In this episode of Futureverse, Molly Wood and Ramanan Raghavendran sit down with acclaimed author and scientist, Naomi Oreskes. They delve into the world of climate communication, from historical turning points to the influence of money and ideology in climate denial.
She also shares insights from her books and discusses the different hurdles in the climate conversation, the power of fiction in tackling climate issues, and the urgent need for effective science communication.
Time stamps and the full transcript are below. This episode is also available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
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Show Notes
02:29 Historical Moments in Climate Change Response
07:19 The Role of Money and Ideology in Climate Denial
08:57 Exploring Climate Fiction and Imagination
12:01 The Importance of Narrative in Science Communication
16:37 Challenges Faced by Climate Scientists in Communication
19:50 The Arbitrary Nature of Scientific Standards
24:12 The Big Myth: Unpacking Free Market Ideology
27:16 The Role of Fiction in Climate Discourse
33:23 Capitalism and Climate Crisis: A Complex Relationship
35:39 Imagining the Collapse of Western Civilization
37:49 Future Endeavors: Naomi's Next Projects
Naomi (00:00) We used to think that if scientists did good science and if their predictions came true and the theories were proven to be correct, you know, that society would say, okay, well, we understand that and therefore we will do X, Y or Z. And what's happened really is in a sense the opposite, that the stronger the scientific evidence has got, the more people have dug in.
Molly (00:20) Welcome back to Futureverse, a podcast centered around climate fiction and how it helps us imagine our way forward through climate uncertainty.
Ramanan (00:29) I'm Ramanan Raghavendran.
Molly (00:31) And I'm Molly Wood. It is unfortunately no secret that our society is responding wholly insufficiently to the climate crisis. But why is this the case? And then just as crucially, what does it mean for our collective futures? Today, we're excited to be joined by Dr. Naomi Oreskes, a leading science historian with several bestselling nonfiction books that examine the influence of doubt mongers and myth makers on our response to climate change.
Ramanan (00:56) In 2010, with co-author Eric Conway, Naomi published Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues From Tobacco Smoke to Climate Change. A pretty shocking expose on how certain vested interests have presented strong science as still uncertain to prevent or delay action on issues ranging from regulating tobacco through to dealing with climate change. In 2014, the authors followed up with a work of science-based fiction entitled The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View From the Future, which is an imagined historical account from 2393, looking back at the dramatic effects of climate chaos on society.
Molly (01:37) And since this is a climate fiction podcast, we'll mainly be talking to Naomi about that book today. But we do want to also spend some time discussing Naomi and Eric's latest book, The Big Myth, How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market, because it turns out that capitalism and climate are intertwined in a lot of ways. Published in 2023, The Big Myth provides an essential component for understanding why climate change continues to be insufficiently addressed. Naomi, we are thrilled to have you on the show.
Ramanan (02:07) So before we delve into your books, Naomi, we'd love to hear a little bit more about you. You have a long history of being at the forefront of climate communication that sort of dominates the discourse around who Naomi is. You've been on the firing line for climate denialists and industry interests. Can you give us the life story in a short form of how all this began?
Naomi (02:29) Sure. Well, I started my career as a geologist. I worked as an exploration and mining geologist in Australia. But when I was in graduate school, I got interested in history and philosophies of science as a way to explore bigger questions about the role of science in society. And I did that work for about about a decade, and I published a couple of pretty serious academic books on the development of scientific knowledge, mostly about plate tectonic theory and continental drift theory.
And then I started working on a book, or was going to be my second book, on the history of oceanography. And in the process of doing that work, I discovered the story of a group of oceanographers going back to the 1950s who had accurately realized that burning fossil fuels would change the climate and had begun working on that way back then. And that was pretty revelatory because at the time almost nobody knew that the science went back that far.
And so I started publishing about that. About how there was this very deep scientific understanding of this issue going back to the 1950s and that actually scientists had a consensus that climate change was underway already in the early 1990s. And for that work, I became the target of the climate change denial machinery. And that was pretty shocking because I didn't think I was doing anything particularly controversial. I thought I was just explaining science. Those days, explaining science wasn't considered controversial.
So when I became the target of attack, decided to, I guess, turn the tables and investigate who were the people who were attacking me.
