John Berger: Silver Buckshot not Silver Bullets

We sit down with JOHN J. BERGER, Ph.D., environmental science and policy specialist, award-winning author, and longtime advocate for a rapid shift to clean energy. He digs into his new book, Solving The Climate Crisis: Frontline reports from the race to save the earth, and previews Accelerating the Transition, a national Clean Energy and Climate Protection Conference that will kick off San Francisco Climate Week, April 18–20, 2026.

John explains why renewables and efficiency are the most economically and environmentally sound path forward, how regenerative agriculture and restoration fit into the solution set, and what it will take to align public officials, investors, and clean-tech builders to scale impact.

Learn more

• Book site: solvingtheclimatecrisis.us
• Conference site: acceleratingthetransition.com (San Francisco Climate Week, April 18–20, 2026)

Transcript

The planet, we're big fans, and it needs some help. We're going to skip the part where we convince you that humans have caused a tremendous change in the climate since roughly the 1700s. We're also going to skip over a bunch of terrifying statistics and doom and gloom stories.

We know you've heard all of that. We are regular people, you might say climate curious, that want to help, and don't know where we can jump in yet. Welcome to Team Climate, a show about what it really looks like to do climate work.

This is real, and this is bigger than all of us, and it's going to take all of us to change it. My name is Jeffrey Bryan Potter. I'm a senior product designer in the FinTech space.

My co-host, Kristin Shaw, is the head of growth for a consulting agency and the national marketing chair for a clean tech accelerator. Each episode we're going to be talking with someone in the field doing the real work it takes to make change. We hope this inspires you to jump in too, because we're going to need you.

Welcome back, team. Today, we're really excited to bring you our conversation with John Berger, who is an environmental science and policy specialist, prize-winning author, environmental consultant, teacher, and advocate for a swift transition to 100% clean renewable energy. We're going to discuss John's journey into climate advocacy, his book, Solving the Climate Crisis, and his upcoming event, Accelerating the Transition, kicking off the San Francisco Climate Week in April 2026.

Also, I had COVID, so my voice sounds really different. Sorry, not sorry. Let's get to work.

John, how are you today?

I'm doing fine. Thank you very much. And thank you very much for inviting me to join your podcast.

It's a pleasure to be here and I'm looking forward to our conversation.

Thank you so much. So we'll jump right in, busy guy. So you say, in some of our previous conversations that you really became convinced that renewable energy and efficiency technologies were the most economically and environmentally sound way forward.

So what was the spark or the moment that you really convinced you of that? Can you point to a single moment?

I don't know if I can or not, Jeff. I think that it was more the preponderance of evidence. And to some extent, my instincts on this topic were really reinforced by the research of Professor Mark Z.

Jacobson at Stanford University, who has done the deepest dive into the costs and the adequacy of renewables for meeting all of our energy needs. And I think that it was more an accretive process, accreting different facts, which ultimately created, for me, a comprehensive picture. It was almost like I was looking for pieces of the puzzle.

And the puzzle was, how do we solve the climate crisis? And I've been deeply concerned about environmental issues ever since, I think, I was a very young man when I first encountered nature and fell in love with nature and with the natural world and with the outdoors. As I flew from New York City, where I grew up, to the West Coast to go to Stanford, I would look over the United States and I would see development, and I would see farmland and forests being essentially slowly consumed by urban development.

And this concerned me and I felt that this cannot go on forever and that we need to be more rational about how we build and that we need to avert sprawl and begin building upwards rather than outwards. This was actually reinforced for me when I was a graduate student. When I went to UC Davis, I did a research associate ship or a professor, and I was studying land use and sprawl in Sacramento.

There, it was pretty clear that the developers had representation on the Planning Commission, and the Planning Commission was granting variances to their rational urban development plan, so that instead of staying within the urban boundary, development was leapfrogging way out into the suburbs, and then people were having to drive very long distances just to get from home to work or vice versa. So that seemed very irrational. If you're asking me indirectly how I became an environmentalist and how I became concerned about climate issues, I think that it was through a very serendipitous process.

