In this episode, Gil Jenkins sits down with Bill Weir, Chief Climate Correspondent at CNN, for a rich, engaging, and meaningful conversation about his new book, “Life As We Know It (Can Be): Stories of People, Climate, and Hope in a Changing World.” While reporting from every state and every continent, Bill Weir has spent decades telling the stories of unique people, places, cultures, and creatures on the brink of change. As the first Chief Climate Correspondent in network news, he's immersed in the latest science and breakthroughs on the topic, while often on the frontlines of disasters, natural and manmade. In 2020, Bill began distilling these experiences into a series of Earth Day letters for his then-newborn son to read in 2050, to help him better understand the world he will have grown up in and be better prepared to embrace the future. Bill's work and his letters were the inspiration for “Life As We Know It (Can Be),” which confronts the worry and wonder of climate change with messages and examples of hope for all of us on how a better future can still be written. Highlighting groundbreaking innovation in fields of clean energy, food and water sources, housing and building materials, and more, and touching on how happiness, resilience, and health and wellness factor into the topic of climate change, Bill's stories take readers on a global journey, from one community in Florida that took on a hurricane and never lost power, to the Antarctic Peninsula where one species of penguin is showing us the key to survival, to the nuclear fusion labs where scientists are trying to build a star in a box. Through a tapestry of stories—tales of resilience, community, and the indomitable human spirit— ‘Life As We Know It (Can Be)’ celebrates our planet’s marvels, contemplates our collective desires, and calls us all to unite with nature and each other. It’s about preparing and planning for the future, together.
In this episode, Gil Jenkins sits down with Bill Weir, Chief Climate Correspondent at CNN, for a rich, engaging, and meaningful conversation about his new book, “Life As We Know It (Can Be): Stories of People, Climate, and Hope in a Changing World.”
While reporting from every state and every continent, Bill Weir has spent decades telling the stories of unique people, places, cultures, and creatures on the brink of change. As the first Chief Climate Correspondent in network news, he's immersed in the latest science and breakthroughs on the topic, while often on the frontlines of disasters, natural and manmade. In 2020, Bill began distilling these experiences into a series of Earth Day letters for his then-newborn son to read in 2050, to help him better understand the world he will have grown up in and be better prepared to embrace the future. Bill's work and his letters were the inspiration for “Life As We Know It (Can Be),” which confronts the worry and wonder of climate change with messages and examples of hope for all of us on how a better future can still be written.
Highlighting groundbreaking innovation in fields of clean energy, food and water sources, housing and building materials, and more, and touching on how happiness, resilience, and health and wellness factor into the topic of climate change, Bill's stories take readers on a global journey, from one community in Florida that took on a hurricane and never lost power, to the Antarctic Peninsula where one species of penguin is showing us the key to survival, to the nuclear fusion labs where scientists are trying to build a star in a box.
Through a tapestry of stories—tales of resilience, community, and the indomitable human spirit— ‘Life As We Know It (Can Be)’ celebrates our planet’s marvels, contemplates our collective desires, and calls us all to unite with nature and each other. It’s about preparing and planning for the future, together.
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Episode recorded April 19, 2024
Chad Reed: I'm Chad Reed.
Hillary Langer: I'm Hillary Langer.
Gil Jenkins: I'm Gil Jenkins.
Chad: This is Climate Positive.
Bill Weir: What we think are permanent, borders or flags or currencies or corporation ns or religions, are under constant revision. Just in our lifetimes, think about how the major churches or political parties have shifted. If we tell a better story, that's how we get to a protopian space.
Gil Jenkins: This week on Climate Positive, we’re honored to host a special conversation with Bill Weir, CNN’s Chief Climate Correspondent and author of the inspiring new book, ‘LIFE AS WE KNOW IT (CAN BE): Stories of People, Climate, and Hope in a Changing World.’
Through a tapestry of stories—tales of resilience, community, and the indomitable human spirit—‘LIFE AS WE KNOW IT (CAN BE)’ celebrates our planet’s marvels, contemplates our collective desires, and calls us all to unite with nature and each other. It’s about preparing and planning for the future, together.
As Earth Month draws to a close, I’m eager to share this rich, engaging, and particularly meaningful conversation with you all. As I record this introduction, I’m filled with anticipation for the arrival of my third child, reminded of the cycles of life and renewal we see in nature—cycles that echo through the hopeful narratives we’ll explore with Bill today.
Gil Jenkins: Bill, welcome to Climate Positive.
Bill Weir: Gil, thank you for having me, man. Thank you.
Gil: Oh, it's my pleasure. You wrote a series of letters in 2020 to your then newborn son River to read in 2050, which is really the inspiration for your great book, Life as We Know It (Can Be), which I should say also includes letters to your daughter. As the father to a boy not much older than River, I have a toddler daughter as well, and another son just a few months away, I was just really moved by the first words in your book and throughout which I found to be frank, wise, humorous, and heartfelt.
I want to read a quick line from the prologue and then just ask you to expand a bit on the inspiration behind the book. You wrote, "River, you have a good shot at seeing the 22nd century, and when you get there, I want you to tell them how we came together, sorted out our shit and wrote a better story." Please expand.
Bill: [chuckles] Well, as you know, probably Gil now, you get this perspective as a dad. With my daughter who's now 20 years old, she became a living breathing unit of time measurement for me, especially when I started doing international travel and really understanding when scientists pick out the year 2050. I looked at her and realized she's going to be my age in the year 2050.
That inspired the idea to do a show called The Wonder List, where I went to the wonders of the world and wondered what would be left of them. There were social change stories in those and over tourism stuff, but a lot of times it came back to just the physical changes of a warm and planet. Then when they created the climate desk, I'd been a generalist most of my career, but now suddenly I was just living, breathing, waiting in scientific warnings and peer reviewed dread.