Molly (04:06) I want to go so many directions with that, including that investigation, but I want to stay on science for a minute in this work as a science historian, because I wonder, you know, some of this comes up in The Collapse of Western Civilization, but I wonder if you can point to, you know, one or two key historical moments that have defined our completely inadequate response to climate change.
Naomi (04:37) Well, that's a tricky one. I guess I think about it. Well, one historical moment that I've written about is 1992. So that's the year of the United Nations framework convention on climate change. And that's super important because it tells us that actually already in the late eighties, early 1990s, people understood that this was a big problem. Political leaders were aware of the scientific evidence and they gathered in Rio de Janeiro and signed an international treaty to act on climate change. And we have really gone backward in the last 30 years.
So that moment, that moment of political will, that moment of scientific understanding to me is really crucial in terms of thinking about this problem and what happened after 1992.
Ramanan (05:25) Can I just do a quick follow-up on that? I mean, we're living in a moment and we're going to come back to this moment more than once in this conversation. Is this also another moment, another such crucial moment where we may be going off in not the right direction?
Naomi (05:45) Well, yeah, I mean, I think so. One of the things that's so hard, I think, right now for me and for climate scientists is that everything that is happening now, scientists predicted. And if we think about our basic understanding of science, right, most of us were taught in school, the hypothetical deductive model, scientists make predictions, we see if the predictions come true. And if they do, then we assume that theories are correct. So scientists have done everything we expected them to do.
But the world has not responded the way we expect them to do. We used to think that if scientists did good science and if their predictions came true and the theories were proven to be correct, you know, that society would say, okay, well, we understand that and therefore we will do X, Y or Z. And what's happened really is in a sense the opposite, that the stronger the scientific evidence has got the more people have dug in and gone deeper and deeper into denial.
And I feel like we've really seen that these last few weeks with these devastating fires in California, fires that are truly catastrophic, right? We're not exaggerating when we use the word catastrophe to talk about tens or hundreds of billions of dollars of lost real estate, families who have lost their homes, businesses that have been destroyed. This is a true catastrophe and everything that has happened was predicted and instead, we should be saying, "my gosh, this is the moment to act on climate change." And instead we're fighting about who's to blame and, know, FEMA and Donald Trump is still claiming the whole thing is a hoax.
Molly (07:19) Right. And I wonder, sort of picking up on this idea of pivotal moments and your investigation of sort of who was coming at you with climate denialism, I often wonder if one of the failures of imagination of scientists and media is the inability to understand that in fact sometimes it's just money. It is literally about the money and that is an animating life force that it's hard for a scientist or a journalist to really believe.
Naomi (07:55) Yeah, I know I struggle with this so often because I feel like people don't like it if you oversimplify. Of course, scientists are very, know, scientists hate oversimplification, right? But as you say, you know, sometimes it really is about following the money. Although, in this case, part of the work we've done is to show how it's really about a kind of complex nexus of money and ideology and how the money and interest and the ideological arguments work together.
And that's why it's been so powerful because I feel like if we were only money, most of us would see through it. We would say, “well, of course Exxon Mobil wants to keep selling oil and gas.” But when you link it to this ideological argument that claims we're protecting freedom. This is about my right to do what I want. That's an argument that people can be sympathetic to even if they don't hold stock in Exxon Mobil. And so a lot of our work has really been trying to understand that kind of toxic blend of money and ideology that has brought us to this really terrible moment.
Molly (08:56) Right.
Ramanan (08:57) I knew coming into this discussion that within the first five minutes we would learn 50 new things that we want to take an entirely different directions, but I'm to try and haul us back to our main thread, which is your books. And we're now going to drill into
The Collapse of Western Civilization. So Molly and I started this podcast to focus on climate fiction, which is not the preponderance of your work, but this one is.
Naomi (09:04) You - Of course. Yeah.
Molly (09:15) No pun intended.
Ramanan (09:26) Non-fiction a lot more, what led you to say, hey, we're going to inject some imagination and we're going to sit in the 24th century, the 23rd century and look back? What led to the decision to make it fiction?
Naomi (09:39) Well, there are a couple of things. I mean, you've been talking about failure of imagination and that's so much a part of this whole story, right? That, along with the moneyed interests and the ideological arguments, there's also this failure of imagination that many of us just can't imagine how we can live any differently. We can't imagine how we could live without fossil fuels. And of course the fossil fuel industry uses that to try to tell us, you can't live without fossil fuels.
