Front Burner - As COP27 begins, a new picture of our climate future emerges

Episode Date: November 7, 2022

David Wallace-Wells, the acclaimed science journalist and author of The Uninhabitable Earth, says the past few years have given him reason to feel both "buoyant optimism" and "abject despair" about the future of climate change. As the COP27 climate summit kicks into gear, we're speaking to Wallace-Wells about both — and we're going to start by talking about the good news. While we aren't currently on track to keep global warming down to the levels the scientific community has called for, the worst-case scenarios are also looking far less likely than they did even a few years ago. There's more and more evidence that the actions the world has taken so far really have made a difference — and that we still have significant capacity to determine the kind of world that lies ahead.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hey, I'm Jamie Poisson. Music COP27 must be the place to rebuild trust and re-establish the ambition needed to avoid driving our planet over the climate cliff.

In the last few weeks, report after report has painted a clear and bleak picture. Emissions are still growing at record levels. So COP27 has just kicked off in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. And like with every COP at this point, I think people are kind of bracing themselves to feel a lot of despair. Which, of course course makes sense. Climate change is terrifying and the future is going to be really difficult and really disruptive. And I know even thinking about this, even hearing me say these words can make a lot of people just want to check out. So I want to make something clear today. There is also a good news story here. More and more evidence

is showing us that the efforts we've made so far actually are making a difference. And while we're not currently on track to keep global warming to where the world's experts say we need to be, the worst case scenarios are also looking way less likely than they did even a few years back. way less likely than they did even a few years back. Today, we're going to talk about what that narrower window of climate futures is starting to look like and why it's a case for still believing that what we're doing here does make a difference. My guest is David Wallace-Wells. He's a climate journalist and the author of the book, The Uninhabitable Earth. author of the book, The Uninhabitable Earth. Hi, David. Thank you so much for coming back onto FrontBurner. It's a pleasure to have you. It's great to be back. Thanks for having me. So you wrote in this great piece in the New York Times recently about how for you,

the last few years have provided arguments for both buoyant optimism and abject despair. And we're going to get into both today, but let's start by talking about your reasons for optimism, because there's a good news story here that I don't think it's talked about a lot. Yeah, it's interesting. When I first started writing about climate change five or six years ago, I often said that almost nobody understood just how dramatically bad it could get because their expectations were anchored in the present and they looked out their windows and the world looked normal. Now it's the case that when we look at our windows, or at least when we watch the news on our social media feeds, we see a lot of climate disaster. And in a similar way, I think

we can't see through that to see some of the progress that's being made. But there is real progress there. Five years ago, when I was first writing about this stuff, almost every scientist would tell you that a business as usual, that's the phrase they use, business as usual future would bring four or five degrees Celsius of warming this century. We're at about 1.2 now. So it's three or four times as much as we have today. We're at about 1.2 now. So it's three or four times as much as we have today. Now, thanks to a lot of factors, the price of renewables dropping considerably, a global political awakening, prime ministers and presidents really taking this seriously for the first time and designing serious policy to decarbonize.

For all of these reasons, they now think that a business as usual future will land us at about two or three degrees, which is still well above the targets that were established in the Paris Accords and well above levels of warming that scientists have called dangerous and even catastrophic. But they're still only about half as high as the temperatures we thought we were expecting just five years ago. So we've basically cut in half, just about in half, our levels of expected warming in just five years. And that is a remarkable revision to our expectations for the future. Again, it doesn't mean that we're out of the woods. It doesn't mean that we're not going to be dealing with climate disarray. We will. But we don't know exactly what the world is going to be in between those

two futures, in between the everything's fine future and the everything's ruined future. But that's where we're heading. We're not heading on a worst case scenario path anymore. We're heading in the direction of something a bit more complicated, still very messy, still up to us to determine, but sub-apocalyptic. You talked about one of the factors that has contributed to this is the cost of renewables dropping dramatically. And just tell me a little bit more about that. Since about 2010, the cost of solar power has fallen by 85 or 90% around the world. That means that it now costs only one-tenth as much to get a certain amount of power from a solar panel than it did in 2010.

