The Daily - A New Climate Tipping Point

Episode Date: October 19, 2018

Last week, a long-awaited report showed that the worst consequences of global warming would occur even sooner than previously thought. Here’s the story behind the findings. Guests: Coral Davenport, who covers energy and the environment for The New York Times, and William D. Nordhaus, who was awarded a Nobel this year for his work on the economics of climate change. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today. Last week, a long-awaited report showed that the worst consequences of global warming will occur even sooner than we thought. The story behind that report. The story behind that report. It's Friday, October 19th.

Mr. Secretary General, Monsieur le Président de la France, Your Excellencies. So back in 2015, when world leaders got together in Paris and forged the Paris Climate Agreement. It's an enormous privilege to be here on Earth Day to join in signing this historic agreement. What it says is every country on Earth, every government would pass policies and take actions to lower emissions to stop climate change. And there was a very specific target. A mean temperature well below two degrees. Two centigrade or even lower than that. If we get to two degrees Celsius, Bangkok could be underwater. Two degrees Celsius or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit over pre-industrial levels. six degrees Fahrenheit over pre-industrial levels. Coral Davenport covers energy and the environment for The Times.

So for a couple of decades, that has been the point at which scientists really understood that the planet would tip into damages that would be severe and irreversible. If nothing is done to curb emissions over the next couple of years, there will be a two-degree change in the temperature of the next century, which is enough for some cataclysmic event. Severe droughts, severe food losses. In the two-degree world, people are poorer and have less food. Extremely devastating and damaging storms. The higher frequency of severe weather conditions taking place throughout the world. Melting of the

polar ice sheets, major sea level rise, loss of coastal habitat. And all the coral in our seas has gone. And keep in mind, we're already halfway there. The planet's already warmed about one degree Celsius since the 1850s. It sounds like a really small margin, but it could mean the difference between billions of people facing droughts in Africa or not. It's really just one more degree of warming that brings us those outcomes. So we're basically halfway towards climate Oregon. Yes.

And Coral, when do we expect to reach that pretty terrifying tipping point of a two degree increase? Well, it's been understood for the past couple of decades that that two degrees of warming will hit sometime in the second half of the 21st century.

So it's not today, it's not tomorrow, but it's within sight. So basically any time after 2050. Exactly. But what's interesting is that in Paris, as the accord was being written and put together, a lot of the smaller and more vulnerable countries in the world, particularly small island nations that are experiencing some of the impacts of climate change, particularly rising sea levels, loss of their homes. They're experiencing their

freshwater supplies soaked by saltwater. Countries that are starting to live the impact of climate change now kind of raised their hand in Paris and said, hey, we know the goal of this is to avoid that two degrees of warming, but can we also take a look at what 1.5 degrees of warming looks like? We wonder if bad things might happen halfway to that two degree point. Maybe half a degree matters more than we think. Maybe not. Let's find out. And so the rest of the world, the other countries said, okay, we're not going to change the

target. We're settled around two degrees here. countries said, OK, we're not going to change the target. We're settled around two degrees here, but let's assign the world's best climate scientists to tell us what 1.5 degrees earlier warming looks like. Let's make the vulnerable countries happy and just kind of figure that out. So what happens with this study? So the scientists got this assignment at the end of 2015. The group chosen to work on this was 91 scientists from 42 countries. They went to work together. They reviewed about 6,000 published studies. They responded to about 42,000 comments from governments and other scientists. All the scientists do this

voluntarily. They don't get paid. So they worked for a year and a half on it. Good morning, everybody. Welcome to this press conference of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to present the special report on global warming of 1.5 degrees. A couple of weeks ago, I went to the city of Incheon in South Korea, where all of the 91 authors of this report were gathered. I'm going to hand over now to the chair of the IPCC, Dr. Lee, who will give you an introduction to the report. And then the co-chairs will give you some information about the report and go through the highlights. And in South Korea, what did they tell you about the report? What did they find? It first of all tells us 1.5 degrees of warming looks a lot more like 2 degrees of warming than we thought.

Limiting warming to 1.5 degrees C implies changes on an unprecedented scale. That we're going to experience a lot of those same outcomes. We're going to experience major loss of sea ice, major loss of coral reefs. The impacts of climate change in the oceans are increasing risks to fisheries and livelihoods that depend on them. Major droughts and subsequent crop loss, thus a lot of food shortages, a lot of coastal inundation as well, probably tens of millions of people losing their homes, losing their livelihoods. All that stuff happens at a lower temperature. The damaging impacts come with less warming than

we thought, and that also means that they come sooner in time. Global temperature is likely to reach 1.5 degrees C between 2030 to 2052. So within most of our lifetimes. It's literally like around the corner. Yes. From everything you've said, Coral, the world has been very much planning around staving off a two degree warming. And now we have this new math that says that 1.5 degrees warming is almost as bad and something that must be avoided, which makes me wonder how much the world is prepared to deal with that new reality.

