We, with Jonathan Rowson

Jonathan Rowson (intro clip) 

Climate conversation is awash with this kind of maddening, lame ambiguity that when we evoke the we to do something, we have to specify who it is. We have to specify who's going to do it and how, otherwise we're not really saying anything.

Dave (00:33.294)

Hello I'm Dave and welcome to Your Brain on Climate. Now in this episode we're going to talk about this. Have you ever heard someone talk about like degrowth or ending capitalism or revolutions or these big ideas that feel like solutions to the knotted entanglement of things like climate change. Now talk about these ideas and then they will say something like what we need is degrowth, what we need is a revolution, what we need is a world, we can build a world, we can do this and they talk about this we. It's a kind of collective we which simultaneously means like you and me listening but also implies everyone else. So you've got we meaning different things and I increasingly find myself listening to that kind of thing which you hear all the time in Climaty World and feeling kind of not just turned off by it but kind of annoyed? Like what is it you mean? Because I think it does matter, it does matter who the we is, it's a political rhetorical trick, it sounds great, but I think it often allows you to fudge an obfuscate and not do the hard stuff, not really set out. Well what we are you talking about and what is my relationship to the we and is there anything I can do to make this we you're talking about happen? If you see what I mean.

So in this episode of Your Brain or Climate, I'm going to be talking about all that stuff. It's not just a linguistic problem. Linguistic problem though it is, it's a collective agency problem. It's the flip side of the episode I did last time with Lorraine Whitmarsh about individual behaviour change and how we get it. Well, this is looking at the big stuff, the other side of the telescope. To what extent can I have any sort of influence over what a global economy, a global society does?

What is the route by which this we, which is going to fix things, and the we that wants change, gets to happen? Who is it? Am I part of it? What actually do you mean?

So I'm going to be talking to the wonderful Jonathan Rowson, always wise, always clever and inspiration. He's the chief executive of an organization called Perspectiva. He's a chess grandmaster who once in my previous podcast, Sustainababble, destroyed me live on air. Go back and listen to that. And an author of several books. His stuff is always fascinating, thought-provoking, challenging sometimes. He doesn't take questions at face value. He digs down and digs down. We could have talked for hours, but we don't. We talk for about half an hour and it's properly interesting.

As always when you hear this noise it denotes wisdom. Jonathan has a PhD in wisdom thus there is a lot of wisdom to be gleaned from this episode so you don't have to bother stopping the episode to pause and look at Wikipedia or whatever just have a look afterwards and in the show notes you'll find a link to all the stuff that the owl noise talks to.

Thank you as always to people who give me money on Patreon. That enables me to pay my guests, keep this show on the road.

Please join them, go to www.patreon.com/yourbrainonclimate. The very least I would love you to do is to give me a review on your podcast medium of choice with some stars, but particularly with some words. And please, if you like this episode, send it to someone else. Word of mouth recommendations on how podcasts grow, particularly independent ones. What do you not have behind them? Nish Kumar or Josh Widdecombe or an army of promotion people. It's just me. Please help me get the word out.

Dave (04:34.846)

I was listening to an infuriating thing yesterday. The infuriating thing was the kind of thing I listened to all the time, and it infuriates me. What it was, was two clever people on a podcast. One of them was a lefty. The lefty was saying, we, he was saying, need a revolution. That's what he was saying. We need to smash this system. I was sitting there going, yeah, all right, mate. All right. I get it. I'd love a revolution. That'd be brilliant. How do we get that then?

to be honest, I turned it off. I don't know. I've just got really kind of like, this isn't, you're not doing anything by saying we need a revolution because we ain't got one.

Jonathan Rowson (05:15.286)

Right. Well, I'm immediately thinking of a Beatles song actually. You say, you want a revolution, yeah, you know, we all want to save the world. Or is it change the world? I can't remember. And then there's some thinking of Oasis. So I started Revolution from my bed because you said the brains I had went through my head. And there's all sorts of song lyrics with revolution in it. I mean, it's a popular notion, right?

