The Carbon Brief Interview: Adam McKay

Monday 23 September 2024

Leo Hickman

Adam McKay is the Academy Award-winning screenwriter and director behind hit movies such as Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, The Big Short, Vice and Don’t Look Up.

His producer credits include Daddy’s Home and the universally acclaimed TV series Succession.

In 2023, McKay established Yellow Dot Studios, a “non-profit production studio to raise awareness and mobilise action on the climate emergency”. He is also a board member of the Climate Emergency Fund, which “plays a critical role by funding disruptive climate movements”.

Carbon Brief’s editor Leo Hickman discussed a wide range of climate-related topics with McKay including the “Great Silence”, James Lovelock, Elon Musk, Kamala Harris vs Donald Trump and his love of the 1957 movie, The Bridge on the River Kwai.

Carbon Brief: You’re famous around the world for your storytelling and many people describe climate change as the biggest story of the century, with the potential to impact all our lives, everywhere, all of the time. Why do you feel it seems that so many of the world’s greatest storytellers almost seem to be avoiding this topic in their own work?

Adam McKay: Yeah, I’ve referred to this time before and I’ve read that other people have called this time of inaction, [where there is] almost no popular discourse about rapid climate change, as the “Great Silence”. Lately, I’ve been calling not just climate change, but a host of the issues or catastrophes we need to be dealing with, as the “Great Pretend”; the way we all kind of pretend they’re not happening. [Barking by McKay’s dog momentarily interrupts the interview.]

Why aren’t filmmakers, novelists, TV shows – let’s even throw the news in there – addressing what is, I would say, the greatest threat in human history, right? I mean, if you look at it, the entire foundation of the civilisation we live in is the climate stability of the Holocene era. And we have now left the Holocene. We are approaching the Pleistocene era, the time of woolly mammoths and giant sloths. And, if we don’t get our act together soon, we’ll go to the Miocene, which, for anyone who doesn’t know, they should look it up, because it is not a place we want to be. How can it be that so many people are quiet about this?

I think it relates to the reality that our culture is much more connected to our economy than we ever think it is. I think they are one and the same. I think culture is a byproduct of economy and self-interest. And, once you take in the enormity of rapid climate warming, it shatters so many of the foundations of our identity, of our community, of civilisation, of our achievements, our successes, our failures. Everything changes instantly.

And I also think because of that risk, when you really look at the reality of what we’re confronting, there’s also a very high risk – and I’ve experienced it personally – of other people with that investment, with that identity, mocking you. Because it’s such a preposterously dynamic and large problem that we’re dealing with. When you really say it in even hard scientific terms, it sounds like you’re a crazy person. 

So, I think the combination of the collective agreement necessary to drive our economy, which is more and more becoming a consumer economy, the sense of identity, community and culture necessary to keep that economy afloat, mixed with the threat of mockery, has silenced a lot of big voices. 

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CB: It’s really interesting that you’ve already sort of spoken to some of the other formats and forms and shapes in culture and popular entertainment. Obviously movies, TV and comedy are kind of your area, but also pop music and theatre and even literature to some extent. They’ve all seemingly struggled in some way, shape or form to deal with the topic of climate change. But maybe you feel there’s actually some exceptions to that? Maybe you feel there’s some shining lights amid that gloom and that kind of avoidance and that silence?

AM: No. [Laughs.] No, I’m kidding, I’m kidding. There are a few. Mark Ruffalo, the actor, really understands what we’re up against. God bless him. Billie Eilish, the singer, has a pretty acute awareness of what’s going on. And the all-time legend Brian Eno understands what we’re up against. So there are those people. 

I also think – this is something I think about probably far too much – is how can a culture shut these realities out? And the connection between culture, economy, power, the sense of wellbeing that we all have around our fossil-fuel Holocene identity and sense of our life, our career, and at what point does that shift? Does the reality around us become so tactile? Does it shift? 

And there’s another thing that’s just much simpler that we bump into all the time with our not-for-profit climate studio, Yellow Dot, which is that we have to raise money from very wealthy people. And when you have that much money – and we’re talking about like billionaires – but, honestly, even people worth hundreds of millions or millions, I think we don’t fully appreciate how much that money makes life pleasant and shock-free. So a lot of these people really don’t want to talk about the nitty-gritty reality of the waters we’re sailing into simply because it makes their day unpleasant. [Laughs.]

