SEASON FOUR | Time to 1.5

Sky’s the Limit

AMY: Do you think we're going to keep temperatures below one and a half degrees of warming?

JIM: Uhhh…(laughter)

AMY: Be honest.

MUSIC

Welcome to Threshold, I'm Amy Martin, and this is Jim White. He's a dean and a professor of geological sciences and environmental studies at the University of Colorado in Boulder. 

JIM: Umm…Let me answer that question this way, I am fundamentally an optimist, and as a climate scientist, that may sound a little unusual, but I have a great deal of respect for the ingenuity, for the inventiveness, for the ability of human beings to recognize problems and solve problems.

Over the last 18 months of reporting for this season, many of the conversations I've had have ended up in places like this: explorations of core questions about who we are as a species. The climate crisis is provoking an identity crisis. We're all trying to figure out what it is about humanity that led to this mess, and if we've got what it takes to get ourselves out of it. And here in our final episode this season, I'm going to share parts of a few of those conversations with you.

I’m starting with Jim White, because I think the ideas he brings up are a really powerful frame for the other conversations you'll hear this time, and for the climate crisis overall. I talked with Jim for almost two hours in July of 2021, and we spent most of the time talking about climate science. The carbon cycle and tipping points and the climate stability of the Holocene—a lot of the same things I talked about with Johan Rockström, back in our first episode.

JIM: The last 10000 years was remarkably stable. We did not have very many challenges climatically speaking. And as far as humans go, that was really beneficial to us.

But toward the end, the conversation took a turn when I asked Jim this.

AMY: So what top three things, like if you were king of the world, Jim White, and you could wave your magic wand and say in 2022, I am going to institute these three things are going to happen to help keep us below one point five degrees of warming. What would they be?

JIM: Well, I'm going to give you an answer that that, um, is not going to be nuts and bolts. Because I frankly, I think that. You know, things like better windows, better doors, drive electric cars, you know, generate electricity from, you know, sunshine, all the, you know, stuff like that yes, I think we know all that stuff. I think there's some other fundamental issues that we need to address.

Like so many other guests we've talked to this season, the issues Jim is most concerned about are social and political, not technological. He said he would use his magic wand to solve global economic inequality, improve our long term thinking and planning abilities, and make us smarter about recognizing the value of diversity. Basically, he'd get people working together, respecting each other, and being fair to each other.

JIM: The pathway to sustainability, the pathway to living sustainably on the planet is actually paved with some very good changes that we need to make as human beings. We need to we need to all care about each other from that economic status point of view. We need to care about our kids and grandkids. And we need to understand that there is no reason why one gender or one race should run the show.

AMY: I'm moved by the idea that in this crisis that the things that we need to do to get through it are things that are part of making us better people. That's kind of beautiful to me.

JIM: Yeah. I you know, I'm a, um. I always view challenges as learning lessons, you know what challenged us and what is it we need to do to adapt to that challenge? And what lessons can we learn from that? And to me, as you said, the beauty, if you will, of our current situation is that the way out of our current situation is to actually be better people. And, you know, honestly, is that a bad thing? Hell, no. It's not a bad thing. It's a good thing. And that's you know, it's slow. We're not going to get there right away. Um, but the faster we recognize that, that a lot of the fundamental problems we have really generate with us, and they're fixable, then I think the faster we can get to a point where not only can we live sustainably on the planet, but we can be, you know, much nicer people. I would love the world to be a much nicer place for my grandkids and great grandkids, et cetera, and that is the sort of if there's a silver lining in any of this, Amy, it's that, you know, if we can get to that point, then the world will be a much better place for those who come after us.

AMY: It's really inspiring to have something to work toward versus just some horrible thing to try to avoid, you know?

JIM: Right. This is not just a question of, you know, we don't want to run the, you know, the car into the ditch, but we actually have a you know, there's a there's a goal up here and let's get to it.

