Give Up Your Climate Guilt
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The biggest climate stories blame “all of us,” or cast solutions as “impossible.” These narratives leave people feeling hopeless and confused about what we actually can do.
In our first episode: individual actions versus structural change. What’s the right way to think about the role they each have in addressing the climate crisis? We’ll explore the nuances and misperceptions.
Leah and Katharine dig into their own personal histories and revelations. Plus, we’ll hear from Bill McKibben about why plastic straws and lightbulbs do very little about the problem. And we’ll hear from Dr. Shazeen Attari about how individual behavior can have an impact on the climate crisis.
TRANSCRIPT
Katharine Wilkinson: All right, Leah. So do you have your list?
Leah Stokes: Yeah, I brought it. Did you bring yours?
Katharine Wilkinson: Yes, I did. All right, who's going to start?
Leah Stokes: You go first.
Katharine Wilkinson: Okay. Okay. So when I was 16, I lived in the woods with 25 kids and that's when I became vegetarian, and I've been meat free for more than two decades.
Leah Stokes: Pretty impressive, Katharine. I think you got some real climate bona fides here. Here's a good one. I did this research project once where we were trying to figure out how much people were idling their cars on campus, and keep in mind, this was in Canada. So it was really cold and it was the winter and I would stand outside with a piece of paper and a notepad. It was so cold that if you had a pen, the ink wouldn't run. So you had to use a pencil, and what you would do is you would note down how long people were idling their cars on campus.
Katharine Wilkinson: Weren't they probably idling so they didn't freeze?
Leah Stokes: Yeah, I know. That's a good point.
Katharine Wilkinson: Well, probably similar vibes. When I was in undergrad, I went professor by professor trying to convince them all to pledge to have paperless classrooms.
Leah Stokes: I think we were all pretty zealous in undergrad. Here's one, here's a more recent one, one that I still am doing that drives my husband rather nuts. I tend to turn off the oven before things are actually done cooking. Because I feel like residual heat, residual heat and my husband's like, there's no ... What are you talking about residual heat? You have to cook the thing for the amount of time that the recipe says you have to cook it for. But I'm like, "Well, I could just save a little energy at the end there if I just turned off the oven a bit earlier."
Katharine Wilkinson: Wait, you're putting your fluffy muffins at risk for like a watt or two? Is that what you're doing?
Leah Stokes: Yeah. I just feel like you got to try save energy everywhere you can.
Katharine Wilkinson: I will say that I will accumulate and carry around recyclable items for weirdly long periods of time until I can find a place to put them in a bin hoping maybe that they get recycled.
Leah Stokes: I hate to say it, but I do that too and particularly with aluminum cans. Those are really very recyclable materials. So tell me, Katharine, when did you realize that none of this really mattered and none of this was going to stop the climate crisis?
Katharine Wilkinson: That's not very nice.
Leah Stokes: Okay, fair. Maybe that was a little bit of a low blow, but my point is just that we don't want to be fooling ourselves or our listeners about what's going on with the climate crisis. The fact is, the climate crisis is really about a small number of fossil fuel companies who have been lying about their own bad behavior and trying to pin it on the rest of us.
Katharine Wilkinson: Totally agree, but it's not that simple. It's a bigger story about all of us humans living on earth, and I don't think that what we do doesn't count at all.
Leah Stokes: Well, I definitely agree with that when it comes to our political action, let's say, and I feel like we should just unpack these ideas in this episode.
Katharine Wilkinson: This is A Matter of Degrees, stories for the climate curious. I'm Dr. Katharine Wilkinson.
Leah Stokes: I'm Dr. Leah Stokes, and together, we're going to explore the climate crisis. Its roots, its challenges, and the possible ways out of this mess.
Katharine Wilkinson: Leah, before we go on, I feel like I need to admit something.
Leah Stokes: Uh-oh, this is an ominous beginning.
Katharine Wilkinson: Listen, we're going to be in a relationship together and I feel like this is just something I've got to get off my chest. So you write about that part of the solution is that we have to electrify everything. So all the stuff in our buildings and our transportation that runs on fossil fuels today, it's all going to run on clean electricity in the future.
