Today, Explained - The case for climate optimism

Episode Date: April 20, 2021

In 2019, David Wallace-Wells wrote a book called The Uninhabitable Earth. Just two years later, he’s feeling hopeful — thanks to the world’s biggest polluters. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Visit connectsontario.ca. Dragon SpaceX. go for launch. Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one, zero. In a world with many problems, one problem reigns supreme. The climate emergency. The stakes have never been higher. The odds of bipartisan agreement on this issue have possibly never been lower. But there's a new president in town, and he's hot for science. We've already waited too long to deal with this climate crisis.

We can't wait any longer. It's Earth Week at Today Explained. We're going to talk about what's in store for this planet. The future of our future. Welcome to Earth. Week on Today Explained. It's Earth Week on Today Explained. I'm Sean Ramos from. Yesterday on the show, we set the table at the Scorched Earth Diner.

It was a vision of what our menus might look like in 2050. Today, we're going to spend a little more time talking about the steaks. New York Magazine editor-at-large David Wallace-Wells testified in front of Congress last week on the stakes. In 2020, what was once called the novel coronavirus killed, according to the CDC, 350,000 Americans. According to new research, that same number, 350,000, die even in an unexceptional year from the air pollution produced from the burning of fossil fuels. Decarbonize, and we could save those lives. To be clear here, there is a lot of uncertainty. Putting that caveat front and center, now let's do it.

Thank you. Deep breath. According to the best analysis of current trajectories, we are basically in line for about three degrees Celsius of warming past pre-industrial levels by the end of the century, by 2100. At three degrees, we would be dealing with probably hundreds of millions of additional deaths from air pollution, from the burning of additional fossil fuels. We'd be talking about storms that once hit once every couple of centuries, hitting every single year in many, not just coastal parts of the world, but also places on rivers. We would be talking about migration crises in the at least tens of millions annual, maybe hundreds of millions. The UN says it's possible that we could get up to a billion refugees. I think those numbers are a bit high, but again, it gives you a sense of the scope of the disruption that we're talking about, especially in parts of South Asia and the Middle East. There would be hundreds of days every year in major, major cities where you wouldn't be able

to walk around outside without risking heat stroke, and you certainly wouldn't be able to work outside for hours at a time without risking heat death. The economic impacts have been estimated as high as something like 25% of global GDP would be lost compared to a world without warming. Wars would probably more than double. The map of global illness would change dramatically as well because you'd start seeing especially mosquitoes that carry all these tropical diseases flying all the way up to the Arctic Circle. And so basically the entire globe, wherever humans lived, would be dealing with all of the diseases that have been for many centuries confined to the tropics. And that would be, you know, not entirely unovercomeable. It's not like

if malaria is in Stockholm, that means that everybody in Stockholm is going to die of malaria. But it does just totally change the, you know just totally change the epidemiological landscape of the world. So it looks really quite grim. You know, we already all are living in a transformed world at 1.2 degrees. 1.2 degrees Celsius of warming doesn't sound like very much, but it already puts us entirely outside the window of temperatures that enclose all of human history. So there have never been humans walking around an earth as hot as this one. And everything we've ever known as a species is a result of climate conditions, which we've already left behind. And it's like we've landed on a new planet and have to figure out what that we brought with us. What are the civilization we brought with us can survive these new conditions and what will have to be adapted and what we're going to have to discard.

And that's just today's temperature level. And that's temperature. And temperature is a lagging indicator. In spite of everything he just laid out, David is hopeful. Two things that are giving him hope, believe it or not, it's the world's two biggest polluters, the United States and China. A number of the world's biggest emitters, and maybe most significantly China, announced pretty concrete plans to get to zero carbon. The COVID-19 epidemic has enlightened us that mankind needs self-reform to speed up the formation of a green development mode and lifestyle, to build a beautiful world with ecological civilization. China will make tougher policies and take more stringent actions

to achieve the peaking of carbon dioxide emissions before 2030 and strive to neutralize carbon neutrality before 2060. Much slower than I would like, but amounts to much, much more ambition at the sort of geopolitical scale than was really visible, has ever been visible on climate before. And maybe most importantly, or most intriguingly, most encouragingly, those commitments were made in calculations of national self-interest, which means that Japan and South Korea and many member nations of the EU, but the EU as a whole also, and China. And if you want to count Joe Biden's climate plan

with it too, like, you know, something like two thirds of the world's carbon emissions are now quote unquote on track to getting to zero, not soon enough to get us below two degrees of warming, but soon enough to, you know, keep us on track to stay below about two and a half degrees of warming, if all those pledges are honored. And as with everything on climate, it's a matter of perspective, two and a half degrees is going to be really, really bad by the standards of world history. But it's much, much better than four or four and a half, which is what we the track we thought we were on as recently as a year or two ago. I think it was a year or two ago, we last spoke and you sounded less hopeful. But I mean, because you're talking about pledges here

