Climate special: How to fix the climate crisis with Tim Lenton and Kate Marvel

17:38Tim Lenton:And that also makes it more attractive to adopt. Oh, and also with a new technology, there's a habit for innovation to create other technologies that come along and make it more useful, also making it more attractive to adopt. And that's All of those things are sometimes broadly called increasing returns by the complexity economist Brian Arthur. But yeah, we might also call them learning by doing, economies of scale, and something like technological reinforcement. And the point is, these amplifying feedbacks together can get strong enough to sometimes create a tipping point. And that's often where there's a critical mass of people who've adopted something new is enough to trigger almost everybody else to adopt.

18:19Tim Lenton:Yeah, like the obvious ones I'm thinking of are electric vehicles. And also just as we sat down, I saw that there's a Chinese electric vehicle firm, BYD. This BYD firm is just about to overtake Tesla sales in the UK. So that's an example of some real, it is really snowballing. Solar, of course, is so cheap now, that's really taking off. but Tim is that the template for positive tipping points that we kind of just have to let them or make conditions for them to be just to sort of be taken up or is that how we leverage it? Well we have exactly the right question and we have to think about what actions can bring forward the positive tipping point accepting that we need to be going more than five times faster than we are at decarbonising the economy.

19:12Tim Lenton:And luckily, there's a bunch of answers as to how each of us, one of our professions or whatever, have got not just skin in the game, but agency to do something about this. So at the most basic level, maybe we can be an adopter of a new behaviour, eating less meat or a new technology, an EV, solar panels on our roofs, whatever. We've probably also got a pension fund, many of us working people, and we should be asking hard questions about where that's invested and agitating if it's in the old fossil things and not in the new clean things. But on top of that, you know, the story of positive tipping points that have already happened, like the fact that Norway, the car markets tipped entirely to EVs, or the great rise of offshore wind power that starts out of Denmark, or even in the UK case, the precipitate to decline and shutdown of coal burning.

20:08Tim Lenton:All of these, if you trace the story back far enough, start with social activists of some kind and or innovators, the people who have a passion to develop the core new technology and activists who are often wanting to create change and see that possibility before everybody else. It's a great story in the Norway case because it's members of the pop band AHA, people as old as me will remember, and their architecture friend, Harold Rosvik, and their environmentalist friend, Frederick Haug, who in 1989 start essentially drawing attention to the possibility of an EV tipping point in Norway and have basically come up with nine policy demands to the Norwegian government to try and incentivise EV uptake.

20:55Tim Lenton:So it was a long journey to the eventual tipping point, which was in about 2012 in Norway. but it's fascinating to see how at heart a very small group of people can ultimately trigger a phenomenal scale of change. I noticed I was looking at the index and I saw Morton Harkett. What? What's he doing in here? And then I read it. It was like, oh my God.

21:18Kate Marvel:I feel like I need to do a piece on the unlikely climate here.

21:21Tim Lenton:Well, I think we should encourage 80s stars to come back and do something. I think you should try and get Morton on the pod Because if you've ever listened to an interview with him, you'll realise there's a diode in the wool environmentalist lurking behind a famous 80s pop singer.

21:39Kate Marvel:And so, Tim, we've run through some of the, I guess, more obvious tipping points that perhaps are underway, hopefully, like the EV revolution, offshore wind, the end of coal power in the UK. Are there any that you see in your day to day life that you think, oh, we're almost there, we're just on the cusp of real change?

21:59Tim Lenton:Yeah, I think that diet change is a really interesting and emotive thing to appeal to Kate's favourite topic. I mean, people are very passionate, understandably, about what they eat. And it's a way in which we commune together around the table. But there's evidence in the UK and at least seven other rich nations that overconsume meat, way over what's healthy, by the way, excess protein consumption that's actually bad for your health, you know, excess meat consumption, especially red meat can cause colorectal cancer, heart disease, diabetes, etc. In seven or eight rich nations, there's been a quite marked decline in meat consumption, including Britain.

22:45Tim Lenton:And I think we have all seen examples of athletes or other social influencers who are pushing particular diets, whether that's vegan or whatever, but often plant-based or low-meat diets. And we can probably all, well, some of us are old enough to remember how social norms shifted around things like smoking in restaurants. It was perfectly normal when I was a kid and it would be abhorred now. I'm kind of looking forward to the day where the person who orders a steak in the restaurant gets everybody turning to look at them in a slight disgust, if I'm honest. Not because I'm a hardliner. I'm a kind of flexitarian myself.

23:25Tim Lenton:But I do recognize that to get anywhere near the zero emission future we need, we need to be eating on average a lot less meat than we are. And that's a classic melting pot of kind of norm change and behavior change. This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome.

