Listen to people you share intellectual common ground with

LISTEN TO PEOPLE YOU SHARE INTELLECTUAL COMMON GROUND WITH

Galef’s account in chapter 10 describes climate change skeptic Jerry Taylor in a state of uncertainty. He had been alarmed to discover that a scientist on his side had misrepresented the facts and disturbed that the sources he had been citing were shakier than he realized. He still thought the basic arguments for climate change skepticism were correct . . . but he had become much less certain of his position than he once was.

Taylor remained in that state of uncertainty for several years, until a friend set up a meeting for him with a climate activist named Bob Litterman. When you hear “activist,” you might picture someone sporting hemp and tie-dye who has chained themselves to a tree in an act of protest. But Litterman wasn’t a typical activist. His day job was running Kepos Capital, an investment advisory firm, which he founded after spending more than two decades at Goldman Sachs. Litterman was a prestigious figure in the field of risk management, having developed one of the most popular models used by investors to allocate their portfolios optimally.

In their meeting, held at the Cato Institute in 2014, Litterman made an argument for taking action on climate change that Taylor hadn’t heard before. Catastrophic climate change is a nondiversifiable risk, Litterman said. That means there’s nothing you can invest in that could hedge against the possibility of it happening. In normal circumstances, investors are willing to pay huge sums of money to avoid nondiversifiable risks. And by that same logic, Litterman argued, we as a society should be willing to invest a large amount of money in preventing the possibility of catastrophic climate change.

Litterman, Taylor, and one of Taylor’s colleagues argued for an hour and a half. After Litterman left, Taylor turned to his colleague and said: “It looks like our position just got shredded to pieces.” Shortly after that conversation, Taylor left the Cato Institute and became an activist for climate action—described by Galef as the only professional climate change skeptic known to her at the time to have switched sides.

Why was that disagreement so productive? Because even though Litterman was on the other side of the climate change issue, he was nevertheless someone with “instant credibility with people like me,” Taylor said later. “He is from Wall Street. He is kind of a soft Libertarian.”

Knowing that you have intellectual common ground with someone makes you more receptive to their arguments right off the bat. It also makes it possible for them to explain their side in your “language.” Litterman’s case for climate action relied on economics and uncertainty, a language Taylor already found compelling. To someone like Taylor, one conversation with a climate activist who can make their case in those terms is going to be far more valuable than one hundred conversations with activists who talk about humanity’s moral responsibility to Mother Earth.