603 - Adjusting for Reality: Rethinking Goals to Address Climate Change
Public Health On Call
The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
4.6 • 644 Ratings
🗓️ 21 April 2023
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In the 1980s and 90s, the world came together to successfully address a major environmental problem: a growing hole in the ozone layer. So why hasn't that success translated to global collaboration to make a dent in climate change? For Earth Day, David Victor, professor at UC San Diego, talks with Stephanie Desmon about the unique problem of climate change, and some optimistic and realistic signs of progress.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, |
| 0:05.9 | where we bring evidence, experience, and perspective to make sense of today's leading health challenges. |
| 0:16.3 | If you have questions or ideas for us, please send an email to public health question at jhhhu.edu. |
| 0:23.8 | That's public health question at jhhu.edu for future podcast episodes. |
| 0:30.6 | This is Lindsay Smith Rogers. |
| 0:33.2 | Today, Stephanie Desmond talks to David Victor, professor of innovation and Public Policy at the School of Global Policy and Strategy at the University of California at San Diego. |
| 0:43.9 | They discuss climate change and why it's been so hard to change the behaviors of individuals, corporations, and governments and the critical role of public health in motivating change for our |
| 0:55.3 | environment. Let's listen. David Victor, thanks so much for joining me. Well, it's great to be |
| 1:02.0 | with you today. So tell us first a little bit about you and your expertise in climate change. |
| 1:08.3 | Well, I've been working on the climate change issue now for more than 30 years. |
| 1:12.6 | When I was in college and then graduate school, the big environmental problem of the day was the ozone layer. |
| 1:18.6 | I spent a lot of time working on that, both in the scientific point of view and on the politics of it. |
| 1:22.9 | And frankly, we developed very effective solutions to that. And it was obvious that even then the next really big problem was going to be climate change, |
| 1:29.9 | is going to be a lot harder. |
| 1:31.2 | I started working on that from the point of view of international relations and how countries cooperate to address problems or in this case, |
| 1:36.1 | don't really cooperate to address problems. |
| 1:38.3 | And that led me into very, very detailed work around the energy system and energy transition. |
| 1:45.0 | And so that's been really the tenor of almost my life's work as a scholar, is understanding technologies around energy |
| 1:49.9 | systems and industrial systems that cause these emissions, and understanding what they do ultimately |
| 1:54.5 | in the atmosphere as they affect the climate. I'm glad you mentioned ozone, because that seems |
| 1:59.9 | to have been a major problem that we worked together and we fixed it, and now it's not the problem that we were very concerned it would be. |
| 2:07.6 | Why is climate change different? |
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