(upbeat music) - It's impossible to think about the reality of the climate crisis without feeling depressed, angry, guilty, or simply insane.

That's how one millennial described the angst many of us feel about a growing mental health crisis wrapped around the planet on fire, but thankfully there is good news on the horizon.

Here to talk about that and what's ahead are three distinguished climate champions.

Joining us are Katherine Hayhoe, Chief Scientist for the Nature Conservancy, Michael Mann, Professor of Earth and Environmental Science at the University of Pennsylvania, and Britt Wray, Instructor in Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University School of Medicine.

We'll get to our panel in a few minutes, but first, we're thrilled to welcome Ian Bremmer, political scientist and author of the bestselling book, "The Power of Crisis."

Ian, you say the climate crisis should give us hope, that it represents a historic chance for world leaders to meet the moment to save the planet, but in a world driven by disunity and polarization, Ian, how is that even possible?

- Thank you, and it's great to join you right now, Jane.

Look, I call it a Goldilocks crisis in the sense that it's not so large that we're incapable of responding to it, but it's not so small that we're going to pretend that we can just ignore it, even though for the first decades that was indeed the case.

You mentioned that we live in a world that has so much conflict and mistrust, and by the way, so much misinformation.

And yet we all know, the entire planet agrees, that we have 1.2 degrees centigrade of warming so far.

We all know that there's over 400 parts per million of carbon in the atmosphere.

We all know that it's caused by humans, not by cyclical changes in the global climate.

And we know the impact it's having on species eradication, on deforestation.

We know the impact it's having in terms of climate weirding and major storms and droughts.

That by itself, the fact that we now have all of these countries and corporations and scientists, governments across the political spectrum that agree on the facts, that should first of all give us very significant reason to believe that responses are going to be in an environment where science is what's driving outcomes and not misinformation.

That's the first point.

The second point is, and then I'm done, is that there's so much money that has now gone into post carbon energy and infrastructure, and as a consequence, you're seeing that solar power is now cheaper than coal.

20 years ago, no one believed that would be the case.

Today, you see that even the poorest countries in the world that desperately need increases in energy for their population, like India for example, like Indonesia for example, if you look at their new solar power, their new wind power coming online, it's almost a vertical graph because it's become so much cheaper.

So when I look ahead for the next 50 years, yes, I get just as upset, just as unnerved by what's happening to the climate, and I know young people feel even worse, but I also feel hopeful that ours is a planet that will ultimately, at a time that our children will still very much be around and capable, we will have inexpensive, abundant and decentralized post carbon energy.

And I think that's a very exciting future ultimately for our kids and our grandkids to live on.

- Ian, I'm just like marveling.

You do make it sound like the glass is half full.

And for somebody, you started the Eurasia Group and you advise countries and governments about political risk.

And based on what you just said, it all sounds terrific, but there's still a lot of geopolitical obstacles.

What am I missing here?

- Well, what's interesting is that there is a lot of mistrust.

There is a lot of competition, but the competition is virtuous.

It's not like China building more nuclear weapons, and then we're closer to Armageddon.

So for example, you look at China today, the US-china relations are as bad as they've been in my lifetime.

- Right.

- There's mistrust and every day, you have a new piece of news that says that we're heading towards de-risking, if not actual decoupling, of the integration of the two largest economies in the world.

China is putting an immense amount of money into--world changing--into new nuclear capability, advanced nuclear plants and infrastructure.

They are leading the world in electric vehicle production and sales and in the global supply chain to support that in solar and in wind.

Now, I know a lot of people in Washington that are not Sierra Club types.

They're not people that hug the trees, they're not people that wear Birkenstocks, but they are deeply concerned that they don't want the United States to lose the battle to become the post carbon energy superpower to China.

So what does that mean?

That means that the Americans have to start investing a lot more in critical minerals with American allies.

The Americans have to invest a lot more in post carbon energy with the allies.

So it's not coordinated, and it would be better if all of our governments were working on solutions together because it's more efficient.

You have less waste, but it is radically better to see a virtuous competition that moves us beyond coal and oil and even gas as a transition energy that still puts a huge amount of methane in the atmosphere, that's still a fossil fuel and moves us to a sustainable energy future.

That is happening not only in spite of our geopolitical mistrust, but Jane, in part because of our geopolitical mistrust.

- I have to tell you something, I've watched you for years, Ian, I've never heard you sound this excited about it.

I mean, you sound really excited.

- Jane, it's all you.

That's why.

- It's me?

Okay, let me ask you, because in your book "The Power of Crisis," you talk about three major existential crisis that the world faces, and one of them is the climate crisis that we're talking about.

The other one is the probability of another deadly pandemic health crisis.

And the other, we're talking about disruptive technologies like AI, and I want you to explain why they're interconnected in the sense that how we deal with the solutions to climate impact, theoretically, how we're going to deal with disruptive technologies.

Can you explain that?

- Well, first of all, the AI revolution is one that shows that we're going to have all of a sudden these incredible tools available to anyone that has access to a smartphone around the world.

