Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics. Well we discussed the top political headlines with some of today's best minds.
We're on vacation, but that doesn't mean we don't have a great show for you today. David Wallace Well stops by updatus on what he's seeing on the climate change front. But first we have the author of Fluke, Chance, Chaos and why everything we do matters, Brian Klass.
Welcome too, Fast Politics.
Brian, it's so great to be back.
You're in the UK.
I think we must first do two seconds on the UK, despite its complete lack of importance in the world, no offense or anything, talk to us about what's going on there. Yeah.
So I'm a dual national now, so I get to vote in both the UK and the US elections.
Is that photo fraud? That feels like photo fraud? Now?
I endeavor to do a bye by the rules since I once sorte a book called how to regular Election, I have to be sort of careful about that.
No.
But the thing that's interesting about the UK, it's going to be an electoral landslide for the Labor Party, the last wing party, And what's really striking here is that when you screw up a country and when you sort of fail to govern, people actually change their minds. And so what you see here is that the Tory base,
the Conservative Party base, has sort of fallen out. I mean, they're pulling somewhere between seventeen and twenty four percent in most of the polls, and they won forty six percent of the votes in the last election, so they've lost half their vote. And I think this is the thing that makes me the most depressed about the United States is that, by contrast, you can have all the stuff with Trump, you know, thirty four felonies, all the craziness and all the failures of governance, and he's just at
forty percent always. And I think that's something that speaks to you know, a rareer statement these days. But the comparative health actually of British democracy is that when you wreck the country, there are still electoral consequences here.
Okay, so I'm going to just push back here, and I hate to push back, but you guys are a coalition government. I mean, if we were in a coalition government, I think we'd be in a totally different place.
That's true, But really there are are two main viable parties in most UK elections. And I think the other thing it's worth remembering is that this is something where the Conservative Party has collapsed. It's not something where you have, you know, a situation where it's all of a sudden, you know, there's different coalitions. It's that they've actually lost half their voters. So in other words, they got forty six percent last time around, they're probably going to get
like twenty percent this time around. Whereas you know, you're not seeing that sort of shift in the US, especially even among favorability ratings for Trump, right, So like if you ask people like do you think the Conservatives are good, those ratings have also collapsed, Whereas if you ask people do you think Trump is good, they're pretty flat. And
so you know, that's that's the thing again. I mean Liz Trust was the other instance of this, where she's completely bankrupted the country, messed the economy up in a catastrophic way, you know, famously failed to outlive a lettuce and so on. She had a nine percent approval rating in the only poll that was taken, because she was only in power long enough to have one poll taken, but it was you know, unbelievably unpopular, and that meant
that her own party had turned on her. And I think that's what's really striking to me as an American living in the UK and now a naturalized British citizen as well, is that they are still capable of turning on their own party.
They're not as partisan as Americans.
Well, I think there's just more of a willingness to sort of jettison a politician when they objectively screw up. And I mean, you know, the last sort of fourteen years of Britain has been one of decline, and so people are fed up and they're actually changing their minds and changing their votes.
I both agree and disagree here, Like I do think that one of Trump's superpowers is that he's very charismatic, which is Boris Johnson was. I don't want to sound like a snob here, but Boris Johnson was like maybe a little too intelligent, even though again I feel like I'm going to get roasted for saying this, but like he was. I mean, Boris Johnson compared to Trump.
As like Lincoln. I mean, am I wrong?
I mean, his policies are terrible, He's completely crazy, but I think he is a little less crazy than Trump and a little more posh.
I think that's true, But I also think that the UK electorate would never go for a Trump figure. I mean, Boris is as close to that that you could possibly get, because for sure, I mean over here universally, the conversations that Americans have with British people about US politics is what is happening? How can you possibly still be flirting
with Trump for a second term. There's just a bafflement, right, There's this sort of can you please explain to me how this person still is in politics, because you know, there are consequences for scandals in UK politics, even though there's still scandals, right. It's not like they're politicians who
are free from scandal. It's just that they actually have consequences and they destroy careers still and they have you know, sort of inquiries from nonpartisan groups that condemn them, and then they leave politics and shame still exists Boris notwithstanding.
