Bonus Episode: Hank Green on How to Talk About Climate Change [Full Transcript]
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Casey: Welcome to a very special episode of Pricing Nature. I’m Casey Pickett, Yale Planetary Solutions Project Director and Director of the Yale Carbon Charge.
Naomi: And I’m Naomi Shimberg, a junior in Yale College.
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Naomi: So, last summer, my friend Gavin Weinberg texted me and said, “Naomi, I can’t believe it, but your podcast is on a Hank Green video.”
Hank Green from video: [15:20] I’d suggest a podcast called Pricing Nature to
understand the complexities of carbon pricing and international agreements.
Casey: And Naomi, for those of us over 30 in the room, can you explain who Hank Green is?
Naomi: Of course. So Hank Green is a vlogger, entrepreneur, and author. He’s a host of Crash Course and SciShow, which are educational youtube channels with a combined 19 million subscribers. But as you’ll hear today, he got his start in science communication thinking about the environment.
Casey: As you can imagine, we have many subscribers. One might even say a plethora. But we don’t have as many as Hank Green. This feature was big for us.
Naomi: It was, yeah. And so naturally we wanted to thank Hank for featuring us and learn how he heard about us. But then I got the idea, what if he came on the show? So I sent him an email and asked for an interview.
Casey: Uh… Naomi…
Naomi: Ok sorry sorry. I sent him *many* emails…but he eventually responded, “Ninth time’s the charm!”
Casey: So he did. And on a glorious day in December 2021, we picked up the ol’ Zoom phone. Now, as fellow science communicators, we wanted to understand what kind of change he’s trying to bring about, and how those of us working in climate communication can be more effective.
But we ended up getting into deeper questions. Like, does individual choice exist independent of the influences of societies? And, the emotionally laden question, should oil companies be allowed to make money from the clean energy transition? Without further ado, here’s our lightly-edited conversation with Hank Green.
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Casey: Hank Green. It's a real pleasure to have you on Pricing Nature. Thank you so much for joining us.
Hank: I'm a really big fan of what you do. I appreciate you doing it. It has been very informative for me. I’ve learned a lot.
Casey: Can't tell you how thrilled I am to hear that. That's really nice to hear. So we want to have a conversation about climate education. Something that you do very well. We are trying to do. And let's think about what, what that is and how do we do it, do it well. So we'd like to start with where you started. And so, so you're what we think of is like your original job before YouTube was writing for Eco Geek.
Hank: Yeah, that was my thing I started. So I was in graduate school in Montana studying environmental studies for my master's degree.
And I took a class that was called “starting a magazine.” So I started a blog because the idea of starting a magazine in 2004 was a bad idea. And so eco geek was the blog that I started. And it was really a reaction to being in an environmental studies master's program and being constantly exposed to terrible news. And I was like, “What?! There's gotta be some news that's not bad.” And technology was kind of the only place I was finding that news. And I don't think that's the case. There's lots of good news and policy. There's lots of good news, even in U.S. policy, though I'm not feeling that mood today… When we're recording this as a lot of climate legislation is sort of suddenly much more up in the air than it felt a week ago. But, yeah, so it was a response to that. And it became my job, weirdly enough, for a little while.
Casey: So now, what kind of change are you trying to bring about?
Hank: Oh gosh. I mean… the conversation about how to communicate about climate or any complicated, contentious issue, is necessary, but never gonna end on a solution because it shifts all the time and your audiences are different. It's who are you making the content for? Are you trying to convince people, are you trying to activate people who are already convinced? Are you trying to get views or are you trying to get change? And to what extent do those things relate to each other? Like, you're not going to change anybody's mind if nobody's reading your stuff. So, my lane, I have several, but like my main lane is science communication generally. I have a TikTok that's quite popular. And so I reach a lot of people who are, you know, under 25, who maybe are interested in science…. And when you are in that lane, sometimes it's like, “Here's how they build bridges underground!” and… that sentence didn't make any sense, but whatever, something like that, or like, “Wow, caterpillars are weird!” and like, nobody's going to get mad about that, people are going to be interested in it.
