Nathaniel Rich is a writer-at-large for The New York Times Magazine and the author of three novels. His nonfiction book, Losing Earth: A Recent History, is an account of the 10-year period from 1979 to 1989 when we ‘almost stopped climate change.’ On this episode of the podcast, Nathaniel joins Ross to give us an overview of the story behind the book, explaining how climate change was a bipartisan issue at the time and what eventually moved Republicans into a much more hostile posture.
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Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: Hey everyone, welcome to season two of Reversing Climate Change. We are doing that podcast thing now and launching a Patreon. You can find it at patreon. com slash nori podcast. There are various tiers with different types of goodies available. Do you want to receive a special newsletter digest of what nori knots 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 nori podcast 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. Rolling solo today, I have with me Nathaniel Rich, who’s a novelist and author of Losing Earth, A Recent History.
This book began as an August 2018 New York Times Magazine story called Losing Earth, The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change, and then was adapted and expanded into a book, which I really enjoyed. It’s a great history of the early days of raising the climate alarm. And it filled in a lot of gaps that I had. So thank you for writing that, Nathaniel.
Nathaniel Rich: My pleasure. Appreciate it.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I guess, how would you say, what is the story broadly that you’re trying to convey here? And where does it fit into the narrative of climate change and people becoming aware of climate change? I know LBJ knew about climate change when he was president, but it wasn’t really mainstream or being discussed until some decades later. Is that true?
Nathaniel Rich: Yeah, LBJ and really every president since then has been briefed on the problem. The book tells the story of what happened mainly in Washington between 1979 and In 1989, it’s a story that’s been largely forgotten. And it’s a story of enormous triumph in which a few people, a handful of people, a NASA scientist, a young environmental lobbyist, and young congressman, and a few of their colleagues, staffers in the Senate and the House, Began to try to tell the world about what was happening, try to tell their own government what was happening and the American public, and managed over the course of a decade with a number of setbacks along the way to bring the issue to the world stage and to what was then thought to be a solution, a global treaty to reduce carbon emissions.
That would have been signed at the end of the 80s or the beginning of the 90s. So the piece runs from 79, which is when there was scientific, it’s essentially the date at which scientific consensus on the fundamental nature of climate change was articulated or crystallized. And it runs to 1989 when this agreement fell apart. And it’s a narrative history. So it tells the stories from An intimate vantage point of these several figures, Rafe Pomerantz, James Hansen, Al Gore, and a few others. And it explains what happened during that period and how it changed their lives.
And I think it’s an effort also to try to make sense of their failure.
Ross Kenyon: One of the juicy hooks that I noticed that definitely caught my eye, and I imagine many readers as well, is that during this period, there really wasn’t as much political conflict over climate change or global warming as we see now. There’s fights, there’s divisions that seem intractable in many ways, but this used to be thought of as a sort of bipartisan, come-together kind of issue, something that seems dreamlike to me at this time in world history.
Nathaniel Rich: It is, and it is bizarre. It’s like entering an alternate reality in which the issue is not a partisan issue. As you said, it’s not even politicized. There are Democrats and Republicans during this period in the highest levels of Washington- And the US government who pushed very forcefully for major comprehensive solutions. And one of the hardest things, I think, one of the hardest tasks of writing this history was to convey to a reader living in 2019 or 2020, How different the political landscape was, there was essentially a large faction of the Republican Party that then that no longer exists.
And so, you know, that someone like George H. W. Bush even would come out and run for the presidency by using climate change as one of, you know, a major plank.
Ross Kenyon: He called himself an environmentalist at some like United Auto Workers rally or something in Detroit too.
Nathaniel Rich: Yeah, he essentially ran, in current terms, you would say he ran to the left of Michael Dukakis on the environment in 1988. And so, you know, to understand that, you have to understand this lost strain of American conservatism, which believed that protecting the natural world and natural resources was a conservative idea, that there was nothing, in fact, more conservative than This is a case that’s laid out pretty eloquently at the beginning of the decade by an officer within the Reagan White House, a conservative leader of the White House’s own environmental policy group.
