Today, Explained - The case for climate reparations

Episode Date: November 4, 2021

While world leaders have descended on Glasgow to try to figure out how to slow emissions in the future, New York magazine’s David Wallace-Wells argues rich countries like the United States should also atone for their polluting past. Today’s show was produced by Will Reid and Miles Bryan, edited by Matt Collette, engineered by Cristian Ayala, fact-checked by Laura Bullard and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit Superstore.ca to get started. You might think every climate conference is the same. A bunch of world leaders get together and fail to take meaningful action on the biggest problem facing the planet. But I'm here to tell you they are not all the same. For example, the United Nations kicked off COP26 with a velociraptor. This particular raptor was voiced by two-time Golden Globe nominee Jack Black. And yet every year, governments spend hundreds of billions of public funds on fossil fuel subsidies. Imagine if we had spent hundreds of billions per year subsidizing giant meteors.

That's what you're doing right now. The Raptor gave an impassioned speech. It's time for you humans to stop making excuses and start making changes. Thank you. But will this promotional video make a difference? And even if humans do stop putting carbon in the atmosphere, who's responsible for all the carbon that's already stuck there? That's what we're going to talk about on the show today,

starting with Vox's Umair Irfan. He said, first, we have to turn back the hands of time to Paris 2015. That was when just about every country in the world agreed to limit climate change. Good afternoon, everybody. Today's a historic day in the fight to protect our planet for future generations. They wanted to limit warming this century to 2 degrees Celsius or less compared to pre-industrial temperatures, that's about 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, and had a more ambitious secondary target of staying below 1.5 degrees Celsius.

No nation, not even one as powerful as ours, can solve this challenge alone. All of us have to solve it together. This was a huge step forward. This was not a given that every country in the world would take climate change seriously enough to commit to solving it. Today, the world meets the moment. And if we follow through on the commitments that this Paris Agreement embodies, history may well judge it as a turning point for our planet. But then that one guy showed up, right?

That one guy being Donald Trump? Uh-huh. The former president of the United States? That guy. That guy. The United States will withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord. That was a bit of a detour, a curveball, a setback. Depends on how you want to frame that.

The bottom line is that the Paris Accord is very unfair at the highest level to the United States. He announced basically within a few months of taking office that he would withdraw the U.S. from the Paris Agreement. But because of the way the process works, the U.S. wasn't actually able to formally withdraw until after he had already lost the election. So this was basically back in November 2020 when the U.S. formally exited the agreement. But what that did was it basically sent a signal to the rest of the world that the U.S., the world's second largest greenhouse gas emitter, currently about 15 percent of total global emissions, wasn't taking this seriously. And a lot of other countries

use that as a signal or as a cover to not take it seriously themselves. So for President Joe Biden, who campaigned on rejoining the accord and basically put in the paperwork to do it just about right after he took office, he has to make up for lost time and basically rebuild trust with the rest of the world and show that the U.S. is actually taking this seriously, not just in terms of commitments, but with actually bringing action to the table. We meet with the eyes of history upon us and the profound questions before us. It's simple. Will we act? Will we do what is necessary? Will we seize the enormous opportunity before us?

Or will we condemn future generations to suffer? Okay, so the United States is back at the table in Glasgow. What about the rest of the world's biggest polluters? The whole gang is here. You know, just about every country that signed onto the Paris Agreement, you know, all the conference of parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, they all have representatives here. Now, some countries sent their top leaders, like the United States, sending the president, but others sent just negotiators. And some people are reading that as a signal that they're not taking this as seriously. In particular, China, President Xi Jinping did not make a personal visit to this

conference. So some people seem to read that as China not really being willing to step up their game just yet. The fact that China trying to assert, understandably, a new role in the world as a world leader, not showing up. Come on. Bit of a bummer because China's the biggest polluter in the world, if I remember correctly. The U.S. is number two. So I guess that leaves Biden out there trying to lead the polluting pack. How's he doing? Since this was the meeting where countries were supposed to step up their game, we've actually been seeing over the past few months a lot of countries actually doing that. Back in April, the United States said that it was going to amplify and enhance its initial target for cutting greenhouse gas emissions, essentially saying that they would cut in half

relative to 2005 levels by 2030. Okay, so the United States is stepping up. Let's talk about the goals of COP26. The big goal is to have everybody at the table come forward with stronger commitments, ideally in line with what the Paris Agreement set out. So below two degrees Celsius of warming. So have emissions cuts that would bring us on that pathway and ideally get us on course for 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming. So an even more ambitious target. Okay.

