B (26:19)
I would say that, you know, there was this incredible surge of concern coming out of the late 2000 and tens that kind of peaked around 2019, 2020. And there were a lot of things that went into that, like the, you know, the Paris accords, which is 2015, is one part of it. There was a big scientific report that the UN put out in 2018 that was about the difference between 1.5 degrees and 2 degrees, and was saying, like, this half degree really, really matters. Like, we really need to keep it close to 1.5, not 2. And there was a lot of climate activism. Greta Thunberg's like, the most visible example. But all around the world, people in impoverished countries, queer people, minors, politically repressive states, nevertheless turning out and protesting in ways that really raise the alarm. And the powers that be responded to that. If you look at what happened in 2020, 2021, you had these climate conferences where every single person, every single political leader the world over got up on stage and described climate as an existential threat, as the challenge of our time. You had corporate CEOs, you know, not just like, you know, lefty ones, but like the CEO of BlackRock is like, you know, writing about how sustainability needs to be like the new framing of all their investment policies. You have huge numbers of corporate ESG policies enacted and you have this sort of like, yeah, global governing class consensus that like this is really important. It's really important because it threatens us. But it's also really important because if we move fast, we can build a cleaner, healthier, more just economic and political system. And for all those reasons, like we need to get going really fast. And that was like the global consensus view of like the Davos fear of the UN world of like every politician in 2020, 2021 that they may have said, okay, Greta's a little extreme. They may have said about me, like, okay, you're like, what you want is a little extreme. But they were all on board for moving real fast. And then kind of history intervened. There was the pandemic, which destroyed protest culture for a while. I think we could talk about this separately. But it made people, I think a lot more selfish and self interested, destroyed a spirit of solidarity that had been growing for a long period of time. We had Russia invading Ukraine that changed, that created an energy crisis. We had inflation, you know, all of these things like kind of crowded up the mind space, not just of leaders, but like everyday people. And as a result, you know, we're now climate is like much farther down on the, on the rhetorical pecking order and I think has basically been kicked out of our political discourse. Like when you talk about in America, maybe most visibly, like even lefty Democrats aren't talking about green energy in terms of the climate consequences. They're talking about in terms of affordability, which is, you know, I think a pretty good pitch. Like the cheapest energy we can build now is green energy. But even so, it's like a sign of something that's changed. And then when you look abroad, even in climate conscious places, like European leaders aren't leaning into climate in the same way China, which is in certain ways both the biggest villain in the world and the biggest hero on climate. They're not really talking about their green energy build out in terms of climate. They're talking about it in terms of energy security and clean air, all the lives they can save in Beijing from the, you know, the pollution that they've cut and all that stuff. And so I think in the big picture level, like, we. Our politics has retreated from climate or climate has been extracted from it. That said, you know, I wrote a big piece about this in the fall, which was right around the time of the. The UN General assembly and the COP and the climate. The UN Climate Conference. And I heard from a lot of people who are like, it doesn't really matter, actually that our politics have retreated from climate because the investment forces and the business forces are so strong globally that we're having this transition that's faster than we ever anticipated or hoped, even though no political leaders are engaged in it anymore. And I think that that's also true.
