Facing Climate Change with Hope

[MUSIC - Marden Hill: Hijack]

Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Now, our Climate Story of the Week, which we're doing every Tuesday on the show all this year. This week, what if we get climate policy right? There's always so much talk of catastrophic worst-case scenarios, and rightly so, but what if humans do enough of the right things in response to the threats?

With us now, marine biologist and climate activist, Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson. She was one of the co-chairs, some of you may remember, for the March for Science in 2017 when she joined the show to talk about why scientists marched on Earth Day in Washington, DC, that year. She's also the co-founder of the nonprofit think tank Urban Ocean Lab. She's out with a new book simply called, What If We Get it Right?: Visions of Climate Futures. It's a collection of interviews in which each conversation showcases a different potential climate solution. Hi, Dr. Johnson, welcome back to WNYC.

Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson: Hello. Thanks for having me.

Brian Lehrer: Congratulations on the book. Why that frame for the book, "What if we get it right?"

Dr. Johnson: I feel like most of what we see in popular culture are these visions of apocalypse, of getting it wrong. For a lot of folks, myself included, that's not really enough. It's great to scare us away from the bad stuff, but if we don't know what we're working towards or for, it can be really hard to motivate ourselves for the kind of level of transformation in terms of our society and economy that's really needed in order to address a crisis of this magnitude.

This book aims to give people some glimpses into what the future could look like if we deploy all the solutions we already have at our fingertips, right? We already know how to transition to renewable energy. We know how to green our buildings, to improve public transit, to lower the carbon impact, the climate impact of our food systems, to restore and protect ecosystems that are doing so much through the magic of photosynthesis to help keep our climate in balance. We don't really think about the solutions as much as we think about the problem. This book is an effort to answer, I guess, the challenge like, "Show me it's worth the effort," like, "What do we get for all this change and work we have to put in?"

Brian Lehrer: Let's take some examples and let's start close to home for you since you're a marine biologist that the ocean can be beneficial to climate solutions.

Dr. Johnson: Absolutely.

Brian Lehrer: Where would you start?

Dr. Johnson: Well, the ocean has actually absorbed about 90% of the heat that's been trapped by greenhouse gases that are blanketing our planet because we keep burning fossil fuels. Without the ocean, our atmosphere would be 97 degrees Fahrenheit hotter. First of all, just shout out to the ocean, thank you for keeping the planet livable for humans.

Also, we know that the ocean is estimated to be about 35% of our climate solution. That includes offshore renewable energy, scaling that up, decarbonizing shipping, eating low-carbon seafood like seaweeds and oysters, conserving and restoring coastal ecosystems, which can actually sequester three or five times more carbon per acre than a forest on land. There's all these solutions that the ocean has to offer us and we don't think about that often enough.

Brian Lehrer: In fact, you've been fighting for what you call a Blue New Deal. What is that and how is it different from the Green New Deal, which we always think of as the policy framework to shift away from fossil fuels generally?

Dr. Johnson: I read the Green New Deal and I would actually encourage everyone to read it. It may shock you to learn it's only 12 pages, [chuckles] big font, double-spaced. It'll take you five minutes and then we can stop all believing whatever rumors are about what's in it and what's not in it. There's nothing about the government stealing your hamburgers, for example, but it doesn't really include the ocean in anything more than a passing mention on page 11.

Knowing that the ocean is a third or so of the climate solutions we have at our disposal, I, of course, raise my hand always for the ocean in rooms talking about climate policy. This is years ago now in 2019. When the Green New Deal resolution was released, I got together with a bunch of colleagues and said, "We actually need to include the ocean in federal climate policy too, or else we're missing a huge portion of the solutions and slowing ourselves down as regards making progress on the climate crisis."

Brian Lehrer: One of your interviews in the book is with Attorney Abigail Dillen, who's president of the nonprofit Earthjustice. Some listeners might be familiar with their tagline, "Because the Earth needs a good lawyer."

