The Dr. Hyman Show - Why Climate Change is Worse Than You Think with David Wallace-Wells

Episode Date: July 17, 2019

Climate change is not moving as slowly as we’d like to think. In fact, half of all the damage done through burning fossil fuels has been just over the last 30 years. Unfortunately, every year is now more damaging than the last. The good news is that we are not at a point of no return. While we will never have the same climate we had before industrialization, we can make a positive impact on the future of climate change by taking action now.  My guest on this week’s episode of The Doctor’s Farmacy is here to tell us how. David Wallace-Wells is the deputy editor of New York magazine and the author of the international bestseller The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming, published in February 2019, which the New York Times called both "brilliant" and "the most terrifying book I have ever read." While the real truth about climate change can be scary, it’s a more important conversation than ever. Throughout our talk, David shares the history of climate change and the three major issues at hand: speed, scope, and severity.

Coming up on this week's episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. No matter how hot it gets, it will always be up to us to determine the climate future of the planet, and that will be done by how much carbon we emit. Welcome to The Doctor's Pharmacy. This is Dr. Mark Hyman. This is a place for conversations that matter. And I believe today's conversation matters to all of us, whether we like it or not, because it's about climate change. And we have today with us an extraordinary guest, David Wallace-Wells, who's the deputy editor of the New York Magazine and the author of the international bestseller, The Uninhabitable Earth, Life After Warming, which is published in February

2019. And I've read, and it's a staggering book. For someone who thinks they're pretty well informed, I really realized how little I knew about climate change. Before his book and the New York Magazine article that spawned it, there was a lack of a real framing of this issue in a coherent way where you understood all the pieces and threats. It wasn't just a bit of news here, a bit of news there, or there's 500 tornadoes in 30 days, or there's California wildfires, or there's five hurricanes that were the worst hurricanes in history in the last couple of years. I mean, those are the things we hear

about, but we don't put the whole story together. So we're going to tell that story today. It's a terrifying book. Hopefully it'll inspire us to action. Maybe it'll inspire governments and politicians to action. And I'm really glad you're here having this conversation with us in New York, which may be partly underwater soon. So thanks for being here. Oh, my pleasure. Great to talk to you.

So this article you wrote in the New York Magazine went viral. And it really impacted me because you laid out the costs of doing nothing and the impact of what's already in play and the fact that we have strikingly caused most of the carbon in the environment that's driving climate change in the last 30 years since Al Gore wrote his first book about global warming and as you said since Steinfeld, you know, and so tell us what, what inspired you to write that article and then the book and, and what's been your journey in understanding this process since you sort of wrote that article? Yeah, it's, it's started in about middle of 2016, summer of 2016. I'm a journalist who has a kind of natural interest and to some degree professional focus

on the near future. And I follow news from the academy, new research in a lot of fields. And I just started seeing, first of all, much more research about climate change and also research that was much more alarming than I was seeing described when the issue was written about in the places that I think of as the competitors of New York Magazine, newspapers, other magazines, TV news programs, all of which seemed quite cautious, quite careful, and quite technocratic and even optimistic in their presentation of the science. It's just one degree or two degrees or, you know. Yeah. And as you say, sort of piecemeal also. So you'd hear about this one threat or this one other threat. But when you started to see the

whole mass of that research together, it came to me anyway, to be clear that this was an all encompassing story, that there was nowhere on the planet that would be untouched by it. And there are people who would be hit harder and other people who'd be hit less hard. Generally speaking, those in the global South will be hit most intensely. And those of us lucky enough to live in the West are going to be hit relatively less hard. But that doesn't mean that we'll be able to avoid this force no matter where we live, no matter who we are. And in the late fall, early spring of that year, there was a week of temperatures in the Arctic that were 40 degrees, 30, 40 degrees warmer than they should

have been. And I saw that news story and I knew enough about what was called runaway climate change, which is what happened to Venus when the planet went from being quite earth-like and possibly habitable to very much not earth-like and very much not habitable very quickly to worry that we were seeing that in real time here. And I looked into it a little bit and that was obviously not the case. Nothing was happening that quickly. But in just about every other area, just about every other research niche, by every other metric, things were much, much worse than I had understood as, I think like you, an informed, engaged reader of the news who was to some degree concerned about the planet, but wasn't really, really focused on it, I felt I had been actually somewhat deeply misled by much of the storytelling about climate change. And I started to think of those,

there being three major areas of misunderstanding. The first was about the speed of change. So as you mentioned, we've done half of all the damage we've done to the planet through the burning of fossil fuels in the last 30 years. But I had been led to believe that climate change was really slow. James Hansen, who's one of the most outspoken climate scientists, his major book for a general audience is called Storms of My Grandchildren. This was the timescale that we had been taught to think about this issue on. And yet we were seeing now every year, unprecedented heat waves, 500 year storms

hitting year after year after year, famine, drought, civil unrest that had a climate change footprint on it, a fingerprint on it. I mean, basically this has all happened since I graduated from medical school. Yeah. I'm 36 years old, which means that my lifetime actually contains this entire story. When I was born, the planet's climate was stable. Scientists were worried about the long-term trajectory, but there wasn't anything too scary about to happen. 36 years later, we are on the brink of catastrophe. And that has happened because of what we've done during my lifetime and to a certain degree as a relatively well-off Westerner in my name. million. That was already 60 parts per million above what's called the pre-industrial average, which was 280. And it was 10 parts per million below what scientists believed was safe.

They thought if we got past 350, things would start getting crazy. So when I was born, we had a buffer of 10 parts per million. In the 36 years since I was born, we've added 75. We had a buffer of 10 and we added 75. And we did that, as you say, knowingly. Al Gore had told us about the problem. James Hansen had told us about the problem. The UN had established its climate change body, the IPCC. And since that body was established, we've done more damage than we did in all the millennia before. When governments got together with the intergovernmental panel on climate change to address the problem- We've made no progress. We've made no progress. In fact, every year now is the worst year in history.

We're just getting worse. We're now doing as much damage every 10 years as we did in the entire first two and a half centuries of industrialization. And that damage is speeding up. I think there are reasons to think it will slow down and reverse. But at the moment, we're careening down a really, really terrifying path. So that's the speed. The second was about... Before you go on, I just want to say, I want everybody listening to understand that we are going to unpack what's

really happening around climate change and it's terrifying. And there is also hope, which we're going to unpack at the end. So stay with us because I don't want you driving off a bridge if you're driving. I want you to listen to this because we all need to know. Well, just to give a brief preview of that, we're doing all this damage. It's important to remember, you know, we is a complicated term, you know, whose interests are in fossil fuels, etc. But collectively, as a planet, as a species, we are doing this damage now. And that's the flip side of the incredible speed that we're doing this damage to the planet is that it's in our control. We can choose to do less damage. We can choose to emit less carbon if we want to. We can hopefully choose in relatively short order to totally zero out on carbon. But ultimately, the damage that we're doing to the planet, in addition to being terrifying, is a reflection of how much power we have over the climate. If we get to some really hellish scenarios, which we're going to, I'm sure, talk through soon, it will be because of what we do from here on out,

not because of forces beyond our control. So we're not at a point of no return. We're never going to return to a planet that is as climate peaceful as the planet was 50 years ago. But no matter how hot it gets, it will always be up to us to determine the climate future of the planet. And that will be done by how much carbon we emit. So even if we get to three or four degrees, which will be quite terrible, we will still have before us the choice of taking action and avoiding future warming or not taking action and creating more warming.