In some circles, being anything other than nihilistic about the climate crisis is...uncool. Like if you express hope, you’re burying your head in the sand. Blind to reality. And it’s true, naïveté can blind us. But so can cynicism. So I want to challenge you—and myself—to entertain the possibility that we can do this. That we can hold global temperature rise to one-point-five degrees, prevent the worst impacts of the climate crisis, and eventually, turn this ship around. Return global temperatures to pre-industrial levels. I think one of the bravest things we can do is risk imagining that we can solve this. Not because we're convinced that we will, but because we know we have to.

INTRO MONTAGE

We're going to spend the first half of this episode focused on cooperation. It's been a running theme throughout this season of our show, and as we witnessed first hand in Glasgow, it's the key to our ability to contain the climate crisis. We know what we need to do, we know what we need to stop doing, we have the technologies we need. The primary thing that's holding us up here is the level of cooperation required.

So...can we do this? Are we capable of cooperating at the level that the climate crisis requires? Pondering that questions sent me to my bookshelf, to re-read the work of a scientist and thinker I have admired for years, primatologist Frans de Waal.

FRANS: I am of Dutch origin and I'm a specialist of chimpanzees, bonobos and a few other primates.

Frans is professor emeritus at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. His books and TED talks have been read and watched by millions of people. He says people are fascinated by chimpanzees and other great apes because we're so similar to them. We study them as a way of understanding ourselves. But the problem, Frans says, is that until relatively recently we've focused almost exclusively on one of our closest non-human relatives—the chimpanzee—and ignored the other—the bonobo.

FRANS: But the bonobo is exactly equally close to us genetically and anatomically, I would say even a bit more similar to us than the chimpanzee.

MUSIC

Bonobos look a lot like chimps—they both have those intelligent eyes, and big, protruding mouths—but bonobos are a little shorter, and more lightly built. What really distinguishes them from chimps, though, are not their physical characteristics, but their social lives. Chimp societies are led by an alpha male, and violence is a regular part of chimp life.

FRANS: People always present our species as hyper aggressive, warlike, we have war in our DNA, and they always bring up the chimpanzee as the example to prove their point. Like chimpanzees do it, we do it, so it must be very old.

But bonobos live in female-dominated groups. They use sex to avoid and mitigate conflicts, and they're generally much more peaceful than chimpanzees.

FRANS: Scientists have tried to avoid the bonobo, have tried to downplay the importance of the bonobo, partly because they didn't know what to do with the sexiness of the species, partly the peacefulness, and certainly the female dominance throws them off and they don't know what to do with that.

AMY: I can't help but flash on human gender dynamics here. Do you think that emphasis on competition and on the violence, and battles is in part because the academic world has been dominated by men?

FRANS: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Men are obsessed with competition. We love competition. And we compete quite a bit, although I was I would say females compete quite a bit, too. But men are very focused on that.

So what we see when we observe our nearest relatives has of course been heavily influenced by who's looking, and the biases they've brought into those observations. And that has consequences for how we think about ourselves. Frans says that by ignoring bonobos, we've ignored all kinds of pro-social, cooperative tendencies that are just as central to primate identity as competition. Take the question of response to outsiders. It's very different in these two species.

FRANS: Chimpanzees hate strangers. And if they get a chance, they would attack them. But bonobos, they like strangers. And so you can bring bonobos together who don't know each other, and set up a situation where one can help the other, and the bonobos will do that kind of thing. And it's even looked at as if that's an overture to contact, like this is this is my gift, I bring you a gift and that way we have a good relationship.

Frans says in the wild bonobos have also been observed sharing food, and adopting orphaned babies of different groups.

FRANS: Yeah the bonobos have very different relationships between the groups in the wild. The groups may even mingle instead of fighting like chimpanzees do. And this may be partly because the females are in charge and the females actually have a tendency to try to meet other females of other groups, and groom them and look at the babies and things like that, something that the males don't do. The males are more territorial.

