Transcript for #1259 - David Wallace-Wells

I mean, it's pretty bad already, and it's gonna get, I think, a lot, lot worse.

I mean, how long ago were the fires? Right, right?

Yeah, I know the fires, California fires are kind of interesting in that. They both seem like it's like the future of the apocalypse they're here, but also it's so familiar from decades of Wildfires, but you know, they're scientific estimates that say that they're going to get by the end of the century 64 times worse. What? Yeah, I think that number's a little high because that would mean more than half of California burning every year. But I mean, it's going to get, yeah, it'll get, it'll get crazy.

Well, I mean, you know, if we don't raise the temperature of the planet, then.

But there's a lot of preventative stuff you can do. I mean, not building in certain areas. I mean, it used to be, you know, the Indians who lived here before the white people came. did a lot of controlled burning, they like lived among fires. And I think that's like a probably more responsible way to be, but we've now built up the whole state so that there are all these homes that we don't want to burn, there are all these properties we don't want to burn. And when you restrict the ability of natural wildfires to burn, that means that more Tinder gets built over time. And then at some point, some thing lights the match and it all burns. So, I mean, you could do more controlled fire, you could take more aggressive action in terms of, you know, like spraying foam and that kind of thing. You could have a lot more firefighters, but I was just talking to a guy yesterday, I'm out here actually doing some reporting on wildfires, and who is saying that no Santa Ana powered wildfire has ever been stopped by firefighters, and he is like an environmental historian. Wow. It's like you can hope that the winds redirect them, but like the action of firefighters is basically just spitting in the wind.

Yeah, but, you know, it's hard because you, you have a lot more, it's a lot easier to do that when, um, you know, if the land was totally raw, you'd be like, oh, let's, we'll just try to direct the fire in this direction. But if the land is like full of homes, you're like, well, we can't.

Not a person.

Well, the last year there were flames like hopping over the 405, right? I mean, yeah. And that's really like crazy to me because, you know, I'm a New Yorker, I've lived my whole life in New York and I just feel in my bones. I now know it's sort of not true, but like, My inner emotional perspective on the world is that I live in a fortress. I don't live in nature. I walk down on concrete streets. I look up at steel buildings. Nature can't come for me. When you see fire straddling the four or five, that's, you know, this is a major metropolis here. And we're not safe. We're certainly not totally safe. And that's like, for me, that's a major, like a major revelation I've had is that wherever you live, no matter how defended against nature you are, climate change is teaching us that, you know, You still live within climate and when it gets fucked up, it will fuck you up. It will affect you in some way.

And Bella, up to me, Bella is really interesting because it's, you know, most climate impacts, they hit the world's poorest first. And like the wildfires are, they work in the reverse because it's like people living in the hills. Yeah. Those are the rich people. But it just shows you like no matter how rich you are, no matter how comforted by that wealth you are. Like, you know, you might get hit.

Yeah, I mean, I mean, yeah, and you think about Miami Beach going underwater. Right.

I mean, it could out of there. There's basically a sandbar that like some developers in the 20s decided that was, oh, we can make this into a fake paradise. Oh, really? Yeah. I mean, there was, yeah, I was, I mean, LA is kind of the same way. Like nobody looking at LA in 1850 would have said, like, here's a great place to build a city. Right. But we did it anyway. Like America, and it's like Imperial Swagger was like, no, we can create some paradise out of this completely and hospitable land. And both places, and then, you know, it's just a lesson that like, you know, it's just a matter of time.

I mean, if you think about like the long, long sweep of human history, most human settlements didn't happen on the coast. Right. Like people lived, maybe they lived on a river. Maybe you'd have like a little community on a river. But the, you know, the last like 50 years, or 100 years, we built up, especially in America, so much more on the coast. And that's like, You know, really inviting disaster. I mean, all of Houston, like all of that is like, that was floodplain that, like, nature was like, you know, swamp land, it was, and now it's, you know, New suburban developments made out of concrete, and that just means more and more flooding.

I actually really love that city. It's kind of like, um, this great food.

I mean, it cooked. There's, there places in the world that are gonna be, they're gonna literally cook you by 2050. So cities in India and the Middle East, you won't be able to go outside during the summer without ever being a risk of dying by 2050.

Well, it's a combination of heat and humidity, but usually the heat will be up around 130 combined with some bad humidity. But they've already been, we've already broken that threshold. There have been temperature records every year, but last year, broke 130 in Omaha, and I think. But the scarier parts are not some of these crazy desert places that have gotten really hot. It's the cities. It's like Calcutta has 12 million people in it, and you may not be able to live there in the summer in just 30 years. And then you just think about where all these people are going and how much that's gonna destabilize everything.

I mean, I have different feelings about it at different times of day because it's that big a story. It's like going to affect everything, I think. You know, I think civilizations are not going to collapse. I think like there'll be people around, even living like kind of rewarding prosperous lives. forever and the question is like what shaped those lives take and where they're where they are so me personally you know I'm like a relatively well-off person who lives in America in you know New York I think I'll be able to do okay I think my children will be able to do okay and when I imagine their future I think it's a reflection of all of our kind of like cognitive biases and emotional reflexes that when I imagine like my daughter's future I'm imagining a world that seems a lot like the one that we live in today. But when I look at the science, it paints a really, really bleak picture. So, you know, the question of like optimism and alarm, I think it's really all a matter of perspective, right? So, we're at 1.1 degrees Celsius right now. I think there's basically no way that we avoid two degrees of warming, which is like this UN calls, catastrophic warming, the island nations of the world call genocide. And that's when we would be making these cities in the Middle East. Unlivable, it would mean like some ice sheets would start a permanent collapse, which could all of the melted eventually bring 260 feet of sea level rise. And we're on track for four degrees of warming. So that would mean $600 trillion in climate damages by the end of the century. That's twice as much wealth as exist in the world today. It would mean there'd be parts of the world scientists say where you could be hit by six simultaneous climate disasters at once. There'd be at least a few hundred climate refugees. The UN says the low-end estimate is 200 million, the high-end estimate is a billion, which is as many people as live in North and South America come up. Last topic for those against?

Yeah. What does that mean? like flooding, hurricane, famine, you know, some public health issue, like malaria. It's like every category of modern life can be affected by this. And there aren't that many that could be hit by six, but like already right now in Australia, there is a crazy heat wave. It's like over 120 and lots of Australia. They're also dealing with like epic floods in other parts of the country. And That's kind of the problem actually with wildfires in California. It's not just that it's getting hotter. It's also getting wetter. So the more rain means more growth, means when it gets hot again, that growth gets baked and then becomes fire starter. And that's not just a temperature. It's higher temperatures, I mean, crazier extremes in all directions. And that's why I think sort of looking big picture. There's not a life on earth that's going to be untouched by this force, like over the decades ahead. But that's not to say that we're all be destroyed by either. I think like we will find ways to live and adapt and mitigate. It's just a question of how much it's going to screw up our politics, how much it's going to change the way we think of history. You know, like I'm a 90s kid, I grew up, end of history thinking the world was going to get better. The world was going to get richer globalization was progress, et cetera. What does it mean if like climate change completely eliminates the possibility of economic growth? Which probably won't be the case for the US, but there are huge parts of the world with that is going to be the case if we don't change course now. So like at the end of the century, if we don't change course, the economists studying, they say global GDP could be at least 20, possibly 30% smaller than it would be without climate change. 30% is twice as being an impact as the Great Depression.

