The Joe Rogan Experience - #1259 - David Wallace-Wells

Episode Date: March 6, 2019

David Wallace-Wells is Deputy editor and climate columnist for New York magazine. His book "The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming" is available now.

four three two one david so first of all thanks for doing this oh my pleasure i'm really excited how much trouble are we in legitimately i mean it's pretty bad already and it's gonna get i think a lot lot worse so it's not bad right now right here it's raining it seems nice out the hill i mean how long ago were the fires right right around i got evacuated this october yeah it was rough but in all fairness i've been evacuated three times over the past 20 years yeah i know the fires california's fires are kind of interesting in that um they both seem like it's like the future of the apocalypse they they're here, but also it's so familiar from like decades of wildfires.

But, you know, there are scientific estimates that say that they're going to get, by the end of the century, 64 times worse. Yeah, I think that number's a little high because that would mean more than half of California burning every year. But, I mean, it's going to get, yeah, it'll get crazy. And there's no way to avoid any of this wildfire stuff? Well, I mean, you know, if we don't raise the temperature of the planet, then. But is that the only thing that's causing wildfire? I mean, like, obviously, if the temperature raises, there's more brown, dry leaves and grass and stuff like that.

Yeah, no, there's a lot of preventative stuff you can do. I mean, not building in certain areas. Like, I mean, it used to be, you know, the Indians who lived here before the white people came, um,

did a lot of controlled burning. They like lived among fires. And, um, I think that's like a probably more responsible way to be, but we've now built up the whole state so that there are all these homes that we don't want to burn. There are all these properties we don't want to burn. And when you, um, when you like restrict the ability of natural wildfires to burn,

that means that more tinder gets built over time. And then at some point, something lights the match and it all burns. So, I mean, you could do more controlled fire. You could take more aggressive action in terms of spraying foam and that kind of thing um you could have a lot more firefighters but i was just talking to a guy yesterday i'm out here actually doing some reporting on wildfires and um who was saying that no santa ana powered wildfire has ever been stopped by firefighters and he's like a environmental historian wow um it's like you can hope that the winds redirect them but like the action of firefighters is basically just spitting in the wind so the action is not to stop it's to

kind of contain it yeah as best they can yeah and minimize property damage yeah but you know it's hard because you you have a lot more it's a lot easier to do that when um you know if the land was totally raw you'd be like oh let's we'll just like try to direct the fire in this direction but if the land is like full of homes you're like well we can't have you ever seen it live not a person yeah i've one time uh we were filming fear factor and we were uh way up on the five like um probably i would say maybe 75 miles from here and for a full hour driving about 50 miles an hour there was fire on the right hand side of the road for a full hour i mean like lord of the rings end of the world yeah like you're waiting for satan to come riding on a burning phoenix over

the top of the hill it was crazy i've never seen anything like it in my life that was the worst one i've ever seen but i think that was just because of placement i think that this past one was actually worse in terms of physical damage and size it's just i didn't see it the way i saw this one well the last year there were there were flames like hopping over the 405 right i mean yeah mean, and that's really like crazy to me because I'm a New Yorker. I've lived my whole life in New York and I just feel in my bones, I now know it's sort of not true,

but like my inner emotional perspective on the world is that I live in a fortress. I don't live in nature. Like I walk down on concrete streets. I look up at steel buildings. Nature can't come for me. But when you see like fire straddling the 405, that's, you you know this is

a major metropolis here um and we're not safe we're certainly not totally safe um and that's like for me that's a major like a major revelation i've had is that wherever you live no matter how defended against nature you are climate change is teaching us that you know you still live within climate and when it gets fucked up, it will fuck you up. It will affect you in some way. Yeah, both sides of the 405 were on fire last year. Last year or the year before last, one of those. But it was insane.

It was hitting Bel Air. And people were like, well, we've never seen this before. I talked to a firefighter once. This was years ago. We've never seen this before. I talked to a firefighter once. This was years ago. And he told me with the right wind, it's a matter of time for a fire hits the top of L.A. and burns all the way to the ocean.

And he goes, there's not going to be anything we can do about it. He goes, if the right wind catches and a fire starts at the top of Los Angeles, it'll just go straight through L.A. Look at this. What is that from, Jamie? It was the 405 fire. Yeah. fire yeah okay oh that's it that's the crazy video so this is bel-air on the left hand side yeah and so these are people driving down the 405 looking at you know the most insane sight for a place that has 30 million people or whatever la has to see the entire hillside on fire. And Bel Air, to me, Bel Air is really interesting because it's, you know, most climate impacts,

they hit the world's poorest first. And like the wildfires are, they work in the reverse because it's like people living in the hills. Those are the rich people. But it just shows you like, no matter how rich you are, no matter how comforted by that wealth you are, like, you know know you might get hit well the best example was uh point doom yeah and uh we were flying over it my friend uh bill uh has a helicopter license and so we went uh around the peak of point doom it's crazy because you know these are like 20 million dollar estates these massive bluff side homes they thought they were living in the peak of luxury overviewing the ocean and like wow we're on top of the world and the fire just

scorched it to the ground like that's what it looks like now yeah it's so crazy well it's really crazy because you like they couldn't even because people have always said oh well they'll protect the rich folks they didn't protect these ones yeah they can't protect anybody when it gets this crazy i think they lost more than 600 homes in malibu alone yeah i mean and that's i mean yeah and you think about miami beach going underwater and right and it's well miami beach is a weird one right because the the ground is porous yeah yeah so it's inevitable i mean get out of there that's basically a sandbar that like some developers in the 20s decided that was oh we can make this into a fake paradise. Oh, really?

Yeah. I mean, LA is kind of the same way. Nobody looking at LA in 1850 would have said, here's a great place to build a city. Right. But we did it anyway. America, in its imperial swagger, was like, no, we can create some paradise out of this completely inhospitable land in both places. And then it's just a lesson that it's just a matter of time well the most cocky people are the people that have those houses on stilts on the water yeah in malibu yeah how long is this gonna work out for you yeah like

this thing moves back and forth over time and it has forever i mean if you think about like the long long sweep of human history most human settlements didn't happen on the coast right um like people lived in maybe they lived on a river maybe you have like a little community If you think about like the long, long sweep of human history, most human settlements didn't happen on the coast. Right. Like people lived in, maybe they lived on a river. Maybe you have like a little community on a river. But the, you know, the last like 50 years or 100 years, we built up, especially in America, so much more on the coast. And that's like, you know, really inviting disaster. I mean, all of Houston, like all of that is like, that was floodplain that like nature was like, you know, swampland. It was, and now it's, you it's new suburban developments made out of concrete.

And that just means more and more flooding. Yeah, I've been to Houston right after floods. Houston is a crazy one. There was a hotel that we used to stay at whenever I used to do gigs in Houston. It's gone now because the floodwaters just filled up the hotel. So crazy. I actually really love that city. It's kind of like a, there's great food.

Oh, yeah. Houston's super underrated. I think so, too. It gets lumped into this weird sort of San Antonio vibe. I don't know why, but I'm a big fan of Houston. I'm a big fan of Texas in general. They're fun people. Yeah.

But, yeah, if it gets hotter, they're fucked, too. Because it's just like in the summertime in Houston, you know, you're dealing with 100 humidity and it's 115 degrees outside you can't even explain to people what that feels like i'm getting cooked there's there are places in the world that are going to be they're going to literally cook you by 2050 so cities in india and the middle east you won't be able to go outside during the summer without being at risk of dying by 2050 by 2050 like what kind of temperature are we talking about well it's a combination of heat and humidity so but you know usually the heat will be like up in the around 130 combined with some bad humidity um but you know they've already been we've already

broken that threshold like there have been temperature records set every year but um last year broke 130 in oman i think but like the the scarier parts are not some of these crazy desert places that have gotten really hot it's that the cities it's like calcutta has like 12 million people in it and it may not be able to you may not be able to live there um in the summer in just 30 years and then you just think about where all those people are going and how much that's going to destabilize everything. You know, I've talked to people who are terrified about this, and I've talked to people who are nonchalant. Where do you sit?

Are you terrified? Are you thinking that you're going to be physically in trouble yourself? Or do you think that with proper planning and just not being tied to one spot, you can move to another area? I mean, I have different feelings about it at different times of day because it's that big a story it's like gonna affect everything i think um you know i think civilization is not going to collapse i think like there'll be people around even living like kind of rewarding prosperous lives um forever and the question is like what shape those lives take and where they're where they, where they are. So me personally, you know,

I'm like a relatively well-off person who lives in America in, you know, New York. I think I'll be able to do okay. I think my children will be able to do okay. And when I imagine their future, I think it's a reflection of all of our kind of like cognitive biases and emotional reflexes that when I imagine like my daughter's future, I'm imagining a world that seems a lot like the one that we live in today but when I look at the science it paints a really really bleak picture so you know the question of like optimism and alarm I think it's really all a matter of perspective right so we're

at 1.1 degrees celsius right now I think there's basically no way that we avoid two degrees of warming, which is like the UN calls catastrophic warming. The island nations of the world call genocide. And that's when we would be making these cities in the Middle East unlivable. It would mean like some ice sheets would start a permanent collapse, which could, if all of them melted, eventually bring 260 feet of sea level rise. And we're on track for four degrees of warming. So that would mean $600 trillion in climate damages by the end of the century.

That's twice as much wealth as exists in the world today. It would mean there'd be parts of the world, scientists say, where you could be hit by six simultaneous climate disasters at once. There'd be at least a few hundred climate refugees the un says the low end estimate is 200 million the high end estimate is a billion which is as many people as live in north and south america combined stop you for a second six simultaneous natural disasters at once yeah what does that mean like flooding hurricane um famine uh you know some public health issue um you know like malaria uh it's like every every

category of modern life can be affected by this and um there aren't that many that could be hit by six but like already right now in australia there's a crazy heat wave it's like over 120 in lots of australia they're also dealing with like epic floods in other parts of the country and that's kind of the problem actually with wildfires in California. It's not just that it's getting hotter. It's that it's also getting wetter. So more rain means more growth means when it gets hot again, that growth gets baked and then becomes, you know, fire starter.

And that's the, you know, it's not just, it's not just a temperature. It's like higher temperatures mean crazier extremes in all directions. And, you know, that's why I think sort of looking big picture, there's not a life on earth that's going to be untouched by this force like over the decades ahead. But that's not to say that we'll all be destroyed by it either. I think like we will find ways to live and adapt and mitigate. It's just a question of how much it's going to screw up our politics, how much it's going to change the way we think of history. You know, like I'm an end of, I'm a

nineties kid. I grew up end of history thinking the world was going to get better. The world was going to get richer. Globalization was progress, et cetera. What does it mean if like climate change completely eliminates the possibility of economic growth, which probably won't be the case for the U S but there are huge parts of the world where that is going to be the case if we don't change course now. So like, at the end of the century, if we don't change course, the economists studying this say, global GDP could be at least 20, possibly 30% smaller than it would be without climate change. 30% is twice as big an impact as the Great Depression. How did you get involved in this? How'd you get involved in studying this? And what was your perception before you got involved? And how did it shift?

