Peter Kalmus is a climate scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the author of Being the Change: Live Well and Spark a Climate Revolution. In addition to his scientific work he is a high-profile climate activist who has advocated civil disobedience as a necessary means of spurring action to stop the climate catastrophe. Dr. Kalmus recently wrote a scathing article about the UN’s COP 28 climate summit, which has been dominated by the fossil fuel industry. He joins today to explain why, as a climate scientist, he wants people to understand the basic fact that we have no choice but to eliminate the fossil fuel industry as soon as possible. The transcript has been lightly edited for grammar and clarity. Dr. Kalmus’s views are his own and not presented on behalf of his employer.

Nathan J. Robinson 

Recently in Newsweek, you had a column where you described the current United Nations Climate Summit—COP28—as, in your words, “a sick joke.” You wrote:

“As a climate scientist, I am appalled, frustrated, disgusted. I am losing my faith in humanity.”

What led you to describe the current climate summit as a “sick joke”?

Peter Kalmus 

It’s just so over the top. This is supposed to be the international system for solving the global problem of global heating. We can’t solve it effectively and rapidly without some sort of global mechanism for coordinating that effort. And the cause—by far the main cause—is the fossil fuel industry. We’re about 1.3 degrees Celsius hotter than we should be on planet Earth right now, and about roughly 80% of global heating is caused by fossil fuels.

I say it’s caused by the fossil fuel industry, and that’s not unintentional. The fossil fuel industry has been spreading disinformation for about half a century, and even colluding, very systematically, by hiring some of the best lobbyists and PR people in the world, spending billions and billions of dollars forming think tanks—like the American Petroleum Institute—to do this work so that all the different fossil fuel corporations can pitch in and cooperate in this effort. They’ve been blocking action by basically bribing—through legalized bribery—politicians by writing laws, like for example at the state level through the American Legislative Exchange Committee [ALEC] for the last 50 years. About 15% of global heating is caused by the animal agriculture industry, so we have to take care of that also, but the fossil fuel industry is the main cause.

They’ve been acting dishonestly, and they’ve recently promised to continue acting dishonestly and have recently taken over this United Nations summit meeting process, which is happening in the United Arab Emirates this time around. The president of the meeting is this guy is literally a fossil fuel executive who, by basically going directly against the world’s climate scientists and in a remarkable way, is saying that fossil fuels aren’t the cause, which is absolutely a ridiculous statement.

So, it’s just so out in the open at this point. The process is so corrupted that it really is a sick joke, and we’re in danger of losing our planet this way.

Robinson 

Joe Biden’s climate envoy, John Kerry, described the selection of this gentleman, Sultan al-Jaber, as a “terrific choice” when he was picked and suggested that we have to bring all the stakeholders to the table. It’s a very John Kerry kind of thing to say.

Kalmus 

It makes me wonder if John Kerry himself is somehow corrupted in this process. That’s just such a ridiculous perspective to have on what’s happening.

In my piece in Newsweek, I did a little thought experiment: imagine an alternate reality in which the fossil fuel industry back in the ’70s, when they realized that their products were literally destroying Earth’s habitability, said to themselves, we’ve got more money than we know what to do with anyway already, so let’s instead pivot and try to switch to being energy corporations instead of fossil fuel corporations and preserve a habitable planet for all. To me, that’s common sense.

That’s what should have happened. But instead, they did the exact opposite. They said, we’re going to do everything we can to block action to get even richer and keep the gravy train going for as long as we can, even though our own scientists, and external scientists, have told us that we’re irreversibly destroying or degrading Earth habitability.

Now, in 2023, we’re seeing the fruits of that. We’re getting to levels of global heating under which it’s not clear that we can have global civilization as we’re used to. Their dishonesty, lies, and disinformation are so well documented by science historians and journalists, like Naomi Oreskes, Benjamin Franta, or Amy Westervelt. There are smoking guns—documents going back to the 1970s. There was a 2021 testimony in which six fossil fuel executives went before the Congress and were asked, will you stop spending money to fund climate disinformation and block action? They did not agree to that. They filibustered, they hemmed and hawed. They spewed bullshit about how they’re spending a percent of their profits on solar panels or whatever, but they would not agree to stop spending to block action and spread disinformation.

