CAS Inquire "Sustainable Futures" Panel

CAS MarComm Author

04/08/2024 Added

5 Plays

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CAS Inquire panel discussion for the theme "Sustainable Futures" with Patrick Bitterman, Mark van Roojen, Ken Bloom, and Julia Frengs.

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[00:00:01.560]Welcome to our final panel.
[00:00:04.520]Discussion of this year's CAS Inquire series
[00:00:07.920]focused on sustainable futures.
[00:00:10.960]Our theme this year, as you all know,
[00:00:14.040]has been both urgent and complex,
[00:00:18.200]but it also expresses optimism in our shared abilities to imagine
[00:00:22.840]and to enact a future that will sustain life in all of its diversity.
[00:00:28.200]And our speakers who have been with us this whole academic year know
[00:00:32.840]well the challenges that we face over the course of this series.
[00:00:36.720]They have helped us better understand through science, through story and through
[00:00:41.640]other methods how unsustainable our current practices are
[00:00:46.440]and some of the challenges that we face in trying to imagine
[00:00:49.680]and then, more importantly, implement a sustainable future.
[00:00:54.000]And today we have the great privilege of bringing together
[00:00:58.480]or of our esteemed panelists to engage in dialog,
[00:01:02.880]drawing connections between their respective areas of expertise
[00:01:06.960]and trying to explore the synergies and tensions
[00:01:09.560]inherent in the pursuit of sustainable futures.
[00:01:12.720]And so joining me up here on the stage tonight is Patrick Bitterman, assistant
[00:01:16.720]professor of geography in the School of Global Integrative Studies.
[00:01:20.040]Ken Bloom, professor and chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy.
[00:01:24.560]Julia Frengs who is associate professor of French in the Department of Modern
[00:01:28.440]Languages and Literatures, and Marc van Roojen, who is a professor of philosophy.
[00:01:32.880]Unfortunately, tonight, Cara Burberry, geology professor
[00:01:37.080]in Earth and Atmospheric sciences, is unable to join us.
[00:01:40.120]So perhaps we'll just talk about carbon capture without her, but for
[00:01:44.960]her own personal carbon got.
[00:01:49.800]So to get us going.
[00:01:51.240]We're hoping you all will participate and ask questions.
[00:01:54.480]We have some prepared questions
[00:01:56.320]and then we will open it up for other questions from all of you.
[00:02:00.320]If you're in the room with us live.
[00:02:02.600]Please raise your hand and we'll have the microphone brought to you.
[00:02:05.480]So people participating by Zoom can also hear your question.
[00:02:09.080]And if you're participating with us by Zoom, you can submit your questions
[00:02:12.600]through the chat and we will ask your question of the panelists.
[00:02:17.840]So to get us going, I'll start us off with this first question
[00:02:20.400]and invite the panelists to speak to this.
[00:02:23.720]And that is the following that although our theme is at its heart
[00:02:28.560]hopeful, it does include a question mark that registers
[00:02:32.800]the worry wrought by heatwaves, wildfires, melting glaciers and floods.
[00:02:38.200]2023 as this panelists, as these panelists
[00:02:41.280]know, was 1.52 degrees Celsius
[00:02:44.360]hotter on average than temperatures before industrialization.
[00:02:48.000]And January 2024 was 1.66 degrees warmer than the average January temperature.
[00:02:53.600]And pre-industrial times
[00:02:56.400]numbers which are alarmingly close to the two degrees
[00:02:58.960]of warming the 2015 Paris Agreement aim to avoid.
[00:03:03.360]So we want to ask the panelists to start us off
[00:03:05.640]by sharing something you presented or something you learned from someone else
[00:03:09.480]in this series that gives you hope for the future.
[00:03:13.760]And if it's all right, I'll just work down the list here.
[00:03:16.600]The group here, I sat in the wrong chair.
[00:03:19.560]All right.
[00:03:22.680]You know what I mean?
[00:03:23.240]I hope so.
[00:03:23.760]So thank you, Mark.
[00:03:25.360]I'm happy to be here with the panel.
[00:03:27.360]Admittedly, I am somewhat of a cynic when it comes to this sort of thing.
[00:03:31.440]But one of the things I think that makes me hopeful
[00:03:34.040]that I included in my talk way back in September, I think it was
[00:03:39.040]I'm having a meeting anymore is that I think there is a growing recognition
[00:03:45.080]that in fact, a lot of the problems we talk about,
[00:03:47.400]whether that is the amount of carbon we put into the atmosphere,
[00:03:50.680]the issues with land use that lead to bad
[00:03:53.200]water quality droughts and famines
[00:03:57.120]and things like that are in fact largely caused by us right now.
[00:04:01.520]Obviously, it's unfortunate that it is caused by us,
[00:04:03.600]but sort of recognizing that we are part of the problem is
[00:04:07.080]perhaps the first step in trying to address that problem.
[00:04:10.440]And we see this reflected in changes in public opinion.
[00:04:14.960]I actually survey my students every semester in my global
[00:04:18.960]environmental issues class, and perhaps there's some self-selection bias going on,
[00:04:23.080]but I do see shifts in my students opinions on this topic as well.
[00:04:27.640]But we also see this reflected in recent policy.
[00:04:30.960]The Information Reduction Act, which was passed last year, had about $370
[00:04:36.240]billion for climate and environmental
[00:04:40.000]related activities, which I think is a really big deal.
[00:04:42.760]And even policies that are not ultimately successful
[00:04:46.080]and sometimes become political footballs like the Green New Deal, for example,
[00:04:49.920]do sort of permeate
[00:04:51.160]some of these ideas into the culture, into our policy, into our politics.
[00:04:55.560]And ultimately, I think, sort of change the narrative,
[00:04:58.480]move the window of sort of what is potentially possible.
[00:05:01.800]So I think there is good news and that's there's
[00:05:04.640]obviously a long way to go, but I can find some hope there.
[00:05:09.000]Thank you.
[00:05:10.920]Okay. I mean, for myself, I would say.
[00:05:12.800]Yeah, I know.
[00:05:14.400]Although we're certainly
[00:05:14.960]in a dangerous state on this, we're not entirely out of time.
[00:05:18.960]Right near the most recent IPCC report said as much.
[00:05:22.000]Right.
[00:05:22.200]There's still time to act and there's still time to make a difference. Right?
[00:05:25.040]So we we we don't have to just throw up our hands at this point.
[00:05:28.240]I actually
[00:05:31.320]I mean, I to do my day job, I think I have to be an optimist right
[00:05:35.080]then you have to believe that, you know, change is possible
[00:05:37.080]if we want to do it or, you know, willing to commit to it.
[00:05:40.200]So I'm optimistic in that respect.
[00:05:44.520]I'm I'm also an optimist about technology right now.
[00:05:46.880]I work in a technologically driven field, and I think there's still
[00:05:52.240]a lot of technology work we can do to to try to mitigate production of carbon.
[00:05:58.080]We're not going to get solved.
[00:05:59.640]We care about carbon capture.
[00:06:00.760]But but but you know what?
[00:06:04.160]You know, technologies we could yet develop to
[00:06:07.320]you know, to help spur electrification.
[00:06:10.480]Right.
[00:06:10.680]Whether that's improving the electrical grid, improving battery technology,
[00:06:14.920]you know, what technological advances can we make to reduce carbon production?
[00:06:20.600]You know, what technological advances, advances
[00:06:24.120]can we make that would help us reduce energy consumption overall?
[00:06:27.760]You know, these are all things that are still out there ahead of us.
[00:06:31.080]And that I think our potential,
[00:06:32.520]if we have the will, to do it in various ways, right?
[00:06:34.840]I mean, we have to have the money behind it.
[00:06:36.240]And yes, the inflation reduction Act is absolutely one example of that.
[00:06:40.320]You know, we need to get people interested in working on these problems.
[00:06:44.120]And, you know, that's just sort of,
[00:06:47.960]you know, intellectual incentives or real incentives to work on the problems.
[00:06:51.280]And hopefully also, I guess as okay as your students
[00:06:54.360]are, views are changing and they're seeing this as a more of an imperative.
