June 10, 2025 • 53 mins
On this week’s Next Steps Forward, Dr. Chris Meek welcomes back environmental expert and author Dr. John Berger for a timely and eye-opening conversation on the climate crisis. Building on their first interview, Dr. Berger - author of Solving the Climate Crisis -discusses the evolving science of climate change, the rise of organized denial, setbacks in U.S. environmental policy, and how we can still chart a hopeful path forward. From energy waste in American buildings to the global responsibility for emissions, Dr. Berger offers practical insight and a compelling call to action. Whether you're passionate about sustainability or simply want to understand what’s at stake, this conversation is a must-listen for anyone seeking clarity, solutions, and motivation to act.
About Dr. John Berger: Dr. John Berger is an environmental science and policy specialist and a former senior research fellow at The Pacific Institute. He is the author of Solving the Climate Crisis: Frontline Reports from the Race to Save the Earth, which he spent more than six years researching as he traveled the nation and abroad to gather a sweeping array of perspectives. A graduate of Stanford and the University of California, Dr. Berger has written more than 100 articles on climate change and transitioning to clean energy for such publications as Scientific American, the Los Angeles Times, and the Boston Globe. He also has been a consultant to the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences, corporations, utilities, and Congress.
Additional Resources:
Profiles in Sustainability by Franz Bauman. Appeared in the Jan/Feb Issue (vol 67, No 1) of ENVIRONMENT; Science and Policy for Sustainable Development.
Solving the Climate Crisis. Dr. John Berger's first appearance on Next Steps Forward with Dr. Chris Meek.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
There are few things that make people successful. Taking a step forward to change their lives is one successful trait, but it takes some time to get there. How do you move forward to greet the success that awaits you? Welcome to Next Steps Forward with host Chris Meek. Each week, Chris brings on another guest who has successfully taken the next steps forward. Now here is Chris Meek.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
Hello. You can hear this week's episode of Next Steps Forward, and I'm your host, Chris Meek. As always, it's a pleasure to have you with us. Our focus is on personal empowerment, a commitment to wellbeing, and the motivation to achieve more than ever thought possible. This week, we welcome back Dr. John Berger. Dr. Berger was on Next Steps Forward last November 12th, and I highly encourage everyone to go back and listen and watch that and read the transcript. And there were so many questions I didn't get to ask that we just had to have them back. Dr. Berger is an environmental science and policy specialist and a former senior research fellow at the Pacific Institute. He is the author of Solving the Climate Crisis, Frontline Reports from the Race to Save the Earth, which he spent more than six years researching as he traveled the nation and abroad to gather a sweeping array of perspectives. A graduate of Stanford and the University of California, I won't hold that against you as a USC grad. Dr. Berger has written more than 100 articles on climate change and transitioning to clean energy for such publications at Scientific American, the Los Angeles Times and the Boston Globe. He also has been a consultant to the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences, corporations, utilities, and even Congress. Dr. John Berger, welcome back to Next Steps Forward.
Speaker 3 (01:43):
Thank you so much, Chris, for inviting me. It's a real pleasure to be here and I'm very much looking forward to talking with you again. Likewise. It was great to talk to you last time.
Speaker 2 (01:53):
It's great to have you here. And like I said, we've got a lot to go through. So let's just, you know, get right into it. But before we jump to the new questions that I had time to ask during our last conversation, let's go back to the few that we did discuss so we can set the stage. People hear about global warming every day and can become numb to the topic. Please start by giving a brief overview of what's happened over the past few centuries and what's happening now and why this is so urgent.
Speaker 3 (02:17):
well what's happening now is that we're having exceedingly rapid climate change like a hundred times faster that natural climate change over the past you know ten thousand years and our carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere is higher than it's been hundred and twenty five million years uh... a hundred twenty five thousand years and uh... that this is really unprecedented uh... the temperature is rising so rapidly compared to prior times we are in the red zone the emergencies on the danger zone if you will the danger is that we might trip certain uh... climate tipping points that would cause the natural world itself meaning the soils and the forests to remit so much greenhouse gas that we would be unable to do anything to stop it by reducing human uh... scale so-called anthropogenic releases of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases so this is the real danger unfortunately we are now racing tell mail as if we were uh... blindfolded and in a car with our foot press to the metal heading for a climate cliff ready to go over it at some point but we don't know exactly where that point is uh... i could read you this is perhaps relevant but not on the point of going over the cliff but just in terms of giving you a little bit of context for what's happening in in terms of climate change now let me see if i can find that that spot in the book where where this comes up well actually it comes up in many cases but this is a little anecdote but it gives you a sense of the the drama and the ferocity that climate change is capable exerting upon the human sphere. On July 29th 2018 at 7 29 p.m. fire inspector Jeremy Stoke was driving his pickup in Northwest Redding, California. Ominous reddish gray clouds of smoke darkened the sky around him. The 37 year old family man and community volunteer had returned to duty from vacation and he was on his way to to protect and evacuate residents in the path of the car fire. One minute later, the unpredictable fire exploded into a towering 1,000-foot-wide fire tornado. The swirling funnel of flame, with scorching 2,700-degree Fahrenheit winds of up to 165 miles an hour, ripped roofs off houses and sent cars and power lines flying through the air in an instant the flames burned over stoke killing him he left behind a grieving wife and two children just one of many tragedies that vast wildfires sparked by drought related climate change have left in their wake in the united states and globally now that's just one type of climate impact there are also certainly enormous floods for example there was uh... quote five hundred-year flood arriving for the second year in a row uh... which dumped three feet of water through uh... the effects of hurricane harvey on houston in twenty seventeen and we're getting more and more hurricanes in twenty twenty the national weather service ran out of alpha roman alphabet names to name those hurricanes and so we're seeing climate disruption of every sort we're seeing heat waves and droughts become more common we've seen crops parchment grain yields slip and we've seen livestock dying food prices go up and people go hungry and tens of millions of people are already fleeing the impacts of global climate change we already have about a a percent of the earth that's too hot for human habitation but if we keep up what we're doing which is burning vast quantities of climate disturbing fossil fuels by twenty seventy nineteen percent of the earth will become uninhabitable in the sense that Temperatures when it's very hot and very humid will be too high for human beings to naturally cool off. So unless you have some way of reducing your body temperature, well, in a matter of hours, you'll have organ failure and subsequent death. And this will render those regions of the earth uninhabitable because if you're living in an area like that and you think, oh, no problem, It's going to be very hot, maybe 90 degrees and 90% humidity. I'll just turn the air conditioner on. What if everybody has the same idea and the power fails? You're going to have millions of people subject to this kind of unlivable condition. Even now, we don't realize it, but thousands of people are dying prematurely because heat waves in the United States and around the world we're seeing probably 12 million people die from the results of fossil fuel air pollution. So we have a real crisis now as a result of our dependence upon fossil fuels and this is something I underscored in our last conversation. We need to really wake up and smell the coffee as it were. There's so many things that could be said about this, but I know you have lots of questions that you want to get to.
Speaker 2 (09:00):
So you were talking about the wildfires, the hurricanes. We know that we just started the hurricane season a couple of days ago. They're already calling for a very active hurricane season, which you mentioned before. In your book, Solving the Climate Crisis, you call for a national climate plan. How can we get a national climate plan passed with so much division in Washington, DC and a large number of people in power who don't even believe climate change is real?