So I'm a journalist. I'm an editor, mostly, actually, at New York Magazine. And I'm interested in the near future. As a result, read a lot of scientific papers, read a lot of obscure subreddits and that kind of thing. And just in 2016, started seeing a lot more of the news from science was about climate. And a lot more of that, a lot more of the news from science was about climate and a lot more of that climate news was really scary. And when I looked around at the other places that like we think of as our competitors, you know, newspapers, TV shows, I just felt like the scarier end of the spectrum was just not at all being talked about. So most

scientists talk about this two degree threshold as like the threshold of catastrophe. And I think most lay people think that that means that that's kind of a ceiling for warming like that'll be the worst it could get but actually it's functionally the best case scenario and yet we hadn't had any storytelling any discussion around what the world would look like north of two degrees and i just felt as a journalist i was like holy shit there's a huge story here like the way that this world could be completely transformed by these forces is not something that anybody is writing about in part because it's a long story, but scientists and science journalists were really, they were really focused on making sure that their messaging was hopeful and optimistic and they were reluctant

to talk about their scariest findings. And so, I was terrified by the science. I looked at it and I was like, nobody's talking about this. It's scary. Gotta like spread the word. And I wrote a big piece in 2017 that was very focused on worst case scenarios. So I mentioned before, I think two degrees is about our best case scenario. Four degrees is where we're on track for now. This piece was looking at five, six, eight degrees of warming. So things were not likely to get this century at least. And it was a huge phenomenon. It was read by a bunch of million people, the biggest story that New York Magazine had ever published. And I just thought, man, I guess there are a lot of people like me out there who have intuitions about climate suffering and terror,

but aren't seeing it in the way people are writing about the story. So I decided, you know, there's more to say. And even beyond like telling the bleak story, telling the really dark, talking about the really dark possibilities, I just thought there are all these categories of life that we haven't even thought about how they'll impact us. So we know about sea level rise, but that's like, as I mentioned before, that makes you think if you live off the coast you'll be okay but the whole planet is going to be touched by this some

places are going to be hit harder than others india is going to be hit by like 29 of all global climate impacts of the century um but everyone's going to be affected in some way and the way that changes our politics the way it changes our pop culture the way it changes our psychology our mood our relationship to history how we think to history, how we think about the future, how we think about the past, what we expect from capitalism, what we blame capitalism for, what we expect from technology, what we think technology can do, can technology save us, can technology entertain us while the world is burning? These are all these kind of like humanities questions that I felt really, really had not been talked about. And so the book does like, it's a tour through what the world would look like

between two and four degrees, but it's also, which is a kind of hellscape, but it is also, you know, about half of it is about, we're going to live here. We're going to survive in what form? What will it mean? You know, at the mythological level,

what will it mean at the personal level? What will it mean the way we think about our kids and their futures and all that stuff and um you know my my my big picture thinking about it is um yeah it's really bleak um and i think there are some possible ways that we could avert some of these worst case scenarios i mean there is technology that can suck carbon out of the atmosphere already it hasn't been tested at scale it's really expensive but if we really if we can over the you know the next decade or two really like build it um like global plantations of these carbon capture machines then not only can we like stop the problem from moving forward we could actually reverse it a

little bit um yeah i've seen those before. I've seen the designs for those where they had these enormous apartment building-sized air filter things. Yeah. I mean, it's basically like- But only in theory. They do exist in the real world, but only at a kind of like in laboratories.

They don't exist at anything like the scale they need to. But there's a guy at Harvard named David Keith who has tested his machines. They're able to take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere at a cost of a hundred dollars a ton which would mean we could totally neutralize the entire um the entire carbon footprint of the global economy we wouldn't have to change anything we could suck out all the extra carbon we're putting into the atmosphere for a cost of three3 trillion a year, which is a lot of money. But there are estimates for how much we're subsidizing the fossil fuel business that are as high as $5 trillion a year. So if we just redirected those subsidies to this technology, in theory, we could literally solve the problem immediately.

There are other complications. It's like in order to store the carbon, you need an industry that's two or three times the size of our present oil and gas industry which and where that goes and next to whose homes and all that stuff it's complicated but we have the tools we need it's just a matter of deciding to um put them into practice and i think we're pretty like that you know recent history shows that um we're not doing that fast enough so one of the big you know points that i'd like i make in the book and i it sticks in my head so strongly is you know we think of climate change is this thing that started in the industrial revolution like centuries ago but half of all the carbon that we've put into the atmosphere in the history of humanity

from the burning of fossil fuels has come in 30 years the last 30 years that's since al gore published his first book on warming it's since the un established their climate change panel it's since the premiere of seinfeld so like you and i have lived through the lion's share of all of the damage done to the climate in all of human history whoa yeah and the next 30 years are going to be just as consequential. So, we brought the world from the basically a stable climate to the brink of total climate catastrophe in 30 years, one generation. We have about one generation to save it. To me, that's like, it makes me uncomfortable to use this language, but it's basically a theological story. We have the entire fate of the planet in the hands of these two generations.

What happens 50 years from now, 100 years from now, will entirely be up to the way we act now and what we do. And the timescale is so crazy because you have this really compressed, we must act now to avert these worst case scenarios timescale. But also the impacts will unfold if we don't do anything over millennia. So like we could have, you know, if we really bring into being the total melt of all ice sheets, that means that eight centuries from now, 12 centuries from now,

people will be dealing with the shit that we're fucking up today. We will be engineering problems for them to be solving 800, 1200, 1500 years from now. And that damage will be done, if it is done, in the next 30 or 50 years. So we are, I mean, we are really writing this epic story about Earth, humanity, and our future on this planet in the time of a single lifetime a single generation and that is on the on the one hand it's sort of like overwhelming but it's also empowering you know like um all the climate impacts that i talk about all the climate horrors that are really terrifying if we make them happen we will be making them happen. The main input in the system is how much carbon we put into the atmosphere. There are feedback loops that people are worried

about. There are things about climate that we can't control, but at least at this point, the main driver of future warming is what we do. And so we could, if we get to a four degree hellscape with hundreds of millions or a billion climate refugees, that'll be because of what we're doing. It's not some system outside of our control, even though we're often kind of, we find it kind of comforting to think that it's outside of our control because that means we don't have to change anything. Well, one of the problems with climate change is that human beings like to react to things that are immediate and right in front of them. And I think for us, it's very difficult to see the future, especially if it's inconvenient, especially if it does something to inconvenience or get in the way of our day-to-day routine. And that seems to be what's happening

here. And that seems to me to be why people are so willing to dismiss it so flippantly because in front of them right now it's not an issue in front of them right now this very second this very day i'm gonna go to starbucks it's right there it's open look i'm outside it's 65 degrees out global warming's not a problem yeah no i think that's i mean totally true and i feel it in my own life like i i mean i've been living i've been working in this material so long. I know it so deeply. And yet when I look out the window, I'm like, you know, things are fine. And I think that has a really powerful anchoring effect. Like we expect the world of the future to look like the world as it does today, but all the science says that's totally naive and we're going to have at least twice as much warming as we've had to this point. And I think we need to think

about the future of the world in those terms, like what it will be at two degrees, at three degrees, at four degrees. But it's not just like the immediacy. I think we have so many biases that make, like, we want to be optimistic about the future. We have a status quo bias. We don't want to change things. We think that'll be complicated and expensive. We have a hard time holding big ideas in our head, like that the entire planet is like subject to these forces. I mean, the list goes on and on. In the book, I have a little riff where I say, you know, there's this new, not so new now, 30, 40 year discipline in economics, behavioral economics, which is about all of our cognitive biases, how we can't really see the

world. Every single one makes it harder to see climate. There's this, he's actually an English professor named Timothy Morton who wrote a book about climate. And he calls it a hyper object, which is like, it's a phenomenon that's so big that we can't actually hold it in our heads at once. We can only see it. It's like if you imagine seeing a four dimensional object in three dimensional space. It's that kind of thing where you can only see it at an angle, only partially. Climate change is so all-encompassing that we can't comprehend it properly. But I think all of those things are reasons that we need to be listening to the scientists and what they're projecting. Not to say that everything they're saying is

going to come true, will come true exactly as they predict it. Obviously, that's not how science works. It gets revised. Some things are alarmist, some things are extreme, some things just wrong. But, you know, I've been really working on this stuff for a couple years and the number of papers I've read that show, that make me have a more optimistic idea about the future of climate, I could count on two hands. And the number of papers I've read that make me have a bleaker view of the future, it's in the thousands. And when you look at the totality of that, whether the six climate-driven natural disasters prediction is going to pan out exactly as those authors say, who knows? But when you see, you know, so many, so many terrifying studies that you could fill like i did

a 300 page book with them you realize that like there's a huge margin for error and it would like we would still be really in bad shape you know is there a i mean i'm sure there have been uh some studies that made mistakes in terms of like past studies that projected that by now we'd all be dead um are those those seem to be a problem with this whole uh concept we have of wrapping our head around and if we find anything that we could point to that say oh back in the 80s they said we all be dead by now and we're fine we're gonna be fine that kind of thing is that that is an issue correct totally yeah there was um there was a really famous book in the middle of the 20th century called the population bomb so this is a guy named paul erlich erlich um who he was like you know the world just cannot support this many people like if we get to eight billion people there just won't be enough food there won't be

you know that the planet can't sustain that and he's often pointed to as this sort of like prophet of doomsday that and his prophecy totally didn't work out because we had this thing that's called the green revolution basically we figured out ways to make crops way way way more productive and that's encouraging human civilization does that a lot we figure our way out of foxholes all the time yeah um but that revolution was literally like one dude norman borlaug who figured out how to grow crops differently in one guy one set of innovations and he completely transformed the whole fate of the planet what did he do he just basically did um like genetically

modified crops before like the you know before the name it was like um is he the golden rice guy yeah okay yeah and um and you know the whole developing world benefited enormously and you're still seeing that today like we see all these charts that you know so much less poverty so much less infant mortality in the developing world and that's great that's like incredible progress but a lot of that has was powered by the industrialization of those countries. So that bill is going to come due going forward. And, you know, I think like when you look at climate change, you know, if there was just one threat, like let's take agriculture, since we're talking about agriculture. Estimates say that if we continue on the path we're on by the end of the century grain yields would be half as productive as they are today just by the temperature effect so we'd

have just as much land just as much grain crops as we have now but the food we get from it we'd only get half as much as we get today what's the cause of that it's just the temperature effects plants the temperature alone yeah wow i mean there are other impacts too on food um like insects there's you know hotter temperatures means more insects which is bad for crops um carbon has a complicated relationship to crop growth like in some plants grow better better with more carbon but actually they're like the weeds and the ones that we like to eat don't grow better with more carbon um and you know by the end of the century that we like to eat don't grow better with more carbon. And, you know, by the end of the century, so we could have half as much grain and we could have 50% more people than we have right now. Now, there's a way you could imagine, oh, well, like maybe there'll be another Norman Borlaug.

