CNN's Bill Weir on Climate Change, Fatherhood, and Hope

We are thrilled to host Bill Weir, CNN's Chief Climate Correspondent. Bill shares profound insights from his new book, Life as We Know It: Stories of People, Climate, and Hope in a Changing World.

Bill Weir's new book started as a series of Earth Day letters to his son River, born in 2020. The letters reflect on the challenges and opportunities brought by climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic. Weir discusses the importance of storytelling in shaping our understanding and response to climate issues, emphasizing the need for hope and collective action. Through personal anecdotes and professional experiences, he highlights the role of climate correspondents and the transformative potential of climate solutions.

Main Topics Discussed:

• Origins of the Book: How Life as We Know It began as Earth Day letters to Bill's son River.

• Role of a Climate Correspondent: Bill's journey from a generalist reporter to CNN's Chief Climate Correspondent.

• Climate Storytelling: The power of narratives in shifting public perception and driving climate action.

• Pluralistic Ignorance: Understanding the misconception that fewer people care about climate change than actually do.

• Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs: Applying this framework to understand human motivations and responses to climate change.

• Building Resilient Communities: Examples of sustainable living and adaptive measures in response to climate challenges.

• Positive Developments: Technological advancements, policy shifts, and the Inflation Reduction Act as sources of hope.

• Climate Helpers: Stories of individuals and organizations making a difference in the fight against climate change.

Links:

• Book: Life as We Know It: Stories of People, Climate, and Hope in a Changing World by Bill Weir

Transcript:

- Much the way we lack the capacity to imagine the worst that can happen. We also lack the capacity to see the best of the future could bring for us if we all rode in the same direction. The tools are available. All it takes is sort of shifting the story we tell ourselves about these things.

- Hello and welcome to We Are Not Doomed, optimism in a Changing Climate. We bring you interviews with industry leaders, authors, journalists, and real people who are making an impact on climate change Every day. We Are Not Doomed is produced by Puddle Creative, a full service podcast production agency. I'm Jonah Geil-Neufeld, the executive producer. Today, I'm really excited to bring you this interview with Bill Weir. He's the Chief climate correspondent at CNN and he's written a new book called Life as we know It can be Stories of People, climate and Hope in a Changing World. We talk all about his book, which started as letters he wrote to his newborn Son River in 2020. My son was born the same year. So we talk all about how climate change and Covid, VID affected these new kids lives and also about the work that he's done over the years to cover different climate change stories, the sad stories, the happy stories, and everything in between. Bill, of course, is a great storyteller and you'll love all the tidbits that he has in here to share. I hope you enjoy it. Give us a follow on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you find your podcasts. Here's our interview. So Bill, welcome to We Are Not Doomed. Thanks for being on.

- Thanks for having me, Jonah. I love the title.

- Yeah, thank you. And I, I love your new book. Life as we know it can be is I connected with it on so many levels. The first, I really have to say that I got a little emotional reading, just I think it's like the beginning intro chapter where, and just to give people a little bit of context, part of the structure of the book is that you're writing letters to your newborn Son River who was born in 2020 and Correct. Kind of started as these Earth Day letters, right. That you would, that you wrote to him. Yep. And in the beginning you talk about his birth in 2020, and I also became a new father in 2020. My son was born in August of 2020. And just, it made me immediately think, oh my gosh, we, we are never gonna have like enough therapy to recover from that year because just so much happened in terms of how it kind of shook the world. And then at least for me, living out West, I, you know, my son was born and then we had just like this heat and wildfires a month after he was born. Horrible smoke for, for about a week. That was just, you know, covid is one thing in terms of feeling like, oh, what, what world did we bring him into? And then climate change really was, was the other thing. So maybe just to start off te tell people like how, how the book came about, you know, why you decided to write it and, and the inspiration for it. Sure,

