The Daily Beast Podcast - Controversial Climate Solution May Cool Earth, but at What Cost?

Episode Date: August 27, 2023

Professor Ted Parson tells The New Abnormal how we already have the technology to help cool the Earth by 1 degree within years and why lawmakers are fearful of embracing it. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Andy Levy, former Fox News and CNN-HLN guy, and current cable news conscientious objector. I'm a former libertarian who now sits pretty comfortably on the left. Hi, I'm Danielle Moody, former educator and recovering lobbyist. But today, I'm an unapologetic, woke commentator on America's threats to democracy. And I'm producer Jesse Cannon, and I'm here to make sure things don't go too far off the rails. We're here to have fun, smart conversations with some of the most knowledgeable and entertaining people in politics, media, and beyond. Our goal is to try and make sense of our current crazy world, our new abnormal, and hopefully even make you laugh through the tears. Hello and welcome to another Sunday bonus episode of the new abnormal.

We thank you so much for being here. Today we have an extra special guest with Ted Parson, who's a professor of environmental law at UCLA and the faculty director of the Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment. He's going to talk to us about all the recent climate disasters and what we can do to slow them. But first, let's have some fun. Are you guys ready to listen to some clips? Clips. Andy. Oh, yeah.

Clips. Yeah. Okay, so we all remember the Thanks Obama joke where we virtually blamed everything on the former president. Well, MTV VJ of my youth turned Fox business host Kennedy wants you to hold her beer because it's thanks, Brandon, time. The big story tonight's. The wrath of Tropical Storm Hillary, 42 million desperate souls in the path of the storm,

made landfall in Mexico several hours ago. But they let it right into the country because it's Biden's America. Its impact far from over. This is the first tropical storm to hit California since 1939 when Joe Biden started his Senate career. I can't believe they hired an orator like that on television. Okay, I think that was a joke.

Is it? Was it, Andy? I think so. Yeah, I saw that clip going around and I was like, I think that's a joke. I will say, though, I was a little disappointed because the obvious 1939 reference there is Hitler, and then you compare that to Joe Biden.

So I feel like she missed something there. Do I recall that you worked as a producer for her? Is this the type of feedback you were giving? Because this is good. I never worked as a producer for her. I thought you did. No, you're thinking of Andrew Carrell. Oh, yes, you're right.

I am thinking of Andrew Carre. Oh, my God. Not all Andy's are the same. Right? Thank you. Yes. It's because he booked so many of them when he had that short tenure

where it was just his show for a while. Oh, you can't. tell us apart we all look the same to you? All right. Well, speaking of people who are like that, you want to touch my hair? Oh, shit. I can go home. Andy's got this covered. I've learned from the best, Daniel. You're welcome.

Speaking of racists like that, as we know, Tucker Carlson counterprogrammed the GOP debate with an interview with the Orange Man. And here he'll ask a question I really did not want Trump to answer. But the withered-aging grandpa energy Trump gave to it was really something. And legally. Do you think we're moving towards Civil War? There's tremendous passion and there's tremendous love.

You know, January 6th was a very interesting day because they don't report it properly. I believe it was the largest crowd I've ever spoken before. And you know some of the crowds I've spoken before. like July 4th on the mall. I think they had a million people there. But I think that the biggest crowd I've ever spoken before was on January 6th. And people that were in that crowd,

a very, very small group of people. And we said, patriotically and peacefully, peacefully and patriotically, right? Nobody ever says that. Go peacefully and patriotically. But people that were in that crowd that day, very small group of people, went down there.

And then there are a lot of scenarios that we can talk about. But people in that crowd said it was the most beautiful day they've ever experienced. There was love in that crowd. There was love and unity. I have never seen such spirit and such passion and such love. And I've also never seen simultaneously and from the same people such hatred of what they've done to our country. So do you think it's possible that there, open conflict.

We seem to move towards something. I don't know. I don't know because I don't know what it, you know, I can say this. There's a level of passion that I've never seen. There's a level of hatred that I've never seen. And that's probably a bad combination. Donald Trump, thank you.

Thank you very much. Very much. Thank you. That is a bad combination, by the way. Bad combination. Thank you. What in the entire fuck was that? I think he was joking.