Dr. Johnson: Indeed. Unfortunately, it does.

Brian Lehrer: Your conversation was about using the legal system to address climate change and come up with a positive future. For example? I'm asking.

Dr. Johnson: Ah, [chuckles] I thought you were going to maybe play a clip from the audiobook because the 20 interviews in the book are actually all live. The audiobook is essentially a 20-episode podcast series condensed in there, which would be fun for folks to listen to. One of the things that she emphasizes in that interview is that we basically have the legal framework that we need just by enforcing existing laws like the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act.

We have the statutory authority we need to minimize the harms associated with our fossil fuel-based economy right now because a lot of burning fossil fuels, it's air pollution in the short term and then warming the planet in the longer term, right? There's a lot of water pollution associated with fossil fuel extraction, et cetera. I actually found it really bolstering to know that within our existing legal system, although there are gaps that she wants to fill and there's concern about the overturn of the Chevron doctrine by the Supreme Court, which gave federal agencies the ability to regulate much more robustly than they may be able to do in the future.

Of course, there's things that should be improved, but we don't actually have to wait for any big changes in our major governing laws in order to move forward. A lot of it is about enforcement. Abby also points to what's happening in, I think, about 30 other countries now, which is this emergence of legal frameworks recognizing the rights of nature. All these countries are thinking about protecting rivers as living entities with rights, other species as having rights to exist.

That's really starting to shift how you're seeing policy play out everywhere from the Ganges River in India to Ecuador and Bolivia and Colombia. South America is actually really leading in a lot of ways on this. That's been really exciting to see too. As a lawyer, Abby Dillen is really focused on, and Earthjustice is, how can the courts be a part of the climate solution? Because were going to have to keep taking our government to court and corporations to court for breaking the rules essentially that do exist to protect clean air, clean water, and a livable climate.

Brian Lehrer: I guess that means you're hoping that you can win some after the recent streak of losing some, at least that the Supreme Court you mentioned overturning the Chevron doctrine, which reduces the power of regulatory agencies. John Roberts wrote, "Congress did not pass the EPA in the Clean Air Act the authority to devise emissions caps."

Samuel Alito wrote in another decision, "The Clean Water Act extends only to those wetlands with a continuous surface connection to bodies that are waters of the United States in their own right." In other words, they're looking for the most precise language in the environmental laws that we have for the purpose of limiting those laws as much as possible. If it's not just going to be laws that you go back to Congress to have them expand, it's going to have to be some other way to go through the courts, right?

Dr. Johnson: Yes, that example of the Chevron doctrine, what's the alternative? Congress writing extremely detailed air quality parts per million limits? That makes no sense. That's why we have federal agencies. That was clearly just designed to slow down our ability to get things done. Look, I think it's important to say, this is not a political issue. This is like a health and safety issue that's been politicized unfortunately.

This is why it's really important to elect politicians that get it on climate because they're appointing the Supreme Court and other judges, hundreds of them a year, in the case of the President, that determine whether or not we have an environment that is polluted with poisons, whether or not we're inhaling lots of particles from coal plants, et cetera. Nine million people die a year just from the air pollution associated with burning fossil fuels. Even if you don't care about climate change or think that's a hoax, no one should be breathing in this soot.

Brian Lehrer: The SNURs. We're in our Climate Story of the Week if you're just joining us with Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, marine biologist, co-founder of the nonprofit think tank Urban Ocean Lab, and author of the brand new book, What If We Get it Right?: Visions of Climate Futures. Does anybody out there have one, a vision of a climate future in which we get it right or how to get there, or a question for Dr. Johnson? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Let's take one. Mike in Madison, New Jersey, you're on WNYC. Hi, Mike.