Gil: The apocalypse beat, right?
Bill: Exactly. Suddenly it was like things got a lot less-- I was a lot more fun-covering sports early in my career, let me just say. I was a lot more fun at parties. When my little boy was born, it felt even worse because on top of the climate that was unraveling that I could go and visit and actually see, we were in a maximum lockdown, height of the pandemic. I would go on to cover the George Floyd protests that summer.
I started these letters really as a cathartic record of this just insanely tumultuous seismic moment of history and using him like the day you learn to open kitchen cabinets, your dad packed body armor and went to cover the inauguration in Madison, Wisconsin, because we had no idea what was going to happen after January 6th. The early drafts of this were super dark. I was supposed to turn this thing in two years ago, and it got delayed for various reasons.
I'm glad it did because as he grew up, as climate policies changed in the country, I was suddenly talking to all these enthused green tech investors and activists and land managers and regenerative agriculture, and I could focus on-- The story just wasn't, "This is a horrible thing and we're doing nothing about it. Back to you." [chuckles] There was no arc to that story. Now there's an arc, an upward arc to the story. What started as an impetus to be angry and take note of the destruction and gathered ideas for how my little boy should build a life on this new planet we made for him.
Where should he live? What latitude and what kind of house? What about water? What about food? What about community and how should he fill his pyramid of needs in ways that I never had to think about? The more I focused on the helpers and the doers and the dreamers, the more I came up with, "Wow, this is an exciting idea. You should live here like these folks, or we should steal this idea from this blue zone in Greece." The book ended up a lot more hopeful than it started.
I do think we're just not telling this story with enough full color of human emotion. It's one note terrorizing or depressing starving polar bears, and none of the possibilities of a world transformed for the better and more equipped to handle whatever's coming. The bad stuff is going to come. We have to be clear out and honest with the kids about that. Dr. Martin Luther King didn't say, "I have a nightmare." He said, "I have a dream." That rallied people in a way that just anger and fear cannot.
Those are still important emotions to have in the coloring box. I just want to start a conversation at least with my kid and to myself. A lot of this letter is just to myself, like, look for the helpers. There's a way to improve everything in our lives. 5%, 10%, maybe more. You add those up over the course of a life, we can be net positives for good.
Gil: There's to save, as you said?
Bill: Yes. Totally. So much left to savor it-
Gil: Let's get after it.
Bill: -and save.
Gil: I love that. You mentioned king and these notes of optimism and outlook, because the doom breeds inaction. We need the soberness, but the spirit of opportunity. Again, when I was reading it, throughout, my favorite quote from JFK is from his American U Peace speech. He was talking about nuclear annihilation, of course, but it's always resonated with me when I think about climate. He said, "For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit the same planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal." I was thinking of that like you hit on that. I don't know if you're a JFK buff too.
Bill: That's a great one. Yes.
Gil: Thank you for this, what you've done here.
Bill: Thank you. What's crazy to think about now, there's a very similar quote like that. I'd have to pull it up to get it exactly right from Howard Baker Republican Senator, when Nixon was trying to veto the Clean Water Act and then the Senate shot it down unanimously and he said, "Look, if we can't swim in our lakes and drink from our rivers and breathe our air, what good is any prosperity?" It's been proven that we can tackle the ravages of the byproducts of our development without hurting economic development. That seems quaint now to think that imagine somebody like Mitch McConnell saying that today.
Gil: You alluded to another really powerful device, I think throughout your book, where you unpacked Maslow's famous hierarchy of needs and posited, and of course organized your book that those really need to change in the age of climate change and how it's shifted. Talk a little bit about that. I thought that was a very effective way to organize. Please expand there.
Bill: Thank you. I was grasping for how to structure this book. I write for TV, which is for the eye or the ear, and writing when you say, "Okay, hey, I'll give you a hundred thousand words in a year." I was just lost. I'm not an outliner, so I'm like a man lost in the woods with a flashlight with no batteries. I didn't know where to begin. Then I started asking myself what made the problem. Most people are good. They want to do good, or they just want to take care of their families.
How do we get to a point where we're wiping out entire species? It really boiled down to the idea of that we're made of stories, that we're the one species that has a capacity thanks to a fire we found which helped us cook and unlocked these big brains. Imagine alternate realities. Then rally millions of people around these notions of, "Yes, we're going to land a remote control robot on Mars. We're going to do it." I'm like, "Okay, let's do it." Our capacity for that but the stories are always changing.
What we think are permanent, borders or flags or currencies or corporations or religions are under constant revision. Just in our lifetimes, think about how the major churches or political parties have shifted. If we tell a better story, that's how we get to a protopian space. We'll never get to utopia, but it doesn't have to be all dystopia. When you're thinking about stories and then it was like, "Well, why do we do what we do?" If just google human motivation, you'll find the OG of this branch of psychology.
Abraham Maslow was this sort of brilliant teacher from Brooklyn, where I'm sitting now. Miserable childhood, mom was sort of just an evil villain in his stories. He hid out in the library and studied all kinds of psychology things.
In 1939, he wrote just one of his first papers, A Theory of Human Motivation, which didn't reference a pyramid shape, but that's the way pop culture took it. If you imagine, for those who remember, it's Psych 101 or haven't heard of this, it's imagine a five-layer pyramid with a first floor of the foundation. Your physiological needs is stuff that keeps you alive. It's air and water and right temperature and rest, sleep and homeostasis. Level two is once you are able to stay alive is safety needs, is shelter and rule of law and an economy, information is a safety need.
