We tend to think of climate change as a problem in and of itself. But what if the climate crisis is a symptom of a bigger issue? What if we can’t solve climate change without social justice?
Meteorologist Eric Holthaus is the climate correspondent for The Correspondent and author of The Future Earth: A Radical Vision for What’s Possible in the Age of Warming. Today, Eric joins Ross to explain how climate change is a symptom of broader societal inequalities and discuss the role ownership has played in causing the climate crisis. He shares his vision for a cooperative political and economic system based on distributed production that supports the ideals of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for all.
Eric goes on to explore the complexity of our connections with the each other and advocate for a system of ethics that promotes care work and prevents overconsumption by a privileged few. Listen in for Eric’s insight around what the pandemic has taught us about the potential for a radically different life and learn how actively reducing inequality is the first step in solving climate change—once and for all.
Key Takeaways
[1:16] The themes Eric presents in The Future Earth
Combination of urgency + optimism (picture of what fighting FOR)
Climate change provides chance to fix other structural problems
[5:20] How quickly ‘radical solutions’ have become mainstream
Demonstrated in numbers published by Data for Progress
Example—100% renewable energy seemed out of reach
[7:26] The relationship between climate and justice
Climate change = symptom of broader inequalities + injustice
Perspective lends to expanded list of solutions (e.g.: care work)
[8:08] The role ownership has played in causing climate change
Idea of private property consolidated wealth to few
Overconsumption by those who control resources
Can only survive by caring for each other and our home
Must become stewards of objects, own as community
[17:41] Eric’s vision for our future economic and political systems
Yet to be invented, drawn out of ecologically focused world
Can’t survive in competitive economic system on finite planet
Believe life, liberty and pursuit of happiness possible for all
[21:35] The concept of distributed production
Democratize everything for broader societal goal of cooperation
Example of libraries as community resource anyone can use
[27:58] Eric’s take on toxic masculinity and care work
Must understand complexity of relationship to world
Develop skills in asking for help, admitting when wrong
[32:08] How Eric thinks about energy efficiency and overconsumption
Break addiction to overconsumption with focus on reducing inequality
Wealth tax provides universal access to housing, food and water
[37:18] The potential for us to lead radically different lives
Demonstrated by Coronavirus pandemic
Reframe what is and is not necessary (e.g.: air travel)
Rebuild purpose of society in zero carbon context
[40:47] Eric’s insight on travel and the auto industry in the US
Bike networks in Amsterdam don’t interface with roads at all
Surface areas of cities 30% to 40% car infrastructure
Highways built to boost economy but destroy neighborhoods
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Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: Hey, everyone. Welcome to Season 2 of Reversing Climate Change. We are doing that podcast thing now and launching a Patreon. You can find it at patreon. com slash noripodcasts. There are various tiers with different types of goodies available. Do you want to receive a special newsletter digest of what norinauts are reading that week? Be a part of a nori book club? Get special access to nori events? Go take a look at patreon. com slash noripodcasts for what we’re offering. And in that spirit of being lean in that startup kind of way that, you know, we like to do, this list of goodies is subject to change and we’d very much like your feedback.
Is there something that you’d really like to see but it isn’t listed here? Honest feedback does a lot to help us shape what we offer to you. You can send an email to podcast. nori. com or fill out our podcast survey anonymously in our newsletter which you can find at nori. com slash subscribe. And thank you so much for listening to another season of Reversing Climate Change. Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast. I’m Ross Kenyon. Today I have with me Eric Holdhouse, meteorologist, climate correspondent at The Correspondent, and author of The Future Earth, A Radical Vision for What’s Possible in the Age of Warming.
Eric, thank you for being here. Yeah, no problem. Thank you for having me. Yeah, my pleasure. What inspired you to do this take on climate change? Because it does seem, in some ways, it really illustrates the stakes of climate change, but there’s also quite a lot of optimism built in here too. It seems like you got me on both sides.
Eric Holthaus: That’s great. You’re the target audience then, triangulated right in the middle. No, this book has a long backstory. It originally started about five years ago as a letter to my oldest kid before he was even born. And I started it not even knowing at all what was going to happen by the time I finished. And then it’s harder to have a baby than I expected. And so that book project got sort of derailed and put on the back burner. And then I rebooted the book project as a choose your own adventure book, which is sort of like, here are the possible futures.