Leah Stokes: Yeah.
Katharine Wilkinson: So a couple years ago, my gas water heater dies. I'm across the country trying to figure this out with my handyman and basically in my condo is going to be really hard to switch to an electric water heater and it was going to be three times as expensive and it was just a fricking nightmare and I replaced the gas water heater with another gas water heater.
Leah Stokes: We did not electrify everything.
Katharine Wilkinson: We didn't even electrify one thing.
Leah Stokes: Well, I'm glad you brought this up because the fact is we're not here to make you or any of our listeners feel guilty. The goal is not shame, or climate guilt. It doesn't matter if you replaced your gas water heater with another gas water heater. I mean, it does matter, but not for you listening to this show. It doesn't matter if you took a flight or if you're still eating beef. We want you to be in the climate fight and we want you to be listening to our show.
Katharine Wilkinson: We are not climate puritans, clearly and our tagline is stories for the climate curious. When we say that this podcast is for climate curious people, we really mean that. If you found your way to the show, you're probably already worried about the climate crisis, that maybe you don't quite know how to wrap your head around what to do, or even how bad it is and that's what we're here for.
Leah Stokes: Because unfortunately, the public doesn't really hear the big climate story very often. When there are wildfires, or heat waves or hurricanes, we don't have TV news telling us that this is climate change and it's happening now. We don't hear much about the fact that it's fossil fuel companies with money on the line that have lied about this crisis for decades. We don't get told that actually, if we want to find a way out of this problem, we're going to need government action to solve it.
Leah Stokes: Instead, a lot of what the biggest climate stories tell us is that we're all to blame and they often cast solutions as impossible. These big prominent, public narratives can leave people with a sense of doom, and a feeling that it's a hopeless situation and that's not what we want to do for you. We don't want to leave you confused. What we're going to do is tell you stories about the history of climate denial, and delay, the movements that are fighting right now for real change, and the technology and policy solutions that actually are sitting right in front of us right now.
Katharine Wilkinson: So it's our first episode. Individual actions versus structural change. What's the right way to think about each of their roles in addressing the climate crisis. We're going to hear from a prominent activist and a prominent researcher who see them pretty differently. As you could hear from the start, Leah and I also see things a bit differently. So we're going to share our own perspectives, drawing on decades of collective research on the topic.
Leah Stokes: I'm thrilled to be hosting this podcast with my friend Dr. Katharine Wilkinson, who has her PhD from Oxford University where she studied climate change, and she's also an author and a teacher and one of 15 women who are going to save the world according to Time Magazine. She's written several books, including the New York Times bestseller, Drawdown, and she was the editor of a new book that just came out called, All We Can Save.
Katharine Wilkinson: I'm super excited to host this podcast with you, Dr. Leah Stokes, who has a PhD from MIT in energy policy. Now in the Department of Political Science at UC Santa Barbara, she works on energy, climate, environmental politics. Her book, Short Circuiting Policy breaks down the role that utilities have been playing in climate denial, and blocking climate action. She publishes frequently in places like the New York Times, The Washington Post, and you actually wrote a piece for that collection, All We Can Save.
Leah Stokes: Yeah, and it was exactly about the topic that we're talking about today. Individual action versus structural change, and really, the links between them.
Katharine Wilkinson: One of the things that I really love, Leah, is that you open up that essay with a line of poetry from Rilke.
Leah Stokes: Yeah, it's a quote that really informs my thinking about how we can use our own lives to create bigger changes in this world and it's this. I live my life in widening circles that reach out across the world.
Katharine Wilkinson: So I love this kind of idea of you making your ripple effects and you walk us through some of that in the essay. So what were some of those first early steps that you took to address the climate crisis?
Leah Stokes: Well, like so many kids, especially growing up in the 90s, I was really focused on things like recycling. So when I was in fifth grade, we found out that the little milk cartons that you would get for lunch, they weren't recyclable at our school. So me and a few friends, we used our lunch hour, rather than going out to play recess, we stayed inside and we cut up those little milk cartons and made them flats that my friend could take them home and recycle them.
