Pause/Play

In the latest episode of Pause/Play, you’ll hear from musicians, venue owners and fans about how climate change is affecting Austin’s Music Scene.  We also talk to weatherman David Yeomans and neuropsychotherapist Bella Rockman.

The full transcript of this episode of Pause/Play is available on the KUT & KUTX Studio website. The transcript is also available as subtitles or captions on some podcast apps.

James Moody We opened an outdoor room in Texas because the weather was fairly predictable. Wasn’t that dramatic? You had what? Less than 60 days of quote unquote winter, and then the rest was some version of summer. How it’s changed is that the ice has gotten more crazy and icy, and the sun has gotten hotter.

Elizabeth McQueen I’m Elizabeth McQueen.

Miles Bloxson And I’m Miles Bloxson. And you’re listening to Pause play. A podcast about live music, why it matters, and what comes next.

Elizabeth McQueen This season, we’re exploring all the changes that are impacting Austin’s live music ecosystem.

Miles Bloxson And in this episode, we’re talking all about climate change. We talked to venue owners, musicians and fans about how they’re all coping.

Elizabeth McQueen You’ll also hear from weatherman David Yeomans. So if you live in Austin, you’ve dealt with extreme weather caused by climate change. Like that extremely hot summer we all endured last year.

Miles Bloxson Yeah, it was one of the hottest summers on record. We had 80 days of 100 degree heat.

Elizabeth McQueen We had 45 days where the temperature reached 105 or higher.

Miles Bloxson We Austinites are used to hot summers, let me tell you. But that was way too much.

Elizabeth McQueen Yeah, it was. And we’ve also experienced extreme storms here, like during Winter Storm Uri that brought snow and ice and so many days of freezing temperatures to Texas.

Miles Bloxson It wreaked havoc on our unprepared electrical grid. Almost 70% of people in Texas lost power at some point during this stretch of cold weather, and almost half had some kind of water service interruption.

Elizabeth McQueen And hundreds of people died during that time.

Miles Bloxson And if you want to hear more about the Texas electrical grid and why it did so poorly during that storm, you should listen to the Katy podcast, The Disconnect.

Elizabeth McQueen And then there was that storm last September with baseball sized hail. It caused $600 million of damage in Travis and Williamson counties alone.

Miles Bloxson We are all having to deal with this new climate reality, and this includes everyone in our music ecosystem as well.

Elizabeth McQueen But before we go any further, we wanted to hear from an expert who could tell us about climate change in Central Texas. So we turn to one of our favorite weatherman.

David Yeomans I’m David Yeomans. I’m the chief meteorologist at KXAN on the first warning weather team. The NBC affiliate here in Austin.

Elizabeth McQueen That was his job when we interviewed him. But this episode took a long time to put together. So long, in fact, that David has a new job at Wbhm in Chicago. We wish him all the best. But still, he had lived in Austin for a long time, and he knows a lot about climate change. He, like, integrates it into his weather reporting, which is why we wanted to talk to him. I mean, and for people who, like, maybe are listening and are unclear, could you like very simply, as simply as you can kind of explain what climate change is?

David Yeomans I love that question because the physics of it is not scary. The way this works is so simple. Someone in the 1800s discovered it, a woman named Eunice Foote. She put a couple of tubes full of air out in the sun. Each one of them were stopped up and they had a thermometer stuck in them. One of them was just the air that we breathe. The other one had CO2 artificially added to it, so it had a higher concentration of CO2. Well, after they were out in the sun for a couple hours, guess what? The one with CO2 in the tube. More of it got hotter. 1856 when we discovered that CO2 is what we call a heat trapping gas. So the earth zooming out now is surrounded by this down comforter. Let’s say it has a natural greenhouse effect. We have heat trapping gases in our atmosphere. We always have. That’s what makes Earth a livable planet. But since the 1800s, since the Industrial Revolution, were burning fossil fuels, artificially increasing the concentration of these heat trapping gases, there’s more CO2 than there used to be, 50% more. So of course, that’s warming temperatures. The simplest way I can put it is this every particle of exhaust that comes out of your tailpipe, every particle of smoke that comes out of the fat coal plant an hour east of Austin, is another feather that’s being added to the down comforter in our atmosphere. And they don’t go away tomorrow. The residents time of CO2 up in the sky is about 100 years. So what we do today has huge impact for a long time going forward. Which is why when people argue, you know that the climate’s not changing. The science on this is so simple. And it’s something that we’ve known about for more than 150 years.

