Innovating Leadership:
Co-Creating Our Future

Resources:

The Climate Overshoot Commission Kim worked with has the report she referenced at https://www.overshootcommission.org.

Here are the books she mentioned:

– The Petroleum Papers, on Amazon at https://amzn.to/3Opq6M1 (print) and https://amzn.to/3SD6UNj (audiobook).

– The Heat Will Kill You First, on Amazon at https://amzn.to/3UDlEgH (print) and https://amzn.to/48SZbQV (audiobook).

The poem by John Keats, which she quoted at the end of the interview, is from his larger work, Endymion. Read that full section at https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44469/endymion-56d2239287ca5.

Kim’s memoirs as Canada’s first female prime minister, Time and Chance, are available in paperback at https://amzn.to/3Q8TxDc.

Our host, Maureen Metcalf, posts a newsletter every week on LinkedIn. You can subscribe here.

Maureen’s latest book is Innovative Leadership & Followership in the Age of AI. You’ll find details about it at https://bit.ly/LeaderInAI. Her other 10 books are available on Amazon here.

NOTE: As an Amazon affiliate, we may receive a small commission on any books ordered through these links.

Books we’re reading for fun or personal development right now include:

• Becoming Superman: My Journey from Poverty to Hollywood by J. Michael Straczynski
• Own the AI Revolution by Neil Sahota
• Time and Chance by Kim Campbell
• Three Rocks: The Story of Ernie Bushmiller, the Man Who Created Nancy by Bill Griffith

Other episodes you’ll enjoy:

• How Inner Work Transforms Your Leadership: Tools for Growth with Jonathan Reams
• How to Avoid the Bad Leader Trap with Barbara Kellerman
• Navigating the Global Storm: Rethinking Leadership for the Future with Cynthia Cherrey

Guest(s):

Guest(s) Bio:

As Canada’s first and only female Prime Minister, Kim Campbell’s life has been a life of firsts. From the age of 16, when she became the first female student body president of her high school, until 30 years later, as the 19th Prime Minister of Canada, Ms. Campbell has spent much of her life breaking barriers for women. She served at all three levels of government in Canada. After leaving politics, she served as the Canadian Consul General in Los Angeles, then taught at the Harvard Kennedy School, after which she became an international leader of leaders with organizations such as the International Women’s Forum and the Club de Madrid. Drawing on her extraordinary experience as an academic and a leader, she served as the Founding Principal of the Peter Lougheed Leadership College at the University of Alberta from 2014–2018.

Holding audiences since the age of ten, Ms. Campbell speaks widely on issues related to leadership, international politics, democratization, climate change, gender, and Canadian/American relations addressing audiences in places such as Kyiv, Dubai, Cordoba, Toronto, Berlin, Ulaanbaatar, Prague, Brussels, Paris, Vancouver, London, Beijing, Seoul, Washington, DC, and Ottawa.

Transcript
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Maureen: [00:00:00] This is Innovating Leadership Co-Creating Our Future. I’m your host, Maureen Metcalf, the founder and CEO of the Innovative Leadership Institute. Where we help leaders be future ready. We’re recording this interview from the 2023 International Leadership Association Global Conference in Vancouver, celebrating its 25th year of impact.

Today we are talking to the Wright, honorable Kim Campbell, the 19th Prime Minister of Canada. Thank you for joining us. What’s most compelling to you at this point in time? What’s interesting?

Kim Campbell: We are in a pickle. I am deeply concerned about where we are with climate change. I just finished serving, it was a year and a half of work.

On a global commission on climate overshoot, and this was a group of people, uh, former heads of state and government and ministers from the global north and south who were looking at [00:01:00] the implications and trying to recommend strategies for if the world overshoots the 1.5 degrees Celsius warming limit that was set in the Paris Climate Accord in 2015.

The process itself was very interesting and informative and enjoyable, working with wonderful people. And uh, our report is available, I think, on climate overshoot.org. If anybody wants to look at it, we launched it in New York. As a result of that process, I’m aware of just how far we are from meeting the goals that we set in 2015 and what the implications are.

Yesterday I had the opportunity to address a healthcare leadership group and said to them that. As far as I could see global warming, particularly the, you know, extreme weather and heat that the healthcare professionals are on the front line of this, that it’s largely a healthcare crisis. All sorts of heart and kidney disease will become even more in intensified as a result of heat changing vectors of infection.

The, uh, increased. Number of accidents that happen because cognitive capacities decline, workers have [00:02:00] more accidents. Everything about it will land on the lap of people in the healthcare professions. And what concerns me is the fact that they may feel overwhelmed that many people may leave those professions.

But also I was trying to urge them to be active in advocating for policies to deal with climate change. And also because so many of these impacts have. Now quite measurable financial implications that there’s a lot of research being done about how much it costs not to deal with these issues, what these injuries and health costs mean.

Whether you’re in a country like Canada that has a public healthcare system, so you’re talking to the government about what it’s gonna cost, or a more private system where you’re talking to insurers about what it’s going to cost. The fact is that it’s a very desperate situation. You know, I see this and, and it really, really concerns me.

There are a lot of wonderful young people, very animated and very devoted to trying to push the agenda for dealing with climate change. But it is an extraordinary example of intergenerational [00:03:00] injustice, what we are doing and not doing everything that we can. There are positive things happening, but not enough.

And the interesting thing is when you look at the research on the social impacts of extreme heat. I mean, aside from the fact that it makes people sick, there are behavioral effects, there’s more violence, people tend to be more impulsive Rapes and violent crime go up. I mean, all of these things showing that temperatures rise in, in the Middle East and Africa, more situations of civil war.

So when you think about the conflicts that are happening now, whether it’s in Israel or Ukraine or whatever. Global warming is a factor that undermines often efforts to try and resolve these issues peacefully or to reduce the level of conflict. It affects everything. So I think that that’s perhaps my biggest concern.

