Plain English with Derek Thompson - The World Is on Fire. Here’s a Realistic Plan to Save Humanity.

Episode Date: July 19, 2022

The world is on fire. In southern Europe, wildfires are streaking from Portugal to Greece. In the U.K., airport runways melted as temperatures exceeded 103 degrees for the first time on record. In the U.S. this week, about one in five Americans are living in a place that will be even hotter than the U.K.’s historic mark. And what is our government doing about it? Pretty close to nothing. But if you look behind these headlines, there’s something very interesting happening. In the past decade, the price of solar electricity has declined by 90 percent. The efficiency of lithium-ion batteries has increased by 90 percent. Per-capita emissions in the U.S. have declined by a quarter since 2005, falling all the way to levels not seen since 1960. These are technological revolutions worth building on. But they will require that Americans get over their allergy to new construction. And build. Today’s guest is David Wallace-Wells, a writer for The New York Times and the author of the bestseller 'The Uninhabitable Earth.' In this episode, we talk about the future of a hot world, the science of heat, the depressing state of climate policy in Washington, the more hopeful state of climate technology and global adaptation, the end of old-fashioned environmentalism, and the future of a new climate movement. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: David Wallace-Wells Producer: Devon Manze Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What's up, everybody? Are you tuning in to the Challenge USA on CBS? Well, tune in to me, Tyson Apostle, as I break down each and every episode with my co-host, Amelia Weddemeier. I'm also a contestant on the show, which gives you all the insider scoop. Amelia, how stoked are you to do this? Tyson, I'm freaking excited. I cannot wait to sit my butt down every single week to watch the show, then come here and recap it with you on the Ringar Reality TV podcast. Today, the world is on fire. In southern Europe, literal wildfires are streaking from Portugal to Greece. In the UK, airport runways have melted as temperatures exceeded 104 degrees Fahrenheit for the first time in the country's history, going back more than 500 years on record.

In the U.S. this week, about one in five Americans are living in a place that will be even hotter than 104 degrees, the UK's historic mark. So what are we doing about it? Well, there's the Senate, which is doing close to nothing. There's the EPA, which, according to the latest Supreme Court decision, can do close to nothing. If you turn on the news, you know, on TV, the radio, especially if it's a left-leaning show, a show that takes climate change capital S seriously, what you'll hear is probably some kind of familiar ritual, grief and anguish throughout the state of the world, comments about how this can't

keep happening, this can't keep happening, this is the most important story on the planet. And then you know what happens next. The wild thing is, you know that several months from now, the news will move on, the epicenter of outrage will move to some other issue, and in the interim, at the national level, almost nothing at all will change. But if you look behind Washington, look behind these gloomy headlines, there's something very interesting happening, something that's not entirely depressing. In the last decade, the price of solar electricity has declined by 90% in order of magnitude. The efficiency of lithium ion batteries has increased by 90%. Per capita emissions in the U.S. have declined by a quarter since 2005.

falling all the way to levels not seen since 1960 and even decades earlier. These are technological revolutions worth building on, but they will actually require that Americans get over their allergy to new construction and actually build. Today's guest is David Wallace Wells. He is a writer for the New York Times and the author of the bestseller, The Uninhabitable Earth. In this episode, we talk about the future of a hotter and hotter.

hotter planet, the science of heat, the depressing state of climate policy in Washington, the more hopeful state of climate technology and global adaptation, the end of old-fashioned environmentalism, and the possible future of a new climate movement. I'm Derek Thompson. This is planning on question. David, welcome to the podcast. Super happy to be here. Thanks for having me.

So we have to start with these heat waves that are taking over Europe. the U.S., much of the northern hemisphere, I do not know enough about climate or meteorology to ask this question in like a smart and sophisticated way, and so that leaves the not very smart or sophisticated way. Why is it so hot in Europe right now? Well, I mean, your intuitions as a lay observer are not in any way wrong, which is to say like it is crazy hot in Europe.

It's also crazy hot in China. It has been for several months now crazy hot in South Asia. And just to bracket that for a second, means like both China and India and Pakistan. So together about almost three billion people on the planet have each experienced heat waves lasting longer than 30 days so far this year. We often think about China and India is like there are two countries, which they are, but they're also like, you know, more than a quarter of the world's population. There's heat waves in the U.S. right now. And all of them are pretty extreme. Some are more extreme than others. Some are more off the charts

than others. The ones in Europe are getting a lot of attention now because they are so out of the range of our expectations. And that means that they're also much more dangerous, which is something we can talk about a little bit later. But the fact that these populations are not used to these temperatures is itself a really important thing about how bad they're going to be. Whereas in a place like India, even if things are really hot, people on some level know how to deal with them.

So we're dealing with some pretty unusual in a lot of places, totally unprecedented temperature events. Like in England, they have some kinds of records going back, 100. of years. So we know with some certainty that that island has never seen days as hot as they've seen this week in William Shakespeare's time, in Queen Elizabeth's time, anytime this century. This is totally unprecedented. And the records are being broken by several degrees in one swoop, which in a normal climate would never happen. Why is that happening? It's complicated. One reason is the planet's heating up. That's important. It just means that when you move the bell curve of

temperatures a little bit to the right. The things that show up sort of rarely are like way more extreme than the things that used to show up. But it also is happening because of some bigger transformations of the climate system, notably having to do with the circulation of the oceans, which is to say the way that the planet moves heat around itself, those are slowing, which means that we're seeing more and more of these what are called heat dome events where it's not just really hot for a period of time, but it can be for an extended period of time and can produce some really extreme temperatures. Last summer, there was one of these quite dramatically in the Pacific Northwest. But the truth is that the term can be applied to many of these events. And even this

heat wave in Europe that we're seeing this week, which is crazy, it's melting the streets and the Port of France, producing wildfires all across the continent and even like urban firestorms in London now. All of that is, you know, is crazy. But it actually was also really hot in Europe like a month ago. So a couple of days ago, they've been uncirculating on social media, this like fake forecast that the UK Met Office, which is like the National Weather Service put together a few years ago showing what temperatures could look like in 2050 if climate change continued unabated. And today's temperatures are basically the same, which is scary enough. But what was really most striking to me about that was,

