(bright music) (bright music) - The apocalypse wrapped in a global mental health crisis as stress and anxiety over climate change surge, that's how the threat of a volatile planet is being billed.

Or as one Idaho teenager put it, "I'm mad, I'm powerless, "I'm exhausted, and I'm only 18."

But thankfully, there's some good news on the horizon.

Here to guide us through that and the forecast ahead are four distinguished climate champions.

Joining us are Cristina Mittermeir, Marine Biologist and Photographer.

Bill Weir, Chief Climate Correspondent at CNN.

David Wallace-Wells, New York Times Opinion Writer and Author of "The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming".

And later we'll talk with Ambassador Cindy McCain, who's on a mission to fight global hunger, exacerbated by our warming planet.

But first, we're grateful to have you all with us.

David, I'm going to start with you because you were here three years ago.

You were talking about your book.

A lot of people were out on the ledge about your book, and it was billed as a terrifying polemic that was kind of a cross between Stephen Hawking and Stephen King.

But the good news is that of late, your most recent writing in the New York Times, has you sounding a little bit more upbeat.

Why?

- Well, the short answer is that I think we're not going to get as hot a planet as I thought or many scientists thought was possible just a few years ago.

So today the planet's at about 1.2 degrees, which doesn't sound like very much, but actually puts us already outside the window of temperatures that encloses the entire history of human civilization.

So it's scary already.

But five, 10 years ago, the conventional wisdom was that a business as usual future would land the planet at the end of the century at four or five degrees of warming.

So three or four times the warming that we have today.

Now just maybe five years later, we're expecting a business as usual future between two and three degrees.

So not much more than half of what we were expecting five years ago.

So we basically cut in half expected warming in just five years.

That doesn't mean that we're out of the woods, things are going to get considerably worse between 1.2 and 2.2 or wherever we end up.

There's a lot more suffering, a lot more damage to come.

But I think it's a great relief to be thinking about a future of 2.2, 2.4 degrees as opposed to 4.6, 4.8 degrees.

And that means that while we still need to do a lot to make those futures real, we can start thinking in sub apocalyptic terms.

It's post-normal, the world's not going to be normal anymore.

But it also is not going to be the warming apocalypse that scientists told us was act--not just possible, but quite likely just five years ago.

- Bill, I've heard you say that you're not a lot of fun at parties because you talk about-- - I used to be you.

- You used to...

But keeping on this theme, you do say that there's not going to be any sort of happy, satisfying ending to this climate story.

And yet you also in your good cop mode, talk about how there are a lot of optimistic, hopeful stories about climate.

So where do you net out at this point?

- It really depends on the day, Jane.

It depends on which part of this giant mural I'm focused on.

And there's some darkness.

David's book woke me up in ways that other reporting hadn't.

And I can focus on the peer reviewed dread and it really takes me to some dark places.

When you realize that the most Googled term on sustainability is, what is sustainability?

That can make you want to draw the curtains and get back in the fetal position.

But then if I focus on all of the human talent I talked about this covering Hurricane Ian afterwards, that the best hurricane coverage advice I ever got was from Mr. Rogers who said, "If you see something scary on TV, "tell your children, basically look for the helpers."

Helpers are there, there's always somebody who's smart and strong who's going to take us to a better tomorrow and that'll give you hope.

And so I can...

I'm also working on a big special on the helpers at the global level who are looking at massive natural or manufactured fixes.

And what you realize is this story touches every aspect of our lives.

And so the solutions will come from every aspect of our lives.

The construction of this building, how you got here, what you ate for breakfast, how we interact with each other, the stories we tell each other, all of that has to change.

And change is hard, but it can also be exciting and positive if done in the right way.

So, I resisted a beat most of my career.

I was an anchor at ABC and at CNN I wanted to be a generalist.

And they said we want to create a climate beat, I realized, this is the one beat that touches everything.

It's politics and it's healthcare and it's manufacturing and housing and all these sorts of things.

And the sooner that my brethren in the newsroom and the rest of us can come around with that sort of mindset, I think the conversation will really change 'cause there's so much potential just waiting to be released.

- Well, as you're saying, it does touch everything, Cristina, but very often people don't hear it that way because... And I'm certainly guilty of this, I hear all these stats and all these technological terms and I don't even know what's being talked about.

So you who started out as a marine biologist and you still are, decided to become a storyteller through photography.

And that's because the very often the, talk is cheap, but the visceral of a photograph resonates with people.

And I'm going to start as the example with an iconic photo you took.

I do want to let folks at home know that this is a tough photo to look at, so you may want to avert your eyes, but this is a picture of a starving polar bear that you took five years ago in the Baffin Islands who became the face, heartbreaking face of this existential threat that we're trying to deal with.

So talk about how you think your storytelling turns apathy into action.

- Well, one of the things that I've noticed is that we don't have enough people engaged in this conversation and I'm so grateful for people like both of you for connecting the dots, cause we see these hurricanes and then whoever's covering the story fails to bring it back to the fact well, that the ocean is a lot warmer and a lot angrier and it touches every aspect of our lives.

But I don't think people are necessarily worried about thinking of these things in the day.

So when I was a scientist, I was writing scientific literature and I realized that it's a very elitist way of speaking and that most people don't connect with it.

So how do we keep bringing it down to a colloquial way that people can really understand and photography was a revelation, people look at photographs and they immediately want to ask questions about the things that they're looking at.

