Podcast: The Climate Crisis Is Here. Will We Ever Fix It?

You’re supposed to buy the right things, avoid the wrong ones, recycle perfectly, waste nothing, think about every decision ... and even then, it’s hard to know if any of it is actually making a difference.

So the question is, how did we get here?

How did climate change become something individuals are expected to solve—one paper towel, one grocery run, one guilty decision at a time?

Episode 1 of our third season of Insight Unpacked posits an answer. 

Podcast Transcript

[we hear sounds in the room, people shuffling, chatter in the background]

Laura PAVIN: It’s a cold Wednesday night in December. I’m with a handful of people tucked into the corner of the Eco Flamingo, a cafe on Chicago’s north side.

We’re here for a presentation on how to be less wasteful during the holidays.

[chatter quiets down]

A woman stands up and starts in with some thinly veiled stage setting.

Katherine TELLOCK: Why do we give gifts? What is, when you drill it down to the purpose of them? What is that?

PAVIN: People respond, say it’s to make the recipient feel good. And also the giver. She moves on. Asks about our favorite gifts. The responses are thoughtful. Like this one.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: My two favorite street names in Chicago are Washtenaw and Wabansia. My husband went down to that intersection and took a picture of the street signs and then just printed it out in a little sepia tone and framed it for me. It was just very sweet and thoughtful.

TELLOCK: I love that.

PAVIN: Finally, she lands the plane.

TELLOCK: I didn’t hear a single person say an electronic or a piece of clothing. It seemed as if the ones that were the most heartfelt were ones that someone put effort into and weren’t some mass-produced thing.

[sounds fade under narration but not all the way out]

PAVIN: Katherine Tellock runs the Chicago Environmentalists, a local nonprofit. The one behind the event. She gives advice on how to participate in the season of giving without leaving too much of a carbon footprint. A lot of the tips are from her own life. Says you can avoid Amazon by going directly to the manufacturer, toggle off the AI option when you search Google because it’s just automatically on now ... and it’s wasteful.

But more impactful than that are the types of gifts you can choose to give people, like second-hand stuff, your own artwork, experiences like massages, or time together.

And then there’s the most eco-friendly gift of them all.

TELLOCK: You can choose not to gift. It’s an option. And I say that only because it feels like that’s not an option—like you’re a terrible person if you don’t.

PAVIN: The event went on for maybe an hour. [It] ended with a craft: making holiday decor and gift embellishments using recycled materials.

[crafting sounds]

I sat next to Tellock for that. I was there to understand one really important thing.

PAVIN: It just seems like your life is a lot of work. Do you ever feel like that?

TELLOCK: Oh, yeah. Because it is — a lot of companies are doing the wrong thing, making it as cheap and easy as possible for you to get their product. Does it involve a lot of thought? Yeah. Sometimes it’s hard. Sometimes I have to try to shut my brain off. But it’s hard, so.

[music bump]

PAVIN: To be sustainable these days, at least in America, is to fight an uphill battle against convenience. Convenience made possible by a system reinforced by emissions and waste.

When regular people have to reverse-engineer their own solutions to their individual climate impact, you have to wonder: Shouldn’t this have been fixed by now? By forces larger than individuals? Why is the burden of sustainability still on us?

You’re listening to season three of Insight Unpacked: “Can We Still Build a Green Economy?” I’m Laura Pavin.

In the last decade, we’ve had world leaders signing an agreement to limit global warming, companies have pledged net-zero targets, investors have prioritized greener bets, solar panels and electric cars have become commonplace.

And yet, if everyone says they care, why are global emissions still at or near record highs? We’re still putting more carbon into the atmosphere every year. What gives?

In this five-part season, we look at where the world stands on its climate struggle, [and] what it would really take to decarbonize our economy. Specifically, we’ll look at what the world’s most powerful forces—from companies and investors to policymakers and technologists—what they can do to create a truly green economy, and we’ll hear why even they can’t do it alone.

But perhaps the biggest question we deign to ask is whether we have the Herculean strength to pull off the massive feat of coordination needed to turn things around. Because this isn’t just a story about the climate. It’s about what humans are actually capable of when the risks are existential and the odds of coming out ahead are getting slimmer.

...

PAVIN: So, where, exactly, do we stand on climate change and what’s at stake at this moment in time? This was the thing I genuinely wanted to wrap my head around before I dug any deeper, because, suffice it to say, I’m not exactly plugged into the sustainability space.

It’s actually quite the opposite, unfortunately.

