YouSaid · the spoken record

Eugene Linden

lines on the record: 63
first: 2022-05-16
most recent: 2022-05-16
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Enormous promise for reducing emissions drastically given how important electricity is in terms of greenhouse gas emissions. They're going to have a two operational drill wells in 2024. That's just two years away, not even. So I think that is a game changer, not to use an overused term and has enormous promise. But there are plenty of other technologies as well. I mean, wind power, of course, is expanding. Tidal power, Great Britain uses it. Lots of places use it. So, I mean, we're seeing a renewal of the kind of innovation we saw in the end of the Victorian era. Couldn't happen a moment too soon.”
2022-05-16 · Intelligence Squared · How to Avert the Climate Catastrophe and a Financial Meltdown, with Eugene Linden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I have a ready answer for that. Deep geothermal. There's a company called Quays Energy out of Cambridge, Massachusetts that is a year away from doing a pilot project with that technology I talked about, which is using what are called millimeter wave beams to actually vaporize deep rock and access this deep heat within 100 days of the commencement of gelling. 61% of the U.S. energy is produced by steam turbines.”
2022-05-16 · Intelligence Squared · How to Avert the Climate Catastrophe and a Financial Meltdown, with Eugene Linden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of various reasons, whether it's fire, flood, sea level rise, windstorms. Their houses will become unsaleable. And that will be the trigger for the four financial crisis. I won't say it's the next financial crisis because we've got a lot of triggers around the world that aren't related to climate. But a climate one looms large down the road.”
2022-05-16 · Intelligence Squared · How to Avert the Climate Catastrophe and a Financial Meltdown, with Eugene Linden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so you could see the same kind of crisis that happened in 2008, where other sudden there's a drought of buyers and people who can't get the protection they need to get a mortgage. And it could quickly morph into a financial crisis. The difference being, of course, is that the great financial crisis was a financial crisis in once trillions in liquidity was injected into the system, the ship eventually rioted. What will happen with the climate change financial crisis, however, is it'll get worse every year because it will not be better the next year than it was the year that might wear the tipping point might have occurred and the crisis began and the next year will be worse than the year after that will be worse. And so in a large number of parts of the US and Europe, you are going to be seeing an area where people might be living in a place where a common”
2022-05-16 · Intelligence Squared · How to Avert the Climate Catastrophe and a Financial Meltdown, with Eugene Linden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Areas. What that might mean is that in many of these at risk places, people won't be able to get a mortgage. It wouldn't be a problem if everybody just stayed in their homes all along and paid off their mortgages. People have to leave their empty mesters, they retire, one reason or another. And then they have to sell their house, but the buyer has to get a mortgage in most cases.”
2022-05-16 · Intelligence Squared · How to Avert the Climate Catastrophe and a Financial Meltdown, with Eugene Linden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To try and hedge ourselves and protect ourselves. Well, let's say fast forward to what's happening now with climate. And what we've seen is that millions and millions of people have moved into essentially what we call harm's way by moving into zones vulnerable to sea level rise, to floods, and to fires, mainly because insurers have kept writing policies that don't reflect that risk. And what happens in that case is that it acts as the perverse incentive for people to move into those areas. And as we've discussed, the insurers had to sort of get out of jail free card because they feel they can always not renew policies after a year. But then you have to think about what the consequences, or they can raise their prices, what the consequences for the housing market is if, in fact, insurers start pulling out of these.”
2022-05-16 · Intelligence Squared · How to Avert the Climate Catastrophe and a Financial Meltdown, with Eugene Linden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Those mortgages were worth very, very little, and the whole daisy chain, the whole House of Cards collapsed, and we watched this firsthand, and actually the fund I work for did the same thing that was shown in the big short.”
