Latest / HEATED / Who’s telling you climate change is no big deal?

Transcript

Who’s telling you climate change is no big deal? · HEATED

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: Last year,
• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: Donald Trump's Energy Secretary,
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_01: Chris Wright, delivered a message to Americans about climate change.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_02: Climate change for impacting the quality of your life is not incredibly important.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_02: In fact, if it wasn't in the news and the media, you wouldn't know it.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_01: It's an interesting statement to revisit now after a summer
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_01: of record-breaking floods and droughts and wildfires and scientists predicting
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_01: that 2026 will be the hottest year on record.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_01: But hey, what does that matter?
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_01: Wright, who was a fracking executive prior to becoming energy secretary,
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_01: is dedicated to spreading this idea.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_01: Here's him speaking about climate this past May.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_02: It's like a real thing, but it's no big deal.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_02: It's nowhere close to the world's top five or ten problems.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_01: Now, look, I expect to hear stuff like this from Chris Wright.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_01: People in the fossil fuel business,
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_01: their wealth and their power depend on climate change not being a big deal.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_01: So I don't normally give statements like these a lot of credit or even attention.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_01: But lately,
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_01: I've been hearing this argument a lot more from just regular people
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_01: who also increasingly seem to believe that the climate problem has been exaggerated.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_01: And I think I know why.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_02: The United Nations Climate Committee now says its worst case scenario is implausible.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_01: The United Nations is widely backed away from its most extreme climate doomsday scenarios.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_02: We just found out the other day that the U.N.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_02: rescinded all dire predictions regarding climate predictions.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_01: All these quotes from Fox News were part of a conservative media blitz
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_01: that happened earlier this summer.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_01: And they all stemmed from a very real, very nerdy piece of news.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_01: Back in May,
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_01: an international group of scientists whose job is to create climate models announced
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_01: that they would be updating the climate scenarios used
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_01: for future United Nations climate reports.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_01: And in that update,
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_01: they said they'd no longer be using the worst-case scenario they'd previously relied
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_01: on.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_01: A scenario commonly referred to as RCP 8.5.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_01: To right-wing media, this update was a bombshell.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_01: It was a confession.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_01: It meant that scientists admitted they'd been exaggerating the danger
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_01: of climate change all along.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_01: And now they're saying, actually, there was never anything to worry about.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_02: There needs to be a reckoning for that.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_02: What would be a reckoning?
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_02: They should be forced to go around to schools and tell young people,
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_02: you don't have to be worried about climate change.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_02: You know that's not going to happen.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_01: Except what Fox News is describing is not what happened at all.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_01: So today we're going to tell you the actual story of what happened with RCP 8.5.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_01: The real version, the nerdy version that Fox News would never tell you.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_01: And we're going to show you how a genuinely good piece of climate news got twisted.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_01: Into yet another argument for doing nothing.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome to Heated, a show about climate change and the forces standing in the way of action.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_01: I'm Emily Atkin.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_01: This season, we're debunking some of the worst climate myths plaguing society today.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_01: Today's myth, that climate change might be real, but scientists have exaggerated the danger.
• 3:03
  [music]
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_01: To understand what actually happened with RCP 8.5 and the state of our climate
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_01: in general,
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_01: I wanted to talk to an actual climate scientist,
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_01: someone who day in and day out works with climate models like RCP 8.5
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_01: to figure out how greenhouse gases might affect our world.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_01: So I called up Kate Marvel,
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_01: a senior climate scientist at Project Drawdown and veteran climate modeler who spent
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_01: over a decade tracking planet warming trends at NASA.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_01: First thing I wanted to know, is climate change still a big deal anymore?
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_01: Or like, is it chill now?
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I don't want to be rude, but like, have you gone outside ever this year?
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, it is still a big thing.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_00: Emissions are still rising.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_00: Europe has been absolutely slammed by heat waves.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: We have had fires.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_00: We have had poor air quality.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: So in my opinion...
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_00: I feel like that's kind of a big deal.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, okay.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_01: Climate change is obviously affecting us right now.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_01: Literally look out the window.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_01: But what about the future?
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_01: According to Fox News, scientists retracted their prediction of future climate catastrophe.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_01: Except, Kate says, RCPA 0.5?
