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Climate leadership comes from each and everyone of us, not just the United Nations, says Project Drawdown’s Executive Director Jon Foley on the Climate Curious. In conversation with Maryam Pasha and Ben Hurst, tune in to learn how we invigorate a new sort of bottom-up climate leadership, which climate solutions are the best and should be accelerated, why Jon thinks climate doomists are worse than deniers, and why fossil fuels are dead men walking.
Created by TEDxLondon
Executive produced by Josie Colter
Produced by Ben Beheshty
Hosted by Maryam Pasha and Ben Hurst
Communications by Tara Cooper and Issey Gladston
00:00 Introduction
00:54 Guest introduction: Jonathan Foley and Project Drawdown
02:24 Understanding climate change and solutions
05:14 The role of leadership in climate action
10:55 Global emissions trends and challenges
17:07 The power of technology and market forces
19:46 The importance of hope and action
24:47 Breaking down climate solutions
27:01 Comprehensive climate solutions
28:09 The role of carbon removal
29:38 Challenges with industrial carbon removal
31:52 Societal transformations and climate
36:53 Effective climate solutions
43:09 Empowering local climate action
49:27 The power of individual actions
54:43 Conclusion
Transcript
[00:00:00] Jon Foley: Even people I do disagree with vehemently on politics or what are social issues. I know that they love their children. I know that they, you know, care about their communities and they want a better future. I’ve never actually met a person who doesn’t. Neither of you,
[00:00:16] Ben Hurst: this. Is Climate Curious, the podcast for people who are bored, scared, or confused by climate change?
[00:00:23] Maryam Pasha: I’m Maryam Pasha, the director and curator at Telex London, and the co-host of this podcast alongside the amazing Ben.
[00:00:29] Ben Hurst: Hi, [00:00:30] I’m Ben Hurst, activist and advocate exploring what positive masculinities can look like and self-confessed climate. Nomi.
[00:00:41] Maryam Pasha: Hi, Ben.
[00:00:42] Ben Hurst: Hello. Hello. How you doing? Yeah, I’m good. I feel, yeah.
[00:00:44] Maryam Pasha: You feel
[00:00:45] Ben Hurst: I’m, I was gonna say, I feel interested in today’s episode. I feel like this is like a, a big deal. I dunno, this is a big deal. A thinky one. This is like a thinky
[00:00:54] Maryam Pasha: one.
[00:00:54] Guest Introduction: Jonathan Foley and Project Drawdown
[00:00:54] Maryam Pasha: I would say that like, so the reason I’m excited about our guest is that when I started to really start [00:01:00] thinking and working on, on climate.
[00:01:02] Maryam Pasha: In the big sense about around 2020, you know Jonathan Foley, who is the executive director of Project Drawdown, his work at Project Drawdown was the place I went to to figure out what climate change really meant. Because honestly, up until that point, I was just like, climate change bad. We’re putting things in the air we shouldn’t be.
[00:01:22] Maryam Pasha: That’s as much as I knew. And so if people are like. I get it that it’s bad, but I really just don’t understand it, and so then I cannot understand [00:01:30] all this stuff about like solutions and this and that and emissions and mitigation. I would say that John’s work and Project Drawdowns work is the place to go.
[00:01:39] Jon Foley: Mm. To.
[00:01:40] Maryam Pasha: To figure it out because they do the analysis on like what’s causing all these problems. And then as I think we’re gonna probably get into, they’ve done incredible analysis on like how we get ourself out of this with all the solutions. So mm-hmm. This is, I think I would say like. My prediction is gonna be that if you’re listening to this, this is one to like [00:02:00] listen to.
[00:02:00] Maryam Pasha: It’s gonna be packed with information like, um, but intellectually
[00:02:04] Ben Hurst: stimulating.
[00:02:05] Maryam Pasha: Yeah. Um, yeah. So let’s, let’s, I think we just, I think we just get straight to it. And also obviously, like John Stu, a number of Ted Talks, he is a scientist. Project Draw Down is an incredible resource. Like we’ll link all the things we talk about in this episode, which this is one of those ones with lots of references.
[00:02:21] Maryam Pasha: We’ll link in the show notes. Let’s get into it, Ben.
[00:02:24] Understanding climate change and solutions
[00:02:24] Maryam Pasha: For people who aren’t familiar with Project Drawdown in the way that we are, can you just give us a little [00:02:30] top line of like, what it is and, and, and your perspective in this whole conversation? ’cause then I want us to delve into some harder questions.
[00:02:37] Jon Foley: Sure. Well, the world is finally taking climate change a little bit more seriously now. Maybe not enough, but at least there’s some attention to the issue and we’re starting to move on solutions. But Project Drawdown occupies a really important place in all this landscape because we’re the world’s leading guide.
[00:02:53] Jon Foley: Based on good science and hopefully good communication for effective climate solutions. ’cause [00:03:00] everybody and their brother right now is kind of trying to sell you their favorite climate solution to spark your investment, your philanthropy, your policy. Often with a little bit of self-interest or motivation that might not be purely altruistic and we need to listen to the science to kind of guide us to make sure we’re doing the right things.
[00:03:16] Jon Foley: Just like you would in medicine. You wanna make sure that, you know, this is really the consensus of the medical community that that works. And this doesn’t. Mm-hmm. And this is the best thing to try, but it might have some side effects. So we’re kind of the, uh, [00:03:30] neutral science-based, non-commercial, non-partisan arbiters of like, what are the best climate solutions for getting the job done and how do we move forward?
[00:03:39] Jon Foley: And maybe most importantly, what are maybe distractions? To getting that done, things we maybe shouldn’t focus so much on. Instead, I’ve been, uh, working on these kind of climate issues for over 30 years in academia as a university professor for many years as the CEO of a large science museum, and now the head of Project Drawdown.
[00:03:57] Jon Foley: I’ve devoted my life to [00:04:00] doing good science, but hopefully making sure science does some good. And, uh, we couldn’t be, that couldn’t be a more important problem now than getting out of the climate change mess we’re in.
[00:04:09] Maryam Pasha: I would just say to people listening, like, if you were really new to cl to, to climate and, and, and actually just understanding what’s going on.
[00:04:17] Jon Foley: Mm-hmm.
[00:04:18] Maryam Pasha: Project Drawdown is like. Stop number one, I think like it was for me, like just you have these, I mean, we we’re gonna get into like the more where you’re going now, but just, I mean the, the [00:04:30] foundational things that you have around visualizing beautifully. The, the sources, the, like all of the, the, the things that contribute to climate change and the way that you can understand them and whether they’re.
[00:04:43] Maryam Pasha: Nature, whether they’re, it’s about carbon emission, all of the different things. I’m not explaining it well, but it’s, for me, it was like it gave me the, ah, okay, I understand now what the problem is and now we can move to the solutions. And then you have these beautiful, also really [00:05:00] easy to understand visualizations of these solutions.
[00:05:02] Maryam Pasha: And before we go get into that, uh, you mentioned something around like, in my country, so you’re in the us mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And obviously this is a tough time.
[00:05:12] Jon Foley: Yeah. Uh, in many ways, a little bit.
[00:05:14] The Role of Leadership in Climate Action
[00:05:14] Maryam Pasha: Um, it’s like, I know it’s like the understatement of the century, but one of the things you’ve been speaking about more is climate leadership.
