Knowing that something disastrous is about to happen, but no one is listening to you despite the mounting evidence: It's incredibly frustrating and sadly a reality for many climate scientists who have been warning us for decades. So, a quick question for you as a climate scientist. Why don't people like to listen to a scientist who warn us?
F: Well, actually in the past they used to. So in 1990 when you go back within 2 years we got a climate convention. So in the past scientists were listened to but now you have the rise of misinformation and disinformation. You have denial delay and you have slap litigation and that creates an impact on public.
All right. Well very clear. I'm very interested to dive into this topic. Can't wait to hear more about it. We'll be discussing this topic today in response to the 2021 film Don't Look Up. welcome to Net, the University of Amsterdam's podcast in which we examine films and series from a scientific perspective. Today we have a guest who can tell us all about this, Professor Geoja Gupta, a globally respected climate expert and researcher. Welcome. great to have you here. and of course also present my co-host, philosopher Petal Febec. Petal, we watched this film. What struck you and in the conversation with our guest today, what is something you would like to focus on and what question would you like to see answered?
-It's a fascinating film. I think because you can hardly believe that people do not listen to the scientists who really know that there will be a disaster.
So I think for me the conversation here would be helpful if we find out what the best ways would be for scientists to get engaged in forms of politics. How far should we go? Should we become activist or not? Or should we address a different audience than we do now? What is the best way to be society engaged if we know that bad things are going to happen and people don't listen?
Yeah. All right. Well, hopefully we'll know a little bit more after the end of this podcast recording. before we discuss the film and its underlying message.
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When we finish a project, we send a policy brief but we can't wine and dine the policy makers whereas lobbyists have a different agenda, different budget, different skills in networking and they're all the time over there lobbying.
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Here is a brief summary for the people who haven't seen the movie. Don't look up. It's about two astronomers who discover that a giant comet is on a collision course with Earth. They try to warn the world, but they are met with disbelief, political games, and media frenzy. And although the film is about a comet, it's really about climate change.
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And that's today's theme as well. How do you as a climate scientist get your message across to the public? Shita, as I mentioned earlier, the movie is actually about how we deal with scientific news about climate change. The similarities between this fictional comet in the movie and the climate crisis are striking. What similarities do you see?
Well, one of the biggest things I see is that the press doesn't like to repeat the same story. So when you come with more and more evidence, most of the press will not try to come up with that story. They don't go actually very much deeper in the story. The second thing you see is that there are various types of organizations in the press which either promote the narrative or they don't promote the narrative.
So if you take Fox News for example, it won't talk about climate change. So you do have two types of press in this story line. Also among scientists, you have scientists who talk about the scientific problem but you also have others who then question the problem, the skeptics and beyond the skeptics you also have certain economists who will come back and say it's just not affordable for all of us.
So in this cacophony amongst the scientific community itself it's quite difficult for the press to deal with us. The other thing is and to come back to the previous question, are we as scientists just sitting in our ivory towers and writing publications? Are we not going out onto the streets and telling people? And I would say that's not an activist role. That's just simply telling science to the public because the moment the other party convinces you that you are an activist, they're basically trying to say that you're not scientific. And so we have to be very careful with the words we use for ourselves.
The other thing is that in this world what you're seeing is in this film what you're seeing is that that there is a disregard for multilateralism. It's the United States is going to either rescue the world or let the world fall. But it's a pretty similar story at the international level where the US is now pretty much attacking multilateralism. Then of course you see the enormous faith in technology and in the private sector.
So it's called the brolyarchy where the politicians make deals with the major billionaires and then they try to solve the world's problems and that is a real problem over here because the techno optimism that you see here is based on an untried technology. It's not based on peer-reviewed technology and it's untried and it's very worrying and that is very close to what's happening in real life because we're going to do carbon capture and storage. We are going to do geoengineering.