Katharine Wilkinson: I like you had like a milk-carton gang. Like an indoor milk-carton gang.
Leah Stokes: Yeah, exactly. It was sort of like, I don't know, our own recycling plant.
Katharine Wilkinson:Then you went from milk cartons pretty quickly to other things. What were some of those?
Leah Stokes: Well, when I was when in high school, I did things like right to my local grocery store to tell them that they need to stop selling Chilean sea bass, which was this threatened species at the time that people thought you shouldn't be eating. I would also kind of get really upset about these huge, gas-guzzling cars that were just starting to get popular like Hummers and I would like flip the bird, meaning give them my middle finger. So it was things like that, things I could do in my daily life that were kind of consumer oriented, but not really very political.
Katharine Wilkinson: So what kind of helped you make the leap from those sorts of things, writing letters, flipping birds, into more structural projects?
Leah Stokes: Well, when I was in undergrad, I was a psychology major, meaning I was really focused on individual behavior change. I ended up running this big energy conservation campaign that affected thousands of people at my university, getting them to turn off the lights and take the stairs and make better choices. I ran that campaign for several years and at the end of it, we had saved a bunch of energy, like maybe 10%. It was pretty impactful at the scale of what we were working at, but I just walked away feeling like this isn't big enough. It isn't fast enough and the biggest lever out there is not individual consumer behavior change. Its political change.
Katharine Wilkinson: So you made some pretty big mental leaps in your early days of environmental engagement. How do you think about what those leaps are?
Leah Stokes: Well, there's actually this cartoon that I love that has gone around Twitter and the internet by this artist named Tommy Siegel and it's called, it's that easy and it's these four panels that are the 80s, the 90s, the 2000s, and the 2010s. Really, I feel like it brings me through my own life as an environmental activist, because the first thing that many people were thinking about in the 80s was picking up litter, and then you'll save the world.
Leah Stokes: So that was what people were thinking about. Then in the 90s, just like my story of recycling those little cartons, it was all about recycling. So the panel says, recycle, and you can save the earth. Then when I was in university, I got really interested in this idea of a carbon footprint, and actually, my first job after I graduated, was working at this NGO, helping them do a carbon audit and figure out what was their carbon footprint and that was really the way we thought about it at the time.
Leah Stokes: It was like reduce your carbon footprint, and you can save the earth. Then there was this cartoon, by the time it gets to the 2010s, which is where we are now if not beyond that, it's not about litter, recycling or carbon footprint-
Katharine Wilkinson: Leah?
Leah Stokes: What?
Katharine Wilkinson: We are beyond the 2010s.
Leah Stokes: I know. I know we are. How do I say that? Then we get to the 2010s and the 2020s and the cartoon says, it's not about littering or recycling or reducing your carbon footprint anymore. The cartoon says, completely restructure global economic systems, and you may be able to save a remnant of humanity and that's kind of how I think about the problem now.
Katharine Wilkinson: Yeah, with flames surrounding the little cartoon guys.
Leah Stokes: Yeah, just like there's flames all across California, Oregon, Colorado. We're living in that flaming world right now.
Katharine Wilkinson: I think that makes a lot of sense. Like, where is the recycled item come from and where is it going and why is it that I actually don't have better options for my water heater or anything else? That's kind of structural stuff.
Leah Stokes: I feel like we were all born into the system that thrives off of carbon pollution. We didn't choose that, we weren't given an option. That was the system that we were born into and our goal during our lifetimes is to change that. Our goal is to not die in it. The only way we can do that is to not just reduce our own 15 tones of carbon pollution a year, it's to think about those 6 billion tones that the US emits every year.
Leah Stokes: The only way to do that is to really think about policy and political change. I feel like Greta Thunberg said it really well.
Greta Thunberg: I think people should do everything, but I think right now, if I was to choose one thing everyone would do it would be to inform yourself and to try to understand the situation and try to push for a political movement that doesn't exist because of the politics needed to fix this, doesn't exist today.