The fact that we are really at some tipping points. I don’t think that I or any. Other individual person can change the world, particularly, I mean, every once in a while somebody is in the right place at the right time to do [00:04:00] something, which has a disproportionate effect. But most of us try to be tiles in the mosaic of progress.

But that I think is the single issue that worries me the most because so many of the other issues I’m concerned with are also impacted by climate change and the warming of the atmosphere.

Maureen: You point to the impact of warming temperature on violence and incivility. Almost every conversation I’m in, there’s a thread of concern about the incivility, but we don’t often say that will be resolved or positively impacted if we address climate change.

Kim Campbell: Yeah, for example, uh, racial slurs and hate speech. Spike when you have high temperatures. The interesting thing now is that, that there’s a lot of research and I was saying to the, the healthcare professionals, when we look at the costs, for example, there was a study at UCLA that showed that, I think it was in 2020, uh, just not a, you know, modest increase in temperature resulted at 20,000 more workplace injuries in [00:05:00] California for an additional cost of a billion dollars.

So there are people who are counting and measuring and creating the data. I was looking at a, an article recently about an insurance company in Belgium that’s been doing very interesting research on the link between pollution and healthcare costs. And when we talk about pollution with fossil fuels, there’s two things.

One is the direct greenhouse gas effect, but also fossil fuels do pollute the atmosphere and do create all sorts of issues of respiratory problems, et cetera, in addition to the effects of heat and extreme weather of all kinds. That comes from global warming. One doesn’t have to fly solo. In dealing with these issues, there are resources of very good research.

There are good books that have brought together the information that we need to know to make the case. I. But we are also facing very concerted pushback. I’ve actually thought of writing a book about the concept of what evil looks like in the 21st century, because it is almost unimaginable to me that people would [00:06:00] deliberately lie and obfuscate the truth about global warming, greenhouse gases, et cetera.

In order just to sustain their profits. Sometimes it’s called predatory delay, the desire to delay things that need to be done for a short-term profit, but where the ultimate end is gonna be negative for everybody, like with the tobacco industry. And we all know that scenario. And people from the tobacco industry testify to Congress and being asked, do you think smoking causes lung cancer?

And they all say no. And yet their own scientists were telling them and when they were. In their own board meetings and strategy meetings, they were trying to deal with how you can get people to smoke, even though smoking causes lung cancer. So it is a level of, I don’t know how to describe it other than wickedness that I, I find it hard to understand the fact that the oil companies have known for decades about the impact of burning fossil fuels on the atmosphere and what it means for the future of the earth.

And they know about it because their own scientists did the work. It’s not something where a bunch of wild-eyed researchers somewhere come up with some questionable research and say, oh, you [00:07:00] know, and lobbying and we’re against business, or we’re against progress, or whatever. No, the companies themselves produce this research and minutes of the American Petroleum Institute, all of these companies, they knew, but instead of saying, okay, we have a problem, we can’t continue to consume these fuels, so we need a strategy.

To move into new forms of energy, so we should use our massive profits. And the fact that we can’t shut down today, and there was several decades ago. How do we fund that transition so that we ensure for the long term that we are still making pots of money, that we are still vital companies? What is our infrastructure?

What are our skills? How can we transition? How can we make these things happen? And in many cases, when they had technological advances, for example, when company developing a lithium battery and they decided to scrap that research. Now imagine if they had kept it where they would be in terms of electric vehicles, et cetera.

In other words, instead of having the vision that their skills and their technical capacities and what they understood about [00:08:00] energy grids, all of those things, instead of figuring out how they could transition into new forms of energy and be investing in new research, they just decided to hunker down and to create institutions that.

We’re seemingly scientific, but we’re absolutely spurious that we’re designed to cast doubt on the certainty of the research. Even. I know the research was absolutely sound. I’ve often described that as knee capping democratic policymaking because the one thing that’s hardest for a democratic policymaker, and I was one at three levels of government.

Is to advocate for a policy when people are saying, well, it’s not certain, you might not have to do that now, or you might not have to do that much. In other words, undermining your capacity to build a constituency for good policy. To me, there should be a new crime, a crime against democracy, because what it was was it absolutely undermined the ability of accountable authorities around the world to make the decisions that needed to be made.

So, I don’t know how else to describe it, but wickedness, because I don’t understand what [00:09:00] they will say to their grandchildren. There’s no escape. I mean, that’s why the know these moguls who are talking about you, they wanna, you know, colonize Mars, well bully for you. But colonizing Mars is not the answer to destroying this planet.

We already have what we know. It may be the only planet like it in the whole universe. It may or it may not, but the fact is we know it’s here. It’s a precious and wonderful and delicately balanced thing. Whatever Mars may offer to us, it is not going to be another home for human beings, and it is not going to be a home for ecosystems and all of the things that have made life so rich for us, and which we inherited as we evolve to be the species that could actually impact the planet the way we do.

To me, it’s a moral issue, and I’m happy to say that people are using the law and the rule of law to hold people accountable. That more and more lawsuits are being launched and passionately supportive of democracy. And the most fundamental aspect of democracy is the rule of law. Even [00:10:00] more important than elections.

Elections are necessary but not sufficient. It’s the rule of law and the fact that now people are suing their governments for not protecting them. They’re suing companies. I just feel that what we know about what identifiable people have done to prevent us from doing what needs to be done to save the planet, that there needs to be some accountability.

And the only way you can fend them off perhaps, is through lawsuits, through holding them accountable, through damages, through maybe even injunctions. I don’t know. But we’re in very, very difficult times, and the thing is that we didn’t need to be, we’ve known for decades, Lyndon Johnson was briefed on global warming and took it very seriously.

It’s not something that’s new. We’ve known about it. If anything, you know, the scientists were kind of browbeat to sort of downplay the worst case scenarios, but the predictions that the climate scientists created even early on or have been pretty accurate, you know, the modeling gets better and better as computing power increases, et cetera, and there’s more data inputs, et cetera.