The movie I always refer to is The Bridge on the River Kwai. It’s really a remarkable film. I’ve never seen a movie like it, in that it’s a second world war prisoner of war camp film that is actually about a culture being applied in the wrong time and place. But, in this case, it’s Victorian England, stiff upper lip, “wot-wot”, that sort of approach being applied to building a bridge for the Japanese right in the middle of a world war. And the realisation that applying that culture to that situation is sheer madness. 
But there aren’t many movies that are made about warped culture, culture misapplied, toxic cultures. I mean, probably the most you see [are about] the run up to Nazi Germany. You’ll see plenty of things about that, but I really think it’s the key to where we are. Much like a star with a gravitational pull, trillions and trillions of dollars, affect the way people see and engage with the world.

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CB: You’re obviously well known for your work on climate themes, either directly or indirectly, and there have been reports, Hollywood rumours, gossip, whatever – you can correct us on this – that you’re working on a movie called “Greenhouse”. I have no idea if that’s right or not. And that also you have the rights to David Wallace-Wells’ 2019 book The Uninhabitable Earth. Are you in a position to say more about these projects? Because that sounds really interesting.

AM: For sure, those rumours are correct. Inspired by David Wallace-Wells’ The Uninhabitable Earth, I wrote this script, which was initially called “2C”, now we’re calling it “Greenhouse”, although that could change. It gets into a lot of what we’re talking about with storytelling, culture and holding onto an old economy, holding onto old routines and it takes place over a large time span. We have it mostly cast, but we still have a couple of key roles we need to fill. And it’s not set up at any studio right now. I’m actually doing a rewrite, but, yes, that is correct, we are proceeding with that movie and, fingers crossed, we can get some financing and get it made and hopefully give it a big distribution.

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CB: OK, that sounds exciting. You’ve already touched on this a little bit, but the failure of mainstream media – and journalism, to some extent – is a strong theme for your work. And it’s hard to think of an area where this failure is as acute as climate change. The business model of journalism and media, with its perverse incentives and biases, is effectively totally shot, really, when it comes to informing the public. Even Carbon Brief itself was pretty much launched in 2010 as a specific response to this problem about the business-model failure. What is our way out of this, in your view? Is this unsolvable, this problem with the media and journalism at the moment, in terms of informing the public? Or is there a route out of this? 

AM: The news media is particularly infuriating, only because their declared job is to inform the public about events and stories that will affect all of our lives and that we need to be informed so we can properly vote and we can affect our supposed representatives in government. I’m almost to the point where I don’t complain about it much anymore, because it’s so utterly broken. Really, the large majority of people, certainly here in the [United] States, are aware that the news is pretty much not the news. Their rating subscriptions are plummeting. I just read somewhere that after Joe Biden became president, the Washington Post haemorrhaged half a million subscribers. A lot of people talk about these big news cable channels, but, if you look at their ratings, they’re almost nonexistent. They’re so small. 

So, the bottom line is, if you can’t do news without interrogating power and holding power accountable, it stops becoming news at that point. And, sadly, you’re seeing that there’s tonnes of layoffs and outlets closing shop. 

I think also what’s happened in the news [industry] is what’s happened to tonnes of other institutions in our world, [such as] universities, hospitals and that’s happening to some degree here in Hollywood with studios and streamers, which is just, quite simply, that everything gets financialised. Everything gets strapped to the quarterly stock returns and the profit reports. All these institutions were created to serve, in some way, to help, to be useful. And when their entire goal becomes just quarterly profit reports, they really start to fall apart and they become something entirely different. 

So, how to fix it? I started getting involved with trying to help, in my small way, with the gun violence insanity here in the States. And then the realisation hit me that the real problem was the billions and billions of now-legal corrupt money that chokes our government. So I started doing a lot of work in that world and then I got into the climate and all of it sort of came together. 

And the only real answer I see to it – and, once again, it probably doesn’t fit a lot of people’s sense of identity, career arc, community – but we need some sort of healthy, constructive leftwing, hopefully, Velvet revolution, because the neoliberal forces that have taken over. I mean, you saw what [French president Emmanuel] Macron did with refusing to hand over the government to the properly elected leftwing party and instead conspiring with [Marine] Le Pen and the extreme rightwingers. So, I really feel like all the change that’s going to lead to real action on climate – restoring institutions like our news, education, healthcare – the only road to it is a proper leftwing democratic socialist – whatever label you want to put on it, we all know the actions that happen in that direction – but, without it, I really don’t see any road to change. 