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_01: That was never a prediction.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_00: When you talk about the future,
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: you need to be so careful to say this is a projection, not a prediction.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody can predict human choices, human societies.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody can predict what are politics,
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_00: what are economics,
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_00: Our technologies are going to look like all the way into the future.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: And we as physicists don't even try to do that.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: We don't make predictions.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_00: We make projections.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: And the reason that that distinction is so important is that
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: a projection is conditional on something happening.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: So we say, if you do this, then this is what the climate will look like.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_01: RCP 8.5 stands for Representative Concentration Pathway.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_01: And the 8.5 is not a temperature measurement.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_01: It refers to a measure of radiative forcing.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_01: It's extremely nerdy.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not going to get into all of it.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_01: But what it was, was a scenario.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_01: So RCP 8.5 is a story, is a speculative story in which...
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_00: People burn coal like crazy.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_00: People dig up coal right now that is not economically feasible to extract and set it on fire.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_00: There is massive development in oil and gas.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: There is massive increase in demand for energy.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_01: And if the world did that,
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_01: the RCP 8.5 scenario projected roughly 4 to 5 degrees Celsius of warming by the end
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_01: of the century.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_01: A truly catastrophic amount of warming.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_00: What are the upper bounds of what humans could do?
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_00: And let's investigate how the climate system responds to really,
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_00: really, really big outside influences.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_00: You know, how does the Earth change when it gets backed with a hammer?
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_01: In journalism and in science communication,
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_01: the RCPA 8.5 scenario was often used to talk about the worst-case scenario
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_01: of climate change.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_01: But the intention was not to predict that those things would happen.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_01: It was to warn that it could happen if humanity keeps expanding fossil fuels
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_01: at this extreme rate.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_01: Then, this is how much the planet would warm.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_01: But listen to how Fox News and others have twisted that distinction.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_02: The original forecast predicted a drastic rise in sea levels,
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_02: rapidly melting glaciers, global crop failures, and even the extinction of mankind.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_02: Now,
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_02: they have been thinking that temperatures would go up by eight degrees Fahrenheit by
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_02: the end of this century.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_02: All of these predictions made by the United Nations and many others,
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_02: often for bad reasons,
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_01: But again, RCP 8.5 was not a prediction.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_01: And further than that, Kate argues it wasn't even retracted.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think this scenario got retracted.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_00: I think that is kind of a...
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_00: A misnomer, almost.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_00: I think what happened is there was a reassessment by the people who make these scenarios.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_00: And they said, hey, this scenario no longer seems like it's very likely.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_00: And so let's not use it anymore as we go forward and tell the next generation
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_00: of climate models different stories.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_01: This is something scientists do every time they prepare a new generation of climate models.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_01: They update their what-if stories to reflect what has changed in the real world.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_01: The last major update was about a decade ago,
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_01: and it still included a future as extreme as RCP 8.5.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_01: Now this one doesn't because the world has changed.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_01: And that is actually really good news.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_01: Because at one point it absolutely was feasible that the world could go all in
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_01: on fossil fuels and not do anything about climate change whatsoever.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_01: So journalists and climate communicators talked about these worst case scenarios
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_01: and what they would mean.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_01: And in response, the world changed.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_01: If you had told me at the beginning of my career,
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: But here's the thing,
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_00: just because those solutions now exist and scientists aren't using RCP 8.5 anymore,
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_00: that doesn't mean climate change is no longer a problem.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_00: It actually means the opposite, right?