PAVIN: Would you say that we’re both kind of wasteful?

Jake CONNORS: You’re definitely wasteful.

PAVIN: My husband and sounding board, Jake.

PAVIN: Okay. I’m wasteful. How am I wasteful?

CONNORS: You let a lot of produce go bad.

PAVIN: I clean with paper towels.

CONNORS: Yeah.

PAVIN: Where someone like Tellock believes she can be the change, I believe that I couldn’t possibly be such a thing. On a recent walk, my daughter noticed trash on the ground and suggested we pick it up. It was a bag of dog poo. “Maybe next time,” I said, and shuffled her along.

It’s easy to feel nihilistic.

Meghan BUSSE: Climate change is not something we’re gonna stop. Climate change is happening already.

PAVIN: This is Meghan Busse, a professor at Kellogg.

BUSSE: The cumulative choices we have made over the past, about how much carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases we’ve put in the atmosphere, have simply changed the nature of the atmosphere that the earth has.

PAVIN: Busse is a pragmatist when it comes to climate change. At this point, it’s about managing something that’s already underway.

BUSSE: What we do have control over is how much more different, from what we might have been used to 50 or 70 years ago, it’s going to get.

PAVIN: Okay. So make it less worse, and not so much worse.

BUSSE: Less worse. Not a lot worse.

PAVIN: I want reasons to be hopeful. Despite my wasteful ways. When I think about my descendants, and my fellow humans, I do hope the future is habitable.

There was a lot of hope, at one point—about a decade ago, when the Paris Accords happened.

Bear with me for a moment.

REPORTER: Scientists and a few politicians are beginning to worry that global energy planning does not take the greenhouse effect seriously enough.

PAVIN: Scientists had long been concerned about what emissions were doing to the atmosphere, before the Paris Accords.

REPORTER: If the earth gets too warm, for example, ice caps could melt, raising the level of the seas.

SCIENTIST 1: Changes of this magnitude are very probably going to have a profound effect on agriculture, on all of the aspects of energy use and generation, and on water and land use.

REPORTER: One scientist put the urgency of the greenhouse potential in biblical terms, citing the warning given to Noah. In the Old Testament, Noah knew trouble was coming, he said, and he prepared for it.

PAVIN: They knew the global average temperature was rising, that is, the average temperature of the Earth’s surface across both land and ocean. It had been rising since humans started industrializing, especially since the mid-20th century. And it was leading to weird and frankly terrifying problems. We could see it happening.

CLIP: If this reef is to be fully restored, it will take tens of millions of individual coral transplants. And even if that can be achieved, it still won’t ...

CLIP: In August, a second dose of Western wildfires. This California Rim Fire was one of the largest in the state’s history caused by man, fueled by dry conditions. It threatened a national treasure — Yosemite National Park.

CLIP: With historic floodwaters pulling back in Eastern Kentucky tonight, fears are becoming reality. The death toll climbing — at least 25 confirmed dead, including four children, all siblings.

PAVIN: People were feeling it. So much so that in 2015, a critical mass of countries around the world finally decided it was time to chat.

OBAMA CLIP: The United States of America not only recognizes our role in creating this problem—we embrace our responsibility to do something about it.

PAVIN: Almost 200 countries, states, and governing bodies convened to consider what needed to happen. And what needed to happen was to hold warming well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

Busse again.

BUSSE: The real goal was to keep the increase no more than 1.5 degrees, because scientists think that’s where we need to hit in order to avoid some of the worst effects of climate change.

PAVIN: Worst effects as in lethal heat waves, major ecosystem losses, food system stress, worsening droughts—the whole nine.

And at the time those agreements were made, the global average temperature was about .98 above pre-industrial levels—so, not quite one degree. 

So the mission was, steer clear of the dreaded 2-degree zone. Try to keep it to 1.5.

To do that, scientists estimated, we’d need to get CO2 emissions down to net zero by around 2050—as in, we’d have to be taking out as much carbon as we’re putting in.

It was ambitious, sure. But countries seemed motivated to make changes.

It was an exciting moment because you didn’t often see the world unite around anything. But here we all were, rallying around an enemy that wasn’t each other. And, ultimately, agreeing on something.

PARIS AGREEMENT ADOPTED CLIP: I see the reaction is positive. I see no objections. The Paris Agreement is adopted. The drop of a gavel by French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius culminates several nights of haggling and years of paralysis on the question of climate change.