Miles Bloxson Climate change is something that’s happening to the whole world, right? But we want to know how it’s impacting Central Texas specifically.

Elizabeth McQueen David started out by quoting the Texas state meteorologists from 1927. No one actually knows that person’s name, but they remember this quote.

David Yeomans Texas is the land of perennial drought, broken by the occasional devastating flood. Our average weather is just the mid-line on our extremes, right? We’re always up and down, and we always have been. But since then, temperatures have gotten measurably hotter. In the last 20 years in Austin, the 100 degree day count that we all keep track of every summer has shot through the roof, and it’s more consistently higher than it used to be. We’re seeing fewer freezes each winter. You know, the data is very clear when you look at this stuff every day, like I do. The line is going like this. It’s going up. We used to. Average 15 triple digit days per year. 15 days per summer when we hit 100 or higher. Now we average over the last 30 years. 29 of them. We’ve already doubled our average 100 degree day count. And how how many do we have last summer? 8100 degree days?

Elizabeth McQueen I don’t know why I talk about last summer. It was so hard to do. And do you like live music?

David Yeomans I love live music. Who doesn’t?

Elizabeth McQueen Do you personally feel like the extreme heat has, like, affected your relationship to go to see shows?

David Yeomans 100%. It’s affected my relationship with everything. I mean, everything I love to do in Austin is generally outdoors. I love being on the lake, going to the greenbelt, but now the lakes are so low that people can’t even put their boat on Lake Travis. So they all go to Lake Austin. Then it gets too crowded. The green belt either has no water because it’s so dry and hot, or the water that is there is stagnant, and it has algae that can kill my dog. And it’s way too hot to go to an outdoor show like you mentioned. So climate change is affecting a lot of things that I personally love about Austin. I could see it affecting the bottom line for concert venues.

Elizabeth McQueen Yeah, in fact, the heat did impact venues, and we’re going to talk about that later in this episode.

Miles Bloxson Up to this point, David had mostly talked to us about Austin’s current climate situation.

Elizabeth McQueen But we wanted to know what’s coming.

Miles Bloxson What do you feel like climate change will mean for Central Texas in the future.

David Yeomans Even in an intermediate emissions scenario, meaning we continue to cut our greenhouse gas emissions at the rate we’re doing, maybe a little faster than that even. Remember, this stuff stays in the air for a long time, though. So even in that situation, in 20 years, Austin is going to double our 100 degree day count again. So instead of an average of 29, it would be an average of over 5100 degree days. So if you extrapolate that to our worst summers, 8090 days in our worst summers, well, let’s double that in a worst case scenario. By the end of the century, we may not be around, but our kids will. Our grandkids, they could triple. In those situations. It is possible, according to these scientific projections, by people much smarter than I, that half of the days in a given year in Austin would be 100 degrees.

Miles Bloxson Okay, David, we got to find somewhere else to live. So where do you live?

David Yeomans I used to be fun at parties, and now I’m not.

Elizabeth McQueen Yikes. It’s going to be getting really hot. Y’all. Like, in a serious way.

Miles Bloxson Like hotter than a Nelly song. It’s getting hot in here.

Elizabeth McQueen Definitely hotter than a Nelly song. And like we talked about in the intro, it’s not just the heat that’s impacting us. The warming climate actually is making storms more intense. Take, for instance, that hailstorm in September.

