The Limits of Progress: Roy Scranton on Climate, Collapse, and Moral Clarity

More than half of all historical carbon emissions have occurred since 1989—after world leaders knew the risks. So why do we still believe we can innovate our way out of collapse?

In this sobering and deeply philosophical conversation, Roy Scranton—former soldier, literary scholar, and author of Impasse: Climate Change and the Limits of Progress—joins Will to explore why our faith in progress may be our greatest liability. Drawing from his experience in Iraq and his study of civilizational decline, Scranton dismantles the optimistic narratives that shape American culture, from techno-utopianism to climate heroism.
They discuss everything from American exceptionalism and carbon optimism to moral psychology, Jonathan Haidt’s “elephant and rider,” and the ethical case for pessimism. Scranton argues that rather than trying to save the world, we should focus on how to live meaningfully in a collapsing one—with compassion, honesty, and courage.

Whether you’re a climate realist, a techno-optimist, or just anxious about the future, this episode will stretch your mind.

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Guest Bio
Roy Scranton is a writer, scholar, and former U.S. Army soldier whose work explores the philosophical and cultural implications of climate change. He is the author of Learning to Die in the Anthropocene, War Porn, and most recently Impasse: Climate Change and the Limits of Progress. Scranton is a professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, where he teaches literature, environmental humanities, and moral philosophy.

Impasse: Climate Change and the Limits of Progress (Stanford University Press) – https://bookshop.org/a/112456/9781503640030

Transcript

0:17

Hey, welcome back, Faithful Politics listeners and watchers. If you are watching us on our YouTube channel, we're really glad to have you. oh My faithful host, Pastor Josh Bertram, he has his out of office reply on, so he won't be here with us today. But we are blessed to be speaking with a uh person from my wife's neck of the woods up in Indiana. This is Royce Granton. He's a writer, scholar and former soldier. whose work grapples with moral, philosophical, and existential dimensions of our climate crisis. He's written a lot of books. The book we're going to talk to him today about is called, Impasse, Climate Change and the Limits of Progress, where he challenges the dominant narratives of hope, innovation, and endless growth. And he's also going to be urging us to confront the deeper cultural myths uh about climate change. So welcome to the show, Thanks for having me on Will. I'm excited to talk with you today. Yeah, I am kind of interested. So as I was reading and doing my research of your bio, you served a little stint in the military. When did you serve? I was in the army from 2002 to 2006, and that included about 14 months in Iraq. my gosh, when were you in Iraq? 2003 to 2004. So it was around May 2003 until about June 2004. So right after the invasion, we were the follow on, I was in the field artillery unit in the 1st Armored Division. We were in the follow on to the invasion and then security and stability operations or some military acronym. And then we left right as sort of things where blowing up, not yet the Iraqi Civil War, but beginning to really fall apart. So we got out just in time. Yeah. I asked because when I read your bio, was like, wait a minute, I was in Iraq in 2003 and 2004. I with the Striker Brigade and we were QRF most of the deployment. So we started off in Balad, went up to everywhere, route Tampa, like we became very familiar with and ended up in Mosul, Anaconda, all that kind of stuff. There's a good chance, actually no, we were in the same country. yeah, we probably passed each other on the highway. remember it was really exciting when the Stryker Brigade showed up because it's new, like it's these new vehicles and we're like, oh, those are cool. I wish we had those instead of these crappy Humvees without doors and no armor. Yeah. well, anyways, what a heck of a way to start a show. So I want to talk to you, I want to change the topic from war fighting and talk about a different kind of war fighting with regards to climate change. So you wrote a book called Empaths, Climate Change and Limits of Progress. Tell us what it's about. So impasse is essentially about the current climate crisis um and how we're not fixing it. But it's kind of about a bigger problem than just the climate crisis. It's about a I um guess it's a sort of a bigger civilizational problem or narrative problem or cultural problem. because that we're dealing with, that climate change really brings to the fore, right? And that's the idea of progress. So it's climate change and the limits of progress, right? And so, you we've been, it's this narrative of progress that we've been living with that's been organizing our sort of society. It's sort of how we make sense of a lot of things about, you know, how we think of the future and how we think of how we live our lives. how justice works, right? It's all embedded in this idea that through reason and law and all these different other mechanisms, we'll just be able to keep making things get better and better. And it's a narrative, it's fundamentally a belief, a kind of faith. climate change is really, like that's a hard wall. that progress is coming up against because what climate change means is it's it's proof to us that we can't we don't uh have we're not omnipotent right when it comes to nature our environment the world right we change things we have we