So part of what Eric and I, Eric Conway and I were trying to do in the book was just to try to get into that imaginative space because so much of dealing with this question really is about trying to imagine alternatives. In addition, after we wrote Merchants of Doubt, and any author will tell you this, obviously it's great to write a bestselling book, but one of the things that's bad about it is then you get asked to write the same book over and over again. You get all these invitations.
Ramanan (10:32) Yes.
Molly (10:33) Yup.
Naomi (10:34) And it's so tedious and horrible and you become like a prisoner of your own book. And so I was invited to this conference where I was asked to talk about, why haven't we acted on climate change? And I thought, wow, didn't I just write a best-selling book on that topic, right? And so then I thought, well, maybe, maybe sometimes in life you need to say the same thing in more than one way. And I think now think that that's not sometimes. Now I think it's actually all the time.
When anything is important, we have to find different ways of saying it for different audiences in different contexts. And so I just started thinking about, could we take the basic message of Merchants of Doubt and say it in a different way? And that's when something happened to me, which I called Eric Conway and I said, I'm either having a creative inspiration or I'm having a psychotic break because I started hearing...
Molly (11:30) Sometimes the same.
Naomi (11:31) I started hearing a voice in my head and the voice was the narrator of The Collapse of Western Civilization. And she started writing the book. And so then it was this weird experience where, I mean, the book kind of wrote itself in a very interesting way. And so the first draft of that book I wrote in two weeks and I called Eric up and I said, this may be really weird. You might not want to have anything to do with this, but you know, take a look and see what you think. Because it was really based on a conversation we had been having. And he wrote back and said, “I'm in.”
Ramanan (11:38) Wow.
Naomi (12:01) And so that was great. And then of course, there was more work to revise it and all of that. But, now I think, I mean, I'd like to write more fiction, but fiction's hard. Fiction's really hard. It's really hard. I feel like non-fiction's a lot easier. But what's great about fiction, I think, is this imaginative capacity, right? That it allows us to go beyond our immediate experience and imagine things that haven't happened, but could. And particularly science fiction, but really all fiction does that.
Ramanan (12:10) Fiction's hard.
Naomi (12:30) And one of things that's interesting about being trained as a scientist, we're so indoctrinated with the idea that science is all about facts, facts, facts, facts, facts, facts, you know? And of course that's incredibly important and facts are incredibly important and scientists deserve huge amounts of credit for the hard work they do to establish facts. But what we've learned, I think in life in general is that facts are not enough.
That if you want people to understand something, you have to put it into some larger context. And there are many different ways you can do that. I'm not saying every scientist has to become a fiction writer, but fiction is a way we can take factual information and put it into a narrative structure that people can understand. And especially also, it's a way to talk about meaning. And I think that was the biggest thing that Eric and I were trying to achieve in the collapse book was that all these facts, all this information,
Ramanan (12:57) Yes.
Naomi (13:25) …but when I spoke to people, when I gave public lectures, I often felt that people didn't really understand why it mattered. Like, why does it matter if the climate change is one and a half degrees? Why does it matter if the West Antarctic ice sheet starts to destabilize? And so we were trying to find a way to really get the question of the meaning of these facts and why they really mattered and what was really at stake.
Molly (13:48) Yeah, this book is written as a historical account, which is one of my favorite styles of presenting information like this for I loved World War Z, right? This sort of like 10 years after the apocalypse and the social implications of that. And, it is this very deeply compelling and almost more upsetting way to present this reality though, you know? I mean, it really works to say, here were all the things we knew, here is the neoliberal reaction to communist ideology that led us to double down on the idea of a really free market, which really just meant deregulation and enriching rich people, et cetera, et cetera. But it sounds like it just came out like that. It wasn't even a decision. It was sort of like, okay, I'm gonna follow these threads to their inevitable conclusion.
Naomi (14:40) Yeah, I think so. It's great talking to you because it's great talking to people who are real readers and you clearly have really understood this book very, very well. I appreciate that. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, think the other thing that Eric and I were trying to bring to the fore was the irony of this whole story. So when we were writing Merchants of Doubt, one of the things we felt very, very strongly was how ironic this story was, that these people…
Molly (14:48) It's my favorite style. I was just like, it's just, know, catnip.