I see why people reach for it. People are desperate because they don't trust the prevailing institutions and they don't feel that we have a competent political class that's worthy of the particular challenge in discussion, the climate crisis. That's what it says. The first thing to feel is a certain degree of sympathy, even empathy, perhaps even compassion. If you care about the climate crisis, you care about the climate crisis.

It's not surprising they'd call for revolution. However, I also recognize what you feel, which is this is hauteur. This is basically a rhetoric on stilts. And it's a kind of shrill clamoring for something without a strategy to bring it into being. And as you probably know, the heart of the matter is, well, revolution has a history and a politics, and there are many cases where revolutions work and when they fail.

The climate crisis has two things going on. One is the invoking of the we and the big question mark over what exactly has meant when you say we need a revolution because it's ironic really because in most revolutions there is one we against another we and that's what characterizes a revolution. One group defines itself against the other and says we're going to take you down. Now in the context of the climate, that's a bit tricky because we're all in some sense complicit, albeit some much more than others. It's true that there are particularly problematic entities, including fossil fuel companies, including the governments that subsidize them, and so on. But when he says we need a revolution, I would say, well, okay, talk me through it. Because if what he means is we need to take up arms, run down to the Houses of Parliament or 10 Downing Street and break through the gates and, I don't know, usurp the authorities and sit in the throne and say, okay, here's what we're going to do. We're going to get Shell out of the country and we're going to reduce aggregate energy demand and there'll be a temporary martial law and everyone's going to have a universal basic income and yada, some kind of plan like that, however far-fetched.

That's one thing. But if you say something more like when I say revolution, what I really mean is, I don't know what the etymology of revolution is exactly, but something to do with recasting the world, that we need a fundamental shift in things, an overhaul in how things work. I would broadly agree with that. And that might mean, for example, the idea of a political party that gets elected without promising economic growth would not be a revolution, it would be reform, but it would be revolutionary in its impact. It would be a profound shift, transformative and so on. So I guess I'm just saying that there's a certain amount of sympathy, a certain amount of incredulity, and a certain amount of curiosity is evoked by that. What was the word you used? Irritation?

Dave (09:07.914)

disconnect somehow. Do you know what I mean? I think that's mostly what I feel when I kind of hear... I agree with you, right? That I think there is... I'm very seduced by the big ideas about system change because whenever you look at the small individual stuff, it just doesn't seem like enough. But there's always something, usually something anyway, that's kind of lacking in what it means to get from here to there. Because almost always what is evoked is a system where somehow everybody has decided that system's going to work different. And I can't even get my neighbors to agree that we're going to cut a tree down or not. So this thing, there's something in there about kind of doing stuff together that feels like the problem. And unless I've had enough of listening to people just going, what we need is everything to be different. 

Jonathan Rowson

Yeah, no, and that is a sound basis for irritation because it's also paradoxically a source of inertia because we tend to think that there's a question of things staying the same or a question of things changing. But actually what often happens is you have change and countervailing change that together amount to a kind of inertia.

And what that means in the climate context is you have the kind of frenzy of noise around all the things we have to do alongside things carry on almost exactly as they are. And so it can feel or sound like lots of things are happening while the signal is not really changing. Now, why does that matter? Because a lot of this everything has to change is a kind of learned helplessness.

If all you do is say, there's no point in, for example, getting a more fuel-efficient car or getting some kind of heat pump for your house, or there's really no point in flying less or going vegan or whatever. Now, I have a certain amount of sympathy for that because given how much control one individual has on the overall eight-plus billion people predicament and the political economy that drives that. It certainly might have simply been for that. But really, it's not wrong to think that everything has to change. It's just wrong to think that negates the other things we have to do. And it's also incumbent on those who think everything has to change to specify the steps we can take towards it. Which is why I think, and I think you can, you know, I've come to the view, and quite recently actually.

For a long time, I wasn't sure because I'm not particularly partisan by nature. I like to keep an open mind and so on. For a while, I wasn't totally persuaded that the green growth story wouldn't work. I was sort of open to the possibility that something vaguely eco-modern might not be so mistaken after all. But to be honest, I've reached a point now through reading and consideration and just looking at the data.

