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

Episode Date: August 27, 2021

We conclude with Part two of our interview with David Wallace-Wells, author of The Uninhabitable Earth. 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. Heyo, this is It Could Happen Here, The Daily Show. This episode is going to be part two of a interview with author and journalist David Wallace-Wells. If you have not listened to part one, you should probably do that first.

But anyways, without further ado, let's get this second interview going. I appreciate the optimism. I mean, maybe I should just say like, you know, two degrees, 150 million additional people dying of air pollution. Yeah. It once a century hitting every single year. Cities in South Asia and the Middle East are so hot during summer that you don't go outside without risking heat stroke or death. Hundreds of millions of climate refugees. When I say like,

we're going to get to a best case scenario, that's the best case scenario that I'm describing. It's not optimism by anybody's conventional definition. It's just optimism compared to like what actually looked possible a few years ago. And, you know, ultimately I think the only intellectually responsible perspective is to try to hold those two facts in your mind at once, to say things inevitably will be grim. We will have to be doing an enormous amount of adaptation to allow ourselves any promise of human flourishing in even the best case scenario, but also changes have been made and will be made in the next few years, and then certainly in the next decades, that allow us to avert a lot of even bleaker, even grimmer futures. And I think both of those things are

true. Whether your impulse is to place your sort of emotional weight on the first fact or the second is really more a matter of personal temperament, I think, than it is about the facts on the ground. The facts on the ground say that, you know, basically, if even a few years ago, it was defensible to say we could achieve 1.5 degrees, but also a business as usual was four and a half degrees. We're now looking at a much narrower window where unless we're really surprised by climate sensitivity, which may be something we could talk about also, that we're looking at something like the range of two to three, two degrees to three degrees. And that's like, we have a much clearer idea of where we're going to end up, I would say. One of the things when you lay out, as you do very, very, very well,

the, what that actually means, what two degrees means, like what that means in human cost. I have to think that there's going to be an increasing desire to punish the people, particularly who were responsible for like the different kind of disinformation campaigns that have persisted over the last couple of decades. I don't know how much political traction I expect those to get. But one of the things we do, we are going to be talking about is like the potential of sort of a climate Nuremberg. And I'm wondering if you, if you think that's even a productive avenue of thought, or is it kind of one of those, there's, there's so much, is it a situation where, I guess I'm just interested if you've thought about that in any way yourself or if you think that's just not a

particularly productive line of thought to go down. Well, I think it's an intellectually rewarding way of thinking about the problem, whether it has practical real world upside, whether it has practical real world upside, I'm a little more ambivalent about, but I would say, you know, there are two sets of issues that you're talking about. There is, did companies like Exxon and Shell delay action on climate change by shaping our sense of urgency around the climate crisis and buying off politicians in a way that meaningfully changed the trajectory of global warming. If so, to what degree and to what degree should they be held responsible? where you should maybe held responsible. To me that, I mean, I think that like those companies should be pulverized, you know, that like they should be, even just from a practical perspective,

put aside the morality, like we need to stop producing fossil fuels. Like those companies should not continue to be in that business. I think it's also worth pointing out that many of the biggest oil companies in the world are state-owned, not private enterprises. But I also think there's the sort of separate question, which is countries of the world. The United States has benefited enormously from the cheap energy produced from the burning of fossil fuels. That explains a lot of how we became the dominant power in the world. And one amazing thing about carbon is that it hangs in the atmosphere for at least 300 years, which means that every single ounce of carbon that has ever been produced

in the entire history of industrialization is still in the air heating the planet today, which means that the climate doesn't care if that coal is being burned in, you know, Xi Jinping's China or Frederick Engel's Manchester or, you know, Abraham Lincoln's United States. They are all having the equal effect and that we should think about the impact of past emissions when thinking about responsibility for the crisis as much as we think about how to shape future emissions. You know, I think that climate reparations as an idea is very powerful. I think, you know, countries like the U.S. have profited from this technology is one way to think of it,

