Resources

• New book: Life as We Know It (Can Be) and video trailer
• CNN programs:
  • How to Unscrew a Planet (trailer): carbon removal episode of The Whole Story with Anderson Cooper
  • The Wonder List with Bill Weir
  • CNN's Bill Weir discusses life on the climate change beat (CNN Reliable Sources)
• Hollywood Reporter piece: “Say It!”: Why TV Weather Forecasters Can No Longer Avoid Climate Change
• Interfaith Power & Light
• American Climate Corps
• American Meteorological Association’s climate change guidance

Host and Guest

Climate Rising Host: Professor Mike Toffel, Faculty Chair, Business & Environment Initiative (LinkedIn)

Guest: Bill Weir, Chief Climate Correspondent, CNN (LinkedIn)

Transcript

Editor’s Note: The following was prepared by a machine algorithm, and may not perfectly reflect the audio file of the interview.

Mike Toffel:

Bill, thank you so much for joining us here on Climate Rising.

Bill Weir:

So great to be with you, Mike. Thank you for having me.

Mike Toffel:

Yeah, so let's do a brief introduction if we could. I know you've been with ABC News before CNN. Tell us a little bit about your background, how you became a reporter even.

Bill Weir:

Sure. Well, maybe I can blame my mom for sort of planting a gypsy curiosity in me. I'm from Milwaukee originally. My folks split up when I was a boy, but my mom became very zealous evangelical when I was young and literally started taking her dreams as orders from the divine. So one morning at breakfast, she announced that God wanted us to leave Milwaukee, move to Texas so she could be a televangelist and we went and the dreams kept coming. So I went to 16 different states or 17 different schools in six states growing up. And then we spend my summers with my atheist dad in the mountains of Colorado. And so it was a really interesting idea that I was raised with this that, you know, understanding each other, empathizing when you're a new kid constantly, you learn how to read a room and listen to people's stories. So I consider it great.

training for a job in journalism, which kind of came to me. The interest was I read all the president's men as a kid and saw the movie and thought that's very romantic, you know, the newspaper journalism thing. And so I... in college, studied it. We had a little TV station on campus. I decided to start my career in weekend sports and general assignment reporter in a tiny little market in Minnesota, the first job offer I got after a year of shot -cutting tapes as fast as I could afford the postage. And then I worked my way up through local news, Green Bay, Chicago, LA, doing sports and news, sort of a mix.

But then when 9 -11 happened, I had really a sort of a crossroads career moment because I love the news. I had a voracious appetite and was really bored with doing local sports. And actually I thought I didn't have a path to legitimate network news because I was doing sports and being goofy. And so I spent a year in Hollywood and that's where I really, I was trying to sell TV shows, shot some pilots, but I really immersed myself in the craft of storytelling and what works from the Iliad to, you know, the Star Wars films. Like, what is the math and metrics of a well -told story?

When I got an opportunity to go back into news after a year of this, we were pregnant with my daughter. They canceled all my pilots around Hollywood. And I got a call from ABC News. They're starting Good Morning America weekend.

And just this sort of Forrest Gump’d my way into this amazing job which opened up the world to me and all the foreign policy and economics. And I got sent to China just as they were opening up and covered everything from Hurricane Katrina to the Fukushima disaster and just got a master class in human behavior and the planet ecosystems.

And after about 10 years there, an opportunity to come over to CNN opened up and I thought it was going to be just your typical, I wanted to sort of reinvent the prime-time hour and on cable news, do a lot more field reporting and live remotes. But Malaysian airliner went missing my first month on the air. And so I was talking about the same story every day and was really disappointed because I really crave variety. But to my boss's credit, they looked at me and said, maybe you should go do an original series. They just hired Anthony Bourdain. And they wanted similar shows and they said what would you do if we gave you one? I said I know exactly what I want to do. My daughter is going to turn my age in the year 2050. I want to go to the wonders of the world and wonder what will be left of them and how they're changing now. And so they gave me The Greatest green light and we shot that show in almost 30 countries around the world. But in 2016 after the election the appetite on CNN for the viewership changed as the Trump presidency came in and they decided that time we should create a climate desk. It's a big enough thing. And I had long resisted being pigeonholed because I like politics and entertainment and everything in between, although they kind of go together these days.

Mike Toffel:

So you wanted to be a generalist, it sounds like.

