Dave Powell: “This is Your Brain on Climate”

What does it even take to get a brain to grasp this huge problem? In this episode, activist, storyteller, climate communicator, and podshow host Dave Powell says it’s like trying to hold a whole planet in your arms. We channel all the brilliant minds he’s interviewed for his show, “Your Brain on Climate,” to understand why our brains are stymied by climate change.

Show notes:

• Dave’s podcast, Your Brain on Climate
• Dave’s podcast Sustainababble
• New Economics Foundation
• Center for Climate Change and Social Transformation
• Local Storytelling Exchange
• Sarah Stein Lubrano’s episode on Your Brain on Climate, and her interview on Climate Magic
• Timothy Morton’s book on climate change as a “Hyperobject”
• Pseudoinefficacy concept explained
• The “We” episode of Your Brain on Climate
• Kris De Meyer’s episode on Your Brain on Climate
• Daniel Kahneman's book, Thinking, Fast and Slow
• Jamie Bristow’s episode on Your Brain on Climate
• Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark
• Laurie Layborn’s episode on Your Brain on Climate
• Rupert Read’s episode on Your Brain on Climate
• Mike Berners-Lee’s episode on Your Brain on Climate
• The Climate Psychology Alliance (and the CPA of North America)
• Jonathan Rowson’s episode on Your Brain on Climate
• Dana Fisher’s interview on Climate Magic about her book, Saving Ourselves
• adrienne maree brown’s work on Pleasure Activism
• Radiohead’s music about climate change
• Stuart Goldsmith’s episode on Your Brain on Climate
  

Transcription:

POWELL: I think liberate yourself from the idea that the response to a problem that 8 billion people on a planet and a vastness are experiencing is something you can fix.

RAY: Welcome to Climate Magic, where we explore the emotional life of climate politics. I'm your host, Dr. Sarah Jaquette Ray, chair of the Environmental Studies department at Cal Poly Humboldt. Today, I'm speaking with David Powell, who is currently host of the brilliant climate psychology podcast Your Brain on Climate. And he also hosted the long running, chart topping comedy climate show Sustainababble.

He has 20 years working on climate communications, economics and policy. He's been head of environment at the UK thinktank the New Economics Foundation, and head of advocacy at the Global Climate Communication organization Climate Outreach. He's now head of programs for the climate journalism organization the Local Storytelling Exchange.

Dave thinks culture and psychology are often the missing bits in most political and communication strategies on climate change, which is what makes him so perfect for a guest on the show. On Climate Magic, culture and psychology are our favorite levers for change. We talk about the biggest things that he's learned about brains and emotions and his interviews. One of those things is how our decisions and actions are based more on identity and our sense of our own self than on reason or logic. As he put it, emotions are bigger than facts, and beliefs follow actions. And I think this is really counterintuitive, because I often think of emotions being secondary to facts, or even getting in the way of good decisions based on reason.

And I often think about actions deriving from our beliefs rather than our beliefs coming from our actions, which the neuroscience and all the studies that he researches through his conversations actually show us to be true. He invites us to liberate ourselves from the notion that we can change the world, and to stop saying we need to fix the problems, or we need to do x, Y, or z.

But to identify the we that already exists within each of our own spheres of influence, and see the action rippling out from there, we get towards the punchline that whatever we're doing for climate change, it should just feel good. And to that point, we talk about humor and how important levity and humor are for finding our way through all of this mess. And it also helps us ground the ungraspable idea of climate change in culture.

He's funny. He's super smart. He's been in this world of thinking about the emotional and cognitive life of climate politics for a long time. And so he has some epic wisdom to share.

So are you ready to channel all of Dave's interviewees from Your Brain on Climate into this one hour? Let's dive in.

I really want to talk about your podcast. I have to confess that I found it, a little bit by accident. I found your podcast because I was thinking of naming my show Your Brain on Climate. True confessions. True confessions of brilliant minds think alike. And when I found it, I thought, oh, my gosh. And I've been devouring it since. So I wanted to thank you for that. You also introduced me to a couple other thinkers through your show that I had not heard of before, and now I'm finding it so fun because you've expanded my intellectual network and my kind of internal bibliography much, much wider.

And I've got all these books coming in the mail, so thank you for that.

POWELL: Yeah, I always get, as my mate always tells me off because every time I do an episode, he has to go and buy the book and he's got that far more. He can't read all the books, just stacking up these books by interesting people. You know, there are a lot of interesting people out there saying interesting things.

RAY: There are. And, who would have thought so many people are studying this stuff with such granularity? So, I'm really appreciating that.

I think of your show a little bit like you're like the marriage counselor for these two, this partnership that, has a lot of conflict that needs to work out your brain and climate change. It's like what happens when these two partners sit down on a couch together in the therapy room?

So, yeah, let's start with that. You know what? Why did you put these two things together on the couch?

POWELL: It's a better way to describe and like, this is the first time I've sort of, anyone's really asked me that question, so forgive me if this comes out a bit, a bit funny. I think that, so I've been working on, like, climate stuff for 20 odd years, something like that. My background, like I, started off as a climate campaigner. You know, oil companies are all bastards. All we need to do is think of a better world and they will come along.

And maybe there's a few vested interests to tackle and, and sort of gradually beginning to dawn on me and that process of, like is a bit more complicated than that. Like, I think, I think I don't think everyone who goes to work for an oil company is actually a bastard. And I don't think that like simply saying to people that they need to stop doing bad things will get them to stop doing it.

And I wonder why that is. And I didn't study psychology or anything like that, you know, any more than anyone else does, really. But just sort of beginning, you know, shortcutting a lot of the process in beginning to think like. What is this thing called climate change in our brains? Like, how do we actually understand it and represent it? And how come what I think it is not what other people seem to think is what is?

Some people care more or some people care less. And so I got more and more interested in kind of climate communications and how you talk to people realizing that, like. I don't think human brains aren’t really kitted out to understand this thing called climate change at all. I don't think we've evolved for it. Like we probably evolved the collective ability to do something about it, if we can harness that.