We're going to do all kinds of things which we have never tried at the global scale and we are also going to go into overshoot. So we are going to go beyond 1.5° and come back at the end of the century as if the global climate is like a thermostat and you can change it. So there are many many stories over here that come in line with the real life situation but there is a difference.
The comet is no one's fault but climate change is the fault of our countries.
And the other problem over here is if they are able to deflect the comet it's quite cheap, whereas if we want to solve the climate problem, it won't be cheap in the next two two generations maybe next two decades but beyond that it will save a massive amount of money.
Yeah, it's interesting to make a parallel maybe also between the role of scientists in the film and the scientists at this moment regarding the whole topic of climate change. Because what you often see now in our society is that as soon as we try to bring in scientific knowledge into politics, we're being accused of doing politics rather than bringing science to it as as if scientists would then have their own kind of political interest and they're all seen as left-wing activists, etc.
So I really like what you said about not calling ourselves activists because then you put yourself in the wrong box in the box of the politicians rather than of the scientists. But is it avoidable that we are seen as activists as politicians? Yes, because we are doing political science, we are doing social science, anthropology, we're not just doing natural science and each of our sciences contributes something to the knowledge formation.
So I think it's very important for us to bring this point out that we are analyzing the politics of decision-making; it's not that we are actually participating in the politics.
So that's very important for us to do. And also what's very problematic is today is the the way in which denial has become extremely large through the process of social media. It becomes- a story becomes viral.
That's also what you see in the film that people would rather see some good news stuff than bad news and then the good news gets viral or the silly news gets viral or the face of the scientist gets distorted so that everybody can have a good laugh.
And that narrative about denial getting viral through social media is something we do not know how to fight because we as scientists should be actually saying the whole time this is not a fact. This is misuse. We need to come back and fight back. But we don't have the skills to fight back against misinformation and disinformation. And what you're also seeing is that NOS's and scientists are now suffering from SLAP.
SLAP is strategic litigation against public participation. You see right now that the United in the United States a judge has given more than $600 million judgment against Green Peace, effectively silencing Green Peace. And when I go to conferences on climate change, I am warned by people that we should actually get legal protection for what we are doing.
Right now, we have a paper submitted to my special issue from Cambridge University which has a one-page denial or disclaimer that they are not going to be legally held liable for what they're writing in that paper. And this is this new world we are moving into and that we don't know how to deal with that.
The other thing is that when we finish a project, we send a policy brief but we can't wine and dine the policy makers whereas lobbyists have a different agenda, different budget, different skills in networking and they're all the time over there lobbing whereas we just send off an email and we think then it's done. We don't have the resources and the time and this is also very very problematic for us.
So in many ways we have a challenge but I think if I may say one last point over here which comes back to your earlier point about science and politics.
politics is in science also we pick a particular discursive starting point.
So in my view, if you're talking to a neoliberal capitalist, they basically believe in individual freedom. They believe in free markets, deregulation, small states. But a problem like climate change requires collective action. It may require some collective sacrifice now for collective gains in the future.
It requires markets that are controlled. It requires a state that can regulate but also is capable of checks and balances. and it requires so and it requires more regulation. So almost all the stories that we're talking about within the climate change narrative are not compatible with a neoliberal capitalist approach. Yeah. So all the examples that you now give seem to be examples of the impossibility almost for scientists to be heard in society and you say we don't know how to do that better etc. So does that maybe also show that we need to put our energy also there that we should learn how to bring our story in a new way to politicians to society in the media because the old story that we know how things are because we are scientists and we know things better than the public doesn't work anymore.
No because within the scientific community we are arguing with each other. So if you have scientists in the scientific community that are in a neoliberal capitalist frame then they are techno optimists. They want new technologies to solve the problem or they're thinking about scenarios which will give some space for countries. So even their solutions are different from the solutions of other scientists who are arguing collective action is different or that justice requires a different perspective.
So first of all we as scientists are arguing with each other.