Maybe he'll figure out a way through that. But when you look across the spectrum, it's like agriculture. It's, you know, conflict for every half degree of warming. You're going to get between 10 and 20% more war. So if we get to the end of the century, we're going to have more than twice as much war as we have today and this is projected because of battles over resources mainly that famines droughts um weather you know weather impacts basically everything about unstable societies get stressed by temperature rise the syrian civil war was you, wasn't singly caused by climate change, but it was, that's one of the causes.

There was a drought that produced it. And that conflict, it's not just at the level of nation states or even civil war. It's also at the level of individuals. So if you look at crime statistics, when temperatures go up, there's more murder, there's more rape. People get admitted to mental hospitals more when there's, when it's warmer out. Babies develop less well in the womb when it's warmer out. Babies develop less well in the womb when it's hotter out. For every day over 90 degrees that a baby's in the womb, you can see those days in that baby's lifetime earnings. And we're going to be living on a planet that's

considerably warmer, that's going to have real dramatic effects on everything. Air pollution, there's a big study that I write about in the book that's totally alarming and eye-opening. Just between 1.5 degrees and 2 degrees of warming, just through the effects of air pollution, would cause, that one half degree of warming would cause an additional 153 million deaths, which is 25 holocausts. That's just air pollution, just between 1.5 and two degrees. And two degrees for me is our best case scenario. So our best case scenario is 25 holocausts worth of death from air pollution. And that sounds terrifying people. When I say that to them, they're like,

holy shit, how could we possibly, that's unconscionable. But already, 9 million people are dying every year from air pollution. And we don't pay attention to it. So I think the likeliest outcome, even as we enter into this climate hellscape, is that we find ways to turn away and not look at the real pain of people, especially in the developing world. But to answer your earlier question, you can imagine agriculture getting figured out. But to answer your earlier question, you know, like you can imagine agriculture getting figured out. But when you see just how many impacts there are, it's like it's everywhere. Everything will be changed. And it just makes the challenge that much bigger and more complicated because how are you going to solve the conflict problem? How are you going to solve the problem of having 30% less economic growth?

You know, like I said, that's an impact that's twice as big as the great depression and it would be permanent um 600 trillion dollars in in climate damages twice as much wealth as exists in the world today um and that's just you know then you deal with the right refugees food i mean it's it's it's so all-encompassing and i think um that's another reason why we don't want to look at it closely because it's terrifying. Well, there's also a matter of how it's being projected to the public, right? Like in certain circles, particularly right-wing circles, there are people that are trying to paint this with rose-colored glasses, right? rose-colored glasses right they're trying to maximize short-term profits and sort of dismiss the risks of climate change and dismiss the risks of or rather the impact of our what we've done in terms of raising the carbon in the atmosphere there's some people that point to that like this

this is nonsense science this has been disproven there's a few people like that but it's a overwhelming the overwhelming consensus of scientists who study this are terrified of it yeah i would say there was some recent report that said it now passed the standard of physics that like climate science is now more um reliable than physics um but it's hilarious but you know the um, to the deniers who say things like, you know, the planet was hotter than this before. That's true. Yeah, dinosaurs lived here. Humans were not here. I mean, if we were four degrees warmer, the last time the planet was four degrees warmer, there were palm trees in the Arctic.

What? Yeah. Really? We've already exited the entire window of temperature that enclose all of human history so the planet is now warmer than it ever has been when humans were around to walk on it which means to me it's an open question whether humans would have ever evolved in the first place and this is all from the industrial revolution from then on yeah and uh yeah and like and to that question it's like there are people who say there's some natural warming going on.

I don't think that's true. I think most scientists would say it isn't. But I also think if what we're seeing is natural warming, that should terrify us even more. Because it would mean that it's outside of our control. And if we're really heading down the path that we're heading down and we have no control over it, that's even more scary. It should be a comfort that we're doing it because that means we can stop doing it right well it should be a comfort that there's people smarter than the people that don't think that we're doing it that there are people that can possibly consider some sort of way to mitigate this yeah and what what are the what are the ways that are being proposed and how

seriously are they being taken other than this um the idea of building these machines extract carbon from the atmosphere i'm sure you're probably aware of um there's some of the programs that they've talked about uh suspending reflective particles in the atmosphere to to minimize the amount of solar radiation we receive yeah so it's interesting this guy who i mentioned earlier who's like done the most the sort of most innovative carbon capture machine i talked to him a few weeks ago and he was like no no but we shouldn't be using carbon capture we should be doing solar geo engineering which is what you're talking about um and that means probably suspending sulfur is like the most useful thing in the atmosphere oh great we're gonna smell like sulfur well the sun the

sky would get red oh jesus there are all of these aesthetic effects too which nobody talks about so like trees are going to just turn immediately brown they're not going to turn color there was a study a couple weeks ago that the oceans are going to change color um this is if we do that we suspend no no this is just for warming just for warming the ocean's going to change color to what yeah i think just from more green to more blue but that'd be nice yeah um but yeah so the sulfur thing is um so we could you know we could suspend these um basically an umbrella of sulfur around um in the atmosphere which would mean that it would some of the sunlight coming to the earth would be reflected back into the atmosphere and that would mean that

the sun would absorb less sunlight i mean the earth would absorb less on sunlight which would make it a little bit cooler um the problem is that would have some crippling impacts on agriculture and we basically don't know other side effects that would have and how would you take that stuff out well you could just stop doing it it has a shelf life of i don't know what it is 10 years so you could just stop doing it and that's a big concern actually because if we did that just to mask the amount of global warming that we were doing, then whatever program was responsible for it would be really vulnerable to terrorism, to war, because if the planet were functionally warmed, say, five degrees, but we were suspending

enough sulfur that it was actually only two degrees warmer, then if we just, for instance, like somebody bombed the facility that was doing it the planet would be immediately tripped into a much much hotter state and that would be completely catastrophic even more catastrophic than a more slow approach to five degrees because we would adjust to it we over a century or several centuries we might in ways we'd be able to adjust to it but if if it was immediate. So it would be immediate. Yeah. Now, why sulfur? I think it's just something about the particular characteristic of it. I don't know.

Wouldn't it smell horror? I mean, it would literally be like hell. Like, that's what you always hear about with the horror movies, right? The devil smells like sulfur. Yeah. And, I mean, it's what farts smell like. Yeah. And the reason we're able to smell farts is because sulfur is also i mean some related compounds hydrogen sulfide are um are really toxic and so that

brings me to methane that's another issue as well right yeah cows producing methane gas yeah a large-scale agricultural yeah wait let me just say one more thing about the solar geoengineering so the thing about that that's real this sounds horrifying this program people are excited about it because it's really cheap it's way cheaper than carbon capture and um but so there's a positive for it but it's also um we are basically already doing this so we have what's called small particulate pollution um that's or aerosol pollution um stuff suspended in the atmosphere that's why like delhi is really hard to breathe in because we have a lot of particulate in the atmosphere that is already suppressing global temperatures by as much as a half degree or maybe one degree which means and

that's the reason that those nine million people are dying every year from air pollution so if we solve that problem if we solve the air pollution problem save those nine million lives we every year we would immediately make the planet at least a half a degree warmer and possibly one degree warmer, which would put us at the threshold of catastrophe or above it. So we're sort of already doing this program, just not in a systematic way. We're doing it in a haphazard way. The methane that you mentioned, there are basically two big issues with methane. The first is cows. there are basically two big issues with methane the first is um cows um so yeah cows produce a ton of methane which is depending on how you count about 35 or maybe 85 times stronger greenhouse gas

than carbon whoa yeah it's really intense um but there are also these like small scale studies that show if we feed cattle just a little bit of seaweed their methane emissions could fall by 95 or 99 so we could if if that was scalable which is not clear it is but if it was we could immediately eliminate the entire carbon footprint of beef which people talk about a lot now that's incredible yeah just it's a reminder to me that like you know you get told oh you should eat less hamburgers or whatever but obviously this is like a problem that's too big to be solved with like individual choices we need some kind of global policy or national policy about it but the scarier methane issue is um there's all this carbon stored in frozen permafrost in the northern latitudes um that permafrost is melting and when it melts that carbon will be released into the

atmosphere we don't know the proportion that it will be released as carbon dioxide versus methane, but there is in that permafrost twice as much carbon as now exists in the atmosphere, which means if it were all released, possibly in a relatively sudden way, it could make our carbon problem immediately three times worse. And it could be even,

the effect could even be more dramatic than that if it was released mostly as methane because methane is a stronger greenhouse gas most scientists think that that's not something that we need to freak out about in the short term but it's there it is melting and methane is being released at some rate so the craziest solution that i ever heard for that one was to uh bring back the woolly mammoth yeah yeah they're trying to do that yeah and the idea that the woolly mammoth is going to save us all by releasing them throughout siberia yeah it's crazy right i mean i think that we're going to have a whole a century of shit like that and shit like cows eating seaweed that everything you know we'll have our global politics will be

reoriented around climate change so that you'll start to see sanctions put against nations that are behaving badly um mbs the guy who's you know the like kind of thug who's running saudi arabia now says he needs saudi arabia's economy to be totally off oil by 2050 and i think that's because he knows that you know the global community will not tolerate someone producing more oil and um as recently as it you know as as soon as a few decades from now but the impacts are you know everywhere so that like um yeah like in california now you can you know during wildfire season you can buy um masks to you know to shield yourself from the smoke which is really really damaging its effects

on cognitive performance are really dramatic can lower cognitive performance by like 10 to 15 percent its effect on the development of kids is really dramatic um there was an incredible study a few years ago where if you looked at places where they instituted easy do you have easy pass out here in california no we don't we don't have uh tolls oh right isn't that amazing yeah you guys just think what like one or two places? Yeah, but like depending on where you live, you'd have to take that every day. Dude, in New York, they're everywhere. I know.

I know what you mean. Yeah, like the, okay. So it used to be the case that cars had to like slow down and pay a toll. Yeah. And because they were slowing down, they produced more exhaust. When they instituted E-ZPass, cars could just drive through. Right. And that meant they produced less exhaust.

And the effect on premature birth and low birth weight in the areas where they instituted these new easy pass toll plazas it reduced them by like 15 each that's how dramatic just the exhaust effect is on development of babies um how much is an effect of electric cars yeah that can i mean that that will be right now it hasn't had enough of an effect because there's not enough of them. Yeah. But yeah, I mean, that problem on the technological level has been solved. We know how to replace cars with electric cars. We can make them even pretty affordable.

Not quite as affordable as they need to be, but the new Teslas are like $35,000, I think. If you get it down to $15, grand, that'll be a huge solution. But then there are a lot of other problems that are more difficult, like air travel. We don't have electric planes around the corner. You can't fly planes. Is there anything like that on the horizon? There are some people who are trying to develop it, but it seems like probably it's at least like a decade away. it's at least like a decade away and you know one cross-country flight in the u.s is the equivalent one seat on one cross-country flight is the equivalent of eight months of driving

every time you fly from new york to london and back you melt nine three square meters of ice every single seat on every flight from new york to london melts three square meters of ice um of arctic ice yeah that's insane that's real yeah i think it's every every time you fly across the country it's like eight months of driving yeah whoa so globally air travel is only two percent of the carbon footprint so it's relatively small but for people in especially rich people in rich countries it's a much bigger part of the carbon footprint so it's relatively small but for people in especially rich people in rich countries it's a much bigger part of the footprint they fly around all yeah but yeah no the average american i think the stat is the average american every year emits enough carbon to melt 10 000 tons of ice jesus christ that's just the average american

and if you're a person like me who flies like every other weekend. It's way worse. Way worse. Yeah. Oh. So. Holy shit. You put it in that perspective.