23:45Kate Marvel:You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome? That's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required. Compatibility and availability varies 18+. so Kate can you we've talked a little bit about some of the the negative emotions that come alongside thinking about climate change so anger grief and fear but what about the the impact of positive emotions and their role in inspiring actions I'm thinking about you know your chapters on love and and pride for example yeah you know I wanted to start the book with a positive emotion I wanted to start with wonder um because when you take a step back you know exactly like Tim said when we started out, just thinking about this planet that we live on and the fact that we understand it at all, that's incredible.

24:43Kate Marvel:And I feel like that can be both it's true in and of itself, but it's also a really useful tool for making connections and starting conversations, right? A lot of times when I tell people I'm a climate scientist, they assume that I'm going to immediately start scolding them, right? People are like, I recycle. And I'm like, I don't care. Um, but if you start out with kind of wonder, right, if you start out with, did you know the earth's water is probably older than the earth itself? It came from space. Like that's gonna, people are gonna say, oh, how, wait, that's, that's amazing. And they're going to be more likely to talk to you.

25:21Kate Marvel:So I think, you know, embracing a really wide spectrum of emotions is really useful as a communication strategy. But I also think that there is support for feeling these emotions in the scientific and social scientific literature, right? So my chapter on pride begins with kind of what we would think of as hubris or arrogance, right? The fact that, oh, we can just geoengineer our way out of this. All we have to do is just block out the sun and then problem solved. And, you know, like, it's really a little bit more complicated than that. But there is a sense of pride that I think we can feel in doing the hard work, right?

26:02Kate Marvel:Exactly like Tim said, there's so much that so many of us can do to really seed the social change. And I think there is deep satisfaction in doing that work and in building that power in order to make that change. I have a whole chapter on hope, even though I have a very complicated relationship to hope. I feel like when people always ask me, oh, do you hope we can solve climate change? That for me is kind of like asking, do you hope you can clean your bathroom? That's a silly question. You know what to do. Just go clean your bathroom. As Tim says, we have so many of the solutions we need. We are on these trajectories already.

26:46Kate Marvel:we just need to push them over the precipice. We need to get past that social tipping point. And there's so much that we can do and we know what to do. And finally, the emotion that I ended with is love, because I think that is something that we all share, all something that we can feel for each other, for this planet. The fact that the science says how amazingly interconnected and intricate everything on this planet is, you know, really makes you feel a part of this whole world. And then the social science literature says that love is probably the most powerful motivating factor in climate action.

27:29Kate Marvel:People are motivated to act because they love their communities, their families, love for their children, for future generations. So we know how powerful that emotion is. How did you find the process of writing the book? I have to be honest, when I was reading some of the chapters, late at night, just before you go to sleep, I found it quite a difficult read to kind of confront head on some of the science that you're talking about. I mean, I can only imagine what it was like for you to have to go out and do the research and then write about it. Or was it quite a cathartic process? I should put that on the cover.

28:06Kate Marvel:Quite a difficult read. I actually, I found it, I found it to be kind of a nourishing process. You know, it's such a gift to be able to sit down and sift through the science, think about your emotions, and kind of produce something creative. The ability to do that, the time to do that is really such an incredible gift. And I did find it helpful. I found it helpful to take a step back and sort of survey the scientific research literature. I found it helpful to try to talk about it in a different way, because no shade to the IPCC or the National Climate Assessment or anything. I've worked on those things, but they're kind of boring.

28:54Kate Marvel:And, you know, thinking about, okay, how can I talk about the same science in a way that is may be more engaging because I am, you know, tapping into those emotions. You know, some chapters were really, really difficult to write. You know, I found the fear chapter really hard to write. I found the grief chapter really hard to write because I didn't, I didn't like feeling those emotions. I didn't like being stuck in those places, but it was, it was helpful and it was honest, I think. And then, you know, writing things like the surprise chapter, which is about the things that we still don't understand as scientists, I found that to be actually kind of fun because I feel like my job as a scientist is mostly really fun.

29:38Kate Marvel:It's really fun to find stuff out about the world.

29:40Tim Lenton:Well, I mean, we have to face up to these emotions, don't we? Because I mean, maybe that's one reason, apart from fossil fuel lobbying and all of that small thing, but why we haven't really got to grips with the problem. I mean, this hyper object of a problem that's too big for us to face or grapple with. So we just get on with TikTok instead.

30:01Kate Marvel:Totally. I mean, I think about this stuff all day, every day, and I still don't really understand it. I still can't really fit it in my head. This is a problem that is caused by basically every industrial human activity. And because carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are well mixed in the atmosphere, it is affecting literally every aspect of life on this planet. You know, trying to boil that down to something very glib and manageable, I think that's just not possible. I think it is the work of a lifetime or many lifetimes to really come to terms with what this is and what this means and what we do about it.