That dilemma will always be in front of us. So scientists of the world, I'll talk about this a little bit more, talk about this threshold, two degrees of warming, which is about twice where we are today as the threshold of catastrophe. It's a level that the island nations of the world call genocide. Yeah, because I'll be underwater. Yeah. And there are many, many other impacts beyond that that are quite terrifying. I don't think there's any chance that we are going to stay below two degrees of warming, but staying at 2.4 degrees is a lot better than staying at 2.9 degrees, is a lot better than staying at 3.4 degrees, is a lot better than staying at 4.3 degrees, which is where

we're headed by the end of the century. So what you point out in your book at the end of the century will be probably at four degrees if we don't do anything. That'll mean there's palm trees growing in the Arctic. And there'll be parts of the planet that are hit by six climate-driven natural disasters at once. There'll be $600 trillion in global climate damages, which is twice as much wealth as exists in the world today. There'll be twice as much war as we have today because there's a relationship between temperature and conflict.

It's hot. You get pissed off. Yeah. No, it's amazing. It maps out at the state level where famines and droughts produce some kind of social disarray, but it's also true at the individual level. So rates of domestic assault and rape and murder go up when it's hot out, which we all sort of know because we're familiar with the idea of the summer crime wave. Same phenomenon would be happening globally. But just to get back to the misconceptions of permanent- First is the speed. The second is the scope. Yeah, exactly.

So I, you know, it sounds deluded. I've lived my whole life in New York and it never really occurred to me that we're on the coast here. We're going to have to deal with sea level rise also. You don't get to the beach very often in New York, but that's here. We got some beaches, but yeah, when I walk down the street on these concrete streets, I look up at these steel buildings and I think, I'm not living in nature. Why do I have to worry about climate change?

I knew it was an issue that we should be worrying about, that our leaders should be focused on, but I also didn't think it was coming for me. And I certainly thought that while sea level rise would be an issue if it happened as the scientists were predicting, it was also the case that we could escape that by moving inland. The more I learned about the science, the more I learned about the economic impacts, the effect on war, the effect on public health, the effect on agriculture, which could mean by the end of the century, if we don't change course, our grain yields could be only half as bountiful as they are today. And we'd be using that half as much grain to be feeding probably 50% more people. So less food, more people.

More people. Not a good combination. The more I learned about all of these different impacts, the extreme weather, wildfires, hurricanes, flooding, the more I realized that this was a total system touching every life on planet Earth, no matter where you live, no matter where you are. There was no escaping it.

And life of all kinds in every way would be impacted by this force no matter what we do. By the end of the century, it's possible we will have taken dramatic action and avoided almost all of these terrifying scenarios. But even if we do that, the planet will be full of solar plantations and carbon capture plantations. We will have totally reinvented our methods of travel, our infrastructure, the way that we grow our food, the way that we eat. All that stuff will be completely transformed, which means even if we avoid catastrophic warming, the planet will still be transformed by the threat of warming. So whatever we do,

life will be completely changed. And I like to think of this in terms of the long history of humanity, which is to say, we are already now at about 1.1 degrees of global warming, outside the range of temperatures that enclose all of human history. So no human has ever walked a planet as hot as the one that you and I are walking on today. And everything that we know of as human history, the development of agriculture, the development of civilization, even the evolution of the human animal to begin with, the development of everything we know of as of modern life of civilization that happened under climate conditions that no longer prevail. It is as though we've landed on an entirely different planet. We've brought our

culture with us, and we're trying to see what aspects of that culture can endure under these new climate conditions. Now, I'm not someone who thinks none of them can. I think even if we get to a quite hellish situation, we'll be able to adapt. We'll be able to endure. We will have something that looks like human civilization 100 years from now, even if we're at four or five degrees of warming. But it will be dramatically transformed by that force of warming. And we will have had to- There may not be enough Earth to support all the people. There might be- I mean, the UN says that by just 2050, we will have 200 million climate refugees at least. They say it's possible we could have 1 billion climate refugees by 2050.

1 billion is as many people as live in North and South America today combined. And I think those numbers are a bit high. But even if you take the lower number, 200 million, and divide it in half, it's 100 times as big as the Syrian refugee crisis that has totally destabilized European politics. So that gives you a sense of just how dramatically transformed, for instance, our politics will be, but also literally our geography. If the equatorial band of the planet has become close to uninhabitable, what will that mean for all those people? What will that mean for all those people? What will that mean for the civilizations that are anchored there? The traditions, the communities that trace their lineages back over centuries, those people will have to be displaced en masse. Those entire worlds, those empires will be no longer attached to the landscape in which that gave rise to them. And those people will be having to navigate totally different- And we're seeing that today, right?

Totally. There are climate refugees today. There are people displaced by natural, quote, natural disasters. Yeah. I mean, much of the immigration from Central America that we're seeing that's causing so much American political disarray is increasingly being understood as a response to climate impacts in Central America, which is concerning in part because it means there'll be considerably more of them coming soon. And we already see what a difficult time we're having responding to those people with empathy. So I want to go through the scope in a minute, a little more detail. But there's a third thing you say we're not thinking about, right?

Speed, the scope. And the severity. Severity. So, you know, I was following this story pretty closely and I heard a lot about this two degree level, which I mentioned earlier, the scientists of the world call the threshold of catastrophe. And they would always say we have to do whatever we can to avoid it. I think the lay reader would have been totally justified to process that to mean it's a worst case scenario. But in fact, practically speaking, it's about our best case scenario. I think if there was a global dictator who could command the world's economies and turn them on a dime today, we could probably stay south of two degrees to about maybe 1.6 or 1.7 degrees. But when you factor in all of the human obstacles that we face,

I think literally a best case scenario is about two degrees. And what we're on track for is 4.3 by the end of the century, which will bring us all these horrors that I mentioned before, you know, the war, the natural disasters. You can take beach vacations in the Arctic. Yeah. But, you know, all those beaches, every beach you've ever been on will be underwater.

And it takes millions of years to produce new sand. Yeah. It's frightening. So let's go through each of the areas. The first is, and the threats, the first you call heat death. In 2003, there was a European heat wave that killed 2000 people a day day that sort of pales in comparison to the kind of stuff that you were talking about in the book that would be the consequence of the heat so what do you mean by heat death and what is the scope of that problem well basically the human body there's a natural limit to how much heat the human body can take technically it's about a combination of heat and humidity it's not just heat

but in the same way that we get hypothermia and can die from that if we're exposed to horrible, hardly cold conditions, we can also die sort of in the reverse way through an exposure, extended exposure to heat and humidity. And there's a- And you said in your book, if you were in Costa Rica and it's 90% humidity and 105 degrees, you're dead in a few hours from cooking. Yeah. And those conditions will be relatively common, which is maybe even to say every day in parts of South Asia and the Middle East during summer, as soon as 2050, which means that some of these cities that today hold 10 and 12 or 15 million people in them, you won't be able to walk around outside

without risking heat stroke and possibly death. Now, that's not to say that every single person in Calcutta in 2050 stepping outside their door will die immediately, but it will mean that the business of the city, as we understand today, will mean dramatically more heat death than we have now. So that European summer that you mentioned in 2003, it's expected that that will be a totally normal summer at the end of the century if we don't change course, which means that an event, an outlier event, a summer that was unusually warm, exceptionally warm, could do considerably more damage to that. And that's in relatively northern latitudes. That's in France and Russia. The impacts in places like Saudi Arabia are going to be much more dramatic. You won't be able to go on pilgrimage to Mecca in the next few decades