It's. How much fucking ice is there? I mean, there's a lot of ice. Yeah. But it's going to melt. Yeah. Well. That's how you get, you know, the outside projections, the high-end projections for a sea level rise are 260 feet.

Now, the plus side is it's way better to get hotter than it is to get colder, right? Like ice ages kill everything. Well, you know, each of the, so there have been five mass extinctions in planetary history, in Earth history before. One of them was caused by an asteroid. But the other four were produced by global warming related to greenhouse gas. What about the Ice Age? Well, the Ice Age doesn't count. It didn't kill as many?

No. Really? The biggest mass extinction, the end Permian extinction, which was 252 million years ago, 90 to 95 percent of all life on earth died when was that 252 million years ago god so each of these mass extinctions basically is like a complete slate wiping of the evolutionary record it's like we're starting over from scratch so we want to think that the the asteroid that hit the yucatan did the most damage in terms of the fossil record.

Is that not true? Is the one that was the global warming, was that more? Well, so there are five and four of them were from global warming. And the worst one was just from greenhouse gas warming. But yeah, the one that killed the dinosaurs was also really bad. It was something like 70% of all life on Earth. But it's less than the one where there was a temperature rise. Yeah.

Wow. There was a volcano. This is a little bit sketchy science, where there was a temperature rise yeah wow there was a um a volcano this is a little bit sketchy science but there was a volcano explosion um something like 30 000 years ago or something i don't remember the exact dates but that um volcanoes can cool a global temperature for the same reason we're talking about with suspending particles because it basically clouds the atmosphere with um and it dropped global temperatures i think it was two degrees and the human population at the time then shrunk to 7 000 there's this incredible bottleneck a bunch of times that's less people than live on nantucket and it just it just makes you see like everything about the way that we live on this

planet is dependent on climate conditions yeah like we'll figure a way to like have a civilization, but it will be transformed. It will be very different if the world is four degrees warmer. And, you know, everything about the way that we take for everything we take for granted today is like a permanent feature of the modern world. I think we're going to learn is much more precarious,

much more unstable. And yeah, like I said earlier you know climates were stable for all of human history that's how we were able to evolve it's how we were able to invent agriculture the part of the world where we did invent agriculture the middle east it's now getting almost too hot to grow crops it's also going to be too hot to go to mecca for a pilgrimage in just a couple decades. We're entirely outside of that window of temperatures, which means we're functionally now living on an entirely different planet than humans ever lived on before. And it's going to keep changing. So by the time we get to two, three, four degrees, we'll be living in a climate that's two or three or four times as much different as the one that we're is now from the one before the industrial revolution and yeah it's like those impacts could

be totally overwhelming and catastrophic now the al gore film is uh something that scared a lot of people but was also very widely dismissed by a lot of other people as well. How accurate was that movie? I think it proved to be too sanguine. It didn't deal with a lot of extreme weather. It thought that stuff was far away. And I think this is one of the big shortcomings of most writing about climate, most kind of communication about climate for 25 years, is that we were told it was slow.

for 25 years is that we were told it was slow. We were told it was going to be coming maybe at the scale of centuries, something we'd have to worry about for our grandchildren. But when you realize that half of all the damage we've done has been done in the last 30 years, and you see already the extreme weather, we had a global heat wave last summer, totally unprecedented. People died in Canada. They died in Russia. They died in the Middle East. The same season, 3 million people were evacuated in China from a typhoon. Unprecedented rains in Japan. We had multiple hurricanes in the Caribbean all at once. There was an island in Hawaii, East Island, a small island, not one that most people have gone to, but got literally wiped off the map by a hurricane. They're thinking about inventing a new category of hurricane, category six. All of these impacts are coming much faster than

scientists predicted even a decade or two ago. And so, I think the first inconvenient truth is a little too complacent. But Al Gore is also, you know, I know him a little bit. I've talked to him a few times. He's temperamentally, he's a technocrat. He's an optimist. He thinks market forces can solve all this stuff. And I don't even totally disagree with him. I think that market forces are really powerful. We've had a huge green energy revolution in the US that's, you know, and had spillover effects elsewhere in the world so solar power is now cheaper than anybody expected it would be a decade or two ago although it's also the case that we haven't replaced any of our dirty energy with it we've just added to our capacity so the ratio of renewable energy to dirty energy is now the same as it was 40 years ago so we made no

progress um why is that because we just if we're like rather than saying oh let's retire this coal plant and replace it with a um you know a wind farm we think oh we'll have the coal plant and the wind farm we'll have more energy you know we just grow the pie of energy um and this is unnecessary it's not because there's just a massive demand is it just because they don't want to end that industry yeah i mean there is a demand people like energy trump was talking about clean coal yeah and everybody was like what the fuck are you talking about yeah clean coal i mean i think on some level american policy is a red herring the u.s is 15 of global emissions um and we're falling the future climate of the world will be determined by china by india by sub-saharan africa

those are carbon footprints that are growing china's now almost twice as big a carbon footprint as the u.s and they're building all this infrastructure outside of china that doesn't even count um in asia and africa you know the belton road do you know this no project so basically taking the model that the u.s had with like the suez canal and the panama canal and they're building the infrastructure of the developing world so recently they they loaned kenya a huge amount of money to build a new rail line which was being built with chinese workers they built the rail line um then they kenya couldn't pay back the debt. So China is threatening to take over the entire port of Mombasa as debt repayment. And this is like going on all around the world.

Highways across Africa, across Asia are being built by Chinese workers in an effort to build a new imperial infrastructure for themselves. And is the thought that they're doing this in terms of setting up the debt in a way that's unpayable so that they could take over? That's one motive. I think that the Kenya example, but they'd be happy if the debt got repaid. I think they're stitching together an alternative to the Western infrastructure of trade and transit. They're basically stitching together an entire second system of how the world will work,

how the economy will work, and it will be conducted through their own infrastructure and through their own ports and through their own airports. And that's being done by their own standards. So China is now pouring more concrete every three years than the entire,

than the US poured in the entire 20th century. Jesus Christ. And if concrete were a country, it would be the world's third biggest carbon emitter. three years than the entire than the u.s poured in the entire 20th century jesus christ and if concrete were a country it would be the world's third biggest carbon emitter so the the path of development of these other countries china india and sub-saharan africa are really what's going to be writing the story of the future america has a kind of i think like a moral obligation to lead because historically we had the biggest carbon footprint. But at the moment, we're a relatively small part of the problem.

And within the U.S., market forces are doing a lot of, are making a lot of progress for us. So the real issue is how do we figure out a new geopolitics that forces countries like China to act better? figure out a new geopolitics that forces countries like China to act better. And one answer may be as weird as it is to say that, you know, Xi Jinping is basically a dictator. If he wants to impose new standards, if he wants to invest aggressively in green energy, he doesn't have any of the political obstacles that we have in the US. And so there's this sort of weird sympathy among American climate people for that authoritarianism. And he has, especially since Trump has been elected, been a lot more aggressive about talking about climate because he sees if America is not going to be leading, this is an opportunity for China to be like the real face of climate. And that means they've paid, you you know they've invested a ton in in

solar and wind they've done a lot with air pollution so beijing used to be really awful in 2013 and more than a million chinese people died of air pollution and now that's much better um what have they done just imposing stricter standards on um on pollution so emissions uh coal plants things like that kind That kind of stuff, yeah. But we think about carbon and the whole problem, I think, a little too much in terms of energy. Energy is just 30% of the global carbon footprint, and it's the easiest one to solve because wind and solar is actually really cheap now. Most parts of the world is cheaper than dirty energy.

What's the majority of the footprint? Well, nothing's a majority but so there's um energy there's infrastructure there's transportation um and agriculture is like a huge underappreciated part of it it's something like i don't know 30 of the global footprint um and is it because of tractors or what is it because everything everything everything that you need to do to run a farm i mean really everything you need to do to live in the world has some kind of carbon footprint but you know if we were able to like feed all our cattle seaweed that would have like a big that would have a big impact um but all kinds of crops have um have carbon footprints and they but they would still have to do something to get the seaweed and have the seaweed travel the seaweed deliver it to these

farms well you could also do you know you could imagine lab-grown meat having a much smaller carbon footprint um i mean it should if it like proceeds as we expect it will um and like i said before like when you look at each particular threat there's like you can see reasons for optimism you can see like oh we'll figure it out in oh, we'll figure it out in this way. We'll figure it out in that way. But the UN says we need to have all of our global emissions by 2030 to have a chance of averting two degrees of warming, which they call catastrophic warming. And the projects that we need to put into place in those 11 years are just much bigger than I think we're capable of pulling off. They say, the UN says, what is necessary is a global mobilization at the level of World War II against climate starting this year, 2019. And there's just no chance that we're going to do

that anytime soon. I mean, maybe 10 years from now we'll get there. That may even be optimistic. But the total decarbonization that's required is we need to totally zero out on carbon by 2050, they say. And I just think a lot of these sectors are much trickier. We could maybe zero out on energy, zero out on carbon when it comes to energy in 15 years if we wanted to. But again, that's just 30% of the total problem. Which is why I think there's the negative emission stuff, the carbon capture is so important, because it will allow us to move more slowly than the UN says we need to. And still, if it works out, you know, keep the planet relatively stable, relatively livable.

But that's, you know, those technologies have been called magical, magical thinking by like the Journal of Nature, which is like the biggest scientific journal, writing about this stuff. So, it's sort of a leap of faith to think that they could solve that problem. Do you think that we're dealing with like shifts in degrees of perception that it's things like your book, things like Al Gore's movie, things like, you know, anytime there's a new story that's written in the New York Times or in any periodical, we need more of this. It needs to be hammered home to people. It needs to be something that's a global discussion that accelerates.

