Climate Change, Global Governance, The Global Cable Is Science Science to Everybody? Understanding How People Understand Science with Michael Weisberg

The Global Cable is back for the new year with a conversation with Michael Weisberg. He is the Professor and Chair of Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, and this year he’s the inaugural Penn Faculty Fellow at Perry World House.

Professor Weisberg is currently working on initiatives in the Galápagos Islands, educating local communities about their unique environment and how to conserve it.
 
He talks to us about taking part in the COP25 climate negotiations in Madrid; how a better understanding of science shapes public attitudes to major issues like climate change; why Charles Darwin inspires him; and whether we can still be optimistic about saving the world from the coming climate emergency.

Music & Produced by Tre Hester.

Transcript

Michael Weisberg [00:00:08] Late December 2019, it's extremely hard to be optimistic about the mitigation side of climate change. I think that the there are many countries that are trying to do what they can do. And I think you see France and Germany being real leaders here. You see Canada trying to do its best, you see New Zealand trying to do its best. But I think some really important large countries don't seem to be taking this seriously. Don't seem to be seeing that this is an emergency.

 [00:00:37] So I'm unfortunately not especially optimistic about the aggressive mitigation that needs to happen. Just to give you a sense of how aggressive, what was agreed to in Paris, which is not being which is not happening, was not nearly sufficient to deal with the biggest emergencies. The idea in Paris was simply that if we can get any kind of agreement and we can have goodwill and have get used to working with each other, we can ratchet up and make things more sophisticated and more aggressive over time. Well, we're not even meeting those kind of Paris goals, which the goals themselves would have kept the global mean temperature around three degrees centigrade. So we're aiming towards a much warmer world than that. The world has already passed the one degree mark and you can see the result of that.

John Gans [00:01:31] Welcome to The Global Cable Podcast from Perry World House at the University of Pennsylvania, where we discuss the world's most pressing issues that people work on. I'm John Gans, Director of Communications and Research here at Perry World House. We're back from the holiday break and jumping right into 2020 with a conversation with none other than Michael Weisberg, Professor and Chair of Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania. And this year, he's the inaugural Penn Faculty Fellow here at Perry World House. Michael spends his days thinking in part about how people think about science. He's currently working on initiatives on the Galapagos Islands, working with those in the local community to develop new ways to both consider and conserve the environment.

[00:02:10] Michael talks to us about taking part in COP 25, the UN's recent climate negotiations in Madrid, why Charles Darwin continues to inspire him, and whether we can still be optimistic about saving the world from climate change. Michael Weisberg, welcome to The Global Cable.

 [00:02:27] So how does one get interested and dedicated to the Philosophy of Science in the 21st century? How does one get into it? And what drew you to the field and how we tried to move it forward?

Michael Weisberg [00:02:40] I think I came into Philosophy of Science the way that many people do, which is that I started in the Natural Sciences. I went to college to do Chemistry. I was one of these kids that like to try to create explosions in my backyard and I just loved that sort of thing. And I was so eager to be in the laboratory and actually doing science and research. And that's what I did through college. But like everywhere else, I was an undergraduate in San Diego. We had to take some distribution requirements. And I saw this course Philosophy of Science, and I thought, well, that sounds cool. So I took it. And it was taught by this incredible professor Philip Kitcher, who's now at Columbia University, a really, really, really fabulous and interesting philosopher. And it started working on me. Took a year or two, but it was kind of working in the background and it just seduced me. And I think what happened was I realized that I loved science and what really drew me were the biggest questions, at least in the piece of Chemistry that I'd been studying Organic Chemistry. It was great and it was incredibly successful. But in some sense, it was incredibly successful because the kind of biggest, hardest, most conceptual questions had been addressed. And I think I had this taste for the questions that weren't addressed. And so slowly but surely I got pulled into Philosophy, but always with with one hand and the Natural Sciences.

[00:04:00] Prior to the 20th century, there wouldn't have been a distinction between someone who called themselves a philosopher, someone to call themselves a scientist. In fact, there's a famous volume about Einstein called Albert Einstein, Philosopher-Scientist. But I think since that time, since the early 20th century, all disciplines have professionalized and everybody's sort of encouraged to stay in their lane. And I've never really liked that so I've always looked for projects that pull me across different disciplines and to really think about them.