And for me, that breaking moment when somebody asks a question is such a good opportunity to engage in what I think is the most important conversation of our lifetimes.

So I use photography to lower the price of entry to bring people into a conversation.

I start by trying to be really inspirational and hopeful and positive because I think people that are afraid tend to reject and recoil.

So it's just a way of bringing people in.

And that photograph of the starving polar bear, we're talking about.

Martin Luther King didn't start his famous speech by saying, I have a nightmare, he told us where we're going.

You have to paint the vision of what a potential future could be like if we do all the right things.

So he told us that and then he reminded us that we have a long way to go.

So when I published photographs like that starving polar bear is to remind us that not all is well and we cannot sugarcoat it and pretend that things are right.

When I was working for National Geographic, we were spending months photographing animals that are dying because of heat waves in the ocean and lack of oxygen in the ocean.

So we just wanted to help people stop for a moment and think about what it means to die of starvation because you can't find food.

And I think that photograph was very controversial.

It stirred up a conversation and five years later people are still talking about it.

- I'm sure.

David, I do want to talk more about the scope of where we are right now in the overview.

And we don't want people to be lulled into a false sense of complacency that things are necessarily fabulous.

But you had written when you were at New York Magazine, a cover story about what you consider to be the greatest threat of the 21st century and it was entitled "The Guilty and the Damned".

And I think it's an important point to be made.

if you would, explain what that's about.

- Well, it's about justice and equity as core features of the climate crisis.

So maybe it's actually best to pull back and talk a little bit about how you open your question, which is to say, I talked about some of these levels 1.2, 2, 3, 4, just a few minutes ago, and those can feel a little bit abstract.

To keep in mind, sort of ballpark.

Two degrees is what is described as dangerous warming, sometimes catastrophic warming.

Island nations of the world have called it genocide.

African climate diplomats have called it death for the continent, certain death for the continent.

And this is given where we are now almost a best case scenario for where we're ending up.

And last year at New York Magazine I wrote a piece about what it means for those who have the least and who have done the least to cause this crisis to be heading into a future that might be somewhat manageable for the rich countries of the world, but will be much, much less so for them.

And what kind of politics that opens up, what moral obligations and demands it makes those of us in the rich world.

And how broken our way of seeing our relationship to other people in the world is that we can see four or five straight failed rainy seasons in the Horn of Africa and just think that that starvation is a sort of a natural feature, not something that we've sort of designed and allowed to happen for our own benefit.

And I do think that, your misgivings about data aside, some of these numbers are unbelievably striking.

So all of Sub-Saharan Africa, which is nearly a billion people, in their entire history, is responsible for something like 1% of historical emissions, 1% of historical emissions.

The United States is responsible for about 20% of historical emissions.

The average person in sub-Saharan Africa uses less electricity than the average American refrigerator.

A transatlantic flight, one ticket on a transatlantic flight melts like I think nine tons of Arctic ice.

The way that we live sort of somewhat casually in the global North is having unbelievably large consequences on the climate that are going to be felt primarily by people living elsewhere who can do the least to protect themselves from them.

And that dynamic in which literally billions of people are going to be suffering, having done nothing to create this problem, while many of us in the global North benefit from the economic growth that was powered by fossil fuels over the last century and turn a blind eye to that suffering is an unbelievably ugly feature of our climate presence.

And the thing that I was trying to get at in that piece, and I think is opening up more and more in the climate conversation more generally, is that it doesn't have to be a feature of our climate future.

We can design a new geopolitics around climate obligations that takes the suffering of people in the global south more seriously.

But we're very, very far from that today.

- Bill, you famously have said that all the worst disaster movies start with somebody ignoring a scientist.

- Right.

(laughing happily) From what I read, the science community, climate community's not happy.

I mean, they're fed up.

They feel they're not being heard.

People aren't paying the attention that should be paid to the warnings.

And basically the deniers are blocking, as you put it, exits to a burning building.

So I want to talk about this human behavior part of this today because it's not that I have misgivings about stats, David, it's that I sometimes feel people really don't, they don't resonate with people.

So in terms of the impact that that denialism is having, what have you seen?

'Cause you've been everywhere.

- Yeah, well it's really a America specific problem and there's... You see it in Australia a little bit, but this is purely the result of the stories we've been told that we grew up, I grew up in a world where fossil fuels were unlocking longer lifespans and we saw the proof of that.

It built the modern world.

So it's hard just on a baseline to make the cognitive leap to realize, wait, all the things that we think are fantastic about human beings are coming back to bite us in just these violent, unpredictable ways and I have to feel responsible for that.

That's a tough one for the average person to wrestle with and is an easy one for a denialist or somebody of vested interest who profits off of this way or the politicians who love them to sow doubt into that.

And ultimately, the peace I had to make with this, I went down to the very tip of southern Louisiana where I did a story on this El de Jean Charles, this small community, most Native Americans who, they've lost 90% of their land in the last 50 years.

They just raised their house every decade about three feet, and they're living on stilts and they want a grant to move inland.

That the federal grant would give them 50 million or more to build a brand new community.

Most of them don't want to leave, they don't trust the government as long as it's above ground, it's theirs.

That's a whole nother layer of psychology, we don't talk about enough when it comes to this story managed retreat, what that means.

