Regina de Heer: Since you deeply care about climate change, what do you value? What part of your value system makes you care deeply about the issue?

Bill: The world of the future may be very different from the world I grew up in and not in a good way.

Kris: I believed in the interdependence of all beings.

Joshua: I've always really been in tune with mountains and nature and really liked forests liked to go hiking.

Bill: In Buddhism, the teaching of interdependence and interconnectedness really comes to bear both our connections with all other people, then also with people in the future, and people in the past.

Rev. Dr. David: From our Christian perspective, love of neighbor, and that we are interconnected, and that we live in fidelity to God and in faithfulness to our neighbors. By doing those things for the common good.

Suzanne: I value what our children are growing in their hearts.

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Kai Wright: It's Notes From America, I'm Kai Wright, and welcome to the show. Here's one thing that's got me twisted up about the midterm elections. Sometimes it feels like we're not even having the right debate, regardless of who wins the argument. I mean, it's great and all that there was this clear rejection of election deniers and Christian nationalists and the like but boy, does that feel like a low bar.

There are many really time-sensitive challenges that sit well past that basic level and climate change is probably at the tippy top of that list. Now, of course, just days after the election, President Biden was in Egypt at the Global Climate Summit, touting investments and making promises. Those promises are nowhere near enough and in particular, they are barely meaningful when it comes to the question of how rich nations like ours are going to pay for the climate destruction already ravaging poor countries.

By all accounts, there was a global sigh of relief at that summit when the midterm elections here ticked in. Hey, the youth vote came strong this year powered in no small part by their concern over the climate. Maybe all of that is reason for hope but I have been wringing my hands. That's made me think about a conversation I had this summer with climate scientist, Katharine Hayhoe, She's the Chief Scientist at The Nature Conservancy, a professor at Texas Tech University, and author of the best-selling book, Saving Us: A Climate Scientists Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World.

She says that we all need to spend less time wringing our hands and more time just talking about climate change. That is what we are doing this week, we're going to revisit my conversation with Katharine Hayhoe. We spoke just before Congress passed President Biden's rebranded Inflation Reduction Act, which of course included new money for clean energy investments, among other measures that are meant to combat climate change. Professor, thanks for coming on.

Katharine Hayhoe: Thank you for having me.

Kai Wright: Before we get into the book, and essentially the therapy session I'm going to ask you for tonight. What's your reaction to the news out of Washington? How would you characterize the bill that Democrats hope to pass this week?

Katharine Hayhoe: It's an enormous step forward to reducing our carbon emissions and investing in a clean energy economy but at the same time, first of all, you can't count your [laughs] chickens until their hatch so to speak and second of all, we still need more. It's no surprise that people feel concerned, worried, anxious, panicked, overwhelmed. That is a rational and logical response to what we're seeing today.

Kai Wright: You say, if we want to contribute a solution, those of us who are anxious and overwhelmed and concerned and all of that, one thing we can do is talk about it. We're going to get into the techniques you offer for doing that but I just want to start with the why on that. Why is talking about it the thing?

Katharine Hayhoe: It's the first thing, obviously, if all we did was talking then that wouldn't fix the problem but how do humans do anything together through communication? What happened was when I first started talking to people about why climate change matters, and why we need to do something about it, the natural question people would have is okay, what should I do?

I said, measure your carbon footprint, eat more plants, look at how you travel, all of those traditional things that we should do and are all good to do. Don't get me wrong but then I did the math, and I realized that if everybody who was worried did everything that they could to reduce their personal carbon footprint in this society. That wouldn't even fix a quarter of the problem.

No wonder, we feel like I've tried hard and I just can't make a debt. Then I started to look at how things have changed in the past and this ties directly into the themes that you look at in your podcast. How has social change occurred in the past? Most times, it was not because a president or a CEO or a big, rich, wealthy, famous person woke up one morning and said, the world has to change.

Women have to get the votes, civil liberties have to be enacted, gay marriage has to be possible. It was because individuals have no particular power or wealth or fame, use that one thing we all have, which is their voice to advocate for that change. Talk about what we need to do and how we can do it and that is the first step to the societal change we need to fix climate change, too.