John Gans [00:04:27] So I think this is a good Segway to your work on the Galapagos Island, which is like where you have been pulled in some ways. And to a degree you've helped pull, I think, a lot of interesting new ideas into how you preserve such a special place in the world. So I thought I'd ask sort of how you got involved in that and what's your ambition for it, and how does it fit within your line of inquiry?

Michael Weisberg [00:04:50] So I where I landed in my career was in Philosophy of Biology, which is the part of Philosophy of Science that thinks about how biology works, the conceptual foundations and looming large for biology in the 20th century, in the 19th century is charles Darwin, of course. The Galapagos Islands is this incredible laboratory for thinking about ecology, thinking about evolution. The reasons this is incredible laboratory is because it's a series of volcanic islands a thousand kilometers off the coast of South America. And it's a really hard place to live. So there's very little freshwater. It's hard for non-humans to live, even harder for humans to live. And for the most part, it had been completely left alone until the 20th century, with few exceptions. So Darwin found, I don't like to use the word pristine, but he essentially found one of the most undisturbed places in the planet. And that's what stimulated his thinking. So naturally, Galapagos looms large in anybody's mind who studies Biologt and that's what initially drew me there. I just went like anybody else, thinking I would see this incredible biodiversity.

 [00:05:50] What I didn't realize and what I think few people realize is there are now thirty five thousand people living there because Galapagos is the first UNESCO World Heritage Site and it's 97%  National Park, but three percent has been set aside for humans living there. And as I started to think about what was interesting about the place, of course, I think the biology is interesting, but in some sense the humanity is even more interesting. And I got really intrigued by the question of how can this community living in such a complex place that's confined to three percent that can't even enter into the national park, how could they be engaged as the best guardians of the national park in ways that the governments of Ecuador have failed to do?

[00:06:32] So my work in Galapagos has slowly but surely turned into an issue of resilience capacity building, by which I mean the community that lives in Galapagos, they are the ones that ultimately have to preserve this place or not. And there's lots of talk from the outside. How can we support Galapagos to be a place that's preserved for future generations? But if you have people living there, in the end of the day, they're the ones that are going on who it's back, it's either going to be successful or going to fail. So that's the kind of questions that I'm interested in.

 [00:07:06] Now, you might say, why is a philosopher involved in this? And part of the answer is boring, which is like, why not, you know, anybody could do this. But I think what positioned me well to be thinking in these terms is Philosophy is sort of the ultimate synthetic discipline. It comes at this naturally because it's the discipline from which all other disciplines broke away. I mean, Aristotle was both the first real modern, systematic philosopher for the way that we think about that now, but also the first biologist, the first physicist, the first logician, the first mathematician, so forth. And philosophical training, I think gives you a kind of different kind of a perspective and a kind of synthetic perspective. And it has allowed me to put together a team of people from biology, from medicine, from nursing, from education and so forth, who can kind of think about this problem in a holistic manner. So that's how I got involved in it. And I think that's why, you know, a philosopher continues to be involved in it.

[00:08:03] But it's a long journey from organic chemistry, building model rockets in the backyard that explode to Galapagos. And if you said was there a path that you followed consciously? Of course not. I mean, I think one stumbles into things. And one of the nice things about academic life is it allows you to actually see interesting paths and take them. But I think you have to be open to the experience and, interested and willing to work with other people.

John Gans [00:08:29] Darwin went to Galapagos and basically came home and launched an entire line of science, and you went to Galapagos and came back with a mission to help publics understand science and help understand how publics understand science, and then act upon science and the data that they learn about. So one of my questions is, this is become one of your real focuses, which is how do people get science. And so how have you come to understand that? I think you've looked at evolution and climate change, both of which matter to the Galapagos. So how, as you've looked at those two issues and visited the Galapagos, has your understanding of how the public understand science changed? And why are those two issues similar and how are they different?

Michael Weisberg [00:09:22] I got interested in how the public thinks about science actually in Philadelphia or in Pennsylvania, not in Galapagos. And when I was a young assistant professor, we had a creationist incident in Pennsylvania called the Dover case. It's now about 15 years ago. And creationism is this funny American tradition of people trying to teach the Bible instead of biology in a science class. And it when it raised its head in Pennsylvania, I had the good fortune of working with colleagues in biology to kind of try to help mount a defense of the the teachers in these communities in central Pennsylvania who were the ones who are fighting it. And it really got me interested as a research question.

