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Wicked Problems - Climate Tech Conversations

The Heat and the Fury

Host Richard Delevan interviews author Peter Schwartzstein, whose experiences give him a unique authority to explore how difficult it is to cover “climate security” from the front lines.

Climate and Violence

Many associate climate-related violence with regions like Syria. Schwartzstein explains that while climate change didn’t directly cause the Syrian civil war, it played a critical role in weakening the societal fabric. Severe droughts exacerbated poverty and rural migration, fostering instability and making communities more susceptible to revolutionary movements.

The West and Climate-Related Violence

The developed world won’t remain untouched by climate-induced violence for long. The infrastructure, even in advanced economies, is struggling under the strain of extreme weather events.

Catalysts:



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Broadcast on:
24 Sep 2024
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New customers on first three month plan only, taxes and fees extra, speeds lower above 40 gigabytes of city details. This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever think about switching insurance companies to see if you could save some cash? Progressive makes it easy to see if you could save when you bundle your home and auto policies. Try it at progressive.com. Progressive casualty insurance company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary, not available in all states. Climate change is already contributing to violence. I'm trying to get across to the average man or woman on the street, but this is an issue that is very much already here as opposed to a hypothetical future thread. We are collectively, massively underestimating the volume of violence that climate change is contributing precisely because of our failure to understand how climate change is intermingling with other drivers of instability, such as corruption, such as inequality, such as kind of prolific statements management. Welcome back to Wicked Problems. I'm Richard Delavan, fresh back from the Labor Party Conference in Liverpool, where we recorded a terrific episode from a live audience in the fabulous Maudrey in a startup coalition's tech hub, and that episode will be coming out to you tomorrow. Climate tech is such an interesting area because it's not just about batteries and solar farms, or buildings even need to be redesigned or retrofitted, but even how the physical environment is going to need the kind of adaptation and resilience measures we haven't been good at building for decades. We've basically built for a climate we no longer live in, if you doubt that, then we are probably weren't kayaking to your house in Dunstable or in South Western Poland this week. But what we're actually missing is perhaps a bigger story. We do a lot to adapt to the climate, and we do a lot that affects the climate. We don't usually talk about how the climate might change us, sometimes for good reasons, because generalizations can lead to some problematic thoughts. You want to hunker down? Okay, just for that. When it comes time to give out gang nicknames, you're going to be, I don't know, but you're not going to have a good nickname. Ellie had a teacher named Mr. Porty who had no interest in nuance. He asked the class why there's always been conflict in the Middle East and Ellie raised her hand and said it's a centuries old religious conflict involving land and suspicion and culture in wrong, Mr. Porty said. It's because it's incredibly hot, and there's no water. In case you were too young to remember, that was the West Wing. And whether Aaron Sorkin was gripping Camus, the stranger or the cures killing in Arab, the idea that when people, men particularly, get too hot, they also tend to get more violent is not something we really want to think about. But what if it's actually true? And if you zoom out from an individual level to a whole society of the whole world on a planet with average temperatures climbing higher and higher, the implications are quite scary. What if, year after year, like the fabled boiling frog, higher temperatures just made it more difficult for humans to exercise restraint, rationality, just ordinary self-governance? Without us even noticing why? I mean, you can really look at politics over the last decade and think, yeah, is this fine? This is fine? Do we really are really confident that increasing temperatures have had a no effect whatsoever at the durability of our political systems? The Heat and the Fury is a new book out this week in the UK and North America from Peter Schwartzstein, who's reported from around the Middle East and North and Africa and beyond. Peter has some bad news and some less bad news when it comes to that. And the message of his book is that we really should be paying attention, not just the effects of climate change on physical infrastructure like coastlines, crops and power systems, but how our political and even psychological infrastructure might be being affected. Hope you enjoy our chat. Go to Schwartzstein. Thank you for joining us in Wicked Problems. Thank you, Richard. I'm delighted to be here. And we're a couple of weeks, but we're recording a couple of weeks before the release of your new book, The Heat and the Fury. Congratulations. You've been all over the world. You've been out there. I was talking to you earlier in the green room. I mean, for me, like this red, like a bit like P.G.O. Rourke meets David Wallace Wells as a travelogue of interesting places to have spent some time. So tell us what made you decide to write this book. Thank you. Yeah, it's a kind of a distillation of quite a few years of work and it's at 18 odd months of writing and editing. And I mean, as much as I've grumbled about the process of basically every step of the way it's been about as painless as possible. I mean, the number of reasons underlying it and one of it is quite possibly sheer ego and kind of vanity and a desire to see my name kind of emblazoned across the front cover of a book. But maybe more than that, it's my sense that this is a part of the climate discourse, part of the climate space that remains somewhat inaccessible for the casual reader. And so by laying out the many different ways, many different parts of the world in which climate change is already contributing to violence, I'm trying to get across to