In a speech he gave to business leaders at the time, you know, this is not to say that Republicans as a whole were great on environmental issues. They certainly weren’t. And Reagan himself was a total disaster in a very, you know, sort of Trumpian manner, you know, taking office and nominating to run each agency, you know, the worst industry hack that he could come up with. And so, There was still a left-right divide on environmental issues, but on climate change particularly, you didn’t see the same divide. And in fact, you saw a major bipartisan push towards the end of the decade to try to develop real solutions.
Ross Kenyon: This is an obvious follow-up question, but why? And what changed? How did we get from there to here? And I guess maybe it’s more similar than I think in the way that you framed it, because there are people who are right of center. We’ve had a number of them on this podcast before who are working Benji Backer from American Conservation Coalition, which is a conservative conservation, what a tongue twister that is, organization, and Bob Inglis from Republican. And there’s other organizations too, I’m sure I don’t even know about that are germinating who recognize that there’s a gap in the market here where this old strain of conservatism still wants to value this and they aren’t being represented in the Trump White House or the Republican mainstream to the degree that they might like.
So is it that similar? Is it a similar level that I’m comparing it to? Or was there really some sort of sea change between now and then?
Nathaniel Rich: I guess some of both, really. I think there was a sea change by the end of the decade. And Losing Earth goes into detail about how that happened. And the short version of it is that there were a couple policy decisions made at the highest levels of the oil and gas industry at the American Petroleum Institute and within Exxon, the biggest oil and gas company then and I guess now. To fight against any kind of meaningful policy to reduce carbon emissions. And what we’ve seen since then is this enormous lobbying effort paired with a disinformation campaign funded by hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars to sow doubt, convince the American public that the science is uncertain, to buy off politicians, And particularly to turn the Republican Party into a party of climate denialism.
And, you know, a position that has sustained, even as the oil and gas industry in its own public comments, at least pretends to be interested in climate change and reducing emissions. Of course, you know, their actions don’t support that, but even they understand publicly it’s It’s not tenable to pretend that this thing isn’t happening, but you still have the Republican Party having taken on the issue as a bedrock partisan issue. So it’s, you know, the short version is the industry got involved. Now, there are people, as you say, who are center or right of center today who may share those values, but they’re not really welcomed in this party.
Certainly their positions are not. And, you know, Then I guess it’s on their conscience to how they vote and how they prioritize environmental issues or these issues confronting the future of our civilization versus other things like abortion or immigration or tax law and all the rest. So I think there are plenty of Americans who might still occupy that area on the Venn diagram of conservative beliefs and some sense of environmental stewardship. But you don’t see it reflected, certainly not in the national party.
Ross Kenyon: No, it isn’t super common. So it sounds like the narrative that you’re bringing here, and this is after the period in which you cover in your book, terminates. But after your book, you’re saying that there is a very strong coordinated effort I recently read Michael Mann’s The Madhouse Effect, or some of what you’re saying. I haven’t read this, but I know this is broadly the thesis of Merchants of Doubt, that the strategy of industry lobbyists and tastemakers is to cast doubt on the fundamentals in the same way that tobacco companies cast doubt on whether or not tobacco use is actually dangerous.
I’ve always wondered to what degree that story is nearly as nefarious as it’s presented. Is that a form of activism? Or is that actually what did happen? Is there anything that is available to complicate that story that you think? Or is that just broadly correct?
Nathaniel Rich: It’s probably correct. I mean, it’s not a theory. I mean, I think there’s a huge amount of evidence to support those claims or those conclusions. As I learned in my research, I spoke with some of the people who were responsible for first formulating policy, industry policy response to proposed climate legislation. So to take a step back, by 1988, As the issue enters this public consciousness in a dramatic way after James Hansen testifies before Congress and this now famous testimony where he said, it’s time to stop waffling. Global warming is here.
It’s already present. It’s not a theory anymore. You have 32 bills introduced in Congress, including some bipartisan omnibus bills that are more ambitious and far-reaching than even what is now being proposed as the Green New Deal. So you have an enormous amount of energy there. You have George H. W. Bush running on the issue. You have the head of Bush’s EPA, Bill Riley, calling for a massive American leadership in this major global treaty and all the rest. The oil and gas industry for the first time has to figure out. And they decide at the beginning, they agree upon several points.
