YouSaid · the spoken record

Johan Rockström

lines on the record: 60
first: 2025-11-24
most recent: 2025-11-24
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“We can do it. I'm trying to do whatever I can to push it in that direction. As I always say like this, I always present these kind of more positive visions of the future as an opportunity because they're not inevitability. It's going to take us to actually make it happen. But my key point is always that option is there and it's up to us to go and take it.”
2025-11-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What the climate story gets wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I think many of these issues were at a crossroads. We're in a very good position to make the right choice and go down the pathway that not only protects us, but also protects the future generations and the opportunities that they have. And there's a not so good pathway. So I hope that looking back on this, my niece in 50 years would be proud that we took the better path, not just for us, but for her and also for the next generation that comes after her. So I would hope that she would look back and I guess be proud and satisfied that we made the right choice rather than the wrong one.”
2025-11-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What the climate story gets wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You dedicate the book to your niece, who will very likely, unlike me, live to see the twenty second century if she, her name, is her name Maeve or Maeva. If she listens to this conversation in fifty years, what do you hope she says about this period and about our generation?”
2025-11-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What the climate story gets wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think the narrative component of this is really key. When it comes to tackling climate change or environmental problems, often the narrative is framed around the danger and the risk, right? And I think that was really, really successful and important in having people understand the problem of climate change, want to be able to take action against it. But as we discussed earlier, most people are convinced, right? So that job is done. I think what's really key from here now is helping people understand the solutions and what we need to do. And what's really fundamental is that people need to know that there are ways that we can solve this. And in the process of solving this, you also bring a host of other benefits. So is that positive vision of in 2050, what do you want the world to look like? And can you provide a vision in a”
2025-11-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What the climate story gets wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Are circling around a question that's sort of central to every political project or movement, which is how the hell do we motivate people? How do we inspire people to do something or to change what they're doing?”
2025-11-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What the climate story gets wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of these technologies in this transition and then supporting political parties or leaders that are willing to make that change and basically putting your money on the table for companies that are also trying to shift in that direction.”
2025-11-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What the climate story gets wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The way we talk about climate and its solutions, I think really has quite a profound impact on public discussion more broadly. And I think that filters up to how governments feel about taking action and about how companies feel about taking action. If you have a populist that can see the potential of clean energy, wants to shift away from gasoline cars to electrified transport or wants to develop cities that run on public transport, if you have a populist that's really passionate about that, I think it makes a huge difference to, I guess you might frame it bravery of the government or willingness of the government, the incentives for companies to get involved and take action. And I think that starts with us as individuals. And I think that means having really honest discussions with others about your willingness to change and the benefits.”
2025-11-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What the climate story gets wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We sort of wrap up here. I wanted to bring this back to the question of what can people do that matters. What rises to the top of that list? What institutions, what governments should do, can do is a separate question. What can I do that matters? What can everyday people do that matters?”
2025-11-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What the climate story gets wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You not brought your plastic bag right come on, we're all predicting the environment here. You have to bring your plastic bag. So, people really, really care and think about the plastic bag, but the reality is that they then wander around a supermarket not thinking at all about the environmental impact of the food products that they're buying. And if you were to weigh up the environmental impacts of the stuff they're buying and putting in the bag, you know, it's probably thousands to tens of thousands times more than actually just the environmental impact of the bag. So that's just one example of where what people are focusing on is really skewed from the reality of what makes the most difference.”
2025-11-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What the climate story gets wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Still recycle And I mean, if you recycle too, you should continue recycling. I think the marginal benefits of recycling, especially materials like plastic, are very small. And that's just because in order to recycle stuff requires energy and the amount of energy required to make new plastics is actually quite small. They're really light materials. So the net benefit there is often quite unclear, maybe marginally on the side of recycling, but it's not this huge benefit. And when you zoom out and look at the climate impact of that relative to all of the other behaviors that make up your carbon footprint, it's extremely, extremely small. So I often use this example of, I don't know if it's a big thing in the US, but in the UK we have like a, you now have to, if you go to supermarket, you have to pay for a plastic bag. It's quite cheap, but you have to pay. But that's drastically changed the social fabric and expectations, right? So, you know, if you go to the supermarket and you don't have a plastic bag, why?”
2025-11-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What the climate story gets wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I think people focus way too much on plastic from a climate perspective. I think if you talk to people about environmental problems or what they're doing. Solve environmental problems, the first thing they see is recycling.”