because it'll be lethally hot. Now, it's an interesting question. How will we respond to that? Will we change the schedule of that pilgrimage so that it's in wintertime rather than in summertime? Will we start to think of dying on pilgrimage as a holy calling and rewire the way that we think of suffering in its relationship to religious glory? I think that's possible too. These are some of the questions I get into in the second half of my book where I get sort of, and I know we want to spend a fair amount of time on the science, but I sort of turn the page on the science and think about, well, what will it mean for us to be living in a world that is so transformed by these forces? What will it mean if 200 million climate refugees are moving northward? What will it mean if tropical mosquitoes that have always been relatively

constrained in their footprint are flying as far north as the Arctic Circle and bringing- Yeah, you just had something that struck me. By 2050, there'll be 5.2 billion people at risk for malaria, which is a tropical disease. Yeah, and I think that's people at risk, so a much smaller percentage will actually get it. But now, if you're in New York, you don't have to worry about malaria. And in the decades ahead, we will have to worry about it at least. And that's leaving aside some of the more obscure public health risks. I write in the book about all of the diseases that are frozen in Arctic ice. Yeah, the climate plagues, you call them.

Yeah, this is- The ebonic plague, the flu virus of 1918. It feels like it's totally out of a horror movie. And, you know, it's probably the case that most of these diseases that are frozen in that ice, when that ice melts, won't come out and immediately kill everybody. It's not going to be like that. But we have already seen instances of events like that happening on small scale. A few years ago in Russia, reindeer that had died about a century ago, but their carcasses had been frozen in permafrost, that permafrost started to melt, and the reindeer had died of anthrax, and that anthrax was released when their carcasses started

to melt. It came out of the carcasses, infected a huge number of reindeer, and even infected some humans and killed at least one Russian boy. So we already have at least a huge number of reindeer, and even infected some humans and killed at least one Russian boy. So we already have at least a death toll of one. And that anthrax was there from the first half of the 20th century. There's a lot of Spanish flu from 1918 that's frozen in that ice. It killed like 50 million people, right? Unbelievable, catastrophic, really dramatic,

almost as significant a health event as the Black Death. And even more straight out of a horror movie is the fact that there are diseases frozen in that ice that predate human existence, which means that our immune systems have never reckoned with them, have no training to respond to them. And maybe most of them, maybe almost all of them will be able to respond to, who knows?

But it's an open question. And on that point, the scariest story in the whole book to me, it's not about humans. It's about the experience of this particular category of antelope called a Saiga antelope, which is a dwarf antelope that lived mostly in Siberia and happily for millions of years. And in 2015, I think, an unusually hot and human summer wiped out the entire species. This happened because the temperature conditions, the climate conditions changed the behavior of some of the bacteria in their intestines and turned what had been a kind of friendly symbiotic bacteria into an enemy, a villain, attacking the antelope from the inside out. And that totally wiped out the species entirely in the space of a couple of weeks in what's called a mega death. Now, we know we've

learned so much over the last couple of decades about how humans are complicated creatures too with millions, possibly billions of viruses and bacteria in our bodies. And I think- Brilliance. Almost all of them are unlikely to be changed dramatically by a temperature rise of one or two

or three or four degrees. But the chances that a couple of them are are certainly not insignificant. Well, what's more frightening is what you describe is the effect on pregnant women, on babies, on the risk of ADD and autism that are connected to climate change, which most people are not linking. Yeah, not at all. I think that these are, from an advocacy perspective, really underutilized storytelling mechanisms because I think public health is something that everyone recognizes immediately as a personal threat. And yeah, you can see the number of days that a child was in utero where the temperature was above 90 degrees

Fahrenheit. You can see that number. You can see that number on their lifetime earnings. How do you do that kind of study? Like looking at the temperature of exposure when they're in utero and their lifetime earnings? Just using data sets that include both the temperature range of their, when they were- Gestation. Gestating, and then using their tax returns, I think. I don't actually know the details about that particular study. Fascinating. But it's really amazing to know that those kinds of conditions can have such an impact. And the even more dramatic condition impacts, for me, come through, you know, small particulate pollution,

which- Yeah. So you call that the unbreathable air. Yeah. So we've gone through climate plagues, heat death, and now we're into unbreathable air. So this is, you know, it's not narrowly an impact of climate change, but it's produced by the same thing that produces climate change, which is the burning of fossil fuels. And this is just to me some of the most harrowing, eye-opening material in the whole book. There's a study just studying the impact of air pollution between 1.5 degrees and 2 degrees. So just that half degree addition of warming, the authors of the studies say, just through the impact of air pollution would kill 153 million additional people. From air pollution?

Just from air pollution. So how did air pollution and climate change connect? When you burn coal, when you burn wood, it produces small particulate pollution. And so it's a byproduct in the same way that, you know, in the same way that carbon is a byproduct. Yeah, I mean, you write in your book in China in 2013, one third of all deaths in China were from air pollution, from air quality that was so bad. And you say that, you know, 300 to 500 is considered don't go outside ever, it's going to kill you. Yeah. It was 800 in China at the time.

And it was from Arctic melting that caused this shift in the climate that led to- Yeah, it changed the weather patterns so that they had sort of been polluting into a kind of a jet stream that would clear the pollution out over the ocean. And so they didn't have to breathe it in. But the weather patterns were changed because of changes in the Arctic, such that the pollution just sat over Beijing and it was really catastrophic. And by the way, we are one connected planet. If you live in Seattle, where it should be the pristine Northwest, you're exposed to mercury pollution from the coal burning in China that passes over the oceans in the climate and then rains down into the city.

And the smoke from wildfires traverses the whole globe. So, and, you know, that's really an important impact from an American perspective. But at the moment, you know, China's cleaned up a lot of its air pollution because it had so much

public health trouble with it in 2013. Today, the worst hit country is India. Delhi, the air pollution is now so bad, they haven't just canceled planes because you can't see, they've canceled trains because train conductors couldn't see and they thought it was unsafe

even though you're following a track. There's air pollution that collects in the lobbies of buildings in Delhi. You can see it in the lobby. And people go around outside wearing surgical masks and having headscarves wrapped around their mouths. And it's connected to everything. I'm sorry, heart disease, diabetes. Absolutely everything.

Cancer, obviously respiratory diseases, asthma. Yeah. And down to the development of children. So cognitive performance is really dramatically impacted by it. ADHD and autism. The impact of this small particulate pollution that we're talking about on premature birth and low birth weight is so dramatic that when you put in E-ZPass, which meant that cars didn't idle for a while and therefore didn't produce more smoke, they could just drive through, In regions around those interchanges, low birth weight and premature birth declined by about 10 or 12%. That's wild. Unbelievable.

That's pretty wild. And in America, most places in America don't have such dramatic air pollution issues now. Although many places have unsafe levels, they're not nearly as dramatic as people in the developing world are dealing with. Yeah. But people who live in America who've never been to the developing world, I used to live in Beijing and China, you could literally on a bright, sunny, clear day, not look out your window and not be able to see the building next to you. Yeah. That's how bad it is. And people would wear masks. I mean, I literally wore a mask with a filter on in Beijing because it wasn't safe to breathe in. We're seeing some adaptation like that in California during wildfire season now. And the wildfires, I mean, it's one thing that many people, even people who are engaged on climate, don't really understand is that a tree is a store of carbon.

