Hey, thanks for listening.

This is Ross Kenyon.

I'm the host of Reversing Climate Change, the podcast you are listening to right at this very moment.

Before we get into the bulk of today's show, I'd love to tell you about our sponsors, Absolute Climate and Philip Lee LLP.

I've made great radio with both of them.

They should be familiar to you if you listen to this show, but I want to tell you about why you should learn a little bit more.

The first sponsor is Absolute Climate.

I did a show with their founder Peter Miner few months back and a lot of people love that show.

I was asking a question of can registries design their own methodologies for carbon markets without it being a conflict of interest?

An absolute climate's thesis is no, they shouldn't be in the business of doing that.

We actually need to disintegrate functionality within carbon markets even further.

They are literally the only independent standards body for carbon removal that exists.

Their name is very well chosen.

I.

Think they are some of the most aggressively idealistic people within carbon removal.

It's come up on reversing climate change so many times about how and why there's tension between commercial teams and science teams within carbon markets.

There's some fundamental tension between the rules of running a business.

Or I should say the rules.

Of running a profitable.

Business is maybe a better way to put that.

And climate impact.

And I think Absolute is one of those companies that.

At least from my experience of what I know of them over there, I think they're going to be some of the staunchest holdouts.

Just trying to make sure that there can be a justified true belief that a TON purchase is a TON truly.

Removed.

They're betting big on not compromising.

It's a bold strategy.

I respect the absolute hell out of that.

Absolute is very much doing things their own way and they stand out to me and I will never mistake them in a lineup.

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I really am endlessly fascinated by what they're doing.

And that's also true of our other sponsor, Philip Lee LLP.

In fact, I told him to pitch me on some weirder legal shows.

I really like doing shows about the law.

I think the law is such a fascinating.

Part of our.

Shared social life, It structures so much of it.

It's badly understood by most people.

Just structuring deals within carbon removal is hard.

I'm talking grown up deals here, like when you're trying to put together an enormous package, complicated structuring, a lot of money, changing hands.

The stakes are high.

You really do need a good lawyer.

I'm sorry to tell you that if you are a startup out there in carbon removal, you're going to probably pay a fair amount of money to lawyers.

There's just no way around it.

Your choice is basically do you get a bad lawyer or a good lawyer?

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Well, one Ryan Covington and I did a very fun show about how basically no one except for an elite few really know what bankability and project finance even mean.

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If you'd like to go listen to that show, it's awesome and it's LinkedIn, the show notes and also we end up talking about Ernest Hemingway for him not.

To so it keeps with the tradition.

Of reversing climate change.

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They put it three years in a row, 2023-2024 and 2025.

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You really make this so that it's something that in a busy life with lots of competing priorities.

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Coming back and making more Reversing Climate Change.

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And now here is the show.

Hey, out there.

Thanks for listening.

This is Ross Kenyon.

I'm the host of this podcast, which is called Reversing Climate Change.

Hey, here's a fun piece of news that will anchor this show for the last unit of time.

I'm not even sure how long at this point.

I've been doing a fellowship with Leichen Ventures, which has been a lot of fun.

They're a venture capital firm, a new one focused on a number of different sectors.

And I've been thinking quite heavily about adaptation and resilience investment and how to think about deals of that nature.

So I've been, you know, I come from carbon removal.

That's where I cut my teeth.

I'm still very, very passionate about carbon removal, but I'm also thinking a lot more about adaptation and resilience now, and I suspect you'll probably see some of the shows that get programmed that will go in that direction.

That being said, there's a lot of adaptation topics that have come up on the show numerous times, so in some ways it's probably not as big of a change as it sounds like.

But today's show is absolutely an adaptation show and I'm going to tell you all about it.

First though, before we go down that path, please allow me to request of you to open up your podcast app and give Reversing Climate Change a five star rating and whichever app that you.

Use if you use Apple.

Podcasts, you can also write a quick review and you could just say this show is great.

I love it.

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Open it up right now and give it five stars and that would be terrific.

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Also, if you're a super fan, $5 a month gets you access to bonus content that no one else gets.

It's only for a paid subscribers.

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And that would be wonderful.

But also, hey, it's not not strictly necessary.

Thanks for just coming and listening and spending time with me and my brain and the people that I think are interesting.

I'm grateful to you even for that alone.

OK, so this show today Susanna Fisher who wrote Sink or swim, how the world needs to adapt to a changing climate.

But the title like that, how could I not be interested?

Susanna is a long time researcher deeply involved in a climate politics has been focused on adaptation.

For a long time.

I think adaptation, at least within the climate tech spaces I've been working in for better part of a decade.

Was a bit of a.

Backwater for a long time.

That's probably unfair.

It probably represents just my orientation where I was focused, but it felt like adaptation wasn't as prominent when things were going better, when it felt like we were making progress, even during the the first Trump administration and the Biden administration just felt like there was momentum behind us, you know, like things were we're going in the right direction and we were making progress on climate and mitigation was working.

Decarbonization was happening.

Carbon removal was starting to wake up and starting to get to scale.

And I was coming.

And now that just doesn't feel like it's happening to the same degree.

Maybe you feel some of that, maybe not.

That's that's just sort of where it's been from where I sit.

And as a result of that, the adaptation conversations are much more prominent.

Everything from physical infrastructure of how should we build cities, rebuild cities, protect them, abandoned them, questions like that, thinking about the spread of disease.

And I just saw, 10 minutes before I started recording, I just saw an article saying that mosquitoes have been found for the first time in Iceland.

And that's going to have an impact on adaptation.

That is something for adaptation to address.

We are going to have more mosquitoes, different kinds of mosquitoes in different parts of the world, and they've been previously.

And that will have major implications for public health.

And those are the kinds of questions that will need to be dealt with.

I'm really happy that Susanna was here to write this book, to frame this for me much better than it was previously, and also just to answer a lot of the questions that I have.

A good chunk of the start of the show is dealing with grief and thinking through what it means to have a fundamentally adaptationist orientation to climate.

