ASM199 Fighting Climate Change with Mary Anne Hitt

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what if there was good news on climate change that's what we're talking about this week with marianne hitt on ask [Music] [Applause] sciencemic [Music] welcome to ask science mike the weekly podcast where we believe every sincere question deserves a non-judgmental and supportive response this week i'm talking with mary and hitt about her work with the sierra club's beyond coal campaign and some actual good news about climate for once it was a really great conversation and i hope you enjoy it right after the break so let's get it started marianne hitt directs the sierra club's beyond coal campaign which has been recognized as one of the most successful environmental campaigns in history working with partners across the nation the campaign has blocked the construction of 200 proposed u.s coal plants secured retirement of over half of existing u.s coal plants and helped usher in the clean energy era she is also the co-host of the climate storytelling podcast no place like home with her friend anna jane joyner who you may recognize from a previous episode of ask science mike she lives in west virginia with her family and it was a joy for me to talk with mary ann this week i was a wonderful conversation that i think is going to leave you feeling hopeful and optimistic and maybe even joyful about the potential for us to mitigate and reverse the impacts of human activity on our climate in a topic that is so often full of justified doom and gloom it was so refreshing to talk to someone who not only has ideas of how to improve the climate but is actually doing the incredible substantive and substantial work required to limit the impacts of human activity on our climate so i hope you enjoy this conversation with mary and hit as much as i did marianne welcome to the worldwide headquarters of ask science mike my tiny little long hallway office oh but you know your listeners out there don't know all that for all they you know for all they know you're in some fast glass walled studio overlooking you know we do have a sliding glass door with a view of somehow my house has an alleyway i don't understand how that's even possible your own personal alleyway yeah getting in by the way there's like a carpeted alleyway and then i was sliding last door with another alleyway you had some traffic coming up huh you know you all are famous for that here um but you know i persevered because i'm excited to be on your show oh and also i had an uber so i didn't have to that's the only way to do this city yes what where what part of town are you coming from to get here santa monica oh i had no idea oh it's okay i'm uh i'm it's a well i'm here for some sierra club meetings and that's where we're all staying and my afternoon was free and i had a nice driver and it was fine so for those of you not in the la area which would be most of you where i am is la crescenta and santa monica that might be one of the most harrowing awful drives that are possible in this city because you probably had to come on the 10 the whole way oh here i am my inner peace is intact because i didn't have to drive that's impressive like i was already grateful that you were here and now i am i'm blown away so you're in town with sierra club yes which you're involved with professionally yes i am the director of the beyond coal campaign and for folks who aren't familiar with the sierra club it's the largest environmental organization in the country 125 plus years old and the campaign i run is the biggest campaign in the history of the sierra club and so we're we're working on transitioning the country off of coal to clean energy and that's that's my job and then i get to work with a lot of amazing people in the sierra club and i'm so encouraged that our current presidential administration i'm sure is completely on board with going oh yeah we're basically you know bffs just there skipping down the yellow brick road holding hands what is what has that been like this administration this time in history with a trying to move everybody past coal well you know what what's amazing so i have been working on coal issues uh for over 15 years and um first with an organization called appalachian voices where i was the executive director um and that then with the sierra club for the last 10 years and the really amazing thing that i have been a part of is watching this grassroots movement of people actually lead the charge to phase out coal in this country which is you know our biggest source of climate pollution biggest source of all sorts of air and water pollution that's dangerous um and so when trump came into office and said he was going to bring back coal i knew that he was going to fail because i know how decisions get made about how we make electricity i know that this grassroots momentum is on our side and the economics were on our side um and what was frustrating to me because i live in west virginia was that instead of uh being honest with people and saying look coal isn't going to come back we're moving on to clean energy we need to have an economic transition he was making these empty promises to people that it would come back and i knew those empty promises wouldn't come true but that he was using them to get people's votes and that a lot of people would hang their hopes on that and here we are you know a couple of years in and coal plants are still retiring and clean energy is still growing and he hasn't been able to bring it back and i think we've just lost this time that we could have spent you know providing a transition for