Environmental Attorney Barbara Freese on the State of Climate Change Action

What you're doing with this book is essentially you have a magnifying glass on some of the worst aspects of human behavior. Is it depressing? Kind of. It's kind of depressing. I've also had people tell me the book is infuriating. Which, you know, I really didn't intend that. I kind of thought, well, let me tell you, when I first imagined this book, I imagined that we were going to go through climate denial. We were going to snap out of it because it was so obviously suicidal. And then we were going to look around and go, how did that happen? And how do we make sure that never happens again? And I would be able to say, look, here are some factors that have contributed to this throughout history. And here's, you know, maybe this will lead to some reforms. And obviously, it didn't work out that way. This book has come out when we have a climate denier running the country. So... Is it really a climate denier? He has called it a hoax several times. Now, I think maybe he's been talked out of using that term lately, but he's still pushing back the regulations and trying to bring back... So he really said climate change is a hoax? I said that several times. And I know at least in one tweet, maybe more, a Chinese hoax that China was trying to perpetrate on us. So in any event, you know, I wrote an infuriating book. I didn't mean to. I meant to write a kind of let's all step back and look at this sort of book. But it just turns out you cannot write about infuriating topics without writing a kind of infuriating book. I do try to keep some perspective here and, you know, look at the good parts of this history, which is to say in each case, you have members of the public, you have scientists, you have journalists, you have movements stepping up and confronting that denial, and eventually, in most cases, overcoming it. And we do have other segments of our society that are designed to try to not just pursue profit, but to seek truth of scientists and journalists. And that doesn't mean they're not also trying to pursue profit sometimes or at least get paid for their work. But we do have systems in place that have successfully confronted this. And so it's not like we're starting from scratch. We are just in a very big hole right now, and particularly about climate change, and particularly with so much corporate power over Congress and frankly, the states as well. What subjects have, where you see there's actually progress been made? Well, you know, people have been fighting climate change on the state level. We have done some things also federally for a long time over the years. I mean, many, many states have put in place climate targets to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. Many have put in place renewable energy standards, which have been enormously successful in building up the wind industry, the solar industry, and those technologies as they deploy and improve have gotten so much cheaper. I mean, it's really much, much easier now to imagine getting rid of fossil fuels than it was 40 years ago when the industry first confronted this or when society first really started looking at this. On the federal level, they've made major improvements in, they've required efficiency standards, which have been really helpful for major appliances. We've had auto efficiency standards. Now, Obama put some strong ones in place. Trump has rolled those back again. So that's going to limit the progress exactly when it needs to be accelerated. That's maybe not one of the good pieces of news you were asking about. Well, I mean, I think that's going to be largely the focus. And even though Trump has said we're not going to be part of the Paris Agreement anymore, which by the way, every other country in the world is a part of, there's a handful that haven't ratified it, but everybody else is part of it. Even though he said that, you have many states and many cities stepping forward and saying, well, we are still part of it and we are going to be working to reduce our emissions. So that's all very good news. The technology that we do have a deep bench of policy experience. We know a lot of good things that we can do that will work. And we have the rising concern, the youth movement all around the world, really, who are really stepping up and say, enough. We have got to deal with this and we've got to deal with it now. And because you grown ups have wasted 30 years, we've got to deal with it particularly aggressively.