And similar, not quite as big, but similar price declines have been seen in onshore wind and offshore wind, both of which have fallen by more than 50% by battery technology, which is incredibly important to store some of this renewable power. That's fallen by about 80, 85%, I think. And over the course of this time the cost of dirty energy has if anything gone up i mean it's basically stayed stable but it's grown so much more volatile that in any given month you're likely to have much higher prices as we're seeing over the last year or so with the energy crisis that was produced by the invasion of ukraine and that means that five ten years ago it might have seemed like undergoing this transition

would be a burdensome effort requiring us to all sort of shoulder some cost. It now is an incredible opportunity in which if we transform our energy systems in particular to be based around renewables, we'll all be better off. We'll be paying less for that energy today. And it also means that anyone making those kinds of plans at the highest levels of government, but also in the private sector on a 20 or 30 year time horizon, sees very clearly that fossil fuels are no longer the future. Renewables are the future.

And that changes a lot about the way that our 21st century energy systems are going to look. Just last year, there were more investments made in renewable power than in dirty energy around the world. And 90% of the world's population now lives in places where new renewable capacity is cheaper than new dirty energy capacity. So it used to seem like we were going to have to engineer a political revolution to produce an energy transition. Now it used to seem like we were going to have to engineer a political revolution to produce an energy transition. Now it almost feels like the market is rushing in that direction on its own. And it's the old political economy in which fossil fuel interests still have a lot of power that's slowing that down. It's almost like the reverse logic.

There also have been major political shifts, right? Like, I remember just a few years ago, just saying Green New Deal was like ludicrously controversial. Yeah, and now we're living in a place where it's the logic of the Green New Deal was like ludicrously controversial. Yeah. And now we're living in a place where it's the logic of the Green New Deal. It's not called that anymore, at least in the U.S., but the logic of the Green New Deal has basically underwritten all of the ambitious legislative spending across the global north over the last few years, the global north over the last few years, which is to say anybody who's trying to do large scale public stimulus spending is doing it in the interest of new infrastructure, you know, the green energy economy and trying to bring about that future a little more quickly. That's true of, you know, the European Green Deal. It's true of the IRA in the US.

And I think that will continue to be the case. And that's, you know, for a number of reasons, including the renewable revolution I talked about, because leaders now see that this is a good bargain. But it's also because there's been this incredible global political awakening has probably embodied most by Greta Thunberg. We can no longer let the people in power decide what hope is. Hope is not passive. Hope is not blah, blah. Hope is telling the truth. Hope is taking action. And hope always comes from the people. But of course there are millions of other people who have been striking around the world. What do we want? Climate justice!

When do we want it? Now! This! Future! want it? Now! This! Future! Now! Future! There's Extinction Rebellion, there's Sunrise, and there's also just a growing sense in the public that this is a first-order political priority that we need to be addressing urgently, and that's finally being reflected in our policy and our legislation.

It's not moving fast enough, but it feels like a world of difference from where we were five years ago when it was possible to look at the climate movement and climate politics and say, nothing's being done and nothing ever has been done. Now, we can no longer say that. We can only say we're not doing enough. We're not doing it fast enough. I think it's a much bigger deal than many of us assume at first. enough. I think it's a much bigger deal than many of us assume at first. Right. So as you've said, it's looking more likely that we're headed towards two to three degrees of warming, not that super grim projection of four to five degrees. So that's obviously good news. But as you said, this is by no means a best case scenario either. Scientists have been telling us for a long

time, right, that we need to stay below 1.5 degrees of warming. So let's talk a little more about what two to three degrees actually means. What does life look like in a world with that level of warming? Well, the truth is that just about everything is going to be transformed by these temperature rises, yeah, from the microscopic all the way up to the geopolitical. That's what it means to have a climate transformation at this speed. You know, the Earth's climate is now warming faster than it has ever in planetary history. formations of this scale have happened, they have been much slower, and they still manage to wipe out huge percentages of the world's life. So we're dealing with an unbelievably tumultuous period. Humans, I think, are likely to engineer their way around that. But the natural world in which we live and on which we base so much of our modern life is really in for a shock or a series of shocks. So in the article, I write about how many more viruses we're expecting to make jumps from animals to other species and then ultimately to humans,