the average man or woman on the street that this is a an issue that is very much already here as opposed to hypothetical future thread. And in addition, and I hope this hasn't come across as too presumptuous to many of my colleagues in climate security faiths, you've been in this field since, well, quite possibly before I was born. But because I, of course, of that kind of 10, 11, 12 years of work, have spent a lot of time in the complex zones and other places in which this phenomenon is is playing out. I like to think that I've kind of had a bunch of insights to sort of add to the wider discussion, particularly when it comes to articulating quite how climate change contributes to violence. Because that slight relationship is something that I think even many of these extremely experienced followers and practitioners to whom I have an extraordinary debt would admit that there's still real space for collaboration. No, I mean, I think that was one of the most fascinating takes ways into the thing. And again, the writing is amazing. The anecdotes are incredible. I mean, again, like, so I remember watching the opening salvos of the Syrian civil war on the backs of the Arab Spring and thinking at the time and reading, I think reading a piece in, I want to say the FT way, way back about someone hinting and I saw very little coverage after that in mainstream press about the idea that the Syrian civil war was sparked in some measure by the effects of climate change. I think you start the book in the intro, giving some anecdotes about some travels that you had and talking to a chap called, you call it a lull. But as I understand it, like, essentially, like, whether climate change calls the Syrian civil war is kind of the bad question. So what was the better question? And like, how did that help you kind of get into the, into this space? Yeah, I mean, it's, it's got to the point in the connect climate security world, where whenever anybody raises Syria, there can be a sort of tendency to sort of die. And that's because so much of the, the kind of debate and discussion over the origins of the, uh, during civil war has sort of come to block out a lot of the kind of oxygen in, in the entire climate security space. And that's because back in 2011, 12, 13, you had a certain amount of extremely sensationalized reporting that looked to basically blame the entirety of the conflict on climate-induced drought and the ways in which that had contributed to intensifying poverty and other problems in, in the lead up to the revolution against the Assad regime. And then that in turn led to kind of, I mean, I would argue, and many others I feel would agree that kind of real excessive blowback from others who felt that this narrative was far too convenient to the Assad regime. It was a way of kind of getting them off the hook. And this led to this kind of years-long back and forth that was mostly contained in, in academic circles. But, and the reason why kind of, lightly, reluctantly, I kicked off the book with a discussion of Syria is because having worked there relatively extensively, since about 2014, I have absolutely no doubt about the role of the climate played in, in, in contributing to the initial hostilities. But I feel it's a narrative that's quite a lot more complicated and convoluted than the more mainstream one that we've heard in bits and pieces over the last decade. So, I mean, just to very quickly recapitulate, according to that kind of mainstream narrative, years of drought in the run up to 2011 led to the massive outmigration of villagers through to the kind of slum districts of the country's cities where many of these people struggled to adapt and were kind of in that kind of jobless, unhappy void. They were extra susceptible to these protest movements when, when they got off the ground. And that's not necessarily wrong. There's a certain amount of evidence that the poor part of that narrative. But in, in my sort of many trips and very large number of interviews with, with farmers and others to clean the northeast, they've given me a kind of a slightly different way whereby climate stresses had basically reduced their tolerance. I'm really implying greatly here, but reduced their tolerance for the kind of corruption, the kinds of brutality, the kinds of prolificness management that theory and officials had displayed towards them, well, since time immemorial, as far as many of them were concerned. And then in time when their income levels were dropping on account of, of harvest that were failing on an, on an almost annual basis, their willingness to sort of tolerate, for example, official bribe-seeking or the kind of poor treatment that was sort of generally needed out to them was just much diminished. And really, I use that example in part because it feeds into one of the single biggest points in my book, which is that we are collectively, massively underestimating the volume of violence that climate change is contributing precisely because of our failure to understand how climate change is intermingling with other drivers of instability, such as corruption, such as inequality, such as kind of prolific statements management. And Syria, in that instance, actually is a perfect encapsulation of that, that challenge. I mean, it, it reminded me, again, this confluence between kind of issues around governance and issues around kind of environmental catastrophe, a thing I did, well, probably before you were born, Peter, well, back in the 90s, where, you know, in New York, I hang up with a bunch of narrative wells, some of whom were quite radical and were trying to push a agenda to get the New York state curriculum changed to include referring to the Irish famine as genocide, which led me down a rabbit hole for about six months of having to like tease out like, well, how would you actually parse that? Well, is it policy or is it in fact that? And of course, it's impossible to actually say to disentangle all these these factors. So it's interesting to see these things don't change, playing them out simplified narratives are the thing that we all prefer to have. But of course, your reporting has taken you from Nat Geo and for other places, all across Africa, as well as Western Asia, and you in the book kind of look at environmental crisis, fueling everything, fueling extremism and violence, and in Iraq, to Bangladesh, etc. What was the most surprising or overlooked way would you say that climate has contributed