[00:06:57.480]Maybe we'll get more students interested in these things to be
[00:07:02.160]doing.
[00:07:05.000]Okay.
[00:07:05.760]So I think all of the presentations made me feel hopeful.
[00:07:09.960]I think for me, being a part of this
[00:07:14.480]series makes me feel hopeful because it makes me think
[00:07:18.680]the humanities voices are being included in this mostly scientific conversation.
[00:07:24.400]And clearly I'm maybe I'm biased, but I think the humanities
[00:07:29.120]are really important, and I think that we can shed light on things.
[00:07:32.400]But science can't, although science sheds light on other things.
[00:07:37.920]So I think that
[00:07:41.040]what really made me hopeful about being a part of
[00:07:45.560]this is the questions that we all got, the engagement that we all got,
[00:07:50.480]the participation from the audience, the acknowledgment
[00:07:56.120]from ourselves amongst ourselves that all of these voices matter,
[00:08:00.640]and that all of these disciplines can do something
[00:08:04.880]about the climate crisis, whether it's philosophy
[00:08:10.640]or or geology or or literature.
[00:08:16.480]You know, I think we can all we all have a part and we all have a role.
[00:08:20.880]And I also wanted to echo what Patrick said.
[00:08:23.480]I taught an environmental literature course last year,
[00:08:26.600]a graduate seminar, and one of my evaluations
[00:08:32.200]said at the end after we had read, you know, I don't know how many novels
[00:08:36.600]I used to feel hopeless, but now I feel hopeful.
[00:08:40.880]After reading these works, and that makes me feel hopeful myself.
[00:08:47.720]I just have to look quickly.
[00:08:48.720]For how for
[00:08:49.200]how long has environmental literature been a thing that you would have a course
[00:08:53.000]on on that since 1970 when Rachel Carson published Silent Spring.
[00:08:58.080]Yeah, it's it's been around a while. Okay.
[00:09:00.880]Francophone French and francophone
[00:09:04.400]environmental literature is kind of new to the game.
[00:09:08.080]Yeah.
[00:09:12.240]So I suppose the thing
[00:09:14.840]that makes me optimistic is connected with the thing that makes me pessimistic.
[00:09:18.000]Politics makes me pessimistic.
[00:09:20.000]I was really pessimistic a year and a half ago,
[00:09:25.160]and then the Inflation Reduction Act went through, which seemed impossible
[00:09:29.880]all week before it went through.
[00:09:34.720]And as I understand it, it gets us about halfway to where
[00:09:38.640]the United States promised to get by 2020, 30 to 2030 is pretty close.
[00:09:45.240]Halfway isn't all the way,
[00:09:47.160]but I think it's a necessary condition for the world that the United States do it.
[00:09:51.000]So that was it.
[00:09:53.280]It took me from despair to moderate hopefulness.
[00:10:04.920]Any questions from the audience just yet?
[00:10:06.640]Because if not, I'm I'm going to go through
[00:10:07.960]a few more questions that we have prepared for them.
[00:10:10.000]So you just raise your hands when you're ready for us, right?
[00:10:12.760]Okay.
[00:10:13.440]The next question will pose is the following.
[00:10:16.120]In the very first lecture of our series, Dr.
[00:10:19.560]Bittermann began by talking about the present moment
[00:10:22.280]and the range of alternative futures before us that depend upon the decisions
[00:10:26.160]we make now.
[00:10:27.720]And you hear that a little bit in the answers you've just heard
[00:10:31.000]in his talk and in the talks that followed,
[00:10:34.200]one could imagine that in order to achieve true sustainability,
[00:10:38.160]we will have to veer pretty substantially away
[00:10:40.760]from the status quo and the way we do things now.
[00:10:44.280]For example, to quell the green algae blooms and lakes once and for all.
[00:10:48.560]An alternative future might involve radically curtailing
[00:10:52.720]or stopping pig and cattle
[00:10:54.240]farming that leads to the fertilizer runoff that causes algae blooms,
[00:10:58.000]rather than just tinkering around the edges of that
[00:11:00.800]and changing the way that happens around waterways.
[00:11:03.720]So we might come to a whole range of other alternative futures
[00:11:07.720]by also thinking about Dr.
[00:11:09.360]Bloom's provocative question How can we pursue the science we love sustainably?
[00:11:15.040]that I feel are absolutely necessary, though exceptionally hard to do
[00:11:19.240]would be public funding of elections, paying lawmakers well,
[00:11:23.320]so that that is not the situation
[00:11:26.680]where the only that the people that can afford to run are the wealthy.
[00:11:29.840]Right.
[00:11:30.080]They have their own sort of opinions and can entrench power ranked choice voting.
[00:11:35.240]Right.
[00:11:35.360]So I think, frankly, dramatic overhauls of the political system,
[00:11:39.160]how we pay for it, how we vote will lead to, in my opinion, at least,
[00:11:46.520]representation that more
[00:11:48.000]accurately reflects what is actually necessary.
[00:11:51.240]And I would add to that actually
[00:11:54.640]incentives to get more young people to run,
[00:11:57.400]whether that's term limits, age limits, that type of thing.
[00:11:59.720]Our our elected bodies do not reflect our population
[00:12:03.240]very well.
[00:12:09.680]I probably a lot of people
[00:12:11.200]look at climate change issues and you know what?
[00:12:14.600]We might have doing in reaction to these issues.
[00:12:18.560]And you worry about the the implications of of lifestyle changes.
[00:12:22.360]Right.
[00:12:22.760]And, you know, I'm I'll have to give up my car.
[00:12:25.720]I have to give up my gas stove.
[00:12:27.200]I have to, you know, all all these things.
[00:12:29.560]I can't go anywhere anymore.
[00:12:31.240]And you know that that's the sort of thing that maybe
[00:12:34.320]can turn people off too easily, you know?
[00:12:37.960]So what you know, what can we do to think about how, you know,
[00:12:41.760]technologically I'm coming back to technology?
[00:12:43.800]Fine. Maybe the politics is more important.
[00:12:47.080]You know, can we do to sort of the easy transitions.
[00:12:51.400]Right.
[00:12:51.760]And and move some of the some of the stuff, the background.
[00:12:55.200]Right. You know, the, you know, smarter electric power grids.
[00:12:57.360]Right now, my understanding of things is that,
[00:13:00.760]you know, the power grid is the like the easiest thing to decarbonize.
[00:13:04.480]And, you know, can we,
[00:13:06.720]you know, make that's
[00:13:07.320]where investment is going to be more behind the scenes for people.
[00:13:10.400]And, you know, it will let people do the sorts of things
[00:13:13.840]they are doing now, you know, and still do it in a more sustainable way.
[00:13:18.840]But I mean, certainly does require leadership and investment
[00:13:21.880]in all of these things to push these things through,
[00:13:23.680]because they're not they're not small cost either.
[00:13:30.680]Yeah, this is a hard one.
[00:13:32.440]But I think that both of you have kind of said what I would like to say,
[00:13:37.920]but also I think that on an individual level, we all
[00:13:41.680]and somehow we all need to take on a responsibility, right?
[00:13:46.360]So Become vegetarians, for example.
[00:13:48.760]And I think that's hard for a lot of people to imagine.
[00:13:51.280]But I'll go back to what gives me hope is, you know, all of these inventions
[00:13:57.200]of the impossible burger and beyond burger and beyond meat.
[00:14:01.920]And I'm going to go low brow here and talk about the Netflix documents,
[00:14:06.480]really the twin experiment that is out right now.
[00:14:10.360]It's really fascinating.
[00:14:11.440]And it talks about how what we eat does matter to the environment.
[00:14:17.240]And so I think I think
[00:14:20.520]that kind of getting more information like that out is helpful and people
[00:14:25.680]changing the way they eat and also like sustainable farming.
[00:14:30.160]This documentary also talked about sustainable
[00:14:33.480]farming or using mushrooms instead of meat or whatever.