[00:10:05] Why is it that these bits of science or science denial that are so at odds with not just like a lot of the scientific community, but essentially all of the scientific community keep arising? The big ones really in the United States right now are evolution, climate change, and vaccines, where you have differences between the scientific community's view and the general public. In fact, we have, especially with evolution and climate change, pretty strong polarization, not quite 50, 50 splits, but something like that. Surprisingly like that. So I got interested in that as a research question maybe about a decade ago. We've done a lot of work in North America with public opinion polling, but also with small scale experiments, both trying to think about what could be the basis of this polarization and what could be done about it. So we've done some experiments with documentary work and also just trying to figure out what does, say rejection of evolution or rejection of climate science correlate with.

[00:11:06] One of the things that we've learned over the years is that what's missing for people who reject evolution or reject climate change is a kind of realistic understanding of what science looks like. So most people's encounter with science ends in high school, if that. And so and science is taught in high school as, "well the book says so, the textbook says so." And then maybe people encounter science in a medical context. And again, you typically hear from your physician, "this is the way it is." You don't get a lot of detail. And what you really don't get is the sense that at the edge, where scientific discoveries are being made, the world is noisy and we're trying to claw our way towards understanding what a noisy world looks like. And in some sense, at the very edge of science, it looks more like a courtroom that there's a balance of evidence. That's really the issue and not just a machine that gives you a number that settles the answer.

[00:11:57] So one of the things that we start doing was investigating that: does a more sophisticated understanding of how science works actually lead people to be more willing to accept evolution, climate and so forth? One of the things that we found in work that will hopefully be published soon, is at every level of political ideology and religious persuasion, there is a correlation between understanding how science works and accepting the scientific ideas as scientists see them.

[00:12:27] So just for example, in our country, very conservative people tend to reject evolution and reject climate change. But among those very conservative people, if they know more about the process of science, they're much more likely to accept evolution and climate change. So that kind of trying to get a little deeper into what the sources of tension might be, I think has been it's been a central focus for us. But it also got us thinking, what kind of science education is the most important part of science to be promoting throughout the world? And so as we started working Galapagos, we thought, well, we're not just going to teach classes about Darwin. Instead, what we want to do is get the community involved in doing science with their own hands and actually try to think about what questions for the communities they're interested in. What's really relevant in their own lives and then show them via support that science can actually be a tool that they can use to learn about the situations that they face.

[00:13:24] Now, what's interesting about all of this is it connects to one part of the climate discussion, not so much the part about lowering the amount of carbon dioxide emissions, but the other part that involves what's called adaptation or preparing to deal with the climate emergency that's coming. Because even in the best case scenario, where we're super aggressive and reduce emissions to a huge magnitude as quickly as possible, there's still a lot of serious problems coming as we're starting to see with increased hurricane seasons and increased wildfires and everything else. And of course, if countries are not ambitious, which sadly they don't seem to be, these problems are going to be even worse. So I think a really important part of being ready for climate change and being ready for this emergency that's facing us even now is actually building local capacity. But this is, again, one of these things where it's you know, it's not helpful for professors from the University of Pennsylvania to just swoop in to South America and say, this is what you should do. I think that this capacity has to really be built from the bottom up. And we've learned that the part of building capacity is building this understanding of how science is actually practiced.

John Gans [00:14:29] Now, it's interesting. You're you're trying to help people, not just trust scientists, but trust how scientists come up and make their findings, which is, you know, kind of an interesting approach.

Michael Weisberg [00:14:40] Yeah, there's there's a lot of emphasis in this world on messaging and scientific communication and trying to depolarize. And of course, I'm entirely in favor of that. But I think that that's really not enough in the end, because it's not about the people, it's about the process. And in fact, if anything, you know, one thing with my philosophy of science had learned is that the objectivity of science comes from communities of scientists, not from individual scientists. And so I think that there's no way to appreciate that without actually participating.

John Gans [00:15:12] Which is interesting because in our previous episode with Trudy Rubin, we talked about facts. And one of the things she's interested in is promoting journalism as a model of actually trying to get facts and try to find out what they are. And it's a challenge that she's having in the news business. Thankfully, science is a little better funded than the news business these days, but it's still a similar challenge on both fronts.

Michael Weisberg [00:15:34] And if I can connect to what she said, I think that you see in both science and in the news business, it's an active process. So this image that people have of science that you just kind of like go into the lab and you put it in the machine, you push a button, you get a number. I mean, it isn't like that. You actually have to really actively interrogate nature as journalists have to really actively interrogate what they're hearing and not just report back what they're hearing. So I think it's really productive, actually, to look for the parallels between science as it's actually practiced realistically and news as it's practiced ideally.