Kai Wright: When we're talking about, you got to talk about it. It's not sitting in your living room and wringing your hands. It's, be an advocate. That's what you mean by talking about that.

Katharine Hayhoe: Exactly. I think of talking about as having two sides to the coin. The first side is we have to understand the risk of inaction but it's not about the polar bears in the ice sheets unless you are a polar bear who lives on the ice sheets.

Kai Wright: They know very much about those things for you.

Katharine Hayhoe: Yes, I know, they're frequent listeners and listeners to your program but other than that, it's about how it matters to us. I talked to people where I live in Texas about how it's affecting us in Texas, or how it's affecting wildfires in California, or terrible flood risks in Kentucky or Missouri like we've seen this past week. How it might affect you if you're a parent and you care about your kids. If you love tennis or outdoor activities?

If you're a gardener, if you're a foodie, if you like beach vacations, if you're a person of faith, if you're a business person if you value national security. Begin where we already care, connect the dots to how climate change is affecting us. That's the first half but then the other half is the rewards of action.

What can we do individually? What can we do together as an organization, a corporation of school, a group of people? Everybody walks their dog together, our family, our church? What could we do together to make a difference? Those two things together are what we need to move forward.

Kai Wright: Values, values are really important to you. Why we care about these things? We have to start there. What about you? What is the value that drove you to care about climate change in the first place?

Katharine Hayhoe: It's not just one value, it's almost every value I have and what I realized is, I don't have to make everyone care about climate change, for the same reasons I do, I just have to try to figure out what reasons they already have to care and connect the dots. I recommend doing an inventory and I'll just do a sample of mine that I'm going to ask you for a couple of yours too.

First of all, I am a mother, and I want a better world for my child. I know that if we don't fix climate change, he won't have it. I'm a Canadian, and I live in Texas I see how climate change is affecting both my home and the place, I live on a daily basis. Affecting the health and the welfare of the people who live there, as well as all the other living things. I love skiing and to ski, you need snow. Snow is going one way fast because it's getting warmer.

I am a Christian and I truly believe and this is common not just to Christianity, but to almost every major world religion in the world, that we are to be good stewards of this amazing planet we live on and we are to love our sisters and our brothers and care for their needs. Today, climate change is affecting most vulnerable people among us. The people who are already marginalized people who already do not have a voice, they are the ones who are most affected by climate change. For me, that was the bottom line that made me decide to become a climate scientist realizing how completely unfair and unjust climate change is.

Kai Wright: Just to dwell on the faith question for a moment, because it really is sadly in the political conversation, counterintuitive. We don't hear at least in the headlines, we don't hear evangelical Christians or we don't see people who identify as Christian saying, "Hey, my faith is what drives me to care about the climate in the way that you are doing." I gather for you that goes all the way back to being a little kid in Colombia. I believe it was, can you take us back to those early days?

Katharine Hayhoe: We moved down to Colombia and South America and not British Columbia. When I was nine years old, and growing up down there as a child made me see firsthand and then later understand as an adult, just how vulnerable people are to natural disasters like floods and droughts and storms and heat waves and more when they don't have all the resources that we just take for granted here. Like air conditioning, insurance, the National Guard, flood warnings, all of those things that we just take for granted, even though we still have disasters here today.

A lot of countries and places don't have those and how does that tie into climate change? Climate change is taking these previously natural events and supersizing them, making them bigger, stronger, more dangerous, and more damaging. Once again, not just on the other side of the world, but right here in the US, the people who are the most vulnerable, the people who live in the low-income neighborhoods, the Black and the brown neighborhoods, those are the people who are often most affected, and who are most at risk and find the most difficulty and have the least health and recovering from these increasingly dangerous disasters that are fueled by climate change.

Kai Wright: In facing that stuff, you said we need rational hope. That's the phrase I've heard you use is rational hope. In the context of right now and maybe in the context of this bill that's coming from Congress, what is rational hope?

Katharine Hayhoe: That is a really important question and I'm so glad you asked. Because these days, I see just as much despair and doomerism as I see denial. Denial is, "Oh, it's not real, it doesn't matter we don't need to do anything about it." Denial results in inaction and inaction will doom us but doomerism says, "There's nothing we can do, it's too late." "It's over, the goose is cooked."

