Part Two: The Uninhabitable Earth, An Interview

wance a century hitting every single year. Cities in South Asia and the Middle East are so hot during summer that you don't go outside without risking heat stroker death, hundreds of millions of climate refugees. When I say, like, we're going to get to our best case scenario, that's the best case scenario that I'm describing. It's not optimism by anybody's compactional definition. Is just optimism compared to like

what actually looked possible a few years ago. And you know, ultimately, I think the only intellectually response able perspective is to try to hold those two facts in your mind at once. To say things inevitably will be grim. We will have to be doing an enormous amount of adaptation to allow ourselves any promise of human flowers fishing in even the

best case scenario. But also changes have been made and will be made in the in the next few years and then certainly in the next decades that allow us to avert a lot of even bleaker, even grimmer on futures. And you know, I think both of those things are true. Whether you tend to, whether you you know your impulse is to place your sort of emotional weight on the first fact of the second is really more matter of personal temperament, I think than it is about um. The

facts on the ground. The facts on the ground say that you know, basically, if even a few years ago it was defensible to say we could achieve one point five degrees, but also a business as usual was four and a half degrees, we're now looking at a much narrower window where unless we're really surprised by climate sensitivity, which may be something we could talk about, also that we're looking at something like the range of two to three two degrees to three degrees, and that's like, um,

we have a much clearer idea of where we're gonna end up. I would say I'm you know, one of the things when you when you lay out as you do very very um very well, the what that actually means, what two degrees means, like what that means in human cost um. I have to think that there's going to be an increasing desire to uh punish the people particularly who were responsible for like the different kind of disinformation campaigns that have persisted over the last couple of decades.

I don't know how much political attraction I expect those to get um, but one of the things we do we are going to be talking about is like the

potential of sort of a climate Nuremberg. And I'm wondering if you if you think that's even a productive avenue of thought or is it kind of one of those there's there's so much is it a situation where I guess I'm just interested if you if you've thought about that in any way yourself, or if you think that's just not a particular the productive line of thought to go down, Well, I think it's um an intellectually rewarding

way of thinking about the problem. Whether it has practical real world upside, I'm a little more ambivalent about, but I would say, you know, there are two sets of issues that you're talking about. There is, did companies like Exxon and Shell delay action on climate change by shaping our sense of urgency around the climate crisis and buying off politicians in a way that meaningfully change the trajectory of global warming? If so, to what degree and to

what degree should they be held responsible to me? That I mean, I think that like those companies should be pulverized, you know that, like they should be um even just from a practical perspective, put aside the morality, like we need to stop producing fossil fuels, like those companies should not continue to be in that business. I think it's also worth pointing out that many of the biggest oil companies in the world are state owned, not private enterprises.

But I also think there's the sort of separate question, which is countries of the world. The United States has benefited enormously from the cheap energy produced from the burning of fossil fuels like that had That explains a lot of how we became the dominant power in the world.

Um And one amazing thing about carbon is that it hangs in the atmosphere for at least three hundred years, which means that every single ounce of carbon that has ever been produced in the entire history of industrialization is still in the air heating the planet today, UM, which means that the climate doesn't care if that coal is being burned in you know she Jin Pings China, or Frederick Engels Manchester, or you know Abraham Lincoln's United States,

they are all having the equal effect. And that we should think about the impact of past emissions when thinking about responsibility for the crisis, um, as much as we think about how to shape future emissions. UM. You know, I think the climate reparations as an idea is very powerful. I think, um, you know, countries like the US have profited from this technology is one way to think of it, that will be punishing, um those in the developing world

who have benefited considerably less, considerably more. Even from a practical like how do we stabilize the world's system and our geopolitics point of view, I think it makes sense for the wealthy countries in the world to support the poorer countries in their efforts both to decarbonize and to adapt.

