Climate Breakdown, Converging Crises, and Systemic Change: A Q&A with Gus Speth

The prominent environmental advocate and voice for transformative change discusses working in the Carter White House, resistance during the Trump 2.0 era, and signals of hope.

Photo courtesy of Gus Speth

Happy New Year to all! I have a real treat to bring to you to start off this year at One Earth Now. What follows is a Q&A style conversation with one of America’s leading environmental advocates and voices for transformative system change. With so much destruction, disruption and chaos happening in the US and around the world, as the planet heats up and long-festering, systemic problems start to converge and compound, one leader I look to for wisdom and inspiration to help navigate through the choppy waters is James Gustave (‘Gus’) Speth. Gus has been a big influence on my thinking about the importance of deep, systemic change as a necessity for dealing with environmental deterioration, and I was honored to have had the opportunity to interview him for this piece.

Gus Speth (who is a reader and subscriber to this publication - thank you, Gus!) cofounded the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) – one of the leading US environmental organizations – and was founder and president of the World Resources Institute. He served as chair of the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) during the Carter administration, and as administrator of the UN Development Group in the 1990s. He is also former dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and a former professor at Vermont Law School. And he is an author of multiple books, such as Red Sky at Morning: America and the Crisis of the Global Environment; The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability; Angels by the River: A memoir; and They Knew: The US Government’s Fifty-Year Role in Causing the Climate Crisis.

The following Q&A discussion covers quite a bit of ground, and the thematic topics can be grouped into three parts. Part One is a historical perspective, looking back at the environmental progress under former President Jimmy Carter as well as the “road not taken” in the subsequent administrations in turning away from fossil fuels. Part Two is about our present reality in 2025 and how we might both resist and try to make progress in the Trump 2.0 era. Part Three looks ahead and ponders how we might get from where we are to where we need to go in terms of realizing social, economic and environmental justice. (Transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.)

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PART ONE: LOOKING BACK

Q: I want to start off with Jimmy Carter, (Rest in Peace), as he’s in the news now with his recent passing. You worked in his administration at the CEQ, so you had a front-row seat to his environmental initiatives, and Carter is now being remembered for that. A recent piece in Rolling Stone for example labeled him “America’s greatest environmental president.” Do you agree with that characterization, and what was Jimmy like as a person and as president?

A: Yes, I had the honor of serving for four years during the entire Carter Administration. Four years as a member of the Council on Environmental Quality. It's a three-member entity within the White House structure. And the last two years of the Administration, I had the honor of being the chairman of the Council. Looking back on it, I can see that I was a very young man to be the chairman of anything.

But I did have a wonderful experience working for this absolutely amazing man. We see him now from his post-president perch, so to speak. But he was, as president, a very determined man who knew a lot about the world and a lot about people, and was very compassionate.

He was an extraordinarily decent person with a tremendous integrity, and there were times when I thought that he watched out for me, because during those years, I kept doing pretty outrageous things, and I think some of his staff were a little upset with me from time to time. I know this because I kept getting called to come over to the White House and explain myself, but I was never given sanctions. I was never sanctioned or restricted in what I was able to do as his top environmental advisor. I think that was probably because he saw something, I hope, in what I was trying to do…

This was a great period. I think it was a high point in environmental policymaking in the country. Carter had to resolve a lot of energy issues. He addressed a lot of them, a lot of it in favor of the first renewable energy programs, the first major conservation and efficiency programs, and he saw the risks of the buildup of greenhouse gases. In a speech in 1980, pledged to take it up in a second term if he were reelected…

Bottom line, I think he was. Yes. Not only our greatest environmental president, but also the only president that we've had who was a deeply committed environmentalist, who felt this in his bones and who knew the issues and who respected the science behind it all.

Speth with former President Jimmy Carter in 1978. Photo courtesy of Gus Speth

Q: During your time at CEQ, climate change entered the national policy arena really for the first time. As you write in your memoir, “By the time we left office in January 1981, CEQ had called for action on climate change in three public reports.” What would it have meant had real policy action been taken back then on this issue?

A: I now realize that there were more than three reports because I wasn’t accounting for the CEQ annual report, which we put out every year, and during that era was an important document. It went to the Congress and to the public and it was mandated by the National Environmental Policy Act. There were several more reports in which the climate issue was addressed. But I think the action in the Carter administration was elsewhere.

Yet Carter actually did things on the climate that were exactly the things you would do if you were focusing on the climate issue. There wasn't a big public debate about climate change, although there was a debate within the administration about it.

