Bridging the Carbon Gap
Join students at Hunter College High School and Stuyvesant, two schools in New York City, on their journey to gain knowledge about climate change, a topic that is not taught enough to young students across the U.S. We interview climate activists, experts, and researchers about their work and experiences, and use our knowledge to think about how a climate change themed high school education can be created. This podcast is created in collaboration with newyork.thecityatlas.org.
Bridging the Carbon Gap
Mark Gongloff: what it's like writing about climate change on Wall Street's top financial platform
Mark Gongloff is a Bloomberg Opinion editor and columnist covering climate change. He previously worked for Fortune.com, the Huffington Post and the Wall Street Journal.
Every week his climate column sends a stark, realistic viewpoint on the urgency of climate change action through the world’s 355,000 Bloomberg Terminals, the principal trading tool for people working in finance.
New York City high school seniors Helena Rambler, Pierce Siegel, and Giulia Di Vincenzo interviewed Mark at Hunter College High School, and were joined at the end of the interview by their physics teacher, Ross Pinkerton. This interview took place on October 8, 2025.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/authors/APR88DH6QO0/mark-gongloff
https://newyork.thecityatlas.org/people/mark-gongloff/
Mark Gongloff 00:05
Writing about climate change, the risk is that you just scare people to death. And I have a daughter who's 12, and I watch movies and stuff with her, and she's funny, and we're joking around and stuff, and sometimes I'm like, you know, I'm living this weird world that is like separate from this other horrifying reality that's going on so many horrifying realities going on in the world. But we can, we can compartmentalize in a healthy way, like keep going about our daily lives, keep living our lives, not live in fear, but take the fact that we do have things we can do. We can make a podcast, we can write a column, we can talk to our friends, we can help educate people. We can do whatever. We can use the power that we do have to sort of fend off that fear. It helps make the future better, and it also helps give you a sense of power. I'm saying this to myself too, not just you, but like to myself, because there are days where I wrestle with this too.
Helena Rambler 01:14
Okay, so just to get started, could you give us a quick introduction about yourself and your job and what you do?
Mark Gongloff 01:21
My name is Mark Gongloff. I am a opinion columnist for Bloomberg opinion and my primary focus is climate change and green energy. I did not start out being interested in energy or climate or any of that stuff. I mean, I graduated college in 97 with a degree in magazine journalism, and then magazines stopped being a thing. And so then I went into the dot com world and just did all business news for a long time. And when I was at the Wall Street Journal in like 2007 I just started this blog. I was noticing a lot of things about climate change. Leo DiCaprio was on the cover of Vanity Fair talking about climate change and stuff, and it just started piquing my interest a little bit. And so I just started a blog at the Wall Street Journal, just writing about climate change. That went on for like a year or so. And then I changed jobs at the Journal. The financial crisis happened. I got wrapped up in doing that, and they sort of dropped the whole thing. Fast forward to three years ago, I joined Bloomberg -- 10 years ago, as an editor -- and then I was doing a newsletter, and I was writing about business and markets and stuff, and I've been doing that for like, 20 something years, and I was just kind of like, sick of it. And Bloomberg is a place that really cares about climate change, and they were interested in expanding their coverage, and they asked me if I wanted to do it. And so I jumped at the chance. And so for the past, I've been doing climate change exclusively as a columnist for the past two, almost three years now. So that's how I got to where I am.
Helena Rambler 02:57
Could you give us, like, just as an example, your most recent article, and what you focused on?
Mark Gongloff 03:03
Yeah, so I just published one today, which was, I pulled the chart, so there's a guy named Zeke Hausfather, who is a climate scientist at Berkeley Earth, and he publishes a lot of great charts. He does a lot of stuff, and he published this chart that showed that by decade, how many global heat records, like monthly heat records, have been set by decade. And was a really striking chart to me, because it showed before the 20th century, like basically none were. There were no heat records that still stand, that were set. All of them, 78% of them have happened in this century since 2000. 38% of them have happened since 2020, and so we're it's only been like five years of this decade, but already this is the biggest decade for heat records ever in human history. It was really striking to me again, 78% of those have happened in this time period in this century. So that really struck me. And, you know, it's not the type of thing I usually do, but I really like to lean on charts a lot. I like to do a lot of stuff. You know, evidence really helps make a case. Especially with Bloomberg, we do a lot of data stuff, and so it really helps me fit into the sort of Bloomberg kind of vibe with I'm doing doing stuff with charts and data. And so the other thing is that this chart did was it like, puts a lie, a couple of things like Donald Trump had said recently, you know, he had said that the Earth had been cooling since the 1930s and these, this chart showed that's obviously not true. It did show that there was a bump in heat in the US in the 30s, but that went away over time and so anyway. So that just seemed really interesting to me as a way to, like, sort of push back on some climate denialism, get a chart out there. But that was my latest from today.
Pierce Siegel 04:52
Thank you. Can you talk about how the stuff that you take in from being in the finance world, and how you apply that to your current position?
Mark Gongloff 05:01
Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, it's the working for Bloomberg, like I said, they care about data, they care about business and stuff. And so sometimes I'll write about climate denialism, but a lot of times I have to come up with stuff that fits into business. And so I found a couple of tracks that I can keep going back to again and again. One of them is insurance. Home insurance is really hard to get, or getting harder to get because of climate change, and so if you live in parts of Florida, if you live in parts of California, you can't get it at all, or you have to go to like state insurers of last resort. So this is a thing. This isn't this involves maybe trillions of dollars in homes that are don't have enough insurance. Many people don't have enough and if a flood or fire hits them, they're going to lose their house, and they don't even know it. And so there could be trillions of dollars wrapped up in that. You know, another thing is just sort of that climate finance, like, who helps pay for green energy, but also who helps pay for fossil fuels? And the sort of shocking, kind of bumming, depressing thing is that governments pay for fossil fuels. Governments subsidize fossil fuels. They've been, have been for 100 years, making it cheaper for oil and gas companies to dig their stuff up. And meanwhile, solar and wind have just barely started to get subsidies here. And then, of course, the latest, the new administration has killed all those immediately. And so I look at that, and I'm following the money where that's going. But then there are also investors. The positive news is that there are a lot of investors who are investing in clean energy and solutions right now, because it's a good business case. And so following that is kind of a good news story. But again, it involves the money and the finance that you know have a little bit of understanding.
Pierce Siegel 06:41
Yeah, I'd love to dive into that. You wrote in your article, that insurers and reinsurers use instruments to hedge risk built on parametric insurance, and you have a lovely quote, If your house gets destroyed by a hurricane, parametric insurance won't help you out if, say, wind speed never hit the payout threshold. Yeah. Can you just elaborate on what that means for the average American and also for the big companies?