Mike: Hello there. In 2019, we finished rebuilding our house as a passive house, which means, among other things, we doubled the square footage. Our house now uses a quarter of the energy it used to use. I would like to see passive house building standards become building code that you couldn't build to anything less than this. I understand that in Frankfurt, Germany, Dr. Johnson, the municipal building code is that you can't build to anything less than passive house standards. Are you aware of that?

Dr. Johnson: I'm not aware of that, but that's really exciting to hear. Congratulations on your home upgrade. I think we don't use that word enough actually that these changes that you're talking about for energy efficiency for a less drafty home with lower energy bills, these are improvements on our quality of life. Building codes are actually a significant part of the solution. Buildings are a major source of greenhouse gas emissions.

Unfortunately, this is a lot of city-by-city and town-by-town kind of work. One of the things that does need to happen is prohibiting the inclusion of new gas lines into new construction. The fossil fuel industry has been fighting that at every turn. Places like Berkeley, California, where you would expect that to be successful, they passed it. It looks like it's gotten repealed. It's just very hard to deal with such entrenched and powerful political interests and lobbying.

The money the fossil fuel industry is willing to throw behind preventing energy efficiency and passive housing, et cetera, is astronomical. Until we get those policies in place, we need more and more folks to lead by example as you're doing. I'll say the Inflation Reduction Act that was passed two years ago created so many tax credits and incentives for homeowners who are interested in this. If you check that out, energy.gov/save, I think it's called.

I put solar panels on my house this year because there's a 30% tax credit for those. You can upgrade to an induction stove. There's money to offset the costs of insulating your attic, putting in better windows. I put in a heat pump, hot water heater, right? All of these things are just better. Now, our government is subsidizing this transition, which I think is wonderful. Not enough people know that these credits are available for those who want to follow your lead and get it together on the home front first.

Brian Lehrer: Mike, thanks for talking about your passive house. Another one from the book. You spoke with emergency management expert Samantha Montano. She told you, "One thing I want everyone to do is google what their local emergency management budget is. That is the thing I think can radicalize people." Okay, why is that?

Dr. Johnson: It's horrifically small when we think about the impacts of climate change, right? The floods, the fires, the hurricanes, the heat waves. We think about the amount of resources and organization in terms of public services that would be required to address those properly. Those things are way out of whack. In many cases, as Professor Montano describes, the local emergency management head is, actually, the fire chief doing this on the side.

There's not even a full-time one person in charge of emergency management for most places. When we're thinking about cooling shelters or places people can go in a hurricane evacuation, all of this stuff is just woefully underfunded. The other thing that she recommends is that we really think about what resilience looks like in the face of these increasingly unnatural disasters that we're facing.

What does that look like at a community level? Do you know your neighbors? Can you call them if there's a power outage and you have an emergency? Who is going to be the first responder? It's actually the people right around you. She recommends, one of the best things we can do to prepare for an emergency is bring your neighbor a basket of muffins and build those relationships and get an understanding of who around you would need extra help in an emergency, right?

Can you offer that help? Are people clear on what you need for the elderly and the infirm among us? How are we taking care of each other before emergency services may be able to arrive? Then, of course, being prepared with our go bags and et cetera, but this has to be bigger than an individual response. We need resources at town, city, state, societal, federal levels. The FEMA budget is really inadequate for dealing with this along with other challenges with FEMA, she points out, if you read that interview.

Brian Lehrer: Sorry for that clunk, listeners, that you may have heard. I dropped my water bottle. It happens. When you're on the radio, you hear a clunk.

Dr. Johnson: I hope it's not single-use plastic, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: [chuckles] It is not. Are you kidding? Single-use plastic, besides not crossing my threshold, would not make that noise.

Dr. Johnson: [laughs] Proper clunk.

Brian Lehrer: It's a nice metal water bottle. You were talking about tax credits before for things like installing solar. Listener writes, "Tax credits do not help low-income families who do not pay large amounts to the IRS."

Dr. Johnson: Great point.

Brian Lehrer: I know your book does focus a lot on equity, so where would you start on equity as a climate solution?