Bill Weir:

I want to be a generalist. Yeah. But I realized that the climate beat really is the one that includes all the others. It is foreign policy and economics and health policy and food, shelter, transportation, everything is connected to an ecosystem and balance that is now careening wildly out of balance. And so my beat is now physics, you know, sort of understanding what's happening in the natural world as it overheats, but also psychology as, as people react to this or don't, or, you know, fight over it. And so I just, every day is just a sort of a bottomless well of story ideas on any way you could go. And I'm gratified to be in a place like CNN that understands the magnitude created this, you know, has now expanded our team to over a dozen reporters and editors. A circuitous route to where I am now. I wouldn't lay it out. I wouldn't recommend it to a new grad, but I loved every second.

That's amazing. So let me go back and pick on a couple of the items that you mentioned. So you pitched this idea of doing a show where you could travel around the world to see the wonders and see what they would be like in 2050. So the way you described it implies they're in jeopardy, which as someone who studies climate, we know that

weathering and also development do pose challenges to all sorts of historic sites. Is that what you are worried about? You're worried about development and climate change or other factors?

Bill Weir:

It was everything. Climate sort of loomed large in certain places, but some episodes were about loving these, what we all agree are global treasures, loving them to death. Places like Venice, we did. Not only will it survive rising waves and how they're fighting it with the mosaic gates to protect the city.

But can it survive a flood of tourism and how they manage keeping the soul of a community? That’s why we have true Venetian society that is being destroyed by cruise ships, you know, like that storyline. I went to Iceland, actually, because I'd read a list of statistics of countries that led the world in unwed mothers and Iceland far and away, two out of three babies born in Iceland, their parents aren't married. I thought, that's interesting. What does the end of marriage look like in a Viking feminist society? And I went there and you realize it's because they have such a strong social safety net for women, they start families when they're ready. And there's no religious stigma. So if they want to hang out with a partner for 10 years and then get married to throw a party, they do, but it's not a precondition. Very small, interesting take on what we consider very different coming from the States. But while I was there, I ended up doing a piece on whaling, the last of the whalers holding on to his trade and geothermal booming and so it was a beautiful show that really let me follow my curiosity to places, to Bhutan, you know, gross national happiness of Bhutan. Can they hold on to that? Will there still be islands in the South Pacific? Without Bollies or Burger Kings and I end up in Vanuatu looking for one of the last wild rhinos in Namibia and next door in Botswana they've banned big game hunting. So we were able to use a lot of different filters. The way Bourdain used food, mine was change. And we all agree that's a renewable resource in wherever we are.

But the pressures of a planet with now almost eight billion people and what's happening to the climate is just accelerating. And often places the degradation of these places, but they're also looking for models on how to preserve them. What are they doing in the Galapagos to protect that place? And can we copy that and save places like Venice or Machu Picchu? But again and again, we came back to the pyramid of needs and how we fill it around the world and how it's being assailed against by unpredictable weather patterns now and this water whiplash. And so when climate came up, I thought, man, I can draw in so many different ways, not only just the nightmares, which definitely must be reported, but the dreams of a clean energy future or more resilient communities and how do we build those? And so I get to do both sides of the tragedy and the hope on this angle.

Mike Toffel:

Yeah, super interesting. Now that started in 2015, if I remember correctly, the wonder list. Now in 2019 is when CNN created this role, chief climate correspondent, and enlisted you to take that on, which I think was not only new to CNN, but was really new to news more broadly. I think that might have been the first chief climate correspondent role. Is that right?

Bill Weir:

I believe it is, yeah. I knew there were people , a veteran reporter named Bill Blakemore at ABC who was kind of on the beat, but the network at that point would have never created that title. Just calling it something like that. The term has been politicized for so long for very deliberate reasons. And The Guardian,

 led print journalism by just changing the language around it. Climate crisis, they called it that. And then we followed, we were the first network in the US after talking about it, like how do we refer to this?

And so yeah,I guess I'm kind of the first Marine on that beach. But I always say, and my team is sick of hearing me say it, I think we're all gonna be climate reporters sooner or later, kind of the way everybody became a health reporter during COVID. Suddenly you had sports guys who had to be knowledgeable about, you know, vaccination rates. And so this, as it becomes, I think, more evident in a lot of places, it's very localized, obviously, but in the United States, I really think this summer, next summer, these will be the years we'll look back and say the conversation really shifted. And when I was at ABC News around the time of Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore winning the Oscar, the Nobel, the first IPC reports to really catch attention.