people so and you also co-host a podcast with anna jane joyner another recent guest on s class mike yes my climate uh sister from another mister i'd be curious uh could we do a little backstory roll the clock back before the sierra club and before your podcast and kind of talk about what drew you to climate work and and uh and how you got to where you are today before we talk about what you're doing today yeah yeah um so i grew up in east tennessee in the smoky mountains anyone's ever been to the great smoky mountains national park it's a beautiful place and so i just grew up my dad worked for the park service so we were outside all the time and from a pretty young age i you know at that point i didn't know about climate change but i just knew that i wanted to whatever was the uh you know the crying seals of the 19 you know baby seals of the 1980s or the um you know the ozone layer of the 1990s kind of whatever was the big environmental cause of the day i was always really moved by it and um in probably the early 2000s i went to work at this organization called appalachian voices and i went there because i love appalachia because i love the mountains of appalachia i love the music i'm a musician what do you play well i play the guitar badly but i mostly sing [Laughter] my husband plays the guitar very well so and so you you you grew up in east tennessee yeah gatlinburg dolly parton went to my high school i'm surprised um our accents should be more similar than they are have you just done a really good job well it's maybe some sort of code switching some kind of appalachian code switching i'm impressed because this is me code switching [Laughter] well okay anyway sorry it's okay it's okay but um appalachian voices yep so i went to appalachian voices you know just because i wanted to help protect this place that i loved and that was where i first encountered the impacts of coal in particular and it started with mountaintop removal coal mining where they blow up entire mountains and um i had you know the sad but very unforgettable experience of flying over the coal fields and small airplanes and seeing all the mountains that were blown up and then i ended up getting to partner with google earth in the very early days of google earth and we actually did these virtual flyovers and we counted all the mountains that had been blown up by this type of mining and it was 500 mountains oh my god and you know having grown up in the smoky mountains where you know people come from all over the world to see our mountains the idea that any that a coal company had the right to actually blow up a mountain where you know people had run and their dog and played with their families and hunted and fished and whatever they'd done and it was had just wiped off the map forever i just couldn't believe that that was allowed to happen and so i got involved in in trying to stop mountaintop removal and that was sort of like this trail of breadcrumbs that led me to all these other impacts of mining coal and burning coal one of the worst i don't know if it's worse but but one of the most consequential of them is climate change right so you know coal coal in the united states burning coal for electricity has been our single biggest source of climate pollution for decades but it was it was my love of appalachia and that first understanding of mountaintop removal that sort of opened my eyes to all the other pieces of the puzzle well it's true as i understand it right that of fossil fuels cole's kind of the king of environmental destruction in a lot of ways it it definitely is i mean fracking obviously in oil and gas drilling have their own very severe impacts but you know for from coal you mine it and it pollutes the air in the water you burn it um some of the big uh health effects that we all experience heart attacks strokes asthma attacks people don't realize the single biggest source of that pollution is burning coal and power plants in nationwide um and then after you burn the coal there's this stuff called coal ash this this flowery substance that they literally have just dumped in holes in the ground behind these power plants for decades and every once in a while that catastrophically spills uh it did in tva and a kingston spill and then in north carolina in the dan river spill within the last decade but it also leaks into people's groundwater so from the cradle to the grave is just you know causes health problems pollutes the environment is the biggest contributor to climate change and obviously fracking and gas and oil also have a lot of huge impacts climate impacts and pollution impacts but coal has been the biggest uh for a long time and that's declining because of our work but it's it's it's it's not only super polluting but we have an alternative that's the other thing we don't there's better ways to make electricity so how did the sierra club get involved in a coal campaign well you know the cool thing about the sierra club is that it is a truly grassroots organization and so during the george w bush administration people started seeing these proposals in their communities for new coal-fired power plants and a coal-fired power plant is a massive you know industrial facility and so individual people were seeing these proposals pop up for new coal-fired power plants and they started you know fighting the water permit or fighting the zoning permit or trying to get their hands around stopping this thing in their backyard and the sierra club started connecting the dots and realized there were 200 of these new coal plants proposed all over the country and so started providing folks with legal resources