Huge heads up, the Digital Course Academy is closing September 26th. This is the course that changed my life and taught me virtually everything I know about online courses, how to create them, how to launch them, and how to help people get results with them. When you join Amy Porterfield's Digital Course Academy, you'll get everything you need to turn your expertise into a profitable online course from idea to launch. You'll gain the confidence to build a business that gives you more time, more freedom, and more impact, all while helping others with what you know and love. Visit jenakuture.com/dca before it's too late. I believe in this course so much I've partnered up with Amy to ensure a fast route to success for you. When you enroll in the Digital Course Academy before the doors close, you'll also get my strategically built implementation suite of bonuses that's worth nearly $2,000, yours for free. Seriously, you do not want to miss this. This course won't be available again until next year, which means a heck of a lot of time between you and your online course dreams. As someone whose life has changed when she started teaching and creating digital courses, I personally cannot wait to help you get there too. Enroll now at jenakuture.com/dca before the doors close on September 26th. That's jenakuture.com/dca. We focus so much individually, but what the social science shows us is the most effective thing any of us can do is to use our voice to talk about what we can do together to make a much bigger difference. I'm Jenna Goodger, your host of the Gold Digger Podcast. I escaped the corporate world at the age of 23 with nothing more than a $300 camera from Craigslist and a dream. Now I'm running a seven-figure online business that feels even better than it looks all from my house in small town, Minnesota with my family. Here, we value time as our currency. We mix the woo and the work, and we are in the pursuit of building businesses that give us the freedom to live lives that we love. I've always loved turning big goals into reality, and I'm here to help you do the same. This isn't just a peek behind the curtain, come along with me and my guests as we tear the whole curtain down. Every week, we tackle practical, no-fluff marketing strategies and host honest discussions on what works and what doesn't. Join me and my expert guests for actionable insights to help you grow your dream business with confidence, pull up a seat, and get ready to be challenged, inspired, and empowered. This is the Gold Digger Podcast. We all have causes and beliefs that we care deeply about, things that we wish we could change in the world, and while it can sometimes feel like our individual actions aren't enough to make a real impact, today's conversation will remind you that we can create meaningful change, especially when we come together. I am so excited for you to listen to today's guest, the amazing Dr. Catherine Hayhoe. She is the chief scientist at the Nature Conservancy, a professor at Texas Tech University, and the best-selling author of Saving Us, a client scientist, case for hope, and healing in a divided world. But what I love most about Dr. Hayhoe is how she inspires everyday people to take action. She's a co-founder of Science Moms, a movement where moms unite to protect the future of their children by taking on climate change together, proof that when passionate people join forces, incredible things happen. In today's episode, we're going behind the scenes of the all-powerful, active man campaign, a movement that's changing how we talk about extreme weather and client-related disasters. Dr. Hayhoe will share why shifting the way we communicate about climate change is so important, how this campaign is moving people from belief to action, and how partnerships are making an even bigger impact. And the best part is, Dr. Hayhoe gives us real, tangible ways that you can get involved, whether you're a parent, a business owner, or just someone who wants to make a difference. We also dive into how we can address the unequal impact climate change has on different communities and discuss some really important facts that a lot of us likely don't know. Get ready for an uplifting, action-packed conversation that will leave you feeling inspired on how you can be a part of a movement that is literally changing the world. Let's welcome Dr. Kathryn Hayhoe to the Gold Digger Podcast. A super quick question, how many tabs do you have open right now, like actually go to your browser and check? If you have ADHD like me, it's a lot. And when you throw a business into the mix, it's even more. You might have a tab for your email marketing system, one for your payment software, one for your CRM, content tools, email tools. And with all those tabs, you're spending more time searching through data, and less time, you know, growing your business. But with HubSpot's customer platform, you can close all those tabs and access all your tools in one convenient place. With HubSpot, you'll get everyone's eyes on the same work. Boost data analysis with AI, optimize workflows for marketing, improve pipeline management for sales, and keep track of every customer question big or small. So close those tabs. It's business growing time. Visit HubSpot.com to get started today. That's HubSpot.com. I am so excited to speak to someone who is so much smarter than me today. Dr. Hayhoe, welcome to the episode of the Gold Digger Podcast. Thank you for having me. And I have to take issue with that. We all have different types of intelligence. No, it's true. It's true. Okay. I am dying to know a little bit more about you, how you got started, how you got into what you're doing and passionate about what you're passionate about. Well, the science came early because my dad was a science teacher. And my grandmother didn't work outside the home, she had eight children, but she even had a degree in science education herself. So I was indoctrinated from a very early age into the wonders of science. In fact, you know, my perspective as a child was who wouldn't want to understand why the sky is blue or the grass is green or why polar bears skin is actually black. So I love science. I mean, some of my earliest memories are my dad taking me to the park at night, probably felt like two in the morning was actually probably like nine o'clock at night, showing me how to find the Andromeda galaxy through binoculars. So science was an early love, but I didn't make the connection between science and climate change. I always thought, you know, science is something that you do for the good of future humanity, but