David Yeomans What contributed to that hail? And that storm being so bad at the end of September when it’s supposed to be cooling off, was that it was 100 degrees that day and more heat energy low in the atmosphere where we live and breathe. Feeds these storms and makes them more intense.

Miles Bloxson And then there’s this winter storm in 2021. David told us that he’s seen research from Doctor John Nielsen Gammon out of Texas A&M that indicated that without climate change brought on by humans, that the Snowpocalypse could have been way colder. But climate change may also be the reason it stuck around for so long.

David Yeomans We can get these crazy swings in the storm track across the country called the jet Stream, the jet stream, which carries these storms across the country from west to east. Generally, it’s getting wavier and bumpier, which means that weather patterns get stuck more often. Remember, in February 2021 it was cold for a week. A week of really cold weather. It got stuck.

Elizabeth McQueen So the climate is changing. Storms are getting stronger and sometimes lasting longer and things are getting hotter.

Miles Bloxson So what does that all mean for the Austin music scene?

Elizabeth McQueen I mean, a lot of our venues are outdoor venues.

Miles Bloxson And James Moody, who owns a venue on Red River called Mojo, told us that historically, Austin was a good place to throw outdoor shows.

James Moody We opened an outdoor room in Texas because the weather was fairly predictable. Wasn’t that dramatic? You had, what, less than 60 days of quote unquote winter? And then the rest was some version of summer. How it’s changed is that the ice has gotten more crazy and icy, and the sun has gotten hotter.

Elizabeth McQueen And outdoor venues are having to contend with that hotter sun, especially last summer.

Miles Bloxson Lawrence Boone, who books music for the Far Out Lounge in South Austin, told us what this past summer was like for them.

Lawrence Boone It was very hot, very dry and very expensive because we were booking shows every single day and a lot of them really good shows with touring bands and bigger local bands, and no one was showing up because it was literally 112, 115 degrees. For how many days in a row? 45 days in a row or something. There was just no reprieve. It was tough, even. Like physically, it was tough for the staff to be here. For an engineer to be here for six hours, whatever it is out there baking in the sun. And so our patrons felt the same way. It was just too hot, maybe even for a band they really, really like. They would maybe just say, maybe I’ll catch them in the fall or spring, and go to the lake instead.

Elizabeth McQueen And Laurence told us it wasn’t just far out.

Lawrence Boone We talked to other bars, other venues they were doing in the exact same boat. I know a couple of them just completely stopped having a door person because it was too hot for the door person to be out there, or they couldn’t afford the door person because no one was going to the bars because again, it was just too hot for entertainment purposes. Outside, it was just too much.

Miles Bloxson Lawrence and Far Out Lounge co-owner Pedro Cavallo, who you’ll hear from later in this. Busload told us that overall business was down about 30% for their venue and other outdoor venues around town as well.

Elizabeth McQueen James Moody told us that post-Covid, a lot of people in his world, venues and restaurants projected an increase in business last summer, and they built that into their budgets and their staffing and everything.

Miles Bloxson And then the brutal heat came. And I mean, it’s not like we don’t expect extreme heat in Austin during the summer.

James Moody Everyone’s okay with a week of it. No one expected three months of it. Two things happened that I think people weren’t prepared for. One, we’re kind of used to locals packing up and going away during those hot runs because they’re usually replaced by tourists that are curious about Austin. Right. So the locals will leave and the tourists will come and it all kind of work out. This particular summer, the locals left and the tourists left to the locals left. The news started hyper reporting on 108 degree weather. The tourists said, let’s change that flight to somewhere else. And it was a double whammy for everybody in the city, no matter who admitted it or not. I can tell you it happened to everyone, and it was not just being surprised by the locals leaving and the tourists not replacing them, but then having to reconcile the projections that you placed for what the summer was supposed to be. Really brutal.

Elizabeth McQueen And when you hear Austin based musician Caleb de Casper described his experience with the heat. It’s no surprise that people weren’t showing up this summer.