Naomi (15:05) …and now I'm not talking about Exxon Mobil, but I'm talking about the actual merchants of doubt, Bill Nirenberg, Robert Jastrow, Fred Singer, Fred Seitz. These were scientists. And they were not primarily in it for the money as far as the evidence showed, although obviously the money is playing a role in this. But they believed, and I think authentically, that they were fighting communism, that they had dedicated their lives to containing communism. And this was a kind of extension of that project.
But the irony was, we thought, was that they had it all wrong because the more you deny the reality of climate change, the worse it gets, the more likely that's going to threaten liberal democracy. And I think we've already seen that around the world. You know, don't have to be a rocket scientist to realize, you know, when do we call out the National Guard? When there's a, when there's a, emergency, when there's a, you know, like an extreme weather event, a hurricane, a flood, horrible fires, right? So we felt that as climate change began to unfold, we would actually see democratic institutions threatened.
And so the very thing they thought they were fighting for or fighting against would in fact be the thing that would happen. And so we wanted to find a way to bring that irony to the fore. And so to the extent that the book has a conscious construction and the conscious choice to set the book in China, it was an attempt to bring forward that ironic element of the story.
Ramanan (16:33) I have a question I really want to ask, but it'll take us off our thread. So I'm going to just keep bringing us back to it.
Molly (16:36) What? What thread?
Ramanan (16:37) We can, but you know, I mean, this is just so interesting. So just on the book for a minute, we just were touching on it in different ways that climate scientists are not listened to anywhere as much as they should be. And part of the problem lies potentially with climate scientists. Can you you expand on that? You've touched on it already, but can you expand on that a little bit?
Naomi (17:00) We can come back. Yeah. Well, one of the themes in the book has to do with this theme of specialization, right? So scientists tend to be highly specialized and that's not all bad. I mean, to do scientific work, you have to be specialized. That's how science advances. And that's not just science. I mean, think about artists typically specialize in a particular medium or, you guys are specializing in, you know, what you guys do. So specialization can be empowering. It can enable us to do things we wouldn't otherwise be able to do.
Ramanan (17:04) Right.
Naomi (17:29) But the risk of it, the downside, is that we lose skills that we need. And so most scientists have no training in communication at all. And so when they're suddenly in this position where they have to talk to the public, they need to explain why climate change matters or why 1.5 degrees is significant. Many scientists find themselves in a pretty tough situation.
Now it has changed. I've definitely seen changes during the course of my own career. I think we see a lot more attention to communication now than we did say, you know, when was in grad school, you were actively discouraged from doing anything to do with the public discouraged from taking a public speaking class, discouraged from working on your writing. I mean, actively, actively discouraged.
I think that's not the case anymore, but still, you know, communication is often treated as this sort of epiphenomenon, like you do the science and then you figure out how to communicate it, as opposed to really thinking about communication as being part of the job. And I always think of that, you know, the classic conundrum of the tree falling in the forest and nobody hears. If you don't communicate the work, then it's almost like the work doesn't exist. And now it's even worse because it's not merely the fact that scientists have had trouble communicating.
Molly (18:39) Yeah.
Naomi (18:50) But now you have active forces actively trying to undermine what you've done, actively trying to spread disinformation and tell the public a story that is false and that we know is false. And scientists are just so unprepared to deal with that.
Molly (19:06) Well, and they're very good at that story. And then you have this communication field. But the other thing that you talk about in the book is this sort of danger of the excessive rigor that maybe is in response to that, those attempts to discredit, right? And what you seem to be saying is that we...
Naomi (19:09) Well, right.
Molly (19:29) In this exact moment, when we maybe have a chance to turn it around, we're over-focused on this idea of whether we can prove the attribution science, whether we can actually say these fires are because of climate change. And we're rotating on that so much. And it is the way of scientists to say, I don't want to give you a superlative. I don't want to be definitive, because the science could turn out otherwise. But that is its own worst enemy.
Naomi (19:50) Well, right, and that's such a complicated issue too, because obviously we want science to be rigorous and robust, and we don't want scientists to make claims that are false. But then there's this question of, you know, who's controlling the default assumption and where you draw the line and what is your standard of proof?