There is some amount of that being negotiated now, although I think it's woefully inadequate, And you know, it's something I'm working on at the moment, but you you really can sort of put a dollar figure on exactly what like the U s O S in this context, because we know how much it cost to take carbon out

of the air. So if you take a price of like fifty dollars a ton, then the US basically has a climate reparations bill of like trillion dollars um, which is two and a half times what China's does, which is the second biggest country. And I do think that that's also really important to keep in mind when people talk about China. China is an incredibly important player going forward, but because of the weird timeline bending nature of carbon emissions, like the US is still much more important that we

The US brought us to the brink. It's just China that's at risk of pushing us over the brink. And on the company front, I'm supportive of lawsuits that are that are already going forward on these issues, and those lawsuits that are going forward that obligate particular companies to behave in ways that are in line with the goals

in the Paris Agreement. I think that those are useful I think I'm a little maybe a little less comfortable attributing so much responsibility for the current crisis to the villainy of those companies, although I don't deny that they've been villainous in the sense that we really have been voting with our you know, with our dollars on this for a long time, UM, and I do think that most people have, you know, or as a society, as a civilization, we've chosen to continue using fossil fuels basically

because they were they provided cheaper energy than any other option. That's not to say that there's been no effect, um, from the disinformation campaigns. I think there has been an effect.

But if you rewind that history and don't engage in that disinformation, I have a hard time believing even if you're just like looking at the cost of renewable power, I have a hard time imagine in the US like embarking on a major renewable push like in the year or two thousand, of the scale that's possible now because of the changing market dynamics there. So, you know, another way of looking at the same issue is um, you know, climate denial is I would say it's no longer really

alive anywhere. It's no longer really alive in the US. But it was much more pronounced in the US in American politics than any other country in the world for a very long time, aside from maybe Australia. And it wasn't like those other countries were decarbonizing much much faster

than we were. Um they maybe we're a little bit in parts of Scandinavia, um Like Denmark has done a bit better, the UK has done better over the last five or ten years in the U S. But like in general, we're all sort of on the same track together, Which makes me think that a lot of these dynamics, at least to this point, are much more the result of um social and cultural forces than they are direct

fossil fuel disinformation and denial campaigns. But you know, that's not to say that I think that those people should be let off the hook, um in the same way that the cigarette company cigarette companies were held to account for their decades of disinformation. I just also think, like the son of a guy who died of lung cancer, like I don't think that like the cigarette company is to blame for my dad's death. Like I just don't, um, like I'm glad that they're I'm glad that they had

to pay those fines. I'm glad that they were, like, you know, to some degree, push to the edge of bankruptcy. I'm glad that cigarette smoking is not nearly as dad a force in our culture and our public health and it used to be. But I also think that there is like I don't know, to point the finger neatly at that, at those like ten big companies or whatever. I just think it's a little simplistic and lets us all off the hook. But I do think that's another

big story. Here is the way in which, as the crisis unfolds, many more people will want to see themselves as blameless UM and not be willing to really see clearly that the role that they played or those that they loved played in exacerbating the problem, even if just through UM by living in complacency and denial for too long. Yeah. Yeah, you probably just no, no, no, it is like that. That's the thing though, it is it is UM. I

can cut again. You can hold two things in your head, which is that UM, the attempts to mislead people and alter the public conversation around climate change through bad data, we're criminal UM. And also that fundamentally the damage was done by our desire to continue living a certain lifestyle.

And we knew that and and and past a certain point, especially, we knew that it would continue to like we kept buying the cars, we kept orienting our societies in such a way, we kept consuming and putting carbon into the atmosphere.

And it is this question of Okay, if you're saying, in the United States, I want to hold ex On Mobile and Chevron accountable, Well, then who who's holding you accountable for the fact that you, as an American, were responsible for a vastly greater amount of environmental degradation than somebody living in Kuala Lumpur. Yeah. I think Also it's you know, we have this like in part because of the cultural changes that have unfolded over the last fe years.