If anything, [00:11:00] we made it difficult for them to tell us the truth, and they’re now extremely worried and frightened. So that’s a long answer to a short question. What am I scared about? I’m scared about the future of the world and wondering whether there is a role, however small for me to play, to be part of a process that helps mobilize people to do what we can to prevent that overshoot and the creation of tipping points that would be catastrophically destructive to life on our planet.

Maureen: How about the idea of corporate boards? Do you see them as impacting. Or companies like BlackRock and State Street, some

Kim Campbell: of the, uh, the big investment companies have actually now come out and said, I can’t remember if it was BlackRock or was some company, which was saying that if pension funds divest themselves from fossil fuel stocks, it will not affect their ability to have the resources necessary to pay the pensions of their pensioners.

So all of these ideas, oh, we can’t do it because of this, or we can’t do it because of that. No, that’s, it’s not true. Some of the big oil companies are now have just announced [00:12:00] big expansion. Well, who are the people on their boards? What are these people saying? You know, isn’t the the real answer? What’s our plan for a strategic transition?

How are we gonna be part of the transition? Where should we be investing? And what is the legitimate scenario for the phasing out of fossil fuels? In our report, the Climate Overshoot Commission report, we argue that the wealthy countries need to take the lead in phasing out of fossil fuels. That developing countries may need a little bit more time to make that transition and to develop whatever they need, although possibly not, because possibly they can go straight to alternative forms of energy.

So much of the energy alternatives, you know, have defined our predictions in, in the sense of the cost of them coming down and the scale of them, uh, increasing. And there’s still lots that we need to do. I mean, why is any government paying subsidies to fossil fuels? I mean, when you stop and think about it, you know what’s wrong with this picture?

I don’t know what corporate governance is doing. You know, I’d like to think that if there were any women on these boards decades ago where this information came [00:13:00] up, that maybe the notion that you would just hunker down and try to distract people from the reality of the science and undermine it so that you could continue to ruin your profits.

I’d like to think that maybe if there were a lot of women on those boards, that they might have had a different view, but I don’t know. I don’t know to what extent greed is that corrupting. And the thing is, you don’t have to lose money. Because there are opportunities for investment and economic growth.

The old idea that somehow fighting climate change was gonna cost us a lot of money and we’d all be poor. No. What’s costing us is not fighting climate change. That’s the expensive thing when we’re talking about losses of a trillion dollars in lost productivity. The magnitude of the losses is huge.

Talking

Maureen: health

Kim Campbell: losses or economic productivity losses and look what’s happening with extreme weather. I. We’re sitting in Vancouver on the west coast of Canada, and for a long time we felt, well, climate change wouldn’t really affect us that much. And it’s interesting that with the melting of ice sheets, the increase in the level of the oceans is not uniform.

The oceans are not like a [00:14:00] bathtub where if you put in a big rubber ducky, everything goes up the same. Because gravitation affects it. So the rises would be greater actually on the East coast than on the west coast. So a lot of people thought, well, you know, we wouldn’t be all that much affected and we’d be sort of fine or not for a long time, and we’ll deal with it and it won’t be a problem.

But in 2021, we had a heat dome here, unprecedented heat, dome of extreme heat that according to the British Columbia coroner killed 600 people. And not only did it kill 600 people, but it killed over a million intertidal creatures on our ocean, on our coastline here, and these creatures are part of a whole food chain.

You know, it’s like when people talk about phytoplankton, the reason why they’re important is because they’re the beginning of a chain that actually creates the oxygen that we breathe. If you’re indifferent to those things, there are tipping points and there are interrelationships. That it isn’t just whether you and your neighbor are too hot, it’s what’s happening to all of the other creatures and all the other chains of [00:15:00] interdependence and interaction that support our capacity to live on the earth.

So here we were in Vancouver with this terrible. He don’t. Plus the fact we’ve had terrible wildfires here and in British Columbia and in Alberta, and in Quebec and Asia, Canada too. But we had wildfires here that were so powerful that their smoke went over the Rockies and people in New York were breathing British Columbia smoke.

1. Now, when did that ever happen Before? But you know, we all sort of thought, you know, the Rockies, you know, certainly that’s not gonna happen. So there’s no escape. And with those fires, the health implications of them and what it does well, aside from the fact it’s burning our carbon sinks, I. You know, we have this wonderful boreal forest, which is a carbon sink.

Well, you burn it down and aside from the destruction at the species, at the smoke and all of that, there’s a whole big chunk of your capacity to take carbon dioxide out of the air that’s been destroyed. There’s no time to waste. And it just boggles my mind that huge [00:16:00] financial resources are being deployed to prevent us from making the decisions that we need to make buying off politicians, spreading disinformation, you know, and if somebody’s hearing conspiracy theories, and if they’re watching Fox News or any of the ways that they get false information, they might quite sincerely believe that it’s, you know, all a hoax, or it’s overstated or it’s exaggerated.

I can’t hate them because they have come to that belief based on what they’ve heard. But I have to say you’re wrong and dangerously wrong. It’s

Maureen: very

Kim Campbell: distressing

Maureen: in the overshoot commission. What kind of recommendations did you come up with?

Kim Campbell: It’s an eight part report and people are welcome to access it online and our recommendations, we boil them down to one acronym, the word care, CARE.

And it’s not just that each letter stands for something, but the order that they appear in the word indicates the priorities. So seed stands for cut, meaning cutting emissions. And what we have said is this is an urgent need [00:17:00] and there is no alternative. There’s no way out of this other than cutting emissions.

There’s no other way to keep the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at a level that will make it sustainable for human life because of keeping the heat A is for adaptation. In the early days of climate debate and discussion, a lot of people didn’t like to talk too much about adaptation ’cause they felt that was sort of like accepting the reality of warming when we should be focusing on cutting emissions.