But then you get to pieces of the world that actually affect the decisions that we're making right now as individuals and as a society. And that, you know, in science communication, that bumps up against vaccines a lot, it bumps up against climate a lot, bumps up against some other stuff too.
And so like, I do see that as like: so I have established myself like some credibility here. I've worked hard to not get stuff wrong for a long time. And so, you know, that I'm mostly not getting stuff wrong. And when I do get stuff wrong, I talk about it and I talk about why I got it wrong. So establish that credibility first, which is a tricky, tricky thing. And it happened kind of unintentionally for a lot of my career. Hopefully, that means that people will take it more seriously, when I say like, this is a crisis and we need to be treating it as such. And also from the other angle -- the solutions that I hear are like, oh, if only we'd spent $500 million on this problem, everything would be solved. Like that's also BS. That's not a real thing. It's gonna take sacrifice. It's going to require a different world than the one that we live in now. It's going to require people to make decisions. Like if you're going to like, try and live as if this is a crisis, then you're going to make decisions that maybe are going to make your life a little less pleasant. Your house might be a little less warm in the winter. You might wear a sweater inside more often, like Jimmy Carter said, and you might, you might eat less meat and like, I like a hamburger, but I don't eat them anymore. So. I'm a chicken boy now. I'm sorry. I haven't gone all the way. *laughs* Pricing Nature interviews “Chicken Boy” Hank Green.
Casey: So you are very much hinting and headed in the direction that I want to go, but, can you articulate a theory of change? What work are you trying to do and how does that then make other things change to get to the result that you want?
Hank: I believe the children are our future.
Casey: *Laughs* Good start.
Hank: They're also the present to some extent, being people who exist. Oftentimes you want to reach people before they're in the middle of an argument. Like that's really the time to reach them with information that might eventually lead to an argument.
If you invite them into an existing argument, you're asking them to take a side. And this is generally how our worldviews are formed, is that like, I got the information from my sociologist mother that racism was real in 1989 in very sort of clear and present ways that were discussed openly.
Now apparently that's a contentious conversation that you have to be on one side or the other of. That's a lot of what I hope for is that these messages of reality, like how strange a caterpillar is, lives alongside the severity of impacts of a two degree Celsius increase in the climate of our planet.
A huge problem among the people who have been exposed to these ideas is that they're exposed to the scariest version of it. And so like you also don't get change when you have hopelessness.
So you have to have that balance between getting the correct image of our world and how it is changing into people's minds, without resorting to the kind of rhetoric that leads to increased hopelessness and like…
This is a fairly normal thing. When you realize that the world doesn't have to be the way that it is and that things might be broken, you can kind of clean the slate and be like, “Okay, so what world would it be if I thought it was perfect? And like, always, that’s gonna result in good and bad ideas, in the same person. Like I remember this period of my life, where I was reforming my vision of what the world could be.
But that's a really important time to be reaching people. And it is also a really common time for people to think like, okay, I've got in my head, the picture of what the world should be. And we're so far away from that that I basically give up. And there's sort of like a little path back from there.
Usually, hopefully, for people where, you sort of start to see how progress actually gets made. And that it can be made. So I'm trying to sort of communicate that whole thing all at once. And push back against the narrative that, we, as humans, have no control over we, as humans, seems to be the message. And I'm like, well, it turns out that every gallon of gasoline that gets burned is burned by a person. People make that choice and there's reasons we make that choice.
I was exposed to this in an uncomfortable way where my college was paid for by my grandfather who, among many other things in his career, was the executive at an oil company. Like an energy company that had an oil rig named after him. So I'm like sitting in my grandfather's basement, and I loved my grandparents very much, but disagreed with them on a lot of stuff. Even my mother disagreed with them on a lot of stuff, like, it was very obvious to me that there was the kind of contention that we see among families.
And sitting there and looking at that picture of the oil rig named after my grandfather--
Casey: What’s the name of it?