That's been a bigger switch for me and I'm trying not to just shove all the feelings down and just get right to like, Oh well, how are we going to do personal cooling units?

You know, I'm trying to think.

Through what how it actually feels to be in a.

World where this technology is increasingly necessary.

That's that's a non trivial thing.

And thinking about the personal ethics when we start from a very small personal way of viewing this.

And what do you do for you and your family?

Given that the world is changing, the climate is changing, and you're trying to protect yourselves, Should you be thinking about immigration and going somewhere else?

Or do you see your role as being a helper in a place that is going to face changes and is going to be potentially hard up, but you want to be there with your community?

What actually do we owe one another and how should we conceive of our obligations, if you even believe such a thing exists?

And then we start zooming out to bigger questions of how do we determine which fish stocks belong to which country or which companies, given that they're also migrating as a result of climate change?

How do we avoid some of the worst problems that will result from the feedback loops that when there's mass immigration, how do we just avoid the sort of scarcity mentality that we have when if the world is getting hotter and where people can go is limited?

I think we're going to have to face a number of very difficult decisions about ethics, about governance, about food systems, about physical geography, about how we treat one another.

These questions are so big, and it's one of the reasons why I love podcasting about climate change because it truly is about everything.

Everything touches this.

Everything is touched by this.

It's all over the place.

And it's very useful to be thinking ahead, both for you personally, like how do you want to adapt?

What kind of plan can you start making now?

And also, what kind of person do you want to be when you're asked to adapt or when you're forced to adapt?

I think being able to grapple with this ahead of time and having a plan is a really important thing for determining which kind of person you want to be in the world.

What kind of legacy would you like to leave to the world when you're gone?

And how do we make sure that whatever does happen, we're able to best protect people that were best able to make sure that the worst effects of climate change and the downstream effects of it are mitigated as much as possible.

So thank you to Susanna Fisher for being on the show.

You should go pick up a copy of her book, Sink or Swim.

How the World needs to Adapt to a Changing Climate.

I really liked it.

I like this oriented around questions.

I think that's a really cool thing about a book and it gave me a lot to think about.

So thank you again.

Here is your show.

Suzanna, thank you for being here.

Thanks for the invitation.

I'm very happy to have you read your book.

Really enjoyed it, gave me a lot to think about.

And often times I ask authors, why this book?

There's so many books you could have written and yet you chose this one.

But I'm going to skip that one and ask you a different kind of question, which is how did it feel to write this book?

Wow.

Well, it felt a relief in some ways because this book was really ideas I've been thinking about for probably at least a decade.

And we're kind of building up.

And I was kind of putting bits together, you know, both from my academic research but also from my practical experience.

But I hadn't really had the time to kind of sit down and think it all through.

And it turns out that for me, I really think through writing.

So it was when I was kind of really had that time and space to write, you know, what's a pretty long document that I was really able to get my kind of thoughts in order and actually think, you know, what is my contribution here?

I've been feeling a bit dissatisfied with some of this for a long time and really wanted to make a kind of big argument around it.

And then finally, through having the discipline of having to sit down and produce that manuscript, I kind of was able to really clarify about what I thought and you know, what I wanted to communicate.

So yeah, in the end, to get it out and get finished feels like a huge relief.

I imagine some portion of the relief is publishing any book and finishing any large creative project is a relief.

I asked this because I, I sense a lot of grief in your writing.

It's, it's hard working on adaptation resilience.

And recently I haven't when I publish this, I'll probably have to announce at the same time, but I'm currently doing a fellowship at a new venture capital firm called Lycan Ventures.

And I'm focused very closely on adaptation and resilience investments and which of them are actually backable in a venture capacity.

And I've been dealing with a lot of feelings about this because I come from carbon removal, which I think tends to be a very optimistic type of mitigation where OK, we're going into overshoot, but we're going to be able to pull it back like the tech is happening.

Good things are so possible.

ANR work almost strikes me as we're not going to make it or we're going to be an overshoot longer than we really hoped.

And I'm having a lot of feelings of melancholy and, and, and staring into what a future looks like where people will are already placing bets on having profitable businesses that are based upon us failing to meet what we thought we were going to do for climate change.

And I know you have some of those feelings.

Maybe you feel more relief at this point.

Maybe you process them.

But I'm much earlier in this journey.

So every therapy I can get from you will save me on the therapy bills later.

What can you tell me that will help me process some of these feelings?

Well, I think firstly, it's important to not think about this as a binary, you know, that we've failed or that we haven't failed.

Like reducing greenhouse gas emissions and stopping burning fossil fuels is a kind of spectrum, isn't it?

And it's unfortunately, we're not looking to to reach the global average temperature target of 1.5°.

We're looking unfortunately at a rise above that.

But also every fraction of a degree counts.

So that's one of the things I hold on to is not only about a yes or a no with that side of the equation.

It's also about, particularly for adaptation, a kind of spectrum about can we stop it getting any worse.

And I think the answer is yes, we can always stop it getting worse.

So I think that's one of the things I try and hold on to, especially when, you know, we see some of these deadlines slipping and there's a kind of doom narrative in the media.

I think it's really hold on to the idea that things get more and more difficult.

So it's not as if, oh, at 2°, you know, we'll, we'll still be fine.

Then 2.5°, it's like every little bit counts.

So I think that's a really important thing to hold on to.

And I think the other thing I try and hold on to with adaptation is I think we can't think about it as giving up.

So yes, we have reached a situation where we have to adapt, and that is because we have failed on some aspects of mitigation.

But also adaptation can be something to allow people to think again about their futures.

And that's something I tried to think about in the book as well.

Because as you say, otherwise, it's like really tough because people's lives are getting worse.

And as much as we can put in investments, it's only really to get them back to where they were before.

And in some many places in the world, people's lives are incredibly difficult without climate change, just adding an extra stress.

And it just seems impossible.