And if people's lives are at stake to say, we can't say anything until we've, you know, hit that seventh decimal place. I mean, that's irresponsible and unethical.
And, you know, there's a very interesting story that we wrote about the emergence of doubt about the proof that secondhand smoke killed people. So, you know, there's this standard that we is invoked in lots of science about the 95 % confidence interval, right? That you don't accept the claim unless it's been proven at that 95 % level. Well, when it came to looking at secondhand smoke, the EPA decided to use a 90 % confidence level and they argue that this was warranted because they understood something about the mechanisms involved. And so since you knew what the mechanisms were, you could have a little bit lower threshold on the statistics. Right?
And this is a really complicated thing that we could talk about for three hours. And it's actually super interesting. What happened was the tobacco industry went crazy over this and they started attacking the EPA saying EPA had compromised the science. You know, it was outrageous that they use this 90 % standard, blah, blah, blah.
Well, but think about it for second. I mean, who decided that 95 % was the right number? I mean, there's no god of statistics. and you know, why is it 95? Why is it 90? Maybe it should be 75. Maybe it should be 51. If people's lives are at stake, you could argue, you know, and think about it in a court of law, the balance of evidence, the preponderance of evidence. If it was 51%, then the balance tips,
Molly (21:20) Right.
Ramanan (21:40) Right.
Naomi (21:41) So scientists have accepted this super high bar. And one of the really, so I got interested in where that 95 % thing had come from. And the weird, creepy part of the story is it was actually developed by the statistician, R.A. Fisher, who actually wrote in his own papers, well, you know, we don't really know what it should be, but if we say 95%, nobody will argue with it. So, I mean, it's like pretty arbitrary and it gets even worse. R.A. Fisher didn't believe that smoking caused cancer.
Ramanan (21:58) You’re right.
Molly (22:09) God.
Naomi (22:10) Heheheheh!
Molly (22:12) Amazing. Wow.
Ramanan (22:16) So, you this book was written 10 years ago. It's very fresh and I would encourage everyone listening to us to go read it. And 10 years ago, the China-U.S. dynamic was not as grim as it is today. And, you know, the narrator of your book is writing from the Second People's Republic and that's the dominant superpower, the Second People's Republic of China, which has become the dominant superpower after the Second Dark Age.
I kind of know the answer, but I'd like to hear you say it, which is what made you choose China in particular as being that dominant force? What is the rationale behind that?
Naomi (22:52) Well, there were two things. So one is the thing we've already discussed, that we were trying to make the point that climate emergency will be bad for liberal democracy and liberal democracies will struggle to figure out how to deal with it. Whereas if you have an autocratic regime, if you need to move 100 million people, if you need to relocate people, an autocratic regime is in a much better situation to do that kind of thing than a liberal democracy. And so we wanted to underscore that point.
But then in addition, if you just ask yourself, well, what civilization on earth has lasted the longest? The answer is China. So just empirically, they've come through a whole lot of things in the past. So it seems that they will come through a lot of things in the future. And also we wanted, you know, there's a way in which a lot of Americans, you know, buy into what we call American exceptionalism, this idea that somehow we're the best, we're the greatest, we'll get it all sorted out.
And you know, America is a great nation in many ways, but there are also a lot of things we do rather poorly. And so we were also trying to make the point that, you know, the United States is really not prepared for what is about to happen and things, there's a good chance that things could get very messy in this country, which is not to say they don't get messy in our story in China too, but they get messy in a different way.
Ramanan (24:12) They do. We're going to shift to another book and this is not quite 100 % climate, far from it, but the concepts are interrelated. Can you give us a potted summary of
The Big Myth?
Naomi (24:27) Sure. So when we finished writing Merchants of Doubt and the Collapse of Western Civilization, the question that Eric, Conway and I were left with was, why do so many people buy into this argument about free markets when there's so much historical evidence to show that it's just not right? And so we started digging deeper into the history of free market ideology and where it had come from. And what we found was this, you know, another really amazing story about how these ideas had been deliberately propagated by American business interests to try to fight against government regulation of markets and to fight against government action on climate change.
