Award-winning journalist and CNN Chief Climate Correspondent Bill Weir shares the story of his new book LIFE AS WE KNOW IT (CAN BE): Stories of People, Climate, and Hope in a Changing World, explains why reporting on climate includes reporting on EVERYTHING, the one thing that makes humans special from every other animal on the planet, advice from Mr. Rogers, the influence from his very unique upbringing, why there’s no climate change without culture change and why Earth repair is self-repair, and bonds with host Stephanie Maas over a mutual admiration of Taylor Swift.

Welcome to the Action Catalyst. Today's guest

is Bill Weir, an award winning journalist, Chief climate

correspondent for CNN, host of the CNN original series, the

wonder list, and now author of the new book Life as we know it

can be stories of people climate and hope in a changing world.

Hey, Bill, how are ya?

Hi, Stephanie. How are you?

I am doing great. Thanks for being here.

My pleasure. Great to meet you.

Hey, you too. Is that is that a sunny New York. I

see the backdrop.

It is a gorgeous, gorgeous New York. Love that

sunshine for the mood, right?

Absolutely.

Where are you?

Nashville.

Awesome. I love nashvegas I was just down there.

Yeah.

What brought you to town?

Taylor Swift. I brought my daughter to see her

this summer and it was epic. We had a great time.

How old is your daughter?

She is 20.

Wow. Okay. Yeah. And you know what? I don't care

what people say about her. That girl is hard working. I give her

props all day, every day.

Let me tell you something. I've been to hundreds

of festivals in my life. I'm a huge music nerd. And I've always

liked was you know, ambivalent about our catalog. I love my

daughter loved her. And I love that she's a really good human.

But this show in Nashville. It was delayed a couple hours by

pouring rain. And she played until her whole set until one in

the morning and leaned into it like Prince at the Superbowl and

it will go down as one of my top three. I saw Guns and Roses when

their first album came out, right? Like I've seen every big

act, you can imagine she will go down by far on the Mount

Rushmore of live performers. I've seen her like four times

with my kid. I have such respect for her.

Yeah, super fun. So in preparing for our time

today, I want to hear about your book and kind of where it came

from what you're hoping to achieve. I really want to put

some legs under that table. Walk us through the genesis and

evolution of this book.

Absolutely. So I have to back up a little bit. I've

been sort of a journeyman journalist, I started as a

sportscaster and came up through, you know, bigger and

bigger markets until I got my big break with ABC News and

spent 10 years there. And that was the first time somebody

said, actually was Diane Sawyer, who said, here's some strange,

interesting things are happening in China. Why don't you go

explain China to us. And this is like 2004, you know, and it's

the first time someone just gave me carte blanche to explore a

place. And that was the biggest gift I ever got in my career.

And I decide more if I can do this as much as possible. And so

I started angling towards that sort of exploratory journalism,

big picture stuff, global trends. And I moved to CNN.

Right around the time Anthony Bourdain had arrived, and they

were looking to do more original series like that globe trotting

series. And I, you know, came over to do a typical studio show

on cable news. But the first month I was on the air, the

Malaysian airliner went missing, and we're talking about the same

story every night, I thought I'd made a horrible mistake. And my

boss said, Well, what maybe you should do an original series,

what would you do? I said, I know exactly what I want to do.

I just had realized that my daughter Olivia is going to turn

my age in the year 2050. So I want to go to the wonders of the

world and wonder what will be left in how many elephants in

Botswana? How much ice in the Alps? Will Venice still be above

water? And so they said yes. And I got to do this the show called

The Wunderlist. And we shot in 24 different countries around

the world in that in nothing like that kind of travel,

immersive travel to shake your American ego centrism and start

thinking about all the ways we could do things better. And then

2016 that the election there, it sort of changed the landscape on

CNN, and the original series kind of drifted out of the

tension and they decided to create a climate desk at CNN,

and I for most of my career headed had avoided being pigeon

holed into a beat. I love politics. I love entertainment,

but I don't want to eat either one of them every day, you know,

and so, but I realized that climate is the one beat that

includes everything. Everything in our lives depends on a

livable planet. We think about it like a list. When pollsters

come around election. How important is the climate to you?

