Deep Dive with Shawn

Unnatural Disasters: Climate Change in the Trump Era (Featuring Jonathan Mingle)

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Can rising insurance premiums finally make climate change a reality for everyone? And, what does it mean for the world that climate change denier Donald Trump has returned to the American presidency? Jonathan Mingle, journalist and author of "Fire and Ice," joins the podcast to explore the tangible impacts of climate change on everyday life. We discuss the disturbing projections of a world three degrees warmer and the looming crisis of insurability in the U.S. We also examine political challenges and the potential impacts of a second Trump presidency on global climate action, highlighting the stark choices and immediate actions needed to address these issues amidst seeming federal inaction.

There is an urgent need to break free from our fossil fuel dependency and rethink our energy, agriculture, and land use systems for a climate-stable future. So, we discuss the current impacts of climate change, such as wildfires, hurricanes, and heatwaves, which are not just future threats but present realities. Our discussion spans from the tangible effects on regions like New England and Vermont to the broader socio-political implications, including mass migrations, rising nationalism, and xenophobia, drawing parallels with historical events like the Arab Spring.

Messaging plays a critical role in the climate change debate, and we examine the challenges of crafting a universally compelling narrative that transcends political divides. Despite widespread support for climate initiatives, political messaging remains contentious, and Jonathan highlights the importance of building coalitions to advance meaningful action. Finally, we highlight the environmental and health impacts of black carbon, the pressing need to rethink democratic structures for better climate outcomes, and the importance of both individual and corporate responsibility in addressing these urgent environmental challenges.

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Jonathan Mingle:

This coming crisis in insurability of homes in the United States. That is about to make climate change very real for almost everybody, because it's going to touch If you have a homeowner's insurance premium. It's going to, it's going to affect it, so like that's already playing out right now and so, in a sense, we don't need to time travel, you know, to mid century or the end of the century. Although if you do do that, and again, if you talk to climate scientists, you know they will paint some pretty grim picture for you of what it's like to live in a world that is three degrees warmer, and that's what we're on track for right now. I don't know if it's really widely understood just how bad that is. Like you don't, you don't want to live in that world. That's a world in which we have hundreds of millions of people migrating because it's too hot where they live, they don't have enough water.

Shawn:

Welcome to Deep Dive with me, s C Fettig. Climate change isn't a distant threat. It's here now, reshaping our world in ways that scientists have long warned about From record-breaking heat waves to devastating wildfires, rising sea levels to extreme weather events. We are experiencing the consequences of decades of inaction. And yet, despite the overwhelming scientific consensus and clear warnings from experts, meaningful climate policy remains a political battleground rather than a global priority. What happens if policymakers continue to ignore the crisis? What are the long-term consequences if political leaders refuse to act? And that begs the question what does a second Trump presidency mean for climate action in the United States and, frankly, the rest of the world? With Trump picking up where he left off from his first term, which was marked by environmental deregulation, withdrawal from the Paris Agreement and an embrace of fossil fuels, the stakes for our planet in 2024 could not be higher.

Shawn:

In today's episode, I'm joined by Jonathan Mingle, journalist and author of Fire and Ice, who has written extensively about climate change. Author of Fire and Ice, who has written extensively about climate change, pollution and the human cost of inaction. We discuss the science, the policies, the real potential consequences of this second Trump presidency and the urgent choices that we need to make now. That will determine the future of the planet. All right, if you liked this episode or any episode, please give it a like, share and follow on your favorite podcast platform and or subscribe to the podcast on YouTube. And, as always, if you have any thoughts, questions or comments, please feel free to email me at deepdivewithshawn at gmailcom. Let's do a deep dive.

Jonathan Mingle:

Jonathan, thanks for being here. How are you?

Shawn:

I'm doing well. Shawn, thank you for inviting me. Yeah, absolutely, I'm actually. I'm really glad to have you here, because I think that one of the real threats to well, I guess, our future, our democracy, our way of life, etc. Is climate change, and when we talk about climate change, I think the average person myself included if they believe in it and if they care, I suppose conceptualize it as something that you know might require some adjustment to our daily lives, how we live, some changes we might have to make. You know the cost of things like insurance, etc.

Shawn:

But it's actually a bigger threat than that. It's more serious than that. The impacts of climate change will dramatically impact probably every aspect of our lives, and it will lead to mass migration, some of which we may be feeling in the United States right now, as climate change leads to things like droughts and floods and inhospitable land for farming, etc. People are leaving for more stable areas. So policy, then, is incredibly important. It both impacts how we address these issues, but is also impacted by the consequence of climate change, and some of the policy coming out of the White House now, especially related to immigration, could very well be directly linked to climate change, even if we don't understand that or even know that. That's the underlying factor. So this is something you research and you write about quite extensively, so I appreciate you being here to discuss this.

Jonathan Mingle:

I'm happy to do it. And you're right, I mean, it's a subject that I think for a lot of people just feels overwhelming. And, you know, for a long time it's felt abstract, I think, for a lot of people who just kind of casually keep up with the news and try to figure out how it fits into their lives. And even for someone like me I'm a reporter who focuses on climate change and energy politics. You know, even for me it can feel a little too big to wrap my arms around on any given day. So you're absolutely right about that. And in this moment in particular, we're undergoing some rapid policy shifts in the last couple of weeks, so that makes it even harder to orient yourself.

Shawn:

Yeah, and I don't want to oversimplify it, but I think in a lot of areas but climate change, germane to the conversation that we're having specifically, you know, it feels like we're on the precipice of make it or break it, and it feels like the last two weeks has pretty much almost ensured that we're going to break it. And, like I said, in a lot of ways and I don't want to sound histrionic, but it does sound like we are at that moment in history where something dramatic has to be done and that requires thoughtful leadership and I feel like we missed the boat on that one. And how do you feel about that?