The reason why you've never heard the phrase peacefully and patriotically is because he never fucking uttered it. Not one person on that stage said that phrase ever. The most beautiful day as if we all haven't seen every single angle of video from that day, filled with passion and beautiful people, the biggest crowd? Oh my God. that's all I have to say. Jesse, you're right. I mean, it's the rambling for me, as the kids say.

Man, like, we've talked about this before, and we really, we need to do a segment diagram in his sentences. It's really, it's true. It really is. Coming soon to video of this podcast. I have to find some kind of software that, like, there's got to be a program out there that diagram sentences, and then we could do it as a bit because, my God, it just, it's always, all one sentence, you have no idea what the next phrase is going to be. The crazy thing is,

he doesn't know what the next fucking phrase is going to be. Right? Like, he has a, like, he shocks the shit out of himself, I think. Yeah. It's wild. I know. But it really is. It's like writing the essay where you had a word, you had to write, you know, 250 words and you're struggling to get there. So you just write as many words as you can. And that's it, that's, he's, he's, He's filling time. That's what he's doing. It's amazing. Let me age myself and say that there aren't enough blue books.

Do you know what I'm saying? Exactly. Let me age myself when kids used to write. There aren't enough fucking blue books. And just one big giant orange period at the end of the stack. I have to say the other thing I was really taken with. And I had to do some listening to go back and I listen to some other Fox interviews with Trump. He sounds withered as hell there.

And when we're hearing all about how Brandon's too old all day, I'm like, this guy is sounding like the sundowning grandpa that's about to lose it. Yeah. Yeah, it's something. Well, unfortunately, now we're going to pivot to some of the worst young energy I've ever seen in my entire life. Vivek Ramoswamy, who unfortunately, we all had to get to know better at the Republican debate the other night, as he did his vulgar display of anti-charisma. He did a warm-up hit on CNN with Caitlin Collins. and let's check out his insufferable vibe. Yeah, absolutely was involved,

and our government for 20 years lied to the American people about it. There was an entire 9-11 commission report on this. Yes, and it lied, and it was false. And in fact, you know where that's coming out, Caitlin? There's now a case, a federal case in the Southern District of New York, where the government of Saudi Arabia is being sued by victims of families. That's why this is resurfacing itself. It is relevant, and it turns out in those good, classic questions about Saudi Arabia.

involvement and the government's involvement and then pushing this idea that whenever your comment about who was on the plane and then was 9-11 an inside job where you did not say no earlier. That's why it's important to clarify those comments because otherwise it feels like you're towing the line when it comes to conspiracy

theories. Caitlin, I am guilty as charged that I do not follow the establishment super PAC donor approved script on these questions, but I'm speaking truth grounded in fact at every step of the way. And that's what's really elicited, something of an an anaphylactic reaction of the kind we saw in 2016 against a different candidate. It was a lot of words. It was a lot of 25 cent words strung together, but it all amounted to one pile of shit.

I think Caitlin Collins nailed it there. Got to give her a lot of credit for that. She said it perfectly. Like it is one thing to say, hey, you know, there might have been Saudi Arabian government involvement or, you know, the 9-11 commission may have not told us the full story. Okay, that's at least defensible, but what he was originally talking about, which was, you know, looking to see if there were federal agents on the planes and whatever. I mean, she's absolutely right. That's just, you know, that's full-on conspiracy theory nonsense. And he can try to backpedal all he wants,

which is what he has done a lot of these last few days. But we know what he said. I mean, he tried to claim that the original quote was taken out of context and then the reporter at, I think it was the Atlantic. Yes, the Atlantic. It was like, yeah, here's the tape and it was exactly what he said. Yeah, my other thing is when he knows he's getting embarrassed as all of us are on here, a bit experienced with some media training and done some of it. One of the things you tell people is like when you're getting embarrassed to make sure you smile and not get angry, which Ron DeSantis does a terrible job. Oh, dear God. Oh, dear God. Award winning bad. job at that every single time.

Like truly the anti-Olympic winner. Why does his smile look like it hurts his face? Yeah. Do you know what I'm saying? Like somebody did a video of it and zoomed in. And I had to watch it. I said, no. Is his mouth betraying him or is he betraying his mouth?

Do you know what I'm saying? What's happening there? It's a software glitch. Yeah, seriously. But, you know, a couple generations down the line, they won't do that anymore. And you won't be able to, it will look like a human smile. This is just a glitch? Okay.