So I'm a journalist. I'm an editor mostly actually at New York Magazine. And you know, I'm interested in the near future. Like as a result, read a lot of scientific papers, read a lot of obscure subreddits and that kind of thing. Just in 2016 started seeing a lot more of that, a lot more of the news from science was about climate and a lot more of that climate news was really scary. And when I looked around at the other places that like we think of as our competitors, you know, newspapers, TV shows, I just felt like the scarier end of the spectrum was just not at all being talked about. So most scientists talk about this two degree threshold is like the threshold of catastrophe. And I think most lay people think that that means that that's kind of a ceiling for warming. That'll be the worst it could get, but actually it's functionally the best case scenario. And we hadn't had any storytelling, any discussion around what the world would look like north of two degrees. And I just felt as a journalist, I was like, holy shit, there's a huge story here. The way that this world could be completely transformed by these forces is not something that anybody is writing about in Park is a long story, but scientists and science journalists were really They were really focused on making sure that their messaging was hopeful and optimistic and they were reluctant to talk about their scariest findings. And so I was terrified by the science. I looked at it and I was like, nobody's talking about this. It's scary. I got to like spread the word and I wrote a big piece in 2017 that was very focused on worst case scenarios. I mentioned before, I think two degrees about our best case scenario, four degrees is where we're on track four now. This piece was looking at five, six, eight degrees of warming, so things were not likely to get this century at least. And it was a huge phenomenon. It was read by a bunch of million people, the biggest story that New York Magazine had ever published. And I just thought, man, I guess there are a lot of people like me out there who have intuitions about climate, suffering, and terror, but aren't seeing it in the way people are writing about the story. So I decided, you know, there's more to say. And even beyond like telling the bleak story, telling the really dark talking about the really dark possibilities I just thought. They're all these categories of life that we haven't even thought about how they'll impact us. So we we know about sea level rise, but that's like as I mentioned before. That makes you think, if you live off the coast, you'll be okay. But the whole planet is going to be touched by this. Some places are going to be hit harder than others. India is going to be hit by like 29% of all global climate impacts of the century. But everyone's going to be affected in some way. And the way that changes our politics, the way it changes our pop culture, the way it changes our psychology, our mood, our relationship to history, how we think about the future, how we think about the past, what we expect from capitalism, what we blame capitalism for, what we expect from technology, What we think technology can do, can technology save us, can technology entertain us while the world is burning. These are all these kind of like humanities questions that I felt really, really had not been talked about. And so the book does like, it's a tour through what the world would look like between two and four degrees, but it's also, which is a kind of hellscape, but it is also, you know, about half of it is about We're going to live here, we're going to survive in what form, what will it mean? You know, at the mythological level, what will it mean at the personal level, what will it mean, the way we think about our kids and our futures and all that stuff. And, you know, my, my big picture thinking about it is, Yeah, it's really bleak. And I think there are some possible ways that we could have heard some of these worst-case scenarios. I mean, there is technology that can suck carbon out of the atmosphere already. It hasn't been tested at scale. It's really expensive. But if we can over the next decade or two, really build global plantations of these carbon capture machines, Then not only can we like stop the problem from moving forward, we could actually reverse it a little bit.

Yeah, I mean, it's basically like only in theory. They do exist in the real world, but only at kind of like in laboratories. They don't exist at anything like the scale they need to. But there's a guy at Harvard named David Keith who has tested his machines. They're able to take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere at a cost of $100 a ton. which would mean we could totally neutralize the entire carbon footprint of the global economy. We wouldn't have to change anything. We could suck out all the extra carbon we're putting into the atmosphere for cost of $3 trillion a year, which is a lot of money. But there are estimates for how much we're subsidizing the fossil fuel business that is high as $5 trillion a year. So if we just redirected those subsidies to this technology in theory, We could literally solve the problem immediately. There are other complications. It's like, in order to store the carbon, you need an industry that's two or three times the size of our present oil and gas industry, and where that goes and next to whose homes and all that stuff is complicated. But we have the tools we need, it's just a matter of deciding to put them into practice. And I think we're pretty like that, you know. The reason history shows that we're not doing that fast enough. So one of the big, you know, points that I'd like, I'm making the book and it's six of my heads up strongly is, you know, we think of climate change, this thing that started in the Industrial Revolution, like centuries ago. But half of all the carbon that we've put into the atmosphere in the history of humanity, from the burning of fossil fuels, has come in 30 years, the last 30 years, that's since Al Gore published its first book on warming. It's since the UN established their climate change panel. It's since the premiere of Seinfeld. So like you and I have lived through the lion's share of all of the damage done to the climate in all of human history. Yeah. And the next 30 years are going to be just as consequential. So we brought the world from the basically stable climate to the brink of total climate catastrophe in 30 years. One generation. We have about one generation to save it. To me, that's like it makes me uncomfortable to use this language, but it's basically a theological story. We have the entire fate of the planet in the hands of these two generations. What happens 50 years or now? 100 years or now? We'll entirely be up to the way we act now and what we do. And the time scale is so crazy because you have this really compressed, we must act now to avert these worst case scenarios time scale. But also the impacts will unfold if we don't do anything over millennia. So like we could have, you know, if we really bring into being a total melt of all ice sheets, That means that eight centuries from now, 12 centuries from now, people will be dealing with the shit that we're fucking up today. We will be engineering problems for them to be solving 8, 1200, 1500 years from now. And that damage will be done if it is done in the next 30 or 50 years. So we are really writing this epic story about earth humanity and our future on this planet in the time of a single lifetime of single generation and that is on the on the one hand it's sort of like overwhelming but it's also empowering you know like all the climate impacts that I talk about all the climate horrors that are really terrifying if we make them happen we will be making them happen The main input in the system is how much carbon we put into the atmosphere. There are feedback loops that people are worried about. There are things about climate that we can't control, but at least at this point, the main driver of future warming is what we do. And so we could, if we get to a four degree health gap with hundreds of millions or a billion climate refugees, that'll be because of what we're doing. It's not some system outside of our control, even though we're often kind of comforting to think that it's outside of our control, because that means We don't have to change it.

Yeah. No, I think that's, I mean, totally true and I feel it in my own life. Like I, I mean, I've been living, I've been working in this material so long. I know it so deeply and yet when I look out the window, I'm like, you know, things are fine. Yeah. And I think that has a really powerful anchoring effect. Like we expect the world of the future to look like the world as it does today. But all the science says that's totally naive. Yeah. And we're going to have at least twice as much warming as we've had to this point. And I think we need to think about the future of the world in those terms like what it will be at two degrees at three degrees at four degrees. But it's not just like the immediacy, I think we have so many biases that make like we want to be optimistic about the future. We have a status quo bias. We don't want to change things. We think that'll be complicated and expensive. We have a hard time holding big ideas in our head like the entire planet is like subject to these forces. I mean, the list goes on and on. In the book, I have a little riff where I say, you know, There's this new, not so new now, 34 to your discipline in economics, behavioral economics, which is about all of our cognitive biases, how we can't really see the world. Every single one makes it harder to see climate. There's this, he's actually an English professor named Timothy Morton, who wrote a book about climate and he calls it a hyper-object, which is like, it's a phenomenon that's so big. that we can't actually hold it in our heads at once. We can only see it. It's like, if you imagine seeing a four dimensional object in three dimensional space, it's that kind of thing where you can only see it at an angle, only partially, climate change is so all encompassing that we can't comprehend it properly. But I think that's all of those things are reasons. that we need to be listening to the scientists and what they're projecting. Not to say that everything they're saying is going to come true will come true exactly as they predict it. Obviously, that's not how science works, it gets revised, some things are alarmists, some things are extreme, some things just wrong. But, you know, I've been really working on this stuff for a couple of years and the number of papers I've read that show that make me have a more optimistic idea about the culture of climate. I could count on two hands. And the number of papers I've read that make me have a bleaker view of the future. It's in the thousands. And when you look at the totality of that, whether the six climate driven natural disasters prediction is going to pan out exactly as those authors say, who knows. But when you see so many terrifying studies that you could fill, like I did, a 300-page book with them, You realize that there's a huge margin for error and we would still be really in bad shape.

Totally. Yeah, there was, there was a really famous book in the middle of the 20th century called the Population Bond. So this is a guy named Paul Ehrlich, who he was like, you know, the world just cannot support this many people. Like if we get to eight billion people, there just won't be enough food. There won't be, you know, the planet can't sustain that. And he's often pointed to as this sort of like profit of Doomsday that and his prophecy totally didn't work out because we had this thing that's called the green revolution. Basically, we figured out a way is to make crops way, way, way more productive. And that's encouraging. Shumun civilization does that a lot. We figure our way out of foxholes all the time. Yeah. But that revolution was literally like one dude, Norman Borlegg, who figured out how to grow crops differently. In one set of innovations and he completely transformed the whole fate of the planet. What did he do? He just basically did genetically modified crops before like the you know before the name. It was like he's the golden rice guy. Yeah, and you know the whole developing world benefited enormously and you're still seeing that today like we see all these charts that you know so much less poverty so much less infant mortality and in developing world and that's great that's like incredible progress But a lot of that has was powered by the industrialization of those countries so that bill is gonna come due going forward and You know, I think like when you look at climate change You know, if it was just one threat, like let's take agriculture, since we're talking about agriculture. Estimates say that if we continue on the path we're on by the end of the century, grain yields would be half as productive as they are today, just by the temperature effect. So we'd have just as much land, just as much grain crops as we have now, but the food we get from it, we don't get half as much as we get today. What's the cause of that?

It's just the temperature effects. Plants.

Yeah. Wow. I mean, there are other impacts to one food like insects. There's, you know, hotter temperatures means more insects, which is bad for crops. Carbon has a complicated relationship to crop growth, like in some plants grow better, better with more carbon, but actually they're like the weeds and the ones that we like to eat don't grow better with more carbon. And, you know, by the end of the century, so we could have half as much grain and we could have 50% more people than we have right now. Now, there's a way you can imagine, oh, well, like maybe there'll be another Norman Borleug, maybe he'll figure out a way through that. But when you look across the spectrum, it's like agriculture. It's, you know, conflict for every half degree of warming, you need to get between 10 and 20% more war. So if we get to the end of the century, we're going to have more than twice as much war as we have today.