These are all the things that go away when I'm covering a hurricane, generally for people. The bottom two layers of that pyramid. Then once your belly is full and the door is barred, you feel safe. You want to belong. Level three is love needs to a partner or a family or tribe. Level four is esteem needs. You want to be respected within that group and to strangers. That's why we practice Oscar speeches right into the mirror. Imagine being rock stars like I used to.
Then the tip of the pyramid at that time, he called self actualization. Whatever you're meant to be, you should have the freedom to be. If you get the love you need, if you get the food and protection you need, you can be a force for good. If we could just understand each other on these basics, we could create a peace table and end wars. Instead, marketing mad men took his ideas and used them to sell us stuff. Now we're selling us cars not just to meet our safety needs, but our love needs and our esteem needs.
To me, it was like combining the idea that the story that I have been told on how to fill my pyramid, how to build my pyramid, it was like an amusement park, for one.
It's all about whatever you want to be, you can be and go nuts and you guys do you, but I'm going to be over here filling my love needs this way. Towards the end of his life, Maslow realized he'd made a huge mistake because people were asking, wasn't Hitler self-actualized? He was the best murderer he could be.
What he realized at that point what he mistook for self-actualization, the people he admired the most, the heroes in life, the surgeons and Nobel winners. For them, it wasn't about self at all, they carried one of 14 values, like truth, justice, beauty, completeness, humor. It was as much a part of them as a spleen or kidney. They pursued those with the best way they knew how, and success followed. Anyway, it became a neat little way for me to suddenly, like, "Okay, we'll start with air." What's in the air? How do we understand it?
What are the threats? What are the solutions? What about water? Just working my way up the pyramid and then as I get into the love and esteem needs, I shift to my daughter because she's at an age where that really matters, the age of social media, the love and esteem needs have been completely scrambled. In the end, I argue that if we rally around each other, around the bottom of the pyramids, the stuff I took for granted growing up.
I'm from a lower middle class house, but I never had to worry about my food supply. Food is on the table. The air, I didn't see it. The pollution had been cleaned up. Now this generation, I'm afraid doesn't have the luxury of that. We have to help them fortify their pyramids and at the same time make our lives healthier and happier. Then if we do that, if we rally others around the bottom of their pyramids, we fill the tops of our own.
Gil: I loved your thematic pull through of the five stages of grief with respect to the lens of all these climate fueled natural disasters as we move through it. You shared an anecdote of the book when you were hitting on the theme of the five stages of grief, where you challenged Mister Al Gore, the Goracle a little bit.
I really appreciate that because maybe I'm mischaracterizing it, but he's, in his normal frame and we appreciate all that Al has done and is doing, but he skims over the stages of grief in his regular talks and goes right from doom to the solution. That threw Al Gore off a bit, but I think it was important that you did that. Maybe you could share a little bit about that story.
Bill: Sure. This occurred to me when I was making a special a couple years ago on CNN called The Road To Change. It was a road trip across America to just see the effects, the attitudes about this big story. David Wallace-Wells' book had just come out, An Uninhabitable Earth, very dark. He just basically, in a clinical way, laid out, here's what the current science says, here's where we're headed. That has changed, and even he said now it's not as doomy as it was because humanity is adjusting in real time.
I interviewed him for that, and he said, if we do everything, if we do nothing that science recommends, our coastal towns are going to be destroyed, the entire states are going to burn in wildfires. All this is going to happen and the world will have changed. If we do everything that the science recommends, that means a lot more visible wind turbines and solar farms.
It means literally remaking everything in our lives in a more sustainable way, probably in ways you don't notice in a comfort level because technology's advanced so much, but it's going to change. It occurred to me that the Goldilocks earth that I grew up on is dead now or is on life support. We have to grieve that. We have to wrestle with that. At the time I thought this is like a road trip through the five stages of grief, which are denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. In the petrostates, a lot of denial, in places, the activists are very angry.
You can find those in both political parties. Bargaining happens in places like Miami or Charleston, where they're building seawalls or raising streets. Like we're going to adapt our way around the problem. Please keep come moving here, and depression hits everybody in this space if you work in it at all, but acceptance is okay, this is what's baked in. I use it in the sense of, okay, this is a huge problem, but as my old man used to say, "Good thing you're tough, and so what's next?"
This sense of it. I was sitting down with Al Gore. He was having this weather underground conference on his farm in Tennessee, talking about regenerative agriculture and very much as you say, the goraclel, cool to talk to him and walk around his land and I used a lot of that in the other specials I did on food, but I said at one point I had heard from other climate psychologists who say this message where you skip right from the world is ending, but just don't forget to vote.
Gil: We got it. Yes.
Bill: Like there's something you have to cycle through the bargaining and the anger and the depression of all of that, and I was just saying if someone wants to mock Al Gore as a messenger of this, maybe they just haven't processed through those stages yet. He very much disagreed with that because it made it seem like, well, we've accepted that earth is dead. I wasn't trying to make that case at all, but if you live in Lahaina, Hawaii, you have to mourn what will happen to your town, and until you get to acceptance and get over the depression and get over the anger, that's when you go from survivor to rebuilder and thriver, anyway.
I really dug into that premise more when I sat down to write the book and looked up-- The origins of this came from a woman named Elisabeth Kübler-Ross who's a Swiss. She wanted to be a medical doctor, very stern father just wanted her to be either a maid or a secretary. She defied him, went to med school, and when she started practicing in Chicago in the late '60s, 95% of doctors wouldn't tell terminal patients they were dying. Mortality was like a dirty word, and everybody knew, but they did tell people, when they were forced to tell people that you only have weeks to live, the clergy in her hospital said, you should interview these folks.