And so the point of the story, it's a long history of ideology and the way in which this ideology was consciously and deliberately promoted and propagandized by business interests who did not want to A, admit the reality of market failure, B, have to change their ways and treat workers in the environment better and C, didn't want the government to act to require them to protect workers or the environment.
And this is the piece that's so relevant today because this is what we're seeing playing out in front of our eyes right now.
Ramanan (25:38) We are.
Naomi (25:39) Yeah. I mean, this is the attack on the federal government that's going on right now has deep, deep roots. This is not something that Donald Trump just came up with last week. And so we think our book is super relevant for people understanding.
Naomi (25:53) Where the whole history, this history of anti-government ideology comes from. And especially if you think about the bashing of federal workers that is happening right now, know, federal workers do all kinds of hard jobs from running the post office to airport security to predicting the weather, to protecting us from disease outbreaks. And I know a lot of federal workers, including my husband, who's a government scientist and...they get paid a lot less money than if they'd gone into the private sector, but they do it because they actually care about the American people.
And so why would you bash people? Why would you bash the Forest Service, you know, the park rangers, all these good people who do good work and take care of us? Well, in our book, we really answer that question. It's because the federal government does a lot of stuff that big business would prefer it didn't do. Big business would prefer that they just got to do anything they wanted.
Ramanan (26:30) Right.
Naomi (26:46) Without regulation, without regard to the safety of workers, without regard to pollution. And so this is a battle we've been fighting for a long time. And so the new book goes deeper into the roots of this fight.
Molly (27:00) Yeah. Just like the devastating relevance means you will probably sell a lot of copies to put it in to put it in mercenary terms.
Naomi (27:09) I know I always say that, but the really terrible thing about my life, you know bad news for the world is good news for my book sales.
Molly (27:16) Yeah. But you know, it's interesting a little. So we have been lucky enough to have Kim Stanley Robinson on this podcast, who you mentioned in
Collapse of Western Civilization. You have said he's an influence of yours and also an early adopter of some of these ideas, right? Like he is he's the first author I know of or I read who wrote a book about climate change and capitalism and put those two things together in an inextricable kind of way.
Naomi (27:22) Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yes.
Molly (27:46) Can you talk about some of those, the ideas that you see overlapping and then how important it is to really tie these two things together?
Naomi (27:53) Yeah, exactly. Well, and again, this gets back to the whole bigger question about fiction. I mean, one of the things that Stan did so effectively, as you say, is to really think about the relationship between the climate crisis, climate science and capitalism. And no scientists were doing that because climate scientists don't think about capitalism. They think about science, right? And economists generally don't think very much about science. I mean, a few do, the environmental economists do, but mostly don't. And again, this gets back to the silo-ization.
But Stan and his work, especially starting with his trilogy, the climate change trilogy, was already beginning to think about the relationships between the climate crisis and our economic system. And so that, for me, was, I think, reading his work was one of the first places where I saw someone who was making those connections and someone who was really deep in the science. Stan's understanding of climate science is really deep.
So he gets the science as well as anyone, but he has this tremendous capacity then to tell, you know, I mean, he's a great storyteller, right? So to tell these stories that are really engaging, you get involved with the characters, you get involved with the situations, and you, you know, it helps you to think through these questions in ways that, you know, well, I mean, as one of the few people on the planet who's probably actually read all the IPCC reports, I mean, they just put you to sleep, right?
Ramanan (29:16) Yes, yes they do.
Naomi (29:18) It's not their fault, know, it's not, they're not meant to be entertainment. But, you know, I don't know, it would be nice if there were some way to find a middle ground and make the science a little more interesting. given that the scientists are doing what they feel they have to do, it's just essential that there's people like Stan who are finding ways to talk about these issues in ways that are interesting and emotional and entertaining. And, you know, and that hit us in the heart, right?
And I don't think of Stan as being like that emotional a writer. I mean, as writing goes, his work is less emotional than some, but nevertheless, in his books, you feel the significance of the issues that he's talking about.
Molly (29:58) There's some, there is really something about his scientific matter of factness actually, that's almost much actually like your book, like Western Civilization, where you're like, I'm sorry, that's just true. And it hurts. He doesn't have to dress it up to hurt you.
