The Social Implications of Climate Change: Joseph LeDoux

Certainly, I have no idea what your position on climate change is, but personally I think that things are happening and something needs to be done. That's clearly things are happening. And that, you know, I read a couple of editorials probably in the New York Times or something a couple of months ago. One was about how, yes, the things are changing and we have a right to worry, but, you know, we shouldn't worry about the earth as, you know, the famous quote is, Gaia's a tough bitch. So the earth will survive, but the configuration of life on it is unlikely to continue to be the same under those conditions. The more that everything changes, the conditions of life change. And the first things to go, and this is what happened to the dinosaurs, are large energy-demanding organisms because as the conditions change, you know, the climate that we've lived in, we've succeeded because we were able to benefit from that kind of climate. But as the climate begins to change, our kind is not going to be able to succeed as well because those conditions are, you know, the waters are rising, the desert are expanding, all these things are happening, and it's just not going to be, you know, species don't last that long. A few million years and they go. So our time may be... But we've only been around for what, 300, 400,000 years and something? Well, it depends on what we are. What we call wheat, right? But Neanderthals were around quite a bit longer than that. Yeah. And they're not here anymore. So we don't have a... I mean, I think that we can use our minds to try and, you know, help us get through this. But that's only going to work if we can do that collectively. That's the scary part. We have to work together collectively as a world because these are not local issues. These are global issues. Yeah, right. And that is... How's that going to happen? Good luck. You know, especially getting other countries like China to comply. Yeah. But you know, you see that small successes, I mean, like auto companies deciding, well, we need to, you know, rein in the emissions. And there's probably a profit motive underlying that at some point. Sure. And people are conscious. There's green dollars, right? Yeah, right. Like you want to... When you think about technological achievements and you think about the conscious mind and the ability to create and the creative process, do you envision the possibility of some sort of a technological solution to a lot of the problems that we're facing? I think it has to be a social solution. Social. How so? We have to figure out how to balance this worldwide. We can do whatever we want in this country if we could do what we want. But, you know, even if we were the best country in the world for the environment, that wouldn't solve the problem. You know, it's a worldwide problem. Amazon forest, that's affecting a lot of people. It's just not a simple thing that one country can solve. Right. But if one country takes steps and imposes some sort of a technological solution that pulls carbon from the atmosphere, that does enhance some sort of a cooling process to bring homeostasis, to bring some sort of a generally agreed upon state of the environment, if that's technologically possible, I mean, that's going to come out of the creative mind, right? Well, you know, I don't want to go too far off into my not area of expertise like climate and so on. I just think there's, I think I would put in the kind of the social perspective and what our brains are contributing, but I don't want to, I don't think I can really address the details of all that. Right. But even like socially, if we did address it socially, we're still going to have to deal with the actual physical limitations of the, just the environment that we live in and what we've done. This is how to somehow or another mitigate it. Yeah. I agree. Yeah. So, but yeah, so I think, you know, creators coming along and trying to find technical solutions. That's great. When you analyze the human mind and knowing what you know about the thought processes and the way people think and work, when you see people in denial of climate change, and then you see people that are so enamored with the concept of capitalism and big business that they don't really think that it's a big deal or they want to deny that it's a big deal so that they can continue short term profits. Right. What is that? Like those mechanisms like watching that take place in the monkey mind. Yeah. What are you, what are you thinking when you see that happen with humans? You know, I don't think it's simple. It's not simply denial of climate change for climate reasons. I think there's a lot of social, you know, within certain groups, there's social stigma for being pro environment. Yes. And so it's... Tribal. Yeah, tribal. It's, it's people, you know, people cling together and it's a kind of form of self protection by identifying a set of issues that we all can agree upon because they're kind of dictated top down in a sense that are our thing. And then that thing is somebody else's thing. Yeah. That's a weird aspect of being a human being, right? These tribal identity things where if you're in this group, you must be pro choice. If you're in this group, you must be pro life. You must be anti-war. You must be pro second amendment. No, there's very little deviation. And that's left, right? That's everything. I mean, the belief systems, rigid belief systems, you know, part of, just part of being. And when you look at politics and you know that these belief systems are, do you find it odd that we have these like sort of polar opposites or at least left, right choices, red, blue choices that we've limited ourselves to these very distinct tribes? Right. And that's, yeah, I think that's unfortunate, but that's where we are. Is there a way out of that? Yeah, the political scientists have to take that one out.