[00:14:39.160]I think that eventually we are going to get to a place
[00:14:42.760]where we can eat meat ethically that, that and I'm thinking about this
[00:14:47.800]just because of the question, right about the increased algae, etc..
[00:14:53.200]But there I mean, but there are other things, right?
[00:14:55.600]I think we can make.
[00:14:57.160]But I, I think that
[00:15:00.880]electric vehicles are going to get better and better and more affordable.
[00:15:04.240]And politicians are trying to make them more affordable.
[00:15:07.720]Right.
[00:15:07.920]I think there's like a 70 $500 credit if you
[00:15:11.280]get a new electric vehicle
[00:15:16.240]and so tax 70 $500 tax credit or whatever.
[00:15:19.880]So I think incentive incentives are important.
[00:15:23.160]Those motivate people to maybe they're not going to do it
[00:15:27.320]for the right reasons, but they'll do the right thing.
[00:15:31.600]So yeah, that's my response.
[00:15:34.520]Yeah.
[00:15:37.440]Yeah.
[00:15:37.680]This was the one I didn't want to answer
[00:15:41.680]on the list of questions, but
[00:15:45.400]in a way I think there's lots of big changes
[00:15:47.520]needed, but I don't think there's time to like
[00:15:52.200]put it.
[00:15:53.200]We've got to do some stuff really fast.
[00:15:55.160]It's sort of triage time.
[00:15:56.680]And so whereas I think politics is really
[00:16:01.520]the big problem behind many of the big problems,
[00:16:03.960]we've got, I don't think the kinds of political reforms
[00:16:06.960]that would make it a whole lot better quickly
[00:16:11.200]are going to happen on the timescale that we need to get
[00:16:15.720]to deal with climate change realistically.
[00:16:18.600]So I mean, this is kind of why I don't have a good answer
[00:16:21.760]because I think there's like I mean, I start
[00:16:24.080]I used to lead this, but I mean, I was an undergrad when I stopped eating meat.
[00:16:28.120]You know, that's that's not a big change for me.
[00:16:30.640]That's, you know,
[00:16:34.120]and and
[00:16:36.520]I do think the political changes are big changes.
[00:16:38.480]I think they aren't going to be easy.
[00:16:42.160]I think they're important for lots of things,
[00:16:46.360]not just climate change, but I think climate change is so urgent
[00:16:49.520]that probably the big political changes aren't happen fast
[00:16:53.480]enough.
[00:16:57.160]Pushing that.
[00:16:58.000]Well, this this next question might be a great way to start
[00:17:00.880]at this challenge in a different way.
[00:17:02.680]And maybe we'll
[00:17:03.440]kind of come to a reverse order and we'll start with you on this, Mark.
[00:17:06.640]But a number of the talks address the challenge of convincing governments,
[00:17:11.800]the public or even other scientists that they need to take action of the kind
[00:17:17.080]that we were just describing, political change, scientific change.
[00:17:21.400]And it seems that part of the challenge involves gathering and integrating
[00:17:25.000]different kinds of data.
[00:17:27.040]Another part involves making it understandable to your audience.
[00:17:31.600]Another part is motivating an audience
[00:17:34.400]to to embrace these issues and make changes.
[00:17:38.840]And many of the
[00:17:40.000]fields that bear most directly on climate science
[00:17:44.080]are reasonably and rightly valued dispassionate arguments
[00:17:47.800]based on technical understandings of field specific data.
[00:17:51.920]But we're asking here, too, the group of panelists, is your experience
[00:17:55.000]as a CAS inquires speaker or perhaps audience members offer insights
[00:17:59.440]into ways to communicate issues in a compelling fashion that connect
[00:18:04.600]with an audience, especially an audience that might be beyond your own field.
[00:18:08.440]And so this is a question about the challenges of communication.
[00:18:11.560]Given all the challenges that you all have as so well described.
[00:18:15.040]So I wonder what you think about that.
[00:18:16.160]Mark So
[00:18:24.640]so one of the things that I want up reading, not especially for this,
[00:18:27.800]but just because I did a climate change seminar last year
[00:18:31.600]for advanced students last term and I was reading something
[00:18:35.320]actually I saw a video by Caroline Caroline or Caroline Hayhoe,
[00:18:39.320]and one of the points she made, I think I brought it up maybe in my talk was that
[00:18:44.080]it's useful for people to
[00:18:49.080]feel like something can that they don't feel hopeless.
[00:18:51.800]They're not going to listen
[00:18:52.960]to the rest of what you have to say if they feel hopeless.
[00:18:56.560]So that's an important thing.
[00:18:59.560]So coupling that and look here, I'm a pessimistic person up here,
[00:19:03.440]but coupling that with where we started a little bit,
[00:19:09.880]the it's not like it's a yes, no question.
[00:19:14.200]Like it's sort of like it's a pretty bad,
[00:19:17.400]really bad, totally awful set of options.
[00:19:20.400]And we're trying to stay on the better end of that.
[00:19:24.200]And the two degree goal, which is a which was once
[00:19:28.160]I think, a realistic goal and may not be anymore,
[00:19:30.560]it's not like, you know, the world blows up
[00:19:32.960]if we go over it, it's like, okay, now there's a reason to try to
[00:19:36.840]stay as close to that as we can and so on.
[00:19:39.000]And so I think
[00:19:42.120]there probably are ways of talking about that kind of two degree goal
[00:19:44.920]that are are counterproductive because if people think of it
[00:19:49.240]as the apocalypse, if you go across a certain threshold,
[00:19:51.680]then they're not going to do anything if they think
[00:19:53.640]we're going to go across that threshold.
[00:19:55.600]But if it's if you think about as a matter of degree, that might be
[00:19:59.280]an important thing to get across to people,
[00:20:02.680]even though we there are thresholds that we don't know where they are.
[00:20:05.520]So there is a possibility we go over some threshold that we don't know about.
[00:20:10.600]But so my whole field is again,
[00:20:22.720]about emotion and
[00:20:25.200]and about talking to people and communicating and communicating
[00:20:30.640]important points on and on pressing issues.
[00:20:36.600]And so I don't think that a dispassionate conversation
[00:20:40.960]about climate change is very effective in changing people's minds
[00:20:46.280]or in changing the way people behave.
[00:20:48.920]I think I think emotions are important.
[00:20:52.880]I think we have to I think we have to play to people's
[00:20:59.800]feelings and personal experiences.
[00:21:03.680]And I obviously think the way
[00:21:06.360]I think we do that is through reading literature that talks about these things.
[00:21:10.120]And maybe that's literature
[00:21:13.240]that that people aren't terribly familiar with.
[00:21:18.480]Maybe it's maybe it's magazine articles,
[00:21:21.800]or maybe it's a Netflix documentary or it's some sort of film, right.
[00:21:26.280]That that plays to our emotions.
[00:21:28.480]But I think that's an incredibly important, powerful tool
[00:21:32.120]to make people to make people listen.
[00:21:36.280]I'm I was doing an independent study with a student who was working on
[00:21:42.280]environmental literature, and she she had just read one of the novels
[00:21:47.840]that I mentioned in my talk, The Island of Shattered Dreams.
[00:21:51.280]And she said, this moved me more than anything I've ever read in my entire life.
[00:21:57.000]And I am so grateful to have read this book
[00:22:00.840]because it was just so powerful to her and
[00:22:05.080]I just think literature has that power to make people,
[00:22:09.160]like, physically respond, right, just and physically and emotionally respond
[00:22:14.880]has something that, you know, if you just tell them all this to statistics,
[00:22:20.040]either they're going to be like, okay,
[00:22:23.280]I don't really understand or man, that sounds really scary.
[00:22:27.280]I'd just like to ignore it.
[00:22:28.760]But I think that if you bring in if you bring in a conversation
[00:22:33.080]about real people who experience climate
[00:22:36.280]change in a critical way,
[00:22:41.080]I think it moves people to want to do something to change.
[00:22:46.360]Can I just follow up with you on that?
[00:22:47.640]Because so
[00:22:48.520]I mean, right,
[00:22:49.120]so coming from the field of literature and people
[00:22:51.280]who've read The Island of Shattered Dreams,
[00:22:53.200]you can see how that would resonate, right, for people within your field.