It's one of the things where whenever I tell people, you know, that I've become a naturalized British citizen, they always say, you know, commiserations, you've left one sinking ship for another, you know, But I do think that the UK is sinking less, and I think part of that is because of what's about to happen on July fourth, which is the UK elections, where there is going to be a I mean, I think this will be a
complete sea change election. I mean we could have one of the biggest wipeouts of Conservative politicians in living memory, possibly more than from nineteen ninety seven when Tony Blair rose to power. To me, this is really indicative of complete collapse, is that they're like the person who's the chancellor right now, Jeremy Hunt could lose his seat right he's like the second in command basically for the party
and he's fighting to maintain his position in Parliament. There are going to be a lot of senior politicians who are ousted from politics altogether in this election, which is not going to happen in the United States come November. So I think there's some stuff for his glimmers of hope.
In the UK.
Every election since twenty sixteen, Trump has lost. So even though the polls make it look tight, make it seem tight, they're polling this elector we don't know if that going to show up or not. Largely Republicans have not really won since twenty sixteen, and even when they won the House, it was sort of this Ron Lauder sneak in these five Republicans in California and in New York State that they might be real moderates and not vote for stuff.
I'm talking about d Esposito and Mike Lawler and a bunch of white guys who seem like they might not be so bad. So even if the polls say one thing, and maybe these polls are correct and maybe we have this trumpy election in twenty twenty four that makes us all eat our hats. But if you were to just look at elections, every single special election since the fall of Row has been a fucking shit show for Republicans.
Yeah, I mean I get that, But the thing is that there's not been like an electoral blood bass for Republicans ever. And like, this is something where we're talking the Tories. So there's six hundred and fifty seats in the British Parliament and there's a question about whether the Tories going to win one hundred, right, I mean, this is the kind of stuff we're talking about.
But they've been in power for almost twenty years. I mean, they left the European Union. Like Trump is a fucking moron and a lunatic, But the damage that has happened with leaving the EU is harder to effects than Trump.
Well, I don't think I agree with that.
Do you think they could go back into the EU or you think it's not as damaging.
I don't think that the damage is more severe than Trump is doing to say American democracy and so on. I think the problems that Trump is injected into the US political bloodstream are generational. One way that I think is worth thinking about with the UK versus the US is that I think the UK is basically a broken economy with a functioning society and political system, and I think the US is the opposite. The US is a
functioning economy with a broken society and political system. You know, And I think basically, you know, economics can be fixed. I mean, obviously leaving the EU as a catastrophic disaster, but you know there's going to be over time closer regulatory alignment, and they're going to try to get the trade policy closer and closer to what it was in the EU. Won't be the same, it will still do mass damage. But I mean, like social trust still exists to a pretty high degree here.
Right, that's true.
And on top of that, you know, I mean it was just it was really indicative to go through the pandemic and then go to the US because you know, like the guy who is the version of Anthony Fauci here and then and Chris Whitty, like he's like a celebrity, he's like a hero, and like Anthony Fauci has to walk around with like, you know, protection because people are trying to murder him because they think he concocted COVID, and so like this is the kind of stuff where
you just see like mirror images where there's just like a generally functioning society based in reality. And I'm not I'm not trying to whitewash the UK's problems. It's got serious political problems. But like because the BBC is the main source of news for people, which like sixty percent of people get their news from the BBC, the debates start from the perspective of like here's how the world is.
A shared reality.
Yeah, like what should we do about it? Whereas like when I talk to people about US politics, like you start to talk to a Trump supporter and you just don't agree on basic principles like who is the president who won the election? Right? Like is COVID real? Like these are problems that are just so fundamentally different, I think in terms of the scale of the debate, and also I think the state of the media as well.
I mean, the ways that politicians get held to account in the British press is savage and it's something that we do not do as well in the United States.
No, no question, and we can definitely agree on all of those points. So I'm just curious that when we're right now talking about the United States, what you're pointing to with the BBC, which is something we talk about a lot, is how do you make sure that the information that is linked to is verified and true?
Right?