Mainly that famines droughts, whether impacts, basically everything about unstable societies gets stressed by temperature rise. The Syrian Civil War wasn't single-lead caused by climate change, but that's one of the causes there was a drought that produced it. And that conflict, it's not just at the level of nation states, or even civil war, it's also at the level of individuals. So if you look at crime statistics, when temperatures go up, there's more murder, there's more rape. People get admitted to mental hospitals more when it's warmer out. Babies develop less well in the womb, when it's hotter out. For every day, over 90 degrees that a baby's in the womb, you can see those days in that baby's lifetime earnings. And we're living, we're gonna be living on a planet that's considerably warmer. That's going to have real dramatic effects on everything. Air pollution, there's a big study that I write about in the book that's totally alarming and eye-opening. Just between 1.5 degrees and 2 degrees of warming, just through the effects of air pollution, would cause that 1.5 degree of warming would cause an additional 153 million deaths, which is 25 Holocaust. That's just air pollution just between 1.5 and 2 degrees. And 2 degrees for me is our best case scenario. So our best case scenario is 25 Holocaust worth of death from air pollution. And that sounds terrifying people when I say that to them, they're like, holy shit, how could we possibly... that's unconscionable. But already 9 million people are dying every year from air pollution. And we don't pay attention to it. So I think the likelyest outcome, even as we enter into this climate health gap, is that we find ways to turn away and not look at the real pain of people, especially in the developing world. But to answer your earlier question, you can imagine agriculture getting figured out. But when you see just how many impacts there are, It's like, it's everywhere, everything will be changed and it just makes the challenge that much bigger and more complicated because how are you, you know, how are you going to solve the conflict problem? How are you going to solve the problem of having 30% less economic growth? You know, like I said, that's an impact that's twice as big as the Great Depression and it would be permanent. $600 trillion in climate damages, twice as much wealth as exists in the world today. And that's just, you know, then you deal with the refugees food. I mean, it's so all encompassing. And I think that's another reason why we don't want to look at it closely because it's terrifying.

Yeah, I would say, there was some recent report that said it now passed the standard of physics, that like climate science is now more reliable than physics. That's hilarious. But, you know, the, to the, to the buyers, you say things like, You know, the planet was hotter than this before. That's true. Yeah, dinosaurs lived here. Humans were not here. I mean, if we were four degrees warmer, the last time the planet was four degrees warmer, there were palm trees in the Arctic. What's, yeah, really? We've already exited the entire window of temperature that enclose all of human history. So the planet is now warmer than it ever has been when humans were around to walk on it, which means to me it's an open question where the humans would have ever evolved in the first place.

Yeah. And like, to that question, it's like, there are people who say there's some natural warming going on. I don't think that's true. I think most scientists would say it isn't. But I also think if what we're seeing is natural warming, that should terrify us even more. Because it would mean that it's outside of our control. And if we're really heading down the path that we're heading down and we have no control over it, that's even more scary. It should be a comfort that we're doing it because that means we can stop doing it. Right.

Yeah, so it's interesting this guy who I mentioned earlier who's like done the most the sort of most innovative carbon capture machine. I talked to him a few weeks ago and he was like, no, no, no, we shouldn't be using carbon capture. We should be doing solar geoengineering, which is what you're talking about. And that means probably suspending sulfur is like the most useful thing in the atmosphere. Great. We're going to smell like sulfur. The sky would get red. Oh, Jesus. There are all of these aesthetic effects too, which nobody talks about. So like trees are going to just turn immediately brown. I'm not going to turn color. There was a study a couple weeks ago that the oceans are going to change color.

No, no, this is just pure warming. Just from warming. The oceans are going to change color to what? Yeah. I think just from more green to more blue, but. That'd be nice. Yeah. But yeah, so the sulfur thing is, so we could suspend these basically an umbrella of sulfur around in the atmosphere, which would mean that it would some of the sunlight coming to the earth would be reflected back into the atmosphere. And that would mean that the sun would absorb less sunlight. I mean the earth would absorb less sunlight, which would make it a little bit cooler. The problem is that would have some crippling impacts on agriculture. And we basically don't know other side effects they would have.

Well, you could just stop doing it. It has a shelf life. I don't know what it is 10 years. So you could just stop doing it. And that's a big concern actually because if we did that just to mask the amount of global warming that we were doing, then whatever program was responsible for, it would be really vulnerable to terrorism, to war, because if we, if the planet were functionally warmed, say five degrees, but we were suspending enough sulfur that it was actually only two degrees warmer. Then if we just, for instance, like somebody bombed the facility that was doing it, the planet would be immediately tripped into a much, much hotter state. And that would be completely catastrophic, even more catastrophic than a more slow approach to five degrees.

We over a century or several centuries, we might in way as we'd be able to adjust to it.

Yeah. Why sulfur? I think it's just something about the particular characteristic of it. I don't know.

Yeah. And I mean, it's the, um, it's what Fart smell like. Yeah. And the reason that we, with the reason we're able to smell Fart is because sulfur is also, I mean, some related compounds hydrogen sulfide. are really toxic.

Yeah, wait, let me just say one more thing about the solar geoengineering. So the thing about that, this sounds horrifying, this program. People are excited about it because it's really cheap, it's way cheaper than carbon capture. And so there's a positive for it. But it's also We are basically already doing this. So we have what's called small particulate pollution. Um, that's, or aerosol pollution. Um, stuff suspended in the atmosphere. That's why like Delhi is really hard to breathe in because we have a lot of particulate in the atmosphere. That is already suppressing global temperatures by as much as a half degree, or maybe one degree, which means, and that's the reason that those nine million people are dying every year from air pollution. So if we solve that problem, if we solve the air pollution problem, save those nine million lives, every year, we would immediately make the planet at least a half degree warmer and possibly one degree warmer, which would put us at the threshold of catastrophe or above it. So we're sort of already doing this program, just not in a systematic way we're doing it in a half-hazard way. The methane that you mentioned, they're basically two big issues with methane. The first is cows. So yeah, cows produce a ton of methane, which is depending on how you count about 35 or maybe 85 times stronger greenhouse gas than carbon. Yeah, it's really intense. But there are also these small scale studies that show if we feed cattle just a little bit of seaweed, their methane emissions could fall by 95 or 99%. So if that was scalable, which is not clear it is, but if it was, we could immediately eliminate the entire carbon footprint of beef, which people talk about a lot now.

Yeah, just it's a reminder to me that like, you know, you get told, oh, you should eat less hamburgers or whatever, but obviously this is like a problem that's too big to be solved with like individual choices. We need some kind of global policy or national policy about it. But the scarier methane issue is There's all this carbon stored in frozen permafrost in the northern latitudes. That permafrost is melting. And when it melts, that carbon will be released into the atmosphere. We don't know the proportion that it will be released as carbon dioxide versus methane. But there is in that permafrost twice as much carbon as now exists in the atmosphere, which means if it were all released, possibly in a relatively sudden way, it could make our carbon problem immediately three times worse. And it could be even, the effect could even be more dramatic than that if it was released mostly as methane, because methane is a stronger greenhouse gas. Most scientists think that that's not something that we need to freak out about in the short term, but it's there, it is melting, and methane is being released at some rate.

Yeah, it's crazy, right? I mean, I think that we're going to have a whole a century of shit like that and shit like cows eating seaweed that everything, you know, will have our global politics will be reoriented around climate change so that you'll start to see sanctions put against nations that are behaving badly. And BS, the guy who's the kind of thug who's running Saudi Arabia now says, he needs Saudi Arabia as a economy to be totally off oil by 2050. And I think that's because he knows that the global community will not tolerate someone producing more oil as recently as soon as a few decades from now. But the impacts are everywhere so that like, Yeah, like in California now, you can, you know, during wildfire season, you can buy masks to, you know, to shield yourself from the smoke, which is really, really damaging. It's effects on cognitive performance or really dramatic. Can lower cognitive performance by like 10 to 15 percent. It's effects on the development of kids is really dramatic. There was an incredible study a few years ago, where if you looked at places where they instituted easy, do you have easy paths out here in California?

So it used to be the case that cars had to like slow down and pay a toll. Yeah. And because they were slowing down, they produced more exhaust. When they instituted easy pass cars could just drive through, and then meant they produced less exhaust. And the effect on the on premature birth and low birth weight in the areas where they instituted these new easy pass toll plazas, it reduced them by like 15% each. That's how dramatic just the exhaust effect is on development of babies.