We'd love to know what they're going through so we can ease their final weeks, and to her surprise everybody said yes. Would sit down with her, and then that's how she realized that people were cycling through these five stages, not in a linear fashion, sometimes jump around, sometimes you go back from acceptance to anger, but she basically invented hospice care and was so good at this, at empathizing with folks that now 95% of doctors take the family's advice for end of life care. In not talking about the worst that could happen, I think Al Gore his tone has changed.
There's a lot of anger in his talk these days [crosstalk] especially towards oil companies in Abu Dhabi and the last COP, but again, there's no right way to move anybody. It depends on the day, their mood, what stage we're all in, and I just want us to remember that we're going through this together, and unless we do talk about it, I think that's why there's so much anxiety among the youth, is the grownups aren't sitting around going, "Are you angry?" "I'm angry." "Are you depressed?" "I'm depressed." "What are we going to do about this? How can we rally?"
Gil: Let's talk more about the incredible people you've met reporting and the great characters in your book by extension, and I imagine it was hard to decide who to include. Here's a few that jumped out to me I'd love you to talk about, and any others. Gosh. Was it the Fisherman in Maine who coined this great phrase, Carbon Godzilla, which I'm going to start using.
Bill: Do it. Spread it.
Gil: I'm with you because it reminded me that Harrison Ford, just random [unintelligible 00:20:18], had some climate conference in '18. At the end of his speech, he said, "Everyone, let's put down our phones and go kick this monster's ass." You really expanded. Maybe it's just because there's a new Godzilla movie out, too, and my son wants to go see it. There's something like, "Yes, we're going to beat this monster." There's going to be some ups and downs. Expand on this great Fisherman in Maine, I think.
Bill: You bet. This guy, his name is Marty Odlin. He's a Fisherman scientist. He's a fourth-generation Mainer right on the Gulf there in Portland and always just dreamed of having a boat like his dad and his grandpa and chasing cod and halibut around the Gulf. He went and studied robotics at Dartmouth, I believe, and Earth Systems at Columbia. When he came back to get a boat and get a fishing lease, he realized that the Gulf of Maine had warmed up four times faster than the rest of the planet, and all the fish stocks were diminishing. Lobsters were hitting it hard, but they were moving north, too.
He got mad. He said, "Well, if I can't have a boat named Running Tide," that's what he wanted to call it up. He started an ocean repair company called Running Tide and called all these people he knew in the science world and said, "What can we scale up? How can we help this problem and create nature-based solutions?" I was bemoaning the fact that how we talk about the problem is a barrier to progress, because first it was global warming, but warmth is nice. People like warmth. Then it was climate change.
The climate's always changing. Then we say, "Well, we have to explain the greenhouse effect." "People are not afraid of a greenhouse. That's where we get yummy tomatoes and flowers." Then you go, "Well, if we could just rally people like World War II and nationalize factories and recruit young folks to fight this." That's easy when your enemy is wearing very conveniently scary uniforms and very easy to rally against a guy like Hitler and his minions. When in this particular challenge, it's everything around us.
It's systems and things that are built in that you feel powerless to try to do anything. It's not like a moonshot because it's really almost 200 countries doing a moonshot at the same time. I'm going through this, and Marty just blurts out, "It's a Godzilla. It's a Godzilla." We have unlocked a Godzilla from underground, just like in the movies, by mistake. At first, he helped us do the heavy lifting. He helped us build cities and expand lifestyles. now he is so big and out of control, he's killing all the fish, melting all the ski resorts, ruining everything that's fun and free. We should get mad and go kill that thing and chop it up.
Gil: Get the best scientists together, get all the towns folk together.
Bill: Exactly. What kind of tools? What makes sense? What's your Godzilla killing the idea? Is it direct air capture? Is it pumping biofuels back into old salt mines? I met a bunch of these carbon removal startup guys, and Marty, he did the cost-benefit on all kinds of technologies and really settled on massive kelp, floating rats made of forest waste, feed it with limestone and kelp seeds. They make these micro forests that gobble up carbon way faster than trees would.
The idea is then you've got technology that beams this data into the cloud for carbon markets to show how fast it's growing, when it's cut, it'll sink to the bottom and be sequestered there. Nobody knows if this will work at scale. We don't know how putting this biomass at the bottom of the ocean. For him, it was the most benign nature-based solution. The limestone in the raft is like tums for the ocean to help with the acidification that's happening.
They're also working with oyster beds for the coastal communities so you have that. Oysters really pull down carbon. They filter water, and you have a protein you can sell and eat. He's tackling it from these ideas. Along the way, he invents a way to beam data from a floating raft in the North Atlantic into the cloud as a byproduct of his research. The more people start thinking like this, it just fills me with hope. Countries like Iceland are like, "Yes, come here. Tie your rafts here. We want to get behind you on this." I love that, and again, I've stolen that metaphor, carbon Godzilla.
Gil: I love it. On the other side, on the climate resilience side, Archie from Maui. What an incredible human being there who you encountered after the terrible wildfire, and as the community was picking up the pieces, it's fair to say Archie gave you the title for the book too. Directly or indirectly.
Bill: Indirectly. I was circling around it, at that time and tried it out on him, and he helped me nail it. We went into the burn zone in Maui there, just while it was still smoldering, and when you come ashore, I had been there in better days, and you see the contrast, it was like a World War II movie. We spent a couple days interviewing folks in the area, but couldn't get really into the town until we embedded with some DIY relief workers who were taking a U-Haul full of relief supplies in, and took us into this neighborhood in the center of the burn zone that they had held the line and had survived.
Right on that line is a guy named Archie Kalepa, who lived there, who was a Hall of Fame waterman in Hawaii. He was a lifeguard who pioneered the use of jet skis to tow in to rescue people and then tow-in surfing for big waves, and he teaches navy seals how not to drown. He is just this otherworldly waterman and just so respected. In the Hawaiian native Hawaiian culture, his family goes back 10 generations to when Lahaina was this watery paradise before colonialism diverted it all, turned it into grassland.