PAVIN: The other exciting thing about the Paris Accords, for a lot of people, was that it took what felt like an abstract concern and gave it a numerical target: something people could actually do something with.

For a moment, it felt like, okay, maybe we can do this.

And yet, a decade later, global emissions have not fallen to zero. And we’re still talking about whether we can hit those temperature targets.

BUSSE: It looks like we’ve had a couple of very hot years. Some people wonder whether maybe we have already exceeded the 1.5 target.

PAVIN: It’s hard to tell when you’re dealing in averages. You need to let some years play out still to know for sure. But, ya know, this isn’t what the Paris Accords had hoped for.

What a lot of these countries have come to find is that signing an agreement is one thing. Rewiring the global economy is another. It’s hard to phase out fossil fuels without short-term economic pain. And it’s hard to manage voter backlash over energy prices. And then there’s the politics of it all. In the U.S., in a span of just a few years, we went from passing the largest federal climate investment in our history to pulling out of the accords, again, and now questioning whether greenhouse gases are even something the federal government should regulate in the first place.

TRUMP EPA CLIP: Effective immediately, we’re repealing the ridiculous endangerment finding and terminating all additional green emission standards imposed unnecessarily on vehicle models and engines between 2012 and 2027 and beyond.

PAVIN: Right now, it kind of feels like we’re all shooting from the hip, here. Operating with no true north. No clear sense of what’s okay and not okay to do.

Stepping over a bag of dog poo with our daughter in the hopes that someone else somewhere down the line will pick it up.

...

PAVIN: There is good news in all of this. And it’s that most people today understand that climate change is an issue. More people report feeling anxious and concerned about it. It’s on people’s radars. But there is still a hurdle—people don’t think it will affect them. There was actually a YouGov poll last year that showed this. It found that the majority of Americans do think climate change will significantly impact the world, just not in their backyard.

And then there are the other people who are maybe connecting to things personally but getting it all wrong.

PAVIN: I just remember Halloweens in the Midwest being a lot milder than they are now. Is something like that a result of climate change?

HORTON: I would say there’s no support for climate change causing cold events in the fall.

PAVIN: Daniel Horton is an associate professor in the Department of Earth, Environmental, and Planetary Sciences at Northwestern.

He’s primarily a numerical modeler, which means he builds virtual versions of the planet to simulate how our climate system responds over time.

He also studies something called time of emergence, the moment when a long-term statistical shift becomes strong enough that it’s detectable in the real world.

But he doesn’t just live inside models.

HORTON: I do touch grass occasionally.

PAVIN: Because while his models can tell him when the odds are shifting, people help him understand what that shift means. Whom it hurts. How it breaks things. What it costs. And so, he listens to their stories.

HORTON: Those stories almost inevitably revolve around extreme events and people’s experience with extreme events.

PAVIN: Extreme events, like heat waves, flooding, multiday downpours. Not every strange day, like colder-than-usual trick-or-treating conditions that make people like me throw their hands up and say, “climate change, you know?!”

Climate scientists aren’t looking for weird.

They’re looking for patterns that stop being rare.

Heat waves that used to happen once in a generation now happening every few years.

That’s when the signal rises above the noise.

HORTON: Just from Chicago’s own experience, the city has a history with extreme heat events. There was a heat wave in 1995.

NEWS CLIP: On the first day, the temperature hit 106, but that felt like 120 degrees to the human body. I remember it being so hot. The heat was relentless and the result was catastrophic.

HORTON: Seven hundred people died during that heat wave. A mass casualty event.

NEWS CLIP: Most were elderly, poor, and living alone without any access to air conditioning.

HORTON: More recently, Chicago experiences a lot of flooding events. Heavy rainfalls—particularly on the south side—lead to flooding events, lead to all sorts of impacts on communities living there.

NEWS CLIP: It’s like a nightmare. A never-ending nightmare. I have to sit on my basement steps and just watch and see if it’s gonna flood.

NEWS CLIP: I am scared to death that it’s gonna storm. I don’t have too much left in my basement to destroy. Because everything has been destroyed.

HORTON: That’s the kind of manifestation of climate change that people experience—not in their daily lives, but in their lives.

All of these kinds of impacts from, say, hurricanes or flooding events have gotten worse since the nineties—and since the 1890s, for that matter.

It’s a slow progression of things just gradually getting worse and worse over time. One thing to hammer home is that there’s always gonna be extreme events—hot and cold spells, things like that. But generally speaking, those extreme events are exacerbated by the increasing greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere.