Speaker 3 (09:23):
Impossible, impossible. That's encouraging. We can't do that. If we don't protect our democracy, we'll be unable to protect and save the climate. There's no question about it. So anybody who is concerned about climate issues has to be very politically engaged and should work with organizations that are on the ground now trying to make sure that this particular administration, which is so hostile to science and to climate change and to public health and is unbelievably lawless and reckless in its behavior, this administration cannot be permitted to continue in office one second longer than legally possible. And we, as citizens have to take over the political power back into our hands and restore our democracy. I cannot stress enough how extraordinarily important this is because we cannot implement any progressive measures that deal with climate change and that slow our current very, very heavy dependence on fossil fuels to the tune of about 78% of all of our energy in this country comes from fossil fuels, Chris, and today we are the world's leading producer of petroleum and natural gas and the third largest producer of coal and what President Trump wants to do is expand what he calls the beautiful coal industry, which is the most polluting fuel short of tar sands and oil sands in Canada. And so this is a terrible idea for the climate, for the environment, for public health. When you burn coal, you're releasing mercury into the atmosphere. Nothing could be more reckless and heedless of the public health consequences of these actions. It just boggles the mind and it gets me all worked up and into a lather here. I can see that. So maybe as a
Speaker 2 (11:58):
follow-up to that in terms of you know not believing there's climate change at all, is it accurate to say that there's an organized effort to promote denialism?
Speaker 3 (12:07):
It's so obvious, Chris. I even wrote a book about this over 10 years ago and it wasn't the most exhaustive book. I wrote a very short book hoping that people would be willing to read a short book and it's called Climate Myths, the campaign against climate science. It's like about a hundred and twenty page paperback. There are other much deeper dives into this disinformation campaign It stems from funding by the Koch brothers originally, and the Heritage Foundation, and the Cato Foundation, and other right-wing extremist foundations that use tax shelters in order to propagandize for the fossil fuel industry. This is the source of disinformation and hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent on it over the decades. And much of that money has gone into political lobbying to defeat the known measures that would have safely, cheaply, and economically decarbonized our economy gradually ever since we first heard from science back in the 1950s that climate change was a real and present danger. But we have chosen to ignore those warnings, and the canaries in the coal mine may be safe for me. A lot of them are dead now. And we need to really be extraordinarily serious about addressing this problem. We cannot do what President Trump is doing, which is to try and not record emissions from sources of pollution in the belief that if out of sight out of mind. I don't believe he cares at all about what happens to the environment, the earth or anything long as he is able to enrich himself and along with other plutocrats and autocrats and oligarchs. That's where we're at now Chris. This is where I give
Speaker 2 (14:29):
my disclaimer that the views of my guests are solely theirs, not that of Voice America, Chris Meek or Next Steps Forward but it's a free country and freedom of speech and that's what we're here for. You know is there a way to engage constructively with politicians or those in denial without alienating them so we can have a hopefully a real conversation about this? I think so Chris
Speaker 3 (14:51):
but I wouldn't put my major efforts into trying to convert people who are in climate denial. I think that the tactics to use if you are in such a a conversation is to listen very, very carefully and very respectfully and ask questions. Make sure that you have a very comprehensive understanding of the other person and what they believe and why they believe it. Put yourself in their shoes and make sure you understand their concerns before you offer them facts. Recognizing that some people are not motivated by facts because they are in the grip of emotion or in the thrall of a political cult, if you will, or because they have bought into the idea of the politicization of climate change and it then becomes a tribal issue and if you were to renounce this set of beliefs that you hold about denying climate change then you are in effect ostracizing yourself from your community and and that's untenable for many people who belong to cults and who have made that type of emotional commitment, but if you're arguing with somebody who is responsive to facts, not just to myths and fictions, then I would suggest using kitchen table arguments about the money that you can save and how much cheaper gas and groceries, you won't need gas, you could have an electric vehicle, which I bought yesterday. I bought my first electric vehicle yesterday, Chris, and it gives me the equivalent of 105 miles per gallon in terms of the electric energy usage and its efficiency. It's an amazing car. The sticker price was under $25,000. It was only two years old and it's got a warranty on it now that will last for three and a half years. There are few things that can go wrong because it doesn't have an engine, it doesn't have the water cooling and the oil system and the spark plugs and the carburetor, you can throw that all away. It's very simple. It's an electric motor, and if you'll pardon my French, if you put your foot down on the accelerator, it goes like a bat out of hell. So if you're interested in a muscle car, you can win that drag race from the stoplight with this car. But, I mean, it's cheap, and it's got a range of 305 miles on a single charge, and you can fast charge it, too. So it's an amazing car, and electric cars are getting cheaper, batteries are getting cheaper, and you'll never have to go to a gas station again.
Speaker 2 (18:18):
Well, let's go talk to them and see if they'll sponsor the show.
Speaker 3: I didn't mention the name of the vehicle. (18:21):
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Speaker 2 (18:23):
No, I know that. I know that. Yeah. John, you know, you talked a few minutes ago about some of the policies the Trump administration has done. A couple of things you didn't mention, they've made cuts to the National Weather Service, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and various research grants. In addition, employees of the federal government who have been focused on climate change have been laid off. What are the short-term and long-term ramifications of those developments?
Speaker 3 (18:47):
Whoa.
Speaker2: Do we need another hour?
Well, this, you know, head in the sand approach won't make the problems go away. We'll just be unprepared and there will be disastrous impacts on individuals and communities. We're also going to lose precious expertise at these agencies. Their research will be disrupted and maybe impossible to continue. We'll lose valuable data in a time series to understand how climate change is accelerating and affecting people. We'll lose institutional knowledge. So it's going to be difficult to reconstitute those disrupted agencies and disrupted for ideological reasons. Not to save money. It's not a major drain on our economy. But it's also, excuse me, it's not just
Speaker 2 (19:49):
the new administration's policies that have been affected. The World Bank is toned down as cheerleading for climate action as the Trump administration evaluates support for international organizations. Energy companies are reevaluating their move toward more renewable energy and President Trump is pushing to, as he says, you mentioned before, to reinvigorate America's beautiful, clean coal industry. How consequential are those trends and how long will it take to reverse its impact?
Speaker 3 (20:14):
I'm not sure if anybody knows how long it will take to reverse those impacts, but the damage is incalculable to the climate, to the environment and public health and to public understanding, to the credibility of science, Some of its efforts in trying to disrupt clean energy and expand coal will be still born. As one of the Republicans I interviewed for my book said, he's not going to revive the coal industry. The coal industry is dead, in effect. And that is not that you aren't going to mine metallurgical coal. There are substitutes, but it turns out that the coal industry is so uneconomical. The coal power plants burning coal, I should have been more precise, and just the operating costs of some of these facilities are greater than the life cycle costs of renewable energy systems that can produce the same power output and yet can do so cleanly, safely, and without fuel and without any environmental air quality impacts or public health impacts. So that's kind of the big picture. You could drill down into the details, of course, but that's really where it's at. You're just losing the ability to understand this tremendous threat which is bearing down on us with great speed and intensity. And like I said, perhaps in our last interview, you now don't need to be a weatherman to know that the climate is changing. You just look out your own window. I've experienced it personally and breathing the smoke from Canadian wildfires just last week. So it's kind of obvious and if your home is flooded, you have to understand that the hurricane did not just blow the roof off the homes of Republicans. It's not a Republican or red or blue issue. It's just the way the natural world is responding to our extraordinary abuse of the climate.
Speaker 2 (22:56):
Well, that's a great segment. The next one, we obviously think of the melting polarized caps and the devastation of the Amazon rainforest when we think of climate change and human's abuse of the planet. You talked about the hurricanes, the wildfires. What other regions are being severely affected at climate change right now that we might not be focused on?
