Climate Week at Caravan of Dreams #2 · Cleaned Transcript
September 21, 2026 · Caravan of Dreams, East Village, NY
A live recording of Better Future with Michael Mezz, taped in the back room. This is a cleaned and condensed transcript: filler trimmed, crosstalk smoothed, the shape of the conversation kept intact. It is not verbatim. The podcast's own edit is the record of what was said; names and figures here were checked against primary sources where the room recording was unclear. Audience members are not named.
Download as .txtMezzatesta · Thank you so much for being here. This is a cool moment for all of us. It is the start of Climate Week and you are very busy, so we appreciate you fitting us in. We are not just at the start of Climate Week. We are at the end of an incredibly shocking summer of climate news, and you have been working on climate your entire career. Thank you, by the way. You are one of the first authors in this space I came across, and you inspired me to move into this work. Before we get to solutions, how do you wrap your head around where we are in the fight for a livable future, right now?
Johnson · The scientific projections have been dire since the very first paper I read. I was just reminiscing with Bill McKibben about him coming to my college and teaching a seminar on the IPCC assessment report, and reading in the abstract about the tens of millions of people who were going to have to relocate in Bangladesh because of flooding, and the food shortages from drought, when I was in college. We knew how bad it was going to be then, and we are seeing the badness now. It is a chickens coming home to roost thing, a slow-moving truth, and grief. When you can see something coming for decades in advance and you cannot stop it, there is a particular kind of fury and heartbreak that comes with that. The heat waves this summer, the floods, the droughts. I live in Maine, so wells are running dry, we are worried about forest fires in a place that never had to deal with that, tick populations are exploding because there is no winter to kill them back. We always thought there would be sanctuary places where you could be safe from the impacts, and I remember three years ago sitting on my porch watching videos of the flooding through Vermont, which was supposed to be one of those places, thinking: we are so fucked.
There are endless examples. El Niño is arriving and projected to be worse than anything in the records. I have come to you straight from the Planetary Guardians briefing, on how we are at or about to exceed all these tipping points, the Amazon going from a net sink of carbon to a source of emissions. Endless bad news. I would encourage everyone to read the Planetary Health Check that Planetary Guardians just published. They synthesize all that science with experts from around the world and point to the interventions that make the most difference. And one of the few uses of AI I am a fan of is analyzing satellite imagery to find the largest sources of fossil fuel emissions and the worst power plants around the world. Climate TRACE does that, the coalition Al Gore helped found. Countries make their commitments at the UN, but many do not have the resources to track their own major sources, so they cannot dedicate what they have where it would do the most, and where there would be major near-term health benefits.
Mezzatesta · Tipping points are a piece of the science a lot of people miss. It is not that it just gets warmer each year; there are flows and cycles inside the Earth system that warming can break. We had Johan Rockström on the show on exactly that. But having described it as a slow-moving train, have you ever had the urge to say, I told you so?
Johnson · I am not the one publishing the papers, so it is not an I told you so. Scientists writ large told you so. And that feels glib, as opposed to the rage version full of expletives, which I feel more often. So much of my work is pointing people toward solutions, so instead of I told you so about the problem, it is: I told you we have the solutions. Get up. It is not too late to get on board.
Mezzatesta · We will spend most of our time on solutions. Any more facts you want to set the stage with?
Johnson · I have my book open to the money section. Each section starts with ten problems and ten possibilities, because it is critical that we not only think about the problems; the two are kissing. Walking here I was thinking about the Paris Agreement, signed in 2015. Since then, 65 banks have provided more than eight trillion dollars in financing to fossil fuel companies, with the top four US banks alone, JPMorgan Chase, Citibank, Wells Fargo and Bank of America, providing more than 1.6 trillion to increase extraction. Knowing your focus on economic systems, that is the one: we are putting the money in all the wrong places. So take your money out of these banks as soon as possible. We talk so much about individual impact without talking about where our money is, which is often the biggest part of an individual carbon footprint, fraught as that term is. If you have retirement savings, if you have a bank account, think about where it is, because it is being lent out to extract fossil fuels.
Mezzatesta · I often say the top three individual solutions are eat less meat, fly less, and move your money, and move your money is the one people forget. It is the easiest, because it is not a lifestyle change and there is no social risk. You do not have to be the annoying vegan.
