748: The End of the World as We Know It
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A quick warning - there are curse words that are unbeeped in today's episode of the show. If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, thisamericanlife.org. It's been the kind of summer that makes it seem like the alarmists were right about everything. Heat waves and drought and wildfires across the west, hurricanes along the east coast drowning people in the cars in New Jersey, and in their basement apartments in New York. So yeah, climate change is real, and most Americans believe that is what we're seeing right now. But for most of us, including me, knowing that that is our future, it doesn't change much for us. You know, it's like knowing that you're going to die someday. Like sure, true. And then you put it aside, go on with your day, but there are people out there who look at the same evidence that the rest of us do, and they just take it to heart in a way that most of us don't, they have a wake-up moment, Rebecca Huntley had one, totally took her by surprise. So I'm a really early riser, I'm like a 5.30 AM riser, I think a lot of mums are because it's sometimes the only time that you have any quiet time, like if you want to sleep, make the first of 10 coffees that I'll consume that day, sit on the couch, turn the TV on, and I just say all of these young Australians, like thousands of them walking on the streets of Sydney, which is where I live, all of them looking like they could be, you know, friends of my eldest daughter. It was a massive climate strike. Young people, skipping school to protest, inspired by Greta Thunberg and her protest. And they were carrying all these signs, you know, most of them handmade, saying, "We can't vote. We don't have a lot of money. We don't have a lot of power individually, or even as a group. Do something." She says it felt like they were pleading for action, their generation to hers, and the fact that they seemed exactly like her own children, it just got to her in this way that was new. And I realised, actually, these kids are talking directly to me, specifically to me, it felt so personal, and I need to do something. And something in me shifted at that exact moment, and it felt physical. I felt an internal physical sensation. And even now as I talk about it, I'm not a crier, I actually well up with tears thinking about it because it was this genuine sense of, you know, I can think about my kids and the things that I do for them every day, you know, I make sure they brush their teeth and I make sure they do their mass homework. And this is one of those things, you know, suddenly the fact that we've got a very limited period of time to turn this around. You know, the scientists talk about, you know, 10 years, they talk about 2030. So we've got the next decade. And in the next decade, my youngest kids won't yet have finished high school, and it just suddenly seemed so extraordinarily urgent, critically important, and I remember finishing my coffee, getting up off the couch. And I went straight to my study, and I logged into my, you would describe it as a pension fund, but we call it superannuation. And within 10 minutes, I divested my superannuation completely away from fossil fuels.
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