- Sure. So yeah, this is my first book because I'm very lazy. I've, I've, I've been in TV most of my life, sort of writing for the screen and writing on a very di different deadline timeline scale. But I took over the climate beat in 2017. Most of my career I'd been a generalist and had the great fortune to be given documentary series and got to travel the world. And, and anytime I had to cover something very dark, there was always another story to balance it out, something lighter, something in, in the entertainment world or whatever. But in 2017, CNN decided to be fir come the first network to create a, a chief climate correspondent role. And, and I had sort of resisted that I'm a I I'm an omnivore, like all beats. But then I realized this beat is the mother of all beats. We think of it as an, as a menu item when pollsters come around on election year. Like how do you rank climate and your list of worries. I think it's the whole restaurant, everything else, foreign policy, economics, travel, you know, transportation, shelter. All of these things are, were built for a planet in balance. And that planet, sadly is, is gone now. And so I, I jumped at it in the first couple years. I really immersed myself in the fire hose of peer reviewed dread. You know, there's just all this science and you go and meet with these paleoclimatologists and have a couple of glasses of wine and they get emotional and, and you understand, you start to see this through the, through the eyes of normally reticent academics and scientists and experts. And that becomes overwhelming. So that basically led to these Earth Day letters, right? And river comes along much to our surprise and delight in, in 2020. I have a daughter, Olivia, who's 16 years older, and my, my partner didn't think, you know, she could become a mom. And we were just so blessed. And, and when he showed up and it gave me a sort of a reset on how I, how I see the world, right? And, and with my daughter, she inspired my show, the Wonder List, when I looked at her and realized she was about 11, we share a birthday and I realized she's gonna turn my age in the year 2050. So I wanna go to the wonders of the world and wonder what will be left of them. And so I, same kind of thinking happened when I'm holding river height of the pandemic, looking out at a world in lockdown and realizing this little bundle is gonna live to see the 22nd century. And that summer, you know, followed, you had the fires up in Portland. I was covering the George Floyd protests right at that time as well. Just so much pain and anger. And, and, and so I just as a cathartic exercise to kind of mark this, this seismic moment in history, I started these Earth Day letters of apology. Like, I'm sorry we broke your sea in sky, welcome to the party, but I'm sorry for all of this, but I'm so glad you're here because we need all the good health we can get. And there's also all this positive stuff that's happening that we don't get to talk about nearly enough. And that I found the greatest advice to cover the climate beat, in my opinion, came from Mr. Rogers who said, anytime he saw a scary event on tv, his mom taught him to look for the helpers. There's always helpers. Now I get to meet these people, you know, rushing into disasters. But then I get to meet all these other helpers behind the scenes in, in laboratories and green tech startups and investment funds and activists and folks trying to help this huge problem. And over time, enough happened on the ground, the inflation reduction act passed, policies were shifting, the price of clean energy was just plummeting. And in the end, I came away more, way more hopeful than I ever thought I would be on this topic. And you know, Dr. Martin Luther King, we remember him most not for saying, I have a nightmare. Everybody knew what the nightmare was. It was like he had a dream. And, and much the way we lack the capacity to imagine the worst that can happen in a place like Maui with a wildfire that is just, you know, other worldly or, or hurricanes that get stronger and stronger. We also lacked the capacity to see the best of the future could bring for us if we all rode in the same direction the tools are available. All it takes is sort of shifting the story we tell ourselves about these things. And so that sort of was all percolating in my mind and eventually became this book.

- Yeah, yeah. Speaking of the stories that we tell ourselves about these things, one of the things that I know you've talked about a number of times is pluralistic ignorance. Can you talk about sort of the, you know, that there's just all these people out there that care about climate change, but everybody feels like no one else does. You know

- Exactly. It just, you, you think you're outnumbered at least two to one, especially in the United States by people who just don't either get it or don't care. But a couple years ago, a bunch of academics, different universities around the country did a big survey and asked people to guess what percentage of fellow Americans care about this story as much as you do. And they would guess, regardless of political between, I know 33 40%, when in reality it's between 66 and 80%, even 75% of Republican voters are in favor of climate action, sensible climate action. So you think you're outnumbered, turns out you're surrounded by allies you never knew you had. And they call this pluralistic ignorance. And I think it happens for a lot of reasons, especially with the climate conversation, because it has been deliberately politicized for so long. Right. The people profiting from the status quo, like the, the fact that we don't know really how to talk about this and you don't want to be, you know, the buzzkill at the cocktail party or the morning drop off by bringing up climate change. I mean, is there more a repellent, you know, two words these days? And I think we gotta start these conversations and a lot of times we can start them without using those two words and connect with people around shared values, around shared reverence for our local hiking trail or fishing hole or, you know, farmer's market stuff that we all agree on is super special, but may not connect the dots to a climate imbalance. Right. And that gives us so many openings into that conversation in ways you hadn't considered before. It just takes a little shift in the approach. And for me it's come just by trial and error, you know, going out into the country to kind of cover this beat and this story and being surprised time and time again by the people who may not get it all the way or the by the people who absolutely do, but just to have no capacity and, and, and, and no way to, to plug in with their community around this story. So yeah, that's kind of the big motivation of the book is, is just to start conversations a little bit different way.