Johnson · I am happy to be the annoying anything if it helps, but I actually think we need more extremely cool vegans on television. That is a hill I will die on. And we have to make moving your money cool. People do not do it because it is an administrative task that feels annoying. It takes one day, and then you are a good guy forever.
Mezzatesta · We will get to finance and capitalism. Let us follow the thread of solutions. The individual stuff matters in aggregate, but one by one it feels like we are up against the train you described. You have famously said we already have the climate solutions we need, we just need to fucking implement them. That may surprise people who think we are still waiting for the right solutions. What do you mean?
Johnson · The tech-bro cultural influence has been damaging in many ways, including on this. They say, we are working on fusion, nuclear is the answer. There is no the answer. It is an incredible array of solutions, and that line is another excuse not to do the things already at our fingertips. When you post about clean energy, people reply that the only answer is nuclear. There is no only answer, it takes a long time to build, and it is expensive even as the price comes down. We cannot wait for these other things. High-speed trains: humans already invented those, and we could put them in more places. Greening our buildings, improving public transit and electrifying it, electrifying everything, our homes, all of that is imminently doable. And we do not spend enough time on the food system, which is right on time given the clattering plates, and how big a deal it is for emissions, partly because it is the inconvenient truth about our diets, and partly because big ag is an entrenched global industry causing deforestation, land-use change, pesticides and huge fossil fuel use. It is not a mystery how to do things better. So much of it is shifting the cultural status quo, and accountability across the board.
Mezzatesta · People book you as a climate person, but you are first a marine biologist. What would it look like to get it right with the ocean?
Johnson · Shout out to the ocean. We mostly think of the ocean as something being impacted, or creating risks for us, rather than a place to look for solutions. A lot of people do not know that coastal ecosystems like wetlands and mangroves can absorb more carbon per hectare than a forest. I see nods; you know what is up. There is a lot less of those ecosystems, but we are starting to see the decline of mangroves reverse. You can replant them. People want to make it complicated, and it is close to: you bulldozed them, that was bad, plant them back. Not quite that simple, but not far off. Those ecosystems are the nursery habitat for so many fish and lobster and crustacean species, they physically buffer storms, and they help mitigate sea level rise. It is a gorgeous win, win, win: protecting and restoring nature, which often gets bumped far down the list of priorities.
Tomorrow night I am hosting a conversation on industrializing the ocean, the ocean frontier, with the clean energy sector moving offshore. Ocean energy mostly means offshore wind right now, but there is floating solar, wave energy, tidal energy, which has existed a long time, and now data centers in the ocean, because so much of a data center's energy goes to cooling and seawater does that for free. That will air on the What If We Get It Right? podcast. This is not rah-rah data centers. It is: how do we evaluate the options rigorously and think about the tradeoffs? I have talked about this with Kate Marvel, my favorite climate scientist among many favorites, who wishes scientists did more to help people understand tradeoffs. My Instagram mentions right now are a dumpster fire because I posted that if you drive a car it should be an EV, and people asked why I was promoting single-occupancy vehicles. Did you read the if? Yes, electric public transit is the priority, but it does not make sense everywhere yet. We have a very large country and a shitty train system. And there is misinformation that you should keep your gas car running forever. That is not true under life-cycle analysis, and as the grid cleans up it becomes less true. The role of science right now is to help people get clear on tradeoffs, because as Earth lovers it is hard to stomach that batteries and solar panels require mining metals, with labor issues in that supply chain that are awful. And we ignore that mining fossil fuels is far worse for people and the planet. I want us all to think more rigorously about costs and benefits, and about how doing nothing is also a choice, and often a dangerous one.
Mezzatesta · That is an issue in politics too: purity tests. There is no perfect solution, so we have to be willing to do the imperfect things, because they beat doing nothing.
Johnson · Even protecting and restoring ecosystems, which seems simple. E.O. Wilson proposed Half-Earth: protect half the planet. And fights erupt about indigenous land rights and whether we are evicting people, instead of embracing the concept and saying, let us work out the details together, how close can we get in a way that is feasible, is land back part of this. It does not have to be that complicated if we force ourselves to be more analytical, instead of holding strong opinions that are not supported by the data.
