Katharine Hayhoe
Katharine Hayhoe unpacks climate change division in America and refocuses the narrative on emotional connection. She is an atmospheric scientist, author, and climate advocate committed to averting human suffering. Find her at katharinehayhoe.com.
Transcript
Katharine Hayhoe:
The number one most trusted messengers to have these conversations, that help connect the head to the heart to the hands, not about ice sheets and polar bears, but about my life and how climate change is affecting sports or the air my kids breathe or the home insurance rates I pay. It's not scientists. Scientists are number two. The best people are people we know.
Ted Roosevelt V:
Welcome to Good Citizen, a podcast from the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library. I'm Ted Roosevelt. Today I'm thrilled to welcome Katharine Hayhoe. She's really one of my favorite people in the climate space. She bridges two worlds by approaching climate change through the lens of her Christian faith. In this episode, Katharine helps to unpack why Americans in particular are so polarized on this critical issue. We discuss the connection between climate change and our personal and political identities, and Katharine helps map out new systems that would automatically lead us to better decisions. It's a dialogue that weaves scientific insight with a profound moral imperative to act with love, which makes sense since Hayhoe's fundamental motivation as a climate scientist is to reduce human suffering.
Welcome to the show, Katharine. I am really excited to be talking to you right now because we are still in the shadow of the presidential election and I think a lot of people, particularly on the left, are scratching their heads and saying if the Trump voter just had more information, they would've voted differently. And it reminds me a lot of climate advocates who struggle with the idea that the challenge they're facing is that people just don't understand the facts of climate change. But you discovered early on that it's not actually about climate literacy. The problem is not a lack of facts, even. There's something else getting in the way. Is that a fair framing?
Katharine Hayhoe:
I think it's more of an "and" rather than an "or."
Ted Roosevelt V:
Fair enough.
Katharine Hayhoe:
We do need to understand that climate is changing, humans are responsible and the impacts are serious. We also need to understand that the solution is not getting rid of plastic bottles.
That is a great thing to do to avoid plastic pollution, but it's not going to fix climate change. So there are some very basic scientific literacy points that are important, but they're so simple that frankly our kindergartners can get them a lot quicker than we can. That's what we're talking about, but that is still in our head and what is in our head is insufficient because that is not how we make decisions. We make decisions much more with our heart. In the US it's already ---two thirds of people in the US are worried about climate change and around the world the majority of people are worried, but we haven't made the head to heart connection. If you ask people, will it affect your life personally, the people, places, things you love, the majority of people still say no. And then there's an even bigger gap between the heart and the hands. If you ask people, are you worried about climate change but are you activated? There's a 60% gap between the people who say they're worried and the people who say they're activated. That is the biggest gap that we have in opinions on climate change today. So we do need the head, don't get me wrong, but that head has to be firmly connected to our heart and to our hands if we really want to activate people at scale.
Ted Roosevelt V:
You wrote a book in 2021 that talked about saving us and it was really focused on the fact that it---climate change is a human issue almost more than any--- maybe not more than anything else, but it's certainly central to the issue. Why did you feel like that was so important for people to understand?
Katharine Hayhoe:
Well, to be totally honest, I feel like the book I wrote three years ago is more relevant today than it was back then. I feel like it was a little sort of an advance of where we find ourselves today, and the book isn't called Saving the Planet because it isn't about saving the planet. The planet will be orbiting the sun long after we're gone and there will be living things on that planet, but there's not likely to be a functioning human society on that planet if we don't get our act together. And so it really is about us and not just us, but the fact that our life depends on nature. So we just completely, in our industrialized westernized society, we have somehow forgotten that the air we breathe comes from nature. In fact, 70% of the oxygen we breathe comes from phytoplankton and kelp in the ocean,
And then the water we drink, the food we eat, all the resources we use---nature doesn't need us. We are the ones who need nature. And so when we see climate changing this rapidly, and it's really the pace that is most concerning because we've seen climate be warmer or cooler in the past, but it's never changed this fast, especially not with 8 billion people on the planet and the most rapid periods of change that we can see that are an analogy to today in the distant past, they were periods of rapid extinction as well. We have to realize that we're all in this together, and if we're a human being living on this planet, which I think most of us are, then we have every reason we need to care and we just have not made that head to heart connection effectively yet.
Ted Roosevelt V:
There was a study out of Yale about a decade ago which showed that if you started as a climate skeptic, having more education, paradoxically made you more resistant to climate change messaging. Highly educated individuals use their intellectual skills to craft counterarguments in order to protect their identities, and climate has become an identity marker. So when you think about connecting to people, how do you get out of their heads and into their hearts?