we come up with ways to control nature but then it like it flips back on us there's always feedback and there's all these unintended consequences and that's what climate change is is a massive unintended consequence of industrial development and it just, shows up how, how little control we have over the world that we live in. We're creatures of the planet that we live in. And so this, this, this is the big problem, right? Is this narrative of progress because it's, it organizes a lot of our, ways that we think about reality in the world. And it's increasingly on, it's increasingly, you know, tearing apart. It's shredding a little bit. A lot of people still believe in it. A lot of people don't anymore. A lot of people are raising questions. ah But more to the point, it's not gonna be able to carry us through, right? Through the problems that progress has caused, right? Through the problems of climate change, civilization development, civilization complexity, et cetera, et cetera. ah It's that narrative of progress isn't going, I'm arguing, isn't. Reliable. It's not a good narrative for carrying us through the radical changes that climate change presents, right? Climate change is radically transforming the world that we live in. It's going to put immense pressure on pretty much every aspect of human society today. Um, and that narrative doesn't work anymore. Some people have argued we need a new narrative. We need to come up with a new story, how to have civilization. And I'm, this is the other half of the book, I guess. ah is that I don't really think we're capable of doing that. That seems just like another sort of progressivist can see. Like, oh, it's just a problem that we need to solve to figure out the big story that we all live in. And that's not how this works. The big civilizational narratives that different societies have lived within over time, it's not like some professor wrote it at their desk. these emerge over time as people try to make sense of the world that they live in. ah Right? Like, yeah, I could come up with examples, but you get my point. ah And so my, the second half of the book is an argument for pessimism, for ethical pessimism. And I can talk more about what that means. I don't have to do it all right now, but the basic idea is that ah we need to recognize that There are limits, suffering is real and we can't fix everything. And for right now, especially in this period as our big narrative of progress like comes apart and before there's some new narrative that helps reorganize society after the, you know, coming climate chaos or whatever happens, it would be better for us, I think, and more realistic and more pragmatic. ah and more ethical to try to live in this space of unknowing ah in a compassionate way. So that's, yeah. So that's basically in a big nutshell, I guess. I think I agree with a lot of what you're saying. Not that necessarily that's the whole point is to get me to agree with you or disagree. uh I do think that your thinking on this topic mirrors a lot of, and I'm not inclined to know what your political affiliation is, but. It's a very persuasive argument for a progressive like myself. uh We spoke with another scientist. um Gosh, her name is Currie. Judith? Judith Currie. um We brought on the show to talk about climate change. She essentially was making a similar very nuanced argument uh along the same lines as yours where, She wasn't outright saying that climate change is bunk and it's just a bunch of tree-hugging, lib center, making the stuff up kind of thing. She's just basically saying like, we don't need to be spending money on this thing over here because this is a foregone conclusion essentially. Is that kind of similar to what you're explaining? At this point, uh yes. So, you know, it would have been a different story 40 or 50 years ago uh if there had been global leadership on the issue. There's ways it's imaginable. uh It could have been ah handled or managed. But, you know, it's worth it's worth noting, right, that over half of all historical greenhouse gas emissions have happened since 1989. Right? So that's the, uh, and that was when that was when Jane, James Hansen, the climate science scientists, uh, went before Congress and warned them about climate change. Right. And that was when the IPCC was founded, the intergovernmental panel on climate change, the UN, uh, NASA and, uh you know, the people, James Hansen worked with scientists. The government was aware of it. There was widespread awareness in, in the kind of. ruling classes in the United States and globally that climate change was a real risk and that it was going to happen if we kept on doing industrial society the way we did it. And we did, and it got worse. And so at that point, at 35, 36 years ago, even 30, 40 years ago, that, you know, something could have happened. We could have redirected. It would have been a massive lift and it's hard to imagine how it could have actually happened politically. That's a sort of maybe fantasy story that a science fiction writer could write, but it didn't. And now there's, we've loaded so much carbon into the atmosphere, the temperature's accelerating, the temperature increases accelerating ah in alarming ways, and the feedback mechanisms are beginning to kick in. Just globally, if you look at the science of what's happening with climate change and global warming, it's all happening faster. ah And at this point, it's really difficult to imagine. any kind of political, any kind of realistic political um or economic or any kind of exit ramp that could oh bring down carbon emissions to negative emissions. And this is a