So our close primate relatives exhibit a lot of cooperative behaviors. And that disrupts the notion that primate survival is all about dominating competitors.

FRANS: And so the bonobo has been marginalized in the whole story because the story of human evolution, according to anthropologists is a story of war and conquering. And that's the story they like to tell. And I'm not convinced at all that that's the story of human evolution, but that's the one they tell.

So what does all of this have to do with climate change? Well, we humans are strongly influenced by our expectations; we see what we think we're going to see, and behave the way we believe we're expected to behave. And it runs deeper than behavior, actually. It's about identity—who we believe we are. So if we approach the climate problem believing that we are essentially aggressive, violent creatures and ignoring our deeply-rooted cooperative capacities, I think we're at real risk of creating a self-fulfilling prophecy of our own doom. If we convince ourselves that we can't cooperate well enough to solve climate change, that will become the truth. But the reverse is probably also true. If we understand ourselves to be inherently cooperative animals, that will help to make us more so. And Frans says cooperation is deeply rooted in us. He says we can see it even if we focus only on our chimp lineage. He tells me about an experiment that he and his team set up involving a group of 11 chimpanzees kept in a large outdoor enclosure in Georgia.

FRANS: They were all together and there was an apparatus from which they could get food, which required two or three chimps.

This apparatus was sort of like a self-feeding machine, but the only way to get the food was if two or three chimps operated it together. And the question was, would they do it? Would they moderate their aggressive tendencies and figure out how to collaborate in order to get the reward? Frans and his team set up the apparatus and then sat back to watch the chimps in action.

FRANS: In the beginning they competed and we had more fights than cooperation, so to speak.

Before they realized that they had to work together, many of the chimps shoved each other away from the apparatus, hoping to keep all the food for themselves. But over the course of an hour, things started to change.

FRANS: Almost half way they started to change their behavior. And by the end, they were almost entirely cooperative. There was almost no fighting anymore.

They ran the experiment two to three times per week, for ten months.

FRANS: And our analysis of the data showed that what they did actually is becoming more selective. It's like, if I work with you and you are competitive and you try to take all the foods and so on, or you try to keep me away from the apparatus, I'm not going to work with you anymore. So they became selective. I'm going to work only with those who work well with me. And as a result, you got more cooperation and individuals who were too competitive—there's always individuals who are like that—they were sort of excluded. And these individuals learned, if I want to get access to the apparatus and get some food, I need to behave a bit nicer than I did before.

FRANS: They all learned in the process how to cooperate, and you would expect that. If you if you look at a group of wolves or killer whales or lionesses, you see very high levels of cooperation between animals who are all maybe hungry and have reasons to compete, but they must be able to suppress that. And think the suppression of competition is probably very widespread.

So the ability to suppress competitive impulses in order to achieve a common goal is easily found in nature. Birds do it. Bees do it. Whales and wolves and even chimpanzees do it. But what about us? Aren't we essentially selfish creatures? Isn't that what survival is all about, according to Charles Darwin? Beating the competition, winning the game of life?

FRANS: What you need to realize is that survival in wild animals is not necessarily based on who's the toughest and the strongest. That may play a role on occasion. But if my hearing is better than your hearing, or my eyesight is better, or my immune system is better, or I am better at finding food, that's also survival. And so most of the selective forces in nature, so to speak, have more to do with that kind of qualities. Like are you healthy enough to travel? Are you healthy enough to fly? If you cannot fly as a bird, what are you going to do? You can be strong and big and mean, but that doesn't mean that you're going to get anything. And so physical strength and fighting abilities are sometimes important. But I would say it's a really in the minority of cases and we should emphasize all these other qualities, too. And Darwin did that.

AMY: Huh. Fascinating. Do you think that cooperation is one of the things that nature selects for?

FRANS: Absolutely.

This is not how Darwin's theories tend to get referred to in popular culture. The complex ideas behind natural selection are often reduced down to a very simplistic mindset of “might makes right.” The strongest wins.