I do believe that the only ultimate hope for climate change, short of some technological miracle, which we can't rely on, is reducing aggregate energy demand. Now, how exactly you do that becomes a matter of global international agreements and national targets and so on. But what it means in practice for advanced developed countries like ours is something like a post-growth economy. Now we're a million miles from that being electorally feasible.

But nonetheless, once you realize that is the coherent answer, it's then incumbent to work towards it. So at the moment you have our main opposition party, the Labour Party, trying to get elected on the prospectus of growth, and understandably so for economic reasons and conventional political reasons. But it's not visionary. It's not worthy of the challenge of our times. I think you need something that is effectively a post-growth prospectus, but is sold and marketed in a way that is more deeply inspiring, that uses different language, that presents a different vision of life that's convivial and focused on intrinsic ends, and is presented as a kind of radical sanity. Now, I know this is not yet going to win the election. I'm not naive in that sense. But I do think when people say change everything, it's like, okay, well, if that's one of the things that have to change, for example, what's your first step? And it might be, well, try and become leader of the Green Party, or it might be join the campaign for electoral reform, or it might be somehow we have to build up local coalitions around this idea, or we have to find time with, I don't know, someone who advises the shadow chancellor.

Or we have to find an example from another country where someone won an election on this basis and see how they did it. Or we have to get our mind away from elections entirely and realize that we're playing a game over 10 years and not over five years. But it's not impossible to turn a big picture vision into actionable steps, I guess that's all I'm saying.

Dave (14:52.462)

What peaked my interest in chatting to you, apart from you always being an interest in chat, was a thing that what you wrote, what I read on your sub stack, which I should put a link to in the show notes, about something that troubles me, which is this idea of the we, right? Now you will see this all the time in campaigning stuff, in political stuff, and kind of in how we talk to each other all the time. We'll say something like, what we need to do is get a clean energy system.

or what we need to do is do something about that problem over there. And it will be said, this word, we, will be used in a way that kind of means lots of things all at once and isn't clear what it means. It sort of means we get together collectively somehow, this amorphous mass of us needs to achieve an end. But there's also an implication somehow that you and me, the people talking, should be doing something about it as well. But that gap is not spelled out. And you wrote that basically there's a kind of a linguistic problem in there, which you don't think is small, right? 

Jonathan Rowson

Yeah. I think this is maybe an underappreciated detail. I don't want to premise too much upon it, but when I realized that it did strike me as worth investigating, and I only began to in that post, it was really a promissory note. So it's like this. We have roughly 8 billion people on the planet.

There are, I forget the number of languages, but there are a certain number of languages and then you have a few dominant languages. English is by far the most widely spoken language. It's actually surprised me a little bit, but it's spoken more widely than Chinese, Spanish, Hindi and so on are quite close behind. And it's not just that it's the most numerically spoken, it's also that it's a language of international business and it's a language of international diplomacy.

So the English language really matters politically, right? That's kind of obvious, but it's just worth recognizing. Whatever this language is like, the world will become. At some level, there's a deep connection, right? And one of the features of the English language, which is quite particular to it, it's not unique to it, it's nothing very special about this, is just that the way we use we is almost infinitely ambiguous. The way they put it in linguistic term is clusivity, by which they mean the term doesn't specify whether you're including the person you're talking to or including someone else. For example, we, Dave, are having this conversation, but if you ask me what I'm doing tonight and I'm in another part of London, I'll say, oh, we'll probably go out and see a film. And then it's like, yeah, well, exactly. So you're like, well, that's the thing. You're joking, but you get the point.

There's a sort of 1% that I'm talking to you, but 99% because of the context, you know I'm not. That's true of the language in general. The injunction based on the we is invariably ambiguous. The problem is it's lame because of that. It's not that it's constructively ambiguous, which is sometimes the case. When people speak of the global we, there isn't really such a thing.

Right. That's the first thing. So there's various ways to speak about this. The first is a problem of communication that actually we're not really making sense. There's nothing intelligible about the injunction that we have to do something unless you're at the UN COP negotiations and you're talking about the we that has to agree a treaty. The climate regime, there is a kind of we in the room there.