Katharine Hayhoe:
That research you're referring to, that was by Dan Kahan, was really central to my thinking on this issue because Dan's research showed very conclusively that the smarter we are, the more polarized we are on climate change. And that's because the smarter we are, the better we are at motivated reasoning. In other words, when there's an issue that relates directly to our identity and climate change is an identity marker in today's society, then as humans, our instinct is not to change our identity. Our instinct is to validate ourselves and prove why we're right, why we're smart, why we're good people. And the smarter we are, the better we are at doing it. Given that climate change is today an identity marker---the number one determinate of whether you agree that climate is changing and humans are responsible is simply where you fall in the political spectrum---how much more so would that cause people to engage in motivated reasoning?
And so that's another reason why just focusing on the head doesn't work. So if somebody says to me, for example, it's just volcanoes, and I say, no, actually, all geologic activity in the whole world produces the equivalent amount of carbon every year to three medium sized US states no more. They don't hear me saying that. What they hear me saying is, "you're stupid and you are bad." And so they react as if I said "you're stupid and you're bad," rather than if I simply said, volcanoes don't produce that much CO2. And so that's why remaining in the head just isn't going to cut it because it's become an identity marker. It's not like black holes where you could just say, oh, scientists have discovered something new about black holes. And people will be like, okay, sure, that's fine. This is an identity issue.
Ted Roosevelt V:
When did climate become an identity marker? Because I know in the eighties it wasn't nearly as associated with the political party that you were associated with. At what point did it switch over to becoming kind of a political flag one way or the other?
Katharine Hayhoe:
So the oldest data that I'm aware of on public opinion goes back to the early nineties. So it was a Gallup poll. It shows Republicans and Democrats essentially in the exact same place and there was no political polarization. But here's the key. Until the late eighties, climate change was still a comfortably future issue. And if it's a future issue, it means you don't really have to do much about it. But it wasn't until the late eighties that we started to see a really crazy heat wave. We started to see really alarming melting at the poles. So all of a sudden, very abruptly within just a few years, climate change transitioned from a comfortably future issue to a present issue that had to be addressed. And that is immediately when it became politicized. Because if you look back in time at the Fortune 500 list of the richest companies in the world back in the 1990s---you can find this archive online---if you look at the top 10 companies, just about every single company on that list, I think all but one had made their riches from digging up, processing, selling or making things that burn fossil fuels. And so right about that time, there was a lot of spin doctors and faux medical and science experts who were losing their jobs at the tobacco industry because they'd finally lost the lawsuits claiming that cigarettes didn't cause cancer. So the fossil fuel industry in some cases literally hired the same people to muddy the waters to create climate denial out of nothing. Up until then, there was nobody saying "it's a natural cycle" or "those scientists are lining their pockets" or "warmer is better." Nobody was saying that. All of the climate denial was manufactured to delay action as long as possible. And it was so successful that here we are 30 years later and we are at a place in terms of our action that should have been happening 10 years after it transitioned from future to present, not 30 years.
Ted Roosevelt V:
That's so fascinating. And I'm curious because there are other developed nations that were learning about climate, that were being impacted by climate at the same time, that also were becoming increasingly polarized, but climate denialism has found probably its richest soil or richest home in America. Is there something else unique to America that makes climate denialism so successful?
Katharine Hayhoe:
I think there's multiple factors. So first of all, there's the role of money and lobbying in politics. As a Canadian, it was a shocker to me. I mean in Canada our political parties get a fixed amount for advertising from the government and that's all they can use. Whereas in the US, money is threaded throughout politics, as is lobbying. And so corporations, both through their financial impact and through Citizens United, they have an outsized impact on policy and politics. But then there's this extra layer in the US--- if you look at sociological scales of different cultures by country, some cultures are very hierarchical, some cultures are very communal, some cultures are extremely independent. And the US is very independent in part because with the history of how the US developed, it favored people who were strongly independent. So there is a pattern around the world where the folks who are like, I'm independent, I can do this myself. Well, with climate action, we can't. We have to work together. So there's sort of a cultural conflict between the, "I'm in charge of my domain and I can run everything here myself. I don't need anybody's help." And it's like, well, we got to fix this climate change thing together.
Ted Roosevelt V:
It's so interesting. I thought you might go in a slightly different direction in your answer, which is the decline in organized religion and the increase in identity around politics that's been taking place. And I don't actually know if that's been happening. I think that's been happening globally to some extent, but it's certainly been happening in the United States is organized, religion is becoming less popular. You are seeing people identify more strongly, particularly in the United States, with their political party and then that issue of identity comes to the fore when you talk about climate change. Is that a connection that you're seeing as well?