But I don't think we have like the conceptual toolkit for a thing that is like distant in time, bigger than any of us. You can't see it directly. It's not a tiger in a bush. It's not the immediate sort of stuff that we, you know, that we kind of are wired to do something about. And it's, you know, the idea of a hyper object is a thing that crops up in motion, Timothy Morton's idea is this is an idea that is just too big to get the human brain around. It's like, you can't ever take all of it in. It's like imagining standing really, really, really close up to a planet and trying to sort of hold it all in your arms. You can't. You can't do it. And I just find that, like, for some reason, I haven't quite got to the bottom of. I think it's something to do with Jesus. I'm sure we'll come to that in a minute, but, like.

I find it all just fascinating. Like. how is what is going on in your brain and my brain and your listeners’ brains and my dad's brain and my mate in the pub's brain when they hear this thing called climate change, what do they think it is? And like how do and then you think about that for a bit and then you go, how do you and brains think about anything? How do we make sense of the world?

Like what, if any ideas come from what do we decide to do anything. And you can still go down this rabbit hole of psychology. So, but it all of that just seems to be kind of missing that sort of how what are people actually think this thing is? What moves them to act on it? Why do we move on, act on some ideas and not on other ideas? Why do all of these brilliant things that humans do?

What are the ideas that underpin them, and how can we get some of that for climate change? And like ultimately that seems to be missing, I think, in a lot of campaign strategies and political strategies and certainly in economic strategies, which are totally not working. So mostly I did the podcast because I wanted to find out more about it. Like I say, you know, when I first pitched it to the world, I was like, I know nothing about this.

So come and talk to me and, and forgive my stupid questions. And I think I'm sort of learning more about it, but. But, well, I'm not you know, an …

RAY: Expert. That is your approach. Yeah. Yeah. The fact that you don't have a background in psychology makes your role on the show, I think, really effective, because you're the kind of dumb it down for me. I need to figure out how to apply this to some to my life, or to help people who are listening apply this in some way. I find that really great. And I'm sort of attempting a similar thing here where I'm trying to say, okay, I spent all this time in my geeky research circles on these topics.

I also didn't have a background in psychology, so I came to it kind of late too and I'm like, wow, why? Why aren’t we using all this information people have and methodologies for studying these things for climate change? So I had a similar kind of energy around that. Like there are a lot of people who know a lot of stuff over here. Why aren't we applying it correctly or effectively, I guess is the better word for it.

You're referring to a lot of what, from inside the research circle of people, they call things like risk theory or risk perception theory. And the Timothy Morton concept of a hyperobject has this idea. Social psychologists have this concept of pseudoefficacy, which is kind of a big premise of the show, which is like, this problem is so big, and because I can't tackle the whole problem, I'm not even going to look at it.

You know? I can't even begin to think about it. I'm curious. You know, whether or not you've gotten any kind of handle, has studying all this and talking to all these smarty pants people, has it helped you make the problem smaller to tackle? Do you feel any differently about climate change as a result of all these fascinating conversations?

POWELL: That's a brilliant question. I mean, I mean, yes, I think emerging from, certainly some of the episodes. Particularly that I've done recently, emerging from them has been what feels like a common theme. And I don't know if it's just because I'm looking for that theme or whether actually it's beginning to drop into place. And, that. It's a theme basically, about. We. So some of the stuff about how the.

Human brain works is just crazy, right? We don't respond. To rational argument. We like to think that we do, but we're creatures of kind of emotion and we're creatures of, you know, we act first and think later. And the brain's capacity to kind of justify to itself stuff that is done, something it thought was right. All of this stuff. Like, you know, we do it all the time we do something bad in our life.

And then brain goes, oh, hang on a minute, you're a bad person for doing that. And so your brain kind of thing goes so right. You're not a bad person. Here's all the reasons why the thing that you did is bad is all right. I'll rationalize it and we kind of make it okay. And all of that applies like to when you're talking to people about climate change. Like the number one thing it seems to me that you need to do is like, don't make people have to feel that they have to take a position based on their priors as much as you possibly can. Right? What do I mean by that? Like if you're, if I say to. You something like, Is the death penalty good? Yes or no? Right. And you in reality haven’t really thought about it. Maybe you think it's complicated, right. But I'm making you go, yes or no. Right.

And I'm me. And you think, oh, Dave's this person. What does Dave want me to say? And you say, yes. I think it's bad. What you want that won't your brain will then go. Oh, why did I say that? Maybe. I do think the death penalty is good. And then you will become someone ever so slightly more who does think that the death penalty is good, regardless of what you think about it. If I say to you like, hello, I'm from Greenpeace and I think oil org, all oil companies are bastards. Do you think we should do something about climate change? And your immediate response to that is to go? I don't like that person. No, I don't think we should. Then that's a thing that you now think. And you think it forever. And your brain starts to harden around the stuff you do in the world. Like, beliefs follow actions much more than people think. Emotions are bigger than facts, and beliefs follow actions. And so much of like the distillation of things I've heard recently, is about like try to have conversations with people about climate change where you're not triggering their sense of like, am I a good person? What would a good person like me say about this? What is my tribe? Think about this?

Just creating the space for kind of people to reflect on what they do think. Which is like, I think, a thing that we all are pretty good at in our lives in general, when it's about some stuff like, you know, having conversations with your mates in the pub, you don't generally immediately come in and try and judge people. But with climate change people, I think because it's so complicated.

And a bit abstract, we sort of go all in and it just as soon as you do that, you've lost people as is. Wonderful work. Well, an episode I did with a guy called Kris de Meyer, who's sort of theorized all of this around this idea of a pyramid that you start with any given idea in the world, you start at the top of it. You could sort of go, yes or no, left or right. And then when. You decide to go yes, or no, left or right. It’s very hard for you to go back, and then you're more likely to keep tripping down a particular path. And that's how two people that know each other really well can, like, I have the same view on something and not see each other for 20 years. And they come back and one is a Republican and one's a Democrat, right. Because like, in that time, they've taken a small series of quick decisions that someone like them would take.

And then you've ended up like over a period of time with that becoming a sort of a deepening of identity. So. Yeah, I think that's certainly at the moment, anyway, a thing that keeps coming up. Coming out of so many of the episodes is like, that's the way to talk about climate change with people is to try, try to sort of just not be triggering people’s sense of identity and threaten self.