But anyway, in the course of this story, I took a scientist out to talk about the ecosystem and the guys who were on the boat were these two brothers and they weren't even going to be in the special, but we got to talking and I realized one believed a manmade global warming, the other one didn't.

And these are men of the same blood, on the same land who share a same fishing camp that is beaten to death by these bigger hurricanes and subsidence and everything else.

And they're just the products of different stories.

The news that one brother gets is different from the news this brother gets.

You can guess which network.

You can guess how they vote.

And there is a very strong sense of loyalty to place and industry, this is oil country.

So to say that my brothers and my daddy and my neighbors are part of a problem that's melting the ice caps, I don't blame those guys for that, I blame the storytellers who convinced them that was the case, the people who do know better.

But I think the conversation really is changing and another way to frame David's numbers before, some people now are seeing even those who denied it or then delayed it for ideological or political reasons, see that there's a 50 trillion dollar carbon capture business out there for somebody to come along and get rich off of.

Maybe I should take a look at that.

And so some people are going to come to this story as climate allies for completely different motivations, but I think we should be empathetic to all and take all the help we can get.

We just have to get out there and sometimes way more than maybe driving a Tesla is having an impact is just talking to your neighbors or talking to your school board councils or your PTA meetings and just saying, "Hey guys, do we have a climate plan?

I mean, you know, Are we prepared for this hotter summer?"

And that is, we can't, Jane, solve this problem without common ground.

- There you go.

Of course.

Thank you.

Shameless plug.

Thank you, we love that.

But that's part of the problem, Cristina, 'cause people make assumptions about, I mean, a lot of climate activists are considered wacky and crazy.

I mean, they are.

I mean people are throwing tomato soup on priceless paintings and you wonder if that's really advancing the cause in any way.

I'm sure they have good intentions, but the point I'm making is that, that it doesn't help when people label other people.

And how do you get past that sort of stereotyping when you're talking to people?

I'm sure you... Do you see a lot of people who are climate deniers?

- I do.

And I've been of course the victim of online attacks from people who say, that I'm making stuff up.

- [Bill] After the polar bear picture.

- Oh my god.

Yeah, these were scientists that came out of nowhere, and when you dig into where they come from, you realize that they're being paid for by very powerful, special interests that are telling the story that they're interested in keeping.

And the point about storytelling is so important because it is the stories we tell and one of the things that I talk about is the lack of funding we have to continue growing the right story and to have more access to bigger audiences to hear the story that people need to be hearing because I don't think they're getting there.

So to your point about protestors throwing tomato soup, I mean these are young people that are terrified and they're angry and they have every right to be.

But what that allows, for those of us who have more of a middle of the ground message is to have a better chance of being listened.

We're not throwing tomatoes soup, we're just trying to make sense.

- No, but the, but you raised the point that the Lancet recently did a survey.

I mean, overwhelming evidence talks about the fact that young people from 16 to 25 are absolutely frightened about the future.

75% of them are frightened, half of them think humanity is doomed and that's a quote.

And they feel betrayed by leaders and by people who could have done something about this, 'cause as you point out, this is our generation's issue.

I mean, we did this, we own this in a lot of ways.

So these young people who... You have three children actually who are 21, 25 and 31 or something.

- Something around there you.

After 18, you stop counting.

But yeah a huge part of the reason that I'm involved in this is because I can see how scared they are and how they become apathetic.

It's almost like they feel so defeated.

There's nothing we can do about this.

- Here's the thing I will say though, too, as well, if we ignore these kids, you think they're going to stop at throwing soup in museums?

It could get much, much worse for people who think they have no voice and nothing to say.

Eco terrorism came to light in the 70's when things got grim.

You shudder to think at that.

But what's going on with what David said about the injustice of the global south.

These people, we have to pull them into the conversation.

And the best medicine for depression in this space is action, is rolling up your sleeves and meeting like-minded folks and planting or rehabbing or doing coastal restoration work, all these sorts of things can both be a balm for the anxiety, the eco anxiety, which is now an official term in American Psychiatric Society.

- Well, I want to pull another voice into this broadcast because recently I had the honor of sitting down with our US ambassador to the United Nations for Food and Agriculture, Cindy McCain.

After a lifetime of public service, she's tackling her toughest challenge yet, fighting global hunger, a calamity made worse by the climate crisis.

Ambassador McCain, we are so honored to have you with us today and congratulations on your appointment and your new mission.

- Thank you.

- You have devoted your entire life to humanitarian causes.

You've been a special ed teacher, you have helped children with cleft pallets, you've helped clear landmines in Zimbabwe.

You've been all over doing good for many, many people.

Now you're on a mission to fight hunger and food insecurity around the world.

And it's a mission you say is really integral to people's dignity.

Can you explain why?

- First of all, thank you for having me and I appreciate you covering this topic and talking about it because it is indeed something that we as a world need to worry about in a major way.

- For people who don't often make the connection between why climate crisis is so important within this picture, there are three Cs and let's talk about climate first and why that impacts food insecurity.

- I'll start with the Southwestern United States and the lack of water, that's a climate change issue.

I will also talk about the crops that they try to grow in many countries, but particularly Africa, where there is no water and no access to anything even remotely helpful in trying to grow crops to feed a village, let alone a family.

Climate change affects everything.

- And what about the other two Cs?

Let's talk about conflict because that's critical in this picture.

- Conflicts is a huge issue as you know.