And that means they won't just have search capabilities on the internet, but they'll have access to world class medicine, access to world class education, the ability not just to learn, but also take action.

That's very exciting.

That can drive a second globalization.

But Jane, there will also be negative externalities.

The first globalization we had, and I'm sure you've read the “World in Data.” I'm sure you've read Hans Rosling, the Swedish demographer who passed away a few years ago, “Factfulness.” And these are very optimistic people that are talking about how human life expectancy is greater than it used to be.

And that's expanded dramatically.

How infant mortality has gone way down, how women are getting much more educated, how urbanization is driving greater wealth.

That's all true.

But over the last 50 years, while we were all urbanizing and industrializing and getting richer, we were destroying the planet.

There were negative externalities that came, and the companies and the people that made all the money from the industrialization, the globalization, didn't want to pay for all the carbon going into the atmosphere, didn't want to pay for the climate crises that we are now experiencing every day.

The technology revolution will do the same thing, but faster.

There'll be trillions and trillions of dollars that will be invested and profitability that we will benefit from in terms of greater growth, but there will also be negative externalities that we will need to pay for.

And you have to address both the glass half full side of that crisis and the glass half empty.

And you know, we know that when you put trillions of dollars in the hands either of oil companies or of technology companies, they will invest for greater profitability.

We don't need to worry about that happening.

That will happen.

We will get them working on greater growth.

We'll get them working on better market outcomes, but who's taking care of everybody else on the planet?

The 10 billion people that will live here by 2100 or all the species that are going extinct?

And the answer is that we will pay for that unless governments around the world require a new social contract.

And that's why kids are getting angry.

That's why kids are worrying, because they've seen that that's been ignored for decades now.

- Ian, I think it's you, but unbelievably, inexplicably, we are out of time with you right now and we hope you will come back for another show because you're so incredibly compelling.

But we want to thank you for your expertise and for your optimism in joining us today.

And we will see you again, I'm sure.

But we're going to right now turn to our all-star panel, and I'm going to start with someone we're delighted to welcome back, Evangelical climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe.

It's great to see you.

And there's Dr. Britt Wray on the screen.

We're thrilled to have you both with us today.

Katharine, I am going to start with you because two years ago, I said that you were like an oxymoron in some ways because you are a devout evangelical and you're also a world renowned scientist, and that hasn't changed.

But what has changed is that you're now saying that we've reached a tipping point in the climate crisis.

And I want you to explain why you say that.

- I think we're reaching a tipping point in terms of people's awareness.

10 years ago, 15 years ago, most people would have to be living up in the Arctic to point a finger in a way that climate change was directly affecting them, the people, the places, the things that they loved.

Today, no matter where people live anywhere across the United States or around the world, everyone can point a finger at a way that they are being personally impacted.

And that means that the gap of psychological distance that we've struggled so long to bridge, showing people how climate change is here, not over there, how it's now, not in the future, that gap is finally closing.

But more than ever, we have to close the solution gap too.

People are worried, most people are worried, but if we ask people, do you know what to do about it, most people say no.

That is the gap we need to close now.

- Exactly.

Well, at this point I'm going to ask Michael, because the Paul Revere of the climate movement, Bill McKibben, said that you have more scars from being in this fight than any other person he knows.

And I want to ask you, I mean, your latest book "Our Fragile Moment" talks about do we still have time to avoid human generated extinction?

Do we?

- We do.

And frankly, I'm used to being the person who's dismissed as the sunny optimist when it comes to the climate crisis.

But compared to what we heard from Ian Bremmer, I have a little bit of bad news actually to offer here.

The bottom line is the same as what the way Ian characterized it and the way my good friend Katharine has characterized it.

The way I sort of frame where we are today is the urgency.

And the urgency is there as, you know, Katharine explained, we can now see the impacts of climate change literally playing out in real time on our television screens, in our newspaper headlines.

And so the urgency is there.

We understand the urgency.

The problem is most people don't understand that we have agency as well.

It's not too late to prevent the worst consequences of climate change.

But, and here's where I differ a little bit with Ian, you know, we do have to close that solutions gap, as Katharine described it.

We're not making enough progress, and we have to be able to keep these two seemingly mutually exclusive realities in our mind at the same time.

The reality that we're making progress and we clearly are making progress, but it's not enough progress.

We're not yet making enough progress to prevent that amount of warming, three degrees Fahrenheit warming of the planet, where we will start to cross some of those, not the good tipping point that Katharine's talking about, the tipping point in public consciousness, but the bad tipping points.

Irreversible changes in the collapse of the ice sheets and sea level rise and ever more extreme weather events.

So there's urgency and there's agency.

We're making progress.

It's not yet enough progress.

- We're going to get back to both, but I want to turn to Britt because Britt, you bring in a very, very, very important addition to this whole notion of physical climate crisis.