and communications resources and so it was very much this grassroots effort that the sierra club was in a unique position to help support because we're this national grassroots organization and fast forward 10 years and those scrappy grassroots folks stopped 200 new coal-fired power plants from being built in the united states wow and if they had been built it really would have been game over for our climate because we would have had 200 brand new gigantic coal-fired power plants that would have had a 50-year plus life span and we wouldn't have had any hope of turning the corner on climate change which we still have so and it was a huge grassroots victory by regular folks okay great image like i know one thing we talk a lot about on this show is dealing with the feelings of hopelessness hopelessness and grief around climate and to take a moment and just reflect on the fact that we have had some successes and because there have been successes because of people like you organizing the work of thousands of people tens of thousands of people it is not hopeless it is dire but it's not hopeless i needed to hear that today that is the if i could just say one thing to everyone out there it is i have seen on climate david beat goliath hundreds and hundreds of times and it's not just the small individual personal lifestyle choices are not the only place that you can make a difference on climate um you know i think i think a lot of times people feel like my my pr i'm going to make my personal choices about what i eat or what i drive and then my only other kind of action i can take is is to call congress or to the or to fix the political system and that seems overwhelming so the kind of political system is pretty bad yes so they feel too big or too small the solutions and the thing about that i i wish um everyone knew about the work we've done in the beyond coal campaign is regular people have actually like in that middle zone where you're you're winning victories on the scale that matters it's happening it's happening all the time i mean it's i get to see in my job at the beyond coal campaign not just those 200 new coal plants that we stop there's 297 existing coal plants that are retired or announced to retire in just the last decade most of them because of this kind of grassroots determination and so there is just there are so many good things happening so if someone's trying to build a coal plant it means there's some kind of energy demand right either they've got an older plant of some kind that's going out of phase or they have new demand or a mixture of the two i think a lot about the economics of energy um part of the problem with fossil fuels um is their immense portability and infrastructure right like if you take an engineering perspective you kind of have to think pros and cons i think a lot about like with a car it's really easy to put 50 000 calories of energy in a car in like four and a half minutes in a way that's really difficult with chemical batteries how has the renewable energy sector and the grassroots community that supports it created solutions that make other forms of energy a viable alternative to coal well that is one of the other really exciting things honestly is that um we have so in april of this year 2019 we got more electricity from renewable energy than from coal in the united states for the first time since the industrial revolution that's incredible yeah it's really incredible like things are changing really fast right now and the way that we uh have done business for decades is changing under our feet and so we it was more electricity from coal or from renewable energy then coal in april um we have several states in the country that are regularly getting you know 30 40 percent of their electricity from renewables we have i think seven states and dis and the district of columbia now that have 100 clean energy legislation that they have passed that commit the state to a path to 100 clean energy and it's for a couple of reasons it's one because renewable energy is now cheaper it's now cheaper to build a new wind or solar with storage facility than to run an existing coal plant in almost every part of this country today and so the economics are on our side and people are really worried about climate change and so the public will is on our side and when you have those two things um the you know the market sometimes responds to those things and so so we really there are things possible now that were not possible five years ago and i think five years from now we're going to be living in a very different world when it comes to how we get our energy storage seems to play a big role in that and the viability of renewables it does and that is growing very quickly there there's one example there's a utility in indiana which is a conservative state it's a coal state called nipsco northern indiana public service company they just did a huge energy study and found that they can replace both of their gigantic existing coal plants with a combination of wind solar with storage and efficiency no new fracked gas and they will save their customers over four billion dollars in indiana and so those kind of and again they didn't necessarily come to that you know on their own there was a lot of grassroots pressure that pushed them to look at the alternatives and pushed them to compare the costs with other forms of energy but yeah the you know solar with storage is is evolving really quickly and it can meet energy needs on a pretty big scale at this point and again that innovation that'll just keep accelerating so i just want to pause there so you're saying in red