I saw the same thing happened in France like a month ago, which is to say that the French meteorological society had put together a forecast of what a really scary climate future in 2050 would look like. And a month ago, France was sitting those temperatures. So we're in a new state. Extremes are more extreme and more common, but there are also some basic changes to the way that weather happens on a planet that are going to make some of these events even more regular and intense than we might have expected without those changes. Right. So this is historically abnormal, but it also is at the same time maybe a kind of new normal. Like we're breaking 600-year-old records potentially, but also there are reasons to think that we're

likely to face these kind of heat domes in the U.S. and Southeast Asia in Europe. for the foreseeable future, which is really scary. And it makes the next question, I think, pretty important, which is, what does heat do to our bodies scientifically? Like, is it the temperature level that's most dangerous or important? Or is it humidity? Or is it something about, like, recovery time? I feel like I read something about how, you know,

the body can take 100 degrees Fahrenheit for a little bit, but we need to recover at a lower temperature, especially at night when we're sleeping. Help me understand, like, the smart way to think about what kind of heat is most dangerous for a human body? Well, I think the way that I put it in my book was that, like, we are physically heat engines. We are producing heat all the time. And in order to survive, we need to constantly be cooling off.

So the main thing that heat conditions of all of these varieties do is make it harder for us to cool off. And that can have a variety of effects on our heart rate, on, you know, our liver function, on other organs. And different people will experience it in different ways, which is a, a meta point that's important to make is that like, you know, when we talk about some of these impacts, we imagine them as essentially universal and uniform. And we say, like, well, if we hit this temperature, X number of people will die. But of course, humans are complicated. The way that we respond to heat is complicated. Yeah. We're moving into danger zones, but it's certainly not the case that like

when anybody walks outside, everybody's going to just drop dead. And certainly even those people who are dying in these heat waves and the numbers are not small in Europe right now, they're not dying off from the same thing. Many of them, even most of them, are dying not of obvious heat stroke, but of exacerbated underlying conditions, people who are sick with other diseases being pushed over the edge by the heat because our bodies need to be cooling off in order to operate properly. And is it the temperature or the humidity? Like, is there a certain aspect of the heat picture that is most important when it comes to affecting our bodies, our cells, our organs in this way? the measure that most scientists use to talk about it is a combination of heat and humidity.

It's called wet bulb temperature. And it's, I mean, it's really actually a crazy measure. It's like the temperature of a thermometer wrapped in a wet cloth when you swing it around in the air. That is actually like the technical measure of how dangerous heat and humidity is. And it is those things together, which is to say that very high heat with very low humidity is dangerous, especially to vulnerable people, particularly old. but the more that you get both of them in combination, the worse off you're going to be. So at temperature and humidity levels,

you know, I actually know the scale in Celsius, so it's a little complicated and it does factor in humidity. So it's, you know, whatever, it's a little hard to talk about it in an American audience. But at temperature and humidity levels that are approaching these real limits, that means that many young, healthy people are said to be unable to move. around outside for a period of a few hours without literally dying. And that means that there is a ceiling scientists have given us to say, like, we can't pass that point without seeing true

mass death. And in fact, we are seeing parts of the world hitting those temperatures for brief periods of time, but that gets back to something else you mentioned, which is that the duration of the heat is really important and the ability, and, you know, because that factors into our ability to recover. So I spoke to a really prominent heat scientist about some of these issues a week or two ago. I was looking in a big picture way about why these really crazy heat waves in South Asia actually hadn't killed all that many people. And one of the things that he said to me most memorably was like, you know, you could survive in an oven for 15 minutes. And it's a different thing for an hour. And it's a different thing for three hours. And it's a different thing for six hours.

And one of the complicating stories and factors in all of this is, yes, we're living in hotter, on a hotter planet, the heat is more intense. But also many of us are living in urban areas. And urban areas both get hotter during the day because of all the asphalt and concrete, which absorb heat. But then also they don't cool off nearly as much at night as they would if you were living in a rural area because all of that stuff is basically like a heat battery that's just storing it all the time. And that means that the temperature levels that we used to see at night during really intense heat waves, we're not getting. And that doesn't mean again that every person in a city that has a crazy heat wave is going to die or pass out or have heat.

heat stroke, but it does mean that we could be seeing the number of people who are suffering in those ways, you know, multiplying by a factor of two or four or even more than that relatively soon. So it's a complicated picture, but, you know, on the big story, it's like all of the metrics are getting worse for human health. We're starting to figure out how to respond to it in an interesting way. It may be some of the poorer countries of the world that are showing us how to do that, because that's interesting because it's a reverse of the way a lot of people in rich countries the world think where we think all we need is air conditioning. It turns out, a lot of things cheaper than that are doing a relatively good job in the parts of the planet

that are already hit by most intense heat. But it's representing a growing threat. And even today, I think the extreme heat is the biggest climate killer in the U.S. today. And so we're likely to see more of that going forward. I'd love you to say one more piece on that, because it's really interesting when you juxtapose the fact that according to official records, you know, thousands of people have died in Europe of heat-related causes. But in India and Pakistan, you just said, at least according to the official statistics, there weren't nearly as many deaths as a result of heat as a lot of scientists were expecting. And there's a lot of possible reasons for why that's the case, but at least one reason might have something to do with

human adaptation. Now, I want to sort of bracket all of this by saying, I'm not trying to be polyanish and say, you know, it doesn't matter how hot the world gets because we'll always find some way to adapt and it'll be totally fine. I'm not trying to suggest that. But maybe just go one level deeper on why it might be the case that some people in places like that Southeast Asia that are dealing with really, really extreme heat might have found some subtle ways to adapt to it that didn't necessarily require hunkering down in your apartment or house and dialing up the thermostat or down the thermostat to 65 degrees. Well, to begin with, there's some not subtle ways, which is to say it may be the case that those people who couldn't have survived those