I mean, it's the whole restaurant, every menu item,

foreign policy, health care, justice, social justice, food,

shelter, transportation is tied to a livable ecosystem, an A,

and we just happen to be born in this Goldilocks moment on the

one planet that supports life as we know it. And we just we take

that that for granted, right? So I sort of leaned into that. But

then it was hugely depressing once you go deep into this, and

you really sort of drink from the fire hose of peer reviewed

dread every day and see what is happening and then go cover

disaster after disaster. So when my son was born in 2020, he was

a surprise. My partner, you know, was down to one ovary,

it's 42 years old, we didn't think this was in our cards. But

here we go. And when he arrived, it was such a joy, such a treat.

But at the same time, I had all this new information about what

kind of world this kid was going to grow up in. And the idea that

my little boy river is going to see the 22nd century. And so I'm

holding him height of the pandemic covering the George

Floyd riots, you know, between feedings. And so I just sat down

and started with Welcome to the world, I'm sorry. And so I

started distilling these into earthday letters to him, just an

assessment of things, how things were going awry. But over time,

I also became leaned into the innovation and the hope and the

organization and the possibility of a better world that we don't

really talk about in this space, you know, and Dr. Martin Luther

King didn't say I have a nightmare, everybody was living

the nightmare, he had a dream, you know, and we don't talk

enough about what life could look like if we do everything

that scientists encourage for us. technology and human

creativity is so powerful right now. And there's so much sort of

waste built into the way I grew up in our in our world, that by

eliminating these things, people wouldn't notice a difference in

lifestyle. I've seen now proof of communities from the first

solar town in Florida, that survived Hurricane Ian, and

they've never lost power to other, you know, societies

around the world, that I just sort of putting these little bit

of wonder a little bit of dread, you know, you have to be clear

eyed about what's happening. I structure the book around

Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs, which I took for granted,

never thought about the bottom of my pyramid, food, water, air

temperature, but I argue the top of the pyramid of needs, which

is love and esteem and sort of self actualization that I argue

if we pay attention to each other around the bottom of the

pyramid of needs, that it will fulfill us in ways that

supersede sort of what we get out of modern life.

Part of what I hear you saying is, you know,

there's definitely hope. But there's also some dread. And I

think this is a topic that can be really polarizing, there is a

way to bring us all together.