And I sort of had an active... Plan of having sort of two thirds of the scenarios being disasters because I figured like, you know, that’s about the chances that we have or that’s what I thought at the moment. And that was probably roughly early 2018. Have they gotten better or worse since then? It’s gotten better. It’s gotten a lot better, I think. Yeah, and it showed in my writing, too, as I was going through the year 2018 writing that started to have the Green New Deal come into prominence and the school strikes and the IPCC report.
And then I started thinking, like, my good scenarios are already kind of way farther along than I expected. I had some things sketched out for the late 2030s that were happening just nine months after I started this project. And then my editor came back to me and said, how about let’s scrap that entire idea and focus on the good scenario, the scenario where we do what we need to do. So I mentally rejected the idea of apocalypse and then sort of rewrote the book a third time with an idea of this is what has to happen.
There’s really no choice left for sort of a middle path that it’s now or never. And we need to act that way. And that urgency, I think, came out in the final version.
Ross Kenyon: One of the things I think is strongest is definitely the visions that you’re painting of the future and what kinds of changes might come about as a result of climate change. And most of them do seem to be really positive. So you see this as a moment. We associate this most strongly with Naomi Klein, but you see climate change as a chance to sort of right the ship, as it were, and fix many of the problems that have been permanently baked into the country’s foundations or the world economic structure. This is sort of the last chance that might exist to fix these things.
Is that broadly how you see this crisis?
Eric Holthaus: I don’t think it’s a last chance at all. I think there are always chances continuously. I think every day actually is a continuous stream of choices that we’re making. And I think that we can create our own chances. So maybe that’s the most optimistic part of the whole book is that it doesn’t have to wait, that we don’t have to find some perfect moment that the stars align. Just so happens this year in 2020, there’s a lot of change happening, and it seems suddenly not that far-fetched to imagine transformation on the scale that the IPCC sort of recommends is necessary.
I think that having a picture of what we’re fighting for and not necessarily what we’re fighting against changes the dynamics of the climate movement, and that’s sort of the main intervention that I want to make with this book.
Ross Kenyon: And you’re right that a lot has changed this year. There are positions that related to the prison and police abolition that were once friends of mine who were pretty deep on the left reading Angela Davis and people like that have suddenly become mainstream policy positions for a lot of people or nearly mainstream. I don’t know if you see it in the same way that climate has had this too, where the influence of Sunrise Movement and Greta Thunberg and Those positions are seemingly more and more mainstream if they’re not already. So it does seem like quite a lot of change is happening fast, and I doubt we’ve seen the end of it.
Eric Holthaus: Yeah, I definitely agree. I see the numbers coming out of places like Data for Progress, whose kind of sole reason for existing is to put numbers on these issues in a way that other polling firms don’t. Asking questions about detailed policy of the Green New Deal, how does that poll nationally? It’s kind of shocking to see how quickly those ideas have also become mainstream, like 100% renewable energy, which was really kind of laughed at even just a couple of years ago in the climate movement. The idea of the wedge issue now is, do you count nuclear power as renewable energy or not?
It’s not really... A question of this is never going to be politically possible, so why do we even talk about it? It’s become how quickly can we make it happen? You know, is it possible to have 100% renewable U. S. electrical grid in 10 years? Maybe. It seems a lot more possible than it was 18 months ago, that’s for sure. So I do think that if you poll the general public that May not have a technical understanding of what that would require. It polls probably even better than it would among climate experts, which means that the climate movement is constantly being pushed and shifted from sort of democracy, from what people think is necessary to do this work the right way.
Ross Kenyon: I see. Yeah, that sort of maps with how I understand it, too. Would you allow me to read your own words back to you? Sure. Sure. Okay. Maybe this will help us frame this next part of the discussion. You wrote, success on climate change where it can exist will look like democracy. To build a sustainable and just world for the next century, everyone will have to participate, especially those who have been excluded from the political process for far too long. An inclusive society is a just society in which we all listen to one another with genuine care.
Where to start? That is sort of like a key nugget that I think helps understand the entire book.
Eric Holthaus: Thank you.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. So it isn’t just about climate change. You have a bunch of other quotes in there about how if we could just magically remove excess CO2 from the atmosphere and get down to an appropriate parts per million, that still wouldn’t be good enough. And we wouldn’t have, I don’t know, what even is the right way to say it? Because there’s an insensitive and bad way to say it. But if you could solve climate change without addressing any of the Racial injustices or inequality, should we even consider that as a possibility or do you need to address them all at the same time?
