Welcome to Crash Course, a podcast about business, political, and social disruption and what we can learn from it. I'm Tim O'Brien. Today's Crash Course mother Nature versus life as we know it. For the first time in more than eighty years, southern California was deluge by a tropical storm. A broad swath of the American Southwest, including long arid deserts,
also got soaked. Lahina, the picturesque tourist destination on the Hawaiian island of Maui, got burnt to the ground by a fast moving wildfire that may have left at least hundreds of people dead. Weather's fickle and climate related catastrophes have become all too common in the US and around
the globe. Deadly rain induced flooding interspersed with deadly heat induced fires have also visited the Koreas, Ethiopia, Australia, Pakistan, India, Brazil, the UK, Canada, Greece and other countries during this still new twenty first century. July twenty twenty three was the hottest month on record in the US, according to National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Records. Records dating back to eighteen fifty We now live in a climate change world in which every season or region is host to the hottest, the driest, the coldest, or the wettest moment of the modern human era. The league tables keep changing, with each new climate disaster outranking its predecessor. We are witnesses to violent extremities that are often unpredictable and difficult to manage. We are the authors of the disasters and victims of
the consequences. Mother Nature has had enough. Joining me to discuss climate change and what we can do about it is Mark Gonglof, the columnist with Bloomberg Opinion who specializes in covering the environment and climate change. He's a stellar writer and wonderfully clear thinking. Welcome Mark, Thank you Tim. I thought we could break up our conversation today into three parts flooding, fires, and solutions. Does that sound like a reasonable approach?
It sounds like it's an enormous topic, and I am happy to be here to talk about such an enjoyable, you know, cheerful topic.
Yeah, well, it's an important topic. Sometimes the important topics aren't that cheerful, right, So let's get started. Let's talk about the rains that recently soaked the American Southwest, just in a very basic way.
What caused that, Well, there was a hurricane that formed in the eastern Pacific off the coast of Mexico, Hurricane Hillary. There was really really hot water and it went really deep, and so the hurricane went from zero to one hundred really fast, went up to a category four really quickly.
And then a couple of freakish things happened that sucked that hurricane right up into California, one of which was a giant heat dome sitting over the central part of the US that kept air from blowing to the east. And then you had Ordinarily California's waters are really cold, and that kills hurricanes and tropical storms. But this was so strong that even that cold water couldn't really kill it.
But also it was also not as cold as it usually is, because the oceans are hotter than they've ever been right now, and so it weakened dramatically to a tropical storm by the time it got to California, but it still contained a whole lot of water by the time it got up there, and kept dumping water all the way up into Boise, Idaho.
And so is that a one off you know, as you noted, colder waters have traditionally protected the California coast at least and some of the inland regions from hurricanes and storms like this. But if the oceans are warming, that logic may change. Yeah. Do you suspect that this is only a one.
Off, Well, I described it as sort of a freakish event. But a couple of those things are going to be with us for a long time. Hotter oceans, heat domes. I saw a scientist say that this used to be a once in a one hundred and eight year event, and now it's a once in thirty year event. And as the climate keeps warming, it could become more frequent
than that because some of those conditions aren't going away. Yes, the water off coast to California will remain cold, it will remain hopefully rare, but not nearly as rare as it used to be.
Whatever I try to understand when these things are happening. I think about those like snow globes or those toys I had as little kid, you know, where you would shake it up and different things would happen inside, you know, the sphere. But now all of the conditions that were used to for understanding how weather develops have shifted, so when the entire earth shakes like a snow globe, the cause and effect is radically changed in ways we're just starting to experience.
Now, right, that's right. I mean, it's a great analogy. You know, used to think about climate change, or at least for a long time I thought about it. Maybe other people did too. Is just you'd hear about these tiny temperatures. You'd say, well, it's going to rise by two degrees celsius. And if you and I walk out of the building today and it's two degrees celsias warmer, we're barely going to notice. Right, that's you know, maybe four or five degrees fahrenheit. A lot of people would
find that more pleasant. You might think, well, Canada is going to be warmer, Wisconsin's going to be warmer. Everything is going to be great. What's the worry? And I think that's one of the reasons people haven't been as worried about it as maybe they should be. But what we're discovering is that if you apply even that small amount of extra heat, we've warned by about one point
one degrees celsius, so far above pre industrial averages. If you apply just that small amount of heat over an entire planet for a long period of time, you get weird things that happen. And so you can see Siberia, it doesn't rise up to like eighty degrees fahrenheit. It rises to one hundred as we saw earlier this year, which is just an incredible thing to think about. In Canada as much hotter, And that's one of the reasons
we can get into this later. While we're seeing record wildfires there this year, and so it's affecting wind patterns, affecting jet streams, affecting ocean currents. It has all kinds of things that we are discovering and living through right now.