So I think one of the ways you have to think about this is what could the additional climate risks also do?

Like what could they open up in terms of finance or opportunity or like possibility space for people to try and design new futures for themselves.

And I think it's maybe trying to think about it as that leverage point or that position or possibility of like a new politics can make it seem like a more hopeful space.

But of course, I also oscillate between, gosh, this is all looking really like tough and OK.

But anyway, we've got to roll up our sleeves and, you know, keep going.

A wise answer, one that I'm going to probably listen back to several times in dark moments trying to be like, OK, I need to keep this in mind because my mind often goes to OK.

If we can attribute increased environmental stressors and disasters to climate change and we're likely to have more of them.

The century that could create crop failure, droughts, floods.

This will lead to emigration from those places where those folks immigrate to will likely face some of the right wing populist backlash cycles that are seemingly just inherent of whatever latent xenophobia we just have in all of our hearts.

Like it triggers that.

And then whatever country it is, there's often a reaction or we're not able to incorporate these elements.

And I worry that rather than we're going to develop a more humane system that understands our responsibility and a a need to practice genuine hospitality and understanding and warmth towards our fellow humans and species and other species.

I should say.

I worry that worldwide just get nastier, smaller, hotter.

This is a chance for us to redesign the social contract and what it means to be a human or what it means to be another species.

Or are the odds good that we're just going to get more scarcity minded, more xenophobic, more protective of the little that we have?

That might be changing with climate change.

So I mean, I think you're kind of outlining two different futures there.

And yes, the one that you've obviously spent more time thinking about and you're worried about is what I would think of as the almost the sync scenario.

This is if we don't manage to put in place policies, incentives, regulation, social organizing and mobilization around different ways of doing things.

And yeah, it's a huge risk, what you say.

And obviously I see that too.

And we see what's happening around the world right now.

And the indications are that some of those triggers are being pulled and that people are responding by kind of putting down the borders and the shutters and and creating a kind of us and them.

And I think that's a real fear and it's something that we see and we have to hold on to.

But also I think we have to, in the kind of words of Christiana Figueres, who's always about stubborn optimism.

So, you know, the former executive secretary of the UNF Triple C is kind of saying, well, we have to really hold on to optimism.

And I think it's important not to be naive about optimism, but also to try and be what she calls gritty.

So, you know, yes, we have those fearful scenarios and it could play out that way, but what would it mean to play out differently and what do we need to do?

And so if we're thinking about migration, whether that's internal to a country or across a border, you know, what do we need to put in place so that places that are receiving people are not feeling put upon and that their services are massively, you know, under pressure and that they can't kind of cope with additional population.

So that there are things that we can do and examples that we see elsewhere where this has gone much better.

So I think we still have to think like what what does it take to do things differently and, and where is my place in those in that ecosystem to chip away a little bit at, you know, what might look better?

You just mentioned that there are places that have done this better than others.

What are those places?

Well, I mean, in terms of movement, you know, we see say countries in the Caribbean have a regional movement protocol.

So when they're hit by a hurricane, people, citizens can move from one country to another.

They can take their social protection benefits with them because obviously a huge problem is kind of the mobility of that type of support and suddenly you arrive somewhere without your your systems and everything.

So yeah, we, I mean, we see examples there, particularly around disasters.

Obviously more recently we've seen say a migration pact set up between Tuvalu and Australia to look at climate related migration for skilled, late skilled.

I think it's skilled workers anyway.

So I mean, we see these little pockets and you know, there've been political discussions other times about humanitarian visas or climate visas and they haven't gained traction.

But they are kind of policy ideas in the soup.

And I think, you know, in the context also of the ICJ ruling, which kind of put a much bigger emphasis on.

On states having to address the issues of climate change and taking responsibility, you know, these things just might gain traction.

And I think that the legal angle, it's 1 angle that that could go, but the other is seeing other, other policy examples from around the world and actually seeing that the long term benefits of that can far outweigh the short term political costs.

Man, I am such a downer because I'm OK.

So there's a part of your book, I think it's, I have it pulled up here that what did you say?

Oh, it's on page 29 and it says the good news is now that it's not very likely that we're headed towards a 4° or 5°C warming world.

The ship is turning slowly.

And this I know books take a long time to come out.

I've worked in, in publishing.

This is clearly, clearly written in a different US administration or.

Yes.

You can see that part, yeah.

And then even this, this past week, we had the International Maritime Organization say that they're not going to be dealing with emissions in the way that we were all really hoping for that in carbon removal climate multilateralism is not a popular move right now.

It's it's endangered.

What's changed?

Does this compromise some parts of the thesis of the book or is it just a temporary set back or I'm like, hear myself say these things.

And honestly, I don't like being in this role.

I like feeling more optimistic than this.

And, and I'm I'm having a hard time with it personally.

I mean, I think the economics of the transition is still in favour of what I wrote in the book that, you know, with renewables becoming much cheaper with the big push from China on solar in particular, that there is a kind of inevitable move towards that transition.

And yes, there are really unfortunate policy hiccups in place.

The the kind of shipping example being, you know, a really sad one because that looked like progress was being made and that would have been a really important step.

But I think if we take the bigger picture, the, that we are still heading in the right direction.

And I, I guess it's a question of pace.

So how quickly are we going to get there?

And I think this comes back to the earlier point that, you know, like speed does matter because if, if we're still heading in the right direction because of the economics of the energy sector, it it matters whether we get there sooner rather than later because of the damage that will be done in terms of, you know, loss and damages around the world and the adaptation and the limits we're going to face.

I'm able to take some comfort in what you said, that every fraction of a degree does actually matter.

And doesn't make.

A material difference for people that on the margin may or may not be suffering dependent upon the actions that are taken now or in the near future.

And that is something that can be encouraging.

If it was binary and we've either, we're either safe and no action is necessary, or we're doomed and no action is truly possible.

That doesn't leave a lot of it open.

But this thinking in terms of gradations I think is actually a very useful framing.