But Carter, as I mentioned, did pursue big renewable energy programs and conservation and efficiency initiatives and declared that we should have 20 percent of our energy from renewable resources by the year 2000, and set that as a national goal. So he was doing all the right things. And as I said, in 1980, he said he wanted to take it on in a second administration. And I think he would have. I'm as sure as anything I can be positive about that he would have. And it would have led us to a sort of smooth glide path out of the fossil fuel clutches that we are still in. We could be today on alternatives to fossil fuels overwhelmingly, whereas today we are still 80 percent fossil fuel in this country despite all the conversations about climate change in recent years. So we could have been 80 percent something else by now over those 40-something years if we had taken all the right steps since 1980.

Q: You’ve called the US federal government’s actions on the national energy system over the past several decades – promoting, subsidizing, authorizing, and supporting fossil fuels despite knowledge of the catastrophic climate consequences – you’ve called it “the greatest dereliction of civic responsibility in the history of the Republic.” And you document this malfeasance, from the Carter administration up through the first Trump administration, in your book They Knew, which is essentially your expert witness report for the Juliana v. US youth climate case against the federal government. What is the top-line takeaway message about that pattern of catering to fossil fuel interests that we’ve seen over decades through both Republican and Democrat administrations?

A: It's kind of a two-fold, two points. One is that in every administration from Carter forward, there were innumerable reports in the government which pointed to the seriousness of the climate issue. No matter what the administration stood for, what it did, there were people in these administrations who were bringing forward the real risk of the climate issue. And I was able to document that in every administration.

So thus the title of the book, They Knew. They did know. There should never have been any doubt as to the seriousness of the climate issue…

The second sort of top line is that no administration, and I would caveat this for the Biden administration, no administration has ever adopted a policy of getting us out of the fossil fuel business. There may have been rhetoric about this, but the most that the administrations did in terms of energy was ‘all of the above.’ President Obama who had some good environmental policies and some good climate policies in his administration and who had campaigned on the climate issue, when he left office, he was still bragging about the amount of fossil fuel that the U.S. was developing. And fracking was coming in then and we were beginning to export fossil fuels. So it’s been all of the above until we get to President Biden, who early on said that we were going to go to net zero emissions by 2050, and had a goal for 2030 which is very ambitious as well. And, you know, we’ve got to give President Biden a lot of credit for that. They didn't always do things that were consistent with the goals, but they did some things that were very important, like the Inflation Reduction Act and other things, tough standards on vehicles.

And so, I think it's a very sad story. Elsewhere in the book I say this is the saddest story ever told. Because the bottom line on all of this is that we are now faced with a perfectly awful situation where we are, because of this neglect, this all of the above approach to energy development, and crowing about our energy exports and energy development, we are now the largest purveyor of fossil fuels on the planet. And quite apart from us, you know, the world is on a trajectory to exceed even the upper limits of the Paris Accord, two degrees global average warming…

And so anyhow, it's a tragic outcome of a story that did not have to have a tragic ending. But right now, whether we like it or not, we have saddled future generations with a horrendous, horrendous problem, and affected their lives in an unprecedented set of ways, negatively.

PART TWO: RESISTANCE DURING THE TRUMP 2.0 ERA

Q: Well, it’s going to get a whole lot worse. We’re now about to witness, and have to live through, the sequel to Trump’s presidency. Trump of course is not only a climate denier but a real threat to our democracy. Were you surprised he won in November? What do you think it says about Americans’ fears and insecurities and could it be seen as a rejection of the status quo system that seems to be failing so many of us?

A: Well I think you know basically we’re into this at the end of the Carter years. Reagan came in and Reagan reversed a lot of what Carter had done on the energy issue and blocked the development of the climate issue that Carter had promised.

So at the end of the Biden administration and the good things that the Biden administration has done, we find ourselves in a similar situation where we have a president who has campaigned against the climate issue and the actions that are needed.

And we are fated to a very difficult period of four more years of really backwards-looking measures in every way, except the direction that the fossil fuel industry wants to take us. And that’s the direction that the president promised them that he would take if they would support his campaign. And I think there’s no indication that he’s not going to do that. So, we're in for a very, very rough time with President Trump version two, worse than version one, because as many have noted, they know a lot more what they’re doing now and how to get it done.

It's really scary, frightening. And you ask, you know, why? How could American voters, and particularly the swing voters, which have gravitated to him, how could that have happened in the face of the improprieties, the threat to democracy, the indictments, convictions? And these anti-environmental positions, how could we have elected this person? And I think it stems in part from a deep frustration in the American public. People are angry. People are frustrated. People are looking for a different answer from the one that seemed to be represented by Biden's vice president, for example, and they want change.