not necessarily immediate benefits until I was almost finished my undergraduate degree at university. And I needed an extra class to finish my degree in astrophysics. And I was studying galaxies at the time, which are very cool, but they have really nothing to do with our present day life, or that we certainly learn interesting things from them that do help us long term. So I needed an extra class and I looked around and there was this brand new class on climate change that this new professor was just teaching. And I thought, well, that looks interesting. Why not take it? So and I would add that I'd already taken children's literature and I'd already taken like all sort of like the fun classes. So I took this class on climate change and I was completely shocked not to find it. It was real because I knew it was real. I am Canadian and I learned about it in school as many of us do no matter where we live. But I always thought of it as sadly still too many people do today as a distant future issue, one that was going to affect people in the future that would affect maybe the environment, but not us, one that mattered to environmentalists and then the rest of us could watch their documentaries and donate to their social media campaigns. So I took this class and that was where I learned first of all that climate change is no longer a future issue. It's actually affecting us right here today. And you know, if you tell me where you're from, I can tell you how climate change is affecting you. And then also I learned that although it's affecting us all, it's not affecting us equally. The people who have done the least to cause the problem are the ones who are most affected. And that is true generationally, younger people have done less yet they're most affected. It is true within our cities and our states and our provinces, the people who have lower income are most affected yet they've contributed least and it's definitely true across countries. The richest countries have contributed the most, yet the poorest countries are the ones who are suffering the brunt of the impacts. And so to me, that was what made me want to become a climate scientist. The profound sense that this thing is not fair. It is not fair at all. And now I'm a mom and it's even worse because I have a child and so I'm like, I would do anything to ensure a better future for him. And that today means tackling climate change. Wow, thank you so much for sharing that story. And I often just love when we can pause and like look at our paths and think, what if you hadn't taken that course, your whole course of your life and career could change. And I just love when we can see those line in the sand moments of like before and after. So that was just such an amazing story. I want to know, you know, you touched on so many different things, but first, like why does it matter how we talk about climate change? I feel like there is a lot of language. And I think for a lot of people, even myself included in listeners, just as you said, a lot of people think this is a future issue or this is, you know, our children's children's children will be dealing with this. And so talk about language because even just hearing you speak, I'm like, there is so much power in the way that you're using your words and there's so much thought there. But there's also intention. How do humans ever do anything together without talking about it? I mean, communication is so essential and so basic to everything we do in our relationships, in our work, in how we engage with each other in person and online. We just often leave these conversations sort of out of the equation when we're thinking, what can I do to help us move towards a better future? So often like when it comes to climate change, people are like, oh, well, I have to reduce my carbon footprint. And you know, don't get me wrong, we live in North America in a continent where we have some of the highest personal carbon footprints in the world. So that means we have a lot more personal responsibility than someone who might be living in Sub-Saharan Africa or in Southeast Asia. But even if we live here, there's only so much we can do individually. So you know, for many years, I lived in West Texas where I didn't even have public transportation where I lived. So that wasn't even an option. Like if I wanted to go to my job or if I wanted to go anywhere, I had to have a car. So I got a plug in car as soon as I could, but then there was no where I could plug it in except for my house. So I had to have a hybrid otherwise I couldn't drive more than a certain amount of miles. So we focus so much individually. But what the social science shows us is the most effective thing any of us can do is to use our voice to talk about what we can do together to make a much bigger difference. So for example, how much more difference would it make if, for example, where we work, has a place where we can plug in our cars and then you tell everybody on campus, hey, we'll give you free electricity for a year if you bring a plug in car to campus instead of taking a gas car like that. Or if you build a public transportation system and you tell everybody, here's a very affordable way to get to places instead of having to drive. There's things that we can change together that make a much bigger difference. So getting back to how do we talk about this issue, I feel like there's a huge gap first of all between our head and our heart. Most of us are actually worried, but we don't know what we can do and we don't know why it matters to us. So first of all, bridging that gap to talk about why it matters to the people I love, the places I love, the things I love. I've started conversations over, you know, the fact that we both love beach vacations or I've even started conversations over how we both knit or we both really like wine or chocolate or with parents. But then making that connection between our heart and our hands, what can we do to make a difference? Because the whole world could be worried. But if we don't know what to do, we won't do anything about it. And it's the same difference, right? Except if we're not worried, we just be happier. So we have to bridge that head to heart and heart to hands gap. And the first way to do that is to talk about it. I love how you explain things. And I just feel like already we are learning so much. I think it's beautiful too. And I've actually listened to past interviews you've done about just the approach of like finding that commonality. And it's even more important in today's world where everything is so divisive and everyone wants to