- Yeah. Yeah. So maybe, I mean, before, before we kind of get into some of those stories that of, you know, people around the country who have, who you've talked to, who have been affected by these climate change disasters, but also the helpers as you've talked about, you also structure the book around besides being around these letters to river around Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Can you talk about that a little of like what, what that is? Absolutely. And, and how, why you structured it that way?

- Sure. You know, I hadn't thought about, you know, Maslow's pyramid of needs since, you know, the days of, of Psych 1 0 1. Abraham Maslow was a sort of seminal figure in the field of psychology since he wrote a 1943 paper called A Theory on Human Motivation. And when, when I started the project and wanted to sort of dig into it, I started with, well, what got us into this mass? And you realize that it is the wants and needs of, of homo sapiens. It's the over the course of human history that the stories we tell ourselves about what jobs to have, what industries to exploit, you know, how to, how to interact with the earth, all of those stories have led to these systems, right? That we take for granted and think they're permanent, but they're really just stories that we agreed on in the moment. That's everything really. It's flags, borders, currencies, just stories that, and, and they're always under constant revision. And Maslow thought that if he could figure out what, what our wants and these are and help fill them, we could, we could understand each other more and, and create a, a planet of peaceful harmony. And he never used the, the term pyramid in his paper, but popular culture came to it by that came to give it that shape. But if you imagine a triangle with five, like a building shape, like a triangle with five stories, the first floor is, is your physiological needs. It's air and water, and a temperature is close to 68 degrees. It's possible you need certain minerals, fat, excretion, sleep. And if you don't get those, nothing else matters that just keeps your machine alive. Level two is your safety needs. That's shelter and, and an economy and rule of law and information. These are all the things that I find when I go cover a hurricane or a wildfire. The bottom two layers of your pyramid of needs are, are the stuff that's just, everything's upside down. It's been thrown into doubt and just fundamentally shakes people, right? But if your belly is full and the door is barred and you feel safe, then level three is your love needs. We're social animals. We wanna belong to a partner or, or a tribe. Level four is your esteem needs, you wanna be a respected member of, of whatever community. Our ego comes in there. And then the top of the pyramid is what's Abe Maslow called? Self-actualization. Whatever you are meant to be, you should be, you wanna play for the Yankees, you wanna open a artisanal cup, cakery, you should be able to to do that. But later in his life, right before he, he died, Maslow realized that there was problems with the type of that pyramid that ultimately the, the healthiest people he met mentally, the people he admired, general CEOs, it wasn't really about self. They transcended their own personal beliefs in, in, in, in, in pursuit of like universal cool values like truth or justice or humor. Anyway, this, this gave me a great framing device. When I'm talking to my boy about how to build a different pyramid than I did when I would grew up sort of middle class, lower middle class, bouncing around the country, I didn't, I didn't consider where my water came from or the quality of my food or the strength of my shelter. You know, it is just, you know, I was too cons, too busy trying to fill my love needs by, you know, wearing a bomber jacket like Tom Cruise and Top Gun and Cruising the Mall, or, you know, having fantasies about being a rock star. That's how I thought I was gonna fill my esteem needs. If I could just be get on TV and be like David Letterman or Peter Jennings, then I could fill the, the tip of my pyramid. But now my kids don't have the luxury anymore. Now when you can see the smoke in the air in the summers now in North America because of wildfires, when water whiplash is happening either too much or not enough, depending on where you live, we really have to, I felt like a responsibility to teach this generation of like, these, this is how your pyramid is being gonna be upended and here's much more sensible way. It started out as kind of a practical guide for where should my kid live? Like, where's a sa, where's a haven? And what kind of house should he build that would be the safest and most sustainable? And what will the food supply look like if if you do it right? And that, and down that road, I found all these really sort of practical tips and inspiring role models of people who are thinking about these things that we, we take for granted.