And so you ask, well why? Why is there so much anger out there? Why is there a resentment against the political leadership, against Washington? I think a lot of it is manufactured by a very sophisticated disinformation campaign that the Republicans have been very skillful with and that their media supports. But it’s also due in part to the failure of the Democrats to have addressed these issues and frustrations and anger and the feeling that half of Americans feel like their system isn’t serving their interest and meeting their needs. In fact more than half feel that way…

The Democrats were constrained in going to deal with these problems, with their normal rational policy response approach, because the changes that are needed are very deep, profound changes that threaten a lot of the Democratic support and the money. And the Democrats are very close to elements of Wall Street and big corporations. And the changes that are needed do threaten these power structures. We have a system that is geared to a political economy, the real operating system of the country, that will allow almost anything for profit, power and production, and doesn't really care in its core about people and place and planet. I’ve written a lot about the failure of our system to deal with these issues…

I think Democrats missed this opportunity to really be responsive to these frustrations and concerns that the so-called working class, non-college educated voters and rural voters have expressed.

The Republicans, taking a totally different approach to politics, were able to mobilize these voters through a lot of misleading information about what they were going to do in power and how they were going to do it. And making a raft of personal attacks against all kinds of immigrants, against women, against trans people. Just riling up an opposition with the endless stream of misinformation and vitriol and hate, if you will, and lies. It’s a sad situation, but it was in a way accepted and normalized by the vote in this past election.

So, we have a hell of a problem on our hands now because whatever happens in terms of our democratic rules and guardrails, even without attacking those, we have a political system which is badly dysfunctional…And so, you know, as a number of us have been saying lately, the democracy issue and the climate issue are really closely interlinked in a big way.

Q: Will climate action be possible if we end up losing our democracy or sliding into semi-fascism or authoritarianism? Should defending democracy become a priority for the climate movement?

A: I think defending democracy has got to be a major priority of the climate movement and environmentalists. We are so siloed in our range of concerns. There are a series of issues which are fundamental to environmental success and to climate success. But having a democracy that really works, and dealing with social and political issues, is fundamental to dealing with the environmental issues. We think of an environmental issue as climate change and biodiversity loss and others, but we don't think of a failing democracy as an environmental issue, and it's kind of off limits for environmental activism by the major environmental groups.

It is a crying shame that the environmental groups don't rise to the reality that they’re getting beat by areas that they consider off limits. It’s like fighting with both hands tied behind you back. It really is crazy, and I have screamed about it, including in person, to some of the [environmental] groups, and nothing changes on that.

Q: Well, working to save our democracy, or whatever extent we have left of it, is one of multiple recommendations for action and resistance to Trumpism that you mention in your latest essay, “Climate: Facing reality and fighting back in 2025.” Could you walk us through some of the other ones? How are we going to get through these next couple of years?

A: Yeah, there’s a lot we need to do. I personally live in two worlds. I think of one of them as the ‘right world’ and the other as the ‘wrong world.’ And the wrong world is what we live in every day. We see it all around us and we see a lot of wrong things happening. And we have to live within that world. So you have to have initiatives that make sense and have some chance of making progress in this wrong world.

There are obvious things like taking a lot more climate action at the state and local levels. And taking more climate action at the international level, which we badly neglected. We now have had 29 of these Conferences of the Parties, climate treaty parties, and it’s just glacial what goes on there. It’s dominated now by petrol states and thousands, literally, of lobbyists from the fossil fuel industry and their friends. The whole process is badly broken. We need a lot more action at the international level.

The article you mentioned goes on through five other areas, but one of them is we need to spend a lot more energy building up a climate constituency. Again, in this wrong world, we have to make the best we can out of our climate politics. Another dimension related to that is the kind of progressive reform of our politics, our democratic system. And there are a lot of these things within the wrong world that we just need to do and work on, and we have an opportunity to do that and build more of a climate-capable democracy in the years that we have with President Trump.

I also try myself to live in the right world. And the right world is one that really does respond to these great challenges that we have of inequality and environmental and climate decline, and not only responds to them, but responds to them with a system that is really geared to making a successful response to them…

If we had a system of political economy, a political system and an economic system that was configured, that was designed to produce good results for people and place and planet in a routine way, the whole system should be designed to give us these results that are pro-people and pro-climate and pro-environment in a natural way.