John Gans [00:16:10]  So some of the best minds at Perry World House and Penn more broadly, and across the world are thinking about climate change. But it feels, in fact, at times as though this sort of efforts to meet the climate change and climate change challenge are either insufficient or losing steam. Are you optimistic or pessimistic about international efforts to deal with climate change?

Michael Weisberg [00:16:32] Oh, man. (laughs)

John Gans [00:16:34] I stumped a philosopher! That's a solid one on The Global Cable!

Michael Weisberg [00:16:45] Late December 2019, it is extremely hard to be optimistic about the mitigation side of climate change. I think that there are many countries that are trying to do what they can do. You see France and Germany being real leaders here. You see Canada trying to do its best, you see New Zealand trying to do its best. But I think some really important large countries don't seem to be taking this seriously. Don't seem to be seeing that this is an emergency.

Michael Weisberg [00:17:13] So I'm unfortunately not especially optimistic about the aggressive mitigation that needs to happen. And just to give you a sense of how aggressive: what was agreed to in Paris, which is not happening, was not nearly sufficient to deal with the biggest emergencies. The idea in Paris was simply that if we can get any kind of agreement, and we can have goodwill and have get used to working with each other, we can ratchet up and make things more sophisticated and more aggressive over time. Well, we're not even meeting those kind of Paris goals, which the goals themselves would have kept the global mean temperature around three degrees centigrade. So we're aiming towards a much warmer world than that. The world has already passed the one degree mark. And you can see the result of that. Again, just look at the pictures of wildfires from Australia or from California.

[00:18:08] And so I am not especially optimistic. And I think that unless there's a huge breakthrough in technology, like something that will allow electrification to happen quickly and cleanly, or some new way of capturing carbon in the atmosphere, I think we're in for a very, very rough ride.

[00:18:26] Now, on the adaptation side, which is trying to help people around the world prepare for the climate emergency. I think there's a little more reason for hope. And fortunately, you know, you'd rather stop the problem instead of address the problem. But the nice thing about the adaptation side is it's not competitive. Countries are going to have to do this, cities are gonna have to do this, small towns are going to have to do this. And I think that at least me and some of the other people at Perry World House who've been thinking about the global policy scene here have tended to focus on that question, partly because it aligns with our interests, but also because it seems as if there's really hope of making progress. Unfortunately, the mitigation side is a matter of countries being aggressive, and I think countries will only be aggressive when they're politically ready to be aggressive. And unfortunately, the United States, Australia, the UK, are not ready. Or anything like ready.

John Gans [00:19:19] Well, thanks for that.

Michael Weisberg [00:19:21] Sorry. I wish I could bring us into a little more holiday cheer, but...

John Gans [00:19:25] That's OK. So you just got back from COP25 in Madrid, the UN Climate Change Conference. And so I feel as though that's your stats report in some ways in terms of your optimism versus pessimism. But I thought sort of broadly speaking, what was it like? You know, you were part of a broader Penn delegation. And so what did you take away from COP25?

Michael Weisberg [00:19:53] COP is the convention of the parties. So this is part of the the UNFCCC. So this is the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. This is the twenty fifth year that it's been meeting. The term "Paris Agreement" might be more familiar than COP, and the Paris agreement was the outcome of the 21st of these meetings.

[00:20:14] So what is it like? Well, at the core of what of this is a multilateral negotiation among all the countries in the world to try to address the climate emergency. And then in concentric circles surrounding that are technical discussions with scientists like the the IPCC (the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) and academic institutions like ours and some other NGOs who are interested in these subjects. And then moving outwards, there is civil society in various ways. And then at the periphery and other buildings, there's just anybody that has any interest whatsoever in the climate space.One of my friends described it as a 20-ring circus, and I think that's an understatement. It's an incredibly interesting but complex set of meetings.

[00:21:01] At the core of it, though, is this negotiation. So it starts with an agenda setting in a kind of high ministerial level and then that gets broken into work streams on different topics. So the delegation from Perry World House was especially interested in the discussions around adaptation and around financing for both mitigation and adaptation. So one of the big issues is how loss and damage associated with climate change is going to be financed. And then one of the really exciting things for Perry World House is one of our fellows is actually high level staff member at the U.N. Secretariat that handles climate change, so this is Koko Warner. Hopefully in a future episode you'll have her come talk about this process.