Mark Gongloff 07:10
So for the average American, what this means is, like, you're not able to go and get necessarily, if you live in a high risk area, you may not be able to go and just get, like, flood insurance or wildfire insurance, but you can go and get this parametric insurance, which will say, Okay, we'll just pay you no matter what happens if wind speed of this hurricane hits 120 miles an hour. That's the parameter. So that's why it's called parametric. So, but your house can get destroyed if the wind speed is only 100 and they'll be like, sorry, never hit 120, so you're not getting paid out. So that's kind of bad news for the homeowner. I mean, it seems good on the front end, because it's like, okay, cool, I can get insurance. But the home, the insurance may not pay out for you. For the companies, for the insurance companies, it may help them, because insurance companies are kind of middle men in this thing. They're giving you insurance, but then they have to get insurance for themselves, because if a bunch of houses get wiped out, they have to be they have to pay you. So they need their own money. So they get these giant companies called reinsurance companies, which, like, they're all in, like, Switzerland, all these matter or Berkshire Hathaway is kind of another one. That's it here. But they're massive insurance companies that insure insurance companies. They are like, even harder core than the insurance companies. They're like, I'm not, we're not going to give you any more insurance, because you got to have too many risky customers. So these people are turning to like Wall Street, not always a great way to go. They're turning to Wall Street and selling like catastrophe bonds, which will pay out of a catastrophe happens. Or they're doing their own parametric insurance. So it helps these insurance companies get their own insurance. It helps them, kind of finance themselves, keep themselves afloat, and also maybe avoid paying out big disaster claims. They're always looking for ways to do that.
Helena Rambler 08:57
Have you ever faced opposition in maybe your intermediate kind of working circles?
Mark Gongloff 09:06
So not in my working circles. Everybody that I work with, I really work with great people. We will have arguments. Some of us, on like the Energy and Climate team, will have arguments about, there's a guy who's in Spain who is constantly harping on about how everybody's using coal still, and he's right. Unfortunately, I'm very mad at him about that. He makes me angry all the time because he's always like, everybody's still using coal. I mean, he believes in climate change, but he's like, he's the doomsayer always around the office. And I'm I'm trying to be like, the kind of optimistic guy, because it just gets me out of bed in the morning to be like, Okay, people care and they're doing things, and we are seeing like a big boom in renewables. But we're also seeing a boom at the same time in coal, and it's very frustrating, but that's the only kind of arguments we have now. As a Bloomberg writer, I'm on the Bloomberg Terminal. Bloomberg Terminal is this thing that people hedge funds and people like that, pay $24,000 a year to get so they can do their trades and stuff. And that's how Bloomberg makes all of its money. That pays my bills and so I'm grateful for it. But a lot of the people that are on Wall Street are hardcore conservatives, and I get people who, It's bizarre. These people are almost like friends in a bizarre, perverted way, because they will write me every time I write something to tell me that I'm an idiot and a communist and I should be fired, and, you know, and but every time they religiously faithfully write to me to tell me how stupid I am. So it's almost like kind of, you know, heartwarming, in a way, that they care about me so much, but those are the kinds of people that I get pushback from, or like people in business or people in Wall Street, people in finance who just don't want to hear it and either. And we could go into a whole different range of reasons why people just cling to these beliefs, cling to disbelief, I guess. But there are some people who are just die hards on that they come from that world, actually.
Helena Rambler 10:56
Why don't we dive into that a little bit? What's like, I mean, working with or, I guess, receiving those types of messages and kind of always having that in the back of your mind. Have you almost, like, come to a conclusion at all of like, what people's primary reason is for trying to ignore this crisis, do you think?
Mark Gongloff 11:15
Yeah, there are a few different reasons. One, we live in a in a fractured media environment where people are getting their information from Tiktok or wherever, or they're getting it from Fox News. People silo themselves into only hearing the things that they want to hear. So if you believe this stuff, you're going to go to the place that's going to tell you what you want to hear all the time. So we don't have a shared media environment. We don't have a shared information environment, so that's extremely difficult to get through. The other thing is, there are a lot of studies out that show that there is a strong correlation. And I hesitate to say this, because I don't want to insult people, but there is a strong correlation between sexism, racism, kinds of these extreme kind of like right wing views and climate denialism. Not everybody who's a climate denialist is a sexist or a racist, vice versa, but there is a strong correlation, and it's just it all comes from this sort of hyper conservative mindset, conservative in the sense, again, not to be insulting to other kinds of conservatives, but conserving the status quo specifically, like this is the way things have always been. I wanted to stay this way. And there's strong psychological, you know, reasons for that people. Some people hate change, and there's a certain mindset that just hates change. Some men especially are like oil and gas are manly, and coal is manly, and caring for the earth is womanly, and it's stupid to do that. And these are really hardened perceptions, and we're still finding them. They're still doing studies that are finding these ancient, kind of ingrained perceptions that really make people cling to these beliefs. And then, of course, there's also just sort of sorting, you sort, into a group I live in South Orange New Jersey, where there are a bunch of liberal people, and we all sit around. We get together at barbecues and stuff, and we talk about, you know, we all agree with each other all the time. These people are sitting around talking to people who agree with them all the time. And so it's hard to break out of that, to say, to raise your hand head above the crowd, and say, Wait a minute. Maybe we shouldn't believe this exactly. So those are a few of the things that hold us back from greater acceptance. But I will say that for the most part, you do look at studies, surveys show that most Americans and most people in the world care about this issue. Two thirds of Americans believe in climate change. Are afraid about it. They're experiencing it more and more. I mean, no place in the country is immune from like these disasters, and so they're experiencing it more and more. They care about it more and more. What we hear are a vocal minority of people you know, who happen to run the country currently, but they don't represent the majority of us, but most of us who feel this way are quiet about it for some reason, part of part of which is we've had decades of indoctrination, you know, fossil fuel propaganda and just this sort of belief there's only one way to do things. There's only one way to run an economy or a society, and that's to burn as fossil fuels as fast as we can. You know, these things are not really true anymore, but we it's really hard to break out of this sort of paradigm.
Pierce Siegel 14:28
In 2012 Bloomberg News put out the headline, it's global warming, stupid, after Hurricane Sandy. It's safe to say that everyone on the Bloomberg terminal working in finance saw the headline, why do you think the industry still remains opposed to changing practices in terms of funding and exacerbating fossil fuel and instead of shifting to finance the energy transition?