that will be punishing those in the developing world who have benefited considerably less, considerably more. Even from a practical, like, how do we stabilize the world's system and our geopolitics point of view, I think it makes sense for the wealthy countries in the world to support the poor countries in their efforts both to decarbonize and to adapt. There is some amount of that being negotiated now, although I think it's woefully inadequate. And, you know, it's something I'm working on at the moment, but you really can sort of put a dollar figure on exactly what like the US owes in this context, because we know how much it costs to take carbon out of the air. So if you take a price of like $50 a ton, then the U.S. basically has a climate reparations bill of like $25 trillion,

which is two and a half times what China's is, which is the second biggest country. And I do think that that's also really important to keep in mind when people talk about China. China is an incredibly important player going forward. But because of the weird timeline-bending nature of carbon emissions, like the U.S. is still much more important. The U.S. brought us to the brink. It's just China that's at risk of pushing us over the brink. lawsuits that are already going forward on these issues and those lawsuits that are going forward that obligate particular companies to behave in ways that are in line with the goals of the Paris Agreement. I think that those are useful. I think I'm a little, I may be a little less comfortable attributing so much responsibility for the current crisis to the villainy of those companies,

although I don't deny that they've been villainous in the sense that we really have been voting with our, you know, with our dollars on this for a long time. And I do think that most people have, you know, or as a society, as a civilization, we've chosen to continue using fossil fuels basically because they were, they provided cheaper energy than any other option. That's not to say that there's been no effect from the disinformation campaigns. I think there has been an effect. But if you rewind that history and don't engage in that disinformation, I have a hard time believing, even if you're just looking at the cost of renewable power, I have a hard time imagining the US embarking on a major renewable push in the year 1996 or 2000, of the scale that's possible now because of the changing market dynamics there.

So, you know, another way of looking at the same issue is, you know, climate denial is, I would say it's no longer really alive anywhere. It's no longer really alive in the US, but it was much more pronounced in the US in American politics than any other country in the world for a very long time, aside from maybe Australia. And it wasn't like those other countries were decarbonizing much, much faster than we were. They maybe were a little bit in parts of Scandinavia, like Denmark has done a bit better. The UK has done better over the last five or 10 years than the US. But like in general, we're all sort of on the same track together, which makes me think that a lot of these dynamics, at least to this point, are much more the result of social and cultural forces than they

are direct fossil fuel disinformation and denial campaigns. But, you know, that's not to say that I think that those people should be let off the hook in the same way that the cigarette company, cigarette companies were held to account for their decades of disinformation. I just also think like this, the son of a guy who died of lung cancer, like, I don't think that like cigarette company is to blame for my dad's death. Like, I just don't. Like, I'm glad that they're, I'm glad that they had to pay those fines. I'm glad that they were like, you know, to some degree pushed to the edge of bankruptcy. I'm glad that cigarette smoking is not nearly as bad a force in our culture and our public health than it used to be. But I also think that there is like, I don't know, to point the finger neatly at those like 10 big companies or

whatever, I just think is a little simplistic and lets us all off the hook. But I do think that's another big story here is the way in which as the crisis unfolds many more people will want to see themselves as blameless um and not be willing to really see clearly that the role that they played or those that they loved played in exacerbating the problem even if just through um by living in complacency and denial for too long yeah yeah you of that. No, no, I mean, it is like, that's the thing though. It is, it is, I think, again, you can hold two things in your head, which is that the attempts to mislead people and alter the public conversation around climate change through bad data were criminal. And also that fundamentally the damage was done by our desire to continue living a certain lifestyle. And we knew that, and, and, and past a certain point, especially we knew that

it would continue to like, we kept buying the cars. We kept orienting our societies in such a way we kept consuming and putting carbon into the atmosphere. And it is this question of, okay, if you're saying in the United States, I want to hold ExxonMobil and Chevron accountable, well, then who's holding you accountable for the fact that you as an American were responsible for a vastly greater amount of environmental degradation than somebody living in Kuala Lumpur? Yeah. I think also it's, you know, we have this, like, in part because of the cultural changes that have unfolded over the last few years, these are not, like, the world's richest companies anymore. And so, like, liquidating them just, like, simply doesn't, from just, like, the perspective of finding capital that will help us in this fight, like, liquidating these companies simply doesn't get us nearly as far as it might have 20 or 30 years ago. I think that there is a moral case for closing them down. I think there's