I originally, as a very young man, wanted to be a journalist for the New York Times, which I never became. And I also wanted to be a fiction writer. But after writing a couple of novels and discovering that the world was not eager to publish them, I thought, well, I should just write nonfiction books because little did I know how difficult and how poorly recompensed that field was.

But I thought with all of the naivete of youth that I could do it and become financially stowned and support or subsidize my fiction writing habit. At that point, I looked around for a topic to write about, and I settled on the idea of writing a book about nuclear energy, which was probably the most implausible thing for me to have ever come up with, because I had never had a college course in physics, let alone a deep understanding of energy or nuclear power, nuclear physics or whatever. But again, with the naivete of youth and some serendipity, I plunged in and I self-educated myself on much of the technology.

And I had the great good fortune of having a mentor in Dr. John W. Goffman, who had been the associate director of Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, and who was a professor of medical physics, and he had an MD, and he had a doctorate in physics, and he had been a graduate student back in the day for former AEC Chairman Glenn Seaborg. Dr. Goffman was a brilliant man, and he was also very kind and solicitous of me as a young man, and he taught me what I needed to know.

I guess it was the bare bones of what one needed to know to write a book about nuclear power. It was difficult to get this book published eventually through serendipity. I was driving from Santa Cruz to my home in Berkeley, and I had already had my book proposal for my book on nuclear energy rejected by 17 publishers.

And I remembered as I was driving through Palo Alto that Ramparts Press had an office in Palo Alto. So I drove off the freeway and stopped at a phone booth. We did have phone booths back in those days.

I phoned the publisher and it turned out it was a very small company. The publisher himself answered the phone and I pitched him my idea for this book. And I subsequently was lucky enough to sell it to him for the glorious sum of $1,000.

So I wrote the manuscript and I delivered it to him. And I had various experts review every chapter that I wrote. Ultimately, Linus Pauling wrote the introduction to the book.

Linus Pauling, the great chemist, famous for his research on vitamin C, but also not only the winner of the Nobel Prize in chemistry, but a Nobel Prize for peace, put his imprimatur on the work, and so did then Senator Mike Gravel, also the late Senator Mike Gravel. So that was my first book, and it was all about the problems of nuclear power, starting with the economic and the safety issues and the nuclear proliferation issues and the possibility of nuclear terrorism and how a nuclear power plant could be vulnerable to attack, as we see right now in Ukraine. Oh, anyway, I wrote about the dangers, and that spurred me to look for alternative ways of providing clean, safe, affordable power, and I devoted 40% of the book.

I started working on it in the early 1970s, and it was ultimately published in 1976, and it contained many, many pages of in-depth reporting and writing about clean alternative energy. And I realized at that point that we were being presented with a false choice, and the choice which society was being presented with was either nuclear power or coal. I realized from my studies that the alternative was not nuclear coal, but it was coal, ore, solar, wind, energy storage, geothermal power, hydropower, ocean power, and so forth.

Onshore wind, offshore wind. We have a glorious and abundant supply of clean, everlasting, sustainable energy that is flowing around us all the time. We have more than twice the capacity of our entire electrical system in the offshore wind resource that we have around the coastal United States.

And what I'm saying about the United States is not so unique. We could power 140 countries in the world or maybe more. I don't know the exact number, but I use that number because Professor Jacobson actually studied the energy systems of 140 countries and he found that these countries could sustainably supply all their energy needs from renewable energy sources.

So therefore, I came to the conclusion that we have this alternative to coal and to natural gas. I then gradually, I was teaching at Vista College in the early 1980s. And this is after I had already, as I had said earlier, I published in the mid 1970s my book which was called Nuclear Power, The Unviable Option, A Critical Look at Our Energy Alternatives.

And I used a nuclear reactor, imaginary nuclear reactor meltdown scenario. And I chose a Babcock and Wilcox reactor, which was the same reactor that ultimately did meltdown in the real world at Three Mile Island. So moving right along, in the late 1970s, I founded an organization called the Nuclear Information and Resource Service together with Stanley Weiss.

And I set this up for Stanley in Washington, DC. And Lynn Cherry also did a lot of research, which I believe I'm remembering correctly on the eastern part of the United States. So that we surveyed groups that were working for safe energy.