RAY: Yeah, I love that you're the sort of threat to identity, social identity and threat to being a sense of yourself as a good person. These two things being kind of key, the idea that emotions matter more than, logic in some of these things. And, actions follow, beliefs follow actions. And in a way that's actually kind of counterintuitive. We often think that our actions are coming out of our beliefs.

Well, we do this, and I know we…

POWELL: Got this idea. About ourselves, don't we? As like these kind of, you know, and. The Enlightenment's got a lot to do with this is where it all went wrong. But like this idea that we are like.

RAY: We always go back to the Enlightenment.

RAY: That's where it all starts.

POWELL: We've got different bits of our brain. We've got the bit of our brain that is rational and thinks about stuff and processes, logic and facts. And let's not pretend that's not there. But it's not the only bit of our brain. We've still got the scared chimp bit of our brain and the squishy, you know, protein, little bit of our brain, that kind of all it wants to do is, you know, the various F's. And, and like, that's…

RAY: The pleasure seeking..

POWELL: Pleasure seeking part, you know, and those bits of the brain when the chips, when you have to make decisions quickly. When you don't have the time to engage, that you know, that I forget about system one or system two, but the Daniel Kahneman stuff about the two types of thinking fast and slow. When you don't have to do that, you will take orders when you don't have time to do that, you'll make a decision based on stuff you have thought before and things that hold yourself together and stuff that you think someone like you should say. And,, and then once you've done it, that's it. Your brain will go, well, that's I think that's it.

RAY: And that's what you mean by emotions matter more than reason for so many of our decisions, all that other all those other parts of the brains, all of those shortcuts, if you will, are actually dictating our decision making and our actions a lot more than we pretend is logic. And we rationalize that after the fact is a little bit what you're saying.

Yeah. I love this. You talk about it in terms of communication, that we need to take all these things to account when we're communicating about climate change.

But, you know, I also listened to a great episode with Sarah Stein Lubrano that you had where she basically said, we don't need to talk to anybody. That's a waste of time. I'm wondering, I like that blew my mind the amount of energy I have spent teaching students, working myself on writing about how we need to have better communication, how we have to have more compassion and communication, how the problem of polarization and the demise of democracy in our country is about this fundamental problem of communication.

I'm curious, did she make you think differently about it? Is she making you rethink your entire career?  Know what I mean? I mean, it's communication, you know? Are we over? Are we post communication, or is this not the solution to all of our problems?

POWELL: So firstly, you’re right, the book which has just come out, I’m not sure the name, by Sarah Stein Lubrano, but you ought to read it, I think it's called Don't Talk about Politics, I think.

RAY: Oh, yeah. It's called. Oh, yeah. She's, I'm going to get her on the show.

POWELL: You need to get her on. And it's an amazing, it's an amazing book. And she was one of the guests I was referring to who was kind of in this little recent run that I've had. So that is making me think like, you know, try not to get people's backs up, because. At the heart of. What she's basically arguing is it's a book about cognitive dissonance, right? It's a it's a book about the fact that basically human brains are quite capable of thinking conflicting things at the same time, like, a really good example we talk about this in the show is: people who care about climate change, they might vote green, they might be members of Greenpeace. And they also fly a lot, and they fly a lot. Not because they have to, but because they like to. Our brains are quite capable, and we can also do this like 25 times every day of like, there's a thing I believe about the world, but my actions are not consistent with it or my, you know, or my, you know, the way I'm behaving in the world is not consistent with it. And what do you do when you've got that going on? You've got two choices. Which is you either like kind of just ignore it and shut it down and go away, or you seek out information that sort of backs up why you write in the first place.

So, you know, if you're taking a flight. I've done this, I've been on planes and I find. Myself, oh, well, you know, the plane would only go anyway, so I just not really mind. It's not really going to contribute to any emissions. The plane would have gone anyway. So it's, so it's fine or you know what. Yeah. Okay. But then yeah this is pretty bad. But then also my mate who, yeah his is worse. You know, you kind of compare all of this stuff and.

RAY: My individual action doesn't matter at all. It's the company, that’s the one I use. It’s another cognitive rationalization, to your earlier point.

POWELL: You know, and this is the thing we rationalize our way out of stuff. We don't deal with the cognitive dissonance generally by going, yes, you're right. I must amend my ways immediately.

RAY: Generally, I'm a hypocrite.

POWELL: You go, you preserve yourself and your idea of the self, which is a good self, a nice I'm a nice person and people like me don't do bad things and you preserve it by telling yourself a story. Right. And so her book is all about that. And her book is you don't do like if what you want to do is to get someone who thinks X and you want them to think Y. For all of the reasons we've been talking about, you're not going to get them to do that by sitting down and saying to them, here are a lot of reasons why X is wrong and Y is good, right? So, you know, that's not how it works. What you want to do instead is just give them a chance to try Y out, you know?

So if someone, she says are two things, the book really did stick with me, as you can tell, is there's two things that like actually change people's minds. It's not words. It's doing something new for the first time that you've never done before. And so you go, ooh, that's good. Actually, I quite like that. Be that going on a bungee cord or recycling for the first time. Or hanging around with someone that you know, that exposes you to kind of new ideas and you, you trust them. And then again, to that thing. I'm not triggering people's sense of identity. You make new friends with new interests. So actually they're all right. And they do this.

So maybe that's all right too. So I think her point I think, is not that communication is a waste of time because, you know, we communicate. That's what we do. But almost like what the purpose of communication is. The purpose of communication is not to deliver facts and hope. So that changes people's minds. The purpose of communication is, if you like, to lower people's sense of threat.

But yeah, I mean, it's her stuff is really fascinating. And this is I it's taken a while. I think, for the show to, to really get into that stuff. But this is what the show is about. It's like there are these basic human conflicts between living a life as a squishy bag of water, where you have stuff to do and you don't want to get eaten by a bear, versus thinking about the entire sodding planet and my tiny relationship to it.

And obviously that causes your brain to explode. And most of the time. The way you deal with that is just by pretending. Pretending that you're all right. And you know, so it is.

RAY: That's when I'm right there with you. I am, most of the time pretending I'm all right, too. I mean, one of the reasons why I want to study this stuff is because it helps me be accountable to my values and ease a little of my cognitive dissonance, you know? So yeah, I love that. Thank you for introducing us to some of these really important key terms, around what's happening with our brains too.