point that needs to be made, I guess, is that the solution isn't just to decarbonize society, right? Like that itself would be an enormous task to get us to all stop using fossil fuels. the actual goal that what would be required to stop and start to bring down global warming would be pulling carbon from the atmosphere, right? We would need negative emissions is what they call it. But there's that technology is not developed at scale yet. And it's not like it's nowhere near being plausible or profitable as like a real technology working in the world that people would pay money for. So ah Yeah, there's just there's no real There's no real exit ramp at this point. So, you know, I yeah, yeah, basically is it? it, is is it fair to say that, um, you know, your, your, your book isn't necessarily like a, um, scientific exploration for the percentage and the 1.5 temperature, blah, blah. But rather it's more of a exploration of how our worldview got us to, kind of where we're at and if so, like I am curious, like what is it about like our worldview specifically that's kind of keeping us locked into this like loop where we're just trying the same thing over and over again and getting the same result. Right, right, yeah, and that's correct. So that's a correct assessment of the book. It's not primarily, I'm not breaking down the science. It's not a science explainer. I've done my research on that. It's all in the footnotes in the introduction, right? It's all, because that to me, that conversation where we should be past that, right? The science is clear on a lot of this stuff. There's still arguments about this and that, but in terms of... what's visible and where we're going, right? That seems pretty clear. The question of whether or not we can stop it isn't a scientific question at all. In fact, it's a political one, right? And I talk about some of that in the book. And this connects back to the question you're asking is about what it is about our worldview. But it's not just, the thing is it's not just the narrative that I was talking about about progress, because that narrative is, as it were, it's embedded in the infrastructure. of our world, right? ah It's in the way we pay for things with credit cards, right? Credit itself, right, is an idea that depends on the economy growing, right? It doesn't make sense to borrow a bunch of money unless you think you're gonna have more money later to pay it back. And that's, mean, that's capitalism, right? It's all, it's all, sort of wrapped in together. And it's not just the story, it's the infrastructure, it's the structures of civilization that we live within that keep pushing us this way. And it's also, I guess, two other things. One is... in terms of progress, right? A lot of people point to, um you know, they're, yeah, Steven Pinker or what have you. They're like, how can you deny progress, right? We've brought down the infant mortality rate. More people can read. There's more aggregate wealth. That's all true. ah It's also true that like, it's amazing, right? To be alive today. Like here we are recording this thing from, you know, halfway across the country. I'm using this computer like there's I've got a fridge downstairs full of food from around the world. I could hop on a plane tomorrow and fly to Kazakhstan if I wanted to. uh The technological progress specifically has created a miraculous world. ah And it seems like you know, it's hard to deny that aspect of our existence. seems like we are kind of, we might as well be omnipotent, right? Like you can just like look up anything on the internet. I mean, you can't really, there's a lot of information that's not available there, but it feels like it. And I think that's part of it, is there's this feeling because of our deep, deep embeddedness in a human built technologically advanced society that we... we are omnipotent and we have this incredible power. Like we can do everything. uh And then the other thing is, and I talk about this in the book, uh we have a kind of, we have an optimism bias. Like there are all kinds of biases and heuristics and narratives and different ways that humans filter and sort of navigate reality, right? That what William James called the blooming buzzing confusion of of experience, right? It just like, if we could actually see everything, if we could actually like cognize everything coming at us all the time, it would be like psychosis, right? It would just be too much. You'd break. ah So we filter, okay, this is fine. This is not normal, no big deal. uh One of the ways that we do that is uh we tend to be optimistic about things. We tend to think things are gonna work out better than they tend to that. We're gonna live longer, that people like us better. We tend to think we're better drivers than we actually are. In all kinds of ways, Tali Sherrote and other scientists have shown this bias for optimism. And I think this is one of the things that's really kicking us in the butt today. Because since 1945, if not before, we've lived in a world where human beings and human societies have these godlike powers that I was just talking about, right? launching missiles across the planet and blowing things up, going into space. All these cars, we can drive everywhere and fly and you know, and it's there are consequences, right? ah and we, we are not, we're not sort of built, if you will, to really, to really think about, think hard about the negative consequences. Like that takes work, right? To be pessimistic about like building all these cars and burning all this gas, right? It would take work. It's much easier. We're much more inclined to be optimistic about