Caleb de Casper Beat my psychology to a pulp. It was worse than like, seasonal things in the winter. It was just so unrelenting.

Miles Bloxson I can so relate to what Caleb is talking about. Elizabeth.

Elizabeth McQueen Oh, yeah. Last summer was so hot. I mean, you’d go outside and the wind would blow, and it would feel like someone was holding a blow dryer set on high heat, like, right up to your face. It was so intense.

Miles Bloxson It was like you, like, had to literally set yourself up for success. Like, okay, I’m going outside and I’m going to feel all this heat coming at me, like, how am I going to handle it? What am I going to do? And God forbid if, like, your AC in your car doesn’t.

Elizabeth McQueen Work, because.

Miles Bloxson What is happening right now?

Elizabeth McQueen It took a real mental toll. And part of the way we were feeling mentally was because of what the heat was doing to us all physically. We asked neuropsychologist Bella Rockman what impact extreme heat can have on the mind and body. You heard her in our first episode and you’re going to hear from her throughout this season.

Bella Rockman Heat can impact us in terms of our energy levels, where a lot of people and, you know, talk about feeling really lethargic and tired in terms of our brain. A lot of times people experience brain fog or even like confusion, like where it’s like a delayed response and making decisions. Excessive heat can cause us to shoot off more cortisol, the neurochemical, cortisol. And so we’re having like higher amounts of stress being pumped out at a time. And so we’ve had a lot of people report actually, we talked about this over this past summer feeling like increased agitation, restlessness, feeling, you know, tired, disconnected, having a hard time recalling information and performing their day to day job function.

Elizabeth McQueen So there’s like a real physical response. Oh, I I didn’t realize that all happened in the heat.

Bella Rockman Yeah.

Miles Bloxson Yeah, I know I was a lot more agitated this summer than normal, and I didn’t. You don’t really know why you don’t think of that, because you just kind of like trucking along, just getting through. You got to go to work anyway. You got to get out of your car. You have to do things. So it’s like, what can you do?

Bella Rockman Yeah, yeah. Anger management became a theme. The summer for sure.

Elizabeth McQueen Was the cortisol. Would that make people more like irritated and angry?

Bella Rockman Yeah. Yeah. Increases our stress levels. And and then also just it’s kind of like our neocortex, like our logical part of our brain, our executive function that can make logical decisions is kind of starts to go offline a bit. And we’re kind of living out of that amygdala region more. And so that’s where a lot of more of that reactivity comes in. I think everyone has had an experience or they had a response in there like, gosh, I really wish I could have shown up differently. They can logically realize it, but their immediate sort of autonomic thought or their autonomic response is far more reactive than what they would have liked.

Miles Bloxson Imagine the entire city walking around in a fog with the logical parts of our brain shut down like lethargic, but also angry and irritable. That was so me.

Elizabeth McQueen Yeah, that was like all of Austin last summer.

Miles Bloxson I mean, it makes sense the way the heat impacted the way people acted at shows when they did show up.

James Moody One of the funny quotes to this adjacent to your question was that my GM said, well, you can correlate the. Heat index to a 40% reduction in marsh quality. It’s like when it’s too hot, they marsh less like with less like energy or passion. And I just thought that was so hilarious. It’s such a Red River thing to say.

Elizabeth McQueen And like Pedro from the Far Out told us, when people did show up, the venue had to make sure they were taken care of, especially at things like festivals where shows were happening during the day.

Caleb de Casper We threw a festival in July. Ripple effects, it’s metal festival. Super fun. But that was one of our biggest challenges, is like making sure that people were safe during these like super hot days, like 110 112.

Miles Bloxson And he said this was especially true if people were coming from out of town and weren’t used to the Texas heat.

Elizabeth McQueen Yeah, they really had to prioritize health and safety.