So that's the primary objective, getting most of the world's emissions in line with that goal. get us on course for 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming, so an even more ambitious target. So that's the primary objective, getting most of the world's emissions in line with that goal. Beyond that, there are a few other targets, you know, things like international climate finance, basically how developing countries who need more resources can finance their transition toward cleaner energy and also protect themselves from the changes in the climate that we can't avoid. And then there's also some important sort of weedy discussions about how countries can comply with the Paris Agreement, basically what tools are available to them. Beyond just reducing their emissions in the near term, there are rules that have to be sorted out about how they trade carbon across countries and across borders. And that has been a thorny

issue in the past. And the idea is to help resolve those issues. So that way we have a definite set of standards for how countries can actually meet their targets and how they can be scrutinized and validated. Okay. And I think what it's Thursday today, we're about halfway through COP26. What commitments have come out of the conference so far? Well, in addition to the U.S. increasing its commitment to cutting greenhouse gas emissions, that announcement was made back in April, we heard a huge commitment from India, which was kind of a surprise. Firstly, India will increase its non-fossil energy capacity to 500 gigawatts by 2030. India is aiming to reach net zero emissions for its entire economy by 2070.

That's a little bit further past other goals from other countries. Most countries are aiming for about 2050. But the fact that India committed to a target at all is a big step because this is something that India was not willing to do at all. So China also has a net zero target by roughly 2060. The U.S. has a net zero target by 2050. So the world's top three greenhouse gas emitters have all committed to zeroing out their greenhouse gas emissions by roughly the middle of the century. So that's a big step forward and something that kind of overshadows a lot of the other developments.

And there have been some other announcements as well. So another big one was a pledge to reduce methane emissions. Scientists say this highly potent greenhouse gas has been responsible for about half the human-induced warming of the planet we've experienced so far. Methane is a very powerful greenhouse gas. It's about 30 times as powerful as carbon

dioxide in terms of trapping heat in the atmosphere. So reducing it has an outsized benefit. And so some of the world's largest methane emitters agreed to cut methane emissions by about 30 percent by 2030. So that's a big pledge. Including the United States, yeah? Including the United States, which, you know, is one of the world's largest natural gas producers, and methane is a dominant component of natural gas. It's going to boost our economies, saving companies money, reducing methane leaks, capturing methane, turning it into new revenue streams, as well as creating good paying union jobs for our workers.

So that was a pretty significant commitment. And then countries also committed to ending deforestation. Ending it? Yeah, basically. We have to stop the devastating loss of our forests. Some of the world's largest countries basically said that forests are really important for sucking carbon dioxide out of the air, and they have a whole bunch of other side benefits in terms of natural resources. And they're really important also for people who live in those communities as

well. These great teeming ecosystems, trillion-pillared cathedrals of nature, three trillion-pillared cathedrals of nature that are the lungs of our planet. And so the goal now is to not just slow the decline of forests around the world, but to bring it to a halt by roughly 2030, and then eventually reverse it. So we may be adding more forested area in the world than we're losing. But of course, there's no enforcement mechanism here, right? These agreements don't have any teeth. I wouldn't say they have no teeth. I mean, I think the main enforcement mechanism is naming and shaming, you know, calling everybody to the mat, having everybody being transparent about where their goals are and what they're actually doing, you know, having that available for public

scrutiny. The idea is that when countries, other countries can see what you're doing and not doing, that can add sort of pressure. Now, you're right that there isn't a penalty per se. You know, you can't, nobody's going to jail for this. Nobody's getting fined if they miss their target. No one's getting sanctioned. Yeah. I mean, like there's the limit to how much you can pressure countries or how much of a disincentive you can offer. But that's also a function of an agreement like this. You know, nobody lost a war and was forced to the table to sign this. Everybody's here voluntarily.

And for a problem like climate change, we need everybody at the table because everybody has to contribute to the solution. And so if you have an agreement that's too strong or that causes too much consternation in one country, that country can just take their ball and go home. And then where would we all be if we have a holdout, a country that isn't willing to participate? So it's a really difficult collective action problem. And for diplomats, that's really the trick here is, you know, U.S. and China have to sit at the same table, even though they have an ongoing trade war. And there's concerns about China's treatment of the Uyghur Muslim minority there as well. And, you know, you have geopolitical rivals also having to work together.

You have countries that want to sell oil and you have countries that want to ban the export or extraction of oil. And all of them have to come to some sort of agreement here. And that's why these things are slow going. They're tedious. On the other hand, how else would you do this? There's really no other way to get everybody at the table to agree to something like this. John Kerry, who is now America's climate envoy, has called COP26 the, quote, last best chance the world has to come together in order to do the things we need to do to avoid the worst consequences of the climate crisis.

I feel like everything feels like the last chance these days. And even for, you know, years in the past, Al Gore was talking about this being our last chance in like 2004. Is it always the last chance? The longer we wait, the harder things get. And so this might be the best opportunity to use some of our easiest and most effective options. You know, climate change is a problem that, you know, is not just about space.

It's about time. It's about how quickly you address these issues. And when we emit carbon dioxide, that's a gas that stays in the atmosphere for centuries. So the CO2 we emit now will be reckoning with in 2050 and 2100. Conversely, whatever we do to reduce emissions now in the near term has huge benefits that will, you know, ripple out throughout the rest of our lives. And so that's why it's really important to get as much aggressive action up front to front load the emissions reductions as possible. If you keep waiting, then that keeps painting you into a corner. That means you need more and more aggressive cuts in a narrower window of time. And you may have to rely on

technologies that we haven't even seen reach maturation just yet. But the converse of that is true as well. Anything we do to limit climate change benefits us. Whatever we can do to keep that warming in check has dividends for all of us, for all of humanity. So while there might be a point where we miss our goals, there will never be a point where we should give up. And certainly there will never be a point where we should despair. Thank you. photo frame by Wirecutter. Aura frames make it easy to share unlimited photos and videos directly from your phone to the frame. When you give an aura frame as a gift, you can personalize it, you can preload it with a thoughtful message, maybe your favorite photos. Our colleague Andrew tried an aura frame for himself. So setup was super simple. In my case, we were celebrating

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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. All right, we established China's the number one polluter on Earth right now, and all these countries are at least talking about pumping the brakes on carbon emissions in the future. But what about the past? Who's responsible for all the carbon that's already, you know, destroying the planet? The short answer is the rich countries of the world. Maybe even the shorter answer is the United States above all others.

David Wallace-Wells, New York Magazine. We have about 2,500 gigatons of carbon that's been put up there, and about 500, a little more than 500, has been put up there by the U.S., which means this one country, the richest country in the world, is responsible for about 20% of all historical emissions, which altogether are the reason we're in the bind we're in today. We're not in the bind we're in today because of India and China's future emissions, although we need to take care of them. We are where we are now because of what's happened in the past, because those emissions are still functionally heating the planet. And I think this sort of sets the stage for why you wrote recently a cover story for New York Magazine titled The Case for Climate Reparations. What's your case? I mean, if you take seriously and understand the way that historical emissions have really degraded and damaged the planet, especially in ways that are affecting

the most vulnerable who have also done the least damage. That implies a very clear to me moral responsibility of those who have gotten rich off of development powered by fossil fuels and who are now much better prepared to endure the new world that they've made. It's like if a toxic chemical plant was dumping all of its waste down the river, you know, down to the next town, and that town was suffering all of these terrible health consequences of that pollution, an honest reckoning with who did the damage and who is suffering would suggest that that company, that industrial plant, was responsible for taking care of those who are bearing the burden of environmental impacts that they've imposed on the world. At a very basic sort of philosophical level,

we owe it to the people who've done the least and who are going to be suffering from the damage that we've caused. I think that's inarguable unless you want to look at people in the global south and say that their lives just don't count or don't count nearly as much as ours. And so specifically here, you're not just talking about a moral obligation or a moral debt. It sounds like you're suggesting that there is a literal financial debt here. Is that right? What I was trying to do is to put a dollar figure on it. And the way that I did that is by talking about the fact that we have technology today that can take carbon out of the atmosphere. It's expensive. It's very energy intensive. We're not doing it at anything like the scale that we need to.

But in theory, we could be using it at much greater scale that we didn't just neutralize the planet's remaining emissions, but sort of wound back the clock, taking carbon out of the atmosphere and allowing the whole climate to sort of restore itself to a pre-industrial level. And from that, I tried to work backwards and say, okay, if carbon removal of that scale is going to cost, most experts expect, something like $100 a ton, that you take a ton of carbon out of the air, it'll cost 100 bucks, then really all you have of carbon out of the air, it'll cost $100. Then really all you have to do is multiply the number of tons that we've put up there by 100, and you get the bill.

How big is it? The U.S. would owe $50 trillion. Wow. Globally, the entire bill would be $250 trillion, which is basically about half of all global wealth today. And that sounds like an enormous amount, right? Which it is, of course. But two things to keep in mind.

The first is we've probably spent something like $25 trillion this year on pandemic relief. In the U.S. alone, we've spent about $10 trillion on pandemic relief. So we're talking about a total bill for the U.S., which is the world's biggest emitter. That's only five times what we spent on COVID. And we're talking about spending it over the course of a century or two. So it's in this zone of, you know, enormously large, but it's also tangible. You know, I think it's quite unlikely that we undertake a spending project of that scale in the near term. But I would like to think that we can start planning for it in the second half of the century, sort of as a next act beyond getting to net zero. Because once we have reduced most of our emissions, we're probably

going to want to do something with all the infrastructure we've built to do that in order to go even further and make sure that, you know, if we land at two and a half degrees, that's not the permanent temperature for the future of human history, but we could actually rewind and get us back under one degree Celsius of warming, for instance. It feels like there are two massive hurdles to get over here with your plan. The extraordinary financial cost and the technology. Let's talk about the technology first. Is carbon capture technology anywhere near where it needs to be to do something like this at the scale you're talking about? Well, those are sort of two different questions. Is the tech ready to do it?

And is it ready to do it at scale? The answer to the first is yes. Here's how Climeworks system works. It's a box with a huge fan on one end and a filter inside that only attracts carbon dioxide. The fan sucks the air through the filter and once the filter is saturated, the box is closed. It's then heated to 100 degrees Celsius and pure carbon dioxide is released and collected. I mean, there are companies that are doing it for profit today. Their costs are considerably higher than $100 a ton. The biggest one in Switzerland is charging $600 a ton, $500 a ton. But experts expect that as this grows, that those prices will fall pretty predictably. Different companies all around the world are doing it in different ways

and storing the carbon in different manners. And some are using it to produce zero carbon jet fuel and other ones are putting it underground. Storage starts by pumping liquid CO2 into a carefully chosen reservoir. A suitable CO2 storage reservoir needs a layer of porous rock at the correct depth to hold the CO2, sufficient capacity, and an impermeable layer of cap rock to seal the porous layer underneath. But the tech is there, it works, and we know that the storage will last forever. Unlike some nature-based solutions like planting trees where we're dependent on the life cycle of the tree to store that carbon. So if there's a forest fire, or if the tree gets cut down, or if there's some beetle infestation, that carbon ultimately gets released. And these tech solutions, particularly direct air capture, which is one of the tools, are much more permanent.