So you've explained a little bit about what happens when the brain and climate sit on a couch. They don't get along very well. There's all kinds of reasons why, the brain doesn't want to accept this as a thing. It's just, you know, it's part of this bag of water, and it's dealing with the things that are right in front of it. And climate change, for all the reasons you just described, just doesn't go with what our brains want to do.

Here's a question for you. I am wondering if you think part of what in your work you're doing with this, with the podcast and maybe in your work, you know, your day job? Are you've mentioned there's mentioned in your bio and there's other places where it says stuff like, you want to bring culture and psychology as a toolkit to this work, or you think that's there's a gap in the kind of mainstream discourse around using psychology and thinking of culture as kind of the arena of change to happen.

And obviously, when each of us as individuals learn this stuff about our brains, we can have interventions and do different things. Like you just interviewed Jamie Bristow and he talked about mindfulness as a strategy and not a panacea to solve all these problems, but certainly a place to give us a little cracks, more around agency in this big system. I guess my question is, you know, how can we translate that individual stuff about, okay, if I know a little bit more about how my brain works and how it's getting in the way of us doing this work to this collective, now our societies look like a society that knows what it's doing with nature, and it has an awareness of its collective brain, if you will.

POWELL: So, I mean, in a way you've described is that.

RAY: Is it possible?

POWELL: I mean, in a way, I think you've described kind of the category problem. There is no way that I can conceive of my action in the world unless I am Elon Musk or something, where anything I do will change the course of human history right? It might. And I think Rebecca Solnit is amazing on this. Like, it is definitely worth trying and you never know who sees your flame. Listen to your podcast. You know, hope in the dark and all that. It has ripple effects, but you can't really understand what they are. But what I've really taken from my show, the thing that, like I am trying to do, is understanding that we, I'm, you know, including my, my tribe here, leftie, liberal, activist, educated people are every bit as prone to the biases and heuristics as anyone else.

Right? Or the stories that we carry around about things like climate action and why it matters. Is all and the things. That galvanize us to take actions and the arguments that make sense to us are every bit functions of our monkey brains as anything else. And understanding that, I think, is and doing some. Reflection on that, you know, it's not a show about mindfulness. I did one episode about mindfulness, but if you do spend a bit of time just thinking about, Why do I think that? Why actually do I think that climate change is important? What is it to me I mentioned in passing at the start, like I did a lot of reflecting on it myself. Like if I. If I really sit still. Why do I care? You can do some great exercises on this. You say to people like, your listeners might want to do this now, like if I get you to think about what climate change means to you, like why you care about it, and then you ask people to sort of go to Google and find some images and share those images, or you try and conjure up in your head what you think.

Then on the first pass people will tend to chalk up stuff like they will, they'll go wildfires. Wildfires are bad. I don't want to see those or pictures of animals or, you know, they'll describe the effects in the world that they're worried about. But you can kind of you can push out. It and you can go deeper and you realize, like, what story is it that you hold very deeply about the world, that climate change is attaching itself to?

And for me, I was brought up religious. I was brought up, you know, and I sort of, going to church every week, went to a church school. I don't know if I ever believed or not, but that stuff was all around me. And like the iconography and the story about, like, God made this world and you evil sinners are messing it up right? And the idea that, like, you know. Some this idea, this idea.

Of sinning against creation, right? I'm not at all religious. Now, this is not a thing that consciously galvanizes me, but my deep story that's in there for all sorts of like for genetic and cultural reasons. It's got that idea in it that is, I know. Is why I what it is that I'm. Really accessing when I'm thinking about why we should do something about climate change is this sense of like there is a higher order thing that was created and we are messing it up.

And it's a really fascinating exercise to do that and to understand that. Therefore, if I'm like, it makes you go like the sort of business. The arguments about acting on climate change, you know, the ones about like, well, we should act on climate because it's really good for companies and it's really good for, you know, GDP and all that stuff. And a lot of people are really galvanized by that.

I get it. It doesn't work on me. Like, I understand intellectually that it's important. It doesn't move me. It doesn't move me because that's not that's a completely different story. That's a story about like, human ingenuity and kind of you know, the triumph of the human spirit. My story is one about humility. It's based in this kind of religious idea that is deep, deep inside me, that you go into your belly, you foul little human, and await the punishment of God for the stuff that you have done.

And I think, like, the first thing we should all do is, other people's will be different, I hope. But the first thing you should do is just reflect on what is it that what is that the underlying deep stuff that you carry around the ideas, the fundamental ideas that are deep in you that climate change is a cipher for because you're not, because it isn't climate change itself. You cannot comprehend it like it means something different to every person on earth, because you're attaching it to your sort of culturally, socially, individually constructed story. I just think that then makes you a much, it makes you much more like accepting of, and, you know, generous towards people who have it wrong. Because they don't, you know, they don't they don't have it wrong. They just see the world differently to you. Everybody's got these foundational beliefs.

And it makes you I think it makes you much more kind of able to understand where you can have agency, like what your tribe is, how you can have who are the people that think like you and also where you sometimes get stuff wrong, you know, I mean, there's some basic stuff in here.

I'm doing an episode about this quite soon about, like our fear of death and, like humans, kind of, like our understanding of our mortality. And the denial that particularly in Western cultures, we kind of wrap ourselves in about, you know, sort of the fact that we are just going to get eaten by worms. And we are this squishy bag of water and we, you know, we have emerged from dust and back to dust. We will go and we don't really live and understand that. And so. We're always like, we're never really thinking about the mess we're making, and we're never really thinking about the kind of collectively here. I mean, you know, the payback for all of this. We just, we, we extract and we use and we burn and we put waste in a hole and we move on. And until we change, I think that kind of way of understanding what it means to live on this planet, then I think all the other stuff is just going to keep happening.

And large parts of that come down to understanding how our brains work.

RAY: I am loving this because you say it comes from an origin of humility and the sort of sense of, kind of blasphemy or desacralizing the earth, from this kind of Judeo-Christian kind of origins that are really for a lot of Western white people walking around in the U. S to that is in our water, even if we don't identify as religious ourselves. One of the things that you've prompted me to think about is that, and I don't know if you talk about this in any one of your episodes, maybe curious of what you'd say about this, which is that I am sort of on a little bit on my own rabbit hole, thinking if we peel back those layers of how our stories are, attaching to climate change and how, you know, really critically engage in a humble way why it is that we, you know, think climate change is an important value.