And that is, I started the top of the show by quoting New Yorker staff writer Jia Tolentino who was talking about emotions, how we deal with our emotions around climate.

And I think in 2021, there was a survey where 56% of Gen Zers said they feel humanity is doomed.

Now, if you factor in the millions of people who have just been hammered by a hellscape of a summer with heat waves and floods and droughts and wildfires, and you█re starting to see really a crisis within a crisis, as we call it.

So talk about that if you would.

- As we see climate disasters, extreme weather events piling up, we notice the crisis within a crisis being a mental health crisis.

So what does that mean?

Hurricanes, wildfires, floods, droughts, and the disruptions that they cause to necessities like food and work and shelter can lead to new mental health problems or exacerbate preexisting ones like clinical anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder.

We see that extreme heat, which we now have quite a lot of, can make people violent and self-harming.

And researchers have been able to show that the psychological impacts of disasters outweigh the physical impacts about 40 to 1.

So that's an invisible but deeply harmful thread throughout the climate crisis that we now must contend with.

And then there's also the fact that the climate crisis makes us physically sick, right?

It impacts air quality, nutrition, the spread of vector-borne diseases and more.

And as we get physically sicker, we tend to also suffer in terms of our mental health because there's a bi-directional relationship between how well we feel psychologically, mentally, emotionally, and how we're doing physically.

And then lastly, and this is probably unsurprising to many of us watching this, the nonstop bad news barrage about the climate crisis is stoking mental and emotional distress virtually everywhere around the globe.

And that's what we typically call, in shorthand, climate anxiety.

But it's much more than anxiety, it's grief, it's outrage, it's sadness, it's a sense of helplessness or guilt or shame depending on your positionality when you confront the climate crisis.

So it's really an umbrella of distress that people are reporting.

- Britt, I mean, this is something you've been studying for a long time, but it does feel like somebody's flipped a switch and that suddenly people are really internalizing this more.

I mean, is that what you're seeing?

- Well, we see a gradual rise rather than a flipping of the switch, but there are some significant milestone moments where this has now become more of a surface level cultural phenomenon, whereas before it was underground or mostly held onto by people who were just frontline climate activists or really dealing with the frontline effects of disaster, let's say.

And so there was the 2018 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which outlined a world between 1.5 and 2 degrees of warming, which really had stark implications for just what those few fractions of a degree mean, and that freaked a lot of people out.

We saw a lot of climate aware therapists at that point saying that their offices started to fill with people presenting with the climate as a symptom.

Beyond that, we've had, of course, the intrepid amazing leadership of youth climate activists filling the streets in the millions in 2019 and beyond, which also caused a social tipping point towards awareness and people voicing their distress and creating new norms to say that they feel betrayed by our institutions and power holders who are meant to protect youth, but clearly are not following the science, and are often even acting directly against what the scientists tell us we need to be doing in terms of still expanding fossil fuel infrastructure.

And that causes a lot of moral injury and distress.

And there's a lot of disasters and heat waves and horror stories in the news, right?

So I was a co-author on that study that you mentioned where we surveyed 10,000 16 to 25 year olds in 10 countries around the world.

We were looking in low, middle and high income nations from Nigeria and the Philippines to the US and Finland.

And we found that 75% of youth globally say that the future is frightening to them because of the climate crisis.

39% express hesitancy to have their own kids one day because of it.

And 45% said that they experience functional impairment, meaning that they can't get through their day eating, sleeping, playing, concentrating as easily because of climate thoughts and feelings.

- Katharine, you know, back in 1990 when the first UN study was talking about how dangerous this was, that the planet was warming, since then, there's been 40% of the carbon emissions that have been released.

But in terms of categorizing the biggest change you've seen just since you were with us two years ago, what would that be in terms of dealing with solutions?

- Well, first of all, we have seen this huge shift in awareness.

And the awareness is driving a large part of that umbrella of mental health crises that Britt spoke about.

Because when you're aware that there's a huge problem and it's affecting you and the people you love and the places you love, but you don't know what you can do about it, that is a recipe for a mental health disaster.

But what we're also seeing, and what Ian mentioned is true, we are seeing that solutions are advancing exponentially in many areas.

So for example, the price of solar has come down to the point where it's the most affordable type of electricity humans have ever known.

The International Energy Agency says that within just a few years, more than half of the electricity around the world will be generated by clean renewable energy, which is phenomenal.

But we also see this gap.

And yes, most governments around the world will acknowledge that climate change is happening and it's human caused.

There are certainly still many members of governments, including here in the US who will not acknowledge that, but the majority will acknowledge that.

But the question is, are they doing enough?

And the answer is clearly not yet.

Subsidies to fossil fuels increased last year.

They did not decrease.

So we are looking at over $13 million per minute in fossil fuel subsidies at a time when we must accelerate the transition to clean energy.

And then what about adaptation?

We are not adapting and building resilience fast enough to the increasing way that climate change is loading the weather dice against us.