to these conflicts in a way that most people who are new to this, or perhaps haven't given enough time to think about it, are perhaps you would like them to understand better? It's the two particular things that lead to mind, both of which are centered on the emergence of ISIS in Iraq and Syria. I spent very large parts of the period between about 2014 and 2018, exploring how collapsing agricultural conditions in the rural heartlands of both of these countries had enabled ISIS to kind of bolster its ranks well beyond the point that it otherwise likely would have managed. And the first of these, perhaps surprising things, at least to me, is centered on inequality. And that's perhaps because I haven't until then fully understood how inequality set into this wider mosaic. And that's that, in me, the kind of periphery of Mosul, I found that many of the villages there had yielded as far as I could see, and I interviewed in many hundreds of villages across these two countries at this point. These villages had yielded as far as I could see the highest per capita number of ISIS recruits. Now, that's despite the fact that many of these villages were by no means the poorest of the poor. Many of them were relatively well connected and many of the people there enjoyed all sorts of amenities that they're kind of more geographically isolated and peripheral counterparts could only have dreamed of. But what you have with climate is that you have kind of agriculture, which is the profession that is kind of uniquely vulnerable to climate stresses, and which is a lot of the time really the only economic game in town in a lot of these villages that is collapsing bit by bit in many of these places. And at the same time, most jobs in cities like Mosul are relatively untouched or in most instances completely untouched by climate stress. But basically the differential between the sort of the relative halves of the people of Mosul and the kind of increasingly have not of the villages around Mosul was coming into ever starker relief. And because these villages were close enough to the city, they had a much clearer sense of the widening gulf between their fortunes and those of the urbanites. And they were angry, they were resentful, they were in some instances jealous, and they were particularly bitter at the fact that as far as they could see, and they weren't necessarily wrong about this, that the people of Mosul were receiving more in the way of government services than they were despite their superior need. But to me that was extremely arresting, maybe it would be a little bit less surprising to others. And one other quick example, and this is something I'm still wrapping my head around, and in fact I just got some some State Department funding to explore a little bit more. And that's what I deemed to be the kind of intangibles at the climate security space. So when I've been conducting interviews in villages in Iraq where an inordinate share of villages threw in there a lot with the jihadists, equally when I've been in various parts of the Sahel, which have been roiled by farmer herder violence and other forms of instability, a lot of the time, the nature of the violence doesn't really make sense. It doesn't make sense that kind of ex-individual had sided with ISIS in ex-village despite a relatively, so it seemed clear cut sense that this wasn't going to end well. And quite a few other examples along those lines. And it's I've increasingly just come to see that climate stress is a little bit of other things. They're kind of fueling for wanton better way of putting a kind of devil-may-care type attitude among many people, particularly villagers who are seeing the kind of last constants in their kind of already confusing lives changing. I mean, the bird migrations are not happening when they previously did plants are not blossoming, blossoming at the kind of customary times of the year. Most importantly, of course, the rains are not falling in a manner in which they can be used by these almost entirely agriculture-dependent people. And in that world where many of these physical and natural phenomena have often been among the few kind of yardsticks against which they can measure their lives, it's just contributing to this kind of wild, often irrational, often deranged behavior. So, I mean, neither I, or as far as I can see, anybody within the wider field has fully got a handle on. So, this is something that very much in need of additional research. I'm sorry, I'm getting chills as you're describing this because it's so there's so many striking parallels, right, as a microcosm of the kind of, of the disparity in inequality, the inequalities that you're talking about, but also this disruption of things that people counted on in a kind of more rural, perhaps more traditional setting, vis-a-vis the most cosmopolitan counterparts in the Mitropole who, we kind of are living through an era where that's playing out in all sorts of countries, not necessarily just the ones where you've been reporting on and from. So, eloquently, it's, I don't know, like, I suppose it's the resentment, as you mentioned it, that is totally understandable. And yet, if you're a policy elite, you must be absolutely shitting yourself, thinking about how is this going to play out over the next 30 years when it comes to deciding here in the UK how you're going to deal with folks who are trying to flee an uninhabitable area of the earth, and deciding are you going to count climate refugees as real refugees? If they seek asylum, etc. Like, these seem to be impossible choices and they're not going to get any easier. Yikes. Yikes, indeed. I mean, the important thing to remember is that kind of climate-related violence is almost always a marriage of climate stresses, and not always particularly bad climate stresses with poor quality governance. I mean, as you have alluded to in your slightly dispiriting, but I would argue, mostly correct, analysis, that doesn't put us in great stead because the quality of global governance in both richer and poorer parts of the world appears to be declining, if anything else. I mean, the thing we see is, and particularly in the poorer parts of the world, is that when you do have violence, it's usually a consequence both of state involving themselves in ways that they shouldn't, and they're not involving themselves in ways that citizens there have come to expect. And it's not just deeply unhappy, as far as local people