FRANS: The problem is that we have depicted competition as the natural thing and cooperation as some sort of invention, and empathy and morality, things that we have invented. And we have not emphasized how that is also connected with our nature.

AMY: Yeah. You're so right. I think I mean, I think I have had that unconscious assumption of like, oh, cooperation is sort of like this later thing, this add on to this core. And what you're saying is the core contains the cooperation as well. Very much.

FRANS: Our whole body, and the body of every animal is a cooperation between cells. So, I mean, cooperation is ingrained in nature. So even bacteria, plants, there's all sorts of cooperation in the world. And I think we have been a little bit late in realizing that. I don't blame this at all on Darwin, because I think Darwin was fully aware of the levels of cooperation and altruism that exist in nature. But I think it's partly for political purposes that people have been emphasizing that.

And it's not that competition isn't important among primates and in nature overall, Frans says. It's just that it's not the only important thing—even among chimps. He says male chimps actually spend far more time grooming each other than they do fighting, and females sometimes wield enormous power, but it might be exerted in different ways. Just like humans, chimps and bonobos are extremely complex creatures living in intricate, multi-layered social webs.

FRANS: Well humans are a highly, highly social species. The biggest punishment we have apart from execution is solitary confinement. And so we are a super social species, very dependent on each other. And I think that needs to be emphasized much more than this competitive side, which we also have, clearly, no one is going to deny that we have that side. But I think we are, first of all, a group living animal, like many other animals.

I think this has huge consequences for how we think about our odds of getting through the climate crisis. What Frans is saying is that our cooperative tendencies are just as old and deep and intrinsic to us as our competitive ones. That the instinct to collaborate is just as much a part of human nature—and our survival—as the urge to dominate. So the idea that we're all in this together, that we're dependent on each other, this isn't some modern idea that's been bolted on to our core nature. This has been with us all along our evolutionary journey.

Another very old part of our nature is a concern with fairness. Frans says this comes with being highly social; being a group-living animal makes us very sensitive to how resources get distributed. Monkeys have this trait too. They, like us, are very aware of who is getting what, and react strongly when they feel like they're not getting their fair share. Frans says there's a name for this in his field. It's called inequity aversion.

FRANS: It is that you watch what you get and if you get less than somebody else, you need to protest to make sure that you get equal to somebody else.

He says inequity aversion is a logical part of being a member of a cooperative species.

FRANS: If two monkeys hunt and one and one catches the squirrel, then there needs to be sharing. Otherwise, why would I hunt with you and help you catching the squirrel.

But in the apes, this trait goes way beyond the level of self-protection, of wanting to make sure I get what's owed to me. Frans says many chimpanzees—and many humans—demonstrate aversion to inequity even when the imbalance tips in their favor. For instance, he says, if one chimp is offered a higher reward than another for the same task, sometimes they'll refuse it.

FRANS: And that has we think to do with the fact that if you create these inequalities, you reduce the cooperation. And so chimpanzees realize—as humans, I think—that if you take everything and the other gets nothing, you're going to lose a partner, because the partner is going to look for a better partner. And so you better not take everything. And so that means that we're also interested in equal distribution from the winner's perspective. And and that's a very important part of cooperation, also human cooperation. And so winners need to be generous if they want to keep keep the cooperation going.

The idea that we have an inherent aversion to inequity strikes me as one of the more hopeful things I've heard in a long time. It’s a recognition that the line between helping another and helping oneself is in many instances a false one—that our fates are intertwined, and therefore, helping you helps me. This is precisely the kind of mindset that we need to bring to the climate crisis, and especially the UN climate negotiations. We need to grasp that cooperation is essential to our survival, and therefore it’s in the interest of the so-called “winners” to be uncomfortable with their advantage, to want to even things out. But if this is kind of baked into who we are, why aren't we doing it? Why are the climate negotiations moving so slowly, and why, in general, are so many of us OK with the inequality in our world? Frans says that probably has something to do with another human characteristic: we're a very in-group, out-group kind of animal.