2022-05-16 · Intelligence Squared · How to Avert the Climate Catastrophe and a Financial Meltdown, with Eugene Linden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“was that the banks, instead of holding the mortgages, were selling them into these giant billion dollar securitizations called mortgage-backed securities. And because they weren't holding the mortgage, they relaxed their underwriting standards. And this huge risk was built into these piles of mortgages. And everybody said, well, you know, this isn't going to be a problem because subprime mortgages were only 5% of the housing market. But it turned out it was because the subprime mortgages constituted a lot of the lower end of these giant securitizations. And essentially, as people began defaulting on their mortgages and there was foreclosures,”
2022-05-16 · Intelligence Squared · How to Avert the Climate Catastrophe and a Financial Meltdown, with Eugene Linden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it absolutely could lead to a financial crisis and sooner than we might think. I had the opportunity to watch firsthand the great financial crisis of 2008 because I was chief investment strategist for a hedge fund. And what I'd noticed back then was that people were getting mortgages that shouldn't have gotten mortgages. In other words, in the US, for instance, 65% was the previous sort of high for the percentage of people who owned who owned their own homes. It rose to 69%. So that 4% of people wouldn't have qualified under earlier underwriting standards. And then we saw what happened, the reason that happened was that I'm giving a little background on the financial crisis to sort of understand the next crisis. And the reason that happened”
2022-05-16 · Intelligence Squared · How to Avert the Climate Catastrophe and a Financial Meltdown, with Eugene Linden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The World Trade Organization has already said that they want to get involved with climate change, and they'd be a natural place to sort of see it. We can now monitor sources, certainly at the national level and even more precise that for greenhouse gas emissions. So it'd be easy to see who was playing ball and who wasn't.”
2022-05-16 · Intelligence Squared · How to Avert the Climate Catastrophe and a Financial Meltdown, with Eugene Linden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, you know, nuclear is always there, but it takes a while. And in the United States, we have this not in my backyard. It's called NIMBY phenomenon where nobody wants a nuclear plant next to their community. So good luck with that. Fusion has always held promise, and I hope today it will. There are other technologies there, but the problem with not having a universal agreement is that the problem that's dogged us all along, the free rider problem. And that's essentially what China and India were doing is they were taking advantage of their exemption from the Kyoto Treaty to just industrialize powering in any way they wanted, regardless of the cost to the future or to the citizens in their city through air pollution. So I don't think that piecemeal works. I think we need something universal. By the way, I don't think a universal tariff would be hardly to implement.”
2022-05-16 · Intelligence Squared · How to Avert the Climate Catastrophe and a Financial Meltdown, with Eugene Linden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You put these incentives in the pricing of, I think now insurers are beginning to price in these risks of climate change. It's going to have a dramatic effect. And it could be create a financial crisis down the road, but we can talk about that if you like.”
2022-05-16 · Intelligence Squared · How to Avert the Climate Catastrophe and a Financial Meltdown, with Eugene Linden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, in the old days, you know how we got around it? It was religion. In the really old days, I mean, there'd be taboos. You'd cut that tree, and your wife would be barren and your crops would die, you know. And then, of course, when you think about a lot of the religious prescriptions, they actually were either ecologically sound or health sound in one way or another. That's no longer the case, obviously. So what do we have? Well, we have government. The question is absolutely right. We are wired to be short-term thinkers. And so we need an external agency to sort of remind us of the long term because we can't all be good citizens. I mean, we can't all be long-term thinkers. And in fact, most of our population in the States here isn't really engaged in the issue, even if they worry about it a bit. So that is where you...”
2022-05-16 · Intelligence Squared · How to Avert the Climate Catastrophe and a Financial Meltdown, with Eugene Linden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Taxes are probably the most efficient way to change behavior because you allow people to make a choice. They want to do a polluting thing, they pay for it. I mean, and I mean, you have congestion pricing in London. And I assume that's worked pretty well, or at least last times I was there was working pretty well. I mean, that's the kind of thing where you at the city or state level, you can incentivize people. You're not telling them not to do anything. You're just making it very expensive if they do it. That's what we did with cigarettes in the States, where it's eight bucks a pack now and like seven of that is taxes.”
