Revisiting Nothing You Do Alone Will Save the Climate
Notes from America with Kai Wright
WNYC Studios
4.4 • 1.5K Ratings
🗓️ 31 January 2022
⏱️ 51 minutes
🧾️ 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.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | When we talk about climate change, we get a lot of audience responses. |
| 0:05.0 | Hi, this is Jordy from the South Village, also a baby boomer. |
| 0:09.0 | Hi, my name is Jeff. I'm actually an environmental lawyer. |
| 0:12.0 | I just want to say that the solutions that were mentioned on and discussed on the program |
| 0:16.0 | were all about what government and industry and banking could do. |
| 0:20.0 | What do you do with the excess volume of water and the flooding? |
| 0:23.0 | And what does that say about adaptation generally? |
| 0:25.0 | Every individual can make a difference. You don't have to lobby your government. |
| 0:30.0 | Individually, you can make a difference. |
| 0:33.0 | Obviously, the younger generation and millennials commitment to climate change |
| 0:37.0 | as a core issue give me some confidence that the future will be brighter. |
| 0:42.0 | With a wonderful show with Bill McKibbin, who is a hero of mine, |
| 0:46.0 | he's just a brilliant person and so humble and wonderful. |
| 0:50.0 | We're revisiting that conversation with Bill McKibbin. |
| 0:55.0 | This is the United States of anxiety, a show about the unfinished business of our history |
| 1:05.0 | and its grip on our future. Global temperatures will rise. |
| 1:08.0 | The extremes we're now experiencing, fires, floods, droughts and storms |
| 1:13.0 | will only intensify. |
| 1:15.0 | When you're exposed to that kind of information, things are not normal anymore. |
| 1:19.0 | Fear-based messaging only gets you so far. |
| 1:22.0 | How can we fight climate change if we can't even face it without feeling demoralized or hopeless? |
| 1:27.0 | What do we want? What is it? What do we want it now? |
... |
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