Totally. And I think that that's happening. I think there was this big report that the UN did in October that spurred a lot of conversation about it. And I think that in a grotesque way, the best teacher is just extreme weather. When you see every year these California wildfires, every year they're burning and that is really dramatic people i talk to in europe are focused on the california fires even

though they have wildfires over there there's something about the california fires that they're really worried about when you see these global heat waves when you see unprecedented hurricane seasons we just had a typhoon in the pacific in february first time in recorded history um you know when every day on the news, there's some, there's some, you know, dramatic extreme weather. And when they come one after the other, I think that's a really powerful teaching tool. So, you know, there's this term, it's now outdated, but 500 year storm, you hear a lot about. 500-year storm means, you know, a hurricane that would hit a particular area once every five centuries, right? That means five centuries ago, there were

no white people in America. So, that means we're talking about a storm that would come once as colonists came to America, as they, you know, committed genocide against Native Americans, as they built their own empire, as they built an empire of slaves and cotton, as they, you know, committed genocide against Native Americans, as they built their own empire, as they built an empire of slaves and cotton, as they fought a civil war, as they fought World War I, as they fought World War II, everything that we've done, we'd expect one, one storm of that kind in that time. Hurricane Harvey was the third 500- year storm to hit Houston in three years. We are living in such unprecedented climate that it's impossible to look at the news and not learn that. Despite all of our inclinations, all of our reflexes to look away, I think it is seeping in. I think people are

beginning to be more alarmed about it. And I think alarm is really useful. There are people in the climate community who think, you know, it's dangerous to scare people. It turns them off. But I'm somebody who's awakened to this out of fear. And when I look at the history of environmental activism, when I look at activism generally, like we don't try to get people to stop smoking cigarettes by like messaging through optimism. We try to get them to stop because we tell them how bad it's going to be for them. Drunk driving, nuclear proliferation, same thing. Rachel Carson, you know, wrote Silent

Spring about pesticides. It was called hyperbolic alarmist. It led to the creation of the EPA. And, you know, when you think about that UN directive that we should be mobilizing the scale of World War II to combat climate, we didn't fight World War II out of hope. We fought World War II out of panic. And I think that that should be part of how we think about this story. Obviously, I think, you know, when I look around the world, when I talk to anyone, when I talk to my family, when I watch TV, when I watch whatever, read stuff, it just seems obvious to me that there are many more people who are still too complacent about this issue even if they're concerned about it a little bit even if they're aware of it um they don't think of it as like the overarching all-encompassing story of our time that requires an existential response

and even saying those words make me uncomfortable because i like it's hard it's hard for me to believe that the threat is that big but But that is what the science says. And like I said before, some of that science is not going to get borne out. But when you look at the full scope of it and just how large, just how bleak the impacts will be, you realize, like, we really need to wake up to just how dangerous a world we're heading into and do everything we can to avoid it. In addition to probably planning to adapt. Now, you live in New York. Were you living in New York when Tribeca flooded a few years ago?

Yeah. What was that like? Well, I mean, I think in a situation like that, most people emerge from a particular disaster and think, my God, since this is so awful, it must be an anomaly. And, you know, I think New York was really horrified as a city by Sandy. But there's going to be Sandy's, I don't remember the exact stat, like once every five years by the end of the century. What category storm was Sandy?

I think it made landfall as a category three so it's not even a five yeah so if a five hit is it possible for a five to hit new york is it too far north no it's possible totally possible i was talking to a really prominent climate scientist a few months ago who is like one of the he was one of the lead authors on the the un report um lives in new y, does a lot of consulting with the city. And I said, so we're going to build a seawall to protect New York from flooding. And he was like, oh, absolutely. You know, Manhattan real estate's way too expensive to let flood. So we'll definitely build a seawall. But an infrastructure project like that takes at least 30 years to build.

And if we started right now, we wouldn't be able to finish in time to save Howard Beach and parts of Brooklyn and Queens. If we started right now, he said. He said, the city knows this. And you'll see in the next few years, they'll stop doing repairs on infrastructure. They'll stop attending to the subway lines in those neighborhoods.

And even a few years after that, they'll start staying explicitly to the people who live there you might be able to continue living in these homes for a couple decades but you're not going to be able to live them leave them to your kids whoa this is in new york city it's like the richest country in the richest city in the world and yeah huge parts of um huge parts of southern brooklyn and queens are going to be underwater so for the people that live there right now what parts are you talking about um well the one that the one that he mentioned most explicitly was howard beach but um which is it's kind of an it's like a mob

neighborhood and you know it's still yeah really well yeah yeah so because that was like the gaudy neighborhood right yeah that's where they buried all the dead bodies wow um i didn't know that was like the Gaudi neighborhood, right? Yeah, that's where they buried all the dead bodies. Wow. I didn't know that was still a mob neighborhood. Well, you know, to the extent that there is a mob. Yeah. And yeah, I mean, that's true everywhere on the coast, everywhere. It's not just New York. New York's not exceptional.

Right. You know, there are projections that like $30 billion of New Jersey real estate could be underwater by 2030? 2030. Why is that not as alarming? I was born in New Jersey, too. It's not as alarming. And then Miami Beach is done for. Yeah, Miami Beach is almost inevitable, correct? Yeah.

I mean, they could build a seawall. But that's not going to help because of the ground right and it's just so expensive so you really have to um you really have to pick your poison and then when you look around the world you know it's like bangladesh that country is going to be almost entirely underwater that's hundreds of millions of people if we wanted to build a seawall they can't afford that who going to afford, who's going to pay for that? And this is all because of the raising sea level, because of the melting ice, because of the temperature, and all this is happening.

And I think, you know, we think of sea level as really a thing that happens on the coastline, which it is primarily, but it also increases flooding on rivers because the water is all connected. Of course. So flooding in the UK is expected to grow 50-fold by the end of the century. What? 50-fold? London is already underwater a couple times a year.

I mean, not the whole city. What is this, Jamie? This is Bangladesh. I just went to Bangladesh underwater. Jesus. This is like a video that pops up. Oh, my God. These people are fucked.

Yeah. It says 18 million residents live here. That's a swamp. Yeah. It says 18 million residents live here. That's a swamp. Yeah. That looks crazy. Like, like if you are a real estate projector and you're flying over that, like,

oh yeah, yeah, we can't build here. Yeah. Jakarta will be totally underwater. Look at those apartment buildings. Like you could see the water level. Look back up a little bit.

This is just a running little thing. Oh, but if you see, look at like, doesn't that look like a water level on the apartment buildings on the right hand side near where your cursor is? Yeah. Like, like like that's gonna go up to where that orange level is fucking christ well i mean over millennia we're they're gonna rise hundreds of feet oh god i mean it's gonna take a long time so you can adjust to that a little bit but um but that's always been

the case right the the i mean they're still, they find these artifacts and things in the middle of the ocean and areas where people used to be able to live, and now they can't live anymore. Yeah. I think that'll be. We have to move. People have to move. So what's a good spot?

Alberta? Is that good? It's close as fuck. Anywhere off the coast. Edmonton. Yeah. That's the spot now. I mean, I think I would, like, people ask me that all the time and i say you know honestly the place that i would move to

is somewhere in scandinavia really because um you know i talked about the impacts of economic growth before but there are going to be parts of the world that benefit economically from this anywhere in the north so canada russia and scandinavia will benefit because but why don't go to Scandinavia. Go to Canada. It's right there. Well, but Scandinavia seems kind of like prettier to me. I don't know. Yeah.

Well, Scandinavia is nice, but Canada is like our neighbors. Although they also – Yeah. They have wildfires there too. Canada? Yeah, they do. And in the Arctic Circle in Finland last year. They also have bears.

Yeah. Mountlines. But so these guys, the economists who study this stuff say that um there is actually an optimal temperature for human productivity it's 13 degrees celsius which is the historical median temperature of the u.s it's also the historical median temperature of germany what is 13 celsius was that 60 degrees or something like that yeah i think it's like in the high 50s what we got jamie google didn't give it to you i whenever i'm in canada i'm always like i don't know what you're saying yeah they're like holy

shit it's 22 degrees 55.4 um and so for every degree north of that you lose about a percentage point of gdp so the u.s is now at about 13 and a half degrees Celsius at our median temperature. That means that we're losing about a half percentage point of GDP every year from it. But there are parts of the U.S. that were cooler than 13 and are now brought up to this optimal level. Silicon Valley is like exactly at 13 degrees right now, which is, you know, notable because they're like super productive. Yeah. And that's going to be, so that'll be true for Scandinavia generally. And it may be part of the explanation

why there's been so much economic productivity in Scandinavia over the last generation is that they have already started doing better with temperature. Crops are going to be more bountiful in Russia. Like Russia will have better agriculture because of global warming, which is why they make such a,

you know, they're such a complicated figure in the geopolitical story about climate. So they're a petrostate. They have almost all of their economic activity has to do with burning oil, but they're also poised to benefit from warming. So they're doubly motivated to produce more global warming.

And they have such a fuck the rest of the world perspective that they're not going to stop. Whereas Canada, probably they're like likely to, even though they'd benefit from more warming, they'll probably get on board with any program to avert warming. But that's a dilemma that faces every nation. You know, like Justin Trudeau talks a lot of shit about Donald Trump and his climate policy, but Justin Trudeau is also approving new pipelines.

Angela Merkel does the same, but she's retiring nuclear so quickly in Germany that they're having to use dirty energy. And even though they've had this incredible green energy revolution there, their emissions are going up. And every country in the world is, it's a collective action problem.

Every country in the world is incentivized to behave badly and let the rest of the world clean up the mess. So I was talking to this guy yesterday about wildfires, and he was like, you know, California is doing so great, you know, with all of the emission standards, they're basically, you know, holding themselves to the Paris Accords, even though the country as a whole isn't. But that impact isn't local.

It's global. So it's dissipated the temperature impact on california wildfires will be determined by like i said earlier basically what china does so in terms of you know what any individual area what any any individual nation is doing the motivations are really really complicated there and in california in particular this is a bit of a tangent but um you know the state has done incredible stuff with emission standards, fuel efficiency, green energy. And yet all of those gains now are wiped out every year by the fires because fires are trees. Trees are burning.

Trees are basically coal in the sense that they are stored carbon. When they burn, they release carbon into the atmosphere. So every time there are wildfires like there were last year in California, it literally wipes out all of the progress that the state made in all of its green initiatives that year.

Yeah. And you know about in Brazil, the president of Brazil wants to like basically deforest the amazon the amazon is responsible for something like 30 of the world's oxygen um and is a huge so all plants obviously absorb carbon and produce oxygen um so plant life is really good for fighting climate change when you say he wants to deforest the amazon like at what scale what does he what is he talking about doing so the scientists who've studied his proposal say that um his plans would be the equivalent of adding over a 10-year period adding a second china to the world's global footprint

jesus christ yeah and this is just to pump up brazil's economy yeah well he has a kind of a trumpy like i'm gonna fuck the environmentalist's perspective too so he's just like a little bit like you know whatever flipping the bird to people who care about it oh my god and that just makes you think that like it seems crazy now but it really won't be crazy i think a generation from now for another country to threaten at least sanctions and maybe military action to deal with that you know after world war ii we built a whole liberal international order around the principle of human rights that would have been unthinkable in the 20s and yet it led to a series of military interventions over the next century half century because people were behaving badly towards their own citizens.