- Yeah, that's, I think just as, as we go along here with into the future with climate change, I think that's a big thing that is talked about a lot is, oh, we're gonna, you know, climate change is this is gonna happen. We're gonna have to adapt to it. And in certain sense, we're already adapting and we're there are things that people are already doing. Can you talk about a couple of those stories, if, if any, you know, that you talk about in the book or, or Sure. Or otherwise of just how people are adapting?

- Yeah. So one good example is in the shelter chapter. I, you know, I grew up working construction in the summers and building stick frame houses and never really given two thoughts about how, how stupid it is is that we build homes with skinny walls and giant furnaces and air conditioners instead of the other way around. And in this country, in the 1970s when the oil embargo happened after the om Kaur war, one of my earliest memories was waiting in a gas line in my dad's pickup truck, you know, and him cursing opec, which I thought was some evil Irishman. But at that time in the seventies, a team of researchers at the University of Illinois said, well, if we can't up our fuel, our energy supply, maybe we can cut our demand. And what if we could design a house that used two thirds less energy than average in a climate like Madison's, Wisconsin. And they ran with early computers, these models, and came up with what is now known as sort of passive house construction. A house that has such tight, thick, well insulated walls and like an envelope ceiling, walls, floor. And if you orient it to catch the sun and southern exposure, it becomes a basically a box of sunshine that in, if built well enough, you could heat with the, the, the warmth that comes off your appliances or body heat in many ways. And we just don't build that way. And so, you know, understanding how wanting to see this in practice led me to a neighborhood in Arvada, Colorado where they tried to be the first net zero community in the country by building these what are known as passive homes. There an American version of that. And it became an interesting story about them fighting with the new developer and keeping natural gas lines out. But when I got to step into these houses that are, they have sort of high tech ventilation systems, so there's always fresh air, but it's so efficient that it captures the energy from the exhaust air and uses it to heat or cool the fresh air that's coming in. And in wildfire season, a a well in a well built passive house can have the cleanest air in the whole zip code. Hmm. But now we have to build them fireproof and we have to build them storm proof. Right. And I met a woman named Annette Rubin, a a an NFL mom who married a Seattle Seahawk. She's from the Pacific Northwest up in your neighborhood, had never been through a hurricane before, but her husband retired from the NFL and they settled in his hometown on the Florida Gulf Coast. And 12 weeks after she had her first baby, hurricane Michael came roaring right at them. And she was googling, what is the building code in my town? Can my house survive? It was a new house. Can my house survive this category five storm? And turned out it couldn't, they were only coded up to category three. Luckily the storm turned, but it shook her up enough that this woman, Annette Rubin, with no experience in construction or business at all, went down a rabbit hole to try to figure out how can I build a hurricane proof, disaster proof home? What are the houses that survived Hurricane Michael? What are they made of? What are the systems? And a year later she found this technology out of Italy that uses basically blown concrete like shot shotcrete or gunite. It's the kind of sprayable stone they used to make swing pools or train tunnels. This guy in Italy was looking to make earthquake proof homes. And fig came up with a very easy to construct design that uses these styrofoam and steel mesh panels covered in the stone. And you can shape it however you want, you can make it match any home in any neighborhood. And it is now rated up to 250 mile an hour winds. It is the first home she built. She created a business called Vero Building Systems. Her first customer was the police department of HOA, Louisiana, way down in the Bayou because they wanted a bulletproof headquarters for their cops. So she came up with something that's bulletproof, which sadly is a selling point in modern America, tornado proof, hurricane proof, you know, way, way more fireproof than most construction. And that just was such an inspiring example of, of somebody turning their anxiety into real value and not just action, but valuable action to, to prevent other moms from being as stressed out as she was. And the business has just taken off. And there's, you know, so many ideas like that of just people asking the big questions. And for her, it took an out, it was, she was an outsider who looked around at her neighbors who she described as having the frog and the boiling pot mentality. They just had made peace with the idea that hurricanes are part of living on the Gulf Coast. But she's like, I'm not gonna do this every year and worry about my kids. There's gotta be a better way. And there are so many people like that in so many different sectors tweaking around the edges. And it starts with a new story.