But the reality of warming is here. And many countries are suffering grievously from the reality of warming. You know, 30% of Pakistan was underwater because of the floods. So we need to have the resources for adaptation. And in the cop, meaning last year, the committee of the parties of the, um, climate agreement that met in Egypt last year for the first time, the concept of loss and damage.

In other words, the concept that the wealthy emitter countries needed to provide resources to the countries that were not emitters, but were suffering disproportionately from climate change. To be able to adapt and preserve their community. So adaptation is [00:18:00] important and a lot of the methods of adaptation can also be supportive of emissions, limiting natural processes and other things.

So it’s not that they’re separate, but that adaptation is our second priority is important. The R stands for remove because even when we limit, if we can stop greenhouse gas emissions from increasing, we still have carbon dioxide and greenhouse gas in there that we have to take out. And we do not have a technology that will do that at scale.

I mean, I often say there is a machine that takes carbon dioxide outta the atmosphere. It’s called a tree. But we don’t have any technologies that enable us to do this at scale. And so, you know, the fossil fuel companies are talking about, well, we have carbon capture and sequestration and you know, like we can catch carbon dioxide.

Chimney said, and they talk about it as if this is a technology that would enable them to continue to produce fossil fuels and use them, and it’s not. So we have no technology to do that, but the R suggests that we should be trying to find whatever we can to support the efforts to get the parts per million down.

1. Then E means [00:19:00] explore, and that’s referring to a whole other area of research that are sometimes called climate interventions, where the goal is not to reduce emissions, but perhaps to cool the planet either in a whole or in part to buy a little bit of time. In other words, if there is such a level of human suffering or the danger of tipping points, that if there was some way one could cool the planet.

While you’re dealing with all the other things, you’re phasing out the fossil fuels and building the alternative advantages, then that might be a feasible thing. But the technologies that are proposed, like solar radiation management, you know, built on the example of Mount Pinatubo, you know, volcano that erupted and.

But the sulfur aerosols in the stratosphere, and it cooled the earth by about half a degree Celsius for a little over a year. Could we do that? Well, it’s very controversial. We don’t have enough research. So what we are proposing is a moratorium on any of these technologies, including marine cloud brightening, which is a way of putting things into marine clouds that increase their reflectivity.

But at the [00:20:00] same time, we do think there should be research because if we ever get to a point of desperation where people feel, we’d like to be able to use them, we need to know whether they’re usable or not. In other words, we need to be prepared, not sort of suddenly be in a panic and say, oh my gosh, this is so terrible.

Bring out the self for aerosols. ’cause we’re desperate, because we may have already determined that the downsides are worse than the upsides. Or that in a risk assessment you’d have to get to this level. Of tipping point danger before undertaking that level of risk would be a reasonable thing to do. And so one of the challenges of that e the Explorer, is the governance structures.

Because we don’t have a governance structure that enables us to bring the countries of the world together to evaluate the science and determine what we think about it. And that will be really important. Now, it’s quite possible that some existing organizations like the World Meteorological Organization or some others could find a way of doing this or create new bodies.

But we’ve done things like the Montreal Protocol for fluorocarbons [00:21:00] acid, rain treaties, uh, arms control. Agreements. You know, there’s a lot of international mechanisms that we’ve used and we think we need to create something that would enable us globally to prevent anybody freelancing, to keep the research, any use of these technologies in the hands of governments so that there’s no temptation of some company to run off and do it because the effects are not confined to one area.

So care. That was sort of the acronym that sums up the category of recommendations that we’ve made. But so for example, in the C, we have recommended just quite simply phasing out fossil fuels, but also that the lead needs to be taken by the wealthier countries, not only because of their moral responsibility for being emitters, but because they can more easily make the transitions that if there is to be any kind of phasing, that the still developing countries need to have a little bit more room to maneuver.

Maureen: What is the body or who are the people who created this report and is there a level of authority they have? We are totally

Kim Campbell: powerless, [00:22:00] which is one reason why we are so independent that none of us speaks for our government anymore or kind. We are independent, but we are very representative. I. But the commission was created by the Paris Peace Forum, which is an organization that brings together all sorts of nonprofit groups and research institutions, et cetera, and came out of the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015.

So they created this commission, raised the money to fund it, and because we are independent, we don’t owe any allegiance to anybody. And we were people from governments, but also. Senior scientists and people from climate organizations, and we released our report in New York on September the 14th, but because of who we are, we can get attention.

We have access. We have been meeting with key players in this area. The chair and I, for example, were in Geneva. One time I met with the head of the World Meteorological Organization, the head of the World Health Organization, the High Commissioner for Human Rights. So we’re very connected to global organizations and governments.

So we have the capacity, we’ve had good press coverage and interest in it. We we’re [00:23:00] independent, but we’re not lacking in access to decision making bodies that have shown an interest. The thing about the report is that it’s a kind of strategy for how to deal with this, and it kind of takes a big 30,000 foot view of these things and sets out priorities and clear direction.

But we’re the only body that has looked holistically at the impact of overshoot, and there was a lot of pushback when we were created. People said, well. First of all, who are you? Why is it any of your business? Well, it’s our business ’cause we’ve made it our business and we think it matters to the world.

But also people said, well, you know, why are you talking about overshoot? That’s a failure. We should be still focusing on meeting the 1.5 degree Celsius limit on warming, but we are on track to overshoot it. And if we don’t think about what that means. That’s why things like this, geoengineering stuff, if people are panicked, then people can make a lot of unwise decisions.

That’s why we’re saying we need to have a clear view, no pussyfooting around. We have to phase out fossil fuels. These are things that we have to do. These are [00:24:00] priorities that we need to follow, and also forms of preparation so that we’re not making decisions in a panic mode that might turn out to be unwise because again, there is this whole issue of intergenerational justice.