be separate to find those things of like, you love this, I love this. Here's what this looks like. And here's how we can change it. And so I just love like bridging the gap in such a beautiful and natural way. And also in a way that appeals to people because I think oftentimes when we are passionate about something, we want that passion to just explode onto everyone we know. And if it doesn't, we can get so disheartened. And so finding those common threads can be such a beautiful way to do this. So I want to know like, what can we, all of this collective listeners, this gold digger community, what are some things we can do to make a difference? We've talked about cars and electric cars, but like in our everyday life, like as we are investigating, what are we doing in the next 24 hours? What are some things that we could be conscious of or cognizant of or even just putting more thought behind or intention behind as listeners? So as I already mentioned, most people are already worried about this issue. Even in the US, two thirds of people are worried. But we don't talk about it because if you don't know what to do about it, why would you want to have a depressing, sad conversation? So often we just assume people don't care. And we assume that they just need to be more worried. And we assume that we need to focus on ourselves as individuals to make a difference. But the reality is we can't do this alone, but we can together. So when people ask me, and I have to say this question, what can I do, is the number one question I get these days as a class scientist? I'm sure. So if you go to my Instagram account or my threads account, I have pinned the top of my accounts, the answer to my question. And the answer I have hastened to add is based on science because there are scientists who study people and they study how people can make a difference. And they've been studying this for a long time. They study, you know, the civil rights movement. They study how women got the vote. They study how slavery was abolished. They study how, you know, gay marriage was passed. They study how social change happened. And this is what we need to fix climate change. We need social change. So here are the top things that individuals can do that make the biggest difference. Number one is something so simple. Again, we often don't even think about it, the fact that we need to be having conversations that connect our head to our hearts, to our hands. Most people are worried, but most people aren't having conversations. Across the U.S., you know, maybe a third of people hear somebody talk about it once in a while, how do we as humans ever do anything together without talking? That's number one. Number two is join a climate group to help amplify your voice. And there is a climate group for everyone. In fact, on my website, which is just my name, KathrynHaco.com, I've started to collect climate groups for people who are winter athletes, for people who are students, for people who are people of faith, whether Christian or Jewish or whatever, for people who are mothers. That's why I helped to co-found Science Moms because a lot of us are mothers and we do accept fathers and other types of parents too. But we call it Science Moms because we're all moms and we're climate scientists. Let's join a group to help elevator voices together. That's number two. Number three, you can guess, is to use your voice where you work or where you study. Because everything that a school or a university or a place of worship or where you work, a business and organization is doing is because somebody, usually not the CEO, said, why aren't we doing this? And then we can make our money count. So where we get our credit card, where we bank, if we have retirement or pension or anything like that, we can make a difference because here's a crazy stat. Having a thousand dollars in a bank account with a bank that invests in fossil fuels produces the same amount of carbon as flying from New York to Seattle if you have that thousand dollars in an account over a year. So where we put our money makes a difference and then we can use our voice with politicians. And now that means voting, but it doesn't mean only voting at the federal level. Most elected officials over 99 and a half percent of them are not federal. They're at the local or state level where they can make huge differences and it's not just about voting. Students underestimate what their constituents think about climate change. And the number one reason they underestimate them is because they never hear from them. You see a theme here. And then the last thing on the list is this, make personal choices in your personal life. You know, try that plant based recipe because what we eat makes a difference. Sign up for the wind energy plan, get those solar panels in the rebate, put a heat pump in your home, try public transportation, get an EV, but don't stop there. Talk about it to make it contagious, tell people how much better your life is because of these changes and encourage them to do it too. Those are the most effective things we can do. And didn't you see something on that list that you felt you could do? Yes. Oh my gosh. Yes. This is such a beautiful breakdown. You hinted and talked very briefly about science moms. Tell me more about this, why it got started, who's involved, like just the conception of it because I think it's so beautiful. I am a huge fan for helping to connect what people already care about to why climate change matters, as I already mentioned. And you know, once you have that child, and I just remember the first time I laid eyes on my son, I mean, my life just profoundly changed in ways that I couldn't even have ever imagined before. And I would do anything to protect that tiny little human being. Now he's not so tiny anymore, he's quite large, but you know that passion remains. And so as parents, we have a huge stake in the future, the most valuable and precious stake ever in ensuring a better future. And the organization that I worked with to co-found science moms, they're called potential energy coalition, they are really smart. They cut their teeth on advertising for profit, and then they realized there's no profit in a dead world. So they decided we got to make sure there's a better future for us. So they've asked people around the world what motivates you to care about climate change? And they were sort of expecting to find different answers in different places around the world because people care about different things. And they were expecting to find, you know, one place people might care because of the