Jonathan Mingle:

Well, I think it's fair to say that, with the new administration that's taking charge, we're going to see a wholesale retreat of the federal government from climate action. Right, I think we should all just assume we're not going to see the federal government really do anything with the words climate change and in fact they're scrubbing those words from the websites of federal agencies as we speak. Um so so, thinking about this stuff at this moment, early February 2025, it kind of requires us to get comfortable with some cognitive dissonance. Because, you know, the big picture on climate at the moment is, you know, on the one hand, clean energy, you know, solar, wind, electric vehicles, batteries have never been cheaper. They've never been deployed faster or more widely.

Jonathan Mingle:

You know, if you just look at that side of the coin, there's a lot of progress being made to wean our economies off of fossil fuels, which, you know, burning fossil fuels that's the primary driver of climate change. But at the same time, you know, in terms of the actual climate itself, things are warming up and destabilizing faster than even the experts expected, if you talk to them. A few years ago, you know, we hit over 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Last year, 2024, was the warmest year ever on record, at 1.75 degrees above the pre-industrial average. So you know the trends in terms of the climate not looking good, right, but you know you can look for glimmers of hope in terms of policy, market shifts towards renewable energy in certain parts of the world.

Jonathan Mingle:

And so what is the average person who's not steeped in this stuff every day left? To conclude, especially, you know, in the wake of the change in power in Washington DC, it's all a little disorienting when you add it up, and that is what we're called upon to do, though. You're called to reconcile these truths that are in tension, right, which is that there is real momentum behind the clean energy transition, and yet we're not doing nearly enough, and we're not doing it fast enough to keep pace with, you know, the changes in the climate itself and to meet the targets that have been agreed upon by governments and industry actors. Um, you know, you look around there's we're in a moment where there's kind of generalized retreat by major institutions from climate action, whether it's corporations or, now, the US federal government.

Shawn:

So there are some good actors on the world stage or better actors, let's say, on the world stage that, at least for now, at the nation state level, acknowledge that climate change is a real thing, are taking steps to meet some targets, are investing in that and, as we both have said, the new administration suggests that we might be, in the United States, taking a completely different direction. And so, like brass tacks let's say the rest of the world, or at least the part of the world that is the highest polluting if they were to take this seriously and the United States were to completely reverse and not only dismantle any climate change initiatives but also contribute to climate change in a much more escalated way, is it possible that the United States alone?

Jonathan Mingle:

accounts for something like, I want to say, 13 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, so we're the second biggest polluter after China.

Jonathan Mingle:

But, historically, we are the biggest Right, we have contributed the most to anthropogenic climate change over the past couple of centuries, and so you know that that means we have a certain moral responsibility, especially to parts of the world that are still pulling people out of poverty. You know, like in India, indonesia, these are fast growing economies. Indonesia, these are fast growing economies. They are trying to bring electricity access to millions of people still right, and the argument you hear from their governments is why should we have to? You know, balance the climate ledger on our backs if you're not pulling your own weight, united States? So there's a risk in terms of global climate diplomacy and governance.

Jonathan Mingle:

You know we just withdrew from the Paris Climate Agreement. That now you could say, well, it doesn't make a big difference because it's a voluntary agreement and there are no enforcement mechanisms and there are a lot of other countries that aren't following through on their pledges, you know, to the, to the climate treaty framework anyway. So what difference does that make? And it's hard to quantify. I think there are serious risks that the US withdrawing from that arena both, you know, in nuts and bolts terms, but also symbolic terms, is very damaging Right, there's a risk that it takes wind out of sales of their climate pledges and their own ambition right to transition their economies away from fossil fuels to tackle deforestation.

Jonathan Mingle:

You know, in India they burn a lot of coal and they have state subsidized coal companies. You know this is all stuff that it's going to be a heavy lift. You know this is all stuff that it's going to be a heavy lift. And if the US isn't there, to be a leader symbolically. But also, you know, finance like climate finance, from north to the global south, if we're retreating from those obligations and if we're retreating, you know, in terms of doing our own work to decarbonize our economy, yeah, I think it's very damaging. It destroys trust and trust is the fuel on which that whole framework was supposed to operate right, like Paris was designed to be. This race to the top, you know peer pressure driven ratcheting of climate ambition system and now it's there's a risk that it ratchets in the other direction.

Shawn:

So it strikes me that one of the things that we really struggle with is just understanding what climate change is, and one of the narratives that you hear increasingly, at least in contemporary times, from climate change deniers. Well, there's a handful of things you hear. One is beyond logic to me, which is that, well, you know, this is all biblical anyway and there's just no logically debating that. But the others are that you know, this is cyclical Climate's always changing, yeah, the climate is always changing and also there's snow on my front yard, you know.

Shawn:

so like what are we talking about here? It's not warm. So I guess I'm wondering can you bumper sticker, maybe as best you can, what climate change is and then what the biggest threats are?

Jonathan Mingle:

Yeah, I don't. I've never been good at writing bumper stickers, but you know basically what what's going on is.