how much the world is prepared to deal with that new reality. So since this was commissioned by world leaders for world leaders, the scientists did something else in this report that I pretty much don't ever see, which is they laid out essentially some policy prescriptions for how to do it. Rapid breakthroughs in technology, changes to the way we do farming, changes to the way we drive. changes to the way we do farming, changes to the way we drive. But at the center, there is one economic policy that could sort of be the driver of all of this change, and that is a price or a tax on carbon dioxide pollution. And if you look at the report and you look at the section that describes this, it's several points about the importance and the powerful effectiveness of pricing or taxing carbon dioxide pollution,

you see again and again and again, one name is mentioned, a Yale economist named William Nordhaus. After the break, a conversation with William Nordhaus. We'll be right back. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has today decided to award the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in memory of Alfred Nobel. So on the same day that this new climate report came out, this economist, William Nordhaus, whose idea is cited throughout the report as the central solution to climate change. With one half to William D. Nordhaus. Also won the Nobel Prize in economics. For integrating climate change into long-run macroeconomic analysis. Is that a

coincidence? I'm going to go with no. And the Nobel Committee was very clear that they were awarding this prize to William Nordhaus specifically for coming up with the idea of a carbon tax to solve global warming. Nordhaus asks, how should economists appropriately address climate change? I think it's highly unlikely that that's a coincidence. appropriately address climate change? I think it's highly unlikely that that's a coincidence. So that was last Monday. Where do I sit? Oh, here.

Sorry, sorry. Two days later, I flew back home from Korea. And the next day, I went to visit William Nordhaus at Yale. And the first thing I did was sit in on his Econ 122 class. Good morning, everybody. So we're... I should say that he asked for the class to be off the record, so I should probably keep to myself what I learned.

You've got a geeky class today. It was a good class. I enjoyed it. It was a geeky class. That's appropriate. Okay, let's go. And what exactly is this idea of carbon pricing? Sure. Let me just talk about the idea a minute. So this idea, which gradually emerged in my mind,

it wasn't something that just immediately the light bulb went off. So it's kind of a basic idea that a lot of governments use to tax things that you want less of. Pollution taxes are not uncommon. That's a pretty standard way to sort of disincentivize pollution. But no one had ever sort of thought of applying that idea to carbon dioxide before. Environmentalists hadn't, scientists hadn't, and economists weren't really thinking about this. So we really brought these disciplines together. If you think of the people who are concerned about the environment, people concerned about climate change, I have many friends who do environmental science. And so this was not on their radar screen for a very long time. Not on their radar.

Not on their radar screen. that we know is caused by carbon dioxide. And so William Nordhaus created this economic model that looked at the science of climate change and how much damage is caused by heat-trapping emissions and how you can extract from that the amount of damage caused by a single ton of carbon. I think if this does anything, I hope it points out the importance of pricing. Because unlike a lot of pollution, you know, carbon dioxide is invisible.

You can't see it. You can't touch it. It goes up in the atmosphere. It's a very abstract thing. But when you're able to say, OK, one ton of carbon causes $50 of damage, two tons of carbon cause $100 of damage, and that damage is quantified in things like rising sea levels that would, say, damage your home and, you know, raise your insurance costs and lower your property values. All right. Well, that cost has been inflicted by a certain amount of carbon dioxide. It's a complicated model. He called it the social cost of carbon. So it sounds like his breakthrough is figuring out a way of putting a literal price tag. Literal price tag.

On the damage caused by climate change and then applying that as a kind of price on the producer. Exactly. Pricing carbon, putting a price on this, ending the subsidy that firms have to put their carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is the first step we need to take. That was a true breakthrough. Once he came up with the social cost of carbon, then you can apply that to policy. You can take that over to the realm of governments dealing with carbon pollution,

and you can, in a perfect world, use it as a tax. So if we go back to the basic idea of carbon pricing, which is that you want to raise the prices of carbon-intensive products so consumers buy less of them and producers find less carbon-intensive ways of producing them. And what the scientists who wrote this new report and what economists who have been studying this issue for years have said is this is pretty much the most powerful and effective way to stop greenhouse gas emissions. If polluters have to pay the same amount that they're damaging

the environment to pollute, you are going to create all kinds of market signals. Consumers will consume less carbon-intensive electricity, but also producers will move from coal to natural gas and natural gas to, say, wind. So these are the obvious substitution effects. Electric utilities are going to say, wow, wind and solar are suddenly looking a lot cheaper. So a firm like GE, which does all kinds of energy, would know that it should invest its money in, say, wind turbines rather than turbines for coal-fired plants.

