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Joe Rogan Experience #1259 - David Wallace-Wells

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

Joe RoganhostDavid Wallace-Wellsguest
Mar 7, 20191h 53mWatch on YouTube ↗

EVERY SPOKEN WORD

  1. 0:00 – 3:36

    Wildfires as a preview of the climate future (California, Santa Ana winds)

    1. JR

      (sniffs) Four, three, two, one. David. So, first of all, thanks for doing this.

    2. DW

      Oh, my pleasure.

    3. JR

      And-

    4. DW

      Really excited.

    5. JR

      How much trouble are we in? Legitimately?

    6. DW

      I mean, it's pretty bad already and it's gonna get, I think, a lot, lot worse, so-

    7. JR

      It's not bad right now, right here. It's raining. It seems nice out. The hills are green.

    8. DW

      I mean, how long ago were the fires? Right, right around the corner.

    9. JR

      I got evacuated (laughs) . It was October.

    10. DW

      Yeah.

    11. JR

      Yeah, it was rough but, in all fairness I've been evacuated three times over the past 20 years.

    12. DW

      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.

    13. JR

      What?

    14. DW

      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.

    15. JR

      And there's no way to avoid any of this wildfire stuff?

    16. DW

      Well, I mean, you know if we don't raise the temperature of the planet then...

    17. JR

      (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-

    18. DW

      Yeah.

    19. JR

      ... leaves and grass and stuff like that. But is-

    20. DW

      Yeah, no, there's a, there's a lot of preventative stuff you can do. I mean, not building in certain areas-

    21. JR

      Right.

    22. DW

      ... 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.

    23. JR

      Mm-hmm.

    24. DW

      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.

    25. JR

      Wow.

    26. DW

      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.

    27. JR

      So the action is not to stop it, it's to kind of contain it-

    28. DW

      Yeah.

    29. JR

      ... as best they can.

    30. DW

      Yeah.

  2. 3:36 – 6:27

    When nature breaches the city: fire near major metros and the myth of safety

    1. DW

      Well, uh, the, last year there were, there were flames like hopping over the 405, right?

    2. JR

      Mm-hmm.

    3. DW

      I mean, um-

    4. JR

      Yeah.

    5. DW

      ... and that's-

    6. JR

      That happened.

    7. DW

      ... that's really like crazy to me because, you know, 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.

    8. JR

      Right.

    9. DW

      Like I walk down on concrete streets, I look up at steel buildings. Nature can't come for me.

    10. JR

      Right.

    11. DW

      But when you see like fire straddling the 405, that's, you know... This is a major metropolis here, um-

    12. JR

      Right.

    13. DW

      ... and we're not safe. We're, 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.

    14. JR

      Yeah.

    15. DW

      It will affect you in some way.

    16. JR

      Yeah, there was, uh, the, both sides of the 405 were on fire last year. Last year or the year before last, o- one of those. But it was insane. It was, uh, it's, it was hitting Bel Air and people were like, "Well this is, this... We've never seen this before." I talked to a firefighter once, and this was years ago, and he told me, "With the right wind it's a matter of time 'fore a fire hits the top of LA and burns all the way to the ocean." And he goes, "And 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 LA..." Look at this. (coughs) What is that from, Jamie?

    17. NA

      That was the 405 fire, but it's just-

    18. JR

      Yeah, okay.

    19. NA

      ... above it.

    20. JR

      Oh, that's it. That's the crazy video. So this is Bel Air on the left-hand side.

    21. DW

      Yeah.

    22. JR

      And so these are people driving down the 405 looking at, you know, the most (laughs) ins- insane sight for a place that has 30 million people, or whatever LA has, to see the entire hillside on fire.

    23. DW

      And Bel Air, to me Bel Air is really interesting 'cause it's... You know, most climate impacts, they hit the world's poorest first.

    24. JR

      Mm-hmm.

    25. DW

      And like the wildfires are... They work in the reverse 'cause it's like people living in the hills.

    26. JR

      Yeah.

    27. DW

      Um, 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, you might get hit.

    28. JR

      Well the best example was, uh, Point Dume.

    29. DW

      Yeah.

    30. JR

      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 Dume. It's crazy because you know these are like $20 million estates.

  3. 6:27 – 8:19

    Coasts, floodplains, and building in the wrong places (Miami, LA, Houston)

    1. DW

      Yeah, I mean, and that's... I mean, yeah, and you think about Miami Beach going underwater and-

    2. JR

      Right.

    3. DW

      ... I mean, it's, uh-

    4. JR

      Well, Miami Beach is a weird one, right, because the, the ground is porous.

    5. DW

      Yeah.