[00:05:22] Jon Foley: Yeah.
[00:05:22] Maryam Pasha: And how we need to be thinking differently and, you know, and, and how important climate leadership is. Can you tell us a bit about that? You said you’ve been doing [00:05:30] this work for 30 years. What do we need right now?
[00:05:33] Jon Foley: Well, you know, you know that old Apal definition of insanity, like, let’s keep doing the same thing again and again expecting a different result this time.
[00:05:41] Jon Foley: And, you know, for at least my whole lifetime and even longer than that, we’ve been kind of hoping, uh, that one theory of change is gonna work out. That we just do the science over here. We talked to some politicians over there, and if we just voted for the right ones, they would make it all go away. We’d take care of the [00:06:00] climate problem that governments like the United States and the UK would be enlightened and not be beholden to special interest or crazy people, and that they would get together at a place called the UN and just.
[00:06:10] Jon Foley: Hold hands and solve all our problems. That hasn’t worked out particularly well and I think it’s really crazy now to kind of, uh, leave the future to our planet, to, you know, the, the heads of our heads of state in most countries in the world are not. Really the smartest, best people we could have hoped [00:06:30] for.
[00:06:30] Jon Foley: And then these kind of international diplomatic processes, which I would love to have work well mm-hmm. Just aren’t working as well as they need to. So we’re not getting the job done. And I’m looking around saying, well, who can. And it turns out there are lots of different levers for leadership and um, uh, I think we all need to recognize those, whether it’s in the private sector, we have of course, you know, um, small businesses and very big businesses, multinational corporations.
[00:06:55] Jon Foley: There’s a lot of power there. There’s a lot of money there. There’s a lot of resources there. Some of it used [00:07:00] very badly. Some of it could be used much better. That could be one place. There’s trillions of dollars going into kind of clean tech, renewable energy, things like this. I want that to be even more money and maybe pull the money out of things like fossil fuels.
[00:07:14] Jon Foley: How do we reallocate trillions of dollars worth of capital? Out of bad things and into better things. Um, what about philanthropy? What about, um, all the, you know, public investing, private investing, venture capital, private equity impact, all these different flavors of [00:07:30] investment? That’s where a lot of things really are happening right now.
[00:07:33] Jon Foley: I. But we also have like technologists. Uh, some are, you know, doing the world a lot of harm, I would argue, but some, I hope are doing some good too. Let’s focus on the latter. How do we get those good technologists to who see kind of a, a real public good, not just scooping up billions of dollars for themselves?
[00:07:52] Jon Foley: How do we change that? But also local communities and cities, states, provinces that are local districts, a lot of the governing that matters in the world [00:08:00] doesn’t happen at the UN or a Downing Street or in the White House. It happens in small towns and communities across the world that decide, can I put a solar panel on my roof or not, or you know, where does the bus go in this town?
[00:08:13] Jon Foley: Mm-hmm. That isn’t, mm-hmm. I think we get seduced by the drama of our national and international politics and put all of our chips down there and actually a lot of decisions and a lot of. The things that really happen in the world are happening elsewhere. And so I, I don’t think we have to [00:08:30] abdicate completely our national and international politics and we shouldn’t, and we should expect better from them.
[00:08:36] Jon Foley: But there are other places to go and in the United States we have to do that. Right now we have a, you know, completely hostile kind of, uh, Washington, DC at all levels, pretty much to climate. But I’m not giving up. In fact, I think we’re gonna continue to make great progress in the us. In the next four years, but it just won’t be happening out of Washington.
[00:08:55] Jon Foley: Mm-hmm.
[00:08:55] Jon Foley: But that’s the way things always change. It turns out, um, we have been making [00:09:00] real progress on climate, but it’s not really thanks to the politicians anyway.
[00:09:04] Ben Hurst: Yeah. This is super interesting. So you are saying, correct me if I’m wrong here, but you are saying that. Government, national governments are maybe the loudest voice, but not necessarily the most important one when it comes to climate leadership.
[00:09:17] Ben Hurst: And then there are a whole bunch of other groups around that that are also influencing things that maybe we should be paying more attention to.
[00:09:25] Jon Foley: Yeah, I think that’s right. I mean, uh, obviously national governments and our international diplomatic [00:09:30] platforms like the UN Framework Convention and climate change, the COP meetings and all that kind of stuff, those are important, don’t get me wrong.
[00:09:37] Jon Foley: Mm-hmm. But I think we’ve put them up on a pedestal so much and think that’s the only place climate action can occur when it’s probably the slowest and last place climate action, real climate action is going to occur. Okay. It’s, it’s kind of, we, we put this up in a pedestal. It’s where the. The big CEOs, the, you know, the celebrities, the big jet, you know, it’s like going to [00:10:00] Davos, going to cop.
[00:10:01] Jon Foley: It’s like a big show and it literally has carpets and things. Right. And, um, at the end you’re kind of feeling kind of empty inside wondering what really happened here, if anything. Mm-hmm.
[00:10:11] Maryam Pasha: Yeah.
[00:10:12] Jon Foley: And in the meantime, the real progress that’s been happening on climate. It is kind of extraordinary and it’s happening by quieter people and all sorts of places.
[00:10:21] Jon Foley: The unsung heroines, the unsung heroes in the world doing great work, whether it’s our cities and towns, small businesses, [00:10:30] startups, philanthropies, smaller investment firms, they’re just doing the work. And a lot of the climate work we need to do has, you know, people with a little grease under their fingernails and a little dirt on their sleeve.
[00:10:41] Jon Foley: Getting stuff done, not posing in a red carpet with Leo DiCaprio and Al Gore. That’s nice. But there’s a lot of real work happening too that I think we don’t pay enough attention to, and that’s where a lot of things are happening And.
[00:10:55] Global Emissions Trends and Challenges
[00:10:55] Jon Foley: I hope your listeners realize that there are about 40 countries in the world now where emissions [00:11:00] are dropping dramatically.
[00:11:01] Jon Foley: You’re living in the leader of all of this. The UK peaked its CO2 emissions back in the 1990s mostly ’cause you had a huge reliance on coal, right, and your electricity sector and industry. And that’s now phased out with now natural gas filling in, but also increasingly renewables, but also a more efficient building stock, some improving industries.
[00:11:22] Jon Foley: And yes. You have to make adjustments for how much is outsourced to other countries and things. But even when you do, the UK has dropped its emission by over [00:11:30] 40%. Since this peak back in the 1990s, the United States, we peaked our emissions back in 2007 or so, right before the last big financial crisis, and it’s now about 20% below that peak today, 22% right now.
[00:11:46] Jon Foley: Yet the US economy’s grown 50%. Since then, uh, even more. And the US population’s grown another what, 10, 15%. Mm-hmm. So we’ve grown the country, grown the economy, but lowering emissions.
[00:11:59] Maryam Pasha: So let me, let [00:12:00] me ask a question here, because a lot of people will have seen graphs that just show, like, let’s say the US is emissions just increasing.
[00:12:08] Maryam Pasha: Yeah. Mm-hmm. Right? What, how do I understand that versus this idea of we’ve peaked missions? Like I, I, I think that for like. Those of us who aren’t in it every single day, those two things seem like they’re saying opposite.