I mean, that's the issue, right, I Mean. One of the weirdest things that now we're back in the pandemic, but I want to talk about it, is this idea of COVID. Right, we had this disease. It was Trump, you know, just spread disinformation. A million Americans died. There were things that were like laughably bad, Like for example, the thing I think the most about is the horse de Warmer, right, or the blood pressure medicine, right or no, it was a malaria medicine. The malaria medicine or the
horse to warmer. These were two things that Trump's people said could cure COVID. Neither of them cured COVID. About a year ago, maybe not a year ago, six months ago. We had dinner with a friend who's very smart, you know, advanced degrees, but a right winger. He said he had taken horse to warmer when he had COVID. I mean, it was insane, right, Like, you're a smart person. Just
we have an actual medicine that works for COVID. So I do think that there's not an agreed upon truth in America, which is insane.
Yeah.
And I think this is like the generational challenge that I keep pointing to when I when I think about US politics is that you know, I hope and and still believe that Trump is likely to lose in November, but I don't think that's going to break the spell and change the Republican Party right.
Of trump Ism. Yeah, I agree.
There's a core question that I think people don't always take head on, which is, you know, what explains the fact that forty percent of the country still likes him, and there's sort of you know, there's two main groups of arguments around this. One is that they're bad people, right because like choice, you nowhere, like you just you
like the Fellon, you're racist, et cetera. Right, And that explains some of the base, like there's no question that these are people are you know, just valueless or have values that I simply don't share. But I think there's another part of it, the second camp of explanations, which is around information flows. British people don't get exposed to Fox News, and when they do see it, like when I show my classes clips of it, they think it's insane.
They have never seen news that's like this, and the right wing equivalent, gb News in the UK is watched by a tiny, tiny slice of the electorate. I mean
it's it's really unpopular, it's hemorrhaging money, et cetera. And if I could show, you know, one of the things I've always wanted to do is like to show Americans, like what does a BBC radio show look like in the morning, And like last week I was listening to this labor minister abs grilled about like the minutia of housing policy in their manifesto right like down to like details, and you're like, where is this in the US, Like we don't talk about the sort of nitty gritty of
like what are you going to do if you govern? And I think it creates a sense of reality where it's like, Okay, there's a real problem. So I think the information pipelines are one of the biggest generational problems we have in the United States. And I think it's something where, you know, if all I did was watch Fox News twenty four to seven, you know, I think I'd be more sympathetic to Trump too, because you just get a warped sense of what's going on and you
don't see all of the bad news about him. In fact, they often you know, sort of just gloss over it or don't even report it. So I, you know, I think this is the This is the big difference to me is that the BBC, which is imperfect. I mean, I'm not saying it's perfect, but it's something where it provides this sort of shared base where people say, Okay, this is what's going on in the world. Now let's debate the solutions, which is what democracy has to be. And in the US you have the debate over like
what is happening, and there's two different persons. He's a reality, they're competing.
Yeah, I think that's right, and I also think that I mean, now at this point, Fox News doesn't have the numbers it had in twenty sixteen, but the Fox News ethos, you know, streams and podcasts. I mean, Steve Bannon has a humongous podcast, The War Room, and Steve Bannon is not the same as Joe Rogan, but Joe Rogan is a gateway to Steve Bannon, and millions of people listen to Joe Rogan. Right, So Joe Rogan is arguably significantly more meaningful than Fox when it comes to
shifting the electorate. So Rush Limbo was the biggest voter turnout driver that Republicans had.
He was the get out the vote for Republicans.
So if you think about it, you know, Fox Rush, Now Joe Rogan not necessarily as toxic as Rush, but certainly on a similar continuum. There is a real media complex that is devoted to pumping up Republicans, which is such a strange thing if you think about because I mean, I guess it's just an ideological love of not paying taxes, right.