states you're having success getting renewable energy projects green lit and moving forward absolutely you know one of the things i think about red states and clean energy is it is uh there's a lot of self-sufficiency in renewable energy and wind and solar um there is a lot of of economic opportunity for farmers who maybe are having trouble holding onto their land but they can put up some wind turbines and then they get these lease payments that help them stay on their farms um and you know renewable energy uh renewable energy tends to be nonpartisan also you know pollution people don't like pollution they don't like water pollution they don't like air pollution and so you know climate change can be polarizing politically and it can be hard to envision how you ever like reach across the divide when you're sitting across the thanksgiving table from your uncle who is a climate skeptic um or a climate denier um but even if you can't break through to somebody ideologically usually you can talk about pollution and usually people think wind and solar are pretty cool so there still are places where we can connect i did some uh climate advocacy in dc um with william matthews he took me up there and it was a lot of fun and what what was striking to me is how some of the representatives in iowa were like all in on wind power because they saw it as like a chance to win votes from across their constituency because progressives love that it's renewable farmers love being able to lease land that they continue to raise um not crops when it's animals whatever uh use it for pasture land yeah um and uh and i was like struck by that i remember looking it up and i was already living in california at the time but iowa was using a greater percentage of renewable energy than california and it blew my mind uh because california cell style says this wildly progressive forward-thinking state but iowa had more wind power than we do yeah and the folks there are starting to feel the effects of climate change they may not all you know maybe a slower evolution but you know when you farm the same piece of land for many decades and you've you know the spring is coming at a different time every year and the rain isn't doing what it used to predictably do and you know people are starting to connect those dots that's a slower process but you know when you pay attention to the land you know the changes are here and they're happening and i think people see those too so you know i think i think you mentioned earlier um people get kind of stuck in despair about climate change and i completely understand why um because that's a very like wise response to what we're in the middle of because if the changes are here and they're happening and i also i think that um you don't want to let that over overtake you so much that you lose sight of the like the reality that people can change like people the farmers in the midwest are connecting the dots with climate change they're seeing the benefits of renewable energy um you know you there's several electric utilities that are now moving to 100 clean energy there's a bunch of states and most of the important like entry points and decision points are at the state and local level they're not federal it's not washington it's not in the white house and so it's easy to get overcome by despair but there's just so much opportunity there's so much opportunity there's so many decisions wherever everybody lives there are decisions being made right now at the state level at the city level that are of great consequence to our climate um and i think we also um we still have the chance to change hearts and minds too i mean sitting here this conversation is um i hope people listening or feeling the same sense of um relief and renewed optimism i am that i am in this like very moment um you said something earlier about how people focus on making personal changes and contacting congress you just described me a hundred percent what what i do personally um i mean if you look at around our home there's not an incandescent bulb anywhere there's uh i work from home so i we can't turn our thermostat way up during the day but i walk around the house as the sun moves and clothes whichever blinds are facing the sun and we use fans and we grow our own vegetables and and we're doing all these things our car is electric um and i contact congress all the time about climate but that is a hundred percent of the imagination i have in terms of what actions i can take and i because of that when i talk to people on this podcast that's what they hear me talk about personal actions and government outreach what are some of those other possibilities for moving the levers around decisions especially as you say at the state level and with local governments well i can just use la as an example so when i started working at the sierra club um la was i forget la was getting maybe half of its electricity from coal maybe 40 percent which for but people who don't live here is a terrible idea because a quirk of the atmosphere means anything released in the air here stays around us basically in a soup bowl yeah and thickens and bringing it in by the wires from other states and so at that time mayor villarreal so we ran this big campaign and this is this is the key thing here this is just an example but the key thing is decisions are being made all the time at the city level and the state level that i believe that's what's going to make or break our climate even more so than you know whether or not we can ever get our act together in washington like in this in this decade that matters so la we ran this big campaign to get la