Speaker 3 (23:13):
Well, sea level is rising. it's already risen about eight inches. And if you own coastal property or coastal infrastructure, as we melt the polar ice caps, and Greenland has already lost 8 trillion cubic feet, I think, of ice, you're going to see sea level rising faster and faster. And there are certain parts of the country, because of geological realities where sea level will be rising faster than other areas. So coastal infrastructure which is worth trillions of dollars is threatened by sea level rise. And the problem is that sea level rise has a couple of components. It's not just the fact that ice melts and adds to the massive water, but as you warm the climate, the ocean itself warms and expands, and that expansion contributes to sea level rise. And so these are irrevocable, irreversible changes in our lifetime. How are you gonna cool the ocean and cause it to contract and cause sea level to go down? Once sea level rises, sea level is going to be at that new baseline, and then hurricanes and sea surges will come off of that higher baseline and create ever more serious far-reaching inland flooding, like we saw in Hurricane Sandy some years ago, which devastated parts of New York State and other states as well.
Speaker 2 (25:06):
I live in Connecticut just outside New York and so I remember that we were
Speaker 3 (25:12):
without power for about a week. Yeah you've had drought in Connecticut too and wildfires in places that have rarely ever seen wildfires. The boreal forests of Canada are now on fire. These northern forests were not historically susceptible to frequent wildfires. Now they're burning every summer maybe even into the fall. This is a tremendous tragedy, not only for the environment, but for the people who live in communities that are proximate or within those forests. And other people who breathe this wildfire smoke and have their respiratory systems damaged as a result. There There are tremendous costs to all of this, and people who say climate change, it's too expensive to do anything about it, need to consider that we're going to increasingly experience trillions upon trillions of dollars of damage from climate change. The sooner we can address it, the less these damages will be, unless, as I indicated earlier, go over some type of fatal precipice where we cannot no longer reverse the climate change that you know that is within human ability to manipulate.
Speaker 2 (26:41):
Well let's go off script here for a minute and talk about why people are ignoring this. Is it because the United States is not point centers because United Nations or the World Health Organization. I know that Europe has been for years ahead of the United States in the climate front. They've been embracing it. You know the first Trump administration removed themselves from the Paris climate accord. Who needs to be the champion here or how many people, organizations, countries, regions need to be the champion here to actually make this something that people have to sit down and talk about in a real fashion?
Speaker 3 (27:15):
In other words, let me see if I have the the point of your question clearly in mind, is it that why is the United States particularly recalcitrant to no? No it's
Speaker 2 (27:29):
if we're not going to do it then who else should be doing it right now? Well
Speaker 3 (27:33):
the European Union is doing it. Everybody should be doing it but many nations look to the United States as an example which makes it of paramount importance that we become a global model and set a good example and show how this technology can be profitable, how it can create millions of new jobs, how it can save trillions of dollars on our energy bills, and how it can generate trillions of dollars of new economic activity. And we've demonstrated that to a small extent as a result of Biden's Infrastructure and Jobs Act and his Inflation Reduction Act. The Inflation Reduction Act basically provided $37 billion a year in federal investment and allowed tax credits as a result. That's a tiny amount of money for a $30 trillion economy. But even with that, we got millions of new jobs and we got, I don't know, hundreds of billions of dollars of new economic investment. And most of that investment, paradoxically, something like 80% is in so-called red states. But nonetheless, representatives from red states are seemingly on board with cutting off their nose to spite their faith and hurting their constituents for ideological reasons. It totally boggles the mind if you think about it. You're offering these states tens of billions of dollars, and they're spitting on that money. It's very hard to understand the logic and rationality behind that unless you accept my sort of cult hypothesis and the fact that people are willing to believe almost anything when their bread is buttered by that belief.
Speaker 2 (29:45):
In the late 1960s, there was a book titled The Population Bomb that predicted overpopulation will lead to global famines, upheaval, and other disasters by now. David's predictions were wrong, but a global population topping 8 billion people has put a tremendous strain on many resources and contributed to climate change. What role should population control play in slowing and eventually reversing climate change?
Speaker 3 (30:09):
I believe that it should have a central role. I'm not talking about draconian efforts. I'm not talking about infanticide or anything. I'm not talking even about abortion, particularly. I just think that family planning and the education of girls is of great importance and should be fully funded so that those needs are met. Because just as climate change itself is a force multiplier, population is a force multiplier, aggravating every problem that we have on the planet. We have enough people right now, eight billion is more than enough. It's probably four times the population that the Earth can sustain on an ongoing long-term basis. So we're exceeding the carrying capacity in certain resource areas already. And we're making our life more difficult, more expensive, things are more crowded. And people make money off selling stuff to more people. So there is a corporate vested interest in seeing population grow and trying to profit from it. But from a societal welfare point of view, I think it's incontestable that in some respects, Paul Ehrlich was very right. And we are seeing some, you know, we have had tremendous improvements in technology and living standards. And it is possible that we could have a much more equitable distribution of wealth and income and resources. But nonetheless, we are seeing people who are, in a sense, struggling because there are so many people competing for scarce resources in agricultural areas, causing people not to have enough land to grow enough food to live, migrate to cities, and exacerbating problems in those urban areas.
Speaker 2 (32:23):
We've been talking a lot of heavy topics here, a lot of different angles. If people wanna learn more and get more in the weeds about you and the work that you're doing, where can they find you?
Speaker 3 (32:33):
Well, they can find my website at johnjberger.com, and they can also find my other website, SolvingTheClimateCrisis.com, and they can look on Amazon or at Seven Stories Press websites, and they'll find indications of my previous work. I've been active in this field for many, many years, and I have produced 11 books, and so some of them are still in print. I would suggest that people who want to read both good and bad news should have a look at Solving the Climate Crisis because it's not a downer. I think that I hold out a great deal of hope, but as I think – I'm trying to think who it was that said – I can't think of – Rebecca Solnit, that hope is a verb. Maybe that was David Orr or someone, one of the profound thinkers on environmental topics. But if we are truly committed, there are more of us than there are employees of the fossil fuel industry or the coal industry. We can definitely make change. We are powerful, people are powerful, and sometimes change can happen very quickly once you have a critical mass of people who are willing to become active. So if you want to know what to do today, become active. We are individually like a drop of water, but if we work together with other people, we're like an ocean, and we can turn this tide. We can definitely turn this tide and we can emulate those other countries, for example in Sweden or Denmark, Norway, who have made great progress and who are, have basically gotten 95 or 100% of their power from clean, renewable sources. I can read you a little passage if you want about an area that you would think would have have had a tremendously hard time becoming 100% dependent on clean energy and yet managed to do it. Let me rifle through my pages and see if I can't find you this little story about this island of Samso. It's off the coast of Denmark and my little passage about Samso goes, one community has been able to achieve not just one hundred percent clean power, but the more challenging goal of providing one hundred percent clean energy. Energy of course is including heat as well as electricity. Rural Samso, an island off the Danish mainland, was once a nondescript farming and fishing region of 22 villages, home to 3,800 people. Now, however, it has become well-known as a community where people not only rely on, but enthusiastically support, invest in, and profit from renewable energy. Since 1998, the island's transformation has been led by Soren Hermansen, who previously headed the SAMSO Energy environmental organization and now heads the Samso Energy Academy. Hermansen is an idealistic yet pragmatic vegetable farmer turned high school environmental studies teacher who knocked around the world for years on Norwegian fishing boats before returning to Samso where he was born and raised. When he first got involved there the island was dependent on increasingly expensive imported oil for heat, and on electricity generated in coal-fired power plants. Fishing and farming were on decline, or in decline, and jobs were scarce, so something had to be done to revitalize the economy. Thanks in large part to Hermansen's efforts and to supportive government policies, SAMSO today gets 100% of its power from the sun, the wind and the earth, save for the hybrid electric natural gas ferry to the island, soon to be converted to biofuel. And Samsung's remaining internal combustion engine vehicles will also be converted. Each citizen of Samsung today accounts for minus 12 metric tons of CO2 emissions a year, whereas the average Dane produces more than six tons and Americans produce Fifteen. Much of the clean power on SAMSO now comes from onshore and offshore wind turbines, something that we can easily do pretty much in any of the windy areas of the United States. SAMSO exports a surplus 80,000 megawatt hours, that's a million hours of solar and wind power a year. And owners of the turbines, local farmers, co-ops, and the municipality of SAMSO enjoy millions of dollars in profits as co-investors in the island's energy projects. That's something that communities in the United States could also emulate. And instead of heating with imported oil, SAMSO now gets heat from geothermal heat pumps and from boilers in four local district heating biomass plants fired with local straw and forestry wastes. Farmers get paid for the nearly carbon neutral straw which burns far more cleanly than oil and the ash goes back to farms as fertilizer. Local plumbers won contracts to install the island's geothermal heat pumps and the piping that sends hot water from the district heating plants to radiators around the community. Danish Kroner are invested in the community not in imported oil. The SAMSO economy is carbon neutral and its carbon emissions today are close to zero.