Mark Gongloff 14:54
So there's a lot of, one thing is, there's a lot of money still in fossil fuels. And fossil fuel companies, they have all this oil and gas that's still underground, and some coal, to some extent, coal, not so much, but all these fossil fuels are still underground, and these things are assets that they don't want to die if we switch tomorrow to all renewable energy, all this stuff underground that's worth, theoretically worth, trillions of dollars that they could sell for trillions of dollars suddenly becomes useless overnight. So they have a real, powerful motivation to keep us burning that stuff, and now they're talking about using it to make plastics. They may say, Okay, we won't. Maybe we'll drive electric cars, but we'll make a bunch of more plastic stuff in the future. So you got to keep using our fossil fuels. All that money filters through to politicians and it pays for think tanks. It finances hedge funds, my retirement funds, everybody's retirement fund is tied up to some degree in these fossil fuels. We are all kind of responsible for this in some way. And efforts to get them to divest, to dump that stuff, have failed to some degree, and partly because of politics, because the fossil fuel industry, when they try to get out of financing fossil fuels, the industry goes and pays a whole bunch of lobbyists to go and, you know, and they they help pay to put Donald Trump in the White House and put, you know, Republicans in Congress who will make laws that say you can't, you have to invest yourself in fossil fuels. You have to invest money in fossil fuels, which is a totally not a capitalist. You know, in the old days, when I was growing up, you know, 100 years ago, conservatives were people who said, the government's got to, can't tell me what to do with my money. Well, now the government is telling people what to do with their money. They're saying you have to invest in fossil fuels. You can't do business in Texas or wherever. And so there are a lot of powerful forces working against that,
Helena Rambler 16:52
So more like, kind of, I'd say, the intersection between, like, you know, economics and politics, and then also involving the climate, we were kind of discussing how, in 2009 Tesla was about to go under, and they were like, about to fail, and Obama helped out and bailed them out. And now Tesla is, you know, as successful as it is, and Elon Musk is the richest man in the world. And now seeing how Musk has kind of, you know, switched and is now, I guess it's a little bit less relevant now, but especially when Trump was running for re election, Musk was such a prominent part of his movement, I would say, like, this is obviously a very, you know, hard situation. But does that outcome surprise you? And how do you think that this happened?
Mark Gongloff 17:44
Yeah, it surprised me. I even wrote about it at the time. I was like, What is he doing? Because Trump didn't believe in climate change and wanted to do away with EV subsidies and stuff like that. There was an argument at the time that kind of made some sense, which was that Tesla was dominating the EV market in the US. And so if you're a major if you monopolize a market, one thing you can do to keep that monopoly is make it harder for rivals to join, to compete with you. And so one way you do that is just by cutting off pulling up the bridge that the ladder that got you to where you are. So you cut off subsidies for everybody else Tesla's got, what it what it has, and it's just going to keep that that was kind of simplistic for a couple of reasons. And you know, also, you have to talk about the psychology of Elon Musk, which I God only knows what, what is going on there. But yes, he got tons of government help early on for Tesla, and then, you know, fully embrace this idea that these companies shouldn't get government help, even though, again, fossil fuel companies are getting as much government help as they ever have. The other thing is that he's discovering is that a lot of these EV makers are were kept on going anyway, despite the threat of Trump, and also his involvement with Trump hurt the Tesla brand with consumers, and so people who were who were looking to buy EVs started looking for alternatives. So Tesla has really lost a lot of market share as an EV maker. So he's pivoted to saying, I'm going to make Robo taxis and robots and stuff, and none of that stuff even shows any sign of being possible to hack, but he still has this core of like, fan boys that buy the stock and pump it up, and so it's just the whole stock is, like built on air and hope and nonsense, whereas Tesla is kind of suffering a little bit from the policies that he helped put in place. And I think some of that stuff was not seen at the beginning. I don't think anybody realized just how strong the attack of the Trump administration would be on clean energy and that sort of thing. They have helped build out an EV charging network, which is again helping Tesla, but it's also helping Tesla's rivals, and so in this weird way, as you. Could have predicted, probably back then, Musk has hurt himself and Tesla by joining forces with Donald Trump in this way.
Pierce Siegel 20:09
Just to switch topics, what advice would you give to students seeking a financial career in this day and age?
Mark Gongloff 20:15
A financial career? I hesitate to. I don't have good advice on a financial career because I did not get one right? I started out in school to do business, and then I started taking classes about business, and I realized that the accounting classes put me to sleep, and I couldn't handle them, so I wanted to do journalism instead. And then I got into journalism, and ended up having to learn about accounting and finance anyway. The one thing that I that I know from talking to people in finance is that at the beginning, it is extremely hard. People will abuse you. I worked at Deutsche Bank for a year, and I saw junior bankers there who were sleeping under their desks every night, they were getting yelled at by their bosses every day, that were deeply miserable. I think that probably went away after the first several months or years so, but the first few years you are just busy all the time. You have no life aside from making money. And so I have talked to some who have, like, sacrificed the early years of their career to make that money and then to try to find something else to do that's more fulfilling to them or maybe easier on them. But in terms of getting a sort of financial career going these days, I don't have good advice on that, you know, it's just obviously follow it. You know, follow your passion, and do what you what you love. And I don't know, could I go back when I go back and have tried to make more money back in the old days, maybe, but I kind of have ended up doing mostly what I love along the way, and so I feel pretty good about that.
Helena Rambler 21:55
So I assume that, you know, the majority of Bloomberg readers like I, I would guess not a lot of it is like, you know, youth our age, so but I do think that, you know, kids our age, like, for example, when we started this podcast, kind of the main focus was almost to replace or to kind of subsidize what we lack through not having a climate curriculum. And I think because, you know, our generation is going to be the generation that's affected the most in the future, how do you think youth should get involved in this movement? And do you think that it's the youth responsibility to be the one to make this change?
Mark Gongloff 22:43
Responsibility is a big word. I don't think it's your responsibility. I think we all have a responsibility. I think my generation, you know, Generation X, and the other generations that came before you really put you in a bad spot. You know, it's really our responsibility. If anybody bears responsibility for this. It's the generations that have come prior. I think there are people, you know, in I have teenage children of my own, and I know what they're who they're talking to, and I can kind of see what's going on. And you know, I know that there are some people who have bought into sort of this, who whose politics would be difficult to mistake from those of like boomers, you know, at a certain point. So everybody is affected by a certain amount of brain rot and a certain amount of stuff like that. But so I don't think it's generational necessarily. I think you have an opportunity, though, to because you're going to be reaching people who are younger, who are still forming their opinions, still forming their view of the world. You have an opportunity to help change some minds. I may not have an opportunity to change many minds because I'm writing to 50 year old men who are millionaires, who are like, I'm the smartest person everywhere. I don't have to listen to you, you communist idiot. You know, they can tell me that you are talking to people who are still young and still developing their worldview. So talking about this stuff is really important, and I think learning about it is really important too. So I'm a little, you know, I'm disappointed here you don't have and surprised honestly, to hear you don't have any kind of climate curriculum, because I do think it's a really important thing to learn, because it involves, it affects so much of your world. I mean, it's affecting your health, it's affecting your economics, it's affecting everything. And so I think understanding that, understanding the basis of that, the ways we can get out of it, the effects it's having now, I think all that stuff is really important. So is educating ourselves constantly. I mean, I'm constantly doing it for my job, but you know, everybody should be educating themselves and also sharing what they learn with other people, not being afraid to speak up about these things and taking action where possible. One other thing I will say is my generation was guilted into believing that we need to worry about our carbon footprint, and the cart the idea of a carbon footprint was created by BP to make individuals feel bad at a time when BP and other oil companies were under pressure for, you know, polluting the planet, they want to make people feel bad. They're like, okay, yeah, we're bad. But you look at you, you drive a car, and you don't, you know, you throw away your trash, you don't care. And so it made people feel bad, and that made, that made people feel like they were powerless. Like, okay, yeah, you're right, crap. I can't do anything about this, because I'm just as bad as BP is. That's not true. Taylor Swift's carbon footprint is something we can maybe talk about. You know, her private jets and stuff. Private jets and stuff. There are people who are very, very wealthy who have large carbon footprints that maybe we could do something about, but me and you, our carbon footprint is minuscule compared to our political power. The thing that we can do is use our voice help get people elected that believe the way we believe, and help influence the people around us, to help them understand the things that we understand. That is where we have real power and that can overcome, you know, Taylor Swift's private jet use and all kinds of things. That's a real power that we have.