One is that they need to be part of the policy conversation. You know, big surprise. They want to be in the room where these things are being negotiated. They want to make sure that where there is doubt in the science, that they emphasize those areas of uncertainty. Now, that should be understood as a distinction from where they would later get, you know, some years later, where they would try to Cast doubt on the whole fundamental science of climate change. Here they’re saying, where there’s some doubt about future projections, we should emphasize those bits of uncertainty.
That’s the beginning of that. And we will refuse to endorse any legislation that affects our bottom line. Also very significant when you start to understand what kind of legislation is being proposed, these very far-reaching efforts to curb emissions. So that’s the beginning of it. And I would say, in its first iteration, it’s not nearly as sinister as it would get. In fact, it’s more in line with this standard practices of the industry, which are Themselves, I think, morally questionable, but are essentially to try to fight off any kind of regulation.
So that’s bad enough, but I think where it gets to pretty quickly, and it gets there quickly in part because they’re so successful right away at sowing doubt in the public sector. They soon push it further and further until they’re actually saying that the world’s not getting warmer, or they’re saying that carbon dioxide doesn’t cause atmospheric warming and all the rest. So I think that’s as nefarious as you get. So I think those who find those actions villainous are completely... Supported by the facts. These are companies that are trying to maximize profits while knowing that doing so will bring about tremendous destruction, injury, death, and all All the effects of warming, and of course, in the long term, put our entire civilization at risk.
So I think there’s no way to understate their role in this. And yes, the playbook is connected because you have the same firms that are being used, the same PR firms that are being used in some of these early PR campaigns. So it’s all part of the same... And that’s what Naomi Oreskes wrote about in Merchants of Doubt, that this is corporate campaign. But you see it taken to this incredible level with climate change in particular. They’re able to push this disinformation as far as they have been able to with any other kind of health threat or environmental threat.
And smoking is probably the closest analogy, because they got to a point where they were saying smoking was healthy for you when they knew.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Telling mothers that to get to a healthy birth weight, certain brand of cigarette will help stuff like that. Yeah. Okay. That’s interesting to know. And this goes beyond the bounds of this book and your scope. But if you want to speculate wildly, do you think there will be legal ramifications for fossil fuel companies in the future? Should we expect something similar to what happened with tobacco companies?
Nathaniel Rich: Yeah, it’s already happening. There are a number of legal campaigns to try to hold these companies responsible. Also, one that seems to be failing now to hold the U. S. government responsible, this suit called Juliana versus the United States, which was brought by 21 youth plaintiffs, I should say, including James Hansen’s granddaughter, that Recently suffered a setback in an appeals court, but is attempting to hold the U. S. responsible, the federal government, for failing to take action and, in fact, making the climate problem worse while knowing full well the repercussions of its policy.
But a lot of these lawsuits, you know, they’re major ones against Exxon, and they’re weaving through the courts now. And whether any of them will be, ultimately, will be an effective remedy, I think, remains in doubt. You know, I could imagine under a different administration, some kind of more directed effort to try to hold accountable these companies. And I imagine in the future, as the devastation mounts, there will be some kind of popular movement or a broader popular movement than there already is to penalize these companies for these actions. But I doubt whether those penalties, even if realized, will be sufficient to undo or even check some of the damage they’ve achieved.
Ross Kenyon: This is another highly speculative question, and it fits broadly with what I understand. Your point is why there was failure to act on this information, even though there was broad consensus, which is just why. I mean, the people who work at oil companies live on the same planet. Their children will have to face the same consequences as everyone else’s, or even they themselves, if they’re young enough, will live through the nastiest bits of this too. So why? Is it just... Do they expect to, I don’t know, have some gated enclave where they can live that is separate from the consequences of these actions?
I don’t fully understand that part of the story or how they might justify it if it really is nearly as mendacious as you believe the evidence supports, which I don’t know enough about to say one way or the other.