Secondly, a number of our scientific community is being financed by the fossil fuel sector. I'm not saying within our university, but across universities. We have universities worldwide that are still training people to work in the fossil fuel sector. So, in fact, in some ways, our universities do not have a mainstreamed approach about how climate change should be solved. So, we are amongst ourselves fighting with each other when we are communicating to the to the journalists. And then the journalists pick those of us who are in the mode or those of us who they feel is more in line with the view of that newspaper.
So that's one part.
The second part is how do we make our story actionable? How can we help equip newspapers and the public to do certain activities and that requires us to go not from a purely critical mode but to also have solutions for the public. So this requires a different way of thinking. Yes, it does. and what you described the the the incompatibility of what we want to achieve and the well the situation we are faced with it it paints a very bleak picture and I can imagine it it can make you feel powerless or frustrated how do you deal with that it's maybe a more personal question but that's something that I wonder about I don't think we have a choice because if you give up it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy so you have to keep pushing and what I do know is that technology cannot solve the problem overnight but consumer behavior can and co shows us co shows that if you have a leader and leaders worldwide who have a clear idea what happens you can change the behavior of people all over the world and that you can do overnight over one day two days three days and that is something that gives me hope and this whole narrative that we have to focus on future technologies to solve the problemI've been hearing that since 1989. But the situation maybe also shows that same problem with the relation between science and politics.
And so during co all the measures that the governments took also resulted in a lot of critique on scientists that they would actually have hidden interest actually and and actually and that they would somehow be trying to impose their own leftist agenda impose on our society. That that reaction came not immediately that came a little bit later. So the whole the fear of vaccinations that came a little later. Conspiracy theory did not arise immediately to the extent that conspiracy theory arose.
It arose in the United States and then it moved from there to other parts of the world. We are seeing that also today that disinformation mostly starts in the US and then via the UK it comes into Europe and it also goes to other parts of the world. So we have to be very careful about that.
But there are lessons learned from COVID that we could also apply now. So that's also important in this process that we try to do that. All right. Very clear. I want to go back to the movie a bit. what you see is that in this movie you see how political and economical interest overshadow science. you have a lot of experience with yeah climate negotiations in the UN or IPCC. have yeah have you seen this happen in real life climate negotiations that it is overshadowed by these two factors so I think what's important to say for example in IPCC is that the structure of the report is predetermined by a group of people and then you cannot diverge from that so I was once in a chapter on on international cooperation and we were just asked to work on market mechanisms and there was no possibility to squeeze in other kinds of stories. The other thing is that you have to site peer-reviewed papers. But legal papers are often not in peer-reviewed journals. So it's difficult to site that kind of science and that makes it complicated. in the in the UN right now I have an independent position. So I can write whatever I want. So there you do have some freedom. Maybe nobody reads it.
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We are seeing today that disinformation mostly starts in the US and then via the UK it comes into Europe and it also goes to other parts of the world. So we have to be very careful about that.
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That's a different story. But to go back to science, what is science? For me science is across all disciplines whether it's history, philosophy, social science or natural science. And then within that science there are economists who will argue that it's too expensive, it's not viable.
And when you look at the politics of 1.5 and one degree, you will find that a lot of it comes from the scientific community itself. But those are a particular group of economists who then argue it's not feasible. And then you have other groups of economists who will argue it is feasible. The question is which group gets more attention from policy makers and that's ditto for the politics.
But to go a little bit further, if you look at the last conference of the parties, there were 1,600 fossil fuel lobbyists present and at the end the word fossil fuel doesn't show up in the final document. I don't know if there's a direct relationship that the lobbyists made sure that the word didn't come in or the lobbyists worked via the government or the lobbyists offered money or the lobbyists threatened. I have no idea. But you see that 1,600 people were there and the word fossil fuel is not there. So there is a politics taking place there. Yeah, definitely. Definitely. Yeah. So, I know that in your work you focus a lot on justice from the idea that actually well the the cost and the benefits of what's happening with the planet at the moment are unequally distributed. So maybe can you say a bit more about that so that then we can maybe also link you to the movie? All right. So basically we have four blocks in our justice story and the first block is that politically feasible ideas are generally incremental and that's not going to address the driving causes of climate change or inequality.