And I got more into the safe energy movement at that point. And then in the early 80s, I was teaching at Vista College. And there I taught my students about climate change, which I was just learning about for the first time.

And I kind of put together all that I had learned about clean energy alternatives with the dangers of climate change. And I could see that the clean energy ecosystem, if you will, was the solution to climate change. And I began to become deeply interested in that.

In the 1980s, I was also working earlier, had worked in the mid 70s for David Brower at Friends of the Earth, and became their Energy Projects Director. So I think I've probably more than answered your question here. Have I gone overboard on it?

No, that's perfect. And it kind of answers several other questions I had lined up. So thank you.

You have worked in science, policy, restoration, energy, and also the intersection of those things. Has that shaped how you frame the climate crisis?

Yes, indeed it has. That's an excellent question, Jeff. One of the solutions to the climate crisis, and there are many, the solutions are not a silver bullet, but silver buckshot.

And one piece of silver buckshot are natural climate solutions. Through the restoration of forests, we can improve the ability of forests to extract, if you will, carbon from the atmosphere and then incorporate it into the soil and into plant tissue through photosynthesis. This process is extremely important.

The Amazon has, for thousands of years, been a carbon sink, which reduced the global quantity of CO2 in the atmosphere by taking CO2 out of the atmosphere and sequestering it in the soil, building the soil of the tropical rain forest and also in the standing biomass of the trees. Ultimately, I had studied environmental restoration while I was working for Friends of the Earth. And then subsequently, I wrote a book about environmental restoration called Restoring the Earth, How Americans Are Working to Renew Our Damaged Environment.

And through that, I became acquainted with the opportunities for reforestation by studying the work of Tony Look, who was the founder of Semper Virens Fund in Los Altos, California. But I continued to be very interested in restoration and restoration ecology. And I subsequently got a PhD in ecology, environmental policy and planning from UC Davis.

I think this is all kind of... I began to see this is all kind of related. Energy and climate and the natural world are inextricably connected.

And so the solution to the problem has to be a holistic one. Out here in California, where I'm based, John Wick of the Marin Carbon Project has discovered that you could put a light dusting of organic compost on soil. And this would...

this little dusting, this injection, as it were, of carbon in the form of compost serve to jumpstart the soil ecosystem and make it healthier in a number of respects, including the functioning of the soil microflora, the bacteria, fungi, viruses, the whole little ecosystem below the surface beneath our feet. That's trillions of organisms, probably in a square foot or a yard of soil. And this is very important for taking carbon out of the atmosphere.

We could remove billions of tons of CO2 from the atmosphere on a global basis. If we were very conscientious about deploying regenerative agriculture and similar techniques that I mentioned that John Wick employs. But there are other techniques, like I write about in my book, Solving the Climate Crisis, Frontline Reports from the Race to Save the Earth.

I described North Dakota farmer Gabe Brown and his methods of regenerating the soil. He took sort of worn out, impoverished farmland and using regenerative agricultural techniques, which he learned from the Mandan Indians who had lived in North Dakota. And Gabe studied the journals of Lewis and Clark.

Lewis and Clark had crossed the Great Plains around 1804, and they wrote in the journals, the famous journals of Lewis and Clark, about the agricultural practices of the Mandan Indians. And Gabe studied those journals in the local library when he was desperate to find a way to farm more profitably and economically. And he deviated from the practices that were so common all over North Dakota and all throughout the United States, where we follow a factory farming model.

And that model is destructive of the soil. It's a very expensive model in a number of respects. It's expensive in that it's a waste and a squandering of environmental capital and of healthy soil, but it's also wasteful because we are spending enormous amounts of money, I would just guess, wild guess, billions of dollars annually in the United States on herbicides, pesticides and nitrogen-based fertilizer that are created from natural gas.

Gabe was able to farm very successfully and more profitably without all of that by using compost, by using mulch, by multi-cropping, using diverse kinds of mixes of plants following the model of the Mandan Indians. He also did a mixture of animal husbandry and field cropping and ranching, so that as the animals grazed the land and became fatter and healthier because of they're not eating pesticides and herbicides, and the grass itself is healthier because the soil is richer. They leave their droppings on the landscape, providing natural fertilizer.

