Cosmic Queries – Climate Solutions with Katharine Hayhoe, PhD

Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide.

StarTalk begins right now.

This is StarTalk.

Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist.

I got Chuck Nice with me.

Chuck.

Hey, Neil.

How’s it going?

Chuck, one of your favorite subjects today, how to save ourselves from a climate crisis.

That’s right.

Save ourselves.

Because no one else is going to save us.

We got to save ourselves.

And it ain’t going to be the aliens.

No one’s showing up.

Not yet.

And so we have for this, we got Katherine Hayhoe.

And she’s not her first time on StarTalk.

Katherine, welcome back.

Thank you so much.

It’s great to be with you here again.

And you know, I would love to be people’s personal climate scientist.

Is that title available?

I don’t see why not.

Go ahead and do that.

But then you’ve got to be like respond when they call.

You see, that’s what I’m saying.

Yeah, that’s not good.

It just comes with some obligations, right?

Oh, I already do that.

I already do that on Twitter.

I respond to a lot of people there.

Okay, so we’re going to do a Cosmic Queries out of this.

But there’s so much other information we want to get from you that the Cosmic Queries will be on the outskirts of what we try to do here with you.

So let me remind people, you’re an atmospheric scientist, right?

And you’re a professor of political science.

Let me get it here, Director of Climate Science Center at Texas Tech.

All right, so there you go.

And you’re recently Chief Scientist at the Nature Conservancy.

Did I say that right?

The Nature Conservancy.

So I want to find out from you in a minute how that happened.

But more importantly, right now, your author of Saving Us came out in 2021.

So I want to find out all about all of that.

So, Katherine, how did you land at the Nature Conservancy?

Well, the Nature Conservancy, many people have probably heard of because they’re the biggest global conservation organization in the world.

They work in 76 countries around the world and they’ve got chapters in every state.

And you might have taken a walk or a hike on one of their preserves in the past.

But like so many other organizations, they’re recognizing that if we don’t fix climate change, we can’t fix anything else.

And so now the Nature Conservancy has climate change and biodiversity right at the very top of its global priorities.

Because they know that climate change is a threat multiplier.

And that is what stands between us and a better future.

Man, using military speech.

I was going to say, threat multiplier.

Threat, threat.

It’s like, whoa.

I guess it is.

It’s a battle.

It’s a battle for our lives at the end of all this.

So, yes, we’re with you on this.

So, Katherine, if we’re supposed to do something about it, why isn’t it the industry’s fault?

Collective industries.

They seem to be the biggest climate polluters out there.

So, what’s up with that?

Well, it really is industry’s fault.

I mean, 90 corporations are responsible for two-thirds of heat-trapping gas emissions since the dawn of the industrial era.

We need a system-wide solution, but systems are made up of people.

Even corporations are made up of people.

Don’t you know that, my friend?

Corporations are people, my friend.

Not what I said.

Not what I said.

And you’re absolutely right.

There is a big difference.

And you’re right.

A big difference.

But that was my mitrami.

Thank you.

So, a corporation, rather than thinking of them as a monolith, we think of them as comprised of people who have the same interest as we do.

Most of them do.

There’s always a few people who will put short-term profit over the long-term welfare of themselves, their children, their grandchildren, and the future of the human race, as we know it.

But if we really look at what we have in common…

Damn, how to make a corporate dad feel bad.

That sounded like…

Lady, I’m just trying to make a buck.

Well, you know what, Neil?

You actually hit it on the head.

We’ve incentivized the people who run corporations to be extremely short-sighted, because their reward is in upping the stock price, which means at all costs, they’ll do whatever they need to.

Katherine, we created the rules, the sandbox, that they’re playing in.

And now we’re going to complain that they’re doing what the sandbox was intended to do.

Well, that’s exactly it.

That’s why we need system-wide change.

It isn’t enough to just change one thing over here, one thing over there, and it definitely isn’t enough to just focus on our personal carbon footprint.

I mean, when we talk about climate action, most people immediately go to light bulbs and recycling or diet and plug-in cars and solar panels.

And, you know, don’t get me wrong, I’ve done all of those things, but I’ve done the math.

And even if all of us who are worried did everything we could to reduce our personal footprint, that wouldn’t even be 20% of the problem.

But then people say, okay, so you…

You mean other solutions.

Sorry, that wouldn’t even be 20% of the solution, yes.

It wouldn’t even tackle 20% of the problem.

So then people say, okay, so that means I can’t do anything.

And my answer to that is no, you can do something.

In fact, individual action is really the only way we have seen our industrialized society change in the past.

But how we did it was not through personal action.

It was through using our voices to advocate for change.

Yeah.

And part of that is what Neil said about these guys that we created the sandbox and now they’re using it like for kitty litter.

And so, you know, you can’t poop in the sandbox, man.

We all play in the sandbox.

Like so.

No, but when the tour gets hard, then it’s just another hard thing in the sandbox.

Yeah, well, yes.

By then, we’ll all be dead.

Wait, wait.

