It Could Happen Here - Part One: The Uninhabitable Earth, An Interview

Episode Date: August 26, 2021

Part one of our chat with journalist and author of the book The Uninhabitable Earth, David Wallace-Wells. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadowbride. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Ready to be pod-pilled? Gonna take the podcast pill? Well, it is too late. You already have. You are listening to this podcast right now. This podcast is It Could Happen Here, The Daily Show. Welcome, I'm Garrison, and today we have an interview with the author of the book

The Uninhabitable Earth, David Wallace-Wells. David is a journalist who covers climate, among other topics, and his book was very useful for putting together the first five episodes of the scripted daily show. It does a really good job laying out the different physical effects that climate change will have on environments and ecosystems and the differences between like 1.5 degrees Celsius, 2 degrees Celsius, and you know, the potentiality of like three or three degrees or even four degrees. of like three or three degrees or even four degrees. The book is, you know, is pretty scary to read. But David in person on in the interview was actually a lot more optimistic about, you know, different ways we can prevent some of the worst effects. You know, the book came out in 2019. There's been new reports and new stuff that's come out since then about the different ways that

can be mitigated and adapted to. And, you know, talking to David on the interview was, you know, not quite what I expected based on the book. He was a very, very interesting talk. But I don't need to tell you that because you can listen to it right now. The interview was a bit longer than usual, so we split it up into two episodes. Part one is you're listening to it right now, and part two will come out tomorrow. So that's enough of me talking. Let's get to the actual interview. So the first thing I'm curious about, David, is kind of since publication of your book, some real world weather events have happened. I think that kind of the mainstream coverage I've seen is like, this is all happening much faster

than we had anticipated. And like, 1.5C is going to be a lot worse than had previously been anticipated, which is stuff that you wrote about. I'm kind of wondering, has personally what's happened in the last year and change, has

that impacted at all how you feel about what you've written? Has it changed in any way all how you feel about what you you've written has it changed in any way kind of your opinion about the pace things are occurring at well i think there's sort of a few different stories unfolding at the same time and they're sometimes not all running in the same direction so the ultimate lesson is a little bit unclear um on the science of impacts you know i've been personally struck by how there hasn't been like a week since my book came out in early 2019 that there wasn't some kind of natural disaster or extreme weather event that got climate change back in the news. That's not to say that it has always been, you know, occupying the place on the front page of the newspapers that it should, or that it has even done that very often. But nevertheless, it was, I felt like I was issuing a kind of a prophecy. And then almost as soon as the book came out, like the real world was illustrating that and making

people feel the same way that I did about what was coming our way. That's been, you know, what was coming our way. That's been, you know, really alarming. I did think that I was writing a book largely about climate impacts, you know, 2030, 2050, not climate impacts that were going to terrify us in the year 2021. And the ones that we've seen this year, the heat dome in particular, was, you know, as has been written about quite extensively um like literally off the charts of what most climate models predicted and that's really scary um these are models that you know they're not simple they're supposed to include essentially any possible outcome um you know they have like their fifth percentile outcomes and their 95th percentile outcomes. It's really not supposed to happen that something comes along that breaks

that. And that's really scary. I mean, it means that a lot of other climate impacts are likely to, you know, probably be worse than we were expecting right now. It means possibly that the global temperature models that we have for projecting where we'll end up given a certain amount of emissions are also clouded with even more uncertainty than we thought. And that's really scary. I mean, it's scary for me, maybe particularly, but I think this is true of a lot of people. You know, the bleak formulations of climate science were obviously bleak, but you could also tell yourself, like, if you process them, you were also in a way of preparing for them. And to know that we now have to treat even those quite alarming high-end estimates as incomplete pictures of what is possible and maybe insufficient as a projection of the world we will be living in relatively soon is quite bad because those projections were pretty bleak to begin with.

On the other hand, you know, I think we are living in a different world when it comes to climate consciousness and climate action than we were a couple years ago. The fact that all of these countries made net zero pledges during the pandemic and did it you know outside of the realm of pressure in like a Paris style negotiation without bullying each other or shaming each other but just because they thought it was in their self-interest to decarbonize quicker that's really really different than the place we were in just a few years ago and you know I take all those pledges with a grain of salt basically none that's ever been made in the past has ever been fulfilled. On the other hand, you know, it is definitionally progress that like many more people are concerned about climate change.