Hank: I'm not going to tell you! That’s weird. You can figure it out if you go-- It's not operating anymore. It was like, in the 60s he did this… And knowing that a lot of the advantages I had were because of this.
And then coming to terms with the fact that he and everybody who works in that industry, they know that they're solving problems for people and that without their work, I can't go see my family on an airplane. That's a real thing. That isn't a problem… Now there was a transition that they made where they were like, now we're going to actively work to maintain our stranglehold over the energy system in this country and not allow change even if it's technologically viable to take hold.
But, I try to remember that before light bulbs, we burned whales. Before my lightbulbs were powered by coal, they were powered by dead whales. So there's a good transition there. And that's like that it's better to use coal to have lights than dead whales, and it's better to use solar panels than coal.
And this is a transition that we move toward. To sort of give myself that perspective is valuable. Even if it is tempering. I think maybe it makes me stronger, but a little bit less inflammatory.
Casey: So to play back the theory of change a bit here, and I want to dig into this because it's a way of reflecting on what we're trying to do through the Pricing Nature podcast as well. It sounds like the theory might go something like: People are actually making decisions and choosing behaviors that are driving climate change. In order to influence people, we have to influence their set of ideas early on. And before they get into a conflictual kind of situation. And the best way to do that is to establish credibility and to focus on a broad base of science education that then treads into particularly important areas like climate change sometimes, but isn't purely about that.
Hank: Yeah, I think that that can-- that there is a lot of advantage to that. Now, obviously they like, if there a group of people who are very activated and want to be more involved, and I think this is part of the change, is that you take somebody who doesn't have much thought about this stuff, and some portion of them… You take a hundred percent of those people and you turn them into people who recognize the existence of the problem.
And then you take some portion of those people who become more active in some way, who might be interested in politics themselves, or in working in advocacy and lobbying, et cetera. Or people who are just going to be active in their community and tell people about things so that they'll be more likely to support policies that work to take on the problem.
So you have to have content like your content that's out there, also. Obviously I don't think that like the average 20 year old TikTok-er is going to be like, I'm really interested in the economics of externalities.
But I think that is a thing that happens… if you catch them in the right moment and if they have the right perspective and if they have the space to do it. So there are a lot of pieces of this. But I think also, I mean, if we're talking about changing minds, like, what is the change that we're talking about?
Is it individual change, is it social change? Because of course, we can all buy Impossible Burgers until we die and it's not going to solve the problem. So what you really want is for people to change their minds enough that they support policies that--and this is something that I try to remember--is that they're gonna hurt a little bit. And there's ways to structure it so that it hurts less, but it always hurts a little bit, even if it only hurts the richest people.
There's always going to be stories. This is a thing that is very frustrating: you can make it so that a piece of legislation benefits like 90% of people, but you'll find a farmer somewhere who is actually suffering due to the legislation. And like you tell that story and it's like, actually this seems completely like political suicide to try and support this thing that is making life miserable for this farmer. And you can even find a farmer out there who can say, “I loved this politician before they did this and they destroyed my…” And then that's such a powerful story. And we are story-based people.
In the long-term we're gonna need market-based solutions. I mean, I'm talking to people who agree with me on this, but right? Aren't we?
Casey: Seems reasonable…
Hank: But you want people to be in a place where they make decisions that do two things: One, they increase their likelihood that they're going to support the market based solutions. Two: they’re starting to create the market. They're building a little bit of a market for, demand for things like electric cars, like solar, that's lowering the barriers to those things so that it is easier to implement the market-based stuff because you had the early adopters is like the story of all technology.
And the frustrating thing is those early adopters, they're not going to be the people with the least. The early adopters are-- this is Elon Musk's stroke of genius with Tesla: don't try and make a bolt. Don't try and make an EV1.
Make a supercar that isn't going to be practical because you need to open the door somehow. So you build a Roadster and then you scale down from there.
Casey: So we need the Tesla of sweaters?