a practical case for literally just closing them down. I think we should try to pursue that. But I also think that, you know, it's like you take all Bill Gates's money away. Like, it's not like people in sub-Saharan Africa are going to be millionaires. It's just like, there isn't that much money to go around. And the same is true of the fossil fuel companies. But, you know, I do think there needs to be a kind of mechanism for capital redistribution in the service of decarbonization and climate resilience. I think that that is a very, very urgent moral demand that the climate of the future is making of us, which is to say, you know, let's try to treat hundreds of millions of people living in Bangladesh near the coast,

like they were living, you know, on the Gulf Coast of the US and treat their lives with as much, give their lives as much significance and do the same level of things that we would want to do for our distant relatives to protect their lives and livelihoods there. To name one example, I mean, you know, it's not just like there's one place to deal with it, but they can't even get $100 billion out of the G7 to, you know, to the developing example. I mean, you know, it's not just like there's one place to deal with it, but they can't even get $100 billion out of the G7 to, you know, to the developing world.

I think we're going to need considerably more than that going forward. Welcome. I'm Danny Threl. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnal 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. I know it. 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 iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Yeah, I've been reading the book Disposable City by Mario Ariza, which is about Miami and the fact that Miami is doomed unless actions are taken in order to make it survivable in the future. But also just like all of these problems are going to be commensurately more severe for people living in huge chunks of Southeast Asia that have a much larger population than Miami. But we'll never have the resources dedicated towards them.

And there are also it's also the case that a lot of the solutions that we think of here are not available there in the sense that, you know, there was a big study that came out maybe six or nine months ago looking at what it would mean to for land use in the U.S. to be to really decarbonize the power sector through wind and solar and you know it was significant it was like it was not it's not like half the country but it was like i think we had to do something like we had to use like a couple multiples of the land of north dakota um to like get to a total totally zero carbon electricity sector like, you can't do that in Indonesia. There just isn't that amount of land. And what does that mean? Is that an argument for nuclear?

Is that an argument for, you know, a lot more offshore? You know, like it's not exactly clear, but we also, we have, there are many ways in which Americans thinking about climate change suffer from a national narcissism and really think that the whole global problem is our problem. But the challenge is really different everywhere, both on the adaptation side and the mitigation side. And, you know, in a lot of places, it's going to be just tricky to figure out. And the more that we can do as, you know, those with more, the more, I don't know, it's not quite, I'm sure we're never going to be behaving in ways that are actually moral in

this issue, but maybe like approaching some kind of morality, you know? Yeah. Garrison, did you have anything else you wanted to get into? Yeah. Can maybe talk about what you think the future of international coalitions are going to be in terms of like the, the different summits um what you know the different ways the un might try to do stuff um yeah like how how do you see the effectiveness or maybe not even effectiveness but like just how do you see that impacting um people's perception of what's going to happen and then you know if you think that has any chance of making things better at all. Well, you know, the examples that I used in the book, I think,

are still the ones that I come back to, which is the way that the post-World War II international order, which was led primarily by the U.S., treated the issues of human rights and free markets, which were never handed over to a particular political authority to police around the world, but which became universal enough values that they could be invoked as reasons to intervene in other countries, to invade other countries, to bully other countries in trade negotiations. And oftentimes they were covers for what were basically just national self-interest, calling something a human rights issue so that you could open a market or whatever. But on the whole, I think they did sort of successfully promote both of those values over the course of those 50 years, you know, not to say that markets are unequal,