Mezzatesta · Maybe that is why you dropped the F-bomb. We just need to do stuff.
Johnson · I was trying to get attention on the internet. It was on Subway Takes. How do I get the Subway Takes audience to care about climate change? Maybe if I curse on the train.
Mezzatesta · Let us stop debating exactly what to do and start doing the long list of things we know are good. You did not mention building a fleet of satellites to reflect the sun back into space. I say that tongue in cheek, but the techno-futurist solutions get peddled by a tech industry that wants us to think they are the only ones who can fix this, and that we should give them more power and get out of their way.
Johnson · I also think it is a reflection of how little faith they have in humanity. Upload everything to the magical cloud that will answer whatever you type. It is not humans collaborating on solutions. It is taking humans out of the equation, and I think that is boring. Which sounds like a weak indictment of Silicon Valley, but what kind of world is that, and why pretend it is the only, inevitable option? The messy collaboration and muddling through of being humans together is something we cannot skip.
Mezzatesta · They have shown their cards. You spoke with Naomi Klein recently about end times fascism, and she paints a picture of what these people actually want, which is not really to keep the rest of us around. Peter Thiel could not answer when Ross Douthat asked whether humans should keep existing. These are people who do not believe in the future. They are trying to escape humanity and bunker themselves in ways that are anti-social, and so much of their power depends on us believing they will build the next big thing to save us.
Mezzatesta · So, capitalism and climate. Beyond wanting the perfect solution or not understanding the science, is capitalism standing in our way, or something to work within, or both?
Johnson · I think we need to be more specific than capitalism at large. Concentration of wealth is an enormous problem. I enjoyed your episode on taxing the rich. A hundred people have all the money, and how do we solve societal problems when they have a totally different vision of the society they want to live in? I personally believe there should not be any billionaires. Who needs that much money? Tens of millions of dollars is enough for a completely ridiculous lifestyle. So wealth accumulation and inequality, massive problems. People evading taxes in ways that mean government does not have the resources to implement things. The Republican Party being completely captive to the fossil fuel industry: we just had the rollback of the Inflation Reduction Act tax credits that helped people electrify their homes, which was going extremely well at a reasonable cost, a great use of money, and instead we are spending on needless foreign wars, which on top of the human rights and genocide issues are destroying the planet. War is extremely bad for the climate, not to mention agriculture and ecosystems. So capitalism, yes, but more specifically: who has the money and power, and do they have a shared vision of a future where nature thrives and everybody has enough?
Mezzatesta · In the same way people get held up on the perfect solution, people get held up on the big systemic stuff. We need to dismantle capitalism to solve climate change is one of the main points of this show so far, and you have said we have to walk and chew gum on that one. Say more.
Johnson · It is an old-timey saying. We cannot wait to have an entirely new economic system before charging ahead with the climate solutions we already have. We have to do both at once: shift the economy while doing the clean energy transition, dealing with agriculture, restoring ecosystems. Which comes first is a false binary. We can do multiple things at once, and we have to. It gives us agency, and a push from behind to do stuff. And I get so caught up in switching to a new economic system that I forget there are things I can do today, especially locally. We get caught up in Washington and forget that so much of the implementation happens on the ground in every city and town, on every farm, and that is something we can have a huge influence on. We also do not put enough emphasis on elections. Over eleven million environmentalists did not vote in 2024, people whose number one voting issue is the environment, not going to the polls. We know how close elections are, and not just for president, though that would have shifted the outcome. Governors can do so much with state taxes and resources. City council members decide whether we have municipal composting or bike lanes. Public utility commissioners decide how quickly utilities transition to clean energy. So yes, we let the perfect be the enemy of the good, but we also under-appreciate how much elections matter. With the DSA and socialism having a resurgence, I would say we already have a lot of socialist programs in the United States, and I would not want that to become another purity test. Think about pro-social policies that make sure everybody has enough. So much of this is electing the people who have the government resources to accelerate things, because as much as we blame tech executives and fossil executives and bankers, we are supposed to have regulations. If we do not elect people who want to regulate, we get the situation we have now. That is what I hope we are all focused on for the next six weeks.
Mezzatesta · Eleven million voters who say the environment is their number one issue did not vote. Why?