These are not like the world's richest companies and or and so like liquidate liquidating them just like simply does it from just like a like the perspective of UM finding capital that will help us in this fight, like liquidating these companies simply doesn't get us nearly as far as it might have twenty or thirty years ago. I think that there is a moral case for closing them down. I think there's a practical place case for literally just closing them down. UM. I think we should try to

pursue that UM. But I also think that you know, it's like you take all Bill Gates's money away, like it's not like people in stuff Saharan Africa are going to be millionaires. It's just like there isn't that much money to go around, and the same that's true of the fossil field companies. But you know, I do think, UM, I do think there needs to be a kind of UM mechanism for capital redistribution UM in the service of

decarbonization and UM climate resilience. I think that that is a very very urgent moral demands that the climate of the future is making of us, Which is to say, you know, let's try to treat hundreds of millions of people living in Bangladesh near the coast like they were living, you know, on the Gulf coast of the US, and treat their lives with as much give their lives as much significance, and UM, do the same level of things that we would want to do for our distant relatives

to protect their lives and livelihoods there to name one example. I mean, you know, it's not just like there's one place to deal with it. But they can't even get a hundred billion dollars out of the G seven to you know, to the developing world. I think we're gonna need considerably more than that going forward. Yeah, I've been reading the book Disposable City by Mario Riza, which is about Miami, and like the fact that Miami is doomed and less things actions are taken in order to make

it survivable in the future. And I kept thinking throughout that process because it's a very good book, I think,

very well written. But also just like all of these problems are going to be commen certainly more severe for people living in huge chunks of Southeast Asia the form much larger population than Miami, but we will never have the resources dedicated towards them, and they're also it's also the case that a lot of the solutions that we we think of here are not available there in the sense that you know, there was a big study that came out maybe six or nine months ago looking at

what it would mean to for land use in the US to be to really decarbonize the power sector through wind and solar, and you know, it's it was significant. It was like it was it was not it's not like half the country, but it was like, I think we had to do something like we had to use like a couple of multiples of the land of North Dakota um to like get to a total totally zero carbon electricity sector, and like you can't do that in Indonesia.

They're just that amount of land. And what does that mean? Is that an argument for nuclear? Is that an argument for you know, a lot more offshore? You know, like it's not exactly clear, but we also we have there are many ways in which Americans thinking about climate change suffer from a national narcissism and really think that the

whole global problem is our problem. But um, the challenge is really different everywhere, both on the adaptation side on the mitigation side, and you know, in a lot of places it's going to be just tricky to figure out. And the more that we can do as you know, those with more, um, the more I don't know, it's not quite well. I'm sure we're never going to be behaving in ways that that are actually moral in this issue, but maybe like approaching some kind of morality, you know, Garrison,

did you have anything else you wanted to get into UM? Yeah, I can maybe talk about what you think the future of international coalitions are going to be in terms of like the different summits UM what you know, the different ways the u N might try to do stuff. Yeah, like how how do you see the effectiveness or maybe not even effectiveness, but like just how do you see that impacting UM people's perception of what's going to happen?

And then you know, if if you think that has any chance of making things better at all, well, you know what. The the examples that I used in the

book I think are still UM. The ones that I come back to, which is UM the way that the post World War two international order, which was led primarily by the USUM, treated the issues of human rights and free markets, which were never like handed over to a particular political authority to police around the world, but which became universal enough values that they could be invoked as reasons to intervene in other countries, to invade other countries,

to bully other countries in you know, in UM trade negotiations, and you know, oftentimes they were covers for what we're basically just national self interest, you know, calling something human rights issue so that you could open a market or whatever. But on the whole, I think they did sort of successfully promote both of those values over the course of those fifty years. You know, not to say that markets are unequal a value that we should value as much

as we value human rights. But we saw you know, globally a changing culture of geopolitics sort of as a result, and the tools that were used not just by the US, but especially by the US in promoting that change. We're really diverse. Like sometimes we did go to war. Sometimes we just argued about stuff in the u N. Sometimes we you know, put sanctions on countries and refused to trade with them because we consider them, you know, to