John Kerry knows all this—he has to know all of this. We can’t pretend anymore. Since 2006, it’s been clear to me that the fossil fuel industry is not acting in good faith. But for somebody like John Kerry to pretend that they’re still acting in good faith when they clearly are not, when they’re clearly acting dishonestly, is something that blocks action because that gives defense to the fossil fuel industry. And that allows the public to pretend, for example, that things are okay and that the process is working. It’s not working. 

Robinson 

It’s not. Because they say they take the problem seriously. This gentleman, Sultan al-Jaber, said he’s very pleased to head the climate conference, and we’re going to find a solution together. And then, of course, it turns out—shocker of the year—that he’s been using his position as the head of the climate conference to push for new fossil fuel deals. And then, once again, everyone’s shocked because he opens his mouth and spouts out a bunch of denialist talking points about how actually, maybe the science says we don’t need to get off fossil fuels. 

Kalmus 

It’s crazy. It’s so out in the open and so corrupted that as a climate scientist, it’s hard for me to articulate just how ugly and evil and horrible it actually is.

I tried to do that in the Newsweek piece. I tried as hard as I could to find new language and framings. I think language is so important in this whole process of climate denial and of the world. Collectively acting as if we can keep going business as usual—just a few more electric cars, a little bit of carbon capture and carbon offsetting, and we’ll be okay. That’s not true. What we have to do is end the fossil fuel industry. That’s it.

Look at what’s happening; look at the fires and the deaths and the heat waves and the flooding. Plenty of scientists who study the Amazon rainforest feel that it’s already past its tipping point. I study coral reefs, and I feel like they can’t be saved at the levels that we’ve lived with them on planet Earth any longer. I also study extreme heat, and I’m terrified by what’s coming down the pipe. Not to mention things like ten, a hundred, or a thousand times as many immigrants coming to national borders and destabilizing geopolitics. Or things like hits to the agriculture system and crop yield losses that are going to raise food prices and will also destabilize global geopolitics.

I’m almost at a loss of finding words to adequately describe the corruption and the evil at COP28.

Robinson 

You mentioned the importance of using language very precisely and clearly because we are cutting through a forest of bullshit that is erected to prevent us from thinking clearly about the problem. And there are a lot of tricky phrases like “net-zero.” You have to pay close attention when “net” is said. 

Kalmus 

And the fossil fuel industry itself has worked very hard to inject this sort of language and framings into the mainstream. So, they love the concept of carbon capture. “Oh, we’ll just build a bunch of carbon capture plants and suck the carbon out of the atmosphere, and then we can keep burning fossil fuels and making our money.” That’s absolute bullshit. We don’t know how to do it, it’s going to be incredibly expensive. You sort of have to run the economic system in reverse. We’ve been running our economic system by burning fossil fuels, and to pull the byproducts out of the atmosphere—the Second Law of Thermodynamics—takes a huge amount of energy and inputs.

And energy, basically, is economy. “Economy” is basically our word for describing how we relate energetically with the rest of the planet. So, we’re basically saying that we’re going to use uncertain technologies that we don’t know how to scale up and that will be tremendously expensive and saddle our kids with that. While dealing with all the supercharged storms, moving their cities away from the coast, and crop failures and heat waves kill millions or tens of millions of people over the course of a few days, our kids will be dealing with that. We’re going to saddle them with spending 20% or something of their GDP on sucking carbon out of the atmosphere with technology that doesn’t exist yet.

It’s so evil. It’s just crazy.

Robinson 

To go back to the conference, do you know how it ended up that this guy’s the president of the conference, and it’s in the United Arab Emirates? This is the UN—don’t they take this problem seriously?

Kalmus 

I have been wondering that, too. I was hoping that you or some journalists could clarify that. I know that the UN Secretary-General Guterres seems just as angry and disgusted as me, and yet he seems powerless to stop it. It’s a great question. I almost felt a little bit weird publishing the Newsweek piece without knowing the answer to that. 

Robinson 

It’s bizarre! Who said this was okay? But obviously, the Sultan is the head of an oil company. As you said, they have a record. We know what they do. They have a financial interest. We know that you are trying to get them to give up profits that they would like to keep. They have a pathological desire to make money. 

Kalmus 

That’s all they want. 

Robinson 

Right. I understand them, though. I understand where they’re coming from and what they want. What I don’t understand is the people who say they care. I mentioned John Kerry, but the Biden administration generally touts the Inflation Reduction Act. They’ve got new methane rules that they are really proud of. But also, at the same time, they’ve been recently kind of boasting that oil production in the United States is hitting a record high. 