things and to think, okay, well, this will work out. And if there are problems, we'll figure it out as we go. And I think this is one of the reasons behind the failure on climate change um is that I think there was a kind of optimism behind it. Some people say, you know, there's definitely been bad actors involved, oil companies, shaping. perceptions and involved in shaping government reports and minimizing the dangers and that's all true. But I also think that, you know, maybe a lot of the politicians they were talking to didn't need to be convinced that hard because they would like to think that, you know, maybe in five or 10 years we can figure out a way around it. Right. And I think that's a deeper problem. It's not just like amenable to, I don't know, talking it out or or policy that's just sort of wired into our view of the world. Yeah, I mean, how much do you think like us mythologizing America has to do with like our own optimism that we'll eventually get it done? know, mean, like it's like there's all these like examples you could pull from where folks would say, you know, we sent a man to the moon, you know, of course we can do X, Y or Z, you know, and And then, of course, you have stuff where, oh, we have this once in a lifetime pandemic, and all of a sudden, we have this vaccine, and people are getting better, and we're just like, see, American greatness. And so then they take that same perspective and then apply it to climate change and say, yeah, we can wait till the last minute. It's fine. How much of that plays into why we're in the situation we're in? Yeah, think that's a big part of it. And it's particularly a problem, I think, with American culture, right? So the studies on optimism bias show that this is a pervasive bias globally, regardless of nationality. ah There may be some variations at more specific levels. And I do think American culture is particularly committed to optimism. ah you know, Barbara Ehrenreich has a great book on this, Brightsided, and other people have written on this. ah Yeah, I think there's a particular sense, and maybe it's a deep cultural narrative going back to the Puritans or whatever, the whatever, you know, that's part of the founding myth of the country and the continuing progressivist myth of the country that ah we can do it, right? We can fix it. we can make a better world. And that's what America is in its noblest ideal is a bunch of people from all over coming together to make a better world in the world, to make a better place here. ah It's beautiful and it depends on a faith that it can be done. and And it's also, you know, and it's also, mean, it's not, like, there's a question, right? Yeah. So like, I mean like, like, like a Greta Thunberg, you know, I mean, icon, you know, kind of Darlene of the left. I mean, I respect her hustle, you know, but yeah, and her commitment. Yeah, she's been very brave. Yeah. like, is she really doing anything that's going to help the environment? Yeah, no. I mean, no, she's she's I mean, she tried. She she made an effort, but like, it's not. it's not really gonna, it's not really doing anything. know, yeah, I mean. Yeah. So I mean, um I'm sorry. I'm still somewhat like just stuck on this, this like fact that you and I are actually somewhat like fellowshipping and pessimism right now. ah But it's like your entire book isn't just like a doom and gloom though, right? Like, it like there has to be, and maybe this is my own sort of hopeful. ah intuitions that are coming out. ah You know, like, like this can't all be doom and gloom. There has to be some structure, some thought process, some, you know, something that we can do. Is there or are we basically just all going to die? uh I mean, it's true we're all gonna die. That's sort of bedrock. You can't get around that. I'm sorry, you're mortal, I'm mortal, we're all mortal. And more than that even, civilizations are mortal, right? Like every civilization that's ever developed on Earth has gone away at some point, right? Sometimes it happens slowly, sometimes it happens quickly. But like, you know. the Roman Empire still does not exist as the Roman Empire, or the Mayans. It's just like, this is what happens. Change is the only constant and death is part of life. And there's no way around that. And I don't think that's doom and gloom. I think uh it's a difficult truth, like the truths of pessimism. as you might call them, ah such as the fact that suffering is inevitable. Like suffering is just part of life. You're never going to get rid of suffering, right? Or that we all die, or that people come into conflict, or that ah we can't ever anticipate what problems may emerge, or what challenges might emerge to our projects, right? There's always going to be some shit that Can I swear in here? There's always gonna be some shit that happens that you just can't predict. ah These ah are what I consider to be some of the core truths of pessimism. And they're difficult, they're unpleasant. Sometimes they take a while to learn. ah But I don't think they mean that you should, that they imply that you should end your life or curl up. and give up or any of that. They're just like, these are just the conditions under which we operate, right? Like we can still find joy. We can still build meaningful lives together. ah We can still live with a sense, like a meaningful sense of an ordered cosmos, right? Whether it's God or some other unifying concept or narrative. ah And and accept that we're fallible, we're limited, we don't actually know everything, and we will die and we will suffer. You can do all that, but sometimes it takes some effort and some