By injecting CO2 underground, we are in effect returning carbon back to where it came from. We're talking about billions of tons of carbon. The IPCC says that putting aside carbon restoration of the kind that I'm talking about, just getting us to zero is going to require something like 10 to 20 billion tons of carbon being taken out of the atmosphere every single year in the second half of the century. That's an enormous project. To do it at an even greater scale so that we reverse the damage will require even more. This is not something I think that there's really going to be a market for. It needs to be a public market. It needs to be governments getting together and agreeing that this is a valuable

thing to do. In terms of storage, just about everybody who really works on this stuff thinks that there's effectively no limit to how much we can store. It's a question of how much money we're willing to spend to take it out of the atmosphere and what the political and social willingness is to build out a sort of new industrial infrastructure to deal with this problem. It'll cost some money, but you really can do it. Well, let's talk about the money because that was my other big question. And that seems like the other, you know, even more insurmountable hurdle here. I mean, it's a bit of an ironic time, of course, to be talking about how the United States can get together and drop maybe $50 trillion or how the world could get together and drop something like $250 when you can't even get all the Democrats in the Senate on the same

page or whatever. So how exactly do you get the world's richest nations and biggest polluters to commit to a spending plan unlike I think any the world has ever seen? Speaking practically, I think the case is really about time, which is to say, you know, we've heard a lot over the last few years about this timeline to cut our emissions in half by 2030. That's really important. Also, we've been hearing more over the last year about getting to zero by 2050. That's also really important.

But those timelines are relatively short. And so the kinds of things that we can mobilize and even imagine undertaking in those timescales are relatively limited because we have to erect them given the politics, given the political economy that we have today. But if you're talking about running some fleet of carbon capture machines in certain parts of the world to reduce carbon concentrations in the atmosphere from about 415 or 420 where they are today, maybe down to 350, which is understood to be a pretty safe level, or even to 280, which is where we were before the Industrial Revolution, you're talking about a project that could last 200 years. And spending $50 trillion over 200 years really is just a very different scale of spending

than talking about spending $50 trillion in a decade. So whatever seems plausible or implausible today, whether that'll seem plausible or implausible in 2075 is a really big open question. Personally, I like to think of this as a sort of everything and the kitchen sink, all hands on deck kind of a situation in which carbon removal seems to me to play, at least in the long term, a helpful contributing role to like restore some amount of the damage we've done. And because I think it's possible, I'd like to think we can do it. And I think it is beginning to shape some of the geopolitical landscape. At the COP26 conference in Glasgow, you had a recommitment, at least,

to this $100 billion a year climate funding that had been promised at Paris and never fulfilled. Everybody's now saying that we're going to deliver that amount of money. But, you know, it's another helpful thing about calculating those numbers we calculated earlier, $50 trillion, $250 trillion. When you think it's like the rich countries of the world are promising $100 billion, it's a tiny fraction of the debt that we really owe. It's time to count the real costs,

and it's time for the polluters to pay. It's time to keep the promises. No more empty promises. No more empty summits. No more empty conferences. It's time to show us the money. It's time. It's time. It's time. That was Ugandan climate activist Vanessa Nakate

speaking at the Youth for Climate conference this past September. Before that, you heard David Wallace-Wells, editor-at-large, New York Magazine. Before that, Umair Irfan, Science Vox. The show today was produced by Miles Bryan and Will Reed, edited by Matthew Collette, engineered by Christian Ayala, and fact-checked by Laura Bullard. The rest of the Today Explained team includes Afim,

The Dream Shapiro, Halima Shah, Victoria Chamberlain, and Hadi Mawagdi. Our supervising producer is Amina Alsadi. Our veep of audio out here at Vox is Liz Kelly Nelson, the deputies Jillian Weinberger. We had extra help this week from Paul Mounsey, music from Breakmaster Cylinder, and Noam Hassenfeld. I'm Sean Ramos for him. It's Today Explained. We're part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Thank you.