That's where the future is. And it's not because it's a socially responsible corporation. It's because it's a profit-oriented corporation. And if it sees these prices, carbon prices going in that direction, it will know where to put its innovation dollars. What economists will tell you is these market forces are so much more powerful than altruism or a sense of moral or social responsibility. When the market is speaking, when you as a consumer say, all right, because of that carbon tax, the price of gasoline is now going to be $6, $7, $8, $9 a gallon permanently, forget it.

I'm never going to buy a gas guzzler again. I don't want my electricity from coal-fired power. That is so much more expensive. And electric utilities, who are the ones who buy the electricity, are going to say, that's too expensive. Let's invest hugely and heavily in cleaner power right now. And so, you know, in a theoretical way, economists have looked at this and they've said, this is the way to send a market signal. And, you know, if we see this implemented around the world, that is how you turn around the entire global economy. And it was that idea that Nordhaus won the Nobel for and that the scientists who wrote this new climate report elevated and said, look, this is it. This is the solution. This is what we've got to do. So basically, his plan is to create a market incentive to solve climate change.

Exactly. Stick a price on it, and then the market does the rest. Well, I have a view that we need a global program. Yeah, but Nordhaus is pretty clear. In order for this to work... The only way you can have a global program is to have cooperation of nations, not cooperation of all the other countries in the world and 50 U.S. states. Most countries have to do this. And to be clear, there's no federal carbon tax right now in the United States. No, there's no federal carbon tax. There's no federal carbon price. Some states have experimented with different forms of carbon pricing, most notably California.

And has it ever been deployed at a national level anywhere in the world? Yes. I think people may not be aware of how much it's been embraced abroad. What I find to be really interesting and ironic about the idea of carbon pricing is that it's considered sort of politically toxic in the United States, and yet it's being implemented all around the world. I mean, it's widely used in Europe. Australia put in place a carbon pricing system. The model plan is the one in British Columbia.

Canada is moving forward to a national carbon price by next year. It's now being gradually introduced in China. So most of the world's major economies are at least starting to implement some form of carbon pricing or implement it regionally with a plan to do it at the national or federal level. At the United States, it's absolutely DOA. What exactly keeps the U.S. from experimenting with carbon pricing if so many of our fellow nations are doing it? U.S. politics. And it just happens that this particular policy is one that has sort of faced the wrath of a whole group of thinkers, if I could say that. Taxes have become politically toxic.

There is a powerful anti-tax lobbyist, Grover Norquist, who has Republican members of Congress sign pledges that they will never vote to raise taxes. This is the biggest and most controversial tax increase that you can imagine. The libertarian billionaires, Charles and David Koch, have been absolutely out front in rock solid opposition to this. They're, you know, major contributors to political advocacy campaigns. You know, the idea of raising energy costs, raising taxes, doing some kind of global thing that's endorsed by the U.N. In terms of the politics of this, this is sort of at the heart of kind of everything that is politically opposed by so many of these powerful forces in U.S. politics right now. And what does he say about what feels like an incredibly formidable wall of opposition

inside the United States to this plan. Well, it's what can you say? I mean, what can you say about Trump, Trump's environmental policies or McConnell? I mean, there's no coherent environmental policy there for either of those. They're only interested in the political side of things. Well, he takes the long view. Things change over the long run. But he absolutely acknowledges that right this minute,

because of the current sort of set of political forces, it would not be possible to pass a carbon tax in the U.S. And we just have to continue explaining to people. And when the Trump administration and its disastrous policies are gone, then we'll have someone there. I think, whether Republican or Democratic. They will want to embrace something the entire world feels is important and many Americans feel is important. Given that, the fact that even Nordhaus concedes

that this is politically kind of dead on arrival in the U.S., why do the scientists believe that a carbon pricing system, a carbon tax, is the most effective way to stave off the worst effects of global warming? Why are they making that the linchpin of their plan to keep us from getting to 1.5 degree warming or keep us from getting to 2 degree warming if it's not going to be implemented in places like the United States? Well, the scientists live in political reality as well. And one of the

big takeaways from this report is that they said, you know, here's what 1.5 degrees of warming looks like. Here's what two degrees of warming looks like. Here's how to avoid those. And they gave another scenario, which they called the overshoot scenario. They said, this is what it looks like if we keep going at the rate we're going, we hit that 1.5 degrees, we don't turn around the global economy on a dime by carbon pricing everywhere. And then maybe sometime in the 2040s, when those damages have already hit, that may be the time that global governments and economies actually get their act together and go ahead and do some carbon pricing. And we see emissions go down and we see technology develop that could reduce carbon emissions

from the atmosphere. And so we overshoot and then we come back down. It's almost like they anticipate that the world, perhaps led by the United States, will fail to act, will fail to adopt carbon pricing as they recommend. And that the repercussions of that failure, the pain inflicted on countries like the U.S. and the rest of the world will then prompt the country, the United States, to adopt carbon pricing. Is that what you're saying? That is a specific scenario that the scientists envision and lay down in their report. And so they looked at what happens if emissions go up, we heat up past that 1.5, and then we bring emissions down and the atmosphere cools back down.