2022-05-16 · Intelligence Squared · How to Avert the Climate Catastrophe and a Financial Meltdown, with Eugene Linden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's again a terrific question when I address at the end of the book. I think we need ways of representing the long term in. The way in which we do business. And I think Europe is ahead of the US on that in the sense of there's more regulation in terms of what you can and can't do. I think whereas if we pursue a libertarian path, as we have been tending in the United States, we're going to go off a cliff. We're not going to deal with climate change. So we have to sort of...”
2022-05-16 · Intelligence Squared · How to Avert the Climate Catastrophe and a Financial Meltdown, with Eugene Linden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Going to explode, we see that all over the place. But people game things. This is one of the fragilities of the way we do business is that it's easy to game things. And we've seen that time and time again with initiatives on climate change. The clean development mechanism was used, in some cases finance a coal-fired plant in India. So, you're going to have some of that, but on the other hand, I think the momentum is in that direction. It's not sufficient, but it's heading in the right direction.”
2022-05-16 · Intelligence Squared · How to Avert the Climate Catastrophe and a Financial Meltdown, with Eugene Linden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A lot of it is greenwashing, and a lot of it is just cosmetic. But a lot of it's real. I mean, the head of Volkswagen, which I think is the largest car maker in the world, was on 60 Minutes the other day saying they're going to have a 50% EV fleet in a matter of a few years. I mean, that is a major commitment. And that's real. Now, of course, they've all been humiliated by Tesla, which has a market capitalization larger than the entire auto industry combined by ignoring it for as many years as they have. But they're all playing catch-up. And they realize the EV market is only going to expand as charge stations proliferate. Battery technology gets better. It gets easier to own one. And then, of course, the benefits are manifest. So as the EV migrates to the middle class as opposed to the affluent, that's...”
2022-05-16 · Intelligence Squared · How to Avert the Climate Catastrophe and a Financial Meltdown, with Eugene Linden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The good news on this side drilling is not going to help. And it also, the last thing we need is a step backward and increased reliance on fossil fuels. And all we're doing by doing that is basically empowering these homicidal psychopaths around the world who are in charge of the petro states.”
2022-05-16 · Intelligence Squared · How to Avert the Climate Catastrophe and a Financial Meltdown, with Eugene Linden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, that is a fascinating and terrific question because I think about that a lot. It couldn't have come at the worst possible time in terms of not the sanctions, but the invasion of the Ukraine. Because one, it distracts from this, I mean, this is a global threat we're facing and it's very near. And there have been calls for increased drilling as a result of this. Of course, if you want to lower gas prices and have more available fuels, the best way to do that is to reduce demand. And indeed, in the States, we're seeing a lot of people now buying EVs who didn't before just because the 50 to 80 percent increase in gas prices in some of the places over the past year, which have made, if you can get 80 miles to a gallon with a plug-in hybrid or even better with an AV, faced with those costs, you can do it. So that is...”
2022-05-16 · Intelligence Squared · How to Avert the Climate Catastrophe and a Financial Meltdown, with Eugene Linden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In the US, we've seen people try to run on climate and get nowhere like Tom Steyer and Jay Inslee. I don't know what the situation is in the UK. But the UK has been much better on climate and much more consistent, I would say, than the US, although it did stay with coal a long time. But point is that don't count on the politicians to save us. Count on consumers demanding change, people demanding change. And then just this change in the attitude of the business community is indeed a big deal.”