Johnson · That is the Environmental Voter Project's analysis, an incredible nonpartisan nonprofit I have donated to and volunteered with since they were founded, about a decade ago. The number is up from about eight million in 2020. On the one hand that is good, because there are more people with the environment as their top issue. On the other it is a huge gap and a huge opportunity, because these are people who are already registered, and registering people is hard, and getting them to prioritize climate is hard, and these 11.2 million already have both boxes checked. So I have been hosting weekly phone banks to call these folks and encourage them to vote. Not to debate candidates, just: do you know where your polling place is, do you know how to get your ballot, do you need anything, and thank you for being a good voter. Which is a lie, because we are calling because you do not vote. But the behavioral science is well tested: you want people to commit to being good voters, and people care about being perceived that way. I have called people who say, oh yes, I vote in every election, and I am literally looking at the record. You have not voted in the last three. Whether you vote is public record. Who you vote for is private.
Mezzatesta · I did not know that. So if you get a call from EVP, you have really screwed up.
Johnson · They can see that you did or did not vote, not who for. Which, with this government, I am glad of.
Mezzatesta · What I want to bring to the socialism-capitalism debate is that many of the solutions we need are already post-capitalist. Investing public funds in public transportation is a post-capitalist solution, because there is no profit for a private company in building high-speed rail. Companies can run parts of it, but it is fundamentally less profitable than building SUVs and telling everyone to buy one, which is the solution a free market running on profit arrives at.
Johnson · Can we pause on that? Getting everyone to buy an SUV is a cultural issue as much as a capitalist one. Both, obviously. Companies maximize profit by selling you the big expensive metal thing, but you buy it because you think it is cool, and they spent a lot on advertising to convince you. The cultural norm and status quo piece is as important as the push to maximize quarterly earnings.
Mezzatesta · There was a point where those companies hit market saturation, sold all the SUVs they could, and asked how to sell more, and the advertising industry came to be largely to sustain demand for companies that needed quarterly earnings to keep going up. I am not against earnings reports or the stock market existing. I just think it helps people to realize that if they do not think that system leads to a better future, a lot of the tangible solutions you are talking about are a different economic system starting to emerge, one that asks what social outcome we want and directs public funds and our behavior toward it instead of the maximization of profit.
Johnson · Maybe a dumb question, but does capitalism require profit maximization to always be the number one priority? I do not know that it does. Some would say you could have a reformed capitalism with a different goal. I am not rah-rah capitalism. It is just not the framework I think most about.
Mezzatesta · What frameworks do you think about?
Johnson · I started my career in the EPA's policy office, and I have a huge respect for government bureaucrats, which we could use more of. There are very smart people doing thankless work for much lower wages than the private sector, and the upside was a bigger impact on what you care about, a good retirement, and some job security. The security is gone now, and it is hell working on the environment in a federal agency right now, so to everyone holding the line in there, I am grateful. My first job out of graduate school was at NOAA, and I saw what government can do when you elect leaders who care and they appoint people who know their subject and think about the greater good. I just interviewed Louise Yeung for my podcast. She is New York City's chief climate officer, was Zohran Mamdani's policy director for his whole campaign, not just climate, and before that was chief climate officer in the comptroller's office under Brad Lander, figuring out how to divest the city's pension funds, take climate into account, and think about whether the city's infrastructure spending accounts for climate projections. It is almost an accounting function, and Lander was so smart to use the comptroller's office that way. Bill McKibben and I wanted to interview her to ask: say you do elect someone who cares about inequality and affordability and climate, even if he does not talk about it anymore. What do you get?
Mezzatesta · It did not come up in the campaign at all, even though as a council member he led on it.
Johnson · There is a huge issue with climate hushing in politics right now, even though the data says it does not hurt you and might help. Some political consultant put out a memo: do not talk about climate, people do not want to hear it, focus on affordability. Turns out people are really concerned about climate and would like their government to do something, because there is only so much we can do as individuals. Polling out of UC Santa Barbara shows it does not hurt to talk about it and may help, and Nathaniel Stinnett, who leads the Environmental Voter Project, has shown climate is a wedge issue, one of the biggest differentiators between the parties: deniers versus people who at least believe it is real, and some who really get it and want to use the power of government. With a strong differentiator and a majority of Americans concerned, it is to your benefit to differentiate on it. So this scourge of climate hushing is a setback.
