An ever-warming world, rising sea levels, shrinking glaciers — it’s easy to despair over the climate crisis. But scientist Tim Lenton says not every tipping point leads to doom.

Guests

Tim Lenton, Chair in Climate Change and Earth System Science at the University of Exeter. Author of the book “Positive Tipping Points: How to Fix the Climate Crisis.”

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Transcript of Full Broadcast

The version of our broadcast available at the top of this page and via podcast apps is a condensed version of the full show. You can listen to the full, unedited broadcast here:

Part I   

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: We’ve crossed many grim thresholds in the climate crisis.

(MONTAGE)

NEWS BRIEF #1: The Earth is getting hotter than ever, with the last 11 years the warmest since record-keeping began.

NEWS BRIEF #2: 2024 was the hottest year on record. Last year was the first to break a key global warming target, reaching one and a half degrees above pre-industrial levels.

NEWS BRIEF #3: Record high temperatures have been recorded in the world’s oceans.

NEWS BRIEF #4: The average surface temperature of Earth’s non-polar oceans hit 70 degrees Fahrenheit over the weekend. That breaks a record set in March 2024.

NEWS BRIEF #5: Carbon dioxide levels set a new record high in 2024, reaching levels not seen in at least 800,000 years.

CHAKRABARTI: The cascading list of negative tipping points makes it easy to despair over the climate crisis. But scientist Tim Lenton says not every tipping point leads to doom. He says there are also positive tipping points and wants people to know that they are not powerless in the face of continuing climate change.

And Tim Lenton joins us now. He’s chair in Climate Change and Earth System Science at the University of Exeter in the UK and author of the book Positive Tipping Points: How to Fix the Climate Crisis. Professor Lenton, welcome to On Point.

TIM LENTON: Thanks, Meghna.

CHAKRABARTI: Well, of course I want to spend the bulk of the hour focusing on what you call positive tipping points. But let’s go through some of the not positive ones that you actually do outline in the book, because I was fascinated with how you open the book with a personal experience of a kind of literally in the physical world around you tipping point. Can you tell us the story of what happened in May of 2012 when you were in Greenland?

LENTON: That’s right. I was in Greenland. I was blessed to be there filming a TV series about the climate tipping points, and we’re right up in the northwest of Greenland, a little settlement called Qaanaaq. And we were set to go out onto the sea ice with the Inuit hunters to do some filming, and they confidently told us, “Oh, it’s going to take a couple of days to get to the edge of the ice edge.”

So we set off on the dog sleds, beautiful sunny day. About four hours later we found ourselves in the breaking up ice floes and it was almost like a literal tipping point, because we’d gone across some bits of the ice that started to break up underneath us and a big crack opened. And then we had to go into reverse.

The dogs had to jump or swim the crack in the ice, and then drag the sled across fast enough that we didn’t end up in the freezing water. Which we didn’t, which was a great moment. But I can still remember it vividly.

CHAKRABARTI: So first of all … so the point is that the ice was breaking up much faster than you had expected?

LENTON: It was. Because even in the northwest of Greenland in the supermarket, they do have one in the little settlement … you’ll get a satellite photo of where is the ice, or where was it the last time the satellite looked, and everybody thinks, “Okay, that’s where the ice is.”

But yes, this was extraordinary. That particular summer, and it was early part of the summer then, was turned out to be record-breaking. So it was a record-breaking retreat for the time of the Arctic Sea ice, and record-breaking melt on the big ice sheet that’s on the Greenland land mass up behind us as well.

We were just catching the start of it.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. Now what interests me about this is here you are, you’re with indigenous Inuit there, so they know the land obviously intimately. You’re a climate scientist, and yet it seems that all of you were somewhat, were caught out a little bit.

Which says a little, which says something about, I don’t know, our ability to cope with the unexpected speed at which some of the climate change is exerting itself around the world.

LENTON: Exactly, Meghna. It’s telling us that things are changing faster, more abruptly, than even the specialists were expecting.

