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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Now Our Climate Story of the Week, which we've been doing every Tuesday on the show all this year, and yes, Power Hour Tuesday included. Maybe you saw the op-ed in The New York Times by climate scientist, Kate Marvel, who was a lead author on the 5th US National Climate Assessment, which just came out this month. If you did see the op-ed, maybe her take surprised you for the optimism that she expressed even around the dire warning that her own national assessment produced. Let's find out why.
Kate Marvel, besides being a leader on the government's climate assessment, is a research scientist with the environmental group Project Drawdown. Previously, she was a research scientist at Columbia University and the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Dr. Marvel, thanks for giving us some time today for our climate story of the week. Welcome to WNYC.
Kate Marvel: Hi, there. So happy to be here.
Brian Lehrer: To set the scene, you wrote that you were reluctant to join the team writing this national climate assessment at all. Why was that?
Kate Marvel: I was, because we have had so many assessments before. This is the fifth national climate assessment. We've had six IPCC UN reports, and I was getting really frustrated because we had kept issuing, what to my mind, were very accurate and also very scary, very dire warnings, and yet emissions kept climbing and the temperature kept rising. I just wondered, is there any point to this? Is anybody actually listening?
Brian Lehrer: Now, this audience, listening, is generally aware, I think it's safe to say, of the severity of the threat and takes it very seriously. Let's skip over having to prove that again and go right to this. In your Times op-ed, you wrote that the most surprising new finding in the national climate assessment is that there has been genuine progress. How would you begin to describe that?
Kate Marvel: Because I'm a climate scientist and I have to put a little bit of a downer hat on, I want to make it really clear that while there's been progress, it's not anywhere near enough but the fact that there's been any progress at all is, to my mind, really staggering. Not only have we seen climate change actually starting to really affect the United States and our way of life, but we've also started to see the stirrings of people taking action.
We've seen the stirrings of climate solutions really coming to the forefront and beginning to be implemented. I was really staggered to see the cost declines in wind and solar, which have fallen by 70% and 90%, respectively. Now if we look at planned generating capacity, 80% of that's renewables. Now, that's not good enough, that's not fast enough, but that's, in my mind, does represent really genuine progress.
Brian Lehrer: Let me drill down with you on a couple of those stats. One that you were just referring to, that renewables now make up 80% of new electricity generation capacity. What do you mean by new electricity generation capacity? That's the way you put it in the op-ed. From what kinds of renewables?
Kate Marvel: I mean, stuff that's planned or in the pipeline. I guess pipeline, I hope that will become an obsolete metaphor very soon. When I talk about planned generating capacity, what I mean is the things that we are planning to build that will be generating our electricity in the future. Things like wind, things like solar, and to a much lesser extent, low-carbon sources like hydropower and nuclear.
I've been really surprised at how the cost declines in these technologies has really made them start to win on economic grounds, in addition to just being better. That's something else that we found in this climate assessment, that the things that we can do to reduce emissions to stop climate change, those are also things that we can do that will make our lives better right now. These technologies, they have massive advantages beyond climate change. We estimate that we could save hundreds of thousands or even millions of lives from improved air quality alone if we move away from coal and move toward more renewable sources of energy.
Brian Lehrer: That was another part of your op-ed that really struck me too, that we hear so often that we have to make sacrifices so our children and grandchildren don't suffer catastrophic climate changes. Your article says, and you were just alluding to this, that climate-positive policies benefit people right now, right?
Kate Marvel: Absolutely. Don't get me wrong, I do want a better world for my children and grandchildren if they exist, but I also want a better world for me right now. You can tell the story of climate action in a way that makes it sound really unappealing. You can say, "We can make all these sacrifices, we can work really hard, we can do all these things, and then maybe we will be able to achieve a marginally less bad future than we might have expected otherwise."
That's not a very motivating narrative, but there's another narrative that you can tell that is also very, very true, and I find more galvanizing, which is that these things that we can do to lower emissions, they're better along a whole number of different axes. They're better for our air and water. They're better for our economy. They give rise to better products. I think framing climate action in that way has the advantage of being 100% accurate, but also just to my personal view, is a better story.
Brian Lehrer: Let me go back to some of the stats that you found in the climate assessment or cause for optimism and cite a big one that we haven't mentioned yet that might surprise and maybe even confuse people. Our country's greenhouse gas emissions are falling even as our GDP and population grow. Really, emissions are falling?
Kate Marvel: US emissions are falling, yes. They have dropped by 17% from 2005 to 2021. At the same time, the size of the economy over the same time doubled. That's a stat that I think most people aren't really aware of, that United States greenhouse gas emissions are falling, while at the same time, our economy and our population are both growing.
Brian Lehrer: How is that happening?
Kate Marvel: It's a combination of a wide variety of different factors. Most of it right now has been getting away from coal as an electricity source To a certain extent, that coal has been replaced by natural gas, but now we are seeing natural gas be replaced by wind and solar, which is just more cost-effective. I think the really important lesson there for me personally is that it is possible to decouple emissions from a growing economy.
Now, I want to make it really clear that the climate does not care where greenhouse gas emissions come from. A molecule of greenhouse gas emitted anywhere is going to have the exact same warming effect as one emitted from anywhere else. Globally, greenhouse gas emissions are not falling in the way that we need them to fall.
That's why I think it is really important if we zoom in and take a domestic view that the United States really be the leader in these technologies, really be the leader in climate action, really be the leader in saying, these are the energy sources of the future, and we want to be out in front of that.
Brian Lehrer: Last question. The headline on your op-ed is, "I'm a climate scientist. I'm not screaming into the void anymore." That's an important part of this too. You think the science wasn't getting through to people, but now you think it is?
Kate Marvel: I think there was a small group of really committed first responders who were listening to the science, who were convinced by those earlier, very, very dire warnings. That wasn't just other scientists. That was activists, that was policymakers, that was engineers. As a result of their actions, we are now in a much better place than we were before. It doesn't mean that we've got this. It doesn't mean that we can stop working, but it means that now we know what to do, and the solutions have now become even clearer and more manageable, more obvious than they were before.
Yes, the people who were going to listen to those warnings, they listened, and their work really, really mattered but now it's time to get not just the people who are going to listen to warnings on board. It's time to get everybody on board. That's why I think the story that we can now tell of taking climate action will not just stave off these dire climate risks, but it will also create a better world for us right now. That's why I think that narrative is so important.
Brian Lehrer: Kate Marvel, besides being a leader on the Federal government's official new climate assessment, is a research scientist with the environmental group, Project Drawdown. Previously, she was a research scientist at Columbia University and the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. That's our climate story of the week. Dr. Marvel, thank you so much for your first take.
Kate Marvel: Thank you so much for having me.
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