Greta Thunberg: So I think what we should do as individuals is to use the power of democracy to make our voices heard and to make sure that the people in power actually cannot continue to ignore this.
Speaker 4: That's powerful. Wow
Katharine Wilkinson: I feel like Greta totally nails the answer to that question. It actually, Leah, kind of reminds me of a quote that's in your essay from a real veteran of the climate movement, Bill McKibben.
Leah Stokes: Yeah, he says changing the system, not perfecting our own lives is the point. Hypocrisy is the price of admission to this battle. Katharine, when I knew that this would be our first episode, I was looking at individual action versus big political and structural change, I knew that we had to call up Bill, because he has been a grandfather in the climate movement for decades. He has been arguing that we need to get organized and get political, rather than focusing on our straws or eating habits, or really our own consumer behavior.
Bill McKibben: Well, I think sometimes people get ... We're getting carried away with the idea that the task was to perfect their own lives and that's not the task. It is important to do all the things that one can do in one's own life. I'm proud of all the solar panels on my roof. I'm glad I drove the first electric Ford in the state of Vermont, on and on, but I don't never tried to fool myself that that's how we were going to win this fight. So the idea that somehow it was going to be effective to go off and become a hermit who never used any carbon at all, that that was how you were going to change the game never seemed persuasive to me. Climate change is a math problem and the numbers are very large.
Leah Stokes: I have the math in that article that I wrote, actually. It's something like each American emits like 20 tones a year, but the entire US is like 6 billion tones. So you could be focusing all the time on shrinking your little number, but forgetting the much bigger number that's floating above you for the economy-wide emissions.
Bill McKibben: Yes. I remember trying to figure out over the years, the rhetoric to get people to understand this. Early on in the 1990s, there was a lot, a lot, a lot of attention around light bulbs, first compact fluorescent light bulbs, which you probably don't even remember. You-
Leah Stokes: No, I do remember. I ran a whole campaign where the symbol was a compact fluorescent light bulb.
Bill McKibben: Twisty little thing and so on. Great, they were terrific. They saved energy, why wouldn't you put them in? So on and so forth. I remember the rhetoric I would use then. I'd say, "Look, it's important to screw in a new light bulb, but it's probably more important to screw in a new senator." So I don't really know how anyone at the moment could look around ... The day we're talking doing this interview, three of the four largest fires in California history are burning out of control. It was so dark this morning in San Francisco, that street lights were on in the middle of the day.
Bill McKibben: They evacuated 80,000 people from Medford, Oregon, because wildfire was racing up, I-5. I don't really know how anybody could look at that, and really conceive of the idea that we're going to solve this at this point, one Prius at a time. If you're going to drive a car, you should definitely try and drive an electric car. That's important but it's not how we're going to solve this. We're going to solve it or not, by making big, wide economy scale changes.
Bill McKibben: That's why I keep telling people, all of us have a finite quanta of time or energy or money or whatever to spend trying to solve this problem. So job one is to organize, job two is to organize your friends and neighbors and job three is to organize and if you have some energy leftover after that, by all means, check out every light bulb in your house.
Leah Stokes: I love it. So we are living through this kind of funny and sad experiment of the limits of personal behavior change, right? Because we had a lockdown where people stayed in their homes, they didn't take airplane flights, which is what a lot of these climate campaigns focus on in terms of our personal carbon footprint and people weren't driving to work. We're all on the internet all the time and yet, the best projection for how much emissions will fall this year is 8%. We know that if we need to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, we actually have to cut emissions by about eight percent every year out to 2030. So it feels like we wrung all the emissions out in the first year when it comes to personal behavior change. How have you thought about the COVID experience and how that's made you think about this personal behavior change wedge?
Bill McKibben: I think that that's exactly right and by now, there's a report today saying emissions are basically going back to where they were before already. There are certain bad habits that I'm afraid are going to get amplified by COVID. People's desire to take public transit, say, is down for reasons that should be clear. It was a pretty good experiment to demonstrate both the importance and the real inherent limitations of personal change. So 8% is not nothing. That's good and it was amazing to see how quickly the air cleared over major cities when there weren't people driving all the time, and so on, but that leaves 90% of the problem that clearly is hardwired into our system.