I mean, when we talk about Ethiopia or we're talking about Yemen or we're talking about any of the other countries where there is strife, conflict is a major reason people don't have access to food or water.

- And talk about Ukraine.

- Well, Ukraine was considered the bread basket for most of Europe and certainly most of Africa.

And with that shut down because we've gotten very little grain out of there considering what they're capable of.

It's going to affect and is already affecting many parts of Africa.

It's a cataclysmic problem and it spirals, everything's connected to it.

- How do you even start to prioritize where to go first?

- Well, there's the emergency side of it and then there's the long term sustainability side of it.

And so we work on both issues.

We work with all other countries in the world that are willing to work.

We work with the Food and Agriculture organization, World Food Program, EFAB, which deals with small family farmers, small holding farmers.

So it's a lot of work.

- What has surprised you most since you took this assignment?

- I think the vastness of it.

I mean, it's one thing to say the world is hungry, but it's another thing to see it.

- There are people who say it's already too late in some ways to stop the effects of climate change.

You've been hearing about it for so long and people say, we're out of time, we're out of time, we're out of time.

But the point is, you have to carry on and try and figure out solutions to these problems.

What do you see as the biggest challenge ahead for the whole notion of trying to feed the world?

- It's making people believers that climate change is not only real, but it affects all of us.

I'm looking at my own home state where we're going on possibly water rationing, which is something I never thought we'd see.

So it's about using what we have in a better way.

- The last question I have is, because I think I read somewhere you said you never imagined yourself doing this kind of work and that it's been a mix of heartbreak and hope.

Talk about that.

- It is.

I mean, my husband before he passed said, you have to go on, you have to live your life, you have to be productive.

When I had the opportunity to take this job and it's an honor of a lifetime for me, I was a little bit mixed.

Only that I just hope my husband agrees with what I'm doing and I'm sure he does.

But it is bittersweet though for me, it really is.

- Well, I will say that on behalf of so many people who you will never know, we are very grateful for the service that you have committed to this country and that you are committing for this country.

And we wish you every success with what you're doing and we are so grateful for your time today.

Thank you.

- Thank you very much.

- Wish we could clone that lifetime of public service.

Wonderful woman.

Thank you Ambassador McCain.

David, I want to go to her point though about the three Cs, are conflict and climate and COVID also has done a tremendous amount of damage to the food supply around the world.

In looking at carbon emissions, which you talked about it earlier, I think of carbon emissions like fat cells.

Once you have fat cells, they're yours forever.

Now he's looking at me...

But you know what I'm saying.

The point is you can't, unless you take them out with carbon capture, they're there.

Do you plant billions of trees?

What do you do to try and mitigate the damage that's been done in terms of food production?

- Well, just to answer that first bite, just to have a sense of the scale of what we're dealing with.

I wrote about this in a recent piece, but there are about 1.1 trillion tons of carbon that are hanging in the atmosphere from human contributions, that is more than the weight of everything that we have ever built on this planet that is still standing today.

So we've done more to transform the atmosphere through our carbon emissions than we've done to transform the landscape of this planet.

And it is not going to dissipate quickly, which means probably we should be planning more for managing a hotter future rather than solving it through removing that carbon.

But on the margins we can make a difference by removing it.

And there are a number of different ways that we can do that.

We can do that by planting trees, but many of the efforts to do that to this point have not been very successful.

There's a lot of kind of colonial issues about it because it's often the case that it's rich countries of the world, who are paying farmers elsewhere to use land that they might be using to produce food instead of putting carbon sucking trees there, oftentimes they also don't work.

Forest can go up in in flames as we've learned more and more over the last few years.

But there are still large numbers of natural solutions.

Bill can probably talk about this in some more detail in the oceans, on lands, there are also some slightly farther out things that we can do, like sprinkling certain minerals on open landscapes to absorb carbon.

And then there are technological solutions, machines that can allow us to take carbon out of the atmosphere and store it deep underground.

And this is sort of the gold standard because we can really manage that carbon much more effectively than we can if we're taking it out with trees or whatever.

But if we're thinking about how we're going to manage food production, especially over the next 20, 30, 50 years, I don't really think that this whole bouquet of solutions, negative emissions is going to make all that much of a difference.

Across the equatorial band of the planet people are going to be dealing with much more intense weather, extreme drought, extreme heat waves, almost no matter what we do over the next few decades.

And that means that we need to be adapting on the ground in the hands of farmers, particularly in those parts of the world that don't have many resources to do it themselves.

That's to say mainly in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa and the challenges there are really large.

We have some crops that can do better that aren't yet in the hands of farmers.

We know that certain fertilizers can work better into these conditions, but it's very hard to get those tools into the people, into the hands of the people that need them.

And that is not a technological problem, it's a political and economic problem.

And I would say that that's true of the food crisis generally, which is harrowingly large.

And yet it's also important to keep in mind we're still producing more calories on this planet every year than we ever have before.

So when we think about the hunger crisis, growing, which it is, and it has been over the last decade pretty reliably.

It's not because the planet as a whole is failing to produce food, it's that the food that we are producing is not going to the people who need it most.

And that I think is a useful lens to put on all of these issues, which is like, it's not just about do we have the tech, it's not just...

If we were designing a new world from scratch on a whiteboard, we could do it pretty well.

It's, do we have it in our hearts?