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At the last conference of the parties, there were 1,600 fossil fuel lobbyists present and at the end the word fossil fuel doesn't show up in the final document.
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So you have to look at something that is structural and that is not always feasible or economically viable in the short term and that's the first one. The second one is your in the first block sorry you also have recognition justice. So it's not just about us. It's about the people in the Pacific who are being whose houses are being threatened because of storms. Epistemic justice it's not about some ways of knowing but it's also about different knowledge systems and how do you look at it and data justice is about how most of us have data which is relevant for the north but not for the global south. So that's the first block. The second block is that when we are talking about what level what temperature level is just then we need to do a balance between interspecies justice intergenerational and intragenerational and this was never just discussed in the climate change negotiations. The third part is procedural justice access to information not disinformation access to decision making civic space so that your students don't get arrested when they go and protest based on science and access to courts. and the last one is substantive justice which is based on all this how do we ensure that people have access to basic needs and how do we allocate the remaining carbon budget which is very which is zero in two years amongst countries and people how do we allocate responsibilities and liability for harm caused so that's the story of earth system justice and climate system justice yes I see and it entails actually also that we need to to act maybe in a different way than we are doing Now I mean in the movie you see big attempts of involving a company that might have the power to destroy the comet that's coming to earth and then everything would be solved and so such an easy solution of course brings a lot of inequalities as well and in in the end you also see the inequality because the people who have the power manage to save their own lives and to get in a freezer and to come back to life later which will end in a nasty way anyway. spoiler but can we learn something from from that and so there is no easy solution for the problems that we are facing now but what would be ways to enact more justice in the current situation well in the in the film for example you see three scenarios there's a scenario in which the US is going to solve the problem alone and rescue the world and and in theory they could have solved the problem. the second scenario is that another group of actors in the world Russia, China etc that they take over and they solve the problem. And then the third scenario which is the final which is the one that they chose is that they try trust a technocrat a technology expert to use untried technologies to solve the problem and then of course everybody dies except that they have an escape plan for the rich people and I think that's quite similar to real life in some ways
because I think a lot of the top billionaires in the world think that they can escape that they won't have to face the major serious impacts of climate change that they can somehow sit in a trouble and escape. And so that's why they're less worried than the rest of us. but I think the most important problem with the film is that there is no multilateral discussion about how to solve the problem. It's just within a closed room within a few people, even without telling the press what's happening. So there is no real procedural justice. There's no access to information for the public in a proper way. There's no access to civic space. there's no access to going to a court to sue the government because you don't know what you're going to sue the government. So procedural justice is completely absent in that film. If you talk about the the story line of ideal versus transmitter, they're all focusing on how do we make money and the frame is the marketbased approach. So initially the asteroid is the enemy and then the asteroid becomes the friend because the a sorry the comet becomes the friend because the comet will make you rich and it will make one man rich or a few people rich. And you see that whole story is based on political feasibility plus that the cuddling up between the president and the the technocrat and that in itself is not recognition justice because it's not taking into account what will happen if it goes wrong to other people of the world.
It doesn't take into account other ways of knowing because basically it's just taking a neoliberal capitalist approach and it doesn't take into account other stories. So it breaches the first story line and the second story line it doesn't hard it hardly talks about other species on the earth and that humans are then going to sacrifice a whole bunch of species and ecosystems.
So there's no interspecies justice.
There's no intergenerational justice.
There's no intragenerational justice.