to commit to move beyond coal it was a grassroots campaign lots of pressure la owns its own electric utility la department of water and power so that electric utility makes hugely consequential decisions and they are you know subject to the will of the people of the city so la first made the decision to move off of coal and they instructed the electric utility to hey figure out how to how to extract the city out of these contracts we have with these coal plants so that process happened again there was many like public hearings along the way and um letters to the editor along the way and lots of opportunities for regular people to have their voices heard long story short la has now extracted itself from all of the coal plants that were once powering the city and under the leadership of now mayor garcetti they are also they were just on the verge of reinvesting in these three very big fracked gas plants and he just made the decision again thanks to lots of pressure lots of grassroots pressure to not invest i think it was it's many billions of dollars in sort of giving a second life to these fracked gas plants and instead is going to invest all that money in renewable energy and he now is coming under a lot of political pressure for that from the folks who were invested in the gas plants and the gas industry so that's just one specific example where all along the way these are hugely significant climate decisions they're being made at the city level and it took grassroots folks being involved and showing up at hearings and writing letters etc to give the cover to the politicians to do the right thing and then when they do the right thing to kind of have their back and wherever your listeners live there are decisions like that being made because we make decisions about how we produce electricity in states and cities not in washington dc and the president can try to sway those or sort of stack the deck in terms of fossil fuels which is what the you know president trump is trying to do but the rubber hits the road in states and cities and i think that people don't really realize that and it's either and that's part of the job of groups like the sierra club is to kind of demystify that process and open it up to people so it isn't this wall of acronyms and this wall of good like like inscrutable government bureaucracies but we just kind of open the door and and explain what's happening and invite people into to make their voices heard you know i think about that a lot um the data i've seen tells me that most people care most people like a significant majority of people care about the environment about pollution it gets a little more polarized if you talk climate change but still a majority of people want to take action that benefits the environment and most people live paycheck to paycheck and they're busy and they're tired and it's overwhelming yeah and when you've spent all day you know maybe getting yelled at by your boss or trying to hit your sales numbers or in a challenging retail environment your feet are tired you come home and even if you care it feels like it feels like having to do homework at school to figure out how to protect the planet we live on you know i'm really lucky i'm a full-time author podcaster so all of you wonderful people listening right now make sure that i can read books all day and and and educate myself on these issues but i actually have a tremendous empathy for people feeling overwhelmed by all the acronyms and all the points of contact and all the potential organizations and um and wanting to make sure first that they do no harm for people who care and are busy and overwhelmed what are some some steps you'd recommend in finding ways to get involved at their local level well you know i love that you said that because um i think you know as somebody who wakes up every day thinking about climate change and i have the privilege to work on it um there are other issues that i care a lot about that i feel that way about whether it's you know kids at the border or gun violence or i think oh my gosh i so want to help and i'm so tired at the end of the day and it's not my job to know the solutions to gun violence but i look to the organizations who that is their job or you know whatever the issue might be that sort of touches my heart that i'm not an expert in um because i understand especially i think i think climate change can feel especially daunting to people because of the science because the they they think i can only be involved here if i once i am an expert in the science and i think that that's one of the big myths about this issue that you have to wait to understand all the science or be an expert to get involved um when in reality it's the pieces of it are pretty simple and um and just as i would turn to some other organization on these other issues i care about that's what the role is i hope of groups like the sierra club to say you know what if you only have if you can only do one thing this week and you're tired of calling your congress person here's someone local that you could call that is going to make a big decision who doesn't get 10 000 calls uh you know a day but maybe just gets a dozen you know or here's the one hearing that you could go to in the next six months that really is going to matter and so i think part of it is to look to the organizations are doing that work for you uh and to find the one and again if they're you know you can always come to the sierra club but there are others um and then i also think um to uh also not not think you have to be an expert as a barrier to entry and not think you have to do all the things