Yeah. But yeah, I mean, that problem on the technological level has been solved. We know how to replace cars with electric cars. We can make them even pretty affordable, not quite as affordable as they need to be, but the new Tesla's are like 35 grand, I think. If you get it down to 15 grand, that'll be a huge solution, but then there are a lot of other problems that are more difficult like air travel. You can't, we don't have electric planes around the corner. You can't fly planes.

There are some people who are trying to develop it, but it seems like probably it's at least like a decade away. And one cross country flight in the US is the equivalent of eight months of driving. Every time you fly from New York to London and back, you melt nine, three square meters of ice. Every single seat on every flight from New York to London, melts three square meters of ice of Arctic ice.

Yeah. Whoa. So globally, air travel is only 2% of the carbon footprint, so it's relatively small. But for people in especially rich people in rich countries, it's a much bigger part of the focus than fly around all. Yes. But yeah, I know the average American, I think the stat is the average American every year amidst enough carbon to melt 10,000 tons of ice. Jesus Christ. That's just the average American.

Yeah. Oh.

I mean, there's a lot of ice. Yeah. But it's gonna melt. Well, that's how you get, you know, the outside projections, the high end projections for a sea level, eyes are 260 feet.

Well, the, you know, the each of the, so they've been five mass extinctions in planetary history in our history before. One of them was caused by an asteroid, but the other four were produced by global warming related to greenhouse gas. And one of them, the Ice Age. Well, the Ice Age doesn't count. It didn't kill as many. No. Really? The biggest mass extinction, the end-permian extinction, which was 252 million years ago, 90 to 95 percent of all life on Earth died. When was that? 252 million years ago. So each of these mass extensions basically is like a complete slate wiping of the evolutionary record. It's like we're starting over from scratch.

Well, they're five and four of them were from global warming. And the worst one was just from greenhouse gas warming. But yeah, the one that killed the dinosaurs was also really bad. It was something like 70% of all life on it.

Yeah. Wow. There was a volcano. This is a little bit sketchy science, but there was a volcano explosion. Something like 30,000 years ago or something I don't remember the exact dates but that volcanoes can cool global temperature for the same reason we're talking about with suspending particles because it basically clouds the atmosphere with and it dropped global temperatures I think it was two degrees and the human population at the time then shrunk to 7,000 there was a bunch of times that's the less people than live on the antacids And it just, it just makes you see like everything about the way that we live on this planet is dependent on climate conditions. Yeah. Like we'll figure a way to like have a civilization, but it will be transformed, it will be very different if the world is four degrees warmer. And you know, everything about the way that we take for everything we take for granted today is like a permanent feature. of the modern world, I think we're going to learn is much more precarious, much more unstable. And yeah, like I said earlier, you know, climates were stable for all of human history. That's how we were able to evolve. It's how we were able to invent agriculture. The part of the world where we did invent agriculture, the Middle East, it's now getting almost too hot to grow crops. It's also going to be too hot to go to Mecca for pilgrimage in just a couple of decades. Whether like we're entirely outside of that window of temperatures, which means we're functionally now living on an entirely different planet than humans ever lived on before. And it's going to keep changing. So by the time we get to two, three, four degrees, will be living in a climate that's, you know, two or three or four times as much different as the one that we're as now from the one before the Industrial Revolution. And yeah, it's like those impacts could be totally overwhelming and catastrophic.

I think it proved to be too sanguine. It like it didn't deal with a lot of extreme weather. It thought that stuff was far away. And I think this is one of the one of the big shortcomings of most writing about climate. Most kind of communication about climate for 25 years is that we were told it was slow. We were told it was going to be coming Maybe at the scale of centuries, something we'd have to worry about for our grandchildren. But when you realize that half of all the damage we've done has been done in the last 30 years, and you see already the extreme weather, we had a global heat wave last summer, totally unprecedented. People died. In Canada, they died in Russia, they died in the Middle East, the same season. Three million people were evacuated in China from a typhoon. Unprecedented rains in Japan. We had multiple hurricanes in the Caribbean all at once. There was an island in Hawaii east island to small island, not one that most people have gone to, but got literally wiped off the map by a hurricane. They're thinking about inventing a new category of hurricane, category six. All of these impacts were are coming much faster than scientists predicted even a decade or two ago. And so I think the first inconvenient truth is a little too complacent. But Al Gore is also, you know, I know him a little bit. I've talked to him a few times. He's temperamentally. He's a technocrat. He's an optimist. He thinks market forces can solve all this stuff. And I don't even totally disagree with them. I think that market force is a really powerful. We've had a huge green energy revolution in the U.S. that's, you know, and had spillover effects elsewhere in the world. So solar powers now cheaper than anybody expected it would be decade or two ago. Although it's also the case that we haven't replaced any of our dirty energy with it. We've just added to our capacity. So the ratio of renewable energy to dirty energy is now the same as it was 40 years ago, who made no progress. Why is that? Because we're rather than saying, oh, let's retire this coal plant and replace it with a wind farm. We think, oh, we'll have the coal plant and the wind farm. We'll have more energy. You know, we just grow the pot of energy.

I mean, I think on some level American policy is a red herring. The US is 15% of global emissions and we're falling. The future climate of the world will be determined by China, by India, by Sub-Saharan Africa. Those are carbon footprints that are growing China's now almost twice as big a carbon footprint as the U.S. And they're building all this infrastructure outside of China that doesn't even count in Asia and Africa, you know, the Belt and Road, you know, this project. basically taking the model that the US had with the Suez Canal and the Panama Canal and they're building the infrastructure of the developing world. So recently they loaned Kenya a huge amount of money to build a new rail line which was being built with Chinese workers. They built the rail line, then can you can pay back the debt? So China is threatening to take over the entire port of Mambasa as debt repayment. And this is like going on all around the world, highways across Africa, across Asia are being built by Chinese workers as an effort to build a new imperial infrastructure for themselves.

That's one motive. I think that the Kenya exam, but they'd be happy if the deck I repaid. I think they're stitching together an alternative to the Western infrastructure of trade and transit. They're basically stitching together an entire second system of how the world will work, how the economy will work, and it will be conducted through their own infrastructure and through their own ports and through their own airports. And that's being done by their own standards. So China is now pouring more concrete every three years than the US port in the entire 20th century. And if concrete were a country it would be the world's third biggest carbon emitter. So the path of development of these other countries, China, India and Sub-Saharan Africa, are really what's going to be writing the story of the future. America has a kind of, I think, like a moral obligation to lead because historically we had the biggest carbon footprint, but at the moment we're a relatively small part of the problem. And within the US, market forces are doing a lot of, are making a lot of progress for us. So the real issue is how do we figure out a new geopolitics that forces countries like China to act better? And one answer may be as weird as it is to say that Xi Jinping is basically a dictator. If he wants to impose new standards, if he wants to invest aggressively in green energy, He doesn't have any of the political obstacles that we have in the U.S. And so there's a sort of weird sympathy among American climate people for that authoritarianism. And he has, especially since Trump has been elected, been a lot more aggressive about talking about climate because he sees if America's not going to be leading this is an opportunity for China to be like the real face of climate and that means they've paid they've you know they've invested a ton in in solar and wind they've done a lot with air pollution so Beijing used to be really awful in 2013 in more than a million Chinese people died of air pollution and now that's much better what have they done Just imposing stricter standards on pollution.

That kind of stuff, yeah. But we think about carbon and the whole problem, I think a little too much in terms of energy. Energy is just 30% of the global carbon footprint. And it's the easiest one to solve because wind and solar is actually really cheap now. Most parts of the world is cheaper than dirty energy.

Well, it's all nothing's a majority. So there's energy, there's infrastructure, there's transportation, and agriculture is like a huge underappreciated part of it. It's something like 30% of the global footprint.

I mean, really, everything you need to do to live in the world has some kind of carbon footprint. But, you know, if we were able to like feed all our cattle seaweed, that would have like a big, that would have a big impact. But all kinds of crops have carbon footprints.

Well, you could also do, you know, you could imagine lab grown meat having a much smaller carbon footprint. I mean, it should if it like proceeds as we expect it will. And like I said before, like when you look at each particular threat, there's like you can see reasons for optimism. You can see like, oh, we'll figure it out in this way. We'll figure it out in that way. But the UN says we need to have all of our global emissions by 2030 to have a chance of a verding two degrees of warming, which they call catastrophic warming. The projects that we need to put into place in those 11 years are just much bigger than I think we're capable of pulling off. They say the UN says, what is necessary is a global mobilization. at the level of World War II against climate, starting this year, 2019. And there's just no chance we're going to do that anytime soon. I mean, maybe 10 years or now we'll get there. That may even be optimistic. But the total decarbonization that's required is we need to totally zero out on carbon by 2050, they say. And I just think a lot of these sectors are much trickier. We could maybe zero out on energy. Zero out on carbon when it comes to energy in 15 years if we wanted to. But again, that's just 30% of the total problem. Which is why I think there's the negative emission stuff, the carbon capture is so important because it will allow us to move more slowly than the UN says we need to, and still, if it works out, you know, keep the planet relatively stable, relatively livable. But that's, you know, those technologies have been called magical, magical thinking by like the journal nature, which is like the biggest scientific channel, writing about this stuff. So it's sort of a leap of faith to think that they could sell that problem.