FRANS: We cooperate very well within the group, but between groups, what you you're talking about is the climate change is now you have different groups who need to cooperate. I think that's a challenge for us. Now you are asking different groups to come together. What we actually need in this case is a common enemy, like an extraterrestrial invader who says we're going to invade you unless you clean up your mess, so to speak. And then then we might do it.

AMY: Well, yeah, because I thought I was just going to say, it's like what we need to do is understand that this is not between groups, but that we are one group. And to ask all humans around the world to understand themselves, to be one group involved in one giant, complicated long term group project is is daunting. But it sounds like I hear you say that it is deep within us, these cooperative abilities. This isn't like something we have to just suddenly learn how to cooperate on a on a big scale tomorrow. Like we actually have a lot of the skills we need if we can employ them in this direction.

FRANS: Yeah so I think what is special about human cooperation, is the scale. So in chimpanzees, you have a bunch of individuals, maybe a dozen, who may do things together and help each other. But what humans do is set up a corporation where you have thousands and thousands of people, who each their own own thing and their own task. It's extremely complex. There's an element of self organization in there that is not fully understood, but there's also a hierarchy of ordering. And that kind of scale of cooperation of humans is really exceptional. And humans are very good at that. We are actually excellent at cooperation. And nowadays many people believe that the secrets of the success of humans is actually cooperation. It's not so much competition and warfare, but it's how well, well, we cooperate with each other.

I just want to underline that Frans said we're really good at cooperation, and especially doing it at big scales. In fact, the ability to cooperate is one of our key tools for adapting to changing circumstances—it's been refined over millennia and there's no reason it can't continue to develop as we face new challenges. I kind of want to shout this stuff from the rooftops, to help bolster our confidence in ourselves.

FRANS: People will say, “that's how nature works, we are competitive and that's how we need to structure society.” And they have completely forgotten that we come from a very long line of animals that are not so competitive necessarily, certainly not all the time, and that live in societies because they survive by living together and helping each other. And so we have never made that connection.

The climate crisis is teaching us plenty of things about ourselves that we would rather not know—that we are capable of creating very serious global problems and being way too slow to try to solve them. But maybe this challenge is also an opportunity for us to learn more positive things too. Because to get through this, we're going to need to exercise our cooperative capacities in ways we never have before. But we're not starting from scratch here. Those muscles exist. We just need to make them stronger.

We'll have more after this short break.

BREAK

Welcome back to Threshold, I'm Amy Martin, and we're going to turn now to something I've been really preoccupied with throughout this whole season of our show: how to tell the story of the climate crisis. We humans make sense of the world through stories, and stories have structure: a beginning, a middle, and an end. But the climate crisis doesn’t feel like that most of the time. There's no plot; it's just everyday, everywhere, all the time. And I think this is part of the reason why we're having such a hard time solving it. There's no narrative arc. It's just an amorphous, endless blob of bad.

I think that kind of fries our circuits and opens up this void in our imaginations that's often filled with images of apocalypse. It's pretty remarkable, really, when you think about it. We've made story after story about ourselves ruining the world, or fleeing from it, but almost none about continuing to live here, on this planet, far into the future, in a way that's healthy for us, and for everything else. To be clear, I don't think simply telling the right kind of story about the climate crisis will solve it. Obviously, we can't get to the other side of this with stories alone. But I also don't think we get there without them.

BRUNO: I think that the story that we need to tell about the climate crisis is the story of the potential of building a new world.