It's just, you know, they just, they haven't got, the smile uses a lot of muscles. And so it's hard to program. It's hard to mimic. You're right. Yeah. But, you know, with this early, you know, if you're an early adopter, you understand this stuff. The first couple generations, you know, they don't work perfectly. And then, you know, a couple generations down the road, they, they, they, I understand.

it out and they figure it out. So I'm not worried about it. Yeah, yeah, you're right. I remember Anthony Hopkins having this conversation at Westworld, Shirley. Exactly. It's exactly right. By the way, I say this as someone who cannot smile for pictures. That makes two of us. Folks, I am very happy to welcome to the new abnormal for the first time. Professor Ted Parson, who is a professor of environmental law at UCLA. He's faculty director of the Emmett Institute on climate change and the environment. First off, let me start off by saying that there has not been a day this summer where a headline has not talked about some climate crisis. So we just

experienced, and this is unimaginable, the pictures that we are seeing coming out of Maui, the picture of absolute devastation that we've never seen, the largest wildfire, and most destructive wildfire to hit the country in, I would say, I think forecast said over 100 years. Before we even delve into the larger picture, I just want to get your reactions to what you saw, what we have all seen take place in Maui over the last week plus. It's extreme. It's crazy. But there's extreme and crazy stuff that's happening all over. multiple horns of extreme events at every scale, everywhere you look. I mean, you can zoom down to individual places like the catastrophic are Maui, like hurricane Hillary, not that it was that destructive by the time it got to California, but how crazy is it to have a hurricane hit in California? That's not where they happen.

Zool up to the level of a country. I'm sitting in Western Canada right now where we're having not just the most extreme wild season in history, a wildfire season that already has burning more than double the area of the previous record, which was 1995. So 15 million hectares have burned so far and the season to the globe. Zoom up to the level of the globe. My friend Oliver Morton compiled some statistics for something he's writing about world average temperature. So July 3rd broke the all-time record for the hottest day in history. Okay, and it was like eight years before that the record was last rock. And then with a heating train, you expect that now and then.

But then after July 3rd, 35 days in a row were all hotter than the hottest prior day in history. It's unbelievable. Zooming up to kind of climate law and policy, so we have the Paris Agreement, we have the framework connection on climate change, the Paris Agreement as targets for what nations are supposed to do to limit global heating. It's supposed to keep global average heating well below 2 degrees C above the pre-industrial average, so that's 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, and try to hold it as close as possible to 1.5. Well, July 2020, 3 was more than 1.5 above pre-industrial.

So that's one month. Here's a place where people get both overwhelmed and confused, right? Because it's like you let off by saying it's like every day there's something to be crazy and extreme. And it's going to keep happening. And there's crazy and extreme stuff happening, even where it doesn't make the headlines in the same way. So it's like the most extreme heatway in the world right now is actually going on in South America where it's winter. It's not killer heat the way the heat waves have been in the Mediterranean and Beijing and in the southern United States.

But it's still kind of crazy extremes. So you can get kind of overwhelmed and numbed by the succession of weird extreme stuff that's happening. But it's all part of a pattern and it's a predictable pattern. Even the crazy stuff, it didn't just come out of nowhere in 2023. It's been building. It was like 2022 was weirder than anything before in 2021 was weirder than in before in 2020. So these are the short term place-by-place manifestations on just the whole system, the clostatic whack, in a way that has been pretty well understood and pretty well predicted for a long, long time. I mean, the press coverage is focusing on individual things. And in my view, it's like, it's completely

confusing people by posing a distracting question. So every time you've seen the headlines, you've heard the broadcast, is the Maui fire caused by climate change? What a stupid question? Thank you. Thank you. Good. So when you, when you have a crazy system that wobbles all over the place, as the weather does, and then you push the whole thing so you ship the averages, you get more extremes of every kind, at every place, at every time. But it's still a wabbily thing. So you look at this peak, oh, you know, this storm, this feed wave, and so on, and you say, did climate change cause that? And you can do a bunch of like sophisticated analysis of the statistics and say, well, just how much does it weather vary normally? And then how much would we have to push it to be