The country seemed really focused on it in ways that I'd never seen before. We did a two -hour special at ABC in prime time. Diane Sawyer was anchoring in Times Square. They turned the lights off monumentally there. They had a reporter on every continent. I got Australia, so I'm underwater on the Great Barrier Reef talking about this mass bleaching event, which now in hindsight looks minor compared to what's happening lately. I thought the conversation had changed then.

The Obama administration went all in on health care and the fragile bipartisanship of Nancy Pelosi and Newt Gingrich shooting a commercial produced by Al Gore's Climate Reality Project. That seems like a different time 100 years ago politically. The conversation shifted, but now I don't know that we can ignore it much more these days.

Mike Toffel:

Yeah, so by creating this role, this chief climate correspondent role, it seems like it's CNN's effort to say we're putting a stake in the ground. This is an ongoing beat. We're not going to as much go with the ebb and flow of the popular culture, whether it happens to be something that people want to talk about. We're going to make sure it's talked about. Is that the right way to think about that creation of that role?

Bill Weir:

Yeah, I think that's fair. And that if there was a certain time, like the tobacco debate, because that was a story that had much more to do with narratives and stories and PR than it had to do with actual medical science forever. You know, it was a debate. And so if you covered it, you had to include the doctor who still smoked a carton a day and said, it was fine. At a certain point you stopped interviewing that guy, or the fifth dentist who recommends chewing sugar gum. And you just take the science, the overwhelming opinion of evidence from the peer -reviewed community as, all right, this is the baseline. Here's the proof that we're seeing manifestly. I don't know that I need to hear from a guy who wants to talk about it might be wobbles in the Earth's orbit. When everybody else at NASA and Copernicus and all the other experts say, no, that's not it, we don't need to hear that, I don't think as much anymore. And it wasted a lot of time.

Mike Toffel:

Yeah, that's for sure. Was it an easy call for you to accept that position?

Bill Weir:

Yeah, it was. It was. You know, my dad, I give so much credit to my sort of worldview who raised me. the smartest high school dropout I've ever known. You know, loved history, geology and the outdoors and ecology so much. And he'd take me either backpacking in southern Utah or in the Rockies somewhere or with canoe up in the boundary waters. And he instilled in this sense of wonder about, you know, how long it took. You know, I mean, billions of years it took for this, all of this concert of frogs and birds and bugs and beauty to settle into balance. You know how quickly we can, blow it up. And, and so it was always, he was a great lovely humanist, but also had that real sense of worry that, you know, the worst of human nature can take these things away from us. And so I think my beat now would really honor him. And I'm just endlessly fascinated by it because there are so many layers to the energy transition and the legal fights and the youth movement and the psychology, which we don't talk about. To me, it's the last story I'll cover because it's just so big.

Mike Toffel:

Yeah, yeah, it's a story that keeps giving, I guess, in one way or another. So as part of this role, it seems like one of your jobs is to create new series like that you mentioned earlier, or to partner up with some of your colleagues to help bring climate to their beats. And I know, for example, you were involved with the news and documentary called Eating Planet Earth, The Future of Your Food.

Which won an Emmy for a news documentary. Can you tell us a little bit about that project?

Bill Weir:

Sure, that's just, you know, that came out of the beauty of the wonder list is that it was creative constraint. We had to sort of produce a show that visually looked like the rest of the Sunday night lineup, but for a much smaller budget. So we all learned to shoot and my team over just through all those years of doing that, I've got just a two man team and you know, who can fly drones and really know their camera stuff well.

And so that business model worked for us because even if I don't have a strip show that's on like the wonder list, I always have a special hour in production. The one you mentioned was about just, it was, came out of COVID when our food system had basically shut down as we knew it and restaurants were changing business practices and there were all these interesting conversations around it. So I took that as a Sunday night show we do called The Whole Story and just looked at everything from synthetic meats to lab grown proteins and stuff. We profiled this amazing company called Nature's Find that found this protein source in the bubbling hot springs of Yellowstone. They found this microbe that is an incredibly clean protein that grows super fast and they can grow it to mimic everything from chicken to yogurt to ice cream and just an amazing sort of science gee whizzy story. You know, interviewed the head of Impossible Foods and talked about that movement. But also what really surprised me in the reporting was the idea that the biggest hurdle with replacing cows. We can agree that cows as a food delivery system, protein delivery system, hugely destructive. The way they are raised though is the main culprit as I looked into it. And there's new science that shows if you graze your cows more like buffalo, they can be allies in the climate fight and helping build soils.