I mean, if you look at where the United States is with choosing between a lunatic who’s held by big money in Donald Trump and a total shameless corporatist in Kamala Harris, who’s utterly beholden to her donors, this is where you end up when you try and work “within the system” and when you try to institute incremental change. It’s far too powerful and all encompassing. 

So, yeah, my answer would just be the answers that have worked in the past: unions; proper tax structure to prevent extreme congealed wealth from pooling in our societies; access to resources for ideally all people, but certainly the vast majority of people; and a government that doesn’t have the hand of giant corporations around its throat so it can give proper pushback and find that middle-ground between industry and the general welfare of the people, which seems like a far away dream at this point. 

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CB: It’s interesting you raise the topic of what’s going on in France and other, what are sometimes described, “modern democracies”. But do you feel that with the Trump/Harris election imminent, do you think the US political system in itself can help deliver what’s required for tackling climate change? Because, if you look at Trump versus Harris – obviously, it’s stark when it comes to action on climate change – but, even if Harris wins, as you’ve alluded to, it’s going to be nowhere near what the scientists are sort of screaming for, basically, [in terms of] what needs to happen to see off the worst effects of climate change. But do you think there’s something unique [about the US]? I think you’ve touched on this issue of corporate lobbying, etc. Do you feel that the US political system is uniquely problematic in terms of tackling climate change amid a range of democracies around the world and not-so-democratic places, as well?

AM: Yes, there’s a whole giant story about how the United States turned. People call it a lot of different things. The best I’ve heard is the counter revolution to the New Deal, from old money and corporate money. But I did a bunch of research on a script about all the money in our system and I was able to interview some state and federal lobbyists off the record. And the main thing I can say is there came a moment after a few hours of discussion where I said: “Oh, my God. It’s 10,000 times worse than I thought.” And the federal lobbyist laughed and he said: “Well, yeah, but it’s 10,000 times better from where I sit.” We couldn’t find an exact number, but it’s somewhere in the range of $15bn [of corporate lobbying] in any given year flowing through state and federal government. And it’s through both parties. In fact, Democrats take almost twice as much dark money as the Republicans, mostly because Democrats somewhat pretend to be not as corrupt as Republicans. So, it’s a major problem. 

There’s an excellent podcast series out right now, which I can’t possibly recommend to enough people. It’s from the independent news outlet, the Lever, and it’s called the Master Plan. They tell the kind of incredible story of how this plan was put together in the 70s to strike back against unions and consumer advocates like Ralph Nader and to institute more control from big business in Washington, DC. It’s all sourced. None of its conspiracy theory. 

But, yeah, the United States is in serious trouble. And the worst part is most people – through no fault of their own – have no idea. So, I think the United States is in a uniquely terrible position when it comes to the world’s nations to contend with the climate emergency.

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CB: Another theme in your work – and we’ve been discussing it already – is inequality and injustice. Where people, ordinary people, are crushed by the system and the powerful, where the rules are rigged and stacked against them. Is this what drew you, or draws you, to the topic of climate change? In contrast to, say, the nerdy science or whatever, is it this sense of huge injustice of the world’s most vulnerable being the most exposed to the problem that they are least responsible for causing? This kind of epic imbalance. Is this at the heart of your interest in climate change?

AM: I think in some ways that’s what drew me to climate. Obviously, we all saw Al Gore‘s Inconvenient Truth. That was Wake-up Moment Number One. Then I sort of assumed that we were in some way dealing with it for a handful of years. And then when I started really looking into things – I was doing it before I made the Big Short – really deep diving into a bunch of topics, because of the work I was doing in the gun violence world, you start to kind of lift up stones. It’s really shocking what you find and it really shatters a lot of stories we tell ourselves to get through the day and get through the week. 

By far the biggest stone that I overturned was almost accidentally while writing the script for the Dick Cheney movie Vice. I was astounded to find that he was a major player in killing climate action. He individually played a giant role. [George] W Bush was actually going to do some constructive things about climate – and, believe me, I’m no fan of W Bush’s – and there were a bunch of moves that Cheney did to make sure that not only did it not happen, but it would go the other direction. 

So, off of that, I started wondering: where are we at? I remember the Al Gore movie. We’ve certainly done things like contribute money and ask candidates what they’re doing. But when I started asking questions around the science, talking to scientists, reading – I’m a deep dive kind of person, so I started reading a bunch of books – I went from alarm to fully losing sleep. And I kept double-checking, going back, finding new scientists, experts to talk to, expecting there to be a moment where I could calm down a little bit and, to this day, I’ve yet to find it.