really confident that something this extreme is caused by the big push rather than just by a normal variation? And it doesn't matter, right? The way to understand this, is to flip it around and say, we're pushing the whole system in a way that stuff like this is going to continually get more frequent and more extreme. And it's a fool's errand to fight over whether an individual peak on a given day is a odds by the big trend or is somehow related to natural variability. It's like, okay, that's what we saw. That's how hot it was. It is the result of the way the weather works plus how we're pushing it. I want to interrupt you just for a second. because the things that you're saying are exactly how I believe this needs to be covered,

which is we have this way in mainstream media of looking at siloed events instead of educating the viewer and the audience of the patterns over a long period of time. Because what we are seeing in many ways is almost cinematic in our inability to really imagine that in poems, Springs, a hurricane came through. Palm Springs, California, which is a fucking desert that had a hurricane come through. And we're seeing pictures of cars literally stuck in mud, in mud slides, and it looks like a movie. A majority of us are not in Palm Springs. We're not going there. The same way that you're looking at the devastation in Maui, we're taking these things as if they're all not connected and related to one another.

And the point I think of journalism is to be able to connect the dots in a way that people can actually understand. And so, Ted, when you say, this is all predictable. We've been talking, scientists have been talking and warning us about this for decades. So as a scientist right now, why do you think there is an inability to compensate? what you've been raising the alarm about for decades that is now literally at our doorstep. Okay, first, great observation. So I agree completely about the tendency of communication, the media and other communication deserve still fight, focus on single things instead of

C patterns. One important amendment here is that the particulars aren't predictable. It's like nobody could have or did predict. In August 2023, there would be a devastating wildfire and malady. It's the broad pattern that's predictable. It's like push the whole system and you're going to see more as weather fluctuates in various seasonally, daily, annual and stuff like that. You're going to see more strange stuff. You're going to see more killer heat waves. And those are increasingly predictable on a time scale of weeks or a month or two, but particular heat waves are not, have not been predictable on a time scale of years of decades. It's just a broad pattern more and more these in the place that are already too hot. So that's a bit of a subtle way that's hard

beats wine. As long as we're dumping on media, which is a little unfair because it's like it's hard to communicate, you know, conflict, subtle stuff to, to, you know, watch large audiences. There's a couple of other failures. One, the desire to find someone to blame, and two, the desire to find single causes and single fixes. You can just sort of imagine a cartoon of like a journal was standing in a burricane and say, you know, what caused this? Who's a, who's responsible? Right? Of course. Resolve what has to be done? How do we get accountability? And that's really cause because there is a single cause at the level of abstraction that you say human driven planet change, which is caused by human greenhouse gas emissions and a little other stuff that almost all by

human greenhouse gas issues is causing this. But then what's causing that? It's the totality of what everybody's doing the boosting and consuming stuff, food, energy, products, etc. Worldwide. Eat building people. Yep, highly unequal, living and consuming, stuff being made for them. So, the fix, you can describe it in a sentence, but it's like it's vast and appalling. You can serve how big a job it is. The fix is eliminate net human greenhouse gas emission by transforming the world economy to sustainable, non-rehouse gas emitting energy sources. and technologies. Oh, fabulous. We'll do that next week. So, you know, one of the tragedies, okay, so I'm old, you're young. I've been in this

business for 45 years of that that's right new to say. And there's this weird sense in which it's like, we understood it all in 1988. Greenhouse gases, climate change, how greenhouse gases keep the earth at a nice comfortable temperature for people naturally, how we're doing more than natural and making it hotter on what way it can go. The details and the A3's confidence have come since then, but it's like it was sort of obvious in 1990. What has to happen is get away from fossil fuels and get away from other technologies that are pushing, shunning update. And that has not been done. And so we're now seeing the consequences in all this space is job. But we're also seeing the consequences with this sort of long lag in the system. Fixing climate change is like, let's see,

Climate change is like a train wreck happening in slow mode. You refer to cinematic in some moment ago. And by the way, the movies stay ahead of reality, I think. Right. I mean, we haven't had an art going to have a mile high ice sheet descend all of a sudden on Manhattan. Although one of my favorite movies, the day after tomorrow, when I watch it, which is what you're referencing, I watch it like a documentary in some version, which is that we're looking at. at what's happening in the United States because it's we're here, right? And you're in Canada. We're in, we're on North America. I'm also looking at what is happening in the Middle East with temperatures

that are 120 degrees outside and saying humans can't actually function in that type of heat. Like our bodies are not made for it. What I continually say and have said for so many years is that there is a cost to our ignorance here. It is costing billions and billions of dollars every time. that there is an extreme climate event. We're talking about billions of dollars worth of repair two different regions. We don't have the money for it. Like, our ignorance is cost ineffective. Well, we don't have the money for it unless we put it to the fault of our priorities.

