, that is what is gonna change people's minds. 

[00:40:28] Ed Whittingham: Got you. So I, I know you've done a lot on values-based communication. This is a great tip for, you know, how people might engage folks who are working in the oil and gas sector. Which, and you could say on one hand their, their fears are not irrational when they fear the solution being worse than the problem.

If, you know, if you really wanted to get a handle on the climate problem in a rapid way, we would just more carefully constrain fossil fuel development. And that's going to result in, in job losses. And I personally find that divide hard to cross, but maybe talk about, because you are well known for your outreach to.

Conservatives and evangelicals, and that's kind of the toughest outreach. And you said in this kind of ladder of, of people who deny the very existence of climate change, you've got evangelicals and Catholics who would sort of be the top of that list. They're their most resistance. They, they deny the existence of climate change the most.

What else have you learned and specific to the evangelical community, which we know in the US is a huge voting block and has lots of power. And then since you published your seminal book, saving Us, what has changed like in this era of Trump now, what is not working anymore that say would've worked a few years ago?

[00:41:46] Dr. Katharine Hayhoe: Great questions. So in addition to recognizing that most objections are actually to the solutions rather than to the science, the other key thing we have to do is we have to begin our conversations with what the people we're talking with already care about. And all too often we don't, all too often, we try to make them care about this issue for the same reasons we care about this issue.

And lemme give you an exaggerated example to show you how foolish this is. So one reason why a lot of people care about climate change is because it affects the availability of snow for skiing in the winter. And I'm one of those people. But imagine if we had to make everybody in the world a skier before they could care about climate change, that's ridiculous.

A lot of people care because climate change is affecting birds and they're passionate birders. I'm not a passionate birder, but imagine if everybody had to become a passionate birder before they could care about climate change, then how is affecting our world? So all too often we want people to care for the same reasons we do.

And I often get a lot of questions. I haven't looked at the Q and A here, but I often get a lot of questions about how do I get people to care about X? Because if they care about X, then they'll care about climate. I'm like, well, you just made your job 10 times harder. Why don't you just figure out what they already care about and then help them connect the dots to climate?

So, after I wrote my book Saving Us, which frankly I feel like is even more relevant today than it was if I had to reissue it today, all I would do is rewrite the Forward. Because I wrote the Forward during COVID, I would add the new research that even makes my points even stronger than they were when I wrote the book.

Um, but after I wrote that book, um, CBS called and they're like, oh, we love your idea of having conversations with people. Can we just take you somewhere and you just approach random people in the street and have conversations with them. And I'm like, I guess maybe. And they're like, no, let's do it. So they took me to this aquarium in Dallas, and they were the ones who picked the people.

And there was this guy with a little daughter who had an oil rig on his hat. And he, and they're like, talk to him. Go talk to him. And so, you know, what's the cardinal role? You have to figure out what they care about. So, they approached him and they said, you know, are you worried about climate change?

And he said, absolutely not. And then they were like, okay, Katharine, here you go. And I was like, oh, thank you. So I, I, I, he was here with his daughter, so I started asking about his daughter. Well, his daughter was his world. He had driven four hours from Oklahoma because his daughter wanted to go to the aquarium.

And she was like about three or four years old. So I asked him what he did with his daughter. I asked him what his daughter enjoyed doing. Pretty soon he was telling me how his daughter loved playing outside, but how he was worried about her playing outside because it was too hot most of the time. And he was seriously concerned about how exposed she was getting to heat.

And it was really challenging when she wanted to play outside and you had to say no to her. I mean, so immediately there it was, I'm a parent too. I care about climate change because of how it's affecting my child. In fact, he got heat stroke a couple years ago because our summers are getting so hot. When I was recording, saving us, um, in the studio over at the long weekend in August, after I'd recorded the first couple hours, I came out to take a break and the sound engineer said to me.

I didn't realize your book was about climate change. I have some questions and I was like, ah. But I was like, well, you know, if, if this works, I gotta give it a try. So I sat down with him, but instead of talking to him, I asked him how long he'd lived in Lubbock, Texas. Did he have family? Yes. What did he enjoy doing with his family?

And pretty soon he was telling me how the lake he'd grown up fishing in was so warm these days that the type of fish in it had totally changed how he used to love to ski over the border in New Mexico. We have some really good skiing. And I was like, oh yeah, but like two years ago we didn't even have a season at Christmas 'cause it was too warm.

He is like, yeah, it never used to be like that. And so he was telling me all the things that he had seen happening that he cared about. And then by the time he got to the end of it, I just said, you know, this is happening all around the US and in fact all around the world. And he looked at me and he said.