Hank: Well, solar panels on people's houses are kind of that. They're cool. They feel good. Utility scale is obviously much more sustainable, but we do it on our houses because it feels like we're making an individual choice and you're signaling that you care and that you're treating it like a crisis. And also you get to open your app and be like, “Oh, it was a good sunny day. Look at all the kilowatts I made.” And it's kind of geeky and fun. So things like that exist. Now I don't think that we're going to make the Tesla of sweaters, but I remember when I was excited about LED light bulbs and I bought them a little early.
And I was like, actually these suck, but now they're great! Because I was an early adopter of LEDs, same thing with eBooks, like a lot of different kinds of things that you can make the case are paths towards sustainability, but are also just kind of like fun.
Casey: Well, I like that bridge of market pull in bridging the question about, should we focus on individual action or systemic change?
Hank: Yeah. It's wild to me that we have created that as a dichotomy. And it's frustrating. I hate these tweets from people who like, every time I talk about people making choices, or like… there are a couple of different services that will calculate your carbon footprint and then offset it for you and people being like, “This is BP’s idea! BP wants you to care about your carbon footprint!”
And I'm like, oh, why are we mad suddenly? So these things affect each other. There isn't a harsh line between the individual and society. Society is made up of individuals. That's the thing about being a person, we feel like we're individuals, but we're kind of not. But we kind of are.
It's very strange.
Casey: It’s like waves and particles.
Hank: Yeah. We're definitely all making individual decisions that somehow line up on a really normal curve. Like we just make a perfect bell somehow with our really individual, definitely based nothing about society, decisions.
Casey: So given that, when you're deciding to weigh in on climate, either through a whole episode or a mention, it sounds like you've got this, what shouldn't be a dichotomy between individual and society, in mind. But what are the other challenges in talking about climate and educating about climate that you find as you're doing this work?
Hank: So I remember back in the early aughts when I was just first starting to do this, that you would always be challenged by deniers, who… you know, obviously we're all motivated in our reasoning… A challenge that I faced then, and that I see a lot of people facing now is being able to not engage.
It's not interesting to me. And so I decided to early on, “I'm not interested in talking about whether or not there's a problem. And I feel like talking about whether or not there's a problem, is a problem.” I think that that's… you know, I wouldn't entertain the idea that dogs aren't animals, if that came up.
Or, here's one that used to be a thing that people believed: Dogs don't feel pain. And I'm not interested in entertaining that as an idea. If you come at me with “dogs don't feel pain,” I'm like, that person is not connected to reality and I'm not having that conversation.
Why would I talk to someone who has such a clearly untrue and objectionable belief? This is how I feel about climate deniers. I'm like, this person either believes this because they have a lot of reasons to believe it. Because their identity is tied up in fossil fuels… And I understand that. I understand having my identity tied up in the technologies and products that I use… I like cars, I love motocross. I like demolition derbies. I like monster trucks. That stuff's great. It's like the only thing we should use fossil fuels on.
I will let go of monster trucks last. And, I don't think that they're probably a huge percentage of the gasoline consumption, so probably going to be okay with that. So I get it.
Because of that, I don't see… It's on the verge of conspiracy theory at this point, the level of motivated reasoning that's going on. And I think that most people, I don't know… I feel like either that battle is won or I'm not interested in connecting with it.
Casey: Can you say more about that? What do you mean, that the level of motivated reasoning is on the verge of conspiracy?
Hank: Well, when you sort of, when you look at how people are like, “oh, the sun is actually just closer to the earth, and that's why things are getting warmer.” Like it seems like you're trying, you're looking anywhere for some reason why it's getting warmer. Like, everyone now agrees that it's getting warmer.
And now what you see are the more legitimate voices in the fossil fuel industry saying yes, climate change is real. Yes. It's caused by humans, but at the moment it's too expensive to shift. That's what the API is saying out loud in front of people on news shows. They agree that climate change is caused by people, but like, we just can't take it on right now. We need to stick with fossil fuels for a little while because otherwise it'll crash the economy.