So, wait, Katherine.

Katherine, in my experience, I agree with you, but I tend to have a more sort of realistic view.

And that is I’ve only ever seen everyone change.

Not all the time, but most of the time when people change, even when there were sort of conservationists and people tooting that horn, they only end up changing when the act of changing improves their wallet.

And so consider the movement to stop killing the whales back in the 1800s, and then we stopped killing whales.

Was it because the movement succeeded?

No, because we found oil in the ground.

And so economically that whole thing switched.

So don’t we need an economic solution here so that the same sandbox can now make money cleaning things up rather than getting things dirty?

Well, yes, and we already do.

Solar energy is now the cheapest form of electricity we have ever had in the history of human civilization on this planet.

And solar with storage, because of course the sun doesn’t always shine at night, doesn’t shine at all at night, in fact, and you could give us a whole…

I’m glad you caught that because I was going to be all up in your face on that.

Well, if you’re up in the Arctic, Neil, we could get into those.

But that is actually cheaper than natural gas already in many parts of the world.

And right now, I mean, just look at the price of gas in the United States and in many parts of the world.

It is a lot cheaper to have an electric vehicle over a pretty relatively short timeframe.

So the economic argument is already there, even in a market that is heavily skewed towards fossil fuels.

The IMF, the International Monetary Fund, not the IMF that Tom Cruise works for in Mission Impossible, but the other one, the real one.

They estimate that fossil fuels…

But they’re both real.

Don’t denigrate that movie.

That’s the Impossible Mission Force.

Don’t badmouth that.

Well, if they could just fix climate change for us, I would happily call them real.

Well, it is an Impossible Mission Force.

I don’t know if we should give it to them.

Kind of admitting that.

If it involves fake faces, they could definitely fix it for us.

No, fake faces.

That’s a fake face show.

But anyways, the IMF says that the United States currently subsidizes fossil fuel use to the tune of over $600 billion, which exceeds the Pentagon’s budget.

So if you want to follow the money, we are not on a level playing field.

Fossil fuels are subsidized.

And that is why solutions like carbon pricing, which are endorsed by pretty much every economist in the world, including the two who won the Nobel Prize a few years ago, that’s why carbon pricing is one of the suite of solutions.

A policy solution that we need in tandem with our clean energy solutions.

We need it to work with our good old-fashioned efficiency solutions because efficiency could cut our carbon emissions in half and save us money.

And our nature-based solutions where we take carbon out of the atmosphere where we have too much, and we put it back into the soil, coastal wetlands, grasslands, ecosystems, trees where we want the carbon, put all those solutions together, and then you have a plan to fix climate change.

But, you know, to Neil’s point about the economics, there’s a different type of economics attached to this issue, and it’s social capital.

It’s the idea that people buy in, you know, and that means that they have to first believe, second believe that action is necessary with some type of urgency, and then third, punish those who will not participate in being the solution.

So it’s like smoking.

Okay, at one point, smoking was everywhere.

It was cool.

They smoked on airplanes.

I can’t believe it when I see that they used to smoke on airplanes.

I’m like, where was the smoking section?

But the fact is that we don’t do that now.

If you lit up on an airplane, people would look at you like have you lost your mind.

They could throw you out the side window.

Wait, so, Katherine, could you give me an example of a subsidy that we’re not otherwise privy to that amounts to the $600 billion a year?

Yeah, I can give you two types of examples.

And this also speaks to the economic costs.

So, first of all, you have direct subsidies where, for example, oil and gas companies are paying pennies on the dollar for their land leases that they negotiated decades ago and they’re actually pulling from the public good.

They’re pulling coal and gas and oil from publicly owned lands and they’re paying a fraction, a pittance, of what that is actually worth.

But then there’s the indirect subsidies.

And the way we set up our economic system is we did not put a dollar sign on externalities, which is the fancy economist word for things that we don’t price, things outside our economic system.

And so they didn’t put a dollar sign on all of the heat trapping gases we produce, yet those heat trapping gases are producing very costly and certainly valuable impacts on us every day.

Just to give you one example, Hurricane Harvey.

Hurricane Harvey incurred over $120 billion worth of direct impacts.

The indirect impacts extend for decades afterwards.

It’s estimated that 75% of those costs would not have occurred if that hurricane hadn’t been supersized by climate change.

So it’s a single event, you’re looking at over $80 billion from a single event.

That’s a lot of dollars.

Carbon really is carrying a cost.

And until we incorporate it into our economic system, we have a socialized system, which is kind of ironic for most people because people think, oh, those climate solutions are socialized.

No, no, no.

Our current system is socialized because we, all of us as taxpayers and insurance owners and homeowners and people who suffer the impacts of fossil fuel use, we are paying for the price.

And a few companies…

And it started early on, I guess, because we paid to build the roads that then the cars that use gasoline drive on.

All right.

So the people who made the cars didn’t build the roads to use their product.

So this goes way back if you’re going to add it up that way, I think.

But Chuck, let’s get to some cosmic queries.

Let’s see if we can fit one in before the break.