And that's the big key that folks are missing as everybody thinks going vegan or vegetarian is the answer for everybody. We don't have the soil to feed the nation because it's been depleted by pesticides and commercial fertilizers for so long.

 When the Lewis and Clark crossed the country, there was 15 feet of just thick, black, rich topsoil that had been created by the poop and hooves of all these bison and elk and all of that. And it's just by moving cows in that way, you know, I discovered new, maybe hopeful storylines. And so, yeah, we did that one and a few more.

We're in the middle of production on a follow -up to these about adaptation around the world. And I'm just back from the Netherlands where I'm looking into how to live with water in the age of sea level rise and more flooding and how they're designing entire neighborhoods that are designed to float. Not the houseboat as we think of it, but next level apartment buildings that float essentially. I interviewed Bill Gates at his Breakthrough Energy Summit. And so I like building these hours around hopeful solutions and climate tech.

I think it's really under -reported. There's a huge appetite for it. And it's just constantly fascinating, the stuff that entrepreneurs are coming up with. We're getting most of our hope these days from that sector, because politics feels so broken.

Mike Toffel:

Yeah, adaptation, it seems to me, is way under -reported relative to the mitigation stories. I mean, in part, it's easier to envision what solar fields and wind farms and electric vehicles look like. It's a little harder to figure out, except for some maps and flood zones, what adaptation looks like. So maybe that's part of it, is the visualness. I'm not sure. What do you think?

Bill Weir:

Yeah, it is. And it's just because it's such a radical shakeup of how we see the world, how we think about shelter, for example. You know, I grew up working on construction my summers in Colorado and never questioned the wisdom of building homes with skinny little walls and giant furnaces or air conditioners instead of the other way around. And what you're seeing now in these building trends emerging, it just makes sense. It was actually invented in 1973. The University of Illinois, they came up with what is now best known around the world as the passive house that has such thick, tight insulation with southern explosion windows that you catch free sunlight throughout the day. You can hold onto it. And even in hot climates, that insulation can keep you cool.

I'm well into my mid -50s before I understand what a heat pump is, and how much more efficient, I would have guessed it was a dance from the 70s, do the heat pump. But the idea that this is a machine that is both furnace and air conditioner and much more efficient. What either gives me depression or hope, depending on the day, is that we're ultimately made of stories and they're always under revision. How we define ourselves, our borders, our currencies, our corporations, our political parties, constant revision, right? And so we were so set in these ways and just as human beings resistant to too much change at once.

But what I think is fascinating now after a youth grown up by my dad, whose generation of outdoorsmen were raised with the, think globally, act locally paradigm. And if the idea that acting locally meant living in a yurt, you know, off the grid or eating tree bark or a life of austere sacrifice. Now the advances in tech and energy, clean energy, it's more comfortable, you know, and will ultimately be more inexpensive and more efficient and more healthy and more resilient without the sacrifices.

But you got to change the story, right? And that's the thing. If you think cooking with gas is somehow a birthright and better, makes your food taste better, you got to change that story before you can get somebody to appreciate the benefits of a magnetic induction cooktop, which is undisputably better, faster, cleaner, all of those things. But it's the story around the old ways of doing things that sometimes are the hardest to change, right?

Mike Toffel:

Yeah, I find that in a lot of areas. You know, it was stories that led people to think that SUVs were necessary after living for decades with just regular passenger vehicles. And yet now the idea of giving up an SUV to drive a more fuel-efficient vehicle seems like a birthright. And you're like, how can you take that away? I'm like, it was just a story that got you to think you needed this in the first place. Now, of course, there are use cases where four -wheel drive is important and so on and high clearances, but it's, you know, for driving around the groceries, it doesn't seem quite as necessary.

Bill Weir:

I totally agree with you. And you know, it's funny but how it makes it even harder to break is at a certain point, there's an arms race of steel around your family, right? And if you think, okay, I really want to be responsible, but am I going to put my family in this with a relative clown car to the latest SUV? Anyway, but the one example I love lately,

Bill Weir:

Most of my life I was told that if I wanted to show my true devotion to a life partner, I would buy a diamond. I would spend three months salary on a diamond because diamonds are forever and super precious and rare. When in fact, the truth is, there are gigatons of diamonds underground in vaults, they reign diamonds on some other planets, it's just carbon. The rarest substance in the known galaxy is a tree. And so wood is way more valuable in the grand scheme of things than a diamond, but good luck proposing with a wooden engagement ring.