Yeah, and I've actually found that really helpful as I've thought through a lot of the arguments in the book and things that I've read in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, for example.

I think, you know, some of the ideas around like habitability, like where where are places in the world they're going to become impossible to live?

You know, I really increasingly understand that as a question as as not being such a hard limit as I had understood before, you know, that it being quite values driven in terms of where, where are people willing to live?

You know, what risks are they willing to bear?

What measures can we put in place to help them live there?

So I do think a lot of this is about kind of gradations and that and we can lessen the impacts and yeah, you know, there aren't as many hard limits as you might think.

I think I'd like to start at the personal level when we kind of already did, and then work our ways up to increasing levels of abstraction or ecology.

I imagine every person listening to this show has had the thought, or if not, we're going to put it in their brain right now, of thinking in terms of the decades of your life and where it makes sense to build a life.

Where is a safe place to raise a family?

How do you minimize the risks for your your children over time?

There's plenty of stories and research.

I did a show with Clayton Aldern where we talked about some of both current generational trauma from extreme weather events, but also the epigenetic legacy of those that can pass on through generations and how you want to minimize exposure to disaster, if you at all can.

So where do you choose to be?

But I've also been thinking as someone who is striving to be more humane and a good ancestor, if you will, or just a a good influence in my community.

I'm also not sure that my role is if I'm right about this and I and I end up moving my family someplace that is perceived to be safer than where I am in the United States, I might be removing myself from a place where I could add a lot more value.

I might be more imperiled.

I might be less safe for me, but maybe I, am I supposed to be as safe as possible?

Is that ethically how I should be thinking about myself and my family?

It feels like a failure of, of spiritual wisdom to just be like, well, I got out early and I'm good.

And how do you think about that for yourself?

How should people listening think about it?

I'm grappling with it.

I'm surely going to do another show about the the ethics of climate immigration on a personal level in the future.

I'm thinking about it a lot.

Please tell me what you think.

Yeah.

I mean, it's such a huge issue, isn't it?

Because there's what we experience personally as an individual and then how we think about our sense of community and what community we're actually part of.

And then of course, you know, So what we do in our professional lives and how the knowledge of that might influence, I think I mean, so for me personally, I, I live in what I'd say would be a fairly safe place in the UKI live in London and we're protected by the Thames Barrier.

So we have a, you know, quite serious infrastructure to prevent flooding.

I looked it up after you.

You mentioned it in the book.

It is really cool, yeah.

I mean, although you do read climate fiction about London being flooded and there being particular risks, you know, I'd say that we are in a fairly stable position right now.

And so in some ways these decisions, you know, haven't really come across our mind, I have to confess, because in fact, personally, I, I'm quite distant from some of these climate risks.

But we see media stories all the time now about the fact that the UK is going to be facing increasing risks from, for example, food, food prices because of our position within, you know, supply chain networks.

And if we were to experience any of the tipping points also, that could really shift because the UK would be really exposed to if some of the ocean currents and circulations move.

So although perhaps I feel a false sense of security now about where we're based, that could of course all change in the future.

Although I should say, you know, that when we thought about buying a house, we did look at the flood maps.

So at a personal level, you I'm, you know, you are looking at, is this at the bottom of a of a river?

What's that going to look like from an insurance perspective?

So you kind of are making micro level household decisions and also actually just say, I mean, extreme heat, it's becoming a a bigger thing in the UK, which might sound like a surprise to some listeners, but I guess if you're not used to it, right.

So our housing stock is very poor and our schools are not made to be ventilated.

So the kids, for example, will have days off school if it's too hot because they just can't keep the keep the places cool.

So yeah, I guess it's a rambling way of saying that kind of from an individual way, we're all kind of weighing up our own risks.

But I, I do really hear you about is it ethical to, to make a move away if your place is at high risk?

And we're like, what does that mean for others who can't move?

And also, what does it mean for the place that you moved to?

Because, you know, there's a bit of a risk of climate gentrification where people who have the resources, money and kind of flexible employment situation to do so move to the much safer places, make them more expensive, and then other people can't follow.

And yeah, but I can't really offer the answer to that except that we need to kind of weigh up every choice.

And it's so hard because of course, at the forefront of our minds is, is our own, our own nuclear family in all likelihood.

And balancing that with wider priorities both to a community and and to a wider country is is pretty tough.

It's a really tricky 1.

And it's not just about climate either.

This argument gets brought up in private insurance for healthcare.

It gets brought up for public schooling for the parents who are wealthier and or very engaged with their children's education will pull their kids out of the public school and send them to a better school.

But then you just don't have parents who are as engaged as otherwise might be, might improve the public school.

Or you have healthy people who opt for better insurance, but then they make fewer claims on the system, but then they're no longer there to pay into them.

And part if you're able to think collectively about it and abstract yourself out of it, you think this is clearly inefficient and probably the wrong way to dole out risk.

But also if you're the person whose kid has to go to a dangerous or inferior school when you have the option to otherwise it's hard to look apparent in the eye and tell them that they're a horrible person for for doing that.

I feel both of those things really strongly and it the positionality really changes how one might feel about it, which is a good indication that there's maybe multiple valid perspectives here.

I'm not trying to like cast a universal moral rule so much as try to figure out what kind of life I want to live and, and, and who I want to be in that world.

And I think previously I would have been like, well, pull, pull my kid out, like put them in the, put them in the best place for them.

And.

Everyone will go to hell, essentially, and I don't actually know that I want to feel that or be that as strongly as I once did.

I don't think that's, I don't think I'm very proud of that attitude.

Yeah.

But I think, as you say, when you look at it from the lens of your children or young people that, you know, it does kind of change your perspective.

And I think thinking about the future of my kids in the climate change world definitely brings it home in a way that thinking about it for me doesn't necessarily.

And maybe that's just a failure of imagination on my part because, you know, we will see lots of this within our lifetimes.

But it's it's just so hard to really to really feel that we're somehow feeling it for, for somebody or something whom you've got responsibility over makes it more poignant for me at least.

