Smart climate policy is good for people, not just the environment

It is difficult to read about global heating and climate change without being pessimistic. Every new report warning that humanity is entering "uncharted territory" or exceeding our limits as a stable ecosystem can produce feelings of hopelessness and despair. Yet even as Earth roils through unprecedented heatwaves and animals like river dolphins face extinction, there is still hope that climate change can be at least partially mitigated. But the fight is far from over and it won't be easy.

John J. Berger's new book, "Solving the Climate Crisis: Frontline Reports from the Race to Save the Earth" chronicles the experiences of ordinary people fighting climate change, from business leaders, politicians and farmers to scientists, engineers and activists. Berger identifies practical, real-world solutions that can empower ordinary citizens to fight for their environment.

Berger brings to this endeavor his invaluable background as an environmental science and policy specialist who has written for publications like Scientific American, the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times and others. He has also written and edited 11 books, including three previous works about climate change.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

One of the biggest problems with stopping greenhouse gas emissions is financial. How do we go about preventing financial institutions and banks from continuing to finance the development of oil, coal and gas assets?

I know that Third Act [a community advocacy group] is addressing this issue by urging members to boycott certain banks that are prominently associated with funding carbon bombs, so to speak, which if developed could add over their lifetime a billion tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Almost any of these projects would be a significant step backward in the effort to get towards zero greenhouse gas emissions on a net basis.

I think that the environmental movement needs to do a great deal more thinking about this issue. I don't think it has been adequately discussed and completely understood, but it is clear that since the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement that trillions of dollars from the multinational banks have flowed to the fossil fuel industry for continued expansion of oil and gas drilling and production and exploration.

That money should rather be used to facilitate the clean energy transition. And those dollars should be used to renovate buildings, make them more energy efficient, and to deploy vast numbers of renewable energy generators in the form of wind turbines and solar power on rooftops and on other available spaces, as well as in central station solar powered facilities. That money, in other words, could be put to much better use. I don't think anybody really knows today how to stop this flow of capital. But in the past, we have discovered that mass movements of concerned and indignant people can shed light on practices that are comfortable for large institutions to pursue when they do so in darkness.

So I think, as the saying goes, sunlight is the best disinfectant. That will be helpful, but more needs to be done strategically in general to move large financial institutions. They act according to their economic self-interest. And if it can be that these transactions can be structured so that it's more profitable for them to invest in the clean energy transition than in perpetuating our addiction to fossil fuels, then the money will flow in that direction. Just as the fact that new solar generating capacity is now the cheapest new capacity in the world has meant that it's been difficult or more difficult to fund new fossil fuel power generating facility. And the vast preponderance of new generation capacity that's being built now is renewable.

That makes a great deal of sense.

To the economic change, changing the incentive structure so that the money will flow in a different direction. And there has to be some regulation of investments that have huge public costs. One could envision steep rising carbon fees that would operate throughout the economy, and that would be incident on the fossil fuel industry. If the fossil fuel industry can be so regulated that it becomes a less profitable industry, then it will have fewer resources to attract the banking community to its aid.

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My next question is related in a sense, because you're discussing how people can make a difference. What kinds of actions people can call for and engage in order to bring about positive change? That's something that I like about your book. It's not bleak and dire. It tries to be proactive. I'm now thinking about something that I commonly hear from climate change deniers, which is, they fear the government wants us to eat nothing but bugs and grass. I'm wondering if you could discuss how we can reduce or eliminate the 20% of total greenhouse gas emissions that can be attributed to agriculture and bad land use without the extreme measures that the deniers insist are necessary. 

This is actually also an extremely challenging question, and it involves some cultural changes, but we are not going to convince people overnight to change their dietary habits. And that's something that people will resist vehemently. And I don't think that we need to tell people, you cannot eat meat. I think people could be told, for example, if you reduce your consumption of meat, you will be aiding in the transition towards a cleaner agricultural sector.

But I think in a way, this accusation that people through their dietary habits are somehow responsible at large for climate disruption is really a half-truth. The fossil fuel industry and climate deniers love to put blame on the individual. And then the individual turns around and says, "Well, my scope of activity or my leverage on these massive national and global issues is very limited." And they become frustrated and they despair.

I think, again, in the agricultural sector, one can find ways in which adopting environmentally sensitive practices can be made more profitable. And I talk about the work of rancher Gabe Brown in my book, and he pioneered regenerative agricultural practices in the 1990s and to the present day and has become something of an apostle of regenerative agriculture. He was going broke when he followed the conventional industrial agricultural model, and he turned to regenerative agriculture, to farming without herbicides, without pesticides, without irrigation, without plowing.