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_00: It means that those solutions exist.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_00: They are cheap, they are good, they are better, they are cleaner.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_00: And we can and should deploy them much, much, much quicker than we are doing now.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_01: Because even though scientists aren't using RCP 8.5 anymore,
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_01: they're still examining other potentially dangerous and feasible futures.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_01: They've just replaced the old scenario with a new set
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_01: of scenarios spanning everything from very low emissions to very high emissions.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_01: The new high emissions scenario imagines a world
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_01: where countries roll back their climate policies,
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_01: energy demand keeps rising because of things like, I don't know, AI.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_01: And renewables can't keep up with that demand.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_00: Something like the high scenario right now has renewable energy being deployed,
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_00: but it's being rapidly outpaced by growing demand.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_01: Now,
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_01: scientists haven't finished running these new scenarios through the new generation
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_01: of climate models, so the final warming projections don't exist yet.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_01: But preliminary estimates suggest that the new high-end scenario,
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_01: the new worst case,
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_01: could produce close to 3.5 degrees of warming by the end of the century.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_01: And because of uncertainty about how the planet will respond,
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_01: warming above 4 degrees is still possible.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_01: That is still absolutely catastrophic.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_00: I think worrying slightly less than before because we have replaced coal with solar,
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_00: that is defensible.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_00: But I don't think we should worry zero.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, I think we should worry a lot.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_01: And here's something else I think is important,
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_01: but not talked about by obviously anyone in Fox News or anyone agreeing with them.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_01: The range of scenarios didn't only change at the terrifying end of things.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_01: Scientists also moved away from the old best-case scenario future,
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_01: the one where humanity avoids exceeding 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming altogether.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's fair to say the world turned out to be better than we feared,
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_00: but worse than we hoped.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_01: Now, I'm not saying there aren't legitimate criticisms of RCP 8.5.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_01: There certainly are.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_01: For one thing,
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_01: journalists and climate communicators should have never presented RCP 8.5
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_01: as business as usual or the future that humanity was definitely heading towards.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody should call it business as usual.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody should call it the most likely outcome because we honestly have no idea.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_01: But some scientists and journalists did call RCP 8.5 business as usual.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_01: And I know that because I searched through all of my reporting from
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_01: the last 13 years for the words RCP 8.5.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_01: And I found an example from 2015 where I did that.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's fair to ask journalists and climate communications.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_00: There are also fair questions about why RCP 8.5 continued to appear so frequently
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_00: in scientific research and news coverage,
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_00: especially in the last five years or
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_00: when its assumptions looked increasingly not likely to occur.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_00: But that's
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_01: An entirely different, nuanced conversation than the one happening across media right now.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_01: After the break,
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_01: how the story of RCP 8.5 became evidence of a supposed climate conspiracy and
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_01: who benefits from telling that story.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_02: This episode of Heated is brought to you by the American Petroleum Institute.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_02: No, I'm kidding.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_02: Can you imagine if we were actually sponsored by API?
• 13:28
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• 13:28
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• 13:33
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• 13:36
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• 13:40
  SPEAKER_02: or what we don't.
• 13:42
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• 13:45
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• 13:49
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• 13:54
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• 13:56
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• 14:00
  SPEAKER_02: So let's get back to the program.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_01: Before the break,
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_01: Kate Marvel described a real debate about RCP 8.5,
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_01: whether scientists and journalists sometimes gave
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_01: an extreme scenario too much weight.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_01: And that conversation matters.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_01: But it is not what the Fox News clips you heard earlier have been doing.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_01: And it's certainly not what Trump was doing on May 16th when he posted
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_01: on Truth Social, good riddance.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_01: After 15 years of Democrats promising that climate change is going to destroy
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_01: the planet,
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_01: the United Nations top climate committee just admitted that its own projections,
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_01: RCP 8.5, were wrong, wrong, wrong.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_01: So how did an update to an extremely technical climate modeling scenario
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_01: That's what Philip Newell has been investigating.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_01: Philip is the communications co-chair of Climate Action Against Disinformation.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_01: In a new report shared with Heated before publication,
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_01: he traced how the RCP 8.5 story moved through a network
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_01: of fossil fuel-connected pundits, think tanks, and media outlets.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_03: We found that a network
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_03: of ultimately fossil fuel funded disinfluencers were spinning what was
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_03: a success story of renewables saving us from the worst into the further conspiracy
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_03: of scientists exaggerating.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_03: But there's no problem at all.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_01: Phillips' report doesn't describe one secret meeting where all
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_01: the fossil fuel cronies came together and received the same talking points
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_01: and agreed that they'd go disseminate them.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_01: What it describes is more like a fossil fuel connected ecosystem
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_01: where misinformation grows and spreads.