[00:12:22] Jon Foley: Um, well, they didn’t look very carefully or somebody cherry picked the numbers. Um, if you, I’m a, I’m a data nerd.
[00:12:27] Jon Foley: If you look at the CO2 emissions by country, and [00:12:30] there’s tons of sources for this, you can see that in the uk your, I forget which year it was, but sometime during the 1990s, you peaked emissions and are enough, 40% lower. Now a lot of climate, uh, doist and people who are always trying to look for the bad side of the story.
[00:12:45] Jon Foley: Often climate activists are trying to rile people up and say nobody’s doing anything. And it couldn’t possibly accept that a capitalist country like the US or the UK actually is doing something on climate. They will go through all sorts of contortions telling you, oh, no, no, we [00:13:00] exported all that, uh, carbon to China.
[00:13:02] Jon Foley: Like, no, we can account for that. The numbers nerds. Hi. I’m one of them and actually do that balance of trade and look at the carbon emissions of other countries. And we, even when you adjust for international trade carbon emissions in the uk, in the United States, the Netherlands, Sweden, a whole bunch of other countries have been going down that we have started to decarbonize the economy in the richest countries in the world.
[00:13:25] Jon Foley: With two notable exceptions. Uh, Canada and Australia are not doing that. They’re [00:13:30] still Canada. Oh yeah. They’re worse than the US even though they, they’re much nicer people of course, but Right. The nicest people on earth, but. They have a huge oil and gas industry for the size of their country. Oh. Um, it’s not big compared to like the UK or Saudi Arabia or something, but for a small, relatively small country population-wise compared to the us, their emissions are basically flat or going up a little bit, you know?
[00:13:54] Jon Foley: But they haven’t made big cuts like the US has. Certainly not like the uk, but even China. [00:14:00] China’s emissions peaked probably last year. And they’re starting to peak and go down too. So there are a lot of countries that are hitting peak emissions, but the real wild card after this will be the ones that stay flat for a long time.
[00:14:12] Jon Foley: The Canada’s Australia’s and others in the world, but also the, the countries are still rocketing upward. Uh, India, uh, that’s the big wild card, I think for the 21st century. Isn’t China anymore? It’s India. What happens to the next big economies after China? Which already shows sign of beginning to [00:14:30] turn what’s next.
[00:14:31] Jon Foley: And then after that will be countries like, you know, Nigeria, um, countries, Southeast Asia, other big economic superpowers of the middle century, maybe. What are they doing as they grow their economies. And that’s where I think we get put more attention is starting to nudge those curves earlier, maybe helping them leapfrog over, uh, the kind of path of development that countries like ours have done.
[00:14:53] Ben Hurst: This is, um. Super interesting ’cause it feels like, I, I see what you’re saying about being neutral, right? In that you, you are, you are [00:15:00] actually not on either side. Like you’re literally just looking at the data and saying, this is what the data says, but this also feels a bit like an episode of the Twilight Zone.
[00:15:08] Ben Hurst: ’cause I feel like this is like quite a, quite a massive like reframe of m maybe what my understanding of the issue was, because my assumption was that everything was getting worse. But it sounds like what you’re saying is. Things have actually got better. But then is the issue then that things are not getting better fast enough?
[00:15:26] Ben Hurst: Or what’s like what’s happening? What should we be worried [00:15:30] about? Or is there nothing to worry about? Maybe, I don’t know.
[00:15:32] Jon Foley: Oh no, there’s plenty to worry about. Um, okay. Right. Don’t worry about that. Yeah. Gosh. Oh, um, yeah. Um, I think the world is a mixed bag like it always is. I mean, that’s the thing that I try to big, big picture.
[00:15:44] Jon Foley: The world has always been a mess. Um, we’ve always been in a race between some things getting worse and some things getting better. Mm-hmm. And history is determined by who wins that race. And, um, I don’t want to abdicate that race. I wanted the world to get better. I think we have a more [00:16:00] opportunity for the world to get better than any other time in history, uh, for sure.
[00:16:04] Jon Foley: But mm-hmm Um, there are on climate change, you know, we are definitely in a race and we may not win it, that’s for sure. There’s a lot of damage yet to come. There’s a lot of things not happening. Fast enough, but there are some promising signs and things we can learn from. That’s that’s what, going back to leadership, I like to say as a science nerd, I’m like, well, I know when I look at the numbers, there are about 40 countries that have turned the corner on emissions.
[00:16:28] Jon Foley: How did they do it? How do we get [00:16:30] the other countries to do that, and how do we do it faster? Because we obviously have evidence that something did work and some other things aren’t working. How did the US go down, for example? Um. In the US we peaked again in 2007. We’re at about 22% below that now, and it’s been slow and steady through the Obama administration, the first Trump administration, the Biden administration, and now the second Trump administration.
[00:16:57] Jon Foley: No change at all. It’s been slow and steady the [00:17:00] entire time. That doesn’t mean who in the White House doesn’t matter. Baby meat matters less than we think.
[00:17:07] The power of technology and market forces
[00:17:07] Jon Foley: What really drove that was technology, getting rid of coal, switching in natural gas, but now the rise of renewables and cheap solar, cheap wind, cheap batteries, cheap EVs, cheap, LED lighting, heat pumps getting cheaper.
[00:17:21] Jon Foley: So I look at those curves around the world, and I say it’s mainly driven by markets and technology. Technology sets the stage that we get to play [00:17:30] our game on. If, if solar is 10 times cheaper than it was 20 years ago, which is about right, the world policy is irrelevant in that world when solar is the cheapest form of energy in human history.
[00:17:43] Jon Foley: I don’t care what Donald Trump says about it, he’s not bringing back coal. Um, economics will always win out. Technology will always went out over somebody scribbling in a piece of paper at a meeting somewhere. So I think that a lot of the things we are seeing that are promising [00:18:00] are the engineers did their work markets, did their work, and things are getting cheaper.
[00:18:05] Jon Foley: Just look at the curves of like solar, wind, um, battery technology, LED, lighting, heat pumps, electric vehicles. Those are all hitting like Moore’s law cost curves where they’re getting cheaper, faster, better. Than anything. They’re, they’re more like this than any other technology we’ve ever seen. They’re, they’re just getting better.
[00:18:24] Jon Foley: And so that’s really exciting and those are accelerating good trends. The bad [00:18:30] trends are the political stranglehold, the fossil fuel industry, and the, the old emitters, the old technologies have bought their way into national capitals. They’ve bought their way into the COP meetings. They’re incredibly powerful and they’re holding on.
[00:18:43] Jon Foley: You know, with their fingernails for dear life, causing a lot of mischiefs. So you have a, a mega trend of technology helping us in the right direction. But we have a kind of a lock-in political power grab of the most powerful industry in human history holding on for dear life. And then now [00:19:00] it’s battle royale who, when they are going to lose, they are going to lose.
[00:19:04] Jon Foley: By the way, fossil fuels are dead men walking. Whether they know it or not, they’re the, the end of this century. They will not exist. The question is, how much damage will they do between now and then?
[00:19:14] Jon Foley: Mm mm
[00:19:15] Jon Foley: So I’m kind of terrified and hopeful at the same time. Um, but that’s. Called human history. Things are always a mess.