- Yeah. When, yeah. That just brings up for me, I think there's a lot of us out there who our concerned with climate change, as you said, pluralistic ignorance, there's many more than we know are out there concerned with climate change. But even if we are often it, it becomes, you know, debilitating sort of the the worry where you feel like a little depressed about it. And so you're like, what can I do? I'm just one person. Right. So what would you say, you know, and maybe this is also a question of sort of what you want people to really get from the book. What would you say are your, you know, just sort of your motivation for people or, or a takeaway for people reading the book and then Yeah. How to feel like they can take

- Action? Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, people so often they ask me, what can I do? I'm one person or, you know, I really try, I compost or I right. You know, I ride a bike to work. And I think that stuff is great. I mean, but if you don't do that because of where you live and it's, you know, it's impossible for you to ride a bike to work, that's fine too. You know, ultimately so much of the problem now is being generated by corporations. And so you could fit the dec the decision makers of the c-suites of the biggest mega polluters on a couple of buses, you know, and if we could get those men and women to come around, gosh, it would do so much good. So, but for the average person out there who just wants to be a good neighbor and good citizen, my my answer is, well, what are you good at? What do you like to do? Because again, this is a story that touches everything. And so if you have a head for numbers or you're a CPA, maybe you could donate some of your time helping out your local Audubon chapters bookkeeping, you know, as they try to bring back a species or, or do a census of, of wildlife, you know, you can help out with those folks. Or if you are really engaged, if you're kind of a busy body and you wanna, you want to like, to, like to spread the the tea to, to your neighbors, you, maybe you're the one who goes to the utility board meetings and understands what your energy mix is in your town and, and who's influencing it, and how you can motivate your neighbors for something better. So many clean energy projects historically get shut down by a tiny minority of NIMBYs, not in my backyard. The, the entire sort of conservation movement was built around stopping big oil projects or nuclear plants in the, in the sixties and seventies. But now science shows us we have to build our way out of this problem, which means denser cities less sprawl, but it means smarter grids, it means more wind and, and storage. It means more solar. And not, of course, not every project is that every quote unquote renewable project should be green lit automatically. Some things just don't make sense in some places. But for the most part, you know, you, you now have to sort of advocate for the good stuff and to battle those who want to just shut it down, to keep the status quo as, as what it is. So, and I remind people that, look, Greta Thunberg is one girl by herself sitting outside, you know, the gates of parliament in her country. And thanks to social media, she erased the pluralistic ignorance around her and connected with millions of other people who took to the streets, you know, and literally help change policy. I don't think the inflation reduction act happens without those kids in the streets back in, you know, 2000, 19, 20 those days. And we have incredible agency as not just voters and and members of civil society, but as consumers, young people have a, have a almost superpower and have in, in their ability to just look an adult in the eye and call BS on what they're doing. And if, if being an engaged, you know, if your favorite fashion brand is doing something you wanna, you should know, well, what is their supply chain look like if, if you care about those sorts of things. And so I think there's so much to do all around us, and that the premise that I used with the Maslow's Pyramid of Needs that I landed on was if you connect with your neighbors around and connect with community around nature-based solutions and, and really plug into whatever your, the health of your local ecosystem, understand it deeper and share the responsibility of earth repair with the folks around you, man, you'll fill the love and esteem needs in your pyramid in ways that's just blind social media or consumption or another vacation. Really. Never can we've, we live in this golden age of convenience, but also isolation our devices. You know, I can order five star meals in New York City every night and never look anybody in the eye, just have 'em drop the bag outside the door. That's not how we evolved. A as, as, as homo sapiens. We, we need connection, we need action outside, we need collaboration. So a lot of this is, I'm preaching to my kids, but I'm also talking to myself because I'm the same. I get just as isolated and in my own screen and in my own head as anybody else, but connection, communication, these are as much, I think, a part of fixing this story as new energy models, right. Or, or shifting to electric vehicles. It's really a mindset and, and how we coexist with each other and, and understand, you know, the way that I was taught, just throw that away. Well, there is no way anymore. It's all connected. And so yeah. That's, that's where I landed there.

