Speaker 1: Hey, O, this is it could happen here the Daily Show.
Speaker 1: This episode is going to be part two of a
Speaker 1: interview with author and journalist David Wallace Wells. You have
Speaker 1: not listened to part one. You should probably do that first.
Speaker 1: But anyways, without a further ADO, let's get this second
Speaker 1: interview going. I appreciate the optimism, I guess. I mean
Speaker 1: we actually just say, like, you know, two degrees hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty million additional people dying of air pollution. It
Speaker 1: wance a century hitting every single year. Cities in South
Speaker 1: Asia and the Middle East are so hot during summer
Speaker 1: that you don't go outside without risking heat stroker death,
Speaker 1: hundreds of millions of climate refugees. When I say, like,
Speaker 1: we're going to get to our best case scenario, that's
Speaker 1: the best case scenario that I'm describing. It's not optimism
Speaker 1: by anybody's compactional definition. Is just optimism compared to like
Speaker 1: what actually looked possible a few years ago. And you know, ultimately,
Speaker 1: I think the only intellectually response able perspective is to
Speaker 1: try to hold those two facts in your mind at once.
Speaker 1: To say things inevitably will be grim. We will have
Speaker 1: to be doing an enormous amount of adaptation to allow
Speaker 1: ourselves any promise of human flowers fishing in even the
Speaker 1: best case scenario. But also changes have been made and
Speaker 1: will be made in the in the next few years
Speaker 1: and then certainly in the next decades that allow us
Speaker 1: to avert a lot of even bleaker, even grimmer on futures.
Speaker 1: And you know, I think both of those things are true.
Speaker 1: Whether you tend to, whether you you know your impulse
Speaker 1: is to place your sort of emotional weight on the
Speaker 1: first fact of the second is really more matter of
Speaker 1: personal temperament, I think than it is about um. The
Speaker 1: facts on the ground. The facts on the ground say
Speaker 1: that you know, basically, if even a few years ago
Speaker 1: it was defensible to say we could achieve one point
Speaker 1: five degrees, but also a business as usual was four
Speaker 1: and a half degrees, we're now looking at a much
Speaker 1: narrower window where unless we're really surprised by climate sensitivity,
Speaker 1: which may be something we could talk about, also that
Speaker 1: we're looking at something like the range of two to
Speaker 1: three two degrees to three degrees, and that's like, um,
Speaker 1: we have a much clearer idea of where we're gonna
Speaker 1: end up. I would say I'm you know, one of
Speaker 1: the things when you when you lay out as you
Speaker 1: do very very um very well, the what that actually means,
Speaker 1: what two degrees means, like what that means in human
Speaker 1: cost um. I have to think that there's going to
Speaker 1: be an increasing desire to uh punish the people particularly
Speaker 1: who were responsible for like the different kind of disinformation
Speaker 1: campaigns that have persisted over the last couple of decades.
Speaker 1: I don't know how much political attraction I expect those
Speaker 1: to get um, but one of the things we do
Speaker 1: we are going to be talking about is like the
Speaker 1: potential of sort of a climate Nuremberg. And I'm wondering
Speaker 1: if you if you think that's even a productive avenue
Speaker 1: of thought or is it kind of one of those
Speaker 1: there's there's so much is it a situation where I
Speaker 1: guess I'm just interested if you if you've thought about
Speaker 1: that in any way yourself, or if you think that's
Speaker 1: just not a particular the productive line of thought to
Speaker 1: go down, Well, I think it's um an intellectually rewarding
Speaker 1: way of thinking about the problem. Whether it has practical
Speaker 1: real world upside, I'm a little more ambivalent about, but
Speaker 1: I would say, you know, there are two sets of
Speaker 1: issues that you're talking about. There is, did companies like
Speaker 1: Exxon and Shell delay action on climate change by shaping
Speaker 1: our sense of urgency around the climate crisis and buying
Speaker 1: off politicians in a way that meaningfully change the trajectory
Speaker 1: of global warming? If so, to what degree and to
Speaker 1: what degree should they be held responsible to me? That
Speaker 1: I mean, I think that like those companies should be pulverized,
Speaker 1: you know that, like they should be um even just
Speaker 1: from a practical perspective, put aside the morality, like we
Speaker 1: need to stop producing fossil fuels, like those companies should
Speaker 1: not continue to be in that business. I think it's
Speaker 1: also worth pointing out that many of the biggest oil
Speaker 1: companies in the world are state owned, not private enterprises.
Speaker 1: But I also think there's the sort of separate question,
Speaker 1: which is countries of the world. The United States has
Speaker 1: benefited enormously from the cheap energy produced from the burning
Speaker 1: of fossil fuels like that had That explains a lot
Speaker 1: of how we became the dominant power in the world.
Speaker 1: Um And one amazing thing about carbon is that it
Speaker 1: hangs in the atmosphere for at least three hundred years,
Speaker 1: which means that every single ounce of carbon that has
Speaker 1: ever been produced in the entire history of industrialization is
Speaker 1: still in the air heating the planet today, UM, which
Speaker 1: means that the climate doesn't care if that coal is
Speaker 1: being burned in you know she Jin Pings China, or
Speaker 1: Frederick Engels Manchester, or you know Abraham Lincoln's United States,
Speaker 1: they are all having the equal effect. And that we
Speaker 1: should think about the impact of past emissions when thinking
Speaker 1: about responsibility for the crisis, um, as much as we
Speaker 1: think about how to shape future emissions. UM. You know,
Speaker 1: I think the climate reparations as an idea is very powerful.
Speaker 1: I think, um, you know, countries like the US have
Speaker 1: profited from this technology is one way to think of it,
Speaker 1: that will be punishing, um those in the developing world
Speaker 1: who have benefited considerably less, considerably more. Even from a
Speaker 1: practical like how do we stabilize the world's system and
Speaker 1: our geopolitics point of view, I think it makes sense
Speaker 1: for the wealthy countries in the world to support the
Speaker 1: poorer countries in their efforts both to decarbonize and to adapt.
Speaker 1: There is some amount of that being negotiated now, although
Speaker 1: I think it's woefully inadequate, And you know, it's something
Speaker 1: I'm working on at the moment, but you you really
Speaker 1: can sort of put a dollar figure on exactly what
Speaker 1: like the U s O S in this context, because
Speaker 1: we know how much it cost to take carbon out
Speaker 1: of the air. So if you take a price of
Speaker 1: like fifty dollars a ton, then the US basically has
Speaker 1: a climate reparations bill of like trillion dollars um, which
Speaker 1: is two and a half times what China's does, which
Speaker 1: is the second biggest country. And I do think that
Speaker 1: that's also really important to keep in mind when people
Speaker 1: talk about China. China is an incredibly important player going forward,
Speaker 1: but because of the weird timeline bending nature of carbon emissions,
Speaker 1: like the US is still much more important that we
Speaker 1: The US brought us to the brink. It's just China
Speaker 1: that's at risk of pushing us over the brink. And
Speaker 1: on the company front, I'm supportive of lawsuits that are
Speaker 1: that are already going forward on these issues, and those
Speaker 1: lawsuits that are going forward that obligate particular companies to
Speaker 1: behave in ways that are in line with the goals
Speaker 1: in the Paris Agreement. I think that those are useful
Speaker 1: I think I'm a little maybe a little less comfortable
Speaker 1: attributing so much responsibility for the current crisis to the
Speaker 1: villainy of those companies, although I don't deny that they've
Speaker 1: been villainous in the sense that we really have been
Speaker 1: voting with our you know, with our dollars on this
Speaker 1: for a long time, UM, and I do think that
Speaker 1: most people have, you know, or as a society, as
Speaker 1: a civilization, we've chosen to continue using fossil fuels basically
Speaker 1: because they were they provided cheaper energy than any other option.
Speaker 1: That's not to say that there's been no effect, um,
Speaker 1: from the disinformation campaigns. I think there has been an effect.
Speaker 1: But if you rewind that history and don't engage in
Speaker 1: that disinformation, I have a hard time believing even if
Speaker 1: you're just like looking at the cost of renewable power,
Speaker 1: I have a hard time imagine in the US like
Speaker 1: embarking on a major renewable push like in the year
Speaker 1: or two thousand, of the scale that's possible now because
Speaker 1: of the changing market dynamics there. So, you know, another
Speaker 1: way of looking at the same issue is um, you know,
Speaker 1: climate denial is I would say it's no longer really
Speaker 1: alive anywhere. It's no longer really alive in the US.
Speaker 1: But it was much more pronounced in the US in
Speaker 1: American politics than any other country in the world for
Speaker 1: a very long time, aside from maybe Australia. And it
Speaker 1: wasn't like those other countries were decarbonizing much much faster
Speaker 1: than we were. Um they maybe we're a little bit
Speaker 1: in parts of Scandinavia, um Like Denmark has done a
Speaker 1: bit better, the UK has done better over the last
Speaker 1: five or ten years in the U S. But like
Speaker 1: in general, we're all sort of on the same track together,
Speaker 1: Which makes me think that a lot of these dynamics,
Speaker 1: at least to this point, are much more the result
Speaker 1: of um social and cultural forces than they are direct
Speaker 1: fossil fuel disinformation and denial campaigns. But you know, that's
Speaker 1: not to say that I think that those people should
Speaker 1: be let off the hook, um in the same way
Speaker 1: that the cigarette company cigarette companies were held to account
Speaker 1: for their decades of disinformation. I just also think, like
Speaker 1: the son of a guy who died of lung cancer,
Speaker 1: like I don't think that like the cigarette company is
Speaker 1: to blame for my dad's death. Like I just don't, um,
Speaker 1: like I'm glad that they're I'm glad that they had
Speaker 1: to pay those fines. I'm glad that they were, like,
Speaker 1: you know, to some degree, push to the edge of bankruptcy.
Speaker 1: I'm glad that cigarette smoking is not nearly as dad
Speaker 1: a force in our culture and our public health and
Speaker 1: it used to be. But I also think that there
Speaker 1: is like I don't know, to point the finger neatly
Speaker 1: at that, at those like ten big companies or whatever.
Speaker 1: I just think it's a little simplistic and lets us
Speaker 1: all off the hook. But I do think that's another
Speaker 1: big story. Here is the way in which, as the
Speaker 1: crisis unfolds, many more people will want to see themselves
Speaker 1: as blameless UM and not be willing to really see
Speaker 1: clearly that the role that they played or those that
Speaker 1: they loved played in exacerbating the problem, even if just
Speaker 1: through UM by living in complacency and denial for too long. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you probably just no, no, no, it is like that.
Speaker 1: That's the thing though, it is it is UM. I
Speaker 1: can cut again. You can hold two things in your head,
Speaker 1: which is that UM, the attempts to mislead people and
Speaker 1: alter the public conversation around climate change through bad data,
Speaker 1: we're criminal UM. And also that fundamentally the damage was
Speaker 1: done by our desire to continue living a certain lifestyle.
Speaker 1: And we knew that and and and past a certain point, especially,
Speaker 1: we knew that it would continue to like we kept
Speaker 1: buying the cars, we kept orienting our societies in such
Speaker 1: a way, we kept consuming and putting carbon into the atmosphere.
Speaker 1: And it is this question of Okay, if you're saying,
Speaker 1: in the United States, I want to hold ex On
Speaker 1: Mobile and Chevron accountable, Well, then who who's holding you
Speaker 1: accountable for the fact that you, as an American, were
Speaker 1: responsible for a vastly greater amount of environmental degradation than
Speaker 1: somebody living in Kuala Lumpur. Yeah. I think Also it's
Speaker 1: you know, we have this like in part because of
Speaker 1: the cultural changes that have unfolded over the last fe years.
Speaker 1: These are not like the world's richest companies and or
Speaker 1: and so like liquidate liquidating them just like simply does
Speaker 1: it from just like a like the perspective of UM
Speaker 1: finding capital that will help us in this fight, like
Speaker 1: liquidating these companies simply doesn't get us nearly as far
Speaker 1: as it might have twenty or thirty years ago. I
Speaker 1: think that there is a moral case for closing them down.
Speaker 1: I think there's a practical place case for literally just
Speaker 1: closing them down. UM. I think we should try to
Speaker 1: pursue that UM. But I also think that you know,
Speaker 1: it's like you take all Bill Gates's money away, like
Speaker 1: it's not like people in stuff Saharan Africa are going
Speaker 1: to be millionaires. It's just like there isn't that much
Speaker 1: money to go around, and the same that's true of
Speaker 1: the fossil field companies. But you know, I do think, UM,
Speaker 1: I do think there needs to be a kind of
Speaker 1: UM mechanism for capital redistribution UM in the service of
Speaker 1: decarbonization and UM climate resilience. I think that that is
Speaker 1: a very very urgent moral demands that the climate of
Speaker 1: the future is making of us, Which is to say,
Speaker 1: you know, let's try to treat hundreds of millions of
Speaker 1: people living in Bangladesh near the coast like they were living,
Speaker 1: you know, on the Gulf coast of the US, and
Speaker 1: treat their lives with as much give their lives as
Speaker 1: much significance, and UM, do the same level of things
Speaker 1: that we would want to do for our distant relatives
Speaker 1: to protect their lives and livelihoods there to name one example.
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, it's not just like there's one
Speaker 1: place to deal with it. But they can't even get
Speaker 1: a hundred billion dollars out of the G seven to
Speaker 1: you know, to the developing world. I think we're gonna
Speaker 1: need considerably more than that going forward. Yeah, I've been
Speaker 1: reading the book Disposable City by Mario Riza, which is
Speaker 1: about Miami, and like the fact that Miami is doomed
Speaker 1: and less things actions are taken in order to make
Speaker 1: it survivable in the future. And I kept thinking throughout
Speaker 1: that process because it's a very good book, I think,
Speaker 1: very well written. But also just like all of these
Speaker 1: problems are going to be commen certainly more severe for
Speaker 1: people living in huge chunks of Southeast Asia the form
Speaker 1: much larger population than Miami, but we will never have
Speaker 1: the resources dedicated towards them, and they're also it's also
Speaker 1: the case that a lot of the solutions that we
Speaker 1: we think of here are not available there in the
Speaker 1: sense that you know, there was a big study that
Speaker 1: came out maybe six or nine months ago looking at
Speaker 1: what it would mean to for land use in the
Speaker 1: US to be to really decarbonize the power sector through
Speaker 1: wind and solar, and you know, it's it was significant.
Speaker 1: It was like it was it was not it's not
Speaker 1: like half the country, but it was like, I think
Speaker 1: we had to do something like we had to use
Speaker 1: like a couple of multiples of the land of North
Speaker 1: Dakota um to like get to a total totally zero
Speaker 1: carbon electricity sector, and like you can't do that in Indonesia.
Speaker 1: They're just that amount of land. And what does that mean?
Speaker 1: Is that an argument for nuclear? Is that an argument
Speaker 1: for you know, a lot more offshore? You know, like
Speaker 1: it's not exactly clear, but we also we have there
Speaker 1: are many ways in which Americans thinking about climate change
Speaker 1: suffer from a national narcissism and really think that the
Speaker 1: whole global problem is our problem. But um, the challenge
Speaker 1: is really different everywhere, both on the adaptation side on
Speaker 1: the mitigation side, and you know, in a lot of
Speaker 1: places it's going to be just tricky to figure out.
Speaker 1: And the more that we can do as you know,
Speaker 1: those with more, um, the more I don't know, it's
Speaker 1: not quite well. I'm sure we're never going to be
Speaker 1: behaving in ways that that are actually moral in this issue,
Speaker 1: but maybe like approaching some kind of morality, you know, Garrison,
Speaker 1: did you have anything else you wanted to get into UM? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I can maybe talk about what you think the future
Speaker 1: of international coalitions are going to be in terms of
Speaker 1: like the different summits UM what you know, the different
Speaker 1: ways the u N might try to do stuff. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like how how do you see the effectiveness or maybe
Speaker 1: not even effectiveness, but like just how do you see
Speaker 1: that impacting UM people's perception of what's going to happen?
Speaker 1: And then you know, if if you think that has
Speaker 1: any chance of making things better at all, well, you
Speaker 1: know what. The the examples that I used in the
Speaker 1: book I think are still UM. The ones that I
Speaker 1: come back to, which is UM the way that the
Speaker 1: post World War two international order, which was led primarily
Speaker 1: by the USUM, treated the issues of human rights and
Speaker 1: free markets, which were never like handed over to a
Speaker 1: particular political authority to police around the world, but which
Speaker 1: became universal enough values that they could be invoked as
Speaker 1: reasons to intervene in other countries, to invade other countries,
Speaker 1: to bully other countries in you know, in UM trade negotiations,
Speaker 1: and you know, oftentimes they were covers for what we're
Speaker 1: basically just national self interest, you know, calling something human
Speaker 1: rights issue so that you could open a market or whatever.
Speaker 1: But on the whole, I think they did sort of
Speaker 1: successfully promote both of those values over the course of
Speaker 1: those fifty years. You know, not to say that markets
Speaker 1: are unequal a value that we should value as much
Speaker 1: as we value human rights. But we saw you know,
Speaker 1: globally a changing culture of geopolitics sort of as a result,
Speaker 1: and the tools that were used not just by the US,
Speaker 1: but especially by the US in promoting that change. We're
Speaker 1: really diverse. Like sometimes we did go to war. Sometimes
Speaker 1: we just argued about stuff in the u N. Sometimes
Speaker 1: we you know, put sanctions on countries and refused to
Speaker 1: trade with them because we consider them, you know, to
Speaker 1: be behaving immorally. Sometimes we finance clandestine wars like where
Speaker 1: our CIA agents trained. You know, we did a whole
Speaker 1: lot of different ship in the name of those values.
Speaker 1: Um and I sort of suspect we're likely to see
Speaker 1: the same thing unfold with climate, where it becomes a
Speaker 1: sort of first order value of the global system. And
Speaker 1: that doesn't mean that there is a independent climate change
Speaker 1: authority with you know, some kind of you know that
Speaker 1: that can like throw leaders in jail for behaving badly,
Speaker 1: that I can go into Brazil and arrest jar Balsonaro
Speaker 1: or something. Um, I don't think that's all that likely.
Speaker 1: But I think that we start, we start to talk
Speaker 1: about power dynamics um as in ways that are inflected
Speaker 1: at least with climate considerations. And I think we're already
Speaker 1: starting to see that. You know, the way that the
Speaker 1: EU is talking about um it's border adjustment carbon tax.
Speaker 1: There's a similar proposal now in the in the US
Speaker 1: really suggests that we're already embedding climate values in what
Speaker 1: were once quite coldly calculated trade deals. You know, there
Speaker 1: was a couple of years ago there was that back
Speaker 1: and forth about the fires in the amaz On where
Speaker 1: where Emmanuel mccron threatened to pull out of a major
Speaker 1: trade deal with with Brazil over the fires and like
Speaker 1: you didn't totally come to pass. But um, that sort
Speaker 1: of power dynamic I think is quite um, you know,
Speaker 1: quite present on the world stage already. Now. The question
Speaker 1: is ultimately like who's doing the policing, who's empowered to
Speaker 1: enforce these values and one of their own what's their
Speaker 1: own record? You know, at the moment, the US, I think,
Speaker 1: is not really in a position to lecture anybody. And
Speaker 1: to some degree, you know, in a certain light, China
Speaker 1: has a certain amount of um, you know, moral authority
Speaker 1: here because they've they've invested so aggressively and um green technologies.
Speaker 1: But they also have the opposite problem, which is that
Speaker 1: they are still wearing a ton of coal. And I
Speaker 1: don't really know, you know, there's been a lot of
Speaker 1: I don't really know how that dynamic will play out.
Speaker 1: I just think it's hard to imagine a geopolitics going
Speaker 1: forward that doesn't center climate change in the same way
Speaker 1: that some of these other values have been centered. But
Speaker 1: what I do think is very clear is that the
Speaker 1: U N based treaty framework is probably at most a
Speaker 1: partial component of this dynamic and not the whole of it.
Speaker 1: Um you know, all of I mentioned this earlier, but
Speaker 1: all of the net zero pledges we've seen over the
Speaker 1: last couple of years, all of them have been done
Speaker 1: totally outside of the you know, the Paris Framework and
Speaker 1: the UN framework. It's not the US are China going
Speaker 1: around and telling India that they need to up their
Speaker 1: ambition at all. It's you know, all of these countries
Speaker 1: coming to the realization that it is in their self
Speaker 1: interest to decarbonize, and that is I think a likelier
Speaker 1: path forward than one in which these things are negotiated
Speaker 1: country to country. And I think it's frankly a lot
Speaker 1: healthier because for a long time, climate diplomacy was conducted
Speaker 1: under the anxiety of UM the collective action problem, which
Speaker 1: is to say that, you know, the US goes to
Speaker 1: zero carbon tomorrow, functionally, its climate will go will be
Speaker 1: unchanged over the rest of the century, even even a
Speaker 1: huge amount of like the US UM compared you know,
Speaker 1: if nobody else does anything. And so everybody's just sort
Speaker 1: of waiting around, waiting for someone else to to act,
Speaker 1: because they think the cost of acting nationally or locally
Speaker 1: is born nationally and locally, but the benefit of acting
Speaker 1: nationally or locally is carried around the world. Now, I
Speaker 1: think that is no longer the paradigm. I think that's
Speaker 1: the reason why we're seeing all of these new nation,
Speaker 1: new national pledges outside of the framework of paris UM.
Speaker 1: I think that's in part because we have a clear
Speaker 1: understanding of the damages of climate change. I think it's
Speaker 1: also really we're having We're getting a much clearer sense
Speaker 1: of the burdens of help from air pollution, from the
Speaker 1: burden of fossil fuels, And so when you're doing your
Speaker 1: even like your crudest um cost benefit analysis, it seems
Speaker 1: really obvious that decarbonizing is worth it independent of the
Speaker 1: climate benefits. And you know that's true in the US.
Speaker 1: Dru Sian dell Is, this great professor at Duke, has
Speaker 1: calculated that the health benefits of decarbonizing the American electricity
Speaker 1: sector would entirely pay for themselves. It would entirely pay
Speaker 1: for the project. Um. You don't have to factor in
Speaker 1: any climate benefit at all. It's just like through cleaner air,
Speaker 1: it would be paid for by itself. I think many
Speaker 1: more countries around the world are seeing things that way,
Speaker 1: and that's why they're beginning to move more quickly. And
Speaker 1: even though that's like a a sign that the geopolitics
Speaker 1: is abandoning some of its moral pretense um and returning
Speaker 1: to something that amounts to a more naked, even quasi
Speaker 1: like capitalistic um mercenary set of values, I also think
Speaker 1: that it I have a sort of easier time trusting
Speaker 1: the progress will happen in that context, if every country
Speaker 1: thinks that, um, they're people will be better off if
Speaker 1: their economy is greener. I don't think we're gonna do
Speaker 1: it fast enough, but I think the progress is is
Speaker 1: on the way. The last thing I wanna maybe discuss
Speaker 1: a little bit is the future of carbon capture and
Speaker 1: geo engineering, specifically with you know, Bezos and Mosk and
Speaker 1: other people doing more space stuff. Um, and just yeah,
Speaker 1: seeing how the likelihood and how much you think it
Speaker 1: will affect things when they start messing with the atmosphere
Speaker 1: or if you think they're going to go that route,
Speaker 1: because I know Basos talked a bit about that in
Speaker 1: terms of like moving stuff into space for like pollution
Speaker 1: and stuff. Yeah, I mean your chapter on g on
Speaker 1: geo engineering was really good. Um, in my opinion, I
Speaker 1: thought that would gave a really good overview of the
Speaker 1: terrible double edged sword that that is. And yeah, with
Speaker 1: with all the space stuff, how do you see those
Speaker 1: kind of things coming to pass the next few years.
Speaker 1: I think it's gonna geo engineering in particular, and solar
Speaker 1: radiation management, which is the sort of most common way
Speaker 1: that people talk about it, which is suspending soultware in
Speaker 1: the atmosphere that reflects on that. I think that that's
Speaker 1: going to become a much bigger part of the conversation UM,
Speaker 1: And personally, I would like to see more research. I'm
Speaker 1: not of the I'm skeptical of this as a useful solution,
Speaker 1: but I think it's worth testing and steeing. And I
Speaker 1: don't think you know, at the moment, there's still basically
Speaker 1: like a global gag order on even figuring out what
Speaker 1: it would mean. And I think that that's really counterproductive actually,
Speaker 1: that we should have a clearer sense of what the
Speaker 1: costs and benefits of doing it are. UM. The people
Speaker 1: who I admire most, who are supportive say this isn't
Speaker 1: a permanent solution. If we imagine a century from now
Speaker 1: or seventy five years from now, technological advance is sufficient
Speaker 1: to remove carbon from the atmosphere at scale being run
Speaker 1: cheaply and efficiently, and I don't think that's a crazy
Speaker 1: thing to imagine on that time scale. What we really
Speaker 1: need to do is sort of protect ourselves for a
Speaker 1: period of time, for a generation or so, until those
Speaker 1: things can come online and really make a difference in
Speaker 1: the in the atmosphere. That seems like a plausible argument
Speaker 1: to me. Um Like, I'm certainly not ready to endorse
Speaker 1: it because I think we really just don't know actually
Speaker 1: much of what the effects would be. Um But I
Speaker 1: think any you know, it sort of depends on what
Speaker 1: you're hoped for goal is. But any project of decarbonization
Speaker 1: or just say climate action that is built entirely around
Speaker 1: wind and solar power is not going to get us
Speaker 1: to stay below two degrees UM. And if you think
Speaker 1: that living a two degrees is going to be really tough,
Speaker 1: maybe there are some other ways to make it a
Speaker 1: little less tough. Now, I think I'm sounding at the
Speaker 1: moment more supportive geo engineering than I really am. But
Speaker 1: I just think in general, like this problem was too
Speaker 1: big to dismiss any partial solution out of hand. On
Speaker 1: carbon capture, I'm you know, I'm more supportive at the
Speaker 1: theoretical level, and my objections are primarily practical, which is
Speaker 1: to say, you know, at the moment, we have these
Speaker 1: machines that do this. You know, they can do this already.
Speaker 1: It's kind of expensive, but it's not impossibly expensive. But
Speaker 1: to use them to even counteract the emissions that are
Speaker 1: today produced by the hardest to de carbonized parts of
Speaker 1: the economy, namely heavy industry and jet travel would require
Speaker 1: through these machines, would require something like a third to
Speaker 1: a half of today's global energy production. On top of
Speaker 1: which we need to find a place to build these
Speaker 1: huge industrial plantations. We have to find a find a
Speaker 1: place to store all that carbon um. You know, estimates
Speaker 1: suggest we might need an infrastructure two to four times
Speaker 1: the size of today's oil and gas business. And that's
Speaker 1: not to like make it so we can drive gas
Speaker 1: cars longer. It's literally like the hardest. If we decarbonize
Speaker 1: as rapidly as the i p C says we they
Speaker 1: want us to cutting in a half our emissions, they
Speaker 1: say we're still going to need a carbon capture or
Speaker 1: at least a negative emissions infrastructure as much as four
Speaker 1: times the size of today's oil and gas business. And
Speaker 1: of course there's no market for that that carbon at all, um,
Speaker 1: which means you would have to be entirely state funded
Speaker 1: unless someone comes up with a with a market for it. Um.
Speaker 1: So my, you know, on top of that, there are
Speaker 1: objections to land use. Um. They're sort of likely nimby
Speaker 1: issues um. And while it's tempting to turn instead too
Speaker 1: you know, natural negative emissions with a far station. It's
Speaker 1: estimated that to do the same just again for this
Speaker 1: sort of sliver of emissions that are the hardest to decarbonized,
Speaker 1: would require land being used something like the scale of
Speaker 1: between five and fifteen times the size of Texas UM
Speaker 1: just for this purpose. So we're talking about like in
Speaker 1: either of these cases, either like sucking, like sucking up
Speaker 1: a huge chunk of what today's energy system produces, or
Speaker 1: using an enormous amount of the planet's land in order
Speaker 1: to deal with only a tiny sliver of the problem
Speaker 1: through either of these technologies. Now, my hope is that
Speaker 1: fifty years from now, seventy five years from now, hundred
Speaker 1: years from now, UM, we'll have a lot more options
Speaker 1: for how to take carbon out of the atmosphere. Um
Speaker 1: we can, we'll be able to do it much more efficiently,
Speaker 1: both in terms of energy and in terms of land use.
Speaker 1: And I think there are some things that are encouraging
Speaker 1: that are sort of early stage m R and D
Speaker 1: that we're at sort of early stage on R and
Speaker 1: D on but the scale of the problem is just
Speaker 1: so large that we can't believe that they're going to
Speaker 1: do our work for us. It really will be like
Speaker 1: over the time scale of our lifetimes, it will be
Speaker 1: a marginal solution that allows us to um decarbonized really hard,
Speaker 1: to de carbonized sectors a little more slowly. UM and
Speaker 1: maybe on a time scale of two centuries, it'll that'll
Speaker 1: allow us to like revert to an earlier climate and
Speaker 1: stabilize things back at you know, something like parts per million,
Speaker 1: although who knows how possible that is. Briefly on that note, UM,
Speaker 1: we want to talk about the like the actual long
Speaker 1: term impacts, like how the pollution that we're doing and
Speaker 1: the emissions that we're doing now is gonna impact stuff
Speaker 1: three years from now. Do you have anything to say
Speaker 1: because like that that that's stif aspect. He's not talked
Speaker 1: about as much because of how urgent it is for
Speaker 1: people who are living now. We have a lot of
Speaker 1: problems to deal with the fact that you know, we
Speaker 1: don't talk about, you know, the farther future. It's something
Speaker 1: I worry about a lot, because all of our models
Speaker 1: are basically to the hundred and nothing goes beyond them. UM,
Speaker 1: And I think there is some reason to worry that
Speaker 1: we're not really capturing some slower processes and feedbacks that
Speaker 1: may add considerably to our level of warming, even if
Speaker 1: we get to zero emissions sometimes this century. Of course,
Speaker 1: the impact some of the impact are essentially irreversible. You know,
Speaker 1: the term tipping point gets used a lot. I think
Speaker 1: often it's used a little misleadingly because it's not like
Speaker 1: you're gonna wake up, you know, on a Tuesday and
Speaker 1: the planets is going to be completely different than it
Speaker 1: was on that Monday. But what it really means is that,
Speaker 1: like we're going to enter into a new state with
Speaker 1: a variety of these impacts that we won't be able
Speaker 1: to return to the old one. Um. The melting of
Speaker 1: the ice sheets is probably the most dramatic of those,
Speaker 1: and you know, it's based it's estimated that somewhere north
Speaker 1: of two degrees we we probably lock that into inevitability.
Speaker 1: And that means over time, you know, something like two
Speaker 1: d two hundred feet of sea level rise. UM. Now,
Speaker 1: we don't expect that would take place even on the
Speaker 1: time scale of centuries. It would probably take millennial or more.
Speaker 1: But it means that the choices that we're making now
Speaker 1: are really going to live on for an incredibly long time,
Speaker 1: I mean thousands of years and UM That's another reason
Speaker 1: why they're so consequential. You know, some of the ecosystem
Speaker 1: loss um that we're going through is irreversible. You simply
Speaker 1: can't recreate those things by design. And you know, even
Speaker 1: thinking about wildfires in the in the in the West,
Speaker 1: the fire scientists I talked to, you know, they're they're
Speaker 1: all really reluctant to talk about fire even in the
Speaker 1: second half of the twentieth century because they expected by
Speaker 1: so much of the region will have burned, and they
Speaker 1: don't know what kind of plant life is going to
Speaker 1: grow back in that, you know, among those ashes, so
Speaker 1: they don't know how to model it. It's like, is
Speaker 1: it this kind of a tree, is that this is
Speaker 1: a eucalyptus? Is an ash? You know, it's like um
Speaker 1: And that's kind of amazing to think about, just like that.
Speaker 1: You know, when we think of the landscape as permanent
Speaker 1: and human intrusion as possibly transient, but we are engineering
Speaker 1: changes to the land um that will make many of
Speaker 1: the things that we think of as you know, the
Speaker 1: iconic features of a place like California totally disappear within
Speaker 1: the space of our lifetime. And you know, perhaps the
Speaker 1: most dramatic of these impacts would be if if the
Speaker 1: Amazon were to enter into a divec state and turn
Speaker 1: into something like a savannah, which is you know, some
Speaker 1: scientists think is quite possible, maybe even in relatively short
Speaker 1: time scales. But more importantly, as you know that there
Speaker 1: would be no time scale for recovery, that we would
Speaker 1: have lost it forever as a as a rainforest, and
Speaker 1: with it a huge capacity for carbon absorption and a
Speaker 1: lot of the world's oxygen. So yeah, it's it's it
Speaker 1: gets it gets scarier when you look past, even though
Speaker 1: what's happening the century is scary enough. Yeah, that's all
Speaker 1: I wanted to talk about. Yeah, that's the I'm planning
Speaker 1: a trip down there in the not too distant future,
Speaker 1: and it's kind of hard to overstate the importance of
Speaker 1: not reaching that point, and also the difficulty of knowing
Speaker 1: if we already have not good news coming out of
Speaker 1: that region right now. I mean the slightly positive, slightly
Speaker 1: good or part of the news is that what we're
Speaker 1: doing now. I mean, there's a big report a couple
Speaker 1: of weeks ago those you know, more carbon's coming out
Speaker 1: of the Amazon and going into it, which is terrifying.
Speaker 1: But that is because we're deforesting and burning. It's not
Speaker 1: because of Yeah, theoretically, if we change policy there, we
Speaker 1: could you know, we could stop that. Um. There is
Speaker 1: a point though, at which the climate changing itself will
Speaker 1: be producing similar effects and that will be considerably more alarming. Well, David,
Speaker 1: you've been incredibly generous with your time. Thank you very
Speaker 1: much for talking with us today. Now my pleasure great
Speaker 1: to talk to you guys. And with that, that is
Speaker 1: the end of our interview with David Wallace Wells. You
Speaker 1: can find him on Twitter at d Wallace Wells. You
Speaker 1: can find his book The Uninhabited Earth and you know
Speaker 1: probably probably some local bookstores. I know you can get
Speaker 1: it online that's where I got it. Um. And you
Speaker 1: can follow this podcast of Happen Here pod and Cool
Speaker 1: Zone Media on Twitter. UM. I think we have Instagrams
Speaker 1: for those two, but I don't use that. You can
Speaker 1: follow me at Hungry bow Tie and you can follow
Speaker 1: Robert at I Right. Okay, thanks for listening. Stay tuned
Speaker 1: next week for more It could Happen Here daily