[00:19:23] Maryam Pasha: When I listen to you, John, and I think about the solutions, and I think about the progress, and then at the same time I think about Trump [00:19:30] pulling out of cop, uh, you know, India, the national oil producers, the way that the oil and gas industry can outspend us on everything. What it feels like is that if we decide that this isn’t possible, it, it, it, how do I put this?
[00:19:46] The importance of hope and action
[00:19:46] Maryam Pasha: Our mindset, our willingness to believe it’s possible feels like one of the most important things. ’cause if we give up now, that’s it. Mm-hmm. And, and it feels like so many of these forces are actually [00:20:00] trying to get us in a place where we feel hopeless.
[00:20:03] Jon Foley: Oh yeah, absolutely. And, um, combine all that with, um, a worldwide industry now of division polarization and hate and misinformation that’s now become a multi-billion dollar industry.
[00:20:16] Jon Foley: We have a political apparatus and media, you know, big media apparatus and now, you know, activists apparatus who are making money off of scaring the shit out of us and dividing us. Um. That’s terrifying. And in, you [00:20:30] know, in the United States recent experience of our last election, you have it in the UK too, and a lot of other countries see this ugliness of division hate and disinformation.
[00:20:40] Jon Foley: And not only is it just sort of organically occurring, it’s deliberate. It’s actually engineered to divide us and scare us for profit. That’s terrifying and infuriating to me, at least probably to others that they’re, you know, multi-billionaires, you know? And it is not just social [00:21:00] media. It started with a lot earlier than that.
[00:21:02] Jon Foley: You know, think of the tabloids, think of talk radio and the hateful kind of media. And we have politicians and media and activists all, whether they even realize it or not, all kind of working together to divide and scare everyone. But I’m actually convinced there’s, um. A good 80% of people who are kind of somewhere in the, you know, we’re, we’re listening to the 10% crazies on the far in fringes of our discourse, but it’s probably about 80% of [00:21:30] us in the middle who are just shaking our heads saying, I just want to get shit done.
[00:21:33] Jon Foley: I just want the world to be a little better. I, I even people I do disagree with vehemently on politics or whatever, social issues. I know that they love their children. I know that they. You know, care about their communities and they want a better future. I’ve never actually met a person who doesn’t and neither have you.
[00:21:50] Jon Foley: Um, and if we talk about these issues in a different kind of sandbox, in a, you know, a different way, I think we can actually see there’s a lot of progress to be had, but we’ve gotta tune out [00:22:00] these scary, polarizing, angry voices, even the ones we agree with. And that’s the hard part. Because they’re working on your brain.
[00:22:07] Jon Foley: They’re kind of scaring us. They’re paralyzing us, making us fearful. And when you’re amygdala firing off all the time out of fear, that flight, flight or freeze reaction, that’s just psychology. You know, like that’s not a good place to be solving problems. I, I don’t think we’re gonna make our best decisions or best moves if we’re just scared and angry all the time.
[00:22:27] Jon Foley: So, um, I’m not a [00:22:30] psychologist, uh, obviously, but. You know, it just seems kind of common sense that we need to kind of look for like, wait a minute, is that really what’s going on? Can we kind of get back to a calm data-driven point of view and say, yep. And except the fact not everything’s perfect, there’s no, um, absolute good or absolute terrible evil.
[00:22:49] Jon Foley: There’s a lot of gray and we’re gonna chip away at this. And, um, just to kind of set that context, and that’s where like, you know, the climate deniers, the people are trying to. Um, tell us this is all not [00:23:00] happening. That’s really pulling us in the wrong direction. But I would also say the climate doomsday kind of community, the doomers, if you will, are probably even worse ’cause they should know better.
[00:23:11] Jon Foley: Mm-hmm.
[00:23:11] Jon Foley: Um, you know, not all is lost. Um, it’s only lost if you give up. You know, pessimist are only right about their own futures. And we can change the world. You know, the, there’s so much waiting to be done. Don’t roll up the white flag. Let’s get to work. There’s still, you know, [00:23:30] every ounce of us could be put to work here.
[00:23:31] Jon Foley: To change even just a little bit, the outcome of the future and just moving the needle even a little means millions of lives got better, or species that could have gone extinct. Now, don’t. And you know, how dare people give up? How dare people sit on the sidelines at this moment in history? This is, that’s reckless and irresponsible.
[00:23:52] Jon Foley: I think we have to muster every possible movement and we have an obligation to future generations to do our best. Just like [00:24:00] every generation before us, I think try to do their best too, and often failed, but sometimes succeeded brilliantly and were here because of them. So, I don’t know. I think we, I, I totally agree with you.
[00:24:12] Jon Foley: If we give up, that’s kind of the biggest crime of all, and a lot of people are trying to make us give up and feel fatalistic and like, oh hell that, well, there’s nothing we can do. It’s too late.
[00:24:22] Jon Foley: Mm-hmm.
[00:24:23] Jon Foley: As you can probably tell, I get really irritated about that because it’s just not only wrong factually, um, [00:24:30] it’s not a picnic.
[00:24:30] Jon Foley: It’s not like, oh, everything’s gonna be rosy. Um, but there’s work to do. I’m like, if anybody tells you they know what the future is gonna be, they’re lying or they’re trying to sell you something. I don’t know. ’cause we haven’t made it yet. You want to, you wanna make the future better than get, get, get out there and start working on it.
[00:24:47] Breaking down climate solutions
[00:24:47] Maryam Pasha: So let’s talk about these solutions. Actually. I talked about how one of the things I love about Project Drawdown is it helped me, me understand the problem. But you also have an amazing way of talking about the solution. Will you give us just a little bit of a [00:25:00] breakdown of how you and the organization think about climate solutions and help?
[00:25:04] Maryam Pasha: Put together that mosaic for us.
[00:25:07] Jon Foley: Sure. Um, it boils down to a couple of big things. Um, first and foremost is we gotta cut the emissions, stop putting crap in the atmosphere that’s causing more climate change every day that goes by that we burn more stuff and throw it into the atmosphere, whether it’s carbon dioxide or methane.
[00:25:26] Jon Foley: Other funny gases like nitrous oxide, fluorinated gases. There’s a [00:25:30] couple hundred greenhouse gases we actually track out there, but those are the big ones. The more we dump that stuff in the atmosphere, it builds up over time. Warming the planet. We all know that part from our Al Gore movies and our, our primary schools and all this kind of stuff.
[00:25:44] Jon Foley: Um, so we have to cut the emissions of those things. That’s jobs number one, two, and three. No question. There’s no other way around it. And there are basically six areas we have to focus on. It turns out that all those emissions boiled into, into six major [00:26:00] economic sectors. First is making electricity, so burning coal or natural gas, that’s the big problem there.
[00:26:07] Jon Foley: Second would be industry making stuff like, um, steel, concrete, glass, but also throwing away stuff and dealing with waste. Landfills wastewater treatment. Those are surprisingly large emitters as well, so as electricity industry, buildings, transportation, food, which a lot of people forget about, but it’s one of the biggest sectors.
[00:26:29] Jon Foley: About [00:26:30] a quarter to a third of all the emissions are related to food. It turns out that’s burning down forest in the Amazon for more agricultural land. It’s all those belching cows releasing methane into the world. It’s also stuff coming out of the soils from overusing fertilizers. And that’s a huge sector and we’re not making real progress on that one yet.
