Part One: The Uninhabitable Earth, An Interview

first half episodes of the scripted Daily Show. UM. It does a really good job laying out the different physical effects that climate change will have on environments and ecosystems, and the differences between like one point five degrees celsius to a degree celsius and you know, the potentiality of like three or three degrees or even four degrees um. The book is is you know is it's it's pretty

scary to to read. But David in person on in in the interview was actually a lot more optimistic about, you know, different ways we can prevent some of the worst effects. You know, the book came out in there's been new reports and new stuff that's come out since then about the different ways that can be mitigated and adapted to. And you know, talking to David on the interview was was, you know, not quite what I what I expected based on based on the book. It was.

He was a very very interesting talk. But I don't need to tell you that because you can listen to it right now. The interview was a bit longer than usual, so we split it up into two episodes. Part one is you're you're listening to it right now, and part two will come out tomorrow. So that's enough of me talking.

Let's get to the actual interview. So the first thing I'm curious about, David is kind of since publication of your book, Um, some some real world weather events have happened that uh, I mean, like I I think that kind of the mainstream coverage I've seen is like this is all happening much faster than than we had anticipated, and like one point I've see is going to be a lot worse than you know, had previously been anticipated,

which is stuff that that you wrote about. Um, I'm kind of wondering has personally, what what's happened in the last you know, year in change, has has that impacted at all how you feel about what you've you've written, has it changed in any way kind of your opinion about the pace things are occurring at I think there's sort of a few different stories unfolding at the same time, and they're sometimes not all running in the same directions. So the ultimate lesson is a little bit unclear, um

on the signs of impacts. You know, I've been personally struck by how there hasn't been like a week since my book came out in early twenty nineteen that there wasn't some kind of natural disaster or extreme weather event that got in time it changed back in the news.

It's not to say that it has always been, you know, occupying the place on the front page of the newspapers that it should, or that it has even done that very often, but nevertheless, it was, Um, I felt like I was issuing a kind of a p see and then almost as soon as the book came out, like the real world was illustrating that and making people feel the same way that I did about what was coming

our way. That's been you know, really alarming. UM. I did think that I was writing a book largely about climate impacts, um Um, not climate impacts that we're going to terrify us in the year and the ones that we've seen this year. That the heat dome in particular was you know, as as has been written about quite extensively, um, like literally off the charts of what most climate models predicted. And that's really scary. Um. These are models that you know,

they're not simple. They're supposed to include essentially any possible outcome. Um. You know, they have like their fifth percentile outcomes and the entile outcomes. It's really not supposed to happen that something comes along that that break that. And that's really scary. I mean, it means that a lot of other climate impacts are likely to you know, probably be worse than

we were expecting right now. It means possibly that the global temperature models that we have for projecting where we'll end up given a certain amount of emissions are also clouded with even more uncertainty than we thought. Um. And that's really scary. I mean it's scary for me, maybe particularly, but I think this is true of a lot of people.

You know, the bleak formulations of climate science were obviously bleak, but you could also tell yourself, like if you process them, you were also in a way preparing for them, and to know that we now have to treat even those quite alarming high end estimates as incomplete pictures of what is possible and maybe insufficient um as a projection of the world we will be living in relatively soon. It's quite bad because that those those um, those projections were

pretty bleak to begin with. On the other hand, you know, I think we are living in a differ in world when it comes to climate consciousness and climate action um than we were a couple of years ago. The fact that all of these countries made net zero pledges during the pandemic and did it, you know, outside of the realm of pressure, in like a paras style of negotiation, um, without bullying each other or shaming each other, but just because they thought it was in their self interest to

decarbonized quicker. That's really really different than the place we were in just a few years ago. And you know, I take all those pledges with a grain of salt. Basically none that's ever been made in the past has

ever been fulfilled. On the other hand, you know, it is definitionally progress that like many more people are concerned about climate change, maybe particularly many more people in positions of power in the political and corporate worlds are concerned enough about it to at least be paying lip service to it. There's a lot more to do, but you know, it feels like, for the first time, the world is beginning to take this whole challenge seriously. And you know,