jobs that you could get in a green economy. In another place, people might care because it's not fair that the richest corporations in the world are subsidized, the tune of almost a thousand dollars per person around the world to produce all this carbon pollution that is not only driving climate change, it's killing almost 10 million people a year from air pollution. They would expect some people to be up in arms for that. They would expect different reasons that people would care. But what they found is around the whole world, there was one reason why most people care, and that is because of love, love for the places, things, and people we care about and especially love for the next generation, that's why we're fighting for a better future. So, I mean, doesn't it make it clear that harnessing the power and, frankly, the very powerful voices of mothers and other parents, wouldn't that make sense to say we care about this issue? In fact, we already have every reason to care. And because of that reason, we want a better future. It is not about being blue or being red or being on a certain side of the political spectrum, don't we all want a better future for our children? So that's what led us to start Science Moms. What is Science Moms, and I just want people to see the beauty in coming together. I think one of the biggest and best themes that you've brought up, Catherine, is like, this isn't a silo. Like this work is not meant to be done in an isolated island. It's meant to be done together. And so what is Science Moms? How does it work? How did it come together? Who's involved? I love it. So most of us climate scientists are climate scientists like me who started studying science because we were passionate about science. But then something connected to our hearts, and we realized we have to work on this big global challenge because if we don't do that, we can't do anything else. And for a lot of us, we realized that it's the fact that we're parents that makes us care about it. So a couple of years ago, I got together with a number of my fellow scientists who are also mothers. And we helped to create this nonpartisan group of climate scientists who are mothers because we realized that a lot of people don't have the information they need to have these conversations. Yeah. So we want to provide accessible and reliable information, facts and truth for people to have these conversations with people around them, with their kids, you know, what books can I be reading with my kids? What things do I need to say if I'm actually going to do something really scary, like reach out to an elected officials office and say, I care, what am I going to say? Yeah, if I'm going to share something on social media, I'm not a scientist. What am I supposed to say if I'm sharing on social media? So we want to provide all that information to help engage and empower moms across the U.S. and beyond to use our voices to advocate for a better future for our kids. That's the goal of science moms. I am obsessed. And I feel like you just answered so many questions in that is I remember listening to a past interview you did and you were just saying that like, as humans, it is not possible for us to understand, know and research everything. And so oftentimes we're seeking out people that we trust and know that have done the research ahead of us so that we can learn from them versus trying to go out and do it all. And I feel like with a topic like climate change, it feels insurmountable. It feels impossible, especially as a busy mom to take the time to really understand it, know the language, be able to back it up. And so I absolutely adore what you guys are doing and the resources that you're creating because for busy moms, it helps equip us with the information that we would be seeking on our own and maybe not finding. And so I just think it's amazing. Thank you. And I totally agree. I mean, we're all busy moms too. Yes. So we know we have no time to waste. I'm not going to give you a scientific paper. I'm trying to give you like a tiny sound bite or a social media meme or if you want a really short, tiny little video, but we just want to cut to the chase here. We've got lunch in one hand, we've got our work in another, we've got rocking the cradle with our foot, so to speak, as we're doing two things at once with our hands. We don't have any time to lose, but here's the thing. We know that we are utterly 100% committed to a better future for our kids. And now we know as scientists that we're not going to get that better future if we don't fix climate change. So we're all in this together. Yes. How can our listeners get involved? So let's talk a little bit about the active man campaign. I think it's really interesting. It's sparking conversations. What are some ways that our listeners can jump in and support this movement and just learn more about it? So let me explain what that is. We've been talking earlier about how we have a lot of information in our heads. Like a lot of people are sort of worried about what's going to happen to the future of the planet and the future of humanity and the ice sheets and the polar bears and the Amazon. But we haven't made that head to heart connection. We don't understand what's happening where I live. Yeah. Well, these days nature is making that connection for us and it is making it primarily through what I call not global warming, but global weirding. In other words, wherever we live, it's as if we have a pair of weather dice and we always have a chance of rolling a double six naturally. That's like a heat wave, a drought, a flood, a storm, wildfire. But as the world gets warmer decade by decade, it's like it's sneaking in and taking one of those numbers on our dice and turning it to another six. And then now these days we even have some sevens and eights on our dice. And so we're getting heat waves that start earlier and last longer and that are way hotter than we've ever seen before. We're getting heat waves in some places in winter, like Australia just had a record-breaking heat wave in their winter and articles having heat waves. We're seeing wildfires. I'm from Canada. If you can't tell by the way I talk. We're seeing wildfires that are burning huge areas many times bigger than we've ever seen before. We're seeing hurricanes that are dumping way more rain than we've ever had before. We've seen floods getting more frequent. We've seen these disasters get into the point where people used to call them acts of God. But today these disasters, the way our weather dice are getting loaded against us the way global weirding is