Mezzatesta · What is the thinking? That voters find it uncomfortable? Because a huge part of why food prices are rising is drought in the supply chain, and I think it is disrespectful to voters to assume we cannot care about multiple things or understand how they connect.
Johnson · That people care more about other things, like the cost of living. Not that climate impacts are cheap. I will contradict myself briefly: most people do not pay close attention to US politics, and most are only just starting to tune in and think about who to vote for, so I understand keeping a simple, clear message. But a politician is not giving one speech. They are talking all the time. They could sometimes talk about this, and it seems like a winning issue. There is actually talk of going back to the Inflation Reduction Act credits for clean energy in homes, heat pumps, solar, batteries, and gathering bipartisan support, because with fuel prices through the roof people are heating homes with gas or heating oil, and it is a huge problem to depend on the geopolitical order to keep your house above freezing. Maybe this is naive, but there are still opportunities for cross-aisle collaboration on climate, if we do not call it that. Call it energy security. Climate hushing, not cool. But if it gets us clean energy tax credits, fine.
Mezzatesta · A lot of climate policy that worked over the last ten or twenty years was dismantled in the last year. Bill McKibben mentioned on your show that the flood alarm system in Nepal was funded by USAID and got cut right before a glacier collapsed and caused deadly floods. And it affects us here: wars, the price of oil, the price of food. Does the urgency open up political opportunity to change things faster? Environmental people have been framing it as being on our heels, protecting everything from being dismantled. I am trying to think of it as everyone waking up to the urgency at once. With El Niño coming, climate scientists are predicting 2027 will be the warmest year on record by far. Do you see this as an opportunity?
Johnson · I think the Trump administration has overshot, and they are losing their base, because people like national parks. Our public lands are incredible. No matter who you vote for, you want to see a national park with your family. That is why we pay taxes. So there is a growing frustration: why are we paying taxes for this, it is fiscally irresponsible, from a conservative lens. People do not want the Endangered Species Act dismantled. They like the wacky species we share the planet with. They do not want roads bulldozed through wilderness, or oil and gas mining on public lands. They do want clean air and clean water, not unregulated data center development spewing poison into the air, which is a public health problem as well as a climate one. The administration did not understand that people actually like nature, and people will go hard for their park rangers in a way I do not think it anticipated. Maybe that is too optimistic, but it is becoming a political issue in a different way. And the reckless spending on wars and ballrooms is not well received when there are huge problems in the country.
Mezzatesta · Could climate become the movement that drives the progressive side into action? The early negative press was that we were too early: you are telling me the future is bleak but everything is fine for me, get off my TV. Now people are experiencing the warmer temperatures, and it could be part of a more populist movement, even if they have to admit Greta was not lying. Could climate be central to a platform, or does it have to be bundled with the other things the progressive movement stands for?
Johnson · I can certainly imagine it. I am not sure how likely it is, but I wish people connected the dots between those issues, because climate change is affecting all the other things we care about. We are in a moment of bonkers media consolidation, which means a lot of people are not hearing about climate at all. As people experience all this extreme weather, they are often not connecting it to climate. Corporate TV news had less than thirteen hours of climate coverage in the entirety of 2024, less than one percent of programming, and down from a few years earlier. If you are not actively interested in climate solutions, you could blink and miss it. Even the reporting on extreme weather often does not connect it, though we have increasingly good attribution science that can say a storm was thirty percent wetter because of climate change. We do not have a very informed public, because of how bad our education is on this and how bad our news media is, and because algorithms push the drivel they think we want instead of what might be useful. So the politicians are responding to an uninformed public. I can imagine a progressive politics with climate solutions at the center if it connects the dots to everything else. That is why I would love politicians like Mamdani to talk about climate. He would be one of the best spokespeople in America for connecting income inequality, affordability, quality of life and climate, and we do not have many compelling leaders who understand how those fit together and can explain how government is part of the solution. There is a huge possibility, and I have not seen enough of it yet.
Mezzatesta · Is that changing, or going backwards?
