S3E5: How to Start Your Climate Journey | with YouChangeEarth

You Change Earth, created by young people across 7 countries and 5 continents, is a non-profit tool meant to empower individuals to take action on climate change. By answering questions about your career level, home situation, employment situation, and more, You Change Earth creates a climate action plan tailored for you. Will Reynolds and Nick Fournier are both undergraduate students at Duke University working on the You Change Earth team to help individuals answer the question, "what can I do about climate change?" In this episode we talk to Will and Nick about individual action vs. systemic change when it comes to the climate, why we should all have sustainable habits, and how to get started on your climate journey. Visit YouChangeEarth and get a climate action plan tailored for you: www.youchangeearth.org/operationclimate

Guests: Will Reynolds and Nick Fournier of YouChangeEarth

Writers: Katherine Li '22, Ryan Lou '24

Hosts: Katherine Li '22, Ryan Lou '24

Audio Engineer: Emily Nagamoto '24

Music: reCreation by airtone “Oasis” by Casey Goldstein

TRANSCRIPT:

Katherine Li: 2020 was one of the warmest years on record. Carbon dioxide levels in the air are at their highest in 650,000 years. Climate change could be irreversible by 2030. What can you do about this? This is the question that YouChangeEarth is attempting to answer.

Ryan Lou: You Change Earth was built to empower people and give them the solutions, information and support to act effectively in tackling climate change. With questions about your career level, home situation, employment situation, and more, You Change Earth gives you climate actions tailored for you. This tool exists to help you find what you want to do for our climate, and help you find communities to continue your journey as a planet-positive citizen.

Katherine Li: Welcome to Operation Climate, the one stop shop for environmental issues that matter to Duke and Durham community members. We’re a podcast run by Duke University students, aiming to inform and empower Duke at large to create lasting change in the fight against climate change and environmental degradation. This season, we’re focusing on climate activism and activism in general.

Katherine Li: My name is Katherine

Ryan Lou: I'm Ryan.

Katherine Li: And we're with Operation Climate. Today we are chatting with Nicholas and William from You Change Earth. Thank you guys so much for joining us today.

Nicholas Fournier: Thank you for having us.

Ryan Lou: Alright, so first off, tell us a little bit about yourselves, what exactly is You Change Earth?

William Reynolds: I’m Will. I work with the team as one of the cofounders. I personally am a New Zealander so if you can’t understand something I say, just put it on half speed.

But I came to the US two years ago to start my Duke degree after a couple years working around technology in San Francisco and London, and China.

And along that time, I had come to read a couple scientific papers and gone through one of those typical transformations of “oh no”, the climate situation looks bad.

And with that, luckily ended up teaming up with Nicholas and a few people on this team to try to address the fact that we've seen everyone we knew, so our parents, our families, our cousins, every coworker I've ever worked with, asked the question of “what can I do?”, and go through these days of inspiration, particularly after documentaries, where they authentically care about getting involved. And then so quickly, say three days later, they might have recommended that content to someone else, but so quickly, it turns from that to nothing. And so, people might recycle more and they might consider themselves conscientious about this.But that does so little in the scheme of what we can be doing. And the big shame is that whatever your skills, whatever your time commitment, however you want to get involved, or to what little extent you do, there are a lot of things you can do that suit you besides just changing your LED light bulbs, and then there's so many things you can do with your time or skills.

And so we've ended up over the last year, we've tried to build a platform that answers, “what you can do about climate change”.

That has been fraught with many different challenges. Individual action is a very, very hard component to build without greenwashing people.

But we’re on our third iteration of the site. And then have 12 really passionate, incredible researchers and volunteers who have got us to this point.

Katherine Li: You said something that interested me. I wanted to touch a little bit on that greenwashing thing that you mentioned. Could you expand on that a little bit more? What exactly does that mean?