Nathaniel Rich: Yeah, I think that’s a moral question that I’ve certainly thought a lot about. I think your premise is, I would adjust your premise, I suppose, which is to say that they will be as affected as everyone else. In the short or even medium term, they won’t. Wealthy people and people in the wealthiest countries of the world will not be as affected Greatly harmed as poor people, people in marginalized communities, people of color. Climate change cuts, exacerbates every form of inequality just about that we have in society. So poor people will suffer more from the effects of warming.
Immigration will spike. You’ll have greater geopolitical conflict between states that are suffering natural disasters or resource scarcity. So yes, everybody will be affected in some way, but perhaps the CEO of Exxon and his heirs, they won’t feel it the same way that a poor person living in I was going to say Bangladesh, but even somebody living in Norfolk or somewhere will feel it. However, you’re right to say that in the long term, of course, these are civilizational threats. So we’re all at risk. And so then it gets into these other questions about Larger questions, which are very much the questions that I wanted to try to explore in Losing Earth, which is, you know, how do we really make sense of long term threats?
How do we think about the future? How do we value the future, particularly the distant future in relation to the present or the short term? And I think we have, we do have real limitations as a species, certainly as a democracy, you know, in which no elected official As an office, as a term that lasts longer than six years, you know, we have real limitations here in how the systems we have in place, our government, our economy, deal with these kinds of risks. And that’s not to say that we can’t overcome those limitations, but I think one of the lessons of the period that I wrote about was When, as you said, there wasn’t really any antagonistic force to be reckoned with.
The industry was not trying to stop progress. It was sort of sitting on the sidelines following along during most of the decade. Then it does force one to realize that how difficult it is to even act on a problem of this scale when everybody agrees on the basic facts of the case. And so that’s... That’s a tricky part of it. And that certainly opens up more questions than it answers. But those are the kinds of ideas I was trying to wrestle with in the book.
Ross Kenyon: Indeed. And I liked that focus, though. You also received criticism as a result of that conclusion or that wrinkle that you’ve added. In particular, I was reading Naomi Klein’s latest book, On Fire, The Case for a New Green Deal. And it was a piece that originally appeared in The Intercept called Capitalism Killed Our Climate Momentum, Not Human Nature. Human nature in scare quotes there. Yeah, so she took aim at your piece, the magazine article, not the book, which came later, for what I perceived as the focus on how during this time period, primarily in the 80s, there was an industry pushback to the same extent that would emerge.
Yeah. There was bipartisan support for climate action, and yet it failed to happen. And she wanted to place the blame at the feet of neoliberalism. And you have, you know, this is the era of Datcher and Reagan. And this is what corrupted it. Oh, and also globalization. So globalization is starting to take off. And especially by the end of the decade is really beginning in full swing here and getting going. So... Who’s right, Nathaniel? Basically, was there anything to her criticism that you thought was spot on where you took it on the chin and were just like, all right, that’s a very good point.
I’ll amend this. Or did you think it missed something?
Nathaniel Rich: It’s a weird, it’s a weird argument because I wrote about the Reagan White House. I wrote about Thatcher, you know, who called for a global treaty and climate, the former chemist. You know, I was writing about power in Washington, industry, government. So yes, you can call that neoliberalism. You can talk about, you can use these sort of large academic buzzwords. But if you don’t attach them to anything specific, it’s harder for me to engage it. I mean, you could easily just have read my piece and said, look, this shows you how neoliberalism fails to address these problems.
So, you know, that’s what I didn’t. So I was more confused than anything else. I mean, I think Klein has a very specific point that she likes, that she makes over and over again. And she was using this history to make You know, to put it in her terms, which, you know, she’s welcome to do. But, you know, there was nothing in her piece that either that she substantiated with facts or that overturned anything in my piece. She was just using different buzzwords. So, you know, it felt sort of neither here nor there to me.
There’s nothing she wrote about that I didn’t include and there’s nothing that I wrote about that couldn’t have been used to make her argument just as well.
Ross Kenyon: I think those are very good caveats that you bring with Thatcher being a chemist in her private life and supporting a global treaty on climate change. But then also George H. W. Bush coming out and being an environmentalist also in the Republican Party and doing these things, it doesn’t fit as neatly with... I like Naomi Klein’s work. I read basically all of it or I’ve read most of it. And one thing I noticed is there is a very strong Manichaean trend to it. There’s always like a good versus evil kind of vibe.