happening where we live. They're acts of man now. Here are the ones who are causing these incredibly damaging disasters to happen. And across the United States, nine out of ten Americans would agree that they have been personally affected by extreme weather over the last few years. So this is the biggest head-to-heart connection that's happening. Wherever you live, I can tell you how climate change is already affecting the extreme weather where you live and it's affecting your home, your ability to get around. It's hugely affecting your insurance rates. I have a colleague with a young kid who lives in South Florida and she was telling me that her home insurance just doubled in the last year. And she does not live in a seaside mansion. She lives in a normal-sized home with a normal-sized family, normal-sized income. And pretty soon we can't even keep up with these disasters and they're affecting the price of the food and our grocery stores. They're affecting the quality of our water. They're affecting the air that we breathe. They're affecting every aspect of our lives. And so that's what active man is about. It's about showing us that our decisions are the ones that are doing this to ourselves. So for example, like, where do you live? Duluth, Minnesota. Okay. Duluth, Minnesota. You might be like, well, that's very far north, you know, it's almost on the border with Canada, right? Isn't a little global warming a good thing up there, like longer summers, nicer weather less snow? Well in Duluth, you've got eleven rivers going through the city, right? And over, I think it was over ten years ago, there was a massive flood. In fact, in some places in Minnesota, people's home insurance has gone up by three hundred percent or more just because flood risk is increasing. How is that connected to global warming? Warmer air holds more water vapor. So when a storm comes along today, there's a lot more water vapor for that storm to sweep up and dump on us than there was fifty or a hundred years ago. So the flood risk in Duluth, Minnesota, as well as Toronto, Ontario, where I'm from, has gone off the charts and it's even worse when you've got rivers going through because then all the water from further away is coming through the city as well. So Duluth suffered some incredible floods and as a result, the city has actually invested in creating what they call these riparian zones, which are green areas of vegetation and nature that absorb flood water along the rivers instead of having homes that can be damaged. But at the same time, we know that if we don't fix climate change, you can do all the riparian zone restorations you want and it isn't going to be enough to protect people. So that's just one example of how climate change is making these acts of man, so to speak, worse in Duluth, Minnesota. It's amazing and it's so interesting because really even when we look at the language again, it's just a shift in ownership, right? It's easy to blame it on something else, like an act of God, but even just taking the ownership brings it back to I can actually influence it. And I think that's so huge. And it's so interesting to me, like even living in Duluth last winter, we had the mildest winter of all time. We hated it. There's no snow. I'm like, we live here because we actually like the snow, and it's just impossible to ignore. And I think that's what's really interesting is especially, I believe, for my generation, so many of us still have that back of the mind, like a hundred years from now mentality, but we're literally seeing it and living it. And I think too, as parents, naturally you experience it even more. My kids were so disappointed they got ice skates for Christmas and they couldn't even get out on the lake because there was water on it. And so it's like, as parents, I feel like it hits you even deeper of like, we didn't get to take our snow shoes out this last year. We didn't get to go cross country skiing. My brother bought snowmobiles. They didn't even get to use them. And so it is interesting not only impacts in just what you can do in the weather, but experiencing the lack of experiences due to the weather as well. Oh, totally. I mean, I'm Canadian. So I grew up with an ice rink in our backyard. Yes. My second first memory after my dad showed me how to find a galaxy was going to his hockey game. That's like three years old. So that's a big part of our life is learning how to skate. And the number of days we can skate outside versus inside. I mean, you know, normally you just flood all the tennis courts and that's where people skate in the winter. Well, you can't even do that anymore in a lot of places. Our lifestyle is changing. And what we wanted to teach our children, what we learned from our parents is changing for us. And imagine how much more it's changing for indigenous people who live up in the Arctic Circle. Right. And then there's those types of losses of things that we care about. But then there's also things that affect our health. Like, for example, you and I probably remember, you know, growing up, my mother never checked me for ticks. Like I would spend all summer running through the woods as much as I could in Southern Ontario. And I never worried about ticks. My husband grew up in Virginia. And every night his mother would check him for ticks, which of course carry diseases, right? Yeah. Well, fast forward to today, I was up in the same place where I grew up at our cottage in Ontario with my son. And he came running to me and he's like, I think I have a tick. And I looked and it was a tick. He's like, Oh my gosh, he's like ripping off his clothes because of course, kids know everything these days from so amazing. Do I have any other tips because now they carry Lyme disease? I mean, Lyme disease wasn't even on the list of diseases recognized by health Canada 10 or 15 years ago, because we didn't even have it anywhere in Canada. And now it is all through Minnesota. It's all through Wisconsin. It's all through Southern Ontario. And those ticks are moving north because of climate change. The colder winters aren't cold enough anymore to kill them off. So there's crazy stuff happening even in places where you wouldn't even think are susceptible. And then I live now in Texas. Yeah. Texas already has more sixes on its weather dice than any other state. But Texas has more billion dollar weather and climate disasters now thanks to acts of man than we've ever had hurricanes are stronger. Cold fires, we had the biggest wildfire in Texas record just this past January in the winter. Wow. The heat in the summer is getting so extreme. Our