you know but just what's the one next thing you know what's that one next thing that you might do you know i um that has actually been my approach and like i said i have my full-time job is to just imagine what anybody's interested in hearing about what they and climate change they tell me all the time the borders something they tell me about gun violence is something they tell me about but ultimately my approach is to find credible grassroots invitations and like budget around that so i don't go out to eat very much but i spend what a lot of people spend on restaurant food supporting grassroots organizations financially and signing up for their action lists and so when i get a text or an email from an organization i trust i call the number they tell me to call and i say what they tell me to say and uh what's great about that approach is um somebody is paying attention somebody is doing the work you know i've done some done some grass level whatever they tell me to do work with a latinx-led organization on actions related to the border and um i not only think i'm making a difference i'm letting the people lead who should lead uh and and and reinforcing and amplifying what they do and i so appreciate your sensitivity um to say the sierra club and other organizations but you're here and you know a lot about the sierra club how can people listening right now get involved in the work that you're doing well there's a couple of main ways one is the you know the sort of the um the internet activist thing you know you can sign up for our email list on our website and you'll get contacted about things you care about one difference of the sierra club uh is that we have chapters and groups in every every state and most big cities in the country and some smaller cities so there are actually like regular meetings that you can go to if you want to um the sierra club is the only national environmental organization that is democratically run by its members so our national board is voted on by the members um every state has a chapter and the leaders of that chapter are elected by the members and so it's a you know it's kind of a the civic organization in the tradition of the naacp or some of these other hundred-year-old civic organizations in the country and you know i know like millennials and like you know the gen z's like probably don't go to sit around meetings you know in the church basement necessarily with the you know all the retirees who have more time to sit around in meetings in the church basement so you know i know that right going to those kind of meetings is not everybody's cup of tea but they exist and they exist in most cities and and in most states with the sierra club and even if you don't go to those meetings if you become a member of the sierra club you get those chapter newsletters of those people who do have the time to sit in the church basement and make a newsletter and so though you know you will find out in your state sort of what are the hot issues and what are the opportunities for you to weigh in at this again it's the sort of in between level of your personal choices and what's happening in washington like in your state you'll you'll have plenty of options to choose from and you know the other thing i think that i would also recommend is looking into are there environmental justice or climate justice organizations in your area because the sierra club is a big national you know organization and some of the most powerful and effective work happening out there right now that i most admire is environmental justice organizations climate justice organizations most of those are small and local and they often run on a shoestring and they can you know get a 50 donation or 100 donation goes a very long way with some of these local groups and they also exist in in most places if you want to at least support them financially and if someone would define them do they like google local climate justice organizations yeah yes probably so right yeah yeah and uh and i just um the the leadership from those groups right now is i mean i think we've all we've all seen it we've seen whether it's the climate marches or standing rock or um the you know even what greta tunberg is doing out there with getting the young people on strike these leader leadership coming from all these inspiring new places that is really moving the needle in a really long overdue way i think that's the other thing that's changing right now like the electric sector is changing really fast public sentiment feels like it's changing really fast to me like we didn't have millions of people in the streets five years ago you know yeah and uh we didn't have um we didn't have kids you know standing up and commanding the attention of the world the way that we do now and providing this moral authority and this clarity that i think we've been missing you know when i was in high school i was an environmentalist that probably wouldn't shock anyone listening um but when i would say we're going to make this change in our house you know i could get shut down too i've noticed with my kids they're they won't get shut down um it won't take no for an answer it won't take no for an answer you know like uh we've always loved uh my kids love sushi and they learned about overfishing and just one day i was like hey do you want to get sushi like that we don't eat sushi you shouldn't eat sushi like i knew that so i tried to do it sparingly but the fact that they said we don't and won't ever and like have stuck to it um my my oldest daughter participated in the uh global youth climate strike and was like really adamant about it good for