I think at some point you probably just enter a time in your life when you're thinking more about your own death and know that it is inevitable and knowing that you have to die sometime makes it easier to make decisions about.

Like, OK, am I?

Am I supposed to cravenly eke out as many years as possible in the safest place?

Or what if I could add a lot of value and help a lot of people being in a more dangerous place that might shorten it.

I think it as a younger person you might be attracted to that from romantic ideals.

But as you get older, mortality becomes more real.

I think even that calculus becomes more real and I'm more willing to think about it.

But when I add my own children into the mix, do I want to?

Do I need to drag them into my weird speculations about mortality and how to live life?

I don't know that that is also appropriate.

That changes things.

It sounds like maybe you're you're in a similar spot too, or adjacent to that.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Just it's a tricky intersection.

You didn't expect the interview to go this way, I don't think.

Yeah.

That's why I love talking about climate change, though, because it's never just as simple as well, do we need more sea walls?

Do we need personal cooling devices?

But that's part of it.

But I think that's kind of downstream from the bigger questions that, I mean, your book is is really nicely organized because it it asks questions and you pose them well.

But it doesn't seem like you're always telling people the exact way to slice every issue either.

Like how should we deal with with fish that are migrating in the oceans and maybe moving to different places?

Do you have the final say on the exactly the right way to do it?

I don't think you pretend to.

Well, Phew, that's a relief.

Yeah, yeah.

I don't either.

How do you think?

About that, I didn't set out to provide the answers and I think that's because, you know, I'm a strong believer that there are no right answers.

They're like incredibly complex political, but also have been talking value based decisions, right?

So it's about what people value and there needs to be a political contestation about that.

And I, you know, who am I to sit here in London and say this is right for the Pacific Islanders and their fisheries?

Like, absolutely, I do not have the answer, but what I'm trying to do is really open up the questions because I think the questions are quite invisible sometimes.

So if we can even see what's on the table, then people can start to think on what what might be the right way that we would want to address this in our place at this time.

Which of your hard adaptation questions do you think are the most invisible that we should bring up right now?

Well, I think the one on the role of the military before I started really researching around that, you know, and I've worked in adaptation for at least 15 years.

I hadn't really thought about it, I have to confess.

But it just, when I was reading much more widely across the literature and the kind of scholarship, it just like seems so apparent to me that, you know, the role of the Army is changing and we're using them in different ways.

And that could be beneficial, but it could also have some negative consequences.

But it's kind of, I think, not on the table.

So yeah, I think that's a really interesting one.

Coincidentally, this is totally by accident, but Aaron Sikorsky, who just wrote I'm a Change on the Battlefield, will be the episode right previous to yours.

Give it to her because she's written a whole book on it.

No, I think it's a fascinating one about the the missions that are changing, about how much disaster relief and preparedness militaries are being asked to do in addition to normal military duties.

It's a it's a really big question.

And also it's surprising to see how much they're already expected to do.

That is fairly invisible, I think, to most citizens.

Yeah.

And of course it's pragmatic, right?

You've got a, you've got a resource there.

It's got redundancy, but it's got redundancy for a reason.

So it can respond to a sudden unexpected threat.

So if you keep using it to respond to, you know, in the UK flooding often, then that has implications.

But also I think, you know, it's a question about do we want our disaster relief to be managed by the military?

Maybe we feel it's fine in some contexts, but in some contexts it really might not be.

And certain groups will, you know, not, not get the benefit of that.

So I think it raises a lot of questions.

In the United States, we have, well, the military is not typically supposed to be deployed in America, although that's been more common recently.

The one thing that I have seen people talk about is that the police in the United States don't actually have as robust a set of rules of engagements as militaries do operating abroad.

And the military's actually trained with a fair amount more discretion about the use of lethal force.

And it's possible that that could be on that good, but also you can also just take it out and have a Civilian Conservation Corps kind of approach that is non militarized, non weaponized, yeah.

Like a civil defense corps, but then obviously you'd have to pay for it.

So though you'd come up against whether that's how countries want to invest in their disaster planning?

I'll imagine the kinds of people that you would be able to recruit would would change.

I think a lot of people who joined the military join it because of the opportunities that are there or because they're they're very much invested in like that military culture.

They come from a fair family where there's heritage in there.

I don't think a lot of them are joining because they want to line up sandbags when it floods somewhere.

I think that's like a different kind of person almost.

And are you what?

They feel they signed up for yeah.

Yeah, they'll be like, what?

What the heck?

I want to be, you know, rocking a 50 caliber on top of a Humvee.

I don't want to be out here in the dirt or fighting a forest fire.

I'm not a firefighter now.

I somehow I'm a firefighter.

So I wonder how that might change.

Also good Aaron question.

So if you're listening and you missed that, just go back and listen to the Aaron show, which I also haven't recorded, which is a paradox of time.

I'm caught in a time blueprint.

Up.

But another another one which I think is really interesting, which maybe you haven't got an episode right before on, is also the nature angle.

So, you know, I was also kind of struck by this fact that we don't often talk in the adaptation world.

We don't talk so much about nature as we should.

And, you know, biodiversity has been very separate from the climate conversations.

But not only is nature a huge way to adapt to climate change, it's also, you know, we need to adapt nature in that species are moving up to the higher latitudes.

You know, they can't exist anymore in some of the places where they are.

And unless we support those kind of movements, we're going to have these mass extinctions.

So I think it's maybe a bit of an extension of how the adaptation concepts being used so far.

But if we think holistically, yeah, I think it's really important to think about how do we also adapt the natural world around us.

I remember reading stories about this.

I think I originally started hearing these stories from Elizabeth Kolbert talking about how like species on mountains have nowhere left to go.

Exactly.

They've right reached the edge of their adaptation point.

They've gone as cold as they can get.

Yeah, yeah.

And that's also happening at the latitudinal layer too.

Yeah, yeah.