For what it's worth, my wife Shiva Tambuchetti just was involved in the Oceans Treaty. So I learned a little bit from sort of ringside spousal seats to this negotiation that there is some hope for international agreements. It is possible for the 200 or so countries of the world to find common cause. It's just very, very hard. And in that context, there is a we, but usually within that we, there are several factions and much of the politics is about the debate. In fact, I should add here, although he's a controversial source, but it's such a powerful quotation, the Nazi jurist, also a political theorist called Carl Schmitt, wrote about the concept of the political. And he said that a few different things. The first thing he said was, anyone who speaks of humanity is a liar. And it's a harsh, harsh dark thing to say. But it's also striking. It's the notion that there is never one unified humanity. And the second thing he said is that politics really begins with us and them. That's what politics is. Politics is not the presumptive we, it's us against them. Now.

This is difficult to bear, but it's very important to start from that realist premise, I think, because what's going on in the climate conundrum is a battle of power. It is about incumbent interest. And you don't have to be on the radical left to see that what's preventing us from acting on climate are abundant vested interests. And that it's not trivial to take down those vested interests without a cascading effect on lots of other issues, including political interests and then the way the economy is run and then people's mortgages and house values and all sorts of other interests are implicated. The reason for saying all that is, I don't know if we could invent new terminology to get more clear about what we mean when we say we, but I do agree with you that the climate conversation is awash with this kind of maddening, lame ambiguity, that when we evoke the we to do something, we have to specify who it is. We have to specify who's going to do it and how, otherwise we're not really saying anything.

Dave (21:07.378)

it does matter. On one level, you're right, we can't reinvent the English language, but I suppose we could. But I'm doing it there. I just did it there. You can't help it. You've got to use we. It's in the language. And to an extent, we're stuck with it. And it also has powerful, often rhetorical force to insist that we should do something, and that's what politicians do. But at the same time, I feel somehow that it just makes things harder to understand what people mean sometimes. It feels almost like it's a distancing to say, we should do something without really specifying what you mean. So I don't think it is trivial. I'd love to think it was trivial and it was just a way of making a point, but actually I think it often obscures... It's short stepping the bit that is really, really difficult, which is well how and what? You know what I mean? 

Jonathan Rowson

Right. I totally agree and that's why I've written about it. I believe we don't have to go there right now, but I think it's a fundamental part of what I call the MetaCrisis. is deeper than the climate crisis. It goes into the fundamental lack of intelligibility in the world today. Here we go again. The subtitle of my post, by the way, the title is Forgive Yourself for Speaking on behalf of the World. I say forgive yourself precisely for the reasons we're discussing that we don't have another term to use. It's baked into the English language. It's one of the most widely used terms. Actually, there's a list, by the way. I forget where it is. There's a list of the most used words in English, and we is quite high up there. It's not right at the top, but it's sort of top 20, I think. And the subtitle is, it's somewhat in jest, why it would help if we stopped referring to we as if we knew what we meant, but it's not clear if we can. Right? And each of those we's specify something a little bit different. Now this is not just a parlor game. It matters when it comes to making sense of any kind of political campaign, any kind of policy objective that you specify more clearly when we is evoked, which we are you referring to. Because often, unless you specify that, you're not actually saying anything. It's just a kind of rhetorical wishful thinking.

Dave (23:48.862)

one of the challenges in all of this is a kind of powerlessness. What we're trying to do in our campaigning, in the words, well not just campaigning, but in general, is to kind of persuade people to act. Then there has to be a sense of me feeling that I can do that, that I have the power to do that. And the we that is being implicitly evoked also makes me feel very powerless. Like how am I supposed to get a revolution in my bed or wherever else I get it from?