Eric Holthaus: Yeah, no, this is a great, again, speaking from June 2020, this is sort of the question that’s suddenly on everyone’s minds is how far deep does the climate movement go? At its core, is this a movement for equality and justice? I think that case is being made pretty clearly and forcefully now in ways that may not have gotten the attention it deserved even just four weeks ago. So yeah, I think that the starting point from this book is that kind of an open question to the reader of what is the world that you’re trying to create?
Like, what is the point of what we’re doing here in like a civilizational scale? Like, is it to... Provide a good life for everyone within planetary boundaries. I mean, I think that’s kind of what I would answer that question. Too often, I think the climate movement gets caught in the goal is to reduce emissions or the goal is to advocate for renewable energy. I think those are just sort of like... Tertiary goals. Climate change itself is a symptom of a broader structural unjust society that I don’t think climate change would have happened if we would have really lived out the values that are in, like, for example, in the U.
S. Declaration of Independence. Unalienable rights are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And we haven’t really acted that way as a country at all, ever. And I’m just sort of wondering, like, what would have happened if we did? And we still can. Pretty much any day, we can change that. And I know that those roots run super deep. And we’re talking about hundreds and hundreds of years of history here. But that doesn’t mean just because that’s the way we did things in the past doesn’t mean it has to be the way we do it in the future.
And I think that having climate change be seen as a symptom of the problem rather than the problem itself, I think lends It brings itself to a whole list of solutions that are not maybe immediately thought of as climate solutions. Universal access to housing and food and water and public services. This is focused on care work rather than on upholding certain rules that were put in place to serve small groups of people with outsized amounts of power. I don’t know. I feel like we wrestle with details that I think if we just all took one big step back would sort of drift away.
I think that we really agree on a lot more than we think we do and that thinking of climate as a justice issue primarily makes it a lot easier to align with other justice movements and a lot easier to think about what it is we’re actually trying to do. What I say in the book is that the issue is really with the concept of ownership because if you... If you go back, and this is kind of a new concept, it’s only 200 or 300 years old, the idea of private property and what ownership means.
I think that before the industrial revolution that we were working a lot more with a General common understanding of community ownership and community property. I am definitely not an economist or a lawyer or well-versed on what happened over the last 300 years to change that. But I know that if you change the prevailing mindset of civilization, which of course, easy to do, That we are all sort of here on a finite planet together and only through caring for each other and caring for our home will we be able to survive, which is kind of the situation we’re in right now after...
Two or three hundred years of extractive consolidation of wealth into a few people’s hands. We’re at the point now where it’s clear to see that was destructive for many, many people and many places. So in the book, I have this conversation with Samantha Earl, who’s a philosopher, talking about liminal space and specifically about the idea So thinking of liminal space as this transitory time, you know that the future will be very different from the present. You know that you will be making a fundamental transition, but you don’t know exactly what it’s going to look or feel like or what you will be or what will exist at the end when you’re done with that transition.
All you know is that the transition is going to happen. So we are in that space right now as a civilization. Really, I think for the first time in a conscious way, we are all connected and all understand that climate change has put a time limit on this transition and that climate change itself has physically connected us in a way that collective decision making hasn’t really before on a global scale. In the book, so I just summarize this idea of ownership. I’m just going to read a little bit. With ownership comes control, with control comes hierarchies of power.
Those who own more can marginalize and take advantage of those who own less. The concept of ownership is connected to all of our social struggles, misogyny, racism, colonialism, and the corruption of modern democracy. And of course, the concept of ownership has directly resulted in the climate emergency, which is really a crisis of overconsumption by those who already control most of the world’s resources, with dire consequences for those who own almost nothing. Alternatives to a world built on ownership may feel unfathomable right now, but it’s what we’ll need to strive for if we’re going to survive the century.
So with that, I mean that when we are in this sort of uncharted territory as a planet, Now is the time to sort of go to the root of the problem and imagine completely orthogonal, completely divergent ideas that don’t recreate the problem that we have spent the last 300 years trying to fix. And that’s what I really mean. And that’s what I’m trying to take a first stab at with the whole book is what could the future look like in a world where we challenge that sort of formational issue of why climate change exists in the first place?