Caleb de Casper One of the bigger things we had to do, which is really kind of classes to have, EMT is on site for anything larger. They have like hydrating packs, and they could just kind of help you through it. And we saw a decent amount. The images were were busy, no one got hurt, but gets a little sketchy when it’s that hot. People just don’t know. And then we had to hire like basically full time people just to refill water stations. That was a job in and of itself. Because they were just depleting every ten minutes. That’s pretty crazy.

Miles Bloxson A whole job just refilling water like. Oh my gosh.

Elizabeth McQueen I didn’t even know that was a thing. But Far Out Lounge wasn’t the only venue that had to make changes.

Miles Bloxson Ryan Garrett, the general manager at Stubb’s, says they also made sure they had water stations. Plus, they send an email out to people before the show with information about the weather and how to come prepared.

Elizabeth McQueen They even had to make plans to deal with the lines and make sure people didn’t have to stand in them too long.

Ryan Garrett You know, if you’ve got a band that caters to a younger demographic, the lines can get long. Early in, our line faces west. That’s tough to be on a city sidewalk facing west in July and August. Not recommended.

Elizabeth McQueen They had to make plans to deal with lines and make sure people didn’t have to stand in them too long.

Miles Bloxson And they even move their set times to later.

Elizabeth McQueen They were able to do that because the Red River Cultural District, an organization that works on behalf of the businesses on Red River Street, sought an extension to the city’s sound ordinance.

Ryan Garrett So we’re exploring options instead of a 7:00 door. What about an 8:00 tour on a Friday night and let that sun go down? Let that earth cool a little bit, where people aren’t standing in direct sunlight and then run it to midnight or 1230 instead of wrapping at 11 p.m..

Elizabeth McQueen These are just some of the ways that venues are dealing with heat. But what about fans? Coming up after the break? We’ll look at what climate change might mean for people who go to shows.

Miles Bloxson Welcome back to Pause Play, a podcast about live music, why it matters, and what comes next. And this episode, we’re talking about climate change and what it might mean for the Austin music scene.

Elizabeth McQueen Like, what does Extreme Heat like we had last summer mean for fans?

Miles Bloxson Lots of people just didn’t go out. Elizabeth.

Elizabeth McQueen Yeah, like me. But who were those people who did go see bands in 105 degree heat? Well, it turns out we work with someone who was one of those people.

Maile Carballo Hi everyone. My name is Maile Carballo.

Miles Bloxson Miley works here at KUT. She started as an intern doing graphics and guys, she’s so good and she works here for us now as an official staff member.

Elizabeth McQueen She’s only a sophomore in college, so keep that in mind. I wonder, did you go to any shows outdoors this summer?

Maile Carballo Oh, yeah. Too many. You know, it’s it’s one of those things. Like, if you love music, you’re going to go to the show anyways. And that that kind of sucks in Texas because, you know, it’s so incredibly hot.

Elizabeth McQueen Do you think that you went to like, the same amount of shows this summer as you would have normally gone to, like, did the heat impact you at all, or were you like, whatever, I’m just doing what I do, I don’t care.

Maile Carballo Honestly, I have a whatever mentality. I’m a pretty practical person, so I’m to the point now to where I’m like, I’ll just sweat, you know, stay hydrated and come prepared. It’ll be okay. Not everybody is like that.

Miles Bloxson Miley is right. Everybody’s not like her.

Elizabeth McQueen Yeah, I’m not like her. I feel like I am too old to be seeing anything, even live music in 105 degree heat.

Miles Bloxson I’m going to have to agree with that statement. I will not claim my age at this time, but I feel you on that. Elizabeth. We talked to Most buzzkill, the host of the disconnect, and he brought up this point that we hadn’t really considered that maybe climate change, and specifically extreme heat will start to change. Who goes to shows in the summer? Medically vulnerable people may stay home. And so my older people.