time to sit with that and internalize it. uh And uh this is an important thing to do that I think we often don't do in this society. We often have a tendency to distraction and to ah reject the suffering or to try to rationalize a way out of it or figure out a way that we can solve it or something, problems. And maybe this is because of the optimism in the country or whatever. We want to believe that these things can be fixed. right in time. I mean, there are even there are literally Silicon Valley ah billionaires who are trying to solve death. that's, yeah, that seems like a mental health issue to me. Like, you know, but ah yeah. And so so for me, pessimism isn't um It's at a certain level, it is a giving up. It's a giving up of a sense of omnipotence or it's giving up of a, it's a giving up, really it's a giving up of unrealistic goals, right? And doing a kind of revision or thinking and returning to what can I actually do with my life? Like, what can I actually get done? How can I actually? like affect things in a real way. Instead of trying to save the world, a la Greta Thunberg, noble young woman, courageous. But instead of trying to do that, which is beyond the capacity of any single human being, maybe all of us, Save the world. The world's a big place. What can you do? It's deflationary and it's humbling, right? But what can you actually put your hands on and make better? Or make less bad? And that's um the sort of effort, the argument. the hopeful part, if you will, is that we can live a meaningful life and we can live compassionately and we can do things. We can live ethically in a time of total chaos and catastrophe by sort of reining in our idealism, reining in our overcompensation, reining in our optimism and bringing it back home, bringing it back to what we can do. around us and working with the people that we live with, right? Like working with the people around us instead of being like, no, we have to have the perfect people and all the other people are evil. Like recognizing that everybody's flawed, everybody's suffering. We're all in this mess together. What do we do now? m it's it's I think the thing that that is that's that's really difficult is because, you know, I'm wired to to probably be an optimist. I don't know. Maybe most people are, you know, like like and and and also I'm I'm, you know, one of those like those those liberal optimists. that dreams of a techno utopia that you talk about in the book. That's me. That's me right there. So I have an art time. I have been reading a lot of Jonathan Haidt's work on moral foundations and his elephant writer press secretary president metaphor for those that haven't read it. basically like your elephant is your intuition and your writers like your reasoning and or your press secretary is your reasoning and the president is the writer. Big idea is that your reasoning's job is to basically tell your intuition, your elephant that they're beautiful and they're right all the time. like, you know, like me as a person that is driven by intuition, like I will hear a message, be like, yeah, that sucks. you know, planet is burning up and going to hell and like I'm going to my reasoning is like, yeah, that's right. And it's your job to do everything you can to fix it. So like, like that just seems like a very hard, you know, uh hill to climb, at least for me. And I I'm sure I'm not alone. And I'm sure that you're you're probably having discussions with people that are telling you that this is kind of hard because like I I really do care about the world and I do care about the environment and uh But like, should I not care? I mean, I'm all for, you know, throwing something I used to care about away so I can fill it with something else or spread my care more evenly. yeah, I'm just having a hard time. And for others that are listening to this, maybe having the same kind of feelings, like what would you tell them? It's hard. Like I would acknowledge that and say, yes, it's hard. I, and my first book, ah several books back, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene is sort of more about this in some ways. But with this book, Impasse, it starts not with the science and all that stuff. It starts with a story about going to Chaco Canyon with my daughter and my wife. And thinking about like being in this incredible place where these brilliant, driven, incredible people built this, this civilizational structure, right? They built this city in the middle of the desert, uh in a desert, right? And they figured out how to build it to like take advantage of the sporadic rainfall and like ah ambient temperature shifts and the water under the ground. And like, it's just an incredible achievement from, it's like more than a thousand years old. And then it collapsed, right? Then it fell apart and they, know, a bunch of people moved somewhere else and there was a bunch of fighting. They don't really know what happened. ah You know, ah and then that story feeds right into COVID, right? The COVID pandemic. It's hard. so I start talking about Chaco to help think about civilizational collapse and what that means. talk about the way that works and and talk about the idea of civilization and complexities is sort of set up later arguments but it's it's also a personal narrative that's sort of thinking about loss right and thinking about change and You know, there's a lot of different, I've written a lot of different things about climate change over the years, there's no getting around the grief, right? uh The world is changing. Like it's already changed. It's already changing. It's happening. The nature, the natural world that