You're exactly right. I think the decentralization where there's all these splinter different outlets and you have, you know, all the different right wing TV stations, but also the podcast networks and so on. I mean, I think the difference though as well, is that the stuff that they're putting out is so much crazier than the fringe things that
happen in Europe or the UK. I mean, you know, like Canvas Owens, who's got this big following now, I do you know that her latest, you know, thing that she's trying to pump is this insane conspiracy theory that Brigide Matt Crang is actually a man, right, and it's like it's just and it's just like you know, it's it's hateful, it's delusional, it's insane, and like in Britain, if you were to pump this stuff, you would just become a forgotten crack pot, right, I mean, it would
just it would kill your audience. And even the provocateurists who like make their name in British riving politics, like they have one foot in reality and they push the limits. But the limits are so tame relative to what we're
talking about. Now, And I mean I think this is the kind of stuff where, like, you know, Liz Trust, for example, went on a podcast where the host had previously made objectionable comments about women and specifically about one female MP, and Liz Trust got condemned by members for own party going on a podcast where someone had made
misogynist comments. I mean the scale of sort of like what the boundaries are is so different, right because I mean, like the Republican presidential cad that has been found liable for sexual assault personally, he bragged about assaulting women, Whereas, like you know, if you have a politician who's even adjacent to someone making misogynistic comments, there's still like consequences for them politically in the UK, So this is the
stuff we're living outside the US. I sort of watched these norms moving and they still exist here and the system is still really messed up. I mean, the UK is not a paragon of functioning democracy. It still has this kind of you know, reality and consequences and shame that I think have broken down and really profound and lasting ways in the US.
Thank you so much for coming on. This is really really interesting.
That's my pleasure.
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David Wallace Wells is the author of The Uninhabitable Earth and a writer at the New York Times.
Welcome back to Fast Politics, David Wells.
Wells, really good to be here to to talk to you.
So you are one of my few favorite climate people and we're going to go way back. Well, first, I want you to talk a little bit about John Carey because that is really disturbing that John Carrey was the top climate diplomat and he feels somewhat disappointed.
So can you talk a little bit about that.
Well, he was basically running Joe Biden's international climate outreach for the whole first term. He is kind of a weird position, kind of climate diplomatic that never existed before.
But you know, this is a brave new world we're living in, and he was leading the charge and his main, you know, focus was in trying to set up these financing deals that would allow developing countries to afford to decarbonize by building out essentially by building out wind and solar, but other stuff too, And this is something I think many people in the US really don't appreciate. Like wind in solar is now cheaper on an average basis than
dirty energy just about everywhere in the world. But the cost of capital, how much it cost to borrow money to build one of these solar farms out or to build out a wind farm. The cost of capital is like four times as high in the developing world as of this in the rich world, which means that the actual expense attached to a particular renewable project is much much higher for the poor than it is for the rich.
And that's for a lot of reasons, you know. But it's a huge problem that needs to be solved if we want the global South to, as they finally get onto the electric grid and bring energy to their impoverished citizens, do it in a clean rather than a dirty way.
And Kerrie was trying to do that with this kind of fancy set of financial instruments called jet peas, where basically there's like a little bit of philanthropic money put out that then sort of tells the private money, it's going to be safe to invest here, Like if there's this philanthropic money here, you can actually lend these countries the money they need to build out their green energy sources.
And they did it to much fanfare in a bunch of countries around the world over the last five years, and basically, in no case did it actually work out, Like, in no case did it actually deliver a large scale private investment spending spree that would allow any of the
countries to dramatically change their course on emissions. And so it was, you know, on some level, like a perfect neoliberal, technocratic approach to the problem of poor countries not being able to afford the money they need to build out green energy. It seemed in theory at the whiteboard in a conference room, you know, in the McKenzie coffee clatch or whatever, it seemed like it would be a perfect solution to this problem. And it just hasn't yet worked.
Maybe it'll work in the future, but it has absolutely not worked to this point, which means that his big bet has been basically a failure. As he's exiting this office, he's being replaced by Avesta. He's talking also a lot more openly about the villainy of the oil and gas companies and how much they're standing in the way, which is a whole other part of the.
Saga, Which is good that he's doing that, because they fucking suck. Yeah, but not to put too fine a point on it, obviously.
Yeah, No, you can't overstate they have any of the oil and gas companies. Looking in the really big picture, we're in a much better place than we were, you know, three four or five years ago. I'm climbing in terms of rolling out renewables all around the world. We keep being surprised at how fast it's going, but it's just going much much faster in the rich parts of the
world than in the poor. And if we really want to salvage some whole of stabilizing the temperature at a relatively comfortable level for the future generations, we kind of need to solve that problem for the global south very fast, and we don't have a good toolkit at the moment to do so.