I think we've wasted so much time. We're not going to avoid what was once called catastrophic warming, but we may manage to keep the level of the temperature level to something close to that, to degree celsius. And you know, it may it may mark me as it totally grim apocalyptic alarmist that I think that that's like a good outcome. I'm in a happy outcome, But um, I do. I think it's you know, much better to land at two point three degrees than at three point seven degrees or

four point eight degrees or something. Um And so it's sort of all stories at once. I was just, um, I was just giving a talk at like a book conference this weekend where I was talking about, you know what, the climate change at three speeds was like the name of my talk. The first speed was climate impacts, the second was the speed of climate action, and then the

third was the speed of our disorientation. And I still think we haven't really like started to think about just how profoundly all of these forces are going to shake the way that we think of the world and our place in it and our culture, and um, that's all changing really pretty quickly too. Yeah, And I have a

couple of questions based on that answer. One of them would just be one of the things I find interesting about the way your book is framed is that you're coming at a from a very different perspective than most of the people are read than Garrison and I are, because we're we're definitely more in kind of the ecological end of things, Like I appreciate the woods more than I appreciate being around people, and like that's a big part of like my desire for for conservation, And you're

coming at it more from like a, well, I'm worried that like people aren't going to be able to like handle what's coming and the changes that are coming. And I'm I'm, I think that's much closer to the perspective. You have to have to get Americans on board with doing something about it, because clearly the whole um we're

damaging nature. Um, isn't a big sell hasn't been a big selling point up to this point, And I'm wondering how in your in conversations with people who are maybe kind of like only tangentially paying attention to climate change when there's a disaster, how do you how do you recommend trying to get trying to get people on board

with the severity of the issue and the necessity of action. Well, one thing I think is really important, as like a starting point is just to understand that like basically nobody on planet Earth is living as though this is the emergency that it is. And that includes me, and it includes probably both of you, absolutely it maybe not, maybe

doesn't include Greta. But like, you know, the number of people who are truly living like this is the emergency that it is are you know, you could probably count

them on a couple of hands. And that means that, like the differences between those of us who are alarmed about it and those who haven't yet gotten there or having yet started freaking out, I think it's a lot that distance is smaller than we often really acknowledge, and we we we sort of tell ourselves, especially given like the partisan lens of everything that we, um, you know, everything we do in our lives that like people on

the other side are just impossibly distant from us. But I think functionally, like the average NORMI liberal who says climate change is an existential threat but hasn't done anything about it and hasn't even really changed the way that they vote in response to it, is not all that far from the Republican who says, you know, okay, maybe climate change is happening, but whatever, we'll figure it out.

I don't need to worry about it. Like in terms of concrete behavioral and political action, they're not that different, um, Which means I think that there's a lot of common ground there. And you know, I think that my own awakening on this may be more instructive than say yours, in the sense that um, as you said, you know, I think of myself as sometimes joked on like a

human chauvinist. Um. You know, like if I could snap my fingers and save all the world's forest and all the world's ecosystems and all the world's fishes, that would be nice. But if I had to trade them for the well being of all future humans on the planet, I would take that trade. Um. And when you just walk through, um, you know, everything that science projects for what life will be like let's say two or three

degrees celsius. Um. You know, I have like a little spiel that I can give about how bad that is. But then even beyond that, I say, you know, these are like tens of thousands of scientific papers. If three quarters of them we're totally wrong and the remaining quarter turned out to be overly alarmist, we would still almost

certainly be dealing with an unprecedented ecological catastrophe. This is not We're not asking you to believe every single scientist who's working in every single university, and we're not asking you to believe, you know, the the guy who is running away from civilization and trying to like build a prepper hut in the wilderness. UM, We're just saying, like, the number of things that are being disturbed, are already being disturbed, are well beyond anything that humans have ever

experienced in there. You know, depending on how you count, hundreds of thousands of years or millions of years on the planet, and our capacity to respond to that is very very much in question, especially when you look around and see how poorly we are today responding to the challenges right in front of us. So I think that there's like, um, you know, there's a there's a relatively simple way to talk about you know, not like your

life will be threatened directly in talking to somebody. But the climate basis for everything that you know of as normal is already gone. And exactly what will endure from the civilization that we have inherited is actually an open question. Now that's not to say that I think humans are going to go extinct or you know, um, civilization will collapse, but like, this does represent an unbelievably dramatic challenge to every aspect of our lives, um, and the aspect every

aspect of everybody's life on the planet. And um, we're going to be living around that obstacle and navigating around it, um for the rest of the century at least. Yeah, I am. The term I've been using increasingly that I did not come up with, but that I think adequately describes where we are right now is is post normal um.