And that, that pattern unfortunately has continued to unfold for the like the 14 years since that particular event. We’ve seen surprising rates of melt of the big ice sheets. I mentioned Greenland, but also West Antarctica. In just the last couple of years where we were hearing in the snippet about record sea temperatures, we’ve seen widespread, like I’m talking about more than 80% of the coral reefs in the tropics dying back after extreme bleaching events due to basically what we’d call a marine or ocean heat wave.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. It’s interesting, we did a show a while ago about nostalgia and snowfall. And it was fascinating because I think the social and emotional disorientation that people are feeling with the speed of climate change is real, and we got more listener feedback about the lack of snow in places that they had grown up in.

Obviously, these are northern climes, than we have for almost anything else, and people were genuinely feeling like this profound sense of loss and sadness. And we also, we have listeners in Alaska, and just like the Greenlanders, they know better than anyone how rapidly daily life let alone seasonal life, is changing.

So let me ask you this, Professor Lenton. How long have you been doing climate science for?

LENTON: Probably in a sense since when I graduated, what in the U.S. you might call college or university over here, and started my research. And I was looking on a much longer timeframe then. I started out studying how life shaped this planet over literally billions of years and shaped the climate.

But you couldn’t ignore it if you were a young, as I was then, climate or earth researcher. You couldn’t ignore the fact that we knew the world was warming and we were seeing other big changes around us. It’s just that on that journey of that last, what is it now, 30-odd years, I’ve just witnessed in my own career the real change in the real climate accelerate, surprise us, continue to shock us.

And I love the snowfall anecdotes, because my own daughter, the younger of our two kids, absolutely loves the snow. But, and I’m speaking to you from Southwest England, Devon, and it’s very rare now, snow. So if there is a snowfall, it’ll be on the highland near us, which is called Dartmoor, a great big, raised bog plateau, and we’ll make a special visit, just to see the snow.

CHAKRABARTI: You and the Hound of Baskerville.

LENTON: Yeah, exactly.

CHAKRABARTI: But, actually, speaking of Devon, I heard or read not that long ago that the climate where you are is actually changing so fast that some people are even theorizing that it won’t be much longer until you can grow olive trees there, which is kind of mind-boggling. Is that complete falsehood that I’ve come across?

LENTON: No. I haven’t seen the olive trees yet. They take a long time to establish, so probably good to start thinking ahead like that. But I can tell you the English champagne is getting quite good.

And it’s a thing. Who knew? It’s a thing. I’ve drunk some of it. We were celebrating one of my PhD students passing just a week ago, and it was pretty good. Yeah. So yeah, that might be one of the few good sides of a changing climate.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. No, actually, so Professor Lenton, the reason why I wanted to ask you about how long you had, you have been doing climate science is because, it’s obviously it’s not just colder climates that are seeing an acceleration.

Europe just went through yet another summer of just superheated conditions, fires, deadly conditions in European cities. Canada seems to be just burning more and more every year. We’ve got drought threats, the change in food availability, et cetera. You even mentioned the ever given disaster in the Suez Canal as climate linked.

Can you just quickly explain that to me?

LENTON: I didn’t mean to make it exactly that point. But if people remember, that was when this boat, a massive cargo boat carrying loads and loads of containers jammed the Suez Canal. I was using that as a great example of how a seemingly little change can suddenly cascade into a much bigger change. Without telling the whole story in simple terms, the pilot and the captain of the ship were going too fast and lost control of the ship, hence it jammed. They needed six or seven days, and they really needed the moon to move around to give a stronger tidal lift to eventually unjam the ship.

But in six or so days of blocking the Suez Canal, they triggered a set of un- ricocheting consequences that carried on for months and months down global supply chains. Because no other ships could get through. And once they unplugged the cork, if you like, and the trade could flow again, there was a perverse situation where shipping companies were now basically could charge a way higher premium.

And they were incentivized to dump whatever cargo they had, not where it was needed, but wherever they were, go straight back to port, pick up some fresh cargo, charge a top dollar for it. And so it was a classic case of how in our complex, interconnected world with just-in-time delivery, as it’s called, just a tiny failure in the system can cascade into a massive chaos.

And that’s unfortunately the thing you’ve gotta watch for also to a degree in the climate, because that’s why I focus on the tipping points there. Sometimes you can tip a change that cascades into something much bigger and nastier.

CHAKRABARTI: And I think the key thing is it’s not just a straight-line change, right?