Jonathan Mingle:

We're dumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere faster than natural sinks can absorb them and that traps more heat, which causes rising temperatures, which destabilizes the global climate system, ocean currents, monsoons melts ice caps, that drives up sea level. You know, and on and on and on. We could, we could go on cataloging all the impacts. But basically, humanity has had a nearly three century long habit of burning coal, oil and gas, and we can't kick it. And when you burn that stuff it dumps carbon in the atmosphere and that just is trapping too much heat and causing all kinds of chaos. And so you know, basically the project is weaning ourselves off of our long-standing reliance on these fossil fuels as fast as we can. And you know that is an unprecedented project in human history, right, um, so it should be bumpy and challenging and politically fraught. But, um, what you know, when you talk to climate scientists which I do as a journalist you know they are getting pretty worried, right, like the changes are happening faster and harder than many of them expected.

Jonathan Mingle:

The rate of warming, you know, seems to be increasing and they're trying to explain it. And there's a risk if there are these feedback mechanisms. You can think of permafrost in the arctic, thawing and coughing, co2 and methane in vast quantities of the atmosphere, as an example, or wetlands are expanding, and more wetlands means more methane. When those things kick in, they take on a momentum of their own that we can't control, so there is a sense that we may be on the cusp of some. You know, to use a phrase, scientists are fond of non-linear changes, right, like step changes, uh, that make, you know, think of a runaway train, make the project even harder, right? If the goal is to keep a stable climate, a climate that is familiar to us or recognizable to us, you know, one that encouraged human civilization to develop, then you know we have to basically remake our energy system, but also, like you know, tackle things like the way we grow food. And, you know, stop cutting down the tropical forests and boreal forests.

Jonathan Mingle:

Um, you know it's, uh, it's a massive undertaking right but, like but, but, if there is a bumper sticker for me, as someone who reports on this. Like energy is driving most of this problem, right, like so? Burning fossil fuels for transportation make electricity industrial uses to heat buildings, that's. That's like three quarters of the problem, right, and the rest is deforestation, agriculture, land use. But if you want to boil it down, burning coal, oil and gas is the reason we're boiling the atmosphere.

Shawn:

I think there are a lot of apocalyptic scenarios as to what the world looks like if climate change wins, but I don't know that it's clear to me or to my neighbors or to the average person what life looks like if we continue down this path in 10, 20, 30 years.

Shawn:

So, like, what are some things that you would expect and you've already touched on some of this but I think a lot of people kind of dismiss it out of hand as being something that's not going to impact them. Yeah, which is interesting, right, because you have people in you know, I live in Seattle people in Seattle saying some of the stuff that's happening in hurricanes, increased intensity of hurricanes that's not going to happen to me, right. And then you have people in Florida that's like, well, we don't really have to worry too much about things like tornadoes, right, which is untrue, actually. So I think there's this weird kind of relationship where everybody's feeling something, but they're looking at everyone else and saying, well, that's not going to happen here, right. So I guess I'm wondering what could we just generally expect to be happening over the next couple of decades?

Jonathan Mingle:

You know before I tackle that. I mean we can just look at what's happening now or in the last couple of years, arriving ahead of schedule, right? Whether you're talking about the wildfires that just hit LA or Hurricane Helene in northwestern North Carolina or even here in Vermont, where I live, we had terrible floods in the summer of 2023, 2024. And when you read news coverage of these events or talk to people who experienced them, you often hear this pattern People say, oh, this is surreal. I didn't. You know they're grappling with the surreality of it, right, and we're all used to reading about disasters and extreme weather events happening to other people Increasingly. They're happening to me too, and you too, and your neighbor too. And so some of the examples you know. You mentioned some of them.

Jonathan Mingle:

You know why should you be worried about how climate change is going to affect you or your family? It kind of looks like something different depending where you live. You know, maybe out West you're worried about wildfires where you know California, like fire season used to be a few months of the year, now it's almost year round, right? Maybe you live in coastal North Carolina, you know, you go to parts of the Outer Banks and you can watch houses collapsing into the sea. Every week in places like Rodanthe north carolina, sea level rise, you know, a normal storm surge is just clawing these houses into the ocean.

Jonathan Mingle:

But even less dramatic examples than that, if you go to norfolk, virginia or miami on a sunny day, there they have flooding just because you know sea levels creeping up and it pushes ocean water through their storm drains and floods busy intersections, heat waves, right Like Phoenix two summers ago, I think they had 40 days in a row over 110 degrees.

Jonathan Mingle:

I mean that's the kind of impact that you extrapolate that out a few decades. I saw a study the other day in Europe later this century, you know they're projecting like two to three million deaths from heat waves. You know there are parts of North Africa and South Asia If this, you know, if we keep on the track we're going, it'll be too hot to work outside for much of the year, right, and so these things can seem abstract or distant in time and space. But I think what we're seeing is, you know, let's just keep it here in the US, you're seeing these impacts kind of hit home in lots of different corners of the country in ways that people aren't prepared for, and like another example is I live in New England.

Jonathan Mingle:

You know, in a city like Boston, historically you didn't need air conditioning, right In your school. And there are all these schools that were built, you know, in the 60s. Well, increasingly they have these heat waves and without air conditioning, kids get dizzy, nauseous, they have to go home, they have to close school for the day, right, and so we have all these systems that weren't built for the climate. We have now, right, and you know, the last example I'll give is like here in vermont, we I just did a story about this, actually about planning for flood resilience here in vermont, small state 650 000. But one of the experts I talked to said like, this is a $30 billion problem to get people out of harm's way because we built so many homes and businesses in floodplains. And we, you know we've been doing that for a long time here and we're finally getting the memo, some of us, that oh, actually you are in harm's way, right.

Jonathan Mingle:

Like you know, vermont is often cited as one of these climate havens. These recent floods have disabused a lot of people of that notion here, right, and we've got forecasts of heavy precipitation events increasing by 50% in the coming decades here. So you know, this problem is only going to ratchet in one direction and I think in different parts of the country people are waking up to that fact at different rates, but these changes are coming everywhere. And you mentioned insurance. I mean to me this coming crisis in insurability of homes in the United States that is about to make climate change very real for almost everybody, because it's going to touch If you have a homeowner's insurance premium.