And Gabe would also use green mulch. He would plant cover crops that he would then till into the soil, and that would enrich the soil. His other protocol was to, he had a, you might say, a mantrum.

He wouldn't have used that term, that you always want to keep a live root in the soil, so that there's a cover crop that actually armors the soil, and protects it from the pelting of hail, of raindrops. And this not only minimizes soil erosion, but it improves the infiltration of ground water, which addresses another terrific problem that we have throughout much of the world, where there's a shortage of ground water. It's being overgrown by farmers who are no longer getting enough water over land.

So anyway, this regenerative agriculture solves multiple problems. It allowed Gabe to produce, I guess, 140 different crops on his farm and become very profitable, whereas his neighbors were spending so much money on herbicides, pesticides, and fertilizers, and he wasn't having to spend that money. And he was also very, very hard working.

He would work a day job, and then he would come and he would kind of bale hay until two o'clock in the morning. And he convinced his neighbors to let him harvest the hay growing in roadside ditches because he didn't have any money. His own feed because he had been actually wiped out a couple of times in succession by hail and the bank wouldn't lend him more money.

So he had to be resourceful. And as a result of this resourcefulness, he became a national expert. Maybe he's a global expert in regenerative agriculture.

And he does travel around and do consulting work in that field nowadays. That's one aspect of how ecology comes to be part of the solution to the climate crisis. But there are certainly many more aspects and elements to the solution.

Like I say, it's like a mosaic. And all of these pieces can come together to form a holistic energy solution that enables us to deal with this ever-worsening climate crisis and unlock trillions of dollars of savings. I'm not kidding when I say trillions.

I mean trillions. We in the United States already spend a trillion dollars a year roughly on fossil fuel. That's like over $560 billion for oil and maybe, I don't know, $370 billion for natural gas and maybe $50 billion plus for coal.

If we had a very concerted energy plan that made it national policy to convert from fossil fuels, we could be saving and reinvesting that trillion dollars largely into clean renewable energy, which would be a phenomenal source of clean kilowatts and clean energy of all kinds. And in the process, after saving trillions of dollars, we would be providing millions of new good paying jobs to our fellow citizens, and we would help save millions of lives of people who are now dying worldwide. Over seven, maybe seven to 11 million people die worldwide from the effects of air pollution, 90 percent of which is created by the burning of fossil fuels.

So we could save money, we could lower energy costs for ordinary Americans, we could protect public health, and we could protect the environment. And so I think that there's some good news out here in terms of what is possible. And we're not doing anything remotely like that.

In fact, the current administration is doing everything it can to sabotage, kneecap, undercut clean energy. And it's pretending that this is to provide abundant energy to people at economical prices, but it's actually doing precisely the opposite. And it's, if you had to come up with an insane energy policy that makes no sense for the public or for the nation, but only makes sense for people selling fossil fuels, then there you go.

You've got it in a nutshell.

Yeah, they nailed it. It's funny to think of being starting from the 70s as having the long view. But Kristen and I are both born in the 70s.

That doesn't seem that long ago. But you've been in the game since then. What are you surprised by, positively or negatively, about how this story has unfolded?

I think what I'm surprised by is the fact that renewable energy has gotten so cheap. And so 90% of the new electrical capacity worldwide, I'm not sure if it's exactly 90%, but it would be on the order of almost all of the new capacity, is clean energy, because it's cheaper. It's competing in the marketplace.

And I did not foresee that it would fall 99% in price, in terms of solar panels. I, when I first began learning about it, I thought, oh, this is a very high-cost technology. I don't see how this is going to become pervasive.

I thought we would have to be much more dependent on wind. But now, too, we have opportunities in geothermal energy. And as you know, we are sitting or standing on a fantastic source of clean energy in the form of hot rock.

What we haven't been able to do is economically drill down to it and recover that energy. But now, using some technology that was invented by the fossil fuel industry, and thank you, fossil fuel industry, for this technology, we now can recover that heat almost anywhere. We have had economically competitive geothermal power for over 100 years, but it was limited in its location to those few places where you had hot water or steam accessible to the surface and easy to get.