Mose Buchele You could very well see crowds getting younger and younger, which is not what I always see at Austin shows. You know, I see a lot of people from across the age spectrum that seem to really cherish and go out to live music, at least when I was going out more and checking shows out. But yeah, when you start dealing with this kind of weather, people are who are going to be more more conscious of that, are probably more likely to stay home.

Elizabeth McQueen So yeah, it was hot last summer and it impacted every part of our live music ecosystem.

Miles Bloxson And moles, who thinks a lot about these things, brought up this point.

Mose Buchele 2023 we were already coming out of a super hot, super drought ridden summer. The previous year we thought maybe we’d get a break, but no, we had heat like we had never experienced before in Austin. And what the climate projections are telling us is that that type of heat will become more and more normal for us into the future. So it’s so it’s going to be bad. Maybe it won’t be like 80 days of triple digit heat, but a normal year perhaps of over 50 days, and then the anomalous year as well. Way more than anything we’ve experienced before. We basically need to start getting used to the idea that that summers are going to be what would have been considered unbearable for people. You know, I don’t know, a few decades ago that’s just going to be part of the new expectation.

Elizabeth McQueen Which can seem pretty overwhelming. So like, what can the music scene do?

Miles Bloxson James Moody said he’ll be keeping an eye out to see if this summer is as brutal as last summer, and that will help him figure out if Mohawk needs to make changes.

James Moody Do we need to prepare for a new future? Do we need to invest in overhangs? Do we need to, you know, look into shade structures and misting? Like, I don’t know, because we’re not in an environment where there’s excess capital in the live music space where you have money setting aside for such equations or moments or strategies, you kind of don’t have that money.

Elizabeth McQueen What James is talking about is climate mitigation, you know, making adjustments to how we operate, things to accommodate the reality of climate change.

Miles Bloxson But mitigation takes money. And where does all this money come from?

Elizabeth McQueen We wondered if there was any money venues could use for climate mitigation available from the city of Austin.

Miles Bloxson So we reached out to Ben Leffler, who works in Councilman Ryan Alice’s office.

Elizabeth McQueen He told us that though there is finally money available to venues from the city, there’s nothing specifically available for improvements like shade structures and misters, though that could be something that becomes part of future programs.

Miles Bloxson But there are rebates that businesses can access to make their building more energy efficient through Austin Energy and Austin Water.

Elizabeth McQueen There’s also the Austin Energy Commercial Demand Response program, where the city controls your thermostat depending on demand. So in the middle of a summer day at 5 p.m., when demand is highest, they may turn up a business’s thermostat a little to conserve energy.

Miles Bloxson Well, that can save businesses money and take pressure off of our easily stressed grid and put less fossil fuel into the atmosphere. He even suggested having bike racks at venues all as a way to help mitigate climate change.

Ben Leffler No business, no individual. Nobody is going to individually like, change our trajectory, right? But like if we as a community can use less water, can use less power, can, you know, put less carbon into the atmosphere. I would encourage you to sort of think about that as climate mitigation. If a venue is able to get into the demand response program and allow Austin Energy to turn their power down a little bit during those times of peak demand, that helps the whole grid be more sustainable. That helps the whole grid be more reliable in a state where our grid has not been so reliable lately, right? That itself is like contributing to climate change mitigation.

Elizabeth McQueen But until there’s a real concerted effort to help businesses prepare for the new climate reality, club owners will have to figure it out on their own.

Miles Bloxson Lawrence told us that for people who run venues, when it comes to the weather, you have to remain extremely positive.

Ryan Garrett You have to operate like the weather going to be beautiful every single day. You can’t look at your calendar and be like, oh, a big band wants to play. Sorry. It might be hot that day, or it might be cold that day, or it might rain that month. You have to operate as if it’s going to be flawless every single time, and you promote it that way, and you cross your fingers and hope that that’s the way it turns out. And then as the event approaches, if you have to make changes, that’s part of the job. And a big part of that is just taking losses. If we book a big band and it’s, you know, a few thousand dollars in guarantees and people aren’t buying tickets because it’s too hot, you take a loss. Hopefully you’ve done enough the rest of the year to make up for those losses. When the weather’s not in your favor.