Bill McKibben: So we're going to have to reach into the guts of that system, and tear out the coal and gas and oil and stick in sun and wind and there's really no way around that. As you know better than most people, the good news is, that's entirely economically doable right now. Sun and wind have gotten so cheap, air source, heat pumps are so cheap that we can go and reconfigure our residential and commercial housing stock and our electric grid. We can do it while basically, we save money in the process. So that's the good news.
Bill McKibben: I think if COVID has a silver lining, then really nothing is bad, really, as a silver lining but that's it, that it offers us a compelling opportunity to make large scale change.
Leah Stokes: Yeah. So there's been some reporting about how BP popularized the carbon footprint. I remember I was a climate advocate already back then and I remember this being the focus. One of my ... Actually, my first job after I graduated from undergrad was doing carbon footprint accounting for an NGO. So how have fossil fuel companies helped to shift the focus away from their own behavior and away from the corporate roots of this problem towards individuals?
Bill McKibben: Yeah, it fits perfectly into the rhetorical arsenal of the oil companies. It's like, it's not our problem. We just supply a demand, and it's all your fault for using this stuff. Don't get mad at us. We're just the pushers. You're the junkies, which is a ridiculous argument. People should obviously not waste energy. Your carbon footprint is a good thing to try and lower, but the way that we're actually going to lower our carbon footprint is to stop burning carbon-based fuels, which is precisely the thing that the fossil fuel industry is desperate to avoid us doing.
Bill McKibben: That's why they're spending all their time lobbying to make sure that nothing changes. That argument was perfectly designed for a kind of mindset of consumers, which is what we allowed ourselves to become too much in this country, allowed ourselves to conceive of ourselves mostly as consumers. In fact, we need to conceive of ourselves, mostly as citizens.Leah Stokes: I agree so much. Yes, I agree so, so much, and it's like, the whole thing becomes around, if you're a consumer, then what can you do to consume last or consume better, as opposed to if you're a citizen, what can you do to create laws, so that you have better choices to be making in the first place.
Bill McKibben: I think what I keep trying to say to people is, yes, it's very important to make your own life responsible, just because that's important but by far, the most important thing an individual can do is be less of an individual. Join together with others in movements big enough to matter. That's mathematically where our hope lies at this point. Now, if we had ... If the physics was different, if we had 75 years to deal with this, then we'd have a whole other set of possible answers and a lot of them would have to do with individual action.
Bill McKibben: Look, human change in human societies really does come best when it comes slowly and gradually. So in an ideal world, I'd put solar panels on my roof and my sister-in-law would come over at Thanksgiving and see them and get excited and put them on hers and her neighbors would see them and 15 years later, the problem would be starting to be addressed. If we had three quarters of a century to deal with climate crisis, then by all means, but we don't. We had to start 30 years ago, and we didn't. We've got to compress, according to the IPCC, the work of 40 years into the next decade. So that's only going to happen if we figure out how to work together. Together. Human solidarity is going to be the key here.
Leah Stokes: That was Bill McKibben, founder of 350dot.org. Journalist, climate activist and all around climate mench. So Katharine, what did you think of my conversation with Bill?
Katharine Wilkinson: Well, obviously, I loved it, Leah, because you're you and Bill's Bill. I think he's totally spot on, that our focus has to be on building the biggest, strongest team possible, and linking arms and addressing the leadership crisis that's at the heart of the climate crisis. I think where I feel like I have a slightly different perspective, or maybe something to add is that I don't necessarily think that big, deep structural change is antithetical to individual action.
Katharine Wilkinson: I think maybe I see them as more complimentary, that actually maybe individual action is a thing that can lead us into and help us stay in the work of bigger, collective efforts.
Leah Stokes: Yeah, I think that's totally valid and I know, from your own experience, living out your values, personally has been a big part of your work in the climate movement. Can you tell us a little bit about your own experience of coming to the climate movement?