Jonathan Rowson

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, this is the big thing because this gets to dissonance. This gets to another feature of the climate conversation that's just a bit weird. That we are talking about a planetary predicament and we're often doing it as if the planet were as familiar as our bedroom, you know, as if we knew what this thing was. But what's going on in India and China and Africa and South America?  people there have very different ideas, different language forms, different political objectives. And so when we speak as if we had agency at that scale, of course we're ridiculous, right? But that applies to almost everybody, unless you're maybe president of the US or China or something like that. Or if you're a hyper agent of some kind, like Elon Musk or whatever, and you're actually what you see has that sort of reach. For most other people, the gap between the scale of the problem, which we can, to some extent, grasp intellectually, but we can't really influence, it creates this widespread dissonance that's just part of what it is to be alive today. You have the planet in your pocket, effectively. You can scroll through everything that's going on everywhere.

And it's beguiling because it's just so much bigger than any of us. And in the climate crisis, we want the gap between what we're experiencing and what we care about and our language to be as small as possible. But sadly, the gap's huge. This is why it's a little bit absurd to say, you know, like, people will say, I want to act on climate change, so I'm going to do more recycling or something like that.

And they're not even connected very directly as you know, but it still makes them feel that somehow they're speaking to that big issue that they care about. Which is important. It's important for people to feel that they're doing something, right? That's right. And it's harmless enough. It's not wrong. It's just that to really understand the climate crisis, I think, is to see it as this gargantuan, multi-party, contested planetary delusional, I want to say sclerotic in the sense of not functioning properly and being a bit broken. When you see it that way, then it's very hard to speak of it with anything like credibility because you live your life and this issue is out there. That's why they call it a hyperobject. It's a bit beyond our comprehension. We can't fully grasp it.

Dave (27:21.89)

There's something about bigger than me actions, which feels like it's really important. We're given so many, the last episode I was talking to Lorraine Whitmarsh all about behavior change and there is important individual stuff we can do, but that's kind of the lens that most of us understand climate through is what can I do? What is my individual role? But what I think we need to be finding is those spaces where the we actually makes sense, where there's some kind of a we. that can do something. And that might be a teeny tiny little we. It might be just like me and my wife will talk about this and so together we will do something. And it feels important not just because that's two people doing something rather than one person doing something, but it actually starts to feel like I'm not just stuck in my own little world of doing this and thinking about this, right?

Jonathan Rowson

Yeah, look, I mean, I'm all for alliances and collective agency and you know, God knows we need the wee, right? But it's just that I'm...

Just good to be clear what we mean when we evoke it. So we, by which I mean the planetary we, have a certain amount of time to avoid, let's say, runaway climate change or something like that. And then we, the UK, have a certain amount of time to have a chance of meeting our net zero targets, let's say. And then we, the family here, living in Putney in London have a certain amount of time to improve the insulation of our home so that we can use the heating less, so we can lower our energy costs. Although that may or may not have a climate impact because of things like the Jeavon’s paradox and the fact that we- 

Dave

He's striding off topic. Get him back. 

Jonathan Rowson

Well, no, but just that it's worth knowing that these lateral dimensions are there.  But yeah, but then there's a way of like the school down the street. What are we doing on climate change? Well, you know, there are things the school can do. So it's always possible to specify it. It's just a bit, it slows language down a bit. And people, people love, see, the thing is it's about the arena. You see, it's something to do with the idea of arena. John Vervaeke speaks about the agent in the arena as a way of understanding the stuff.

You see, we all have an arena of sorts, our home, our office, our friendship circles, our social media platforms. These are kind of the arenas we function in. So if you imagine something like the Colosseum as a sort of quintessential arena in Rome, but we all in our own way psychologically have our arenas that we operate in. We're the agent in those arenas. And in those arenas, climate change is a kind of part of the context now, part of the setting.

But we end up speaking of climate change in the same way that we speak about the other aspects of our arena, like our project at work, like our neighbor next door, which are much more proximate. Whereas climate change is this, as I say, this kind of hyper object that's beyond our full comprehension and beyond our reach. But we still speak of it as if it's in our arena, which is why you get this extraordinary dissonance. So when you say we, and you mean the family or the office. and then you extend the we to the climate action, no one quite knows where you are, what you're actually referring to. And I think we should work harder to improve that because I think it tightens up, it gets to your first point about calls for revolution, like lazy calls, kind of unspecified calls. Once you start being more specific, people can begin to believe you, it becomes more credible and therefore more motivating.