In the middle of all this disaster, I pull in and he has this unbelievably well-oiled relief center with shelves of bottled water and food over here and medicine organized for prescriptions over here. I was bringing in musicians that night to lift spirits because they were going to have a cookout, and these are just shell-shock folks who just watched their entire town burn down around them. Their jobs are gone. What I saw him do was fill every level of their pyramid of needs.
Like looking after their air and water. "Wear a mask tonight. This ash is toxic, and we're trying to get a dusk shield up here. Be sure to hydrate. When you see the Hawaiian electric guys, make sure they're hydrated. Let's give a big hand to Auntie Sue who cooked this unbelievable poi for us. This is what we're going to do." Very structured and almost militaristic. I was blown away and I've seen first responders around the world from Katrina to Fukushima to Haiti. This was a guy like, "I want my boy to grow up to be like Archie Kalepa."
[chuckles] Especially in an uncertain time because in the best of times, that guy is saving lives, and in the worst of times he's saving that many more lives and going through so much of the politics, and the angry of the officials, and the human temptation to divide each other. I've learned covering disasters that sometimes sudden earthquakes or hurricanes or even like a 9/11 draws people together immediately because you're all going through the five stages at the same rate, and then it's #Wewillrebuild, and all that.
The longer it draws out, that's when your nerves get frayed and the kids can't go back to school and the FEMA check hasn't arrived, and you look at the neighbor and like, "Wait, has he got a trunk full of supplies? What did I--" Those moments is when guys like Archie are the difference between a communities staying together or falling apart. As I think about how my son has to build shelter differently than I had to think about and has to think about food supplies and supply chains differently, that kind of fortitude.
I'm the kind of kid who made fun of the Boy Scouts. A bunch of nerds. [chuckles] I love the woods. Backpacking with my dad was like, "Oh yes, I don't need the merit badges," but now, I'm the dad who becomes like, "Be prepared. Do you know how to read a paper map? Have you thought about an evacuation route?"
Gil: You got all the advantages and I'm giving you those, but now you need to be strong for those who are less fortunate.
Bill: Totally.
Gil: Climate Positive is produced by HASI, a leading climate investment firm that actively partners with clients to deploy real assets that facilitate the energy transition. To learn more please visit HASI.com
Gil: Maybe still on the resilience theme, can you share some other surprising adaptations we're seeing from people and animals who were coping with rising temperatures. The penguins, I didn't know about these penguins. Fascinating, and I guess the Beaver Dam Analog was, I knew a little bit about that, but maybe start there or anything else that comes to mind.
Bill: Yes, so I took inspiration actually from three animals from my little boy who's obsessed with all creatures.
Gil: Mine too. [laughs].
Bill: Yes. It's so cool. The penguins are one of his favorite animals at the Central Park Zoo. We go to the penguin house, and I went down to Antarctica last year to do a story on Wales. It was the first time I'd been, it was my seventh continent. I was greeted when we went ashore by just thousands of gentoo penguins, and they were building nests. Then I realized that because of climate and because it had been a wet late spring, penguins need dry rock to nest on.
They were making nests for penguins babies that wouldn't have the time, they need to fatten up and grow their feathers for the winter. These chicks that were newborn that I was meeting and seeing these eggs as they were nesting, they weren't going to survive. There was no way. I got really depressed about that. I called a penguin specialist when I got back, and she explained to me that that particular species is actually crushing the survival of the fittest test because they're moving, they're rolling with the changes.
Others like the adelie penguins or chinstrap penguins, which have a funny little, just like they sound stripe under their chin. They're staying like they're stuck in their ways. They're trying to nest eggs in standing water, on ancient nesting grounds, and their numbers are crashing. The gentoos are moving and thriving. Their population is up thousands of percentage points. The camel is another model I use because we think of the camel as the eternal desert animal, it started in Canada. The camel's originally from Canada, and a couple of them wandered across the Bering Land Bridge into Asia and Africa. The ones in North America went extinct.
The ones that made it across to the Sahara realized that the big hump of fat that they had for winters worked on deserts and their feet for snow worked on sand, their eyelids for blizzards worked in the sandstorms. Then they adjusted the behavior and their physiology. The lesson there is, as the planet heats up, we're going to be forced to either move like the gentoo penguin or adapt like the camel. In places like if you live in Phoenix or Riyadh or someplace where you're used to scorching temperatures that are going to get even more scorching, that means the cities will get lighter as more reflective paint is used.
A scientist at Purdue came up with a new white paint that reflects 99% of sunlight and can cool an actual structure by 10 degrees. There's the policies of shade, chief heat officers now in LA and Phoenix and cities in Europe, construction sites may move to the graveyard shift just because working in the middle of the day just is not livable anymore in some of these places. Even places in the northern climates, British Columbia which saw hotter temperatures than Vegas a couple of summers ago, or New Yorkshire, England where they suddenly understand why folks in Arizona have oven mitts in the car to touch the steering wheel.
The heat will rearrange people and I think have the biggest impact. I met people like Annette Rubin, who was a NFL wife from the Pacific Northwest, married a Seattle Seahawk, had never lived in the Gulf Coast, moved down there brand new mom got hit by Hurricane Michael, and it shook her up so much. The fact that her neighbors are like frogs in the boiling pot who accepted this, she's like, "I'm not standing for this. I want to build a literally disaster-proof home. What would I use?"