Katharine Wilkinson: So when I was 16, I spent a semester at the Outdoor Academy, which is an experiential education program in Western North Carolina, right near Pisgah National Forest. I lived in a one bedroom cabin with 10 girls, and we'd chopped wood to heat our cabin and mowed the hay field with mules and worked in the garden and composted like you wouldn't believe. It also was the time when I started to really understand the depth and the intensity of the challenges that we're facing.
Katharine Wilkinson: What happened for me, at that age was kind of this environmental awakening, about the way that I lived my own life, but also about the work of social change and social movements. So it's so entangled. The personal and this sort of politicizing moment that I had.
Leah Stokes: Can you tell me a story, Katharine, from that time in your life when you were sort of living when you were 16 out in the woods. Can you tell me a story about what it was like to have a kind of awakening?
Katharine Wilkinson: Yeah, I think this must have been my Environmental Studies class. We went on a long hike in Pisgah National Forest up through this really beautiful valley, with a creek running down it. Like incredible, lush, ecosystem magic. We came up, up, up and out onto this ridge line, to just a completely denuded mountainside. Freshly clear cut, and the darkness of the clear cut, and the intact ecosystem and this sense of just ... Really just like massacre of the planets living systems at the hands of human beings, and in particular, extractive capitalism, it was just a moment of feeling utterly heartbroken. It set into motion. So many of the things that have followed. I feel like my life is still ripple effects of that time.
Leah Stokes: I feel like so many of us in the climate movement, so many of our listeners, I'm sure who are even just climate-curious, we've all had these experiences where we've seen the beauty of the planet, we've seen the destruction and devastation of our ecosystems, and we've been called to action. So many people this summer have been living through entire ecosystems across the west coast of North America burning up and living through orange skies. I can only imagine what that's doing for people in terms of how they see their own lives and how they see the scale of change and the pace of change that's necessary.
Katharine Wilkinson: I think we feel ... We feel the tension in our own lives of the ways that we have to live today, because of the context that we're in, and the kind of world that we want to build. So I think I have some empathy for folks who focus on individual actions as maybe a way to try to live into their values and feel more in alignment or integrity with the world that they imagine not because those actions will ever be enough, not because they will ever get us to the emissions cuts that we need, or a zero carbon future, but because we're humans, and we're struggling to have a sense of integrity between our values, and what we imagine and how we show up in the world, day to day.
Leah Stokes: I know, Katharine, you called up somebody to have a conversation about personal behavior change and the climate crisis.
Katharine Wilkinson: I did. I wanted to talk to Dr. Shazeen Attari, who I met a couple of years ago at an event at National Geographic focused on this very question of climate change and behavior change.Shazeen Attari: Public opinion about climate change is very strong, it's very high, but again, when you ask an average person, "Hey, what should we be doing?" There's no clear path.
Katharine Wilkinson: She was gracious enough to give us some time to tell us a little bit about our work. Certainly, there are plenty of folks in the climate community that are skeptical about the idea that individual action matters. How do you talk to those folks about your research or your thinking in this space more broadly?
Shazeen Attari: So there are two things that I talk about. One is we had a paper come out a couple of years ago, looking at the individual behaviors of climate communicators do and how that impacts their audience's behavior changes, willingness to change their own behaviors, and also their willingness to support policies that are climate policies. What we find is a direct relationship between the carbon footprint of the communicator, their credibility, and the support and willingness of their audience to A, be willing to support policies that are climate friendly, and whether they're willing to change their own behaviors.
Shazeen Attari: So there is a direct connection between your communicator's carbon footprint, and your audience's willingness to change their own behaviors and policy support. So we have documented data on that.
Katharine Wilkinson: I feel like whether she's been strategic about it or not, it seems like Greta has done a really good job of using personal action to solidify and amplify her message. Does that-
Shazeen Attari: Yeah, absolutely-
Katharine Wilkinson: Resonate for you?