Dr. Johnson: I'm so glad someone mentioned that. This is something that came up in my interview in the book with Rhiana Gunn-Wright, who is actually the key architect of the Green New Deal. For people who don't have a tax burden because they don't make enough money to have to owe the government taxes, it's really not helpful. For people who are not homeowners, it's not helpful, right?

Renters are in a completely different category and often have fewer resources available to them in a disaster because they don't have the same kinds of insurance benefits that homeowners often have access to. There's absolutely an equity issue with how we deploy solutions and think about what justice looks like in the context of addressing the climate crisis. I think one of the programs that I've been really excited about is the job creation work of the American Climate Corps.

This is a program started by the Biden-Harris administration just earlier this year to put tens of thousands of young people to work on climate solutions with good-paying jobs, installing solar panels, reducing wildfire risk, restoring wetlands, because we actually need to put a whole generation of folks to work implementing climate solutions and finding new careers. I, for one, am very excited about the possibilities there.

Yes, we've got a lot of work to do because there's a huge discrepancy between the people who do the most emitting of greenhouse gases and the people who are bearing the largest brunt of that. In New York City, for example, low-income housing is significantly more likely to be in flood-prone areas. There are many more examples like that in terms of where factories are located, power plants that are causing air pollution and who has to breathe that, and the asthma and cancer rates that go along with that, being located much more often in communities of color and poor communities.

Brian Lehrer: I guess what you just said explains, at least in part, the reason for the stat that you give in the book that in the US, 65% of Black people and of Asians and 70% of Hispanics say they're concerned about climate, compared to 47%, a lower number of white people.

Dr. Johnson: Yes, and that number of white Americans is actually declining. It used to be 49%. We're really heading in the wrong direction. I'm so glad you mentioned that statistic because so often when we think of an environmentalist, we've been trained to think of that as a white person, as someone maybe standing on top of a mountain, looking off into the distance with a Patagonia jacket and an electric car.

All of which are great things. I love that kind of outdoor lifestyle, but that's actually not the typical environmentalist, right? As we're seeing from statistics like that, it is the majority of people of color who actually are the most concerned. It's not because, as listeners might guess, they are bearing the most significant impacts of climate. It's because of a more communal worldview instead of an individualistic worldview.

This sense that we're all in this together and we all have a role to play. We better figure this out as a collective because no one person can solve the climate crisis or insulate themselves from it, no matter how wealthy they are. To me, that's a hopeful message in a way and one that comes through all the interviews in this book that community is the answer in a very fundamental way.

Brian Lehrer: Just a few minutes left in our Climate Story of the Week with Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, marine biologist and co-author now of, What If We Get it Right?: Visions of Climate Futures. Mook in State College, Pennsylvania, you're on WNYC. Hi, Mook.

Mook: Hi, Brian. Hi, Dr. Johnson. I just wanted to try to integrate some of the themes that you've talked about throughout the segment and bring to the mind the current dam release and situation in Nigeria, where earlier this week due to heavy rainfall, a dam was released and millions have been displaced. Hundreds or more have been killed.

I'm just trying to figure out, how do we think about getting visions of climate future correct from a more Global South perspective, thinking about disaster risk management, equity, and all these issues? Just before I go, I just want to say I'm a professor at Penn State and I teach environmental policy. I actually assign my students to listen to the climate segment every week. We talk about it in class tomorrow. Thank you, Brian, and the team for your work.

Brian Lehrer: Wow.

Mook: Thank you, Dr. Johnson, for everything you do.

Brian Lehrer: Mook, thank you very much.

Dr. Johnson: Very cool.

Brian Lehrer: Oh, I'm in trouble now if we're required.

Dr. Johnson: [laughs]

Brian Lehrer: Once you're required, then nobody wants really to listen. [laughs] Do you know about that Nigeria story, Dr. Johnson?