You know, it's interesting what you just brought up, the idea of data points. What do two degrees celsius mean when it's abstract? And for a long time scientists and climate specialists have been looking at this data and seeing the changes and warning us, But a lot of it felt data driven. Prepare for the future. If you don't prepare for the future, the world your children and your grandchildren live in might be adversely affected, probably will be
adversely affected. But we weren't feeling dramatic change in our daily lives. Now, lo and behold we are you know, smoke is clogging our lungs, and as these floods have proven, their waters washing down our streets and into some of our homes. And it's no longer about the data, it's about lived experiences. And maybe this year in particular is a turning point in terms of people's awareness that it isn't just the data. Now we're seeing what climate change really means day to day.
That's right. The future is here, The future is now. You can't even call this a new normal. This is a road. We're on a path to a much much worse new normal if we continue down the road we're going with al Nino. This year. You mentioned July was the hottest month. It was the hottest month on record. So far, August looks like it's going to set another record, and we're talking about maybe going to one point five degrees celsius above pre industrial averages for this month for
this month alone. Again, very abstract number. It doesn't make any sense to a lot of people when they hear that, but the effect of that tiny change in temperature is what we're seeing now. We're seeing multiple disasters happening. We're seeing heat domes over the middle of the country, a massive flooding in China and India, wildfires and Maui and Canada, massive heat in winter in South America. It just goes on and on. Corals dying in Florida. This is with
just one point five degrees of warming. So we are living the experience, as you say now. And if there is one hopeful thing to take out of this sort of my asthma of disaster, it's that it is I think I hope starting to wake people up to the reality of what's going on.
Yeah, thinking hope our interesting concepts right now because we can get into climate change denihialism later. I want to ask you a really basic question. Since we're on water in this opening act, tell me a little bit about the mechanics of flooding. Why do floods occur?
There are a few different reasons. On the coasts. It happens when you get a big storm surge, and especially if that happens during high tide, as we saw during Hurricane Sandy. You had a Hurricane Cane, big storm surge at high tide flooded the coastal area. Another way you get is if you live on a river and you get a bunch of rain dumped and the rivers overflow their banks, creeks overflow their banks, you get river rain flooding. Now, all those things are affected by climate change. Of course,
all those things are made worse by climate change. The other weird thing we're seeing with climate change is just sudden bursts of water coming out of nowhere. Because when you talk about the snow globe shaken up, climate change is about energy, and the hotter the air gets, the more energy is in there, and the more snow is dancing around in the globe, and that has all kinds of effects. And one of the effects is it holds
more water. And so when you get rainstorms, when you get regular thunderstorms, as we saw in Vermont and New York recently. That wasn't a hurricane or anything like that. It was just a big kind of a bad storm, but it dumped tremendous amounts of rain. It dumped like months of rain in a period of a day, just like we're seeing in California infacted.
There wasn't the stat on California that they expected to get a year's worth. Yes, of rain in three days.
That's right. And we're seeing things like that happen all the time. We're seeing it in India, we're seeing it in China, we see it in Vermont. And so what happens is you get all this rain coming all at once, it overwhelms. Our systems were not designed to handle this. You know, you've got these drainage systems and culverts, the things that run under bridges so that doesn't swamp the bridge. All that stuff was built for periods of time when you might get an inch of rain at worse during
a day. You know, now you're getting five or six inches of rain, and all that stuff gets overwhelmed. And so that's a big factor and why we're getting some of the flooding we're seeing now.
You know, predictions when Hurricane Hillary first formed were much more dire before it was downgraded into a tropical storm. It became a tropical storm. If it had stayed a hurricane, what might have happened that didn't happen.
We would have seen a lot more flooding, a lot more destruction. You could have seen more scenes like we saw in Vermont, where a lot of more people had to be evacuated. People did have to be evacuated in parts of California, and one of the lessons we can take from what happened with Hillary is that local officials were prepared for it. They saw it coming. In Vermont, New York, you didn't quite see it coming. You had no idea. You saw a storm coming, but you didn't
know you're going to get that kind of rain. With Hillary, fortunately everybody was scared about it and they had time to prepare people, and they could track the storm exactly. They could track the storm, they knew it was coming. They could tell people to get in their houses, get out of dangerous areas, and so they saved a lot of lives doing that because it could have been worse. Even with the we did get a lot of rainfall, even though it wasn't as much as people expected, But yes,
it could have been much worse. We really got lucky. And you know, we're rolling the dice with nature all the time, and sometimes we come up lucky, as we maybe did with Hillary.
So one of the distinctions you're pointing out is that there's some flooding you can anticipate ahead of time, and there's a lot of flooding you can't, yeah, and that's going to put a lot of burden on communities to plan for the unknown.