Speaker 2 (39:12):
Well that's a good segue, that's a fascinating article you shared and it's a good I guess segue in the next one as well. Now you mentioned about knocking around in Norwegian fishing boats. You interviewed people in the United States and around the globe for your book over the course of six years. Tell us about the range of people that you interviewed and why you chose them, and maybe share a story of a few of the activists you interviewed and what inspired you with them.
Speaker 3 (39:37):
Well, I essentially was interested in how we can convert the entire economy to run on clean, renewable energy. And so I checked into each economic sector and I looked at agriculture, I looked at industry, I looked at the residential sector, I looked at the commercial sector. So I think pretty broadly surveyed the entire economy and the electric power generation sector. Then I sought out projects, which I kind of learned about through research And I discovered people who were actually implementing scalable and already cost-effective techniques for increasing the production of clean energy and or reducing the emissions of carbon to the atmosphere. And I looked for people who I think were most effective and I was really inspired to find people who were really heroic in their devotion to their work and their motivation to basically clean up the air, protect the climate, protect the soil. One person that always comes to my mind, I may have spoken about him to you before, is a North Dakota farmer named Gabe Brown, farmer, rancher. He was almost wiped out by the cost of traditional fertilizer, herbicides, pesticides, and by natural disasters like hailstorms that would flatten his crop year after year, and he studied the native agricultural techniques of the Mandan Indians in North Dakota, who Lewis and Clark wrote about when they stayed in that area of North Dakota on their journey, journey of Lewis and Clark across the United States in 1804 to 1806. They stayed with the Mandans and they learned about Native American agriculture and so Gabe Brown decided to emulate them and he was able to turn his unprofitable almost bankrupt operation into an exceedingly profitable family enterprise in which he put the health of the soil as his paramount concern, and instead of looking at yield and trying to boost, let's say, the yield of corn by dumping chemical fertilizer and pesticides and herbicides on the land, and by reverting to natural practices using animals to graze cover crops off to always keeping a root in the soil. He managed to turn what was a light brown kind of sandy soil into a rich, dark, loamy soil that looked kind of like brown cottage cheese. This new healthy soil was also pulling thousands of tons of CO2, thousands of pounds or several tons per acre of CO2 out of the atmosphere and incorporating it into the soil. Carbon is like a fuel for soil and when it's incorporated in the soil, it kind of jump starts the soil ecosystem. There are other people I met who have done this in different ways like rancher John Wick in Nicosio, California, but Gabe Brown used a whole suite of regenerative agricultural practices which people can read about in Solving the Climate Crisis, and also Gabe himself has written a book. I don't I happen to know its title, but I also will commend another book to your readers in a moment that harkens back to our discussion about the causes of climate disinformation. If you help me stay on track with that, but just to conclude the idea of regenerative agriculture and its multiple benefits, I mean, Gabe Brown and his family now have about 126 different profitable enterprises from raising rabbits to, I don't know, renting the land out at times for hunting because the land has become healthy. The plants are healthy, the soil is healthy, and as Gabe likes to say, healthy soil makes healthy plants, makes healthy animals and healthy crops. People who eat the protein and the plant material from those lands are healthy themselves as a result of eating good food that's nutritious and that's not laced with agricultural pesticides and herbicides. He saved all kinds of money not doing that, not having to plow because he can basically use some techniques. I guess he must drill seed into the soil or whatever. But there are all kinds of examples like this. There are examples in the steel industry, people that I met, in the cement industry, in the carbon capture industry where people like Nicholas Flanders at a little company called 12, where they take waste CO2 and they put it into an electrolyzer and outcome useful building block chemicals that you can then use to reassemble higher molecules and produce whatever you produce with fossil fuel, you can produce with this recycled hydrocarbon material. I also write about the circular economy and how we can avoid tremendous amount of waste that goes on in this economy by reusing some outputs that are waste in one industry and use them as new inputs and thereby save on fuel and save on raw materials, save the environment, and so on. That's just a short overview. what i wanted to mention in terms of climate denial earlier is that jane mayor has a terrific book called dark money and she traces how the work of people like richard skates and and joseph coors and uh... david coke and what's what's the other coaxed and i can't remember william coke how these how these billionaires set up these foundations that have really disrupted the American political system and imposed an extreme right-wing political agenda on the nation and pulled the wool over a lot of people's eyes with, as I had said, hundreds of millions of dollars of pro-fossil fuel industry propaganda.
Speaker 2 (47:44):
We've got about five minutes left and I want to make sure we cover this. Sure. you're working in a new national clean energy and climate protection project through a new organization that you're incorporating called Accelerating the Transition that's set to launch in early 2026. Please tell us about that new project.
Speaker 3 (48:01):
Oh, thank you so much for asking, Chris. I really appreciate it. What we are trying to do is we are trying to create in effect a movement at the state and local level, meaning the county level, the municipal level to maintain our momentum on the clean energy transition and not to be derailed by the opposition and hostility of the federal government. There's a tremendous amount that we can do at the local level. So I came up with the idea of a conference called Accelerating the Transition to bring together the companies that are engaged in this clean energy ecosystem, along with the local officials, the cabinet secretaries from different states, governors, mayors, boards of supervisors, people on municipal utility districts, other utility boards, bring them together with the clean energy ecosystem, and then with the funding community, with investors and financiers, bankers, consultants, take these three often islanded little ecosystems and bring them together and let them collaborate. And hopefully this type of collaboration will lead to the funding of projects that municipalities and states can advance. And with the public-private partnerships, we can see billions of dollars of new clean energy projects advanced in spite of the federal government's opposition to clean energy because you make more money and save more money with clean energy than you do with dirty energy. Not even looking at all of the ecological damage and public health damage. So that's what I want to say and I am looking for generous philanthropists who will join forces with me and help me to support this project. We do not have the funding currently to bring this off on the scale that it needs to happen. We probably need close to a million dollars to really do it right because we want to be able to give plane tickets and per diem to mayors and other city and county officials who otherwise would not be able to afford to come to a meeting like this, so we want to sponsor those people and we want to cover our basic costs. We're not interested in making money, we're not interested in self-aggrandizement or creating some sort of an organizational bureaucracy. It's me and an advisory board of about 15 people, but we have the expertise, I have a fantastic advisory board and just we need support and I'm hoping that the public will come forward somehow, and that this money that is needed will materialize.
Speaker 2 (51:06):
One last time, what are the websites where people can find you?
Speaker 3 (51:08):
Oh, my website is JohnJBerger.com, that's my name, and the title of my book, Solving the Climate Crisis.com, is the other website oriented toward the book.
Speaker 2 (51:19):
And confirming it's John, the letter J Berger, correct?
Speaker 3 (51:23):
That is correct.
Speaker 2 (51:24):
All right, so let me make sure we have the right website for you. Dr. John Berger, author of Solving the Climate Crisis, Frontline Reports from the Race to Save Earth. Thank you so much for being with us again today. And again, we covered about half the stuff, so we'll be in touch.