Why is that the risk we want to put, center to our amygdala and, and the threat. So we want to organize people around. Why not something else? What is it, a cipher for you? So that I think that's really a great question. If I am really honest, I can peel it all back. And I think that for me, that really cracks open an opportunity for coalition building, not just around compassion and humility, but around maybe this isn't really to do with climate change.

Maybe the word climate is not the point. Or is aside from the point, I don't know. You're nodding and I'm wondering, are you with me? You know what I'm saying?

POWELL: I'm 100%.

RAY: Is it an arbitrary label?

POWELL: Yeah, it's the big objective that everybody should kind of. We should stop doing all the stuff. That we're doing wrong, some of which will be very costly to stop doing, and there will be disruption to the economy and all of that. And we should stop doing that, because otherwise we will mess up this planet. And that is just as a moral case. We should stop. We should. Yeah. And with it, us and the us, the global us, you know, in particular people who didn't cause it.

Do we need people to understand that or not, or do we not have time for that? Do we need to game the fact that, like actually the way you mostly get people to do stuff, a lot of cases is making it in their self-interest, you know, or talking about, you know, how you should get solar panels because it's just going to save you money. And you're just doing that. And I, I really oscillate on what I think about that. And I just, I think it depends. What, you know, what time for the time frame you're looking at it. Certainly for coalition building, like there are two very different types of coalition you could build, both of which work, one of which is one that is. And these coalitions both exist, by the way, like coalitions about like moral purpose, you know, and a lot of the sort of activist liberal, campaigns are basically ones about we should stop doing this because it's a bad thing to do.

Like that for whatever reason, justice, environmental destruction, whatever. And then all sorts of other coalitions that are based on, you know, we should seize the opportunity of clean energy and we and all of the stuff that happens around, like valuing nature so that business can incorporate it into their balance sheets and sort of turn, you know, subjecting if you like the environment to the mechanisms, that means people will care about it in the here and now.

And they're both like, I have a preference. For the former because as discussed, that's my, you know, my heuristic, but you need them both. You definitely need them both. And again, I think it's sort of understanding like both for yourself but also for people. You might need to make change in any particular time. What's the thing you need to do here? You know. And yeah, it is going to vary unfortunately. And that's the reality of it. There is no kind of one, one strategy to it, but the more one reflects on like both for any given people, like what makes them tick actually what are the things they're excited by? Scared by? What values do they hold? The more you can think about, what's the action really going to look like here? And how do we get to do it?

RAY: Okay, this is where you get to give advice. Given all that you've learned about psychology in these interviews, what would you say to a person who feels overwhelmed and despairing and just doesn't even feel like facing any of it?

POWELL: Good Lord. Right. This is not a first, not there personally. Go and talk to someone. Go and talk to someone. Who's actually a qualified anything. For a start.

RAY: Okay, therapist. Let's say let's say this. They don't have time, money, whatever. They're just listening to this show. And have just happened to be listening to the show for some reason.

POWELL: I mean, the first thing is like, let's just. Say for the record, that I think as a perfectly rational response. Like. Yes, frankly. So I've actually done quite a few episodes. I mean, obviously I'm not I'm not in any way like if people are suffering, they should seek help. And I'm not saying like, you know, subject yourself to anxiety for the sake of it.

RAY: But we should put that as a caveat before everything, frankly.

POWELL: If I had to choose between, you know, someone who, upon learning about the state of things. If I had to choose between a person who just completely ignored it or somebody who leaned into it and got terrified, I would pick, I think the person who leans into it and gets terrified is doing the better thing. Because you cannot, there's an episode I did recently with Laurie Layborn about this, also with Rupert Reid. And Mike Berners Lee. Quite a few episodes that have talked about you have you cannot have honesty and have an action that makes sense for you or society if you don't actually get your head around this. Right? Again, the cognitive dissonance thing. Right? Like it is much, much easier. Every sign up of our brain is telling us to run away from the bad news, pretend the bad news isn't a thing and most people don't look at it.

Or if they do look at it go away and you know and just live their life and don't think about it too much. Which is a perfectly rational thing to do for a species that grew up, you know, eating bananas and running a life and tigers, that's like, you know, it's a perfectly rational thing for humans to do. So. So the first thing is like, it's not a bad thing inherently to be overwhelmed by.

But I think action comes from like reflecting upon what you can do in your sphere of influence, severing this idea that you have to change the world, that you can change the world, that somehow there is a thing that most of us can do that in any measurable sense, could affect the course of humanity. Everybody, everybody's actions affect the course of human humanity. But you can't sit down and plan it, right? So where do you have people who trust you who will follow your lead? Whether you are in an organization. Where you can make a difference? Where do you make decisions in your household where you could, you know, decide about things? Are there, you know. Are you interested in politics? Is politics the thing you want to do? Everybody has a thing that they have a sphere of influence in where they can make a difference.

And where in the making of the difference, somebody will look at you and go, oh, you've done a right. That's quite good. I like the way you've I like the way you've done that. You know, I'm not an expert in kind of dealing with the terribleness in a sort of practical sense and definitely seek those experts out. And the Climate Psychology Alliance has a load of links, and I'm sure there's brilliant stuff in the States.

Forgive me, I don't know, but, you know, loads it. There are loads of resources out there for people that find this stuff too much, but there's nothing wrong with sitting for a bit in the vastness of it and then working out, what's the thing I can do? And, you know, back to what we were talking about with Sarah Stein Lubrano as interview and some of the work about like action based, action based help, like doing something is incredibly therapeutic. Now we know this in our lives, right? You know, you make a to do list and then you do something on that to do list. That's much better than having done that thing without having put it on a to do list. Right? Like the sense of having…

RAY: I’ll take a shower, then put the shower on my to do list. I mean.

POWELL: That doesn't count, you know, let's do that. But just doing so. They said, come on, it's true. Not right. Like, you know, the amount. There's this wonderful quote from, Tanni Grey-Thompson, who's a British Olympian from I think I've she's retired now about ten, 20 years ago. And she said, like, the most important thing you can do if you want to do something is just start, like start doing something. To many people, by the time they hey think about whether they should start or not, could have done something. And it doesn't matter if the thing is wrong and the thing doesn't is probably not going to be perfect.