30:44Tim Lenton:And Tim, we touched a little bit on this idea of the amount of sway you need to push something into a over the hill and create a inflection point. And in your book, you quoted a study that I've seen before, that found that campaigns only need three and a half percent of active participation to succeed. And I've seen some that say, you know, 20%. But I was struck by that 3.5%. I mean, do we not already have that for people campaigning for action on climate change? Well, that's from the work of Erica Chinowet, Maria Stephen. Great work. But to be specific, they're looking at instances of political change where it's not a liberal democracy situation.

31:33Tim Lenton:people are really upset by whoever's bossing the situation and are trying to create not necessarily revolution, but cessation or whatever. So one must be careful not to just map the 3.5 % magic figure over to Extinction Rebellion or any other part of the future or whatever, although the architects of Extinction Rebellion did exactly that. But what's really exciting, though, is that it's the non-violent political campaigns that would appear almost guaranteed to succeed if they reach at least the 3.5 % level. in terms of the fraction that are actively protesting on climate. I never actually totaled the numbers up, but we've certainly been in that ballpark at times, I think, at the height of Fridays for Future, for example.

32:33Tim Lenton:And then, you know, things change. And in the UK, we have a disgraceful situation where successive governments now are locking people up, even for threatening to do civil disobedience, for extraordinarily, extortionately long jail terms. And that must not stand. We should all be, as citizens, appalled at the clampdown on peaceful, non-violent protests on a matter of collective survival in principle. but that's just a case of what tends to happen in tipping dynamics anyway which is the is the status quo the incumbent way of doing things uh wants to keep the incumbent way of doing things because whether they're the oil firms or bankers or whoever they've got a vested interest and they do well out of the status quo and when things start to maybe destabilize a little bit or the protest gets going they may react harder and that um to try and shut things down and i'd argue that's exactly what we're seeing in many liberal democracies now.

33:37Tim Lenton:I might be a little sad we haven't passed apparently these tipping points from the protest movement, but I take heart from the survey evidence we have that you were asked, this is surveys of multiple countries around the world, typically at least three quarters of people think that we're in a climate crisis and that governments should be acting far more urgently and decisively on it. So the silent majority is undoubtedly there and it's well over 80 % actually in quite a lot of countries. A couple of years ago we had Andreas Malm on the podcast and I was just thinking of him when you were talking then because he just posed the question of why hasn't there been violent protest about climate change well and he's not condoning it and nor am I but he's just posing the question because in the past we have seen that in many different protest scenarios but it's just a bit odd that we haven't seen it perhaps with climate yet.

34:33Tim Lenton:And I wondered what you made of that. Well, I wouldn't advocate going there because as we've already mentioned, the studies show that it's non-violent civil disobedience and direct action that is the more effective in a situation of trying to create political transformative change. Non-violent though, if we go back to my suffragette relative Lillian Lenton, her stated aim was to burn one building a week and to show the then government that it was not credible to try and go on governing without the consent of half of the governed, in other words, the female half of the population. And Lillian was not alone in the suffragette movement.

35:19Tim Lenton:That was standard tactics along with windows smashing and all kinds of stuff. Having checked no one was in the building before you set fire to it, of course. But this was, of course, an archetypal example of a small and impassioned group playing a pivotal role in changing democracy for everybody. Now, as I've mentioned, unfortunately, in Britain at least, we're in a situation where the powers that be are putting draconian jail sentences on those who would peacefully and nonviolently protest on climate change. and thank the whoever's for all the moves that are happening in international legal courts to actually uphold the legal importance of us acting decisively to tackle climate change.

36:11Kate Marvel:I wanted to ask you briefly, Tim, about the idea that maybe tipping points that can kind of get close to this threshold, but then maybe peter out. You talk in your book about the school strikes for climate movement that was led by Greta Thunberg. And that happened at the same time in the UK as this wave of extinction rebellion protests. And then after that, we saw the UK government improve its national climate target. We saw local councils declare climate emergencies. So it felt like there was kind of a wave of momentum that has now somewhat dissipated. Do you think that that kind of tipping point that you talk about in your book made a meaningful difference or was it just kind of talk without action?

36:58Tim Lenton:I'm pretty sure it did make a meaningful difference because you can look at survey results. If we just focused on the UK, because the data is pretty good there, you can see that among sectors of the population, particularly the older segment of the British population, they went from, like is the case in the US still, sadly, having, you know, half of them thinking that either climate change wasn't real or wasn't due to humans or we shouldn't worry about it, to being one of the most switched on sectors. They actually tipped, if you like, to more than three quarters thinking that climate change is a serious issue and we should do something about it.

