Earth Day 2024: Some scientists are calling for "urgent optimism" for change | The Excerpt

On Sunday’s episode of The Excerpt podcast: Earth Day falls on April 22nd this year. And as with every Earth Day, it’s a chance to slow down and take stock of where we are with climate change and the state of the planet. While the drumbeat of alarming climate change news continues unabated - it's been the hottest year, we have the warmest oceans, and most severe weather on record - some scientists argue that humanity is actually on the cusp of broad, positive change. Even though the years ahead may be rough, as climate warms beyond what had been hoped for, these scientists are feeling “urgent optimism” for what could be the first generation to achieve a sustainable world. USA TODAY National Correspondent for climate and energy transition, Elizabeth Wiese, joins The Excerpt podcast to explain the many reasons to feel hopeful today about the future of our planet.

Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.

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Dana Taylor:

Hello and welcome to The Excerpt. I'm Dana Taylor. Today is Sunday, April 21st, 2024.

April 22nd is Earth Day this year, and as with every Earth Day, it's a chance to slow down and take stock of where we are with climate change and the state of the planet. While there seems to be news of impending climate doom everywhere, some scientists are saying there's good evidence that humanity is on the cusp of broad positive change. Even though the years ahead may be rough, as climate warms beyond what had been hoped for, these scientists are feeling urgent optimism for what could be the first generation to achieve a sustainable world. Joining me to dig into the story is USA TODAY National Correspondent for Climate and Energy Transition, Elizabeth Weise. Thanks for joining me, Elizabeth.

Elizabeth Weise:

I'm always happy to be here.

Dana Taylor:

Despite ongoing coverage of climate disaster, some scientists are pushing the idea of urgent optimism. Could you explain what's behind that?

Elizabeth Weise:

So, I think there are two parts to it. One is that, I mean, and it's partly us in the news business, but if it bleeds, it leads. When there's bad news, it tends to be what we report on. But there's actually really good news and very positive shifts beginning to happen. So we are on this cusp of a lot of really positive shifts happening that will help us come back from the brink of climate disaster, and those don't get reported enough. So I wanted to call attention to those. And the other piece of it and why they talk about urgent optimism is that if you get caught up in that doom loop of, there's no hope, it's all awful, the world will end in some Hollywood blockbuster awfulness that even The Rock cannot protect us against. The truth is is that if you fall into that mindset, you can't actually engage in the changes that are making that not be the future.

So we don't want to convince people that there's no hope, because there really is. It's not just hope, it's reality. And so I'm hoping in this story that we highlight some of that because that's what the scientists keep telling me.

Dana Taylor:

I'm going to pin you down on some of that. In the 54 years since Earth Day was created, you argue that tremendous progress has been made on the environmental front. How so?

Elizabeth Weise:

So I think the one that surprises the heck out of everyone when I say it to them is that, so we all know that global warming or climate change is caused by the emission of greenhouse gases, mostly carbon dioxide. So, per capita carbon dioxide emissions peaked globally in 2012. So the amount of the number of tons of carbon dioxide that each individual human was pumping out, I mean, this is averaged across the entire globe. That peak was in 2012 and it's been going down ever since. So that's really good news.

Dana Taylor:

The theme for Earth Day 2024 is planet versus plastics. Take us deeper on the focus here.

Elizabeth Weise:

The thing with plastics is one, we just make a whole, whole, whole lot of plastic. And as anybody who's ever runs something through the dishwasher and had it crumble in their hands knows, plastics break up into ever smaller particles, but they don't disintegrate. It's not like a Popsicle stick that eventually just disintegrates back into dirt. Plastics just keep getting smaller, but they never go away. So the other piece of it is that plastics contain chemicals, endocrine disruptors, and a host of other chemicals in which frankly don't exactly know what they do in people's bodies. I mean, there are scientists who are conducting experiments today who wonder if plastic, microplastics in the environment are perhaps one of the causes of male infertility. The fact that male sperm that across the globe is becoming less viable. So that's the other piece of it. I mean, one, there's just a lot of it and it never goes away. And the other is all of it that's out there, we don't quite know what it's doing, and we might not be happy when we find out.

Dana Taylor:

Earlier in April, a grim report was released by the Copernicus Climate Change Service saying that March 2024 was the warmest March ever recorded globally in data that goes back before the Civil War. It was also the 10th month in a row that was the hottest on record itself, an ongoing record-breaking streak. This sounds like a giant alarm bell sounding. Why shouldn't I panic?

Elizabeth Weise:

I think where this idea of urgent optimism comes in is that there're positive things are happening. There is hope. And so if you just go lay in bed and give up, I mean, that doesn't do us any good. But the other piece of it is that, and you said this earlier, it is true we are hitting temperature. I mean, the ocean temperatures are freaking out the ocean scientists. We don't understand why it's gotten so hot so fast and we don't know what's going to happen here. And certainly the global temperature is rising. But all the indications are it's not going to get to the absolute worst levels that we thought it was. So, it's going to be rocky. There's going to be more weird weather and climate catastrophes, and there's just no way to sugarcoat that, but it's not going to get as horrific as it might've been. And there's a lot that is happening now and that we can all do to ensure that it becomes even less horrific than it might.

Dana Taylor:

I'm not going to let this go quite yet. There's another report out this month, this one from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric administration that said that the levels of the three most significant human causing greenhouse gases in our atmosphere have risen to levels, not seen in at least 800,000 years, potentially far longer, perhaps millions of years. Beth, that doesn't sound very encouraging either.