And we see that in the suffering that results from the supersized hurricanes, from the wildfires burning greater area, from the smoke blanketing North America, and from the outrageous heat waves that people are suffering through on a daily basis, we aren't ready yet.

And so we have to kick our solutions into overdrive.

- All right, but Mike--yep.

The audience likes that, yes.

Michael, you know, people get mixed messages.

On one hand, we see a headline that says, “Has humanity broken the climate?” And then we see a headline that says, “We're on a better path toward...

Climate optimism is going to abound.” So people aren't quite sure, I mean, we've been hearing for years time's running out, beat the clock, we've got to keep going.

The window is closing, the window is closing.

How do you explain to people what the perspective is on that?

- Again, it's we have to be able to hold these seemingly inconsistent notions in our mind at the same time.

That we're making progress, it's not enough progress.

You know, we've actually interviewed students at the University of Pennsylvania where I teach.

We've done focus groups to try to understand the source of that climate anxiety.

And what we find is there are a couple different things going on there at least.

But it's important for us to unpack it because on the one hand, there are these, you know, we just heard the litany of extreme weather events from Katharine that we're now experiencing, and this feeling like the climate is spiraling out of control.

And there is this notion that's become prevalent in recent years.

Certain high profile books and magazine articles have put forward this idea that we are experiencing sort of a runaway warming now, that it's out of our control.

And it has to do, for example, supposedly with the release of frozen methane from the Arctic into the atmosphere.

It's what we call a positive feedback.

It's a vicious cycle that we can't stop.

And that notion, of course, feeds this idea that it's too late to do anything.

It turns out that that's wrong.

The science doesn't support that.

And it's gotten so much currency in the discussion that there are a lot of people out there who become doomists in their outlook for reasons that are not legitimate, because they believe it's too late to do anything.

And that's what my book, that's what "The Fragile Moment" is about.

Looking at Earth history, unpacking the lessons from past climate events to understand where we are.

And what it tells us is that we're not yet at that point of no return.

We're not yet committed to the levels of warming and the impacts that will lead to the extinction or the collapse of human civilization.

But if we continue with business as usual, if we don't get our act together, then we are talking about those potential dystopian futures.

So it's up to us, it is up to us.

- Aren't we...

The weather that we're seeing, I mean, basically has been consistent with what you and Katharine and Britt predicted.

I mean, this has been something, this is not a surprise what we're seeing.

- The truth is bad enough.

We don't have to exaggerate what the science has to say to create a sense of urgency because it's there.

We're seeing the dangerous impacts play out in real time, but we're not seeing a spiraling out of control.

We're not seeing runaway warming.

What we're seeing is steady warming.

As long as we continue to pollute with carbon pollution, the planet will continue to warm up.

But there's a flip side to that.

Let me just- - Go ahead.

- But when we stop polluting, when we stop adding carbon pollution to the atmosphere, the planet stops warming up.

- You should pardon the expression it's not rocket science.

I mean, the point is that basically, you know how to fix this.

It's just a matter of actually doing it.

And yet, I want to go back to Brit talking about the powerlessness that people feel.

Actually before I go to that, I want to mention something because I think a lot of people would hear about climate crisis, and yet it didn't really hit home before.

And you know, when you throw stats at people, Britt, people don't hear numbers.

They hear what affects their lives, the visceral emotions.

What is impacting my life?

And I was standing on Columbus Avenue in New York City when the sky suddenly turned orange from smoke from the Canadian wildfires, and actors on Broadway couldn't perform because they were choking.

The air was so noxious.

And in that moment, I know this sounds really compared to what people, bless their hearts, have been going through around the world with all these climate disasters.

But I mean, it takes that sort of like aha moment when you really, really internalize.

Is that part of what we're talking about is that people have to understand what they're really dealing with?

- Absolutely.

And the power of story is so galvanizing for leaving something in our hearts and our minds and our guts that we will be able to act with and influence others with and work in our spheres of influence.

So personally, professionally, politically, not leading again and again with graphs and gigatons and parts per million, but really talking about what this means because as humans, we care about life, right?

We care about love, we care about pain, we don't care about climate science.

No offense to my wonderful esteemed colleagues on the panel.

I don't mean it in that way.

Of course we dearly need climate science, but if we are lay people and we're talking about our relationships and how they're being fragmented by climate reality, that might help people get involved with us rather than thinking about this as an academic or political or technological exercise alone.

And so in that way, we need to bump up the ability for people to share their stories about where they were when the skies turned orange.

And honestly, the psychoanalysts have a lot to offer to this conversation.

The people who understand the deep well of unconscious life that lives within all of us, and the fact that we like to think that we're rational, but we're actually deeply irrational creatures.

And so what Michael's talking about that we need to hold the tension between these two seemingly opposite truths, that's really hard for the human mind to deal with.

And cognitive dissonance that being okay with that ambivalence and holding opposite forces... Mm-mm, we have to do mental gymnastics to be able to be at all comfortable with that.