But now we can go thousands of feet down into the earth, inject a stream of water, and then there is a possibility of doing a lateral fracking and have that water travel through this matrix of cracked hot rock and come up another pipe, go to a geothermal power plant, be, let's say, flash a volatile heat transfer fluid to steam, run a turbine generator, and then have that water re-inject it down into the earth without any adverse emissions from the process. It does pose a risk to groundwater and groundwater contamination. I am frankly not an expert on that risk or on how to ameliorate it.

There is no free lunch in the energy field. There is an environmental cost to absolutely everything that you do. And one has to weigh those costs and determine what is going to be the most economical and least environmentally damaging, and go with that mix of solutions.

This is why in my book, Solving The Climate Crisis, I advocate for a rational clean energy plan, a national clean energy plan where we would use the best science, the best engineering, to weigh all of the adverse and positive effects and do sort of a very comprehensive, serious analysis of what is the best mixture of energy sources in each region, because regions vary in terms of their natural resource endowments. We want to be able to use solar in the southwest. We want to be able to use hydro in the northwest.

We want to use wind in the Great Plains. We want all of this interconnected so that we can have an integrated power grid so that the solar acts as sort of a backup for the wind, the wind for the solar, the geothermal and the hydro, or the intermittent renewables. And therefore, you can put together a comprehensive and reliable system as modelled by Professor Mark Jacobson at Stanford University.

And I'm very happy to say that Mark is going to be one of the keynote speakers at a national conference that I am working on launching with an advisory board and a board of directors for a newly incorporated organization that I'm the executive director of and the board chair. It's called Accelerating the Transition. And Accelerating the Transition will hold a national Clean Energy and Climate Protection Conference in San Francisco, April 18th through April 20th, in conjunction with San Francisco Climate Week.

This will be the kick-off event for Climate Week. And we will address all sorts of climate solutions, but we are going to be addressing this from the perspective of what the state and local officials can do. Our goal is to see that the United States does not lose its momentum on clean energy.

We don't want to see this momentum stall because it's vitally important, both environmentally in terms of protecting the climate and in terms of protecting the pocketbooks of ordinary American citizens. However, because President Trump has thrown up a roadblock to progress on clean energy on the national front, we have to concentrate our efforts now at the state and local level, on the ground. This is ultimately where progress does occur, on the ground.

It doesn't occur in Washington, DC., in the abstract, but power plants are built somewhere. And we want to help state and local public officials of all kinds, in cities, counties, water agencies, utilities, state governments, departments of the environment, mayors, county supervisors.

We're trying to bring these folks together and put them together with the investment community and with financiers so that we help nurture public-private partnerships. This doesn't mean that ordinary people are not going to be welcome or interested in the proceedings. But our goal is to take four somewhat siloed groups and bring them together and help them network and work together.

And these groups are clean energy businesses and clean technology companies, local public officials, the investment community, and then the non-profit sector, civil society, environmental groups, environmental justice organizations. And we want to create good chemistry for all of those groups together, some green chemistry. And we hope that out of this ferment will come maybe billion dollar projects that will have funding from the private sector.

Maybe we will be putting together investors who didn't know about a particular startup company or a particular clean energy company that's beyond startup and it needs some capital in order to scale its work. We may find that we can put a bank together with a city or a county and thereby provide ample capital so that the city or county can proceed with, let's say, creating a municipal solar or wind power system. In Europe, especially in Denmark, there are wind co-ops and ordinary people buy into these co-ops.

They become investors in them, and they are able to make money and to help clean the environment and protect the climate at the same time. So what we want to do is we want to see ultimately hundreds of billions of dollars of private capital, some off the sidelines, and get invested profitably in clean energy technologies. We want to see government stop subsidizing fossil fuels, which we're doing now to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars a year.

On top of all of the money that we're spending to buy the fuel, we're just throwing good money after bad, in my humble opinion. We need to stop.

Let's take a quick break.