Maybe particularly many more people in positions of power in the political and corporate worlds are concerned enough about it to at least be paying lip service to it. There's a lot more to do, but, you know, it feels like for the first time the world is beginning to take this whole challenge seriously. And, you know, I think we've wasted so much time. We're not going to avoid what was once called catastrophic warming, but we may manage to keep the level of the temperature level to something close to that two degrees Celsius. And, you know, it may, it may mark me as a totally grim apocalyptic alarmist that I think that that's like a good outcome and a happy outcome. But I do. I think it's much better to land at 2.3 degrees than at 3.7 degrees or 4.8 degrees or something.

And so it's sort of all stories at once. I was just giving a talk at like a book conference this weekend where I was talking about, you know, climate change at three speeds was like the name of my talk. The first speed was climate impacts. The second was the speed of climate action. And then the third was the speed of our disorientation. And I still think we haven't really like started to think about just how profoundly all of these forces are going to shake the way that we think of the world and our place in it and our culture. And that's all changing really pretty quickly too. Yeah. And I have a couple of questions based on that answer. One of them would just be, one of the things I find interesting about the way your

book is framed is that you're coming at it from a very different perspective than most of the people I read, than Garrison and I are. Because we're definitely more on kind of the ecological end of things. Like I appreciate the woods more than I appreciate being around people. And like, that's a big part of like my desire for conservation. And you're coming at it more from like a, well, I'm worried that like people aren't going to be able to like handle what's coming and the changes that are coming. And I'm, I'm, I think that's much closer to the perspective you have to have to get Americans on board with doing something about it, because clearly the whole we're damaging nature hasn't been a big selling point up to this point. And I'm wondering how in conversations with

people who are maybe kind of like only tangentially paying attention to climate change when there's a disaster? How do you how do you recommend trying to get trying to get people on board with the severity of the issue and the necessity of action? point is just to understand that like basically nobody on planet earth is living as though this is the emergency that it is and that includes me and it includes probably both of you oh absolutely absolutely it may be not maybe doesn't include greta but like you know the number of people who are truly living like this is the emergency that it is are you know you could probably count them on a couple hands yeah and that means that like the differences between those of us who are alarmed about it and those who haven't yet gotten there or haven't yet started freaking out i think is a lot that distance is smaller than we often really acknowledge and we we sort of tell ourselves especially given like the partisan lens

of everything that we, you know, everything we do in our lives that like people on the other side are just impossibly distant from us. But I think functionally, like the average normie liberal who says climate change is an existential threat, but hasn't done anything about it

and hasn't even really changed the way that they vote in response to it is not all that far from the Republican who says, you know, okay, maybe climate change is happening, but whatever, we'll figure it out. I don't need to worry about it. Like in terms of concrete behavioral and political action, they're not that different. Which means I think that there's a lot of common ground there. And, you know, I think that my own awakening on this may be more instructive than say yours in the sense that, um, as you said, I, you know, I, I think of myself as I'm sometimes joke. I'm like a human chauvinist. Um, you know, like if I could snap my fingers and save

all the world's forests and all the world's ecosystems and all the world's fishes, that would be nice. But if I had to trade them for the well-being of all future humans on the planet, I would take that trade. And when you just walk through, you know, everything that science projects for what life will be like at, say, two or three degrees Celsius, you know, I have like a little spiel that I can give about how bad that is. But then even beyond that, I say, you know, these are like tens of thousands of scientific papers. If three quarters of them were totally wrong and the remaining quarter turned out to be overly alarmist, we would still almost certainly be dealing with an unprecedented ecological catastrophe. we would still almost certainly be dealing with an unprecedented ecological catastrophe.