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CB: Your background, back to the late 90s, early 2000s – the Saturday Night Live (SNL) era [where McKay was head writer] – I’m interested in whether and how comedians can take on climate change? Is there laughter to be found within climate change? Or, as with a movie like Don’t Look Up, is satire the way to approach this? You must have thought about this a lot – comedy’s roll in this – and whether we can laugh at, with or about climate change?

AM: They’ve done pretty extensive studies about how people survive extreme events. And the events in the studies I read were being lost at sea, being lost in the woods, being trapped under rubble. And there were really three key conditions that allowed for people to survive, not 100%, but made it much more likely. And one of the big ones is laughter, because, in order to laugh, you have to have some distance and perspective. You just can’t laugh if you don’t, because if you see someone on roller skates lose control and fall into a lake, and you have no distance or perspective, you immediately think: “I hope that person doesn’t drown.” You go jump in the lake, which, by the way, is not a crazy response. [Laughs.] But I’m really talking more about a movie or a silly moment, but if you’re able to look at it as a metaphor for the human condition, where we design these roller skates, but we’re still human beings, we can’t fully harness them, and we end up looking ridiculous falling into a lake. You can laugh. And so I think laughter is absolutely key. 

So, I challenged myself. We’ve been doing these shows through Yellow Dot with stand-up comics, the idea being: “Let’s find a way to laugh around these subjects.” And I challenged myself to go do five to eight minutes of stand-up and to see what it would feel like. And I definitely cheated in that I had some beers beforehand, because I did stand-up a little bit when I was in college, but I was never great. I was OK. And it was really interesting. You can definitely get laughs. You can definitely have laughter around these subjects [such as climate]. And, in a way, it made me more angry, because I’m at best like a D+ stand-up. I haven’t done it in, my God, 40 years. And there are these stand-ups that are highly skilled, charming, confident. And, so, I was doing it and got some respectable laughs. And it infuriated me, because, if I can do this, there are comics who can really do it and why aren’t they? But it goes back to the thing, like a lot of people just don’t know. They aren’t exposed to the real science and the reality of where we’re at, but I can’t say it enough. It’s the reason we knew when we were making Don’t Look Up. If we made it a broad comedy, we were going to get lambasted by the critics. That kind of insider [crowd] – my friend likes to call them the “savvy crowd” – would hate the movie and my editor really didn’t want to go down that road. We had a cut that was a little bit more critic-friendly and I just said: “We’re releasing it on a worldwide platform [Netflix]. We need people to experience big laughter.” And so we did it. 

They have some silly [web]site that does the percentage of good reviews and bad reviews. And I almost predicted it exactly. I was two points off. My editor was mortified when I told him what I thought we would get. And he was like: “No, this is really good.” And I’m like: “You watch, that professional class does not like to laugh. They consider it low.” And, sure enough, that’s exactly what happened. And then the response from the world was incredible. 

And so, yeah, we’re unfortunately in this moment where, the choice between populism and the elite professional classes, there’s never been more distance between them. And I really think the key is laughter. I think it’s the greatest lie-detector test. It’s the greatest. You can’t fake it. You just can’t.

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CB: You’ve mentioned Yellow Dot Studios and I think it’s been more than a year now since the launch. I think you said the aim is to try and push back against the flood of disinformation about climate, with memes and short-form videos, etc. particularly for social [media]. Personally, I often see your weekly Extreme Weather Reports popping up in my feed. In terms of what Yellow Dot is working on, what’s working well, in your view, and what have you got coming up next?

AM: The impetus behind Yellow Dot was really simple and it relates back to what we were talking about earlier, about the connection between culture, economy, history, community and really it relates to big hearty laughs. By the way, let me be clear, when I say populism, I mean constructive populism, labour unions, civil rights. There’s a tendency here in the United States to assume when you say populism you mean fascism, which I am no fan of. But I think without constructive populism, you get destructive populism, aka fascism.

Anyway, so the impetus behind Yellow Dot [is that] we started to notice that there was this way of speaking and processing information in the circles of the professional class, or whatever you want to call them – the establishment types, Democrats, liberals, whatever you want to say – and that tended to strip the emotion out of the information and tended to skew towards weaker conclusions, more conservative conclusions, that tended to minimise risk and stakes. And we were seeing it even with people we really like and we are sure are well intentioned. 