    6. JR

      Yeah, so it's inevitable.

    7. DW

      I mean, it's-

    8. JR

      You gotta get out of there.

    9. DW

      There's basically a sandbar that, like-

    10. JR

      (laughs)

    11. DW

      ... some developers in the '20s decided that was, "Oh, we can make this into a fake paradise."

    12. JR

      Oh, really?

    13. DW

      Yeah. I mean, there was... Yeah, it was, um... I mean, LA's kind of the same way. Like, nobody looking at LA in 1850 would have said like, "Here's a great place to build a city."

    14. JR

      Right.

    15. DW

      Um, but we did it anyway. Like, America, in its, like, imperial swagger, was like, "No, we can create some paradise out of this completely inhospitable land-"

    16. JR

      (laughs)

    17. DW

      ... "in both places." And then, you know, it's just a lesson that, like, you know, it's just a matter of time.

    18. JR

      Well, the most cocky people are the people that have those houses on stilts on the water-

    19. DW

      Yeah.

    20. JR

      ... in Malibu, like... (laughs)

    21. DW

      Yeah. (laughs)

    22. JR

      How long is this gonna work out for you?

    23. DW

      Yeah.

    24. JR

      Like, this thing moves back and forth over time, and it has forever.

    25. DW

      I mean, if you think about, like, the long, long sweep of human history, most human settlements didn't happen on the coast.

    26. JR

      Right.

    27. DW

      Um, like, people lived in... Maybe they lived on a river. Maybe you'd have-

    28. JR

      Right.

    29. DW

      ... like, a little community on a river. But the, you know, the last, like, 50 years, we- or 100 years, we've built up s- especially in America, so much more on the coast. And that's, like, uh, you know, really inviting disaster. I mean, all of-

    30. JR

      Yeah.

  4. 8:19 – 9:20

    Deadly heat and mass migration risk by mid-century

    1. JR

      But yeah, if it gets hotter, they're fucked, too, 'cause it's just like... In the summertime in Houston, you know, when you're dealing with 100% humidity and it's 115 degrees outside-

    2. DW

      Yeah.

    3. JR

      ... you can't even, uh, explain to people what that feels like.

    4. DW

      I mean-

    5. JR

      You're getting cooked.

    6. DW

      There's, uh, there are places in the world that are gonna be l- they're gonna 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 b- uh, being at risk of dying by 2050.

    7. JR

      By 2050, like, what kind of temperature are we talking about?

    8. DW

      Well, it's a combination of heat and humidity, so... But, you know, usually, the heat'll be like up in the, uh, around 130, combined with some bad humidity.

    9. JR

      Phew.

    10. DW

      Um, but the, you know, there've, there've already been... We've already broken that threshold. Like, there've 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 the, the cities. It's like Calcutta has like 12 million people in it, and you may not be able to... You may not be able to live there, um, in the summer in just 30 years.

    11. JR

      Mm-hmm.

    12. DW

      And then you just think about where all those people are going and how much that's gonna destabilize everything.

  5. 9:20 – 13:18

    Warming targets, best-case vs likely paths: 2°C catastrophe and 4°C trajectory

    1. JR

      You know, I've talked to people, uh, who are terrified about this, and I've talked to people who are nonchalant. Um, where, where do you sit? Are you, are you terrified? Are y- do- 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?

    2. DW

      I mean, I have, I have different feelings about it at different times of day 'cause it's that big a story. It's, like, gonna affect everything, I think. Um, you know, I think civilization's not gonna 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, 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 s- imagining a world that seems a lot like the one that we live in today.

    3. JR

      Mm.

    4. DW

      But when I look at the science, um, it paints a really, really bleak picture. So, you know, the question of like optimism and, 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... This UN calls, um, catastrophic warming. The island nations of the world call genocide, and that's when we would b- 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. Um, 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.

    5. JR

      Can I stop you for a second?

    6. DW

      Yeah.

    7. JR

      Six simultaneous natural disasters at once?

    8. DW

      Yeah.

    9. JR

      What does that mean?

    10. DW

      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 in- 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 heatwave. 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, is 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.

    11. JR

      Mm-hmm.

    12. DW

      Um, and that's the, you know, it's not just, um, it's not just the temperature, it's like higher temperatures mean crazier extremes in all directions. And, um, you know, that, 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're 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 '90s kid, I grew up end of History thinking the world was gonna get better, the world was gonna 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 US, 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.

  6. 13:18 – 16:47

    Why Wallace-Wells wrote about worst-case climate scenarios (and why messaging matters)

    1. JR

      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?

    2. DW

      So I'm, I'm a journalist. I'm an editor mostly actually at New York Magazine. Um, and, you know, I'm interested in the near future, like as a result read a lot of scientific papers, read a lot of like obscure subreddits and that kind of thing. And, um, just in 2016 started seeing 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 laypeople 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 we, uh, 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 'cause it's a long story, but scientists and science journalists were really, um, they were really focused on making sure that their messaging was hopeful and optimistic, and they-

    3. JR

      Mm-hmm.

    4. DW

      ... weren't 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 sh- spread the word." And I wrote a big piece in 2017 that l- v- 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, 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-

    5. JR

      Right.

    6. DW

      ... 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,

  7. 16:47 – 35:50

    Tech ‘fixes’ and their traps: carbon capture vs solar geoengineering

    1. DW

      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-

    2. JR

      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.

    3. DW

      Yeah. I mean, it's basically like-

    4. JR

      But only, only in theory.

    5. DW

      They're, they're-

    6. JR

      (coughs) .

    7. DW

      They do exist in, in the real world, but only at a kind of, like in laboratories. They don't-

    8. JR

      Mm-hmm.

    9. DW

      ... 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.

    10. JR

      Whoa.

    11. DW

      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.

    12. JR

      Mm-hmm.

    13. DW

      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.

    14. JR

      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.

    15. DW

      Yeah. No, I think that's, I mean, totally true, and I feel it in my own life.

    16. JR

      Yeah.

    17. DW

      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."

    18. JR

      Yeah.

    19. DW

      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.

    20. JR

      Yeah.

    21. DW

      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.

    22. JR

      Mm-hmm.

    23. DW

      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.

    24. JR

      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-

    25. DW

      Totally.

    26. JR

      ... "Oh, back in the '80s, they said we'd all be dead by now, and we're fine-"

    27. DW

      Yeah.

    28. JR

      "... we're gonna be fine."

    29. DW

      Th-

    30. JR

      That kind of thing is- th- that- that is an issue, correct?

  8. 35:50 – 39:23

    Methane and feedback fears: cows, seaweed fixes, and thawing permafrost

    1. JR

      ... me to methane. That's another issue as well, right?

    2. DW

      Yeah.

    3. JR

      If a cow is producing methane gas-

    4. DW

      Yeah.

    5. JR

      ... 'cause, uh, large-scale agriculture.

    6. DW

      Yeah, wait, let me just say one more thing about-

    7. JR

      Sure, please.

    8. DW

      ... um, the solar geoengineering. So, the thing about that-

    9. JR

      (clears throat)

    10. DW

      ... that's real... this sounds horrifying, this program. People are excited about it 'cause 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- in the atmosphere. That's why like Delhi is really hard to breathe in, 'cause 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. Um, so we're sort of already doing this program, just not in a systematic way. We're doing it in a haphazard way. Um, the methane that you mentioned, 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 a greenhouse gas than carbon.

    11. JR

      Whoa.

    12. DW

      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.

    13. JR

      That's incredible.

    14. DW

      Yeah, just... It, 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-

    15. JR

      Mm-hmm.

    16. DW

      ... 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, um, 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, um, our carbon problem immediately three times worse. Um, and it could be even... The effect could even be more dramatic than that if it was released mostly as methane, 'cause methane's 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-

    17. JR

      The craziest solution that I ever heard for that one was to, uh, bring back the wooly mammoth.

    18. DW

      Yeah.

    19. JR

      Yeah.

    20. DW

      They're trying to do that.

    21. JR

      Yeah. And the, the idea that the wooly mammoth is gonna save us all by releasing them throughout Siberia (laughs) .

    22. DW

      Yeah, it's crazy, right? I mean, I think that we're gonna 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 'cause he knows that, you know, the global community will not tolerate someone producing more oil in-

    23. JR

      Yeah.

  9. 39:23 – 42:47

    Everyday impacts: smoke, cognition, health, EVs—and the hidden cost of flying

    1. DW

      ... um, as recently as, you know, as, 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%. 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 EZ- Do you have EZ-Pass out here in California?

    2. JR

      No, we don't, we don't have, uh, tolls.

    3. DW

      Oh, right.

    4. JR

      Isn't that amazing?

    5. DW

      (laughs) Yeah.

    6. JR

      You guys are s- I think there- ... thing, what- It's like a one time- ... like one or two places. Yeah, but like depending on where you lived, you'd have to take that every day.

    7. DW

      Dude, in New York, they're everywhere.

    8. JR

      I know, and I know what you mean. Yeah, like the... Okay. All right, yeah.

    9. DW

      So it used to be the case that cars had to, like, slow down and pay a toll.

    10. JR

      Yeah.

    11. DW

      And because they were slowing down, they produced more exhaust. When they instituted EZ-Pass, cars could just drive through.

    12. JR

      Right.

    13. DW

      And that meant they produced less exhaust. And the effect on the, on premature birth and low birth weight in the areas where they instituted these new EZ-Pass toll plazas, it reduced them by like 15% each.

    14. JR

      Wow.

    15. DW

      That's how dramatic just the exhaust effect is on development of babies. Um-

    16. JR

      How much is it an effect of electric cars?

    17. DW

      Yeah, that can... I mean, that, that will be huge.

    18. JR

      Right now, it hasn't had enough of an end effect because there's not enough of them?

    19. DW

      Yeah. Um, and... But yeah, I mean, the, that problem on the f- on like 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 grand, I think. If you get it down to 15 grand, that'll be, you know, that'll be a huge solution. But then there are a lot of other problems that are more difficult, like air travel.

    20. JR

      Yeah.

    21. DW

      You can't... We don't have electric planes around the corner. You can't fly planes. Um-

    22. JR

      Is there anything like that on the horizon? Is it that-

    23. DW

      There's some people who are tr- who are trying to develop it, but it seems like probably it, it's at least like a decade away. And, you know, one cross-country flight in the US is the equivi- one seat on one cos- cross-country flight is the equivalent of eight months of driving. Every time you fly from New York-

    24. JR

      What?

    25. DW

      ... to London and back, you melt nine squ- three square meters of ice. Every single f- seat on every flight from New York to London melts three square meters of ice. Um, of arctic ice.

    26. JR

      What?

    27. DW

      Yeah.

    28. JR

      That's insane.

    29. DW

      (laughs)

    30. JR

      That's real?

  10. 42:47 – 45:53

    Deep time warnings: mass extinctions, volcanic cooling, and climate dependence

    1. JR

      Now, um, the, the plus sign is it's way better to get co- hotter than it is to get colder, right? Like, ice ages kill everything.

    2. DW

      Well, the, you know, the, each of the ... So there have been five mass extinctions in planetary history, in earth history before. One of them was ki- was caused by an asteroid, but the other four were, um, were produced by global warming related to greenhouse gas, um, and one of them-

    3. JR

      What about the Ice Age?

    4. DW

      (sniffs) Well, the Ice Age doesn't count. It didn't-

    5. JR

      Didn't kill as many?

    6. DW

      No.

    7. JR

      Really?

    8. DW

      The, the biggest m- mass extinction, the end-Permian extinction, um, which was 252 million years ago, 90% to 95% of all life on Earth died.

    9. JR

      (scoffs) When was that?

    10. DW

      252 million years ago.

    11. JR

      God.

    12. DW

      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.

    13. JR

      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, the global warming, was that more?

    14. DW

      Well, there, so there, there are five and four of them were from global warming and the worst, the worst one was f- just from, from greenhouse gas warming. But yeah, the, the one that killed the dinosaurs was also really bad. It was something like 70% of all life on Earth.

    15. JR

      But it's less than the one where there was a-

    16. DW

      Yeah.

    17. JR

      ... temperature rise?

    18. DW

      Yeah.

    19. JR

      Wow.

    20. DW

      There was a, um, a volcano ex- This is a little bit sketchy science, but there was a volcano-

    21. JR

      (coughs)

    22. DW

      ... explosion, um, something like 30,000 years ago or something, I don't remember the exact dates, but that, um, volcanoes can cool, uh, global temperature for the same reason we're talking about with suspending-

    23. JR

      Mm-hmm.

    24. DW

      ... 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. So there was this-

    25. JR

      Yeah, we've talked about that-

    26. DW

      ... incredible bottleneck.

    27. JR

      ... a bunch of times, yeah.

    28. DW

      That's less people than live on Nantucket.

    29. JR

      Poof. Whoosh. (laughs)

    30. DW

      And it just, it just makes you see, like, everything about the way that we live on this planet is dependent on climate conditions.

  11. 45:53 – 48:29

    Why past climate communication undersold speed—and why renewables haven’t displaced fossil fuels

    1. JR

      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?

    2. DW

      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-

    3. JR

      Why is that?

    4. DW

      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."

    5. JR

      Mm-hmm.

    6. DW

      You know, we just grow the pie of energy. Um-

    7. JR

      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?

    8. DW

      Yeah, I mean, there is a demand. People-

    9. JR

      Like number one-

    10. DW

      ... like energy. (laughs)

    11. JR

      ... Trump was talking about clean coal-

    12. DW

      Yeah.

    13. JR

      ... and everybody was like, "What the fuck are you talking about?"