conditions have already died. And when you look at some of the really punishing heat waves that have hit Europe in recent decades, and actually the world's worst, most lethal heat waves we've seen were in Europe in the 2000s, in 2003 and 2010, not only is it the fact that those are hitting populations that haven't seen heat like this before, they're living in places that not only don't have air conditioning but are not used to air conditioning. They're living in buildings that are not built to cool off. They're built to store heat and all these other factors. But it's also the case that when you look at successive heat waves, even within the same year, the mortality is much lower. And so this is, I mean, it's a really gruesome term, but one of these heat scientists I was

speaking to used it to describe the epidemiology, these are effectively culling events. And one of the things that he said was that by the end of the century, it's likely that even at a biophysical level, putting aside the cultural adaptations that you're talking about at a biophysical level, and maybe the places in the northern hemisphere across Europe and the U.S., we will be as adapted to extreme heat as people today in the tropics are. But in between now and then, we're likely to see a lot of quite lethal heat waves to get the population to that point, which is a pretty dark way of thinking about adaptation, to your point about Pollyanna thinking. But it is an important fact.

And I think it's probably true that if we fast forward 50, 70 years from now, the same heat that's hitting the UK right now or Spain and Portugal right now and killing thousands almost certainly. won't be. Part of that is, of course, the other thing you mentioned, which is the cultural adaptation. And, you know, there are a lot of different levers there and layers of response. But I would just start by saying, you know, it's, I spent some time actually recently with a number of people who are from Delhi who told me that they essentially didn't leave their houses for a period of two and a half months earlier this spring because the temperatures were every day over 100 degrees. And if they did go out, it was between 6 and 9 a.m. and between nine and midnight. Now, that's not possible for everybody in India. It's not possible for anybody

anywhere, especially for the wage earners, the day laborers who are not protected by labor laws. That's really important. But it's also the case that as we know from cultural stereotype, like the tropics have a way of slowing down the pace of life in response to certain threats, like heat. And it is the case that many of these places have siestas in the middle of the day. And it is more normal to take breaks. And, you know, that is, we think of it, you know, there's a kind of a racist stereotype about it, but there's also some great wisdom in responding to the cues that the climate is giving you about what's happening. And there are also, you know, centuries of experience of what we in the U.S. and Europe would consider really, really punishing even lethal heat.

And people know, for instance, like, you don't wear jeans. You wear a really light daydress. You hydrate all the time. And in fact, there is a huge variety of, like, essentially hydration stations all around even the slums of the biggest cities in India and Pakistan where you're not just drinking water. You're drinking effectively like improvised gatorade. They're things that have, you know, electrolytes in them. And these are not like the government is saying, here's a new drink. It's like, no, the people here have been drinking these drinks for hundreds of years in heat.

and they know what to do. They know what kinds of foods to cook and to eat. And they know how to respond. They also are living in oftentimes much more closely networked families and communities than we are in parts of the U.S. and Europe. This is something that Eric Linenberg writes about a fair amount. The NYU Sociologist. Yeah, he wrote one book about a deadly heatwave in Chicago.

He wrote another book about loneliness in the U.S. the lonely. So he sort of thought about these connections together. And it's not just the case that, you know, the stereotype we may have of someone living in India and growing up in an extended family network living in a single house is true, although that can be true for some people. It's also the case that even in, you know, migrant worker labor camps, those people are looking out for one another in a way that is a little more direct than is often the case in many parts of the U.S. And so there's that sort of support network as well. That's really interesting. Yes.

So it's a combination of, right, at the population level, there's some dark news because there's this sort of calling effect that you mentioned. I don't want to say this is a silver lining, but knowing that that is the case means at least that we have the opportunity, not the eventuality, but the opportunity to create policy around that, right, to say, all right, if we know that the southern U.S. is going to get hotter and hotter over the next few decades, we can identify who the most vulnerable people are and have sort of climate adaptation policies directed toward them. but you're right. In the bigger picture, it's certainly a dark one. I would say on top of that, it's, you know, one of the more encouraging things is that the Indian government, the Pakistani government in particular, like, they did very little. So a lot of these measures are actually happening at a kind of vernacular grassroots level, not on the policy level. Right, yeah, they're bottom up, yeah. Well, and speaking up the necessity for bottom up policy, we're about to talk about

U.S. governance when it comes to climate change, where the top-down policy is a little bit lacking. There's been a few setbacks in U.S. environmental movements from Washington, in D.C. in the last few weeks. A few weeks ago, the Supreme Court handed down a ruling in the case West Virginia versus the EPA Environmental Protection Agency. And a lot of people reported on this case as just pure doom for progressives in terms of the EPA's ability to regulate energy policy related to climate change. You pushed back a little bit against the pure doom narrative in a piece, The New York Times. Tell us what this ruling said briefly and why you think it's important? Well, in the really big picture, it's bad news for the American regulatory state.

It was basically the Supreme Court took an opportunity to declare that any time an American regulatory agency was trying to do something new, especially if it was big, it was going to have to get explicit authorization from Congress. And that means that functionally, given what we know about today's Congress and the Congresses were likely to see in the near future, there's not going to be any new regulatory power, you know, assumed by any of these agencies. In the particular context of climate and the EPA, what happened was under Obama, faced with legislative inaction, the EPA basically instituted this what was called the Clean Power Plan, which was a project to essentially regulate American energy away from coal in particular, but to a lesser extent,

oil and gas, and towards renewables. But that never was implemented. It was sort of functionally adopted, but so quickly challenged in courts that before it was ever actually, any state was actually ever held to its standards, it was moot. Then when Donald Trump came in, he tossed it out and put in what, you know, what he, I think was called the Affordable Energy Plan or something, an alternative, which was much, much weaker. But that also was never implemented. And so the Supreme Court was like weighing in on these set of policies, which were never actually imposed, which itself is unprecedented, basically. Like, the Supreme Court is theoretically not supposed to be adjudicating theoretical disputes.