Are we moral enough actors in this world to make sure that the people who are facing the most vulnerability will get first dibs on solution and adaptation as opposed to the people who are least vulnerable like all of us on this stage.

The way things are set up now, we're all going to benefit.

It's not going to be people in sub-Saharan Africa who are going to benefit from adaptation and innovation.

And that's the great tragedy I think, of the next few decades.

- All right, well we're going to go back to the politics in a few minutes.

But Bill, you reported from New Orleans, I think in June during this heat wave.

Last June you were down there, I think, were you talking about that trip earlier, maybe?

- This was a different one-- - Different one.

- [Bill] And I remember it.

- Okay.

But you went to New Orleans where the residents have been pummeled by one extreme weather disaster after another.

And so we have a video question from one of our viewers that addresses that scenario.

Let's take a look.

- Hi, I'm Sam from Alaska.

Natural disasters like Hurricane Ian are increasingly demonstrating the vulnerability of our coastal communities.

How can we protect communities like these and adapt our economy to the increased risks of natural disasters?

- Great question, Sam.

The unfortunate answer is, don't live on the coast.

That doesn't go over well at real estate conventions in South Florida.

- You've tried it obvious.

- Yeah.

(laughs happily) It goes against what we want.

Our dream is to live, I love the ocean, I love the beach.

But a great example was Hurricane Ian.

So I rode out that storm in Punte Gorda, we were a little bit north of where the eye came ashore and then I reported in, near Fort Myers there was a community called Cape Coral that in typical Florida lore, this was made by hucksters who went to jail for selling snake oil.

This was in the days when you'd see an ad in the New Yorker, buy a plot of land in Florida for $50.

They would take swamp without any regard for a sustainable construction, build these really vulnerable communities.

And I went in a home with a woman who in about 15 minutes she went through the five stages of grief.

She thought she'd be able to salvage her home.

It was knee deep water in her kitchen and by the end she knew it was a writeoff.

And when you see that, it's gutting.

A dozen miles inland from there is a community called Babcock Ranch that was started by a former NFL lineman named Syd Kitson, who got out of the NFL, started as a developer, wanted to become the first real eco-conscious developer in Florida.

And he bought a huge working cattle ranch of about a hundred thousand acres, sold most of it back to Florida as protected wetlands around him.

Created a grid of all solar, a 100% solar, convinced Florida power and light to put it up.

They never lost power.

They watched the hurricane in their living rooms never lost power.

And because they built it with sensitivity of connected lakes and that protected wetlands, they never flooded while communities around them were, their lives were ruined by inland, the two feet of rain that came with that storm.

But the uncomfortable conversation is, if we all switched over to skateboards and horses tomorrow, all the carbon that's already up in the atmosphere is there and is going to continue warming things up slowly.

And nothing we do today is going to refreeze Greenland, sadly.

So life as we know it in Miami is changing.

And it doesn't mean it's going to be wiped off the earth, but it means it's, you're going to see, they're already spending millions on raising streets, changing building codes, bigger pumps, different sewers, it's changing if you want to live there.

But the bigger question is financially, because the insurance aftershocks after all of these hurricanes is rippling through.

People in Florida, pay three times the average rate in the country.

It's going to get to the point where if you want to live on the beach, you want to live in paradise, you're going to have to assume all your own risk.

And that means people who can afford it will keep rebuilding after hurricanes.

But the people who teach their kids or police their streets or do their dry cleaning, where are they going to live in these paradise communities?

- Well it's the climate, the climate version of wealth inequality.

I mean, you're talking about climate justice.

- I often think I've, especially over the last couple of years, I found myself thinking we think about this as a carbon problem with an inequality component.

But I sometimes think it's an inequality problem with a carbon narrative.

- [Bill] Yeah.

- [Jane] Yeah.

- It's shifting.

In Miami, Little Haiti was on the wrong side of the tracks back in the day when people were developing Miami Beach, now it's high ground.

So you're seeing climate gentrification where folks are pushing out the folks who could afford that high ground at a time.

And now where do they go?

- Exactly.

Cristina, you started a non-profit organization called Sea Legacy that's dedicated to protection of the ocean.

The biggest carbon sink obviously that we have.

You say that the ocean isn't just a victim, I'm paraphrasing, it's also a solution in many ways.

Talk about that.

- The ocean is one of the largest carbon sinks that we have.

It's over half of the excess heat that's on the atmosphere being absorbed by this enormous body of water on our planet, the ocean.

And of course it's suffering.

The heat waves in the ocean are devastating to the biomass in the ocean, but it's also causing acidification, more and more carbon dioxide dissolves in the water.

It's a chemical reaction that results in acidic water.

That means that the plankton itself, most of it is tiny creatures that are very delicate and they're made of calcium carbonate, disintegrate.

You can't see it plankton and that's the thing, we've already lost the equivalent of four Amazon rainforests of plankton.

And it is one of the most efficient ways of decarbonizing the atmosphere.

So plants in the ocean, we almost never talk about them, but when you think about the five plants that might save the world, cassava is one of them.

It's a root that can feed a lot of people, but it also has many other uses.

Bamboo as a construction material.

But the other ones are mangroves, sea grasses and seaweed.

And you and I were talking, Bill, about these farmers and these fishermen that are transitioning from land-based agriculture and fisheries into seaweed farming.

It restarts the biological pump of the ocean.

It's sanctuary for fish.

It's also sequestering and absorbing carbon from the atmosphere and it's food.

