How to turn climate anxiety into action (w/ Luisa Neubauer) (Transcript)

Please note the following transcript may not exactly match the final audio, as minor edits or adjustments could be made during production.

Chris Duffy: You know the old saying about the frog and the pot of boiling water? How if you put him in a pot that’s already boiling, he’ll hop right out, but if you put him in and warm it up slowly, he’ll just be hanging out in his little froggy hot tub, relaxing, having a great time, until it’s too late.

When it comes to solving big societal problems, we seem to be way better about getting upset and demanding change when it’s an issue that arises all at once. But if an issue creeps in slowly, over time, it can be hard to mobilize around and hard to feel like we, as individuals, have any control at all. So we just sit back, enjoy the bubbles, and watch as we slowly become frog soup.

Well, today on How to Be A Better Human, we’re going to talk about the climate crisis and how to jump out of the pot.

Today’s guest, Luisa Neubauer, helped catalyze a global, intergenerational movement demanding systemic solutions to climate change called Fridays for Future. And personally, one of the things that I find most powerful about Luisa’s message and her work is that it focuses on the systems rather than each tiny individual choice we make in our day-to-day lives. Here’s what Luisa had to say about that in her 2019 talk at TEDxYouth@Munchen.

Luisa Neubauer: we need to drastically reframe our understanding of a climate activist, our understanding of who can be the answer to this. A climate activist isn't that one person that's read every single study and is now spending every afternoon handing out leaflets about vegetarianism in shopping malls. No. A climate activist can be everyone, everyone who wants to join a movement of those who intend to grow old on a planet that prioritizes protection of natural environments and happiness and health for the many over the destruction of the climate and the wrecking of the planet for the profits of the few. 

I need you to get out of that zone of convenience, away from a business as usual that has no tomorrow. All of you here, you are either a friend or a family member, you are a worker, a colleague, a student, a teacher or, in many cases, a voter. All of this comes along with a responsibility that this crisis requires you to grow up to. 

leaving that zone of convenience works best when you join forces. One person asking for inconvenient change is mostly inconvenient. Two, five, ten, one hundred people asking for inconvenient change are hard to ignore. The more you are, the harder it gets for people to justify a system that has no future. Power is not something that you either have or don't have. Power is something you either take or leave to others, and it grows once you share it.

And this is probably the most important aspect of all of this -- I need you to start taking yourselves more seriously. If there's one thing I've learned during seven months of organizing climate action, it's that if you don't go for something, chances are high that no one else will. 

Chris Duffy: Ok! Are you fired up? I’m so fired up. I am READY to take myself seriously. So how do we make use of our collective power? How do we change these systems? How do we save our planet and our species from complete annihilation? Those are the answers that we’re going to try and get from Luisa Neubauer today. No pressure at all. But first, an ad!

We’re back! Today’s episode is all about climate activism. Before the break, we heard a bit of Luisa Neubauer’s talk. Now we’ve got her here live to follow up on how anyone and everyone, yes EVEN you, and EVEN ME, can play an active role. 

Chris Duffy: I feel like for a long time there's been this sense of like if you want to help the environment, it's all things that you are doing wrong, like you need to take shorter showers, you need to recycle more, you need to change where you buy things. And all of those are important, like you said. But I think that it kind of shifts responsibility away from big corporations and from governments and from like these big institutional polluters that are actually making a huge mess of the environment and onto individual people. And I love that you have kind of shifted the focus back to like we as individuals can put pressure on these systems and change these systems and use our political power as well as our individual power. It's not just about what you choose to buy. It's also about who you choose to vote for and where you put your money and where you put the pressure. 

Luisa Neubauer: Yeah, you know, actually, it's something that is as soon as you think about it, it's very obvious. You know, you can tell people to cycle more often, but they won't do it unless as a good cycling infrastructure. And suddenly we are on a systemic stage and suddenly it's about the politics behind it, the politics who are working in favor of automobile lobbyists and not in favor of cyclists, for instance. That's a very patriotic situation that is in. And at the same time, 100 companies are causing 71 percent of emissions. That is where we are at. There's a dis balance between the magnitude of the problems we are facing. 