Right and of course, even with the flooding that you can predict, we saw Hurricane Sandy coming right, and it still caused tremendous destruction. At some point, there's only so much planning you can do, and then you have to prepare in advance for these things by building up better coastal defenses, building better culverts, building better drainage systems, things like that. So it's not just about, oh, a storm's coming, everybody,
you know, head for the hills. It's about we are hardened against these disasters that we know are coming, and we still haven't really done that as a country, not only with flooding but also with wildfires, as we can discuss later too.
Let's go overseas for a minute. There's a lot of places we could go and we talk about flooding, but Pakistan resonates with me as one of the most traumatic, you know, victims of floods in the climate change era. It's annual almost now, but in certain recent years it's all been just devastating, with tens of millions of people dislocated and in many parts of the country they still
haven't recovered. Does this hit developing nations? You know, economically developed nations have measures for dealing with some of this. Does flooding hit economically undeveloped countries in more severe ways?
Yeah, for sure. Yeah, they don't have the infrastructure to begin with. Maybe they don't have good governance that can help with relief afterward or preparing people for disasters ahead of time. A lot of these places in Pakistan, India, they have monsoon seasons that they get regularly, but those monsoons are turning out to be much more destructive than they have ever been before. So there are a lot
of ways that they are unprepared for this. I will say, of course, we can't feel too great about how we respond to things in the US and in the developed world either. We have a lot of our own issues which we can get into. I'm thinking about I visited the Virgin Islands last year, and you know that's a UK protectorate. They had a massive hurricane there five years ago.
They're still rebuilding from it. And when I talked to the locals there about it, they said that the only way they got some of the things up and running was local billionaires Larry Page and people like that pumped money into helping to rebuild and get infrastructure up and running there. But there are still buildings that are wiped out there from a hurricane that happened five years ago.
So you take that kind of issue and multiply by ten or one hundred, and you get what you see in like Pakistan and other places like this that don't have any infrastructure at all or any way to help the people recover from these disasters.
Yeah. I reported from Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, and that's for the Caribbean, a much more developed territory and they're still struggling with the impact of that event. All of this raises, I think a pretty interesting issue, which is the global North versus the global South. Because the global North created the industrializations in many different countries, primarily Western Europe, in the US, moved into China and India. That's created a lot of forces that have caused climate change.
And while the global North seeks to mitigate those forces, the global South is dealing with the impact of climate change in a more ruthless way. And then also as those economies attempt to modernize. They're being told not to do what the global North did when it was creating all the wealth that came out of the industrialization era. So there's an enormous amount of tension here that doesn't seem easily resolvable to me between the global North and the global South.
Yeah, there's a lot of unfairness there. As you say, the US and Western Europe are responsible for the majority of the climate change we're seeing now. They pumped out the most emissions over the past several decades of any other countries in the world. China has caught up a lot recently, but they're still lagging the US in terms of emissions, and the US has cut its emissions, but not nearly enough. This goes from the high level to
the low level to the personal level. Wealthy people in this country are responsible for more of the emissions that this country produces than poorer people. But the people of lower income and marginalize people suffer the brunt of climate disasters in this country, and they're suffering the brunt of climate disasters around the world. So they're angry about that.
They want money from us, They want reparations of a sort from US, and of course the West or the global North doesn't want to give that money to them. But there is an issue. There's a big issue here, a big conflict. They want to develop, and they have a right to develop, and they aren't responsible for the climate change. They have a right to develop. They need air conditioning because it's getting hotter. They need air conditioning to survive. Right, it's a matter of life and death.
Where a lot of people in these countries to have ac they have to run that some way with electricity. If we don't help them somehow develop that electricity in a green way, in a sustainable way, they're going to go to the coal plants they already have running. And there is an argument to be made. Some people would disagree with this. It's a controversy that you need economic growth in order to produce the financing that can lead to a greener future. And these countries deserve to develop
the way we did. And now we in China produce solar panels and wind turbines and all that neat stuff. These people have to get a chance to do that too. But we can help shortcut around the whole. We're going to destroy the planet for fifty years before we finally turn green. We can help shortcut that whole thing by just going ahead and giving them the money they need
to do grain development right now. And it's a hard argument to make here in the US Congress, for example, but it's an argument we need to be having or a conversation.
The US Congress. Don't get me going. Yeah on that note, We're going to take a quick break Mark to hear from one of our sponsors, and then we'll come right back. We're back with Mark Gangloff of Bloomberg opinion columnists specializing in the environment and climate change. Mark. We just spent a chunk of time talking about floods as one manifestation of climate change. Let's change direction and talk about heat. All of those major storms and floods were also living
in an unusually hot era. Are those things contradictory fire and water.