And so what we often see when faced with the fact that things are getting better, but we're not moving quickly enough, and the implications of the science are scary, well, rather than hold the tension of, okay, how bad will it get within my lifetime, when are nations going to react?

How will this affect the people that I love?

And so on, we split off the reality into black and white because the uncertainty itself is painful.

And then at least we can land our feet somewhere that sounds certain, even if it spells out the end of the world, even if it means that we are committing to narrative foreclosure of the future and what might be possible, we then rest and say, it's all done for.

The die is cast.

There's nothing we can do.

And we become a doomer, which strangely is more comfortable because then at least you know what's going on.

- You know what you're dealing with.

Exactly.

- Right.

And you've invested that narrative even though it's false.

So we need to help each other process the ambivalence and stretch our window of tolerance for dealing with cognitive dissonance, for dealing with uncertainty and sitting in that space of the gray zone, not the black and white because the black and white is what creates the damaging prophecy that makes the future darker than it otherwise will be.

- I didn't mean to interrupt you, Britt, but I'm going to ask Katharine about something because disinformation and fear have been sort of mobilized into making this into a culture war.

And I know that you have been on the receiving end of threats and attacks.

You've had death threats.

You've been through this.

People, again, black and white, it is not even based in science because they don't believe in the science.

But the culture wars are an obstacle to moving ahead.

Talk about that a little bit.

- Well, Britt's exactly right that black and white is comfortable for people.

Even if where you are is, oh, the world's going to end anyways, so what can I do about it is much more comfortable than existing in that uncertain middle ground where we know it's bad, we know it's getting worse, but we also know that if we do everything we can, we can make a difference.

And that is that middle ground that all three of us live in constantly.

And we know how difficult it is to be in that middle ground.

And so for many years, all of the attacks that I received, that Michael received, that other climate scientists received online, all came from people who lived in the black and white area of, oh, it can't be real.

Not because I don't believe the science, they still use fridges, stoves, and airplanes, they're still using the same science, but they were there because they didn't want to fix it.

And if there's a big problem that affects everybody in the world, especially the poorest and most marginalized people, but I don't want to fix it, that would make me a bad person.

And so psychologically, our defenses ramp up and we say, well, I'm not a bad person and if I don't want to fix it, that must mean it's not real.

Those scientists are just making it up.

It's all volcanic eruptions and they don't know, or it would just destroy the economy anyways to fix it.

So that's where some of the black and whiteness comes from.

And that tends to be associated with the right hand side of the political spectrum.

But over the last two years, I have seen myself personally, I know my colleagues have documented this well, a rise of black and white-ism at often of the political spectrum of people saying it's over.

The cake is baked, there's nothing you can do.

How dare you climate scientists lie to people, telling them that there is hope?

If we do something, we can make a difference, which is an actual fact.

And so I would estimate now that probably at least a quarter of the attacks that I receive are from people who've decided it's all over.

And they don't want anyone telling them there's something that they can do because that would disturb their comfortable black and whiteness.

And when I hear from people, I say, first of all, typically it's often online.

I'm like, get offline.

Go spend some time in nature.

Go walk your dog.

And if you don't have a pet, consider getting one.

Spend time with the people you love and the places you love because that is why we are fighting for a better world.

But here's the thing, it doesn't matter which side of the spectrum we're on, both of those sides will doom us if we give in.

The only chance we have of a better future lies right in the middle, in that inconsistency of it's bad, it's getting worse, but everything we do is making a difference.

- Well, Michael's nodding here furiously and agreeing with you because you've also been through orchestrated campaigns against you to impugn your reputation, to discredit you.

I don't mean to overplay this, but you went through a lot of upending of your life because people were trying to basically show that you were wrong about things.

Talk about how that factors in, the politics of all this.

- Yeah, I mean, it happens so often I barely even notice it anymore.

- Really?

- No.

It was a failed joke.

You know, it's something that we all deal with.

There are efforts to discredit us because our message is a threat.

And when we published the hockey stick curve 25 years ago, it was a single graph that very... - [Jane] We have it up on the screen.

- There we are.

That really sort of viscerally conveyed just how unprecedented the warming that we're seeing, the changes that we are creating really are.

It became a threat to powerful vested interests, fossil fuel interests, those promoting their agenda, those who don't want to see us move on to renewable energy and get off fossil fuels.

And I found myself at the receiving end of efforts to discredit me personally as a means of discrediting this iconic graph.

I sort of leaned into that.

I decided that whether I liked it or not, this had really created an opportunity for me to participate in a conversation about what is arguably the greatest challenge we face as a civilization.

I felt privileged to be in that position.

And I'll tell you, what Katharine was talking about is absolutely true.

We've seen this almost like a quantum jump from sort of denialism to doomism.

And some of it is because of those headlines that you cited earlier.

We're exposed to these headlines that make it sound like it's all over.

There's nothing we can do.

The climate is spinning out of control.

And so people of good will and good intentions become victims of sort of despair and doom.

These are people who would otherwise be on the front lines advocating for action, but they're now on the sidelines 'cause they think they can't do anything.