That also leads to inaction and that will also doom us. When I say our actions can make a difference, people reply, like the man on Twitter just earlier today, "Hopium." [laughs] You're giving a drug to the masses when there is really nothing that you can do. [laughs]

Kai Wright: Changing open stuff.

Katharine Hayhoe: Exactly but the reality is, I'm a scientist and I look at the future. That's what I do, I look at what the future will look like in the places where we live depending on the choices you make today, in the near future. I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt, based on my own work, that there is a night and day difference between the future where we transition to clean energy, and we in ourselves off fossil fuels, versus the future where we sit on our hands and do nothing.

The future is literally in our hands but we have to realize that hope is not the guarantee of a better future. Hope is not "Oh, everything will be okay, I'll just fold my hands and wait and somebody will fix it for me." That's not hope. Rational hope begins by saying, "It's bad," and it could get worse but there's a small chance that it could get better if we do everything we can and that's what I'm fighting for. That's what I call rational hope.

Kai Wright: You're listening to a conversation I had earlier this year with climate scientist, Katharine Hayhoe. Her book is called Saving Us: A Climate Scientist's Case For Hope and Healing In A Divided World. We're not taking your calls this week but, of course, you can still talk to us just go to notesfromamerica.org and look for the record button. You can leave us a voice note right there. We'll have more with Professor Hayhoe after a break. Stay with us.

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Couchette: Hey, everyone. This is Kousha. I'm a producer. Over the next couple of weeks, we're going to do an episode that personally has me really excited. We're going to talk about a movie that just came out. It's Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. Specifically, we want to talk about grief. As many of you know, this movie was made in the wake of Chadwick Boseman's tragic passing.

If like me, you've seen the movie, you'll know that it wrestles with grief and invites us to wrestle with it too. We want to explore that in our upcoming show and as always, we want you to be a part of the conversation. If you've already seen the movie, here's what we'd like to know. What was your reaction to the movie? Did grief play a role for you in watching the movie and how did it show up?

Now, it could be that something came up from your own past or your own reaction to how grief took a central role in the story, or that maybe it didn't really play a role for you at all. Let us know by sending us a voice message. You can visit our website and record your voice there. The address is notesfromamerica.org. Just scroll down the page a little and click on the green button that says record now or you can always email us the address is notes@wnyc.org. Really hope to hear from you. Thanks for listening. Talk to you soon.

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Kris: I'm a Unitarian Universalist.

Joshua: Intern Pastor at Rock Springs Church of Christ.

Bill: I'm a Buddhist.

Suzanne: A Naturalist.

Rev. Dr. David: Pastor in the Lutheran church.

Regina: Have you changed your life in any way due to climate change?

Andrea: I ran for office in 2007 and I was a climate champ, one of the earliest in office and we created the first county-wide energy strategy in the country.

Eric: I retired so that I can spend full time working on climate change.

Kris: I've done composting for years, my house is heated with a heat pump. I have an EV, I've solar panels on the roof.

John: I have 437 acres out in West Virginia. I'm getting old so rather than trying to sell it, I donated it to two local land Trust

Joshua: I've been really focusing my ministry on climate justice and trying to move things into that lens.

Kris: I bring up the climate catastrophe every day, everywhere I go.

Bill: It's going to take not just the head, but the heart to address climate change.

Eric: Joining with others in your faith community to act on the biggest moral challenge of leading civilization.

Bill: We have members from over 15 local congregations, it's been helpful both as a space to take action and also provide a space to process our feelings and bring other people into the conversation.

John: Most of us, I think here are at least reasonably well off, and can contend with this crisis much more than the people and poverty or places that they can't move. We owe it to our fellow human beings to show the love towards them, as well as everybody else, that this is a crisis and we will not survive as a people without working together on this.

Kai Wright: Its Notes from America. I'm Kai Wright. Those were voices from a listening session we held with the Faith Alliance For Climate Solutions, which is an interfaith climate advocacy organization based in Northern Virginia. This week, we are revisiting a conversation I had this summer with climate scientist, Katharine Hayhoe.