Not at all. In fact, they're part of the same thing. This energy we're talking about, this extra energy that goes into the atmosphere that holds more water. That same heat also leads to drier spells, more droughts. You can see this in Hawaii. We're talking about the Mali wildfires. Hawaii
is a perfect example of this. The southwest sides of those Hawaiian islands are protected by mountains from trade winds that come down from the northeast, and those trade winds bring a bunch of rain to the northeast sides of those islands. On the northeast sides of those islands, they're getting more rain than ever. On the southwest sides, they're getting less rain than ever. They're drier than ever. And so that's one of the factors that led to the
Mali wildfires. There was extreme drought on the southwestern side of Maui down there, and of course you know, they'd also done away with plantations banana and I think sugarcane plantations and replace them with like this dry grass. And when you have drought and climate change, it gets hotter, drier, the undergrowth gets drier faster, and so you have all this tin and becomes like kindling exactly. I was just going to say, yeah, and so you have all that and all it takes is a spark to light all
that up. And that's exactly what happened in Maui. So that is what's happening sort of in the world writ large. You have drier dries, hotter hots and wetter periods of rain and storms.
Climate change also essentially increases both the frequency and the intensity of these various events we're talking about. Is there more we haven't discussed that's behind that kind of vortex of each event almost feeding on its predecessor.
Yeah. We talk a lot about like tipping points, and there are things like the Atlantic meridianal overturning current, which is just this big conveyor belt of water that goes from the South Atlantic up to the North Atlantic that controls all kinds of weather patterns in Europe and the US. A changing climate hotter seas is affecting that. It's slowing that down, which is causing droughts in Africa that are leading to political unrest in Africa and wars. And it's
all connected in different ways. You know, Canada, wildfires in Canada hundreds of miles away affected the air in the US to the south. One of the factors that caused the big wildfire and Maui was a hurricane that was hundreds of miles to the south and just sitting in the middle of the Pacific, And you would think that would be harmless, but it was causing these hurricane force winds to blow up into Malli. So you had the high winds that helped drive the fire when it got sparked.
Like a bellows to get the logs in their fireplace roaring exactly.
And so the planet is all connected. Something that happens and the Antarctic will affect the weather or a disaster in Europe. And again, you know, you've got all this extra energy in the atmosphere making these disasters more likely. I mean, there have always been wildfires, there have always been hurricanes, there've always been droughts. All of these things
have always happened. But by ratcheting up the energy level in the atmosphere, we're making these things more likely and more unpredictable and more destructive when they do appen.
There's so much of climate change currently that feels to me like sci fi movies coming true. You know, I'm a Blade Runner fan, and when the wildfires in Canada turned you know, the New York sky orange, it looked very Blade Running at me.
It was very Ridley Scott.
It was very Ridley Scott. And maybe this is our punishment we have to actually live now in the sci fi movies we make. But Another kind of facet of sci fi made real is heat domes. Like the term heat dome, you know, invokes in my mind, I think exactly what it is, But it's also so extraordinary. I have this image with this giant atmospheric flying saucer sort of just sitting and hovering over a section of the
country and not letting anything escape from its perimeters. In this case heat and just sits above it and traps the heat and cooks everything beneath it. Am I offering a crude description of what goes on?
Actually, that's a really good description of what a heat dome is. It's like a lid, giant lid on a pot. The jet stream, you know. Again, this is we talk about climate change's effects. Climate change moves the jet stream around, It makes it wobble in a wider track than it usually does. Usually it flows in a nice predictable pattern, and it helps airflow from west to east. With climate change, you will make the jet stream jut up to the
north and just sit there for a long time. And that's part of the reason we get these heat domes. It doesn't allow the air to escape, It keeps air trapped over one part of the country for a really long time. When we're experiencing that right now in the US, and in fact, you know, you talk about disaster movies. I think it was in the Day After Tomorrow there's there's a there's a screenshot of like five hurricanes all
happening at once. Well, somebody there was a real picture that somebody sent around earlier this year of four massive heat domes over the planet, one over the US, one over the Atlantic, one over Africa, and one over India, just these massive heat domes, and it was like the planet appears to have gone haywire.
And of course in the Day After Tomorrow movies like that, when they see that up on their screens, they go, oh good god. Yeah, yeah, you know, and again it's happening.
In reality, it is, it is, and some of us did say, oh good God, and I hope more of us did, but yeah, we are living through that. But yeah, that's what the heats on miss. It's a giant lid that keeps air trapped in place, doesn't let the heat escape, doesn't let cold air in. You know, that's one of the reasons Phoenix cooked at one hundred and ten degrees plus for thirty one straight days earlier this year.