In that way, it's like coal. When it burns, it releases carbon. And every year now in California, enough carbon is released from the wildfires, which are the highest ever, every year, to totally counteract all the gains that the state, although still not moving fast enough. It's being completely wiped out by the wildfires, which are also producing small particulate pollution, which has this huge public health impact. And we don't yet know what the last couple of years will have done. But I know pregnant women who left the state last year. I know people who didn't leave their homes for a week at a time. And, and some of the, some of the more dramatic pollution is even farther North in Washington and Oregon and British Columbia. Um, but you know, I just wrote a big piece in New York magazine about wildfires and the

numbers here are really horrifying. I talked to the mayor of LA, Eric Garcetti, who is 48 years old. When he was born, the year he was born, 61,000 acres burned in California. The year he was elected mayor, 2013, 600,000 acres were burned, tenfold increase. The year he was reelected mayor, 2017, 1.2 million acres were burned. So twice as much as in 2013. And last year, 2018, 1.9 million acres were burned. And- Staggering. Scientists say conservative estimates, just through climate change, we're going to get doubling or perhaps quadrupling of wildfires in

California by 2050. It's unimaginable. On the other half of the century- Or uninhabitable, I don't know. Yeah. Their estimates kind of diverge past 2050 in part because they don't know how to model what an ecosystem will do after all of its land has burned. They don't know what's gonna grow back. That means, but there's simple climate modeling suggesting that by 2100, we could have 64 times as much wildfire burning in California as we have today,

which would mean 75% of the state or more would burn every single year. Well, there'd be nothing left to burn after a few years. But, you know, I talked to California. I mean, Garcetti said to me, actually admirably open, there's nothing we can do. There are no amount of firefighters we can hire, no amount of new fire engines we could buy, no amount of brush we can clear that will stop this. The only thing that will stop this will be when the earth, probably long after we're gone, relaxes into a more

normal weather state. But most Californians I talked to were actually normalizing it. They were saying, yeah, last year was bad. The year before was bad, but we've always had fires here. And that to me was really striking because I was- The new normal. Yeah. I came out there expecting everybody to be in the total grip of climate panic. And I saw actually a case study in normalization. Denial is a-

Powerful drug. And I mean, I don't mean to sound holier than thou. I myself live partly through compartmentalization. I think we all do. I do. It's hard to grapple with this in a day-to-day basis. And I want to get into that. But first, I want to sort of go deeper into what you're implying, which is this whole idea of cascades. So we have wildfires

because of climate change, but then we lose the carbon into the atmosphere that makes the climate change even worse. And it's this vicious cycle, but it happens across the scale of all the environment. Oceans are another thing you talked about, the poisoned oceans. So can you tell us how oceans are affected? Most people don't think about oceans and climate change very much, other than that they're gonna rise

because the Arctic is gonna melt. Yeah, well, I don't remember the exact figure, but it's something like 2 3rds of all the additional warming that the planet has undergone have been taken up by the oceans. They also absorb a lot of carbon, which means- So their carbon sinks. They're at the moment carbon sinks, but the warming of the oceans threatens to make them,

certainly threatens to make their ability to absorb carbon less, which means that the warmer the ocean gets, the less able it is going to be to draw down carbon, which means that there'll be more carbon in the atmosphere, which means that the planet will warm up even more. But also as the oceans warm, they become more acidic. And it's one of those things like when you talk about particular temperature increases, you think one degree, two degrees, these are minute differences. It's the same when you talk about the pH level of the ocean. I mean, in your body, just a fraction of a change can be the difference between death or being alive.

It has that impact on the oceans too. I was just reading a study this morning that showed that the plankton in the ocean have moved on average 500 kilometers since the pre-industrial era. Let's talk about phytoplankton because most people don't think much about phytoplankton. And why is it important? Well, there are a couple of reasons. The first is that it is the absolute basic building block of the food chain in the ocean, which means that everything that we eat,

eats something that eats something that eats something that ate phytoplankton. So if we lose that food source, we have a huge disruption to all of that food, which could theoretically dramatically transform the whole ecosystem of the ocean and maybe most directly for our purposes, impact our ability to harvest fish and other- So you only eat your sushi because there's phytoplankton, right? Yeah. But it also is the way um the ocean absorbs carbon and produces oxygen and that's really useful too doesn't it produce 50 of our oxygen in the environment i don't know the number offhand but that sounds totally plausible um in any event it's a quite significant contributor

and not only will we overheat but we'll. Yeah. There's not enough oxygen to breathe because we're poisoning the oceans with carbon. It's killing the phytoplankton. Yeah. And when the oceans become what's called anoxic, which means they don't have enough oxygen in them, that can also have a devastating effect on life. So there are already large parts of the oceans around the world that have what are called dead zones. Some of these are as big as Texas. And there's basically no life in it at all because there's no oxygen in the water

at all. I mean, there's one in the Gulf of Mexico, the size of New Jersey. And there's 400 similar areas around the world. And a lot of it has to do with agricultural runoff from the nitrogen from fertilizers that goes into the rivers and lakes that goes down into the oceans and basically suffocates those areas because of the overgrowth of algae and other things. Yeah. I think, you know, it's in a certain sense, all aspects of climate change are part of this bigger story of how humans are damaging and degrading the planet. Some of which aren't directly related to climate, like, kind of industrial agriculture using that kind of fertilizer, which ends up having all of these literally downstream effects. I tend to think of climate change as being the

biggest story, the all-encompassing story, because climate governs everything that we do. It is the theater in which we do everything we do. But there are a lot of things that we're doing that are really awful to the planet that aren't directly connected to climate, like the way that we're polluting the oceans with plastic. And that has some climate footprint, but it's marginal. But this whole fascinating thing of these feed forward cycles. So you think it's like the acceleration of climate change by the very fact that we're causing climate change. So we're

melting the permafrost in the Arctic, which is a huge store. What is it, gigatons? Yeah, there's twice as much carbon frozen in permafrost as is suspended in the Earth's atmosphere. Yeah. And that's all melting and that's going to get all released. So the fact that we're causing climate change perpetuates more climate change is what you're saying. Yeah. These are called feedback loops. Some of them work in the other directions. There are natural systems that to some degree will work against additional warming, but the overwhelming majority of them will accelerate warming. And that's really what scientists are most worried about. They are scared about what the direct impacts of our passing

two degrees and say getting to three degrees or four degrees might be. And I mentioned some of the impacts earlier, they're quite harrowing. But really what scientists worry about is that doing that would trigger some of these feedback loops, which could quite quickly and quite dramatically add a lot more warming to the system than we really have even started to study. So for instance, there was one quite dramatic study that came out about a month or two ago looking at what would happen at, I think it was 1200 parts per million of carbon in the atmosphere, which isn't going to happen this century, but could happen sometime in the first half of the next century if we don't change course. And they found that that level of carbon in the atmosphere would

completely eliminate the planet's ability to form clouds. And that would immediately add eight degrees Celsius of warming. So we'd probably be at about five degrees at that point. And we'd immediately be carried to 13 degrees, which is a level of warming that, you know, the title of my book is a little hyperbolic. The uninhabitable earth. 13 degrees of warming. It would be very hard for certainly anything like civilization scale human life to survive. There would probably be still some pockets where we'd be able to endure,

but not at a level that we could sustain 7 billion or even probably 3 billion people. Siberia becomes the tropics and we can hang out there. So long as we weren't working too hard, because if we worked too hard, we'd probably be suffering heat stroke um even in siberia move to alice alice alzheimer island up in the arctic circle yeah that's frightening you know the this is kind of terrifying and i think you know the the implications of this are so huge it's hard for people to grasp.