Transitioning to a greener economy could create 24 million new jobs by 2030, according to the International Labor Organization. And about 30% of roles in the climate space don't require technical expertise. Skills in marketing, sales, policy, business operations, or communications are in high demand.

That means your experience might already be more relevant to you than you think. If you're curious about diving into climate work, here are a few ideas to get started. Research and apply for roles in rapidly growing sectors like renewable energy, EV infrastructure, and carbon markets.

These areas are booming with opportunities for fresh talent. Volunteering with climate-focused nonprofits is a great way to build relevant experience, expand your network, and see firsthand what climate work looks like. And remember, networking is key.

85% of jobs are filled through connections. Communities like My Climate Journey, Work on Climate, and Terra.do are fantastic slack communities to meet like-minded individuals and learn from others already in the field. You can find the links in the episode notes.

What do you see as the big barriers to make these connections happen, and how do you try to overcome those barriers?

That's a good question. And I think, to some extent, these four ecosystems that I mentioned, the banking and investment community, the public sector, the environmental community, and so on, they are not really interacting regularly and frequently enough in order to actually seize upon the opportunities that exist. So I think that that's kind of the problem.

And I also think a real problem, and I wish that I could help overcome that in the conference that I'm trying to make successful. I wish that we in the environmental community could be better at messaging. And I think for years we were barking up the wrong tree by talking about CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere in parts per million.

Ordinary people cannot relate to that. I will mention it though sometime, I hope, in our conversation, because there's some very disturbing things that are happening in that realm. But the real need is for the environmental community and civil society to talk about kitchen table issues and how if we have a clean energy economy, your energy bill will be lower, your food costs will be lower, your transportation costs will be lower, your environment will be healthier, your water will be cleaner, the air will be safer to breathe.

That's what people relate to. People have, so to speak, a dog in the hunt in those kinds of realms. But ordinary people are not able to conceive of a part per million.

Don't really know what that means or what that is. And if you stop an ordinary person on the street, I think you'll be hard pressed to find somebody that can give you a good explanation of what CO2 is, let alone how the greenhouse effect operates. So we need to talk to people in a language that they can understand.

And I would like to see the environmental community come together at my Accelerating the Transition Conference and talk with each other about how to project a coherent, common message.

I think I'd like to add to your statement. I think the environmental community has been generally unsuccessful in creating relatable messaging, but I think the opposition has been quite adept in it. I think the arguments against the environmental solutions we want to put in place seem to be because I guess they're not relying on specific science or it doesn't even have to be true, but the messaging is out there to kind of debunk or make it seem false or things.

So I'm just wanting to agree with you that, yes, we have a messaging issue. But then I wanted to ask you, so you've been working in this for several decades now, and we're fighting a very big uphill battle right now when it comes to the opposition to the environmental clean energy movement. How does this compare to periods in the past?

Because I'm sure there's been ebbs and flows when we had a lot of headwinds versus a lot of tailwinds in this moving this forward.

There has been a relentless barrage of propaganda and lies from the energy industry about initially impracticality of clean energy and its intrinsic unsuitability to meet our energy needs. I cracked this for over 50 years. There is less talk now about how clean energy doesn't work, because it obviously does work.

And some people who are creating propaganda for the fossil fuel industry, now talk up a lot of exaggerated environmental impacts and take that out of context with the environmental impacts of the fossil fuel industry. So that's one thing that I've seen change. I think the renewable energy industry has made a case for itself, and it's economically not only viable, but preferable.

There has been a real change in the propaganda that the fossil fuel industry has put forth about climate change. Originally, although in the, I believe, the ninth, probably the mid 1970s, the fossil fuel, it may be considerably earlier. I have to look this up.

The fossil fuel industry's research, particularly ExxonMobil's research, concluded that if we continue burning fossil fuels, we would double the amount of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere and that, therefore, that would result in something like two or three degrees of global warming, which is actually heating the planet. And that was suppressed, and the fossil fuel industry initially pretended that climate change was not actually happening. And then, eventually, when it became inescapably obvious that it was happening, they, they said, well, it may be happening, but it's actually good for you, and it's good for the planet.