She's the Chief Scientist at The Nature Conservancy and author of the book Saving Us: A Climate Scientist's Case For Hope and Healing In A Divided World. She is an evangelical Christian, who has spent a lot of time busting myths about what the Bible does and does not say about our role and our responsibility in caring for the planet. I put some questions to her from our listening session.

Here's the rest of our conversation. Professor Hayhoe, here's a question we got from one of the people in our listening session with the Faith Alliance earlier this week. Here's Joe from that group.

Joe: I would like to ask, from the perspective or her experience, what are the best arguments she thinks that we could bring to the non-believers, not to get convinced, because there is a sector of the population that you are not going to change. Not to bring them to come on board, but at a minimum, not to destroy the work that is being done. What arguments we can have because we cannot move without acknowledging the existence of all these negative polarizing forces that are in society nowadays? Thank you.

Kai Wright: What do you say to Joe?

Katharine Hayhoe: I want to highlight a point that Joe made, which was really important. That is that the people who are truly dismissive, who would dismiss, my definition of dismissive is literally if an angel from God with tablets of stones and global warming is real appeared before them, they would dismiss him. They dismiss 200 years of climate science, 2000, climate scientists, two million climate science studies, those are the submissives, they are only about 8% of the population.

Now, many of us know one or two dismissive so they've gotten the sense that they're everywhere and on social media, they're very common. They're only 8% and we don't need that 8% to move forward but what we do need is the politicians who are stopping that action, not just at the federal level, but at the state level, and at city level, and even below that. We need those people to move. Often they might sound dismissive, but internally, they're not actually dismissive. They just don't know what to do, that would be compatible and consistent with their values and without their voters.

Kai Wright: At the same time, I have to say it's that 8%, this is actually part of what is so maddening is that there's an 8%. They're very loud in social media, but they're very well represented in media often, but they are also overrepresented in Congress. That's what stops me emotionally often is, the knowing that it's just 8% almost makes it worse then makes me feel more powerful.

Katharine Hayhoe: It does. It's the tip of the tail wagging the dog. That's the situation. What I think is really important is, first of all, to recognize that again, using our voices as an effective way to change, using our voices to talk to elected officials but it isn't only about the federal level in fact often the change is happening last it is at the end of the parade. If we look at what's happening in cities from Washington DC to Chicago to California, if we look at what's happening in states, what about corporations?

One of the headlines I saw in the Faith community just a couple of weeks ago were 35 faith-based organizations formally divesting of fossil fuels. If we look at what's happening with universities and colleges, with tribal nations, with organizations all around the US and around the world, we can see that "Oh my gosh, that giant boulder of climate action that we feel like is stuck at the bottom of the hill with only a few hands on it. It's not moving an inch."

No, that giant boulder is actually the top of the hill. It is rolling down the hill. It has millions of hands on it and if we had ours, it will go faster, and eventually, the federal government will catch up.

Kai Wright: Let's hear from another caller, another questioner. We had in our listening session with the Faith Alliance for Climate Solutions. This is a pastor who's on the board of the Alliance, and I think it takes a little bit to something you were talking about earlier.

Speaker: We're an interfaith organization and we have found that the Christian faith communities who are involved tend to be progressive. We're having a hard time involving more conservative Christians, including evangelicals in an interfaith movement and wonder what advice you have for developing ecumenical and interfaith partnerships that include evangelical Christians.

Kai Wright: Do you have advice for that?

Katharine Hayhoe: I do. First of all, I want to highlight something really important, which is in the United States, the word evangelical means something very different than it means elsewhere around the world. The head of the World Evangelical Alliance, which represents 600 million evangelicals around the world, was an official delegate to the Paris Climate Conference.

That's how seriously global evangelicals take climate change. I'm actually the World Evangelical Alliances Climate ambassador. What happened in the US? In the US, the word evangelical is now a political term for many. In fact, a survey last year showed that 40% of the people who call themselves evangelical in the US don't even go to church. Where are they learning about things?

The church of Facebook, the Church of Fox News, the church of their social media feed. We have to realize there's a lot of people whose statement of faith is written today, primarily by their politics and their ideology, and only in a very secondary way by the Bible and if the two come into conflict, they will go with politics over the Bible. With those people, it's not about reminding them of what they believe. It's about going right after the ideology and the politics.