are concerned, experience of state involvement that's... Sorry, am I cutting out? No, no, I was going to say, can you dig in on that as an example? Again, I completely randomly mentioned the Irish famine at the top of the show, because again, it's something that I spent some time down a rabbit hole thinking about. But again, that similarly had this weird combination of terrible policy decisions that made it worse. So, can you have an example from your reporting about the kinds of policy decisions that you say, the state interventions that perhaps either could have been done, but weren't or were done, and actually aggravated the situation from any of the countries or regions you've reported from, just to give that some more color? Absolutely. I mean, so aside, perhaps from the Civil War in Syria, maybe casing point number two among folks who have some familiarity with the idea of climate-related violence, but not a deeper familiarity with it, is its farmer herd of violence in large parts of West Africa. And this is often presented as an instance in which failing rains contributing to a dramatic decrease in pasture, and where, as a consequence, farmers and pastoralists are kind of atling it out over those kind of shrinking chunks of kind of usable, arable land. And again, there's an element of truth, or perhaps more than an element of truth there, but in almost every instance, state action of the region has compounded that trouble. So, for example, a lot of the time states have inadvertently, or in some instances, not inadvertently, sided with farmers, ensuring that they have kind of vastly preferable preferential access to a certain amount of language. I'm surprisingly gives rise to kind of more resentment and an array of grievances among the herders, equally a lot of the time where governments in that instance have tried to do right by kind of eking out alternatives for pastoralists, for herders, and thereby ensuring that they're not competing for those same bits of prime, potentially agricultural land. They've ended up just creating new problems in the Senegal, for example, the colonial French authorities, and then later the independent Senegalese authorities carved out these kind of new watering holes in arid areas that were considered far too marginal to interest farmers. But in doing so, they ended up concentrating herders in such enclosed places that the land very soon degraded, and many of the herders themselves ended up at one another's throats. And then in instances where herders had organized among themselves to ensure that they didn't kind of overgrazed the land in a way that would otherwise be inevitable, they ended up improving the land to such a point that farmers were then incentivized to kind of move in, and then you were kind of right back where you started. Now, to be in fact that the many authorities, you can end up in a situation in which there's you're kind of damned if you do damned if you don't. I mean, a lot of the time, dam construction, which we all know it's got its barrels and pitfalls, but even in instances where you've had relatively well-conceived dams in places where the the pros far outweigh the cons, you've ended up having losers from that process. And yeah, I mean, nowhere, including in the West have we seemingly good at ensuring those losers have their concerns heard out. You write a bit about the Azwan dam and a bit about the potential conflict between Egypt and Sudan and beyond in terms of like water resources around the Nile is something you briefly can shed some light on that because I then when I ask you actually about how we should be because your book goes into chapters eight nine talking about like how if you think you're sitting here comfortably in the West immune from having to worry about this shit, then you're sadly delusional. So I want to come back to that in a second. But in terms of that, water is I think you write at one point that it hasn't historically been a source of conflict, but people climate security folks, futurists, sci-fi novelists. I'm thinking like the author of the water knife, not so not so long ago, have used this as a way of thinking about like, yeah, in the future or Mad Max, even we're going to be fighting about water not too long from now. You're reporting, as opposed to me sitting delusionally in a room typing up fiction, come as actually looked at some of this and you come up with a potential flashpoint. So can you give us a little bit on that? Absolutely. I mean, as you as you say, kind of water experts, including now, will mostly push back quite aggressively and with good reason against the idea that kind of water wars and other kind of big snazzy, slightly sounding phenomenon are far imminent. I mean, when back in the mid-90s, the then president of the World Bank thought boldly about how future wars would be fought over water as opposed to oil, but the pushback was extraordinary. And that again, to complete your point was because the historical record is on the side of the water experts and hydrologists who were quite correctly pointed out that states have seldom gone to war in the modern era for reasons related to water, even when every pressure might have suggested that it's still at either imminent. And the Nile here is quite a case of potential trouble, is that in this era of climate change, we have more and more state actors who have relatively little, if any, history of dealing with water shortages and who consequently have economies and cultures that were not built with water scarcity in mind. You have citizens and authorities who often, and again, I don't mean this in a kind of denigrating manner, have a sense of entitlement towards kind of ample water supplies. And who when, as in the case of Egypt, all of a sudden confronted with a situation where that longstanding status quo threatens to be reversed, people don't react in particularly good ways. Now, as we've seen over the course of these Nile water negotiations over the past decade, there's been tremendous work on the part of authorities in Cairo and Addis and further field to tamp down those tensions and ensure that the dispute that's entered on Ethiopia's construction of this Nile Megadam does not morph into something significantly worse than we've seen to date. And even if they have enjoyed, again, some success in the short run, a big fear is that in this kind of analytical climate of kind of misinformation, disinformation, domestic, messy domestic