John Gans [00:21:42] She's on the books!

Michael Weisberg [00:21:46] So they have a thankless job of basically staying up all night to support what happened during the day. So if there's progress or lack of progress in a negotiation room, the secretariat is staying up with the facilitators of each session and actually trying to write up notes and maybe even move towards draft text. Then at the end of this conference, which is actually a Friday morning and Friday afternoon in Madrid, the the ministerial levels back again in trying to hammer out the last details so that they'll actually be decisions that come out of this conference.

[00:22:19] So that's kind of the really the reason that this thing happens. What we were able to do from a Perry World House point of view is really contribute to some of the technical discussions on two really central sets of issues. So the first is what the UN process calls Brazilians, and that's building capacity to deal with the climate emergency that's coming. And one of the things that's so interesting about that is it's a global issue that can only be addressed in quite specific local ways. And the U.N. is set up to deal with countries dealing with other countries, and not so well to set up dealing with municipalities or even smaller groups. So one of the kind of interesting things is those of us interested in this global policy space is to try to think through with the U.N., how can there actually be a better process for connecting the big global country to country discussions down to small communities? So that's something that I was involved in. And then the other piece, another one of our visiting fellows, Mauricio Rodas, who was the former mayor of Quito. He's been involved in this big process of how can subnational units like cities and smaller towns finance their projects. And so that was another big piece of our presence there.

John Gans [00:23:32] Almost 300 years ago, one of Penn's first trustees, Ben Franklin, who knew a thing or two about science, philosophy and many other things.

Michael Weisberg [00:23:42] And foreign policy.

John Gans [00:23:43] You know, we can change that for every one of these global cables. Journalism, we've got it all. Developed a questionnaire used for conversations among fellow Philadelphians interested in current and global affairs. We've updated it for use today to anchor The Global Cable podcast. So these "Franklin Few," these short questions, can have short answers. And so we know this is the hardest part of the podcast for some. So I will let you meander if you need to. So who would you most like to meet today and why? And we will let you have the historical out if you would like to pick somebody who is no longer with us or on the planet.

Michael Weisberg [00:24:21] Oh is the norm to pick someone who's alive?

John Gans [00:24:23] I mean, you could pick whoever you want!

Michael Weisberg [00:24:25] I do think it would be fascinating to meet, well, I think Ben would be cool. But that's the easy answer at Penn, right? I think I would like to meet St. Charles himself, as we call him, in our discipline, Charles Darwin. I think he was quite an interesting mind. And it was you know, he's in a generation of many great scientists, but he somehow had something really special. He had a this way of synthesizing enormous amounts of information into really stunning ideas. So I think he would be a very interesting person to have beer with, although I do know that he spent more on stamps than on beer. So might have it might have been a different treat.

John Gans [00:25:00] Spent more on stamps than beer. That sounds-

Michael Weisberg [00:25:04] So Darwin has this reputation as this kind of like doddering old guy that sat, you know, like, you know, behind his desk, and played with his children. He did all those things but he also ran this, essentially he ran a scientific military battle from his desk with all of his trusted lieutenants. And he had special mail delivery. I think three or four mail delivery is a day at Down House so he could keep track of everything because there was no Internet, no telegraphs. He had to do everything by post. But also interesting fact about Darwin. What's the bookseller in the train stations? W H Smith? The first one opened in Paddington Station around the time that The Origin of Species came out, and one of the reasons that the Origin of Species was a bestseller was because they were selling in Paddington as people were like going out to like the beach. Because English beaches, you need to have a book, let's just say.

John Gans [00:26:04] Wow. So all those Global Cable listeners on the beach in Dover,

Michael Weisberg [00:26:09] Should all read and all four hundred and thirty, whatever pages it is, of The Origin of Species.

John Gans [00:26:13] And listen to the entire season of The Global Cable. All right. So speaking of books, have you read anything, seen anything? Movies, plays or listen to anything, podcasts other than The Global Cable, the latest Coldplay album, anything on those lines, related to global affairs that our listeners might be interested in?

Michael Weisberg [00:26:34] Well, like you, John, I have young children, so a lot of my book reading is about llamas, Dragons Love Tacos is a favorite.

John Gans [00:26:42] Oh, that's cool.