If we could do that, it doesn't seem all that crazy to me that, say, 30 years from now, an empowered imperial China looking at someone like Bolsonaro in Brazil would just be like, no, you can't do that. We're just going to go in and take you out. And this is what I mean when I say it's a kind of all-encompassing all-impacting threat our politics will be shaped by it our geopolitics will be shaped by it our you know everything will be shaped by it we could have climate wars like in the not too distant future jesus christ how is this being received the book yeah are people people resisting it is there any anybody that wants to debate you on this so i you know i wrote this article a couple years ago that produced i mean it was a

huge sort of viral phenomenon but it produced also some scientific criticism and um you know we published a fully annotated version where every single lot we showed where every single line came from but there were still scientists who were arguing about whether the messaging was precisely calibrated, whether it was too bleak, too dark. The book has had none of that. I mean, it's, first of all, it's been, it's the best, first week it was on the Times bestseller list, number six, bestseller in England. It's been in and out of the Amazon top 10. And all of the reviews have been really kind. I think this goes to what you were saying before i think like the conversation is changing people are actually really interested in um

talking seriously about just how big a deal this is in a way that they might not have been just a year ago where is the resistance though is there any resistance to it right now to the book well not just the book but just the concept in general. 73% of Americans believe climate change is real. 70% of Americans are concerned about it. Those numbers are up 15% since 2015. Who are the 27 that don't? I mean, I think it's, you know, it's... Hard right-wingers.

Yeah. Yeah. But, you know, those numbers are... We live in a culture now where, like, most people's worldview passes through a prism of partisan politics. So like, you know, there's amazing studies that show that in the early 90s, there was no partisan divide on the question of whether OJ Simpson was guilty. When you control for race, Republicans and Democrats had the same idea about OJ Simpson's guilt. That is totally unthinkable today. And there's now a huge partisan split on whether 12 Years a Slave deserves an Oscar.

Partisanship has like totally taken over our minds such that the fact that we have 73% of Americans who believe global warming is real and happening. To me, that's a really fucking high number actually. Because one of the two parties, I don't think that the Republican Party is really anymore a denier party. I think they're just a party of skeptics and self-interest. They want to look out for business interests, which actually the calculus there is changing, which I'll talk about in a second. But people don't want to believe that horrifying things are real because who would? It's terrifying. But 73% of the the country that's a lot

i mean that's you know that's more support than there is for just about anything um so i'm like basically and the speed at which those numbers have grown is really dramatic i said 15 points since 2015 eight points just since march has moved up that's incredible. And I do think that the economic logic is really powerful here. So it used to be the case that there was economic conventional wisdom that action on climate was going to be really expensive because it would require massive upfront investment and it would mean also foregoing economic growth. But all of the new research the last couple of years reverses that logic totally. So there was a big report 2018 that said that we could add $26 trillion to the global economy through rapid decarbonization by just 2030. We could avoid all of these horrible $600 trillion impacts that we're talking about if we decarbonize rapidly. And there are also obviously business opportunities there, their whole solar empires to build their whole new electric grid to build. So the economic conventional wisdom is now that fast action on climate is better for the economy than slow action

on climate. That hasn't yet totally taken over the perspective of our policymakers globally, but I think it will soon. And when it does, I think that we'll see like a real sea change in their perspective, because I think for a long time, even people who cared about climate thought, well, I want to do something, but if I have to like cost some people some jobs and cost like a percentage point of economic growth, that's not worth it. Let me just kick the can down the road. This is a slow-moving phenomenon. We'll invent our way out of it. We'll grow our way out of it.

But all of the new research says, like, let's get started right now. And we'll see how that plays out. I mean, if we really have to have global emissions by 2030, it means really, really aggressive action, which I don't think is possible. But I do think that we'll see much more aggressive action in the decade ahead than we've had in the decades in the past. So you think that once there's a financial incentive for people to either some sort of an industry that reduces carbon or something along those lines, industries that are working to mitigate global warming, that once there's a financial sort of benefit for these people to innovate and to move forward with this that that's when we're going to see real change yeah well also that um i mean direct investment of particular companies but also

you know government leaders who look around and say if the economic picture is going to be better 10 years from now if we make massive investments in green energy, then it would be, and even like past laws, you know, regulating, say, fuel efficiency, or even banning internal combustion engines, which I think will happen within a couple decades. If that's going to be, if the economic picture taking that path is much rosier than the economic picture of inaction, I think they'll go down the path of action. And, you know, again, the question is how aggressively, how quickly, and in what form. But I do think that, you know, I do think the incentives will be different five years from now

than they looked five years ago, and that'll be huge. So that you think would be a great motivator for people to shift their perceptions, and particularly right-wing folks, maybe amongst the 27% that are in denial. Yeah. Well, I mean, if you look around the world, denial is not really a problem anywhere but the U.S. There's a little bit of it in the U.K., but it's a totally American phenomenon. And when you understand that the U.S. is only 15% of all global emissions— Is that just typical American arrogance? Like, what do you think is the the root of that uh i think it's it's basically bad behavior by the oil companies

i mean they've like put out really aggressive um disinformation and denial you ever see the movie merchants of doubt yeah yeah perfect example of that right yeah totally um yeah and i know the people who wrote the book too who are really, really great. And, you know, it's especially horrifying because in the 60s and 70s, the oil companies were like doing some of the most ambitious research on climate. So they're, you know, then they ended up suppressing that going forward,

but they knew shit about how the planet was going to change before any of the rest of us. Really? Yeah. But there's no alternatives back then and there was no real emission standards so like this that's when catalytic converters started being enacted yeah well you know somewhere around then if we had started decarbonization in 2000 which just coincidentally was the year that al gore won the popular vote for president um we would have had to globally cut emissions by about 3% per year to get below two degrees. We're now at a spot where we have to cut them by about 10% per year. And if we wait another decade, we're going to have to cut them by 30% per year, which is like an unthinkable rate. So

we wouldn't have had to take such aggressive action if we had started early. We would have had to just be doing moderate kind of on the margins changes. But we're now in a situation where the problem is way too big for that. And there are people who want to talk about the solutions that could have been useful 20 years ago now. Talking about the carbon tax is like one quite popular thing to talk about. The UN says that in order to be effective, a global carbon tax would need to be perhaps as high as $5,500 a ton. And there's nowhere else in the world, there's nowhere in the world where there's a tax that's even one 100th as high as that right now. And the places in the world where they do have carbon taxes, everybody's emissions are still going up.

So there was a time when like the kind of like, you don't have to change anything, we'll just like fiddle on the margins here. Could have worked if we had taken, if we had really been focused on it. But we're sort of past that point now, unfortunately. But it's interesting, you know, talking about the oil companies. I think they, you know, I think they're responsible for denial. But I also think that denial is not all that important in American politics. Because when you look around the world, you see many countries with very different politics, even quite universally focused on climate issues, who are not behaving any better when it comes to carbon than we are. And so you

think, well, what is the sickness here? Is it the Republican Party and their climate denial? Or is it the fact that all of us just want, you know, more, better, cheaper stuff. And we have a really hard time conceiving of different paths that don't push us for towards more consumption and, you know, more, more than modern amenities that we sort of assume will keep accumulating over time. I mean, people say financial capitalism is the problem. I have some sympathy for that view, but I also look around the world. I see social democracies who are behaving really poorly when it comes to carbon i see socialist countries who are behaving really poorly when it comes to carbon um it seems on some level like it's even deeper than the systems that we have to organize and manage um our cultural priorities

and there are now you know getting back to the villainy of the oil companies um there are now all these lawsuits that are being brought against them for basically on the model of the cigarette companies like that for climate damages. And that may be, they may be victorious. They may put some of these companies out of business. I think it's not that likely, but it's possible. There are also other lawsuits that are happening that are really interesting. There's one in the Netherlands thatlands that some people held um the dutch government they basically the dutch government was not honoring the paris accords and citizens sued to hold them to that and won the case so the dutch

government is now obligated legally to do better on climate than they were doing on their own and in the u.s there's this amazing court case called Juliana versus the United States, which is a lawsuit being brought by kids using this kind of ingenious use of the Equal Protection Clause. They're arguing that their generation has been exposed to climate damages that the previous generation, their parents' generation, were protected from. And so they're saying this climate policy is a violation of the Equal Protection Clause. You're not protecting us in the same way that you protected our parents. That's at the district court in Oregon, which is just one level below the Supreme Court. I think it'll win in the district court. It almost certainly won't win at the Supreme Court. But if it did win in the Supreme Court, it would immediately obligate the US to a totally

maximalist climate policy, because it's literally impossible to protect the next generation from climate damages as fully as the previous generation was, but they'd be obligated to do everything they could, which would mean sort of suddenly something like the World War II scale mobilization that the U.N. calls for, which would be really kind of dramatic and incredible. And I think that's one path forward is through uh litigation because so many places in the world it's not just politics are inert like american politics are inert it's just there's a lot of slow-moving bureaucracy and um slow-moving public opinion and in the same way that a lot of civil rights victories were fought and won in the courts i think we might be able to make some progress in the courts on climate too we'll see if you had a magic wand like if they

made you the king of the world and they said you you can decide what we do what would what would the first step be the first step is just ending fossil fuel subsidies i mean there's no reason why these companies should be receiving public money and why are they just incumbency advantages they're well-connected companies a lot of them um are really big and powerful and any government in the world is not going to want a major industry to like completely collapse um but you know if we're really subsidizing them five trillion dollars a year that's a ton of money that could be poured into green like to r&d of new technology that could be poured into green, like to R and D of new technology. It could be poured into the carbon capture. Like we talked about before,

that's just an unbelievable resource. And it would accelerate the decline of coal in particular and, and other oil, other fossil fuel businesses, which would be great. Is there any discussion about that? In individual countries? Yeah.

But it's slow moving. You know know there's stuff about um people are taking action in all different ways at all different levels which i think is basically necessary so there are cities in europe where cars are now being banned um cars yeah in a city yeah just bike around yeah you've been living in la too long you can do that in amsterdam you can do that it just seems ridiculous yeah well I mean I think um maybe maybe it'll just be you can only have an electric car um you know maybe 10 years from now like it'll be illegal in the US to build uh like a you know a gas guzzling car I got an electric car recently and it's amazing the blowback from my friends what do they say well first of all

it's always homophobic or or uh or feminine yeah they're always going after you about your estrogen levels and your manhood it's like it's weird it's kind of like a space i mean teslas are kind of like they're kind of like spaceships though they feel i mean that there's have you been in one yeah you driven one i haven't driven one i've been driven in one yeah i've i drove in one years ago and i wasn't that impressed i want to say like maybe five or six years ago but now i have one of the new ones that's crazy fast yeah it doesn't even make sense regular cars are stupid yeah they're stupid and you spend all that money on gas why would you want to do that but i mean they're stupid like they don't work as good like that thing is way better than any car i've ever driven yeah and it's only gonna get better they're they don't even make sense how fast they are and they drive

themselves yeah like you hit this little thing go doo doo and it just fucking steers it takes over yeah like it drives yeah and it's it stays within the speed limit and you can just kind of half-ass space out just keep your hand on the steering wheel wheel, and it brakes when there's cars in front of you. It's very strange. It'll even change lanes for you. Amazing. It's fucked. It's weird.

It's weird. It's very difficult to let go and to give in like that. But the strange thing that I felt was the blowback from my friends. And they're joking around. Obviously, most of my friends are comedians but it's uh it's hilarious even people have heckled me about it well i feel that like i just at the aesthetic level i understand that mocking of like the prius but i feel like the tesla is actually a little more macho yeah well the prius is a piece of shit it's like a cheese wedge with wheels yeah but i mean it's like you know yeah we live in a sick culture where like being like healthy

and responsible is like exactly we like cigarettes and whiskey yeah you mock someone eating a salad yeah it's very weird it is very weird but um i was but that is an american problem like other parts in the world they don't they're not as attached to their trucks and shit. We're gross. Yeah. We're gross. But there's something particularly strange about being on that side of it. Because I was...

