For more than a decade now, maybe more than two decades, people have been talking about how the things stopping us from acting on the climate crisis is not so much science or technology.

It's not about understanding the problem or even having the technology to do something about it, but about political will.

We have enough data.

We know how greenhouse gas emissions change the atmosphere.

We know how they'll continue to change it.

We know what the impacts of those changes will be.

We know that human activity is the largest source of those gases

by far, and we have all sorts of good and viable options for doing things differently.

And yet, no government on earth has managed to do what's required to adequately address this problem.

And every international body form to deal with it remains hopelessly incapable of doing so.

In a few months, I'll be headed to the 30th Conference of the Parties,

the annual climate summit that brings together all the members of the UN Framework on Climate Change Convention and asks

them to figure out a way to work together on this problem.

We've covered the crisis of legitimacy facing that body before, but it's more dire than ever

right now.

And it does not help that the U.S. has adopted the toddler approach

to climate change, pretending it isn't there and hoping that does the trick. In the lead

up to the conference, I got my hands on a new book that's been pulled together by the Climate

Social Science Network at Brown University. It's an exhaustive global survey of the peer-reviewed research on climate obstruction,

which might sound boring and academic, but if you're a listener to this show, you know that

I love to nerd out on some social science.

This is the first book of its kind because climate obstruction is a relatively new field of research,

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