Johnson · Literally going backwards in terms of politicians talking about it. Something like two percent of politicians' press releases mention it, for the largest threat to humanity. Think about the 2020 election, where the Democratic primary candidates were fighting over who had the best climate platform, in part because the Sunrise Movement and the climate movement pushed them and held them to a higher standard. They were harassed into doing better, and it was very effective. We do not have that groundswell of activism right now. But there is a big opportunity to make it an issue in the next presidential election, in the Democratic primary especially, where it could be a differentiator.
Mezzatesta · Is there a candidate you like for that? Multiple choice: AOC, Pete Buttigieg, Gavin Newsom, Pritzker, Shapiro.
Johnson · I have not thought that much about it. AOC obviously, Green New Deal OG, so we know she gets it and she can connect the dots incredibly well. Pete Buttigieg, having been transportation secretary, has a nuanced and practical understanding of how that has to shift, which is critical, because in the US about a quarter of emissions is transportation. Newsom has done some not-great things on climate in California. I was talking to Leah Stokes at UC Santa Barbara about how he refused to extend the deadline for schools to install heat pumps with funding that was already sitting there. Dumb stuff like that. The short answer is I do not really know, but whatever push I can give, I plan to push all of them to have climate platforms and make them really good.
Mezzatesta · Something that worries me is that the political right does a better job on climate than the progressive left, in a specific way. Look at the AfD in Germany: immigrants are the problem, we want the past Germany that was safer and better for Germans. They have less of a climate angle, but it is not hard to imagine weaving it in. Things are getting uncomfortable and warm, remember how it used to be, before the immigrants and before this global issue came to our doorstep, so raise the drawbridge, make citizenship harder, wall off the country. People call it eco-fascism. Are you worried about it, and is there a way to prevent that narrative? I think it probably means proving the progressive side can actually deliver the solutions you have written about.
Johnson · That is not how I have been thinking about it. What I have been thinking about lately, and maybe this is too hopey-changey, is energy security and homegrown energy gaining traction on the right in the US. People like Representative Thomas Massie, who is not MAGA-pilled. A lot of conservatives are thinking about solar panels and batteries as a prepper mentality. I was talking about this with the founder of a super PAC of clean energy executives that is intervening in Republican primaries across the country to unseat the members of Congress who killed the Inflation Reduction Act, and it is working: five for five, and they helped defeat a Democrat who did not support the act. Flexing the political power of the clean energy industry in America. There is something in the my-home-is-my-castle, rugged-independence thing that can be harnessed for a pro-clean-energy right. So it could go in any number of directions. Texas and Iowa have the most wind and solar of any states, and not because they are hippies. They benefited most from the IRA funding, which is part of why they resisted the clawback: wait, that was really good for us, we liked those subsidies. I do not think it has to be a partisan issue. But because we have a president who says climate change is a hoax and makes everyone fall in line and kiss the ring, it has been a big step backwards. Polling from Yale and George Mason over the last twenty years shows public concern about climate change growing for all groups except white Americans, and especially white men, where there is a marked increase in climate denial because of the political influence of MAGA. That is extremely dangerous, and there are all these variables I do not know how will work out. It is funny to be in this seat getting asked these questions. I do not have a degree in any of this. I am reading the newspapers and trying to keep up. At some point in my career people decided they could ask me anything.
Mezzatesta · You have acknowledged we do not know how the future goes, and there are infinite possible futures. How do you think about it in a way that is not binary, save the world or all die?
Johnson · Instead of succeed or fail, I think of it as zero to a hundred: how right are we going to get it? It is true that the incrementalist approach in politics and in implementing solutions is not fast enough. At the same time, the increments really matter when you are talking about degrees of warming, inches of sea level rise, the number of people dealing with famine or displaced by floods. If we can make that ten, twenty, fifty percent better, it is a huge deal. It is not going to be a perfect world. Species have gone extinct. We have destroyed ecosystems that will not recover in our lifetimes. But there is a big spectrum of possible futures, and we get to be part of shaping which one we have. We have been talking big picture and national, but I live in a small town, and I think about how that town is adapting its roads, how people think about water systems, how many small farms there are, knowing your neighbors and having each other's backs in a pinch. I met new neighbors last week and told them: just so you know, I have a generator and a backup battery, and if the power goes out, come to my house. I keep thinking about what it means to be a good human and a good neighbor in the climate crisis we are all going to live through together, some version of crisis and resolution and working toward solutions.