And I think a lot of the challenge when it comes to taking effective action, even just for adaptation, is convincing people, um that we're post normal, because as you pointed out, even those of us who write entire books about the severity if the problem have not changed our lives to the extent that we um that we that we would need to if we were really taking the problem like and and it's it's hard to like. I

I don't know how. I think one of the things that frightens me because when I think about the different kinds of responses we could see and we we just talked to one of the authors of the book Climate Leviathan, which kind of poses some of the c Yeah, good book. I'm concerned because the pot the responses to climate change that I see is most frightening in that book are all based around promising people one way or the other,

will get back to normal. We will get you back to the things on the shelf that you're used to having and the kind of lives that you're used to having. And I think the actual adaptations that we need to make and the ones that will lead to the world I consider at least more livable, are ones that um are accepting that normality has gone. And I don't know how you you thread that needle and get people to

accept the end of normal. I think that's what I think. Yeah, I think the real challenge there is that we're we're

unbelievably good at normalizing. Yeah. Um. And I mean there's science, social science suggesting that the basic timeline on which most of us base our you know, our expectations for the near future is five or ten years, which means that we're only ever you know, that's like the baseline we carrying to the future, not like the pre industrial climate, not even a climate of our childhoods, but the climate that we've experienced over the last five or ten years.

And if you think about like what that means in the context of, for instance, like you know, wildfires in the American West, it means that we've already totally accepted a level of burning in a in a in a modern wealthy state, modern wealthy set of states that fifty years ago would have seen seemed truly truly apocalyptic. And a lot of these fires today look apocalyptic. We are horrified by them when we see the images on our scrolling on our phones. We watched some of those dash

camp videos and they terrify us. And on the other hand, like, you know, there's still forty million people living in California and you know, I do think that there's a there's a little bit of an awakening ongoing at the moment having to do with the air pollution effects from those fires. I think a few years ago, we really thought that the main fear was about having your house burned down

or having to outrun you're playing or something. And now it's understood much more broadly that there are these real health risks and that those don't um, they don't stay put like, so you can't escape them even if you're you know, living in a flat land away from away

from the woods or something UM. And I see the same dynamic in my own life, which is to say, you know, I often find myself these days describing myself as as much as I hate to talk about climate change in terms of like mood relatively more optimistic than I was a few years ago. But that's because my baseline of expectation was, like, while I was writing this apocalyptic book, I'm still so much more alarmed than I

was ten years ago. And yet in thinking about my own recent like what's not what counts is normal, I'm thinking about like I'm not thinking about me. And then in that interim I had this you know, huge and really grim awakening, which is already now I basically like retired to the you know, the dustbin of of memory that I don't I don't even think about it anymore. And you know, I often worry about how profound that

capacity and how pervarousive that reflex is in humanity. That we we already accept a ton of suffering and dying that's totally unnecessary in the world today, and that we will will respond to new threats to some degree by adapting and protecting ourselves, but also in some significant way by just defining upward what is an acceptable level of pain and human dying, And um, that could lead to a quite grim future, not just because it involves all

that human pain, but also because it means that we're not really ever going to take control of the problem. Remember I said I was optimistic. No, no, no, yeah, I appreciate that. I think that one of the things that has to become post normal is our understanding what

optimistic means, because um, you know, in the communities. I just did an a M A on the collapse subreddit, which both has a lot of collects a lot of useful information about problems with supply chains and environmental catastrophe, and also provides this pervasive air that like everything's going to fall apart, and I think that actually is. I think it's it's based on the kind of narcissism that total collapse narratives always are because we almost never see