Mike Toffel:

I'd like to see an episode on CNN about that. That'll be quite a story you'd have to tell. Yeah. So it seems to me beyond developing your own stories for the programs or special reports and so on, you must also, in your role, have to engage with colleagues and help them understand how to tell stories. And the tradition of getting both sides of a story when one side is legitimized science and the other side is just the one in a million scientists who still thinks the Earth is flat. There must be some education around that that you're doing with your colleagues. Can you tell some stories about how you're a resource for your colleagues?

Bill Weir:

Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, my point earlier too, though, is that if we do find the one scientist who says it isn't happening, if it is valuable to include them in a piece, And in light of all this evidence, why would you say that? What is your motivation for going on camera? That's a story.

But sometimes it's funny because for a long time you had to urge folks to connect the dots between, okay, this drought or this hurricane is the result of all this pent up heat. But at a certain point, it can go too far the other way. And they want to attribute everything to climate change, tornadoes. There's a lot of strange stuff happening with tornadoes, but we don't have the definitive science. And so you don't want to get out in front of this and make everything alarmist about it. And like I said, and that's the problem.

When I say we should be talking about this in every segment and every desk should have a climate thing, you don't have to hammer the words climate change over people's heads while you do this. You know, it's a subtle thing to expand the coverage beyond here's the crisis, here's the starving polar bear, here's what the Democrats say or Republicans say, but just without even getting into the sources of the warming saying, here's what's happening in this community.

People are freaked out. Here's what they're, rallying around. How we talk about the story, how we connect with each other, I think is so vital these days.

 you find a connection, the shared value you have with somebody next door who you know may not vote the same way you do, but you both love that hiking trail, and you can talk about changes and threats to that in a way that isn't obviously political, but hopefully gets to a place where you say, you know, we have as a community, if we care about these resources, how do we protect them as voters, as consumers, whatever.

Mike Toffel:

Yeah. I've seen a lot of really excellent climate communicators talk about the idea of start with what you value and go from there. And I thought that was very wise advice as opposed to come in with a bunch of facts and figures.

Bill Weir:

Yeah. Exactly, because the human mind, we've seen the studies, the more you try to prove your case, the more somebody will entrench in their belief. But there's a great organization called Inner Faith Power and Light that they go into basically church basements in the heartland and try to connect with farmers around their sense of stewardship and their faith and their reverence for natural cycles and all of that. And because they live in places where you don't talk about climate change, they're not talking about climate change in Boston or Brooklyn or LA either. That's the thing. People, even there, nobody wants to really dig into it on a daily basis, but especially in these rural places, to at least come at it from a different point of view and in the end find out everybody wants the same thing. They want what's right for the soil and the animals and the farmers and if you can do something that fits all of that, ultimately you'll end up helping the climate fight as well.

Mike Toffel:

Yeah, it seems like, you know, our two industries, education and journalism, could fairly be critiqued to say, given the gap in what our citizens know about climate change and the reality of climate change, it seems like we are just not covering it adequately in our elementary schools and our high schools and our colleges; in our business schools. And then when you go out in the world and you watch TV, you're also not really learning about it in the news or in the media.

Bill Weir:

Yeah, there's a study that that actually gives me a lot of hope that a few years ago, I think it was Yale and maybe Boston College, Indiana, they did a study on pluralistic ignorance, this misperception of how your countrymen and women think about an object, a hyper -object like climate change.

And regardless of party, most people polled guess between 33, 40 percent care when it's the opposite. It's 66 to 80. They think, you know, you're outnumbered two to one. In fact, you got allies you don't know you have even around this. And if you really dig into the bipartisan support around stuff like the climate corethat just launched where people from around the country get together and, repair the earth or learn how to install heat pumps and learn new trades and are paid for that, you know, huge, like 80 % support. I wanted to find tools on how to think about these big changes psychologically. And I came across the biography of Elizabeth Kubler -Ross, she's most famous for the five stages of grief after hundreds of interviews with people who had been told they were terminal and how they cycled through these five stages of denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.

And at a certain point after I took the climate beat, I realized that I would go through the five stages of climate grief. I had been in my years of denial where I didn't want to think about it. I realized geographically, as you move around the country, there are these pockets of denial in states where they don't want to hear about it. It's not in the best interest of the local moneymakers. Places like Charleston, where they're building seawalls, or Miami, where they're raising streets, they're bargaining. They think we can adapt to this because we're smart. And I think they're right and I think we can. And then, but depression is obviously there. There's a lot of anger among all, folks. And you can cycle through these stages. You don't have to do it, you know, in a linear fashion. But the sooner we get to acceptance, like, okay, the planet is overheating at this rate. Here's what we know what kind of damage is going to do. What's next? You know, the way my dad used to say when I would complain about something. He'd say, OK, now what? As opposed to, what are you going to do about it? And good thing you're tough. And how do we have that national conversation at a time when we live in peak comfort? It's a tough one.