Yeah, it's hard to look at where we are on climate and not despair, but there are reasons not to despair, right.
It's sort of both stories at once, Like the rollout of renewable energy is absolutely astonishing. It's much faster than almost every forecast said was even possible just a few years ago. So we're building out much more of the good stuff, much faster than anybody predicted. We're not yet drawing down the dirty stuff, and that's the problem. We can keep at wind and solar, but so long as we're continuing to burn oil and gas and coal, we're still doing more damage every year than we've ever done
in the entire history of the planet. Most of the analysis says that we're about to hit a turning point there. Maybe it'll be five years from now, maybe it'll be this year, and we'll have reached a peak. I think it's kind of like, you know, I'll trust that when I see it, but it's certainly better than everybody's saying.
We're nowhere near a peak. The problem is that from the peak, we have to get all the way down from the highest level of emissions ever recorded all the way down to zero, ideally in the space of just a couple of decades, and however long it takes. We need to get all the way to zero, not just halfway or recorders of the way. They're to stabilize temperatures
at any level. So I think there's you know, there's a there's a hopeful story, and there's a really bleak, depressing story, and they're both kind of happening at once. And one of the reasons this, you know, climate is a little bit hard to wrap your head around, is that those are some pretty big contradictions to maintain.
Yes, true, talk to me about China, and then we're going to talk about something else that makes me depressed.
Kina is in certain ways a green miracle. They in the last year have installed more solar power than the entire rest of the world put together. That's inside China. They've installed sixty percent of all of the wind power that's been installed anywhere in the world. And they are absolutely commanding the entire green energy industrial production economy for the whole world, which is to say, they are literally producing five times as many solar pans in China than
the entire rest of the world put together. They're producing so much battery power right now that they could doubly supply the world's demand every year. They are doing this in almost every sector. The big story over the last few months has been, you know, Joe Biden instituting a tariff on a lot of these technologies, but most kind of conspicuously on evs. On the EV's, China has come
out of absolutely nowhere. Like five years ago, they were hardly producing EV's, they were not exporting any EV's, and they've since become over the last five years, the world's largest exporter of all cars, in part because of the power of electric vehicles, which they are now producing cars that can drive at ranges considerably longer than any car on the market in the United States or Europe for
something like ten thousand dollars per car. And that is from a climate perspectives alone, an incredible miracle which opens
up whole new possibilities for how quickly we could decarbonize transportation. Unfortunately, it also looks like a potentially mortal threat to the European and car industries, and so both of those areas are rather than you know, taking the win on climate, they're trying to go to war for their industrial sectors, which maybe they need to do, but you know it's going to come at a climate cost too, because if Americans are going to have to pay three times as
much per EV and then almost anywhere else in the world. We're probably going to be buying many fewer evs than other countries.
I would like to have a bright spot here. Enjoy one of the very few bright spots. Bad for Elon mosk or as I call him, Elon Marsh Right.
Yeah, I think you know, bu Id is neck and neck in a couple of recent quarters. They've been ahead of Tesla as the world's biggest manufacturer of ev is, and I think they're destined to surpass Tesla. He just took home what was it, fifty billion dollars?
Would cry, yeah, now fuck them.
But you know, I think a few years ago, especially the stock price of Tesla, suggested that investors were betting that the entire global ev market would be supplied by Tesla, And now it seems vanishingly unlikely that that will be the case, in part because you know, the world full of many people who can't afford fifty thousand dollars cars, and the Chinese automakers are at the moment at least doing much much better. It's applying the cheap versions.
Can you explain to us why oil companies their new thing is like this pivot to like both and yes, you need green, but you also need oil.
But you really don't fucking need oil.
This is just bullshit to try to keep them alive, right, you know, over.
The next ten twelve years, like probably we're going to need a bunch more oil because the cars on the road are not going to be replaced immediately. Maybe that'll even stretch out to twenty years. But we expect that we've probably already passed peak global demand for oil. So the demand is going to decrease over the next few decades, but it won't be zero anytime soon, because like someone who bought a car two years ago is still going to be driving it ten years from now.