Absolutely. That's sort of a sweeping theme that I

have is truly what makes us special as human beings. It's

not our opposable thumbs. You know, chimpanzees have those,

it's not our ability to work together in groups, because

orcas and ants, you know, and wolves do that. But they've yet

to land a rover on Mars, or build a stock market and

repeatedly crash it. The thing that makes us special is

stories. And so everything in our lives, currencies, flags,

borders, religions, all of these are just the stories we've

agreed upon. And they're always under revision, right. And so,

the story, for example, there's a story that you should spend

three months salary on a diamond for the person you love, because

they're this rare thing. Now, there are quadrillions of tons

of diamonds, there was just a new deposit found there to

diamonds, rain on other planets, the rarest substance in the

known universe is wood, we've got the only planet where trees

grow, you know. And so the stories we tell around energy

supplies, and modern life and sacrifices, and all of that have

been told by a very few people who have very vested interests

in that status quo. And so the story now is changing in ways

that, you know, we've been burning fuel, the kinds of fuel

using the kinds of fuels that burn forever, because that was

the cheapest alternatives. You know, we went from peat to coal

to whale oil, you know, we burned whales for light at some

point. And I think that our kids are going to look back and say,

Wait, you at one point had poisonous gas pumped into your

house and you burned it to cook food, you know, like you didn't

have a house with a battery? It'll seem so sort of archaic,

but my experience is that if you connect with people about what

it is they love, they might be a fisherman. They might be a duck

hunter, they might be a farmer, they might be somebody. And if

you can just connect with them on the changes they're seeing

and not tie it to the politically loaded words that

get used in campaign ads. And just by saying the word climate

change that has been so loaded, on just connect with people over

cash, you know, I don't hear As many Meadowlarks as I did when I

was growing up, and take it from there level outward, and break

down those barriers by usually just starting with, what's your

story, but what gives me hope is there was a study out of Yale in

2022. If you had asked the average American, give me the

percentage you think of your fellow country, men and women

who care about climate change and action, most people of both

parties would guess between 33 and like 42%. In actuality, it

is between 66 and 80%. You are surrounded by allies in this

space that you don't even know you have. Because nobody wants

to talk about climate change at the potluck. No one wants to

Yeah, in the Punchbowl party, but change happens, just by

those opening those conversations.

In this journey for you, where has the hope come

from?

There's a great painting by Hieronymus Bosch,

the Garden of Earthly Delights, on one side is just the the most

depraved human behavior is happening in the middle. It's

sort of like the Garden of Eden and then over to the right earth

as it is, and then over to the right. It's what it could be

right. And so I oftentimes I think about what point of this

am I focused on every day, and it's really easy to get dark.

But when I start to feel sorry for myself, I think about the

Civil Rights Movement, I think about indigenous folks around

the world who are getting up and raising their kids every day in

much worse conditions that I have it here in the first first

world, the developed world, to try to knock myself out of that

sort of sense of Doom or ism. And then the best advice I ever

got came from Mr. Rogers, who taught me that when you see

something scary on TV, look for the helpers, there's always

helpers in, it's in a after a tornado or hurricane. Now I get

to actually meet those helpers when I go into these places. And

so I look for the helpers on the big scales, I look for a folks

like Andrew ponic, a guy just profiles who created a thermal

battery company. And you know, I got to visit the nuclear fusion

labs out at Livermore, after they had successful ignitions.

The idea that we could build manmade little stars and boxes,

using fuel that is essentially seawater abundant with no waste,

no risk of meltdown, once you throw yourself into that world,

and you and you tap into people, really smart people who are

trying to pull carbon out of the sea and Scott in innovative ways

who are leaning into nature based solutions. Those ideas

really get me excited.

Very interesting. I also hear out of

that a lot of empathy, where we're really starting to see a

difference being made as folks to say, hey, it is about the

bottom line, but it's not. And that's really what spawning a

lot of this change to tell me you're in my barking up the

right tree there, talk to me about that.