Dr. Johnson: I hadn't heard that yet. Thanks for bringing that to our attention. I think you're absolutely right. Of course, there is this major inequity between the high-emitting countries in the Global North and the Global South nations that are bearing the disproportionate impact of the climate crisis, especially in the tropics with heat and hurricanes and sea-level rise and droughts and floods and all of the food insecurity and conflict that that kicks off.

We've just really not done a good job as a global collective in thinking about how to address those inequalities. The United Nations is the place where that kind of thing would happen. At the last Conference of the Parties, nations did agree to establish a loss-and-damage fund so that the countries who were dealing with these impacts would have some resources to recover from all these increasingly unnatural climate disasters.

The wealthy countries just aren't putting the money in. Places like the US where you have President Biden committing to put money in, it's Congress who controls the purse strings. He can't just write that check to be helpful. It really, really matters who we elect to be leaders of our countries because they're the ones deciding, "Do we share? Who do we help? If we have climate policy at all, is it implemented justly?"

We're in the middle of an incredibly critical election season. I would encourage everyone listening to really do your homework and figure out how to vote for not just at the presidential level but up and down the ballot, candidates who get it on climate at the presidential level. I think the answer is really obvious. You have, on one hand, Trump, who literally offered fossil fuel executives that if they donated $1 billion to his presidential campaign, he would give them many billions of dollars in benefits if he was reelected, and rolled back over 100 environmental regulations when he was in office, pulled the US out of the UN climate agreement, calls climate change a hoax, et cetera, et cetera.

You have Kamala Harris, who's been a climate justice champion actually for decades, taken fossil fuel companies to court as a lawyer and attorney general, and was the deciding vote in favor of passing the Inflation Reduction Act, which is why we have as much progress on climate policy as we have had in the last two years. Sorry, on climate implementation of solutions, but it really is like the city council members, the public utility commissioners, port commissioners, mayors who are deciding things like, "Are we investing in public transit? Are we dealing with upgrading our building codes? Do we have municipal composting available to us, and bike lanes?"

All of these solutions that will help us deal with the impacts of climate change that are already here and reduce the further impacts that are projected to come. I just can't emphasize enough the importance of electing politicians that get it on climate and are willing to actually go to work to pass the laws we need to have the framework that makes it possible to get it right.

Brian Lehrer: Well, ending with that political endorsement, which is her right, is our guest, Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, marine biologist, co-founder of the nonprofit think tank Urban Ocean Lab, and author of the brand new book, What If We Get it Right?: Visions of Climate Futures. So brand new that I'll tell the listeners that you've got a book launch event in Brooklyn today. It's sold out, but I think people can stream it, right? It's called the Climate Variety Show. Jason Sudeikis, other people.

Dr. Johnson: My co-host, yes.

Brian Lehrer: Can people stream this from their phones or whatever?

Dr. Johnson: It'll be broadcasting live on my YouTube channel and on my Instagram account @ayanaeliza. Yes, we've got Jason Sudeikis as my co-host, Roy Wood Jr. and Wyatt Cenac on the comedy, Nicole Cardoza with magic tricks, Perrin Ireland with hula hoops and how climate is impacting the sex lives of other species, music from the Oshima Brothers.

About 10 of the people I interviewed in the book will be there talking about climate solutions. We've got a DJ, Mamoudou on the ones and twos. It is a Brooklyn climate party, so please join us on the internet. Then I'm going on a 19-city tour for the next six weeks with a bunch of different events in New York City. People can find out all the details of all of this on the book's website, getitright.earth.

Brian Lehrer: I'm glad you gave us some book launch time here today. I don't have it. Do you have the time of the Climate Variety Show in Brooklyn tonight?

Dr. Johnson: 7:00 PM, Eastern.

Brian Lehrer: 7:00 PM. Listeners, we'll put a link for the live streaming for those of you who are interested on our website. Dr. Johnson, thanks a lot.

Dr. Johnson: Thank you.

 

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