And they looked at that as the likely scenario. And Nordhaus acknowledged that that is a more likely scenario as well. And are you worried that these things won't happen in time? Well, they're not going to happen in time for 1.5 degrees. He is not at all optimistic that we will avoid that 1.5. He doesn't think right now, based on the way things are going, that we will avoid two degrees. If we start moving swiftly in the next 20 years, we can stop it. But if we don't do that, we're off to much larger changes,

changes in the Earth's system that we really can only guess at and can't really understand because it's outside the range of historical experience in the last 200,000 or 300,000 years, maybe a million years. Both the scientists and the economists say a real likely outcome is that get the policies in place, you overshoot, and then you bring things back down. We can't wait 10 years because we just heard we only have 10 years, so we shouldn't wait nine years.

But if we wait 11 years and then take steps, then that's better than waiting forever. Coral, if we overshoot, if we blow past 1.5 and 2 degree warming, is it possible that at that point we've lost so much infrastructure, so much of the personnel and the resources required to fix this, that it can't be done anymore? I mean, will there be enough of the world left to implement this in a way that could be effective? Well, the impacts of global warming are very unequally distributed.

The parts of the world and the populations that will experience the most severe impacts are low-lying coastal nations, probably most of the population of coastal Bangladesh in a 1.5 or 2 degree warming scenario will be turned into, you know, international refugees. A lot of countries in Africa that are already grappling with drought but can still grow crops will experience a transition to no longer ever being able to grow crops again. We'll see sort of cropland that's struggling turn into desert. And that will probably lead to food shortages and perhaps famine.

The report, you know, lays out that scenario and a lot of political unrest and disruption associated with those impacts. Here in the United States, we'll take a big economic hit. Certainly, the coasts will be hit hard with rising sea levels. We will continue to experience stronger and stronger storms. But overall, the richest part of the world will adapt. You know, if there's food shortages, there's genetically modified foods. Already, companies like Monsanto are looking at new places to grow crops, growing corn in Canada, are looking at new places to grow crops, growing corn in Canada, using different growth seasons. So in the richest parts of the world, we will see technology and wealth being deployed to help us adapt. I mean, this is still a pretty grim scenario, and it is one in which we see such

an increase in the divide of global economic inequality. The poor and the suffering will be made far more poor and suffering and numerous as a result of global warming. And that's where we will likely then see governments say, OK, this is absolutely not a hoax. This is a real thing. And we still have a little bit of time to save ourselves and maybe make the world not quite as bad as it is now, let's go ahead and slap that price on carbon. Let's try to fix this. And how many years do we have before there's an overshoot threshold? If the world were to act

along the lines of the recommendations of this report and implement Nordhaus's plan, what's the time frame in which that has to be done? If we were to avoid that overshoot scenario, we have two or three years. Really? To get the policies in place, to get that carbon pricing implemented and to start the carbon pricing programs. That's the prescription. And what is Nordhaus' goal in talking about all this, in sitting down with you and having this discussion? Well, I think that he wants this idea to be at the center of the policy discussion for the 2020 campaign. I think that he would like to see this specific policy understood, embraced and endorsed by the next president and thus to be something that is talked about and worked out as a policy proposal by the candidates who are running for president in 2020. talked about and worked out as a policy proposal by the candidates who were running for president in 2020.

So he's basically saying presidential candidates should campaign on this, on a carbon pricing system, and that voters should vote on it. He is. Coral, thank you very much. Thank you, Michael. It's always good to be with you. Here's what else you need to know today. After days of defending Saudi Arabia, President Trump reversed course on Thursday,

expressing confidence in intelligence reports that suggest the kingdom played a high-level role in the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi, a journalist who was highly critical of Saudi Arabia's leaders. What are you considering for possible consequences for Saudi? Responding to questions as he prepared to board Marine One, Trump said he was now weighing harsh punishments against Saudi Arabia. Well, it'll have to be very severe. I mean, it's bad, bad stuff.

But we'll see what happens. Intelligence reports indicate that Saudi agents close to the country's crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, beat, tortured and dismembered Khashoggi the moment he walked into the Saudi consulate in Turkey. The Daily is produced by Theo Balcom, Lindsay Garrison, Rachel Quester, Annie Brown, Andy Mills, Ike Sreeskanarajah, Claire Tenesketter, Paige Cowan, Thank you. Brad Fisher. Our engineer is Chris Wood. And our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly. Special thanks to Sam Dolman, Michaela Bouchard, Stella Tan,

Jason Zineman, and Milena Reisig. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you on Monday.