Absolutely. But I do think we've reached a point

where even if you care nothing about habitats of the manatee or

you know, any or anything, just the natural world, maybe you

don't, maybe you hate going outside whatever the case may

be, we've now reached a point where profit motive is as much

of a as much of a motivator as as anything, right? So let me

give you an example. I just interviewed two guys, who are

the lab partners at MIT, both from India, one grew up hauling

water and buckets and thinking about, you know, the basic

bottom of his pyramid of needs, literally on a daily basis. And

they decided to lean into cleaning up the dirtiest water

you can imagine, in semiconductor fab location

plants, or pharmaceutical plants, the kinds of places that

just use hundreds and 1000s of tons of water a week. And

they've figured out ways using various different technologies,

a suite of technologies, where a factory like that can recycle

95% of its water. So they can not only not take water from

nature, but put it back, those guys are going to be

trillionaires. You know, the business model is completely

different in the renewable space. That's why all the new

power plants that are coming online, they realizing that once

you build a solar array, or a wind farm, or a geothermal

plants, the energy delivers itself to you. You don't have to

go around the world digging and pumping for it. And once you use

your fracking skills from the oil legacy to dig super deep

geothermal wells and tap into the sun, which is beneath our

Earth, and use that heat to spin turbines instead of burning

stuff. Well, the business model is, you know, how do you capture

the rents on that versus charging you per barrel of oil,

you know, so it's going to be a different economic system. And

this is the biggest hardest thing that humanity will ever do

is sort of like changing out the engines on a 747 in flight we

don't want to make especially folks At the bottom of the

financial pyramid suffer because we're taking away readily

available energy sources, but much the way the developing

countries like India leapfrog the landline, they went right

from no phone to cell phones, you know, the hope is that with

help from the developed world, we could still get rich doing

that. But what's happening is a whole generation of new

consumers is changing the way they fill their pyramid of

needs. It's changing how they think. Right? So you've on

shanaar, the, the founder of Patagonia, famously would say,

to his own customers, before you buy that puffer jacket, are you

cold? Or are you bored? Do you really need that that? Or do you

or, you know, could you wear your old one for another year or

something? If you need the jacket, great, go for it, I

don't have any advice on how people should change their

lifestyles around this idea other than just thinking about

the hidden costs of filling our pyramids.

That's a pretty simple, good way to live. One of

my favorite quotes is with great power comes great

responsibility. And to your point, you know, it's

interesting about the two guys from MIT tying this back to your

hierarchy of needs, he was in a position where he had to fight

for those basic needs by carrying buckets of water. And,

you know, again, he'll make plenty of money, the money will

take care of itself. But that burned within him to go solve

that problem. And most people that are in that situation,

trying to figure out that bottom level of needs, they're not. But

when you are gifted with all the talents and the resources to be

a part of the solution. I think that's where the responsibility

really comes in. But that's I think, where the day to day

person can really bring some impact is holding those with

great power to the responsibility. Absolutely. But

it definitely seems like this next generation cares a whole

lot more about that than I've ever heard of a generation

before us.

Absolutely. Because they are smart enough to read

the science and do the math in terms of the calendar and seeing

what is happening and how fast things are changing. And then of

course, they've also whether intentionally or or it's

inferred that you're the generation that's going to save

the world, like, that is so unfair. It's no, the baby

boomers have all the money if they're not at the you know,

they, they, they have to be part of this, but it should be multi

generational as well.

And the world is so much smaller today. At mean,

candidly, you know, you think about the travels that you've

experienced in your lifetime. And I don't know the answer to

this. I mean, what were your parents background, what kind of

traveling did they do?