What do you have?

All right.

Let me back this up here.

Here we go.

This is Tyler Hannell.

And Tyler says, Hello, you wonderful group of humans.

When discussing climate change, there is often this misconception that simply because there have been episodes of dramatic climate change in Earth’s history, that our current era of predominantly human-driven climate change is less threatening than it appears.

Could you touch upon what separates our current episode of climate change from those that have occurred in the past?

And this is Kevin the Salmonier.

Yeah, okay.

And I don’t know if Tyler Hannell sent that through Kevin the Salmonier, but whatever.

Well, Tyler actually hit the nail on the head because it’s been warmer before or it’s just a natural cycle is the number one science-sounding objection to the reality of climate change.

Number one, because it sounds so plausible, right?

Oh, it’s been warmer before.

Haven’t you seen Jurassic Park?

They’re making a reboot of Jurassic Park now so more people will see it.

But when we look into the past and paleoclimate scientists are the ones who do this, what we see from the past makes us even more worried about what we’re seeing today, not less.

Let’s tick off a few of the ways that we get more worried.

Number one, we should be slowly, gradually cooling right now, not warming.

According to natural factors, which include the sun, volcanoes and orbital cycles, our planet should be very, very, very slowly heading into the next glacial maximum or ice age.

Instead, we’re getting warmer faster and faster.

So number one is the direction of the change is wrong.

Number two, we are warming faster than any time in the history of human civilization on this planet.

And our whole civilization, where we build our cities, how we allocate our resources, our water resources, where we grow our food, it’s all based on the assumption of a stable climate.

And now we’re changing faster than any time we humans have experienced.

And then as far back as you can go in the paleoclimate record, tens of millions of years or more, we’ve never seen this much carbon going into the atmosphere this quickly.

So we are truly conducting an unprecedented experiment with the only home we have and the potential for some very nasty surprises increases with every single year that we don’t turn this thing around.

Damn, Katherine, just bumming us all out.

Last time we were going to invite you on this show.

And now with that, well, you can get a recording of this to read to your children before bed time.

Just to make it clear, the astronomical cycles to which you refer, yes, they do cycle but on way longer timescales than what we have seen.

So it’s not an escape route for those who are trying to sound sciency in their objections, for sure.

For sure.

Chuck, we’re going to take a quick break.

When we come back, more with Katherine Hayhoe.

We’ll see if she can have something nice to say about our future.

It’s terrible.

Yeah.

Maybe.

Katherine, you got something nice to say?

Otherwise, we’re not coming back.

Yes, yes, fine.

Okay.

You heard it here.

This is Star Talk.

Neil deGrasse Tyson.

We’ll be right back.

I’m Joel Cherico, and I make pottery.

You can see my pottery on my website, cosmicmugs.com.

Cosmic Mugs, art that lets you taste the universe every day.

And I support Star Talk on Patreon.

This is Star Talk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Like StarTalk, Cosmic Queries.

We’ll talk about what any of us can do about the climate crisis.

And anytime that’s the topic, we need Katherine Hayhoe in the house.

Katherine, how do we find you on social media, Katharine?

It’s pretty easy.

There’s not a lot of Katharine Hayhoe’s in the world.

I’m on Twitter and Instagram and Facebook and LinkedIn, and I’m trying-

Katherine with a K.

With a K, and I’m trying out TikTok with the help of my cat.

Oh, cats will get you far in that one, yeah.

So Hayhoe, H-A-Y-H-O-E.

Yes.

So Chuck, you got another question for her.

This is Cezentuki.

I’m gonna, it is now Cezentuki.

I’ll give you a C plus on that one.

I don’t even know how it’s supposed to be pronounced.

It’s S-Z-E-N-T-K-U-T-I.

Cezentuki.

So Bence is, how much do humans actually contribute to the heating of the planet besides or in addition to natural causes?

Thank you, in advance.

What’s our, what’s our culpability?

We humans are responsible for more than 100% of the observed warming.

Now people often say, what do you mean more than 100%?

That’s not possible.

Well, it is possible if according to natural factors, as we discussed right before the break, we should be getting cooler, not warmer.

So all of the observed warming is human cause.

And then we are actually offsetting a little bit of extra natural cooling.

Oh, wow.

So you have to, you have to subtract what we would have been from what we are.

And you find that what we are is 100% us plus, plus the difference for what we would have been.

Yes.

Without it, without it, correct.

So how does that translate to, of all the CO2 in the air right now, what percent of that CO2 are we?

So rather than think about it in warming, let’s think about it chemically.

So.

So before the industrial revolution, CO2 was at 280 parts per million in the atmosphere.

And now people say 280 parts per million sounds like nothing.

Well, 280 parts per million of cyanide in your glass would you drink it?

No, you wouldn’t.

Because it’s very powerful.

And carbon dioxide is a very powerful heat trapping gas.

A little bit of it goes a long way.

And in fact, methane is an even more powerful heat trapping gas than carbon dioxide.

And it’s been going up even more.