[00:22:57.280]Yeah, but if we're going to try to break down
[00:22:59.280]silos and have scientists learn from literature and vice versa,
[00:23:03.480]do you have thoughts about how we could begin communicating, taking the lessons
[00:23:07.440]you just described, that emotional impact, that resonance that it has?
[00:23:11.440]You have thoughts about how we could begin to have
[00:23:14.320]some synergies between the kind of literature you read
[00:23:17.480]and the kind of literature that Patrick or Ken is drawing on.
[00:23:22.760]You have thoughts about that.
[00:23:24.680]And I've struggled with
[00:23:28.920]where
[00:23:30.760]where
[00:23:32.560]that fits necessarily in these conversations.
[00:23:35.720]And I think this is this is a forum, right, where where
[00:23:39.440]this fits and where we can talk about it.
[00:23:42.840]I was invited to read a poem
[00:23:46.760]at a climate conference last month.
[00:23:52.240]And and it was
[00:23:55.640]it was a conference or a symposium filled with people
[00:23:59.200]from all across the disciplines and not even in academia.
[00:24:06.280]And so I think
[00:24:07.080]it made it that my reading the poem are, you know,
[00:24:10.840]not my words, but this author's words made people think about
[00:24:16.360]about how to connect.
[00:24:18.360]But, you know, it's been kind of a struggle
[00:24:21.280]for me to think about, you know, how can I help
[00:24:25.240]Ken Bloom or how can Ken Bloom and Hope work together?
[00:24:29.640]Everyone's wondering how do you or how you know, how can I help
[00:24:34.000]or how can I help any any scientist
[00:24:37.440]communicate their
[00:24:41.040]their ideas
[00:24:43.720]in ways that would pull at the heartstrings of an audience?
[00:24:47.520]Right. So I think it is challenging.
[00:24:50.120]And I don't have a I don't have a great answer for that.
[00:24:53.880]And yeah,
[00:24:56.680]you know, most of my communication
[00:24:58.800]around this has been with other scientists, right?
[00:25:01.120]So it's not really reaching the, you know, the broader audiences that
[00:25:05.360]you might be thinking about it.
[00:25:09.400]But even with that audience,
[00:25:11.960]I mean, I think we do in science struggle
[00:25:14.880]to communicate quantitative ideas effectively.
[00:25:18.760]Right?
[00:25:19.320]And I think that
[00:25:20.960]that's not just climate change at all, all sorts of all sorts of places.
[00:25:24.920]And there is a quantitative story to tell here.
[00:25:30.040]Right. And, you know, certainly in my talk, right.
[00:25:32.320]I mean,
[00:25:34.120]and also I you know, I didn't
[00:25:36.280]I wasn't involved in this issue until about three years ago,
[00:25:38.800]and that there's a whole backstory to that.
[00:25:40.840]But, you know, no one had said to me previously, you know, you
[00:25:46.200]you know, the target emissions rate is, you know, one tonne of CO2 per year.
[00:25:50.760]Right.
[00:25:51.120]You know, and, you know, once you have a number,
[00:25:52.960]you can start hanging things off that. Right?
[00:25:54.760]So to be able to, you know, have some numbers that we can make
[00:25:58.600]relatable to people, you know, okay, it's, you know, okay, step back.
[00:26:01.960]You know, you know, just sort of like reading in the newspaper.
[00:26:04.600]I don't feel like I see numbers like that. Right.
[00:26:06.320]It's just sort of this you know, there's this big problem.
[00:26:08.760]We have to do some big things.
[00:26:10.720]And, you know, they're probably going to be inconvenient to sort of what you read.
[00:26:14.360]Right.
[00:26:14.560]But to really get into the more granular details of, you know, here's
[00:26:18.480]what here's what we can do and here's how far it'll get you, and here's,
[00:26:22.120]you know, here's here's the impacts.
[00:26:23.880]I you know, I think having some quantitative
[00:26:27.880]facts like that to to hang things around can be useful.
[00:26:31.600]And yeah, you know and certainly,
[00:26:33.640]you know, having given talks about this other places,
[00:26:37.240]you know to Emily physicists audience, you know they'll come out
[00:26:40.360]people said to me afterwards, you know you know I never heard it
[00:26:42.720]put this way right, that, you know, this is what's actually involved.
[00:26:45.960]And, you know, people find that helpful.
[00:26:48.680]I mean, such that, yeah, you know, a year and a half ago, I gave this talk
[00:26:53.280]a Friday and, you know, by Sunday morning, you know, one
[00:26:55.960]the audience members had written to me and said, well, you know,
[00:26:57.760]I went and figured out like,
[00:26:58.840]you know what, my you know, how much carbon
[00:27:00.520]on my putting out there from all these activities.
[00:27:02.640]I'm the unfortunately result of that she concluded that, you know,
[00:27:04.800]she had to live naked in a cave to make this all work.
[00:27:07.400]But but you know I think
[00:27:10.600]I think and fine I mean, this is the bias of my own discipline, right.
[00:27:13.960]To have you have to have some real numbers and facts
[00:27:18.080]out there to draw people to organize their thoughts around is helpful. I'm
[00:27:22.160]sure that's going to be on your own field.
[00:27:28.040]Yeah.
[00:27:28.920]Yeah.
[00:27:29.200]Well, if I can start within my own field for a second, though.
[00:27:32.440]So geographies are really big tech, right?
[00:27:35.440]So we have the super quantitative folks, we got climate folks, we're
[00:27:39.360]also the quantitative folks.
[00:27:40.600]Usually we have the human dimensions, the historical geographers, right?
[00:27:44.160]So within my discipline, there is a lot of this cross talk, right?
[00:27:48.000]So I've really benefited from that.
[00:27:49.920]So but with respect to a lot of this change,
[00:27:53.440]and if I can answer the question kind of narrowly about what
[00:27:57.320]I've learned from this, this experience is that I mean,
[00:28:01.120]if you look at the literature, if you look at sort of what's out there
[00:28:05.440]convincing people or communicating to people, a lot of it is sort of
[00:28:08.800]predicated on them having some sort of personal experience,
[00:28:12.360]like my hope my backyard flooded or something happened, you know,
[00:28:16.000]a tornado happened, the hurricane hit my hometown, that type of thing.
[00:28:18.880]Right.
[00:28:19.480]And there's also evidence that and Mark said this, that
[00:28:22.760]like scaring people works, but only up to a certain point.
[00:28:25.960]Right.
[00:28:26.240]So you want to scare people just a little bit,
[00:28:28.040]but not too much because then they tune out. Right.
[00:28:29.960]And I enjoy. So. That's right.
[00:28:31.600]So but one of things from this experience,
[00:28:35.520]I knew that sort of communicating through arts
[00:28:39.920]was effective, but I had not seen it done frankly so well.
[00:28:43.600]So, Julie, I think you did a really good job.
[00:28:45.760]And,
[00:28:47.600]you know, and I think there is increasing sort of acceptance of this approach.
[00:28:51.680]So the first National Climate Assessment, which came out last year, includes
[00:28:55.920]pieces of art, 92 pieces about, you know,
[00:29:00.120]the sort of the causes, the impacts, the sort of call for collective action.
[00:29:05.160]And I think that's really important.
[00:29:06.960]I don't know if it exists physically, but if you can go to the website
[00:29:10.240]of the National Climate Assessment and look at all 92 pieces,
[00:29:13.360]I think they said they had like hundreds of submissions.
[00:29:15.640]So I think using that type of medium
[00:29:18.960]to get attention is a really important thing.
[00:29:22.680]And I'd also maybe slightly push back on the premise of the question
[00:29:27.080]a little bit like, yes, I understand we're supposed to, you know, be
[00:29:30.520]relatively unbiased, but we are humans.
[00:29:33.280]And if we're essentially saying that our way of life
[00:29:37.840]and potentially, you know, not life as we know it, Right.
[00:29:41.640]I think humans will exist for quite a while. Right.