Pierce Siegel 26:15
You wrote about an interesting parallel between the Climate Group and maybe more right wing on the federal funds rate. And could you just elaborate on your work there?
Mark Gongloff 26:30
Yeah, it was just a weird thing. I noticed I was at Climate Week a couple of weeks ago, and there was a, there's a guy there who is an investor, who has done a lot of research about the problems in housing that could come from under insurance. And so he's the guy that came up with the $2.7 trillion figure of potential losses in the housing market due to climate change. This guy was also mentioned in The Big Short. He was, he was one of the people that Michael Lewis talked to for The Big Short, but he ended up not being played in the movie or anything like that. So he was upset about that. But anyway, this guy has seen problems coming, and he sees this problem. And during Climate Week, he said, to help the housing market, the Fed needs to cut interest rates, and cut interest rates, I guess by kind of a lot. Well, that's exactly what Donald Trump has been banging on about for a long time, so there was this weird intersection between Donald Trump and this climate activist. And I've also personally said the Fed, there's more the Federal Reserve can do. The Federal Reserve, its job, according to Congress, is to keep people employed and keep interest rates stable, so borrowing costs stable. That's its only job, and that's what it constantly says, Hey, don't bother us with climate change or anything like that, because this is our only job. I would argue that climate change is making employment less stable because it's causing, you know, creating these disasters. It is making interest rates less stable because when you have droughts, when you have floods, when you have hurricanes, you lose commodities, you lose food. Agriculture gets upset. Prices fluctuate more. So climate change is something that is something that the Fed has to care about. It also regulates banks, and banks have to worry about this stuff. When you talk about housing, going having $2.7 trillion in potential losses, that's a problem for banks and other banks and other investors. So this is something the Fed should be thinking about. And other central banks, like in Europe and other places, are doing a better job of encouraging green development, encouraging green energy, discouraging banks from investing in fossil fuels and that sort of thing. Cutting interest rates, I think, is a blunt tool, because if you if you let inflation get out of control, that hurts green energy too. But there is a case also to be made that when borrowing is really cheap, like it was for a long time, it was easier to invest in green energy, because if you're building a big solar farm or wind, you know, turbine or something like that, you have to spend a lot of money up front, so people do a lot of borrowing up front in order to make those investments so low, interest rates help that, and that's one reason why, even before Trump came along, green energy was kind of struggling, because interest rates had gotten really high. Cutting interest rates would help, but I don't know if the Fed should necessarily do it just to help green energy. You know, it's got to help the whole economy.
Helena Rambler 29:22
Kind of similarly. On that note, here we have kind of a statistic that, like you said, switching to renewables is pretty expensive, but in the long run, Americans would pay less compared to how they're much to paying for fossil fuels. Do you agree with that statement? And also, you know, if that is true, then why do you think kind of just hasn't convinced people enough to push for this initial investment?
Mark Gongloff 29:48
Yeah, it's still really early, kind of in this era where actually renewables, right now, in many places, are cheaper, not only to run, but to build, than fossil fuels. And so Spain recently, I think was the first quarter, the second quarter, or something like that. I forget the time period, but they generated almost all of their electricity with renewables, and they had a lower electricity price than the rest of Europe, which generated much more of its electricity from fossil fuels. So that's a sign that renewables, running the renewables right now is cheaper than running the fossil fuels. Another thing is like investing building a solar array or something like that is much cheaper right now than building, say, a new natural gas plant, because there's all this demand because of AI, which is a whole other nightmare we can get into. But there's all this demand because of AI to build plants, and they want to build natural gas plants, because natural gas has the benefit natural gas coal, they have the benefit of being able to be on all the time, and that's what people want. They don't want their data centers to ever go down. They don't want blackouts, things like that. Solar and when it's paired with batteries that can run all the time, that can that can produce reliable power, that doesn't stop, but they still want natural gas because they just, they feel it's like a safety blanket. It's like a something they have to have, but there's so much demand for it that it's hard to get natural gas turbines. There are not enough. There's just not enough equipment to build the natural gas plants. Now you have to wait years to get the equipment you need to build a natural gas plant in this country, whereas you can get solar panels all over the place. They're just and so it's much quicker and cheaper to build a lot of renewables right now than it is to build that stuff. You know, generally speaking, on the margins, you know, maybe it's tough to build a huge battery array that could help store the energy that you need if you're if you're running solar. It depends on local permitting things. A lot of the costs of renewables, a lot of the cost of energy becomes on the grid. The grid is different everywhere. Texas has its own grid that's like locked off from the rest of the country. And so where we live on the East Coast of the United States, electricity prices are really high. We have a lot of AI data centers. We also have a lot of gridding issues, so it's a very complex, you know, web, for lack of a better term, but generally speaking, yes, the renewables are cheaper and easier to build, cheaper and easier to run. People are it's still early days in that sort of era, though, and people still don't really fully believe it. So that's the problem that we're facing,
Pierce Siegel 32:21
if we could talk briefly on AI and the required like compute power and the cycle that's going on right now in corporate America and the companies on the forefront.