politics, which is often not conducive to mild-mannered, kind of sensible rhetoric, that at some point, probably relatively far down the line. But at some point, those kind of mismatches in water supply or relative water supply and demand may well bleed into the kinds of confrontations that we haven't really seen so far. So in telling the story of the Nile, I try and push back against some of that unhelpful, sensationalist kind of water wars imminent coverage, while on the flip side, trying to illustrate quite why and how that situation and a number of others will be considering more dangerous down the line. But yeah, I did actually, I did some work with a guy who actually is involved with something called the Blue Peace Index, which actually looks at water cooperation being an interesting example of where jurisdictions have actually done some pretty good work at being able to do peace building, which I want to come back to in a second. So let's talk about the West, let's talk about the so-called develop world, right, in your penultimate chapter. You describe this trip out of baking Athens in June 2023 with your partner to get out to the mountains to get some some relief from the heat and some dodgy AC, which I hope is working better for you today. Why do you think people in the West are so complacent? The things that they're reading about in some of the perhaps conflict zones that sometimes you're writing from is just never going to come for them. Your story about coming out from Athens, tell us more about them. I guess a little bit of the case of the kind of the frog and the kind of boiling cauldron of water. The nature of climate stress is particularly if you live in built landscapes that are sort of designed in such a way as to shield you from some of the worst consequences of climate related stress, air conditioning, kind of effective infrastructure that kind of can mostly tolerate these extreme weather events, then you're not going to hit in the face with the reality of some of these changes that are playing out in the same way as many of your peers in or countries. So I maybe have a degree of acceptance and tolerance and understanding as to why the average person in parts of Europe or parts of North America hasn't yet fully embraced the full extent of what's playing on. But as you said, climate related violence is something that is already beginning to kind of nibble at our own toes. Now the book is mostly centered on violence that's playing out in poorer countries and there's good reasons for that. Those are the places that are mostly experiencing the worst kind of unmitigated climate stresses and the worst governance. And as I repeatedly, possibly extensively hammer home to readers, that is the kind of the grim equation that so often equates to climate related instability. But I mean, here in Athens, we already have massively heightened gender-based violence, violence against women between the months of June and September. This is an area of... Hey, I'm Ryan Reynolds. At mid-mobile, we like to do the opposite of what big wireless does. They charge you a lot. We charge you a little. So naturally, when they announced they'd be raising their prices due to inflation, we decided to deflate our prices due to not hating you. That's right. We're cutting the price of mint unlimited from $30 a month to just $15 a month. Give it a try at mintmobile.com/switch. $45 up from payment equivalent to $15 per month, new customers on first three month plan only, taxes and fees extra, speeds lower above 40 gigabyte CDTails. This episode is brought to you by progressive insurance. Do you ever think about switching insurance companies to see if you could save some cash? Progressive makes it easy to see if you could save when you bundle your home and auto policies. Try it at progressive.com. Progressive casualty insurance company and affiliates, potential savings will vary, not available in all states. Near total lack of gripping or effective stats globally. And again, there are reasons in the summer that go beyond extreme heat as to why violence would be in those particular instances. But there's a wealth of evidence both in Greece and further field to suggest that heat-related, kind of physiological changes and up-fixing aggression are one of the reasons why women in cities from Athens and Paris and New York and beyond are often at the horrible end of this kind of violence. So just to take it down a level, I mean, I'm familiar with some of this research, but I imagine that most people listening to this will not be. And again, we could think of all sorts of pop culture or kind of literary references from Camus to the West Wing to various of the things about basically this cultural trope that's been there for many, many, many centuries, the idea that if it's really hot, men get really pissed off and angry much more easily than they do in cooler climates. And for a long time, I was considered to be like a racist trope of the idea that like, therefore, people within the tropics are less capable of self-governance, let's say, because they're less capable of deliberation. But the unfortunate reality is that the psychology, the evidence, is that when you have these spikes that people in places that are not used to that have a different kind of behavior pattern. That's what you're reporting about when you're seeing that in Athens and other places. Is that right? Absolutely. I mean, everything, as I said, from GBVs through to kind of protest intensity in countries through to mass shootings in the US and prison violence across North America, all of that increases to a noticeable extent in the summer period. And again, among a bunch of unrelated reasons, we have strong evidence to suggest that extremely heat is at the root of that, and the hotter conditions get, and the length here at the summer period becomes the greater the risk of that bleeding into commensurate levels of increased violence is within our own cities. I mean, this really is a challenge that's coming home to roost. I mean, you asked me at the beginning why I wrote this book, and maybe an additional thing I ought to have said is that, I mean, what kind of more in your faith illustration of climate-related peril is there than kind of violent in its various form, filling out around you in part as a consequence of these phenomena? I mean, just one more way of trying to spell it out here in Athens, Greece, where I live. The city is surrounded by increasingly