And you know Phoenix cooking. I was there a couple of years ago in the middle of the last time it got very thoroughly baked, and I was at the time writing about the water levels in Lake Meat and what was happening to the water supply in the Southwest. We have these towns that we've built in the desert that were probably never meant to be inhabited in the
way that we inhabit them. But electric grids, roadways and of course air conditioning have made places like Phoenix or Las Vegas inhabitable, at least inhabitable in far larger numbers. There were indigenous people who lived there quite well for a long period of time before we displace them. But the current world we're in right now is telling us this isn't sustainable.
Yes, as you say, people lived in those places for tens of thousands of years before. But a couple of things that were different is they had acclimated to the heat because they didn't have ac it wasn't as hot. They also had adjusted their architecture their lifestyles. You see it all over the world. People live in very hot places, but they build buildings to let airflow. They don't work
in the middle of the day. What we have done is we've tried to take the typical American lifestyle with a car and a big house and a bunch of air conditioning, and we never have to suffer through the heat or suffer through any kind of like physical pain, and we've tried to transplant that into the desert. And one of the things about those indigenous peoples is that when the water went away, as it did periodically, the
civilizations went away too. Like they fought over water and they killed each other off, or they left, they moved on. We are not doing that. We're choosing to stay there and keep fighting against nature. But nature is currently winning. We're running out of water. The Colorado River, which you visited, like meat, is drying up. They're at all time low water levels there. They're starting to fight over water. They're starting to have big conflicts.
Well, just like the indigenous people. I was thinking that you've brought up that great element of this is that the Colorado River was never designed to serve the number of states and the amount of people that it's now being called upon to serve millions a week. So you have states now fighting each other for access to the river.
Yeah, and we're straining electrical grids. If you build these McMansions and sprawl them out across to the desert around Phoenix, you have electrical goods being strained, and we're having to rethink the way we build these cities. There's just no escaping it.
What happens to the human body when it's exposed to extreme heat. We have a lot of exterior manifestations of climate change. Obviously we're talking about flooding and wildfires, but our bodies as well can't sustain the kind of atmospheric temp we're now in countering.
Yeah, as human beings, we evolved in a part of Africa where if you think about your favorite temperature, I mean this is not everybody. I know some people who love it when it's one hundred degrees, I hate it. But if you think about your favorite temperature, it's like seventy four, not humid at all. We evolved in a part of Africa where the weather was like that pretty much all the time, and so our bodies are designed
to like thrive in that kind of environment. So and we can live in extremes, We can live at the poles. We live in deserts. Humans can live anywhere, but our bodies are designed to maintain a certain level of heat, and it is very easy to overheat us. A great book that I recommend about this is called The Heat Will Kill You First, Very again, a very cheerful peat title. Very cheerful for recommending that to our Yes, yes, it's something to read. A bedtime for Happy Thoughts by Jeff Goodell.
It's a great book and it talks about how the human body responds to heat. He tells some horror stories that I won't get into here, but it doesn't take long to sort of overheat a human body, and you can be very healthy. You can be a marathon and you can get overheated very quickly, and you can drink all the water you want. There are firefighters who were fighting fires and drinking gallons of water to stay hydrated, but they still overheated. Because it's not about the water
you drink. The water you drink helps you sweat out, but if it's too humid out, or if your body temperature rises to a certain level, the only thing that you can do is to bring that body temperature down. And what we saw in places like Phoenix recently. Is they were taking body bags and filling them with ice and putting people inside the body bags filled with ice just to like cool them down enough. Because you start to get organ failure, you start to get heatstroke. And
you can see that right away. If you're out running or something in the heat and you feel dizzy or you feel disoriented, you are starting to suffer from heatstroke, and you need to like stop what you're doing and go get cool right away.
Now, let's think about that from an modern civilization has brought us to the point where it's sticking people in giant ice bags, Yeah, to make sure they can survive.
Yeah, it's not a good sign, you know.
Let's talk a bit about the Malibu fires of twenty twenty two, which capped a few previous years of fire. Were there any lessons from the fires at ravage Malibu? They also ravaged Napa. They were among again the most vivid examples of climate change, not being abstract but coming into people's homes, coming into people's vineyards, coming into people's streets. Mountains were stripped naked of trees and looked prehistoric in They're awake. What lessons came out of those fires.
Learned a few different things. I mean, first of all, obviously climate change is making fires more frequent, more destructive. Another thing is we are moving into these urban wildlife interfaces more and more, testing the boundaries, moving into nature, partly because we don't have affordable housing in the cities. People are living in a wilderness out in California because they can't afford to live in downtown San Francisco or
La because it's just too expensive. So we're pushing people to the margins, and again that's where the bad climate stuff happens. Another issue was the electrical wires. Pacific gas an Electric has been blamed for about thirty of the wildfires that have started in California since twenty seventeen. They deny a lot of that, but they did pay a fifty five million dollars settlement last year to avoid criminal
prosecution and two of the big wildfires. This is again part of our issue with not being hardened against climate disasters. We have these above ground electrical lines that are aging that need a lot of maintenance. When we're running wires out to houses in the middle of this urban wildlife interface, you're putting these things in contact with very dry trees. The same thing happened in Maui allegedly or so well.