Jonathan Mingle:

It's going to, it's going to affect it, so like that's already playing out right now, and so, in a sense, we don't need to time travel, you know, to mid century or the end of the century, although if you do do that, and again, if you talk to climate scientists, you know they will paint some pretty grim picture for you of what it's like to live in a world that is three degrees warmer, and that's what we're on track for right now. I don't know if it's really widely understood just how bad that is. Like you don't. You don't want to live in that world. That's a world in which we have hundreds of millions of people migrating because it's too hot where they live or they don't have enough water where they live. So you know, the question is how do we, how do we avert those grim scenarios by acting right now, and part of part of what's required to trigger that action is is just people becoming alert to the ways this seemingly vast and diffuse problem is actually going to affect your life in very concrete ways.

Shawn:

To go back to the comment about the three degrees, I think what most people end up doing and I think you know where I'm going to go with this is you tell them the planet's going to be three degrees warmer is what they do is well, it's 72 in summer at my house, so yeah, so it's going to be 75. So what? Right, Because they're not grasping what a three degree increase in temperature for the planet means, Even if it does mean for some of us that that the impacts of climate change are going to be a little bit slower on us than it is in other places. If this does lead to like a cascading impact wherein people can't live and it triggers migration and I think we're starting to see this my fear is that the knee-jerk initial reaction is going to be ultra-nationalism across the planet. That's, I guess, a secondary impact of climate change that leads to another dire outcome for the planet.

Jonathan Mingle:

Yeah, I mean absolutely. I feel like this is one of the great under-discussed risks in the climate world, climate discourse, and you know you can argue that we've seen that play out over the last decade, right Like climate change by some analyses, played a role in driving up food prices in Syria and parts of the Middle East and that, you know, may have had something to do with the wave of discontent connected to the Arab Spring and then the Civil War. And then there's migration into the EU, and then now the EU is seeing this kind of backlash, right driven by these immigration patterns that may have been somewhat driven by climate shifts.

Jonathan Mingle:

And you could say the same thing about migration from Central America, where people in certain parts of that region have experienced food price pressures and climate-driven scarcity, right, and so, again, we don't need to forecast too far into the future. You can see evidence of what you're describing playing out around the world in different ways, but this larger. You know to what extent we're seeing a rightward shift in a lot of countries, um, and a rise in kind of xenophobia. You know how implicated is climate change in that. I don't know future future historians will tackle that one, but it's definitely political. Scientists, I know, are starting to kind of really dig into this question of well, of well, if you don't manage this transition in a careful way right now, what are the risks that the dominant governing response to these accelerating climate impacts, these shocks, is more, as you said, more nationalistic kind of platforms, right, like keeping people out or blaming other people for your problems. You know, it's a real, it's a real concern and I don't have any, I don't have any answers to that one, but I do think, like that is that is a story that we're going to have to just keep an eye on, you know, like this insurance story.

Jonathan Mingle:

You know, as a journalist I tend to think of, I try to sort all this fire hose of information into. You know what are the stories here, and I really do think that one you just kind of spelled out is going to be a big one in climate migration, writ large. And you know what I was alluding to earlier. This insurance issue is becoming a huge story now, especially and I think the LA wildfires has elevated it somewhat given more attention to this. You know there were maybe $30 billion in insured losses in LA from that one event. I mean, it's a staggering number. And you have insurance companies already pulling out of California and Florida and Louisiana and these vulnerable parts of the country where maybe it's hurricane path country or wildfire country.

Jonathan Mingle:

And then you know what does that do to drive? You know these climate migration patterns, right? We're going to see people who get priced out of certain places because they can't afford insurance, and if you don't get insurance you can't get a mortgage, and that is that is going to contribute to some, you know, not just flows of capital but of human beings. You know the current administration wants to erase the words climate change from all their policy guidance. Doesn't make these problems go away. Right, I mean just today there was a report that came out from the first street foundation. It's a nonprofit group that looks at climate risk on the housing market and they're warning that, like by mid century, the U? S could see $1.5 trillion in real estate value just wiped out because of climate risks getting priced into insurance markets and then the migration that kind of results from people responding to these increasing risks wildfire, flood, drought, storms.

Jonathan Mingle:

I mean that is again as a journalist that's a huge story, but it's also something that could blow up on the current administration's watch, whether they think it's a real problem or not.

Shawn:

So in the equation of action.

Shawn:

So if we wanted to consider all of the things that might spur action to tackle climate change, I think one of the big components of that is the message right, like how is this, how is this being sold to people?

Shawn:

And you have a message coming from people that deny climate change and then on the other side you have climate scientists and people that believe that climate change is a real thing and needs to be addressed, and unfortunately, in a lot of places, including the United States, that breaks on a right-left spectrum right.

Shawn:

So the right is more denial and the left is not. And I think that the right has a better message right now, and by that I mean it's more effective message, whether it be that it's a hoax or that we'll somehow iterate and innovate and we'll just learn to live with it, or climate change policies killing jobs for no reason, et cetera. That's working better than the message that whatever the left is selling or climate scientists are selling not that those two are interchangeable. You know you mentioned the story about insurance and how that's going to impact our lives, but I guess in your reporting, or you know, in your own thinking, what do you think are some effective messages or ways to sell a story that might actually land with people that are adamantly opposed to the idea of climate change as being a real thing.