2025-11-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What the climate story gets wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For direct air capture no, if I'm honest, the physics of that is extremely hard. Even people working on carbon removal and climate scientists always really reiterate carbon removal was only really helpful if we dramatically reduce emissions. You know, carbon removal is there to try and tackle the last 5% or 10% of emissions that we're really, really struggling to eliminate. We need to get rid of the 90% first. And then that's when we'll start to rely on these carbon removal technologies.”
2025-11-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What the climate story gets wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Very few of them are at scale at the moment. Most of them are kind of in the early stage research and development stage. And that ranges from, I think what people envision when they think about carbon removal, which is direct air capture. It's basically a giant fan that basically tries to pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and store it underground. The issue there is it uses a lot of energy and that means it's expensive, right? So to remove a ton of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is extremely expensive. And I think there are very few governments or companies that would be willing to pay at the current price. So a huge part of that is trying to basically bring down the price and make it more affordable and feasible.”
2025-11-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What the climate story gets wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, if you look at kind of any of her most models of how globally we get to what we call net zero emissions, which is basically that we're not adding more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than we're sucking out, the reality is that there's basically almost no pathway that gets completely to zero without any carbon removal whatsoever. We're going to need some carbon removal 20, 30, 40 years from now. The question is, you know, what are the specific technologies or solutions that are going to have the largest impact? And there are a range of solutions, there are what we call more natural carbon removal technologies, i.e. trees, they suck carbon dioxide of the atmosphere.”
2025-11-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What the climate story gets wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Last thing I wanted to ask about was on carbon removal. It is not a silver bullet. We can definitely say that. But it's also not a fantasy either. What is the most realistic role that can play in getting us to net zero?”
2025-11-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What the climate story gets wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I'm a vegan, but I do try to really reiterate this point that this is not all or nothing. I think for most people, they're not going to go vegan tomorrow. But many people are willing to think about or even start reducing the amount of meat they eat. And the reality is if you run the numbers on this, we'll make much more progress. 50% of the population reduced their meat intake a bit than you would from a few percent going completely vegan.”
2025-11-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What the climate story gets wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Those are huge numbers. I'm not a vegan. I still do eat steak, among other things, but I have tried to cut back. And I think it was such a problem that it often got framed sort of in binary terms, right? Either you had to just eliminate meat or eat meat all the time. When in fact, even just eating less could make a substantial difference if enough people did it.”
2025-11-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What the climate story gets wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Half of that is used for farming. So we use huge amounts of land for farming. And what's really key there is that there are huge differences in the environmental impact of different products. As a brief summary, animal products tend to use more land, emit more greenhouse gas emissions, use more water, any impact really, use much more than plant-based products. And actually there's a kind of ranking there among animal products where generally the large animals, largest animals have the highest impact and the smallest have the lowest, right? So as an individual, one of the biggest environmental changes you can make to have a positive impact is shift to a more plant-based diet. That would make a huge difference. And as you said, if we were to have a hypothetical world where everyone went vegan tomorrow, we would reduce our agricultural land use by 75%. So this huge drop in the amount of land we're using for farming.”
2025-11-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What the climate story gets wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think for here we've focused on climate change and we always focus on fossil fuels when it comes to climate change. And I think actually agriculture is a very underrated environmental problem. In fact, like if you were to take almost any environmental problem where it's land use, biodiversity loss, deforestation, freshwater use, water pollution, agriculture is the leading cause of all of those environmental problems by far. It's not even carpargo. Climate change, it's responsible between a quarter to a third. So even for climate change, it's a huge contributing factor to the problem. And I think many people vastly underestimate this. And I think what people vastly underestimate is how much we've made the world into a giant farm, right? So if you're to look at how much of what we call habitable land, so that's land that's not a desert or is not glaciers or that we couldn't use or other ecosystems couldn't use.”
2025-11-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What the climate story gets wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then there's agriculture, and you say that we could cut global farmland use by half, maybe even more than half, actually, and still feed everyone if we got serious about efficiency. What would that require? How realistic is it politically or culturally?”
2025-11-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What the climate story gets wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Millions of people dying from local air pollution every single year. And most of that is coming from burning fossil fuels. So you have in nuclear's entire history has killed thousands. Fossil fuels Comwins every single year. So when you break down the comparative risks there you're talking about nuclear being hundreds to thousand of times more safe per unit of electricity than fossil fuels. So the notion that we should ban or close nuclear plants and keep fossil fuel plants running just doesn't make sense from a safety perspective whatsoever.”