Ross Kenyon: Huh. Ownership. It’s an interesting locus to pin this on. There’s multiple levels to think about it on, which the first one is just kind of obvious is institutional, which is what sorts of property rights and property rights. Yeah. Your human relationship with objects. And I suppose it would change how we viewed the world and the things that we quote unquote own if we didn’t see them as being owned. But us as merely being stewards of them or guarding them for our descendants or for the world at large. You’re saying that it’s almost more of like a spiritual change.
Is that kind of? Yeah, exactly.
Eric Holthaus: I’m getting close to it. Yeah, I think you got it. And again, hopefully I’m very transparent about this in the book is that I don’t know the first thing about what should come next. I think that the job that this book does is just identifying the problem and actually doesn’t even, I’m clearly not the first person to talk or think about this this way. I’m trying to just sort of assemble the A group of voices that are hopefully a little bit coherent in the way that I put it together about what kinds of things should we be working for in the climate movement and what kinds of things can happen when we do that work together, when we try to imagine a world that is still this world but different.
Yeah. Still this world but different, yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Well, in your Twitter bio, you list yourself as an eco-socialist. So I imagine there’s some relation between the ideas that you’re talking about here and the vision of eco-socialism, or are they divergent somehow?
Eric Holthaus: No, I think that’s true. And again, I have a conversation with Greta Thunberg and with Kate Raworth in this book, talking about what kind of System, economic or political system could come next or might come next. If we get through this sort of 10 year Green New Deal transition moment and that opens us up to an opportunity to sort of put in place a totally different governing ethics. Then what would that look like? I honestly don’t know. And that was Greta’s answer to me is that it just hasn’t been invented yet.
Like we’re doing it all for the first time in this context, clearly. Like we’ve never had a year 2020 before. So we don’t really have anything to base this on. And I think, yeah, thinking about it more of a sort of philosophical or spiritual problem, I think is closer to what it actually is. We’re sort of trying to strive to figure out what we’re going to be right now. And that is a very much open question. But yeah, and Kate Raworth also sort of pushed back on the idea of socialism or capitalism or any label, saying that why bring that baggage with you?
If you’re making this sort of transitional leap to a new type of world, then why bring those labels with you? So I don’t know, maybe it doesn’t even need a label, but maybe I should take that out of my head. Twitter bio. I don’t know. I think that in the Twitter bio, at least, it’s mostly like a provocation that I think that to get people to ask me the exact question that you asked me.
Ross Kenyon: Oh man, I fell for it, huh? Yeah.
Eric Holthaus: I think that what needs to happen is an ecologically focused world going back again to sort of the core of who we are. Like we are animals and we live on a planet with other animals and plants and other living things. And that’s really what it is. You know, I don’t know, like everything that we should do should extend from that as the fundamental truth. That we’re all sort of part of an ecosystem. We are part of an ecosystem. And our politics and our economics should all be sort of drawn out of that truth.
I guess that’s what I mean by eco-socialism is that we will not be able to survive if we’re sort of in a competitive focused economic system on a finite planet. And that at the same time, I still, you know, believe in those aspirational words of the Declaration of Independence that we are all entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That is possible with the resources that we have on the planet in a way that it doesn’t destroy the planet at the same time. I mean, that’s a belief system.
That’s like a, you know, again, when we’re talking about spirituality, like that’s like bordering on sort of like a religious belief for me, maybe. I don’t know. Because otherwise, if that wasn’t true, then I don’t really know what to do. I don’t have a direction for my life. If it’s not possible for us all to live or to enjoy the world, and if it’s not possible for us to respect all the other Millions of species that we’re here with at the same time, then I’m not sure what we’re doing.
Ross Kenyon: Fair enough. I have to say, I respect that you’re willing to say that you don’t know things, which that has gone out of fashion.
Eric Holthaus: There are a lot of things that I don’t know.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, yeah. Myself included. I also I really like that point that Kate Raworth makes that those words capitalism and socialism do have a lot of baggage. And even myself, sometimes I can end up feeling defensive or triggered if it’s framed in the wrong kinds of way, because there are things about capitalism that I do like. I like cooperation. So I think you’re trying to make like a like a Kropotkin mutual aid. Cooperation is a stronger predictor for evolutionary history than competition. Yeah, that’s a point worthy of being made. But there’s also things I like about competition, too.