Shazeen Attari: That actually ... We did not study very famous people. We studied just basic science communicators, climate communicators and that matches our data really well. On the second regard, is that people need an invitation, and they want to feel ... Like I want to feel like I'm making a difference. Ever since I was a kid, I always asked myself, hey, what is the meaning of all of this? What's the meaning of life? Why am I here? What am I doing? What is my call to action. So any good story or any good hero's journey, where we're all heroes has a call to action.
Shazeen Attari: So telling people that, "Hey, your individual behaviors don't matter," I think there's no data to show that. Because if we said that then we wouldn't have people like Mahatma K. Gandhi, or Michelle Obama or any of these people that have inspired so many others. So, I think it's very hard to capture the amount of effect any given individual has.
Shazeen Attari: So because we can't measure it, people tend to think, maybe it's not as important. If you were to ask anyone in the climate space, is it more important to have individual behaviors or political action, we need political action. Everyone will agree to that, but the question is, how do we get there? So just talking about a carbon tax for the past 30 years and not figuring out the psychological reactance that people have to actually implementing it, is really problematic.
Shazeen Attari: Also focusing on one solution rather than a variety of solutions is really problematic. So this is sort of where all of these fields become a complete smorgasbord of how to make action really happen, and there are lots of ways. As you said, we need to invite everybody to the table.
Katharine Wilkinson: Does that end up inspiring them or giving them an on ramp into participation and bigger collective change, or does it make them feel like I've done my bit, and I'm off the hook? What have you all found looking at that?
Shazeen Attari: So in general, what the research shows, and this is not work done by me, but it's done by folks like Elke Weber and others. What they found is that doing some of these behaviors can lead to the single-action bias where you've done one bit, and you go on to the next behavior, but alternatively, it can also lead to the avalanche effect, where you feel good after doing these behaviors, and you do more and more and more and more, and you're like, "Whoa, what happened, my life has completely transformed."
Katharine Wilkinson: Just when I think about my own journey in this space, I feel like part of what kept creating an avalanche effect was that I kept getting an invitation to some next thing. There was someone who reached out a hand, and said, "Come on, we need you or that's cool. Have you then thought about this next thing?" I think that's like ... I would love to know more about what that relational importance is in the avalanche effect? I don't know. I just ... I think a lot about how do we make the climate space more inviting, more welcoming, less shaming and finger wagging.
Shazeen Attari: Oh, my God, yes. Yes, a million times over. Also, how do we invite people who have historically not been environmentalists, or who don't view themselves as environmentalist because I think if you're living on this planet, we are all by our nature, enjoying the planet, enjoying nature, using nature. So we need to all be environmentalist, and we need to retake that label and change it, and make it a bigger bucket, bigger home for everyone. So I'm with you, Katharine. Let's invite all of the listeners to join in.
Katharine Wilkinson: We need the biggest team possible.
Shazeen Attari: That's right. Planet earth or bust.
Katharine Wilkinson: Planet earth or bust. One of the criticisms that comes is like ... From folks in the climate movement is like if we focus too much on individual behavior, we're implicitly telling people that they are to blame, when we know that the blame rests quite squarely on the fossil fuel industry, and industrial agriculture. How do you make sense of that? How do we get the benefits of individual action, but also have people understand the systemic situation that we're dealing with?
Shazeen Attari: I think one way to do that is by talking through the numbers, which is something I've seen you do and your TED talk, and in other places, basically showing where some of the biggest emitters and polluters are. That's the first bit, but facts don't work for everybody, in the same way. So graphs and numbers don't work for everybody. So I think explaining it in the way you just did, where there is a connection, there's a path between individuals and policy. There's been studies that show that path, but at the same time, individuals by themselves are not enough.
Shazeen Attari: Saying that really clearly, I think, explains some of the nuance of the situation. Because just saying, hey, individuals don't ... You can do whatever you want, or don't do anything, that actually leaves us very handicapped. Because for me, I'm just like, I care about this. I need to feel like I matter. I need to feel like my life has meaning. Because if it doesn't, then what's the point? Why am I doing all of this.