Totally and I think that that's happening. You know, I think there was this big report that the UN did in October that spurred a lot of conversation about it. And I think that in a grotesque way, the best teacher is just extreme weather. You know, when you see every year these California wildfires every year they're burning. And that is really dramatic people I talk to in Europe are focused on the California fires. Even though they have wildfires over there, there's something we've had to California fires that they're really worried about. When you see these global heat waves, when you see unprecedented hurricane seasons, we just had to type food in the Pacific and February, first time in recorded history. You know, when every day on the news, there's some dramatic extreme weather and when they come one after the other, I think that's a really powerful teaching tool. So, you know, there's this term, it's now outdated, but 500 year storm you hear a lot about. 500-year storm means hurricane that would hit a particular area once every five centuries, right? That means five centuries ago there were no white people in America. So that means we're talking about a storm that would hump, come once, as colonists came to America, as they, you know, committed genocide against the Native Americans, as they built their own empire, as they built an empire of slaves and cotton, as they fought a civil war, as they fought World War I, as they fought World War II, everything that we've done, we'd expect one storm of that kind in that time. Hurricane Harvey was the third, 500-year storm to hit Houston in three years. We are living in such unprecedented climate that it's impossible to look at the news and not learn that. Despite all of our inclinations, all of our reflexes to look away, I think it is seeping in. I think people are beginning to be more alarmed about it. And I think alarm is really useful. There are people in the climate community who think it's dangerous to scare people. It turns them off. I'm somebody who's awakened to this out of fear. And when I look at the history of environmental activism, when I look at activism generally, like we don't try to get people to stop smoking cigarettes by like messaging through optimism. We try to get them to stop because we tell them how bad it's going to be for them. Drunk driving nuclear proliferation, same thing. Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring about pesticides. It was called hyperbolic alarmist. It led to the creation of the EPA. And when you think about that UN directive that we should be mobilizing the scale of World War II to come back climate. We didn't fight World War II out of hope. We fought World War II out of panic. And I think that that should be part of how we think about this story. Obviously, I think, you know, when I look around the world, when I talk to anyone, when I talk to my family, when I watch TV, when I watch Moot, whatever, read stuff. It just seems obvious to me that there are many more people who are still too complacent about this issue. Even if they're concerned about it a little bit, even if they're aware of it, They don't think of it as like the overarching, all-encompassing story of our time that requires an existential response. And even saying those words make me uncomfortable because it's hard for me to believe that the threat is that big. But that is what the science says. And like I said before, some of that science is not going to get born out, but when you look at the full scope of it and just how large, just how bleak the impacts will be, you realize we really need to wake up to just how dangerous a world we're heading into and do everything we can to avoid it.

There's no safe, like simplysafe. Jim, to probably planning. to adapt.

I mean, I think in a situation like that, most people emerge from a particular disaster and think, my God, since this is so awful, it must be unemaly. And I think New York was really horrified as a city by Sandy, but There's going to be sandies, I remember the exact stat, like, once every five years, but it's a category storm of sandy. I think it may land fall as a category three.

No, it's possible. Totally possible. I was talking to a really prominent climate scientist a few months ago, who is like one of the, he was one of the lead authors on the U.N. report. Um, lives in New York. Does a lot of consulting with the city. And I said, so we're going to build a C wall to protect New York from flooding. And he was like, oh, absolutely, you know, Manhattan real estate is way too expensive to let flood. So we'll definitely build a sea wall, but an infrastructure project like that takes at least 30 years to build. And if we started right now, we wouldn't be able to finish in time to save Howard Beach and parts of Brooklyn and Queens. If we started right now, he said, he said, the city knows this. And you'll see in the next few years, they'll stop doing repairs on infrastructure, they'll stop attending to the subway lines in those neighborhoods. And even a few years after that, they'll start staying explicitly to the people who live there. You might be able to continue living in these homes for a couple decades, but you're not going to be able to live them to your kids. This isn't New York City. It's like the richest country in the world. And yeah, a huge part of huge parts of Southern Brooklyn and Queens are going to be underwater.

Well, the one that he mentioned most explicitly was Howard Beach, but which is it's kind of an inch. It's like a mob neighborhood and you know, it's still Yeah. Really? Well.

Yeah, that's where they buried all the dead bodies. Wow. I didn't know that was still a mob named road. Well, you know, to the extent that there is a mob. Yeah. And yeah, I mean, that's true everywhere on the coast everywhere. It's not just New York, New York's not exceptional. Right. You know, there are projections that like $30 billion of New Jersey real estate could be underwater by 2030. 2030. Why not not as alarming?

And then, you know, Miami Beach is, you know, Miami Beach is done for.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, they could, they could build a sea wall.

And it's just so expensive. So you really have to, you really have to pick your poison. And then when you look around the world, you know, It's like Bangladesh, that country is going to be almost entirely underwater. That's hundreds of millions of people. If we wanted to build a sea wall, they can't afford that. Who's gonna pay for that?

And I think, you know, we think of sea level as really a thing that happens on the coastline, which is primarily, but it also increases flooding on rivers, because the water is all connected. So flooding in the UK is expected to grow 50 folds by the end of the century. What? Well, the love default London is already like underwater a couple times a year. I mean not the whole city, but what is this jamming?

Yeah, Jakarta will be totally underwater.

What? I mean, over millennia. They're gonna rise hundreds of feet. Oh God. I mean, it's gonna take a long time so you can adjust it a little bit.

Yeah.

I mean, I think I would, like people ask me that all the time, and I say, you know, honestly, the place that I would move to is somewhere in Scandinavia, really. Because, you know, I talked about the impacts of economic growth before, but there are going to be parts of the world that benefit economically from this. Anywhere in the north so Canada Russia and Scandinavia will benefit because Why don't go to Scandinavia go to Canada?

Well, it's Scandinavia.

That's your bears. Yeah Not lines. But so, you know, these guys, the economists who study the stuff say that there is actually an optimal temperature for human productivity. It's 13 degrees Celsius, which is the historical median temperature of the U.S. It's also the historical median temperature of Germany.

Yeah, I think it's like in the high 50s.

Yeah, they're like all the shit. It's 22 degrees 55. And so for every degree north of that, you lose about a percentage point of GDP. So the US is now at about 13 and a half degree Celsius. As our median temperature, that means that we're losing about a half percentage point of GDP every year from it. But there are parts of the US that work cooler than 13 and are now brought up to this optimal level. Silicon Valley is exactly at 13 degrees right now, which is notable because they're like

And that's going to be, so that'll be true for Scandinavia generally and it may be part of the explanation why there's been so much economic productivity and Scandinavia of the last generation is that they have already started doing better with temperature. Crops are going to be more bound to full in Russia. Like Russia will have better agriculture because of global warming, which is why they make such a, you know, they're such a complicated figure in the geopolitical story about climate, so they're a petrostate. They have almost all their economic activity has to do with burning oil, but they're also poised to benefit from warming. So they're doubly motivated to produce more global warming. And they have such a fuck the rest of the world perspective that they're not going to stop. Whereas Canada, probably they're likely to, even though they'd benefit from more warming, they'll probably get on board with any program to avert warming. But that's a dilemma that faces every nation, like Justin Trudeau, gets talks a lot of shit about Donald Trump and his climate policy, but Justin Trudeau is also approving new pipelines. Angela Merkel does the same, but she is retiring nuclear so quickly in Germany that they're having to use dirty energy, and even though they've had this incredible green energy revolution there, their emissions are going up. And every country in the world is a collective action problem. Every country in the world is incentivized to behave badly and let the rest of the world clean up the mess. So I started this guy yesterday about wildfires and he was like, you know, California is doing so great. You know, with all of the emission standards, they're basically, you know, holding themselves to the Paris Accords, even though the country is a whole isn't. But that impact isn't local. It's global. So it's dissipated. The temperature impact on California wildfires will be determined by, like I said earlier, basically what China does. So in terms of, you know, what any individual area, what any individual nation is doing, the motivations are really, really complicated there. And in California in particular, this is a bit of a tangent. But, you know, the state has done incredible stuff with emission standards, fuel efficiency, green energy. And yet, all of those gains now, are wiped out every year by the fires because fires are trees, trees are burning, trees are basically coal in the sense that they are stored carbon when they burn, they release carbon into the atmosphere. So every time they're wildfires like they were last year in California, it literally wipes out all of the progress that the state made in all of its green initiatives that year. Yeah. And you know about, in Brazil, the President in Brazil wants to, like, basically de-farce the Amazon. The Amazon is responsible for something like 30% of the world's oxygen and is a huge, some all plants obviously absorb carbon and produce oxygen. It's a plant life is really good for fighting climate change.