Elizabeth McQueen And venues are trying to figure out ways to create revenue that will offset those losses during the increasingly unpredictable summer and winter months.

Miles Bloxson One way that the venues on Red River have found ways to make up some of this revenue is through free week and hot summer nights.

Elizabeth McQueen For years, the Red River Cultural District has held free week during the first week of the year.

Miles Bloxson All the shows during free week are, you guessed it, free. It’s a way to get people out to see shows during a time that they would normally stay at home. And five years ago they started a summer version called hot Summer nights.

Elizabeth McQueen It’s a weekend of free shows in July, which is peak summer here. Hundreds of Austin bands play on over a dozen stages and it’s been catching on.

James Moody But that is a total effort of necessity of like, can we create spikes in these really difficult to read seasons?

Miles Bloxson The venues on Red River are part of the Red River Cultural District, which is a group that can come together and help create solutions like hot summer nights as a team.

Elizabeth McQueen But venues like Far Out, they’re kind of on their own when it comes to figuring these things out.

Miles Bloxson So venues can mitigate climate change by building out infrastructure and creating their own opportunities.

Elizabeth McQueen They might also need to look outside of Austin for answers.

Miles Bloxson Graham Williams runs resound, a company that books and promotes shows at independent venues like Mohawk. He deals with a lot of touring bands and that informs how he thinks about a hotter future.

Graham Williams Other folks have tackled it. Before we did people in New Mexico and Arizona, they’re in desert areas that weren’t always deserts long, long before they live there. Their summers are wildly hot, and they’ve just kind of adjusted to it. And they can actually have big concerts in December if you want, where other folks are batting down the hatches. That might be how we adjust and be tough to get through summers, because there won’t be as many of those concerts. But, they’ll be other things will have to kind of work towards. I don’t know what that is yet, that there’s all that idea swimming around in the end. As long as you fill the gaps and artists are able to get on stage and play to their fans at other times of the year than it, you know, nets out to the same amount of shows for everybody.

Elizabeth McQueen But what about artists? What can they do? Does it even make sense then, to try to play shows in the summer in Austin? Like did it make you rethink that part of it all?

Caleb de Casper I’m going to say the quiet part out loud. Yeah, because it was miserable for me is miserable for them. Why do I want to play this show to a bunch of people who are, like, depleted? There’s no energy. I’m an energy vampire, right? I have to, like, take that from them. And there’s nothing.

Miles Bloxson DGC venues at least trying to, like, help figure it out. Like maybe having a water person or.

Caleb de Casper We’ve always done that though here. And it used to be. It used to be, okay, they have the misters going, they have the water. They have. But it was just so freaking hot. I know a lot of musicians actually like all genres. All they’re like, I’m leaving. I’m leaving during the summer. I can’t handle it. Can’t handle it anymore.

Miles Bloxson Yep. Musicians can tour like, they can just play other places in the summer and they play here when the weather is more reasonable.

Elizabeth McQueen Yeah. You know, when I was on the road, they used to say, when you’re booking tours, you want a tour north in the summer and south in the winter.

Miles Bloxson Climate change can be so overwhelming. And talking about solutions around mitigation, whether that’s building infrastructure are holding shows later or simply having fewer shows in the summer. Well, that’s something.

Elizabeth McQueen But we personally feel this larger question tugging at us, like, what can we do about climate change? It’s such a big issue. And the ultimate solutions to climate change often feel really out of our hands.

David Yeomans But some of these things are going to require bigger solutions and more people getting on board. Over history. Since we started burning all these fossil fuels, 100 major companies are responsible for 71% of all greenhouse gas emissions ever. Of course, they include things like shell, BP, Chevron. But to change all this on a big scale, it’s not going to be you changing your light bulbs. It’s going to be bigger solutions than that.