I don't want to say I was pessimistic about electric cars. But when Elon did the podcast, I told him I'd buy one of his cars. Yeah. Because he was telling me how great they are. I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll buy one of your cars. But I really how great they are I'm like yeah yeah yeah I'll buy one of your cars But I really did not expect to like it as much as I do And then once I got it

I was like okay now I get it But then I was thinking about my own resistance to it Because I like cars I have muscle cars I have an older Porsche I love them They're fun I like those kind of cars

But they're stupid they really are dumb that's a dumb way to get around the tesla is a way better way to get around yeah and you know he's got one that's coming out in 2020 that's going to have a 660 mile range which is insane i mean you drive all the way to san francisco and back with one charge no i mean he's incredible i think you know i like there there are reasons why he gets the shit that he gets, but I also think like Tesla and SolarCity are incredibly important. And I'm actually,

I don't understand why there aren't more people in Silicon Valley who are focused on climate in this way. Like, obviously they want, like these are people who see themselves as gods who want to be world historical figures. They're literally- You think they're they're literally do that who do you think is doing that well like like jeff bezos you think he thinks himself as a god

yeah really yeah really you don't no i read those text messages he sent to that chick i don't i don't think a god would say that but you know god would say you should be lucky to get this dick all the space exploration stuff though it's like you know, all the people are obsessed with the life extension. But don't you think that that's just a side effect of having $150 billion? But you can do so much good with that. Yes. So Bezos is pouring a billion dollars a year into his space exploration project, which is like, I mean, I'm excited by space, too. I think it'd be cool to go up there.

But there's some pressing problems here, which could really benefit you know that money could really benefit and i agree but long term i think the philosophy is that we're going to have to get off this planet and if the human race is going to succeed but because of not just the threat of global warming but of astral impacts and yeah many of those factors It's an asteroid thing, I think. I mean, for me... Supernovas. There's a lot of factors. On the particular question of climate, there's just no way that the Earth is going to get as inhospitable as Mars is.

So the idea of building a colony there as a hedge against global warming is just crazy. It is ridiculous. But on the positive note, if we could fix that shithole, like imagine what we could do here. Yeah, paradise. Yeah, well, the idea is terraforming, right? That they're going to go there with some kind of massive machine that's going to create oxygen in the environment.

And yeah, well, it's a good place to practice because no one lives there. So you could do all kinds of goofy shit and go, well, good news and bad news. The good news is we figured out a way to terraform. The bad news is we already fucked up Mars. So we're to try another spot we're going to go to you know we're going to move on to uranus yeah yeah well you know venus used to be actually quite earth-like and they went through a really rapid global warming um that made it now it's like a total hellhole right and that's like the sort of worst case um worst case for earth is the venus scenario well ultimately the sun's going to burn out right like but that's many millions of years sure but if we really do look into the future something something

has to be done you know i mean this is uh the on the grandest of grand scales the the concept of uh some sort of interstellar arcs i mean i believe that i'm and i'm i'm with it i just think the time scale of the threat that we're that we need to avert by space exploration, that's a timescale of millennia. Yes. We have a lot of new technology to develop over the next thousand years that'll allow us to do it better and more efficiently. But climate change, the timescale is like the next 30 years. Right. So we need to focus on it now to give ourselves the opportunity to do the other shit.

Do you think it's sexier to go to space? Is that what it is? Like rockets and... I mean, I think for these dudes... Yeah. Yeah. It's a big metal dick shooting off in the atmosphere. That's what we're doing.

We're trying to fuck space. I actually made that argument about Mars. Yeah. That it's like they're shaped like dicks. Yeah. There's something to that. Well, also, this generation of people really grew up in the in the age of like the the space race yeah i mean it's um and the aftermath of landing on the moon and i think there

is like peter teal talks about this there's this kind of unfulfilled sense of future that we all like anybody who grew up in the post-war years in the 60s 70s they were like you know whatever his famous line we're promised flying cars and all we got was 140 characters or whatever i think that applies to the space exploration stuff it's like well the government is no longer doing the really ambitious shit right but we can do it privately on the other hand there is a government in the world that is doing that shit in china they just landed on the far side of the moon they're doing really aggressive space exploration And I haven't been there in 20 years, but the people I know who live there say there is so much faith in the future there. They just believe in a very inherent, deep down way that the future will be better and sci-fi-y in an exciting way. And that's so far in from the way that Americans think about the future.

Is that part of the benefit of having a dictator run things? I think it's just like they're on a huge upswing right but it's also like there's no debate about how things get done yeah yeah totally i mean that's what i was saying before it's like it gives you some hope for climate if like xi jinping is just like okay immediately no more coal they'll all stop yeah but he's also throwing 2 million Muslims in concentration camps. Right. Yeah. This Bezos thing. I mean, I'm not criticizing you because I think it's a very common thought. But why is it that when we look at these super rich billionaire characters that are on the top of the heap, why do we think of them as having these tremendous egos and looking like gods?

Isn't it sort of just how you're always going to look at someone who lives in a hundred million dollar house and it's possible i think when you look at i mean not to get too like armchair psychologizing about bezos but when you look at the physical transformation that he's put himself through when you think about like the life extension what has he done physically well he's just like i mean if you look at photos of him when he's like a young man he's you know just kind of like dweeby. Right. And now he's like an action hero. Is he really?

Yeah. I mean, maybe not like you, but he's like, yeah, he's pretty. Is Bezos jacked? Am I missing something? Let me show you. It definitely looks different. Pull up some images of Jeff Bezos jacked. I didn't know.

Well, he's got a trainer. I mean... No, I'm not blaming him. But that's only one part of it. I would say bigger than that is, you know, just how thin-skinned the world's... Okay, let me see. Zoom in.

Well, I guess. I guess he's got some arms. There he is. Oh, wow. That's a big difference. Yeah, but he's also got a vest on. I guess his arms do's a big difference Yeah but he's also Got a vest on I guess his arms

Do look pretty big Yeah I mean I'm not In most ways I'm not a Bezos hater I think Amazon has been Actually really

Pretty great I'm a fan Yeah I like listening to the guy talk And I loved his letter To the National Enquirer There he is right there Yeah

Yeah so he looks fit Yeah In front of the King Kong Rampage movie Is that him there yeah so he looks fit yeah in front of the king kong rampage movie is that him yeah yeah he looks pretty good um okay i guess physical transformation but that's yeah but life extension like uploading your brain to the computer there's so many is he into that shit uh he is actually i think not as into it as some other people but that is so sci-fi you know i um i interviewed kurzweil a while back when i was

doing this sci-fi show and i went to this uh 2045 conference that they had in manhattan and it was um these guys are they're talking about something that they think will be invented and they're acting as if it's been invented inevitable yeah yeah totally i mean eric schmidt has said about climate change that the solution is already here in the sense that AI will just solve it. And it's like, well, no. That's nonsense. That's a weird thing that we do though, right? We always looked like, oh, someone's going to handle this. Yeah, well, the brain upload stuff is interesting to me with regard to climate just because it's like a portal through which we can escape environmental degradation. So, if the world is on fire and full of suffering, maybe we can just upload our minds

to some machines and not live in the real world anymore. And when I think about even my relationship to my phone, like tech addiction generally, we're sort of being taught to think of the world on our screens as more real than the world that's around us. And that sounds in a lot of ways like declinist and whatever, but I also think it may be a kind of coping mechanism for a world that we're about to head into where there is that much more suffering. And when I see, for instance, like the whole wellness movement, I think there their intuitions there about like the toxicity of the world and how we have to avoid it i think the way that it'll reshape our own sense of self and relationship to the world and idea of our place in nature and history all of these things are really um up in the air um and will be affected by climate change

i think in you know in ways that we don't yet appreciate or understand. So to wave the wand, what would be step number one? Step number one is ending fossil fuel subsidies. End fossil fuel subsidies. Step number two. Step number two, just massive R&D investment. Massive investment in R&d and new infrastructure which would be great for the economy right totally so all these things taking a positive or taking a negative

and looking at positive aspects of mitigating the problem yeah and yeah new energy sources i mean that you know you they're really there are already new business empires that were are from the climate change era there are new solar empires there are new wind empires but that can happen globally that needs to happen globally um and you know that's you know then we have to we have to deal with agriculture which may be about seaweed and maybe about lab-grown meat i don't know but um you know it's it's like the big picture it's all carbon it's all just how much carbon we put into the atmosphere so i think it will come to be the case that in the decades ahead everything about the way that we interact with the world will be um described and understood

in terms of carbon so that for instance you walk down the aisle in the supermarket you see organic food you see non-gmo food you'll also see like carbon-free food i think that'll be a big part of the way that we consume everything that things will be advertised that way promoted that way but globally we just need to really focus on reducing carbon is it like and wherever it is which is almost everywhere we need to figure out new ways to do whatever it is we're doing that's um that's causing that problem we need to make it trendy in la that's what we do have some organic gluten-free carbon-free food i feel like that's already kind of happening should be yeah that would as long as that kicks in and people realize

there's some street cred to being carbon-free Yeah. I mean, I think in different parts of the world, people will relate differently to it. So like, yeah, in China, they're scheduled to have this huge boom in beef consumption and dairy consumption because it's expected that as that country gets richer, the people will adopt a more Western diet. But it's also possible that they won't that like the new chinese middle class will be still really interested in you know tofu less interested in beef less interested in milk they are they you know um and it might be it might be easier to have them follow that path than it will be to make the American, average American, eat less beef. But, you know, it's everywhere. It's like everywhere you look, there's some little problem to solve.

But then when you pull back, it really is just carbon it's like absolutely everything if you think about everything you do in terms of the carbon impact it has then you know the solutions suggest themselves and i do think that in the coming decades if even if you and i don't start to think in those terms our policymakers will that like everything will be oh we're entering into a new trade agreement with japan what's the carbon budget here like what how's their carbon behavior oh we're like um you know this um we're providing some public subsidies for this factory over here what's their like emission situation like can we ask them to bring along some carbon capture um plants so that they reduce their footprint um you know every at every level the level of the individual,

like talking about buying a Tesla or buying a Range Rover or whatever, I think we'll start to think in terms of carbon, and that'll be a sign of just how totally climate change will have conquered the world so that there won't be an aspect of modern life that will be not just untouched but in a certain way kind of ungoverned by it yeah what about uh is there a way to educate people in in a way that's not preachy that sort of moves the needle in that direction i think

conversations like this are important i think your book's very important and i think you know interviews that i'm sure you're doing right now and all these different shows are important and everything kind of like ups the needle or ups the perception of it a little bit but is there anything else that can be done that can educate people in a way that's it's not preachy or it's not it's not aggressive in a way that annoys people because yeah it's a horrible thing to say but no i feel totally the same way. We're like, we need sugar in the medicine. You know what I mean?