be behaving immorally. Sometimes we finance clandestine wars like where our CIA agents trained. You know, we did a whole lot of different ship in the name of those values. Um and I sort of suspect we're likely to see the same thing unfold with climate, where it becomes a

sort of first order value of the global system. And that doesn't mean that there is a independent climate change authority with you know, some kind of you know that that can like throw leaders in jail for behaving badly, that I can go into Brazil and arrest jar Balsonaro or something. Um, I don't think that's all that likely. But I think that we start, we start to talk about power dynamics um as in ways that are inflected at least with climate considerations. And I think we're already

starting to see that. You know, the way that the EU is talking about um it's border adjustment carbon tax. There's a similar proposal now in the in the US really suggests that we're already embedding climate values in what were once quite coldly calculated trade deals. You know, there was a couple of years ago there was that back and forth about the fires in the amaz On where where Emmanuel mccron threatened to pull out of a major trade deal with with Brazil over the fires and like

you didn't totally come to pass. But um, that sort of power dynamic I think is quite um, you know, quite present on the world stage already. Now. The question is ultimately like who's doing the policing, who's empowered to enforce these values and one of their own what's their own record? You know, at the moment, the US, I think,

is not really in a position to lecture anybody. And to some degree, you know, in a certain light, China has a certain amount of um, you know, moral authority here because they've they've invested so aggressively and um green technologies. But they also have the opposite problem, which is that they are still wearing a ton of coal. And I don't really know, you know, there's been a lot of I don't really know how that dynamic will play out.

I just think it's hard to imagine a geopolitics going forward that doesn't center climate change in the same way that some of these other values have been centered. But what I do think is very clear is that the U N based treaty framework is probably at most a partial component of this dynamic and not the whole of it.

Um you know, all of I mentioned this earlier, but all of the net zero pledges we've seen over the last couple of years, all of them have been done totally outside of the you know, the Paris Framework and the UN framework. It's not the US are China going around and telling India that they need to up their

ambition at all. It's you know, all of these countries coming to the realization that it is in their self interest to decarbonize, and that is I think a likelier path forward than one in which these things are negotiated

country to country. And I think it's frankly a lot healthier because for a long time, climate diplomacy was conducted under the anxiety of UM the collective action problem, which is to say that, you know, the US goes to zero carbon tomorrow, functionally, its climate will go will be unchanged over the rest of the century, even even a huge amount of like the US UM compared you know,

if nobody else does anything. And so everybody's just sort of waiting around, waiting for someone else to to act, because they think the cost of acting nationally or locally is born nationally and locally, but the benefit of acting nationally or locally is carried around the world. Now, I think that is no longer the paradigm. I think that's the reason why we're seeing all of these new nation, new national pledges outside of the framework of paris UM.

I think that's in part because we have a clear understanding of the damages of climate change. I think it's also really we're having We're getting a much clearer sense of the burdens of help from air pollution, from the burden of fossil fuels, And so when you're doing your even like your crudest um cost benefit analysis, it seems really obvious that decarbonizing is worth it independent of the climate benefits. And you know that's true in the US.

Dru Sian dell Is, this great professor at Duke, has calculated that the health benefits of decarbonizing the American electricity sector would entirely pay for themselves. It would entirely pay for the project. Um. You don't have to factor in any climate benefit at all. It's just like through cleaner air, it would be paid for by itself. I think many more countries around the world are seeing things that way,

and that's why they're beginning to move more quickly. And even though that's like a a sign that the geopolitics is abandoning some of its moral pretense um and returning to something that amounts to a more naked, even quasi like capitalistic um mercenary set of values, I also think that it I have a sort of easier time trusting the progress will happen in that context, if every country thinks that, um, they're people will be better off if

their economy is greener. I don't think we're gonna do it fast enough, but I think the progress is is on the way. The last thing I wanna maybe discuss a little bit is the future of carbon capture and geo engineering, specifically with you know, Bezos and Mosk and

other people doing more space stuff. Um, and just yeah, seeing how the likelihood and how much you think it will affect things when they start messing with the atmosphere or if you think they're going to go that route, because I know Basos talked a bit about that in terms of like moving stuff into space for like pollution and stuff. Yeah, I mean your chapter on g on geo engineering was really good. Um, in my opinion, I thought that would gave a really good overview of the

terrible double edged sword that that is. And yeah, with with all the space stuff, how do you see those kind of things coming to pass the next few years. I think it's gonna geo engineering in particular, and solar radiation management, which is the sort of most common way that people talk about it, which is suspending soultware in the atmosphere that reflects on that. I think that that's going to become a much bigger part of the conversation UM,