This is not, we're not asking you to believe every single scientist who's working in every single university. And we're not asking you to believe, you know, the guy who is running away from civilization and trying to like build a prepper hut in the wilderness. We're just saying like the number of things that are being disturbed are already being disturbed are well beyond anything that humans have ever experienced in their, you know, depending on how you count hundreds of thousands of years or millions of years on the planet. And our capacity to respond to that is very, very much in question, especially when you look around and see how poorly we are today responding to the challenges right in front of us. So I think that there's like a, you know, there's a relatively simple way to talk about, you know,

not like your life will be threatened directly in talking to somebody, but the climate basis for everything that you know of as normal is already gone. Yeah. And exactly what will endure from the civilization that we have inherited is actually an open question. Now, that's not to say that I think humans are going to go extinct or, you know, civilization will collapse. But like this does represent an unbelievably dramatic challenge to every aspect of our lives and every aspect of everybody's life on the planet. And

we're going to be living around that obstacle and navigating around it for the rest of the century, at least. Yeah, the term I've been using increasingly that I did not come up with, but that I think adequately describes where we are right now is post-normal. And I think a lot of the challenge when it comes to taking effective action, even just for adaptation, is convincing people that we're post-normal. Because as you pointed out, even those of us who write entire books about the severity of the problem have not changed our lives to the extent that we would need to if we were really taking the problem. And it's hard to. I don't know how. I think one of the things that frightens me, because when I think about the different kinds of responses we could see, and we just talked to one

of the authors of the book, Climate Leviathan, which kind of poses some of the... Yeah, good book. Yeah, good book. I'm concerned because the responses to climate change that I see as most frightening in that book are all based around promising people one way or the other, we'll get back to normal. We will get you back to the things on the shelf that you're used to having and the kind of lives that you're used to having. And I think the actual adaptations that we need to make and the ones that will lead to a world I consider at least more livable are ones that are accepting that normality is gone. And I don't know how you thread that needle and get people to accept the end of normal. I think that's the challenge. Yeah, I think the real challenge there is that we are unbelievably good at normalizing.

Yeah. And I mean, there's social science suggesting that the basic timeline on which most of us base our expectations for the near future is five or 10 years, which means that we're only ever, you know, that's like the baseline we carry into the future, not like the pre-industrial climate, not even a climate of our childhoods, but the climate that we've experienced over the last five or 10 years. And if you think about what that means in the context of, for instance, wildfires in the American West, it means that we've already totally accepted a level of burning in a modern wealthy state, modern wealthy set of states that 50 years ago would have seemed truly, truly apocalyptic. And a lot of these fires today look apocalyptic. We are horrified by them when we see the images scrolling on our phones. And a lot of these fires today look apocalyptic. We are horrified by them when we see the images on our scrolling on our phones, we watch some of those dash cam videos, and they terrify us. And on the other hand, like, you know, there's still 40 million people in California. And, you know, I do think that there's a there's a little bit of an awakening ongoing at

the moment having to do with the air pollution effects from those fires. I think a few years ago, we really thought that the main fear was about having your house burned down or having to outrun your flames or something. And now it's understood much more broadly that there are these real health risks and that those don't, they don't stay put, like, so you can't escape them, even if you're, you know, living in a flatland away from, away from the woods or something. And I see the same dynamic in my own life, which to say you know i often find myself these days describing myself as as much as i hate to talk about climate change in terms of like mood relatively more optimistic than i was a few years ago but that's because my baseline of expectation was like while i was writing this

apocalyptic book i'm i'm still so much more alarmed than I was 10 years ago. And yet, in thinking about my own recent, like, what counts as normal, I'm thinking about like 2016, I'm not thinking about 2010 me. And in that interim, I had this, you know, huge and really grim awakening, which is already now I basically like retired to the, you know, the dustbin of memory that I don't I don't even think about it anymore and you know I often worry about how profound that capacity and how pervasive that reflex is in humanity that we we already accept a ton of suffering and dying that's totally unnecessary in the world today.

And that we will respond to new threats to some degree by adapting and protecting ourselves, but also in some significant way by just defining upward what is an acceptable level of pain and human dying. And that could lead to a quite grim future, not just because it involves all that human pain, but also because it means that we're not really

ever going to take control of the problem. Welcome, I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows presented by iHeart and Dare Enter. Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-ch chilling brushes with supernatural creatures take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted latin america since the beginning of time

listen to nocturnal tales from the shadows as part of my cultura podcast network available on the iheart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast remember i said i was optimistic no no no yeah i appreciate that i think that one of the things that has to become post-normal is our understanding of what optimistic means because um you know in the communities i just did a an ama on this the the collapse subreddit which both has a lot of collects a lot of useful information about uh problems with supply chains and and environmental uh catastrophe and also provides this pervasive air that like everything's going to fall apart and i i think that actually is i think it's it's based on the kind of narcissism that total collapse narratives

