Apres le Deluge

I’m so grateful Laurent Segalen, the legendary energy transition thinker, investor, and developer, could spend nearly a whole hour with me and talk about a project that I think symbolises hope for some rational outcomes in an irrational time.

Because good Lord this week has been tough. And yeah yeah I know I promised we would try to get more content in this feed that was less about politics and more about the solutions that might actually help the politics. Our interview with Laurent was part of that effort. And we’ve got really quite a few things coming up to geek out over in a good way - on grid, data, geothermal, and even interventions previously unthinkable. But we have to keep one eye on the ongoing ‘doom loop’ of climate shocks and political reactions that make future climate shocks more or less likely.

Imagine living in Los Angeles. Imagine that you actually wrote something nearly 10 years ago that pretty much nailed the fire we’re seeing this month. Imagine you put 10 years of your life into writing a novel that cut no corners and tried to make real the stakes and the conflicts those disasters would bring up – as a warning to act sooner. Now imagine the worst person in the world taking credit for your work while using the tragedy – that you forsaw – to turn people against the solutions that would do something to stop more of these disasters happening in future.

How Stephen Markley, author of 2023 novel The Deluge, is keeping it together despite all the above I will never know, but I’m grateful he could make time to speak with me this week.

We get into all of that. And after my interview with Stephen we share a few other thoughts – on how Donald Trump used his trip to hurricane-ravaged North Carolina and fire-blasted Los Angeles yesterday to great political effect. Which followed exactly the playbook laid out by folks like Dr. Genevieve Guenther in her important book from last year – and who we are excited to say we’ll be interviewing next week.

We’ll be asking her to give her analysis of what we’re seeing in real time. As she wrote this week, the Trump response in Los Angeles and North Carolina is a masterclass in wrangling the four horsemen of climate denial: Sleight-of-Hand, Fossil Fuel as the Main Character of our Story, Gaslighting, and Flood the Zone with Shit:

The right-wing propaganda about the fires was clearly an example of flooding the zone with shit: the lies were so numerous and so fast-moving that it was impossible to deal with all of them at once. They included falsehoods or half-truths not just about conservationist water policies, but also about DEI in the LA fire department, supposed fire-department budget cuts, the incompetence of government bureaucracies, LA Mayor Karen Bass’ travel schedule, arson, and, of course, classic climate denial in which the science is either suppressed or misrepresented entirely.

Of course this firehose of shit, so to speak, was also clearly meant to act as a sleight of hand, directing people’s (specifically journalists’) attention away from climate change — and away from Trump’s climate denying energy policies — and towards adjudicating whether leaders in California had really caused the fires or not.

Trump’s right-wing disinformation also had a very specific emotional effect — or at least intent — which gave it power as political speech: it tried to turn people’s horror over what was happening in LA — indeed, over the big, amorphous climate crisis — into anger. And Trump directed that anger towards Democratic elected officials. In this way, he transmuted feelings of helplessness into an emotion that can increase perceptions of agency and he used that emotion to his political advantage. In the face of terror, anger is a comfort, and scapegoating people as Trump scapegoated LA mayor Karen Bass and Gavin Newsome (who he called Gavin “Newscum”) is a time-honored way to redouble that sense of agency and create social cohesion to boot. Meanwhile, voices on “our side” were reduced to repeating bland facts.

Trump repeatedly turns climate-change disasters into events in which Democrats supposedly hurt the American public. He did it this past summer with Hurricane Helene, and he did it again with the LA blazes. And the right-wing propaganda machine surrounds that false narrative with a barrage of lies. Yet the way to combat and overcome this strategy is not by fact-checking or even just by connecting climate disasters to climate change. It’s to clearly and repeatedly — in every venue and across all platforms — to tell a story of our own: climate change is caused mostly by our use of fossil fuels, and Trump’s plan to expand fossil fuels and suppress clean energy is the kind of policy responsible for the loss of people’s homes, the destruction of their communities, and even their very deaths.

Could you imagine Democratic politicians saying such a thing? Could you imagine mainstream journalists writing it?

So much is going on, and so much of it is happening at a velocity and volume deliberately trying to overwhelm and demotivate us, that I now look a lot more like Godfather III Michael Corelone than I did a week ago. But as friend of the show and our first guest Christian Hernandez of 2150 wrote this week, after looking at all the anticipatory obedience on show at Davos, now is the time for “Anticipatory Rebellion”.

One of the things he explains that he means by that is to be bolder in facing the reality we’re in:

But maybe it’s important to speak less about carbon mitigation -or the fact that 2024 was the first year the planet surpassed 1.5 degrees - and instead change the narrative to providing resilience, risk-avoidance and capital preservation (see LA Fires — cost: $30bn and counting, Spain floods — $1.8bn, Hurricane Helene — $200bn).

If you’re enjoying any of this, we really could use your support. The best way you can help is by taking out a subscription at wickedproblems.earth. Any level of support helps us to continue this work – which I don’t mind telling you isn’t going to do itself, and if there’s another side they’re infinitely better funded. But even if the way you help is to share this conversation with a friend or in the family group chat, we would be very grateful.

And do suggest questions to me on BlueSky or in the comments below.

00:19 Predicting the Fire Disaster

01:05 Reflecting on the Current Week

02:12 Living Through the Fire

03:43 The Role of Environmental Regulations

04:21 Interview with Stephen Markley

06:26 Stephen's Experience During the Fires

11:23 The Political Landscape and Climate Policy

26:43 Closing Thoughts and Future Outlook