2022-05-16 · Intelligence Squared · How to Avert the Climate Catastrophe and a Financial Meltdown, with Eugene Linden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The politicians would guarantee you would follow suit, and so would business. So power is in the hands of ordinary people. You don't just have to be a, and certainly I think the elites, what we've seen is that no one, no politician has been a leader on this in terms of staking their career successfully on climate change. a bunch of climate deniers have been elected prime minister or chosen as prime minister in australia”
2022-05-16 · Intelligence Squared · How to Avert the Climate Catastrophe and a Financial Meltdown, with Eugene Linden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Look, we all recycle. If you'd asked me in the 70s whether everybody would recycle, I'd say there's no way people aren't going to do it. You know, we all use seatbelts and cars. And for years, I would cheat on that. And now I regularly use it. People change and norms change. I assume it's roughly similar, but in the US, consumer spending 70% of the economy. That means average ordinary people have the power to change corporate behavior, to change government behavior, just through their spending patterns. If everybody was sensitive to climate issues in their spending and their lifestyle choices, et cetera,”
2022-05-16 · Intelligence Squared · How to Avert the Climate Catastrophe and a Financial Meltdown, with Eugene Linden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It can't be. I mean, we have to do this, and we can. I'll give you one more example. I just wrote a piece in a little while about the promise of deep geothermal. Between five and twelve miles below the surface of the Earth, there's an almost infinite source of heat of about 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit, right? It hasn't been accessible because it's in bedrock that is basement rock, which is five to ten times harder than sedimentary rock. MIT scientists have come up with a way of vaporizing that rock and being able to access it in 100 days. That could supply electricity cheaper than any fossil fuel plant today and could retrofit because 75 to 80 percent of the world's electrical generating plants are steam turbines and you can use steam from the heated by the deep earth you can just fit it right in so things like that hold enormous promise so it's not too late but we got to do them you know we can't just know about them”
2022-05-16 · Intelligence Squared · How to Avert the Climate Catastrophe and a Financial Meltdown, with Eugene Linden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They haven't been that high since before the ice ages some 3 million years ago. There's plenty of life back then, but there weren't any humans. If you look even at the projections from the IPCC report for food production, Maize or corn production in the best case scenario is going to be lower than 7% than it is now. In the worst 27%, wheat, 22% and 5%, rice and soybeans, so on, a little less. But the point is that... That won't even feed the 7.8 billion people alive today, much less the 2 billion who are being added. So we actually, the main message is we have to do something and we have to start now.”
2022-05-16 · Intelligence Squared · How to Avert the Climate Catastrophe and a Financial Meltdown, with Eugene Linden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Have the ability to sort of come up with an international agreement that would have an impact, one that is simple so that there's not endless negotiations, one that it's universal, and one that's deployable now. And I propose at the end of the book a universal tariff, that if you met a certain goal for reductions in greenhouse gases, every country on earth, no tariff. If you didn't, tariff. I explain it. I won't go into it in detail here. But I do think there are things we can do. And there are also technologies on the near horizon that are just astonishing in their capacity to reduce reductions. We're in for some climate change. We're already experiencing. We can't roll that back. But we certainly can't avert disaster because what we're facing in even if every nation on earth abided by the Paris Agreement, temperatures would rise between 2.7 and 3.7 degrees Celsius.”
2022-05-16 · Intelligence Squared · How to Avert the Climate Catastrophe and a Financial Meltdown, with Eugene Linden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Technologies now to vastly reduce the carbon intensity of steel production, for instance, one at 8 billion tons a year, 10% of emissions, right? 2 billion tons a year, sorry, 8% of emissions. You can actually take carbon out of the atmosphere, combine it with calcium, and make synthetic limestone, which can be used in concrete. In other words, we have technologies off the shelf with no breakthroughs needed to do things. We need the will to do it. Now, I did mention that we have this fundamental blind spot in the way we do business. We've created an economy that is built to drive off cliffs. And we have to sort of figure out how not to do that. That, I think, will require some political change. We also, I think,”
2022-05-16 · Intelligence Squared · How to Avert the Climate Catastrophe and a Financial Meltdown, with Eugene Linden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But good because with capital, you get innovation. And what we, another parallel with COVID is what we saw was that when the global community acts together, we got a vaccine in a year. The previous vaccine took seven years to make. We now see an explosion of innovation in battery technology and storage technology, all these things. EVs have expanded far more rapidly than anybody expected 15 years ago. And these transitions can occur rapidly. We have...”