Which in some cases saying, oh, you think that you support a free market? Let's talk about how fossil fuels are subsidized more than renewable energy. Let's talk about how clean energy is the latest thing you're investing for the future. We have to realize a lot of people call themselves one thing, but that's not actually a faith label.

Kai Wright: That's so interesting. Don't engage it as a faith conversation is what you're arguing because that's not the value, that's not actually the value that's at play.

Katharine Hayhoe: Exactly. It is a political label, but for a lot of others, it still is a theological label, but they've been led astray by their politics. They've mixed up the statement of faith is half Bible, half politics, and they don't know the difference. There, I would say don't focus on bringing evangelicals into an ecumenical movement first before engaging them with climate action because you're creating a gate.

If you try to put-- let me give you a more obvious example. Imagine, I care about climate change because I'm a skier. Does everybody in the world have to become a skier before they can care about climate change? No, of course not. Does everybody have to be on board with ecumenical efforts before they care about climate change?

I would say no. I would say every single major world religion, including each denomination of Christianity, has every reason they already need to care. If we meet them where they're at and show them how their home beliefs make them the perfect person to care that is what gets 'em on board.

Kai Wright: Let's go to Justice in Manhattan. Justice, welcome to the show.

Justice: Hi. Thanks. I wanted to ask you if you knew about the Howie Hawkins campaign for president 2020 that would achieve 100% clean energy within 10 years.

Kai Wright: Thanks for that, Justice. Go ahead, Katharine.

Katharine Hayhoe: I'm ashamed to say that I did not know about that. In my defense, I will say that I am Canadian, so I follow our politics slightly more closely than the US, but I should know about that. Thank you so much for bringing that to our attention.

Kai Wright: To build on that, just to think about what are appropriate political goals, I guess? I don't want to use that phrasing. I'm trying to figure out how to ask it. When you are looking at elected officials and you're looking at whether they're responding to the things that we should be doing, what is this test for? This is an appropriate level of engagement that we should expect from our elected officials as we're advocating?

Katharine Hayhoe: That's a great question. There's no perfect set of solutions. There are bipartisan solutions, there are conservative solutions, there are liberal solutions, there are solutions across the whole political spectrum in terms of the type of policy that you can apply. I'm not looking for a specific type of, oh, this is the policy. I'm looking for people who take it seriously and who realize something really important.

That is that climate change is not a standalone issue like I care about this, this, this. I care about climate change too. The reason we care about it is because it is, as the military calls it a threat multiplier. It takes every bucket we already care about and it makes it worse. If we care about issues of socioeconomic inequality, justice, poverty, racism, sexism, then we care about climate change because it is quite literally exacerbating those issues.

On the other hand, if we care about national security, internal security, the health of the economy, immigration, the issues that people might care about from a different part of the political spectrum, we have every reason we need to care about climate change too because it's affecting them too. I would want someone who said, these are my priorities. I recognize how climate change affects every single one of them, and these are the serious steps that I'm taking to cut our emissions and build resilience to the impacts that we can no longer avoid.

Kai Wright: Another question that's real practical like that I think a lot of people have, and you alluded to this earlier, is what do I do in my own life? While avoiding what feels like fads sometimes and you try, you make one change, and then you're told, "That's not the right thing."

Planting trees, for instance, has been a very popular thing politically and in movements lately. Now, there's a debate about whether or not if you don't plant the right trees, you're actually doing more harm than good, but how do you help people think through that level of engagement? I know as you said earlier, you have made many changes in your own life. How do we make those choices?

Katharine Hayhoe: I'm going to give you one line first and then dig a bit deeper. The one line is this, do something, anything and talk about it, because that is what begins social contention when we tell somebody else what we did. We said, maybe you could try it too, or maybe our school could try it too, or maybe our company could try it too. That's how change begins.

What I do is I do adopt two new habits every year, and I keep them going through the year. Then I take two new ones on after that. I try to look for win-win wins. Like what? Let me give you an example. Due to historic redlining, which I'm sure you've talked about on your program.