This is why I have such a problem with the AI race. It is so anti-community, so anti-humanity, on top of the climate implications, which we are finding out are much worse than we thought. If they build out just what is already planned, that would increase emissions from the electricity sector by twenty to thirty percent, which we cannot afford. All the tech companies are rolling back their climate commitments. Worse, they are selling their fanciest models to oil and gas companies, which use them to extract more oil and gas than would otherwise be possible. Emily Atkin at the HEATED newsletter has done amazing work covering this: the emissions are three to thirteen times worse than the data centers alone because of the enhanced extraction AI is used for. So it is so important to imagine at multiple scales what getting it right could look like, community, state, national, global, and then where each of us fits in pushing solutions forward. It is supposed to feel good, being part of building the better thing and then getting to have it. So much of the environmental movement has been framed as sacrifice instead of co-creation.
Mezzatesta · What would you want the AI industry to look like instead? There are cool things, like the satellite data.
Johnson · It is a net negative for the planet. There are targeted, helpful uses. I am personally just not interested. AI is in the background of things we all use, mapping apps and so on, but the generative AI stuff has never intrigued me. I have watched other people do it and thought, okay, cool, I guess.
Mezzatesta · You have never asked ChatGPT a question?
Johnson · No. There is a whole quit-GPT movement I cannot be part of, because you cannot quit something you never started. I am online, and none of us participating in the modern world can avoid AI at this point, it is embedded in so many systems. But part of me asks: what is the rush? Not the buildout, I understand the financial incentives there, but the rush in our lives. I do not want to do more things faster. The last big piece I wrote for my Substack was: I read the UN climate report. It was 140 pages and I sat down and read it and distilled the lessons for myself, and then thought I might as well post them, since I had already done the book report privately. Comparing my takeaways to what the New York Times and others reported, mine were different. Not to fact-check them, but to say that to the extent we can process information with our own brains, that is not something I want to outsource. We learn so much from grappling with things and talking them through with other humans. I can imagine a cultural backlash toward the analog. We see it in pockets: kids with point-and-shoot cameras, records coming back. Bring it on.
Mezzatesta · That is where I get some optimism. Usually society stays within one standard deviation of the norm, and right now things are swinging wildly. That is scary, and it is a period of political and cultural elasticity. I see the repeal of everything in climate policy leading to a huge swing back toward policy that actually works. I hope.
Johnson · I am more worried that people opt out of the political process. The polling, especially on young people, is that they are not into either party. Understandable, and it does not help.
Mezzatesta · In response, the parties are going to have to stand for something different and do something different. Politicians like Mamdani make me more optimistic: this party can stand for practical problem solving that makes people's lives better. I interview third-party candidates on this show too, because we need some third thing that can challenge the establishment parties. And with the rise of the DSA, whatever criticism people have of the policies, at least they stand for something. I see things swinging in a way that encourages me, the same as the anti-tech movement growing at the same time as the tech is going to Mars. The algorithmic division pushes people away from each other; you go down whatever rabbit hole you peeked down. That is an online thing. Talk to your neighbors in person and they are fine.
Johnson · I keep coming back to: can we all just be humans on planet Earth together, enjoy this biodiversity and majesty, and instead of wrecking it, protect and restore it and share it? That seems good.
Mezzatesta · To bring it home, we started tonight, thanks to our host Ben Von Wong, with community. Culturally we are encouraged to believe that when things go wrong we should turn inward and fear the world, buy some firearms, doomsday-prep the house. Whatever you need to feel safe. But the best way to feel safe is to go meet your community, come into spaces like this, see that you have allies, meet your neighbors, tell them you have a generator and that if something goes wrong in our town, I have got your back. If you were to say one or two things you would encourage anyone to do, is meet your neighbors where you are at?