a value that we should value as much as we value human rights, but we saw, you know, globally, a changing culture of geopolitics sort of as a result. And the tools that were used, not just by the US, but especially by the US, in promoting that change, were really diverse. Like, sometimes we did go to war. Sometimes we just argued about stuff in the UN. Sometimes we, you know, put sanctions on countries and refuse to trade with them because we consider them, you know, to be behaving immorally. Sometimes we finance clandestine wars like where our CIA agents train. You know, we did a whole lot of different shit in the name of those values. And I sort of suspect we're likely to see the same thing unfold with climate where it becomes a sort of first order value of the global system. And that doesn't mean

that there is a independent climate change authority with, you know, some kind of, you know, that can like throw leaders in jail for behaving badly, that I can go into Brazil and arrest Bolsonaro or something. I don't think that's all that likely. But I think that we start to talk about power dynamics in ways that are inflected, at least with climate considerations. And I think we're already starting to see that. The way that the EU is talking about its border adjustment, carbon tax, there's a similar proposal now in the US, really suggests that we're already embedding climate values in what were once quite coldly calculated trade deals. You know, there was a couple of years ago, there was that back and forth about the fires in the Amazon

where Emmanuel Macron threatened to pull out of a major trade deal with Brazil over the fires. And it didn't totally come to pass. But that sort of power dynamic, I think, is quite, you know, quite present on the world stage already. Now, the question is ultimately, like, who's doing the policing? Who's empowered to enforce these values? And what are their own, what's their own record? You know, at the moment, the U.S., I think, is not really in a position to lecture anybody. in a position to lecture anybody. And to some degree, in a certain light,

China has a certain amount of moral authority here because they've invested so aggressively in green technologies, but they also have the opposite problem, which is that they are still burning a ton of coal. And I don't really know, there's been a lot of, I don't really know how that dynamic will play out. I just think it's hard to imagine a geopolitics going forward that doesn't center climate change in the same way that some of these other values have been centered. UN-based treaty framework is probably at most a partial component of this dynamic and not the whole of it. I mentioned this earlier, but all of the net zero pledges we've seen over the

last couple of years, all of them have been done totally outside of the Paris framework and the UN framework. It's not the US or China going around and telling India that they need to up their ambition at all. It's all of these countries coming to the realization that it is in their self-interest to decarbonize. And that is, I think, a likelier path forward than one in which these things are negotiated country to country. And I think it's frankly a lot healthier because for a long time climate diplomacy was conducted under the anxiety of the collective action problem, which is to say that, you know, the U.S. goes to zero carbon tomorrow, functionally its climate will be unchanged over the rest of the century, even a huge emitter like the US, compared, you know, if nobody else does anything. And so everybody's just sort of waiting

around, waiting for someone else to act because they think the cost of acting nationally or locally is born nationally and locally, but the benefit of acting nationally or locally is carried around the world. Now, I think that is no longer the paradigm. I think that's the reason why we're seeing all of these new national pledges outside of the framework of Paris. I think that's in part because we have a clear understanding of the damages of climate change. I think it's also really, we're getting a much clearer sense of the burdens of health from air pollution, from the burning of fossil fuels. And so when you're doing your even like your crudest cost benefit analysis, it seems really

obvious that decarbonizing is worth it independent of the climate benefits. And you know, that's true in the US, Drew Shindell is this great professor at Duke has calculated that the health benefits of decarbonizing the American electricity sector would entirely pay for themselves. It would entirely pay for the project. You don't have to factor in any climate benefit at all. It's just like through cleaner air, it would be paid for by itself. I think many more countries around the world are seeing things that way, and that's why they're beginning to move more quickly. And even though that's like a to move more quickly. And even though that's like a sign that the geopolitics is abandoning some of its moral pretense and returning to something that amounts to a more naked, even quasi like

capitalistic mercenary set of values. I also think that I have a sort of easier time trusting that progress will happen in that context if every country thinks that their people will be better off if their economy is greener. I don't think we're going to do it fast enough, but I think the progress is on the way. The last thing I want to maybe discuss a little bit is uh the future of carbon capture and geoengineering specifically with you know bezos and musk and other people doing more space stuff um and just yeah seeing how the likelihood and how much you think it will affect things when they start messing with the atmosphere or if you think they're going to go that route. Cause I know Bezos talked a bit about that in terms of like moving stuff into