I had a very bizarre background. My parents divorced

when I was a baby. And my dad was a cop and Milwaukee and my

mom was a secretary who had a very zealous, passionate

conversion to evangelical Pentecostal Christianity. So she

announced one morning when I was nine years old at breakfast,

that she'd had a dream from God. And God wanted us to leave

Milwaukee and move to Texas, so she could go to Bible school and

become a televangelist. And she put me on the phone with my dad

to negotiate out of joint custody. And my dad said, Yes,

and, and so we moved, but the dreams kept coming. So I went to

17 different schools and six states, mostly around the Bible

Belt, and would then go back to spend summers and Christmases

with my dad, the out atheist outdoorsman. And so I was

pendulum in between these very different worldviews, which

turned out to be great training for a job in journalism, when

you're perpetually the new kid, learn how to read a room, you

learn how to empathize. And so I have friends in red states and

blue and and, you know, probably have a better lens into politics

of the day as a result of that. And, you know, I was the first

one for my family to go to college, and definitely the

first one to get a passport and actually start, you know,

expanding my horizons. So I consider myself incredibly,

incredibly blessed and lucky to have you know, such a transient,

you know, exposed me to so much. But as sort of another example,

I write about this in my book, you know, as I get into the

loving and the Esteem Needs, it gets more autobiographical,

because I was trying to fill my love and esteem needs in my

career and in different ways, and it's constantly changing,

right? And stories are so powerful, they're more powerful

than family. I've been estranged from my mom for years because

her her belief system is so strong in a different world that

we just she doesn't communicate with me anymore. And that's

heartbreaking. But my chosen family, my stepmother, but my

other people are actually hugely inspiring, right? And so again,

we are products of the stories we marinate in. And every now

and then if we poke ourselves out of that bubble and say,

what's your story and try to understand and connect on that

level, I willing to one thing I sort of realization that came to

me while writing the book was because of my mom's, you know,

fervent belief and her interpretation of, of a

particular faith turned me off so much. But I threw the baby

out with the bathwater by not engaging with a community, a

church, and that around that those ideals, and never

appreciated how valuable that is that sort of connection with

neighbors around higher ideals, and connecting with

congregations and picking out communities of people with

shared values, but that just makes you stronger, and lifts

you up. This is this whole thing we're into is a team sport. You

know, you, you had a really inspiring former Navy SEAL as a

guest recently, I was listening on the podcast where he talked

about how SEAL teams picking each other up, you know,

everybody's got a weakness. And the key is being paired with

somebody who doesn't have that weakness. So you get it

together, I that's such a great metaphor for fighting the

climate fight for connecting with neighbors around these

things, and it's not just a matter of, you know, maybe I

could get into an alternative energy company and and make a

million dollars. It's also is can be motivated about just

strengthening the community for what's coming. I met an amazing

woman who she was an NFL wife, married her husband in Seattle,

he played for the Seahawks, a retired moved down to the

panhandle of Florida, she had her baby, three weeks later,

Hurricane Michael comes ashore and she's googling in her house,

can my home survive a category four hurricane and realize that

the building codes were not up to snuff, they survived and

everything was okay. But it rattled her so much, that

without any experience in construction, she went down a

rabbit hole to try to figure out how to build a hurricane proof

home and ended up importing this technology from Italy. That is

basically a sprayed concrete wall that is bomb proof

bulletproof and is now just trying to build safer homes for

her community in Florida. I find that incredibly, sort of

inspiring, and, and those kinds of characters are going to make

all the difference in the communities of the future.

I think though, I really appreciate your

willingness to share some of what you just shared, it really

brings this full circle. I think it's a really beautiful story.

And it's a perfect example of what you're talking about. It's

the human story. And that is where our answers live. That's

where our hopes lie. I know, I gotta be super mindful of time.

Is there anything else that you were hoping we would discuss or

get to in our time together?

Um, not really, this has been a delight talking to

you. I'd like to say that there's no fix for climate

change without culture change. And I don't mean culture, ethnic

culture, or religious culture, you know, the things that are

really precious about human society I love, you know, the

quilt of different ideas. And and the melting pot of that is

the United States at its best. When I say culture, I mean, the

culture of endless consumption, mindless, mindless consumption,

and taking for granted the bottom of the pyramid, I think

there's so much joy, there's so much light, there's so much

mental health that can be found by rallying around communities,

and rallying around each other and nature and connecting with

the best parts of both, you know, there's been a lot of

policy changes recently, trying to come out of Washington,

depending on the party and power of the one idea that actually

was part of the inflation Reduction Act that excites me

the most, and I don't have a dog in the fight of policy. And I,

you know, I'm a neutral journalist on all of that stuff.

But I'm really excited about the idea of a civilian conservation

corps, where kids from the Bronx, and Wyoming and Maine

come together and spend six months working on trails out

west or bringing back mangrove habitats, you know, in the

southeast. And the thing that I really believe will save us we

have to get the youngest generation engaged with nature,

getting them appreciating how special this planet is, and how

quickly things can go away if we don't pay attention to them. And

with those connections that we make, to heal, you know, one

little patch at a time Mmm it's not just Earth repair itself

repair it is it is. It is good for the soul, the mind the body,

the spirit and, and the land around us. That's my dream. And

that's what I hope this book inspires people to think about.

I love it. I love it. Thank you so much Bill.

This has been incredible time together sincerely appreciate you.

I hope so, it's really easy to talk to you,

Stephanie. Thank you for your time.