It will make northern areas more easy to cultivate. And then they also said, okay, maybe after there was a period of time that passed, maybe it's really not that great for us, but it's not a big deal, and it's too expensive to do anything about it. And we basically are consigned or relegated to our dependence on fossil fuels, where you are our prisoner, and you have to stay our customer pretty much indefinitely.

So, they first dismissed climate change entirely, then they said, it's good for you, then it said, it's not very bad for you, then it said, well, maybe it's not so great for you, but it's too expensive to do anything about it. Now we know that those were all lies.

And that it is your fault, right?

And they want to make it your fault for using these technologies when they spend billions of dollars in lobbying in order to basically make it difficult for government to invest properly in a clean energy transition. We ought to be having a World War II style mobilization, and a national mobilization to have a clean energy transition. This would be the most profitable and sensible thing to do in terms of protecting the climate.

I mentioned earlier that I would say one quick thing about parts per million of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere. We are increasing our greenhouse gas concentration much, much faster now than when I first started studying these problems back in the early 1970s. We are increasing at three and a half parts per million of carbon dioxide every year.

We had been back in the 60s or early 70s at about one part per million per year. So we are destabilizing the climate at an ever greater rate. As a result of this, the Amazon rainforest has flipped so that it is now these days emitting more carbon dioxide apparently.

So we are on very, very dangerous turf here. And this problem could become a global catastrophe of unathomable magnitude. Could be like nothing else humanity has ever seen during human civilization.

We destabilize the climate to the point that natural climate sinks, become sources and start emitting such a flood of greenhouse gas to the atmosphere that even if we cut back our greenhouse gas emissions to zero, the climate will still get warmer and warmer, and there will be a positive feedback loop that will spiral out of control. And that is the ultimate nightmarish catastrophe. We are already seeing areas of permafrost which had been frozen for thousands of years, now beginning to emit carbon dioxide and methane.

This is extremely dangerous. I cannot think of anything more dangerous to the planet, more deserving of public attention, crying out for public attention. We are in a climate emergency, and we need to get our heads straight around this issue.

And we cannot solve this problem without the federal government. We need a federal government that understands this problem, that doesn't deny it, that isn't going to lie to people about it, and call climate change a Chinese hoax, and call it a con job. It's interesting how this administration engages in projection, where they accuse their enemies of doing exactly what they are doing, hoaxes and con jobs.

And if you go down the line, all of the accusations that they're throwing at the environmental community are generally attributes that they themselves are manifesting.

If you had a billboard that pointed at the White House, skipping over the obscenities, what would you put on the billboard?

Oh, my goodness.

You have to go down a couple to avoid the ones with curses in it.

Well, I would say climate change is real. Climate change is a global emergency. We ought to make this nation a model of clean energy production and use as quickly as possible.

That's more than a billboard right there.

Maybe two billboards then. Yeah. Well, I mean, John, I feel like we've just barely scratched the surface, but I want to mention your book one more time, which you were kind enough to send us copies, Solving the Climate Crisis, Frontier Reports from the Race to Save the Earth is the full title.

Actually, Frontline Reports from the Race to Save the Earth, Jeff.

Oh, Frontline, sorry, Frontline Reports from the Race to Save the Earth, excuse me, by John J. Berger and the event you're putting on is called?

Accelerating the Transition in San Francisco, April 18th through 20th, and there's a website by that name, acceleratingthetransition.com. It's not up quite yet, but tune back in in maybe 10 days or so. I hope that it will be live at that point.

Then there's also, if you want to find out more about the book, Solving The Climate Crisis, there is a website for it, solvingtheclimatecrisis.us.

Nice. Thank you again.

I do want to call out the book. I thought it was, I'm a marketer, I'm not a climate scientist. I don't have that depth of educational knowledge, but I did find it to be, I learned a lot from reading that book.

And I think Jeff mentioned this in an earlier conversation. It wasn't overwhelming to consume. Like I learned a lot, gained a broad amount of understanding, but also left feeling hopeful whenever I put the book down.

I just wanted to say thank you. I think it's great. I highly recommend it to anyone who's interested in learning a lot more about climate solutions and how people are getting those select climate solutions.

You know, to market.