Mark Gongloff 32:35
Yeah, the weird thing about AI is there is a lot in the stock market and in the just the market generally, there is a lot of hype and belief in AI and a lot of money being thrown at it right now, without a lot of conviction that it is necessarily all this stuff is going to take hold, that all this stuff is going to come to fruition. It comes to fruition then you were going to be looking at so Sam Altman, OpenAI guy, the other day said he wanted to have enough capacity to run AI that would amount basically to a small country, about a third of total US energy consumption, which is crazy talk. That's crazy talk like you to build that is, like impossible, unthinkable at the moment, unless we invent, you know, cold fusion, like in Back to the Future, when you throw your garbage in a thing and all of a sudden, you have...we'd have to invent a whole new type of energy in order to run that. So we just can't do that. So a lot of this stuff is kind of overblown, and I kind of hope it is because it will consume a lot of energy. Now it's still, you have to put it in some perspective. It is possible that it will so it is possible it will not amount to a huge chunk of our energy demand, which will be kind of a relief, because then we won't need to, you know, we need to supply more energy, which means possibly burning more fossil fuels while we wait. You know, building more nuclear plants, stuff like that, scrambling to build all this energy when we should have been like converting the grid, electrifying the grid, that sort of thing. The other thing is, there is a theory, and I'm not and it may be true that AI could help us run things more efficiently. Run electrical grids, which are very complicated, more efficiently, maybe. So if AI data centers can produce their own power, they will maybe and produce renewable power. They could be completely disconnected from the grid. Be their own problem that nobody else has to worry about, or they can give back to the grid. The issue right now is, and there's a great example. The Trump brothers, Don Jr and Eric, are involved in an AI data center in Texas that runs on wind energy. And so we I have a friend that works for Bloomberg TV, and Eric Trump came by, and he interviewed him for TV, and he said, you know, you were running this data center that's making you a fortune that runs on wind energy. Like, how do you feel about your dad's attack on wind energy? You know, Donald Trump says wind energy is destroying the country and all this. He agreed with what his dad said about wind energy, even though it is helping him run his data center. And I guess, what that wind what that data center is doing is taking wind energy away from other houses, houses in the area in Texas. And again, it's like with what I said about Tesla, if you have a data center that's cranking out data or whatever you know and using wind energy, and nobody else gets to use that wind energy, and then you shut down wind energy altogether. Your dad shuts it down for you, for the whole country. Then you're the only person who's got this data center running wind energy, and so you've got this cheap, free power source that while everybody else is scrambling for power, and you're the one who's like running your data center, making a mint on that. So anyway, that's just an example of the different. I mean, it is a complicated thing. I hope it won't have a huge impact. It threatens to have a huge impact, not only on energy, but also on water consumption. Water consumption, again, you have to put in perspective one chat GPT request uses about a bottle of water, whereas growing alfalfa for cows in the desert in Arizona that we often ship overseas to Saudi Arabia, uses, like incredibly many multiples of that water. So there are different things. It's not as bad, the water use isn't as bad. And maybe these guys can come up with a way to maybe they can use AI to come up with a way to not use so much water. But anyway, it's a thing that is very concerning. And I have, you know, I don't want to say I'm optimistic. I'm just sort of like trying not to be freaked out about it, because there are some ways things you can there are some ways to put in perspective,
Helena Rambler 36:54
Kind of on that note, because the world is filled with so many things happening, you know, some could say it's falling apart, and I think that it's really easy to kind of go down that path and be very pessimistic and just focus on the negatives. But like you've said, you try to be the positive guy. So, you know, is there anything recently that you found or you've written about that's something positive that you want to share.
Mark Gongloff 37:21
Yeah, it's funny because I was just, I just saw a social media post, and I'm going to mangle this badly, but it was, the idea was, it's much easier to believe the world is doomed than to take the even scarier view that the world is fine, but it will take hard work to maintain it and to and to make it the world we want to be. So that's kind of scary, in a sense, to me, it's scarier to think the world is doomed. But whatever. I think that there are reasons to be optimistic, despite the attacks that Trump has made, this administration has made, and also other countries around the world. China has slowed down a little bit on its renewables. Europe is slowing on its renewables despite all that. And this was just in the New York Times yesterday or today, renewable energy outpaced installations outpaced coal installations around the world. For the first time, you are seeing these investments continue. We, despite everything, people are still investing money in this stuff because they see a future in it. The fossil fuel industry is fighting it because it also sees this same future. It's afraid and that's why it helped put Donald Trump in the White House. That's why it is trying to do everything it can to roll back these to roll back the progress we made over the past few years. That may not last for long. This could just be a blip on the way to something much better. Most people in this country are concerned about this issue most, and that is not going to change. Are they voting on this issue, not necessarily. They're not, they're absolutely not voting on this issue, but that could change. So I'm following the money and watching where the money goes, and that is going into green investments, clean investments. I'm watching where the polling is going, and that is going toward doing more, pushing people to do more, and that, and that also is you're talking about, you know, your generation, that is a generational thing, that the younger people are, the more they're concerned about this, and the more they're they want to do something about it. And again, as I said, I think that the more influence they will have over the world. They may not have the political power right now in terms of where they're where they are in office, but they have the political power in terms of what they can do to put people in office that care about what they care about. So those are a few of the things that I see as being reasons to be. Hopeful about this. The other one, one other key thing, two other key things. When we saw the ozone layer had a big hole in it, we all got together back in the 80s or whatever, and said, Let's fix the ozone layer. The whole world got together basically fix the ozone layer. The hole in the ozone layer is going to close at some point soon, because we all said, Okay, we'll stop using these CFCs and we'll, we'll fix that in 2015, 10 years ago, the world got together in Paris and said, This is bad. Climate change is bad. We got to do something about it. They all got together and said, We got to stop it at either one and a half degrees Celsius above pre industrial averages, or two degrees one and a half was kind of the stretch goal. We probably are going to blow through that. Unfortunately, the rate we're going, but at the time, the worst case scenario was like four or five degrees Celsius of total warming by the time all this was over. And you know, four or five degrees Celsius versus three degrees Celsius doesn't sound like that big of a deal. It's not, not going to ruin your day at the beach, but it is a huge thing when you're talking about global averages, because of what we did, and we haven't done it well enough. People aren't living up to their promises that they made 10 years ago in Paris, but they made enough, and they did enough, and we have done enough to take the worst case scenario from four or 5% degrees down to like 2.6 degrees. Well, I say that three something is the worst case. Now we've shaved the degree off. It's still bad. It's still really bad, but it's it's just a sign, and we're not doing what we need to do right now, but it is a sign that 40 years ago, 10 years ago, we all got together, we all for whatever reason, we all came together and actually did something. And so that is something. We have examples that it's happened in history, and we can do it again.