Jonathan Mingle:

Yeah, boy, I, if I had the answer to that one, I would. I would. I would be in a different line of work. Whatever magical force you're looking for, political will, uh, you know, bipartisan support for aggressive climate action. I mean, I'm just thinking.

Jonathan Mingle:

During the campaign, you know, donald trump at a rally said, hey, you know, you notice they don't talk about the environment anymore. It's because the environment doesn't play. You know, and he's a guy you know, whatever you think of him, he knows he's. He's good at reading the political winds and testing out messages and seeing what resonates with people and he's right. He's right. And and if you look at surveys of what um were the salient issues during the election, climate ranked pretty low. And yet you look at other surveys and you see broad-based support you know, north of 70% among registered voters for the government doing more on climate change and clean energy Like these are very popular with the broad public, even among Republican voters. If, depending on how you word it, there is support for some of these things. I think people who in the climate advocacy world, you know there's been so much hand wringing and debate over, oh, what message, you know, should we use what's going to stick and move people. Should we use what's going to stick and move people?

Jonathan Mingle:

And I just don't know if there is some, you know, skeleton key message that is going to unlock that. I don't think there's a substitute for, just like building the slow, boring work of building coalitions and, you know, organizing and clawing back political power, and I guess you know what kind of frames are conducive to that. I mean, again, as a journalist, I can tell you what doesn't work right. And if you put it, if the framing puts climate action or, you know, any policy that's focused on reducing emissions up against, say, affordability, it's going to lose. Right, and I just saw that happen here in Vermont during the election here. You know, we had a proposed policy called a clean heat standard which is basically just trying to. It's a big source of emissions here in Vermont. Is heating fuel right? It's cold place. People burn a lot of oil and propane to heat their homes in the winter.

Jonathan Mingle:

And we have climate targets that are enshrined in law that we have to meet, and so legislators put forward a proposal to as complicated as kind of a Rube Goldberg thing, but and that was part of the problem they couldn't communicate it simply how it would work and what it would do, and it was used as a battering ram by Republican candidates on Democrats and a lot of Democrats lost their seats, I think because of it. Because of this, a lot of voters who are feeling really pressured right now because everything is getting less affordable housing, child care, health care, and it's true around the country, right? And so, if you know, all I can say is any framing or messaging or policy design that doesn't reckon with that reality, that affordability. We're in a moment where affordability is top of mind and, of course, you know, republicans have been very effective at turning any new proposal into a culture war issue.

Jonathan Mingle:

You know, um, they're coming to take your hamburgers and gas stoves and you know, even if a lot of the stuff is just made up, that's very effective, and I don't think people who are pushing for climate action have a good countervailing kind of strategy to that yet, right, and we're kind of living in the wreckage of 10, 15, 20 years of scattershot approaches to framing the climate problem as like oh, it's green jobs or no, it's going to be about, you know, saving homeowners money if they transition to electric vehicles, although they're more costly up front, but hey, use this tax credit. You know, it's like it all gets so convoluted for the typical person who doesn't follow this for a living that unless you can both design and communicate your policy in really simple, accessible, digestible terms, you invite these attacks right? So it's not a satisfying answer, but I mean, those are some of the dynamics that I see at play.

Shawn:

Well, I think another dimension to this is that, in a lot of ways, outside of the objective either immediate or eventual impact that climate change will have on all of us, the argument to invest in clean energy and climate saving initiatives and proposals and policies is really moral to a lot of people, more so than it is economic. It's becoming economic and it will become economic, but I wonder if part of the reason that it's been framed economically like this will save you money, et cetera is because it's a bigger punch than the moral argument, which is you know, this is about saving the planet and it might not be touching you right now, but it is definitely touching other people and it will touch you eventually. And I'm a little concerned that we might be entering a post-moral era, which could be a bit of a death knell for progress that we're making.

Jonathan Mingle:

I think you're right that historically, the way this has been framed is as a moral imperative, right, and that's clearly hasn't worked right. I mean, look around. I won't say everyone is in retreat. I mean there are plenty of actors you know around the world, but also cities and states that are not retreating from action on climate change. But we're in a moment where the general zeitgeist is one of retrenchment, like you know. You see major banks and even utilities you know that I've covered basically abandoning their net zero pledges and it's easy to be cynical and say, well, they weren't worth much to begin with. But that rhetorical shift matters right. That rhetorical shift matters right Because money will start flowing behind it and, yeah, I think maybe that points to an opportunity. I think there are a lot of things missing from these dominant narratives that, as a journalist and storyteller.

Jonathan Mingle:

I'm really interested in trying to kind of fill in some of those gaps, and the big narrative is uh oh, you know, doing this is going to be so expensive, right, and it'll be cheaper to just adapt, you know to, to the climate change that's coming, than to totally remake our energy system and food systems and the way we make cement and steel and everything.

Jonathan Mingle:

And what often fails to make it into that conversation is the fact that I mean, you know, I talked to a lot of energy experts and they painted a very different picture that somehow doesn't percolate up into the general consciousness. It's actually backwards to say that clean energy will be more expensive and that dealing with a hotter, chaotic climate will be manageable, not as expensive, as you know, decarbonizing that's backwards. It's actually the reverse. Adapting to climate change is going to be way more expensive than we think. Uh is kind of the consensus and electrifying stuff that currently runs on fossil fuels, and building out renewable energy is actually going to generate efficiencies and savings that are far greater than, um, most people appreciate, right, you know? Just to give you an example, I think something like 40% of global bulk shipping is just coal, oil and gas right.