Michael Weisberg [00:26:43] Dragons Love Tacos is an excellent book, highly recommended. But when in the time that I have a little adult reading, I must say that These Truths, Jill Lepore's history of the U.S., trying to have a fully integrated history is really, really interesting. And I think that to try to understand our country, and frankly to understand why are we not dealing with a climate emergency is an interesting book. And I also will say that because I'm usually reading about Dragons Love Tacos or llamas, and when I have my escape time on an airplane to read and everything, fairly trashy things like John Le Carre.

John Gans [00:27:19] Nothing trashy about John Le Carre. Greatest English writer of the twentieth century.

Michael Weisberg [00:27:24] That's one kind of trash. So actually, George Smiley, not a real person. Would love to meet George Smiley. So if you can arrange George Smiley for a podcast.

John Gans [00:27:32] Speaking of circuses, that sounds pretty good.

Michael Weisberg [00:27:35] Life is actually a serious amateur circus performer, but not that kind of circus.

John Gans [00:27:40] Really, what is her [troupe]?

Michael Weisberg [00:27:42] The Tangled Circus Arts, it's an all women's circus troupe.

John Gans [00:27:45] And so what is her specialty?

Michael Weisberg [00:27:46] She does silks and trapeze.

John Gans [00:27:49] Alright, I guess cheaper than lion taming.

Michael Weisberg [00:27:51] Yeah, that would be hard lion taming, especially in Philadelphia. The large veterinary hospitals at the edge of campus.

John Gans [00:27:58] That sounds good. So do you know of any individual in the United States or elsewhere, other than your wife, who has done something interesting or deserving praise or imitation? Somebody we should be celebrating, that we don't know.

Michael Weisberg [00:28:10] In the global policy space?

John Gans [00:28:12] Anywhere, I mean, it could be somebody who isn't.

Michael Weisberg [00:28:15] So many people. I mean, I think personally that the young climate activists are our only hope on the mitigation side so that the Time person of the year, Greta, is quite an amazing thing to me.

John Gans [00:28:28] You're not the first person who's mentioned her on The Global Cable.

Michael Weisberg [00:28:30] Yeah, well that's wonderful, because the idea that the present United States finds a 16 year old girl threatening is is pretty shocking. But so, yeah, I think that what's what interests me about not just Greta, but kind of the youth climate movement is that I guess I went to college in the mid to late 90s, and I went to graduate school in the early 2000s. And that would say it was not a time of great political activism. It was the sort of, you know, the kind of Clinton Blair time where the world order seemed very settled and people kind of went about their business. And I remember when I first came to Penn, for example, there was just there was just no student political involvement at all. And it was seen to be kind of radical to be like a Clinton supporter, like that was like that was the full expression of being a leftist.

John Gans [00:29:19] And or not being, I guess, being against triangulation. 

Michael Weisberg [00:29:23] Yeah, that wasn't even on the radar. But now to see, I mean, I have colleagues who, you know, they don't like this tactic or that tactic, but I'm just like, I'm so thrilled to actually see students care to really want to actually, you know, realize that their future is being negotiated and squandered. So I just think that that's really great.

John Gans [00:29:50] Well it's like what you talked about with philosophy. It's sort of you know, it's the moment when it's very clear the big questions haven't been answered. And I think there are parts of history when it feels like they have in their parts of history, when it feels like they're having in this day and age, it's clearer than ever.

Michael Weisberg [00:30:03] No, that's for sure. I think it will be very interesting to understand how. I mean,you know, you would know more about this than I would, but I'm really interested, are all these kind of rightward populist lurches around the world. Is this part of something or is it just a bunch of unlucky things? Is this just, you know, some combination of bad candidates and social media being manipulated or is there really this new kind of rumbling rise of a kind of fascist thing?

John Gans [00:30:36] I mean, I think we've talked a little bit about that. We haven't quite gotten into that quite yet. One of our guests in the spring will get into the sort of populism, those sorts things. I think that there's a totally wild things happening on both sides of the political spectrum. In part because these questions aren't being answered and in part because the leaders who are standing there, if anything else is clear, don't have the answers. And I think that that's leading to people to try new people, try new ideas and try new tactics. And some of them are working and some of them aren't. And, you know, that's a constant force. And I think there's been moments where we've seen lurches right. And there's worrying and there's been moments when there's lurches left. And those are maybe more heartening. I think, you know, 2018 was, in the United States was a big push on the other side. So I think that we tend to forget the progress made and focus on the progress lost. But that's just my hunch.