they're supposed to be adjudicating actual disputes with actual people who have what they call torts that is like claims against an agency or other. But what this meant was that the sort of approach that Obama had sketched out in 2015 is now functionally illegal. Biden had already said that his EPA was not going to reinstitute the clean power plan. We don't know exactly what they're cooking up, but they're cooking up an alternative. And so what this basically means is that like some tool that may have theoretically been on the table available, to future administrations is now likely not on the table anymore. It does not set us back. It does not make us produce more carbon than we would be otherwise, but we are frozen in a place that's really not a good place because the policies we've implemented, and even the kind of remarkable technological

progress and market progress that's been made over the last few years is really far short of where the U.S. wants to go and where anybody in the climate movement wants to go. So this ruling itself didn't make a huge difference to that story, but it meant that we're sort of, it's another thing that's keeping us where we are rather than allowing us to move a little more quickly forward. Right. Frozen, I think, is a good word, right? Legislatively, we're frozen. We can't pass climate change policy. And so as a result, you have the action moving to the administrative state, the EPA is thinking about ways that it can essentially regulate energy production, but that wasn't being actualized either. So essentially, this is a decision that maintains the frozenness of our all

already frozen federal policy. It's also the case that in the last few weeks, and this is more of a developing story, Democrats are facing the demise of their own climate deal. There was hope that for the last 18 months, Democrats might be able to eke something out by the skin of its teeth, but the linchpin here, as always, is Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia. That's a coal-heavy state. Mansion himself is the founder and part owner of a coal trading company. So right now, it looks like not only at the EPA level, are we a bit stymied, but also in terms of legislation, we're stymied as well. What do you think are the odds that we get something, anything new on the climate front from Democrats before the midterms? I would say slim to numb, but I've been saying that for quite

a while. I mean, I think essentially as soon as the Democrats split off the infrastructure package last fall, the chances for climate provision were really slim. And I think that primarily because, you know, this is a little bit reading tea leaves. It's a little bit informed speculation. I know some people in the administration are a part of these negotiations, but I'm not in those rooms myself. I think that Joe Manchin wants to say no. I don't think that he has a bill

that he's going to get behind and he's just waiting for Democrats to get on board. I think they've tried that. The last round of compromise negotiations was inspired by his own framework. And then he came out and basically said the two organizing principles of that framework that is tax hikes and energy spending.

He wasn't interested in doing, at least for the time being, until he saw some future inflation numbers. Now, if we wait another month for the next set of inflation numbers to come out, even taking him at his word, we're getting really close to the midterms and the chances that major legislation passes then, I think is really slim. But like I said, I don't even really trust that he means that. I think he's just wanting to be able to say to his voters, you know, those Democrats are crazy. I stood up to them and you can thank me for the fact that, you know, we haven't killed your coal plans, which is remarkable considering, I mean, just to like pause for a second, you know,

the people who study the large build back better plan estimated that it was going to create, I think, 8 million jobs. There are only 2.6 million people in all of West Virginia. So we are, you know, like even the number of jobs that could be created in West Virginia are like much bigger than the like the coal jobs that would be. loss there. So this is why I've heard plans that are just like, why doesn't the federal government just buy the entire coal industry of West Virginia? Like just spend that, this is the opposite of pork, right? It's like sort of diabolical pork, bizarre pork. You take tens of billions, dozens of billions of dollars.

You buy off every coal producing plant in West Virginia. You're essentially handing Joe Manchin a blank check saying, please sign whatever climate legislation we have here. And your voters will hopefully reward you because they're getting an enormous cash influx. I mean, it's a little bit diabolical. It's a little bit unrealistic. I'm not sure we can particularly, I'm not sure many senators, Democratic senators are ready to do a state-specific stimulus in order to get climate change legislation passed to the Senate.

But to the point that you're making, West Virginia is small enough, and the coal industry within West Virginia is small enough that it raises this question of, why don't we just buy them off? I want to do a quick, sort of subtle turn here, which is that the picture that we painted, not only of heat in Europe, but heat in the world,

and not only of legislation out of the Senate, but also regulatory policy out of the EPA, all this sounds like pure doom and gloom. But something interesting has happened in the U.S. in the last 50 years, in the absence of strong legislation, in the absence of true leadership, I think, from the federal level.

And that is that per capita carbon dioxide emissions in the U.S. peaked in the 1970s, and they held steady at a pretty high plateau for 30 years, and then since 2006 or so, they've fallen by 25%. In fact, I just looked this up a few minutes ago, and the last year I could find data for, 2020, which is a pandemic year, but it's not so different than the years that came before it. In 2020, per capita emissions in the U.S. were below our estimated levels of 1917. So, like, I'm not hanging like a mission accomplished banner here, like the U.S. is saying, still the world's largest producer of oil. It's still by far the world's largest historical emitter. And yet, something seems to have happened in the U.S. in the last 50 years, and in particular,

in the last 15 years, that has significantly reduced per capita emissions. What happened? We stopped burning so much coal. 2005 was the year of peak coal in the U.S. And actually, it's remarkable and kind of perverse, but the U.S. counts its emissions reductions against the year 2005 because that's when we peaked coal. The whole rest of the world is counting their emissions reductions off of 1990 because that was when the UN started its framework. But we're like, we want credit from coming from the highest peak. But that's the main story.

We essentially spent a decade and a half for placing coal with gas. We're starting now to see renewables play a bigger role in that transition. But the main story is that we went from coal to gas. And that is a huge difference in terms of emissions. It's also a huge difference in terms of public health. the air pollution from coal is so bad that it's estimated that in Europe, which doesn't even use all that much of it, for every thousand people who get power from a coal plant, one of them dies every year. And so, you know, there's a really strong public health argument for retiring coal and also other fossil fuels, but coal most dramatically. And that's the story there.

I just want to, like, correct one little thing that you said, which is you compared our essence to 1917. Really important to keep in mind, anyone who's trying to wrap their heads around this story. We think of it as a centuries-long story. We think of it as having started a couple hundred years ago, but half of all of the emissions that have ever been produced in the history of humanity have come in the last 25 years, which means that any time you're comparing something to like pre-World War II, it's just a totally different world.