Kalmus 

It’s like they’re driving a giant diesel truck down the highway at 100 miles an hour and just putting the tiniest tap on the brake, but pushing down as hard as they can on the accelerator. It doesn’t make any sense at all.

I think there’s a broad lack of awareness—I just don’t get this because it’s so obvious—that the cause is the fossil fuel industry, and that making a few more EV is not going to solve the problem. You have to directly address the root cause, which is the fossil fuel industry, and if you’re expanding that, you’re going to outpace production of solar panels and wind farms. We need those things because we’re humans; we’re animals on earth.

Unfortunately, we’ve gotten used to this tremendously energy-intensive lifestyle. I would argue that we need to transition to emergency mode and use somewhat less energy so that we can ramp down fossil fuels faster. But we need some amount of energy to live, just like any other species. And that’s going to have to come from non-fossil fuel sources like solar, wind, nuclear, and geothermal, but mostly solar and wind, probably.

So, we do need to ramp those up, but we’re already in such a deep emergency at 1.3 degrees Celsius. We’re careening past 1.5 degrees. Let’s be real: we are not going to keep global heating to 1.5 degrees Celsius, despite all the rhetoric of recent years. If somehow humans vanish from planet Earth, the Earth system would likely not go past 1.5 degrees Celsius.

But even if humans agreed that we’re in a climate emergency and had to do everything possible to get out of it, and we’re in that alternate universe where the fossil fuel industry was acting in good faith and partnering with us to help us transition as quickly as we could, even then, I would say there’s no possible way that we can stay under 1.5 degrees Celsius. And then think of the political quagmire: all the disinformation, the fossil fuel industry doing everything it can to block us, the Republican Party saying that it’s still a hoax, and all of the people in the United States—even for people that do think about climate change, perhaps—that just want the cheapest possible gas.

It’s just such a clusterfuck, for lack of a better word. There’s no way—no social and political way—we’re staying under 1.5 degrees. We should all be grieving deeply. I think it’s going to be much, much worse than almost anyone recognizes, even at 1.5 degrees, and we’re going to go past that.

I’m not a doomer. I’m fighting as hard I can. I’ve been arrested several times to try to raise urgency about this. So, I’m not sitting on my couch in despair. But I also think that these false hope narratives that we still have a chance to keep it under 1.5 degrees—it’s going to be fine, we just need a few more EVs, carbon capture and carbon offset will work—are all bullshit false hope narratives preventing people from getting out and doing the real work and fighting the real fight. This is a fight. People are already dying, and the number of people that die per year will start—I’m afraid—going through the roof. I think this is a class war, essentially.

Robinson 

You mentioned the number of people dying from the things that we’re facing. I just want to note here that one of the most common talking points—I just read this again in the Wall Street Journal today—is about deaths from heat versus deaths from cold, that there are so many more deaths from cold than deaths from heat. They almost imply it’s going to save lives.

Kalmus 

It’s a noisy thing, and it’s not a very meaningful comparison. And in a few years, we’re gonna look back at this period, and we will wish that we still had years when there were more deaths from cold because there’s a trend here.

Those people are fucking idiots who say that because they don’t understand trends. A trend is basically a chart of some variable, where you have an escalator going up over time or going down over time. That’s a trend. Any second-grader can understand what a trend is. And yet somehow we as a society collectively—as pundits on the right, for example—do not seem to understand the most basic idea of a trend. The more fossil fuel we burn, the hotter planet Earth gets. The worse heat waves and humid heat gets, the more people will die. As you start to get to the limits of these thresholds of human survivability, the amount of deaths does not go up in a linear fashion. It goes up extremely quickly.

Robinson 

I certainly don’t have much respect for the Wall Street Journal op-ed page and Bjorn Lomborg, but there are others—

Kalmus 

That guy is so anti-science. His cherry-picking is just—he might be the most evil person on the planet. Because he’s a smart guy. He completely knows what he’s doing, and he knows what the truth is. And yet, he’s using his smart brain to cherry-pick and make it look like he’s scientifically accurate and fool the public when he would be laughed out of any scientific institution or worse. He’s deeply, deeply unethical. It’s hard for me to understand how any human can be so unethical as that.

Robinson 

I was going to say that there are people like that I don’t expect much from, but then there are people who you would think are intelligent, perceptive people who end up saying things or really not grasping the situation. You just retweeted someone critiquing the physics explainer, Sabine Hossenfelder. She said,

“Lots of climate activists urgently need to wake up and accept that at this point the only realistic way to limit global warming is massive amounts of carbon dioxide removal, everywhere, all at once. And, yes, that will make it possible to continue using fossil fuels.”