The ever given disaster, you’re talking about change that fans out, right? It accelerates and fans out. That’s it’s more dynamic than just a domino effect, right? And so I guess what this has me thinking of is when the … I don’t even remember how, 20-plus years ago when Al Gore’s movie, An Inconvenient Truth, came out. It was probably, in the United States at least, one of the first very pushes into popular culture about broader knowledge of climate change. And people might remember seeing the CO2 numbers, the carbon numbers predicted for being in the atmosphere in that movie.

The thing is, though, is at that time it felt very far away, right? We saw the rising carbon numbers, but it still, the change … seemed very far away. It seemed just like kind of a mathematical future, but now it’s a real future. It’s a real present. It’s a visceral present.

Has this happened faster than even you expected, Professor?

LENTON: Exactly. You nailed it. Even possibly even faster than I was expecting, and I was one of the people who was at the time being told to shut up for being an alarmist, for saying, for warning the world that things could, the change could really accelerate, and we could see these tipping points. And then the world did its thing and yeah, surprised almost everybody. And I mentioned examples where we might be past the tipping point for part of a big ice sheet in West Antarctica, and we’ve lost it for the coral reefs.

So yeah, we need to get real to this new reality and respond fast. Yeah. That’s the key.

Part II

CHAKRABARTI: So Professor Lenton, what on earth is a positive tipping point when it comes to climate change?

LENTON: Maybe I should explain what a tipping point is in general if it’s not obvious. It’s where change in a system becomes self-propelling. So if I’ve got an audience, I’d invite them to lean back on their chair to that balance point where you know that a small nudge one way or the other can create a self-propelling change, either back upright or sprawled over on your back on the floor.

Those are like two alternative states of the system. But that’s not very positive if you end up sprawled on your back on the floor. But it turns out that the changes we need to get to zero emissions, clean the air, regenerate nature, they can also possess this quality where if enough people get behind the change or adopt it some amplification within a system gets strong enough that change itself becomes self-propelling.

We could be talking about the uptake of electric vehicles, might be talking about changes in diet eventually. But if you’d think, take, if we stuck with the example of electric vehicles, first of all, the more people who adopt them, the more they might encourage other people to adopt them because they say, “Actually, it’s quite good, and I really like it.”

But also, the more people who adopt them, it drives innovation. It makes the thing that was expensive in the car, the battery, cheaper and cheaper through something we’d call economies of scale. The more you build, the cheaper the unit. It makes them better. Again, innovators, the more it gets adopted, the more innovation, the better the range you get from the battery in that example.

And also, generally, the more accessible the technology is going to get. In that case, your charging stations will start popping up. You’ll get less and less worried about charging the vehicle because there’s more and more of that infrastructure. All of these things are making it more, the more people who adopt, it’s making them more attractive for the next person to adopt.

CHAKRABARTI: This is a very optimistic take on electric vehicles.

LENTON: It is given, I’m talking to the U.S. … where I know there’s a lot of resistance. But I picked the example because I would think, and I sit in the UK where it’s a bit better, but I picked the other example possibly because if you take a global view, you see some big markets like China, but also Norway way before it and other, and the European countries have already tipped wholeheartedly to electric vehicles.

And in the majority world, we’re seeing, like in India, massive uptake of electric three-wheelers like rickshaws, and in East Africa, electric two-wheeler motorbikes, and that’s because it’s way cheaper to run around on electricity than it is to run around on gasoline. Yeah, so it’s moving from market to market.

It might be the U.S. is the last in line at the moment for the tipping point. But it doesn’t mean it isn’t gonna arrive.

CHAKRABARTI: And actually we’ll come back to this because I do wanna talk with you a little bit later about how policy can influence or hold back these positive tipping points.

But can we stick with Norway here for a second because I’ll admit we focus a lot on China here, so I know quite a bit about the EV market and infrastructure in China. But I did not know about the blazingly fast transformation that’s happened in Norway. You say that in 2010 there were …

Is this true? There were only 338 battery electric cars sold in all of Norway?

LENTON: I think that’s exactly right, yep.

CHAKRABARTI: 338 in 2010? That’s like none.

LENTON: It’s like nothing pretty much nothing, and yet within a decade, they’re dominating the market, and now the full battery electrics, I forget, 98% market share, something like that.