And are they also just, I imagine there's just human built infrastructure that blocks them a lot of the time they just cannot move like they once might have.

In terms of yeah.

Exactly.

I mean, we don't have these in many places, these huge wild ranges anymore where animals can just move across where they need to.

And yeah, there, you know, there are efforts to build those kind of transboundary corridors.

But often, of course, you get kind of people, wildlife conflicts which have to be managed.

So it's.

And so for example, you know, rewilding has been something that has been also put forward as a potential strategy, but that's often full of conflict too, because the farmers don't necessarily like it.

You know, bring the Beavers.

That seems great.

They're really helping out with the kind of damming around the rivers.

But on the other hand, they're also apparently releasing methane and, you know, getting into people's crops, so.

I mean, I liked some of the research that I've seen of paying ranchers for livestock kill.

So if a, if a wolf outside of Yellowstone kills a cow or sheep or something like that, there's certain, under certain conditions, they're eligible to be recompense for that, which is great because it produces conflict or at least doesn't make it like cool, I, I locked out.

I'm glad the abstract Yellowstone environment is better, but I'm made more poor as a result.

I think that's a that's just like bound for conflict.

I think some of these things will probably require some amount of greasing of sympathies just like all right, like here, here's a payment.

You're going to have some Beavers and they might eat some of your crops sometimes, but on that.

Absolutely.

And I mean, we, we've seen that on the other side of the coin, right when we tried to be to stage out coal, for example, we've, we've used payments like in Germany, you know, they've set up great pensions and social benefits for coal miners to help them rescale and move over.

And it kind of gets rid of some of the resistance that you have to something new is to help the people who were benefited by the old system to kind of see what the new system could offer or at least compensate them for their loss.

I mean, or else the kind of resistance that you receive, especially, you know, something like the agricultural lobby is absolutely massive.

And, you know, fair enough.

They're having a pretty tough time in many countries producing foods under the global context and all the subsidies and everything.

So sure, they feel under pressure.

So, you know, we've got to think what are the incentives and regimes going to be that's going to bring them on board?

Because I mean, they're kind of, you know, it's a bit of a struggle in biodiversity, but in a few aspects of how we might adapt land.

It's often a question of how can we bring the farmers on board?

You have some line in the book that's near the end of it where it's just something like reforming agricultural subsidies is tricky business.

I was like understatement of the book, like circle, circle, circle.

Why are?

The tone, you know, I kind of maintain a moderate tone.

Classic British understatement.

Why?

Why is it so?

Hard to change things like that.

We have that here where had a conversation recently with someone who was criticizing environmentalists for ethanol.

I'm like, I don't think I know any environmentalists who even like ethanol.

I mean, they might work with biofuels to some extent for various other projects, but I don't think it would exist were it not for the AG lobby that just sort of has subsidies and making the best of it.

But I think pretty much everyone I know who's environmentally motivated, like yeah, we should probably just not do ethanol.

It cost more in energy than we get out of it and it's basically just a giveaway to farmers and it doesn't really make sense.

I spent, I think I said the same thing like 7 times and it still didn't get through like, well, environmentalists really love this.

I'm like, I work in this space.

I don't think I've ever heard anyone say anything nice about it.

And yet it's just stuck.

I don't think it's going anywhere, probably forever.

I don't think you could get get rid of it and stay in office, so I can't imagine what it's like in places like India where it seems like the politics of agriculture are much more close to the bone.

Not just will I keep the farm, but maybe I'll starve or be seriously endangered.

Tell me about why changing AG policy is is so difficult.

It's tricky.

Yes, we go.

Thank you.

OK, next topic.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, as you say, agriculture is so close to people's lives.

And I mean, depending on where people live, it's really like just a matter of kind of subsistence and literally how they're surviving versus more of an industrial enterprise and a business.

And I think in many places, it's become really, really tough over the years, you know, for a variety of reasons, of which climate is 1, but there are many others.

And, and so those places have often become, or those kind of groups have often become really strong political blocs pushing for their needs because they felt that they had to.

And I think, you know, it's important to come to adaptation with a bit of a lens of kind of empathy in that nobody's just trying to resist what's good for the planet because they're bloody minded.

Although we might take that argument in other places.

But right now, let's kind of take a generous lens and say, you know, farmers are having a really, really tough time in many places.

And so they just feel they can't take anything else on.

And also often the things that have been offered, you know, to try and support biodiversity, I think kind of with the European context have been like hugely bureaucratic and kind of, you know, the money's hardly been worth it.

So, you know, fair dues.

We have to design something better.

And in many cases it feels like the taking of away because we've got so many subsidies in place now that actually aren't really fit for purpose, but they've just built into how people have made their lives.

So to take something away is a really tough, tough option.

So like I said, I think it's it's kind of about, if we think about the comparison with energy being the just transition to move out from coal.

I feel like with agriculture, it's like, what is the just agricultural transition?

Like what, what payments do we need to make?

You know, what do we need to put in place the subsidies to incentivize this action, but in a way that farmers actually care about rather than what's been just, you know, not enough for them really in in the face of what they see.

But I also think that increasingly, you know, agricultural producers are feeling the cost of climate change.

They're feeling the escalating costs of insurance so that crops, the loss on the supply chains, the kind of risky nature of some of it.

So I think it is there'll be a push in the other direction as well.

And I think so, for example, in the in Europe, there was a big push by the kind of agricultural block against a restoration law, a kind of nature restoration law.

But actually when you looked at some of the things that people wanted or kind of agricultural blocks wanted, they also wanted things that were going to protect them from climate change and they wanted more support for droughts and floods.

So, you know, there's a lot I think that goes into the feeling of resistance, and some of it is actually things that addressing climate change could help with.

It seems that you're very well positioned to calm yourself emotionally, be able to change your language depending upon the audience you're speaking with, and maybe find some of those potential upsides without the bludgeons that the left uses sometimes on climate that are genuinely alienating to people who are maybe making agricultural income.