However much we think the coal mines were dirty and the air was dirty back then, we're like the emission story is of the last 30 years. So we really shouldn't be congratulating ourselves for getting back, you know, getting or like we shouldn't be making comparisons back there. We should be making comparisons more recently. But, you know, it's also the case that when, When Barack Obama was trying to pass a cap and trade plan in 2009, 2010, they estimated what effect that would have.

People at the time thought that those effects were ambitiously estimated. And we have cut emissions by more since then than they said we were going to if we implemented that policy. So we were doing better with functionally no policy or more accurate to say a little policy, but no major, major policy than we thought we were going to do. And is that mostly because of the fracking revolution? Like, is the natural gas revolution or the natural gas technological jump responsible for most of our going beyond the benchmark that was set by the Obama administration on this particular metric? Yeah, it's the lion's share of it.

And one thing I would say about that is I'm actually closing a piece tomorrow about this, which is most people don't appreciate that fracking has never made money. It lost like $300 billion lost as an industry between, I think, 2010 and 2020. Now, this is not primarily public subsidy. It's investors losing their shirts. It's major banks losing their shirts. But this energy transition revolution, the fracking revolution, which is now responsible for two-thirds of our oil and two-thirds of our gas, has been a money loser. They're making some money now because of the energy price spikes of the last year. But from the very beginning of the invention of the technology until 2020, it was for almost

everybody involved, aside from like the middlemen and the wild catteras who were profiting down the line, it was an industry scale money loser. And I was listening to a podcast with an analyst from Goldman Sachs, the chief commodities researcher. And he said that he estimated that the industry as a whole had lost. 30 cents on every dollar that was put into it. Unbelievable. So we are now living in a totally different world because of this energy transition, which lost money.

And I think that that's really useful in thinking about the renewable revolution, which we've been told over the same period of time was too expensive and too burdensome to really focus on. And, you know, now we're at a place where 90% of the world lives where renewable energy is cheaper than dirty energy. The IEA has called solar power the cheapest electricity in history, and it's only going to get cheaper.

And so to me, the logic is really, really clear. The Fracking Revolution did do something that reduced our emissions. It got us off coal. That's really powerful and important. But it didn't do so because it was this undeniable market force. It did so because a small number of people with a lot of money decided to make it happen.

And in theory, we could be moving the renewable revolution even faster if we were, pushing that kind of capital into those investments too. So to ground set people, we have this really interesting story, I think, which is that if you look at federal policy, it's been an absolute catastrophe. If you look at the EPA in the last few decades, it basically hasn't done anything new or particularly useful. But you have this very peculiar revolution in the corporate world, which is peculiar because

it's extremely successful in terms of its sort of utilitarian purpose. It reduces per capita emissions. but it's extremely unsuccessful based on its sort of for-profit purpose. It loses 30% of the investment for the people that are financing it. You mentioned that, you know, I'm looking at other places that are being invested in in the climate tech sphere, and you mentioned that solar energy is cheaper than coal. Why then is solar energy such a minuscule part of our total energy picture? Why aren't we deploying this technology that?

we know is cheap? Well, I think it's a complicated story. One is that the price declines of solar are so rapid that anybody who is making investment plans three or four or five years ago was working off a very different baseline of cost and making very different projections than they're making today. Although it's now the case the IA just came out with a global report that said for the first time investment in clean energy has exceeded new investment in fossil fuel energy, which is a major milestone.

So we are seeing some transition there. It's also the case that there are obstacles. It takes time to build infrastructure. There are parts of the world, especially, where this kind of massive build-out of wind and solar is not possible. It requires a lot of land. To fully power the American economy later this century with solar, which I don't think we'll end up doing,

but just as a thought experiment, to fully power it with solar would probably require about 10% of the country's land. And every time we build one of those plants, we face some resistance. Now, that's not to say that that can't be overcome. People can be persuaded of the benefits of clean technology, especially if it's replacing a big coal plant. But there are regulatory obstacles.

There are cultural obstacles. They're policy obstacles. And then there's the simple lag time of like when we see something clearly for the first time in the first conference room, the first investor seeing that, it's not like the next day the whole world has changed. It takes a long time to cycle through all those factors that I talked about, but also our political economy, which has been for several generations,

especially in the U.S., but to a certain extent, all around the world, really, really focused on fossil fuel power, and it takes a lot of effort to shake the world off that habit. You say something that's really important for people that are focused on solar energy being the dominant, sort of the leading edge of the Clean Energy Revolution, which is that it just takes up a lot of space, right?

I mean, that's stat, if I recall, it's just absolutely extraordinary. If we power all the U.S. energy needs with just solar, you'd require 10% of U.S. land. That is a lot, and that's like utterly unrealistic to be perfectly blunt. Well, I mean, on some level, it's like more realistic in the U.S. than elsewhere. If you think about like, you know, Singapore could never do that. Indonesia could never do that. India could never do that. You know, parts of sub-Saharan Africa could, but maybe less easily 50 years from now when they have twice as many people.

And in a certain way, the U.S. is actually uniquely well positioned to take advantage of renewable opportunities because they have an abundance of land and we also have an abundance of wind. It's such an interesting point. But it makes me think, okay, so solar, this extraordinary cost revolution, the cost of solar power is declined by 90% in the last 20 years. Wind power has gotten cheaper, but still these are a small part of total U.S. energy generation. And that's why there's some environmentalists who believe very fervently that nuclear power is an absolutely essential part of this equation. Now, this is tough because there are also environmentalists. I think that nuclear power is quasi-demonic.