Like the song from Mary Poppins. Yeah. I mean, I think in general, like, climate messaging, climate communication has really suffered for a long time because it was so preachy. And because it was so holier than thou. And because the people that get involved in it, part of the reason why they get involved in it is for virtue signaling. Totally. And I've been asked, as I've been promoting the book,

by a lot of people, what have you done in your life to change? And it's like, well, I'm flying a little bit less. Flying really makes me feel guilty. But otherwise, I basically haven't changed anything because I do think that politics and policy

are the most important impact you can have. And I'm spreading the word. Whether I eat a couple fewer hamburgers a year just doesn't really matter that much. But the idea that you would ask a newcomer to the movement to demonstrate their commitment by making themselves the most optimally committed that they possibly could be,

that's just going to alienate so many people. And this is obviously an issue where we need more people engaged in a more direct profound way so i think for me it's like anyone who wants to care about climate who wants to vote about climate like come on like um and i think that you know hollywood can be really important here um i mean since i've been out here i've been i've had a couple meetings about shows and stuff and i do think that we've had really corny storytelling about climate change. Um, and that there are actually opportunities for like really incredible new kinds of storytelling. I mean, in the book, I read about this story

that happened a couple of years ago where, um, you know, anthrax that was, had killed a reindeer in Russia in the early 20th century. The reindeer was frozen in permafrost for the entire 20th century. Permafrost melted, the reindeer thawed, the anthrax was released and killed at least one boy and a number of other reindeer in Russia. Wow. And that is true. So, in the ice, in the Arctic ice, you know, we know of rock as like a record of geological history. Ice is also a record of geological history. So, in the ice, in the Arctic ice, you know, we know of rock as like a record of geological history. Ice is also a record of geological history. So, like the bubonic plague is trapped in ice.

The Spanish flu from 1918 that killed hundreds of millions of people is trapped in ice. There are diseases trapped in the Arctic ice from before humans were around, which means that humans' immune system have no experience with them there's so many horror movies that you can make about this subject um holy shit i didn't even think of that i didn't know that the spanish flu is trapped in ice yeah i mean and there have been instances where like in lab conditions anyway they've revived bacteria that are millions of years old um one russian doctor literally injected a bacteria that he had revived from like 35 000 years ago it'd been frozen for 35 000 years he brought it back to life and injected it into himself why would he do that just to see what would happen that's a fucking marvel comic book that's how you become like the the red skull or

some shit yeah well that's what i mean about this this story is's how you become like the Red Skull or some shit. Yeah. Well, that's what I mean about this. This story is so big. It's like the world that we live in in the next couple of decades will be completely transformed. Like we will be reading about diseases coming out of the Arctic ice. We will be reading about tropical diseases arriving in Copenhagen because now mosquitoes are there because the temperature allows them to live there in a way that they never lived before. We will be reading about climate conflict.

We'll be reading about, you know, I mean, all this shit. It's everywhere. You know, air pollution increases the rates of autism and ADHD. It changes the development of babies in utero. It's like it's all encompassing. Wow. The disease in the ice thing is really freaking me out i never even considered that yeah but that is something to think about along with the methane and carbon

is going to be emitted into the atmosphere as it melts well let me tell you the story so um there we now so there was there was the species of antelope called a saiga antelope they um they're mostly in siberia they're kind of dwarf antelopes and they've been around for millions of years and uh all of a sudden in 2016 or 2015 they literally all died it's called a mega death the entire species died they're extinct they're now extinct jesus um and that happened because a bacteria that had been living inside their guts was changed by temperature conditions. It was an unusually hot, unusually humid summer. And this bacteria that had been living inside them, presumably for millions of years, comfortably as a kind of peaceful cooperator, became a killer and killed the entire species. Now, we have inside us countless bacteria and viruses. Scientists believe millions in every human. So, our guts are full of bacteria that do our digestion for us,

they monitor our moods. There are some scientists who think it's really misleading to even think of the human as a unitary animal rather than a kind of composite creature. And most of those bacteria and viruses are not going to be dramatically transformed by a degree or two degrees of warming, but there are so many of them the chances that one could it's hard to dismiss that and whether that would mean we'd all immediately go extinct probably not but what if that means suddenly schizophrenia increases by 15 because schizophrenia is related to a bacterial infection called toxoplasma i think it's bacteria toxoplasma gandhi um that's

that cat parasite yeah exactly schizophrenia is related to that yeah really yeah it like triples your chances of getting schizophrenia wow yeah um and our bodies are so complex such intricate ecosystems like you say that if one little thing gets disturbed it could have really catastrophic impacts on us and that's true of the planet as a whole i think I think that's one of the big lessons of my book is that this is such a delicate system. It's been stable for all of human history, and now it's not stable. What that means for how we live, we don't know yet, but the changes will be significant, will be profound. But it's also true of the individual. Our bodies will be living differently in a world that's two degrees warmer

than they are today. We can't really predict what those impacts will be, but in a world that's two degrees warmer than they are today we can't really predict what those impacts will be but they could be quite dramatic and they could be things that we can't even imagine today because they're you know by some counts millions of bacteria inside us that we haven't even identified yet jesus christ you're freaking me out david god damn it it's a crazy world out there well not just crazy but it seems like when when you're talking about things like this when you're talking about climate change affecting our actual gut parasites or our gut biome and that this literally could change the way human beings behave i mean these are all things that i've never heard discussed and it it just it's really terrifying

really is you know i mean and part of the problem is people here, they're like, oh, relax. Everything's fine. This is this constant thing that we do where if it's not affecting us currently right now in the moment, there's not a fire in front of us. We don't worry about it. It's a weird compartmentalization thing that human beings do. Yeah. And it's, you know we you think that evolution would have trained us differently you think that evolution would have trained us over

time to have at least some long-term capacity and i guess we do have some long-term planning capacity but it's um we choose to think in really short-term ways just about all the time now you've already freaked me out how's your book gonna freak me out more uh um i mean it's every page every page is more of this yeah jesus man how do you sleep at night are you okay i mean i sleep through compartmentalization and denial too i'm not i'm not you know i mentioned earlier like that i think there's it's been a problem for environmentalism for a long time this kind of holier-than-thou thing that's not who i am i'm not an environmentalist until a couple years ago when for a long time, this kind of holier-than-thou thing. That's not who I am. I'm not an environmentalist. Until a couple years ago, when I started really worrying about this stuff, I had the same disinclination to take it seriously that most

people do. You know, I thought climate change was real. I thought it was something that we need to worry about and deal with. But I thought it was like a small problem that could be dealt with without much change to my life. And I still basically feel that way. I mean, I, you know, I like going on vacations in nature, but I'm not someone who's like spends months hiking the trail or whatever. I've never even had a pet. I don't love animals, you know. But my, the more I looked at the science,

the more I just realized this isn't about affecting some part of nature over there. It's about affecting all of human life, every aspect of human life as it's lived on this planet and that really terrified me but even knowing that even staring at it straight in the face i mean i still get up in the morning and you know whatever do the same shit go to the gym watch basketball go to my day job and i don't think that we should be ashamed of that um I think all of us have, are going to have different reactions to this story, different perspectives on the crisis. And that's good. That's human. But spreading the word generally, making people a little more alarmed is going to make people take some more action. that's what we need um but you know the psychological like i said before the psychological biases are so strong

that like when i imagine my daughter's life i'm not imagining a hellscape i'm imagining the life the world that i grew up in right and again that's not like that's how everybody that's how everybody relates to the world. And it's just a reminder of how important it is to look really directly at the science because the world as it exists today is not a good guide to the world that we will be living in in a decade or two. There's no way that the climate system as it exists today will be stabilized forever. It will get hotter. All of these things will get worse. Every tick upward of temperature will create more climate suffering somewhere in the

world. And if we get to really dramatic levels of warming, that suffering will be basically everywhere. We can't continue orienting our perspective on the future on the world as it is today. We have to take seriously this range of temperatures, two degrees to four degrees, that we're on track for this century, as a way of generating sufficient activity and response and adapting as we need to. If we keep looking out the window and thinking the world as it is now will continue, we're not going to do anything. And that's what we've done over the last 30 years which has been catastrophic i think that message is really important and i think that also the message of that we need to change and evolve as a civilization but as a human being you need to still enjoy your life and that you know it just it's it's a it's not oh my

god i need to drop everything i'm doing that leaves any sort of a carbon footprint. It's we need to address it as a civilization. Yeah. I mean, you know, if the average American had the carbon footprint of the average European, America's carbon emissions would fall by like 35%. Now, I don't think of like. What's the difference? What do they do differently? They drive less.

That's weird because they make the best cars. Yeah. But it's like less territory. Yeah. I mean, there aren't many people in Europe who commute an hour and a half to work every day. And that's not so uncommon in America. Their diet is better carbon-wise. And they have some more aggressive green energy stuff going on.

How is their diet better carbon-wise? They waste less food basically so like a third of all american food i think it's a third is wasted that's just wasted carbon yeah um and you know i think i think the number of electricity is like 70 of american electricity is wasted because how bad the grid is like it just is so bad at delivering from one source to another. This is one reason why solar city is so important because the battery can be a much more efficient transporter of electricity. Well, there's just no excuse for California. I mean, other than this winter, it's sunny every day.

Yeah. But so if 70% of American electricity is wasted, it's like we're just throwing all that carbon away. 70%. Yeah, that's giant. Yeah. And if we were less wasteful, we'd have less of a problem on our hands. But we still order twice as much food as we want and then throw it out. I mean, I do that.

Yeah. So you can understand why someone would say to you, like, what are you doing? But it's that sentiment behind it that's kind of gross, right? Yeah. It's like they're looking for you to be a hypocrite they're trying to catch you well when i look at hypocrisy what i see is like you know you want the world to be a better place than you yourself are doing yes it's like that to me there's a way of it's like we think of hypocrisy as like a negative quality i think it's kind of a positive it can be a positive quality you believe we should be behaving in one way yeah yeah and it's like need a positive it can be a positive quality you believe we should be behaving in one way collectively yeah yeah and it's like need to adjust like you're saying not just what

everybody needs to do what you need to do as well you're being conscious of this need to change and like you know if someone believes in say like better health care we don't ask them to donate all of their money to hospitals that's what taxation is for like policy directs our cultural energy towards targets that we want to reach so again as a civilization we need to adjust yeah and as a an individual we need to be aware so that we promote and support this idea of a civilization shifting yeah yeah listen man. Listen, man. Thank you. Thanks for scaring the shit out of me. Thanks for coming down here.

Tell people the name of your book one more time, please. It's called The Uninhabitable Earth. The subtitle is Life After Warming. It's on my Instagram, and we'll put a link to it on Amazon, on Twitter. And thank you, David. Oh, man. Great to meet you.

I really appreciate it, man. It's great to meet you, too. Good luck with your book, man. I think it's going to make a big impact. Thank you. Ooh really appreciate it, man. It's great to meet you too. Good luck with your book, man. I really, I think it's going to make a big impact. Thank you. Thank you.