So, you know, just opening up yourself to the reality we're facing to this crisis is kind of overwhelming and just absorbing the facts and the science that's tough and it takes energy from you. But at the same time, we don't have that many answers on how to deal with that. So we have really good and, you know, in communicating natural science, but we have robust and social science. So what does it do to your to your mind, to your body, to your understanding, to your understanding of life and the meaning of life? And I think it's really that second part. So what is the appropriate answer to the problems we are facing and how do we communicate that to people and going on to people and say, hey, we are in an existential crisis and it's complex and it's devastating and now go and buy tofu? That doesn't make sense. And it doesn't that doesn't level up. And people know that. That's why they're so critical about this. And that's good reason for that. 

Chris Duffy: Yeah, it's funny. It's like if you were trying to tell people that they had to be more cautious when they buy children's toys so that some of their toys weren't completely filled with poison that would kill the child, you would say like, no, no, no, that shouldn't be on what I choose to buy. That should just be that the poison filled toy is illegal. We shouldn't sell the poison filled toy anymore. I said it's kind of the exact same thing here. So for you personally, what was the turning point where you personally said, like, I have to be an activist, I have to actually take this on? 

Luisa Neubauer: So oftentimes when I'm being asked this question, I think people kind of expect this like really big report that I once read and it said and that that my future is going to be rubbish on a climate crisis planet. And I say, no, I don't want that. And then I I woke up the next morning and I went out on the streets and I had this poster board with me and I became a climate activist. 

Chris Duffy: OK, you tell me I'm not going to be that that is that's not sorry. I'm sorry. I just follow you. But that's not very disappointed. That was exactly what I was hoping for. 

Luisa Neubauer: You know, it's actually I think it's not a turning point, but it's a turning process we're talking about. And in this process, one aspect of this process is definitely it's knowledge about what's going on. So many people do understand that there's a climate crisis. But that's not enough because, you know, we know about many things that go kind of wrong in the world, and yet we don't really feel like it's our, you know, our place to to fight that and to change that. 

So there's a second aspect to that, and it has to do with understanding how bad it is. So being able to differ between a crisis that we live through and that we just did, that just occurs. And politics and the climate crisis, which is much more of a fundamental crisis. We are in, you know, understanding how bad it is, really what the state is and how many species are dying every day. How dangerous is this getting for us understanding? It's not a climate crisis. It's a crisis of humanity. You know, the climate will be fine eventually. Just a question of how much human will be in there, still. And one other really important aspect to this turning process is understanding there's no plan to change that. 

You know, we in a manmade crisis and yet we act like we can't change it. Like, humanity cannot change it anymore, which obviously paradox, which doesn't add up, we can't accept a crisis as manmade as human made at the same time as we deny human ability to turn it around. But that's effectively what we're doing right now. And I think eventually, however. We need to in this process, the moment that I changed my way of thinking about the climate crisis is when I understood. That nobody else will do this for us, that it is up to us effectively, there is no government in the world, or at least very, very few governments in the world that have a reasonable plan to fight for one point five degrees, like to limit global warming to one point five. 

So the real question is like if you know, if we're in a crisis but nobody is acting like we're in a crisis, who is going to make this change that we need? And that is the point where it's like, OK, you know what? I never wanted to become a climate activist and I don't feel like I'm the right person for that. But, you know, considering that obviously people I need it everyone to see that I'm needed to and I would just do this now. And that just changed it for me. 

Chris Duffy: Yeah, well, so for I imagine that for many people who are listening and for myself to sometimes we have that same feeling of like this is really important, but I'm maybe not the right person for this. I don't know how to definitely be the leader. Right. There's only one Gretta Thornburg. There's only one Louisa Newbauer. So what about for the rest of us? How do we. How do we become climate activist, how do we actually make a difference in this if we don't feel like maybe we're perfectly suited for that? 