that in history. You see areas collapse, you see countries collapse, UM, you see geographic regions experience aspects of collapse, but like more of what you see is things get worse for people, but the broad systems, you know, stay together UM, and I, you know, I think that there is. AM. I have the same basic view of the collapse reddit subreddit as you do. But I would say there are some reasons to think that we may be more vulnerable to that kind of threat, which is to say that we are

much more globalized and linked civilization now. Our supply chains are stretched very thin, our food supply is UM has very little redundancies in and even in those parts of the world like where we live, where you and I live, UM, where like food is not really a problem, we still have incredibly fragile UM supply chains. And in the same way that we didn't see global pandemics until there was

some form of globalization UM. With the Roman Empire UM, we are now entering, you know, entering into what is likely to be an age of intensifying UM, you know, disease spread because of how interlinked we are. It's also the case that our vulnerabilities are shared and that other parts of the world are not necessarily do not necessarily offer you know, this sort of system redundancy is UM

that they might have in the past. And I think another thing that's overlooked by to go to the other side of the equation, a thing that's overlooked by those two who think the relational collapses is likely or imminent, is that a lot of the things that we're talking about UM, A lot of the suffering that we're talking about coming as the result of climate change UM is

already present in many parts of the world. Who which are which are full of suffering, but which are not UM lawless UM, you know, on the brink of UM

mass death UM. In the way that I think a lot of the sort of you know, cor mc McCarthy imagination would suggest, and you know, one thing that I've been thinking about turning it over in my head a lot recently is something that you know, some people who are they're not climate deniers, they're sort you know, sometimes called like luke warmers or people who think we can we can adapt away through everything. We'll say where they will, they say, um, you know, how bad could it get?

You know, it could be uh, it could get as bad as the twentieth century. And you know, the twentieth century was really bad. Like there were a lot of famines, they were we had a couple of really big wars like you know, um, there there were there were some really big pandemics like um. But we already regard, like, you know, the life of the first half of the twentieth century as impossibly distant from our own in terms

of expectations of wealth and prosperity and security. And one big question is, you know, if we do return to I mean, it won't be exactly like a rewind to that period of time, But if we returned to a world that is as defined by general fragility and instability as that one was, will it feel human and modern or will it feel um, you know, like the stone

ages um. And I don't totally know the answer to that, but it's certainly the case that someone living in nineteen thirties, London wasn't like this is the end of the world. They thought actually they were at the you know, the pinnacle of the world. There were some problems, you know, there's some things we need to say, you know, and it'll be really interesting to see how all of these

dynamics play out going forward. If we start to see yeah, like a return of um, some scale of suffering and disease and death um that we have that we at least in a in a wealthy West, haven't been comfortable with. They're familiar with for a few generations, but which really do you know, they are sort of part of the fundamental human experience, even the modern human experience. Yeah, um, Garrison, Yeah, I mean yeah, I think we talked about we talked a bit about this yesterday, but it is you you

brought it up again. How almost the the new normal is going to be radical and radical un normal nous like like having like things always be changing. That's going to be like the thing that we're all gonna be used to now is switching back and forth between extremes kind of all of the time. Um. Yeah, and like like you're I mean, I would say, like you know, I'm sort of with Robert. I feel like, you know, I often like, as a strawman, set up the phrase the new normal to them, say really it's the end

of normal and you know, never never normal again. But I also think, um, you know, we've been living in a we've also been living in a civilization that runs on change for a long time, especially those of us in you know, the US, and um, you know, I had a bunch of years ago, I had a long

series of conversations with them. William Gibson, the sci fi Nopolists, I'd like, interviewed him for the Paris Review Writers at Work series, and you know, he was just obsessed with the Victorians because he was like, these were the first this was the first time that you could really see the world changing in the space of a single generation. And we think of the Victorians as being defined by their propriety, their sexual um you know, primness and you know,

overdone morality about almost everything. Um there refused to believe that they were anything but you know, um, incredibly refined, civilized people. But he's like, when you when you really look closely at those novels and read those diaries, there was an enormous amount of just technological anxiety and um disarray,

produced simply by the speed of change. And now that has become he said, you know, that has become the basis of our entire civilization, and such that like we expect our phones to get better every three years, you know, we um, we expect novelty in our culture, in our food, we expect we get bored with old politicians really quickly. We want new faces like these are all um that the like desperate addiction to the new is one of the really defining features of modern American, modern Western life.