we lived in, that we had, you know, we're probably about, the same age, you might be a little younger than me, I don't know, but like that we had as kids, like that's gone. You're never going to get that again, right? ah I moved here to Indiana about 10 years ago. And in just those 10 years that I've been here, the winters have transformed dramatically. Like when I first got here, it was like a bunch of snow. I mean, I moved from New York, so I've seen snow, but like it was a lot of snow, very cold for a long time. It felt really like, um, it was a lot, um, winter was hard here and now it's nothing. We get a little bit of, we get a couple, you know, maybe a week of snow in just 10 years. Um, and it's, it's happening like that all over. It's, you know, it's happening worst in some places, like in the Arctic transforming very quickly. Um, and we don't, we don't even notice it that well because It only takes us, they've done studies on this, it only takes us like three to five years to get used to a new temperature. Like it only takes us three to five years to get used to a new normal, right? uh So we sort of get used to it. We're very adaptive. That's what humans are really good at is adapting, right? And killing large mammals, I guess that's the other thing we're really good at. But those two things, adapting and killing large mammals. uh in teams. ah Yeah, USA. Yeah. And so it's just, it's happening so quickly. And the political repercussions and consequences of that are unspooling and unfolding ah largely so far, largely so far through, I think, ah climate, the increase like the climate driven, we say climate driven, but you know, it's not exactly climate change driven, climate change is, you know, increasing these things. Climate driven migration, right? It's had enormous political effects and repercussions. uh all that's going to continue to get worse. Food prices are going to keep going up. ah Food's going to keep being harder to grow. It's interesting factoid, I guess. Studies, some studies predict, ah suggest that as the climate gets warmer, we may be able to grow more food in some places, overall less. ah But uh the food we do grow is going to be less nutritious because for some reason having to do with like increased carbon dioxide affecting the nutritional value of the food. So all the corn that we grow here in Indiana is gonna become increasingly less nutritious. And so just all these things, there's just all these ways that climate change is already impacting the world. And so that's one aspect of the grief. And then I'll say one more thing and then I'm gonna let you. The other aspect of the grief is like the idea of the future that... maybe we grew up with, right? The idea of the future, this progressivist idea of the future, right? That in the future, there will be justice. In the future, there will be peace. In the future, will be, the economy is just gonna keep getting better. Like the stock exchange is just gonna keep going up forever. ah We're gonna have flying cars and whatever, like chips and... planted in our head and we can read the news while we're, I don't know, playing a video game and dancing on a skateboard. I don't know, whatever your dream is. ah Yeah, but none of that's gonna happen. I mean, some of it will happen. Some of it's already happening, right? The technological changes is like another X factor variable in the overall problem. ah You you talk about, could talk, oh shift, focus and talk about. artificial intelligence and the effect that's having on society or social media. Yeah, so that's the other grief is like, know, letting go of this. the sense that we know what the future is gonna be like and it's gonna be, you know, good. Hmm. Yeah. So it seems like a lot of conservatives, um you know, maybe for completely different reasons than the ones I'm discussing, seem to have like captured this vision, right? Like ah there was, you know, a big bill that passed that uh took out a bunch of subsidies for, you know, quote unquote green stuff. ah And And it seems like we are, it seems like it makes more sense to invest in like rocket ships than windmills, right? Like if this, if the climate crisis is just this train that's left the station and it's not going to stop, or at least, you know, won't stop while humans still live on the planet, like it would make sense that we leave. But I mean, that didn't necessarily seem like... a philosophy that will ensure that human beings live for as long as possible. then again, like, am I? how, I mean, if we do nothing 1,000 years from now, will humans still be around? And maybe that's not a long enough time. Yeah, mean, humans, like I said before, humans, we're really adaptive, right? We're incredibly adaptive creatures. We're not as smart as we think we are, but we're still pretty smart and we figure out how to do. It seems reasonable to wager that. there will be humans for a long time. um You know, but will we be living in the kind of society that we live in now? You know, will there be eight plus billion of us uh living in a primarily urban civilization interconnected around the globe uh held together with fossil fuels and fiber optic cable and shipping containers and uh this idea of capitalism and and so on and so on, you I would bet not. Because this is what we live in today is, it's hard to get our heads around how anomalous the civilization we're living in today is compared to the absolute rest of human history and prehistory, right? It's just like, we're sort of like for, hundreds of thousands of years, humans are going along like this and then, right? Like 20th century hits and we're just