[00:29:44.160]But like, if it is bias to say that we're,
[00:29:48.680]you know, at that type of threat, then call me biased. But
[00:30:00.120]okay, I have an observation and a quick question.
[00:30:02.560]They have they have another class to go to.
[00:30:04.920]They told me the math.
[00:30:06.200]So my observation is that, Ken, in your talk, it was quantitative,
[00:30:10.880]but you were really telling people a story about themselves.
[00:30:14.760]Right?
[00:30:15.480]And so it was at its core storytelling
[00:30:18.640]to other scientists, I think, in some important way.
[00:30:23.160]I mean, or enabling them to build
[00:30:25.760]a story of ourselves and in the impact they personally were having.
[00:30:29.800]And even like, you know,
[00:30:33.240]communicating science as science to scientists.
[00:30:35.920]I mean, ultimately,
[00:30:36.760]you know, we are telling stories about numbers with numbers, right?
[00:30:40.080]I mean, that's that's that's all of science is what we're doing, right?
[00:30:42.440]So but it's also I mean, I think as a non-scientists, yeah,
[00:30:46.240]I often think of science is sort of
[00:30:49.760]observational.
[00:30:50.960]You're apart from it.
[00:30:52.520]And one of the interesting things that you did was you inserted them
[00:30:56.080]into the things that you were trying to observe,
[00:30:59.120]were trying to help them see themselves in it.
[00:31:01.080]And I think that is a literary strategy to some extent.
[00:31:05.200]But my question for everybody is actually goes back to
[00:31:08.640]what was the thing that got you interested in sustainability?
[00:31:13.640]What was the moment or what was the thing that got you
[00:31:18.440]hooked into caring
[00:31:20.280]and making a difference here?
[00:31:25.720]To start with?
[00:31:31.200]I don't know.
[00:31:34.120]It's sort of the other way around.
[00:31:35.760]I mean, how to put it.
[00:31:37.520]I remember reading when I was a kid about climate change and thinking,
[00:31:41.920]people are finally going to start worrying about taking care of stuff.
[00:31:46.480]So, I mean, I was obviously wrong,
[00:31:48.520]but that was my my I thought of when I first heard about it,
[00:31:52.080]it seemed like, you know,
[00:31:53.320]I don't know, I might have been ten or something,
[00:31:55.000]you know, that kind of hopeful thing because this was the 19 1960s
[00:32:00.920]and seventies, you know, and rivers were burning up
[00:32:03.120]and you had all that kind of stuff going on.
[00:32:05.480]I spent a lot of my time with my feet in the creek.
[00:32:08.000]This is before there were as many lawsuits.
[00:32:10.440]So my neighbors didn't kick me out of their creek.
[00:32:12.400]When I went and played in it.
[00:32:14.360]And then it was sort of puzzling that, you know, we've known about that.
[00:32:18.520]Depending on who you believe it might even have been 100 years ago.
[00:32:20.880]There were people a hundred years ago predicting
[00:32:23.680]some of the things we're talking about.
[00:32:25.120]But, you know, I certainly thought that people would be saying enough to try
[00:32:28.280]to worry about things a lot sooner than we have.
[00:32:33.560]But so I mean,
[00:32:35.640]so such as me, I think people get there's things they care about.
[00:32:38.920]They typically do involve the interaction
[00:32:40.640]with the environment somewhere in their lives.
[00:32:42.880]And then those are the things that kind of push outward.
[00:32:47.160]I don't know.
[00:32:52.960]I grew up in Oklahoma, so
[00:32:57.360]I've been a part of many tornadoes
[00:33:00.480]and then some earthquakes after fracking started.
[00:33:05.160]So I think probably was when I was I mean,
[00:33:11.120]I can't I can't pinpoint the exact moment,
[00:33:14.280]my Moment of of starting to care about it.
[00:33:18.640]But I think I always kind of grew up knowing that
[00:33:22.960]at least weather
[00:33:25.320]can be threatening and
[00:33:30.280]so so I think, you know, that kind of form prepared me for
[00:33:36.480]being quite affected by the literature
[00:33:39.840]that I started reading. And,
[00:33:42.960]and I think I didn't I didn't start working on
[00:33:45.760]environmental literature until I was doing my Ph.D.,
[00:33:50.560]but that's when I really started getting more passionate about it.
[00:33:54.520]And the true story is this complete shaggy dog story.
[00:34:01.480]So excuse me, the
[00:34:05.040]I mean, it starts with a friend of mine from graduate school
[00:34:08.360]who is a few years behind me, but we had worked on some things together.
[00:34:11.560]We were both pretty active in the early career particle physics
[00:34:15.240]community when we were early career, which is a while ago now.
[00:34:18.240]And you know, we were friendly, able to at each other's wedding, stuff like that.
[00:34:24.040]But, you know, we're she's working in London now.
[00:34:26.440]She's on the other big project.
[00:34:28.440]That's her.
[00:34:28.880]And, you know, we're not you know, we weren't interacting that much as of late.
[00:34:31.760]And then at CERN, you know, once and some some years ago, years ago
[00:34:36.120]now, and I ran into her in the cafeteria, which you know, it's always a you know,
[00:34:40.560]you want to meet someone in particle physics, go to the CERN cafeteria
[00:34:43.640]and, you know, someone else might be there.
[00:34:45.440]And so, yeah, we sat down, we're catching up on things
[00:34:48.920]and you know what we're doing.
[00:34:49.760]And she said, you know, she said, I'm, you know, I'm thinking of,
[00:34:53.000]you know, changing my research direction
[00:34:54.720]and, you know, going working on some different things.
[00:34:56.320]And I said, okay, why is that?
[00:34:57.280]She said, I'm worried my kids are going to ask me,
[00:35:01.440]You know,
[00:35:01.880]why I was working on Large Hadron Collider when when the world was burning up.
[00:35:05.440]So we talked about that
[00:35:07.800]much when her plans were and, you know, sort of left it,
[00:35:11.680]you know, if was looking into teaching a course,
[00:35:13.600]that sort of thing is a good way to get into any research direction.
[00:35:15.880]But then there was there was a big sort of field wide study
[00:35:22.840]going on in Europe about, you know, plans for the future
[00:35:25.400]particle physics there and there was a a white paper submitted
[00:35:29.560]for that about environmental issues within particle physics.
[00:35:32.640]And, you know, she was one of the lead authors on this.
[00:35:34.560]So I wrote her, I said, look, you didn't you did this thing
[00:35:36.280]you said you want to do something, you did it.
[00:35:37.720]And, you know, and they were, you know, taking names of supporters for the for the
[00:35:41.720]you know, for the white paper.
[00:35:42.840]I said, okay, well, I'm not in Europe, but, you know,
[00:35:44.480]could I design anyway, you know, just to show support?
[00:35:47.040]She said, Yeah, sure. You know, you can put your name on it.
[00:35:48.520]You know, we have a bunch of people from outside Europe doing that.
[00:35:51.080]So I did that, you know, didn't think much of it until a few years later
[00:35:55.120]when when, you know, we were doing a similar field wide study within the U.S.
[00:36:02.520]This was supposed to be in 2020.
[00:36:04.640]It ended up being a little later with the pandemic.
[00:36:07.280]And I was sort of minding own business on this
[00:36:10.080]when I got an email out of the blue from, you know, some of the organizers,
[00:36:13.040]you know, you know, and me and my friend
[00:36:14.800]and some other people saying, well, you know, could you could you write
[00:36:18.040]a white paper on, you know, climate issues in particle physics? And
[00:36:23.160]I'm thinking, okay, why me?
[00:36:24.920]And, you know, the only answer I could come with
[00:36:26.320]was I signed that petition,
[00:36:28.080]you know, So, like, be really careful about what you sign.
[00:36:30.480]So, yeah, so I spoke to Veronique and I said, okay,
[00:36:34.000]you know, they're asking us to let's do it.
[00:36:35.680]You know, we'll be fine.
[00:36:36.320]You know, be like, you know, by grad school again,
[00:36:38.320]we can work on something together and, and that.
[00:36:41.560]That's how I got into it. I learned a lot from it.