It was about 800 parts per billion before.

And now CO2 is at over 120 parts per million and methane is at over 1800 parts per billion.

So big increase.

But so CO2, you’re saying we’ve increased it by 25%.

Yes, more than that.

Now CO2 fluctuates according to the plant cycles, the annual plant cycles, right?

So is that number you gave me like the average on the year and then we’re increment on that average?

Yes, so it goes up and down with the Northern Hemisphere.

It’s sort of like the earth breathing because plants take up CO2 as they grow and then they give off CO2 as they die back.

And so we see this amazing annual cycle in CO2 in the atmosphere, which is essentially the planet breathing in in spring and out in Northern Hemisphere fall.

But then we have the long-term average that ticks steadily upwards.

And if you just look at the peak, the peak is already over 120, but the average is just approaching it.

Got it.

Wow.

Well, there you go.

So we’re basically the cigarettes of the planet.

That’s-

What?

Yeah.

Yeah.

So yeah.

Like, you know, if you’re just breathing normally and, you know, you’re taking your lungs, they’re fine.

But then all of a sudden you start smoking and they’re totally messed up.

So if you think of the planet as the planet breathing-

Yeah, okay.

Yeah, humankind is the cigarettes to what the planet should be.

We’re giving Earth lung cancer.

We’re giving Earth lung cancer.

Well, okay, so that totally works, Chuck, because I use that in a slightly different analogy because people say, well, how much is too much?

And what’s the magic number?

Where should we stop?

And I’m like, there’s no magic number to cigarettes, but you know that the sooner you stop, the better.

And people say, well, is it too late?

And I say, well, we’ve already gotten paired lung capacity.

We’ve already got some spots in our lungs, so to speak, as if we’ve been smoking a pack of cigarettes a day for years and even decades, but we don’t have emphysema.

We don’t have lung cancer and we’re not dead yet.

So I’m gonna add that to the analogy because it totally works.

Well, you know, the problem is the people who are just like, you know, my uncle, he smoked for 30 years.

He smoked until he was 92.

He was totally fine, totally.

I mean, he didn’t have fingertips, but who cares?

Who needs those when you’re 90?

Well, we have those people too.

They’re like, it’s freezing here.

Where’s global warming now?

Right, right.

So my global warming reference is climate, not your day’s forecast, weather forecast.

Right, so, Katherine, what solutions?

I mean, you gave a short listing in the first segment on things that are being done or on the frontier of carbon capture.

Could you just give me a little more specific about what are some of the things that are happening?

Because when I think about it, the carbon’s in the earth and we take it out and it’s in the atmosphere, but it’s been in the earth for millions of years.

Let’s get it back into the earth rather than in the atmosphere.

It sounds like a lot of what you were describing is just that.

Exactly, so carbon is the building block of life.

Carbon is not essentially evil or bad.

We need it, we depend on it.

But when you have too much of a good thing, that can be dangerous.

And so, if you eat too much of something or if you take too many vitamins, especially if you take too much medicine, you can take too much of something that’s good for you and it actually makes you sick.

And so that’s exactly what we’ve got here.

We’ve got too much carbon in the atmosphere and we want to put it back where carbon wants to go, if you could sort of personify carbon.

Carbon loves to go into ecosystems because, again, we’re all carbon-based life forms.

And so it’s not just planting trees.

When we restore coastal wetlands, which protect us from storm surge and also filter water, they store carbon.

When we protect our peatlands, they store carbon.

When you regrow grasslands, they store carbon.

When you green low-income neighborhoods in big urban cities, it cools them down, cleans up their air and stores carbon.

And carbon in the soil is amazing fertilizer.

And so when farmers do really simple things, like planting a cover crop, and then the cover crop takes up carbon as it grows, you plow the cover crop back into the ground before you plant your regular crop.

And all of that lovely carbon from those plants goes into the ground where it enriches the next crop.

So all of these are what we call nature-based solutions, working with nature.

They’re incredible ways to help with our farming, help with our ecosystems, invest in nature and biodiversity and cleaning up our air and cleaning up our water.

Oh, and they help with climate change too.

They’re like win, win, win, win and win solutions.

So have you heard of this, the scientists, I read this in Smithsonian, so I’m not well-versed on it.

Sounds like you are, if you’re reading the Smithsonian Magazine.

Well-

I’m not well-versed, but I read Smithsonian and Scientific American on this in five journals, but I’m not well-versed.

Well, yes, but I’m not a scientist, you know what I mean?

So it’s not like I’m reading a peer review study or something.

But there’s this technology where you’re able to pull carbon from the ocean so that the ocean can absorb more carbon, but then turn the carbon into rock or limestone.

Do you know anything about that?

Yes, so there’s direct air and direct water capture where you literally pull the CO2 directly out of the air, the atmosphere or out of the water and you turn it into a product.

And they have turned it into rock, they have turned it into baking soda and here’s the really good one, they have been able to pull carbon out of the air and turn it into liquid fuel.

That, no, no, no, that’s a big one.

No, I’m saying that is possible.