And we're not going to settle the nuclear question forever here. But maybe let's start with this. Why did the U.S. basically stop building nuclear power plants several decades ago? I think there are two main, or you get maybe three main ways of answering the question. The first is there is the cultural resistance that you're talking about, where especially coming out of the Cold War, the old guard environmental movement of the 1970 is regarded nuclear power as toxic. We saw what happened in Chernobyl, Three Mile Island. We got scared. Just to pause on that for a second, we talked a little bit about the health effects of air pollution. More people

die every day from the burning of fossil fuels every single day than have ever died in all of the nuclear accidents, in all of history. So it's a really vivid, like, picture to think about nuclear meltdown, but at a global level, it is much, much safer than the fossil fuels that we've depended on for a long time. I think that sort of cultural resistance, which also had to do with a sense that it was connected to the defense industry and nuclear war, was an important factor. I also think that somewhat relatedly, there was an incredible growth of new regulation. And this is especially true in the U.S., but it's not exclusively true in the U.S. the cost of new nuclear generation has skyrocketed over the last 50 years, which means that in almost any rich country in the world, with a possible exception of South Korea, it basically

has seemed not economically feasible to build these new plants in a way that 50 years ago it did seem feasible. And that's the third point. So it's like there's cultural resistance, regulatory oversight, and then these sort of massive cost overruns, which means that even when do endeavor to build new plants. They inevitably cost many multiples of what they originally thought they might cost. And as a result, especially compared to nuclear today, you know, the sort of per unit cost of nuclear energy is way more expensive than the per unit cost of renewable energy. Now, that's not to say that we can't imagine a green future where nuclear is playing an important role. You know, as you mentioned, there are some limits. There's the land

use limit to renewable energy. There's also this intermittency problem, which is that to some degree, you know, when the sun's not shining, the wind's not blowing, we have some problems. Battery tech is helping with that already. It will help more in the future. But there are those who think that probably we're going to max out at something like 80, maybe 70, 80 percent of our electricity needs with renewables. And we're going to need something to fill in the gap. And nuclear could well be that. It produces no carbon, except in some amounts of carbon that's used to produce it. But, you know, in an ongoing way, produces no carbon, it's quite reliable. And once you've built those things, you can just run.

maybe not forever, but for a very, very long time. What is your outlook for the future of nuclear? Because I feel like we're at this interesting, maybe cultural blowback moment where everything that you said, I totally agree with. And there's ways in which all those things are connected. If there's cultural resistance, you're going to get more regulation, because it's going more popular. If you get more regulation, you're going to get less learning by doing, less tacit innovation

to figure out how to make nuclear cheaper. And so you're going to build less. You're going to figure out how to make it cheaper less frequently. and so the costs are going to continue to be elevated. But I wonder whether you feel like we're at this sort of groundswell moment where because of the war in Ukraine, because of this rising YIMBY, yes, in my backyard movement in the U.S., we might see a little bit of bottom-up energy around nuclear

that we didn't necessarily see in previous years. Is that just illusory? Am I just hanging out in the wrong crowds? Or are you starting to see maybe something changing on the nuclear front? I think it is changing. I wouldn't describe it as a grassroots change. I would actually describe it as a climate movement change. I think that at the grassroots level,

a lot of people are still scared of those nuclear stacks. They don't like to see them in their town, and they root for them to be retired, even retired early, which is really bad. When we've closed, like, India Point in New York, we now have much higher carbon emissions than we had a couple years ago because we close the nuclear power plant. Basically, that's going to happen everywhere

because we don't have the capacity to replace it right now. But I do think that in the climate movement, there is a lot more openness to nuclear power than there was a few years ago. It may not be the top priority. It may not be like, here's the path, is all the way through nuclear,

but almost everyone recognizes that we should be thinking about researching, especially next generation nuclear technologies that could bring those costs down. So, you know, to the extent that there's a lot of climate movement resistance to natural gas. There's actually, I think, a lot less of it nowadays to nuclear, especially compared to five or ten or fifteen years ago. And that signals a broader change in these, in this movement politics, which is to say you're

basically seeing an old guard environmentalist generation replaced by a younger rising climate generation. And that means that people are prior. What's that distinction? Well, like, you know, the old stereotype of like tree huggers. people who are prioritizing protection and preservation of the natural world against the predation and incursion of humans. That was the old guard. That's what gave rise to the environmental movement in the first place. And I think there's a lot of wisdom there, although it's not a worldview that I ascribe to myself, exactly. And in the new moment, we're thinking about priority number one is reducing carbon emissions in order to protect human life and secure some possibility of human flourishing in the decades ahead.

And if you start from there, rather than from the proposition that human activity in the natural world is destructive, you get to a very different set of conclusions. You get to a place where there's a lot more openness to environmental disruption in the name of climate mitigation and resilience. And I don't want to oversell that transformation. It is still the case that there is a lot of opposition to climate-focused projects. But I think that when you think about the leadership of movements, like asking how old is the head of this? group is like a very easy way to know how they're going to feel about nuclear, how they're going to feel about, you know, other kinds of climate-focused programs that might have a generation ago seem totally anathema to the environmental left.

It's interesting that you see the distinction as old-fashioned environmentalism versus newfangled pro-climate groups, right? I see it in a very similar way, although with slightly different vocabulary. I think of it as like, we used to have, or maybe there still is, a dominant strain of environmentalism that's focused on individual sacrifice and even national sacrifice, the sense of we have to give up, we have to take away. And when I read your work and the work of a lot of younger writers who are writing about and writing about and advocating for climate policy, you talk about a transformation. You know, a transformation requires new things. It requires that we decarbonize the grid, that we build more solar and more wind

and more hydro and more nuclear and maybe geothermal. That's a lot of building. And if we're going to have an environmentalist movement oriented around building new things, you need a very different attitude, right? You can't have the Sierra Club lobbying to reject a solar farm over here and a solar farm over there. You need people saying yes to the construction. of new, cleaner energy generation, even if it does have some local environmental costs, because you're starting from the recognition that, well, everything has some costs.

Doing nothing clearly has costs. We're seeing the cost of doing nothing when we look at the average temperature in Heathrow Airport. And so we have to do something even if there's going to be a local cost to maybe some of the species or some of the existing ecology.

How do you feel about that tension, as I sort of set it up, between the we have to take away versus the we have to build in order to provide for a safer and more abundant future. I think that there is some sociological insight in the instinct to take away, which is to say it is a recognition that the way that we've been living in the past is corrosive to the planet in ways that are going to damage human life going forward. I think that that is valuable, and I don't want to toss that out. But how to secure that future, I think you're absolutely right, does require us to do to be much more aggressive and interventionist in the environment than we've, you know, on the climate left, at least on the environmental

left, have been comfortable being in the past. And, you know, that is, I think, a real, I think we're living through that shift. I don't know if it is filtered down all the way through to the grassroots as we were talking about earlier. But when I think about really most outspoken climate leaders, you know, most people who are doing work adjacent to the Biden administration, et cetera, this is, you know, they believe that what we need to do is rebuild the world. And I think one point that you mentioned is really, really important to underscore and highlight, which is there is no attractive, comfortable status quo. It's all tradeoffs.