Kalmus 

Absolutely unbelievable. Like straight out of the fossil fuel industry. I don’t know who she works for, but that’s exactly what the fossil fuel industry wants people to believe, and it’s just incredibly wrong. It’s as wrong as saying two plus two equals five. It’s just insane.

The cause is fossil fuels. The cause is burning fossil fuels, emitting carbon dioxide. You also emit methane molecules—CH4—from the process of dredging the fossil fuels up out of the earth. There are other greenhouse gases, but those are the two biggest molecules building up in our atmosphere and trapping outgoing infrared radiation, which has to get to space to counterbalance the incoming energy from the sun. If you reduce the amount of infrared radiation streaming out into space because some of it is hitting and interacting quantum mechanically with these fossil fuel combustion products—methane and carbon dioxide—some of those infrared photons get rerouted back down to earth, and they don’t get out to space. So, the same amount of energy is coming from the sun, but you got less energy getting out into space, and obviously, the planet heats up. And then when it gets hotter, it sends out more infrared photons. So eventually, you will get back into energy balance, but the planet will be hotter, and that’s what’s driving all this craziness.

And if you can’t see this craziness yet, even if you’re a Republican—I don’t think I understand how the human brain works, how it’s able to dissociate stuff that’s right in front of your own eyes: things getting hotter, your garden is changing, you can’t grow stuff that you use to grow. If you’re a farmer, you definitely understand that something is changing. 

Robinson 

I’m in New Orleans, and this year, the summer was really, really hot in a scary way. Every day, you’d go out early in the morning, and it would be scary hot. A new kind of hot. And then you hear people saying, “wow, pretty hot these days, I don’t remember it being like this.”

Kalmus 

And remember, this is the trend. It’s just the beginning. And how hot the planet gets is how hot it’s going to stay for a long time. Geoengineering is a whole other dangerous thing that we haven’t even touched on, that the fossil fuel industry would love to see start happening. Basically, by putting up a bunch of sulfate pollution up in the atmosphere, you block out some of the sunlight, and then you can keep burning fossil fuels. What happens then is that if eventually, for whatever reason, you can’t keep flying those planes anymore [to spray sulfate in the atmosphere], the earth will suddenly spike in temperature. It’s called termination shock. It’s a terrible idea.

If there’s one thing people take away from this, and the thing that I hammer on over and over again because it’s the bedrock for this whole thing, is that the fossil fuel industry is the primary cause. The next secondary cause is four times smaller than the fossil fuel industry; it’s 80% fossil fuel industry, 15% industrial animal agriculture. We should end that, too, but the cause is the fossil fuel industry.

Any solution or basket of solutions that are proposed as a pathway out of this that doesn’t center the ending of the fossil fuel industry as quickly as we can is bullshit, and it’s probably worse than bullshit. It’s probably disinformation designed to make somebody richer at the expense of our collective future.

Robinson 

I’m glad you’re hammering on this. Because when I hear, again, a Democratic administration going on about how we’ve increased oil production to record levels—

Kalmus 

I don’t understand it. Again, to go back to the analogy of the pedal being pressed to the floor while the brake is barely being tapped, we spend a lot in this country on the military. The proposed funding for climate mitigation in the Inflation Reduction Act comes out to about 6% per year of what we spend on the military; it’s a 10-year bill, but if you annualize it, every year we’re spending about 6% on climate mitigation of what we spend on the military.

So, let that sink in. A habitable planet to this administration is basically worth 6% of military spending, which is actually kind of a source of hope for me. If humanity decided to really get serious about this and came together and said, this is an urgent issue and we are in the process of losing our planet, which we are—and that’s a euphemism, shorthand for saying, we’re losing the habitability or the ability of our planet to support global civilization and support eight billion humans. We’re losing that. We’re in the process of losing that. If humanity made it a priority to stop that process, we would stop it really quickly.

But unfortunately, that has a prerequisite, which is taking power, resources, and wealth away from the billionaire class and from the fossil fuel industry. Those billionaires, fossil fuel executives, lobbyists, and all the people milking that industry are doing everything they can to stop action, which is really sad. It’s a really sad statement or reflection on humans, or at least on this particular human society—this capitalist society—which grows directly out of Indigenous genocide, slavery, etc.