In Maui was dangling wires contact. Yes, the underbrush that you mentioned earlier exactly, not trees, but it was initially started by this kindling we talked about.
That's right, and electrical wire was involved in that too. So what's the solution to that, Well, you bury a bunch of electrical lines underground. But think of the cost of that. And again, this is one of the things we were talking about the cost of helping emerging countries developing countries against climate change. We have to harden our own country against climate change too, but it is enormously expensive and politically controversial to do that.
I have found Canada's recent struggle wildfires to be compelling, scary, humbling, all the things that climate change makes you feel. But the other thing it raised for me was this idea of climate haven's, which you've spent a lot of time writing about. Canada recently had to evacuate the majority of its population from the Northwest territories because the wildfires that were approaching parts of British Columbia were devastating, and Canada as well to the north of US. Obviously, it's known
for snow and ice and many other things. And it's not immune from climate changes reach either, is it.
That's what we're finding out is like nothing is immune. There's an article I read and this goes back to the idea of the concept that climate change or global warming is just a gentle turning up of the global thermostat by a degree or two. You know, what's the big deal. It's going to make Canada more pleasant. We'll all go live in Wisconsin, will all go live in Buffalo, warmer winters, warmer winters, more farmland, just fertile farmland in Siberia.
What's the problem. Well, Siberia is not just fertile farmland now, it's getting up to one hundred degrees You've got Siberian permafrosts that can thaw out and release all kinds of prehistoric diseases. Canada is drying out, and heat domes can settle over Canada too, Maybe less likely because of the jet stream, but anyway, it gets really hot there. We're finding out hotter than we had expected, and hot enough
to help spark these massive wildfires. Vermont is listed as maybe the biggest climate haven in the United States, and they were all underwater just a month or so ago. There really are no climate havens. I mean, as we talked about in New York, we were suffering. We had an apocalyptic scene outside this building because of wildfires. We're hundreds of miles away in Canada. We are all in this together. Is the message here. There are really no havens.
There are places that will deal with it better. You know, places at the tropics will be more consistently under stress and uninhabitable than say Wisconsin. So maybe you want to move to Wisconsin, or maybe you want to move to Buffalo, but you also be prepared there, but me to be prepared there for climate change's effects to reach you too.
Nowhere to run to, baby, nowhere to hide. Yes, yes, let's take another break, Mark, and then when we come back, we'll talk about solutions or at least approaches to all of this, trying to find the brighter side in this challenge while facing We're back with the great Mark Gangloff, columnist Extraordinary talking about climate change. Mark, We've been talking about some of the most apparent manifestations of climate change, flooding, drought, wildfires.
We're leaving frost off the menu today so we can devote part of the show to solutions. I'm inclined to say that the first step in all of this is for everyone to take climate change seriously and stop the charade of saying it's a media invented myth. You don't have to agree with me, but that feels like a useful first stop.
That'd be a good first step. Admitting you have a problem is always the first step to recovery. You could also look at it as I kind of feel like most of us have moved on. If you think about it in the stages of grief, I think you know, denial is the first one, and then anger and then bargaining. I think a lot of people are now in the bargaining phase. I mean, when I write a climate column, I still get on social media and in my inbox a lot of people saying, oh, it's a myth, Climate's
always been changing, scaring tactics exactly. Most people don't agree with that. Now, about seventy percent of the country agrees the climate change is real. They may disagree about why it's happening, but most of the country agrees that humans are causing it. At this point. And if you go to Congress and talk to individual Republican congress people, they'll tell you they admit it's real, they admit it's happening. But now the issue is what do we do about it?
And how fast do we do something about it? And this is why I think it's the bargaining phase. It's like, Okay, maybe it's real, but do we really have to, you know, drive electric cars? Do we really have to put wind turbines out in the ocean? Do we really have to do all this? To do we really have to overhaul our economy. We don't really want to do that because
it scares us and we're worried about economic growth. And I can get into how much the destruction of climate change is going to cost us, way more than the stuff we need to do to prevent it, but anyway, they don't think like that. Whatever, that's the phase we're in now, And so I think my thing is getting to the next phase of acceptance and realizing, Okay, this is a real problem. As we've been discussing, this is a real problem right now. It's affecting us right now,
and we just start making some changes right now. And I do again As I said earlier, I think the one hopeful thing to take out of this is that maybe we're being smacked in the face almost literally, if you have to go outside New York with a mask on,
as opposed to inside three years ago. You have to go outside with a mask on just to be able to breathe normally, if your house is about to catch fire out in Malibu, you can't avoid, you can't escape these impacts, and maybe it will make people think harder about what we can do to mitigate this in the future.