Well, thank you very much, Kristen. I think that one thing that I wanted to mention is that the book really discusses all segments of the economy, and it talks about how we can clean up heavy industry, how we can clean up the building sector, how we can get to carbon neutral cities, talks about people like Gabe Brown and carbon ranching, and also about green steel and green cement, recycling carbon and so forth. So there's a lot there that people might find interesting, and there are personal stories of individuals who are, I think, my climate heroes certainly, and who have a lot to teach us all.

I agree. I found it really inspiring, and I wanted to share some figures that I dug up, that we were talking about the other day. An oil rig worker, currently, entry level is about 55 grand, their salary, their annual salary.

A coal miner makes about $23 an hour, which is about $48,000 a year. Right now, this is all from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. A solar tech, on average, in this country, makes $89,000 a year.

And a wind tech makes about $81,000 a year. So I just wanted to sort of share those figures because I was inspired by the book. Just go out and actually find the real numbers.

And we talk a lot about working in climate action and what it takes and what it looks like to work for real. And one of the things that it looks like is, it sounds like you make more money than in oil and gas these days. And that tide sounds like it's turning a little bit.

That's very reductive, but I just thought I'd share those little figures I put together.

Yeah. I think something interesting about the market is those industries are able to pay their workers more. And deliver the energy at a lower cost at the same time, right?

And I think that's really important to to call out, like not only is it costing us less to consume that energy, but it's providing better, you know, it's contributing back to the economy at a higher rate as well, right? We're paying people more. Those people are providing better for their families, spending more.

And it's kind of a ripple effect there. So I just wanted to call that out.

Kristen, also, there are millions of clean energy jobs, but there are only, I guess, something like maybe 40, 45,000 coal mining jobs in the United States. And the coal mining industry is shrinking as it should, because we shouldn't be burning coal these days. We don't need to burn the most polluting fossil fuel short of oil shale.

And there are other better ways of providing a kilowatt of energy.

There's a lot of health risks to being a coal worker. So they're making the least amount of money and getting the highest amount of risk.

Yeah. It's not a good deal for the coal miners or for the communities that live near the coal power plants.

Yeah. So I think that's a probably good place to live it, to leave it.

Blah.

I can't talk. We wanted to ask if you had any advice for anyone trying to enter the climate action, climate industry, what would that be?

I think the climate industry and climate action are really two separate questions. And I think that everybody needs to evaluate their own interests, their own strengths and their own capabilities, and think about if in terms of a career, what would be most rewarding, and where they think they could make the best contribution, and what they would love to do. That would be my recommendation in terms of somebody getting into the industry.

In terms of an ordinary citizen wanting to do something to help the clean energy transition, I would say that it's very important to work with other people. And to look around for organizations that you can make common cause with. If you are politically minded, you may want to join an organization like indivisible.com.

We are not going to be able to protect our climate in this country, unless we can protect our democracy. The two are like kiss and cousins. We have to be political in this field.

We just cannot sit on the sidelines and watch democracy being eroded, because when you have autocracy, then you have a government that favors the centralization of power and the centralization of capital. And the most centralized capital-intensive industry that we have here is the fossil fuel industry, the most powerful industry in the world. And unless we have a countervailing public interest government that is striving to protect democracy and trying to democratize energy, so that we use the millions of vacant rooftops all over the United States, so we use the offshore wind resource that we have, so we use the clean energy under the ground and so forth, and are not blocked from using the technologies that we already know that work.

I hope I answered that question. It's mostly important that we all do something. It's not important that we all do anything in particular, but I would say work with other people and do something.

If you can only put a drop in the bucket, put that drop in the right bucket. Don't let this opportunity go by to help protect the climate, the environment, the economy and our children's future.

Yeah, that's a great way to end it. Right there, I appreciate that. That's very inspiring.

And that more than answers the question, so thank you. Well, John, it's a pleasure. I think we could have about 10 more of these.

There's a wealth of knowledge and wisdom. So thank you again. And hopefully we'll talk to you again.

My pleasure. Thank you so much for inviting me. Thank you, John.

Thank you so much. Bye-bye.

Okay. Bye-bye.

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