So the scientists who studies his proposal say that his plans would be the equivalent of adding over a tenure period, adding a second China to the world's global footprint.

Yeah. Well, he has a kind of a Trumpy like I'm going to fuck that environmentalists perspective too. So he's just like, I a little bit like, you know, whatever flipping the bird to people who care about it. And that just makes you think that like it seems crazy now, but it really won't be crazy, I think, a generation from now for another country to threaten at least sanctions and maybe military action to deal with that. After World War II, we built a whole liberal international order around the principle of human rights that would have been unthinkable in the 20s, and yet it led to a series of military intervention over the next half century. because people were behaving badly toward their own citizens. If we could do that, it doesn't seem all that crazy to me that say 30 years or now, an empowered imperial China looking at someone like Bolsonaro in Brazil would just be like, no, you can't do that. I'm just going to, we're just going to go in and take you out. And this is what I mean when I say it's kind of all encompassing all impacting threats. Our politics will be shaped by it, our geopolitics will be shaped by it, our, you know, everything will be shaped by it. We could have climate wars like in the not-to-distant future. Jesus Christ.

So, you know, I wrote this article a couple of years ago that produced, I mean, it was a huge sort of viral phenomenon, but it produced also some scientific criticism. And, you know, we published a fully annotated version where every single lot we showed where every single line came from, but there were still scientists who were arguing about whether the messaging was precisely calibrated, whether it was too bleak, too dark. The book has had none of that. I mean, it's, first of all, it's been, it's the first week, it was on the Times, bestseller list, number six, bestseller in England. It's been in that of the Amazon top 10. And all of the reviews have been really kind. I think this goes to what you were saying before, I think the conversation is changing. People are actually really interested in Talking seriously about just how big a deal this is in a way that they might not have been just a year ago Where is the resistance though is there any resistance to it right now to the book? Well not just the book, but just the concept in general 73% of Americans believe climate change is real 70% of Americans are concerned about it those numbers are up 15% since 2015 who are the 27 that don't? I mean, I think it's, you know, it's hard right wingers. Yeah. Yeah. But you know, those numbers, we live in a culture now where like most people's worldview passes through a prism of partisan politics. So like, you know, there's amazing studies that show that In the early 90s, there was no partisan divide between on the question of whether OJ Simpson was guilty. When you control for race, Republicans and Democrats had the same idea about OJ Simpson's guilt. That is totally unthinkable today, and there's now a huge partisan split on whether 12 years of slave deserves an Oscar. partisanship has like totally taken over our minds such that the fact that we have 73% of Americans who believe global warming is real and happening to me that's a really fucking high number actually because one of the two parts I don't think that the Republican Party is really any more a deny or party I think they're just a party of skeptics and self-interest they want to like look out for business interests which actually the calculus there is changing which I'll talk about in a second But people don't want to believe that horrifying things are real because who would? It's terrifying. But 73% of the country, that's a lot. I mean, that's more support than there is for just about anything. So I'm like basically, and the speed at which those numbers have grown is really dramatic. I said 15 points since 2015, 8 points just since March has moved up. That's incredible. And I do think that the economic logic is really powerful here. So it used to be the case that there was economic conventional wisdom that action on climate was going to be really expensive because you require massive upfront investment and it would mean also for going economic growth. But all of the new research, the last couple years, reverses that logic totally. So there was a big report, 2018, that said that we could add $26 trillion to the global economy through rapid decarbonization by just 2030. We could avoid all of these horrible $600 trillion impacts that we're talking about if we decarbonize rapidly. And there are also obviously business opportunities there. Their whole solar empire is to build their whole new electric grid to build. So the economic conventional wisdom is now that fast action on climate is better for the economy than slow action on climate. That hasn't yet totally taken over the perspective of our policy makers globally, but I think it will soon, and when it does, I think that we'll see a real sea change in their perspective because I think for a long time even people who cared about climate thought well I want to do something but if I have to like cost some people some jobs and cost like a percentage point of economic growth that's not worth it let me just kick the can down the road this is a slow moving phenomenon will invent our way out of it will grow our way out of it but all the new research says like let's get started right now and We'll see how that plays out. I mean if we really have to have global emissions by 2030, it means really, really aggressive action. which I don't think is possible. But I do think that we'll see much more aggressive action in the decade ahead than we've had in the decades in the past.

Yeah, well, also that, I mean, direct investment of particular companies, but also, you know, government leaders who look around and say, if the economic picture is going to be better 10 years from now, if we make massive investments in green energy, then it would be, and even like, past laws, you know, regulating, say fuel efficiency or even banning internal combustion engines, which I think will happen within a couple of decades. If that's going to be, if the economic picture taking that path is much rosier than the economic picture of inaction, I think they'll go down the path of action. And again, the question is how aggressively, how quickly, and in what form, but I do think that, I do think the incentives will be different. five years or now, then they looked five years ago, and that'll be huge.

Yeah. Well, I mean, if you look around the world, denial is not really a problem anywhere, but the US. There's a little bit of an in the UK, but it's a totally American phenomenon.

I think it's basically bad behavior by the oil companies. I mean, they've put out really aggressive disinformation in denial.

Yeah, totally. And I know that the people who wrote the book too are really, really great. And, you know, it's especially horrifying because in the 60s and 70s, the oil companies were like doing some of the most ambitious research on climate. So they're, you know, then they ended up suppressing that going forward. They knew shit about how the planet was going to change before any of the rest of us. Really. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, you know somewhere around then. If we had started decarbonization in 2000, which just coincidentally was the year that I'll go on the pop. We would have had to globally cut emissions by about 3% per year to get below 2 degrees. We're now at a spot where we have to cut them by about 10% per year. And if we wait another decade, we're going to have to cut them by 30% per year, which is like an unthinkable rate. We wouldn't have had to take such aggressive action if we had started early. We would have had to just be doing moderate kind of on the margins changes. But we're now in a situation where the problem is way too big for that. And there are people who want to talk about the solutions that could have been useful 20 years ago. Now, talking about the carbon tax is like one quite popular thing to talk about. The UN says that in order to be effective, the global carbon tax, would need to be perhaps as high as $5,500 at ton, and there's nowhere else in the world. There's nowhere in the world where there's a tax that's even 100th as high as that right now. And the places in the world where they do have carbon taxes, everybody's emissions are still growing up. So there was a time when like the kind of like you don't have to change anything, we'll just like fiddle on the margins here, could have worked if we had taken, if we had really been focused on it, but we're sort of past that point now, unfortunately. But it's interesting, you know, talking about the oil companies, I think they're responsible for denial, but I also think that denial is not all that important in American politics. Because when you look around the world, you see many countries with very different politics, even quite universally focused on climate issues who are not behaving any better when it comes to carbon than we are. And so you think, well, what is the sickness here? Is it the Republican Party and their climate denial? Or is it the fact that all of us just want more better, cheaper, stuff? And we have a really hard time conceiving of different paths that don't push us forward towards more consumption and more modern amenities that we sort of assume will keep accumulating over time. I mean, people say financial capitalism is the problem. I have some sympathy for that view, but I also look around the world. I see social democracies who are behaving really poorly when it comes to carbon. I see socialist countries who are behaving really poorly when it comes to carbon. It seems on some of the legacy even deeper than the systems that we have to organize and manage our cultural priorities. And they're now getting back to the ability of the oil companies. They're now all these lawsuits that are being brought against them for basically on the model of the cigarette companies like that for climate damages. And that maybe they may be victorious. They may put some of these companies out of business. I think it's not that likely, but it's possible. They're also other lawsuits that are happening that are really interesting. There's one in the Netherlands that some people held the Dutch government, basically the Dutch government was not honoring the Paris Accords and citizens sued to hold them to that. And one in the case, so the Dutch government is now obligated legally to do better on climate than they were doing on their own. And in the US, there's this amazing court case called Juliana, first the United States, which is a lawsuit being brought by kids. using this kind of ingenious use of the equal protection clause, there are arguing that their generation has been exposed to climate damages that the previous generation, their parents generation, were protected from. And so they're saying this climate policy is a violation of the equal protection clause. You're not protecting us in the same way that you protected our parents. That's at the district court in Oregon, which is just one level below the Supreme Court. I think it'll win in the district court, almost certainly won't win at the Supreme Court. But if it did win in the Supreme Court, it would immediately obligate the US to a totally maximalist climate policy because it's literally impossible to protect the next generation from climate damages as fully as the previous generation was. But they'd be obligated to do everything they could, which would mean suddenly something like the World War II scale mobilization that the UN calls for, which would be really kind of dramatic and incredible. And I think that's one path forward, just through litigation. Because so many places in the world, it's not just politics, our inert, like American politics, our inert. It's just, there's a lot of slum-moving bureaucracy and slum-moving public opinion. And in the same way that a lot of civil rights victories were fought and won in the courts, I think we might be able to make some progress in the courts on climate too. We'll say.