boom. ah Mostly because of cheap fossil fuels, right? In from the 19th and then 20th century, first coal and then oil. There's so much energy. We unlocked so much energy with coal and oil, right? We just started burning that shit and, and and building, right? And building and technological innovations and scientific research and so on and so on. But at the root of it is this enormous, enormous surge in cheap energy that's radically transformed human civilization. And also happens to be the waste products from that energy happen to be heating up the planet, right? In a way. in a way reminiscent of previous periods of uh global warming that also happened to correlate with mass extinctions, right? Mass global extinctions. Because when you put a bunch of carbon into the atmosphere and you turn, right? The planet operates in these cycles and you sort of nudge the cycle, right? Over all these mechanisms kick in and the planet changes. gets a lot warmer, all these other things happen. And a lot of the animals that live there in that time and place, those places, right, they don't make it, right? They can't move fast enough or they can't, I don't know, you know, they don't do as well in the heat, right? It starts to get really warm and humid and you start, you collapse, maybe you have heat stroke. ah You can't work all day, you work a couple hours, you can't... get out and get food is just too hot all the time. You know, that's what we're looking at over the long term. But to go back to your previous question, it's a big planet. Humans are adaptive and tenacious. And yeah, sure, I suspect that there will continue to be humans. But the thing that happened from like approximately the industrial revolution to the present. That is, I think, I'm guessing, who knows, but I'm guessing that was a one time deal, you know? And I think we're hitting the point, like we're seeing it start to like... come apart. Yeah, you know, your explanation about all the dark oil energy that's stored underneath the, you know, the earth made me think about, like, there's always a price to dark magic for anybody that watches Marvel, of which I'm a big fan. I am curious. So, OK. uh You've made a really, really convincing argument. You wrote a book about it. You are essentially saying, hey, yeah, maybe not expend all of your moral, spiritual, political capital on this one particular topic. But again, somebody might be listening to this saying, hey, I'm a climate scientist, uh of which we have had a climate scientist on the show. We've had two of them, actually. And uh this is my entire field of work. This is connected to all sorts of other stuff. And I can lay out scripture and verse of the world will become unlivable on this day, at this time, in this time zone kind of thing. So what would you tell that person? ah One of the, I came across this somewhere. There's a quote uh from climate science community, I forget who said it. But they were looking at various data and it was sort of a breakthrough data. And somebody asked them how they are and they said, it's the end of the world, but the work is going great. ah I mean, it's a fascinating time to be a scientist. It's a fascinating time to be alive generally. ah But what a time to be an earth system scientist or atmospheric scientists, right? Like we are running an unprecedented experiment on the planet. it's never, never in the history of the planet has so much carbon dioxide been moved from under the ground into the atmosphere so quickly. Never, right? This is incredible, right? What it's doing, how it's happening, ah how we get to watch in real time as the Atlantic, the Gulf Stream turns off, which is likely to happen soon. We get to watch in real time uh Antarctica collapse, right? The ice sheets in the Arctic collapse. We get to watch it happen. It must be very exciting. And that sounds flip. It sounds flip, but no, it's actually very serious. This is, in some sense, knowledge always comes after. We can guess. There is no scientist who can tell you when. everything's going to collapse or when the temperature is going to do whatever, right? They're making an estimate based on their expertise and their knowledge base and often based on very complicated models that, you know, there's another saying, you know, there are no, what is it? There are no. There are no, no, no, no, no, no. There are no, it's about models. Basically, are no true models. There are only more or less helpful ones, right? Models are always a reduction of reality, and there's always the garbage in, garbage out problem with models, right? That you can only do so much with models. But anyway, I'm not to disparage the work of climate scientists at all. A lot of them do fantastic work. anything they say about the future, is an estimate based in data and expertise, but based in data from the past. That's the only thing we have data for. It's for things that have already happened. There's zero data from the future ever. There's not any. It just doesn't exist because it hasn't happened yet. So yeah. ah So, you know, we can't know the future. We can't control the future. We never could. That was kind of uh a fantasy we had in this period of progress, right? That we could just draw the blueprint and then, you know, 30 years down the road. You know, just watched 2001 again the other day, the Stanley Kubrick film. Still an amazing film, still an incredible film. But like 2001 and like there's, you you can take your rocket ship to the moon base and you know, there's like a Howard Johnson's or something in the space station and like it's all, you know, but whatever. there's change, change happens, but