Mike Toffel:

Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, you travel the world, more than I do, I travel the world a bit. And I notice huge differences in those five stages in different proportions of the population in different places. When we traveled to Northern Europe, for example, with our students and we learned about the energy transition and the future of agriculture in places like Denmark and the Netherlands. The companies we visit and the culture that we're exposed to is like, yeah, this is all happening and we're going to figure out what are we doing? It's like, what's next? Just as you were describing. And of course, it's not ubiquitous and it's certainly not ubiquitous across Europe, as we're seeing from some of local elections. It's still a contested issue. But the proportions seem to differ quite a bit in Europe versus, especially in Northern Europe, than the US. Is that what you're seeing as well?

Bill Weir:

Right? Yeah.

Absolutely. This is the only place really where it's been politicized this long. As you hint at, there is a backlash. Even in, you know, even the most progressive climate countries. I saw a study out of Norway where, the affluent, there was sort of a push where skepticism was growing, you know, and you're seeing that around democracy or seeing these populists ebb and throw.

Mike Toffel:

So let's go back to the media and the role, as you mentioned, climate is more politicized in the U.S. than elsewhere. I think folks in the U.S. don't realize that to some extent. I think they think because it's politicized here, it must also be politicized elsewhere, be a natural assumption.

But in my experience, much less so. Conservative parties and liberal parties alike are interested in figuring out solutions to climate change. They may differ in the details, but they don't differ in the need to address it. But here is a very different story, and given your network is a U.S. network, I wonder how do you and others sort of think about conveying this information in a way that tries to not just be in the bubble? So how do you cross the divide? To make sure that the moderates listening to CNN or the conservatives listening to CNN can relate to the climate story and don't just tune out thinking, this is just a conspiracy from the left or something.

Bill Weir:

Yeah, it's a fantastic story question. And I think we were dealing with that all the time. Everybody is so media siloed now, it's sort of choose your own adventure in terms of nonfiction, wherever you live globally these days. And we created this device that gives us the sum total of human wisdom we can carry around our pockets. But something about human nature makes us want to get into arguments with strangers or look at pictures of whatever you're into, you know. But in the end of the day, I think...Truth is the best we can do, especially as journalists, is just telling the most compelling truths that you think affect the most life and letting the chips fall in terms of how the audience responds to that.

The problem is all of these cascading crises are happening at the same time. In journalism, especially with local papers struggling, and you have to get clicks. And so that, you know, who wants to click on a story about, you know, existential threats or the same old beats and all of that.

The worst thing I think we can do is make them feel like idiots. You know, like, where were you? You know, it's too late, right? So an analogy I use is my daughter has this completely irrational fear of sharks. I don't blame her for that. I blame Steven Spielberg, who made a robotic jaws. So convincing. It scared a whole generation of people of this one, keystone species of our marine life. Right. And so I try to hold out empathy for the believers that are out there just trying to get through the week and raise their families and be parts of their community. Empathize with them and if I have an opportunity to talk to them, man do I take advantage of that and try to lean in and try to find common ground. I went and did this story in Ildejaun Charles, Louisiana, with the bayou at the bottom, where like 90 % of their land has disappeared from some siding and sea level rise.

Mostly Native American community that had won this $50 million grant to move them 50 miles inland to higher ground. And just a fascinating story about history and the psychology of those folks who half didn't want to go, they were suspicious. And you know, there's so many complicated things when you think about managed retreat.

Anyway, on the story, we were with a scientist who'd wrangled a boat for us to go out on and had two brothers who were on the boat. And it became, it wasn't long before I realized that they disagreed on climate change. Brothers, you know, in their fifties, right? From the same soil, same blood. But one was a Democrat who, you know, read the New York Times and one was a Republican who watched Fox News. You know, it was as simple as that. And, but in talking about, okay, yeah, I see the changes and yeah, I do worry. And, you know, it transcended that in that way. So I, my hope is that the only way we

do is make the tent as welcoming and open and like for folks. And if somebody just wants to debate me, there was a time I took it personally and I'm on Twitter trying to argue with people about the science that is telling us these things. it's just, it's fruitless, you know, what matters is real life interaction. Looking folks in the eye, getting outside with each other. And I try to infuse that spirit into my storytelling as much as possible and then use what I learned in Hollywood to tell stories that have an arc, that have hope, that find something for the audience, some actionable something at the end and not just flatline, right, that we're doomed. But this whole field of climate journalism is brand new too. So everybody's sort of figuring this out in real time.