always are because we almost never see that in history. You see areas collapse. You see countries collapse. You see geographic regions experience aspects of collapse. But like more of what you see is things get worse for people, but the broad systems, you know, stay together. And I, you know, I, I think that there is a, I, I'm, I have the same basic view of the collapse Reddit subreddit as you know, I think that there is a, I have the same basic view of the collapse, Reddit, subreddit, as you do. But I would say there are some reasons to think that we may be more vulnerable to that kind of threat, which is to say that we are a much more globalized and linked civilization now. Our supply chains are stretched very thin. Our food supply has very little redundancies in it, even in those parts of the world, like where we live, where you and I live, where like food is not really a problem. We still have incredibly fragile supply chains. And in the same way that we didn't see global pandemics until there was

some form of globalization with the Roman empire, we are now entering into what is likely to be an age of intensifying disease spread because of how interlinked we are. It's also the case that our vulnerabilities are shared and that other parts of the world do not necessarily offer this sort of system redundancies that they might have in the past. And I think another thing that's overlooked by, to go to the other side of the equation, a thing that's overlooked by those who think that civilizational collapse is likely or imminent is that a lot of the things that we're talking about,

a lot of the suffering that we're talking about coming as the result of climate change is already present in many parts of the world which are full of suffering, but which are not lawless, you know, on the brink of mass death in the way that I think a lot of the sort of, you know, Cormac McCarthy imagination would suggest. And, you know, one thing that I've been thinking about turning over in my head a lot recently

is something that, you know, some people who are, they're not climate deniers. They're sort of, you know, sometimes called like lukewarmers or people who think we can, we can adapt our way through everything. We'll say, well, they, well, they say, you know, how bad could it get? You know, it could be, it could get as bad as the 20th century. And, you know, the 20th century was really bad. Like there were a lot of famines. There were, we had a couple of really big wars. Like, you know,

there were some really big pandemics, like, but we already regard like, you know, the life of the first half of the 20th century as impossibly distant from our own in terms of expectations of wealth and prosperity and security. And one big question is, you know, if we do return to, I mean, it won't be exactly like a rewind to that period of time. will it feel human and modern or will it feel, you know, like the stone ages? And I don't totally know the answer to that, but it's certainly the case that someone living in, you know, 1930s, London wasn't like, this is the end of the world. They thought actually they were at the, you know,

the pinnacle of the world. There were some problems, you know, but there's some things we need to say, you know, and it'll be really interesting to see how all of these dynamics play out going forward. If we start to see, yeah, like a return of some scale of suffering and disease and death that we, that we at least in the wealthy West, haven't been comfortable with or familiar with for a few generations, but which really do,

you know, they are sort of part of the fundamental human experience, even the modern human experience. Yeah. Garrison? Yeah. I mean, yeah, I think we talked a bit about this yesterday, but you brought it up again,

how almost the new normal is going to be radical unnormalness, like having things always be changing. That's going to be the thing that we're all going to be used to now is switching back and forth between extremes kind of all of the time. Yeah. And like, yeah, like I, you're, I mean, I would say like, I, you know, I'm sort of with Robert, I feel like, you know, I often like as a straw man set up the phrase, the new normal to then say, really, it's the end of normal and, you know, never, never normal again. But I also think we've also been living in a civilization that runs on change for a long time,

especially those of us in the US. And I had a bunch of years ago, I had a long series of conversations with William Gibson, a sci-fi novelist. I interviewed him for the Paris Review Writers at Work series. And he was just obsessed with the Victorians because he was like, this was the first time that you could really see the world changing in the space of a single generation. And we think

of the Victorians as being defined by their propriety, their sexual primness and overdone morality about almost everything. Their refusal to believe that they were anything but incredibly refined, civilized people. But he's like, when you really look closely at those novels and read those diaries, there was an enormous amount of just technological anxiety and disarray produced simply by the speed of change. And now that has become, he said, you know, that has become the basis of our entire civilization. And such that like, we expect our phones to get better every three years, you know, we expect novelty in our culture, in our food. We expect, we get bored with old politicians really quickly. We want new faces. Like these are all, the like desperate addiction

to the new is one of the really defining features of modern American, modern Western life. And so in a certain way, we're already acclimated to rapid radical change, or at least we've been trained to not just survive in that world, but to demand it. us things we want and much more about imposing, you know, great burdens and suffering on us and demanding that we make changes and adaptations that we may not be so happy about. And as I was saying earlier, there are a lot of signs, especially in our politics that, you know, for all our cultural capacity for change, we may be in terms of policy and at the social level, a little too sclerotic in our capacity to move. Welcome, I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonorum. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America.