PAVIN: In other words, these are the things where the signal has risen above the noise.

...

PAVIN: So, Horton connects the science to our lives. What he will not do is predict the future. I asked Horton a few times to do this—to tell me what this horrible, terrible, no-good worst-case future would look like if we hit 2 degrees above pre-industrialized levels. And at some point he kind of sighed.

HORTON: What I will say is that I spent a lot of my life thinking about everything that we’ve just talked about—the bad parts of climate change—and I do everything in my power now to not think about it and to instead think about the solutions to climate change.

I’ve changed my whole research focus from climate-change impacts to climate solutions.

PAVIN: For Horton, dwelling on the extinction-level events that could occur due to climate change, it just isn’t moving the needle anymore from a public-messaging standpoint. Sadly, the impacts of climate change are here and people are only going to become more aware of it over time.

Instead, Horton now looks at what’s called co-beneficial solutions: measures that kill two birds with one stone; the things that we do to improve the quality of the air that we breathe—air quality—for example. Those are also things that reduce greenhouse gas emissions. These are co-beneficial solutions.

But to get to these co-beneficial solutions, it’s going to take a lot of coordination and sacrifice.

...

PAVIN: But do we have it in us?

BUSSE: Is there any hope that this can happen? I think yes—hope is well-founded.

PAVIN: She takes inspiration from a situation that happened long ago.

BUSSE: Chicago, when it was first built, was built on swampy land and it was built kind of fast, without a proper sewer system. As a result, it had recurring cholera epidemics. And after one of those cholera epidemics, they decided this was simply untenable. They needed a real sewer system that would carry away the waste from the city in a safer way.

To create a sewer system, they had to raise the entire city by six to eight feet. They put jack screws—these big human-powered screws—underneath the foundations of the buildings. And they would have teams of men slowly turn these screws and literally raise an entire building up six or eight feet.

Then they would do the next building and the next building. And then they started to do blocks of buildings. At some point they were doing fractions of city blocks, and they simply raised the entire city, which continued to operate. The buildings continued to operate. They just had big stairs that went from the street level, which was now six feet lower, up to the doors.

But then eventually they built sewers, they built streets, and the whole level of the city got raised—with human beings and 1850s technology—because it was existential.

PAVIN: If we could draw inspiration from our mid-nineteenth-century counterparts—if we could conjure the same sense of urgency they had, such that they felt compelled to act in an extraordinary feat of coordination—there’s reason to believe we could get to net zero.

But what would we even do? What would a logical series of steps even look like, if we were to decide we needed to get moving tomorrow?

Busse says there are three levers we can pull.

Lever number one?

Technology.

At the risk of oversimplifying, a lot of the things we do as humans are emissions-heavy. We need new ways to do these things that don’t produce emissions. We need new technology to help us do that. And the area where new tech can pack a really huge punch is electricity.

BUSSE: Throughout the entire world, there are really only half a dozen ways that people produce electricity. They burn coal, they burn natural gas, oil. They use hydroelectric dams. The entire world uses a handful of ways of generating electricity. Our decarbonized ways of producing electricity will work anywhere: anywhere the sun shines; anywhere the wind blows. Anywhere you have enough land to build a nuclear power plant, you can decarbonize in the same way. So that’s really promising, because any technology you invent can be a globally deployable technology—and you are only trying to replace half a dozen ways you do things now with half a dozen different ways you can do things in the future.

PAVIN: Devising the tech is one thing. Scaling it, of course, is another. It needs the support of investors and the market. It needs to convince enough people to adopt a new technology, one that’s pretty niche and expensive, initially, which, if you ask me, kind of adds to this feeling that sustainability is only for people who can afford it.

But there’s some encouraging news on that front. Take solar. Even just a couple decades ago, solar was a very expensive form of energy. But because of improvements and a huge scale-up in production—especially from China—solar’s installation cost has dropped nearly 90 percent and is now actually one of the cheapest.

BUSSE: The path that we have seen solar PV follow, that we’ve seen wind follow, we’re now seeing batteries follow. So I have a lot of hope that these other kinds of technologies, whether it is nuclear—which we know how to do technologically, but we need to get better at in terms of costs—I have a lot of hope that that’s gonna follow the same kind of pattern.

PAVIN: But we need more technology if we want to keep heading down this path where the clean tech makes more and more economic sense.

Which brings us to our second lever:

Public policies and incentives.

The patterns we’ve seen wind and solar follow, they didn’t just happen on their own. They had help. From things like subsidies.