because so many ecosystems are moving that animal species that used to be living totally separate from one another are going to be forced into cohabitation. And when that happens, you see spillover events that produce pandemics like the one that we're still living through from a few years ago. Some scientists expect that this century we're likely to see several thousand additional spillover events like that. That's not to say that every one of them is going to produce a pandemic like COVID-19. Almost certainly they won't. Most of them will likely not be a big deal to humans. But we're talking about raising the stakes and raising the frequency of that likelihood, and that's quite scary. And that's really one way of thinking about all of these changes is not so much that unprecedented events are going to start happening, although they will. It's also that

things that used to just be very, very rare, like a new pandemic, are just going to become much, things that used to just be very, very rare, like a new pandemic, are just going to become much, much more common. So, you know, scientists say to expect things like 100-year floods happening in many parts of the world every single year. So the kind of flood that used to hit once a century and then would give the local community fully a century to recover from, now will only have a year to recover from, if that, because in some cases, they'll be even arriving faster than once a year. We're talking about storms like Hurricane Sandy, which was so brutal where I lived in New York City. I'm hitting more than once a decade, maybe even more than once every five years. The East Coast is being pummeled with the power

of a record-breaking superstorm. Oh my God, it's washed everything away! 90-mile-per-hour winds, driving rain, record-breaking high tides, and rough surf flash the coastline as the storm made landfall in southern New Jersey. We're talking about droughts and heat waves that used to be incredibly rare, happening three or four times as often. And, you know, whether we will be able to live in those conditions, I think to some degree we will, but they require much more preparation, adaptation, and resilience than we've ever really engineered before as a species. And while I think we'll do

quite a lot of that, I think it's also probably true that we won't do as much as we would need to to make life perfectly comfortable, which means we're also likely to see huge amounts of human migration, possibly as many as several hundred million people forced to move from climate impacts. And we really have no geopolitical system in place to manage or ease those transitions and transformations. So I think it's likely to be, you know, it's going to be a political world in disarray as well. A simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here.

You may have seen my money show on Netflix. I've been talking about money for 20 years. I've talked to millions of people and I have some startling numbers to share with you. I've talked to millions of people, and I have some startling numbers to share with you. Did you know that of the people I speak to, 50% of them do not know their own household income? That's not a typo. 50%. That's because money is confusing. In my new book and podcast, Money for Couples, I help you and your partner create a financial vision together.

To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Cups. Just to be clear, there's no guarantee that we'll be able to keep warming limited to just two to three degrees. We need to still make big changes. For one thing, 80% of the world's energy production still comes from fossil fuels. So we're talking about a massive overhaul of our energy infrastructure, right? So just logistically, what would that mean for a country like the United States, for example? Well, yeah, so there are two big buckets, right? There's what's often called mitigation, which is about cutting carbon emissions to limit warming.

And we have a long way to go there. Like I said at the top, there's a lot of good news here, like the energy transition is definitely moving in the right direction. But it's also the case that, you know, we're still at, we haven't even reached a carbon peak. We're likely to peak our emissions only in the next five years, which means we're still doing more damage right now this year than we've ever done in any other year in human history. Next year is likely to be worse than this year. So we're going to be doing more damage next year than we have ever done at any point in human history before. So that's, you know, a kind of sobering perspective. Nevertheless, we are undertaking the longer term investments that

will allow us to reach that peak quickly and then descend, I think, relatively quickly from there, at least in our energy systems. But as you say, that's an enormous, enormous undertaking. Fulfilling the energy needs of the U.S. economy just with wind and solar could require as much as 10% of American land, which is about a size of land bigger than California. That's a kind of a high-end estimate. Some other ones are as low as 1%, but that's still bigger than the state of Maine. And then even beyond that, we need to actually totally rebuild our electric grid so that we can more reliably transmit this power than we do today when we lose about two thirds of the power that we put into the grid gets lost as waste heat. We also have to figure out how to do agriculture in a way that doesn't produce carbon, do new kinds of building, new kinds of heavy industry, get everybody to be driving electric vehicles instead of gas powered cars.