Is that, is that a way that you might identify?

Do you think you're good at something like?

That, I mean, I kind of think we have to build the coalition and that maybe, you know, we've created the agenda as being too small and it's been perceived increasingly to be elite.

And it has to build a broader based coalition because the kind of response we're going to need, not just on energy, but on adaptation is going to need, you know, a much wider group of people involved and feeling like it's their agenda and it matters to them.

So and a big part of my kind of philosophy is how do we get people on board to realize like the impacts of what's going to come, but also to kind of make it relevant to their daily lives and the challenges that they experience.

So it doesn't feel like some kind of high level, you know, green only agenda.

It's basically an agenda about how we live our lives and how communities around us live our lives and how we can make that work in the next 20 to 30 years.

I like this frame.

I think it's an especially productive 1 and I like it better as well more than the counter bludgeon of what if we just reopened coal plants and operated them at a loss just as a make work program for coal miners in the US even though no one actually wants coal energy for the most part in the US.

There's an economist I liked.

He once had a thought experiment where he said for the various dictators in the world for which we have intractable relations and just like cannot solve and persist generationally, what if we just gave them like a billion dollars in immunity from their past crimes and said, like, convert your country to A to a democracy and you can walk away and, you know, independently wealthy, you'll be fine.

And it offends our moral sensibility.

And there's also a cobra problem here too, of do you know that one?

Is that familiar to you?

No.

The British Raj in India offered, they're trying to get rid of cobras and they offered a like a head price for every cobra that was brought in.

So of course bread, bread cobras and sold them to the British Raj.

So it didn't actually result.

In it.

So like there is a, you might encourage more dictatorily behavior because there's a chance of a payoff in the future.

But so if you've just an order, the 2nd order effects of that for a second, you're like, it might offend our moral sensibilities.

But in the, the US especially, I think we have an attitude that may not be as common in other places that you chose your profession and that hopefully involve you making a risk determination for a lifetime of productivity that you were taking the risks of the upside and the downside of your like, you chose to be a software engineer.

It seemed like a great opportunity 20 years ago.

Now that's changing potentially with AI.

You didn't see that coming.

And too bad for you, you're now unemployed.

And we would, we would kind of say like, sorry, that's just the way that it is.

And maybe we do need to treat this more as a generalized insurance thing of we actually don't know when people are born who will be disabled or not.

And so it makes sense to treat that as just like it's a luck of the draw.

And it shouldn't be like on the family alone to take care of a family where it's just genetic lottery in that kind of way.

And maybe that's true of careers too.

Maybe someone chose to be a farmer, was born into that and that's just seemed best.

And it's changing now.

And we can't just say, well, like, sorry, I guess you need to sell your your farm and debt and like, you may not be able to retire.

Maybe we just need to think a lot of people are going to need to be paid off to do something that might just like feel better, be easier, be better for the planet in general.

It comes very unnaturally to Americans.

I don't know if it comes any more naturally to the to the British people or people in Europe, but it offends our moral sensibilities.

I think at a really core level to be like, you chose wrongly.

Here's $1,000,000 as your buy off.

You don't like it that much?

Yeah.

I mean, I guess the question is why you're doing it, you know, because if people can, you know, say with the software and AI example, if you've got highly skilled population there who, yeah, have made the wrong bet or, you know, translators being another one.

But you know, they can fairly easily switch over.

They've got a great skill set, you know, it's no problem for them.

And they're also kind of not holding anything back for the greater good as far as I know.

But if there is a software lobby, you know, we can discuss that.

I guess the issue of the kind of reskilling agenda or like the the supported move agenda for me is when that those kind of employment groups are like seriously blocking action that we need for the collective good.

So, you know, if if we really can't make progress on how we manage land in a biodiverse way, for example, because the agricultural blocks just won't allow it, then that for me is when there's a kind of collective case for, OK, well, we're going to have to, you know, pay out essentially to transition this over and to help those groups kind of see the bigger argument.

And yeah, and perhaps it does come easier from a more kind of state interventionist perspective, which is, you know, I guess what we're sitting over here on the on the European side of the fence.

And maybe we can try that first here and, you know, see how it works because I guess it's not like solutions are going to be rolled out globally.

So I guess it's going to be a situation as people are going to try something, you know, see what works, try a bit more lessons will be learned, hopefully.

So let's see.

A lot of these problems feel that they don't fit inside of most of the timelines that politicians work with.

Like, this might be some abstract generalizable good, but if you're up for election, this might just represent a tax hike.

Seemingly that's a giveaway to like a powerful lobby.

It's I don't know if it's good politics.

Yeah, that's the problem.

Yeah.

I think lots of adaptation is long term risk management.

It's not short term good politics.

And that's why we haven't really progressed so much.

I mean, yes, you're right.

On the one hand, the cost of something like that, but many other things as well, like preventing people from building along coastlines or, you know, stopping businesses going into floodplains, all of that doesn't look good.

We're at the same hand.

You're, you're arguing for affordable housing and, you know, business growth and the kind of stability of your town.

So yeah, I think one of the central questions I'm wondering in the book and, and in myself now in my future work is that how do we manage that, that short term political cost and that long term political and economic and societal gain?

Like at what point will those longer term, and I say longer term, but really I'd say like medium term now will, when will those benefits be able to win out?

And like, what are the conditions under which they'll win out?

Do you have?

Or a speculation, wild or otherwise.

Was that?

Do I have any speculation?

Well, I was just going to suggest maybe we should have longer term political cycles.

But then I thought, oh God, I don't actually know if that's a good idea.

I mean.

Yeah, might face its own problems, but.

Yes, yeah, Yeah.

I mean, you know, like other people have thought about this in terms of should we engage young people?

Should we have like advisory councils that kind of set the broader tone, you know, on these kind of issues?

And then the government is trying to kind of just deliver within.

So like in the UK, we have something called the Climate Change Committee and it's independent and it, it at least provides a kind of, it has a mandate to look back and report on how the government's doing.