With no experience in construction, she's since imported a technology from Italy invented by a guy who was building earthquake-proof homes using basically insulated styrofoam center with sprayed stone shotcrete or gunite, what they used to make swimming pools to build modular homes. You could shape them however you want and just turn them into these rock [laughs] monoliths that will stand for 200 years.
Now, she's trying to disrupt the Florida housing market because after every hurricane we go back in, build the same way, stick frame construction and she's like, "We're smarter than that." I'm just inspired by folks like that. Then there's so many ideas in clean energy spaces too and stuff. It's not just mitigating the problem trying to come up with a way to stop making carbon Godzilla bigger every day, and in fact chopping them up, building that industry in reverse, but looking for the smartest possible ways to fortify our lives. Why we do that stuff if storms are getting worse in the meantime
Gil: You were on Morning Joe recently, and you were asked what gives you hope in all this disaster. Your answer there which you hit on the book, was you reference Texas leading the nation in green energy, number one in wind for a long time, recently number one in solar ahead of California.
Bill: Yes. That was one that gave me a big boost. When you think about the idea that for most of human history, we were just burning whatever was cheap and convenient, whether it was dung or whales or kerosene. Then something better comes along, and now for the first time in human history, a levelized cost of energy of building a new power plant is solar plus storage or onshore wind, which is why over 90% of power plants that are coming online now will be sustainable in the United States.
It's same numbers in India, amazingly enough. When you realize that, like you say, places, and this is what's super interesting, and this happened with housing in Montana too, whereas states that had that hate red tape because they have libertarian Republican leadership, if they form a coalition with people who want to get stuff done, man, it gets done.
In Texas, they have their own grid, and so it couldn't be more just Texan, you do you rugged individualists down there, but that levelized cost of energy now when you build that, the beauty of sun and wind is once you build the infrastructure, the energy delivers itself to you.
You don't have to go chasing it under mountains and oceans. The byproduct is that is it's a lot less profitable. The vested interests who don't want to give up their stake in the energy markets, it's going to be a fight. Just the economics of this now is stronger than ideology. It's stronger than political identity in Texas. It's going to probably grow. Three of the five biggest green states are Republican-led. When you look at the Dakotas with wind and Kansas and Iowa.
Then when you look at the boom in trying to capture that, a couple of Sundays ago, electricity here in Texas was free for six hours because there was so much sun and wind. If you get a thermal battery that heats up a big chunk of carbon till it glows like the sun and has enough heat to make steel, and you can use it to power a factory or maybe you use underground pressure to store that energy, it doesn't have to be chemical lithium batteries the way we think about them. There's a million, not a million ways, but so many ways to store energy. That could create a whole new industrial belt in the wind and sun states the way that-
Gil: That's right.
Bill: -we created the rust belt up near the Great Lakes and shift industry around because now, hey, if I can run an aluminum smelting plant off of the sun, it just makes that much more sense. I think we're headed that way. It's the way, at one point we weren't going back to horses. It just electrification makes the most sense for the future. The question, Gil, that worries me, is whether it will replace the old legacy dirty energy or we'll just figure out new ways to consume it. Between Bitcoin or cryptocurrency and AI data stuff, it feels like we invent energy consumption ideas just as fast as we invent new forms of clean energy.
It's obvious that the big petro coal and oil giants are not going gently into a world where their business model has to change. Until we come up with a vaccine for greed or monomaniacal nationalism, like you see Vladimir Putin where people are invading, there's always going to be this. I don't know. We'll see what becomes of this revolution. It's a good fight to have.
Gil: I'm with you. Let's turn to just your career as a journalist. I've been a PR flack most of my life, so I couldn't do my job I think if I wasn't a great admirer of journalism and also a bit of a news junkie myself. My uncle was a former CNN correspondent too in the mid-'80s through about 2000s. I've always been fascinated by the correspondent, especially the international one. You've lived that life. You became CNN's Chief Climate Correspondent after The Wonder List. Was that in '16 or '19 and I'm just-
Bill: 2016.
Gil: 2016, okay. Talk about that. I'm really interested in the power and the platform the broadcast medium offers today for covering climate. The great issue of our time, but then also the limits. The limits of the soundbite, the unique visual, when it comes to reporting on this great issue. That is your daily balancing the needs of the medium and the challenges with the incredible platform that you have. Just share some thoughts on how you're thinking about that.
Bill: Sure. Well, for most of my life, I really resisted being pigeonholed into a beat. I was a generalist. I wanted to be an anchor. Early in my life, my heroes were David Letterman and Peter Jennings. I either wanted to be a late-night comedy host or a Network News Voice of God anchor which are very different paths. I chose the more yuck it up path and started as a small market sportscaster because it was the most creatively liberating. It was the days of Snarky Sports Center and all of that. I had an amazing run of luck where I got to cover ridiculous moments in sports history. Well, exactly, my first year in a tiny little market in southern Minnesota.
It's a little meat-packing town where they make spam. That year, the Twin Cities hosted the World Series Super Bowl Final Four, when Duke beat the Michigan Fab Five, Stanley Cup and the US Open. I got to cover all of those, as a wet behind-the-ears rookie. Then went to Green Bay for Brett Favre's first three years. I'm from Wisconsin, so I was a Packer fan. That was thrilling. Then I went to Chicago, did a morning show there, and was the sideline reporter for WGN, the Bulls' last three championship runs. Then I had a really irreverent special resume tape given the creative latitude I'd been given, which got attention from the networks.
At that point, I auditioned for the Daily Show when Craig Kilborn left and ended up having two offers to be the main sports guy at a station in LA and one in San Francisco. I went to LA with the promise that they would help me develop some sort of late-night show, but they didn't really have any interest. They just wanted me to do highlights and shut up. You get very little and by this point, the novelty had worn off and I didn't realize how special I had it.