BUSSE: Subsidies are useful in situations where you don’t yet have a viable at-scale product that you’re trying to encourage people to adopt. What you’re trying to do is encourage people to have pilot programs and to experiment with things—to help the development of the technologies that we aren’t quite ready to deploy at scale, but we’ll need along the decarbonization path.

PAVIN: Sure, a small startup could pursue a radical new form of energy or battery technology, but when a project like that could take 10 years, 20 years, possibly longer to ever come to fruition, having some sort of subsidy is kind of essential. Because we don’t really have the kind of time to wait for that to pan out without public intervention.

Aside from building up the supply of clean tech on the market... public policy can help move the demand, too.

BUSSE: You would like policy to change the incentives about how either individuals or businesses—often businesses—make choices among existing technologies. And so putting some kind of price on carbon, whether it’s with a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade system, changes the relative prices of the clean versus the dirty choice for technologies that are out there and available.

PAVIN: Carbon pricing forces polluters to pay for the emissions they crank out, which disincentivizes it. A number of states already participate in some form of carbon pricing, but of course, it’s not as effective as a national penalty would be. And we certainly don’t have that.

Public policy right now, at least in the U.S., well, it’s not exactly pro-green anything right now.

And so, onto our final lever we go.

Businesses.

Companies, not individuals, are the biggest emitters of CO2. And if we’re going to get to net zero by 2050, those companies are going to need to make some significant changes to how they operate, for the sake of the climate. But that’s a hard behavior to compel, for a very simple reason.

It’s expensive. Very expensive. And if the math doesn’t pencil out?

BUSSE: That’s a hard case to make to today’s investors—to today’s shareholders that the CEO has to answer to.

PAVIN: Convincing your board or shareholders to take less profit—or, in many cases, losses—for the sake of a risk many decades in the future is all but impossible.

But there are examples of companies doing things like this—taking significant risks that might not pay off—that Busse thinks about.

BUSSE: I think of the example of pharmaceutical companies. The CEO of a pharmaceutical company has two jobs. One job is to market their current blockbuster—or small set of blockbuster drugs—and make as much money as they can out of that set of blockbuster drugs.

And the second job of the pharmaceutical CEO is to manage the R&D pipeline and to make investments that will produce the next blockbuster drug for when this set goes off patent. That’s a really long-run strategy and it’s a high-risk strategy. So that pharma company is gonna try a bunch of things in its own labs. A bunch of them won’t work. It’s gonna acquire startup firms. Some of those won’t work. And what they’re really doing is pulling a whole bunch of different levers, rolling a whole bunch of different dice, in the hope that one of them—or a few of them—are gonna turn into blockbusters 10 or a dozen years from now.

PAVIN: And blockbusters mean big profits. Now, it’s not exactly a one-to-one comparison, but the principle of it applies. You could imagine a company taking gambles on innovations—not just for the planet, but because it will ultimately be profitable.

...

PAVIN: When Busse lays it out like this, it almost feels simple. We know what needs to happen, so why isn’t it?

On this season of Insight Unpacked, we’re going to try to find out. We’ll peel back the economic, corporate, and policy layers that make pulling these levers, well, so complicated. Along the way, we’ll tell stories of employees trying to change a tech giant from within; investors trying to re-engineer the rules of our capital markets to reward corporate sustainability; policymakers attempting to make the climate a priority. And we’ll hear how artificial intelligence stands to either accelerate the problem or fix it.

On the next episode of Insight Unpacked ...

What are companies—our biggest emitters—doing to move the needle on the climate?

What would it actually take for businesses to decarbonize?

Matt ROLING: It became very, very trendy for companies to set these targets. These aren’t binding. These are just promises. And so they’re only as good as the people that make that promise and whether or not they’re willing to keep it.

PAVIN: This episode of Insight Unpacked was written by Laura Pavin and Andrew Meriwether, edited by Rob Mitchum, and produced by Andrew Meriwether and the Kellogg Insight team, which includes Fred Schmalz, Abraham Kim, Maja Kos, and Blake Goble. It was mixed by Andrew Meriwether. Our theme music is by Sam Clapp. Special thanks to Meghan Busse, Daniel Horton, Katherine Tellock, and Jacob Connors. And additional thanks to the Eleven Eleven Foundation for their support.

As a reminder, you can find us on iTunes, Spotify, or at kell.gg/unpacked. If you like this show, please leave us a review or rating—that helps new listeners find us.