Speaker 3 (51:38):
Okay, my pleasure, Chris. Always a pleasure talking to you, I've enjoyed it. Thank you for the honor of coming on your show.
Speaker 2 (51:45):
No, great educational and very necessary conversation, so I appreciate you and all the work that you do. And a special thank you to our audience, which now includes people in more than 50 countries, for joining us for another episode of Next Steps Forward. I'm Chris Meek. For more details on upcoming shows and guests, please follow me on Facebook at facebook.com forward slash chrismeekpublicfigure and the next at chrismeek underscore USA. We'll be back next Tuesday, same time, same place with another leader from the world of business, politics, public policy, sports, or entertainment. Until then, stay safe and keep taking your next steps forward.
There are few things that make people successful. Taking a step forward to change their lives is one successful trait, but it takes some time to get there. How do you move forward to greet the success that awaits you? Welcome to Next Steps Forward with host Chris Meek. Each week, Chris brings on another guest who has successfully taken the next steps forward. Now here is Chris Meek.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
Hello. You can hear this week's episode of Next Steps Forward, and I'm your host, Chris Meek. As always, it's a pleasure to have you with us. Our focus is on personal empowerment, a commitment to wellbeing, and the motivation to achieve more than ever thought possible. This week, we welcome back Dr. John Berger. Dr. Berger was on Next Steps Forward last November 12th, and I highly encourage everyone to go back and listen and watch that and read the transcript. And there were so many questions I didn't get to ask that we just had to have them back. Dr. Berger is an environmental science and policy specialist and a former senior research fellow at the Pacific Institute. He is the author of Solving the Climate Crisis, Frontline Reports from the Race to Save the Earth, which he spent more than six years researching as he traveled the nation and abroad to gather a sweeping array of perspectives. A graduate of Stanford and the University of California, I won't hold that against you as a USC grad. Dr. Berger has written more than 100 articles on climate change and transitioning to clean energy for such publications at Scientific American, the Los Angeles Times and the Boston Globe. He also has been a consultant to the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences, corporations, utilities, and even Congress. Dr. John Berger, welcome back to Next Steps Forward.
Speaker 3 (01:43):
Thank you so much, Chris, for inviting me. It's a real pleasure to be here and I'm very much looking forward to talking with you again. Likewise. It was great to talk to you last time.
Speaker 2 (01:53):
It's great to have you here. And like I said, we've got a lot to go through. So let's just, you know, get right into it. But before we jump to the new questions that I had time to ask during our last conversation, let's go back to the few that we did discuss so we can set the stage. People hear about global warming every day and can become numb to the topic. Please start by giving a brief overview of what's happened over the past few centuries and what's happening now and why this is so urgent.
Speaker 3 (02:17):
well what's happening now is that we're having exceedingly rapid climate change like a hundred times faster that natural climate change over the past you know ten thousand years and our carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere is higher than it's been hundred and twenty five million years uh... a hundred twenty five thousand years and uh... that this is really unprecedented uh... the temperature is rising so rapidly compared to prior times we are in the red zone the emergencies on the danger zone if you will the danger is that we might trip certain uh... climate tipping points that would cause the natural world itself meaning the soils and the forests to remit so much greenhouse gas that we would be unable to do anything to stop it by reducing human uh... scale so-called anthropogenic releases of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases so this is the real danger unfortunately we are now racing tell mail as if we were uh... blindfolded and in a car with our foot press to the metal heading for a climate cliff ready to go over it at some point but we don't know exactly where that point is uh... i could read you this is perhaps relevant but not on the point of going over the cliff but just in terms of giving you a little bit of context for what's happening in in terms of climate change now let me see if i can find that that spot in the book where where this comes up well actually it comes up in many cases but this is a little anecdote but it gives you a sense of the the drama and the ferocity that climate change is capable exerting upon the human sphere. On July 29th 2018 at 7 29 p.m. fire inspector Jeremy Stoke was driving his pickup in Northwest Redding, California. Ominous reddish gray clouds of smoke darkened the sky around him. The 37 year old family man and community volunteer had returned to duty from vacation and he was on his way to to protect and evacuate residents in the path of the car fire. One minute later, the unpredictable fire exploded into a towering 1,000-foot-wide fire tornado. The swirling funnel of flame, with scorching 2,700-degree Fahrenheit winds of up to 165 miles an hour, ripped roofs off houses and sent cars and power lines flying through the air in an instant the flames burned over stoke killing him he left behind a grieving wife and two children just one of many tragedies that vast wildfires sparked by drought related climate change have left in their wake in the united states and globally now that's just one type of climate impact there are also certainly enormous floods for example there was uh... quote five hundred-year flood arriving for the second year in a row uh... which dumped three feet of water through uh... the effects of hurricane harvey on houston in twenty seventeen and we're getting more and more hurricanes in twenty twenty the national weather service ran out of alpha roman alphabet names to name those hurricanes and so we're seeing climate disruption of every sort we're seeing heat waves and droughts become more common we've seen crops parchment grain yields slip and we've seen livestock dying food prices go up and people go hungry and tens of millions of people are already fleeing the impacts of global climate change we already have about a a percent of the earth that's too hot for human habitation but if we keep up what we're doing which is burning vast quantities of climate disturbing fossil fuels by twenty seventy nineteen percent of the earth will become uninhabitable in the sense that Temperatures when it's very hot and very humid will be too high for human beings to naturally cool off. So unless you have some way of reducing your body temperature, well, in a matter of hours, you'll have organ failure and subsequent death. And this will render those regions of the earth uninhabitable because if you're living in an area like that and you think, oh, no problem, It's going to be very hot, maybe 90 degrees and 90% humidity. I'll just turn the air conditioner on. What if everybody has the same idea and the power fails? You're going to have millions of people subject to this kind of unlivable condition. Even now, we don't realize it, but thousands of people are dying prematurely because heat waves in the United States and around the world we're seeing probably 12 million people die from the results of fossil fuel air pollution. So we have a real crisis now as a result of our dependence upon fossil fuels and this is something I underscored in our last conversation. We need to really wake up and smell the coffee as it were. There's so many things that could be said about this, but I know you have lots of questions that you want to get to.
Speaker 2 (09:00):
So you were talking about the wildfires, the hurricanes. We know that we just started the hurricane season a couple of days ago. They're already calling for a very active hurricane season, which you mentioned before. In your book, Solving the Climate Crisis, you call for a national climate plan. How can we get a national climate plan passed with so much division in Washington, DC and a large number of people in power who don't even believe climate change is real?
Speaker 3 (09:23):
Impossible, impossible. That's encouraging. We can't do that. If we don't protect our democracy, we'll be unable to protect and save the climate. There's no question about it. So anybody who is concerned about climate issues has to be very politically engaged and should work with organizations that are on the ground now trying to make sure that this particular administration, which is so hostile to science and to climate change and to public health and is unbelievably lawless and reckless in its behavior, this administration cannot be permitted to continue in office one second longer than legally possible. And we, as citizens have to take over the political power back into our hands and restore our democracy. I cannot stress enough how extraordinarily important this is because we cannot implement any progressive measures that deal with climate change and that slow our current very, very heavy dependence on fossil fuels to the tune of about 78% of all of our energy in this country comes from fossil fuels, Chris, and today we are the world's leading producer of petroleum and natural gas and the third largest producer of coal and what President Trump wants to do is expand what he calls the beautiful coal industry, which is the most polluting fuel short of tar sands and oil sands in Canada. And so this is a terrible idea for the climate, for the environment, for public health. When you burn coal, you're releasing mercury into the atmosphere. Nothing could be more reckless and heedless of the public health consequences of these actions. It just boggles the mind and it gets me all worked up and into a lather here. I can see that. So maybe as a
Speaker 2 (11:58):
follow-up to that in terms of you know not believing there's climate change at all, is it accurate to say that there's an organized effort to promote denialism?