So completely dominant.

CHAKRABARTI: It’s exponential, if I can put it that way, not having actually done the math myself. But 338 battery electric cars in total sold in 2010, and then you say by 2018 it was 30% of the nation’s vehicle sales market share. And then just five years after that, more than 80%, and now three years later you’re saying it’s, what, close to 97, 98%.

It’s huge.

LENTON: Yeah. Yeah, and to begin with, if you talk about exponential growth in the population of organisms, you can talk about the doubling time. So we can talk about how long does it take to double … what’s the doubling time for the electric cars in Norway? And it was… that doubling time was, like, a year and a half or something, possibly far shorter in the transition, so it’s phenomenal.

And are we seeing a similar then decrease in sales and use is different, but I’ll lump them together, in the sales and use of gasoline or diesel-powered vehicles in Norway?

LENTON: Absolutely, yeah. It takes time to for the whole fleet to shift. But the fleet’s well past a quarter electric now.

Can’t remember the exact number. And yeah, what will eventually happen if you think about this is it becomes more and more of a pain to have a petrol or diesel car because fueling stations will start to close because demand for them will drop, and then you’ll have a self-propelling decline of the old technology if it isn’t already the case there.

CHAKRABARTI: Actually, I just here found the numbers that you quote in the book that in over, in just a little bit over a decade the sale of diesel and petrol cars or gasoline cars plummeted from 94% of the market in 2012 in Norway to 4% in 2024. It’s actually, again, sitting here in the United States, this is a mind-blowing number, but I guess I always want to get to root causes.

Can you point to one thing or a handful of things that lit the match, for lack of a better term, on accelerating this tipping point in Norway?

LENTON: Yeah. Yeah, I’m going to give the credit to a group of what I’d call social activists, but some of them were quite famous.

This was around 1989 when members of the pop band A-ha, famous for “Hunting High and Low,” and lead singer Morten Harket and his bandmates and some of their environmentalist friends- They got together and you could say they lobbied the Norwegian government to try and adopt nine policies that would incentivize the uptake of electric vehicles.

They did that for a bunch of reasons, but they knew already that Norway had cheap, basically hydropower electricity, good grid connections. It was a perfectly available technology. They started by succeeding in getting the import tax waived for one electric vehicle that they imported. It was like a hobby converted, we would call it a Fiat Panda, a little car.

But also, for every electric vehicle since, and that was quite a hefty tax, 20 or 30%. They then campaigned for a decade to get some other demands, like have road tolls waived for electric vehicles, have VAT waived. Very entertaining story. Won’t give the whole of it, but they were literally driving the electric vehicle around Oslo, refusing to pay the road tolls, getting it impounded, and then embarrassing the state when the vehicle would come up for auction and some friend of theirs would buy it back and give it back to them, and then they’d repeat the cycle.

So they fought hard, and then government basically came on board. At the same time, there was experimentation with early electric vehicles, and people in the populations actually decided they quite liked them, especially trundling around the city.

And so a bunch of factors then come into play that mean this little old, cold, quite cold nation, is 10 years ahead of the rest of the world, basically. And those policies were needed in that context as the first nation to tip to make basically the price of owning an EV comparable of already around 2013.

But now globally, the further you go down the transition, the cheaper the batteries and therefore the electric vehicles are getting, and the less and less you need any policy support.

CHAKRABARTI: So let’s apply some scientific and journalistic skepticism to this, Professor, if we may. Norway is a really interesting example, and a lot of people might say focusing on the positive tipping point of 2010-ish is missing the more important point, and that is in Norway there was already in existence a political climate, that’s more, was more receptive to, say, activist messages about EV adoption and also just the actual physical climate because Norwegians doubtlessly have been seeing changes in the climate in Norway, just as we were talking about in Greenland, Alaska, et cetera.

So those two things were already in place and significantly so for quite a while, which then allowed the positive tipping point to happen, meaning if we don’t have similar things in place elsewhere, a positive tipping point simply is a pipe dream.

LENTON: Yes and no in the sense that at the time the Norwegian prime minister was increasing not just Norwegian oil and gas extraction, but export and sales and that was part of what motivated the activists.