RAY: Yeah, and I love what you're saying. And I want to just be a devil's advocate and say things like, okay, well the reason why I'm not going to start to do anything is because it's not gonna make a difference. My, the scale of my action, you know, even if it affects other people. And some people look over me and say, I want to do the same thing you're doing, it really is nothing.

I mean, I remember having an experience with a class where I was trying to get them around, you know, to feeling hopeful and essential, you know, like efficacious about what they are, that they matter in the world.

I mean, young people in particular have been told that they don't matter. And I remember when I was young feeling like, oh, wait till I'm older and have some power, you know it. So there's a real sense of like, when you're young, you don't think you have any power to, in addition to feeling despairing and defeated because it's the sort of natural response our brains would take to such information, there's also this cultural water we're swimming and telling us that we have no power if we think of ourselves only as individuals.

So I, I want to kind of surface out a little bit about the individualism culture that most of us swim around in, that tells us that we have to be heroes to save the whole thing or not, or it's not even worth trying. So there's that too. No, no, no. Right.

And I know you know that, I know you know that. And of course, many of our guests have talked about that too, and I think but what I guess I'm saying is there is this kind of counterintuitive thing you just offered. I didn't want to push you to unpack a little bit. How does it make sense that giving up on thinking we matter actually could free us from that defeatism and enable us to.

POWELL: If that's why I said I didn't mean to say it. What I meant is giving up on the idea that.

RAY: Maybe it's something I do.

POWELL: No, no, it was more of what you said. Giving up on the idea that we alone can change the entire course of human civilization. Okay, so it's giving up on the idea that's giving up on exactly, as you were saying, the kind of hero idea. Right? Again, talking about Western culture, completely steeped in this idea of like, you know, the hero, often a man, also usually a white man who will come along and kind of save us all.

And that's kind of how it is. And we love heroes, don't we? We kind of look out for them and, you know, and whatnot. I think liberate yourself from the idea that the response to a problem that 8 billion people on a planet, a vastness we are experiencing is something you can fix, right? There is an episode that I did with Jonathan Rowson, and I think it's called We.

RAY: I haven't.

POWELL: Listen to that. So it's really good. Because he says he is specifically about he says one of the biggest problems that the way climate is talked about is when people say things like, we need to insert thing here, we need we need to end, fossil fuels, we need to do this or the other. And it's a we that doesn't exist. It's we it's a cognitive dissonance thing.

You hear that and you go, well, who's this “we”, what is my relationship to it? And what he says instead is, well, maybe you should start from the places. Where there is a we in your life, like somewhere where there is already a community, somewhere where, you know, there is, you know, you're a member of a football team or a choir or a business or a student in a class, or just a household, or just you and your mates.

Which is a thing where you do things together and you do projects together and you do stuff and there is trust. And in that trust, you can have the sort of conversation that doesn't get people's hackles up. You can take collective action, be that political or, you know, cultural or whatever it is, and start there. Find the place where. You can make a ripple happen. But it's a ripple, you know, within a predefined community, and then see what happens then. And then imagine if everybody in that community then does that in another community they're a member of, because you've kind of inspired them to do it. Think about it. Not as like, you changing the whole world, but you kind of radiating out good, good work into spaces that then, you know, radiates out somewhere else. I think it's a much better way of thinking about it and also going, it might not work like it might, you know, this thing might be counterproductive. Or maybe by doing a thing over here, we're actually increasing emissions over there.

This is humanity. This is messy. We haven't got a playbook for it. But doing something in a collective space, taking action in a space of people, the form for whom that taking action might be new and you can help them to do it, whatever that looks like is a really powerful psychological, but also sort of efficacious, I think.

RAY: Yeah, yeah. And I think this particular moment that we're living through with more and more evidence around, and I'll put this in the show notes too, but I just finished Dana Fisher's book, Saving Ourselves. I don't know if you're familiar with her work. Basically, the book is nice and short and pithy and written to be accessible, and she basically says over the last 30 years, not just the last six months or since Trump or whatever, over the last x number of years, we've had, failure of the state and failure of markets to solve this problem.

And therefore civil society is the only place where it's going to happen. And, I don't know about you, but for me, that is both discouraging. Like, oh, man, the adults in the room are not going to fix this. Why? Oh, they're so bought out by fossil fuels. We really just have to give up on all these institutions that we that I as a, as a, especially as a white settler, colonial person who's benefited from those systems.

You know, I'm having my first moment of maybe they don't work. Right. So it's coming to that a little late to the party, of course. But I do think that there's also a really beautiful call to action there for civil society. You know, when you say we need to bring culture and psychology as these tools, culture as the kind of leverage point of change, to use a systems theory concept, culture as a leverage point of change.

Civil society is leverage point of change, given where we are on the epidemic of loneliness, given where we are on the fractured relationships you've talked about, given where we're at with not having much we because we're in such an isolated capitalistic, I, you know, individualized atomistic world where all islands in it, feels like it could be like a win all around. You know, we could solve our loneliness, mental health problems.

We could solve our, you know, civil society problems. We can solve our social capital, community trust, resilience, problems to deal with and adapt to climate effects. And we can also, you know, feel good about mitigating climate change, actually taking action on it. So you're just laying that all out for me. And I'm thinking, man, this is, you know, this is where we're at. We're at a point where this could be the biggest leverage point for our moment.

POWELL: I agree with everything you just said. Yeah. And I think like as well as all of that, I think we,

RAY: Tell me more.

POWELL: So in the work that I do, which is sort of, place based climate journalism. So it's about local stories of people just doing positive stuff. And I love it.

RAY: And that's it feels to me like a very important thing you're doing.

POWELL: Is really interesting because when, when people when you go and chat to people who say you haven't got much money, who have used a government grant and they've got their house insulated and now they live in a nice, decent house that isn't moldy. And you talk to them and you actually. Talk to people who have had that done. And firstly you say, why have you had that done? And they go, this makes my house better.