- Yeah. Yeah. That's, and I've, I, I think, you know, as you said, communication is, is just as important as all the other stuff. And I, I hope that, you know, people read your book and it becomes a part of the, the story.

- The other thing too, Jonah, I sorry to interrupt, but I I I, the other big piece that I'm, that I, that's a tougher sell, especially in an election year, is, is empathy for folks who may not share the same concern for the story. Yeah. And it's, it's so easy to get frustrated with people who either blatantly, you know, openly deny that it's happening or, or, you know, just wanna be contrarian to own the libs or whatever the motivation may be, to understand why they are that way and, and the lies that they've been told and, and the vested interests that really wants them to stay that way. And, and, and sort of reserve some grace for the story. Believers, hold your score for the storytellers, because these days it's, I think, imperative, morally imperative for leaders, people in positions of power to understand and explain and act on, on the climate crisis. Yeah. Right now, but sometimes you can connect with somebody in a different way about a shared value over a hiking trail or a fishing, fishing hole, and that opens a conversation with somebody, you know, doesn't vote like you.

- Yeah.

- But you can connect on and who knows, maybe actually work together on, on a solution Yeah. To both of your, and it's really tough when things are so polarized to lean across the fence. But when they used to say, think globally, act locally these days, if you think globally too long, you can get really depressed. But I argue that if you act locally at those times, that builds better, you know, better communities come what may, and sometimes it's as easy as, even if it's just a 15 minute conversation in the course of a day, is that going to stop, you know, the coral reefs from dying this summer? No, but it's a sense, it's a, it's one step towards a better future.

- Yeah. Yeah. I totally agree. I think one thing that from years of producing this sustainability Leaders podcast that I've heard often is another thing to kind of step back and connect with people on, is that even if we're trying to move away from burning fossil fuels, right? That's the, the big problem is we're putting all this CO2 in the, in the atmosphere is that we all have benefited from that system in the past. You know, that like none of us are saying like, this is, we just wanna burn it all down to the ground. Like society has been built on this. Like we, we all benefited from driving cars and doing stuff like that. Yes. And it's not something that, that, that we want to just like burn to the ground. It's something that we all our society has come to a certain place because of it. And it's just that Totally. It's, it's dangerous and we, we need to wean ourselves off of it quickly.

- That's what, that's what makes it so difficult. It's, it's such a huge sort of psychic lift for us to, to make peace with the idea that the very fuels that built the modern world and expanded human lifespans and brought billions out of poverty is now slapping back to kick us in the teeth and is, and is shortening lives. The, the, the best analogy, you know, I've struggled on this beat to come up with the right language and descriptions that just connect with people and give people that light bulb moment. And a couple years ago I was doing, I was profiling different carbon removal startups and around the country for a special, I called how to unscrew a planet. And I'm sitting on a dock in Maine with the guy who's the head of this ocean repair company. He was a fisherman scientist named Marty Oland. And I was bemoaning the fact that, you know, global warming is not really, it's horrible branding for an existential crisis, right? Right. People like warmth and nobody's afraid of the greenhouse effect. Greenhouses are where we grow yummy tomatoes, you know, and, and flowers. It's not really like mobilizing for a world war, you know, because the Nazis, it's easy to get people fired up to go fight the Nazis. It's different when the enemy is systems and, and habits and entire economies and the old way of doing things. And Marty goes, it's a Godzilla, it's a carbon Godzilla. And that was this light bulb moment for me to just use that analogy that we uncorked this monster from the bowels of the earth, which at first it has helped us do a lot of the heavy lifting, but now has grown so big, this trillion ton carbon zilla that it's ruining everything good. It's to killing our fish and our farms and melting our ski resorts and causing all this chaos. And we have to get mad and go kill that, chop that thing up and bury it back in the ground from where it it came from. And that was a sort of a beautiful framing device for me. Yeah. 'cause it's sort of like, is your business model making carbon Godzilla bigger today or smaller? What are you doing to limit the size of this monster? And there's no judge. I mean, you know, there's, there's plenty of judgment to go around, but so much we, we, we, we break off into shirts and skins and argue at each other. And you have to do it this way and this, that's net zero is not net zero enough for me. And I hate wind because I love birds and I, I'm anti nukes from way back, and I'm not, I don't buy. And when in the end, the mission for all of us, job one, is to just, number one, stop making Godzilla bigger eventually. Number two, we're gonna have to chop it up and bury some of it. But number one is to stop making Godzilla bigger. And every little bit we can do, maybe it's 2% today, maybe it's 5% today, moves us closer. And it sends signals to markets for entrepreneurs and investors right? To go, oh, there's a real appetite for this. And then before you know it, you look around and wow, we've done all of these transformative things and I didn't notice a hitch in my daily comfort in life because, you know, technology and advancement and AI could be a huge help in this. It's kind of scary right now. People don't know what's coming next. But yeah, man, we have just incredible capacity as human beings and, and the same frontal lobes that got us into this mess, I think could probably get us out. But it's just a matter of will and, and changing that story and rewarding the right actors in our societies.