And if we make a bad decision about doing something like solar geoengineering or something, you know, future generations can’t undo our decisions. So we need to be very forward thinking and conscious of

Maureen: the long-term impact of what we’re doing. The impact is global. I. And so it seems appropriate to have a global organization to do what you did with the Commission and drive implementation?

Kim Campbell: Yeah. Well, the United Nations is deeply involved in this. It’s not that there aren’t global organizations doing it right now. I mean, the Secretary General is gnashing his teeth on a weekly basis. I mean, when he talks about we’re not in a warming world, we’re in a boiling world because of the dramatic increase in temperatures, and he is trying to mobilize.

The countries of the world to do things. But as I say, it is mind [00:25:00] bogglingly true that there are powerful interests pushing back and trying to undermine this. It’s beyond my comprehension that this could be the case, but it is. So there are global organizations and I don’t know whether you could have something like the Climate Overshoot Commission that would then.

Have the power. That would be different. I mean, global organizations can take our report and use that as a framework, but I’ve been quite pleased that people seem to be quite interested in it because it’s quite accessible. It’s in depth in some ways, in the sense that it’s not a dumbing down of the issues.

It’s quite comprehensive, but it’s user friendly. If you go online and you download the report, you will be able to read it comfortably and it will be clear to you. And I think part of our goal was to clarify the issues. In other words, there’s lots of complications. You know, even with the scientists and all the nuances of this is, and that and all sorts of things, and many things are happening in terms of reducing emissions and many very good things.

I don’t want to say for a moment that that’s not the [00:26:00] case and the International Energy Agency has suggested that we’re gonna be peaking emissions, but we shouldn’t be peaking emissions at 2025. We should be reducing them already. We’re just decades late and it’s not without its impact. And what we are finding is that heat, whether it’s the heat itself killing or the how it dries things to create fire hazards, floods.

You know, every time I see these terrible floods of flash floods that are, that are hitting people, no. Occasionally some of those floods may not be related to global warming, but many of them are. And the mar also, because of the enormous amount of moisture that gets carried in a warmer atmosphere that creates areas getting a year’s rain in 24 hours, that kind of thing.

And I’m looking at these urban areas that are four and five feet, you know, 10 feet deep water, I’m thinking. But all the sewage is up there too. I mean, it’s more than just having water, it just creates terrible, terrible risks to health. The sanitation, I mean, and aside from people drowning and houses soaked with filthy water, I mean, it’s just awful.

But I think the bad [00:27:00] thing is that we haven’t met our climate goals and we are suffering the effects of extreme weather and droughts and all these things. The only good thing I can say about it is that more and more people are coming to see the reality of what it means. I. It’s not theoretical anymore.

This is what global warming looks like, it feels like. And so this summer people say, well, this was the warmest summer on record, but it might be the coolest summer in the century.

Maureen: It ain’t getting any cooler. This is where I wonder the responsibility of corporations, because even if my government doesn’t require it, and some people in our government think it’s not real, if I’m running Amazon or Google or Microsoft or any of the largest corporations in the world.

They still have the power to make changes irrespective of what’s required by the government. And I wonder if the needle moves ’cause they will also bear a lot of the economic burden of rebuild.

Kim Campbell: Well, it depends on the company. For example, you know Elon Musk, I mean he’s [00:28:00] very, uh, pioneering and hell electric vehicles, but he is not on the front lines for global warming.

Fiddle Didi for him. I mean, he’s not helping. What was interesting is when, during the Trump administration, when the, when the Trump administration pulled out of the Paris Accord state and local government stepped in, the city of Ithaca is committed to being carbon neutral by 2030. The advantage of different layers of government is that local communities can in fact make decisions and do things, and there has been a fair amount of that.

Similarly, you know, some corporations are trying to be green and some of them understand. The best thing is those corporations whose profitability is on the line, like insurance companies. I always said it’s gonna come down to the money. Either the people are gonna get sued and be held accountable, but insurance, insurance is the lubricant of business.

1. What enables us to take risks and do things is if we can get insurance and insurance we know is always calculated on the risk. And there’s all these actuaries and people studying to see, you know, how much you have to pay to insure, to drive your car, to open [00:29:00] your business, or walk on a tight rope between two skyscrapers, whatever you’re trying to get insured for.

And more and more insurance companies are refusing to ensure risks that are. Unsustainable given global warming. As I say, I spoke before about an insurance company in Belgium that was looking at the costs of healthcare as a result of pollution. As they look at these things, there’s all this work telling us what it costs, which is why we know it costs a lot more not to deal with it than to deal with global warming, but it’s going to come in these pieces.

In California, there are places where you cannot get insurance on your house, and people are self-insuring or they’re paying exorbitant. Costs in order to have even some small contribution if there is a fire or something that destroys their house. But the fact of the matter is why should I insure you?

The risk is just too great. You know, you’ve built your house next to a forest, it’s very dry, and we’re getting wildfires. Maybe I’ll insure you, but it’s gonna be at a pretty high premium because there’s a 50 50 chance [00:30:00] that your house is gonna burn down. So all of these things are pieces of the economic puzzle.

And insurance is so important. I mean, it’s a wonderful idea when you think about insurance and there’s all sorts of different ways that people around the world have self-insured and communities ensure themselves, et cetera. But it’s what really is the lubricant. Of the whole global business community.

You do things, you take risks, you go out there, you ma make big investments, and how can you make sure that you can be protected if there are things beyond your control that destroy your assets, and that’s where you have insurance and you have ways of London and blah, blah, blah. All of that stuff because it’s so connected with the idea of risk and risk that is connected to climate change, and maybe even to things like crime, because as people begin to connect the increase of violent crime to warming, you know, it may also be that in terms of insuring yourself against theft or any of those kinds of things, that that might also be something that becomes contingent on an actuarial assessment of the risk.