And I don’t always feel like there is a lot of... I don’t know if I’ve ever seen any market actor in any of her work be portrayed as someone who could be conceived as good. And surely there are some just like not everyone who supports government or nonprofit or cooperatives doing something. Not all of those people are good people with good results and good intentions either. It’s a mix. Like most things in life, there’s a nice mix of the moral characters involved. And I think it’s good to recognize that. I think your writing does a very good job of that.
But it also makes your story harder to tell. I feel smarter for having read it, but it also didn’t reinforce something I could write on a picket sign and say, Nathaniel Rich told me this and this is what we have to do now.
Nathaniel Rich: And I think that’s an important distinction to make because Naomi Klein does a very different form kind of writing than I do. She writes activist... she does activist writing. She writes pieces intended to convey a very straightforward message, you know, in this case that capitalism cannot solve climate crisis. And she writes with the intention of delivering also a very specific Outcome or she writes to motivate her readers to act in very specific ways. In this case, I suppose to vote for a Green New Deal. It’s her new book or support candidates that do.
And that’s fine. And, you know, I support those candidates as well. But that’s not the kind of writing that interests me as a writer. I like to write about stories that don’t have such clear agendas or that at least have some sense of moral tension or confidence. And I felt that the story from 1989 to the present with climate change, which is essentially the story of the oil and gas industry getting involved and Republicans becoming the party of climate denialism, had been told well. And it was also, frankly, kind of straightforward and easy story to tell.
It’s a really stark case of heroes and villains. The story before that interested me as a writer because it wasn’t so clear, as you said, to figure out That it wasn’t, there wasn’t some evil force that was trying to stop progress during this time. In fact, a lot of people with good intentions worked really hard on the problem and still failed. And I think in part because of limitations that were intrinsic in them and frankly to some extent in our species and our system of government. Again, as I said, it doesn’t mean we can’t overcome those limitations, but I think that the tragedy of the story, and it really is a tragedy, is that there were flaws in the way that these heroic figures went about trying to solve this critical problem, and that the flaws emerged from their own And that’s what makes it tragic.
It also is what makes the story dramatic. And I think from a narrative standpoint, it’s a lot more dramatic than what happened afterwards, which is just this story of this cruel corporate force trying to stop any kind of meaningful policy. I think both stories need to be told. You know, as it relates to Naomi Klein, she wants to tell the story from 1989 to the president. And, you know, I think she’s welcome to do it. I wanted to talk about a story that is a little bit, as you said, resists interpretation or at least resists clear moralizing as well.
And also, frankly, it’s a story that I think holds a lot of lessons for where we are now and where we’re headed.
Ross Kenyon: And one of the reasons why I liked your book and article so much is because I think for most people, they became aware of climate change either as individuals who are living at the time or just if they’re thinking back in their historical understanding of it is Jim Hansen’s testimony. That’s sort of like the beginning, right? I think for most people. Right. Yeah. And so the story that you’re basically doing a prequel, it’s sort of like a climate change prequel. Is that, is that a halfway decent? Yeah, I think that’s right.
Nathaniel Rich: I mean, I think, I think that’s exactly, that’s, that’s correct. I mean, that the, the story, at least as it’s known in the public is, yes, begins with James Hansen telling Congress, you know, we need to do something. And, and then you have this emergence of this, the Death Star of American Petroleum Institute and the industry.
Ross Kenyon: You had to take it just one step further than me, huh?
Nathaniel Rich: Right. And of course, Hansen testified before Congress just about every year for the preceding 10 years before that famous testimony. And he’d said just about the same thing each time. But it is pervasive, that narrative, and even the idea that this is a new problem. I mean, I think of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on the floor of the House some months ago, making this very eloquent speech. Demanding, you know, Green New Deal and that the federal government take responsibility and so on. And she punctuated this appeal by saying the government or Exxon has known about this since 1989, the year I was born.