So, as ridiculous as it seems, one of the big drives for [Yellow Dot] is that – if we’re going to defeat the hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars Big Oil and the banks that fund them, the travel industry, automotive industry, basically, the fossil fuel economy, the billions of dollars and euros that these industries put into misinformation, into emotionally manipulative pieces – we were going to have to speak in a real way. We couldn’t try to use the same professional speak others were already using with far greater resources. 

So, the example I gave to our small team was to just curse [swear]. It’s the one thing those giant industries can’t do. They could maybe pay some influencers to do it – and cursing is much less of a big deal over where you’re at in the UK, but, here, there’s still a real puritanical streak in the States. So the idea was to use real language, reintroduce emotion into the discussion, because, for any movement, emotions are going to have to be a part of it – despite what the establishment, liberal class likes to think – it is going to be a major part of transforming our world. 

And so it really started with those things, which all came back to the simple idea of laughter. That you can be angry, sad, anxious, so long as you can laugh – it means you’re processing it. So the first video we made was this parody of a Chevron commercial and it just hit in a way that really surprised me. We just put it out. We had no marketing behind it. We had no build up and it just got millions and millions of views. Staci Roberts-Steele, who runs Yellow Dot day-to-day, and I were just like: “Hey, this is kind of interesting.” And that’s mostly what we’ve continued to do. 

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And we work a lot with the activists. We try to work with any celebrities who seem to get what’s going on. Rainn Wilson and Yellow Dot collaborated on a great Game of Thrones parody about climate. From my experience of doing Funny or Die, we all know that not every piece is going to be a giant hit. Each one can hit in kind of the way it needs to, and some will be missed, but the internet is actually perfect for that. It’s pretty forgiving. If something misses, it goes away. If it sticks, it stays. 

So, overall, I’ve been very happy with how it’s gone. Our team is small, we are under-funded. People with big money are not thrilled to give money to us, because we are speaking in much more urgent tones. We can be silly. We can be angry. And it’s just a language that we’re trying to use that can lead to change, or be a part of a larger change.

CB: You mentioned An Inconvenient Truth. Obviously, you saw that along with millions of others when that came out – what is that now, 15 years ago, or maybe a bit more is – and I think you alluded to the fact that might have been one of your personal epiphany moments, or penny-drop moments for climate change. Were there any others? Was there a particular crystallisation? Was it a movie, a documentary, a book, a conversation, that got you motivated and turned you on to this topic?

AM: Yeah, I would say An Inconvenient Truth pushed me into a place that I would say most members of the professional class or establishment liberals are at now. Which is that I understood it. I was concerned. It went on my radar. Our family started to put it on the list of donations that you do at the end of the year. But, at that time, I was far more horrified and emotional about gun violence, which I still am to this day.

So, really, my epiphany was when I looked into where we’re at with climate after the research we had done in the interviews for the Cheney movie [Vice] and we discovered that he really put a knife in the back of action on climate. And I’m trying to remember, because it was really like 12 or 14 pieces of information. But what really brought it all home was later when I read The Uninhabitable Earth and then was able to talk to David Wallace-Wells, who then introduced me to other scientists. 

And it was then I landed on the idea of risk, probability and stakes that really looking at those elements in the effects of how rapidly we’re warming the planet that it put grey hairs on my head. Because I realised mainstream discourse around climate was willfully ignoring risk and stakes. And I don’t say risk and stakes in a sort of casual way. I mean the mathematics of risk and stakes were not flowing through the way we talk about climate, the way the news media, big news media, was covering climate. And when I really started digging into that, it scared the crap out of me.

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CB: About a decade ago, I interviewed the late James Lovelock, the scientist behind the Gaia theory. I was working at the Guardian at the time and he told me something that kind of made a big headline and that kind of made a bit of a ripple at the time. He told me that humans, in his view, had not evolved enough yet to deal with something as huge as climate change. In effect, this problem had come too soon for us as a species. And I guess what he was sort of implying was that we’re not clever enough at the moment to deal with it. But I think, with the reaction that comment got, was that he was actually getting at something a bit more nuanced, namely, that we’re not collective enough as a species in a way that, like, a hive of bees might work together when under attack from a predator or something. But humans are too individualistic to solve a global commons challenge like climate change. It’s quite a depressing and pessimistic view, but do you share that view? Or are you much more of an optimist? Do you have a positivity that we can, in effect, dig our way out of this hole as a species?