That’s the kind of political-economic system that we should be living in. I spend a lot of time trying to think about what are the key design elements of such a system. One very simple one that should be adoptable, even in the wrong world, is a new system of national assessment of progress and well-being. We rely now on GDP, the growth of GDP, growth of GDP per capita. And it just is a rotten metric for understanding how we're doing as a country and as a people. It totally gives misleading systems. I joke and call it grossly distorted picture. It would be pretty straightforward to change to a new system of metrics which measured wellbeing and whether wellbeing, public wellbeing, environmental wellbeing, were improved steadily.

Q: Your last recommendation in this essay is to build a movement of movements. Like we need just like this massive coming together of all these various social and progressive movements that are so siloed now. We need to see a much bigger people's mobilization and outpouring of citizen protest. Could you talk a little about that?

A: Yeah. I think we’ve seen that popular movements can have a big effect. We've seen the women’s movement do a lot, and other movements, the gay rights movement. There’s been a lot of progress stemming from social movements.

We really don’t have a social movement that is now attuned to what is needed because so many of the progressive communities just work on, as I was describing earlier, just work on their specific issues. Whether you’re talking about tax justice or consumer protection or climate protection, we're all in our separate little boats paddling away. And what we have got to appreciate is that we all tend to either succeed or fail together or go forward or backwards together…We need to see that we’re in the same boat, so to speak.

And this is another thing which has been rather frustrating to me. Why don't we all get together and form a big progressive coalition to support each other and try to get something done that we couldn’t do on our own? Despite my urgings, I haven't seen much evidence of that, but I think it is a part of the solution. I think it is a part of what can make a big difference in our country, and I still encourage the leaders of these various communities to have a fusion of forces.

PART THREE: HOW DO WE GET FROM HERE TO THERE?

Q: But at the same time, we are seeing now what some call the “polycrisis” – climate calamity, gross economic inequality and stress, a bunch of crises that are converging, and I wonder if you think that might put so much strain on people that they won't really be able to rise up and protest as they'll just be struggling to survive? And then also do you worry about government crackdown on protest?

A: Well I do worry about government crackdown. We've seen arrests at demonstrations in the Native American communities, for example, and elsewhere. And there’s no telling what this new regime with its poorly led FBI and others might try to do.

But we can’t worry about that. We really, we have to maybe be aware that these are risks, but to go ahead.

But I think that there’s certainly a potential for people to get discouraged and feel overwhelmed and feel that things are beyond the good results, that the right world is beyond a reasonable expectation. I hope, you know, people will not go into that despairing, giving up mode. But it’s certainly understandable if some people do…

And to me, the answer to that is we just can’t let that dominate for more than a minute. We’ve got to get into the fight. And, and in a way, it’s kind of an existential answer, because we need to save ourselves and we have to do this because it’s the right thing to do.

And even if we know we're going to lose, even if we know that we’re going to lose, we have to do it just like, you know, warriors defending a sacred place. You just have to do it, and not worry about whether we are losing or winning all the time.

Q: Are we seeing some glimmers of this “right world,” of progressive change and of persistence and resistance? The climate fight for example is really being led in a lot of ways by young people, as their lives and their futures are on the line. They're fighting this.

A: Yeah, I think that’s amazing. It’s really impressive what’s happening there. And the other group that is leading the way is the environmental justice community.

There are a lot of things that are going on which can inspire hope. And it’s certainly not all bleak.

One thing is that there is a real ferment in the country, particularly at the local level of action. Communities all over our country and other countries are responding in many different ways. There are a lot of local things that can be done on climate and energy, communities trying to determine to run their own utilities for example.

So that’s very hopeful. Secondly, there are, you know, movements of many different communities to deal with these issues. Certainly, in the youth, the Sunrise Movement is a leading example. And there are many others, in the Native American communities, Black communities, lots of frontline communities affected by these changes. There are a lot of community movements, community-based movements and other movements, nationally based movements, that are determined to continue to fight.

I think another thing that gives hope is that a lot of people are trying to opt for different lifestyles…a lot of faith communities are urging an approach to life that is less grasping, less materialistic, trying to see the world in a different way. And so, we do have a lot of communities fighting for a change in consciousness, and that’s another very hopeful thing…

I think another thing is that people who share some of those concerns I’ve been talking about are beginning to appreciate that in a way that we’ve been hoodwinked by this neoliberal orthodoxy that says the market is great and government is bad. I think people, more and more people, are realizing that if we’re going to deal successfully with these problems, we have to recognize the importance of collective action that we call government, dealing with them.

And so, anyhow, there are a lot of reasons to be hopeful. You know, in a way the most disturbing of those, most unsettling of those reasons is that things are going to get so bad if we don't act, that that will prompt the level of response that we haven’t seen yet. I hate to think that’s where we’re headed, but we may be.