Pierce Siegel 41:38
You've given a number like that. It will cost to, as you said, do it again. That number is 192 trillion by 2050 you say 192 trillion is a bargain relative to the potential cost, which is still a huge multiple of US and global GDP, yeah. You just talk about what that would look like. Yeah, the
Mark Gongloff 42:02
$192 trillion is something that Bloomberg NEF, which is New Energy Finance, came up with as a as a total amount of investment around the world that would have to be made to get to net zero by 2050. So you're talking about between now and 2050 it's been $192 trillion to completely decarbonize the entire global economy. That seems like a real stretch, but that is what we would need to get to net zero, which was, has been our goal, that was partly coming out of 2015, and all those agreements, that's been our goal. We're probably not going to hit it, but there are increasing numbers of studies that show that what the damage climate change is doing already is trillions of dollars into the economy, and that's in wildfire smoke, which causes many, many 1000s of deaths a year and also causes many, all kinds of health problems. It can cause dementia, cause heart problems. They won't kill you right away. It can cause low birth weight problems for pregnancies. These are things that won't kill you right away, but just lead to a general kind of like decline in health and productivity among people. That's just wildfire smoke. You can talk about heat. You talk about, you know, floods, does other kinds of disasters, preparing for those recovering from those dealing with all those things, costs trillions of dollars a year. They're just starting to study that, but they're talking about shaving heavy percentage off of global GDP every year based on climate change over the coming decades, and so that is in a race with the spending that we're doing to avoid that outcome. I still think that that that number, the 190 2 trillion, is a bargain. I don't even know if we need to spend $192 trillion because that is based on a model, based on what we're doing now. And one of the nice things, if you want to get really optimistic, there's a group called Ember In the UK, which is run by this British guy that used to be here in RMI, the Rocky Mountain Institute. And he talks about how clean energy is adoption is on an what he calls an S curve. And so you see that with a lot of new technologies, there's slow adaption at first, and then it really takes off. And when it takes off, you start to get these economies of scale. More people are using it so they make more. So it gets cheaper to make more people find new ways to make more. So that 192 trillion is based on today's numbers, but in 2035 maybe we'll have ways that will make it half as cheap, because we're on that S curve of of adoption, that's hopeful, that's optimistic, maybe too optimistic, but that's one way of thinking about it.
Helena Rambler 44:48
So I think we've spoken a lot about our current state, and like, what the issues are, and this might be a very broad question, but like, what do you think is kind of. The most important thing, right? The first step we have to take towards, you know, a sustainable future and a sustainable solution.
Mark Gongloff 45:07
I talked about the politics and unfortunately. Unfortunately, I feel like that is the most important thing here in the US right now. We we have an administration and a Congress that is doing everything it can to fight our transition. Our transition may not be the most important transition in the world. China's is probably more, arguably more important right now, but we set an example for the rest of the world. And so when I talked about our individual power, we have to, we have to think about our individual power, what we can do and how we can channel that into action. A lot of that at this point is just, is political action driving an EV doing? Eating less meat is an important thing that we can do. I mean, Americans consume more beef than any other country in the world. Eating Less beef would help cut down on our carbon emissions. All those things are personal choices, and they help, and they do help build a community around you other people who behave the same way, but your political voices is more important, arguably, than even that, and making sure that we have policies that are not actively fighting against, that are not actively standing in the way of the transition that we need. That, to me, feels like the most important thing right now,
Giulia Di Vincenzo 46:38
As a finance expert and as someone who understands like economic decisions and advantages and disadvantages of a lot of climate policy, and you just said that the government kind of needs to start, or people need to start, making decisions that are climate conscious and kind of work towards this sustainable future. Do you think that the government should be kind of influencing these decisions? Or do you think that this should be something that people come to on their own terms ideally?
Mark Gongloff 47:08
I mean, it's a great question, ideally people would come to it on their own terms. As I was saying earlier, though, we live in an in a fractured information age where, you know, in the 1980s or whatever, we all watched CBS, we all watched NBC, we all read the New York Times. And so everybody had the same information, and then it was up to you to, like, decide what you wanted to do with it. Now, you know, somebody's getting information from Fox News or something like Newsmax, and somebody's getting it from Tiktok, somebody else is getting it from the New York Times. We're all getting different information. We're not We're not on the same page. The only person, the only entity that has a sort of bully pulpit is President United States, members of Congress, people who are in political power. So I would prefer, honestly, not to have the I don't think we need to have the government mandating things or telling us how to think about things. But when you have people in power who this is, this isn't like a political judgment. This is a scientific This is a scientific judgment. The science is real. This is happening. It's the military understands that the military is preparing for it. The insurance industry is preparing for it. And so there's a saying you don't have to believe in climate change, but your insurance company does. And so finance believes in all this stuff. And so at a certain point this does rise to the level of where government needs to be involved, maybe not in saying, Okay, we're not, you're not going to be able to drive an internal combustion engine car anymore. But to say, look, this is a problem. We need to do something about it. We're trying to do something about it. We've given fossil fuels, the fossil fuel industry, subsidies for more than 100 years. We have subsidized burning this stuff that is hurting the planet, that is hurting our economy, that is hurting our health. We need to stop doing that as a first step and maybe get renewables back on a level playing field where they're not right now, you could argue maybe they had a higher playing field for a little while. I don't know, Tesla got a big, you know, loan from the government, as we talked about earlier. But when you have nascent industries that you feel as a national priority, you might want to finance, help finance those industries, and help foster those industries until they can get going. You going. I think there is a role for government in that. There's a role for government in regulating clean air, help regulating the emissions that come out of cars and factories and again, until this year, that was a thing that the EPA did. Now, the EPA doesn't want to do that anymore, at bare minimum, the EPA should continue to do that, and that would help us with our emissions, that it would help us keep us on the road. So there are lots of roles for government that don't involve necessarily, you know, forcing people to behave in a certain way, but that can help, you know, foster the things that we need to get done. Thanks.
Ross Pinkerton 49:59
I've a couple questions that I'll do one at a time. But related to that, the politics and the economics, it seems like what the Biden administration landed on was exactly what you're saying they should do, which is not ruling things out, but just making things cheaper for people to do the right thing. And first of all, I'm curious. It seems like the Trump administration undid that purely out of spite or to help keep the cost of fossil fuel the same, but make that look better in comparison. Is they? Are they going to pay a political cost? Or is the media ecosystem so fractured that like anybody who voted for them is never going to know that their energy is more expensive because we're not turning on the wind plants that are 90% built, or we're not, you know, we're taking away their options to do solar on their house. Are people going to find out and vote about it, or is it only the people who already cared?