AM: Yeah, I remember that story and how incredible that you got to interview him. Boy, that is a big question. I mean, there have been times, periods, eras in human history where I think we could do this. Post-second world war, obviously, the largest collective action of the industrial age, because of that collective positive action fighting back against the Nazis and the imperial militarised Japanese nation, we were really in a pretty decent spot, with the unions beginning to nationalise healthcare [and] the fairly equitable tax structure. I’m not saying things were perfect. There were plenty of problems, but the trend lines were all going up towards good things. And all hit in the early 70s when, in the States, poverty was at an all-time low. The gap between CEOs and workers was minuscule compared to where it is now. 

I think if we had full awareness [of climate change] during that period, we would have dealt with it. And reading about how close that [George] W Bush administration came to taking action – we interviewed Christy Todd Whitman, who was head of the Bush [administration’s Environmental Protection Agency] EPA, and, to this day, she’s still really angry about how Cheney sabotaged the effort and betrayed the president. He was vice president and really forced her to resign. 

We’ve come closer than I think that [Lovelock] theory says. But, since then, we’ve gotten very far away. I mean, you look at what Obama, Trump and Biden did with turning the United States into the number one exporter of oil. Trump is not the brightest guy and I don’t think Biden was very high functioning, but Obama, certainly, you would think would be smart enough to realise what’s going on with climate. Why would he do that? And why would he brag about it? 

So, yeah, it’s a little tough right now. But I always go back to the good news is that we have loads of resources, science, brilliant minds, planners, engineers. All we need to do is start. I think our biggest threat is that we’ve never had a mass media that is this all-pervasive, scientifically calibrated and effective in manipulating people, skewing points of view, spreading misinformation, creating emotional impressions that are disconnected from the reality. That’s probably the biggest opponent, beyond even just military might or police arresting activists, which is ghastly, don’t get me wrong. I don’t know if we’re gonna have the moment.

It’s very possible we go through all these stages of rapid, violent climate change and the majority of people take them as isolated weather catastrophes. Could that happen? It could. For the first time, I’m considering that possibility from what I’m seeing. 

I do tend to think there’s going to be a moment and mostly it’s because this political system we have, the neoliberal age, is falling apart. It’s not going to work. It never works. You can’t have this degree of income inequality, corruption, destruction. You can’t exploit the people to the degree that we’re now seeing without some kind of collapse coming. And I think that’s the key, when that moment happens, where there can be a change of course. I lean slightly, ever so slightly, to the optimistic column.

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CB: In terms of the optimistic column, what are you seeing out there at the moment? Is technology, social change? Are there people who are really inspiring you? What are those stories that we should be holding on to, or amplifying, that are the routes out of all this?

AM: Well, we haven’t even really made a sincere, worldwide, properly funded attempt at innovation on a grand scale. There’s innovation in the private sector. There’s small examples of things, but when you start putting like $500bn into scaling up already existing technologies…like there’s a company here, based out of Los Angeles called Equatic, and they are successfully pulling CO2 out of seawater. They’re not doing it at the scale that’s necessary, because they’re still getting funding. But if you unleashed governments on this kind of thing – the closest example would be the Manhattan Project and how fast that all came together, even though its endpoint was grizzly destruction – we can do a lot with that. 

But there are simple things. For example, no one in our government has ever said: “Hey, you know what? Let’s paint all the roofs white in the southwest to reflect some of the heat back. Hey, you know what? Rather than just tax breaks and rebates for solar panels, let’s actually create a programme to cover all federal buildings and state and municipal buildings in solar panels to help protect our grids.” I’ve never once heard the mayor of Los Angeles say: “Hey, I know the economy’s hard. A bunch of you can’t afford it. But, if you are some of the few lucky people that can, put solar panels on your house. It will help the power grid”. We just had power outages yesterday here in Los Angeles. It’s just absurd that in 2024 that’s still happening. We’ve had nothing, but fair warning. 

So there’s all kinds of big and small things we can do. Like the US military is, basically, a slush fund for funnelling billions of dollars to these big defence companies. But there’s a lot of money and resources there. If the mission of these large militaries around the world became climate mitigation, we can’t even fathom what could happen as far as building canals to channel water from an area that’s getting hit with a deluge of rain to an area that’s getting hit with flash flooding. 

I’m not saying this stuff’s going to happen in a year, but we should have been on this 10 years ago. There’s just so many things that are just fairly easy to do. 