Johnson · There is an incredible expert in emergency management, Dr. Samantha Montano, whom I interviewed for my book, who says the best thing you can do to prepare for a disaster is to bring your neighbor a basket of muffins. And then when things go wrong, look out for each other: look out for the elderly people who do not have air conditioning and whose bodies do not give them heat-stress signals as strongly. That stuff really matters. Heat is the number one climate killer. So yes, meet your neighbors. And also go hard for this election. Vote. It matters. Do not just vote: volunteer, knock on doors, get everyone you know to vote. Patagonia is announcing a huge get-out-the-vote effort tomorrow, and I hope more corporations encourage people to be environment and climate voters. Alongside corporations being terrible and detrimental to climate progress, there is the possibility that they do good with their money and resources, and a lot of that depends on how much social pressure we put on people. So be a good neighbor, and think about how you can be part of the cultural shift, model an appealing shift in the status quo, and welcome more people into this work instead of the purity test. I am obsessed with how to make environmentalists seem cool, so everyone wants to hang out with us. That is my project.
Mezzatesta · You are doing a good job. You seem very cool.
Johnson · That is the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me. So, top three: be a good neighbor, be cool, or make climate solutions cool and welcome people in, and may the best climate candidate win, and may we make it so.
From the room: When I look at policy proposals and get-out-the-vote and the rest, a lot of it registers as reactive, harm reduction: necessary, valuable and insufficient. It fails to get at the root causes, an economy that incentivizes more production and more consumption. Yes, let us put out fires, but can we also shut down the arsonists and replace the whole thing with an economy of sufficiency? Along that spectrum of root causes, what interventions would disincentivize the harm?
Johnson · One of my current obsessions is finding the grandchildren of fossil fuel executives and shaming these guys into the clean energy transition. Because the fossil fuel industry is a root cause, and it is a small handful of humans making the decisions that turn us down this terrible, dangerous path. Same with Silicon Valley. It is four dudes. Four white dudes deciding our entire future. We pretend it is this big, amorphous, complicated, impenetrable corporate financial web, and it is a handful of people. So I am really interested in how to influence those people, how to help them find their moral compass, how to give them an off-ramp to something better. I do not have an uncle who is a fossil executive to harass at Thanksgiving. But someone does. It is not so distant, in degrees of separation from power. What would it look like if people with that proximity were supported and emboldened to have those aggressive reality checks? If you became such a social pariah that no one would hang out with you, and, as Jane Fonda said, never sleep with anyone who works in the fossil fuel industry. In the influencer world we are living in, we forget that family and friends are the original influencers. We want someone in our inner circle to like us. So who is in those circles who can help with this transition? That is one root-cause fantasy of mine.
Mezzatesta · And it is happening. The billionaires are the least cool they have ever been. No one likes these guys, because the masks came off, and it is embarrassing to be them right now, even with all the power. Naomi Klein put it as: it has become clear to everyone that we are not welcome in their future. They are out for themselves, and when you realize that, why would you ride for that person anymore?
From the room: In the same vein, not just the grandchildren of fossil executives but schools. Elementary school students are one great lever. The biggest restaurant in America is the school cafeteria. What could we start there? My ten-year-old already gets it. How do you plant that groundswell, knowing we are time-limited, but it strikes me as a place where values could really take hold.
Johnson · There is a stat in my book I am looking for. Roughly 75 percent of US public school science teachers cover climate change, but they devote one to two hours per year on average. So we are not equipping our science teachers to have these conversations, and the way school board elections are going, they are being attacked by conservatives and climate deniers who are influencing curricula. Sorry to bring it back to politics, but school board elections also really matter, if we want children to have the information they need to be good climate citizens. On the other side, a few states have requirements for climate education. New Jersey was the first state to require climate education from kindergarten through twelfth grade, at whatever the age-appropriate version is. So getting involved at the policy level to require that it be taught, and I would personally like to see climate taught not just in science but across all the subjects, so people connect the dots more deeply. That is a huge lever. And I do not have to hope about this; I could just do it. I am thinking about writing a children's book, because so many parents are struggling with how to talk to their kids about it. The kids know. They say, I have heard about climate, it seems really bad, are you doing anything about it? Figuring out how to give parents the tools to talk about meaningful climate action with their kids. It is almost a book for the parents, not the kids. There is an opportunity there, and in children's programming too.
Mezzatesta · Everyone, this was so fun. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you, Dr. Johnson.
Johnson · My pleasure.
Ben · Thank you both. We will let the two of them leave the room first so the front does not get crowded. Dr. Johnson has to go to dinner, so a couple of books signed at the front and then she is gone. Michael will be around. A round of applause.