2022-05-16 · Intelligence Squared · How to Avert the Climate Catastrophe and a Financial Meltdown, with Eugene Linden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, one, the delay has cost us dearly two and a half billion people have been added to the population. The average person globally emits about four tons of greenhouse gases. This is responsible for four tons of emissions, more actually 4.7 a year. That's 10 billion tons more than we had in 1990 when it was already a problem. So the rock is that much bigger, the hill is that much steeper, the time is that much shorter. That said We do see these remarkable changes. The business community and finance community was a drag anchor for most of the climate change era. Now it's really understanding that this is a risk fundamental risk and it's hard upon us. And so things are rapidly changing. One thing that's happening is that money is flowing in to renewables and into all these innovations. And that's nothing.”
2022-05-16 · Intelligence Squared · How to Avert the Climate Catastrophe and a Financial Meltdown, with Eugene Linden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, back when we needed economists in the IPCC to sort of say, we've got to do something now, they were saying we have tons of time”
2022-05-16 · Intelligence Squared · How to Avert the Climate Catastrophe and a Financial Meltdown, with Eugene Linden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When Nordhaus was intellectually honest, he was trying to do the right thing, but some of his assumptions were absurd. One of them was that since 87% of the U.S. economy is indoors, it's not going to be affected by climate change. Now, a junior high school student could shoot holes in that assumption. I mean, the port of New Orleans probably thinks, well, we are in fact a Houston hit by Hurricane Harvard. We're affected. Those in the fires. But anyway, that was one of his assumptions. But at the same time, he pulled scientists for the costs of climate change in the future. Their average estimate were 30 times the estimates of the economists he poll, because they actually understood that the derivative effects of climate change were going to affect agriculture and everything else.”
2022-05-16 · Intelligence Squared · How to Avert the Climate Catastrophe and a Financial Meltdown, with Eugene Linden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Inconsequential effects on GDP 120 years out or 110 years out in 2021. One model, I think it is a paper rolling the dice 1993 paper, I think he had an estimate of a quarter of 1% hit to GDP in the US in 2100 from climate change. Put that in perspective. I mean, he said, Oh, maybe it'll go up to 1%. No one is going to jump out of their chair and say, we got to do something if it's that inconsequential. And indeed, William Niscannon, another libertarian economist who is then head of the Cato Institute, took those estimates and went to Congress and said, well, here we have this distinguished economist, here we have the IPCC. It looks like the cost of doing nothing right now are very slim and the costs of climate change are not far off in the future and not very much.”
2022-05-16 · Intelligence Squared · How to Avert the Climate Catastrophe and a Financial Meltdown, with Eugene Linden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Encourage ambiguity, mute the language, call for more study. As a consequence, that first study gave tons of ammunition to those who would delay action. I'll give you an example. One of the notable economists who was an early, who made early attempts to try to integrate the costs of climate change into economic models, a guy named William Nordhaus at Yale. He would take the IPC studies where there would be statements saying the thermal inertia of the oceans will delay any signal from warming many decades into the next century. Other ambiguities that would be amplified by those who would amplify them. And he created these models to try and model the costs. And his early models came up with”
2022-05-16 · Intelligence Squared · How to Avert the Climate Catastrophe and a Financial Meltdown, with Eugene Linden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And what happened was the very structure of the IPCC created opportunities for those who would delay action in the sense that these are giant reports, 8,000 pages, something like that. But all that most policymakers would read would be the summary for policymakers. It's like 40, 90 pages at the beginning of the report, or the press release about the summary for policymakers. And that is where the chapters in all these reports were totally undertaken with intellectual honesty. But every country on earth is a participant in this process pretty much. And a lot of these countries, Saudi Arabia notably and others, were petro economies and did not want action on climate change. Also business interests at that point did not want action on climate change. And at every opportunity, they would try and...”