William Reynolds: Yeah. So greenwashing as a term, we take it to mean that you can give people the feeling of playing their part, or greenwash them in a way that they feel like they're doing well, and actually, nothing has changed or nothing tangible is happening. So corporations will often greenwash themselves: “Look at this program we're doing” or “we funded the pandas at the $1 million Panda World Wildlife Fund”, and then in comparison to the fact that they pump out gigatons of CO2 as a massive corporation, that is nothing.

Literally 10 thousand tons of CO2, which small and medium sized businesses pump out, is the same social cost of carbon, social cost being cost to the world of this ton of carbon, is the same cost of carbon as this $1 million which they paid to the Pandas. And they've just pumped out 10,000 times that.

So greenwashing is pretending that you’re green, or internally feeling that way ie. by recycling a lot, when actually it's not making any difference to our planet.

Katherine Li: Now we just want to touch a little bit on the perception of climate change and climate action, especially for Gen Z’ers and college students in particular. So what do you guys feel is the general perception of climate change for Gen Z’ers?

Nicholas Fournier: Yeah. So I'd say at Duke, I think we're very blessed to be in a space with a lot of open minded, progressive thinkers, and a lot of people accept the fact that climate change is happening. It's us and we have to make changes to help prevent it.

Unfortunately though, I go back home and I live in a rather conservative area, and it's a little different. I think it's pretty split. Some of the false narratives that you mentioned earlier with like, “oh, the canals are getting cleaner, people stop flying, people stop driving, and oh, it's still one of the hottest years on record, it must be fake. Right. We did all this and it stopped”. So I think there's this gap where you have people that are worried about the climate. There's a good amount of people that are concerned. You do have this political divide, I guess, that can kind of separate people, but I think it's something that can be overcome pretty easily. I've had conversations, just being back at home over break with a good amount of my friends and been able to kind of get people moving in the other direction and accepting the reality that climate change is real, it's happening, and that it is us.

So I have a lot of hope for a generation. But I think it just, it just needs to happen through a conversation and being open minded, but a good amount of hope.

William Reynolds: Something that worries us as a group of climate activists, it does fall outside of our remit, because our remit with You Change Earth is we help you once you're inspired to take those actions and find where you fit. But something that does worry us is, from all socio- economic backgrounds, both the team is spread out across 8 geographies, and it's a lot more than just Duke students or the limited representation we have on this call, but the arguments in the different areas are very different, but all in these different stages of denialism or plausible deniability. I think plausible deniability more so.

I think desmog.com or dsmog.blog online has placed out every denialist-esque argument, but it’s worrying to see people fall back, as science establishes itself, on the trench just one further back.

And there's almost no way to get around that except through long conversations, and even then often people will dig their heels in one of those trenches. And those trenches I'm sure you examined when this podcast was working on geoengineering, especially, because it comes up with a lot of scientific issues. It's very important to clarify. I think even to the people I know here in New Zealand, like if you're about to listen to climate deniers, these are the arguments that you're going to hear.

For us, we choose that the only way that we can influence that is not by arguing about the trenches. That either pre-clarifying them to people who may fall into their logic, so people who are inclined towards climate change, but may hear someone from Fox News speak and it sounds very convincing at these different levels. Or we just focus on the people who care and move them to action, because honestly with the sheer amount that we can each do; if we can get the 52% of people that Yale's surveyed that shows who cares about climate change, that's all we need to enact massive change.

Ryan Lou: Yeah. So you mentioned being able to help those who are inspired to take action. I understand this is the purpose of You Change Earth. What results have you guys seen from this project?

William Reynolds: We've done about 30 grand in revenue for the climate, and that is, okay we've reduced that amount of carbon use just off the people who have told us: “this is what I'm changing”. And so that's three people changing solar panels and then a few people who have gone through and, incidentally, our copywriters who ran over the site, saying “I've changed this, this, and this about their lifestyles”, and so we equate that to carbon, put it in a conservative cost of carbon at $50 a ton, and then internally go “cool”! In about a week of work, that's been 30 grand.

But everything leading up to now that has been tested has been seeing, are we doing something that's worth putting in front of 10s and hundreds of thousands of people?

And we think so. We are very, very happy with the content, but also there are a lot of climate action platforms that have been coming through, especially through COVID. There are two veins of them in particular that we've met.