And so in a certain way, we're already acclimated to rapid radical change, or at least we've been trained to not just so live in that world, but to demand it. It's just a sort of a what we're talking about is a different kind of a change, um that is much less about giving us things we want and much more about imposing, you know, great burdens and suffering on us and demanding that we make changes and adaptations that

we may not be so happy about. And as I was saying earlier, there are a lot of signs, especially in our politics, that you know, for all our cultural capacity for change. We may be UM in terms of policy and at the social level, like a little too

sclerotic in our capacity to to move. How do you see at least in like the short term, like the next you know, few years, more politicians or tech capitalists like business people starting to realize and it is starting to put those changes in Or do you think it's not going to happen yet? Do you think it require do you think it will require more more things to

happen before they'll like start addressing it more urgently. You know, I guess it's it all sort of depends on what you mean by it, you know, Like in the Reconciliation Bill it's currently being um debated in DC. There is a clean electricity standard UM that you know that would be a major major step forward for American climate policy, really a major major step forward. It's not even something that we're like talking all that much about, UM, but it's you know, at the moment, by far the biggest

and most impactful thing that American politics could deliver. And it's on the table UM, and it would not have been on the table five years ago or probably ten years ago. UM. There's some people who think we could have done in the earlier aboutom years, but I'm skeptical of that. And you know, we have all of these world leaders talking about climate like it's a top shelf issue. They're not yet designing their economic policies as though it's

like the paramount issue. But it's you know, if someone's making a you know, take Barack Obama in two doesn't for the Democratic National Convention. If someone is making that kind of speech really hoping to announce themselves on the stage, is a major political figure in this country. They could not not talk about climate change in that speech, like it would have to be part of the way that

they talked about the future. And that's really that's really different from how it was not all that long ago. And that's true really all around the world, you know, all the way from the authoritarian end of the spectrum to the liberal democracies of the world. Um, it's even true when you listen to um leaders of petro states in the Middle East and sort of quote unquote climate deniers like Scott Morrison. He's not even in Australia, he's not even talking the same way about climate that he

talked two or three years ago. Like they're there are all of these really dramatic shifts taking place. You know, we're still like way short of what science says is necessary serry to avert a catastrophic level of warming. And frankly, I don't think we're going to do that. Um, but we're already starting to see I think our politics and our culture turn around climate in a quite profound way. And I think, you know, that's a sign that like,

we are living in a climate century. This is the meta narrative of our era, and um, there's sort of no gatting around it. Um. You're starting already starting to see more climate stories and in Hollywood and people talking about climate anxiety with their therapists, and you know, in addition to the obvious direct extreme weather events, and it's just pervasive and um, front of mind in a way

that it wasn't before. And I've I've personally been kind of astonished at that speed of change because when I was, you know, writing my book a few years ago, I looked back at I looked at the environmental movement at the present, say like and I looked back at a couple of generations worth of environmental activism, and I thought, these guys are like the same people, they're kind of saying the same things, and they've never made any progress at all, um, And I was, you know, I knew

that the path to the theoretical path to progress was political, but I also didn't really see all that much reason for hope on that front. But the last few years have been, you know, this incredible global political awakening where you know, Gret is the sort of face of it, but she's certainly not all of it. She's you know, thousands of other incredibly brave and noble climate strikers sunrise

extinction rebellion. And then you have like, you know, the head of the Bank of England and you know, the Secretary of the Treasury talking about climate is like an existential threat, like this is just a it's a really really different world than we were living in a few years ago. And you know, as I said, we're not nearly moving as fast as we as we need too, but at the level of like cultural recognition, personally, I'm

actually kind of impressed at how quickly we've moved. Do you think like the so called like green movement or climate climate justice movement has had that much of an impact in the past two years because I mean, like we are seeing more and more rhetoric from politicians, definitely, But if you look at someone like Justin Trudeau or even what the Biden has done the past the past few months, you know, because when Pon was campaigning, he talked about banning fracking and with things that of course

he's probably not going to do. Do do you think like they've given people in power language that makes them sound like they're doing the right thing. But do you do you actually see the climate justice movement like getting people to do actionable things or do you think it's going to be more I think like there's like a term like um greenwashing, right, like like like you say the right thing, but you're not actually doing the thing. I mean, it's not one of the I think. You know,