So on the justice front the film fails completely. But I think that is the point of the film because the point of the film is we all die. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. There's I mean one of the other lines that for me has a parallel to the current discussion about climate change is the technological fix in the solutions and we already touched a little bit about this earlier. But there are people who say governments fail to do anything. so the temperature is raising and we have been trying for such a long time. Why shouldn't the engineers solve the problem? Why shouldn't we dim the sun somehow in order to combat the whole fl of climate change? I think you already said that you don't believe in that solution. in the movie actually it becomes quite likely that that might be the only real solution. But can you explain once more why you do not believe in the technical solution and you still believe in a political solution? I'll tell you why. because in the start of the whole negotiation process in 1990 there was also this idea that maybe we can do some kind of offsetting and so we can and we have now 35 years of offset plans which did not really work effectively. so there is a history of the last 35 years which shows there's a problem. The second reason is that we are talking about let's say as the most successful story line we're talking about electric cars but the problem is if you do electric cars for everybody you still come into a huge problem in terms of resources and pollution and of course all these batteries that will be dumped afterwards will cause a next generation problem. So in fact we should be talking about better public transport shared transport and most cars are anyway parked for 95% of the time. So the even when you talk about a technological solution, you need a political frame for that technological solution. The other reason why there's a problem is let's take the fossil fuel sector. They're arguing that we will take the carbon out of the se out of the air and we will do somehow carbon capture and storage. Okay. Now the problem is it the technology exists. So why are they not doing it? And if they can do it, this means the price at the petrol pump will go up. So basically they don't want they don't want you to pay more because then you won't buy their technology. So they're keeping the price low for the public and then they're postponing the action in the hope that some future generation is going to pay for it. I don't believe that they're going to pay for it in the future. So a lot of these technologies that they're pushing it's just a way to continue business as usual. And anyway any technology you deploy takes a lot of time. It is the political action of people around the world and to take action. The carbon budget is zero in two to three years. I I I I think I completely understand what you say and I'm also not in favor of a technical solution. But I also still find it hard to believe in a political solution especially given all the things that you say now. And so there are people who say we simply cannot afford not to invest now in technologies to to to dim the sun or to do something else to they say it's cheaper also they say it will be much cheaper if they do solar geoengineering and that they can even flood the oceans with algae and then the algae will eat the CO2. There are all these different proposals that have come up. The question is whether that is going to work in time. The question is whether it's going to work the way we think it. In fact, I think some of those geoengineering solutions are very similar to the solution proposed by the technocrat in the film in the movie. That's why I'm asking. Yeah, they're untried story lines and it's very much a delay tactic. But I there's also the idea that people think if we give hope we might come to it. But you know going back to co at that moment we got all the governments together saying the same thing. If he had not done that, maybe the COVID problem today would have been much much more serious than it currently is. So it did try to solve some problems even though after that we get a whole narrative. Yeah. And what I'm wondering then because co was a very acute situation there was a large danger and it forced governments to take action. does in your opinion does it also mean it has to get worse before it gets better? The question is are we have we lost all idea of what is worse and what is better. In the Netherlands alone we know that 60% of the houses in the free sector are exposed to foundations that will have damage. It's going to be very expensive for those people. So okay maybe they can come together and ask the government to fund it. I don't know. But in the rest of the world we are seeing massive damage. So it's going to cause a huge problem to the entire value chain of business. Either the storm will mean that there is no product that can go into your value chain or it is too hot and people fall sick and labor can't function. The value chain of business will survive. A country like the Netherlands depends on trade. So if that value chain collapses, we will suffer in the Netherlands. So I think there's a a different reason. I heard it as a a statement made by somebody who did not want to be cited that the Netherlands does not and many European countries does do not want to tell their own public about the damage that they can face and how much it's going to cost because we don't want to lose our AAA rating in for investors and that was a reason why to to keep everybody calm over here. But I think this is a really big problem. It's also how we tell the narrative to the public and that's not happening and that's that's a reason. that if you watch the film Uni which I watched last night which in the HEG that's a film about these students in the Pacific who then go to class and hear about climate change they see their houses going getting damaged and then they combine themselves they go to the co the conference of parties they go to the UN general assembly they get 90 votes to go to the international court of the justice in the H and then they finally they build up this whole mood to demand justice over there I'm telling my students why don't you write letters to the parliament. Yeah.