less bountiful, olive groves in part because of urban sprawl in part because I believe olive groves are struggling to stay alive amid that intense heat. But because drought has killed so many olives across the Mediterranean basin over the past few years, the prices of olive oil, as those of you who are as obsessed with it as I am, work can attest, have gone through the roof. And that has incentivized thieves to attack olive oil stores and even olive trees themselves in ways they never previously did. It's a valuable commodity. They're just a little, I mean, in the grand scheme of things, relatively unimportant illustration of how crime, big or small, violence, big or small, is picking up because of these changes around us. Right. It's something that, again, I think is starting to emerge in conversations around like some of these lagging indicators about the effects of climate, what it comes to the cost of living, essentially. The commodities that we don't like to think about too much, chocolate and coffee tend to be the ones that, a lot of olive oil tend to be the ones that get the most exposure. I was in Provence recently doing some reporting on how the wine industry is being affected and trying to adapt. But this is creeping into, again, I don't mean to make this a Eurocentric conversation because that's not where the locus of your book generally is. But I do think for the listener, it might be useful to understand that it's a way in to understanding the fact that it's not going to just stay a problem that's over there in the future that I don't need to worry about. Your cost at the till when you check out a Tesco or whatever is being directly affected right now by some of these things in ways that we don't really like to think about very much. I mean, in both rich and core countries, infrastructure is struggling to keep pace with these pretty dramatic changes. And almost every single one of those bits of infrastructure, in some way, bleeds into iffy and more messed up supply chains. I mean, one particular example that I think I invoke on several occasions is what's happening with the Panama Canal. It was built in what is one of the single wettest countries on Earth and is a consequence. It planners back in the late 19th, early 20th centuries could not have conceived that the very fact that that canal passed through a lake and the very fact that that lake is now plumbing new depths on account of trout in Central America has ensured that the canal authorities have had to drop the number of ships that the canal can admit by about a third. Now, that alone is the kind of thing that has pretty broad, pretty direct consequences on, as you said, the amount of money we have to shell out at the fill. And that's just one mini illustration. I mean, on a much less grandiose, much less kind of immediately recognizable manner, every single one of these countries is sort of struggling to keep those supply chains moving. And that means problems for us. Well, I mean, and it is something that, again, we will come back to it. But yeah, I don't want to aim everything on a doom and gloom notes. I mean, again, you chose not to do that in your book, very Hollywood, lovely, very American audience is going to love that. So in terms of kind of, first of all, before we get to these kind of climate security, I appreciate we're coming up against time here, but very quickly, here in the UK, as a chap called Chris Clark, he's had the climate change committee who's now working in government as a civil servant, helping to kind of chart kind of where policy is going to go over the next couple of years in terms of migrating to clean power and trying to adapt the economy to decarbonize. But he put a call on Twitter, not so long ago, whatever calling it now, suggesting that the term net zero is a bit like unhelpful, bit dated. And you use climate security a lot, both in this book and other things I've seen you write. Is that a better term? And if so, why is climate security a better kind of thing that we should be thinking about as a framing device, as opposed to like, here's this one target where net zero, it's a thing, et cetera, just your thoughts. Not answered. No, I mean, I completely agree that net zero is not a good name. I mean, broad series of vital changes that we need to enforce in part because anything that actually requires a degree of explanation for a phenomenon that big is really not for purpose. But equally, I find myself forever having to explain to friends and family and an array of others what climate security itself means. It's not immediately obvious to me, I need them. And for a book in which I kind of proudly, I feel, have avoided as much jargon as possible, the very fact that I've come out with climate security, and as many places that I have is probably a pretty big demerit on my car. I mean, I'm most well, I'm most simply, and this is one of the things I like about coming from an environmental journal, a journalist background, it's that kind of luxury of criticism, like a lot of the work that I do is just centered on diagnosing the nature of the problem. And I'm intensely thankful so much of the time, and perhaps we can talk more about this when it comes to the solution. But I'm thankful that very much of the time, I'm not the one mostly charged with devising recommendations because, I mean, there's nothing that's kind of a hard and fast way of kind of recommending a problem. I mean, for one to, were you to sort of put a proverbial gun to my head? I mean, maybe we should refer to this as kind of climate survival. I'm not, that's, yeah, until I'm in an area where I really found I'm a little bit wary of this kind of climate emergency rhetoric that's coming out, even if it's arguably a period to terminology like climate change, which maybe doesn't have the degree of implied urgency that is required. No, I will agree that net zero is in term that we need to move beyond and scrap in favor of something cashier in next year. Well, there you go. So Peter, so Chris Stark, if you're listening, so Peter doesn't have your solution, but he agrees with your diagnosis of the problem. So we'll workshop that workshop that good. So you end on a more hopeful note, I'm talking about how some of the responses to some of these events and crises have actually helped to bring people together. So before I let you go, I want to come to that and maybe just take us through, should I really believe that? Are there solutions