[00:36:43.480]And it was like trying, you know, if you
[00:36:46.560]you know, if you tell
[00:36:47.200]if you tell a colleague, I've got a seminar in my pocket
[00:36:49.280]about particle physics and climate change, they will say, Can you come next week?
[00:36:52.200]Say, it turns out there are a lot of you know,
[00:36:54.320]when you start raising, there's a lot of interest.
[00:36:55.600]So it was a fun thing to learn about.
[00:36:58.480]And I own now I own an electric car,
[00:37:01.720]so I guess,
[00:37:05.560]yeah, there's no I mean, it kind of comes from everywhere.
[00:37:09.400]There are probably two things that stick out to me
[00:37:13.480]and weirdly, they're both tied to war.
[00:37:15.440]But actually before I went back to school,
[00:37:18.800]I had a previous career in aerospace manufacturing.
[00:37:22.240]I was
[00:37:23.640]I managed a division of an engineering firm that did this type of thing.
[00:37:28.080]And I went to a conference once and,
[00:37:30.040]you know, we made parts and pieces that go on airplanes.
[00:37:33.840]And I saw a drone, and this was following 911.
[00:37:37.840]This was following the war in Iraq that started.
[00:37:40.480]And that made me deeply uncomfortable to realize
[00:37:42.840]I was sort of part of the military industrial complex.
[00:37:46.160]Right. And that was more about killing people.
[00:37:47.720]But that got me into, you know, thinking about
[00:37:50.800]the environmental impact of a lot of the military actions as well.
[00:37:54.120]And that sort of started me reading, listening to sort of early podcasts,
[00:37:58.800]you know, deep dives on YouTube and Wikipedia that keep you up
[00:38:02.720]pretty late at night.
[00:38:03.920]And then the other thing was, again, related to war.
[00:38:07.240]My then girlfriend, now wife, her brother,
[00:38:11.920]went to fight in Iraq
[00:38:14.680]and he had experiences with burn pits.
[00:38:17.640]He had experiences with just sort of general
[00:38:20.400]health outcomes that were related to environmental degradation there.
[00:38:24.160]And he was a technician
[00:38:27.160]that worked on the crew that disarmed the IEDs,
[00:38:31.440]the improvised explosive devices, and talked a lot about the waste
[00:38:34.560]and what happened to the explosives and things like that.
[00:38:37.000]And again, that's not like a giant sort of environmental issue.
[00:38:41.360]It's a really localized one,
[00:38:42.760]but it has dramatic health impacts for a lot of people, all U.S.
[00:38:46.440]soldiers, but also the local citizens there as well.
[00:38:49.120]And that sort of sparked me going into the more
[00:38:53.360]sort of environmental realm and then that kind of took its own path.
[00:38:57.600]I don't do anything
[00:38:58.280]sort of related to the military anymore, but I do have an appreciation
[00:39:01.480]for what that did for totally changing my worldview.
[00:39:16.080]While okay, so I'm going to ask about
[00:39:19.760]technol technological solutions, but the human element in it.
[00:39:23.720]So it's something for everybody.
[00:39:25.440]And so there's a lot of this looking forward that will be things
[00:39:29.360]that if there
[00:39:30.000]could be technological solutions from loosely Ken's field,
[00:39:32.600]if someone, you know, gets off the rear and makes fusion work right,
[00:39:35.520]then we'll have really cheap power and then all of our stuff will be electric
[00:39:39.000]and very little polluting and no one would really complain about that.
[00:39:43.000]And the discussion didn't really get into this idea
[00:39:45.880]of technology and human dimensions other than maybe korra's, which was where
[00:39:50.240]we're kind of doing a kick the can thing of burying CO2
[00:39:54.360]and that, you know,
[00:39:54.920]and then assuming that it won't come back for a long, long, long time.
[00:39:58.320]And if it does come back by then, we'll probably figured out a better way.
[00:40:02.360]And and so I guess some of the things I can
[00:40:05.000]think of is is in the human dimension is that when things get really bad
[00:40:09.040]suddenly, otherwise
[00:40:12.680]painful, maybe even unwise solutions
[00:40:15.320]become accessible to the decision makers.
[00:40:19.160]So we think about short term kick the can mode.
[00:40:22.120]Kick the can mode would be for humanity to go on a JAG, probably a nuclear
[00:40:27.840]reactor construction, because you get carbon wise, pretty clean power.
[00:40:32.960]And the tradeoff is you're now saying there could be a lot of waste
[00:40:35.840]that's going to be around for thousands of years and you have to deal with that.
[00:40:39.080]If the humanity ever gets the lid on on warming on other dimensions of it.
[00:40:44.600]And that got me into the thinking about what's that?
[00:40:47.200]What are the rights of those who want to bring down the temperature
[00:40:51.880]or feel that it's imperative to versus the status quo.
[00:40:55.680]And the example I'll throw in front of you that I think maybe the most likely one,
[00:40:59.680]maybe more than the nuclear power plant building on a large scale is what happens.
[00:41:04.240]For example,
[00:41:04.720]if the Canadians get tired of the US sitting around and say, you know what,
[00:41:08.520]we read that if we put enough tinfoil into the atmosphere,
[00:41:12.160]we're going to bring the global
[00:41:13.000]temperature down two or three degrees by just reflective cooling.
[00:41:16.800]And people are doing all sorts of small scale experiments with this right now.
[00:41:19.920]But what, what what are the rights of like a nation or a group of people to say,
[00:41:24.880]we must do something, we're going to do this thing,
[00:41:27.760]whether it's aerosol or whether it's tinfoil, and it does do
[00:41:31.560]the cooling by nations downstream.
[00:41:34.840]I don't know how you want to call it.
[00:41:35.840]Everyone else is like, Well, wait a minute, that might change things.
[00:41:39.160]There might be more rainfall, there might be more tornadoes,
[00:41:41.200]there might be more of something else.
[00:41:42.720]And we didn't really get into that.
[00:41:43.880]But I think as this all moves forward, those issues are going to become
[00:41:47.920]front and center as the decisions to act versus the decision to not act.
[00:41:51.880]And then who has who has the right to say something about that?
[00:41:55.960]Can I start?
[00:41:58.720]So we're already doing stuff like that
[00:42:01.520]and on a smaller scale.
[00:42:04.720]But I mean, if you think about how we batteries are made
[00:42:09.040]and I have an easy too, So this is an ethical question, right?
[00:42:13.240]But if you think about
[00:42:14.800]how every batteries are made, they require nickel, they require cobalt,
[00:42:18.760]and we're mining for nickel and cobalt in New Caledonia for nickel and in Canada.
[00:42:24.600]And in the one of the Congo, the Republic of Congo for the Cobalt.
[00:42:30.240]Right.
[00:42:30.480]And I'm sorry, the DRC, the DRC, the Democratic Republic of Congo.
[00:42:34.480]Thank you.
[00:42:35.080]And so we're
[00:42:38.280]we're not going in there and saying, hi, indigenous people,
[00:42:43.080]can we have your land so that we can create these batteries?
[00:42:47.280]We're just going in and taking it.
[00:42:49.160]And so and it's more complicated than that.
[00:42:53.200]And there are Indigenous owned mining facilities.
[00:42:56.440]There's one Indigenous majority Indigenous owned mining facility in New Caledonia
[00:43:00.640]for for nickel mining. But
[00:43:03.600]I think this is
[00:43:04.520]an example of how
[00:43:08.960]for the sake of
[00:43:12.640]fewer emissions,
[00:43:14.320]we are kind of saying we have the right to take over this land
[00:43:18.680]and if there are spills into the river,
[00:43:23.600]that's your sacrifice for the good of humanity, right?
[00:43:28.000]So I think that we are already doing things like that.
[00:43:31.880]I don't know the larger scale.
[00:43:34.520]If Canada decides to put a bunch of tinfoil in the atmosphere,
[00:43:40.360]I guess, I don't know.
[00:43:41.920]I think that would cause a big problem.
[00:43:44.920]So, I mean, that's really like a question for a political scientist, I think.