Jonathan Mingle:

So the less you you know, the less you depend on coal, oil and gas to move cars around and make electricity. You know that's 40% of shipping that starts to evaporate If you electrify home heating vehicles. The more you do that you unlock these huge efficiencies right. You just don't need as much energy input to heat a house or to move, you know, a vehicle around and you start realizing these efficiencies that multiply and suddenly you know, at least at the macro scale, you're generating these savings. And that's to say nothing of like the health benefits which to me, as someone who's written a lot about this, you know the health impacts of air pollution are so enormous and they never enter the ledger on these policy conversations, which is remarkable to me. Because you know the less coal, oil and gas you burn, fewer asthma attacks and hospitalizations and cardiovascular disease I mean hospitalizations and cardiovascular disease.

Jonathan Mingle:

I mean you know that's setting even that enormous health and cost savings aside, I guess what I'm trying to say is, like this narrative that's taken hold, that like acting to prevent catastrophic climate change is going to be very expensive but you know getting used to it will be cheaper. Flipping that script and making this an issue of oh no, you know, the more we dawdle and let this just accelerate, the costlier it will be to you homeowner, you local government, city government that can't finance a bond to upgrade your sewer drain system anymore because you have whole neighborhoods that can't finance a bond to upgrade your sewer drain system anymore because you have whole neighborhoods that can't be insured Like. The sooner you get out of the problem, you know, the cheaper it's going to be, and so I think there might be an avenue for the right people, who know how to be more succinct and bumper stickery than me, to make the case that you know ambitious action on this transition is actually about affordability at the micro and macro scales. I don't know.

Shawn:

And actually it's interesting that you mentioned health insurance, because, as long as we're talking about insurance, that's another form of insurance that's probably going to be directly impacted by this.

Jonathan Mingle:

Oh, absolutely, I mean yeah, I mean there in so many ways respiratory illness, lyme disease, infectious diseases that we're not used to seeing, that are spreading, like dengue, like there are.

Jonathan Mingle:

These things are going to show up right in the health care cost side of the ledger as time goes on, more and more, even in places where people aren't used to thinking that they're vulnerable to climate driven vectors and heat waves.

Jonathan Mingle:

You know is like that's going to be a huge issue to parts of the country that don't. That's going to be a huge issue to parts of the country that don't have as much air conditioning or cooling centers for lower income people to retreat to during a heat wave. These are incredibly costly things to deal with, you know, for a health care system, for a city, and they were just not used to thinking of them as costs you have to account for and budget for. And conversely, as we're not used to thinking of clean energy as like an investment, that or a hedge against that or something that will unlock huge savings, and so maybe, you know, maybe we'll see that kind of come to the fore more and more as the moral framing is increasingly out of fashion, given current political winds because I live in a part of the country where, for pretty much all of the winter, it's pretty common for most people to, at least in part, heat their house with firewood in a fireplace.

Shawn:

I am one of those people and I'm ashamed to say that. And I'm especially ashamed to say that because I read your book Fire and Ice which talks about how bad soot is, about black carbon.

Shawn:

I think in the back, like in my lizard brain every year, I'm like I don't think this is great, but I didn't really dig into it and now I really had to kind of reckon with this. So can you maybe tell me what black carbon is, what this is all about and uh how we, and myself included, might be contributing to it and how we could get off of it?

Jonathan Mingle:

I, yes. So I wrote a book called Fire and Ice. It is a nonfiction narrative about the health and climate impacts of black carbon, which is what scientists call soot, basically. And you know, when I got started reporting that book, look, I had no idea it was such a bad actor either, Right, and it was very eye opening to spend four or five years reporting that book.

Jonathan Mingle:

And on the far side of that journey I'm I'm pretty careful about avoiding air pollution and not having my kids, you know, breathe too much of it either, because I now know far too much about how dangerous it is to breathe that soot. But at the same time, look, I mean, I have a wood stove in my house here in Vermont and I love splitting wood and burning wood. I'm pretty careful to only burn dry fuel because of what I know. And what I know is that black carbon is one of the great overlooked health risks in the world. I mean, it's so it's a major constituent of this fine particle pollution that kills, you know, over three million people a year who are exposed to it from household air pollution and even more, over 4 million from outdoor air pollution, and there are higher estimates out there too.

Jonathan Mingle:

And so I started working on that book thinking that this was an overlooked health story, and it still is. I mean, it's still a huge killer globally, more than tuberculosis, malariaiv aids combined, people who die from breathing so and other pollutants. But there's a climate piece to that story too, and and it turns out that black carbon if you picture, you know, these tiny little black rocks basically suspended in the atmosphere, they're super efficient solar heat absorbers, right. And if you live near snow and ice in particular, you should worry a little bit about like the soot coming out of your diesel truck tailpipe or your wood stove chimney or your coal power plant, Because when that soot lands on snow and ice, it darkens it and it reduces the light reflected off it and it heats it up and it accelerates the melt and you see that playing out across the Himalaya, see it in Greenland somewhat and other icy parts of the world. And so I wrote that book thinking you know this, wow, no one's talking about this. Wrote that book thinking you know this, wow, no one's talking about this.

Jonathan Mingle:

And I got I would get messages from readers kind of like what you were saying, Shawn, like oh all this time I've been burning wood, thinking I was virtuous and I'll never do it again, and I'd write back to him and say, no, no, no, I still burn wood too. That's okay, just don't do it. You know, if you're in a dense neighborhood where you have like kids with asthma downwind breathing your wood smoke, uh, or if you live right next to a glacier, you know, but it's, you know, it's a, it's a tricky problem because the solution to it is, uh, burning less stuff. Right, like, burning stuff, especially burning stuff in inefficient ways, makes soot and we breathe a lot of that soot and over time it can damage our health and even kill us. And you know, I'm like everyone else, I smell wood smoke and I'm like, oh, that is a cozy, wholesome smell.