And when you feed seaweed to cattle, it reduces methane by 90%.

So seaweed is a miracle.

- [Bill] It's a win, win, win win.

- It's a win, win win.

So hopefully we will come up with machines that can bury carbon deep.

But until then the best bet that we have is maintaining and restoring these ecosystems that are doing the job today.

So seagrass beds, this week we're going to see it announced the discovery of the largest seagrass meadow in the world, in The Bahamas is going to take that country from being a victim of hurricanes like Dorian destroyed Bahamas and now they're going to protect the seagrass and they're going to be issuing blue carbon credits against that protection generating income to rebuild the country and to restore more ecosystems.

They're going to be restoring their mangroves in Bimini and educating Bahamians to become ocean scientists.

I mean the vision of a single prime minister to build a blue economy based on conservation.

- David going from a sea to land we have a video question that we'd like you to tackle.

So here that is.

- Hey there, I'm Paul Singer, a Climate Activist here in northwest Connecticut where we're working to protect one of the most significant wildlife corridors in our country.

In your opinions, what should we be doing politically to support climate initiatives and wildlife friendly infrastructure programs?

Thank you.

- Well, I'd be curious what you guys think.

My first answer is just to say everything.

We're not doing nearly enough and we don't have nearly enough political support for the things we are doing.

I think there is movement on this.

I think that especially younger generations, but across the generational spectrum, you're seeing much much more focus on concern over climate issues, much more interest in solution sides of things than even five or 10 years ago.

But it needs to be a top shelf political priority.

It needs to be a top shelf social priority, a top shelf individual priority.

And far too few people see it that way.

So it's hard to talk about particular responses without knowing about the particular programs that are being discussed.

But the truth is, there's almost no one on this planet who is prioritizing climate issues as much as they should be.

And I certainly include myself in that, I indict myself in that.

And I think that that's a sign of just how much more we all need to do to really make this a priority.

Because if we don't the world that we know will continue falling apart, nobody wants that.

- But I remember the last time we talked three years ago and you were saying, this is not really part of my life, thinking about the climate and understanding the implications... Has that...

I mean obviously it sounds like it's changed dramatically for you.

- I think that there needs to be a place in the climate movement, in climate culture for people who are not fully on board, who live with some amount of climate hypocrisy in the same way that we live with hypocrisy in all other aspects of our lives.

- [Jane] What's climate hypocrisy?

- Well, living, one way that's a little bit different from the policy is that you want to see out in the world.

So if you haven't yet bought an electric car or you're not yet cooking on an induction stove.

On the other hand what we often call hypocrisy is, I think also could be used to describe just the desire to see our collective actions be better than we are as individuals and that's just called politics.

And when we think about a lot of these solutions, they can really only scale with political support.

So for instance I know a lot of people who want to replace their gas stoves with induction stoves, which are much better for the environment and for your health.

But you need the proper piping and wiring in your house or your apartment to make that happen.

You need building codes to encourage that to happen.

And we're decades behind actually forcing that through.

We need the social revolution to allow individuals to take action into their own lives.

But we also, I think need to have an attitude and perspective towards people who are trying to make changes and advocate for more changes that are welcoming them as opposed to pushing them away.

And that means understanding that not everybody's going to be a perfect climate actor, but that everybody should be doing more and that we should be applauding people who do do more.

But at the truly big picture level, the culture is moving in the right direction.

The question is whether it's moving fast enough.

And I think the answer is no, but it is moving in the right direction.

Every time you buy a plane ticket, there's a little prompt you want to offset this off, the offsets that are available to you or their garbage, but they're still selling it to you.

And five years ago they wouldn't even tried.

(crosstalk) Yeah.

And they could be made better that you could walk down the supermarket aisle, they're now foods that are advertised as being zero carbon.

You see zero carbon fashion being advertised to you.

- We are going to see labeling on carbon footprint of items.

I think we are moving in the right direction and I find that a lot of people are kind of waiting for permission to become bigger actors in this.

And we were just talking about, you have to be willing to have courage and wear your superhero spandex suit like the gentlemen and start speaking to your neighbors and having a louder voice and having a bigger opinion and maintain the stability but be assertive with it.

We are in a crisis and it's going to take all of us.

- If you had a wishlist at the top of the list, and I'm sure you do, aside from the ocean component, what would make the biggest difference?

- We have a carbon problem and if you imagine this carbon all in a tub, we have to do two things.

We have to turn the tap off and slow or stop emissions and that's where 90% of the conversation is today.

The other problem is we have to get rid of the carbon in the tub and that's where we have to turn on either machines or natural carbon solutions like restoration of mangroves and seagrass beds.

But the thing that's most interesting in these solutions is the political will and voting for the people who actually care and are willing to do something.

And I find a lot of hope in younger politicians that have families that can see the future that are scared as we are.

I was recently in Panama and at high level cabinet are all young people.

They're in their twenties, they're on WhatsApp from cabinet to cabinet talking to each other and helping pass legislation really fast.

To do things that are a little bit out of the norm.

Protect sharks, protect whales.

Whales are like the gardeners of the ocean.

They bring nutrients from the deep where they feed and they poop in the surface and they fertilize the plankton.

So we need way many more whales.

And when we think about sustainability, we need to expand the definition of sustainability.

It's not just the minimum we can do to minimize our footprint.