that's a fantasy that we can control the future. It comes the way we come back, right? We come back to... what can we do now, what can we do realistically? And also, in terms of scientists, researchers, people thinking about the world, uh maybe the job isn't to tell the future, or maybe the job isn't to plan the future. Maybe the job is to witness what's happening now. Maybe the job, because I mean, that's sort of... was ever the only job, right? Like even if you wanted to make a model or wanted to draw a blueprint for the future, if you were doing due diligence, you first had to look at data from the past and present, right? So that's what we can do now is we can witness and we can record and we can analyze and we can continue to do that. And that's, I think the core of the scientific and humanistic like research agenda anyway is looking at the world and trying to make sense of it first. And that, you know, it's difficult because there is this incredible urgency, a sense of crisis, sense of emergency, right, to do something about it. But it's also so difficult and complicated right now and so much in flux, right, that it's almost irresponsible if people who are doing that work, jump to solutions, right? Because we don't actually understand what's happening, right? At a basic level, right? In the broad outlines, we understand what's happening, but like in the fine-grained, in the fine-grained like actuality of it, right? It's much more complicated and our understanding is still pretty fuzzy about, oh, like most of existence. So yeah, so that's what I would say to... a climate scientist would be like, well, you just keep doing your work and it's still valuable. It's just not going to save us from anything. Yeah, that's true. So I've got one more question, but before I ask you, where can people get your book or do you have a preferred book uh selling? My preference would be that they go to their local bookstore if they have one. uh But, you know, no, most of us don't. Yeah. ah Bezos' next wedding. Thank you. think this is gonna last forever? Come on. Let's have a little optimism here for poor Jeff. I mean, you can buy it from the Stanford University Press website or, know, I'm sure some indie bookseller, you know, I mean, all the places. Find your, yeah. our... We actually have a bookshop playlist. And if you look, ah I'm updating the information, but on my website, royscranton.com, ah there's events, upcoming events. So I'm gonna do some book readings in some places. And if somebody wants to come to one of those, you can buy a book there at that bookstore and they'll sign it for you, whatever that's worth. Yeah. All right. Yeah, yeah. ah All right. So here's my last question for you. You're going to you're going to be pushing product left and right when this book is released. You're probably going to get a lot of fan mail ah and ah you get a letter from a person that says they loved your book. ah What would you want that letter to say? I guess, mean, okay, I have an answer. I didn't think I had an answer for that, but I do. ah My hope would be, I mean, didn't, I'll be honest, I didn't write this book to persuade anybody. ah If you're committed to an optimistic progressive future where we're sending rockets to Mars and. We're building utopian cities and everything's gonna be great. There's little in the book that's gonna persuade you otherwise. uh And it's also not a book directed at climate deniers or anything like that. uh But what I hope it might be able to do is for a lot of people out there, I think they look around and they think this is messed up. and it doesn't look like things are getting better. And why, like, and I feel terrible because I, like, I feel like I'm responsible and I feel like I need to be doing something and I feel like it's my fault and I feel like there has to be some way we can make things better. And I hope they read my book and, and feel liberated from that. But firstly, it'll make them depressed because they'll, they'll, you know, if, if they, you know, Engage with the book. It's a depressing book in a lot of ways. ah They'll face this sort of, oh, well, maybe not. But you know what? That's okay. That's okay that we can't save the world. That's okay that we can't be saved. We won't be saved. We're all doomed. We've all always been doomed. And that's fine. That's just life. That's just what life is, right? You're born and you're born to die, like that's, and then what do you do with the time in between, right? So then, my hope is that they find that a relief in some way, that they're no longer anxious about the fate of the world, but instead turn their energies toward actually doing something concrete that can help somebody or, you know, make something better somewhere or, do some repair, reparative work somewhere, you know, that actually has an effect. That would be the ideal. Yeah. Well, thank you so much, Roy, for uh coming on our show and telling us about your book and letting us kind of come to grips with it. It's a tough subject for sure. uh One that I know I'll be wrestling with even after this uh interview. So really appreciate you spending some time with us today. Thanks for having me on, Will. And I really appreciate the uh careful read you gave the book and the thoughtful conversation. It's been a pleasant afternoon. Yeah. Yeah. for spending some time with us. And yeah, make sure you check out Roy's book here. We'll make sure you put the links of all the different places that he mentioned on the show notes. And as always, make sure you keep your conversations not right or left, but up. And we'll see you next time. Take care. Bye.