That is created in a warmer climate. [00:31:00] These are all pieces of a puzzle and they can all be helpful. But when I see the big oil companies that at one point were talking on green game, but that was all of it was greenwashing, it was all ways of trying to justify, continuing to explore for and produce fossil fuels.

But some of the big companies have recently just announced huge expansions, and I’m saying, what’s wrong with this picture? We have a certain, what we call a carbon budget of how much more carbon dioxide we could put into the atmosphere before we really get to the tipping point of the 1.5. And it is dwindling very quickly.

We’re spending that budget. But you know, and there’s even, you know, a movement to try and create something called the crime of eco side. And you know, I’ve often thought that some of these oil industry executives who are undermining the capacity of governments to act should be in the Hague facing charges of crimes against humanity because it is a crime against humanity.

It’s one thing just to be wrong, like asbestos, which was a wonderful invention. I mean, there was a time when fire was such a terrible thing and [00:32:00] theaters and knowing Quebec children couldn’t go to the theater because there was a terrible fire in a theater decades ago that killed many children. And so they outlawed having children there.

I mean, fire did terrible things and asbestos was kind of a miraculous thing that asbestos was such a wonderful fire. But then they discovered that asbestos can kill you because if you inhale that little. Fibers of it, it can kill you. And the people who mine it get terrible diseases. And so it’s not acceptable anymore.

It’s nobody’s fault. It’s only your fault if you know the dangers and you don’t act on them. But there’s lots of things that we do that we realize now that we shouldn’t do, and so we can change our behavior. But what is unacceptable is when people deliberately hide the truth from us and try to promote behaviors.

Or certain patterns of consumption that are bad for us. I used to say, you know it somebody’s fault about climate change. Although it is in a way now, I mean I was naive then ’cause I didn’t realize the extent to which people had conspired to hide the knowledge. But we’ve actually known [00:33:00] since the 19th century about the greenhouse gas properties of carbon dioxide.

And the first empirical study was actually done by a woman named Edith Foot. And she wasn’t allowed to read her paper at a scientific conference ’cause she was a woman. So a man had to read it. Nobody paid any attention. And 20 years later, somebody else, a man came along, gave a similar paper, and people paid attention.

But we’ve known for a very long time. In fact, I think even in the 18th century, there was some suggestion that people had noticed and people thought, well, you know, maybe in a few hundred years this will be a problem, because they couldn’t anticipate. I. The extent of the growth of human population and the growth of industrialization and the development of fossil fuels and the internal combustion engine and all of those kinds of things.

But all of those things have dramatically accelerated the rate of putting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. But it’s not a mystery, and it’s actually one of the simplest propositions there is that carbon dioxide has greenhouse qualities. It holds. Warmth in the earth is, it’s an insulator. When you put it in the atmosphere, you could get to a certain level where it [00:34:00] actually affects the heat of the earth, and we have done that.

Maureen: Ipso facto, we have a problem. One of the things I’m thinking is we see studies on a regular basis of the melt of. Ice caps and glaciers and, but I don’t see research that says it’s not true.

Kim Campbell: Well, but it is true. I mean, in fact, if anything though, some of those melts are happening faster than people thought, for example, in Antarctica, when they realize that now that a lot, some of the melt is happening underneath, I.

The ice of Antarctica because of the currents, the oceans adding Greenland, the poorness of the Greenland ice sheet. And the other thing too is that as the ice sheets melt and they put cold into the ocean and it affects the currents of the ocean, if the Gulf Stream has been disrupted, that could actually lead to very cold weather in Northern Europe.

So sometimes when climate change leads to cold weather, like the disruption of the jet stream, the jet stream, which is sort of ran between the temperate air and then the Arctic Air. It would sort of keep that cold arctic air north and the more tempered air for the south. But [00:35:00] when it got disrupted so that it was doing a kind of a wave thing, so we’d pull down cold air and push warm air up.

So you’d get 60 degrees Fahrenheit in Alaska in the middle of winter, but then you’d get a, a freeze in the Midwest. As this cold air is being pulled down. So people said, well, you know, how could there be global warming? ’cause it’s so cold here. That’s why climate change is the better expression because it does show that it’s not uniform, but it’s all happening by warming.

Because the warming changes the currents. It changes the motion of ocean currents and air currents. A lot of things scientists don’t know because, you know, you can’t do empirical studies of running around a melting an ice sheet. It’s observational. Some of the things you have to do observations over time, although, you know, they get the ice cores and there’s all sorts of ways that they can try and look historically and prehistorically at what has happened before to anticipate what might be the case.

But it is all real. And you know, I can’t think that there’s a person in the world who wouldn’t give everything they own to be able to say it’s not true. It’s not happening, but it is happening. [00:36:00] And we can’t put our heads in the sand. And we have to find a way of doing something that perhaps humans have never done before, which is to come together and solve a problem.

But I think about some of the institutions that were created after World War ii, when the terrible destruction of that war made people feel, we have to find a better way. Well, maybe as people are seeing the impact of climate change, there will be a similar sense of purpose about the need to come together to create the agreements and institutions and practices that will keep the worst from happening.

Maureen: We have the Paris Climate Accords. We’ve got the cop. Meetings. So we are meeting, but that doesn’t equate to the action required to reduce carbon.

Kim Campbell: And, and for example, so the COP meeting this year is in Dubai, and uh, you know, a big oil person is the chair of it. So a lot of people say, well, you know, how can this be?

Because what we’re seeing is this pushback by oil producers trying to create scenarios that justify continued production. Now there’s no [00:37:00] suggestion that you have to stop tomorrow. It would be nice if everybody could stop burning fossil fuels tomorrow, but there some places need transitions and there’s been the sense that if anybody was going to get a little bit of leeway, it would be the less developed countries, but the scenario that somehow you can justify continued production, it’s just illusory.