Mike Toffel:

Totally, yeah. And we're figuring that out in our case writing here as well. Like I think you have to create the narrative as well that's engaging and optimistic and solutions oriented. It's some of the same mechanisms you're describing in your reporting. So you recently wrote a piece in the Hollywood Reporter urging local weather forecasters to bring climate into their beat or into their story, if I can summarize it that way. Can you tell me a little bit about what motivated you to write that piece and a little bit of the highlights?

Bill Weir:

Yeah, it actually came as a result. I just put out my book and I had an option to write some op -eds here and there and I wasn't sure what I was going to write about. And then one day my publicist says, you know, we sent your book out to a bunch of newsrooms, you know, big and small around the country. And we got the most curious response from this chief meteorologist in Houston his response was, tell him to write a book about how NASA and NOAA says the Earth is greener than it's been in the last 40 years. And he links this sort of, you know, I don't know, eight -year -old kind of human interest story that NASA had done with satellite pictures of Earth. But the article was careful to point out, yeah, it's greener now, but it's also the result of climate change, which is bad for everything.

And so I reached out to the guy and I said, like, I really want to know. Like, I haven't heard the unchecked pollution is plant food argument in a long time. And especially from somebody with a seal from the American Meteorological Society, which has very scientifically updated how they think about climate change and how you connect the dots. And you can see the evolution of the AMS through the years. They figured this out too. And so he wouldn't respond to me, his news director and his station wouldn't respond. So I kind of get, I show to God, like, okay, this is crazy. And at the same time, around the same time, there was a story in Miami in which the DeSantis, Ron DeSantis administration had removed the words climate change from legislation consideration.

A local sportscaster at the NBC affiliate in Miami went on, or weathercaster, meteorologist went on in front of the green screen in Miami and said, while this is happening, we reported this earlier in the news, but just keep in mind, this is happening while Florida is experiencing record temperatures, record insurance rates, record disasters, the chloral bleaches are dying.

There are some candidates who believe that this is happening and there are solutions and there are some that don't. So just do your research. We wouldn't tell you who to vote for, but please, as a meteorologist, I feel responsible.

 There was no global story that affects more people locally than climate change and if in the science explainers in every living room our local weather folk aren't connecting the dots when there's record -shattering events that your people are covering if you can't call it what it is and at least say the science says this is here as a result of this and here's what it's going to look like. At a certain point I think it's journalistic malpractice, you know? I'm just imploring my colleagues at all levels. I have equal complaints about network folks. I'm looking at the big league and yelling, say it, say the words climate change, at too many news reports. Maybe that makes me the cranky old guy. But to me, at a certain point, it tells a lot about the straight jacket of stories that we've been held to by special interests.

Mike Toffel:

Yeah, your commentary reminds me of the critiques that folks get for what they say, and they're much less often critiqued for what they don't say. And that's the asymmetric incentives that they're facing, which leads folks like you saying, say it. Yeah, exactly. So now you mentioned your book. I was going to ask you about that. Now's a good time. So you recently published a book called Life As We Know It.

can be with can be in parentheses, which, and you've also been talking about your son, which I know that is tied to the book. So tell us a little bit about the origin of the book and what it covers and what you're hoping to get out of it.

Bill Weir:

Thank you, yeah. It came when my little boy was born at the height of the pandemic in 2020. My daughter was 16 at the time from my previous marriage and my new partner did not think she could conceive. So he was a joyous shock to us. And so I become delighted, I'm very grateful, new old dad. And I'm holding this little bundle, realizing this kid's gonna live to see that in a 22nd century.

And then the changes just in the first few years of his life, if you look at politically, racial tension, all these things that were happening outside, I was just so full of anxiety. I started writing these Earth Day letters, sort of an apology, like, welcome to the planet. Sorry, we broke it.

But you know, part of it was a letter to myself. I wanted to get a record down of what I was going through as all these seismic events were unfolding in real time. And the title came out of the idea that, as I talked about the five stages of climate grief, when you realize that one way or another the Earth I grew up on is gone.