Well, what are we supposed to do about it? Because I'm a Republican, I'm like, yes, this is exactly the conversation we need to be happening. So that's the power of connecting over something that people already care about and then bringing in solutions they can get on board with. 

[00:46:00] Ed Whittingham: And what we find, what I've been finding recently is folks who would've been in that denialist camp and where we live, it's often the, uh, the octogenarian pet male petroleum or reservoir engineer who, they were the ones who wanna give talks about climate change, who were the crankiest.

But I've noticed, and even within my, my own family, extended family, that resistance to the fact of climate change is breaking down or acceptance of the overwhelming scientific evidence for climate change is increasing as people are starting to see changes in their lifetime, like climate impacts in their lifetime, whether real or perceived.

And, you know, we've got terrible forest fires that happening in Canada on an annual basis and. Often in the media whether the attribution science is accurate or not. They're leaping to the conclusion that climate change caused this forest fire. It's caused the poor air quality index.

For the first time in Calgary, a couple summers ago, we saw parents keeping their kids indoors and for the first time they knew we're not letting our kids play outside because the air quality is bad. And now drawing that link to climate change, whether or not you can correctly attribute that forest fire to climate change.

[00:47:16] Dr. Katharine Hayhoe: Well, and we do know that, um, there has been formal attribution down like the eastern wildfires, um, or how much more likely 'cause of climate change and the area burned over the last 30 years. 37% of that area was attributed to the carbon emissions just from 88 countries. So there's definitely attribution that can be done.

And this is important because to sort of summarize what I've been talking about, we have a lot of information in our head. What's happening, why it's happening. We haven't made the head to heart connection. And that relates to a question somebody has about the people who don't think it's urgent. If you survey people around the world, including in Canada and the United States, the majority of people agree it's real and they're worried about it.

But when you say, do you think it will affect you, the number plummets. And then when you say, do you think we can do something about it? And are you doing anything about it? The number of plummets even further. So after the wildfire season, our horrible wildfire season in 2023, and of course we've got another bad one brewing right now, after 2023, a lot of people thought that levels of concern over climate change and the prioritization of climate as a voting issue would rise.

I didn't, because I knew the science saying that awareness of the issue drives worry. But you, if you don't think there's anything you can do about it, you dissociate from it. And that's exactly what happened. The people who prioritize climate as a voting issue in Canada plummeted over the last two years.

And in the last election, I think I saw some stats saying that 70% of Canadians were like, oh yeah, of course I'm worried about climate change, but there's nothing we can do about it, so I'm just gonna vote based on the price of housing. So we need to help people connect the head to the heart, but we also have to connect the heart to the hands Efficacy.

Our willingness to do something about climate change is directly correlated to our sense that what we do will make a difference. And today most people think they don't because most people don't know what to do. If you ask people what to do, most people say recycle. They don't realize that we as individuals have a voice that has changed the world before.

And when we use that voice, that's how we can change the world again. 

[00:49:21] Ed Whittingham: Yeah, we, we had Hal Harvey and Justin Gillis on maybe it's, I. Two and a half years ago now, maybe it's actually three. Talking about the big fix, and you had mentioned earlier, uh, Katharine, how you can get people, bring them into the climate debate and then hopefully they're surrounded by good people who can say, and here are the behaviors, here are the actions that really drive change and it isn't recycling, to poach from, from Justin and Hal's book.

Really showing up at a utilities commission hearing or working on municipal building codes. Those are the things that really drive change. You know, it's great to do your own green consumerism bit, but it just doesn't make the big systems change that we need. I do wanna bring in a question and a member in our, in our pre-chat before the show you had mentioned wanting to talk about this, so I'm just gonna read.

It's from Victor, and, uh, he says, nice to see you again. Katharine. I am a climate activist with Seniors for Climate. We do educational sessions in our Edmonton community. My question is related to a solution. What do you think our best approach is to address the billions in subsidies, subsidies by both the federal and Alberta governments.

For CCUS, our governments and the industry are pushing this expensive solution with exaggerated potential. Now this, this is a hot button topic where we live because you've got an entire oil and gas sector that is behind CCUS as a legitimate way of decarbonizing the oil and gas production cycle. How would you, what would you tell Victor?

[00:50:52] Dr. Katharine Hayhoe: Well, when it comes to solutions, first of all, there's no silver bullet, but the more worried people get, the more desperate they are for a silver bullet. And so people tend to seize on a solution, be like, oh, well if we just did this, this would fix it all. And sometimes it's technological, like carbon capture storage or even direct air capture.