There’s things I like about certain types of property rights that I want to be preserved. I like markets, too. But there’s also really interesting work that Kate does, and then also Radical Markets by Glenn Weil and Eric Posner I really like, too, which is they’re thinking about how do you use markets in ways such that they equilibrate in driving towards And I’m like, oh, this is creative. This sort of breaks the right-left thinking on markets in a really, really cool way. And it preserves what I like about markets, too. So what you always wonder about things like that, does that mean everyone agrees and converges on it?
Or does everyone find something that they hate about it and reject it? Could be either. But in any case, though, I think not talking at the level of capitalism or socialism is good because the details matter, right? There are good and bad versions probably of both of those. Actually, I don’t know if you agree with that or not, but it depends on what we mean.
Eric Holthaus: Yeah. And I think I would just go even more fundamental and say like, what is the world that needs to exist and then just do it? Like, I don’t know. I don’t know that it’s worth really even comparing different systems. I guess in that way, it is sort of like a market-based system in a way where it’s just like you try a bunch of things and keep doing what works and don’t do what doesn’t work. I guess that is kind of what a market is.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, like that’s the type of competition maybe. But then there’s other types of competition where I think we could both be like, yeah, this probably isn’t in humanity’s best interest to compete over this.
Eric Holthaus: Yeah. And that’s where I think there should be and is sort of like a baseline governing document for human civilization, which is like the Universal Declaration on Human Rights or something like that. I think there are. There are opportunities to redo those documents that include more voices other than just sort of like the Europeans that wrote them. But I think that there are very basic things that people can agree on. And then the goal of broader human society should be to cooperate with each other to make Communities able to carry those out at the local scale as best as we can.
And it’s going to look super different in different places with different embedded geographies and people and traditions. And so, yeah, I mean, what Kate Raworth is really also a big fan of distributed production. So she’s talking about, you know, democratizing everything, basically saying that Decision-making, production, design of systems, all of that should be sort of able to be self-determined, even like a household to community level scale. That there are things that we can sort of share in common, like blueprints for 3D printed parts, and then like let people do what they need to do with that.
I love that stuff so much. Sort of just like libraries. A library is a great invention in that it’s a community resource, but any individual can use it at any time. I don’t know. We have a seed library here where you can check out seeds, plant them in your garden, and then redeposit the seeds the next year when you harvest them. I don’t know. I think that there’ll be opportunity for that kind of stuff. And all of that is, of course, lower carbon than having the sort of hyper globalization that we have right now.
I mean, because you can see how hyper globalization Breaks down when you have a pandemic or when you have a shock to the system in any way. And then the people who are left out during those breakdowns are the people who are marginalized in the society. So even here in Minneapolis, you have seen over the last three or four weeks a huge outpouring of these ideas and groups focused on mutual aid, people caring for neighbors, caring for each other. The same thing happened in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria. I feel like that is a little bit more of a model for sort of effective government in a period of Escalating chaos and shocks like we’re going to have for the next 30 to 50 years and probably longer climate disasters that keep getting worse no matter what we do.
Even if we stopped all emissions today, there is a roughly 50 year equilibrium period where temperatures are not going to start going back down for about 50 years or so because of the physical sequestering of carbon in the ocean. That takes that long for the ocean to turn over to sort of update itself. And so that is part of what I have running in my head throughout this entire book is that things are going to keep getting worse, even though they’re getting better at the same time. So you sort of have to have the long view by definition, because the work that you’re doing today is not going to potentially Lead to better real outcomes for a long time.
In the meantime, the next few decades is going to look like all of us in crisis mode caring for each other. That’s just sort of my take.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, well, there certainly is a lot there. I like that. And I like often when we have conservatives on the podcast, too, one of the convergent things that we all land on is sort of the scale of these relationships is too big right now. And in some ways, one of the most radical things you can do is actually know your neighbors and take care of them. And I think that’s just sort of a universal thing. Well, granted, I live in Seattle. And so even yesterday, I was walking down the hall and someone deliberately looked away.
I was like, I know you, man. I know you. You’re not even looking like a little nod, the mark of the human, like give me a little nod. No, but I’m in the process of moving right now. I’m really trying to get to know being neighborly and actually doing that. And one of the Criticisms of the left from the left that I’ve always really liked is from Dorothy Day, who says something akin to the welfare state has meant that we have outsourced our Christian duty to take care of our neighbors to this sort of impersonal distant entity.
And really, like your duty is to do that yourself. As a work of mercy, as she might say it. And so I like your focus on care work. And I think that it’s both good for the person receiving it and the person giving it. And I think we would live in a happier, healthier place if people did that, right?