And she said before, you know, the government’s known about this since 1989. And of course, I want to say, well, the government’s known about it since 1957, at least. Exxon’s known about it since the same time, in the 50s as well. So, you know, the industry has been so successful, I think, with Propagating this idea that it’s a new problem that even people like Ocasio-Cortez who are on the forefront of the policy still buy into the idea that this is a new crisis when that could not be farther from the truth.
So I think there is something valuable about understanding how we got to The way I see the story is that as of 1989, essentially the story stops, that we’ve been in a paralysis, political paralysis, and to some extent a cultural paralysis when it comes to climate since then. So I wanted to know how did we get to that paralysis? Why did things come to stop? Why did the needle drop then? And how could it have been different? Was there any hope for any different outcome?
Ross Kenyon: Well, you dangled this in front of me and then we went a different direction with this last question. So what do we do? What is the historical lesson that we should pull from the time period that you were writing about? Is there any sort of good lessons that we can apply onto our current zeitgeist?
Nathaniel Rich: Yeah, I think there’s a major political lesson to be learned, which is that there are limits to What I would call an appeal to reason. Essentially, it’s the argument that activists beginning with Rafe Pomerantz and in my story in 1979 have been making for now for 40 years, which is to say we need to act on climate change because we have the science. We know what to do. We understand that if we fail to act now, things will get much worse very soon. And the longer we wait to act, the worse things will get.
Now, everything about that appeal is accurate, but it’s not enough. It’s clearly not enough to motivate people to act. It was not enough during the 80s when you didn’t have political opposition, and it’s certainly not enough today. And yet that really has been... The activist line since 1979, all the way up until, you know, through Al Gore, through Inconvenient Truth, all the way up until about a year ago, when you have the emergence of this new wave of activists led by Ocasio-Cortez and Greta Thunberg and, you know, Extinction Rebellion, Sunrise Movement in the U.
S. , That the idea being, with this new activism being that it’s not simply a logical issue, that it’s a moral issue, that if we fail to act, we undermine just about every value that we hold dear, that we use as the bedrock for our society. You know, questions of equality and fairness and fraternity, egalitarianism, that all of these begin to crumble if we fail to take action on this problem, because this problem, of course, will exacerbate every form of inequality that we have. And so that’s a different line of argument.
I think it’s, you know, it tends to be expressed more emotionally and more personally. You have activists no longer saying things like, you know, it’s foolish not to act. Inaction is killing us, or I’m afraid to have children, it’s time to panic, all of the rest. I think it’s a more emotional language, but it’s also a more honest language, and it’s a more personal language. And so I think the lesson of this period has been absorbed in that, and you see it in that form of activism. And that to me is the most profound shift that we’ve had in the last 40 years, that people are speaking about it in this different Different register.
And that might not seem like a lot that people are using different words, but I happen to think that it’s enormously powerful to put this into a moral context. And I do feel that whenever we have had moments of profound transformation in our society, particularly around social issues, that they’ve always been accompanied by moral urgency. And we haven’t seen that with climate Publicly, at least writ large, until now. And I think that’s an exciting development. How quickly it will motivate people to change their minds and motivate people to vote differently, we’ll see.
But I think already it has had a quite dramatic effect on the way the American public understands the issue. You see it in polls and you see it in how people are voting in the Democratic primary.
Ross Kenyon: Okay. So if you have a set of scales out here and on the positive side, you have this change in rhetoric and increased awareness and the moral case against the changing climate is becoming weightier in people’s minds and that’s acting. And then on the other side, you have a At least from what we’ve talked about and also the books that we’ve mentioned, concerted disinformation campaigns played a large role in climate inaction. Has that negative side of the scale with disinformation, has that also been lessening or changing? I feel like I’ve noticed that people that I know who used to be deniers that climate change was happening are now more like lukewarmest or they think adaptation will be easier than expected and stuff like that.
So I At least anecdotally, I’ve noticed stuff like that. Do you think that’s also changing at the higher echelons of that too?