Luisa Neubauer: Well, I'm not perfectly suited for that either, you know, before I hate the idea to go on a strike that I organized myself. I thought it was the most embarrassing thing that could happen in my life if I organized a strike and nobody would turn up. I was like I was I was lying awake thinking about, like, would anyone come? Hmm, that's terrible. But this is the moment, you know, when when you're awake and bad and you think like, oh, my God, what did I get into? And then you think about like, can I to get out of it and you just wish this day would pass and you wouldn't have to think about it twice. That is that very moment. That is what it feels like when you leave your comfort zone. The good news here is there is no silver bullet. And this is so good. There's not one thing in this. I'm not going to give you a list of three things that everyone can do. I'm so sorry, because there is no such thing because people are you know, we all unique and we all have something different to offer. Sometimes, you know, it is organizing and going on strikes, I think actually going on strikes or something, at least when there's no pandemic. You know, that's pretty much soup of a lot of people. But sometimes for people, it's just, you know, they they work in an institution and that's suddenly start thinking about what kind of institution am I working and are we on track to Paris? And there are people who are doing photography. So are you taking photos of activists so they can be shared around the world to inspire others? 

There are people who work with industries who are, you know, denying the climate crisis. Why are you telling them the truth of what we are in and what they're causing there so that just like one trillion different things that, you know, people can give to this, that people can add to this crisis management that we need.

Chris Duffy: Yeah, I think and I think that even if one of the things that you say in your talk that that I find really resonates with with me is like even if you don't have a specific concrete skill. Right. 

Luisa Neubauer: It's always also about learning. Like, I learn to be a climate activist. I have no idea how to register it strikes and where and what you organize a microphone are those things. You know, I know now more about the electric infrastructure in central Berlin than I ever thought I would because I know where to plug a microphone. I did something I learned because I had to. So I think it's also, you know, when we think about how can we do with this crisis, how can we become a climate activist, we think a lot about the status quo. So what am I now and what can I do about it? 

But we rarely think about who will I be, who am I becoming in this and what, you know, what does it offer to me? What what else is there that I can learn and then I pass on? Yeah, it's beautiful. It's also, you know, characterizing the climate crisis and such a matching way. So the the climate crisis, it easily isolates. So you suddenly find yourself in the supermarket and you just desperately want to buy something that's not really harmful for the planet. And you understand it's really it's really difficult to find. It's possibly impossible to to finance. And and then you kind of go home and you think about all the other products that are being bought by someone else and you feel like I'm not making a difference. You because, you know, the plastic is up in the ocean anyhow. The plastic is being produced anyhow, whether I buy it or not. And that's isolating. And it's it's depressing experience of things over and over again. 

Luisa Neubauer: And yet when you're on those on the strikes, when you're, you know, on a on a climate strike or on a mass demonstration that is really demanding, you know, political powers to act accordingly. And it matches somehow it is it's turning this collective crisis into a collective experience that we are making that together with everyone else. 

Chris Duffy: I think about that what you're describing in the grocery store to me, I think about that as the peanut butter problem. It's like I'm done with the jar of peanut butter and it's plastic and I know I should be recycling it, but it is so hard to clean the inside of it out. And I'm doing the work on this and I'm like, there are so many people that aren't spending twenty minutes cleaning the inside of a peanut butter jar, they just throw it away. I wish I wasn't washing this peanut butter jar, but then you go out and you realize it's not just me doing this. It's not just me taking the minimal effort to try and clean things so I can recycle them. And also there's all these people who are making way bigger change. We're all together trying to ask for bigger change than just. Scrubbing the inside of our peanut butter jar so they could be recycled, which maybe they aren't even recycled. I don't even know. 

Luisa Neubauer: Well, it's a it's a it's a really matching story. And I think that is also part of the problem that, you know, in a very neoliberal setting, you tell people, please go and wash your peanut butter gloves. That's not even a glass. 