And I just want to, like, underscore that with a couple of stats. You know, I mentioned earlier that data point about coal killing one for every thousand people who get power from it. Globally, fossil fuels are estimated to be killing right now as many as 8.7 million people each year through air pollution. 8.7 million people each year. That is our status quo. So if you care about people in South Asia who are dying, in Delhi, the average lifespan is 10 years shorter than it would be without air pollution. Every person in Delhi is losing 10 years of life because of air pollution. And not all of that is fossil fuels.

They have agricultural burning there too. But globally, we're talking about a public health catastrophe. And, you know, that is at the scale of the Holocaust, we're talking about every year. You know, there are a lot of ways in which that comparison is not exactly appropriate. Or, you know, there are major differences. This is not directed, killing, et cetera. But just to give you a sense of how many people are dying. I get it.

The arithmetic is the arithmetic. Yeah. Yeah. And that is, you know, in the U.S., which has clean air, 350,000 people, 350,000 people are dying every year from air pollution, which is the same number as died in 2020 and 2021 each from COVID. So we're talking about death at that scale every single year because of the burning of fossil fuels. This is just a major sign that we like, the world we're in now is not sustainable. Another way to think about it, another thing that makes the same

point is that we have at least 800 million and possibly 1 billion people on the planet who don't have regular access to electricity. So if what we're talking about is reducing and pulling back from our access to the fossil fuel civilization that we've come to depend on, that makes a certain amount of cultural sense for people like you and me, well-off people and well-off parts of the US and in Europe. And I actually think that there's some things we should be doing to make ourselves at least more efficient on that front. But when you're talking about trying to maximize human well-being and human flourishing at a planetary scale, you kind of have to start with the like, what are we going to do with the most poor people and what can we do to make them richer or faster so that they can live lives of real dignity as opposed to deprivation? And, you know, I think 10 years ago, people would have said, well, we probably got to give them some fossil fuels. I think the really exciting thing about the present moment, beyond the cultural shifts that you're talking about is the fact that because renewables are now cheaper than dirty energy, we can actually say, actually, let's industrialize those parts of the world with clean energy.

Let's make those transitions in a clean way, as opposed to a dirty way, hoping that 20 years on, then they're going to make the transition to clean energy. We can just leapfrog that. People used to make fun of leapfrogging in the global south when it comes to climate, but we're now in a world where anybody who's drawing up a picture of a policy future in any of these countries in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, Southeast Asia, anybody who's just like, well, what should our future look like? All of them would say, okay, we just need to be doing a massive build-out of renewables. we shouldn't be doing anything with fossil fuels now. There are complications beyond that, political economy, the tax base, et cetera, et cetera. But at a very fundamental level, the fact that anybody considering the math would just say, the solution here is obvious.

It's clean energy, not dirty. I think marks a really different phase for our climate future. And it's one reason there are many, but it's one reason why I think some of the more apocalyptic scenarios, including those that I've written about in the past, are while still we're thinking about considerably less likely than they looked even five years ago. I'm so interested in fighting this war at the local level, persuading people that having renewable energy projects built near them and around them is good because people don't like the aesthetics. They don't like local construction. I think nimbism, not in my backyardism, comes naturally to a lot of people.

They don't like the nuclear power stacks. I get all that. And I've been thinking really hard about what is an argument to persuade people, liberals, conservatives, moderates, that this. works with their pre-existing values and virtues. And I was thinking about this with the writer and entrepreneur, Saul Griffith, whose work you might have come across. And he told me this really interesting thing. I just love to get your take on it.

He said, let's say you're talking to a bunch of Trumpists and moderates, right? Not liberals. People who just really do not prioritize climate change at all. And you're talking about the case for solar panels on their roofs and maybe wind power in their backyard. He said, every single time you get in your car, if it's not an electric car, you are powering that with a natural resource

that is making autocrats in Russia rich, that's making the Chinese potentially rich, that's making Iran rich, that's making people who are not our geopolitical friends, rich, right? If, by contrast, you buy an electric car and you power it with a solar panel on your rooftop, you're keeping that money in the community. The money doesn't go to Putin. It doesn't go to Iran. That power stays in your community. And then maybe it can power your own. With the money

that you save, you can pay for education or you can pay for a nicer park. You can make America great by building more energy, renewable energy, near to where you live. And I wonder what you think of that sort of political cultural argument, right, to essentially power the green revolution through kind of a make America great again, yes, sort of message. Well, I would say, I think it can be rhetorically powerful, although logically it actually applies more to other parts of the world. So we're seeing in Europe right now, they're, you know, they're pretty eager to get off Russian gas because they're finally realizing what that means for them. In the poorest parts of the world, actually, many of those countries are relatively

speaking, renewable, rich. They have a lot of solar in particular, and they got a lot of land. And they're actually better off in a world powered by renewables than by one by fossil fuels, where they have to be paying to import it from other countries. In the U.S., we are, I mean, technically we are quote-unquote energy independent. That's, you know, we do import some some oil, but we are producing most of our energy at home anyway. But I think that here, there are a lot of other co-benefits to point to, even if we're not like really cutting ourselves off from the world, which is to say, I mean, the health benefits that I talked about,

you know, are really dramatic. And they are not just about death. So like, you know, when they implemented easy pass, you know, like the automatic toll collector in the U.S., rates of premature birth and low birth weight in the areas around those toll plazas went down by between 10 and 15% because the cars were no longer idling to drop off their coins or make pay,

and so they were producing less exhaust in the area, and that reduced premature birth by, I think, it was 11%. And low birthway by, I think, 13%. Oh, my God. Wow. And that's just like the effect of, like, basically having a rolling, you roll through as opposed to pause. Right. And I'm sure, I'm so fascinated by stories like this,

because there's just absolutely no way that the person who invented EasyPass was like, this is a child mortality instrument. Unbelievable. Wow. And the effects, I mean, of air pollution, I keep coming back to it, but it's, you know, it affects respiratory disease. It affects cancer. It affects mental health and depression and suicide and self-harm.