[00:43:49.120]But but, but yeah, yeah, but I mean, I would like like
[00:43:53.000]that's but I mean, let's take the flip side of that.
[00:43:56.920]I mean, already
[00:43:59.320]a lot of countries are making choices to keep emitting a lot of carbon, right.
[00:44:02.760]And without worrying
[00:44:03.560]about the downstream impacts on, you know, So yeah, that's already happening.
[00:44:07.680]It's just not in the direction you might want it.
[00:44:15.040]Yeah, I, I agree with both.
[00:44:16.920]Right.
[00:44:17.200]I'm not sure how much I have to add there
[00:44:19.600]because I can't speak to the right thing.
[00:44:21.160]But I do think when we talk about technological fixes
[00:44:24.760]and I don't mean to throw a car under the bus when she's not here,
[00:44:27.520]but we tend to focus very narrowly on one problem that's in front of us, right?
[00:44:32.200]Like, sure, we can bury a bunch of carbon, but Summit, the company that's doing
[00:44:37.840]a lot of this right, is using this as cover to greenwash ethanol
[00:44:42.720]and for what they call it, enhanced oil recovery.
[00:44:47.320]Right.
[00:44:47.520]So we can pump the carbon down to the oil well so we can get,
[00:44:50.560]you know, the pressure, can we get more more oil out?
[00:44:54.160]And so when we have the technologies and they are so narrowly focused,
[00:44:58.080]we miss a lot of the side effects, right?
[00:45:01.680]I know it's probably not popular to rail against the renewable fuel
[00:45:05.360]standard in corn production in Nebraska.
[00:45:07.280]I'm going to do it anyway. But right.
[00:45:09.640]So sure, we can potentially solve the carbon problem, but that does not address
[00:45:14.600]the population of the landscape, but the rural landscape
[00:45:17.400]and the closing of schools.
[00:45:18.680]It does not address water quality issues.
[00:45:21.360]It does not address aquifer drawdown.
[00:45:23.840]Right. So we
[00:45:26.440]from a political perspective, it looks,
[00:45:27.680]in my opinion, like we put on blinders and say Solutions, yeah, money please.
[00:45:31.920]And we missed some of the other sort of impacts as well.
[00:45:37.600]And so maybe we'll come to you, Mark.
[00:45:39.320]But this this question also gets into the crux
[00:45:41.680]of of the tension between climate and justice.
[00:45:45.720]Right.
[00:45:46.080]And the ways in which environmental degradation has for a long time
[00:45:49.400]and many of you just spoke to this has been disproportionately
[00:45:55.360]borne by lower economic,
[00:45:58.400]socioeconomic groups, different racial and ethnic groups, indigenous communities.
[00:46:02.760]Right.
[00:46:03.040]And so the question that the panel is posing kind of stresses on this question
[00:46:07.480]about what is in a different way of phrasing the question,
[00:46:10.400]what is the morally right way of thinking about the issues of this
[00:46:14.640]whole series has been dedicated to?
[00:46:16.240]I don't know, Mark, this is your field of ethics.
[00:46:18.760]Do you want to weigh in on this? No,
[00:46:28.880]I guess I don't, because it's complicated.
[00:46:30.760]I mean, I think that's the
[00:46:34.880]I mean, I think it's really important
[00:46:35.840]to realize that we're screwing people over all the time, no matter what we do.
[00:46:39.080]And so there's not
[00:46:42.800]I mean, in a way to put it, we over idealize our goals.
[00:46:47.400]We're not going to do anything.
[00:46:48.880]And that's probably even worse than doing a somewhat better job
[00:46:53.080]than we're doing now.
[00:46:53.920]So obviously you want
[00:46:57.720]people affected with policies to have inputs.
[00:47:00.760]But right now there's a lot of people like on islands
[00:47:03.280]that are like three feet above sea level that aren't getting a whole lot of input
[00:47:06.400]about what's going to happen to where they live.
[00:47:08.520]And so on the one hand, I think you can try to aim for more,
[00:47:13.960]but I don't think you should wait until you got that all figured out,
[00:47:18.400]because in the meantime, other people are also at a disadvantage.
[00:47:22.960]But it just makes it really messy.
[00:47:25.960]And it makes also, I think, a kind of
[00:47:31.240]I want to say
[00:47:31.840]opportunism, but it's not quite
[00:47:34.880]like you take what you can get when you you know, as
[00:47:37.880]far as doing making things better without waiting to make things perfect.
[00:47:44.240]But I do think like Democratic input is like super important
[00:47:47.080]and really much harder.
[00:47:49.680]I don't know if harder to get worldwide right now.
[00:47:51.880]It feels like it's harder yet in the United States right now.
[00:47:58.840]So again,
[00:47:59.600]I think this is where my field really plays a pivotal role, right?
[00:48:03.720]Because I think this is how we inform people
[00:48:08.080]about this, too, about decisions that they're going to have to make.
[00:48:12.040]Right.
[00:48:12.400]So I know about all this Nicole mining that's going on and Caledonia yet
[00:48:16.760]I still bought and EB and that was the ethical decision that I made.
[00:48:22.800]I felt bad about it but
[00:48:26.840]I did feel like having an
[00:48:30.600]iwi is ultimately going
[00:48:34.000]be better for the world as a whole.
[00:48:37.640]But I think this is also I mean, again,
[00:48:40.880]this is it's important to inform people about going on
[00:48:45.080]and it's important to do it at a university setting where there's
[00:48:48.560]young minds that can think about possible solutions to this.
[00:48:52.840]Right? If we put these conundrums
[00:48:55.120]in front of them, maybe they'll figure it out.
[00:48:57.720]We won't.
[00:48:58.960]Maybe I probably won't, but they might.
[00:49:01.760]So I think it's important to put that information in front of people.
[00:49:09.880]Other questions from the audience
[00:49:12.440]or anyone from Zoom now,
[00:49:16.560]how about all of you?
[00:49:17.360]Are there questions you want to ask each other,
[00:49:20.480]points that you've heard, things you want to follow up on
[00:49:24.680]but is not here something?
[00:49:27.960]Yeah,
[00:49:30.600]well then I'll, I'll then I'll maybe push.
[00:49:32.640]So the way we go, we go.
[00:49:37.200]Okay.
[00:49:38.720]So it's just an off the cuff.
[00:49:40.200]So is this a possibility for an Institute of Environmental justice
[00:49:46.080]so we can do entire collaborations?
[00:49:48.840]Nothing
[00:49:52.400]but with What hat do you want that answer?
[00:49:55.800]There's know because, I mean,
[00:49:59.240]there's a there's a university budget issue out there right now.
[00:50:01.720]It's
[00:50:05.640]so something, you know, we could do that, but someone's got to pay for it. I
[00:50:10.760]if only though I will plug geography
[00:50:12.680]for 3 to 3 environmental justice taught by the question.
[00:50:16.840]So there are nascent
[00:50:21.080]ideas I suppose around sounds like a good idea.
[00:50:26.080]Grand challenge is planning grants do present.
[00:50:29.960]That's what I was going to say.
[00:50:31.240]There's some grand challenges, planning grants and stuff going on, so I hope so.
[00:50:37.240]I would love that.
[00:50:41.080]Right.
[00:50:41.920]That would be a productive way of taking this series into some
[00:50:44.720]some forms of action that could be sustainable in themselves.
[00:50:47.760]And and money is made anyway.
[00:50:54.160]Well, one of the last questions we asked the panelists was really about
[00:50:57.200]how we take some of the ideas for a sustainable future
[00:51:01.160]and and recognize that
[00:51:03.680]in pursuing these ideas, we we often make all kinds of tradeoffs,
[00:51:09.200]short term things we might do that might be harder in the future.
[00:51:15.520]We might make certain things better for some, but worse for others.
[00:51:19.840]If you've got, you know, solar panels
[00:51:24.160]or if you've got a wind farm on your land, it's going to depreciate
[00:51:28.240]in certain kind of value. Right?
[00:51:29.440]And so it raises all kinds of questions of gains and losses.