Chris Duffy: It's plastic. 

Yeah, a little plastic jar plastic thing and say, oh, no, seriously, you're taking my very bad metaphor, but it's a real experience. 

Luisa Neubauer: I have no, I'm joking, but it's like, you know, it's so inappropriate to individualize such a collective crisis to a level that people, you know, wake up in the morning and they feel drained by the thought of, you know, not being able again to act accordingly as you know it. And that is why it's important to provide answers that are bigger. You know, and it's great if people, you know, start cleaning and recycling and do all those things. Yet if that is that if that is the act that is taking away your energy, that you would need to go to a strike. Don't do it like, you know, it should give you energy. It's like cycling is like eating healthy meat, free vegan, whatever food that should give you energy. It's something that, you know, should enrich your life. But because, you know, you do something good for your body and the planet and that gives that should give you energy. And that is the energy you should have to actually then fight for a ban of plastic in your town or the extension of the infrastructure for cycling lanes or the end of fossil fuel subsidies, those things. 

Chris Duffy: What’s great about Luisa is that she doesn’t just stop at we should all be climate activists and rely on everybody to figure what that means to them personally. No. Luisa’s movement is based on that idea that there are concrete steps, according to each of our abilities, that we need to be taking. Here’s Luisa’s talk again...

Luisa Neubauer: The night before our first strike, I was so nervous I couldn't sleep. I didn't know what to expect, but I expected the worst. Maybe it was because we weren't the only ones who had been longing to have a voice in a political environment that had seemingly forgotten how to include young people's perspective into decision-making, maybe. But somehow this worked out. And from one day to the other, we were all over the place. And I, from one day to the other, became a climate activist. Usually, in these kind of TED Talks, I would now say how it's overly hopeful, how we young people are going to get this sorted, how we're going to save the future and the planet and everything else, how we young people striking for the climate are going to fix this. Usually. But this is not how this works. This is not how this crisis works.

Bad news first: if you thought I would tell you now to cycle more or eat less meat, to fly less, or to go secondhand shopping, sorry, this is not that easy. But here comes the good news: you are more than consumers and shoppers, even though the industry would like you to keep yourselves limited to that. No; me and you -- we are all political beings, and we can all be part of this answer. We can all be something that many people call climate activists. 

Chris Duffy: We’re going to take a quick break. But we will be right back with more from Luisa Neubauer. What happens when the global climate crisis meets a global pandemic and so much more. Right after this.

And we’re back! We’re talking with Luisa Neubauer herself. 

Chris Duffy: So we've been talking about these big mass demonstrations and these big movements where you really feel community with other people who are in the movement with you. Obviously, covid has really affected that. And I wonder how that how the pandemic has affected your personal approach to climate activism. 

Luisa Neubauer: Well, that was obviously very interesting experience, because until covid the climate crisis, at least where I'm from, was considered to be the biggest present crisis there is. And the way we kind of achieved that was by organizing mass marches and suddenly the most pressing crisis for many, it wasn't the climate crisis anymore, but the COVID crisis. We changed our behavior because we were in a crisis. And that is a really important lesson for for many people. 

If we want to, we can take a crisis seriously. And that also obviously shows that we never took the climate crisis seriously on a governmental scale. And the other thing is, obviously, since we went to confront a crisis, we adapted as climate activists. So we moved to to the to the Internet a lot. We had lots of digital campaigning. We did lots of like background work and organizational work. And that is also, you know, one way of dealing with a crisis. It's, you know, managing what is there, managing the resources and then, you know, focusing getting on with it, looking at that, everyone is good and healthy and safe. And then we just do the work because it needs to be done. 