It's an unbelievably large challenge, and that's just mitigation. But then there's the adaptation side, which is to say, if we're really talking about 100-year floods hitting every single year, and we're really talking about places in the Middle East and South Asia that are going to get regularly so hot during summer that you can't go outside and work outside for many hours during the middle of the day, and we're talking about possibly 150 million additional people dying of air pollution. These are transformations, even in a sort of an optimistic scenario where we keep warming to about two degrees

that are going to require wholesale changes to the way that we live. And that means, you know, at a very basic level, a lot more air conditioning in the world. But it could also mean a lot of more innovative approaches to air conditioning in which we do things like run water underneath city streets to cool cities, missed bus stops so the people who are outside waiting for public transportation don't suffer from heat strokes. It means redesigning a lot of the world's basic crops, staple crops, so that they can grow better under heat and drought conditions um it means figuring out creative solutions to a lot of the disease threats that are emerging in a two degree world where you know you're already seeing there are a lot of scientists who are thinking

about sort of purposefully driving the mosquito into extinction because of in part because of the risk that it poses in terms of carrying malaria and dengue all the way to the northern latitudes but we also just saw actually a quite promising malaria vaccine announced this year so we may see a lot more biotech innovation prompted by climate changes as well and you know new ways of building buildings building cities that's designed to cool as opposed to heat. There's, you know, there's really an enormous amount to do there. Just last year at COP26, all these countries recommitted to a target of 1.5 degrees warming, which we haven't even talked about. Each and every one of you and the nations you represent has stepped up here in Glasgow, agreeing to do what it takes to keep 1.5 alive.

And for that, I am infinitely grateful. Is that commitment impossible now? Is that commitment impossible now? You know, what scientists will tell you is that it's theoretically possible within the limits of physics, which is to say, if we literally, as a planet, decided to never produce another atom of carbon again, we're likely to stay below 1.5 degrees. But the kinds of changes that are necessary to reduce emissions so dramatically to make that future possible are just not not they just don't seem like they're in the offing i mean basically we need to cut we would need to cut in half

our emissions um over the next eight years um you know as i said we're still actually growing our global emissions so we haven't even started to peak and come down we have to cut them in half in the next eight years and if we don't if we stay on a plateau, which I think is actually the likelier sort of medium-term future, we stand in an emissions plateau, we're going to entirely run out the budget of our chances for 1.5 degrees, our carbon budget, in seven or eight years. So by 2030, we will probably have exhausted the entire carbon budget for 1.5 degrees. And that seems grim, and it is grim. It also means that the way that we've, the goals that we've set for ourselves over the last decade, we would be judged to have failed them. But, you know, two degrees of warming, which was one of the goals of the Paris Accords, they said, you know, we're going to limit warming

below two degrees, and we're going to try to get to 1.5 degrees. The two degree goal, while it does involve considerably more suffering and considerably more climate disruption, is also considerably easier to get to. It means zeroing out on our carbon emissions, not by mid-century 2050, but by 2070 or 2080. And, you know, given the sort of pace of transformation that we're seeing now, I think that's quite possible, even something I would probably count on. There's some technologies that we haven't figured out yet how to decarbonize a lot of heavy industry, for instance, or jet fuel. But if we have 60 years to do that, as opposed to 25, it seems a lot more doable. And that's not to say that we should rest on our laurels and

everything's going to be smooth sailing from here. Two degrees is really disruptive. And two degrees is really much, much better than two and a half degrees. So, you know, the faster the better. But I think pretty soon we're going to start recognizing globally that the 1.5 degree goal, while I think quite useful for mobilizing climate action and urgency over the last five years, is out of reach. And in fact, just this last week, both The Economist and Der Spiegel published cover stories that said exactly that, basically, like give up on this target. It's over. What are you hoping is going to come out of this year's COP? I know it ended on a pretty pessimistic note last year, right? Because countries wouldn't make this universal pledge to stop coal production.