whole family has gotten heat stroke multiple times, even though we have these like huge yetis and I just force every drink like gallons of water in the summer and we don't spend time outside in the summer between like 10 a.m. and 5 p.m. It's crazy how things are changing. And one of my fellow science moms, Joellen Russell, she is originally from Alaska. And now she lives in Arizona, which is ground zero for extreme heat. She has to wake her kids up before dawn because that's the only time they can play outside in the summer safely. I mean, it's just crazy what's happening and how it is intimately affecting our lives and our kids lives. It is not a future issue anymore. It's here and it's now. Can you talk one thing that I love when you share about is talking about just different communities and how they're differently impacted. And I think it would be important to go deeper because it's easy for us to think of, well, how does it affect me, right? That's naturally where our brains go. But one of the things that I've loved learning from you is just the different socioeconomic impacts and things that we might not even be considering about others in our communities and the impact of climate change. Can we go a little deeper on that? Oh, yes. I mean, that's like I mentioned, that's what made me become a climate scientist. And I realized that climate change affects us all, but it doesn't affect us all equally. And the people who are most affected are the ones who did the least to cause the problems. So keeping with the idea of parents and kids, let's just start there. So we know that pregnant women are disproportionately affected by the pollution from burning fossil fuels, the air pollution that we breathe in, as well as being disproportionately affected by rising temperatures and by these extreme weather disasters that are getting worse, global weirding. So for example, exposure to pollution actually decreases the effectiveness of IVF, for example, by a factor of five. Air pollution disproportionately impacts young children and the elderly, young children because their lungs are so small and they're breathing in so much of it. We're seeing that when you shift school buses over from diesel school buses to electro school buses, within just a matter of weeks, childhood asthma goes down by 30% and then it continues to drop over time. Having gas stoves, no, I left to cook with the best. And my gas stove was one of my favorite things, I just want to say for the record. But when I read the research that frankly it horrified me that as I'm an atmospheric scientist, I study the air, I didn't even know that gas stoves produce so much indoor air pollution, even when they're off, that I had a gas stove for most of our life. It wasn't until about eight or nine years ago that I started to see the new research on gas stoves and air pollution and the impact on kids and how children are six times more likely to have asthma if they grew up in a home with an indoor gas stove. So I switched to induction and at that time there was a lot of misinformation about how I couldn't use my cast iron lacrosse that stuff that I love that I asked for for my wedding and I use every day. But turns out you can use all of that, I can use everything. So that's all good, not to mention you can boil water faster and there's no air pollution. So all of that disproportionately affects kids and as soon as I found out about that, I posted it on my Facebook page and I have a newsletter every week called Talking Climate where I talk a lot about this type of stuff too. And I posted it and then people were like, "Oh, are you serious? Is this really the case? Are you sure?" And I was like, "Well, yeah, I think the research is pretty clear." So I posted again a couple of years later and this woman commented on my post and she said, "I didn't know anything about it either, but I had a son who had terrible asthma. We had already ended up in the ER with him multiple times." And your heart just breaks when you think about that. I'm very fortunate that my son doesn't have my sister had asthma growing up. And so I know what it looks like to have to be struggling to breathe, have to carry inhaler with you all the time, to be running to the ER as a sibling, it's traumatic enough as a parent. It's even worse. And so she said her son, she'd already been to the ER multiple times with her son. He was only about five or six years old at the time. She said she saw my original post. They immediately switched and you might say, "Well, isn't it super expensive? You can get a two burner inductive stove for 60 bucks at Ikea." So we're not talking super expensive anymore. She said they immediately switched and she said they haven't been to the ER since. And so I'm just like, "Okay, leave climate change out of the picture." From that perspective alone, do we not have every reason to get ourselves off the dirty and polluting ways of getting energy that helped us back then, but we don't need them anymore. We have clean ways to get energy and use energy today. So that's just kids. Now, let's just move up slightly to our cities. It turns out that in our cities in North America, when we have a heat wave, and those heat waves, again, they're getting worse, they're getting stronger, they're coming earlier, they're lasting longer, low-income neighborhoods can be up to 15 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than a high-income neighborhood in the same city. The number one reason is lack of green space and trees. That's the number one reason. And why don't poor neighborhoods have trees in green space? Often, it's because of historic racist practices called redlining, where people couldn't get mortgages or they couldn't get low-interest loans or the city didn't invest in parks and boulevards and green spaces in those areas. So as a result, they're hotter during heat waves. Air pollution is higher because trees actually filter the air pollution out of the air. They don't have places to go with their kids outside. So if you're outside for 15 or 20 minutes, it actually changes your brain chemistry. It helps with our mental health. It provides us a place to spend time outdoors. So and green space, it soaks up rain when it floods, whereas if you just have concrete, then all that water goes and it floods your homes, it floods your streets. So it turns out that greening low-income neighborhoods, first of all, reduces air pollution, reduces the heat burden, which reduces the impact on people's health, reduces the impact on their air conditioning bills, enhances their physical and their mental health, and