that get derived from that, whether there be kind of political solutions as in ways that people are adapting or adopting things and methods of coping to get greater resilience in the face of some of these changes? Or indeed, are there pitfalls in some of the solutions we talk a lot about on this show? Everyone should get an EV or get a heat pump, etc, except then that's terrific, except what it isn't. So can you talk a little bit about that in your last chapter and you're ending on a more hopeful note? Yeah, I mean, as you as you sort of imply and correctly, there's maybe a degree of kind of forced optimism here. I mean, a very idea of leading people on as dispiriting a note as I would have left them had I kind of ended a chapter sooner was sort of enough to sort of push me on. That having been said, this is not a kind of irretrievably dispiriting space. Now that's partly because most of the places that I'm talking about in the book are not necessarily representative of the planet at large. I mean, were I to be asked as like as often am by my friends, are you optimistic about a climate affected future? And I give this kind of hedged there's somewhere in the middle of the ballpark answer. But when it comes to the plight of the most of the places in which I've centered the book, I'm really quite, quite deeply dispirited about their prospects. It's that kind of, again, messy, horrible melange of intense climate stresses and governance that's too poor to help fortify people against their impacts. That said, there are a few kind of little tidbits of kind of relative optimism to grab onto. And this final chapter is centered on this practice called environmental peace building, which is this kind of growing field about which many people in the wider climate space are getting more and more excited. And to simplify grossly, it's basically the ways in which environmental challenges, including many related to climate change, can be leveraged to reduce or solve or prevent in the first place, bits of violence between communities or tribes or in theory, even nation states. Now, as many detractors of the practice will completely correctly point out that the body of evidence is pretty thin so far, but at a local level, in particular, when it comes to sort of tribe on tribe, community on community, village on village, violent, that's where environmental peace building has shown itself to be pretty powerful and potentially much more powerful down the line, like by, for example, dedicating a certain amount of money towards digging new wells in a place where villages are at one another's throats over shared resources, by introducing mediation mechanisms between farmers and herders, instances where kind of certain patches of pasture land are being toppled over in a violent manner, you can do really kill two birds with one stone, like kind of reduce distillities, and also at least partly mitigate some of these kind of snowballing environmental stresses. But again, it's an area of kind of relative optimism and relative optimism alone. Well, I mean, I can't remember now in the unhappable earth, whether David Wallace Wells is one of the people who blurbs your book, felt the need to go there or actually, I just remember, I just walk, I literally reading an encounter and walking through the desert going like, maybe I should just couldn't come back, maybe I should just keep walking through the dunes or whatever. So, but thank you for at least giving us a little bit of that at the end. Normally, we do talk about the kind of solutions on this thing. I guess on the show, so I guess one of the things I did want to last, penultimate question, in terms of the kinds of solutions that we often talk about here in the west, the so-called developed world, the Bill Gates kind of like, hey, we're gonna have a techno's futuristic thing, wherever it's gonna be great. So you're reporting from parts of the world where it's like, yeah, that'd be nice, but so you're not super hopeful that we're all going to Ironman's gonna save the world, or at least everybody in it. Are there things that are not necessarily the techno VC-fueled solutions that you see in your reporting that we could point to in your book that perhaps are more realistic or more hopeful for many of us to be able to think about? I mean, yes, I mean, this is this is an area where one really doesn't need to reinvent the wheel. Like, we mostly know what needs to be done to ensure that climate stresses don't bleed into violence, and it goes back to what I was saying before about ensuring that states involve themselves in people's lives in ways that people want and need, i.e. infrastructure provision, services of a certain quality, and that they don't kind of complicate people's lives through various security measures, various abuses, and things like that. On a more practical level, because I mean, as the nature of the challenge intensifies, we will need solutions of kind of ever-greater ambition. The introduction of things like drip irrigation technology in places where kind of water shortages are already very much a thing, the rollout of more kind of heat-resilient feeds in places where those that people have previously used or are no longer functioning in unprecedented high temperatures. None of this is even slightly new, and it's a consequence of poor governance coupled with political will in many places that these things are not being done on the necessary scale. Now, again, it's obviously nowhere near as simple as that. In a lot of these places where the worst climate-related violence is playing out, you have all sorts of conflict, which often ensures that authorities can't involve themselves in the ways that they might want. You have serious budget crunches, which ensure that funds just don't extend that far, and ironically, you have other climate stresses, which ensure that states are not able to display the degree of good governance that they might want in these situations. For example, try delivering aid to kind of famine or flood victims when, for example, the very bridges and roads that you need to get that aid to those people have been blown away to some monster flash flood over the preceding days. As I think I have kind of jokingly said to you, at the beginning, in some ways I'm a sort of funny guest to have on this show, because in the climate security space, iron, I think most others, tend to be really quite dubious about the utility of technology. It's often been