And down our vein, like the exact flow that we take people through, so the questions, to the dashboard, and the way we engage may not work. And so in the next six months we’re figuring that out because individual action is a very, very hard problem, and there's almost no way to see until you're testing with 10s of thousands of users.

But that's, that's us at the moment. We think we've got the ultimate climate guides and we spent a year engaging with experts and professionals for 16 different facets of climate change from how to change your career to how to use your voice as an employee. We only got four individual action points: use your finances, whatever your financial state, just orienting things like your 401K for Americans. Solar power your home, home efficiency, and green your diet.

Katherine Li: I wanted to touch on this idea of individual action versus, you know, systemic change. And I think the pandemic has brought to light a lot of these issues. With the onset of the pandemic, we did see a large decrease in greenhouse gas emissions, but we found out that that is entirely not enough to meet Paris agreement goals, you know, even with all these individuals staying at home and limiting their own consumption.

And so from that, I think we saw firsthand how much these polluting industries and corporations have an impact on climate change.

And I feel like that may have discouraged individuals from individually leading a sustainable lifestyle, but we don't we don't want to discourage that because that is still like an awesome thing to do.

So my question for you guys is, what would you tell those individuals who may be discouraged about individually leading a sustainable lifestyle? Why is it important for individuals to have sustainable habits in addition to, you know, keeping these industries and corporations accountable?

William Reynolds: Great question. Thank you. The one design edit we're making on the product, is answering that question for every single person on the site. And getting them to buy in on a preset, default project for everyone. This is, this is what we need. This is what we need from 3.5% of the population to the nonviolent revolution that sees that unprecedented change that the IPCC quote says we need from society.

And so the answer to that is by 2050, every community that we're in will need to be or need to be close to net zero carbon emissions. By 2030 we need to get halfway there.

And the sooner we can do it, drastically, the better results. So a ton of carbon that we reduce now, or that our school going carbon neutral and stopping thousands of tons of carbon, is far more valuable than doing so in five years. So when you think about that, and when you think about this problem, is so fundamentally ground up, at least that’s You Change Earth’s belief and approach, and it's also easy to see when you look at how the climate accords have been going, how the Kyoto ones went, to how the 1980s went.

Every community around you needs to change. If you have the time to help change that, you can have an immense impact. Join us on You Change Earth doing that. Learn how to do that, join your local communities to get started. And there is a massive amount we can each do because we all need to buy into that. So, so many of us need to go “yes” and use our voices.

I'm luckily surrounded by a group of seven young New Zealand entrepreneurs, at the moment, and I'm prompting all of them to think about how they think about their businesses’ carbon impact and then the companies they engage with too.

So partially, it is that every community around you needs to change. And so you can play your role in doing that. Or it is going, hey, this is how you use your voice. Just a couple bullet points that we very carefully spend time writing out that prompt you to think about what communities you can advocate in, or not even push people, but just bring climate into the consciousness.

And go “over the next 10 years especially, we need everyone we can doing that”. And so with those two things just alone, that's huge. And then we try to provide tools and resources and guides to think about if you want to get more engaged. Here are the different ways you can. And I hesitated there because it's not your job. It's not your role. It is entrepreneurs and business leaders and politicians who need to carefully think about how we make all the systems underneath us sustainable and pro-climate before the science shows us that we are, in New Zealand we would say, munted.

But if you want to get involved, we need you. And so we show the guide for the people who want to get involved. Whether that’s local political action or changing those communities, Whether it's just being aware of your community changing and you can use your voice.

Or whether you want to specifically join...if you're a designer like climate designers.org and go spend your time volunteering for companies accelerating this transition.

Ryan Lou: You talked a lot about providing advice for people. So what advice would you give to our students, to our listeners who maybe aren't self proclaimed climate activists, who don't know much about environmentalism, how could they get started on their climate journey?

William Reynolds: Yeah. Um, so that's that's a guide that we put off developing until right now.