Elizabeth Weise:

It's not encouraging, but you have to think of a graph, right? You have the graph, it goes up, up, up in that. It's like if we're all on a rollercoaster, we are on a global rollercoaster in a way, it's going up, up, up, up, up, and you're like, oh man, this is so bad. Oh wow, I don't want to go any higher. This is scary. We're starting to come on the down peak. And so yeah, it is. I mean, on the one hand, you can say they haven't been this high in millions of years, and that's really awful. Or you could say, "Wow, they haven't been this high in millions of years, but we've reached the peak and it's starting to come down."

So CO2 emissions are starting to come down, and again, it's going to take them a really long time to come all the way down. And for us to, I mean, we're never going to get back to where we were in 1800 because we've just changed the climate too much. The thing about greenhouse gases is they don't stay around forever. CO2 stays around longer than methane, for example, which is what natural gas is. But eventually they break down or dissipate. So as we stop pumping more CO2 into the atmosphere, it begins to dissipate. And that's a slow process. I'm not going to say it's not, but it's not like once we've done it can never, ever be undone.

I mean, there probably are systems in the globe that are not going to go back to what they were, but I keep saying, but it's true. We are starting to come down on the other side and we're pumping less CO2 into the atmosphere. It's slowly dissipating. It means that we have reached a peak and we're going to start seeing things shift back. I mean, we want to do everything we can to keep it lower, and we're doing those things.

Dana Taylor:

The move to clean energy is accelerating and becoming cheaper with prices for zero carbon. Electricity sources falling more than 70% in the last 15 years. Are these sources able to replace oil and gas in the near future? And what do experts say about keeping up with this shift and its impact on climate change?

Elizabeth Weise:

They can't replace all of it immediately. I mean, that's pretty clear. But they can replace a lot of it, and it depends on where you are. The goal is that we get to a hundred percent carbon neutral energy. It's kind of like with most things, the first 20, 30, 40, 50%, it is hard, but it's not impossible. And then the next 20 percent's a little harder. When you start getting up to 85 90, 95% of all energy being solar and wind, that gets a little harder. And the problem with especially solar, is that that's happening just as everybody, as the sun's going down. And so you've got all this lovely solar feeding into the system. Everybody comes home, it gets dark, and you've got this mismatch. So two things. One, if you put wind and solar together, because the winds tend to pick up at night so they can take over for each other.

And if you have storage, all that extra solar energy that you didn't need during the day, you can feed back into the system at night. And nobody who's reasonable says that that's going to do a hundred percent. I mean, I think we're going to need natural gas peaker plants, or we could probably use a whole lot more nuclear in this country, or geothermal. I mean, we will need things to fill in the gaps, but you can't let the, what is it? You can't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. I mean, we could add a whole lot more solar and wind to our systems and take a whole lot of coal and natural gas and petroleum out of our systems.

Dana Taylor:

A decade ago, there was a real concern that the earth could warm as much as eight degrees. Even with current policies, it likely won't warm more than five degrees. Should that make us feel optimistic? And how are efforts impacting the goal set by the Paris Agreement of limiting global temperatures going?

Elizabeth Weise:

They're going well, I mean, I got to say, the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act in the United States was this enormous shift globally, because when we acted, the rest of the world said, "Oh, the US. I mean, they all look to us. The US is doing it. Okay, we're going to continue with our efforts." And so we're already seeing some of the IRA money that businesses and utilities around the country. And we're not just talking blue states. I mean red states, Georgia, Georgia is going whole hog when it comes to solar because they have a lot of sun, and their energy system was really expensive. And so, we're seeing government efforts in the US are pushing for new innovations, and they're propelling the marketplace, and this is how it works. You put in a little federal funding and then the marketplace takes it and runs with it.

The numbers that we were hearing 20 years ago, 10 years ago, even 5 years ago? I mean, they were pretty horrific. I mean, when you start talking an eight degree rise, that's Florida underwater. That's cities baking in unlivable temperature. That's places where you can't work outdoors during the day and everything, I mean, it's the stuff of nightmares. When I talk to scientists now, they say it will be hotter and the weather's going to be more extreme, but we started to turn the corner, and that the absolute worst of it, the worst of the predictions is is probably, nobody thinks those predictions are going to come true.

Dana Taylor:

So in the end, some scientists are saying that fixing climate change can seem overwhelming, but it's not as bad as it might appear. Beth, what gives you the most hope here?

Elizabeth Weise:

There's a great book out by a professor, University of Oxford in the UK, Hannah Ritchie, which is called Not the End of the World, and she's a data scientist and a climate scientist. So she's got the numbers for everything, and it's full of these lovely, easy to read charts of things happening. And I interviewed her and she said, "When you start talking about we've passed peak CO₂ emissions, per capita CO₂ emissions peaked a decade ago, we've passed the peak number of gasoline vehicles on the roads. Those things, when you start to hyperventilate and you think, oh, this is really ... coral bleaching. Oh no." You start to think, okay, but good things have happened and peaks are really good because then you're coming downhill. So, those are the things that when I start to hyperventilate, I try and focus on those.

Dana Taylor:

Beth, it is always good to talk to you. Thanks for being on The Excerpt.

Elizabeth Weise:

It's always a pleasure and always happy to talk about the positives because we don't talk about them enough, and it's really important to remember that things are going in good directions.

Dana Taylor:

Thanks to our Senior Producers, Shannon Rae Green and Bradley Glanzrock for their production assistance. Our Executive Producer is Laura Beatty. Let us know what you think of this episode by sending a note to podcasts@usatoday.com. Thanks for listening. I'm Dana Taylor. Taylor Wilson will be back tomorrow morning with another episode of The Excerpt.