[00:26:50] Jon Foley: And then the last is processing energy itself, like turning crude oil, we dig out of the ground and turning it into petrol or diesel fuel or aviation fuel or [00:27:00] things that are more refined.
[00:27:01] Comprehensive climate solutions
[00:27:01] Jon Foley: There’s a lot of energy and emissions tied up in that. So if we fix electricity and industry and buildings, transport, food and energy processing.
[00:27:10] Jon Foley: There’s a lot of different things in here, but we actually have on the order of about a hundred different solutions across those six big areas that can really solve the problem, and that’s remarkably good news. It turns out at Project Drawdown, we analyze all the different things you could do to reduce emissions across all those different areas.
[00:27:26] Jon Foley: And you know what? We could do it. Turns out, the [00:27:30] numbers add up. We’ve got enough solutions today that are practical, real scalable, and yes, affordable. In fact, we’re gonna make money in the process for the most part. Uh, we could actually cut those emissions close to zero today without any new inventions at all.
[00:27:47] Jon Foley: Some of them would be a little bit inconvenient and expensive, but it is totally doable. So we don’t have to wait for new technologies. New technologies would be great. They might make it cheaper, faster, better. That’s awesome. Well, please come with your new [00:28:00] technologies, but don’t wait for them. Get started now.
[00:28:03] Jon Foley: So that’s why we always talk about now is better than new and times more important than tech.
[00:28:09] The role of carbon removal
[00:28:09] Jon Foley: The other big realm of climate solutions that gets a lot of attention is removing the pollution later. Like, we first wanna cut the pollution from ever going in the atmosphere, but then we talk about what’s called carbon removal, ways of removing carbon and other greenhouse gases, stuff like that into, uh, from the atmosphere and put it into something we can lock up away from the atmosphere where [00:28:30] it’s doing harm.
[00:28:30] Jon Foley: Mm-hmm.
[00:28:31] Jon Foley: And there are two big buckets of doing that. There’s kind of industrial approaches, kind of big machines that can do it, or nature that can pull carbon outta the atmosphere because that’s how photosynthesis works. That’s how life works on this planet. Mm. Is starting with air and turning it into life.
[00:28:47] Jon Foley: Plants, basically doing that. So how do we do that? Um. The plant-based side is relatively straightforward, but we can grow more trees. We can not cut down the trees we already have. We can build up soils, [00:29:00] build up more grasses and plants. The greener the stuff is on the planet and the richer the soils are on the planet means we’ve pulled carbon out of the atmosphere and put it back where it used to be.
[00:29:10] Jon Foley: That’s great, but it may not be permanent. Because people are messy, we might come along and cut down those trees again, or they might burn down in a different climate where it’s hotter and drier all the time. So there’s a real question of permanence and whether or not, um, you know, if I paid somebody to plant a bunch of trees in the Amazon, did they really do it?
[00:29:28] Jon Foley: Or they just take my money and run? [00:29:30] So it’s not verifiable sometimes and it may not be permanent. And so there are a lot of question marks about those biological approaches to carbon removal.
[00:29:38] Challenges with industrial carbon removal
[00:29:38] Jon Foley: That leads to the machines, which sound great. Um, we’re throwing a lot of money at the uk, the us a lot of countries are spending tax dollars on this and some investors like Bill Gates and a whole bunch of others are throwing money at these technologies.
[00:29:51] Jon Foley: But bottom line, they don’t work very well. They’re itsy bitsy, uh, if we added all of them together in the world, we’ve removed about three [00:30:00] seconds of the world’s climate pollution so far, and we’ve spent hundreds of billions of dollars trying to do it. It’s not very effective. And second, if we use the same amount of money, certainly, or energy, ’cause these machines use a lot of energy somewhere else, like building solar panels or you know, biting better batteries or energy conservation.
[00:30:20] Jon Foley: We would’ve had a much bigger impact on climate. We might have not just removed three seconds of emissions, but maybe prevented five minutes of the world’s emissions, something much [00:30:30] bigger. So it’s kind of a waste of money. It’s very small technologies and also it’s kind of been used by the oil and gas companies as a bit of a fig leaf to say, don’t worry about my pollution.
[00:30:40] Jon Foley: I’ll remove it later. Like, really? Um, you know, if, if you’re in a pub and a bunch of people are smoking. And you’re coughing and like, oh, you know, oh, don’t worry, I’ll just suck it out later. You know, I’m gonna just breathe it in and hold it. You know? Is that the approach? I mean, you know, no, just don’t smoke, stop.
[00:30:58] Jon Foley: Don’t do that. You know, like, [00:31:00] or have a fan that kind of removes it, that doesn’t work very well. We all know that. So this is a bandaid solution at best. But, um, what I think is happening, and this, it’s mainly used as an excuse to kind of keep building fossil fuel projects. Like, don’t worry, we will clean it up later.
[00:31:14] Jon Foley: And we’ve been falling for that for decades in one form or another, whether it was clean coal in the 1980s or carbon capture, now it’s called direct air capture. Different technologies come and go. None of them have worked especially well, but the same idea of it’s a fig leaf for fossil [00:31:30] fuels. So we’re, I’m not a big fan of that.
[00:31:31] Jon Foley: And the math just doesn’t add out. Add up.
[00:31:34] Maryam Pasha: One of the things that you have in there as well that I I’ve, that I think is really interesting are like solutions like girls education. Yeah. Right. You tell us a bit about those. ’cause that is like an, um, not intuitive for me that you would have that in the, the group of climate solutions.
[00:31:51] Jon Foley: Yeah.
[00:31:52] Societal transformations and climate
[00:31:52] Jon Foley: And that gets to the third bucket solutions. So is cut emissions, remove carbon, and then there’s a third category. We, you know, it’s really about, kind of [00:32:00] bigger societal transformations. Um, there’s certainly a lot of things that if we change the way societies worked more broadly. Would automatically have knock-on effects of reducing our emissions, for example.
[00:32:12] Jon Foley: And one of those that can actually be quantified is helping women and girls around the world get access to education and healthcare. I. You are like, why does that matter? Well, it turns out that every time you see this happen in the world, you see incredible things start to get unlocked. In terms of future trends in [00:32:30] the economy, uh, women and girls getting more economic power, the nature of economies change.
[00:32:35] Jon Foley: They tend to be less extractive and less polluting and transformed to different kinds of economies. You also see patterns of consumption start to change. You also see demography starting to change from women and girls only futures having lots of children to be kind of labor at home for kind of domestic work versus, uh, women in other parts of the world.
[00:32:55] Jon Foley: Maybe having fewer children later in life and spaced further apart. So [00:33:00] all these things bend, uh, occurs on kind of production consumption, demography, and just overall economic outcomes. And time and time again, it’s good for the planet, but we don’t really talk about it like that because this seems kind of insulting to women and girls around the world like, oh, the only reason your lives should be better is so that we can lower emissions for the rest of the world.
[00:33:19] Jon Foley: Like. The hell with that. It’s human rights. It’s like, you know, half of the world should have the same rights and access to health and education as the other half. Why not? You know? And so we talk about it [00:33:30] that way as like, Hey look, you should do this for the right reasons. And guess what, when you do it turns out to have a beautiful kind of one, two, um, punch, if you will.