- Yeah. I think another thing that I've thought about recently, going back to the beginning of our conversation, both of our sons were born in 2020 just to give, to give hope for people. Is that Covid? Of course. All the, the horrible things that happened, the silver lining there is that we there in Covid, we have an example of a time when our entire global community mobilized overnight to do something. We all exactly, we all decided we needed to, you know, stay indoors and stop going to huge social gatherings and we just did it. Yep. And it was really, you know, this kind of story we told ourselves. And so we overnight kind of made a change. And so when people are like, how are we ever gonna change? It's like, well, we did it in 2020. You know?

- Well, that's a great example, Joan. I'm glad you brought that up. 'cause when you think about the fact your son Simon, right? Yep. Yep. When Simon was on your ultrasound, when you, you know, was maybe the size of a kiwi when you looked at him, you could, you could have Googled COVID-19 and gotten zero results, right? But by the time he was one month old, if he was born in whatever, I don't remember the timeline, but let's just say maybe six months old, billions of people had masked up, you know, and isolated to save the lives of people they will never meet. Every lab in the world was unified behind finding a, you know, a cure to the point where we had four or five vaccines and test trials and some were approved. And, and yes. And huge mistakes were made. And I think that's, that's a great sort of, sort of an, a lesson for the climate story is that yeah, you're gonna make some mistakes. You're gonna go down some dead ends and, and we're realizing the ramifications, the costs of isolation, all those sorts of things. But we flatten that curve, right? We, we it, and the world is open. And you come to New York City now, you would never know it happened, right? I mean, the people who suffered through it and lost people. Again, another example of what happens in climate, we can't forget them. We have to honor those losses and not let their loss be in vain and, and take it forward. But all of that stuff was built on the backs of a century of science, HIV and, you know, other pandemics and research and all of that. And the other big lesson was the communities that had the most trust in each other, and the science suffered the least. You can look at the death rates, you know, those who politicized it suffered the most. And it can be nonpartisan. You know, one of the examples in New York state was there was a county up upstate rural county in New York that led the nation and vaccination rates for a while as, even though there were a bright red Republican county because of the way they distributed the vaccines, it wasn't outsiders coming in and saying, come get a jab. It was the local librarian was there, you know, everybody's favorite doctor was leading the campaigns. It was a grassroots thing where that community decided we're gonna trust this science in each other. And they did that. And I think you're seeing that now around, you know, building sustainable communities, the idea that a few moms get together and say, wouldn't it be great in Oakland? Wouldn't it be great if our school buses instead of choking us with diesel fumes, if they ran on sunlight and then at night we could plug the school into the buses and use that energy as a battery source and light our classrooms. And that just happened, you know, Oakland Unified School district, first in the country, 75 electric school buses online, you know? Wow. And again, it's, it's, it, you know, the problems are here. We can, they're like Dr. King, we don't need, we know the nightmare. Yeah. Think about the dream, think about what's possible. And there's so many examples like that. I I, I'm so lucky I get to see 'em every day.