 I was supposed to turn the book in a couple years ago, but because of events, they brought my TV show, The Wanderlust, back for a while, and other. I kept sort of asking for a delay, and I'm so glad I did because during that time, the Inflation Reduction Act passed, and most of the sources I was talking to around the climate space went from deeply deep depression to optimism about wow, finally here's something the grownups are taking this seriously. We can do something. And so it and then when I did the Mr. Rogers thing and just started talking to as many helpers as I can to balance out the peer review dread, I got a lot more hopeful.

And then I just sort of followed Maslow's hierarchy of needs as a structure. Like, let's just go up from the bottom of the pyramid. All the stuff I took for granted growing up, air, temperature, water, food, shelter, and sort of highlight both the huge challenges in each one of these needs, but also the huge solutions that are either available right now or are conceptual and are exciting.

And so, yeah, and it's sort of addressed as a letter. First part is to my little boy River. The back end, as I get up into the love and esteem needs, is to my daughter Olivia, who grew up in an age where so much of that is defined by social media and you know, we're just wrestling with the ramifications of that. But I think that's part of it. You know, how you might think is TikTok a climate story? It is in a lot of ways, right? It can connect people for and it can spread the wrong stories. How we feel about ourselves, you know, self -care is Earth care these days.

And so in the end, my argue that. If we rally around each other, around community and nature to fill the bottom of those needs, to really think about water wherever we live, think about what's in the air, get involved in the community, really examine shelter or your energy choices. Who's on your public utility commission? What's your mix? How could it get better? Hey, did you hear about those electric school buses in Oakland? Wouldn't it be cool if we had those? You know, the more people ride around the bottom of the pyramid's needs, the more they'll fill their love and esteem needs that, you know, shopping and social media just can't. And that's how it landed.

Mike Toffel:

Neat. Well, we'll put a link to your book on our show notes as well as so many of the other topics that you've brought up over this past many minutes together. Let me ask you the question that I always wrap up with, which is toward the future, as some of our listeners might be interested in a career in climate and media, whether it be print or cable or anywhere in between.

What recommendations do you give for them to learn more about it, to experiment, to give a preferred medium that you think folks should start with as a way to ground themselves, or is any medium just as good?

Bill Weir:

You know, I think it's it You should obviously look for maximum impact and reach I suppose and the good news is that the barrier to entry to stuff like when I was coming up looking at electronic media magazine and sending my big clunky three-quarter inch resume tapes that look like the size of a dictionary, hoping someone put me on TV so I could get an audience, you know, I would have skipped all of that today, right? And you go right to doing it. And the advice that I give most, or not only just doing it, but putting it out on YouTube, take whatever you're, all of the social media avenues that are available to you, ideally. But again, what has changed is that the equipment is now democratized to the point where the cameras in your phone are so much better than everything we used in studios or on the field for the first 30 years of my career. Editing software is so much easier. And the more versatile you can be as a storyteller in terms of all the media, podcasting, writing for print, how you shoot video. You could be a specialist in one area. I've learned, I've had to reinvent myself and learn how to tell stories on TikTok, which has a much different appetite, much different viewing patterns.

You know, I made the wonder list where we would just like agonize over these nature shots and try to put something together that's just so perfectly sublimely edited. But you get punished for that on the TikTok, right? They want, it feels like you're on a phone call with somebody, right? And they want intimacy or they want this kind of humor. And so it's always about sort of maximizing. So, you know, storytelling just as an art, I think will feed you. If you get it down, it will feed you. It's a great way to make a living. It's a great way to spend your day talking to really interesting smart people, comforting the afflicted, afflicting the comfortable, all the things that are great about journalism. And I think it's just a matter of reps And just start with what you know and love and don't be intimidated, start with your phone. I would have had to get over myself walking up to people on the street. It's much easier for me to walk up, you know, because I did it for so many years with a camera crew and say, hey man, can I talk to you for a second? And then me walking up to them like this and saying, yo, I'm doing a thing. But ultimately that could be better. I could get better stuff if it's just me and my phone. And you see the people who go viral. And we need that. Whether you want to be a professional storyteller or not, but the more you're on your social channels just making observations about, hey, I just ordered this thing and it came in this new packaging that I can dissolve in the sink. Isn't that cool? Like, you know, sort of start the conversation at whatever level and you're already a helper, a climate helper.

Mike Toffel:

Yeah, that's great. Great. Well, Bill, it's been a wonderful conversation. Thank you so much for spending your time.

Bill Weir:

My pleasure, Mike. Thank you so much for having us. It's so easy to talk to you. Thanks.