But to me, there is a way of thinking about it that can inspire a little bit of hope. And it has to do with, like you said, the fact that we cause this, we can actually start to address it. The thing that we haven't touched on, which I want to talk about, because it is seemingly a way for us to address this, is food. And I obviously focus a lot on food. And we've had Paul Hawken on the podcast talked about drawdown. And he said that we can, using innovations in agriculture that help to draw down carbon into the soil,

we can actually start to draw down and reverse climate change. The soil is a carbon sink. And so this is a sort of a loop where you talk about the problems with the end of food because of drought, because of flooding, because of the increasing heat, meaning we can't grow grains where we normally grow them. So you talk about the destruction of our agricultural system by the heating up of the planet. But the converse is true in that the way we grow food now is one of the biggest contributors,

if not the biggest contributor to climate change. And it's something people don't talk about much. We talk about energy, we talk about coal, we talk about burning of fossil fuels, but it seems like the data is pretty clear now that it's our food system, food waste, killing of the soil, loss of soil, lackability to actually have carbon sequestering, increased desertification by our farming practices, all that is contributing to climate change at a scale that no one's really

talking about much. And I don't see it in the Paris Accord. I don't see it in the conversations that are happening. I don't see it as a solution. It's sort of like this absence. So we talked about all the effects in your book and what we've just shared is a huge sort of unpacking of the drama of climate change and what it's doing. But then we have to sort of backtrack and go, what is driving this? You know, what are the things that we actually have control over? So maybe talk a little bit about how you see that and how you think we can start to look at some of the solutions around this. Yeah. Well, I would say, I think there has been some more conversation about agriculture over the last few years, but it's been really, really focused on at the level of

individual consumption. So you hear about eating less red meat yeah going vegan right um and well that's a whole other question we can talk about about how we the way that we've been told that we can solve this problem through individual choice which i think is basically you know a red herring um and that we need policy changes and i agree that agriculture has not been nearly as big a part of the policy conversation as it should be because it is both a contributor and can be a solution in exactly the ways that you outline. If you look at these sort of satellite imagery that traces the carbon patterns of the planet over the course of a year, you see when plants are growing in the Northern Hemisphere, almost all of that carbon

totally disappears from those satellite images. And that means that farmland has the ability, when it's working, to do just about all the work that we needed to do to absorb even the catastrophic level of carbon that we're putting into the atmosphere today. And certainly, if we're able to decarbonize, we should be able to do even more. But we're not using most of that land very efficiently, very effectively, in part because we're tilling, we're not planting- Cover crops.

Yeah. We're using the land in only a very short portion of the year. We're not, we don't, we don't plant. Very extractive. It's almost like mining as opposed to sort of restoring ecosystems that can kind of be sustained over the course of the year. Yeah. And you know, you hear a lot about beef farming, but like there are studies that show if you just slightly change the pattern of how you have your cattle graze, you can turn cattle farms into carbon sinks relatively easily rather than carbon sources. That's one possible way of approaching it. There have also been these small scale studies that show you feed cattle a little bit of seaweed.

Seaweed, yeah. The methane emissions are basically totally wiped out. And that's another major factor in the carbon footprint of... And to put it in perspective, if you fly from London to New York one way, you'd have to be a vegan for five years to offset the amount of carbon that you're going to save. Yeah. I mean, a round trip ticket from London to New York melts three square meters of ice. Yeah.

I mean, which is just to think that you're flying over that Arctic circle and you're looking down and seeing it melt. Bring back horses, right? Yeah. But I think that my own perspective is this is in the same way that I feel it's too big a story to tell in any one way. I also feel like it's too big a problem to solve in any one way and that there's a great hunger for silver bullet solutions. I don't think that we can address this issue through a single silver bullet solution, but obviously agriculture has to be a part of the solution. And the opportunities are sort of staring us right in the face there. They're not meaningfully less productive or profitable. They are in a lot of ways healthier.

They certainly are more in line with agricultural traditions that stretch way back. If we did more farming like we did before the advent of industrial agriculture, our carbon footprint would be much better off. We'd probably also feel a lot healthier and be eating better. It's a win-win. Totally. But, you know, as with everything on this issue, one problem is that most of our farming is done by large scale corporations who have very particular perspectives and demands. Very short-term thinking. Very short-term thinking. And just to put it in perspective a little bit,

there's been a lot of, there's at the moment, a fair amount of hope among climate people that we could find ways to genetically engineer crops so that they could be more heat resistant and they wouldn't be suffering in the future conditions that are gonna be so much worse for them. And that's probably true, but there's been a lot of GMO work on crops for a generation now, and we've made basically no progress on heat resistance in part because most of that research is being done by corporate

agribusiness. Many of those companies are the same companies that produce pesticides. And so most of their innovation has been in making crops more pesticide resistant so that they can profit on both ends of the spectrum. They provide the seed and the pesticides. Exactly. And that's just really bad. I'm not somebody who... I actually don't know your perspective. I'm not someone who is reflexively skeptical of GMOs, but I want to see that innovation directed towards actually productive, healthy improvements in our crops. It's fascinating. You may not know this, but there's been an increase in the carbohydrate content of food because of the carbon, because plants eat carbon. And so there's an increase in the carbohydrate load, which affects the quality

of the nutrition and a decrease in protein and a decrease in nutrients. All the vitamins are dramatically in decline. So it's fascinating. We're producing more volume of food, but much less quality, especially junk food. Yeah, I mean, it's- So climate change sort of accelerates the junk food. I read one study. I think, I don't remember the exact number, but it was something like they looked at the vitamin content of like 35 vitamins across a huge variety of food products,

agriculture products, and all but one of those vitamins were dramatically smaller, present in dramatically smaller quantities than had been the case a few decades ago. And there's a lot of reasons for that. It could be the soil quality. It could be the fact that we don't have organic matter, which helps the plants extract the nutrients from the soil. But it's a complicated loop. So we're in a situation now where you've painted a picture that is pretty frightening, all the effects that we talked about on human health, on the economy, on oceans, on our food supply, on the air. I mean, it's overwhelming. But is there any possibility that we can slow this down and stop it?

Like what, in best case scenario, would we have to do? And you mentioned individual responsibility. I want to have you start there because a lot of this gets offloaded onto people. You know, turn off your light bulbs and drive an electric car and, you know, like be a vegan. And those are things that seemingly put the responsibility on the individual. It's almost like in obesity, we said, well, just eat less and exercise more. It doesn't really address the problem, which is a toxic food environment. So how does that play out in this scenario? Well, I think, I think those people who want to reduce their carbon footprint should.

That's noble. It allows you to sort of live in line with your values. It allows you to show to other people and to policymakers ultimately that you can live responsibly and also in a fulfilling way. So we should all do our part, but- But I start, and it also buys us a little more time. If we were all living 20% more responsible, the timeline in which we'd have to decarbonize, we'd have a little more time to innovate. I mean, for example, food waste is the third biggest contributor.