So it's a, you know, way of verifying whether we're making progress that doesn't sit only with the political party of the day.

But you know, so saying their most recent report on our adaptation progress said we were making inadequate progress.

So we know we have the ratcheting mechanism is in place, but it's still not perfect.

I had thought this might be a good role for a non executive head of state like the UK has.

We're cannot the House of Windsor which I know King Charles is famously like long time environmentalist farming.

Like is this not a role for like longer term political leadership?

This faces its own dynamics as well.

But that's like that's the hope of a mock.

That's like the the probably the best like objective case for having this.

I think is longer time horizons and is.

It your case for the monarchy is it?

I I mean that and I think the tourism dollars is probably, probably all you've.

Got the rest of it just looks like the.

Cool.

Yeah, The tourism angle, yeah.

Yeah.

Is there is there a case to be made for environmental?

For moral leadership on their part, you know, like obviously Prince, now King Charles has played that role for a long time and now William is doing it as well with their Earth shop prize and all of that.

So I think they can kind of set a general tone, but I mean, ultimately they're obviously not political decision makers.

So that can only go so far.

I've also read that the rivalry for moral leadership, even between father and son on that is pretty tense.

So like, even having the prize, like, you're stealing Thunder from the king right now and you shouldn't be doing this.

I Yeah.

That's like, you know, more royal gossip than me.

Why do I by the way, I I don't know that that should be the case.

I probably read stories that are blocked at this end.

Oh, could be.

I've read a fair.

I don't know, I, I think, I think I got, I started watching the crown is what happened.

And then I fell down the rabbit hole and I'm like, oh, this is actually sordid and fascinating and bizarre.

And then I never came back out of it.

So I, I have hope.

So I feel like that is the thing that they they could do.

But maybe you're right, maybe it is at the level of persuasion.

I think there is something that feels when when royal activism does happen, it often has, I imagine people roll their eyes a little bit of being like, Oh yes, the environmental thing that you'd like to do given that you have so much money in all of your estates and I'm glad you do weird eco farming there.

But that's not real life.

That's not how we live.

I imagine there's probably some amount of eye rolling that even happens in the UK when there is royal activism.

Yeah, I mean, I don't think that's the family to really bring it home to, you know, a local resident in Hull about what is going to be, which, by the way, is a city in the north of England on the coastline, you know, what it's going to mean for their lives if their flat gets flooded.

Yeah, they can kind of provide a bigger narrative, but I mean, they're not obviously integrated into how most people live their lives.

So then what, where's how are we going to get people to think long enough time?

I think think trying to make them more secure probably is a start because if you're if you have your needs met, I think you're able to forecast a little bit.

Farther out, think about the future.

Exactly.

Yeah.

I mean, how can you think about the future unless you're currently food secure and secure and in terms of, yeah, safety?

And also, if we frame this more in terms of all right, like we're going to people who are impacted are going to get paid out.

We're not just going to expect you to put the cost of this generalized phenomenon here.

That I think that whenever it sounds like you're going to take my farm away from me or you're going to force me to do something differently in this way, I think that also just strikes me as a loser.

And that's, that's also kind of how you get yellow jackets like in France.

Like I think we want to avoid yellow jackets coming about.

Yeah.

Yeah, thank you.

That's when you get resistance is when you kind of come in with this big agenda of loss, like you're going to lose this and you're not going to be able to do this and this is going to cost you a lot of money.

And I mean, that's never going to be the way we're going to get around the short term political cost.

Like it has to be an exciting forward-looking agenda.

It has to hook on to what people care about, which is employment, inequality, health education, you know, all of which are at risk from climate change.

So it's fairly easy to make that argument, but it hasn't been made very convincingly so far.

And you're advocating that Meghan Markle should take up the the Laurel for that and that should be our leader of our in our movement.

Is that right?

I.

Believe that was your suggestion.

I mean, like, we're going to need unconventional leaders in it, aren't we?

Because the political time frames are short.

So we are going to need like moral and other authority from all kinds of places to shift us in the right direction.

If Meghan Markle's parts out, then great.

I just watched that new Netflix 3 parter Spike Lee New Orleans documentary about Katrina in the aftermath and even not.

Seen it yet?

It's, it's pretty, pretty good and disturbing in all the ways that you might expect.

But in the aftermath episode, they talk about the housing program that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie were super involved in.

And it was a big failure.

Like a lot of the houses didn't that they, they just weren't made well and it caused, they got sued.

And that's, that's unconventional leadership, right?

That's celebrity leadership.

But celebrity leadership, especially in the US, gets accused of hypocrisy or being sort of airy brained.

It sounded really nice at the time, but it didn't actually do what you thought because you're not that smart.

You're just an actor.

This is like, common criticisms that get levied against stuff like this.

Yeah.

So is that is that actually, I mean, if granted politicians, are they, are they much smarter than the average actor?

I'm not even sure that's true.

Maybe.

Maybe we shouldn't hope that much over there either.

Well, I guess you know a politician, when they decide to, for example, do disaster relief, they're obviously not designing exactly what they do themselves.

At least we can say, like with the state for politicians, like, right, we need to do this, we'll invest the funds, then hopefully you'll have enough of a civil service behind there to make the kind of right decisions and find the right technical options.

Obviously, it's usually problematic when you have individuals who've got enough money to jump in but don't really have the know how to do it.

And yeah, well, I mean, we see that in a fragmented way in multiple countries.

And I guess the question is, how can we harness those people's enthusiasm and effectively their money into something that is more systemic?

Because also, you know a dot here and A dot there.

If it's not joined up, it's not going to be enough.

Susanna, thanks for being here.

I'm grateful that I got a chance to read your book, and if you're listening, you should go pick up a copy of it and read it.

It made me think there's so much about adaptation.

We barely even scratched the surface of it in this episode.

There's so much more to say, so thanks for entertaining my what is likely to be your only interview.

Kind of like this I think.

Thanks Ross, it's good to chat.