Yes, yes, yes, yes.

Because it’s one thing to replace our electricity sources with clean energy, with wind or solar or tidal or hydro or others, but liquid fuel is kind of the holy grail because for example, like with an airplane, you can fly short flights with a battery.

So electric planes are actually a reality today, but you can’t fly really long flights with a battery because the battery would weigh too much, you need liquid fuel.

So if you could take the carbon out of the atmosphere, if you could turn it into liquid fuel and then when you re-burn it, what you’re doing is you’re creating essentially carbon neutral fuel.

You’re neither adding nor subtracting to the amount of carbon in the atmosphere.

Right, because it came from the atmosphere.

Okay, so that would, if everybody did that, that would peg us at the current levels.

So we’d have to get used to the storms and things we have now, but it won’t get worse necessarily.

Interesting.

So that liquid fuel, are you saying you can make that coming out of the ocean and out of the air?

I’m only familiar with the way they make it coming out of the air, but here’s the problem.

You might say, well, why aren’t they doing it everywhere?

One answer, it’s a lot more expensive than natural gas because we live in this artificially subsidized economy where fossil fuels are cheap and clean energy, new clean energy technology is not.

So if I have CO2 in the atmosphere and you want to pull it out and make fuel, which has chemical energy, you have to put energy into that molecule to make it happen.

Where are you getting that energy?

Well, you exactly put your finger on it, Neil.

You have to get that energy from clean sources.

Otherwise, you could be creating a low carbon fuel, but you’re not creating a no carbon fuel.

Yeah, and you could essentially add to the problem depending on the amount of energy you need to make the fuel.

Yeah, it’s like bring a gallon of gas over here so I can make a carbon neutral.

Right, exactly.

Burn down this forest so we can actually fly a plane.

Well, that’s what they did with ethanol.

So the old fashioned way to take carbon out of the atmosphere and turn it into fuel is through this amazing technology called photosynthesis where you grow things and as they grow, they take the carbon out like corn and then you turn those things you grew into fuel.

So in some cases, you do get a lower carbon product from biofuels, but for ethanol in the United States, they’ve done study after study, and I actually just read a new one last week showing that ethanol was not a lower carbon fuel than fossil fuels because so much energy had to go into actually producing the fuel.

Sam, what do you think of the, first of all, let me forget, what do you think of it?

Is it true what we see in these seemingly greenwashing television commercials about all this algae that’s being grown and turned into biofuel?

Well, algae is really cool because it, this algae pulls CO2 out of the atmosphere and then you’ve got this algae that you could turn into fuel and the technology exists to turn it into liquid fuel.

And in fact, back in the day, they had some experiments where they just set up these giant bags of blue-green algae sort of in the parking lot beside a coal fire power plant and they pumped the CO2 from the coal fire power plant directly into the bag.

So they weren’t even taking it from the atmosphere to create algae growth.

And they were doing that as an experiment.

It wasn’t operational, just to show that you could do it.

But here’s the thing.

A lot of the big oil and gas companies, they are investing in new technology like algae, like biofuels, like carbon capture, but the amount that they talk about it doesn’t match what they’re actually doing.

And in fact, earlier this year, there was a peer-reviewed scientific study, Chuck speaking of the peer-reviewed literature, that formally found that many of the big oil and gas companies are guilty of greenwashing and that they claim to be doing a lot more than they are actually doing.

Greenwashing.

Yeah.

I love that term.

Interesting.

But Chuck, this is a Cosmic Query, so you can slip one in before we end this.

Yeah, let’s do it.

Let’s do it.

Here we go.

This is Alex Reynoso.

Hello, Alejandro Reynoso from Monterrey, Mexico here.

Chuck does three accents, only three accents.

The rest, we don’t know what he’s doing.

If you want, I can answer in Spanish.

Like I said, this is Alejandro.

I just said he does the accent.

I just said he does the language.

That’s a whole other thing.

What are you talking about here?

Here’s what he says.

I believe the problem with climate change is how we produce and how much we produce that goes to waste specifically.

I also think the climate change deniers don’t believe in it because they don’t want to make any change on their way of life.

How can we shift the bias and actually get something done?

So, I mean, the bias against changing your lifestyle and, of course, changing your lifestyle means either consuming less or consuming products that we don’t throw away.

See, I’m with the questioner on that only because, like I said, you want me to do what?

You want me to go out of my way?

You want me to spend more on this?

You want me to do…

I just want to do what I keep doing.

So, I think the richest future person is going to be the person that does an exact substitute for what we’re doing now, and that’s all green technologies.

And then I don’t have to change my ways if I’m liberal or conservative.

I agree with you.

What do you say?

So much of the messaging around climate action comes originally from the environmental community, which sort of has an ethos of sacrifice.

Yes, it does.

Perfectly worded.

Perfectly worded.

And if you’re not sacrificing with us, you are harming somebody else.

Right.

Right.

You eat babies.

If you’re not doing what we do, you don’t love anyone.

No, Chuck, this is eating babies.