Eric Holthaus: Yeah, I think so. I mean, I was also thinking this is getting a little bit off topic, maybe. Maybe not. You should just go for it. Let’s do it. I think too, you know, my last five years, like I said, in the intro has been mostly defined by me becoming a dad. And so I’ve been understanding and I had both of my kids are boys. So I’ve been trying to think About what it means to be a man raising two boys in this world. And I think that, honestly, care work and sort of understanding the complexity of your relationship to the world is how everything you do impacts everyone else is such an essential part of masculinity in this world.
World that the book is set in, you know, the next 30 years, if we do it right, it’s going to be men feeling comfortable, insecure in the fact that they can care for each other and love each other in a sort of like society building kind of way. If you want to call it toxic masculinity or any number of different labels for it, but I think that is such a huge part of what this whole struggle is, is feeling entitled and feeling like you are somehow above doing all of that work that everyone else has to do.
Like for some reason you’ve purchased that right for yourself to not have to care about that kind of stuff. I feel like when I was growing up, In a small town in Kansas and like playing on the football team. That was definitely sort of felt like what is just like this is how you’re taught how to be a man is that you’re tough and like you don’t have to care for each other. That you can do it yourself. And when you get into such a hyper individualized way and realize that you aren’t able to do it yourself, but yet you have not developed any skills in how to ask for help or how to admit you’re wrong or how to reach out and genuinely check in on your friends, be there for each other.
Like that’s the work that needs to be done right now. And I think if men did that work, More that it would all kind of work out. Maybe that’s like too essentializing the problem too much. But I think that’s a huge part of what the hurdle is right now is that we need to sort of think about what our responsibility is to each other and then just go and do it. Don’t wait for someone else to teach you how. Like learn on your own and do it. Everyone’s capable of doing that.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, that’s a good point. I find even when I speak with people that I might not agree with on everything, I think there’s something about social media that exacerbates this a hundredfold. But if there are people that you know from around your neighborhood or that you see around and they have a persistent, even if you thought that they were upset for no reason, telling someone that they’re upset for no reason doesn’t seem to solve that problem ever.
Eric Holthaus: Not really. Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: For anyone who has interacted with humans for a long period of time, you should know this one. Although I seemingly have to relearn it every so often. Part of it is just like getting good at listening and knowing how to... I don’t know, even like interact on that level. I don’t really connect that to my thinking on climate change, but I think part of what you’re saying is that some of this non-listening kind of aggressive toxic masculine attributes are linked perhaps to your views on ownership and how it’s sort of like a dominance mentality.
Is that fair to say?
Eric Holthaus: Yeah, but I think in my experience, the dominance comes primarily out of fear, where you are afraid to do things that are uncomfortable, and so you just choose not to. And then it snowballs, and then it gets out of hand, and then you end up with 300 years of colonialism and slavery. I don’t know. It’s also, yeah, I mean, to be more explicitly climate-related, it is pervasive throughout the environmental movement, this kind of idea of we know what’s better for you than you do. Like, solar panels aren’t super important if they’re connected to a system that is sort of perpetuating a consumption-based culture.
What is that called? Is that Jevons paradox where increases in efficiency actually end up creating more total consumption in the end? Yeah, so like lighting is a perfect example where total electricity use on lighting has actually increased because you have things like cities installing LED lights everywhere where maybe they didn’t previously have the budget to do that now that the cost of lighting has decreased by 90% or more. Same thing is probably happening with batteries right now. I mean, this in general is like the push to electrify everything is going to create a hyper consumption of all of these technologies if we don’t have it attached to a system of ethics that prevents that from happening.
Yeah, I don’t want to get into the Michael Moore movie.
Ross Kenyon: I had a feeling you said something that caught my ear for that, but we don’t have to.
Eric Holthaus: Whereas like the point of that movie to me was I say, I don’t want to get into it. And then I start talking about it.
Ross Kenyon: I’m going to make a point and then you ignore it and keep going.
Eric Holthaus: The idea was that the renewable energy industry is actually worse than the fossil fuel industry because you require mining and consumption to create solar panels. You have to be so pure that you have to exist as a pure energy being to have no footprint in the world, which clearly doesn’t happen. Yeah, so there’s a risk of getting into that logical trap. But there are also the opposite could happen where we focus as a society on actively reducing inequality, like repairing the harms of the last few hundred years in a world where we have a wealth tax and distribute that income to improve standards of living for the 20-ish percent of the world who still don’t have access to electricity.