What we’re experiencing now is the billionaire class, the fossil fuel industry—this fetishization of profit above all else where the only thing that matters is the quarterly profits—dissociate and turn a blind eye to what’s happening to planet Earth and say it’s a hoax and spread disinformation. I just think it’s a really sad reflection on—let me just say, I think humanity has a lot of self reflection to do. I’ll leave it at that.

Robinson 

You were talking earlier about the kind of cognitive dissidence of, why don’t people notice this? And one of the things you do in your book so well is that you help us to try and think more clearly. To look around and think about what energy is, how things work, what is happening here, and what you’re emitting when you do things in your daily life.

We on the left are often skeptical of “individual” change and changes in consumer choices versus activism. But you say, no, let’s change our individual lifestyles in order to think about and understand what we are doing and the effect that it has. You have that nice mixture of a call to activism and a call toward lifestyle change.

Kalmus 

It’s a great thing to do, and I thought people would find it really fun. I thought that would catch on, that people would think that makes sense—let’s do that, and let’s also be activists. I realized that it’s not catching on.

So, my new framing is, if you’re going to get on a plane, get on a plane—I don’t think it’s a great thing to do, but go ahead and do it—but then be an advocate or an activist. Speak out really strongly that we have to end that entire system of commercial aviation. We’re all addicted to flying, so we have to ramp down that entire system in a sensible and equitable way so that we can kind of protect ourselves from ourselves.

I didn’t really quite finish my thought: the prerequisite for ramping down the fossil fuel industry is to have sort of a redistribution of wealth and power. Again, if you do a thought experiment and say, we have to end fossil fuels and transition to clean energy—to wind and solar, for example—and we have to make fossil fuels more expensive, among many other things. Well, if you do that in a way that makes it so that working class people are spending a larger and larger fraction of their money on energy, and then they can’t afford to get to work and put food on their table, what are they going to do? They’re going to say, fuck this, we’re voting for the guy who says he’ll roll that back so that we can actually live, which is the guy who is the climate denier.

So, if you want to have your climate policies stick, you have to do it in a way that is funded by the ultra rich, who also, incidentally, are causing the lion’s share of global heating. That works within the United States, but also works in an international context. The developing nations are going to say, you caused this, rich nations; we’re still trying to develop, so you owe it to us to help us leapfrog over fossil fuels and get to clean energy; also, we’re dealing with all the disasters that you guys have caused.

So, until the rich nations can do that, the developing nations are not going to pitch in as energetically as they otherwise would. This is why equity is not optional. The left obviously loves the idea of fairness and equity. But anyone, whatever their political views, who wants a habitable planet should realize that we have to take power away from the ultra rich. It’s a practical matter.

Robinson 

One of the talking points the Sultan used was, “Please help me, show me the roadmap for a phase-out of fossil fuels that will allow for sustainable socioeconomic development, unless you want to take the world back into caves.” But I think it is important that we do have a roadmap for sustainable socioeconomic development, and we can show that to people and knock down that talking point.

Kalmus 

Jason Hickel wrote an excellent book called Less is More. In my view, coming out of extractive capitalism to a non-growth economic model that doesn’t depend on an exponentially growing economic system, is just a basket of dozens or maybe hundreds of policies that move the goal of the system. The goal of the system is very important in terms of how that system behaves.

Currently, the goal of the system is as much economic growth as possible, and as much growth and capital for the ultra rich as possible. That’s what extractive capitalism is. And that’s the only goal of the system. It does not care about equity, or about poor people’s lives, their health care, or whether that they have access to food. It does not care about a habitable planet. It does not care about young people, or future generations, one bit. All it cares about is profit, and profit for the ultra rich, especially. If we change the goal of the system to flourishing for all and a healthy planet—flourishing for all includes a healthy planet as a subset because that means future generations as well—if that’s the new goal of the system, then overall, we would all be happier, but rich people will be less little rich, and poor people will be less poor.

And that changing of the goal from profit for the few to flourishing for all leads to thousands of different decisions at every level, from communities to states, from national to international. 

Robinson 

Before we conclude, I want to emphasize that in your work, you exhort people to become activists. Because we don’t have enough. 

Kalmus 

There was a letter from more than one thousand climate scientists begging the public—begging all of your listeners and readers—to become activists.

This is another complicated thing. What is an activist? I would say it’s someone who takes risks. We need to change social norms, and social norms don’t really change on their own. They change when we, as humans, take risks, and go outside or against those social norms. 