Katharine Hayhoe:
Yes, it definitely is. So in the US there's a fascinating book by Notre Dame historian Mark Noel called The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. In it, he tracks the history of religion from before the revolution, the American Revolution, till today, and he shows how even the act of the American Revolution cut American religious ties to their church hierarchies---you know, the Wesleyan Church, the Methodist Church, the Anglican Church---and both the cut ties and the way that America developed so independently favored the tent revivals, the self-proclaimed pastors and ministers... The way America evolved as a country supported the individualization of religion. You're right, people's statement of faith now is written by their political ideology, not by the Bible. And if the two come into conflict, we have seen how they will go with political ideology literally over what it says in the Bible and they will slap a Christian label on it. And that is frankly heresy.
Ted Roosevelt V:
There's something about the language of religion that loans itself particularly well to communicating on climate change. I come from a secular background and when I hear it, I find it to be the most compelling climate language. It gets you out of thinking about the sort of immediate, "what's going to give me satisfaction over the next five minutes" versus "what will give me purpose and satisfaction over a longer term" framing. What can religious leaders do, or even people that are really truly still associating with their church, to better communicate this issue? Because it's clearly not being communicated broadly at all churches at this point.
Katharine Hayhoe:
No, it isn't. And for example, an analysis of social tipping points---so not the physical tipping points in the climate system we so often hear about, like ocean circulation shutting down or the Amazon dying off---but social tipping points in terms of what would catalyze climate action so fast, one of the key social tipping points is framing this as a moral issue. There is a right and there is a wrong. And that's what religion does! It frames things as a moral issue.
What religion also does is offer an opportunity for repentance and atonement. So you are not stuck. That is what I think is so powerful is you are not stuck in this situation. One of my favorite Bible verses literally talks about how God has not given people a spirit of fear, which paralyzes us, but a spirit of power, which means we can act out of love and with a sound mind. Love is what powers our fight. Love of the people, places and things that we have, that is literally what recharges our batteries to fight for a better future. We fight for what we love. And---two years ago, I'm part of an organization called Potential Energy Coalition that helped me co-found Science Moms. Potential Energy does marketing research on public opinion around the world.
And they did a big global survey representing 70% of the world's population. And then they tested all of these different messages on why people would support climate action: because of clean energy, because of health, because of jobs, because of the moral argument against fossil fuels.
And John Marshall from Potential Energy was giving a giant slide presentation with like, 90 data-filled slides to all these interested people who had supported this work. And he said that they found, across the world, by a factor of twelve times, there was one message that was much more powerful and impactful and motivating than any other message. And when he got to that point in the presentation, he sort of like, choked a little bit and cleared his throat--- because for a data scientist, this is a very uncomfortable thing to say. He said the message was love.
Ted Roosevelt V:
If you were to roll the clock back to the late 1980s and the early 1990s and you could advise climate scientists, climate advocates, on their messaging, is it that pivot from guilt, which certainly seemed like a big part of climate change messaging initially, to a focus on love, a focus on hope-- that that's where they sort of got on the wrong foot initially?
Katharine Hayhoe:
So the environmental movement was already in place. We already had Earth Day, we already had Silent Spring, we already had the river lighting on fire in Ohio. We already had the Clean Air Act. So people were already conscious of the fact that we were literally poisoning our environment and poisoning ourselves and we're still doing that today. Pollution is still---I mean we don't talk about it as much, but it is worse today than it was back then. Today more people die every year from breathing in the air pollution, the particulates from burning fossil fuels than, according to the World Health Organization, have died from Covid since the beginning of the pandemic. So there's this certain personality type that really inclines towards guilt, so much so that when I try to share social science on how doom and gloom gets the most clicks and shares, but it tanks people's efficacy, it makes people feel helpless and hopeless, the pushback I get is astonishing and in some cases even vicious. Because people are just so convinced that more doom will do it, well, that wakes people up. So that's why I said back to the beginning of our conversation: we need the head, we need the facts. We need to understand it's bad. We have to understand there's a problem. But if you don't immediately make the head to heart to hands connection, you will have a population that is worried, even panicked, but completely disenfranchised, powerless, helpless, and nothing's going to happen. And do we want everybody to be panicked or do we want something to happen? If we want something to happen, we need a vision of a better future, we need a path to get there and we need to empower every single person to see how they can help us move along that path. And that is the definition of hope.
Ted Roosevelt V:
How do you weigh system changes versus individual changes as it relates to climate?