[00:33:39] Jon Foley: Like kind of a synergistic human rights also means good environmental outcomes. Mm-hmm. And what’s beautiful about climate solutions going the other way too is that. Almost all the climate solutions we look at have an a beautiful association with people’s lives getting better. That’s another reason why I’m convinced we will win in the end because it’s just [00:34:00] better we don’t have to sacrifice a lot for climate solutions to work out.
[00:34:04] Jon Foley: In fact, our lives will get much, much better overall to have solutions to the problem that also end up making the world better. This is pretty cool.
[00:34:15] Maryam Pasha: So I guess then the question, ’cause it is pretty cool, then the question remains, what is stopping us from implementing at scale? These solutions?
[00:34:24] Jon Foley: Well, let me, let me challenge the premise a little bit.
[00:34:27] Jon Foley: We are beginning to do this, okay. Um, [00:34:30] so, you know, please remember on one, yes, in much of the world, we are doing it not enough, not fast enough to solve the problem instantly. Mm-hmm. But there is real progress being made when China’s emissions peaked 10 years earlier than most people predicted. When the price of solar is getting cheaper, faster than anyone ever suspected would ever happen, even the optimist.
[00:34:50] Jon Foley: Something’s going on. So there are some good things happening out in this big mix of things. It’s never all one or the other, right? There are some good things happening, [00:35:00] but like I said, I think you know, a lot of the reasons we’re not seeing as much progress as we should have and that we need is because there’s a huge multi-trillion dollars special interest that owns, well, let’s see, my government, Russia’s government.
[00:35:14] Jon Foley: Part of yours. A lot of the eus, a lot of others that are like, you know, we kind of like it this way, we’re getting rich this way. And so either very directly and visibly just like Trump, like, no, we’re gonna, you know, drill, baby drill kind of nonsense. Or it’s more subtle like, well [00:35:30] no, we’re gonna study it longer.
[00:35:31] Jon Foley: We’ll, we’ll invest in carbon capture schemes and we’ll go to another cop meeting and hold her hands and fret, but not really do anything. So there’s a lot of political and economic lock in of the 19th century power structures that, you know, it’s, again, we’re in this, you know, battle royale between the 19th century way of doing things, colonialism and extractive industry and fossil fuels powering the world, and a 21st century way of doing things, which is renewable energy, sustainable development, [00:36:00] more fairness, more decency in international affairs.
[00:36:03] Jon Foley: I think this one’s gonna win. This one’s gonna do a lot of damage on its way out. And, uh, that maybe it’s simple minded, but I think that’s kind of the overall picture. And, um, you know, it’s a technology argument. It’s a markets argument. It’s a political argument. It’s a moral argument between the, you know, it’s all of the above and there’s no one right place to work.
[00:36:23] Jon Foley: We need to do all of it. Um, I think
[00:36:27] Maryam Pasha: one of the interesting things, I think you’ve also done, [00:36:30] you, you’re a Ted talk on this from. Two Ted Talks ago. Mm-hmm. Was about how you’ve also mapped out where we should be spending our money. Like, ’cause the question is, if we have all these solutions, is there an order in which we should be doing them?
[00:36:44] Maryam Pasha: Is there a place we should be focusing? Right? How do we use the science and the data to help us focus and like, what is the order?
[00:36:52] Jon Foley: Yeah.
[00:36:53] Effective climate solutions
[00:36:53] Jon Foley: Well I’m so glad you asked that. Um, so yeah, it turns out that, um, having a big list of solutions, you know, [00:37:00] we’ve done the math and crunch numbers and all these things showing that yeah, there’s around a hundred maybe more really effective climate solutions.
[00:37:07] Jon Foley: And if we did them all to their maximum capability, we could solve the problem. That’s great. That’s not very actionable though. ’cause people ask the question, well yeah, but where do I start? Or what do I do where I live, you know, in London, what should I do versus Jakarta versus Chicago or Seattle or whatever.
[00:37:24] Jon Foley: Um, so you need to kind of look at the context. So when we look at climate solutions, I really like climate solutions that are [00:37:30] effective. They work once, it could be big. And then ones that are cheap, so I can do a lot of them and not have to worry about arguing with people about it too much. I like ones that are fast and I like ones that have good geographic kind of, um, focus areas where I can really target where my interventions will go.
[00:37:49] Jon Foley: I. So let me kind of walk through that a little bit. So big and effective solutions. I think we can run the numbers on that. Things like, you know, uh, protecting rainforest, solar, wind, these [00:38:00] are big solutions. Uh, none of them are a hundred percent what we need to do, but maybe it’s five here, 7% there, maybe 6% here.
[00:38:07] Jon Foley: You start adding that up, it gets interesting pretty quickly so we know what those are. But then the speed question comes in, like how fast a climate solution is. Um, this kind of taps into a concept that’s really important. We, I call the, the time value of carbon because climate pollution is building up year upon year, upon year, steadily over decades.
[00:38:28] Jon Foley: I. Causing slow, steady [00:38:30] warming that’s building up over time. So it’s not just one year emission that matters. It’s all the years stacked together that matter. So that’s why it’s so important to start now with climate solutions today that can start accumulating good impacts starting in 2025 and keep going to 2030, then 2040 and 2050, adding up to a large cumulative.
[00:38:51] Jon Foley: Impact, like, you know, um, bad analogy, but, you know, steering the Titanic. You don’t wait till the nose of the boat’s on the iceberg. You [00:39:00] start turning early and start accumulating, uh, the, the space between you and the iceberg by moving early a little bit and gradually turning. That’s why we have to act now.
[00:39:11] Jon Foley: So that’s why at Drawdown we talked about the speed of climate solutions and we’ve identified a bunch of solutions that we call the emergency breaks. Ones that we could pull now that are really fast, that kind of turn very quickly if you implemented them. Now, things related to methane, I. Because methane, uh, perhaps, uh, packs its warming [00:39:30] wallop in just a decade or two.
[00:39:31] Jon Foley: It’s a fast acting climate gas, and so it’s the, um, I joke, it’s the James Dean of Climate Gases that lives fast and dies young. Uh, it’s, it’s really powerful greenhouse gas, but it goes away pretty quickly. So if we focus on methane a lot right now, we could bend the curve pretty quickly while slowly, steadily chipping away at the rest of the emissions of CO2 and other gases.
[00:39:53] Jon Foley: So there’s a chemistry trick in here. Methane helps us move quickly on climate solutions, so we need to put a little more [00:40:00] emphasis on that. Also, uh, deforestation, uh, compared to like a solar panel that gives you a little bit of benefit this year and next year and the year after and the year after, and the year after, like a straight line.
[00:40:11] Jon Foley: It’s impact will just grow over time, preventing deforestation in the Amazon, for example. All of the carbon benefit happens today. Because you never burn down the forest. It just stopped. So it’s preventing a huge pulse of emissions rather than a slow, steady drip of emissions. [00:40:30] So that’s another emergency break, and yet we don’t hear about these solutions as much.
[00:40:35] Jon Foley: We don’t hear about deforestation or methane compared to coal and solar panels and electric cars. Those are good too. But there are some solutions that work even faster and we’ve lost so much time. We need to kind of catch up. And we can prioritize the super fast solutions. Mm-hmm. So again, that’s why I like solutions that are effective, big, cheap, and fast.