Nathaniel Rich: It is. I think the pressure... And I really think that there’s a moral pressure that has a role in this. I don’t know that it’s decisive, but I do think at a certain point, it becomes laughable. It becomes ridiculous. Yeah. To pretend this isn’t happening in the same way that even the most evangelical to right wing religious politician would still not pretend, would not say in public that the earth is only 6,000 years old or whatever. So I do think that it is shifting and you see that reflected in some of these new bills that are now being discussed on the right or center right, I guess.
Ideas to plant trees, for instance, and some that I would put in the same kind of realm or adaptation, certainly, which is, yes, on the spectrum is not as extreme, not necessarily useful or helpful, but certainly reflects a shifting of the sands. And I think even Trump said after all of his I think he recently said, well, of course, you know, I think it’s happening, but whatever. And so, you know, I think there will become a time where it’s no longer just socially acceptable, even on the far right, to pretend that this isn’t Certainly not morally acceptable.
And I think you do see that filtering down. And I think there is a transition that’s happening. But, you know, as with everything with climate change, it’s a question of how quickly. And furthermore, it’s not enough for everybody in the country to believe in the science. You know, that’s where we were in 1988, right? And we still didn’t get very much done. What was missing is that it wasn’t the top priority. And the kind of transformation we’re talking about, the amount of money That we need to put into renewable energy, carbon removal, and transitioning away from fossil fuels, even if it’s economically advantageous, it’s still a profound shift that has to take place in our society.
And that will not happen unless there’s enormous political popular pressure on our elected officials to do it. So that’s where we need to get to. And we’re still quite a ways forward. I think so.
Ross Kenyon: And I think it’s primarily, this is just me spitballing here. I have no evidence for this. But from where I sit, it appears that a lot of the climate action proposed by conservatives and libertarians are a response to The Green New Deal, which is terrifying to them. They don’t want to radically recreate the entire world to do this. They want to make sure it’s something that works. They don’t think a lot of these government programs will work in the way as intended. They want to make sure it’s done in a sensible way.
Whereas I think previously, I think solution aversion was in play for a lot of them too, which is that they don’t see any solutions that would appeal to them as people who enjoy markets. And they don’t think that they would work anyways. So why not just like dig a defense in depth and just deny that the problem is even a problem in the first place. But I think they’re realizing now that the defenses have been breached and it’s time to like move back to the trenches farther back. Sorry, I just watched 1917.
So that’s what’s happening, Nathaniel.
Nathaniel Rich: No, it works. I think you inevitably get to a point with climate change and climate policy where you succumb to the military metaphors because that’s what we’re up against or mobilization of society that can only really be compared to a global war.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, it’s always the, I hear Marshall Plan multiple times a week at this point. So I’m wondering what other metaphors people are going to bring in there. I think I did the first World War I one that I’ve heard.
Nathaniel Rich: Like departure.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Indeed. What are you working on now? You have anything else coming out? Another novel? I guess you’ve written a few of those, but you are also writing on climate change. What an interesting career that you’ve had.
Nathaniel Rich: Thanks. Yeah, another novel and also a book of pieces about not exclusively or specifically climate change, but stories that chart our changing relationship to the natural world, which of course is no longer natural by any definition. Now that we’ve, you know, there’s not a single square inch of earth on the planet that we haven’t influenced through our activities in some way. And so it’s about You know, how we got to this point to some extent, this eerie new place that we find ourselves and the even more uncanny future that we are entering and trying to reconcile some of our old traditional cultural views of nature with this very unnatural place that we’re headed.
Ross Kenyon: I would love to read this. I can’t wait. Where could someone keep up with your work if they want to know when something new comes out? If you are running your mouth on Twitter, where might they keep up with you there?
Nathaniel Rich: Yeah, I try not to run my mouth on Twitter as much as possible, but I’m at Nathaniel Rich and my website’s NathanielRich. com and yeah, I’m around.
Ross Kenyon: Okay, yeah. Listeners, I would definitely recommend reading, and there’s also a very nice audiobook version of Losing Earth, A Recent History. I really like it. It’s an undertold part of the story. It’s very detailed and well told. And thank you so much for being here, Nathaniel.
Nathaniel Rich: Thanks so much for having me on. I enjoyed speaking with you.
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