- Yeah. You that i, i, it sounds like a really cool job you have.

- What's, it can be depressing, but Oh, I'm sure. But, but some days it's, it can be really inspiring to you.

- Yeah. So I, what's next for you? You just published the book, so you, you, you should enjoy some time off, but what, what are you working on next and what makes you hopeful for the future? What, what's getting you outta bed these days?

- Well, it is the helpers. It is the big ideas that I see, you know, moving, you know, the idea that for most of human history, we simply burned whatever was cheap and abundant. Can't blame 'em, right? Can't blame our great-great-great, great-great grandparents for burning peat or whales or, or trees or coal or kerosene. You used what you had, but we just happened to live in the first time in human history when the two cheapest forms of energy are solar plus storage and onshore wind, which is why Texas is the greenest state in the country. Despite their politics, despite their ideology and, and industry resistance, the economics, now we don't have to dream about they're here. Right? And so I'm doing a lot of TV specials around the themes in the book. We're working on a big one for Anderson Cooper's, the whole story, our Sunday night magazine show that is going to visit adaptation examples around the country like Annette Rubin and her, you know, hurricane proof houses in Florida, fireproof homes in Paradise, California. Went there. We were going to Phoenix to talk about how they're managing heat to keep people alive, cooling down, you know, latest in cooling technologies and new energy ideas flying cars. It looks like we're finally gonna get our flying cars that the Jetsons promised us. And, and just sampling from all of these exciting startups. I'm going to London for the Breakthrough Energy ventures in, in June to interview Bill Gates. I'm interviewing Al Gore at a Rockefeller Foundation event next week. A as you know, he turns his score on. And we're also doing, you know, stories on politics in this election year, chasing the story that Donald Trump asked, you know, oil executives, if you gimme a billion dollars right now, I'll give you everything you want. We're confirming that reporting outta the Washington Post and chasing that down and, and really just trying to talk to these c-suites about how they see the future and, and what's standing in the way of, of, of earnest transition. There are models out there of energy companies, mostly in, in the, in Europe and Netherlands that are getting out of oil and gas and getting into geothermal, using those drilling skills to, to mine for hot rocks deep in the earth instead of, of more fuels that burn profiling energy. Startups that use ev use everything from gravity to pressure, to hot rocks in a box, to store energy, thermal batteries. And so a lot on my plate, a lot. There's so much to cover. And the thing I realized, Jonah, is that it's sort of like looking at a giant mural, you know, or like by Harus, Bosch or something, you know, big, there's the scary side, and then there's the hopeful garden of few of, of the lights on the other side. And depending on what you focus on, on a given day can really motivate you. And now there's just so much good to focus on and you can really chart the progress. And I don't wanna sound Pollyanna, I, I mean, what's happening in the oceans right now with the temperatures? What's happening to coral bleaching events? What's happening with bigger storms and flooding events all around the world? It is here and it is real and people are hurting, but the, we can, every 10th of a degree, every 100th of a degree of, of overheating that we can prevent, can save entire ecosystems, can save favorite, your favorite, your kids' favorite animals, you know? And so I'm enthused and, and, and trying to wake up every day with more wonder than worry.

- Oh, that's wonderful. Thank you so much. That's a lot to be inspired by and to, and to feel optimistic about. And I do hope that Simon, my 4-year-old and river, your now 4-year-old too, can yeah. Grow up in a world where we've, you know, figured it out to some ex to some extent. I think the world is obviously gonna be a different place. But thank you so much for your time. If people wanna, you know, find the book life as we know it can be and, and learn more about you, where should they go?

- You can go to bill weir climate.com or I'm on all the social medias at Bill Weir, cnn, and I'm, I'm on a TV screen near you most days. Yeah. If CNN is on in your home or local airport and out there trying to, to tell the biggest story ever told.

- Awesome. Thanks Bill. Thank you for listening to We Are Not Doomed. I'm Jonah Geil-Neufeld with Puddle Creative. To find more episodes of the podcast, go to We Are Not doomed.com. You can find us on Spotify, apple Podcasts, or your favorite podcast app. Until next time, have a great week.