[00:51:32.360]And so the question is, how do we weigh these things?
[00:51:35.320]How do we approach balancing benefits or, for example, the developed world versus
[00:51:40.120]the less developed societies present versus future generations?
[00:51:44.120]Or we could even just break it down into sort of people's neighborhoods
[00:51:47.240]and how those change when you make certain kinds
[00:51:49.320]of of incentives around alternative energy.
[00:51:53.080]So one that give each panelist a chance to weigh
[00:51:56.080]in on this question of how we balance these these kinds of calculations.
[00:52:01.240]Yeah,
[00:52:08.360]we're all going to go anyway.
[00:52:09.720]So again, I tend to approach this
[00:52:13.400]through the lens of governance and policy, right?
[00:52:16.120]So think about actual solutions and things that we know that work.
[00:52:19.760]And to Mark's point, right, sometimes this actually takes me back to
[00:52:24.360]to my postdoc where I was procrastinating, writing a paper, and my advisor said,
[00:52:28.400]don't let perfect be the enemy of good, or in this case, maybe good enough.
[00:52:31.800]Right? But we do know that some things work, right?
[00:52:34.760]So if we're talking about sort of environmental justice issues
[00:52:39.280]between the more developed and the less developed countries. Right.
[00:52:41.560]There's tools for that.
[00:52:43.000]Like we can engage in technology transfer, we can give them technology, right?
[00:52:47.440]We can license patents for $0 are really, really cheap.
[00:52:51.080]There are financing mechanisms for green financing or forgivable or low
[00:52:54.960]interest loans that we can absolutely do to incentivize conservation.
[00:52:59.480]Right?
[00:52:59.640]We don't want to sort of get into
[00:53:00.760]the environmental colonialism world, but at the same time,
[00:53:03.760]there are things that we can do to improve the quality of life.
[00:53:07.240]I think the tougher thing, frankly, is the more sort of generational
[00:53:10.720]equity and thinking, you know, multiple generations in the future.
[00:53:13.920]And that's a hard one and there's not great answers for that.
[00:53:17.520]You know, there's things like investing more
[00:53:20.080]in like a circular economy opposed to like a consumptive one, right?
[00:53:23.800]One where we are repairing and renewing and, you know, recycling type of stuff.
[00:53:28.600]Recycling not so great anymore, I guess, but you know,
[00:53:33.040]But there are, again, some things that work and a lot of it is investment
[00:53:36.560]and spending money in things that increase in value over time.
[00:53:40.360]And a lot of that again, is stuff that we know education, health care, right?
[00:53:46.240]So that we have a healthier population that is able to tackle these issues.
[00:53:51.440]Poverty and health and innovation are tightly connected as well.
[00:53:55.200]But things like, you know,
[00:53:57.680]sort of
[00:53:58.400]incentivizing democracy and women's rights and, you know, that
[00:54:01.960]that type of thing,
[00:54:02.880]I think that's really important because those are the type of things
[00:54:05.400]that seem sort of esoteric, not esoteric, but they seem fuzzier.
[00:54:09.400]But I think really pay off in the long run and lead
[00:54:12.560]to more ultimately, hopefully sustainable solutions.
[00:54:15.760]I mean, I would hope so at least.
[00:54:20.440]So recycling is bad now that I didn't
[00:54:23.560]I hadn't gotten that word yet, but plastic now.
[00:54:26.800]Okay. Right. Okay. Okay. Yeah.
[00:54:28.720]Yeah.
[00:54:29.680]That I knew. Okay.
[00:54:33.080]I mean, I think I only have like some, you know, naive slice
[00:54:35.640]of what you're saying, but I mean, the I mean, I think some of the good,
[00:54:39.480]you know, talk out there about what's happening in different parts of the world
[00:54:42.920]in underdeveloped countries, you know, why are the underdeveloped?
[00:54:45.720]Because they haven't
[00:54:46.240]had a chance to, you know, use lots of energy to do things right.
[00:54:50.200]And so, you know, why shouldn't also have a chance
[00:54:52.120]to burn carbon like we did, you know, to get ahead.
[00:54:54.680]But but, you know, maybe this is an opportunity, you know, if
[00:54:58.360]if you have a country society or whatever, that's, you know,
[00:55:01.960]further behind on these things, let's get the better technologies in there sooner.
[00:55:05.800]Right.
[00:55:06.160]And this is, you know, a chance to okay, maybe this is a form of colonialism,
[00:55:10.400]but a chance,
[00:55:10.800]to help them get off on the right foot in, you know, for these for these things
[00:55:14.280]and, you know, make you know, you know, we can all see some benefit that maybe
[00:55:19.640]you I think we should
[00:55:23.000]listen to those communities though I don't think that
[00:55:28.000]what if their way of being is more sustainable than our way of being?
[00:55:33.560]What if we're what
[00:55:35.920]if we're looking at it from the wrong perspective, right.
[00:55:39.640]What if new technologies
[00:55:43.320]isn't the way to go?
[00:55:44.960]It's an assumption about where they want to go,
[00:55:46.800]which may be an incorrect assumption.
[00:55:48.360]Well, yeah, And I mean, I'm thinking about some of the environmental decolonial
[00:55:53.560]philosophy about thinking, feeling with the earth, with Arturo Escobar is
[00:55:59.440]he talks about about these indigenous communities that
[00:56:04.480]that they don't need
[00:56:08.680]all the things we need. Right.
[00:56:10.720]And we don't need all the things we think we need.
[00:56:13.240]So I think in some way we can
[00:56:16.520]can kind of do the opposite, right?
[00:56:20.600]And listen to the people in the Marshall Islands
[00:56:24.240]who are losing their islands to sea level
[00:56:28.320]and ask what they think should be done
[00:56:34.400]because imposing our Western ideas,
[00:56:39.280]there's nothing that says that Western ideas
[00:56:40.840]are better than than those ideas.
[00:56:44.040]So I think listening is one of the ways
[00:56:47.200]that can help.
[00:56:54.400]So one big problem is
[00:57:01.880]giving people without many resources, resources to do things.
[00:57:05.120]There's this paradoxical thing.
[00:57:06.400]It turns out like if you're like a resource rich
[00:57:09.600]a place, often your resources get extracted
[00:57:13.960]to places where people have money and in fact it makes you worse off.
[00:57:17.560]You're almost better off living in a resource poor place because you don't
[00:57:21.440]get exploited quite so much.
[00:57:22.800]Currently.
[00:57:23.240]I don't know much about this, but I read things about this.
[00:57:26.240]So one of the better ways
[00:57:28.360]to help folks who don't have as many resources
[00:57:31.800]is just give them money because it's something that they can then use as they
[00:57:37.240]see fit,
[00:57:39.000]using their own sort of conception or their well-being to do it.
[00:57:42.360]And one of the things that I think is going to be really hard to figure out
[00:57:45.360]is population, actually, because
[00:57:49.160]economies do better when the population is growing,
[00:57:52.760]but we're running out of room to grow population
[00:57:55.960]into and that's going to be really a tough
[00:57:59.200]I can't figure out like, you know, what's the tradeoff here?
[00:58:02.040]How are people how are we going to deal with this?
[00:58:05.000]That's a that's not hopefully it's
[00:58:08.400]related to climate, but it's bigger than climate.
[00:58:11.960]So I think it's it's really hard
[00:58:13.960]to figure this stuff out.
[00:58:18.520]Well, we've appreciated you all being a part
[00:58:20.480]of this conversation and helping us think through these big challenges.
[00:58:23.520]So please join me in thanking everyone on our panel.
[00:58:26.520]This conversation.
[00:58:30.040]Thank you all for your time, your great thoughts.
[00:58:32.320]And I also just want to put a plug in that
[00:58:34.160]our Fire series will continue next year with another fabulous theme
[00:58:38.360]that we will explore again through interdisciplinary perspectives.
[00:58:41.360]It will be war, peace and reconciliation.
[00:58:44.520]So look forward to that next year.
[00:58:46.520]Thanks, everybody. Thanks to

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CAS Inquire "Sustainable Futures" Panel

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