[00:40:55] Jon Foley: And then I like them that are spatially congregated. Um, if we [00:41:00] have to go, um, if, uh, we have to, um, go around the world implementing climate solutions one, uh, house at a time, and they’re all equal. That’s gonna be a lot of work. Uh, or one building at a time, one city at a time, and they’re all equal. Well, we gotta do everything everywhere, all at once, right?
[00:41:19] Jon Foley: Like that movie. But it turns out there are kind of super emitters. There are kind of a couple of, um, like a couple of industrial facilities that are way more polluting than all their neighbors. [00:41:30] We have these kind of 80 20 rules where like 80% of the pollution happens in 20% of the places. So go to those 20% first.
[00:41:39] Jon Foley: Those are the low hanging fruits on the tree. Get those first and you’re gonna get a lot of the outcome quickly. And now, thanks to like satellite data and big data and machine learning and things of this, we’re able to start mapping where those big opportunities are in the world to pinpoint exactly where they are, uh, whether it’s the top a hundred landfills in the [00:42:00] world that produce maybe a third of all the methane from landfills.
[00:42:03] Jon Foley: Oh my God. Go after those. Or we just doing an analysis showing that of about 2% of the rainforest across Indonesia and Southeast Asia are the most important to protect right now. Uh, not a hundred percent, 2%. Focus on that 2% and you’ll get most of the benefit right now. Wow, that’s great. So, um, it’s using a scalpel instead of a chainsaw to solve the problem.
[00:42:27] Jon Foley: It’s a much more precise and we can kind of [00:42:30] target. Big, fast, cheap, and targeted solutions to be much more effective than we’ve ever been before. And later this year actually Drawdown will be releasing a whole new platform that’s gonna be targeting these climate solutions down to the local level around the world.
[00:42:47] Jon Foley: We’re, we’re really excited about this. There’s something called a Drawdown Explorer, and it will launch as a prototype in June this year, 2025. That’ll show solutions not just by their size and cost, but also their [00:43:00] speed and their specific locations on Earth where you could find the low hanging fruits.
[00:43:06] Jon Foley: That’s really exciting and no one’s ever done it before. I,
[00:43:09] Empowering local climate action
[00:43:09] Maryam Pasha: I love that. I love that you could go in and like explore for where you are. What, because I mean, I think that becomes a really powerful campaigning tool, right? So like if you’re thinking, okay, I’m sitting in London.
[00:43:20] Jon Foley: Yeah.
[00:43:20] Maryam Pasha: Right. What should I be asking, like my MP to be focused on?
[00:43:25] Maryam Pasha: Then I can actually go and look and be like, right, well these are the top, let’s [00:43:30] say three things that I, we could be doing to have the most impact. So I’m gonna be asking them about this. And then someone else, somewhere else in the world can do that for where they are. And it kind of becomes very empowering instead of like, ’cause we’re not all science data geeks as much as we want to be.
[00:43:46] Maryam Pasha: It becomes really, no, you don’t wanna be, it becomes really empowering. Is that, is that kind of the ways you’re hoping for this new tool to be used?
[00:43:54] Jon Foley: Well, exactly. Yeah. Like, um, it can, it can, uh, show you the kinds of, you know, um. What climate [00:44:00] solutions make most sense, where you are, um, ultimate. I mean, a global average number doesn’t really help you anymore.
[00:44:06] Jon Foley: We, that was the work we had done before showing kind of global numbers, uh, to just show those possible kind of the proof of what’s possible out there by saying, well, what would the average solar panel do? What would the average key pump do? What would the average change in transportation do, for example?
[00:44:21] Jon Foley: Things like that. That’s good to start, but we don’t live in a global average place. I don’t even know where that is. So we wanna show like, well, how would that work in [00:44:30] London versus, I live in Minneapolis in the United States, very different. We have different electrical grids, different weather patterns, different building stocks in different industries.
[00:44:39] Jon Foley: Of course, they’re different. So we can tell you kind of how different things will work in different places, but that changes the priority list of like what solutions are most effective for you are different than the solutions that are most effective for me, just based on local geographic and economic conditions.
[00:44:55] Jon Foley: On top of that, maybe even more important is uh, we’re also showing for every solution, [00:45:00] all these co-benefits. The things they can do besides address climate change. Like, you know, does it help create jobs? Does it inspire local investment? Does it clean the air? Does it improve health and children’s wellbeing?
[00:45:15] Jon Foley: Wellbeing of vulnerable populations? Does it help us adapt to the climate changes already here? Uh, does it help us with other environmental issues like clean water, clean air, restoring forest, helping preserve biodiversity? We have about 18 [00:45:30] other. Co-benefits that we’re gonna be quantifying as well, showing, hey, when you do this intervention in London, not only do you get clean energy, you get clean air, and that’s probably a bigger argument.
[00:45:43] Jon Foley: In fact, I think the climate community, we might’ve been blowing it a little bit by talking so much about carbon and temperature, we lost a lot of the rest of the argument because so many other people in the world probably care much more today. About the air they breathe, understandably are the jobs that could be [00:46:00] created or the clean water this could create, or the biodiversity in forest we could save and you know, real issues to real people today, not kind of bigger global abstractions about carbon levels and future temperature curves.
[00:46:14] Jon Foley: That matters too, don’t get me wrong, but I think we can paint a bigger picture of like why climate solutions are beneficial even if you don’t care about climate. You’ll care about the solutions ’cause they’re gonna make your life better.
[00:46:25] Jon Foley: Hmm.
[00:46:26] Jon Foley: Um, and I think we can start to talk about those more effectively too by focusing on the [00:46:30] local and the now, not the globe in 2050.
[00:46:33] Jon Foley: I think we need to bring it home. I. To, you know, here and now to real people and talk about what climate solutions can do for you in the here and now. Wherever you are. Make it, make it more of a story about like you, where you are and why this is good for your community and for you, not this is something.
[00:46:54] Jon Foley: Scientists and policy wonks talk about at a big meeting far away that you’ll never go to about [00:47:00] the future in 2050 about some global average condition that’s so abstract. How do we, how do we make it more actionable, more real and tangible? I.
[00:47:12] Maryam Pasha: I am excited to use this tool.
[00:47:14] Jon Foley: Well, we could use your help. Um, one of the things we’d like to do is, you know, we’re the nerds and we can paint all the pictures of the data and all this kinda stuff all day long.
[00:47:22] Jon Foley: But I think also in addition to the science of how the solution could work for you right in where you are and today, I would love to have like, [00:47:30] um, the side of the science right next to it is some storytelling, but like, here are people just like you in communities kind of like yours, who are already doing it.
[00:47:41] Jon Foley: And there isn’t like an Elon Musk or an Al Gore or you know, some person on a pedestal somewhere, but like, oh, hey, somebody kind of like me who just got their hands dirty doing this thing and look at what happened. Wow. Look at how their community got better. Wouldn’t that be cool to have like little mini documentaries and social shares and [00:48:00] stuff about how terrible the world is, about how amazing the world actually is?
[00:48:05] Jon Foley: And how brilliant people around the world are starting to change things quietly, but all over the place. And maybe that could help inspire, you know, we wanna inform people here, but we need to inspire people here too. Connect those two, uh, things in a much better way. Uh, that’s, that’s my big hope down the road.