Naomi (30:10) Yeah, right, right. And he can almost say it in a way that scientists can't because scientists are like, I can't say it's true, but I can talk about the probabilities and my high confidence. I know my high confidence and my low confidence. then like the next, know, again, you've gone to sleep. So, yeah.
Ramanan (30:20) 95 %
Molly (30:20) Right, right, right, 95%. Yeah.
Ramanan (30:30) A quick two-minute follow-up and then we'll get back to the thread. In the United States in particular, even modest critiques of capitalism can result in the vicious insults and the two worst words in American discourse, socialism and communism. And this is in response to just modest critiques of capitalism.
Can you talk a little bit about that issue which really sort of makes it hard to even critique capitalism without just getting dumped on?
Naomi (31:06) Yeah. Well, I mean, think the fact that people go so crazy about it proves that something's going on here. Like, why can't we have this conversation? Right. And people get so defensive and it's like, well, that's telling you something. I, there's clearly a raw nerve there that I think we know.
Molly (31:12) That it's weak. huh.
Naomi (31:13) I think Americans know that the way our economic system is operating is not working well for us. And again, this is in our new book, The Big Myth. We talk about this at great length. I mean, if you look at just the most basic measures of human well-being, health, happiness, life expectancy. America is doing really badly. Life expectancy in the United States is going backwards. We are not making progress. We're not a happy people. We're an angry people. We're upset. We're mad at each other. Every study that is done of happiness around the globe shows that Americans are not a particularly happy people. So something in our system is not working correctly. But
Ramanan (31:41) It is. Yes.
Naomi (32:01) We've been so ingrained with this American exceptionalism, we're the greatest, we're the best, that we have a really hard time talking honestly about the way in which our system isn't working. And so then we get angry and maybe we vote for Donald Trump or whatever it is we do, but we don't have a serious conversation about how things could be better. And so in the new book, The Big Myth, we talk about this. And one of the points we make is that the propagandists of the free market…
Ramanan (32:06) 100%.
Naomi (32:30) …did this deliberately. They wanted us to think that the only choices available to us were extreme totalitarian communism, Soviet-style dictatorship, or a completely unregulated market. And it's this false dichotomy that has been reinforced by various groups and institutions and people that we talk about in the book that has made it really hard to have this conversation about this big middle area.
Ramanan (32:40) Right.
Naomi (32:59) And so part of what we were trying to do with the new book, The Big Myth, was to invite a conversation about this middle area and to say, wait, hold on, like, this is like a classic logical fallacy. It's what philosophers call the fallacy of the excluded middle. There's this giant middle ground that we aren't even talking about. And so our hope for the new book is that it would invite a conversation about the middle ground.
Molly (33:23) So then it sounds like you don't think, and I feel like this is, again, because we go to the polls, this is sort of the P-O-L-E-S poles. This comes up over and over, this question of whether capitalism itself, know, Ramanan and I invest in climate tech startups.
I believe in innovation and ingenuity, and often capitalism is a great motivating force for innovation and ingenuity, and it sounds like you're not saying that capitalism, is incompatible with solving the climate crisis? Or do you think that? Because I think there's a pretty good argument that it might not be, honestly.
Naomi (33:56) Yeah, well, you know. Well, right, exactly. I think this is just again, this is a conversation I want us to have. I think we don't know. I don't want to rule out the possibility that capitalism could respond and give us the solutions we need. And we live in a capitalist world, so obviously we have to do everything we can to mobilize the power and the forces that we have available to us. But I really think we're in this moment where we're about to find out.
I mean, if the world can't figure out some way to respond to the climate crisis soon, really soon, then we are looking at a collapse of Western civilization kind of scenario. And then future historians will say capitalism as they practiced it led them into a catastrophe. And we don't know how this story ends, but I do think...
Ramanan (34:47) No.
Naomi (34:49) Again, getting back to this idea of imagination, one of the things we talk about in the new book is Margaret Thatcher and the so-called TINA Doctrine. Do you remember that? When Margaret Thatcher was promoting neoliberalism in the Soviet Union, ha ha, Freudian slip, in the United Kingdom, her slogan was, "T.I.N.A: "There Is No Alternative.” And that, I mean, of all the terrible things that anyone would ever say, that's among the most terrible because there are always alternatives.
