Andrew Revkin

Yeah, well, inertia.

Friction implies there's a force that's already being resisted.

But there's also inertia, which is a huge part of our, you know, we have a status quo bias.

the scientists that I, in grappling with the climate problem, as a journalist, I paid too much attention to climate scientists.

That's why all my articles focused on climate change.

And it was 2006.

I remember now pretty clearly, I was asked by the Weekend Review section of the New York Times to write a sort of a weekend thumbsucker, we call them, on- Thumbsucker?

You know, you sit and suck your thumb and think about something.

Why is everybody so pissed off about climate change?

It was after the Al Gore movie came out, Inconvenient Truth, Hurricane Katrina.

It was big.

Senator Inhofe in the Senate from Oklahoma wasn't yet throwing snowballs, but it was close to that.

And so I looked into what was going on.

Why is this so heated?

In 2006, the story's called Yelling Fire on a Hot Planet.

And that was the first time, this is after 18 years of writing about global warming,

That was the first time I interviewed a social scientist, not a climate scientist.

Her name was Helen Ingram.

She's at UC Irvine.

And she laid out for me the factors that determine why people vote, what they vote for, what they think about politically.