Although in the Emirates in that area, I mean, those governments have been willing to invest in other forms of energy. I mean, I always thought the smart thing was, okay, we’re richest creases because we’re burning oil. We can’t really burn oil anymore, but we should take our money and become world leaders in all the other forms of energy, and some will be more successful than others.

There’s an island in Scotland that is completely self-sufficient in terms of electricity that they’re using tidal power. They only have electric vehicles and they have public charging stations, and all of this electricity is produced because they’re able to use tidal power in the water to generate enough electricity to support their whole community.

So some places will experiment, some places where there may be efforts to try and burn hydrogen. [00:38:00] I don’t think we know exactly. I mean, certainly wind and solar are very successful and the storage of electricity is the other thing, but we’re, but we’re building mechanisms for storing electricity. There’s lots still to do.

It may not be a one size fits all. I. Because at the end of the day, if we say that the goal is electrification, so that maybe our appliances and the machines and vehicles share a similar form of energy, but how we produce that energy might vary depending on where we are and the natural resources and the access to infrastructure.

So for example, in Hinton, Alberta, which was uh, the oil town, they had traditional oil, not the bitumen. They had 17 oil wells and they turned them into geothermal. Power plants. What I’m saying is that there’s a lot of different ways to do it, and I would think maybe over the next century it might become simplified that there would be fewer, but maybe not.

Maybe the uniformity will come in the size of the wires and the nature of the [00:39:00] storage and the nature of the vehicles and equipment.

Maureen: We were in Dubai in January, so right after the latest cop, they’re very much planning for post oil society. Either it will run out or it won’t be in as high of demand, and so we had conversations about things like how the sand impacts the solar panels.

And so the research they’re doing so that they can move to more solar energy, which was also in conjunction with battery research. So it does seem like countries like Dubai are doing some work. It seemed like there was a general conversation about what that will look like and that there is an expectation that it will happen in some reasonable period of time.

And

Kim Campbell: there’s some concern about solar arrays. Large solar era and their impact on wildlife, their impact on plant life. But there’s also very interesting developments about agriculture growing treason, things under solar panels because they actually can create shade and sometimes they [00:40:00] can actually collect dew and waterfalls down.

There was biding about one area where. This farmer had put up solar panels and the dew collected on them and the dew drained down and grass grew underneath, and his goats were able to feed on this, so they feed on it so that it doesn’t get too grown up and create a fire hazard. But there was this great synergy.

So we’re learning, you know, even in terms of something like solar panels, where is the best place for them? And maybe in some places they’re not the optimal form, but there’s a lot of countries, I mean in Italy, and Italy has a lot of, quite a lot of geothermal. There are a lot of things that we have to turn and see, but the problem is if you’re subsidizing fossil fuels, you’re distorting the economy.

And things like carbon taxes are, are actually quite useful, incentivizing the forms of production of energy that are not carbon related. So we need to be smart with our public policy too. But I’m not saying that we won’t find that, you know, some forms of solar power turn out to be non-optimal for certain kinds of locations.

Burning [00:41:00] fossil fuels. It’s a huge cost to our health. It’s not like, oh, we have this very nice form of energy and the difficulties that we’re having with the alternative energies mean that we shouldn’t go that way. No, because what we’re replacing is so dangerous. That we need to work and perfect the alternatives that we’re using, and there are lots of alternatives and we’re finding which ones will turn out to be the most efficient and cost effective and

Maureen: safe.

We talked about water. We’ve got hydroelectric, we’ve got dams, we’ve got geothermal, we’ve got new forms of nuclear that may be much better than the traditional coal fire. So there are options. Again, not perfect, but the next step forward as we continue to evolve the technology and build the next step, saying it’s not the ultimate is inadequate.

Timothy

Kim Campbell: Snyder had an interesting column recently about fusion and that we should be investing more in that. There seems to have been some small little breakthrough there. And again, if we look at where [00:42:00] we’re putting money for research and subsidizing, we probably could pursue some of the longer shots, but.

Should they work out greater benefits? And there are many climate scientists who say that we already have everything we need to get off fossil fuels. If we did that using what we have now, like offshore wind and all this stuff, would that be where we’d be in a hundred years? No. In the course of that a hundred years, we might refine.

We might decide that as offshore wind turbines. Come to the end of their life that we would want to replace them with something

Maureen: different. It sounds like you have a very clear request for people listening to this conversation.

Kim Campbell: Yeah. There’s so much information out there. You know, there’s a wonderful book, if you really are wanted to press it, called The Petroleum Papers by Jeff de Bki.

M-B-I-C-K-I, which is about, if people don’t believe me about the perty of oil companies and hiding their research, he’s created a very good book of that story. And incidentally, some of the worst defenders are in the oil sands of Canada. [00:43:00] So we’re, you know, I don’t put on any pious earlier than tha attitude at all.

But it’s very interesting because what you see is the statements that the companies themselves have made and their own documents and their own revelations. It’s not something that somebody’s making up about them. There’s another book called The Heat Will Kill You First by Jeff Goodell. And he’s written also about the danger of of water when the water rises.

But I don’t know that people are really aware of the threat to our health that heat is, and there are already parts of the world that are teetering on the brink of being uninhabitable. It’s helpful to inform yourself. But also if it seems like it’s all too big and too much, start small, start in your own life thinking about how you can lower your own carbon footprint.

And sometimes you’ll get things right, sometimes you get things wrong, but there’s lots of stuff online. And then even people in your community or even working with your neighbors to try and you say, can you make your block carbon neutral? Or, you know, what can you do in your block? Because it’s all an accumulation of [00:44:00] decisions and practices that people make.

Now, clearly, you know, you as an individual are not gonna turn the whole tide of global warming back, but your knowledge and your commitment to it is part of a, of a whole atmosphere. And then if you vote, I. And engage in, in your civic life consistent with those policies. You know, rule number one, don’t elect climate deniers

Maureen: can’t afford that seems fitting as you’re saying that, that we’re hearing a siren in the background.