And personally, I would like to see more research. I'm not of the I'm skeptical of this as a useful solution, but I think it's worth testing and steeing. And I don't think you know, at the moment, there's still basically like a global gag order on even figuring out what it would mean. And I think that that's really counterproductive actually, that we should have a clearer sense of what the costs and benefits of doing it are. UM. The people who I admire most, who are supportive say this isn't

a permanent solution. If we imagine a century from now or seventy five years from now, technological advance is sufficient to remove carbon from the atmosphere at scale being run cheaply and efficiently, and I don't think that's a crazy thing to imagine on that time scale. What we really need to do is sort of protect ourselves for a period of time, for a generation or so, until those things can come online and really make a difference in

the in the atmosphere. That seems like a plausible argument to me. Um Like, I'm certainly not ready to endorse it because I think we really just don't know actually much of what the effects would be. Um But I think any you know, it sort of depends on what you're hoped for goal is. But any project of decarbonization or just say climate action that is built entirely around wind and solar power is not going to get us

to stay below two degrees UM. And if you think that living a two degrees is going to be really tough, maybe there are some other ways to make it a little less tough. Now, I think I'm sounding at the moment more supportive geo engineering than I really am. But I just think in general, like this problem was too

big to dismiss any partial solution out of hand. On carbon capture, I'm you know, I'm more supportive at the theoretical level, and my objections are primarily practical, which is to say, you know, at the moment, we have these machines that do this. You know, they can do this already.

It's kind of expensive, but it's not impossibly expensive. But to use them to even counteract the emissions that are today produced by the hardest to de carbonized parts of the economy, namely heavy industry and jet travel would require through these machines, would require something like a third to a half of today's global energy production. On top of which we need to find a place to build these huge industrial plantations. We have to find a find a

place to store all that carbon um. You know, estimates suggest we might need an infrastructure two to four times the size of today's oil and gas business. And that's not to like make it so we can drive gas cars longer. It's literally like the hardest. If we decarbonize as rapidly as the i p C says we they want us to cutting in a half our emissions, they say we're still going to need a carbon capture or at least a negative emissions infrastructure as much as four

times the size of today's oil and gas business. And of course there's no market for that that carbon at all, um, which means you would have to be entirely state funded unless someone comes up with a with a market for it. Um. So my, you know, on top of that, there are objections to land use. Um. They're sort of likely nimby issues um. And while it's tempting to turn instead too

you know, natural negative emissions with a far station. It's estimated that to do the same just again for this sort of sliver of emissions that are the hardest to decarbonized, would require land being used something like the scale of between five and fifteen times the size of Texas UM

just for this purpose. So we're talking about like in either of these cases, either like sucking, like sucking up a huge chunk of what today's energy system produces, or using an enormous amount of the planet's land in order to deal with only a tiny sliver of the problem through either of these technologies. Now, my hope is that fifty years from now, seventy five years from now, hundred years from now, UM, we'll have a lot more options

for how to take carbon out of the atmosphere. Um we can, we'll be able to do it much more efficiently, both in terms of energy and in terms of land use. And I think there are some things that are encouraging that are sort of early stage m R and D that we're at sort of early stage on R and D on but the scale of the problem is just so large that we can't believe that they're going to

do our work for us. It really will be like over the time scale of our lifetimes, it will be a marginal solution that allows us to um decarbonized really hard, to de carbonized sectors a little more slowly. UM and maybe on a time scale of two centuries, it'll that'll allow us to like revert to an earlier climate and stabilize things back at you know, something like parts per million,