Speaker 3 (12:07):
It's so obvious, Chris. I even wrote a book about this over 10 years ago and it wasn't the most exhaustive book. I wrote a very short book hoping that people would be willing to read a short book and it's called Climate Myths, the campaign against climate science. It's like about a hundred and twenty page paperback. There are other much deeper dives into this disinformation campaign It stems from funding by the Koch brothers originally, and the Heritage Foundation, and the Cato Foundation, and other right-wing extremist foundations that use tax shelters in order to propagandize for the fossil fuel industry. This is the source of disinformation and hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent on it over the decades. And much of that money has gone into political lobbying to defeat the known measures that would have safely, cheaply, and economically decarbonized our economy gradually ever since we first heard from science back in the 1950s that climate change was a real and present danger. But we have chosen to ignore those warnings, and the canaries in the coal mine may be safe for me. A lot of them are dead now. And we need to really be extraordinarily serious about addressing this problem. We cannot do what President Trump is doing, which is to try and not record emissions from sources of pollution in the belief that if out of sight out of mind. I don't believe he cares at all about what happens to the environment, the earth or anything long as he is able to enrich himself and along with other plutocrats and autocrats and oligarchs. That's where we're at now Chris. This is where I give
Speaker 2 (14:29):
my disclaimer that the views of my guests are solely theirs, not that of Voice America, Chris Meek or Next Steps Forward but it's a free country and freedom of speech and that's what we're here for. You know is there a way to engage constructively with politicians or those in denial without alienating them so we can have a hopefully a real conversation about this? I think so Chris
Speaker 3 (14:51):
but I wouldn't put my major efforts into trying to convert people who are in climate denial. I think that the tactics to use if you are in such a a conversation is to listen very, very carefully and very respectfully and ask questions. Make sure that you have a very comprehensive understanding of the other person and what they believe and why they believe it. Put yourself in their shoes and make sure you understand their concerns before you offer them facts. Recognizing that some people are not motivated by facts because they are in the grip of emotion or in the thrall of a political cult, if you will, or because they have bought into the idea of the politicization of climate change and it then becomes a tribal issue and if you were to renounce this set of beliefs that you hold about denying climate change then you are in effect ostracizing yourself from your community and and that's untenable for many people who belong to cults and who have made that type of emotional commitment, but if you're arguing with somebody who is responsive to facts, not just to myths and fictions, then I would suggest using kitchen table arguments about the money that you can save and how much cheaper gas and groceries, you won't need gas, you could have an electric vehicle, which I bought yesterday. I bought my first electric vehicle yesterday, Chris, and it gives me the equivalent of 105 miles per gallon in terms of the electric energy usage and its efficiency. It's an amazing car. The sticker price was under $25,000. It was only two years old and it's got a warranty on it now that will last for three and a half years. There are few things that can go wrong because it doesn't have an engine, it doesn't have the water cooling and the oil system and the spark plugs and the carburetor, you can throw that all away. It's very simple. It's an electric motor, and if you'll pardon my French, if you put your foot down on the accelerator, it goes like a bat out of hell. So if you're interested in a muscle car, you can win that drag race from the stoplight with this car. But, I mean, it's cheap, and it's got a range of 305 miles on a single charge, and you can fast charge it, too. So it's an amazing car, and electric cars are getting cheaper, batteries are getting cheaper, and you'll never have to go to a gas station again.
Speaker 2 (18:18):
Well, let's go talk to them and see if they'll sponsor the show.
Speaker 3: I didn't mention the name of the vehicle. (18:21):
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Speaker 2 (18:23):
No, I know that. I know that. Yeah. John, you know, you talked a few minutes ago about some of the policies the Trump administration has done. A couple of things you didn't mention, they've made cuts to the National Weather Service, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and various research grants. In addition, employees of the federal government who have been focused on climate change have been laid off. What are the short-term and long-term ramifications of those developments?
Speaker 3 (18:47):
Whoa.
Speaker2: Do we need another hour?
Well, this, you know, head in the sand approach won't make the problems go away. We'll just be unprepared and there will be disastrous impacts on individuals and communities. We're also going to lose precious expertise at these agencies. Their research will be disrupted and maybe impossible to continue. We'll lose valuable data in a time series to understand how climate change is accelerating and affecting people. We'll lose institutional knowledge. So it's going to be difficult to reconstitute those disrupted agencies and disrupted for ideological reasons. Not to save money. It's not a major drain on our economy. But it's also, excuse me, it's not just
Speaker 2 (19:49):
the new administration's policies that have been affected. The World Bank is toned down as cheerleading for climate action as the Trump administration evaluates support for international organizations. Energy companies are reevaluating their move toward more renewable energy and President Trump is pushing to, as he says, you mentioned before, to reinvigorate America's beautiful, clean coal industry. How consequential are those trends and how long will it take to reverse its impact?
Speaker 3 (20:14):
I'm not sure if anybody knows how long it will take to reverse those impacts, but the damage is incalculable to the climate, to the environment and public health and to public understanding, to the credibility of science, Some of its efforts in trying to disrupt clean energy and expand coal will be still born. As one of the Republicans I interviewed for my book said, he's not going to revive the coal industry. The coal industry is dead, in effect. And that is not that you aren't going to mine metallurgical coal. There are substitutes, but it turns out that the coal industry is so uneconomical. The coal power plants burning coal, I should have been more precise, and just the operating costs of some of these facilities are greater than the life cycle costs of renewable energy systems that can produce the same power output and yet can do so cleanly, safely, and without fuel and without any environmental air quality impacts or public health impacts. So that's kind of the big picture. You could drill down into the details, of course, but that's really where it's at. You're just losing the ability to understand this tremendous threat which is bearing down on us with great speed and intensity. And like I said, perhaps in our last interview, you now don't need to be a weatherman to know that the climate is changing. You just look out your own window. I've experienced it personally and breathing the smoke from Canadian wildfires just last week. So it's kind of obvious and if your home is flooded, you have to understand that the hurricane did not just blow the roof off the homes of Republicans. It's not a Republican or red or blue issue. It's just the way the natural world is responding to our extraordinary abuse of the climate.
Speaker 2 (22:56):
Well, that's a great segment. The next one, we obviously think of the melting polarized caps and the devastation of the Amazon rainforest when we think of climate change and human's abuse of the planet. You talked about the hurricanes, the wildfires. What other regions are being severely affected at climate change right now that we might not be focused on?
Speaker 3 (23:13):
Well, sea level is rising. it's already risen about eight inches. And if you own coastal property or coastal infrastructure, as we melt the polar ice caps, and Greenland has already lost 8 trillion cubic feet, I think, of ice, you're going to see sea level rising faster and faster. And there are certain parts of the country, because of geological realities where sea level will be rising faster than other areas. So coastal infrastructure which is worth trillions of dollars is threatened by sea level rise. And the problem is that sea level rise has a couple of components. It's not just the fact that ice melts and adds to the massive water, but as you warm the climate, the ocean itself warms and expands, and that expansion contributes to sea level rise. And so these are irrevocable, irreversible changes in our lifetime. How are you gonna cool the ocean and cause it to contract and cause sea level to go down? Once sea level rises, sea level is going to be at that new baseline, and then hurricanes and sea surges will come off of that higher baseline and create ever more serious far-reaching inland flooding, like we saw in Hurricane Sandy some years ago, which devastated parts of New York State and other states as well.