So let's talk about some of the entities that participate in solutions. Let's start with government. We could go down a rabbit hole just talking about the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the National Flood Insurance Program that it sits underneath it as manifestations of the US government's effort to deal with this. But do you have thoughts about proactive, smart government actions that we know can help.
Well, first, we really need to overhaul them. FEMA has always been controversial. It's radically underfunded. We saw it in Hurricane Katrina. We see it again and again and again. It struggles to respond to the disasters, and we're seeing more of these disasters, and so it needs to be bulked up to respond to them. It's about to run out.
For a minute, when we talk about mindset is states or citizens who are say their anti government or they don't think the government can help. You See, time and again, after there's a natural disaster, whether it's a flood or hurricane or a wild bar, they actually call on the federal government for assistance and want FEMA on their doorstep as soon as possible.
For sure, everybody's a libertarian until you get into your house is knocked over by a hurricane. And FEMA is about to actually run out of money. And speaking of hurricanes, hurricane season hasn't even really gotten started yet, and FEMA is about to run out of money because we've already had so many billion dollar disasters in this country that it just doesn't have the money to handle many more. And speaking of which, you know, the National Flood Insurance
Program is also about to expire. Congress is about to re up that, and this is another just inefficient, wasteful. You know, five million people in this country rely on that for home insurance, but it heavily subsidizes wealthy homeowners who are building McMansions on the coast of Florida, and it doesn't help out the people who need it the most. It also hasn't updated its risk assessments for climate change. It hasn't updated its flood models for flood maps. It's
flood maps. People in Vermont didn't think they were in floodplains and oops, they discovered way too late that they were in floodplains. And that's going to happen more and more often, and so we're nowhere near prepared. So we haven't made the economics of flooding rational. We're starving these agencies because we're not putting a price on our lifestyle on the way we were not properly pricing the risk.
Of pricing consumption. Water is too cheap. Yeah, certain forms of energy are mispriced.
Well, this gets into when you ask about the bigger level things that government can do. The number one thing that I think this government can do, which every other developed country in the world aside from Australia, has done, is put a real price on carbon. We have to start charging people for pumping carbon into the atmosphere. And instead what we're doing is we're still subsidizing fossil fuel companies. We're still subsidizing fossil fuel use and consumption. That is
going away. We're starting to take gas stoves out of homes. Controversial, Every step of this is controversial, right, primy gas stove out of my cold, dead hands. All of this is controversial. But we're starting to do that. But we need to do that faster. You know, the Inflation Reduction Act last year was the biggest climate bill we've ever had, but it's a bunch of incentives. It's a bunch of we'll give you some money if you build a wind farm
or whatever. We need to start cracking down now. We need to start getting tougher on just the wasteful burning of carbon dioxide and energy. So you know, talk about pricing. That's what we need to price. Is this has a huge price on our society and we're not adequately reflecting that. And then the second thing we need to do is that IRA put in place a lot of clean energy investment. And that's great, but it takes years and years and
years to get this stuff connected to the grid. It can take a decade for a wind farm to go from the planning stage to actually producing energy for somebody, and that's just way too much time. We don't have a decade. We've got months or years at best.
And the grid itself, it's a crazy quilt of different state systems. That's not big enough, it's not expansive enough, not connect doesn't it's not connected enough, and it doesn't generate enough power to meet some of the green solutions that we want to embrace. That's right.
If we want to have everybody driving electric cars in a couple of years or by twenty thirty five or whatever, we need a lot more charging stations. I got an electric stove in my house earlier this year, and I had to rewire my kitchen because my house was built one hundred years ago. It was built for like one plug or whatever, and so I had to rewire my kitchen. Get a new electrical panel in the basement costs a lot more money than I expected. But we're going to
have to do that across the country. You know, if we're going to electrify everything, we need to upgrade all of our electrical stuff. We need to hire more electricians, aiproof career idea for you. You want, we have to rebuild our infrastructure for this. Again, costs a lot of money. But if we're going to meet our goals and cut emissions and keep these disasters from getting much much worse, which we can still do, then this is the kind of stuff we need to do.
I suppose talking about what the private sector should do dovetails with the public sector, But is there anything the private sector can do that we haven't landed on.