And here's what's so pernicious.

Bad actors, the same bad actors who are promoting denialism today recognize that promoting doomism is a way to take those people who would otherwise be on the front lines and move them to the sidelines.

And we're seeing a weaponization of doomism for the same suspects, the fossil fuel industry, and those who don't care what path you take.

They just care about the destination.

They want you disengaged, and whether it's because you deny climate change exists or you deny that there's any possibility to do anything about it, it potentially leads to disengagement.

That's why it's so important for especially young folks to understand it's not too late.

And ironically, the only thing that would make it too late is that if we give in to doom and despair and don't take the actions we need to now.

- A lot of people, Britt, are struggling with, I mean, is it true that eco anxiety is like a real term that the American Psychological Association has like put the approval on?

That that's actually something that is talked about?

- It is true.

And they call it the chronic fear of environmental doom, which is a very vague description.

And so I totally agree with everything that was just said.

I think we can also, as educators, as institutions, and as members of the media do a better job at helping people come out of that crevice of doom if they are not in the other unhelpful crevice of denial.

And why I say that is because we often try and wrap up stories about the climate crisis with hope.

Like it's all very bad.

But don't worry, there's hope as though we need to just give people a feeling of hope that will be motivating.

There's actually research to show that the feeling of hope isn't that galvanizing compared to other feelings when we're talking about emotions such as anger in climate spaces.

And so hope, maybe it's not just a feeling though and an emotion that we need to be digging into.

And when we look at the science of hope, it's actually a mind state and it relies on three things.

It relies on a goal that focuses on the future being better in some way.

It also needs a pathway, a feasible pathway of going from A, where you are now, to B, towards that goal.

And C, it requires efficacy and agency of the individual or group for putting in some mental energy towards walking that path and making that feasibility a reality for themselves.

And so when you look at that, hope is something that we create.

We roll up our sleeves, we get into it with each other, but when we're inundated with bad headlines about the climate crisis and hearing things like it's code red for humanity and so on and so forth, well, then of course people are overwhelmed.

They don't know how to attach themselves to this crisis because it's really hard to see where to intervene when it envelops everything.

We need to make it modular for people.

We need to have activating pathways in our educational systems that show people the goals, the desirable possibilities, and then the role that they can play in ways that are authentic to the skills that they bring to this moment.

- Katharine, did you ever think when you became a scientist that you would get death threats?

Did you ever, I mean, this was not part of the package, right?

- Absolutely not.

I just wanted to speak on behalf of all of those whose voice is not being heard in this, all the people who are the most marginalized, already the most vulnerable, who are already being impacted most severely by climate change today.

My goal was simply to try to elevate those concerns, those impacts, to the level where decision making could be made that was fair and equitable.

I never imagined it would lead to a path where, just like Britt, today I have to talk about how hope isn't practice, how we have to go out and look for it, how we have to build that hope by focusing on, you know what, there is a better future that's possible, but the only way to get there is starting where we are today, which is a very, very dark place for many.

You don't need hope when everything's going well.

If all your circumstances are fine, you don't need hope.

When we most need hope is the situation we're in today, but we're only going to get from A to B if we realize that our actions can make a difference.

So I had no idea when I actually began my degree in physics, my undergraduate degree is in astrophysics, but as compelling as studying galaxies and quasars is, we know that if we want to ensure that ability for our children and their children, we have to fix the climate crisis.

It is the hurdle that stands between all of us and a better future.

- I want to mention something since this is a very personal thing and that hits home today with doing the show that we actually, Ben Jealous, who we all know is the executive director of the Sierra Club, was supposed to be with us today.

And whether it's irony or poetic justice, I don't know, but he was actually unable to get here because of extreme weather, because of of climate, basically.

But one of the points that he makes is the interconnectedness between civil rights and climate justice.

And you are going to be filling in, in this capacity, Michael, talk about how disproportionately people of color, Indigenous people, poor, it always falls on the poor, are being affected when they're the least responsible in many ways for what we're going through right now.

- Katharine already sort of made this point.

Those who had the least role in creating this problem, people in the global south, those in this country who are the least well off, have the least sort of resilience, the least wealth, the least infrastructure to deal with the already damaging consequences of climate change.

How ironic that those who had the least role in creating this problem are the ones who are bearing the brunt of it at this moment.

And this is true also intergenerationally.

I know there are a bunch of high school folks in the audience here today, that they will inherit the legacy of the decisions we are making today.

And so we can't wait until they are in positions of influence, they're able to vote or able to participate directly in the political process.

We've got to make sure that we take the actions now that don't leave them a degraded planet, that don't leave our children and grandchildren a fundamentally degraded planet.

So that's really in our, you know, that falls on us right now.

We cannot wait until the young folks who are so engaged, who understand the crisis better than anyone else are in position to do something about it.

Of course, the youth climate movement ironically has put pressure on all of us to do more, to do a better job.

And so I think that that's been a game changer.