But it's going to be a lot lower.
It depends on the country, yeah, I mean certain countries are going to turn over their their fleet very quickly, and I think the US is probably going to be you know, probably fifteen or twenty years even until the vast majority or but we're heading in that direction. You know. The argument for coal and gas are a little bit different. You know, coal I basically think is not economical anywhere and really is heading for a pretty rapid phase out.
I mean that was true even ten years ago. It's just so expensive all right.
People have different views about gas, as you know, in terms of electricity generation and stabilizing the grid. Personally, I think there are a lot of new technologies coming on that will allow wind and solar to be much more reliable than they have been in the past. Battery storage is getting a lot better, We're going to be doing a lot with geo thermal. The US is actually making
a huge investment in nuclear. All of these things are going to be able to provide what's called the baseload dower, onto which we could stack the kind of intermitt and relatively less reliable wind and solar stuff and get all the way to our energy needs. So I personally, I don't think there's much need for ad natural gas, but there's still some dispute over that. The answer to your big question that why do oil companies exist is because oil is insanely profitable.
You know.
A few years ago, I remember I was on a panel with an energy economist who is like, you look at a barrel of oil, it's like eighty to ninety percent profit. Still roughly the case today. These are companies that, even in a moment of systemic decline, as people are turning away from their product. They are literally producing record profits year after year after year. This has been a few straight years of record profits. I don't think that's going to last for fifty years. I hope it doesn't
last for thirty years. But these are not that are making decisions on thirty year horizons to making decisions up one to five year horizons, and on that horizon it
remains an incredibly lucrative business. There was a book that came out about six months ago arguing that we've wrongly focused in thinking about climate in general, on the price of renewables, which are now really low, rather than the question of profit, and renewables are not generating nearly as much profit than oil, And if you switch your lens from thinking about price, where renewables have already basically won, to thinking about profit, it puts you in a space
of really worrying about just how quickly this transition will happen and how desperately the oil and gas businesses will fight to keep it from going going forward as fast as it otherwise should.
Yeah, I hate for them to have a tough time.
But one of the things that Trump promised them, which I think is really relevant and is very trumpy is He said, if you support me, I will make it so there'll be no regulation and you can just fucking rape the earth as much as you want. Not to put too fine a point on it.
It was one of the more naked quid pro quo offers in American political history. He said, a room of assembled oil and gas people, if you raise me a billion dollars, I will write you a blank check in return. And whoever was in that room, and whatever the size of the price tag you gave. That is an ugly, ugly political gesture that almost every politician anywhere in America at any other point in history would have known better than to say, oh loud. But Trump obviously did not.
Now exactly what he's capable of doing in a second term year. I think is it's a complicated and interesting question because so much of the IRA money and so much private money chasing those tax incentives is going into red districts, and to some large degree, red states, which are often now actually America's clean energy leaders. You know, North Dakota I think has the highest renewable electricity anywhere
in the country. Texas is just building out wind and solar like Gangbusters, and In fact, last year there was an effort in that to try to decap that process in Texas, and it failed because some Republicans said to some other Republicans, hang on, we don't want to like actually raise the electricity bills of our customers and make it give put them at higher risk of blackouts just
for the sake of the oil and gas business. If renewables are going to be helping us and helping our citizens and our voters, let's not stand in the way. And that is from a market perspective, the state of play generally, like, if we do not interfere in this market, renewables will win. They may not win quite as fast as I might like, but they are going to win. It is actually the oil and gas business which is
demanding interventions to prevent process. And that is you know, that means that it's not just Trump withdrawing environmental protections that that's going to let loose an oil and gas bonanza. Primary He'll be slow walking stuff that would help the
green stuff proceed. So that means not doing anything about permitting, not doing anything about all of the local opposition to renewable energy, and just sort of letting that stand as a serious obstacle to new build out, and probably it means that the US in a second Trump term, given a second Trump term, would be decarbonizing considerably less fast
than they would second Biden term. But I actually think that, you know, the market forces are considerably more powerful than a sort of crude political partisan logic would make you think. I think that, you know, America is, like everywhere else in the world, is heading towards clean energy. The question is not if it's just when you know, the best thing that Trump could do for oil and gas is not to stop that revolution, it's just to slow it.