Yeah, no, the same kind of stuff. And I think they have been leading the way. I mean during the Trump administration, he got us out of the Paris Accords, he tried to undo all of the stuff that the previous administration had done. But in the meantime, plugging along in the background, private industry was you know, electrifying, and they were getting a lot of this stuff done, and the rest of the world was doing that. And so the market forces are working in that direction and they
just need to keep doing that. They need to be brave about it, and I think they still are. You know, there's this whole ANTIEESG movement happening, but people are still investing in green energy. At least. I think even if you get a CEO he feels squeamish about you know, whatever woke politics or whatever they still realize that they don't want their warehouse to burn down or flood. They realize that it's cheaper to run a plant on soular
energy than it is on gas or whatever. So they're getting those financial incentives just from the market, which is one of the few optimistic things we can say here today.
And then maybe they don't want their grandchildren to live on a burning marble.
I mean you would think.
Yeah. Lastly, what about individuals? What can individuals do that they're not doing? I think people dutifully try to recycle, more, people are adopting evs, electrifying their stoves. Are there any big things that people need to do on moss as individuals that would help things?
The biggest thing is help elect politicians. I don't care what party they are, but politicians that take this seriously and want to do something about it. Because you, as an individual, you can get an electric car, you can electrify your house, you can get rid of your pets. Pets are a big climate change thing, but you shouldn't get rid of your pets. If you la have pets, keep them. But if you do all these things, you will reduce your carbon footprint by I don't know by
a few tons a year. Walmart can do some of these things and reduce its carbon footprint by millions and millions of tons of years. So your individual carbon footprint is not that big in the grand scheme of things. And one of the things we have to do as people is stop feeling guilty about this and stop feeling
hopeless about this. And I think it's this sort of evil genius that the fossil fuel industry came up with the idea of the carbon footprint about you know, fifteen years ago or so, and said, you know, look at how much you're burning, look at how much carbon you're pumping into the atmosphere. So that we would feel guilty about it and feel helpless about it. You can still maybe take a few flights less, maybe get an electric carb You can afford it. Again, the wealthier people in
this country can afford to make the bigger changes. All those things help. Being conscious consumers helps, you know, you help drive the market, You help raise demand for sustainable things. But ultimately, our voices and our attitude are the most powerful forces that we have. We can raise those voices to our neighbors, to our friends. We should realize that most of the country is worried about climate change. Whether you're in a red state or a blue state, most
people share this concern. So recognizing that first, and so feeling free to use that voice to express that and to elect people that want solutions and try to push solutions on our own backyard in mass Those are the most powerful things that we can do as individuals.
Mark, I call you the climates are inside Bloomberg opinion. What have you learned about climate change that you didn't know before?
I am learning that the changes are much more complicated than I even realized at first. The biggest thing, though, I think, is just the energy transitions can be so expensive. I mean, Bloomberg and EF I always hate to say this number because it's so terrifying, but Bloomberg a nif estimated the world is going to have to spend two hundred trillion dollars to get our emissions down to avoid
the worst climate disasters. And that sounds like a lot, But that is over the next between now and say twenty fifty, and then if you start to add up the costs that happen. Claudia Sam Great Economists were a column for us that said, it's going to cost maybe three hundred billion dollars a year in lost worker productivity due to heat alone by twenty fifty. And so you take those little effects and the effects of hurricanes and drafts and wildfires and just general health. We haven't even
gotten into the health effects of climate change. How diseases are moving there, are expanding their horizons and moving into new areas. All that stuff adds up. And so the biggest thing I've learned is to think about these things, the transition, the spending on green energy and the like, as investments rather than costs, because the real costs are what happened if we don't do anything. What we're spending to avoid that stuff is an investment and a better future.
Mark, we're out of time. Thank you for sitting down with me today.
Thanks for having me.
Mark Gongloff is a columnist with Bloomberg Opinion who specializes in covering the environment and climate change. You can find his work on the Bloomberg Opinion website in the Bloomberg Terminal. You can also find him on Twitter at Mark Gongloff. Here at crash Course, we believe the collisions can be messy, impressive challenging, surprising, and always instructive. In today's Crash Course, I learned that fire and flooding aren't really polar opposites
in this new era of climate change. They are actually manifestations of one another. What did you learn? We'd love to hear from you. You can tweet at the Bloomberg Opinion, handle at Opinion or me at Tim O'Brien using the hashtag Bloomberg Crash Course. You can also subscribe to our show wherever you're listening right now, and please leave us a review. It helps more people find the show. This episode was produced by the indispensable Annamazarakas, Moses On Dam
and Me. Our supervising producer is Magnus Hendrickson, and we had editing help from Sage Bauman, Katie Boyce, Jeff Grocott, Mike Nize and Christine Banden Bylark Blake Maples does our sound engineering, and our original theme song was composed by Louis Skara. I'm Tim O'Brien. We'll be back next week with another Crash Course