Dave (31:24.686)

Do you think that implies that the thing, when talking about trying to get people interested in taking action on climate change, that maybe the climate change bit of it is the problem? That we might want to talk less about trying to get people feeling that they can do anything at all about this global problem. Instead, what we want to be doing is things like, here's a thing that you can do. Here's something you can do in your life which has benefit. Try and retain at all costs that sense of people doing something and not necessarily banging on about the big planetary stuff too much.

Jonathan Rowson

It's a difficult question. It's a very difficult question because I'm conflicted on it. So on the one hand, if your aim is to mobilize interest and action, you want to appeal to people in a way that doesn't freak them out and makes it workable that they can do something, that they can get the intrinsic reward of that, that it has maybe some small direct benefit environmentally in some way.

And it can feel as though you're raising consciousness in some way and everything's becoming a bit more salient. So when the next news item comes up or the next election comes up, because people have been acting, they're a little bit more conditioned to care about the issue. So on the one hand, yes.

On the other hand, no. The no is this. The no is the problem is so much bigger and deeper. It's a kind of denial to pretend that we could tinker away to a solution. This is what I'm coming at with my point about aggregate energy demand. It's a blue pill, red pill moment in the Matrix sense. Do people actually want to know what's .. I hesitate to say what's really going on because obviously it's contested and constructed and so on. 

Dave

And you don't want to sound like David Icke either. That's the other challenge you've got here. 

Jonathan Rowson

No, I definitely don't want to sound like David Icke. No lizards here. But do people actually want to really understand the full extent of this problem? I don't know how many do. I would say about 10% of the population might. People want to get on with their lives or give or take.

And therefore I'm a bit conflicted because there's part of me that wants to say, do you, it's incumbent on people to really understand what's happening. But they're like, well, it's not my world. I'm quite happy doing my own thing. That's your stuff. I'm saying, no, is your part. Like it reminds me of that scene in Lord of the Rings, where the hobbits get the Ents to fight in the battle. 

Dave

You're looking at me as if this is something I have any interest in. 

Jonathan Rowson

Oh, you don't know. Okay. Well, for those who don't know.

It is very interesting, basically. The oldest creatures in Middle Earth are these so-called Ents, and they're called the Shepherds of the Forest. They're very, very old trees, and they're very big, and they're quite powerful, but they do everything extremely slowly. As war in Middle Earth breaks out, initially they're peaceful creatures. They really don't want to get involved. But at some point, it becomes clear that this war is going to completely engulf the whole world. and it's even going to lead to the burning of trees because they're burning trees to make weapons. And at one point, the ents say something like young hobbits, you haven't lived as long as we have, you don't understand. This will come and go.  And then the hobbit says to them, but you're part of this world. And when he says this, but you're part of this world, it's a really searing comment. And then he finds a way of making the tree, making the ent walk a different way so that it sees the other trees being burnt and then they join the war and it makes a big difference. But I say that now because those people who want to get on with their lives and don't really care about bigger than self problems. who want to feel good about themselves as good citizens, but really don't want to be bothered too much. I'm inclined to say that's not okay. Difficult though it may be to say that. I'm inclined to say it's a kind of willful delusion that's self-serving. And who am I to say that? Someone who sees what the problem actually entails, I think. 

But I don't, I'm not. revolutionary in the sense that I want them to come into battle. I just want them to see more clearly. I don't want them to pretend that they know what's going on when they don't. So I have mixed feelings Dave. I don't really want to bother people and shake them out of their existence. On the other hand, the problem does call for it. So what to do? 

Dave

What's interesting there is in a weird way you've ended up agreeing with the lefty I was annoyed at the start, which is that there's a load of people who are just basically this mass of people. where in some way the solution is getting them to care about the thing that I care about. 