and you mentioned Joe Biden, I have to ask, I mean, are these pledges so easily reversed that we shouldn't feel all too hopeful? It sort of depends how you think about it. I mean, obviously, they're worth a paper they're printed on, which is nothing. But, and I should say, like in the history of climate action going back decades now, no pledge of carbon reduction has really ever been met. A couple of individual countries have hit a couple of individual targets, but even those have been really rare. And almost invariably when someone or some group of nations pledges to cut their emissions, they fail. But, you know, the context is really different now than it was even during the Paris Accord negotiations in 2015, in the sense that renewable energy is just really, really cheap, and it's getting much cheaper at an

incredibly fast rate. So the IEA, the International Energy Association, which is a notoriously conservative body this year called solar power, the International Energy Association, which is a notoriously conservative body this year, called solar power the cheapest electricity in world history. Solar is the new king of the global electricity market. The cost of solar power has fallen tenfold in a decade. Of course, wind, onshore wind, offshore wind, growing very strongly as well. The cost of batteries, which are critical to sort of making renewables a large-scale play rather than just a sort of a boutique energy source.

Those costs have also fallen about tenfold in a decade. And that means that anybody who's making a hard-headed calculus about, you know, where to invest, any country, I mean, sees the logic of a renewable future even from a sort of a naked cost-benefit analysis. We expect that even in the absence of major policy shifts, renewables alone will meet 80% of the global electricity demand growth within the next 10 years. And then when you layer on top of that, the fact that there's been this global political awakening. Many more people all around the world are demanding action. Many

more people are fed up with dirty energy and don't want to see to the extent that they can make a difference with personal demands and personal pleas. and don't want to see to the extent that they can make a difference with personal demands and personal pleas. They don't want to see their own homes or even their own electric cars powered by dirty energy. In that sense, the oil and gas business is sort of going the way of the tobacco industry. There's really been a huge amount of momentum sort of on all fronts. And I think it does seem to be the case that like once the economic logic changed, the whole world of possibility changed too. But you know, that's not to say that it's like slam dunk game over, we're all in the clear, honoring the pledges that have been made are, those are

going to be really, really hard, you know, to play our part as countries that have the highest per capita emissions in the world and are responsible for the lion's share of historical emissions means getting all the way to zero pretty quickly. And that is not going to be all that easy. There's the trajectories that are necessary to sort of get us on track to stay below two degrees and maybe even target 1.5 degrees, which is the stated goal of the Paris Accords. Those are really, really steep climbs. But, you know, for the first time in climate history, the world seems to be trying to mount that. Let me call the hearing to order. Let me thank Ranking Member Graham, our colleagues

on this committee, and our witnesses for being with us this morning. I mean, you testified in front of Congress last week, and Senator Lindsey Graham himself opened his remarks by saying that he believes... That climate change is real, that human emissions create greenhouse gas effect that traps heat and that you see a rise in the oceans and acidity in the water and droughts and disruption of weather patterns. That makes sense to me. Does that symbolize a shift away from climate denial that that climate denial certainly won't ever be the mainstream position, at least in our federal politics again? I think so. But you know, there are a few different things going on there. But there's like, what level of rhetorical commitment is a single Republican willing to make towards

climate action? Then there's like, who else is with him? And I think it was notable that in this Senate hearing that I participated in, hardly any Republicans showed up. Now, in previous years, they might have shown up and grandstanded on climate denial. So you can sort of count it as progress that they don't even want to touch this subject. So going from a world in which they saw it as a political win for them to fight climate action, to them seeing it as so much a political loser that they don't show up, but not enough of a political winner to sign up to a climate action that they don't show up for that. You know, we're making progress. We're just making, you know, the progress is too slow. But even on the democratic side, you know, in general, I think almost no one appreciates how urgent the crisis really is and how urgent the

need for an energy transition really is. So, you know, these benchmarks are, they're often a little misleading in the sense that like, you know, the difference between 1.5 and 1.6 degrees is not, may not even be noticeable at the global level, but they're still useful as a way of marking our progress. And to keep global temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius, which, you know, honestly, I don't think it's possible, but to try to do it, which is the stated goal of the Paris Accords and really all of the environmental left, that requires global decarbonization in about 15 years' time. And that means that the U.S. would have to move even faster than that. That's just a timeline that does not seem credible or feasible to me. Now, you can build it out a little longer with what are called negative emissions, which are ways of taking carbon out of the atmosphere, some of them natural,