Luisa Neubauer: And in that sense, I totally agree that I think Rohnert had a bit of a very weird. Nothing surprising story about some very deep edges of society where people engage in extraordinary conspiracy theories. That is the one sorry to that. But obviously, yes, if we can take a crisis seriously and we can act like we are in a crisis and we can solve crises. However, I think for that we need to accept that the Korona pandemic is also a result of a very, very mixed up or quit unhealthy relationship between nature and human. So the real cause, why that is a pandemic and why it's so much more likely that we have more pandemics coming up in the next decades and centuries, that is a different one. We have to solve that one. 

Chris Duffy: You've talked about possiblism as opposed to optimism. Can you explain what you mean by that? 

Luisa Neubauer: So I'm asked a lot whether I'm an optimist, because I think people think that and that I necessarily to be an optimist because I do things. And that is obviously very, you know, very kind understanding of like what motivates me. But in fact, I think optimism and pessimism are both very passive. So it's a very passive understanding of what is changing. So I think everything will be fine or everything will be good. But you didn't take part in this. Things just happen. So the active the more engaged alternative towards that is possible-ism. 

Which a Swedish philanthropist and Yakup an extra came up with and possible as to what is possible, but we understand that we need to fight for the possible and that we need to make things possible in order for them to become possible. So that is, you know, putting us in the center of what is, you know, what can change. 

Luisa Neubauer: And that, for me, is the much more hopeful, but also much more honest approach to this, because things don't just happen. We make them happen whether we, you know, let them happen or engage us. So we are, you know, in the larger sense, if it's systemic changes or, you know, smaller stuff happening around the. You play a part in that inherently,. 

Chris Duffy: You know, there's been a lot of talk in the last couple of months about this idea of doom scrolling of like reading the news and just getting deeper and deeper into this hopelessness. And everything is so scary. Do you ever do that late at night or. I kind of imagine that, like, you start doing scrolling and then you, like, throw your phone against the wall and are like, I'm planning another protest. 

Luisa Neubauer: So for six years now, I've been studying geography. So, um, I'm engaging with the science every day anyhow. And then there is obviously the news, which can be very well threatening, even though we are also in the media crisis and, you know, we have an issue of communicating the climate crisis. That's a side note. But obviously, I do I do scroll and I do read. And I do, you know, usually then call the people that wrote this article or that were interviewed. And I said, can we talk about this quickly? Because that sounds really bad. And then we talk about it. I do also feel devastation at those moments. I do also feel overwhelmed and I do feel anxious about what I read. But I think that is nothing bad. 

Luisa Neubauer: That is actually really good that we allow ourselves to feel to breathe as a crisis to to let it touch us that is so deeply human part of the crisis that we stop kind of feeling those things and that we don't allow ourselves to fear the loss of the of the ecosystems that are dying every day. And we don't allow ourselves to feel sad about the devastation that we are causing. But that is the starting point from where on we kind of, you know, can take so much energy and power to change the things then. 

So I think I try to involve this moment and I say, OK, Luisa, that's great, because you are feeling human and you have you allow yourself to to to open up yourself to that, to those information, to that science. And then I just leave it, you know, sink in and maybe call a friend. 

And then an hour later. A day later. A week later. But now I think about that. And I think, you know what? We're going to do something about that. Then I go on and I do something about it. 

Chris Duffy: So. Well, one of the things you've done about it is, is Fridays for Future. Fridays for Future, it started with students and with school walkouts. But who else do you think is missing from the wider environmental movement? 

Luisa Neubauer: Possibly the most important story of the future is, is that the climate crisis is, in fact not a crisis of the climate, but of the people and those at the front lines mostly, and the young generation, the children, the young, the young people. And it's really easy to ignore the icebergs on the Arctic, which is melting, and it's really easy to ignore the forests that are currently burning. But it's kind of impossible to ignore the future of your own child or your grandchild. And that is what opened up this whole potential of intergenerational change making. So I don't think there is someone, like, missing there, but I think obviously they are so much more potential of people getting engaged with this and understanding that it's now the time to get involved. And if you ask this question about who's missing from the strikes and geographical sense, obviously, that they loads of part of the world where climate activism is. Much more edgy than it is here, where it's really a mainstream thing to do. Hmm. 