This is Bruno Rodriguez, one of the founders and leaders of Youth for Climate Argentina, a branch of the global Fridays for Future movement. We first introduced you to Bruno back in our fourth episode this season, when we explored what's at stake if we fail to act decisively on climate. Bruno and I agreed that talking about that stuff—the consequences of inaction on climate—is important. It's one potential reality, and we can't sugarcoat that. But we also agreed that it was crucially important not to present those consequences as if they are inevitable. So, no to pollyanna stories. No to doom and gloom stories. But what kind of stories can we tell here? How do we make space to think about something this big without either trivializing it or being overwhelmed by it?

BRUNO: I think that needs certainly it needs a different kind of story, a very positive and and a story about alternatives, but not a naive story. We need to be strategic. We need to be bold. And certainly the worst story that we can tell, I think, is a story about irreversible collapse. That's even worse than a naive approach may be.

Both Bruno and I have an interest in being able to communicate effectively about climate. He's an activist, I'm a journalist. But the issue I'm trying to get at here is deeper than just how write or speak about the climate crisis. What I'm grasping for are storylines that help all of us process the climate crisis psychologically—make space for it in our minds, help us get oriented toward it, and organize our thoughts and feelings around it. Because that process is crucial for action.

AMY: And it's really hard because this crisis is so unlike anything we've ever faced before. I mean, humans are story-making machines. We have a million stories for every kind of scenario: love and war and times of want and times of plenty. But we don't have something like this, where the entire world has to try to solve something together. And I wonder, are there archetypes that you go back to, or what do you use to to start to build a different story here?

BRUNO: I think that we have a very rich artillery of narrative resources in Argentina and in Latin America.

As an example, Bruno mentions a famous Argetinian comic called the The Eternaut, by Héctor Germán Oesterheld.

BRUNO: Which is like the most important political comic in the history of my country, written by a man who was assassinated by the last civic and military coup. The comic is about an invasion and an alien invasion in Buenos Aires. And how a group of people struggle to work together, not only to survive, but also to fight against this menace, which is an unknown menace, a menace that we don't understand much of.

I think it's really interesting that aliens kept coming up in these conversations. It seems like an indication of how big the climate crisis feels. In The Eternaut, the alien invasion is a way of talking about the military dictatorships in Argentina which were rising at that time, and which eventually came for the author himself. But Bruno says the power of Oesterheld’s work lives on and can help us find a way forward on the climate crisis. I haven't read it yet, and I want to. But I want more stories too, stories that are explicitly about ending the climate crisis, or about life after it's over. Something that could be turned into a super compelling screenplay. Like maybe something set in a future reality looking back at the 2020s as this pivotal decade. And as we watch that movie, we can imagine ourselves as one of the characters in it, feeling the call, doing heroic things. To be honest, I tried to sketch something like this out for this season of our show. Didn't really work. Who knows, maybe I'll still try to write that screenplay. But I'm also skeptical of my own instincts there, because it feels like that narrative template may not be up to the task.

AMY: It's the hero's journey, right? You must take this quest, you know, Luke, go, do your thing. And yet I'm very suspicious of the hero's journey and the narrative that that all entails, because it's so often...well it's super male, it's almost always a lone actor, and I don't see that it is getting us where we need to be. If that worked, we would have solved this because that one we've got coming out our ears, you know? So I'm wondering what to do with that tension I think we are called to be heroic. And yet the template of the hero's journey doesn't feel like the right way to go, to me.

BRUNO: Yeah, I totally agree with the suspicion you have towards the heroic journey narrative. But I also believe that other narratives are as well emerging and which are extremely different of that traditional heroic path narrative.

Bruno says that comic he mentioned, The Eternaut, is one of those alternative narratives. There's this scary, mysterious threat, he says...

BRUNO: And the way we have to take it on and the way we need to confront it is not this narrative of the lonely hero, of the hero in individual terms. But the group and collective hero, which is the main idea of this comic. He spoke about how in the dictatorship in Argentina, the only way we can get out of this situation and recover our democratic system was indeed a collective expression of hero. United by certain values of justice of social justice, of economic justice, of racial justice at the intersection of old social problematics. And I think that's that's a very strong narrative.

And Bruno says he looks to other nonfiction narratives too. Meaning, history. Because even though this situation we're in is novel, people have gone through all kinds of other hard stuff in the past, and we can learn from that.

BRUNO: For example, when I study the history of my country, and the history of social transformations, one common characteristic of those processes in Argentina is the level of engagement and participation of the youth. Every time a new human right was recognized. Every time we made a step forward in terms of social and economic progress in this country, and in the region, the youth was a key component. The youth was a very, very strong, strong element of those processes. And right now, when we talk about the climate crisis we're now seeing the youth engage in a massive level again. So I think that we need to read our historical moment. When you have the leaders of the future becoming leaders of the present in a very, very important crisis, involved the struggle for fighting against such crises, I think that stories and solutions can be entwined in a very virtuous process.

BRUNO: But it is a very hard exercise because given the fact that this crisis is like none of all the crises that we've suffered worldwide before, none of us have a very, very fast answer and a concrete answer to this, because it is just impossible to imagine it now.

It is hard, and I'm convinced we have to keep trying. We desperately need more and different and better stories about the climate crisis, stories that end with something other than the apocalypse. Even thinking of it as something that has an end feels like such a different way of orienting to this problem. And that makes me realize how much we're just bobbing around aimlessly in a sea of bad news, alternating between terror, boredom, confusion, denial, and a kind of numb dissociation. And that is just not functional. We need to snap out of it.

RACHEL: It's a little like being in a boat and there's a hole in the boat at one end. You know, there's no scenario whereby if you're sitting at the other end of the boat, you do OK. If the other end of the boat is taking on water, we only have one boat. We have to plug the hole wherever it is and we have to collaborate to do that.

This very helpful, very concrete image comes to us compliments of Rachel Kyte the dean of the Fletcher School, the graduate school of international affairs at Tufts University, just outside of Boston. Rachel is a major mover and shaker in the climate world. In the run-up to the Paris climate negotiations, she was the special envoy for climate at the World Bank Group, and she was part of building the financial package that helped to make the Paris Agreement possible. And she thinks a lot about narrative too.

RACHEL: But we also tried to change the narrative from an economic point of view. In the run-up to Paris people would still argue that action on climate change was somehow different or divorced from action on poverty. And we made the case very clearly that you could not eliminate poverty unless you were acting on climate change, because the impacts of climate change would just push people back into poverty.

Today, in addition to her role at Tufts, Rachel is a member of the UN secretary-general’s high-level advisory group on climate action. And she says the thread that runs through all of this work is the quest for sustainable development. Trying to figure out how to make the puzzle pieces of eliminating poverty and containing the climate crisis fit together. A crucial element of that, she says, is making leaders understand that investing in solving these interconnected problems is in their own interest.

RACHEL: If we start from the premise that if we can't leave anybody behind, we only solve this if we solve it for everyone, then when we come to discuss burden sharing, where we come to discuss how are we going to finance our way into that cleaner, greener future where there are good jobs and there are opportunity, that these are investments which makes sense. That the cost of action is less than the cost of inaction. But this requires leaders, political leaders, religious leaders, community leaders, business leaders to own the truth in that, right, and to act accordingly. And it means system change.

And, as we've heard over and over, some leaders have more responsibility than others.

RACHEL: China has an extraordinary role to play at home and abroad. The United States has an extraordinary role to play at home and abroad. So does the European Union. If those three power blocs really aggressively commit to the kinds of reductions we need, that puts us on the right pathway. But then we need Saudi Arabia and Brazil and South Africa and Indonesia and Russia and Iran and Iraq all to do the same. But this is, this is we are called to lead. The largest economies have to lead both the ones who historically have caused the problem and the ones who are in position to cause the problem now. We've run out of space and time. Everybody has to do what we have to do.

But Rachel says what we need to understand is the enormous potential for positive change that awaits us in this transition. She mentions some of the things you've heard about previously this season: developing green hydrogen, building a smarter grid, decarbonizing our homes and buildings.