in fact, at the nature conservancy, where I serve as their chief scientist, we just finished a multi-year study in Louisville, where they looked at the impact of greening a low-income neighborhood on heart health. And it turns out that it, we were collaborating with the medical school at the university and they discovered that the simple act of planting trees in low-income neighborhoods actually decreased inflammation, which leads to a whole host of issues, both mental and physical, as well as heart issues. So I mean, there's just so much inequality that there's some amazing solutions to. And then of course, we have the whole inequality between countries where, you know, we talked about these disasters, these acts of man that are getting worse where we live, whether Minnesota, Florida, or Texas. But if you look globally, which countries are suffering the worst? It's countries like Mozambique, countries like Afghanistan, countries that are already living on the edge that don't have the resources like basic health care or clean water or enough food. They're the ones that are being affected most. So those are all the whole range of inequalities we're dealing with. And I mean, you know, as a, not just as a parent, but as a human, doesn't it just make you want to be like, yes, we got to fix this, right? Yeah. Absolutely. It's all so fascinating. And I think, you know, it can just feel overwhelming. And so Catherine, help us to feel hopeful and to feel encouraged and inspired into action. Because I think at the end of this episode, that is all we can do. And so what would you say to somebody who's listening to this and they're like, this feels so hopeless. Like, where do we go from here? Because honestly, I think that is next to the thought that this isn't going to happen for a long time. That is the next feeling. And so where do we go from here? So I feel like we are all standing there at the bottom looking at the top of Mount Everest. Yes. And I enjoy hiking with the best of them, but I am not a mountaineer. I am not what you would call like an athlete. I have no ambitions of climbing Mount Everest in real life. And I'm not sure I would make it to be totally honest. But it's like we're all standing sort of collectively at the bottom of Mount Everest and we're looking at the top and we're like, there is no way we're going to get there. Well, how do you get there? You get there one step at a time and all of us have the ability to take one step. And if we do things together, we have the ability to take more steps. And here's the thing. We don't have to do this alone. It's not like every human being on their own without reference to anybody else has to get at the top of Mount Everest. We just have to figure out collectively how to do it. And I know that collectively we can't how because we've actually done something like that in real life and we've done many other things in real life. Take that to the social change that we're talking about that we need. You know, a hundred years ago, most of us, women, we couldn't vote, right? Many places we couldn't vote in fact in some countries, people couldn't even vote when I was born. That's how crazy it is. But now we can vote and often we just take that for granted. But it's not because the president of the US woke up one day, he was a man, of course, and said, oh, woman should really get the vote. Like, that's not why women got the vote. You know, slavery didn't end because the King of England woke up one day. It's like, oh, slavery is so unfair, it really should be abolished. No, civil rights were not enacted because the people in charge were like, oh, you know, it's crazy that we have this ridiculous system. Why don't we just fix it? And apartheid didn't end because the ruling party in South Africa said, oh, it's Friday, we should just, you know, give people racial equality. Like, none of these things happened because the leaders just decided spontaneously one day they should happen. They happened because very ordinary people, people who were not wealthy, they were not influential, they were not like, they were not even the Albert Einstein's of the world. They were just people who had the courage of their convictions and they knew that their voice was the most powerful thing they had. So they use their voice. And some of those people we know, so we know the names of Martin Luther King, Jr., right? We know the names of Susan B. Anthony. We know the names of Nelson Mandela, but, you know, they were thousands of people, tens of thousands of people, hundreds of thousands of people who march with them, who use their voices with them in the places where they work as we all have friends, we all have neighbors, we all have coworkers or colleagues, we all have people who are part of the same organizations as us. We use their voices to advocate for a better future. And we don't know who most of those people are, but we live in their shadow today. And those people were ordinary people who were convinced that a better future is possible and did everything they could to advocate for and to paint a picture of what that better future looked like and what we need to do to get there. And we live in their shadow today. And I know that we are those people ourselves and what we do matters and the people who come in the future, they will live in our shadow. So what will we do to make a better and different future for them? I love that the science can be boiled down to this simple statement. So there's this big scientific body called the intergovernmental panel on climate changes. Thousands of scientists from around the world, they produce these giant reports with like 10 point font and a million scientific references. And I don't recommend actually reading them because, and I mean, unless you really love the science and what you just do, but they boiled down the whole thing where they had this huge report that looked at what's going to happen in the future depending on the choices we make. You know, if the world gets warmer by one degree or one and a half or two or two and a half, what's going to happen? And you might say, well, that doesn't sound like a lot. But those levels are actually equivalent to how our human body feels as our human body increase, temperature increases by one, one and a half, two, three or four degrees. The global temperature is as stable as that of the human body. And so we're currently running a two degree Fahrenheit fever globally. That means our planet feels just like we do if we're running a two degree fever. We feel achy or taking Tylenol or wondering who coughed on us or taking a