Here’s a real simple one: why are oil companies still allowed to advertise on television or broadcast or streaming? There’s no ads for cigarettes on television. That’s something you could do in one day. How has the United States not declared a climate emergency? There’s a list of 60, 70 just easy things we could do, but you’re seeing it with these corrupted governments. They won’t even give a climate speech. That’s how beholden to the oil donors and the banks they are. 

Sorry if my answers go on very long, but I’ve learned through the years it’s impossible to talk about climate in short answers. It’s so big. 

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CB: You talked about some of the solutions there. But there’s also a kind of narrative you hear from the tech bros, the kind of Elon Musks and the “let’s just techno-fix our way out of this, let’s head to Mars, let’s drive EVs, let’s do this and that”, this kind of macho approach to climate change, almost sometimes militaristic. Do you think there’s danger in that? And do you think that [approach is] superficially appealing to many people?

AM: Elon Musk is a fraud. He’s an idiot. So, when you hear someone like him say it, he has no idea what he’s talking about. I’ve heard him talk about climate. He demonstrates no understanding, no comprehension of the Earth systems data. He’s not an intelligent individual. But I have heard people I respect throw that out there. This sort of vague idea that we’re going to innovate our way out of it. I always say the same thing: “When’s that going to happen?” It’s not happening now. And have you seen what’s going on with the East Antarctic ice shelf? Have you seen what’s going on with the Amazon? With the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC)? With the Greenland ice sheet? How much time do you think we have? 

And, really, what happens when you have those discussions is that you quickly discover the person has this kind of vague oil-company marketed “net-zero by 2050” timeframe in their head. And they, in all actuality, think it’s still a problem for our grandchildren and they don’t understand, once again, the probability/risk and stakes.

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CB: We’re a couple of months away from the US election and, not just the US, but the whole world goes through this kind of psychodrama every four years and it feels like it’s a permanently rolling campaigning country or political system. If we look to, say, this time next year, in terms of the two possible outcomes of the election, as well as all of those down-ticket questions – what will happen to the Senate, the Congress, etc? – where do you think we’re going to be in a year’s time, particularly in relation to action on climate, in terms of the US political response?

AM: It’s a very tricky topic here in the United States. It goes back to what we began this conversation with, which is the narratives we tell ourselves to live in this economy, this society, the ways we make ourselves feel good, the incentives, the rewards. The real truth is, if you look at the policies enacted by each administration, really going back to Ronald Reagan, and you put them on paper and you don’t tell someone which president did which thing, it’s almost impossible to tell the difference.

I’ve done it before as an exercise. The one that’s really shocking is Bill Clinton. When you look at Clinton and Regan, I mean, Reagan was horrible, but Bill Clinton was maybe even more destructive. And you look at the [George] W Bush years, then you go into Obama, then you go into Trump. It’s really surprising with Trump who – do not get me wrong, I can’t stand him, he’s a malignant force, he’s an idiot, a lunatic – but if you really look at what he did and then you look on paper at what W Bush and Cheney did, W Bush and Cheney are far worse. 

It’s harder to calculate the damage Obama did because his damage was material. He enacted the horrendous policies that led to hundreds of thousands of deaths, but his was also like a betrayal. Long story short, I don’t think you’ll really see a material difference as far as climate action [is concerned]. I don’t really know if the United States can get much worse than we are. And I think Trump is such a clod that the work that would be necessary to make it worse, I just don’t know if he’s capable of that because his ego is so big he likes to be in control. 

Kamala Harris will be complete inaction and probably expanding oil drilling leases. I don’t know. I don’t want Trump to win. Trump’s just upsetting. But everyone talked about how he said to the oil companies: “Give me a billion dollars and I’ll give you whatever you want.” And my response was: you don’t think the Democrats are taking a billion dollars in oil money? They definitely are, either directly or related money. So, I think, until people really get bold and start ignoring these two parties, the change won’t really be substantive. 

But my message to the world on climate is do not wait for the United States. China is far more of a climate leader than the US and I’m not giving a free pass to China. As far as the things their government has done, I’m not saying they’re perfect, but, on climate, they’re way ahead of us. I think you guys in the UK are a couple of steps ahead of us.

Until we fix this elaborate legalised corruption system, I just don’t have a lot of high hopes for the US in any regard.

CB: Thanks so much for your time. That’s quite a conversation we’ve had there.

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