But, up to now, we have said “Okay, read David Wallace-Well’s, Uninhabitable Earth article. It's an incredible, incredible article, and then after you've read that article come to youchangeearth.org and go through… by then we will have the students guide up. And then the two salient points in that will be “Hey, you can consider committing your career to climate change generally, here’s the fundamental ways that you use your voice, or here are a couple resources to learn more if you want to”.

You don't need to consider yourself a climate activist. But once you read that piece and hopefully once you come on the site, there are a lot of ways you can simply bring up climate into consciousness and that is the biggest thing you can do. And these 10 years with your parents, with any business leaders you talk to, with nonprofits you're engaged in.

Simply bringing out, have we thought of the carbon impact of this? And hey, we need to be net neutral by 2050 is huge, and your voice is needed. And we would love to have your voice in this conversation. And in this movement.

Katherine Li: And so our closing question. This is something that we're asking all of our interviewees this season. What does activism mean to each of you?

Nicholas Fournier: I think working at working with everyone on the YouChangeEarth team has given me a pretty different perspective, from what I originally thought activism might have been. I think, when I first started learning about climate change, activism seem to me like something where it's oh you're going to go out and you're going to pickit and you're going to go to a climate rally or something like that. And it seemed more of trying to influence others and obviously I still hold that belief, but also just changing your own habits. And I think in changing things in your lifestyle, they have an influence on others that you might not realize. I feel like you can very easily passively be an activist. There's a number of choices that you can make, whether that's just having a conversation with someone and being like, hey, this really matters to me.

The earth is something that I care about, the health of our planet, the health of the people inhabiting it is super important to me. This is why. Let me explain it to you. This is the science that matters to me.

And kind of just going through, whether that's just a quick conversation with a family member who is interested in the climate and is worried about what's happening or if it's with someone that's not.

Just being able to speak to that and give people your perspectives and just hopefully be able to influence others, whether that's actively through using your voice or passively through changing your own lifestyle and just showing how feasible certain things are and how you can make a lot of change without having to change too too much in your life. I feel like there's some sacrifices that people can make that are beneficial to your health on an individual level, but then also can benefit the planet.

William Reynolds: For me I think activism is a fraught term. Fraught for some groups of the population, for some for some people who care about our planet a lot. Because I think inherently it's pushing a boundary. And so Extinction Rebellion did that incredibly well in the UK and annoyed millions of people too.

But a lot like Bernie Sanders (and none of these references are particular endorsements)

But he's pushed the envelope of what is acceptable conversation. And so did the original Green New Deal from AOC.

I see activism as that. One definition of activism is what we're trying to get the entire population to do. And it is the much more approachable, bringing net value to society activism. I'm not saying those guys didn't, but every one of us, even if you dislike the term activism, should be an activist, because you don't need to force anyone. You don't need to do anything except bring up the causes that you care about. And we'd love to show you how to do so in YouChangeEarth.

But fundamentally, we'd love you all to mention how important climate is to you in these decision making rooms that matter. And even if it's just mentioning it. You don't need to push people, but it has a huge, huge impact.

So that's what we're trying to encourage. Whatever type of activist you'd like to be, even if you'd like to do in the most hands off way, feel free to either go on our site, reach out to me personally at will@youchangeearth.org. Or team@youchangeearth.org or alec@youchangeearth.org, we'd be happy to personally help you see how you can get involved.

Katherine Li: Thank you guys so much, again, that was Nick and Will from YouChangeEarth. Thank you guys so much for joining us today.

William Reynolds: Thank you for having us.

Nicholas Fournier: Thank you.

Katherine Li: The consequences of climate change are serious. Like Will and Nick described, getting involved as early as possible can do a great deal for climate action. We hope you’ll check out all the resources that YouChangeEarth has provided on youchangeearth.org so you can get started on your own climate journey.

Ryan Lou: Thanks so much for tuning in to this episode of Operation Climate. Make sure to subscribe to stay updated about future episodes. For more information on who we are, what we’re doing, and a full transcript of this episode, visit our website at bit.ly/operationclimatepodcast to learn more.