It’s running over the babies in your SUV.

When you swerve to avoid the baby seal.

Right.

Right.

So, no, you’re totally right.

And so that appeals to a certain small percentage of people who most of whom would call themselves environmentalists.

But as you just said, Chuck, and as you just said, Neil, it doesn’t appeal to most people.

And so the messaging…

Not in America, because in America freedom…

I don’t want you telling me what to do.

And a lot of people will even say that, like, I don’t want you telling me how to set my thermostat.

I even have a story in my book about that, how a man in Texas said, you know what, everything you said makes sense, but I don’t want the government telling me how to set my thermostat.

And I said, you’re right, I don’t want the government telling me that either.

And so that’s why it’s so important to talk about real solutions.

Real solutions like, number one, waste is a problem, especially inefficiency.

We waste 68% of the energy we produce.

We waste half the food we produce.

So waste not want not is a huge time saver, money saver and carbon saver.

Then transitioning to clean energy, so when we flip the switch, the light goes on, but it’s powered by clean energy, no matter who you are, no matter where you live.

And it’s the same damn light switch, right?

It’s not some other configuration contraption.

No, like the head of Google said, I want everybody who does a Google search to be powered by clean energy when they do that search, whether they want to or not.

That’s what we need.

Right?

Right.

Right.

And when it comes to the food wasting, I just think that everybody in America, on Earth, needs to spend just a month living with a black grandmother.

And you will not waste any food, because you will burn some toast, and you will go to throw that toast.

Boy, what are you doing?

You’re trying to throw that toast away.

You better scrape that toast and put some butter on it, boy.

Time to take a break.

I was just going to say, I grew up with a Ukrainian grandmother.

Same thing, Chuck, exact same thing.

Okay, but now here’s the real test, Katherine.

All right, little bit of mold on a roll.

Okay, grandma, does she say, now you know that’s dangerous, you can’t eat that?

Or does she say, you better cut that mold off that roll and eat that roll?

Eat the rest of the mold.

People start complaining about their grandmother, it’s time to take a break.

So, we’re gonna come back Cosmic Queries, what we can do about the climate crisis.

Third segment coming right up.

Subs www.zeoranger.co.uk We’re back, third and final segment, Star Talk.

What we can do about the climate crisis.

Katherine Hayhoe, in the house.

Katherine, you’re, from what I can tell, you are uniquely effective at getting people to hear what you’re saying and want to do what you say.

So many other climate folks are there to scold you rather than bring you along with what they have in mind.

And so we need more of you, right?

One of you is not enough.

Do you think?

Short of cloning you, what other, what should people do who have your knowledge base?

Do they, should they be more active on Twitter?

Should they teach classes and master class?

What do you expect of us?

Well, for a long time in my Twitter bio, I had first in line for cloning, but then I started to get some really weird emails.

So I took it out and I wrote a book instead.

And.

Now I’m more interested in the email.

Oh, believe me Chuck, I have a whole folder.

And the book is basically about how every single one of us can do this, no matter who we are, because every one of us has a voice.

But each one of us is unique.

So we all come from a different background.

We have different life experiences.

We have different priorities and interests and values and abilities and talents.

And so who we are is the perfect person to have that conversation with whatever groups or organizations we’re part of.

Where we work or where we go to school, or we might be somebody who’s a skier, or we’re talking with the other moms at the playground, or we’re walking our dogs together, we’re playing Ultimate Frisbee together, we’re going to church together.

Everybody plugs into their niche.

Exactly.

With your wisdom, and they know how to communicate with their own people.

Because the social science shows that us scientists, we are the second most trusted messengers on climate change.

The first most trusted messengers are people you know.

A friend.

Yeah.

That makes sense.

All right, Chuck, let’s get some more cosmic queries.

We’ll run them along.

Here we go.

This is Hunter Kutone who says, hey, it’s Hunter here.

We are able to feed 70 billion animals each year so humans can have meat to eat on the table, but we’re unable to feed the millions of starving humans on our own planet.

What is being done about this and how will factory farming evolve to combat this challenge as well as the challenge of climate change?

There’s a lot to unpack in that question.

I know, and in fact, let me just lead off by saying, as I understand it, unlike the predictions of Thomas Malthus where he said population is gonna outstrip food supply and we will starve in mass numbers, he didn’t know what role science would play in the production of food.

So as I understand it, Katherine, correct me if I’m wrong, there is no shortage of food in the world.

There’s plenty of food and we can have food even up to 10 billion people, but it’s the distribution networks of food that is the problem, right?

And so I don’t know that climate change issues or food production issues can actually solve that problem.

It’s a political problem, isn’t it?

Well, that’s exactly it.

We waste in high income countries, we waste 50% of the food that we produce just by too much on our plates, throw it out, rotting in the back of the fridge, ugly fruit, food just passed its deadline.

Yeah, there’s literally, they take it off the grocery shelf if it’s too ugly.

I thought this is farm cooperative that sells ugly fruit.

I think it’s called something like that.