I have a very pragmatic approach to it. I think, yeah, there's certainly a lot of empty rhetoric, um, there's certainly a lot of pledges that are being unfulfilled. Um. But there's also a lot more investment and mobilization than would have seemed possible a few years ago. And you know, from my point of view, I mean, I'm glad that activists may be frustrated with that and may want to push for more. I think they should, but I also personally,

I'm going to count that as as progress. So um and you know, it's interesting, I am this is a bit of a side note, but my my mother was

this sort of like radical progressive education innovator. She she started this public school that I went to, UM in East Harlem in the seventies, and it was, you know, it just like embraced all of these quite quite progressive values about you know, um, educating kids for democracy but really, um, you know, all this stuff that is it's become quite common in the way that teachers and schools operate, like project based learning and you know, emphasis on individual um

tracks and um you know, open classroom and um, you know, building play into the you know, the experience of and when I and not like now that I'm a person who has kids, and my kids aren't quite ready for a proper school, but I have a lot of friends who are, you know, I hear the way that they talk about their schools, and it's like every single school

now runs their classrooms this way. And when I talked to my mom about it, she thinks they lost the whole fight, like she thinks that it's like a total disaster defeat because there there are some things that they would have wanted to see happen they didn't get happen. I think it's just like, you know, activists are by nature quite demanding and uncompromising, and that's good, but it shouldn't blind us to the fact that, like you know, Joe Biden really has a lot of people in administration

who are really serious about climate. Now, they're still making compromise. This is what the fossil field business. That's not good. There's still worrying about you know, political realities of UM what it means in Swing States to you know, to ban fracking. I wish that weren't the case too. But it also is just like dramatically different than as recently. It's like whatever it was like Barack Obama was bragging about expanding um oil drilling in the US, like that

is just not okay. Maybe Biden doing a little bit of that, but he's not gonna go on stage and be like, you guys, you gotta thank me because I'm drilling. More. Like, it's just it's a really different um It's a really different kind of reality and when you get down to the like nuts and bolts of it, especially if all the stuff in the Infrastructure Bill and the Reconciliation Bill go through, we're really talking about an unprecedented level of

public investment in the decorganization of the American economy. Um. You know. Again, like just to be clear, I don't think it's sufficient. I wish that there were more, but it's not just the same old business um. And when you look around the world, I see basically the same pattern that there's a lot of momentum in the right direction. It's not you know, as fast as I would like, and it's um compromised with all these other things that are you know, politicians have to do, but I think

they have to do. But when I was writing my book, it was a completely defensible which it's a completely defensible thing to say business as usual scenario was for four and a half degrees of warming this century and now. But I think the best analysis suggests that current policies may land us under three degrees. So that's three years and we may have shaved a degree and a half off our base case expectation. That's kind of incredible. I think that there's not all that much more to do that.

Some of those policies and ambitions already sketch out that sort of maximal ambition that we can really achieve in the societies that we have. You know, to take the American example in particular, Biden wants to decarbonize the American power sector by could we do that? By that seems really um. You know, when you hear about these companies in these countries that are banning gas powered cars, by um,

you're like, could you could they do that? By could they really build new factories to supply all the new cars? That seems really fast, maybe even over the ambitious. So my own perspective on all those pledges is that even more important than getting people to announce more ambitious ones is to just sort of hold them to the promises they've already made, um, even though those promises may not be quite up to you know, what the science says is is necessary to give us the future we we

might once have hoped to secure. And that wraps up part one of our interview with author and journalist David Wallace Wells UM. You can find him on Twitter at d Wallace Wells and you can find his book I don't know wherever books are sold, local bookstore, online, I'm sure. I'm sure you can figure it out. Um. So that that wraps up our show today too, and in tomorrow to check out the second part of the interview. That's all today, save pods, save casting. So yeah, M