It affects, you know, ADHD and autism and asthma. I mean, everything that you could possibly think of as a measure of human flourishing, including income, is affected by air pollution. And anything we can do to clean it up, which is a local thing. It's like, if you live by a highway or if you live by a power plant, you are breathing in dirty air, actually 92% I think of the country is breathing in dirty air by the WHO standard, which is astonishing on its own, you can do something to improve your lives and the lives of your children by cleaning up that air. It is also the case that almost every economist who

studies this says that in relatively short order, if we undertake this transition, energy will also be much cheaper. It's cheaper in a sort of measured way now, but actually at the level of the individual consumer, it may take a few years to play out, but say, fast forward a decade or 15 years, you will already have paid yourself back. So it's both, it's like a dollars and cents win. It's a public health win. And to your point about when you're telling the story about, you know, taking your car out or whatever, if you're not powered by solar powers and a wind turbine in your backyard, there's actually like an appealingly American self-sufficiency argument, not at the national level, but at the individual level, which is to say, you know,

there's a lot of talk now about using the car, the electric car battery as a way of storing the solar power or the wind power that you're collecting in your home so that you don't have to, there isn't that intermittency problem that when you're at home at night and the sun is down, you can just be drawing the energy off the battery in your car, which is basically, I mean, the data may have changed inside last look, but something like it's left half unused, basically at all times. So there's an enormous amount of extra capacity there. And that means you're basically making every individual house a totally self-sufficient system, which if you're like, you know, one of the Bundys or whatever, like you should find that exciting.

Yeah, this is definitely not how we're selling it to the Sierra Club. If you're one of the Bundys, find it exciting. But I totally agree. You need to find arguments for Republicans. You have to find ways to get half the country on board with this because I'm not worried so much. I mean, I actually am worried about left Nimbies. But like, you know, Berkeley gets some of this. Brooklyn gets some of this. But like, it doesn't matter if you just win whatever, 65% of Berkeley and Brooklyn. That's no one, statistically speaking, in this country. Like the climate change movement just has to find arguments that reach toward the middle and reach toward the right. I want to let you go in just a second, But I want to end just on, you know, we've talked about reasons to be absolutely despondently pessimistic about federal policy.

We've talked about reasons to be slightly more optimistic about corporate technological developments. When you reach into the optimism jar, right, even when temperatures are breaking records in London and Southeast Asia, what's the first thing that you pull out? What makes you most optimistic about the course of green technological? development in the world? Well, I think the simple answer is just how fast it's moving and how rapidly those cost declines are dropping. I mean, these are basically unprecedented cost declines in the context of energy transitions in global history. You know, there's this famous curmudgeonly energy expert, Vaclav Smil, who talks about energy transitions as taking like decades, if not centuries. And we've seen over the course of a decade, at least the

possibility of really, you know, a whole new paradigm has emerged just in a decade because of these cost declines. It means that the poorest countries in the world can now excitedly plan for a renewable future. And in part because of that, and in part because we're realizing some of the limitations of some are scarier models, it means that a lot of the most extreme warming scenarios that scientists wrote a lot about and talked a lot about as recently as a few years ago really seem implausible. And that's actually to me more important and interesting than the technological progress itself, which is to say, you know, five years ago when a scientist said, a business as usual future is going to be here, that is no longer our business's usual future.

Our business's usual future probably has only about half as much warming in it as that. And that is a huge revision to our mental models of where we're headed. So, you know, we used to talk about four to five degrees as business as usual. Now we're talking about two to three degrees as business as usual. And two to three degrees is above the threshold that scientists have told us they've called it dangerous. They've called it catastrophic. You know, there are huge impacts. It would mean every single coral reef on the planet would die and coral reefs feed 800 million people through their protein. It would mean, you know, storms and flooding events that used to hit every century are going to hit once a year. It's going to mean 150 million additional

people dying of air pollution. You know, there's some really, really bad bleak outcomes there, but it's a lot better than where we thought we were headed a few years ago. And what that means is that we have pulled ourselves out of the range of true apocalypse. And we are now living or staring at a future in which we are going to be dealing with huge climate challenges and difficulty and huge climate suffering, but in which a lot remains up to us to determine how we navigate that landscape. And me personally, I just think a lot more about these days, maybe as a result of some of these changes, about the fact that the climate impacts are only half the story. And the human response is the other one. And we're not engineering a great human response right now.

We're still leaving huge amounts of people vulnerable. We're not upgrading our infrastructure adequately. We're not taking care of the vulnerable elderly, especially. We're not doing good on GMO crops. Like there's a lot of stuff that we're not doing good on. But at least it's possible that we can, through a sort of kitchen sink, you know, addressing everything at once kind of approach, make a world defined by dramatic climate impacts that our grandparents would have been horrified by seem relatively livable and comfortable. And I do think that's actually the likely future, that we end up in a place where if we were looking at it today and looking at the climate impacts, we would say, that's awful. but our children and grandchildren are going to be living that future and thinking it's normal. And that's its own kind of indictment. It has to do with the way that we normalize, you know, suffering.

And that's, we have a whole other podcast about that. But on some level, it's also reassuring that what we're talking about is within the manageable band of human experience, not the end of the world or the human species, which I never thought that was all that likely, but it was like, it wasn't totally insane to talk about it as a possibility a few years ago. And now it's pretty insane to talk about it. David, I really appreciate your education. I really appreciate your realism. My thinking on this topic and my understanding of this topic is very unsettled. And I so appreciate you being here. So thanks so much, man, and we'll have you back soon. Thanks for having me. Great to talk.

Thank you very much for listening. Plain to English is produced by Devin Manzi. If you have a comment, a concern, a question, an idea for a future show, please email us at plain English at Spotify.com. That's plain, no space, English at Spotify.com.