We could do that very easily and sort of at the same time reduce total emissions potentially. So we’ve just repurposed the emissions that we currently have away from things like luxury air travel in business class for the weekend to things like Guaranteeing universal access to housing and food and water and even internet and libraries and healthcare and all of those things that have become necessities to having a good life. I think it’s possible to redistribute that and not have a net change in our emissions and also in the process of doing that transition we would have A world that was explicitly focused on making things better for the vast majority of people.
And so I think we would sort of break that addiction to overconsumption in the process. Anyway, now I’m just sort of like throwing ideas out.
Ross Kenyon: No, it’s fine. It’s totally, totally welcome. Yeah, I’m going to ignore the Michael Moore stuff and skip ahead to the other stuff. Yeah, the points about consumption, I think, are interesting. And I think maybe this link is less strong than I think it is, but you talk about maybe having a four-day work week and a basic income. And most of the time when I buy stuff off of Amazon, assuming it’s not stuff that I could make myself, I can’t make a book that I want to read.
Eric Holthaus: Mm-hmm.
Ross Kenyon: Besides stuff like that, I like doing stuff myself. I do a lot of crafting and increasingly more crafting and gardening and trying to like buy less stuff. And I find my enjoyment is actually increased. I don’t feel deprived that I don’t get instantaneous satisfaction. I like becoming better at things. You don’t become better at things by buying things off of Amazon. You have to do that by going out in your garage and whittling something or using a lathe. So I don’t know. I kind of associate that a little bit with care work, even though maybe it’s self-care or just learning makes you feel good.
But I wish it was more common.
Eric Holthaus: Yeah. Yeah. And of course, there’s a lot of privilege baked into being able to have time to do all that stuff. Like I have a garden and I spend, you know, maybe a half an hour to an hour a day Not even actually. Yeah, it doesn’t actually take that much time. But I know that it also doesn’t fulfill all of my food requirements.
Ross Kenyon: Or any right now, actually, because I haven’t harvested anything off of it yet.
Eric Holthaus: So, yeah, there are things that we’ve become dependent on in the world that we have. And the frank, honest truth is that’s going to have to change a little bit. And that’s, I think, the reality that the environmental movement shies away from when we’re talking about, and especially it seems to be like a hot button issue on flying. Where almost everyone gets defensive when you talk about flying, myself included even. Like several years ago, I decided that I would never fly again, like on spur of the moment decision. And then I took a job based in Amsterdam.
And so I have had to fly a few times since I made that decision. And I get very defensive even in my internal monologue about it when I talk about like, well... I wouldn’t be able to do the work if I didn’t take this flight. I don’t know. I think that, again, the last three months of the pandemic has proven to us that we can live radically different lives. They’ve been forced on us so suddenly that they’ve become really damaging for a lot of people who didn’t have time to prepare for it.
But it is possible to have a radically different way of doing things. Like air travel is not really necessity, I don’t think. I mean, obviously that... A lot of people will disagree with me on that. But the fact that we have families spread all throughout the world now makes it functional necessity if you want to have a relationship with them in person. So I think there will be a transition time. Yeah, like I said, like 50 to 200 year period of transition time where we are sort of, not only are we zero carbon, but we are rebuilding the whole purpose of our society in the zero carbon context.
Like it’s easy to reduce emissions to zero even, but it’s hard to sort of have an entire world that makes it stay that way where everyone has a good life, I think.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I think you’re probably right about air travel and you give appropriate caveats for it. Before the COVID happened, I would have to travel maybe once a month, maybe twice for work travel. I am happy that I no longer have to do that. I used to think that I enjoyed getting to see various cities from around the country and around the world for work. Now I’m happy to just stay in my little nook. I actually find travel very jarring in an airplane. So I would like the return of airships. I want Zeppelins and I want trans-oceanic liners.
I think those should have a return. And maybe if we had more time and weren’t I know so many people are, you can’t miss a day or a couple days of work where it’s really perilous. Maybe in the future, people are better taken care of and could afford the time off to travel more slowly. Also, I love bike trips. I like traveling by bike a lot too. And I wish I was more, people had enough leisure time or availability to do so because there’s a pride in that. And I don’t think flying really does it for you.