Miles Bloxson So what can we do?

Elizabeth McQueen Well, we have a coworker named Rosie Pena. She’s a music fan, but she’s also found a way to feel empowered around climate change.

Miles Bloxson She got really involved in taking action around climate change. After the Bastrop fires of 2011. It burned 32,000 acres over 55 days, and that was just down the road from Austin.

Elizabeth McQueen So she decided to take action and got involved with Citizens Climate Lobby, which trains people to advocate for action around climate change. And she said, it really helped.

Rosie Pena Made me feel comforted because I didn’t see anybody else talking about it. And I thought, but this is something that we should be worried about. And then also if you can be worried and worried and worried, but if you don’t have an outlet, you know, you just kind of sink further into despair. So this was my antidote to despair. Yeah. I just kind of really believe in that action as the antidote to despair, where, you know, doing something, even just talking. Katharine Hayhoe. She says the most important thing we should do is just talk to each other about climate change, because nobody’s just having these conversations. Not enough people are having these conversations. And then through talking to each other, like just casually in conversation, we can educate each other more. And if we feel more educated on it, we’re more likely to do something like vote or write to our members of Congress are more likely to be driven to action.

Miles Bloxson Action is the antidote to despair. I love that.

Elizabeth McQueen Yeah, so do I. And we asked David, who thinks a lot about climate change, how he keeps his spirits up.

David Yeomans It’s very easy to feel like we’re screwed, right? Nothing we do today will matter. And we are locked into some level of warming because of what we’ve done. But what we do now is going to make a huge difference in the future. And that’s what keeps me motivated to talk about the science and to talk about what’s happening with our climate and how humans are contributing to it. There are solutions to this. It’s not unknown. What the heck can we do? Let’s transition our electricity sources so that your phone is not charging from coal, because 60% of it is right now when you plug your phone in, let’s transition. Make that 40% renewable hydropower, wind power, solar. Let’s make that a bigger share. You can keep driving your pickup. You know, you don’t have to change your daily life to do anything with that. I also feel a real responsibility as a scientist and someone with training in climate science to just get the facts out there, because there’s so much bad information that creates doubt in people’s heads, even well-intentioned people who just want to figure out what the heck is really going on. If they don’t have training in how the atmosphere works, you see two sides of this thing and you think, well, who’s right? It’s 5050. What I want people to remember, and this is what motivates me every day to come in here to talk to you guys, is that I see the future in this. I see what’s happening, and I see our trajectory in the world’s climate and in Austin’s climate. And I want people to know that. That’s it.

Miles Bloxson There’s no easy answers when it comes to climate change, but that doesn’t mean that people in our music scene can ignore the reality of it.

Elizabeth McQueen And as we move forward, it’s going to be very interesting to see how this city, filled with live music and outdoor venues, deals with a warming world. In the next episode of Pause Play. We’re looking at how changes in the laws in Texas are impacting women and members of the LGBTQ plus community here in the Austin music scene.

Miles Bloxson Pause/Play is a production of KUT and KUTX studios. It is reported produced and hosted by me, Miles Bloxson.

Elizabeth McQueen And me, Elizabeth McQueen. Our executive producer is Matt Reiley.

Miles Bloxson Zahra Crim helps write, record and edit this episode. Production assistants by his senior shop.

Elizabeth McQueen Additional reporting by Jeff McCord, Jake Pearlman and Matt Largey also helped with editing and audio production.

Miles Bloxson Stephanie Federico is our digital editor. Michael Minasi is our multimedia editor.

Elizabeth McQueen Special thanks to Todd Callahan and Peter Babb for their technical support and guidance.

Miles Bloxson Original music for this episode was created by the talented Jaron Marshall.

Elizabeth McQueen Other music provided by the talented Jack Anderson and APM.

This transcript was transcribed by AI, and lightly edited by a human. Accuracy may vary. This text may be revised in the future.