- That's a good thing, definitely.

Britt, I want to ask you if you would share something that had a real impact on me when I was preparing for the show and that's that when you were researching and writing your book "Generation Dread," it helped you work through something very personal, a conundrum that you were facing in your own life.

Would you talk about that?

- Sure.

So I now research the mental health impacts of the climate crisis because I experienced very profound climate anxiety a number of years ago when confronting whether or not my partner and I were going to try and have a baby.

And this was surprising to me how profound the emotions were that erupted when I not only confronted the science head-on, but mainly confronted the lack of action.

That was really what made it hard.

And so I thought, man, if I'm having this psychological impact, which is affecting my ability to concentrate, I'm sure other people are also going through things, but we're not having a globalization around how the climate crisis is showing up in our nightmares or in our thoughts about the future and so on.

So researching the book and talking to lots of, yes, parents and non-parents and activists and scientists and psychiatrists and public health workers and Indigenous knowledge holders and spiritual leaders, I came to see how I could move away from this heavy question of should I or should I not to what does it take to raise resilient kids in the climate crisis today?

And how can I see this act of creating family as a commitment to joy over the commitment to fear that otherwise would've been giving into my climate anxiety in the way that I was experiencing it?

And the truth is that there's so much that we can do to create win-win solutions, co-benefitting policies and practices that help us nurture stronger connected communities where we have high social trust, social care, social capital.

So much research shows us that when we're living in those kinds of tightly knit networks and the extreme weather events come through, there's far lower post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, depression, maladaptive coping with substance abuse and so on, and that people help each other through and there's higher mental wellness and quality of life as compared with more fragmented communities where people don't trust in each other and aren't living in that intertwined way.

So that really inspired me around ways that I can design my life to live in climate resilient community and also spread that message to others.

But the issue is that right now, we're facing a crisis of loneliness.

I mean, the Surgeon General in the US has said that it's actually an epidemic level of loneliness that people are dealing with as more folks live alone than ever before in human history.

And so we need to step away and outside deliberately from this isolation that let's say many years of neoliberalism have landed us in or whatever you want to pin the structural weight on for getting us here.

But the point is, we need to get to know our neighbors.

And it's not just because it's a nice thing to do, but actually our mental health and wellbeing relies on it, especially as we face a more turbulent world.

- And we didn't get to the happy ending that you have enjoyed based on this because- Go ahead, go ahead.

- I just realized I forgot to wrap that up, which is I guess I do have a child as a result of all of that, if that's what you were saying.

- [Jane] I was going to say Atlas is celebrating his second birthday today.

- Yes indeed, yeah.

Our family's been here today to do that.

- You're right.

So you have a two year old?

- Yes, yeah.

(audience applauding) Aw, thank you.

- No, I just, I mentioned it because we had David Wallace Wells on the show and again twice.

And the second time he came back he had one child and then he had had another child and he was also going through the same, and he's very public about it, this same kind of internal debate.

And he just said ultimately that it's an act of hope, to have another child is an act of hope.

So congratulations and congratulations to Atlas for being so smart and picking you as his mother.

- Thank you so much, very kind.

- Katharine, let's get to solutions at this point because we've been sort of, you know, we've talked about them, we've touched on them, but if you could wave the proverbial magic wand and do one thing today that you think would make them, aside from getting rid of carbon emissions, which would be the fix, right?

What would be something that you would say we should be doing right now?

- If we could do one thing within the realm of possibility, it would be for me, what economists, pretty much every economist in the world says is the biggest step to accelerating our progress towards a clean energy future.

And that is putting a price on carbon.

If I could wave a magic wand, I would do it everywhere in the world.

And the good news is there's already more than 60 different countries and entities that have a price on carbon.

About half of those have the right price.

It's moving into the right direction that we need to avoid the most serious warming.

But that in and of itself would catalyze so much change across the entire economy and free up so much money to be investing in the right places for resilience and for clean energy.

So if I had that one wish within the realm of possibility, that would be it.

- Okay, let me ask you about something, because New Jersey so far is the first and only state to actually mandate climate education kindergarten through 12th grade is my understanding.

And apparently despite the toxic sort of divide in this country, basically, there's an overwhelming majority of parents who think that climate should be taught in a way kids can understand it, not in a scary way, but in a way they can understand it.

So you have, I think, a teenage son, Gavin He's grown since I saw you last, obviously.

What are the odds that that climate is going to be taught when he has children to his kids, along with math and English?

Do you think that's a possibility?

- Well, first of all, I completely agree with what others have said.

Having a child these days is a radical act of hope.

But it is almost like you are putting a deposit on that better future, which means that you as a parent are going to be doing everything you can to get there.

And so I got together with a bunch of my other fellow scientists who are mothers and we created a program called Science Moms that is all about providing resources for parents, not just mothers, but dads too and other parents on how we can have these conversations with our kids that are constructive and productive and not making them more anxious, but helping them see how they can make a difference.