labeled as sort of promising much, and as far as iron, so many others are concerned, it's delivered even less here than it has in other areas. But I will say that certain well rolled out bits of technology could be useful. So, for example, to go back to farmer herder violence for one moment, there has been the rollout of certain call center bits of technology whereby a pretty small, very manageable price herders, almost all of whom have access to cell from to this point, can call in and get satellite imagery fueled readings on where there is superior grazing land to be found. Again, I think that's the sort of thing where utility of these sorts of solutions can't be overhyped. But this is certainly one of these places where technology can complain apart in ensuring that people have tools they need to survive in this more complicated landscape. Well, that's a brilliant thing to end on. And then before we let you go, we ask everybody comes on the show like yourself, Peter, if there are three things that you've read or experienced or watched, I think I said, you know, like basically we've had some really random stuff, but we would love to get your take if there are three things that have shaped your view on climate and climate solutions that kind of you might recommend to their audience. I was trying to work out how I could kind of simultaneously tell the truth and come across as a sort of more literary, tell the truth, tell the truth, Peter. And no, I mean, in the end, even my kind of pretentious attempts at thinking didn't yield much. But I mean, one of which is, and maybe this is a little bit pompous, is actually like a lot of bits of classic literature had really, I think, enabled me to understand the nature of extreme weather events a lot better. So for example, things like the description of drought and flash floods in one of my all time favorite novels, the leopard by by lampadusa, things like lovely. Yes, it's brilliant. Things like salts and hits and description of the coal in a day in the life of Ivan Denisovitch. I mean, this is the kind of literary ability and attention to detail that I would absolutely love to be able to convey. And just by reading how these kind of absolute masters have understood and in through their own perception of the nature of these weather phenomena, I think it's deepened my understanding and certainly enabled me to better describe them. Secondly, and this is probably not a particularly original choice. It's various forms of history, and my particularly environmental history have been useful reminders in some ways that there's nothing new under the sun. So Peter Francopan's The Earth Transformed is a it probably if you're not wildly into environmental history, it probably gets a little bit too into the weeds for for many people. But it's a brilliant summary of the ways in which environmental drivers have contributed to basically every historical event imaginable. I mean, at the height of the pandemic, when everything just seemed a bit crap and a bit spiriting, we were all down, I ended up reading a lot about the Black Death, including the just mirror by Barbara Tuckman. And in some ways that was kind of weirdly uplifting because you're like, you know what, this kind of sucks, but it was way worse back then. And then maybe a final one, and this has been something that's been a complete fixture of my journalistic life since I entered this world 12 or so years ago. And that's been just walking at length, particularly through or parts of various cities. For example, and this all has immediate kind of environmental and climate ramifications as far as I'm concerned. So here in Athens, if you walk through many poorer parts of the city, you immediately feel how much hotter they are. There are many fewer trees, the holdings are mostly closer to one another. These sidewalks happen to be much less slippery, because there were fewer air conditioning units with their kind of dripping New York rain. At the same time, of course, people in many of those neighborhoods are significantly smaller climate footprints. I mean, you can tell there's just by the very fact that many of these neighborhoods have a much smaller concentration of butcher shops. And so just these kinds of, I mean, and then in a kind of, I mean, non-climate sense. You can also in many ways gauge the relative safety or not of an area by seeing how kind of prolific or strong looking the steel shutters are on many of the shop windows. So this is something I always try and do a lot to get a bit more of a grip on on whatever city I happen to be living in or working in at that time. Well, I mean, that is terrific, makes sense. So the book is The Heat and Fury reporting from the front lines of climate violence. But you, there's Schwarzstein. Thank you so much for joining us. When is the book out? When can people get it? Thank you, Richard. It's certainly US and Canada. It comes out on the 24th and in the UK, Ireland, in the Australia, a few other places on the 26th, and then hopefully do enough available in translation in other places. Excellent. And you're doing a launch, I think, on the 23rd, I think I want to say that you wrote. So is that like in DC somewhere? I'm doing, yeah, I'm doing a kind of US book tour from late September and then a UK one in November. So yeah, I will be hoping to see plenty of your listeners there. Well, we look forward to being able to buy you a pint sometime in November here in the UK. But Peter Schwarzstein, thank you so much for taking the time to join us. We'd have time to get into half the things that I wanted to get into. So much more to talk about. Really great read. Again, like, I don't think I'm doing disservice to PJ Rourke to compare it to holidays in hell, because it's a, it's a hell of a great read as well as being an important one. Thanks for joining us. Thank you so much for having me. [Music] Can't seem the knife when you're too close, too close. It's guys forever when someone you called a friend shows you that you can be so cold, so cold, I'd like the third of your name. With the shirt off my back, I thought that you'd do the same, oh, you didn't do that, yeah. Set off the one who's wanted, oh, the farts you started, you knew the house was burning down. I had to get out, you let your seats in soon us, and fed them last for dinner, you knew the house was burning down, and look at you now. [Music] Over to you, Theo. 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