When 9/11 happened, they sent me home for a couple of weeks. The Peter Jennings in me that I had been stuffing down was starting to emerge and like, "Maybe I should do that, or maybe I should just quit and go to do in Hollywood." I quit the job as a sportscaster, spent a year writing screenplays and shooting pilots, and trying to parlay my notoriety into a scripted world, but nothing ever gets made there.
All my projects got killed. Then my then-wife and I had our baby Olivia and ABC news called, and they had remembered me from the Chicago's tape, and they were starting Good Morning America weekend and brought me in and I was shocked as anybody. I came in thinking, "Wow, I made it to the big leagues." I'm going to be hanging out with Barbara Walters and getting tips from Ted Koppel, not realizing I entered into this just cutthroat very competitive world of international journalism at the last days of disco. Audiences were pretty big, and the budgets were pretty big. I spent a couple of years doing my Peter Jennings impression before I just let go of that.
Remember, they hired me because of the Chicago goofy tape and started just being more myself and got some big breaks when Diane Sawyer at one point was like, "Go explain China to us. We're hearing some interesting things happening in China," in 2004. That just blew my mind. Now, to go explore other cultures, to try look for similarities and differences. That just became my favorite thing which led into when I left ABC, CNN. Did that for The Wonder List.
Then again, when the climate beat came up at this point, I cared enough about the story and had seen enough of the world to feel like I could do it and jumped at it. I'm trying to be in a place that really cares about the story. It was the first network to call it a climate crisis, to make it a full beat. We now have 14 people on the team all over the world, some great writers and data visualization folks. I argue we're all going to be climate reporters sooner or later the way everybody had to be a health reporter during COVID. The way it becomes more obvious, you will see that this is also a business story, and it is a health story, and it is a housing story. All that.
Gil: How about a sneak peek of any upcoming projects. Where are you going, or can you say?
Bill: Some days it's just the news of the week. We're heading into Earth Day and Earth week, and we'll play it out to see what the shows you're interested in. If I'm in New York, it's a show's choice if they see something they want me to come and talk about, or if we have some original recording we're offering. I go out into the world a couple of times a month to shoot original pieces. We're most recently doing the strange spinning fish in the Florida Keys.
I'm working on a special hour for Anderson Cooper's Sunday night show, the whole story, really around the themes of the book about adaptation and how climate is already changing, construction and zoning and insurance. I go to meet some of the characters in the book, the woman who invented the disaster proof home, Annette Rubin is in that special. Babcock Ranch, where they built the first solar village in America that survived hurricane Ian, never lost power.
Gil: Amazing story.
Bill: Now, just people are lined up to move in there because they've seen what that looks like. Just want to assemble good ideas. I think the folks who see this coming down the road, much like the gentoo penguin or the camel, and adapt to this new reality if you're a builder, and you start thinking more about if you're in front of this demand for passive house construction which are much better insulated. We've seen the solar employment, that sector grow in many ways. Growing pains of course come with all these things.
Again, for the graduates coming out of school right now, people say, "What can I do?" What are you good at and what do you love?"
Gil: Then go do it for climate.
Bill: Exactly. Go do that, only do it in a way that lives in that positive for people and life on earth.
Gil: Let's wrap up. If you'll humor me with our hot seat, lightning round, if you're up for that.
Bill: Sure.
Gil: Best piece of advice your dad gave you. Not in the book.
Bill: Not in the book.
Gil: [crosstalk]. He sounds like a character
Bill: He was an amazing character. Smartest high school dropout I ever met and really gave me my love of the outdoors and history, geology and all those sorts of things. I'm tempted to go back what I've already quoted already and say it's the idea that when things get rough, good thing you're tough, and to try to pull on something. It's a pep talk in a way. It's a declaration of faith and support, but also pulls you out of self-pity. I do talk about in the book the one time that it sears in my mind where he would talk about geology and he says, "Hold out your arm,"
That is the length. That's how old the earth is, the length of your arm. "Now take a nail file and just scrape the tip of your longest finger three times, you've just erased human history." We've only been here a blink, and to appreciate our capacity as world builders and world destroyers and just how unbelievably lucky we are to happen to be breathing at this precise moment, at this spot in the Milky Way. [laughs] I appreciated that.
Gil: How about your mom. Best piece of advice from your mom. Let's talk about her.
Bill: She is a complicated character in the book, but she really taught me the idea that reinvention is possible. That if you don't like your general conditions wherever you are, a new future is like a U- haul rental away. Instilled me with a real sense of courage and exploration.
Gil: My son and I watched a few wonder list episodes. He was really into your Everglades episode with the Python. We were talking earlier. He loves animals too, like River. He's into lizards, cats and whatnot. You've seen some amazing creatures, we talked about a few. Give me your top five really quick most amazing creatures.
Bill: Interactions that I've had with yes. Or just in-- [crosstalk]
Gil: Yes. You have to photograph them or--
Bill: Sure. Yes, so easy. Surrounded by grizzlies at Katmai National Park in Alaska. Salmon we just talked around, that was incredible. Lemurs in Madagascar, the injury lemur. we released a kiwi into the wild in New Zealand, a critically endangered national bird that they're trying to bring back. I saw we were on safari in Botswana, where two lions were trying to take a big Impala drumstick away from a leopard in a tree [laughs] trying to get it to drop this hunk of meat and watch this whole thing play out there. Then on that same shoot we went to Namibia to look for one of the last black rhinos left in the world.
Gil: Wow. Oh, that riffs, right? That was in the book [crosstalk] that.
Bill: Then as a bonus, God I just have to throw in the humpback whales we saw in Antarctica feeding with bubble nets where they blow bubbles in a tight circle to lasso to krill [unintelligible 00:51:11]
Gil: I’ve got to see that in this lifetime. That's a bucket list, wonder of nature.