her and uh and that's not me like people i do a lot of advocacy so people might assume that like i'm telling that they're they're coming up with this on their own they're organizing on their own they're making connections on their own they're getting involved in student-led climate organizations at their school on their own and um i think millennials and gen z might not sit in church basements but they they're getting a lot done absolutely and and they're talking to their parents yeah and and when i if i think if there's if there's anything that i think could sort of crack open the heart of you know are not not the harsh just climate skeptics but the sort of people who are sort of on the fence and aren't sure what all the fuss is about like i think it's their own kids you know i think that i think that that's the the in addition to the sort of iconic leaders like greta tunberg um i think just as powerful is what are those conversations happening you know over thanksgiving dinner with just kids with their own parents who are like your kids not taking no for an answer and they won't yeah and that excites me that really excites me um i'll try to find for people listening uh some easy front doors into finding uh local climate chapters and we'll put that in the show notes of this week's show um i'm writing that down greg you can leave this and greg produces the show thanks greg um it doesn't make good radio but i sometimes get concerned that podcasts become the auditory version of photoshop where people think i'm more eloquent than i am because i'm edited so i try to avoid editing this podcast as much as i can so people realize i have to stop and think too yeah um yeah because i think i think that's a good point you know i was involved in um the la power plant move uh and it's because an organizer reached out to me i guess they found me on twitter or whatever and said they asked me a tweet they said can you call the mayor's office and say this absolutely i'd love to and it was some group i'd never heard of uh and i would imagine that they were on the kind of shoestring budget you talk about it was just people who cared taking time out of their life to make this city better um and that you know i i love and hate about climate energy the way it challenges our assumptions where you talk to someone in iowa and you figure out how much clean energy they have and then you figure out that la which is ostensibly one of the most aggressive cities in the country well you know until recently was using all this coal power and because of the architecture geographically of where we live it doesn't matter where a particle is emitted on the planet it will end up here stuck in our bowl and so it's a remarkably self-destructive thing to ever think well just because we're it's coming over the wire from another part of the state at least for us china's coal plants and india's coal plants are in the air right here in los angeles uh and creating that lovely smog that we struggle with sometimes um i think that's what encourages me not only about climate but about coal in particular and moving beyond it is the way that um things only get better when local actions aggregate globally [Music] our atmosphere is designed not designed but does rapidly transport anything anywhere in the earth's surface everywhere else we have all these jet streams that do an amazing job of making sure we all share pollution yeah um and that's why it doesn't matter whether we're what our our political persuasion is the things we put in the air everybody breathes yeah and i think when people i know with specific coal plants that we've worked on you know a lot of times they would be in a community and people would not know what they were it was just some sort of an industrial facility over there on the edge of town or in a low-income community or a community of color and even the people living next to it didn't know what it was and then when they connected the dots between that coal plant and their kids asthma they woke up you know because if there's nothing as motivating as your kid not being able to breathe and got involved and that's the story behind a lot of these 297 coal plants that are retired or announced to retire as someone who connected the dots between the asthma and their community in a coal plant and you know i think that that again that's one of those things that it even if someone is doesn't understand climate change or is on the fence about it it motivates people to move to clean energy but that doesn't mean we should therefore just not talk about climate change i mean i think that there's also the temptation to just talk about the public health issues and climate change is too polarizing and so keep it over there and i think we have to do both you know because i think the way that for me mountaintop removal was the sort of stepping stone to this bigger picture that we are all breathing the same air i think that's part of part of how that have the advocacy needs to work it's like the the the thing about the thing that i think is really encouraging is like what you do here in la it matters to the global sort of environmental picture and if we can tell the story of sort of rolling it up of what you did here in l.a and all these other cities resulted in over half the coal plants in the united states are now announced to retire it's not yes it was this one here but when you add that up with a lot of other what's happening all around the country i think then people realize oh we can make a difference on the scale that matters in the time that matters and that's that is the thing that i i just so wish people would