Kim Campbell: Huh? It’s like it’s an alarm. You know? We have to sound the alarm. Are

Maureen: you gonna do

Kim Campbell: a movie on this? I don’t know. I’m trying to think. My husband wants to do things with me and I want to. You know, I don’t delude myself into thinking that I have something unique to offer because a lot of good people are making films and programs and doing whatever they can to raise the level of public knowledge.

But what I do try to do when I have an opportunity to communicate with people is to try and share information. And yesterday when I spoke to the healthcare people, I heard after that some people sat down and, and you know, talked about how they could engage. It wasn’t that I was [00:45:00] telling them anything they didn’t know.

It just sort of galvanized them to think a little bit. And from my perspective, I’d like to, you know, see how many more people I can galvanize if I can, because the other side of this coin is my fear about threats to democracy. I. The rise of authoritarianism and the two go hand in hand because I don’t think we can deal with these issues unless we have people who are empowered and we make our democracies work.

You know, sometimes we think, oh, dictatorships could, they could make good decisions without all that massive democracy, but they can also make bad decisions. I. It’s not the answer. China understands climate change, and I think Xi Jinping wants to deal with it, but he’s got a lot of other pressures and, uh, they’re still opening coal fired power plants and things like that.

So I don’t think there’s any magic that authoritarian governments have in dealing with things. This summer I went with my sister in Italy to lay flowers on the grave of my father’s best friend who was killed there. My dad was in the Canadian army in Italy during the war. He was wounded, but happily survived, but his best friend was killed [00:46:00] there.

My sister and I were together in Italy. We were able to go and lay flowers on Leo’s grave. And when I see all of those graves of young man mostly, you know, if you see somebody who’s 28, well I was a pretty old person. The Canadians are all volunteers ’cause we had conscription, but not for overseas service.

You think of the sacrifices that people made. You wanna make sure that young people know what the cost was of what they have and how people their ages agreed to come. As my dad said, we weren’t heroes. We just knew there was a job that had to be done. And I feel for my generation, this is our job that has to be done and we owe it to them.

To do that job, but it’s important to me for young people to understand kind of the legacy and the inheritance of sacrifice that they enjoy without necessarily even knowing that they enjoy it. That how things are now, where we have functioning democracies and we are living relatively peacefully. Even though it’s not perfect, that’s not an accident.

It didn’t count without a lot of sacrifice and people willing to stand up [00:47:00] against Hitler and militarism in Asia and all these things, and war is a very imperfect way of solving problems. It’s a terrible, wasteful way of solving problems. So I’d like to have those conversations with, with young people too, because I think it’s something that they should know and understand, but in a very positive way to cherish the fact that that was a gift that to them.

Maureen: Thank you for the work you’re doing around the world to make such a significant impact. How would people get a link to this report? Learn more?

Kim Campbell: Well, they can go to climate overshoot.org or even just Google Climate Overshoot Commission, and it’ll come up. And I do recommend looking at the report because it is a nice user friendly, accessible, clear description of where we are.

Then for each person to decide their own ideas, it’s some inspiration from the report of things that they could do. Whether you’re a Greta Thunberg, who speaks for the youth I, I admire her enormously. Whether you do something in your local community, whether you even [00:48:00] just decide that you’re gonna take time to kind of read some of the books about the state of play and how we got to be where we are, so you understand it better, or you decide to run for public office.

There’s a million different ways to be a constructive participant and find what works for you, what you can do. But I think it’s also important not to feel hopeless. So one of the things that I see, like Michael Mann, who’s wonderful climate writer, he says that one of the biggest dangers is the doomsayers, that that’s the other side.

People say, oh, it’s too late. No, it’s not too late. It may be too late to solve the problem without any of the impacts, you know? It’d be nice if we’d been acting decades ago. But it isn’t too late to save our planet and we shouldn’t let the doomsayers discourage us. And the final thing I would say, I’ve often, in the last couple of years.

Thought about Keith’s poem and Dian and when we took English literature in high school and university, you know, we had to read all these poems and we thought, oh well we have to read these poems. ’cause the professors and teachers think these are important poets. But it’s only when you get [00:49:00] older that you realize how, you know why poetry has so much to offer you.

But Keith’s poem, uh, it starts out a thing of beauty is a joy forever. Its loveliness increases and will never pass into nothing as soon as got a whole other story in it. But it’s a poem about how beauty can help you deal. With terrible situations and despair and bad behavior, how it gives you resilience.

So I would also say to young people, what we wanna do is preserve this wonderful planet, which is so beautiful and so full of glories and creatures and wonderful things for us to appreciate. Take some moments to appreciate beauty, whether it’s the beauty created by art, or a beautiful spot in where you live.

A lovely place where there are trees or gardens or something. And cherish that and understand that you need to keep resilient. We’re in tough times. These are serious problems. But if you’re not going to descend into despair or whatever, you need to have those tools. And an English poet named John Keats identified in a [00:50:00] wonderful way the way that things of beauty.

Whatever they may be are not just beautiful in and of themselves. They’re extraordinary resources for the human spirit and the capacity of human beings to remain resilient in tough times, which is why even in wartime, people would go to listen to music with World War ii Mayra Hess, who used to differ concerts in the National Gallery in London is the mob because we need that.

So find the things of beauty that speak to your soul and hold the close, because that’s what will help you to have the resilience

Maureen: you need to face difficult issues. I wanna make a special invitation to our listeners who are corporate leaders and corporate board leaders. The decisions you make absolutely drive the outcomes we’re facing.

So thank you, the right honorable Kim Campbell for being on this commission for sharing this information and for all of our listeners who are going to read the report and take the recommendation seriously, to your point, whether it’s [00:51:00] a child in an elementary school learning about the impact of water all the way through a high level corporate board members who are making decisions.

With a global impact. Every one of those decisions matters. Thank you.

Kim Campbell: My pleasure. Thank you.