The Joe Rogan ExperienceJoe Rogan Experience #1259 - David Wallace-Wells
EVERY SPOKEN WORD
155 min read · 30,692 words- 0:00 – 15:00
(sniffs) Four, three, two,…
- JRJoe Rogan
(sniffs) Four, three, two, one. David. So, first of all, thanks for doing this.
- DWDavid Wallace-Wells
Oh, my pleasure.
- JRJoe Rogan
And-
- DWDavid Wallace-Wells
Really excited.
- JRJoe Rogan
How much trouble are we in? Legitimately?
- DWDavid Wallace-Wells
I mean, it's pretty bad already and it's gonna get, I think, a lot, lot worse, so-
- JRJoe Rogan
It's not bad right now, right here. It's raining. It seems nice out. The hills are green.
- DWDavid Wallace-Wells
I mean, how long ago were the fires? Right, right around the corner.
- JRJoe Rogan
I got evacuated (laughs) . It was October.
- DWDavid Wallace-Wells
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah, it was rough but, in all fairness I've been evacuated three times over the past 20 years.
- DWDavid Wallace-Wells
Yeah, no. The fires, California's fires are kind of interesting in that, um, they both seem like it's like the future, the apocalypse, they're here. But also it's so familiar from like decades of wildfires. Um, but you know there are scientific estimates that say that they're gonna get, by the end of the century, 64 times worse.
- JRJoe Rogan
What?
- DWDavid Wallace-Wells
Yeah, I think that number's a little high, 'cause that would mean more than half of California burning every year. But, um, I mean it's gonna get, yeah, it'll get, it'll get crazy.
- JRJoe Rogan
And there's no way to avoid any of this wildfire stuff?
- DWDavid Wallace-Wells
Well, I mean, you know if we don't raise the temperature of the planet then...
- JRJoe Rogan
(sighs) But is, is that the only thing that's causing wildfire- I mean like obviously if the temperature raises, uh, there's more brown dry-
- DWDavid Wallace-Wells
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
... leaves and grass and stuff like that. But is-
- DWDavid Wallace-Wells
Yeah, no, there's a, there's a lot of preventative stuff you can do. I mean, not building in certain areas-
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- DWDavid Wallace-Wells
... 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 they're all these homes that we don't want to burn. They're all these, you know, properties we don't wanna burn. And when you, um, when you like restrict the ability of natural wildfires to burn that means that like more tinder gets built over time, and then you know at some point something lights the match and it all burns. So that, I mean you could, um, you could do more controlled fire. You could take more aggressive action in terms of, um, you know, like spraying foam and that kind of thing.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- DWDavid Wallace-Wells
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 is like a environmental historian.
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- DWDavid Wallace-Wells
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.
- JRJoe Rogan
So the action is not to stop it, it's to kind of contain it-
- DWDavid Wallace-Wells
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
... as best they can.
- DWDavid Wallace-Wells
Yeah.
- 15:00 – 30:00
Right. …
- DWDavid Wallace-Wells
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, there's more to say, and even beyond like telling the, the bleak story, telling the really dark, um, 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, 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-
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- DWDavid Wallace-Wells
... 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 this 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 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 b- world is burning? These are all these kind of like humanities questions that I felt really w- 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? Um, you know, myth, 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 a, 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-
- JRJoe Rogan
I've seen those before. I've seen the designs for those where they had these enormous like, uh, apartment building sized air filter things.
- DWDavid Wallace-Wells
Yeah. I mean, it's basically like-
- JRJoe Rogan
But only, only in theory.
- DWDavid Wallace-Wells
They're, they're-
- JRJoe Rogan
(coughs) .
- DWDavid Wallace-Wells
They do exist in, in the real world, but only at a kind of, like in laboratories. They don't-
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- DWDavid Wallace-Wells
... exist at anything like the scale they need to, but there's a guy at Harvard named David Keith who, um, has tested his machines. They're able to take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere at a cost of $100 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 $3 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, like, I make in the book, and I, I, it sticks in my head so strongly is, you know, we think of climate change as 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 premier 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.
- JRJoe Rogan
Whoa.
- DWDavid Wallace-Wells
Yeah. And the next 30 years are gonna 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.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- DWDavid Wallace-Wells
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 time scale is so crazy, because you have this really compressed, we-must-act-now-to-avert-these-worst-case-scenarios time scale, 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, 1,200, 1,500 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, 'cause that means we don't have to change anything.
- JRJoe Rogan
Well, th- 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, es- especially if it does something to inconvenience or get in the way of our day-to-day routine, and that seems to be what ha- what's happening here. And that seems to me... (coughs) Excuse me. That seems to me to be why people are so willing to dismiss it, uh, 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.
- DWDavid Wallace-Wells
Yeah. No, I think that's, I mean, totally true, and I feel it in my own life.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- DWDavid Wallace-Wells
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."
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- DWDavid Wallace-Wells
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.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- DWDavid Wallace-Wells
And we're gonna 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- 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. Um, I mean, the- the- 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, um, 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.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- DWDavid Wallace-Wells
There's this, um... He's actually an English professor named Timothy Morton who wro- who wrote a book about, um, climate, and he calls it a hyperobject, which is like... It's a, 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. Um, but I think that's... All- 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 gonna 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, something's 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 cl- 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 gonna 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 st- like, we would still be really in bad shape, you know.
- JRJoe Rogan
Is there a, um, uh, I mean, I- 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, uh, are those a pr- those seem to be a problem with this whole, uh, concept we have of wrapping our head around it, and if we find anything that we could point to and say-
- DWDavid Wallace-Wells
Totally.
- JRJoe Rogan
... "Oh, back in the '80s, they said we'd all be dead by now, and we're fine-"
- DWDavid Wallace-Wells
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
"... we're gonna be fine."
- 30:00 – 45:00
Well, there- there's also…
- DWDavid Wallace-Wells
you know, like, you can imagine agriculture getting f- 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 g- you know, how are you gonna solve the conflict problem? How are you gonna solve the- 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 re- uh, 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 wanna look at it closely, because it's terrifying.
- JRJoe Rogan
Well, there- there's also a matter of how it's being projected to the public, right? Like, in- in certain circles particularly, right wing circles, uh, there- there are people that are trying to paint this with 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, uh, our, uh, what we've done in terms of raising the carbon in the atmosphere.
- DWDavid Wallace-Wells
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
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.
- DWDavid Wallace-Wells
Yeah, I would say, uh, 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-
- JRJoe Rogan
That's hilarious.
- DWDavid Wallace-Wells
(laughs) But, you know, the, um, to the- to the deniers who say things like, "You know, the planet was hotter than this before," that's true-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah, dinosaurs lived here.
- DWDavid Wallace-Wells
Humans were not here.
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- DWDavid Wallace-Wells
I mean, if we were four degrees warmer, four d- the last time the planet was four degrees warmer, there were palm trees in the Arctic. Um ... (laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
What? (laughs)
- DWDavid Wallace-Wells
Yeah. (laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
Really?
- DWDavid Wallace-Wells
We've already exited the entire window of temperature that enclosed 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've ever evolved in the first place.
- JRJoe Rogan
And this is all from the Industrial Revolution, from then on.
- DWDavid Wallace-Wells
Yeah. And, uh, yeah, and like- and-
- JRJoe Rogan
(coughs)
- DWDavid Wallace-Wells
... 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-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- DWDavid Wallace-Wells
... 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-
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- DWDavid Wallace-Wells
... because that means (laughs) we can stop doing it.
- JRJoe Rogan
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.
- DWDavid Wallace-Wells
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
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 to extract carbon from the atmosphere-
- DWDavid Wallace-Wells
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
... I'm sure you're probably aware of, um, there's some of the programs that they've talked about, uh, s- suspending reflective particles in the atmosphere-
- DWDavid Wallace-Wells
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
... to- to minimize the amount of solar radiation we receive.
- 45:00 – 1:00:00
Now, the Al Gore…
- DWDavid Wallace-Wells
more precarious, much more unstable. Um, 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. Weather, like, we're entirely outside of that, um, window of temperatures, which means we're functionally now living on an entirely different planet than humans ever lived on before, and it's gonna keep changing. So by the time we get to two, three, four degrees, we'll be, uh, living in, in a climate that's, you know, two or three or four times as much different as the one that we're es- now from the one before the Industrial Revolution. And yeah, it's like those impacts could be totally overwhelming and catastrophic.
- JRJoe Rogan
Now, the Al Gore film is, uh, something that scared a lot of people, but i- it was also very widely dismissed by a lot of other people as well. How accurate was that movie?
- DWDavid Wallace-Wells
I think it, it proved to be too sanguine. It b- like, 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, 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. 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 heatwave last summer, totally unprecedented. People died in Canada, they died in Russia, they died in the Middle East. The same season, three 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, it's 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, um, were, 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, um, 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. Um, 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 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-
- JRJoe Rogan
Why is that?
- DWDavid Wallace-Wells
Because we just ... if we're like, uh, 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."
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- DWDavid Wallace-Wells
You know, we just grow the pie of energy. Um-
- JRJoe Rogan
And this is unnecessary? It's not because there's a, just a massive demand? Is it just because they don't want to end that industry?
- DWDavid Wallace-Wells
Yeah, I mean, there is a demand. People-
- JRJoe Rogan
Like number one-
- DWDavid Wallace-Wells
... like energy. (laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
... Trump was talking about clean coal-
- DWDavid Wallace-Wells
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
... and everybody was like, "What the fuck are you talking about?"
- DWDavid Wallace-Wells
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
"Clean coal?"
- DWDavid Wallace-Wells
I mean, I think on some level, American policy is a red herring. The US 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 US, and they're building all this infrastructure outside of China that doesn't even count, um, in Asia and Africa, you know, the Belt and Road, do you know this-
- JRJoe Rogan
No.
- DWDavid Wallace-Wells
... project? So, they're basically taking the model that the US 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, um, Kenya a huge amount of money to build a new rail line, which was g- being built with Chinese workers. They built the rail line, um, then they, Kenya couldn't pay back the debt, so China, um, 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 as an, in an effort to build a new em- imperial infrastructure for themselves.
- JRJoe Rogan
And is the thought that they're doing this in terms of, uh, setting up the debt in a way that's unpayable so that they could take over?
- DWDavid Wallace-Wells
I, that's one motive.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- DWDavid Wallace-Wells
I think that the Kenya exam- but they'd be happy if the debt got repaid. I think it's, they're, 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-
- JRJoe Rogan
Mmm.
- DWDavid Wallace-Wells
... 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, um, every three years than the entire, than the US poured in the entire 20th century.
- JRJoe Rogan
Jesus Christ.
- DWDavid Wallace-Wells
And if concrete were a country, it would be the world's third-biggest carbon emitter. So the, the, the path of development of these other countries, China, India, and l- sub-Saharan Africa, are really what's gonna be writing the story of the future. America has a kind of, I think, like, a mar- 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 US, market forces are doing a lot of, are making a lot of progress for us. Um, so the real issue is, how do we 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, um, you know, Xi Jinping is basically a dictator. If he wants to impose, um, new standards, if he wants to invest aggressively in green energy, he doesn't have any of the o- political obstacles that we have in the US. And so there's this sort of weird sympathy among American climate people for that, um, authoritarianism, and he has, especially since Trump has been elected, been a lot more aggressive about talking about climate because he sees if America's not gonna be leading, this is an opportunity for China to be, like, the real face of climate. And that means they've paid, they've, you know, they've invested a ton in, in, um, solar and wind. They've done a lot with air pollution, so Beijing used to be really awful. In 2013, I think more than a million Chinese people died of air pollution, and now that's much better. Um-
- JRJoe Rogan
What have they done?
- DWDavid Wallace-Wells
Just imposing stricter standards on, um, on pollution, so-
- JRJoe Rogan
So emissions, uh, b- coal plants, things like that?
- 1:00:00 – 1:14:46
(laughs) …
- DWDavid Wallace-Wells
um, lives in New York, does a lot of consulting with the city, and I said, "So are we gonna 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."
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- DWDavid Wallace-Wells
"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 saying 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 gonna be able to live them, leave them to your kids.'"
- JRJoe Rogan
Whoa.
- DWDavid Wallace-Wells
This is in New York City. It's like the richest country (laughs) and the richest city in the world, and-... yeah, huge parts of, um, huge parts of Southern Brooklyn and Queens are going to be underwater.
- JRJoe Rogan
So, for the people that live there right now, what parts are you talking about?
- DWDavid Wallace-Wells
Um, well the one that, the one that he mentioned most explicitly was Howard Beach but, um, which is, it's kind of an int- it's like a, a mob neighborhood and, you know-
- JRJoe Rogan
It's still?
- DWDavid Wallace-Wells
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Really?
- DWDavid Wallace-Wells
Well, yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah?
- DWDavid Wallace-Wells
(laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
S- 'cause that was like the gaudy neighborhood, right?
- DWDavid Wallace-Wells
Yeah, that's where-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- DWDavid Wallace-Wells
... they buried all the bed- dead bodies.
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- DWDavid Wallace-Wells
Um-
- JRJoe Rogan
I didn't know that was still a mob neighborhood.
- DWDavid Wallace-Wells
Well, you know, to the extent that there is a mob. Yeah. Um, and yeah, I mean, that's true everywhere on the coast everywhere. It's not just New York. New York's not exceptional.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- DWDavid Wallace-Wells
You know there are projections that like $30 billion of New Jersey real estate could be underwater by 2030. 2030. Uh-
- JRJoe Rogan
Why is that not as alarming?
- DWDavid Wallace-Wells
(laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- DWDavid Wallace-Wells
I mean, I-
- JRJoe Rogan
I mean, I-
- DWDavid Wallace-Wells
... I was born in New Jersey too.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah. (laughs)
Episode duration: 1:53:34
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