space for like pollution and stuff. Yeah. Cause I mean your chapter on geo on geoengineering was really good. In my opinion, I thought that gave a really good overview of the terrible double-edged sword that that is. And yeah, with all the space stuff, how do you see those kind of things coming to pass in the next few years? I think it's going to, geoengineering in particular,

and solar radiation management, which is the sort of most common way that people talk about it, which is suspending sulfur in the atmosphere to reflect sunlight. I think that that's going to become a much bigger part of the conversation. And personally, I would like to see more research. I'm skeptical of this as a useful solution, but I think it's worth testing and seeing. And I don't think, at the moment, there's still basically like a global gag order on even figuring out what it would mean. And I think that that's really counterproductive, actually, that we should have a clearer sense of what the costs and benefits of doing it are. The people who I admire most who are supportive say this isn't a permanent

solution. If we imagine a century from now or 75 years from now, technological advances sufficient to remove carbon from the atmosphere at scale being run cheaply and efficiently. And I don't think that's a crazy thing to imagine on that time scale. What we really need to do is sort of protect ourselves for a period of time for a generation or so until those things can come online and really make a difference in the atmosphere. That seems like a plausible argument to me. Like, I'm certainly not ready to endorse it because I think we really just don't know actually much of what the effects would be. But I think any, you know, it sort of depends on what your hoped for goal is but any project of decarbonization

or just say climate action that is built entirely around wind and solar power is not going to get us to stay below two degrees. And if you think that living at two degrees is going to be really tough, maybe there are some other ways to make it a little less tough. Now, I think I'm sounding at the moment more supportive of geoengineering than I really am. But I just think in general, like this problem is too big to dismiss any partial solution out of hand. On carbon capture, I'm, you know, I'm more supportive at the theoretical level and my objections are primarily practical, which is to say, you know, at the moment we have these machines

that do this, you know, they can do this already. It's kind of expensive, but it's not impossibly expensive, but to use them to even counteract the emissions that are today produced by the hardest to decarbonize parts of the economy, namely heavy industry and jet travel, would require, through these machines, would require something like a third to a half of today's global energy production, on top of which we need to find a place to build these huge industrial plantations. We'd have to find a place to store all that carbon. Estimates suggest we might need an infrastructure two to four times the size of today's oil and gas business. And that's not to make it so we can drive gas cars longer. It's literally like the hardest. If we decarbonize

as rapidly as the IPC says they want us to, cutting in half our emissions by 2030, they say we're still going to need a carbon capture or at least a negative emissions infrastructure as much as four times the size of today's oil and gas business. And of course, there's no market for that carbon at all, which means it would have to be entirely state funded unless someone comes up with a market for it. So my, you know, on top of that there are objections to land use, there are sort of likely NIMBY issues, and while it's tempting to turn instead to, you know, natural negative emissions with AFAR station, it's estimated that to do the same, just again for this sort of sliver of emissions

that are the hardest to decarbonize would require land being used something like the scale of between five and 15 times the size of Texas just for this purpose. So we're talking about like in either of these cases, either like sucking up a huge chunk of what today's energy system produces or using an enormous amount of the planet's land in order to deal with only a tiny sliver of the problem

through either of these technologies. Now, my hope is that 50 years from now, 75 years from now, 100 years from now, we'll have a lot more options for how to take carbon out of the atmosphere. We'll be able to do it much more efficiently, both in terms of energy and in terms of land use. And I think there are some things that are encouraging that are sort of early stage R&D, that we're at sort of early stage R&D on. But the scale of the problem is just so large that we can't believe that they're going to do our work for us.