They were very unhappy about that. So it is true that you could argue it’s cultural in Norway that people are a bit more connected to nature. There’s a lot of it. There’s a lot of mountains, a lot of space. But we’re, like I mentioned, we’ve seen other markets now tip very different political context shall we say, tipping wholeheartedly not just to electric vehicles but the other really big story, the tipping point to renewable energy, especially solar panels getting ever cheaper and wind turbines as well. So I guess my bigger point there would be change has to start somewhere, and it’s fine if it starts among the rich and the more progressive nations.

But then it becomes more and more accessible and doesn’t need such a supportive context because it starts to become economically the cheapest option. And then, okay, of course politics, and I don’t need to say this to your audience, of course politics can then fight back because might be that it’s the politics of the incumbents who benefit from maintaining the old status quo.

And we see more than one example of that around the world. But ultimately, the economics usually triumphs. Perhaps the odd time we’re in right now is that battleground where it does in some places, it doesn’t in others. But for normal people who just want to get around or have, power their homes, ultimately it’s not about politics.

They’re gonna take the cheaper option. And this is rapidly becoming the cheapest option.

CHAKRABARTI: And maybe we’re also giving Norway too much credit here because you did say correctly earlier that China, India, there we have massive nations here who actually I would say are leading the EV global revolution.

LENTON: Absolutely. Yeah. China is leading the clean tech revolution hands down. But it’s not a simple story that’s often told of, “Oh, it’s just the Chinese government boosting their own industry.” That has become super important, but if we switch to thinking about solar panels, which are all largely coming out of China, it started out with some entrepreneurs who were, like, researchers from Australia, Chinese and Australian researchers setting up some startup companies for solar in the early 2000s.

And as several things fell into place, it was actually Germany that had a sort of market they could sell the solar panels into, because they’d created some policy incentives there. But it was also the fact that China’s was liberalizing to the point that companies could list on international stock exchanges like the Dow Jones.

And these early solar panel companies start listing there. They’re making a profit already. They get a big injection of quite a lot of U.S. capital as well as international capital. That kick-starts things. And then the Chinese government, very smart, they say, “Oh, great. You could have a massive domestic market for these panels, so why don’t we pour in support as well?”

So let me just jump in here because I think one of my big takeaways from your book and what you’re saying now is that the change has to start somewhere, right? And there’s no place that’s insignificant in terms of the beginnings of change. And we actually found an example here in the United States and it’s in Wisconsin.

So Professor Lenton, just listen along a little bit with me because this month in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the city reached its own climate milestone.

ERICK SHAMBARGER: We now have 80 city buildings that are powered by 100% renewable electricity. All of our fire stations, all of our police stations, all of our health clinics.

CHAKRABARTI: Erick Shambarger is the sustainability director for Milwaukee’s Environmental Collaboration Office, and he says those 80 buildings are now solar powered. The solar farm is on city-owned landfill land next to the airport, and it has 9,700 solar panels.

SHAMBARGER: We had 2.25 megawatts done in 2021, then we added another 4.6 for a total of 6.8. The big difference on a landfill is that you can’t dig into the ground, versus if you would put it in a rural area, you might drill into the ground, you might have trackers that track the sun, that kind of thing. Everything had to be above ground here. It’s on blocks, basically.

CHAKRABARTI: In 2009, the City of Milwaukee pledged to make one quarter of its power renewable by 2025.

The solar project also required collaboration between city leaders, Wisconsin’s State Utilities Commission, and the utility company We Energies. Milwaukee also pays more for that solar energy, an extra half cent per kilowatt hour, and Shambarger says that’s around $100,000 more per year.

SHAMBARGER: The cost of doing nothing on climate change is much higher than this. That’s why we’re doing this. It’s not just because we like cool new technologies. That’s part of it, but we are very concerned here in Milwaukee about the effects of climate change. We’ve had extreme storms that have led to extreme flooding. We had wildfire smoke throughout the Midwest wrecking our air quality from Canada. And yes, we have to find some ways to pay for solutions.

CHAKRABARTI: With the new solar development, Shambarger says 46% of the power Milwaukee city government uses is renewable, so almost half. But he does not wanna stop there.

We’d love to get to 100% by 2030. We gotta find more projects like this. Now, it’s gonna be a challenge because federal tax credits that were supposed to go into farther into the future got short-changed when Trump came into office.