Michael Weisberg [00:31:32] So when you think about climate, though, and you realize that the progress lost is locked in for many generations, that's hard. It's interesting, one of the things I was involved in at COP was discussions around how to give local and indigenous people greater voices in these discussions because one really amazing statistic is that 80 percent of the remaining biodiversity on the planet is on lands controlled by indigenous groups. And so there's all kinds of reasons that that's true, but presumably one of the reasons is that these groups have a certain respect for the places that they live that have not always been shown by the colonial powers.

[00:32:11] And so one of the things a lot of times gets discussed is we need to integrate into indigenous knowledge and I think that's a really interesting discussion. And I think indigenous expertise on land management, biodiversity management is a very important part of this discussion. But I think the most important thing is that there's a value system that the indigenous leaders that I've spoken to really want to like promote. And that's a as one of them said to me, the chief of the United Tribes of Michigan, he said, "it's because we plan for seven generations."

[00:32:43] So when you're asking political processes that are thinking about the next election to talk about something like climate change, which is a you know, we're talking about hundreds of years, how we're gonna kind of lurch in disaster slowly, that's really, really hard for the political process to deal with. And so if this idea that they want to talk about thinking for seven generations and not just for the next election, they said they don't even like the U.N. emphasizing 2030 or 2050. They want to think seven generations. That seems to be what we need more of. But I don't know if anyone's ever figured out how to create a political system that's compatible, that kind of thinking. The Roman Empire even didn't know.

John Gans [00:33:24] No, I mean, Thomas Jefferson. He thought that every generation deserved its own revolution every 20 years. He had at one point he proposed getting rid of every law after every 20 years and rebooting them based on actuarial tables for how long people lived.

Michael Weisberg [00:33:37] Did he actually say that?

John Gans [00:33:39] He wrote it in a letter to James Madison.

Michael Weisberg [00:33:41] Cool.

John Gans [00:33:41] And James Madison did what all friends do when you get a crazy email from a friend. He just kind of ignored it. And hoped that nobody remembered that idea.

Michael Weisberg [00:33:49] I'm sure you're a fan of The Rock. And, of course, the Sean Connery character.

John Gans [00:33:53] Dwayne Johnson or the movie about Alcatraz?

Michael Weisberg [00:33:55] The movie about Alcatraz.

John Gans [00:33:56] Sure.

Michael Weisberg [00:33:57] The Sean Connery character quoted something from Madison, "the Tree of Liberty needs to be refreshed every now and then." Of course, that was a revolution.

John Gans [00:34:09] I know it's heresy in the Franklin Few to talk about another founding father. But, you know, that's where we are.

Michael Weisberg [00:34:14] Well, so long as we can keep, you know, the Bostonians out, we're OK. I think Jefferson is safe here.

John Gans [00:34:22] So the last thing I think we'll ask you, which I think I know the answer to, is can you think of anything in particular right now which Penn and Penn students can be of service to the country in the world?

Michael Weisberg [00:34:30] Well, I think, of course, if we're gonna talk about climate or the environment. Penn students should vote and make sure all their friends vote. Honestly, as an individual person, it is by far, the most important thing that they can do in this space.

[00:34:43] But if you're specifically thinking about, you know, what are some personal actions that can be taken to actually to be environmentally friendly? There's this wonderful thing called Project Draw Down. And what they do is they rank actions that can be taken both by individuals and by governments, and the kind of costs and benefits, and they sort of ranked them as bang for your buck. And some of them are very obvious, like using L.E.D. light bulbs, but some of them are not so obvious. And among the top things are reducing food waste and plant based or nearly plant based diet. So that's another thing that people can do, is to really think about there's so much energy goes into agriculture and so much of so much of the agricultural product is inefficient and wasted. And so every individual's choices are very small contributions. But if you run a club or an organization and you can work towards reducing food waste and you can have a more plant based menu, all of these things make a big difference. So I think that studying projects like Project Draw Down and to see, are there things at the margins I could be doing? And there probably are many that are relatively costless to you that that's a big difference too. But most important thing is to vote.

John Gans [00:36:00] All right. Thank you so much. Thanks for being on The Global Cable, Michael. We look forward to keeping having you back again soon.

Michael Weisberg [00:36:05] Great pleasure. Thank you.