2022-05-16 · Intelligence Squared · How to Avert the Climate Catastrophe and a Financial Meltdown, with Eugene Linden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because nothing happens if you think you have time, but something worse actually happened. The IPCC, which I'm sure all of your listeners know about, this giant consortium of scientists and policymakers, was formed to sort of aggregate the state-of-the-art science on the issue and issue a series of reports, assessments.”
2022-05-16 · Intelligence Squared · How to Avert the Climate Catastrophe and a Financial Meltdown, with Eugene Linden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Chinese leadership was totally freaked out by Tiananmen Square just a few years earlier. And they wanted to drive economic progress down to the middle class and the poorer people as fast as possible. So they wanted to industrialize very rapidly. Now there were those who were arguing that they could leapfrog. And indeed, there was an economic argument without a grid in many parts of China for distributed power and all that and renewables. But no frogs left. I mean, again, the mixed messages coming from the West, and we weren't willing to help subsidize or pay for any of that, those of us in the West. But, all right, so that's one part of it. But another part of it was, again, this pernicious notion that we had time. And I say pernicious.”
2022-05-16 · Intelligence Squared · How to Avert the Climate Catastrophe and a Financial Meltdown, with Eugene Linden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, they had the coal. China had the fourth largest coal reserves in the world. So it's sitting there attempting. And also they look at the West and we're basically saying, do as we say, not as we do. So we weren't speaking with one voice. And the other thing is that to a degree I didn't appreciate until I started doing research on the book.”
2022-05-16 · Intelligence Squared · How to Avert the Climate Catastrophe and a Financial Meltdown, with Eugene Linden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I wrote the story. Next thing you know, George H.W. Bush is out in the harbor with a bullhorn saying, I'm going to clean up Boston Harbor. And Boston Harbor, this may not resonate with the British audience, but releasing a convicted murderer named Willie Horton. And then the picture of Dukakis in a tank where he looked absurd were the three things that basically helped propel bush into the White House, even though I didn't want him to be there.”
2022-05-16 · Intelligence Squared · How to Avert the Climate Catastrophe and a Financial Meltdown, with Eugene Linden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. Well, I was writing for time back then, and I got a call from a guy named Mike Deland who was in the EPA, and he said, you know, Dukakis may have made the biggest sort of most expensive mistake in the history of the EPA in the sense that Boston Harvard was a sewer in the 1980s. It was disgusting. And back then, if you had a certain timeframe that you could apply for federal money and they'd assume 90% of the cost of cleaning it up and Dukakis didn't do that. And he called it the most expensive public policy mistake in the history of New England. That's what this got DeLand told me. So I thought that's a story. And I'm nonpartisan as a journalist. So I thought I'll write the story. And I go up to Boston. I ask Dukakis about it. And he said and his people, and they said, we're proud of our record on Boston Harbor. And I thought that's ridiculous.”
2022-05-16 · Intelligence Squared · How to Avert the Climate Catastrophe and a Financial Meltdown, with Eugene Linden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Can do it now, but I mean, the US does bear a lot of responsibility for the lack of action. And it's because of the seesaw politics. And going back to renewables and this notion that had we spoken with one voice, we might have shifted. A lot of people say renewables weren't ready in the early 90s. And to a degree, they're right. But I use the analogy. It's like a football coach who shoots a star player in the leg and then benches him because he's not ready to play. Renewables, had we continued and the momentum in the development in any of those administrations, they would have reached grid parity long before when they did. They've all reached grid parity now, but that could have been advanced because of the economies of scale and everything else that would have come in had China chosen to do a NIX portfolio of renewables and fossil fuels to power their industrial...”