Eric Holthaus: Mm-hmm. Yeah, this is one of the things that happened when I was in Amsterdam last year is that, you know, they have the most, they have the densest bike trail network in the world. And I just, you know, like, woke up in my hotel, rented a bike out front of the hotel and biked to the ocean and back that day. Like... And I think only maybe three or four times did I actually cross a road in the sense that you cross roads all the time in the US. Like there is no real concept of a independent national bike network here where it doesn’t interface with the roads at all.
Where there are just like random bike only trails carving through people’s fields in the middle of the country. And that’s the bike road. It’s used primarily as a bike road. And it has overpasses over the highways, just as any other road system would. You just don’t even have to interact with cars if you don’t want to, which is just so weird to me that you could travel halfway across the country without ever having really touched a car based infrastructure. That’s possible. Like it exists right now. Like that could exist in the US in 50 years or even in 10 years or even like in three years if we actually wanted it to.
Ross Kenyon: There’s some of it already. It’s not all the way across the country uniformly, but I just saw an article the other day of various states have it. There’s also the canal trail that goes from like DC, pretty far west, I think to like Ohio or something. But there’s a whole bunch of intersecting ones. Yeah, but I wish it was like that because maybe more people would do it if so. Or maybe it would just be nerds like us who like getting on bikes. I don’t know.
Eric Holthaus: Yeah, I don’t know. I mean, I really think like, I mean, you go to the Netherlands and there are people of literally every age and ability that are... In bikes. And there are caveats to the system for people with disabilities that need assistance. And there is, I don’t know, I feel like it was just sort of like a conscious choice the country made about 50 years ago to shift to like bike focused infrastructure. And, you know, if you had electric assist bike, there isn’t really anything stopping you from using that as your primary mode of transportation permanently in that kind of a world where the hills don’t even really matter anymore at that point.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I do think, you know, there are many things I like about having a car and I like the freedom and the individualism of being able to just go somewhere on my own and not look at any schedule or to have anyone’s permission. I just go. But also, I think it’s bad that every city is essentially built for cars and to not have a car means you’re stuck on public transit, which often doesn’t even go where you need it to go, etc. Yeah.
Eric Holthaus: And if anything, it’s just like a giant waste of physical space, like 30 to 40% of cities’ surface area is car infrastructure, something like that. So you can put a lot more houses and shops and parks and all that kind of stuff in there without all of that wasted space. And also here in St. Paul, to connect everything again, there is a... A neighborhood called the Rondo neighborhood, which is historically black neighborhood, made that way partially because of racist housing policy 100 years ago. But then it was cut in half by building Interstate 94 that they literally excavated a line right through the middle of the neighborhood, cut out a canyon, built the highway in the canyon.
And now the neighborhood doesn’t exist anymore in any real way that it did before. And that same pattern sort of happened all across the country where there were people in neighborhoods that were considered expendable for infrastructure designed to use, you know, fossil fuels and, quote, stimulate the economy. You know, in the 50s, you know, cars were probably one of the main economic engines of the country, you know, auto manufacturing. So you had the government Helping that industry along by literally destroying people’s neighborhoods.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I remember reading about Jane Jacobs fighting with Robert Moses in New York. Yeah, same thing happening. Yeah, I don’t know that we’re better off for having the highways going through there.
Eric Holthaus: But you can still tear them out. I mean, like, there’s nothing stopping us from tearing out the interstate highway system and replacing it with something better.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. If you want to go from Seattle to Spokane, you better get on your bike because that’s the future eco-socialists want, right? Just kidding. Just kidding. I had to rub you a little bit. No, I think people should do that though. It’s pretty fun. Well, we should start wrapping it up. Fun as this has been. Eric, where can people buy your book and where can they follow you personally?
Eric Holthaus: Yeah, I do most of the social media stuff on Twitter at Eric Goldhouse. And I write primarily entirely for The Correspondent now, which is thecorrespondent. com. And the book is available everywhere. I’ve been trying to direct people to bookshop. org, which is a network of independent bookstores, local bookstores. So you can buy it through there and it will be filled by your local bookstore. I think in theory that’s how it’s supposed to work.
Ross Kenyon: Cool. Links are in the show notes for all of that. Thanks for being here, Eric. Yeah, no problem. Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, it was a lot of fun. If you like the show, please rate and review us on iTunes, Apple Podcasts, or Stitcher. Tell your friends and thank you so much for listening.