2025-11-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What the climate story gets wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Fukushima was the most recent one in Japan. Again, no one directly died from that nuclear disaster. You know, you had a tsunami hit us, a nuclear plant, and no one died. And then there was Chernobyl, which was arguably the worst and caused the most damage. In estimates vary, but they range from maybe up to 400 up to 4,000 deaths, right? But if you combine all of the disastrous nuclear events in history, you're talking about thousands of deaths, right, which is tragic. But what's really key here is if you compare that to the amount of people that have died from born in fossil fuels. And here I'm actually, even if you just take climate change out of the equation, you know, we have...”
2025-11-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What the climate story gets wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Everyone can name them. They were in the news, they're in the history books, you can make best-selling drama series about these events. And if you tally up the number of people that have died, so there's been three big events. So the Freemile Island in the US where no one died.”
2025-11-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What the climate story gets wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, or nuclear, I think historically has been hated by a lot of people with an environmental leaning, like it hasn't been the kind of poster child for environmentalism. And I think the key reason for that has been the safety aspect, as you say. So it is a very clean source of electricity. It doesn't really emit carbon dioxide except in some of the manufacturing of the stuff. In the first place, it uses very little land, right? So if you wanted to build an energy system using as little land as possible, you would choose nuclear power. But when it comes to safety, people are, I think, quite rightly concerned about the risks of nuclear disasters. The key point is that no energy source is safe, right? And I think nuclear has such a deep place in people's minds as us.”
2025-11-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What the climate story gets wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You start talking about what to build or what to prioritize politically and otherwise it gets you into some let's call them contested topics in the climate world And I just want to start with nuclear. You call that one of the most misunderstood technologies in the climate debate. What is the evidence actually say about nuclear? Don't really know how to feel about nuclear. I know it's clean. I know it doesn't use up a lot of land, but also it's perceived with some cause as dangerous.”
2025-11-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What the climate story gets wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, some of that is good, but I think those countries also need to be able to build out a kind of national level grid to be able to reach everyone or that inequality, I think, in those countries will just widen.”
2025-11-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What the climate story gets wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think it will take some time for that to play out and see how the dynamics of the energy systems in those countries work. One of my concerns there, I think this is generally quite positive. Seeing solar panels being exported from China to these countries is very positive. I still have some concerns about the inequality of some of those dynamics where Actually for those countries you would like them to build a centralized grid system. It makes it able to supply energy to industries, develop a large national economy, make sure that everyone has access to electricity and low cost electricity. What you're maybe seeing at the moment is that solar power going to the richest people within those countries, right? That can afford to buy solar panels themselves. So I think there is this dynamic.”
2025-11-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What the climate story gets wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I really like that you point out a lot of these developing countries might actually have a head start in the clean energy race, precisely because they are not locked into the old shitty, dirty infrastructure, right? Which it kind of flips the usual story about who's ahead and who's behind and what sort of growth could happen over the next few decades or so.”
2025-11-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What the climate story gets wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Rich countries often, if there are loans or financial agreements for poor countries to build out energy systems, basically won't support anything that includes any fossil fuels at all in those agreements, which does, I think, highlight this hypocrisy. I think some of the dynamics of that are changing where this deadlock is breaking. I think the You're starting to see actually quite promising data where especially countries like Pakistan, for example, is a good example, or many countries across Africa, you've started to see in the last year or two quite large exports of solar panels from China to those countries. Actually, they're quite rapid uptick, which is very promising and does, I think, give some opportunity for those countries to what we would might call leapfrog.”