Shawn:

It's a connection to our ancestors, right it is yeah, absolutely.

Jonathan Mingle:

That's true in every culture pretty much. But there's also part of my brain that's like oh, danger, danger, because there's some real toxic stuff in there. So it's like the same points you in the same direction, like get beyond combustion as much as you can. I have heat pumps in my house, right, but we still every now and then. We like the wood stove because it's you know, it's nice to sit in front of the fire, but it is a super efficient wood stove, I should add.

Shawn:

I don't think mine is. So. One of the things I hear from a lot of people, when you know they're being asked to take measures in their lives to do their part, is that there's a lot of cynicism looking at billionaires and looking at, you know, government officials that are all contributing much more damage to the environment than you know any individual is, and yet there is stuff that we all can be doing and should be doing in our daily lives. So what are some things that you would suggest that we could all be doing, including maybe burning less wood fires?

Jonathan Mingle:

Yeah.

Shawn:

To maybe just do our part, as minimal as it might feel.

Jonathan Mingle:

Yeah, you know it's interesting. You know, over time the answer to this question has kind of whipsawed back and forth. Kind of whipsawed back and forth and for a while there's this idea oh, your individual carbon footprint, you know, consume less and think about how much you drive. And it turned out that BP, the oil company, was, you know, one of the originators of the focusing on the individual consumer footprint as a way to deflect attention from these big fossil fuel companies, more kind of systemic role in keeping us dependent on fossil fuels. But then you know, and then there's a backlash to that as more people kind of get clued into that. It's like no, the most important thing you can do is organize and elect people who take climate change seriously to office. Right, like, that is where your power is if you care about climate change. But now I mean, like I think you need to recognize that if you care about this and you're worried about where things are heading and and I would suggest you should be worried you can do both. Right, like, you don't have to default to your role as a consumer, which is kind of in the US how people often default like what should I buy more or less of? And that's important, right, like you know, if you can, if you have the means and the resources to buy an electric vehicle or put solar panels on your roof or get a heat pump, like good for you, go for it. But I would.

Jonathan Mingle:

I would emphasize to people that there is so much opportunity at the local government scale. You know we're in addition to defaulting to our roles as consumers. We're often we default to like our roles as consumers of national news and politics and we overlook what's going around and happening in our own communities. And go to your local zoning meeting, you know, like where they're figuring out where to build dense housing out of a floodplain, or like your planning commission meeting. Go to town and county government hearings. You'd be surprised like you can make a lot of noise and have an outsized impact if you just show up and be kind of the person you're waiting for.

Jonathan Mingle:

And one opportunity that I remind people about and this is born out of, you know, my more recent book. I wrote about this fight against a gas pipeline in Appalachia that was being put forward by these two big energy utilities in Virginia and South Carolina, and I learned a lot about public utility commissions. Every state has one and there are like four or five people on it, and these people wield immense power. They have billions of dollars at their command. They can tell these huge energy utilities what they can and cannot build and what they can charge you as someone who pays your monthly energy, you know electricity bill, you can go show up to these meetings where these things get decided and you know the legal term is intervene you know you you can.

Jonathan Mingle:

You can be an intervener and combat, and that is a lever that is overlooked, even though it's a lever in all 50 states.

Jonathan Mingle:

Um, just waiting for people to grab so those are I mean, those are just a few things that come to mind there. You'd be surprised. You start looking around. They're like there are more ways to get a handhold on this huge boulder rolling downhill towards your city or your village than you might think, right, like there are more things you could grab, pick one or two if you care about this stuff.

Jonathan Mingle:

But I think all of that is downstream of just talking about it. Right, it's like I think there are a lot of people out there who are concerned about climate change and you know the future their kids will inherit, uh, and the way things are trending these days, and they just assume that you know I'm guilty of this too. Like people don't want to talk about, but like, yeah, just the more, the more you talk about your concerns or hopes, or that starts to snowball, and I've seen that happen in my reporting I do fear that in retrospect, the next few years will be revealed to us, as you know us just going down in a blaze of silver linings.

Shawn:

But I do think one potential silver lining here is what you're talking about, and that is that we might be seeing an opportunity for much more local and state action on things and potential for people and opportunity for people to participate. So that is a good thing. But final question you ready for it?

Jonathan Mingle:

Yeah.

Shawn:

What's something interesting you've been reading, watching, listening to or doing lately, and it doesn't have to be related to this topic, but it can be Okay.

Jonathan Mingle:

I, you know, I've spent the last couple of months narrowing my focus uh to reporting a couple of stories here in Vermont. One was about flooding, uh preparing for floods in the future, and the other was about forests. And I live out in the countryside, I'm surrounded by forests, and it's been very fun, you know, to get up from my laptop and stomp around in the snow with foresters and see how they see the world, like, put on, you know, bird habitat and in this kind of tree, and and here, you know, over here was a tree that's 200 years old, a sugar maple, and, you know, just being out in the woods and trying to think about some of the issues we've been talking about for the last hour, like what is this going to look like 40, 50 years from now? I found that to be therapeutic these last couple months, taking the long view.

Jonathan Mingle:

And what else have I been doing when I muster the willpower to look away from the news reports, uh, coming out of dc, uh about, uh, various actors taking control of the treasury department or federal agencies, uh, which is what's happening as we speak, when I do that, um, and sit down with a book a book, I'm a huge book I'm trying to slowly make my way through is um, it's called the dawn of everything by the late david graber anthropologist and david wingrow, and it's pretty fascinating tour through human history that is trying to remind you. There there are other ways to organize ourselves as human beings. People have tried lots of different ways of balancing personal freedom and hierarchical civilizational structures than we've been taught, and I'm in the early part of the book. But it's pretty interesting stuff and again, I find it nice to kind of take the long view back in time too. It's helpful to do that sometimes.