So I believe, and the classes that I teach at my university are for students across the whole spectrum.

I have students in my classes who might be in engineering or economics or English or art or architecture because climate change affects every aspect of our lives.

But we need every aspect of our society helping us plan for and design and implement solutions to these problems.

But here's my goal, Jane.

My goal is to work ourselves out of a job.

My goal, and I would be completely satisfied if we got to this point, was if society and education doesn't really need to know much about the climate crisis because we fixed it.

So I would love to get to the point where the climate crisis is taught about in history class, not in every other class as it be today.

- [Jane] Always thinking ahead, Katharine.

Very good.

Okay.

Michael, what about you in terms of solutions?

- Yeah, no, I agree with everything that Katharine said.

I would sort of though look at it maybe at an even higher level, which is that in order to get the sorts of policy innovations that we'd like to see, a price on carbon and what form that should take, is it a carbon tax?

Is it a cap and trade system that was used successfully to deal with other environmental problems like acid rain?

Proposed by Republicans, I would note, cap and trade was a Republican innovation.

We weren't always so divided when it came to dealing with these environmental crises.

And so that sort of gets to my next point.

We can't really get those policy innovations.

We can't solve a problem like climate change if we can't solve the larger problem, which is the challenge right now to democratic global governance.

There is no path to climate action that doesn't go through democratic governance.

And we see a challenge here right now in the United States to democracy.

We see efforts, for example, in certain states to essentially outlaw the teaching of climate science in schools.

And so in some areas, in some states, we're actually going in the wrong direction and we're moving away from democracy into what some people have rightfully warned us looks more and more like fascism.

So we can't solve the climate crisis if we don't solve this larger problem right now, which is the defense of our democracy here in the United States and the defense of democracy writ large, globally.

And I say to this audience, some of the kids in this audience, pretty soon you're going to be of voting age.

You're going to have an opportunity to vote in, you know, I'm not exaggerating when I say this is the most, the next presidential election will be the most important election in US history because it will determine whether the American experiment continues on in the direction of democracy and fairness and equality, or whether we veer in a darker direction.

That's up to us.

- I am going to now give the last word to Britt because you talked about optimism, we've talked about hope, we've talked about all kinds of things today.

But if there's somebody out there watching who still is just so distraught and so concerned about what's going on and they don't know what to do, and this is the problem, it'd be great to have public programs, it'd be great to have all kinds of support for folks, but we don't have that right now.

So if you could just give a little bit of advice to somebody who's watching, what's the first step they could take?

- First of all, know that you're not alone.

There are so many people dealing with wrenching emotions of grief and anxiety and despair.

And sitting alone with those emotions are what make it so painful.

But to know that climate anxiety is not a pathology, it's not a mental health disorder.

It's reasonable to a certain extent, right, to be distressed about what is happening.

And actually it's a sign of your heart mind being big enough to be compassionate.

It's a sign of your humanity and you can be proud of that.

And so you can also reach out and find others in groups who are popping up to find a validating space in which they can discuss these emotions.

Climate cafes, climate circles, the Good Grief Network.

All of these places can be found online and you can hop into programs with folks who will never tell you that you're being overly dramatic or just engaging in catastrophic thinking.

And it's really from having a chance to just feel your feelings and move through them, that you can come to see that there's more to the story than only the narratively foreclosing emotions, right?

And that we can create our sense of possibility through communion, through building stronger connections with others who are getting active brcause it's really through expressing that agency that we buffer against some of the pointier ends of climate anxiety while knowing that we're not alone that can help us through.

So I would say check out Gen Dread newsletter.

There are a lot of resources there that we put for folks who are in a very painful moment with grappling with their climate anxiety so that they can start to trudge through those waters with us.

- Okay, and also, I think Katharine's got a newsletter.

I just have been so incredibly impressed by sort of the way you've communicated this today, and it's a complex subject and we're just so grateful to have had the three of you with us.

But we're out of time for this because we're going to turn to our silver lining moment, which is the way we end the show.

Today's silver lining is about 16 feisty young people from Montana, ages 5 to 22, who sued their state for promoting fossil fuels and failing to protect them against climate change.

And they won.

They did it by invoking a special clause in the Montana State Constitution, which says that its citizens have the right to a clean and healthful environment.

Plaintiff Claire Vlases explains.

- It's not a political issue here in Montana.

We all are here because of the land, and we have a right to protect that.

And so as I've learned about climate change and I've seen what our lawmakers have done promoting fossil fuel industries, I've realized that that is unconstitutional acts.

- The Montana 16, as they were dubbed, may have been the first to win a youth-led climate case, but they won't be the last.

Inspired by their victory, hundreds of young people across the nation are following in their footsteps and heading to court to fight for climate justice.

We're grateful to our extraordinary guests for their insights and inspiration and to you out there for joining us.

Until we see you back here next time, from the Frederick Gunn School in the other Washington, Washington, Connecticut, for "Common Ground," I'm Jane Whitney.

Take care.

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