2025-11-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What the climate story gets wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Large amounts of their population living in energy poverty naturally they want to escape that naturally they want to prosper and there is this sense of you know but you can't use fossil fuels to do that of course you can't use fossil fuels now you know we have global climate change and that hypocrisy is very is still very very clear because you know even if you were to argue you know countries like the UK or the US you know historically we used fossil fuels and now we're transitioning but if you compare the amount per person of fossil fuels we're still using it is vastly vastly vastly more than the poorest countries in the world so even if you look at the situation today there's still huge inequality in the amount of fossil fuels that different countries are using but there has been this this this case where”
2025-11-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What the climate story gets wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think, yeah, I think there has been this rich world hypocrisy where countries like the UK, where I'm from, we have basically built our prosperity on building energy system running on fossil fuels, right? I have the life I have today, which is a nice life because my ancestors used fossil fuels to build infrastructure, to build our economy. They burned a lot, right, to get us to where we are now. And they basically had free reign of that where they could do that without any global climate agreements or without any countries telling them, oh, no, that'll put you over the carbon budget. There was none of those constraints, right? So many of the world's richest countries got to do that without any limits or constraints. And now we're in a situation where many of the world's poorest countries basically want to do the same, right?”
2025-11-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What the climate story gets wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“On the international level, I mean, we have or we have had this problem of rich world hypocrisy. You have countries telling poorer nations not to develop in ways that they did. Is that kind of hypocrisy still holding back the global energy transition? Or for all these technological reasons, is it just not the impediment? It was 10 or 20 or 30 years ago.”
2025-11-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What the climate story gets wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Often, what's been effective is basically states having the capacity and the power to build what they want to build and set the kind of rules they would like. And that's kind of naturally resulted in lots of states building renewables. So I think if you went down to the state level, lots of governors and legislators there were very happy to build out clean energy, right? But in the last year, definitely the national level when it comes to politics, I mean, basically there's a ban on building new renewable energy products and they've been put really far down the list. So I think there actually is a very clear disconnect there between what's now the national political take on building out clean energy and actually what at a state level many people would want to do.”
2025-11-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What the climate story gets wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sounds like the politics are sort of already changing. Maybe we just haven't caught up with it yet, or it's changing so quickly. It just takes some time for everyone to readjust. But it seems like the political argument is almost one here. It's just a question of how and where and how quickly”
2025-11-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What the climate story gets wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yet Texas is going hard on solar power and batteries, and a bunch of other red states have been really forthcoming with wind. So they've built a lot of wind power. So actually the majority of the US is wind power is coming from red states.”
2025-11-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What the climate story gets wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Having a kind of legislative environment that allows you to build stuff relatively quickly without large bottlenecks has been really, really key. And red states have taken that on and built a ton of clean energy regardless of the climate reasons for doing so.”
2025-11-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What the climate story gets wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The political situation has shifted a lot in the last year. But if you were to look at the build-out of renewable power across the US and historical data, the majority of the stuff was being built in red states, right? And it wasn't necessarily because they were really focused on getting to net zero or reducing their emissions. Often local air pollution would come up as a key problem, right? So a lot of people are more motivated by addressing local environmental problems than global climate change, but also the focus on energy independence for landowners in states along the wind belt. There's just an additional source of income, right? So why not put up a wind farm and get some extra income, generate some clean energy. So framing it in that way in red states has actually been, and especially...”
2025-11-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What the climate story gets wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Stupid, but in American politics, at least the climate problem is just left coded. It just is. And so like everything else, it gets polarized and split along ideological lines in that way. It doesn't have to be like that.”
2025-11-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What the climate story gets wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Psychology of this is hard. I think a lot of the data suggests is that often to, I guess, if you want to say win the psychological argument, some of the recommendations there are actually not to focus on the climate problem, but instead to just focus on the kind of energy security, innovation, technology dimension of this, which for many people seems progressive, right? You know, moving forward, building new stuff rather than focusing on the climate problem, which is focusing, I guess, on the negative, right? And especially in more skeptical audiences, as we said earlier, the promoting the good stuff tends to work better than really restricting what we would frame as the bad stuff, like the fossil banning fossil fuels. That messaging tends to not work very well. Well for particular audiences”
2025-11-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What the climate story gets wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“An electric vehicles, and basically electrification, right? So, some countries like the US are stuck in this mindset where they see the kind of green transition as a step back and incompatible with growth because they are used to growth being powered by huge energy giants and fossil fuel use. And I think that's disconnected from reality. I can see that starting to shift slightly, but it's certainly shifting much slower in countries like the US than elsewhere.”
2025-11-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What the climate story gets wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think in some countries it's more of a problem than in others. I think the US is a good example where I think the US does very much still have this mindset that its growth has been based on fossil fuels and neurodrill baby drill and that's how it's became this economic superpower and therefore you know going for the kind of tree hugging green stuff would be a step backwards. And I think that's a very, very different psychology from how many other countries in the world are viewing this. So the contrast there is China where China I think is now seeing fossil fuels as the and petrol cars is as the technologies of the 20th century and it wants to build the technologies of the 21st century and that is solar and wind in batteries.”