Jonathan Rowson

Yeah, there is a problem there. I wouldn't say that's where I am. I'm under no illusions that people are very different. They're formed differently. They have different interests, different values, different assumptions, commitments, vested interests, and so on. I think the progressive left has a blind sight when it comes to people who are not like them and how they think and operate. They seem maddeningly curious about what it would be like to be a different kind of creature. And it's a problem. And when it comes to the so-called debate between the so-called moderate flank and radical flank, between the people who are Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil and so on. and those who are more like Climate Majority Project, as Rupert Reid and so on, are now. I'm a bit more of the Climate Majority Project ilk. I think there's a time for the radical flank to draw attention to things, but our hope is ultimately in a kind of peace. And by peace I mean I'm less inclined to want to go to war with the government of the day or to turn off the energy grid and, you know, I don't know, burn the...shell headquarters or whatever. That's not my scene. I think what you need to do is build coalitions among already powerful groups that don't know quite how powerful they are. Whether that's lawyers or doctors or teachers, but sites of collective agency where people feel it's not their job to speak about climate because they're not an environmental NGO. But actually it is. Actually, we have to galvanize on the basis of existing structures. in order to have a chance to transform things, which means what we need today are coalitions of the willing who are not environmental activists. I've always felt there was a deep problem with the conflation of environmentalism and climate change. I think there's something about the climate conundrum that's altogether more entangled and endemic with every form of life and outsourcing it to the Green Movement and to the environmental NGOs was always a huge strategic blunder. That what you need is for what would conventionally be seen as guilds or interest groups or unions, other civil society kind of clusters to use their collective power to speak on climate as if it were their issue because it is. It's everyone's issue. But we've outsourced our agency to these so-called specialized groups. But the key is to make this an ever one issue. But you make it an ever one issue by also being honest about just how big an issue it is and also how variegated it is because the risk of a wet bulb temperature in India or Africa is not the same as coastal flooding harming a property investment I don't know, in Portobello, Edinburgh or something, somewhere near the sea. 

And the more specific you get, like good writing is famously good when it's specific. Like you don't describe a red dress, you describe a scarlet dress with sequins and suddenly the mind is more enchanted, right? And the same way with climate change, this morass of an issue needs to be made more specific to bring it to life.

That's the challenge now. It's sort of, what is the future of climate? Well, it's really fascinating, darkly fascinating how it will play out. No one can be absolutely sure. But it's not an Armageddon story. It's not that everything will suddenly collapse. It's that degradation will take place and there will be indirect effects of that on migration, health, pandemics, economic impacts, military impacts, and so on. And it...It's a training in systems thinking. So what's exciting about it is potentially having a population waking up and thinking in a more sophisticated way at scale. And my hope for that to happen is not through climate change. So coming back to your question, it's not leading with are you into climate change or not. What is your role in society? Are you a doctor? Are you a business person? Are you a lawyer? What are you doing? And how can you build collective action?

arena, your sphere of agency, such that people listen to you to a greater extent. And what are you proposing that people do? Not just act on climate, because that's maddeningly vague too. What in particular do you want to do? And then how do you make it happen?

Sorry, that was a long answer, but roughly, that's roughly how I see it.

Dave (42:11.722)

Right now that was terrific stuff and Jonathan's stuff as always has made my brain hurt and feel very, very small. Jonathan writes loads of sub-stack things. I'll put a link in the show notes. That's where I read about his original thoughts about this stuff, which turned into this episode. He has written books, he's written reports, he's phenomenally clever and writes loads and loads of stuff and he's just an all-around brainy egg. So yeah, have a look in the show notes and I'll put a link to his stuff. Let me know what you thought of the episode, what you think of the show. hello@yourbrainonclimate or Twitter at @brainclimate. And please do take the time to write a review if you like this show. It's the most important thing you can do, you know, other than give me a bit of cash at patreon.com/yourbrainonclimate. It really, really helps. It helps the show get an audience. It helps push it out of the charts. And that's just gold dust for a tiny podcast like this, which is just me doing it around the edges of other things. So thank you. Thank you massively for that. 

I will be back next time, until then look after yourself and I will see you very soon. Okay bye!