Molly (35:10) Yeah, talk about -
Naomi (35:18) And the idea that you would tell people there's no alternative, there's no choice, you have to do it that way. I mean, that's incredibly fascistic and dictatorial, right? And incredibly undemocratic. There are always alternatives. And part of our challenge, I think, is to imagine those alternatives and then to figure out how to get the good ones implemented.
Molly (35:39) Speaking of imagining the alternatives, you are one of the few who has imagined the kind of like collapse of Western civilization. And for people who haven't yet read this, what does that look like? And how should that galvanize maybe people in the West to start thinking about not making extinction-level decisions at the polls?
Naomi (35:59) What does the collapse look like? Well, I mean, you've read the books so you know, it looked like hundreds of millions of people being displaced from their homes across the globe. It looks like massive outbreaks of pandemics because when people get dislocated, disease often is triggered. Also, when people are dislocated and social structures are ruptured, that often leads to other consequences like
Molly (36:01) Yeah.
Ramanan (36:04) You
Molly (36:04) Yep.
Naomi (36:27) …undermining political systems. So it looks like the overthrow of democratic governments. It looks like food riots. It looks like the death of dogs and cats. I got a lot of criticism for that.
Molly (36:40) Which is shocking because of course that, I mean, that's happening right now in the fires and animals are being left behind and yeah.
Naomi (36:44) Exactly. know animals and pets as well as wild animals. During the Sydney fires there were massive losses of wildlife in Australia. again, part of the…
Molly (36:53) Yeah. And the dissolution of governments, right? Back to your point about how this is a danger to not just liberal democracy, to the very exist. I mean, Canada and the United States merge, right? Countries are gone. The UK formerly known as the UK now, Pangea, I can't remember that, know, but yeah.
Naomi (37:14) Yeah, or Australia, my mother, who may she rest in peace when all the people in Australia die, she goes, Naomi, how can you do that to your friends in Australia? And I thought, that just shows the power of fiction. Yeah, so my mother, I know my mother was like really upset that all the people in Australia were dead and that I had killed them in the book.
Molly (37:23) Right. Yeah, spoiler alert, everyone. Everyone in Australia dies. Everyone in Africa dies.
Molly (37:37) Yeah, fiction works. Fiction works.
Ramanan (37:41) You know, even though we've been talking about these fairly gloomy things, for whatever reason, I find this conversation inspirational. So I want to say that. We're going to need to spend more time with you, sadly, for you. I have one last question, which is, anything in the pipeline? New books, fiction, nonfiction?
Molly (37:47) It's delightful.
Naomi (37:49) Well thank you, I think that's, Yeah, I get asked that all the time. It's funny. So with the completion of
The Big Myth for the first time in my entire academic career I finished a book. I hadn't actually already got started on the next one. I mean, I've been writing book continuously for 35 years. So I'm taking a little break I'm taking a breather and I don't know what's next. I mean, I know I'm sure there will be another book.
One thing I'm thinking about comes out of The Big Myth. So in The Big Myth, one of things we talk about is Adam Smith and the mis-representation of Adam Smith and that Adam Smith himself understood and argued for the importance of regulation. So I'm thinking maybe a short book called The Real Adam Smith, something like that. I don't know. But if you have ideas, let me know. I love to hear from readers and hear what people, I like to hear what people think I should be writing about.
Molly (38:44) Do that.
Ramanan (38:51) Well, for anyone listening, just read anything Naomi writes. I'm gonna wrap us up here. Naomi, thank you so much for sharing your knowledge, your drive with us. We love your work. We think it is having impact. It's had an impact on us. And the world needs more of you to get to the changes we need.
Naomi (38:56) Thank you.
Molly (38:56) Read it all. Read it all.
Naomi (38:59) They're nice. Thank you so much. I really appreciate that.
Molly (39:12) Yes. Thank you again for the time. Both The Big Myth and The Collapse of Western Civilization are available online. Please read them. And if you don't have the patience for an entire book, don't worry. Naomi's also written many, many, articles on this topic. And you can find them everywhere. Just turn to your friendly search engine and read everything she's ever done. Thanks, Naomi.
Naomi (39:36) Thank you.
Ramanan (39:37) Thank you for listening. Please email us at [email protected] with any suggestions or ideas. And visit futurverse.earth for the full transcript of this podcast and other information.
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