It really will be like, over the timescale of our lifetimes, it'll be a marginal solution that allows us to decarbonize really hard to decarbonize sectors a little more slowly. And maybe on a timescale of two centuries, it'll allow us to like revert to an earlier climate and stabilize things back at, you know, something like 280 parts per million. Although who knows how possible that is. 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 Sonora. 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. I know you. 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 iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Briefly on that note, I want to talk about the actual long-term impacts, like how the pollution that we're doing and the emissions that we're doing now is going to impact stuff 300 years from now.

Do you have anything to say on that? Because that specific aspect is not talked about as much because of how urgent it is for people who are living now. We have a lot of problems to deal with. The fact that we don't talk about the farther future. It's something I worry about a lot because all of our models are basically to 2100 and nothing goes beyond then. And I think there is some reason to worry that we're not really capturing some slower processes and feedbacks that may add considerably to our level of warming,

even if we get to zero emissions sometime this century. Of course, the impact, some of the impacts are essentially irreversible. You know, the term tipping point gets used a lot. I think often it's used a little misleadingly because it's not like you're going to wake up, you know, on a Tuesday and the planet's going to be completely different than it was on that Monday. But what it really means is that like, we're going to enter into a new state with a variety of these impacts that we won't be able to return to the old one. The melting of the ice sheets is probably the most dramatic of those. And, you know, it's estimated that somewhere north of two degrees, we'd probably lock that into inevitability. And that means over time, you know, something like 200 feet of sea level rise. Now, we don't expect that would take place even on a timescale of

centuries. It would probably take millennia or more, but it means that the choices that we're making now are really going to live on for an incredibly long time. I mean, thousands of years. And that's another reason why they're so consequential. Some of the ecosystem loss that we're going through is irreversible. You simply can't recreate those things by design. And, you know, even thinking about wildfires in the West, the fire scientists I talked to, you know, they're all really reluctant to talk about fire even in the second half of the 20th century because they expect that by 2050 so much of the region will have burned and they don't know what kind of plant life is going to grow back in that in you know among those ashes so they don't know how to model it it's like is it this kind of a tree is it this is a eucalyptus is it ash you know it's like um and that's kind of amazing to think about just like that you know we think of the landscape as permanent and human intrusion as possibly transient but we are engineering changes to the land um that will

make many of the things that we think of as you know the iconic features of a place like california totally disappear within the space of our lifetime. And, you know, perhaps the most dramatic of these impacts would be if the Amazon were to enter into a divac state and turn into something like a savanna, which is, you know, some scientists think is quite possible, maybe even in relatively short timescales, but more importantly is, you know, that there would be no timescale for recovery, that we would have lost it forever as a rainforest and with it, a huge capacity for carbon absorption, and a lot of the world's oxygen. So yeah, it gets scarier when you look past 2100, even though what's happening this century is scary enough. Yeah, that's all I wanted to talk about. That's all I wanted to talk about.

Yeah. I'm planning a trip down there in the not too distant future. And yeah, it's kind of hard to overstate the importance of not reaching that point. And also the difficulty of knowing if we already have not good news coming out of that region right now. I mean, the slightly positive, slightly gooder part of the news is that what we're doing now, I mean, there's a big report a couple weeks ago that was, you know, more carbons coming out of the Amazon and going into it, which is terrifying. But that is because we're deforesting and burning. It's not because of, yeah, theoretically, if we change policy there, we could, you know, we could stop that. There is a point, though, at which the

climate changing itself will be producing similar effects, and that will be considerably more alarming. Yeah. Well, David, you've been incredibly generous with your time. Thank you very much for talking with us today. No, my pleasure. Great to talk to you guys. And with that, that is the end of our interview with David Wallace-Wells. You can find him on Twitter at D. Wallace-Wells. You can find his book, The Uninhabitable Earth, in, you know, probably some local bookstores. I know you can get it online. That's where I got it.

And you can follow this podcast, Happen Here Pod, and Cool Zone Media on Twitter. I think we have Instagrams for those too, but I don't use that. You can follow me at Hungry Bowtie. You can follow Robert at I Write OK. Thanks for listening. Stay tuned next week for more It Could Happen Here daily.

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Join me, Danny Trails, and step into the flames of rife. 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 podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.