Well, I'm actually so maybe starting from the other side, I think I'm so surprised and so overwhelmed in a positive way by what is happening in many parts in Asia right now. So there's so much mobilizing and organizing going on in Southeast Asia, a lot in South Asia and South America and many, many African countries. And that is incredible. And even in like places like Russia and China where, you know, you would kind of think that demonstrations wouldn't be, you know, very possible. They still do it and they get into trouble and they do it because I think, OK, we need to do this. It is obviously I think many people around the world are. How would you say irritated, I think, a bit by the role of the US in the climate arena. 

Luisa Neubauer: Hmm. Because, you know, there is so much climate crisis going on in that country that's you know, oftentimes when I talk about the climate crisis happening here now, I refer to, yes, America. And, you know, people see the flames in California and the floods and Louisiana and so on. 

So that just and it's interesting how people, you know, experience those extremes. And then don't organize in a way I would expect them to organize, I think effectively just shows that we are really, you know, that we're very able to ignore a reality, even if it's just in front of our eyes, if we don't like it. And so that's I think maybe even that. 

Chris Duffy: Yeah, well, I so I'm really curious about that. So let's say that we are let's say that I'm someone I'm listening to you talk right now and I'm convinced, OK, I got to be a climate activist. And again, how do I become a better climate activist? What what can I I do to improve my activism so that it is effective and I'm taking this unique, terrifying situation that we're out in the world and I see these things around me and I want to make urgent change. What would you tell me? 

Luisa Neubauer: So oftentimes I think it helps a lot when you talk about your reasons and your motivation to, you know, to be concerned about the climate with people that you know, that you, your friend, your family or so on, and you, you know, use that situation to brainstorm about what you want to do. What what would you like to change? Where do you think you belong in that sense? And I think it's something that makes it much easier for people to kind of get engaged as to to go somewhere where they're somewhat familiar is it's your local community where, you know, people are ready or you bring a friend or you work around something that you're really you know, you're already, like, really excited about. 

I, you know, first got involved with divestment because I read about it and I found a really interesting idea to divest from fossil fuels. So I started with divestment group and in the town where I started back then. And that was amazing because I knew the concept. So I was you know, there was some family aspect to that. But the first step is, you know, I think the most important thing to us, it's a first step. And that is you ask yourself very honestly, how do I feel about this? 

Luisa Neubauer: And many people when they really, you know, allowing themselves to answer this honestly, they are concerned about the climate crisis and they are concerned about their own future, the future of their children. We feel that we have that in us. And that next step, you can ask yourself very honestly, OK, am I am I doing everything I can or am I doing anything I can to to change the situation? And we are having this discussion right now because many people around the world have made this have asked this question and they have made the decision that they want to make a change, that is try to see a future. 

Luisa Neubauer: That is how fridays for future happened. And so take that as a example of how much of a difference you can make as an individual person if you just turn up. And that's a third thing, you know, leave your comfort zone and turn up whether it's an organization that already exists or one that you found, whether it's a ecological party or a institution that you think does good work, you know, get out of the status quo and turn up. It's just 80 percent of things. Good thing that's happening. I just about showing up. 

Chris Duffy: Thank you so much for your time. Honestly, this has been an incredible conversation. I've learned so much.

Luisa Neubauer: This was a pleasure to me. Thank you so much for having me on your show. 

Chris Duffy: Thanks so much for listening to this episode of How to be a Better Human. That's our show for today. Thanks to our guest Luisa Neubauer.  You can hear more on her podcast “1.5 Degrees.” If you speak German, that is! The podcast is in German. Or, if not, it could be a good way to learn German.

As for this podcast: I am your host, Chris Duffy.  This show is produced by Abhimanyu Das, Daniela Balarezo, Frederica Elizabeth Yosifov, and Kara Newman of TED, and Jocelyn Gonzales and Sandra Lopez-Monsalve from PRX Productions.