Katharine Hayhoe:
If we would just look at psychology 101, it is well established in psychology that humans fear loss more than they value gain. So if you want humans to do something, rather than taking something away from them, you have to show them there's something better. So I don't say, don't eat meat. I say eat more plants.
I say, wow, I just tried this new recipe. It's awesome. We need a different way of talking about this that shows people that a different way is possible and here's why we need system change. Because we need the easiest and the most affordable choice for everyone to be the best choice. We need public transportation to be cheaper and faster to get downtown than driving your own car. We need finding a place to plug your car in to be easier than finding a gas station. And we need EVs to be cheaper than internal combustion cars. We need fresh fruits and vegetables to be the easiest thing to find instead of---I lived in a food desert and the only fresh vegetable in the local grocery store that I could walk to because I didn't have a car was iceberg lettuce. That was it.
We just need to change the system so that it is the easiest and most attractive thing for everybody to make the right choice. And for that, the most important thing us as individuals can do has nothing to do with our carbon footprint. It is all about our voice. That is how society has changed before. That's how women got the vote. That's how the abolition movement started. That's how the civil rights movement triumphed. It was voices that made a difference. Every single one of us has one of those, and if we use it, we have evidence that it has changed the world before. That's why I'm convinced we can do it again.
Ted Roosevelt V:
Yeah. So there's a Thomas Friedman quote from---this is also a couple decades old, where he said something to the effect of, if you want to change the climate, don't change your light bulb, change your politicians. Do you feel that the US political system is even available for that kind of change given the influence of money in politics today?
Katharine Hayhoe:
Well, within the US, politicians radically underestimate their own constituents levels of concern about climate change.
And that's because they never hear from them. So that's why I'm just absolutely obsessed with the idea of having these conversations. And I talk about it so much in my book, Saving Us, in my TED Talk, and I do it on social media all the time, and I have a newsletter, "Talking Climate," that every week shares good news, not so good news, and something people can do about climate change to help kickstart conversations every week. Because I feel like that is the easiest and most obvious yet underappreciated tipping point to climate action. Because if we don't talk about it, why do we care? And if we don't care, why would we do something about it? More research from Yale shows that the number one most trusted messengers to have these conversations that help connect the head to the heart to the hands, not about ice sheets and polar bears, but about my life and how climate change is affecting sports or the air my kids breathe or the home insurance rates I pay. It's not scientists. Scientists are number two. The best people are people we know, friends and family.
Ted Roosevelt V:
Something that I was interested to discover a little while back was that the word "oikos" is the Greek word for house and family and household. It's also the root word for "eco" in "economy" and "ecology." And so the two are very related to each other and very connected, but I think those are often seen as juxtaposed concepts, that the economy and are ecology are diametrically opposed in some way. In fact, that's really not true. They started as very closely related. What role do you think that our corporations, our economy, our capital markets, can play in helping fix this challenge of climate change?
Katharine Hayhoe:
The idea that it's the economy or the environment neglects the fact that everything we have comes from this planet. It's not about saving the planet. The planet will be orbiting the sun long after we're gone. The question is, will a thriving human society still be on the planet? And if it isn't, then there will be no economy. There will be no industry, there will be no corporate profits, there will be no quarterly returns, there will be nothing. There is no profit on a dead planet. So it is in every corporation's interest, if they can get their head out of their quarterly returns, to look at, do you plan to be around 10 years from now? And if so, here's what you have to do to make sure you're there. So corporations have a huge role to play, but they are placed within a structure that de-incentivizes the right thing.
It de-incentivizes it because of the time focus, over short term versus long, but bigger picture, it de-incentivizes it because our entire economic system was massively poorly designed. We have an economic system that assumes there's always more to go in, so there's no value in what's going in. And it assumes that whatever we produce in terms of waste, pollution or garbage can be put far away. And we haven't lived on a planet like that forever. The Romans had sewage issues for goodness sakes! So our economic system was not designed for a round planet. And that brings us right back full circle to the importance of communication and framing. The truth is not self-evident. People have to make that head to heart to hands connection. You can't just toss out the data, that isn't going to cut it. You have to show them why they're the perfect person to care, and in fact, who they already are is the perfect person to care. And caring about this issue, and even more, supporting and taking and participating in action---whether it's with their family, their school, their church, where they work---it actually makes them a more genuine and authentic version of who they already are. If that's what we believe, then that's what's going to power our action. And that is why communication is like the first domino that knocks over a lot of the other dominoes in that long chain that will eventually lead us to that better future.