It's a good thing. And then you say, like. What's it like now? What was it like before? And you get some amazing stories of people who say things like, I was ashamed to have my grandkids come round to the house. I didn't want to have them here because it was moldy and it smelled. And now I'm proud to have them here again. And it's just to your point that. You were making, like so much of this stuff when it's about like the things that we call “Acting on climate,” I've got loads of things that we call co-benefits, and often they're described as economic ones, but they're also deeply human ones, like we're talking about things that are about, you know, just making people's lives better and finding, you know, from that comes an incredible nourishment to kind of go, even if we don't save the planet, at least we're doing the right thing.

Like, that's a nice thing to do. And again, that's maybe another part of the strategy, isn't it? It's like. I don't know if any of this is like, yeah, I don't know if I knew this is making a difference to the course of global emissions. But I know that it feels to me like it is. And, and it feels to me, you know, and that's if everybody. Did that. I can't help but feeling the world will be a bit better off.

RAY: Yeah, I love it. I love, you're making me, you're bringing it back down to pleasure again. Right? The part of the brain that wants things to feel good. Let's do that. Let's have more of that feeling. In part because, of course, environmentalism for a long time, I mean, to your earlier point about your story, you know, deprivation and sacrifice and being humble and waiting for punishment, that all that's all very fine and well to a lot of environmentalists comes out of that kind of ethos, and story.

But I do actually agree with, one of my favorite thinkers is a person named adrienne maree brown, whose work, I don't know if you've come across, but she's got a book called Pleasure Activism, and she actually has this kind of famous quote I use a lot, which is we have to make justice the most pleasurable thing possible. Yeah, yeah. By which, you know, the work we want to be doing in the world should feel good.

POWELL: Joyful, like it's about joy, isn't it? And like, you're not going to carry on doing something ultimately. If it doesn't bring you pleasure. Yeah. And that's why, you know, so much kind of quote unquote activism could just be people love doing it. And by activism, I mean its broad sort of, you know, just doing something cannot be really fun. It could be creative. It can be immersive. It can be a get you out of a flow state, all of that good stuff.

You know?

RAY: Yeah, yeah. All the flow state. Yeah. We need to be in a flow state while we're saving the planet as a collective. This is beautiful.

Okay, I'm going to ask you a question about humor. You're very funny when you listen to your podcast, humor is a major part of your podcast. I'm curious if you thought at all about the role of humor as a form of communication around climate difficult topics.

POWELL: Yeah. Well, thank you. First of all, It's actually not a it's not supposed to be a comedy podcast, but I think I just like sometimes, sometimes, sometimes the comedy comes out of me just being so much, being just bewildered by the brain of the person that I'm talking to. There's like some, some of my episodes, I just ask a question and. You can just see, see the person's face going, What are you talking about? It's actually one of my favorite ones. One whole episode where the guest just didn't quite get the idea is like. What are you talking about? But anyway, I did host for 8 years and we finished it a couple of years ago. I hosted a podcast with a good friend of mine called al. It was called Sustainababble and it was a.

RAY: What a great name.

POWELL: And I worked for a big environmental charity in the UK. And we felt this dissonance. We've been talking about something proper, like, you would have to go on the TV and put your suit on, and you would have to talk in kind of very instrumental, often quite reductionist terms about something. And you would have to say, so they'd say to you, so, Dave, is nuclear power, is that good or bad?

And you'd have to go, what am I supposed to say about this? Bad. Definitely. Definitely bad. You know, unequivocally bad. Right. So the power is not always good. Yeah. That's always that's always 100% good. And just feeling like there was a ridiculousness almost to the clothes that you kind of have to wear literally. And also, you know, symbolically when you're, when you're in a sort of job where you're representing a tribal view and you're kind of representing a position. And feeling that in our jobs we had no room to kind of find it all a bit ridiculous and laugh at it. And so much about the, the, the cognitive dissonance of humans being squishy bags of water, trying good people. Trying in hamfisted ways to do something about climate change is inherently funny, like so much of corporations and greenwashing and some of the nonsense that comes out of companies like pretending to be selling like, the world's most eco friendly plastic lawns, you know, these kind of things where they, as someone, somewhere means it. These aren't bad people. They mean it, but they are just completely dissonant with the thing they're actually talking about.

So that was a show that started out being about, it was humorous from, not very funny at the off because we weren't very good at it, but I think we got better. But it started out looking at those kind of contradictions. And then by the end of it just became like people loved it. It was popular and people loved it because it was the still, I think, the only podcast or regular podcast that was talking about climate change and the environment and not being miserable, dreary and serious and miserable.

Unlike giving people permission to find it all to, to, to view it with the same gallows humor that you've all sorts of stuff in your life. And to find the dark humor. Right. Humor is the light in the dark and the dark in the light. Right. And to find the things that are funny when nothing else is funny, or the thing that is serious, when everything is funny and you know, and to go to that.

And I think it's really important like, and call it culture or call it what you like, like we need to talk about this thing called climate change. And I'm much more kind of normal sort of way. I love listening to comedy. Loads of people love listening to comedy. So let's make some. Comedy about climate change. Other people love poetry. Let's have the poetry about climate change. Other people love films.

And actually, this is really one of the really positive things in the time I've been doing this. Is that there never used to be any cultural stuff about climate comedy, comedy or anything. There were no films about it. There was no books about it.

RAY: There was just all Al Gore.

POWELL: It was all Al Gore. The. Oh, yeah, exactly, exactly. And, you know, there's a place for that, but it's very it's very limited. Now in the UK, there's a, there's a climate fiction prize has had its first year that's just awarding prizes about to books, novels about climate change.

RAY: I mean, I have to admit, if you say it's about climate change, I usually I'm like, yeah, I don't really want to talk about that, even though I make my whole life of it. Yeah, well, because people have. What? I don't want that for pleasure.

POWELL: Well, it's not the sort of thing I think this is the thing about the comedy. It's not the sort of thing that, like, is inherently. A cultural artifact is to it's not a thing it's to is too squishy. And diffuse. Climate change doesn't mean anything. You can't. Like you can't write a novel about climate change. You can write a novel situated in a world in which that is a factor. You can do a song like there's a Radiohead's Thom Yorke recent stuff.