2022-05-16 · Intelligence Squared · How to Avert the Climate Catastrophe and a Financial Meltdown, with Eugene Linden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That was right before the issue became politicized and mobilizing public opinion basically went out the window. Of course, after Clinton, we had George W. Bush. And again, appointing Foxes to guard chicken coops in terms of the environment and climate. I mean, coal lobbyists took over the interior department, for instance. And once again, the issue is the back borner and people are saying it's a hoax. Then Obama comes in and then Trump. And so we had the seesaw in the largest economy in the world between treating the issue as serious and then half the time, literally 16 years of the climate era, treating it as either a hoax or a threat to business. That mixed message registered on the rest of the world. We were not the leader. As you recall, the US dropped out of the Paris Agreement. That's the opposite of leadership. I mean, we're back.”
2022-05-16 · Intelligence Squared · How to Avert the Climate Catastrophe and a Financial Meltdown, with Eugene Linden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To totally cause the president to reverse course. Then Clinton comes into office. And Al Gore is his vice president, whose nickname was global warming in the White House. And I went to participated in a White House conference on climate change in the late 1980s. Clinton said, You know, I'm with you. I want to do something. I believe this is real, but I can't get ahead of the American people. In essence, he was paraphrasing something that FDR had said in the 30s where he said, you've convinced me and I go out and make me do it. And what he was throwing the ball back to the participants in the thing saying, you need to mobilize public opinion.”
2022-05-16 · Intelligence Squared · How to Avert the Climate Catastrophe and a Financial Meltdown, with Eugene Linden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Fast forward. And this is one of my iconic stories in the book George H.W. Bush is elected. And some of you may remember that in 1988, when he was running for office, environment was a big deal. We made a Time magazine Planet Earth the Man of the Year. And climate was one of the main sections. And he made a speech in 88 in which he said, Those of you who are worried about the greenhouse effect should consider the White House effect. And he promised to have a conference on climate change and was going to do all these things somewhere between when he was running for president and when he became president, the lobbyist effect came into play. Yes, he ultimately had that conference, but no participant was allowed to mention global warming. Which is akin to having a conference on pandemics today and not being able to mention COVID. So what that showed you was the power of the fossil fuel lobby.”
2022-05-16 · Intelligence Squared · How to Avert the Climate Catastrophe and a Financial Meltdown, with Eugene Linden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We were off by 15 years. We began to see changes in the very next decade, but they were dead right. And it's a remarkable given the understanding of climate at that time that they made that statement. So then, of course, Carter was driven not as much by the notion of energy independence as he was by climate change in terms of promoting renewables because keep in mind at the same time he was also promoting coal because the OPEC oil embargo the long gas lines and everything else registered deep in the American psyche. So then the Iran hostage crisis happens Reagan comes into office with a quasi-libertarian agenda and appoints a bunch of foxes to guard every chicken coop and all action on climate basic goes into the back burner action on renewables go into the back burner.”
2022-05-16 · Intelligence Squared · How to Avert the Climate Catastrophe and a Financial Meltdown, with Eugene Linden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That is another of the tragedies of this story, and that is Carter, of course. He was open it. He was a nuclear engineer. So he was open to the science of climate change. And he appointed very good people. And they put together this blue ribbon panel. It got presidential attention. That's why I date the book from then, because that was the first time the issue got presidential attention. And by the way, we were already 25% above pre-industrial levels in terms of greenhouse gases. One of the prescient quotes in that report, this Blue Ribbon panel report, was that if we don't take action, we may see changes in climate by the year 2000. This is 1979.”
2022-05-16 · Intelligence Squared · How to Avert the Climate Catastrophe and a Financial Meltdown, with Eugene Linden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Denial movement, and you saw a kind of partisanship enter the debate on climate change. And the problem is, as we've seen with COVID in bold relief, is that once an issue becomes politicized, the facts don't matter. If the messenger is deemed to be illegitimate, you're just going to tune out. And that's one of the reasons I said that at the beginning of the book, because chances are if you don't accept climate change at this point, not because of the science, it's because of partisan reasons. And so the business community was probably the most underappreciated, but the most consequential clock of all. And for most of the climate change era, they viewed regulation as a threat. In recent years, however, there's been a dramatic change, at least among the larger businesses, the large financial institutions and the multinationals now see climate change.”