Speaker 2 (25:06):
I live in Connecticut just outside New York and so I remember that we were
Speaker 3 (25:12):
without power for about a week. Yeah you've had drought in Connecticut too and wildfires in places that have rarely ever seen wildfires. The boreal forests of Canada are now on fire. These northern forests were not historically susceptible to frequent wildfires. Now they're burning every summer maybe even into the fall. This is a tremendous tragedy, not only for the environment, but for the people who live in communities that are proximate or within those forests. And other people who breathe this wildfire smoke and have their respiratory systems damaged as a result. There There are tremendous costs to all of this, and people who say climate change, it's too expensive to do anything about it, need to consider that we're going to increasingly experience trillions upon trillions of dollars of damage from climate change. The sooner we can address it, the less these damages will be, unless, as I indicated earlier, go over some type of fatal precipice where we cannot no longer reverse the climate change that you know that is within human ability to manipulate.
Speaker 2 (26:41):
Well let's go off script here for a minute and talk about why people are ignoring this. Is it because the United States is not point centers because United Nations or the World Health Organization. I know that Europe has been for years ahead of the United States in the climate front. They've been embracing it. You know the first Trump administration removed themselves from the Paris climate accord. Who needs to be the champion here or how many people, organizations, countries, regions need to be the champion here to actually make this something that people have to sit down and talk about in a real fashion?
Speaker 3 (27:15):
In other words, let me see if I have the the point of your question clearly in mind, is it that why is the United States particularly recalcitrant to no? No it's
Speaker 2 (27:29):
if we're not going to do it then who else should be doing it right now? Well
Speaker 3 (27:33):
the European Union is doing it. Everybody should be doing it but many nations look to the United States as an example which makes it of paramount importance that we become a global model and set a good example and show how this technology can be profitable, how it can create millions of new jobs, how it can save trillions of dollars on our energy bills, and how it can generate trillions of dollars of new economic activity. And we've demonstrated that to a small extent as a result of Biden's Infrastructure and Jobs Act and his Inflation Reduction Act. The Inflation Reduction Act basically provided $37 billion a year in federal investment and allowed tax credits as a result. That's a tiny amount of money for a $30 trillion economy. But even with that, we got millions of new jobs and we got, I don't know, hundreds of billions of dollars of new economic investment. And most of that investment, paradoxically, something like 80% is in so-called red states. But nonetheless, representatives from red states are seemingly on board with cutting off their nose to spite their faith and hurting their constituents for ideological reasons. It totally boggles the mind if you think about it. You're offering these states tens of billions of dollars, and they're spitting on that money. It's very hard to understand the logic and rationality behind that unless you accept my sort of cult hypothesis and the fact that people are willing to believe almost anything when their bread is buttered by that belief.
Speaker 2 (29:45):
In the late 1960s, there was a book titled The Population Bomb that predicted overpopulation will lead to global famines, upheaval, and other disasters by now. David's predictions were wrong, but a global population topping 8 billion people has put a tremendous strain on many resources and contributed to climate change. What role should population control play in slowing and eventually reversing climate change?
Speaker 3 (30:09):
I believe that it should have a central role. I'm not talking about draconian efforts. I'm not talking about infanticide or anything. I'm not talking even about abortion, particularly. I just think that family planning and the education of girls is of great importance and should be fully funded so that those needs are met. Because just as climate change itself is a force multiplier, population is a force multiplier, aggravating every problem that we have on the planet. We have enough people right now, eight billion is more than enough. It's probably four times the population that the Earth can sustain on an ongoing long-term basis. So we're exceeding the carrying capacity in certain resource areas already. And we're making our life more difficult, more expensive, things are more crowded. And people make money off selling stuff to more people. So there is a corporate vested interest in seeing population grow and trying to profit from it. But from a societal welfare point of view, I think it's incontestable that in some respects, Paul Ehrlich was very right. And we are seeing some, you know, we have had tremendous improvements in technology and living standards. And it is possible that we could have a much more equitable distribution of wealth and income and resources. But nonetheless, we are seeing people who are, in a sense, struggling because there are so many people competing for scarce resources in agricultural areas, causing people not to have enough land to grow enough food to live, migrate to cities, and exacerbating problems in those urban areas.
Speaker 2 (32:23):
We've been talking a lot of heavy topics here, a lot of different angles. If people wanna learn more and get more in the weeds about you and the work that you're doing, where can they find you?
Speaker 3 (32:33):
Well, they can find my website at johnjberger.com, and they can also find my other website, SolvingTheClimateCrisis.com, and they can look on Amazon or at Seven Stories Press websites, and they'll find indications of my previous work. I've been active in this field for many, many years, and I have produced 11 books, and so some of them are still in print. I would suggest that people who want to read both good and bad news should have a look at Solving the Climate Crisis because it's not a downer. I think that I hold out a great deal of hope, but as I think – I'm trying to think who it was that said – I can't think of – Rebecca Solnit, that hope is a verb. Maybe that was David Orr or someone, one of the profound thinkers on environmental topics. But if we are truly committed, there are more of us than there are employees of the fossil fuel industry or the coal industry. We can definitely make change. We are powerful, people are powerful, and sometimes change can happen very quickly once you have a critical mass of people who are willing to become active. So if you want to know what to do today, become active. We are individually like a drop of water, but if we work together with other people, we're like an ocean, and we can turn this tide. We can definitely turn this tide and we can emulate those other countries, for example in Sweden or Denmark, Norway, who have made great progress and who are, have basically gotten 95 or 100% of their power from clean, renewable sources. I can read you a little passage if you want about an area that you would think would have have had a tremendously hard time becoming 100% dependent on clean energy and yet managed to do it. Let me rifle through my pages and see if I can't find you this little story about this island of Samso. It's off the coast of Denmark and my little passage about Samso goes, one community has been able to achieve not just one hundred percent clean power, but the more challenging goal of providing one hundred percent clean energy. Energy of course is including heat as well as electricity. Rural Samso, an island off the Danish mainland, was once a nondescript farming and fishing region of 22 villages, home to 3,800 people. Now, however, it has become well-known as a community where people not only rely on, but enthusiastically support, invest in, and profit from renewable energy. Since 1998, the island's transformation has been led by Soren Hermansen, who previously headed the SAMSO Energy environmental organization and now heads the Samso Energy Academy. Hermansen is an idealistic yet pragmatic vegetable farmer turned high school environmental studies teacher who knocked around the world for years on Norwegian fishing boats before returning to Samso where he was born and raised. When he first got involved there the island was dependent on increasingly expensive imported oil for heat, and on electricity generated in coal-fired power plants. Fishing and farming were on decline, or in decline, and jobs were scarce, so something had to be done to revitalize the economy. Thanks in large part to Hermansen's efforts and to supportive government policies, SAMSO today gets 100% of its power from the sun, the wind and the earth, save for the hybrid electric natural gas ferry to the island, soon to be converted to biofuel. And Samsung's remaining internal combustion engine vehicles will also be converted. Each citizen of Samsung today accounts for minus 12 metric tons of CO2 emissions a year, whereas the average Dane produces more than six tons and Americans produce Fifteen. Much of the clean power on SAMSO now comes from onshore and offshore wind turbines, something that we can easily do pretty much in any of the windy areas of the United States. SAMSO exports a surplus 80,000 megawatt hours, that's a million hours of solar and wind power a year. And owners of the turbines, local farmers, co-ops, and the municipality of SAMSO enjoy millions of dollars in profits as co-investors in the island's energy projects. That's something that communities in the United States could also emulate. And instead of heating with imported oil, SAMSO now gets heat from geothermal heat pumps and from boilers in four local district heating biomass plants fired with local straw and forestry wastes. Farmers get paid for the nearly carbon neutral straw which burns far more cleanly than oil and the ash goes back to farms as fertilizer. Local plumbers won contracts to install the island's geothermal heat pumps and the piping that sends hot water from the district heating plants to radiators around the community. Danish Kroner are invested in the community not in imported oil. The SAMSO economy is carbon neutral and its carbon emissions today are close to zero.