It's like there's plenty of money in the world. This is just a question of what you spend you though. So just playing with the idea of movies for a moment more. I want to say, you know, day after tomorrow and snowpiercer and, you know, all those. the dictates things. So people who write books and make movies are not very good at understanding and rendering kind of real stuff and science, but what they understand very well is people and how they work. And so when you look at movies like that, I find this sort of that this split image thing, it's like the portrayal of environmental change and scientific basis for it is just, sorry,

you said I could swear, fucking crazy, right? And the portrayal of how people deal with the impending threats. How they deny what's coming, how they, you know, focus on little stuff where to hand, how they look for villains to blame, how they, that's like utterly realistic inaction. Oh, is it? Yeah. It's probably going to get worse, right? I mean, all the projections, like over a time scale of a year or two and a decade or two, it's only hitting in one direction.

And although there is progress on, like, slowing the frame rack down, but it's already slow motion, it's far insufficient, it's way behind, it's too slow, it's too late. So if you look ahead 50 years, things are deflecting in a favorable direction. Like with each passing year, it looks a little less hellish and bad in the future, but it's still pretty obvious bad. But it's sort of too late, it's sort of too slow. Okay, so here's a way it's starting to get crazy. It's sort of bubbling around the margins to be the bit right now. There are identified ways of actively intervening to change the climate that, according to the little, fit of research that's been done so far look like they would very effectively reduce near-term

risks, and they would do so in a way that looks like it's pretty small inside effects, pretty equal in its distribution that benefits worldwide, shockingly cheap, but carries new risks and doesn't solve the whole problem. Okay, so put that package together. There's a bunch of stuff that people are pretty much afraid to think about, and they're afraid to think about it for good reasons. So it's basically active, engineered interventions that would cool the climate. The main way people are talking about doing this is by spraying a fine list of reflected stuff in the upper atmosphere that would make the earth a little bit brighter, like about 1% or some ones. There's about, I mean, there's like a few hundred people in the world who've been thinking about this for 10 of 15 years.

They haven't had any money to do research. Nobody's ever tried this. Nobody's proposing buying it. There would be a ton of problems with feeling it that it would be utterly reasonable to worry about. And yet, all the current indications are that with this stuff, you could rule the earth a degree C within a couple of years for a cost of about $10,000 billion a year, and the side effects and harms based on early research look like they're really pretty most. Not nothing, but pretty small and virtual words. This stuff, people call it by different names. of the specific thing I'm talking about is often called stratosphere aerosol injection. It's like spraying, you know, sort of like your plant sprayer.

Which is a little light. Way up there. You do it way up there because it stays longer and it doesn't interact with people in the environment doesn't chencelain. And the current state of affairs on this is that, you know, the few hundred people thinking about have been trying to get governments and science organizations, and international organizations to pay attention for about 10 years. And they mostly have refused to do so, basically because people are afraid of a bunch of consequences of thinking about and then possibly using this stuff.

They're afraid that it would even further weaken efforts to cut emissions, which we still have to do because this stuff cannot solve the problem early. It's just so the hook gap or parcel fix. And they're afraid that it would be used badly or recklessly or unjustly. nobody has been able to figure out how this is a perpetual. While I listened to you and that sounds like maybe part two of the day after tomorrow in terms of it is Snopjeer, sir. Right.

How we would see something like this happen. There are ways to intervene on a level that has the entirety of humanity recognized that we exist now on one planet and might want to actually pay attention to it and take care of it. in order to preserve it for the next millennial, which doesn't seem like something that everyone is willing to do. But today, Ted, we will have to leave it there. And I hope that you will come back and join us on the new abnormal if in fact, you know,

the planet still exists long enough for you to come back. But I appreciate you and your insight. And frankly, all of the work that you've been doing to try and ring the alarm for the last several decades that is here. Thank you. Thank you. I apologize to you or your entire generation that I haven't succeeded yes. I apologize to my children all the time. I get it.

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