But somehow they feel that it's a little bit too far for them. And those students over there from their with their professors, they were able to come all the way to the Hey, we could have done it too but somehow yeah this takes a discussion indeed back to the question what can we as scientists as academics do right? So writing letters to parliament could help having a convincing story in the media could help. It appears to be very hard.
Is there a lesson that you have learned about this over the past years? Yeah, I think that the green deal was possible because of the Fridays for Fridays for future Fridays for future and the Fridays for future movement sort of slowly disappeared and we need that movement. In fact, if the university students would say every Friday morning, you know, we are going to hit make some noise or do something for 10 minutes across Netherlands, of course, people will hear us.
But the problem is that somehow that energy has dissipated.
But I think the only way to fight big power is through social movements and through scientists and all of us getting together. But we do have to do something. At at the beginning you you said that you're hesitant to call scientists activistic because then you're being pushed into a political role rather than a scientific role. But what you say now actually does make scientists activist. It makes the students activists.
So my argument is that what we want to do is to make our students not consumers but clients. They're not just consuming know sorry citizens. They're not just consuming knowledge. They're citizens in the street. For myself also, I feel myself as a researcher, but I'm also a citizen. So, as a citizen, I want to change things in society and I'm using my science to do that. So, I'm not going to do something that is violent, but I am going to try and spend my time to convince people that there's a problem. And I think this is also true for all the CEOs I meet or the business people or government officials. All of them tell me this is my mandate. I can't do what you're telling me to do because I can't go beyond my mandate. But that's your mandate as a professional. But what about your role as a citizen? So I think that's very important and we need to mobilize our students. Yes. Very clear. All right. We've spoken a lot about your research on climate change what you can do as scientist about it.
I still have one final question and you briefly touched upon it as well because after well we were talking about the movie. how do you look at this movie? Do you think it has a realistic depiction of the role of scientist in an upcoming crisis where nobody wants to listen to them?
[KE: Oh my God we have arrived and the USA has turned into the nation of Idiocracy]
Well the film makes fun of everybody. So the scientist the major scientist is a bit tongue tied and not very articulate. The young PhD is hysterical. So they make fun of everybody even the journalist is a bit awkward. So they make fun of all of the people in the film.
But what I think is really interesting is the message I get from it is the US cannot go it alone. You cannot depend on the US. It has to be multilateral. I think that's very important and I think the story line that you have to behave wait on technology and that technology will solve it. I don't think that's going to work. I think for us we really have to take action in the next few years and that requires a different kind of approach and I think the fact that at the end of the film they use the narrative that the comet hits the earth and everybody dies except for the few people who've been able to create a Noah's arc situation for themselves and escape and of course they went without the species there were no two by twos but the most important point over there is that the difference between the comet And climate is that the comet hits the world and it's over. With the climate, we are like the frog that's getting slowly cooked. And the asteroid metaphor tries to wake us up through shortening the time span of destruction. And I think that's the strength of the film. All right, Paul. at the beginning of this recording, you had a few questions regarding the subject. Have they been answered? I think they they have.
I mean my main question was what would be a good way for us scientists to engage in politics and asked should we become activistic or should we do something else. I think the clear answer is no we should not become activistic in order to keep our role as academics pure and somehow reliable but we should go onto this go everywhere and speak. Exactly. Exactly. So what we should do is to tell the story at all places where we can do that also in parliament as academics not as activists and leave the activism to our students if we can and then to keep telling the story it means that we also should develop maybe new narratives new forms to do that keep engaging as academic citizens in the whole problem of climate change. Yes. Well that's a great summary. everybody listening, this was Net E. thanks to Yoshida Duta and of course my co-host Peter Palake. subscribe in your podcast app for new episodes and see you next time. Thanks for listening. ***https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sGt8f6qohg
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[KE: Everything scientists predicted about global warming/ climate change since the 1970s is coming true, only faster]
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