[00:48:24] Maryam Pasha: Hmm. I love that. I mean, we’re all about that. I think we’re all about it because I think we realize that, [00:48:30] at least, I realize that so many people, they do actually grasp weirdly, the the big intangible thing, but it’s still meaningless. Like you can, you can understand it and agree with it and want to change it.
[00:48:44] Maryam Pasha: But until you feel like you have a grasp of like the how, where you are mm-hmm. It becomes like a, just wishful thinking, you know? Or just something you’re supposed to vote on every four years and then just hope it goes well. So I do think there’s something about [00:49:00] reminding people that it’s, it’s not, doesn’t have to be so far away and, and bringing to life the how is just, I think so super, super important.
[00:49:08] Ben Hurst: I think I’m just finding all of this information. It’s a lot of information. Um, and I guess the question I have is for the average, like lay person, what is like, how, how does, how do I ground this in my reality?
[00:49:27] The power of individual actions
[00:49:27] Ben Hurst: Like what do, what If there was one [00:49:30] action that you would recommend I take today, is it. Uh, lobbying, like what am I, what, what is the thing that I should do now as a direct response to your work?
[00:49:41] Ben Hurst: Um,
[00:49:42] Jon Foley: well, I’m gonna cheat and not name one thing because I think we need to learn more. We need to see ourselves in more multi-dimensional lenses, um, and to talk more as our, uh, friend Catherine Hayhoe likes to say, the best thing we do about climate change is talk about it with each other.
[00:49:57] Jon Foley: Mm-hmm.
[00:49:58] Jon Foley: And, but, uh, this, I would add [00:50:00] to that a post descriptive, like, and see, um, all of our superpowers, uh, we are not unidimensional beings.
[00:50:06] Jon Foley: We don’t just vote. We don’t just consume, we don’t just invest. We don’t just work. We don’t just, uh, post on our social channels. We do all of those things. And I think there’s so much power at our hands today more than any other people who’ve ever lived. That’s the beautiful thing about our time in history.
[00:50:24] Jon Foley: We have more opportunities and more power as individuals and citizens today than any people’s in [00:50:30] human history, bar none. And we’re squandering it. And we have the technological power, the financial power, the education, the opportunities and you know, to connect and use these things for the better. I, I’m just amazed by like how we’re squandering the opportunities of the 21st century by just feeling sad and being angry and polarized all the time.
[00:50:53] Jon Foley: Like, you know, if people, I really laugh when I hear, especially younger people say, this is the worst time in human history. I’m like, oh yeah, I. There, [00:51:00] you know, past generations are like, hold my beer, let me tell you about my time. You know, like, you know, I survived the London Blitz, or I survived, you know, cholera epidemics or slavery or civil war uprisings, you know, the Protestant Reformation, you know, or, but what?
[00:51:15] Jon Foley: Oh my God. You know, there horrors of human history that are beginning to go away. We are living in an imperfect time to be sure it’s far from the best it could be. But we actually, if we look at the long march of history, we have more opportunity and more [00:51:30] possibility than anybody in the past could have imagined.
[00:51:34] And so I would ask people to look at that not as some naive optimist. Everything will be okay, but as a hopeful realist saying, Hey, I do have the power in my hands to do something and I can at least try. That’s all I ask, is at least try. Don’t give up automatically. I will not guarantee your success.
[00:51:54] Can’t do that, but at least get off the your butt and try and how [00:52:00] dare we not? And we have so many tools at our disposal, whether it’s our voice, our political power, financial power, technological capabilities or connections or know-how all of that could be useful. So many people ask me that question, like, what can I do to address climate change?
[00:52:15] And I look at them and like, I don’t know, what can you do? Because we need you, and you, and you. Everything is a climate. Power today, everything we do can be useful and is needed to address climate change. So don’t ask me what you can do. [00:52:30] Tell me what you offer. The world and what you can do, uh, that’s what we’re gonna need.
[00:52:35] Whether it’s the arts, medicine, law, investing, technology, science, storytelling, activism, uh, the trades, you know, um, electricians are probably the most important people in the world right now to combat climate change, and yet we don’t talk about them enough. There are not enough electricians in North America now to power up the transitions.
[00:52:56] Jon Foley: We’re making electric vehicles, heat pumps, transmission lines, [00:53:00] new sources of energy. You know, I want young people to become electricians, you know, but we don’t say that. You know, that’s one example. There’s so many, many, many things to be done. Good to work. You
[00:53:12] Maryam Pasha: know, I guess what what I hear is that one of the things we need to do is unlock our thinking that working on climate is a very small set of things.
[00:53:23] Maryam Pasha: Absolutely. Um, I think probably Ben, you and I have like had to hammer this ho in our own brain over the last like hundreds of [00:53:30] episodes where it’s like. There’s something about how we’ve been talking about climate that has made us think that like, oh, if I’m not in policy, so if I’m either not a cop or I’m not on the streets, or I’m not a scientist, I can’t do anything.
[00:53:44] Maryam Pasha: Mm-hmm. And I think one of the biggest things here is that that. Thinking actually is very beneficial to the people who are making money from trashing the planet. ’cause it keeps all of us at bay. Yeah. Um, so [00:54:00] that is why, that is what I hear from what you’re saying. Mm-hmm. Um, is, and it’s hard though, right?
[00:54:04] Maryam Pasha: Like that’s the other thing is it’s not because like, it, what we often want is someone to say like, do X thing. But it’s hard because actually the answer is do the thing that you do well. Yeah, and, and it, it’s not like prescriptive and I think that’s what’s hard for people because I think we’ve been kind of.
[00:54:25] Maryam Pasha: Steer down this path that we need to like recycle. Like, you know, like it’s very [00:54:30] prescriptive things and what you’re asking is for us to be really like imaginative with what we can do. And that is like a different, it’s like a different muscle to use Yeah. In our brains. Yeah. Um, which I, which I appreciate.
[00:54:43] Maryam Pasha: Thank you.
[00:54:43] Conclusion
[00:54:43] Maryam Pasha: Thank you so much for sharing this time with us and chatting us through all of this. It has been a delight. I really. I actually, I know it doesn’t, I, people believe me, but I’m really excited for this tool, like, we’re gonna share it and thank you for, for doing the math for you and your team so that we can [00:55:00] have access to all of this.
[00:55:01] Ben Hurst: You gonna say so that we don’t have to, but also. That’s our new tagline. We do the math. Yeah,
[00:55:09] Maryam Pasha: exactly. Amazing. Uh, doing, thanks for joining us.
[00:55:14] Ben Hurst: Thank you for joining us this week. We really hope you enjoyed this episode.
[00:55:18] Maryam Pasha: If you did, please hit the follow button to make sure you get next week’s
[00:55:22] Ben Hurst: release. We are now officially crowdsourcing climate Confession, so please leave yours in the ratings and the review section and [00:55:30] we’ll shout out to you next time and shout out.
[00:55:33] Ben Hurst: To our fabulous team behind the pod.
[00:55:36] Maryam Pasha: This episode was produced by Josie Colter, artwork designed by Rebecca Mingus,
[00:55:41] Ben Hurst: curation by Maram Pasha
[00:55:43] Maryam Pasha: Mixed and engineered by Ben Beheshty.
[00:55:45] Ben Hurst: Music, also by Ben Beheshty, presented by Ben Hurst and Maram Pasha. Remember, stay curious.