And that’s a conversation that we can have. In France they saw that very problem where they were like, let's have a big fossil fuel tax. And people were like, actually, that really is great for Parisians who have a subway. But it does feel a little bit like you've ignored some of the country here and we’re not all on board here, so let's make sure that this is a thing that maybe affects people equally somehow, which is of course impossible.
The other thing is that I want to recognize that all of this is hard. If we don't recognize that it's hard, then it's very easy to sort of say, politicians are idiots and can't get anything done. And the other people are evil. I just don't, I also don't like that. I've seen that be good at activating people to be more active. But I've not seen it in the end be good at having change get made.
Casey: Right. So to contrast our approach and your approach a little bit. Our theory of change is yeah. And this may display a lack of ambition. *laughs* We've decided that if we can, we're postulating that if we can reach 10,000 people and the people we're aiming at are folks from your New Yorker climate article-reading grandmother, to the environmental studies undergrad, or master's student, but probably not the climate policy PhD student. That window. And if we can reach 10,000 of those people and then some portion of them end up better informed and more comfortable with market based climate policy, and are more able to talk to their friends about it, then we will have…
When we started this, we were thinking there's likely to be a big kind of climate policy push at some point in the next couple of years and the fossil fuel industries are likely to push back really hard. Let's try to improve the level of education in a segment of the folks who are likely to engage in that conversation so that people are more comfortable and more able to push back and say, actually that that's not the way that this is likely to work. People out there are able to actually defend the policy.
You're aiming at a much wider audience, but there's still this, as you just referred to, there's some significant part of the population that's much larger than the population that believes that the earth is flat, believes that climate change is not human caused. Should we address that, should we worry about it?
Hank: And there's like 30% of the US population who thinks that vaccines are dangerous. The most well studied vaccines in human history. These things end up, right now at least, coming down really harshly on Democrat-Republican lines in the US because we've decided that in order to be a good one of one group, you have to disagree with everything that the other group is saying.
How to change that, I don't freaking know. That’s the root, it feels like to me. Now I think a lot of those people don't really think… they're not conspiracy theorists trying to justify why the world is flat. They're just sort of like, “Oh, well my friend says the world is flat.” And like, “I don't really need to think too much about that. That's good enough for me.”
So yes, I think that I'm also going to almost entirely reach a bunch of people who are going to come to the same conclusions regarding climate change. So it's pretty easy for me to disregard the voices that are shouting, “Oh no, climate change isn't real!” And the people in the comments are taking care of them faster than I could anyway.
Hmm, I guess I want to ask you a question. So I think that these are both similar pieces of the story of change. I'm reaching them earlier, you're reaching them later in the process. You get people connected to the idea and aware of market based solutions. They’re talking to each about them and they're like, oh, that sounds smart. And that makes it more likely that that kind of change could actually happen.
When you see the push against market-based solutions. To me, that's way beyond the normal scope. And so the way that ends up getting talked about is, “they want to increase the price of gasoline. They want to increase the price of heating,” and those are the things that we actually, particularly with heating, you want to make sure that that's not a real problem. Cause people aren't going to switch over… It's not a fast solution to switching over from heating oil and natural gas to-- People need to be warm in the winter.
Oh, here it is. I think that the way that this gets done, probably, is that it takes f****** forever. Sorry. And in the meantime, all of these very large companies will figure out ways to make money and continue existing. It's not only we're going to put Exxon out of business, they'll just be better at generating energy in new ways that don't affect the climate as much, or at all.
The story that a lot of people want to hear is “let's destroy the oil companies.” And in the long-term probably that doesn't happen. And that's not as fun of a story, where it's like, “Well, we punched each other in the face for 50 years. And then we came out the other side, Exxon is still making a lot of money, but the carbon is starting to wane.” And already the carbon is starting to wane to some extent, and coal companies are going to get their asses handed to them because they haven't innovated in the last, I don't know, hundred years. I shouldn't say that, if there's coal people listening, you have innovated. I'm not a fan of a lot of the ways you've innovated, but look, acid rain got better. Good job. But ultimately, that's a very, very hard transition to make.