like forest planting, and some of them more technological carbon capture. But unless you're doing that at essentially a global scale, you're stuck with an oppressively short timeline. And I think everybody is patting themselves on the back, certainly in that Senate chamber, was patting themselves on the back for being on board with the science and for having the business roundtable on board with the carbon tax and talking about how all your corporate donors are mentioning ESG investing. Those are all in a vacuum. Good. We're in a better world than we were five years ago without that momentum, but it's pathetic compared to the scale of transformation that's needed, which is like, really, at the very least, we need to completely decarbonize the American electricity sector

over the next decade or decade and a half. And I think there's a decent chance that we get a clean energy standard into the Biden jobs plan. But when all is said and done, which would accomplish that, that also will be an uphill battle. And it only amounts to, you know, an impact on, again, one slice of that carbon problem of which there are many. More with David in a minute. Support for Today Explained comes from Aura. Aura believes that sharing pictures is a great way to keep up with family. And Aura says it's never been easier thanks to their digital picture frames. They were named the number one digital photo frame by Wirecutter. Aura frames make it easy to share unlimited photos and videos directly from your phone to the frame.

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If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Okay, David, you helped us establish why you're hopeful the U.S. and China are taking big steps. But what about the rest of the world? What's everyone else got to do here? Well, I think it means at this point merely honoring the stated commitments, but genuinely honoring them.

You know, we probably have to double or triple, maybe even more, our emissions reductions targets. And we need to make large scale investments to make those happen. Climate needs to be at the center of all future planning done by all nations of the world. And we're starting to see that happen. It's not happening fast enough or thoroughly enough by my lights, but the 21st century needs to be a century of climate action if it is not going to be a century of climate disaster. But there's also a whole other side of the ledger, which is what's called the adaptation side of the ledger. So when we talk about these extreme weather impacts, we can also find ways to live in that world. It will be harder and harder, the hotter it gets and the more extreme weather we have. But, you know, we're also a

wealthy and innovative set of cultures. If we find ourselves living in climate conditions that our grandparents would have found totally impossible to credit, that doesn't mean that we won't be able to live in them. It just means that they will be shaping the contours of our lives and our expectations for the future in a very deep and profound way. And that goes especially true for a country like the US, which is by global standards, relatively buffered from some of the harshest impacts and because it has so much wealth can adapt. It's less true in parts of the global south and around the equatorial band of the planet where climate impacts could be much more fundamentally disruptive. And yet, even there, if you look at, for instance, in Bangladesh, they've saved countless lives by building out an early warnings flood system to make sure people get out of the way when there's a typhoon coming.

And we can make innovations like that and adaptations like that and indeed we will the problem is the hotter the planet gets the more out of order the climate system gets the taller the challenge of adaptation is both from at a human level where we're probably going to be moving tens of millions of people away from ancestral homelands and that kind of thing and also in a literal dollars and cents way where like to save lower Manhattan where I live, we're going to be building like $100 billion seawall to enclose New York Harbor, which will also totally transform the sort of cultural meaning of a harbor which used to welcome the world's migrants and will literally have a wall in it probably by the time that I'm an old man.

Thinking more about the wealthy nations versus the not-so-wealthy ones or increasingly wealthy ones, how are we going to deal with developing economies increasing carbon footprints, all of the inevitable air conditioners and cars and bigger houses for emerging middle-class workers around the world? Well, I would just say it's not inevitable. You can run your electric car on coal, and that's a bigger carbon footprint, or you can run it on renewables, and that's a smaller carbon footprint. That kind of choose-your-own choose your own adventure pathway is there in front of every country in the world. Now, you know, it used to be the case, even as recently as the Paris Accords, which were negotiated in 2015, ultimately signed in 2016, not very long ago, there was this understanding that we had to make allowances for the global south to continue emitting much more. And indeed, probably the global north owed the global south a considerable amount of support in terms of financing and philanthropy, both on the sort of R&D innovation energy side, and also on the adaptation side. And I think from a moral point of view, that's absolutely right. It's the global

north that has created this problem. And it's by and large, the global south is going to be suffering most intensely. And again, a few years ago, it seemed like this sort of foolish Davos fear dream that you could say, oh, well, these countries jumped from having no phones to having cell phones. They skipped over landlines. We could do the same with jumping over dirty energy and go directly from, you know, burning wood in your home to having solar power or wind power. And there did seem to be something foolish about that a few years ago or naive about it or patronizing about it. But the truth is now, coal at least, is more expensive than solar or wind, which means

anyone who's making a 10 or 15- year plan, even in a poor country, the logic of pursuing renewables is really quite strong. And I think that that bind or dilemma where like on the one hand, you have growth and on the other hand, you have climate responsibility. I really don't think it holds anymore. We want all of these countries to grow. We don't want to keep them in poverty. We certainly don't want to keep them in poverty so that people like you and me in our richer parts of the world can live

in a relatively more comfortable climate. That would be abhorrent. But I actually think that most economic analysis would now say that those countries, all of them would thrive more, grow more quickly if they invested more dramatically in renewables. And it's the stated plan of the government of Indonesia. There are a number of other studies that have come out from national planning entities across sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia over the last few years that sort of pointed in this direction, if didn't get like all the way there,

to say that what we used to think was necessary for global middle-classness now looks very different. And that could be helped by countries in the global north who are doing much more generous financing of new renewable projects. It could also be helped by a more generous relationship to IP such that solar technology was essentially a global good and not privately owned. There are a lot of steps like that that could be taken. But even given the existing economic infrastructure of the world, I think that for the first time, you know, the last year, 18 months, it started to look, even for the poorest countries in the world, like a renewable future was also a prosperous one. And that's another reason why, you that's another reason for optimism in the big picture. And I really love the optimism, but we should be prepared for some tension between

the global North and South, right? Oh, well, I think that 100% there will be tension everywhere, and that the global North and the global south will be one of those dividing lines. I imagine there are going to be calls for climate reparations and investment in adaptation measures in the global south to have countries like the US or the UK support those investments in ways they haven't at this point. I also think the way that the climate-fueled migration crisis grows and challenges the domestic politics of many of these rich countries will be an incredibly important story. And we're already seeing, I would say at best, a complicated relationship to the idea of climate refugees and, generally speaking, an uptick in human migration away from poverty and difficulty towards prosperity and opportunity. It's not like we're letting all those people into all of our countries at the moment. All I mean to say is that the economic logic of a developing nation is no longer that prosperity means dirty

energy. There may be a period of time as they build out their renewable capacity, where they may be reluctant to retire existing fossil fuel infrastructure, say. There may even be a time in certain cases where they're continuing to build out some of that capacity. But I think if you look at the sort of course of coal power, especially around the globe over the last few years, it just seems more and more to be a dead end. And I think more and more countries are seeing it that way. So we'll see. I don't want to rule out the possibility that renewables will continue to be a sort of boutique concern of wealthy Northern European countries. It may continue to be the case. But I think most sort of hardheaded economic analysis suggests that almost every economy in the world will be better off the more it is powered by zero emissions power. than anyone else is, you know, concerted long lasting action from those two super polluters

slash superpowers that have so much economic influence around the world. Is that good enough to get us close to these targets? I think that if the US and China are really racing towards decarbonization, that like, the whole rest of the global economy will be shaped by those forces in a way that makes everybody else inevitably chase along. Truly global international agreements are useful, but if the U.S. and China are really playing serious hardball on decarbonization, the geopolitics of it are almost for show at that point. And that's not just because we're really powerful markets, but it's like we're just going to be innovating that technology so dramatically and making it so much more affordable and so much more efficient. China's also engaged in a huge global infrastructure way, that's going to change the 21st century infrastructure of South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa dramatically. The question is whether

the US and China are going to be that serious about it, or whether they're interested in doing just enough to seem like they're moving in the right direction while still keeping legacy industries alive. Because legacy industries, even if they come out short in an objective economic analysis, still have a lot of power in our political economy. And that goes for China as well. It's even though they're structured differently, their coal industry is very politically powerful and very well connected. It's been a huge part of their economic boom over the last 20 years. So even though there's not the same Citizens United issues over there, you have similar problems of the relationship between especially fossil fuel

industry and political power. And that's true all around the world where many of the biggest oil and gas businesses are actually state owned. And this is the big question. It's like, do we just want to pat ourselves on the back and say, we are taking this seriously? Or do we want to actually move as quickly as the science demands? And I don't think it's any longer like a possibility that we just don't do anything at all. But the question is whether we're just making an empty show of decarbonization or whether we're really investing in it like our lives depend on it, which, you know, ultimately they do. David Wallace-Wells is the author of The Uninhabitable Earth. And maybe if it were

published today, he'd call it the somewhat less uninhabitable earth. Maybe, hopefully. He also writes for New York Magazine. You can find his work at nymag.com. There is no bigger contributor to carbon emissions in the United States, at least, than our automobiles. Earth Week on Today Explained continues tomorrow with an episode about how Norway is crushing us in the electric car race and how President Biden plans to play catch up. You can find everything we're doing all across our Vox podcast to celebrate the Earth this month at vox.com slash Earth Month.