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_03: It's really a constellation of people that the idea is to make a viewer think
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_03: that it's a lot of different people, different experts from different places.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_03: What you look at it is a lot of these different experts have ties one way or another
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_03: to the fossil fuel industry.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_01: One person Philip's report focuses on is Roger Peelke Jr.,
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_01: a political scientist who has pushed the argument
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_01: that RCP 8.5 demonstrates systemic exaggeration by climate scientists.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_03: I think he does deserve credit in pushing this for quite a while, yeah.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_01: Heelke works for the American Enterprise Institute.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_03: They have a long history of taking funding from the tobacco and fossil fuel industries.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_01: Versions of the same message appeared across fossil fuel-funded
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_01: and fossil fuel-connected think tanks and digital media outlets,
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_01: including The Daily Caller, The Daily Wire, The Daily Signal, and Breitbart.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_01: It reached the far-right AFD party in Germany, then Trump's Truth Social Feed, then Fox News.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_03: They build an ecosystem that rewards those messages and those narratives,
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_03: and then they can sort of choose from whoever says, ooh, I'm willing to say that.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_01: Philip calls this a disinformation subsidy.
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_01: Sometimes the subsidy is money.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_01: Sometimes it's free legal or advertising support.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_01: Sometimes it's just attention or access to powerful people or an invitation
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_01: to appear on television.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_01: And social media allows those claims to spread unchecked.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_01: So they look like common popular opinion.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_03: That's very much been social and digital media that allows those kind of claims
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_03: that would get fact checked out of mainstream media or out of
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_03: a peer reviewed journal.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_03: It allows them to circulate and bubble up.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_01: Phillips report contains a striking example of what happened after Trump's post about RCP 8.5.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_01: One climate organization in the United Kingdom analyzed the comments on its Facebook pages.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_01: On a regular week before Trump posted about RCP 8.5,
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_01: only 6.5% of the comments contained climate denial.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_01: But after Trump's post, that rose to 48.6% of the comments, nearly eight times as high.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_01: Now,
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_01: that's certainly not evidence that half the public suddenly became climate deniers,
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_01: but it is evidence that a relatively small number of activated accounts can make
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_01: a marginal position feel enormous.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_03: And Philip says they don't actually need that many people to join that chorus.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_03: They don't need a whole ton of people to believe it.
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_03: They need just enough people to justify the political inaction to continue.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_03: So around the world,
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_03: we've seen polling published in Nature,
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_03: 89% of the global public wants more climate action from our governments, right?
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_03: So 89% versus 11%, that's pretty lopsided.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_03: But the industry makes that 11% feel like it's so much more.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_01: Because the point of all this isn't necessarily to convince you that climate change is fake.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_01: It's just to make you uncertain about whether it's serious enough to require action right now.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_03: Let's wait and see and just see how things shake out.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah, because that continues to buy them more time with the status quo.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_03: And that is what it's all about,
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_03: is keeping that status quo of a fossil-fueled sort of world,
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_03: venting the new incomers, right?
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_03: It's preserving their monopoly on energy in any way they possibly can.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_01: Regardless of what the scientists and people at Fox News say,
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_01: we don't actually need climate models to know what is happening right in front
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_01: of our faces.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_01: The first eight months of 2026 have been the hottest period ever recorded for
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_01: the contiguous United States.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_01: Scientists have called it extremely and concerningly hot.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_01: On August 26th,
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_01: Nepal experienced a flash flood caused by a melting glacier that collapsed,
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_01: killing more than 1,300 people while 5,000 more remain missing.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_01: This was a climate disaster.
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_01: And this is why the myth matters.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_01: People like Chris Wright and other pundits on Fox News,
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_01: they're not trying to convince you that climate change is fake.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_01: Their goal is just to convince you that this can wait.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_01: We don't need to do anything about this right now.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_01: These individuals have built their wealth and power around the lie
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_01: that climate change isn't a big deal when all the evidence points to the contrary.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_01: The real story of RCP 8.5 is one of success.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_01: The world recognized the danger it was heading towards, and it changed course.
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_01: The solutions?
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_01: They're better and they're cheaper than they've ever been.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_01: But the problem is that now the best case scenario has been taken off the table too.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_01: So the strength of our solution continues to be diminished by the power of our opposition.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_01: So if we want to fight it,
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_01: we have to start by pushing back on this lie and flooding the zone with the facts.
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_01: I'm Emily Atkin and this is Heated.
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks for listening.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_01: We'll be back with another myth debunking episode soon.
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks for your support.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_01: Please like, follow,
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_01: and subscribe to all the heated things and elevate your status by becoming
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_01: a paid subscriber.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks so much and I'll see you next time.