Ted Roosevelt V:
As I think about other tools that one might use, we had Daniel Levitin on the show recently, and he's a neuroscientist that's focused on the power of music. And I'm curious because music plays such an important role in organized religion, plays such an important role for humans, and to do that thing that you are so focused on, which is connecting the head to the heart, he said, music can open your heart to an idea that your mind isn't ready to accept. It can open your heart to the idea of peace, for example, or resolving an argument. I'm wondering if you've spent any time thinking about or using music as a tool for your messaging.
Katharine Hayhoe:
Yes. In fact, I am a huge fan and supporter of the way that creative arts in general can help communicate this issue because you're right, they go straight to the heart. Music and sports I think are often equalizers. The same people who are very divided on issues of politics or climate or others, they could be rooting for the same sports team, or they could be enjoying the same music. And so not only in the music itself, but also the people who generate it, who are respected figures in those fields, I think are really untapped potential spokespeople. And so a couple of weeks ago, Talking Climate newsletter, we had a music themed issue. And I talked about how Coldplay is the first band to produce its own carbon footprint sustainability report, and they actually reduced their carbon emissions for their tour by something like 58%.
There's the potential to communicate in visual ways, in auditory ways, in emotional ways, and we need all those people on board. We need them more than ever. We don't need the dystopian novels where everything falls apart and there's a small group of humans left. We need people who are being affected but can actually overcome that to help create something better. And Christiana Figueres, after she finished the Paris Agreement, she wrote this amazing book called The Future We Choose. Not fiction, but she just painted what the world would look like if we did or didn't tackle climate change. And it was just such an inspiring vision. I feel like we need so much more of that in our lives.
Ted Roosevelt V:
There's no question. And we had her on the podcast as well, and her focus was very similar to yours, which was a real focus on optimism. I noticed on your website you have a quote very prominently, maybe the third paragraph in your bio from John Holdren who's one of my favorites, that says, "we basically have three choices, mitigation, adaptation, and suffering. We're going to do some of each. The question is what mix is it going to be? The more mitigation we do, the less adaptation will be required and the less suffering there will be."
Katharine Hayhoe:
I love that you caught that. To me, when I first heard John say that---and of course John is a very eminent senior physicist, science advisor to President Obama---when he first said that, that was the first time I had heard another scientist say a word that scientists don't say: suffering. That's a word that I heard as a Christian. And in the Bible it talks about how humans were made in God's image to "radah" every living thing on the earth, the Hebrew word "radah." And later in the Bible it's used in terms of caring for the needy and the suffering. Averting suffering is why I became a climate scientist. And so to hear John Holdren actually say that was just so--- it resonated so strongly with me. And then the other thing I like about that quote is that, when people get worried, as so many people are about climate change, they often tend to latch onto, "if everybody did X, we could just fix it." Scientifically, I know there is no one silver bullet that can fix the whole thing and the time has passed where we can only reduce our emissions.
We also have to adapt too. I think of it like a swimming pool: if the atmosphere is the swimming pool and the level of water in the pool is the level of heat trapping gases in the atmosphere, before the industrial Revolution, our toes could touch the ground, but we stuck a giant hose in the pool and we've been turning the hose up every year, so we have to turn off the hose. That's mitigation. We have to make the drain bigger: that's investing in nature to take carbon out of the atmosphere, draw down. But then we also have to learn how to swim and help others swim and stay afloat. That's adaptation and resilience, because their toes can't touch the ground anymore. So I feel like John's quote really encapsulated what we have to do and why we're doing it in just one pithy sentence.
Ted Roosevelt V:
Katharine, I could talk to you for another hour and a half here easily, and I have about 18 other questions I want to ask you just on the top of my head, but I want to be mindful of your time, and there is one question that we end every podcast with: the title of the podcast is Good Citizen, and we ask everybody, what is it to be a good citizen?
Katharine Hayhoe:
To me, being a good citizen is loving your neighbor. And today there is no way to love our global neighbor without acknowledging that the barrier of the climate crisis and the biodiversity crisis as well, they come from the same roots. Those are the barriers that stand between all of us and a better future.
Ted Roosevelt V:
I love it. Katharine, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us today. It's been an absolute joy.
Katharine Hayhoe:
Oh, likewise. Let's just do it again.
Ted Roosevelt V:
Let's do it again.
Katharine, I'm so glad we got to have this conversation. And thank you again for sharing your time. You are so incredibly knowledgeable, but just as important, you care so deeply and I wish you continued success. Listeners, in the spirit of connecting the head to the heart to the hands, please share this episode with your friends and family. Good Citizen is produced by the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in collaboration with the Future of Storytelling and Charts & Leisure. You can learn more about TR's upcoming presidential library at trlibrary.com.