Speaker 2 (39:12):
Well that's a good segue, that's a fascinating article you shared and it's a good I guess segue in the next one as well. Now you mentioned about knocking around in Norwegian fishing boats. You interviewed people in the United States and around the globe for your book over the course of six years. Tell us about the range of people that you interviewed and why you chose them, and maybe share a story of a few of the activists you interviewed and what inspired you with them.
Speaker 3 (39:37):
Well, I essentially was interested in how we can convert the entire economy to run on clean, renewable energy. And so I checked into each economic sector and I looked at agriculture, I looked at industry, I looked at the residential sector, I looked at the commercial sector. So I think pretty broadly surveyed the entire economy and the electric power generation sector. Then I sought out projects, which I kind of learned about through research And I discovered people who were actually implementing scalable and already cost-effective techniques for increasing the production of clean energy and or reducing the emissions of carbon to the atmosphere. And I looked for people who I think were most effective and I was really inspired to find people who were really heroic in their devotion to their work and their motivation to basically clean up the air, protect the climate, protect the soil. One person that always comes to my mind, I may have spoken about him to you before, is a North Dakota farmer named Gabe Brown, farmer, rancher. He was almost wiped out by the cost of traditional fertilizer, herbicides, pesticides, and by natural disasters like hailstorms that would flatten his crop year after year, and he studied the native agricultural techniques of the Mandan Indians in North Dakota, who Lewis and Clark wrote about when they stayed in that area of North Dakota on their journey, journey of Lewis and Clark across the United States in 1804 to 1806. They stayed with the Mandans and they learned about Native American agriculture and so Gabe Brown decided to emulate them and he was able to turn his unprofitable almost bankrupt operation into an exceedingly profitable family enterprise in which he put the health of the soil as his paramount concern, and instead of looking at yield and trying to boost, let's say, the yield of corn by dumping chemical fertilizer and pesticides and herbicides on the land, and by reverting to natural practices using animals to graze cover crops off to always keeping a root in the soil. He managed to turn what was a light brown kind of sandy soil into a rich, dark, loamy soil that looked kind of like brown cottage cheese. This new healthy soil was also pulling thousands of tons of CO2, thousands of pounds or several tons per acre of CO2 out of the atmosphere and incorporating it into the soil. Carbon is like a fuel for soil and when it's incorporated in the soil, it kind of jump starts the soil ecosystem. There are other people I met who have done this in different ways like rancher John Wick in Nicosio, California, but Gabe Brown used a whole suite of regenerative agricultural practices which people can read about in Solving the Climate Crisis, and also Gabe himself has written a book. I don't I happen to know its title, but I also will commend another book to your readers in a moment that harkens back to our discussion about the causes of climate disinformation. If you help me stay on track with that, but just to conclude the idea of regenerative agriculture and its multiple benefits, I mean, Gabe Brown and his family now have about 126 different profitable enterprises from raising rabbits to, I don't know, renting the land out at times for hunting because the land has become healthy. The plants are healthy, the soil is healthy, and as Gabe likes to say, healthy soil makes healthy plants, makes healthy animals and healthy crops. People who eat the protein and the plant material from those lands are healthy themselves as a result of eating good food that's nutritious and that's not laced with agricultural pesticides and herbicides. He saved all kinds of money not doing that, not having to plow because he can basically use some techniques. I guess he must drill seed into the soil or whatever. But there are all kinds of examples like this. There are examples in the steel industry, people that I met, in the cement industry, in the carbon capture industry where people like Nicholas Flanders at a little company called 12, where they take waste CO2 and they put it into an electrolyzer and outcome useful building block chemicals that you can then use to reassemble higher molecules and produce whatever you produce with fossil fuel, you can produce with this recycled hydrocarbon material. I also write about the circular economy and how we can avoid tremendous amount of waste that goes on in this economy by reusing some outputs that are waste in one industry and use them as new inputs and thereby save on fuel and save on raw materials, save the environment, and so on. That's just a short overview. what i wanted to mention in terms of climate denial earlier is that jane mayor has a terrific book called dark money and she traces how the work of people like richard skates and and joseph coors and uh... david coke and what's what's the other coaxed and i can't remember william coke how these how these billionaires set up these foundations that have really disrupted the American political system and imposed an extreme right-wing political agenda on the nation and pulled the wool over a lot of people's eyes with, as I had said, hundreds of millions of dollars of pro-fossil fuel industry propaganda.
Speaker 2 (47:44):
We've got about five minutes left and I want to make sure we cover this. Sure. you're working in a new national clean energy and climate protection project through a new organization that you're incorporating called Accelerating the Transition that's set to launch in early 2026. Please tell us about that new project.
Speaker 3 (48:01):
Oh, thank you so much for asking, Chris. I really appreciate it. What we are trying to do is we are trying to create in effect a movement at the state and local level, meaning the county level, the municipal level to maintain our momentum on the clean energy transition and not to be derailed by the opposition and hostility of the federal government. There's a tremendous amount that we can do at the local level. So I came up with the idea of a conference called Accelerating the Transition to bring together the companies that are engaged in this clean energy ecosystem, along with the local officials, the cabinet secretaries from different states, governors, mayors, boards of supervisors, people on municipal utility districts, other utility boards, bring them together with the clean energy ecosystem, and then with the funding community, with investors and financiers, bankers, consultants, take these three often islanded little ecosystems and bring them together and let them collaborate. And hopefully this type of collaboration will lead to the funding of projects that municipalities and states can advance. And with the public-private partnerships, we can see billions of dollars of new clean energy projects advanced in spite of the federal government's opposition to clean energy because you make more money and save more money with clean energy than you do with dirty energy. Not even looking at all of the ecological damage and public health damage. So that's what I want to say and I am looking for generous philanthropists who will join forces with me and help me to support this project. We do not have the funding currently to bring this off on the scale that it needs to happen. We probably need close to a million dollars to really do it right because we want to be able to give plane tickets and per diem to mayors and other city and county officials who otherwise would not be able to afford to come to a meeting like this, so we want to sponsor those people and we want to cover our basic costs. We're not interested in making money, we're not interested in self-aggrandizement or creating some sort of an organizational bureaucracy. It's me and an advisory board of about 15 people, but we have the expertise, I have a fantastic advisory board and just we need support and I'm hoping that the public will come forward somehow, and that this money that is needed will materialize.
Speaker 2 (51:06):
One last time, what are the websites where people can find you?
Speaker 3 (51:08):
Oh, my website is JohnJBerger.com, that's my name, and the title of my book, Solving the Climate Crisis.com, is the other website oriented toward the book.
Speaker 2 (51:19):
And confirming it's John, the letter J Berger, correct?
Speaker 3 (51:23):
That is correct.
Speaker 2 (51:24):
All right, so let me make sure we have the right website for you. Dr. John Berger, author of Solving the Climate Crisis, Frontline Reports from the Race to Save Earth. Thank you so much for being with us again today. And again, we covered about half the stuff, so we'll be in touch.
Speaker 3 (51:38):
Okay, my pleasure, Chris. Always a pleasure talking to you, I've enjoyed it. Thank you for the honor of coming on your show.
Speaker 2 (51:45):
No, great educational and very necessary conversation, so I appreciate you and all the work that you do. And a special thank you to our audience, which now includes people in more than 50 countries, for joining us for another episode of Next Steps Forward. I'm Chris Meek. For more details on upcoming shows and guests, please follow me on Facebook at facebook.com forward slash chrismeekpublicfigure and the next at chrismeek underscore USA. We'll be back next Tuesday, same time, same place with another leader from the world of business, politics, public policy, sports, or entertainment. Until then, stay safe and keep taking your next steps forward.
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