The first step is just ending fossil fuel subsidies. I mean, there's no reason why these companies should be receiving public money. And why are there? Just in competency advantages, their well-connected companies, a lot of them are really big and powerful. And any government in the world is not going to want a major industry to like completely collapse. But you know, if we're really subsidizing them five trillion dollars a year, that's a ton of money that could be poured into green it like to R&D of new technology. It could be poured into the carbon capture like we talked about before. That's just an unbelievable resource and it would accelerate. the decline of coal in particular and other oil, other fossil fuel businesses, which would be great. Is there any discussion about that? In individual countries, yeah, but it's slow moving. You know, there's stuff about, people are taking action in all different ways at all different levels, which I think is basically necessary, so they're cities in Europe where cars are now being banned. Cars, yeah, in the city, yeah. Just like writing around. Yeah. You've been living on the LA too long. You could do that. In Amsterdam, you could do that.

Yeah. Well, I mean, I think maybe it'll just be, you can only have an electric car. You know, maybe 10 years from now, like it'll be illegal in the US to build like a, you know, a gas gasoline car.

Yeah.

It's kind of like a space. I mean, Tesla's are kind of like there's kind of like spaceships though. They feel, I mean, there's it. Have you been in one? Yeah. You driven one? I haven't driven one. I've been driven one. Yeah.

They're stupid and you spend all that money on gas. What would you want to do?

I feel like at the aesthetic level, I understand that mocking of the Prius. But I feel like the Tesla is actually a little macho.

Yeah. Yeah. But I mean, it's like, you know, yeah, we live in a sick culture where like being like healthy and responsible. Yeah.

They're not as attached to their trucks. We're gross.

Now, I mean, he's incredible. I think, you know, like, there are reasons why he gets the shit that he gets, but I also think like Tesla and Solar City are incredibly important. And I'm actually, I don't understand why there aren't more people in Silicon Valley who are focused on climate in this way. Like, obviously, they want, like, these are people who see themselves as gods who want to be a world historical figures. They're literally, they do that.

All the space exploration stuff though. It's like, you know, all the people are obsessed with it. And the life extension extension.

But you can do so much good with that. Yes. So based on this pouring a billion dollars a year into his into his space exploration project, which is like, I mean, I'm excited by space two. I think it'd be cool to go up there, but there's some pressing problems here, which we could really benefit. You know, that money could really benefit.

Yeah. I mean, it's factors. It's an asteroid thing, I think.

on the particular question of climate, there's just no way that the Earth is going to get as inhospitable as Mars is. So the idea of building a colony there as a hedge against global warming is just crazy.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, Venus used to be actually quite Earth-like. Yeah. And they went through a really rapid global warming. That made it now. It's like a total hellhole. Right. And that's like the sort of worst case, worst case for Earth is the Venus scenario.

I mean, I believe that, and I'm with it, I just think the time scale of the threat that we need to avert by space exploration, that's a time scale of millennia. Yes. We have a lot of new technology develop over the next thousand years that'll allow us to do it better and more efficiently. But climate change of the time scale is like the next 30 years. Right. So we need to focus on it now to give ourselves the opportunity to do the other shit.

I mean, I think for these dudes. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, also in this generation of people really grew up in the age of like the space race. Yeah. I mean, it's, um, and the aftermath of landing on the moon. And I think there is, like Peter Teele talks about this. There's this kind of unfulfilled sense of future that we all like anybody who grew up in the post-war years in the 60s. They were like, You know, whatever his famous line where promised flying cars and all we got was 140 characters or whatever. I think that applies to the space exploration stuff. It's like, well, the government is no longer doing the really ambitious shit. But we can do it privately. On the other hand, there is a government in the world that is doing that shit in China. They just landed on the far side of the moon. They're doing really aggressive space exploration. And I haven't been there in 20 years, but the people I know who live there say, There is so much faith in the future there. They just believe in a very inherent deep down way that like the future will be better and sci-fi, e in an exciting way. And that's so far and from the way that Americans think about the future.

I think it's just like they're on a huge upswing. Right.

Yeah. Totally. I mean, that's what I was saying before. It's like it gives you some hope for climate. If like Xi Jinping is just like, okay, immediately no more coal. They'll all stop. Yeah. But he's also throwing two million Muslims in concentration camps.

I think when you look at, I mean, not to get to like, armchair, psychologically, but when you look at the physical transformation that he's put himself through, when you think about like the life extension, what does he done physically? Well, he's just like, I mean, if you look at photos of him when he's like a young man, he's, you know, just kind of like, do we be? Right. And now he's like, an action hero. Is he really? Yeah. I mean, maybe not like you, but he's like, he's, yeah, he's pretty, it's based on Jack to my missing something. Let me show you how he looks different.

I mean, no, I'm not blaming him. But that's only one part of it. I would say bigger than that is, you know, the, I just have thin skinned the worlds.

I'm not a business. Hey, I think Amazon has been actually really pretty great.

There's so many busy into that ship. He is actually I think not as into it to some other people.

Inevitable. Yeah. Yeah, totally. I mean, Eric Schmidt has said about climate change that the solution is already here in the sense that AI will just solve it. And it's like, well, no.

Yeah. Well, the brain upload stuff is interesting to me with regard to climate just because it's like a portal through which we can escape environmental degradation. So if the world is on fire and full of suffering, Maybe we can just upload our minds to some machines and not live in the real world anymore. And when I think about even my relationship to my phone, like Tech Addiction Generally, we're sort of being taught to think of the world on our screens as more real than the world that's around us. And that sounds in a lot of ways like declineist and whatever, but I also think it may be a kind of coping mechanism for a world that we're about to head into where there is that much more suffering. And when I see, for instance, like the whole wellness movement, I think there are intuitions there about the toxicity of the world and how we have to avoid it. I think the way that it'll reshape our own sense of self and relationship to the world and idea of our place and nature and history, all of these things are really up in the air and will be affected by climate change. I think in ways that we don't yet appreciate or understand.

Step number one is ending fossil fuel subsidies and fossil fuel subsidies. Step number two. Step number two, just massive R&D investment, a massive investment in R&D and new infrastructure, which would be great for the economy, right?

Yeah. And, yeah, new energy sources. I mean, you know, there really, there are already new business empires that were from the climate change era. There are new solar empires, there are new wind empires. But that can happen globally, that needs to happen globally. And, you know, that's, you know, then we have to deal with agriculture, which may be about seaweed, it may be about lab grown meat, I don't know. But, you know, it's like the big picture It's all carbon. It's all just how much carbon we put into the atmosphere. So I think it will come to be the case that in the decades ahead. Everything about the way that we interact with the world will be described and understood in terms of carbon. So that, for instance, you're walked down the aisle in the supermarket, you see organic food, you see non-GMO food, you'll also see like carbon-free food. I think that'll be a big part of the way that we consume everything that things will be advertised that way, promoted that way. Globally, we just need to really focus on reducing carbon. It's like, and wherever it is, which is almost everywhere, we need to figure out new ways to do whatever it is we're doing. That's causing that problem.

I feel like that's already kind of how this should be.

Yeah. I mean, I think in different parts of the world, people will relate differently to it. So like, yeah, in China, there's scheduled to have this huge boom in beef consumption and dairy consumption because it's expected that as that country gets richer, the people will adopt a more Western diet. But it's also possible that they won't. That like the new Chinese middle class will be still really interested in, you know, tofu, less interested in beef, less interested in milk. They are, you know, and it might be, it might be easier to have them follow that path. And it will be to make the American average American eat less beef. But You know, it's everywhere. It's like everywhere. Everywhere you look, there's some little problem to solve. But then when you pull back, it really is just carbon. It's like absolutely everything. If you think about everything you do in terms of the carbon impact it has, then the solutions suggest themselves. And I do think that in the coming decades, even if you and I don't start to think in those terms, our policy makers will, that like everything will be We're entering into a new trade agreement with Japan. What's the carbon budget here? How's the carbon behavior? We're providing some public subsidies for this factory over here. What's their emission situation? Can we ask them to... bring along some carbon capture plants so that they reduce their footprint. Every level, the level of the individual, like talking about buying a Tesla or buying a Range Rover or whatever, I think we'll start to think in terms of carbon, and that'll be a sign of just how total climate change will have, how totally climate change will have conquered, the world so that there won't be an aspect of modern life that will be not just untouched but in a certain way kind of ungoverned by it yeah what about uh

Yeah. I mean, I think in general, like climate messaging, climate communication is really suffered for a long time because it was so preachy and because it was so wholeier than now.