    14. DW

      Yeah.

    15. JR

      "Clean coal?"

  12. 48:29 – 1:10:15

    Geopolitics of carbon: China’s Belt and Road, concrete emissions, and climate leverage

    1. DW

      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-

    2. JR

      No.

    3. DW

      ... 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.

    4. JR

      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?

    5. DW

      I, that's one motive.

    6. JR

      Yeah.

    7. DW

      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-

    8. JR

      Mmm.

    9. DW

      ... 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.

    10. JR

      Jesus Christ.

    11. DW

      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-

    12. JR

      What have they done?

    13. DW

      Just imposing stricter standards on, um, on pollution, so-

    14. JR

      So emissions, uh, b- coal plants, things like that?

    15. DW

      That kind of stuff, yeah.

    16. JR

      Yeah.

    17. DW

      And, um, but, you know, we think about, we think about carbon and the whole problem, I think, a little too much, um, 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, it's cheaper than dirty energy.

    18. JR

      What's the majority of the footprint?

    19. DW

      Well, it's all, nothing's a majority.

    20. JR

      Oh, okay.

    21. DW

      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, of the global footprint. Um-

    22. JR

      And is it because of tractors, or what do, what is it because of?

    23. DW

      Everything.

    24. JR

      Everything. Everything that you need to do to run a farm.

    25. DW

      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 a, like, a big, that would have a big impact. Um, but all kinds of crops have, um, have carbon footprints, and they-

    26. JR

      But they would still have to do something to get the seaweed and have the seaweed travel, the seaweed to, to-

    27. DW

      Yeah.

    28. JR

      ... deliver it to these farms.

    29. DW

      Well, you could also do, you know, you could imagine lab-grown meat having-

    30. JR

      Mm-hmm.

  13. 1:10:15 – 1:21:45

    Climate politics, resistance, and enforcement: sanctions, courts, and lawsuits

    1. NA

      Jesus Christ. How is this being received?

    2. DW

      The book?

    3. NA

      Yeah. Are people, uh, are people resisting it? Is there any- anybody that wants to debate you on this?

    4. DW

      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, it produced also some scientific criticism. And, um, you know, we published a fully annotated version where every single line, 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. Um, the book has had none of that. I mean, it's, first of all, it's been, it's a best- uh, first week, it was on the Time's bestseller list, number six. It's bestseller in England. It's been in and out of the Amazon top 10. Um, and all of the reviews have been really kind. Um, 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. Um-

    5. NA

      Where is the resistance though? Is there any resistance to it right now?

    6. DW

      To the book?

    7. NA

      To the b- t- well, not just the book, but just the concept in general.

    8. DW

      73% of Americans believe climate change is real. 70% of Americans are concerned about it. Those numbers are up 15% since 2015.

    9. NA

      Who are the 27 that don't?

    10. DW

      I mean, I think it's, you know, it's, um-

    11. NA

      Hard right-wingers?

    12. DW

      Yeah.

    13. NA

      Yeah.

    14. DW

      But, you know, those numbers are, we live in a, 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 ni- in the early '90s, there was no partisan divide between, uh, on the up-, on the question of whether O.J. Simpson was guilty. When you controlled for race, Republicans and Democrats had the same idea about O.J. 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, c- totally taken over our, our minds, such that the fact that we have 73% of Americans who believe gl- global warming is real and happening, to me, that's a really fucking high number, actually.

    15. NA

      Right, right.

    16. DW

      Um, because one of the two part- I don't think that the Republican Party is really any more a denier party. I think they're just a party of skeptics and self-interest. They wanna, like, look out for business interests, which actually, the calculus there is changing, which I'll talk about in a second. Um, but people don't wanna believe that horrifying things are real, because who would?

    17. NA

      Yeah.

    18. DW

      It's terrifying. Um, but 73% of the country, that's a lot. I mean, that's, you know-

    19. NA

      Gigantic.

    20. DW

      That's more support than there is for just about anything. Um, so I'm like, basically, and the speed at, at which tha- those numbers have grown is really dramatic. I said 15 points since 2015. Eight points just since March-... has moved up. That's incredible. Um, 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 gonna be really expensive 'cause it would require massive f- upfront investment and it would mean also foregoing economic growth. But all of the new research the last couple 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. Um, we could avoid all of these horrible $600 trillion impacts that we're talking about if we decarbonized rapidly. And there are also obviously business opportunities there. There are whole solar empires to build. There are whole new electric grid to build. Um, so f- 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, in their, um, perspective because I think, for a long time, even people who cared about climate thought, "Well, I wanna 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 halve 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.

Episode duration: 1:53:34

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