Yeah, I think there's some study I read that Americans waste something like 60% of their food. Yeah, it depends if you have 30 to 60%. I don't know how you count it. I think there's some study I read that Americans waste something like 60% of their food. Yeah, it depends. We have 30 to 60%. I mean, if we figured out how to stop that, I mean, the food waste is one of the biggest contributors. Yeah, and the truth is it's the same with electricity. It's amazing how much electricity we waste. But the premise I start with is that to stabilize the climate at any point, at two degrees if

we're lucky enough and do enough to get there, but even at three degrees, at two degrees if we're lucky enough and do enough to get there, but even at three degrees, at four degrees, at five degrees, to stabilize it at any temperature threshold, we don't just need to reduce our emissions. We need to zero them out entirely. Because if we're at five degrees and we're still adding any carbon at all to the atmosphere, we're still creating additional warming. Now, from that perspective, you think, what can individual consumption pattern and behaviors change? If you and I and everyone we know and everyone they know and everyone they knew never went on a plane again, we would still be dealing with hundreds of millions of people elsewhere in the world who wanted to travel. And that to me means if we need to totally zero out

the carbon footprint of air travel- Solar planes. We need a new technology. Maybe they'll look a lot like planes or maybe they'll look a lot different from planes. Maybe they'll be electric planes. Maybe they'll be a lot like planes, or maybe they'll look a lot different from planes. Maybe they'll be electric planes. Maybe they'll be zero carbon planes that run on fuel that is like jet fuel, but is zero carbon. There's innovation in both of those areas. Not far enough along for my taste, but there's innovation there. But 30 years from now, unless we can really truly imagine a world that has entirely given

up flying, which I can't, That means we need massive R&D spending to develop these technologies and legislation and regulation that requires manufacturers to be producing them, incentivizes that production, and requires airlines to be running those airplanes in the same way that we've done to a limited extent with the car industry. We need to do the same for planes. I think a similar approach to agriculture is actually quite important. We need legislation, regulation, and oversight and incentive building that will move our farming practices away from these really destructive behaviors

into something that can be much more positive. That's the problem is there are large corporations, very few of them that control most of our agriculture that actually spend literally billions of dollars on lobbying to control government policy. It's a challenge. But I think when I look at that, I see, well, what's bigger than corporate power?

In theory, political power. We need to mobilize, we need to make noise, and we need to change the nature of our politics, which have been inert on this for far too long, in part because they have been captive to these corporate interests. And I would say even more than agribusiness, the fossil fuel industry in particular. But theoretically, we can revise those politics because we live in a representative state and we live in a West that responds to public interest. Except for one thing, Citizens United, which has allowed corporations to give unlimited amounts of money to political candidates. Certainly an outsized influence.

And there's apparently, according to Lawrence Lessing, who wrote America Compromised, there's 132 people who basically control 60% of the elections by their donations, by picking the candidates that get selected by, you know, all sorts of different nefarious behaviors that control the political conversation. And I think, you know, unless all of us become part of the political discourse, actually vote, actually donate, actually contribute. It's very tough to have a representative democracy. Yeah, I mean, I agree. And I do think that there is meaningful political change that needs to happen. But I think there are a couple of reasons why I'm relatively speaking hopeful on that point. Okay. Well, if you wrote this book and you're hopeful, let's hear it. So, you know, when I wrote this,

I turned this book in in September, and I actually didn't see much cause for optimism in our political life when I turned the book in. September of 2018. 18. The last nine months have produced a really dramatic political movement. The Green New Deal?

That's part of it. I think it started really with the UN's climate change report from last October, which was much more alarmist and urgent in its tone than anything that had been published before. And in its aftermath, it produced Greta Thunberg's climate strikes in the EU, extinction rebellion in the UK, sunrise movement in the US. Those are protest movements. But in the EU, Greta, who's now 16 years old, has basically made the president of the EU commit to spending, I think, one out of every $3 in the EU budget on climate mitigation and adaptation. Extinction Rebellion in the UK has made the British Parliament declare a climate emergency and produce a report showing how they could get to zero carbon by 2050, which isn't quite fast enough for me, but is an enormous step forward from where they were before. And in the US, because of the Sunrise Movement,

because of the election of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, we have the Green New Deal as a proposal that has been endorsed to some degree by every single major democratic presidential candidate. Now, we'll see where that proposal goes. For all of the reasons you mentioned, there are obstacles. There are obstacles in the UK. There are obstacles in the EU. But there is unprecedented political movement around climate just over the last year. And that is really heartening to me. Now, the US, our politics are really broken. And one of the ways they're broken is because they're controlled to some degree by corporate interests and especially fossil fuel interests. One of our two parties is, if not quite in a state of climate denial as ours. You see many nations that are far to the left of us, far more green in their rhetoric. And really none of them, aside from maybe the UK, is doing much better on carbon emissions than we are. has been less about the particular institutions of particular nations and their politics than it has been, generally speaking, the consumption patterns of our culture. And I think that we can

change those somewhat dramatically through policy, in part because for the very first time, and this is the second reason I have a lot more optimism than I would have a few years ago. Economists are really seeing a different picture out there than they used to. And it used to be the case that any economist would tell you that fast action on climate change would be very expensive and therefore not really worth doing. It would mean massive investment in things like infrastructure and clean energy, but also foregoing some amount of economic activity because we'd be needing to retire coal plants before they were of retirement age. And I think that's actually the main reason why we haven't had dramatic policy change on this area over the past few decades, because our policy leaders all across the West have really been enamored with economic growth and orient their policies almost exclusively around it. But you say it doesn't have to be that way. Right now, just over the last few years, economists doing new research have really reversed that logic.

So they see, rather than seeing fast action on climate as being expensive, they see inaction on climate as being much more expensive. And they say we would all be better off in relatively short order if we took more action sooner. So a major report from 2018 said we could add $26 trillion to the global economy by 2030 through rapid decarbonization. And that's maybe a little bit of a rosy estimate, but I think we're beginning to see more clearly the business opportunities that lay ahead of us if we take action faster. And we're getting a better estimate, which is to say a bigger estimate of what the costs of an action would be. We could end up at the end of the century if we don't take

action with a global GDP that's 30% smaller than it would be without climate change. That's an impact that's twice as deep as the Great Depression, and it would be permanent. But when you look at, you know, I'm really heartened by a plan that was put forward by the government of Indonesia now, about a month ago. Indonesia is a really representative case because they're a country in the developing world. They've made incredible gains as many countries in the developing world have over the last few decades by industrializing. So they've doubled their per capita income just in the last two decades. They've halved their poverty rate just in the past two decades,

but they've done that by doubling their emissions because they were industrializing. This has been basically the course of every nation in the developing world over the last 25 years. Burn more fossil fuels and make your population richer. Which is why we're in such a bad state. The reason that we went from being a stable climate to being on the brink of catastrophe is because of the development of the developing world. And that's not to say we shouldn't have done that. It's also not to say we want to ask those who remain in poverty to forego that economic growth. That would be a really complicated

ask of them. But it was the dilemma that we thought those nations faced up until a few years ago, because it did seem that we would either have to ask them to slow their growth or have them behave irresponsibly when it came to climate change. Now, given the new economic conventional wisdom about this, we think collectively, the economists of the world think the reverse, which is why Indonesia now says they can cut their carbon emissions in half, which would put them ahead of their commitments under the Paris Accords, accords which no nation in the world is on track to meet right now. This plan would put them-

We all agreed, but nobody's doing it. Horrible, horrible indictment of all of us. Indonesia says they could outdo all of us and have their carbon emissions by 2030 while still continuing to grow- By doing what? At 6% per year. Well, it's a variety of things having to do with investments in renewable energy, changing their infrastructure, their transportation. It's basically the whole bucket. But they can still grow, they say, at 6% per year, which is faster than they've been growing over the last two decades, 5%, when they doubled their per capita income.

