Nothing You Do Alone Will Save the Climate

Notes from America with Kai Wright

WNYC Studios

News Commentary, Politics, History, News

4.4 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 20 September 2021

⏱️ 49 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

New science finds we’ve got less than a decade to avoid climate catastrophe. Activist and author Bill McKibben says the only solutions that can beat that deadline are collective. Host Kai Wright invites listeners to ask McKibben their own climate questions, on the heels of a United Nations report that declared the damage from carbon and methane emissions at our current rate will be irreversible by 2030. What can we do that will make enough change, quickly enough? Companion listening for this episode: The Birth of Climate Denial (5/11/2017) How a movement to create doubt about the reality of climate change began — and how scientific consensus has been perpetually undermined. “The United States of Anxiety” airs live on Sunday evenings at 6pm ET. The podcast episodes are lightly edited from our live broadcasts. To catch all the action, tune into the show on Sunday nights via the stream on WNYC.org/anxiety or tell your smart speakers to play WNYC. We want to hear from you! Connect with us on Twitter @WNYC using the hashtag #USofAnxiety or email us at anxiety@wnyc.org.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is the United States of Anxiety, a show about the unfinished business of our history and its grip on our future.
0:08.0	Global temperatures will rise. The extremes were now experiencing fires, floods, droughts, and storms will only intensify.
0:16.5	Once you're exposed to that kind of information,
0:19.2	things are not normal anymore.
0:20.9	Fear-based messaging only gets you so far.
0:23.6	How can we fight climate change if we can't even face it without feeling demoralized or
0:28.4	hopeless?
0:29.4	What do we want?
0:30.4	What do we want now?
0:32.4	We are in the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth.
0:42.0	How dare you? Approximately 67% of Americans have some level of anxiety
0:48.0	when it comes to the impact of climate change on the future over planet.
0:51.3	Anxiety is useful.
0:52.8	It tells us that there's something
0:54.2	that we need to be paying attention to.
0:57.3	Welcome to the show.
0:58.2	I'm Ky Wright.
0:59.2	The name of this show has rarely felt as appropriate as it does when talking right now about climate change.
1:07.2	It has been a year of stark anxiety-provoking reminders of the consequences of a warming planet.
1:14.5	The storms and floods and heat waves and fires, it's just, it's been unrelenting, and it can
1:20.0	legit feel like in times. And then other times I'm like, okay,
1:24.1	kai, calm down, overstating the problem makes it harder to deal with, we're all
	...

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