And you go in there, it’s got some gnarly tomatoes, you know?

And it’s weird how we have a food aesthetic that has nothing to do with its nutritional value.

That’s sad, actually.

It’s very sad, but what’s even sadder is in low income countries, they’re also wasting about half their food too, but for a completely different reason, because they don’t have the refrigeration and the supply chain to get it to market and to distribute it and to keep it from going bad.

So spoil preserving.

And then you have the challenge that industrial agriculture, especially beef, and to a lesser extent, other animal agriculture is responsible for about 14% of our heat trapping gas emissions too.

So there’s this whole ball of waxed-on pack where we need to figure out how to stop wasting food, how to provide food to the people who need it, and how to shift our agricultural system to one that is truly sustainable, that provides for our needs and replenishes the needs of the planet as well.

Yeah.

You know what that reminds me of?

I saw a comedian joke about this.

I mean, it’s a very serious topic, but the joke made it even more serious.

He was saying, you know, if you had a pen pal from some other, nobody has pen pals anymore, but pen pal from some nation that is developing and food is a scarce resource, and you’re telling each other about each other’s cultures, and said, well, what did you do last week?

We celebrated what we call Thanksgiving here in the United States.

Well, what do you do?

Oh, we eat as much as we possibly can until we’re on the brink of throwing up.

We have to unbuckle our belts a few notches, and then we just roll onto the couch until we digest it, and then we go back for more.

What did you do on your holiday?

I mean, it was the stark contrast of our access to food, and plus, I don’t know any other country that has so many fitness centers to burn off the excess food that we ended up eating, never mind the food that we ended up throwing away.

So true.

Now, for some reason, I am hungry.

Chuck, give me another one.

Oh, sorry, you want to say, Katherine?

Even here, though, we have food deserts.

We have places where people live in poverty, where they don’t have access to grocery stores that sell healthy foods.

It’s all prepackaged, expensive foods.

So food is a problem really everywhere.

And it’s not because of a food shortage in the world, right?

It’s a whole other problem.

Okay, Chuck, what else you have?

Here we go.

This is Bill Wassoli.

And Bill Wassoli says, With the consuming rush to electrification, aren’t we at risk of running out of electricity?

Do we need distributed neighborhood micronuclear power plants?

Plus large parts of the world doesn’t have a sufficient electrical distribution.

How will those parts join the rush to electrification?

I like that.

Many nuclear plants.

So, Katherine, let me co-op that question and ask you what’s the future of nuclear power if there’s no carbon footprint?

Well, that is in my book as well.

As they say, nuclear fusion is always 30 years away.

It’s been 30 years away 30 years ago and it still is today.

So, in the future, maybe in our grandchildren’s time, nuclear fusion could supply a lot of our electricity but not necessarily our other energy sources.

So, even that Holy Grail, so to speak, is not a fix-all.

It’s not a silver bullet for everything.

In the meantime now, we have old school nuclear technology, which is so expensive that the only plant they tried to build in the US in the last 30 years was in the Carolinas.

The price went so far over budget that they essentially dug a hole in the ground and filled it back in for $9 billion.

But all is not lost because Idaho National Labs, in partnership with one of Bill Gates’ startups, they are developing what Bill referred to as the mini modular nuclear reactors, where you can literally put one on the back of a truck, so you don’t have to build it in situ.

You build them as a module and then you transport as many as you need and put them together, and they’re trying that out for the first time in Utah right now.

So it’s like Legos.

Exactly, nuclear Legos, so to speak.

And if you site them somewhere where there are no earthquakes, tsunamis or other natural disaster risks, then they are relatively safe and relatively affordable, although solar is still cheaper.

So for some places under sun circumstances, there could be the role for that, but then you still have the nuclear waste disposal issue.

We don’t need a silver bullet, we need silver buckshot.

We need solutions that work for everyone.

And you know, to generate all the electricity for the whole United States here today using only solar energy, we would need about 100 by 100 square mile area in West Texas.

And I mean, what is that, six cotton farms?

So we don’t need a lot of land area.

And like I said, we’re very inefficient.

If we would just increase our efficiency, we could cut our carbon emissions and our energy use in half.

So all of the above.

All of the above.

And then there’s the 700 million people who don’t have access to electricity, most of whom live in sub-Saharan Africa.

Well, they don’t have a lot of coal or gas or oil there, but they have a lot of sun and a lot of wind.

A lot of sun, wind.

And during the pandemic in 2020, 90% of new energy installed around the world, much of that in those places that don’t have access to electricity, was clean energy.

Yeah.

And by the way, it appears that they’re poised to accelerate and to do better with clean energy because they are building from scratch.

Yes.

So they don’t have to modernize a grid or retrofit anything.

They just build from the bottom up and…

It’s like the city of Dubai.

Right.

Where basically built in the last couple of decades, almost everything you see there.

And it looks like a city of the future.

Whereas all other cities have to sort of combine stuff that’s a century old where science and technology and architecture is advanced.

All right, Chuck, give me another one.

All right, I got a good one for you, Katherine.