2025-11-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What the climate story gets wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And climate action are not opposites. Maybe Not any longer Seems like more of the bottlenecks are almost emotional. Like we have the means to grow differently. Just not enough of us believe it yet. How much of a problem is this in your mind?”
2025-11-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What the climate story gets wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. So when I was looking at this 10 years ago, even when globally we signed the Paris Agreement, you know, these really ambitious climate goals, we were in a situation where the alternatives to fossil fuels for electricity like solar and wind were hugely more expensive than coal or gas. And to me at that time, it seemed totally implausible that the world was just going to pick these really expensive energy sources in order to solve climate change. What's happened over the last decade is that the cost of these substitutes have plummeted, right? So solar has fallen by around 80 to 90 percent, wind by 70%.”
2025-11-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What the climate story gets wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, that's a huge point, right? Getting people to stop doing things they like or stop doing things that they're accustomed to is hard. It's a hard sell. But if you can offer them substitutes for the things they like instead of asking them to sacrifice, is this part of what makes you an optimist on this, at least politically, that may be increasingly we do have the tools to create these cleaner substitutes and that changes the politics of climate?”
2025-11-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What the climate story gets wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, even if you say you care about climate change, you might not be willing to spend a ton of money on a more climate-friendly alternative, for example. So what I always try to make really clearly there is that people are receptive to climate solutions and taking action. But what's really, really key is that the alternatives they need to be available for people and they need to be cheap and affordable for them. They will generally not pay more for those solutions and many people cannot pay more actually for the climate-friendly alternative.”
2025-11-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What the climate story gets wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“About climate change and want to see more action on it, and I think that is not portrayed very clearly to the public. It's not portrayed very clearly to politicians or the media. The one kind of key caveat I would make to that is that, you know, saying you care about climate change does not necessarily mean you follow through really strongly with climate-friendly behaviors or climate-friendly purchases, right?”
2025-11-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What the climate story gets wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Even in the US, there's a majority, right? You can also look at the polarization in that, right? So generally a higher share of people on the left say yes relative to the right. And that's the case in most countries. In most countries, that partisan gap is much, much smaller than people imagine. In some countries, it's basically non-existent. In the US, the partisan gap is still large, right? But even on the right, a lot of people do care about climate change. And actually, if you ask Republicans, they also vastly underestimate how many other Republicans care about climate change. So it seems to be this kind of underlying secret that, you know, you don't talk about climate change, but you do actually care and worry about climate change. So that tends to be the dynamic. You can then argue whether people care enough, right? And I think that's a very relative term. You know, what's your enough versus my enough? But they generally say they care.”
2025-11-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What the climate story gets wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So there are a number of international surveys on this where they ask people about whether they believe in climate change, you know, is it human caused? Should governments take more action? Do they care about it us taking action? And what's really clear is that in every country the majority of people say yes to all of the above. So they think climate change is happening and they want governments and people need to.”
2025-11-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What the climate story gets wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One thing that really comes through in your work is that The world is actually improving faster than we think, than most people think. And yet for some of the reasons you've already mentioned the public mood still feels pretty grim. But there is, however, a chart early in the book that shows that most people underestimate how much others care about climate action, even in the US. And I confess that I've probably said many times on this very show that most Americans don't care enough about this issue. And that's a massive political problem for people who do. But am I wrong about this? I mean, how much do people actually care about the climate according to the data that you've seen?”
2025-11-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What the climate story gets wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Economic systems to change this. And I think that's a false dichotomy. I think both really, really matter here. What's really key is that governments, companies, investors, etc., they play a huge role in making the alternatives to the drivers of climate change, so fossil fuels, for example. They play a huge role in making good decisions on what energy sources we build, what products are available, so an electric vehicle versus a petrol vehicle or public transport. They play a huge role in making that available, making that easy for people to switch and making it cost effective or affordable for people to switch. They play a huge role in that. But as individuals, if they put in that effort, as individuals, we can't sit in our hands and say, you know, we're not going to move from the petrol car to electric vehicle or we're not going to shift to a more plant-based diet as individuals, we play a key role in driving the systemic”
2025-11-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · What the climate story gets wrong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT