oceans

Bringing Biodiversity Back from the Breaking Point

BenTestani — Thu, 01 Jun 2023 22:52:11 +0000

Bringing Biodiversity Back from the Breaking Point

06/02/2023

Land use, pollution and the climate crisis are driving what may be the largest mass extinction event since the dinosaurs. The World Wildlife Fund estimates that the planet has seen an average 68% drop in mammal, bird, fish, reptile and amphibian populations since 1970. In order to help address species collapse, over 190 countries – signatories to the United Nations Framework Convention on Biodiversity – recently agreed to an ambitious new plan, called 30x30, which aims to conserve 30% of the world’s land and waters by 2030. Will the framework be enough to bring biodiversity back from the breaking point?

This episode is supported in part by the Resources Legacy Fund.

Guests

Ian Urbina

Director and Founder, The Outlaw Ocean Project

Jennifer Tauli Corpuz

Managing Director of Policy, Nio Terra

Tanya Sanerib

International Legal Director, Center for Biological Diversity

The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (cbd.int)

COP 15 Goals and Outcomes (niatero.org)

The Outlaw Ocean Project (theoutlawocean.com)

Center for Biological Diversity (biologicaldiversity.org)

Note: Transcripts are generated using a combination of automated software and human transcribers and may contain errors. Please check the actual audio before quoting it.

Bringing Biodiversity Back from the Breaking Point

Greg Dalton: This is Climate One. I’m Greg Dalton.

Ariana Brocious: And I’m Ariana Brocious.

Greg Dalton: In the midst of the climate emergency, the world is facing a connected crisis: the stunning loss of biodiversity – the variety of living things on the planet.

Ariana Brocious: The World Wildlife Fund estimates that we’ve seen an average 68% drop in mammal, bird, fish, reptile, and amphibian populations since 1970. In some areas it's worse: Latin America and the Caribbean have seen a mind boggling 94% drop in biodiversity in that same time period.

Jennifer Tauli Corpuz: A million species are at risk of going extinct. And if you don't do anything about that then we are in trouble.

Greg Dalton: That’s Jing Tauli Corpuz. Later in this episode, we’ll hear my conversation with her about indigenous representation in efforts to reverse biodiversity loss.

Ariana Brocious: Taking stock of how many species we’ve already lost is really depressing. Especially because we know what’s causing it–and most of the causes point back to us, to humans.

Greg Dalton: Indeed. Some people might wonder why humans should care if some exotic insect they’ve never heard of goes extinct. Well, extinctions are like rivets in an airplane. A few can go bust or rust and the plane can still fly. But at some point the aircraft is going to be compromised and eventually crash. That’s how it is with bees that pollinate our food and forests that filter our water.

Ariana Brocious: Right. The main causes are changes to land and sea use – like clear cutting rainforests and converting complex ecosystems into monocultures and rangeland for beef. That leads to habitat loss, which is increasingly compounded by climate disruption.

Greg Dalton: The United Nations says that the climate crisis will become the driving factor in biodiversity loss in the coming decades.

Ariana Brocious: In order to help address species collapse, over 190 countries – signatories to the United Nations Framework Convention on Biodiversity – recently agreed to a new plan, called 30x30, which aims to conserve 30% of the world’s land and waters by 2030.

Greg Dalton: Tanya Sanerib is International Legal Director at the Center for Biological Diversity.

Tanya Sanerib: Conserving 30% of our habitat and our oceans is gonna provide amazing mitigating impacts, not just for biodiversity loss but also for climate.

Ariana Brocious: Right now, around 17% of land on the planet is protected, so going to 30% in under a decade is an ambitious goal.

Greg Dalton: And a quick note: This episode is supported in part by Resources Legacy Fund. Now, Let’s hear my conversation with Tanya Sanerib about the connections between climate disruption and biodiversity loss.

Tanya Sanerib: just as these two crises can have compounding impacts. The solutions, particularly when it comes to addressing habitat loss and conserving 30% of our habitat and our oceans is gonna provide amazing mitigating impacts, not just for biodiversity loss but also for climate, particularly if we really focus on protecting areas that are rich in biodiversity and also rich in carbon. So, a scientist talks about this. When we’re talking about sort of carbon rich, biodiversity rich ecosystems we’re really thinking about places like forests and wetlands and peatlands, some grasslands and savannas, coastal ecosystems as well. Mangroves, salt marshes then we get into oceans and kelp forest and seagrasses, and we have some deepwater and polar blue carbon habitat. So, that's really what we’re talking about. There's a number of places globally, sort of six priority areas that really are carbon rich biodiverse rich that we want to talk about protecting. I think most of us know the first one, right, it leaps to mind it's the Amazon. And that's a really crucial area in terms of being able to sequester carbon, but also to protect an enormous amount of biodiversity. Likewise, we have amazing rainforest ecosystems in Central and West Africa and lots of other areas in the world. Those rainforests are really going to be a crucial part to how we mitigate climate impacts because of their ability to sequester carbon. It turns out that these forests are also home to a critically endangered species. The forest elephant. Unfortunately, like all elephants in Africa, forest elephants have had their populations tremendously impacted by poaching for their ivory tasks. And for that reason, they are critically endangered species. If we were to lose forest elephants, it turns out that the ecosystems they come from would lose somewhere between 6 to 9% of their ability to capture atmospheric carbon.

Greg Dalton: So, explain for me how an elephant helps a forest be more healthy and capture more carbon.

Tanya Sanerib: Yeah, it doesn't really seem intuitive. But it turns out that forest elephants are phenomenal gardeners. So, by consuming biomass they plant the forest with high carbon density trees. They do that by consuming biomass and defecating it out. So, they give tree species sort of that best shot at life by having seeds that are placed in a really nutrient-rich environment to start off their lives. At the same time elephants are phenomenal at weeding the forest. So, they go in and remove a lot of the lower carbon density trees and undergrowth that helps those high carbon density trees have the space that they need to really survive, thrive and take up lots of carbon.

Greg Dalton: So, elephants take weeds and turn them into fertilizer through their poop that then fuels the growth of trees that absorb lots of carbon.

Tanya Sanerib: Absolutely. And so, that's one of the ways when we sort of think about carbon rich and biodiversity rich ecosystems. We need to stop thinking just about, oh, yeah, it's a rainforest. It has amazing trees. We need to save that. We have to think about all those component parts because we’re just starting to understand the really crucial role in the connectivity between all the species that evolved in some of these ecosystems and how that really helps them not only in terms of maintaining biodiversity, but in terms of mitigating climate change impacts as well.

Greg Dalton: When people mention biodiversity they often think about some funny looking creature far away that I will never see and don't really know what function it performs. Why should we care about those species?

Tanya Sanerib: Well, it turns out that a lot of the amazing weirdos that are part of our biodiversity are also just as crucial for saving our ecosystems. And so, another good example is the Ohio River Basin and freshwater mussel species. So, this freshwater mussel is called the purple catspaw pearly mussel. And I have to say mussels, hands down, have the most amazing names probably of any species on the planet. We propagated that species in captivity and reintroduced it into the wild. And the results were phenomenal. So, freshwater mussels are really important because they filter water and improve water quality. So, you immediately have that benefit in the ecosystem. But they also serve as an important food source. And so, you start to see fish otters and freshwater turtles returning when they get their food source. The other thing that freshwater mussels do is they provide as their populations grow they stabilize streambanks. And that provides the opportunity for regrowth of riparian vegetation and that starts to provide habitat for birds, provide shade for amphibians. It provides opportunities for other fish species to come back to the stream areas. And so, you have mussels that come into this ecosystem that were on the verge of extinction. They get reintroduced and you see a complete resurgence in the ecosystem. They're not the charismatic elephants, right? But this tiny little species played this crucial role in basically renewing an entire ecosystem.

Greg Dalton: So, knowing that mussels perform that filtering cleaning function. Do you eat mussels? Should people eat mussels?

Tanya Sanerib: You know, it's an interesting question. And I think one of the things that people who study biodiversity have learned is sometimes it is our connection to a species, whether it's something that we like as a food source or it's a native plant that we like growing in our gardens. That human connection, that understanding of that thing for example, salmon, for us in the Pacific Northwest people love eating it, and as a result we care a lot more about conserving it, than perhaps we would if we didn't care about having it as a food source, right. I mean, salmon, I think are spectacular amazing stories, their life story is unbelievable. how they feed so many species when they return to spawn. How their carcasses get pulled inland and they feed the forest. And through that understanding that sort of link of eating those fish we come to understand the entire benefits that they provide to an ecosystem. Now, that said, we have so many people on the planet that we can’t all consume wildlife in that manner,

Greg Dalton: So, one central idea behind 30 by 30 is that if we protect land and water, nature will rebound in ways you just mentioned. And you also mention food production. So, how do we feed nine, 10 billion people? What change needs to happen to our industrial food system to meet these 30 by 30 conservation goals. Is there a collision between food productivity and conservation?

Tanya Sanerib: I think right now there absolutely is. One of the big things that we have to address in the biodiversity crisis is how we transition to conserving 30% of our lands in a way that accounts for indigenous people and also focuses on livelihoods. And how we transition agriculture away from industrial systems to much smaller systems that have pathways for migration, pathways and borders and areas that provide protection for biodiversity that will benefit both the planet as well as the crops that are being grown on a smaller scale. We’re really looking at livelihoods returning to communities and providing benefits for local people rather than for large industries. But that's gonna take a lot of work on our part and it's gonna take a lot of work economically in terms of rejiggering how we handle subsidies. Because right now we have a tremendous amount of subsidies that go to agriculture that are incredibly harmful for biodiversity.

Greg Dalton: So, we have this big agreement that you say is a big deal. The Biden administration has committed to its own 30 by 30 plan But the US did not sign on to the UN agreement. Why not?

Tanya Sanerib: Yeah. So, the United States is not a party to the convention on biological diversity. And that's because our Senate has failed to ratify that convention. And large part that is a result of what I would say is the third pillar of that agreement, which is the equitable sharing of nature's benefits. That sounds nice but boil it down into a capitalist system and that means that big pharmaceutical companies that have taken samples of nature from all over the world, created drugs that they make tremendous profits off of would need to share those benefits back to the countries that they came from. And as a result, they've done a phenomenal job of keeping the United States out of joining the convention on biological diversity. Not having us have that seat at the table can really diminish our ability to also talk about solutions, right. I think that there is a recognition that because of our oversize role, we need to do a lot in terms of contributing resources. Funding is huge a issue; it held up negotiations on adopting this UN biodiversity framework, you know, until two in the morning on the last day, right. I mean, you know, and you see that happen all the time in climate negotiations as well. Not having the US have that really firm seat at the table, you know, that changes the dynamic there. But also, in terms of transferring technology and building capacity. Those are really crucial things that the United States also needs to be doing when we get back to the question of equity. How do we make sure that we’re actually really making up for historically and currently what we’re consuming? One thing that is really interesting about the text of the UN Biodiversity Agreement is a very important recognition of the role of indigenous peoples in particular trying to attain the 30 by 30 goal. So, that target itself recognizes the rights of indigenous peoples. It says we have to ensure is we engage in this exercise that we ensure there's prior informed consent. So, while we are simultaneously talking about getting destructive human activities out of areas that are important for biodiversity conservation. We’re simultaneously recognizing that indigenous peoples have a long history of protecting biodiversity. And that they may do it in ways that are slightly different from some Western concepts. But that does get into larger questions around the UN Biodiversity Framework around equity, right. As in climate you, you all talk about common but differentiated responsibilities respective capabilities, right. That's been a big part of the discussions.

Greg Dalton: Which means, basically means that rich countries created the problem they have to do more to solve it. The people who did very little don’t, can't be expected to share equally in the solution.

Tanya Sanerib: Absolutely. And unfortunately, those people who didn't create the problem are the ones who are suffering the consequences first, right. So, there's really equity sort of on both sides, unfortunately. And we have the same problem when it comes to biodiversity. If you look at the United States, for example, to get to our place socio economically we have awful history of colonization of slavery tremendous use of natural resources to acquire our status globally. At the same time, we now have pretty phenomenal environmental laws from a global standpoint and in terms of protecting biodiversity trying to ensure species don't go extinct in our country. We have a great Endangered Species Act, but what we don't account for is the fact that we export our extinction footprint to other countries. We consume a tremendous amount of biodiversity from other countries. We import all sorts of crazy things, Greg, from kangaroo leather shoes, bats encased in plastic from China, primate skulls from southeast Asia. All sorts of luxury goods made from wildlife that fueled the biodiversity crisis. And we don't really take into account the fact that we have these ramifications in other parts of the world.

Greg Dalton: And right now we have a moment in the climate conversation where there’s a movement to electrify everything and to get away from extracting coal and oil and burning it and to use the sun and the wind. But to do that requires a lot of copper wires, a lot of lithium for UV batteries. That is extraction that happens in the Global South. So, is there a collision course between electrify everything to get away from fossil fuels and protecting these resource rich areas in the Global South that are the kinds of ecosystems you want to protect.

Tanya Sanerib: You know that has been a traditionally thorny issue, right, when we come to talk about how do we solve these two crises together. And I think what’s really exciting is my organization along with 290 other entities indigenous peoples front-line communities, environmental justice groups just sent a letter to Congress and the administration that's accompanied with a positive policy briefing called “pursuing a just and renewable energy system” that maps out how the United States can scale up renewables and get off fossil fuels and do it in a way that isn't going to cause that sort of surgence both in terms of how we cite renewables and then also how we get the materials needed to upscale renewables. And so, let's talk about that a little bit because this is the kind of creative thinking that I think the UN scientists, both in the climate and biodiversity spheres, are talking about when they talk about transformative change. We have to get creative and rethink the systems. And part of I'm not gonna pull my punches here, part of this means we have to drastically change mass transit in this country, right. We have to decarbonize transportation because if we truly want to not wreak havoc on biodiversity and mining for some of these essential minerals, we need for renewables then we’re gonna have to change some of the things in our country that are not sustainable. So, when we think about producing lithium, and the report really gets into this, we need to invest in mass transit. We need to limit battery size. We need to increase city density. Limit suburban sprawl. So, you’re really condensing people, making it easier for them to move around in ways that aren't car dependent, right. And then think about robust recycling programs. That’s something we are absolutely terrible about in the United States. We have this expendable you know budget and you know, rather than fixing something we’re going to toss it and get a new one. And by toss it, I don't mean recycle it. A lot of times these are things that are going to landfills. So, we absolutely can take a whole of supply-chain approach to decarbonizing the transportation system.

Greg Dalton: The Biden administration right now is trying to onshore reshore manufacturing but some environmentalists like no we don't want that factory here that lithium mine in Nevada. We’d rather have it be somewhere else in another country where we don’t see it.

Tanya Sanerib: Yeah. And, you know, the thing is, if we actually change what we need and we conserve resources more and we recycle more that factory doesn’t have to go anywhere, right. And that’s the kind of transformative thinking that we need to start talking about. We can’t just say, oh, we have the system, how do we make it work for renewables. What we have to talk about is how do we reform the system so we’re gonna have a livable future. And I want to talk a little bit about the siting side of things, right, because that's the other big conflict. When we get into renewables there's this really big concern on the part of environmentalists and on the part of front-line communities that we’re talking about. You know, destroying biodiversity, destroying communities with solar panels and siting of renewables in ways that are going to be really detrimental to biodiversity and to justice communities. And the other component of this that I thought was really interesting because we identify three ways that we can upscale renewables to meet our energy demands. And we don't have to actually degrade places where communities live or biodiversity. So, the first thing is and I'm sure you've heard this before because people do say this a lot but you know we need to do the large-scale renewables on built environments. So, we have to be looking at parking lots, at canals, rights-of-way of highways and degraded lands that already have access to existing transmission lines that aren’t gonna impact communities and biodiversity. But we have to couple that with two other things. And I think this is again where we get into creativity. We really need to be thinking about microgrids and we need to make sure that we’re producing energy where it gets to use. And so, that means we’re putting solar panel on everyone's home.

Greg Dalton: Some electrical people would say that rooftop solar cost more than industrial utility scale solar. And that makes it a lead unless affordable, etc. so that brings in equity question. This is a really naughty gnarly puzzle to solve.

Tanya Sanerib: Absolutely, absolutely. But the other component of it is, of course, we have to change how we live our lives too, right. There's a major conservation impact here. We have to think about weatherizing all of our structures, our homes to our offices. You know we want to get off of fossil fuels transition to heat pumps. There's a lot of things that we can do in terms of changing how we live our lives. And really changing from sort of, you know, the fast fashion culture that we have right now in the United States to a more circular economy where we think about the long-term impacts of everything that we buy. We make sure that everything that we acquire is going to be something that can be recycled, composted, reused down the road. And having that shift and that means a major change in our consumption patterns and we need that both in terms of addressing the climate crisis but also in terms of the biodiversity crisis, right. Those kangaroo leather shoes you don't need those, you know, leave them for the kangaroos,

Greg Dalton: Tanya, thank you so much for sharing your insights and your enthusiasm about biodiversity with us today.

Tanya Sanerib: I was happy to be here. Thank you.

Greg Dalton: You’re listening to a Climate One conversation about saving and restoring our planet's biodiversity. Our podcasts typically contain extra content beyond what’s heard on the radio. If you missed a previous episode, or want to hear more of Climate One’s empowering conversations, subscribe to our podcast wherever you get your pods. We have a brand-new website that makes it easy to share specific episodes or even whole playlists on topics including food, energy, justice, and much more. Check it out at climate one dot org and if you liked today’s episode, share it with a friend. Coming up, how a different relationship with our environment could lead to better human behavior.

Jennifer Tauli Corpuz: For indigenous peoples, we regard ourselves as rich, if we are able to maintain a healthy relationship with nature.

Greg Dalton: That’s up next, when Climate One continues.

Greg Dalton: This is Climate One. I’m Greg Dalton.

In 2022, The Kunming-Montréal Global Biodiversity Framework was adopted at the UN Biodiversity Conference in Montréal. Over 190 nations who are part of the Convention on Biological Diversity – or CBD – agreed to the goal of conserving 30% of land and water by 2030. The United States and The Vatican are the only holdouts. Numerous studies show Indigenous people have a disproportionately positive impact on maintaining habitat and species health. Jing Tauli Corpuz is from the Kankana-ey Igorot People in the Philippines, and is Managing Director of Policy and advocacy Lead for Nia Tero. She says the Kunming-Montréal Global Biodiversity Framework is crucial.

Jennifer Tauli Corpuz: it's meant to stop the sixth great extinction. And, you know, a million species are at risk of going extinct. And if you don't do anything about that then we are in trouble. The bees are going to disappear and we won't have any crops anything to eat if the bees are gone, right. So, yeah, it’s quite significant. It's important.

Greg Dalton: And what's the role of indigenous people and saving the bees and the other biodiversity that helps the food we eat, and lot of the economy.

Jennifer Tauli Corpuz: Going into the negotiations, what the CBD did was to conduct studies on where biodiversity is found currently. And one of the discoveries in the global assessment on biodiversity on ecosystem services is that biodiversity is declining everywhere. However, it is declining at a much slower rate in indigenous peoples’ territories. Indigenous peoples and local communities’ territories. And so, it was quite clear that in places governed by indigenous peoples whether it was covered by protected areas or not, biodiversity was thriving. And so, they couldn’t escape acknowledging the role of indigenous peoples because obviously we’re the best guardians of nature as shown by the scientific studies that were conducted before the negotiations.

Greg Dalton: But some people might think that, okay, indigenous people are good stewards of land. They also have a less developed, I don’t know, lower standard of living. So, does that, the stewarding lands like indigenous people mean a lower material standard of living?

Jennifer Tauli Corpuz: That’s a very Western point of view. In the current mainstream view, no? The way to measure success is through the GDP. The income per person in a country. However, for indigenous peoples the way that you measure poverty and the way that you measure progress is quite different. I'll give you an example. In one of our partner countries in Vanuatu they try to determine indicators of Melanesian well-being. So, that’s how indigenous peoples measure their well-being. And the result is that people there valued the ability to practice rituals. The ability to access land and resources and the ability to speak an indigenous language. So, in short, it's not the income that matters. It’s the way that indigenous people maintain their relationship with nature that matters. So, it may be primitive in one way of measuring things, but for indigenous peoples, we regard ourselves as rich, if we are able to maintain a healthy relationship with nature.

Greg Dalton: Sure. Well, we know that lots of capitalistic societies have lots of material wealth and not so much health and anxiety, you know, or things don't necessarily make us happy or healthy. Last year at the UN Climate Conference in Egypt, I spoke with Johnson Cerda, a Quechua from the Ecuador and Amazon, and he expressed some frustration over the fact that indigenous people, while they're increasingly included in the conversations, they aren't recognized at the same level as governments that are members of the United Nations, which is built on nation states. So do you feel you had a voice at the UN Biodiversity conferences, even though you're not representing a nation state?

Jennifer Tauli Corpuz: Well, the Biodiversity Conference is a bit more open I think than how they do things in the climate space. Because in the biodiversity space almost all of the meetings are open and accessible for indigenous peoples. This is not the same in the climate space. Almost all of the meetings there are closed. And although they did establish a local communities and indigenous people's platform at the moment it's not clear to what extent the discussions in that platform are able to influence the actual negotiations of the climate convention. That's why the demand from indigenous peoples is for recognition of indigenous peoples as nations at par with the countries. Because if you look at indigenous societies, we are nations, we have people, we have a territory. We have a government. We have customary governance rules. We have a governance structure. And so, if you look at the definition of our country or a nation. Most indigenous peoples would qualify.

Greg Dalton: And there’s definitely more inclusion and recognition talk about including indigenous people in these conversations at all levels, even including the United States regarding Colorado River, internationally, in this biodiversity convention. Yet for centuries, colonial powers have exploited indigenous peoples on their land and then promise to make amends. Do you see anything different this time around?

Jennifer Tauli Corpuz: One strand of debate or one strand of discussion during the negotiations for the Global Biodiversity Framework was the colonial legacy of conservation. The way that the United States was obtained or colonized from the Native Americans, you know, it’s like a caricature, you know, land in exchange for trinkets. But the truth is it’s still happening nowadays. Colonization is alive and well, especially in the climate and in the biodiversity spaces. The idea of fortress conservation is a very colonial legacy. The idea that you have to eject people from land in order to keep healthy. When in fact we are seeing more and more evidence that in places occupied by indigenous peoples in fact, they have been carefully managing their territory for centuries. Deep in the Amazon, they discovered evidence of agriculture, of fertilizing the soil through ashes. So, yeah, the colonial legacy is there, but we're trying to subvert the legacy. And in the biodiversity space that’s why the Kunming-Montréal Global Biodiversity Framework is such a breakthrough, because it recognized that there are places that are well-managed by people who live close to nature. So, yeah, there’s definitely still colonial legacies, but we’re trying to change that.

Greg Dalton: One way to change that is not have this fortress conservation which is, you know, get all the people off the land and preserve it. Which as you say this colonial legacy and that the Global Biodiversity Framework is a good basis for walking hand-in-hand with indigenous people. What measures are in place to ensure that will be implemented different this time?

Jennifer Tauli Corpuz: I'll take Target 3 or 30 by 30 as an example. In the previous incarnation of that target, it was called Target 11 and it's the area-based conservation target. And there was only one small word to make sure that violations of indigenous peoples’ rights don't occur and that there's an opportunity for indigenous peoples to access partners. And that word was equity. And obviously, it wasn't enough; it wasn't a sufficient safeguard to prevent violations of indigenous peoples’ rights. So, now we made it a point in Target 3 to ask for three main inclusions in the language. The first is to make sure that indigenous peoples are able to consent before protected areas are established over their territories. The second is to recognize the government system of indigenous peoples as a governance system that is good for biodiversity. And the last one is to recognize the need to partner with indigenous peoples if implementation of the target is to be successful. And that's why we now have recognizing indigenous and traditional territories in the language. We have governance in there and we have the need to recognize the rights of indigenous peoples at the tail end of the target.

Greg Dalton: The climate effort and the biodiversity effort are connected and somewhat different. We have these big international efforts to address both things. Sometimes there's tension between the climate goals and the biodiversity goals. For example, electrifying homes in the economy means getting all fossil fuels; it also means mining for copper and lithium which are often located in indigenous areas in the Global South. So, how do you see the tension between the climate goals and biodiversity?

Jennifer Tauli Corpuz: Well, yeah, you know what first of all, it's really incredible for me that it was only in COP 26 in 2022 that the linkage between nature and culture was recognized in a formal resolution or a formal decision of the climate change conference. So, that was incredible for us as indigenous peoples because when we govern our territories on the ground, we don't identify whether one particular action is contributing to biodiversity. And, you know, whether the other actions are contributing to the climate mitigation. So, it’s all the same governance actions on the ground. So, for us it's very clear there's a link between biodiversity and climate change. However, there are risks in the way that we designed the solutions. Which is why one of the things that the indigenous movement has set is that we have contributed the least to biodiversity loss and to climate change and global warming, and yet we stand to suffer the most because we are in the frontlines. And at the same time in the proposed solutions our rights are also at risk. One example is if you think about climate solutions without considering biodiversity, planting monoculture trees, monoculture plantations, it meets the goals of the climate convention because the more trees the better. But then you ignore the need for diversity in a certain forest in a certain area. And then what you mentioned about the mining for transition minerals is also a risk that we face in the course of implementing solutions to the climate crisis. Most of the minerals that need to be used for electric vehicles, they are found in indigenous lands. And what we're finding nowadays is that mining for transition minerals you know because of the social need and the need, well, in general, the need for those minerals, the safeguards for indigenous peoples and indigenous people’s rights tend to be ignored.

Greg Dalton: I've noticed that some environmental organizations, even state governments like California, are paying more attention now to indigenous practices because fires are burning throughout the American West. And like indigenous people have used fire as a tool in long history of better management of forest. One organization I know to protect forest recently brought on the first indigenous person to be on their board. I thought, well, that’s kind of late but better late than never. How do you react to these organizations suddenly recognizing indigenous people after so long.

Jennifer Tauli Corpuz: Well, that’s exactly the reaction, right. Better late than never. I mean it's super late for organizations to be recognizing the role of indigenous peoples. However, better late than never. So, one of our partners in Australia, the Warddeken people, have been practicing cultural burning for thousands of years. And because of the problem with the wildfires now their skill those that practice cultural burning it’s now in demand. There's even a global alliance of savanna burning because, recognizing that indigenous peoples have a lot to contribute in that space. And the idea there is that cool burns, you know, burns during the cool season prevent bigger burns, wildfires during the dry season. And because of the close relationship of indigenous peoples with nature that’s something that we were able to notice and practice early on. And so, you know, it's better late than never. There's now recognition of cultural burning. There's also recognition of indigenous guardians. And now there are many, many organizations that are scrambling to include indigenous peoples in their staff in their board, their decision-making structures because well, one part is because a lot of the pledges for funding are to indigenous peoples. And the second thing, the less cynical point of view is that we need to tap into indigenous knowledge in order to make sure that we’re designing solutions correctly.

Greg Dalton: Yeah, a little bit of that, oh, we need that knowledge now because we’re in trouble. Or we might get some money from it by including you. You’ve talked about being able to swim in the local river when you were four with your three-year-old brother without your parents, which as a parent terrifies me. But you said the whole community was there to watch out for you. How do you think that influenced your approach to the work you do today?

Jennifer Tauli Corpuz: The lesson from that experience for me is the need to respect collective power. And just respecting that people when they work collectively and when they govern themselves collectively and so forth. they have power but also at the same time they have solutions. Because of this idea that we have to move together as one. We have to make sure that no single entity within the collective is accumulating more than their share. And, you know, and that decisions are taken also collectively. So, that was an important lesson for me and it's guiding me in my work now. The respect for the collective and the need to recognize that indigenous peoples as collectives are nations. They have their own rules and laws, customary law. And that they have their own ways of deciding on things, including matters of justice, matters of criminal law. Matters of how to use resources but also deciding whether extractive industries can enter the community or not.

Greg Dalton: Thank you so much, Jing, for sharing your story and insights on biodiversity.

Jennifer Tauli Corpuz: Thanks so much, Greg.

Ariana Brocious: You're listening to a conversation about bringing biodiversity back from the brink. This is Climate One. Coming up, even with a framework in place to address biodiversity loss, how can regulations be enforced where no national authority exists?

Ian Urbina: The high seas is this crazy thorny place where no one really feels they have the jurisdiction nor do they want to put up the money doing anything about it.

Ariana Brocious: That’s up next, when Climate One continues.

Ariana Brocious: This is Climate One. I’m Ariana Brocious.

On land, countries and governments can enact regulations to help slow the trajectory of biodiversity loss. But there are huge parts of the ocean that fall under no national jurisdiction, complicating efforts to preserve fishing and marine biodiversity. We talked about this with Ian Urbina, author of The Outlaw Ocean and Director and Founder of The Outlaw Ocean Project.

Ian Urbina: the high seas, which is that realm beyond national waters. It's a realm defined by a lack of government control. No one country owns it, but it belongs to everyone. The end result is that you can go out there and do largely as you please even if there are rules that apply to that space. There are not cops, there are not police that enforce them. And so, that can be good and that can be bad, you know, but it's largely an ungoverned space and therefore the best and the worst of human nature manifest.

Ariana Brocious: You reported on all kinds of crimes that happen on the high seas from illegal fishing to illegal dumping to slavery and murder. What do you see as the main drivers of some of those crimes?

Ian Urbina: Money. You know, I think at the end of the day resources so broader than money. It's the competition for ever diminishing resources whether the resources are time, whether the resources are access to labor, the resources are oil and gas, or fish or permission to cross a certain terrain. These are all resources and there's competition for it. And that competition is what largely players to sometimes cut corners. Why obey that law that says you're not allowed to use that certain type of net because it's gonna kill baby fish and collapse the ocean biosphere? Why obey that law that says you're not allowed to go into that area of protected waters because if you do then it's gonna be harder for you to catch your quota. But if you don't, you can get home a week earlier.

Ariana Brocious: How has climate change and stresses on the oceans affected fisheries in ways that have also led to increased human desperation?

Ian Urbina: The combination of climate change and overfishing and illegal fishing, kind of is an evil trinity that has conspired to make it tougher to do the work of fishing. Because number one, climate change has resulted in many things including shifting water temperature. The shifting water temperature has cause of where fish go, how long they stay when they procreate, etc. And that has sewed unpredictability into the equation that fishermen are calculating as they decide where to go. How long they’ll be at sea, how much fuel they need, how can they break even. When you don't really know where the fish are headed over, they’re headed much further from shore to different countries' waters, etc. it becomes harder for you to survive. think overfishing also and climate change have caused a lot of the nearshore stocks to collapse. And so, the easier to catch fish are gone in many places in the world. And so, that means that fishing fleets have to go much further out and stay much longer and therefore come back with much less profit if any. Most of the high seas fishing fleets in the world are actually unprofitable were they not to have state subsidies. So, these things are intensifying competition.And climate change, you know, also has just made for more desperation on land. So,even when you can catch the fish and you bring it back to land your ability to sell it is much tougher just because of drought in many of these places and other instabilities that cause especially in motion developing world the market that they used to think was stable to no longer be.

Ariana Brocious: In December, the UN adopted what's known as the Kunming-Montréal Global Biodiversity Framework. This was largely held as a win for getting nations to agree to the goal of conserving 30% of land and water by 2030. With everything we’ve been discussing, how could restrictions on overfishing be enforced?

Ian Urbina: If we just look at overfishing on the high seas portion of the planet rather than the national waters, which is this other thorny area. there's some big things that could really move the ball downfield. One is ships should be seen. You know, in the post-9/11 era you can't fathom the notion of a 747 leaving from Boston heading to Taipei and going dark and not announcing when it’s leaving, where it's headed, keeping its transponder on while it’s in the route. Indicating to all the relevant party who is on board what are they carrying, you know, all that stuff is normalized in other industries, trains, trucks, airplanes. But distant water fishing vessels that are on the high seas have been allowed both legally and just culturally and in policy to operate by different set of rules. And going dark being invisible is normalized. That's crazy. You know that has to stop tomorrow. And the first way that we can actually have a chance of enforcing rules is making sure we know who the rule obeyer should be and where are they.

Ariana Brocious: And I would guess that part of the problem is just the scale of the ocean relative to human's ability to monitor it, right? I don't know if there's anything on the scale of like satellite monitoring or any kind of international force that could or could be created to do this or if that's even the way to go.

Ian Urbina: So, imagine these dots on the map they’re traversing the Big Blue and your game board, you know, challenge is how can you keep your eyes on those dots. Well, those dots, those ships, have information that you can either see them from space without their permission or not. Or you can force them to transpond so they have to keep their signal going, or both. And then the other place where you can apply pressure on them is when those guys come to shore, you can say, wait, you are dark for three weeks, we can’t take your stuff. You cannot possibly give us your stuff, we cannot unload those goods. And so, those are the three categorical ways that you would probably impose traceability on these carriers of goods, these extractors of goods.The most promise in my humble opinion is eyes in the sky without their permission. You know, we put up enough satellites and there are some folks pushing for this. Right now, there are satellites up there and you can see everything everywhere. But they cost a lot of money and you have, there’s also logistical challenges. And you, me or the relevant NGO doesn't have the price point access to that material; militaries do; governments do. So, that's got to change, it’s got to be sort of publicly available and accessible and you need a lot more satellites up there etc. etc. But that's probably the best chance because you don’t have to ask permission, we can see whether you want to be seen or not.

Ariana Brocious: And you mentioned that you know, airplanes can't really go dark and can't also just sort of arrive somewhere with a bunch of stuff and not say where it came from. So,how would that be handled

Ian Urbina: because the high seas is this crazy thorny place where no one really feels they have the jurisdiction nor do they want to put out the money doing thing about it. How many are looking at the market players who benefit from the start that crosses there. So, the big buyers of goods would have to get a lot of pressure from the public, journalists, and NGOs and lawyers, and say look, you shouldn't be associated with this and you should hold a higher bar. And basically, you shouldn't be allowed to take goods unless these criteria are met. You know when you get your goods, your fish or whatever it is it should only come off ships that can prove they abided by these 10 rules, right. And that's in my view probably what will work because government shift and the turnover rate is fast, and they don't get along and all that. But market players can make unilateral decisions and the big market players, you know, can affect the entire marketplace if they impose rules on their own supply chain. Because then the people that want to play ball with that big player make changes and they might as well make changes for all their buyers here as the purchasers the one that’s, you know, giving them a hard time.

Ariana Brocious: So, let's talk about national governments taking some action. Can you tell us the story of Palau? For a while it looked like a David and Goliath story success of a tiny underfunded nation taking on Chinese fishing fleets illegally fishing in their waters. In that story what worked and what didn't?

Ian Urbina: Well, so you know when I reported the Palau story. I found myself split between two different cliché tropes. You know, one is the David and Goliath and the other is The Myth of Sisyphus, you know, Myth of Sisyphus keeps pushing the rock up the hill and wait for it to roll back down and do it again. And I wasn't sure which was the best one for Palau, it’s this tiny nation, right, it’s an archipelago nation. It has the landmass of Philadelphia and the sea space of France. And it had two ships, you know, 17 guys that were patrolling this realm that's impossible to patrol. And they are in a rough neighborhood on the planet in terms of illegal fishing huge industrial fishing nations nearby traversing their waters. So, it was just this sort of Wild West for them where everyone was poaching their stuff. And, you know, what worked was number one you had a president who cared and this meant a lot to him and he was willing, president of Palau at the time, he was willing to really push through politically thorny provisions. Marine protected areas that were super expensive and were going to anger some of their local fishermen and foreign lobbies, etc. And so, you have that one. And number two you had some big wealthy players like Australia in particular that were willing to stand by this government and offer up intel, military support vessels. So, really bolstering their effort to sort of change the narrative and better patrol their waters and some faraway places like the US and UK who are offering eyes in the sky military grade satellite information that could save those two vessels chasing every different robber and instead target better because they knew where to go and who to prioritize. The sad part of the story was, as this often the case, governments change and when that guy went out of power in Palau a new person came in, took over different set of priorities put in office by different set of constituencies. And now all of a sudden there was the beginning quiet rollback of many of the progressive protective provisions that the former president put in place. And the story now is not as hopeful because a lot of the protections have been removed since the new leadership came into office.

Ariana Brocious: So, in thinking about stories of preservation success you point to a case in Brazil where the government had opened up an area near the mouth of the Amazon for gas drilling. Tell us what happened next.

Ian Urbina: Yeah. This was an illustrative story because in many ways. One was you have a realm which is the seafloor which is hard to get to you need very specialized equipment, submarines, you need a lot of resources to get down there. And the reason different players might want to get down there are different. Those who want to extract oil and gas want to get down there because there’s a lot of money to be made. They have a lot of money already and therefore they have the resources to buy and dispatch ROVs and to sort of assess the landscape. Those who might want to protect those waters, or at least know whether there is risk to the biodiversity that's in those waters are scientific community advocates, Greenpeace, the like, and local government. They mostly don't have the resources to actually get down to the seafloor and check it out. So, you have a fundamental gap in resources that matters when it comes time to giving a license to drill. So, the government, in this case Brazil, gave permission sought permits to oil and gas companies to drill in these regions.The companies put forward their own hired scientific evidence showed there would be no harm. They were not drilling in places that were at risk or vulnerable or delicate, and it would be fine. But the governor of Brazil didn't have the resources to check that independently. So, along came Greenpeace with the big ship and a submarine, brought a bunch of Brazilians on board. I was there watching the whole thing. And this race began where the advocates and the scientists put a sub in the water at first with resistance of the present government but finally, they caved and went to the seafloor to check out what's down there what might be at stake. And what they found was exactly as they expected. Lots of undiscovered, you know, species some species that were known but were actually at risk huge. A huge coral wall that was much bigger than originally thought. All things that would definitely be traumatized, possibly decimated by an accident or even just standard drilling. And so, Greenpeace and the scientists got together and said, hey look, this is a problem and the companies didn't tell us all these things that are down there that might be at risk. And that gummed up the whole process which was the point that the advocates were trying to achieve.

Ariana Brocious: Yeah, so a success in terms of blocking the project, right. I mean they didn’t go ahead.

Ian Urbina: Temporarily. But again, here is where you get back to the unfortunate reality of government and politics. So, you know, one administration in Brazil slowed it down and put the brakes and legal fights came up and everything happened as the advocates wanted. Until the next administration came in in Brazil which was much more industry pro opening the waters on gas, etc. and they clear the way much more effectively. The drilling has not started. And so, it has not but the last administration, the most recent administration before Lula was heading back in the direction of opening it up and allowing oil and gas to come in and drill that region.

Ariana Brocious: We did a previous episode on Climate One about deep-sea mining which has some similar issues in terms of being able to actually monitor what's happening. And meanwhile, the push for batteries for cars and grid scale storage has accelerated the demand for minerals critical materials needed to make these batteries.There are corporations like The Metals Company who say that they can collect these polymetallic nodules from the seafloor with less environmental impact than land-based mining. So, I'm curious what you think about deep-sea mining as a way to meet this growing demand for materials for batteries.

Ian Urbina: Oh, I’m personally pretty skeptical, And I think most environmentalists are pretty skeptical of seabed mining. And the ones I hear from that I find smarter and trust more say, look, if you pull the helicopter up to altitude and look at the bigger picture the short term fix that is supposedly being offered by these manganese nodules on the seafloor is unproven, financially insane, the amount of revenue and carbon emissions that would be involved in getting at those things. If you actually look at the math the dollars and the carbon emissions get those manganese nodules from the seafloor as opposed to where we get them now it doesn't quite add up to carbon savings and financial boon as you might be told by the industry. And then secondly, look, the overall problem is that we’re gonna solve one problem but create three more. And we probably need to figure out other ways to build the solar panels and long-lasting batteries that don't run us into a new situation of having to embrace child labor in Congo or use things that are going to destroy other parts of the environment and possibly unlock huge masses of carbon from the seafloor anyway in the process.

Ariana Brocious: And not just release carbon but also destroy ecosystems, right. Isn't there I mean, it's unclear what the impact would be of churning up that much sediment underwater.

Ian Urbina: Yeah, I mean, and again, I want to be careful of to, you know, there is a Chicken Little thing here where we are alluding to worries of threats that have not been demonstrated. And therefore, we could sound a little bit like we're being skeptical for its own sake.But in fairness the opposite is also scary: allowing industry to get too far out in front of the science or the law on this stuff is a formula for problems. And if they've already put the bulldozers on the seafloor and the huge vacuums pulling the stuff up. And then only 10 years down the road do scientists realize in the process we did terrible things. It’s gonna be too late to turn that industry around then.

Ariana Brocious: Yeah, I really appreciate your clear-eyed look at that. And I will also say that I would just opine that like our history is not great in this regard. We have a lot of examples of things that we’ve allowed industry to pursue and then find out oh no, that actually is harmful. You’ve also written about Sea Shepherd engaging in the longest pursuit of an illegal fishing vessel in nautical history in both this case and the National Geographic case in Brazil that we're just talking about. Nongovernmental organizations were doing what governments could not or would not do. So, what do you think about the role of NGOs when it comes to enforcement?

Ian Urbina: Band Aid. You know I love band-aids. If I get a cut I want one. But it's not gonna actually solve the cut, you know, it needs stitches and antibiotics to really fix it. And I think NGOs are band-aids and we should not be relying on them. There are very few NGOs out there on the water. You know it's extremely expensive you need ships etc. So, it's really just Greenpeace, you know, Earthrace, Sea Shepherd that are out there on the water doing this direct-action kind of stuff. And I think to a large degree they are filling the gap that the government has left. But it's not the solution that the planet needs the governments need to really get involved.

Ariana Brocious: So, you are a PhD candidate in anthropology before you shifted gears and became a reporter. How have your years of reporting on the outlaw ocean shaped your views of human nature?

Ian Urbina: I mean I was always a dark kind of pessimistic guy to begin with. But I guess I think it's verified my original outlook which is that left to our own devices, humans can engage in pretty dark behavior. And that there is a really important civilizing role played by law and government and it may be less libertarian, let’s put it that way. I was not libertarian to begin with and I'm less so now. I do believe that governments play a very important role. At the same time, you know, the reporting has inspired me with the bravery and scrappy ingenuity and will to survive and sort of humanity of us creatures by seeing things that people are doing out there to put their life on the line to protect others or to protect the environment. I've seen a lot of that. I don't write about it as much because I’m an investigative reporter and I focus on the negative stuff. But there's a lot of heroism out there and that really has given me hope for what we are as thinking beings.

Ariana Brocious: Ian Urbina is Director and Founder of The Outlaw Ocean Project. Thank you, Ian, so much for joining us on Climate One.

Ian Urbina: Thank you for having me.

Greg Dalton: On this Climate One... We’ve been talking about how to slow the climate-driven biodiversity crisis. This episode is supported in part by Resources Legacy Fund. Climate One’s empowering conversations connect all aspects of the climate emergency. To hear more, subscribe wherever you get your pods. Talking about climate can be hard-- AND it’s critical to address the transitions we need to make in all parts of society. Please help us get people talking more about climate by giving us a rating or review. You can do it right now on your device. You can also help by sending a link to this episode to a friend. On our new website you can create and share playlists focused on topics including food, energy, EVs, activism. By sharing you can help people have their own deeper climate conversations. Brad Marshland is our senior producer; Our managing director is Jenny Park. Ariana Brocious is co-host, editor and producer. Austin Colón is producer and editor. Megan Biscieglia is our production manager. Wency Shaida is our development manager, Ben Testani is our communications manager. Our theme music was composed by George Young (and arranged by Matt Willcox). Gloria Duffy is CEO of The Commonwealth Club of California, the nonprofit and nonpartisan forum where our program originates. I’m Greg Dalton.

2:52 Tanya Sanerib on the Kunming-Montréal Global Biodiversity Framework
6:57 Tanya Sanerib on how mussels saved an ecosystem
23:01 Jennifer Tauli Corpuz on the Kunming-Montréal Global Biodiversity Framework
23:36 Jennifer Tauli Corpuz on the role of Indigenous people protecting biodiversity
36:47 Jennifer Tauli Corpuz on how her experiences influence her current work
39:01 Ian Urbina on the lawless high seas
49:45 Ian Urbina on a success in Brazil

Play

Stefan Rahmstorf: 2022 Schneider Award Winner

Otto Pilot — Fri, 16 Dec 2022 08:01:00 +0000

Stefan Rahmstorf: 2022 Schneider Award Winner

12/16/2022

Every year, we grant an award in memory of pioneering climate scientist Steve Schneider, a who fiercely took on the denial machine from the 1970s until his death in 2010. This year's recipient is German physicist and ocean expert Dr. Stefan Rahmstorf. Dr. Rahmstorf says we’re running toward a cliff in a fog. What can science tell us where that cliff is – and how to avoid it?

In a time of oceanic changes happening at an unprecedented pace, Dr. Rahmstorf exemplifies the rare combination of superb scientist and powerful communicator. He works to convey the impact of climate disruption on ocean currents, sea level rise, and increasing extreme weather events fueled by warmer oceans.

We are already experiencing the devastating effects of a warming planet, and we are inching closer to several tipping points that could change life as we know it. According to Rahmstorf, we are in the middle of a global die off of coral reefs: “We are basically in that tipping point process now. And the latest IPCC report said after 2° warming basically no coral reef will be left.” He also says that we may be past the tipping point for the West Antarctic ice sheet, “The tipping point is where the further deterioration and actually complete loss of the ice sheet is already programmed in by self-amplifying feedback even without further warming.”

On the other hand, Rahmstorf says, further warming itself is not inevitable. “The science suggests that once we have reached zero CO2 emissions, the temperature will not rise further.” But he also recognizes that getting to net zero emissions won’t be easy, “With the politics we have now it is not possible of course, we have to be treating this problem as a top priority like a wartime situation.”

Earlier in his career, Dr. Rahmstorf was attacked for calling out climate skeptics in mainstream journalism. He remarks, “That put a big stress on me. Obviously if you are attacked and discredited in mainstream media simply for telling the truth and calling out disinformation on climate change.” Despite that experience, he believes that the debate around climate has changed significantly. At one time, outright denialism was the barrier scientists were up against, but now he says, “There is no outright or very little outright denial of the basic scientific facts. The whole discussion has shifted to criticizing the solutions.” But he also feels that, while scientists have a duty to tell the public what they are working on and what they’ve discovered, change won’t happen with scientists alone. They need the public to pressure governments to act:“This is the kind of pressure that is needed because scientists explaining in sober terms in IPCC reports what is at stake – we've been doing this since 1990, and it's just not happening.”

Even though communities of color experience the worst effects of the climate crisis, white voices are often centered in the public sphere. Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, marine biologist and winner of last year’s Schneider Award, wants more inclusion in climate spaces, “We need leaders who can lead their communities and that means we need a broad diversity of leaders. We need a lot of ideas at the table.” She continues, “A lot of the work that I do in terms of climate communication really aims to say like you are welcome in this work, you are needed in this work, let's think about where you will fit in.”

Guests

Stefan Rahmstorf

Professor of Physics of the Oceans, University of Potsdam

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson

Marine Biologist; Co-founder, The All We Can Save Project

About the Schneider Award (climateone.org)

Real Climate Blog: Climate Science from Climate Scientists (realclimate.org)

Climate One: Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Naomi Oreskes: The Schneider Award (climateone.org)

Note: Transcripts are generated using a combination of automated software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the actual audio before quoting it.

Greg Dalton: I’m Greg Dalton and this is Climate One.

Every year we grant an award in memory of the late Steve Schneider, a pioneering climate scientist who fiercely took on the denial machine from the 1970s until his death in 2010. He launched his last book, “Science As a Contact Sport,” on the Climate One stage and was a guide to me when I first entered this field.

This year's recipient is German physicist and ocean expert Dr. Stefan Rahmstorf.

Earlier in his career, Rahmstorf was attacked for calling out climate skeptics in mainstream journalism.

Stefan Rahmstorf: That put a big stress on me. Obviously if you are attacked and discredited in mainstream media simply for telling the truth and calling out disinformation on climate change.

Greg Dalton: And how has the conversation evolved or changed since then? Is it better or worse now?

Stefan Rahmstorf: Well, it’s actually I think it's a lot better now because the debate about climate change has moved on a lot. And at least, you know, I can only speak for Germany here. There is no outright or very little outright denial of the basic scientific facts. The whole discussion has shifted to criticizing you know the solutions, renewable energy, electro-mobility, etc. So, the debate also in this field contains a lot of false information put out by interest groups, but it doesn't concern the basic research as climate science researchers like myself so much anymore.

Greg Dalton: Right. It seems like a lot of the skepticism about climate stems from the fact that climate models were predicting effects that most people weren't yet experiencing in their lives. You know, this kind of far away in time and faraway lands. What do you think people distrust models and how both as a scientist and science communicator do you explain why we should believe in the predictive models?

Stefan Rahmstorf: Well, in a way I can understand that people distrust models as such, because they don't know what's in there. They don't really understand in detail what we are doing. But I think one of the big effects beyond the healthy distrust of models is that as scientists we also have of course we are very critical of each other's models and hopefully our own as well. And you really have to learn what a model can do well and what it cannot do well. But I think a big issue with the distrust of the general public of models in climate science overall is that this has been deliberately stoked by interest groups. In a way, it's not surprising that there is a lot of distrust there.

Greg Dalton: And have the models been conservative have the models actually underestimated the pace and magnitude of changes that we’ve seen in the atmosphere?

Stefan Rahmstorf: That again depends on what you are looking at. If you are looking at the change in global average temperature, that has been spot on in the model since the 1970s and 80s already those early models got that pretty well, right. Not only the models by university scientists or NASA, but also by Exxon, for example, did their own modeling and they also get it pretty well, right. There are other things that are more complicated physics like rainfall extremes for example, is more difficult and there is still a lot of uncertainty in regional terms where you expect what kind of extreme precipitation changes. And in one of my main fields of research for quite a few years has been sea level rise. That has also turned out to be quite a complex problem because there are several contributors, especially the ice sheets are very difficult to predict in their behavior. The sliding behavior depends on the material properties of the ice. And there we unfortunately have a history of underestimating sea level rise. And the IPCC had to raise its sea level projections several times basically every time in the last three times a new report came out the sea level projections have become more pessimistic as we learn more about potential ice sheet instabilities.

Greg Dalton: So, what I heard there is that, yeah, models are like a black box to most people, even me I never actually seen a climate model. I’ve talked to lots of people who make them and talked about them, but I've never actually seen a climate model. So, they are a black box and on surface temperature they’ve been very accurate. And on sea level rise they’ve actually underestimated something that is very complex. You said that we’re running toward a cliff in a fog and we don't know exactly where the cliff is. How far can models go toward letting us see through that fog?

Stefan Rahmstorf: Well, this quote was about tipping points where we indeed we know there are these tipping points. But we typically have a fairly large uncertainty range about exactly where this tipping point is going to be by at how much warming are we going to cross that tipping point. And this is a classic case because tipping points by definition are highly nonlinear phenomena. So, complicated physics and these nonlinear phenomena they depend exactly on the boundary conditions, and in many cases, we just can't pin that down very easily. Whereas other things like I mentioned the global mean temperature just follows a global energy balance. We know how much radiation is coming in, ow much longwave radiation is going out and how that's going to change when we increase in greenhouse gases because it's a fairly smooth change in the global energy budget. And so, that's pretty easy to predict. But those cliffs like the tipping points, are often well understood in principle but not where exactly that cliff is.

Greg Dalton: Let's talk a little more about tipping points. In one of your talks I've seen you show a graphic of various tipping points and at what temperatures they would be triggered. Can you talk through us some of the most imminent dangers because there are kind of three bands of tipping points? Those that could happen relatively soon. Those that are sort of medium-term and those that are further out. What are the ones that are closest the ones a little further out?

Stefan Rahmstorf: Yeah, this graph comes from a review paper in Science that was published this September by David Armstrong McKay and colleagues from several countries. And in a way it did really shock me to some extent because they are now indeed, when you put together the latest science six tipping points that even not just possible but even likely to be crossed within that range between 1.5 and 2.0° of global warming.

Greg Dalton: We’re at about 1.1 now so that’s not very far away, right?

Stefan Rahmstorf: Exactly. the coral reefs, for example. A long time it has been known that they have critical temperature thresholds and we are now already since 2015 in the middle of a global coral die off. So, we are basically in that tipping point process now. And the latest IPCC report said after 2° warming basically no coral reef will be left. Another one is the West Antarctic ice sheet which may already have passed the tipping point. I should add that the tipping point is where the further deterioration and actually complete loss of the ice sheet is already programmed in by self-amplifying feedback even without further warming. So, that's what the tipping point is and it means you can't necessarily see it when it's happening with these ice sheets because they are moving very slowly and there is no dramatic change once you've passed the tipping point. But what it means is it's going to continue to decay until it's gone. In case of West Antarctic that would be 3 meters global sea level rise. Greenland ice sheet it’s a different mechanism but the same thing. We may already be passing the tipping point very soon. We might even already have passed it, and that would just mean the total loss of the Greenland ice sheet would be programmed in to occur over the next centuries and unstoppable basically, and that would mean 7 meters global sea level rise.

Greg Dalton: Let me just jump in here, Stefan. These are places most Europeans Americans will never go to or see, the West Antarctic ice sheet or the Greenland ice sheet. What does it mean for someone living in Europe, North America anywhere? Why should a person care about these faraway things?

Stefan Rahmstorf: Well, in case of the ice sheets the main reason to care about them is the sea level rise they are causing, and we are expecting, the IPCC is expecting half a meter to 1 meter sea level rise by the end of the century. But with a big one-sided uncertainty to much higher values like 2 meters by the end of the century, 5 meters by the year 2150 as a result of potentially passing these tipping points where amplifying feedbacks really destabilize these ice sheets. And that means basically the loss of most of the world's coastal cities and also natural ecosystems along the coast beaches being washed away by the rising seas, etc.,

Greg Dalton: And these things are closer and more likely than you estimated a couple of decades ago, is that correct?

Stefan Rahmstorf: Absolutely. Even closer than I thought five years ago.

Greg Dalton: Wow. And then there's some that are further out that are you know, sort of happen between 2 and 4° that is, you know, the Sahel. Tell us about the range the Amazon and the Sahel the things that happened between 2 and 4° of warming which we hope we won't get to and we’re currently on a trajectory if everybody meets their Paris climate agreements we won't get to that point, but it could happen.

Stefan Rahmstorf: It could happen and for the Amazon rainforest there is a tipping point where it simply gets too dry to be maintained. And that has to do with the fact that the rainforest generates its own rain and recycles the water that falls in one area. The roots pick it up from the ground again, push it up to the leaves and they evaporated again. And so, that rainfall is recycled again and again by the forest and that is a self-sustaining feedback which is typical for a tipping point, because when you stress that too much, it turns into the opposite. The forest dies back and that recycles less rain that amplifies that die back and then the Amazon rainforest basically threatens to get so dry that big parts go up in flames. Now with the Sahel and West African monsoon this is actually in a way a positive tipping point I would say. And because we’re talking about the potential greening there like we had in the first half of the Holocene where we had a stronger West African monsoon bringing in moisture from the tropical Atlantic. And so, this could actually lead to a greening of the southern fringes of the Sahara. And so, not all tipping points are negative and we are all hoping for a societal tipping point where the world society finally takes climate change seriously enough to stop it.

Greg Dalton: So, there will be some, you know that’s a rare example of actually something a positive trend anywhere and particularly for Africa. So, are you saying there’ll be winners and losers in this?

Stefan Rahmstorf: Well, of course that tipping point for the greening Sahara will only be reached if we have pushed warming already far too far or way beyond 2° and we are in the middle of fighting disaster. So, that is little consolation that further out there may be even some positive change.

Greg Dalton: You’re listening to a Climate One conversation with this year's winner of the Schneider Award for climate science communication. We value you as a listener, and your rating or review of our show helps others find our podcast and learn more about the climate emergency. Please take a moment to rate or review us on your pod app. Coming up, why 1.5° of warming may not be inevitable.

Stefan Rahmstorf: A lot of people think we are already inevitably going to surpass the 1.5°. That is not what the science is saying. The science suggests that once we have reached zero CO2 emissions, the temperature will not rise further. (:16)

Greg Dalton: That’s up next, when Climate One continues.

Stefan Rahmstorf: The first thing I remember about Steve is his 1989 book called “Global Warming: Are We Entering the Greenhouse Century?”, which I read as a PhD student in the late 80s when the book came out. And that was to me one of the eye openers at the time about that greenhouse problem. And indeed, I had a fair amount of interactions with Steve over the years and I would call him a friend. And one of the things I talked quite a bit to him about and where he was very vocal in public as well was the thing about thinking about risk about probabilities and to also take seriously low probability events. This is something I really learned from Steve because the IPCC until quite recently has been focusing strongly on the best estimate scenarios of you know what is most likely to happen, but not focusing on the tail end of the probability distribution and what risks are lurking there. It’s a bit like analyzing the risk of running a nuclear power plant and you just look at scenarios where everything runs according to plan but of course to understand risk you have to also look at the things that may go wrong even if it's not very likely. And so, Steve and I we were both quite vocal about this issue to consider the risks as well, and I remember in 2000 he invited me to write an editorial for his journal the first climate change journal which was called climate change on the thresholds of what we now call tipping points of the Atlantic journal overturning circulation. And the other where Steve was really a mentor to me was public climate science communication. He was really somebody who he encourages everybody basically to get involved in the public debate. It's not enough to just put your stuff in the peer-reviewed technical literature. He was convinced you have to put it out into the public arena and debate it.

Greg Dalton: And so, what do you consider the role of a scientist because there’s some data about whether scientists ought to stick to their stay in their lane, stick to their laboratory what they know not veer into policy, not get into politics. Others say there's a moral responsibility. What do you view as the role of a scientist at this time focusing on this?

Stefan Rahmstorf: Well, I think we definitely have a duty to explain what we’re doing and what we are finding out to the general public. Like doctors have a duty to warn their patients that smoking causes lung cancer and, you know, if you know about the risks that affects people you have to speak up. I don't think that necessarily it's a role of a physicist to tell the government what it should be doing. And we generally I think a scientist don’t the IPCC doesn't, it's, you know, when the politicians want to know how do we stop global warming for example, at 2° also then as natural scientists we can say how much what's the emission's budget, you know, how much can we still emit in terms of CO2 if we want to stick to that goal. And so, I think we need to communicate the risks, but not necessarily solutions. But there are other scientists like renewable energy experts, economists, etc. that are really engaged in designing policy measures for example, a carbon pricing scheme that is fair so that low income households actually have more money in the bank afterwards and so the burden for changing the energy system and reducing CO2 emissions should really be paid by the high emitters which are typically the people with more income.

Greg Dalton: Yeah, the Global North. We’ve done a number of episodes on that on Climate One recently from COP 27. Much of your work has been in the field of paleoclimatology. How has studying ice ages informed your understanding of current and future climate change and how do you communicate with people who average person has a hard time really grasping geological timescale.

Stefan Rahmstorf: Yes, quite early already when I started as a postdoc turned to studying paleoclimate because you know I was studying abrupt ocean circulation changes. And, you know, we can’t observe that in the last hundred years, but we can if we go back further in time because they have happened repeatedly during the last ice age. So, if we want to test our models can they reproduce these phenomena realistically, we have to compare them to paleoclimatic so-called proxy data that come from the ice cores or sediment course from the deep ocean, etc. And most people that I talked to or give lectures, public lectures they are amazed how much we actually know about past climate changes, and about the mechanisms, especially when you look at the past few million years which of course is a short part of the total earth history of 4 1/2 billion years. But the last few million years we have very nice data from sediment cores all over the planet. We know the waxing and waning of the big continental ice sheets and with our climate model for example, we can now reproduce all the ice ages of the last 3 million years just driven by the cycles in the earth orbit, the so-called Milankovitch cycles which are the course of these cyclical ice ages. And so, I think the main thing it teaches us is that the earth system the climate system is a sensitive beast that responds strongly when you change the forcing for example, either by these orbital cycles or by adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. This is what we call the forcing radiative forcing and we know from the earth history that the earth responds very strongly to this. So, that's the so-called climate sensitivity. How sensitive is our climate system? And my colleague Wally Broecker, who unfortunately also already died like Steve Schneider, he used to say the climate is an angry beast and we are poking it with sticks.

Greg Dalton: It’s an angry beast and a sensitive beast. That’s quite a powerful image. You mentioned the Greenland ice sheet and the Antarctic ice sheet and how there's some melting there that's faster. It's complicated, but faster than you would've predicted just a few years ago. We have enough ice left on earth to raise sea level by 60 meters, that's almost 200 feet. This is a mind-blowing number obviously, you know, your paly of work you know it's been that high before but not on an earth with 8 billion people. So, how do you imagine a 60-meter sea level rise and still function? I mean that’s just a mind-blowing number.

Stefan Rahmstorf: Yeah, that is a really big number and we know that at the end of the last ice age, you know, which is only 10,000 years ago, so that, and I mean the height of the ice age was 20,000 years ago and then between 20,000 and 10,000 the ice age came to an end. We moved into the Holocene warm period, the interglacial. And there the sea level rose by 120 meters because two thirds of those ice age ice masses on the continents were melting in response to about 7° of warming from the ice age to the Holocene. 7°C global warming caused 120 meters of sea level rise. So, the fact that we still have 65 meters worth of sea level rise lying in form of ice on the continents, to me, it doesn't mean that sea level will ever rise by 65 meters because well, certainly not in the next 1000 years because Antarctica is simply right on the south pole and very cold and the main part Eastern Arctic is not gonna melt down. But what it means is that we can afford to lose only a few percent of that continental ice. And, you know, last time we had several degrees of warming, you know, two thirds of the ice melted 120 meters of sea level rise and now we're heading for 3, 4° warming maybe half as much. And we can't even afford to lose this kind of a few percent of the ice. Even one meter of sea level rise would for many places be really catastrophic. We’re already witnessing real problems after the 20 cm of rise that we have seen since the late 19th century. We have already at the US East Coast for example, the so-called nuisance flooding in quite a few places. The Carolinas, Boston, for example, where even with the tidal cycles you get some low-lying streets underwater.

Greg Dalton: So, some people say that even if we stop emissions there’s momentum in the system: warming will continue, seas will continue to rise. how much sea level rise is already baked in?

Stefan Rahmstorf: Well, let's first say how much further warming is baked in because a lot of people think we are already inevitably going to surpass the 1.5°. That is not what the science is saying. The science suggests that once we have reached zero CO2 emissions the temperature will not rise further.

Greg Dalton: Great. Let’s just hold on to that for a moment. They say the science so sometimes the public discourse gets darker than the science. And we get these moments of light. I like to pause and hold on to them. That once we stop emitting the warming will stop. That's really good news.

Stefan Rahmstorf: Absolutely. Yeah, that’s the good part of us causing it. It means we can stop it. And in the global temperature there's not much inertia.So, that is really what we have to aim for: get to zero emissions before or at the time where we reach 1.5°. And that is theoretically possible. With the politics we have now it is not possible of course, we have to be treating this problem as a top priority like a wartime situation basically, in order to get such a really fast end of fossil fuel use. Now, there is, of course, a lot of inertia in the sea level issue because the ice sheets are very slow to melt. That's the main reason but also heat penetrating into the oceans is also a gradual, slow process. So, after we stabilize the global temperature, sea level will continue to rise for many centuries. And the best we can hope to achieve by stopping global warming is to prevent further acceleration of sea level rise.

Greg Dalton: So, I heard a lot of positive news there. We hear a lot about net zero goals these days. When we get to zero emissions, some of the bad things will stop pretty quickly. Some will continue slowly rising seas with the thermal acceleration. So, that really gives me encouragement that this net zero goals we’re talking about that are we’ll see pretty immediate effects when we get there. It won't be some long delay. That we’ll see some pretty quick results that it’s a goal worth fighting for and getting toward.

Stefan Rahmstorf: Absolutely. I mean, just think about it overland when the sun comes up in the morning, you know, it gets hot within hours. So, that's how fast the atmosphere responds to a change in radiative forcing. The inertia is in the oceans and so maybe in coastal regions, things will not be noticeable so quickly, but a lot of the CO2 effect is very immediate and with every molecule of CO2 that we add we change the radiation balance. And once we stop doing this, we will stop making things worse.

Greg Dalton: One way to avoid tipping points could be dimming the sun to cool the earth possibly known as solar and geo-engineering. What do you think of geo-engineering? Is climate inaction making solar geo-engineering more likely, perhaps even inevitable?

Stefan Rahmstorf: I think it's a terrible idea because of huge side effects and also to a large extent unknown side effects that this would have. And you have to consider that this CO2 that we add will remain in the atmosphere at an elevated level for literally tens of thousands of years. So, we actually in my department have a couple of projects from the Swiss and the German authorities about nuclear waste storage because these people are interested what happens in the next million years. And so, because we can successfully model the ice ages of the last 3 million years and these Milankovitch cycles of the earth orbit can be calculated with astronomical precision also into the future. We can also predict the next ice ages. The next one would be happening in 50,000 years from now. But we can say that is practically already canceled because even in 50,000 years CO2 will be still so elevated in the atmosphere that the new ice age, the next ice age will not be happening. So, this is very long-term and the counter effect by adding these particles shading the sun and the atmosphere, which some people discuss, etc., they will wash out within weeks basically, if you don't keep renewing them all the time. And so, once we do this, we add a lot of CO2 but at the same time we add kind of short-term shading aerosols in the stratosphere also. We will have to keep doing this for tens of thousands of years to keep a habitable planet. And at that point we would hand over the control over the climate system to humans rather than leaving it as a self-regulating system. And I think this is a terrible idea.

Greg Dalton: There's a saying that what happens in the Arctic doesn't stay in the Arctic. The jet stream is slowing, according to different studies using different methods. How does the melting Arctic ice affect the jet stream and how could that affect Europe? I talked to people who are very worried in Europe about the jet stream changing.

Stefan Rahmstorf: The changes in the jet stream data show that in some of the jet stream slowing down. Also, further analysis shows that it's getting more wavy in the winter. You get these instabilities in the polar vortex letting out cold air outbreaks from the Arctic to adjacent continents. And these things have to do with the disproportionate warming of the Arctic, which has actually warmed 3 to 4 times faster than the global average temperature in the last decades. And that basically reduces the temperature gradient that drives the jet stream, you know, the difference between the subtropical atmosphere and the polar atmosphere. The temperature difference is getting smaller because the North Pole is warming up such a lot. And we think that this leads to more persistent weather, especially in Europe, so same weather situation, lasting longer and thereby becoming extreme. You know if you have one week with no rain it’s not a problem but you know if you have three weeks with no rain you have a problem. Or when you have a low-pressure system dumping a lot of rain you also have a problem when it stays for a week over the same place because it's going to cause massive flooding like we had last year in Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands.

Greg Dalton: Angela Merkel was a huge figure on the world stage for a long time. She was a physicist. She knows the science; what has been her climate legacy?

Stefan Rahmstorf: Well, unfortunately, I would say she was very good at using nice words and especially on the international arena. And quite, you know, riveting speeches about global warming and she's been I've seen her several times in person speaking to audiences of scientists at the meetings that we organize, etc., And she always said the right things and then you know she intervened in Brussels against emission standards for motorcars, etc. And also, you know I think her government basically stopped our photovoltaics industry and our wind industry. They strongly halted the exponential growth of wind power in Germany because there was a lot of fossil fuel interests there and our strong dependence on Russian fossil gas now that we are now suffering with the Ukraine war from. This dependence also that was all growing during her government. So, I think climate people here in Germany are especially disappointed with her because she did understand the problem and she said the right thing but she didn't act accordingly.

Greg Dalton: What energy trajectory is Germany on now? I know that they just signed a long-term liquid natural gas contract with Qatar that goes out into several more than a decade from now.

Stefan Rahmstorf: Well, this is actually quite difficult to say because on one hand we now have a climate ministry run by a green minister, Robert Habeck, who are working hard to remove obstacles to the renewable energies and build them up faster. And we are now in Germany at around about 50% of our electricity is coming from renewables and the plan is to be at 80% in 2030. That's the good news and the actually there are new reports by the International Energy Agency on renewables has really upped the estimates dramatically how quickly the renewables worldwide will increase, and including because they now say now after the attack on Ukraine there will be an acceleration also in Germany with the buildup of renewable electricity generation. That's the one side. But you mentioned those LNG terminals. There is a big debate about those because it’s kind of a fossil lock-in effect and people try to say how well they can later be used for hydrogen, green importing green hydrogen. But I'm certainly not an expert on this, I'm outside my core expertise here, but I see reports from experts saying this is just kind of greenwashing. These terminals are not suited for hydrogen. And so, this is not gonna happen. And yeah, environmental organization here is going to court against these LNG terminals because they are basically contravening Germans climate policy just like the British new coal mine that is going to be opened. That really undermines the credibility of Great Britain in climate policy. I just see the fossil fuel lobby kind of you know it's like whack-a-mole they’re popping up everywhere. You try to make this transition away from fossil fuels, but the power of the forces that want to hold onto fossil fuel burning is still very strong. And, you know, they're making record profits at the moment and they’re using that money also for lobbying power.

Greg Dalton: So, how do you think that, I understand this is not a physicist question. But how do you think that power is challenged or changed?

Stefan Rahmstorf: Well, I think by the public, basically, demanding climate action and I think a big impact was by the Fridays For Future movement and the general climate movement that has really grown in recent years the last five years or so, it has become quite powerful and I can see that you know fossil fuel dependent governments, like in Australia get voted out and also in Germany of course I mean we could have had Angela Merkel’s party again in government. I think had not been for this the climate issue and the massive flooding we had last summer in West Germany, the climate topic is now something that voters demand and that people, the young people, especially demand in the streets. And I think this is the kind of pressure that is needed because scientists explaining in sober terms in IPCC reports what is at stake. We've been doing this since 1990 when the first IPCC report came out and it's just not happening. So, I think it needs more political pressure.

Greg Dalton: We've had an attack on science and a lot of reason-based thinking in the United States seems to have subsided a little bit. What advice do you have to people who want to pursue science and are maybe turned off by the nasty politics surrounding science these days?

Stefan Rahmstorf: I would say do it anyway. And I think go into the solutions field, you know, study energy systems, etc. Because basically we understand the climate system well enough to know what we should be doing and we really need people working on the solutions.

Greg Dalton: This is Climate One. I’m Greg Dalton.

Last year’s recipient of our climate science communication award was marine biologist, policy expert and writer Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson. She’s co-founder of the Urban Ocean Lab and co-creator of the The All We Can Save Project.

After an op-ed piece where Johnson proposed a Blue New Deal, the Elizabeth Warren presidential campaign took notice and asked her to formalize the plan. In our conversation last year, I asked her about that experience.

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson: This is actually the piece of climate communication that I think I'm most proud of and it’s the one I speak the least about now. And it just the idea came to be just over a lunch with Chad Nelsen who’s is the CEO of Surfrider. We were both talking about having read the Green New Deal resolution and you get to page 10 or 11 out of 14. For those who haven't read it it is short it is double spaced and large font it’ll take you like five or 10 minutes. And I thought wow this is really ambitious and exciting, but they left out the ocean and so it will not work. Because the ocean has absorbed 90+ percent of the heat we've trapped with greenhouse gasses, right. It's absorbed over about a third of the carbon dioxide we’ve emitted. It is buffering us from the impacts, it is providing all the solutions in terms of protecting shorelines and renewable energy. And so, we leave out the ocean then we’re leaving out what a report that came out earlier this year calculated about 20% of the climate solutions available to us. And so, Chad Nelsen and I thought well how can we help to make sure the ocean is included and then we ended up connecting with Bren Smith who is a regenerative ocean farmer who cofounded a nonprofit called GreenWave, who was also working on the same concept and the three of us put our heads together for that op-ed in grist, called the Big Blue Gap in the Green New Deal. And that sort of became a policy memo with Data for Progress and that caught the eye of the Warren campaign and then with Maggie Thomas who was her climate advisor who is now chief of staff in the White House on climate working with Gina McCarthy. She and I led the effort to craft that policy plan, which is something you know that those ideas keep moving forward. And that's something that I'm working on now through Urban Ocean Lab, which as you mention is the policy think tank that I cofounded. So, I think being able to interject the ocean into the climate narrative is something that I'm always trying to do. That is the core of my scientific training. So, just consistently raising my hand and saying hey, don’t forget about the ocean when we’re talking about climate solutions and climate policy.

Greg Dalton: Did you know science was going to be a contact sport when you started to pursue a PhD in marine biology? Did you anticipate how rough it would be?

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson: No. But I also did not anticipate in any sense the role that I would end up playing. I never aspired to or expected to be any sort of public figure. My first --

Greg Dalton: Lots of scientists don’t. That’s not why people go into science, right.

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson: Exactly.

Greg Dalton: You wanna be in your lab doing your work.

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson: I also never thought I would be in the lab. So, my first job out of college was working in the policy office at the Environmental Protection Agency in DC. My major as an undergrad with environmental science and public policy. So, I always wanted to work at this intersection of science and policy. And so, for me it was just a matter of how can I get this advanced degree in science in order to make sure that that all the best science is used to inform policy making even if I'm not the one doing that science. I will have the training to be able to interpret it and convey the importance of it in the context of how we form policy. And so, I guess the answer is no but because I never thought of myself really as having a career as a research scientist and I never thought of myself as having a public profile in any significant way. I thought I would just like be a policy wonk who had a bunch of science training that made me useful in a different way. Because some of the best advice I ever got was and there are a lot of lawyers doing policy there aren't as many scientists doing policies that I could help build the bridge from the other direction. So, I kind of thought I would stay out of the fray and I think I’m gonna back out of it now as you know I'm not doing as much public speaking right now. I’m sort of going into a bit of hibernation and look forward to coming back with some new things to say.

Greg Dalton: You reference some of that in an article you wrote in 2020 in the Washington Post, which was my first honestly remember hearing of you and reading about you. I was like, whoa, I’m always on the lookout for rising stars and new voices and faces. And in this you said, “I’m a black climate expert. Racism derails our efforts to save the planet.” In it you quote Toni Morrison saying “The very serious function of racism is distraction it keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining over and over again your reason for being." And I get that and so, part of me doesn't want to ask you about this and yet I feel an obligation to do so. And as a white guy with a show, you know, can we spend a little bit of time talking about going that and you talk in that piece about superficial task and the need to do deeper work.

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson: The thing that I wish more people understood at this intersection of race and climate is that people of color already care and get it. In fact, are more concerned about climate than their white counterparts in the US. And for this knowing we have to thank for this knowledge the last year's recipients of this very award Dr. Leiserowitz, and Dr. Maibach whose research whose polling of Americans shows us that it's about 49% of white Americans who are concerned about climate change, 57% of black Americans and about 70% of Latinx Americans. So, when we think about how are we going to address this crisis. It's how do we build the biggest strongest team. And so, how do we then welcome in the people who already get it who already care who are already disproportionately more likely to want to be a part of the solutions to want their elected representatives to be more active on pushing forward climate legislation who are more likely to volunteer who are more likely to call their members of Congress. And to me one of the most important findings of their research and polling is that it's not just because communities of color are more heavily impacted by climate change and extreme weather events that are fueled by climate change. That’s what we think we think it's because they're getting pummeled and they see it more this certainly that they are more concerned. And the answer is actually that especially for Latinx communities in the US it’s because they have a more egalitarian worldview. It’s because they have the sense of needing to be a part of the solution of this responsibility to your community as opposed to a more individualistic worldview which tends to be what more of the white people have in America in terms of this context around climate. And so, I think there's a really important lesson there that it's not just about climate justice in terms of who is the most heavily impacted, which is where we normally focus our efforts on all the injustices associated with climate change and its absolutely critical to address those and make sure those do not become more extreme and in fact are reversed. But it's also really important to think about who do we need at the table if we’re gonna work on solutions effectively. If we need these transformations in every community all over the world who’s gonna be leading those transformations in every sector in every town in every part of our economy in every corporation in every level of government. And so, we need leaders who can lead their communities and that means we need a broad diversity of leaders. We need a lot of ideas at the table. And when I say diversity I don't just mean racial diversity I mean age diversity, I mean gender diversity, I mean geographic diversity. Diversity in areas of expertise diversity in ways that we think and approach problems. And so, a lot of the work that I do in terms of climate communication really aims to say like you are welcome in this work, you are needed in this work, let's think about where you will fit in, people who maybe didn't think there was a place for them before.

Greg Dalton: Yeah, welcoming rather than kind of guilt or other way coming into it. As cofounder of the All We Can Save Project you focus on nurturing a climate community rooted in the work and wisdom of women. We have an episode of the Climate One podcast titled The Feminist Climate Renaissance that features you, your coeditor Katharine Wilkinson and four women featured in that book. For those who haven't heard that show, how is the work and wisdom of women, particularly BIPOC women different from white men so needed and what we need on climate now.

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson: So, Katharine and I were inspired to create this anthology because we were just so frustrated with seeing you know who was controlling the narrative, who had the mics who have the financial resources to do their work. And in the US, it was largely white man controlling what we think of as you know, who we see when we think about climate who are the leaders --

Greg Dalton: Steve Schneiders of the world, right. This award may be perpetuating that.

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson: I actually think I don't think of that as a problem. I mean, I'm so honored to be following in his footsteps and the footsteps of all who have received this award before me. I was like literally jaw-dropped gob smacked to be in his company. So, it's not about pushing aside the leadership of white men. It's about having more leaders, right. What we need is a leaderful movement as black lives matter sort of thinks about it. We need just more leaders as well as different leaders. And the way that Katharine and I sort of framed that in the opening essay of All We Can Save was to identify a few key features of the leadership that we were seeing of women that was different and remarkable and important and worth uplifting. And of course they are characteristics that anyone can embody and so it's this clear focus on making change rather than being in charge, right. It’s the shift in the ego. It's the commitment to responding to the crisis in ways that heal systemic injustices rather than keeping them. It's this appreciation for heart-centered not only head-centered leadership and integrating the two. And it's the recognition that building community is a requisite for building a better world that we’re in this together that this is not about a hero that this is not about yelling the most facts or having the best science. It's about how we actually implement the solutions in a way that work for people. And I know implementation is not maybe like the sexiest word, but for me it's like extremely exciting because we have most of the solutions we need and the question is like, how are we going to make them all happen in the world.

Greg Dalton: On this Climate One, we’ve been talking about climate science communication with Schneider Award winners Dr. Stefan Rahmstorf and Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson.

Climate One’s empowering conversations connect all aspects of the climate emergency. To hear more, subscribe wherever you get your pods. Talking about climate can be hard-- AND it’s critical to address the transitions we need to make in all parts of society. Please help us get people talking more about climate by giving us a rating or review. You can do it right now on your device. You can also help by sending a link to this episode to a friend. By sharing you can help people have their own deeper climate conversations.

Brad Marshland is our senior producer; Our managing director is Jenny Park. Our producers and audio editors are Ariana Brocious and Austin Colón. Megan Biscieglia is our production manager. Our team also includes consulting producer Sara-Katherine Coxon. Our theme music was composed by George Young (and arranged by Matt Willcox). Gloria Duffy is CEO of The Commonwealth Club of California, the nonprofit and nonpartisan forum where our program originates. I’m Greg Dalton.

Stephen Schneider Award Winners

12 Episodes

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Two Hemispheres, One Story: Reporting on Rising Seas

Otto Pilot — Fri, 21 Oct 2022 07:01:00 +0000

Two Hemispheres, One Story: Reporting on Rising Seas

10/21/2022

An undeniable reality of the climate crisis is that poorer countries in the Global South are experiencing climate-induced disasters first and worst. That doesn’t mean that wealthier and whiter countries in the Global North are free from climate disruption. But wealthy countries have far more resources available to adapt and recover when disaster strikes.

In a collaboration with Covering Climate Now, we invited two award-winning journalists to share their reporting on climate change in their part of the world and how journalism can help bridge the disconnect between the industrialized north and developing south. Lauren Sommer is a correspondent for NPR, and Lagipoiva Cherelle Jackson is a reporter for the Guardian and host of the three-part podcast series An Impossible Choice, which won Covering Climate Now’s Journalism Award for Radio Podcast Series. Having grown up in Samoa, Jackson understands this global inequality all too well:

“Pacific Islands are only responsible for 0.03 of emissions globally yet stand to lose entire nations as a result of it. The responsibility lies in the Global North. And ultimately the role of the journalist is to really highlight these issues.”

Lauren Sommer sees the same injustices play out, even in the generally wealthy Bay Area., “I think the data is very clear. Disaster after disaster, people who have the means are able to put their lives back together. It's painful, but you know they can do it.”

Loss and Damage - the idea that the companies and countries most responsible for emitting climate changing pollutants should have to pay for the damages caused by climate disasters – is sure to be at the center of this year’s UN climate summit, known as COP27. Those in the most affected areas have been advocating for loss and damage payments for years. But Jackson believes that the ability to put those policies into practice is out of the hands of those in the Global South, “Unfortunately the decision-makers are not those who … have to pay for it in terms of lives lost, or identities lost, or islands lost.”

Both Jackson and Sommer hope their work might help the public understand that what’s happening to others around the world isn’t that different from what’s happening in many of their own communities. “As journalists, that's what we’re trying to share with the world, that maybe it's not you this time but it's a very good chance it could be you in the future, no matter where you live because these are becoming much more common events,” says Sommer.

Jackson agrees, “I love hearing Lauren’s reporting because I feel like the impact of the climate crisis has finally reached those with the means to do something about it.”

Related Links:
An Impossible Choice
What Can We Do About Rising Seas? East Palo Alto Has a Few Great Answers
Who Will Pay to Protect Tech Giants From Rising Seas?

Guests

Lagipoiva Cherelle Jackson

Reporter for The Guardian, Host of An Impossible Choice

Lauren Sommer

Reporter, NPR

Note: Transcripts are generated using a combination of automated software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the actual audio before quoting it.

Greg Dalton: This is Climate One. I’m Greg Dalton. Twenty of the world’s richest countries – mostly in the Global North -- are responsible for 80 percent of the carbon pollution that’s driving extreme weather and supercharging natural disasters. Yet poorer countries in the Global South are experiencing climate-induced disasters first and worst. Wealthier and whiter countries in the Global North are being hit by climate disruption as well, but they also have more resources to adapt. This dichotomy underlies this year’s climate summit in Egypt, where loss and damage payments are expected to be a key focus.

In a collaboration with Covering Climate Now, we invited two award-winning journalists to discuss reporting on climate change in their part of the world and bridging the disconnect between the industrialized north and developing South. Lauren Sommer is a correspondent for NPR, and Lagipoiva Cherelle Jackson is a reporter for the Guardian and host of the three part podcast series An Impossible Choice.

The series explores climate disruption the Pacific Islanders are facing. This year it won Covering Climate Now’s Journalism Award for Radio Podcast Series. Jackson opens the first episode with a gripping personal story about delivering her child during a cyclone.

Lagipoiva Cherelle Jackson: Growing up in Savaii, Samoa cyclones and extreme weather events are very much a part of our lives and our existence. So, when I was brought on to host An Impossible Choice, I was asked to share my personal story like any journalist who wants to remain objective and just tell the story. I didn't necessarily want to share my story because I didn't feel that I should be part of the story. But in having conversations with my editors at the time, you know, they really did say well, actually you are part of the story and so you should be part of that narrative. So, even though it was hard for me professionally to center myself within the story I was very much aware that I was both a survivor and an eyewitness to the climate crisis in the Pacific. And then that's how my birth story came up of how my daughter was born in between storms in Samoa. And the fears that come as a new mother as you know, having a child for the first time and then a cyclone we just survived Cyclone Evan which you know displaced over 5000 people in our villages. And then another cyclone was due on the very evening that my daughter was born. So, to be able to tell that story and then hear from audiences how they resonated with it and also just connecting the fact that hardships, that lives of Pacific Islanders continue irrespective of the extreme weather events that people continue to live their lives even with the climate crisis and all of the issues that bring. So, it was, as a journalist, a very challenging time in centering myself in that story, but at the same time, it is the strongest piece of work I've ever done on climate change, and I used different approaches to try and reach international audiences on climate change. And this was a story that resonated: putting myself in it and telling the story of the people on the ground who are directly impacted by climate change and continue to be impacted by it. I really did make a difference.

Greg Dalton: And how have you experience climate change since then?

Lagipoiva Cherelle Jackson: Well, climate change is very much a part of our lives, you know, and extreme weather events such as intense cyclones flooding that something that happens on an annual basis. So, for us in Samoa, the change in the way that our livelihood options are available to us. So, seasonal crops variations have really impacted the way that we have access to food and have changed the diet. Storm surges have increased in coastal areas and then the availability of certain ocean-based food sources have also been a problem. So, this continues to be something that we deal with on a daily basis. Professionally going to town to do an interview and it be flooding is one of those, like immediate kind of climate change impacts that one experiences on the islands.

Greg Dalton: Thank you for sharing that. Lauren, you're in the Bay Area and produced an in-depth report on how communities here are preparing for future sea level rise. What does climate disruption feel like to you personally here living on the California coast?

Lauren Sommer: Yeah, I think it’s an interesting moment because obviously wildfires have gotten extreme, have affected many people in the West. But some of the decisions that people make every day are climate decisions and we don't always call them that. And I think where people are building where they live and decisions to build more in risky areas, those are all climate decisions, but they're happening in city councils they’re happening in kind of communities. And a lot of times aren’t kind of connecting the dots in those moments when they make those decisions about who's gonna be there in the future and might be at risk. And so, I think those are the types of stories I tend to gravitate to which is like we know a lot about the science now we know what sea level rise might do and who might be at risk and what the impacts might be. But is that really trickling down to the decisions we make every day that are gonna matter? I'm not sure it is.

Greg Dalton: Right. They’re kind of separated. Climate still in that far away future frame for a lot of people. Lauren, your work focused on the question of who should pay for climate resilience and protection, especially in a place where tech giants have established their headquarters. Tell us a little bit about what's at stake for the communities here like East Palo Alto and the wealthy ones nearby.

Lauren Sommer: Yeah, a particular story is kind of an interesting microcosm of this big question of fairness climate change. Like who should pay, who should pay for the damage that have been done and who should pay to protect people in the future. So, in particular, Menlo Park, which is in kind of in Silicon Valley in the Bay Area, you know, it has Facebook or Meta as it’s called now at their headquarters. They've spent a huge amount of money building a massive campus right on the waterfront there in an area where it's very clear that, you know, even by midcentury, there’ll be risk from storm surge and sea level rise. It’s also right next to East Palo Alto, one of the last kind of low-income communities of color kind of left in Silicon Valley, which is extremely expensive area to live. They are also right on the waterfront, they also need protection. And so, as the community in general is looking at what do we build do we build a levee do we build some sort of protection. This question of who should pay what's fair is really kind of it's coming up. It's causing a lot of tension in the community and it's kind of right on the forefront of like a lot of places haven't quite figured this out yet.

Greg Dalton: Right. And Cherelle, does that come up also in Samoa that, you know, what Lauren’s describing within one county basically is a microcosm for what's happening globally between the North and the South. Your reaction when you hear about these fights.

Lagipoiva Cherelle Jackson: It’s like the constant fight at climate negotiations. It's very interesting because among Pacific Island leaders and communities. Our cultures are not based on confrontation so it's very rare to hear a Pacific leader really confront the you know high emitting nations on the problem that they caused and were paying for. But what you do hear among Pacific Island leaders is accountability and the need to own up to their responsibility. And this is very much the case when we’re calling Australia to account for their role in the problem. My work has been focused internally on creating awareness among Pacific Islanders that it's not our fault. You know that this is the problem caused by others, and that our communities are suffering as a result. Because what you'll find and what you’ll hear especially if you’re listening in local languages is that Pacific Islanders some of them are taking this personally as our responsibility and our fault that the earth is suffering. So, it's very interesting that those who have done the least are also taking some responsibilities morally for what has happened and for the climate crisis.

Greg Dalton: Lauren, do you find that, you know, the sort of accountability recognition when you’re, we’re talking obviously a very different scales or we’re talking with Cherelle about a very human scale. And Lauren your work is with like zillion dollar corporations although run by humans, but are you hearing acknowledgments of accountability?

Lauren Sommer: Yeah, I think you know the project that they're trying to build there in that particular spot, you know, it’s gonna be expensive. I think the early cost estimates are probably underestimates. So, you have Meta-Facebook putting in some money and then East Palo Alto putting in almost exactly the same amount of money and then they’re hoping that the bulk of it is coming from the federal government to build it. And so, I think that's been a major source of tension, you know, and this kind of other question which is, you know, East Palo Alto, is a community that's been there a long time. Facebook is a place that built knowing that sea level rise was gonna be an issue more recently, and so that's where some of these tricky issues come in which is, is everyone on the waterfront equally responsible when you built, does that, you know, impact how much you should pay and how much risk you took on knowingly. That’s the really kind of thorny issues, especially if the costs you know end up being much more of an expected, which is happening with a lot of these huge climate adaptation projects right now.

Greg Dalton: What did you find, Lauren, among the people you talked with in terms of how they feel about these threats. I’m thinking about Mayor Carlos Romero, for example.

Lauren Sommer: Yeah, you know, he's been very outspoken that you know these companies kind of, they’ve come into these communities, you know, there are definitely been tensions about the way the communities have changed and the influence of gentrification as a result of kind of this kind of Silicon Valley boom. So, there was already kind of a little bit of history there. But he’s been very outspoken that you know they should be paying their way within their means which would mean he wants to see them do more than they’re doing right now. And I think he wants to see kind of more of a structure where if you're gonna build you’re gonna make a decision to build in a risky area that there's something baked in that you're taking responsibility whether it's a development fee whether it's more taxes whether it's something that’s gonna help pay for all this infrastructure in the future. But that's a really tough case to make for a lot of cities and communities because they want development, they want housing, they want jobs, they don't want to be doing things that discourage that type of development. And so, that's where the real tension comes in.

Greg Dalton: Cherelle, I know that it’s important to talk about Pacific Islanders not only as victims that there's leadership there's adaptation happening. In particular I'm interested in the former Tuvalu Prime Minister, Enele Sopoaga. Can you tell us his story and how he's seen as someone who came from that region and really made an impact and made people heard?

Lagipoiva Cherelle Jackson: Sure, Greg. Enele Sopoaga, former Prime Minister of Tuvalu is really one of these amazing - I like to call him a quiet hero because he's very humble and he's from one of the smaller atoll nations in the Pacific Islands. Like if you think Pacific Islands are small, Tuvalu is very small. And to have a leader from a country such as Tuvalu rise to the level of global leaders and stand side-by-side with US, UK, European leaders in the climate platform and in the climate negotiations, has really been quite inspiring. And that’s really driven from the fact that Enele Sopoaga is intrinsically or rather that his experience as a Pacific Islander in an atoll nation is really raw. Having grown up in Tuvalu and educated in Australia he not only intellectually understands the issue, but also has firsthand experience of the suffering that his people have gone through. For some context, Tuvalu experiences king tides annually. And king tides are basically an abnormal high tide which causes storm surges and because it's an atoll nation it floods the majority of the islands. And you'll see on an annual basis Tuvaluans holding up their like fridges holding up fridges holding up pigs holding up children so that they don't drown every time the waves hit. So, it's a normal occurrence for them except it's becoming frequent and it's becoming normalized. So, the fact that former Prime Minister Enele Sopoaga raised and brought a very key, he had a very key role in negotiating the Paris agreement, you know, is something that is not just monumental for the Pacific Islands, but globally. It's very significant to have, let’s be real here, a very insignificant country, an island, play a role in that way in negotiating one of the most significant agreements of our time on the climate crisis.

Greg Dalton: This is Climate One. I’m Greg Dalton.We’re speaking with journalists Lauren Sommer of NPR and Langipoiva Cherelle Jackson of the Guardian. In both their reporting, the people they speak with don't want to be forced to leave their homes, even when faced with increasingly dangerous conditions. Let's hear a bit of Lauren Sommer’s story of East Palo Alto residents Leia and Heleine Grewe, a mother and daughter who live in a flood zone and are concerned about losing their community because of climate disruption.

Lauren Sommer: Because they’ve seen how other disasters have hit communities of color, you know, like Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. A lot of people were displaced and just didn’t return. And that’s Leia’s fear.

Leia Grewe: They'll move us out to, like - sorry. I didn't want to think about it. But we'll get moved out to, like, Stockton, Sacramento.

Greg Dalton: Lauren, what comes up for you when you hear that person, the Grewes, saying that and what they’re facing.

Lauren Sommer: Yeah, it’s very real for that family because their house is a kind of one of the first that you see before San Francisco Bay before all the water. And so, her daughter when she was in high school started learning about climate change and sea level rise and she was coming home and saying, mom, we gotta pay attention to this and got her mom involved. And their goal is really to get their community much more involved. You know, their family is from Tonga, there's a large Samoan population in East Palo Alto. There's a lot of people that really care about living there and being together and not being moved as she said. You know what she was talking about is you’re talking about two, you know, with traffic maybe three hours away from where they are right now where you can still find somewhat affordable housing in the Bay Area. So, it's not like they're moving to the town next door, you know, it would be a full displacement. And the communities already faced a lot of gentrification pressure with Silicon Valley growing the way it has. They have a lot of friends that have been priced out that have left the neighborhood, you know, or when their kids grew up they couldn't afford to live there, their parents. And so, I think they, you know, seeing kind of what happened with Hurricane Katrina where you just had so many people who are already kind of vulnerable or on the edge just not being able to kind of rebuild in place and have to move elsewhere. I think that's their fear is that one disaster one flood would be that thing that would be kind of the disruptive force that would kind of break their community apart.

Greg Dalton: And I’m curious, Lauren, when you’re reporting this, you know, talking about people in this very wealthy state and this very wealthy country being flooded out. Do you ever think about or did others mention Pacific Islanders or these small nation states their whole country are facing what you’re reporting on, on a neighborhood scale?

Lauren Sommer: Yeah, my colleagues at KQED in San Francisco did some reporting that was great, which was they spoke to someone in East Palo Alto who had come from Samoa and was very familiar with extreme storms and flooding. And in Palo Alto there have been floods already, especially when there's really intense rainstorms there's flooding kind of along this river in this Palo Alto. And so, the interview was fascinating because they'd move somewhere where they thought maybe that they were in different circumstances and they were like this is way too familiar that we’re dealing with this all over again.

Greg Dalton: We’ll play a clip of that and then we’ll get Cherelle to respond. So, this is KQED reporter Ezra David Romero talking with two Samoans in East Palo Alto.

Female Speaker: Anytime there’s a tsunami at home, all of our emotions rises.

Male Speaker: My wife has decided to leave because it’s too much. And then we come here to America and here it is --

Greg Dalton: He trails off there but they come here, it’s just the same thing they have been facing at home. Cherelle, your response to hearing, you know, people who leave Pacific islands, come to America and face the same thing.

Lagipoiva Cherelle Jackson: I was actually smiling at that soundbite because it's the way that one would translate. I could just hear that in Samoa they were like literally translating that in English and it's a really frustrating tone that they’re using. It’s like okay so we've moved the whole entire nation thinking that we’ll do better and yet here we are facing the same crisis. There is this perception that you know if you move to a developed country, you’ll be safer and you can seek refuge elsewhere. And I can just imagine that couple you know thinking okay we don't need to live on the beach anymore in Samoa and suffer this. This is the strongest way that we have captured the experiences of the climate crisis in Samoa in the Pacific is really speaking to the people who lived in coastal communities and are impacted directly whether it be their homes, you know, inundated or taken down because of cyclones or their livelihood options been impacted directly as a result of the climate crisis.

Greg Dalton: And Cherelle you say the choice whether to stay or leave is one of every Pacific Islander has to deal with whether now or in the future. And, you know, of course that’s difficult for anyone yet the connection to homeland is particularly strong in Samoa like the word per placenta and land I think are the same. And it’s tradition to bury that on your land, and when a family member passes they’re also buried on the property. So, can you tell us about for those who don't fully understand, most Americans don't have that kind of connection with land. We've lost that. Can you tell us a little more about your personal struggle in deciding whether to go or not in connection to that land.

Lagipoiva Cherelle Jackson: Well, all across Polynesia and in many Pacific cultures we are intrinsically tied to land as we say and, in the podcast, I do explain this. Fanua is the word for the placenta or the afterbirth and fanua is also the land itself. So, it's the same word and you'll see I think in Maori language it’s the same as well. So, across Polynesian cultures this is tied and culture and land and environments are very much tied, so without a healthy environment or an intact piece of land you also lose a lot of the languages and cultural references that we have. So, in the birth story of a Samoan, first the afterbirth is buried on your land marking where you stay and this is your ancestral land. And then the umbilical cord of the baby once it drops off is also buried on the land, usually with a tree. And then when you die you will also be buried on that land and you'll often find in Samoa and in other Pacific Island countries that we sometimes bury our dead in our homes because the homes are open, you'll see like graves within the front porch of the house. Because we’re still related, we’re still very much a part of the family whether or not you died a hundred years ago 50 years ago or yesterday. That people are still very much a part of that land. Now where this becomes a climate story is that for atoll nations such as Marshall Islands, Kiribati, Tuvalu, Tokelau, when they are forced to leave because there will be no more land or it’s fully submerged or it's no longer inhabitable. You cannot just up and leave a piece of land as you would say in the states in the US where you’re like okay, I'm in apartment here I own a home I can go buy a home somewhere else. No, this is something that your ancestors grew up in, you’re born into this land, your children, your children's children are supposed to be on this land forever, irrespective of where you go in the world. For my children they will always have land in my home village. Our ancestral land that we will always go back to. Like infinity and beyond. Like it's always going to be there. So, to then say to a Pacific Islander this is no longer yours because the ocean has taken over. That's essentially saying cutting off it's almost saying you’re cutting off the rest of their lineage. And lineage is very much a part of our upbringing. So, the way that we frame this podcast is to really to ask those hard questions of the people that do stand to lose their entire nations. I’ve interviewed communities in Fiji where the whole villages were wiped out by Cyclone Winston in 2016. And they’re like, yeah, we’re gonna rebuild right here, which ties to Lauren's point of you do have some responsibility on where you build; it's a climate decision. But when it comes to islands and you don't have any other choice of location you rebuild there because culturally that's where you are and where you will always be. It’s almost in a sense it's not even a choice; you just stay.

Greg Dalton: And Lauren, in your reporting there's other forces at work more commerce than culture. There’s a central tension between cities that you write about that want development and tax revenue. Yet, they’re on the hook for protecting those developments from rising waters and lack the resources to pay for that. Can you share some of what you learned about these decisions with big tech firms, Google, Facebook, in terms of how that's playing out for them shaping their decisions about where they’re locating and how long they’re staying there.

Lauren Sommer: Yeah, a good example I reported on was down a little bit further down San Francisco Bay in a town called Sunnyvale. And that’s a spot where Google has bought a huge number of properties just in recent years. So, they bought this big area of parcels just right on the water and it's an area that the city is really interested in having development. And Google is very interested in developing more sustainably. So, more walkable neighborhoods, more green spaces, more housing because obviously housing is a huge demand in the Bay Area. But of course, it's right on the shoreline. it's protected by a levee that you know is not adequate. It's not up to federal standards, it would not protect that area. And so, there's a real kind of conundrum which is like well okay do we let people put housing there and people who will live there before a new levee would be built because it's you know it's extremely long and expensive process to get these big projects built. Do we let people live there before we know it's protected? Do we wait till a project like that is built before we let them come in. I mean, that's a really tough call in a place where housing is in such short supply. But, you know, like once something is there it’s really hard to undo. Like if you pour concrete and put homes there and those decisions last you know, decades, centuries. And so, that moment that that decision is made is really important when it comes to climate change.

Greg Dalton: And one of the people, A.R. Siders says this behavior is kind of foolish, putting people at risk.

Lauren Sommer: Yeah, I mean she kind of in her research has really looked at you know this kind of pattern where we keep growing and expanding into risky areas. And then the really tough choices of what do you do in those communities if people do need to move. And so, I think you know from her point of view if you don't have to think about managed retreat as it's called, right, of actually having to relocate people and buy them out or find new places to live like that's the best case scenario, you can avoid those tough decisions by not building homes there in the first place, with what we know today.

Greg Dalton: Cherelle, I’m wondering just hearing these stories of a place that you know the states, you were in the states recently. How you view these kinds of conversations compared to when the resource disparity is so great.

Lagipoiva Cherelle Jackson: I love hearing Lauren’s reporting because I feel like that's the impact of the climate crisis have finally reached those with the means to do something about it. And then the impacts of reaching those with means, means that they'll finally understand the plight of Pacific Islanders. And it's sad that it takes a firsthand experience of you know, the West and of the Global North for them to understand what Pacific Islanders have been going through for many, many years and have been trying to raise attention to it.

Greg Dalton: It’s interesting because, you know, fascinating your reporting with worlds apart and yet there’s an interesting strand that connect them. Some of the onset is fast, some of it slow. There's a lot of wealth there's less material wealth a lot of cultural wealth. Cherelle, your reporting covers some of the day-to-day struggles of Pacific Islanders already facing because of warming temperatures. In particular you share the story of Vanessa, your friend, who experienced sudden flooding during a storm when a wall of water rushed down around their house where she lived and her husband and four kids. Let’s hear a bit of that story.

Vanessa: So, my husband, he said to me, get the kids, get the kids grab the kids. And I quickly ran in; he came as well. And my baby was sitting on the toilet at that time. I grabbed him by the shirt and he didn’t even have time to pull his undies up because the water was already rising, it was getting to our knees. So, by the time we got out of the house, we were already struggling. That’s how quick the water came.

Lagipoiva Cherelle Jackson: Their first plan was to get in the car and drive to safety. But once outside they realized the car had been washed away. The water was rapidly rising.

Vanessa: We’re already struggling. I had two kids with me, both hands, we have two kids. And there was a point where we were looking at each other like we’re struggling. Are we going to make a decision to let one of them go. At one point we didn’t really have the choice. The water was really strong and it’s hard to hold on with our hands with the kids, all of us would be gone. So, it was the most scariest day ever.

Greg Dalton: Thankfully they all survived there. But that just gives me chills, Cherelle and Lauren, as a parent thinking about having to let go one of your children or to hold on or else the whole family might go under. How did you deal with hearing that and also the aftereffects of these experiences?

Lagipoiva Cherelle Jackson: Vanessa’s story is one of the most heartbreaking I ever had to report on. As a mother and her village was five villages away from mine, you know, and her children are around the same age as mine. So, to hear her say, well there was this point where I was gonna have to choose which kid to carry up it stays with you. And the thing with Vanessa’s story is it's one of many stories. It's just one story and it doesn't belittle it, but what it does do is it really elevates the fact that there are people who continue to face these existential issues in the Pacific and on a regular basis. I have reported on these issues for many, many years and to hear Vanessa’s story is to really hear about the climate crisis on the ground. And I want to go back to the issue of resources and the disparity between how the poor and how the rich experience climate change. For this particular story Vanessa and her husband owned a business. There were two buildings. They could climb up and save themselves. Eventually they did, thankfully, on top of the warehouse that they owned. Everything was gone and wiped away. But what of the families who didn't have that? And many throughout the years have died because you had no place to go when your home is wiped. So, it is something that as a journalist we do need to look into further – the disparity between the experiences that those with the means have and those without the means. Because when a wealthy person suffers climate, they can build higher. They can build somewhere else. They can afford the Metas and the Googles can do this. The Tuvalus and the Tokelaus they have no choice. They cannot build a new island. They cannot afford to do that. So, this experience of climate change when you have the means to save yourself afterwards is so very different to the plight of Pacific Islands where you just simply don't have the land or the resources to continue having the life that you've always wanted to lead as a Pacific Islander. Now, I just like to share the story of how you know I have survived many cyclones in the past, but the most recent cyclone, Cyclone Evan. My mom and I were in my house in town which is on stilts. And I remember the first day of the cyclone my mother saying, my mom is a high chief and she survived a whole lot of stuff growing up. And she said, it's very quiet, like the cyclone is very quiet. And I’m like what do you mean? She said you don't hear the sound of the wind and that's because the house is a western styled house it had walls, windows, doors. It was well protected. But our earlier experiences of cyclones were in open valleys, traditional huts, and you hear the wind it's like right in your face and you have no choice. So, for me that was like this picture of how you know resources can protect you from extreme weather events. And that's really for me very interesting to hear Lauren’s reporting compared to how I've reported as well. And that disparity between those with the means and without.

Lauren Sommer: And that’s, I mean those stories you know, I mean I live in California. I've lived here a long time and covering wildfires 10 years ago. I would be so surprised when I would need a family that had to evacuate quickly, you know, I would be really shocked. Covering the wildfires in the last few years I barely even have to have one conversation before I hear a really harrowing scary story about family, you know, let’s say two summers ago, yeah, a family who like they once take both their cars they threw their kids in one, they were had to have their kids like huddle in the center of the car because the flames were so hot on the sides of the road that they were getting burned through the windows as they were trying to escape. And it’s, you know, I think as journalists, like that's what we’re trying to share with the world that you know maybe it's not you this time but it's a very good chance it could be you in the future, no matter where you live because these are becoming much more common events for many parts of the world.

Greg Dalton: This is Climate One. I’m Greg Dalton. Living through climate disasters is becoming increasingly common across the globe. Beyond physical and property harm, surviving them can take a toll on mental and emotional health. In some cultures, the language for trauma as we think of it doesn’t really exist. Lagipoiva Cherelle Jackson helps us understand how trauma is processed in her culture.

Lagipoiva Cherelle Jackson: We don't have a word for trauma in Samoan in a way that translates to the way we deal with trauma in that we deal with it with humor. And which is very intriguing when you're covering climate change and you're trying to relay the seriousness of the situation, you know, internationally --

Greg Dalton: You have some really dark climate jokes?

Lagipoiva Cherelle Jackson: So dark. So dark that inappropriate when translated into English. So, as a journalist from the islands straddling that divide between how my local audience has received climate change news with international audiences is always been quite intriguing because I know that when I translate to English and I report say previously for The Guardian that, no, I shouldn't be mentioning the funny story of my uncle hanging onto the roof of the house while trying to hold his skirt on and how that has always been hilarious for us. But when you're writing for an international audience who should be sympathizing or who should be made to be aware of the seriousness of the situation, relaying those humorous stories is not necessarily the best way to report the climate story from the Pacific. So, it's very interesting and that really ties to the issue of trauma. And I've done some work with the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma. We brought them into Samoa to talk to journalists who are reporting on climate change and extreme weather events. And just because we don't acknowledge it culturally nor do we have the language to relay what trauma is or understand it, doesn't mean it's not happening. Because journalists who cover climate stories who are first on site who are there with the first responders do experience a lot of trauma anywhere in the world. And so, dealing with that means that we can, you know, assist journalists in better reporting and perhaps even having a more hopeful lenses in reporting on climate change.

Greg Dalton: How was that related to the language and culture around race, and the sense of self?

Lagipoiva Cherelle Jackson: So, in Samoa and again in many Pacific Island countries, the self is we and the self is collective. It's not about you it's about your family, your village or community. So, you'll find that the experience of climate change is not about the individual losses but rather the collective losses. And that's really why this issue is so severe for the Pacific, culturally, and as communities and as families because the loss is not choked up to one family. It is the loss of the whole community. And with that is kind of like I guess in American's terms; it would be like institutional knowledge. So, it's the historical oral history and everything that comes with it. It's the collective. So, trauma is experienced not just by the self, but also collectively as a family. Your experience as one person reflects on your family. So, if one family is experiencing, flooding, or they lose . Their home. We consider that a loss of by the entire village.

Greg Dalton: So, we've been talking about this on so many different levels. And as we’re at this moment, looking ahead for COP 27 in Egypt, loss and damage who pays is a big part of the conversation as it always is. So, I’m curious about this particular moment we’re having increasing awareness, increasing experience of these climate impacts. How you work and help frame the conversation around who pays equity and justice both within neighborhoods and globally. Lauren.

Lauren Sommer: Yeah, I think coming into this COP, I mean just look at what’s happened this summer alone. You got the flooding in Pakistan. You've got heatwaves in India. The number of just really incredible devastation that’s happened recently. these aren’t just one offs anymore, you know, like and this is billions of dollars that it's gonna take for people to rebuild. So, I think yeah, this is going to be an interesting COP potentially because obviously last year there was a ton of frustration over loss and damage. You had a lot of, you know, countries coming forward saying like we can’t keep ignoring this. This is something that every single year starting to happen.

Greg Dalton: Lauren, you covered Mia Mottley’s gripping speech from last year's conference.

Lauren Sommer: Yeah. And I think the momentum has built even since then, about what are the ways that countries can actually make this a reality. You know there's a lot of countries that are really have a huge amount of debt as a result of disasters and other things, right. Is it kind of a debt forgiveness mechanism is what she's bringing up to say that's how you could help countries deal with these kinds of damages and damages going forward. So, there’s a lot of frustration because there is a lot of reticence on the part of richer countries to take on anything that looks like liability to say like, it’s our fault and that maybe they feel like would open the door to more and more costs in the future. So, it’ll be interesting to see what kind of progress is made. I think it really is gonna be the flash point of this COP is what I think is gonna happen.

Greg Dalton: Cherelle, your thoughts on going into COP 27 in Egypt with this issue of pay equity and loss and damage.

Lagipoiva Cherelle Jackson: Pacific Island leaders have been bringing up this issue for many, many years and it's made very little advancement at the negotiations. Loss and damage ultimately is a conversation that has to unfortunately the decision-makers are not those who are, you know, have to pay for it in terms of lives lost or identities lost or islands lost. So, in a way it continues to be a disempowering conversation for Pacific Islanders because they are not necessarily the ones who have the sway in the poll to advance the conversation in loss and damage. You know, ultimately, the Global North and high emitting countries do have to own up their responsibility but as we all know that blockades and you know they will continue to block this. So, a lot of Pacific Island negotiators are not hopeful moving into COP 27 that there will be much change but it doesn't mean that they go in without hope. Pacific Island negotiators met just last week as part of the preparatory meeting towards COP 27 where Pacific Island negotiators come together to consolidate their joint oppositions moving into COP 27. And you know this is it continues to be an issue for the Pacific and it feels like a long, long road ahead before anything is done for Pacific Island Nations in the climate front on loss and damage.

Greg Dalton: Covering climate now is a collaboration of over 460 news and media partners aimed at driving a public conversation that creates an engaged public. And we’re collaborating with Covering Climate Now in producing this episode. As we draw to a close here, I’d like to think about how your work centers on power and equity at the core of your reporting and how you try to bring that out and how you think about power and equity in your telling of these climate stories as they unfold.

Lauren Sommer: I mean I think the data is very clear disaster after disaster people who have the means you know are able to put their lives back together. It's painful, but you know they can do it. The folks that don't have the means, don't have the insurance, didn't have savings that didn't have the kind of like social structure around them to kind of rebuild and stuff. It's very clear that the kind of devastating impact these disasters have. Like we see it over and over and over with disasters. And so, I think you know that's kind of the thread of every climate story now that I try to do, right, is whatever inequity already existed and whatever part of society you’re looking at. I mean climate change is the added layer that's gonna make it worse.

Greg Dalton: Right. And Cherelle, your thoughts on that and also the potential for collaboration. You’ve spoken eloquently about the collective and is there a need for more collaboration in climate reporting and media where there tends to be kind of competitive in spirit.

Lagipoiva Cherelle Jackson: So, in the Pacific media we’re not necessarily competitive, we're very collaborative naturally. It’s when we veer into international media that it becomes a dog eat dog world as I unfortunately experienced. So, first of all I just want to mention that covering climate now has been a game changer for climate journalism globally and they have not only elevated climate change as a news beat in the US but also globally. I have a small news organization in Samoa that has benefited from the content shared by Covering Climate Now. That collaboration that spirit of sharing free content of highlighting stories from under covered areas is key in not just understanding climate crisis as a global issue, but also increasing the capacity of journalists in the Global South and then also the exchange between Global North and Global South journalists. On the issue of equity, I want to talk about the responsibility. Pacific Islands are only responsible for 0.03 of emissions globally yet stand to lose entire nations as a result of it. The responsibility lies in Global North. And ultimately the role of the journalist is really highlighting these issues, highlight the fact that you know there are those who are responsible and those who are paying for it who are suffering as a result of it. So, to come back to the issue of the value of climate journalism in highlighting these issues, Covering Climate Now has been instrumental in changing that.

Greg Dalton: Thank you. And I should also mention that Cherelle, your reporting won in the category of radio podcast series for the Covering Climate Now journalism words. And Lauren’s reporting earned recognition as a finalist. So, congratulations to both of you on that. So, as we wrap here how are you personally navigating the stay or go? I have personal impulses of like moving from the Bay Area moving north then I’m like okay calm down, Greg. How do you personally navigate that, Cherelle, you’re laughing so I’ll go with you first.

Lagipoiva Cherelle Jackson: I laughed at the calm down, Greg, reference. Okay. So, for me personally, I will never leave my land. My family will never leave the land. We will stay there because the bones of my mother, my father, of my ancestors are there. So, we’ll sink with it. At the same time, I do have children who want to make a difference in the world. So, realistically speaking, there should still be a future that’s secured for them, whether it be in Samoa or in the developed country where they may be safer on higher ground.

Greg Dalton: Lauren, when you're doing your reporting do you ever have thoughts of like, oh, I got to get out of here while I can.

Lauren Sommer: I mean, yes, I always like to look at maps of California because if you map the wildfire and the flood and all the disaster and drought I don't know where you would go necessary to avoid it completely. But no, I think I mean I honestly do think a lot about there’s so many people living in places that’s gonna be hit with something whether it's a flood or a fire. And the thing I think most about is evacuation, honestly. Like people have to be able to get out safely and that's the thing we all need to work on in addition to, you know, the decisions that are tough building decisions in the future.

Greg Dalton: Lauren Sommer is a correspondent for NPR. And Lagipoiva Cherelle Jackson is the Climate Collaborations Editor for the Associated Press and host of the Impossible Choice podcast for The Guardian. Thank you so much for sharing your stories and the people you've talked to.

Lagipoiva Cherelle Jackson: Thank you, Greg.

Lauren Sommer: Yeah, thanks for having me.

Greg Dalton: On this Climate One... We’ve been talking about sharing the stories of those affected by the climate crisis in the Global North and South. Lagipoiva Cherelle Jackson’s series An Impossible Choice won Covering Climate Now’s Journalism Award for Radio Podcast Series. It will be featured in Burning Questions: Covering Climate Now premiering October 25th on public television's WORLD channel.
Climate One’s empowering conversations connect all aspects of the climate emergency. To hear more, subscribe to our podcast on Apple or wherever you get your pods.Talking about climate can be hard-- but it’s critical to address the transitions we need to make in all parts of society. Please help us get people talking more about climate by giving us a rating or review if you are listening on Apple. You can do it right now on your device. You can also help by sending a link to this episode to a friend. By sharing you can help people have their own deeper climate conversations.

Brad Marshland is our senior producer; Our managing director is Jenny Park. Our producers and audio editors are Ariana Brocious and Austin Colón. Megan Biscieglia is our production manager. Our team also includes consulting producer Sara-Katherine Coxon. Our theme music was composed by George Young (and arranged by Matt Willcox). Gloria Duffy is CEO of The Commonwealth Club of California, the nonprofit and nonpartisan forum where our program originates. I’m Greg Dalton.

Play

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Naomi Oreskes: The Schneider Award

Otto Pilot — Thu, 30 Dec 2021 08:01:00 +0000

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Naomi Oreskes: The Schneider Award

12/30/2021

Visionary Guests

Established in honor of Dr. Stephen H. Schneider, one of the founding fathers of climatology, Climate One’s Schneider Award recognizes a natural or social scientist who has made extraordinary scientific contributions and communicated that knowledge to a broad public in a clear, compelling fashion. Past winners include Robert Bullard, Katharine Hayhoe, Jane Lubchenco, Michael Mann, and James Hansen, among others.

This year’s recipient is marine biologist, policy expert and writer Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson. She’s co-founder of the Urban Ocean Lab and co-creator of the All We Can Save project.

In 2019, Johnson co-authored an op-ed piece highlighting what she calls the “Big Blue Gap” in the Green New Deal.

“I thought wow, [the Green New Deal] is really ambitious and exciting, but they left out the ocean and so it will not work. Because the ocean has absorbed 90-plus percent of the heat we've trapped with greenhouse gases. It's absorbed over about a third of the carbon dioxide we’ve emitted. It is buffering us from the impacts, it is providing all the solutions in terms of protecting shorelines and renewable energy,” Johnson says.

The idea caught the attention of Elizabeth Warren's presidential campaign, which then invited her to formalize it.

Johnson says when training as a scientist, she never aspired to or expected to be a public figure. “I always wanted to work at this intersection of science and policy. And so, for me it was just a matter of ‘how can I get this advanced degree in science in order to make sure that all the best science is used to inform policy-making,’ even if I'm not the one doing that science.”

In spite of the gravity of the challenge of addressing the climate crisis and the ongoing human suffering resulting from extreme weather events, Johnson says she wants to show that there is a place for everyone in this transformation.

“What gets me out of bed in the morning, what makes this work of communicating about climate science and policy so important, is that we have such a huge spectrum of possible futures available to us. And which one we get depends on what we do,” Johnson says.

Dr. Naomi Oreskes is the Henry Charles Lea Professor of the History of Science and Affiliated Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University. She’s an internationally renowned earth scientist, historian, and past recipient of the Schneider Award. Her 2010 book with Erik M. Conway, Merchants of Doubt, focused on the decades-long campaigns by oil companies and political operatives to mislead the public and sow doubt on several scientific matters, including the ozone hole and global warming.

In 1981, as a young scientist, she was bluntly rejected for her dream job on the British Antarctic Survey explicitly because she was a woman. The reason? Because the geologists had to sleep in tents. “It was assumed that somehow a woman couldn’t sleep in a tent. And in fact, if anyone had to ask, I had slept in tents many times,” Oreskes says.

“Many people really don’t appreciate how widespread, how rampant and how cavalier the sexist rejection of women in science was until quite recently,” she says. “So it could be taken for granted that my application wouldn’t even be considered. And I graduated top of my class at one of the leading geology programs in the world.”

Oreskes says the field of science has evolved in a positive way for women in the intervening decades, though they still face unfair expectations, additional service work, and in some cases, an underlying bias that they aren’t as good as men.

So while there’s still work to be done, “I would encourage any young woman who feels that she has the aptitude to do science, the desire to do science, should absolutely do it,” she says.

Guests

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson

Marine Biologist; Co-founder, The All We Can Save Project

Naomi Oreskes

Professor of History of Science, Harvard University

Greg Dalton: This is Climate One. I’m Greg Dalton. I’d like to hear your comments on the show, topics we should cover, and guest suggestions. You can reach me at greg@climateone.org. Today we’re honoring this year’s recipient of our award for excellence in science communication, marine biologist Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson.

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson: What gets me out of bed in the morning, what makes this work of communicating about climate science and policy so important is that we have such a huge spectrum of possible futures available to us. And which one we get depends on what we do.

Greg Dalton: We’ll also talk with renowned earth scientist and historian Dr. Naomi Oreskes about how the field of science has changed for women during her career.

Naomi Oreskes: Many people really don’t appreciate how widespread, how rampant and how cavalier the sexist rejection of women in science was until quite recently, so it could be taken for granted that my application wouldn’t even be considered. And I graduated top of my class at one of the leading geology programs in the world. (:20)

Greg Dalton: Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Naomi Oreskes: Up next on Climate One.

Greg Dalton: This is Climate One, I’m Greg Dalton. Today we’re honoring the recipient of an award we give out each year to an accomplished climate scientist and communicator. Established in honor of Dr. Stephen H. Schneider, one of the founding fathers of climatology, Climate One’s Schneider Award recognizes a natural or social scientist who has made extraordinary scientific contributions and communicated that knowledge to a broad public in a clear, compelling fashion. Past winners include Robert Bullard, Katharine Hayhoe, Jane Lubchenco, Michael Mann, and James Hansen, among others. This year’s recipient is marine biologist, policy expert and writer Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson. She’s co-founder of the Urban Ocean Lab and co-creator of the The All We Can Save Project. In 2019, Johnson floated the idea of a Blue New Deal in an op-ed piece. The idea caught the attention of Elizabeth Warren's presidential campaign, which then invited her to formalize it. Johnson says this is the piece of climate communication she’s most proud of, though she speaks about it infrequently now.

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson: The idea came to be just over a lunch with Chad Nelsen who’s is the CEO of Surfrider. We were both talking about having read the Green New Deal resolution and you get to page 10 or 11 out of 14. For those who haven't read it it is short it is double spaced and large font it’ll take you like five or 10 minutes. And I thought wow this is really ambitious and exciting, but they left out the ocean and so it will not work. Because the ocean has absorbed 90+ percent of the heat we've trapped with greenhouse gases, right. It's absorbed over about a third of the carbon dioxide we’ve emitted. It is buffering us from the impacts it is providing all the solutions in terms of protecting shorelines and renewable energy. And so, we leave out the ocean then we’re leaving out what a report that came out earlier this year calculated about 20% of the climate solutions available to us. And so, Chad Nelsen and I thought well how can we help to make sure the ocean is included and then we ended up connecting with Bren Smith who is a regenerative ocean farmer who cofounded a nonprofit called GreenWave, who was also working on the same concept and the three of us put our heads together for that op-ed in grist, called the Big Blue Gap in the Green New Deal. And that sort of became a policy memo with data for progress and that caught the eye of the Warren campaign and then with Maggie Thomas who was her climate advisor who is now chief of staff in the White House on climate working with Gina McCarthy. She and I led the effort to craft that policy plan, which is something you know that those ideas keep moving forward. And that's something that I'm working on now through Urban Ocean Lab, the policy think tank that I cofounded. So, I think being able to interject the ocean into the climate narrative is something that I'm always trying to do; that is the core if my scientific training. So, just consistently raising my hand and saying hey, don’t forget about the ocean when we’re talking about climate solutions and climate policy.

Greg Dalton: Right. And I think without the oceans there be some mind-blowing amount of surface temperature warming --

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson: Like 97° hotter or something like that.

Greg Dalton: I can't even imagine. So, the Biden administration has proposed 30 x 30 conserving 30% of land 30% of oceans. But as you just said ocean seemed often get left out it tends to be land centric. So, are they doing in terms of balancing the oceans and the lands with the oceans often overlooked?

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson: So, the United States actually has quite a large percentage of its exclusive economic zone the waters that we have jurisdiction over in protection. The exact percentage just slip in me but it’s actually you know over 15 maybe 20% something like this but it's mostly very remote areas. So, it's the Northwest Hawaiian Islands, right. It is these faraway places where there aren’t a lot of people where there is not a lot of extraction happening. And so, what I would like to see when we think about this goal of protecting 30% of nature by 2030, is that we’re also protecting nature near where people live. It wasn't until the last few years that there was any sort of significant protection in the Northeast United States waters, right, until we had the Northeast Seamounts and Canyons National Monument created. And so, I think there's a lot of work to do in terms of making sure we have representative proportions of each ecosystem protected, not just faraway places that people will never get a chance to visit and which are in many ways de facto protected. So, that's kind of what I'm looking at and going to be advocating for when it comes to establishing more protected areas in the United States, not just 30% overall but 30% of each ecosystem type as well.

Greg Dalton: They’re the ones that are more at risk. More than 120 million people live in coastal counties in the United States. How will climate disruption impact the lives of those people? Is that mainly a story of risk loss and grief?

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson: That’s a very well put question and I think the grief part absolutely. I have a friend who reminds me that in part what we need to do to deal with the climate crisis is grieve, is mourn the things that are lost that are being lost so that we can only metabolize what's happening and then move on because we don't really have the cultural norms or traditions for saying goodbye to things that are being lost because of climate change. And so, we need to think about how do we as a culture create the new traditions that we need, the ceremonies and some sense that we need. Because you know the place where you learn to swim, the place where you went fishing with your father, the place where you had your first kiss or learn to ride a bike might all be underwater or those ecosystems might be unrecognizable from what they were a few decades ago, if not already. So, figuring out how to deal with that much change emotionally and culturally is something that I do not feel equipped to lead on, but I know a lot of people are helping us think through that. But your broader question I think this term of coastal elite is a real pain in the butt because as you described about 40% of Americans live in coastal counties. About 30% live in coastal cities, which is why the work of Urban Ocean Lab is focused on how to do we make policy change in coastal cities because it's not an elite issue it is one in three or you know four in 10 Americans depending on how, you know, sort of which geographic scope you're using to think about that. So, figuring out what are the policy changes that we need to deal with the extreme weather events that we’re already seeing and which will you know become more frequent is absolutely a critical need and there's so much that we can do. I just want to be clear that I've been talking a lot about of how bad things are and all of that is true but what gets me out of bed in the morning what makes this work of communicating about climate science and policy so important is that we have such a huge spectrum of possible futures available to us. And those really depend, which one we get depends on what we do, right. We’re not gonna have a pristine planet with 8 billion people living on it and all of the changes that have already happened but we could have like a really, really terrible future or we could have like an actually pretty good and interesting one. I often get pegged as being an optimist or somebody that’s really hopeful. And those are titles that I actually don't relate to at all because both of those words have in their definition that you expect a good outcome. I've no expectation or assumption that the outcome for humanity is necessarily going to be good. But I know that it could be much better than it would otherwise be if we sort of get our act together and move with immense speed and welcome as many people as possible into this work and show people that there really is a place for everyone in this transformation.

Greg Dalton: Marine protected areas are sometimes pointed to as like when people get out of the way nature comes back quickly. What’s a positive story you can point to because it’s one thing to say good things can happen in the future if we choose this path? But what good things have already happened that you can be little more specific you can point to and say, ah, this is possible let’s do more of these.

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson: So, absolutely marine protected areas is one. And Dr. Jane Lubchenco who is a previous winner of this award probably can rattle off these facts more eloquently and robustly than I can at this point it's been a while, but you have like several hundred percent increase in fish biomass for example, within you know five or 10 years of establishing a marine protected area in place. If we leave nature alone if we give it a break. It can in fact replenish itself. If we just figure out how to back off a little bit. And so, those kinds of things are very exciting to know about. I think just absolutely the resilience of nature is a major source of inspiration for me. And lately I've been reading this new book called Required Reading and the subtitle is Climate Justice, Adaptation, and Investing in Indigenous Power. It's right here on my desk. And it's an anthology of essays by indigenous leaders who are working on climate solutions who are working on the cultural and policy and community level transformations that we need. I keep using that word transformation because that's the only way I can think about the magnitude of change that's really needed. And I'm finding this book to be incredibly inspiring because so often we do our land acknowledgement we talk about the value of indigenous wisdom in addressing environmental issues, but it's something that I think not very many of us actually read about and study that wisdom in any detail. And so, it's something that I have started to dedicate more of my time to. And overall the answer to your question is I don't know. And that's actually the next project that I'm working on is I'm writing a book with the tentative title of What If We Get It Right. Because I feel like it is so important for us to know what we are running towards, what all this work will get us if we do charge ahead with the transformations around electricity and transportation and buildings and manufacturing and agricultural and land use, what do we get? Show me that it’s worth it. Show me that there's a place for me in this future. Show me that the work can be joyful and exciting along the way. And so, that's what I am working to put together now.

Greg Dalton: You are the recipient of the Climate One Award in memory of Stephen Schneider, a pioneering climate scientist whose last book was Science as a Contact Sport. Did you know science was going to be a contact sport when you started to pursue a PhD in marine biology? Did you anticipate how rough it would be?

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson: No. But I also did not anticipate in any sense the role that I would end up playing. I never aspired to or expected to be any sort of public figure. My first --

Greg Dalton: Lots of scientists don’t. That’s not why people go into science, right.

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson: Exactly.

Greg Dalton: You wanna be in your lab and do your work.

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson: I also never thought I would be in the lab. So, my first job out of college was working in the policy office at the Environmental Protection Agency in DC. My major as an undergrad with environmental science and public policy. So, I always wanted to work at this intersection of science and policy. And so, for me it was just a matter of how can I get this advanced degree in science in order to make sure that all the best science is used to inform policy making even if I'm not the one doing that science, I will have the training to be able to interpret it and convey the importance of it in the context of how we form policy. And so, I guess the answer is no but because I never thought of myself really as having a career as a research scientist and I never thought of myself as having a public profile in any significant way. I thought I would just like be a policy wonk who had a bunch of science training that made me useful in a different way. Because some of the best advice I ever got was and there are a lot of lawyers doing policy there aren't as many scientists doing policy that I could help build the bridge from the other direction. So, I kind of thought I would stay out of the fray.

Greg Dalton: You’re listening to a Climate One conversation with this year’s winner of the Schneider Award for climate communication. Coming up, broadening who’s involved in creating effective climate solutions:

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson: If we need these transformations in every community all over the world, we need leaders who can lead their communities and that means we need a broad diversity of leaders, we need a lot of ideas at the table.

Greg Dalton: That’s up next, when Climate One continues.

Greg Dalton: This is Climate One. I’m Greg Dalton. We’re talking with noted climate scientist, policy expert and writer Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, the recipient of Climate One’s Stephen Schneider Award for climate communication. These days it feels like extreme weather is bringing the climate emergency home almost every week--with severe floods, hurricanes, wind storms and wildfires. I asked Johnson how that increased sense of urgency affects her and her work.

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson: I feel very lucky that my brain chemistry doesn't tend towards anxiety and depression. That is just a luck of the draw of how I was constructed at birth. And I know that it’s much harder to do this work if you’re more susceptible to those things. And so, I'm really grateful that I have a mind that tends towards, it's really bad; what do we gonna do who’s the team what’s the strategy let me make a checklist like let me just chip away at this is my immediate instinct when faced with even a problem of the magnitude of the climate crisis. But even I am stopped in my tracks by the horrors in the news, right, because we’re seeing the impacts of climate change all around us on a day-to-day basis now. We’re seeing how people's lives and livelihoods and cultures and communities are at such extreme risk. And I’m not a robot right. I feel those things and I feel them in a way that I think is different from a lot of people. We hear so often that what we need in climate communication is more compelling storytelling, more narratives about people and how individuals are impacted and dealing with this and how individuals are working on solutions. But I think in part because of my training as a scientist while I value that kind of journalism and communications work. The stuff that hits me the hardest is actually the graphs. I read the United Nations report on oceans and cryosphere and I looked at the graphs of the scientific projections of sea level rise and ocean temperature and ecosystems and sea ice and all of these things. And I was on the New York City subway a few years ago perking out reading it, and I was crying in public because I knew what those numbers meant and I had the same experience just a month ago writing an essay on the ways in which the ocean has been impacted by climate change, even though I'd known for a long time about ocean acidification about the risk to coastal ecosystems like coral reefs, which I studied for my PhD about how coastal ecosystems are such an important buffer for the impacts of climate change for coastal communities and how sea level rise affecting people and hurricanes. All that stuff is not new to me but having to go back into the scientific literature read the peer-reviewed studies to make sure I was including the most up-to-date statistics that barrage of scientific details about exactly how bad it is what really just far mold my spirit for a few weeks there. And so, the thing for me is always thinking about how do we sort of race through the bad stuff I mean acknowledge and absorb just how high the stakes are so that we can know that we are grounded in that reality in order to move forward. But then I instantly want to switch from okay it's bad it's worse than we can imagine it's coming faster than we thought. But who does what and how quickly can we make this transformation from a fossil fueled and extractive economy to a more regenerative one?

Greg Dalton: In an article you wrote in 2020 in the Washington Post you said, I’m a black climate expert racism derails our efforts to save the planet. In it you quote Toni Morrison saying “The very serious function of racism is distraction; it keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining over and over again your reason for being." And I get that and so, part of me doesn't want to ask you about this and yet I feel an obligation to do so as a white guy with a show. Can we spend a little bit of time talking about that and in that piece about superficial task and the need to do deeper work.

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson: I guess the thing that I wish more people understood at this intersection of race and climate is that people of color already care and get it. In fact, are more concerned about climate than their white counterparts in the US. And we have to thank for this knowledge the last year's recipients of this very award Dr. Leiserowitz, and Dr. Maibach whose research whose polling of Americans shows us that it's about 49% of white Americans who are concerned about climate change, 57% of black Americans and about 70% of Latinx Americans. So, when we think about how are we going to address this crisis. It's how do we build the biggest strongest team. And so, how do we then welcome in the people who already get it, who already care, who are already disproportionately more likely to want to be a part of the solutions to want their elected representatives to be more active on pushing forward climate legislation who are more likely to volunteer who are more likely to call their members of Congress. And to me one of the most important findings of their research and polling is that it's not just because communities of color are more heavily impacted by climate change and extreme weather events that are fueled by climate change. That’s what we think we think it's because they're getting pummeled and they see it more viscerally that they are more concerned. And the answer is actually that especially for Latinx communities in the US it’s because they have a more egalitarian worldview. It’s because they have the sense of needing to be a part of the solution of this responsibility to your community as opposed to a more individualistic worldview which tends to be what more of the white people have in America in terms of this context around climate. And so, I think there's a really important lesson there that it's not just about climate justice in terms of who is the most heavily impacted, which is where we normally focus our efforts on all the injustices associated with climate change and it's absolutely critical to address those and make sure those do not become more extreme and in fact are reversed. But it's also really important to think about who do we need at the table if we’re gonna work on solutions effectively. If we need these transformations in every community all over the world who’s gonna be leading those transformations in every sector in every town in every part of our economy in every corporation in every level of government. And so, we need leaders who can lead their communities and that means we need a broad diversity of leaders. We need a lot of ideas at the table. And when I say diversity I don't just mean racial diversity I mean age diversity I mean gender diversity I mean geographic diversity. Diversity in areas of expertise, diversity in ways that we think and approach problems. And so, a lot of the work that I do in terms of climate communication really aims to say like you are welcome in this work, you are needed in this work, let's think about where you will fit in, people who maybe didn't think there was a place for them before.

Greg Dalton: Yeah, welcoming rather than kind of guilt or other way coming into it. As cofounder of the All We Can Save Project you focus on nurturing a climate community rooted in the work and wisdom of women. We have an episode titled The Feminist Climate Renaissance that features you, your coeditor Katharine Wilkinson and four women featured in that book. For those who haven't heard that show, how was the work and wisdom of women, particularly BIPOC women different from white men so needed and what we need on climate now.

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson: So, Katharine and I were inspired to create this anthology because we were just so frustrated with seeing you know who was controlling the narrative, who had the mics, who have the financial resources to do their work. And in the US, it was largely white man controlling what we think of as you know, who we see when we think about climate who are the leaders --

Greg Dalton: Steve Schneiders of the world, right. This award may be perpetuating that.

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson: I actually think I don't think of that as a problem. I mean, I'm so honored to be following in his footsteps and the footsteps of all who have received this award before me. I was like literally jaw-dropped gobsmacked to be in this company. So, it's not about pushing aside the leadership of white men. It's about having more leaders, right. What we need is a leaderful movement as black lives matter sort of thinks about it. We need just more leaders as well as different leaders. And the way that Katharine and I sort of framed that in the opening essay of All We Can Save was to identify a few key features of the leadership that we were seeing of women that was different and remarkable and important and worth uplifting. And of course they’re characteristics that anyone can embody and so it's this clear focus on making change rather than being in charge, right. It’s the shift in the ego. It's the commitment to responding to the crisis in ways that heal systemic injustices rather than keeping them. It's this appreciation for heart-centered not only head-centered leadership and integrating the two. And it's the recognition that building community is a requisite for building a better world that we’re in this together, that this is not about a hero that this is not about yelling the most facts or having the best science. It's about how we actually implement the solutions in a way that work for people. And I know implementation is not maybe like the sexiest word but for me it's like extremely exciting because we have most of the solutions we need and the question is like, how are we going to make them all happen in the world.

Greg Dalton: Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson is a marine biologist, policy expert and writer. She’s co-founder of Urban Ocean Lab and co-creator of the The All We Can Save Project, and this year’s winner of Climate One’s Stephen Schneider Award for outstanding climate communication. Dr. Naomi Oreskes is Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University. She’s an internationally renowned earth scientist and past recipient of the Schneider Award. Her 2010 book with Erik Conway, Merchants of Doubt, focused on the decades-long campaigns by oil companies and political operatives to mislead the public and sow doubt on several scientific matters, including the ozone hole and global warming.

Greg Dalton: Recently, CEOs of six major oil companies testified before the House oversight committee about their role in misinformation about climate science. I asked Naomi Oreskes to respond to two clips from that hearing: First, Michael Wirth, CEO of Chevron.

[Start Playback]

Michael Wirth: We accept the scientific consensus. Climate change is real, and the use of fossil fuels contributes to it. We are committed to helping address this challenge. I also want to address directly concerned expressed by some those calling for today’s hearing. While our views on climate change have developed over time, any suggestion that Chevron is engaged in an effort to disinformation and mislead the public on these complex issues is simply wrong.

[End Playback]

Greg Dalton: And next Congressman Ro Khanna.

[Start Playback]

Ro Khanna: I don't believe you purposely want to be out there spreading climate disinformation. But you’re funding these groups and they're really having an impact, you know, they’re spending millions of dollars in Congress to kill electric vehicles. And they’re spending millions of dollars against the methane gas. And you can do something here. You can tell them to knock it off for the sake of the planet. You could end it. You could end that lobbying. Would any of you take the opportunity to look at API and say stop it. Any of you?

[End Playback]

Greg Dalton: API of course the American Petroleum Institute. Naomi Oreskes, what’s your reaction when you hear those two clips from those congressional hearings?

Naomi Oreskes: Well, I’d say my main reaction is I get a little bit of heartburn. Because it’s so much consistent with the pattern we've seen for such a long time of the kind of careful parsing of words to avoid really taking responsibility for what they've done. So, if you notice when the Chevron CEO spoke, he said any suggestion that Chevron is engaged using the present tense. Okay, well, I don't know what Chevron is doing at this very moment because you know they don't open their books to me, but we certainly know that Chevron and Exxon Mobil and BP and Shell and all of the major fossil fuel corporations were for many years highly engaged in a process of confusing the public through half-truths, disinformation, cherry-picking data that that went on for decades, and that has been documented by me, by investigative journalists from the Los Angeles Times and elsewhere. So, it is proven beyond any reasonable doubt that Chevron was engaged in those activities. Activities which they have never apologized for, never acknowledged, never disassociated themselves from. And the second question about API then follows directly on the heels of that problem. So, even today we know that one of the strategies that corporations like Chevron and Exxon Mobil use is not necessary to be engaged in disinformation themselves but to do it through third-party allies. And this is a pattern that they have followed that was established by the tobacco industry. We have many, many thousands, hundreds of thousands and millions of pages of documents about the tobacco playbook. The use of third-party party allies was a key strategy to make it seem as if the industry itself had its hands clean while it let someone else do the dirty work on their behalf. We have clearly seen this with API and Congressman Khanna was inviting them to say, you know, we don't have to do that, we could stop. API is the fossil fuel industry; it's not like API is somehow independent and autonomous of the petroleum industries that it represents. And as we heard not one of them would take up the Congressman's request. I also wanted to say one other thing about the parsing of words. We heard many times during the congressional hearings, CEOs say we acknowledge that climate change is real and that fossil fuels “contribute” to it. We heard that line used many, many times during the course of the day. And this is a beautiful example. It's almost, I mean sometimes I wish I were a professor of rhetoric so I could use these examples in my classes. Like this is incredibly skillful rhetoric to say that fossil fuels contribute to it implies that there are many other causes as well. But that's just not true. The IPCC has said repeatedly and clearly that the observed warming of the planet is caused by greenhouse gases increased greenhouse gases probably 90 I think they cited last time was 98% of the observed warming is being driven by the increase in greenhouse gases. And about 60% of that comes from fossil fuels. So, fossil fuel combustion is the primary cause of climate change, it doesn't just contribute to it. And that repeated refrain of contribute, contribute…it’s so frustrating because it is in a way dishonest, right? It’s representing their product as just one of many causes as opposed to the primary driving cause.

Greg Dalton: Right. Very skillful use of rhetoric and present tense. And it’s also they also there’s an implication that they’re not denying the basic science but they have done things such as campaigns aimed at people saying that green energy will take your job and there's other ways it's not sort of a head-on assault on science but still creating anxiety and fear about the solutions or taking action because that means that, oh I might, you know, solar is gonna take my job away. So, there's some very nuanced ways they chip at it where it’s not a direct assault on science.

Naomi Oreskes: Although I wanna just jump in there. I totally agree with what you said but I wanna say that actually it is a direct assault on science. To say that fossil fuels contribute to climate change is an assault on science when science proves.

Greg Dalton: Oh, sure. Yeah.

Naomi Oreskes: So, when they say, oh we accept the science but actually they don’t actually accept the science because they continue to misrepresent the scientific findings through this very careful, rhetorical parsing of words.

Greg Dalton: So, in the tobacco case there was very famously, you know, boxes of documents that landed on doorsteps. If you saw the insider with Russell Crowe and Al Pacino that portrayed, yeah, there’s a lot of smoking gun so to speak and a paper trail. That was before email. What do we know about the oil industry and what kind of smoking guns or documentary trail might we see from these congressional hearings?

Naomi Oreskes: We already have a very substantial paper trail going up to about 10 years ago. We don't have as much about the more recent period because it usually takes time for documents to make their way into archives. And so, I think a lot of industry obfuscation and blowing smoke if I may use that metaphor has to do with what the industry is doing right now today. And that's why you keep hearing the executives using the present tense any allegation that Chevron is engaged. Well, it is much harder for us to know exactly what they are doing today but we see the advertisements that they do. There's been a flood of advertisements on social media in the last few months. There's the well-documented social media campaign by BP to promote the idea that climate change is largely the result of our own personal carbon footprints as opposed to the decisions made by industry executives. So, we don't know as much about the most recent period. We don't know about the industry's thinking behind those ad campaigns. And so, partly what Representative Khanna has been trying to get out with his own document requests is to get a clear picture to have more transparency about what this industry has been doing.

Greg Dalton: And there’s also been an evolution of straight out denial, it's not happening to more sort of delay dismissed. So, it's gone from it's not happening to we’re not sure to oh we can’t do much about it, to, it’s China’s fault or technology will solve it. I think of it sometimes a little bit like COVID, you know, there are kinds of mutations and that’s how evolution works, right. Their messaging is often evolving and mutating in very subtle ways.

Naomi Oreskes: That’s right. And again, we know that the fossil fuel industry hires smart and talented public relations firms. They hire smart and talented advertising firms and they are, in their advertising, very responsive to public perception. If only they were as responsive in their actual actions. So, I think you're right once it became to a point where nobody can really say that climate change wasn't happening you couldn’t say that with a straight face when the American people could see the results of climate change in front of our own eyes as California was burning, as Texas was flooding, as hurricanes were destroying communities. It became harder to say that with a straight face. And so, we did see a shift to strategies of delay well, we can't rush, you know, we have to think this through we have to be judicious, you hear that a lot. And also, what my research associate Geoffrey Supran and I have called the fossil fuels savior framework. That actually the industry will save us. The industry that caused this problem, we should now trust them because after all they're doing all this great stuff. So, many of us have seen for example, the advertising campaign that Exxon Mobil rendered in the Olympics where they spoke a lot and promoted their algae biofuel program. Well, algae biofuels is a good thing. I'm in favor of that. But it’s a tiny, tiny percentage of the actual efforts of this industry. There have been a number of studies which have shown that the total amount of effort that the fossil fuel industry is putting into renewable energy and genuinely green initiatives is less than 2% and, in some cases, probably less than .2%. It’s this tiny sliver but the ads would make you think that they have really pivoted to a new model which they have not. If you actually read their annual reports, which I've done or you even listen to what they said in those hearings which I also did. They are very clear. Their plan is to continue exploring for still more oil and gas and to continue to develop those fields which means continuing to produce climate damaging fossil fuels for the foreseeable future well into the 2050 and beyond. And if you paid any attention to the scientific reports at all you know that that is not compatible with preventing dangerous anthropogenic interference in the climate system, otherwise known as the 2° threshold. So, these companies say that they accept the Paris Accords, but their actions are completely at odds with that.

Greg Dalton: You're listening to a conversation about science and climate communication. Coming up, the danger of talking about climate “risk” as opposed to reality:

Naomi Oreskes: It’s another form of strategic rhetoric to make us think the problem is somehow less severe or less certain than we know for a fact that it is.

Greg Dalton: That’s up next, when Climate One continues.

Greg Dalton: Let’s get back to my conversation with earth scientist, author, and professor Naomi Oreskes. She’s written that quote, “the rhetoric of climate risk downplays the reality and seriousness of climate change." She explains that the word “risk” isn’t intrinsically misleading, except if you use it to talk about things that are already happening.

Naomi Oreskes: So, the word risk implies something that may or may not happen. It's a hazard, it's a potential threat. It's something that could happen. So, if I ride a motorcycle without a helmet, that's risky. If I rock climb without good equipment, that's risky. But I might not get hurt, I might get hurt, I might not. It depends. But in the case of climate change, climate change is no longer a risk. The irony is that if Exxon Mobil had spoken of it as a risk back in the 1970s then I would agree I’d say, yeah, in the 70s it was a risk. That’s what scientists were saying. They didn’t think it was happening yet but they believed that it was a future threat, it was a risk and that it almost certainly would happen sooner or later, but they weren't exactly sure when. So, the irony is that when it really was a risk Exxon Mobil didn't talk about the risk. But when it actually became a reality that’s when they started calling it a risk. So, you see again this kind of subtle and clever use of language. Climate change is a reality. We already know that the globe has warmed up more than 1° C. We know from detection attribution studies that that warming has made a number of extreme weather events worse and we can even point to specific extreme weather events, specific fires, droughts, floods and hurricanes that have almost certainly been made worse by climate change. And these extreme weather events have destroyed people's homes, they have caused billions and billions of dollars in damages that the taxpayer picks up the bill for and they have killed people. So, this is not a risk. And yet, the industry keeps talking about risk, risk, risk, risk, risk. And so, it’s another form of strategic rhetoric to make us think the problem is somehow less severe or less certain than we know for a fact that it is.

Greg Dalton: Exxon Mobil has accused you and your co-author of having a conflict of interest because you did a few hours, 3.5 hours of work for a law firm that is suing them. How have such attacks on your character affected you personally and how do you respond to that?

Naomi Oreskes: Well, first of all I wanna say this is classic projection. So, obviously the group here with the giant multibillion-dollar conflict of interest is Exxon Mobil. They have a business model that is counting on continual damage to the climate system and counting on exporting the cost of that damage on to the rest of us. But in terms of how it affects me, look, nobody wants to be attacked, nobody likes to be called names. But my own view is that the fact that Exxon Mobil feels compelled to attack me is basically a sign that I’m doing something right. I'm telling the truth and sometimes the truth hurts. And, you know, one of the hardest things in the world is to be able to say, yeah, we made a mistake and we want to try and find a way to fix it. And particularly, you know, I'm sure Exxon Mobil is frankly probably terrified of the potential legal liabilities that they face and they probably have an army of lawyers telling them that they can't admit in public that they are responsible for billions of dollars in damage from extreme weather events. So, it doesn't surprise me that they respond the way they do, but I think it's really, really sad because they have an opportunity to lead, they like to think of themselves as leaders, they always talk about how they are industry leaders. There's a real opportunity here to do something different, to do the right thing and they are smart enough to know that and the fact that they refuse is to me really just well it's a tragedy of genuinely planetary proportions.

Greg Dalton: Right. They are science-based organizations. They have a lot of capital, they have a lot of capacity if they could use that in direction of that, I’m sure you’ve seen the Shell Climate of Concern video from about 1990 spells it all out very clearly, they talk about greenhouse gas refugees and we’re seeing that. It’s like I hadn’t heard that term but Shell was using the term in their own corporate videos in 1990 greenhouse gas refugees and laid out everything that we’ve seen. So, they knew.

Naomi Oreskes: Exactly. So, this isn’t about me, this is about the seven billion people on this planet who are affected by climate change.

Greg Dalton: What do you think about the primary role of science as we’ve seen scientists kind of getting into activism. There was a march for science a few years ago. Some scientists in Glasgow were engaging in civil disobedience. I think some were getting arrested. How do you think about the primary role of scientists at this intersection of truth and policy and climate disruption?

Naomi Oreskes: Well, it’s a tricky moment for scientists. Most scientists just want to do science. They go into science as I myself did because they were curious about the natural world, because they found scientific research gratifying. It’s really great to do work where you feel like through your work there are some pieces of the planet that we understand better than we did before. And most scientists that's what they're trained to do, it's what they're good at. And many scientists are not necessarily comfortable in a more public role. That said, one of the things I've learned through my own work is that one of the primary obstacles to public engagement for scientists is the perception that they will be viewed as overstepping the bounds they’ll be viewed as crossing some line that define scientific objectivity and that they won't be viewed as objective or credible if they become involved as a public voice. And the really interesting thing about that is that the data don't support that. And it’s so interesting to me that scientists who are in their scientific work so data-driven, often have views of action very unscientific when it comes to how people view them what we know about social change. So, we don’t have a lot of good data on this but I've been doing some research with wonderful graduate students now postdoc Victoria Colonia and she's actually done surveys of people asking people this very question. Do you think scientists should have a public voice on these questions? Do you think a scientist is less credible if they have a public voice? And by and large the evidence says that people do think that scientists should speak up and they don't think that it undermines their objectivity. And the way I understand this is through something that my colleagues and I have called epistemic proximity. That if you think about a problem like climate change no one understands it better than scientists. Scientists were at the frontline of what climate change is and why it matters. And so, they have potentially tremendous credibility to speak in public about why this issue is so important, how it affects our lives. And I think that when scientists embrace that role, they can do it incredibly effectively. And we've seen that particularly with the previous winners of this prize, people like Mike Mann and Ben Santer and Jane Lubchenco and Katharine Hayhoe. They are incredibly powerful voices because they both understand the science and they get why it matters. And when they're willing to speak to that in public in a way that is both scientific and personal at the same time it’s an incredibly powerful mix. So, my message to scientists is if you don't feel comfortable doing this and you just want to do your science. That's okay. That's your job, and that's what you're trained to do. But if you are willing to try, the world really needs you to do this. The world wants you to do this and there’s a good chance with a little bit of effort you could in fact be a powerful voice.

Greg Dalton: And there’s a tendency in these conversations to think of the physical sciences, natural sciences, chemistry, physics, atmospheric sciences, I would just lift up that there’s also the behavioral and social scientists. Because for me, the cognitive science is how we process language and risk and respond to facts and emotions, that’s also very important part of our understanding of why humans are not doing more and how we perceive threats and that sort of thing. So, it's those brain and cognitive sciences as well as the other kinds of sciences.

Naomi Oreskes: Absolutely. Yeah, and also the solution space. Once we start getting into policy solutions, then physicists and chemists and climate modelers are not the most relevant experts, they're not the people with the most epistemic proximity. But then economists and anthropologists and sociologists and historians like myself have a lot to say about the history of certain policies, what we know about how they do and don't work. I was once at a conference where two very, very famous climate scientists started yelling at each other about whether we should have a carbon price or I think it was a cap and trade versus -- I can’t even remember which one it was. But they were both arguing incredibly adamantly and one of them said, well, you know, that policy what you're proposing doesn't work. And that wasn’t true, actually, and I’m sitting there as the historian in the room and I actually knew that the particular policy that was being discussed actually had been applied in a different context. And in that other context it had worked but as a historian I would also say that policy interventions are very context and culturally dependent. What might work in one situation might not work in another. But that's where we need social scientists to become part of the conversation and do their best to inform us about what are the circumstances under which these kinds of approaches have worked in the past and is it likely that they could work now for climate change.

Greg Dalton: Right. That’s where it gets dicey sometimes. Scientists getting out of their lane beyond their expertise, making policy recommendations. In 1981 as a young scientist you were bluntly rejected for your dream job on the British Antarctic Survey explicitly because you were a woman. What did that rejection letter give as the reason and what was your reaction at the time?

Naomi Oreskes: Well, the reason that was given was because the geologists had to sleep in tents. So, that was it just that. Like assume that somehow a woman couldn’t sleep in a tent and in fact, if anyone happened to ask, I had slept in tents many times. So, probably there was also assumption that you couldn’t just send one woman, you’d have to send two. I do know that on many oceanographic cruises the argument was made that you couldn’t send a single woman because that wouldn’t be, I don’t know, wouldn’t be appropriate wouldn’t be safe, so you had to have two and, in many cases, there weren’t two available so therefore no one could go. I remember very clearly at the time I tore the letter into shreds and I am sad about that now I wish I’d kept it. I wish I kept it and framed it because I think one of the things that has happened is that many people really don’t appreciate how widespread, how rampant and how cavalier the sexist rejection of women in science was until quite recently, so it could be taken for granted that my application wouldn’t even be considered. And I graduated top of my class at one of the leading geology programs in the world and my application wasn’t even considered. Now, I was a determined person and I am now. I ripped the letter up I tore it into shreds and I moved on and I got a job with the mining company in Australia. So, life goes on, and I think one of the lessons that I think all of us have learned as we get to be a certain age is that you don’t always get what you want in life but you brush yourself off you pick yourself up and you keep on going. And every woman in science I know has done that but there is a bit of a toll, right. It’s kind of exhausting and I think this is the part that sometimes our male colleagues don't always quite get. The extra work the extra labor the extra emotional effort of having to say it doesn't matter I’m gonna keep on going because on some level it actually did matter, but I didn't let it matter. I didn't let myself acknowledge that matter. I just moved on.

Greg Dalton: Right. And of course, there’s the whole pay equity issue and representation and tenure-track positions, lots of areas. What’s your assessment today of the acceptance of women in science we’re on this episode of honoring Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson for winning the Stephen Schneider Award, but overall what's your assessment now compared to that day when you were told you couldn't go because you couldn't sleep in a tent?

Naomi Oreskes: Well, it’s certainly much better now there’s no question about it. And I think it is important to take stock and acknowledge the real progress that has been made. So, I mean there are so many more women in tenure-track positions. As a graduate student I entered a department that had never had a tenured woman. Fortunately, some women did get tenured right around that time. My first job as an assistant professor in earth science department a department that never had a woman and I actually witnessed a very ugly case of the first woman who was hired in that department but was treated very badly. Every woman I know has some horror story they can tell about bad things that happened along the way but it certainly much better. I mean most leading science departments now I mean virtually all of them have at least some tenured woman many science departments are approaching equity. Many graduate programs are approaching equity but, you know, there’s obviously still work to do. And I think a lot of the work has to do with the problem of work the way women still are expected to do more. We’re expected by society to do more at home. We’re expected by our universities to do more committee work, more service. We get asked to do more in terms of mentoring young women and people of color in this is particularly true for women of color who get it like doubly because they ask you more as women but then they’re also asked to be role models and mentors as people of color. And often they might be the only person in their department and so there's extra labor extra work that lands on them. And then there are still the extra burden of people making assumptions that you're not as good. And I'd like to be able to say that that's no longer the case. But I still think there are a lot of people who still assume and well there’s a celebrated case of this in my own university who still assume that you know the really great people in science historically were men, who will still say that when it comes to math or physics women still somehow don't quite have it. And even people who will even now today say that you know women are just not as good in math even though all the evidence suggests that the obstacles are primarily social, cultural, not epistemological or cognitive. So, there's still work to be done but we’ve come a long way things are definitely much better than they were and certainly I would encourage any young woman who feels that she has the aptitude to do science the desire to do science should absolutely do it, and no one should be discouraged from going into a career in science just because some of us were treated badly in the past.

Greg Dalton: Naomi Oreskes is the Henry Charles Lea Professor of the History of Science and affiliated professor of earth and planetary sciences at Harvard University. Thank you so much, Naomi it’s always a pleasure to have you on the show.

Naomi Oreskes: Likewise. Always a pleasure to talk with you, Greg.

Greg Dalton: On this Climate One... We’ve been talking about climate science and communication with Naomi Oreskes and Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, recipient of this year’s Stephen Schneider Award.

Greg Dalton: Climate One’s empowering conversations connect all aspects of the climate emergency. To hear more, subscribe to our podcast on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your pods. Talking about climate can be hard-- but it’s a critical step in addressing the climate emergency and moving forward. Please help us get people talking more about climate by giving us a rating or review. It really does help advance the climate conversation.

Greg Dalton: Brad Marshland is our senior producer; Ariana Brocious is our producer and audio editor. Our audio engineer is Arnav Gupta. Our team also includes Steve Fox, Kelli Pennington, and Tyler Reed. Our theme music was composed by George Young (and arranged by Matt Willcox). Gloria Duffy is CEO of The Commonwealth Club of California, the nonprofit and nonpartisan forum where our program originates. I’m Greg Dalton.

Stephen Schneider Award Winners

12 Episodes

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Sea Changes: Why Oceans Play a Bigger Role in Climate Change Than You Think

Otto Pilot — Fri, 10 May 2019 08:43:52 +0000

Sea Changes: Why Oceans Play a Bigger Role in Climate Change Than You Think

05/10/2019

Global temperatures would be soaring even higher were it not for a powerful heat-trapping ally: oceans. From regulating the temperature of the planet to generating half of the oxygen we breathe, oceans are a vital part of sustaining life on Earth. Increasing their temperature as little as two degrees, however, has an opposite effect, threatening marine biodiversity and turbocharging dangerous hurricanes and typhoons. But there are bright prospects on the horizon for humans and oceans. Join us for a conversation exploring how oceans play a bigger role in climate than you may think.

Guests

Sara Aminzadeh

Vice President of Partnerships, US Water Alliance

Ken Caldeira

Climate Scientist, Carnegie Institution for Science, Stanford University

Daniela Fernandez

Founder and CEO, Sustainable Ocean Alliance

Announcer: This is Climate One, changing the conversation about energy, the economy, and the environment.

Daniela Fernandez: When you think about the ocean you don’t necessarily associate yourself with the ocean. But the reality is that the ocean affects and impacts all of us. (10’’)

Announcer: From regulating global temperatures to generating half the oxygen we breathe, healthy oceans are critical to sustaining life on Earth. But that vital role is under threat from human activity.

Ken Caldeira: We've been treating the oceans as a resource that we’re mining and we’re essentially just extracting things out of the ocean without thinking about sustainability. (9’’)

Announcer: So how do we get people invested in preserving healthy oceans?

Sara Aminzadeh: I think we do want more people to use the coast but in doing so we need to embrace a culture of care and stewardship. (7’’)

Announcer: Why oceans play a bigger role in climate than you think. Up next on Climate One.

Announcer: I’m Greg Dalton. Today’s program is underwritten by Bank of the West.

Announcer: From coast to coast and everywhere in between, the ocean plays a bigger role in our climate and our culture than we often realize.

Sara Aminzadeh: I think a lot of people across the country feel like going to the ocean and the coast is part of their culture and a part of their family and is a right.

Announcer: Sara Aminzadeh is Commissioner of the California Coastal Commission. Her agency’s mission is to make the ocean coast a place for everyone to enjoy, and to do so responsibly. Which can also encourage innovative solutions from the private sector.

Daniela Fernandez: We’re looking at all these entrepreneurs who know they want to help change the planet, they want to help the ocean.

Announcer: Daniela Fernandez is Founder and CEO of the Sustainable Ocean Alliance, a global organization that helps young entrepreneurs create start-ups that have a positive impact on oceans. And the oceans need all the help they can get right now.

Ken Caldeira: Almost all of the carbon dioxide that we emit through fossil fuel burning eventually winds up in the ocean.

Announcer: Ken Caldeira is a Climate Scientist with the Carnegie Institution for Science at Stanford. I began our conversation by asking him how our understanding of the connection between oceans and climate has changed over the last several decades.

Ken Caldeira: Yes, in the 1980s when I was a graduate student, it was considered a good thing that the oceans were absorbing both heat and carbon dioxide from the atmosphere because that was slowing climate change in the atmosphere and on land. And it was only several decades later that it really became understood that this heating of the ocean was damaging to marine life, coral reefs are the most obvious example. And then also the carbon dioxide when it's absorbed by the ocean acidifies the ocean and that's also harmful to marine life. And so what was once thought of as a service that the ocean was providing to humans is now seen as something damaging that humans are doing to the ocean.

Greg Dalton: And we’ll get into that a little more later. Daniela Fernandez, you say plastics are a gateway drug for understanding getting involved in the oceans. Tell us about that gateway drug, the straw.

Daniela Fernandez: They really are when you think about the ocean you don’t necessarily associate yourself with the ocean. And people don’t know that many people think that it’s trees in the forests that provide all the oxygen. But the reality is the ocean affects and impact all of us. Even if you're living in the middle of the United States, even if you’re living in a hut where you may never see the ocean. It truly is our life support. And so when I talk about plastic as being a gateway drug it means that it’s something so tangible that we can see, we can touch and that we use in every single day basis. The lifespan of a plastic bag is 12 minutes. And when you think about that it means that you use a plastic bag to go grocery shopping and the next thing you know it’s out in the garbage or in the landfill or it’s in the ocean. And so it’s really understanding the ocean problem and making it relatable to every person out there and not just making it seem as if it’s, you know, this distance and ecosystem that we don’t relate to. (0:08:15)

Greg Dalton: Sara Aminzadeh you think that plastics straws and bags are kind of a distraction that they get perhaps too much attention in the ocean conversation.

Sara Aminzadeh: I don’t know if I would say they get too much attention. But I guess I would say that I think a sole focus on plastics issues for example and a bag ban and a straw ban all of which I worked on in my previous life so it's critical but can feel like a total solution when the issues are much larger. And so I worry to some extent that celebrities or, you know, some aspects of our culture who want to engage in environmental issues feel that they've made a difference so to speak by focusing solely on a relatively small problem which is huge I care about these issues I worked on the California's plastic bag ban for eight years myself. But I want to be sure that in our culture where there are these short media bites and these short clips and everything is sort of immediate that people don't lose sight of the larger and more complex issues that we really have to grapple with about both climate change and the ocean.

Greg Dalton: And Ken Caldeira, you think that sort of a fetish on straws or bags can actually backfire in middle America by telling Nebraskans that they, you know, how they’re gonna drink their iced tea.

Ken Caldeira: Yes. I’m concerned obviously about turtles and others sea life that are swallowing plastics and getting damaged by these and that's a serious problem that we need to address. But I think we need to think about long-term political strategy and, you know, I’m worried about sort of the heart of Trump country in the middle of America taking away straws and plastic bags from people they going to say, look this is these coastal liberals taking things away from us. And so I think we need to be thoughtful both in environmental protection and also in political strategy.

Greg Dalton: We’re gonna turn to another area where there are some creative solutions being approached on the oceans. It’s hard to imagine that 50 years ago the town of Cancun didn't even exist beginning in 1970 the Mexican government and private investors work to turn the idyllic tropical beach into a tourism mecca. But among other environmental oversights the world-renowned coral reefs off the coast of Cancun weren’t given much thought or protection to try and slow the deterioration of the reefs. In 2010 a collection of sculptures was placed on the seafloor nearby. The idea of this underwater museum was to draw some of the 750,000 annual snorkelers and scuba divers away from the fragile reef systems. While the underwater museum is drawn about a quarter of those tourists away, it’s questionable whether it's actually helping the reefs. We spoke with Dr. Susana Enriquez, a researcher at Mexico's National Institute of Ocean Sciences and Limnology.

Susana Enriquez: Well the underwater museum was a nice, you know, alternative for visitors to having a nice day and dive in there. And it’s like going to an exhibition of nice sculptures in the bottom of the ocean. Has been great in terms of marketing but never a way to resolve the problem of the reef. Because one of the things you see when you look at this statue is that they are full of algae and this is a sign of fertilization, they shouldn’t be there. When we fertilize this habitat we favor the organic growth in the treatment of the mineral production. So we change the system, the system start to accumulate a lot of biomass organic carbon. And then the community also changes the opportunistic species are taking over the place in the northern part of the state in Cancun where the situation and the seagrass bed is terrible. And also you see already some effects in the coral community. In the ‘70s the place was a paradise it was beautiful, beautiful magnificent place. The amount of touristic offer is huge, it’s too high. And was not balanced with adequate control of sewage and all these products of the city and hotels and there’s no tertiary treatment for this. So there’s a huge fertilization of the ocean and the level of the environmental deterioration is serious. The economical pressure is huge the level of investment and of the interest, the economical interest here is huge. So it’s very difficult for any country also for Mexico to defend their natural environment from this pressure.

Greg Dalton: That was Susana Enriquez, an ocean science researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Daniela, let’s ask you because you work with a lot of entrepreneurs who are trying to develop profit motives to preserve ocean resources. There is trying to kind of Disneyfy an area to try to lure people away to a certain area of the oceans. Is it really a profit motive in conservation with some of the entrepreneurs you're dealing with?

Daniela Fernandez: You think it has to be profitable for it to be able to scale in the capitalistic system that we live in. If we have nonprofit it’s great, I mean I’ve run a nonprofit myself. But when you look at the ecosystem of change I mean you really have to make sure that you invest money in ocean tech entrepreneurs and then helping them nourish their idea. Just to give you some examples in the topics we’ve touched upon, one of our companies that we’ve invested in this past summer it’s called Loliware and they’re creating straws out of seaweed. So the idea here is to replace plastic completely. And the seaweed straw would biodegrade in water in 18 hours as opposed to lasting a lifetime. And that’s exactly the type of hope that we’re trying to promote in this really doom and gloom scenario that we live in. Another company it’s called Coral Vita and they’re changing the DNA cycle of corrals so they can be more resistant to warmer temperatures. So it’s truly about getting young people globally to feel that they have responsibility can take part in changing the ecosystem of the ocean and making it profitable is the way to go.

Greg Dalton: Straws from seaweed sounds interesting. But if that scales up, could there be a negative impact on the oceans with so much seaweed for straws, right there’s always kind of a shadow side to things, especially when they scale.

Daniela Fernandez: Yeah, I mean this company is using a sustainable seaweed farm in Norway. And seaweed is one of the algae that grows the fastest. So obviously there’s a concern there. But the phase two for this company is to go in the lab. So it’s truly about using new technology emerging tech and innovation to figure out how can we solve these problems so that we’re not harming the environment but rather we’re in harmony with our planet and being profitable but also in these really exciting solutions.

Greg Dalton: Ken Caldeira, your thoughts on kind of innovation technology to harness the profit motive to perhaps displace ocean harmful products or to leverage the ocean in different ways.

Ken Caldeira: I guess I’m always a believer in the portfolio of approaches. And I think that better technology is essential in that for example we can get better straws, better plastic bag replacements that are not deleterious to the oceans, that's good. But there's always this trade-off between somebody who can locally get some short-term gain and the damage that it created socialized and spread out over long times and many people. And we need a regulatory environment that prevents people from personalizing the benefits and socializing the damage.

Greg Dalton: So Daniela, when you look at companies do you look at because corporations are kind of externalizing machines, right. They consolidate profits and spread the costs widely sometimes. Are you looking at that when you invest in companies whether they are trying to push the impact somewhere else?

Daniela Fernandez: Oh absolutely. First of all it’s scalability, you know, this model scale can it grow outside of your local community where the company is from. Two, is impact, what positive impact are you having in the ocean space, right. We’re looking at all these entrepreneurs who know they want to help change the planet they want to help the ocean. This is the matter of understanding how their business model is so different than what the current system exist. And I personally believe that our current governance system is absolutely broken. And that’s where you have young people striking, you know, every Friday around the world because we believe that our generation is inheriting this problem that we didn’t caused and it’s time for us to stop pointing the finger at corporations, stop pointing the finger at government and to take responsibility for everything that’s happening in our ocean and in our environment. And this entrepreneurship passion it’s really a form of activating people and acting upon something that otherwise would just be a passive blame in the system that is continuously just incessantly thinking about the other person instead of, you know, really taking ownership for that problem yourself.

Greg Dalton: Sara, what are some of the most promising solutions that you see?

Sara Aminzadeh: Well, you know, I think in a couple of buckets I guess so to speak. I think about policy ideas and solutions. I think about investments and financial changes, and I think about private sector partnerships. I think there are lot of promising policy solutions. California is actually innovating one of the world's first ocean acidification action plans to look at ways to reduce the flow of pollution to the California coast which exacerbates hypoxic conditions and can improve the health of the ocean and make it more resilient to climate during changes. I think about investments as well. Investments in scientific monitoring and analysis investments in restoration. There's some preliminary evidence to suggest that planting seagrass can actually mitigate hypoxic conditions. And I think about private sector partnerships. For example, Hog Island Oyster Company based here in California is partnering with scientists who are measuring the impacts of ocean acidification and working to support aquaculture as a sustainable ocean industry that can hopefully thrive even in the face of climate change. So I think there are lot of sort of big ideas and big solutions it’s really about creating the critical mass and the political momentum behind them and about putting people in office ultimately who are gonna prioritize that. We've seen for example the guns lobby make it a voting issue, you know, something that they feel affects their culture and their lifestyle and their families. Well I think a lot of people in this room and across the country feel like going to the ocean and the coast is the part of their culture and a part of their family and is a right. And I would like to see a much more effective lobby effort where leaders and decision-makers the next president knows that they have to take action because it's something that their constituents are gonna hold them accountable for.

Announcer: You’re listening to a Climate One conversation about oceans and climate change Coming up, the evolving threats to the oceans’ -- and our own -- wellbeing.

Daniela Fernandez: When you look at the amount of microfibers that end up in the ocean because of the clothes that you are using, this becomes not only an ocean centric problem but it's a human health issue.h

Announcer: That’s up next, when Climate One continues.

Announcer: We’re talking about sustainable oceans at Climate One, with Sara Aminzadeh, Commissioner of the California Coastal Commission. Daniela Fernandez, Founder and CEO of the Sustainable Ocean Alliance. And Ken Caldeira, a Climate Scientist with the Carnegie Institution for Science at Stanford. I’m Greg Dalton. With so much of human life dependent on ocean life, I asked Ken Caldeira what can be done to counter the market incentives that lead to overfishing.

Ken Caldeira: Yes. I mean there are some positive examples of good fisheries management where you have an ability to exclude others and there’s a relatively small group of people and also marine exclusion zones are another approach. But these agreements are hard to develop but they’re essential.

Greg Dalton: And Sara your thoughts in terms of using markets, you’re changing markets getting some of the market incentives for extracting resources from the ocean.

Sara Aminzadeh: Yeah, I mean I think there are different levels to it as Ken alluded to. There’s obviously the major market changes that we need to see in terms of our energy whether we can move from fossil fuels to renewables. So that's perhaps one of the biggest market transformations that we need to see. And then of course there are market signals and transformations that we can incentivize in terms of how we’re treating our ocean with respect to pollution flows and overfishing and shipping and things of that nature. So I think large-scale market solutions can and need to be deployed to really address climate change impacts to the oceans and there are multiple ways that we can get at it, from personal use of sending a signal of whether or not to order that sushi in a restaurant. I was at the Monterey Bay Aquarium and I was reminded of their seafood watch program which is phenomenal. So the personal choices we make can send market signals. And then again I think putting leaders in place who are gonna pass policies that urge more immediate and transformative market solutions I think is important.

Greg Dalton: Ken Caldeira, a lot of the oceans are governed by outside national jurisdiction so they require multilateral so many, you know, U.N. kind of collaboration which is notoriously slow. There is some movement I guess on the maritime industry to kind of clean up the fuel they use to kind of be part aviation is another one these, global industry, this kind of out of the reach of particular countries because their assets are so mobile. Is there any hope there that those international institutions will move fast enough to solve climate?

Ken Caldeira: Well, I think they have to so let’s just hope they will I don’t know if it’s an expectation but obviously an international water things so very difficult even in national waters of countries that don't have much power it’s difficult for them to control their waters. We've been treating the oceans as a resource that we’re mining and we’re essentially just extracting things out of the ocean without thinking about sustainability and really, the mindset has to be that this is an endowment that we have to pass on to future generations and that we can live off the interest but we can’t eat into the capital. But how to actually do that in a policy framework is beyond my expertise

Greg Dalton: Let’s talk about offshore oil drilling, Sarah, in terms of, you know, most people are against that's really on the West Coast are against it even some people on the Atlantic Coast, you know, we’re in a situation now where they’re trying to open that up. What are the risks there in terms of offshore oil drilling new production can happen, forget the Arctic, the Continental U.S.

Sara Aminzadeh: Yeah, well the risk are enormous. We’ve seen that here in California both in San Francisco and Santa Barbara of an oil spill. And more fundamentally I think the risks of perpetuating fossil fuel driven economy, when we have renewable options is perilous, you know, California has been a leader on renewable energy and climate mitigation solutions. And so to even consider or accept opening up our offshore to oil drilling is preposterous, and I think you saw that reaction not only here in California but across the country when the Trump administration sent signals that they would be considering that. You saw typically red states step up and say not our coast unacceptable absolutely not. You saw California do that as well both the Coastal Commission and slew of businesses and organizations. So I think you know, there’s the immediate implications of the potential for a spill from offshore drilling, but more fundamentally sending a signal to oil companies that they can continue that line of business and this time is truly ludicrous.

Greg Dalton: Ken Caldeira.

Ken Caldeira: Almost all of the carbon dioxide that we emit through fossil fuel burning eventually winds up in the ocean. And so all of that carbon coming out of oil or the vast majority of it will end up in the ocean. And so if we want to protect the oceans, we can't be expanding our fossil fuel industries.

Greg Dalton: If you’re just joining us we’re talking about oceans at Climate One. I'm Greg Dalton. My guests are Sara Aminzadeh is Commissioner of the California Coastal Commission. Ken Caldeira is a climate scientist with the Department of Global Ecology at the Carnegie Institution for Science. And Daniela Fernandez is founder and CEO of the Sustainable Ocean Alliance. Daniela, another thing that ends up in these ocean are the fibers from synthetic clothing, which I learned recently that when you wash synthetic clothing you put it in the dryer there are some things that are gonna end up in the oceans. I wonder whether any of your portfolio companies are looking at replacing microbeads or other types of clothing that doesn't kind of trickle into the ocean.

Daniela Fernandez: Yeah I think there’s a really critical movement around sustainable fashion and millenials particularly are really interested in the renting phenomenon, right. Instead of just buying all your clothes why don’t you rent them, you know, I think Rent the Runway has a great model there’s others around there. And when you look at the amount of microfibers that end up in the ocean because of the clothes that you are using and everyone here is responsible for it. I mean we all wash our clothes they all end up in the ocean. And the ironic thing is that not only do these fibers end up in the ocean, but you're also ingesting them yourselves as you’re eating fish, right. So this becomes not only an ocean centric problem but it's a human health issue that we have to be concerned about. So when we’re thinking about, you know, these systematic changes, we have to approach them with innovation like why can’t we create a washing machine that captures all this microfiber, it’s already a filter with in, right. It doesn’t exist yet but, you know, for us putting this challenge out to our young community and saying, who out there has an idea to build this new laundry machine. Then finding the right industry partners to help them build out this machine and helping it scale. I think that’s the type of mentally we have to start getting into because previous business models have been set up in a way where we don't care about the repercussions of what happens to the end product, right. And if we, as human beings and no matter what role you have in your life, if you’re a consumer you pay with every dollar you spend, right. Whether you’re spending it in a sustainable product or if you’re, you know, eating less meat, right. You’re making a choice for the environment. If you are an investor the money that you are putting into a portfolio matters and it matters where it goes whether you’re choosing those stock options that ultimately end up supporting this fossil fuel companies or if you helping, you know, this new type of entrepreneurial activities. So it’s truly about understanding where our values lie and taking true responsibility to make our choices as consumers as investors as CEOs and leaders. I mean I’m really proud that Bank of the West is sponsoring this event, and they’re one of the only corporation that aren’t saying by 2030 we are going to do X, Y and Z as many of them are. We don’t have by 2030, we have the next 12 years to act on climate. David Attenborough and the series Our Planet that just came out on Netflix said the next 10 years will determined the fate of our planet. I mean just let that sit with you for a second. And the next 10 years will determine what will happen to our oceans to our forest to every human being and every life on earth. So it’s a matter of acting with urgency in every type of industry not just as entrepreneurs but as consumers.

Greg Dalton: Ken Caldeira.

Ken Caldeira: There’s a postdoc in my group who went to a local supermarket and bought some mussels and basically dissolve them in a strong base and there is a bunch of plastics that floated out of them. And so plastics are definitely in the food chain and, you know, I agree that improved technology is part of the answer. But one of the things if we think of, you know, we put lead in gasoline or, you know, people put lead in gasoline they didn’t know what it did in the environment it turned out to damage children's brains. We burn fossil fuels without knowing what CO2 would do to our environment and now we’re putting all these plastics into the environment and we don't really know it’s eating mussels with plastic and is that harmful to us or is that okay to do. But we’re transforming our planet in substantial ways without having any understanding of what the long-term consequences will be.

Greg Dalton: It seems like we’re playing this game of whack-a-mole. There’s phthalates and parabens and microbeads and it’s like they’re kind of which and those are successful stories of things that have been banned pretty quickly. I mean 2015, Obama signed a law about microbeads they banned it 2018. But, Sara, are we really just kind of playing whack-a-mole it's like every time we think we solved one toxic issue there’s a couple more that pop-up.

Sara Aminzadeh: I don’t know that I would characterize it as whack-a-mole. I think we’re constantly learning about new contaminants of emerging concern. The most recent of which is microfibers they have developed filters that you could put in washing machines to prevent those from going into the environment. I think the way I would characterize it is we have to be constantly vigilant. On the one hand we’re innovating new technologies at a pace which was previously unimaginable and on the other hand, we have to keep pace with our environmental and public health protection innovation so that those technologies can continue to monitor and understand and then protect us from any risks and harms that arise. Because we’re constantly seeing new things that come up and I think we need to embrace that as our society is rapidly evolving, so must our environmental and public health protections.

Greg Dalton: If you’re just joining us we’re talking about ocean health and climate at Climate One. I'm Greg Dalton. My guests are Sara Aminzadeh, Commissioner of the California Coastal Commission. Ken Caldeira, a Climate Scientist at Stanford and Daniela Fernandez, Founder and CEO of the Sustainable Ocean Alliance. We’re gonna do a lightning round. True or false for our guests. Starting with Sara. True or false. You frown on the notion that technology can save the oceans?

Sara Aminzadeh: I can only say true or false? False.

Greg Dalton: Ken Caldeira. The United States should conduct carefully controlled experiments of enhanced alkalinization, a process that could reverse ocean acidification.

Ken Caldeira: Yes.

Greg Dalton: Also Ken Caldeira. The United States should test other kinds of geo-engineering as a hedge against runaway climate destabilization.

Ken Caldeira: I have to answer that question?

Sara Aminzadeh: Ken’s questions are so much harder.

Ken Caldeira: Yeah, really. At small-scale. That wasn’t a yes or no but I don’t want to get --

Greg Dalton: Fine. Daniela Fernandez. True or false, manufacturing a paper bag requires about four times as much water as a plastic bag?

Daniela Fernandez: False.

Greg Dalton: Also Daniela. Fertilizers and other chemicals used in tree farming and paper manufacturing can cause acid rain and harm waterways?

Daniela Fernandez: Perhaps.

Greg Dalton: Association. I’m gonna mention something and our guests will say the first thing that pops into their mind unfiltered with complete abandon.

Ken Caldeira: I’m putting my filters on.

Sara Aminzadeh: I just want to note too that my fellow guests not followed the true false rules, so now I feel equally empowered to --

Greg Dalton: There you go. The wheels are coming off for this whole thing. Okay. Ken Caldeira, what comes to your mind when I say efforts to create giant vacuums to suck plastic pollution out of the ocean?

Ken Caldeira: Crazy.

Greg Dalton: Daniela Fernandez, U.S. Navy sonar.

Daniela Fernandez: Technology.

Greg Dalton: Sara Aminzadeh, the idea that cows should be fed seaweed to reduce their methane emissions.

Sara Aminzadeh: Distracting.

Greg Dalton: Daniela Fernandez. The Clean Water Act.

Daniela Fernandez: Important.

Greg Dalton: Ken Caldeira. Your favorite ocean movie.

Ken Caldeira: I pass. I don’t know what’s my favorite ocean movie.

Greg Dalton: How can an ocean guy not have a favorite ocean movie? Sara Aminzadeh. The worst ocean film ever.

Sara Aminzadeh: Can I do my favorite?

Ken Caldeira: Because I didn’t do my favorite maybe I can do the worst one.

Sara Aminzadeh: Okay, I’ll do my favorite. The Little Mermaid.

Greg Dalton: Ken Caldeira your worst?

Ken Caldeira: I don’t know, can I say the Day After Tomorrow? That’s not really an ocean movie but it’s still one of the worst.

Greg Dalton: We heard a lot of Waterworld out in the audience.

Ken Caldeira: I can say Waterworld didn’t seem too awkward.

Greg Dalton: Last one. Daniela, your favorite ocean heroine? Your favorite ocean character.

Daniela Fernandez: Character. Penguin.

Greg Dalton: There you go. Let’s give them a round of applause. Yeah, where’s Ariel? No love for Ariel.

Announcer: You're listening to a conversation about sustainability and the seas. This is Climate One. Coming up, some bright spots on the ocean’s horizon.

Sara Aminzadeh: I think that if we can find ways to sustainably use the ocean and have industries and communities that are invested in the health of the ocean then we will be more motivated to protect it.

Announcer: That’s up next, when Climate One continues.

Announcer: You’re listening to Climate One. We’re talking about the ocean and climate change with Sara Aminzadeh, Commissioner of the California Coastal Commission. Ken Caldeira, a Climate Scientist with the Department of Global Ecology with the Carnegie Institution for Science at Stanford. And Daniela Fernandez, Founder and CEO of the Sustainable Ocean Alliance. I’m Greg Dalton. Sea level rise is obviously one of the greatest risks when it comes to life near the ocean. But it’s also an opportunity for innovation, as Daniela Fernandez explains.

Daniela Fernandez: There’s actually a big area for data collection in the ocean. We’ve collected more data in the last two years in the history of the ocean space which when you think about that, you know, we know more about space than we know about what's going on in the ocean. So there’s definitely a lot of opportunity for exploration and understanding the deep sea or floor not for mining purposes but for rather just understanding the creatures that exist and are living there. There’s also opportunity to better understand the people that are experiencing these problems firsthand. There's, you know, when I find myself at Davos or sitting with a lot of these heads of state or high-level individuals, I ask myself and I ask them like are you listening to the people that are experiencing these problems on the ground. And that’s something that for us at our organization we do with our young leaders. We don’t come to them and say to them this is the silver bullet to solve all the ocean problems now go and do it, go sign this petition. But rather we say to them, what are your passions what are your interests, you know, how can we support you and your ideas and tell us what’s happening in your local community. Because we stopped listening and if we are trying to tackle these problems with models being put together in a data center instead of getting data from the people on the ground that are in developing communities that are experiencing sea level rise, are experiencing these horrible storms more so than we are. I mean we are so privileged to see all the news and see all the CNN pop up alerts and then to just, you know, feel a little bit of sadness and pity and then go on with our lives. It’s just not fair. So I think it’s honestly a matter of understanding what's going on in your local communities and listening to the people that are being affected by these problems.

Sara Aminzadeh: Can I say one thing on innovation such as sea level rise. The most innovative thing we can do to address sea level rise is nature-based solutions is to restore our coastal habitat. We lost 90% of our wetlands here in California and wetlands can be some of the most effective buffers to sea level rise and much more effective than coastal armoring. Similarly in Florida are mangroves really protect those areas. So I would just say if we’re thinking about innovation to address sea level rise, and this is where I don't go down the technology road. I sort of return to nature and how can our ecosystems protect us from the impacts that we know are coming.

Greg Dalton: Daniela Fernandez, when you talk about those people impact on the ground, I think of subsistence fishermen in places like Indonesia where once the coral collapsed. There’s people who rely on catching a fish for dinner and that feeds them. What happens to those cultures and those economies when coral, you know, the foundation of the food chain collapses and those people are just living on basically day-to-day?

Daniela Fernandez: Yeah, 3 billion people depend on fish as their primary source of protein, right. So when that goes just imagine the amount of malnutrition that is going to take place. And so obviously it’s a problem and, you know, just to give another example of a technology solution. One of our company, SafetyNet Technologies, is attaching these electromechanical device so think of them as flashlights to fishing nets. And fish see light differently so, you know, if half of the room sees yellow in a better way and you can swim towards in the other half of the room sees red and you don’t like red you swim away from it. So they can change the wavelength of these flashlights so that fish can either, you know, come towards a fishing net or away and they can decrease the catch of the wrong fish by 90%, right. So when you’re thinking about technological solutions and as simple as attaching device to a fishing net and then teaching these fishermen on the ground how to use them. I think that is an absolute need and necessity, right, to not only provide this technology but also to be on the ground and talking to the fishermen and helping them understand how this can serve them.

Greg Dalton: Ken Caldeira, what are some real bright spots in the oceans? What are some good stories?

Ken Caldeira: Good stories. For one, my brother and this is kind of a smaller story but my brother lives in Fiji and actually there was a coral reef in front of him got destroyed because of the sugarcane sediments going into it. But that's not the good story. There’s good stories in the next village over. The bay was getting fished out and people were like fishing harder and longer and catching less and less. And there was a Peace Corps person who talk to them about protected zones and they didn’t do anything when the Peace Corps worker was there. But after the Peace Corps worker left the village itself decided to protect its bay and they have a no-fish zone and people are now just allowed to fish around the outside of it. And I think while it’s a small scale I think it’s an example that when you do have controlled access and a limited number of players that people can cooperate and improve things. And there's also a book by Scott Barrett about, it’s calle Environment and Statecraft, and he list case study after case study of successful environmental, you know, either no-fish zones or limited fish zones. And so there have been successes in the past, but they're usually in places where there’s a relatively small number of actors and they can control access to that area.

Greg Dalton: Sara Aminzadeh, bright stories in the ocean.

Sara Aminzadeh: Yeah, I'm glad Ken mentioned marine protected areas those are definitely hope spots as Sylvia Earle calls them. And there are places where fishing is limited so that our marine life can be resilient and can sort of rebound from all the impacts that it's experiencing. We have a phenomenal network of marine protected areas here in California and there are marine protected areas around the world which were enforced to varying degrees. I really do see aquaculture as a bright spot there's a really phenomenal project on the East Coast called the Billion Oyster Project. And as I mentioned we have a lot of aquaculture here in California. I think that if we can find ways to sustainably use the ocean and have industries and communities and cultures that are invested in the health of the ocean then we will be more motivated to protect it. So I'm really excited by that and also I just love seafood. So I look at those and I really do see ecosystem restoration and habitat protection as a true bright spot. It’s incredibly exciting to me to see that our natural habitats conservatives is our best defense from sea level rise impact. So I think looking across our communities and our ecosystems that really gives me a lot of hope for the ocean despite all the climate impacts that we are already experiencing.

Greg Dalton: Daniela Fernandez, what seafood do you eat and how do you choose it wisely?

Daniela Fernandez: I’m vegan.

Greg Dalton: Okay. Ken Caldeira.

Ken Caldeira: I do eat seafood but I do like the Monterey Bay Aquarium's seafood cart and try to abide by it.

Greg Dalton: Sara, anything else other than that what to look for Marine Stewardship Council it’s kind of confusing. You go to the supermarket these days there are 16 different labels and shades and colors and little icons.

Sara Aminzadeh: Seafood Watch is great and they even have an app. I’m a huge Dungeness crab fan. So that’s one of the seafoods that I like to eat and it’s local.

Greg Dalton: We’re gonna go to audience questions. Welcome to Climate One.

Male Participant: Yeah, hello my name is Ross File [ph]. I'm a geologist by academic training in a career in oil and gas and environmental consulting and financial IT, so complex background. But my question for I think Ken and Sarah is going to be how well do we truly understand ocean chemistry? And what’s motivating that question is we have an extreme example of the past in the Paleozoic and Mesozoic where we see huge organic carbon sinks in the limestones of the Cambrian, Ordovician and Mississippian. So what is preventing the oceans today from forming the same carbon sinks that they have in the past?

Greg Dalton: Thank you. Ken Caldeira.

Ken Caldeira: So first of all I think the chemistry of the ocean is very well understood what's not so well understood is the biological response to that chemistry. And yes there have been huge organic carbon deposits in the oceans over time. But if we look at the rate at which we’re emitting fossil fuels today we’re emitting fossil fuel CO2 at roughly 100 times or 50 to 100 times what just coming out of volcanoes and what's coming from weathering of organic carbon. And so if we were just doubling natural fluxes we could think that natural processes would take care of the problem. But when we’re 50 or 100 times over what nature is injecting into the system it's just overwhelming the natural capacity to buffer and get rid of the excess CO2.

Greg Dalton: Next question. Welcome.

Male Participant: Hi guys, first of all thank you all for being here. My name is Matt Moslo [ph] I’m from Colorado. I'm wondering and I’m hoping each one of you could answer this question individually. If you could choose between public policy and private market innovation as far as solutions to ocean problems which would you choose and why?

Greg Dalton: Daniela.

Daniela Fernandez: Yeah, it’s not either or, honestly you have to have public partnerships. One specific governmental leader that I admire immensely and I think it's a role model for the world is the E.U. Commissioner Karmenu Vella. So he heads the E.U. fisheries policy and it’s been so refreshing to see a public leader truly come together with technology with innovators with corporate leaders and have a seat at the table and talk about these problems, right. Because if we’re gonna have technology be scalable we need to have subsidies we need to have tax breaks we need to really build the ecosystem of change that is required and you can’t do that by having only technology. You really need to have the right policies in place the right economic incentives to be able to build this ecosystem of change. So it truly is a partnership.

Greg Dalton: Sara.

Sara Aminzadeh: Yeah, I would say if I had to choose I would choose public policy. There's a lot of innovation and promise from the private sector to deliver needed solutions at scale but it can leave people out. The private sector can leave people out and if we approach public policy in the right way it can hopefully benefit and protect all of us.

Greg Dalton: Yes, some of the most vulnerable areas to sea level rise are the low-lying poor areas that are at risk of being abandoned. Let's go to our next question. Welcome.

Female Participant: Hi, Jennifer Savage. Surfrider Foundation. Daniela you spoke about privileged, and Sara, I know the Coastal Commission recently passed an environmental justice policy and Greg, you just in fact mentioned about sea level rise impacting poorer communities that are greater phase than privileged communities. And so my question is where do you see the role of social equity in addressing climate change solution in sea level rise?

Sara Aminzadeh: I can just speak to that briefly. I mean I think it has to be at the center of what we do and not just sort of a side project. I think we have to be inclusive in the way that we approach and think about climate change impacts to the coast and ocean. And I think communities, all communities, especially disadvantaged communities have to be at the center and at the forefront of every solution that we’re thinking about. I think if we do approach coastal issues from an elitist perspective or trying to preserve you know, the primo spots and the sort of elite spots along the coast then we’re really failing. It has to be we have to approach it in such a way that we’re thinking about the whole and we’re thinking about all people.

Greg Dalton: Daniela, you want to get on that in terms of the equity issue?

Daniela Fernandez: Yeah, I think it comes down to giving people seat at the table. And what we need to do is to make sure that the right people are in these decision-making rooms whereas many times you have people that have a basic understanding of what, you know, lower income communities need but haven’t experienced what inequality means. So truly getting younger people or just indigenous people or island nation in the room and making sure that we talk to them about what their needs are and if they are ecological changes that are happening understanding how we can best support them.

Greg Dalton: Sara, I want to ask you about visualizing rising seas. Because I think rising seas is so hard to visualize and that may help us understand. So tell us about some things that are being done to help us envision things that are just hard to see.

Sara Aminzadeh: I touched on it earlier but there's an effort called the King Tides initiative. And during the winter months we see our highest tides of the year and it's an opportunity to visualize exactly what a rising sea or an extreme weather event will do to our favorite road or favorite beach or favorite access area. And we encourage people to take photos and upload them. I’ve seen them frequently used in government presentations and in coastal planning efforts. That's an initiative of the Coastal Commission and one of my favorites. And then there are numerous sort of mapping exercises where we can view inundation and what the impacts will be to infrastructure like SFO for example here in San Francisco. There are a lot of really phenomenal art projects as well. I think in Miami there's a project where they're sort of mapping where the rising sea will intersect with the community. So I think arts and imagery and photography have a big role to play in helping us visualize, it's not just science.

Greg Dalton: Sara, red tides were a big issue in the recent election in Florida. The toxic algal blooms is something we haven't touched on that's an issue for freshwater the Great Lakes it’s also an issue for saltwater. That’s where we saw Florida Republican campaign on that issue. So tell us about the politics of that.

Sara Aminzadeh: Yeah, I think as dire and sometimes depressing as climate change impacts can be. They can also make problems more visible. And I think toxic algal blooms are an example of that. I think if we can see a problem then we can solve it. And that's an instance when warming temperatures combined with nutrient flows and pollution flows causes these blooms these outbreaks of toxicology which are unhealthy as the name describes. So I think the climate change is intensifying our environmental problems. And I think although that is causing alarm it is also bringing new partners to the table and unlocking the potential for bipartisan solutions. And we’ve seen that in Florida with toxic algal blooms. We’ve seen that a Florida congressperson is campaigning on this issue.

Greg Dalton: Republican.

Sara Aminzadeh: Republican. Because it's incontrovertible it's visible and I think we’re seeing that with a lot of climate change issues, whether it's sea level rise whether it’s impacts to our coral reefs. These problems are now right in front of us and I think if we all do our jobs correctly we can use that to really hold our leaders to account and take action on these issues. So I mean I hate to say that but maybe it had to get worse before it can get better. But at least the potential silver lining is that the fact that these problems are becoming so visible and undeniable maybe can unlock some bipartisan action and leadership.

Greg Dalton: Ken Caldeira, perhaps not as economic but majestic to a lot of children who enjoyed exploring tide pools are the sea stars are having trouble these days. Is there a climate correlation and what's happening to the sad sea stars?

Ken Caldeira: Well, ocean acidification, especially in the larval stage is, echinoderms, of which sea stars are an example, have when they’re juveniles they float around and they have little calcium carbonate skeletons that are eroded by the increasing ocean acidification. And it's really, it’s a kind of thing where we just don't know over time we’re interfering with these ecosystems in an important ways and unknown ways. And we don't know, I mean the sea urchins the mollusks the sea stars and, you know, it’s impossible in the lab to do an experiment on entire ecosystems. And so we’re interfering with these ecosystems and we really don't know how it’s gonna end up.

Greg Dalton: The 2020 budget put forward by the Trump administration for NOAA, cuts the budget by 18%. Ken Caldeira, you know, how is NOAA faring under the current political it's so important, the National Weather Service it's a huge part of the Department of Commerce. Something we take for granted but we rely on in so many ways.

Ken Caldeira: I mean even before proposed budget cuts ocean research has been like the ugly stepchild of the, you know, there’s so little ocean research going on that any, you know, we should be looking at giant increases in research. Because we’re perturbing, this covers 70% of our planet, we’re interfering with it in profound ways, things that happened to the ocean that hasn't happened for hundreds of millions of years. And we have no idea what the long-term outcome of what we're doing will be we. So we should try to understand what we’re doing before we do it.

Greg Dalton: Daniela, end us on an upbeat note.

Daniela Fernandez: Upbeat note.

Greg Dalton: Bring us up. Where do you see hope and optimism?

Daniela Fernandez: There’s hope in all of us in this room. And just the fact that you’re here listening to this conversation gives me hope and that people are finally paying attention. I think that we all have to act with fearlessness, right. Because these challenges are so big that it’s not gonna just take a political leader or an entrepreneur or individual to solve them. But it’s truly gonna take collaboration and compassion for our planet for each other and forming these partnerships. So I mean even just look at this panel, right, I think it’s so fascinating that we’re all coming together from different perspectives but the same message to you. And of course you look at the next generation, right. I think that the hope is there that we’re not giving up on this issue and that, you know, people are out there in the street, you know, asking for change but also changing their own lifestyle. I think that young people are lifestyle activist and it is up to us to make a difference and we have to start today.

Announcer: Daniela Fernandez, Founder and CEO of the Sustainable Ocean Alliance. We also heard from Sara Aminzadeh, Commissioner of the California Coastal Commission. And Ken Caldeira, a Climate Scientist with the Carnegie Institution for Science at Stanford.

Announcer: To hear all our Climate One conversations, subscribe at our website: climateone.org, where you’ll also find video clips and more. Please let us know what you think of our pods by writing a review wherever you get your podcasts.

Announcer: Climate One is a special project of The Commonwealth Club of California. Kelli Pennington directs our audience engagement. Tyler Reed is our producer. Sara-Katherine Coxon is the strategy and content . The audio engineers are Mark Kirchner and Justin Norton. Anny Celsi and Devon StroloΩvitch edit the show. The Commonwealth Club CEO is Dr. Gloria Duffy. I’m Greg Dalton. Climate One is presented in association with KQED Public Radio.

Play

High Tide on Main Street

Otto Pilot — Fri, 01 Dec 2017 00:01:00 +0000

High Tide on Main Street

11/16/2017

The coast line has been basically in the same place for all of human civilization and now that’s changing in very unpredictable and unsettling ways. Oceans will rise faster than the past but no one can say how fast that will happen or what’s the best strategy for protecting trillions of dollars in waterfront real estate.

Kiran Jain, Chief Operating Officer and General Counsel, Neighborly
John Englander, Author, High Tide on Main Street
Will Travis, Sea Level Rise Planning Consultant

This program was recorded in front of a live audience at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, CA on November 13, 2017.

Music courtesy: MINSTREL by Jason Shaw

Guests

Kiran Jain

Chief Operating Officer and General Counsel, Neighborly

John Englander

Author, High Tide on Main Street

Will Travis

Sea Level Rise Planning Consultant

Announcer: This is Climate One, changing the conversation about energy, economy and the environment.

Rising sea levels are forcing us to reconsider how we think about our coastlines.

Will Travis: We should be looking at the immediate shoreline as a place to use with the understanding that we’re going to get to use it for a limited period of time.

Announcer: Because a changing coastline means changing human behavior.

Kira Jain: When you go down to the community level and say okay when this king tide hits, how will that impact them. Commute to work, to school. I think putting in those terms makes people respond more.

Announcer: So cities around the globe need to prepare for a shoreline that’s going to move inland.

John Englander: We don't have to know when it's gonna happen and we accept that with mudslides, avalanches, earthquakes and tsunamis. Yet we still design for them.

Announcer: Cities, sea level rise, and coastlines on the move. Up next on Climate One.

Announcer: How will rising seas affect the 40% of the world’s population who live within an hour’s drive of the ocean? Welcome to Climate One – changing the conversation about America’s energy, economy and environment. I’m Devon Strolovitch. Climate One conversations – with oil companies and environmentalists, Republicans and Democrats – are recorded before a live audience, and hosted by Greg Dalton.

Since the dawn of human civilization, the coastline has basically been in the same place, with tides ebbing and flowing in predictable ranges. Recently, that started to change, and in the 20th century seas rose 7 inches, driven by humans burning fossil fuels that release heat-trapping gases, which in turn cause glaciers to melt and oceans to warm and expand. That rate may seem slow but it has already doubled in this century, and scientists say it will probably accelerate further, threatening every major coastal city from New York to Shanghai and Rio de Janeiro.

To address the planning and design challenges posed by rising seas, Greg is joined by three guests. John Englander is author of High Tide on Main Street: Rising Sea Level and the Coming Coastal Crisis. Kiran Jain is Chief Operating Officer of the startup Neighborly and former Chief Resilience Officer of the city of Oakland, California. And Will Travis is former executive director of the Bay Conservation and Development Commission, the California state agency responsible for land all along San Francisco Bay.

Here’s our conversation about cities, sea level rise, and coastlines on the move.

Greg Dalton: John Englander, you also were up in the Arctic in 2007 in Greenland. So tell us that story who are you with and how that set you on the path to also be a, you know, an alarmist about sea level rise.

John Englander: Sure. August 19, 2007 was my first trip to Greenland as you said. And I was there with some wealthy auto owners. I was running a group called International SeaKeepers. And we were gonna go see the big Jakobshavn Glacier one of the largest glaciers in the world the next day and it’s the one that supposedly spawned the iceberg that sank the Titanic, so kind of an interesting footnote. And I was trying to think about how to get these people who are interested but a little skeptical about climate change to be focused on it and it just suddenly hit me. In college, I studied ancient sea levels, how with the ice age the sea level moved up and down 300 or 400 feet regularly. And I suddenly realized that it was simple that if the oceans are warmer which they are the ice will melt on Greenland and Antarctica, primarily. The sea will rise and if the sea is taller that the shoreline will try and move. And it suddenly occurred to me that that there was a fairly simple case to be made without the jargon without the technical science and I got the idea to write that book right then and there it happened all within a minute.

Greg Dalton: So that matters to yacht owners because their docks may move I guess, yeah. I’m gonna talk here from Reinaldo Borges who’s an architect in Miami. He is on the city sea level rise committee and I wanna hear his thoughts on the potential solutions for South Florida's water problems.

[Start Clip]

Reinaldo Borges: South Florida of course is looked at as the epicenter of the concern because we’re very low. And we start to see the sunny day flooding during the king tides where we really see the water flowing into the certain parts of the city. And people sort of driving through salty water without at times knowing that it’s actually salty water. I get invited to talk to developers I just spoke to 400 developers about resiliency. A lot of them already have sustainability features in their buildings like their buildings are greener they consume less energy and consume less water. But then how they may be affected by the impact of climate change we’re really not thinking through how our buildings would be affected by water in the long-term and perhaps even in the short-term. So we need to look at the water flowing through our communities in a different way and the way that we navigate and move around our communities may change, you know, there may be more amphibious vehicles that could navigate both in dry conditions and wet conditions. If a ground-floor of the building gets abandoned, it’s the second floor, designed so that it could become the first floor. And I don’t think that there is one single solution and the South Florida continues to grow. The growth is gonna be pretty constant for now. Architects in general are optimistic about community about quality-of-life about urbanism and the things that we could design into. So I do think that there is a future beyond, you know, where we may see doom and gloom and sort of South Florida being taken over by the Atlantic Ocean. I saw the sea a future in Waterworld we’re still attracted to live on the coast.

[End Clip]

Greg Dalton: That's Miami architect Reinaldo Borges. So John Englander, you live in South Florida. There’s a lot of in there sort of saying we’re prepared but we’re not and I’m optimistic but, you know, that things are gonna change dramatically.

John Englander: Yeah, I live in South Florida about an hour north of Miami. I'm down there a lot. I’ve encountered Reinaldo many times in fact working with architects is a really an important channel I think. And he's very knowledgeable and very concerned and it's hard to get the clients in the city and the building codes to respond to what’s a clear and present danger frankly. And but I was in Jacksonville a few weeks ago people never think of Jacksonville up in the north end of the state. They were flooded during Hurricane Irma, there's hotels are still closed. Tampa Bay was hit, Naples. So, you know, so Florida is a big state and there are lots of different points of vulnerability the keys as well.

Greg Dalton: Kiran Jain, you were a chief resilience officer of Oakland and part of a program funded by some philanthropist to have these new offices in city halls around the country. So tell us about that program and how it looks, what’s happening with other cities that are looking at these all these integrated resilience issues that are coming forward.

Kiran Jain: Sure. So this is a program funded by the Rockefeller Foundation called 100 Resilient Cities. And the idea is to see the 100 chief resilience officers in cities around the world. The realization being that the way that our government structure have been set up over the last 50 years are not equipped to handle the challenges for the next 50 years, particularly pertaining to climate change and some other kind of pressing issues around housing affordability, economic insecurity. So there’s ought of one size fits all kind of description for chief resilience officer but in Oakland, you know, our baseline work was really around this fact of you can be in Oakland live 1 mile away from another Oaklander be twice as likely to be unemployed and live 15 years less. And it changes depending on race. And if you look at these vulnerable communities and you look at the sea level rise maps, the liquefaction maps, the flooding maps they overlay. And so our goal really was to focus on how can we make our people our communities more resilient so that when these slow burning crises like sea level rise or cute things like earthquakes happen how can our community better prepared.

Greg Dalton: Will Travis, give us there are some options we think about sea level rise you worked about the city as a planner thinking about shaping the life and character of cities. What are the options of sort of defend, retreat, et cetera?

Will Travis: Well those are the two options defend, retreat. What we're looking at is a new option, which is resilience. And I think the important thing to understand and why this is also difficult is that as you pointed out in your introduction for the history of civilized human beings we’ve live in a period of relative calm so far as our climate is concerned. So without any great amount of ice melting or water freezing the shoreline didn't go up or down. So the location of the shoreline didn't move laterally. So we came to learn that the shoreline is where the shoreline always was, and we’ve therefore believe that the shoreline always be where it is because that’s where it's always been. And we've crafted a whole series of laws and rules and regulations that say on this side of the shoreline here are the rules and on this side of the shoreline here are different set of rules. Now as that shoreline begins to move, we’re trying to do things that are innovative and that are creating resilience but in some cases, the laws make it illegal. And the reason for that is the vast bulk of the body of law that we rely on were written before anybody was thinking about climate change. So the fact that the laws don't respond to climate change I think it's not surprising will be a miracle if they did. So what we’re trying to do now is find those innovative design solutions. I like to say to every difficult public policy problem there's a clever design solution. And once we get enough of those clever design solutions then use those as examples to go change the laws so we can make it possible to build those things.

Greg Dalton: John Englander, for people to design the cities of the future that can adapt to these increasing storms sea level rise, et cetera. They have a basic question which is how fast and how high and scientist have a difficult time answering that question. Tell us the range of the science and you write about that someone, you're not a scientist but you write about it in your book.

John Englander: Sure. Well I distinguish myself from those doing the kind of fundamental granular research I'm an oceanographer. But I explain, what I’m trying to do is translate the science without jargon and using the metaphors and examples that a wider audience can understand. And sea level is the ideal example or problem in effect because we can't be too specific about sea level and that surprises people. But in San Francisco which everybody knows about and we happened to be filming this here in San Francisco recording it. We know there’s gonna be another earthquake just like there was a century ago. We don't know when we don't know where and what magnitude but there will be another earthquake. Well the collapse of Antarctica and Greenland is about the same. There are ice sheets that are a mile tall on average, and together they are the size of North America. Imagine that covered by ice over 6,000 feet tall, on average. We can't predict exactly how this gonna melt. So the scientists try to and they say if the glaciers do this and Greenland does that and thermal expansion the seawater does that we add all that up and so we get to somewhere between 20 and 30 inches. The problem is there’s a big uncertainty just like when the next avalanche will happen up in the Alps or something like that we can’t predict those things. So science tends to say what they know will happen with a high probability. It was sea level that really fools us because the truth is we could get five or 10 feet of sea level rise this century which is stunning. Most of the estimates talk about 2 or 3 feet but they kind of leave out Antarctica because you can't quantify it any more than you can quantify the next avalanche or mudslide on Pacific highway, you know in Big Sur or something like that, which happens unpredictably. We don't think about it like that. And the scientists don't explain that very well because they're trying to get the granular information about what they know for sure. But the fact is that sea levels moved up and down 300 or 400 feet every hundred thousand years with the ice ages we didn't see that. So now we’re left with this real conundrum. We have to design cities like San Francisco with the Embarcadero or Miami or Boston or Jacksonville, Florida or Seattle or Vancouver. Pick any coastal city in the world, Copenhagen, Shanghai, every most big cities are on the coast or on tidal rivers. And we have to design them for storms, king tides, heavy rainfall, runoff and the slowly rising sea level. In the next 20 years I don't think we can get more than a foot even in the worst case but that would be a problem. The promise those curves start spreading out with time because of the melting of Antarctica and Greenland where you've been. And the truth is, we’re somewhere between 2 feet and 12 feet. How do you design for that, how do you build for that, do you have to jack up buildings, do you put them on skids and drag them up hill as Trav has talked about. Do you put things on wheels everything is gonna be on floats we’d figure that out, but we don’t have a choice. We really have to do this.

Greg Dalton: Kiran Jain, Oakland is one of the biggest ports in the country. Think about that 2 feet is sort of the cautious case. Is Oakland and the other ports ready for 2 feet?

Kiran Jain: You know it’s interesting you talk about there are these known unknowns and are we now pushing ourselves to rethink governance structures to rethink finance in a way that can help us prepare for these types of events. So I'd like to think that, you know, right now with these government entities everybody's thinking about what are we going to do, right. So you might have at the port, you know, the logistics center being built higher up. But then the communities around say well what about us? You know your resources to be able to do that what is it mean for more vulnerable home. So I think it's a question that we have to look at, you know, community wide we like to say it, we don’t know political boundaries, right. These natural hazards don't have political boundaries yet our regional planning mechanisms whether it's, you know, capital planning and budgeting happen within a political jurisdiction. So you really need to think about how do we answer this regional governance issue with challenges like climate change.

Announcer: You’re listening to a Climate One conversation about cities, sea level rise, and high water everywhere. You can subscribe to our podcast at our website: climateone.org. Greg Dalton will continue his conversation in just a moment.

Announcer: We continue now with Climate One. Greg Dalton is talking about sea level rise and sustainable development with John Englander, author of High Tide on Main Street: Rising Sea Level and the Coming Coastal Crisis. Kiran Jain, Chief Operating Officer of the startup Neighborly. And Will Travis, former executive director of the Bay Conservation and Development Commission.

Here’s your host, Greg Dalton.

Greg Dalton: Will Travis, it’s been about five or six years since superstorm Sandy, you know, closed the New York Stock Exchange for three days and devastated lower Manhattan, remember that just dark lower Manhattan. What do we learned from that time, you know, people knew that something like Sandy was possible. Many people just thought they had another decade or two before it happened it came faster and more fierce than many expected.

Will Travis: Unfortunately what we've learned is that the human spirit is such that they believe that'll never happen again. And it is surprising how many people are now moving back to the Jersey shore. They're buying out. The poor people who suffer the losses who didn't get nearly full recovery from their insurance and the folks who've always wanted to have a house at the beach can now afford to do so. It is unfortunate but we tend as human beings to we have to experience this ourselves. I have a daughter and I remember going through this actually, “Don't touch the stove, it’s hot. Don’t touch the stove, it’s hot. The stove is hot.” “Daddy, I burned my finger.” And I am afraid that we're going to as species have to go through this terrible process of finding out that yes, the scientist said the water was coming up and yes it has come up and yes it has wiped out my house and will have to do it again and again before we really respond to it.

Greg Dalton: John Englander the FEMA maps, most of the country as maps not all of it and when FEMA comes up with a new map and says, oh you're in a flood zone. People get upset because they're forced to buy flood insurance because their bank will require that and then politician sometimes go to FEMA and say, hey you know, can you just let this little town out. It happened in St. Augustine, Florida, right, where some politicians said, hey, you know, we don’t need to be in those map so people don't have to buy insurance. Then a flood comes and people say, oh my God, we have no insurance. And then they go to politicians and say we need a bailout. Tell us about that cycle.

John Englander: Sure. The National Flood Insurance Program as many people know is badly broken. It's $25 billion upside down or underwater as they say in their insurance. More debts than assets and it get worse. And I think the obvious lesson of letting politicians or Congress determine the rules for a National Flood Insurance Program that's gonna basically be a monopoly, you know, what could go wrong. And we’ve seen that and they keep tweaking the rules to make homeowners happy voters and we find ways to get exemptions from the rule because your 1 inch over the line and you really shouldn't have to pay that $2,500 in insurance. That if you are just in the sideline you won’t have to pay. And so there's companies now that help you get your flood rates reduced and it's crazy. It should be privatized. It is gonna be up for renewal for another five years. But the whole system needs to be rethought because it's based upon archaic maps and with lines and if you’re in this side of line you don’t need flood insurance. And if you’re 1 inch over the line you need flood insurance and maybe thousands of dollars. That's crazy. And also people the disincentive in Texas not many of the people in the path of Hurricane Harvey had flood insurance and we stop to think about well, FEMA's gonna come and fix things, whether they had flood insurance or not. So another part of The Department of Homeland Security actually almost undermines the normal reason to have flood insurance because it's expensive and even then it subsidized. So the truth is, we really got to rethink the National Flood Insurance Program. It’s gotta treat sea level differently than storms and the other kinds of flooding because those are events. Actually the place Trav and I first met in Florida six years ago. We were at a conference about sea level in Boca Raton where I happen to live. And I think one of the points that kind of brought us together was saying that sea level is not an event, storms are events, tides are events, king tides, heavy rainfall events, flash floods, those are all events but the water recedes and you can rebuild. Sea level rises like filling the bucket drip by drip, but it won’t go down for a thousand years. And once I think we talked about this that the events are layered on top of sea level rise we just assume sea level wouldn’t change much. So our terminology is not even right.

Greg Dalton: Is this affecting property prices yet?

John Englander: There's indication that it is. Nationwide property price had been up pretty steadily in the last few years and coastal properties aren't going up at the same rate. And there's a theory that the increase flooding and it's all over the country is starting to sink in the people that, you know, maybe this is in the permanent piece of real estate.

Greg Dalton: Kiran Jain, we’ve been talking a lot about the government solutions to rising seas here at Climate One. Let's talk about, you left government to go into the private sector because you think that there's a role for entrepreneurship and financing to help solve this problem. Tell us that.

Kiran Jain: Yeah, absolutely. I think my time as chief resilience officer made me really appreciate just how fast we need to move that this is definitely even though it’s a slow burning crises as we say it is moving faster than the rate of bureaucracy and government. And so how can we think about more innovative solutions and that’s really what brought me to Neighborly which is a public finance technology platform that has built an end to end digital platform for municipal bond originations, and then connects them to investors. And the idea is, you know, we say that public finances at $3.8 trillion market yet we have $2 trillion of unmet infrastructure needs in the U.S. And it is a corner of the capital markets that really hasn’t benefited from the transparency and efficiency that other parts of the capital markets have benefited from. And so you have that coupled with this idea that we need to move more quickly. We need to design more creatively for this future that we are preparing for. And so how can we finance it. We know that the technology and designs are there. We know the governance structures may need to be rethought of but then the last piece is really thinking about the finance and how do we actually make these projects come alive.

Greg Dalton: And if someone is listening to this and they want to invest in green bonds, those sort of things. Where can investors go today, I mean green bonds, green infrastructure are those accessible to retail investors?

Kiran Jain: So it depends. I think, you know, there is a market for retail and institutional investors when it comes to green bonds. We have seen the market grow year over year by quite a big percentage. There's obviously a desire by investors but also by these public agencies who really are saying, okay how can we be better stewards of the environment. And so you have, you know, the Climate Bonds Initiative. So the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission actually just issued the first CBI green bond last year. And the East Bay Municipal Utility District did a similar issuance around green bonds. And I think that for not just the cities, but for the investors this present a really great opportunity to put your values or your investments are.

Greg Dalton: If you’re just joining us we’re talking about rising seas at Climate One. I’m Greg Dalton. With our guests are Kiran Jain from Neighborly, John Englander, author of High Tide on Main Street and Will Travis, a former California state official and sea expert. We’re gonna go to our lightning round. I’m gonna mention a person, place or thing and you’re gonna tell me first thing that pops into your head without any regard for how politically correct it is and what anyone will think about it. So John Englander. Florida Governor Rick Scott.

John Englander: Denier.

Greg Dalton: John Englander. Miami Mayor Tomas Regalado.

John Englander: Proactive and will be remembered as somebody putting forth the green bond issue. So, you know, doing the right, a step in the right direction.

Greg Dalton: Kiran Jain. The bond rating company, Moody's.

Kiran Jain: I was about to say dinosaur. I just say that. Look, I think well.

Greg Dalton: Dinosaur. We got it.

Kiran Jain: We got it. Sorry. It takes me more than one word.

Greg Dalton: Will Travis. Facebook's corporate headquarters on the edge of San Francisco Bay.

Will Travis: Great place to surf.

[Laughter]

Greg Dalton: True or false. What a segue. True or false. Will Travis. Rising seas will create some epic sets of radical waves for California surfers?

Will Travis: True.

Greg Dalton: John Englander. True or false. Some people on Wall Street will make money when the risks of rising seas get priced into coastal property?

John Englander: Yes.

Greg Dalton: Kiran Jain. True or false. The Oakland Athletics baseball team made a smart move when they moved a proposed new waterfront stadium to a new location away from San Francisco Bay?

Kiran Jain: No comment.

John Englander: Oh no, come on. Can’t wimp out.

Greg Dalton: Maybe this one is easier for Kiran Jain since she used to work for the mayor of Oakland, we’ll give you a San Francisco question. True or false. Kiran Jain. The Golden State Warriors new waterfront arena one day will be a good place to play water polo?

[Laughter]

Kiran Jain: True.

Greg Dalton: Easier for Oakland to punch San Francisco, okay. Will Travis. True or false. Your former agency, the Bay Conservation & Development Commission tried to hold property developers more accountable for building in flood zones and the powerful industry beat back that effort?

Will Travis: That is false.

Greg Dalton: True or false. Will Travis. Not being a scientist is an advantage?

Will Travis: Absolutely.

Greg Dalton: True or false. John Englander. President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort could be threatened by rising seas?

John Englander: Yes, eventually.

Greg Dalton: Final one for Kiran Jain. True or false. Surging seas will cause coastal elites to find new appreciation for flyover country?

Kiran Jain: True.

Greg Dalton: Let’s give them a round for getting through that.

[Applause]

John Englander let's ask about the politics of climate in Florida. Lots of deniers there and yet people who live outside the state look at Florida and say, wait, you're on the front lines you're feeling it and yet there are deniers elected statewide. And Carlos Curbelo who represents South Florida is a leader in this Noah's Ark caucus in Congress where there is now 20 or 30 members of Republicans and Democrats who on the record saying we gotta do something. So tell us about the politics of climate in Florida.

John Englander: Yeah, it’s a great segue and opening because I think climate is almost too broad a term. I mean it’s sometimes nice to have inclusive terms, but the truth is climate to me is a least three different issues. There’s the energy part. How do we reduce greenhouse gas and slow the warming and that's entirely valid. Everything from solar energy and electric cars and the conservation and LEED certified buildings and all of that, everything to reduce energy and carbon in the atmosphere, which is all the warning very valid. There's broad effects like with higher temperature, more fires out West here different temperature, weather patterns from changing from a warmer planet really abstract and kind of moving target, but lots of different issues. And then there sea level rise which is really simple because the ice in Antarctica and Greenland is gonna melt and has to raise sea level. And so it’s really unambiguous and it gets to people’s feelings about place and communities and risk and investment. So I’d like to separate even though Climate One is one issue, and it's a huge issue. It sometimes helps to think of that. Sea level gets around the concerns about the energy part, you know, a lot of the resistance to look at the climate issue is because you’re gonna take away our coal supplier or you’re gonna make, you know, or tar sands in Canada or things like that. You’re gonna tell me how to make energy and you’re gonna affect reserves in the ground. So a lot of the sensitivity has to do with that energy part which is important. Sea level and the flooding which is happening coastal communities from Marin to Miami and from Boston to Bangladesh that gets around that and I've noticed that even conservatives and people who might be politically, you know, you might think they could be categorized they’re getting concerned about sea level rise. They may not want to have the government telling them energy policy, but sea level rise and flooding is getting their attention. So that's good.

Greg Dalton: All politics is local. Yeah, so we can talk about the solutions and impacts but we don't want to talk about the causes. John Englander, I read an article in Scientific American that talked about how Jim Crow restrictions in Florida basically contained African-Americans to some higher grounds. It was further away from the desirable waterfront property so it was like you people can live up on the hill. And now that hill property is suddenly desirable, and there are people worried about gentrification and kind of speculation and traditionally African-American neighborhoods in Miami. And this gets the sort, you know, the displacement because if you think about it lot of wealthy people live by the water because it’s nice. And now they’re figuring out, wait, it may not be so good to live here. Let’s go uphill and push those, you know, let those people go live down by the water. Have you encountered that at all?

John Englander: Yeah, but it’s not quite as simple as we’d like to think. You tend to think that the wealthy have those houses on the waterfront. Well that’s not a rule, okay. And some of them are high up on the water like 20 or 30 feet. There's a lot of low-lying land from California if you look where the trailer parks basically, the RV homes and the mobile home communities. 50 years ago, those places were vulnerable and it wasn't smart to build right on the coast. And actually a lot of poorer communities, white and black and different minorities are in those densely packed trailer parks in effect from Southern California to Florida. And so it defies what we think and there’s a lot of voters there. The wealthy people tend to have better designed houses and may be built up on pilings and things like that and they may have influence. So we have to break down some of the stereotypes I think.

Greg Dalton: Fair enough there was an overgeneralization about waterfront. There is East Palo Alto, very poor area along the coast and then there's other places, Belvedere, where there is $30 million houses on the coast. Kiran Jain, your thoughts on the social displacement that can happen as people sort of move away from the coast into, you know, we kind of reshuffle the deck in terms of where is desirable to live.

Kiran Jain: Yeah, absolutely. You’re talking about the future state, I’m thinking about the social displacement that’s happening today, right. We’re battling rising sea levels and rising housing prices in the Bay Area.

Greg Dalton: Yeah more immediate concern.

Kiran Jain: Exactly. So, you know, I think it’s going to have to be tackling our kind of zoning laws and similarly in these decisions that we've made in terms of density where we’re building, where are we defining our sea level rise vulnerabilities zone. And if it’s, you know, a retreat or adapt, what is that mean for future building. And knowing, you know, the Bay Area for example is gonna increase in population by 30% by the year 2040, you know, thinking about where we can house everybody. These are issues that we need to think about today in addition to rising sea level.

Greg Dalton: Will Travis, one of the biggest solutions to reduce rising temperatures and carbon emissions is to have greater urban density. Because people who live in cities have lower carbon footprints they use fewer services they don’t drive as much, et cetera, so urban density infill is a solution. How is that gonna fit with defending what John said earlier, most cities are on the coast. They need to be more dense and they need to live with a different relationship with water. Oh and throw in autonomous cars, how’s that all gonna come together?

Will Travis: Well here again I think we’re gonna have to find a new way of designing that density. There are a lot of us that believe that we should be looking at the immediate shoreline, not as a place to retreat from but as a place to use with the understanding that we’re going to get to use it for a limited period of time. And that then we are going to either recycle those buildings or move them or jacked them up or do something with them. There's a famous scientist at Columbia, Klaus Jacob, who says we have to come up with nomadic infrastructure because it's the infrastructure underneath all of this. And there's been, you know, a lot of work being done, Dr. Edward Church here at Berkeley, was talking about using microgrids. So instead of having a massive infrastructure, it’s all decentralized, so that we can move this new type of density.

Greg Dalton: And one of the natural instincts for people who do live along the waterfront if you have private property is to defend yourself, defend your family. Put up a seawall. Will Travis, tell us what that does the impact of people who do, it’s called coastal armoring. Put up a seawall and the concrete will hold Mother Nature back.

Will Travis: Well the simple answer is that along the open ocean coast the way sea level rise will manifest itself will be through more erosion. And if you stop that erosion in front of your property that is where the sand comes from that is on the beach. So if you stop that sand from going out onto the beach. You're going to end up actually making the problem worse. Not just for you, but especially for your neighbors.

Greg Dalton: Explain also Will Travis, if someone lives on a hill in Boston or San Francisco or Seattle. Because the first thing people do when they look at sea level rise maps they look for their house. I’m not on it. I’m okay. Is that true?

Will Travis: Well only if they don't drink water, flush their toilet or go to work or take their kids to school or anything like that because we realize you have a massive interrelated system. And you're absolutely right people do look at where is my ass, I'm okay and you aren’t. You aren’t.

Announcer: You're listening to a conversation about cities, sea level rise, and moving to higher ground. This is Climate One. You can check out our podcast at our website: climate one dot org. Greg Dalton will be back with his guests in just a moment.

Announcer: You’re listening to Climate One. Greg Dalton is talking about rising seas and coastlines on the move with John Englander, author of High Tide on Main Street: Rising Sea Level and the Coming Coastal Crisis. Kiran Jain, Chief Operating Officer of the startup Neighborly. And Will Travis, former executive director of the Bay Conservation and Development Commission.

Here’s Greg.

Greg Dalton: Kiran Jain, you know, we’re talking about these things that are slow moving, far away, but in a lot of urban America, there are more immediate concerns about safety, jobs, health, that sort of thing. So how does something like this get traction in a city government or even mainstream news media? I talked to journalists like, yeah, okay seas, you know, it’s not a sexy, dramatic story or it’s an issue that’s gonna get a mayor elected.

Kiran Jain: Right. And I think, you know, we’ve talked about this a lot with many community organizations during my time as CRO and putting it kind of in people terms, right. We tend to talk about the environment and kind of rising water in this abstract type of situations. But when you go down, you know, to the community level and say okay when this king tide hits, what will that look like. When we layer on illegal dumping or some other kind of city challenge that is really facing our electorate today how would that impact them. Commute to work, to school. I think putting in those terms, you know, makes people respond more but it's a really great question because we’re obviously having this conversation today in this room, yet it is not part of a kind of global conversation right now.

Greg Dalton: Will Travis, San Francisco, you know, iconic downtown, you know, part of Silicon an extension of Silicon Valley, you know, economic engine of the country, the world needs to spend $5 billion with a B to replace a seawall that protects the headquarters of salesforce and other companies. Voters will be asked to approve that and yet no one can really say how high that seawall should be for the future. So how does that play out, that’s just one example of what needs to happen to spend a lot of money to protect what we already have. We don't get anything new for that.

Will Travis: That's right. And this gets back to the question about how high the water will get. I’m gonna let you all in on a secret if you want to get rich. Get a whole bunch of experts on sea level rise together and ask all of them to tell you exactly how high the water will be at a particular date in the future. And then bet against all of them. You'll make a lot of money. Nobody knows and nobody can know. So what we need to do is find a way of designing and building so that it doesn't matter.

John Englander: But, you know, actually here in San Francisco you’ve got a great test tube for this. We know what an earthquake was like. You know there's going to be another one. You don't have to know when it's gonna happen and where the epicenter will be and what the magnitudes gonna be. You design for a fairly, you know, substantial earthquake. We design for hurricanes. Not for the average hurricane. We design for the worst-case hurricane. For sea level, we’ve really got a great opportunity. It's going to rise. The plan is already a degree and a half warmer we’re trying to keep it to another degree or two warmer, but ice is gonna melt. The sea is going to rise it’s not going to hit in one place, it’s gonna be every place in the coast and up tidal rivers like Sacramento or Hartford, not just on the shoreline. So the truth is, once we get our heads around that we’re gonna realize there's a safety margin here. If we build it 3 feet higher or 6 feet higher, 6 feet is gonna be better than 3 feet. We don’t have to do all at once, but we’ve gotta realize this is to some degree inevitable but slow. And I think there is an opportunity there because we don't have to know when it's gonna happen and we accept that with mudslides, avalanches, earthquakes and tsunamis. Yet we still design for them.

Will Travis: But those are one-time events, John.

John Englander: That’s right.

Will Travis: What we need to do is design buildings for some credible amount of sea level rise and then add water. See if the design is still resilient if you add another 5 feet. And you can incorporate those reasonable measures into building so that you can allow the first story or two to be abandoned.

John Englander: Absolutely true.

Will Travis: But that’s, what does that matter if you can't get to the building because the sidewalks are 10 feet below water. So this whole cycle is something it's very challenging from a design perspective, it's very challenging from governance and the finance and in insurance perspective, but we’ll get through it.

Greg Dalton: If you’re just joining us we’re talking about sea level rise and other issues at Climate One with Will Travis, former California state regulator. John Englander, author of High Tide on Main Street and Kiran Jain with Neighborly, former Chief Resilience Officer of the city of Oakland, California. I’m Greg Dalton. We’re gonna go to your audience questions, welcome.

Male Participant: Appreciating that, I think the number is 212 feet of ocean rise if the Antarctic and Greenland both melt on the current 30 feet and appreciating that they just discovered this last August, the largest volcanic collection of 91 volcanoes under the Antarctic right now. What can those who are in the media communicating and creating messages not just for the administrators and the politicians, but for the mass audience. What kind of messages can we give the world the wants and everybody jumping off of the cliff?

Greg Dalton: Yeah this is a real, how to do that John Englander without being a downer.

John Englander: It’s a great question. And we can think about catastrophe, an asteroid hitting the planet or Yellowstone blowing up and, you know, extinguishing most life. We can think about this worst-case disaster movie scenarios. We shouldn't do that because if you take the worst-case scenarios whether be volcanoes under Antarctica which we don't know whether they're gonna last for a thousand years or not is the truth. But the fact is there's a really simple equation, that the amount of ice on land, which is 98% in Greenland and Antarctica, is if it all melts will raise sea level over 200 feet, 212 feet that’s the best estimate and it’s happening. And it doesn't matter what we do in the short term, we can slow it hopefully in the longer term by the better energy policies, but we need to wake up to this reality that sea level which we thought was a flat line and therefore determined the shoreline that those two lines are gonna change. And there is no question about it even if the world are 100% solar energy today, never burned another lump of coal or barrel of oil, we’re still gonna get sea level rise because the oceans have already been warmed. And even adhering to the best plans from the Paris Climate Agreement we’re allowing for another degree or two of warming. So the fact is we have to wake up to this new world reality after 5,000 years of sea level stability, it's changing. We don't need to discuss the super disaster case any more than an asteroid coming here or, you know, wiping us out or various other things that could be just these terrible disasters one in a thousand chances. That's not the problem. It’s just the planet is a degree or two warmer and there will be less ice and higher sea level.

Greg Dalton: There was an excellent book on climate change communication called Don't Even Think About It by George Marshall, a British journalist. And he cites a researcher in there with the acronym PAIN. Getting through to people about climate needs to be personal, abrupt, immoral, and now. Personal, abrupt, immoral, and now. Sea level rise meets none of those criteria, right. It is slow, it is not immoral we don't know who’s causing it. It’s not abrupt. It doesn't really affect me so it's a real communication challenge.

John Englander: Well here’s where it goes in between actually. And I’m glad you from the questioner to you just put things in perspective for me. We can't get 10 feet of sea level rise next week, that’s not possible. Like you can get a tsunami or you can get a terrible coastal storm or something like that so totally different timescale and magnitude. But we do know from Jakobshaven Glacier in Greenland, which could add a foot and a half of sea level rise to the six, Pine Island Glaciers, very specific in Antarctic that we’re monitoring. Those six glaciers are going to slide into the sea at some point and they hold 10 feet of sea level rise. We just don't know when they're gonna slide into the ocean. So most of the scientific journalists they kind of put a footnote and say well, unknown but the fact is it could make it happen 53 years or 153 years, we’ll see, partly depends on how warm the climate gets. So there's where you have an abrupt, a relatively abrupt event but even in the worst-case real scenario, we’re probably looking at I don’t know, a couple of feet a decade maybe 5 feet which will be a disaster. But now like we imagine it like the, you know, the disaster films and the, you know, where the floodgates burst and there are suddenly 200 feet of sea level rise and, San Andreas I think was the movie or something like that.

Greg Dalton: How do you talk about this without bumming people out. Convey the urgency without bumming people out. Kiran Jain.

Kiran Jain: Use it as an opportunity to say we now can rethink our system of governance and finance around this organizing principle. We know that this unknown known is going or this known unknown is going to happen and what do we want to do about it. How do we, you know, use it as an opportunity to rethink the way we design our cities so we can live with nature and the built environment. I think that we had a slogan that our community organization came up with “how wet will you get” you know, just really bringing it down to the individual level.

Greg Dalton: It needs to be personal. What’s that mean for me? Let’s go to our next audience question. Welcome to Climate One.

Female Participant: Thank you. Actually this is a good segue for my question about what we can do in terms of policy. So you have an Obama administration the idea that if a disaster strikes in order to be able to rebuild, I believe it was the executive order that you have to rebuild keeping the new levels of safety and demands in mind. And then of course recently our current president whose name I will not say is of the mind that we didn't need that anymore. And I wonder a few things. Do we even care about that you hear about things like the global parliament of cities. Are really cities and local communities gonna take this on and work these things out and sort of ignore what prevails at the global or larger levels and just solve things locally. And the other thing is is that do we have a right to sue? Do we have a right to make a legal stance against arbitrary, irrational decisions like the president made?

Greg Dalton: Who’d like to tackle that? Kiran Jain.

Kiran Jain: Sure absolutely. I think cities already are taking on that this global challenge at the local level, right. And I think the COP 21 the Paris Agreement was a great kind of watermark seeing all of these mayors from around the world come together and say we're going to tackle this at the city level. And you’ve now seen it with the change at the federal, you know, Jerry Brown, Governor Brown and Mayor Bloomberg were at COP 23 talking about the U.S.’s --

Greg Dalton: That’s the UN Climate Summit.

Kiran Jain: Exactly. Talking about how the U.S. was going to meet their climate obligations. So I think that cities have already in part of the conversation and will continue to be. And that again brings us back to 100 Resilient Cities, right. There's a scale at which I think we can make some real change and I really do believe it’s at the local level.

Greg Dalton: Will Travis.

Will Travis: California isn't taking a leadership role in climate necessarily because of good politics. It’s because it's good business. That’s what the difference is in California. There is no executive order that the president can write that requires us to be stupid and we choose not to be. California is making an awful lot of money out of climate change. We’ve realized in making business decisions that you can't ignore the reality. Climate always gets the back last, it’s better to have climate on our team than on the other team.

Greg Dalton: Let’s go to our next question. Welcome.

Female Participant: Hi, thank you. You mentioned how government approval is part of the process to get this resilient projects made. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the permitting process and how it is currently really difficult to restore wetland or raise a levy because all of the different permits that you need from state and federal agencies. And if you have any suggestions of how to streamline this permitting process to help these resilient designs actually be implemented in a timely manner.

Greg Dalton: Will Travis. Bureaucratic red tape is in the way of doing the kind of things we need to do.

Will Travis: Well, Winston Churchill said “Democracy is the worst form of government that there is, except for all the rest.” A benevolent dictatorship is very efficient so long as I’m the benevolent dictator. We have a complex process because it was set up to protect the environment the way it was. And I think here again we're going to have to change all these laws in some cases, what we’re trying to do is protect endangered species that are doomed by climate change, and needing a recognition that that's going to happen. How do we expedite changing and approving the sorts of things that will provide a resilient environment for those species that maybe aren't here now, but will be moving here.

Greg Dalton: We have to wrap up. I wanna ask starting with Kiran Jain, what gives you hope, you know, dealing with the sort of dark things all the time. How do you keep going and how do you talk to other people who don't like say, okay Kiran and see you coming kind of go the other way because.

[Laughter]

Kiran Jain: Bringing transparency and efficiency to a $3.8 trillion market to help make these projects a reality.

Greg Dalton: So you’re gonna fund the solutions. John Englander. What gives you hope and keep you going when you think we’re facing some long odds here?

John Englander: We don’t have a choice the sea is gonna rise the ice is gonna melt for quite a while. We should do the right thing to slow it, but the fact is, sooner or later we’re gonna wake up to the reality that the water is around our ankles and heading higher. And this isn’t an optional adaptation. We will figure this out. It's either gonna be done in chaos and catastrophic economic collapse or it’s gonna be done with good planning. And I just hope that the sooner we educate people that this is separate from the energy issue and separate from the other climate impacts, the sooner we’ll wake up and begin to rise with the tide.

Greg Dalton: Before we jump, I wanna ask John, you were evacuating with your family from Hurricane Irma barreling down on Florida and tell us about that road trip and who you are listening to.

John Englander: It’s really funny we drove about 200 miles north because we thought the storm was gonna hit us in south sort of where I lived. And I heard Climate One on the radio. It’s the first time I heard it on the radio on NPR. So that was great.

Greg Dalton: So you’re racing away from this extreme weather event listening to Climate One about more climate -- yeah. Love it. Okay. Will Travis, what keeps you going and gives you hope in talking to other people?

Will Travis: The most difficult job that planners, urban planners have isn't looking at the data and figuring out what to do. That's the easy part. The hardest thing is to look at something that's a problem now and it’s gonna be a crisis in the future and dragging that crisis back into the present and forcing elected officials to deal with it during their term of office. Climate change is a great story. You could drag that sucker back because it's big and flashing and we got a lot of help from some great journalists. That's who I think we should be celebrating.

Announcer: Greg Dalton has been talking about cities, sea level rise and coastlines on the move with John Englander, author of High Tide on Main Street: Rising Sea Level and the Coming Coastal Crisis. Kiran Jain, Chief Operating Officer of the startup Neighborly and former Chief Resilience Officer of the city of Oakland, California. And Will Travis, former executive director of the Bay Conservation and Development Commission, the California state agency responsible for land along San Francisco Bay.

To hear all our Climate One conversations, subscribe to our podcast at our website: climateone.org, where you’ll also find photos, video clips and more.

Please join us next time for another conversation about America’s energy, economy, and environment.

[Applause]

Greg Dalton: Climate One is a special project of The Commonwealth Club of California. Kelli Pennington directs our audience engagement. Carlos Manuel is the producer. The audio engineer is William Blum. Anny Celsi and Devon Strolovitch are the editors. I’m Greg Dalton the Executive Producer and Host. The Commonwealth Club CEO is Dr. Gloria Duffy.

Climate One is presented in association with KQED Public Radio.

Play

Deep Dive Into the Arctic

Otto Pilot — Fri, 27 Oct 2017 00:01:00 +0000

Deep Dive Into the Arctic

10/29/2017

Climate One goes to the front line of climate change - the high Arctic - to hear from the people there how their economies, communities and culture are changing due to global warming.

Nancy Karetak-Lindell, President, Inuit Circumpolar Council Canada
Catherine McKenna, Canada’s Minister for Climate Change
Pascal Lee, Planetary Scientist, NASA’s Mars Institute
Brendan Kelly, Former White House Scientific Advisor
Kuupik Kleist, Former Premier of Greenland
Danko Taboroši, Director Coral and Ice

This program was recorded during a Students on Ice trip to the Arctic in August of 2017.

Image courtsey: Martin Lipman, Students on Ice

Announcer: This is Climate One, changing the conversation about energy, economy and the environment.

On today’s program, we travel to the Canadian Arctic to hear from the people there how their economies, communities and culture are being affected by climate change.

Nancy Karetak-Lindell: Our lakes are thawing out sooner. We have the sea ice freezing later. We have someone like our elders who knew so much about the land. And because of climate change they no longer trust that knowledge. It's shaky.

Announcer: On the front line of climate change, the Inuit of the high Arctic – together with scientists, educators and policymakers – are fighting a battle for their homeland against a threat that ultimately connects us all.

Catherine McKenna: And we had an Inuit elder talking to a leader from a small island state. The Inuit elder said, “How sad is it that my homeland is melting and it's flooding yours.”

Announcer: Taking a deep dive in the Arctic. Up next on Climate One.

Greg Dalton: This is Climate One. I’m Greg Dalton. In 2007 I went to the Arctic on a Russian icebreaker to learn about global warming. That trip inspired me to found Climate One and now ten years later, I’m back in the Arctic to reconnect with the beauty and learn more about the top of the world. This time I’m traveling on a cruise ship with scientists, educators and and more than a hundred high school students from Canada, the United States, and other countries. The trip was organized by Students on Ice, a Canadian educational group dedicated to learning about the Arctic and the indigenous people who live there. They used to be called Eskimos, and now prefer to be called Inuit. Our group included many Inuit elders and students, offering me much more cultural contact than my first Arctic adventure.

Our journey began in earnest when our charter plane landed on a dirt runway about three hours north of Toronto. One of the first things I saw in the tiny airport terminal was an Australian cattle dog.

Pascal Lee: He’s our polar bear guard dog and it’s wise at a camp like this in the middle of nowhere in the Arctic to have more than just shotguns if there’s a polar bear incursion.

Greg Dalton: Pascal Lee is a planetary scientist with NASA’s Mars Institute in Silicon Valley.

Pascal Lee: First of all, the dog might detect the bear ahead of time from smelling it. And then it can actually intimidate a bear and, you know, make the bear go in circles rather than to attack and buy some time for example. But anyway, it’s still theory because King Kong has not met a polar bear yet but --

Greg Dalton: It makes you feel safer knowing he’s here.

Pascal Lee: But we all have this warm fuzzy feeling that he would be a help if there was a polar bear.

We come every summer to Devon Island in the high Arctic just east of Resolute Bay. Because it’s one of the most Mars-like places on earth. And the landscape looks like Mars, the climate is cold and dry, a bit like Mars. And when you visit Devon Island today, Devon being the largest uninhabited island on earth. When you visit Devon Island today you sort of catch a glimpse of what Mars was like earlier in its history when there was more ice at the surface, more water flowing. The canyons on Devon Island, the gullies that you’ve seen, the canyon walls, there’s even a giant meteorite crater that we go visit. All of these things make the place incredibly Mars-like.

Greg Dalton: How is climate change affecting Devon?

Pascal Lee: So climate change is affecting Devon in a significant way because there’s actually an ice cap on the eastern half of Devon Island. It used to cover the entire island but with glacial retreat over the past centuries, now half of Devon is exposed there’s no more ice on it. But the other half still has ice but it’s ice is receding quickly especially with global warming. When we explore Devon Island, we are still using some air photos that were taken from the sky in the 1950’s. And when we go to the same locations today where there was ice in the 1950’s there’s no more ice, there’s barren ground. So in just a few decades we’re seeing a significant change in the amount of ice free ground that is exposed now on Devon Island.

Catherine McKenna: For Inuit here, ice is life.

Greg Dalton: Catherine McKenna is Canada’s Minister of Environment and Climate Change. She was on the journey with her two daughters.

Catherine McKenna: Ice is how people connect to each other so if there's less the time in between, you know, seeing people is much longer but also ice is hunting, ice is relationships between elders and young people when they go on the land and hunt. Ice is dogs.

I remember one Inuit I met he was talking about a hunter in the village who went on the ice and was for, you know, for decades had been able to tell the thickness of the sea ice. But because of the changes wasn't able to do that and fell in. And, you know, think about that. So you lose a father, you lose an uncle, you lose someone who provides food for the family. You lose a connection to culture and history. And I think that other people telling those stories and, you know, if you're a farmer in Saskatchewan having a farmer in Saskatchewan talk about the changes that they're already seeing with droughts and floods and how that's impacting the crops that they can plant. I think that that's really important.

So what I try to do is I go seek out people who can tell or talk in a very real and compelling way about how climate change is really impacting their lives. Because I think that's the connection that you make. It’s great if that person is someone that you can directly relate to, but at least it's telling someone about a story and it’s direct and it’s immediate. Becuase we know climate change is real and it's having impacts, not just in the high Arctic. It’s having impacts across Canada we know that and across the world.

I also think there's also interesting, making the link between different places. So when I was at Cop22 this year in Morocco we had a reception. And we had an Inuit elder talking to a leader from a small island state. And there was just this one moment where the Inuit elder said, “How sad is it that my homeland is melting and it's flooding yours.” And that's reminding people that we’re all connected and that's why we all have to act on climate change. It's not this like well should we do our part because other people aren’t doing their part. We all have to do our part and we all have to step up. And, you know, we all have to lead and then we will all be able to make progress on a really challenging issue and we all know we have to be more ambitious but you got to start somewhere.

And that's why I think, you know, international negotiations are important. I think the Paris agreement is really important. But getting people to act locally to look at, you know, to demand net zero houses or better access to electric vehicle charging stations or public transit. I think that's all part of the puzzle.

Greg Dalton: I talked with one Inuit youth about oil extraction in the Arctic. The warming is making resources more accessible. Some people worry about a resource rush among the Arctic nations, Canada, Russia, U.S. What are your thoughts about the economic opportunity of oil extraction in the Arctic and yet moving toward carbon free economy?

Catherine McKenna: Well I mean we always say the environment and the economy go together. And I think they go together in a practical way in a real way in the sense that you can't just talk about the environment without thinking about the benefits that we all take out of it, and there's a value on that. There's a real economic value.

But there's also a practical way. When you talk to people who live in communities here often, you know, they're poor. They don't have a lot of opportunities and so they need to be part of that conversation about how or whether we develop. I think there are places that you should not have resource development. I think you need Marine conservation areas, you need protected areas. I think those are like extremely important. If there was a spill in a place like some of the places that we’re traveling through right now it would be absolutely devastating.

Greg Dalton: We were riding in a Zodiac yesterday along a glacier and it was interesting moment. There are 10 people in the Zodiac, people were very quiet. You were there with your daughter. I'm just curious what you were thinking about looking at that beauty of that glacier as we are riding in that Zodiac.

Catherine McKenna: I mean, I guess in my job I always think about the impact of my decisions and how do I in my small or big way, you know, try to make sure that that glacier is still there, you know, in decades, in centuries. And, you know, you can only do your part, but it is very real here. There's no abstracting that, you know, the decisions we make as a government will have an impact on what we care greatly about in our natural beauty. I also thought I'm responsible for parks and protected areas and really making sure that Canadians have an opportunity even if they can't come up here. It's a challenging place to get to; in fact you probably don't want everyone coming up here. But how do we show people these places because I don't know that Canadians understand how incredibly diverse and beautiful our country is. And I want -- luckily we have new technologies, you know, there are drones there are ways that you can actually create a virtual-reality experience. So even if you can't come up here you can see these places and you can feel the connection. Because I think people make decisions based on connections. You get the hard facts, but probably in the end when you're gonna make some decisions, you know, it’s gonna be because you care about your kids. Like I look at my daughter on the boat with me and I think like this, you know, decisions that I'm making it's about future generations more than anything else.

Announcer: That was Catherine McKenna, Canada’s Minister of Environment and Climate Change. We’ll hear more voices from the Arctic, right after this. This is Climate One.

Greg Dalton: Welcome back. I’m Greg Dalton, and on this special Climate One program we’re taking a deep dive into the Arctic, with some of the people that I met on my recent trip to the top of the world.

While many carbon-conscious people worry about the impacts of climate disruption on future generations, in the Arctic those impacts are being felt today. The Inuit and other indigenous people in the region live off the land and their humble lifestyles generate tiny carbon emissions. I asked one of the Inuit leaders how she felt about the fact that those who contributed least to the problem are being hit first and worst.

Nancy Karetak-Lindell: Well there has been many unfair things that have happened to us that we have had no control over and, you know, this is one of them too.

Greg Dalton: Nancy Karetak-Lindell was referring to colonization of the arctic by European and Canadian settlors. She was the first Inuit woman to be elected to Canada’s Parliament. She now is president of Inuit Circumpolar Council Canada, a nonprofit organization that represents approximately 160,000 Inuit of Alaska, Canada, Greenland, and Russia.

Nancy Karetak-Lindell: I think we are one of the most adaptable people in the world. We live in a land of extremes, extreme cold, extreme hardships. And so we have had to learn to be resilient and adaptable. But in this time where we are not isolated from the rest of the world anymore, when I grew up my community had no telephones we had no TV and we had no flights that people regularly got on to visit another community. I didn't leave my community until I was probably 13. And my life was just my community. That's all I knew.

And yet today, I can go on the Internet and show my mother all the different pictures people are posting on the Internet. She watches, love nature. She knows more about the jungles and the animals just from watching because she doesn't speak or read English. And so we’re now living in a world where we can see what's happening in the outside world. And then realize that our world has expanded beyond our communities. 25 communities in Nunavut and none of them are accessible by land. We have no roads going into the communities, we fly in, we fly out.

And we can get to each other by boat in the summer time. Our communities we can go by snowmobile but travel by air is the only way that we can travel commercially.

And so we realize now that what happens outside of our communities touches us in different ways. And unfortunately one of those is climate change, you know, the pollution that we see on TV, factories spewing smoke into the air, a mine somewhere where the effects of that.

Something happens in Russia, it goes up into the sky and falls down on our side.

Something that happens in a land thousands and thousands of miles away could be on the other side of the world from us does have an effect on my land, my water, the sea, the animals. And we need to bring that awareness to the world but we’re very small communities; some communities have 200 something, 300, 400 to 500. The bigger ones maybe a thousand people. My community has 2,500. We don't have the numbers to force the world to do something, but we can have a voice which was again something we didn't have in the past, either.

Greg Dalton: One thing we've heard on this trip is how people of the Pacific islands are suffering consequences of rising seas caused by melting in the North. And those are very different parts of the world. So I'm curious if you have any insights thinking about the connection between the melting in the north islands and the impacts on the Pacific islands. We have some people on this journey, who are from Micronesia, Palau, et cetera.

Nancy Karetak-Lindell: Yes, well I just saw a presentation on that and listening to someone from Micronesia talk about the locals there. They are so similar. They live off the land, they use their knowledge to try and combat some of the changes affecting their communities, which is exactly what we’re going through. And what we want is recognition that our indigenous knowledge has a role to play along with the scientific work that is being done. And I was told that when our glaciers melt and the sea level rises that those islands are going to be affected that they're going to be no longer an island, it could be I guess and that someone's home.

And that impacted me so much knowing that as much as I live in a land of ice and snow and live my life, there’s someone else in a very hot country feeling the same changes to their environment caused by something in my area.

So again I keep telling the students, awareness -- as someone said, educate yourself find out more. And I always say put a human face to the situation. You're going to meet people from this area. When you hear about the Arctic you're going to be able to visualize the people. And it's a lot harder to just disregard hearing something when you know the people and can picture their face and their families. And it becomes a human issue.

Greg Dalton: One thing that’s happening in your communities is there's a lot of challenges for youth, lots of challenges among the youth having depression even suicide. And climate change brings uncertainty and stress and worry about their future. How is that affecting our already difficult situation of youth despair?

Nancy Karetak-Lindell: I think it would be that there has been so much change in our lives. Inuit people lived for so many years in the same environment without changes, very minimal changes. And then in the last 50 to 60 years, we have seen tremendous change. And no society can go through that much change and not suffer social consequences.

And so, I tell people my history is right behind me. My father was a special constable with the Royal Canadian mountain police. And I'm not that old, but I remember feeding the dogs with him because that's how he patrolled. And we traveled by dog team. We had no telephones. We had no television.

So that's tremendous change. But that's not counting the changes that we've gone through as people. We had our own governance system. We had leaders, we had a way of seasonal living. We’re very seasonal people. We travel depending on the season and where. And we still do that to a certain extent. But now we live in communities and not everyone has a hunter in their family. We live within laws and a justice system that we’re still trying to adjust to.

And so climate is just one of those changes and it creates its own challenges. Our lakes are thawing out sooner. We have the sea ice freezing later. We have different species coming in. We have someone like our elders who knew so much about the land; how to predict the weather, what conditions they will see. And because of climate change they no longer trust that knowledge. Like everything they have been taught is now losing its foundation. It's shaky. Do I teach this to my grandchildren now, when it might not be relevant today? Because I could say this is how the weather's going to be tomorrow based on the clouds, the sun, you know, what I see in the sky. But they have to give a disclaimer now and say because the conditions are so different now I can tell you this is how it should be tomorrow. But I cannot say this is how it will be tomorrow.

So that changes people too. People who have been so grounded in their own knowledge all of a sudden their ground has shifted and they’re no longer quite sure what points of our knowledge do we pass on. We have to keep adapting to and making new knowledge to pass on because our foundation is changing too.

Greg Dalton: Nancy Keratak-Lindell is a former member of Canada’s parliament. She now is president of Inuit Circumpolar Council Canada.

We're listening to Celina Kaluk and other Inuit singers, performing at the community center in the village of Resolute, Canada.

As I traveled on a cruise ship around the arctic with scientists, educators and high school students, I kept hearing the phrase - What happens in the Arctic doesn’t stay in the Arctic. Brendan Kelly was a scientific advisor in the Obama White House and now is an Arctic expert with the Middlebury Institute of International Studies. He explained why people outside the Arctic should care about it, and what’s happening to science under the Trump administration.

Brendan Kelly: If you think of the Arctic Ocean as being ice covered for most of the year and it is this, it’s a continental sized mirror if you will, reflecting the sun’s energy back to space. So that's solar energy that’s not heating up the Arctic. But as we’ve warmed through our greenhouse gas emissions, the planet, we began to melt the ice and diminished the area covered by ice.

When you do that, you go from having this highly reflective mirror, snow and ice are among the most reflective natural materials on earth. So that area it starts being increasingly an open ocean and that actually absorbs the vast majority of solar energy. So you start warming up the Arctic Ocean. So you melt more ice, so you have less reflectivity. So you warm-up the ocean and you get the sort of runaway effect.

What is this have to do with people living in lower latitudes? Well, several things. I mean we’re beginning to have such a change in the Arctic Ocean that we’re changing oceanic currents. The distribution of heat around the planet is to a large degree driven by the circulation, oceanic circulation. And as we change the temperature and the salinity and density of Arctic sea water, the water that comes out through this portion of the Arctic we’re in right now, that Arctic water typically sinks into the less dense North Atlantic Ocean and really is from the engine if you will that drives the global ocean circulation pattern. So that's one way. But the other thing that is a hypothesis it's gaining good support is that we see a substantial change in atmospheric flow. So if you think of the warm upper atmosphere over mid-latitudes and the relatively cold upper atmosphere in the Arctic there's a differential, right. And air actually flows from this high warmer air in the mid-latitudes down to the coal error in the Arctic. And as it does so, Coriolis Effect spins that air and you end up with this rapidly moving West to East flow in the upper atmosphere. It’s called the jet stream, right.

But as we've shrunk sea ice in the Arctic now you've taken sort of the lid off the ocean and the ocean is in direct contact with the atmosphere. Heat is escaping from that ocean into that atmosphere. So we’re now warming the atmosphere in the Arctic as well. Hence, we’ve decreased the differential between the temperatures in the atmosphere of the mid-latitudes and the Arctic; that slows down that northward flow, ultimately slows down the jet stream. And the jet stream starts to like a slowly moving river begins to meander and it starts to have large waves in it. And those ripples to things like you get this big trough coming down along the East Coast of the United States and Canada and we end up pulling cold air out of the Arctic and having these severe winters with massive snowstorms that happened several years recently along the East Coast of North America. There’s some evidence that those changes in the jet stream have been blocking for a number of years Pacific flow into the West Coast of the United States. Hence, this six year drought we had in California.

You know, my colleagues who sort of advance this connection between sea ice loss, and extreme weather and mid-latitudes, you know, they've received some pushback by other colleagues who are more specialists on low latitude weather. They say, well, you know, there are all these other complicating factors.

So without going into all of the details this debate, right now my sense is that what those scientists are trying to work through is we see a very plausible mechanism by which loss of sea ice is changing, of course there are other influences. So it’s really a matter of trying to sort out the degree. But if you think about it, this is a fairly recent phenomenon. The model suggests this is a very plausible mechanism. But we don't have much of an observational record yet. We have just sort of changed to this new sort of normal if you will. So it’s gonna take a few years to really confirm or refute that hypothesis.

Greg Dalton: You worked on science policy in the Obama White House. A lot of your colleagues have left. Tell us what's happened to the brain trust of science inside the White House and the new administration.

Brendan Kelly: Well, so when I left there the office of science and technology policy which is headed up by the president’s science advisor had something like 130 people there. There's about 35 left and declining as we speak. There is no, the current administration has not appointed a new science advisor. And this is troubling because that office has a lot of influence on A, keeping the president apprised of the kind of current state of science and technology across many fields.

And, you know, there are a host of issues, climate change being one of them where it’s really the president has a lot of influence on how money gets spent, what our priorities are and research. So it's quite troubling. We’re still in touch those of us who worked on that issue and we’re, but we’re all working in different venues now and, you know, trying to see the things that were in our portfolio that were really important continue.

Greg Dalton: Brendan Kelly was a scientific advisor in the Obama White House and now is an Arctic expert with the Middlebury Institute of International Studies. It can be troubling watching the Trump administration dismantle scientific efforts to manage the risks of climate change. I asked Catherine McKenna, Canada’s Minister for Climate Change, how she views American obstruction to dealing with a problem that nearly every other country in the world has agreed to tackle.

Catherine McKenna: So I've always been an optimistic realist. So hard things are hard. So this is really hard but I think you only get to a good place if you bring people together. And I don't think you bring people together around despair. I do point out that, you know, you have specific climate events like in communities, people are seeing flooding, they’re seeing drought so it connects to them. Like they remember oh yes, that flood, that was terrible and very scary and worrying. And if we see more of those which we will they get that connection. But I think it's also the hopeful piece that we’re smart. Like we’re able to come to a very harsh country and survive and thrive. And so, let's just take that spirit and really figure out how we can make the right decisions, big decisions and small decisions, and all be part of it.

And I really have always said this that I am a minister of environment and climate change for environmentalists sure, but also for people who are in the energy sector. And we have to figure this out together. And I also am very aware that if I don't get it right, if I don't figure out how to bring people along. I won’t get reelected. And how does that help us, because, you know what you might get a party that doesn't care about climate change, God forbid they don’t believe it’s real. But I think in Canada luckily we’re in a pretty good spot. But we need to be mindful that this is about people and people are also just trying to get through the day. They're trying to get food on the table maybe take their kids to their activities after school. So they want to be part of this conversation. And Canadians actually really value the natural environment, but we need to make it so that they feel like they're empowered to make decisions. And just feeling like it's too big and you can’t make decisions and it’s not gonna matter is not gonna get us anywhere.

And so I will continue to push though. I know young people in particular will continue to push me which is great. You need to be held to account and you need to always be reminded that we need to be more ambitious. But I think that there's a way of going together. I was really proud when the Prime Minister was with the premieres from all the provinces and territories and indigenous leaders and stepping up and announcing our climate plan. That took a lot of work. That was like the post Paris work, you know, went to Paris got an ambitious agreement within Canada we’re resource-based economy still and everyone has to play a piece in it. The government of Alberta really stepped up; it was a new government put a hard cap on emissions from the oil sands a price on carbon, phasing out of coal. And that was really important because everyone, you know, that set the stage, you can’t have a climate plan without, you know, the province that has the largest emissions being part of it. And so we came together in Canada and I think we can do more and I'm gonna continue talking to everyone I can and cajoling people, pushing people, jamming people, encouraging people, being pushed myself to get to a better place.

Announcer: You’re listening to a special Climate One program from high in the Arctic. You can listen to all of our programs and subscribe to our podcast at our website: climate-one-dot-org. We’ll be back with more right after this.

Greg Dalton: This is Climate One, changing the conversation about energy, the economy and the environment. On the show today we are hearing conversations I recorded traveling around the Arctic on a ship with students and scientists.

The warming Arctic is an alarm bell for the rest of the world but it also does open up new economic opportunities in the region. More tourism, mining, oil drilling, and new shipping routes through the fabled Northwest Passage are enticing to people who would like to see more economic development and jobs.

Kuupik Kleist: I’m Kuupik Kleist, former premier of Greenland.

Greg Dalton: Kuupik Kleist now works as a consultant for the Inuit Circumpolar Council. His focus is developing and diversifying the Greenland economy to lessen its dependence on the fishing industry. I asked Kleist what the opening of the Northwest Passage could mean for Greenland’s economy.

Kuupik Kleist: I would say that we are not sure of the consequences yet. But we have seen some of the big shipbuilding nations actually building cargo ships suited for that kind of transportation. Whether it will in the end contribute to our economy that’s uncertain yet. But definitely sailing through Arctic water also holds some risks still because even the sea ice is disappearing. We have a lot of icebergs deriving from Arctic glaciers. And also in terms of what we are dealing with actually with the ICC commission on the North Water polynya is that it disturbs the wildlife. And also it disturbs the environment that the wildlife is dependent on. In terms of sea ice for instance, if icebreakers would break up the ice it will dramatically change the environment the different species that are living in.

And actually the North Water polynya is proved to be providing wildlife for not only the area but a big part of the Arctic seas actually. And it's the most productive polynya in the Arctic and by that the most important marine area. And for Inuit living on both sides, in Greenland and Northern Canada, I think it's fair to say that it's vital for the lives of the communities. It’s vital for the countries’ economies based on living resources. And also it holds, it bonds us together culturally and the ways that we are living.

Greg Dalton: One large cruise ship went through the Northwest Passage got lots of attention. Do you see the prospect for tourism, new docks, hotels, that kind of economy?

Kuupik Kleist: Actually that’s been one of the issues which caught a lot of interest to discuss during our communities consultations in the Northern Canadian villages, especially because of that cruise ship. What people said basically was in the small communities, when a ship that magnitude arrives with several hundred people maybe a thousand people and arriving to a village with maybe 100 people, they cannot cope with it.

Because those tourists are, even though officially they’re welcomed but what they do to small villages is that -- for instance one story was about they had this arrival and the tourists actually emptied the convenience store for the goods which they only get once a year. And after the summertime they were worried, how do we survive next winter if we don’t get new supplies for the convenience store. And also cruise ship tourists are those giving away the less money ‘cause they live on the ships, they sleep on the ships, they eat on the ships and don’t leave much money when they leave the villages. So on one hand there is a definitely there is a wish for developing tourism and generally in the Arctic. At the same time you need to be aware which kind of tourism that you are promoting. And maybe cruise ships is not the answer.

Greg Dalton: Yesterday we were in Ilulissat and that's a very active glacier and fjord that puts in a small amount of global sea level rise every year. But the Greenland ice sheet is very concerning to scientists. They’re not sure how fast it's melting and that's potentially a big ticking time bomb for the global civilizations.

Kuupik Kleist: Actually also yesterday we looked at the newest satellite images of the melting of the ice cap. And it proves that a much bigger part of the ice cap was actually melting away except for the core in the middle of the ice cap. It contributes, of course significantly to sea level rise, but for Greenland, I mean Greenland is a mountainous country; we all live like 100 feet above sea level. It wouldn't have that kind of serious consequences. But what it has done while retreat of glaciers is going on is that there is a new and stronger interest in searching for minerals on land in Greenland. And maybe also with it goes the disappearance of sea ice which means easier transportation. Transportation is a key issue. You can take out the minerals of the ground, but if you can't transport it to the markets, it gives no sense. So that goes together. But then again, the world market has been behaving negatively on mineral resources for the last decade prices have been going down. Now it seems there are more positive tendencies but so far in Greenland it has had no significant impact.

Greg Dalton: And how about the, I don’t know, the almost psychological aspect of this beautiful area of your country, you know, is melting and of deep concern. And yet you can’t control it but it’s happening in your backyard. And in some sense, the future of coastal communities around the world are connected to the melting that’s happening in your homeland.

Kuupik Kleist: It’s very visible. I mean, you can look out your window and see it’s really happening. I mean in comparison to the kind of hypothetical discussions we have around the world, is climate change going on or not. In Greenland there’s no question, it’s a fact that you can see with your bare eyes.

I was born and raised in this area. And some years ago, maybe 15 years ago when I, for the first time realized what was going on and I was an adolescent. Usually we would see the icebergs breaking from the glacier actually being higher than the small hills in the town. And you could see it from long distance. But suddenly that year I couldn’t see the icebergs anymore because they had grown smaller. And the ice cap has retreated like for more than 20 kilometers which means that when the ice breaks off the glacier, it’s falling on the ground. Before that it fell out to the sea so it was, it was not destroyed by breaking off. I must admit I was really shaky with that experience because to me those icebergs was like mountains. It’s always there, it will not disappear in front of your eyes. So psychologically I think in Greenland we’re all aware of what's happening. And also we are worried because it’s beyond our control. And it does things to the environment which we cannot predict and the weather conditions and being dependent on living resources. This is very serious.

And for instance, now we are in the northern part of Greenland where dog sledding or sleds dogs are allowed, it’s not allowed below 60 degrees. So what happened to the dog sleds is in comparison to how many dogs we had 20 years ago. Now it’s a half the number because the hunters cannot go dog sledding on the ice anymore. So you don’t need the dogs for fishing or hunting. So they get rid of them because otherwise they have to feed them and cannot afford that. So every aspect of society is impacted by climate change and it's really hard sometimes when you go to meetings internationally that you have to sometimes be involved in silly discussions on is climate change really going on. And I mean, to us, it seems most insulting and also a kind of waste of time, rather than discussing issues related to how to adapt to the new situation and how to protect the communities and the livelihoods of the Arctic Inuit despite the climate change.

Greg Dalton: Kuupik Kleist is a former premier of Greenland.

People from all over the world were along on the voyage, which gave us the opportunity to understand how climate change connects us all. Islands far away from the Arctic are impacted by what’s happening there. Danko Taboroši runs a program called Coral and Ice that connects the people of the Arctic with people in Micronesia. He brought three students from the Pacific Islands to see the melting Greenland Ice sheet that is contributing to the rising seas that are threatening their homes thousands of miles away.

Taboroši left war-torn Yugoslavia when he was a teenager. After studying in the United States and Japan he landed in Guam, and carries a deep empathy for displaced people.

Danko Taboroši: It really changed my life, you know, for many reasons. In Guam like everyone is different people from all over the U.S., all over Asia, all over the Pacific, lots of indigenous people lots of mixed people.

It was just such a kind of a treasure house of culture, human culture that just from there like my love for the world exploded. I wanted to see everybody I met, I wanted to see where they come from and that actually took me to Micronesia. And to this day like my life is connected with Micronesia. Pretty much everything I do professionally and also out of love I do a lot of projects with no funding and it's all related to Micronesia to the island's physical geography or human culture, languages, education, everything, yeah.

Greg Dalton: You felt like you lost a country, but you gained the world.

Danko Taboroši: You know, I think even as a child I was very curious about the world, you know, but I couldn't, I think we’re all are very much kind of trapped in the mental borders of our countries, you know, and the limitations of one single language or, you know, what you see around you. And I really don't think that I would've been, I think I would become some sort of citizen of the world no matter what. But totally losing a country just gave me no choice. I had to kind of go all the way. Yeah, I have a passport from that country but I really, it's not the same place.

I could have worked with students and has to bring people from, students from the former Yugoslavia. But that’s not what I worry, that’s not where my, you know, that’s where I’m from. And I love that region as well but like right now I don't think there is a place in the world that is more threatened than that, you know.

Like the Arctic is really severely challenged by climate change, but in Micronesia the land is literally being washed away underneath people's feet. And there is a lot of hope, you know, these are complex systems, these islands, the coral reefs are very complex. So it's not all black and white. It’s not certain of what’s going to happen. But it's clear that what is happening has never happened before in living memory. And I have seen way too many places where people will point on the reef or water and say like I was born like in that spot and there is no land there. And I want to help the young people in Micronesia connect with people who are going through similar climate change issues in their own communities, particularly in the Arctic. So as they’re growing up, they’re aware of each other, they’re in contact with each other. Someday they will be the governments of their respective territories or countries. And I hope that by giving them this opportunity while they're young, it will enable them to be much more powerful and their voice is stronger when they speak out together against the causes of anthropogenic climate change.

Greg Dalton: What's been their experience connecting with Island people up here?

Danko Taboroši: Each one of them have Inuit roommates. I think they are getting along very well. And they're seeing what I was seeing and that is really similarities in culture, you know, like these are young students. They’re not focused on one issue like the climate change. They’re looking at all sorts of things; everything they see here is new. And it's interesting that they're pointing out like even something as exotic to them as a seal.

You know, and like seal meat hunting for seals actually has an like equivalent like, whoa, that’s just like our sea turtles. You know, they’re endangered but we still love them, we still eat them, they’re part of our culture and we know how to sustainably manage the fishery, the resources and it's similar. So I wanna say basically that in every thing they see here. I think they’re enjoying and seeing something new. And they’re subconsciously or consciously connecting in with something they know from home.

Greg Dalton: Throughout this program, we’ve been listening to the music of Ian Tamblyn and sounds from the Arctic recorded by participants of the Students on Ice expedition. Photos of our arctic journey are on the Climate One facebook page.

Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.

Play

REWIND: Sea Heroes: Extreme Edition

Otto Pilot — Thu, 14 Jul 2016 00:01:00 +0000

REWIND: Sea Heroes: Extreme Edition

04/16/2017

Our planet’s oceans drive our weather and generate much of our oxygen -- and they’re being severely impacted by climate change. What can be done about it?

Liz Taylor, President, DOER Marine
Peter Willcox, Captain, Rainbow Warrior, author, Greenpeace Captain: My Adventures in Protecting the Future of Our Planet (Thomas Dunne Books, 2016)
Stiv Wilson, Director of Campaigns, Story of Stuff

This program was recorded in front of a live audience at the Commonwealth Club of California on May 12, 2016

Guests

Liz Taylor

President, DOER Marine

Peter Willcox

Captain, Rainbow Warrior

Stiv Wilson

Director of Campaigns, Story of Stuff

Greg Dalton: From the Commonwealth Club of California, I'm Greg Dalton. Today we’re going to sea with three people who have spent their lives exploring and protecting the world's oceans. The seas generate much of the oxygen we breathe and drive much of the weather we think about when we get dressed every day. But most people know very little about the ocean below the surface and how it's related to climate change. In the next hour, we’ll explore how global warming is impacting the ocean and what you can do about it. We’ll also hear tales of drama and intrigue and violence on the high seas, as well as positive stories about marine ecosystems coming back to life.

Leading us on this journey are three salty veterans of the sea. Liz Taylor is president of DOER Marine, an Alameda based company that builds robots and other vehicles for deep-sea exploration. She grew up learning about the sea with her mother, the legendary ocean explorer Sylvia Earle. Peter Willcox is the former captain of the iconic Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior that was sunk by French government agents in 1985. He’s the author of the new autobiography Greenpeace Captain: My Adventures in Protecting the Future of Our Planet. Stiv Wilson is Director of Campaigns at the Story of Stuff, an education and advocacy group based in Berkeley. He sailed over 35,000 nautical miles to four of the big garbage patches in the ocean and lives on a sailboat in the Bay Area. This program is underwritten generously by the Bernard Osher Foundation. Please welcome them to Climate One.

[Applause]

Liz Taylor, let's talk, begin with you and tell us about Hydrolab; it was one of your first experiences in sort of this underwater world.

Liz Taylor: So Hydrolab was a subsea habitat. Very basic basically like underwater camping and a team of aquanauts and mixed team was down about 50, 60 feet in the Bahamas. And my job as a kid maybe 10, 11 years old was to man the radio overnight, make sure that everybody was still breathing. And be ready to alert the surface team of anything went amuck and then during the day to take supplies down to the Hydro Lab. And so it took some ice cream we watched Boyles’ law in action when there is only half-full at the bottom, things of that nature. Didn't smuggle any rum down to them even though they asked but it was great.

Greg Dalton: And so that turned you on to sort of a life of the sea or did you have any choice maybe it was for –

Liz Taylor: Well I was kind of thrown in early on but to breathe normally underwater worked out alright. But what is interesting I mean just spending a few weeks there traveling down every day began to recognize the fishes as individuals. There was a barracuda that was always there underneath the surface barge and just very big curious animal, bigger than I was but not aggressive at all, he just checked everything out, kind of like the resident watchdog.

Greg Dalton: Fabulous. Peter Willcox, you started sailing at six months old which just terrifies me as a parent. But tell us how you started came from a sailing family, six months old.

Peter Willcox: I did, my grandparents were sailors my father is still a sailor today. And I caught the bug at an early age it's something I've always enjoyed doing. Last year I sailed 18,000 miles and I came home and I went sailing. That and sailing for a reason, is what makes it so rewarding.

Greg Dalton: And we’ll get to some of your stories. Stiv Wilson, you were a surfer and had a seminal moment where you realized that you wanted to focus on oceans and on advocacy way. So tell us about that moment when you were surfing.

Stiv Wilson: Yeah, I actually started surfing when I was 30 years old on the Oregon coast. It was very pristine and beautiful place. The Oregon coast is very remote comparatively to California and it was just primeval wood you can’t see a human made object from the lineup. And I came in, my dog was running on the beach and he seemed distressed and I thought he might've lost his tennis ball. And I was sort of looking around and then I noticed just tons and tons of plastic on the beach and what assailed my senses was the aesthetic incongruity to the natural order there. Not necessarily the environmental implications, but that put me on this journey of working on plastics issues in the ocean for the rest my life.

Greg Dalton: We’ll get into some of that plastics and exploration and ocean stewardship. Peter Willcox, take us to the Rainbow Warrior in 1985; you’re in Auckland and you woke up. So tell us what happened then.

Peter Willcox: Well, 1985 was our year of protesting nuclear testing in the Pacific. We had just come from the Marshall Islands where we had relocated a group of Marshallese people that have been used by the U.S. Military purposely as guinea pigs to test the effects of radioactive fallout. And over the years that generation from 1955 when the first hydrogen or the biggest hydrogen bomb the 20 megaton Bravo shot was launched until 1980, which is when they started appealing to a way they’ve had increasingly poor health, especially in women's reproductive health issues where many women had 6, 7, 8 miscarriages.

They had jellyfish babies, which is just what it sounds like. And after as I said, a generation of this they appealed to the U.S. and the Marshall's government to move them. They said no. So five years later when we came with the Rainbow Warrior we did move them about 150 miles away. After that we went down to New Zealand to resupply for a trip out to the Polynesia where the French had been testing nuclear weapons for many years. The French were worried about this and so they sent a team of soldiers, espionage people, whatever you want to call them to New Zealand. They sailed in with some explosives, one night about the fourth night after we were in they took us two of them took two of the divers went across the harbor, tied up on the pier across from us, dove underwater planted the bombs, swam back and went back across the harbor.

The people from across the harbor saw them come in throw the outboard engine over the side. Drag the boat at the beach and leave it there halfway up and then jumped into a waiting camper van. And they thought, oh some kids have stolen the boat again so they wrote down the number. About two hours later, on board the Rainbow Warrior the boat shook fantastically. I was asleep in bed. I thought initially that we had been involved with a collision with another ship at sea. When I looked out, the lights, the port hole in my cabin to the dock I could tell that we were safely tied to the dock. But the sounds weren't right, so I got up. About 40 seconds after the bomb went off I'd made it 20, 30 feet back to the engine room door and the boat was already almost completely flooded. The water level was 2 feet below our feet where at normally should have been 15 or 16 feet and you couldn't see it. So my first thought was to go back to the after accommodations where people were rising.

The first bomb went off about a minute later. The second bomb went off and it had given our photographer Fernando Pereira just enough time to go to his cabin. And the second bomb was directly underneath his cabin. It racked the door and he drowned in his cabin. I got off on the dock and there was not anything we could do. There was tons of diesel fuel floating on the surface. We were questioned by the police most of the night, they were furious at first it was only the second act of political terrorism in New Zealand history. Going to New Zealand for us at the time in 1985 felt a bit like coming home because they were about to become a nuclear free zone and we felt so welcomed there and relaxed.

What happened then was the two French agents who were masquerading as Swiss tourists, the next day about 36 hours after the boat had been bombed returned the camper van to the airport, asking for a refund for a day’s rental because they had to fly home early because her uncle was sick in Switzerland. Well there's a big note under the counter. They were detained by police, interrogated and put in a hotel room that night and said “Look we’re sorry we’ll take you to the airport in the morning. Please feel free to order room service, use the phone, do whatever you want just please don't leave the hotel room.” So the agents immediately got on the telephone to Paris DSEG headquarters and said “We blew up the boat it all went cool but we’ve been detained but we’ll be home tomorrow.” The New Zealand police recorded the whole thing. Two days later they were arraigned and about a month later they copped a plea to second-degree murder. Obviously losing a shipmate is about as bad a thing that can happen on a ship; it’s the Captain’s first priority to keep his crew safe.

And it was a bad day, but all of us on the boat felt in some weird way that if we had scared the government of a first world superpower so badly they would set out to kill us, that we must be doing something right. And myself and another crew member sailed out to Moruroa a couple months later on the Greenpeace sailboat that had been out there many times. We sailed across the 12 mile limit when the French announced that they were going to do a very small insignificant nuclear test. We’re arrested and deported banned for life from French Polynesia. Eventually a couple years later the French were forced because they wanted their agents back from New Zealand to arbitrate with Greenpeace and paid us quite a bit of money. But they have never apologized either to us or the Pereira family.

Greg Dalton: One of the agents expressed remorse that he was involved in it?

Peter Willcox: He absolutely did, and I think that was a courageous move on his part. I appreciate his sincerity. I have no doubt the Pereira family has not accepted his apology and I don't think it's a matter that for me to say yes or no. They feel it's too little too late, that France or he had a responsibility to say something 35 years ago and this happened 30 years ago.

Greg Dalton: Is there any indication or evidence how far this went in the French government?

Peter Willcox: Yes, absolutely. We learned 20 years after the bombing that it had been approved by President Mitterrand. It had come right from the top.

Greg Dalton: We’re talking about sea adventures at Climate One. And that was Peter Willcox, former captain of the Rainbow Warrior.

Peter Willcox: I’m sorry; I’m still Captain of the Rainbow Warrior.

[Laughter]

Greg Dalton: Still captain, there you go. And there’s Rainbow Warriors 1, 2 and 3. So you’re now captain of the number 3 which is looks fantastic.

Peter Willcox: Thank you. It’s just a funny issue because I've been introduced for 20 years as the former captain of the Rainbow Warrior. And I don't know how it happened but here I still am.

Greg Dalton: People think that it sunk and there’s two other ships after in that.

Greg Dalton: Liz Taylor, tell us what you're seeing below the sea in the oceans about climate impacts. How is climate change changing the oceans?

Liz Taylor: Well, we’re seeing a lot of it happen in terms of the just the ocean temperatures. We’re looking at this great bleaching that's going on in the Great Barrier Reef right now. It’s just devastating about 90% gone of the Great Barrier Reef. It's shocking.

Greg Dalton: Can it come back?

Liz Taylor: There's hope that parts of it can come back. It depends on how long the surface temperature is sustained at a high rate. With the remotely operated vehicles and human occupied vehicles that we are developing, we’re able to go down into deeper water and see if some of these corals are coming back. Were they more resilient where the water is cooler instead of just being at the surface? There's some discussion about transplanting corals from deeper water back into shallower water as temperatures cool. We’re trying to collect them, and then to rear them in captivity in the same way that some other endangered species have been saved. Now we are looking at being able to do that for corals. But it’s quite shocking to see these sudden changes happening just, you know, we’re all witnesses to it.

Peter Willcox: I would like to add to Liz’s story that we were down on the Great Barrier Reef three years ago and got a chance to talk to the scientists from Townsville who know coral. They were hypothesizing that was then 15 to 20 years the waters would be too warm and acidic to support coral growth.

And here we are three years later, with major sections of the reef gone and that's the one constant that’s in climate change is that you make a prediction, two or three years later you can tear it up and start all over again.

Greg Dalton: It's happening faster. Why is coral so important as the base of the food chain? And why is that so important, Liz Taylor?

Liz Taylor: Well, it’s I mean well the plankton is really the base of the food chain but the coral contribute to that when they spawn all their little corallettes are water born into the into the planktonic soup that’s there. But beyond that they are very important barrier to storm damage and they’re one of the first lines of defense that we have. So we have all this goes to development most of the population lives in 50 miles of the coast around the world. And so if we’re tearing down things like mangroves and coral reefs are dying that just opens the door for these huge storm surges to race in much further in than they would have in the past. So the coral reef helps to calm the storm conditions ahead of them reaching the shore and so they're very critical for that reason. And just the myriad of fish that they support, all kind of different fishes there.

Greg Dalton: And lots of people subsist on – farmers rely on that fish. So it gets to people pretty quickly. Stiv Wilson, what does an average American and their lifestyle what are some of the most impactful things that we do as consumers that get to the oceans?

Stiv Wilson: You know, really I work on plastics in the ocean because I like to think of it as the visual evidence of climate change. About 10% of petroleum products go to the production of plastics. Interestingly with coral, coral is filter feeders and fibers from synthetic clothing that come off in the washing machine. About every load of laundry about 1,900 fibers going out into the ocean. Ultimately coral is choking on this too so they’re kind of getting a one-two punch from acidification and synthetics.

And the footprint of plastics per capita in the United States is about 326 pounds of plastic per person per year, 50% of which is single-use plastics. So if you want to talk about the most impactful not only problem but also empowering device is getting out of single use plastics. You can literally reduce 50% of your footprint overnight.

Greg Dalton: And we've heard about bag bans, plastic bag bans. I heard from you the first time about straw bans. So why are plastic straws, tell us the scale and scope of plastic straws and what's being done about it.

Stiv Wilson: Well, San Francisco is sort of leading the way. There may be a measure introduced to ban them. We as Americans use 500 million of them a day. There’s 308 million people in the country. So I don't know if you've had your quota of 1-1/2 straws today, but that's about how many we use.

Greg Dalton: And why do bars like them so much?

Stiv Wilson: Well there's been some research to determine that if you drink your dark and stormy which is my drink of choice, that you’re going to drink two of them if you have a straw rather than just one.

Greg Dalton: Peter Willcox, we’re talking about, you know, banning things and Greenpeace is, environmentalists are often thought about stopping things. Stop bags, stop straws, is that really gonna be effective or is that just kind of a game of whack a mole?

Peter Willcox: Oh geez, I don’t know. You know, listening to these folks to my right. I'm aware that as people on the planet we don't take good care of the oceans. We don't pay the first attention to them. A farmer living at home would never treat his farm the way we treat the oceans.

We constantly overfish, we constantly fish a species to decimation and then we move on to the next one. And Greenpeace believes that the oceans are a resource that need to be shared by everybody and can produce a lot of food for everybody. But when we overfish a species into extinction, we’re destroying the resource. And we’ve done this over and over and over again. Most recently we have wiped out the tuna by three quarters of their normal population. And that's not the way to get the most food out of the ocean. But there's no regulations on the high seas and that's something we desperately need to change.

Greg Dalton: Liz Taylor, is sustainable aquaculture or farming what’s the way to do it right in terms of to utilize the oceans bounty for humans without overdoing it?

Liz Taylor: Well, first of all we need to stop treating the ocean as a supermarket and a sewer at the same time; that’s kind of fundamental. But beyond that, it's really looking at do we want to continue this kind of trade in global wildlife. You know, we’re shipping fish all around the world. We have tuna that are caught off the coast here or caught elsewhere and they’re shipped overnight to a fish market in Japan. That’s a huge carbon footprint. It seems a more logical way to fish locally, fish with artisanal methods of hook and line and not have these massive commercial trawling operations going on. The McDonald's filet o’ fish sandwich supports the largest trawler a ship more than 400 feet long in the Bering Sea. That just takes metric tons of pollock out of the environment and, you know, how does that affect the other animals that rely upon that food source?

Greg Dalton: I've read that even there is fish caught off the coast of the United Kingdom, sent to China for processing and then back to the UK for fish and chips. So that, yeah –

Liz Taylor: Right. So I mean the answer is to know where your fish comes from. Know your fishmonger, make sure that the methodology used is as low-impact as possible.

And for the farm fish, you know, maybe bring it onshore in these closed systems. Don't discharge things directly into the ocean or feeding antibiotics to fish that are penned in the ocean. You could be doing it onshore.

Greg Dalton: Peter Willcox, do you eat fish?

Peter Willcox: I do more and more reluctantly every, all the time. I haven't eaten meat for 40 years because I read how President Reagan was signing a special bill every year, allowing beef farmers to use steroids and hormones to grow their beef. Yet he was serving organic beef at the White House so he knew better. That made me so mad I gave up on meat. And now I listen to these folks and I realized that even wild caught fish contain a high number amount of plastics. I don't know how much longer I will.

Greg Dalton: There is even a report recently about cocaine found in salmon off the coast of Seattle.

Peter Willcox: Yeah, the NPR report.

Greg Dalton: Stiv Wilson, what did you think about when you heard that story?

Stiv Wilson: Well, I was wondering how they get up these very rough streams to spawn and now it seems to make sense.

[Laughter]

Greg Dalton: And how about your personal diet?

Stiv Wilson: I don't eat fish and that largely comes from, you know, when you’re sailing across an ocean you often just have a line dragging, you know, you can catch a Dorado or a tuna and, you know, we would get to these very remote places in the South Pacific with these reef systems and there’d be no fish. And there’d be tons of plastic on the beach but no fish. And it just – and there is one atoll in the South Pacific called Henderson which is actually where Herman Melville got the idea for Moby Dick from chasing a whale there. And I, you know, swimming to shore I was like this should be Shangri-La. This should be the Jacques Cousteau video that I saw when I was kid and there was nothing there.

Greg Dalton: We’re talking about ocean conservation and exploration and age of climate change at Climate One. We’re talking with Peter Willcox, Captain of the Rainbow Warrior Greenpeace ship. Liz Taylor, who is an explorer based in Alameda and Stiv Wilson, who’s a plastics expert.

I want to go to our speed round, lightning round and ask a couple some quick questions of each of our guests today at Climate One. Stiv Wilson, bans on plastic bags are feel-good measures that don't address bigger threats to the ocean?

Stiv Wilson: False.

Greg Dalton: Liz Taylor, most you do work with industry and we’ll get into that in a minute. Liz Taylor, most offshore oil wells are operated safely and responsibly?

Liz Taylor: Maybe.

Greg Dalton: We’ll get to Peter Willcox’s vacation in Russia. Peter Willcox, is the food in the Russian jails better or worse than the food in American jails?

Peter Willcox: Fortunately, I don’t know. I haven’t been in that many American jails.

[Laughter]

Greg Dalton: Maybe some of your Greenpeace colleagues here in the audience have. Peter Willcox, is Siberia a good place for a vacation?

Peter Willcox: I wasn't in Siberia, I was in Murmansk which is the only ice free port Russia has on the northern shore and I was in St. Petersburg.

Greg Dalton: Okay and so we’ll get to that story. This is a quick word association. If I mention a word, just what pops into your mind first. Don’t need to explain it; just the association is what we’re looking for. Peter Willcox, sea world.

Peter Willcox: Orcas.

Greg Dalton: Liz Taylor, the actress Liz Taylor.

Liz Taylor: Still alive.

[Laughter]

Greg Dalton: Peter Willcox, the ocean protection group Sea Shepherd.

Peter Willcox: Good group. I don’t appreciate their sometimes use of violence.

Greg Dalton: Stiv Wilson, the proposed new coal terminal in Oakland.

Stiv Wilson: Bad.

[Laughter]

[Applause]

Greg Dalton: Peter Willcox, Bluefin tuna.

Peter Willcox: Threatened in their existence.

Greg Dalton: Liz Taylor, the U.S. Navy.

Liz Taylor: They’d like a better white front door.

Greg Dalton: Peter Willcox, French food.

Peter Willcox: Excellent.

Greg Dalton: French agents.

Peter Willcox: Not so smart.

Greg Dalton: Okay. That ends our lighting round. How they do, I think they did pretty well. Let’s give them a –

[Applause]

– round for getting through the –

Greg Dalton: Who are some of your sea heroes? Liz Taylor, who are adventurers that you look to, people that are protecting and stewarding the oceans?

Liz Taylor: Well, increasingly I think we’re seeing real heroism from citizen scientists, people that are every day trying to go out and make positive change. Whether they’re staging a beach cleanup or there’s a sailor that's looking for ghost fishing gear or they're contributing to the different NGOs and trying to keep them going and just making good personal choices, educating themselves.

Greg Dalton: And what are some technologies that are enabling them to do that?

Liz Taylor: Well, certainly we’re seeing the Internet is a huge thing. You know, we worked at DOER Marine we worked for three years with Google on the Google ocean layer in Google Earth. We converted it from being Google dirt to being Google Ocean, the whole thing.

Greg Dalton: Initially, it just had lands not the ocean, okay.

Liz Taylor: Exactly, the ocean was left out in the beginning. But we work to them and with the U.S. Navy so it’s kind of a three-way team with a cooperative research and development agreement. And we brought in partners from around the world to add their content into that platform. And I think it's something that will continue to grow that will have the ability for more people to add their adventures, their observations and has its big searchable encyclopedia for the world be very powerful.

Greg Dalton: For a part of the world that’s kind of off the radar for most people they don't go there. Stiv Wilson, sea heroes who are your ocean adventure protection heroes?

Stiv Wilson: Well when I was – I mean Jacques Cousteau is that's what really opened my brain to this whole other world that ultimately comprises 70% of planet Earth. And it’s funny my girlfriend is actually knitting me six red caps that Jacques Cousteau so there will be a requirement on my sailboat that going in and out of port that everybody will have to wear a red Jacques Cousteau cap.

Greg Dalton: Nice homage to the King. Peter Willcox, heroes.

Peter Willcox: Well there’s a French yachtsman named Eric Tabarly who over and over again just did extraordinary things with sailboats. And he's always somebody I have looked up to.

Greg Dalton: Cuba recently opened up, is opening up more so and Liz Taylor, Cuba is one of the few places hasn't been trampled by tourism, et cetera. I’d like to hear from any of you if that's a place for exciting undersea exploration. There's some sea life there that might be less touched by humans than elsewhere in the world.

Liz Taylor: Well, a lot of people are looking to Cuba to see what’s going happen. There's a lot of concern about the opening of the cruise ship industry in there and what’s going to happen with discharge from these large vessels. It’s very, very pristine at the moment and will they have the wisdom and the courage to sustain it in a pristine state or will they just capitulate to capitalism. So it does represent an opportunity for again, to serve a nursery opportunity for corals that have been decimated elsewhere through the Caribbean. And I think it represents the opportunities for sustainable tourism with just really eco-innovation if you will looking for new ways we can enjoy these environments without large footprints. So whether it's highly regulated diving whether it's diving with small submersibles so we’re standing off the reef but we’re able to spend more time at depth; there’s a variety of ways it could be done.

Greg Dalton: Peter Willcox, marine protected areas are one of the positive stories in the ocean. There are basically national parks in the oceans and some of the people would say that they've actually come back some of those areas signed into law by George W. Bush. Do you see that as one of the bright hopes in the ocean, we can set some areas off-limits and maybe they’ll come back?

Peter Willcox: Well we have to respect the ocean, that's a start. And Marine protected areas are an excellent way to do it. We haven't nearly done enough. We’re still decimating the life in the oceans by overfishing. Everything else we do our activities are not congruent with protecting the ocean. Marine protected areas are a good way to start, but we haven't done nearly enough of them.

Greg Dalton: Liz Taylor, marine protected areas?

Liz Taylor: Well like you’re saying we really need to do a lot more. One of the goals is the loftier goals is 20% by 2020 for ocean protection. But, you know, we see marine protected areas and we have a lot of them right along our own coasts here the marine sanctuaries, Cordell Banks, Gulf of the Farallones. And yet fishing is still allowed in those areas to some extent. So we really need areas where these animals can just be left alone and there’ll be plenty of fishing outside the boundaries but we need to spend more time in the ocean directly observing to understand where the real key areas are for breeding, for resting. Somewhat what Ducks Unlimited did on the land where they went out they observed, this is where the ducks are breeding we need to protect these areas, and yet a hunter can still go out and take a few ducks but we don't have commercial duck hunting anymore.

Greg Dalton: Stiv Wilson, you’ve been out to the plastic gyres, these garbage patches. Can they come back to life? You’re a plastics expert.

Stiv Wilson: Yeah, I mean this will astonish you, but people talk about the garbage patches as being the final resting place. The plastic will never escape there and it's there in perpetuity. The good news is actually when these gyres rotate, takes the North Pacific gyre takes about three years to rotate, spits out about 50% of its contents. That’s either gonna enter another gyre or wash up on land. So I mean hopefully what I say is beach cleanup is gyre cleanup. If you're capturing that stuff before a surge or a storm puts it back in the ocean, you have effectively clean the ocean. So the key is we need to stop it going in. I mean the first thing you do when a bathtub is overflowing is you turn off the faucet. And that's what we need to do is turn off the spigot and then the ocean will take care of itself. The best thing to do for the ocean, it seems, is to leave it alone and it'll figure itself out.

Greg Dalton: Nature's okay without us. Talk about the microbeads story.

Stiv Wilson: Yeah, so I had spent all this time at sea looking at plastics and I'm originally from Minnesota and I grew up sailing we have 10,000 lakes there. But I wasn't a salty dog as you say; at that point I was a fresh dog I guess. But after doing all this, you know, adventure around the world what I realized is, you know, very few people actually have a connection an emotional connection to the middle of the ocean.

And so, you know, bringing it back to my boy Jacques Cousteau he said, you know, we protect what we love. So I said let's look at the Great Lakes. Let's see if we find plastics in the Great Lakes. And we found really big concentrations of them. Hitched a ride on a tall ship out of Erie, Pennsylvania it was a replica of a war of 1812 brig, it was actually pretty funny. We were literally hitching a ride and I would ask the captain if I could throw the trawl in, he’s like oh, we’re just actually about to be in a battle reenactment. And I was like, that's why you’re dressed funny. So but we did find these really high concentrations of these plastic beads that were traced back to personal care products, scrubs and toothpaste. And that said, I started a campaign about 3 1/2 years ago to get rid of them and happy to say, through both California State legislation which gave us the leverage for a federal legislation. Obama signed my bill at the end of 2015 and we have effectively eliminated them from commerce in the Western world.

[Applause]

[CLIMATE ONE MINUTE]

Announcer: And now, here’s a Climate One Minute.

There’s a growing amount of plastic choking our oceans – and yet, we keep making more. Adam Lowry of Method Products says our planet already has all the plastic it needs. His company harvests the plastic from oceans and beaches and recycles it into bottles for its cleaning products.

Adam Lowry: Now, the reason we've done this product is really to raise awareness. We’re not trying to solve the ocean plastic problem by taking plastic out of the oceans and making bottles out of it, but by doing that we’re demonstrating that what people say is impossible actually is possible. And I believe taking sort of the first most important step towards addressing the ocean plastic pollution problem.

We gather the plastic for our ocean plastic bottle on the beaches of Hawaii because, it's sort of horrifying, but the beaches of Hawaii actually act as a natural sieve, and they collect the types of plastic that we can use to put back into a recyclable bottle. But like I said, this is really done to raise awareness about the fact that we should use the plastic that's already on the planet. As consumers, we should demand products that come from recycled plastics because it's a solution we have today that works and, combined with other things, it's a solution that I believe is not utilized enough.

Announcer: That’s Adam Lowry, co-founder of Method Products, speaking at Climate One in 2014. Now, let’s join Greg Dalton and our live audience at the Commonwealth Club.

[END CLIMATE ONE MINUTE]

Greg Dalton: We’re talking about the oceans and plastics and climate change at Climate One. That’s Stiv Wilson, director of campaigns at the Story of Stuff and a sailor. Also today here with Peter Willcox, Captain of the Rainbow Warrior for Greenpeace and Liz Taylor, who's directs a company that explores the deep ocean.

Peter Willcox, let’s go back to your Arctic vacation. You were on the Arctic Sunrise in 2013 going out in the Barents Sea after Gazrprom which is a large Russian gas company. Tell us that story.

Peter Willcox: Yeah, as Siberian oil fields wind down Russia is very interested in maintaining its petroleum exports, which is a huge their biggest export. So they opened up oil drilling in the Arctic Ocean. Now the Russian oil industry as a rule, and this is something that shocked me, spills five times what BP spilled in the Gulf every year just as a way of doing business. They do not have a good track record. You could say that they’re about the farthest thing from it. Combine that with what scientists are telling us that we need to leave fossil fuels in the ground if we’re going to do any mitigating of climate change. And I think you'll agree that the idea of the Russians drilling for oil in the most hazardous marine environment possible is not a good idea.

We had gone up in 2012 and planted a banner on the rig taking pictures and come away and it was no big deal. When we went back in 2013 they immediately started shooting machine guns at us, not at us but in the water. We have videos of machine gun bullets landing 3, 4 feet away from our inflatable. The Russian Coast Guard guys came up in their rubber boats and start slashing ours with knives and they, we got two climbers up the side of this really massive rig. I mean, this rig goes up about 100 feet above the water and its solid steel on all sides because they need to protect the pipes and the drilling equipment from the ice. And these steel walls go right down to the ocean floor, which at that point is about 120 feet deep, and then most of it is filled up with stones to make it just as strong as possible against the ice. But we put a couple climbers up there and the Coast Guard guys started pulling them way away from the rig and smashing them back into it in a real, real dangerous situation. So they came down and we’re arrested and we spent about the next 36 hours having face-offs with the Russians who wanted us to leave.

We didn't want to leave; this rig is in international waters. Now it's inside the Russian EEZ; they have every right internationally to drill for oil in that place. What they're doing wasn't illegal; it was just in our opinion, not very well guided. 36 hours after we did the operation they flew over us with a helicopter, spetsnaz, special forces sailed down onto the deck. The Russian spetsnaz guys don't wear any insignia they wear balaclavas and they’re a little scary at first. They rounded all the crew up and pushed the crew onto a couple cabin, searched them, searched all the cabins, stole everybody's liquor and immediately got wildly hammered that night so we had a dozen spetsnaz guys running around drunk as skunks, while we were supposedly being arrested. The next morning they start, they towed us the four-day tow to Murmansk. And up to that point it all fell pretty much like another day at the office. We’ve been arrested before we’ve had this before it just felt to me very déjà vu. We got into Murmansk and the first surprise was an embassy everybody's embassy officials came out. The American one came into my cabin and said, oh I think you guys are in trouble and I said, nah, I ain’t worried about it. He said, I hope you're right. And he left a few minutes later the soldiers told us that we're going to go into shore for a couple hours. Maybe we should bring a toothbrush with us, that's all we have to bring. So we went into the investigator's office and the first thing they told us was we’re getting done for piracy, which in Russia is 10 to 15 years in jail.

Now the way the Russian judicial system works is that once you’re put in detention there is a 99.99% chance you'll be found guilty at trial. The trial’s pretty much of a rubberstamp just to finish off your detention before you start your prison sentence. (0:49:11)

So them telling us that we were going to be spending 10 to 15 years in Russia and we better start studying Russian because we need it when we got to the work camps, it was not very reassuring. And it was a month before I was able to meet with a lawyer or contact my wife Maggie home to find out what was going on. The food was not very good but your friends can send you food into the detention center, which is an unusual part about the Russian system. So once we got our supply line set up we did all right and we start getting some clothes sent because nobody had enough. After a month or I guess about five weeks the charges, they added the charges of hooliganism to our piracy thing. They have no way of taking away the piracy charge. The mechanism just doesn't exist, as does neither does the mechanism for receiving bail money. They just don't do that in Russia.

Six weeks after we were detained we were transferred down to St. Petersburg where I got a chance to spend some time in the Europe's oldest jail which was built in 1860 called the Kresty it wasn't a bad place. Two weeks later we had to have another detention hearing and that's where we were given bail. We were held under city arrest in St. Petersburg for a month and finally the Duma passed an amnesty which was also what was used to kick Pussy Riot out of jail. Although I have to say in their case, being the incredibly strong women they were, they wouldn't leave. They had been in jail for 20 months they only have four months to go, they didn’t want amnesty which confers that you had done something wrong in the first place. We, on the other hand, we’re like no problem I'm ready. Thank you very much. (0:51:04)

They threw them out of jail physically threw them out of the jail. I didn’t have to be thrown out. But I think the person in Moscow who decided to have us arrested in the first place knew that the amnesty was going to be coming up. It was something the Russians do every 10 years to celebrate their new constitution after the fall of the Soviet Union. And Soshi, the Olympics were coming up they didn't want us in jail for the Olympics. But I think it was their way of sending us a message that we had better no longer mess with their ambitions to do more oil exploration in the Arctic. I'm not sure what our plans will be for the future if somebody had asked me before I left that, you know, you might go to jail for a couple months but you’ll radically improve the level of the campaign, that more people become aware of the dangers of drilling for oil not only in the Arctic, but anywhere I’d say well that's part of the deal that's what we do. If somebody had said you might go to jail for 10 to 15 years, I'd pull the covers back over and wave goodbye and say no, that's not in my plan.

But I'm quite willing to take those risks, I'm quite willing to spend a couple months in jail because I think the threat of climate change, which is we’re already seeing as we’ve described tonight is so real. I've got two children, ages 21 and 24 and almost 33, that's what gets me up in the morning. I'm not at all, I don't at all regret doing what we did. I would do it again if I knew it was only gonna be two months because of what we’re facing.

Greg Dalton: What’s your next action? What's Rainbow –

[Applause]

– Peter Willcox is the Captain of the Rainbow Warrior Greenpeace Rainbow Warrior. What’s your next action, where are you going next?

Peter Willcox: Right. I expect now to meet the boat in Malta beginning of August and then go to Lebanon and Turkey to do climate change, which probably means anti-coal work. We were there in Turkey two or three years ago, it all blends in after a while. Where we helped a small village fight off a coal-fired power plant that was attempting to bulldoze their olive groves, which would've killed the whole village of 150 people so they could build another coal-fired plant. And because of the Greenpeace support from the office in Istanbul who provided lawyers, witnesses, support in one of the actions I've been most proud of in years. We stopped that coal plant from bulldozing the olive groves and closing down the village. And I suspect it will be more actions like that we’ll be doing when we go back this fall.

Greg Dalton: Let's go to our audience questions. Welcome to Climate One.

Male Participant: Thank you. Stiv, I'd like to ask you about the plastics. A little while back there was some young kid, a brilliant kid who supposedly invented a machine that was gonna scoop it all up. So I have two questions. One, is some of the plastic gone to the bottom of the ocean and is that gonna stay there forever or is it gonna be eaten by the fish and how bad is it in the food chain? And then the other question is how does all that plastic get in the ocean, where is it coming from, cruise ships or is it blowing offshore or coming out of rivers and into the ocean?

Greg Dalton: Thank you for the question. Stiv Wilson.

Stiv Wilson: Well luckily Liz is inventing machines to go get it all off the bottom, no I’m kidding. Yeah, the sad truth is a lot of the – half the plastics we use sink. So we don't really have much data on what's on the bottom of the ocean and Liz is where she was talking earlier about seeing a lot of this stuff down there, both at depth and in near shore environments. With regard to how it gets there this is really a story of death by a thousand cuts. It's every river, it's every stream, it's every cigarette butt, I mean here’s 7-1/2 billion people on the planet and, you know, they’re using a lot of plastic. And some of it escapes the waste stream, especially in developing countries. We’re working very hard with an international team to develop a strategy for five Southeast Asian countries that account for about 80% of what goes into the ocean because of poor waste management infrastructure. So I'm very hopeful that this is gonna be really successfully get some really interesting zero waste models by creating value to the plastic at the end of life from a recycling standpoint.

With regard to cleaning it up – you know, any of us on this panel can tell you it's really hard to explain how big the ocean actually is. It’s really, really, really, really big and you know, I mean you get out there and you're like I'm two weeks away from land, no helicopter could carry enough fuel to come and save us right now. You know, there is nothing we are an island on to ourselves and totally reliant. And that's how big and that's how widespread the problem is. And so I think unless we turn it off, unless we turn the spigot off and we capture the stuff before it gets into the ocean, it's gonna be a dog chasing its tail no matter how good this technology works or not. But to give you a quick example: 95% by count of plastics in the ocean are smaller than a grain of rice. The kid from the Netherlands who - Boyan Slat, who is talking about cleaning the stuff up, his devices aren't designed to capture any of that. So really what we you know we’re talking about maybe 5% of the problem. But, you know, when you’re talking about plastics this big, there’s a lot of sea life that is this big. Like most sea life is, you know, 50% of fish in the ocean by weight are this size or bigger. So you’re gonna catch a lot of by-catch if you try and seen the ocean for plastics. And to me it's just it's not the right strategy you need to get at the root of the problem, which is the plastics going in in the first place. (0:59:10)

Greg Dalton: Let’s have our next question at Climate One. Welcome.

Female Participant: I wanted to ask Ms. Taylor to expand a bit on the words that you said about Cuba. It sounds so promising but is there work being done, are there people there who are already working on this? It sounds like it will be wonderful if it works but it sounds like it's going to take an awful lot of work.

Liz Taylor: Well, it is going to take a lot of work and dedicated effort. There are groups that have been going to Cuba, you know, those of us in the United States have been pretty good from there for a long time but there’s a lot of other countries that have been going there already for a long time in trying to get good stewardship in place. But now we’re seeing some of the Gulf of Mexico, the Heart Research Institute and some of the other institutional groups that have been really kind of forming bonds with the Cuban government for a long time and they’re very concerned with maintaining the pristine nature of that area. So I think although there is a lot of work to do and agreements to be made it's all going to be about getting the local people to understand and the same with any marine protected area. It’s all about getting the local people to understand the value of what they've got and that they are really going to enjoy sustained tourism, sustained bottom-line benefit if they look after pristine intact environments versus these trash areas that no one wants to go to.

I thought for a long time instead of having sort of the seafood watch card that we should have the watch card for places we want to visit that are doing good jobs. And, you know, have those kind of validated somehow; this is an area that’s got green protection they’ve got enforcement they’ve got sustainable fisheries and choose where you spend your tourism dollars. Don't take it to a place that’s gonna support shark finning and just bad stewardship.

Greg Dalton: Liz Taylor is president of DOER Marine a company in Alameda that builds deep sea exploration vehicles and explores the deep ocean. Let’s go to our next question at Climate One.

Male Participant: Thanks. The three of you touch and go into the ocean almost I would say pretty much on a daily basis. Do you have any suggestions about people at home maybe from flyover states who don't necessarily get to see the ocean on a daily basis, about how they can get more involved and more impactful?

Greg Dalton: Liz Taylor.

Liz Taylor: Yeah, I think everyone has the ability to be very impactful. Whether it's a decision to, you know, tear out their lawn and put in native plants. Whether it's a decision to just make those choices. The single use plastic is by far I think the largest of the choices people can make whether they live in a completely landlocked area, if you have your soda bottle and it goes into a lake and then it goes to the creek and then it goes to the stream and it goes downriver. It’s gonna get to the ocean in due course. So every choice we make every day, we have that opportunity to make a difference.

Greg Dalton: And how would you explain to a person in a flyover state how the ocean matters to their life if they seem so far from it, why does it matter?

Liz Taylor: Well, I’ve heard it said many times in my own household. Do we like to breathe? You know, that’s what it comes down to; the plankton in the oceans are generating more oxygen than the rain forests. And we really need to look after them together.

Greg Dalton: Let’s go to our next question. Thank you.

Male Participant: Hi, this is for Liz. With the Chinese economic slowdown they’ve been closing down a lot of seafood processing units. Do you see that as an opportunity to improve the localization of seafood from Alaska, from other ports in America?

Liz Taylor: Well I think we’d like to see sea life differently. I don't like the red lobster “sea food differently.” I like the “sea life differently.” But I think if we encourage again encourage tourism to the areas where fishermen are doing a good job locally and not really supporting these vast extractive fisheries but looking after the place and doing an incredible job that these is the areas we want to see supported. And, you know, aquaculture has a role in it, sustainable fisheries has a role in it. I think it’s mostly the large strip mining activities that go on around the world that we want to back away from. And being able to really look and see where, you know, you see this little package of fish in the market, it looks like a little package of chicken in the market. It’s this disassociation we don't really understand what is going into that to create that animal. We don't eat a 20-year-old chicken but we think nothing of eating a 20-year-old orange roughy, so –or a 50 or 100-year old orange roughy. So we need to look at these aspects and think about it.

Greg Dalton: We've been talking a lot about extraction of living organisms from the oceans. Liz Taylor, I want to talk about mineral extraction. There’s a bit of a gold rush going on in the oceans. So tell us about that and how that's playing on particularly with China and the geopolitics of that.

Liz Taylor: The deep-sea mining issue is tremendous and of course it’s below the surface. So we don’t really think about it, everybody sees the beautiful surface of the ocean. The sun setting, rising, the big seas we deal with. But what goes on below is a huge rush at the moment particularly as oil and gas kind of slows down a little bit. We’re looking at going in mining these deep-sea vents. These areas where we’ve recently seen just on these live streams these very robust colonies of crabs and unique mussels and all kinds of animals that live around these chimneys that are just spewing deep minerals from the crust of the earth in deep water. China now has the deepest ocean presence in the world. They have a manned submarine that can go to 7,000 meters. They’re working on a full-ocean depth submarine. We, in the United States spent $50 million on one submarine that now goes no deeper than it did before that we spent $50 million dollars. You know, it's incredible that all around the world we have countries that are making investments, not for the right reasons, but to lay claim to these deep-sea minerals to fuel our cell phones. And really what's going to happen we’re not doing the environmental research or impacts reports we do on the land in the deep sea because it’s out of sight. So we need to be there in person on a regular basis a lot more.

Greg Dalton: And it’s not really regulated and the U.S. won’t sign the law of the sea. So it’s kind of, right. We have one more audience question. Welcome.

Male Participant: Yeah, Michael Stocker, Ocean Conservation Research. I really appreciate you guys lovely ocean how you expressed it in your lives, so it’s really encouraging. A little extension on what you're talking about Liz in terms of the industrialization of the sea. I really want to highlight that, maybe get some of your comments about it.

It’s not just deep-sea mining but also offshore energy industries, extraction industries for fossil fuel, but also large wind farm productions. These are huge industrial scale factories; they’re building refineries on the bottom of the ocean. They’re using a lot of underwater communication systems that are all acoustic. The ocean is an acoustic environment, and the ocean is getting increasingly noisier, not just from shipping but also from industry out there. I wonder if you guys could comment a little bit about that.

Greg Dalton: Yeah, so Liz Taylor, pick up on wind farms; people think of clean energy is a good thing. We need to get off fossil fuels, but oh wind farms could be bad.

Liz Taylor: Well, the wind farms I mean certainly a cleaner alternative. The installation is very similar to the oil and gas platform. It could potentially be repurposing of some existing platforms could be converted to a combination of solar and wind, perhaps. In addition they make kind of a nice artificial reef over time and probably better thing than trying to take them out in some cases because they’ve been heavily colonized by animals. So may not want to cut them off. But, you know, there’s trade-offs in every way of it. In general, the ocean is incredibly noisy at this moment in time. If you just look on again going back to Google Earth or these other search engines you can track all the ocean ships going across the planet. And it’s just like, it’s like watching airplanes going across the planet it’s just stripes everywhere these tracks going back and forth. These enormously loud propellers hrumming away.

Greg Dalton: Stiv Wilson, some people might say well it's there; it's a resource to be used for humans, what’s wrong with mining the ocean, just like we mine the land. If it’s going to be done responsibly? People want their cell phones; people want this high consumption life.

Stiv Wilson: Yeah, I mean I think what we live in a fundamental paradox. We live in a linear system, a finite system with finite amount of resources. Yet we have an economic system that supports exponential growth. It’s a paradox in and of itself. The idea of sustainability is it's not the sort of hippie mantra that I think it's often made out to be by the right, it's actually looking at what can we do and what can we not do. And we can fish some; we can burn some things that emit carbon. The issue is that we are now at this point where we gained this divine power from the industrial revolution, but we did not gain the divine wisdom on how to wield that power. And right now I think we’re bearing that consequence. And so we’re playing catch-up to figure out, you know, what the Earth can sustain and what it cannot. And eventually it will happen; if we don't kill ourselves in the process it will happen because it's necessary. And, you know, I don’t even think of it as a political issue it's like, you know, what Peter said earlier is like it's happening, it's there and it’s present. Climate change is real, if we want to survive as a species we are going to have to adapt. That's the bottom line.

Greg Dalton: We have to end our conversation with these three heroes of the sea. Peter Willcox, Captain of the Greenpeace Rainbow Warrior, Liz Taylor, President of DOER Marine in Alameda and Stiv Wilson with Story of Stuff and a sailor. Please thank them for coming here to Climate One.

[Applause]

Play

Sylvia Earle on the Health and Wonder of Our Seas

Otto Pilot — Fri, 19 Jun 2015 09:00:25 +0000

Sylvia Earle on the Health and Wonder of Our Seas

06/22/2015

Visionary Guests

As the health of our oceans go, so goes the health of our planet. But climate change, overfishing and pollution have taken their toll – what can we do to help?

Sylvia Earle, National Geographic Explorer in Residence

Guests

Sylvia Earle

National Geographic Explorer in Residence

Greg Dalton: I'm Greg Dalton. And today on Climate One, my guest is Sylvia Earle, ocean scientist, explorer, teacher and advocate. In the 1950s and 60s, she became the first woman to paddle into the world of ocean research, dominated by bearded men in plaid shirts. In 1969, she applied to join a research team living in an installation 50 feet below the sea surface in the Virgin Islands. She was rejected even though she had logged more than a thousand research hours underwater. The next year, she was selected to lead the first all-female team of aquanauts at the station. We’ll see a little video clip of that later. In 1990, Sylvia Earle became the first woman to be appointed chief scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. She’s won more than 100 awards, including a TED Prize and 2014 Glamour Woman of the Year.

[Applause]

Greg Dalton: Over the next hour, I will explore the health and wonder of the seas with the Joan of Arc of the Oceans. Along the way, we'll include questions from our live audience here at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco. Please join me in welcoming Her Deepness, Sylvia Earle, to the Commonwealth Club.

[Applause]

Sylvia Earle: Thank you.

Greg Dalton: Dr. Earle, welcome to Climate One. I'd like to begin by citing an eminent scientist named Stephen Colbert who asked you and said about the oceans, "The oceans are deep, they are dark, people drown in them, and they are full of sharks who want to eat us." So why should a person who's not into the oceans, like you are, care so much about the oceans. Why do they matter?

Sylvia Earle: Well, if you like to breathe, you'll listen up among other things. More than half of the oxygen in the atmosphere is generated by little green guys out there in the ocean. They also take up a lot of carbon which is very relevant to the climate issues that we're here to talk about in part. So no water, it starts with the water, no life. 97% of earth's water is ocean, but we don't drink saltwater. Well, some of us do a little bit. But the water that you see in clouds, it's largely generated out there over the ocean. It falls back to land and sea, regenerating the freshwater. Only 3% of earth's water is what we call freshwater and most of that is locked up in polar ice, most of it in Antarctica. So no water, no life. You care about the ocean, you care about living, it kind of connects.

Greg Dalton: And 60 years ago, you started to explore the oceans. You described it as sort of a wonderful Sea of Eden. What were the oceans like 60 years ago when you first explored their wonders?

Sylvia Earle: Well, I tell people sometimes that I come from a different planet. And they say, "Well, yeah, we know that." We thought about that. But it was a different planet. And then certainly, although from the surface, the ocean looks pretty much the same today as it did half a century ago, under the surface, much has changed. In that time on the order of 90% of many of the big fish have been extracted from the sea. We’re so good at taking them; we're getting better and better at finding them, extracting them, marketing them, and cooking them and eating them that the natural systems cannot replenish at the rate that we're extracting. So that's one thing.

We have seen an avalanche of debris like plastics enter the ocean. I come from the pre-plasticzoic. No plastic bags, no Ziplocs. I mean, Ziplocs are so handy and not just that brand, but we've become seduced by their convenience. I don't blame the plastics. We should look at the mirror and say, "Well, what are we thinking when we just throw things away?" There is no “away.” In fact the ocean is, by and large, the "away" where a lot of the stuff that we toss eventually winds up. Both the things you can see, the tangible things, but also the things you cannot see, the chemical changes in the ocean itself.

So look at the trends. Half a century ago, if you take that as a starting point for where coral reefs and kelp forests were, their decline globally is on the order of about half. It's not just warm water; it's cold water systems too. And that's just the areas that we can see. What we're now learning is that corals, deep water corals, thousands of feet beneath the surface, not the same species as what you see in Cousteau films and National Geographic films too, I have to say as National Geographic Explorer in Residence. I have to plug my institution.

But the decline is heartbreaking. But the good news is that some of us have been around long enough to see the changes, the shifting baseline, as some of my fellow scientists have come to call the changes. We're witnesses, all of us are, to the most extraordinary time in all of human history at least, and the changes are not all bad. We have seen so much that benefits us as human beings, but there's been a cost that we haven't properly been accounting for on the land, in the air and certainly in and under the ocean.

Greg Dalton: You grew up in New Jersey and then Florida. I'm interested in sort of the early days. Your mother was a bird lady who take care of wounded animals.

Sylvia Earle: She's a critter person.

Greg Dalton: And she went for her first dive at 81, is that right?

Sylvia Earle: That's right.

Greg Dalton: Okay.

Sylvia Earle: "If you're 81, don't wait any longer," that's what she said. Get with it.

Greg Dalton: So for everyone in the audience, there's still a chance if you haven't taken the plunge yet. But tell as a little bit about your awakening and wonder to the natural world. You were kind of what we would today call a free-range kid running around in nature.

Sylvia Earle: I think all kids start out as explorers. I think even all of you, whoever you are or wherever you are, you don't lose that part of being a kid, asking questions who, what, why, where, when, how. That's what explorers do. That's what scientists do. I don't know where along the way we sort of get off track and start sort of accepting what we're told rather than saying, "Well, how do you know that? Show me the evidence." Or, "Why is the sky blue?" That's a kid question. "How deep is the ocean?"

The fact is, we don't actually know precisely. Although thanks to James Cameron, who went down in his little submarine and cruised along, taking measurements over a couple of hours, as the best measurement that we have so far. But it's still kind of squishy. It could be a little bit this way or a little bit that way. With Mount Everest, we know precisely how high places on the land are. But anyways, so kids ask embarrassing questions. Why do we stop? Why do we stop?

So I think I had parents who didn't discourage me from asking questions and often saying, "Well, let's find out," instead of saying, when you don't know something, that's okay. Let's find out. Where does this frog live? You can see it hopping around on the shore. Where does it live? Well, be an investigator, but there are so many things. Back to the climate thing, I get asked "Do you believe in climate change?" My answer is, "I do not believe or disbelieve." That's not the question. The question is, I look for evidence and you can do that too. Ask the questions. Why do people think that the planet is warming?

Well, they've been taking the temperature of the planet, measurements. Here's the evidence. Look at the evidence because that's what -- I don't think my mom and dad ever were trying to coach me to become a scientist, they were just following maybe the things that they were curious about themselves. And they let me run around on my own which is great, and my brothers too. So it was a different time, a different planet, if you will.

I'm not sure I feel as comfortable with my own kids and now my grandkids doing the things I did as a child. It's not fear of getting wet or muddy or encountering beetles and earthworms and things of that nature, I certainly did. But I have reason to be concerned about my species and we live in different times.

Greg Dalton: So I'd like to show a clip from a different time. This is a clip from Mission Blue about the time when you were on the research expedition. Is it Tektite? Is that right?

Sylvia Earle: That's right.

Greg Dalton: So let's watch this video and then I'll have you respond to it. Listen to this from Tektite.

[BEGIN CLIP]

Male Speaker: Now a team of divers will attempt to live for two weeks as quiet residents on the seafloor. Ironically, these aquanauts are not men with extraordinary physical endurance and stamina, but five young and attractive women. The world's first real-life mermaids. Their leader is a renowned scientist, Dr. Sylvia Earle, a marine botanist and an experienced diver.

[END CLIP]

Greg Dalton: That's Dr. Sylvia Earle in a clip from the 1970s kind of breaking into the man's world. We kind of laughed, kind of cringed there, but I'd like to know about sort of what you encountered there, some of the sexism you've encountered in trying to get into research science.

Sylvia Earle: Well, I wasn't trying to knock down barriers, I responded to a notice that was on the bulletin board when I was at Harvard as a post-doctoral student and still a student. It just didn't say that women need not apply, and some of us did.

There were no women astronauts in 1969. There were footprints being put on the moon but they're all guys. And women who did apply to become astronauts were well-qualified, but there was just this aura of it's not a place for women. So it was natural, I suppose, that those who were behind the Tektite program that included NASA, included the Navy, included the Department of Interior -- the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), did not exist when that program started, but it did as the program came to a close in 1970.

But the applications that came in, mine included, were I guess at least as good as those of the men. And so the head of the program, James Miller, I think he had a really good marriage and he and his mom got along really well. Because when the decision had to be made, shall there or shall there not be women, "What are we going to do with these applications? They are well-qualified." And he said, at least it is said that he said, "Well, half the fish are female, maybe we could put up with a few women." And so they did and they more than.

But we thought when I applied, I applied with some of my fellow scientists and they're all guys. I work in a laboratory. I ride in airplanes. Men and women work together usually pretty well, and had been my experience. Although I was the first - not the first, the only woman with 70 men on a research vessel in 1964. And at the time, I thought, "Well, some people think this is unusual, but imagine if the guys were asked if they could go to sea with 70 women, would they object to that?" I don't think so.

Greg Dalton: And you've been a pioneer in what we now call STEAM - science, technology, engineering, arts and math careers. What do you say to young girls who are considering entering the sciences? Now there still seems to be some obstacles. The numbers are not what they ought to be.

Sylvia Earle: That's for young men and women alike, it's why not go for it. Everyone should become science literate, to be a science savvy, to use the capacity. As I say, do what you do as a kid; ask questions, demand evidence, don't just take stuff for granted. It's the scientific method. What does a scientist do? You observe carefully, you report honestly what you see, that's the basic stuff. Now there are all these rules and regulations about how you conduct experiments and have tests and so on, but the basic thing, observe carefully, report honestly. That's what scientists do.

The coolest thing of all about science and scientists I think is, they're really happy even when something new is discovered, even if it means that's something they thought they knew has been proven not to be so. I mean, it's just advancing the quality and the quantity of knowledge, the truth of really trying to get at the heart of what's actually going on. That's cool. I mean, that's how we have progressed from not having a language, not having that you could write down, that's relatively speaking in human history being able to write things down with alphabet, to be able to communicate with numbers. It's fairly new.

But generally speaking, we just are the beneficiaries of our collective learning and what we know today is unprecedented. It gives us an edge with plenty of reason for hope that we can figure things out from where we are to some better place in the future because we have this habit of figuring things out. The human mind is really a pretty wonderful thing.

I look at creatures when I'm swimming around underwater. Sometimes I see dolphins, turtles, fish, fish that get up to the surface anyway, I’m sure they have speculated or wondered about stars.

But we're the only ones who can know what a star actually is and know what our sun, to know where we fit in the greater scheme of things, and even humans couldn't know that until fairly recently. Poor Galileo had a hard time because he really tried to tell people, "We are not the center of the universe." Well, people now who still kind of think that they're the center of the universe. But here we are, this is a wonderful time to be around.

Greg Dalton: She goes deep. She dives deep, deep thinker here. If you're just joining us, our guest today at Climate One is Sylvia Earle, the ocean advocate, protector and author. I'd like to ask you about the impact climate is having on the oceans in terms of warming, acidification, what impact is climate having on the oceans and what can we do about it?

Sylvia Earle: I think I'll turn that question around so what impact is the ocean having on climate? Because climate is driven by the ocean. No ocean -- I mean take away the ocean, what have you got? A planet that's a lot like Mars, really. I mean, Mars is smaller than earth, but earth is governed very largely because we're an ocean planet. The world is blue to coin a phrase. It is. Average depth two and a half miles, four kilometers. Maximum: 11 kilometers, seven miles down.

And the ocean is where most of the action is. It's not just where most of the water is, it's where most of life on earth is. It's where the greatest diversity of life is. And but for the ocean, how could there be clouds? There might be clouds of something other than water. I mean, there are clouds on other planets, methane clouds and things, but we have a planet that is shaped, the chemistry of it, the temperature, the ocean is earth's great thermal regulator. It holds heat, releases it slowly, holds cold, releases it gradually. The air is much more flexible or more quickly responds to temperature. And so the ocean holds the planet steady.

The ocean governs climate, governs the weather. So we should be asking, "So tell us about the ocean and how it distributes heat with the ocean currents?" Think of this, that most of life on earth lives in the dark all the time - and I don't mean just places like Washington D.C. - I'm talking a thousand feet underwater or more and the average depth is two and a half miles. We're looking at the skin of the ocean that is illuminated half the time or something like half a time when the sun is around. But below that it's dark. That's where most of light and it's cold even in the tropics.

You get to 1,000 feet, there's a temperature drop of whatever it is at the surface. Maybe it's 30 degrees centigrade. At 1,000 feet, it may be 12 degrees centigrade. And you get down close to the bottom, it's near freezing, never quite freezing because if its freezing ice forms and ice is lighter than water and it comes back up to the surface. So that's part of the miracle of water that it has all these forms of ice and vapor and liquid. You see it in places like the Arctic and the Antarctic where you have all three forms right there all the time. Okay. So you asked a straightforward question.

Greg Dalton: And we're seeing more severe weather, is that impacted by changing ocean currents, rising ocean temperatures?

Sylvia Earle: It's important to recognize that earth has always been changing every day, every minute. It's always never the same at any moment as any other moment in the past or any in the future.

But the changes, generally, are gradual and sort of these changes occur at a stately pace. The geologic changes of continents moving apart, of the gradual ups and downs. I mean, there have been ice ages in the past. They have come and gone. But what we're witnessing now is accelerated warming. We're accelerating the change of chemistry of the ocean with the acidification that has happened in the past. There is evidence of this.

And so if you should ask the question, "How do you know?" Don't just accept it, dig for the answers and convince yourself of what's happening right now. And then look for the causes. Why is it happening at such a pace? And look at the correlations between what we have been able to measure providing evidence of the correlation between burning of fossil fuels, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, how this is formed along with the exhalations of methane creating this blanket - the greenhouse effect.

It's great that we have some protective layer that makes it possible for earth to be suitable for the likes of us. But the greenhouse effect means that we are capturing the sun’s heat and holding it and accelerating this warming trend that is mostly captured and held in the ocean. So it doesn't happen like overnight; it's a gradual trend. So we're seeing temperature rise that means seawater, as it gets warmer, expands. That's part of the reason that we're seeing the increase of sea level rise. It’s partly the melting of ice, but it's also the expansion with increased warming.

So it all sounds like really bad news, ocean acidification, warming that is changing the weather, changing the climate. We're getting more variation in storms, less predictable and with the shorelines around where most people live, the greatest numbers of people who were in coastal areas vulnerable to the increased impact of storms as sea level rises and all these things. But the good news, and I think it really is the best news of all: we can see and understand that these things are happening. You can't solve problems if you don't know you've got them.

We know that one thing we need to do is understand how our prosperity has come about, how we have used the natural world to fuel ourselves to become the creatures that we are at this level in civilization.

Knowing what we know, there's a cost. We go back 10,000 years, largely as hunter gatherers. Today, we feed ourselves largely because we've mastered agriculture so most of the calories that feed us come from corn, rice, wheat and to a growing extent soy. I understand that's about 80% of the calories that people globally consume come from those four basic categories of plants.

And all the other stuff, all the animals we grow, all the wild things we take from the land and also mostly from the sea and all the other plants from apples to peaches cherries or whatever it is, that's in that 20%. If we want to look at food security, going forward, we have to think differently about how we acquire the calories to propel the numbers we’ve got, let alone, the more we're on the way, to be able to avert poverty and hunger and all the other plagues of humankind.

But we can do it because we're armed with knowledge. We don't have a lot of time to figure it out. I mean, I do think that the next decade will be really critical, the next ten years the most important perhaps in the next 10,000 years.

Greg Dalton: A decisive decade. If you're just joining us, our guest today at Climate One is Sylvia Earle, the ocean explorer and advocate. I'm Greg Dalton. We’ll be right back.

[Climate One Minute]

Announcer: And now, here’s a Climate One Minute. As Sylvia Earle tells us, change begins when we start to ask questions and take action. For actor Ted Danson, his own “aha” moment came about during a walk on the beach. He was starring on “Cheers” at the time.

Ted Danson: Mid-80s, I'm getting paid a lot of money. I'm a little guilty. What do I do? How do I be responsible? I also take a walk on the beach in Santa Monica with my daughters who are about eight and four. And the sign, you know, "No swimming. Water polluted." It was a gorgeous day. It was beautiful, crystal clear water. Couldn't go swimming, started to ask some questions. The same time, I met a man named Robert Sulnick, who was the head of No Oil Inc.

We became great friends. We wanted to continue the conversation. Naively, almost like, “my father has a barn - let's put on a play!” we decided to start American Oceans Campaign and we did. And lo and behold, it turned into a really small but respected ocean advocacy group in Washington and LA. But then 10 years ago, merged into Oceana, which is now the largest single issue marine conservation group in the world.

Announcer: Ted Danson talking with Climate One in 2011. Find out how you can help at www.oceana.org. Now, back to Greg’s conversation with Her Deepness, Sylvia Earle, at The Commonwealth Club.

[End Climate One Minute]

Greg Dalton: Now it's time for our lightning round, speed round, some fun.

Sylvia Earle: Uh-oh, this is scary.

Greg Dalton: Yes or no.

Sylvia Earle: Is there a prize for getting it right?

Greg Dalton: Questions. Do you use compostable cutlery and cups?

Sylvia Earle: No, I use real silverware, stainless things I wash and use again.

Greg Dalton: I ask because I went into a shop in San Francisco one time and kind of chided a proprietor of this healthy place for using plastic. And she said, "Well, compostable is worse because it comes from corn, lots of fertilizer that creates the dead zone in the Gulf."

Sylvia Earle: You see, ask questions. Figure out where does that spoon come from and where does it go and how did it get here in the first place? I love investing in things that you have around for a while, like glass instead of plastic cups.

Greg Dalton: Yeah, or bamboo.

Sylvia Earle: Yeah.

Greg Dalton: Next question, president Obama has been a good steward of our ocean, yes or no?

Sylvia Earle: Qualified yes. He could do better but he, as president, actually did even more than George W. Bush, who at the time protected more ocean than any president before him or any other person on the planet through a stroke of his pen by designating over two years a huge part of the Pacific Ocean -- yay, Pacific Ocean! For not just protection but full protection where even the fish and shrimp and squids and octopuses are safe. What a concept. Obama now on the order of half of a million square miles of ocean, and that's actually now the UK government has upped the ante a bit by protecting the waters around Pitcairn Island in the Pacific, as well as Chagos Archipelago in the Indian Ocean, expanding the British Empire into the sea.

But all nations with a coast, ours very much included, have jurisdiction out 200 miles. And nations are beginning to wake up to the power in some ways the responsibility that that brings with it. I mean, it happened in the 1980s and we're just kind of saying, "Oh, there's another United States out there that's bigger, the blue country that we need to face up to and think about and maybe do what it takes to take care of it,” so yes.

Greg Dalton: This is a single word answer or two words, one person in history you'd most like to meet.

Sylvia Earle: I think any kid who is ten years old today.

Greg Dalton: What was --?

Sylvia Earle: What a time to be ten years old.

Greg Dalton: Yeah, very cool. So if you're ten years old in the audience, come see her afterwards. Most Americans have never seen a polar bear and never will. Therefore, polar bears are poor symbols of human-made climate change. Yes or no.

Sylvia Earle: No, they're good symbols.

Greg Dalton: What do scientists call orange roughy?

Sylvia Earle: Slime heads.

Greg Dalton: That ends our lightning round. How did she do?

[Applause]

Greg Dalton: And speaking of orange roughy or slime heads, I'd like to talk about diet. A lot of people care about the oceans. They still eat some fish. Do you eat fish? If not, when did you stop?

Sylvia Earle: Well, as a child, I came from a family that ate a lot of sea creatures. We lived in New Jersey. We called him the fish man would come by once a week with his little truck and ice and relatively fresh fish. And then when I was 12, we moved to Florida and my backyard was the Gulf of Mexico. Well, lobsters, the spiny lobsters, oysters, clams, fish of great variety, it just seemed the thing to do and I failed to do what I'm advising you to do - ask questions.

How old is this fish? What did it take to make a grouper? How many of them are there? Where did they live? How far did it have to travel from the ocean to get to my plate? What does it look like anyway? When you see it on your plate, it's just, it has lemon and little green stuff. You don't see what these creatures really are. At least most people know what a chicken and a cow and a pig, what they look like.

But the fish, you just look at fish sticks. What's a fish? What does it look like? You see goldfish but that's not a good model for the 25,000 kinds of fish, freshwater and marine that exist. What is fish? Fish chowder. Catch of the day. The catch is, you don't know what you're eating.

Greg Dalton: It's probably been relabeled by the industry in some way.

Sylvia Earle: But I don't eat fish anymore. I know too much. I really do. I know too much about how important fish are alive, like birds are to the land and the skies above, to the planet as a whole. There was a time early in the 20th century when a lot of birds were taken basically with the same attitude that we have today about fish. They're just commodities.

Yes, they taste good but a lot of things taste good that I avoid eating. Some people on the planet are fond of eating dogs, but I've come to respect dogs for other reasons and fish too. Blue carbon, think about that. Just take that little phrase "blue carbon" and go Google it and see where that takes you about the value of fish for something other than just something on your plate like trees, carbon-based units, capturing, storing, sequestering carbon.

These food chains in the ocean starting with phytoplankton or kelp or other kinds of seaweed going up the food chain and storing carbon in the ocean. Then we disrupt those great storage capacity of the ocean to maintain carbon and release it to the atmosphere when we capture them and gobble them up and break those tightly knit nutrient cycles in the ocean that have held the planet steady for lo these many gazillions of years.

Greg Dalton: For people who aren't quite ready to give up fish, is it possible to eat responsibly sustainable seafood? There some labels out there, is that possible to eat sustainably and what about farmed fish?

Sylvia Earle: How many hours do you have? Well, but I can be succinct. I think that I think that eating wild fish at this point in time. If you go out and catch it yourself and you take it home and it’s dinner, you respect it. You know what it looks like, you know where it's come from, you have some idea if you do your homework about how old it is. Most fish that you take are carnivores, think about the investment that it is taking to make that salmon that you've just captured, if you can find one in California waters.

Because they take several years to make an adult most of the fish that we consume. Barbara Block at Stanford will tell you that Bluefin tuna take 10 to 14 years to mature. Most of the ones that are taken today aren't mature. But it's years, six or eight years, whatever it is. And halibut, they can be as old as anybody, older than people in this room if they are allowed to fulfill their halibut destiny and get to good old age 80, 90, 100 years. And so you see a little piece of halibut on your plate. Have you ever seen a live halibut, big as a doormat and a lot heavier?

Well, bigger than six doormats put together and we just eat them. It looks good on the menu and is it sustainable? Okay. Probably not. When you look at what we -- with all of our rules and regulations about how to have our fish and eat them too, it's a wonderful vision. And I think if we were really conservative about how many we take instead of taking as many as we can capture and market. And if we protected big areas of the ocean where the fish were safe, protect the breeding areas, the feeding areas, respectful of the corridors under which they pass as we have come to be more or less with birds.

But we've so overdone it with wildlife from the sea because of this illusion that there are so many out there and it's because the ocean looks the same on the surface. You can go to a restaurant or a supermarket, and you see the equivalent of eagles and owls and lions and tigers and bears and snow leopards. The numbers are really low as compared to what they were. But because we're amping up the effort to catch, we have new methods of finding that didn't exist when I was a kid.

And we go deeper, like orange roughy. Okay, 2,000 feet down or more. And you find them by looking at sonar and seeing the terrain below and little movement around where the terrain is drop these bottom trawling devices. You take not just the orange roughy, you take sometimes and often because they live among these ancient corals that may be among the oldest living things, living animals on earth 6,000, 7,000 years old, and they just get trashed in the process of capturing this little fish that most people never see the whole fish. They see the piece of meat with lemon slices and butter on their plate. They don't know the real cost.

I think that if people really know or they knew what it took and the subsidies that now support commercial fishing, they might make the choice that I've made which is just stop. Sustainably, what? I haven't even gotten to the -- you see, I said it's going to take two hours, but let me cut through it then.

Greg Dalton: Just the farm question. Is farming always bad? Fish farming always bad and can be done?

Sylvia Earle: No. I mean, I think there's hope with smart aquaculture, closed systems, more crop per drop as they say, with tilapia, catfish, carp and there are probably others that are plant eaters. We just haven't been looking very hard to identify in the ocean the equivalent of those handful of animals that's not very many that meet the requirements of growing fast, tasting good and eat plants.

Ironically, we're now taking a lot of fish from the sea to feed to cows and chickens and pigs. Not a very smart move, but here is the thing. We think of fish as free. We have an accounting base of zero when they're swimming around in the ocean and that's false accounting. We have to face up to the cost of what we consume really is when you put nature on the balance sheet.

Greg Dalton: If you're just joining us, our guest today at Climate One at the Commonwealth Club is the scientist, explorer and advocate Sylvia Earle. I'm Greg Dalton. I'd like to ask you about a couple of documentaries. One is the Island President which shows the former president of the Maldives. You've currently sort of champion his cause a little bit - President Mohamed Nasheed. We're going to show a brief clip of the former president of the Maldives who has become something of a voice of conscience in the climate community. Let's watch this.

[START CLIP]

Mohamed Nasheed: If we can't stop the seas rising, if you allow for a 2-degree rise in temperature, you are actually agreeing to kill us.

[END CLIP]

Greg Dalton: So that's former president Mohamed Nasheed, talking about sea level rise in the Maldives. He's currently in jail. Tell us what's going on with him.

Sylvia Earle: Boy, a tragic story. I have such respect and admiration for President Nasheed. I met him some years ago and most recently was able to actually give him the Mission Blue Award at a conference that really was recognizing his leadership and his voice, the power of his voice as a leader of an island country. He actually, when he was president, held a cabinet meeting under water to just bring home the point.

Greg Dalton: It's a great photo.

Sylvia Earle: It was fantastic and a lot of people suddenly got the point and wake up. Unfortunately, his little island country is not just one island, it’s hundreds of islands in the Indian Ocean that are like opals when you look from an airplane down at this beautiful string of islands. Most of them are not inhabited by people, but a few of them are. It was during a time when he was in the capital island, capital city of Malé earlier this year. He was really ruthlessly - I mean just not showing respect at all - just thrown to the ground and dragged off to prison. On the grounds that when he was president, he -- well they used the term terrorist.

That's not a valid term to describe anything that he's done, except that he discharged some people when he became president who were kind of angry about being let go, and actually put in jail for some of their not so savory activities. So they're getting even. The new administration, I guess, is taking action. But it's an injustice that the world should know about and try to at least get him safe.

Greg Dalton: He does have a celebrity law representation now by Amal Clooney and has some Western attorneys, but he's still dealing with the courts in the Maldives. The other documentary I'd like to ask you about is Blackfish. We had John Hargrove here who gave an amazing talk about the emotional love for the whales he had and how emotionally evolved the Orcas are. So I'd like to hear what you thought about if you saw the film Blackfish.

Sylvia Earle: Actually, I have not seen the film, but I have met the woman whose idea it was and I certainly know about the film. Like The Cove, telling the story of creatures that people can empathize with. We are fellow mammals who have social structure and they relate to us and we relate to them. It's through films and stories that we sometimes change, not through evidence although that really is the key to whatever change is about to happen. It touches our hearts. Humans we have the human mind, but we also have the human spirit and we are connected in ways that transcend common sense or transcend the evidence. So we empathize with the animals and with the people who care about them. When you see these very intelligent creatures under circumstances that are less than nice.

One of the most moving examples of this that I recall was going to a place in Hong Kong many years ago, it was in the 80s. There's an open pool that had one orca blackfish and I could see it sort of looked like one of these nice hotel swimming pools that wasn't interesting in the orca's sense at all. Just painted aqua and no rocks or whatever, just a big pool and here's this orca and he's lifting up because he could see the ocean. I could see the ocean. He could see it, but there's all this land between where he was and where the ocean was. I mean, it still makes me feel empathy for that poor creature. And why were we doing it? And that's a question of the why. Why do we do this?

You can make a case for saying and I have do, why do we keep fish in captivity? Well, because aquariums are like halfway houses for people and fish. A lot of people who never see a fish other than on their plate can see a grouper, can see a shark, can see this great diversity of life in the sea and not just fish either but other creatures. But that's really not the point of why they're having these animals, at least the orcas, it's because they're a great draw. I mean, that has come out loud and clear.

Greg Dalton: Its business.

Sylvia Earle: Its business.

Greg Dalton: And that business has been affected. When John Hargrove, one of the trainers featured in Blackfish was here, he told about he was injured one time during an exercise and the orca circled around him in a protective manner, and then carried him back behind stage and cared for him when he was injured. Amazing story.

Okay, let's go to our audience questions. We're at Climate One. We're talking with Dr. Sylvia Earle, the ocean explorer. Welcome.

Male Participant: My question is, what policies, both in the United States and perhaps at the UN, are you spending your time to champion now that we can help support you also?

Sylvia Earle: Think of this. Half of the world is beyond national jurisdiction; it's called the high seas. This year, the United Nations, early in 2015, came to a point of agreeing that they would explore having a framework of governance for the high seas that makes possible as a next step, maybe within the next three or four or five years, establishing large areas of the ocean as protected areas. Hey, what a concept.

[Applause]

Sylvia Earle: Here's the thing. These are the global commons, these high seas areas, of everyone. All of you have a vested interest in keeping them safe. Again, if you like to breathe, think about where oxygen comes from and if you like the processes that shape the world. President Obama once said in a different context that our highest priority must be to keep the world safe for our children, and that means we have to protect nature. I mean, that's how I interpret it; he was thinking guns and things. But keep the world safe for our children, hold the planet steady, protect the ocean.

I am working, to some extent, with both the United Nations and with an organization called International Union for the Conservation of Nature. It's been around for a very long time and they have a seat at the United Nations. They speak for more than 1,000 organizations around the world and more than 100 countries have representation. The whole concept here is to identify -- one of the goals they have is to look around the world, land and sea, where are the places that have magnified importance about protection of keeping the world safe in a natural sense, the water cycles, the natural forests and the fabric of life itself, the diversity of life.

So I'm really, above all else, looking because it's a big umbrella that encompasses the many other concerns, whether it's acidification, loss of diversity about the climate change, whatever. If we can hold the planet steady by having big areas on the land and the sea. Parks, national parks came into existence, the National Park System about 100 years ago. It's taken us longer to look at the ocean, but we're starting to. The United Nations now is really, they need to hear your voice.

Claire: Hi. My name is Claire. In the next two years, I'm going to be going to college. My question is, what do you suggest for future marine biologists and environmental advocates to do academically besides just explore and stuff?

Sylvia Earle: Go get wet. I mean, there are many institutions and of course it's logical that going to a place that is accessible to the sea or at least to water, it helps but it's not mandatory. But try to get to some place, whether it's within school or on your own time, get somebody to take you there if you can't take yourself. But spend time actually observing the things that you're drawn to.

And be good at something. Choose something that you really love and become as good as you can. And it's not necessarily in biology, but it maybe it's in terms of you have a good voice, so be really good with music or with writing or if you have a way with words or drawing cartoons. Jim Toomey, who was the shark cartoonist, he loves the ocean. He's a marine scientist, but he expresses himself in a unique way by having a cartoon strip about sharks. So it may sound a little unconventional, but don't just -- yes, learn everything you can, take advantage of the schools that are there, devour what your teachers are trying to stuff into your brain - that's their job - but it's your job to absorb it.

But also, on your own, follow your heart. For me, it turned out to be seaweeds, but that has led me to look at whales, that's led me to kind of go diving all over the world because I have a specialty that people, they want that expertise. So don't let people say you can't do it because you're a girl.

[Applause]

Greg Dalton: And I just want to mention that this girl is going to turn 80 in August and it's wonderful.

Sylvia Earle: Zeros don't count.

Greg Dalton: It's wonderful to see so many young people in the audience. We'll get a couple of more questions here for Dr. Earle. Welcome.

Cassidy: My name is Cassidy. What was your favorite part about the ocean?

Greg Dalton: Okay.

Sylvia Earle: Okay.

Greg Dalton: And let's have one more from up behind you. Okay, favorite part about the ocean.

Female Participant: Is there anything that we can do to help?

Sylvia Earle: Yea, hey, good question, yeah. So I love the fact that the ocean is alive. Water is great. When you're diving or swimming or whatever you're suspended, you can stand on one finger, the water holds you up. You can just be so graceful. But the part that really attracted me to the ocean in the first place was the fact that there's life in the ocean and it's endless. I mean, the mystery.

My daughter and her husband have a little company across the bay from where we are now; they build submarines and robots and other equipment to explore the ocean. So part of what I love about the ocean is, there is so much out there yet to be seen that everyone can be an explorer. And even though you've been to the ocean a thousand times and I have, you never know what you're going to find the next time. And so what can you do to help?

Well, go out there and be part of the action. Go build a submarine and then use it. Or walk along the beach and keep your eyes open. Think about what you think that can make a difference that, whether it's writing a poem. Some people can do this, but don't just keep it to yourself, share your view. Use the power of communication that didn't exist when I was a kid that does exist now to inform people about what you know or what you care about. Support the idea if you can figure out whatever way you can.

Here in California, we're in a leadership role in terms of identifying critical areas and then protecting them as a standard that other states and other countries could follow in this country with. Support what Obama has already begun with respect to expanding protection for the sea. I call these areas, whether it’s land or sea, hope spots. Hope spots. Because if we can protect the natural world and the life that's there, it really does provide hope for us.

Greg Dalton: Let's have our next question for Sylvia Earle.

Male Participant: The Tragedy of the Commons says that one person has the incentive to take as much out of the commons as they can before the next person gets it. It seems to me that oceans are the world's biggest commons and that we have nations working for their own best interest at the cost of overall interest. So do you think this is an intractable problem? And if it is not, what do you see as a solution?

Sylvia Earle: It's a tough problem. I don't think it's intractable. I think the solution starts with knowing why it matters. The fact that there are now about a dozen nations, only a dozen out of the 200 or so that exist, are disproportionately extracting from the global commons right now with large fleets of nets and long lines. Some of these long lines are 40, 50 miles long with baited hooks every few feet.

If you're worried about food security, then why would you waste all this bait that taken together with the thousands of miles of long lines that are out there right now with bait to catch something bigger. I mean, if you really want, its food choice that these fleets are after and they're taking from parts of the planet that until right about now have never been accessed by anybody, ever. It's hard to justify this based on need; it's based on greed. And these fleets are mostly subsidized because to get out to thousands of miles away from your home port takes a lot of fuel and it wouldn't be profitable if you didn't have taxpayer money helping you to get out to where the action is.

So I don't think it's intractable. I think ignorance is probably the biggest problem facing the world today. People don't know what's happening; they don't know why it matters. So it's a question I once had, "If the ocean dried up tomorrow, why should I care?" Well, if you like to breathe, you'll care. If you like to live, you'll care. When you see what's happening to wildlife in the sea, what we did for centuries to whales, we're now doing to fish and we're doing to shrimp and krill. They're just treated as commodities; the same attitude we had for wild birds. But can we change? It starts with knowing and then you can change on a dime.

Greg Dalton: Let's have our last question for Sylvia Earle at Climate One.

Female Participant: Hi, Dr. Earle. Nice to see you again. I want to bring it a little closer to home. In the last 30 days, we've had 100,000 gallons of oil spilled down in Santa Barbara, right near our national sanctuary of the Channel Islands. Just last week, we had 100,000 gallons of raw sewage spill into Pacific Grove down in Monterey. And in the last 30 days, we've had four wonderful big whales wash up on our beaches, right here within 30 miles of us. Who's protecting us? Who's keeping an eye on this? Who can we call and say, "Make this stop?"

Sylvia Earle: I think the most important person to contact on these issues is the person you see in the mirror.

It's up to us to have our voices be heard now that we know. When some of the infrastructure that was put in place years ago that have led to the issues we now see, this is the cost that we now can see of the prosperity that we have been enjoying. Take action. Use your voice in ways that we're now empowered to do. I think you have just raised your voice. People who may not even have been aware about the whales are now clued in, "Why did they die?" Well, let's go find out and let's see what we can do now that we know.

Greg Dalton: Our thanks to Sylvia Earle, the ocean explorer, scientist and advocate for being with us today at Climate One.

[Applause]

[END]

Play

Rising Seas, Rising Costs

Otto Pilot — Fri, 21 Feb 2014 13:25:57 +0000

Rising Seas, Rising Costs

02/12/2014

Swelling sea levels used to be a concern associated with future generations and faraway lands. Then Superstorm Sandy poured the Atlantic Ocean into the New York subway. Here on the west coast, we’re no less vulnerable to the rising tide, and it’s not only our coastal communities that will be affected. From shoreline to bay to Delta and beyond, California’s economy is bound together by highways, railways and airports. Cities and states are beginning to realize they need to start planning now for tides heading their way. The citizens of Redwood City have already made the issue of rising sea levels a priority. But as Alicia Aguirre, that city’s former mayor, points out, the problem is not limited to one community. “It's not just fixing what's happening in Redwood City, it's fixing what's happening all along the bay and along the coast as well. How do you work with developers and politicians and county government…and say, "This is what we can do?” Larry Goltzband, Executive Director of the Bay Conservation and Development Commission, agrees that for Californians, focusing on one area is short-sighted. “Those ships you see…docking at the port of Oakland, many times carry product that employs people in Redding or employs people in Tulare County…. So, it is in the best interest of all of California, whether you touch the bay, whether you see the bay on a daily basis, to actually invest in the bay for economic and environmental reasons.”

Adding to the big picture, Julian Potter of San Francisco International Airport points out the ripple effect that damage to the region’s airports would cause worldwide. “The economic impact is not singular to any one side -- everybody gets impacted by it, whether or not you’re near water. Chicago will be impacted by it, any of these hub cities.” Goltzband says retreating from the shoreline is not an option. “People will always want to build near the water,” he says. “I think that's probably just part of our DNA after thousands of years. The question that we…have to figure out is, how do we ensure that as the water rises, economic vitality and our community's vitality continues to grow?” Whether it’s due to a hurricane, tsunami or just the slowly rising tide, it’s inevitable that our coastline will be changing dramatically in the coming decades, and with it our economy, our environment and our way of life. Sandbags and levees aren’t enough – Californians must come together to create and enact real solutions, or we’ll all be in over our head.

Laura Tam, Sustainable Development Policy Director, San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association
Larry Goldzband, Executive Director, Bay Conservation and Development Commission
Alicia Aguirre, member of the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, former Mayor, Redwood City
Julian Potter, Chief of Staff, San Francisco International Airport

Guests

Alicia Aguirre

Former Mayor, Redwood City; Member, Metropolitan Transportation Commission

Larry Goldzband

Executive Director, Bay Conservation and Development Commission

E. Julian Potter

Chief of Staff, San Francisco International Airport

Laura Tam

Sustainable Development Policy Director, SPUR

Greg Dalton: Tonight on Climate One, we're discussing rising seas in the San Francisco Bay Area, and what that means for our economy and communities. I'm Greg Dalton and this program is sponsored by the San Francisco Foundation. If the global economy stops spewing any carbon pollution today, the oceans would still rise at least a couple of feet this century because of the warming already baked into our atmosphere. Scientists debate how high the tides will rise and how fast but there's no debate about the direction the water line is going - up.

Over the next hour, we'll discuss what the Bay Area is doing to prepare for an expanding bay. How will we pay to protect shoreline roads, homes and businesses? And what will happen to San Francisco and Oakland airports. Joining our live audience at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco we're pleased to welcome four leaders planning a new relationship with our beloved bay.

Alicia Aguirre is former Mayor of Redwood City and a member of the Metropolitan Transportation Commission; Larry Goldzband is Executive Director of the Bay Conservation and Development Commission; Julian Potter is Chief of Staff at San Francisco International Airport; and Laura Tam is Sustainable Development Policy Director at SPUR, the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association. Please welcome them to Climate One.

[Applause]

Greg Dalton: So Larry Goldzband, sea level rise happens slowly. Sea has risen eight inches in the last century. What's the big deal? Why should we care since it's just slowly rising seas?

Larry Goldzband: Well, I think what we really need to think about when we think about time is chunks. We can always look at the guidance that says, by the end of the century, it may rise as much as 55 inches. But how many of us are going to be around at the end of the century? Probably not many. And so what we are trying to figure out is how we can communicate the issues surrounding rising sea level by actually asking people to look at it in time chunks. What's going to happen during the next 10 years and what shall we do about say the 30 years after that? What would then happen in the 30 years after that and how would we think about say the next 50 years? Because if we try to imagine from now to the end of the century, much less beyond that, we're all going to just be paralyzed.

Greg Dalton: Laura Tam, what is the governments and companies in the Bay Area preparing to not be paralyzed by this?

Laura Tam: Well, we've seen a lot of activity in just the last five years in terms of people becoming more aware of the issue of rising sea levels. We've seen a lot of local governments preparing climate action plans that include adaptation activities, so not just trying to stop climate change which, of course, is extremely important but preparing for its effects, of which sea level rise is a big one for the Bay Area as you all know. So we've seen a lot of projects popping up around the Bay Area trying to look at the challenges of rising sea levels, where will they be in the next 50 years to the next 100 years, what can we do about preparing to build resilience into the shoreline, how can we protect ecosystems that are out there in the bay that are worthy of protection as well.

And you're seeing a lot of people really wrestling with, I think, what the biggest challenge of sea level rise presents which is how are we going to make decisions about this? There's no governance precedent for dealing with sea level rise. So it's a vexing climate challenge that I think you're starting to see that conversation building and growing around the Bay Area, and it's encouraging to see the dialogue.

Greg Dalton: Alicia Aguirre, you're on the frontlines. Redwood City right through in the bay, there's a port. San Mateo has the most property of any county in the state, most at risk. So what is Redwood City doing to get ready for this?

Alicia Aguirre: I think you mentioned it. San Mateo County has probably the most amount of money to lose, or the biggest losses in any of the counties in the Bay Area. Think about what's in San Mateo County when you have the airports, when you have all of the infrastructure, all the housing, the cities like Foster City, like Redwood Shores, when you have the Googles, the Facebooks, everything that's around the area. What are we doing in order to take care of that? Because it's still a -- as was mentioned before, it's still an unknown. So the people that are there or the infrastructure or the companies are still battling with this idea.

So I think what cities need to do, not only in my role on the council but also in Metropolitan Transportation Commission, but how are we actually preparing for that, what kind of structures are we allowing to be built, what are the size of the levees, how much investment can we put and get from companies that are already there? Because when you look at the maps, it's going to go past the 101. And when you look at everything that's going to happen in that area, it's kind of scary and it takes San Mateo County quite it flips halfway into the ocean. And you know, it’s a regional issue, so it's working with all of the cities. We have a lot of flooding in certain parts of Redwood City and so we have to work with all the cities that contribute to that flooding that ends in Redwood City.

So it's working on a regional issue because it's not just fixing what's happening in Redwood City, it's fixing what's happening all along the bay and along the coast as well. And how do you work with developers and politicians and county government in order to look at the different pieces and say, "This is what we can do and we can add to that piece." And at what level are we going to do it?

Greg Dalton: Let's talk about San Francisco Airport. A lot of people fly in and out of there. It's a huge economic engine. Julian Potter, those runways are very close to the bay, what are you doing to protect them from sea level rise?

E. Julian Potter: Thanks, Greg. Yes, the runways are close to the bay. They have been for the last 85 years since the airport has been there. So we've been well aware of the positioning and we've been building barriers along the shoreline for the last 30 years, some concrete barriers, rock and fill, other vinyl barriers. To date, no flooding has occurred on the runways due to the tidal "surges" but although not being the scientist, we are taking this all very seriously. And so we are in the middle of a two-year $500,000 coastal adaptation study, a structural engineering study. We're looking at the 8.1 miles of shoreline and we're going to plan for three events: the mid-century, the end of the century but most importantly, probably to us, is the 1% chance that we could have a storm event similar to Hurricane Sandy. That's in our sights right now.

Greg Dalton: And what happens if right now if that happens at SFO? Power goes out, runways underwater.

E. Julian Potter: Right now, we have our own waste water treatment plants and industrial waste water plant and we have underground storm drains and we have pumps. So we could flush the runway. Runways are built -- a lot of the systems on a runway obviously are waterproof so we will be able to clear the runways fairly quickly but that doesn't mean that we're not looking at it. Because today, we do have some gaps in the shoreline and so I think we would be operational fairly quickly, as was La Guardia. But they did sustain damage there and we want to make sure that we put in place plans now so that we don't sustain the kind of damage that they did.

Greg Dalton: So you could make SFO a fortress but it's no good if people can't get there on the 101, because the 101 is underwater. So Alicia Aguirre, you're on the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, this is one of the hardest parts of this problem is no jurisdiction can solve this themselves, people have to work together. That's hard for people and humans.

[Laughter]

Alicia Aguirre: One of the things that we did is the Plan Bay Area and that's been a huge effort with nine Bay Area counties that put together this plan on what we are building today is actually in-fill. It's high density. It's in transportation. But yes, the 101, there are improvements happening in different parts of it but it would be a catastrophe if that roadway -- and as you mentioned, a bridge to the airport or to other areas, wouldn't happen. So the whole plan is about infrastructure and is about high density and its in-fill and it's away from all of what we call the bay and, of course, the gulf and the ocean.

Greg Dalton: Does Caltrans get this? Because we've had a lot of the headlines recently about Caltrans and the Bay Bridge, I mean do they get climate change over at Caltrans?

Alicia Aguirre: Caltrans, yes, definitely. Caltrans is part of the MTC and we have been working with them. They were part of this plan. They were part of all the work that we've been doing on the Plan Bay Area. This was a plan that took us nine hours - nineyears. And so they are part of it but its groups like MTC and other transportation organization that are actually having MOUs to work on these kinds of issues. So MTC is working with Caltrans with working with others in order to mitigate some of the issues and to look at how we address the issues.

Greg Dalton: Larry Goldzband, you look at the entire bay. You work for a state agency. What are the greatest risk areas? Who's most at risk around the bay from storm surge sea level rise?

Larry Goldzband: Well, it really depends upon how you define who is. Alicia is totally correct. If you take a look at the bay, San Mateo County sort of has this target right on it. Because simply the way the topography works, if a storm comes, if levees break, no matter what happens, the bay waters rise. San Mateo from essentially the airport south is ~~definitely~~probably - is more at risk in terms of dollar value and in terms of people than just about anybody else. On the other hand, when you look at the bay, one of the great things about the Bay Area is that there are different topographies, different demographics, different geologies and no place is exactly the same.

And so if you go north to Sonoma and Napa, you have a fundamentally different appreciation of the bay than if you say head south to San Mateo or even over say to Newark because it's a very different kind of place. Napa has done an amazing job with its Napa River project to try to work with the water so instead of fighting the water and it's something that we can learn. And in San Mateo County, I should add, the San Francisquito Creek project is trying to do basically the same thing to account for water flow, to account for storm surge and to ensure that we can live with water up to a certain extent, instead of simply putting a seawall up there and trying to fight it.

Greg Dalton: So how do we need to think about change our relationship with the bay and the water? There's the ocean and it doesn't change much. But what we're hearing about is going to change a lot. We don't know how much or how fast so we have to change our mindset and that's a hard thing to do. So Larry Goldzband, how are we going to change our concept of living near the water which is a large reason why we are all here?

Larry Goldzband: We don't live in the ridge area. We don't live in the valley area. We live in the bay area and I know that may sound really simple but it's something that probably most of the people just take for granted. Well, we're not going to just simply take the bay for granted after the next 10, 20, 50 years, because it's obviously going to change. And from the way we tend to think about it as a state agency with regional jurisdiction, we are the first people to tell you that we don't exactly know what it's going to look like, but we can tell you how we need to get there.And the way we need to get there is, as Alicia says, regionally and sub-regionally. It's not simply the cities that are going to decide what the city is going to look like. The city is going to work with the cities next to it and the county is going to work with the county next to it.

We have nine counties that touch the bay and over 40 cities that touch the bay, and we're not going to be able to have one city work in a way that endangers another city. And so that's why regional agencies such as MTC, BCDC and ABAG and all that alphabet soup of regional agencies have to learn to work together in not only a coordinated fashion but a partnership to ensure that we can figure out the regional approach.

Greg Dalton: Laura Tam, are there any specific projects or cities that come to mind that are doing a good job on this? Is there anything built today where you can say, "That's what our future is going to look like"?

Laura Tam: I can think of quite a few actually but I'll start with our own town here in San Francisco. We've been working on a project on Ocean Beach, where there've been erosion events happening during major storms over the last, well, 20, 50 years, some of which have taken out the infrastructure and important things that are assets to the community. At Ocean Beach, we've worked with a lot of different city agencies and federal and state agencies as well, to try to come up with a long-term vision for how that beach could be maintained as an asset, as a recreational place, as a home to endangered species considering sea level rise and erosive events. So we've come up with sort of a design vision for what we could do.

We're also, this year, starting a project looking at a section of the waterfront on the eastern side of San Francisco. Alameda County has really stepped up and done a lot of work with BCDC actually to look at what are the assets on their shoreline and what things are at risk and how can those things be protected in a way that's coordinated. Lots of different city and county agencies are working together on that project. There's an effort going on in Silicon Valley, in Santa Clara County right now. Larry mentioned the San Francisquito Creek which is in San Mateo County, San Mateo and Santa Clara County, and they're managing a project looking at not just sea level rise but a river that flows into the bay that suffers from pluvial flooding. So when it pours, there's a lot of backup and a lot of flooding both on the flood plain as well as in the bay.

So there's a lot of exciting -- Napa River, the Corte Madera Creek in Marin, there's a lot going on and all these projects are sort of in the nascent design phase. I don't know if you could point to any of them and say this is how we adapt and actually you probably wouldn't want to do that anyway because every shoreline is different. Not anyone strategy is a one size fits all kind of strategy, but we have a lot of things in the works that I think we'll be able to look to in five, ten years and say, "This is a good model for planning. This is a good model for making a resilient shoreline."

Greg Dalton: And the model for San Francisco, the west side of San Francisco, I believe I saw it at SPUR. The Pacific Coast Highway goes behind the zoo so the Pacific Coast Highway is going to change and go eastward, which raises the question of where we defend and where we retreat. So what are the places we're going to say, "Okay, we got to protect this. But what are some other places where we're going to sort of pull back from the coast and some people are going to lose their homes or businesses. Larry Goldzband, how are we going to make that decision?

Larry Goldzband: The decision is going to be made regionally. It's not going to be made city by city. Because the only way you can try to create a pareto-optimal solution, that is a solution which ensures that those disadvantaged communities that are say, next to the bay, East Palo Alto, for example, are not disadvantaged, is to look at it regionally. And from my perspective, one of the great examples of how a city can actually start thinking about real projects in real time is actually the port of Redwood City. Because BCDC permitted a new seawall there as the first time we've actually permitted by using the bay plan amendments that were passed a few years ago that talked about sea level rise and how we needed to actually work through it through a permitting process. And it was a success and it is a success. So we can demonstrate that we can actually do this.

Greg Dalton: Julian Potter, do you want to --

E. Julian Potter: Yes. Just I think you've hit on the points on the jurisdictionally. So as I spoke earlier, we're looking at the bay side, the eight miles, right? But behind us is 101 and the San Bruno mountains, so we've partnered with San Mateo County and we just got a grant with the state coastal conservancy working with Dave Pine, a supervisor down there, and we're looking at the alluvial flow off the mountains into the creeks that run north and south of SFO.

Greg Dalton: So that's rainfall for those of us who are not water experts?

Larry Goldzband: Yes.

E. Julian Potter: And yes, as the rain comes down. Because we realize that it can come from all sides. The idea of the jurisdiction, the waters, they see no boundaries. So that's starting that partnership with San Mateo County, we know that we need to continue our outreach with the transportation linkages, the egress in and out of the airport is going to be - But also the partnership, we have the coast guard sits on the airport and it has an exposure to the bay. So working together with them on what they want to address. We have South San Francisco, San Bruno, Millbrae, Burlingame, all kind of touch a little bit of the airport. So we're beginning that work. So we start with what we know, the airport, and we're moving out and gaining partnerships and coming together to address this holistically.

Greg Dalton: Alicia Aguirre, was it possible that some people will need to retreat or pull back in Redwood City, and how do you think we're going to make this decision about what places to protect if you say that we can't afford to protect everywhere? There's going to be some tough choices and some pressures on places where there's lower property values, lower-income areas.

Alicia Aguirre: I can give you a perfect example of what's happening right now. We have an area that we're studying at Precise Plan, it's the Inner Harbor Plan, and we have liveaboards. We have a dock town. We have a Marine Science Institute. We have Bair Island Aquatic Center. We have rowing, Stanford rows there, Palo Alto Club rows there. We have all of that happening plus you have the port nearby and development and cargo. So you're looking at all of these things happening and this is a great opportunity where we're involving all the stakeholders.

And as what's mentioned, it's not only the stakeholders in Redwood City or San Mateo County, but also regionally that would benefit from this and deciding what does that inner harbor want going to look like? Is it going to be recreational? Are the liveaboards still going to be there? Is it similar to Sausalito? Is that what we want?

Because of affordable housing so they're screaming and yelling affordable housing or the recreation area wants to keep it open. Do we do more wetlands? There's all these decisions to be made and developers are part of the conversation as well as the county. So there's a perfect opportunity there to say, "Do we need to retrieve or do we need to protect or what is it that we're going to do?" Because it's an opportunity, very few opportunities that we have left in the Bay Area to do something that's a forward-moving and that will benefit the region.

Greg Dalton: So it sounds like people want to do more development. We have a basketball team that wants to do a big new pier arena on the waterfront in San Francisco. Larry Goldzband, are we going to see more big money development on the coast? And if so, what's that setting us up for?

Larry Goldzband: One of the things that we all have to recognize is that people believe that if an asset is placed close to the bay, it has greater value. And candidly, we can all agree with that because we love the bay. But one of the things that BCDC staff and BCDC commissioners recite as a mantra is that that should not be seen as simply what you do, that is, the bay is not a lost opportunity for what you can do on land. And so the public policy process, which is pretty difficult and pretty hazardous to get through, basically says that there are special conditions that you have to meet in order to build within BCDC's jurisdiction.

The short answer is people will always want to build near the water. I think that's probably just part of our DNA after thousands of years, and they will want to live near the water. The question that we have at BCDC and the regional agencies have to figure out is, how do we ensure that as the water rises, economic vitality and our community's vitality continues to grow albeit in a way that we can't forecast. Because we don't know what this place is going to look like in 100 years, much less 200 years, when our grandkids and great grandkids and so on are there. But the water will always be something that we want to be next to.

Greg Dalton: Laura Tam, I heard someone who's an expert in this area talk about waterfront development would be permanently temporary. That is the idea that goes to like there was Will Travis, who used to be at BCDC, the idea that this sort of permanence along the waterfront is more of a campground thing. I'd like to have your thought about our relationship with the water and whether we ought to be still building near it. Laura Tam?

Laura Tam: I think we've think that things that -- there's a lot of things that are already right next to the water that are worthy of protection. We're going to have limited resources for protection, right? We can't protect everything. We have to kind of have this regional conversation play out about what are the things that are important to us a region to protect. Maybe they are the airport, maybe they're some wetlands that are otherwise getting drowned. We have to figure out where those resources are going to come from.

And then in terms of thinking about things that we may choose to put on the waterfront that don't exist there now, ~~we have to think about~~ those things have to have a design or financial strategy for dealing with sea level rise. Because if they anticipate being there for the next 30 years, next 100 years, they have to anticipate that they need to do some planning around projected future sea level rise. I don't think we, as a public, should stand for any project that wants to be near the water that isn't planning to protect itself in some way, because there is limited dollars to go around for the things we already have.So that's one thing. And I also think you can think about planning and how much effort you're going to put in to design and financial strategy to protect yourself, depending on what kind of thing you're building.

If you're building an airport runway, you want to build something that's really tight. You want to make sure that that's going to be around. You're planning for the 1%, as Julian said, the 1% event. If you're building a park interpretive center, maybe it's something that could be moved inland in a few decades maybe it's something that's temporary so you should be adopting the sort of design strategies and the cost profile that best suits the type of thing you're trying to build.

Greg Dalton: Laura Tam is Sustainable Development Policy Director at SPUR. Our other guests today at Climate One are Julian Potter, Chief of Staff at San Francisco International Airport; Larry Goldzband from the Bay Conservation and Development Commission; and Alicia Aguirre, member of the city council in Redwood City. I'm Greg Dalton.

Alicia Aguirre, let's talk about paying for this. Where the money is going to come from? You’re someone who has to look to the voters and say, "Look, this is going to cost more to protect Redwood City." What are the ways that we're going to come up with money to protect the shoreline and a political environment where people don't like taxes? How are we going to do it?

Alicia Aguirre: We're already doing that in Redwood Shores which many people don't know is Redwood City, and they've already self-assessed themselves a parcel tax in order to not only create but maintain the levees in that area. So that's one idea is if you have construction, you have housing near the water, then you are going to pay for making sure that you're sustaining it. We don't even know the amount that it will cost. The billions that were -- if we lose what we have or in order to protect.

And so in speaking with the engineers, in speaking with the builders, the developers, the same question, it could be billions. We have no idea what it will cost to protect what we want to build or what we want to add. And so those are the unknowns. But when you do have something like Redwood Shores, where you have the residents there saying, "You know what? We want to protect this. We're willing to tax ourselves." So that will be -- it has parcel tax that has to be organizations and like Metropolitan Transportation Commission that has a lot of funding to work with areas of transportation and infrastructure. And now they've added housing and that's a very important aspect. So we have to look at all of those pieces. I don't think it's just taxing ourselves, I think it's also looking at what all of these organizations can do together, and I'm just talking about one but that has MOUs with many others.

Greg Dalton: So that's one example in contrast with what happened up in Belvedere, where some people said, "You're on the flood zone, you got to buy insurance." They kind of think people went crazy up there. "No, we don't want to pay for it. We want government to do it, et cetera." Larry Goldzband, what are some of the funding mechanisms where this money going to come from, these unknown billons?

Larry Goldzband: Well, not only do we not know where the money is going to come from but I think we also have to take one step back because that money is going to pay for a bunch of different kinds of things. And one of the things that I want to make sure that the audience recognizes is that we can talk about levees, which are made of concrete. We can also talk about levees that are made of dirt, and we can talk about marshland, and we can talk about increasing the amount of wetlands within the bay at specific places which can, in the near-term, actually absorb much of the energy and in the near-term help prevent the storm surge and so on.

But that's really expensive. And one of the things that we have to learn how to do better as a society is place a value on natural ways to do things, which is candidly not very easy to do. And one of the things that I'm excited by is that, for example, at Black Rock, they’re this very large investment firm, right? Well, they have a very much a growing practice of natural capital. That is they have clients who want to invest in fixed assets and get a fixed return but want to do so by investing in projects which are environmentally friendly. So I think that there are ways to think about this beyond the simple discounted cash flow of passing a bond measure and throwing cement into the water.

Greg Dalton: So some of this capital may come from the private sector not just taxing government?

Larry Goldzband: I think that it's going to end up being a mélange of forces that are going to ultimately ensure that the communities are protected and it's going to be private, it's going to be public and it's going to be inventive.

Greg Dalton: Julian Potter, you have the situation where you can basically just tax airlines and passengers, right? You have a revenue stream to --

E. Julian Potter: Not exactly.

[Laughter]

Greg Dalton: These people who use the airport are willing to pay for the airport presumably.

E. Julian Potter: Somewhat.

[Laughter]

E. Julian Potter: One thing, I think, you have to and we have to think about is the airport as part of a national aviation system, right? We have 45 million passengers a year that's 175,000 people a day go through the airport, 30,000 people work there. It's a big operation and it's connected worldwide, right. So this is not a problem for San Mateo County because of its geographic location where we are, nor is it for San Francisco because they own us. This is a national asset and we need national leadership and I know we seek that on many issues.

But one area that I can point to is the runway safety areas. Congress passed and said that every airport shall have a runway with sufficient distance to accommodate any aircraft that might slide off the end of the runway. We're in the middle of that construction. It's a $200 million program. Well, Congress mandated it and the FAA funded it, 70-30. We are paying 30. So I think there has to be some sort of a partnership because if you look across the country and you have New Orleans, you have JFK, you have La Guardia, Miami, Fort Lauderdale, L.A., San Francisco, we're all in the same boat here and these are assets that are worth protecting. And so we're not waiting for the federal government, as I told you, we're investing now and we're reaching out with partnership. But I think we call on Congress to help protect these assets.

Greg Dalton: Is that realistic in this political environment?

E. Julian Potter: Well, I think if they were willing to invest in these runway safety areas, yes. I think it's going to take time, as all government processes do, but I think because it's an aviation system, if SFO has a problem, that's a problem all over the country. I mean planes go down in airports everywhere so the economic impact is not singular to any one side, so everybody gets impacted by it, whether or not you’re near water. Chicago will be impacted by it, any of these hub cities, worldwide you are. So I think because of the disparate impact, a lot of people are going to feel the pain if they feel that these assets aren't protected. So I think we meet with our trade association and it's something we have put on the map and we started with -- I think you mentioned earlier -- first with looking at carbon mitigation and how can we reduce carbon and the airports, we’re working hard on that but that's not going to solve the problem we know.

Larry Goldzband: Can I add an example to Julian's example? We, in California, have a tendency to look at California as at least a couple of states, the coastal state and the Central Valley. What many people don't recognize is that a startlingly large percentage of the crops that are grown north of Bakersfield that are exported, are exported through the port of Oakland. So those ships you see in the bay, carting to and from, docking at the port of Oakland, many times carry product that employs people in Redding or employs people in Tulare County.

In addition, something like 98% of the fertilizer that's used in the Central Valley comes through the bay and goes up the Stockton channel. So, it is in the best interest of all of California, whether you touch the bay, whether you see the bay on a daily basis, to actually invest in the bay for economic and environmental reasons.

Alicia Aguirre: Good point.

Greg Dalton: Let's talk about seismic because we haven't talked about earthquakes. Some people would say earthquake is a more immediate and real risk to us than sea level rise or climate change, which is ephemeral and abstracted and apparently slow-moving. So I looked up some statistics recently, about quarter of the people in the Bay Area are prepared as the Red Cross says they should be. So Larry Goldzband, adding to seismic to this, how does that factor into it?

Larry Goldzband: Well, there are a couple of ways you can look at scenarios in the bay. There are probably many more than a couple. We've been talking about the combination of the Great Sandy, our version of Sandy. The big storm that comes in, it comes in on a king tide in January so the whole place floods and the water is coming from both directions. But there's another just as perhaps likely, if not, more likely scenario, which is that the next Loma Prieta, which is larger than the last Loma Prieta, comes on by.

And all of sudden you have wreckage where there were once earthen berms, which means that the South Bay gets flooded. And lo and behold the same thing happens in the Delta, so all of a sudden you lose a key levy or two in the Delta, which means the valley gets flooded. You have water flowing wherever you can imagine and so there's a scenario you really have to look at as well. And so when we take a look at scenario planning and we take a look at how we envision the bay, what we really need to do is make sure that we take into account all the different types of hazards that can come right beneath us.

Greg Dalton: Laura Tam, San Francisco recently upgraded their Hetch Hetchy water system that was largely seismically driven because of earthquakes. Now, San Francisco is reminded by the signs in the buses that they're going to soon upgrade the sewer system in San Francisco. How is that going to be done in a way anticipating sea level rise? Are they doing a good job?

Laura Tam: Yes. I would say our water and sewer agency, the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, has been really thinking about climate change in many dimensions as it has to, thinking about sea level rise with respect to the sewer system and will we be able to keep --

Greg Dalton: Keep it flowing.

[Laughter]

Laura Tam: Thanks. And as well thinking about the impacts to our water supply because, of course, with climate change, we're expecting to see warmer winters, potentially less water like the historic drought we're having right now. We expect that maybe we'll have something like 70% less snowpack by the end of the century on a regular basis. So the PUC and other water agencies in the Bay Area, I might add, have been doing a lot of work to model the potential changes to snowpack and rainfall and what will that do to our water supply, as well as starting to think about how can we upgrade this, the infrastructure we have in the ground to be prepared for not only earthquakes but sea level rise.

Greg Dalton: So if San Francisco is doing a good job on its sewers and Hetch Hetchy, help me understand Mission Bay where it’s liquefaction landfill right on the water, billions of dollars of new buildings being put right in flood zones and is anyone thinking about sea level rise? Laura Tam?

Laura Tam: I would say that they're aware of sea level rise. Sea level rise is ~~not something that we~~ -- it takes 20 years to plan and build anything in San Francisco, so we weren't thinking about sea level rise 20 years ago when we planned and permitted Mission Bay.

So that said, Mission Bay has a lot of qualities about it that enable it to be readily protected. They have a lot of new property owners, a lot of new tenants, so there's the ability to do what Alicia was speaking about earlier, the infrastructure financing districts or people taxing themselves to pay for protection. There is also a pretty clear area of waterfront where Mission Bay is potentially exposed that could be protected with a levee or something else. So I think it's an opportunity more than a risk and it's definitely important for San Francisco with the housing situation that we have right now. It's a lot more affordable. [Crosstalk]

Larry Goldzband: And let me say that -- I apologize. Let me say that, just in defense of Mission Bay to some extent, the City of San Francisco is working with BCDC and a couple of outside partners on a special study with regard to Mission Creek and that whole southern area there to try to figure out how it can best adapt as a community. And that's really the important thing to think about as a community.

Greg Dalton: One contrast -- just one second -- is Hunters Point where now we know about sea level rise and Hunters Point is being built at 55 inches and they're planning all sorts of storm drains, and sea level rise is very much on the radar from the beginning at Hunters Point, whereas it clearly wasn't at Mission Bay. Julian Potter?

E. Julian Potter: Yes. I was just -- you kind of brought up an interesting note when looking at earthquake preparation, right, for the seismic stability and have we finished that, right? I mean, that's a big problem that we know is real and we still have a lot of investment to do there. And, in fact, at the airport, we're just finishing, it'd be another year, a year and a half, air traffic control tower and the reason being it wasn't seismically stable. You'll see it as you go out to SFO now, two towers out there, one under construction. It’ll be another 40 feet higher that costs about 100 million. We're also underway of building Terminal 1, which is the oldest terminal out there now, and it is sinking with the liquefaction. And so that will be a huge multi-billion dollar project. So at the same time, I think you have to know that there is still significant investment that we're doing in terms of being in an earthquake zone, so don't jump too fast to the rising tide.

Greg Dalton: Well, this is a matter of personal interest. The Commonwealth Club just bought a building on The Embarcadero. We're going to move there next year, so we want to know. My office is on the third floor. [Laughter] We're talking about sea level rise in the Bay Area with Alicia Aguirre, former mayor and councilmember in Redwood City; Larry Goldzband from BCDC; Julian Potter from San Francisco International Airport; and Laura Tam from SPUR. I'm Greg Dalton. Larry Goldzband, tell us about Goldilocks. Tell us the story of Goldilocks.

Larry Goldzband: Well, there are these two little kids -- one of the great things that BCDC did under the great leadership of Will Travis, who's in the audience, was to really start the discussion about the rising bay. And one of the great things that was part of that was the creativity that was associated with it, and BCDC held a competition that was international, about what are the really interesting, even if they're not realistic at this point, ways that we can deal with the rising bay. Well, of course, that happened a few years ago and their talk has continued, and one of the ways that this talk has continued has been manifested in the idea of putting a series of locks underneath the Golden Gate Bridge, therefore, Goldilocks. Yeah, there you go. Well, my last name is Goldzband and I've been called Goldilocks for how long and I don't have any hair; that's just the way it goes, so I figure it's just being named after me. But one of the things that really needs to be seriously discussed in the Bay Area is whether it is possible, much less wise, to actually stop the water from coming in to begin with in some way, in an engineering solution, underneath or near the Golden Gate.

There are huge issues with regard to this, not the least of which are the fact that doing something like that would alter the biological functions of the bay. But as we look at the bay and as we look at what's going to happen over the next hundred years, much less thousand years, it's going to change no matter what. And so we have to figure out what the alternatives are and one of those alternatives that we have to always look at is doing nothing because that costs us as well.

Greg Dalton: I want to ask a personal question of each of you, starting with Alicia Aguirre. What are you personally doing in your lifestyle to plan or adapt to severe weather, sea level rise, resilience in your own life?

Alicia Aguirre: Well, I really enjoy the bay and so I'm enjoying it as much as I can. In my personal life, to prepare, I think I am one of the percentage that is prepared for an earthquake and prepared for what can change. I'm also very aware of how we grow things in our backyards and what type of systems we use. We have a recycle water plant in Redwood City and how we built that and how it affects the schools and the playgrounds and -- so those are the things that I'm part of. And just to jump off of what you were saying earlier, if we had the Goldilocks, and I just want to end that --

Greg Dalton: Yes, because it would impact San Mateo in a big way, so please --

Alicia Aguirre: Well, I'm a rower in the bay and so there are times when we get stuck in the mud, and you know that most of the bay -- I think it's 60% to 80% -- is not lower than 12 feet. I mean, you can literally get stuck if you don't know the canals to go in on the bay. So the bay is very shallow and so imagine what would happen if we had Goldilocks and we're just going to be on sand in all of San Mateo because it's going to take all the water away. Right.

Greg Dalton: She’s going to whack you with the paddle. Okay. Laura Tam, how about resilience in your own life?

Laura Tam: Resilience in my own life. Well, I try to focus on the fact that we both need to be prepared as well as do what we can to minimize our own environmental footprints. And so I'm a transit rider and a cyclist, and so are my kids and they're learning about the importance of conserving water, especially now, conserving energy, about the value of habitat in the bay and the ocean. And we take field trips with them to show them the great environment that we were blessed to inherit and that we hope to pass on in a sustainable way. So I guess sort of teaching the new generation as well as trying to minimize our own footprint as much as possible.

Greg Dalton: Get them in the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, those skills are going to be useful coming ahead. Larry Goldzband?

Larry Goldzband: We have a 10-year-old whose favorite thing to do is go to zoos or go on expeditions in which he can see wildlife, and so we're doing very much the same thing that you are. We're basically teaching him that this is great as it is now, but it's all different depending upon where you go. And as a 10-year-old, that's sort of an easy thing to get because we don't look like where, say, Vancouver is in some respects, although we do in others. And he's learning that the wildlife there is different than the wildlife here. And he loves riding BART, and it's a great thing to be able to take your kid to work on BART and have him look at 24, where we live, and see the backlog of cars and say, "Gosh, we're going 60 miles an hour faster than they are."

Greg Dalton: Julian Potter?

E. Julian Potter: I'll be honest, I'm happy I have my earthquake bag prepared at work and at home.

But most of my effort falls in my professional life. I can't say that I've changed a lot of my personal actions. I try to ride to work on ride-to-work day, ride my bike down to the airport; that's pretty tough. [Crosstalk] But really it's growing awareness within professional associations, working the airports, the trade associations, our elected leaders, and our employees, we're trying to always do new initiatives to move people on to transit. We actually pay for the BART transit surcharge, the $8 to go in and out of the airport, for any of the employees there, especially the wage workers. We're pushing a transit initiative so that we can give $130 to employees to use transit instead of taking their own personal car. So I'll admit I don't personally --

Greg Dalton: Personal resilience is tough because it relies on system, so you can be on a hill, but where's your food come from? Or you can stash some food or water, but how long is that going to last? So it really relies on communities and I just wanted to get that in there.

Let's go to audience questions. Welcome to Climate One.

Female Participant: Last year, we had a similar talk about the sea level rise where you talked about the levee system and the marshlands, so is that plan still on and how has it progressed? Is there any hope we see with that?

Greg Dalton: I think that's Larry Goldzband. Delta levees.

Larry Goldzband: Well, it's not just Delta levees. I mean, it's really when you look at the bay, what we have the ability to do in various places is to have what I would say is a real win-win situation. I apologize for the jargon. But one of the things that we have to do to make sure that the bay is productive is to dredge and we have to make sure that there are great navigation channels to allow the ships to get where they need to go. Well, what should we do with that dredged material? Historically, it's all gone out to the Pacific or even dumped at Alcatraz. Well, that has lessened, thankfully. What we really need to do is use that dredged material and place it where it can be used to accrete and to ensure that we have more and better marshland which can help with the rising bay. So we're working with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and a host of folks who are involved in dredging to maximize the amount of dredged materials which are reused.

Greg Dalton: Let's have our next question. Welcome to Climate One.

Male Participant: Yes, thank you. ABAG and MTC recently produced Plan Bay Area and it seeks to put development into planned development areas, but a number of those planned development areas, if you overlay the ABAG map for what's going to get wiped out with sea level rise, are in areas that will be wiped out by sea level rise, doesn't say a word about that. A number of those planned development areas are in areas that are subject to liquefaction, doesn't say a word about that. How can a fairly sophisticated regional agency screw it up so badly?

[Laughter]

Laura Tam: I would say that they didn't really screw it up so badly. I think we have a lot of priority development areas, to use ABAG and MTC language, are areas that we already inhabit. There ~~are places where we -- or there~~ are places like Downtown San Francisco, Downtown Oakland, there are places that are already good candidates for protection and there are places where there's a whole lot of existing infrastructure and people's houses and jobs where we're going to figure out as a region, and perhaps the cities themselves, ways to protect themselves. And so in some ways, if we can concentrate growth in areas where we are already likely to be able to try to fund additional protection, it's a smart strategy, rather than sprawling into areas that will require new protection, new infrastructure, a bunch of other expensive stuff, in addition to sea level rise protection. So I would say that it's a much smarter strategy, and actually it was a recommendation of SPUR several years ago to concentrate development and plan for taking regional resources that become available for sea level rise planning and focus them on protecting priority development areas because these are the places that we can contribute to reducing emissions as well because people are more likely to ride transit and things like that.

Larry Goldzband: Let me add to what Laura said in two ways. Number one, BCDC is actually working with MTC and a number of different organizations to actually look at those priority development areas and do the risk analysis and the vulnerability analysis because we think we have to. The second thing I'd say is that the next Plan Bay Area, whatever it's called, in 2017 will actually include information from BCDC with regard to how we can have resilient shorelines.

Greg Dalton: Let's have our next question. Welcome to Climate One.

Female Participant 2: I heard that San Francisquito Creek, the gentleman that's proposing the plan, is planning on spending billions of dollars for earth and levees, which if he -- just to Dumbarton Bridge in East Palo Alto, that doesn't consider the other eight counties around yet. Are you considering -- if you're going to continue bringing in people to this area in times of drought and sea level rise, are you thinking, like we are in Redwood City, about perhaps floating homes for development instead of permanent things? And are you looking at more than 30 years which is just a small amount of time because it's going to continue for hundreds of years.

Greg Dalton: Thank you. Alicia Aguirre?

Alicia Aguirre: I think she asked if other areas are doing things like -- other than Redwood City. But I think the planning does go on. In fact, I mentioned earlier the developers are developing at 2070 levels and so they're already planning on that.

Greg Dalton: Laura Tam, are we going to all turn into Sausalito?

Laura Tam: I mean, it's a possibility. That kind of development is also vulnerable in many ways. They can't handle a lot of wave action. The infrastructure isn't already there. You got to put stuff in the bay. I don't know if that's a good place to put a bunch of new people, but, yes, we do have a lot of people coming to the Bay Area in the next 30 years and there's going to be a lot of preparations needed on the water supply front as well as on the sea level rise front, as you mentioned.

Greg Dalton: Laura Tam works for SPUR. We're talking about sea level rise and climate change at Climate One. Let's have our next audience question. Welcome.

Jeff Potter: We have another threat of sea level rise which is tsunamis. The biggest source we've got right now is the Cascadia Subduction Zone off the coast of Oregon and Washington. That is a fault that's very similar geologically to the faults that let go recently in Japan and Sumatra.And the projections for sea level rise due to tsunamis on the north coast of the city is 12 to 14 feet and that would be lesser as the tsunamis make their way into the bay. But it's something that is part and parcel with what you folks are doing.

Greg Dalton: Are tsunamis on the radar?

E. Julian Potter: Absolutely. The studies have to contemplate any level of sea level rise through the projections, and so a tsunami, I think that level whether it'd be again the 100-year flood or the 15 inches or the 55 inches, I think the question really is the timing, right? So we have to plan for them. Whatever we build, we have to build contemplating that in the future they might need to build on top of. So it's really an understanding of the potential for the worst and what can we build now to protect today.

Laura Tam: Can I get additional comment on that, too?

Greg Dalton: Laura Tam.

Laura Tam: One of the most important things you can do to prepare for tsunamis is develop emergency plans. It's kind of in the field of warning people to get out of way and protecting human life. Tsunamis also go away. They recede. Sea level rise is something that is going to happen and remain high. It's going to just keep going up forever, so it's something -- it's a little bit of a different planning framework than planning for something that will happen and it's certainly horrifying and scary and we hope doesn't happen, but it's certainly a different sort of planning exercise to prepare for an emergency event versus a long-term emergency.

Greg Dalton: Let's have our next question about sea level rise at Climate One. Welcome.

Jade: My name is Jade. I'm an intern with San Francisco Office of Environmental Policy and Compliance with the Department of the Interior. We've recently been doing a lot of research on drought and so I was wondering what are your thoughts on the impact sea level rise could potentially have on droughts such as the flooding of deltas and other freshwater resources?

Greg Dalton: And also saltwater intrusion is a big concern. So who'd like to tackle that one? Laura Tam?

Laura Tam: I could take a little bit, yes. I mean, I haven't really thought too much about the impact of sea level rise on drought issues, but certainly we talked earlier about levees in the Bay Delta and how they protect - there’s a series of islands and levees that sort of protect some of the most important water conveyance infrastructure in all of California. If those levees, which are extremely seismically vulnerable, were to fail and saltwater, which gets further into the Delta and will continue to as sea level rises, if that stuff is able to enter the water intakes right now that supplies so much of not only Southern California but the entire Bay Area -- much of the Bay Area as well, the water supply could be interrupted to those customers for a year and a half before it's restored. So it's a significant imminent catastrophe in the Delta that we have to prepare for and there's a bunch of work going on right now. I urge you all to check out something called The Bay Delta Conservation Plan. It's a strategy to try to deal with that problem before it arises. However, I should also say that it wouldn't be totally effective for 10 to 20 years, so hopefully the big earthquake doesn't hit before then.

Larry Goldzband: And I would add to that because I think Laura is right on target. The Bay Delta Conservation Plan, which is now being promoted by the administration, is an incredibly important thing for all of us who drink water in the state, which is everybody, to really understand because the Delta is a very fragile place. And one of the things that we always have to remember is that the Delta really should not simply be called the Delta. It is the Bay Delta. And so remember that the freshwater flows from the Delta that aren't captured, say, from the aqueduct or don't stay in the Central Valley, come right through here and end heading out to the Pacific at some point, right?

And so at the next BCDC meeting in a couple of weeks, we'll have the BDCP people in. How's that for jargon, Greg? BCDC and BDCP. So that we can understand how those freshwater flows will actually be effective so that we can have a better understanding about how that will affect the Bay.

Greg Dalton: Larry Goldzband is executive director of the Bay Conservation and Development Commission. Let's have our next question on sea level rise here at Climate One.

Male Participant 2: Thank you. I was living in New York when Hurricane Sandy hit and one of the things that stood out was that there was only one building in downtown Manhattan that get their lights on because they have their cogeneration plant. My question is that how did the utilities prepare. I mean, if all of our preparations fail and the grid goes down, how does the utility prepare for that? And are there any buildings here in the Bay Area that would be able to continue to operate and get their lights on?

Greg Dalton: Sorry, Larry, but you used to work at PG&E, so that one's got your name on it.

Larry Goldzband: We actually at BCDC have PG&E and Chevron and a number of other private entities in to talk to us about their preparations. And it's more than just keep the lights on from the idea of a storm. Climate change is going to have tremendous effects on heat and so how can PG&E understand and prepare for more hotter days? PG&E has a tremendously intensive program that they're going through right now to do just that. Here is my question back to you. If you were to have a storm surge and one of the other things that happened in New York was the fact that the subways got flooded. Well, we've had BART in one of the things that BART said that was really interesting is that two-thirds of all trips on BART either begin or end between Embarcadero and the Civic Center on Market Street. So how is BART trying to prepare?

And they have a tremendous program now trying to figure that out and they have done something which I think is very, very commendable. They have decided that anytime they do a capital improvement project, basically, no matter how large or small it is, they throw in the analysis of sea level rise and climate change, and try to figure out how they can, over the long term with that project, help better their system.

Alicia Aguirre: And to add to that, what cities need to do and are doing is looking at their infrastructure and the investment of that and make sure that not only it meets the requirements of sea level rise but all the seismic activity. I know that's what we're doing because a lot of our infrastructure goes through we have a lot of creeks in Redwood City that we need to end. Sometimes with development you have to kind of move things a little bit. I mean, most of the cities' infrastructure and sewers are more than 50 years old and so you have all of the issues and all of the leakage and all of the water running out. So as cities look at their budgets and look at their infrastructure, they have to now look at not only seismic precautions but also sea level rise. And that's part of that big regional picture.

Greg Dalton: Alicia Aguirre is a member of the Redwood City Council. Let's have our last question at Climate One. Welcome.

Steve Lynch: Good evening. My name is Steve Lynch. I drove down from Davis. As I drove down, I listened to a podcast called Sea Level Rise that had John Englander in it. John Englander talks about whole cities disappearing. Miami will become an island. And that.

And the feeling I got from that one was that a lot of these measures we're talking about tonight will be too little too late. So, Greg, you're quite involved in this. I'd like to hear what your opinion is in contrasting tonight's program with that one.

Greg Dalton: Well, John Englander is in the audience, so, John -- we're going to ask him. He was here recently, so thank you for being here, John. If the question is being science-based, we have lots of different programs, lots of different guests over time. If the question is that we're not thinking dark enough here, that if you buy into some of Dr. Hansen's research, et cetera, that the sea level rise is going to be a lot greater and faster than we've been talking about tonight, there are some very credible people who think that those scenarios are plausible and that we're not thinking bold enough, fast enough if that Greenland ice sheet goes, we're going to see some -- and Richard Alley, who was another Climate One guest here, works on abrupt climate change, we may not be thinking big enough. I'd like to know -- close here, by -- oh, boy, we can go dark or we can go light. Let's go light [laughter] and think about some up notes here -- let's end on an upbeat note here so we don't send people off to drink in depression here tonight. So, Julian Potter, let's think of an optimistic note to end on .

E. Julian Potter: Optimistic note. We're ready. [Laughter] No, no, really. In looking at the runways and in looking at the airport, we are doing things today to help prevent, but we're also planning for the future. You sometimes see maps where the airport is underwater and I'm here to tell you that has not happened. We do have the walls up and we are putting steps in place now. And we're looking at what can we immediately do to clean and to resume operations. I think that's what's most important about an airport. It is an outdoor site. We are used to weather and how do you get operations back up and going? We might be down, but as you said, the water will recede and trust that we'll get the operation going.

Greg Dalton: We have to end it there and I guess what we just heard is that when the bad one happens, you can get to the airport and get out of town. [Laughter] So we have to end it there. Our thanks to Alicia Aguirre, former mayor of Redwood City; Larry Goldzband, executive director of the Bay Conservation and Development Commission; Julian Potter, chief of staff at San Francisco International Airport; and Laura Tam with the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association. I'm Greg Dalton. Thank you all for coming and listening to Climate One today.

[Applause]

[END]

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