And exactly how capable he is about given how capable he is doing anything, is you know, a huge open question.
Yeah.
I mean, I'm not going to take that to the bank, because that fucking guy, he's got smart people trying to explain to him how to do stuff now in a way that he didn't before.
The Heritage Foundation Project twenty twenty five stuff really ugly and scary on climate. It's really ugly and scary in every category. But the question is whether that will actually be the playbook that is put into place, or whether Trump governs a lot more like you did in the first term, you know, running around as a desperate, resentful score settler. You know, my guess is it's some mix
of both. Even as I think you're wise to say I'm not going to take my David Well as well as those reassurances to the bank, I also wouldn't take the Project twenty twenty five playbook to the bank as a guarantee.
What I think the top line on the twenty twenty five stuff is that the Heritage Foundation has been taken over by complete lunatics.
Well, the whole party has, really Yeah.
But the Heritage used to be like the last fashion of normal in that party, and that is no more the case.
Of the future we're staring down.
Yeah, would you talk for a minute about like, there are a lot of people who listen to this podcast who just would like to have some sort of concrete stuff they should be doing when it comes to climate.
Well, I mean, honestly, heading into an election season, I think voting and campaigning is the most important thing that we can do in America at an individual level. If you want to shrink your carbon footprint, if you want to live within your values and think of yourself as a climate person who is doing right by the future
of the planet. The main things that you can do to reduce your carbon footprint are fly commercial, I mean I'm not fly honestly, not fly fly yeah, not fly driving ev if you can, and not eat red meat. And those are really like by far the biggest contributors to the carbon footprints of most relatively well off Americans. You can also do carbon offsets for your fly to some extent for your cars too, but they're pretty unreliable.
So like, I do them when I fly, but I also know that like they don't actually cover my.
Guilt, but they make you feel a little better, a.
Little bit better. And there are bees and worst ones that you know you can you can get into the research on that as much as you like or not as much as you like. These days, you in most airlines do have like a little button when you're checking out that say if you know, if you'd like to offset the carbon cost of this, click here, But most
of those are pretty unreliable. That's a bit like if you're worrying about what you're doing, the things that you can that you should focus on our air travel, internal combustion engine vehicle driving, and red meat.
Yeah, and also not drinking bottled water right or now? Is that a rounding era?
I don't know. Tell me I need to now.
You know, I've gotten considerably more worried about plastic pollution over the last couple of years. When I when I wrote my book five years ago or so, I actually had a few lines in there that called it just like a red herring and a distraction. But it's become much more central to the way that I think about how we're despoiling the planet. We now see microplastics in freshly fallen Arctic snow. We found them in the deepest depths of the Mariana Trench, in you know, the deepest
parts of the ocean. They actually got there before human explorers got there. We find them in you know, in mother's milk, on the inside of placentas, in sperm, in testicles. It's like everywhere. If you cut open your arm, there would be lots of microplastics there.
No.
I know, you know, we don't know exactly what they're doing to us. I think, you know, the fact that we're not all immediately dropping answer suggests that, you know, it's not like an apocalyptic, you know, extinction kind of event. But it is also quite strange to take seriously the idea that none of us, anywhere on the planet are
avoiding this kind of contamination. It's pretty mind bending to try to reckon with what it means for our sense of autonomy that we are all of us passing through a contagion field of pollution, navigating our way through that, thinking we are in control of our lives, but actually having many aspects of our health, cognitive performance, you know, economic well being determined by these forces of pollution which
are well beyond our individual control. And I worry a lot about, you know, the contribution of plastics to that problem.
We'll see the next five or ten years. I think you're going to tell us a lot in the science, but at the moment, I would just say I would rather be living on a planet where every single living being was not already contaminated by microplastics than the one in which when we're living on now, where every one of us is, you know, to our core, already a kind of a hybrid being human and pollution of the same time.
Our human evolution at the same time. Thank you, David Wallace.
Well, thank you.
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