COVID test or going to the doctor, wondering what we ate. So the whole conclusion of that giant report was this, every bit of warming matters, which means every action matters and every choice matters. And so we as individuals have so much power to not only make decisions in our personal life and then talk about them to make them contagious, but we have the power to use our voice individually in person and online to join a climate action group, start with science, moms, why not? To use our voice where we work or where we study or where we worship and to use our voice with our elected officials at every level to say, this matters. We all want a better future. What can we do together to make that happen? I have absolutely loved this interview so much. Thank you so much for your passion. Thank you for breaking it down. Thank you for sharing. Thank you for your facts like this was so incredible. And I'm just so I'm really, really thankful. Where can everybody find out more about you? Just with you, get involved with science moms, check out active man, give me all the places. Oh, so many places. So you can find first of us online at actofman.com or and sciencemoms.com. And then my own website, just my name, Katherine Hayhoe.com. You have to spell it with two A's though, then you can find us on social media. So you can find science moms on social media and there's lots of resources that you can share also on social media because that's a way to use our voice. I'm on social media too, like I mentioned Instagram, threads, blue sky, Facebook, LinkedIn. I have a newsletter every week called Talking Climate. And it every week shares good news in green, not so good news in red so you can skip that if you need to, but I feel like we need to understand why this is a problem. And then in blue, it's got what you can do to make a difference. And there's so much available. I have a book about it called Saving Us because it's not about saving the planet, it's actually about saving us. If you want to know how to have conversations and where we find hope in this world that just seems full of doom and gloom all the time. But if you start these conversations with people around you, don't start again about the polar bears and the ice sheets unless you are a polar bear living on an ice sheet. In which case, yes, that's exactly where you would start. But start a conversation from the heart about what matters to you. And for those of us who are parents, where better to start than with what we're most passionate about our kids? For those of us who work in a certain industry, there is so much that we can talk about about solutions in the fashion industry, solutions in the finance industry, solutions in the banking industry, solutions in every industry there are people working on solutions already today. In fact, the carpet industry has solutions where you can actually buy carpet that is carbon negative carpet. The shoe industry has carbon negative shoes. There's solutions all around us and when we start looking for those solutions and that's why I write my newsletter because people are like, "Well, where do you find all these solutions, Kat?" I'm like, "Oh, I'm going to share one with you every week." When we start looking around, they're all around us and when we have these amazing solutions, we realize the giant boulder of climate action, it is not sitting at the bottom of an impossibly steep cliff with only a few hands on it. We normally think it's this huge boulder. It's a giant cliff and it's got Greta Thunberg, who's this little girl. It's got Sir David Attenborough, who's like, "What, 95?" It's got Al Gore, but he's been pushing on it for like 40 years. He must be exhausted and we're like, "That boulder's not moving. So why bother add my hand? It's just a waste of time and who has any time to waste? None of us do. I feel like our time is the most non-renewable resource we have, carbon's number two, times number one." But when we look around, we realize, "No, that giant boulder. It's already at the top of the hill. It's already rolling down the hill in the right direction. There are millions of hands on it. Some of those hands might be my neighbors, my coworkers, people I know, people in my industry, even people in my city council, people in my church, people at my school. It has millions of hands on it. If I add my hand to a rolling boulder, it's going to go a little bit faster and I'm going to be making the world a better place. Bottom line is, don't we all want to be making the world a better place? Isn't that what helps us sleep at night? Yes. This was amazing. Thank you so much for coming on The Gold Digger Podcast. I hope everyone goes and checks out science moms, gets involved. I can't wait to get your newsletter. I just feel like I love the breakdown in the sections and I also just love newsletters in general. So bravo to you. Thank you so much for coming on the show today. Thank you for having me. This has been such a pleasure. I've got to say, I am feeling so fired up about this episode. I absolutely loved hearing from and learning from Dr. Katherine Hayhoe. I think she is a brilliant communicator and I absolutely loved the focus on conversation and finding commonality in a world that feels so dismissive and divisive, finding the things that you love alongside other people who have that common love so that we can all come together and make a massive difference. I feel enlightened. I feel inspired. I feel ready to take action and I hope you feel the same too. Make sure you check out science moms and learn more about ways that we can all come together and make a difference for this beautiful planet that we live on. And thank you so much for tuning in to another amazing episode of The Gold Digger Podcast. Until next time, keep on digging your biggest goals. Thanks for pulling up a seat for another episode of The Gold Digger Podcast. I hope today's episode fueled you with inspiration, gave you information that you can turn into action and realign you with your true north in life and business. If you've enjoyed today's episode, head on over to golddiggerpodcast.com for today's show notes, discount codes for our sponsors, freebies to fuel your results and so much more. And if you haven't yet, make sure you're subscribed so that you never miss a future show. We'll see you next time, Gold Diggers. Please note, this episode may contain paid endorsements and advertisements and individuals on the show may have a direct or indirect financial interest in products or services referred to in the episode. 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