We have to think about biodiversity 'cause we have a dual crisis and since 1970 we have lost 69% of species on this planet.

It's not just about humans.

There's no life on this planet unless we take care of our fellow passengers.

- Exactly.

- Long answer though wasn't an answer, sorry.

- No, it was a lot of answer.

It was terrific.

It's like you're the shell answer woman of these suggestions.

I do want to go back to the politics because David, in reading some of your writing, you talk about the fact, optimally and we have talked about it today, we need to overhaul.

We have to look at our economic policies and our culture.

We have to look at why we're shortsighted.

I mean we have to look at why we're selfish.

All of this addressing this lack of climate justice that you've been talking about.

But I do have to ask you, even if you start local, which again, people are increasingly, and it's exciting to see the understanding that it starts local, it starts in the states, you've got to make a difference there.

But we live in a country where people don't even agree on who won an election.

So where do you start?

- Well, I think luckily we're in a place where we can make a case for climate action on the basis of self-interest and indeed local self-interest now.

And that was not the case five years ago.

Things have really changed here.

I think it's one of the reasons why there's considerably more hope in the climate movement than there was just a few years ago.

Because for all the great moral intentions, for all the growing concern, for all the existential feeling that's out there, there's also a growing consensus among economists and policy makers that at nearly every level of society in almost every place in the world, moving faster to decarbonize will be better for the people there very quickly.

90% of the world now lives in places where renewable energy is cheaper than dirty energy, 90% of the world.

So when you asked earlier like what's your number one ask, my number one ask is just like, let's cut the fossil fuel subsidies, which believe it or not, are still ongoing today.

In part because we need to move more quickly on the transition, in part because we know that fossil fuels are today through air pollution killing, millions of people every year fossil fuels are killing.

Renewable energy is not going to kill any of those people.

And in part because we want actually a more prosperous future.

And that can only happen if we get off of these damaging, this damaging energy dependency and towards something that will allow us to even in a really crude kind of like business minded cost benefit kind of way, allow us to grow more quickly than we have right now.

Nearly every new paper about this says like the faster we move, the better off we'll be.

That's not just true at the global level, it's not just true at the national level, it's true at the local level.

And that means you don't even need to engage in a question about climate change or climate damages or climate reparations if you're talking about how to decarbonize.

You can just say, you want to live a healthier life, you want to breathe better air, you want to grow faster and have more prosperity?

The answer to all of those questions is the same, which is to say to decarbonize.

And that to me is a sort of a silver bullet through a lot of the partisan conflict and even beyond the partisanship, the sort of culture war dynamics that are afflicting these debates elsewhere in the world.

It's one reason why, I think we're going to see some change here.

Like we're not there yet.

But five, 10 years from now, I do really think that we're going to be in a very different place than a lot of these issues when it comes to climate because fossil fuels are undeniably dying.

That business model is gone or going, it's only there now because it's being propped up by public subsidies.

Once those disappear and green energy grows, I think the culture war dynamics are going to change dramatically.

- Bill, do you think he's right?

- I think he is.

I do think that what we're seeing disturbing trends, you've got sort of private investors buying the dirtiest, smallest oil companies trying to take 'em private so they don't have to worry about regulation.

There's always going to be people who are going to try to squeeze the last of a dying energy source.

I want to burn the last whale or a hundred years ago.

That's troubling.

I think people are sorting themselves or moving around the country and whether they're making these conscious decisions that they're a climate migrant or not.

But if you just went through Ian and you don't want to go through another one and you're going back to the Midwest, you're a climate migrant, you know, and that is just going to intensify going forward changes the definition of neighbors and strangers and local politics and all those sorts of things.

But at a certain point there was a tipping point with the automobile that we're not going back to horses.

There were enough manufacturers, there was enough of the supply chain around that.

And I think we've passed that point when it comes to electrifying our lives.

It's just a matter of how fast it happens.

- If I could just say a couple words about the geopolitics, which I think are really interesting and important, and also move in a bunch of different directions at once.

It's crazy that the price of American gas, gasoline is dependent on whether somebody invades some country on the other side of the world.

We can control our energy if we produce it renewably in our own countries.

And that's being been seen all around the world, although how it all shakes out for countries in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia that need to that are living in energy poverty today is a big open question because we grimace at the increase in energy prices here, but in places like Bangladesh, they're already having mass blackouts as a result of the same dynamics because we're outbidding them for not just gas but also coal.

- [Christine] Exactly.

- Okay, well we've had good news... We've had, actually, let's stick with the... No, it's been surprising to me that there's been a fair amount of good news during this broadcast.

And the good news is that there has been, but the bad news is that we're almost out of time.

Before we do break away, Christine, I want to ask you a quick question, which is, has there ever been a photograph that you couldn't bear to take?

- Yeah.

I was at beginning of my career as a photojournalist in the Amazon, I was sent to tell the story of indigenous people that were going to lose their homeland because of the construction of the third largest hydroelectric dam in the world.

And there was a moment when a woman who had lost her baby, she dug the body of the baby out of the ground and she was carrying it around the village and hitting herself with a machete and she was all bloody, and I just couldn't bring myself to shove a camera in her face.

But that was a bitter lesson because there have been images that have changed the course of history.

If I say Vietnam, Napalm, we all know which images.

So I learned an important lesson.

It takes a lot of courage to stand up for the things that you believe in and people stop inviting you to dinner parties and that's part of the price we pay.