From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. No. Chilling brushes with supernatural creatures Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time Listen to the Tales from the shadows as part of my cultura podcast network as part of my Cultura podcast network available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

How do you see, at least in the short term, like the next few years, more politicians or tech capitalists like business people starting to realize that and it's starting to put those changes in or do you think it's not going to happen yet do you think it will require do you think it'll require more more things to happen before they'll like start addressing it more urgently you know i guess it's it all sort of depends on what you mean by it. You know, like in the reconciliation bill that's currently being debated in D.C.,

there is a clean electricity standard that, you know, that would be a major, major step forward for American climate policy, really a major, major step forward. It's not even something that we're like talking all that much about. But it's, you know, at the moment, by far the biggest and most impactful thing that American politics could deliver. And it's on the table. And it would not have been on the table five years ago, or probably 10 years ago. There's some people who think we could have done it in the early Obama years, but I'm skeptical of that. And, you know, we have all these world leaders talking about climate, like it's a top shelf issue. They're not yet designing their economic policies as though it's like the paramount issue, but it's, you know, if someone's making a,

you know, take Barack Obama in 2004, the democratic national convention, if someone's making that kind of speech, really hoping to announce themselves on the stage as a major political figure in this country, they could not not talk about climate change in that speech. Like it would have to be part of the way that they talked about the future. And that's really, that's really different from how it was not all that long ago. And that's true really all around the world, you know, all the way from the authoritarian end of the spectrum to the liberal democracies of the world. It's even true when you listen to leaders of Petro-states in the Middle East and sort of quote-unquote climate deniers like Scott Morrison. He's not

even in Australia, he's not even talking the same way about climate that he talked two or three years ago. Like there are all of these really dramatic shifts taking place. You know, we're still like way short of what science says is necessary to avert a catastrophic level of warming. And frankly, I don't think we're going to do that. But we're already starting to see, I think, our politics and our culture turn around climate in a quite profound way. And I think, you know, that's a sign that, like, we are living in a climate century. This is the metanarrative of our era. And there's sort of no getting around it. You're already starting to see more climate stories in Hollywood and people talking about climate anxiety with their therapists

and, you know, in addition to the obvious direct extreme weather events. And it's just pervasive and front of mind in a way that it wasn't before. And I've personally been kind of astonished at that speed of change. Because when I was, you know, writing my book a few years ago, I looked back at, I looked at the environmental movement at the present, say like 2018. And I looked back at a couple generations worth of environmental activism and I thought, well, these guys are like the same people. They're kind of saying the same things and they've never made any progress at all. and they've never made any progress at all. And I was, you know, I knew that the path to, the theoretical path to progress was political, but I also didn't really see all that much reason

for hope on that front. But the last few years have been, you know, this incredible global political awakening where, you know, Greta's the sort of face of it, but she's certainly not all of it. She's, you know, thousands of other incredibly brave and noble climate strikers, Sunrise Extinction Rebellion. of it, but she's certainly not all of it. She's, you know, thousands of other incredibly brave and noble climate strikers, Sunrise Extinction Rebellion. And then you have like, you know,

the head of the Bank of England and, you know, the Secretary of the Treasury talking about climate is like an existential threat. Like this is just, it's a really, really different world than we were living in a few years ago. And, you know, as I said, we're not nearly moving as fast as we, as we need to, but at the level of like cultural recognition, personally, I'm actually kind of impressed at how quickly we've moved. like green movement or climate justice movement has had that much of an impact in the past few years because i mean like we are seeing more and more rhetoric from politicians definitely but if you look at someone like justin trudeau or even what biden's done the past few the past few months you know because when biden was campaigning he talked about banning fracking and all these things that of course he's probably not going to do. Do you think like they've given people in power language that makes them sound like they're doing the right thing? But do you actually see the climate justice movement