Now, if that logic really holds, it's incredibly exciting because it means that we don't have to give up on the idea of economic growth and all of the things that we've come to expect from new prosperity. So technology and innovation can help, but it's not the only thing, right? Because a lot of people go, oh, technology will save us. Someone will come up with a solution. Someone will figure it out. My basic perspective is like technology is our only hope, but it is insufficient on its own. If we really, you know, the UN says that to avoid catastrophic warming, we need to have our emissions by 2030. 2030 is really right around the corner.

10 years. And when you realize that this is not just a matter of energy, which itself is complicated, we need to build those solar plants, we need to rebuild that electric grid, et cetera. But infrastructure and transportation, those are projects that take a really long time to put into place. Some of them, if we started them now, wouldn't be finished by 2030. There's a lot of net benefit. By 2030, you said if we shifted away from fossil fuels to more green energy, there'd be a net benefit of $26 trillion in the economy, which is huge. But it still requires a heavy lift. And the UN, their analogy is that it would require a global

World War II scale mobilization, which the Secretary General said would have to start this year, 2019. Now, that's conceivable, but it's not happening. And I don't think it's going to happen anytime soon, which means that we have a lot more to do in terms of using policy levers to accelerate technological innovation and especially to scale up the technology that we have today. The problem is most politicians are short-lived, right? And they don't think of their short-term survival, their longevity, and aren't making

decisions for seven generations ahead, right? I think that that's true, although I think it's in a certain way, a perverse way, helpful that we're now seeing climate impacts in such real time. And we're seeing it today, and we're seeing it right around the corner. And so some of these impacts, which used to feel so far down the line, we didn't need to plan for them, are now seeming much more immediate. But I also think that our politics is shifting around this issue. In 2016, there was not a single question asked at any of the presidential debates about climate change. And now, as I mentioned, all the Democratic candidates have endorsed the

Green New Deal to some extent. And one new governor entered the race whose focus is just on climate change. Yeah. And I think he's an unlikely nominee. Yeah. But I think he could be a plausible VP pick for somebody. And either way, he is helping initiate a policy arms race among all of the more serious candidates, more plausible candidates who are making commitments of an unimaginable size on climate change themselves. Now, we would need a Democratic president to win. We would need them to also win control of the Senate or to really change the commitment of the Republican Party on this issue to make meaningful action in the US. But I think you're seeing that change all around the world.

And I think it's important to keep in mind, the US is responsible for the lion's share of historical emissions. We have a moral obligation as a result to be a moral leader on climate. But practically speaking, we're only responsible today for about 15% of global emissions. And that number will likely fall in the years ahead, which means China is about double the contributor that we are. India will soon pass us. And at some point, if they don't change course, sub-Saharan Africa will too. Now, as I say, I think that's not an excuse for American inaction, but we really do need to think of this as a global problem, not a problem of domestic politics. Getting global governments to work together is tough.

That to me is actually the hardest challenge. I can see a way towards changes at the community level. I can see a way towards changes at the national level. But the international level to me is really tricky. I think that's why no nation is on track to honor Paris, because there is this real collective action problem. Even if countries of the world agree in principle that we need to reduce our carbon immediately. You think it's a lack of understanding of the problem and scope of the problem and speed of the problem and scale of the problem? I mean, that is existing at the political level. you know someone who's trying to pay close attention to this i kind of missed the boat yeah and i and i think that may be the case for a

lot of people i mean i think it was basically the case for me up until a few years ago yeah um i think in part that's been a failure of the storytelling i don't think that the journalism has been done about this i don't think that i don't think the public messaging that's been done about it the advocacy that's been done about it has been honest about this. I don't think that, I don't think the public messaging that's been done about it, the advocacy that's been done about it has been honest about the science, but I do think that's beginning to change. I mean, I know, you know, personally, three or four democratic presidential candidates have read my book. It's been talked about in Congress. And I think that that is, you know, that's a minor contributor, but the UN report from last October was a major contributor and you're starting to see political leaders talk in these

terms, existential terms. Yeah. Cause your book was, uh, handed in before the UN report. Yeah. Yeah. But you know, it's, it, it, um, in a mercenary way, it came out at the right time. Yeah. Um, you know, it's funny. I think if the book were published now, just a few months later, it might almost seem like old news. And yet, I mean, that's one of the reasons why I think the second half, which gets onto what it means for us to be living in this world is so important, because the science, we're now much more familiar with that science than we were six months ago. But I think that's true of policymakers. I think their policies haven't yet gotten to the point that we'd want them to be, but they're moving quite rapidly in that direction. And I'm hopeful that that movement continues and that they actually put that policy into action. Now, as I say, the UN says we have 12 years, right? That means really immediate, quite dramatic action, which I don't think we're likely to see at the national level or the international level. But when it comes to the question of hope and optimism, I really feel ultimately it's all a matter of perspective. And

while I don't think there's any plausible way that we can stabilize the climate at something like its current state, which by the way, is already punishing the global South intensely, has already produced three 500-year storms just in Houston, just in the last three years, has produced those California wildfires, which have been so much dramatically worse than ever before. But it was that storm in Houston once in every 500,000 years, 500 millennia, right? I mean, it's crazy. And yet, it's going to get worse. It's certainly going to get worse. It's probably going to get dramatically worse. So if you're hoping for the climate to stay the same, I think there's no reason for that hope. But if you base your expectations on the path we're on, 4.3 degrees of warming, I think there's a lot of reason to think we're going to do quite a lot to avert some of those. So you're the global dictator. You got elected

or you took over or whatever. You're in charge. What would be the top changes that you would implement that would arrest this and maybe reverse it? Well, the IMF recently put out a report, the IMF, no enemy of big business. That's the International Monetary Fund. Yeah. Is saying that they, I mean, really like one of the main engines of the era of neoliberal globalization that we're sort of probably living in at the tail end of, but we've been living in for quite a long time.

They say that we are- As they say in the play Hamilton, it's the room where it happens. Yeah. They say we are currently globally subsidizing the fossil fuel business $5.3 trillion a year. Now, most of those subsidies are not direct subsidies. They involve the fact that we're not pricing carbon responsibly so that we're imposing an environmental cost on the planet that's not priced into the price of carbon. So the price of the fuel isn't the cost of the fuel. Right.

Right. But if you take just that number, $5.3 trillion, I mean, I think the lowest hanging fruit is eliminating those subsidies. That is to say, pricing carbon responsibly and directing the direct subsidies that we're now putting into failing businesses that are also poisoning our planet, directing that money into solutions. Those are renewable energy, R&D into carbon capture, which can take carbon out of the atmosphere. That's one big thing. I also think we need to very intently focus on the matter of regenerative agriculture, which we were talking about earlier.

I think that's more of a policy question and a cultural question, less a matter of subsidy. On the other hand, we do know that a lot of those agribusinesses are being subsidized as well. And there are strong levers, strong policy levers to adjust there too. Those would be my sort of two big starting points. But as I say- So food and energy. Food and energy make up, I think if you count them together, depending on how you count, the majority of carbon emissions. They're not all of it.