Here we go.

It’s on right now.

This is why…

This is why KAS is coming for you or he’s coming for you or they’re coming for you.

This person says, While I personally don’t necessarily agree with your views on this matter, I wonder how you would respond to the late mathematical physicist Freeman Dyson, who acknowledged humans’ effect on the climate, but question if this effect was necessarily bad and if it was the most important immediate concern for the majority of the world’s people, a view promoted by the Eco-Modernist movement.

Isn’t progress for the developing nations more important than their effect on the global climate?

Okay, so I got to lead off.

I got to say something about Freeman Dyson because I knew him.

I was at Princeton while he was there.

He died a few years ago.

A brilliant physicist, second World War, worked for the UK.

He’s a British physicist, but was at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton while I was at Princeton University.

We had lunch every Tuesday.

There’s a big group of us.

And so brilliant guy, not a climate scientist.

That’s all I have to say.

That’s all I have to say.

So if you want to cherry pick the random comments of people no matter their education level that conflict with those of the emerging consensus of data and results of climate scientists, then you are revealing your own bias in this.

You have your bias and you’re looking for things to fulfill it.

And if you have to leave the corral and find the wanderers who agree with you, this is not how we come to learn and understand how the universe actually works.

All right, Neil, I’m going to just say this.

I don’t know if I agree with you.

That’s the Freeman Dyson side.

This is my handoff to Katherine.

Go.

No, that makes sense.

I got my lasik surgery done by a proctologist.

That’s exactly where I was going, Chuck.

You know, somebody could be a great cardiologist.

Wait, is that because you mistook your ass for your face?

You made me…

Oh, no, I walked into that.

Oh, my God, that was good.

Katherine, please answer the question.

Okay, Katherine, save us, Katherine.

Oh, Chuck, you rolled out the red carpet on that one.

This is what happens when I don’t take a nap.

All right.

Okay, go ahead.

So, Katherine, so go for it.

I think that the strongest question there, we have a developing country that is on the brink of reaping the fruits and benefits that developed countries have reaped using the inexpensive prospect of oil, which is just coming right out of the ground.

And it’s transportable.

It has high energy density.

And all of a sudden the Western world is saying, you can’t do this because it’s bad for the environment when we did what was bad for the environment for 150 years.

So why is that even fair?

And who are we to say what they should or shouldn’t do?

Well, that is a straw man argument I hear frequently.

And as your listeners probably know, a straw man argument is where you say something that isn’t true and then you ask somebody to explain why it’s true.

So no one is telling developing countries what they can or can’t do.

The Paris agreements contributions are entirely voluntary.

Every country determines their own contribution to the Paris agreement.

Nobody else tells them what it is.

That’s number one.

Nobody’s telling them what to do.

And number two is this.

One of the biggest reasons why low income countries are low income is because they do not have massive fossil fuel resources.

And the few countries that do like Nigeria, Venezuela, Brazil, those resources are used to enrich a very few elite and the multinational corporations and those riches do not trickle down to the average person.

So when we say, oh, those developing countries should be using fossil fuels like we did, what we are saying is, oh, they should be using Model T Fords right now and party line telephones.

They shouldn’t be using the technology we have today because they have to do in the same order we did.

And oh, by the way, they have to buy it all from us because they don’t have it.

It is the most colonialistic and patronizing perspective that you could possibly imagine.

Let them pick how they want to do it because you know what?

The 3.5 billion poorest people in the world so far have produced 7% of emissions.

So if they want to go ahead and burn some fossil fuels on their way to a clean energy future, they’ve got a long way to go before they catch up with the United States of America that is responsible for almost 30% of cumulative carbon emissions.

Mic drop.

There you go.

Mic drop.

And in addition to that, by the way, geopolitically, this is how strongmen and dictators are made.

Because they don’t care.

They don’t need to take care of their people.

All they need to do is take the commodity and sell it to somebody like us in order to maintain power and to sustain a system of oppression.

Chuck is running for office, by the way.

So guys, we got to end the show.

So, Chuck, always good to have you as you know.

Katherine, do you have any final words for us that might give us some hope for the future?

Yes, I would love to end with some words from a fellow climate scientist who is in Ukraine right now.

Svetlana Krakowska.

She’s an IPCC author.

And what she said when they were just releasing the latest IPCC report, the latest doorstop of doom, showing all the terrible things that are happening to this world because of climate change, this is what she said.

She said, climate change and the war on Ukraine have the same roots, fossil fuels.

But she went on, she said, just as we will not surrender, we must not surrender to building a climate resilient future as well because all of us are at risk.

Powerful stuff.

There it is.

Katherine, you know we’re going to have you back.

This was your third visit and we’re not done with you.

And I’m delighted that you tolerate both me and Chuck.

That takes a little bit.

That takes its own special set of resiliency.

There you go.

There you go.

Katherine, we’re all better citizens because of you on this earth.

Thank you for sharing your time.

This has been Star Talk Cosmic Queries.

Neil deGrasse Tyson here as always.