Mark Gongloff 51:03
Yeah, well, so the past 10 years have taught me anything is that I can't make political predictions, and so I don't know what on earth American voters will do next, but I do know that they obviously care about prices. They cared about the price of eggs 10 months ago, or whatever, and they care, they do care about electricity prices, those are going up. So whether they can connect the dots, and not all of that is necessary is exactly about renewable. Some of it is about renewables. Some of it is about not investing in grids, which all of it is, is not investing in the future, not not climate proofing ourselves for the future. And so whether they connect the dots or not, they'll say, my bill, my electric bill, is too high. The food, I'm paying more for food. For some reason, I don't know why. Why is that still happening? Eggs were supposed to be cheaper. A lot of that might have to do with climate change. Things that are happening like that, they will see the prices going up, and maybe they're losing jobs a lot of these. One of the things that the Biden administration did, one of the things that Congress did when they enacted the IRA was they thought they were like Trump proofing it, or future proofing it by putting a lot of these manufacturing jobs and facilities in red states. Most of the benefits of the inflation Reduction Act went to red states. Didn't matter, like, get rid of it all. And so some of those voters are kind of finding out, like, oh, you know that job I was supposed to have, I don't have anymore. That plant that was going to be here isn't here anymore. Why is this happening? You can say the same thing about immigration. They're running, they're rounding up workers at the Hyundai plant and and shipping them off. And shipping them off. And so now the Hyundai plant doesn't work anymore. Well, you know, it's, it's totally self defeating. It's out of spite. It's, it's political signaling. It is also to benefit the fossil fuel industry. I do, I continue to expect, maybe, again, this is me being the dumb optimist, that there will be a political price for it, just because it will show up in these like kitchen table, things that you know, people may say they care about climate change, but they vote on the price of eggs. They're going to maybe, hopefully, vote on the price of energy not having that job that they were promised. That sort of thing.
Ross Pinkerton 53:12
That makes sense. So it might come out whether, whatever they think about the reason it's happening might just come out as general dissatisfaction with who's in power. Yeah. So on the flip side, when somebody who cares about climate and wants to do the right thing is in power, nationally or locally, largely that looks like it's going to be Democrats. But when that happens, it seems like the other thing you said of withdrawing the fossil fuel subsidies, that's going to feel like a non starter, because that's going to raise gas prices, or whatever the case may be, or at least be said to raise those things. I'm wondering, as an example, supposing Zohran Mamdani becomes the mayor of New York City, and he has said good things in the past about enforcing Local Law 97 which would force buildings to clean up the bigger buildings and make them actually invest in electrified equipment and lower carbon equipment, as opposed to what Mayor Adams has tried to allow them to do, which is just to pay for cheap renewable Energy Credits that don't affect New York City mamdani's whole election is premised on affordability. Is he going to be able to do the things that he would like to do, and I think thinks would be the right thing, or is he going to be is he going to have to avoid anything that might look like a cost?
Mark Gongloff 54:39
You're talking about a very fine balance that Joe Biden had to walk, Mamdani would have to walk it. Meanwhile, you're being pushed. Business interests are opposed to Mamdani. Landlords don't like him. The federal government might try to work against whatever. Library does they would try to intervene? I'm sure it the trouble with sometimes I do think there is a better chance of getting something like that done, of affecting the businesses, affecting the landlords, than there is of passing something like, say, when France tried to make it make gas more expensive, that went right to people, and so that you had the yellow vest riots and all that sort of thing. Is very hard. We do subsidize gasoline in this country. If we, if we tax gasoline properly, it would be like it costs in Europe, say, where it's way more expensive. If you tried to take that away, you would have blood in the streets, I'm sure. But it's also maybe not fair to try to target consumers, especially if you can find ways to lure them into doing the things that are cheaper and better anyway, and in the meantime, I guess if you are imposing costs, imposing them on sort of the entities that are able to bear that cost. The problem is those entities have political power, but imposing it on those entities is an easier lift, one that you can maybe get people behind, voters behind, much more easily. So it's hard to say whether it will succeed. But I think targeting those areas is is easier than targeting, you know, consumers. There are fossil fuel subsidies that if you told people about them, they would be they wouldn't even understand them, you know, like advanced depreciation, and you know, there are all kinds of little tax breaks that they get, that you could easily pull the plug on those, and it would not. This is an industry that made 100 something billion dollars and net profit last year. It's going to be fine if you take away some of these little these little perks here and there. Those aren't the kinds of things that should draw a lot of political like populist pushback, although they will make the lobbyists go crazy, and then that's a huge problem. When Biden tried to pass the IRA, you had a very narrowly divided Congress. You had people like even on the Democratic side, who were trying to limit what they could do. Same thing with healthcare. When Obama tried to pass the ACA, there's always that, it's always a tough divide for that reason, but again, focusing on the people who can bear the cost maybe is one way to approach it,
Giulia Di Vincenzo 57:34
Kind of as a follow up question to that. So what would what do you think the outcomes of a more moderate approach to climate change policy kind of look like financially and politically, since so many proposals we were just discussing, put forth by by progressives, by environmentalists, appear so radical to public, especially given our polarized landscape right now. Do you think this is more of like a lose, lose situation in which we, you know, don't make enough progress, while also upsetting too many people? Or do you think that compromising in the short term politically will allow for more progressive policy to kind of, I guess, climate proof, as you were saying for us in the long term.
Mark Gongloff 58:08
Yeah, this, this was, again, the problem with the IRA, the issue that you had, you had, you had the Green New Deal first that everybody was pushing and and everybody pushed back and recoiled at the idea of a Green New Deal. Green New Deal is obviously the sort of thing, the sort of idea that you need a whole of society approach to this, that you fix the fixing the climate and fixing the economy are tied together inexorably. But yes, voters are like, Whoa. That's crazy communist stuff, even though a lot of it is just stuff that they're already doing in normal, perfectly functioning socialist countries like in Europe, and but it's, it's crazy for people in this country say. So a lot of people have taken an incrementalist approach to it. Obama did it. Biden did it. And what even talking about green new deals and stuff like that does, is it, you know, it expands the window, the Overton Window, of what people are talking about, what and what is possible. And so what we got with the IRA was something that was a lot better than maybe had been possible under Obama, say, eight years earlier. Maybe so it is possible that we have expanded the window a little bit, but yeah, there are always going to be trade offs. I mean, I think a a a moderate policy is sort of basically going back to what, at least going back to what we have with the IRA, which was, you know, under Biden, you had massive production of oil and gas, record production of oil and gas. But at the same time, we were financing, we were building a EV charging network. We were making it cheaper to buy EVs. We were supporting the renewable industry in all kinds of ways. I think that people understand that, and as long as it doesn't impose direct costs on them, they're going to have less they're going to have less reason to complain about it. I think, you know, Trump and other people have made political hay out of out of high costs and just said, Well, that's green energy. And you know, they have not they can't connect those dots because there are no dots to be connected. But it registers with some people. But I think if you're in a different kind of economic environment, I think you can make those Ira arguments all over again, at the very least. And the problem again, with with going moderates to moderate is you end up trying to get half a loaf, you end up getting none. And that's where we are today. You know, we thought we were being moderate. We thought we were being when I say we, I said they, you know, the Biden, Biden and Congress, thought they were being moderate and giving red states and giving Republican voters, you know, some some goodies by building this stuff in their districts. And it didn't matter all of it was wiped out. We thought energy was a bipartisan thing. Four years ago, they were saying energy is just a bipartisan thing. Everybody wants energy. Let's do all the above. The problem with all the above is that if the political, the politics changes, political winds change, then all of a sudden, you only get fossil fuels. You get you get just one of the above. So, but it is. It is a tough balance, and I if I were smarter about it, I might be in politics and not doing what I'm doing.