Robinson 

As you emphasized, you’re not a “doomer.” Just because we’re blowing past the 1.5 degree target does not mean that we can’t prevent a huge amount of destruction and suffering. But the choices we make right now in this generation are going to determine the fates of many beings on this planet in the years to come.

Kalmus 

Exactly. We’re heading deeper into the sixth mass extinction, for example. I’m not a doomer. I’m a realist, and I’m a fighter. And I’ve realized that we are kind of in a war—it’s not a war that involves bullets, shells, and bombs yet, although with political destabilization that could get there. But right now, it is a war of the billionaire class basically extracting wealth at the cost of the deaths of millions—maybe even billions—of people, depending on how hot the planet gets. There’s a lot of people that live in the tropics, and if we continue prioritizing growth over sustainability for, say, another 100 years, then huge amounts of the Earth will become uninhabitable. Even at the coolest time of day, it’s going to be too hot for a healthy human body, lying down to rest, for example. Not to mention the loss of agriculture.

Robinson 

There’s this thing that I also sensed when I talked to people in 2016 who didn’t think Donald Trump was going to win, where if something’s bad enough, there’s some part of you—some deep-baked optimism in people—that says it can’t happen. And I feel like part of the battle is getting people to realize this is real—this is going to happen. Every single year, this is going to get worse. If you think it’s bad, it will get worse.

Kalmus 

It’s possible that my view is colored by the fact that I started out as an astrophysicist, so I don’t take this habitable Earth for granted. I know that a planet in this habitable zone of temperature is exceedingly rare in the galaxy and in the universe. The laws of physics don’t guarantee that it’s going to stay habitable, no matter what we do.

In fact, the laws of physics guarantee that it will get much too fucking hot if we keep burning fossil fuels. So, pardon my language, but I don’t know what it’s going to take. I’m really disappointed because I thought that at this level of heating, of obviousness, of disaster, that everyone would wake up and realize that none of our hopes and dreams will come to fruition if we don’t have a habitable planet.

Robinson 

That was one of the things I thought was most profound in Don’t Look Up: when the asteroid appears in the sky, that denial actually gets worse.

Kalmus 

Yes, exactly. I really think that this COP28, the Sultan guy and the United Arab Emirates, and the way they’re saying things that to limit global heating damage the path is not ending fossil fuels—which is just ridiculous—is actually beyond, in some ways, anything in Don’t Look Up. 

Robinson

It’s like if they were actively trying to get the asteroid to hit the Earth. 

Kalmus

Exactly. It’s exactly like that. That’s it. That’s the analogy.

Robinson 

Instead of just not diverting it.

Kalmus 

It’s as if the asteroid was just going to barely miss Earth, and they made sure that it hit it.

Robinson 

Because this was especially a solvable problem if we’d started 50 years ago, but here we are.

Kalmus 

And it’s so sad, too. I’ve got two teenage boys. And I just feel so sad and sort of powerless as a father. I have deep instincts to protect them, and I see what’s coming, and it just destroys me. It makes me fight harder to think about that. I’m a climate scientist. I thought that the way it was supposed to work—again, this probably in that alternate universe, where the fossil fuel industry doesn’t destroy our planet for their short-term profits. Those executives will be just as dead as anyone else, pretty much. 

Robinson 

They have kids! What are they doing? 

Kalmus 

I don’t understand. It’s evil. Maybe this is a good note to end on. I think the public tends to think that billionaires are smarter than the average person. I would say that they’re far more foolish and ignorant than the average person. They’re psychopaths, maybe. Maybe they’re just stupid as fuck. I don’t know. Whatever the reason, they are taking us into 10 million years of a degraded planet. They’re basically selling the entire future of humanity for a little bit more money. They already have more money than they know what to do with. They build rockets in the shape of penises. It’s insane. What is wrong with them? It’s like a mental illness. They’re not smarter than everyone else. They’re just much more mentally ill.

So, we have to take power away from them. It’s like the toddlers are in charge. Imagine toddlers in charge of nuclear weapons and being able to press the launch button. You would fucking take that toddler away—

Robinson 

I would trust a toddler over Elon Musk. 

Kalmus 

They’re somehow more emotionally, relationally, morally, and ethically stunted human beings.

Robinson 

We need to be better. And we have work to do. 

Kalmus 

We have to build power as a movement and then revoke the social license for fossil fuels, and put those executives behind bars as well.

Transcript edited by Patrick Farnsworth.