I'm sure you've seen people say that about that. Sometimes it's behavioral, like if everybody just stopped eating meat, that would fix the problem. Sometimes if it gets into population control, if every, if all those women would just stop having the babies that would fix the problem, well, I guess technically it sort of would, that's not, that's not the solution that we want as the human race.

So the more worried we are and the less efficacy we feel, the more we tend to want to season a silver bullet. There is no silver bullet. But there's a lot of silver buckshot. And the way I think of solutions is I think of them like a swimming pool, like the above ground swimming pool I grew up with in my backyard in Toronto, where my toes could just touch the ground.

So if you think at the swimming pool as the atmosphere and the level of water in the pool as the level of carbon in the atmosphere, at the beginning of the industrial revolution, we stuck a giant hose in the swimming pool and we've been turning the hose up every year. So the first thing we have to do is we have to turn off the hose and we can do that through efficiency.

Clean energy, behavioral change, land use change, including stopping deforestation and things like that. And for the last few drops in the hose, we can cut a slit in the hose with at great expense and great energy, and suck a few drops outta the hose and bury them underground. That's carbon capture and storage.

Uh, similarly, our po our hole has a, our, our pool has a drain, and we can make the drain bigger by investing in both nature, which takes up carbon from the atmosphere and in direct air capture, which takes carbon from the atmosphere and stores it in a permanent way. But there's a third thing we have to do.

We have to learn how to swim and help others learn how to swim, because for many of us, our toes don't touch the ground anymore. That's resilience and adaptation. So I, I present that answer because it shows that there's no one thing, we need it all, and. The technological solutions, David, that you're working on, we need those drops down the drain because we know that every bit of carbon matters with carbon and capture and storage.

We need those drops also to be taken outta the hose because every bit matters. But what we don't need is for any solution, any of those solutions to be used as a fig leaf. And unfortunately, often they are used as fig leafs by the same fossil fuel companies who have invested in disinformation campaigns, who have directly attacked and questioned the integrity of you, David, and of me, myself, and many other scientists who just want to keep on going until the last drop has been burned.

They seize on solutions and say, oh, well we can continue to increase oil and gas production 'cause we'll just do carbon capture and storage. It's like. Show me that actually happening. Because right now it's not happening and we need action now. So we really needed an all of the above approach.

But all too often people are lobbying, and this is why using our voice as citizens is so important. People are lobbying for their pet solution, especially if they solution will allow them to keep on doing whatever they're doing and just put a little fig leaf on top of it. 

[00:54:08] David Keith: To me, director capture just one of a, a range of, of permanent carbon removal.

And I think some of the geochemical ones in has rock weathering or ocean alkalinity may actually end up being larger. And I think those actually, I, I think you've only talked about stopping, but I think those are ways you actually could drain the pool. And I think the issue is about environmental compatibility and cost.

I don't see nature-based solutions the way you do. If you look at just the most basic data of how atmospheric carbon has changed since 1850, only a couple percent of that entire change has had anything to do with land use. It's really dominated by the long-term, uh, carbon cycle. And it's not obvious to me that, um, there's lots of reasons I personally care a great deal about protecting wilderness in nature, but it's not, obviously, building up carbon stocks in natural systems actually reduces long-term risk that much because they, it's short-term carbon and also they come out as a climate worm.

So it's unclear that risk has changed very much. I think I really focus on the long-term carbon problem where you need. To stop putting the hose in, which is the permanent carbon, and you need to find a way to remove it, which is permanent carbon. And to me, the biospheric stuff is really moving between separate reservoirs that are all short-term kind of sub pools, if you like.

[00:55:19] Dr. Katharine Hayhoe: And, and that's definitely true. We need, we need the long-term solutions. But from a human perspective, um, given again that climate change is disproportionately affecting the poorest and most vulnerable people, and that when we invest in, in clean energy and nature-based solutions, we're often. Helping those people who live in poverty who are otherwise destroying the very nature on which their own life depends, that shelters the biodiversity that supports our life.

We need to be looking at a whole range of, of silver buckshot, some of which addresses the pollution and inequity in biodiversity and climate crises at the same time, especially over short term mitigation, while these longer term mitigation solutions are being put into place, which we absolutely need, like you said, not just to stop the level from increasing, but even potentially drawing it down in the future, which would be phenomenal.

We really, really need it all. 

[00:56:08] Ed Whittingham: Katharine, we have time for pretty much one more question and, and then a quick answer. This has been fascinating and, and, uh, the minutes have just flown by. The question is, it has to do with values and I'm gonna read it. Would, uh, Dr. Heyhoe have more examples of the values that people have that can connect with solutions and.