So the big solar tax credits expire at the end of 2027. So we are doing what we can locally, but the federal policy is making it much more difficult. There’s no way around that fact.

CHAKRABARTI: So that was Eric Shambarger, sustainability director for the City of Milwaukee’s Environmental Collaboration Office.

Professor Lenton, your thoughts about efforts in Milwaukee, Wisconsin?

LENTON: Love it. Yeah, I hope Erick and the team are listening. Great to hear. And I appreciate the point they made that, okay, right now it’s maybe more expensive up in that northern part of main part of the U.S., but there’s other parts of the U.S. where clearly the renewable power is, electricity is demonstrably cheaper in the some of the sunnier, more southern climes.

But I love the argument, though. You gotta do this because you’re seeing all the bad side of climate change. And in the bigger picture what they’re doing there in Milwaukee, public procurement we would call it, that’s a great way to start to kickstart innovation and kickstart the snowball effect of more adoption.

And that doesn’t just apply to solar powering municipal buildings. The same thing would apply to, like, why don’t we have electric garbage trucks or whatever, or yeah. Yeah. A bunch of other such examples.

CHAKRABARTI: But human beings really thrive on hindsight. There’s that famous line from financial services companies that says, “Past performance is no indication of future performance,” and yet we always seem to think that way. And I think one of the biggest challenges here in believing in the possibility of positive tipping points is when you’re doing these efforts, you cannot know if it will be a positive tipping point.

LENTON: Interesting. Yeah, maybe the first people to do it might even take themselves by surprise when it happens, and they’ve gotta have that kind of drive to start creating change. But once you’ve got instances of the positive change happening around the world, you can look across and see, “Hey, this is possible for us as well,” and take that inspiration and run with it.

Part III

CHAKRABARTI: Professor Lenton, I want to share another example for you from here in the United States, and it’s in Ascension Parish in southern Louisiana because automaker Hyundai is planning to build a nearly $6 billion steel plant there that Hyundai says will be better for the environment.

BO-RYONG LEE: Our vision goes beyond building a steel mill that produce steel. We will produce low carbon emission steel.

CHAKRABARTI: So that’s Bo-Ryong Lee, president and CEO of Hyundai Steel, at a groundbreaking ceremony for the plant earlier this month.

MARIA GALLUCCI: At full production, the steel mill will produce about 2.7 million metric tons of metal per year, which is typical for a steel mill in the United States. What’s different about this plant is how it will make the iron and steel.

CHAKRABARTI: Maria Gallucci is a senior reporter who covers clean energy with Canary Media.

GALLUCCI: Conventional steel mills, especially the ones, that are still running in parts of the U.S. Midwest, run on coal. So what Hyundai is proposing to do is to use natural gas in this iron-making, steel-making process, and also use other efficiency measures some carbon capture techniques, that will ultimately reduce the carbon footprint of its steel by about 70% compared to those conventional coal-based mills that I just mentioned.

CHAKRABARTI: But Gallucci says natural gas is still a fossil fuel, obviously, so it produces greenhouse gas emissions and creates harmful air pollution.

GALLUCCI: Ultimately, the goal is that Hyundai and any other steel maker would transition to using a type of fuel called green hydrogen, which can be made by using renewable electricity to split water into its constituent parts, hydrogen and oxygen, and using that hydrogen to produce iron for your steel-making.

CHAKRABARTI: Hyundai Steel president and CEO Bo-Ryong Lee has said the company does plan to use hydrogen at the Louisiana plant.

BO-RYONG LEE: We plan to progressively increase the use of hydrogen over time, with the goal of achieving substantial reduction in carbon emission and advancing towards sustainable steel-making.

CHAKRABARTI: But reporter Maria Gallucci says Hyundai has not given a clear timeline of when that switch to green hydrogen would happen, and she says a lot of other things actually need to fall into place first, such as finding hydrogen in the first place.

GALLUCCI: There’s virtually none in the United States right now, so what that would mean is that Hyundai or its partners would need to build what are called electrolyzers. And these are the enormous machines that use electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. And they would also need to build significant amounts of renewable energy, wind, solar storage, what have you, to produce the electricity for the electrolyzers and produce the pipelines and the infrastructure needed to carry the fuel to the facility. So all of those puzzle pieces are still missing.