Kai Wright: Indeed.

Katharine Hayhoe: Racist practices of insurance and mortgages. A lot of low-income neighborhoods are more prone to flooding and they can be over 15 degrees Fahrenheit hotter during a heat wave than better off neighborhoods in the same city. They have poorer air quality. They have no green faces. There's no place for people to play and be outside, which affects our physical and our mental health.

For example, in some cities, like in Chicago, there's efforts where you can help with greening lower-income neighborhoods. What does that do? First of all, it provides green space for families and kids to play outside, trees filter the air and clean up the air that we breathe and improve our health. Green spaces absorb water when it rains, reducing flood risk. They provide canopy resilience during heat waves, which are getting worse.

They take up carbon too, which takes it out to the atmosphere where we have too much of it. Those are the types of win, win, win win-wins, not to mention the fact that you're outside. You're doing something with your friends or your family, you're making a difference in your community. Count the wins. I think we must be up to 10 by then. Look for those types of things where you can really make multiple differences and you'll never be sorry.

Kai Wright: You'll never be sorry. Let's go to Pamela in Elmhurst, Queens. Pamela, welcome to the show.

Pamela: Oh, wonderful. Thank you very much for taking my call. I'm a member of a Christian community, but I've noticed that a lot of the resistance is coming from, let's say the evangelical or the fundamentalist, I'll say born again segment of Christianity that contends that we shouldn't really be bothering so much with trying to do something about climate change. The events, the disasters that we've been seeing over the recent years are indications of the end times.

Therefore trying to do anything to alleviate these problems is really a waste of time. These things have been predicted, they always point to particular passages.

Kai Wright: Hey, I'm going to stop you just because the time is short, but I think we got the question. How do you respond to that idea?

Katharine Hayhoe: That idea is actually the second most popular Christianity-sounding objection I hear. The first one is, God is in control, so nothing we do matters. The second is, "Oh, the world's going to end anyway, so why do we care?" I have a little Global Weirding series on YouTube. It's a PBS Digital series called Global Weirding. One of our most-watched episodes is the one that addresses these two myths.

It's called "What Does the Bible Say About Climate Change?" To answer these questions, you don't go to the science, you go to the Bible. Turns out, back 2000 years ago, people were people. In the book of Thessalonians, Paul was writing to people who were basically folding their hands, putting up their feet in the lazy way of life, and saying, "Oh, the world's going to end anyway, so why does it matter?"

He was like, "Get a job. Take care of the widows and the orphans. You have things to do here and now. There is no excuse for not loving your neighbor." That is what we're called to do and what we're called to be recognized. Pretending that what's happening right now doesn't matter when people are suffering, that is the exact opposite of love.

Kai Wright: If you go to the Bible, and therein lies the answer. You will share with us the links, I hope to those two episodes and we will put them in the notes for this episode so people can find the full answer to that question. Katharine Hayhoe is an award-winning atmospheric scientist. She's Chief Scientist at The Nature Conservancy, a professor at Texas Tech University, and author of the best-selling book Saving Us: A Climate Scientist's Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World. Thank you so much for this time, Professor.

Katharine Hayhoe: Thank you for having me.

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Kai Wright: That was a conversation I had with Professor Hayhoe this summer. If you heard anything that sparked new thought or a question for yourself, hit us up. Just go to our website notesfromamerica.org and look for the little record button. You can always leave a voice note for us right there. It's super easy. In this case, I'm particularly interested to hear any questions about climate change or our response to it that you want the show to tackle.

Give us your assignments in the speak. Katharine Hayhoe says the first thing we all got to do is just talk about it more. Tell us how we can help you do that. Leave us a voice note right there at notesfromamerica.org. Notes from America is a production of WNYC studios. You can follow us wherever you get your podcasts. You can also follow us on both Instagram and Twitter @noteswithkai.

Music and mixing by Jared Paul. Production reporting and editing by Karen Frillmann, Vanessa Handy, Regina de Heer, Rahima Nasa, Kousha Navidar, Keisha Nava Dar, Lindsay Foster Thomas, and me, Kai Wright. Thanks for spending this time with us, and I will talk to you next week.

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