although who knows how possible that is. Briefly on that note, UM, we want to talk about the like the actual long term impacts, like how the pollution that we're doing and the emissions that we're doing now is gonna impact stuff three years from now. Do you have anything to say because like that that that's stif aspect. He's not talked about as much because of how urgent it is for people who are living now. We have a lot of problems to deal with the fact that you know, we

don't talk about, you know, the farther future. It's something I worry about a lot, because all of our models are basically to the hundred and nothing goes beyond them. UM, And I think there is some reason to worry that we're not really capturing some slower processes and feedbacks that may add considerably to our level of warming, even if we get to zero emissions sometimes this century. Of course, the impact some of the impact are essentially irreversible. You know,

the term tipping point gets used a lot. I think often it's used a little misleadingly because it's not like you're gonna wake up, you know, on a Tuesday and the planets is going to be completely different than it was on that Monday. But what it really means is that, like we're going to enter into a new state with a variety of these impacts that we won't be able

to return to the old one. Um. The melting of the ice sheets is probably the most dramatic of those, and you know, it's based it's estimated that somewhere north of two degrees we we probably lock that into inevitability. And that means over time, you know, something like two d two hundred feet of sea level rise. UM. Now, we don't expect that would take place even on the time scale of centuries. It would probably take millennial or more.

But it means that the choices that we're making now are really going to live on for an incredibly long time, I mean thousands of years and UM That's another reason why they're so consequential. You know, some of the ecosystem loss um that we're going through is irreversible. You simply

can't recreate those things by design. And you know, even thinking about wildfires in the in the in the West, the fire scientists I talked to, you know, they're they're all really reluctant to talk about fire even in the second half of the twentieth century because they expected by so much of the region will have burned, and they don't know what kind of plant life is going to grow back in that, you know, among those ashes, so

they don't know how to model it. It's like, is it this kind of a tree, is that this is a eucalyptus? Is an ash? You know, it's like um And that's kind of amazing to think about, just like that. You know, when we think of the landscape as permanent and human intrusion as possibly transient, but we are engineering changes to the land um that will make many of the things that we think of as you know, the iconic features of a place like California totally disappear within

the space of our lifetime. And you know, perhaps the most dramatic of these impacts would be if if the Amazon were to enter into a divec state and turn into something like a savannah, which is you know, some scientists think is quite possible, maybe even in relatively short time scales. But more importantly, as you know that there would be no time scale for recovery, that we would have lost it forever as a as a rainforest, and with it a huge capacity for carbon absorption and a

lot of the world's oxygen. So yeah, it's it's it gets it gets scarier when you look past, even though what's happening the century is scary enough. Yeah, that's all I wanted to talk about. Yeah, that's the I'm planning a trip down there in the not too distant future, and it's kind of hard to overstate the importance of not reaching that point, and also the difficulty of knowing if we already have not good news coming out of

that region right now. I mean the slightly positive, slightly good or part of the news is that what we're doing now. I mean, there's a big report a couple of weeks ago those you know, more carbon's coming out of the Amazon and going into it, which is terrifying. But that is because we're deforesting and burning. It's not because of Yeah, theoretically, if we change policy there, we could you know, we could stop that. Um. There is a point though, at which the climate changing itself will

be producing similar effects and that will be considerably more alarming. Well, David, you've been incredibly generous with your time. Thank you very much for talking with us today. Now my pleasure great to talk to you guys. And with that, that is the end of our interview with David Wallace Wells. You can find him on Twitter at d Wallace Wells. You can find his book The Uninhabited Earth and you know probably probably some local bookstores. I know you can get

it online that's where I got it. Um. And you can follow this podcast of Happen Here pod and Cool Zone Media on Twitter. UM. I think we have Instagrams for those two, but I don't use that. You can follow me at Hungry bow Tie and you can follow Robert at I Right. Okay, thanks for listening. Stay tuned next week for more It could Happen Here daily