2022-05-16 · Intelligence Squared · How to Avert the Climate Catastrophe and a Financial Meltdown, with Eugene Linden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Basically designed to fight regulation of tobacco and then find regulation of ozone harming chemicals. But they didn't just mobilize with climate change. They basically mounted a blitzkrieg. And the playbook involved dispute the science, dispute the consensus, dispute the motives of the scientists, but most of all say we have time. And if you say, let's continue to study something we have time, you're never going to act on it. The public, but then one other thing happened at the end of the 90s that was, I think, the worst thing of all. And that was the issue became politicized. With the passing of the Kyoto Treaty, business thought, oh, this regulation is coming. And so they began to paint climate change as part of a liberal agenda. And this is in the English-speaking countries, the UK, Canada, the United States, and Australia.”
2022-05-16 · Intelligence Squared · How to Avert the Climate Catastrophe and a Financial Meltdown, with Eugene Linden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Saying the public was in the 90s when we were in the 2010s on climate change was actually giving them more credit than due. The public, even a couple of years ago, 45% of people polled by Gallup said that they didn't believe they'd see serious consequences from climate change in their lifetimes. This is even as we're seeing serious consequences from climate change. That's a fascinating story because what happened is that the business community, my fourth clock, got involved in the story early on and realized they felt that regulation would be a threat to profits. And so fossil fuel industry sort of led the way, but other industries joined in at every turn fought regulation related to climate change and were a drag anchor. And they used a playbook. This is the business community that was basically...”
2022-05-16 · Intelligence Squared · How to Avert the Climate Catastrophe and a Financial Meltdown, with Eugene Linden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For also duration, storms coming into an area and dumping tens of inches of rain just because they were moving so slowly. And so all these things began to happen. The scientific community was given the impossible job of trying to understand a phenomenon even as it's unfolding. In other words, they're trying to, they come up with the paradigm of climate change even as we're undergoing a rapid climate change event. And so you have a structural lag to reality just by the nature of science. You've got to gather the data. You have to analyze it, peer review it, then publish it. So it's a couple of years behind reality. The public is basically influenced by the financial community and by the scientists to some degree. But mostly it was disengaged.”
2022-05-16 · Intelligence Squared · How to Avert the Climate Catastrophe and a Financial Meltdown, with Eugene Linden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I use that device to try and unpack what happened in a comprehensible way. First, we have reality. And of course, we began to see hottest years in the 80s, six out of the ten years were among the ten hottest years ever recorded. But even back then, I mean, back then, it was not clear that you could disentangle the noise from the signal. In other words, it might have been random variation. By the 90s, which again had year after year after year of record-breaking heat, it became clear that something new was going on. And then, of course, we in the 2010s, we began to see a lot more than record fires around Australia and the United States, Siberia, all over the world, anomalous storms and ugly surprises. Like, for instance, rapid intensification of hurricanes. We see hurricanes going from category one to category five in a matter of 24 hours, which really hadn't happened before.”
2022-05-16 · Intelligence Squared · How to Avert the Climate Catastrophe and a Financial Meltdown, with Eugene Linden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In the 90s, the early 90s, because that's when the decisions were made by India and China to industrialize with coal. In 1990, China produced about 3.4 billion tons of greenhouse gases from coal. 1918, they produced 11 billion tons of greenhouse gases from toll and coal. And had they chosen a different development path, had we spoken with one voice to China and other emerging economies back then? Had we actually put the effort into renewables that we could have done, the world would be a different place today, but we didn't.”
2022-05-16 · Intelligence Squared · How to Avert the Climate Catastrophe and a Financial Meltdown, with Eugene Linden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT