In Conversation: David Wallace-Wells makes the case for climate reparations

This is "In Conversation" from "Apple News Today." I'm Shumita Basu. Every weekend, we're taking you deeper into the best journalism on Apple News.

World climate summits are usually where big pledges are made. But lately, we've been seeing smaller, less wealthy nations use the global platform to plead for their future.

Two degrees, yes, is a death sentence for the people of Antigua and Barbuda, for the people of Dominica and Fiji, and yes, for the people of Samoa and Barbados.

Leaders of the G20, we are drowning, and our only hope is the life ring you are holding.

Even though we in Africa are the least of the contributors to this phenomenon, we suffer the most.

That is a death sentence to the Maldives.

We do not want that dreaded death sentence, and we have come here today to say try harder, try harder.

Developing countries are bearing the brunt of the worst effects of our changing climate. And in the meantime, the largest, richest nations make promises and set goals and agree to meet again next year. Now, it's one thing to talk about how to reduce the amount of carbon we release into the atmosphere going forward. You know, the "let's do better starting tomorrow" approach. It's another thing to consider how we can remove the carbon we've already put out there.

We have a tool in our hands now that will allow us to literally repair the damage of global warming. To take the carbon out of the air so that not only do we stop climate change, but in theory, at a big enough scale, we could undo it.

Life After Warming." David isn't the first person to write about carbon removal technology. It's an idea that's picking up more and more traction. But here's how he framed it in an article for "New York Magazine": Wealthy nations should front most of the cost for this technology, and we should think of it as a form of climate reparations.

It is huge and it would be massively expensive, but it gives us, at an intellectual level, a device by which we can calculate the cost of undoing everything that we have done. So, what exactly would climate reparations look like? And how do we even begin doing the math? I sat down with David Wallace-Wells to find out.

We have a pretty clear table of which countries have emitted how much carbon historically, and because that carbon hangs in the air for centuries at least, and maybe millennia, we also know that it's not going away, it's not leaving the atmosphere unless we do something about it. Which means that any ounce of carbon that was produced 30 years ago, but even 100 years ago, even 150 years ago, even 250 years ago, by say some coal miner or somebody using coal in the north of England in the 18th century, that carbon's still up there in the atmosphere, and it's still causing warming. Globally, we've produced about 2,500 gigatons of carbon. That's 2,500 billion tons of carbon. And it is amazing just to pause there for a second and remember that, even though this is a gas, it is that heavy. I mean 2,500 …

Yeah. It's measured in tons. Gigatons.

Billion tons. Yeah. Every single flight, every seat, every economy class ticket on a flight from New York to Paris produces one ton of carbon dioxide that hangs in the atmosphere. And all of that is basically a warming blanket, which is why we are having the problem that we're having today. And about 500 tons, technically 509 gigatons, of that was produced by the U.S., which means about one-fifth of all the damage that's ever been produced to our climate in the entire history of industrial civilization was produced by the United States. It's about double the number two country, which is China. And when you start looking around the developing world and the Global South, they've contributed a paltry, paltry amount to this problem. So, Sub-Saharan Africa, which keep in mind is home today to more than a billion people, has produced less than 1% of all historical global emissions.

We know that there is a crisis, but a lot of the time it gets talked about as a collective problem, you know, something that everyone needs to be part of the solution for. Why is it important to reject that framework or challenge that framework and think about it as the Global North really bears most of the responsibility here?

We are where we are today because of the emissions of the Global North. And those countries have benefited from those emissions. We have grown, our economies are rich, and we are rich because of the power of fossil fuels, because we have used them in such profligate ways. Now, I don't mean to say that all of that use was villainous. Someone buying a gas guzzler in 1950 didn't exactly know the damage that that was going to do in the Global South. And I don't want to suggest that individuals are the main moral actors here. Nevertheless, we are the beneficiaries of fossil fuel-powered economic growth. We owe that growth, to some degree, to the fact that we have simultaneously been poisoning the planet and our future at some great scale. And I think a kind of a moral accounting would demand that we repay that to some degree.

Let's talk about the phrase "climate reparations." It sounds intentionally provocative. So, why use it and what does it mean?

Well, the word "reparations" comes from the word "repair," and in the context of slavery reparations or any other reparations that have been talked about to sort of undo historical injustices or crimes, that's the idea, that you take some measure that allows you to repair the damage that was done by whatever crime or sin or injustice was created in the past. And for a lot of those crimes and sins and injustices, the calculation's pretty complicated. It's a really murky concept. It's useful morally, but practically has a lot of limitations. When it comes to climate, for most of the history of, you know, talk about climate reparations, which goes back now a couple of decades, there's been a similar problem. We knew that parts of the world were going to be hit harder. We knew that certain countries were much more responsible for the problem. But while countries of the world, especially at climate conferences, often talked about needing additional support from countries in the rich world to respond to climate change and to ease their own transition to green energy, those figures were not really about repair. They were about responding and adaptation and what's called "mitigation" in the climate community, which is to say doing what we can to put less carbon into the atmosphere, so that future generations have less difficulty to deal with. But over the last few years, the technology has arrived and is working to take carbon out of the atmosphere.

technology that removes carbon from the atmosphere. One kind is called "direct air capture."

Which basically sucks carbon, and it does the whole industrial process in reverse. If the industrial process is we mine coal, we burn it, it turns into smoke, it goes up into the atmosphere and heats the planet, this is we take that smoke, we sort of collect it using giant fans, we run it through a filter, we condense it into something that is actually quite like coal, and then we bury it underground again, so it'll never dissipate into the atmosphere on its own.

Globally, we're talking about 250 trillion dollars to undo all of the damage of carbon pollution to this point. That's a huge amount of money. It's also an unbelievably large-scale engineering and infrastructure project. I think most people imagine, you know, we're sort of trained by Silicon Valley to think that technological progress can be kind of instantaneous because really what it amounts to is downloading a new app on your phone. But in the real world, these things really take time and money and effort and come up against resistance when you're trying to really build new stuff. So, we're very, very far from realizing carbon removal at any large scale. The UN IPCC, the scientific body that makes recommendations and studies the state of climate science and puts out periodic reports, they want us to cut carbon emissions by 45% by 2030 to give the planet a 50/50 chance of avoiding what they call, what has been called "catastrophic warming," two degrees. That, I think, is not going to happen. We're not on track for that. But even assuming that we did do that and we did cut in half, more or less, our carbon emissions over the next nine years, the UN says, in order to give ourselves a decent chance of avoiding catastrophic warming would also require so much carbon capture that a new plant would have to be built every single day between now and 2050. And now in the world, we have one operational plant.

A single plant. One single plant.

One plant. There are others that are sort of, you know, tech … like there are laboratory-scale experiments, but there's one commercially working plant out there today. And we would need to do one every day between now and 2050. And that's not to undo the damage of the last 150 years. That's just on top of the rapid decarbonization they say is necessary, and which may be impossible, to allow us to avoid catastrophic warming. To do even more than that, to actually remove carbon from the atmosphere at scale, rather than just sort of limiting the damage that we're doing going forward, would be an even bigger undertaking. What we're talking about when we're talking about carbon removal at a scale of climate reparations, like I'm sketching out in this piece, is really, it's what scientists often call "planetary scale." It does mean meaningfully rebuilding the surface of the planet in order to make this job one of our biggest priorities along with, you know, food production, for instance. And that is not something that most people are contemplating. And I think most people even who get excited about carbon capture tend not to understand just what scale is required to meaningfully impact our carbon trajectory as a planet.

Are there any wealthy nations that have adopted or embraced the language of climate reparations in this way, talking about carbon removal and their own role and responsibility in it?

The short answer is no. The connection between carbon removal technology and climate reparations is relatively new because the tech is so new. The language that has been used by most developing nations in calling for support, they've used the word "reparations," but not connected to carbon removal, and they often talk about loss and damage, which is to say that they want payments to help them deal with extreme weather and natural disasters they've seen already and the ones that they're likely to see in the future. That language has, to some degree, filtered up into the rhetoric of wealthy nations. And if you look at all of the speechifying at Glasgow, the climate conference in November, there was much more rhetorical support among global leaders from the Global North for the conceptual proposition that vulnerable countries need more help.

It's imperative that we support developing nations.

We are doubling our initial climate finance commitment for our Pacific family and Southeast Asian partners.

We in the developed world must recognize the special responsibility we have to help everybody else.

And so that, on some level, is progress. But the concrete commitments that were made were, I think, quite laughably small. So, in the last major climate conference in Paris, the rich countries of the world promised 100 billion dollars in annual funding to the countries of the Global South through what's called the Green Climate Fund. They haven't yet made good on that promise. They've gotten sort of close if you count in that figure a lot of loans that those countries will have to pay back. You can get close to 100 billion, but they haven't actually met 100 billion. And the only promise that was made this time at Glasgow was that, okay, now, in fact, we are going to get to 100 billion, which is, you know, of course the same promise they made in 2015. The developing countries of the world, in the meantime, have dramatically upped their ask. And depending on which diplomat you talk to, they would say the figures are now the requisite figures or something, at least on the order of 750 billion dollars a year, maybe a trillion, maybe 1.3 trillion to help them both deal with the inevitable impacts and to help them transition more quickly into their own green economies. So, we're falling far, far, far, far, far short. We're starting to talk like this is important. But it's not clear exactly what that means or whether, you know, these leaders in these rich countries are essentially paying lip service to an idea so that they don't actually have to pay up themselves.