Totally. And I've been asked, as I've been promoting the book, by a lot of people, like, what have you done in your life to change? And it's like, well, I'm flying a little bit less, flying really makes me feel guilty. But otherwise, I basically haven't changed anything because I do think that politics and policy are the most important impact you can have. And I'm like spreading the word, whether I eat like a couple fewer hamburgers a year, it just doesn't really matter that much. But the idea that you would Ask a newcomer to the movement. to demonstrate their commitment by making themselves the most optimally committed that they possibly could be. That's just going to alienate so many people. And this is obviously an issue where we need more people engaged in a more direct, profound way. So I think for me, it's like anyone who wants to care about climate, who wants to vote about climate, like, come on. And I think that, you know, Hollywood can be really important here. I mean, since I've been out here, I've been a couple of meetings about shows and stuff and I do think that we've had really corny storytelling about climate change and that there are actually opportunities for like really incredible new kinds of storytelling. I mean in the book I write about this story that happened a couple years ago where you know anthrax that was had killed a reindeer in Russia In the early 20th century, the reindeer was frozen in Permafrost for the entire 20th century. Permafrost melted. The reindeer thought the anthrax was released and killed at least one boy in a number of other reindeer in Russia. Wow. And that is true. So in the ice, in the Arctic ice, we know of rock as like a record of geological history. Ice is also a record of geological history. So the bubonic plague is trapped in ice. The Spanish flu from 1918 that killed hundreds of millions of people is trapped in ice. There are diseases trapped in the Arctic ice from before humans were around, which means that humans immune system have no experience with them. There's so many harm movies that you can make about this subject.

Yeah. I mean, and there have been instances where like in lab conditions, anyway, they've revived bacteria that are millions of years old. One Russian doctor literally injected a bacteria that he had revived from like 35,000 years ago. It'd been frozen for 35,000 years. He brought it back to life and injected it into himself.

Yeah. Well, that's what I mean about this story is so big. It's like the world that we live in in the next couple of decades will be completely transformed. Like we will be reading. about diseases coming out of the Arctic ice. We will be reading about tropical diseases arriving in Copenhagen because now mosquitoes are there because the temperature allows them to live there in a way that they never lived before. We will be reading about climate conflict. We'll be reading about, you know, I mean, all this shit, it's everywhere. You know, air pollution increases the rates of autism and ADHD. It changes the development of babies in utero. It's like it's all encompassing.

Well, let me tell you the story. So there's the species of antelope called a Sayuga antelope. They are mostly in Siberia. They're kind of dwarf antelopes and they've been around for millions of years and all of a sudden in 2016 or 2015 they literally all died. It's called a mega death. The entire species died. They're extinct. They're now extinct. Jesus. And that happened because a bacteria that had been living inside their guts was changed by temperature conditions. It was an unusually hot unusually humid summer and this bacteria that had been living inside them presumably for millions of years comfortably as a kind of peaceful cooperator became a killer and killed the entire species. Now we have inside us countless bacteria and viruses. Scientists believe millions in every human. So our guts are full of bacteria that do our digestion for us. They monitor our moods. They're, you know, they're some scientists who think it's really misleading to even think of the human as a unitary animal rather than a kind of composite creature with system. And most of those bacteria and viruses are not going to be dramatically transformed by a degree or two degrees of warming, but there are so many of them. The chances that one could It's hard to dismiss that. And whether that would mean we'd all immediately go extinct, probably not. But what if that means suddenly, schizophrenia increases by 15% because schizophrenia is related to a bacterial infection called taxoplasmic. I think it's bacteria. Taxoplasmic Gandhi. That's that cat parasite. Exactly.

Yeah, it like triples your chances of getting schizophrenia. Wow. Yeah. And our bodies are so complex, such intricate ecosystems, like you say, that if one little thing gets disturbed, it could have really catastrophic impacts on us. And that's true of the planet as a whole. I think that's one of the big lessons of my book is that this is such a delicate system. It's been stable for all of human history, and now it's not stable. What that means for how we live, we don't know yet, but the changes will be significant, we'll be profound. But it's also true of the individual. Our bodies will be living differently in a world that's two degrees warmer than they are today. We can't really predict what those impacts will be, but they could be quite dramatic. And they could be things that we can't even imagine today, because they're, you know, by some counts, millions of bacteria inside us that we haven't even identified yet.

Yeah. You know, you think that evolution would have trained us differently. You think that evolution would have trained us over time to have at least some long-term capacity. And I guess we do have some long-term planning capacity, but we choose to think really short-term ways just about all the time.

I mean, it's every page. Every page is more of this?

I mean, I sleep through compartmentalization and denial, too. I'm not, you know, I mentioned earlier, like, I think there's been a problem for environmentalism for a long time, this kind of whole year than now thing. That's not who I am. I'm not an environmentalist until a couple years ago when I started really worrying about this stuff. I had the same disinclination to take it seriously that most people do. You know, I thought climate change was real. I thought it was something that we need to worry about and deal with. But I thought it was like a small problem that could be dealt with without much change to my life. And I still basically feel that way. I mean, I, you know, I'd like going on vacations in nature, but I'm not someone who's like spends months hiking the trail or whatever. I've never even had a pet. I don't love animals, you know. But my, the more I looked at the science, the more I just realized this isn't about affecting some part of nature over there. It's about affecting all of human life every aspect of human life as it's lived on this planet, and that really terrified me. But even knowing that, even staring at it straight in the face, I mean I still get up in the morning and you know whatever, do the same shit. Go to the gym, watch basketball, go to my day job, and I don't think that we should be ashamed of that. I think all of us are going to have different reactions to this story, different perspectives on the crisis, and that's good, that's human. But spreading the word generally, making people a little more alarmed is going to make people take some more action, and that's what we need. But you know, The psychological biases are so strong that when I imagine my daughter's life, I'm not imagining a hellscape. I'm imagining the world that I grew up in. That's how everybody relates to the world. And it's just a reminder of how important it is to look really directly at the science because the world as it exists today is not a good guide to the world that we will be living in in a decade or two. There's no way that the climate system as it exists today will be stabilized forever. It will get hotter. All of these things will get worse. Every tick-up word of temperature will create more climate suffering somewhere in the world. And to really dramatic levels of warming, that suffering will be basically everywhere. We can't continue orienting our perspective on the future on the world as it is today. We have to take seriously this range of temperatures, two degrees to four degrees that were on track for the century. As a way of generating sufficient activity in response and adapting as we need to. If we keep looking at the window and thinking the world as it is now will continue, we're not going to do anything. And that's what we've done over the last 30 years, which has been catastrophic.

Yeah, I mean, you know, if the average American had the carbon footprint of the average European, America's carbon emissions would fall by like 35%. Now, I don't think of likes the difference.

They drive less. That's weird because they make the best cars. Yeah. But it's like less territory. Yeah. I mean, there aren't many people in Europe who commute an hour and a half to work every day. And that's like not so uncommon in America. Um, their diet is better, carbon-wise, and they have more, you know, they have some more aggressive, um, green energy stuff going on. How is their diet better, carbon-wise? They just, they waste less food, basically. So like a third of all American food, I think it's a third, is wasted. That's just wasted carbon. Yeah. And I think the number of electricity is like 70% of American electricity is wasted because how bad the grid is. It's so bad at delivering from one source. This is one reason why solar city is so important because the battery can be a much more efficient transporter of electricity.

But so if 70% of American electricity is wasted, it's like, we're just throwing all that carbon in a way. Yeah, that's giant. Yeah. And if we were less wasteful, we'd have less of a problem on our hands. But we still like order twice as much food as we want and then throw it out. I mean, I do that.

Well, when I look at hypocrisy, what I see is like, you know, you want the world to be a better place than you yourself are doing. Yes. It's like, that to me, there's a way of, it's like, we think of hypocrisy as like a negative quality. I think it's kind of a positive, it can be a positive quality. You believe we should be behaving in one way or another. Yeah. Yeah, and it's like need to adjust like you're saying not just whatever but needs to do what you wouldn't you need to do as well You're conscious of this need to change and like you know if someone believes in say like better health care We don't ask them to donate all of their money to hospitals. That's what taxation is for like policy directs our cultural energy towards targets that we want to reach

It's called The Uninhabitable Earth. The subtitle is Life After Warming.

Oh man, great to meet you.