Bill: Absolutely. That's a wonderful comeback story. The humpback whale we almost killed them all but when people changed the story, and we were able to use the sounds of their songs and think about them in a new way, we brought them back from the brink. It's one of the great conservation success stories.
Gil: Speaking of changing the story, best way to deal with climate-denying trolls on social media or in your inbox.
Bill: There were days when I tried to engage them, "Let's talk, where are you from?" There are days when I've tried to snark back at them. There are days I've tried to subtweet them as foils and fools. I regret all of those. Unfortunately, I see social media and the way I was using it as a net negative for me. It made me mantisocial, it didn't help the discourse. I do realize the motivation behind that guy who's sitting behind a keyboard somewhere is angry at the system, is angry at a lot of things I'm probably angry at. I guarantee if we sat down together and had a beer, we would find so much more in common but the way we communicate is broken down.
I try to remind myself this is what I come back to is my daughter, Olivia has this irrational fear of sharks. I don't blame her. I blame Steven Spielberg who made Jaws so convincing with two notes on a cello that scared a whole generation of this creature. I hope Olivia goes scuba diving with me, but I know that's not going to happen by me calling her an idiot. I try to hold grace for the story believers and really aim my eye at the storytellers who should know better.
The ones with the biggest platforms who are obvious. There are lots of just now-- and you don't know if it's weaponized trolling. You don't know if it's somebody in Russia trying to push your buttons but the more positivity we pump into the algorithm, I've found the more I celebrate just the solutions folks and don't engage with that stuff. My feed seems to [laughs] be a lot more positive. Life's too short to feed the trolls, I think.
Gil: Totally. Don't wade in the national marinade of misinformation as you said beautifully.
Bill: Exactly. Yes.
Gil: Okay, how many times have you jumped out of an airplane?
Bill: 182, I think is my last count. I was avid for a while. My dad was a skydiver when I was growing up, and he met my stepmom that way in Wisconsin. When I turned 18, it was like, "Oh, I couldn't wait to do it," and I did it. I was living in LA, I did it every weekend for a while. It was fun. [laughs]
Gil: In one of your stories, were you windsurfing back in the '80s and maybe you still are or you're scuba diving, jumping out of airplanes. Have you tried this new thing called wingfoiling? Have you seen this?
Bill: I have seen it. Yes. It looks so cool. My dad taught me to windsurf on a reservoir in Colorado, like freezing water. The big clunky bick thing.
Gil: Yes, I remember those/.
Bill: For the last few years, I've been dying to learn how to kite surf. I actually took some lessons on the outer banks once but then the weather changed. I wasn't able to actually get in the water. I have seen those inflatable foils, right? I love all that stuff. I might be too old to try it anymore. [laughs]
Gil: Is it fair to say that once you've done the climate beat now, you can't really go back to doing anything else or maybe you don't want to? To the point--
Bill: I really don't want to. Early in my career, it was just enough to be on TV and be in the action and be in the locker room getting sprayed of champagne. That was fantastic in that moment but I realized that I was still the same miserable SOP [chuckles] who wasn't enough to fill whatever keeps you on that treadmill. Like, "Oh, if I just get a job in this market or if I just get that." Having tasted this kind of storytelling to do, we did a piece recently about a woman in Columbia who is reforesting.
She was a landscape architect who was hired to build a zoo and fell in love with this little cotton-top tamarin, this cute little monkey that's critically endangered. Lives only in this one part of Columbia. She decided to get into saving this one species by regrowing forests. It's such hard work. I visited her, you can't do this dropping seeds from drones. She's out there getting sweaty and understands the ecology. She got hooked up with this wildlife conservation network, which was started by a bunch of Silicon Valley swells who were tired of big nature NGOs and felt very non-transparent.
They created venture capital for creatures and doers like boots on the ground conservationists to connect the money directly with these people. She needed to buy a neighboring cattle ranch, which would've added 1,000 acres to this vital cotton-top tamarin corridor. One of the guys she'd met at these expos said, "What if we had a website where people can pick out a hector from a satellite picture and for one time donation, help you buy that ranch?" We aired that story once, she got the money she needed to buy the ranch.
Gil: Awesome.
Bill: The power of helpers connecting. This is one woman connecting with a bunch of strangers around the world who are looking down on these monkeys through a satellite from above, watching her bring the forest back. They can see in real-time as the trees transform. What else are we capable of? Imagine what we can do in terms of earth repair with stuff like that. I like to focus on the helpers as Mr. Rogers taught us.
Gil: Love it. Last one. Our signature question we ask every guest to fill in the blank. To me, climate positive means?
Bill:[GJ4]Building, eating, living, doing with our eyes wide open, understanding that one of our choices adds up to big results for our planet and we have the power to turn things around.
Gil: Well said Bill. Thank you so much for this. This was really fun.
Bill: [chuckles] It's so easy to talk to you, brother. Thank you so much for your interest-
Gil: Thank you, Bill.
Bill: -and for having something called Climate Positive [chuckles].
Gil: We're in the spirit, man. We're in the [unintelligible 00:57:56]. There's so much to save. There's so much good. It's not to be Pollyannish but let's capture this opportunity and try to just do a little bit better.
Bill: Amen.
Gil: A Lot better.
Bill: Amen brother.
Gil: Thank you, Bill.
Gil: If you enjoyed this week’s episode, please leave us a leave a rating and review on Apple and Spotify. This really helps us reach more listeners.
You can also let us know what you thought via Twitter @ClimatePosiPod or email us at climatepositive@hasi.com
I'm Gil Jenkins.
And this is Climate Positive.