- But I do think too, and I'll double down on that uncomfortableness, that hydroelectric is considered a clean alternative fuel source but it can be just as draconian if it's not built in a humane way.

- At the end of the day we fail to talk about the fact that there's just too many humans on this planet and that is taboo, nobody wants to talk about that.

But we have already overshot the ecological capacity of planet earth to support of all us equally.

- David, and this is the last question to you.

The last time you were here, you had...

I don't remember how old your first child was, but young like a baby, right?

And you had said that having a child is an act of hope, obviously.

I mean you were talking...

I mean people were scared listening to you.

And so you had that child and now you've had a second child.

So where are you on the optimism scale at this point?

- Well, I'm definitely more optimistic than I was a few years ago, but I'm still much more pessimistic than most people are.

- I don't think anyone's surprised.

- I think that that's real...

But I think that's really important to understand in the context of everything that we've been talking about, which is there is reason for hope.

There is progress being made.

In fact, there's a lot more progress that's being made than I would've thought was possible just a few years ago.

And yet we waited so long to get started that we're not going to solve this problem, we're just going to be living with it.

We get to decide whether we're living with 4x of it or 2x of it.

We get to decide how we apportion the burdens that climate crisis produces, how we apportion the responsibility of dealing with it.

Those are all up to us, they're political challenges.

But no matter what we do from here, we're not going to steer clear of climate disarray, the planet will be transformed.

It has already been transformed.

And no matter what we do, no matter how hopeful we can be and how hopeful we sound up here, we also have to be realistic about the changes that are already afoot and will define this century and indeed probably many centuries to come.

- All right.

Bill, you have two children, I think 19 year old Olivia, and you have a two year old son, River.

- Yes, very good.

- And you wrote a letter to River or you wrote a book.

You wrote to River and what you said was, "Get mad and get ready."

What does that mean?

- I think it was...

I was writing that around the time of COP26 in Glasgow and was frustrated with a bunch of guys and women sitting around talking about the problem and nothing ever... And you watched the carbon emissions go up over the last 27 conference of the parties and I was just saying sort of indignation over where we are and the forces that are keeping it this way is a renewable resource.

And so if you get angry at somebody who know this business model, who knows their business model is damaging the future, that should motivate you to do something.

What you do with that as a consumer, as a voter, as your own neighborhood conservation core is really up to the individual.

And then get ready for what David was talking about.

Like this is not...

This was a drought season and we're going to get a bunch of rain and everything will go back to 1985 again.

The Goldilocks planet not too hot, not too cold, this unbelievable sweet spot, we just managed to come alive in, that planet's gone and we've passed that.

We don't know what this new planet is like.

We don't know how the rules work.

We don't know what the growing seasons are or what supply chains will have to bend around, all this new reality, we just know it's going to be different.

And once you do cycle through the five stages, acceptance at the end of that is where you find the most capacity to save as much life as you can and ease as much blood, sweat and tears as you can, 'cause that is up to us.

- Cristina, last question goes to you, and it's based on what you say in this clip.

Let's watch.

- Martin Luther King didn't start his famous speech by saying, I have a nightmare.

He told us what the dream was.

So I want Sea Legacy to be that vision of the future of where we can go if we actually take the steps that are needed.

Because if you can visualize the future, if you can imagine a planet where there's a living ocean and there's wildlife everywhere, then we can make it happen.

- So you all have helped make that happen today, but there's still, I promise you, people out there saying, okay, I want to do something.

Just give us one step, where should people start?

- Well, you have to start with yourself.

And there's everything that we can do today to be more sustainable.

You can choose to be vegetarian three times a week.

We can choose to change some of our appliances.

There's like an endless list that you can Google on the things that we can do.

But I think the most important thing that we can do is reorient ourselves to recognize that we are not separate from this planet.

This is our home planet carrying us across the universe.

We have nowhere else to go.

We don't even know how it works.

And very importantly, I think our economic model is completely flawed and failed.

In nature anything that's supposed to grow infinitely is called a cancer.

And yet we insist that our economy needs to grow at infinite every year has to grow, grow, grow.

We've already overshot the ecological capacity of this planet.

So we better start telling a story for a different type of economic model that is not the one that we have today.

- Okay, well you're also zen.

I mean, for climbing people it's kind of like, I don't know if you're always like this, I don't need... - It's a marathon, not a sprint, Jane.

We got to pace ourselves.

- Resignation, is that the fifth?

(laughs happily) - I don't know, I want to... - Acceptance.

- Well, you've all inspired us to envision and work for a better future for the planet.

And now we're going to wrap up with a silver lining moment with someone who shares that vision.

Meet 18 year old high school junior and activist, Shiva Rajbhandari, who channeled his passion for climate justice and a sustainability platform that would save money into a seat on the Boise Idaho School Board.

- It is our duty to fight climate change in the United States.

It's our duty to align with what the city of Boise's doing, but really because it will save a ton of money.

- Shiva beat out an opponent endorsed by a far right group that supported banning books.

He hopes his victory sends the message that we can never back down in the face of extremism and violence.

Indeed.

That's our show for today.

Again, we're grateful to our all-star panel and to you for joining us originally from the other Washington, Washington, Connecticut, now from Litchfield, Connecticut.

Until we see you back here next time for Common Ground, I'm Jane Whitney.

Take care.

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