It was a matter of necessity, but he found that he was able to enrich the soil through his use of diverse cover crops. And more lately, the use of fungi to help rejuvenate the soil. The soil became very carbon rich and supported a rich flora and a rich microflora. The soil became healthy and produced healthy crops, healthy animals.

And ultimately the people that eat healthy food tend to be healthier than people, for example, that are reliant on more expensive processed food that is less nutritious and laced with chemicals that can be problematic for our health. So I think it's important for people to look analytically, very carefully, at what's happening in the agricultural sector, not just from an environmental point of view, but from an economic point of view to show that the policies that people like Gabe Brown have been pursuing are actually more profitable than policies that follow the industrial agricultural model that is so energy intensive, and also tends to waste a lot of water and to create biodiversity problems as a result of herbicide and pesticide use. 

There is another element to the answer to that question, which is that as a result of the kind of regenerative agricultural practices that Gabe Brown and others like the Marin Carbon Project out here in Northern California are pursuing, the soil becomes rich in carbon and government programs can and should be expanded to provide farmers with payment for additional tons of carbon dioxide that they're able to trap and store on a semi or permanent basis in the deep contours of their soil. And the way that happens is that if you plant deep rooting prairie plants, for example, the roots can penetrate down as deep as 30 feet, and when roots like that die, they enrich the soil with the carbon from their biomass.

Of course, one doesn't just plant prairie plants, but [a] diverse mix of cover crops that can enrich the soil with their roots and their exudates and the fungi and the whole soil ecosystem that thrives on keeping roots in the soil, keeping the ground cover present as opposed to allowing the soil to lie barren and fallow and then to graze it with live animals so that they fertilize the soil naturally. 

And in a way it emulates some of the natural processes that took place for thousands of years on the prairies of the United States and other vast grasslands. So summarizing that, we ought to be paying farmers for the ecological services that they provide, and we can encourage them to do that on a national scale and also on an international scale because this is an example of a natural climate solution that can, if done pervasively over billions of acres of range lands and crop lands, store billions of tons of carbon dioxide in the soil very safely and also extremely economically relative to other, more costly ways of getting carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. 

I want to transition to a different area ripe for decarbonization: Transportation. That is another area where people have this emotional investment, not just in cars, but in coal rolling, or in cars that have very bad emission standards, to put it mildly. What is your advice to people who want to have intelligent conversations about green transportation? 

I think that we need to build cities that prioritize human habitation over prioritizing spaces for vehicles and for vehicle use. Vehicles have their place, but relative to the vehicles that are used in most of the rest of the world, our vehicles tend to be oversized and overpowered, and they use more raw materials and fuel than they need to in order to deliver the services that are required.

So even if you weren't going to electrify transportation, which is increasingly happening now that 7% of new automotive sales are electric, we could still make major improvements by discouraging the use of unnecessarily large and heavy and dangerous vehicles that are [a] danger to pedestrians as well as to the environment. That's one thing that can be done. If you analyze most of the trips taken, I don't have the exact statistics at my fingertips, but something like two-thirds of all the trips taken are under five miles. 

So there are great many trips that don't require a car that can be done on a bicycle or an electric bicycle or an electric scooter or a small local use urban vehicle that maybe doesn't exceed 25 or 35 miles per hour, but is perfectly fine for going to the grocery store and picking up groceries.

And we also need to make cities much more friendly to bicycles so that you don't take your life in your hands when you decide that you want to go out for a bike ride because there's no separation between the roadway and the bikeway. In fact, in many places there's no bikeway. But if you go to advanced European cities like Copenhagen for example, or Stockholm or Amsterdam, you'll see they've given a great deal of thought to bikeways and to make the urban areas accessible. We also want people to be located in dense or semi-dense, mixed use residential and commercial neighborhoods as they are in Copenhagen, where virtually the entire population is within half a mile of the subway. 

And when the city plans and implements a new development, they make sure that it's a mixed use residential and commercial area with a public transportation. So this basically obviates the need for everybody to own their own vehicle. Some people need to use vehicles and maybe they want to keep that vehicle in a garage for 95% of the time in order to have it available for that few percent of time when you actually need a long distance vehicle. But other people may prefer to just rent a vehicle on a daily or weekly basis when they need it for such purposes.

So I think that we probably have more car ownership than we need as a society, and we could probably more cost effectively accomplish many of our errands and transportation needs with vehicles that are shorter range and more economical to operate or healthier to operate. Because there've been studies that show that cycling, for example, regularly can extend your life by something on the order of five or seven years. So these things are good for the environment and they're also good for people.