take away is we can still make a difference on the scale that matters in the time that matters and the things that are happening in your state and your city aren't just isolated here they are connected and you know maybe we need to do a better story of painting that bigger picture of how those things all add up because they really are adding up they're adding up to in april we got more electricity from renewable energy than coal and and that was because of all these people in all these cities and all these states doing what they were doing and uh and it's it yes we're still gonna have a changed climate and there's a lot of very scary things that are at this point i think um we can't stop from happening but this decade we can make it a lot better we still have chance to make it a lot better yeah change is happening yeah good things are being done and people listening can be involved in that there is not hope and we people are already acting together yeah and you can get involved and when you feel that like despair about climate change that everyone feels i think that is a healthy emotional response to it and then it's like that's coming from a place of love you know and it's sort of the love we have for our kids and our world and the fear of losing that and channeling that despair which is really love into these really important decisions that you actually can influence um i think is like all of us doing that together is what gives me hope is there anything else you'd like to say that i didn't think to ask you about hmm let me think you know i guess i think that one other thing we didn't touch on that i think about a lot is um uh the the sort of the i guess and anna jane and i are working on our next season of our podcast and we're going to talk about this a bunch um or explore it i should say as i think as we are doing this advocacy for the world and it's um the the you know the people that i look up to and admire most the martin luther kings and the gandhi's of the world they had a spiritual foundation for their activism and i think climate in particular is like highly sort of secular and highly cerebral and intellectual and i think i think that that might be another reason uh that people out there sort of find it intimidating as it feels sort of technical and impersonal and there is also like a deep sort of spiritual and um i guess uh a spiritual and personal and sort of moral part of this that i just don't feel like we do a very good job of talking about that i think is probably part of what motivates a lot of your listeners and uh you know just i guess say you don't have to you don't have to come at this always from the brain of an engineer you can come of it come to it from the you know from the mindset of an artist or a mystic or a poet as well like we need those we need those um forces to be harnessed for this cause just as much as we need the the solar engineers and the you know policy wonks thank you for saying that mm-hmm there's it mystifies me but there's a great number of artists who listen to this show [Music] i'm always struck by that when i travel around and do events is how many people in the arts are listening to a program called ask science mike which means they're very generous and patient people um and the fact that everybody has a role to play um that's a good reminder yeah because you know art is what moves people to act often more so than intellect you know art or poetry or um some sort of a personal experience that you know that usually does not come from an equation equations are beautiful yeah you know i kind of view part a huge part of my work is science education and advocacy yeah um and i've often had scientists whose work i've shared asked me how i was able to get people to care about and i was like well have you ever tried crying or laughing as you describe it can you find a way to connect your insight to like a time that you felt joy or sadness yeah and um you know i kind of have an engineer's brain but i very much have a storyteller's heart and um there's a little picture on my wall over here and that is an artist who heard my story about my brain injury and made a piece of art about it and that is the story of my motorcycle accident and recovery and uh on a day that i'm feeling slow or brain foggy or days when you know my symptoms are worse i look at that picture and i feel so seen and so known in a way that an mri really could never do even though it might be more technically accurate as a picture of my brain that sure what it feels like on a tough day um we love you artists thank you where can people uh follow you online my twitter and instagram are at mariannehit and then our podcast with my beloved friend anna jane is no place like homepodcast.com great thank you for coming up today oh my gosh it was a pleasure thank you for having me [Music] ask science make is made possible by the generous support of my patrons on patreon and i've seen a lot of donations the last couple of weeks with my redone patreon page so i want to thank the patrons who not only fund the show but also select the guests and the topics and the questions and everything that we do on this program if you'd like to join them just go to asksciencemike.com and click the button that says become a patron or the one that says support this show in the menu i'd like to thank greg nordin for his work in production and sound design of the program caitlin hermstad for being the show's producer and brett cradle for management services andrew golucky provides pre-production and i'm your host mike mccarg thanks for listening everyone and i can't wait to talk with you next week