Shazeen Attari: So in order to feel that both in a real way, and a way that I actually do have meaning, I think threading that needle and sort of explaining the nuance is really, really important. So it's not that ... I mean, Greta is an individual and I would say she has made a difference. You are an individual, and when it comes to climate communication, you have made a difference.
Shazeen Attari: So we have here two data points where individuals have made a difference, but then to quantify what is the emission reduction that your one talk does, it's really hard and it's kind of a crazy challenge. So I think doing that in a way that's quantitative is problematic, but at the same time, explaining to people that we can imagine another world, and they're part of it, is really powerful.
Katharine Wilkinson: That was Dr. Shazeen Attari, Associate Professor at the O'Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University Bloomington. Her research looks at people's judgments and decisions about resource use, and ultimately how to use that information to motivate action on climate change.
Leah Stokes: Well, I think at the end of the day, Katharine, it's really a question of, is personal behavior change a compliment? Does it increase our likelihood to act together, or is it a substitute? Is it going to de mobilize this and make us less likely to try to act together? I don't know if we know the answer to that yet, but I sure know that I'd rather have people voting and protesting and calling their representatives than worrying about their plastic straws, or whether or not they took a flight in the last year.
Katharine Wilkinson: I think you're spot on, Leah. I guess I just think that anything that keeps us focused on what we want, focused on the values that we hold, focused on the world that we want to create, that's a good thing. I can't vote three times a day, but I do eat three times a day, and ... Sometimes more than three times a day. Every time I do that, I have a chance to think about my connection to the planet's living systems, the way that I want to show up in the world, not in how I'm eating, but in the kind of change-maker I'm trying to be.
Leah Stokes: I guess, for me, I just don't want to put barriers up against people coming into the climate movement. I don't at all think that's what you're doing, but I think that people sometimes think that climate action is about sacrifice, or about giving things up. It's really about working together to create a stable planet, to create a better world for our own lives and for the lives coming after ours. So, from my perspective, there's these big structural changes. That's what we got to be focused on, and I don't want to be shaming people or turning them off from joining the climate movement.
Katharine Wilkinson: You'll actually be proud of me, Leah, this week, as we've been thinking about this episode. I got asked to help with advice on a book about personal carbon footprints and I wrote back, "Absolutely not, we don't need people thinking about carbon footprints. We need people thinking about power." Well, Leah, it sounds like we've got some stories to tell.
Leah Stokes: We do, and there are stories that don't require climate guilt, because we're going to be focusing on the big polluters, like the companies that the Trump administration is currently bailing out.
Katharine Wilkinson: We're going to look at the big forces that are mobilizing to stop them, like the Youth Climate Movement.
Leah Stokes: We're going to talk about solutions. Could we have a clean electricity system by 2035, and what would that change?
Katharine Wilkinson: Can we actually undo the harm that we've already done to the atmosphere?
Leah Stokes:
And what about our responsibilities to black and indigenous communities? How have we been exporting our pollution from the fossil fuel based system into sacrifice zones for these people? A Matter of Degrees is co-hosted by me Leah Stokes.
Katharine Wilkinson: And me, Katharine Wilkinson.
Leah Stokes: We are a production of Post Script Audio.
Katharine Wilkinson: Jaime Kaiser, Sydney Bartone and Stephen Lacey produced the show.
Leah Stokes: Sean Marquand edited, mixed and scored the show.
Katharine Wilkinson: Additional music came from Blue Dot Sessions.
Leah Stokes: The show art was designed by Karl Spurzem.
Katharine Wilkinson: Our website was designed by Caroline Hadilaksono.
Leah Stokes: A special thanks to the funders and supporters who made the show possible. The Hewlett Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, the 11th Hour Project, UC Santa Barbara and others.
Katharine Wilkinson: You can subscribe on Spotify, Apple, Google podcasts or any other place you get your shows.
Leah Stokes: You could follow both of us and our production team on Twitter. You'll find our accounts in the show notes.
Katharine Wilkinson: Stay with us as we tell more stories for the climate curious.