Helena Rambler 1:01:07
But do you have any questions for us?
Mark Gongloff 1:01:11
Yeah, I do. You know, I'm talking to you, it's I am, you know, an old person, and it's easy to be demoralized and cynical about the world, but I'm curious at how you think about this issue, and your optimism level about it, what you think you can do, what you think is achievable. And I'll just open that up to any of you, or all of you who want to answer because I'm curious here.
Helena Rambler 1:01:40
I mean, I would say a lot of it is, I think, because there's so much information out there, a lot of it is just kind of trying to deal with it, and, like, trying to understand it. I would say, I think it's really easy to be kind of scared. I would say, me personally, I'm, like, pretty scared, but I try to be optimistic. And I think that, you know, because a lot of our generation, I think, has been exposed to the idea of climate change, even at like, a younger age, and we're growing up with it, and it's a lot more, you know, present in our lives. And I think any previous generation, because we have this, I think that in the future, there's going to be a greater like number of people who are kind of working towards a solution. So I think that even just out of sheer number, there's going to be like we have the potential to make a much greater impact. And I think that, you know, I prefer to focus on that, because I think especially being quite young and knowing that there's so much ahead of us, the idea that you know the world is going to end is not really how you want to
Mark Gongloff 1:02:48
think of it. Yeah, that's good to hear.
Pierce Siegel 1:02:54
Yeah, that was good. I guess I think about the little stuff and how that compounds. I guess it's a little easier to focus on than the big crisis at hand. But yeah, we do the podcast as well. So it does feel like we're, we're doing a little more there, and I think it's, it's good. We also made a game, or helped make a game called energetic, so people can, kind of like play and set up, set up power and energy in the New York City and greater Long Island grid. And there's been some some progress with that. So, yeah, yeah.
Giulia Di Vincenzo 1:03:43
I'd like to kind of add on to what Helena said, Just because, I mean, I love talking about climate change. I mean, not climate change, like the bad effects, but just kind of like, you know, updating my friends on, like, things I read in the news and stuff like that. And it's really, it's really amazing to see a lot of people who aren't traditionally invested in climate change, like, don't really think of it in the same way that we think of it, like politically, but are interested in interested in it in other ways, kind of like thinking back to like culinary arts, or like fashion or art. I have a friend who's like, actually gonna do something with environmental design, which is something that I think is so amazing, especially because this is not something that I would have traditionally thought that she would be interested in. And so I think that there's, like, a lot of, I think a lot of people are going to kind of pursue environmentally adjacent careers, which allows us to make a lot more progress. But I will say, I do think a lot of people tend to be super polarized, even just the classroom, without having a lot of, like, financial like climate literacy, just because, even though there's so much information out there, like, a lot of it isn't really geared to younger audiences, and it's either super technical or super generalized. So it doesn't really allow you to have like, a very succinct, or, I guess, like, cohesive understanding of what's really going on. And so people tend to just make assumptions about what's going on, which can either be super drastic or super, I mean, drastic in either direction. And so I think that like that's would probably be one of the greater issues that I think that our generation is facing, just because there is such a big disconnect between just like people of our age who aren't even voting yet, because we consume such different types of media, and because the media isn't really providing like a single story for us to kind of follow, or at least like multiple stories for us, like, I guess, converge into one story. And so I think that's something that is going to impact, I guess, our future generation to look out for it.
Mark Gongloff 1:05:41
Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. No, that's really helpful. And it's helpful for me to think about too like ways to write about this stuff and think about this stuff, because, you know, you talked about being afraid. And there, there is, there is the real risk that you, I mean, when writing about climate change, the risk is that you just scare people to death. You know, you read things all the time about tipping points, and it just sounds like, oh, you know, the Atlantic circulation is going to collapse. And it's like, it's easy to end up feeling terrified and, and I guess there are a lot of things, and, you know, for me personally, I kind of feel terrified about, maybe the direction of the government, say, but, but the fear is, is a and at the same time, there's this cognitive dissonance, because I have to go about my daily life too, right? My kids are going to school. I've got two kids that just went into college. I've seen them to college, and I'm like, seeing them, and I'm like, they're going to college here. But, and yet, the world feels insane. How is that even possible? Like, and you have a daughter who's 12, and I watch movies and stuff with her, and she's funny, and we're joking around and stuff, and sometimes I'm like, you know, I'm living this weird world that is, like, separate from this other horrifying reality that's going on so many horrifying realities going on in the world. But we have to, we're human beings. We have to compartmentalize. And that's part of the our evolution enabled us to, like, just be able to, like, Shut stuff out and keep going. Because that's that's the way we just, you know, survive. But we can. We can compartmentalize in a healthy way, like, keep going about our daily lives, keep living our lives. Not live in fear, but take the fact that we do have things that we can do. We can make a podcast, we can write a column, we can talk to our friends, we can help educate people. We can do whatever. We can use the power that we do have to sort of fend off that fear. It helps make the future better, and it also helps give you a sense of power. I'm saying this to myself too, not just you, but like to myself, because there are days where I wrestle with this too, you know. But we give ourselves a sense of power when we just do something, and the more we do, the more it builds on itself, and maybe other maybe it inspires other people to do things too. And so living in fear is just you got to have a little bit of, I guess, fear, because we didn't care at all, I'll be like, Oh, who cares? Because that was kind of like what my generation did for a long time. It's like, well, that's a problem for people in 2035 to worry about. Well, 2035 is almost here, and so, like, it's our problem now. We are dealing with it. We're living in it. So you can't do that. You have to have a little bit of fear, a little bit of concern. But you can turn that into healthy, you know, action.
Helena Rambler 1:08:25
Great. Any final thoughts?
Mark Gongloff 1:08:27
No, that's it. Again. I, I'm glad to see that you all are caring about this. Thank you for inviting me. It's really, it's been, it's been helpful for me, in a way, and just just to feel that other people across generations are caring about this and taking action about this, and you know, I'm just honored to you that you asked me to come talk to you. Thank you.
Helena Rambler 1:08:49
Thank you so much. This is great hearing from you, and I think that we learned so much and got a lot of insight.
Helena Rambler 1:09:01
Thank you for listening to our tiny podcast about a giant topic. We've learned we have listeners all over the world, and we're curious who you are and what you would like to hear on the show. So if you'd like please send us an email at podcast at the city atlas.org, that's podcast at the city atlas.org Thanks for listening. You.