Shawn:

One of the things that I've been thinking about for a little bit now. Admittedly I'm a progressive, so the direction that the country is going in right now is catastrophic to me. I'm also a pessimist, so those two things are married together. But one of the things that I've been thinking is some of the stuff that's really challenging for me is just these broad sides against, like the constitutional order and our system of norms, and to me that just suggests that democracy is under attack. But then I was thinking as a progressive.

Shawn:

I haven't been particularly happy with the way American democracy has kind of played out in the last couple of decades. I mean, you could probably go back to the dawn of our democracy, to be completely honest. So I'm wondering if it's just a good opportunity or this is an opportunity for progressives to be thinking about. To go back to what you were just saying about how we structure ourselves. If we were to revisit the structure of our democracy, what would we do differently? That would be hopefully better. As long as we're weakening the system, why not have our shot at it, you know?

Jonathan Mingle:

I, you know, I've been thinking of this in terms of here in, I keep talking about Vermont, but it's where I live, so you know I'm going to talk about it one more time. Vermont, but it's where I live. So you know I'm going to talk about it one more time. It's town meeting season soon here, and we are very proud of our tradition of town meetings, where we all get into a room and vote on different issues like do we buy a new road grader? Do we hire another, you know, part-time clerk at the town office? How much do we want to spend on our school? Every March across Vermont, these town meetings happen and there's something lovely about it, right? You're shoulder to shoulder with your neighbor and seeing what they think about these issues, and then you take these voice votes but you have this debate, anyone can get up and say whatever they want, and there's a tension I've been thinking about lately.

Jonathan Mingle:

You know there's a lot of talk in climate energy policy circles about permitting reform and we need to make it easier to build stuff. In America we don't build stuff anymore, whether it's high speed rail, which we never really built, but transmission lines to get solar and wind power to where people use it, or even nuclear power plants, which we're going to need more of if you care about decarbonization, and so there's a tension there between this idea that, oh, local communities have too much input in what gets permitted and what gets built and what decisions get made and they can slow down anything and they will, whether it's affordable housing in their neighborhood or a power line or a pipeline, for that matter.

Jonathan Mingle:

And yet you know, I think you go to any part of the country and if you frame the question a certain way, like, you'll hear a lot of people say, oh, local input's good, I should have input in what gets built in my backyard or my county or my state or my town.

Jonathan Mingle:

Frame the question a certain way, like, you'll hear a lot of people say, oh, local input's good, I should have input and what gets built in my backyard or my county or my state or my town, and that is a tension that we're gonna keep butting into more and more, just in in the context of this clean energy transition. We're gonna have to build a lot of stuff really fast and Trump's executive orders these last two weeks just made that a lot harder. In some ways he's paused permitting of wind and wind turbines and he's made it easier, by the way, to produce oil and gas on federal lands and build pipelines and build pipelines. But in terms of this question of like, can we reboot kind of the way we approach democratic governance in this country? I mean, I think a lot is going to hinge on how we navigate this question of how much local, grassroots kind of input and control and engagement Is there going to be an involvement? And with climate change, like we talked, about this earlier.

Jonathan Mingle:

There's just not a huge broad-based coalition for rapid climate action in this country, and there are a lot of smart people who've thought for years about how to build one, a constituency for that. Maybe we'll start to see that overlap more and more with these fundamental questions of how do you rejuvenate democracy, given the attacks underway, I don't know. It'll be interesting Again, as a journalist, I'll be. It'll be interesting to see how that plays out. Yeah, silver linings.

Shawn:

Yeah, it'll be interesting to see how that plays out, yeah silver linings.

Jonathan Mingle:

Yeah, it'll be a great story, but you know I don't want to end on that. I mean, yeah, I guess the last thing I'll say is that I think we're seeing more and more people, I think, slowly waking up to the fact not only that climate change is going to touch their lives, it already is. It'll show up in your insurance premiums, your health care bill. It's going to, it's going to trickle and then flow into every corner of your life sooner rather than later. Sorry, everyone, but this idea that democracy is a verb right Like democracy, isn't you voting once a?

Jonathan Mingle:

year like democracy. Is you going to your local town meetings, zoning, zoning planning meetings, public utility commission meeting, sure, protests, rallies, whatever, I mean it is an active verb and maybe we'll see kind of a zeitgeist shift in that direction in the months and years to come.

Shawn:

Jonathan, thanks for the conversation, and here's to a brighter and cleaner future.

Jonathan Mingle:

Shawn, here's to that and thanks so much. This was fun.

Shawn:

The science is clear. There's no disputing it. Logically, anyway, Climate change is not just an environmental issue. It's a political, economic and humanitarian crisis that demands urgent action, and it will touch all of us in profound ways in the very near future, if it hasn't already. As Jonathan Mingle said, the consequences of inaction are dire and, with political leaders like Trump poised to dismantle climate policy, the planet couldn't be in a more vulnerable position. So, again, on yet another issue, we are at a crossroads. Either we act boldly now or we face a future of worsening disasters, displacement and economic and political instability. This is a serious moment that requires serious people to make serious choices, because the planet can't afford we literally can't afford another four years of climate denial. All right, check back next week for another episode of Deep Dive Chat. Soon, folks, Thank you, Thank you.

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Shawn C. Fettig

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