Whereas I think that there will be liquid fuels. There will be… if you have the kind of money and you are in the energy industry, the energy companies will figure out a way to make it through and they will continue to provide services that frankly, we need and use.
Everybody wants a simple story. And so you have to give a lot of people a simple story, but what's going to happen isn't going to be a simple story. It's going to be slow. It's going to be annoying. It's going to require a ton of work for incremental change. And in the end, our enemies will thrive. But in a world in which change is being made.
Should we just ignore that and not talk about it? Should we pretend like the battle is like right now and must be fought today? And this is a thing in climate change: I hear all the time people are like, “I heard that the tipping point happened two years ago!”
I'm like, yeah, there's lots of tipping points. We will continue to tip over other tipping points forever. And the IPCC report was really clear, that every fraction of a degree that we prevent saves lives and money way more than you could ever imagine.
Casey: Yeah, it’s a continuous, not a binary variable. Absolutely. It's a great question. I think we have the same question for each other. I wanted to ask you about tips and tricks for being a good climate educator and how you deal with complexity versus simplicity in your message. That's one of the emotionally hard parts about Kim Stanley Robinson's latest novel, is that a bunch of oil companies figure out that they can reverse the flow of their pumps and pump a bunch of stuff back underground…
Hank: And isn’t that interesting that that’s emotionally difficult?
Casey: Yeah, it is!
Hank: Shouldn't we be like, amazing! A bunch of people can get rich solving the problem! I have this frustration with vaccines as well, where everybody is like, “We shouldn't be letting Pfizer and Moderna make so much money off these vaccines” and I'm like, they are saving us so much money! And they're capturing some tiny fraction of that value that they have created through their remarkable technology that literally just saved your grandmother's life. And I don't know, I feel like that's okay. We seem to think it's okay to make money by solving problems. And if it's not…
Now I am totally in favor of governments creating artificial markets to support that stuff, which we did in the US but we should also be creating artificial markets to support it in not the US because it turns out diseases don't care about the lines that you drew on a map, but whatever.
Can we get our brains to a place where we think, “Oh my God, Exxon just made a billion dollars, saving us $10 billion of climate damage,” and think “That's great.” And the really emotionally hard part is like, not only turning the drills around, but saying “Here's $10 billion for the coal that's still in the ground. Cause you're gonna make that $10 billion if you take it out. And so we're going to pay you $10 billion to keep it in.” I think that's an important part of the solution, but it feels really bad to say, “Hey person who caused this problem, here's a lot of free money.”
Casey: Yeah, absolutely. No. I mean, I find myself wondering, as I'm listening to you, to what extent is more yoga and meditation the solution, because the emotional content here is so important. I mean, we observed this last year in the flip around carbon pricing. This decades long sort of… We've made the analogy like a romcom or he likes her and is not sure she likes him. And then makes it clear. And then she realized that she does like him. Then she decides that once it's clear that he likes her, she doesn't like him.
This back and forth between the progressives and conservatives on market mechanisms. And it strikes me as a similar kind of thing. When our identities get bound up in policies, things get really weird.
Hank: Yeah…
Casey: Remember Gavin Weinberg, who clued us into our cameo in Hank’s climate explainer video? Gavin is a huge fan of Hank Green and has been a long time supporter of the podcast, so we decided to invite him on to the call so he could ask a question…
Casey: I want to open this up here. In particular Gavin wants to weigh in, as we said, Gavin, introduced me anyway to you, and he’s been a great source of feedback and ideas for this podcast. Gavin, do you have a question you want to ask?
Gavin: Yeah, thank you for that introduction. I was curious Hank about… you mentioned early climate panic. And I'm curious about your experience with that. What accuracy do you think that that kind of thinking has, and then also just the productivity of that, and how to combat that?
Hank: Yeah, I think that climate panic has two main sources.