Just the term "reparations" on the political stage is met with backlash by conservatives in the U.S. And I'm curious, you know, given that reality, why use the term "reparations" for climate? Does it ultimately hurt the goal?

I think wherever we look on climate, we have been constrained in the past by plotting our hopes from the basis of what we considered politically possible, and not from what we understood from the science to be necessary. And I think that has been a real failing and it is a large part of why we are today where we are, so close to this threshold that scientists have been warning us about for decades. I think that the question of carbon removal and reparations, and even putting aside the carbon removal part of it, just the reparations part of it, is similar. We know there will be more warming than there is today. We know the developing world is already ravaged by today's warming. We know that that future warming will impoverish them further, expand rather than shrink the gap in resources and wellbeing that today, really if we looked squarely at it in the Global North, should embarrass us. That gap is only going to expand. And we know that doing nothing to help them transition and adapt means subjecting billions of people to much harsher lives, full of much more suffering than they would be subjected to if we did help them. Whether that project is politically palatable in the immediate present tense of domestic politics in this or that country I think is less important than asking readers, Americans, citizens of the world to think about this challenge in moral terms and ask them, invite them to think about what they could do and what their polities could do to alleviate the suffering of those who are expected to suffer most.

You've been writing about climate for years. And I mean, I remember when "The Uninhabitable Earth" was first published in "New York Magazine" in 2017 and just … [SIGHS] I mean, I remember in my own social circles at least, it felt like a million alarm bells went off. I think that was a real wake-up call for a lot of people and that you eventually turned that into a book. But I also know that you have, in your writing, been sort of cautiously optimistic about the future. Not saying it'll be easy, but that it's at least plausible to achieve a better future for our planet. How do climate reparations fit into your forecast and fit into your, I don't know, your understanding of optimism?

Well, I don't think that the relative optimism that you're describing depends on a large-scale embrace of climate reparations. So, at a global level, you know, a few years ago, I think it was plausible to imagine the planet warming by four or even five degrees Celsius this century. And that would've been absolutely catastrophic. Now, I don't think that it would've meant civilizational collapse. I'm not one of those people. But it would've put a lot of stress on a lot of particular societies, produced a lot more famine and drought and suffering and hunger and indeed death than we have today. And that landscape has really changed over the last couple of years. That's not because of stuff we've done exactly. It's because of how much cheaper renewable energy looks now than it did a little while ago. So, almost all of the forecasters looking at our energy trajectories now see a much faster transition to renewables, a much more immediate end to coal than was thought possible even just a few years ago. And as a result, we're looking at a future of somewhere between two and three and a half degrees, and maybe on the cooler end of that between two and two and a half degrees. Now two degrees is still hellish. It would still mean 150 million additional people dying of air pollution, 150 million from the burning fossil fuels. It would mean storm and flooding events that used to hit once a century would hit every single year. And it would mean all across South Asia and the Middle East, during summer in many cities that are today home to 10 or 12 million, 15 million people, it would be so hot that you couldn't go around outside, you couldn't walk or work outside without risking heatstroke and possibly death. That's two degrees. I think that's about our best-case scenario. Now, the way that carbon removal and reparations come in on top of that is twofold. The first is it lowers the floor. If we don't really have a hope of staying below two degrees without carbon removal, with carbon removal, we do. Which means we could get under 1.5 degrees. We could even get under one degree. Theoretically, we could get all the way back to the pre-industrial climate, if we had this at enough scale. And as I said and we talked about, huge scale, hugely expensive, but it's conceivably possible.

I don't think it's a coincidence that we're heading probably for a temperature level that will be difficult, but manageable for the wealthy countries of the world, and yet absolutely punishing for those in the Global South. I think probably, you know, a lot of people would've predicted that that was the quote-unquote "optimal policy point." But I think that it would be a moral failing if we looked at that dynamic and said that that was an acceptable outcome. I think we need to understand our obligation to others. Not just because they are fellow humans, but because they are suffering because of what we've done, how we've benefited, and ultimately because of how rich we are. In theory, we wanna extend those same promises and opportunities all around the world, but a first step towards that means protecting them from the collateral damage that we have already imposed.

David, thank you so much for this conversation. I appreciate it.

Thanks for having me. Great to talk to you. David Wallace-Wells' article for "New York Magazine" is available now on Apple News. You can find the link on our show notes page.