Yeah, that was one of the complicated issues that came out of the last one. But overall, I think the last COP was relatively productive as it was designed to be. It was this sort of every few years, the countries under the Paris Agreement, countries are expected to come to COP with new promises, new pledges, more ambitious ones. And they did that last year. A lot of them are still empty promises. They're still paper pledges. They're not backing up a policy or investment, but at least they came with a new raft of promises. This COP is not designed to do that. So it's unlikely that we see much of that at all. And I think the biggest subject will be this subject of climate justice, which is sometimes referred to as loss and damage or even climate reparations. And this is, I think, a really critical next stage in the climate conversation.

It's very clear that the rich countries of the world have engineered this problem, which is going to be devastating the poor countries of the world most dramatically. And what happened in Pakistan this summer with the monsoon flooding, devastating that country, a country that in its entire history has produced only as much carbon as the U.S. produces every single year, I think is a really powerful illustration of just how unjust many of these dynamics are and how important it is for us to sort of solve the riddle of climate justice. Yeah. Just before we go, you were on our show in 2019. I remember that conversation really well. I think we spent a good portion of it talking about these worst case scenarios of

four to five degrees. So it was a bleaker conversation than we had today. And I remember it in part because we talked at the end about whether it was ethical for people to bring kids in the world, into the world, because the future looks so grim. And it was ethical for people to bring kids into the world because the future looks so grim. And it was a question that I was personally wrestling with at the time. And since then, I actually had a little boy. He's like two and a half now. And I know you mentioned you have a toddler running around your house today. So back then you said you were hopeful we could find solutions. and would your answer be different now and if so how well first of all congratulations on your on your baby um you know i think in

general um the world looks the future looks brighter and less jagged than it looked a few years ago which means if i was hopeful then, surely I'm more hopeful now. But I also have started to think about these dilemmas in, you know, a few different ways that offer slightly, some slight complication to that picture, which is to say that, you know, we have demonstrated over the last few years, including as recently as with this flooding in Pakistan, our incredible capacity to normalize suffering, especially elsewhere in the world. And I think that that's, you know, likely to be the way that we deal with damages and transformations going forward. I wish that we were, responded with a more capacious moral

imagination and understood our own responsibility in those climate disasters. But I suspect that we're going to see growing climate suffering. And yet, you know, people in places like Canada and the US continuing to live much like they lived before and continuing to turn away from suffering elsewhere in the world as a result. I don't think that a world of two degrees is going to be so overturned by climate that the only recognizable story unfolding on the planet will be a story of climate disruption. I think that at two degrees, maybe even a little above two degrees, what we're talking about is a new landscape on which we can build a new future. And that landscape is much harder and harsher than the one that gave rise to human civilization in the first place. It's much less predictable and much more discombobulated than

the one that we've gotten used to in recent centuries. And it calls into question a lot of the expectations that we have for the future that it'd be you know full of more prosperity and more justice and more equity but i don't think it dooms us to a future in which there is less flourishing and less prosperity and less equity and less justice i think it just means that we have to engineer that future we have to build it in our politics in our technology in our society in our culture um rather than just trusting that whatever 3% growth compounded over the course of a century is going to make all the difference. We need to attack this problem head on, both on the mitigation side and the adaptation side,

in order to build a future that looks to us like the one that we thought we'd be seeing when we were all children. It's not an inevitability. It's a responsibility. But thankfully, because we're facing a future of two degrees instead of four, we have that opportunity. We're not going to be overwhelmed in the same way that we'd be overwhelmed if warming was twice as high. It's going to be difficult, but the world is ours to make. And what world we make is therefore going to reflect on us, not just on the climate changes that we've unleashed. David, thank you. So great to have you.

Thanks so much for having me. I hope to do it again soon. All right, that's all for today. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you tomorrow.