One is bad news of which there is plenty. And then the other is wanting to not have to think about it. And the reality is, there's lots to think about and I encourage people to care about things more than climate. I don't encourage everyone to do that though. I think that some people need to care primarily about climate and some people need to care primarily about criminal justice and some people need to care primarily about reproductive rights.
And we need people to have first issues and to not let all of the things go, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then be like, “I can't f****** do anything, everything's terrible!” So we have to have people... And I think sometimes people are like, “I would feel like a bad person if all of these things were my primary issue. And so I'm going to build a story in my head about why I shouldn't be interfacing with that one and that one and that one.”
And also sometimes your primary issue is your final. The primary issue is going to be your mental health. Your primary issue is going to be your relationship with your partner, which needs attention. Your primary issue at that moment's going to be your kid or your neighbor who is nuts or needs your help, like either way…
I think that we need to accept that there are big issues that people are going to fix that aren't going to be fixed by us. I think that that can be hard.
And also to get away from… Sometimes I think that there's two ways our brains make this story. They're either something's not going to get fixed because I can't fix it, or it's going to fix itself.
And what we need instead is gratitude for the people who are taking that on, without the responsibility for me having to be one of those people. And that's how I feel about my secondary and tertiary issues where I'm like, “I care a lot about that.” And so the role that I'm going to play is just being so grateful for the people who have that as a primary issue. And to think about them and to support them and to care about the work that they do.
I took that in a very different direction, but I think that that is often the source of hopelessness: “I don't want to have to think about that one too.” But instead I think that we should be grateful for the people who are putting it first while we focus on the things that we have to focus on, when we don't happen to be one of those people.
As for what to do about it. I think that oftentimes when you're 20, you're being exposed to so many ways in which the world isn't perfect. After maybe having been 14 and thought, “The majority of the ways the world isn't perfect is how I'm being treated by my peers.” That being the primary concern.
That transition is fast. It doesn't feel fast when you're in it, but it's fast and from a 41 year old’s perspective, it's very quick. Because it’s such a big change. And it can feel like a ton… People fix it in themselves over time, they find the ways to understand how problems get solved if they're paying attention. And then also I think that it's important to talk about the progress that has been made as part of the story of the progress that we need to make.
Sometimes it's seductive to not do that because you want to tell the scariest story, but the reality of the success of cap-and-trade systems for other pollutants are a really important part of the story of what we should do about carbon.
And if we try to pretend like no environmental problem has ever been solved, I think that can be activating for a moment, but it can burn really hot, really fast. And you run out of fuel.
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Casey: That was our conversation with Hank Green. I hope you had as much fun as we did. We are going to take a mid-season spring break, and will return in May with new episodes on carbon pricing inside companies, on carbon offsets, and more. Thank you for listening. This episode was produced by Naomi Shimberg with help from Jacob Miller, Casey Pickett, Maria Jiang, and Cami Ramey. Sound engineering by Jacob Miller. Original music by Katie Sawicki. Special thanks to the Carbon Pricing Leadership Coalition and the Tobin Center for Economic Policy for their partnership, and to Ryan McEvoy, Stuart DeCew and Heather Fitzgerald for making this episode possible.
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Casey: This is a little bit navel-gazy, but I’m really curious: How did you find out about us?
Hank: Oh, shoot! Honestly?
Casey: No. *laughs*
Hank: I was at a party and a guy who was my friend's dad was telling me about the work he was doing in advocacy. And he just had a meeting with some legislator in Montana and he was telling me about how important they thought market based solutions were.
And I wish I could tell you that he was like, check out this podcast, but he wasn't. He was like, watch this hour-long rambly, bad YouTube video. And so I started watching it and I was like, I'm not going to watch this. I know, like 90% of this stuff. And it's very slow. So then I was like, I need a podcast.
So I searched for “carbon pricing” on Apple Podcasts. I think I just searched for it.
Casey: That's awesome.
Hank: I'm pretty sure that's how it happened.
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