A version of this article first appeared in WFAE’s Climate Newsletter. Sign up here to receive weekly climate news straight to your inbox.
How do you get people talking about climate change? It’s the question at the heart of Billy Talen’s performance as Reverend Billy, a satirical evangelical climate preacher. I spoke to him a few hours before he was to take the stage at Charlotte’s PNC Music Pavilion. Talen and his Stop Shopping Choir are the opening act for Neil Young and the Chrome Hearts during the band’s Love Earth tour, which began the American leg of the tour last week in Charlotte.
“I will be shouting, and we will be singing to this end: We have got to start jumping around, getting scared, making new ways of relating to each other, knocking on doors — talking,” Talen said.
For Talen, rampant consumerism drives the problem, as people escape into the present to avoid the future. It’s a brand of consumption that reflects in our media diet as well. From the constant immersion in a stream of images, vibes and plotlines that require minimal concentration to follow, a new style of media emerges.
If the French absurdists Camus, Sartre and Ionesco responded to the abject horror of World War II with nihilism, then “immediacy,” as defined by Anna Kornbluh in “Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism,” responds to the impending climate apocalypse with a style that’s firmly rooted in the present. “Urgency; extremity; no future, only presence. Party before the lights come up,” she writes.
Americans tend to think of global warming as a problem for other people, probably sometime in the future, according to a 2024 Yale Climate Opinion Survey. Most of us believe the country should burn less fossil fuels in the long run, weaning off gradually and eventually achieving carbon neutrality by, say, 2050. It’s a date that’s comfortably far-flung, a problem for another generation, another legislature and another Duke Energy CEO.
In North Carolina, Democratic representatives Carla Cunningham, Nasif Majeed and Shelly Willingham recently joined with the Republicans to eliminate our state’s interim 2030 carbon pollution reduction target, meaning we’re tackling this statewide group project with fewer milestones than my master’s thesis. North Carolina’s original decision to reduce carbon pollution by 70% of 2005 levels by 2030 was not an arbitrary goal post. It was, in its own right, an important climate target rather than a benchmark. It directly responded to the demands of the Paris Climate Agreement, which aimed to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
As of 2024, we’re at 1.28 degrees above pre-industrial temperatures.
Statistically speaking, climate change isn’t on the tip of most North Carolinians’ tongues — not often, anyway. The same Yale survey found that fewer than half of North Carolinians believe they have personally experienced the effects of global warming, and only 36% talk about climate change at least occasionally, matching the national average. I imagine even fewer consciously make life choices that respond directly to or factor in climate change, although I’ve seen a few notable exceptions.
“I always thought that climate change was in the future or just a few more years away,” small business owner Alice Scott said. Her art studio in Asheville’s River Arts District flooded during Hurricane Helene. “Going through this experience made me realize that it’s here. It’s now. And it’s going to keep happening.”
In June, Scott joined more than 30 other speakers at Highland Brewing in Asheville to petition the Environmental Protection Agency to keep its federal climate protections. Melissa Booth, a professor at Warren Wilson College, was among them. She had moved to western North Carolina from the Georgia coast to seek refuge from the rising tides and worsening tropical storms.
“There are no climate havens anymore,” Booth said.
Information overload
I can empathize with wanting to shut out the barrage of bad news. Humans are bombarded with information from the moment we wake up until our heads hit the pillow.
“We are overwhelmed by the attention industry. Saturation advertising. Pixelated, simulated, virtual reality,” Talen said. “It's just all over our senses all day long.”
The drive to dissociate is compounded by the fact that things in the present seem pretty good for a lot of people. Many of us are either content (or complacent) in a world that’s been engineered to keep us productive and working, if not happy. We have our pick of gyms and restaurants, though most are probably chains, and few nourish much besides our desire to optimize.
In this way, we are expected to endure climate change. There are plenty of distractions to keep us busy. Season two of “Severance” is up for an Emmy. The bromance between President Trump and Elon Musk is in shambles. Podcaster Joe Rogan criticizes Trump over the Epstein files.
All the while, advertising is the siren’s song that plays in the background, subtly encouraging us to plug in and tune out the constant torrent of trauma. Instagram morphs into a mosaic of irreconcilable, fragmented realities. One square explains how Israel, an American ally, killed seven journalists over the weekend. Next, Sydney Sweeney sells you a full Canadian tuxedo. After that, a square says a heatwave hit southern Europe, sparking widespread fires. Then, a post about how that Sydney Sweeney ad selling you blue jeans was actually thinly-veiled white supremacist propaganda. Genocide and famine, jeans and sex — everything gets the same-size square, the same platform. Equality, if not equity. All posts matter.
Talen, or Reverend Billy, who performs protest concerts with his Stop Shopping Choir in banks, chains and anywhere that might disrupt the “retail experience,” seeks to interrupt what he calls the “low-grade hypnosis of shopping.”