CHAKRABARTI: So Gallucci also says that the Hyundai Steel plant in Ascension Parish, Louisiana, is expected to start production in 2029. Okay. Professor Lenton, I’ve got to confront something that perhaps a lot of listeners are thinking and feeling right now because climate catastrophism is still very much in vogue, that in hearing these examples, even the Norway example or the Milwaukee or Louisiana examples that I just brought up in our conversation today, they’re saying, these listeners might be saying that’s not going to slow down the acceleration of the Greenland ice sheet.

It’s not going to reduce the growth and intensity of global wildfires. It’s like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. You might feel better about it, but the ship is still sinking.” Just what do you think about that in terms of a core criticism of this idea of positive tipping points in climate?

LENTON: I need to emphasize, yes, some, yeah, some bad stuff’s already happening, like we started the show on. But the point is, it gets way worse the further you go up in global warming. I’m afraid I’m European, so I’m going to talk in degrees centigrade. But really whether it’s Fahrenheit or centigrade, it’s every fraction of a degree now that counts.

So it’s about, there are some changes we’re going to have to try and find resilience to, but we’ve got an enormous amount to play for here. Because looking out there at two degrees centigrade global warming or above is a situation which I don’t think we’d be able to cope with. So we need to avoid that future, and that’s the point.

That’s the point. That is avoidable still, but only if we accelerate action to zero emissions, basically. And that’s why we’re talking about positive tipping points. You could say in bold terms it’s a survival strategy, but it’s also a flourishing strategy. Because we’re talking about having the cheapest electricity we’ll ever have had, an electrified economy that’s way more productive, cleaner air.

We can create space to regenerate nature. There’s lots of things that are great to fight for in this as well as it being if we don’t do it, we’re in a kind of a situation that some of us aren’t convinced we’d be able to ride out, basically.

CHAKRABARTI: Because actually, can I just jump in here on that point?

I guess what I’m asking you to do, Professor Lenton, is to confront the doomerism that so often hear from people that it’s too late, right? And that unless everything changes everywhere at once, the unsurvivable future that you’re talking about is inevitable. … And so people feel like why bother even trying?

LETON: It isn’t inevitable that we’re doomed, thankfully. But we have to get a move on. We’ve got a generation to get to transform the economy. 30 years, give or take. We can do that. We know that’s possible because of the rate of change that we’ve seen in some of the examples we’ve already talked about on the show.

We know that all the big we would call them sectors or activities, if you like, that are responsible for emissions starting with power generation, then mobility, cars, trucks, and then ultimately ships, planes, all the rest of it, and the way we heat our buildings and cool them. All of this we know there are positive tipping points there to be had.

We’ve got the solutions, and we just heard about the example for, we call it green steel. But green hydrogen that you just heard about, that can be used to make green ammonia for fertilizer for the fields, for the green ammonia, can also be allowed, used to power ships. All the technology’s there.

All of it can obey the same principles that the more of us who support it or adopt it, the cheaper, the better, the more accessible it’s going to get so that it becomes the obvious option. That’s the point, that we have the agency, even just as consumers, to start a change that then creates further amplifying change and further amplifying change.

So instead of putting our head in the hands and just feeling despair, it’s time to act. Use the agency we’ve got to start creating a self-propelling change in the solutions.

CHAKRABARTI: So then let’s talk about an example you bring up in the book about how local agency could actually turn into a perhaps even a global positive tipping point.

You had mentioned diet earlier. Can you talk about that?

LENTON: Yeah. I’m not sure everyone loves this subject. It’s pretty emotive especially in the U.S. But essentially if we ask ourselves, what are the big contributors to the destruction of forests in the tropics still and the massive footprint that humans have on the land?

About half of it, literally half of it worldwide, is just associated with grazing-fed beef. Another quarter is to do with milk and dairy ironically. So almost three quarters of the world’s farmland, when you talk about pasture and not just cropland, is to do with a tiny fraction of our protein and our calories coming from those forms of red meat.