I'd say that, uh, so this is of interest to me 'cause I sat with a group of environmental activists in a room with Susan Clark of the Yale School of Forestry a couple decades ago, and we did values mapping and it was like, what are our values? Versus if you're sitting across the table from someone in a negotiations framework, you know, someone from industry, what are their values of those?

In the room of the environmental activists in the room, rectitude was off the charts and by rectitude righteousness. And so often I find people are coming at an environmental problem not knowing that they're driven by righteousness and they're trying to work or convince others who are not driven by righteousness.

So what can we do to understand our own values and where we're coming from before we try to engage people with, uh, different values? 

[00:57:19] Dr. Katharine Hayhoe: Oh my gosh. I mean, I'm just, laughing because I'm, uh, like the fact that you could even articulate that is, is, is so funny so often. I see, and this is what, this is part of why people are so obsessed with personal actions to address climate change because it's a form of religion.

Religion is a series of rules that we adhere to to produce righteousness. And so people get really uptight over, did you fly there or did you drive in this or did you eat that? Or even, I've even been castigated for having a child, even though I just have one. They get really engaged in the personal righteousness of climate action.

Even though this, it's very clear that collective action is what we need as an individual. The most important thing we can do is to use our voice to advocate for systemic action that then makes the personal choices for everyone the easiest and most affordable choices to be the best choices. That's what we need, and that only happens when we use our voice, but if we turn this into a righteousness producing religion, so to speak, then we're never gonna get the solutions we need.

So I love that that came up and it's fine if that's your motivation, but don't use it to guilt and judge people. Unfortunately, it's too often the flip side of, of religion, uh, use it to encourage people to hope. So how do we find the values to connect over? Well, I have a newsletter every week called Talking Climate.

A link is there, you can sign up. You can also find Talking Climate on Instagram or threads. And every week I share good news and not so good news about things that matter to us, like how climate change is affecting fertility rates or children's sports, or the availability of coffee or bananas or chocolate or Japanese rice, things that matter to us.

In my book Saving Us, which I put a link in the chat there too. I talk about how I've started climate conversations over a shared love of knitting. Or cooking or the fact that we're both Canadian or we both live in Texas, or we're both parents or both enjoy skiing or we're both people of faith.

There's so many ways to start the conversation, but the key is this. We have to start the conversation with what we have in common, not what divides us. And if we're talking to a dismissive, this isn't gonna work with them. The dismissive that we all know. You just have to say, as I say in Texas, bless your heart, I'm sorry you're wrong.

But now let's talk about something else. Don't try to argue with the dismissive, but with the 90% of other people who are not dismissive, start with something they already care about. Connect the dots to how it makes them the perfect person to care and bring in a positive, constructive solution that they can get on board with, with who they are.

That is the formula to change. And if you want more on that, I outline it in my TED Talk. I'll give you a link to my TED Talk here as well. Um, it's kind of a short overview of how to have these conversations. 

[01:00:07] Ed Whittingham: Great. And for those who are listening to the pod version of this, when it drops, say a week from now, we'll have all those links in the show notes.

I love your reference to knitting one of Alberta's great conservation activists. Martha Costic was infamous or famous for knitting. During a meeting, I sat watched as we were meeting with officials from the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency. And sort of put them through the ringers to what the government was doing wrong.

But at the end of the meeting, she knit a hat, not just one, but two of them, and sent these two bureaucrats home with, uh, with hats and talk about a lasting impression. Katharine, thank you so much. Uh, what, what, what a fitting discussion for. What is our last show, our last recorded show of the season. Uh, it's great to talk to you and we really appreciate the time and the insight that you've given us.

[01:00:59] Dr. Katharine Hayhoe: Thank you so much for having me. This has been such a pleasure. 

[01:01:03] Ed Whittingham: Thanks for listening to Energy vs Climate. The show is created by David, Keith, Sara Hastings-Simon and me Ed Whittingham, and produced by Amit Tandon. Our title in show Music is The Windup by Brian Lips. This season of Energy vs Climate is produced with support from the Trottier Family Foundation, the North Family Foundation, the Palmer Family Foundation, and our generous listeners.

Sign up for updates and exclusive webinar access at energyvsclimate.com and review and rate us on your favorite podcast platform. This helps new listeners define the show well. That's about it for season six of Energy vs Climate. Keep an eye on this space for more bonus content over the summer, including episodes of Climate Books Review with my friend Roger Thompson, who's moving over to teach at Arizona State University. Until then, enjoy your summer everyone, and thanks for listening.