37:37Tim Lenton:So it did shift public understanding and perception more effectively than Kate and I and a bunch of climate scientists, but obviously leveraging off our work, but with emotion, I think, and with commitment, expressing why it mattered. The fact that the protest movements, like everything else, couldn't continue in the pandemic and so on and so forth, I don't think that's the end of the story. We are seeing in a global context a rise of what's called deliberative democracy in the academic lingo, but lots of instances where bottom-up new forms of democracy are gaining strength and power.

38:19Kate Marvel:These are things like citizens' assemblies to come to be.

38:22Tim Lenton:Well, in the UK and elsewhere, they could be indeed the climate assemblies. But if you go to Madagascar, for example, it's where communities are taking control of the spending of their own tax money and using their collective power to protest mining interests and so on and so forth that are affecting their communities. so this this is never going to go away and i think it's alive in various shapes and forms that morph over time and that's an another exciting dimension to what both of us are talking about because the change we need as kate is emphasizing it comes from the bottom up often um you know it comes from motivated and impassioned people who have a vision and understand and are committed and use their emotions to drive change, it really works well when the top-down governance and policy comes into alignment.

39:19Tim Lenton:And that can happen very clumsily. It doesn't have to be super well coordinated. But arguably, although I've said bad things about the situation in the UK, we still have a Climate Change Act and an Independent Climate Commission holding the government to account and a good net zero target. And all of that was originally born out of a private members bill that was born out of decades of environmental activism in Britain, but now is enshrined in the civil service and the workings of government. So long may it continue to try and force us towards zero emissions. We'll gloss over what's happening in the US, shall we?

40:00Tim Lenton:Well, again, when things are getting less stable, including that could be the fossil fuel status quo the incumbents will fight back harder that history teaches that and right now teaches that and you couldn't see a clearer example of that than what's happening in the us but i wouldn't wouldn't take that as a wholly negative signal you've got to see the bigger systems picture i think yeah and i was being glib but um if you look at california it's what the world's sixth biggest economy now on its own um and it's not going to stop doing you know converting to solar and wind because of what's happening in Washington.

40:38Tim Lenton:So there is still hope there, Kate.

40:41Kate Marvel:Well, do you know the state with the most wind power in the US is Texas?

40:46Tim Lenton:Right.

40:47Kate Marvel:So, you know, these technologies are essentially unstoppable, I think. And, you know, if you look at the polling, the percentage of Americans who dismiss climate change, say it's not a problem or not caused by humans, that has consistently been in the single digits of percentage. I think it's about 7 % last time I checked. And most Americans are concerned about climate change and want the government to do something. But really interestingly, when you look at the polls, most Americans think that other Americans do not think that. And so that, I think, is why one of the most powerful things that an individual can do regarding climate change is to talk about it.

41:32Kate Marvel:Because when you talk about it, you realise, oh, maybe I'm not so much of an individual after all, maybe I'm not alone.

41:38Tim Lenton:Well, I was going to ask what your dream outcome for the books are, and definitely talking about this is one of them. So if you can't say that, what do you want people to do after reading your books? Kate, do you want to go first?

41:50Kate Marvel:I would like people to read my book. I worked very hard on it. But I think, you know, having Having read it, I would like people to think about, well, how do I tell climate stories that resonate with me, with my own community, with the people who will listen to me because of who I am and what I bring to the table? And that is going to be different for everybody. And that is both the most terrifying thing about climate change is that it's going to take people from all over to solve it. But that is also one of the most hopeful things about climate change is that it's going to take people from all over to solve it.

42:32Tim Lenton:And Tim? I'm hoping the readers are feeling empowered to act in what might have beforehand been feeling like a kind of very scary, kind of disempowering, this is big, it's complex, I can't cope kind of situation with all this other bad stuff we talked about going on in the world. instead to feel oh yeah we've got a sense of agency and just little me and my little community can be the start of something much bigger because actually that's that's pretty much always the way the world's being changed brilliant well we'll leave it there shall we with a sense of agency and hope um you've been listening to the world the universe and us thanks to our guests Kate Marvel and Tim Lenton their books human nature and positive tipping points are out soon or out an hour depending on where you live do go and check them out and thank you for listening at

43:21Kate Marvel:home do subscribe to our show and we'll see you next week bye for now bye

43:32Tim Lenton:close your eyes exhale feel your body relax and let go of whatever you're carrying today

43:40Kate Marvel:well i'm letting go of the worry that i wouldn't get my new contacts in time for this class I got them delivered free from 1-800-CONTACTS. Oh my gosh, they're so fast. And breathe. Oh, sorry. I almost couldn't breathe when I saw the discount they gave me on my first order. Oh, sorry. Namaste.

43:57Tim Lenton:Visit 1-800-CONTACTS.com today to save on your first order. 1-800-CONTACTS.