RACHEL: And then think of all the jobs that would be created when we retrofit every building so that it's hyper efficient, and then think of all of the jobs that would be created because we would be swapping out energy intensive materials for new materials which are less energy intensive. And think about all the green jobs that would be created if every township in Massachusetts had a bio-digester and that we composted all of our food and our food waste, and that we actually ran small towns off that kind of energy in addition to the grid. If you close your eyes, you can imagine that this could be so exciting, and so invigorating and not extremely expensive, but there is a cost in transition.

MUSIC

One of the stories that I tell myself to help me process this moment we're in is that I'm witnessing humanity trying to evolve. Almost like watching an organism try to will itself to grow a new limb or something. The climate crisis demands new things from us. It's forcing us to start thinking together as a species, globally, at an unprecedented level of complexity. And not just think—we have to do things. Set planetary goals, create new systems and processes for meeting those goals, hold each other accountable. We need everyone to be on board, all eight billion of us. That is hard. So we need to be patient with ourselves, even as we push to go faster.

AMY: So my last question then is what should we do with the time between now and one to one and a half degrees of warming? I am so struck by the weight of this time, the remaining time that we have both and the responsibility of it, but also the possibility of it. I mean, there will be a time in the future when we look back and think those people alive, right then, you know—this could be me looking back on myself seven years from now—what, you know, did you use that window to the best possible effect. And help us understand what we should do with that time, with this time.

RACHEL: So we're in uncharted territory and we have to embrace it. We can't sort of shy away from it. Which means that we need to have processes to collaborate internationally among countries. As well as within communities and within a country. Which means we have to hold the space open to make mistakes, to take risks, to trust each other.

MUSIC

Like it or not, all of us who happen to be on the planet today are the protagonists in a highly suspenseful drama, and the next few years are a crucial turning point in the plot. So how do we want to play it? Do we see our remaining time before one-point-five as a burden, or a gift? Do we imagine ourselves as condemned by the mistakes of the past, or empowered to prevent suffering in the future? Are we going to act out a tragedy here, or are we going to embark on some version of the hero's journey, all together?

Like I said at the beginning of this episode, the climate crisis is forcing us to ask big questions about who we are as a species. But one of the defining human qualities is that we can change the world—including ourselves. So maybe the real question here is: who do we want to be? If we choose to surrender to our worst impulses, we are headed for a world of hurt. But if we choose to work and grow together, then the sky's the limit.

RACHEL: We are in uncharted territory, but we can do this.

CREDITS

This episode of Threshold was produced and reported by me, Amy Martin, with help from Erika Janik, Nick Mott and Sam Moore. The rest of the Threshold team is Eva Kalea, Deneen Wiske, Caysi Simpson, and Shola Lawal. Our intern is Emery Veilleux. Thanks to Sally Deng, Maggy Contreras, Hana Carey, Dan Carreno, Luca Borghese, Julia Barry, Kara Cromwell, Katie deFusco, Caroline Kurtz, and Gabby Piamonte. Special thanks to Heloiza Barbosa and Matthew Simonson.

The music for this season of our show was composed by Todd Sickafoose. You can download his soundtrack album, called “Time to 1.5,” on all the major digital music platforms. Huge thanks to Todd for everything he contributed to this season of Threshold.

I also want to say a huge personal thanks to the entire Threshold team for all of the work they poured into this season of our show. Speaking of cooperation—that’s what making Threshold is all about. And you, our listeners, are a part of that. Thank you for everything you are doing to help us make this show: donating to support our work, telling friends and family about us, leaving us reviews, and most importantly, listening. Listening deeply, thinking with us, grappling with these big, challenging questions together.

If you’d like to continue the conversation about this season and find out about future releases, please follow us on social media and join our mailing list at thresholdpodcast dot org.

And again thank you so much for listening.