So what is this carbon capture technology? Is that just sci-fi or what's the deal with that? Well, it basically is the same thing that plants do. Plants suck carbon out of the atmosphere. They turn it into oxygen. Soil does the same. Yeah. And the idea is that we could build machines to do a similar project.

And we have built them. We have machines that can suck carbon out of the atmosphere for the moment, a cost of about $100 a ton. It would then be stored underground in much the same way that coal is stored underground now. Which is what we did. We released it out from underground. In a certain sense, we'd be reversing the time's arrow. We extracted coal from the ground,

we burned it, it released these fumes, which are now poisoning us. These machines would allow us to collect those fumes, concentrate them into bricks, and then bury them like the coal was originally. Now, there's a big question of where we'd store that carbon. We'd probably get into huge fights about, NIMBY fights about who'd be living next to it and all that. But keep in mind that $5.3 trillion figure that I mentioned, which is how much today we're subsidizing the fossil fuel business. If it costs $100 a ton to suck carbon out of the atmosphere, we could totally neutralize all of the carbon emissions that we're producing today from every sector of our economy, industry, energy, agriculture, transportation. We could do that for a cost of about $3 trillion a year. So for the same amount of money that we're

today subsidizing fossil fuels, we could totally neutralize all of the carbon we're producing, which would mean that we could effectively continue on exactly the path that we're on and do no additional damage to the climate at all going forward. Now, that is a simplistic equation, which gives an overly rosy view of how simple it would be. But it does give you a sense of the scale and the inherent trade-off that we're making by subsidizing fossil fuels. If we deployed these machines at scale, we would need an infrastructure to store the carbon that they say would be two to three times the size of today's oil and gas business. It would be quite huge. What about just regenerating soil?

That seems like the best. I mean, a much better solution, which is why. And which will produce a lot of great food. It's really remarkable. This $100 a ton machine. I mean, there are a lot of companies doing developing machine technology in different ways. But the one that has the most cost-effective method at the moment, which costs $100 a ton, is this company called Carbon Engineering, which has been backed by Bill

Gates and others and is based in Vancouver. But the intellectual spade work has been done by a lead researcher named David Keith, who is based at Harvard. And this is a man who, if we decided to deploy this at global scale, would become a billionaire. Unimaginable wealth. Yeah. And he says to me when I interview him, this shouldn't be done at scale. Why? Because it's still more expensive to take carbon out of the atmosphere than it is to put it up there in the first place, which means that methods of decarbonization, regenerative approaches to agriculture, and other renovations to the way that we build infrastructure and do business are much more

cost-effective than his technology. Now, he says there are certain sectors that are going to be really hard to decarbonize. I mentioned jet fuel. Jet fuel is actually one of those where it's going to be really hard to decarbonize that sector. So he says in those areas, we might be able to use this technology effectively to neutralize the carbon footprint of those sectors. But thinking of it as a problem, as a solution to the global problem, even as a man who would literally be made like the world's richest man, that happened, says, we shouldn't do that. It's nonsensical.

And that tells you about all of the obstacles, all of the challenges. Yeah. It seems like a high tech expensive solution that could be better mitigated through other strategies. Exactly. And Drawdown is this book by Paul Hawken, which we've discussed on this show, where he's identified global solutions that are science-based to draw down carbon out of the environment across all sectors from agriculture to energy,

even women in terms of empowering women, family planning and education for women because they control a lot of what happens in the world. So there are solutions, but they're not really being taken up in a coordinated, focused way. And I think that sounds like what needs to happen. And maybe it needs to get a little worse before we wake up. But hopefully this story has gotten people alert to the danger, to what life after warming might look like, and inspires governments and citizens and businesses to start to change what we're doing. Because otherwise it's just, you know,

it just seems like, you know, we're in the sixth extinction. Like we're really facing, I mean, the planet will be fine. You know, it'll recover. It'll go through whatever it goes through next. We're going to be gone. And maybe that's just the way it is. I mean, maybe everything has a life cycle. There were dinosaurs, now there's no dinosaurs.

There were humans, maybe there's no dinosaurs. There are humans. Maybe there's no humans. We're trying to figure out a way to prevent that. But it might come to that, right? Yeah, I mean, my own feeling, I may be a little bit of a human chauvinist. I think, first of all, I'm really most focused on human life. But also, I think that we will, in any scenario that is really imaginable of the next century or two, we will find ways not just to survive, but to preserve some form

of the civilization that we would recognize. But it will be transformed, I think, quite dramatically, our politics, our geopolitics, our relationship to technology, our relationship to capitalism, how we think about food, how we think about our place in nature, how we think about our place in history. All of these things are going to be quite profoundly shaped by this force. And to me, the long history of the planet is not all that much of a comfort. So I hear from climate skeptics a lot who say, okay, the planet's been warmer than this before. Why are you so worried? And I say, well, first of all, when the planet was warmer than this, there were no humans around.

We have no basis in the fossil record to believe that human life can survive in the ways that we've expected it to under these new climate conditions. I think we will find ways to survive, but we can't say that neatly based on the fossil record. And every time there has been dramatic warming like this in the past, it has created a mass extinction where sometimes as many as 95 or 97% of all life on earth got wiped out. Now, I don't know about you, but if we end up in a world 2000 years from now where the only life on earth are some phytoplankton in the ocean, that's not a reassuring

picture to me. That's a terrifying picture to the ocean, that's not a reassuring picture to me. That's a terrifying picture to me. So it's not a comfort that this has happened before. It's scary that it's happened before, on top of which, if you were to believe that these are natural cycles, which I think there's overwhelming evidence that they aren't, because even the most basic understanding of the greenhouse effect that we had in the middle of the 19th century, if you had taken that understanding and plugged in the amount of carbon we've added to the atmosphere, you would have come up with a prediction for global warming that is just about exactly where we are today. But even if you do believe that what we're going through is the result of natural cycles, to me, that's even more terrifying because it means that we're heading

towards this mass extinction with no control at all over what's coming. To me, as I said earlier- So the fact that we caused it is cause for hope. It's empowering. It means that we control the system. Now, the question of who we are is a complicated one. As you mentioned earlier, there are certain people, certain governments, certain corporations, certain industries that control a lot more power than individuals who are wanting to make the most change here. But when you think as a species, we are the ones doing this damage. If we get to a place of four degrees where we're overrun with forest fires and flooding and extreme weather and famine and drought and war, it will be because of what we've done. We will be responsible for it. We will have made it happen. Or what we haven't done.

Well, but I think that we have to start thinking of that as an active choice too. And that means that we have many paths ahead of us and we can choose which one to walk down. We can choose, theoretically, we could choose to go completely zero carbon tomorrow. I think you should be global dictator. David Wallace Wells for president and global dictator to solve this problem. Because we need this kind of thing. I can't tell you how great flyer you came on the show and enlightened us about what's really happening. Not sugarcoating it, but also framing it in a way that is empowering where we can make different choices and we can do different things. But it's not only becoming vegan or doing compost

or turning your lights off. It's a much bigger problem that we have to force our governments and force our policymakers to talk about, to think about, to have the conversation about. I think your work has really helped us do that. So thank you so much for being a guest on The Doctor's Pharmacy. You've really enlightened us about climate change. So thank you. Oh, my pleasure. Great to be here. And if you've been listening to this podcast and you love the podcast, please share with your friends and family on social media, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. And please leave a comment. We'd love to hear from you. And you can subscribe anywhere you subscribe to podcasts. And hopefully

we'll see you next time on The Doctor's Pharmacy.