So any change in diet, and we’re not talking about everybody becoming vegetarian or vegan, we’re not talking about an extremist position. We’re just saying any change towards less meat in diet, especially less red meat, can pay disproportionate dividends in terms of, in a simple sense, giving land back to nature, stopping the destruction of forests, allowing nature to regenerate, which does loads of good things for health, for sucking up carbon from the atmosphere obviously for nature.

So there’s a interconnected web of stuff there. But what I can tell you, believe it or not, including in the U.S. and certainly in the UK, there is a downward trend in meat consumption on average. The trouble is if you look in the global context, that’s not true everywhere, but it’s clearly possible, and it is happening in rich nations for people to actually, they’re eating healthier, because most of us are overeating meat, and it’s doing bad things for our health. So what could that be a tipping point? Many people would say no because they get immediately emotional if you start talking about what they should eat. But forget, but don’t forget like since in my lifetime people used to smoke in restaurants, in pubs, and they wouldn’t dream of doing it now.

That’s a shift in what we call social norms. What we eat is strongly influenced by our families, by our friends, by the people we see around us. So there is this really strong kind of social norm thing going on.

CHAKRABARTI: But it’s a social, it’s a change in social norms that’s reinforced by a change in the law, right?

So policy does play, still play a big role here.

LENTON: Policy plays a spectacular role if it’s got the courage to do so … because I have to be frank with the audience that the meat lobby is even stronger than the fossil fuel lobby. It has governments completely in its pocket in many parts of the world and that to the extent that nations including the UK have failed to adopt public health science-based guidelines on what’s a healthy diet.

They’ve turned the science down. And of course way more money is poured, public money, your money and mine, is poured into the meat farming industry relative to the non-meat, the plant-based farming. So there’s a lot of cards stacked against at the moment, that’s for sure.

This is possibly the hardest area for change to happen in, and it might be let’s see if it’s the last one we get to. But I think we can also all observe that there are movements going on. There are vegan runners in the UK who are gathering support. There’s all kinds of funky stuff happening, and so I think it’s right there in the melting pot to see if change could tip.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. We’ve just got a couple minutes left, Professor Lenton and I just, I want to be completely clear that I find your clarion call to not give up on individual agency as potentially leading to positive tipping points with climate, I find it very inspiring and bracing. And I think in the media we need to do a better job of giving a whole picture about climate change and not just exclusively focusing on the we’re all going to die scenarios.

So I’m very glad that you were able to willing to join us today. And that said how these conversations happen again focusing here on the United States for obvious reasons. A lot of people are resistant to messages about individual agency and climate because understandably they feel, they fear that for the past 20 years whenever activists talk about climate, it’s just, it’s turned into tiresome moralizing, right?

Like unless you change who you are and how you live, we’re all going to die on a melting planet. And just people reject that, and I completely understand that. So is there a way to talk about adopting changes in one’s individual life that don’t have to succumb to the do this, or, but it’s a more sort of positive view of why one should participate in making positive tipping points?

LENTON: Absolutely. You nailed it, and that’s where those of us who are advocating for this have totally failed to tell a story of abundance, but it’s a different kind of flourishing and abundance to the narrative maybe we’ve grown up with but perhaps an even better one.

So you asked me, if you were asking me why would I be eating less red meat in my diet? It’s because I’m healthier that way. And I can tell you my dad and my grandad died of colorectal cancer … and that can be linked to red meat eating. So it’s like a simple decision, right? But I’m also really enjoying going to London to a city now where it’s way quieter.

There’s an ultra-low emission zone. The air is cleaner. Less people are dying from air pollution. There’s a lot … It’s obvious to all the people in the great city of London that this is better despite some small, some people with megaphones are always going to resist the change. But yeah, it’s all about a narrative of a flourishing in a sustainable way, and it’s a different kind of growth as well.

It’s not like we’re giving up on growth. No, maybe it’s how we think about all the things that are growing. That we don’t wanna just grow kind of metrics like GDP that aren’t telling us, aren’t necessarily making us happier. We’re talking about, ah, we’ve got more green space to enjoy.

It’s more accessible to the least well off in society. There’s a whole bunch of dimensions of this where, yeah, it’s a collective charge for any of us involved not just in the science but in the communication, to articulate this is a great future to strive towards, what’s not to like? What’s not like to like in it? And it’s not party political.

This article was originally published on WBUR.org.