“If they're shocked out of shopping, they're open for a moment, and they might be angry, they might be annoyed, but they might be laughing,” Talen said.
Climate conversations
Even if the average American isn’t addressing the climate problem on a weekly basis, some are discussing it. The Charlotte chapter of the Citizens’ Climate Lobby continues to honor meteorologists who educate the public on climate change with its Climate Coverage Champion award. This year’s winner, Brandon Lawson of WJZY, hosted episodes of Pinpoint Weather University, which explores topics such as the 4th of July floods in Texas, the Atlantic hurricane season and how warmer waters make fishing more challenging.
WCNC’s Brittany Van Voorhees, last year’s award recipient, recently appeared on Charlotte Talks to explain why North Carolina’s high humidity has kept temperatures from changing as drastically as other parts of the world.
“When the air is drier, it takes less energy to warm temperatures,” Van Voorhees said. “You were actually more likely to hit 100 [degrees Fahrenheit] 30 years ago in Charlotte.”
Harder to break 100 degrees, and yet, the city’s average temperature was 4.6 degrees warmer than normal last month.
That 36% of North Carolinians who occasionally discuss climate change seems low, but maybe we're underreported. It’s easy for us to discuss climate change without realizing we’re talking about it. For example, N. fowleri — aka the brain-eating amoeba and my main phobia other than microplastic-induced dementia — feeds on cyanobacteria, or blue-green algae blooms. Amoebic meningoencephalitis, the disease caused by an amoeba eating your brain, approaches rabies-level mortality rates once contracted. Luckily, similar to rabies, it’s exceedingly rare; there have only been 167 reported cases from 1962 and 2024.
However, the amoeba thrives in warm, fresh water. The same goes for its food source, and federal regulators expect harmful algal blooms to increase as the climate continues to warm. So, when I say, “I’m terrified that a single-celled organism is going to eat my brain,” I’m really saying, “I’m worried that if we keep burning fossil fuels, I’m not going to feel safe swimming in a lake.”
In other words, if you pull on any thread long enough, it leads back to the combustion of coal and natural gas. Depending on how you sit with that knowledge, it can breed nihilism or optimistic realism. Camus or Greta Thunberg. Sartre or Naomi Klein. Vous n’existez pas mon cher, parce que vous n’agissez pas — ”You don’t exist, my dear, because you don’t act,” to paraphrase Ionesco, who, in turn, paraphrased Descartes. After all, if the problems are numerous, then solutions must be equally abundant. At least, in the case of brain-eating amoebas, I certainly hope so.
All in this together
Whether it’s hungry amoebas or Democrats defecting to override climate legislation, it’s easy to feel powerless. However, much like the problem itself, we might be talking about climate solutions more than we think. Talen, when I asked him what values he preaches about during his climate sermons as Reverend Billy, pointed to the “gift economy that takes place when a superstorm hits.”
“The survivors walk up to each other, and inevitably, they say, ‘What can I do for you? How are you? Can you walk? You're afraid? Give me a hug. I've got some leftover food,” Talen said.
It’s the story of western North Carolina after Helene. In Asheville, Lansing, Linville and many other cities and towns that flooded last fall, reports of neighbors helping neighbors sprang up. They coordinated helicopter supply drops, ran groceries on ATVs to hollers and connected homes to electric generators. Even now, 10 months after the storm, local nonprofits are distributing resources to repair damaged infrastructure and get their neighbors back home.
Part of the local solution to climate change parallels the same mechanisms that alleviate labor abuse, poverty and food insecurity. Sometimes, it involves group purchasing programs for rooftop solar, a salve — if not a solution — for prohibitive electricity bills. Other times, it looks like H2A visa workers banding together to demand heat relief. Some solutions cost nothing. Buy less, compost more, drive less. At the very least, get to know your neighbors.
Talen sat across from me at a picnic table outside the arena. He was about to go on stage for soundcheck, and I asked him, as Reverend Billy, to share some of the evening’s sermon with me:
“We’re in this together.
We're doing this together.
We're burning together.
We're drowning together.
We're going extinct together.
We're surviving together.
We're loving together. We're loving together. We're loving together.
Don't isolate when it comes to the Earth.”
Read more: Rev. Billy wants you to 'Stop Shopping' for the climate
Articles mentioned:
- Israeli strike kills journalists in Gaza City, worsening the death toll for the media
- Western North Carolina petitions EPA to keep federal climate protections in place after Helene
- How the climate crisis is fueling the spread of a brain-eating amoeba
- Duke Energy announces nearly $1 billion in profits, plans to merge its two main NC utilities
- Local organizers visit NC farms to educate migrant workers on heat safety
- New group-purchase program aims to lower the cost of solar energy installations in Mecklenburg County