like getting people to do actionable things? Or do you think it's going to be more, I think like there's like a term like greenwashing, right? Like you say the right thing, but you're not actually doing the thing. I mean, it's not one or the other. I think, you know, I have a very pragmatic approach to it. I think, yeah, there's certainly a lot of empty rhetoric. There's certainly a lot of pledges that are being unfulfilled. But there's also a lot more investment and mobilization than would have seemed possible a few years ago and you know from my point of view i mean i'm glad that activists may be frustrated with that and may want to push for more i think they should but i also personally am going to

count that as as progress so um and you know it's interesting I am, this is a bit of a side note, but my mother was this sort of like radical progressive education innovator. embraced all of these quite quite progressive values about you know um educating kids for democracy but really um you know all this stuff that has since become quite common in the way that teachers and schools operate like project-based learning and you know emphasis on individual um tracks and um you know open classroom and um you know building play into the you know, open classroom and, you know, building play into the, you know, the experience of, and when I, and like, now that I'm a person who has kids, my kids aren't quite ready for a proper school, but I have a lot of friends who are, I, you know, I hear the way that they talk about their schools and it's like every single school now runs their classrooms this way. And when I talked to my mom about it, she thinks they lost the whole fight.

Like she thinks that it's like a total disaster defeat because there are some things that they would have wanted to see happen that didn't happen. I think it's just like, you know, activists are by nature quite demanding and uncompromising, and that's good. But it shouldn't blind us to the fact that, like, you know, Joe Biden really has a lot of people in the administration who are really serious about climate. Now they're still making compromises with the fossil fuel business. That's not good. They're still worrying about, you know, political realities of what it means in swing States to, you know, to ban fracking. I wish that weren't the case too, but it also is just like dramatically different than as recently as like whatever it was like 2014, 2015, Barack Obama was bragging about expanding oil drilling in the US. Like that is just not, okay, maybe Biden's doing a little bit of that, but he's not going to like go on stage and be like, you guys, you got to thank me because I'm drilling more.

It's a really different kind of reality. And when you get down to the nuts and bolts of it, especially if all the stuff in the infrastructure bill and the reconciliation bill go through, we're really talking about an unprecedented level of public investment in the decarbonization of the American economy. Again, just to be clear, I don't think it's sufficient. I wish that there were more. But it's not just the same old business. And when you look around the world, I see basically the same pattern that there's a lot of momentum in the right

direction. It's not, you know, as fast as I would like. And it's compromised with all these other things that are, you know, politicians have to do, but, or think they have to do. But when I was writing my book, it was a completely defensible, which is 2018. It's a completely defensible thing to say. Business as usual scenario was for four and a half degrees of warming this century. And now I think the best analysis suggests that current policies may land us under three degrees. So that's three years and we may have shaved a degree and a half off our base case expectation.

That's kind of incredible. I think that there's not all that much more to do that some of those policies and ambitions already sketch out that sort of maximal ambition that we can really achieve in the societies that we have, you know, to take the American example in particular. we have, you know, to take the American example in particular, Biden wants to decarbonize the American power sector by 2035. Could we do that by 2030 or 2025? That seems really hard. You know, when you hear about these companies in these countries that are banning gas powered cars by 2030, you're like, could you, could they do that by 2025? Could they really build new factories to supply all the new cars by 2025, that seems really fast. 2030 may be even overly ambitious. So my own perspective on all those pledges is that even more important than getting people to announce more ambitious ones is to just sort of hold them to the promises they've already made, even though those promises may not be quite up to what the science says is

necessary to give us the future we might once have hoped to secure. And that wraps up part one of our interview with author and journalist David Wallace-Wells. You can find him on Twitter at D. Wallace-Wells, and you can find his book, I don't know, wherever books are sold, local bookstore, online. I'm sure you can figure it out. So that wraps up our show today. Tune in tomorrow to check out the second part of the interview. That's all of today. Safe pods, safe casting.

See ya. you should probably keep your lights on for nocturnal tales from the shadow join me danny trails and step into the flames of right an anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.