Chapter 6: Minting The Coin
Minting Both Sides of the Coin
For 25 years I’ve had a strong interest in climate science and policy. And in that time I’ve learned three things:
- First, there are two climate camps, the “crisis camp” who view climate change as a serious man-made threat, and the “skeptics camp,” who recognize climate change, but still have questions regarding climate science and climate policy. The crisis camp is the much larger of the two.
- Second, despite their differences, climate scientists tend to be very friendly and respectful. They’re interested in talking about their work in general.
- Third, the differences between the two camps prevents them from discussing the issues head-on and in public. So, I came to the conclusion that creating some kind of public-facing forum was a great idea.
Before It Was a Podcast
My first idea went beyond scientists and policy experts.
In 2023 I finally made a commitment to create a forum for climate conversations that was open to the general public.
The original idea was to create a database of people interested in climate issues.
Anybody could sign up and then search in this database and say, gee, I’d like to have a dialogue with somebody who disagrees with me about some particular aspect.
Their conversations would be recorded, and the more interesting conversations would be available for view on my Climate Verso website.
So Much For Friendly Dialogue
But then I got a real-world taste for how friendly that dialogue would be. In September of 2023 I went to the Climate Forward conference sponsored by The New York Times. I knew that the vast majority of people there would be on the crisis side of the fence. Still, I wanted to make friends with as many of them as I could.
However, when I started talking about my vision of conversations across the divide of climate views, many people responded that there were no legitimate opposing views to the crisis view.
Over time, I eventually slipped back into arguing for the skeptics view, and surrendered my attempt at neutral objectivity. My goal had been to invite people to participate in the project. I got zero takers.
I walked away thinking: this whole thing isn’t going to work. And so I gave up on my database of interested people idea.
It just seemed that the pool of participants from the general public might just be too one-sided and too emotional to create a useful collection of interesting conversations.
A Pivotal Conversation Opened My Eyes
Then in November I had a pivotal conversation. I was at a meeting of a personal development group when I mentioned my climate website idea to a fellow participant named Craig.
I said I was rather depressed about the idea because I had gotten all this negative energy at the Climate Forward conference. That there had been all these crisis people, and it didn’t go well from my point of view.
I thought out loud, what the hell do I do now?
Craig and I agreed to talk further on the phone. So during the call Craig shared that he thought that I had an interesting idea that might work well on YouTube.
Enter the Guests
Not too long after that, I had a three-way phone conversation with Craig and his friend/business partner Ed. It may have been at that point that I had added the idea of having scientists and policy makers as guests. Craig and Ed both immediately saw great possibilities. The concept is interesting enough, and after all, these days there are podcasts for just about everything.
These phone conversations were indeed pivotal in the evolution of Climate Verso. Meeting Craig made a huge impact on my project – and on me.
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