Where like climate anxiety is kind of is the background of the sort of stuff they would do anyway. You can do comedy that is, about the same stuff. Stuart Goldsmith has always done. Comedy about, which is how ridiculous humans are. But you but the lens you put that on is climate, right. And so finding ways that you know to bring the, the, the, the head. Screwing the large thing of climate change and grounding it in cultural stuff that people understand.

I just it's brilliant that it's happening. It's really important.

RAY: Yeah. And I mean, even Al Gore got criticized by looking at actions that individuals could do to change their relationship to sustainability and not demanding that systems change and the fossil fuel industry get out of politics. And I mean, the you know, there's no one action that's the right one. And to limit yourself that way would be.

POWELL: What would have happened if Al Gore had ended those films or ended his speeches. You know, which are. It's a ex-Presidential candidate in a suit, an older white man. Using the language, like talking effectively to people like him, right? Talking to elites and people and businesses like. What he is talking about is not for climate off the street. It's trying to raise the profile of this in a way that people like him understand.

What will happen to the credibility of his message with those people if he then said, what we need to do is smash capitalism like, no. Well, they wouldn't have worked, right? So if people…

RAY: Censored.

POWELL: Yeah, it will be people. It would have, you know, more than it already did. Would have degraded his credibility. And I think people often want any one intervention. And again, it's to this hero thing, isn't it, because there are. So few of them that people when a hero, person, someone who is getting traction, stands up and does something and it doesn't do everything, people are very quick to criticize it where it's like this, so many things have to be done, so many different messages and stories have to be combined every.

RAY: Little bit and every. Yeah. That's I love that. Thank you for adding the humor part I, I do you make me want to talk to some comedians too. That's really fun. I'm going to do, I'm going to wrap up with a lightning round. I haven't done a lightning round yet, but I just felt like you might be a lightning round kind of a guy. Okay. So super quick. Well, for first comes to mind. Okay. Okay. Given everything you've learned about brains on climate, ok. So like that's the lens, right? Brains on climate.

What has surprised you the most?

POWELL: I don't know what surprised me the most. The thing that I learned that I think was the one of the most useful things I learned, and I didn't. It was about like, for everything we've been talking about, this is almost the opposite of it, kind of about how neurons work and about how, like, how, how it is that we come to do anything at all like what has to happen to the firing of what neurons in our brains so that we kind of do something.

And you to really distill my incredibly, you'll have neuroscientists or even basic, basically intellectual people listening to your show all tell me this is wrong. But as I basically understand it, like you've got loads of neurons in your brain that associate basically different ideas right at different kind of different things. And in order to do something in the world, you have to have the right combination of them receiving enough energy that's transmitting to other ones and then receive enough energy. And the base.

RAY: Is quite something.

POWELL: And it's incredible really. But it's also basically how society works. Sort of like, remember we were talking about like how you have an impact in the world. Like all of our jobs is to sort of increase the amount of energy going to the bit of anyone else's brain that might be interested in hearing what we have to say. Right. So kind of and, and they're also from culture. They're getting the idea that climate action is important and from, you know, seeing wildfires on the news they got they're getting but they're also getting loads of other stuff saying it isn't. And that like the job is to have them having more positive stuff signals coming at them than negative stuff that stopped them doing it. And my very crude understanding of it is that sort of, I'm sure this is wrong, but that's sort of how neurons work. And basically how society works. And so, rather than being surprising, it's like, you know, when you just, you get a mental model of something that you haven't had before, you go, oh that's interesting.

RAY: Yeah. Let me see if that, if that fits, if that lands for every observation I make henceforth. Yeah. Okay.

What has worried you the most?

POWELL: Oh, the way that we're completely buckets. I mean, we. Okay.

RAY: There.

POWELL: Well, I just think. I think what worries me the most is that. And your question that you asked is the right one about, like, how do you not freak out and scream into the abyss? Like, the more that I learn about humans, the human biases and you restricts and kind of how they, at the individual level then become sort of collective silences and collective lags. The more you learn about that, the more you can get bummed out. But I always, I always, always try in any episode to kind of to, to go, but what about this is the thing that mean that might not happen? And I meant the thing I think I said this right at the start in passing. Right. But like humans, I think we might not conceptually be able to understand something like climate change, but we are evolved to collaborate like no species that has ever existed on Earth.

Right? Like we build look, look out your window and look at what we have done. Right? And some of it is awful, and some of it is Shakespeare and his majestic and his wonderful.

RAY: Yes. Okay. What encourages you the most?

POWELL: I do think it's the same thing. I think fundamentally. What encoded, the fact that none of us really have the same idea about what this thing called climate is, and we have these fuzzy ideas about these big concepts is a is an impediment when those ideas get hacked and coded. And so the idea of climate action, if you're a Republican, becomes a problem. Like just because it's that something a lefty would care about.

But it also like it works the other way as well. Think because you can also like those ideas that are equally fuzzy, galvanize people to action as well. So I think like that again, is everything about. The brain that can be hacked the wrong way can also inspire people to rally behind an abstract like rally behind a chemical soup. And the change in that chemical is amazing. If you think about it.

It's amazing. We do it at all like it's amazing that millions of people march in the streets because the chemical composition of a planet is slightly changing, you know. Like it's.

RAY: It is really one way to put it. I am just loving that, you know.

POWELL: I'm we do that because of the collective idea that we have about it doesn't have to be like that. And that is, again, if you step back from it, that's a bonkers thing to do. You wouldn't get my cat doing something like that. But humans can do that. And the very like the it is, it's the way the human brain works that's sort of cool. So many of the problems, but it's also the energy that can, you know, that can rationally or otherwise solve it.

RAY: There's such a beautiful note to end on. I love that I'm going to harness the heck out of that in my day to day. Thank you. How can people learn more about what you're doing and learn more from you?

POWELL: Oh, I think listen to the podcast. So Your Brain on Climate is the name of the show which, Sarah wanted to call this and couldn't because I've already done it. It's Your Brain available in all podcast places. Also on LinkedIn, Dave Powell. Find me on there if you like this conversation, hopefully there'll be something in the show you like.

RAY: Thank you so much.

POWELL: You're welcome.

RAY: You've just listened to my conversation with Dave Powell, climate communication expert and host of the fabulous podcast Your Brain on Climate. Check out our show notes on KHSU.org. I'm Sarah Ray and thanks for listening to Climate Magic.